My Only Wife (12 page)

We unbuttoned, unzipped, unclasped. We fell, rolled, fumbled. It felt old and new, exciting and comfortable, deviant and spontaneous. I made many comments about how much, indeed, I enjoyed that pillbox hat.

Although my wife had always called the shots sexually, she called them that evening with the vigor of our earlier years. Lately, she’d become hyper-aware of the posturing involved in lovemaking, how even when genuinely motivated, a moment’s objective glance at the situation could pull her out of the action. When she found a way to ignore these thoughts, we were terrific, like we’d been when we began. She found passion and whimsy and belief in us.

We arrived at the restaurant on time, a little mussed, and the maitre-d’ ushered us to a table at the back of the restaurant.

We ordered an extravagant meal, beginning with an artichoke soaked in a Brie and mustard sauce. For our entrees my wife had fricassee of chicken and I had marinated steak. For dessert, profiteroles doused in chocolate sauce. We savored each bite, vocal in our enjoyment. About halfway through our meal, when each of us had downed two martinis apiece, a couple was seated next to us. Quite a bit older, probably in their fifties, they glanced over when we both moaned at the first taste of our entrée. We apologized; they laughed. They asked us if our meal marked a special occasion.

“Sixth anniversary.” My wife responded with actual joy. Her tongue sprang out to catch a trickle of sauce threatening to spill from the corner of her mouth.

“Is that right?” the woman asked. “This is our
twenty-sixth
anniversary. You both still seem very much in love. So nice to see a young couple making it work so well.”

“Thanks,” I replied. “Although most of our friends are married, too, have been for a while, and they’re all holding strong. I don’t believe we’re an anomaly.”

The woman smiled. “I suppose I hear the divorce statistics and assume nothing works out anymore. This is both of
our
second marriages. We both married while still in college, and neither lasted more than a couple years. By the time we were trying to find jobs and a place to settle, the differences were too wide.”

“It’s true,” the man chimed in. “My first wife and I thought we had it all figured out, and one day she just went crazy, said I didn’t care about her goals, only worried about myself. The day I knew it was over she kept shouting, ‘When are we going to start thinking about me?’ Every decision I made, every word spoken had been for her. I didn’t know what to do. We went to a few marriage counseling sessions, and decided we were too young to spend a lifetime making it work. Then I met this one,” he nodded at his wife, “and it all came clear. We both wanted to live in the city. She took a job at a gallery. I’m a lawyer. Our life is logical and clean and easy. Twenty-six years of smooth sailing.”

His wife leaned in, whispered, “Not always entirely smooth, but certainly better than the first marriages ever could have ended up. My first husband is a high school wrestling coach out in some bumbling farm town. Now tell me, can you imagine me in a farm town?” She looked at us as if we knew her, as if she wanted a straightforward answer, valued our opinions.

I froze, but my wife exclaimed, “Absolutely not. That would be absurd. Look at you. You’re a city girl all the way.”

“Exactly!” The woman sat back in her chair. “You’ve known me five minutes and you could tell. How on earth did I marry a man who couldn’t see I’d never be a country wife?” She chuckled to herself.

My wife never turned away, wanting to appear polite; she was, I’m sure, loving this odd little encounter.

The woman next to us showed no sign of stopping. The waitress came, took our plates away, our new friends at the next table received their food and the man slowly began to eat. The woman eyed her steak, but carried on as she cut it into ever smaller bites, talking a mile-a-minute. “I’m a reader,” she said.“My first husband followed me around college like a charmed snake. We had nothing in common, but he listened intently to everything I said. I rambled on and on about the work I was doing. I was an art history major. He wrestled. We met in a lit class that we needed to take for a general education requirement. I was a hot ticket back then and he was handsome, friendly, popular. I was arty and exotic, and I had a great body.” She held the back of her hand to shield her mouth. “Though you’d never be able to tell now! We were sure we were in love and we’d last a lifetime. He wanted to get married, so we’d never have to hide anything from our families, could begin our lives together. I’d been terrified of commitment and settling down, but for some reason, with this huge decision, I decided to attempt to overcome my fear. After my junior year, we married, a smallish wedding, reception in my parents’ backyard. We’d known each other less than a year.”

