Husband and Wife (12 page)

“Yeah, but you said it like this.” He sighed, rolled his eyes, folded his arms, snapped, “Fine, I’ll go by myself.”

I threw my hands in the air. “So I don’t just have to support you working all the time, I can’t ever express an emotion while I’m at it.”

“Oh, please. Like you’ve ever not expressed an emotion.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You should listen to your tone half the time you talk to me. ‘What are you doing in there, Nathan? Are you planning to take out the trash?’ You know, my work takes concentration, it takes hours of—”

“
Your
work? Like it’s a foreign concept to me? Funny, I thought I did similar work.”

“Well, you wouldn’t think so,” he said. “Given the amount of time you seem to have free to give me crap about mine.”

“You don’t think my work is as important as yours,” I said.

“What? Where is that coming from?”

“I heard what you said in France,” I said.

“What did I say in France?”

We’d been at a restaurant, sitting next to each other but engrossed in conversation with the people on our other sides. And I’d caught my name on the lips of the woman he was talking to, just at the moment when my companion had turned to signal the waiter, and I heard Nathan say, “She writes poetry.” I noted that he said, “She writes poetry” instead of “She’s a poet,” but I wouldn’t have thought much
about that if I hadn’t heard the woman ask, in a flirtatious, joking way, “Is she good?”

“She’s pretty good,” he said. My husband said. Pretty good. “She just needs to take a leap.”

“A leap?” the woman asked.

“You know. A leap.” He arced one of his hands through the air, as if he were sketching a rainbow. He might as well have slapped me with that hand. I turned back to the man on my other side and tried to keep on laughing through his attempts at English and mine at French, but all I could think was, “I need to take a leap,” and one month later I stood in my kitchen, squared off with Nathan, and said it aloud.

“Oh.” He flushed. “I didn’t mean in your work, I meant in your career. Like, you just needed something big to happen, like winning a book contest.”

“Then why are you blushing? And why did you say ‘She’s pretty good’ if you weren’t talking about the quality of my work?”

“I was joking,” he said. “That woman was flirting with me.”

“Well, that makes everything better,” I said. “You sold me out not just for the hell of it but in the service of flirting.”

“Come on, Sarah, you know I love your work,” he said.

“Sure, when you’re alone with me. But when you’re drunk on wine with a French woman going ‘Ooh la la, you’re a genius,’ all bets are off. Why didn’t you just tell her I was an inferior talent who failed to understand you? Maybe she’ll be waiting for you when you arrive in Paris.”

Then he laughed. He actually laughed. “This is ridiculous,” he said, and, oh, the rage that filled me.

“I’m leaving,” I said.

“What do you mean you’re leaving?”

I didn’t bother to reply. I grabbed my bag, hanging right there on the back of a kitchen chair, and I left, with him shouting, “Where are you going? I’m making dinner!” and me shouting back that I hoped he and Philip Roth would be very happy together, dropping off the world.

I peeled out. What a satisfying sound. What a satisfying jump the car took forward, kicking up gravel behind. I only wished one of those stones had pegged him between the eyes. I drove too fast for our country road and hit the interstate hard, the roar and whoosh of the car an exact replica of my emotions. I was never going back. I said that to myself, and I believed it. That’s how I used to give myself over to anger—purely, wholly, with a conviction unblemished by fears for my future or that of offspring who didn’t yet exist. I used to lose my temper, and to take pleasure in its loss. I’ve never been so sure of myself as when anger was the only thing I felt, before the meeker, more nagging voices began to offer justifications and concerns and possible consequences. Sitting in the cafeteria now, I wished for the purifying clarity of anger like that.

I went back that time, obviously I went back. I drove all the way to the coast and walked the beach and spent the night in a hotel and the next morning I went back, to a Nathan vibrating with worry and remorse. I’d accepted his claim that he was talking about my career, not my writing, though I’d never fully believed it. What if I hadn’t gone back? What if I’d said, I’ll show you a leap, and blown past Chapel Hill on a fast track to Austin? Listen, Nathan, you want to know what I thought about, alone in that hotel room? You want to know the truth? I thought about Rajiv. I considered phrases from the e-mails he’d sent since we moved, a
we miss you
that seemed to me code for
I’m a little in love with you
. Why
hadn’t I just told you what he’d said? Why had I hidden the book, never made casual reference to an e-mail from him? Because Rajiv—he was like a wishing stone, handed over by a fairy queen in return for some karmic good deed. I’d been saving him, you see, for when I needed him, and sometimes when we fought or when my life didn’t seem to be quite what I’d had in mind, I’d turn thoughts of him over in my mind, the way you might reach into your pocket to feel the firm reassurance of that stone. All I had to do was wish.

