Husband and Wife Read online

  Maybe Nathan, even now, was telling Smith how they’d met, what they’d said. Maybe he was describing the act itself, or acts, because, after all, I had only his word that there had only been one, and his word apparently wasn’t terribly good. Maybe he was saying again that he wished he loved her, so that instead of doing the sort of thing we say can never be justified he would have done the sort of thing we say can be justified by love. Maybe he was telling him her name.

  Kate.

  Here is where I admit that I spent the next hour Googling the name of the writers’ conference where he’d met her along with her name. Kate. I wanted to find a photo. I wanted to know if she was a fiction writer or a playwright or a poet. What if she was a poet? What if she looked like me? What if she was a poet and she looked like me but a skinnier, pre-pregnancy me, and she had the time to go around railing passionately against the prose of Gertrude Stein, and in every way she replaced the me I was now with some version of my earlier self? Or what if she was nothing like me at all? Would that be better or worse? All I got in answer to my questions was a bunch of hits that included both words but not in any helpful relation to each other. A woman named Kate Pyle was a playwright who’d written a one-act with a man who’d once attended the conference. That was the kind of thing I learned.

  I suppose once I’d started down this road of technological surveillance the next step was obvious. I knew the password to his e-mail account: Lovesah. But there were no e-mails to or from anyone named Kate. There were e-mails from Nathan to his agent, his mother, his friends, written that week, written today, in a tone of dumbfounding normalcy. “Yo,” he’d written in greeting, in an e-mail to one of his high school friends. Yo? He was a good actor, I guessed, at least over e-mail. Or this yo, this ludicrously jaunty word, somehow captured what he really was feeling. I imagined confronting him when he got home with the evidence of yo. “What the hell is this?” I’d scream, and because he was Nathan and we understood each other he’d know why, in the face of his larger transgression, I might fling myself into hysterics over a yo. God is in the details. Or is it the devil is in the details? One of those.

  Nathan kept his drafts inside a folder called “Fiction.” Inside that was another folder called “Infidelity,” and inside that were ten different versions of the novel, dutifully numbered. I opened number ten. It kept happening, the novel began. Why was I reading it again? Did I expect it to have changed? One of the subplots was about an affair between two people who met at a downscale motel on their lunch breaks from office jobs, and the twist was that the affair wasn’t the tragic or seedy or tragicomic situation you might imagine from this setup but a genuine romance, albeit one carried out in the milieu of a noir’s doomed deceivers, or an art film’s resigned dreamers, looking to escape their Wal-Mart lives. Nathan had given the woman my job, and in the novel she did the job well and that satisfied her. In one scene she and her lover talked about movies that started with an office worker in the process of having his soul crushed by the cubicle doldrums and then followed him on a hero’s journey, in which he discovered that he was never meant to be a cog in the machine, but the dude at the front of the pack stopping bullets with his mind, or catching them with his teeth, or whatever it was, these CGI days, that heroes did with bullets.

  “I don’t want to be a hero,” the woman said. “I don’t want my life to turn out to be virtual reality. I just want to do a good job.”

  “Because you’re a happy person,” the man said. “Unhappy people—they want to think their unhappiness makes them special. You always felt misunderstood and out of place? Well, guess what, it’s because you’re Jesus. That’s why depressed people are so self-involved. They all think they’re Jesus.”

  “Let’s make a movie,” the woman said, “about an office worker who turns out to be an office worker.”

  “What would happen in it?”

  “He’d spend the whole movie thinking he ought to be able to stop bullets, and then a photocopier would reveal to him that his destiny was to get his report turned in on time. You know how in the movies they always have to get reports in on time? Just what are these reports?”

  “A photocopier reveals his destiny?” the man asked. “A photocopier of destiny.”

  And then she grinned at him, and repeated the phrase in the tones of a preview voiceover, and he began to tickle her, and they rolled around on their tainted motel bedding, on top of the bloodstains and the sperm. Only Nathan left those last details out, not remembering, as I did, the 60 Minutes with the infrared light.

