Husband and Wife (13 page)

In the morning, after I called every hotel and hospital within a thirty-mile radius and learned that none of them contained Nathan, at least not under his own name, I went into his study. Binx was taking his morning nap. Mattie was watching
Blue’s Clues
in the living room, and as I picked up a paperback copy of
A Sport and a Pastime
that had been lying facedown on Nathan’s keyboard, I heard, “A clue! A clue!” burst forth in piping television voices.

I sat down in Nathan’s chair with the book in my hand.
Suddenly it is quite clear how acrobatic
,
how dangerous everything is. It seems not to be his own life he is living
,
but another
,
the life of some victim.
A clue, a clue, but to what? Was this about Nathan or me?
A Sport and a Pastime
is a book—a
sens
ual book—about an affair, but so is every third book on the planet, and I’d known for more than a decade that it was one of Nathan’s favorites. Nathan liked to ask other writers what book they wished they’d written—it was the fastest way, he said, to learn their sensibilities, the nuances of their ambitions, maybe even something about their very natures—and when they
turned the question on him, as they almost always did, he’d sometimes answer that it was this book. Sometimes
The Moviegoer
. Sometimes
The Great Gatsby
. And I knew that when he answered with the Percy or the Fitzgerald he was comfortable with his own accustomed mode, the wised-up romantic still longing for the greater reality of myth, and when he answered with the Salter he was wishing he saw the vicissitudes of love and sex with a colder eye. So what did it tell me, finding this book on his desk, at the end of a time in which he’d confessed an affair and disappeared? That Nathan thought about sex. I already knew that. And what would it have told me to find Gatsby on his keyboard? That sometimes Nathan succumbed to romantic notions at odds with the dailiness of our life, of any life, and blurted out that he wanted to leave me to live in Paris. I already knew that. I even knew that this happened especially when his work wasn’t going well and he wanted the excitement he got from high-flown inspiration to be generated by his own life. What did it tell me to sit in his chair, my body against the contours that usually shaped his? That he was taller than me. That, too, I already knew.

Nathan’s first book—a short story collection—was about romantic yearning, about sex. This is the book that did well in France. He tried to expand one of the stories—a fable-like thing about a guy who forms a family with his current wife and all his former girlfriends—into his first novel, and ended up with his first major misfire, a book that never saw the light of day, characterized by the intensity of its sincerity about a situation that Nathan just could not render believable outside the compressed, metaphorical confines of a short story. The next book, the one he actually published, the one that spent three weeks on the
New York Times
best-seller list, was about a guy who has to choose between his
soulfire love for an artist who doesn’t want to procreate and marriage to a lawyer who wants, as he does, to have children. And, of course, the third book—the one he’d written in a delirious rush that had looked like inspiration at the time but now seemed more like rechanneled passion, or an exorcism of guilt—that one was about infidelity.

Now he was working on a book about a missing child—one, unlike the bulk of them, from the father’s point of view. He was sensitive about this book, because of the proliferation of novels with the same subject matter, because of their success, and his fear that people might perceive him as trying to cash in. He’d made many a speech to me and to his friends about how his desire to write it had nothing to do with best-seller dreams, how he wasn’t going to use the mystery in a cheap or obvious way, how since having children he’d discovered a new seriousness and this book was simply the result of that, an expression of his fears. I hadn’t read any of it yet. In fact I’d hardly read his work at all in these, our child-rearing years. The edit I’d done on
Infidelity
was the only exception. That—my lack of knowledge about, of participation in, his work—was another of the many things about our life together that had changed. Time was, he read to me a paragraph he’d just finished. He called me into his study to determine whether “he handed her the flowers” or “he thrust the flowers at her” was a preferable construction. I read draft after draft of his earlier work, and, oh, the knock-down-drag-outs we had about that polygamy book, not the least of which was over my insistence on calling it a polygamy book and his insistence that the book wasn’t about that, wasn’t about the desire of a man to have multiple sex partners but the desire to maintain connections to those we otherwise lose, the endless possible permutations of love.

I tried to remember the last time he’d asked my opinion, the last time he’d read a paragraph aloud to me moments after it left his brain. I couldn’t. I remembered testy exchanges—a couple? several?—in which he’d asked my opinion and then argued with it and I’d said I didn’t have time for argument. This kind of thing began to happen after Mattie was born. It was hard to care whether flowers were thrust or handed when I needed to use what little free time I had to get blueberry stains out of baby clothes. So I’d grown impatient. Without my even noticing, he’d stopped asking, and maybe that was what I didn’t know anymore—not
him
, not the essential him, but where he went in his mind these days when he was working, and who he saw there, and what kinds of things those people wanted, and what kinds of things they did. Why had he asked me to edit that book? Had he wanted that connection back, the one we used to have? Or had he thought I’d be suspicious if he didn’t ask? If so, he was wrong. I’d trusted him, trusted him so completely that a book called
Infidelity
had raised no doubts in me.

The computer came to life when I touched the mouse—still on, of course, because it had been on before I’d asked him to leave, and he hadn’t had reason to think he wouldn’t perform his usual prebedtime ritual of checking e-mail and the news. I opened the “Fiction” folder again, and then another one labeled “Current.” I opened it and saw four files: missing.doc, missingnotes.doc, missingcuts.doc, and?. “Missing, missing notes, missing cuts, question mark,” I said out loud, seeing in the file titles, in the subject matter, some kind of sign. Missing, missing, missing, and a mystery. I clicked on the question mark file, and found one paragraph inside.

