Dear Diary: Spoiled
The thing is, I’m married to Sheherazade. Only, my wife has updated the job description to suit herself. I’m the one who does the talking. This is not something that I am unwilling to do, as you may have inferred from hints here and there. But she gets to listen.
Decapitation is not a risk, but when Kathleen has had enough, she excuses herself from the table. This doesn’t mean that I’ve begun to bore her; it just means that she has had enough. She asks questions. Sometimes I don’t know the answers — that’s why netbooks were invented. Sometimes her question opens a floodgate of talk. The subject is almost always history of some kind: what happened to other people some time ago. Kathleen hated history in school, and insists that she learned nothing. She also — how Sheherazade is this — insists that, if I had been her teacher, she would have loved history. I make the people so real, she says. It is true that a number of the prominent figures — disproportionately kings, cardinals, and trouble-making aristocrats — are almost as familiar to me as people whom I “actually know.” They are certainly more familiar to me than they are to a rather small number of lives in being. Every time I talk about them to Kathleen, I get to know them a little better, and not just because I’m making stuff up as I go along.
Kathleen’s conversational manner at the dinner table, then, is quite colossally flattering to me. To say that I am quite aware of this is not to deny that I am, effectively, as flattered as buttered toast.
If Kathleen does not find my disquisitions on inquisitions difficult to follow, that is because she spends her days running inquisitions of her own, into faulty and misleading legal instruments. Years of explaining and anticipating the actions of the Securities and Exchange Commission have made her rather like the ambassadors whom Venice planted at all the major Renaissance courts, suave analysts of the bottom line who knew how to ask serious questions without seeming to be rude. I make it sound glamorous, but Kathleen’s dealings do not take place in Palladian arcades. They wearyingly transpire, for the most part, on telephones and computer screens. After a day of that, it seems, it’s a pleasure to come home and listen to me chatter about Venetian diplomats at Renaissance courts. She feels the kinship to those long-dead diplomats, but she doesn’t have to know the people. Knowing about them is entertaining.
Considering the documents that Kathleen edits by the hour, my complicated sentences, in spite of being saturated with dependent clauses and parenthetical asides, are so much syntactical finger-painting. As I say, my idea of history is a matter of personalities. It is always and only about distinct individuals, so that, instead of forces and trends, there are fashions and anxieties. Despite the complexity — the occasional hypertrophism — of my verbiage, it is usually not abstract, but rather about a specific somebody who was once worried sick about making the right impression (or who ought to have been). They are just like Kathleen’s clients, except that, wonderfully, they are not her clients.
I sometimes have reason to suspect that my wife’s interest in what I have to say has rendered me unfit for general conversation. And there is something else that you ought to know about Kathleen.
She loves to hear me whistle along with Mozart, Verdi, et al. No, I didn’t believe it, either. But it’s true.