“My Wife Handles the Paperwork, I Handle the Assets,” He Told the Contractor. He Never Read What He’d Signed

The paperwork.

As though the deeds and the accounts and the careful legal structures were a kind of secretarial busywork beneath a real man’s notice, and the assets — the visible, impressive, photographable things — were his by natural right.

He never grasped that in the actual architecture of a life, the paperwork is the assets; that the person who understands the structure owns the building, and the person posing in front of the fireplace for the magazine merely lives there at her pleasure.

He’d told a contractor I handled the paperwork as if he were confessing my small role.