Husband and Wife (24 page)

“Are you okay?” Rajiv asked.

“Fine,” I said, and though I coughed out the word he seemed to accept that response. I held the cigarette and watched the smoke rise upward and hoped he wouldn’t notice if I didn’t inhale again. Why did I think I had to pretend
for him? I thought that to get what I wanted I had to be the old me, and at that moment I remembered the old me as one in tune with the rhythms of smoking, drinking, flirting. The old me was the girl in the maze, the girl he’d loved a little, and even though I was five years and ten pounds and two kids heavier than that girl, I wanted him to see her when he looked at me. I wanted to be her. She hadn’t had a husband who’d chosen another over her. She’d been a poet. She hadn’t had a husband at all. Rajiv didn’t ask me about Nathan, or recent events, or what I planned to do next, questions surely almost anyone else would have posed. Only later did it occur to me that he wanted to pretend, too.

What did we talk about? I have no idea. It was a stream of pointless chatter. I was talking in a nervous, hiccupping way, my sentences stop-and-start, my voice rushed and high-pitched, my laugh too quick and too loud. All the alcohol I’d consumed seemed to be rushing through my head like whitewater.

“You know,” he said after a while, and I knew by the way he hesitated that something honest was coming. “I thought about you a lot, after the last time I saw you.”

“You wrote great e-mails,” I said.

“Oh, those.” He grinned. “I slaved over those.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Hours and hours!” he said. “Checking every word in the thesaurus. Because there might be a better word.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, and he gave me his secret smile. “Well, I have a little microphone right here”—I touched my ear—“telling me what to say.”

“Interesting. Who’s on the other end?”

“Hmmm. I haven’t thought this joke out enough. James Bond? The president? Shakespeare?”

He laughed. “I can’t imagine a more schizophrenic combination than that.”

“One minute it’s poetry, then it’s spy talk, then it’s a bunch of nonsense about coexisting with fish.”

“Pretty much,” he said. He inhaled, exhaled. I watched the smoke drift upward. “So what I’m gearing up to tell you,” he said, “is that I made a short film about you.”

“This time you sound serious.”

“This time I am serious. It was sort of a losing-the-dream-girl thing, but, you know, the importance in your mind, the ongoing importance…” He sighed. “Now I’m babbling.”

“No, sir,” I said. “I know babbling, and that was not babbling.” I was inches from saying more about babbling, the sounds Binx made, and then I remembered, no babies, not with him.

“Anyway,” he said.

“Anyway,” I said. “Can I see it?”

He laughed. “Oh God no, it’s terrible. I’m embarrassed by it now. It’s really overwrought.”

“I don’t think of you as capable of overwrought. Or,” I said, remembering, “of obvious.”

“Obvious,” he repeated. He dropped his cigarette and rubbed it out. “Yeah, but sometimes I am.” He looked up. And there was the intense eye contact. And there, oh no, was the nervous giggle.

“I don’t think of myself as a dream girl,” I said, and hoped that it was only to myself I sounded high-pitched and breathless.

“Maybe that’s what makes you one.”

“Hmmmm,” I said. “If that were the only requirement a lot more people would be dream girls.”

He laughed. “There are other requirements,” he said.

“What are they?”

He smiled. He stepped closer. He didn’t answer me. Nathan liked to explain things. We had that in common. If he had been the one with me in the garden, he would have made an effort to explain. He might have listed my good qualities. He might have made a joke about big bazongas. He might have done both, because we had in common, too, a tendency to conclude a bout of sincerity with a joke. You couldn’t just let the emotion lie there, all naked and newborn and strange.

Rajiv explained nothing. Rajiv, I was beginning to see, had a weakness for the inexplicable, the ineffable, the sweet abandonment to things beyond our ken. He kissed me. Though I responded, for a moment my thoughts hovered with Nathan: Did Nathan really want to undercut emotion with a joke? Or was that just me? Had I made him uncomfortable with sentiment, the way he always made me late?

Rajiv was kissing me. I stopped thinking about Nathan. I stopped thinking about anything.

“Your mouth is all red,” Helen said.

