Latest / My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story / My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 36: The Four of Us

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My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 36: The Four of Us · My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story

• 0:00
  Good, I said. Just that. The small word. The
• 0:04
  full container. Not let's plan it. Not what will
• 0:08
  you make. Not a single anxious, useful syllable
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  to rush the rising tide. Just good. I felt you
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  turn. I'm gla. Take all the time the tide takes.
• 0:22
  My Playful Wife. Episode 36. The Four of Us.
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  Written by Mia. On the last night we ate at his
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  table, the four of us, the dinner we had promised
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  on a deli morning two years ago when the promising
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  of it had felt like reciting a sentence in a
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  language none of us yet spoke. I remember the
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  promising. It was early in the thaw, one of the
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  first calls that had lost its blade, and somebody,
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  Mira, probably, it is always Mira, had said the
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  words the four of us should have dinner, the
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  four of us at our table, when you come south,
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  and we had all agreed the way you agree to a
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  thing you do not quite believe will happen, a
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  thing that belongs to some better behaved version
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  of your family, that exists only in the conditional
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  tense. The four of us. At a table. It had sounded
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  then like a foreign phrase you repeat after a
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  teacher without understanding the grammar of
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  a kind of family we were not, the four of us
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  being at that point a quantity that had never
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  once successfully occupied a single room without
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  something in it going wrong. And now here we
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  were, the conditional tense made indicative,
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  the foreign sentence spoken at last in our own
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  fluent mouths, the four of us at his table, in
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  his city. on an ordinary Thursday, eating. I
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  have thought, since, about how many of the best
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  things in a life arrive first in the conditional
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  tense, as a someday, a when you come south, a
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  we should, spoken lightly and half -believed,
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  filed under the pleasant fictions a family tells
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  itself to stay tender across distance. Most of
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  them never leave the conditional. They stay someday
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  forever and the family ages and the dinner is
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  never actually had and nobody quite notices the
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  loss because a someday that quietly expires makes
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  no sound when it goes. Ours had crossed over.
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  Ours had become a real Thursday with real food
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  on it and the crossing over of a single someday,
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  I have come to believe, is rarer and more precious
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  than we ever let ourselves know. I had decided
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  beforehand that I was going to be awake for it.
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  This was not incidental. It was the whole project
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  of the evening privately on my side of the table,
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  to be entirely present for the good thing while
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  it was happening, which is, I have come to believe,
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  the single hardest discipline there is, and the
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  one almost nobody practices. Because here is
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  the strange treason we commit against our own
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  best evenings. We leave them while we are still
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  sitting in them. You are at the table, the rare
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  assembled table, everyone you love in one warm
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  room and nothing wrong, and some traitor mechanism
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  in the mind begins, even as it happens, to convert
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  the evening into a memory of the evening, to
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  stand slightly outside it, narrating, already
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  filing it under things that were nice, already
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  half composing the account you will give of it
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  later so that you are never quite in the room,
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  only adjacent to it. watching yourself be at
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  the dinner instead of being at the dinner. I
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  suspect this is why so many people photograph
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  their happiness so compulsively now, the phone
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  up at every good moment, the meal shot before
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  it is eaten, not vanity or not only vanity but
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  a kind of quiet panic, an attempt to seize a
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  thing they can already feel themselves failing
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  to be present for, to at least secure the evidence
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  of the joy if they cannot quite manage to inhabit
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  the joy. But the photograph is not the evening.
