The Senator's Wife (6 page)

And so he began—the computer meeting, the library meeting, the departmental meeting. After a few minutes, she got down and began to go through the grocery bags, setting things out. Beer. She held a bottle up.

“Yes, thanks,” he said.

She got a church key from one of the bureau drawers and opened two of the bottles. She handed one to him and took a long swig herself of the bitter, fizzy stuff. She was thirsty. She hadn't drunk anything since the coffee that morning.

She was really only half listening to Nathan, thinking more about how surprised he would be when she told him about the job at the radio station.
I've got a secret,
she thought.

He had moved on to an account of lunch with the dean. She made him a cracker with pâté, and had another one herself.

He'd taken her place on the door by now, boosting himself onto it, his legs dangling. His jacket was off and he'd rolled his sleeves up. She loved his arms. His arms, and his hands—so surprisingly long-fingered and delicate for a man his size.

He described the motley collection of furniture in his office. He said he'd gone over to the college gym to check out the pool hours—he was a swimmer, with a swimmer's graceful, strong body. He told her about the colleague across the hall, and the joke this guy had told him.

“A joke already!” Meri said. “What a good sign!” She'd started to eat grapes from the second grocery bag.

“Well, I don't know,” he said. “It was a dirty joke. Is that a good sign? I mean, isn't it too soon to tell a guy you don't even know a dirty joke?”

“I don't know either,” she said. “But then I've never understood any of the rules for guys.” She had another grape. “Was it a good dirty joke?”

“So-so.” He slid sideways, closer to the grocery bags. He began to eat the grapes too.

“These aren't washed, you know,” Meri said.

“I know.”

“Aren't you worried that we'll suddenly break out in some horrible scabrous rash? That we'll develop uncontrollable facial tics?” She blinked one eye rapidly, jerking her head along with it.

“I think there's some danger that our children will,” he said.

She had another swallow of beer. “The hell with them,” she said. “They're such brats.”

“But they're such
interesting
brats. So intelligent. So gifted.”

Meri snorted. She tore off a long stem dangling with grapes and handed it to him. “Now it's your turn, buddy,” she said.

“My turn for what?”

“Your turn to say, ‘How was
your
day, sweetheart?’”

“And? How was it? Aside from being productive.” He waved his hand to include all she'd accomplished.

“It was really, really, really productive. In that”—she danced away from him, jumped and landed, spreading her arms wide—“ta da! I got a job.”

“What job?” She enjoyed watching his face move from puzzlement to surprise. “The radio job?”

She nodded.

“But I didn't even know you had an interview. Why didn't you tell me?” There was the slightest note of irritation in his voice, but then he said, “That's fantastic!”

He slid down off the door. He kissed her, a beery kiss that was slippery and lasted awhile.

“Let's congratulate me,” she said, her mouth only an inch from his. “Let's fuck.”

“What? Now? I thought you were starving.”

“I've taken the edge off.” She stepped back.

“But you're filthy.”

“So? Come lick the dirt off me.”

She walked with long strides to the back stairwell and started up, peeling her shirt off as she went. She took the steps two at a time, feeling an anticipatory pleasure in using her long muscular legs this way. She could hear Nathan behind her. She tossed her shirt back at him and sprinted down the hall to their room at the front of the house. It was sunny and hot in here—they were sweating almost as soon as they lay down together, grappling with each other to take off the other's clothes. And as they moved against each other, making love, their bodies made slapping noises, squelching noises.

By the time they were done, they were panting and slick with perspiration. They lay together for a few minutes. Then Nathan unstuck himself from her and fell back. Meri's hand lifted to her chest. She had a little pool of liquid between her breasts. After a few minutes, Nathan propped his head up in one hand, and with the other he began to stroke the sweat there, spreading it out over her nipples.

“Your project,” she said.

“I'm doing a very good job at it. A very thorough job.”

“Thank you.” She picked his hand up and brought it to her mouth. She kissed his salty fingertips.

They talked in a desultory way for a while, each bringing more news of the first day of life here. Meri told him in detail about the interview. The low sun was slanting into the room. After a while, their voices slowed and stopped. The tall wardrobe boxes stood sentinel around them. They slept.

