The Better to Hold You (7 page)

Not that I expected Hunter to make a big fuss about the day.

He had established early on in our relationship that he felt birthday and Christmas presents were for children—grown-ups surprised each other by commemorating more inventive, personal dates. Which, to give him credit, he sometimes did—a bouquet of red roses one year to celebrate our first year of shared rent, a pair of silk pan ties the morning after he’d first seen me drunk.

But birthdays, even pivotal, painful ones, Hunter tended to forget. If you don’t need to buy a gift, you don’t mark it on your calendar—as simple as that. I suppose, if I’d asked him out to the movies, he would have taken me. But it just seemed a bit pathetic, somehow, like calling in a special favor. Far better to just let things slide by.

I thought I had come to terms with the absence of any special anniversarial treatment—or, as Hunter would call it, any false emotion. So maybe it was just my imagination that he seemed particularly dour that morning. He was preoccupied as he stood by the fussily percolating coffeepot and short-tempered when I asked him if he wanted toast, so I didn’t bother to suggest an afternoon movie. Clearly, he was intending to spend this day as he had all the others since his return: searching the Internet for obscure books and articles on wolves, or interviewing Canadians as he worked on his seemingly endless article.

I’m not sure what the deal was with Canada—I guess they just have more wolf people there to interview.

My mother called to wish me happy birthday and asked me to take the train to see her so she could give me her gift in person. She knew about Hunter and his birthday theories, because in a weak moment I had complained about it. And if there is one thing my mother, the former B-movie star, cannot understand, it’s putting up with something you don’t like.

“Act like you have top billing or you’ll never get it,” she always said. “If I’d slunk around like you do, I’d still be ‘blond vampire girl number three.’ “

But I have watched people’s faces as my mother launches into one of her tirades, and I think there may be worse things than slinking around dissatisfied. In any case, I said I would try to visit her next weekend. My father called next and told me he’d sent a check, because he wasn’t sure what I needed. He spent a while telling me about his girlfriend’s crazy ex-husband, and then told me to come visit soon. He didn’t mention Hunter.

I knew my work friends wouldn’t call me, as they would see me tomorrow. I had lost touch with my college and high school friends; funny how you never see that in movies—the heroine always has at least two close childhood friends, each a little fatter or crazier than herself. Sometimes there’s a third, a gay man who is smarter, more stylish, and underneath more tragic than the rest. I wished for such sidekicks. I wondered if you could put in a personal ad: Straight woman seeks gay man, straight women, for walks in the park, foreign films, impromptu make overs, well-chosen gifts. No secret competitors, annual migrators, or disappearing acts need apply.

Or maybe what I needed was a dog. Dogs don’t wake up one morning and realize that the relationship isn’t working for them anymore. Dogs don’t lie about what they’ve been doing, or leave you to go explore other options. Like their wolfish cousins, dogs love for life.

Feeling maudlin, I decided to go for a long walk by the boat basin in Riverside Park, to get my endorphins flowing and work the wobble out of my thighs.

“I’m going out,” I told Hunter.

“Aah,” he replied, looking briefly in my general direction. Once out the door, I found it hard to move my legs very quickly. I contemplated taking a bus to the park, but then convinced myself that the urge to move would take hold once I got my feet near some grass.

A few runners passed me on Riverside Drive, looking lean and serious in skintight Lycra while I churned along in my gray sweat suit. A businessman with a plastic bag on his left hand waited for his mastiff to defecate. It’s moments like these that make me love the city so much: Nowhere else is the natural made to seem so unnatural.

On Seventy-ninth I met a woman I’d gone to high school with in the suburbs. She told me she was writing plays and designing software. She had perfect toes in strappy sandals, and her stomach bulged with chic, designer-sweatered pregnancy.

“Are you married?” she asked me, not waiting for a reply. “I just married a lovely man from a small village in Italy. I can’t tell you how happy we are. We got married in the little white church where Paolo was christened and the whole town turned out, all the young girls wearing ribbons. I remember you used to say you weren’t going to get married. I always imagined you’d wind up in a big, funky apartment with a lot of cats.”