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  The photograph is the receipt for an evening
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  you were too busy documenting to attend. I left
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  the phone in my pocket all night. I had decided
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  this once to attend. I have done it my whole
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  life. The better the moment, the more I have
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  tended to absent myself from it in exactly this
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  way, as though happiness were too bright to look
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  at directly and had to be viewed through the
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  smoked glass of anticipated nostalgia. And I
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  had decided this once at this table, not to,
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  to stay in it, to be a man actually present at
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  the best dinner of his year while it was, irreversibly,
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  and only once, occurring. It is harder than it
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  sounds. I had to keep catching myself drifting
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  out, into the photograph I might take, into the
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  notebook entry I would write, into the future
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  tense where this evening would be a fond thing
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  remembered, and hauling myself back into the
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  present tense, the only tense anything actually
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  happens in, the warm loud now of the four of
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  us at the table. Stay. I kept telling myself,
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  the way you'd gentle a dog. Stay. You will have
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  the rest of your life to remember this. You have
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  only this one evening to be in it. There is a
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  paradox folded into this that I have not fully
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  untangled, that the act of trying to stay present
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  can itself become a kind of absence, a narration,
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  a watching yourself watch. The mind is slippery
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  that way. It will turn even your effort to be
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  in the room into one more place to stand outside
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  it. The only escape I have found is to stop trying
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  to hold the moment and simply let the moment
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  hold me. to put down the effortful grasping after
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  presents and let the warm noise of the table
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  reach in and take me, the way you stop swimming
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  and let the water carry you, and discover, with
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  some surprise, that you float. And it was, when
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  I stayed in it, almost unbearably good in the
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  way that only ordinary things can be. My brother
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  cooked, which I had not known he could do. Another
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  page in the file I never reopened. The 15 -year
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  -old who couldn't boil an egg having become a
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  man who quietly makes a thing with five kinds
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  of patients in it and sets it down without fuss.
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  Mira ran the table the way she runs everything,
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  refilling before you knew you were empty. The
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  logistics of hospitality so smooth it disappeared,
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  which is the highest form of the art. Saloni,
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  my off -duty, unhooked, fallow wife. nobody's
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  maker tonight was loose and funny in a way the
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  deadline had pressed out of her for months telling
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  a long ridiculous story about a buyer's impossible
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  request with her hands moving the way they move
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  when she is happy and mira was crying with laughter
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  and my brother was doing the dry commentary thing
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  i had only just discovered he did and the room
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  was full of the particular noise that i had spent
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  the cold blade decade believing our family was
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  constitutionally incapable of making. The noise
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  of people enjoying each other. I want to be precise
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  about how strange it was to sit inside that noise,
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  because for the whole cold decade I had carried,
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  without once examining it, a quiet conviction
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  that our family was simply not built for this.
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  That some families are warm, and ours was not.
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  That we were a people of careful distances and
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  managed truces, and that the easy, uproarious
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  affection other families seemed to come by naturally
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  was, for us, structurally unavailable, a thing
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  we lacked the parts for. I had been wrong. We
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  had the parts the whole time. We had only mislaid
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  the conditions. Put the four of us at a table
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  with the blade finally gone, and the warmth came
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  up out of us, as if it had been waiting underground
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  for a decade for permission to surface. We talked
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  about the parents. Of course we did. You cannot
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  get two brothers at a table without the parents
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  arriving as the invisible third and fourth chairs.
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  But here was the thing the awake years had bought,
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  the thing I would not have believed possible
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  during the cold decade. We talked about them
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  warmly. We laughed. My brother did our father's
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  way of clearing his throat before delivering
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  an opinion nobody had asked for, and I did our
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  mother's specific telephone voice, the one she
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  puts on only for relatives she is competing with,
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  and the wives laughed, and we laughed, and the
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  parents, who had spent years being the disputed
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  territory between us. The very ground we fought
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  our blade war over became for one evening simply
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  what they were. Two flawed people who had loved
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  us imperfectly and were now old, one of. Them
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  with a bad knee, and whom we had both, separately
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  and now together, decided to forgive for the
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  crime of having been human while in charge of
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  us. You know a wound has truly closed when you
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  can finally laugh at the thing that made it.
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  We laughed at the thing that made it. The laughter
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  was the scar tissue, strong and a little numb
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  and entirely healed. My brother caught my eye
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  while we were laughing at our father. And there
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  was a flicker in it of the old thing. Not pain,
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  just acknowledgement. The briefest mutual nod
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  to the fact that we both knew exactly how unlikely
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  this laughter was. How far each of us had traveled
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  to be able to make it together. How recently
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  the very same material had been a wound and was
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  now a joke. We did not speak it. We just let
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  the flicker pass between us. Two men who had
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  buried a war, and went back to laughing, and
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  the not speaking of it was, once again, the whole
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  of the tenderness. There was a moment, there
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  is always a moment if you stay awake for it,
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  when I looked up from my plate and around the
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  table and understood, with the force of something
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  physical, that this was it. This was the thing.
