Falling

Just finished an astonishingly excellent Jincy Willett short story entitled ‘Melinda Falling’. It’s told from the perspective of a highly successful 40-something man who becomes utterly enamored of a younger woman whose chief trait which attracts him is her grace when falling; stumbling; tripping; etc. He first catches sight of her cartwheeling down some stairs at a party. She is otherwise unremarkable. He describes her as dull, stoic, saturnine, plump, and disinterested. Marrying him practically by mistake and staying in the marriage through inertia. Despite all of her superficial and not-so-superficial shortcomings, he truly loves her, and the story manages to get that across even while expressing that this woman is Not Attractive.

Eventually, Melinda decides that she wants a baby, but fails to get pregnant. In her fury, she begins exercising and starving herself as a sort of “fuck you” to her body. She loses weight; becomes conventionally attractive, and loses her peculiar grace. The narrator’s partner at the firm where he works, something of a charming rake type character, takes note of her now.

Here is the final paragraph:

She did not have to tell me. I was there when it happened. I was witness; which is only fitting, since from the start I had been no less than her devout, adoring witness, and no more. I forget the place, the date, the occasion. Some awful party, a humid night, tired laughter and tireless conversation, innocent of thought. My wife stood in a clearing at the other end of the room, leaning against a pillar of pink marble. She wore a sheath of olive brown chiffon, cut in the current severe style, and her hair was skinned back into an elaborate, gold-braided knot, and the corner of one ravaged hip pointed accusingly at me. And her eyes were clear and fathomless and gave away nothing, not a trace of desire or disappointment, or memory, or wonder. She was terrible, maddening. An impossible object. My only love, I thought: Oh, my. Then she swiveled her head to face, almost, in my direction, and her mouth widened slowly into a dazzling smile, and into her eyes dawned a light of intelligence and purpose; and she stirred and hurried forward, not to me but to another. The hem of her filmy skirt lapped gently at her ankles as she rushed, with step delicate and sure. She was suddenly, irrevocably, all elegance and heartbreaking grace. And I closed my eyes and turned away; for just this once I could not bear the sight, of Melinda falling.

Doesn’t it give you goosebumps? His helplessness toward this woman, and heartbreak at her love for someone else? “I could not bear the sight, of Melinda falling.” In love, we all fall, and someone isn’t always there to catch us. There is often no grace or elegance, only the humiliation of one’s own body’s betrayal as it trips and collapses at the feet of a fathomless Other.