My Only Wife (17 page)

J
UST
WEEKS
BEFORE
I
WOULD
see her for the last time, we walked through a prairie up north. My shoes were soaked through with dew in minutes and I stepped carefully to avoid actual puddles and muddy low points in the trail. My wife splashed ahead, galoshes barring the moisture from her feet. She was safe.

“Wait up, Speedy!” I called, sidestepping a pile a stray dog had left behind. She turned her head before she darted down the left fork in the path. I resigned myself to the sloshing feeling and jogged to catch up. When I reached her she was on a bridge, sturdy, but swaying back and forth. She was shifting her weight, enjoying the ride.

“Whoa. Wobbly,” I said, and as my first step landed on the bridge, she started moving more violently. I almost lost my balance, but I steadied myself on the cable handrails. She smiled at me devilishly and walked calmly off the bridge. “What was that about?” I asked, still a little shaken.

“A test,” she replied, seriously. I searched her face, and, looking back, the resignation was there then. A decision had been made and it had little to do with how I reacted to her swaying a bridge. Whatever she had decided was a long time coming and had more to do with her than anyone else.

“Well, you know, ‘Be prepared!’” I stopped for a moment as she ran ahead again. I wanted to look out at all of the ground we’d covered. It was a crisp fall day and we’d come north along the lakeshore to some open prairielands to admire the leaves changing and take in the fresh air. Winter would be upon us soon. We’d be housebound and hermetic, frozen by the fact of it. At that moment I thought about turning around and heading back. If I left, my wife would be lost. I knew she was counting on me to keep track of the path we’d taken. She’d gone ahead, and who knew how far? I could walk back at my leisurely pace enjoying myself and it might be hours before she found her way back to where we’d parked the car. The grass was high and it was impossible to predict which way a certain fork would lead. I looked in the direction she’d headed and looked back from where we came and decided I couldn’t do it. She would be angry and could possibly get herself hurt out here on her own with her clumsiness and poor sense of direction.

I stood where I was, waiting, and finally she returned, giving me a look that both asked why I hadn’t followed and answered the same question. She looked out from the vantage point at which I’d positioned myself. She stood in front of me, her back against my stomach, her head against my shoulder. I hugged her. “Look at all of this. It’s huge.”

“I hope you remember where we’ve come from because I am
lost,”
she said.

“I know how to get back,” I replied. “I’ve been keeping close track. I kissed the top of her head and thanked goodness that she returned to me so we could look out together. In seconds, the wind started up again and we were off.

Years later, I’m still searching my memory for my wife. I find her now and again in unexpected places, and it’s there I feel like I know who I am. In the relief of rediscovering her, I’m able to place myself within her, about her.

I
CALLED
MY
WIFE’S
ART
teacher. We had never spoken, but in the midst of the mess, in the aftermath of her departure, I found a registration form for the class. I filed it away.

I’d never heard one of her recordings. I’d never seen her painting. I’d stopped trying to reason her out and was simply waiting for signals. I had been trained by the end; I knew and performed the appropriate reactions.

I had stopped trying to connect dots, because the dots weren’t numbered. There was an infinite quantity of paths between points the lines could take.

My wife was a constellation without a mythology to inform her shapes.

I wondered about that still life, that painting she had never let me see, because her teacher had heard sounds from within the canvas that couldn’t be seen.

I wanted to see it, to try to experience my own jumbled version of perception.

So I called her teacher. When I’d regrouped the apartment; when I’d taken photographs of the state of things immediately after she left; when I’d begun to be able to talk in less tangents; when my speech patterns had resumed their normal linear paths and I was no longer punctuating each conversation with questions of grief and confusion, I called her teacher and I asked for that painting.

He said he would never part with it. It was a work of art, and he suspected it would be worth a lot of money some day.

I explained to him what had happened, that my wife had disappeared, and he apologized, said he wondered why he hadn’t heard from her. He didn’t offer up the painting though.

“I need this,” I said to this man, but saying such a naked statement to someone who does not know you, someone who has no idea how difficult it is to say something like that, saying something like “I need this” in the most honest and vulnerable way you can muster, never quite has the effect you would hope. It’s easy to deny the unknown.

This man was obviously staying on the line for the sake of politeness; it was not because he was going to reconsider. I changed my tactic. “Can I come and look at the painting?”

The man exhaled on the other end of the line. I imagined his eyes flicking around the room trying to think of any reason he could give me so that he would no longer have to deal with the situation, looking for some excuse as to why he might not have to allow me anywhere near his office or his home or his classroom, or wherever it was that he was housing my wife’s painting at the moment. Finally, “I’m not sure your wife would want me to do that.”

The tense of his statement brought me to tears. I thought this would be easier and that I would have the strength to make it through a simple phone call without breaking down. I had already begun to refer to her in the past tense. Despite my belief that I was going to be able to recover her, I had to let myself believe that she was gone. “It doesn’t matter what she would want you to do now. She’s not here anymore and—” I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to say it because it felt irreversible and I didn’t want to say it because it would be bigger than I was able to handle. I didn’t want to say it because I knew if I did, I would have said it as a tool to get to see this painting, and, for that same reason, I wanted to say it. I wanted to say it and have him break down and offer the painting to me. I wanted to say it and then force myself to deal with it, and so I said it: “She’s not coming back.”

The art teacher didn’t know me. He hadn’t heard all that reasoning that went on in my head before I said that irrevocable statement that meant all my hope was gone, that the reason I wanted to see that painting was not because I thought it would bring her back. The reason I wanted to see that painting was for myself. I wanted to see what she wouldn’t show me. I wanted it to lead me to her, but the “her” I knew was never meant for me. I wanted it to lead me to her, but I didn’t think it was going to bring her back.