Our dessert arrived. Coffee was poured. While my wife and I spooned mouthfuls of puff pastry, ice cream and chocolate sauce, the woman inhaled the majority of her plate of food. When she’d finished, she continued. “Anyway, we went on our honeymoon: Hawaii. We began living our lives in a little apartment our senior year. He had a collection of sporting equipment he horded in the one communal storage closet. I bought masses of shelving.

“Enter books. Mine. The beginning of the problem. He didn’t understand why I had so many. Nor why they needed to cover the walls. He thought the apartment would look so much nicer without all that clutter. He didn’t get why I needed to buy the books, why I couldn’t take them out from the library. Finances immediately came into play. I worked extra hours to pay for books I wanted to own. He said I was never around and that I never did anything for him. What he meant was I worked instead of cooking him dinner, which I actually did quite often. Not every night, but
often
, and not once did he make dinner for us. He said I should be putting the money I earned toward something for the both of us, or save it for the future. I told him the reason I worked was books. If I didn’t buy books, I wouldn’t work. I told him, I’m not giving up books for you. We fought about priorities. We were young and foolish. All those times I thought he was interested, even fascinated in what I was talking about, I realized he was just being a good listener, an honorable trait certainly, but I’d been under the illusion that listening implied we would build a relationship marked by fulfilling exchange.

“I kept working. We both graduated. We stayed in the college town for some time after, all the while I tried to convince him that I needed to move back to the city. He nodded, I thought genuinely, but actually, I later learned, dismissively. He thought he had me pinned. He was sure eventually he’d break me, cow me into doing whatever he pleased and he waited me out slumped in an easy chair, expecting me to calm into my domesticated self any minute. One evening near the end, a slow day at the gallery allowed me to go home early. My first husband and I had had a spat the night before, again about how committed each of us were to making the marriage work, our willingness to sacrifice personal pleasures for the sake of our general well-being. Again he’d brought up my books, suggested I sell them to used bookstores, suggested I stop buying more. I came home from the gallery and collapsed in his easy chair. I stared at the book shelves that dominated the living room. They climbed every wall. Almost immediately, I felt dampness sink into the bottom of one pant leg. I felt the seat, cool and wet with something, beneath me. I stood and then crouched beside the chair lowering my face to the dampness.

“It was beer. He’d spilled a beer and made no attempt to clean it up. Upon closer inspection I found a herd of cheese snacks packed into the crease of the seat. Disgusting! I brought a trashcan and some paper towels. I scooped the remaining debris into the waste bin and found a layer of Fritos, a layer of corn chips. Under that, deep in the groove, I brushed out anonymous grime and lint. I scrubbed the beer stain out. Then I disposed of my tools and I looked again, standing this time, at all of my books. I was feeling dramatic. I began taking the books down in stacks. I brought them to our bedroom first and laid them end to end, overlapping so no space lay between them. I opened each to a random page, covering the floor, the bed, every horizontal surface. I did this in every room of that tiny apartment.

“By the time I finished, my books blanketed the place. Every surface covered. Every binding broken. The content of all of those books released into the air. All the theories, images, stories I’d processed in my lifetime, lay around me and sang out their silence together, pages shuffling. I sat on the couch, and looked over them, this miraculous garden of my notes, my influences, and I heard my husband fumbling to turn his key in the lock. I heard him twisting and pushing the door in at the same time.

“I had laid the books all the way to the door. He had to add a little pressure to swing the door open against the books’ resistance. When he came in, I grinned, Sheherazade laying out all one thousand and one stories in one night, asking for it. I smiled with the relief of an ending. Surely, this had to be the last straw. ‘What the fuck is this?’ he asked.

“I said nothing. I had no answers to give, no approximations I thought even remotely appropriate. I sat and grinned, let words I’d read speak, pipe up into the air from their grounded pages.”

The waitress came and took their plates, asked if they’d like a dessert menu. The husband nodded. My wife and I had our coffee cups refilled. We were no longer humoring this woman; we were riveted.