I didn’t mean to kiss her. Maybe she kissed me first. Let’s say
that. Yes
,
she kissed me first. We’d been skinny-dipping in the reservoir. I didn’t look when she took off her clothes in the XX dark
,
I didn’t look when she cannonballed into the water
,
or when she clambered out
,
slipping and saying
,
“Whoops!” and then laughing with drunken embarrassment. OK
,
I glanced up then
,
at the “Whoops!”—I had to make sure she wasn’t hurt—but all I saw was the shape of a body
,
a body white with reflected light.

I’d read enough of Nathan’s drafts to know that when he couldn’t find the right word for something he just put
XX
or
??
and moved on. Many times I’d helped him fill in those blanks. “Quiet,” I said now. “Thrumming, the thrumming dark. The watery dark. The steamy, steamy illicit-sex dark. The guilty dark. The moonlit dark.” I typed that last one in.
She took off her clothes in the moonlit dark
. And she had, hadn’t she. That was exactly what she’d done. I hit save.

If you spend any time with a writer there will inevitably come a moment when he tells you a story you recognize from something he’s written, or you read something he’s written and find a story you’ve already heard. My own work was not confessional in a blow-jobs-and-suicidal-thoughts kind of way, but it was clearly about me, about my experience of the world, and maybe partly because of that I always made a point of not indulging the temptation to get double duty out of my material. I never wrote an e-mail, as one of my poet friends did, that began
Spring lies heavy upon the doorstep
. Nathan was a perpetrator of this particular crime. It used to drive me crazy when he told a story at a party that he’d used in his fiction, especially when he got confused, as he usually did, about what details came from the true-life source and what were embellishments he’d added in translation.

Or maybe he didn’t get confused. He always said he had,
when I pointed out to him, as I could never resist doing, that he’d told an anecdote from one of his novels to people who’d likely read his novels, that by using fictional details rather than the real ones he’d confirmed an impression that every word he wrote was true. But maybe he said he was confused because he didn’t want to admit that he knowingly used the refined details, the fictional ones—his social life as much of a performance as his work. Or maybe it was the reverse—maybe the work was as real to him as the life. Why can I summon without effort the emotions of Meg Murry as she shivers in her bed during a storm, fearing for her picked-on baby brother, her vanished father, when there are whole stretches of my own life, my actual life, that have blurred into alarm clocks, cars, staircases and elevators, streaks of color, streaks of light? Stories are experience, dreams are experience, your parents talk about a childhood event until, though the details are vivid in your mind, you no longer have any idea whether you actually recall it. What does it matter what really happened? Sometimes you don’t know if you remember the moment, or the photograph.

I was a writer myself, I lived with a writer, I knew some things were lost and some things gained when experience was transmogrified into phrases. I knew that in a writer’s work you both find and fail to find that writer’s life, and when people asked me whether it worried me that Nathan’s work so often featured infidelity and unhappy marriages and ambivalent parenthood I said no, and when they asked me if any of it was true, I said no. No was a much easier answer to give than the actual one, which was that sometimes he might feel something that he wouldn’t act on and give that feeling to a character who did act on it, and sometimes he’d take something he actually did or felt and make it big
ger, an irritated retort to his mother becoming an argument in which two characters laid bare the resentments of years, and really, just, it’s complicated, okay? People never asked me if the things in my poems really happened. Maybe they just assumed they had, and so Nathan had to contend with our friends and families knowing he cried in the parking lot of the movie theater after we saw
Titanic
.

And now I had to contend with this. Not just the know ledge that I’d been wrong not to worry, that he’d transformed a betrayal into fiction, that he’d let another woman inspire him, but this. This paragraph, this snippet of the true. It wasn’t in Nathan’s usual prose style, which was verbose and exuberant, treading the line between comic and poignant. This was compressed, concise, matter-of-fact, an unadorned rendering of actual experience, a snapshot of the moment when he chose. I wanted there to be more, I wanted details, the way we want to know the nasty things that have been said about us, listening with our stomachs hot and sick, the blood pounding in our ears, and at the same time I was sorry to have read even this, to have seen the moment from his point of view. I didn’t want to see his point of view. I didn’t want to inhabit him as we inhabit the characters we read about. I didn’t want to stand there, wet and naked, and look at that woman and attempt to shore up my loyalties against the tidal wave of yearning. I rejected empathy. I didn’t want to see the moonlight on her body, the otherworldly romance of that. Now I knew, as I knew so many other things about him, how it felt to my husband to want someone else.

Listen, buddy, you’re not the first, OK? You’re not even the first to write it down. I myself have written it down, in a poem I never showed you, about an event I never described to you, because unlike you I know what and what not to re
veal. Remember how I came home from that visit to Helen and suggested we get married? You want to know why? Because of Rajiv. I went there knowing I would see him, of course. You and I had seen him the last time we’d gone, but we were together, and he was with a girl who twined herself around him like a vine. But on the next trip he was single again—Helen had told me—and I’d be there alone. I didn’t plan for anything to happen. I just wanted to know if anything would.

I couldn’t tell, at first, whether he still felt what he’d claimed to feel for me. And then one night Helen took me to a party, and when I bumped into him outside, and said in my best Katharine Hepburn, “Hello, you,” he grabbed my hand and pulled me farther into the dark of the yard. He told me—again! and you didn’t even know about the first two times—that he was a little in love with me, and, oh, in that moment, drunk on gin and abuzz with desire—my own or his, I couldn’t have told you—I believed him. And then I kissed him, and I felt what you felt, and oh, believe me, I wanted to do what you have done. But I didn’t. I stepped back, though every nerve ending resisted the stepping back, and on the plane on the way home I thought that if I could resist someone I’d spent years finding attractive, if I could resist what I wanted that badly, because of you, because of you, then I should be your wife.

But I still thought about him, because my experience of him never faded into the everyday the way it did, of course, with you and me. Two months before our wedding I wrote this: