The Senator's Wife (3 page)

Their room is on the second floor of the inn. The floor is bare wood. It creaks as Nathan paces back and forth, needing motion as he always does when he's happy. She's seen him teach, and he's always in motion then too.

The window in front of Meri is open. She props her bare feet on the sill. The curtains rise and fall around her, sometimes brushing her legs as she listens to her husband. Oil sparks out from the skin of the orange as she bends it, sparks out and disappears in the air, leaving its scent behind. There's white pith under her fingernail. She eats the sections slowly, carefully peeling off all the threads. Nathan and his mother are talking about money now, about interest rates and monthly payments. Outside, someone passing by is whistling, and across the street, the canopy of leaves on the town common moves slowly in the wind, one mass of green. There were four or five students playing Frisbee on the lawn under these trees when they came in.

Nathan and his mother have agreed on things, it seems. At least Nathan is making agreeing noises, winding-it-up noises. He hangs up, and the room is quiet for a long moment except for the students’ faint cries floating in from outside.

Then she feels his hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” he says gently. She reaches up and touches him with her own orange-smelling fingers.

“Hey, turn around,” he says.

Meri does, gripping the arms of the chair, picking it up and turning it with her. She sits back and looks at him. Nathan is beautiful. You shouldn't love someone for the accident of his beauty, Meri knows this, but it's what drew her to him. How could it not? His eyes are a brown so light as to be nearly gold. He's sitting on the edge of the double bed, facing her. Their knees are almost touching. They would be touching if the bed weren't so high. It's a four-poster, with a white chenille bedspread.

“It's all okay with my mother,” he says.

“I gather.”

“Are you ready to own a house?” He reaches over and strokes her leg, her jeans. “This is something you want to do, right?”

Meri nods.

He rocks her leg back and forth a little. “Right?” he asks again. He wants more from her.

“Oh, you know me, Nate.” Meri makes a face. “I'm always nervous about change. I'd have had us grow old in my apartment.”

“I would have had that commute, though. Hard on me.”

“Yeah. That would have been the wrinkle.” She feels the curtains around her like a quick caress, and then they die back.

“Don't be nervous,” he says softly.

“Oh,” she says brightly. “Okay.”

He laughs. Then his face grows serious and he says, “It's our house, Meri. I wouldn't have wanted a house if we weren't together. It's for us.”

She offers him a wedge of orange, and he takes it. They're quiet for a moment, eating.

“Let's celebrate,” he says abruptly. “I'll call Sheila and make the offer, and then let's go downstairs and have champagne.”

“You think they have champagne downstairs?” The inn's bar is dark and utilitarian. At lunch it was full of people who might have been faculty, having hamburgers and iced tea or beer in heavy mugs.

“We can but try. Put on something hot. Let's be festive.”

As she's changing out of her jeans, she calls to Nathan, washing his sticky hands, “Maybe it's because I don't have a job yet. Maybe that makes me feel . . . less
real
about living here.”

He's come to stand in the doorway to the bathroom, holding a towel. “You'll find a job.”

She opens the closet to get her dress out, smiling at him. “I'm so glad that's settled.”

“Well, it is.”

Downstairs, the bar is half full. They sit at a square table, its surface a single thick slab of wood, scarred and fissured, with a shiny finish. Nathan goes over to the bar and leans on it. She watches his back and his strong rounded buttocks as he shifts his weight to rest one foot on the rail. The window next to her is open. In the distance, there's the sound of someone running a leaf blower.

Nathan comes back with two champagne glasses, the bubbles coursing frantically upward in each. He hands one to her and sits down. Though it has the weight of glass, Meri's flute feels like plastic to her, and when she touches it to Nathan's to toast the future, there's a dull noise, nothing musical.

But it's good champagne, dry and flavorful. “Yum,” she says.

“
You
are yum,” he answers, and raises his glass again. “My mistress of the house.”

“Now, why does that sound so much more interesting than
wife
?” she asks.

“It doesn't,” he says.

She snorts and has another sip of champagne. As she sets her glass down, she says, “I have another question: who's Tom Naughton? Besides being an ex-senator.”

“You don't know?”

“I'm asking.”

“He's one of the really good guys. He was. I think he had two, but it might have been three terms at the time of all the Great Society stuff in the sixties and seventies. He was part of the whole discussion on poverty, of how it should be dealt with, which
was
the argument for the few seconds they had all that money to throw at it. He was always known to be a straight shooter. Even the guys who disagreed with him respected him.”

