My Only Wife Read Free Page B

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.

7.
    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.
    My wife woke early while I slept. It always rains at night in the South of France, or perhaps it rains in the early morning. Either way, there were first-light puddles in the paved-brick streets, the air damp at sunup. For the people who lived there, the drying rainwater was something to watch happen day after day; it was another part of the set-in-cobblestone routine.
    My wife plunked through puddles, the water weighing down her pant hems. She bought baguettes she watched being pulled from the oven.
    My wife would haggle in broken French with the little old men in the market down the street for tiny bananas, fresh strawberries, bright bouquets of intricate ranunculus.
    I would rise to the smell of the rain my wife dragged in. She smelled of sea and slope and narrow streets yawning “Bon matin.”
    My wife and I drove to gallery after chapel after mansion and remembered laughingly how people warned us of the rudeness of the French.
    We climbed to the top of everything, pressed every button, sat on the base of every sculpture before being shagged off. There was age there, cities built into stone, clinging to the sides of mountains with stubborn, arthritic fingers.
    My wife touched art and artifacts that had velvet ropes strung before them. She touched objects older than we could imagine. She helped them age a bit more quickly.
    In the Musée d’Orsay, on our only day in Paris, my wife whispered. “Hands,” she said, “are full of chemicals that cause things to deteriorate quickly. When I was a child on vacation in Dublin we went to see the Book of Kells. It was under glass in a dimly lit room. They told us if we touched it, it would fall apart. They warned us, ‘You don’t want to deny other people the chance to see this beautiful artifact, do you?’ They spoke like fathers protecting their daughters’ virginity.”
    My wife said, “I wanted to crack the glass, let the book feel my hands.”
    My wife’s eyes glowed mischievously.
    My wife, her eyes trained on mine, placed one hand on the foot of a plaster cast model of Rodin’s Balzac .
    My wife took one of my hands and placed it on her face. She placed a hand on top of mine.
    She shut her eyes, my hand on her cheek, her hand on mine, her other hand on Balzac. “Have you noticed how hands are born wrinkled, where the finger joints have already been bending for months?”
    My wife said, “How must we age from handshakes alone?”
    She opened her eyes, squinting in the sun. She raised her eyebrows.