My Wife and My Dead Wife Read online

  “We can’t afford this,” Renée said. “You should take it back.” But I knew she didn’t want me to take it back. She was already stroking the wood.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We can afford it.”

  And she said, “How?”

  And I said, “I’m going to quit smoking. I’ve been meaning to quit smoking anyway. I figure I must spend fifteen dollars a week on cigarettes. That is fifteen dollars a week we’ll be saving, which we can apply to the cost of the guitar. So, when you consider the savings, the guitar will be paid off in a couple of months, then we’ll start making money. Hell, if I quit drinking, too, we’ll be millionaires before you know it.”

  I was joking, but it all made perfect sense, how the money for the cigarettes would pay for the guitar. Only I didn’t figure on the guitar lessons she needed, which were ten dollars an hour, two nights a week. That alone was MORE than the cost of the cigarettes. Two nights a week, a boy from the college would come by. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen, and he had oily black hair that was long in the back and stained his shirt collar. They would sit on the sofa in the living room, he and Renée, each one playing a guitar.

  “This is such-and-such chord,” he’d say, and he’d strum his guitar. He was good with a guitar and if you gave him the name of a song, any song, he could play it for you, note for note. “Stairway to Heaven.” “Get Off My Cloud.” Etcetera. His name was Walter Something-or-other.

  After he showed her a chord, Renée would try it, and she’d make a sound that sounded something like what the boy had played. Not quite, but close, like when you try to make a photocopy of a photograph. Then they’d move on to another chord, then another. I’d try to watch television or read my sports magazines while they were doing that, but I couldn’t concentrate. Eventually, I’d end up sitting out on the front steps, waiting for it to get quiet so Renée and I could go to bed.

  x

  I suppose Renée was practicing her singing and her guitar playing while I was at work. Except for when that boy was giving her lessons, I never heard her practice, not once. And she must have had a lot of extra time on her hands, because that’s when she started baking. At first, it was once or twice a week. Cakes or pies or cookies.

  “Did you bake all day?” I’d say.

  And she’d say, “No.”

  And I’d say, “Did you work on your songs at all?”

  And she’d say, “Yes, I did. I just did some baking to take a break.”

  But with all the cakes and pies and cookies, I have to admit that I was beginning to think she wasn’t practicing at all. When I’d get up for work, she’d still be sleeping in bed. When I’d come home from work, there would be the cakes or the pies or the cookies, and she’d still be dressed in her pajamas. And I never heard a single note come out of her pretty pink little mouth. Never.

  That’s why I was so surprised one night when I came home from work and Renée was dressed in a red blouse and blue jeans, with a cowboy hat and cowboy boots and a bandanna tied around her neck. You could only see a little of her blonde hair hanging down at the back of the cowboy hat.

  She said, “I want to play you a song I wrote, and I want you to tell me what you think of it. I want you to tell me the truth.”

  And I said, “Okay,” and sat down on the sofa.

  And she said, “The truth? No sugar-coating it?”

  I said, “I’ll tell you the truth,” and crossed my fingers over my heart.

  And then Renée sat down and played the WORST song I’ve ever heard in my life. It was called “Winona Forever,” and it was about a girl who had a puppy named Winona who ran away, and the girl was so sad that she had the words “Winona Forever” tattooed on her arm, only the puppy came back a few months later and was missing an ear. It was a stupid, stupid song, and Renée kept messing up the chords the boy had taught her. Her singing wasn’t bad, but it was hard to focus on it because of the words, which made you want to laugh out loud. Except for the part where she sang, “Winona forever, I’ll love you Winona, forever,” which was very sad, especially because she had her eyes squeezed shut whenever she sang that part.

  When Renée was finished, she said, “So, what did you think?”

  I couldn’t lie to Renée, but I didn’t want to make her unhappy either, so I tried to sound positive. I smiled and said, “That’s not bad for a first try.”

  And she said, “What do you mean?”

  And I said, “Just what I said. For your first song, it’s not bad. Just think how good you’ll be when you improve.”