“And then?”

“Well, basically I think he just retired. Maybe he saw the handwriting on the wall.” He frowned. “Or there might have been some personal issues, I'm thinking. I can't quite remember. Anyway, the whole thing died in the seventies, and his heyday was over.” Nathan twirls his glass slowly. He shrugs. “He's still around, with some fancy D.C. law firm, part of various commissions. You hear about him every now and then, advising, writing policy papers. Like Hart. Or Rudman.” He looks at Meri and grins. “It'll be neat to meet him.”

Now they start to talk about the house again, about specific rooms and how they might use them. Meri makes her voice casual as she brings up the solid-core door, the bureaus. When Nathan says, “Yeah, we'll sure need them, won't we?” she feels a rush of something like gratitude. She lifts his hand to her mouth and kisses his fingertips.

But as she releases his hand, then as they sip the last of the champagne, as they leave the bar and head upstairs, she is thinking, as she has at certain moments ever since she married Nathan, of how separate she and he are. She is thinking that she doesn't want to be grateful to him for what he allows her. She doesn't want not to have been consulted about the house.

But she let it happen, didn't she—the situation of her own disenfranchisement about these things? In order to be truly honest with Nathan about all her feelings, she would need to be willing to fight it out, to argue over every small thing. And she hadn't realized, until she got married, just how many small things there were. It makes her feel tired to think of it.

Upstairs they stand on opposite sides of the bed and move quickly out of their clothes. Meri crawls across the coverlet to Nathan. She lies down on her side, looking up at him, opening her knees as he reaches for her.

The air from the open window is cool, but Nathan's body is warm, he radiates heat. He's hard, and she reaches down to help him, to shift him into place. She feels a kind of relief as he enters her. This is what she wants. This is the way she feels honest with him, safe. Here, she thinks. Yes. As he begins to move in her, she whispers it: “Yes. Yes!”

They make love quickly, fueled by his urgency, and when he comes, Nathan cries out so loudly that Meri can imagine someone on the sidewalk below stopping, listening under the darkening trees.

Afterward they lie still, side by side. Meri is looking up at the ceiling, which is low and veined with cracks that have been patched in. She thinks of the ceiling in her apartment, the patterned tin squares. Nathan's stomach rumbles. Meri's mind begins the cartwheels through her life that routinely follow sex. She's remembering how it was to make love with the man she was dating before she met Nathan. Rick was his name. She thinks of his cock versus Nathan's—shorter, fatter. She thinks of the comment he made about the inadequacy of her stereo speakers, a comment that deeply offended her and led directly to their breakup. Then—how? is there any possible connection?—she's off on the article she's in the midst of writing about the research of a young archaeologist at the college. She'll finish this article and one more, a summary of recent faculty publications, and then she will be done, her job will end.

Nathan says, “You like it, don't you?”

She looks over at him. “The house?” she asks. Her voice is croaky.

“God! What else?”

She clears her throat. “I don't know.” He's silent. “Sex?” She's smiling, but he doesn't look at her. “This room?” She turns on her side to him. “Don't be cranky, Nate. Maybe I just feel less . . . connected to the idea of homeownership than you.” She thinks abruptly of Elias, the gay man who works with her at the magazine. When he wants to ask discreetly whether someone else is also gay, he says, “Is he a homeowner?”

She is about to tell Nathan this, but he's moved on, he's started to talk about the house again. This time his angle is the amazement—“I mean, how likely is it?”—of moving in next to Tom Naughton.

“Yes,” she answers. She thinks of Delia Naughton's face changing at the mention of her husband's name. She runs her hand over Nathan's belly, smooth and white and hairless. His whole body is long and beautiful this way. He makes her think of an El Greco saint. Her head is propped up on her other hand. “Yeah, I like her, anyway.”

“What do you mean, you like her?”

“Oh.” Her hand lifts and her fingers make quote marks. “
The wife.
I talked to her for a minute today. When you and Sheila were inside. She was . . . I guess you would say,
welcoming.
Nice.”

Nathan is silent for a moment. He gets up abruptly. He goes into the bathroom. She can hear him splashing water around in there. Now he's standing in the doorway, filling it with his long body, wiping his face with a towel.

He's looking at her.

“What?” she says.

“Why didn't you tell me this, earlier?”

