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Authors: Leah Stewart

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BOOK: Husband and Wife
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“Is that a lucrative field?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “The people are clamoring.”

At the time she herself had been enamored of the prose of Gertrude Stein, whose childlike repetitions seemed to me silly where they were supposed to be profound, a response that Helen said proved something about me, something bad, the particulars of which I now couldn’t recall. We’d fought about Gertrude Stein. Helen was the sort of combatant who turns on you suddenly, unexpectedly, like a cat who lets you pet it until it suddenly turns to sink its teeth into your hand, ears back, eyes wild with the jungle. I remembered the lash of anger in her voice, but not what she’d said.

In Austin? Was that where I would stop the clock? Not before Austin, certainly. I had no desire to go back to the person I’d been then, too embarrassed to call myself a poet, sure that it would be seen as presumptuous, pretentious. In the year between college and grad school I worked my first nine-to-five job, tried to teach myself to write without deadlines. When people asked me at parties what I did, I said, “I’m a secretary,” and watched them struggle not to reveal
their reaction, waiting for me to offer the caveat we all offered in our twenties,
But what I really want to do is…
“But what I really want to do is
rock
,” a guy had once said to me and a friend at a party. Oh, my Lord. As soon as he was gone, I turned to my friend and said, “What I really want to do is
rhyme
.” What I really wanted to do didn’t much seem to matter, as I wasn’t doing any kind of work not required by my job. I was in a bit of a muddle without teachers to tell me what to do. My sister wanted me to move to Gainesville, where she was in medical school, and live with her. She would take me in, and take me over. I knew just how it would go. I wasn’t in that much of a muddle.

And then Austin. Austin. Austin was not a place, it was my dream of another life, my Oz, and for years after I left, whenever I wished for a tornado, that was where I imagined it taking me. Days there were hot and slow. All the coffee shops had wooden porches strung with Christmas lights. A girl wearing a bright green bikini and flip-flops forever rode by on a bicycle. The temperature of Barton Creek was always sixty-eight degrees. I was a poet there. People seemed to take that for granted, and after a while so did I. And I hadn’t had to leave. I’d left for Nathan, because he’d gotten a job and we were together. Without Nathan, I could have stayed. I would have stayed. But I never really got to choose.

In Austin I lived a life of late nights and late mornings, sitting at the kitchen counter in the house Helen rented with her cousin Jane, smoking pot and talking about how things seemed and what they meant, the life of an artist, the prose of Virginia Woolf. Sometimes Jane got out the video camera to record these conversations. The lens trained on my face made me self-conscious, made me feel like not just the con
versation but the whole way we were living was staged. But still I admired our commitment to that life. That life! We fought about Gertrude Stein. We went out for pancakes at midnight. We watched
Imagine
, about John Lennon, and at the end we cried. We watched a documentary about Marvin Gaye, listened to Smokey Robinson’s attempt to explain the singer’s troubles: how tortured he was by his fraught childhood, his thwarted desire to be a sweater-wearing crooner like Perry Como. From Smokey, the camera cut to Marvin Gaye’s mother, deep-voiced and weary in a hospital bed, who said, “Marvin did a lot of drugs.” Cut away. We agreed on the truth of both assessments.

Helen and Jane stayed in Austin after Nathan and I left. I’d go back to visit, and find the house exactly as it had been, a museum to my memories. Fragile pyramids of cigarette butts rose from the ashtrays on the arms of all the chairs, trails of ashes on the floor, the countertops. Dog hair like a plague upon the futon. The sharp, piney smell of pot smoke seeping from the walls. A strong aroma of garbage in the kitchen, flies on the half-eaten pizza left in an open box on the stove—sure, OK, but the point is that Helen and Jane didn’t notice, they didn’t see it, they were living the life of the mind. Jane repainted the whole house, without the land-lord’s permission, to give it the color scheme of her childhood home, and over a period of weeks she shot her student film there, both she and Helen living in her childhood on a movie set, headshots on the table of the actors playing her parents, the life and the art twined like DNA strands.

Helen told me that the way we lived for the five or six days of our yearly visits was not the way she usually lived. She had a job with a law firm. Five days a week she put on a suit and went to work in an office building down-
town, among the upwardly mobile, where young lawyers with shiny cars and a gleam in their eyes asked her out in the copy room. I couldn’t believe that. I didn’t see it. I saw the way the lights strung across the wooden railing of a coffee shop twinkled and blurred after a dose of shrooms, and the way time, too, twinkled and blurred, the days not about vacuuming up the dog hair or taking out the trash but about what we were thinking, what we wanted to say, so that by the time I got home from these trips I had a talking hangover, worn out by overindulgence in the sound of my own voice. The world trembles between light and darkness, we said. Between agony and beauty. The agony of beauty. The beauty of agony. Writing about it is hard, we said. The struggle with your own mind. The pursuit of the elusive, ever-vanishing, perfect phrase. Some years Nathan came with me, and one night he made us sit with our eyes closed while he read aloud Barry Hannah’s story “Even Greenland,” turning the words over in his mouth like caramels. We celebrated the beauty of the sentence. We believed. The light was bright, the weather warm.

