Husband and Wife (8 page)

“Can I help?” Rajiv had asked, the night before Nathan and I moved away from Austin. He’d been surveying the nearly empty room and drinking a beer while I struggled to pack a box with exactly the number of books that would fit. We had a great many books, and only so many boxes.

“I’m fine, thanks,” I said. I glanced up at him, and then
back down. Rajiv, when he gave you his attention, gave it to you entirely. Mr. Intense Eye Contact, Nathan liked to call him. Because of this, and the extremity of his beauty, I’d always been prone to nervous giggling in his company. I wasn’t quite sure what he was doing here, on our last night in town. We’d been friendly the last year or so, ever since Helen had introduced us, but he was really her friend. And he wasn’t in our program—he was studying film—so I saw him only from time to time. He’d come tonight with Helen, who was in the bathroom helping Nathan sort through the cabinets. I could hear the murmur of Nathan’s voice, the words
feminine hygiene
, then her laughter.

“I brought you a going-away present,” Rajiv said.

I sat back, surprised. “It’s not a book, is it?”

“Well, yeah.” He grinned. “It
is
a book. Not just any book. It’s
the
book.”

“The Bible?”

He laughed. “Kind of.” He held out a small black paperback.

“Where did that come from?” I asked, and at his puzzled look, I added, “Looked like you conjured it.” On my feet now, I took the book. It was a copy of Denis Johnson’s
Jesus’ Son
, dog-eared in several places. And why was he giving it to me? I flipped open to the first marked page.
The door opening
, I read.
The beautiful stranger
.
The torn moon mended
. “It’s my copy,” said Rajiv. “The one I used to carry on the T.” And then a lightbulb—I remembered a long conversation in the corner of a party, me and him, this book and how much we loved it, the two of us quoting lines back and forth. He told me how he used to carry a copy in his coat pocket on his way to the office job in Boston that he’d hated, how it was a comfort to know it was there. I’d never seen Ra
jiv passionate—he was a relatively quiet guy, the kind who fades a little at a party until suddenly he drops the perfect quip and steals the scene. Did I really think
fades
? No, honestly, I didn’t, because his appearance was so striking that when he was in my vicinity I never stopped being aware of him, and I was certain no other woman did either. Look how they giggled. Look how they put their hands on his forearm when he unleashed that dry wit, how they leaned forward so that their breasts brushed against his skin.

“How can you not want him?” I’d asked Helen, not long before.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think looking at him too long might blind you.”

“Wow,” I said to Rajiv. “Thanks.” I took my time closing the book. “I’m not sure I deserve this.”

He said, “I’m a little in love with you.”

“What?” I said. “No, you’re not.”

His eyebrows jumped. “I thought I was so obvious.”

“You? You’re not obvious about anything.” I thought, but had the sense not to say, that the short film of his I’d seen had been so subtle, I’d struggled to grasp its meaning. At another party he’d described for me the plays of Horton Foote, whose dialogue was entirely about what went unspoken. Maybe that was why he liked me—the same reason Nathan did—because I showed great interest in conversations like this. You’d think everybody in school for film or writing would have, but no, there was too much talk about romance and money and television and posturing about one’s own torrid past and heady future. I liked—Rajiv liked, Nathan liked—to stand around and talk about dialogue. “You’re never obvious,” I said.

“Except right now,” he said. “Now I’m obvious.” He
waited. He was not going to try to kiss me. He was not going to ask me for anything. I knew that. He was not the sort to press. He just waited to see what I would say. And what would I say? My God, there was nothing to say, was there? And yet wasn’t it nice to be loved? And wasn’t he beautiful? Wasn’t he funny, wasn’t he talented, wasn’t he smart? Wasn’t he not unlike Nathan, the man packing my tampons in the other room?

