Husband and Wife (16 page)

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he snapped.

“Hey, look, if you weren’t in the mood for maudlin self-pity I don’t know why you came over here.” I swirled the milkshake with my straw. “I’m an unholy mess of a girl,” I said.

“That’s from something,” he said. “What’s that from?”

“
The Philadelphia Story
.”

“That’s right. Good movie.”

“Nathan and I used to watch that together once a year.”

“Like on your anniversary or something?”

“No,” I said. “Actually, we didn’t. I made that up.”

He stared at me. “Why?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I really don’t. Clearly I’m going crazy.”

He seemed disturbed. Perturbed. Discomfited.

“What’s the word for what you’re feeling right now?” I asked.

“What?” He frowned.

“Unnerved? Trapped? Agitated?”

“Concerned,” he said. “How about concerned. Listen, is Alex back yet?”

I shook my head. “She gets back tomorrow. Why? You want to pass me off to her?”

“Well, frankly, yes,” he said. “I think she’d do a better job.” He frowned. “I think maybe it’s time you told somebody else what’s going on.”

“I called my friend Helen.”

“I mean somebody local,” he said. “Like Erica. Somebody who could, I don’t know, bring you dinner.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Look, I know you didn’t want anybody to know. But Nathan’s not here. If that keeps up, people are going to notice. Plus, you need the support.”

He was right on both counts. I’d felt bad before he came, better when he was here, and when he was gone I’d felt bad again. Telling more people might make me feel better, but it would also mean that more people would know.

“I can tell people for you, if you like,” he said.

“Have it your way,” I said, picking my cell phone up off the table. “I’ll start calling people.” I dialed Nathan. At the beep I said, “Just wanted to let you know I’m going to start filling people in on our situation, as in you cheated on me and now you won’t return my calls.” I hung up.

Smith sighed. He held out his hand. “Give me the phone,” he said. I thought about snatching it away from him, hunkering over as Mattie would have, but suddenly I was weary of playing the petulant child. I put the phone in his hand. He turned it off and we both listened to the chime as it powered down. “I don’t blame you for being angry,” he said. “But I’m talking about reaching out for support. I don’t know if making Nathan feel worse will make you feel better.”

“Oh hell yes, it will,” I said. “I’m considering rampant promiscuity. The only problem is the mirror.” I was so, so tired. I let my forehead drop to the table.

“Have you been sleeping?” Smith asked.

I laughed. “No,” I said. “And that’s an understatement.”

“Well, how about you go to bed now?”

“What’s the point? There’s no one else to get up with the baby.”

“I’ll stay,” he said. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“Will you breast-feed?”

“I’ll give him a bottle. After yesterday I’m a pro.”

I shook my head, my forehead turning from side to side against the table. “You don’t need to do that. I can’t go to bed. I’m afraid of going to bed.” I choked out a laugh-cry and said, “I’m afraid of going closer to stuff.”

“I’ll go in there with you, okay?”

I didn’t say anything for a moment. What?

“I mean”—this time the embarrassment in his voice was unmistakable—“I’ll tuck you in. I bet that’s what one of your girlfriends would do.”

“So you’re my girlfriend now?”

“You got it, sister.”

I lifted my head from the table and looked at him.

“What?” he asked, grinning. “Don’t you all call each other sister?”

He did tuck me in. He walked me into my bedroom, one hand hovering lightly near my shoulder in case I needed steering down the hall. I climbed into bed with my clothes on, and he leaned over me and pulled the covers up and then gave them a pat. I thought for a second he was going to kiss my forehead, but he didn’t. He said, “Listen to me. Everything is awful now, but it’s going to be OK.”

I closed my eyes. “How?” I asked.

“That’s the way of it,” he said, and then he turned out the light.

I fell, for a while, into an alcoholic doze, and then I woke up, headachy and nauseated, and got up to get a glass of water. When I opened my bedroom door I saw the glow of the light from the living room. Smith was still awake, and I could hear the murmur of his voice. He was talking on the phone. I crept down the hall and stood just out of sight, like a child hoping for a glimpse into the mysteries of the grown-up world.

“She needs me,” he said. “She’s having a hard time of it. She hadn’t eaten all day, she…No. No. No. It’s not like that.”

