The Silent Wife (8 page)

Natasha's readiness to take offence, her proclivity to cry, to pout, to withdraw—this is all new to him, and he finds it wearing. Jodi doesn't behave this way. What is Natasha's problem? He'd like to take it up with her but prudently holds his tongue, and although the day is slipping away he talks her into meeting him for lunch.

When he shows up at Francesca's in Little Italy—a regular spot of theirs because it's close to the university—Natasha is seated by the pillar, reading a menu. As he settles into the chair across from her she fails to lift her eyes or otherwise take any notice of him, sticking with her menu as if she doesn't already know it by heart. Why can't she act her age and talk to him, call him a name or two, get it out of her system? On the other hand, meeting him here was no doubt a big concession for her to make, after the way he spoke to her. Ever so gently he takes the menu out of her hands and sets it aside.

“Let's not fight,” he says. “I'm sorry.”

Based on the look she gives him—unsmiling, apprehensive—he understands that she intends to break up with him. But it was such a little spat. There must be something else going on. Of course there is. The something else he's always feared. It's finally happened, and how could it not, given the throngs of likely young men who rub shoulders with her every day at school. He never believed that she would stay with him forever, in spite of what she says. The talk of marriage, that was just a sideshow, something to try on for size. She's like that, Natasha. She likes to speculate and presume, just to see what will happen. And why not? She has her whole life ahead of her and needs to figure out what she's going to be doing and who she's going to be doing it with. Whereas he is more than half done. Forty-six. Over the hill. A few more years and he'll be popping vitamin V. He can't compete with a rival half his age. He has to face the facts and let her go.

“I can't let you go,” he says. “I love you.”

Her eyes widen. She gives a little laugh. “Don't be silly,” she says.

“Aren't you breaking up with me?”

“No. As much as you deserve it.”

Their server appears and Natasha orders a meatball sandwich, so Todd gets that too, even though he has no appetite. Then he breaks his lunchtime rule and orders a beer. She isn't leaving him and he should be feeling relieved, but something isn't right.

“What is it?” he asks.

Ignoring the question she starts to talk about school: her nine o'clock class, what the professor was wearing, what he said about the Fauvists. At least she's decided to speak to him, but when the food arrives she digs in and falls silent again. He talks about his morning, the string of mishaps starting with the lost key. He's trying to entertain her, get her laughing, but there's something on her mind. He drinks down his beer and orders another. She doesn't come out with it till after she's eaten her meal, every scrap of it, and has a cup of tea in front of her. When she tells him it's like a kick in the head.

“How could this happen?” he yells. “I thought you were on the pill.”

She shushes him. She's turned pale and seems confused. “I thought you wanted children,” she says.

“Of course I want children,” he shouts.

Of course he wants children, though
children
may not be the word for what he wants. Natasha wants
children
, meaning helpless little beggars who need her constant attention and bring
her a sense of kinship and belonging. What he wants is not that. What he wants is descendants, heirs, or just one heir, preferably a son, someone who shares his DNA, a variant of himself to replace him when he's gone. As a younger man he never gave this any serious thought and would have kept on like that had he not awakened one morning with a lust for progeny that shot through him like a virus, and then, when he met Natasha, mutated into a rampant longing that never left him. It made him feel that his life, as it stood, was a wasteland. It gave his pursuit of her an urgency that was unrelenting. That she could love him meant that it was not too late.

“Of course I want children,” he repeats. “Just not like this.”

“Not like what?”

“Like this. With you springing it on me at lunch.”

“When should I have sprung it on you?”

“We've never even discussed this.”

“Yes we have. You want children.”

“That's beside the point.”

He's shouting again, and he can see from her face that he's lost her. She stands up, takes her knapsack from the back of her chair, and leaves the restaurant. He gets out his wallet, slides some bills under a plate, and hurries after her, fearing that she might have run off and disappeared, but there she is, standing idly by.

“I have to get to class,” she says.

He drapes an arm across her shoulders and keeps it there as they walk up Loomis Street toward Harrison.

“I can have an abortion,” she says.

“You would do that?”

“If that's what you want.”

It's a ray of light, and with the hope it brings his panic subsides a little. He stops walking and swings her around to face him. “How far along are you?” he asks. “I mean, is it doable?”

She gives him a look of such intense hatred that he physically recoils.

“You're the one who brought it up,” he says.

As the bickering continues he forgets to press his point about how this could have happened. It doesn't occur to him that she might have done it on purpose. He is not by nature suspicious or vindictive, and without knowing it he moves past blaming her and starts on the process of puzzling things out, much as he would a plumbing leak or a bad debt. Now he's saying things like: “Don't worry … we'll get it straight … it's going to be okay.” But this kind of talk falls short.

“You're still talking about it like it's a problem,” she says.

“Okay, fine. But I'm not twenty-one. I have a history and that complicates things. I'm not, at the moment, a free man.”

“Whose fault is that? You were supposed to tell her about us ages ago.”

He wonders if this could be true. He doesn't recall any discussion with Natasha in which he agreed to talk to Jodi. He only knows that Natasha has been pressuring him to talk to Jodi.

“I don't think I was supposed to tell her,” he says. “But I'll have to tell her now.”

The reality of this is dawning on him. If Natasha won't
consider an abortion, people will have to know. Maybe not immediately but eventually. Jodi will have to know. And Dean.

“I don't think you should tell your father,” he says. “Not right away.”

Natasha has started walking again. She's several steps ahead of him. “I've already told my father,” she says, tossing the words over her shoulder.

He lengthens his stride and catches up with her. “You told Dean? When did you tell him?”

“After I spoke to
you
.”

“I can't believe you would do that.”