  After I read this part of the novel the first time, I said to him, “You think I’m happy in my job?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not you,” he said.

  It wasn’t me. I went back and forth over the pages of the book, scrolling up, scrolling down, waiting for something to jump out, to announce, Aha! The truth! I could hardly stand to read it. I couldn’t bring myself to stop. If she wasn’t me, then no one was. I could see no reflection in any of these characters. For all I knew every one of the women—there were twelve, I counted twelve of them—were variations of her. Kate. For all I knew he’d written about her over and over, and never written about me at all. So many points of view, and not one belonged to a betrayed wife, a cuckolded husband. The cheaters, that’s who got to talk. If I wanted to be in Nathan’s book, I needed to have an affair of my own.

  She kept running into him, I read, and not just running into him as in crossing paths in the hall, but literally running into him, body against body, collision and retreat. Was she doing it on purpose? He couldn’t have said why but he had the feeling that she wanted to touch him. Was that all it took? Action creates an equal and opposite reaction. She wanted to touch him and after a while he wanted to touch her back. Physics, that’s all it was.

  But what, I wanted to ask, what about his wife? Was she catalyst, or just casualty?

  Rajiv still waited in my in-box. I was in his head. I opened the e-mail, hit reply, typed, Hey, Can’t believe it took me a year to write back. Things are crazy here. I hesitated. I typed, I’m hunting for the eject button. I signed it S.

  I was still awake when Nathan came home, but I pretended not to be. I pretended, even to myself, that I didn’t hear the jangle of his belt buckle as he took off his jeans, that I didn’t feel the mattress shift beneath his weight, that I didn’t feel him hesitate—should he spoon me, the way he always had?—before he settled into place, not touching me, on his side of the bed. I listened as his breathing shifted into sleep. Sleep arrived so easily for him, and yet it wouldn’t come for me, like my stubborn three-year-old standing on the other side of the room, shaking her head every time I called her name. Panic fluttered in my throat, splashed hot across my back. And so I got up. I snuck out of my grown-up house like a teenager. By the time I got home, I’d driven a hundred and fifty miles. I could have been well on my way, if I’d actually gone somewhere.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Kate Ryan. An unremarkable name, one that brought up 2,530,000 hits on Google. There was an army of Kate Ryans. More than an army. There was a universe of them. But what about Nathan’s—or should I say our—particular Kate Ryan? What about her? She was a fiction writer, and as fiction writers often do, she taught fiction writing, at a small college in South Carolina.

  There are a number of versions of the literary life. Kate Ryan’s was the kind where you publish a few pieces in small journals and then get a job teaching a 4/4 load at an out-of-the-way teaching college and struggle to find time to write between grading an avalanche of composition papers. You hope to get a book published, because if you do, you might get a job at a bigger university, teaching fewer classes, or even better, you might achieve the miracle of selling so many books or winning so many fellowships you can afford not to do anything else. If I’d finished my MFA a single woman, if Nathan and I hadn’t decided to put our writing first, make do with part-time jobs, let the chips fall where they may, I probably would have followed this path. If I hadn’t
stayed with Nathan, if I hadn’t yet had children, I would have a life very much like hers. Nathan wanted to be with the sort of woman I’d be if I hadn’t been married to him.

  I knew her name, I knew she was a fiction writer, because I got Smith to tell me. As soon as I got to work, I called him. He didn’t want to tell me anything, of course. He didn’t want to betray Nathan’s confidence, he said, but more than that, he didn’t see how knowledge of the details could possibly benefit me. “You have to at least tell me if she’s a poet,” I said to him. “Give me her name, rank, and serial number,” I said. “Tell me something. Tell me something that will make me feel better.”

  “He loves you,” he said.

  “That doesn’t help.”

  He sighed. “She’s not a poet.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m positive. She’s a fiction writer. Her first book just came out.”

  “And it’s not poems?”

  “It’s stories.”

  “What’s her last name?”

  Silence.