  The tip of her nose got red like it did when she was getting out of the shower. She said, “Ham, I spent a lot of time writing that song. I’ve been working on that one song since I lost my job.”

  It’d been three months. Three months writing about a dog without an ear.

  And I said, “It sounds like you put a lot of time into it.”

  Now she was crying and crying, and I had to put my arm around her. When I did, I accidentally knocked off her cowboy hat. It landed on the floor, upside-down. There was a drawing of a girl with a lasso inside.

  “You’re going to leave me, aren’t you?” she said.

  And I said, “No. No, Renée, no.”

  And she said, “I can tell you will. I can tell you’re going to leave me.”

  All I could do was say, “No, no, no,” then I carried her to bed and she fell asleep, still dressed in her cowboy outfit like a child who’d stayed out too late on Halloween.

  x

  After Renée lost her job, money became a problem. We still had to pay the rent, and for food, and for heat and hot water, and for car insurance for the cars.

  And we had to pay for the guitar and the guitar lessons.

  And we had to pay for the cowboy outfit, even if Renée kept insisting that’s not what it was. “It’s not a cowboy outfit, silly,” she’d say. “It’s just a rustic look I’m going to use.” Then she’d name someone famous whom I’d never heard of who supposedly dressed the same way. I don’t care what she wanted to call it, it was a cowboy outfit. The red blouse and the jeans, the cowboy hat, the cowboy boots, the bandana. They weren’t cheap, either, especially the boots, which were leather and had stitching all over them. We couldn’t afford them.

  One month we were late with the rent. Another, with the telephone bill. I ended up having to borrow some money from my brother Carl, the lawyer.

  “I promise this will never happen again,” I said. “It’s an emergency.”

  And he said, “No need to worry about it. You don’t need to pay me back.”

  Thank God for Carl, or else we would have been sleeping naked out on the street, just me, Renée and the guitar.

  Every once in a while when I got home from work Renée would sing one of her songs for me in the living room. She would sit down on the edge of the coffee table and start strumming the guitar. Her guitar playing improved, and you could tell she’d been practicing. Some of the songs she wrote were pretty good, too. She wrote one called “A Whisper Tames the Wild Horse,” which was slow and pretty and made you smile if you thought about it. The chorus went like this:

  Like a hush that stops a baby’s cry,

  Like mothers wash and fathers dry,

  Like a compass keeps a ship on course,

  A whisper tames a wild horse.

  The song was about a man who was wild—smoking, drinking beer, driving fast cars, gambling—and about how a woman was able to calm him down and get him to straighten out. I don’t think she wrote the song about me because I don’t drive fast. I usually stay at the speed limit, give or take a couple miles per hour. I don’t gamble much, either. Sometimes I play cards, but that’s where I draw the line. The smoking and the beer? I suppose that part could’ve been written about me, which is very flattering.

  When Renée was done singing that song, I said, “That was wonderful,” and I started clapping and whistling.

  She said, “Do you really mean it?”

  And
I said, “Of course I do. It was wonderful. It was as good as anything I’ve heard on the radio.” I was proud of her, really, truly proud.

  She was smiling so big. She sat on my lap.

  “Say that again,” she said.

  And I said, “Say what again?”

  “Say that about the radio. I want to hear you say it again.”

  And I said, “That was as good as anything I’ve ever heard on the radio.”

  That night, we had a good night in bed.

  x

  There were some bad nights, too. Sometimes she would play a song that was so terrible that I had to tell her for her own good. Even though it broke her heart, I had to tell her. I remember she played one song called “Dance With Me Bobby Bailey,” that was almost as bad as that “Winona Forever” song. It was about a boy in a wheelchair who went to the school dance alone, but a girl approached him and asked him to dance.

  How could he dance if he was in a wheelchair?

  How?

  HOW?

