My Only Wife (7 page)

I held out my arms, apologizing but triumphant, and my wife collapsed onto the couch so that I might hug her, congratulate her again.

I was relieved. It had been a difficult six months of unpredictable temperaments and a certain sense of ennui that cut through even the most enlivening events. I had spent those months trying to think up ways to break the mood and nothing had worked. It had been all shrugging and sighing.

I was nothing but relieved my wife would begin recording her stories again, and yet what I said was: “I’m going to miss you when you retreat to your shut-in time. I’ve enjoyed having you for a bit more of each day.”

My wife pulled away. Her face, a moment ago spread so wide,closed in on itself. “I was miserable, and you say you’ll miss me when I’m doing what makes me happy, what keeps me sane?”

I told my wife, “I’m so happy your stories have returned.”

I told her, “I though it would be romantic to say I would miss you now.”

I said, “I
need
the you in my life that tells those stories.”

My wife believed me, but she still frowned.

My wife said, “I wouldn’t exist.”

My wife said, “I’m younger for these quiet months of mine.”

She said, “I think it’s time to start tacking on the memories again.”

The trees were beginning to unravel green in the early April light.

M
Y
WIFE
HAD
A
KEEN
ear for chit chat and bullshit, which she claimed were the same thing, and neither of which she cared for.

She wasn’t keen to answer questions she didn’t have to. There were days I would ask her how she was and it wasn’t that she ignored me so much as just didn’t feel like answering my question, or saying so. My wife knew the difference between an honest question and a fill-in-the-blank.

My wife knew I cared, but she also knew that I would ask questions like how her day was before I was ready to listen. My wife was honest and forthright, but only when she could tell that the questioners were genuinely curious for an answer. She read people impeccably and so if she could tell someone was asking a question for politeness’s sake, she would often not answer, throwing all notions of courtesy out the window.

She could detect even the whitest lies with great ease as well and she had no problem bringing the error to the attention of all involved in the conversation. Often people were astonished at my wife ’s capacity to notice even the slightest alteration of a story.

My wife was, for the most part, uninterested in making the stories she collected more audience-friendly. She wanted the truth, not the entertainment. My wife thought people who catered their stories to their audience preposterous. She was amazed at how people sought to impress
insignificant her
with a silly story.

My wife paid attention to the way people spoke.

Even if she had never met a person before, a few moments of speaking with them gave her all the information she needed to know. It was in these encounters that her little talent proved the most disconcerting, both because of how easily my wife caught on and also how often it seemed people tweaked information in the first strains of conversation. Everything is a bit altered in the hopes that this person might appear at his most attractive and desirable. Everyone wants to continue talking.

My wife would point out every glitch.

My wife would raise one of her infamously skeptical eyebrows.

The person she was talking to would pause, testing her with their eyes, admit defeat by revising, and carry on with their story.

With a smile, my wife would thank them for their honesty, letting them know she thought nothing less of them for attempting to adjust the story for her benefit.

All of this with a look.

My wife, who spent so much time focusing on the verbal and the vocal, said all of this with her face.

And after these people had jumped that first hurdle with her, they would talk to her for a long time. My wife made them feel they had earned something and they’d turn that something over to her.

O
NE
LEG
PROPPED
UP
in the window frame, my wife looked at the view.

We
had
no view from this apartment. A book lay ripped beside the foot that remained on the floor.

She had a cigarette in her mouth. Her hands were a fistful of pages. She was sending them out the window one by one. She crumpled some, sailed some flat and free.

She sent out a puff.

I had just opened the door. I was coming home from work. It was summer, year four and the sky was still light.

This didn’t make me nervous, but instead excited. She looked over her shoulder when I came in the door, mumbled a hello from her cigarette-pinched mouth. She turned back to what she’d been doing and threw the cover of whatever book it was down the several stories.

I walked over to her and sat in the chair near the windowsill. “Bad book.?”

She smiled, conspiratorially.
“Great
book.”

I knew there was some sort of method behind her madness and I knew she wanted me to ask, so I did. “Why tear it to pieces then?”

“My hope is that people will find a page and read it. I hope they’ll fall in love with it and look for the book. The author and the title is printed on each page, on either side.” She folded a page into a smallish paper airplane, flew it out and away.

I was fascinated, disturbed, intrigued, but not surprised. Wasn’t this exactly the type of thing she’d come to make me expect? Hadn’t it been little constructed acts such as this that had drawn me to her? When we met, didn’t I think the banks of cassette tapes had to be the tip of some insanely creative iceberg?

“What’s the book?” I asked. I would read it that night. I would figure out what had made her so mad with passion.

She gathered the pile of paper from the floor in her arms and stepped onto the fire escape. She sent the armful into the air in a flutter. “You have to go down there and find out for yourself. I’m not going to talk about this book, or recommend it. This was my sole act of promotion. This is all I can do.”

“Haven’t you already messed up this philosophy a bit by telling me how wonderful the book is, by telling me I could go down and get a page, and figure out what book it is? I would be reading it with that expectation then. I’m not just randomly stopping on the sidewalk to pick up a piece of trash.”

“So don’t go down there, then.”

A moment ago I had been fascinated. Now I was seeking loopholes in her grand gesture. Why did I feel the need to ruin this for her?

As usual, I digressed. “I’m not going to go pick up a page. I think it would foil the plan. I’m sad I can’t read this book that was so important to you, though.”

“So read it! I don’t care. This isn’t some experiment that can go wrong,” my wife replied. “It was something fun I wanted to do.”

I had invested more in the act than she had. I had assumed she meant the entire action on some magnificent scale.

