My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story

The waiting had a texture I had not anticipated, a grain to it, and I spent those weeks learning the feel of it the way you learn the feel of a new cloth. It was not empty time. That is the thing no one tells you about waiting for a large thing: you imagine it as a blank interval, a held breath, a nothing to be got through until the something arrives. It is not. It is a substance. It has weight and presence; it sits in the flat with you; it gets into the food and the conversations and the space between us in bed at night, the way a houseguest you cannot see is nonetheless always faintly there. We were three in the flat already, in a sense — myself, Saloni, and the waiting — and the waiting was the loudest of us, for all that it never said a word. I had imagined waiting as a passive...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

The wish put on its working clothes faster than I had expected, and the working clothes were not romantic. They were forms. A great many forms, and a telephone call to an office, and then another office, and a list of documents to assemble that ran to a second page, and the slow dawning understanding that the beautiful thing we had decided in an empty room was going to have to be born, like most beautiful things, through a long corridor of the unbeautiful — through certificates and clearances and references and the patient machinery a society builds, rightly, around the question of who may be given a child. I want to be fair to the forms, because my first instinct was not to be. It would be easy to paint the paperwork as the dull enemy of a beautiful impulse, the state's grey hand laid...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I went back to the empty room a great deal, in the days after Saloni said what she wanted. I would find myself standing in its doorway in the morning with my tea going cold, or last thing at night on my way to bed, drawn to it the way you are drawn to worry at a loose tooth, and I understood that the question she had set down in there was not going to close on its own, that I was going to have to answer it, and that the answer was going to be made of something harder than the easy yes a generous man gives to a generous idea. I distrust the easy yes, having given so many of them in my sleeping years. The sleeping man is generous with his agreements precisely because they cost him nothing; he says yes the way you nod at a stranger, pleasantly, without engagement, already moving on. I had...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

We moved, in the end, to the larger flat we had been not-quite-talking about for two years — the workshop having done, after the collection and the slow good seasons that followed it, well enough to allow such a thing — and on the first evening in the new place, with the boxes still taped and the rooms still echoing and the smell of someone else's life not yet aired out of the walls, I walked through it counting, the way you do, and found that there was one room more than the two of us had any earthly use for.

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

On a Tuesday in the rains, with nothing whatsoever special about it, I sat at the desk by the window and wrote the day's one true thing, and came, in the middle of a sentence, to the bottom of the last page — and found that the fifth notebook was full. There was no more paper. I had reached the back cover. I sat with the pen still touching the final line, a sentence about the particular way Saloni had stood in the kitchen doorway that evening drying her hands, and I understood that the sentence would have to end there because the book had ended, and that something else, larger than the sentence, had ended with it.

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

We were clearing the top of the steel almirah on a slow grey Sunday, the monsoon massing somewhere over the city and the annual war against the damp begun, when Saloni handed down a flat tin box I had not seen opened in years, and we sat on the floor with it between us and found, under a layer of old documents, the photographs of when we were young.

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Tara stayed late at the workshop on a Thursday, long after the others had gone home, folding and refolding the same length of cloth she had already folded perfectly twice — which is how I have learned, after a year and more of her, to tell that something is sitting on her chest that she has not yet decided whether to say. Saloni had stepped out to see the last of the cutters off. I was at the side table with the accounts I am still, after all this time, not much good at, and I let the girl fold her already-folded cloth in peace, because you cannot pull a question out of a person; you can only be quiet enough that they decide, on their own, to set it down in the room between you. I have come to think a workshop after hours is one of the last true confessionals we have left, better than...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

We went, that Saturday, to a dinner at the home of friends — six or seven couples we have known for the better part of a decade, the long-married middle of our lives gathered around one long candle-lit table — and I went, for the first time, with my eyes still raw from the week before, and I found that I could see the whole room in a way I had never quite let myself see it.

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

It was the notebook that caught me, in the end — which is the irony I keep turning over since, that the very instrument I had begun, in the fifth book, to believe I was nearly finished needing was the thing that reached out one ordinary night and woke me, a second time, from a sleep I had not even known I had fallen back into.

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

On the third of the month, writing late at the desk by the window with the city gone quiet below, I came to the end of a page and turned it and found that there were only a few left — that the fifth notebook, which I had been filling without quite noticing for the better part of two years, was nearly done. I sat with my pen held above the thinning sheaf of blank paper and felt something I had not expected to feel, which was a small grief, the particular grief of a thing nearly finished that you had not let yourself notice you were afraid to finish. There were perhaps six pages left. At the rate I fill them — a little most nights, a paragraph or two, the day's one true thing set down before sleep — that was a week, ten days, no more. And then the fifth notebook would be full, and I...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.