Husband and Wife (22 page)

“What happens?” I asked. “Do you do the rub-and-
touch thing, and he gives you that look, that oh-no-not-now look?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s exactly the reverse. It’s exactly the look I’ve given.” She demonstrated, her expression a wary recoil. “It’s exactly the look you’ve given, I bet.”

“Why do we all give the exact same look?” I said. “It’s depressing.”

“Depressing is getting the look,” she said. “It’s my job to give the look.”

“Nathan likes to pretend he just wants to snuggle up, you know, but then his hands start creeping—” I heard my use of the present tense and stopped. For a moment I’d forgotten I was now outside of the normal conversations of wives, the complaints about husbands that again and again reveal the surprise of our commonality, the ordinary sameness of our lives. The looks we all give. The arguments we all have.

“I guess it gives me more sympathy for them, to be the rejected one,” she said. “But I’d like to go back to being the woman. If I’m going to get the look, I think he should do the child care.”

Daniel was a good-looking guy—he had bright green eyes and the lithe build of an actor—and it was odd to picture him with that look on his face, as I did as soon as I saw him. He was waiting at a table when we got to the restaurant. Helen and I had sat on the couch a long time feeling already exhausted by the steps necessary to departure—the trips to the potty and the diapering and the gathering of bottles and bibs and sippy cups and toys. He expressed no annoyance at our late arrival. He had two high chairs waiting, and crayons and kids’ cups of milk, and after he kissed the tops of his children’s heads, Helen’s
mouth, my cheek, he said he’d gone ahead and ordered assorted items off the children’s menu so the kids wouldn’t have to wait. These days I counted such thoughtfulness as a seduction technique. Helen seemed jostled out of her bad mood. When she leaned across Ian to kiss Daniel again, I found, suddenly, that I could hardly look at them. For the first time it occurred to me that it might be difficult to be around them, engaged in their own version of the more or less happy life I had so recently thought I had. We had so much in common, Helen and I, we had for so long, and now my life had jolted right off the track that hers continued to chug along.

They kissed. She was talking to me, but just for a moment she let her hand rest on his shoulder. He fed her a bite of his food. They retained the necessary ability to move in and out of irritation and companionability, offense and forgiveness, distance and intimacy, the ability that keeps a marriage going, the ability I perhaps no longer had. To know something and yet live as though we don’t know it, the way we all do, friends, parents and children, husbands and wives. How many secrets had I been told about the marriages of my friends and my friends’ friends? The couple who shoved each other in a drunken argument. The couple who confessed to each other they were sorry they’d ever had the children. The husband who told his wife he was paying the bills, until she came home to an eviction notice on their apartment door. The one who threatened suicide. I glimpsed the depths of other people’s lives, in which they nearly drowned, these wives who told me these stories, and then we all struggled back, gasping, to the surface. How do you know when to leave? Is it after one drunken shove? After two? Does it matter who shoved who first?

I called Nathan after the kids went to bed. Helen and Daniel were still upstairs with their children. I paced the kitchen while his phone rang, my heart hammering in my throat. “Sarah?” Nathan said. I heard relief in his voice. Relief and gratitude. I was both sorry and glad for the way I’d made him worry.

“Hi,” I said.

“Are you OK?” he said. “Are the kids OK?”

“Everybody’s fine.”

“Where are you?”

“Austin.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“Why would you go all the way there?’

I shrugged, though he couldn’t see me. “You wanted me to be unconventional.”

“That’s not exactly what I meant.”

“Well,” I said. “That’s what you got.”

There was a long silence. Was he struggling, on the other end of the phone, against the urge to yell at me? Or was he just stunned? “We’re at Helen’s,” I said.

Another silence. “How is Helen?” he asked, finally.

“She’s fine. She’s good. She got mugged last week.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but she’s fine. Her foot is scraped up. She actually refused to let go of her bag and the guy dragged her.”

“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me,” he said.

“That’s our Helen,” I said. In the silence that followed I felt certain we were both thinking the same thing, hearing the echo of that loaded word
our
. “How’s Kate?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. He sounded miserable. “I didn’t see her.”

