My Wife and My Dead Wife

by Michael Kun

  I put my hands on Renée’s waist, fanning my fingers, then rest my chin on her shoulder. I can’t think of anything romantic to say, so we both just stand there, looking at ourselves in the mirror. Renée holds the brush to her eye shadow next to her face. It’s the same position as if she were holding an umbrella over both of us.

  I consider saying, “You look beautiful, Sweet Potato,” or “I love you, Sweet Potato,” but I don’t. I almost say, “Sweet Potato, do you want me to do your eye shadow,” but I don’t say that either.

  After a moment, Renée says, “Ham?”

  And I say, “Yes?”

  And she says, “Ham, we’ve got to get going. It’s past nine already.”

  “Maybe we could be a little late,” I say trying to be seductive, and I bring my hands to her breasts and press my lips to her neck, but Renée pulls free.

  “No, Ham,” she says sternly.

  I release her, and she waits for a moment before starting to apply the eye shadow again, holding the little brush as if she were only holding the umbrella over herself now.

  I dress, then sit on the bed and pull my socks and shoes on.

  On the drive, I tell Renée about Broom Hilda and the Krispy Kreme donuts. I tell her about the other Hamilton Ashe, but I don’t mention how he met Shellie. She doesn’t need to hear about Shellie.

  Renée smiles when I talk, but she doesn’t say anything. Instead, she sits quietly for most of the drive, holding her hands on her lap, occasionally running her fingers over her cheeks to blend her rouge. I can tell that she’s thinking about all the new words she’s been learning. Effervescent. Translucent. Dollyshot. Ubiquitous. Pharoah. You can see her lips move if you pay attention. Tiny, tiny movements, but they’re doing it. Renée knows that she doesn’t sound comfortable with her new words, I’m sure of that. Once, when she was showering, I pressed my ear against the bathroom door, and through roar of the water I heard, “Hyperbole. Hyperbole. Hyperbole. Hyperbole.”

  She knows.

  I almost drive past Guitar Walter’s apartment because Renée isn’t paying attention. I have to nudge Renée to ask, “Is this the street?”

  She says, “Oh, oh, yes,” and I park the car around the corner.

  Walking to the apartment building, I keep my hands in my pants pockets. I extend my elbow in case Renée wants to clutch it, but she doesn’t. Her lips are making those tiny movements, fluttering.

  The party is on the third floor of a sorry-looking apartment building. There’s no elevator, and the air in the stairwell STINKS. There are bags of rotting garbage left to one side and forgotten. Five or six other people climb the stairs with us. All of them are wearing black clothes. They’re all Films, I can tell. They all say hello to Renée. Me, they don’t say anything to. They don’t even ask if I’m Renée’s boyfriend, and I wonder whether she’s even told them about me.

  As soon as we enter the apartment, a man hugs Renée to him. He kisses her on the cheek. If I’ve met him before, I don’t remember. I try to picture him sitting at our kitchen table, but I can’t. Still, there’s a chance that he’s been over to the house and I simply hadn’t paid any attention to him.

  The man takes Renée’s coat and drapes it over his arm. I look around the room, but I don’t recognize anyone. There’s loud music playing, but no one is dancing. They just stand in small circles, talking and drinking from plastic cups.

  Renée takes my coat and hands it to the man, and we follow him to a small table with an assortment of wine bottles on it. There may be thirty bottles in all.

  “Please help yourself,” he says. “I’ll put these in the bedroom.”

  Renée fingers several bottles, reading the labels, then selects one and pours red wine into two plastic cups. She hands me a cup.

  “Where’s Walter?” I ask.

  Renée searches the room. Her hand is on her hip, her hip cocked slightly. I have never seen her stand like that before. It’s provocative and sexy. Then she stands on tiptoe, and, when she does, I notice she’s removed her shoes. They’re dangling from her fingertips, twisting like hooked trout.

  When Renée spots Walter, she waves her arm high and smiles broadly as if she’s greeting him at the airport.

  A tall, thin man walks up to us. He grabs Renée’s wrist, making a bracelet of his thumb and index finger, then kisses her cheek. His mouth, which is pretty for a man, breaks into a grin.

