My Only Wife Read online

  21.

  MY WIFE FORCED ME TO paint wine glasses one evening. It had been something she’d been talking about for a long time, and one night she had all the supplies laid out.

  She said, “We need to do something together. We need to make something. At the same time. We need to start producing.”

  We had been married just over a year.

  She bought the glasses, bought paint and set up a painting party. I was so tired that night, wanted nothing more than to collapse into bed. I didn’t want to do something creative. I didn’t want to do something silly and sentimental. I didn’t want to do anything that required energy at all.

  I certainly didn’t want to think of some picture or symbol to paint onto a glass that I’d be asked to explain, make meaning where there needn’t be any.

  What I wanted was out.

  I wanted away that day.

  I had come home with the intention of telling my wife I didn’t think I could last. I had married her in a blind spot.

  My heart was pumping wildly as I turned the key in the lock, anticipating what I had no idea I thought I was going to say.

  I was sure it was going to be irreversible. I was certain it was going to hurt her. I knew I would be even more tired at the end of the night.

  For weeks I had felt trapped and weighed down.

  In the first few months the marriage had been nothing but splendid. I had someone to come home to every day. I had a woman who loved me, who was endlessly interesting, who I dreamt of while she was lying next to me.

  As that first year progressed though, I felt simultaneously ostracized and smothered, this being the first occasion in which I ever had to answer to anyone but myself. My wife, I came to learn, was extremely private. She simply refused to talk about certain things and sometimes refused to talk altogether.

  And yet there was nothing to accuse her of. Despite these feelings of being left out of some loop, there was nothing concrete that I might point to as evidence. I would leave conversations fulfilled, and then sitting at my desk the next day I would remember a question I had asked her, a simple question that likely could have been answered with a word or a sentence, and I’d also recall how I had never received a response. In the beginning I thought it was possible that I had a terrible memory, but I would tend to ask a similar question again, only to find myself seated at my desk the next day, not remembering the answer.

  It was like some conversational sleight of hand. I excused the disappearance of the quarter I thought I was supposed to be following with my eyes in favor of the bunny rabbit she produced from her hat. Only when the bunny was no longer visible did I sit back and wonder where that quarter had gone.

  That night I arrived home overwhelmed by this feeling of isolation, of obsession, of a certain sort of deception I couldn’t identify. I decided I would tell her how I felt. I would tell her I didn’t think I could do what we promised to, that I was wrong and I wouldn’t be able to live the rest of my life with her. I loved her, but I was too constantly disoriented.

  When I turned the key in that lock, I saw her seated at the dining room table, beaming at me. There was a pizza, plates and eight little pots of paint and a half dozen plain clear wine glasses. There were two cups of water, some mixing trays, fine-tipped brushes. I paused at the door. I must have looked pale. “I thought we could paint ourselves wineglasses.” She stared at me expectantly.

  I was going to accuse her of not loving me and trusting me, and there she sat with pizza and paint, ready to feed me and make something that could last for all of our life together.

  This woman was nowhere near ending our relationship. She believed this was only the beginning. And so, looking at her flip open that pizza box at the table as I shrugged off my jacket and set down my bag, I didn’t say a single thing I’d planned to say. My usual cowardly self decided I was too tired that night to try and convince a woman that we didn’t belong together, that what she thought was the beginning was actually a well-disguised end.

  Instead I smiled back at her and sat down at the table as she put the largest slice of pizza on my plate and then helped herself to the smallest.

  I thought I still needed to stand up to something; adrenaline hadn’t stopped pumping through my system. I said to her, “I don’t feel like painting tonight.”

  She looked at me as if I were crazy. She challenged me to turn her down again. She said, “Oh, you’re painting these wine glasses with me. And we’re going to enjoy it.” She said this with a straight face, and then broke into a fit of giggles. I could tell she was serious though, that she had been looking forward to painting these wine glasses and she wasn’t about to let her hopes be dashed.

  “I’m exhausted though. I mean, it’s a lovely thought. You should paint them yourself. We know I’m a terrible artist,” I said, not looking at her, focusing on the last bites of my first crust of pizza.

  I saw her hand reach into the pizza box and pull another piece free. She set it on my plate. Not since I was a child had anyone done this. “That’s precisely the point,” my wife responded. “We can have guests over and let them guess who made which ones and then we can laugh at my pretentious copies of artists, and praise your, at the very least original stick figures and wishy-washes of color. It’s the perfect expression of what art is truly valuable. You’re not derivative, darling. You’re too untalented to even be derivative and that’s all that matters to me and to anyone.” She chuckled to herself as she bit into a slice.

  I was breathing heavily now. I still couldn’t look at her. “Perhaps we could do it another time then. I don’t want to right now.”

  Her response was curt and assured. “Nope. It’ll take all of a half hour and I will do all the clean-up. I’ve been looking forward to this all day. We’re going to paint wine glasses even if you have a terrible time of it.”

  We painted wine glasses that evening. Of course we did. I painted messages and tiny illustrations that had no value, had nothing to do with me, in fear that some form of my previous intention might leak out. I painted a glass with a primitive-looking golf ball and putter, with a message that read, “Golf is a good walk spoiled.”

