Husband and Wife (20 page)

“You’re going out of town?” He wore the expression of a patient with a bad diagnosis. “Oh,” he said.

“What?”

“This is all just too fucked up,” he said. “I really need to tell you something.”

“What?” I asked again, and when he hesitated, I said, “What?” again. I had time to guess what the something was, and I thought maybe he was going to confess that he did like me after all. That’s exactly how I put it in my head, that he
liked
me, as though I was in junior high circa 1986.

“That woman,” he said. “The woman who Nathan—”

I held up my hand. Stop. “I know who you mean,” I said.

“She’s coming here. This weekend. Or not here, exactly, but to Raleigh. She’s giving a reading at Quail Ridge.”

“Quail Ridge?” I repeated stupidly. I knew Quail Ridge, of course. Nice bookstore. I liked it. I would have gone there more often if it hadn’t been so far away. “Quail Ridge?” I said again.

He nodded.

“You think that’s why he said I should go out of town?” I said. I was awestruck by the magnitude of Nathan’s perfidy, beyond anything I could have imagined. I stood amazed, like Buffy at the Hellmouth, while a hole in the earth opened up beneath me. I looked down into nothingness. I couldn’t see the end. “Oh no,” I said, my voice small and insufficient. “Oh no.”

“He said you should go out of town?” Smith repeated, and whatever he said next sounded indignant, but I was falling and the words were wind rushing past my ears. I gripped his arm. He was in the middle of a sentence, but he stopped talking. He looked down at my hand. Then he lifted it, gently, and brought it up high, as if he was going to kiss it, and gave it a little squeeze. “I’m so sorry,” he said. He made as if to release my hand, but I tightened my fingers on his.

“Can you kiss me?” I asked. “Just kiss me one time.”

“I can’t,” he said.

“Please,” I said.

I’d never seen a person look more miserable. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “I know why you need that, but you have to find somebody else.”

“I need you to kiss me,” I said. “Just one time right now.”

He looked away, expelled a breath, looked back at me. “Just one time,” he said.

“That’s it,” I said. “I promise.”

He could have just pecked me on the lips and called it a day, but once Smith committed, he committed. He didn’t stint on the kiss. He brought his mouth to mine slowly, and his lips were soft and parted, and the kiss started out tender
and then got passionate. I lost myself in it, and, you know, I think he did, too, because his hands came up to cup my face. But it was as if that touch reminded him of everything that was wrong with this picture, because he brought those hands down to my shoulders and he pulled away, just as slowly as he’d approached. He closed his mouth. I should have recognized, when I looked in his face, that a door that had opened in the last week was now shut, once again, against me, that I’d reached the end of what he was willing to give me, what I’d be able to take. Instead I said his name in a pleading way, I tried to pull him back, so that he had to brace himself against me, and the embarrassment I felt at my own clingy desperation fueled my anger at Nathan, without whom none of this would have happened, without whom I wouldn’t even have this life. All the way home I cried, cried until my face was wet and sticky, my throat sore from the release of inhuman noise. She was me. That was why he’d done it. She was me, and I was gone.

When I got home that night Nathan was asleep on the couch. He didn’t wake. In the study I found the computer on. I e-mailed Rajiv.
Do you remember what you liked about me?

Within ten minutes I had my answer.
Everything.

I let Nathan think I was sticking to the plan. I packed. He loaded the suitcases into the car. I nursed Binx. I sent Mattie to the potty. And then we were ready to go. Nathan carried Binx outside and strapped him into the car while I was strapping in Mattie. “So when are you coming back?” he asked.

“Never,” I said, not looking at him.

“We’re not coming back?” Mattie asked. She squirmed, twisting the car-seat strap.

“Hold still,” I said.

“We’re never coming back?” she asked, volume increasing.

“I was just teasing Daddy,” I said. “Ha ha ha.” I snapped the last buckle into place.

“When are we coming back?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. I stepped away from the car, my hand on the door.

“Tell me!” she cried. “Tell me, tell me, tell me!”

Nathan said, “You’re coming back Sunday, sweetheart. On Monday Mommy has to go to work.”

I shut Mattie’s door. Over the top of the car I could see Nathan, and behind him the tree line where our backyard disappeared into the woods. “I’ve made a decision,” I said. “You can publish your novel.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“I’m sure,” I said. “Publish away.”

“You’re sure?”

“Don’t ask me again,” I said. “I’m sure.”

Relief on his face, and pleasant expectation. Like I’d told him everything would be better from now on. Like he’d believed it.

“You should also know that I haven’t been going to work,” I said. “I haven’t gone in a week.”

He gaped at me. “Where have you been going every day?”

“Shopping,” I said. “But don’t worry, I didn’t buy anything.” I climbed into the driver’s seat.

