Husband and Wife (5 page)

I looked at her cigarette and wished that I wanted it. “I can’t stand the smell of those anymore,” I said.

“I know,” she said. She took a long inhale. “Me neither.”

“Doesn’t Adam think you quit?”

“That’s why I’m
sneaking
,” she said, inflecting the word like Gollum in the
Lord of the Rings
movies. We were closet fantasy nerds—a weakness for the mythological was part of our bond, both of us still mourning the end of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. “But this is the last one. After this I’ll lead a life of purity and openness.”

Why is it that when you have a secret, everything anybody says seems to be about that secret? “That’s nice,” I said. “And Adam will, too.”

“Oh, he’d better,” she said. She looked past me as something caught her eye. “Hey, there’s Smith and Holly. I do not get that combination.”

I turned to see Smith, Nathan’s other best friend, and his latest girlfriend. Smith was the arts editor for the local free weekly. He was slender and angular and spiky-haired, and might have been an arrogant hipster type if he hadn’t been brought up southern and polite. I sometimes had the impression he didn’t quite like me. The girlfriend was, as near as we could tell, a bitch, the sort of person whose mood shifts freeze the atmosphere.

“Well, you know he likes those icy blondes,” I said. “It’s very Hitchcock. He likes women who may or may not be dead, who attract homicidal birds.”

“You and your metaphors,” Alex said. “What are you, some kind of poet?”

“Ha ha ha,” I said. And then for no reason I said it again.

“She looks like a homicidal bird,” Alex said.

“Mmmm,” I said. The girlfriend was so skinny, so childlessly skinny, or skinnily childless. I was suddenly cold, and couldn’t recall what I’d done with my sweater.

“Speaking of metaphors,” Alex said, “I really did love your toast.”

“I’m glad,” I said.

“So this procreation thing,” she said. “You really want me to do it, huh?”

“You know I do,” I said. “Misery loves company. Oh, wait—I mean, it’s one of life’s transcendent experiences.”

She laughed. “Should I get knocked up on my honeymoon?”

“Maybe,” I said. Nathan and I had been talking about kids when we conceived Mattie, but we hadn’t meant to conceive her. “Is this an OK time?” he’d asked, and I’d breathed, “Yes,” into his ear, without giving any thought to whether it really was, without giving it a second thought. But Binx we had planned. Binx we’d conceived in late June during a rather bloodless episode of let’s-make-a-baby sex, and then his father left me at home, cells dividing in my uterus, and went off to fuck another woman. “Here’s the thing about having kids. It’s kind of exhausting trying to do the right thing all the time, and then half the time you get sabotaged. You know, breast is best and all that, so I nurse them both and take my ginormous prenatal vitamin and eat right and sterilize all the pain-in-the-ass pump equipment and take the pump to work and close my office door and sit there at my desk with my breasts hanging out of my shirt, the pump whirring away, and then after all that it turns out the bottles I was using leak chemicals into the milk.”

“This is the story you want to tell me?” she said.

“So I’m feeding my baby chemicals,” I said. “Cancer-causing chemicals? Early-onset puberty chemicals? Delayed-onset puberty chemicals? I can’t even remember. Fuck-them-up-somehow chemicals.”

“They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad,” she said, and I supplied the next line, “They may not mean to, but they do.”

It was true, wasn’t it, and I was not exempt. As if it wasn’t enough to worry that, as one parenting book said, if I picked my baby up too much, he’d never learn independence, and as another book said, if I didn’t pick him up enough, he’d never learn trust, now I had to worry about the effects of divorce. Now my children’s faces would be like the ones on the divorce mediation billboard I saw on the way to work—teary-eyed and trembling-lipped—and since I was bound to screw them up, my only hope was to screw them up in a sufficiently dramatic way, a way that led to a best-selling memoir, so they could make big bucks in the psychological freak show circuit.

“Jesus, girl,” Alex said. “I thought you were trying to get me to procreate.”

“I am, I am,” I said. I dimly heard her say something about my needing to step up the propaganda efforts, to make frequent use of the words
cute
and
charming
. I saw the need, in my response, for a comic tone, but I couldn’t muster it, stuck on the flip side. “If Nathan and I got divorced,” I said, “what would I do about money?”

“What do you mean?”

“Divorce is expensive, right? I make fifty-five thousand a year. We have the mortgage, and the car payment, and Mattie’s preschool. We’re living paycheck to paycheck as it is. In fact we dip into the savings a little every month, and we only have that savings because of Nathan’s book money. I’m embarrassed to tell you how much credit card debt we have. I don’t know how this happened. Why have we been living like this? Why do I have cable? I shouldn’t have cable.”

