My Only Wife (11 page)

My wife turned to watch me. “How could that have happened?” she repeated.

I finished clearing the table and bundled up the tablecloth. I dumped it in the hamper, but the wet spot had whitened the wood in an oddly-shaped splotch already. “Maybe the glass wasn’t flat on the table; maybe half of its base was on a piece of silverware or something. It could have tipped anytime. Maybe when I came in.” Whenever we shut the door, the whole apartment shook.

My wife’s face calmed a bit, but her hand lingered near her stomach, like something had jarred deep within her, like she might be sick.

I went into the kitchen to get a rag and some Pledge.

I heard my wife hum along with the record.

I rubbed at the splotch, but the white darkened only a shade to pale brown, still distinguishable from the rest of the table.

She stood, peculiarly still and meditative. “How odd,” my wife said softly. It didn’t feel like she was talking to me.

I walked into the kitchen and called to her. “I’m gonna start warming this up in here, alright?” I worked to restore the food to its original grandeur, added a few spices of my own, and my wife eventually joined me, watched me work while she leaned against the sink.

We ate the meal standing at the counter. We never returned to the dining room, never even settled at the kitchen table. We cracked into the lobster on its platter, which was balanced on the burners of the stove. We ate the vegetables from the large bowl I microwaved them in. We pulled off chunks of bread I had warmed in the oven, slathering on butter straight from the wax-paper covered stick, with dull knives. I poured another glass of white wine for each of us and we drank them down quickly; we poured again.

When we had demolished the countertop, the wreckage was severe. It looked as if an army of hungry scavengers had invaded our kitchen.

It was then that we sat down at the table and each pulled a piece of fruit from the bowl.

I took an orange, deftly peeling the skin off in two pieces.

My wife took an apple. She ate it with a knife in hand, slicing off chunks, piece by piece, instead of just biting in. The knife would meet her thumb, and I would watch for blood each time, but she remained unscathed.

We traded with each other, placing slices into the other’s mouth.

When we finished our fruit, I asked her, “Sure you don’t want to do a modern still life of this mess on the counter?” She looked tempted for a minute, but then I saw artistic ambition give way to the urge to have everything tidy again. She shook her head. We slid lobster carcasses into the trash. We wrapped up the remaining bread. We put the leftover vegetables in Tupperware. We poured out the little wine that was left in the bottle between our two glasses. I washed the dishes; she dried and put them away.

We wandered back into the living room. My wife eyed the spot on the table. “Did you try to get this out?”

I said, “Yes.”

“This is the best that can be done?”

I nodded the truth.

I
READ
A
STORY
I’d found in an art history book to my wife. We were sprawled on the couch of a bookstore. This activity defined most of our fifth year together: colonizing one or more stuffed pieces of furniture in bookstores or cafes for the better part of a day.

The story I read was an account of why Rodin’s great monument to Balzac lacked hands.

“As Rodin was nearing the completion of the cast for what was to be his monument to Balzac, he called a student in to share in his joy and excitement at his progress.

“The student came into his studio and Rodin pulled the sheet from the plaster cast.

“‘Master,’ the student gasped, ‘this statue is truly superb, but, my god, those hands are magnificent! They are surely the most beautiful thing you have ever created.’

“Annoyed, Rodin quickly covered the statue, and ushered the student from his studio, calling a second pupil in to hear another opinion.

“The second apprentice entered and Rodin, again, pulled the sheet from the plaster cast with a flourish.

“‘Master,’ the student brought his hand to his face in amazement, ‘those hands are incredible. They are proof that you are the best sculptor this world has seen.’

“Enraged at the affirmation of the previous student’s statement, he grabbed the chisel and hammer from his nearby worktable and in two hard knocks, had freed the hands from the sculpture. They fell to the ground shattering beyond repair.

“‘Master, what have you done?’ The student fell to the ground grieving for the loss of those beautiful hands.

“‘This was not meant to be a statue of hands. I never would have forgiven myself if the world had been distracted from the greatness of Balzac because of the hands I made him.’”

My wife stared at me.

I watched her eyes and, below them, saw something in her lap twitch.

My wife’s hands were pulsing in tightly wound fists.

Something was ticking its way up from her lungs.

That something reached her lips and she opened her mouth: “But how was it that Rodin knew Balzac’s hands weren’t prettier than his prose?”

I didn’t respond; I knew I couldn’t argue. I knew we would be quiet while we waited for the tension to dissipate. We sat and read silently for a long while. I switched books to try and ease the situation.

My wife cleared her throat. She had something to say.

A bookstore employee cut her off before her first syllable made its way out: “Excuse me, ma’am, but you’ll have to put your shoes back on.”

My wife looked at this gentleman with an expression that said, “C’mon, really?”

The clerk looked back with an apologetic plea.

My wife untucked one leg from beneath her and slid both of her feet into her shoes again.

“Thank you,” the young man said. He continued on to wake up a man in an armchair a few paces away.

My wife turned back to her book and kept reading.

“What were you going to say?” I asked.

She looked at me and searched my face. She was confused.

“What?”

“You were going to say something before he asked you to put your shoes on. What was it?”

She thought for a moment. “I’m not too sure.” She looked back to her book, then lifted her head again.

My wife said, “Was I going to say something?”

“I’m pretty sure of it.”

“Did you
want
me to say something?”

“I
thought
you were going to say something.”

“Oh.” She looked back down at her book.

I watched her stare at the page for a few moments, and then begin reading again, her lips moving.

I looked back to the magazine I was flipping through, stalled on an article whose title attracted me, called “Wolves at the Door.”

Her voice: “I would die on a daily basis if I could. I think that’s true.”

She could smile so wide. I was
sitting
in her smile, and I admit this reluctantly because there are times when my stomach turns at the thought of that smile, where I regret those smiles of hers so much and wish I could have ignored them and escaped them.

