Dept. Of Speculation (7 page)

She knows. She knows. So it begs the question, doesn’t it? Did she unkind and ungood and untrue him?

The wife goes to yoga now. Just to shut everyone up. She goes to it in a neighborhood where she does not live and has never lived. She takes the class meant for old and sick people but can still hardly do any of it. Sometimes she just stands and looks out the window where the people whose lives are intact enough not to have to take yoga live. Sometimes the wife cries as she is twisting her body into positions. There is a lot of crying in the class for the old and sick people so no one says anything.

But even the wife notices that her teacher is arrayed in light. The teacher takes pity on her and gives her private lessons. The wife tells her about the husband. About how he may or may not love someone else. About how she may or may not leave him. She tells her that they viciously whisper-fight at night when her daughter is in bed.

She does not say, Last night, I pulled his hair. Last night I tried to pull his hair out of his head.

It is so easy now for the wife to be patient and kind to the daughter. She will never love anyone or anything more. Never. It is official.

She remembers the first night she knew she loved him, the way the fear came rushing in. She laid her head on his chest and listened to his heart. One day this too will stop, she thought. The no, no, no of it.

Why would you ruin my best thing?

Her neighbor’s husband fell in love with a girl who served coffee to him every morning. She was twenty-three and wanted to be a dancer or a poet or a physical therapist. When he left his family, his wife said, “Does it matter to you how foolish you look? That all our friends find you ridiculous?” He stood in the doorway, his coat in his hand. “No,” he said.
The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that.
Kummerspeck
. Literally,
grief bacon
.

Love
is the word men use to paper over this.

Studies show that 110% of men who leave their wives for other women report that their wives are crazy.

Darwin theorized that there was something left over after sexual attractiveness had served its purpose and compelled us to mate. This he called “beauty” and thought it might be what drives the human animal to make art.

Every single song has a message for the wife these days. Some are particularly moving and must be played on repeat over and over as she walks to the subway. For example:
Watergate does not bother me. Does your conscience bother you? Tell me true
.

No one gets the crack-up he expects. The wife was planning for the one with the headscarf
and the dark jokes and the people speaking kindly of her at her funeral.

Oh wait, might still get that one.

We both felt really bad about it, the husband tells the wife. “Oh, the hand-wringing!” her best friend says. “Do they think they’re in a movie?”

Sometimes the husband and wife run into each other in the park across the street. He is there to smoke, she to stare at the trees. He buttons the three buttons of her coat.
He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me
, she thinks. Both have trouble working up the nerve to go into the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings. They joke that they should just run off to Mexico together. Forget this whole stupid thing.

But in they go. It is the designated place for questions.

“Are you still e-mailing or calling her?”

“No,” he says.

“Are you still sending her music?”

“No,” he says slowly. “I’m not sending her music.”

“What? What are you sending her?”

“Just one video,” he says.

“Of what?”

“Of guinea pigs eating a watermelon.”

What Kant said:
What causes laughter is the sudden transformation of a tense expectation into nothing
.

What the Girl said:
Hey, I really like you
.

The wife thinks the old word is better. She says he is
besotted
. The shrink says he is
infatuated
. She doesn’t want to tell what the husband says.

Anyway, he takes it back a few days in.

I am not very observant, the wife thinks. Once her husband bought a dining room table and it wasn’t until dinnertime that she noticed it. By then he was angry.

These are the sorts of things they talk about in the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings.

But she does get irritated when her college sends around the memo at the end of the semester about how to recognize a suicidal student. She wants to send it back marked up in black letters.
How about you look in their eyes?

People say,
You must have known. How could you not know?
To which she says, Nothing has ever surprised me more in my life.

You must have known
, people say.

The wife did have theories about why he was acting gloomy. He was drinking too much, for example. But no, that turned out to be completely backwards; all the whiskey drinking was the result, not the cause, of the problem. Correlation IS NOT causation. She remembered that the almost astronaut always got very agitated about this mistake that nonscientists made.

Other theories she’d had about the husband’s gloominess:

He no longer has a piano.

He no longer has a garden.

He no longer is young.

She found a community garden and a good therapist for him, then went back to talking
about her own feelings and fears while he patiently listened.

Was she a good wife?

Well, no
.

Evolution designed us to cry out if we are being abandoned. To make as much noise as possible so the tribe will come back for us.

The ex-boyfriend starts sending her music. Rare cuts, B-sides, little perfect things. He wants to make amends, she remembers.

She did speed with him once. But it is not the best drug for her. Her brain tends to speed along anyway, speed, swerve, crash, and so on and so on. That is the default state of things.

Some nights in bed the wife can feel herself floating up towards the ceiling. Help me, she thinks, help me, but he sleeps and sleeps.

“What is he acting like?” her best friend says. Like an Evil Love Zombie is the answer.

That first time they fucked after she found out. Jesus. Jesus. He looking down at her body which was not the girl’s body, she looking up at his face which was not his face. “I’m sorry I let you get so lonely,” she told him later. “Stop apologizing,” he said.

What John Berryman said:
Let all flowers wither like a party
.

The wife reads about something called “the wayward fog” on the Internet. The one who has the affair becomes enveloped in it. His old life and wife become unbearably irritating. His possible new life seems a shimmering dream. All of this has to do with chemicals in the brain, allegedly. An amphetamine-like mix, far more compelling than the soothing attachment one. Or so the evolutionary biologists say.

