The Silent Wife (10 page)

Jodi sticks around for coffee, which she drinks on her feet, standing in a circle with her colleagues as they cheerfully dissect the squabble that just took place. Her mind briefly wanders and she thinks of her visit to the laundry and what she has in her purse. She takes it out and shows it to the woman standing next to her, who happens to be a psychiatrist.

“Sleeping pills, right?”

The psychiatrist takes the container and looks at the label.

“Right,” she says. “Eszopiclone.” And absently hands it back, still engaged in the general conversation.

As Jodi makes her way out of the building she tries to puzzle out what Todd would be doing with a bottle of sleeping pills prescribed for Natasha Kovacs. She hasn't seen Natasha in years, and as far as she knows neither has Todd. He did have dinner with Dean last week, though she can't think what that could
have to do with it. Unless Natasha happened to join them. But he would have mentioned it.

On the drive home she calls up a mental picture of the teenage Natasha—Natasha as she last saw her—a big girl with a forward manner. A little on the manic side, which could account for the sleeping pills. That and the fact that she's now in university. As Jodi well remembers, university can be stressful. It's important to study and get good grades, but there are compelling distractions. You stay up late with friends, drink too much coffee and alcohol, take the odd upper, and eventually get so strung out that you no longer sleep. Not until she's parking her car does she remember Dean—that he called her, that she called him back, that it's his turn again. When she gets in she checks her phone, but there are no messages.

She unwraps her picture and props it on the mantel. The gilt frame brings out touches of gold that she hadn't noticed in the feathers of the peacocks. The woman in her finery is lovely but today seems wistful, even forlorn. She gives off a sense of being cloistered and secluded, even trapped, in her beautiful garden. Maybe the frame is too ornate, too bold for the delicate little painting with its vulnerable central subject.

Jodi knows that you can come to your senses in a blinding flash because she's seen it happen with clients, but that's not how it happens to her. In her case it's been coming on incrementally for some time. You could almost say it started with the onset of Todd's depression—that's when things took a turn for the worse—and then again with his depression lifting the way it did, as if he had suddenly found a reason to live. That was in the
spring or early summer, and she was happy to have him back even though he seemed distracted a lot of the time. But now events are accelerating, taking on a sickening forward thrust, and she knows why Dean is calling.

She changes out of her day clothes into a simple black dress. Standing in front of her wardrobe mirror she's vaguely surprised to see herself looking perfectly well. Her complexion is pale, but she's always had a natural pallor. People remark on it, tell her that she ought to see a doctor. Once in a while she resorts to a powdered blush to give her cheeks some colour, but the contrast with her milky skin can make her look vulgar, so most of the time she leaves well enough alone.

The phone rings as she's transferring her wallet and keys to a clutch bag. She picks it up and checks the call display. She can't talk to Dean right now. It's time to leave for the restaurant. She's already running late, and Alison will be waiting. She'll speak to Dean later, she decides, but she nonetheless carries the phone to the foyer and leaves it on the console table while she puts on her coat, and on the sixth ring, irrationally, she picks it up and presses the talk button.

“Dean,” she says. “You've been trying to reach me.”

Alison is a chunky blonde with apple cheeks and bobbly blue eyes. Being close to Jodi's age—a little past her prime—is good reason in Alison's opinion to wear her heels a little higher and her necklines a little lower. Twice divorced, she has settled into a functional independence and regards her short-lived marriages as little more than minor disruptions in her life, temporary and
unavoidable, like bad weather not her fault, unexpected squalls in otherwise placid waters.

The Garnet Club is Alison's home base and social sphere. She often spends her day off sitting at the bar sipping a cola. The staff and regulars are like extended family, and she is den mother to the girls, who squabble over everything—schedules, costumes, music, territory. Alison's boss, the club manager, can see that she is the glue that binds things together, and so she is allowed certain freedoms. This is what Jodi has gathered from Alison's talk.