“Oh. I thought that was the whole reason I was going out of town. So you could see her.”

“I didn’t want you to find out she was here.”

“Obviously.”

“No, I mean, she was insisting on seeing me, and I was afraid…”

“That she’d boil my bunny?”

“No,” he said.

“But you were planning to see her, right? Before I left.”

“Not to…not for any…” He took a breath. “I just wanted to make sure I didn’t have any feelings for her. I wanted to know why…why I let things happen.”

“Things?” I said. “Things with an
s
?”

“If that’s why I let
something
happen,” he said. “It was only one time.”

“Only one time,” I repeated, and he met me with silence again. “I don’t know whether to believe anything you say anymore. Do you know that I just used to assume you were telling me the truth? And now I can’t?”

“I’m sorry.”

“That might be the worst thing about this, the thought that maybe everything you’ve ever told me was a lie.”

“It wasn’t,” he said. “You know it wasn’t.”

Everything that I’m trying to achieve, I’m trying to do with you or for you
, he’d said once, when we were making up after a fight.
I want you to think well of me. Without you my accomplishments don’t mean a thing
. “Did you tell them to go ahead with the book?”

“Yes.”

“So that’s it, then.”

“That’s what you told me to do. And then you left. I don’t know if we’re going to have any other source of income. And I can’t keep jerking them around.”

“I know all that.”

“So what do you mean, that’s it then?”

“I mean that’s it. Everyone will know.”

“It’s fiction, Sarah. I mean, yes, OK, but essentially it’s fiction.”

“Apparently,” I said.

“Apparently what?”

“It depends on what the definition of
it
is.”

He sighed. “I’m just doing what you told me to do,” he said. “I don’t know what else—”

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” I said, and I hung up the phone. I stood there in somebody else’s kitchen, in somebody else’s house, in somebody else’s town. He wanted to know if he had feelings for her. He thought he might. He’d said nothing to suggest he’d decided he didn’t. He hadn’t even asked me when I was coming home.

I heard Helen’s footsteps on the stairs. I put the phone down on the counter and went to meet her. “Let’s go get cigarettes,” I said. “Let’s sit outside and smoke. Or let’s go to a bar and sit at the bar and smoke and drink martinis.”

“Martinis?” Helen said. She picked up the remote and collapsed on the couch, and half an hour later we were still there, staring at the television with the same stunned expressions that had earlier decorated our children’s faces. Daniel had yet to emerge from putting Ian to bed, and Helen said he’d probably fallen asleep himself. We were watching the news, and the news was bad. “Everybody talks about how complacent Americans are,” Helen said. “But I didn’t really
grasp that until lately. How complacent we’ve been. What if Daniel lost his job? What would we do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. My throat was tightening, tightening. “Can we watch something else?”

She clicked the TV off with a sigh, tossed the remote on the coffee table.

“Cigarettes,” I said. “Don’t they sound good?”

“Can’t,” she said. “Was too hard to quit.”

“The thought made you lose your pronouns,” I said.

“Daniel would kill me,” she said. “Daniel in a state of self-righteous anger is a terror to behold.”

“He seems so easygoing,” I said. “It’s hard to picture.”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “You have no idea.”

“No,” I said. I just didn’t know Daniel, did I. Not like I knew Helen. Not like she knew Nathan, the three of us bonded by common experience, classes and classmates and parties and late-night pancakes, the sort of drink- and pot-fueled conversations that make you feel you’ve traveled the highways and byways of somebody else’s mind. “You seem happy together,” I said.

“I think we’re a pretty good fit.” She sat up, adjusted a pillow behind her back, snuggled back down. “You can check the liquor cabinet and see what we’ve got, if you want a drink.”

“I don’t want to drink by myself,” I said. “I wanted mutual debauchery.”

“Ooh,” she said. “I could make iced lattes.”

The last thing an insomniac needs is an evening latte, but I said OK, because she’d offered it with the same anticipatory excitement with which she used to offer me a joint. She smiled more easily when she was stoned, her eyes got small and her grin got wide, and when she was drunk her skin flushed, redness creeping up her face to spread along
her hairline, and I knew those things even though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her stoned or drunk.

