Husband and Wife (10 page)

Kate Ryan. An unremarkable name, one that brought up 2,530,000 hits on Google. There was an army of Kate Ryans. More than an army. There was a universe of them. But what about Nathan’s—or should I say
our
—particular Kate Ryan? What about her? She was a fiction writer, and as fiction writers often do, she taught fiction writing, at a small college in South Carolina.

There are a number of versions of the literary life. Kate Ryan’s was the kind where you publish a few pieces in small journals and then get a job teaching a 4/4 load at an out-of-the-way teaching college and struggle to find time to write between grading an avalanche of composition papers. You hope to get a book published, because if you do, you might get a job at a bigger university, teaching fewer classes, or even better, you might achieve the miracle of selling so many books or winning so many fellowships you can afford not to do anything else. If I’d finished my MFA a single woman, if Nathan and I hadn’t decided to put our writing first, make do with part-time jobs, let the chips fall where they may, I
probably would have followed this path. If I hadn’t stayed with Nathan, if I hadn’t yet had children, I would have a life very much like hers. Nathan wanted to be with the sort of woman I’d be if I hadn’t been married to him.

I knew her name, I knew she was a fiction writer, because I got Smith to tell me. As soon as I got to work, I called him. He didn’t want to tell me anything, of course. He didn’t want to betray Nathan’s confidence, he said, but more than that, he didn’t see how knowledge of the details could possibly benefit me. “You have to at least tell me if she’s a poet,” I said to him. “Give me her name, rank, and serial number,” I said. “Tell me something. Tell me something that will make me feel better.”

“He loves you,” he said.

“That doesn’t help.”

He sighed. “She’s not a poet.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive. She’s a fiction writer. Her first book just came out.”

“And it’s not poems?”

“It’s stories.”

“What’s her last name?”

Silence.

“If you don’t tell me I’m going to search Amazon for a Kate with a new story collection. So please just save me the time, Smith, because I really should be working.”

“Ryan,” he said. “Kate Ryan is her name.”

So now I knew. I’d wanted to know, and now I knew. There’s what you want and there’s what’s good for you, and when we’re children we don’t realize what a luxury it is to have our parents to tell us the difference.

She was no prettier than I was. The two of us were a
couple of reasonably attractive women. She had big, appealing eyes, but so, I’d been told, did I. She had dark hair, like me, but hers was short and plain and mine was long and curly and still sometimes Nathan tugged a ringlet to make it bounce and looked at me like he was a schoolboy and I was the classroom’s prettiest girl. Did it make things better or worse that she wasn’t prettier, that I had no recourse to that easy, obvious explanation? She wasn’t younger, either. She was, in fact, older, though by only a year. She was almost exactly my age. And it wasn’t just the circumstances that made me feel that her life was my alternate reality. It was the sensibility. Here, from an interview I found: “I don’t write about love so much as intimacy. Because it’s so daily, you know, and yet so full of mystery, and that combination fascinates me.”

And what about the men you date?
the interviewer asks.
Are they looking for themselves in your work?

“One of them was. And, you know, he was in there, but he didn’t recognize himself, which is probably a good thing.”

Do you ever feel
,
as a woman
,
that you should tackle subjects other than love?

“As a woman? What do you mean?”

I mean
,
the stereotype is that love is a woman’s primary concern. Do you feel the need to defy that?

“I think that in part because of the expectations placed on them, women wrestle constantly with the place of romantic love in their lives, and not just romantic love but ideas of motherhood and women’s roles in general, and that even if you reject marriage and motherhood that very rejection in some ways defines you. To be fair, I should say that I see your point—I have sometimes worried that my work
would be characterized as particularly ‘female’ because of its subject matter, and part of me says, ‘So what?’ Both because, why should we feel there’s anything wrong with that? And because it’s ultimately ridiculous. Love isn’t a female concern, it’s a human one. And when I think about what art can do, how it shows us our common humanity, love, and its loss, seem to me to be the primary components of that commonality.”

