My Only Wife Read online

  “I’d listen to them. and predict how much longer we were going to have to stay by what topic they had moved onto.

  “If it was who had visited my grandmother in the past week it would be at least another hour.

  “If it was who had died recently, maybe forty-five minutes.

  “If it was a new disease my grandmother had read about in the newspaper and now believed she had, we were in the last half hour.

  “When we moved on to a list of errands my grandmother needed my mom to run for her in the next week before we would visit again, we had about fifteen minutes.

  “When my grandmother started talking about how she had lived too long without my grandfather, how she was ready to go up and join him, how death would be better than living like this, we were bound to leave the kitchen any minute, kissing my grandmother on the head, letting her cry alone.

  “As I got older, I started visiting my grandmother on my own. I didn’t like her attitude, but I was fascinated and decided it would be my mission to figure out what happened to her, why she felt the need to end each experience by telling us she wanted to die.”

  My wife sat silent for a long time. I knew better than to prompt her. She would continue when she was ready. She would stop only if she couldn’t say any more.

  My wife said, “Each ending felt like a tease to her. Each goodbye felt not final enough. After eighty-five years of farewells, she grew unsatisfied with their outcome; their purpose seemed superfluous. She felt the need to make them something she used to get her hopes up, to remind us that maybe that would be the last time we had to perform the ritual of kissing her forehead, leaving her to cry alone in the kitchen.”

  My wife didn’t cry.

  “I want to be old. I want to watch myself age. I’m uncomfortable being young. I want to forget what it was like to be a child.”

  My wife said, “I met a little boy who built sandcastles for a living today. He was young. Youth isn’t wasted on children. It’s inflicted on them, when they can’t tell what’s hit them.”

  I worried about my wife. I asked, “Shall we mark our heights against the wall?”

  She nodded solemnly. This was something we had learned to do together. On bad days we would make the other stand up as straight as possible against a thin piece of molding that ran along the bathroom door. We would take a pen and mark how tall we were that day. The divots where our heights hadn’t changed since we met were a constant. We could look at those deepening furrows of measurement and sigh that we hadn’t shrunk, that we weren’t slowly becoming gigantic. Our size was something even and clear, unchanged by a difficult day. My wife knew days like this gave her the age she desired, but she liked the idea that they couldn’t touch her height.

  She and I were tall: five foot eleven and six foot four, respectively. We were tall, and we often spoke of how this meant so much.

  We had learned to appreciate that people had to look up at us even if they didn’t look up to us. We had been raised to feel awkward when standing straight and we had been raised reaching for the top shelf our grandmothers couldn’t quite get to. Tall was our way. We changed light bulbs and bent our knees in group pictures.

  12.

  LATER IN OUR TIME TOGETHER, my wife would wake in the night.

  She wasn’t a light sleeper, but there was one sound that could stir her without fail.

  When it was warm out, we left the windows open. If it was quiet and if the traffic was slow, we could hear the faint sound of a tin sign swaying down the street.

  The sign was lightweight. It didn’t take more than the slightest breeze or a car driving by to start it swinging.

  I could sleep right through the sound, but I know my wife would wake often because of it.

  I could play music loudly and she wouldn’t so much as twitch. But at night, in the warm silence, she would wake to the cool squeak of that sign below.

  She knew there was no use tossing and turning. She couldn’t try to ignore it. Closing the window wouldn’t even be enough.

  She would simply stand quietly from her side of the bed, open the bedroom door and pad to the kitchen where she would flip on the light and lean against the counter, arms folded patiently, waiting for the breeze to subside.

  I would wake and find her side of the bed empty.

  I’d stumble into the kitchen blindly and stand in front of her.

  My sleep-swollen hands would find their way to her hair and as my fingers began to thread through the soft tangle on her head, her eyes would shut and her chin would lift and she would bask in the light of the overhead lamp like it was the warmest of summer afternoons.

  Eventually she would lift her arms in a stretch, yawning, like a cat in a spot of sun, and then she’d place her hands on my shoulders to still me. Her lips would form the shape of a “sh” but no sound would come out and I would watch her listen, afraid to breathe, afraid to blink.

  The sign had silenced itself.

  Her hands would slide down my shoulders, down my chest and abdomen, onto my hips and she would push me gently away so she could walk back to our bedroom and climb into bed. Her hand would hit the light switch on her way out of the kitchen, a moment before it might seem like an afterthought.

  I would stand in darkness for a few seconds and listen to the rumple of the linens as she climbed into bed. Then I would run the faucet, letting the water get cold, as I pulled a glass from the cupboard. While downing the glassful in a gulp with my right hand, my left hand would tap the faucet off with measured accuracy. I would set the glass in the sink and count the steps back to the bedroom where I would find my wife already fast asleep.

  13.

  AFTER RECORDING A STORY each night for three years, my wife stopped. I think the hiatus lasted about six months.

  It wasn’t that she told me the stories had ended. I knew because I stopped waiting for her to come out of closed-door rooms.

  She didn’t have a ritual place to tell her stories; she brought her tape recorder into whatever room I wasn’t in at the moment.