He's wounded. As Meri knew he would be. As she had intended, she realizes. Almost as soon as she mentioned Delia Naughton—“the wife”—certainly when he responded with silence, she knew she had wanted this moment, this moment of a kind of revenge. On Nathan. Whom she loves. She can't help it; even now she feels a kind of pleasure.

At what? That she knew something he didn't? Nyah, nyah. Is it that petty? Is
she
that petty?

“I didn't think to, until just now,” Meri says. This isn't true and she knows it. There were several moments when she could have offered it to Nathan and she didn't. She didn't because he had made her feel excluded.

Nathan stands watching her for another moment. Then he sits on the foot of the bed. “What did you talk about?” He half smiles. “With
the wife
?” His voice is sarcastic, but he's trying to forgive her, trying to get back to where they were.

“Oh, nothing, really. It was a minute. ‘Hi, how are you, let me know if I can help, blah, blah, blah.’ Just, she gave it a little more than that. She has serious charm.”

He doesn't answer.

“Nathan, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I should have told you earlier. But it doesn't matter, does it? We've bought a house. We just made love. I would file this under ‘trivial,’ this mistake. Not so very wicked, after all.”

He reaches down and grips her feet, moves them gently. His hands are warm. “Only a little,” he says. “Only a little wicked.” He smiles at her in the twilit room. She loves him. That's all that counts. She loves him.

CHAPTER TWO

Delia, August 1993

I
T RAINS STEADILY
through the night, and Delia wakes from time to time to its heavy racket in the trees outside her open bedroom window. At one point, she gets up and puts another blanket on the bed.

When she wakes for good, though, at about five, light is flooding the room. There's a cool breeze moving the branches of the tree outside, but she imagines she can feel the heat of the day entering the house, rising.

She begins assessing her body—what hurts today, what doesn't—and then flings back the covers in irritation with herself. How tedious can you be? She's up, she goes down the hall to the bathroom, to urinate, to brush her teeth, to lay out her medications and take the morning batch.

The kitchen, at the back of the house, seems cold and dark when she comes down the back stairs, and she's glad for the sweater she pulled on over her bathrobe. She makes her breakfast and sits listening to the news on the local public-radio station. There's much talk, a year later, about the recovery from Hurricane Andrew in Florida. And locally, they've arrested someone who'd been dropping rocks on cars from an overpass on the state highway.

At seven, she goes upstairs and writes a long letter to her older son, Evan. Then she showers and gets dressed in what she thinks of as her work clothes—today a cotton dress and low-heeled sandals. She puts on the makeup she usually wears—mascara, lipstick, a little color on her cheeks—and looks at herself critically in the mirror. Well, she's done what she can, she can do no more.

It's around eight-thirty when she goes back downstairs to make her second cup of coffee at the espresso machine—black this time. She's just sitting down at the table to drink it when she hears a truck pull up outside, and then, in a minute, men's voices yelling at one another. Carrying her coffee, she goes to the living room, to the front windows. The moving van in the driveway on the other side of the double house is huge, red and white, and the men are busy around it, opening doors, pulling out clanking metal ramps. They are young, they are wearing matching T-shirts, though she can't make out what they say. Delia can hear someone next door, inside what she still thinks of as Ilona's house, thudding up the stairs.

As she sits looking out with her coffee, the thudding becomes steady. They have begun to carry furniture in. They shout to one another, they call back and forth from the driveway, from the foot of the stairs up to the top. The new owners, too, have arrived and added their voices to the din. Delia hears the young woman—Mary, her name is. No,
Meri.
She spelled it for Delia, she remembers that now. There was something nervy and tomboyish about her, qualities Delia likes in a girl. In a woman.

So this will be the end of the deep silence on the other side of the wall, then. Delia won't be sorry, though by now she's used to it—the house next door has been empty since Ilona Carter's death eight months or so ago. But even before then, her elderly neighbor's routines weren't the kind that generated much noise. Certainly not noise at a level that could easily penetrate the multiple layers between Delia's house and hers—the solid brick fire wall, the studs and slatted lath on both sides, the two coats of old horsehair plaster, and then all that had been added and attached on top of that over the years—paint and wallpaper and wallpaper and paint again.

