My Only Wife Page 5

  It had been ages since she smoked.

  I knew I was supposed to be angry that she was doing something so bad for her health.

  I knew I was supposed to look at her perched on the windowsill half-in half-out of the apartment with disdain for the cancerous scent she was exhaling all over our home, into the cool night air. I knew I should think it was ridiculous that she opened a window so widely, multiple times a day in December when the snow was beginning to accumulate.

  I was supposed to be even more disgusted by this in the morning.

  But I wasn’t. I liked the way she looked.

  I liked the broad inflations of her chest on the inhale.

  I liked the collapse of her shoulders, heavy with all that weight, on the exhale.

  I liked the delicate poise of her hand, wrist balanced on a bent knee, the limp bend of her fingers.

  I liked the contrast of the white smoke to the night sky and I liked the silhouette of her form against the morning sun.

  I liked the flick of her thumb on the lighter, the Popeye grimace with which she sucked in the first gulp of air.

  I liked the little slivers of cellophane I found glinting around on the carpet.

  I liked the ashy flavor of her.

  Her mouth tasted of urns and volcanoes.

  I liked the butts I found in the cheap ashtray we kept for smoking guests and the rings of her bright lipstick decorating the filtered ends.

  I know I shouldn’t have, but I supported her. When she put Marlboro Lights on the grocery list, I asked for them from the cashier without moral hesitation.

  When the clerks asked if I wanted them in the bag or with me, I held out my hand and pocketed them so that I might hand them to my wife personally.

  I pocketed them so that I might receive some of her gratitude immediately, a kiss on the cheek, as she pulled the loose end of the cellophane and unwrapped the package, eager for the soothing relief.

  After she took her first drag, I kissed her mouth, in love and happy to help.

  16.

  I ASKED THE QUESTION, sure of the answer, but my wife said, “Deaf.” I was certain she’d rather be blind.

  “Really?” I asked, confused. Maybe she was being contrary.

  The question surfaced after we had seen a woman in the art museum with her seeing eye dog. We wondered how and why a blind person would go to an art museum, whether they might be allowed special privileges or something, like running their hands over the statues. We wondered whether there were floor plans printed in Braille. We were on a schedule, though, and we were polite, so we didn’t follow her around to figure out what was happening.

  In the gift shop at the end of the day we saw the woman flipping through a row of art calendars priced at half-off because it was already the middle of January. Her dog was seated contentedly at her feet.

  “She must be only partially blind,” my wife said.

  “Or maybe she just wanted to bring her dog to the museum,” I replied, in good humor.

  My wife seemed to consider this for a moment before moving on. We paid for a handful of postcards and an art book. On our way out the huge glass doors I asked the question.

  I heard my wife’s answer and distrusted it.

  “But you listen to your records every night. You record stories on cassette tapes instead of writing them down. You’re saying that if tomorrow you had to choose between being blind or deaf, you would be deaf? I don’t believe it for a second.”

  She sighed. “The situation is ridiculous in and of itself. I’m never going to be given that choice. If either of those unfortunate events should occur, I would, of course, learn to deal with it, but if I had to choose right this moment, especially after that afternoon we just spent seeing beauty, I would say I would rather be deaf. I don’t care if I ever listen to those tapes again. I would rather spend my time gathering more stories than being nostalgic for the past or listening to them and thinking about what a wonderful storyteller I am.”

  “But, why, then, do you record the stories at all?”

  “For the sake of time. They need to go somewhere. I need somewhere to store them so I can start over again.”

  “What does that mean?”

  My wife stopped walking. The sidewalk was crowded. People bumped into us. My wife looked at me like I had offended her deeply.

  “Well, come on!” I said. “That was so cryptic. You can’t say something like that and expect me to roll with it. Did that mean anything? Did you want to avoid answering my question?”

  My wife was furious. “Let’s hear your answer to the question. Would you rather be blind or deaf?”

  “Deaf, but I don’t focus my life around listening to people’s stories, and recording them on cassette tapes!”

  My wife’s expression shifted to one of triumph, “You’re right about that. You most certainly do not listen. I’m sure it would be quite easy for you to give that up. I’m not saying I want to be deaf. You made me choose; I chose. You can’t tell me my choice is not my choice. It’s mine. Does it drive you crazy that you have no control over that?” My wife broke through the crowd of people passing us, to get to the staircase leading down to the el station.

  I stood for a moment, watching her, astonished. When my wife had disappeared out of my sight, I started after her, pushing through the sidewalk traffic. I tried to race down the stairs, but I got caught behind a slow, elderly woman. By the time I had scanned my card, I heard a train pulling up and raced toward the track down another staircase. As I arrived on the platform, the train was already pulling away.

  My wife was gone.

  17.

  THIS WAS THE YEAR MY wife had a wall of calendars.

  The fourth wall of our bedroom was covered in them. There was no furniture up against this wall, calendars from floor to ceiling.