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  Not the December Room. Not the Triumph. Not the
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  slow flame of the centerpiece pouring through
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  a room full of strangers. Not any of the grand,
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  bright moments a life gets photographed for.
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  This. For ordinary people who loved each other,
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  eating dinner in a southern flat on a Thursday,
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  the food good, the wine poured, the old war buried,
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  the laughter real. I looked at my brother, restored
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  to me after a decade I had assumed was permanent.
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  I looked at Mira, who had held the door of reconciliation
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  open with both hands and a calendar full of booked
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  tickets until the rest of us were brave enough
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  to walk through it. I looked at my wife, unhooked
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  and laughing and entirely herself, the most unmapped
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  country I will ever be lucky enough to spend
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  a life failing to fully chart. And I understood,
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  the way you understand a thing in the body and
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  not the head, that the whole enormous machinery
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  of a life, the work, the striving, the collections
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  and the deadlines and the notebooks, all of it,
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  exists for the sole purpose of buying you, now
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  and then, an ordinary Thursday like this one.
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  The striving is the means. This is the end. We
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  get the striving confused with the end constantly,
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  spend our whole lives treating the Thursdays
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  as the gaps between the important things, when
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  the Thursdays are the important things, the only
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  things, the actual cargo the whole ship was built
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  to carry. I think most unhappiness, the chronic,
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  low, causeless kind, is just this confusion run
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  long. A life spent treating the means as the
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  end, chasing the next deadline and the next acquisition
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  under the standing assumption that the good table
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  is the thing you will finally get to once the
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  striving is done, never noticing that the striving
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  is never done, that there is no once, that the
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  good table is not the reward waiting at the finish
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  line of the work, but a thing you have to deliberately
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  stop and sit down at here. Tonight, in the unfinished
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  middle of everything, or else never at all. I
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  did not say any of this at the table. You do
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  not say it. Saying it would break it, would turn
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  the warm now into a speech, would make everyone
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  self -conscious and convert the evening prematurely
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  into the memory I was working so hard not to
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  convert it into. I just held it. I sat in the
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  warm, loud middle of the best dinner of my year
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  and held the whole understanding silently, awake,
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  present in the room, and let it be enough simply
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  to know, while it was happening, that it was
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  happening. Soloni caught me at it. She always
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  catches me. Across the table, in the middle of
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  her own laughter, she found my face doing whatever
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  my face does when I am holding too much at once,
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  and she gave me the look, the collar, the private
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  sentence, the wordless language we built in the
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  bad year, and now speak across crowded rooms
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  and dinner tables and the whole width of a life.
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  The look said, I see you seeing it. The look
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  said, you're all the way here tonight, aren't
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  you? The look said the thing only she could say
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  to me across that particular table, which was,
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  We made it. Look where we are. Two years ago,
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  you came in off a balcony, unable to say a true
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  word, and tonight you are sitting awake and full
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  at your brother's table in the south, holding
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  more than you can hold, and I am across the table
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  watching you hold it, and this, this, is what
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  all of it was for. I lifted my glass to her,
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  a small private inch of a gesture that nobody
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  else at the table read as anything but a man
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  reaching for his drink, and she lifted hers back
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  the same secret inch, and we drank to the thing
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  without naming it, the way our family carries
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  everything in the smallest available container,
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  and then we went back to the dinner, to the loud
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  warm now, to the four of us at the table being...
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  For one whole, ordinary, irreplaceable Thursday
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  evening. An actual family. Later, much later,
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  when the dishes were done and Mira had finally
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  been persuaded to stop organizing and my brother
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  had gone quiet in the contented way, I was still
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  learning to recognize. Saloni and I lay in the
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  narrow guest bed in the dark, and she said, into
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  my shoulder, I needed this more than I knew.
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  Not the rest. The opposite of the rest, almost.
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  I needed to be reminded what the work is for.
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  A pause. The southern night warm at the window.
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  I think I want to make something again. Not yet.