“No,” I said slowly, “that’s my mother. I prefer dogs.”

Mrs. Small Village in Italy threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, that’s what I remember about you, Abra. Your killer sense of humor. Let’s get together for dinner sometime soon. Here’s my number.”

I stuffed her card into a pocket and continued walking, passing young lovers in faded jeans, laughing and talking animatedly, their faces turned to each other.

On the way back, I shopped for dinner at the health food store, where I saw a woman in her fifties with stark black hair and oversized tinted glasses. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her until she ran up and hugged me, explaining that she was my father’s old girlfriend Rita, and she hadn’t seen me since I’d been in college, and how was the old man.

“He’s doing all right.”

“Is he with someone? He’s always got to be with someone, your father.”

“He’s with someone.”

She shook her head. “I just have no respect for people who have to be in a relationship at any cost.”

Rita embraced me again, enveloping me in strong perfume. She gave me her card in case I needed a job or some public relations, and then she finally left me free to examine the onions.

The problem with Manhattan is, everyone comes here eventually—all your old friends, enemies, lovers, demons. People you met on vacation in Nepal will wind up beating you out for a taxi. The bully who called you “Dog Breath” all through first grade will turn up at your local diner, and will remember you didn’t come to his sixth birthday party, which is where the whole trouble began. Don’t come to the big city to become anonymous. New York is like Oz: The Wicked Witch of the West turns out to be the lady who didn’t like your dog back in Kansas.

Back in the safety of my own apartment, with no one to remind me of my failings as a human and as a wife, I prepared dinner while Hunter remained focused on what ever he was writing. Because of the roiling uneasiness building inside of me, I chopped and mixed and measured with more care than usual, the way I did back in high school when I was first teaching myself to cook. Our kitchen was really a windowless nook, and from time to time I found myself gazing out into the living room. I tried not to look at the taut, defended posture of Hunter’s back as he brooded over his words.

When there was nothing more to do with the vegetarian chili, I made my way through four sections of The New York Times waiting to see if Hunter would finish up what he was doing, but at three o’clock he was still hard at work, so I decided to take myself off to the bookstore. I returned from Barnes & Noble at seven (having glanced through a few titles in the Help, My Marriage Is Dying section at the exact moment our next-door neighbors strolled by, arm in arm, with books on gardening and Tuscany).

“Want some wine, Hunter?” I said to the back of his head.

“Mm.”

“Red or white?”

“What ever.”

“Or should I just put out some blotter acid?”

“Hah, very funny.”

“So you are listening.”

Hunter looked up from his computer, and I was reminded of a dog guarding its bone. “I’m almost done,” he said. “Two more sentences and then I can take a break.”

You would think, from his tone, that he was closing up after an arduous surgery and I was asking him to leave his patient bleeding on the table. Swallowing my annoyance, I opened up a bottle of Merlot.

I glanced up when Hunter pushed his chair back from the computer and shambled over to the dinner table, his mind clearly a thousand miles away.

“Okay, then, I’m here,” he said, reading over a page of notes before laying it on the couch. “What’s for dinner?”

I served him his chili, so intent on concealing any hint of my own hurt and irritation that the first hint I had of Hunter’s hurt and irritation was when he shoved his bowl away with such force that it skidded off the table and bounced against the living room wall.

For a moment, I just stared at the shattered pieces of pottery. Then I looked at my husband over the flame of a thick gold candle. “Mind telling me why you just did that?”

Hunter gave a long, deflated sigh and then buried his face in his hands. He spoke without looking at me. “I don’t ask you to cook, Abra, but if you say you’re going to make me chili, then for God’s sake serve me something I can eat.”

“You are aware that I’m a vegetarian?”

Hunter’s head came up, and he stared at me from bloodshot eyes. “Are you aware that I am fucking not? You keep saying how thin and tired I look. How sick I am.” He snarled out the word “sick” like a curse, then gestured sarcastically to my bowl. “Here, babe, build up your strength with a nice, juicy, red tomato. Genetically modified and pesticide-filled, I might add.”