“I thought you had satellite.”

“I do, but that’s not the point. I shouldn’t have TV at all.”

“What would you do with Mattie when you’re trying to put Binx down for a nap?”

“I don’t know. People did
something
before television. Not just at naptime. In general.”

“They embroidered.” She frowned. “How much credit card debt do you have?”

“Twenty thousand.”

She let her jaw drop. “Holy shit. You’ve kept
that
secret.” She took a big swig of her beer, as if to wash the information down.

“If we had to give back Nathan’s advance, I don’t even know where we’d get the money.”

“Why would you have to give back Nathan’s advance? Is there a problem with the book? I thought they were super gung-ho about it.”

I looked at her. “Yes,” I said. “They are.”

“And why are we talking about divorce?”

“I miss Austin,” I said.

“You haven’t lived there in years.”

“I know,” I said. “I just realized I’ve been missing it for years. We had this great porch swing.”

“You could get a porch swing here, couldn’t you?”

I shrugged. “We don’t really have a porch. Not a proper porch. It’s just a fucking carport with a wall around it.”

The look on her face said I’d been too emotional about this. “I like your porch,” she said. “You have a hammock.”

“Why do the same things happen to everyone?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You think you’re different. And then you find yourself talking about your mortgage.”

“You don’t have an adjustable, do you?”

“Fixed,” I said.

“Thank God,” she said. She swiped at her hair, sweaty and slipping from its pins, with the back of her cigarette hand.

“Don’t set your hair on fire,” I said. That had happened, once, years before, when we were passing a bowl back and forth, and she’d been a little careless with the lighter. She hadn’t really set her hair on fire, just singed the tips a little, and it had seemed funny to us then and might have gone on seeming that way to me in memory if I hadn’t had children and begun to picture them doing all the stupid things I’d ever done and more, and maybe not having the luck that had kept me from burning the house down or crashing my car at ninety miles per hour on a stretch of country road.

She ignored me. “What happened was, we grew up. And growing up is mortgages and IRAs and…” She waved her cigarette in the air, conjuring adulthood.

“You remember that quote from
The Breakfast Club
, ‘When you grow up your heart dies’?” I said. “When I was a kid, I remember being like, ‘That is so
true
.’ You think when you’re young it’s a permanent state, or that you’ll still be you even as you get older, but you’re not.”

“Sure you are,” she said. “You’re you with a mortgage and kids, instead of you with an adolescent chip on your shoulder.”

“John Hughes is so wrong,” I said. “Your heart doesn’t die. I wish it did.” Maudlin. I was drunk and quoting the movies of my youth and getting maudlin.

She looked at me, and I could see in her face the transition from one mode of behavior to another, as she shrugged off ironic banter in favor of sincerity. She could tell I needed
sincerity. The next words out of her mouth were going to be, “Sweetie, what’s wrong?” and it was her wedding and I couldn’t tell her. I shouldn’t even have said as much as I had, but what I had to say wanted out, a bird inside my mouth.

“I’m going to get a drink,” I said. “You need a drink?” I left without waiting for her answer. I didn’t go to the bar. I had reached the stage of drunkenness where it no longer seems pleasurable to keep drinking, an alarming place I hadn’t visited in a number of years. A memory swam upward, of visiting a friend when I was in grad school, having a few too many at a party, then sitting down to e-mail Nathan, who was at home in our house in Austin, our little rental house.
I’m rather runk
, I wrote.
Where are you? Love
,
Sah
. He was delighted by that e-mail. Maybe it was the idea that my brain, even at its most befuddled, reached out in search of him. Maybe he just found it endearing that I misspelled my own name. He called me “Sah” sometimes after that, and whenever he did, I could count on him to beam at me, flush with love.

I gave the dance floor, all those happy jumping people, a wide berth, swinging out into the dark. I stumbled against a solid male torso, and a hand grabbed my arm. It proved to belong to Smith. “I’m too drunk,” I said to him.

“I can’t help you with that,” he said. He said it pleasantly, but as I looked at him it suddenly occurred to me that he might know what Nathan had done, and that, not liking me, he might not disapprove, and I said, “I’ve never done anything to you,” my eyes suddenly awash with tears.

He looked properly alarmed. “What are you talking about? What’s wrong?”

“You don’t think we’re a good couple,” I said. “You never have.”

“I think you’re happy,” he said. “I always have.”

