Husband and Wife (6 page)

“Why are you thanking Mommy?” Mattie said, and then, when Nathan didn’t immediately respond, she said it again, louder.

“Um,” he said, lifting his face. While I’d been watching the snow in our backyard, he’d clearly gone someplace too, a place from which it was a struggle to return. The thing about children, we’d often noted, is that they drag you relentlessly back to the here and now, which in our childless days Nathan and I had spent much of our lives escaping.

Matttie started bouncing on the balls of her feet, chanting, “Ay-ay-ay,” in a robotic, unnatural voice. This was a tactic she used to get our attention, because, as much as we tried to hide it, she knew it drove us crazy.

“Hey, Mattie,” Nathan said. He pushed off me, and squatted at her level.

“Ay-ay-ay,” she said into his face, her teeth bared like a little animal’s.

“What would you like to do today?”

This question stopped her. She cocked her head. “Why are we not going to school today?”

“Today is not a school day,” he said. “It’s Sunday.”

“Why is it Sunday?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned and went over to her play refrigerator, whispering to herself as she opened the door. Now that she had his attention, she felt free to wander away. In that we seemed to be alike.

The baby ran out of the Cheerios he’d been happily eating and began to cry. Nathan scooped him out of the high chair and lifted him into the air. “Can you shake your head?” he said, demonstrating, and Binx shook his head wildly in return, laughing, showing his one hillbilly tooth. “So,” Nathan said without looking at me, “do you still want to go to that festival, or do you feel too sick? Because I could just take the kids if you want to nap or something.”

For a moment I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I remembered—there was a street fair in Chapel Hill, the sort of thing Nathan hated and which, up until this moment, he’d been strenuously refusing to go to, leading to the sort of argument in which I said he was only thinking of himself and not of the children’s pleasure and he said I was stressing everyone out by insisting we do so-called fun things with the kids when they’d be just as happy at home. Now he was not only offering to go, but offering to take both kids by himself. I swear if a hair shirt had been available, he’d have donned it in an instant.

“That sounds good,” I said. “Let’s all go.”

“Mattie,” Nathan cried, “we’re going to a festival!” And she, who probably had no idea what a festival was, caught the excitement in his voice and began to do what we called her happy dance, her little feet flying, and Nathan swung the baby in circles, and the baby shouted, “Ah!” and Mattie and Nathan shouted it back, all three of them laughing. I realized I was holding onto the seat of my chair with both
hands, as if to keep myself in it. I looked at this delightful domestic scene—two children and their adoring father—and my heart broke and broke again. I thought, I’m a mother. A mother, a mother, a mother. I thought, Remember this. This is what you’re trying to keep.

Funnel cakes and African dancers and bongos and beaded necklaces. Mattie was at her most delightful, dancing to the music and announcing to everyone that she was three and obsessed with party shoes, both of our children eliciting from strangers those high-wattage smiles you never see until you go out into the world toting a baby. Nathan pushed the stroller and I held Mattie’s hand, and every so often Nathan reached for my free hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed it. The sun was out and the air was crisp. The fatty, greasy funnel cake had helped ease my hangover, and it was hard to remember why I’d ever held anything against anyone. We saw one of the other children from Mattie’s preschool, a sweet, shy blond boy who liked to tell Mattie he loved her and hug her tightly, attentions she seemed to accept with a certain amount of perplexity. His parents were about our age, and they had a baby girl about Binx’s age, and we stood together chatting in a pleased mirror reflection of each other while the preschoolers ran circles around us. Binx demanded to be picked up, so I held him near the other baby. They smiled at each other and touched hands, and then Binx put both his hands on her shoulders, leaned in, and gave her the gentlest of kisses on the mouth.

“Oh, so you love her, and her brother loves your sister,” the father said. “This is going to work out well.”

The mother laughed. “Boys start early, don’t they?” she said.

“And they never stop,” the father said. I laughed, but this more-or-less innocent moment gave me a pang, and for a little while my throat closed up again, and I had to watch the babies intensely because I couldn’t look at anyone else, tears behind my eyes. Look at those babies, though. A moment I could live in, watching little fingers meet and part, the joy of those gummy smiles.