The truth is, Nathan, I sat on the stained comforter in that cheap motel room, and dialed Rajiv’s number on my phone. He’d sent it to me, in one of those e-mails.
Call me when you’ve finished Denis Johnson’s new book.
I hadn’t called, but I had programmed the number into my phone. I’d labeled it with the name of a high school friend Nathan would never have any reason to call.

“Hello?” he said.

I took a breath. “It’s Sarah.”

“Wow,” he said. “It really is.”

I laughed. “It took me a long time to finish.”

“Finish what? Oh, the book!”

“Yeah,” I said. “The book.”

And so, dutifully, we talked for a while about the book, the writing, the story, the ways it did and didn’t resemble the earlier work. I have no idea what I said, what he said. I wasn’t even paying attention at the time, distracted by the speed of my heart.

“He’s here, you know, doing a visiting gig at UT. He’s giving a reading next month,” Rajiv said.

“Who?”

“Denis Johnson.” He laughed. “What have we been talking about?”

“Him,” I said. “We’ve been talking about him.”

“You should come to the reading.”

“I
should
come,” I said.

“Listen,” he said, his voice growing quiet. “You really should.”

I could feel my pulse in my throat. “Yeah?”

“Nothing’s changed for me, Sarah,” he said.

There it was—what I’d wanted to hear. “Why hasn’t it?” I asked.

“Because you—you’re a grown-up, Sarah. These girls I date here—they say they want to be writers or filmmakers but all they do is get high and talk bullshit, and you, you’re serious, you’re a real artist. With you I can have a conversation. You connect when I’m being serious, and you connect when I’m making a joke. You don’t understand how rare that is.”

No, I supposed I didn’t, having had that with Nathan for quite some time. With you, Nathan. That connection I thought would stop you from ever doing what you did, just as it stopped me from telling Rajiv I’d get to Austin as fast as I could drive. Me, I hung up the phone. I lay awake imagining I had to choose between the two of you, pick one of you out of a lineup, and over and over it was your face that swam to the surface, even though I wanted to choose Rajiv. Why couldn’t I choose Rajiv?

I drove back to you, when I could have driven to Austin. If I’d done that I might, right this minute, be at a film festival with Rajiv, shaking hands with Scorsese, or curled up next to Rajiv in a hammock under the Texas sun, reading Proust, or at work in a study lined with bookshelves, writing a series of sonnets on modern love, instead of sitting in a university cafeteria drinking rapidly cooling coffee and
reading nothing at all. If I’d gone to Austin, I might never had had children.

The thing is that writing poetry, making art of any kind, is an essentially selfish act. You could argue about what art brings the world, sure, but there’s no guarantee that your own personal art will do that. Your pursuit of it might just annoy the friends and family who wonder why the hell you don’t get a job. If I hadn’t had children, I might not have taken my job. I might not have cared very much about my credit-card debt. I might still be writing. I might not be racked with worry and fear. I might still be enjoying a cigarette. I might not have changed, while Nathan went on being Nathan. Now, if Nathan got invited to a literary festival in France, he wouldn’t take me. He’d leave me at home with the kids. I wasn’t a poet anymore, after all. I was a business manager. I was a working mom. If one of the parents was fantasizing about leaving the other and moving to Paris, it wasn’t supposed to be me. “Why did she even
have
children?” people ask. Does anyone ask, “Why did
he
even have children?”

I never meant to stop writing poetry. I never exactly decided. Sometime between the birth of my first child and the birth of my second I just slowed to a stop. One day I realized I’d been sitting at my desk for weeks without writing a single line. The poem didn’t talk back. The poem didn’t laugh with a baby’s primal lack of inhibition when I made a funny face, didn’t giggle and squirm helplessly if I tickled it. It didn’t say “Mama” when it saw me like I was the only thing it wanted to see in the world, like laying eyes on me was, each and every time, the realization of a dream. When I held her at bedtime, and told her that it was time for me to sing her a lullaby, Mattie laid her cheek on my shoulder and
collapsed her whole weight against me in obedient release. What could a poem do compared with that?

But maybe it wasn’t about the children, or at least not about the children alone. You could argue that motherhood had been the death knell for a poetry career that was already on the decline. The trouble had started before Mattie began to fish-flop around my insides. Could it be I’d stopped writing because of what I’d overheard Nathan say? We’d been of one mind, after all. Learning he didn’t believe in me was like learning I didn’t believe in myself. And maybe, really, I didn’t. Maybe that was why I’d been so angry, because he’d voiced my own fears: that I was only “pretty good,” that I needed to “take a leap.” I had trouble believing that pretty good was worth much. Maybe I’d needed him to do the believing for both of us.
I’ve been rereading you
, Rajiv had written. He’d meant the work, of course, but the way he phrased it made it sound like he meant me. And of course he did mean me, he meant the work
and
me, because for him, unlike for me, for Nathan, there was no reason to separate them.

