Husband and Wife (19 page)

When we got inside, Nathan said, “That was heartbreaking.”

Line
, I thought. I nodded. Then I reached for the baby, took him over to the couch to nurse. I could tell that Nathan didn’t take offense, that he thought I was too shaken to talk about what we’d witnessed. I could tell this by the gentle way he spoke to Mattie, a gentleness that extended to me.

Over dinner, Mattie was full of death questions, which Nathan answered in a vague yet truthful way, while I poked at my lasagna and tried not to listen. It was a vegetable lasagna out of the Moosewood cookbook, one of Nathan’s specialties, and I thought that if we didn’t go back to living together, I might never have it again. I almost never did the cooking anymore, though there had been a time when we alternated that chore. What would I do in his absence?
Would I take up cooking again, or would we subsist on a steady diet of cereal and scrambled eggs? Nathan mowed the lawn, took out the trash, went to the grocery store. The thought of taking on all these tasks as well as my own made me want to put my head down on the table. And Mrs. Dodson? Could she live there alone, with no one to help hoe the garden, no one to lie under the truck doing whatever it was Mr. Dodson did under there, no one to steer the riding mower over their three acres of land?

“If Mr. Dodson has been so sick, I don’t think he could have fixed the mailbox.” I separated a noodle from the cheese with my fork. “Did you fix it?”

“No,” he said.

“Stupid question,” I said. I dropped the fork on my plate. I looked up to find him staring at me, wearing the expression that presaged a scolding. “Don’t look at me like that,” I said.

“I can’t believe that’s what you want to talk about.” He rose abruptly from the table, grabbed his plate, and dumped it with a clatter into the sink.

“Be careful,” I said. He ignored me.

“Are you all done, Mattie?” he asked her. “Are you ready for your bath?” She said that she was, and he wiped off her hands and scooped her up, bouncing her up and down to make her laugh as he carted her off to the bathroom. I extricated Binx from the high chair, wiped sweet potato out of his eyebrows, and took him to his room. I changed his diaper and prevented him from sticking his fingers in the butt paste and pajamaed him and wiggled him into his sleep sack and plopped him on my lap for a reading of
Owl Babies
, and the whole time I carried on a mental argument with Nathan, that self-righteous man. Surely it wasn’t difficult to
grasp how much easier it was to focus on the petty and the trivial than on the heartrending, the life-and-death. What did he want me to say, what useless profundities did he want me to offer on the subject of loss? Besides, didn’t it matter that he didn’t do what he promised to do? Wasn’t that the entire problem? The personal is political, it’s the little things, for want of a nail, and so forth. You said you were going to be faithful to me, and you weren’t. You said you were going to fix the mailbox, and you never, ever did.

I took a long time putting Binx to bed, reading him books until I heard Nathan say good night to Mattie. Then I laid Binx in his crib and stood over him a moment, patting his back while he made the cooing, moaning sounds he made before sleep, plucking at his eyelid in what Nathan and I agreed was a weirdly painful way to self-soothe. I was steeling myself for an argument with Nathan. I was gunning for him. But when I left Binx’s room, I found that he wasn’t waiting for me in the living room. I went into the kitchen and spotted him on the other side of the glass doors, pointing the key fob at his car.

I followed him outside. “What are you doing?” I said.

He turned. He looked genuinely surprised. “What do you mean? I’m going home.”

“You’re going
home
?”

He flushed. “You know what I mean. Back to Alex and Adam’s.” I stared at him. “What?” he said. “The kids are down.”

“I thought we were postponing an argument until they were.”

“Oh.” He looked at the ground. “I don’t really want to have that argument.”

“Why not?”

“I just think there are some things that don’t need to be said.”

I felt my eyebrows shoot up. It was clear from his tone that these unsaid things were about me. “Like what?”

“Just…” He shook his head. “I’m disturbed you reacted like that.”

“Like what?”

“So
coldly
.” He looked at me like he couldn’t believe what he saw. “I mean, what’s happened to you?”

“What’s happened to me is you cheated on me,” I said. “What’s happened to me is you screwed up our lives and wrote a book about it. And then you disappeared for two days, remember that part?”