  “If you don’t tell me I’m going to search Amazon for a Kate with a new story collection. So please just save me the time, Smith, because I really should be working.”

  “Ryan,” he said. “Kate Ryan is her name.”

  So now I knew. I’d wanted to know, and now I knew. There’s what you want and there’s what’s good for you, and when we’re children we don’t realize what a luxury it is to have our parents to tell us the difference.

  She was no prettier than I was. The two of us were a couple of reasonably attractive women. She had big, appealing eyes, but so, I’d been told, did I. She had dark hair, like me, but hers was short and plain and mine was long and curly and still sometimes Nathan tugged a ringlet to make it bounce and looked at me like he was a schoolboy and I was the classroom’s prettiest girl. Did it make things better or worse that she wasn’t prettier, that I had no recourse to that easy, obvious explanation? She wasn’t younger, either. She was, in fact, older, though by only a year. She was almost exactly my age. And it wasn’t just the circumstances that made me feel that her life was my alternate reality. It was the sensibility. Here, from an interview I found: “I don’t write about love so much as intimacy. Because it’s so daily, you know, and yet so full of mystery, and that combination fascinates me.”

  And what about the men you date? the interviewer asks. Are they looking for themselves in your work?

  “One of them was. And, you know, he was in there, but he didn’t recognize himself, which is probably a good thing.”

  Do you ever feel, as a woman, that you should tackle subjects other than love?

  “As a woman? What do you mean?”

  I mean, the stereotype is that love is a woman’s primary concern. Do you feel the need to defy that?

  “I think that in part because of the expectations placed on them, women wrestle constantly with the place of romantic love in their lives, and not just romantic love but ideas of motherhood and women’s roles in general, and that even if you reject marriage and motherhood that very rejection in some ways defines you. To be fair, I should say that I see your point—I have sometimes worried that my work would be characterized as particularly ‘female’ because of its subject matter, and part of me says, ‘So what?’ Both because, why should we feel there’s anything wrong with that? And because it’s ultimately ridiculous. Love isn’t a female concern, it’s a human one. And when I think about what art can do, how it shows us our common humanity, love, and its loss, seem to me to be the primary components of that commonality.”

  Do you think…

  “Plus, you’ve got to write about what you write about. What preoccupies you, I mean.”

  You’re preoccupied with love?

  “Well, see, that’s my point. Who isn’t?”

  Kate Ryan. Ah, Kate Ryan. Yes, I agree with you.

  I ducked out of work early to go to the Regulator, where I found Kate Ryan’s book on the new releases shelf. Yes and No. That was the title, standing out in white against the red of the spine. I picked it up. The same photo on the inside flap, her rueful eyes. She was at work on a novel. Of course she was. Who wasn’t? The blurbs used words like witty, astute, and wise. No doubt the writing of this book had pre-dated her encounter with Nathan—had pre-dated it by months and years. I knew that. I knew how the whole thing worked. And yet I expected to find a story about him in there, among her other stories of love, of intimacy. I expected a story that would tell me how Nathan figured in the ongoing construction of the narrative of her life. Maybe he was a meaningless thrill. Maybe he was the man she wanted. Either one was strange to imagine. How her sense of the stakes could be so different from mine. I opened the book to a random page, like you might open the Bible, looking for something—explanation, solace, advice—in the first passage on which your eyes alight.

  My mother doesn’t love my father anymore. He keeps flinging himself against this fact, like a bird against a window. Everyone but him can see it. What am I supposed to do about it, when he comes to me with his sad eyes? I am busy trying to get my Baptist boyfriend to take my virginity, a suggestion which makes him shake with temptation, sliding away from me on the couch, rolling off me where we lie on the golf course behind my house.

  Another page.

  “We never talk about anything,” he says. “Have you noticed how we never talk?”

  “No,” she says. “We talk constantly.”

  He says, “You always do this. Why won’t you let me talk to you? There are things…I want. Things…” He stops, and his arms pump as though he is stopping just short of beating his chest. He says, “Desires…”

  “Look,” Julie says, “why don’t you just go to the movies like the rest of us?”