I heard the clanking of metal, and looked up to see the cafeteria workers readying the lunch buffet. A couple of students walked by, arguing in a language I didn’t recognize. I checked the wall clock and saw that I’d been sitting in the cafeteria for two hours, when I was supposed to be at work. I didn’t really care that I was absent, that I was irresponsible. Funny how the loosening of one commitment had loosened all the others, as if they’d all been tied by the same rope.

Nothing lasts, so the poet says, and what can we do, helpless as we are, but refuse to believe it. Even the indifference, the numbness that had felt so certain and committed that I didn’t go into work at all—even it left me by the time I got home, so that when I arrived, I sat for sometime in the car with the engine running and the radio on, lost in a what-have-I-done reverie. Surely ten thousand e-mails awaited, asking where the hell I’d been. Surely there were puzzled or angry messages on my voice mail, or maybe Smith had answered the phone and I’d have to explain myself to him, justify why I’d wasted his time. Oddly no one had called my cell phone all day. What was worse, if everyone was made furious by my absence, or if no one had noticed it at all?

I opened the kitchen door to the smell of spice and tomato, the sight of Smith at the stove. Binx was in his high chair, sucking on a bottle, Mattie at the table making a chain out of paper clips, both of them concentrating so hard they barely spared me a glance when I came in. On the counter, chips and guacamole in the chips-and-dip serving dish we’d
gotten for our wedding and never used. Smith was bent over the oven door, sprinkling cheese across a casserole dish, asking if I’d ever had his enchiladas, saying I was in for a treat—a soap opera actor gamely carrying on with someone else’s part.

“Did anyone call today?” I asked.

Smith shook his head. From the sympathetic expression on his face, I gathered he thought by “anyone” I meant Nathan.

No one had called. Well. Had they just imagined I was sitting in my office with my door closed? Maybe they’d assumed I’d scheduled a day off that none of them knew about. I was in charge of vacation time. I could just go in Monday and make vague references to a glitch of some kind. It would be all right. Everything would be all right. Look at Smith and believe it. Observe the quiet dailiness of this domestic camaraderie. Listen to him saying, “Dinner is almost ready,” refusing my offer to help, insisting I go sit down.

“What are you making, Mattie?” I asked.

“This,” she said, not looking at me. My inability to grasp the obvious was a constant irritant to her.

“I know you’re making that,” I said. “I mean, what’s it for?”

“It’s for Smith,” she said. She held the chain up, eyed it as if she was only now determining its purpose. “It’s a crown,” she said decisively. “Smith is a queen. Queen Smith.”

“Queen Smith,” I said to him. “Is it OK if I address you thusly from henceforth?”

“Please, milady,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to be royalty.” He brought two plates to the table and set one in front of Mattie, one in front of me. I cut Mattie’s food into bites, blowing on it as she urgently instructed me to do, say
ing, “See the steam? See the steam? That means it’s hot.” I pulled some hunks of chicken and cheese out of my enchiladas, tasted them—not too spicy—and then tore them into smaller pieces for Binx, who shoved five of them into his mouth at once right after I set them down. I sat, picked up my fork to bolt my food before Binx started fussing, and only then realized that Smith wasn’t coming to the table. I turned to see him loading the dishwasher.

“You’re not going to eat with us?” I asked.

“I can’t,” he said. “I’ve got to be in Raleigh for a show by eight, and I told Holly I’d meet her for dinner first.”

“Oh.” I turned back around, sideswiped by the intensity of my disappointment. My enchiladas swam before me. Jesus. Was I going to cry?
Disappointed
wasn’t the word for what I felt. Let’s try
betrayed
.

I did my best to hide this unseemly reaction, asking Smith about the show, thanking him profusely, insisting he let me finish the dishes, waving and smiling him out the door. My good mood and my appetite went with him. I put a piece of plastic wrap over my plate and stuck it in the fridge.

“He left us aw a-wone,” I said to Mattie, who laughed.

“Aw a-wone,” she repeated, and laughed again. She forked an enormous bite into her mouth, chewed industriously, swallowed. “This dinner is delicious,” she said.

“De-wi-cious,” I repeated automatically.

“Usually Daddy makes dinner,” she said, and I agreed, and then, inevitably, she asked, “Where is Daddy?”

