Husband and Wife (7 page)

“Where are you off to?” she said when she saw me. I
usually packed a lunch and ate it in the tiny break room, next to the tiny fish tank Tanya maintained.

“I’m going to lunch.”

“With Nathan?”

“No, he’s home with Binx.” I was reluctant to tell her who I was going with, and reluctance like that was the sort of thing she was hardwired to notice.

“Who is it, then? Your boyfriend?”

Smith’s car turned into the drive, and he waved as he went past us, turning around in the circle to return facing out.

“Cute,” Kristy said. “Does Nathan know?”

“Ha ha, Kristy,” I said. I couldn’t look at her. “Shouldn’t you be working?”

“Nothing going on in there,” she said. “I’ve been reading
People
all morning.”

“Shh,” I said. “Don’t tell your boss.” I headed for the car, tossing a “See you later” over my shoulder.

“See you,” she called.

When I opened the car door, Smith was leaning toward me, but looking at Kristy. I could tell from his face he could hardly believe what he saw. I got in the car and shut the door hard, as though sufficient force could make Kristy and her stomach and her cigarette disappear, and forestall the conversation I knew Smith and I were about to have.

“Should she be smoking?” he asked.

“Of course not.” I put on my seat belt with unnecessary care, strangely reluctant to look at him. “She says it will keep the birth weight down.”

He reacted with such horror his body jerked backward. “That’s why she’s doing it?”

“She’s doing it because she’s addicted. That’s a joke she makes.”

“You think it’s funny?”

“No, Smith, Jesus. I don’t think it’s funny. I think she should quit smoking. What would you like me to do, call Social Services?”

Smith jerked up the parking brake and got out of the car. It was a mark of his agitation that he didn’t turn the car off, seriously as he took the environmental strictures of Al Gore. It was a mark of my shock that I did nothing, just sat there and watched through the window with my mouth hanging open as he crossed behind the car and up the sidewalk to Kristy. She looked at him with a curiosity that hardened into anger as he said whatever he said, and I watched as he gesticulated and she moved her head from side to side in that “Oh no you didn’t” way—a pantomime of middle-class liberal righteous ness colliding with working-class conservative righteous ness. She inhaled elaborately and blew the smoke out in his face, and then he snatched the cigarette and dropped it on the ground. She was yelling, her mouth open, her arms flapping out at the sides, a giant pregnant bird. I reached for the door handle, steeling myself to enter the fray. I had no idea what I was going to say. Did I think she should be smoking? No. Did I think he was right to tell her so? No. The only statement that came to mind was, “I can’t handle this right now,” which I didn’t imagine would be particularly useful. And then, abruptly, her arms stopped flapping, her hands went to her face, and she started to cry. She rocked forward, and Smith caught her, patting her on the back. They stood there a moment like that, strangers embracing on the sidewalk, and he murmured something in her ear.

The sight of Kristy in tears astonished me. I thought of her as brash, tough, the sort of girl who got into parking-
lot fights in high school. She was hardly a candidate for a public meltdown, although of course she was pregnant, and there were the hormones to contend with. And really, I had no idea what went on in her life. That thought hit me with the force of a new idea. I knew her husband drove a tow truck but not whether he cheated on her, or hit her, or loved her like there was no tomorrow. Really I had no idea what went on in anyone’s life, not even Nathan’s. What had made Nathan value the moment over the lifetime? Why was Smith hugging Kristy, a woman he didn’t even know, when he hadn’t hugged me in my moment of crisis, though he’d known me for years? There he was in full view through the windshield taking her and her extra weight against him and, just for a moment, holding her up. Why wasn’t somebody, anybody, holding me right now? Why was I sitting alone in a car watching two strangers embrace?

Abruptly, as if remembering herself, Kristy pushed away. She wiped her face on the back of her hand. She pulled open the heavy glass door, refusing Smith’s attempt to help her, and disappeared inside.

Back in the driver’s seat, Smith wore an expression of self-satisfaction as he eased the car out onto the road. “You left the car running,” I said. “What would Al Gore say?”

“Oh, shit,” he said. “I guess I was fired up.” He smiled at me, this oddly hopeful smile, and all at once I was furious.