  The wall was not decorated with wall calendars alone, there were day planners affixed to the wall and clipped open day-by-day calendars, and a couple of those vast grid calendars businesses make for some unknown reason. There were even some of those little card calendars that have only the number of the days, almost too small to see printed in little squares of the months.

  This wall was one of my wife’s rituals. It was another system that helped her make the transfer from day to day. They helped her make it between days when the stories were stalled.

  I rarely saw my wife marking the days, but when I did, it was like watching a dance.

  She began at the left side of the wall. She had a small stepping stool. The calendars reached to the ceiling, so she had to stand on the stool to reach the highest ones. She took a permanent marker and put an X through the previous day. If today was Monday, she marked off Sunday. She only ever marked off the day she had just woken from.

  She made precise and weighty Xs through the days.

  If she knew I was watching, she silenced me with the palm of one of her hands flattened in the air as she tore off the page of a day-by-day calendar.

  She Xed out horizontally wide days in the day planners.

  My wife made delicate tiny Xs through the small cards’ numbers.

  My wife would work her way down the wall, kneeling on the floor to X out the calendars lowest to the ground. Then she would scoot her stool over a few feet and climb to begin at the ceiling again.

  When she was done she would cap her marker. She’d take the time to read the new day’s day-by-day information. She had a word-of-the-day calendar. She had some cartoon calendar. She had a calendar providing a random fact each day.

  On the days when I watched my wife perform this ritual of marking out the passing of another day, she would share something with me.

  She would read me a particularly unusual definition.

  She would sit down beside me and show me the punch line of the cartoon.

  She would say, “Can you believe this?”

  I would raise my eyebrows with surprise, smile and laugh as she threw the slips of paper away.

  Most days she sl
ept later than I did, but on the odd weekend morning when I stayed in bed, I enjoyed watching her dance against the wall, up and down her one-stepped stepping stool, boosting her already long body to the ceiling, arm extended with a marker poised to cross out our days.

  18.

  THE STORY THAT INEVITABLY BROUGHT my wife out of her funk was that of another local business owner.

  My wife, thrilled at the end of her dry-spell, bombarded me when I walked in the door at the end of the day.

  “I found a story!” she said while flinging her arms about my neck. She showered my face with wide-spread smiling kisses. She pushed me against the door with a tackling hug and my laptop bag fell to the ground with a blunt thump.

  My wife didn’t notice.

  She placed my hand on her waist.

  My wife grasped my shoulder.

  My wife pulled our other hands together and projected them away from us, tugging tango-like into the living room, me tripping over my feet, she gliding, for once graceful.

  “I ended up talking with the owner of the bakery down the street for almost an hour as he closed the store down for the day. He was a delightful man. You would not believe what he’s been through!” She gripped my hand tighter. “You can’t imagine how excited I am!” She was still guiding me around the room with our joined fists.

  “I think I have a vague idea,” I said, laughingly as she twirled on the end of my hand. I, despite all, was still thinking about my dropped laptop lying by the front door.

  My wife spun herself into me. “Finally!” She let out a dramatic sigh and collapsed in my arms, forcing me to dip her, to support all of her weight but the little left on the tips of her toes, dragging on the ground.

  I carried my wife to the couch. “Let me get this straight. You lost your stories with a butcher. You found them with a baker. If my powers of prediction are all they’re cracked up to be—”

  She came to life again, eyes wide, warning me. “Don’t even say it.”

  I kissed my wife and she pushed me away playfully. I said, “You knew you had it coming. Anyone would have made the connection. You could have tweaked that story so it didn’t sound quite so ridiculous.”

  My wife stood, haughty now. “I happen to think it’s horrifically coincidental that I had to resume my storytelling with a baker, but, as you know, I never ‘tweak’ a story, even if it means I’m going to have to deal with your ridicule.”

  I held out my arms, apologizing but triumphant, and my wife collapsed onto the couch so that I might hug her, congratulate her again.

  I was relieved. It had been a difficult six months of unpredictable temperaments and a certain sense of ennui that cut through even the most enlivening events. I had spent those months trying to think up ways to break the mood and nothing had worked. It had been all shrugging and sighing.

  I was nothing but relieved my wife would begin recording her stories again, and yet what I said was: “I’m going to miss you when you retreat to your shut-in time. I’ve enjoyed having you for a bit more of each day.”

  My wife pulled away. Her face, a moment ago spread so wide,closed in on itself. “I was miserable, and you say you’ll miss me when I’m doing what makes me happy, what keeps me sane?”

  I told my wife, “I’m so happy your stories have returned.”

  I told her, “I though it would be romantic to say I would miss you now.”

  I said, “I need the you in my life that tells those stories.”

  My wife believed me, but she still frowned.

  My wife said, “I wouldn’t exist.”

  My wife said, “I’m younger for these quiet months of mine.”

  She said, “I think it’s time to start tacking on the memories again.”

  The trees were beginning to unravel green in the early April light.

  19.

  MY WIFE HAD A KEEN ear for chit chat and bullshit, which she claimed were the same thing, and neither of which she cared for.