  “Syd,” she says, “This is Ham, my boyfriend.”

  See, she said “boyfriend,” not “husband.”

  See, she’s NOT my wife.

  The man leads Renée toward Walter, leaving me alone. There’s a small group standing in the doorway to Walter’s kitchen. There are four men and two women in a semi-circle, all listening to a chubby man with a goatee. They’re tipped forward toward him, as if there was a strong wind at their backs. I’ve never seen any of them before, but I join the group anyway, standing just outside the semi-circle, looking between the shoulders of two of the men. They stop talking when I arrive. They all look at me.

  “Hey,” one of the men says, “aren’t you Renée’s boyfriend?” He’s a thin, round-shouldered man with hair cropped so closely to his scalp that it looks like a felt cap.

  “Yes, I am,” I say, even though I don’t recognize the man. “Have we met before?”

  And he says, “Yes, we did. We met at your house. In your kitchen.” The man taps his temple with two fingers. “Now, don’t tell me. I remember your name.”

  And I say, “It’s —”

  “— No, don’t tell me. I remember. It’s some kind of meat, isn’t it?” The man turns to the rest of the group. “His name is some kind of meat,” he announces.

  “You’re named after meat?” one of the women asks.

  And I say, “No,” and shake my head. I start to say that I was named after my mother’s first love, then stop myself.

  “I know,” the man says, pointing a finger, “You’re Sausage.”

  There’s a burst of laughter, but I don’t say anything.

  And the man says, “Am I right? Is it Sausage?”

  I smile weakly.

  “Pepperoni?” one of the women asks.

  “Bologna? Is that your name, Bologna Ashe?”

  “Liverwurst?”

  “Who would name their child Liverwurst?”

  “Don’t mock me—you guessed Pepperoni. As if Pepperoni’s a more reasonable answer than Liverwurst.”

  “Ground beef?”

  “Is it chuck steak?”

  “Tongue? Could it be tongue?”

  It’s like being in my own kitchen, except that there are fifty people now, not just one or two. I can’t just go off somewhere by myself like I can in our bedroom or our living room. I can’t just sit on the steps outside and smoke a cigarette, or drive down to the convenience store. You can ignore one or two of them, but you can’t ignore fifty. Fifty overwhelms you.

  Finally, I interrupt them. “Very cute,” I say. “My name’s Hamilton.”

  “Ham!” the man shouts, then shakes a fist in the air, laughing. “Didn’t I tell you he was named after meat? Want to know something else about him? He only eats sandwiches on toast! And it has to be warm toast!”

  Renée!

  When the group stops laughing at me—and it isn’t soon that they do—they turn their backs to me and return their attention to the man with the goatee, who seems disturbed at having been ignored for two minutes. The man is dressed in all black. A black turtleneck sweater, black pants, black shoes. He stares at me meanly.

  “Sorry for the interruption, Jules,” one of the women says. “Now, you were saying that you don’t consider your work to be avant-garde?”

  “It depends upon your definition of avant garde,” he says. “If you mean odd or self-indulgent, then, no, it’s not avant-garde. But if you mean advanced or experimental or unconventional or in some other way more contemplative than the norm, then, yes it’s avant-garde. As avant as garde can get.”

  Every
one nods. I place my wine glass on the counter and ignore it as if it were someone else’s.

  One of the men in front of me, the same one who’d teased me about my name, asks Jules a question. “What do the markings on your films mean?”

  And Jules says, “Are you referring to the slashes and the triangles that appear in each of my frames?”

  And the man says, “Yes.”

  “In the corners?”

  “Yes.”

  And Jules says, “Well, what do you think they mean?”

  The man in front of me cups his chin, rubbing it like smart people do when they’re deep in thought. Finally, he says, “I see it as an indication of the fleeting nature of film. As if to say, `This is a film. This is not reality, but just a facsimile, and it will end shortly.’”

  Jules smiles. “Yes, yes,” he says. “Bravo. You’re very perceptive.”