Rajiv was gone, Daniel upstairs with the kids. Rajiv had left not long after we’d returned from our kissing interlude, for which I was grateful, because it was a struggle to stand there making chitchat with him and Helen when all I wanted to do was touch him again.

“Really?”

“Mmm-hmmm,” Helen said. “Actually, half your face is red. He must be quite the kisser.”

I went to the mirror. She was right. I looked like a teenage
girl who’d been out in the car with her boyfriend, my mouth bright red and the skin around it pink, like I’d worked my lips so hard they’d dissolved into the rest of my face. You just don’t kiss that vigorously once you’ve been together for ten years. You go much faster to the sex. “Wow,” I said.

She laughed. She seemed a little excited herself—if you’re married, and you’re faithful, you get your thrills vicariously. “So what happened?”

“He kissed me.”

“Well, your face tells that story,” she said. “But what did he say?”

“He said he’d made a film about me, but it was terrible.”

“Huh,” she said. “Never saw that one, I don’t think. Unless you were the carny in the one about the amusement park.”

“The carny, huh? Is that what I am to you? Because your friend used the words
dream girl
.”

“And you just bloomed like a flower, didn’t you?”

“That kind of talk—it’s like a drug, Helen.”

She started reminiscing about a guy she’d dated in college who’d been prone to courtly speeches about how wonderful she was. “But his metaphors were bad,” she said.

I was only half listening, my mind still on Rajiv. I wanted to ask her if he was so romantic, so certain, about every woman he dated. I suspected the answer would be yes, because if Helen thought his feelings for me were as revelatory and particular as he claimed, surely she’d be worried about the damage I might do him, so obviously indulging the urge to make myself feel better. But I didn’t want to hear a yes. So I didn’t ask.

“So what now?” Helen asked.

“Well, I like him,” I said. “Really, you know, for a lot of the things I first liked about Nathan, the way we connect about books and movies and music, the fact that he gets my jokes.”

Helen said nothing, but she looked at me. Oh, she looked.

“It’s not weird,” I said. “We’re attracted to the same qualities over and over. Daniel’s got some things in common with the other guys you’ve dated.”

“Sure,” she said. “But you don’t want to go after Rajiv because you want to get back some version of Nathan.”

“Get back, or get back at?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Either one.”

My cell phone began to play “Family Affair,” which meant Nathan was calling me. The sound was muffled and seemed to come from behind Helen. She leaned forward, pulling a couch cushion with her, and my phone tumbled out. One of the kids must have been playing with it. I looked at the screen, though I knew who the caller was. “It’s Nathan,” I said.

She made an “uh-oh” face. “Are you going to answer?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I closed my hand over the phone.

“I’m going to go check on Daniel,” she said.

The phone vibrated once more in my hand and then stopped. The sound of the ring had been like an alarm clock snatching me out of a dream. Nathan. Oh, right. My husband. The whole reason I was here. What was he thinking, what was he doing, while I was outside in the arms of another man? I was sure he missed the children. A few weeks before all this we’d gone to the movies, a rare night out, and there was a scene in which a man leaned close to a baby, letting the baby grab and squeeze his nose, and the baby looked
exactly the age of Binx, who loved to grab our noses, look at us inquisitively when he did so, then laugh. As I watched, my eyes filled up with tears, as they did these days at any media mention of children—happy children, sick children, missing children—and I could feel the goony, lovesick smile on my face. I glanced at Nathan. He watched the onscreen baby with the same smile, and the love I’d been feeling for Binx wrapped itself around Nathan. We loved each other, we loved our children, and we were of the same mind, and at that moment those states of being seemed to stretch forward unstoppably into the future. Why wouldn’t we always feel what we felt at that moment? Why not?

I called him back. Where before he’d been chastened and prone to silence, now he’d worked himself up to angry. “You haven’t called,” he said.

And I said, “I’ve been busy,” my own anger spiking in response. Austin was my world now, however temporarily, Helen and Daniel and Rajiv the people who populated it. Nathan—who was Nathan, this asshole on the other end of the phone? Not the man who’d so recently kissed me in the garden, that was for sure. Not the man who’d called me his dream girl. This voice on the phone, sharp with accusation—it belonged to someone very far away. I was here and he wasn’t, and if experience is entirely the mind’s perception of the moment, then he didn’t even exist.