Tonight they're having dinner at Cite on the top of Lake Point Tower, where they like to watch the sun setting over the city. Spotting Alison across the room, already seated with a glass of wine, Jodi smiles with pleasure. Alison, as always, strikes her as larger than life, a vivid presence with a generous measure of vitality. In the cooking class where they met, Alison emerged as a natural leader, helping people with their knife technique even though she never did take to cooking. For her part, Alison found it impressive that Jodi was paid money to give advice, something that she herself has always done for free.

“Is that the Duckhorn?” Jodi asks, taking a seat.

“How can you tell?”

“You always have the Duckhorn.” She waves the server over and orders a glass of the same.

“So how are you keeping, sweetie?” Alison asks but doesn't require an answer. The question is merely a prelude to her newscast. “You'll be glad to hear that Crystal broke up with her boyfriend,” she says. “Took her long enough. And Ray's wife finally
died, poor thing. It's hard on Ray, but at least now he can move on.”

Jodi knows that Crystal is a stripper who suffers from low self-esteem. She's heard a lot about Crystal's hard-earned money and the way her boyfriend spends it. Ray is one of the regulars, an elderly man who is treated by the girls like a favourite pet.

“I'm just so relieved for them both,” Alison says. “It takes a weight off. It really does.”

Jodi's wine arrives and she raises her glass. “Here's to better times ahead for Crystal and Ray.”

Alison touches her glass to Jodi's and forges on, eager to share a treasury of detail about Ray's wife's final illness and Crystal's boyfriend's reaction to getting the boot. Jodi understands that Ray and Crystal are like brother and sister to Alison—what happens to them is part of Alison's own life story. Alison has a heart like open country, and although she chides herself for getting caught up in other people's lives, other people's lives are what she is all about.

The restaurant is more subdued than usual, all the action taking place in the blazing sky beyond the windows where the sun is busy with its feverish descent. The closer it gets to the horizon the more dramatic are its effects. Alison rambles on, pausing only when the server comes to take their order. Her voice is soothing and distracting, a steady, dependable patter, like rain on a roof. Not until their wine has been replenished and their food is on the table does she stop to take her bearings and consider a change of subject.

“You're quiet tonight,” she says.

It's true that Jodi would normally be interrupting her with questions and comments. She nods and says, “I must be tired.”

She isn't aware of lying or trying to conceal anything. Rather, she has the sense that dealing with Todd all these years has indeed tired her out. In fact, she would gladly share with Alison everything she learned from Dean, but the news is thrashing around inside her like a trapped bird, giving her a kind of psychic vertigo. “I don't understand it,” she says, referring, however obtusely, to the stupefying revelation—the pregnancy, the wedding, the magnitude of the betrayal, the scope of the intrigue—but even as she speaks, the words and even the thoughts behind them seem to dissipate and lose all meaning. If someone has to talk it had better be Alison.

“How are things with Renny?” she asks, knowing that once Alison gets started on her first husband it's like she's on a train that she can't get off. Loser that he is, Renny has worked his way under Alison's skin, and her lament is one that she often repeats: “I'm crazy about that man. I'd marry him again if he'd ever grow up.”

Renny comes from a small town in Quebec, where he was raised by a French father and an English mother. His full name is Sylvestre Armand Rene Dulong. He's done jail time for drug trafficking. Alison met him at a Montreal nightclub where she waited tables one summer. He used to come in with his biker friends, and they'd sit near the stage so they could slide hundred-dollar bills into the girls' G-strings. Renny would tip Alison the same, even though she was just a server.

Alison's courtship with Renny, a high point in her life, featured
heaps of cocaine, sex from dusk to dawn, and joy rides up and down the mountain on his Harley. The marriage itself lasted under a month. He didn't tell her he was seeing someone else—just stopped coming home and let her figure it out for herself. But he still drives from Montreal to surprise her, and he still likes to give her a whirl.

“He's always trying to get money off me,” Alison is saying. “He knows I'm at work most nights so he calls at four or five in the morning when I'm trying to sleep. Of course, he would never ask for it up front. That's not Renny. It's like he's giving me this fantastic opportunity to invest in some deal he's got going. I put in ten Gs and get back fifty. If he's dealing on that level then why is he broke?”

