My Only Wife Read online

  My wife rolled ricotta cheese balls in paprika and chopped nuts and parsley.

  We tackled a recipe for Onions à la Grecque.

  We baked fennel. We soaked tomatoes in olive oil and garlic and basil. We made crostini alla Fiorentina. We doused mussels in white wine.

  We made a mess of that beautiful kitchen, left no utensil untouched, sampled everything, and then cleaned the room from top to bottom.

  In the midst of this, the phone would occasionally ring and the friends I had left messages for the previous evening called to say they were or weren’t coming. A few were reluctant to give further details of their other plans, when I asked.

  My wife and I collapsed on the couches in the family room, leaking the scent of garlic and brine and ginger from our pores. The house was spotless.

  The next morning, we felt useless. There was nothing left to prepare.

  We pampered ourselves, took a long bath together, sat in the sauna until we were lightheaded and sweaty enough to shower again. We took afternoon naps. We set up the bar. We got out all of the serving plates and spoons and cocktail plates and napkins.

  My wife primped in front of the mirror, arranging long strips of fabric around her torso in unpredictable ways. She had on a pair of brown pants that tied around her waist, the legs flapping open on the sides with the help of a draft or a spin. They were wide and thin and flowing. She tied the fabric around her chest again and again in front of the mirror, while I sat on the edge of the bathtub, silent even when she asked for my opinion. I was in awe.

  Her hair knotted on the top of her head left everything from the nape of her neck to her lower back completely bare in between arrangements. She was magnificent: a grand line of a woman.

  As she spun to express her frustration with how to tie the fabric, the pants billowed out, revealed the length of her legs as well. I swore she was getting longer.

  I could answer no question posed to me. I was entirely occupied with the activity of watching her dress. I wanted this to last forever.

  She would sigh at my not answering and turn back to the mirror to rearrange the stripe of fabric around her neck and those pants would spread again in a luminous breeze.

  Forgive this flowery speech. The words don’t even do justice. There’s a not-even-ness to them in comparison with the sight of her.

  And what I finally said to her were the words that kept sounding delicately awed in my head: “That back!” And I came up behind her and wrapped my arms around her while she was between attempts at wrapping the fabric.

  My wife swatted me away. “How do I tie this?” She was near tears.

  “Here,” I took the fabric in my hands, and she slouched, limp and upset. I felt the weightlessness of the strip in my hand. I looked at her, evaluating the canvas of her body, and wrapped the fabric around her torso, spinning her to face away from me. I wrapped the fabric leaving as much of her back exposed as I could. I tied it around her neck and kissed her shoulder, again spinning her to see herself in the mirror. She calmed down immediately, a decision having been made.

  My wife offered a weak smile as thanks.

  “Anytime,” I said, and leaned in to kiss her cheek from behind

  My wife turned her head just in time and met my kiss.

  We watched ourselves in the mirror, a moving portrait, blinking like shutters flashing, and then the doorbell rang.

  The party began later than we thought it would. It began quietly and continued quietly, grew gradually. A few guests arrived right around the time we had suggested, but it was an hour later when the majority showed up. Everyone seemed to think they would arrive in the thick of things. After this next round of people appeared, it wasn’t long before the atmosphere grew lively.

  And yet the group still seemed smaller than we expected. We kept pulling each other aside to ask whether some confirmed guest or other had shown up. Many never arrived.

  We piped good jazz through the house’s sound system.

  Spring finches chirped along outside in the garden.

  Women’s dresses floated like feathers constantly settling around them.

  Comments of “You look amazing” and “What lucky weather” spread like wildfire, heating the room to gathering glee.

  Men planted their feet, standing in circles, telling jokes, cocktail glasses in hand. They rolled back on their heels as they laughed.

  All eyes seemed to linger on my wife and I was convinced it was because she looked so stunning. When we met to check in with each other, it seemed we had an audience. We’d glance out at the eyes, so aware of our every move, and they’d turn back to their conversations.