“Busy doing what? What’s going on there?”

“What do you mean?” I went cold.

“I mean, how long are you planning to stay? When are you bringing my children home?”

I didn’t answer. I had no idea. I couldn’t imagine. I couldn’t look past the next day.

“Hello? Are you listening to me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Because I’m not exactly talking about what I had for lunch.”

“No,” I said. He was referring to an argument we’d had a month before, or maybe longer. “No, you’re not.” I paused.

“Hello?” he asked. “Are you there?”

“I’m here,” I said. “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?” And then I hung up the phone. How strange that he was still thinking about that argument, given everything that had happened since. I’d been having a bad day and he’d called me at the office, interrupting me in the middle of some task that had, at the time, seemed important. He’d started telling me about his morning, then he took a breath and I assumed he’d finished, and I said OK, I’d talk to him later. “I wasn’t done,” he said.

“What,” I snapped, “you weren’t finished telling me what you had for lunch?”

Because he had a tendency to do that, you know. If he had half a can of lentil soup, I knew about it, and, alas, I didn’t particularly care. He likes details, Nathan. He thinks a story should start at the beginning—of course, of course, but many times we’ve differed on what the beginning is. To understand the story I’m telling now, he might think you needed to know about the first girl he loved, what she wore to the prom, what her face looked like when she broke his heart. He once told me that the driveway of his childhood home sloped down at a thirty-seven-degree angle. Sometimes we could laugh about his predilection for minutiae, but not that time when he called me. That time he was furious. That time he said, “You could at least pretend to give a shit about how I spend my time.”

I said, “I do.”

He said, “You do give a shit, or you do pretend?”

“Both,” I said, which was the accurate, but unwise, answer, and the fight went on from there, to such places as whether it took longer to do the laundry (my job) or the dishes (his). If there’s anything we’ve learned from the endless parsing of everything, it’s that nothing is ever about what it seems to be about. Depending on what the meaning of
is
is. There’s subtext to the subtext, every argument a rabbit hole. Do we know why we’re angry? Do we know what we’re fighting about?

“You are self-absorbed and inconsiderate,” he said, and I said, “Funny, that’s what I was thinking about you.”

For every good memory there’s a bad one. And the reverse. The reverse is also true.

It had been so long since I’d lived outside the regimented world of work that I still found it disconcerting to wake up on a weekday morning without any sense of what the day would hold. Was it possible I missed going to work? That I liked my job after all? Yes, it was possible. There was satisfaction, wasn’t there, in the daily accomplishment of tasks, in the neat organization of files and spreadsheets. And I missed Tanya and Kristy, who continued to believe, or at least pretended to, that my family and I had been struck down by the rotavirus. “Nasty stuff, the rotavirus,” Kristy said when I talked to her that morning, and I agreed that it was. “Don’t come in and give it to me,” she said, and I promised I wouldn’t. It never ceased to amaze me, how easily all of us were fooled.

“How are things there?” I asked.

“Falling apart without you,” she said. And then she laughed.

“Hey,” I said.

“No, seriously, we miss you. I’m working a lot harder
than usual. And Tanya and John are pissed at each other. He wants her to print out his e-mails and put them on his desk, then he dictates his answers for her to type. Then she’s supposed to print them out so he can correct them, then make his corrections, then send the e-mails from his account. I am not making this up.”

“Jesus.” I could hear her sucking on a drink, probably Bojangles sweet iced tea. The straw made that pool-draining sound, a squeak against the plastic lid. I could picture her pulling it in and out, looking for more tea. “Seriously, Kristy,” I said. “Refills are free.”

“Shut it,” she said. “I’m only allowed one. That’s the diet I’m on. I’m fat as a cow.”

“You’re pregnant,” I said.

“Yeah, I noticed,” she said. “Plus, I can’t be running off to Bojangles every five minutes, what with having to do your job. If you don’t come back soon, Tanya might start sending crazy e-mails from John’s account.”