Do you think…

“Plus, you’ve got to write about what you write about. What preoccupies you, I mean.”

You’re preoccupied with love?

“Well, see, that’s my point. Who isn’t?”

Kate Ryan. Ah, Kate Ryan. Yes, I agree with you.

I ducked out of work early to go to the Regulator, where I found Kate Ryan’s book on the new releases shelf.
Yes and No
. That was the title, standing out in white against the red of the spine. I picked it up. The same photo on the inside flap, her rueful eyes. She was at work on a novel. Of course she was. Who wasn’t? The blurbs used words like
witty
,
astute
, and
wise
. No doubt the writing of this book had pre-dated her encounter with Nathan—had pre-dated it by months and years. I knew that. I knew how the whole thing worked. And yet I expected to find a story about him in there, among her other stories of love, of
intimacy
. I expected a story that would tell me how Nathan figured in the ongoing construction of the narrative of her life. Maybe he was a meaningless thrill. Maybe he was the man she wanted. Either one was strange to imagine. How her sense of the
stakes could be so different from mine. I opened the book to a random page, like you might open the Bible, looking for something—explanation, solace, advice—in the first passage on which your eyes alight.

My mother doesn’t love my father anymore. He keeps flinging himself against this fact
,
like a bird against a window. Everyone but him can see it. What am I supposed to do about it
,
when he comes to me with his sad eyes? I am busy trying to get my Baptist boyfriend to take my virginity
,
a suggestion which makes him shake with temptation
,
sliding away from me on the couch
,
rolling off me where we lie on the golf course behind my house.

Another page.

“We never talk about anything,” he says. “Have you noticed how we never talk?”

“No,” she says. “We talk constantly.”

He says
,
“You always do this. Why won’t you let me talk to you? There are things…I want. Things…” He stops
,
and his arms pump as though he is stopping just short of beating his chest. He says
,
“Desires…”

“Look,” Julie says
,
“why don’t you just go to the movies like the rest of us?”

Another page.

It is never clear to the rest of them what they should call Claudia and Bob. Sometimes they are a couple
,
sometimes they are not
,
and sometimes Claudia will look at one of them
,
whoever happens to be the host that weekend
,
and say
,
“Why on earth is Bob in another room? Don’t you know we’re sleeping together?” The poor host will say
,
“So you’re back together?” and Claudia will say
,
“No,” with that gentle scorn that is her special touch. The host will go away thinking that this is it
,
this is the last time Claudia is invited
,
and also about that old recurring topic of dis
cussion
,
that anyone could have known they were unsuited the first time they heard their names paired. Claudia. Bob.

Sarah. Nathan. No denying those names went together, with their biblical, inevitable ring.

Another.

She wonders how it would feel to discover that all of her memories were someone else’s stories
,
like in the movie
Blade Runner.
It could mean that she was free. Or that she was nothing. It would be hard to tell which.

Another.

There is nothing I want more than him in my bed. Dana says
,
“You’re exaggerating.” But she is wrong. I am giving myself over to it. Him
,
him
,
him. It is exhilarating
,
and at the same time I understand how sick it is. How pathetic. I want to write him letters that say I love you
,
that say please. Please. Pleas
,
as a word
,
is awfully close to please. She pleas. Please. She pleas for him to please
;
she pleases him for pleas. If you think about it
,
pleas starts to look truncated
,
as though it’s missing something. I wonder why this never occurred to me before.

My hand was on the doorknob when Nathan pulled open the door. Behind him in the ExerSaucer Binx was screaming, but I couldn’t get to him because first Nathan and then both Nathan and Mattie were blocking the door, standing in my way. “Mommy,” Mattie said, “can I wear a sundress?”

“I’ve been doing some research on insomnia,” Nathan said.

“Can I wear a sundress, Mommy?” Mattie asked.

Binx ramped up his screaming to its most ear-shattering pitch, his face a red mask of fury, his fists balled in the air.
“You need to exercise,” Nathan said, “but not too close to bedtime, so I think we should all go for a walk now.”