In lieu of replying I sang, “Where is Daddy, where is Daddy, ding ding dong, ding ding dong.” Mattie found this delightful and sang it herself, and continued to do so on and off throughout the next hour and a half while I nursed her brother and bathed them both and left her in the tub to play
while I put his pajamas on until, against my instructions, she climbed out on her own to track small wet footprints into his room, where she stood, naked and dripping, singing that song, until she grew impatient with my ministrations to Binx and began to cry that she was cold. When he was finally down and she was finally down, and I closed the door to her room, I could still hear her singing, her little voice and its merciless question trailing me down the hall.

Rajiv had written me back.
Hit eject
was the subject heading.
You should come back to Austin
, the message said.
Every little thing is better here
.

Of course I shouldn’t have gone driving that night when I couldn’t sleep, not with the children asleep in the house and Nathan gone. I’ll say so before anyone else can, although I realize that will forestall no one’s judgment. What can I say about why? Sometimes an urge comes, and you give in to it. That’s what this whole story is about. Nathan gave in to physics, and sixteen months later so did I. At three a.m. I drove eighty miles an hour down Old 86. I’d crashed a car once, on this road, years ago. The stick shift, the one Nathan taught me to drive. I’d gone onto the shoulder, and when I heard the crunch of gravel under the tires I panicked, overcorrected, lost control of the car. I zigzagged into the other lane, yanked the wheel again, shot back through my lane and off the side of the road, spun around, hit a tree, sat there stunned in the new reality. After a while I stumbled out, sat down in the ditch. A couple of men came running across a field. They’d heard the impact. One of them gave me his cell phone and I called Nathan. My memory of this is hazy, except for the clarity of
the look on Nathan’s face when he arrived and ran toward me, not sparing a glance for the totaled car. I was all he cared about. He came to touch me, to make sure I was real, and his hands on my face, on my shoulders, were both fierce and gentle. “Tell me you’re all right,” he said.

Now I hit a rise and felt the car lift. It was a scene out of
The Dukes of Hazzard
, except that I was in a Toyota Camry, which was far too reasonable a car for running from the law. But there was the cop, taking his cue, pulling out from the clearing where the cops liked to park, often two of them, cruisers pointing opposite directions so that they could chat out the windows.

For a brief, wild moment I thought about not stopping.

“Do you know how fast you were going?” the cop asked.

“Yes,” I said, and even in his impassive face I thought I detected surprise. He was an older man, dark-skinned, with an air of polite weariness. He swung his gaze from my face to the back of the car, where the two car seats sat like stand-ins. I watched him coming to conclusions. “License and registration, please,” he said.

I handed them over. He studied the photo on the license, then my face, then the photo again. Any sign of suspicion, and I felt I’d done the thing I was suspected of. I fought a hysterical urge to confess that the photo wasn’t me, see if he believed it, see if he hauled me off to jail. “Be right back,” he said.

It had been years since a cop had pulled me over, but I recognized this feeling, which was always exactly the same. Agitated suspense and suspension. Scattershot anger at both cop and yourself. The outcome in another’s hands, and nothing to do but wait. Funny how some experiences recur and disappear entirely, like bubbles that form and pop.
Most days you forget the feeling of sliding your heels into the metal stirrups at the end of the doctor’s table, of a sinus headache just behind the eyes, of the dull, flat drive between here and elsewhere, of lying awake in the eerie stillness of the middle of the night. And then there you are again, back in that bubble, and you think, Oh,
this
. I remember this. Same as it ever was, even as everything else rushes away.

Now, now, was probably when the kids were waking, now that I could no longer choose to go back to them. “Mommy?” Mattie called. “Mommy, the deepness!” And Binx, startled into awareness, cried out his displeasure in consciousness. Lightning hit the house. Windows rattled as a tornado approached. Someone in the woods threw a match, and it arced in a flare of light. A tree began to topple slowly toward the roof. Mattie climbed up her dresser, which pulled in slow motion away from the wall. Binx stuck his head between the bars of his crib. Chokables, chokables everywhere.

The cop was back, passing me my license and registration, and that was all. “No ticket?” I asked.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “I think you need to get on home. I don’t think this is where you want to be.”

“Shouldn’t you give me a ticket?”

“You have some other things you need to worry about,” he said. “Don’t mess up what you’ve got at home.”

“I deserve a ticket,” I said.

“Ma’am,” he said. “I’m letting you go.” He stepped back from the car.

“I deserve a ticket,” I said again, but he was done with me, walking sure-footed back to the cruiser. “I deserve a ticket,” I shouted out the open window, because I did, I really did. “Come back here!” I shouted, but only after he’d already driven away.