  My wife gave tours of the house, but asked people, politely to remain on the lower level. “We have to return our toy when we’re done playing with it, after all,” she would remind them, good-naturedly.

  Our friends laughed.

  A friend said to me, “We haven’t heard from you in so long. We’re glad we could come. We’ve missed you.”

  A fellow professor from my department said, “Your wife is something else. Where did you find such a thing?”

  A neighbor said, “You two work well in a large space like this.”

  Clusters of people gathered around the art on the walls, all up-and-coming names that they weighed the merits of with an embarrassingly thorough knowledge of the art market.

  We had strung lights around the backyard fence, and people ventured outside as the night carried on.

  People left their shoes in little huddled pairs on the deck and slowdanced on the dew-slick lawn.

  Women and men smoked cigars from a box we’d set out on the patio table, ashing into empty cans, perched on the deck railings.

  As the air cooled, people returned inside, to lounge on couches. There were separate conversations energizing the living room, the family room, the library. Empty glasses and bottles littered every surface.

  People pontificated through their slurred speech on their most honorable life goals, how the magnitude of them had changed through the years, how each year less seemed possible. There were the lucky few who claimed the opposite.

  The night went through so many stages.

  High school parties when parents were away for the weekend tickled our memories. We felt devious. We felt we might be caught any moment; our parents might come home, furiously sending our friends away, leaving us to our lonely bedrooms, drunk and unfulfilled.

  We knew we were safe from this. We knew we were allowed.

  Still, my wife grinned at me repeatedly from across rooms like we were getting away with something enormous.

  A game of “Truth or Dare” transformed into “Would you rather….?” in the living room.

  My wife found she was the only one who would like to spend the rest of her life being older than she was, but she also asked easier questions, ones she didn’t care about the answers to.

  I watched my wife begin to fidget with the shirt I had tied onto her hours before.

  People began to doze during conversations, from comfort and liquor.

  Designated drivers gathered coats, jingled car keys.

  I kissed, hugged, shook hands with everyone who walked through the door. My wife, visibly drunk and exhausted, retreated to start cleaning up, to scavenge people from the back of the house.

  After the last guest waved goodbye as his car pulled away, I shut the front door and sighed with relief.

  “My wife!” I filled the house with a voice scratched with the threat of silence. “I believe we might be the best hosts in the entire land!”

  I heard no response and pushed myself from where I was leaning on the front door. I headed back towards the kitchen, the family room, “Where are you, my dear?”

  The kitchen was still covered in empty plates, in lipstick-rimmed champagne flutes, in cocktail glasses, now full of tinted, melted ice.

  “Are you hiding? I want to congratulate you on ‘la fete de l’an.’”

  She wasn’t in the family room ei
ther. Perhaps she had truly tired out while I was saying our farewells.

  I climbed the front staircase. “My love? My life? Where is my better half?” I called teasingly, still a bit buzzed myself. I peeked into the bedroom: nothing but the rumpled bed where jackets had been piled. I saw the attic door open at the end of the hallway, but the stairway light wasn’t on.

  “Are you upstairs?”

  I walked down the long hallway and found the end of the length of fabric, that had once wrapped her chest, lying on the bottom stair. I flipped the light on. “Hello? Are you up there?” I called and I followed the strip of cloth climbing the winding stairs. I heard a whimper, and climbed faster. A couple of turns around the spiral and I saw her foot, limp. She was on her knees, crawling up the stairs, naked from the waist up, her hair loosened down her back, her shoulders heaving with tears.

  I scrambled up beside her, hoisted her onto my lap, “What is it? What happened?” I asked.

  My wife wept into my shoulder, dead weight in my arms. I gathered her up, tried to carry her down, but she shrieked,struggling against me. She broke free and continued to attempt to scramble up the stairs, her hands clawing at the treads. When she reached the attic, she caved, fell prostrate on the floor, her torso still pulsing with rhythmic sobs.