“I got an espresso maker,” she said. “It’s awesome.” The thought of the coffee had rejuvenated her. She walked into the kitchen with a bounce in her step, and I followed, thinking of grad school, afternoons at our favorite café, coffee and cigarettes, a melancholy mood we both wished away and welcomed. Nathan never smoked, but he did occasionally join us for coffee. “In the time you two have spent bitching,” he said once, “you could have written a poem or three.”

“When’s the last time you wrote a poem?” I asked Helen now, leaning on her kitchen counter while she fiddled with her shiny new machine.

“Like, worked on one, or finished one?”

“Either.”

“I worked on one yesterday,” she said. “I finished one last week.”

That was not the answer I’d expected. “Oh,” I said.

She scooped espresso beans into a grinder, counting under her breath. “You sound surprised.”

“I guess I assumed you didn’t have time to write.”

“I didn’t, until we hired the babysitter.”

“You have a babysitter?”

“I didn’t tell you that? She comes three mornings a week, and I go off to a coffee shop and write.”

“When did that start?”

“About six months ago.” She pulled two tall clear glasses from the counter. “It was weird at first. It felt really weird to sit and do nothing, you know? To sit and think. To pay someone ten dollars an hour so I could sit and think. I still feel guilty on the days when I don’t actually produce anything.”

“That’s part of the process.”

“I know,” she said. “But it didn’t use to cost me ten dollars an hour.”

I wanted to ask more questions—I knew I
should
ask more questions, how it was going, what she was working on. But I was still struggling with the inaccuracy of my assumptions, my notion that we had similar failures of ambition or energy, the feeling of inadequacy produced by the revelation that we weren’t, after all, the same. Ian had been born three months before Mattie, and Helen had been one of my primary sources of support and reassurance. It was OK that I sometimes cried for no reason. It was understandable that when older women urged me to enjoy this time, I felt a flash of anger. It was normal to find the first months of motherhood so hard. Making chitchat with other mothers on the playground, I’d found myself retreating from the ones who refused to complain, the ones who did not seem to feel like a bomb had gone off in the middle of their lives. If they could stand around glowing with love like a figure in a Mary Cassatt painting, then what the hell was wrong with me?

Helen was holding out the glasses to me. They were still empty. I didn’t understand.

“Can you put ice in these?” she asked, and so I took them, and obeyed. As I stood at the freezer, ice cubes sticking to my hand, she asked, “So what do you want to do about Rajiv?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I told him you were coming here.”

“Oh,” I said. “You did?”

“I thought you wanted me to. He really wants to see you. I said maybe we could have him over for dinner tomorrow night.”

“Here? Really? But I don’t know if I want the kids to meet him.”

“They wouldn’t be meeting him as your boyfriend. It’d be just like meeting us.”

“I know, but it’s also, I don’t want to mix up flirty mode and maternal mode. I don’t want to be thinking, ‘Oh, baby. Now I have to go breast-feed.’ I want him to see me without the kids.”

“You want to be Sarah, not somebody’s mother.”

“Not somebody’s mother,” I said. “Not somebody’s wife.”

“Wife,” she said. “I hate that word.”

“It’s not a good word,” I said. “Girlfriend was better.”

“I can watch the kids tomorrow night. You could meet him out somewhere.”

“That would feel so datelike,” I said. “Is that too much?”

“Well, the other option is to go to his house,” she said.

“You mean just show up there?”

“Show up there, say, ‘Hello, I’m here for the sex,’ and ask him where the bedroom is,” she said. “What are we talking about here? Did you drive across the country for this guy or what?”

I brought her the glasses, and she dumped in the dark espresso, the white milk. We watched the colors swirl. Did I really drive across the country for Rajiv? Was that why I had done it? I didn’t know. But if so, wasn’t that—really, truly—a little on the crazy side? “What
are
we talking about here?” I asked.

“Sex?” she said. “Marriage? Motherhood? No longer being twenty-two?” She handed me my glass, lifted hers. “Cheers,” she said, and we clinked.