The one regular exception to the quiet had been in the late afternoons, when Ilona listened to classical music at a high volume while she had one very strong double martini, consumed with habitual slowness over several hours of listening, of getting up over and over to change the records: Ilona never made the transition to tapes or CDs. And though on Delia's side of the house the music sometimes caused a bothersome light buzzing of the window glass, for the most part she liked it, liked the way it seeped murmurously through the walls. She counted on it, actually. It was like listening to flowing water, she thought. Something as elemental as that.

It was harder occasionally when Ilona invited Delia over for a drink too, and put on a particular piece of music by a particular performer she admired. Then they'd sit together in the overwhelming racket, Ilona smiling, her old head thrown back, her eyes behind the Coke-bottle lenses of her glasses closed in a kind of ecstasy, her large, horsey teeth exposed; Delia waiting with all the impatience of someone under a dentist's drill for the noise and the pain to stop.

Ilona was more than slightly deaf. Thus the volume. She was also arthritic and had macular degeneration. “But I don't complain,” she would say, when she'd finished complaining. And it was true that she was by nature a buoyant person. She confirmed Delia's opinion that musicians were usually the happiest people—Ilona had played second violin with a small symphony orchestra in the Midwest earlier in her life. Delia had known her for thirty years and felt an uncritical devotion to her for most of that time.

Ilona's death had been sudden. It was Delia who found her, and it was the silence late one winter afternoon that made her think to telephone over there. That made her go through the hall drawer for Ilona's keys when there was no answer to the ringing and ringing, that made her step across the ice-crusted front porch and let herself in, that propelled her upstairs when Ilona didn't respond to her calls and wasn't anywhere on the first floor.

She'd died in her sleep, apparently. At any rate, she was in bed with the covers pulled up nearly to her chin. Her skin had turned a startling yellow-gray. Her death shocked Delia, though it shouldn't have. The old woman was ninety-two.

Delia herself was seventy-four when Ilona died. Old too, yes. But Ilona's presence, her very existence, had always made Delia feel young and vital—sometimes even girlish. Oh, she knew, of course, that to the mostly truly young families who were her neighbors now, she and Ilona were more like than not. They inhabited a category: old woman. These neighbors might have understood that one was quite a bit older than the other, but what difference really did that make? What they would be focused on was the waste of their both still living alone in those two huge houses. And now Ilona is gone, and her side of the house will be reclaimed, transformed.

But the truth is, Delia is perfectly happy to have young people moving in. More liveliness, more children. There'd been a kind of pause on the street after the last of the previous batch of children had left, vanished into high school or college or life. For a few of those years there'd been hardly anyone playing on the street, there were few trick-or-treaters at Halloween, there were no cries echoing through the early dusk as the children ran through one another's yards.

Delia had missed it. It's good that the silence is over. The childless older couples have moved on. The houses have sold. Some were so large they've been turned into condominiums, so two or three families live where one did in the old days. Once again you saw children, you heard them—their high, light voices, their games, their occasional extravagant public weeping. She's glad for it. She's glad for this young couple moving in next to her. Perhaps they have children, or will have them. She hadn't asked when she met the woman.

When Delia leaves to go to work, there's no one outside. Ilona's front door is propped open though, and she can hear voices in the house.

She takes her car. Usually she walks, but she's decided she'll do some shopping today when her workday is over—she'll buy some little gifts for her new neighbors, something to make them feel welcome.

The air is soft and clear, the roads still black with damp after the heavy rain she heard in the night. The main streets around the town green are already crowded with shoppers, people getting ready for the weekend. Delia likes these days at the beginning and the end of the summer, when the students are gone and the town is suddenly reclaimed by adults. When you can drive from one stoplight to another without dodging the perpetually jaywalking young people, kids who barely glance at the cars before they launch themselves into the road.

Delia drives several blocks past the campus and parks in front of an old white colonial house, set close to the street, a worn rail fence around its shallow front yard. This is the Apthorp house, where Delia works.

This work—her job, as she thinks of it—is not paid. She's a volunteer, a docent, at a house that was the home in the early to mid-nineteenth century of an itinerant preacher and his wife. It's the wife who's made it famous, one hundred years after her death. Her unfinished novel and a group of unpublished stories were discovered in the attic in the late 1950s.

Four days a week, four months a year—June, July, August, September—Delia leads people through the house, answering their questions about the Apthorps. And though Anne Apthorp was admittedly not a figure of any real importance in the New England intellectual scene, there are many questions. About her marriage, about her furniture, about her china, her kitchen equipment, her writing implements, her children. About how she lived and how she died.

