Latest / My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story / My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 33: The December Room

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My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 33: The December Room · My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story

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You saw it pour, she said. Not a question. I
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saw it pour. The recut held. It was the most
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beautiful thing in the room. It was, wasn't it?
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My Playful Wife Episode 33 The December Room
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Written by Mia The room they gave her for the
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show was long and white and full of December
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light, and I took up my position the way I always
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do, at the edge of it, near the back, where I
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do my best living. I have thought about this,
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over the years, why I am always at the edge of
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the rooms that are hers, and whether it is a
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failing. A husband, the world might say, should
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be at her side, in the photographs, sharing the
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light. And I have stood at her side when she
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wanted me there, and I will again. But the truth
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is that the edge of the room is not where I hide.
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It is where I work. Because from her side, I
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can only see what she sees. The buyer's face
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is arranged into the polite masks people wear
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when they are deciding whether to want something.
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From the edge, the back, the corner by the window,
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I can see the things she cannot see from inside
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it. I can see the whole room receiving her. I
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can watch the cloth do its work on a hundred
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strangers at once. I can watch the mask slip.
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That is my place at her shows, and it took me
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years to understand it was not a lesser place,
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but a different and necessary one. She makes
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the thing. I witness what the thing does. Somebody
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has to stand where the maker cannot stand and
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watch the world meet the work and bring the report
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home. My father stood at the edges of rooms,
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too. I have come to realize, though for the opposite
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reason, he stood at the edge because he could
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not bear to be in the middle of anything, because
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feeling was a country he had been taught to mistrust,
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and a crowd was too much of it at once. For years
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I assumed I had simply inherited his cornerstanding,
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the same flinch in a newer body. It took me a
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long time to understand that I stand at the edge
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for the inverse of his reason. Not to escape
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the room's feeling, but to receive all of it,
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the whole room's worth, which you cannot do from
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the warm, crowded center where you only ever
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get your own. The collection walked in, piece
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by piece, and the December room went quiet in
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the particular way a room goes quiet when it
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had not expected to be moved, and is being moved
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against its will. I will not describe all of
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it. I do not have the vocabulary, and any way
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the cloth is hers to describe, and mine only
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to witness. But I had been in the workroom now.
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I had sat on the stool, and so I saw the show
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with the clumsy new literacy she had given me.
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I could see, this time, the grain. I could see
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which pieces were cut straight, honest and architectural
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and still, and which were cut on the bias, pouring
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and alive. moving with the bodies that wore them
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as if the cloth were a thing that had decided,
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on its own, to follow a person through the world.
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I had never seen her work this way before. For
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years I had seen nice clothes. Now I saw the
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decisions, the difficulty, the places where she
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had chosen the hard cut and paid for it in wasted
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cloth and broken sleep, and the seeing turn the
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whole show from a pretty event into something
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closer to watching a person say, out loud and
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in public, in a language of thread, the truest
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things she knew. It is a strange grief, learning
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late to read your own wife's life work, because
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you cannot help tallying the years you spent
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illiterate beside it. Every cut I now understood
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was a cut I had once walked straight past. Every
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difficult, alive, biased cut piece was a sentence
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she had been saying in thread for the whole length
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of our marriage, in plain sight, on the racks
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in the next room, while I asked what was for
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dinner. I do not flog myself for it anymore.
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The self -flogging is only another way of making
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her work about me. But I note it, the lost years
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of illiteracy. The way you note the price of
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a thing you intend never to pay again. And then
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the centerpiece came. The rose dark. The seventh
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piece. The one that had twisted on the table
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eleven days before and broken her heart and sent
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her back to recut it from not enough cloth with
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one pass of the scissors and no margin for a
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second mistake. I had watched her recut it. I
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had brought her chai at two in the morning and
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the night. She laid the pattern and did not speak
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and did not breathe wrong near her while she
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found the true of the grain by touch and committed.
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And here it came into the December room on a
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living body and I stopped breathing again at
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the back by the window because I knew exactly
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what was at stake in the way the rest of the
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room could not. It poured. It fell off the shoulder,
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and down the body the way water finds the low
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place, the way the bias -cut remnant had poured
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off the cutting table the night she taught me,
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fluid and alive, and following the living shape
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while it lived. The recut had held. The true
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cut, found by a tired woman's hands at two in
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the morning under a single lamp, had held, and
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the rose -dark cloth moved through the white
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December room like a slow flame, and the mask
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slipped. All of them. All across the room at
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once. And I watched it happen from the only place
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you can watch it happen. And I had to put my
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hand flat against the cold window glass because
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something enormous was going through my chest
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and I did not want to make a sound and take even
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a particle of the room's attention off her. There
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was a woman near the front who wept. I had heard
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of her in a way Saloni had told me. A year and
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more ago, about a buyer from a metabod who had
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once wept when she touched a length of the rose
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dark, a woman to whom a dress had arrived at
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its weeper. As Saloni put it, the maker's highest
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and most private award. Not the sale, not the
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press, but the one stranger in the room for whom
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the cloth turns out to have been, somehow, secretly,
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about her. I do not know if it was the same woman.
