Husband and Wife (14 page)

It was good, too. I knew it was good. I never sent it out. I never showed it to anyone. I’d changed the gin to bourbon, and I hadn’t really pricked my fingers or thought about Christmas, but all the rest of it was true, and I’d had rules, you see. I never exposed anything that would hurt you, Nathan, no matter what you sometimes claimed. But now I will. I’ll write a poem now, I really will, an unabashed, na
kedly true poem about you and what you did. The shoe, the wedding toast, the crying at the Fiesta Grill. The missing, missing, missing. The moonlit dark. There is no point in resisting. That’s what the title can be.

I opened a new file. I drummed my fingers on the keyboard. I waited for concentration to settle on me like a cloud, to focus me like a laser beam—oh, my similes had gotten stale. How long had it been since I’d entered that mental space, the one that cannot bear interruption? Interrupted, you try to check your irritation, one part of your brain struggling to hold steady, like a paused screen, on your last thought, another part coping with whatever minor daily concern the person in your space has brought along to trouble you, this person who’s crashed through the wrong door into your dream. Nathan and I used to understand that look in each other, the impatience that would sharpen the speech of the interrupted one. Listen, if you came into my study when I was writing and spoke to me, you were stepping into the lion’s den, and it wasn’t my fault if you lost your head.

You can’t be that way with children, though. Or shouldn’t be. Or anyway I thought you shouldn’t be, and Nathan more or less agreed. Sometimes even when he wasn’t working Mattie spoke to him and he didn’t hear her, lost in thought, and though when he came back from wherever he’d been he tried not to sound irritable, it was nevertheless true that sometimes she stood by his side saying, “Daddy,” five or six times before he dragged his gaze outward and saw her there, and even then it was usually because I’d said, with some sharpness, “She’s talking to you. Your daughter’s talking to you.” Was this something I should hold against him? Would she grow up feeling less than important, would she choose to marry a negligent man? Or was it good for her not
to assume that attention was automatically granted, so she wouldn’t turn out a princess of entitlement, certain of her eventual fame, like, according to the media, all the young people of today? How was I supposed to know?

The cursor blinked.
You
, I typed. Mattie appeared in the doorway. “You didn’t come,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I called you, and you didn’t come,” she said. “You never do anything I want.”

“Who says I have to do what you want?” I said. “That’s not the deal.”

“The show was scary,” she said. “It had dinosaurs.”

“I thought you liked dinosaurs.”

“Well, I don’t like the scary ones.”

“Why don’t you go back in there now? Maybe the scary ones are gone.”

“They’re not gone, actually,” she said. “I don’t want to. What are you doing?”

“I’m writing a poem.”

“Is it scary?”

“Yes,” I said.

She advanced on me, cautiously, as though the monster of my poem might at any moment spring forth from the screen. “Lift me up so I can see,” she said. I hauled her into my lap. Her hair smelled like peanut butter. “Read the word,” she said.

“Mommy, will you read the word, please?” I said.

“Mommy, will you read the word, please?” she repeated.

“I’d be happy to,” I said. “It’s you.”

“No,” she cried. “Read
the word
.”

“That is the word. The word is
you
.” I pointed at the screen.

“That starts with
y
,” she said, and I agreed. We sat a moment and looked at that one word, the only word it appeared I would write. Then I deleted it.

What I didn’t know, I decided later that day, driving around with the kids in the backseat in hope that they would sleep, was what Nathan thought of
me
. It had been years since it had occurred to me to ask. He loved me, I’d assumed. He thought I was “pretty good,” he thought I needed to “take a leap.” But no—he hadn’t quite meant that, or so he’d said, and I’d allowed myself to accept his explanations. “It’s not you,” he’d said, about the character in his novel with my job, and I’d decided to believe him. But maybe it was me, this woman satisfied with being ordinary. Maybe her story was Nathan’s attempt to understand me, the person I’d become. Maybe because he thought I was ordinary, and content to be so, it was OK for the ordinary to befall me, the banality of a drunken husband, a willing woman, a moonlit reservoir.

