My Only Wife Read online

  It is as this statue that I desire my wife to receive my missive. I would never wish the words I wrote to cross anyone’s line of sight, but if there were a way that she could know the nature and tonnage of my message without having to read the words, I would wish this fate upon her; I would wish her a weight for eternity as heavy as the one she placed on me, one which might only be worn down by the whipping sands of time.

  I can think of no more accurate instance of retribution, but age and weight.

  36.

  MY WIFE HELPED TO DECORATE a local haunted house each fall.

  She was in charge of one room and it seemed to be the favorite attraction of most of the patrons. It looked like a work of art.

  My wife scoured flea markets and antique shops year round, always with a purpose lurking in the back of her mind to hunt up broken dolls and masks that she could use in the haunted house.

  The room she designed was bathed in red light. The ceiling was covered in dry branches and leaves. Stapled to the walls were all of the dolls and masks, many missing arms, many naked, many lacking half of a face, shirred or with one eye glued shut from moisture and time.

  The dolls hung in all sizes: ventriloquist dummies, Madame Alexander dolls, life-size plastic little boys, baby dolls, voodoo dolls, stuffed animal people. The masks were African tribal masks, deflated rubber costume masks, ceramic masquerade masks.

  In the room, visitors were terrified and overwhelmed by the sense that they were being watched.

  In the center of the room she hung one of the most lifelike dummies I’ve ever seen.

  It was the body of a naked, middle-aged woman. She hung in a noose and her feet dangled about a foot above the ground. Beneath her was a pile of chicken bones, delicate and in danger of being crushed when the woman was inevitably cut down.

  The scene made no real sense, but when one walked into the room, there was a petrifying, eerie feeling. It seemed like the woman was hanging there because of all the eyes that were trained on her. None of the eyes looked nearly as real as the body that was hanging in the middle of the room.

  Everything felt slightly false.

  This falseness felt like part of the problem.

  When people were going through the haunted house, a lot of monsters and ghosts jumped out to surprise them, but when they came to this room, the stillness was overwhelming. People would stand waiting for something to happen, but the more nothing happened the faster their hearts started to beat, and the more they wanted to leave the room. They had paid to be scared though, and so they stayed as long as they could and then left, perhaps disappointed that nothing had ever grabbed them or fallen on them, but also undeniably affected.

  When I asked my wife where the idea had come from, what it all meant, she seemed reluctant to reveal anything.

  “It’s about seeing and being seen.”

  “It’s about pressure and shame.”

  And then her mood would shift. “It’s a haunted house room. It’s not about anything.”

  Each time she changed her answer, and each time I told her how scared I had been, precisely because of the stillness and the illogic of the details. In all of the other rooms you could figure out the stereotypical creepy situation, but in this one the unknown was deafening in its silence.

  My wife said, “To be someone else. To play games one doesn’t know the rules for. Delightful, isn’t it? Halloween is a time for make-believe and pretend and the unknown. My room lets Halloween be what it wants to be, not what people expect of it.”

  37.

  MY WIFE LAUGHED OFF her tumbles because it was like a conscious reminder that she had to slow down. She had to stop and think occasionally which foot she was going to put in front of the other.

  It was like she was catching up with herself.

  My wife would pick herself up and dust herself off.

  My wife would keep going.

  As she walked away she would examine the heels of her hands, callused and scarred over.

  “You shouldn’t catch yourself like that,” I would tell her again and again. “You’ll break something someday.”

  She would dust out bits of gravel, look up at me wide-eyed, and shake her head.

  38.

  WHEN I TRY TO THINK about what she was to me, it’s both easy to come up with answers and complicated.

  I had a dream that I was a child and I had a pet dodo bird. I had no way of effectively leashing this bird except to tie a piece of bread to a string and feed the bread to the dodo, the other end of the string still in my hand. Then, I could pull the gagging bird along with me. In the dream, my mother yells at me to stop doing this if I truly love the bird. My fear is that it will escape. I feed it this way again and again and it eventually kills the bird.

  When I recall the time my wife and I had together, I think about how happy I was, but I can also admit that happiness is relative and, if I look for it, I find I can enjoy being alone. I would never have predicted this, and, more importantly, never wished it. She was my life and I still haven’t figured out what I am without her.

  I have only these guarded memories I roll around in my hands again and again. They are no doubt getting tarnished, but they seem bright as ever. We spent our time alone together, with the exception of the rare strangers my wife befriended. They couldn’t have known her like I did, and perhaps that’s the point: that it was only me who knew her that way. Who is there to try and talk me out of this vision of her I hold so close?

  When I opened that closet door, and pressed “play” again and again for each and every tape that sat in that closet, I heard nothing. Every one of those stories she had taken the time to relay was gone. It was shocking to hear the silence. Each carefully labeled case, filled with a thin cassette, was empty. Like mug shots with no film in the camera, each person had been scrutinized from multiple angles, and then released into the night, untraceable.