When I could join in the conversation again, I looked up at the parents and thought how happy they looked together, noting the fond glances, the casual touches, the way she leaned against him when he made a joke. Hadn’t I heard that they’d had problems in the past? That at one point they’d come close to divorcing? Or was I making the whole thing up? I didn’t know, but I decided to see them as survivors of a near-catastrophe, now firmly bonded together in the way Nathan and I were from here on out to be. When we walked away from them, in search of the balloon-animal maker they’d told us about, I took Nathan’s hand. He had to push the stroller with one hand and hold mine with the other, which made for awkward maneuvering, but he held on anyway, until Mattie spotted our target and ran ahead, and I had to let go.

I knew my husband. I was confident of that. No matter what, I knew him. I knew that he didn’t like tomatoes until he was twenty-five. I knew that after we saw
The Matrix
he cried out, “Keanu!” in his sleep, and then insisted that I’d misheard. I knew that his voice softened and his jokes grew sillier in the presence of cute girls, and I knew that this was less true now than when I first met him, so that no one but me might detect the change. There was no undoing my knowledge of him. Mattie would be sure to tell me, when she was sixteen or so, “You don’t know me!” and she’d be wrong, because I’d always know how her voice sounded—weirdly authoritative despite its high pitch—when she was three and said, “From now on when I’m naughty I want to decide my punishment.” And maybe I’d say to Nathan, ten years after our divorce, if we got one, that he didn’t know me anymore, and I’d be wrong, because he’d always know what animal sounds I made in labor, he’d always know I was ticklish only in the arches of my feet. We want to be known when we do, and we want to be unknown when we don’t,
just like we want someone to touch us and kiss us until we don’t anymore. We make our bodies off-limits again, but still that other person did touch us, he ran his fingers down our inner thighs, he slipped his tongue inside our mouth.

Nathan, my Nathan. He was so careful, even self-righteous, about what we owe to others, the sort to overpay when it came to splitting the bill, rather than risk shorting someone, or, perhaps even worse, risk confronting them about their own stingy inclination to put in two dollars less than they owed. He’d once refused to eat a thirty-dollar roast he’d accidentally overcooked because he said he’d ruined it. He’d made what should have been rare and tender into something tough and common, he said, and he threw the meat thermometer into the garbage, claiming it had betrayed him, and it was only my intervention that stopped him from tossing the roast in after it. Finally, after much discussion, he agreed to cut it up and use it for sandwiches. Hard to believe that this person could have not only cheated on me but written a book about having done so, and then could go on living with that brand of ruination now, could make oatmeal for everyone in the morning and remember that I didn’t want raisins in mine. I was relieved, of course. I ate my oatmeal and watched Nathan read the
Times
, absentmindedly doling out Cheerios to Binx, and debated with Mattie the wearing of sundresses when it was under sixty degrees. I was relieved.

What was it, after all, that could be said to be ruined? I’d rubbed Binx’s head and kissed Nathan good-bye and dropped Mattie at preschool with five magic hugs and five magic kisses, and now I was driving the usual way to work, the usual trees flying by outside my window. Life was going on as it always did. In troubled times, I still had
my children and my house and my job and apparently my marriage, and as long as no one found out what had happened, Nathan could still have his book, and I wouldn’t have to fork over $50,000 like a blackmail victim. I wasn’t going to look at the book, I wasn’t going to think about the book, the book would be published, the book might bring in some money and so was just a means to an end. Fiction, fiction, it was all fiction. I still loved Nathan, and he said he still loved me. I believed that if Nathan could keep it together, everything would be fine. I didn’t give much thought to whether I could keep it together. I was used to the answer to that question being, on a large scale, yes, automatically yes, no need to even ask. The ability to keep it together was my essential quality.

It wasn’t as though we’d lived together, in the years before this, in an eternal bliss of peaceful intimacy. I knew as well as anyone the rhythms of life with another person, the days of kisses, casual touches, easy familiarity, the days of snappish voices, rolling eyes, weary familiarity, the way that as one state of being gave way to another, the other seemed distant and fantastical. I’d thought, How could I ever have married you? And I’d thought, How could I ever have been mad at you? And then I’d thought those things again and again and again.

This was different. No, it wasn’t different. The offense was larger, yes, than any previous ones. So what? Husbands, wives—countless others had survived it.

He
said
he still loved me. The ruination was in my phrasing. He still loved me. I corrected myself. He loved me. That was what he’d said.

What is
it
, anyway, this thing that we keep together, or lose?