“I’m talking about before that,” he said. “Mrs. Dodson was in terrible pain, and you just stood there. You didn’t reach out to her at all.”

“Are we talking about you now? That I somehow failed to reach out to you? Because it’s hard to reach out to somebody who won’t answer the phone.”

“No.” He sighed. “I knew we shouldn’t talk about this.” He started toward the car.

I grabbed his arm and dropped it. “You say what you want to say.”

“You’ve changed.”

“Excuse me?”

“You used to be different. You used to want to see art films. Now unhappy endings make you squeamish. You used to read books because they were good, or interesting, or challenging. Now you abandon them if the chapters are too long. You used to talk about poetry, not NEH forms.”

“NIH forms.”

“What?”

“The NEH is the National Endowment for the Humanities,” I said. “Do you even know what I do?”

“You sit in an office,” he said. “You move some numbers around.”

“Once again with a little more scorn,” I said.

“You don’t seem to care about my writing anymore. You sure don’t care about your own. You said you wanted to lead an artistic life, but at the first opportunity you took a job so you could stop worrying about money.”

I stared at him. “I took a job for our family,” I said. “So we could have health insurance.”

“I’m not saying those things aren’t important,” he said. “But you’ve got to think about quality of life.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like having food in the refrigerator and prescription medicines.”

“I just don’t think you value art like you used to.”

“And Kate does, I suppose? That’s your point?”

“No, that’s not my point.”

“Did you give her the ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’ routine? Did she stroke your ego and your penis simultaneously? What other insights did she have to offer?”

“She said maybe we didn’t have the same values anymore.”

“What?” My body rocked like he’d punched me in the stomach. “Are you actually saying this to me? Are these words coming out of your mouth?”

“I’m not saying I agree with her.”

“But you’re not saying you don’t. So while I’ve been working my ass off for this family, trying to think about everybody’s future, your interpretation is that I’ve grown materialistic and shallow. Meanwhile you’re keeping the flame alive writing a page every other day.”

“I’ve been writing because I’m a
writer
, that’s who I am, and might I add that I’ve made money doing it. I didn’t make you give up writing. It’s not my fault you decided the creative life equated to irresponsibility.”

“I don’t want to feel like that!” I screamed at him. “Don’t you get it! This wasn’t my idea at all!”

“Whose idea was it?” he asked.

“Yours!” I knew that was unfair. I said it anyway. I lobbed the word at him, hoping that, fair or not, it would knock him flat.

“Mine? Mine? You’re kidding, right? I’ve done nothing but suggest you keep writing.”

“Somebody had to change,” I said. “And it wasn’t going to be you.”

He pointed at me. “You,” he said, with a jab of his finger. He took a breath. “You chose to change.” He hit each word like a drum, the finger keeping time. “I will not let you blame me for that. When we met, your favorite movie was
Last Picture Show
. Now it’s
Spider-Man 2
. When we met, you wanted to stay up all night talking about Alice Munro. Now you go to bed at ten o’clock. I try to talk to you about what I’m reading and you say you want to watch TV. You’re a poet, for God’s sake. When’s the last time you read a poem? What’s the last poem you read? What do you care about now? What do we have to talk about?”

I stared at him. “You liked
Spider-Man 2
,” I said.

“That’s not the point,” he shouted. “You’re so conventional! That’s the point! And you were never conventional. That was one of the reasons I—” He stopped himself, but too late. I’d heard him start to make the word
loved
.

“Go ahead and say you don’t love me anymore,” I said. “You’re saying everything else.”

Slowly he lowered the accusing finger. He stepped forward. He softened his voice. “I do love you,” he said. “What I mean is that I miss you.” He reached out to touch me, his fingertips skimming my arm. I looked at my arm where he had touched it. “I know you’re my wife, you’re the mother of my children, but I miss
you
. And she—”

I snapped my gaze back to his face. He flushed. He hadn’t meant to invoke her. He hadn’t meant to say the dreaded word
she
. “She what?” I asked. “She was me?” I didn’t sound angry, though. I sounded lost. I snatched the keys from his startled hand, ran past him to his car. Maybe gravel shot up behind the tires as I hit the gas. If it didn’t, it should have.