  Another page.

  It is never clear to the rest of them what they should call Claudia and Bob. Sometimes they are a couple, sometimes they are not, and sometimes Claudia will look at one of them, whoever happens to be the host that weekend, and say, “Why on earth is Bob in another room? Don’t you know we’re sleeping together?” The poor host will say, “So you’re back together?” and Claudia will say, “No,” with that gentle scorn that is her special touch. The host will go away thinking that this is it, this is the last time Claudia is invited, and also about that old recurring topic of discussion, that anyone could have known they were unsuited the first time they heard their names paired. Claudia. Bob.

  Sarah. Nathan. No denying those names went together, with their biblical, inevitable ring.

  Another.

  She wonders how it would feel to discover that all of her memories were someone else’s stories, like in the movie Blade Runner. It could mean that she was free. Or that she was nothing. It would be hard to tell which.

  Another.

  There is nothing I want more than him in my bed. Dana says, “You’re exaggerating.” But she is wrong. I am giving myself over to it. Him, him, him. It is exhilarating, and at the same time I understand how sick it is. How pathetic. I want to write him letters that say I love you, that say please. Please. Pleas, as a word, is awfully close to please. She pleas. Please. She pleas for him to please; she pleases him for pleas. If you think about it, pleas starts to look truncated, as though it’s missing something. I wonder why this never occurred to me before.

  My hand was on the doorknob when Nathan pulled open the door. Behind him in the ExerSaucer Binx was screaming, but I couldn’t get to him because first Nathan and then both Nathan and Mattie were blocking the door, standing in my way. “Mommy,” Mattie said, “can I wear a sundress?”

  “I’ve been doing some research on insomnia,” Nathan said.

  “Can I wear a sundress, Mommy?” Mattie asked.

  Binx ramped up his screaming to its most ear-shattering pitch, his face a red mask of fury, his fists balled in the air. “You need to exercise,” Nathan said, “but not too close to bedtime, so I think we should all go for a walk now.”

  “Mommy!” Mattie insist
ed. “I want to wear a sundress!”

  “It’s cold out, sweetheart,” I said to her. To Nathan I said, “Excuse me,” and when he stepped back, I crossed the kitchen to lift the baby out. His screaming stopped. He looked at me reproachfully and said, “Aaahhhh” in a mournful way.

  “Aaaahhhh,” I said back.

  “Huh-huh, huh-huh, huh-huh,” he said. He launched himself sideways, screaming when his face met cloth instead of nipple.

  “I’ve got to feed the baby,” I said.

  “Oh, right,” Nathan said. “You feed him, and I’ll take Mattie to the potty, and then we’ll go walk the drive.”

  “I don’t need to go potty!” Mattie shouted.

  “Push the stroller up and down the hill a few times, and I guarantee you’ll sleep tonight,” Nathan said.

  “Guarantee?” I asked, not to affirm his guarantee but because I’d never heard him use that word in that way, with the overeager sincerity of a salesman.

  “I don’t need to go potty!” Mattie shouted again.

  “You haven’t been in three hours,” Nathan said. He put his hand on the top of her head and steered her down the hall, ignoring her protests.

  “Why would you lie about needing to go potty?” I asked Binx. He screamed in response. “What if I don’t want to go for a walk?” He screamed at that, too. “I take your point,” I said.

  Through the lens of my exhaustion the world was both blurry and sharp, as when you’re sitting outside on a sunny day drinking too much wine. I sat on the couch with Binx at my breast, his hands kneading maniacally at my flesh, and all the little darkening hairs on his head seemed distinctly in focus, but the room beyond him—my bookshelves, my reflection in the dark television screen—seemed vague and far away. “Oh, baby,” I said. “Oh, baby, baby.” I rubbed his head. I touched the tip of his tiny nose. He smiled at me around my nipple—why was that the most charming in his repertoire of smiles?—and I pretended he was all there was in the world, the sound of Mattie and Nathan arguing in the bathroom just fading away.