My Only Wife Read online

  5.

  MY WIFE DIDN’T ALWAYS FIND it easy or enjoyable to tell people’s stories to that tape recorder. Some of the stories my wife collected were difficult.

  On the evenings when this was the case she ’d come home and put on a record. My wife and I only owned an old record player with a radio dial. I often offered to buy us a newer stereo but she forbade it. She said she had come to require the warp that vinyl records inevitably developed. It was like sleeping by the ocean; the subtle waves in the sound made each song a lullaby. She said, “A rocking chair couldn’t work half so well.”

  Most commonly my wife put on old soul records she let sit by the radiator too long. They’d distort in and out, the sound twisting out of shape as she lay on the couch in a daze, letting the music bend around her while she tried to grasp how to tell a story.

  My wife never told her stories for sensational effect. She liked to tell them in a way that would make them quiet and interesting. She wanted people to lean in. She liked to foreshadow huge events to come. She did this even when the stories were simple and straight forward. She gave hints when there was nothing to hint at.

  The way the people told the stories to my wife would be out of order in the least interesting way. Often these acquaintances tended to share with my wife the hardest bit of their life first.

  There was a sense that my wife could handle it, that telling her might lessen the blow each time these people would think about the event in the future.

  There was a warm openness to my wife in the beginning of the story, like she was making some kind sacrifice to take on such a burden.

  My wife never directly asked someone to tell his story, but she was adept at gently steering the conversation.

  In the beginning my wife seemed generous, but by the end there was hunger.

  She needed those stories to be told as much as the teller needed to relay them.

  When my wife returned home, she would sit on the couch and evaluate how a listener wanted to be teased, eased into a story.

  My wife would flip the arm of the record player all the way to the left to click it off. She didn’t have one of those fancy little mini-tape recorders. She had one of the bulky ones that were about the size of a hardcover novel, with a slide-out handle. She clicked the RECORD button and spoke.

  Sometimes she talked for only a short amount of time: not everyone was open with their lives, not everyone was aware of what was fascinating about themselves. Usually my wife could seek it out, but this is not to say there weren’t exceptions.

  Sometimes my wife would go on for over an hour. She would carry on and carry on.

  Usually she clocked in around twenty minutes.

  What seemed most fascinating about my wife’s project, as she tried to explain it to me once in the beginning, was that whenever included herself in the story. She never interjected how something made her feel or how she felt she was affected.

  On the nights when she would flip on those old soul records, it may have been that the only way she could imagine telling the story was to include herself, and in denying herself that option, she needed to think of a new way to look at the situation. She had to tell the story once in her head so that she could manually erase all the traces of herself.

  When my wife talked with these people, she tried never to pass judgment. She tried to bring out parts of their story that she felt were important and that she thought they were avoiding.

  My wife laid on the couch and listened to soul to ease her mind, to exempt herself from the stories of the world outside, to allow herself to become what she considered an auditor.

  She’d have to let the voice teach itself to her, so she could learn how to speak it.

  6.

  MY WIFE TOLD ME A story once, when we were not yet married, about a man who wore little wire rim glasses framed by long hair and a matching auburn beard.

  My wife said this man offered her his story easily outside a general store in some western town.

  She’d gone on a road trip by herself for an entire summer. She assumed there wouldn’t be many young people driving through Wyoming or South Dakota. She figured people would leave her alone for a while.

  My wife loved the sidewalks of the city, but one summer she wanted to leave them behind so she could come back to them.

  She wasted time while she took this trip. She lived out of her car and spent large portions of the day leaning against it in parking lots, taking in the dusty sunlight and the families spilling in and out of their vehicles.

  One morning sitting on a bench outside of a general store, she was greeted by a friendly mutt. She set her bags down and petted the dog, but soon the man with the wire rim glasses came up behind the dog apologizing.

  My wife said it was no problem. She loved dogs and hadn’t seen nearly enough of them lately.

  The man said he had hitched in the night before.

  The man said to my wife, “I’m the kind of man who likes to buy a woman a cup of coffee to get to know her, no expectations. I’m a rambler. I like to meet as many people as I can.”

  My wife said, “I like coffee.” And they were off.

  My wife told me, “It became clear quickly I was never going to get this guy’s story. I don’t think the man lived a day of his life. He spent all his time defining who he was, like it was a possibility. If I told this man’s story, it would be about how incorrect his own version was.”

  My wife told me what this man had said, this rambler:

  “I’m the kind of man who likes to live from day to day. I’ve never had a steady job, and I never intend to have one.”

  “I’m the kind of man who loves women serially. I meet women and write their name on my hand, to remember. When we say goodbye, I spit on my hand and rub the name off. Off my hand, out of mind.”

  “I’m the kind of man who likes all sorts of music. I’ve played with a lot of bands in my travels. I can play any instrument your posse’s lookin’ for.”

  “I’m the kind of man who makes instant friends with people. I’ve never met someone who could resist my charms.”

  “I’m the kind of man who tells it like it is, no matter who it hurts. I’m chronically honest. I can’t help it. I have a keen eye for the truth and I lack the tact to not call it as I see it.”

  When my wife told me this story, she shook her head, smiling. “He was so far off. He never told me a single true thing. I had never met someone so set on identifying himself with so many different labels. He didn’t tell stories; he told me what categories he fit into. When we were done with three or four cups of coffee we walked out of the coffee shop and I petted his dog as I said my farewell. He tried to convince me to let him stay in my car for the night. Obviously I refused. ‘I’m the kind of man who takes no for an answer,’ he replied. The man and his dog walked a few paces away before he said, ‘You think you have something on me. I can tell by that smile. You think you have all the answers. You might fool the others, but you can’t fool me.’ And he winked like he’d let me in on a secret and sauntered away, his dog loping at his side. I walked back into the diner to talk to the waitress a little while and tell her about what had happened.”

  My wife told me the waitress said, “Must happen all the time. Some people are unknowable.” She’d misunderstood. She thought my wife was saying he was an enigma.

  My wife hadn’t intended to pay him such a compliment.

  My wife had lost to a man obsessed with fitting himself into his own picture frame.

  My wife said, “The only story I could tell that afternoon was ultimately about myself.”

  “Tricky bastard.” My wife laughed, defeated.

  7.

  MY WIFE KNEW A LITTLE French. We went to the south of France for our honeymoon, stayed in Nice, took day trips along the coast, spent only one day in Paris, threw its proportion of French history to the wind.

  My wife spoke French to shopkeepers; waiters spoke English to my wife. The French people became exasperated. Th
ey kept trying to convince her to speak English. My wife waved off what she thought were their accommodations. “Arretez!” she would say nonchalantly. She would take her time recalling what words she could say to get her meaning across. Her voice slid through this language I was hearing her speak for the first time. My wife enjoyed the waltz of it. She liked the way everyone was trying to adapt to the others’ rhythms, like dancing with strangers.

  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?

  8.

  MY 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.”

  9.

  MY 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 ca
me 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.