Husband and Wife (18 page)

She laughed. “You’re right,” she said. “I should work on it all the time.”

“Every minute,” I said.

While she was in there I got up and went into the guest room. The room showed signs of Nathan’s habitation. Normally the bed was made neatly, the extra quilt folded across the end. Nathan had left the quilt dangling off the bed, the decorative pillows in a pile on the floor. When he’d gathered up his laundry he’d missed a stray sock under the desk. I moved, automatically, to pick it up, and then I stopped and left it there.

I sat down on the bed. It was an old four-poster that had belonged to Alex’s grandmother, and it creaked beneath my weight. Alex had had the bed for years, and so I knew from experience that it groaned every time you turned over, in a way that started to make you self-conscious, because you worried that Alex might think the sounds were made by headboard-banging sex. And your husband would say, “So why don’t we? I mean, if she already thinks that.” And then when you did have sex in that bed, you were so careful, your movements so small, that sex was quieter than simple restless sleep. I lay down. I rolled on my side. The quilt smelled clean yet musty, like everything else in Alex’s house. Nathan slept here, I thought, as though that were special, as though I had not spent ten years of nights in a bed that Nathan had slept in. I closed my eyes and listened to the wall clock tick.

I woke an hour later, sleep-drunk and confused, and shoved myself out of bed as if after a shameful one-night stand. I’d left the shape of my body on the quilt, so I smoothed it out, moving frantically, my heart caroming off my ribs, and then I punched the pillow to erase the imprint of my head. I stumbled down the hall to find Alex on the couch, her laptop on her knees.

“I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” I said.

“I didn’t want to wake you,” she said. “Nathan told me you haven’t been sleeping.”

I didn’t like the thought of them discussing me. I picked up the book on the coffee table. I read the line,
I don’t want to lose you
. Ah, I thought. That story again. I closed the book and set it down, taking a petty satisfaction in the thought of Nathan being unable, however briefly, to find his place. “Aren’t you late for work?” I asked.

“I called and told them I wasn’t feeling well and I’d be in later. I’m sure they don’t believe me, first day back after my honeymoon. Or now they all think I got pregnant on my honeymoon.” She gave me a rueful smile. “What about you? Did you call in sick?”

I shook my head.

“Oh no, you’re really late then,” she said. “Should I have woken you?”

I laughed. “No,” I said, and didn’t explain the laugh. This was my chance to take her into my confidence, to let her be who she always had been to me, someone I could always turn to. I said, “I’d better go.”

Smith’s office was upstairs in one of the old tobacco warehouses in downtown Durham, resplendent with exposed brick and heart pine timber. I’d been to restaurants in the building, but never up to Smith’s office, and I battled nerves as I climbed the stairs. I slipped past the receptionist, who was staring out the window, and peeked into cubicles until I spotted Smith. He was on the phone, cradling it between his ear and his shoulder while he sorted through a pile of papers on his desk. His eyebrows shot up when he saw me. “Hey,” he mouthed, and then he held up one finger.

He was going to ask me what I was doing here, and what
was I going to say? I stared out the window myself. Nothing out there but sky, trees, buildings, and power lines.

He hung up. “Hey,” he said, this time out loud.

“You shouldn’t do that,” I said. “It’s bad for you.”

“What is?”

“Holding the phone like that. Bad for the neck. Bad for the posture. Not at all ergonomic.”

“I know,” he said. He took a breath.
What are you doing here?
I thought, but instead he said, “You want to sit?” and without waiting for me to reply he got up and pulled a chair over to the side of his desk. I sat. He sat. We faced each other. He waited.

“I’ve been doing something strange,” I said.

“What?”

“You can’t tell Nathan.”

“I won’t. You know I won’t.”

“I haven’t been going to work.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t go Friday and I didn’t go today. I called in sick before I came over here. I didn’t want them to call the house and get Nathan, you know. I told them I had the stomach flu. And then for some reason I coughed, like that was going to sell it.”

“I think you deserve a day off,” he said.

“But what if I never go back? What would we do for money?”

“What are your savings like?”

