My Only Wife Read online

  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.

  Of course, I had imagined this happening a million times. I had planned exactly what I was going to say, but I had never imagined she would say something first.

  “I like the beard.” She said, tugging near my chin ever so gently.

  Was it possible that she had no idea how greatly she had devastated me, by not returning my calls, by avoiding me at all costs? Surely our friends had informed her of the state I was in. Surely someone had let it slip how obsessed I’d become, how much the idea of her had come to mean to me, that she wasn’t simply another crush.

  “Are you here alone?” she asked, unthrown by how unresponsive I was. She squinted her eyes at me now, and tilted her head, unsure what the problem was. “I’m sorry about not returning your calls. I don’t deal well with people acting aggressively. Usually I’m the one who figures out a situation and takes it forward. You caught me off guard, pal.”

  I was utterly perplexed. She was whispering in my ear, using words like buddy and pal. I had been sure she was the one a month before; I had been sure she was the one the night before. I’d been sure I had messed up the best thing that had ever happened to me. I had regressed so far as to think of my loss in those awful terms: “the one that got away” and “the love of my life.” Right then I hated her a little bit. Why did she get to be calm enough to call me pal?

  I tried to look through her, searched the space beyond her for some sort of answer, and then my cousin emerged from the theater, and threw her arms around me.

  My wife winked and waved, walked out.

  My cousin hugged me, and my arms, wrapped around her, felt foreign. Her hair was kinky from pin curls that had been hidden under a wig. Her face was pale, scrubbed of the heavy greasepaint. Her back felt damp with sweat. I didn’t enjoy hugging her. I waited for her to loosen her grip.

  I said, “Congratulations.”

  I said, “You were wonderful.”

  I said, “I never knew you were so talented.”

  “Was it worth coming out of your little hole?” my cousin asked.

  She loosened her grip and I held her at arms length. “Absolutely.” I kissed her forehead and we walked to the nearest diner to get a cup of coffee and a piece of pie, to talk about the show. Something felt full again. Something felt started over.

  The next day my wife called and asked if I wanted to meet her somewhere for lunch. I agreed immediately. I shaved my beard that morning. It was summer now and I was slightly paler where the beard had been.

  At lunch my wife told me how she had missed me.

  She told me how her stories had been huge since she met me. She told me she thought she might have begun to bridge the gap between people’s stories and themselves.

  I told her I wasn’t sure what she meant and she smiled, happy to hear this. “I think you and I could work together.”

  I was wary to start anything, but also becoming excited again. “Work together?”

  “I think you and I should maybe start dating. I’ll make lots of vague statements and if you figure out what they mean in the middle of the night, you’re never allowed to tell me again.” She winked and I knew she must have known how I had suffered in want of her. “I’m not a puzzle to be figured out, and I think if you figure something out, it’s probably just for you, and probably has nothing to do with me. Deal?”

  I nodded, terrified to answer the wrong way.

  We began seeing each other exclusively then. We moved in after six months. We were engaged in a year. We were married six months after
that, and then she was gone ten years later.

  It’s been five years now.

  I’m cooking full meals.

  My face is clean-shaven.

  The day I realized my wife was gone, our apartment was ransacked, torn apart. Almost all of it was emptied onto the floor and pulled into pieces.

  The day I realized my wife was gone, everything else went with her.

  And I tried to bring it back, but it never came, so I relented.

  And now I’ve carried on.

  10.

  MY WIFE SAID, “I like to think about how our bodies constantly make themselves. How we keep ourselves alive.” She enjoyed studying the mechanical workings of the body.

  My wife attributed this interest to an experiment she did in her high school biology class.

  In this experiment they penned in the outline of a square inch on their hands. They then took a hot probe and poked random places within the square. In black ink they marked with a tiny dot the places where the heat of the probe was distinguishable. The number of places within this square inch that the hand actually registered heat from the probe was quite small. They did the same experiment in the same square with a frozen probe. About an equal number of spots, different ones, felt the cold probe. They marked these areas with tiny red dots.

  These dots indicated temperature nerve endings present at the surface of the skin, and their absence indicated places where the skin was not sensitive to temperature.

  “Every inch of the human body,” my wife said, “is blind to something.”

  “He was a terrible teacher,” she added, “except for that experiment. That experiment changed my life.”

  My wife said, “People think the brain continues out into the universe, but it doesn’t. It ends at your skin. If you want to change your life, change your body. I’m not talking just form or appearance, but any physical dislocation; moving somewhere else changes your body, because you’re situated in a different context.”

  I smiled. It was hard to keep up all the time, but I did my best. In the years we’d been together, I’d learned that’s what she wanted. She slapped my arm. “I’m serious. This is important. You can laugh, but in the end, our bodies are where we reside for our whole lives.”

  Soon after, on a cold day, walking home from the grocery store, my wife suddenly stopped. “Breathe in,” she commanded. I did, eager to placate her so we might get home. “Now, quickly, breathe out.”

  “Do it again,” she said, “and this time, feel the temperature.”

  “I was breathing before you told me how,” I countered.

  “Don’t be a smartass. This is remarkable.”

  I breathed in and out a few more times. “Cold in and hot out. What’s your point?”

  “See how quickly you did that? The air out here must be thirty degrees. When you exhale, feel the warmth in your mouth? In seconds, you’ve heated that air almost seventy degrees. Isn’t that incredible?”

  I’d never thought of it that way, so I nodded. Genuinely.

  “Every one of those molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide touched your blood. Every minute of the day we bathe ourselves in blood. Every cell of our bodies is touched by our blood. And we can feel it happen. Put a finger to your wrist or neck, or lie back and you can feel blood beat through your stomach. We’re flooding ourselves constantly. No wonder the air we breathe out is warm. It’s gone everywhere there is to go.”