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I think, from the way Celonie's eyes went to
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her and softened, that it might have been. But
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there she was, near the front, an ordinary well
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-dressed woman in late middle age, and when the
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rose -dark centerpiece poured past her, she put
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her hand to her mouth and her eyes filled and
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spilled, quietly, not performing it, trying in
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fact to hide it, undone by a thing made of cloth
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and a stranger's two -in -the -morning hands.
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And I understood, watching her, something about
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what my wife actually does for a living, which
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is not clothes. What Saloni does is find, in
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cloth, the thing a person did not know they were
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carrying, and give it back to them in a form
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they can wear. The weeping woman was not crying
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about a dress. She was crying because something
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true and probably wordless inside her had been
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seen and named and made beautiful by a person
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who had never met her, and that is not dressmaking.
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That is closer to what the priests are supposed
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to do, and mostly don't. I looked at the weeping
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woman, and then at my wife across the room, gracious
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among the buyers, and I felt the specific vertigo
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of being married to someone whose gift is larger
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than the daily life that contains it. We argue
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about whose turn it is to call the plumber. She
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forgets where she has put her own glasses and
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sends me to find them. And then she walks into
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a white room and quietly undoes a stranger with
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a length of cloth, and you remember, with a small
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shock, that the person across the breakfast table
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from you is, in some chamber of herself you mostly
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never get to see, enormous. I had married a woman
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who could do that, and for years I had said nice,
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very nice about it on my way to something else,
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and the not seeing of it had been its own kind
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of small daily sin, and I was done with it, and
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I was so proud of her in that December room that
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I could hardly hold my own ribs. And then, across
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the whole crowded room, in the middle of her
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triumph, she found my eyes. I do not know how
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she did it. There were a hundred people between
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us, and every one of them wanting a piece of
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her, the buyers and the press and the young makers
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who had come to see how it was done, and she
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was at the center of all of it, gracious and
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luminous and entirely in her power. And in the
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middle of it she turned her head, once, and looked
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across the whole length of the white December
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room, past every face that wanted her, and found
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me at the back, by the window. with my hand still
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flat on the cold glass, and she gave me the look.
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The color of it. The private sentence. The one
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our family speaks without words, the language
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we built in the bad year, and have spoken every
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day since. The look said, there you are. The
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look said, you saw it, didn't you? You saw what
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it did. The look said the thing that the whole
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crowded room of her triumph could not give her
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and that only the man at the edge could, which
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was, I am witnessed. Not by the buyers who see
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a product. By the one person who sat on the stool
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and knows what the centerpiece cost and watched
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it pour true and understands all the way down
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exactly what just happened in this room. She
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had a hundred people telling her she was brilliant.
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She turned away from all of them for one second
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to check that the witness had seen, and I had,
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and I let her see that I had, across the whole
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length of the room, without a word, and something
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passed between us in that one held look that
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was worth more than the entire white room full
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of praise, and then she turned back and gave
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the room her face again, and only I knew where
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she had just been. People talk about the grand
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declarations of love. the ones with witnesses
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and rings, and a hall full of relatives. I have
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come, over the years, to trust the small private
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ones more. The big declarations need the audience,
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a little, to feel real. That is partly what they
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are for. The small ones need no one. That look
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had cost her a single second of a triumph a thousand
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people had come a long way to give her, and she
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had spent the second on me, at the back. by the
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window, and the spending was the whole proof
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of the thing, precisely because no one but the
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two of us would ever know that it had been spent.
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I have been given a great deal in my life that
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I did not earn. That look across that room, in
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the middle of that triumph, is near the top of
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the list of things I will be grateful for on
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the day I die. I did not need any of it to be
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about me. That was the other thing I understood,
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standing at the edge with my hand on the glass,
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and it is a thing I want to write down plainly,
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because it is rarer than it should be, and I
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had to learn it late. There is a way of loving
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an accomplished person that is really a way of
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feeding on them, of standing near the light so
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that some of it falls on you of being the husband
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of, of converting her triumph into your own reflected
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importance. I have seen it. I have felt the pull
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of it. There is a version of me, in some other
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life where the balcony morning never came, who
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is at her side in every photograph, taking his
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quarter of the credit by proximity, needing the
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room to know that the brilliant woman goes home
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with him. And I felt, in the December room, the
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deep clean pleasure of wanting absolutely none
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of that. Her triumph did not need to be partly
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mine for me to be glad of it. In fact, the gladness
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was pure for being entirely hers. I got to feel
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the whole thing, undiluted by any anxiety about
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my own share, precisely because I had no share
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and wanted none. The witness does not need credit.
