After the death of a spouse, there are often revelations in the process of tying up loose ends and sorting through the files, possessions, workspaces, hard drives, and finances that make up a life these days.
In the more sensational versions of these discoveries, on soap operas and Lifetime movies, the revelation is of a secret family or a murdered twin and a stolen identity, or something else equally salacious. In most real life cases, it’s more innocuous. A secret fetish for 1800’s erotica, or an addiction to celebrity gossip.
After Margaret died, my revelation about her lands somewhere in between.
Going through her office and looking through her private finances with our accountant, we discovered that Margaret had been renting an apartment across the river in Hoboken for the last sixteen years.
The was shocking to me for a great number of reasons, not the least of which her vocal disdain for New Jersey. Apparently, she was actually in Jersey quite often, when she was supposedly working late or grabbing drinks with friends.
The space was just a few blocks away from where baseball was invented, a fact that Margaret most certainly would have been ignorant of. Even if she’d been told she had a habit of forgetting things she didn’t care about moments after hearing them. Then again, maybe she was spending as much time at baseball games I didn’t know about as she was spending in New Jersey.
Of course, I’m still a bit in shock. I honestly didn’t think we had any secrets, at least not big ones. Not clandestine apartment sized secrets.
When I went over there for the first time, I was worried I’d discover some love nest, less because there might have been another person she had been sleeping with and sharing her life with, but because it was something she felt I shouldn’t know. I guess in that light it was as bad as I’d feared, because I really did find her secret love, and she really did feel the need to keep that love from me.
Her secret apartment was full of original art, a skill I didn’t know she’d used since college, even though I’d tried several times over the years to get her painting again. There were hundreds of paintings, all fitting the same pattern. Every painting was a recreation of a different famous Renaissance paintings, but to each one she added a dog wearing a party hat. The dog on each painting was a different breed. There in Mona Lisa’s lap was a Pomeranian wearing a colorful triangular hat with a fuzzy ball on its point. In the foreground of The Rape of Europa, there was a mastiff in the same hat. Over here is a recreation of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, with the addition of a Westland terrier, head cocked to one side curiously as he watches that fat little cupid baby dig around inside that sarcophagus or what have you.
Her motives are lost on my. Whatever metaphors she was getting at apparently as inscrutable to me as she was, not that I knew she was inscrutable just a short time ago, but this apartment makes it quite clear how well I could read her.
Some say you never really know anyone, and in light of these recent events I’m going to have to say I agree.
trigger fiction. 