“Like what?”

“Dear Professor Buttface,” Kristy said. “Please join me in an experiment to enlarge my penis.”

“Do you think he could get the NIH to fund that?” I asked.

“He probably already has,” Kristy said. “They’re probably spending half their day enlarging their penises.”

“Who’s they?” I asked.

“The faculty. The professors so-and-so.”

“What about the women?” I asked.

“Oh shit, it’s John,” Kristy said. “I’ve got to go.” She hung up, just like that. She had to work, you know. And what did I have to do? Sit around with Helen drinking coffee, idly debating what to do next. And that was strange. It
was strange, walking a wide trail through a park, pushing the babies in their strollers while the older kids ran ahead, without the beat of my to-do list in the back of my brain:
return e-mails
,
weed garden
,
make phone calls
,
clean stove
. Around us college kids played Frisbee golf, and I watched them, their laughter, their investment in the game, the way nothing about them suggested that they might have homework or troubles waiting at home. I’d spent my high school and college years, and then my twenties, trying to get somewhere, and then at some point, without quite noticing the change, I’d begun to assume there was nowhere left to get. I had two kids and a job and a marriage and a house. I lived on a plateau and went around busily maintaining it. Now here was a new reality, the path ahead disappearing under golden trees, like paths do in fantasy novels, on their way to magic and swordplay. What would happen next in my life? In the world? I couldn’t even pretend I knew. We never really know, do we, and yet we manage to live as though we do, as though there is some permanence to our routines of waking and breakfast and school and work and afternoon coffee and television and bedtime and the same person sleeping every night on the other side of the bed. What a shock it is, that there is no permanence. But it has to be a shock, right? Without the magic trick of belief, it would be too hard to live.

“So tomorrow the babysitter comes,” Helen said.

“Oh, right,” I said.

“Do you want me to ask if she can watch your kids, too? I mean, you’d have to pay her.”

“I don’t know. What would I do?”

Helen shrugged. “You could go to the coffee shop with me and work.”

“Hmmmm,” I said. “What are you working on?”

“A series of poems about my parents—hey!” Ian was waving a large stick in the air, dangerously close to Mattie. “Stop that right now, or no TV time!” Ian shot her a mutinous look but dropped the stick.

“Do you have trouble going back and forth between TV time and work? I mean, switching from kid mode to writing mode?”

“Um…” She was still watching Ian, who lingered near the stick, looking back from time to time to see if she was still watching. “Don’t you dare,” she called to him. Ian turned and stomped off down the path. Mattie ran after him, and we quickened our pace to keep them in view.

“Kids just make you so present in the moment,” I said. “When I’m with them, I feel like I’ve never been so attuned to what’s going on around me in my life. Because you have to be. You always have to have half your mind on them.”

“That’s true,” Helen said. “Some days I can’t concentrate, and instead I’m wondering how Ian’s doing at school, or whether the babysitter remembered to give Abby her morning snack. But there were always days when I couldn’t concentrate. I was just thinking about different stuff.”

“But the ability to concentrate is still there,” I said. “You can still lose yourself in your work.”

“I found it harder when I was still breast-feeding,” she said. “Maybe it was the hormones. But now, yeah, that’s back, like it used to be. On good days I look up and see it’s time to go and I have no idea where the hours have gone. I enjoy the experience even more than I used to because that kind of time, when you can just get lost in your mind, is so rare these days.”

“I don’t know if I can do it anymore,” I said. “Let go like that.”

For a moment we walked in silence. Binx had fallen asleep, his head lolling to one side like he had no bones in his neck. Abby sucked contentedly on the collar of her jacket, watching the world go by. The older kids were chasing each other, laughing, around a tree. Helen said, “You know how you said you used to confuse the art and the life? Maybe you’re still being too romantic about your work, like you have to live a certain way to produce it. Maybe you’re making it black and white: you have this kind of life or you have this kind of life.”

“When would I write?” I asked. “I’ve been at work, or I’ve been with the kids. And don’t say at night, because I know you know I don’t have the energy for that.”