“We’ve got about fifteen thousand in the bank, but we’ll owe some of that in taxes. We pay the credit cards five hundred a month. We were already going to be in trouble if he had to get an apartment, and now we’re going to run out of money for the original place. I guess he’ll have to move
back in. Or I guess he’ll have to get a job, or I’ll have to get another job.” The tightness in my throat choked my voice.

“You didn’t quit, though?”

I shook my head.

“So you can just go back?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t seem to. I know that sounds crazy.”

“You don’t have to tell them what’s really going on.”

“You know my boss, the chair, he kills songbirds?” I said. “For his research, I mean. I wonder if he ever has nightmares about it. Tiny songbirds poking at his brain. Let’s see what makes
him
tick, tweet-tweet.”

“I don’t think you should say that,” Smith said.

“I’d have to tell them something.”

“How about your favorite aunt died and it traumatized you?”

“Smith,” I said. “Are you telling me to lie?”

“I’m telling you to consider the possibilities. Maybe you should see this as a chance to find something closer to home. Or get a job more in your field. I mean, you told me last week you’d always thought that job would be temporary. Why not look for something in the arts?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve got two small children. The economy is in the tank. It’s not exactly the moment for finding myself.”

“Granted,” he said. “But you should be able to live on your savings for three months. So if you can’t go back to that job, go ahead and apply for whatever job you think you can get, but it doesn’t hurt to try for a little reinvention while you’re doing it.”

“That’s true,” I said. “That’s right.” For a moment I imagined myself working here, with Smith, surrounded
by warm red brick, popping down to the Greek place for lunch. Or maybe I could work for the documentary film festival, or for the art museum, or one of the university magazines. Then I pictured myself sending out résumés and then I wondered where my résumé was, if I’d even moved the file when I’d gotten a new computer, and then I thought about how I’d have to update it, anyway, and figure out who at my old job was going to be my reference, which would necessitate explaining my disappearance after all, and the thought of all these necessary steps made me very, very tired.

“I’ll help you look,” Smith said. “And you know, Nathan doesn’t have to get a place right away, he can stay with me, or he can move back in without moving back in, sleep in his study or something.” He stopped. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

I shook my head, for a moment unable to speak. I managed to say, “I can’t believe this is my life.” I leaned forward as though I was going to put my face in my hands, but it was like I’d pitched over a cliff and I just kept falling until my head came to rest on Smith’s knees. I sobbed with abandon into his jeans. This made him extremely uncomfortable—I could feel the tension in his legs—but nevertheless he brought both of his hands up and cupped the back of my head as tenderly as…well, a mother, I’m tempted to say, but why not a father? Fathers can be tender. Fathers like Nathan. He cupped my head as tenderly as Nathan would.

Later that day, I went home to the actual Nathan, except that he wasn’t the actual Nathan. The actual Nathan didn’t speak to me with sorrowful politeness, didn’t put the children to bed and then tell me good-bye. I couldn’t have the actual Nathan, the Nathan I wanted, the Nathan who could comfort me.

Thursday as I pulled up to the house Nathan was coming out the glass doors, bumping Binx in his stroller down the porch steps. Mattie trailed behind, sucking her fingers and twisting her hair. When she saw me, she brightened up, and did what Nathan and I called her “cavort” up to the car. I got out and picked her up, and she insisted I spin her around, so I did, until we were both dizzy. Nathan watched, standing with both hands gripping the handle of the stroller, wearing a melancholy smile. I put Mattie down and then stumbled in an exaggerated way and she swayed on her feet and laughed. “We’re going to check the mail!” she said.

“Great,” I said. “Let’s go.” I offered her my hand and she took it. Nathan started down the drive, and she and I fell in behind him. He hadn’t said anything to me. I hadn’t said anything to him. I watched the back of his head, lately my primary view of him.

“I’ve been thinking,” I said.

He stopped the stroller and looked back at me, a strange expression briefly contorting his features, gone too quickly
for me to read before the blank-faced Nathan-bot returned. Was that an agony of hope I saw? Of fear? Did he think I was going to say he should move back in? That he should get his own place? Which would he hope for, and which would he fear? He’d said he wanted to work it out, but nothing in his behavior this week had suggested that. Interacting with me was just a duty, like all the other ones that dragged him through his days. Maybe he thought I was going to say he could publish his book after all. “Yeah?” he said.