  There’s a pause, and for some reason I decide to say something. “You know,” I say, “I don’t feel very intelligent around here. I don’t know a thing about films. I mean, I still call them movies.”

  I wait for laughter, but there is none. One of the women contorts her face.

  There’s laughter across the room, and I look over to see a circle of twenty people or so. At the center are Renée and Walter. His hand is on her waist, and her wine is almost gone.

  x

  Throughout the night, the apartment rings with laughter, the deep laughs that come from your stomach. A burst here, then there, then one in the corner, like a string of firecrackers. Pop-pop-pop-pop.

  I circle the room, trying to become invisible like a ghost in winter, moving among the people. I can’t find a group I want to join. I find myself back with the same group I’d been with earlier. They’ve grown in number, still listening to Jules and his black clothes and his goatee. I’m beginning to get a headache.

  Jules points to a wooden chair at the kitchen table.

  “See there,” he says. “You look at that and what do you see? You see the chair and the floor. The chair and the floor, two distinct objects. The chair and the floor.”

  “But with film,” he says, “with film we can work miracles. We can break down the laws of science. If we focus on it for ten minutes, it becomes chair-floor. Chair-floor. Chair-floor. One object.” He says it swiftly, as if it were a single word: chair-floor.

  No one says anything, and I wonder whether they’re all as confused as I am. When I look at their faces, though, I can tell that they aren’t confused at all; they’re just being quiet.

  Jules touches his eyebrow with his finger.

  “Chair,” he continues, moving his hand slowly from his forehead down to his waist, “floor. One object.”

  There’s an empty wine bottle on the counter behind me. Bottle-head, I think. Bottle-head. One object. The bottle and Jules’ head. The thought makes me snort out loud. Again, I move away from the kitchen and circle the room. I eavesdrop on conversations, acting as if I’m not listening, acting as if I’m looking at the posters on the walls, the view of the city, the books on the crowded bookshelf.

  “It’s the difference between color and black-and-white,” a man says.

  A thin, plain woman says, “I never wanted the apple sauce, I always wanted the apple butter,” and it sounds like she’s about to cry.

  A short woman with a cap says, “Your words seem so true that the truth seems like a lie in comparison.”

  What does that mean?

  What could that possibly MEAN?

  “We had a love-hate relationship,” another woman says. It’s Claire. Claire, from the kitchen. “We both loved him and hated me. But that was a long time ago. Mark’s perfect for me.”

  A man with heavy glasses says, “It’s the darkness of the theater that makes film so exquisite, because only in the darkness can we truly see ourselves.”

  A woman says, “He knows my every thought. It’s like he’s been talking to my therapist.”

  A woman is talking about Fellini.

  A man is telling a story about a pair of shoes he bought.

  A man says, “I used to believe that there was a beauty and purpose to everything in life. But how do you explain carnival workers?”

  Two women are talking in a doorway.

  “The next thing I knew,” one says, “he married Lisa, The She-Dog From Hell.”

  “Oh,” the other says, “so she kept her maiden name?”

  And the first woman says, “Well, it was already on her checks.”

  A man is talking to a woman. “She wants to know what everything feels like. If I eat a sandwich, she wants to know what it feels like. If I go for a jog, she wants to know what it feels like. If I go to the bathroom, well, let’s just say it’s getting a bit restrictive.”

  A man says, “Have you ever noticed that all the great cartoon characters have three-syllable names? Mickey Mouse. Donald Duck. Porky Pig. Fred Flintstone. Bugs Bunny. Elmer Fudd. Daffy Duck.”

  “What about Magilla Gorilla?”

  “Oh, please, Magilla Gorilla wasn’t a star. He can’t even get a job anymore.”

  I walk to the center of the room.

  “How was my day? Sweetheart, my day was like a thousand breathless summers.”

  I don’t recognize the voice. Then I see it’s Renée talking to Walter.

  “That’s wonderful,” Walter says. “That’s superb.”

  “I feel as if, finally, everything is starting to mean something.”

