The Question

“I have a question for you,” said Taylor’s wife at breakfast one morning.

“Let’s have it,” he replied.

She reached across the table and handed it to him.

“Oh, a question,” he said, somewhat lamely. “I thought—”

In his palm, the question was as dense and smooth as a creek stone. Every-colored with whorls and bursts, it resembled an agate fighting an outbreak of turquoise. Before the pattern could draw him in, he put the question away in his briefcase. They kissed in the doorway as he left for work.

In Taylor’s life, he had been given only a handful of such questions. He himself had asked only one. His fiancée accepted, and they moved into their first apartment, where they conceived and lost their one child. When he later asked her to marry him, he did so with only his voice.

The question lay for a while in a bowl of polished stones on his desk at work. He had put it there hoping the colorful stones would camouflage it. They did not.

“Taylor, look at this,” passing colleagues would say, plucking the heavy ovoid from the bowl. They could not seem to leave it alone. Young men lingered, and skirt-suited women found more excuses to stop at his desk. Each day they picked up the bauble and marveled at it, gathering in a group around it as if the question were a baby and they could determine its future with enough speculation.

“Who gave this to you?” each of them asked once.

“My wife.”

“Ooh...”

Others acknowledged the question with sidelong looks at the bowl. They wore golden rings on their hands and darker half-rings under their eyes. Life was difficult, and they felt it was so because of questions.

Taylor was of the same mind as the doubters. He didn’t care to know the matter of the question, which would automatically entail answering it. He would leave it among the stones for all his life if he could, let it be buried, though he worried his wife would not allow that. In fact, it was more likely that the question itself would not allow that. Forgotten questions had a way of re-arising, the way certain illnesses did, again and again, once you caught them.

Taylor began to work longer hours. The fatigue didn’t strike him until he reached his front door. He shucked off his coat, hung his scarf on a hook, said hello to his wife, who always got home before he did.

Before his shoes were off, she would start in on him. How was your day? What is the auditor like? Well, what does Mr. James think about it? “What is it with all these questions?” he wanted to yell, but the very word, questions, had become a danger.

“Honey,” he said, “you’re wearing me out.”

“I’m sorry, I just—”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

With time she quieted, gave up on her evening sallies. She sat calmly with Taylor’s arm on her shoulder. They made love with slow movements. Husband and wife, they talked about books and he thought about work, always a wellspring of satisfaction. Year after year, he gnomed away at his spreadsheet, checking and double-checking his figures. The curious stopped visiting his desk so often; only when a new hire came on did interest in the question renew. Then its beauty, its mystery, its fractal perfection of colors were trotted out to be admired all over again. He endured until another firm offered him a position. Same benefits, higher salary, three people under him. He accepted.

This created the problem of what to do with the question. Fed up with the intrigue of his earlier office, he had no desire to bring the question into the new one. He didn’t dare bring it home. There would never be any hiding it from his wife.

Yet he could not keep it on his person, nor could he throw it away. After time it would turn up, as questions did. His wife would seize on it and refuse to let go again. Thus there were two choices: lock it away or answer it.

He chose to lock it away. At a different bank from the one where he kept his money, Taylor rented a safe-deposit box. He placed the question there in a white paper box of the kind manufactured for earrings.

Along with the question went the bowl of stones. It was a needless oddity, a trinket, inappropriate for a man of status. He settled in well at the new company. His wife, no longer working due to an anxiety disorder, occupied herself at home and with friends. She did enough to keep busy, attending book club discussions, Italian lessons and yoga. She kept good house and did all the cooking. Aside from their lack of religion and children, Taylor and his wife were the most traditional couple they knew.

Except for the question.

Taylor stopped at the bank on his way home now and again, to peer at the question in its white paper box, to lift it out and flex his fingers across its smoothness, to heft its weight. And then to return it, bundled up in its box, box locked in box, the key on his ring, indistinguishable from a dozen others.

He knew he was destroying his wife just as surely as if he had handed her the question unanswered. A real question arrowed straight from the core of a life. In one sense it was a life, expressed as an interrogative. It could never be boxed finally, and for all the embraces and words of comfort that still passed between them, the question remained.