  And there was another one called “Grandma’s Kitchen.” Nothing happened in that song. It was just a list of things that Renée’s grandma used to cook:

  Meatloaf, pork chops, apple pie,

  Noodles, turkey, my oh my,

  Cookies, bread, Yankee stew,

  Chicken soup so good for you,

  Beans, potatoes, cobs of corn,

  The kitchen floor was always worn,

  We’d start at five and end at seven,

  Bet Grandma’s cooking up in heaven.

  I had to tell her that was a bad song, and Renée stayed up all night in the living room, writing a brand new one to prove that the song about her grandma was just a mistake. And it was. After I’d told her how much I liked the song about the whisper and the wild horse, most of the songs she wrote were pretty good. The bad ones were exceptions to the rule as they say. She started to get up when I got up to go to work in the morning, and she’d get dressed, and then she’d have a whole plan mapped out for what she was going to do that day, how much time she’d spend writing her songs, how much time she’d spend practicing her chords, how much time she’d spend doing this or that or the other thing. Every couple of nights, she’d play a new song for me in the living room while I ate some cake or pie or cookies, then we’d go sit on the porch. I’d smoke a cigarette, and we’d each have a beer or two, and I’d tell her how much I liked the new song.

  The cigarettes. The cigarettes that were supposed to pay for the guitar.

  That didn’t work out at all.

  I’ve been smoking since I was thirteen. The only other time I’d tried to quit was back in high school, when I had to go to the funeral of a boy from school who had died. My friends and I didn’t want all the teachers and parents to smell smoke on our clothes, and we even scrubbed our hands, the notches between our index and middle fingers, to try to get rid of the yellowy stains there.

  That time, in high school, I’d quit for two full weeks.

  This time, trying to save money to pay for Renée’s guitar, I’d only quit smoking for six days.

  Probably closer to five.

  Which didn’t even save us enough money to buy a picture of a guitar, let alone a real guitar.

  x

  One night when I came home, Renée was dressed up in her cowboy outfit again. The same blouse and jeans and cowboy boots and cowboy hat. The same red bandana. She had her purse with her, and her guitar was in its case and propped up near the door.

  I said, “Hey, Sweet Potato, what’s going on?”

  And she said, “I want you to come with me to Eddie’s Attic tonight. I’m going to sing some of my songs. I’m going to make my singing debut.”

  And I said, “They’re going to pay you to sing your songs?”

  And she said, “No, not yet. It’s Wednesday, and every Wednesday is Amateur Night. They let people get up and sing their songs, and if you’re good enough, they might have you come back to sing for money. That’s how the Judds got started.”

  And I said, “The Whos?”

  She grinned and rolled her eyes a little and said, “The Judds, silly,” like I should have known who they were. Like they were Kennedys or the Rockefellers.

  So I drove Renée into Decatur, to Eddie’s Attic. I was almost as excited as she was. While we were driving, I asked her which song she was going to play, and she said, “I’m not sure. I’m thinking about playing `A Whisper Tames The Wild Horse.’” It was her best song. That, or the one about the woman who got lost on her honeymoon. The woman went out to run an errand, then couldn’t remember the way back to the hotel where she and her new husband were staying. When she finally found the hotel, he’d already checked out because he thought she’d run away from him. Only his tuxedo was left in the room. That one was called “Lost Honeymoon.” The chorus to that one went:

  It was a lost honeymoon,

  She returned too late,

  He had left too soon.

  On the pillow where he’d laid his head,

  There was just a bowtie instead.

  I really liked that one.

  When we reached Eddie’s Attic, I carried Renée’s guitar from the car. The entrance was on the side of the building, and the club was on the second floor. There was a line of people standing in the stairwell leading upstairs, leaning their instruments against the banister. There must have been thirty people in line to sign up to sing, all different kinds of people. Fat men, skinny women, scrawny boys, girls with puffy hair on top, and Renée in her cowboy outfit.

  Renée was nervous, and after she’d signed up we went and sat at a table in the back and drank beer as the other people got up on stage to sing. Most of them sang songs by famous singers. I recognized the songs by rock groups—the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, the Beatles—but I didn’t recognize the county-and-western songs. Renée would lean over to tell me who wrote those songs.