“I don’t know what to do about the weekend,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. He looked back down the drive, started walking again. “What do you mean?”

“Well, should I be alone with the kids all weekend? Should we try to spend it together? We’re having trouble maintaining a civil conversation for more than five minutes, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“Maybe not locally,” I said. “But globally.”

He kept on walking. Mattie pulled her hand from my grip and stuck her fingers back in her mouth, her brief burst of energy evaporating. She slowed her pace, and Nathan quickened his. I walked a little faster to keep up, calling to Mattie to come on. Then Nathan said, “Why don’t you go out of town?”

“What do you mean?”

“Go to the beach. Stay with your aunt. You can get out of here and get some help with the kids and get away from me.”

“What about gas prices?” I said.

“You don’t have to go,” he said. “It was just a thought.”

I thought about a three-hour car trip, parenting solo, no one to hand the baby his bottle when he dropped it, no one
to pop
My Neighbor Totoro
out of Mattie’s player and put in a new DVD. Then I thought about hours alone in the house, parenting solo, with nothing to distract any of us from Nathan’s absence, or perhaps his presence, which might be just as bad, or might be worse. “I think you’re right,” I said. “It would be good to get away from you.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say things like that in front of Mattie,” he said.

“Didn’t you just say it?”

“Not in that tone,” he said.

“Oh,
tone
,” I said. “I would love to never have another discussion about tone for the rest of my natural life.”

“The point is—” He stopped. He looked at me again. “You know,” he said, “just because I’ve made mistakes doesn’t mean I forfeit the right to the high ground on anything.”

I pointed back at Mattie. “She’s not listening anyway,” I said. She was letting her feet carry her down the road, eyes on the ground, in the oblivious manner that often led her to bonk into people in the grocery store.

“Hey,” Nathan said. “There’s Mrs. Dodson. What’s she doing?”

I looked ahead to Mrs. Dodson’s house. She was standing in the middle of the yard by the clothesline, which often flapped with T-shirts and underpants but today was empty. She wasn’t hanging clothes, as she often was, or taking them down. She wasn’t bending slowly to pluck a weed from her carefully tended garden. She was just standing there. When we came even with her, I saw that her gaze was fixed on a hole in the ground.

“Hi, Mrs. Dodson,” Nathan called.

She lifted her face, and her eyes were so blank that I had
the sudden, startling impression that she was blind. She stared at us for a moment before she seemed to register our presence. Then she said, “We’ve got a mole.”

“Oh dear,” I said. I found that I often adopted old-fashioned exclamations in her presence. Oh dear. My Lord. Goodness me.

Her gaze moved to the stroller, and then at last her face registered emotion—pleasure at the sight of the baby. “There he is,” she said. “Let me see that baby.” She started moving toward us, now looking at Mattie. “Let me see that sweet little girl.” At the stroller she bent to Binx and said, “Hi there, hi there,” and then to Mattie she said, “Ain’t you pretty,” and Mattie popped her fingers out of her mouth and said, “I wanted to wear a sundress but Daddy said no.”

“True story,” Nathan said.

“I haven’t seen Mr. Dodson lately,” I said. “I’ve been hoping to run into him, so I could thank him for fixing the mailbox.”

Mrs. Dodson looked up at me. She blinked, once, twice. She eased herself back up to standing. Then her face collapsed and she began to cry.

I just stood there in blank astonishment, staring at her with as much rudeness as Mattie. Binx began to cry in sympathy, his complaining, keening cry. I didn’t move to pick him up. I didn’t move to comfort Mrs. Dodson. I just stood there, wholly inadequate. Nathan, my Nathan, he stepped forward and took Mrs. Dodson in his arms.

“He’s dying,” Mrs. Dodson sobbed. “He’s dying. I wanted to let you know but I didn’t want to upset you with your new baby.”

“He’s dying?” I repeated.

“What am I gonna do?” she wailed into Nathan’s shoulder. “Oh, what am I gonna do?”

“Mommy,” Mattie said, “what does a dead elephant look like?”

I didn’t want to answer, but I knew if I didn’t she’d just repeat the question, louder and more insistently. I bent to tug her closer so I could whisper in her ear that we’d talk about it later.

