My Only Wife (16 page)

She stood. “Why don’t we dance?”

I pulled her hand down, so she’d sit back on the barstool. “No. I don’t want to dance. You don’t want to either. You just don’t know what to say. Why don’t we go home?”

She nodded and gathered her purse. I lifted her jacket from the back of her stool and held it up behind her so that she could easily slip her arms through the sleeves. I spun her around and buttoned her up as well. I ran my hands through the short length of her hair, brought her forehead to my lips and kissed her lightly there.

“We’ll be alright.” I held the door open, and while lightly pressing my hand on the small of her back, my wife passed in front of me, into the cool night.

S
OON
AFTER
MY
WIFE
LEFT
I wrote her a letter. I wrote her a letter I knew she would never receive. I wrote it so that I would remember exactly how I felt right after she left me.

I knew it was going to appear overblown if read in hindsight, but I knew it was the honest expression of that moment. I knew the immediacy of the letter, how close to the situation it was, I knew how this would resonate even a year later. I would appear to be a mad man, angry and inordinately wronged.

I wrote the letter for all of these reasons. I wrote this letter hoping an address might commit the impossibility of appearing so that I might mail it.

I sealed the envelope and put her name on it. I carefully penned the return address and put on a stamp, a stamp that is now a few cents away from being the proper postage.

I left the address blank because I had no idea of where she was. I knew I was never going to find her again and that even if somehow I did, I would still not have anything to write in that silent spot on the envelope. If I met her again I would become immediately disoriented. I would be so eager to never release her from my sight that my eyes would stay tightly focused on her. I would never know where I was again.

I wrote her a letter that was vicious and hurtful and honest about exactly what I felt toward her.

I dug in deep, I pressed my foot against the top edge of the dirtiest spade I owned, my ballpoint pen. I stomped on that shovel until it was full of earth and grime, and I brought it all to light and deposited it on a page in a crumbling heap, filthy but appropriate, baroque, incoherent and sick:

To my lovely wife
,

I wish you were here right now so I could give you a slew of gifts for what you have put me through
.

I would give you a needlepoint pillow sewn with the hair of cancerous children, a woven pattern of hopeful eyes, stitched from the spoils of their war
.

I would give your fingertips the discovery of the mound of a lump under your breast’s fatty tissue, coated with layers of Vaseline indented with the ripped tips of fungal fingernails
.

I would give you the pinching twitter of lice scrambling your scalp gnawing your bubblegum dandruff, popping bubbles that cause your hair to mat with insect vomit
.

I would give you the iron taste of blood in your mouth, only after you’ve noticed the INFECTED sticker clinging to the outside of the bag
.

I give you the musky smoked scent of our miscarried child’s remains smeared from your thighs to your tits in triumph
.

I give you the drag of your old soul records, played slowly and melted into the quiver of a dirge, the low death rattle of the recently deceased singing for companionship in their demise
.

I am made ill by the thought of you. By the way in which I believed we belonged and functioned together. I gag at the thought of the love I thought you had for me
.

I miss you. I’ve found bruises under my skin, now, weeks after you’ve gone missing, that stagnate and wait for you to heal them to a clean clarity of flesh, instead of corrupted purple and green stains that anchor themselves in the depth of my tissue
.

I’m not sorry I said what I’ve said. I may look back on this and think it extreme, but it is truth
.

I am going to assume your absence is
your
truth
.

I wish I would have known. I am furious and I still love you
.

Since you are gone I am going to claim you as my own. Maybe someone else is busy claiming you for themselves right now
.

I don’t care. I assume the
you
that was mine will never be anyone else’s. Maybe I’m naïve. Maybe you are simply a pattern
.

May you replicate with agility and grace. May you compound steadily, simplifying infrequently and only out of necessity
.

I will write you letters the way a young lover whispers his secrets to a scarecrow loudly enough for his lover nearby to overhear
.

Eavesdrop
.

Love
,
Your husband

I hated writing this letter and yet it made me feel better. I knew she would never read it and yet the cruel act of voicing such terrible thoughts was enough for me.

I could have gone on, but this was my concentrated worst and I wanted her nauseated.

I repeat that I knew she would never read this letter.

But I imagined instances in which she would.

I imagined her on a Greyhound bus next to a child who had demanded the window seat. I imagined her turning away to throw up in the aisle at the thought of what I’d written. I imagined her vomit splattering the lap of an elderly woman seated across the aisle from her. I imagined her throwing the letter into the puddle in an attempt to erase it before she could read the rest. I imagined waves of her remorse at leaving me flooding through, weaving her with surging nausea.

I imagined her at the bottom of a lake, still and bloated, watching the letter float before her eyes. I imagined her waterlogged fingers clumsily fumbling the letter open. I imagined the moment her eyes fell upon the first abuse was when her eye sockets dilated to a slackness that set her eyeballs loose to float a bit in front of her face. I imagined those eyes reaching toward the letter, not believing what they were reading. I imagined the loosely ballooning skin of her mouth opened wide in horror and apology. I imagined her floating to the surface, letting the tide drag her to shore, any landmass being that much closer to me.

But mostly, I imagined an instance in which some distantly renowned god had turned her into a statue so that she might become eternal and universal. I imagined her missing an arm, perhaps a dent in the stone where her nose once was. I imagined smooth planes where the age she wanted had worn away what few curves she had, sanded them down to mere angles. I imagined her old in an ancient sort of way that would have pleased her immensely. I imagine her a caryatid, one arm still raised above her head supporting nothing more than air, air and sky, and at night, when viewed from the right angle, resting in her palm: one star shining so clearly it must have burnt out already, its light still on its journey to earth’s eyes. I imagine her situated in a museum, salvaged and displayed in a courtyard. I imagine one guard slipping out into the garden on his rounds. I imagine him looking from side to side, checking to make sure none of the other guards were passing through the windowed corridors inside. I imagine him placing my letter onto the stretched tall palm of her hand. I watch his face shift as he walks away as if he has done nothing out of the ordinary, his usual disinterest shifting back into his features. I imagine the guard letting himself back into the museum proper with his heavy ring of keys. I imagine him thoroughly locking off the corridor again, and glancing out to make sure the letter still lies on my wife’s palm.