They woke midevening as the air cooled. They got up and put on T-shirts and underwear and went downstairs together to unpack the groceries, most of them still sitting in their bags on the old door-table. Meri found a blue china bowl from Nathan's mother and set the fruit he'd brought home into it—three shiny red apples and what was left of the pale green grapes.

M
ERI LOVED HER JOB
. Even on the first days when she didn't know what she was doing and had to ask for help over and over, she loved it.

The station was based at the college, in half of the ground floor of a building at its edge. The other half held the offices of the campus police. She liked them too—flirty, friendly, middle-aged guys. She liked the long walk or bike ride each day through the center of town and across the campus. She liked the campus itself, with its huge oaks and even a few remaining elms, its beautiful old stone buildings. She liked the little carts selling falafel and wraps that set up in the walkways at lunchtime, she liked the students calling to one another across the lush greens, playing lacrosse and soccer and Frisbee on them.

The station did mostly music through the day—classical in the morning, jazz and then rock in the afternoon and evening, and late at night, the blues. There was a short news summary at the beginning of each hour, and four times a day there was a longer break for news.

The noon news show, the one Meri was working for, started with a five-minute feed from National Public Radio, and then covered four or five of its own topics in greater depth. These could be almost anything—peculiar or touching human-interest stories, politics, the arts, whatever the current local or world or national crisis was.

Meri's job was partly helping to generate ideas for these topics, mostly in the afternoon meetings just after the show ended; and partly conjuring and contacting the relevant people to be interviewed about each one—interviewed live at the station, or in another National Public Radio studio somewhere, or by phone. Phone was always the last choice, because the sound quality wasn't as good.

At the afternoon meetings everyone was always relaxed. The show was over and there was a sense of ease and play in the way they tossed ideas around. People brought in newspaper articles, offbeat facts they'd discovered, new books or CDs they'd read or heard or seen reviewed. Burt Hall was the anniversary guy, the birthday guy—he maintained a perpetually updated list of what had happened or who'd been born one hundred years ago tomorrow, or fifty years, or twenty-five—sometimes important anniversaries, sometimes whimsical ones, all of them available to fall back on on a slow day. There was one other person with a job identical to Meri's—Natalie. She'd been there three years, ever since they started the show. She was about Meri's age, small, with wildly frizzing hair. She was patient and generous about explaining things.

By the time Meri had been at the station for ten days, she'd worked on more than a half dozen of the show's segments. The first one was a piece on shaken-baby syndrome. She'd lined up participants for a roundtable discussion with Jane—a couple of pediatricians, a specialist in medical forensics, and a social worker who counseled parents having difficulty with anger. Meri spoke with them all at length by telephone ahead of time to prepare Jane's questions and suggest approaches for her to take in the discussion. This was called, she learned, the
pre-interview,
designed to make Brian or Jane sound intelligent and knowledgeable about whatever they were discussing.

She was so busy learning what the steps were as she worked on this piece, so nervous and distracted about how to frame the questions, how to seek out the appropriate people, that she hardly had the time left to think about the issue under consideration, a topic that had been triggered by the local death of a little girl of five months. Her middle-class father, a cocaine addict, had killed her—accidentally, he said.

As she listened to the program, she was first amazed at how it had come together, at how professional it was; and then she was surprised to find tears welling in her eyes at different points during the discussion. How immediate it was compared to the writing she'd done for the alumni magazine! In this case, how awful: the father's drugged rage, the terrible injuries to the tiny child.

Still, she couldn't help herself, she was pleased. Hearing her words spoken in Jane's melodious, warm, sympathetic voice made them sound so professional.

Radio,
she thought, even as she was blowing her nose.
I'm glad I found you.

Meri was doing research for something else entirely when she found an old photograph of Tom Naughton. He was standing behind the senators on the Watergate committee. He was less conventionally handsome than she had imagined him—tall and skinny—but even in this grainy shot there was a visible kind of relaxation and ease in his carriage that made him attractive. She photocopied the image to take home to Nathan.

They'd speculated several times about his failure to appear next door even once in the three weeks or so they'd lived there. At first they decided he must be traveling. He'd be back at some point soon.

As time went on, though, they conjured other possibilities. Maybe they were divorced, Meri suggested.

But then she had two or three conversations with Delia on the front porch, and Delia didn't indicate anything of the kind. In fact, she always spoke of Tom as her husband; and, as Nathan pointed out to Meri, there was that thing she had said to them the night they moved in—about having them over when Tom was home.