“But what does it look like?” she whispered back.

“It depends on how long it’s been dead,” I said. I expected a follow-up, but this answer seemed to satisfy her.

“He had a cough,” Mrs. Dodson was saying. She’d stepped back from Nathan. She pulled a tissue from her pocket and wiped at her eyes. “They took X-rays. It’s lung cancer. We had no idea. They said he could live for twenty years or for a month, but now, he’s just gotten so much worse, it’s been so fast, we have to have this woman in the house, and he’s not going to hang on much longer, I know he’s not. He’s going. He’s leaving me.”

“I’m so sorry,” Nathan said, and I repeated it.

Mrs. Dodson folded the tissue and put it back in her pocket. Her face had resumed its usual stoic lines, though both her mouth and her eyelids trembled. “Will you come inside and see him?” she asked. “I know he’d like to see you.”

“Of course,” Nathan said, and I echoed him. That seemed to be all I was capable of doing.

We’d never been inside the trailer before. The front door opened directly into the living room, which was small, low-ceilinged, dark, and cool, so that I had the impression we were stepping into a cave. The furniture had obviously been rearranged to accommodate the hospital bed on which Mr. Dodson lay under a white sheet, his upper body propped with pillows, a tube in his nose. His eyes were closed. Mrs.
Dodson went immediately to him, her eyes on the rise and fall of his chest, and I wondered how many times a night she got up to watch him breathe.

There was an old-fashioned brown couch still in the room, and on it sat the nurse, wearing scrubs and an expression that fell somewhere between sympathy and boredom. I gave her an awkward smile, which she returned. I noticed over the course of our visit that she and Mrs. Dodson maneuvered around each other in that small space like pedestrians in a crowded city, enduring the other’s presence only by resolutely ignoring it. Behind the nurse, on the wood-paneled wall, hung school portraits of the Dodsons’ three smiling children, now adults, older by twenty years than I.

“It smells funny in here,” Mattie said, and at the sound of her clear, ringing voice, Mr. Dodson’s eyes fluttered open.

“Mattie, shhh.” I bent to whisper in her ear. “It does not.”

“Yes, it does,” she whispered back. “It smells funny.”

“Well, be quiet about it,” I said. I squeezed her hand. Mr. Dodson gaped, bewildered, at the ceiling, and then he seemed to register that he was still in the world. He pushed himself up on shaking arms to get a better look at us, and his nurse got up and moved with slow deliberation to the bed, pressing a button to raise the back of it higher, staring at a spot on the wall. When I could see him more clearly I realized that he didn’t have his teeth in, and that that in part explained the slack-jawed, skeletal look of his face. I’d never seen him before without his teeth. I’d never seen him inside his home, prone in a hospital bed. I’d never seen him dying. He shifted, and the covers did, too, and though the nurse moved quickly to straighten them, I glimpsed the edge of a bed pad, poking out from beneath his lower half, and a flash of his bare, gnarled foot.

“Let me see that baby,” Mr. Dodson said.

Nathan obeyed. He took Binx right up to the head of the bed, where he beamed at Mr. Dodson and then lunged forward to grab his glasses. “No, no,” Nathan said, extricating the glasses from Binx’s grip.

Mr. Dodson laughed. “You’re quick, little man,” he said to Binx.

Nathan tried to put the glasses back on Mr. Dodson’s face, but holding Binx he couldn’t manage it smoothly and nearly poked him in the eye with the earpiece. I waited for Mr. Dodson to protest irritably, to snatch the glasses from Nathan’s hand—this was a blunt, irascible man, a man who’d patrolled his property with a gun, who’d told me, when I was pregnant, that I was getting fat, and then laughed and laughed, a cigarette in his hand. But he just sat, grinning at Binx, and waited for Nathan to get his glasses on.

“Little man,” he said to Binx. “What a little man.” He extended his pointer finger and Binx grabbed it, babbling, “Na na na na.”

“Na na na na,” Mr. Dodson said, and Binx laughed.

Mattie tugged on my hand. “Pick me up, Mommy,” she said, and when I didn’t immediately respond, “Pick me up!”

I bent and hoisted her up, and she put her hands on either side of my face and said, “I want to tell you something.”