“You’re an amazing guy,” I said. The clichés sprouted in my mind: You’re a great friend, maybe in another life. But there was no other life, only this one. For a wild moment I thought I should just kiss him. I opened the book again, another dog-eared page.
And you
,
you ridiculous people
,
you expect me to help you
, it said.

“So I know the last thing you need is another book,” he said briskly, “but it’s small, and I think we can fit it in.” He crouched, peered into the box, reached a hand up for the book, not looking at me. I handed it to him and watched as he made room. “Just fits,” he said.

I’d been unhappy about leaving Austin, though I’d tried not to say so to Nathan. But right then, my eyes on Rajiv, I was relieved. There’d be nothing I could do about what he’d just said, no temptation to consider it at all.

For years I kept the book underneath a pile of junk in one of my desk drawers at home. Not that there was any need to hide it. Nothing about it would have caused Nathan a moment’s suspicion. But I liked having it hidden, secret, a talisman. I liked, sometimes, on bad days, or days when nostalgia rose up and briefly seized my heart, to take it out and flip to the dog-eared pages, trying to guess what line Rajiv had meant to mark. When I moved out of my study I put the book on the shelf next to our other copy. “Oh,” Nathan
said when he noticed it there. “I didn’t know we had two copies of this.”

“Yeah,” I said, and that was all.

I found Nathan sitting on the floor in his study, cross-legged with his head in his hand. The phone was in his lap. He’d neglected to turn it off, so the busy signal beeped angrily. He lifted his head when I came in, his face a picture of misery.

“I’m sorry, Nathan,” I said. “I didn’t mean to tell him.”

“Don’t apologize to me,” he said. “I don’t deserve that. I should be apologizing to you, a thousand times a day, a million times a second.”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” I said. This was supposed to be a mild joke, but Nathan gasped like I’d punched him in the stomach.

“He said he doesn’t know who I am anymore,” he said. “He said if there’s a side to take, he’s on yours.”

I didn’t know what to make of that statement, or of my reaction to it, which was surprise and gratification and a dash of anger. “There’s no side to take,” I said. I sat on the floor beside him. His eyes searched my face. “There’s no side,” I said.

“Are you sure you want this?” he said. “Are you sure you want me?”

“Yes,” I said, because although at that moment I really wasn’t sure, it was hard to see what good any other answer would do. The only thing I was sure of was that I didn’t want every evening to end with him crying. So I touched his cheek, and we had sex, the kind of tender, grateful sex that sometimes happens when you’ve come very close to believ
ing it’s over, and I managed somehow, miraculously, not to think about him and the other woman, what we were doing and what he’d done with her. I found that I didn’t much want to kiss him, though. I didn’t really want to look him in the eye.

Why’d you do that?
That’s what we asked Mattie when she dumped her plate on the floor, or hit the cat, or threw a toy. And she said her food was too hot, when it hadn’t been, or that the cat had been about to scratch the couch, when he’d been sleeping peacefully on the floor, or that honk monsters were trying to get the toy, when unless we were very wrong about the world honk monsters didn’t exist. She had no clue why she did these things. She was three. But we kept on asking. For some reason
why
was the main thing we wanted to know. We taught her to offer explanations even when they made no sense at all. Maybe it doesn’t matter why you do something. Maybe it just matters that you do it. What good does it really do you, the why?

I do wonder, though, I can’t help but wonder, why I tried so hard in the days after Nathan’s confession to proceed like everything was fine. Wasn’t I supposed to throw him out immediately and burn all his possessions in the yard, according to the new story of Western womanhood, the one that doesn’t accept infidelity, that doesn’t make standing by
your man the primary virtue—that, in fact, holds women who stand by their man in contempt? I should say that when my grandmother told me, “You do what you have to do,” she was talking about her own mother’s efforts to keep her family intact while her husband slept with his secretary and otherwise lived out the masculine cliché. Here I was, eighty supposedly liberating years later, making the same attempt.