Maybe it was a commuting marriage, he speculated, and she agreed that this was the likeliest explanation. Delia seemed to have been away at least once for several days—that was probably it.

But Meri knew Nathan was disappointed that Tom Naughton seemed not, in any real sense, to be their neighbor, and she couldn't help wondering if in some way he felt he'd been tricked into buying the house. She didn't want to ask him that though—in part because she sensed the question would be connected to something faintly and reasonlessly vindictive in herself, something she didn't quite understand. For why should she take any pleasure in his disappointment?

The Xerox, then, was a gift, a way of commiserating, a way of sharing in his puzzlement.

CHAPTER FOUR

Meri, September and October 1993

T
HE CONVERSATIONS
Meri had had with Delia on the front porch as they came and went were the usual kinds of exchanges, cordial but empty, that people who don't know each other well have. But Delia always brought something extra to them, a certain style.

“Suicidal yet?” she'd asked Meri cheerfully a couple of days after their arrival, when it seemed they'd barely begun to unpack. And told her, in the ensuing conversation, where the best liquor store in town was. “I find that the influence of alcohol makes anything more tolerable,” she'd said in a comforting tone.

And on a rainy day, as she and Meri each stood at her own front door, Meri fumbling with the trickiness of the old lock on hers, Delia having trouble collapsing her umbrella, she had turned to Meri and said across the lion, “Don't let them wax rhapsodic to you about autumn in New England. There are about six wonderful days, and then”—she gestured up at the gray sky—“
this.
”

These exchanges confirmed for Meri the feeling she'd had when she first met Delia. “She's eccentric,” she told Nathan. “But in a warm way.”

“As opposed to?”

“Eccentric in an egocentric way, or a chilly way, natch.”

They were bicycling home together when they had this conversation, weaving slowly through the wide, untrafficked streets. She had stopped by his office after work to rescue him from office hours. He had them every Wednesday, and every Wednesday he was late getting home. When she'd opened his door—after knocking, after being invited in—he was sitting across the desk from a girl so lovely that Meri had been momentarily stabbed with jealousy. But then she looked at Nathan—Nathan, whose face was lifted in relief and pleasure at seeing her—and she forgave him instantly for the student's beauty.

“Her eccentricity invites you in, that's what it is. It's not self-regarding, the way so much eccentricity is.”

“You've got a crush on her, I think.” He'd pulled up next to her and they were bicycling side by side. They both had old three-speed bikes they'd bought used in Coleman, and she loved the way he looked, sitting up straight with the wind blowing his hair back.

“I've got a crush on you,” she said.

On the third Friday after they'd moved in, there was a message from Delia waiting for her on the answering machine at the end of the day. She was going to drive out into the country tomorrow morning, to a farmstand she liked, and she wondered if Meri would like to come along—it was supposed to be beautiful weather.

When Meri told Nathan about the invitation, he smiled. “Hey. Nice,” he said. After a moment though, when he'd gone back to what he was doing—they were in the backyard, and he was grilling fish for supper—he said suddenly, “How come, do you think, she didn't ask us both?”

Meri looked down at him from the stoop where she was sitting. “Natey,” she said. “Shame. You're jealous.”

“Well, I suppose I am. But I'm the one who'd really like to get to know them, after all.”

“What? And I don't?”

“But you know what I mean.” He picked up a saucer of olive oil and started to brush some on each fish. “I'm the one who cares more about who they are. Who
he
is, anyway.” He replaced the lid on the grill. “Not that he's ever even there.” He made a moue.

“Well, maybe that gets tiresome for her, everyone's abiding interest in ‘the senator.’ Maybe that's why she asked me—because she knows I'm interested in her, her, and only her.”

He came up onto the stoop and sat next to her. Their four bare feet were in a row, and she bent down quickly and touched his.

After a minute, he said, “You know, this is something I just don't get about you.”

“What?”

“About you and women. Older women.”

“That's because you have a warm, accommodating
enthusiast
of a mother. She's in your corner, always.”

They were quiet a long moment. The charcoal smelled wonderful. It was dusky and cool. This would be one of the last times for grilling outside.

Meri said, “The real reason, of course, is that we're the
gals.
She doesn't think you'd be interested in the farmstand. It's not manly enough.”

