Perfume
He’d always been stunned by his wife’s beauty when she slept. Sleeping, her natural beauty was undeniable, entirely uninfluenced by his feelings, her feelings, their various difficulties with one another, resentments, by their complex histories, unfulfilled longings, secrets. In repose, there was nothing to interfere with the undeniable fact of her physical loveliness. You might even say angelic. He would say Perfect, if he believed in perfection, or believed that any one deliverance of beauty, any one manifestation of it, or any one vessel shaped into some form of it, could be considered ‘more’ beautiful than some other deliverance, manifestation, shape.