She nodded her head and shifted her position on the couch, kicking her shoes off again and sitting on her feet: “I would die everyday if I could.”

I wasn’t humoring her this time. “You would be coming back to life though. If you knew you were dying every day, it wouldn’t be difficult. You’d know you have more chances.”

She wasn’t even looking at me, just shaking her head, repeating “Every day,” stressing different syllables, saying the words every way she could muster.

I was irrationally angry about the confidence she had in this being some sort of grand statement. “Dying would be nothing more than falling asleep.”

Something lit her face anew. “I’d be a man in bed.”

My wife said, “I’d be an opera singer. Yvette Guilbert in her black gloves. I’d capitalize on my deficiencies. I’d make a name for myself from nothing.”

My wife looked me in the eye, and her face saddened, “I’d fall asleep in the back seat of a car and let someone else drive. I’d stop making decisions, but I’d still get where I needed to be.”

My wife grabbed her bag and began rifling through it. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter and kissed my cheek. “I’m gonna run outside for a smoke. I’ll be right back.” She ran off, practically skipping.

It was like she had her own sense of reason. It’s such a commonly accepted notion that people have their own sense of humor. Often people with differing senses of humor don’t get along very well, but there is the odd occasion where two people with extremely different senses of humor can find themselves in admiration of one another.

I watched my wife through the window of that bookstore and wondered where she came up with the things she did.

I wondered where my wife found the energy to chase after the reasoning she constantly tried out.

I admired it, but I would never understand.

I watched my wife outside that window and her cigarette disappeared quickly. She inhaled and exhaled like a sturdy steam engine, manic with direction and focus.

I watched her drop the tiny stub on the sidewalk, grind it out with the toe of her shoe.

My wife sped through the door and anchored onto the couch beside me.

My wife began: “When I was a kid I had this fear of the opera.

“People spoke of opera as if it were a natural disaster on some grand scale.

“I heard people speak about it like there was no greater punishment on this earth and I heard people make it sound like it was what made life worth living.

“Either way I was sure it was something far too large for me. It was insurmountable. When people even so much as mentioned opera, I equated it with speaking of god. My parents told me never to take the name of the lord in vain, but they never said anything was wrong with talking about opera. Of course, I said ‘God’ in exasperation constantly and my parents quickly stopped even trying to chastise me for it; they would just give me a look. No one, however, ever noticed that I didn’t talk about opera.

“The reason was that I feared what opera could do to me, the way other little children fear the punishment of god if they cry wolf one too many times. I thought opera would find me, and—
change
me, I guess. That was what I was so afraid of. Something was so irreversible about it.”

My wife took a sip of her coffee, her hands began to wave: “Everything is bigger: the stories, the voices, the people, the sets, the theaters, the distance between you and the stage. All those people sitting with their flippy little binoculars, squinting towards something enormous. There are so many holes. There’s the language barrier. There’s the sense that in watching opera one is bridging a gap between the time on the stage and the time this opera was written. And the audience is so far from the action, it’s like the delay of starlight. The opera might be over, but you’re still glowing with it as the radiance of it travels out to you in your seat. And all of those spans of time are so enormous.

“But I didn’t know any of that when I was a child. I had no idea what it even was. It was this thing,
opera
, that people talked about ominously, like it was some omnipotent dictator that could not be brought down. People either loved it or hated it, but it couldn’t be touched.

“Now, I’d like nothing more than to be an opera singer. It seems the role to play.

“There are so many things I have been sure of in my life. They have changed so constantly.”

She slumped. I stared at her.

“I’m exhausted,” I said, and turned back to my book.

A
ROUND
OUR
SIXTH
ANNIVERSARY,
my wife cut off all of her hair. It had been long, to the middle of her back, and a honey blond color she’d never dyed.

My wife donated her hair to have it made into a wig. Her hair had been thick: it was soft and fine, but there were masses of it.

After, she was left with a pixie cut.

My wife had never really styled her hair when it had been long. She washed it regularly, combed it through, and let it fall down her back for the rest of the day. At work, she wound it into a regulation bun to wait on tables.

Now that her hair was short, she filled a once almost-empty shelf of our bathroom cabinet with molding waxes, gels, mousses and sprays. When I came home each day I was always surprised to see how she’d arranged her hair. Some days she matted it to her head. Some days she fluffed and flipped it out. She spiked it, sometimes subtly, other times in a punky mass of confusion. One evening I came home to her lying on the couch, a Mohawk flaring above the pillow upon which she rested her head.

On our sixth anniversary I gave her a variety of barrettes I found in an antique store. I brought an enormous ancient silk flower I’d discovered in a box marked “Miscellanea” and a selection of pillbox hats with netted veils.

Digging through the bins at the back of the store, I’d also secured a variety of scarves she might tie around her head as headbands.

She opened the box before we left for dinner. “We’re going to be late now.” She smiled.

“Why?” I moved to touch her and she slapped my hand away.

“Fiend! I have to try all of these on and figure out which one to wear tonight.”

“Our reservation is in twenty minutes. If we don’t leave now we’ll wait for a table all night.”

She darted into the bathroom with her box of goodies, “So call and ask if they can hold our table or maybe move our reservation down a bit.”

I called and they could get us in a half hour later than we’d originally planned. “You have fifteen minutes to primp like a schoolgirl in front of that mirror and then I am leaving whether you’re on my arm or not.”

My wife appeared wearing a dramatic smile. “Do you like?” She wore the hot pink pillbox hat.

“If I say I adore it, does that mean we can leave?”

“Silly.” She straightened my lapel. “You’ve moved our reservation to a half hour from now. So, do you like this hat? Because if you like it, I have an idea for something else we could do.” She pulled me to her by my lapels.