My Only Wife (2 page)

If you’d seen my wife in a mall, near one of its jewelry stores, you would know the truth.

My wife and I had never visited a mall together before we were married.

I loved that we could avoid it without talking about it. I thought I had found one of the only women who disliked malls. I was right, but it wasn’t because she hated the capitalism in the air or disliked the activity of shopping.

I found out the real reason the day I proposed. I didn’t feel the need to be creative. My wife was not a fan of rote romantic gestures. She was happy with simple straightforwardness. She liked intimacy and romanticism when they were genuinely inspired. She hated Valentine’s Day. She despised roses. I was nervous the very act of proposing might annoy her. I didn’t want to push my limits and do something grand, like taking her up in a hot air balloon.

That night we were reading in our apartment. I watched her read for a while, something I enjoyed doing. She mouthed the words as she read. She’d majored in theater in college and had grown accustomed to evaluating language through its sound. This was one of the reasons she loved to talk to people. This is why she didn’t write the stories down at the end of her day. This is why my wife felt those tales needed to be spoken. She liked being a medium. She thought the stories became fraught with error when she retold them and she thought these secondhand mistakes were an inevitable addition to the evolution of the tales.

I’d watch my wife read, because she had a funny voice. She didn’t add air to any of the syllables she read, but I watched her mouth twist around words in a way entirely her own. I imagined what Tolstoy sounded like with the crackled warp of my wife’s reedy speech. I watched her shape her lips around all the poetry in each issue of
The Paris Review
. She like to take night classes and for three months I watched her silently project the laws of physics at the back wall of our living room.

She didn’t read aloud because she didn’t want to listen to
other
people read aloud. She feared if she began to read aloud, other people might as well, and then she would have to compete to hear her own voice. If she read and only mouthed the words, she could imagine what the words sounded like through muscle memory and the choreography of her lips.

On that night I was to propose, I watched her read until she looked up and smiled with a little bit of sheepish guilt, having been caught at this habit of hers. She didn’t ask me what I was doing or what I was looking at. When she looked up is when I asked her to be my wife. She smiled again. My wife, skeptical, said, “Are you sure?”

I nodded. Of course I was sure. She knew, and yet still she asked. I was practical and predictable.

“You didn’t think up the idea this moment?” My wife searched for a lie, knew the truth was plain.

In response to this question I reached into my jeans pocket and pulled out the little box. I popped the box open facing me and turned it so she could see the ring.

My wife wrinkled her nose and looked away.

“Is that from the mall?”

I was confused. She shivered and pulled her feet up to hug her legs to her chest. I nodded.

“You’re going to think I’m nuts.” My wife couldn’t look in the direction of the little grey velvet box. “I will marry you. Of course, I will marry you. I will be your wife, but return the ring.
Now
would be best.”

“You don’t like it?”

“I know I’m crazy to say this, but there is nothing, seriously, nothing, I hate more than mall jewelry stores. You had no idea, I know. They make me…” I could see her struggle to find words, like she was suppressing a gag. She grunted. “Return it and go to an antique store and pick me something old and—imperfect. Something that has a little history.”

I might have been hurt, but my wife was honest. She was kind, and she wouldn’t say this because she didn’t want to marry me. My wife appeared to be genuinely put-off.

She told me to return the emptiness of that ring to where I had gotten it.

She said, “You can bargain down the price in antique stores. Value is negotiable.”

My wife said, “Things are unapologetically broken and incomplete in antique stories.”

She said, “Be careful of the suited men with sharp, bright teeth in the mall who will try and talk you into an exchange.”

My wife said, “Give me wood and fiber any day.”

It wasn’t late when I proposed. The mall was still open. I kissed her forehead and she smiled weakly. I’d never seen her smile with anything but strength.

I needed something to send me out. “You’ll be my wife, though, right?”

With ease that sailed me to the mall, my wife said, “More than anything.”

On the way to the store I phoned my father. I told him about the engagement. My dad asked me to put my wife on the phone. I told him she wasn’t with me and that I was heading to the mall.

He asked why. I explained and he was confused. “Couldn’t she wear the ring until you found another? Why won’t she come to pick out a new one at the store with you? A ring is a ring.”

I tried to explain that the ring was not the problem, but where it had come from. I tried to tell him that if I was going to spend the rest of my life with this woman I wasn’t going to mar this day by forcing a ring on her that she hated.

I could practically hear the shrug of his shoulders over the phone before he digressed, “I’m happy for you. Send her my congratulations.”

I parked the car in the lot and ran into the mall to explain the situation one more time.

I was delirious with joy. She had said she would be my wife.

M
Y
WIFE
DIDN’T
ALWAYS
FIND
it easy or enjoyable to tell people’s stories to that tape recorder. Some of the stories my wife collected were difficult.

On the evenings when this was the case she ’d come home and put on a record. My wife and I only owned an old record player with a radio dial. I often offered to buy us a newer stereo but she forbade it. She said she had come to require the warp that vinyl records inevitably developed. It was like sleeping by the ocean; the subtle waves in the sound made each song a lullaby. She said, “A rocking chair couldn’t work half so well.”

Most commonly my wife put on old soul records she let sit by the radiator too long. They’d distort in and out, the sound twisting out of shape as she lay on the couch in a daze, letting the music bend around her while she tried to grasp how to tell a story.

My wife never told her stories for sensational effect. She liked to tell them in a way that would make them quiet and interesting. She wanted people to lean in. She liked to foreshadow huge events to come. She did this even when the stories were simple and straight forward. She gave hints when there was nothing to hint at.

The way the people told the stories to my wife would be out of order in the least interesting way. Often these acquaintances tended to share with my wife the hardest bit of their life first.