  I would have to wait for her to finish before I could enter that room, or she would need to stop and start over.

  My wife never told me when she was about to tell a story. It was an unspoken thing. She would disappear behind a door and I would hear the faint stirrings of her narrating a tale, but I would never try to listen.

  It would be a lie if I didn’t occasionally catch a word or a phrase, but I directed my attention to anything beside her voice. I was nervous I’d hear something I wasn’t supposed to and bring it up later by accident. I knew my wife would share with me what she wanted, in a room where the doors were open.

  For about six months though, she never disappeared to speak to the containment of a shut-off room and a rewound cassette tape, and I knew this because she shut down.

  My wife would come home from work, lie on the couch and play folk music instead of her usual soul records.

  I heard females wailing Cuban revolution songs.

  I heard the twang of steel strings being plucked.

  I heard lyrics about the rape of the land and the earthy smell of desire.

  Because of this soundtrack, I was on edge.

  About a month into this hiatus, I sat at the foot of the couch where my wife slid her feet up to accommodate me.

  My wife looked at me expectantly and I forgot everything I had planned to say. My wife had the power to make me forget: a bittersweet fact, for when I needed most to forget, she was gone.

  She looked away, settling her eyes back to space, her ears back to listening, assuming I had just wanted to be near her.

  She still had the power to call up a knot of silence in me, when all I wanted were the meticulous strings of words I had composed. So I improvised, inadequately, saying, “No stories, huh?”

  “No.”

  “Haven’t felt like it?”

  “I need to stop for a while.” She looked up at me again, this time with blankness, an innocent emptiness I found somew
hat frightening.

  I narrowed my brow. “Everything alright?”

  As I said this, I became nauseous with its inadequacy.

  She shrugged.

  “What is it?” I put a hand on her foot and she flinched.

  “I feel too full right now. I’m overwhelmed… I’m not sure why exactly, but I figure it can’t hurt to pare everything down a bit. To live a bit more simply for a while.”

  “Is it the stories?” She never talked much about them. I didn’t want to pry. I knew they were her own and they had nothing to do with me.

  “Might be,” she said, shrugging again. It was out of character for her to be so indifferent. It unnerved me. “I talked to a butcher last week. I met an old college friend for a late lunch on the south side and she told me I had to go to this butcher in the area. It was some of the best meat she’d ever eaten and she said I should go and get some high-quality filets, as a treat for you and me. I wandered to the address she told me after our lunch, thinking I would give it a try while I was down there. I spotted the sign for the shop about three storefronts away and, of course, I didn’t notice a fire hydrant and I tripped and by the time I’d gathered myself up again, and reached the store, the butcher was flipping the CLOSED sign in the window. I gave him a pleading look, certain he would be happy to have one last customer for the day.

  “I was entirely wrong. He looked at me sternly, almost grimaced, and sliced the air with the knife edge of one fat hand.” She demonstrated this, karate-chopping the empty space above her reclining figure. “He didn’t make a single gesture of apology, just retreated behind the counter and began closing up in a leisurely fashion. He didn’t appear to be in a rush to get anywhere.”

  My wife said, “I watched him carry trays of meat to the coolers in the backroom.”

  My wife said, “I watched him wipe the counters down.”

  She said, “I watched him shut the lights off: the ones in the coolers, the fluorescents overhead.

  “I stood outside and watched until he pulled his coat from a hook on the wall inside the backroom. He headed toward the front door and only then did he notice I was still there. He looked at me confusedly and unlocked the door to let himself out. He opened the door and began, ‘I’m sorry. You’ll have to come back tomorrow. We are closed for the day.’

  “He began to walk away from the store, from me. I asked him, ‘Why wouldn’t you let in one more customer?’

  “‘You think you’re so important I should change my routine for you? I close every day at 5:00, whether there is someone on his way or not. If I let you in, I should let in the fellow down the block as well, the fellow stuck on a stalled train? Where do you think I should draw the line?’

  “He kept walking and I stopped following him. Usually I would have chased him down, but I didn’t. I was exhausted. I can’t remember someone ever being so reluctant to talk to me.”

  My wife said, “I stopped.”

  She said, “ I watched him disappear around a corner.”

  She said, “I regretted him even before the corner carried him away.”

  My wife’s face looked lost. “These stories are how I’ve relied on myself; they’re what I expect of myself. When I failed, I wasn’t sure what to do. I felt like a lost lamb, and I was my own shepherd: all I need to do was gather a few stories to pull myself back in, but I’m not sure I should. I started thinking about what or who I was without them. I realized I know myself differently than anyone else knows me, than even you know me. I wondered if this was alright. I don’t know yet, so I’m taking a break from the stories. I’m absenting myself from the antique stores. I’ve left the key to the closet in my sock drawer in hopes I’ll think about it less. They’re just other people’s histories. I need to start thinking a bit larger. I’m pretty sure it’s this proximity I find too stifling.” She sat up, swung her feet off the couch, down to the floor, stared straight ahead, “Don’t say anything right now, okay? I know you might think the idea of stopping the stories altogether is either a good or a bad idea, but don’t say which. Or maybe you think I’m being absurd and blowing all of this out of proportion. But I don’t want to resent you either way in the future. I want to figure this out on my own, for myself. Deal?”

