Husband and Wife (29 page)

Nine days since his wife’s car had disappeared around the bend of the drive
,
taking his wife and children with it. Nine days in a house so full and yet so empty of them
:
her
,
and her
,
and him
,
or rather Her
,
and Her
,
and Him. His people. His family. Gone and gone. And what had he been doing with his time in this enormous empty space? He couldn’t account for a minute
,
not one minute
,
and yet somehow those minutes had found a way to pass. Now it was indeterminate night and the fireflies would be doing their airborne mating dance
,
fallen stars
,
Christmas lights. Or would they? Maybe it was too late in the year for that. His wife would know
,
if she were there to tell him. How many days had it been since he’d gone outside? Nothing marked the hours. Never mind the clocks.

The doorbell rang and he skyrocketed out of his chair
,
certain from the millisecond he registered the sound that it was her. Her. She was back—he was certain
,
certain
,
never stopping to remember that of course she had a key. He went to the side door off the kitchen
,
which was the door they always used
,
but there was no one there but the usual great and tragic moths beating themselves senseless on the window
,
and only then did he realize
that the doorbell was at the front door and therefore the person who had rung it was not
,
and never had been
,
his wife.

A girl
,
though. A person of the female persuasion. A blond with her hair in a ponytail—and here he remembered with a prickling in his eyes that his daughter referred to this hairstyle as “a bundle.” This girl had her hair in a bundle
,
and big
,
trust-me eyes
,
and a persuasive smile. She wore some sort of badge around her neck. “Hi,” she said. She handed him a small slip of paper which he took without thought. He
,
like so many others
,
automatically took things that were handed to him—that’s what the people who handed him things were counting on. The girl said
,
“We’re offering homes in your neighborhood a free cleaning.”

“Neighborhood?” he repeated. He looked past her at the fields around his house
,
half-expecting to see cul-de-sacs. Maybe they’d appeared in the last nine days
,
a flurry of construction happening unnoticed on the edges of his misery. Neighborhood? was the least of what he wanted to ask her. You’re offering this cleaning to homes? he wanted to ask. What do the homes say? And where the hell did you come from? He didn’t see a car.

“We’ll clean one room for free
,
carpets and upholstery,” she said. She looked past him into the house. “Free,” she said again. “If I could just come in and take a look.”

Well
,
the right answer was no thank you
,
wasn’t it? That much was obvious. And yet there she was in his living room
,
pro-claiming with great confidence that she could “brighten up” the rug
,
calling her boss from his phone and uttering the ominous and mysterious words
,
“I need the machine.”

Oh help
,
he thought. What was the machine? Why was Bundle Girl—whose name
,
appropriately
,
was Candice—in his house? Where was his wife? Could he just run out of the house and leave it to Candice and her machine? Would anybody care?

Car wheels on a gravel road
,
and Candice went outside. He peeked out the window. A car of daunting
,
old-person enormity
,
out of which emerged a tall man who had the air of someone with a firm and jocular handshake
,
and then
,
a large box which he assumed contained the machine.

He had to admit he was a little disappointed
,
despite his dread
,
that the machine turned out to be a vacuum cleaner. An impressively large vacuum cleaner
,
with the 70s-era silver largeness of the car out of which it had come
,
and a vast array of attachments
,
but still just a vacuum cleaner
,
and not a magical one either
,
into which his whole life could vanish like something out of a cartoon. Inexplicably Candice insisted on calling it a sweeper.

But why is he going on and on about this? Was it anything
,
after all
,
but a visit from a door-to-door seller of vacuum cleaners
,
in and of itself surprising only because he hadn’t realized the species continued to exist? Can he persuade you of his loneliness if he confesses that the girl stayed in the house for almost three hours
,
executing with practiced flair her endless presentation
,
and that he never once tried to get her to leave? What if he describes the way she attached black squares of cloth to the “sweeper” as she vacuumed
,
and then pulled them off and spread them open like a magician at the climax of a trick
,
and again and again he said
,
“Wow,” and agreed that yes
,
there was an awful lot of dirt in his house
,
an awful lot of dirt? What if he admits that he began to use the word “sweeper”? If only you could have seen the room after two hours of this
,
lined with square after square of black cloth
,
like a deranged chess board
,
each square decorated with a star of dust and dirt and
,
as Candice kept saying
,
dust mites and their droppings
,
what it all comes down to
,
the detritus of our lives. “We shed skin all the time,” Candice said
,
“and that’s what they live off of. That’s what they eat.”

