My Only Wife
My Only Wife (Jac Jemc, Dzanc Books 2012, 194 pages)
A Small Doggies book review by Jarret Middleton of Dark Coast Press
A husband relives the layered labyrinth of his marriage to a wife who is gone. He returns to every detail, every ghostly minutia in hopes of discovering why his short marriage went wrong. Travailing high points and low, Jac Jemc's unique, poignant prose narrows in on the lesser known details that torture the husband’s mind, posing cause for reconsideration, concern, and great regret.
He tackles her biggest eccentricity first. She collects the stories of strangers that she meets and recounts them at home into her tape recorder. She doesn’t listen to them after collecting them all and she keeps the tapes locked in a closet that she never lets him see. He does see it, once, which upsets her. When he asks to see it again, five years later, she simply declines.
He agonizes over each action as he searches for clues. She wears trousers, walks more quickly than him, listens to warped records left on the radiator, goes to the occasional bar, makes the occasional feast, takes a class in still-life painting, helps decorate a haunted house. As he goes back over it, nothing was ever ordinary.
When she decides to cook a nice dinner for them one night, she doesn’t tell her husband in advance, and when he comes home late the food is cold. They heat it up and eat lobster standing over the counter. In reality, this is a beautiful moment plucked from any domestic courtship. One that could either be sad or one of riches revealed through miscommunication; a shining memory. That is how marriages go. You have to love it. The husband makes it clear that he does, but with the wife it seems to be just another mystery.
He quickly finds that he cannot understand himself without her. “My wife was the start of me,” he recalls. When love is lost, we naturally question whether or not it was ever there in the first place. And we undertake the painful inquiry of missed gestures, the moments of slight disregard and ignored subtleties that shout louder than ever from their bare existence in the past that problems were there and we just did not see them, or if we did, we did not react in the correct way.
In this purview, even the happiest memories have cracks in them at the outset. The two celebrate their anniversary at a nice restaurant. The constant presence of food shows the sensuousness and obstinate animalism of killing and consuming to survive. It also reveals the awkward existential process of literally substantiating your self through eating. We attempt to mask it with civil decorum, both the animal and the existential, and more than once the wife just simply cannot pretend, so she comes undone.
Their differences comprise much of the movement through the short, episodic chapters. He always knows where they are going; she gets lost. She walks out of theaters at the slightest provocation; he sits dutifully until the end of every movie he ever buys a ticket to. “She felt no obligation to anyone or anything,” while his obligation is clearly to her, and one could say through her, to himself, which she never fails to remind him.
This helpless condition wears on him. They take turns exhausting each other. In the end it would appear it is she who has exhausted him more, if we weren’t left with the distinct impression that the damage she has done to her husband is just a fraction of the mental derision she subjects herself to. “Forgive flowery speech. Words don’t do it justice. There a not-even-ness to them in comparison with the night of her.”
Space and sensory experience are big for the narrator’s approach of the past. Food, the light in apartments, department stores, bars, the sand, and nostalgic rolling ocean at the beach.
My wife found her grace when she swam. There is no falling when one is in water. My wife did not have to go up or down in the waves, she hovered near the surface and moved with assurance. Gone was the fear of a misplaced step that so often brought her down to the ground.
The imagery Jemc works with is so essential: a lost woman crying at a gas station, an admiring older man on a bench at a museum, a little boy building sand castles whose mentally disturbed mother refuses to leave her bedroom. These are the people whose personal tales the wife takes in, who shatter and remake her. And his memory as metaphor: the two of them at the beach, playing in the water with the enthusiasm of children. Viewing caryatids at a local museum, an expertly crafted metaphor arises as the two ponder together the portrayed postures of stone women.
Through the portal of these honed, singular images we see the wife at once sweet and then quickly vicious. As the book moves on, it is this cruelty that emerges like a path to the truth of their unraveling.
She rifled through her purse, two fingers clasping the newly lit cigarette, until she found a pack of mint tic-tacs. She popped one into her mouth, grimaced at the mixture of mint, nicotine and vodka. “I found one of the love letters you wrote me when we first met.” She pronounced the word “first” with a delicate slur. “You had written it in pencil,” she said, “so I erased it.”
Through this minor but blunt cruelty she informs him of the miscarriage of their child which she kept secret. Heinous, yes, but her logic is excellently represented. She had no control over her child being taken from her. The love letter was hers, to do with as she pleased. So she destroys it, almost as a sort of test to discover if her will even existed in the realm of the world after such a defeat. The author sculpts her characters to reveal their bare form, which just happens to include their innermost flaws. She impressively closes the gap between objects and affects, emotion and experience, exactly what any attempt at accurately portraying our world requires.
The dialogue in hindsight is cryptic, inaccessible but accurate. At times, very seldom, the language runs a bit too thin, exposing some metaphors that border on transparency. But even this could be equated with how sappy and obvious we can be in our less flattering moments, which is what My Only Wife is mostly comprised of, unflattering moments. Metaphors are layered so thinly over one another that they return us, again, to the mysterious truth of presence in love and in the world.
The book asks us to consider the differences between understanding the ones we love, the limits of that understanding, and the flaws of attempting to understand how we understand them. Perhaps this last point is the step that goes too far, where life de-solidifies and confusingly comes apart in our hands. It forces us to examine ourselves, whether we are the wife, who has crossed over into disappearance, or the husband: broken, humiliated, but remaining in life.
Since it is his narrative, we are taken through the past to finally arrive at the present where he confronts the reality of his loss. In a letter he writes to her after she has disappeared, he proclaims, “Maybe your absence is your truth.” By clinging to his presence, he succeeds in reclaiming space from her ghost and renews his own life, which he will continue on to live.
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My Only Wife is currently available for purchase through Dzanc Books.
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Learn more about Jac Jemc at her website.