I realized then what I thought I would find in this painting was some sort of one-way mirror through which I could catch a glimpse of her without her knowing I was there.

But the art teacher didn’t know all this. He said, “You shouldn’t give up hope just yet. How long has she been gone? Two, three weeks? She’ll probably show up from some tropical vacation, refreshed and- and- oblivious to the fact that you would have been worrying about her. If she calls me up and says it’s alright if you see the painting, I’ll be happy to show you, but I can’t show it to you right now. Sorry, pal.” And this time he did hang up.

I held the phone receiver in my hand for a long time. And I realized that he had not known my wife because the idea that she would go off to the Caribbean by herself was inane. In comparison, it seemed rational that she would disappear for good.

I had worried that my wife had told him not to let me see the painting if I ever asked. I had wondered what my wife had told him about me. I became nervous that he knew something I didn’t. I wanted to see that painting because I thought it would fill me in. I thought all that he knew of her must be in that painting and I wanted it all.

I went to the school and found his office. “She’s not here and she’s not coming back and I know this for a fact and I don’t find this easy to say or even think, so take my word for it and let me see the painting. I need something here: I’m lost without her and I need
something
. This is all I can think of.”

Once I stopped speaking I allowed myself to register the man I was talking to. He was larger, older and hairier than I was. He sat at a desk littered with a mess comparable to that which had decorated my apartment for the last two weeks. He had an immense bookshelf behind him filled with big, expensive books and unidentifiable objects that appeared to be abstract modern sculptures. He looked at me, eyebrows raised, but not entirely put off by my presence.

He cleared his throat, adjusted his position in his chair, and looked me straight in the eye. “I’ll let you look at it, but you are not taking that picture out of here and if you give me any trouble I
will
call security.”

This response seemed extreme, but I agreed. “Anything is enough right now,” I said, because, at that moment, anything and something were the same thing.

He stood, tugging on the belt holding up his threadbare corduroys. “I’ll be right back. I come back and it looks like you’ve so much as set a finger on something in here, the painting goes back into storage. Got it?” He stepped out of the door behind me and I waited.

It seemed like he was gone a long time, but when he returned he had a large canvas turned toward himself. It was about four feet tall the way he was holding it and maybe two feet wide. He came in and I tried to position myself beside him so that I could see the painting. He turned it away from me as I moved. “Ten minutes,” he said. “I’ll give you ten minutes and I’m not leaving the room.”

I nodded and as he turned the painting to me, he shifted it so that the length of it stretched horizontally.

I stood there, calmly dumbfounded. My head began nodding immediately to the rhythm of my heavily beating heart. I knew this painting. I had already seen it.

I could feel the man watching my reaction. I knew he wanted me to begin responding out loud.

The teacher must have left the room, but I heard nothing: no footsteps down the hall, no low murmur of voices or a distant grandfather clock chiming from the canvas. If this teacher had told the truth and heard something when he looked at the painting it did not do this for me. The painting seemed entirely quiet to me. There was just the muffled drumbeat nudging in my chest that even this painting could not drown out.

This
still life
was a painting of a room. It was a destroyed room. There were holes torn into the walls. A mattress stretched, up-ended toward the corners of the room. It looked as if a snake had sidled through the space, shedding many years’ layers of colorful cotton skin. Cracked ceramics punctuated these stretches of sleeve and sheet carpeting the floor. Drawers were pulled free and stood on their ends, their contents littered and tangled and cracked in lumps. The whole scene looked correct.

This painting was our apartment the day she left.

I have the distinct feeling that looking at that painting my face did not change. I feel certain that my expression had paralyzed as soon as the canvas was flipped round. I knew my head nodded, agreeing with everything I was seeing, affirming that yes it was true. She was gone and she wasn’t coming back and this painting had known before I knew. She had whispered this information with her brushstrokes, had revised her plan laying layers of paint on each other, compounding them into a literal vision of where she could see our future was headed.

She had said with paint, had told this canvas, what words couldn’t say, what she couldn’t tell me.

I stared at the painting and the old questions forked into new ones. Had she thought of destroying the apartment, of leaving, and then painted this, hoping it would satisfy that urge? Or had she painted this and seen how attractive an option such destruction proved? Either way the similarity between this painting and the damage done to our apartment, as well as the time that had elapsed between the creation of both, proved that she had spent time thinking about it. She hadn’t made a rash decision. Our apartment hadn’t been torn apart while she was kidnapped. What she had done to our home, the fact that she was gone, this painting was the link between then and now and every confused moment before and to come.

I stared at the painting and the
why
of the whole situation was not answered, and the
where
didn’t even seem relevant.

“Time’s up.”

I looked away and the art teacher began to spin the painting back to himself.

“Thank you,” I said, and because it was honest and I felt compelled to say something else, “That helped a lot.”

“Goodbye, then.” He was waiting for me to step from his office so he could do the same, so he could put the painting back in storage.

I stepped tentatively from the room and he hustled out after me. He shut the door behind him. I walked through the exit, got in my car and drove back to the apartment.

My home looks pristine now, untouched by my wife, clean of her wreckage.

M
Y
WIFE
WALKED
OUT
of theatres when she was bored, offended, tired, felt like moving.

I sat through every movie I ever bought a ticket to, even if they were insufferable. I waited to see how a story turned out, if it redeemed itself. If my wife was sufficiently offput halfway through something, she saw no reason to continue, to give it more of a chance.

She felt no obligation to anyone or anything.

My wife acted and reacted with meticulous consideration of herself. I see now, though, it was not often that she considered what her actions would spur in others. She behaved for herself alone, and I was the one who most tolerated this behavior. I was in such awe of her, so ready to be filled by her, that I rarely questioned a thing. She was who I had the most faith in and she was my faith itself, a conduit through which I lived my life. Everything was once removed through her.