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The witness gets something better than credit,
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which is the thing itself, seen whole, from the
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one place it can be seen whole, with nothing
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in the way. To stand at the edge of someone's
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triumph wanting nothing from it but their joy,
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that is a discipline too, I think, a cousin of
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the bias cut, another way of staying awake. The
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sleeping husband takes his credit and calls it
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support. The awake one stands at the back, by
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the window, and just lets her be great and counts
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himself lucky to have been in the room. I think
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this is one of the quiet tests of a long marriage
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and one almost nobody names. Not whether you
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can survive each other's failures, which everyone
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frets about, but whether you can survive each
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other's successes. Failure draws people together.
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There is a cheap intimacy in disaster that asks
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no virtue at all of you. Success is the harder
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test. To watch the person you love become large,
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larger maybe than you, and to feel only gladness
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and no smallness, no clench of comparison, No
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sour private need to be reminded that you matter
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too. That is a thing a person has to grow into.
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I was in that December room, only just beginning
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to be big enough for it. We did not get to speak
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until much later, when the room had emptied and
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the cloth was being packed, and the December
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dark had come down outside the long windows.
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She found me still near the back. The luminous
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public face was gone. What was left was the other
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one, the tired private one, the one only I get.
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And here was the thing I had not expected, the
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thing that seeded the unease I would carry home.
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At the very height of it, the show of triumph,
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the centerpiece of marvel, the weeper wept, the
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buyer's buying. She looked, underneath the tiredness,
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not elated but strangely. quietly hollow, as
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if the thing she had poured two years and four
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collections and a thousand two -in -the -morning
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hours into had crested and broken and was now
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running back out to sea and left her standing
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on a wet beach in the dark wondering what it
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had all been for. You saw it pour, she said.
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Not a question. I saw it pour. The recut held.
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It was the most beautiful thing in the room.
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It was, wasn't it? She said it without vanity.
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The simple craftsman's assessment. And then she
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looked at the packed cloth, the emptied room,
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the triumph already becoming a memory, and something
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crossed her face that I did not have a name for
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yet, but would learn the name of in the days
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after. So why, she said, very quietly, almost
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to herself. Does the top of the mountain always
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feel so much like the empty bit at the end of
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something? I did not have an answer. I had the
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new discipline, though, which is sometimes the
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same as an answer. I did not try to fix it or
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argue her out of it or tell her she should be
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happy. I just took her bag of scissors and chalk
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so she would not have to carry it. And I stood
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with her in the emptied December room while the
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hollow things she could not name moved through
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her, and I witnessed that too, the strange grief
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that lives, apparently, on the far side of getting
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exactly what you worked for. I wrote it in the
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fifth notebook that night, while she slept the
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flat, exhausted sleep of after. The December
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room, the centerpiece poured. The recut held,
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the true cut found at 2 a .m. by her hands held
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in front of 200 strangers. A woman wept. Saloni
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found my eyes across the whole room in the middle
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of her triumph to check the witness had seen.
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The whole crowded room full of praise, and she
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turned from it for one second to the man at the
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back. I will be grateful for that look on the
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day I die. And then, at the top of the mountain,
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the hollow, Why does the top always feel like
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the empty bit at the end of something? I don't
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know yet, but I know the new rule covers this
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too. You don't fix the hollow, you don't argue
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it away, you witness it at full size and you
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carry the bag of scissors. Stayed awake for her
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win and for the strange grief on the far side
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of it. The awake years aren't only for the hard
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days. They're for the great days too, which turn
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out to have their own difficulty that nobody
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warns you about. The long quiet after the thing
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you wanted arrives. I closed the notebook. The
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December dark was full at the windows. The show
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was over. The collection sold. The maker asleep
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and emptied beside me. And I lay awake on purpose
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in the dark, witness to a triumph and to the
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odd hollow on the other side of it, and I thought,
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tomorrow there will be the empty room, the morning
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after the mountain, and she will not know what
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to do with herself, and that, the come down,
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the after, the wet beach in the dark, will be
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its own thing to stay awake for. I intend to
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be awake for it. It is harder in its way than
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the show. I am learning that the great days ask
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as much attention as the terrible ones. Nobody
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tells you that. The notebooks are how I am teaching
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it to myself. To be continued in episode 34,
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episode 33 of My Playful Wife. If this story
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is staying with you, the next episode is already
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waiting. Subscribe so you don't miss it. The
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complete book is on Amazon and early episodes
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plus bonus chapters are on my Patreon. Links
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are in the description. Thank you for listening.