  I touch Renée on the waist to get her attention, but when she turns around, for a second it’s as if she doesn’t recognize me, as if we’d never met, as if the past four years were just a dream. There’s a look on her face as if she were already starting to forget me.

  “Renée,” I say. I don’t know what I’m about to tell her, but I want to leave. “I’m hungry. I’m going to head home. Here are the keys to the car—” I fish the keys out of my pants pocket—“and I’ll just get a cab.”

  “Ham,” she says, “I’m not going to drive this late at night, especially if I’m drinking. You take the car. I’ll get a ride from someone.”

  And I say, “Are you sure?”

  And Renée says, “Yes.”

  Walter shakes my hand.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk,” he says. “I would’ve enjoyed getting your perspective on things.”

  “Maybe some other time,” I say. “Thanks for inviting me to the party. I really should be headed home, though.”

  “That’s fine, Ham. Whatever you want to do is fine.”

  And that’s when I say, “Your words seem so true that the truth seems like a lie in comparison.”

  Renée shoots me a disapproving look, then shakes her head. She says, “I’ll get a ride, Ham. Good night.”

  And I say, “Good night.”

  I get my coat from a pile in the bedroom. I brush the lint off it, and walk toward the front door. Walter’s hand is on Renée’s waist again, and neither one of them looks at me.

  A young man wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap stands on a chair, and the apartment quiets down as everyone gathers around him. The man removes his cap and places it over his heart and says, “Today today today…I consider myself myself myself…the luckiest man man man…on the face of the earth earth earth.”

  I get out of the apartment as everyone applauds. I move down the stairwell and out to the street.

  x

  Do I really believe that Renée’s having an affair with that boy Guitar Walter? No. But for a moment, a hair of time, the thought enters my mind again and I feel it changing me, the way a drop of alcohol changes a drink.

  When I get home, I remove my coat, folding it over a chair in the living room.

  I want to talk to someone about Renée and Guitar Walter, only there’s no one to talk to. It’s too late to call Carl. And, when I think about it, I realize that the only people I could talk to are Palmeyer and Debbie. But I’ll have to wait until Monday to talk with them. I think about calling
the other Ham Ashe, but it’s too late at night to call a stranger, even if he does have the same name as you.

  I walk to the kitchen. There are dirty dishes on the counter top. I wash the dishes and put them in the rack next to the sink.

  I think about what I’ll say to Renée when she comes home. I can’t help thinking about how things have changed. There was a then, and there’s a now, and there’s no confusing the two. First, it was the guitar. Then, it was the gas man. Now, it’s her classes. Soon, we’re going to start hating each other. We’ll hate each other, but will we ever be brutal like some people are? I think about grabbing her by the arms and shaking her and saying, “Renée, look what’s going to happen to us.” I want to hold her until she sobs, but Renée never sobs anymore. She studies. She talks. She has breathless summers.

  I’m tired but not sleepy, and my mouth tastes like old wine. I decide to fix a sandwich, even though I’m not really hungry. I pull the toaster out of the cabinet next to the sink, drop two pieces of white bread in, and unwrap a few slices of American cheese. I eat the sandwich quickly, while the toast is still warm, but don’t put the toaster back in the cabinet when I’m done. I just sit and look at it. I remember how I once pretended to do a magic trick for Renée.

  “Look,” I said. “It’s bread. Now I put it in here”—I dropped two slices in the toaster, and when the toast popped I said, “What happened to the bread? It disappeared.”

  I take the loaf of bread out of the refrigerator again, and, two at a time, I toast every slice. It takes fifteen minutes, and when I’m done, I put all of the slices back in the bag, then return the bag to the refrigerator.

  x

  It’s two-fifteen, and only God knows where Renée is. I’m not going to call the police and the hospitals. I’ve already done THAT once today. I undress and toss my clothes in the bathroom hamper, then climb into bed and just lay there. I picture Shellie sitting on the washing machines at the appliance store. I picture her laughing and brushing her hair out of her eyes. Then I picture Shellie telling me about her brother, about how he wanted to be an astronaut and a baseball player, and how the only thing I could do to stop her from crying was to tell her I loved her over and over again.