  My wife cast me a disparaging look. “You hate golf. Tell me you didn’t paint that for the irony. I’m so sick of irony.”

  I didn’t respond. She painted a glass with a lacy looking pattern and then, on another, a gradated blend of color that evoked Rothko. I painted a glass with a set of small eyes in large eyeglasses, inscribed, “Free vision tests.”

  On my final glass I painted two outlines of a square. One square met the circumference of the base at four points. The other I painted plainly on the side of the glass.

  My wife’s last wineglass had on it a rather impressively intricate drawing of a spine, each vertebra indicated with the smallest stroke of her paintbrush. Next to the illustration she wrote the suffix “-less.” I eyed her, looking for clues as to its implications, and she smiled proudly.

  I begged exhaustion and went to bed soon after, while my wife was still cleaning up the supplies.

  It took only a few days before the need for escape passed. It was a hunger that lingered until the point when it could no longer be felt.

  22.

  MY WIFE AND I AGREED to housesit for a distant cousin of mine.

  It was a mansion on the north shore, but truly old, not one of those awkward new behemoths in a cul-de-sac development.

  We were to stay in the house for a week. Their dogs needed daily feeding and we would water their plants and take in the mail.

  One could say we were doing it as a favor to friends, but it was a great getaway for the two of us. We were lucky to go on one small vacation a year. The opportunity to housesit fell over my spring break. My wife took off a week from work. We packed suitcases, told our neighbors we would be away for a bit, and drove up to the house. Our eighth anniversary was coming up and we welcomed the escape from our everyday lives.

  My cousin and his wife gave us free reig
n: “Eat what you want. Use whatever isn’t behind lock and key. Have people over. Clean up after yourselves when you’re done, and it’s fine by us.”

  We were told to stay in the master bedroom. They’d already changed the sheets. It was a massive bed with curtains that shut it off from the rest of the room.

  The master bath was, as we should have expected, larger than our entire apartment.

  The kitchen was gourmet, and their cookbook selection was elite and extensive.

  The living room was breakable-looking yet sturdily restored.

  They had a library with a sliding ladder that ran along the bookshelves.

  My wife said, “That was my dream. When I was a little girl? I dreamt of gliding along a wall of books.”

  My wife said, “This is heaven!” She was not being over-dramatic or sarcastic.

  The study, a separate room from the library, had a roll-top desk. I had read about roll-top desks when I was a kid and had imagined organizing an entire lifetime within those cubby-holes and drawers.

  Once our hosts had given us a tour, had again told us to behave as we pleased, had shared with us the alarm codes and headed off to the airport, we roamed the house on our own.

  We found the attic up a narrow, spiral staircase in the back of the house. The ceilings slanted along the interiors of the peaked roof. We tiptoed among steamer trunks and dress forms. We had no idea why our friends would own these items. They were the type of people that might buy this stuff because it was what should be in an old attic. We found a shoebox of old love letters. My wife became entranced. We spent the entire first afternoon and evening in that attic. We found old typewriters and phonographs. An old grandfather clock, in our first hour, startled us with proof that it was still functioning.

  My wife wept in the attic that afternoon, in love and overwhelmed.

  I played old scratchy big band and jazz records on the phonograph.

  I clicked the typewriter keys.

  I found a garden of old music boxes beneath one of the eaves and wound them all to play in a little cacophonous symphony of intricate cylinders.

  My wife choked out love letters filtered through her bleary eyes, tripping over words with anxious speed:

  A Very Valentine for my Gertrude,

  Thanks for the freedoms that hide beneath our limits. Thanks to mighty age that lets us feel secure in our knowledge. May our parents open their eyes one morning to new knowledge, and tell us to love with all our hearts despite the silly dreams they hold in their heads. May they find new language to say what separates them from us: the first hand from the presumptuous hindsight of practicality.

  You have placed your finger on my pulse. My heart is beating for the pressure of your touch alone now.

  Can you imagine a day when our words no longer are a sign of our separation, but more so our reunion? A compensation for all that has been lost in this time when we live under roofs that bear down, rather than lift high?

  Almost everything is yet to be said,

  Mason

  My wife looked rapidly between the letter and me, in disbelief, waved the letter around as if it were proof of some argument she was making. “This entire box is like this. There are no letters from Gertrude, but there are boxes of letters from other people, too.”

  My wife opened another box, began to rifle through them. “But all of them are addressed to this house. This is incredible.”

  I unfolded ancient easels, set old pastoral oil paintings on them, probably once rotated from their spaces on the walls.

  I found hope chests of yellowing old table and bed linens and constructed togas and gowns by folding and draping them on old dress-forms.

  My wife, new tears streaming down her face, walked over to me, held a new letter tightly in her hands:

  Henry! Oh! Henry!

  I snorted. My wife shot me a look.