“Mommy!” Mattie insisted. “I want to wear a sundress!”

“It’s cold out, sweetheart,” I said to her. To Nathan I said, “Excuse me,” and when he stepped back, I crossed the kitchen to lift the baby out. His screaming stopped. He looked at me reproachfully and said, “Aaahhhh” in a mournful way.

“Aaaahhhh,” I said back.

“Huh-huh, huh-huh, huh-huh,” he said. He launched himself sideways, screaming when his face met cloth instead of nipple.

“I’ve got to feed the baby,” I said.

“Oh, right,” Nathan said. “You feed him, and I’ll take Mattie to the potty, and then we’ll go walk the drive.”

“I don’t need to go potty!” Mattie shouted.

“Push the stroller up and down the hill a few times, and I guarantee you’ll sleep tonight,” Nathan said.

“Guarantee?” I asked, not to affirm his guarantee but because I’d never heard him use that word in that way, with the overeager sincerity of a salesman.

“I don’t need to go potty!” Mattie shouted again.

“You haven’t been in three hours,” Nathan said. He put his hand on the top of her head and steered her down the hall, ignoring her protests.

“Why would you lie about needing to go potty?” I asked Binx. He screamed in response. “What if I don’t want to go for a walk?” He screamed at that, too. “I take your point,” I said.

Through the lens of my exhaustion the world was both blurry and sharp, as when you’re sitting outside on a sunny
day drinking too much wine. I sat on the couch with Binx at my breast, his hands kneading maniacally at my flesh, and all the little darkening hairs on his head seemed distinctly in focus, but the room beyond him—my bookshelves, my reflection in the dark television screen—seemed vague and far away. “Oh, baby,” I said. “Oh, baby, baby.” I rubbed his head. I touched the tip of his tiny nose. He smiled at me around my nipple—why was that the most charming in his repertoire of smiles?—and I pretended he was all there was in the world, the sound of Mattie and Nathan arguing in the bathroom just fading away.

Because we lived on a winding country road with no sidewalk, no shoulder, and pickup trucks swerving around cyclists at sixty miles an hour, since the kids had come along we’d taken our walks on the driveway. It was a long driveway, as I’ve said, and steep, so pushing a stroller back up the final stretch to our house was good exercise, even if going up and down five or six times lacked a certain excitement. Mostly Nathan and I were working too hard to talk, fighting to keep the strollers from running away with us on the way down, fighting to push them up the hill on the way back. Not talking was fine by me.

By the fourth lap I was lagging behind Nathan. I was too tired for this, and I didn’t want to do it, and I suddenly resented Nathan for making me do it, even if his motivations were good. Kate Ryan. Kate Ryan. And Nathan had failed, week after week, to fix the mailbox, which wobbled on its post at the end of the drive, and which he’d insisted I not fix myself, because if I did what he perceived to be his job I’d make him feel bad. I resented that, too. I resented the hell out of the back of his head. Over the crunch of wheels on gravel Mattie was calling my name. Or, anyway, she was
calling me Mom. Is that the right word for that appellation? Is Mom my name? I stopped walking and leaned over the top of the stroller to hear her better. Caught in the grip of wheeled momentum, Nathan and Binx kept trundling down.

“What is it, sweetie?” I asked. I was braced for her to say she wanted to get out and walk, for argument.

“Mom,” she said, her tone inquisitive, “why did you decide not to be married anymore after your wedding a few days ago?”

A flash of panic, shivery and hot. What did she know and how did she know it? “What do you mean?”

“Why did you decide not to be married anymore?” she repeated.

“We didn’t decide that,” I said.

“No,” she said, frustrated by my stupidity, “why did you decide not to be married when I wasn’t born anymore?”

“Oh,” I said. Relief chased the panic away. “We got married before you were born. Is that what you mean?”

“No! I mean after your wedding a few days ago!”

“That wasn’t our wedding, sweetheart. That was Alex and Adam’s wedding.”