Husband and Wife Read online

  “Nathan,” I said at the beep. “I forgot about child care for Binx today. I could call in sick, I guess, but I’ve got a lot of work to do, so if you could come out here…Anyway, just call me when you get this.” I waited a beat. “Maybe you’re in the bathroom.”

  I paced the kitchen, patting Binx on the back until he belched and then patting him still, thumpity-thump-thump, while he said, “Ba ba ba” and yanked on my hair. I waited what I thought was more than enough time for all Nathan’s morning ablutions, shower, shaving, etc. Where the hell was he, anyway? The night before I’d been aware only of his absence from my house, and not of his presence somewhere else. He’d been antimatter. But I remembered from my science classes that matter is neither created nor destroyed, and so he had to go on existing somewhere, in a hotel, in a pancake house, lying in a ditch beside his suicidally wrecked car.

  Again the phone rang and rang. “Just checking back, in case you didn’t get my first message,” I said. “I need to know if you can come, so I know whether to call in. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this before. Um. I hope you’re OK.”

  I took Mattie into her room and picked an outfit, which she pronounced ugly. “I don’t like pants,” she said. “I won’t wear it.” I said she could stay in her room alone until she decided to put it on, so she put it on quickly, almost frantic, asking me the whole time not to leave even though I was just sitting there on the floor with Binx in my lap, staring past her at the wall. She knew something was up, she had to, or why was she so desperate at the prospect of thirty seconds alone in her room?

  When I called again the phone was off. He’d turned it on and then off again. He’d sat there, wherever he was, probably looking at our number on the screen. He’d let me leave two messages. Maybe he’d listened to them. And then he’d turned the phone off so that as he continued his sojourn into irresponsibility the sound of my dedicated ring tone—“It’s a family affair…It’s a family affair”—couldn’t follow him.

  “Why is your phone off?” I said. “Or wait, maybe you’re trying to call me. I’ll hang up.” I hung up. I waited. My phone didn’t ring. I called voice mail, just in case it wasn’t signaling me like it should. “You have no new messages,” the mechanical woman said.

  I called again. “Something better be wrong with your phone.”

  Again. “Is this your way of telling me you don’t intend to take care of your children today?”

  Again. “You know, you’re still their father.”

  Again. “Fuck you, Nathan. Fuck you.”

  Mattie resumed her new song, dancing around the kitchen. “Shit,” I said. Then I called Smith.

  “Hello?” He sounded groggy.

  I didn’t apologize for waking him. “Do you know where Nathan is?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He left last night,” I said. “I thought he might have called you.”

  “No. No,” he said. “He left?”

  “I asked him to,” I said. “But I wasn’t thinking about who would watch Binx today, and now I can’t find him. He didn’t call you?”

  “No,” he said again.

  “I thought maybe he would go to your place.”

  “He didn’t,” he said.

  I paused a moment to fully absorb the new reality. Nathan wasn’t at Smith’s. He wasn’t answering his phone. I had no way to reach him. I’d asked him to leave, and he’d certainly taken that seriously. There was no anger in my voice, only wonderment and despair, when I asked, “What am I going to do?”

  “Um,” Smith said. “Do you want me to come over?”

  “You?”

  “I don’t work during the day on Fridays,” he said. “I usually work Friday nights, you know. And on Saturdays.”

  For as long as Smith had been part of my life, I didn’t know much about him. “I never knew you had Fridays off.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said. “I do. And I can come watch the baby if you want.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “I can call in sick. Or I guess I could take him with me but frankly I just can’t face the thought of packing up all his stuff and hauling it from the parking lot.”

  “Do you want to call in sick?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Because if you need to go in, I’m happy to come.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said.

  “But I can.”

  “Really?”

  “If it would help.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” he said. “I’m more than happy to help.”

  “You’re very polite,” I said, though generous was what I meant, or bighearted or unstinting, something more dramatic than that mild word polite, and he said, “I know.”