Delia had come to her love for all things Apthorpian twenty or so years earlier, shortly after she moved to Williston with Tom and the children. She'd been asked then, as the congressman's wife, to be on a committee whose charge was to raise money to convert the house, which the college had recently bought, to a museum. It was one of many civic obligations she saw as being part of her public life. She said yes, and she did what she was asked to do—she went to the fund-raisers, she worked the rooms, she gave the required spiels.

And then she was asked to read Anne Apthorp's letters aloud at a fund-raising event—perhaps excerpts from three or four. She was free to choose which ones.

She was tempted to say no. She was going through a difficult time in her own life with Tom then, and she was saying no to many things.

But the young woman doing the asking was persuasive, and Delia thought finally that it might be good for her to get out and move around among people. And so, on a winter afternoon, with the sky the even soft gray of a threatening snowfall, she pulled on her boots and hiked over to the college library to go through Anne Apthorp's correspondence, to make her selections.

The letters were still in boxes then, and the librarian put her in a paneled conference room with several of these cartons set out on the enormous table. Delia sat in a comfortable chair next to an old floor lamp and started to read.

Of course, she'd long since read the unfinished novel, about the wife of a sea captain, a man who repeatedly abandons her for a world he's more compelled by, for a life he prefers. But she hadn't known until now about the existence of the letters, and she read them with growing interest.

A small number of them were addressed to Anne's parents—her mother mostly. They still lived in northern Massachusetts, where Anne had grown up. But most were to her husband, and it was clear to Delia as she went through them that this husband, Joshua, had other women—or, more likely, one other woman, who was part of his life, a life of preaching and ardent abolitionism that took him regularly away from home. “I am pleased for you,” Anne Apthorp wrote him, “that you have found so congenial a place to stay in Chesterville, for it seems such an excellent center from which to travel to the villages and churches surrounding it in every direction. I would caution you, though, against staying too long or too often with Mrs. Harding when Mr. Harding is himself away. Surely this will unnecessarily provoke comment and perhaps even make more difficult the work you've traveled so far from home and hearth to do.”

Mrs. Harding is mentioned three or four times over several years: “Please greet that fortunate woman, who has for her daily companion the person I hold closest to my own heart.”

What wasn't in the letters, Delia provided in her imagination, and by the end of the afternoon, walking home in the dark with the expected snow lightly falling, she had the odd sense of having been comforted by Anne Apthorp's story. She felt, somehow, bound to her, linked to her.

· · ·

S
UMMER IS THE
busiest time of the year for the house. There are tourists from all over the country, of course, traveling through New England, seeking out historic places, literary landmarks. But there are also the families of the young people looking at the college in these months, trying to fill their time while their children are trooping off to classes or interviews. And then in the early fall, parents stop by, parents who are dropping their children off to start school, or visiting them. The rest of the year the house is open by appointment only, and Delia, in any case, is in her apartment in Paris in the spring and fall, and busy with family visits in December and January.

But for the summer months, she's full of Apthorpian information. She has a desk in the front hallway, where she's available to answer questions as visitors come and go. And three times a day, at eleven, at one-thirty, and at four, she leads groups through the house. Whatever level of knowledge the visitors have, whatever the focus of their attention, it's Delia's job to answer them thoroughly and respectfully, and she's good at it. Once recently a young man with a camcorder hung around his neck and a baseball hat turned backward on his head asked her what she knew about the Apthorps’ sexual relationship. Perhaps he was inspired to curiosity by the size of the marital bed (small), or by the two little children's cots wedged into a corner of their bedroom.

But Delia thought there was something teasing in his tone. As he finished his question, he looked around at the little group touring the house with him, smiling, as if to draw them into what Delia suspected he saw as a kind of joke, a joke that perhaps he imagined her as the butt of—the elderly docent who probably didn't even remember what sex
was
being asked to discuss it with someone as young, as sexy, as he was.

Delia treated the question as courteously as she treated any other. She mentioned the nearly annual pregnancies, many of which didn't come to term. She referred to the letters that Anne Apthorp had written to her husband. And she suggested the young man
re
read—she always gave the visitors the benefit of the doubt—the passages in the novel,
Hamilton Harbor,
that referred to the fictional Julia's yearning wait while her husband was at sea, her fevered grief when she thought he was lost to her.