heyimnic

The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had  

watched her for a week.  She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and  

he thought he was in love with her.  He loved her work, and her work was 

like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly  

when she made amused or considered answers to his questions.  One  

night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she  

turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me.  I would like  

that too, but I must tell you I have had a double mastectomy,” and  

when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.”  The radiance  

that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity—like music— 

withered, very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said,  

“I’m sorry.  I don’t think I could.”  He walked back to his own cabin  

through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the  

porch outside his door.  It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found  

when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the  

bowl—she must have swept them from the corners of her studio—was  

full of dead bees. 

— Robert Hass