Dept. Of Speculation (8 page)

If only they were French, the wife thinks. This would all feel different. But no,
feel
isn’t the word exactly. What is it that the grad students say?

Signify
.

It would all
signify
differently.

General notes: If the wife becomes unwived, what should she be called? Will the story have to be rewritten? There is a time between being a wife and being a divorcée, but no good word for it. Maybe say what a politician might say. Stateless person. Yes, stateless.

Either way it’s going to be terrible for a long time
, the shrink says.

Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad. K tells the wife the story of a childhood friend who wears too much makeup now, who seems always to be sweating. This friend asked if she could come and cook a meal for K and her husband at their housewarming party. “No, no, just bring yourself,” she said. “We have everything.” The woman arrived at the party, sweating, carrying a bag of kale and raw meat.

The wife is afraid. She is afraid again in the old way. She’d thought it was done. Until he died. (“If he died,” she almost said. “If” she loved him so much she contrived to say.) She did say “loved,” she noticed.

“Tense! Tense!” the wife has always said to her students, trying to explain that it matters, that it illuminates things.

They used to send each other letters. The return address was always the same:
Dept. of Speculation
.

All of the letters are still in their house; he has a box of them on his desk, as does she.

“I just feel …,” she says. The shrink cuts her off. “I know, I know, everyone always knows exactly what you feel, don’t they?”

“What about me?” Her daughter likes to ask this whenever the conversation veers out of her comprehension. “What about me?” A chip off the old block, the wife thinks.

The wife has taken to laughing maniacally when the husband says something, then repeating the word back incredulously.

Nice????

Fun????

She has seen this rhetorical strategy used before by a soon-to-be ex-wife talking to her soon-to-be ex-husband. Poor creature, she thought then.

The undergrads get the suicide jokes, but the ones about divorce go right over their heads.

You’re a truth bomb, a cute guy said to her once at a party. Before excusing himself to go flirt with someone else.

The wife is advised to read a horribly titled adultery book. She takes the subway three neighborhoods away to buy it. The whole experience of reading it makes her feel compromised, and she hides it around the house with the fervor another might use to hide a gun or a kilo of heroin. In the book, he is referred to as the participating partner and she as the hurt one. There are many other
icky things, but there is one thing in the book that makes her laugh out loud. It is in a footnote about the way different cultures handle repairing a marriage after an affair.

In America, the participating partner is likely to spend an average of 1,000 hours processing the incident with the hurt partner. This cannot be rushed
.

When she reads this, the wife feels very very sorry for the husband.

Who is only about 515 hours in.

In Epirus, there is a kind of spider called “the sunless one.” The Cypriots called the viper “the deaf one.” The idea was to give such dangerous creatures a sort of code name, one that is calculated to leave them unaware that they have been mentioned. The fear was that to mention such a creature was to cause it to appear.

Her sister has a deal with her husband.
Whatever happens, keep it like in the fifties. Not one word ever. Make sure she’s a nobody
.

Towards the end, the baby hadn’t been growing quite as she should be and so once a week the doctors had the wife come in to be tested. She’d sit in a recliner, hooked up to the machines, waiting to hear the heartbeat. Each time, the wife feared she wouldn’t hear it, but then there it would be, a sound like horses galloping. The way he looked at her when they
heard it. It seemed impossible to feel more than they did.

Always always
, he wrote in the book he gave the wife last Christmas.

The sunless one? The deaf one? The cubicled one?

The wife gets an expensive haircut. She shops for something to wear to the husband’s office. She is going to meet him there for lunch; they have decided to try this. This civilized French-seeming thing. In the end, the wife buys only a pair of boots and takes them home without even trying them on. Later, she opens the box and looks at them. The heels are higher than she usually wears. They look uncomfortable. So why does she want to wear uncomfortable shoes on this the most uncomfortable of all days?

Oh, right, she thinks. Evolution.

BECAUSE I AM A BIGGER BIRD THAN YOU!

She wears her black sneakers and jeans and a shirt someone cool once said was cool.

She would not have let one of her students write the scene this way. Not with the pouring rain and the wife’s broken umbrella and the girl in her long black coat. To begin with, she’d suggest taking out the first scene on the subway, the boring one, where the wife pretends to be a Buddhist. (I am a person, she is a person, I am a person, she is a person etc. etc.)
Needed? Can this be shown through gesture?

She would ask for more details of the girl’s appearance. She’d cut the implausible handshake and point out how stilted the dialogue is.
(You have caused my family great pain. I don’t want to be an abstraction to you anymore.)
She might pencil in the girl crying or saying some small thing.
Surely she feels something? Wasn’t there hand-wringing?
She’d slow down the moment before the girl turns on her heel without a word and leaves them.
Nothing else here?

She’d point out that what’s interesting is
actually the lead-up to the scene. How the wife takes a picture of herself before she leaves the house, how she looks somehow as if she is standing in a wind tunnel, how the husband calls her just as she gets off the subway and says, “Don’t come here. A change of plans. I’ll meet you outside.” The husband says he couldn’t help it; he told the girl she was stopping by. “She’ll come out here instead,” he says. But the girl doesn’t do it. She stays and hides in the office.
Perhaps a bit more about how the wife feels?
How she feels something she’s never felt before surge through her body, how she stands on a corner in Midtown at one in the afternoon, kicking a newspaper machine, screaming, “You fucked a child! She’s a fucking child! Tell her to come out here!”
This is very emotionally charged
, she’d write next to the moment when the husband calls the girl and softly tries to convince her. Softly saying, just come, please, so tender his voice, so sorry to cause the girl pain, and all because of the scene his crazy wife is making, his wife yelling in the background. Yelling and yelling.
Then the wife stops yelling and says slowly and clearly to the husband, “Tell her if she doesn’t come, I’ll come to her job, and if she quits this job, I’ll come to her apartment and if she leaves that apartment, I’ll come to her new one. Tell her I’ll find her. Tell her I’m great at research. Tell her I’m fucking great at it. I’ll fucking find her one way or another.” People avert their eyes as they pass. “Just come out,” he says. “Please? Please? It’s going to happen sometime.”