“If you think she’s going to stop smoking,” I said, “you’re batshit insane.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But at least I said something.”

“What you did was upset a pregnant woman and create another problem for me. I called you to talk about a problem, and you made me another one.”

“Why would she hold what I said against you?”

“That’s a dumb question.”

“I think the health of her baby is a little more important than tension between the two of you.”

“Which brings me back to my original point. She’s not going to quit because you told her to.”

“You don’t know that, do you,” he said. “Sometimes when we realize how other people see us, we see ourselves in a new light.”

“Well, what light do you see yourself in if I tell you that you’re unbelievably self-righteous?”

“I’d say maybe you should look in the mirror.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re self-righteous,” he said. “And you’re rude.”

I stared at him. He stared back, still flush with the proselytizer’s zeal.
Rude?
“That’s great,” I said. “That’s just great. Let me out of the car.”

Now he looked sorry. “Sarah—”

“Let me out of the fucking car!”

He pulled over. In my agitation I forgot to unbuckle the seat belt and strained against it for a full five seconds trying to climb out, and then he tried to help me by unbuckling it just at the moment I realized and reached for the buckle myself, and I ended up smacking his hand away before I tumbled out of the car, as if this was a first date gone wrong. “Sarah,” he called again, but I started to run, and I ran back to the corner where you turned for my building, and then I slowed to a walk in case anyone saw me, running and desperate and disheveled in my professional clothes. Thanks a lot, Smith. You’ve been a big help.

Kristy wasn’t outside anymore, and I hoped she’d be in the break room eating lunch so I could make it back to the sanctuary of my office without encountering her. But when
I walked in she looked up from
People
with a fighting expression. “Who was that asshole?” she said, in a loud and carrying voice.

“I’m sorry about that, Kristy,” I said. “He had no right.”

“No shit he had no right. Who was he, anyway?”

“He’s my husband’s best friend.”

“Oho.” She lowered her voice, beckoned me closer. I stepped up to her desk. “So he’s giving me a hard time about smoking when he’s running around with his best friend’s wife?”

I blanched and said, “No,” a reaction that did nothing to persuade her she was wrong.

“What’s worse?” She looked around like she was playing to the audience at a talk show. “A cigarette every now and then, or putting it to your friend’s lady on the sly?”

“That depends on your point of view,” I said.

“Oho, point of view,” she said. “Point of
view
. Is that what you call it?”

“Kristy,” I said. “Just stop it. Stop it now.”

She looked at me in some surprise. “Hey,” she said, “I’m just messing with you. I know you and Nathan got a good thing going.”

I took a breath. I closed my eyes. I felt my head shake a little, more like a tremor than a
no
. Then I opened my eyes. She was looking at me with a combination of alarm and curiosity. I pushed off from her desk like it was the wall of a swimming pool, propelling myself toward my office. “Hey,” she called after me, sounding genuinely worried now. “Hey, Sarah. Look, I was just—”

“It’s OK,” I said without looking back. I shut my office door.

I’d started an e-mail to Tanya, before the phone call
to Smith. It was still up on the screen.
Remind me
, it said, and nothing else, and I could no longer remember what I’d wanted her to remind me. And it didn’t even say
Remind me
, I saw now, but
Rewind me
. An interesting typo, although given the distance of the
w
from the
m
, you couldn’t really call it a typo. More of a Freudian slip. Yes, please, rewind me. Be kind, rewind. No fight with Smith. No unwanted honesty from Nathan. No Nathan ever doing what he had done at all. I closed my eyes and pictured casters turning, and the idea of going backward was so compelling that when I opened my eyes I nearly believed I’d achieved it. The mind’s experience of the world, that’s all that matters. If you smile, you’ll begin to feel the corresponding emotion. If you tell yourself something never happened, then it never ever did.