But I didn’t have to keep him around, did I, not like my great-grandmother had to keep her husband, the provider, the man of the house. I wasn’t even reliant on Nathan for financial support, although it would be awfully hard to manage the bills if we had to pay for two places to live. And I didn’t know how we’d handle the child care, or how I’d be able to do his chores in addition to my own. How I’d ever get to see a movie, or run out to meet friends for a drink. How I’d pass the lonely evenings. How I’d meet somebody else and bring myself to take off my clothes in front of him. Because I’d want somebody else, wouldn’t I? Sooner or later I would. The truth is, it’s hard to go it alone. Few of us are exempt from the longing for another. Each of us half of a heart locket, a lonely puzzle piece. If we weren’t we wouldn’t be so determined to jam ourselves together.

Would it help to know that I’m a middle child? That I’m a Pisces? That my older sister was an agent of chaos, and as a result I am deeply conflict-averse? In grad school Helen and Nathan liked to joke that I had a strangely sanguine temperament for a writer. Where were my debilitating depressions? My wild convictions of genius? Sometimes I worried that my lack of emotional upheaval meant my work wasn’t any good. I thought perhaps my sister should have been the poet, though
I hate you I hate you I hate you
was all I could imagine her writing.

It’s not that I don’t have a temper. It’s not that I can’t be mean. I am just as capable of it as my sister ever was, and isn’t that the horror, the horror? When Mattie reached two, the age of defiance, I started to feel anger at her that strained toward release like a dog that wants off the leash. Once, she bit me, and I bit her back hard enough to leave the imprint of my teeth in her skin. I’d never before hurt her in any way. Before she started to cry, she said, “You bit me,” in a voice of utter astonishment, and I knew that I’d radically altered her sense of the world. I’d revealed what I was capable of, to her, my tiny child, and I hadn’t wanted her to know.

The incident confirmed what I already knew—it wasn’t safe for me to get angry. Nathan used to say I had no cruising speed. I was Princess Pliable or I was Queen Demented Rage. Those were his names, not mine, and you have to wonder why the nice me was only a princess while the nasty me got to be a queen. Queen Demented Rage—only Nathan knew her. I never fought with anybody else. For a long time he saw that as a sign of the health and openness of our relationship, and then he started to see it as a sign that I managed to hold back the worst of myself from everyone but him.

I’m happy to talk more about my family, since we now believe that the family explains nearly everything, which is one reason it’s so terrifying to have children. Sometimes I looked at Binx and thought that whether he turned out a diplomat or an actor might depend entirely on whether we chose to have a third child.

I grew up in Cincinnati, in a four-bedroom house in a neighborhood called Mount Lookout. My father is an engineering professor and my mother is a psychologist, which Nathan liked to say was the perfect combination to give rise
to a poet. My parents are nice people, my younger brother, too. The only time I ever heard my parents fight was about my sister. My mother wanted to make her see a therapist; my father thought that would make things worse. She was twelve. Don’t get the idea that this was about drugs or sex or any of the usual things. At school she was a well-behaved child. She was a good student. But at home she was angry, all the time, at all of us, and nobody knew why. Sometimes when I was off my guard, sitting on the floor watching television, she’d smack me as hard as she could in the back of the head, barely slowing her steps as she passed through the room.

Even now when we’re together, the rest of us can spend an hour trying to decide where to go for dinner, everybody trying to suss out the others’ preferences before they state their own. Where would you like to go? Oh, I don’t care. Where would you like to go? Not my sister. Jesus Christ, she’ll say. You fucking people. We’re having Chinese.

And we go get Chinese, even if not a one of us want it, because after years of smashed-up chairs and screams of
I hate you!
we are beaten down. We fly under her radar, and I can’t speak for the rest of my family, but I know that I’m wary in her presence, guarded, muted, unfunny, not myself. I am detached from her because otherwise I cannot bear to be around her. Was that how I would be, from here on out, with Nathan? Would that be doing what I had to do? To be a wife, to be a walking mannequin.