“I get why you haven’t been writing. I’m just saying you act like you’ve given it up for good, and that I don’t get. What you need is time, but you seem to think it’s something more than that. It’s like you’ve bought into the idea that a mother can’t also be an artist. Or shouldn’t be.”

“I just find it hard to go from breast milk and peekaboo and diapers to, you know, bigger things.”

“But that’s saying breast milk and peekaboo and diapers aren’t bigger things, or don’t represent bigger things, which seems like a very male point of view. A fixation on your mother is a subject for literature, but actually being a mother isn’t? Well, guess who set those rules? If obsessive interest in your own penis wins you the Pulitzer, then what’s wrong with obsessive interest in your own breasts?”

“Are you writing about your breasts?”

“No, but I could,” she said. She glanced down at them. “At this moment I can’t think of what I would say.”

“Poopy!” Abby suddenly shouted from her stroller. “Poopy, poopy, poopy!”

Helen sighed. “That’s Abby’s contribution,” she said.

“She’s a fan of the trochee,” I said.

Helen pulled off the trail and unfolded a changing pad from her diaper bag. I corralled the older kids, I joked, I smiled. But I was hurt and angered by this characterization of myself, as submitting to the views of the oppressor, surrendering my identity. I’d been busy—I’d been, often, overwhelmed—and so the activity for which I had no time and made no money had fallen by the wayside. Did Helen agree with Nathan, that I no longer cared about art, that my values had changed? It was as though I made them uncomfortable not writing anymore, like my quitting called into question the necessity of the whole enterprise, like they no longer quite knew who I was.

Helen’s cell phone rang while she was in the middle of changing Abby’s diaper. She held Abby’s feet in the air with one hand and picked up the phone with the other, tucking it between her ear and her shoulder. I wasn’t really listening, watching the kids planting a stick in the ground, talking earnestly about how it would grow into a tree, and then suddenly Helen said, “Here,” and thrust the phone at me. I assumed it was Nathan. I’d left my cell phone at home, and maybe he was no longer willing to wait for my calls. I braced myself and said, “Hello,” and a voice much deeper than Nathan’s said, “Hey, lady,” and I knew it was Rajiv.

“Lady” was what he’d called me in the e-mails he’d written after the visit when he’d kissed me, e-mails always addressed
Hey lady
just like he’d said and which I’d been able to hear him saying when I read the words on the screen—
lady
not with an angry edge, the
lady
of a New York City construction worker, but with a caress. The first time I met him he had a girlfriend, and I’d heard him refer to her as
“my lady,” and so when he used the word for me I saw it as a coded endearment, just one small pronoun away from being his.

“Hi,” I said. It wasn’t Nathan. Thank God it wasn’t Nathan. Why wasn’t it Nathan?

“I’ve been thinking about you all day,” Rajiv said.

“You have?”

“And all last night.”

“I’m with my children,” I said, “or I’d ask what you were thinking.”

He laughed. “Do you think you could come by tonight?”

“Tonight?” I looked at Helen, and she nodded.
Tonight.
A word that rang with anticipation, that spoke of living in the now. A word for Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, for Fred and Ginger, for pop songs, for swooning into his arms despite everything, because of the stars and his eyes and of course the champagne. A word for what I wanted. “Sure,” I said.

The house was one of those low-slung southwestern houses that looks like it’s all roof. It was set back from the road and had a big front yard, the grass brown and crisped. Near the house, a red hammock was strung between two trees. Hanging from the roof of the porch was a hammock chair, this one multicolored, and I pictured Rajiv spending his days moving between the two hammocks—was he in the mood for red or rainbow, upright or reclined? I pictured our hammock at home, hanging between posts in our carport-porch. Time was, I used to spend hours lying in it, rocked
by the breeze, wind chimes and birdsong the sound track to whatever book I was wandering through. Now it seemed eons since I’d done any such thing. I climbed into the red hammock. Above me the sky swayed. Here I was at last, and I was too nervous to go inside. What if he wanted to sleep with me? What if he didn’t? I closed my eyes. I’d just lie here a moment, and then I’d go knock on the door. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I wouldn’t do that at all.