“Happy families are all alike,” I said. “In that they’re all unhappy.”

“That’s a grim view for a guest at a wedding.” He frowned. “What’s going on with you?”

I rubbed at my eyes. I sniffed, loudly, like a child. I don’t think he wanted to ask me the obvious question—whether we were an unhappy family—but he was too kind a person not to acknowledge my obvious distress. “What’s wrong?” he asked again.

“Nathan cheated on me,” I said. Just like that, it was out.

He hadn’t known. I could tell by the look of horror on his face. Poor guy. He’d believed in Nathan, just like I had.

“I thought we were reasonably happy,” I said. “But. Poof.” I made two small explosions with my hands. “So you tell me,” I said. “Is a happy life always an illusion?” Not that I thought he would know. Not that I thought anyone did.

He didn’t answer. His eyes went past me, over my shoulder, and I turned to see that man, my husband, walking slowly toward us, my sweater dangling from his hand.

“Are you ready?” he asked. “It’s time to go home.”

I woke alone. I had a hangover, which made me want to quote to Nathan the line from
Lucky Jim
about a small creature using my mouth first as its toilet and then its mausoleum. But Nathan wasn’t there. I imagined, immediately, that he’d decamped to some seedy motel. But why a seedy motel? Why not a perfectly respectable Holiday Inn? I pictured him sitting on the bed in a sterile hotel room, flipping through the little booklet that tells what’s on HBO. No one knew where he was, not his wife, not his children, as if he’d become a lonely traveling salesman, reclining in bed after bed next to a phone that was never going to ring. Nathan, I wanted to tell this imaginary figure, don’t sit on the bedspread. Don’t you remember that story—was it on
60 Minutes
?—about all that besmirches a hotel room bedspread? Don’t you remember what horrors glowed beneath the infrared light? I remembered saying to Nathan, when we saw this story, that I would have preferred to live in ignorance, rather than to know that every time I crossed the threshold of a hotel room, I entered a hellhole of bloodstains and sperm.

Nobody would let me be ignorant. Not the Internet. Not CNN, with its relentless, maniacal ticker. Not
Newsweek
, which I’d taken to calling
Everything There Is to Be Afraid Of
.

“Catchy,” Nathan had said. “I wonder why they don’t change their name to that.”

Not Nathan. Him least of all.

At the time when Nathan dropped his bomb, I was already feeling more uncertain, more anxious, more infected with a Thomas Hardy–style fatalism, than I could ever remember feeling in my life. I tortured myself with the horrors of the world. I couldn’t stop myself from reading anything with a headline about a child who’d been hurt or killed or just gone missing. I stared at the little photos from Sears with the shimmery blue backgrounds reproduced on CNN.com. I let the cursor hover over the link, willing myself not to click on it, and then I always did. Was I hoping to steel myself, with this endless goggling at other people’s misery, against anything of the sort happening in my own life? Was this what it meant to be a mother? Or was I affected by the state of the country, of the world? Had I been this anxious as a teenager in the days of nuclear escalation, when I’d wondered with Sting if the Russians loved their children too? Had I been this anxious after 9/11? I’d always considered myself an optimist—I
hated
Thomas Hardy. Where had that person gone? How was I to be an optimist in a country that seemed heavy with foreboding as the economy tailspinned, the war tumbled on, the terrorists trained, the polar bears drowned, and the president stood at the podium, peevishly squinting. What madness, in the face of all this, to have procreated not just once but twice, and so to square myself against an array of indomitable forces all
hell-bent—it seemed to me, in the middle of the night, and sometimes during the day—on harming my children. What madness, now, to be confronted with the prospect of raising those children alone.

I considered getting up to discover where my husband had gone. If I tried to move, there was an excellent chance I was going to throw up.

Someone knocked on the door, and for a moment I thought it was Nathan, which would mean that this room was suddenly not ours but mine alone. “Mommy,” Mattie said, “can I come in?” and then she opened the door without waiting for an answer. “Can I get in the big bed?” She clambered up next to me, said, “Hi, Mom!” her little voice ringing out exuberantly, and then she put two fingers in her mouth to suck and began twirling her hair with another, and her face went slack and sleepy.

“You’re funny, Mattie,” I said.

She took the fingers out of her mouth. “Why?”

“Because you turn on a dime.”

She considered this and decided it not worthy of comment. The two fingers went back in her mouth. The one resumed twirling.