And then, at last, I was at my desk, in my safe, functional office with its ergonomic rolling chair, everything I needed to know neatly labeled in a file. I sipped the coffee I’d made an hour ago but not yet tasted—still hot, in the heavy-duty travel mug Nathan had bought me—and watched the e-mail messages pop up on my computer screen. A normal day. At work it was just a normal day.

I had never cheated on Nathan. Why not? I could have. I could have chosen to. Like anyone I’d had those moments—too much to drink, the man lighting your cigarette, meeting your gaze a little too long. There had been that guitar player promising he’d teach me to like Rush, if I just gave him a chance, that French poet murmuring about my eyes, my smile. And there had been Rajiv.

I opened my personal e-mail account. I kept a folder in it labeled “Austin Friends,” and though I’d added some e-mails from other people to it—not because Nathan was paranoid but because I was—mostly I kept it to collect the e-mails from Rajiv.
Hey lady
, the last one said.
I’ve been rereading you
,
so lately you’re in my head. How are you? R.
He’d written it more than a year ago, and I had never answered. Why had I never answered? There was something of the love note, of the secret, in the use of that initial rather than his name. Wasn’t there? I looked at all eleven of his e-mails. All signed like that. He’d written ten times over a period of about a year, between the last time I’d seen him and my wedding. And then once about two years ago—a brief, belated congratulations on Mattie’s birth. Then, a year ago,
I’ve been rereading you
. Then nothing.

Dear Fan of Me
, he’d written once, in reply to an e-mail
I’d sent, congratulating him on acceptance of one of his films to a festival, a piece of news I’d gotten from Helen.
Thank you for your adoration. Though Central Headquarters of Rajiv Asthana are closed today in observance of Labor Day
,
I nevertheless labor in this response to cast a little of my light on your life
,
as do my brief but dazzlingly intense films. If you have not yet experienced the profundity of my work
,
my wisdom
,
go now
,
to festivals across the land
,
and seek it out. May it be an incredible journey full of twists and turns
,
peaks
,
valleys
,
and plains in between. And may you
,
in the end
,
discover that the very thing for which you had been searching was right there in front of you all along. Yours ever so sincerely
,
R.

And then he’d written, all alone at the very end, the small word
hi
.

Didn’t he have a serious girlfriend now? Wasn’t that what Helen had said? I quit the account. I had things to do. At work it was just a normal day.

But, no. There was no normal anymore. There was no safe. Because as I was doing my job, catching up on e-mail, my throat relaxed without my having noticed it, I was all at once visited by the memory of my drunken confession to Smith at the wedding. My throat seized shut again. Smith knew. In my own effort to forget what Nathan had told me, I’d forgotten Smith knew. And who might he have told by now? His Hitchcock girlfriend, that psycho gal? Was the word even now speeding along a network of Web designers and part-time painters and NPR fund-raisers and editors, on its way to everyone I knew? If everyone knew, and Nathan found out that everyone knew, he would crumple, and our fragile experiment would come to an end. There were few things Nathan feared more than other people thinking badly of him, and under the combined weight of guilt and
judgment he wouldn’t be able to function, he wouldn’t be able to stay. He’d realize, if he hadn’t already, that publishing the book or not publishing the book was not just about me. He’d realize that he couldn’t endure a book tour if everyone knew, couldn’t endure standing behind a table piled with books that announced
Infidelity
, couldn’t endure the questions about how much was real, how much was true. Or could he? Could he endure that?

I started three or four different e-mails to Smith, but it was too delicate a thing to phrase properly, and finally I surrendered to the inevitable and looked up his number at work. I didn’t have it—why would I have it? I’d never before felt the need of any communication with him that couldn’t be dispatched by e-mail. We didn’t have a phone-call friendship. At home, when I saw his name on the caller ID, I didn’t answer. I said, “It’s Smith,” and Nathan picked up the phone. Dialing his number now, I was as nervous as a twelve-year-old girl calling a boy in her Spanish class with a made-up question about the homework.

He picked up. “This is Smith,” he said.

“It’s Sarah,” I said. “I need to talk to you about the other night.”

A brief silence while, perhaps, he absorbed not only what I’d said but the fact that it was me on the phone. Then he said, cautiously, “OK.”

“I don’t really want to discuss it,” I said. “I just want to make sure you don’t repeat it.”

“Repeat what?”