She shrugs, and he understands that she did it to spite him, because he was short with her on the phone when she asked if he had called his lawyer.

“What did you say exactly? You didn't tell him about me—about us.”

“What do you think? I'm going to tell him and not say who it's with?”

“You didn't need to tell him at all.”

She shrugs again, her pique and pride and truculence all packed into the single insolent gesture. As she walks on at a steady deliberate pace he has to make an effort to keep up with her. He feels like a cockroach scuttling along at her side.

“Slow down,” he says. “Talk to me.”

“What's to say?”

“Lots. There's lots to say. How far along are you? When did you find out?”

“I don't know how far along I am. I found out this morning.”

“You found out this morning? I thought you had a class this morning.”

“I did it first thing, when I woke up. That's when you're supposed to do it.”

Todd, who has never heard of a home pregnancy test, says, “You did
what
when you woke up?”

“There's this plastic stick that you pee on. You get it at the drugstore. If it's positive, a pink line comes up.”

“A plastic stick?”

“That's not all. My period is late.”

“But you need to see a doctor to know for sure.”

“You so want it not to be true.”

They're on Harrison Street now, heading east. The sidewalk is crowded with students moving in both directions. They're getting jostled in the congestion.

“When you told your father, how did he take it?” he asks.

“How do you think?”

“He wasn't happy.”

“No.”

“What did he say?”

“He said that he was going to wring your neck.”

“That's all?”

“It's not enough?”

“He must have said more than that.”

“Oh yeah, I almost forgot. He said that he was going to talk to Jodi.”

He waits for her to disappear into Henry Hall and then turns back toward his car, already regretting the hash he's made of things. Clearly this is a sensitive situation, one that's going to follow him, and he should have been more tactful. Not that it would have made any real difference. Women have babies or not according to their whims—and what some guy wants, even the guy responsible, is completely beside the point. There's no recourse for the men of this world. Men are a race of suckers who don't realize that having sex is the biggest risk they'll ever take. His whole world changes as of now, and there isn't a damn thing he can do about it. He ought to have a voice here, but things don't work like that. In spite of what anyone says it's women who make the rules. In this case it's Natasha who makes the rules. And now she's upset with him, and he still has Dean and Jodi to face. Regardless of his feelings about fathering a child or an heir or whatever you want to call it, this right now is too complicated, too fraught, and moving too fast. It's like he's in a car that's careening along in the wrong lane, heading into oncoming traffic. It makes no difference that he doesn't know how he got here. It's going to be him who's held accountable.

As he passes in front of the UIC Pavilion he has his phone in hand and is speed-dialing Dean's mobile. He ought to take some time to get his thoughts in order, figure out what he's going to say, but time is passing and he needs to get to Dean before Dean gets to Jodi, if it's not already too late. He thinks he has a chance because Dean has only known for a few hours. The main thing is that he's willing to be humble, willing to give Dean plenty of space and take a certain amount of flak. Dean can be
a little wild and a little unruly, and Dean can be stubborn, but he's not a blockhead. He may not like what's happening, but given time he's going to adapt because if Dean is anything he's loyal, and Todd is Dean's oldest friend.

But Todd is mistaken if he thinks that Dean has had enough time to come down to earth and have a rational conversation. Before Todd can form a single word Dean lets him have it.

“I thought you were my friend, you slimy son of a bitch. What the fuck are you doing with my daughter?”

Todd wants to say that he's sorry, that he didn't mean for this to happen, that he never wanted to hurt Dean or put their friendship at risk, that Dean has every right to be upset. He wants very much to say these things and be forgiven, but most of all, right at this moment, he wants to ask Dean if he will please not speak to Jodi, if he'll give Todd a chance to talk to her first. Dean, however, is not in a listening mood.

“I'll rip your head off, you stinking turd,” says his friend. “I'll have you arrested for sexual assault.” And with that he breaks the connection.

Todd is riled now. The son of a bitch has got him going. He needs to simmer down, and it helps that he's striding along. Walking is a known remedy for getting a grip on yourself. Go for a walk, they say. Get outside and shake it off. It's one of those days when the sun is breaking through low-lying clouds and the odd spatter of rain hits the pavement with a hiss. Scattered showers. They moisten his head and shoulders and raise the smell of the pristine lawns that dominate the grounds of the university. He needs to focus on the future. Not the distant future—
although that, too, is at stake—but the hours just ahead. Where will he be eating dinner? Jodi was planning to cook. And where is he going to be sleeping? Something has to be done, but what?

His thoughts are a jumble of discordant notes, painfully sounding in his overwrought brain, beating on his temporal lobes. But something else is going on as well. Even in his alarmed, disgruntled, and apprehensive state, he's aware of a certain ambivalence. His thoughts are leaning mostly one way but not entirely, not conclusively. Faintly chiming in the fray is the hint of something wholesome, amusing, even comical, a punchy little ditty arising from the orchestral skirmish, having to do with Natasha and all that he feels for her.

He's known her for her entire life—from the day she was born, in fact—and in some antiquated part of himself he still regards her as a hapless child whose mother has died, a loudmouthed brat in a school uniform, a pimply adolescent with braces, all of these rolled into one. If he had known then that she would be the one to bear him a child, he would have laughed out loud. It would have been a real knee-slapper.

He remembers the moment when he first saw her in her fully adult form, in the new and still surprising rendition that he has come to know and love. He was sitting at the bar in the Drake, waiting for Dean, and happened to look around when she walked in, a beautiful stranger who caught his eye and glided toward him in all her succulent splendour, all her scandalous swank, hips swaying, breasts bobbing, earrings swinging—he didn't stand a chance. When she planted a kiss on his lips, a garden of hopes and dreams blossomed in his fertile mind.