The next night Nathan wanted to go to our favorite restaurant for dinner, and I didn’t, but he looked so hopeful when
he made the proposal, as if he was trying to recapture the good times, the pleasure on my face the first time he fed me a bite of the specialty of the house, a spicy, chocolaty chicken mole. So I said fine, okay. The Fiesta Grill was one of the few business establishments near our house, along with an ice cream place and a gas station or two, so we thought of it to some degree as ours. Alas, the restaurant’s virtues of authenticity and affordability had recently been extolled in the local paper, so that night it was nearly full, and Nathan found the crowd stressful, more so because Binx wouldn’t stop screaming no matter how many Cheerios we gave him, and when it came time to pay and the line at the cash register was long, Nathan, my Nathan, ran out on the bill. I learned this when I got outside, hauling both children and their accessories—bib, sippy cups, toys, wipes—and found him already in the car. He had his forehead pressed to the top of the wheel, which he clutched with both hands, as if he were driving without looking, willing or daring himself to crash. I wanted to forgive him. I did. A strong desire rose within me to do him some kind of physical harm.

Instead I buckled the children into their car seats. Instead I lifted the check from where Nathan had abandoned it on the dash. Instead I went back inside and waited in line, counting to ten over and over in English, French, and Spanish, until it was my turn to pay. The Fiesta Grill was our favorite restaurant. I wanted to be able to go back.

Ah, but there is a price to be paid for such calm, such relentless accommodation, and I discovered what mine was when I woke later that night, just after midnight. I had an alert,
startled feeling, but Binx hadn’t cried. No lights danced on the baby monitor. Of course I didn’t know that this sleepless night would be the first of many. Even now it frightens me a little to talk about that time, my capital-I insomnia, because of the possibility that to invoke its name is to invite its return. Oh God, I hope that doesn’t happen to me again, you think, and then, because you thought that, it will, and you’ll wake once more into a bleak, remorseless stillness. You’ll wander in a panic through the rooms of your mind and find them just emptied, as if your thoughts were bugs that scattered as soon as you entered.

But I meant to talk about the first night of my insomnia, which in my memory comes after the incident at the Fiesta Grill. I woke and lay there for quite some time in the innocent expectation that sleep would soon return. I felt the reverberations of every move Nathan made, each shift in position a radical upheaval of my terrain. Our queen-size bed seemed far too small. Because more than once I drifted off, only to jerk awake at his inadvertent touch, I did my best not to have any contact with him, camped out on the cliff edge of the mattress. Still I couldn’t escape the brush of his foot, the nudge of his backside, as though his body sought me out, groping toward me in the dark. Maybe he just wanted the familiar, soothing intimacy of my body, the rightness of his legs tucked into mine, his right hand cupping my left breast, his breath against my neck. What it felt like was that he didn’t want me to sleep. What I wanted was to push him out of the bed. I lay awake and imagined the satisfying thud of his body against the floor. I lay awake and remembered when the two of us, Nathan and I, could sleep together all night in a twin.

What was the point of lying there? I got up. I had the
claustrophobic’s choking desire to escape. What I needed were clothes and car keys. What I needed was to drive really fast. I got on the interstate and hit the gas, and before I slowed back down the speedometer had edged up to 100. I felt better. Better enough to get off the interstate in Durham and start making my way back toward Chapel Hill. I drove down 15-501, a road segmented by stoplights that one by one turned red just in time to stop my car. On either side the strip-mall staples: Wal-Mart, Barnes and Noble, Lowe’s. On hot days, when cars were packed so tightly together there wasn’t room to go on green, and the sun stabbed merciless light through the windshield, it felt like the road through the middle of hell. Late at night, it wasn’t so bad. Look, there was the old mall, finally defunct after the long exodus of shoppers and stores to the new mall. Poor thing. Was it jealous of the new mall? It seemed a distinct possibility.