She usually functioned at this level.

Just this once, she had apparently wanted to share something in an unobtrusive way, without imposing herself, her opinions on the work.

She had sought to enlighten the world through a random act that could never be tied back to her.

I had made the entire situation reflect her.

And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed she was performing all these acts and tasks of hers at random. She would pick at the beginning of a spool of thread and tire of unwinding it before coming to the end. Only once do I know of her managing to maintain interest until the spool was spinning, naked, but in sight of the huge knot of thread of which it had spent its life being stripped.

M
Y
WIFE
FORCED
ME
TO
paint wine glasses one evening. It had been something she’d been talking about for a long time, and one night she had all the supplies laid out.

She said, “We need to do something together. We need to make something. At the same time. We need to start producing.”

We had been married just over a year.

She bought the glasses, bought paint and set up a painting party. I was so tired that night, wanted nothing more than to collapse into bed. I didn’t want to do something creative. I didn’t want to do something silly and sentimental. I didn’t want to do anything that required energy at all.

I certainly didn’t want to think of some picture or symbol to paint onto a glass that I’d be asked to explain, make meaning where there needn’t be any.

What I wanted was
out
.

I wanted
away
that day.

I had come home with the intention of telling my wife I didn’t think I could last. I had married her in a blind spot.

My heart was pumping wildly as I turned the key in the lock, anticipating what I had no idea I thought I was going to say.

I was sure it was going to be irreversible. I was certain it was going to hurt her. I knew I would be even more tired at the end of the night.

For weeks I had felt trapped and weighed down.

In the first few months the marriage had been nothing but splendid. I had someone to come home to every day. I had a woman who loved me, who was endlessly interesting, who I dreamt of while she was lying next to me.

As that first year progressed though, I felt simultaneously ostracized and smothered, this being the first occasion in which I ever had to answer to anyone but myself. My wife, I came to learn, was extremely private. She simply refused to talk about certain things and sometimes refused to talk altogether.

And yet there was nothing to accuse her of. Despite these feelings of being left out of some loop, there was nothing concrete that I might point to as evidence. I would leave conversations fulfilled, and then sitting at my desk the next day I would remember a question I had asked her, a simple question that likely could have been answered with a word or a sentence, and I’d also recall how I had never received a response. In the beginning I thought it was possible that I had a terrible memory, but I would tend to ask a similar question again, only to find myself seated at my desk the next day, not remembering the answer.

It was like some conversational sleight of hand. I excused the disappearance of the quarter I thought I was supposed to be following with my eyes in favor of the bunny rabbit she produced from her hat. Only when the bunny was no longer visible did I sit back and wonder where that quarter had gone.

That night I arrived home overwhelmed by this feeling of isolation, of obsession, of a certain sort of deception I couldn’t identify. I decided I would tell her how I felt. I would tell her I didn’t think I could do what we promised to, that I was wrong and I wouldn’t be able to live the rest of my life with her. I loved her, but I was too constantly disoriented.

When I turned the key in that lock, I saw her seated at the dining room table, beaming at me. There was a pizza, plates and eight little pots of paint and a half dozen plain clear wine glasses. There were two cups of water, some mixing trays, fine-tipped brushes. I paused at the door. I must have looked pale. “I thought we could paint ourselves wineglasses.” She stared at me expectantly.

I was going to accuse her of not loving me and trusting me, and there she sat with pizza and paint, ready to feed me and make something that could last for all of our life together.

This woman was nowhere near ending our relationship. She believed this was only the beginning. And so, looking at her flip open that pizza box at the table as I shrugged off my jacket and set down my bag, I didn’t say a single thing I’d planned to say. My usual cowardly self decided I was too tired that night to try and convince a woman that we didn’t belong together, that what she thought was the beginning was actually a well-disguised end.

Instead I smiled back at her and sat down at the table as she put the largest slice of pizza on my plate and then helped herself to the smallest.

I thought I still needed to stand up to something; adrenaline hadn’t stopped pumping through my system. I said to her, “I don’t feel like painting tonight.”

She looked at me as if I were crazy. She challenged me to turn her down again. She said, “Oh, you’re painting these wine glasses with me. And we’re going to
enjoy
it.” She said this with a straight face, and then broke into a fit of giggles. I could tell she was serious though, that she had been looking forward to painting these wine glasses and she wasn’t about to let her hopes be dashed.

“I’m exhausted though. I mean, it’s a lovely thought. You should paint them yourself. We know I’m a terrible artist,” I said, not looking at her, focusing on the last bites of my first crust of pizza.

I saw her hand reach into the pizza box and pull another piece free. She set it on my plate. Not since I was a child had anyone done this. “That’s precisely the point,” my wife responded. “We can have guests over and let them guess who made which ones and then we can laugh at my pretentious copies of artists, and praise your, at the very least original stick figures and wishy-washes of color. It’s the perfect expression of what art is truly valuable. You’re not derivative, darling. You’re too untalented to even be derivative and that’s all that matters to me and to anyone.” She chuckled to herself as she bit into a slice.

I was breathing heavily now. I still couldn’t look at her. “Perhaps we could do it another time then. I don’t want to right now.”

Her response was curt and assured. “Nope. It’ll take all of a half hour and I will do all the clean-up. I’ve been looking forward to this all day. We’re going to paint wine glasses even if you have a terrible time of it.”

We painted wine glasses that evening. Of course we did. I painted messages and tiny illustrations that had no value, had nothing to do with me, in fear that some form of my previous intention might leak out. I painted a glass with a primitive-looking golf ball and putter, with a message that read, “Golf is a good walk spoiled.”