  39.

  JUST WEEKS BEFORE I WOULD see her for the last time, we walked through a prairie up north. My shoes were soaked through with dew in minutes and I stepped carefully to avoid actual puddles and muddy low points in the trail. My wife splashed ahead, galoshes barring the moisture from her feet. She was safe.

  “Wait up, Speedy!” I called, sidestepping a pile a stray dog had left behind. She turned her head before she darted down the left fork in the path. I resigned myself to the sloshing feeling and jogged to catch up. When I reached her she was on a bridge, sturdy, but swaying back and forth. She was shifting her weight, enjoying the ride.

  “Whoa. Wobbly,” I said, and as my first step landed on the bridge, she started moving more violently. I almost lost my balance, but I steadied myself on the cable handrails. She smiled at me devilishly and walked calmly off the bridge. “What was that about?” I asked, still a little shaken.

  “A test,” she replied, seriously. I searched her face, and, looking back, the resignation was there then. A decision had been made and it had little to do with how I reacted to her swaying a bridge. Whatever she had decided was a long time coming and had more to do with her than anyone else.

  “Well, you know, ‘Be prepared!’” I stopped for a moment as she ran ahead again. I wanted to look out at all of the ground we’d covered. It was a crisp fall day and we’d come north along the lakeshore to some open prairielands to admire the leaves changing and take in the fresh air. Winter would be upon us soon. We’d be housebound and hermetic, frozen by the fact of it. At that moment I thought about turning around and heading back. If I left, my wife would be lost. I knew she was counting on me to keep track of the path we’d taken. She’d gone ahead, and who knew how far? I could walk back at my leisurely pace enjoying myself and it might be hours before she found her way back to where we’d parked the car. The grass was high and it was impossible to predict which way a certain fork would lead. I looked in the direction she’d headed and looked back from where we came and decided I couldn’t do it. She would be angry and could possibly get herself hurt out here on her
own with her clumsiness and poor sense of direction.

  I stood where I was, waiting, and finally she returned, giving me a look that both asked why I hadn’t followed and answered the same question. She looked out from the vantage point at which I’d positioned myself. She stood in front of me, her back against my stomach, her head against my shoulder. I hugged her. “Look at all of this. It’s huge.”

  “I hope you remember where we’ve come from because I am lost,” she said.

  “I know how to get back,” I replied. “I’ve been keeping close track. I kissed the top of her head and thanked goodness that she returned to me so we could look out together. In seconds, the wind started up again and we were off.

  Years later, I’m still searching my memory for my wife. I find her now and again in unexpected places, and it’s there I feel like I know who I am. In the relief of rediscovering her, I’m able to place myself within her, about her.

  40.

  I CALLED MY WIFE’S ART teacher. We had never spoken, but in the midst of the mess, in the aftermath of her departure, I found a registration form for the class. I filed it away.

  I’d never heard one of her recordings. I’d never seen her painting. I’d stopped trying to reason her out and was simply waiting for signals. I had been trained by the end; I knew and performed the appropriate reactions.

  I had stopped trying to connect dots, because the dots weren’t numbered. There was an infinite quantity of paths between points the lines could take.

  My wife was a constellation without a mythology to inform her shapes.

  I wondered about that still life, that painting she had never let me see, because her teacher had heard sounds from within the canvas that couldn’t be seen.

  I wanted to see it, to try to experience my own jumbled version of perception.

  So I called her teacher. When I’d regrouped the apartment; when I’d taken photographs of the state of things immediately after she left; when I’d begun to be able to talk in less tangents; when my speech patterns had resumed their normal linear paths and I was no longer punctuating each conversation with questions of grief and confusion, I called her teacher and I asked for that painting.

  He said he would never part with it. It was a work of art, and he suspected it would be worth a lot of money some day.

  I explained to him what had happened, that my wife had disappeared, and he apologized, said he wondered why he hadn’t heard from her. He didn’t offer up the painting though.

  “I need this,” I said to this man, but saying such a naked statement to someone who does not know you, someone who has no idea how difficult it is to say something like that, saying something like “I need this” in the most honest and vulnerable way you can muster, never quite has the effect you would hope. It’s easy to deny the unknown.

  This man was obviously staying on the line for the sake of politeness; it was not because he was going to reconsider. I changed my tactic. “Can I come and look at the painting?”

  The man exhaled on the other end of the line. I imagined his eyes flicking around the room trying to think of any reason he could give me so that he would no longer have to deal with the situation, looking for some excuse as to why he might not have to allow me anywhere near his office or his home or his classroom, or wherever it was that he was housing my wife’s painting at the moment. Finally, “I’m not sure your wife would want me to do that.”

