Husband and Wife (11 page)

She looked puzzled. “Alex and Adam’s wedding?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh.” She put her fingers in her mouth, got the twist going in her hair. I resumed the walk, the matter resolved, but no. Her misunderstanding about the wedding failed to explain away the original question. I stopped walking. I came around to look her in the face.

“Why did you think we decided not to be married anymore?”

She didn’t answer. Children her age are by nature cryp
tic, unable to explain the assumptions and associations they make, falling back, in the face of questions too frustrating to answer, on silence and refusal. She looked at me with her fingers in her mouth, her eyes heavy-lidded and dull. “Answer me, please,” I said. Twirl, twirl, twirl. “Mattie, please answer me, or we’re going back inside.”

With a wet pop the fingers came out of her mouth. “Daddy,” she said, and then opened her mouth to insert the fingers again.

“What do you mean, Daddy?”

She said, around her fingers, “Daddy said you decided not to be married anymore.”

“When did he say that?”

“Yesterday,” she said. This answer told me nothing. To her yesterday was not the day before this one but anytime in the indeterminate past. And really, why not? What did it matter that Nathan had told me what he’d done five days ago, and that he’d done it more than a year ago? He might as well have done it, be doing it, right this minute, fucking Kate Ryan, short story writer, right here across the gravel drive. Nathan and I had been together ten years. We’d met ten years ago. We’d married four years ago. We’d had our first child three years ago. When was it that, sick with a fever, I lay on the couch beside him through wavering hours as he read to me from books I’d loved in childhood,
The Dark Is Rising
,
A Wrinkle in Time
, and then when his eyes got tired he recited all the poems and scraps of poems his memory retained: “Whan that Aprile with his shoures soote” “Note the stump, a peachtree. We had to cut it down” “I want to say that forgiveness keeps on dividing” “For he on honeydew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise”? I didn’t know. Yesterday.

“Are you sure, Mattie? Are you sure he said that?”

“Yes,” she said, with the polite, precise pronunciation she’d learned somewhere. From her teacher? Not from us, habitual users of the sloppy, casual
yeah
, unless we were angry, and then it was
yes, yes, yes
, squeezed out through the teeth.
Yes
.

Nathan and Binx were at the bottom of the hill, behind the Dodsons’ place. Nathan stood with one hand on the stroller, looking back at us. “Come on,” he called. “We’ve got to wear you out.”

I started walking. I was walking fast, letting the stroller tumble me forward. I called out before I even got to him, “Did you tell her we decided not to be married anymore?” I kept moving while I said it, so by the time I reached him it was his turn to talk.

“What?” he said.

“Did you tell her we decided not to be married anymore?”

“Of course not,” he said.

“Did you tell her something like that?”

“No,” he said.

“She says you did.” We both turned to look at her, witness for the prosecution. Her face was a blank, her eyes a mystery.

“Well, I didn’t,” he said. “I said nothing like that. I don’t know what she’s talking about.”

“Why would she say that?”

“Sarah, she’s three. She says that honk monsters are trying to eat her. She says she’s afraid of going closer to stuff.”

“I just don’t think she would make that up. Where would she even get the idea to make something like that up? And she said you told her that after the wedding. Don’t you think that’s a bit coincidental?”

“I can’t explain it,” he said. “I can only tell you that I didn’t say that. For one thing, we didn’t decide not to be married anymore, did we?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me.
We
don’t seem to decide on anything. You decided.”

“I didn’t decide anything. I acted on impulse, and regretted it.”

“You decided to act on impulse,” I said. “At some moment you decided. You decided to let yourself.”

He took a deep breath. “The point is, I didn’t say anything like that to her, and there’s nothing like that I want to say to her or you or anyone else.”

“Whatever.”

“I can’t believe you don’t believe me.”

There is nothing I want more than him in my bed.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’s fucking shocking.”

“Sarah,” he said. “The kids.”