“He kicked some of the books, furious at the state of the apartment and my silence. ‘What the fuck does this mean?’

“I sat and smiled, tears dripping down my face. I knew they’d be fine. Even if pages ripped, they could be taped. The wear they withstood in this beating would only add to their history. Several books of theory he shredded —the fiercest deconstructionist critic I’d encountered, that hillbilly man I’d married.

“I cried through my smile, and when he finally tired and swept the books off his easy chair, he said, ‘I don’t know who you are. What on earth is this all about?’

“We cleared books off our bed and slept, tired and settled. Early the next morning we woke and without turning to me, he said, ‘I thought we wanted the same things.’

“‘Didn’t we both, though?’ I said. I’d been sure of it myself. ‘At least we could figure out how wrong we were together?’ I offered.

“‘Some consolation prize,’ he said. ‘My wife chose books over me. How do I explain that to people?’ He turned then as if he wanted a real answer.

“‘You don’t,’ I said. ‘People don’t need the world explained to them. You need the faith that they’re smart enough to see with their own eyes, and that the only truth is the one they construct on their own.’”

My wife and I sat. Our neighboring table’s dessert arrived. The woman looked rather abruptly down at her slice of pie and didn’t turn back to us. She picked up her fork.

My wife and I had no idea what to say. The woman ate her pie. Her husband downed his slice of cake. As if they had come to some bizarre agreement, neither looked at us. We continued to look at them, but they never made eye contact again.

Neither of us knew how to proceed. Leaving might be rude. Our coffee cups were filled for a third and fourth time.

The couple didn’t speak. When both had finished their desserts, the waitress brought their check. They paid, politely responding to her. They looked at each other for affirmation as they straightened themselves. When they stood to leave, shuffling between our tables, my wife took the initiative. “Nice to meet you,” she said. “Have a lovely anniversary.”

Neither of them turned or acknowledged my wife ‘s well wishes in any way. It was as if she had said nothing.

My wife stared at me.

“What was that?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. Maybe she needed to get that out?” My wife’s face wore confusion, anxiousness, maybe a bit of humor.

We walked into the unusually cool summer night mostly silent, unsure how to process what had occurred. Instead of taking the el the two stops to our house, we walked home.

At our apartment building, my wife fumbled for her keys and I knelt to pull a piece of soiled and torn paper from beneath the bushes lining the walkway.

As my wife pushed into the entryway she looked back to eye me and the page.

We brushed our teeth, washed our faces, climbed into bed. With the lights off, my wife’s breathing quickly regularized itself into sleeping sighs. I slipped out of bed and crept to the night table on her side, where I’d placed the piece of paper I’d found.

It was a page of a book, a few lines underlined, and some marginalia. Evidenced by the handwriting, my wife had been the annotator. I shuffled back to my side of the bed, and after listening to her breathe for a long time, fell asleep.

O
N
WEEKEND
DAYS
DURING
THE
summer, of our fourth year in particular, we would pack a cooler, pack a bag of towels and books, and head to the beach. Often we’d ride our bikes there, but there were days when we decided to walk the two miles to the lake.

As we got closer the sidewalks got more and more crowded. If we were on our bikes we stayed in the street. If we were walking we parted now and then for the children darting between us. Rollerbladers sailed past, my wife marveling every time at their balance. She, in her clumsiness, had never gotten more than a few squares of cement before tumbling from her height to her knees, jamming the heels of her hands into the ground, imbedding pebbles in her joints and standing again to brush them away. “They move so fast!” my wife would say and look to me for some answer she knew I didn’t have. I wasn’t much better.

When we arrived at the long strip of walkway that ran along the miles of beach, we’d have to wait for a break in traffic. We’d wait for the bikes to whiz past, for the rollerbladers to glide by,for the runners and joggers to get ahead, so we didn’t break their pace.

We never got up early on these summer mornings so the beach was crowded by the time we got there. Broken by docks at which boats never arrived, the first few spans of beach were always packed with people, blanket to blanket, masses of little children weaving in and out between them.