It is raining harder now. They are getting drenched. “Ten minutes!” the wife screams in the background. “Ten fucking minutes! That’s all I want!” His wife who has hardly ever yelled at him and never in public.
It’s important to note the POV switch here
. The wife notices that her foot hurts from kicking the newspaper machine. She wonders if she’s broken it.
Add a pause here. A little beat before the action continues
. The husband hangs up the phone. His hands are shaking. “She’s coming,” he says. “She’ll be here in a bit.”

But it’s a long time still. They stand on the
designated corner. There is, of course, the theatrical rain. The wife knows which direction the girl will be coming from and she thinks that she should stand back in the doorway, that it would be kinder that way, because it will be hard for this girl to walk towards her. So she lets her husband stand out there in the street and then when she knows the girl has come from the look on his face she steps out and greets her in the rain. The girl is shorter than she expected. Long red hair. Glasses, fashion-forward ones. She stands there shaking. With fear, the wife thinks. Or no, something else maybe. The girl stands there rigidly as the wife speaks. Then the moment the words stop she turns and walks away.

The husband and wife walk in the other direction. It is a block before they speak. “She has pretty eyes,” the wife says. They walk towards a bar, prearranged. He holds the door open for her. “Wait, did she have bangs?”

“Haven’t you punished us enough?” the husband says a few days later.
Us?
the wife thinks.
Did he say us? Holy shit
.

She learns something new, something that sends a chill through her. The girl made him go for a walk with her the next day. Correction—he went on a walk with the girl the next day.

The husband doesn’t volunteer this. Like every detail it is eked out of him in the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings. “She was furious,” he explains. “She felt ambushed.”

Sorry
, the wife thinks of saying.
Sorry, sorry
.

But that night, in the taxi, she does not concern herself with his voice, which is low and grievous, but only with the position of the moon in the sky. How she can make it disappear with one small movement of her thumb.

Hahahahahaha​you​stupid​cunt​hahahahahaha

“Am I winking?” the daughter asks them when they get home. One of her eyes is closed, the other twitching.

“Not quite,” he says.

“Now? Now?”

1. A man is standing on the bank of a river when it suddenly begins to flood. His wife and his mistress are both being swept away. Who should he save?

His wife. (Because his mistress will always understand.)

2. A man is standing on the bank of a river when it suddenly begins to flood. His wife and his mistress are both being swept away. Who should he save?

His mistress. (Because his wife will never understand.)

The wife is reading
Civilization and Its Discontents
, but she keeps getting lost in the index.

Analogies

bare leg on a cold night, 40

cautious businessman, 34

guest who becomes a permanent lodger, 53

Polar expedition, ill equipped, 98

When she tells people she might move to the country, they say, “But aren’t you afraid you’re going to get lonely?”

Get?

Imaging studies have found that the pain involved in romantic breakups is not just emotional. Similar areas to the ones that process physical assault light up in the brains of the recently jilted.

What John Berryman said:
I’m too alone. I see no end. If we could all run, even that would be better
.

At night, they lie in bed holding hands. It is possible if she is stealthy enough that the wife can do this while secretly giving the husband the finger.

Grow old with me. The best is yet to be
, say the cards in the anniversary section.

But there are other lines from Yeats the wife keeps remembering.

Things fall apart
.

“The girl had red hair,” the wife tells her sister. “The same color I used to dye mine.”

The wife stopped dyeing her hair when she got pregnant. (Because of the monster babies with no hands that the vain hair-dyeing women have.) But she never went back to it and for years now her hair has been streaked with gray.

Spell for invocation of divorce:
Greener! Greener!

Sometimes she talks to the husband in her head.
You think I don’t know. I know. Once I was sleeping next to that boy and a mouse ran through my hair, but I didn’t move. I didn’t want to risk him getting out of bed
.

The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)

I was hoping your happiest memory might include me
.

Later the wife realizes what that was, why he placed that special emphasis on each word of the sentence.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the prosecution rests
.

In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and avoids information
and interpretations that contradict prior beliefs.

“You’ve made me into a cartoon wife,” she tells him. “I am not a cartoon wife.”

The Buddha named his son Rahula, which means “fetter.”

The Buddha left his wife when his son was two days old. He would never have attained enlightenment if he’d stayed, scholars say.

As for us, our days are like grass
.

“We don’t know, but the cards know,” her daughter says when they are playing a game later.

Are you going to leave him? Is he going to leave you? Do you think you’ll make it?

It is her married friends that ask these questions. The single ones don’t. They think it’s
simpler. Sometimes the wife cries. Sometimes she shrugs.

The cards know.

The wife has never not wanted to be married to him. This sounds false but it is true.

She has wanted to sleep with other people, of course. One or two in particular. But the truth is she has good impulse control. That is why she isn’t dead. Also why she became a writer instead of a heroin addict. She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks
instead
of acts. A character flaw, not a virtue.