“Wait a minute,” he said. He pulled open the passenger
door and leaned inside. “Slow down. So did you quit? Are you serious?”

“I didn’t quit,” I said. “But I won’t be surprised if they fire me.” I watched the emotions come and go on his face. Ah, yes, Nathan. Confusion. Dismay. The nauseating lurch into a new perspective. And I enjoyed it. I
savored
it. Who doesn’t want to punish the person who’s punished them? Who doesn’t want to hurt the one they love? Isn’t that the essential problem with humanity, the kick we get out of spreading the misery around?

“I kissed Smith,” I said.

He flinched. “What?”

“I kissed him.” In terms of poetic meter, the sentence was an amphibrach, emphasis on the middle word. “Last night I drove to his house, and when he came to the door I kissed him.” Where in Nathan’s face, and how, would his response reveal itself? Would his eyes widen or narrow, would his mouth tighten or fall slack? He looked sick. He looked like he was going to throw up. Yes, the nauseating lurch. I reached over and grabbed the door handle. I pulled a muscle in my shoulder yanking the door out of his hand. “I had to tell you,” I said, though I wasn’t sure if he could still hear me. “I tell you everything.”

Mattie wanted to stop. She wanted to go home. She was hungry, she said. She wanted french fries. She wanted a different movie. She was hungry. I did not want to stop. Going, going, gone—that was right. That was the thing to be. My hands were made to grip the wheel. I explained that I wanted to get a couple hours down the road before we stopped, because we had to time our drive to avoid rush hour in the various cities we’d be passing through. She wanted to know what rush hour was. I told her it was a bunch of cars blocking your way. She said, “Why do the cars want to block your way?”

Because they’re motherfuckers, I thought. “Everybody just wants to get where they’re going,” I said.

We drove and drove, and Mattie kept up her complaints. Then Binx, who hated the car, decided to express that emotion, and launched into high-pitched screaming, which I knew from experience could last up to an hour. Usually when this happened Nathan was driving, and I was free to jiggle Binx’s car seat, or crawl into the back and talk to
him, let him hold my finger. Usually this didn’t help, and he went on screaming with his face red and his eyes frantic, but at least it made me feel like I was doing something. Now, with him sitting in a rear-facing seat, I couldn’t even catch his eye in the rearview mirror. I thought about pulling off at the next exit to nurse him, but in the past this had produced only a temporary cessation of hostilities. As soon as he sensed my intention to return him to the car seat, Binx would stiffen, arch, scream bloody murder again. Before long Mattie started to cry, too, and I gave up on my plan and pulled off at the next truck stop I saw.

“I want french fries!” Mattie said, and Binx continued to scream. I got out of the car and extricated him from his seat, and then I bounced him on my hip outside Mattie’s open door while he wiped his wet face on my shoulder and Mattie cried to be let out and begged for fries, and I got Helen on the phone. As soon as she answered, I said, “We’re coming there.”

“Great! When?”

“Now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m driving there now. The kids and I hit the road about two hours ago.”

“You’re serious?”

“We were supposed to go to the beach,” I said. “But I’m coming there instead. I took 40 West instead of 40 East.”

“Okay,” she said slowly. “I’m happy to have you, of course. But you know it’s a long way to Austin.”

“I don’t care,” I said. She was silent. She was much better than I was at silence. She could be silent for minutes at a time, and then she’d make the one neat quip that exposed the nervous verbosity of everyone else, including me, for the
nattering that it really was. I waited with some anxiety for her to speak again. Believe me, Helen could convince you you were being stupid if she wanted to. She had a particular expression of amused derision—sometimes that was all it took. But that was reserved for ill-considered comments, grandiose claims. True emotional distress brought out the maternal in her. The summer between our years of graduate school, I worked an exhausting waitressing job while Nathan spent six weeks at an artist’s colony I’d failed to get into, and after my shift I’d stop at Helen’s apartment, worn out with discouragement, and as soon as I sat down she’d pull a Coke from the fridge, pop the pull tab, and hand it to me, and I’d be revitalized by the sweet taste, the sizzle of carbonation on my tongue, her concern for me. Surely she knew how much I needed her to tell me she couldn’t wait to see me, and to go put fresh sheets on the guest bed.

She still hadn’t spoken. “Remember in grad school when you used to give me Coke?” I asked.

“This is a long way to come for a Coke,” she said.

“If you don’t want me, just say so,” I snapped, and realized only after the words had left my mouth that I’d said, “If you don’t want me,” when I should have said, “If you don’t want me to come.”

“Listen,” Helen said, “I want you to think a minute, that’s all. I’m thrilled to have you come. God knows you could stand to get away, and God knows you could use a hookup with Rajiv. Anything I can do for you I want to do. But you’re sleep-deprived and emotionally distraught and you’re talking about driving for two days in the car with two small children by yourself, which would be hell on wheels under the best of circumstances. I just want to be sure you’re up for that.”