“Are you sure you want me to go?” Nathan asked, for the thousandth time. He had a date with Smith, a date that, unbeknownst to Nathan, I’d arranged.

“Yes, you should go.”

“You’re not just saying that because you think I want to go.”

“No.”

“Because if you don’t want me to go, I won’t.”

“I think you should go,” I said.

“I want you to be happy,” he said.

It was the end of a long day, a one-thing-after-another day. The kids were finally in bed. I’d had two hours of sleep the night before. “OK,” I said. “I will be.”

Old Nathan, my Nathan, my ping-ponging-between-sentimental-and-ironic guy, would have said, “From here on out, you promise? Because this isn’t just about whether I go out tonight, it’s about our
lives
.” This Nathan said, “That’s all I want,” and I had to say, “I know,” and endeavor to sound like I believed it. And endeavor to believe it.

He bent to kiss me, a quick peck on the lips, because we never parted without such a kiss and we both seemed to understand the necessity of doing the things we always did. Then at last he was gone. I had big plans: to lie on the couch and tend to no one, to stupefy myself with guilty-pleasure TV, to go to bed early. I’d given Smith a clear mission—to reassure Nathan, to give him the support and comfort he needed to function. And was I hoping that while so doing, Smith would also learn who this woman was and how Nathan felt about her and why he’d cheated on me, all the answers I couldn’t ask for because I had to pretend that everything was fine? Yes, yes, of course. But I didn’t say so. This was a delicate operation. Smith was my man on the inside, but he didn’t like me calling him that, visibly stiffened when I did. “I’m your friend, and his, too,” he said. But doubtless he would learn something, and then the trick would be to get it out of him.

I wandered the house a while. Passing through the living room, I gave the upright spines of Proust’s seven volumes, with their refined deep blue coloring and tasteful font, the finger. I considered calling Helen. When was the last time I’d talked to her? She still lived in Austin, with her husband and two small children, and our conversations, which had once been leisurely sightseeing trips through the landscapes of our thinking, were hurried, short, and all about our kids. We had not expected to be women like that. We had thought that we really would read all seven volumes of Proust. We had thought we would always care—care to the point of shouting—which of us liked, and which of us didn’t like, Gertrude Stein. We often felt torn between the people we were and the people we had been, or perhaps had never actually been but always thought we should be.
We tended to think that motherhood had changed us, but maybe it had just reduced us to our essentials. This was who we were when we no longer had the time to persuade ourselves we gave a rat’s ass about Gertrude Stein.

I would’ve liked to call Helen, but if I got her on the phone, which was doubtful, and she asked how I was doing, which of course she would, what would I say? Since Alex’s wedding I hadn’t spoken to any of my friends. Alex was on her honeymoon, so that one was easy, but Erica and Sally had called, and I hadn’t called them back. If I told them what had happened, then I would always know they knew, and then how would I be able to forget it? And why would I want to hash out the demeaning particulars of my crisis, so awful, so ordinary, with anyone I knew?

Maybe Nathan, even now, was telling Smith how they’d met, what they’d said. Maybe he was describing the act itself, or acts, because, after all, I had only his word that there had only been one, and his word apparently wasn’t terribly good. Maybe he was saying again that he wished he loved her, so that instead of doing the sort of thing we say can never be justified he would have done the sort of thing we say can be justified by love. Maybe he was telling him her name.

Kate.

Here is where I admit that I spent the next hour Googling the name of the writers’ conference where he’d met her along with her name. Kate. I wanted to find a photo. I wanted to know if she was a fiction writer or a playwright or a poet. What if she was a poet? What if she looked like me? What if she was a poet and she looked like me but a skinnier, pre-pregnancy me, and she had the time to go around railing passionately against the prose of Gertrude
Stein, and in every way she replaced the me I was now with some version of my earlier self? Or what if she was nothing like me at all? Would that be better or worse? All I got in answer to my questions was a bunch of hits that included both words but not in any helpful relation to each other. A woman named Kate Pyle was a playwright who’d written a one-act with a man who’d once attended the conference. That was the kind of thing I learned.