Jodi is doing her best to stay alert and follow along. She feels like she's perched on a treetop in a high wind.

“What I need,” Alison says, “is a nice, quiet, steady guy with a good income. Guys come into the club, they're hitting on me all the time. Married guys. What do they take me for?”

Alison sips her wine and frowns at her manicure. The server takes their empty plates and leaves them with dessert menus.

“The quiet, steady guy may be a myth,” says Jodi. “Biologically, men are predators.”

“Tell me about it,” says Alison.

“Women like to believe that their men are nicer than they actually are,” Jodi adds. “They make excuses for them. They don't see the whole picture, just bits at a time, so it never seems to them as bad as it really is.”

Jodi looks at her dessert menu, which the server has placed
squarely in front of her. The words are floating—little boats set adrift in white space. “It's hard to choose,” she says.

“You like the créme caramel,” says Alison.

“Okay,” says Jodi.

“But we don't have to stay for dessert. If you're feeling too tired.”

“We always have dessert.”

“But we don't have to. How are you feeling?”

“Actually, I'm a little dizzy,” says Jodi.
Dizzy
is not the word for what she's feeling, but it's a convenient shorthand for a volley of symptoms that she can't itemize or describe.

Alison's concern is immediate and genuine. She gets the server's attention, gives him her credit card, asks him to rush it, takes Jodi's arm, and insists on driving her home.

“Don't be silly,” says Jodi. “It's a ten-minute walk.”

Alison ignores this. As they leave the restaurant she keeps a protective arm around her friend, and when the valet brings her car she buckles her in as if she were a child. When she gets Jodi home she makes her lie on the sofa and brings her a cup of tea.

“Where's Todd?” she asks.

Jodi shakes her head. “It's still early.”

“Maybe I should call him.”

“God no.”

“Why not?”

“I'd rather you didn't.”

“So,” says Alison. She sits in an armchair and rests back. “What's he done?”

Jodi doesn't immediately answer. Alison waits. The moments
that pass are taut, marked by a distant sound of water rushing through pipes and the ticking of the Keininger mantel clock. Jodi resists divulging her news because right now it's nothing but words in her head, a story she was told that she could still try to forget.

“Have I ever mentioned someone named Natasha Kovacs?” she says finally.

“I don't think so,” says Alison. “Not that I can remember.”

“Todd has gotten her pregnant,” says Jodi.

“Oh dear,” says Alison.

Having made a start, Jodi finds that going on is less of an effort. “Natasha can't be more than twenty or twenty-one. She's Dean Kovacs's daughter. Dean is an old school friend of Todd's.”

“That's disgusting,” says Alison. “How could he do that to you?”

“He's planning to marry her. That's what Dean says.”

“He doesn't have to
marry
her. How ridiculous. She can have an abortion.”

Jodi finds herself rising to Alison's show of outrage. “He
wants
to marry her. According to Dean he's
dying
to marry her.”

“Well, maybe Dean doesn't know what he's talking about. Or maybe the marriage is Dean's idea. Maybe Dean is the old-fashioned type who thinks that you marry the girl if you get her pregnant.”

“I don't think Dean wants Todd to marry her. I think that's the last thing he wants.”

“Okay, well, let's not go off half-cocked. Better get the story straight first.”

Jodi shrugs. Dean has no reason to deceive her. The way he tells it is probably as close to the truth as it's going to get.

After Alison has left she gets up from the sofa, smooths her hair and dress, and goes into the bedroom. The clothes she wore to the seminar are draped across the made bed: beige trousers, white shirt, flesh-toned bra and thong, sheer panty hose. Her Fendi leather handbag is on a chair, and under the chair her Jimmy Choo leopard pumps are lying askew. Surveying her beautiful clothes gives her a measure of comfort. It isn't that she's insecure about her looks, but it could be that the bloom is not as fresh as it once was, that a younger woman might enjoy advantages that she herself can no longer claim. At one time she could throw on a pair of Levi's and a T-shirt, and she can still do that, no question, but there's reassurance in dressing well.