  I wasn’t sure why I’d accepted Smith’s help, and even as I walked him around the house—him holding Binx as though he was trying him on before purchase—and showed him where things were and explained that I’d arranged for him to pick up Mattie from school and interjected a thousand things out of order until I was certain he wouldn’t remember a word, I kept thinking that I should say, Never mind, that’s OK, it’s sweet of you, but I might as well stay home. But I didn’t. I wanted to go to work because it was what felt normal, and I wasn’t yet ready to acknowledge how abnormal things now were. More than that, though, kept me from turning him down. In the end, I was just like Mattie. When I couldn’t find Nathan, I had felt all alone. I had just wanted somebody to come.

  All the way to work I thought about going somewhere—anywhere—else. But I couldn’t decide where, and the thought of taking advantage of Smith’s virtue gave me pangs of guilt, so while my conscious mind juggled desire and indecision and remorse my subconscious just went ahead and drove me to my assigned parking lot. It was a ten-minute walk from there to the office, past a Walgreens and a Chik-fil-A and the sex shop where Tanya and Kristy had once taken me. I lingered in front of every place I passed, even the sex shop, until it dawned on me that those were embarrassing windows to gaze into with anything approaching longing. My reluctance to go to work clung to my ankles like a child who doesn’t like the babysitter. Please don’t go, please don’t go, please don’t go. I altered my route to take me to an on-campus cafeteria, where I got a cup of coffee and sat for a while nursing it, the caffeine dragging my thoughts out on the dance floor for a jitterbug while the rest of me sat, inert as the chair beneath me.

  I thought, Where is Nathan? And then thought it again, and again, until the question took on the tune of “Frère Jacques”—where is Nathan, where is Nathan, ding ding dong, ding ding dong. My skull was a bell, my thoughts the clapper, my whole body a helpless reverberation. Because of “Frère Jacques,” I started imagining he’d been on a plane to France when he shut his cell phone off. He’d had a thing about France—the wine! the cheese! the double kisses!—ever since we’d gone there for a literary festival after his first book came out. The book had been a hit there. He’d even been on TV. He’d said to me once, after a month back at home struggling with an early, failing draft of his second novel, far from the kiss-kisses and the adulation, that sometimes he thought he should leave me and move to Paris.

  “Excuse me?” I said. This was before the kids. I was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper while he made dinner. He’d had his back to me, reaching up for a mixing bowl on a high shelf, when he’d let loose that line.

  “I just mean, like Philip Roth and his cabin,” he said. “A lot of people think he’s done his best work since he pretty much dropped off the world.”

  “Going to Paris isn’t exactly dropping off the world,” I said. “But, you know, if you want to leave me, go right ahead.”

  “Hey,” he said. “I didn’t say leave you. I said go to Paris.”

  “That’s not what I heard,” I said. “I heard leave you.”

  “I didn’t say that,” he said. “I was just talking about getting away for a while to work.”

  “Really,” I said. “Becaus
e I was thinking maybe I should move to India to learn all the positions of the Kama Sutra. Just for a while.”

  “Cut me some slack,” he said. “You know I’ve been having a really hard time with this book, and frankly you’ve been less than understanding, giving me crap if I want to work at night…”

  “When have I tried to stop you from working at night?”

  “Just last night when I said I didn’t want to go to the movies.”

  “I said I’d go by myself.”

  “Yeah, but you said it like this.” He sighed, rolled his eyes, folded his arms, snapped, “Fine, I’ll go by myself.”

  I threw my hands in the air. “So I don’t just have to support you working all the time, I can’t ever express an emotion while I’m at it.”

  “Oh, please. Like you’ve ever not expressed an emotion.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You should listen to your tone half the time you talk to me. ‘What are you doing in there, Nathan? Are you planning to take out the trash?’ You know, my work takes concentration, it takes hours of—”

  “Your work? Like it’s a foreign concept to me? Funny, I thought I did similar work.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t think so,” he said. “Given the amount of time you seem to have free to give me crap about mine.”

  “You don’t think my work is as important as yours,” I said.

  “What? Where is that coming from?”