I was inches from knocking on Smith’s door when I remembered Holly, who might be there, whom it was much easier to forget. So I looked in his living room window, through the space left between the sill and the bottom of the blinds, and I saw the TV, the couch, and Smith, alone. Why wasn’t she with him, curled up beside him watching
Last Picture Show
and talking about Alice Munro, as all good women should? I knocked on the window, and he jumped. He came to the door, and when it was open, he looked at me, his expression wary before he conquered it. He wished I wasn’t there. “Come in,” he said, but I shook my head.

“I just want to ask you something,” I said.

“What?”

“What do you really think of me?”

He stepped out on the porch, left the door open behind him. “You mean do I like you?”

“You said not so long ago that I was self-righteous and rude.”

He jammed his hands into his pockets, hunched his shoul
ders. “I was fired up,” he said. “I was being self-righteous and rude. That wasn’t a general character assessment.”

“Nathan says I’ve changed. That I don’t care about art anymore. Basically that I’m bad, bad, bad.”

He sighed. “What brought that on?”

“We just found out our neighbor is dying. We visited him this afternoon. And later I asked Nathan if he’d fixed our mailbox.”

“Oh,” he said. “I did that.”

“You did?”

“I noticed it was wobbly that day I was watching the kids.”

I stared at him, speechless. He’d fixed my mailbox. It was all I could do not to fall into his arms.

“But I have to say I don’t totally follow that story,” he said. “From your neighbor to the mailbox.”

“Nathan thought I was being shallow and cold, to want to talk about the mailbox after we visited our dying neighbor. He wanted me to be profound.”

“Nathan,” he said after a long moment, “is in pursuit of self-justification.”

“Is that what he’s in pursuit of?”

“Sarah,” he said. He took a breath. “I have to tell you something.”

“Is it what you really think of me?” It made me nervous that he was avoiding that question. I’d asked for his opinion hoping, of course, that he’d weigh in against Nathan’s claims, but I also wanted an honest assessment of my character. There’d always seemed to be a fairly clear relationship between what people thought of me and what I thought of myself, but in the wake of Nathan’s accusations I was cast into uncertainty. Was Nathan, the person who knew me
better than anyone, completely wrong? Or was I, indeed, conventional, materialistic, and cold, and only now cottoning on to that fact?

Some painful emotion contorted Smith’s features, but when he looked me full in the face his expression was sincere and calm. “I think you’re great,” he said. He held my eyes. I leaned in and kissed him on the lips. He didn’t move, his hands still in his pockets. He made a startled, muffled sound. I could have just given him a swift kiss, a plausibly friendship-and-gratitude-driven kiss, and then stepped back, but I kept my lips pressed against his too long, as though we were in a clinch out of a 1940s movie, where they just keep mashing their faces together and never get an inch closer. By the time I moved away there was nothing to do but say, “That didn’t go well.”

He took a breath. “We can’t do anything like that.” He swung his pointer finger back and forth between us in the universal sign for “you and me.”

“Well, we could,” I said. “Technically.”

“What I mean is that things are complicated enough already,” he said. “I do have a girlfriend, you know.” There was a silence while I refrained from saying something nasty about her. I wasn’t that far gone. Then he said, “I don’t think you really want to kiss me.”

“Why did I then?” I asked.

“You want to make Nathan jealous, maybe. Even the score. Or maybe you just want to feel something besides what you’ve been feeling. I know when my college girlfriend cheated on me, the first thing I did was make out with some random girl at a party.” He went on talking—“perfectly natural, blah blah blah”—but what I heard was, I don’t want you, and what I felt was humiliated. Maybe I
didn’t really want him. Maybe he was right, and all I wanted was a different emotion. But I felt like I wanted him, and I didn’t like being told I was wrong about my own feeling. Even if my explanation meant what had just happened was a humiliating rejection of a genuine come-on, while his explanation meant that it was just the honorable response to the unhinged behavior of a bereft and betrayed wife. Either way it was humiliating. He wasn’t attracted to me, or I was crazy, or possibly both.

I interrupted him. “Did I tell you I’m going out of town this weekend? The kids and I are going to my aunt’s. She lives in Wilmington. It’s a little cold for the beach, but it’ll still be nice to walk it, and maybe the kids can play in the sand…”