“Let’s go back to sleep, okay?” I said. I pulled her against me and tucked the covers over her. I knew this wasn’t going to work, but I pretended that it might. She snuggled against me, and I closed my eyes. Maybe I could pretend my hangover away, and the sum total of yesterday as well. Mattie’s little feet were cold. I cupped one in my hand to warm it.

Mattie squirmed. She wriggled away from me and sat back up. “Daddy had a sleepover with me,” she announced. Well, that explained Nathan’s absence. The guest bed was in Mattie’s room. The events of the night before were bleary.
Had I sanctioned his departure to the guest bed? I might have been concerned about the effect on Mattie of seeing us sleep apart, but maybe I was too drunk to debate it.

“I know,” I lied. “He wanted to make sure you were sleeping well.”

“Oh,” she said. “I was. Did you have a good sleep?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Why?”

“Mommy has a headache,” I said.

“Why?”

“Mommy drank too much.”

“Why?”

“Why indeed,” I said. “Never drink too much, Mattie.”

“Why you don’t want me to?”

“Why?” I repeated. My head throbbed, as if in answer. I wanted to turn to Nathan to say, “I
drank
too much,” which he would of course recognize as a line from the opening of “The Swimmer.” I was full of literary allusions this morning. Without Nathan, that happy conspiratorial feeling of shared recognition, they weren’t much fun, and the way they kept jumping up and down in my brain waving their hands like eager students made me feel dull and flat and alone. I had only my preliterate three-year-old to talk to, and she wasn’t yet familiar with the works of John Cheever. “Goodnight Moon,” I said to Mattie.

“Moo-night goon,” she said, and laughed. This was something Nathan said to her. He liked to switch the first letters of words in phrases. Then she returned to the original topic. Weren’t children supposed to be easily distracted? Why was my tenacious little offspring the one exception to that rule? “Why you don’t want me to drink too much?”

“It gives you a headache.”

“Too much milk?”

“No, not milk. Alcohol.”

“
Al
cohol?” Her
l
’s were still
w
’s, so the word came out
Ow
-co-haw.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Did Daddy drink too much?”

“Oh, Daddy,” I said. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. Why don’t you go ask him?”

“I want
you
to come.”

What I wanted was to pass out, to enter a sensory deprivation chamber. To die, I might have said, but in the hyperbolic mode, not the suicidal one. I really didn’t want to go find Nathan asleep in the guest bed, snuggling up to a cliché of estrangement, but it seemed a fine idea to me that Mattie go. I loved my daughter more than life, but I would have liked very much for her and her high-pitched little voice to be in another room. If you have kids, you know that you can say to your child that you don’t feel well, but you can’t expect any resulting change in her behavior. Small children don’t take excuses. When Mattie was two and I was pregnant with Binx, she caught a stomach virus and almost immediately recovered, but not before she passed a far more vicious version to us. All night Nathan and I threw up, me heaving in the bathroom with my swollen belly pressed against the underside of the toilet, and the next day I was in a state of wonderment that I still had to take care of this child. No time off for illness, or hangovers, or severe emotional distress, let alone good behavior.

“Why don’t you go by yourself?” I asked.

“I want
you
to come.” She turned the volume on her voice up a notch, and I could see by the set of her jaw that my choices were to acquiesce or face down a tantrum. At
that moment the baby shrieked. He woke up demanding, unlike his sister, who as a baby had lain in the crib babbling happily to herself until we went in to get her. “Mom,” Mattie said. “Your baby’s crying.”

“Let’s just lie here,” I said, “and pretend he’s not.”

She regarded me a moment.

“Ignorance is bliss, little goose,” I said.

“But he is crying,” she said. “He is.”

“I know.”

“He
is
crying.”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

I changed the baby’s diaper—an operation he protested vehemently every morning, firm in his belief that no activity should come before his milk—and took the kids into the kitchen, glancing, as we passed it, at the half-open door to Mattie’s room, through which I could see only a pile of half-naked baby dolls on the floor, a jumble of limbs. In the kitchen I looked for the advance copies of Nathan’s book—they had been on the table where we dumped the mail—but there was no sign of them either.

Mattie had some Cheerios and Binx had some milk and then some Cheerios, and I ventured a few tiny swallows of water. Nathan slept on, or maybe he lay there listening to Mattie say that she wanted to wear her striped dress and her party shoes, to Binx bang the tray of his high chair and shout, “Ah! Bwah!”—normal, everyday sounds from the normal, everyday scene that suddenly felt as fragile as a bubble headed for a pin. I was as alert to sounds of Nathan waking as I normally was to sounds of the baby. Part of me
waited, and listened, and tried to guess what would happen when he finally emerged, while Mattie chattered happily and my hangover increased in amplitude and the strain of being on watch became increasingly difficult to bear.