  The tense of his statement brought me to tears. I thought this would be easier and that I would have the strength to make it through a simple phone call without breaking down. I had already begun to refer to her in the past tense. Despite my belief that I was going to be able to recover her, I had to let myself believe that she was gone. “It doesn’t matter what she would want you to do now. She’s not here anymore and—” I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to say it because it felt irreversible and I didn’t want to say it because it would be bigger than I was able to handle. I didn’t want to say it because I knew if I did, I would have said it as a tool to get to see this painting, and, for that same reason, I wanted to say it. I wanted to say it and have him break down and offer the painting to me. I wanted to say it and then force myself to deal with it, and so I said it: “She’s not coming back.”

  The art teacher didn’t know me. He hadn’t heard all that reasoning that went on in my head before I said that irrevocable statement that meant all my hope was gone, that the reason I wanted to see that painting was not because I thought it would bring her back. The reason I wanted to see that painting was for myself. I wanted to see what she wouldn’t show me. I wanted it to lead me to her, but the “her” I knew was never meant for me. I wanted it to lead me to her, but I didn’t think it was going to bring her back.

  I realized then what I thought I would find in this painting was some sort of one-way mirror through which I could catch a glimpse of her without her knowing I was there.

  But the art teacher didn’t know all this. He said, “You shouldn’t give up hope just yet. How long has she been gone? Two, three weeks? She’ll probably show up from some tropical vacation, refreshed and- and- oblivious to the fact that you would have been worrying about her. If she calls me up and says it’s alright if you see the painting, I’ll be happy to show you, but I can’t show it to you right now. Sorry, pal.” And this time he did hang up.

  I held the phone receiver in my hand for a long time. And I realized that he had not known my wife because the idea that she would go off to the Caribbean by herself was inane. In comparison, it seemed rational that she would disappear for good.

  I had worried that my wife had told him not to let me see the painting if I ever asked. I had wondered what my wife had told him about me. I became nervous that he knew something I didn’t. I wanted to see that painting because I thought it would fill me in. I thought all that he knew of her must be in that painting and I wanted it all.

  I went to the school and found his office. “She’s not here and she’s not coming back and I know this for a fact and I don’t find this easy to say or even think, so take my word for it and let me see the painting. I need something here: I’m lost without her and I need something. This is all I can think of.”

  Once I stopped speaking I allowed myself to register the man I was talking to. He was larger, older and hairier than I was. He sat at a desk littered with a mess comparable to that which had decorated my apartment for the last two weeks. He had an immense bookshelf behind him filled with big, expensive books and unidentifiable objects that appeared to be abstract modern sculptures. He looked at me, eyebrows raised, but not entirely put off by my presence.

  He cleared his throat, adjusted his position in his chair, and looked me straight in the eye. “I’ll let you look at it, but you are not taking that picture out of here and if you give me any trouble I will call security.”

  This response seemed extreme, but I agreed. “Anything is enough right now,” I said, because, at that moment, anything and something were the same thing.

  He stood, tugging on the belt holding up his threadbare corduroys. “I’ll be right back. I come back and it looks like you’ve so much as set a finger on something in here, the painting goes back into storage. Got it?” He stepped out of the door behind me and I waited.

  It seemed like he was gone a long time, but when he returned he had a large canvas turned toward himself. It was about four feet tall the way he was holding it and maybe two feet wide. He came in and I tried to position myself beside him so that I could see the painting. He turned it away from me as I moved. “Ten minutes,” he said. “I’ll give you ten minutes and I’m not leaving the room.”

  I nodded and as he turned the painting to me, he shifted it so that the length of it stretched horizontally.

  I stood there, calmly dumbfounded. My head began nodding immediately to the rhythm of my heavily beating heart. I knew this painting. I had already seen it.

  I could feel the man watching my reaction. I knew he wanted me to begin re
sponding out loud.

  The teacher must have left the room, but I heard nothing: no footsteps down the hall, no low murmur of voices or a distant grandfather clock chiming from the canvas. If this teacher had told the truth and heard something when he looked at the painting it did not do this for me. The painting seemed entirely quiet to me. There was just the muffled drumbeat nudging in my chest that even this painting could not drown out.

  This still life was a painting of a room. It was a destroyed room. There were holes torn into the walls. A mattress stretched, up-ended toward the corners of the room. It looked as if a snake had sidled through the space, shedding many years’ layers of colorful cotton skin. Cracked ceramics punctuated these stretches of sleeve and sheet carpeting the floor. Drawers were pulled free and stood on their ends, their contents littered and tangled and cracked in lumps. The whole scene looked correct.

  This painting was our apartment the day she left.

  I have the distinct feeling that looking at that painting my face did not change. I feel certain that my expression had paralyzed as soon as the canvas was flipped round. I knew my head nodded, agreeing with everything I was seeing, affirming that yes it was true. She was gone and she wasn’t coming back and this painting had known before I knew. She had whispered this information with her brushstrokes, had revised her plan laying layers of paint on each other, compounding them into a literal vision of where she could see our future was headed.

  She had said with paint, had told this canvas, what words couldn’t say, what she couldn’t tell me.