“What?” I asked.

“I want to leave,” she said. “I don’t like it in here.”

“Shhh,” I said. “We’re visiting Mr. Dodson.”

“I don’t like it,” she said. “It’s scary in here. I’m afraid of going closer to stuff.”

I wanted to reassure her, but also I wanted her to be quiet, to not offend these nice old people in their darkest
hour. To my relief Mrs. Dodson, too, was focused on Binx, who was smiling and chattering away, swinging Mr. Dodson’s finger—and isn’t that the wonder, the grace, of a baby, the way that their profound lack of understanding allows them to be representatives of purity and joy? Mattie, only three, was already old enough to share the discomfort and worry I felt, if not yet old enough to know she shouldn’t express those things aloud.

The nurse had moved away from the bed to sit on one end of the couch, and I sat on the other, whispering to Mattie that we wouldn’t stay long and that she shouldn’t say she wanted to leave because it was rude. She curled up in my lap, squinched her eyes shut, and put her fingers in her mouth. Nathan and Mrs. Dodson talked about Binx and Mr. Dodson talked to Binx, and Binx, sweet Binx, gripped Mr. Dodson’s finger and smiled and shouted, “Ba!” I tried not to stare at the nurse.

I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about the nurse, who maybe wasn’t even a nurse but an aide of some kind. I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about whether she was a nurse or an aide. I was supposed to be thinking about death in general and Mr. Dodson in particular, and I was supposed to be thinking about grief in general and Mrs. Dodson in particular, and maybe even reflecting on the trivial nature of the event that might end my own marriage in the face of the unchosen, unavoidable end of this one. I saw nothing in the nurse’s face. Nothing about what was it like to enter people’s lives at their most grotesque and pitiable moments, about whether you had to be a compassionate person to do this work, or the opposite. How could you endure it, life among strangers, the sound of an elderly soon-to-be widow weeping in the next room? How could you live your
life confronted day after day by the losses that await us all? Stranger after stranger, dying in your hands. Was it possible to go on believing, in the way that all of us who manage more or less to stay sane go on believing, that the worst of life won’t happen to you? You won’t be the man in the bed, so recently up on ladders and tinkering under cars, now unable even to use the bathroom. You won’t be the woman who’s lived with that man for fifty-three years, helpless to slow his departure. You won’t lose your mind, your dignity, your partner, your life. The world is not an abyss into which everything you love must fall. It’s a world. You go on home and watch TV.

Eventually Mr. Dodson grew too tired to hold his hand up for Binx anymore and sank back against the bed, and Nathan said we should go. I carried Mattie out. She was clinging to my neck, still feigning sleep. Mrs. Dodson walked outside with Nathan and Binx. “Thank you,” she said, her voice trembling with gratitude. “I haven’t seen him like that in two weeks. He really lit up when he saw that baby.”

“I’m glad we got to see him,” Nathan said. “Please let us know if there’s anything we can do for you.”

“Will you come back and see him again? With the baby? I know he’d be mighty grateful.”

“Of course,” Nathan said.

“Please,” she said. “Please come back.”

“We will,” Nathan said. “We promise.”
We promise
, Nathan said.

I carried Mattie all the way back up the drive, though she grew heavier with every step and my back began to hurt. I liked the warm weight of her in my arms, and I thought that it made sense to crave the embrace of a child in the wake of a visit to death, and that one could write a poem about such
a feeling, and that many many people probably had, even if at that moment I couldn’t think of one. I said nothing to Nathan about this as we trudged back up to the house, but he, too, must have felt the desire to cling to new life in the face of death, because he carried Binx all the way, pushing the stroller awkwardly with one hand. I was sure that we were going to have a conversation about life and death and love and marriage, that the scene in the trailer—the scene that should have been an epiphanic moment—demanded it. I could hear the dialogue in my head, lines about seeing what was really important. If one of us were writing the scene, we’d try to avoid such clichés, but in actual life we employed them as readily as anyone. The situation called for such a conversation, and we were fully capable of enacting it. I saw all that, I saw the need, and yet I didn’t feel it. I didn’t actually feel compelled to speak. I was still encased in a weird remoteness.