But, I wanted to say to him, if I could find him, I am not the person this happens to. Don’t you remember the bohemian dark, a grad school party, one of our classmates reciting, from memory, Andrew Hudgins’s poem “Blur”—
and more than joy I longed for understanding / and more than understanding I longed for jo
y—and then a poem of her own, with that line about being as small as a star, and as we listened to her there lived in the two of us, in all of us in the room, the transcendent?

The Nathan in my head said that that didn’t matter, the transcendent, the memory of it, up against the facts of my life. As I thought this, my idiotic brain queued up the theme
song to the TV show:
the facts of life
,
the facts of life
. We are not special, you know, most of us, no matter what our parents say. We should all sit down and look at ourselves in the mirror and see an ordinary soul. We are going to get married and have children and have jobs. We are not going to be rich. We are never going to be on television. There is no reason for us to have—for us to try to give our children—such unseemly quantities of self-esteem.

Rajiv was at that grad school party. I was almost sure I remembered him there.

“Where are we going?” Mattie asked.

“We’re just driving around,” I said. “We’re looking at things.”

“Are we going to see my mother?”

“What do you mean?”

“My mother lives far away.”

I glanced at her in the rearview mirror. She had a blank yet rapt look on her face, like a medium channeling a spirit. “I’m your mother.”

“You’re
not
my mother,” she said, her tone so definitive that for a moment I believed her, I felt what it would be like to look at this child and have no connection to her at all, and I wondered how we came to be here together, driving around in this car.

“Why would you say that?” I asked.

“I’m pretending,” she said. “My mother lives in Kentucky. Her name is Lola and her cat’s name is Sophie. She fixes furniture. She takes me to see grown-up movies. She took me to see a silly grown-up movie. There was a monster and a child and the monster wanted to eat the child but the lion ate the monster before he could eat the child.”

“So I’m not your mother?” I asked.

“No.”

“Who am I?”

“You’re a writer who came to see the movie.”

I was not her mother, I was a writer. See—even she knew it was impossible to be both. “Why did I come to see the movie?” I asked. “What kinds of things do I write?”

But she’d lost interest, or lost the thread of her narrative, or both. “Where are we going?” she asked, and then she put her fingers in her mouth and let her face go slack, as though she despaired of the answer.

She was right to do so, because by then I’d begun driving to places where I’d known Nathan to go, in the order they occurred to me: his doctor’s office, the Regulator, the coffee shop that served its coffee in a French press and posted descriptions of its beans as full of sensual adjectives as a food and wine magazine. In the coffee shop parking lot, I nursed Binx in the front seat, his head propped awkwardly on my bag, and he pinched my stomach and my breast, rolling the skin between his tiny fingers, and I said, mechanically, “No pinching,” but made no effort to stop him, just sat there feeling the tug at my breast, the small sharp pains. A man glanced into the car as he walked by and did a double take, clearly not expecting to witness lactation. He reacted with the mingled pity and embarrassment of someone who’s just barged in on you in a public bathroom, and quickened his pace on his way inside.

Mattie began to complain that she was hungry, so when Binx was sated I drove to Weaver Street, a food co-op and café where Nathan liked to go for jazz Sundays, part of me still thinking that if I just went to one more of his haunts, just one more, I’d find him. By the time we arrived both kids had fallen asleep, so I sat in the parking lot and stared
at the passersby. From what distance would I recognize Nathan? That guy coming up the street, far enough from me to still be featureless, if he were Nathan would I know it? I would, I believed I would. I knew his gait—the hunch of his shoulders, the hands in his pockets, the way he stared at the ground, lost in thought, giving him a propensity for collisions with poles. I knew the geometry of him, the breadth of his shoulders and the length of his hair. And if I rolled down the window and closed my eyes—like this—how readily would I recognize his voice? Would I know him from a shout? From a laugh? From a sigh? I believed I would. I would. I knew him as a shape. I knew him as a sound.