“The kids!” I said. “The kids! Maybe you should have thought about the kids before you fucked somebody else!” To tell the truth I screamed this last part. My voice shot up on the word
fucked
, spiked higher on the word
else
. “Maybe you should have thought about them before you wrote a book about cheating on their mother. You selfish asshole! You motherfucking prick! You want me to decide? I decide! You can’t publish that book! That book is dead. It’s dead and dead and gone. So live with that, why don’t you. Live with that!” His face became a mirror, and in it I saw a monster version of myself, unleashing my anger like black magic. In front of my children, in front of my neighbors’ house. If I’d really been a witch Nathan would have been a column of dust. Not even a lizard, not even a toad. Just nothing. Nothingness.

I decided. I decided then. I couldn’t be this person. I couldn’t live with him anymore.

This is what it’s like when your husband leaves, because you’ve asked him to. He goes out to his car carrying two small bags that, for once, you didn’t help him pack, and you follow, but hesitate at the door while he goes on down the porch stairs. You stand at the door with the screen held awkwardly open, which takes a constant application of pressure because the door is broken, something the two of you have been meaning to fix but haven’t, because neither of you knows how. He puts his bags not in the trunk but in the backseat, and normally you would ask why but this time you don’t, which is another way you know things are different. He shuts the car door. Then he looks at you. He waits to see what you’ll do. Will you come down the stairs and say something? Will you hug or even kiss him good-bye? You don’t know. You don’t know what to do. You’re still registering your surprise that he didn’t ask you to change your mind, or cry, because he’s been known to cry about far less. He did go pale when you told him what you’d decided. He did look like he was going to be sick, or faint, or die. But all he said was that he would go, that very night, because you’d asked him to and it was your right to decide what happened next, and he’d find somewhere to stay and call you the next day and figure things out from there. He did say he hoped you’d change your mind about wanting him gone. But he didn’t ask you to. He didn’t ask you to change your mind about the book, or even say he hoped you would. He said he’d call his agent the next day. Does it make it easier on
you, or harder, his obvious conviction that he deserves this? You’re not sure, never having tried it the other way.

You go down the porch steps to hug him, but halfway there you realize that you can’t hug him, because letting go again might be too hard. So you stop, practically midstep, and cross your arms over your chest. He understands what all this means, because he knows you so well he could turn you inside out, so he makes no attempt to approach. He looks at you with wet and tragic eyes, and then he says again that he’ll call you the next day and then he says, and this really breaks your heart, that he hopes you get some sleep. He gets in the car. And then he backs up, and then he turns to the right and points himself down the drive, and then he goes.

After a moment you follow, hanging back at a distance you hope keeps you too small to see in his rearview mirror. At the bottom of the hill, just before the road curves, the brake lights brighten, and you think that he can’t do it after all, he’s coming back to beg you to let him stay, and you’re glad, you don’t really want him to go, you love him, you love him, you don’t know what you were thinking. Then you see your neighbor making her dogged way across her lawn to the car, her hand lifted in a motion that’s somewhere between a wave and a request to stop. Oh, you think. You hadn’t seen her there.

Your husband gets out of the car, leaving his door open, and goes around the front to greet the neighbor. They exchange some words. What are they saying? You can’t begin to guess. Then suddenly your husband bends—really bends, because your neighbor is a small and rapidly shrinking woman—and hugs her. You feel a shock of surprise at the sight of her hands on his back. You think he must have
told her that he’s leaving, and the thought of him spreading your business around angers you, but now that you’ve asked him to leave you’ve moved this matter into the public domain, and what the hell do you expect? He releases the neighbor. They talk some more. Then he goes back to the car. Just before he gets in he turns his head to look up at your house, and you step hastily back into the shadow of the trees, not wanting him to see you. You’re not sure why it matters if he sees you. He gets in. He shuts the door. He drives away.

You would like to stay there in the woods, a frozen vertical thing lost among the trees. But your children are in bed in the house above, and at this very moment might be crying, might be calling for you. So you go back. You trudge. That’s the right word, for this moment, and maybe all the moments after.

And that is what it’s like when your husband leaves you, because you’ve asked him to. In my case, anyway, that is what it was like. I don’t know why I framed the experience as universal. I guess it felt too big to have happened only to me.

The morning after Nathan left, Mattie woke at six, an hour earlier than usual. I imagine she called for her daddy, as she always did, and when he didn’t respond, screamed for me. I didn’t hear her right away because I’d only been asleep two or three hours and so was deep in slumber, and because Nathan was the one who got up with her and I wasn’t alert for the sound of her voice the way I was for the sound of the baby’s. When neither Nathan nor I came, instead of getting up to find us, she lay in bed and screamed, and then she began to kick the wall, and that woke not only me but Binx as well. I dragged myself awake to stereo screaming. What I wanted to do was to keep on lying there, and for a little while I did. Mattie cried, “Daddy! Mommy!” and Binx just cried, and I lay there and revisited a thought I’d had the night before, about irresponsibility. How they made the word ugly so you won’t want to embrace the concept. Think of that harsh beginning and seven lurching syllables. Not until you reach the last do you get to make a nice long vowel sound, a relaxation of the mouth, a sigh.

I got Binx first, although picking him up didn’t stop the screaming, as what he wanted was his milk and he wanted it now, and then I went into Mattie’s room and found her turned sideways on the bed with her eyes squinched shut, her legs up the wall, her feet bang-bang-banging away. “What are you doing?” I had to shout to be heard.

She stopped. She opened her eyes. “You didn’t come,” she accused. “You left me all alone.”

“Aw a-wone? You sure have abandonment issues for a child who’s never been abandoned,” I said. I said it with a fair amount of irritation, and immediately wished I hadn’t taken that tone—hadn’t said it at all—when she asked, “Where’s Daddy?”

I should have prepped an answer to this question, when I wasn’t toting a screaming baby and a head filled with sand. “Why didn’t you just come look for me?”

“I can’t,” she said. “I’m scared.”

“Of what?”

“The deepness,” she said. “In the night movie, a little girl fell into the deepness.”

“The night movie?”

“It played up there.” She pointed at the ceiling.

I looked up, like I expected to see this night movie projected there, the little girl, falling and falling.

“Usually you have to turn the TV on,” Mattie said, her voice now casual, conversational, although her face remained a swamp of tears and snot. “But with the night movies the TV just comes on.”

This was the first time she’d told me about her dreams. I was surprised to find out she was having them, even though I’d read somewhere that babies dream even in the womb and wondered how anyone could possibly know that. What did
they dream about? What did they know, before they knew anything? Warm liquid, a rocking motion—their sleeping lives no different from their waking ones. And now Mattie’s dreams were scary, her subconscious already turning against her at the age of three. “What happened to the little girl?”

“I told you,” she said. “She fell into the deepness.”

Remember my recent emotional trauma, how little sleep I’d gotten—I reacted to this like she was talking about me. “Oh,” I said. “And she never got out?”

“Once you fall in, you can never get out,” she said, her face ominously blank, the littlest prophet of doom.

“Maybe you can,” I said.

“No!” she shouted, suddenly enraged. “
You can’t!
”

“Don’t scream at me!” I screamed, and then I whirled the baby around and stormed out of the room, and Mattie started shrieking, “Mommy! Mommy!” as if I’d abandoned her on the side of the road like an unwanted pet.

So this was single motherhood. And where was my husband? What had I done? My daughter wanted to know that, too. Over her Cheerios she hammered at me like a prosecuting attorney. I put her off with flimsy lies until she asked, “If you go to work, who’s going to take care of Binx?”

“Oh, fuck,” I said. It seemed unbelievable that I could have failed to consider Binx’s care, and my anger at Nathan flared at the thought that he hadn’t considered it either, at the conviction that it was his fault I’d just cursed in front of our little parrot of a child. I looked at Binx, who offered me his gummy smile and said, “Ba!”

“You’re going to leave him all alone!” Mattie wailed.

I swore again. Mattie cut short her crescendo to repeat the word, looking wicked and delighted. I did not want to have to call Nathan. I did not want to ever have to call Na
than. Although it hadn’t been my intention at the time, I found that I wanted our awkward yet politely melancholy parting to be the end, which wasn’t possible because we had a legal contract and a house and a three-year-old and a baby who couldn’t be left at home—no matter what wild fantasies were flashing through my mind—and couldn’t be brought to the office. I was going to have to call Nathan.

The message picked up right away, meaning his cell phone was off. “Hi, this is Nathan,” his voice said, sounding to my mind brusque and annoyed. “Please leave a message.”

I choked. I hung up the phone. I registered that Mattie was singing, “Fuckity fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck,” to the tune of “Here Comes Peter Cottontail,” which Nathan sang to her when she was complaining on long walks and he told her they were bunnies on the bunny trail and had to keep hopping along.

It occurred to me that I could call in sick. Or had I used all my sick days with my maternity leave? Suddenly I couldn’t remember how that worked, even though I’d carefully researched the policies beforehand. Anyway no one would question me if I took a personal day. I could say one of the kids was sick, and then spend the whole day in the house, where my husband would normally be, while he enjoyed a little vacation.

This time his phone rang and rang. So it was turned on now, our number flashing on the screen under the little word, “Home.” But he didn’t answer.

“Nathan,” I said at the beep. “I forgot about child care for Binx today. I could call in sick, I guess, but I’ve got a lot of work to do, so if you could come out here…Anyway, just call me when you get this.” I waited a beat. “Maybe you’re in the bathroom.”

I paced the kitchen, patting Binx on the back until he belched and then patting him still, thumpity-thump-thump, while he said, “Ba ba ba” and yanked on my hair. I waited what I thought was more than enough time for all Nathan’s morning ablutions, shower, shaving, etc. Where the hell was he, anyway? The night before I’d been aware only of his absence from my house, and not of his presence somewhere else. He’d been antimatter. But I remembered from my science classes that matter is neither created nor destroyed, and so he had to go on existing somewhere, in a hotel, in a pancake house, lying in a ditch beside his suicidally wrecked car.

Again the phone rang and rang. “Just checking back, in case you didn’t get my first message,” I said. “I need to know if you can come, so I know whether to call in. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this before. Um. I hope you’re OK.”

I took Mattie into her room and picked an outfit, which she pronounced ugly. “I don’t like pants,” she said. “I
won’t
wear it.” I said she could stay in her room alone until she decided to put it on, so she put it on quickly, almost frantic, asking me the whole time not to leave even though I was just sitting there on the floor with Binx in my lap, staring past her at the wall. She knew something was up, she had to, or why was she so desperate at the prospect of thirty seconds alone in her room?

When I called again the phone was off. He’d turned it on and then off again. He’d sat there, wherever he was, probably looking at our number on the screen. He’d let me leave two messages. Maybe he’d listened to them. And then he’d turned the phone off so that as he continued his sojourn into irresponsibility the sound of my dedicated ring tone—“It’s a family affair…It’s a family affair”—couldn’t follow him.

“Why is your phone off?” I said. “Or wait, maybe you’re trying to call me. I’ll hang up.” I hung up. I waited. My phone didn’t ring. I called voice mail, just in case it wasn’t signaling me like it should. “You have no new messages,” the mechanical woman said.

I called again. “Something better be wrong with your phone.”

Again. “Is this your way of telling me you don’t intend to take care of your children today?”

Again. “You know, you’re still their father.”

Again. “Fuck you, Nathan. Fuck you.”

Mattie resumed her new song, dancing around the kitchen. “Shit,” I said. Then I called Smith.

“Hello?” He sounded groggy.

I didn’t apologize for waking him. “Do you know where Nathan is?”

“What do you mean?”

“He left last night,” I said. “I thought he might have called you.”

“No. No,” he said. “He left?”

“I asked him to,” I said. “But I wasn’t thinking about who would watch Binx today, and now I can’t find him. He didn’t call you?”

“No,” he said again.

“I thought maybe he would go to your place.”

“He didn’t,” he said.

I paused a moment to fully absorb the new reality. Nathan wasn’t at Smith’s. He wasn’t answering his phone. I had no way to reach him. I’d asked him to leave, and he’d certainly taken that seriously. There was no anger in my voice, only wonderment and despair, when I asked, “What am I going to do?”

“Um,” Smith said. “Do you want me to come over?”

“You?”

