It's common fact that Kate Moss, having survived six heart attacks, all within the span of five years, is among the greatest exemplars of human resilience. Less known is the slight physical clue that tipped off her then-husband as she was having her fifth, allowing him to more quickly rush to her aid.

"I remember it so clearly," Mr. Peale told André Leon Talley during a recent interview, "the dinner and everything. Lord, the size of those scallops."

Here, Leon Talley made a mental editorial aside about the temerity of a person's psyche to allow seafood to loom so large within the memory of their ex-wife's medical emergency.

"She was sitting across the table from me, much as you are now —"

"Just such," said Leon Talley.

" — and I noticed her mouth began to quiver. Not quiver, exactly, but ripple from one corner to the other, like a sheet of pavement in the midst of an earthquake."

"And your wife's mouth never behaved like this under typical circumstances?"

"Never," said Peale. "Her mouth, at rest, was a drawn line, calm as the dawn spread of sand."

"Fascinating," said Leon Talley. "Tell me, Mr. Peale, do you believe the mouth-ripple was the intervention of a higher power, or do you owe your lifesaving action to your own perceptual abilities?"

Here, Peale paused, taking a neat sip of his Aperol soda. "I consider myself a man of keen perception, I do," he said. "I wouldn't have gotten as far as I have without it. But that night, I was drawn to look at Kate's face more than usual, yes. I'm not a religious man, by any means, but I wouldn't wholly discount the possibility of intervention by the hand of a benevolent god."

"Her face," said Leon Talley, "you weren't in the habit of looking at it?"

"Not excessively, no." Here, beneath the table, Peale wrung his hands as though to wash them according to the CDC's prescribed manner. "When you've been married as long as we had, at that point, you start to tire of seeing the same face day in, day out. If that makes sense."

"It does," said Leon Talley. He, too, had experienced this phenomenon. "But the movement of her mouth — how did you know it was indicative of crisis and not, say, a stifled belch?"

"Kate never belched, for one," said Peale. Then, "The ripple contained within its rhythm a pattern of maliciousness, of dread. Along the lines of how we fear snakes because of the arhythmic motion of their bodies, this motion that doesn't fit any of our schemata —"

"— I'm not afraid of snakes —"

"— our comfortable frameworks of the world. If I may ask a question —"

"— if it's short —"

"— do you believe that all of the answers are, at a given time, available to us, made accessible via subtle but unmistakable clues?"

Leon Talley sat back in his chair, reflecting. He remembered his first dog, Buttons, how the day before Buttons' disappearance the electrical grid failed; his family ate dinner by candlelight, their ham sandwiches eerie in the orange light. A certain lover who, in the weeks preceding a ghastly breakup, neglected to adequately wash a single dish that he had used. In Spain, a conspiracy of ravens circled high above the cathedral hours before the city's mayor was assassinated in his preferred pew. When we know the world well enough, we become aware of the inconsistencies in the fabric of the ordinary; the challenge lies in developing a knowledge so deep.

Sweat beaded along the brow of Leon Talley, crept toward the border of his collar. At once, his chair — a sumptuous seat upholstered in puce velvet — became too small for his body. He felt the urgent need to flee. Each door was marked by a discreet Exit sign, but he could no longer determine which one to trust.


.

Kate Garklavs lives in Portland. She's had work in Juked, NOO, Matchbook and others.

Read her postcard.

Image on main page derived from drawing made during the Janiger LSD experiments conducted at UC Irvine in the 1950s.





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