My Wife

by Steve Koppman

      Everyone loves my wife. Friends bring smiling coffee cups to "the world's best listener." Students scrawl her poignant incomprehensible thank-you notes. Principals call her godsend. Burly men in barbershops and service stations look reverent, a hint of tears in their eyes, at the mention of her name. Once a guy held her up with a gun. He sent her wallet back return mail, certified.
      Landlords love her most. They see her through the mob, holding our little girl's hand, glowing with unearthly light. She's already polishing the hardwood. She's telling them they should be charging much more.
      She was like that to me before our wedding. She wouldn't let me out of her apartment. She'd look at me and start to cry. I was unready to marry. It seemed the only way to calm her down.
      Everyone knows she's the ideal human. What they don't know is: I'm why. What she keeps from the world she saves for me, behind tastefully sealed windows and thick blinds. We never stop fighting. Marriage is war pursued by other means. She never gives in. I'm not made for it. She's hardy as apples.
      She used to call what we did making love, and liked it. She almost got evicted from the screaming. Her neighbors formed a committee.
      Now she calls it being used for sex, and wants no part. One day she kicked me out of the bedroom. just piled my things in a corner. Two years later in therapy, she agreed this may have been insensitive. We've always been in therapy. We used to go to dinner and therapy.
      In therapy we talk freely. We express our feelings. We try to acknowledge each other's feelings. Then we start screaming. Then it's time to end the hour. We're free to continue working on this at home. We've been featured in several prestigous journal articles. We're the best example of something awful they can't name.
      Why won't you listen?
      What you're saying's too awful.
      You won't hear me.
      You want me to agree with you.
      I do not.
      I can't say what I want.
      Say what you want to.
      You'll shout me down. I WILL NOT.
      I can't stand the way you think of me.
      Why don't you change what you do to me then? I can't. Try.
      We both wait for the other to walk. Sooner or later she'll saunter off, kid in her arms, music in the background, surrounded by adoring crowds of landlords, principals, grandparents, and other upholders of the community.
      We're skating on thin earth, she says, living pretty low on the shoestring, rubbing each others' elbows the wrong way. See the natural lampposts of Spring, she says, there's a golden rainbow just around the corner, let's buckle down the hatchets and strike while the lightning is hot. We're still green behind the ears, she says, maybe we need to get out more and chew the flesh.
      I had a dream last night, I was running up the highway, my wife driving alongside, pacing me at 50, 60, 70 miles an hour, us laughing together, proud of what good shape I'm in, how I can run fast as a car just like I used to when we met. I woke and felt how much part of me loved part of her and wished I had the space and time to figure it out.
      Let's try again-I catch her in the kitchen-work things out. I'll do this, you'll do that, let's promise to be better, meet halfway, negotiate, compromise, deal like we never could before, talk to me, please.
      She heads for the front door.
      It's hopeless, she says, how could we be happy. I've tried so hard so long, she says, I'm used up.
      I still want a miracle, I say.
      Her little white hand turns the doorknob. There are no miracles, she says, and it falls off in her hand.

Steve Koppman works as a telecommunications analyst and writer and lives in Oakland. He is co-author of Treasury of American Jewish Folklore, to be published later this year by Jason Aronson Publishers, Northvale, N.J.