The phone rang. It was Nathan. He wanted to know where the diaper bag was. So I told him, because it was just a normal day, and telling him where he could find what he’d lost was one of the things I normally did. I always knew where his wallet was, his phone, his keys, and when I got sick of his pitiful attempts to locate them—he’d drift around the house picking up objects and putting them down with such an air of hopelessness he might as well have been keening softly—I’d walk right over to the pile of newspaper on the table and lift it up and lo and behold, what should be beneath it but his keys. Sometimes his ineptitude annoyed me, and then when he asked where his keys were, I said, “How should I know?” or “If I gave you a million dollars, could you find them yourself?” Recently, not too long ago, Nathan had spent a Saturday morning struggling with a section of the book he was working on and then, much later in the day than he’d intended, was trying to get out to the grocery store but couldn’t find his keys, and when I’d asked that question,
he’d snapped, “Why are you being such a bitch?” in front of Mattie, who said, on cue, as if we were all actors in some sort of horrible domestic drama, “Why is Mommy a bitch?” Then Nathan overwhelmed us both with apologies, me and Mattie, who had no idea, really, what he was sorry for, but gleaned from the whole experience that
bitch
was an awfully exciting word.

And these are the ways we drive each other crazy, men and women, husbands and wives. He asks me, for the millionth time, if I’ve seen his keys. He wants me, for the millionth time, to drop what I’m doing and tend to his needs. And I snap at him. And his feelings are hurt, because all he did was ask me to help him find his keys, and I know he has trouble finding things and why do I have to get so mad about it, when all he’s trying to do is go buy groceries for his family, and then he trots out the b-word, and even though he apologizes, none of it goes away, not my irritation, not his. It subsides. Yes, it subsides, unless you become one of those couples for whom it doesn’t, who start saying things at dinner parties like, “Well, my wife says I’m a fucking retard,” and “My husband calls me Cruella De Vil,” dragging everyone around them into an Ingmar Bergman film.

The first year we lived together, Nathan’s keys went missing for weeks, until I found them one morning inside a folded umbrella, which was leaning against the hall table where we normally dropped our keys when we came in the door. I had a flash of inspiration, turned that umbrella over, and they dropped into my hand with a satisfying jangle. Nathan had still been asleep. I’d crept into the room and jingled the keys before his eyes until they opened, and then I watched delighted comprehension dawn on his face before he reached up to grasp the keys, to touch my fingers. He said, “You found
them?” and looked at me like I was the one who would always know what he needed, would always know exactly where it was to be found. And how would I have ever gotten to be that person, if he had never lost anything?

At quarter after seven I walked into a quiet house. Nathan was at the stove, the scent of garlic in the air. “Hey,” he said. He handed me a glass of wine.

“You already got the kids down?” I asked. “Wow.”

“I thought you could use a quiet evening,” he said.

I said that was great and thanked him, though I wished Binx was still awake. Usually I nursed him when I got home, and breasts don’t adjust quickly to a change in plans, so I’d have to pump for the third time that day, and I hated pumping. Funny that in the face of paradigm-shifting events I was still capable of annoyance over such a minor thing.

“I’m working on my fifties housewife routine,” Nathan said.

“Shouldn’t you be in a pretty dress then? With your hair all…” I made curls with my fingers in the air. Recently an old magazine article had circulated among our friends on e-mail, one of those shockingly, hilariously sexist pieces featuring advice to women about greeting your husband at the door with a martini, never disturbing him with your problems, keeping every hair in place—one of those things too ludicrous to have ever been something people believed. Who ever took that seriously, this notion that to be a wife was to be a walking mannequin?

“I thought about the dress,” Nathan said. “But I thought you might find it disturbing if I raided your closet.”

I laughed. “If I came home and you were wearing my black dress…”

“High heels…”

“Lipstick…”

“A thong.”

“I don’t own a thong.”

“Hey,” he said. “I have my own, of course.”

“Is it red and lacy?” I asked. “I hope it’s red and lacy.”

“Of course,” he said, “because I—” The phone rang. It was sitting on the kitchen counter. I picked it up and checked the caller ID, saw it was Smith, and without thinking handed the phone to Nathan.

He answered. “Hello?” A beat. His expression changed from lingering amusement to puzzlement, worry. My throat clenched. He gave me an apologetic look, held up one finger, walked out of the room. I heard the door to his study close. I walked over to the kitchen table and sat down. I listened to the murmur of Nathan’s voice, which kept spiking louder in ways that did not bode well. I drank my glass of wine. I got up, turned the stove off, and poured another glass. I pictured myself squeezing the stem of the glass until it shattered. I pictured the mess that would make. I imagined the sticky wine, the blood. I waited.