I turned in its entryway, directed by the sign toward stores that were no longer there. There’s something eerie about a giant, empty parking lot, but that night the whole place just seemed sad. Waiting for us all to come back, and you know what? We never, ever would. Right after we moved here, Nathan had taught me to drive a stick shift in this parking lot. He’d been so patient. “I can’t do it,” I said, after an infinite number of stalls, and he said, with total certainty, “Yes, you can.”

I circled round the lot for hours until I could ease up on the clutch and push down on the gas pedal with the exact balance of pressure and speed, and now I circled round it again, like I was trying to catch that other car, but I couldn’t, and so I couldn’t laugh at Nathan’s bad gearshift puns or hear him clap when I finally got it right, and I certainly couldn’t stall. This car was an automatic.

“Yes, you can,” he’d said.

Oh, Nathan, Nathan. Where did you go? Why’d you do that? Why’d you do that to me?

Smith lived in Carrboro, in an old mill house. I had little occasion to visit it, but whenever I did, I was struck by how stark the furnishings were. No pictures of people on the walls, only a black-and-white of the dog who’d died five years ago and never been replaced. Smith did not take back his heart.

When I pulled up, he was sitting on his porch, smoking a cigarette. I was surprised for two reasons: I hadn’t expected to see him smoking, and I hadn’t expected to see him. It was two a.m. Why had I driven to his house if I hadn’t expected to see him? Just an urge, an impulse. Why was I driving around at all? There was a moment when I could have kept going, a dark car sliding by on a dark road. He might have squinted through the smoke and the streetlight haze and thought, “Isn’t that…?” He wouldn’t have risen slowly from his chair, as he was doing as I climbed his porch stairs. He wouldn’t have said, with that tone of wary and puzzled surprise, my name.

“You smoke?” I said.

His cheeks pinked. “Sometimes,” he said. “Secretly.”

“You are a complicated dude,” I said.

He put the cigarette out, although it was only half smoked, and moved to a stool so that I could take the solitary chair. “You really are a gentleman,” I said. “A complicated gentledude.”

“Gentledude,” Nathan would have repeated, drawing the word out, pleased and amused.

“What are you doing out?” Smith asked.

“I thought maybe I’d drive to Tennessee,” I said.

“What would you do there?”

“Visit the scene of the crime,” I said. “Look for clues.”

“Clues to what?”

I sighed. “Motive.”

Smith said nothing. He stared out at the street, and I stared at him, willing him to speak if he had something to say. “I was a little annoyed with you the other day,” I said after a moment. “I told you not to tell anyone, and there you were on the phone with Nathan.”

“Why wouldn’t I tell Nathan?” he asked. “He already knew.”

“Did you mean what you said to him? That you were on my side?”

“I meant it,” he said.

“What does it mean to be on my side?”

“It means I think he was wrong, of course.”

“Yeah, I know
that
,” I said.

He was silent a long moment. “It means…I don’t know. What should it mean?” He glanced at me, away. “Is there something I can do for you?”

Kiss me, I thought, but didn’t say, of course, because why had I even thought it?

“I’m serious,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

What could he do for me? What could anyone do for me? Turn back time, oh yes please. Turn back time. But where would I stop the clock? I considered this, nursing Binx on the couch at six a.m. I’d walked in the door to the sound of
him crying. How long had he been wailing, poor motherless thing? Long enough for his face to be as wet as if I’d doused him with a bucket. Now he ate ferociously while I stared at the seven volumes of Proust lined up on the top shelf of the living-room bookcase. They’d been a gift from Helen when I first got pregnant. She said she figured I might need a lot of reading material for nights when I’d be up nursing the baby—neither of us knew yet that in the early weeks you don’t seem to have enough hands to get the baby on the breast and keep her there, let alone hold a book, let alone heft a seven-hundred-pager. She joked that if I ever got through all seven volumes, I’d be a qualified Proust scholar.