The Smell

It is the strangest yellow, that paper. It makes me think of every yellow thing I have ever seen. Not the beautiful ones, like buttercups or the inside of a lemon. The old ones, the foul ones: a bruise three days along, a page kept in a damp basement, the underside of a mushroom.

But there is something else about this paper, and it is the smell.

I noticed it the hour we walked into the room. With so much air and sun coming through, it was not bad; it was almost pleasant, the way an old book is pleasant. Now we have had a week of rain and fog off the lake, and whether the windows are open or shut, the smell is here.

It creeps all over the house. I find it sitting at the dinner table, skulking in the parlor, lying in wait for me on the stairs. It gets into my hair. Even when I go out, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it, there it is, riding on my own shoulder.

Such a peculiar odor. I have spent hours trying to place it. It is not bad at first and it is very gentle, but it is the subtlest and most enduring smell I have ever met. In this wet weather it is awful. I wake in the night and find it hanging over me like a hand.

At first it disturbed me. I thought seriously about burning the house down just to get at the source of it.

But I am used to it now. And the only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper. A yellow smell. That is the only honest description I have, and I have a professional vocabulary for describing surfaces, so I suppose that tells you something.

Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. I have something to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and I am quieter than I was, and I sleep in the middle of the day like a cat on a porch.

Hollis is so pleased to see me improve. He laughed the other evening and said I seemed to be flourishing in spite of my wallpaper. He said it in the kitchen doorway with a glass of wine in his hand, and he meant it kindly, and it was the first time in a month that he had made a joke about it instead of a policy.

I turned it off with a laugh. I have no intention of telling him that it is because of the wallpaper. He would make fun of me. He might even want to take me away.

And I do not want to leave now, not until I have found it out. There is a week more. I think that will be enough.

I am feeling ever so much better. I do not sleep much at night, because it is so interesting to watch developments, but I sleep a great deal in the daytime.

In the daytime it is tiresome and perplexing. There are always new shoots on the fungus, and new shades of yellow all over it, and I cannot keep count of them, though I have tried, and the pencil is downstairs and the wall is up here.

I wake up at four now, without an alarm, which is new. I used to sleep until the ring woke me with its little buzz, and then lie there listening to his phone do the small thing it does on the nightstand, the sound he reads and does not answer, and I would count them in the dark until I lost the count.

I left the ring on the nightstand on Tuesday. He has not mentioned it, and I have not brought it up, and we are both behaving as if I still wear it, which is how we do things now.

There is one more thing, and I have decided it belongs in the notebook and not in my mouth, which means it will stay here in the wall. On Thursday afternoon, in the flat gray light before the rain came, I took the corner of the loose paper by the head of the bed in both hands and pulled. It came away from the plaster with a sound like a long zipper. Under it was more pattern. I laughed out loud in the empty room, and then I was quiet for a while, because I had heard myself.