Everyone has secrets,” she told you again and again. “It adds to the fun,” she said. You were talking too much and she was not talking enough, and you couldn’t tell whether she was being cagey or if she was trying to politely tell you to shut up. You yourself are often mentally saying shut up, Hunter, sometimes in mid-monologue you’re rebuking yourself for blathering on even though you can tell other people aren’t listening anymore, but you have so many remarkable facts to share and funny jokes to make, and it’s so hard to sit quietly listening, and the more you like certain people, the more you talk to them, because you’re afraid the silence will encourage them to reassess their association with you, and once they start reassessing they’ll find there is no particular reason to be near you besides convenience or a lack of options. Which is why you did about 80 percent of the talking in your relationship, and you would get annoyed when she didn’t remember everything you told her, because you remember every word she ever said to you, at least you think you do.
COUPLES ARE SUPPOSED TO have Cute Stories to Tell at Parties, and they’re supposed to have access to each other’s internal lives in ways that no one else does, and you had that, but you also didn’t have it, which made double dates frustrating, because one of the functions of a double date is to measure yourself against the other couple, to compare their cute stories to your cute stories, and to evaluate their shared experiences versus your shared experiences, so that later when you’re alone in your home, you can assess the quality of their relationship and rank them as less in love than you, saying things like They’re kind of weird, right? or I don’t understand why she stays with him or Did you see the way he couldn’t stop playing with his ring? They’ll be divorced within a year. Or sometimes on good nights, I really like those two, why don’t we hang out with them more often? You’re sure other couples met you and then left thinking you talked too much and she too little, and they said things like one day she’s going to get sick of him, and they started applying expiration dates to your marriage, not that they could have known it would have ended this way. The problem was they didn’t see what you were like in private, the way she laughed at your jokes and trusted you and was happiest with simple things like spending an entire day at home with you, eating leftover Chinese and laughing at bad Lifetime movies.
A PARTIAL LIST OF things you will never know about your deceased wife:
• What she did—besides “taking a break”—during the year between high school and college
• How she could have gotten into the habit of opening a can of soda, taking three sips, then putting the can in the freezer and forgetting about it until several days later
• What she actually did at work, besides Boring Bank Stuff
• Why sometimes she seemed so lonely, even when you were with her
• What she thought about as she was dying
The Guided Tours never disappeared completely, but at some point you progressed from the urgent and performative early-relationship conversations and shifted into the comfortable chatter that is crucial to the maintenance of a long-term relationship. The ability to talk about nothing for hours. To accurately predict the other’s reactions. The casual banter of sparrows chattering away on a tree branch.
THERE ARE STILL THINGS you’ve never told her, either because she wouldn’t let you tell her or because you were embarrassed and afraid to scare her off. Which is why she will never know, for example, that, for reasons you cannot explain, you hated watching her tweeze her eyebrows. You try revealing your secrets to the urn, hoping the information can be conveyed through the ashes to her spirit, if such a thing exists, and so you want her to know that when you’d only been dating for a few weeks, you got busted for possession and had to perform two hundred hours of community service back in Hartford. At the time, you said you were stuck at home for a few weeks because Jack was swamped at work and needed your help around the office. You tell her about the mandatory counseling sessions in high school because you’d written on a mental health questionnaire that you sometimes had suicidal thoughts, even though that wasn’t strictly true, you were exaggerating to seem deeper and more profound. She never knew, but maybe knows now, that you sometimes resented her for not playing Trivial Pursuit with you just because it made her feel stupid when she didn’t know the answers. You confess that last night you lost her and possibly had sex with some girl who was on the verge of getting married. You tell her the one thing you’re sure she never knew, although you’ve said it before: that she was infinitely more beautiful and charming and intelligent than she thought she was, and that no matter how many times you said it—not enough times, you owe her another hundred years’ worth of adoration—it never became routine or perfunctory for you, you always meant it as deeply as one can mean something, you just wanted her to believe.