He grunted. “Mmm.”

“And you couldn't go anyway, so there's no need for petulance.” She had a sip of wine, and set her glass back down next to her on the wooden step. “You'll be working, as usual.”

Nathan had gone to his office both days of the last two weekends to work on his book—his second book. The first, which had gotten some attention in his field, had been an expansion of his doctoral thesis on family structure and poverty. This one was more ambitious, more consuming. It was about the Great Society programs. It interspersed an account of the politics that had dictated the shape of those programs with the life stories of five people who were supposed to have benefited from them, bringing their histories up to the present. The research had taken him two years, and he'd been writing it since before Meri met him. He wanted to finish it by the end of the following summer because it would be important in his getting tenure. He'd been working on it every minute he could spare from keeping up with his courses.

“Yeah, you're right,” he said. And after a long moment, “I wonder where old Tom
is,
anyway.”

· · ·

T
HE WEATHER
was beautiful on Saturday—one of the six fall days Delia had spoken of, cool and dry, with a bright sun.

Meri rang Delia's bell, as arranged, and after a moment, she saw the older woman coming down the hallway toward her.

“Come in! Come in!” she said as she opened the door. “Come in
this
door and then let's go out the back one—the car is in the driveway off the kitchen.” She turned back into the house. Meri followed. She was wearing those canvas shoes again, the ones Meri liked. As Meri walked quickly through Delia's rooms, she was startled by how different they were from the ones on their side. She said this to Delia after they were strapped into their seats.

“We owe that to the Carters, who preceded you in your house,” she said. She had started toward Main Street.

“Oh, yes,” Meri said. “I remember. He was an architect, right? The real estate person said something about that.”

“Precisely,” Delia said. “Taking out the walls was his notion of the way things ought to be. Open. Airy. And she let him. I don't think she cared a whit about anything to do with the house or any of that kind of thing.”

After a moment, Delia said, “Ilona was a musician. Or had been. The violin. It was all she really cared about, music. Besides people, of course.”

“Of course,” Meri said, though to her mind this did not go without saying.

They were passing through the center of town. The sidewalks were already busy with Saturday-morning shoppers. As she drove, Delia's foot moved on and off the gas pedal whimsically, almost rhythmically. The car speeded up and slowed down, speeded up and slowed down. It was a little like being in a rocking chair, Meri thought.

“In the years right after we moved in, they used to have huge parties quite regularly.” She looked over at Meri. “It's a good space for parties, if you're so inclined. That big open area, and then the kitchen. The kitchen that seats
thousands.
We went a few times. They were great fun. All architects and musicians.” After a moment she said, “I love architects and musicians, don't you? They're so
healthy.
”

“They are?” Meri asked.

“I think so, yes.”

“This is something I hadn't realized.”

Delia looked over at Meri quickly and smiled. After a moment she said, “Well, I think it's true. Their work connects them so directly to other people, and that makes them happier. Or it seems to.”

“Ah,” Meri said. She wondered if this was true.

As they drove along, Meri rolled her window down and let the air push her hair back. They were on a closed-in, winding road now. The air smelled of the pinewoods around them. Delia was telling Meri about the history of the town, how it had been centered around a mill on the river built by Gideon Willis; how the center had moved to where it was now years later, after the college was established; how, much later than that, the mill itself was abandoned.

“But it's restored now,” she said. “There's a restaurant there. It's quite pretty. Romantic, really. You and Nathan ought to go there sometime.”

After a moment, Meri asked, “Have you gone? With your husband?”

“Not for years,” Delia said, equably.

They were moving past open fields. Some, here and there, were under cultivation. Some were overgrown. Hay fields, Delia said, waiting to be mown for the last time this year. After about ten more minutes, Delia signaled again and pulled over into a dirt parking lot around a long, low, shedlike building, painted white with dark green trim. Six or seven cars were already parked under the spreading linden next to it, and there were at least that many people at the open front of the building, where bins—wooden boxes, really—were set on two long trestle tables, tilted forward to show their brightly colored contents. Meri got out and followed Delia, walking past the array.

There were tomatoes and peaches and lettuces and apples. There were green grapes, and red ones, and bluish purple ones. There were potatoes in several shapes and colors, and small, fresh-looking carrots with their feathery green tops still attached. There were onions and scallions and heads of garlic and bushels of corn. There were boxes overflowing with basil and mint, tied bunches of thyme. “God, the abundance!” Meri said. “It's overwhelming.”

Delia picked up a basket from where two towers of them were stacked at the end of the tables and began to move back along the boxes. “I only do fruit and lettuces,” she said. “It makes things simpler. I hardly ever cook anymore.”

“I never used to cook,” Meri said. “But I'm afraid we do now, every single night. I guess that's what's supposed to happen when you get married.”

“They do seem to go hand in hand,” Delia said.

“We share it. Nathan's terrific and I'm so-so. But I'm learning.”

Delia's old fingers moved quickly over the fruits, gently squeezing. “You'll have to rearrange a few things in that old kitchen if you're going to get very tricky about it.”

“Oh, I know,” Meri said. She was filling her basket more slowly than Delia, who seemed to know ahead of time exactly what she wanted. Meri chose apples, lettuce. “But Nathan is making plans,” she said. “Plans for
renovation.
He loves to roll the word around in his mouth.”

“Renovation,” Delia pronounced loftily, “is almost as much fun as moving.”

Meri laughed, and looked over at her. She was smiling slyly to herself, pleased, it seemed, to have been found amusing.

Meri hesitated by the basket of corn. Should she get some? She and Nathan hadn't discussed what to have for dinner, but it looked so fresh, the tassels still silky and white, the husks tight, that she couldn't resist. Two. No, four. She chose a hard, fat garlic, a sampling of herbs.

They went inside to pay. The shed had a dirt floor and two bare lightbulbs hanging from a wire strung across the ceiling. The plump woman running the cash register knew Delia. She greeted her warmly. She asked about her grandchildren, and Delia inquired about the woman's husband, who wasn't well, apparently.

There was a plate stacked with individually wrapped pieces of fudge on the counter by the cash register. Delia bought two squares as she settled with the woman. “To fortify us on the trip home,” she said.

In the car, she unwrapped a corner of her piece. She nibbled on it as she began to drive. Meri imitated her, holding the fudge in the plastic wrap just as Delia did, to avoid getting her hands sticky.

“So. You're pretty much settled in?” Delia asked after a few minutes.

“After a fashion.” Meri shrugged. “We don't have curtains, we need a new couch, we need new rugs, we want to paint just about everything, but aside from that, yes, sure, pretty much.”

“Agony,” Delia said.

“Actually, I think the worst of it is over,” Meri said. She let the fudge dissolve in her mouth and watched the fields flash by.

“I hope never to move again,” Delia said. “I want to be carried out feetfirst, as Ilona was.”

Meri turned back to Delia. “Ilona
was
?”

“Yes.”

“You mean she died in the house?”

“Yes.” Delia looked at her. “Didn't you know that?”

“No.” Meri was startled. It seemed strange to think of. They had been sleeping in the room where someone died. They had been making love in that room.

“Well,” Delia said, “she did.”

Meri shook her head. “It's just that I didn't know.”

After a minute, Delia said, “You'd probably be hard-pressed to find one of the older houses in town that someone hadn't died in. That's where people used to be when they died. Home.”

“I just hadn't thought of it,” Meri said, almost apologetically.

Delia drove on, speeding up, slowing down. “It was, I think, a happy death.”

“I didn't know there was such a thing as
that,
either.”

“Well, we can't really know, can we?” Delia laughed a little. “But if you're old enough, I think, you're ready. And Ilona was. She was tired. Her world had shrunk. Her pleasures were fewer.” Delia shrugged. “I can certainly imagine it.”

She seemed to be doing just that, Meri thought. Her expression was faraway.

Then her face lifted. “She once said to me, ‘When you get to be my age, you've had to watch most of your friends die.’ Seemingly sad. But
then
she said—after one of her wonderful
judicious
pauses—‘But of course you get to watch your enemies die too.’”

Meri laughed. She had the last bite of fudge and crumpled up her plastic wrap. She saw that Delia was almost finished too. “Can I take that?” she asked, pointing to the plastic.

“Oh. Yes. Thank you.” Delia popped the last bit of fudge into her mouth and handed over the wrap. Meri crumpled that up too, and put both into her purse.

They drove in silence for a while. Meri was looking out the window. She looked back at Delia, who seemed drawn in somehow. Or maybe just concentrated on driving.