I suppose once I’d started down this road of technological surveillance the next step was obvious. I knew the password to his e-mail account:
Lovesah
. But there were no e-mails to or from anyone named Kate. There were e-mails from Nathan to his agent, his mother, his friends, written that week, written today, in a tone of dumbfounding normalcy. “Yo,” he’d written in greeting, in an e-mail to one of his high school friends. Yo? He was a good actor, I guessed, at least over e-mail. Or this
yo
, this ludicrously jaunty word, somehow captured what he really was feeling. I imagined confronting him when he got home with the evidence of
yo
. “What the hell is this?” I’d scream, and because he was Nathan and we understood each other he’d know why, in the face of his larger transgression, I might fling myself into hysterics over a
yo
. God is in the details. Or is it the devil is in the details? One of those.

Nathan kept his drafts inside a folder called “Fiction.” Inside that was another folder called “Infidelity,” and inside that were ten different versions of the novel, dutifully numbered. I opened number ten.
It kept happening
, the novel began. Why was I reading it again? Did I expect it to have changed? One of the subplots was about an affair between two people who met at a downscale motel on their lunch breaks from office jobs, and the twist was that the affair wasn’t the tragic or seedy
or tragicomic situation you might imagine from this setup but a genuine romance, albeit one carried out in the milieu of a noir’s doomed deceivers, or an art film’s resigned dreamers, looking to escape their Wal-Mart lives. Nathan had given the woman my job, and in the novel she did the job well and that satisfied her. In one scene she and her lover talked about movies that started with an office worker in the process of having his soul crushed by the cubicle doldrums and then followed him on a hero’s journey, in which he discovered that he was never meant to be a cog in the machine, but the dude at the front of the pack stopping bullets with his mind, or catching them with his teeth, or whatever it was, these CGI days, that heroes did with bullets.

“I don’t want to be a hero,” the woman said. “I don’t want my life to turn out to be virtual reality. I just want to do a good job.”

“Because you’re a happy person,” the man said. “Unhappy people—they want to think their unhappiness makes them special. You always felt misunderstood and out of place? Well, guess what, it’s because you’re Jesus. That’s why depressed people are so self-involved. They all think they’re Jesus.”

“Let’s make a movie,” the woman said, “about an office worker who turns out to be an office worker.”

“What would happen in it?”

“He’d spend the whole movie thinking he ought to be able to stop bullets, and then a photocopier would reveal to him that his destiny was to get his report turned in on time. You know how in the movies they always have to get reports in on time? Just what are these reports?”

“A photocopier reveals his destiny?” the man asked. “A photocopier of destiny.”

And then she grinned at him, and repeated the phrase in the tones of a preview voiceover, and he began to tickle her, and they rolled around on their tainted motel bedding, on top of the bloodstains and the sperm. Only Nathan left those last details out, not remembering, as I did, the
60 Minutes
with the infrared light.

After I read this part of the novel the first time, I said to him, “You think I’m happy in my job?”

He shrugged. “It’s not you,” he said.

It wasn’t me. I went back and forth over the pages of the book, scrolling up, scrolling down, waiting for something to jump out, to announce, Aha! The truth! I could hardly stand to read it. I couldn’t bring myself to stop. If she wasn’t me, then no one was. I could see no reflection in any of these characters. For all I knew every one of the women—there were twelve, I counted twelve of them—were variations of her. Kate. For all I knew he’d written about her over and over, and never written about me at all. So many points of view, and not one belonged to a betrayed wife, a cuckolded husband. The cheaters, that’s who got to talk. If I wanted to be in Nathan’s book, I needed to have an affair of my own.

She kept running into him
, I read,
and not just running into him as in crossing paths in the hall
,
but literally running into him
,
body against body
,
collision and retreat. Was she doing it on purpose? He couldn’t have said why but he had the feeling that she wanted to touch him. Was that all it took? Action creates an equal and opposite reaction. She wanted to touch him and after a while he wanted to touch her back. Physics
,
that’s all it was.

But what, I wanted to ask, what about his wife? Was she catalyst, or just casualty?

Rajiv still waited in my in-box. I was in his head. I opened
the e-mail, hit reply, typed,
Hey
,
Can’t believe it took me a year to write back. Things are crazy here.
I hesitated. I typed,
I’m hunting for the eject button.
I signed it
S
.

 

I was still awake when Nathan came home, but I pretended not to be. I pretended, even to myself, that I didn’t hear the jangle of his belt buckle as he took off his jeans, that I didn’t feel the mattress shift beneath his weight, that I didn’t feel him hesitate—should he spoon me, the way he always had?—before he settled into place, not touching me, on his side of the bed. I listened as his breathing shifted into sleep. Sleep arrived so easily for him, and yet it wouldn’t come for me, like my stubborn three-year-old standing on the other side of the room, shaking her head every time I called her name. Panic fluttered in my throat, splashed hot across my back. And so I got up. I snuck out of my grown-up house like a teenager. By the time I got home, I’d driven a hundred and fifty miles. I could have been well on my way, if I’d actually gone somewhere.

BOOK: Husband and Wife
2.78Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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