Then I heard him stirring. A thump. A rustling. I tried to identify the movements that made the sounds. I heard him cross the hall into the bathroom. The toilet flushed. Footsteps approached. I seemed to be holding my breath, like I was the girl in the closet and he was the guy with the knife.

“Hi, Daddy,” Mattie said, as casually as ever. Nathan stood in the kitchen doorway. Instead of his usual morning garb of boxers and a bathrobe he was wearing some of his clothes from the night before, his dress shirt and his suit pants now as rumpled as if he’d first balled them up in his hands. Maybe he’d slept in them. We looked at each other and I saw trepidation in his face. Like I was the guy with the knife.

My voice, when I spoke, was surprisingly neutral. “Good morning,” I said.

He took a breath. Surprised? Relieved? Who knew what the hell he was thinking? “Good morning,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Extremely unwell,” I said. He flinched. “By which I mean hungover.”

“Oh,” he said. “I thought that might be the case. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Thanks.” I’d made no conscious decision to be so formal, but now I seemed to have committed to the mode and couldn’t swerve from it. We were like two embarrassed college freshmen in a morning-after dorm room. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

“No hangover,” he said, which was not, I noted, an answer to the question. “I didn’t drink that much.”

“Mommy doesn’t want me to drink too much,” Mattie said.

“Oh, no?” Nathan said. His eyes darted to her face, like he was relieved to have an excuse to take them from mine. He went to her, moving fast, scooped her out of her chair, and hugged her hard. “Who’s my little goose?” he said. “Who’s my goose?”

“I’m not a goose!” Mattie said. “I’m a kitty.” She meowed, and Nathan meowed back.

I looked at Binx, who was grinning at the two of them, spasming his body in delight. “Ah!” he shouted, and Nathan turned and shouted it back and Binx laughed, and Mattie did, too.

“Nathan,” I said. “What happened to your galleys?”

He looked at me, the smile dropping off his face. “I threw them away,” he said. My gaze went to the kitchen trash can, and he said, “Not in there. Outside. In the Dumpster.”

We didn’t have trash pick-up, out in the county as we were, and so we had a big plastic storage bin outside, which we referred to as the Dumpster and treated as such, and when it got full Nathan hauled the disgusting, odiferous bags to the dump. Sometimes in hot weather he neglected this task long enough for maggots to erupt. “Outside?” I repeated. “With the maggots?”

“Yes,” he said, and looked at me in such an intense and serious way I understood that throwing the books away was not, as I’d first thought, an attempt to keep me from searching for clues, but an attempt to prove to me that his offer not to publish had been genuine. He would, symbolically, throw the book away. He was willing to say that maggots were what it, and he, deserved.

“You said it was up to me?” I said. “You’ll do whatever I want?”

His lips moved like he was saying yes, but he didn’t quite make a sound. I felt like the judge addressing the defendant. The whole world hung on my next words.

“I want to work it out,” I said. “I don’t want anything to change.”

He set Mattie down, steadying her with a hand on her shoulder. Then he crossed the kitchen to me and bent to hug me, burying his face in my neck. I put one hand on his back and then the other in his hair, and something inside me let go. My whole body sighed. He dropped to his knees and held on.

“What are you doing, Daddy?” Mattie asked.

“I’m thanking Mommy,” he said, and I believed—I believed—that everything would be all right.

Here is where we should have had a fade to black. But this was life, and there were no merciful cutaways, only the two of us—his chin pressing rather painfully into my clavicle, his weight bending my upper back forward in an increasingly uncomfortable way—and within seconds of that glorious moment of happy conviction I felt myself drifting back toward the restless ambiguity that characterized my emotional state at that time and for a long time after. Picture a wrestling ring. Around the edge circled relief and love and anger and despair, and every so often a couple of them jumped into the ring and tangled and one of them emerged the victor, but mostly it was just them circling that blank gray ring in the center, the empty battleground.

Still, in that moment, with his breath warm against my skin, my hand in his hair, I wanted relief and love to stay with me. I willed them to. I thought of standing in the backyard with Nathan during a nighttime snowfall, years before, both of us with our faces turned up to watch the snow come down. He said, “Light speed,” and I knew what he meant—that the sensation of watching those white flakes fall toward us, catching the light from our bright warm house behind, was like those moments in the Star Wars movies when they jump to light speed and all the stars rush in. But none of that needed to be explained, because we had the same mind.