  I stroked her bare back. I felt helpless. I waited for her to calm down.

  I said, “Hush, it’s alright.”

  I traced shapes on her skin. I drew angel wings. I wrote love letters. I rubbed lullaby rhythms against her scapulae.

  Eventually she slowed to a sniffle.

  “Tell me about it, love. Let’s go downstairs and get in bed, and you can tell me everything.”

  Between gasps: “I don’t want to go back downstairs.”

  “Alright. We’ll stay here. Tell me all of it.”

  “No. I don’t ever want to go downstairs. I want to stay here.”

  Sometimes when she was drunk she became irrational like this; my wife would believe in the possibility of fulfilling a desire like this “I want to stay up here forever,” she repeated.

  “Alright,” I said to keep her calm. “Why do you want to stay up here though?”

  “I can be old here. We can be old here. I can be as old as I want to be.”

  “How old is that?” I asked, concerned. I had never seen her this ratcheted up.

  She lifted her head, eyes shut tight, but directing her response to me. “Old!” she hissed, and curled in on herself again. “Play me a record. Please! I can’t take the silence.” I found a jazz album, some old torch singer. She sighed with relief.

  “It might be lonely up here,” I reminded my wife.

  “Good. I can’t take anymore youngness,” she spat. “I thought this would make all of us feel old and mature, but we regressed to junior high students. It felt like a high school house party. It was disheartening.”

  “We were all having a good time. You, too. I saw you laughing and smiling. Didn’t you have a great time? Everyone loved it.” I was trying to figure out where things went wrong.

  “I asked if people would like to be younger or older than they are for the rest of their lives and they all said they wanted to be younger.” She began to cry again. “They all think the best is behind them. Not one person said they wanted to be older. Not one person said they wanted the wisdom of age. No one said, ‘Let me leave this behind.’ They all said, ‘I wish for that time.’ They all think they’ve missed out on something. They’d rather go back and right the past rather than righting the future, than feeling old and new at once. To be newly something else, but to have all of that history behind them. None of them want that. They want to forget. They want to restart. It’s tragic. I’m done with them.”

  “They can’t go back though. They’re all going to live on. They only choose the other because they know it isn’t what they’re actually going to get.” I was grasping for anything that might comfort her. I unlatched a trunk and pulled out an old lace-edged sheet that smelled of cedar and wrapped it around my wife. “We’ll all get to tomorrow and it will be a million times more than we thought it could be. We can’t all see it as clearly as you do.”

  My wife sat up, her face cried clean. She looked at me, exhausted, eyes still a little vacant.

  My wife stood, wobbled a bit, and I braced her against myself. She stumbled over to an old couch covered in a sheet to protect it from dust.

  The clock struck five. I kissed her forehead. “Did you get any stories from our friends?”

  “No,” she said, absently. “No, I didn’t even think of it.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” I said, silently chastising myself for asking. “You were busy being an excellent hostess. What hostess has time for stories?”

  “I don’t think I wanted any of those people’s stories.”

  “That’s fine, I think.” I traced a clump of tear-damp hair behind her ear. “You’ve told me before, not everyone has a story like that to tell.”

  I watched her getting upset again. “But one of them must have. At least one of them must have had a story. What was I doing? Passing out appetizers?”

  Her eyes welled up and I pulled her to me. “Shhhhh.”

  “All of their stories were so young. I like old stories. It was like they were trying out new myths on each other. What do they think they’ll find?”

  My wife said, “They all think they can sustain this youth forever.”

  My wife said, “They all like the exposition more than even the climax, definitely more than the denouement.”

  My wife sobbed. “They all want the messy feast so when they look back they’ll see the violence of a still life. They want to remember that at least once they were voracious and reckless.”