  Eyes wide, my wife looked like she’d arrived at her conclusion ahead of time.

  With the hand free of groceries she tugged my sleeve, asking for a response.

  “What made you think of that?” I asked.

  “I was walking and I keyed into the temperature of my breath and suddenly came the revelation: everything our bodies do constantly, how capable we are of the extraordinary, even something like heating air really quickly.”

  “You’re right. In those terms, blood becomes a sort of a romantic notion, this entity, the most familiar resident of our bodies, huh? And our breath, then, because it’s ridden through the blood, flowed through our bodies, becomes an intimate thing. Pretty wonderful,” I said. “Magnificent.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” She nodded, satisfied, her thoughts wandering further.

  We began to walk again, laughing as we exhaled white clouds and walked through them, breaking relics of our respiration with our faces.

  11.

  MY WIFE MET A LITTLE boy in a sandbox. He was building castles.

  She had been out for a walk through the park. It was the beginning of fall and the leaves were just starting to change.

  My wife had gone on the walk for lime, for tangerine and lemon.

  My wife had gone on the walk for all the citrus colors of the autumn leaves, before they burnt through to brown, when their death still smelled fresh, didn’t crinkle underfoot.

  The little boy in the sandbox wore a knit cap pulled down over his ears.

  My wife was fascinated by his aloneness. There was no one else at the playground.

  My wife watched him with great interest as she walked. She wasn’t watching the cracks in the sidewalk and her eyes stayed on the boy when her hands hit the ground.

  My wife hobbled over to the sandbox, plunked down on the edge to get a better look at her scraped knee.

  The little boy said hello to her.

  The little boy told my wife he was eight and a half.

  He told her he didn’t go to school today.

  He told her he liked her scrape.

  He asked if it was real.

  He had not seen my wife fall.

  The boy told my wife sometimes he drew on himself with red ink to make it look like he had been hurt.

  He told my wife he had watched a program on special effects makeup where people drew and glued things on themselves for a living.

  He told her that now he knew what he wanted to do.

  My wife told the boy that, yes, the cut was real.

  She told him one day he wouldn’t want to pretend to be hurt; he would spend all his times of well-being remembering away the hurt.

  The boy told my wife, “Your cut hurts.”

  My wife confirmed his statement with a nod.

  He said, “Aren’t you going to ask why I’m not in school?”

  My wife shook her head. She smiled at him, silently telling him to go ahead.

  “My mom won’t come downstairs. I bring her breakfast in the morning and leave. I come home and my dad makes us dinner. We bring the food upstairs and eat together sitting on her bed. Today I didn’t go. I took my backpack and I walked here instead of school. My dad said today was going to be the last warm day and I wanted to build one last castle before it was too cold.”

  My wife stared, listening.

  The boy looked down at his castle. “My mom’s not sick. She doesn’t cough or throw up. She just won’t come downstairs. I think she will someday, but I don’t know when. I thought it would be okay if I missed a day of school to build one last castle before winter. Now I’m worried they might have called my mom. If they did call, she would be worried. Maybe she would come downstairs. I would go home to check, but if they didn’t call, I don’t want to get in trouble. If they did call, I don’t want her to go back upstairs. My mom’s not sick, though. She just won’t come down.”

  “I think you should go home.”

  “Is that what you’re supposed to say, or something you want to say?”

  “Sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

  “I like your pearls. My nana wears pearls like yours.” “Thank you. I wish I were your nana,” my wife said. The little boy asked, “Why?”

  For this child, who was giving so much, my wife broke her own rules. It was a rare instance, where she realized how valuable it could be to give a little back. “I’m still waiting to feel grown-up. I think being a grandmother would be a sure sign.”

  He wrinkled his nose at her. “You’re grown-up. How old are you, thirty-one and half?”

  My wif
e thought for a minute. Her eyes widened. “Thirty-one and a half today exactly. How did you know?”

  “I’m good with age.”

  My wife took charge of the situation as she did so well. My wife did the appropriate thing that afternoon for the little boy and then she came home. I was sitting in a large armchair, going over some notes for a lecture . We’d moved in together about six months prior. I was getting comfortable being the one my wife came home to.

  She laid down on our patched leather couch. “When I was a child…” my wife began.

  “You spoke as I child?” I tried to finish her sentence with a joke, smirking at how clever I was. I expected to hear a giggle, but when I didn’t, I looked over at her.

  Her eyes were wet.

  “I’m sorry. Go on.” I hadn’t realized.

  My wife began again. “When I was a child, I was frightened of the elderly. I would avoid them at all costs. I remember hating to visit my grandmother because of the smell of her house, because she would force me to take home spiral notebooks that had solid-colored covers, rather than the ones I eyed at drugstores covered in pictures of kittens. I disliked the way the ice cubes she pulled from the tray for my sodas were shrunken small and wilted with age because she never used them herself; the ice irritated her teeth. My mother and I visited my grandmother every Thursday morning in the summer.”

  My wife said, “We would pick her up from the beauty shop where she had her hair done and take her to breakfast.”

  She said, “We would take her grocery shopping.”

  She said, “We would take her to the bank, and then to the dollar store.”

  My wife said, “We would go back to her house, and my mother and grandmother would have tea. My grandma’d get a glass coated with a thin layer of dust, crack two or three emaciated ice cubes into the cup and pop a can of cream soda for me. We would sit at her kitchen table with the curtains drawn and the overhead light dim with too few bulbs. I would draw windows and people with flat skulls on scrap paper with pens pulled from the floral centerpiece while my mother and grandmother settled bills on the plastic tablecloth, the macramé place mats. Framed formations of sunflower seeds hung on the wall above my head.