It’s not like what? I wanted to ask. It’s not like what?

“She’s scared,” he said. “She doesn’t want to be alone.”

I was scared, he was right. I had two small children with a long list of needs, emotional and physical, and, apparently, no husband to help me supply them.

“Give me a break, Holly. That’s not what I meant. I hardly think that’s what she’s after right now.”

Oh, Smith, I thought. Innocent, innocent Smith. If you came down the hall right now and expressed willingness to
keep the lights off I’d take you right into my bed, my marriage bed. Nathan said he still wanted me, but now I can’t be sure, and if he doesn’t, he whose children did this to my body, then who will? See, Smith, I thought some things belonged to the past—the moonlit night, the sound of a stranger’s rapid, anticipatory breath—and that was fine, that was OK, until my husband brought those things back into the present and reminded me of their pleasures, reminded me that those pleasures are sometimes enough to override the rest of your life. And I don’t even know if I want the first kiss, the strange body’s mysteries, desire’s sweep and surrender, I might be too damn tired for those things, but you can’t get to what I do want—the familiar, the shared—without having those things first, can you? Unless you want to go on living with me, just like this, I’m happy with this, and maybe Holly can get herself a dog.

“I love you,” Smith said. Not, of course, to me. I retreated to my room, gulped water from my hand at the bathroom sink, and got back in bed to dream of poverty.

In the morning he got up with my children, fed them, and made me pancakes. He didn’t love me, but two extra hours sleep followed by pancakes seemed superior to love. We were sitting in faux-marital contentment over coffee and the Sunday
Times
—Binx down for his morning nap, Mattie watching
Max and Ruby
in the living room—when we heard the crunch and rustle of a car coming up the drive. We’d been chatting about something on the op-ed page, but as the sound steadily increased in volume, Smith and I both fell silent.

After a moment, I said, “That’s probably Nathan.”

Smith nodded. “What do you want to do?”

I shrugged. I took a sip of my coffee, looked into the cup,
swirled it. Hot liquid sloshed on my finger. I stuck the finger in my mouth and sucked on it. It wasn’t that I had no answer to Smith’s question. It was that the answers were manifold, and contradictory, and therefore impossible to express in this brief, suspended time before Nathan walked in the house. I wanted to hide. I wanted to send Smith out to turn Nathan away. I wanted to rush outside and fling myself into Nathan’s arms. Outside, the engine stopped churning. A car door shut.

“I wonder if he’ll knock,” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“I wonder if he’ll knock or just come in.”

“I don’t know.”

Footsteps on the porch stairs. The creak of the screen door opening. The thud of a foot connecting with the door, propping it open. A hesitant knock, which neither Smith nor I got up to answer. Then the jingle of keys. I waited for the door to swing open, for some emotion or another to rush in. I might have imagined any number of possible reactions to the sight of Nathan, but I couldn’t have imagined what I did feel, which was that for the first time in our relationship, in my life, I had fallen in love at first sight. Look at him, that man, my husband, the startled, distraught expression, the hangdog posture, the scruffy chin, the disarrangement of his curls that told me he hadn’t shaved or showered in days. I was fairly certain the shirt he had on was the one he’d left in. What a reservoir of tenderness I must have had to fall in love, at that moment, with him. What did it were his contacts, which he was wearing despite his dishevelment. He didn’t like the way he looked in his glasses—like, he said, a middle-aged accountant—but in the normal course of our lives he’d wear them on a sleepy Sunday morning. He’d put them in this morning, in a small, pitiful effort to look good for me.

“Hi,” I said. Smith said nothing. Nathan went on standing there at the door with his hand still gripping the keys, like a man who’d walked into the house he called his own to find the furniture changed, the children grown, his wife at breakfast with another man. He looked beaten, bewildered, utterly lost.

“I’m sorry,” he said. There was no disputing that he was.

“Sorry for what?” I asked. I’d felt, as I said, a rush of love for him, and yet the question came out so light, so casual, as to be cold. We are many people, all at once, and all the time.

“Sorry for interrupting,” he mumbled, dropping his gaze to his feet. He seemed to feel that I was having an affair with Smith, and that it was no less than he deserved.

