My Only Wife Read online

  I stared at the painting and the old questions forked into new ones. Had she thought of destroying the apartment, of leaving, and then painted this, hoping it would satisfy that urge? Or had she painted this and seen how attractive an option such destruction proved? Either way the similarity between this painting and the damage done to our apartment, as well as the time that had elapsed between the creation of both, proved that she had spent time thinking about it. She hadn’t made a rash decision. Our apartment hadn’t been torn apart while she was kidnapped. What she had done to our home, the fact that she was gone, this painting was the link between then and now and every confused moment before and to come.

  I stared at the painting and the why of the whole situation was not answered, and the where didn’t even seem relevant.

  “Time’s up.”

  I looked away and the art teacher began to spin the painting back to himself.

  “Thank you,” I said, and because it was honest and I felt compelled to say something else, “That helped a lot.”

  “Goodbye, then.” He was waiting for me to step from his office so he could do the same, so he could put the painting back in storage.

  I stepped tentatively from the room and he hustled out after me. He shut the door behind him. I walked through the exit, got in my car and drove back to the apartment.

  My home looks pristine now, untouched by my wife, clean of her wreckage.

  41.

  MY WIFE WALKED OUT of theatres when she was bored, offended, tired, felt like moving.

  I sat through every movie I ever bought a ticket to, even if they were insufferable. I waited to see how a story turned out, if it redeemed itself. If my wife was sufficiently offput halfway through something, she saw no reason to continue, to give it more of a chance.

  She felt no obligation to anyone or anything.

  My wife acted and reacted with meticulous consideration of herself. I see now, though, it was not often that she considered what her actions would spur in others. She behaved for herself alone, and I was the one who most tolerated this behavior. I was in such awe of her, so ready to be filled by her, that I rarely questioned a thing. She was who I had the most faith in and she was my faith itself, a conduit through which I lived my life. Everything was once removed through her.

  There is a large part of me through which I still channel that way of life. When I think about her leaving I can transfer back to those strong feelings of sympathy. When she first left I felt the need to imagine myself in her place and imagine why she must have done whatever it was she did.

  In this realm I can feel certain as my wife pulled drawers from dressers that she owned each movement. I can be sure that as she swept her arm through the kitchen cupboard she committed to what she was doing and had a vague idea of why she moved her arm with the force she did.

  I can be sure that the day my wife climbed the stairs up to our apartment so that she could tear it apart, she felt the weight of Sisyphus. I’m sure as she stumbled up the stairs she felt like she was hauling her history for the millionth time. I can have no doubt that as she came nearer our apartment’s floor, the heft of her history grew more burdensome and she tripped under the pressure.

  It makes me nauseous to think of the degree to which I am still capable of snapping back into this mode of thinking, of justification.

  I can still quite easily imagine that when my wife flung the door open, this action was the most liberating she’d ever taken. When she had reached the top of her mountain the slight plateau of its peak certainly allowed the force she exerted on her load to lessen a bit and so that door flying open would be something like the last push that breaks into a moment of no resistance.

  My wife must have felt light, dancing about the apartment and tearing down what had rooted her for so long. I imagine she cried tears of joy, then glanced in fear at the door when she heard footsteps reaching our landing, and I imagine she stood still for a long time in front of the closet and considered what to do.

  But it wasn’t that she was worrying about me, or about how I would react when I figured out she was gone, or how I would cope when she, the woman through which I had lived, was absent. She wasn’t thinking about what she must have known,that without her now, after all this time, I would feel like a ghost. She was thinking about how, if I had walked in at that moment, that moment would be less perfect because it wouldn’t have fit as neatly into her grand design.

  Right after she left, what I would imagine most was how she must have descended that staircase.

  I believed my wife must have flown. Finally stripped of every truth she had been trapped within, I imagined my wife was nude and lithe and gliding back down to the earth again. I imagined the stairs carried her smoothly so she didn’t have to bother with the graduated treads of the staircase. Maybe the stairs leaned into themselves creating a slide she could ride to the ground floor.

  My wife was setting herself so free.

  She allowed herself none of the limits of the nostalgia she had for so long defined herself by.

  Armed only with her aging hands, she must have pulled the door shut behind her and paused.

  My wife must have realized exactly what she was doing and, in a moment, she must have decided to forget.

  For so long I had imagined my wife as this woman who had lived trying to remember not for herself, but for everyone else, and when I thought of her leaving, I imagined that she must have paused a moment and left it all behind.

  Her hand closed around the doorknob; her arm pulled the door shut and she turned to lock the apartment from the outside.

  My wife slid the key in the lock, turned it, and then slipped down the stairs.

  The one truth I know is that I came home.

  I climbed the stairs, light and unknowing.

  I slid my own key into the lock, turned and pushed.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which portions of this novel first appeared: The Denver Quarterly, Wigleaf, Melusine, and Mud Luscious.

  Many thanks, in no particular order, to Matt Bell, Dan Wickett, Steven Gillis, Jennifer Hancock, Beth Nugent, Carol Anshaw, Bin Ramke, Janet Desaulniers, Steven Seighman and Amanda Jane Jones.

  Thanks to the Ragdale Foundation and Vermont Studio Center for time and space, and to my classmates at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

  Above all, thanks to my family and friends for their love, support and tolerance, especially Mom, Dad, Jenny and Jared.

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