My Only Wife (6 page)

I looked at my wife, confused.

She shouted, “I reorganized that cabinet a week ago!”

I told her I was sorry but I’d had to get to the pipe. “

Yeah, but you can’t say that cabinet wasn’t
clean!”

At this point I chuckled a little, because I had no idea what she was getting at. I said, “Yes, the cabinet was indeed quite clean.”

“See?”

I claimed that I did see because I sensed if I let this go, we might move on and not talk any more about this accident that was no one’s fault, just a matter of poor timing. We were supposed to have a dinner party that evening.

We set about finding places to stash the bins of toiletries in closets and under our bed. My wife said, “I should cancel the party.”

“Don’t be silly. We’ll put some hand sanitizer in the bathroom and redirect them to the kitchen sink. It’s not like one room’s far from the other.”

My wife was conceding, letting the drama go, when she moved a bottle of bleach from the kitchen table. Beneath the bottle, on her good red tablecloth, was a wet spot faded to pink. My wife pitched the bottle into the basket. My wife shouted, “Why can you never not ruin something?”

“Excuse me?”

“You ruin everything. You are never not ruining something.”

I stood, bewildered, watching my wife rip the cloth off our kitchen table. “My wife is logical,” I kept telling myself. I knew I didn’t ruin everything. She had used a double negative; this was proof she wasn’t thinking. My wife spent her free time ruining, or as she liked to call it,
aging
her clothes on purpose.

I said, “You know I don’t ruin things on purpose. I put a bottle on the table and it leaked. It’s hardly like I meant to do it.”

She knew I was right, but she went on to vent. “No! You are always ruining something.” This time she sounded less enthused by her anger. She had corrected her grammar. She was calming down. “What if I ruined your favorite shirt?”

I unwisely laughed again, and she pushed my shoulder almost playfully, hiding behind a grimace. I said, “Since when do I have favorite articles of clothing?”

“That’s what I mean. I can never get even with you because you are inhumanly unattached to everything.”

I shrugged. “So if I had a favorite shirt, you would ruin it to get back at me?”

She lifted her chin into the air. I was a few inches taller than her, so when she wanted to appear haughty and superior, it often seemed like an exaggeration of her looking up at me. She said, “No. I wouldn’t have ruined your favorite shirt, because I love you and people who love each other don’t ruin each other’s stuff.” She raised her eyebrows as if the comment was a trump card. She turned with the basket of cleaning supplies and began attempting to cram them into the cabinet below the kitchen sink instead.

After we cleaned up, she collapsed onto our bed.

I pulled the door shut and watched some special on the domestication of feral cats on PBS.

When she emerged she was heading to the bathroom to shower before the party. I asked if she was feeling better, hoping she had cooled off a bit.

“You’ll never get it, will you?” she asked. I didn’t worry myself too much about her response. I wrote it off as another irrelevancy and turned back to the television.

I heard her turn the water on, a white noise rush like an erased cassette tape.

W
HEN
THE
STORIES
STOPPED,
my wife started smoking again. My wife sat on the windowsill to the fire escape rather than the couch.

It had been ages since she smoked.

I knew I was supposed to be angry that she was doing something so bad for her health.

I knew I was supposed to look at her perched on the windowsill half-in half-out of the apartment with disdain for the cancerous scent she was exhaling all over our home, into the cool night air. I knew I should think it was ridiculous that she opened a window so widely, multiple times a day in December when the snow was beginning to accumulate.

I was supposed to be even more disgusted by this in the morning.

But I wasn’t. I liked the way she looked.

I liked the broad inflations of her chest on the inhale.

I liked the collapse of her shoulders, heavy with all that weight, on the exhale.

I liked the delicate poise of her hand, wrist balanced on a bent knee, the limp bend of her fingers.

I liked the contrast of the white smoke to the night sky and I liked the silhouette of her form against the morning sun.

I liked the flick of her thumb on the lighter, the Popeye grimace with which she sucked in the first gulp of air.

I liked the little slivers of cellophane I found glinting around on the carpet.

I liked the ashy flavor of her.

Her mouth tasted of urns and volcanoes.

I liked the butts I found in the cheap ashtray we kept for smoking guests and the rings of her bright lipstick decorating the filtered ends.

I know I shouldn’t have, but I supported her. When she put Marlboro Lights on the grocery list, I asked for them from the cashier without moral hesitation.

When the clerks asked if I wanted them in the bag or with me, I held out my hand and pocketed them so that I might hand them to my wife personally.

I pocketed them so that I might receive some of her gratitude immediately, a kiss on the cheek, as she pulled the loose end of the cellophane and unwrapped the package, eager for the soothing relief.

After she took her first drag, I kissed her mouth, in love and happy to help.

I
ASKED
THE
QUESTION,
sure of the answer, but my wife said, “Deaf.” I was certain she’d rather be blind.

“Really?” I asked, confused. Maybe she was being contrary.

The question surfaced after we had seen a woman in the art museum with her seeing eye dog. We wondered how and why a blind person would go to an art museum, whether they might be allowed special privileges or something, like running their hands over the statues. We wondered whether there were floor plans printed in Braille. We were on a schedule, though, and we were polite, so we didn’t follow her around to figure out what was happening.

In the gift shop at the end of the day we saw the woman flipping through a row of art calendars priced at half-off because it was already the middle of January. Her dog was seated contentedly at her feet.

“She must be only partially blind,” my wife said.

“Or maybe she just wanted to bring her dog to the museum,” I replied, in good humor.

My wife seemed to consider this for a moment before moving on. We paid for a handful of postcards and an art book. On our way out the huge glass doors I asked the question.

I heard my wife’s answer and distrusted it.

“But you listen to your records every night. You record stories on cassette tapes instead of writing them down. You’re saying that if tomorrow you had to choose between being blind or deaf, you would be deaf? I don’t believe it for a second.”