It is during this period that people burn
their houses down. At first the flames are beautiful to see. But later when the fog wears off, they come back to find only ashes.

“What are you reading about?” the husband asks her from across the room. “Weather,” she tells him.

People keep flirting with the wife. Has this been happening all along and she never noticed? Or is it new? She’s like a taxi whose light just went on. All these men standing in the street, waving her over.

I CAN HAS BOYFRIEND?

She falls in love with a friend. She falls in love with a student. She falls in love with the bodega man. He hands her back her change so gently.

Floating, yes, floating away. How can he sleep? Doesn’t he feel her levitating?

I will leave you, my love. Already I am going. Already I watch you speaking as if from a great height. Already the feel of your hand on my hand, of your lips on my lips, is only curious. It is decided then. The stars are accelerating. I half remember a sky could look like this. I saw
it once when she was born. I saw it once when I got sick. I thought you’d have to die before I saw it again. I thought one of us would have to die. But look, here it is! Who will help me? Who can help me? Rilke? Rilke! If you’re listening, come quickly. Lash me to this bed! Bind me to this earthly body! If you hear this, come now! I am untethering. Who can hold me?

What John Berryman said:
Goodbye, sir, & fare well. You’re in the clear
.

These bits of poetry that stick to her like burrs.

Lately, the wife has been thinking about God, in whom the husband no longer believes. The wife has an idea to meet her ex-boyfriend at the park. Maybe they could talk about God. Then make out. Then talk about God again.

She tells the yoga teacher that she is trying to be honorable.
Honorable!
Such an old-fashioned word, she thinks. Ridiculous, ridiculous.

“Yes, be honorable,” the yoga teacher says.

Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip and then a giant lobster followed him around for the rest of his days.

Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friend calls it.

So she invents allergies to explain her red eyes and migraines to explain the blinked-back look of pain. One day, coming out of their building, she staggers a little from the exhaustion of all of it. Her elderly neighbor comes over, touches her sleeve. “Are you okay, dear?” he asks. Carefully, politely, she shakes him off of her.

Sometimes when the wife is trying to do positions, the yoga teacher will single her out for instruction. The wife can’t help but notice that she never has to correct other students in this particular way.

Do not instruct the head! The head is not being instructed!

How has she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

He sent the girl a love letter over the radio. Later, the wife sees his playlist from that night. It is from the night before she went out of town. The night before it first happened. She listens to the songs he played one by one, ticking each of them off the list.

Afterwards, the wife sits on the toilet for a long time because her stomach is twisting. She feels something rising in her throat and spits into her daughter’s pink plastic bucket. Just a little bile. She dry-heaves again, but nothing. The longer she sits there, the more she notices how dingy and dirty the bathroom is. There is a tangle of hair on the side of the sink, some kind of creeping mildew on the shower curtain. Their towels are no longer white and are fraying along the edges. Her underwear too is dinged nearly gray. The elastic is coming out a little. Who would wear such a thing? What kind of repulsive creature? She takes
her underwear off and wraps it around and around in toilet paper, then puts it in the bottom of the trash where no one will see.

When you pick up one piece of dust, the entire world comes with it
.

“I am alone,” her student says. “Everyone is tired of this. No one will come anymore.” But Lia is only twenty-four. She is beautiful and brilliant. There are so many more years when people will come.

Your friends and students adore you
.

The wife loses a twenty-dollar bill somewhere between the store and home, but she can’t make herself go back to look for it. In the last store, the clerk was unkind to her or at least not kind.

I only wanted you to adore me
.

She goes to visit Lia in a hospital in Westchester. Her wrists are bandaged but her eyes have a little light in them. “Thank you for coming,” she says formally, as if she is in a receiving line at a wedding.

The wife has been teaching for twenty years. It is not the first time she’s been at the bedside of someone with bandaged wrists.

She brings Lia a notebook, spiral-bound. But they won’t let her take it. No wire, they say. She should have thought of that. Lia called her right before the lights went out. There’s that moment, you know, for most people, where you decide you want to wake up in the world one more day.

Everyone there won’t do something. There is a small flock of dull-eyed girls who hate to eat, who hide measuring spoons in their coats
and leave clumps of hair in the sink, and then there are the ones who never answer questions no matter how many different ways you ask them. Sleep is the thing Lia won’t do. She never sleeps unless they drug her. But she never rings the call button in the middle of the night either. “I just wait for first light,” she says. “I watch the window.”

This is how the wife gets through the nights too, but she doesn’t tell her this.

Lia was legally dead for one minute but she said she didn’t see anything, that there was only darkness and a low hum like a vacuum cleaner running.

Now the wife is sitting with her on a porch, looking at the trees. There are trees everywhere you look at this place. Someone, long ago, must have believed that trees could solve anything. The other patients take turns blowing bubbles from a small container because they are not allowed to smoke or
drink here. “The great green earth,” Lia calls it, but not as a joke, more like it breaks her heart to say it. “Stay,” the wife tells her. “Just stay.”

Enough already with the terrible hunted eyes of the married people. Did everyone always look this way but she is just now seeing it?

Case in point: The wife runs into C at a party, a brilliant woman married to a brilliant man. She has just had a show at a major gallery. Her husband is in the MoMA permanent collection. Brilliant, brilliant. But C does not talk to the wife about brilliant things. She talks about her dissembling contractor, about spa treatments, about waiting lists for private kindergarten. Later the husband asks, “Oh, you saw C, how was she?” “She was radiating rage,” the wife says.