But he couldn’t afford the $1,800 sweeper
,
that’s what he told her
,
with genuine regret
,
and then he sat and stared at the patterns of dust while Candice had a loud and stagy conversation on the phone with her boss. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I showed him the dirt. They’ve got a lot of dirt. I guess they want to be dirty. They want their kids breathing that stuff.”

He did want his kids breathing that stuff
,
because that would mean they were here. And what did it matter if they breathed it
,
if it was their shed skin anyway? He had an urge to dump all that grit on the floor
,
lie down and make a snow angel in it. This was his life now. This was all he had. And he let Candice take it away. He watched as she folded each square in an aggrieved and deliberate way
,
as though he had forced her to it
,
he had made this mess. Her manner had changed and gone on changing after he’d said he wouldn’t buy the sweeper. She hardened and hardened before his eyes. She hated him. And didn’t he deserve it? Hadn’t he let her dump baking soda into the carpet and then vacuum it with their own sweeper one hundred times
,
breathing hard
,
sweating at the hairline
,
to do him the favor of proving the inadequacy of his life? She took the squares away
,
piling them and the machine and everything else she’d brought with her back into that silver spaceship of a car
,
and the tall man spared only one glance at him
,
a glance accompanied by the shake of a head
,
as if to say he’d failed. And didn’t he know that? Didn’t he know that? Why else was he following their car at a slow
,
stumbling pace as the taillights bumped away down the gravel drive? Why was he crying? Why was he calling after them
,
“Please give me back my dirt! Please give me back my dirt!”

He can’t write about his wife. He has tried. It is like trying to describe the air
,
the earth
,
the sun. It is like trying to describe the way the heart beats fast without saying
pounded,
without saying
skipped a beat.
It is like trying to describe crying
,
like
trying to describe himself. She is elemental
,
both obvious and impossible to render
,
and if he says
, I’m sorry,
and if he says
, I love you,
how does that break through the scrim of the ordinary
,
how does that burst forth and vibrate with the truth?

All he has is how it was without her. He walked back to the house alone. No fireflies. He sat down in the living room. Should he say he felt as if his heart had been torn out? Should he say he felt as if he’d had a limb removed? What he felt he finds himself unable to describe. He was alone in the house
,
and it seemed as though the camera pulled back to show him shrinking smaller and smaller as the space around him grew. What would she say if he called her and told her what had happened? Would she be happy that the rug was clean? He wouldn’t say I love you. He wouldn’t say I’m sorry. He’d say
,
The rug is clean. I had it cleaned. I did it for you.

We packed up our things, searching under beds and couch cushions for the inevitable missing toy, the lost baby sock. We buckled the children into their car seats. We hugged Helen and Daniel and their kids, and we thanked them profusely for their hospitality and their understanding, and then while Nathan was talking to Daniel I went to hug Helen again and with my cheek against hers I very nearly cried. “You know you’re welcome to stay,” she whispered in my ear.

“I know. But.” I stepped back and smiled. “We have a mortgage. And can you imagine putting a house on the market right now?” I thought about the line in
Pride and Prejudice
where Elizabeth says she changed her mind about Darcy when she saw his house, and I thought, yeah, she meant it a little, a hard nugget of truth inside the joke.

And then all that was done, and because Abby needed a diaper change and Ian was clamoring for a snack, Helen and Daniel took their family inside. In the old days she would have stood there waving, watching us drive away, and as I
stood watching the front door close I felt a little bit wistful about that.

“All right,” Nathan said. “Let’s go.”

He opened the car door and lifted a foot inside, then paused when he saw me still standing there. I wasn’t changing my mind, though no doubt it looked that way to him. I was going to go. I was going to put the key in the ignition, and turn it, and back the car out of the drive. I was going to stop for fast food and nurse the baby and pull into a motel parking lot and then eventually, eventually, pull up my gravel drive and notice, as I always did when I came home after some time away, that our house smelled a little like cat pee. I was going to go back to my job and take the children to Mr. Dodson’s funeral. I was going to click my heels and go home, where life would be, as it is anywhere, a little bit dull Kansas, a little bit great and terrible Oz. I just wanted to stand here for a minute, first, and fix in my memory the life I wasn’t choosing, the way Rajiv looked at me before I told him I was leaving, the cottonwood snow.

Nathan watched me, an uncertain look on his perfectly, terribly familiar face.

“Are you ready?” he said.

Jacket photographs: couple © Claire Morgan/Trevillion; wedding ring © Sébastien Baussais/Alamy

Jacket design by Christine Van Bree