Only when no human eyes rest on her any longer does the statue of my wife feel the weight of my letter in her hand. She cannot bring her arm down; it is made of stone. Even if she could bend she has no other arm and hand with which she might open the letter. She can only feel the great heaviness of my sentiments funneled into words, deposited onto paper, wrapped into an envelope. She cannot know precisely what they say, can only feel the burden anchoring her shoulder into its socket, heavier than any ruin’s lintel she has before hefted high above her head.

It is as this statue that I desire my wife to receive my missive. I would never wish the words I wrote to cross anyone’s line of sight, but if there were a way that she could know the nature and tonnage of my message without having to read the words, I would wish this fate upon her; I would wish her a weight for eternity as heavy as the one she placed on me, one which might only be worn down by the whipping sands of time.

I can think of no more accurate instance of retribution, but age and weight.

M
Y
WIFE
HELPED TO
DECORATE
a local haunted house each fall.

She was in charge of one room and it seemed to be the favorite attraction of most of the patrons. It looked like a work of art.

My wife scoured flea markets and antique shops year round, always with a purpose lurking in the back of her mind to hunt up broken dolls and masks that she could use in the haunted house.

The room she designed was bathed in red light. The ceiling was covered in dry branches and leaves. Stapled to the walls were all of the dolls and masks, many missing arms, many naked, many lacking half of a face, shirred or with one eye glued shut from moisture and time.

The dolls hung in all sizes: ventriloquist dummies, Madame Alexander dolls, life-size plastic little boys, baby dolls, voodoo dolls, stuffed animal people. The masks were African tribal masks, deflated rubber costume masks, ceramic masquerade masks.

In the room, visitors were terrified and overwhelmed by the sense that they were being watched.

In the center of the room she hung one of the most lifelike dummies I’ve ever seen.

It was the body of a naked, middle-aged woman. She hung in a noose and her feet dangled about a foot above the ground. Beneath her was a pile of chicken bones, delicate and in danger of being crushed when the woman was inevitably cut down.

The scene made no real sense, but when one walked into the room, there was a petrifying, eerie feeling. It seemed like the woman was hanging there because of all the eyes that were trained on her. None of the eyes looked nearly as real as the body that was hanging in the middle of the room.

Everything felt slightly false.

This falseness felt like part of the problem.

When people were going through the haunted house, a lot of monsters and ghosts jumped out to surprise them, but when they came to this room, the stillness was overwhelming. People would stand waiting for something to happen, but the more nothing happened the faster their hearts started to beat, and the more they wanted to leave the room. They had paid to be scared though, and so they stayed as long as they could and then left, perhaps disappointed that nothing had ever grabbed them or fallen on them, but also undeniably affected.

When I asked my wife where the idea had come from, what it all meant, she seemed reluctant to reveal anything.

“It’s about seeing and being seen.”

“It’s about pressure and shame.”

And then her mood would shift. “It’s a haunted house room. It’s not about anything.”

Each time she changed her answer, and each time I told her how scared I had been, precisely because of the stillness and the illogic of the details. In all of the other rooms you could figure out the stereotypical creepy situation, but in this one the unknown was deafening in its silence.

My wife said, “To be someone else. To play games one doesn’t know the rules for. Delightful, isn’t it? Halloween is a time for make-believe and pretend and the unknown. My room lets Halloween be what it wants to be, not what people expect of it.”

M
Y
WIFE
LAUGHED
OFF
her tumbles because it was like a conscious reminder that she had to slow down. She had to stop and think occasionally which foot she was going to put in front of the other.

It was like she was catching up with herself.

My wife would pick herself up and dust herself off.

My wife would keep going.

As she walked away she would examine the heels of her hands, callused and scarred over.

“You shouldn’t catch yourself like that,” I would tell her again and again. “You’ll break something someday.”

She would dust out bits of gravel, look up at me wide-eyed, and shake her head.

W
HEN
I
TRY
TO
THINK
about what she was to me, it’s both easy to come up with answers and complicated.

I had a dream that I was a child and I had a pet dodo bird. I had no way of effectively leashing this bird except to tie a piece of bread to a string and feed the bread to the dodo, the other end of the string still in my hand. Then, I could pull the gagging bird along with me. In the dream, my mother yells at me to stop doing this if I truly love the bird. My fear is that it will escape. I feed it this way again and again and it eventually kills the bird.

When I recall the time my wife and I had together, I think about how happy I was, but I can also admit that happiness is relative and, if I look for it, I find I can enjoy being alone. I would never have predicted this, and, more importantly, never wished it. She was my life and I still haven’t figured out what I am without her.

I have only these guarded memories I roll around in my hands again and again. They are no doubt getting tarnished, but they seem bright as ever. We spent our time alone together, with the exception of the rare strangers my wife befriended. They couldn’t have known her like I did, and perhaps that’s the point: that it was only me who knew her that way. Who is there to try and talk me out of this vision of her I hold so close?

When I opened that closet door, and pressed “play” again and again for each and every tape that sat in that closet, I heard nothing. Every one of those stories she had taken the time to relay was gone. It was shocking to hear the silence. Each carefully labeled case, filled with a thin cassette, was empty. Like mug shots with no film in the camera, each person had been scrutinized from multiple angles, and then released into the night, untraceable.