  She wasn’t keen to answer questions she didn’t have to. There were days I would ask her how she was and it wasn’t that she ignored me so much as just didn’t feel like answering my question, or saying so. My wife knew the difference between an honest question and a fill-in-the-blank.

  My wife knew I cared, but she also knew that I would ask questions like how her day was before I was ready to listen. My wife was honest and forthright, but only when she could tell that the questioners were genuinely curious for an answer. She read people impeccably and so if she could tell someone was asking a question for politeness’s sake, she would often not answer, throwing all notions of courtesy out the window.

  She could detect even the whitest lies with great ease as well and she had no problem bringing the error to the attention of all involved in the conversation. Often people were astonished at my wife ’s capacity to notice even the slightest alteration of a story.

  My wife was, for the most part, uninterested in making the stories she collected more audience-friendly. She wanted the truth, not the entertainment. My wife thought people who catered their stories to their audience preposterous. She was amazed at how people sought to impress insignificant her with a silly story.

  My wife paid attention to the way people spoke.

  Even if she had never met a person before, a few moments of speaking with them gave her all the information she needed to know. It was in these encounters that her little talent proved the most disconcerting, both because of how easily my wife caught on and also how often it seemed people tweaked information in the first strains of conversation. Everything is a bit altered in the hopes that this person might appear at his most attractive and desirable. Everyone wants to continue talking.

  My wife would point out every glitch.

  My wife would raise one of her infamously skeptical eyebrows.

  The person she was talking to would pause, testing her with their eyes, admit defeat by revising, and carry on with their story.

  With a smile, my wife would thank them for their honesty, letting them know she thought nothing less of them for attempting to adjust the story for her benefit.

  All of this with a look.

  My wife, who spent so much time focusing on the verbal and the vocal, said all of this with her face.

  And after these people had jumped that first hurdle with her, they would talk to her for a long time. My wife made them feel they had earned something and they’d turn that something over to her.

  20.

  ONE LEG PROPPED UP in the window frame, my wife looked at the view.

  We had no view from this apartment. A book lay ripped beside the foot that remained on the floor.

  She had a cigarette in her mouth. Her hands were a fistful of pages. She was sending them out the window one by one. She crumpled some, sailed some flat and free.

  She sent out a puff.

  I had just opened the door. I was coming home from work. It was summer, year four and the sky was still light.

  This didn’t make me nervous, but instead excited. She looked over her shoulder when I came in the door, mumbled a hello from her cigarette-pinched mouth. She turned back to what she’d been doing and threw the cover of whatever book it was down the several stories.

  I walked over to her and sat in the chair near the windowsill. “Bad book.?”

  She smiled, conspiratorially. “Great book.”

  I knew there was some sort of method behind her madness and I knew she wanted me to ask, so I did. “Why tear it to pieces then?”

  “My hope is that people will find a page and read it. I hope they’ll fall in love with it and look for the book. The author and the title is printed on each page, on either side.” She folded a page into a smallish paper airplane, flew it out and away.

  I was fascinated, disturbed, intrigued, but not surprised. Wasn’t this exactly the type of thing she’d come to make me expect? Hadn’t it been little constructed acts such as this that had drawn me to her? When we met, didn’t I think the banks of cassett
e tapes had to be the tip of some insanely creative iceberg?

  “What’s the book?” I asked. I would read it that night. I would figure out what had made her so mad with passion.

  She gathered the pile of paper from the floor in her arms and stepped onto the fire escape. She sent the armful into the air in a flutter. “You have to go down there and find out for yourself. I’m not going to talk about this book, or recommend it. This was my sole act of promotion. This is all I can do.”

  “Haven’t you already messed up this philosophy a bit by telling me how wonderful the book is, by telling me I could go down and get a page, and figure out what book it is? I would be reading it with that expectation then. I’m not just randomly stopping on the sidewalk to pick up a piece of trash.”

  “So don’t go down there, then.”

  A moment ago I had been fascinated. Now I was seeking loopholes in her grand gesture. Why did I feel the need to ruin this for her?

  As usual, I digressed. “I’m not going to go pick up a page. I think it would foil the plan. I’m sad I can’t read this book that was so important to you, though.”

  “So read it! I don’t care. This isn’t some experiment that can go wrong,” my wife replied. “It was something fun I wanted to do.”

  I had invested more in the act than she had. I had assumed she meant the entire action on some magnificent scale.

  She usually functioned at this level.

  Just this once, she had apparently wanted to share something in an unobtrusive way, without imposing herself, her opinions on the work.

  She had sought to enlighten the world through a random act that could never be tied back to her.

  I had made the entire situation reflect her.

  And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed she was performing all these acts and tasks of hers at random. She would pick at the beginning of a spool of thread and tire of unwinding it before coming to the end. Only once do I know of her managing to maintain interest until the spool was spinning, naked, but in sight of the huge knot of thread of which it had spent its life being stripped.