  My wife passed out on that couch soon thereafter; I laid on the floor and watched her sleep trying to imagine how I could help her when she woke again. When the clock struck six, she was startled awake. “Let’s go downstairs to bed,” she said, as if nothing had happened. She let the sheet fall from her shoulders, and I followed her downstairs, hitting the light, still clutching that thin strip of fabric she’d been wearing. I tucked her in and went downstairs to clean the mess before morning woke her.

  Sunday our hosts returned to a spotless home. We asked about their trip. They asked about our stay. They told us everything. We told them almost everything, except we never mentioned the attic.

  My wife and I returned to the city, to our apartment. Monday she and I were both back at work. When I got home that day, she was in her closet.

  “Everything alright in there?” I called.

  “Mmm-hmmm,” came her muffled response. She emerged a moment later, locking the closet behind her, struggling to clasp the bracelet back onto her wrist.

  “Let me help,” I stepped forward and fastened the bracelet. “How was your day?”

  “Wonderful. I feel so rested. I decided I’m going to start painting. I went to the art store and picked up some oil paints and some canvases today and now I have to go to work, but tomorrow morning I intend to start painting.”

  “That’s great.” I wandered to the kitchen to make myself some dinner. “Do you know what you want to paint?”

  “I think mostly I want to work with objects for a while; I want to start with some elaborate table spreads, you know? Some feasts complete with wild game, big bowls of fruit, some ravished dinner plates. Nothing modern. I want to paint like those seventeenth-century masters.”

  I was already distracted, comforted by her familiar quirkiness. “What an odd choice. I love it,” I said. I rifled through cabinets and then the refrigerator finding nothing at all appetizing to me. “Would you care to paint me a feast right now for dinner?”

  “I haven’t started yet, but soon,” she replied, with a smile.

  23.

  “CAN I SEE THE CLOSET again?” I asked, at five years.

  “You know better,” she said, locking it behind her and struggling to reattach the bracelet to her wrist, key dang
ling.

  “Why not?”

  “That was a one-time thing. I told you that. You understood. That’s the end.” She wasn’t amused.

  “Well, can I see it now?” I took on the voice of a pestering child.

  She didn’t even look at me.

  I changed tactics. “No, I’m serious. This is your life’s work. You must have filled a few more shelves now. I want to see your progress.”

  Again, she said nothing.

  “Pretty please? I’m not asking to listen to any of the tapes. I just want to see the closet. I want to see the visual growth of the mass of tapes.”

  This wasn’t me being selfish, or it was me being selfish, but it was out of genuine interest in her work.

  “The closet is mine,” she said, stone-faced. She’d stopped moving. The closet door was off of the living room. She was standing solidly in the doorway to the kitchen. She was looking for the response of surrender from me that meant she had won.

  I wanted in that closet. I felt suddenly entitled. I felt it was something small she could easily do that meant she was letting me in. I stared defiantly back at her.

  She was a bit bewildered by my stubbornness. “That closet is mine, and I get one thing that is only mine. No, you can’t look inside.”

  This was an unexpectedly harsh way for her to respond to my unprecedented anxiousness about the closet. “What’s in there?” I asked, suddenly suspicious. It might have been a clever ruse of her to show me the closet so early on in the marriage so that I might believe the use remained the same.

  I stopped myself. I told myself I was being crazy. What did I think was in there? Bodies? Did I suddenly suspect my wife of being a serial killer, smuggling in bones while I was away at work?

  My wife never answered the question. I knew the answer. She knew I wanted her to become defensive and open the door.

  My wife ripped the bracelet from her hand, breaking the clasp. She whipped it at me on the couch.

  I didn’t open the closet with that key.

  Later when I came into our bedroom to return the bracelet and apologize, I saw that she had bruised her wrist tearing it off. I kissed the tender area as she turned away from me. I strung the key on a piece of ribbon and tied it gently onto her other wrist. She pulled her hand to her, her opposite palm pressing the key flat against her pulse. She never so much as opened her eyes to accept my apology.