“I don’t work during the day on Fridays,” he said. “I usually work Friday nights, you know. And on Saturdays.”

For as long as Smith had been part of my life, I didn’t know much about him. “I never knew you had Fridays off.”

“Yeah, well,” he said. “I do. And I can come watch the baby if you want.”

“You don’t have to,” I said. “I can call in sick. Or I guess I could take him with me but frankly I just can’t face the thought of packing up all his stuff and hauling it from the parking lot.”

“Do you want to call in sick?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Because if you need to go in, I’m happy to come.”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“But I can.”

“Really?”

“If it would help.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” he said. “I’m more than happy to help.”

“You’re very polite,” I said, though generous was what I meant, or bighearted or unstinting, something more dramatic than that mild word
polite
, and he said, “I know.”

I wasn’t sure why I’d accepted Smith’s help, and even as I walked him around the house—him holding Binx as though he was trying him on before purchase—and showed him where things were and explained that I’d arranged for him to pick up Mattie from school and interjected a thousand things out of order until I was certain he wouldn’t remember a word, I kept thinking that I should say, Never
mind, that’s OK, it’s sweet of you, but I might as well stay home. But I didn’t. I wanted to go to work because it was what felt normal, and I wasn’t yet ready to acknowledge how abnormal things now were. More than that, though, kept me from turning him down. In the end, I was just like Mattie. When I couldn’t find Nathan, I had felt all alone. I had just wanted somebody to come.

All the way to work I thought about going somewhere—anywhere—else. But I couldn’t decide where, and the thought of taking advantage of Smith’s virtue gave me pangs of guilt, so while my conscious mind juggled desire and indecision and remorse my subconscious just went ahead and drove me to my assigned parking lot. It was a ten-minute walk from there to the office, past a Walgreens and a Chik-fil-A and the sex shop where Tanya and Kristy had once taken me. I lingered in front of every place I passed, even the sex shop, until it dawned on me that those were embarrassing windows to gaze into with anything approaching longing. My reluctance to go to work clung to my ankles like a child who doesn’t like the babysitter.
Please don’t go
,
please don’t go
,
please don’t go.
I altered my route to take me to an on-campus cafeteria, where I got a cup of coffee and sat for a while nursing it, the caffeine dragging my thoughts out on the dance floor for a jitterbug while the rest of me sat, inert as the chair beneath me.

I thought, Where is Nathan? And then thought it again, and again, until the question took on the tune of “Frère Jacques”—where is Nathan, where is Nathan, ding ding dong, ding ding dong. My skull was a bell, my thoughts the
clapper, my whole body a helpless reverberation. Because of “Frère Jacques,” I started imagining he’d been on a plane to France when he shut his cell phone off. He’d had a thing about France—the wine! the cheese! the double kisses!—ever since we’d gone there for a literary festival after his first book came out. The book had been a hit there. He’d even been on TV. He’d said to me once, after a month back at home struggling with an early, failing draft of his second novel, far from the kiss-kisses and the adulation, that sometimes he thought he should leave me and move to Paris.

“Excuse me?” I said. This was before the kids. I was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper while he made dinner. He’d had his back to me, reaching up for a mixing bowl on a high shelf, when he’d let loose that line.

“I just mean, like Philip Roth and his cabin,” he said. “A lot of people think he’s done his best work since he pretty much dropped off the world.”

“Going to Paris isn’t exactly dropping off the world,” I said. “But, you know, if you want to leave me, go right ahead.”

“Hey,” he said. “I didn’t say
leave you
. I said
go to Paris
.”

“That’s not what I heard,” I said. “I heard
leave you
.”

“I didn’t say that,” he said. “I was just talking about getting away for a while to work.”

“Really,” I said. “Because I was thinking maybe I should move to India to learn all the positions of the Kama Sutra. Just for a while.”

“Cut me some slack,” he said. “You know I’ve been having a really hard time with this book, and frankly you’ve been less than understanding, giving me crap if I want to work at night…”

“When have I tried to stop you from working at night?”

“Just last night when I said I didn’t want to go to the movies.”

“I said I’d go by myself.”