“Interrupting is the least of it,” I said.

There was a sudden end to the murmur of cartoon voices coming from the other room, and then Mattie appeared in the kitchen. She didn’t seem at all surprised to see Nathan. “Hi Daddy,” she said, like he’d just gotten back from the grocery store.

“Hi little goose,” he said, his voice choked with emotion. He released his death grip on the keys, squatted, opened his arms wide for a hug, and she went willingly, if with no special eagerness, into his arms. “I’m hung-gry,” she said into his ear. “Can I have a snack?”

She was hungry, and he obliged her, letting her go so that he could stand and cross the room to the pantry and offer her a cereal bar—no, they were yucky—and an apple—no, it had a snaking bruise—and—jackpot!—a handful of Goldfish crackers, and while she and Nathan performed this ordinary back-and-forth Smith and I just sat there at the table, waiting. I don’t know for what.

This is why once you have children you should live a staid and stable life, without affairs and disappearances or moonlight of any kind. For the children, of course, because it’s true what they say about them, they thrive on stability, they devote themselves slavishly to routine. But also because with the children there you can’t play out a scene like the one Nathan’s return should have been, the breast-beating, full-throated drama of betrayal, accusation, remorse. Or at least I couldn’t. We couldn’t. Some people do, I suppose, and it’s their children who go on to write the memoirs.

Smith was the odd man out in this tragic little tableau, and so it was fitting that he was the one to shake us out of the positions we’d assumed. “Why don’t you two go outside and talk?” he said. “I’ll stay in here with Mattie.”

“I want to go outside, too,” Mattie said to Nathan. “I want to go with you.”

“I need to talk to Mommy,” he said.

“Grown-up talk?” she asked.

“Grown-up talk,” he said, as though there had never been such a miserable concept.

I walked outside first. I bypassed the chairs and the hammock, where on frisky occasions we had sex. I waited for Nathan in the middle of the yard. He managed somehow to be a good two or three minutes behind me—perhaps he’d paused to comfort Mattie? to say some suspicious words to Smith?—and as I waited I resolved on kindness. Holding him to account, yes, but with sympathy for our mutual distress. I said to myself that our love was bigger than any of this. I felt good about believing it. When Nathan finally arrived, he seemed slightly beside the point. Nevertheless there he was, squaring off with me in the arena of our backyard. “You look like you’re getting ready to box me,” I said.

“Box you?”

“You know.” I jabbed a couple of times, bouncing on the balls of my feet.

He hunched his shoulders, put his hands in his pockets as though to disprove this notion. “Aren’t you going to yell at me?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I’m really tired,” I said.

He looked away from me, gave himself a shake, looked back, and asked the question I could tell he’d been dying to ask, even as he told himself he had no right to. “What’s Smith doing here?”

“He’s been helping me out in your absence,” I said. “He watched the kids on Friday. Like you were supposed to do.” Love, love, I reminded myself, hearing my own bitchy tone.

“He watched the kids?” Nathan seemed as unmanned by this as if I’d announced that Smith had assumed his duties in the sack.

“He did. And meanwhile, you were…where were you?”

“I was at Alex and Adam’s,” he said.

“Ah!” I said, like someone finally given the answer to a riddle. “I never thought of that.”

“I had their key,” he said. “For feeding the cat. I had the key.”

“Right,” I said. I paced a little, fighting the anger that rose at this information. “You just stayed at their house without telling them?”

“No, I told them.”

I stopped. I stared at him. “What?”

“I called Alex right after I left here.”

“You called them on their honeymoon to tell them I’d kicked you out?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you tell them why?” I wouldn’t have thought it possible for him to make himself smaller, but somehow he did, and I got a glimpse of how he might age.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I can’t believe you did that. You ruined their honeymoon.”

“No, I didn’t.” He looked worried. “You think I did?”

“Yeah, I think you did. I think they spent the rest of their honeymoon and the whole trip home talking about us, worrying about us, and seeing a bad possible version of their future.”

“Well, they didn’t say anything like that,” he said. “They still told me about their trip, showed me pictures—”

“What do you mean, they showed you pictures? You’ve seen them?”