My Only Wife (3 page)

My wife woke early while I slept. It always rains at night in the South of France, or perhaps it rains in the early morning. Either way, there were first-light puddles in the paved-brick streets, the air damp at sunup. For the people who lived there, the drying rainwater was something to watch happen day after day; it was another part of the set-in-cobblestone routine.

My wife plunked through puddles, the water weighing down her pant hems. She bought baguettes she watched being pulled from the oven.

My wife would haggle in broken French with the little old men in the market down the street for tiny bananas, fresh strawberries, bright bouquets of intricate ranunculus.

I would rise to the smell of the rain my wife dragged in. She smelled of sea and slope and narrow streets yawning “Bon matin.”

My wife and I drove to gallery after chapel after mansion and remembered laughingly how people warned us of the rudeness of the French.

We climbed to the top of everything, pressed every button, sat on the base of every sculpture before being shagged off. There was age there, cities built into stone, clinging to the sides of mountains with stubborn, arthritic fingers.

My wife touched art and artifacts that had velvet ropes strung before them. She touched objects older than we could imagine. She helped them age a bit more quickly.

In the Musée d’Orsay, on our only day in Paris, my wife whispered. “Hands,” she said, “are full of chemicals that cause things to deteriorate quickly. When I was a child on vacation in Dublin we went to see the Book of Kells. It was under glass in a dimly lit room. They told us if we touched it, it would fall apart. They warned us, ‘You don’t want to deny other people the chance to see this beautiful artifact, do you?’ They spoke like fathers protecting their daughters’ virginity.”

My wife said, “I wanted to crack the glass, let the book feel my hands.”

My wife’s eyes glowed mischievously.

My wife, her eyes trained on mine, placed one hand on the foot of a plaster cast model of Rodin’s
Balzac
.

My wife took one of my hands and placed it on her face. She placed a hand on top of mine.

She shut her eyes, my hand on her cheek, her hand on mine, her other hand on Balzac. “Have you noticed how hands are born wrinkled, where the finger joints have already been bending for months?”

My wife said, “How must we age from handshakes alone?”

She opened her eyes, squinting in the sun. She raised her eyebrows. What did she want me to say?

M
Y
WIFE
CLAIMED
A
CLOSET
as her own as soon as we moved into our apartment.

She was handy and installed a lock. She kept the tiny key on a chain she wore on her wrist.

I asked my wife what it was she felt she needed to lock away from me.

My wife said, “The lock is for me, not you.”

She said, “I trust you and know you would contain yourself not to look in the closet if I asked you not to. But I would be going in there all the time, if there weren’t a little something that made it more difficult.”

With a smile, she said, “What’s a little uncharted closet on the map of this apartment? It’s other people’s stories in there. They have nothing to do with you or me. We must contain ourselves, leave those stories to age. When you begin to age wine you can’t open the cask to check on its progress.”

She said, “I’ll show you the closet. We can look at the shelves, but this can’t be something we do often. Come on, we’ll look now and that will be the end of it.”

She unclasped the bracelet from her wrist and fit the key deftly into the lock.

Her hand moved into the closet to pull a string and light a bank of closely spaced shelves I hadn’t even known she put up. I wondered where I’d been.

The shallow shelves ran across the back wall of the closet, probably twenty in all, from top to bottom. I believe I remember only the first three shelves being filled. The fourth shelf held only two tapes. She had just begun.

My wife kindly gave permission. “Go ahead. You can look at the labels if you like.”

I smiled at my wife. This was exactly what I wanted. I scanned the first few:

Joe, 37, Chicago: No longer that of the Clocks
.

Kim, 19, Chicago: White Napkin
.

Allan, 72, Chicago: A True Correspondence
.

I asked my wife, “Name, age, location and then what? Title?”

“Yes.”

“How do you decide the title?” I asked.

“That’s the one thing that’s mine. The title says something about the way I understand the contents. That’s the little liberty I allow myself.”

I smiled at my wife again. This was her cue. “Alright, out we go then. I don’t want you getting attached.”

“Come on, shoo,” she said half jokingly, though I could tell she was ready to lock the space away again.

I asked what I had to ask. “Can we listen to some of them?”

My wife pulled the string to darken the closet.

My wife locked the door with the tiny key.

She fastened the bracelet back on her wrist.

“Of course not.” She hurried to our bedroom, began changing her clothes for work. “You know better than that.”

M
Y
WIFE
WAS
THE
START
of me.

If someone were to ask how I had changed since I met her I would be unable to find the words. It wasn’t that I changed because of knowing her.

It’s more accurate to say that I began.

She was enough for me. She was enough for the both of us.

How we met is inconsequential, but if it must be told: through friends, first in a large group and then slowly spending more and more time together alone.

Sometimes it’s difficult for me to remember time we spent with other people. She filled the space. She eclipsed others. She made other people seem less real.

My wife didn’t throw a Frisbee onto my blanket on the quad.

My wife didn’t ask one of her friends to tell me she liked me.

She didn’t send me anonymous love letters and mixed tapes.

Most importantly, she did not ask me to tell her my story.

We met in spring when our groups of friends somehow combined. Her friends told us about her obsession with stories. They told us how she would talk to anyone, how she could get anyone to talk, how she would begin speaking to someone new before the last person had finished their story, but how people seemed comfortable waiting for her.

It’s true. When we began talking I didn’t think myself special. I assumed she wanted my story as well, not because I was intriguing, but as another name to check off some imagined list.

I wasn’t resistant to the effort. I figured if she was as good as they said, my story would come out without my even knowing.

When we had been hanging out for about a week, I thought I had proved them all wrong, as she wasn’t pulling my story from me. It turned out I was the one getting it wrong. She didn’t try to draw stories from people she planned on keeping around. She wasn’t interested in getting me in one go.