  “I heard what you said in France,” I said.

  “What did I say in France?”

  We’d been at a restaurant, sitting next to each other but engrossed in conversation with the people on our other sides. And I’d caught my name on the lips of the woman he was talking to, just at the moment when my companion had turned to signal the waiter, and I heard Nathan say, “She writes poetry.” I noted that he said, “She writes poetry” instead of “She’s a poet,” but I wouldn’t have thought much about that if I hadn’t heard the woman ask, in a flirtatious, joking way, “Is she good?”

  “She’s pretty good,” he said. My husband said. Pretty good. “She just needs to take a leap.”

  “A leap?” the woman asked.

  “You know. A leap.” He arced one of his hands through the air, as if he were sketching a rainbow. He might as well have slapped me with that hand. I turned back to the man on my other side and tried to keep on laughing through his attempts at English and mine at French, but all I could think was, “I need to take a leap,” and one month later I stood in my kitchen, squared off with Nathan, and said it aloud.

  “Oh.” He flushed. “I didn’t mean in your work, I meant in your career. Like, you just needed something big to happen, like winning a book contest.”

  “Then why are you blushing? And why did you say ‘She’s pretty good’ if you weren’t talking about the quality of my work?”

  “I was joking,” he said. “That woman was flirting with me.”

  “Well, that makes everything better,” I said. “You sold me out not just for the hell of it but in the service of flirting.”

  “Come on, Sarah, you know I love your work,” he said.

  “Sure, when you’re alone with me. But when you’re drunk on wine with a French woman going ‘Ooh la la, you’re a genius,’ all bets are off. Why didn’t you just tell her I was an inferior talent who failed to understand you? Maybe she’ll be waiting for you when you arrive in Paris.”

  Then he laughed. He actually laughed. “This is ridiculous,” he said, and, oh, the rage that filled me.

  “I’m leaving,” I said.

  “What do you mean you’re leaving?”

  I didn’t bother to reply. I grabbed my bag, hanging right there on the back of a kitchen chair, and I left, with him shouting, “Where are you going? I’m making dinner!” and me shouting back that I hoped he and Philip Roth would be very happy together, dropping off the world.

  I peeled out. What a satisfying sound. What a satisfying jump the car took forward, kicking up gravel behind. I only wished one of those stones had pegged him between the eyes. I drove too fast for our country road and hit the interstate hard, the roar and whoosh of the car an exact replica of my emotions. I was never going back. I said that to myself, and I believed it. That’s how I used to give myself over to anger—purely, wholly, with a conviction unblemished by fears for my future or that of offspring who didn’t yet exist. I used to lose my temper, and to take pleasure in its loss. I’ve never been so sure of myself as when anger was the only thing I felt, before the meeker, more nagging voices began to offer justifications and concerns and possible consequences. Sitting in the cafeteria now, I wished for the purifying clarity of anger like that.

  I went back that time, obviously I went back. I drove all the way to the coast and walked the beach and spent the night in a hotel and the next morning I went back, to a Nathan vibrating with worry and remorse. I’d accepted his claim that he was talking about my career, not my writing, though I’d never fully believed it. What if I hadn’t gone back? What if I’d said, I’ll show you a leap, and blown past Chapel Hill on a fast track to Austin? Listen, Nathan, you want to know what I thought about, alone in that hotel room? You want to know the truth? I thought about Rajiv. I considered phrases from the e-mails he’d sent since we moved, a we miss you that seemed to me code for I’m a little in love with you. Why hadn’t I just told you what he’d said? Why had I hidden the book, never made casual reference to an e-mail from him? Because Rajiv—he was like a wishing stone, handed over by a fairy queen in return for some karmic good deed. I’d been saving him, you see, for when I needed him, and sometimes when we fought or when my life didn’t seem to be quite what I’d had in mind, I’d turn thoughts of him over in my mind, the way you might reach into your pocket to feel the firm reassurance of that stone. All I had to do was wish.