  “That’s a George song,” she’d whisper to me.

  Or, “Johnny Cash wrote that.”

  Or, “That one’s by Emmylou Harris.”

  Her skin was white from being so nervous, but I could tell she was eager, too. She kept squeezing my fingers the way she might do when we were on a carnival ride together, spinning round and round, screaming. When a girl finished playing a song by someone named Lucinda Williams, Renée grabbed my hand and said, “I’m next. I’m next. Wish me luck.”

  I said, “You’re going to be great.”

  And she said, “I owe this all to you.”

  And I said, “No, you don’t, Sweet Potato. You did this all yourself.”

  Then the owner announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a nice, warm, Eddie’s Attic welcome to our next performer, Ms. Renée Yates.”

  Everyone applauded. Renée took her guitar and walked up to the stage, and I took a drink of my beer and lit a cigarette. It was like dreaming, Renée sitting up there on stage, on a stool, a circle of white light on her face. She fixed her blouse with her fingertips, and said, “Thank you,” then started strumming her guitar. Strumming her guitar and smiling, her teeth white like piano keys. Only she wasn’t playing the song about the whisper and the wild horse, like she said she would. And she wasn’t playing “Lost Honeymoon, ” either. She was playing “Winona Forever.”

  Why would she play that song?

  Why?

  Why?

  She started singing about the dog, and how the dog ran away, and you could see that she was practically crying just singing about how much she missed that stupid dog. People started laughing, quietly at first. I don’t know if Renée could hear it. Her eyes were closed, and she kept singing, “I love you Winona, forever.” I looked around the room, and the people were laughing and laughing out loud now like she meant the song as a joke, which she didn’t. There were two men at the table next to mine, laughing with their mouths wide open. You could see their fat red tongues. You could see the beer running down their chins.

  Even though there were two of them and they we
re both much larger than me, I leaned over, and I pointed at them, and I said, “Hey, will you both kindly shut the hell up so I can hear the young lady sing?”

  They ignored me and kept laughing with their enormous mouths and their pointy teeth like beasts.

  So, a little louder this time, I said, “Will you SHUT THE HELL UP so I can hear the young lady sing?”

  And one of them said, “Shut the hell up yourself, jackass,” and started to rise from his seat like he wanted to fight me.

  And then the other one said, “Who is she to you anyway?”

  And I said, “For your information, she’s my wife,” which shut them both up.

  But she is not my wife.

  She is NOT my wife.

  CHAPTER 2: ELECT HAMILTON ASHE FOR A BETTER TENTH GRADE

  That was how it started. That was the night Renée started saying she was my wife. That was the night she stopped being “Renée Yates” and started being “Renée Ashe.” Or, actually, “Mrs. Renée Ashe.” Even though A) I never asked her to marry me, B) we never got a marriage license, C) we never had a wedding ceremony, and D) lemonade.

  That’s the night Renée started saying we were married, even though she doesn’t even know how to say my name. Not my last name, Ashe, which rhymes with “cash.” No, she says my FIRST name wrong. Ham, which rhymes with “lamb” and “wham” and “sham” and plenty of other words. THAT’s the one she doesn’t know how to say.

  Whenever she says my name, it comes out “Hay-yum,” like it’s two words, instead of “Ham,” which is only one.

  “We need to pay the rent, Hay-yum,” she’ll say.

  Or, “You need a haircut, Hay-yum.”

  Or, “Have some peas, Hay-yum.”

  Or, “Have some cookies, Hay-yum.”

  Or, “Have some a) cake, b) pie or c) muffins, Hay-yum.”

  Or, “Have some hay-yum, Hay-yum.” She said that on Easter Sunday when she made ham and potatoes for dinner. They were very good.

  When Renée says my name in the bedroom, it’s very provocative, I’ll admit. She’s normally very quiet when we’re in bed, quiet like there’s someone in the next room listening with a glass pressed to the wall, but sometimes very softly she’ll say, “Oh, Hay-yum. Oh, Hay-yum.”