But she didn’t. She didn’t know his body, hadn’t seen him naked before that night at the reservoir when he shed his clothes. He’d been new to her, each flash of naked back or buttock a glimpse into the mystery. And he’d liked that, I knew that. It hadn’t just been about looking at her. It had been about her looking at him.

The shape of a body. The moonlit dark.

White Christmas lights strung along a hedge in the back of a rental house in Austin. The taste of gin in my mouth. A hand catching my fingers, tugging. “Come on,” he said. “Come on.”

“What is this?” I asked, a little breathless, as though we were running.

“He calls it the secret garden,” he said.

“Who does?”

“The guy who lives here. Joe. Didn’t you meet him?”

I laughed. “I have no idea.”

And then we were through a gap in the hedge, and I saw that a path opened up and then rounded a corner and disappeared, and I said, “A maze!”

And he said, “Told you,” and I said, “I’m amazed,” with the ironic tone that acknowledged I was making a terrible pun but allowed me to make it anyway. But I didn’t laugh, because of the way his hand tightened on mine, not casual anymore, and the inexorable pull, closer, closer, the white lights starry around his face, his beautiful face, his not-Nathan face.

I opened my eyes in the here and now, the sunlight bouncing viciously off a parking lot full of windshields. For a moment I didn’t know if I’d resurfaced from a memory or a dream. It didn’t seem possible I could have been that girl in the maze. Had all my cells replaced themselves since then? What could I say, what could I do, to go back there now and be that girl again?

In the back of the car my children, Nathan’s children, went on dreaming. I risked the slow, quiet extrication of my cell phone from my bag. I dialed Helen. When she answered on the second ring, I murmured into the phone that it was me.

“Hey!” she said. “I’ve been meaning to call you for ages.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“But listen,” she said, “can I—” She was about to ask me if she could call me back, and she’d promise she’d call me right back, but then one of her children would demand a book and the other would want a snack, and her mother would call or the guy would show up to fix the cable, and then her husband would come in asking if she knew where to find his keys and they’d get in an argument about why he could never find them that would evolve into an argument about arguing in front of the kids, and then it would be dinnertime and then bedtime and then Helen would collapse
on the couch, washed ashore at last, drained as a shipwreck survivor and certainly too tired to call me back. Meanwhile in the backseat Binx stirred and whimpered in his sleep. I didn’t have time to wait. I had no time.

“Nathan cheated on me,” I said.

“What?” she said. “Nathan?”

The incredulity in her voice—was that a compliment to me? To him? “You sound surprised,” I said.

“I’m beyond surprised,” she said. “I’m incredulous. I’m flabbergasted.”

“Well, I’m enraged,” I said. “I’m enraged, I’m distraught, I’m losing my goddamn mind. I can’t sleep, I don’t want to eat, I skipped out on work yesterday, I genuinely think I’m going crazy, and right now, right at this moment, I’m sitting in a parking lot staking out a place where he likes to go because I thought he might turn up here. I haven’t seen him in two days and he’s not answering his phone. For all I know he’s dead. Maybe it would be better if he was.”

There was a flat silence, one that went on long enough that I thought we’d lost the connection, and I said, “Hello?”

“I’m here,” she said. “I’m caught off guard.”

“I know,” I said. “I am, too.” I was losing it, breathing hard. I was the werewolf catching sight of the full moon, feeling the pain and the power of a claw bursting through what used to be a hand.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I can’t believe it. What happened?”

“Oh, he slept with some writer. And then he confessed, and said he wanted to work it out, and I tried for a week or so and then I asked him to leave, and now he’s gone, really, really gone. At least before he left I had this illusion of being in control, because he kept telling me what happened next
was my decision, but now I’ve got no control at all because I don’t even know where he is. And I’m pissed, I’m just so pissed that I let him stay one day, one minute, after he told me. I can’t help but think things would have been totally different before the kids. I wouldn’t have just taken it, you know. I wouldn’t have tried so hard.”

“Oh, Sarah,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

I blinked, and spilled tears. “If you sympathize with me, I really will come undone. Let’s talk about revenge. Let’s talk about raw animal sex.”