I had failed to consider that he might have been too drunk to remember. I could have smacked myself in the face for my stupidity. “If you don’t know, then we don’t need to talk,” I said. “Are you saying you don’t know?”

“No,” he said. “I know.”

“Well, then why are you pretending you don’t?”

“I’m not.”

“Never mind. I just wanted to tell you that Nathan and I are going to work through this, and I think it would make things easier if nobody else knew about it. Otherwise we’ll both feel like we’re being watched, you know?”

“I won’t tell anybody,” he said. “You know I won’t tell anybody.”

“That’s true,” I said. Of course he wouldn’t tell anybody. Smith, Man of Honor, was what Nathan liked to call him. “I should have remembered that.”

“I wish I didn’t know myself,” he said. “I can’t believe Nathan would do that. I mean, my God, it changes my whole conception of him. Who is he? How could he do that, when you were pregnant? You were pregnant, for God’s sake! Can I even still be friends with him?”

I couldn’t answer. I tried, but my throat was so tight now I couldn’t even speak, and so, in surrender, I started to cry.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, that was really stupid, I’m sorry.”

I took a deep breath. I tried to remember the last time I’d cried—not just teared up at anything on television about children, but really, truly cried.

“I won’t tell anybody,” he said again.

I couldn’t remember. Strange. Before I had children I used to cry out of frustration or anger every once in a while, and now I didn’t do that anymore. Had becoming a mother made me tougher? Now it took adultery to make me cry.

“Listen,” Smith said, sounding desperate, “can I take you to lunch? We can talk more. Maybe you need to talk.”

“I don’t want to talk,” I managed to say, but he must not
have understood me, because he said he would pick me up at twelve thirty and hung up the phone.

My job, as the business manager of the Department of Neurobiology, was one I’d arrived at more or less accidentally, and then proven to be good at. I’d started as a secretary in the department, as a charity hire. The husband of the then-chair was friends with my thesis adviser from graduate school, and my adviser said, “Hey, can you help a starving poet find a job?” It didn’t hurt that I could type eighty-two words a minute, a skill that would have been more suited to a fiction writer like Nathan, who still typed with two fingers after years at the computer. I’d never written a poem at eighty-two words a minute. I was slow. I was agonizingly slow. More than once I’d spent a week on a line.

But at work I was fast, and efficient, so much so that when the grants manager left, they offered me his job, and when the business manager retired, they offered me hers. Now all the administrative types in the department were my employees, something that had by this point almost stopped seeming strange. Two of those employees had been working there long before I had, and had, in fact, treated me as upperclassmen treat a freshman when I’d first arrived, alternately teasing me and taking me under their wing. One of the women, the receptionist, Kristy, was actually younger than I was, but she’d grown up faster—married at nineteen, first kid at twenty-one, and now she was pregnant with her third. The other woman, Tanya, who was the chair’s secretary, was in her late thirties, but she, too, seemed older, or at least older than my friends seemed at that age. Kristy and
Tanya belonged to a culture that, before them, I’d observed only in passing—they wore fake nails, went to church but drank hard, supported certain NASCAR drivers. Kristy had a Jeff Gordon jacket, which she wore on race days with a hairpin that had his number sticking out of it, a red 24 balanced at the apogee of her curly bleached-blond hair. For years they’d been telling me they were going to take me to a local track and show me how to parade around in a tank top and Daisy Dukes, eating fried bologna sandwiches. Once, on Valentine’s Day, they’d taken me to the local sex shop, where they’d debated buying lingerie to please their husbands and I’d marveled at the vast array of dildos, and then to Bojangles for greasy, salty biscuits and fries. They’d both come over strange when I’d been made the business manager, but they were over it now, or at least I thought so. Kristy liked to call me “Boss” when I asked her to do things, to remind me that even if I was in charge she retained the right to tease me.

She wasn’t at her desk when I went out at 12:28 to meet Smith. I assumed she was on her lunch break, but she wasn’t. She was outside smoking a cigarette, something she persisted in doing even though she was six months pregnant. If I’d smoked while pregnant, I would have done it in secret, ashamed—I didn’t even drink wine in public in my third trimester, though I had an occasional glass at home—but Kristy just stood there, three feet from the entrance to the building, puffing away, apparently oblivious to the looks she got. Was she making a statement? Did she just not care? It was hard to say, but I thought it was the latter. I disapproved of her smoking, but admired her “I am what I am” attitude.