  The truth is, Nathan, I sat on the stained comforter in that cheap motel room, and dialed Rajiv’s number on my phone. He’d sent it to me, in one of those e-mails. Call me when you’ve finished Denis Johnson’s new book. I hadn’t called, but I had programmed the number into my phone. I’d labeled it with the name of a high school friend Nathan would never have any reason to call.

  “Hello?” he said.

  I took a breath. “It’s Sarah.”

  “Wow,” he said. “It really is.”

  I laughed. “It took me a long time to finish.”

  “Finish what? Oh, the book!”

  “Yeah,” I said. “The book.”

  And so, dutifully, we talked for a while about the book, the writing, the story, the ways it did and didn’t resemble the earlier work. I have no idea what I said, what he said. I wasn’t even paying attention at the time, distracted by the speed of my heart.

  “He’s here, you know, doing a visiting gig at UT. He’s giving a reading next month,” Rajiv said.

  “Who?”

  “Denis Johnson.” He laughed. “What have we been talking about?”

  “Him,” I said. “We’ve been talking about him.”

  “You should come to the reading.”

  “I should come,” I said.

  “Listen,” he said, his voice growing quiet. “You really should.”

  I could feel my pulse in my throat. “Yeah?”

  “Nothing’s changed for me, Sarah,” he said.

  There it was—what I’d wanted to hear. “Why hasn’t it?” I asked.

  “Because you—you’re a grown-up, Sarah. These girls I date here—they say they want to be writers or filmmakers but all they do is get high and talk bullshit, and you, you’re serious, you’re a real artist. With you I can have a conversation. You connect when I’m being serious, and you connect when I’m making a joke. You don’t understand how rare that is.”

  No, I supposed I didn’t, having had that with Nathan for quite some time. With you, Nathan. That connection I thought would stop you from ever doing what you did, just as it stopped me from telling Rajiv I’d get to Austin as fast as I could d
rive. Me, I hung up the phone. I lay awake imagining I had to choose between the two of you, pick one of you out of a lineup, and over and over it was your face that swam to the surface, even though I wanted to choose Rajiv. Why couldn’t I choose Rajiv?

  I drove back to you, when I could have driven to Austin. If I’d done that I might, right this minute, be at a film festival with Rajiv, shaking hands with Scorsese, or curled up next to Rajiv in a hammock under the Texas sun, reading Proust, or at work in a study lined with bookshelves, writing a series of sonnets on modern love, instead of sitting in a university cafeteria drinking rapidly cooling coffee and reading nothing at all. If I’d gone to Austin, I might never had had children.

  The thing is that writing poetry, making art of any kind, is an essentially selfish act. You could argue about what art brings the world, sure, but there’s no guarantee that your own personal art will do that. Your pursuit of it might just annoy the friends and family who wonder why the hell you don’t get a job. If I hadn’t had children, I might not have taken my job. I might not have cared very much about my credit-card debt. I might still be writing. I might not be racked with worry and fear. I might still be enjoying a cigarette. I might not have changed, while Nathan went on being Nathan. Now, if Nathan got invited to a literary festival in France, he wouldn’t take me. He’d leave me at home with the kids. I wasn’t a poet anymore, after all. I was a business manager. I was a working mom. If one of the parents was fantasizing about leaving the other and moving to Paris, it wasn’t supposed to be me. “Why did she even have children?” people ask. Does anyone ask, “Why did he even have children?”

  I never meant to stop writing poetry. I never exactly decided. Sometime between the birth of my first child and the birth of my second I just slowed to a stop. One day I realized I’d been sitting at my desk for weeks without writing a single line. The poem didn’t talk back. The poem didn’t laugh with a baby’s primal lack of inhibition when I made a funny face, didn’t giggle and squirm helplessly if I tickled it. It didn’t say “Mama” when it saw me like I was the only thing it wanted to see in the world, like laying eyes on me was, each and every time, the realization of a dream. When I held her at bedtime, and told her that it was time for me to sing her a lullaby, Mattie laid her cheek on my shoulder and collapsed her whole weight against me in obedient release. What could a poem do compared with that?