She sighed. “The situation is ridiculous in and of itself. I’m never going to be given that choice. If either of those unfortunate events should occur, I would, of course, learn to deal with it, but if I had to choose right this moment, especially after that afternoon we just spent
seeing
beauty, I would say I would rather be deaf. I don’t care if I ever listen to those tapes again. I would rather spend my time gathering more stories than being nostalgic for the past or listening to them and thinking about what a wonderful storyteller I am.”

“But, why, then, do you record the stories at all?”

“For the sake of time. They need to go somewhere. I need somewhere to store them so I can start over again.”

“What does that mean?”

My wife stopped walking. The sidewalk was crowded. People bumped into us. My wife looked at me like I had offended her deeply.

“Well, come on!” I said. “That was
so
cryptic. You can’t say something like that and expect me to roll with it. Did that mean anything? Did you want to avoid answering my question?”

My wife was furious. “Let’s hear
your
answer to the question. Would you rather be blind or deaf?”

“Deaf, but I don’t focus my life around listening to people’s stories, and recording them on cassette tapes!”

My wife’s expression shifted to one of triumph, “You’re right about that. You most certainly do not listen. I’m sure it would be quite easy for you to give that up. I’m not saying I want to be deaf. You made me choose; I chose. You can’t tell me my choice is not my choice. It’s mine. Does it drive you crazy that you have no control over that?” My wife broke through the crowd of people passing us, to get to the staircase leading down to the el station.

I stood for a moment, watching her, astonished. When my wife had disappeared out of my sight, I started after her, pushing through the sidewalk traffic. I tried to race down the stairs, but I got caught behind a slow, elderly woman. By the time I had scanned my card, I heard a train pulling up and raced toward the track down another staircase. As I arrived on the platform, the train was already pulling away.

My wife was gone.

T
HIS
WAS
THE
YEAR
MY
wife had a wall of calendars.

The fourth wall of our bedroom was covered in them. There was no furniture up against this wall, calendars from floor to ceiling.

The wall was not decorated with wall calendars alone, there were day planners affixed to the wall and clipped open day-by-day calendars, and a couple of those vast grid calendars businesses make for some unknown reason. There were even some of those little card calendars that have only the number of the days, almost too small to see printed in little squares of the months.

This wall was one of my wife’s rituals. It was another system that helped her make the transfer from day to day. They helped her make it between days when the stories were stalled.

I rarely saw my wife marking the days, but when I did, it was like watching a dance.

She began at the left side of the wall. She had a small stepping stool. The calendars reached to the ceiling, so she had to stand on the stool to reach the highest ones. She took a permanent marker and put an X through the previous day. If today was Monday, she marked off Sunday. She only ever marked off the day she had just woken from.

She made precise and weighty Xs through the days.

If she knew I was watching, she silenced me with the palm of one of her hands flattened in the air as she tore off the page of a day-by-day calendar.

She Xed out horizontally wide days in the day planners.

My wife made delicate tiny Xs through the small cards’ numbers.

My wife would work her way down the wall, kneeling on the floor to X out the calendars lowest to the ground. Then she would scoot her stool over a few feet and climb to begin at the ceiling again.

When she was done she would cap her marker. She’d take the time to read the new day’s day-by-day information. She had a word-of-the-day calendar. She had some cartoon calendar. She had a calendar providing a random fact each day.

On the days when I watched my wife perform this ritual of marking out the passing of another day, she would share something with me.

She would read me a particularly unusual definition.

She would sit down beside me and show me the punch line of the cartoon.

She would say, “Can you believe this?”

I would raise my eyebrows with surprise, smile and laugh as she threw the slips of paper away.

Most days she slept later than I did, but on the odd weekend morning when I stayed in bed, I enjoyed watching her dance against the wall, up and down her one-stepped stepping stool, boosting her already long body to the ceiling, arm extended with a marker poised to cross out our days.

T
HE
STORY
THAT
INEVITABLY
BROUGHT
my wife out of her funk was that of another local business owner.

My wife, thrilled at the end of her dry-spell, bombarded me when I walked in the door at the end of the day.

“I found a story!” she said while flinging her arms about my neck. She showered my face with wide-spread smiling kisses. She pushed me against the door with a tackling hug and my laptop bag fell to the ground with a blunt thump.

My wife didn’t notice.

She placed my hand on her waist.

My wife grasped my shoulder.

My wife pulled our other hands together and projected them away from us, tugging tango-like into the living room, me tripping over my feet, she gliding, for once graceful.

“I ended up talking with the owner of the bakery down the street for almost an hour as he closed the store down for the day. He was a delightful man. You would not believe what he’s been through!” She gripped my hand tighter. “You can’t imagine how excited I am!” She was still guiding me around the room with our joined fists.

“I think I have a vague idea,” I said, laughingly as she twirled on the end of my hand. I, despite all, was still thinking about my dropped laptop lying by the front door.

My wife spun herself into me. “Finally!” She let out a dramatic sigh and collapsed in my arms, forcing me to dip her, to support all of her weight but the little left on the tips of her toes, dragging on the ground.

I carried my wife to the couch. “Let me get this straight. You lost your stories with a butcher. You found them with a baker. If my powers of prediction are all they’re cracked up to be—”

She came to life again, eyes wide, warning me. “Don’t even say it.”

I kissed my wife and she pushed me away playfully. I said, “You knew you had it coming. Anyone would have made the connection. You could have tweaked that story so it didn’t sound quite so ridiculous.”

My wife stood, haughty now. “I happen to think it’s horrifically coincidental that I had to resume my storytelling with a baker, but, as you know, I never ‘tweak’ a story, even if it means I’m going to have to deal with your ridicule.”