Except the door opened and closed, all on its own. And I didn’t move. I heard footsteps on the porch, and then on the grass—how would I describe the sound of his approach? Was
rustle
the right word? I kept my eyes closed. Every nerve ending in my body seemed to anticipate his touch. He stopped beside me. I could hear him breathing. Then I sensed movement, I felt the approach of warmth, and he pressed his lips to mine. The hammock swayed as he braced himself on it, and I tilted toward the ground, grabbed at the webbing, opened my eyes. He steadied the hammock, one arm on either side of me. There he was, smiling, dark curls falling forward around his face. “Sleeping Beauty,” he said.

“Well, hi,” I said. I’d never considered before how easily the Sleeping Beauty position could segue into the missionary position, what with the woman already supine on the bed.

“Hi,” he said.

I sat up and scooted over, and he sat next to me. It’s impossible to sit together in a hammock without touching. Our legs pressed together. Our arms. I pretended not to notice, though I could think of nothing else. It was like being back in high school, squeezed into the crowded backseat of somebody’s car with a boy you like, sitting on his lap, your heart beating fast, your laugh louder than usual as you fake interest in the conversation, and it feels like no part of your body
exists except the part that’s touching his. “
Sleeping Beauty
was my favorite of those movies,” I said. “The early Disney ones, I mean.”

“Did you want to be her?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think it was that. I think I liked the song she sings.” I launched into it—“I know you, I walked with you…”—and unbelievably he joined in, “once upon a dream.” I stopped. “You know that song?”

“Sure,” he said. “I had three older sisters. I loved all those movies as a kid. It was my secret shame.” He picked up my hand like he was going to read my palm. Instead he rubbed his thumb over it in a slow circle. “So ‘Sleeping Beauty’ was your favorite fairy tale?”

“My favorite of those movies,” I clarified. “My favorite fairy tale was ‘Beauty and the Beast.’”

“Really,” he said. “Now that’s psychologically interesting.”

“I guess it is,” I said.

“You’re looking to transform somebody. You’re looking for the virtue other people can’t see.”

He seemed a little too pleased with this assessment. “Or a magic castle,” I said. “With a talking teapot.”

“I don’t think the teapot is in the original story.” He turned his head toward me, which put his mouth inches from mine. I thought he was going to kiss me again, and I was all for it, under the spell of the hammock and his hand on mine and oh my God was he beautiful. But instead he said, “Come inside.”

“So I can see your etchings?”

He laughed. “You should be so lucky,” he said.

It was awkward getting out of the hammock. My memory of this time with Rajiv vibrates with desire, but I can’t
deny there were awkward moments, made more awkward by the investment we both had in maintaining the thrill of new romance. Stars and kisses fit the bill, and scooting out of a hammock and nearly falling and yanking down my shirt after flashing a pooch of belly did not. As he got out, he accidentally pressed on my hand and pinched my finger, and the way it throbbed was not romantic, but what about the way he brought it to his mouth as he said he was sorry? It sounds like nothing, it sounds almost silly, like he was offering to kiss my boo-boo the way I did for my children, but we all know that when you’re in the grip of desire there’s nothing silly about eyes meeting your eyes, lips on your finger, murmured words, the warmth of breath. If Nathan had pinched my finger I probably would have said so, and probably in an aggrieved tone, and depending on his mood and how irritably I spoke and how well we were getting along that day he might have said, “Oh, honey, I’m sorry, are you all right?” or he might have snapped, “I’m sorry, OK? It was an accident.” When Rajiv did it, I said nothing, just winced, and he noticed without my speaking, and made his apologies. I said nothing, I felt no irritation, and at the time I didn’t wonder how long we’d have to be together for the way I reacted to Nathan to become the way I reacted to Rajiv. There’s the appeal of the new romance, when you’re so accustomed to the old one. It’s not just that you don’t snap at each other, that you’re so ready to forgive offenses you barely notice them, that you look at each other with starry, starry eyes. It’s that the snapping, the irritation—they don’t even seem possible. Nothing that happened before will happen again. Can’t you see that this is a different life?