“I can’t turn around, Helen,” I said.

Mattie wailed, “We’re going the wrong way!”

“I’ve got to go,” I said into the phone. “I’ll call you when we’re closer.” I hung up before she could dissuade me. “Listen, Mattie,” I said, unbuckling her with one hand. “We’re going on an adventure. This is going to be fun. When I was a grad student there was this guy who thought he was Kerouac—liked to go around with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and talk about the thrill of the asphalt rolling away beneath him—and I thought he was a big-time loser, but now I see his point. We’ll learn, we’ll grow, we’ll roll with the punches. You’ll see.”
All right
,
all right
, I was saying in my head.
All right
,
all right.

“What about gas prices?” she said.

So she had been listening yesterday, when I’d told Nathan I wanted to get away from him. I was traumatizing her. I could only hope that at three she was too young to retain any of this in memory, that in the years to follow I could make up for any future need for therapy I was creating now. Could I? Or would she always have a deep insecurity, the kind that sends people careening from one disastrous romance to the next? And why did I have to live my life obsessed with these kinds of concerns, this constant attempt to control the most uncertain of outcomes, my own effect on somebody else’s mind? Parents have always worried about the damage the world might do their children. When did they begin to obsess about the damage they themselves might do? And mightn’t that obsession itself lead them to do the damage? “Don’t worry,” I said. “I get a small rebate for gas on my credit card.”

“What does ‘roll with the punches’ mean?” she asked.

“It means we’ll be flexible,” I said. “It means Binx will
nap when he naps. We won’t worry about it. We’ll stop when we get tired. We’ll eat french fries. We’ll have an adventure.”

“Like Jack Care-whack?” she asked.

“You’re too little for a motorcycle,” I said. “Otherwise exactly the same.”

The line at the McDonald’s counter was long, which was bad news for Binx, who truly, truly wanted his milk. If Nathan had been there, he would have waited in the line with Mattie while I searched out the most secluded table and made an effort at modestly sliding Binx under my shirt. He usually foiled these efforts, grabbing the shirt and thrusting it upward just as I popped the clasp on the nursing bra, as if to say, “Hey, everybody! Get a load of this!” I found this frustrating, but I saw now that it wasn’t nearly as frustrating as trying to stave Binx off in a long, indecisive line of people torn between honey mustard sauce or barbecue. I could retreat to a table and make Mattie wait for food, but not only could she cry just as loudly as Binx, with the addition of words, she could get up and march her determined little sparkplug self back to the line, and with Binx attached to my nipple it would be difficult to stop her.

Binx threw himself sideways, aiming his mouth at my breast. When I straightened him back up, he screamed, and when I say he screamed I mean he made a sound like an eagle swooping in for the kill, or perhaps like an eagle who’d just been struck by a spear to the chest. I mean my ears rang. It was loud. As one, America’s travelers turned to look upon me and judge. Perhaps they thought I was pinch
ing him. Perhaps they thought I’d put burrs in his diaper. Perhaps they just wanted me to shut my baby up. I stared down a woman who looked like she was from Florida in the most egregiously stereotypical way—too tan, too skinny, too blond, and far too colorful in her splashy floral print. I imagined that she either had no children or had had them so long ago she’d succumbed to the pleasing fantasy that she’d always kept them one hundred percent under control, and I thought that if she kept on glancing at me and then muttering something to her husband, who studied the menu as though he’d never been in a McDonald’s before, I was going to march right over and offer to pay her a hundred bucks if she could keep Binx from making that sound for five minutes without smothering him. I put the words, “Fuck you, bitch,” into my gaze. Mattie tried to ask me something, but at the same moment Binx screamed again, drowning her out.

“What, Mattie?” I snapped, which was unfair, because she wasn’t the one screaming, but I did it anyway.

“I’m hung-gry,” she said. She grabbed the chain regulating the line and swung on it. “I want some fries.”

“What do you think I’m doing here, Mattie? We’re waiting in line.”

“But I’m hung-gry.”

“What would you like me to do?” I asked. “Would you like me to summon the fries out of midair?”

She considered this. “Yes,” she said.

“Well, too bad, I can’t. You have to be patient.”

“Why can’t you?”

“I can’t do magic,” I said.

“Why can’t you?”

“Why can’t
you
?”

“Because I’m a human,” she said.

“And I’m not?”

“You’re a mommy,” she said.

“Mommies are human,” I said.

She turned to contemplate me. “I want french fries,” she said.