  I had understood this habit of collecting stories as some sort of necessary obsession. It was a quirk I knew about, and loved, and was afraid to examine out of existence. I loved her with or without these stories lurking in the closet, but the fact that she was compelled to do such a thing had certainly been a large part of why I had grown so attached to her. I said, “Fine. The decision is, of course, entirely yours.”

  I looked away, not trying to pressure a reply. Our sightlines ran parallel to each other, landed on the painting covering the opposite wall. It had been given to us as a wedding gift.

  The picture was almost cartoonish, looked like an old promotional poster for some sort of French nightclub. A woman in a pouf of a silver dress stood pulling the hand of a stubborn seated man, dressed in an ill-fitting tuxedo. The faces of these two figures were what made the painting so intriguing. The woman had a look of utter surprise on her face, mouth open, eyes wide, as if she had been caught trying to take the man away. The man looked blissful, seemingly certain that he wanted nothing more in life than to have her pulling his hand.

  My wife shut her eyes and said, “Thank you.”

  14.

  AROUND THIS TIME, MY WIFE started throwing irrelevant elements into arguments.

  She had impeccable logic most of the time, but she knew exactly how to win a fight with me. If she avoided logic and went on tangents that were completely unrelated to the point I was trying to make, she would win because I would get confused and sidetracked.

  Our bathroom sink was clogged. My wife left me a note asking me to work on it when I woke up. She would be back around noon.

  When she returned home I had emptied the contents of the cabinet beneath the sink into the kitchen and I was on the phone with a plumber. My wife looked around, astonished, wondering why all of this stuff was everywhere.

  I told my wife that while I was snaking the drain, a portion of the pipe had rotted out and I poked a hole through it. My wife looked horrified already. Her eyes were wild and her mouth agape. I told her the plumber would be unable to come until Monday because his truck was in the shop. My wife said, “You’re kidding.”

  I shook my head. She went off on me in a completely unexpected way: “Did you happen to see how clean that cabinet was?”

  I looked at my wife, confused.

  She shouted, “I reorganized that cabinet a week ago!”

  I told her I was sorry but I’d had to get to the pipe. “

  Yeah, but you can’t say that cabinet wasn’t clean!”

  At this point I chuckled a little, because I had no idea what she was getting at. I said, “Yes, the cabinet was indeed quite clean.”

  “See?”

  I claimed that I did see because I sensed if I let this go, we might move on and not talk any more about this accident that was no one’s fault, just a matter of poor timing. We were supposed to have a dinner party that evening.

  We set about finding places to stash the bins of toiletries in closets and under our bed. My wife said, “I should cancel the party.”

  “Don’t be silly. We’ll put some hand sanitizer in the bathroom and redirect them to the kitchen sink. It’s not like one room’s far from the other.”

  My wife was conceding, letting the drama go, when she moved a bottle of bleach from the kitchen table. Beneath the bottle, on her good red tablecloth, was a wet spot faded to pink. My wife pitched the bottle into the basket. My wife shouted, “Why can you never not ruin something?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You ruin everything. You are never not ruining something.”

  I stood, bewildered, watching my wife rip the cloth off our kitchen table. “My wife is logical,” I kept telling myself. I knew I didn’t ruin everything. She had used a double negat
ive; this was proof she wasn’t thinking. My wife spent her free time ruining, or as she liked to call it, aging her clothes on purpose.

  I said, “You know I don’t ruin things on purpose. I put a bottle on the table and it leaked. It’s hardly like I meant to do it.”

  She knew I was right, but she went on to vent. “No! You are always ruining something.” This time she sounded less enthused by her anger. She had corrected her grammar. She was calming down. “What if I ruined your favorite shirt?”

  I unwisely laughed again, and she pushed my shoulder almost playfully, hiding behind a grimace. I said, “Since when do I have favorite articles of clothing?”

  “That’s what I mean. I can never get even with you because you are inhumanly unattached to everything.”

  I shrugged. “So if I had a favorite shirt, you would ruin it to get back at me?”

  She lifted her chin into the air. I was a few inches taller than her, so when she wanted to appear haughty and superior, it often seemed like an exaggeration of her looking up at me. She said, “No. I wouldn’t have ruined your favorite shirt, because I love you and people who love each other don’t ruin each other’s stuff.” She raised her eyebrows as if the comment was a trump card. She turned with the basket of cleaning supplies and began attempting to cram them into the cabinet below the kitchen sink instead.

  After we cleaned up, she collapsed onto our bed.

  I pulled the door shut and watched some special on the domestication of feral cats on PBS.

  When she emerged she was heading to the bathroom to shower before the party. I asked if she was feeling better, hoping she had cooled off a bit.

  “You’ll never get it, will you?” she asked. I didn’t worry myself too much about her response. I wrote it off as another irrelevancy and turned back to the television.

  I heard her turn the water on, a white noise rush like an erased cassette tape.

  15.

  WHEN THE STORIES STOPPED, my wife started smoking again. My wife sat on the windowsill to the fire escape rather than the couch.