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  But I can feel it. The wanting starting to come
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  back. Like a tide turning. I'd stopped being
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  able to feel it in the empty room. I can feel
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  it now. And I lay very still. Because I knew
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  what I was hearing. I was hearing the fallow
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  end. Not with a decision. Not with a deadline.
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  Not with anyone pushing. Just the slow, natural
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  turning of a field that has lain empty long enough,
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  beginning, on its own quiet schedule, to think
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  about the spring. The dinner had done it. The
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  being carried had done it. The four of us at
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  the table, the old war buried, the love assembled
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  and witnessed, had refilled some well in her
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  that two years of deadlines had run dry, and
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  now the water was rising again, and she could
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  feel it, and she was telling me, in the dark,
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  the way she tells me everything now, sideways,
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  softly, the most important news of a season folded
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  into a sentence murmured into a shoulder. Good.
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  I said, just that. The small word, the full container.
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  Not let's plan it. Not what will you make. Not
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  a single anxious, useful syllable to rush the
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  rising tide. Just good. I felt you turn. I'm
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  gla. Take all the time the tide takes. I have
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  learned that there is an enormous difference
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  between the silence that waits and the silence
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  that pressures. Though from the outside, the
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  two can look identical. The pressuring silence
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  is only a question holding its breath, a held
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  expectation the other person can feel against
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  their skin, a so -well -what -are -you -going
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  -to -make -then -dressed -up -as -patience. The
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  waiting silence asks nothing at all. It is genuinely
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  at peace with whatever comes or doesn't. Saloni
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  can tell the two apart instantly, the way she
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  can find the true of a grain by touch, and the
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  only reason my single small good had any power
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  to comfort her was that it was the real waiting
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  kind, with no held question hiding anywhere inside
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  it. I wrote it in the fifth notebook on the last
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  morning, before we packed, in the brother's kitchen,
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  in a light that was not our October light but
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  was, I thought, a southern cousin of it. The
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  four of us. The promised dinner, finally spoken
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  fluent. Stayed awake for it on purpose. The whole
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  project of the evening. Be I in the good thing
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  while it happens. Don't leave it for the memory
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  of it while still sitting in it. the strange
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  treason we commit against our own best evenings.
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  He cooked another page in the file I never reopened.
• 18:08
  We laughed about the parents, warmly. You know
• 18:11
  a wound's closed when you can laugh at what made
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  it. The moment of looking up and understanding
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  this is the thing, not the triumph, the Thursday.
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  The striving is the means, the ordinary love
• 18:24
  table is the end, and we spend our lives getting
• 18:27
  them confused. Held it without saying it. Saloni
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  caught me. We drank to it without naming it.
• 18:34
  And in the dark she said the tide's turning.
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  She wants to make something again. The fallow's
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  ending. On its own schedule, no one pushing.
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  I said good and nothing else. The whole art now
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  is to not rush the rising water. And below it,
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  the working line. Be present for the good evenings.
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  It is harder than being present for the bad ones,
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  and it matters more, and almost no one does it,
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  because joy is somehow more frightening to look
• 19:05
  at directly than grief. Stay in the room. You'll
• 19:09
  have the rest of your life to remember it. You
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  only get the one night to be in it. The Thursdays
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  are not the gaps between the cargo. The Thursdays
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  are the cargo. Tomorrow we fly north, home. Back
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  to our own October light, and the empty workroom
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  that will not, I think, stay empty very much
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  longer, because something has turned in her quietly
• 19:32
  in the south at a table with the four of us at
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  it, and I am carrying home, along with the bag
• 19:38
  Mira has certainly overpacked for us, the single
• 19:41
  most important thing a trip can give you, which
• 19:43
  is the renewed and specific knowledge of what
• 19:46
  the whole striving life is actually for. To be
• 19:51
  continued in episode 37. The way home. All rights
• 20:00
  reserved. That was episode 36 of My Playful Wife.
• 20:07
  If this story is staying with you, the next episode
• 20:10
  is already waiting. Subscribe so you don't miss
• 20:14
  it. The complete book is on Amazon and early
• 20:17
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• 20:20
  Links are in the description. I've Mia. Thank
• 20:24
  you for listening.