When we finally had the food, I surveyed the place, Mattie clinging to my leg, Binx struggling to grab the tray, which I held, one-handed, at an awkward distance, one part of my mind picturing it crashing to the floor and this whole thing starting over. I was looking for a good spot to breast-feed and not finding one. There was an open table right by the line, where I’d be like a tourist attraction on the way to hamburgers and fries. There were open booths right by the enormous windows, where I’d be framed for every beer-bellied dude passing through the parking lot. I picked one of the booths and pointed Mattie toward it. She walked in front of me, stopping every couple feet for no particular reason. “Keep moving,” I said, Binx slipping a little in my grip. “Keep moving. Keep moving. That’s our mantra now. Keep moving.”

“Keep moving,” she repeated, and then she said it again and again, so that the words lost their grip on the sound and it became a
chugga-chugga, chugga-chugga
, like a train.

In the booth, Binx screamed while I wrestled with my shirt and my nursing bra, trying not to flash everyone in the place. I got the nipple out and brought his head to it, but he resisted, pushing back against my hand and screaming, drawing all eyes to my exposed left breast. I stuck the nipple in his open mouth and he screamed some more, eyes squinched up, face reddening, until I squeezed my breast with my other hand and milk shot against his tongue. Then
he stopped crying, opened his eyes, and began to suck, unclenching his fist so that he could knead the top of my breast. “Oh,” I said, in my bad British accent, “jolly good, then. Sorry about that.”

“Why did you say that?” Mattie asked.

“I was pretending to be Binx,” I said.

“But why did you say jolly good then?”

“I was pretending that Binx was British.”

“Binx is not British,” she said hotly. “He’s a baby.”

I thought about explaining that babies could be British, but decided instead to cede the point. “Touché,” I said, and when she wouldn’t stop asking me what
touché
meant and then, after I used the word
rejoinder
for the hell of it, what a rejoinder was, I reminded her there was a toy inside her Happy Meal, and she wanted to know why. I asked her why did she think, and she said, “Because you summoned it out of midair.”

I said, “So you do think Mommy can do magic?” but she had a mouthful of fries and didn’t answer. I had a couple bites of salad, dropped a piece of lettuce on Binx’s head, wiped the salad dressing off his temple and then noticed that some of it had gotten on his leg as well. Or, no, that wasn’t salad dressing on his leg—it was mustard, a watery yellow-brown. Except it wasn’t mustard. “Oh, shit,” I said.

“Shit?” Mattie asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Lots of it.” Because it wasn’t just on Binx’s leg, it was halfway up his back and seeping through the fabric of his onesie. And I saw, when I lifted him away, protesting, struggling back toward my breast, that it was on my leg as well, that it was on the booth, that it was dripping onto the floor. He’d exploded.

I sent Mattie to get napkins, both of us nervous as she
navigated farther from the table, looking impossibly small. She brought back two—not enough, but I couldn’t send her out again. I wiped off my hand, bits of napkin sticking to my skin, and then I just stuck the napkins on his leg and left them there. I tried to lift up and over the mess in the booth without adding to the mess on myself, and then I picked up my bag and put it over my shoulder, Binx pressed to my side, sticking us together with that yellowish paste. I carried him to the bathroom, Mattie walking just ahead while I barked orders at her like an animal trainer and tried not to notice the wet cling of my jeans against my thigh. Inside the bathroom I put Binx in the sink and pulled the pants off and the onesie over his head, dragging the mess, despite my efforts, up to the back of his head, and then I dropped those clothes in the other sink. Two teenage girls walked up and then backed away, as if from a rotting corpse. “Remember this,” I wanted to say. “Remember this, and use birth control.”

The diaper came off next, and I pegged it into the nearest trash can—
swoosh!
I thought—and then I washed Binx in the sink with pink liquid soap as he squirmed and slipped and reached for the faucet, pushing it toward the hot side just as I grabbed his hand. I held him there as tightly as I could with one hand while I wriggled out of my own shirt and rinsed it in the sink on the other side, trying only to rinse out the mess but ending up soaking the whole damn thing, because I had to move quickly to tighten my grip on him. I squeezed the shirt out as best I could and contorted my way back into it. Because he was screaming now, not his horrible death-knell scream, but the piteous one that spoke to me of lifetime trauma, I picked him up and held him naked against my wet shirt, hoping he wouldn’t pee
on me, while I put each tennis shoe up on the counter, one at a time, to untie and remove it. Then I unsnapped and unzipped and pushed down my jeans with one hand, standing dripping and half-naked in bare feet on the McDonald’s bathroom floor. I rinsed the jeans, too, and then reversed the process, the jeans a struggle to get on with the fabric heavy with water, the shoes impossible to tie with one hand, so I just left the laces dangling. Mattie didn’t know how to tie shoes yet. How many years away from learning was she? I should have taught her ahead of the curve. “Mattie,” I said, “do you think you can tuck my laces inside my shoe?”