Marriage Quote by Hugh Leonard

Domestic life is supposed to be the one place where reality holds still. Hugh Leonard yanks that rug away with a throwaway, almost chatty report of the impossible: a wife seen, verified ("It wasn't an illusion"), and then erased. The comic snap is in the insistence on plainness. He’s not describing a ghost story so much as the bureaucratic paperwork of a haunting, as if the real scandal is that the witness might be accused of exaggeration.

As a dramatist, Leonard knows that what matters isn’t the vanishing; it’s the angle of vision. "Out of the corner of my eye" is the line that does the cultural work. Peripheral sight is where we register what we’re not prepared to face: the person we live with becoming a blur, the intimacy we take for granted slipping into habit and then into absence. The wife isn’t just disappearing; she’s being demoted into the status of background furniture, noticed only when she’s not fully looked at. That’s the quiet brutality.

The repetition of "living room" reads like a stage direction, trapping the scene in a banal set. This isn’t gothic; it’s marital. Leonard’s subtext is about modern relationships and modern attention: the way people can be physically present yet socially invisible, and how quickly the mind corrects away what it can’t metabolize. In a culture that romanticizes "seeing" as proof of love, Leonard offers a darker gag: sometimes you only see someone when they’re already gone.