This is not to say that my wife was not genuinely interested in the people she got stories from. She was. But from me, she was looking for a lengthier tale. She was seeking a sum which might take a bit longer to add up.

When we spent our first evening alone together it was an accident. A large group of us were supposed to meet and go on a pub-crawl one night, and by the time we were scheduled to leave, only my wife and I had congregated at my apartment. Everyone else had called one by one to send their last-minute regrets. When the last call came in I asked my wife if she still wanted to go, she kicked off her shoes and settled into my mangy couch.

“Let’s take it easy.” She picked up a magazine on my coffee table. I sat down next to her, but not too close.

We didn’t stay up all night talking.

We didn’t sleep together.

We didn’t even kiss.

We talked for a couple hours and then she went home relatively early. We were both supposed to work in the morning and we were relieved that we didn’t have to go out. We didn’t talk about deep and personal feelings. We talked about what movies we wanted to see and the good books we had recently read. We gossiped a little about our friends. I didn’t take it personally when she wanted to go. I didn’t think I was missing out. I wasn’t even sure if I was interested in her in any romantic way.

We were just two friends that got ditched by everyone else that night.

Nothing suddenly changed. We kept seeing each other around and eventually we started to go off from the group, just the two of us. We would be at a bar and go play darts, or once we paired up for the rides at a carnival. No, we didn’t kiss on the Ferris wheel. We might have slid together playfully on the Tilt-a-whirl, but that was the most that happened.

We moved slowly. Everything felt comfortable. I’d get nervous with her sometimes, but then again, I got nervous with all girls, even ones I knew I had no chance with.

And I would be lying to say that this comfort was not complicated by a certain sense of mystery that seemed to shroud her ever so slightly .

In the beginning I thought it was annoying. I thought she was trying to appear enigmatic. I would ask questions and she wouldn’t answer. I assumed she imagined herself a bad girl, with enough secrets to keep people interested without ever letting anyone close.

As we spent more time together, I realized she avoided only the questions she didn’t like and that this was some peculiar form of honesty.

When she didn’t answer a question it seemed the logical response. I began to wish other people acted the same way.

When we’d known each other a few months, I asked her if she had my story yet.

My wife looked at me surprised. I had never mentioned that I knew about her habit. She said, “Nope. I don’t want it. There’s a difference between people and their stories.”

She didn’t answer.

That night I thought a lot about what she had told me in that one sentence, and still I wasn’t sure what she could mean. I woke up in the middle of the night and everything felt clear, though I couldn’t explain it. “There’s a difference between people and their stories.” I didn’t understand why it suddenly worked, but it was the truth.

I called her in the morning. I didn’t call any of our friends for the number. I looked her name up in the phone book and luckily she was listed. I called her early, and she answered the phone, groggy and somewhat disoriented. “I understand,” I said. “‘There’s a difference between people and their stories.’ I’m sorry I asked what it was last night. I get it now.”

She knew exactly what I was talking about even in her sleepy state. “Good. I’m glad to hear that. It takes some people years to figure it out.” She yawned. “You’re a morning thinker, huh?”

I had no idea what she was talking about again so I asked her to clarify.

“You think your clearest thoughts in the morning, is that right?”

“Oh! No, not at all. I figured it out in the middle of the night. I mulled it over and fell back asleep. I had to call you immediately to let you know. This feels huge. You know?” I was elated to be functioning at what felt was a heightened level of consciousness.

“Yeah, I do. Go back to sleep though. I am anything but a morning thinker. I’ll talk to you later, alright?”

“Definitely. Thank you. I’m sorry again about last night. Thank you for not answering. It was definitely worth it to figure it out myself. You know there’s that quote, I think Gertrude Stein said it, that one doesn’t know something until one’s written it themselves—”

“Good. Sleep well, then.” I could hear annoyance, with what I hoped were traces of amusement, in her voice, but how I had wanted to talk to her about this event! I had been sure I would call and she would be astounded that someone had finally gotten it. I thought then would be the time where we talked for hours over the phone and then decided that we needed to meet in person. Everything felt like it had been building up to that moment, and then she had written it off to be something simple and not nearly as significant as I had imagined it.

I hung up the phone and laid back down on the top of my sheets. It was that morning after she had apparently snubbed one of my questions that I realized how valuable she was to me.

I became more aggressive then. I called her more often to see if she wanted to spend time together. I sent her flowers. I visited her at the restaurant where she worked and left her a generous tip and a card.

It wasn’t long before she stopped returning my calls, before she refused the flowers I sent, before she asked her manager to seat me in any section but hers.

She didn’t come to any functions she thought I might attend, which was anything either of our friends planned. I never turned down an invitation in the hopes I might run into her and apologize for my overzealous behavior.

After having not seen her for about a month, I stopped attending any gatherings at all. I went to class. I went to work. I went home. I became a sorry case of a man. I grew a beard that I failed to trim regularly. I stopped making myself real dinners and ate horrible food out of cans. I didn’t read. I got the rabbit-ear antenna out of the closet, hooked it to the television I had only used to watch movies.

About a month later a cousin of mine was in a play and I promised her I would go see it. I arrived late, missing the first scene and getting seated in a random open seat near the back. At intermission I didn’t try and find my real seat. I was exhausted from the effort of being in public.

After the show, I was one of the first to exit the auditorium, and I waited to greet my cousin in the lobby.

I felt a tap on my shoulder, and turned, expecting to see my cousin.

There was my wife. I could say nothing, just stared, astonished that she was there.

She smiled, genuine and concerned. “Still got it all figured out there, buddy?” I must have looked awful. She could see my state of turmoil. I know I was unkempt. And still, there was a sense that her fist was being held up: the champion of a TKO. Her face moved quickly between smug and apprehensive.