  In this world, I choose you. I choose red wine stained teeth on an ordinary, unknowing face. Oh! How I laughed the other evening as we drank and your mouth grew a heavy purple lining. (Don’t think me unladylike!) I wanted to kiss it from your plump, wet inner lips. I wanted to absorb your color.

  I am eager to drunken you myself.

  (Am I being obscene? I am frightened to record these feelings for myself, let alone share them with you. Ignore this! No! I regret none of it!)

  With the modesty of my signature,

  J

  My wife and I were both laughing now, with the glee of the innocence of the letter. I wrapped her in my arms. One music box was playing on. The clock chimed midnight. We tucked antiques back into their places and headed downstairs.

  My wife was giddy, “What if we left behind an attic like that? What if we became such artifacts? Something for people to find and fall all over themselves with? To hold high in the air and wave around like it was proof of their eternal arguments? What if our desire was chronicled for someone to fall in love with someday?”

  “Do we love like that?” I asked. It was a gut reaction. “Does anyone love like that anymore?”

  She looked hurt. “Of course! We do especially.”

  I looked at my wife, changed the subject. “Well, your tapes are that, aren’t they? Not the story of our love, but a massive amount of other people’s stories that you’ve taken in, that you’ve preserved. Don’t you think someone will delight in finding all of those someday?”

  My wife had noticed how I avoided the topic of our love. She graciously galloped ahead, “Those aren’t for the future, though. Those are for the past.” She was thoughtful for a moment. She was always denying me my theories. “We’ll figure something out. Now, I’m going to use up an absurd amount of water to take a bath in that massive tub off the bedroom.”

  She refused to make the connection, preferred to drop the subject, to go wash the evening from herself.

  That night, I read in the immense curtained-off bed, until my wife, returned to me, clean and damp, slipping through the drapes onto the endless plane of the mattress. I went to sleep sure we would spend at least the next day holed up exploring that attic more.

  My wife got up before me the next morning. I found only her absence beside me, but laid in bed for a while. She returned babbling about how beautiful it was outside, how we should take advantage of the weather. She dragged me out of bed, into the shower with her. We had our own showerheads in the marble and glass room. We toweled off and lounged around our individual sinks. We were so used to fighting for time under the faucet, for mirror space.

  We let the dogs out and chased them around the enormous backyard. We grilled vegetable kabobs for lunch. We struggled to set up a net to play volleyball and badminton and then played for less time than it took to get the net assembled. We remembered how bad we were at both, how not athletic.

  My wife and I fell to the lawn exhausted from the fresh air, knees a bit grass stained, noses a bit stuffy from the spring pollen being carried through the breeze.

  My wife and I let the dogs lick the sweat from our faces.

  We laid there like that through the late afternoon. We watched the sun set, propped up on our elbows, new dew starting to chill through our clothes.

  My wife said, “We should share this while we’ve got it. We should have some friends over here. We should throw a bash! We finally have the space for it! It won’t be cramped. It’ll be an experiment. What happens when people aren’t forced to talk to each other because of proximity? Friday, maybe? What do you say?”

  I agreed and said I would call people that night, to make sure they were free.

  My wife rolled onto me, excited. She kissed my face, voraciously. “Are we going to be the best party-throwers ever? Are we going to set a new standard for the elite house party?” It was a high-society voice.

  I raised an eyebrow. “I think probably not, but is that what we want to be?”

  “No!” she exclaimed, grinning, getting to her feet, wobbling a bit, dizzy with plans. “We’ll be the most all-inclusive velvet carpet ushers that
ever existed. We won’t turn a soul away.”

  “I don’t think this is going to be that huge, honey,” I said, getting nervous. Perhaps we had different ideas of what this soiree would be. We didn’t see too many people anymore.

  She was already walking back toward the house. “We can dream big!” she shouted, arms thrust in the air, spinning around as she headed toward the deck. She tripped on the second stair.

  “Big!” she shouted, righting herself.

  I called people that night, asking if they were free. Many were. Some asked if they could bring friends. I told them to tell their friends to bring friends. While I called each name in my phonebook I paced up and down the grand staircase in the entryway of the house. My wife passed by several times, pirouetting across the hall, losing her balance in a twirling chaîné. She pumped her arms in the air, each time I said “See you then” or “I’m glad to hear it.” Her enthusiasm convinced me this was going to be good.

  We had two days before the party and four days before the owners of the house returned.

  We spent the next morning mining the cookbooks for elaborate appetizer recipes. We scanned bar guides for fancy drinks, to offer specialties people wouldn’t expect.

  We went on an impressive grocery store shopping spree. We didn’t want to clear out our hosts’ pantries or bar shelves.

  My wife and I filled two shopping carts with bottles and jars and loaves and boxes of the good stuff. We had paid no airfare for this trip. My cousin had already insisted on paying us for taking care of the dogs, so these party supplies were to be the only real expense of this vacation.

  We spent Thursday preparing food and cooking. We made too much. We knew it. We made mint and cannelloni bean dip to serve with fresh vegetable crudités.

  My wife made a buttered nut and lentil dip and breadsticks from scratch.

  I prepped smoked fish and potato pate and baked homemade melba toast.