There was a sense that my wife could handle it, that telling her might lessen the blow each time these people would think about the event in the future.

There was a warm openness to my wife in the beginning of the story, like she was making some kind sacrifice to take on such a burden.

My wife never directly asked someone to tell his story, but she was adept at gently steering the conversation.

In the beginning my wife seemed generous, but by the end there was hunger.

She needed those stories to be told as much as the teller needed to relay them.

When my wife returned home, she would sit on the couch and evaluate how a listener wanted to be teased, eased into a story.

My wife would flip the arm of the record player all the way to the left to click it off. She didn’t have one of those fancy little mini-tape recorders. She had one of the bulky ones that were about the size of a hardcover novel, with a slide-out handle. She clicked the RECORD button and spoke.

Sometimes she talked for only a short amount of time: not everyone was open with their lives, not everyone was aware of what was fascinating about themselves. Usually my wife could seek it out, but this is not to say there weren’t exceptions.

Sometimes my wife would go on for over an hour. She would carry on and carry on.

Usually she clocked in around twenty minutes.

What seemed most fascinating about my wife’s project, as she tried to explain it to me once in the beginning, was that whenever included herself in the story. She never interjected how something made her feel or how she felt she was affected.

On the nights when she would flip on those old soul records, it may have been that the only way she could imagine telling the story was to include herself, and in denying herself that option, she needed to think of a new way to look at the situation. She had to tell the story once in her head so that she could manually erase all the traces of herself.

When my wife talked with these people, she tried never to pass judgment. She tried to bring out parts of their story that she felt were important and that she thought they were avoiding.

My wife laid on the couch and listened to soul to ease her mind, to exempt herself from the stories of the world outside, to allow herself to become what she considered an auditor.

She’d have to let the voice teach itself to her, so she could learn how to speak it.

M
Y
WIFE
TOLD
ME
A
story once, when we were not yet married, about a man who wore little wire rim glasses framed by long hair and a matching auburn beard.

My wife said this man offered her his story easily outside a general store in some western town.

She’d gone on a road trip by herself for an entire summer. She assumed there wouldn’t be many young people driving through Wyoming or South Dakota. She figured people would leave her alone for a while.

My wife loved the sidewalks of the city, but one summer she wanted to leave them behind so she could come back to them.

She wasted time while she took this trip. She lived out of her car and spent large portions of the day leaning against it in parking lots, taking in the dusty sunlight and the families spilling in and out of their vehicles.

One morning sitting on a bench outside of a general store, she was greeted by a friendly mutt. She set her bags down and petted the dog, but soon the man with the wire rim glasses came up behind the dog apologizing.

My wife said it was no problem. She loved dogs and hadn’t seen nearly enough of them lately.

The man said he had hitched in the night before.

The man said to my wife, “I’m the kind of man who likes to buy a woman a cup of coffee to get to know her, no expectations. I’m a rambler. I like to meet as many people as I can.”

My wife said, “I like coffee.” And they were off.

My wife told me, “It became clear quickly I was never going to get this guy’s story. I don’t think the man lived a day of his life. He spent all his time defining who he was, like it was a possibility. If I told this man’s story, it would be about how incorrect his own version was.”

My wife told me what this man had said, this rambler:

“I’m the kind of man who likes to live from day to day. I’ve never had a steady job, and I never intend to have one.”

“I’m the kind of man who loves women serially. I meet women and write their name on my hand, to remember. When we say goodbye, I spit on my hand and rub the name off. Off my hand, out of mind.”

“I’m the kind of man who likes all sorts of music. I’ve played with a lot of bands in my travels. I can play any instrument your posse’s lookin’ for.”

“I’m the kind of man who makes instant friends with people. I’ve never met someone who could resist my charms.”

“I’m the kind of man who tells it like it is, no matter who it hurts. I’m chronically honest. I can’t help it. I have a keen eye for the truth and I lack the tact to not call it as I see it.”

When my wife told me this story, she shook her head, smiling. “He was so far off. He never told me a single true thing. I had never met someone so set on identifying himself with so many different labels. He didn’t tell stories; he told me what categories he fit into. When we were done with three or four cups of coffee we walked out of the coffee shop and I petted his dog as I said my farewell. He tried to convince me to let him stay in my car for the night. Obviously I refused. ‘I’m the kind of man who takes no for an answer,’ he replied. The man and his dog walked a few paces away before he said, ‘You think you have something on me. I can tell by that smile. You think you have all the answers. You might fool the others, but you can’t fool me.’ And he winked like he’d let me in on a secret and sauntered away, his dog loping at his side. I walked back into the diner to talk to the waitress a little while and tell her about what had happened.”

My wife told me the waitress said, “Must happen all the time. Some people are unknowable.” She’d misunderstood. She thought my wife was saying he was an enigma.

My wife hadn’t intended to pay him such a compliment.

My wife had lost to a man obsessed with fitting himself into his own picture frame.

My wife said, “The only story I could tell that afternoon was ultimately about myself.”

“Tricky bastard.” My wife laughed, defeated.

M
Y
WIFE
KNEW
A
LITTLE
French. We went to the south of France for our honeymoon, stayed in Nice, took day trips along the coast, spent only one day in Paris, threw its proportion of French history to the wind.

My wife spoke French to shopkeepers; waiters spoke English to my wife. The French people became exasperated. They kept trying to convince her to speak English. My wife waved off what she thought were their accommodations. “Arretez!” she would say nonchalantly. She would take her time recalling what words she could say to get her meaning across. Her voice slid through this language I was hearing her speak for the first time. My wife enjoyed the waltz of it. She liked the way everyone was trying to adapt to the others’ rhythms, like dancing with strangers.