I remained calm as Hunter got up, fumbled in his jacket pocket, and extracted a cigarette. I’d thought he’d quit over a year ago. On the exposed brick wall, the sauce was dripping slowly onto a woodcut of a hare.

“Hunter, I don’t suppose you feel like telling me what’s really bothering you?”

He dragged his hand through his hair. “It’s just all this sitting in the apartment day after day, trying to write about nature. I’m a fucking prisoner of the Upper West Side.”

“Then why don’t you go out more?”

He paused as if weighing his reply against my stupidity. “Abra, I’m writing about wilderness. And yes, I know I can take a walk in Central Park, but somehow after spending the summer in the Carpathian Mountains, crossing a grid of Gap stores and concrete to get to a sliver of toddler-infested grass is not as exciting as it once was.”

I looked at him with what he called my nun’s face. “So you’re tired of living in Manhattan, and you decide to let me know by throwing your dinner at the wall?”

“I didn’t throw it.” Hunter shook a cigarette out of the pack, lit it, and inhaled.

“I’d rather you didn’t do that in here.”

“It tastes like shit anyway.” He ground his Marlboro out on the butter plate.

“Don’t ruin the butter,” I said, “just because you don’t like dairy products.”

“Christ, I’ve got to get out of this place. I’m dying in here, Abra, can’t you see that?”

The stick of pale yellow butter was coated with dark ash, a crooked spear sticking out of its side. Why did I even care about that now? My hands were shaking, so I let them hold each other. “Get out of here? Do you mean out of the marriage?”

Hunter examined the palms of his hands as if he could read his own lifeline. “Maybe. I don’t know. I need something to change.”

I felt my face crumple, then got it back under control. “Okay, so something in your life needs to change, and you don’t know exactly what it is yet. Okay. If something’s bothering you, we need to talk about it. Is it the writing? Or did something happen on the—” He was getting his jacket out of the closet before the word “trip” had left my mouth.

“I’m sorry, Abs,” he said as he left, “but I just can’t do this now.”

I leaned against the open door for support. “Are you leaving me?”

“Don’t read more into this than there is.”

Suddenly I wished I had bought one of those self-help books with multiple choices and single answers. Something with a title like The Caveman at Your Table or How Gone Is He? I closed the door quietly and leaned my head against it, listening to the sound of Hunter’s footsteps as he bounded down the stairs and out of the building.

At midnight my husband returned, reeking of cigarette smoke.

“Where have you been?”

“Out.”

I was sitting up in bed, wearing my white cotton pajamas and tortoiseshell glasses. The remains of dinner had been cleaned away long ago: I wasn’t the sort of woman to leave the tomato on the wall as a kind of unspoken recrimination.

Especially since Hunter would just leave it there.

“Out where?”

“Movie.”

In the background, I was half aware of the television’s still reporting the day’s disasters.

Hunter threw his clothes off without looking at me and climbed into bed. I was relieved he didn’t feel the need to shower: That’s one of the first signs of infidelity, according to The Six Signs of Infidelity by Louise Rosegarten. I had discovered this earlier, during my visit to the bookstore. You also had to watch out for a new style of underwear, particularly a switch to bikini briefs. Of course, Hunter already wore bikini briefs. When he wore underwear.

“Which movie did you see?”

Hunter tossed a thick lock of brown hair out of his eyes, like a fractious horse. “Womb Raider. Rated triple X. Want to check the times?”

I didn’t flinch. “Yes.”

Heaving himself dramatically out of bed, Hunter went to the back door and fished the paper out of the recycling pail. He returned to the bedroom, loudly flipping through it till he found the page, then slammed it down on the bed in front of me. We glared at each other until we both started to laugh.

“You didn’t really go to this, did you?”

He was still laughing. “Why? Did you want to see it with me?”

The tension lifted, he pulled on his tattered robe before excusing himself and heading into the bathroom. As I waited for my husband to come back to bed, I opened up this week’s New Yorker magazine and tried to come up with a caption for a wordless cartoon. There was a couple in a marriage therapist’s office, being shown a tank of water. Befuddled, I looked up, startled by the chime that meant the computer was being turned on in the living room.

“Hunter?”