Husband and Wife Read online

  But maybe it wasn’t about the children, or at least not about the children alone. You could argue that motherhood had been the death knell for a poetry career that was already on the decline. The trouble had started before Mattie began to fish-flop around my insides. Could it be I’d stopped writing because of what I’d overheard Nathan say? We’d been of one mind, after all. Learning he didn’t believe in me was like learning I didn’t believe in myself. And maybe, really, I didn’t. Maybe that was why I’d been so angry, because he’d voiced my own fears: that I was only “pretty good,” that I needed to “take a leap.” I had trouble believing that pretty good was worth much. Maybe I’d needed him to do the believing for both of us. I’ve been rereading you, Rajiv had written. He’d meant the work, of course, but the way he phrased it made it sound like he meant me. And of course he did mean me, he meant the work and me, because for him, unlike for me, for Nathan, there was no reason to separate them.

  I heard the clanking of metal, and looked up to see the cafeteria workers readying the lunch buffet. A couple of students walked by, arguing in a language I didn’t recognize. I checked the wall clock and saw that I’d been sitting in the cafeteria for two hours, when I was supposed to be at work. I didn’t really care that I was absent, that I was irresponsible. Funny how the loosening of one commitment had loosened all the others, as if they’d all been tied by the same rope.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Nothing lasts, so the poet says, and what can we do, helpless as we are, but refuse to believe it. Even the indifference, the numbness that had felt so certain and committed that I didn’t go into work at all—even it left me by the time I got home, so that when I arrived, I sat for sometime in the car with the engine running and the radio on, lost in a what-have-I-done reverie. Surely ten thousand e-mails awaited, asking where the hell I’d been. Surely there were puzzled or angry messages on my voice mail, or maybe Smith had answered the phone and I’d have to explain myself to him, justify why I’d wasted his time. Oddly no one had called my cell phone all day. What was worse, if everyone was made furious by my absence, or if no one had noticed it at all?

  I opened the kitchen door to the smell of spice and tomato, the sight of Smith at the stove. Binx was in his high chair, sucking on a bottle, Mattie at the table making a chain out of paper clips, both of them concentrating so hard they barely spared me a glance when I came in. On the counter, chips and guacamole in the chips-and-dip serving dish we’d gotten for our wedding and never used. Smith was bent over the oven door, sprinkling cheese across a casserole dish, asking if I’d ever had his enchiladas, saying I was in for a treat—a soap opera actor gamely carrying on with someone else’s part.

  “Did anyone call today?” I asked.

  Smith shook his head. From the sympathetic expression on his face, I gathered he thought by “anyone” I meant Nathan.

  No one had called. Well. Had they just imagined I was sitting in my office with my door closed? Maybe they’d assumed I’d scheduled a day off that none of them knew about. I was in charge of vacation time. I could just go in Monday and make vague references to a glitch of some kind. It would be all right. Everything would be all right. Look at Smith and believe it. Observe the quiet dailiness of this domestic camaraderie. Listen to him saying, “Dinner is almost ready,” refusing my offer to help, insisting I go sit down.

  “What are you making, Mattie?” I asked.

  “This,” she said, not looking at me. My inability to grasp the obvious was a constant irritant to her.

  “I know you’re making that,” I said. “I mean, what’s it for?”

  “It’s for Smith,” she said. She held the chain up, eyed it as if she was only now determining its purpose. “It’s a crown,” she said decisively. “Smith is a queen. Queen Smith.”

  “Queen Smith,” I said to him. “Is it OK if I address you thusly from henceforth?”

  “Please, milady,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to be royalty.” He brought two plates to the table and set one in front of Mattie, one in front of me. I cut Mattie’s food into bites, blowing on it as she urgently instructed me to do, saying, “See the steam? See the steam? That means it’s hot.” I pulled some hunks of chicken and cheese out of my enchiladas, tasted them—not too spicy—and then tore them into smaller pieces for Binx, who shoved five of them into his mouth at once right after I set them down. I sat, picked up my fork to bolt my food before Binx started fussing, and only then realized that Smith wasn’t coming to the table. I turned to see him loading the dishwasher.

  “You’re not going to eat with us?” I asked.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I’ve got to be in Raleigh for a show by eight, and I told Holly I’d meet her for dinner first.”

  “Oh.” I turned back around, sideswiped by the intensity of my disappointment. My enchiladas swam before me. Jesus. Was I going to cry? Disappointed wasn’t the word for what I felt. Let’s try betrayed.

  I did my best to hide this unseemly reaction, asking Smith about the show, thanking him profusely, insisting he let me finish the dishes, waving and smiling him out the door. My good mood and my appetite went with him. I put a piece of plastic wrap over my plate and stuck it in the fridge.

  “He left us aw a-wone,” I said to Mattie, who laughed.

  “Aw a-wone,” she repeated, and laughed again. She forked an enormous bite into her mouth, chewed industriously, swallowed. “This dinner is delicious,” she said.

  “De-wi-cious,” I repeated automatically.

  “Usually Daddy makes dinner,” she said, and I agreed, and then, inevitably, she asked, “Where is Daddy?”

  In lieu of replying I sang, “Where is Daddy, where is Daddy, ding ding dong, ding ding dong.” Mattie found this delightful and sang it herself, and continued to do so on and off throughout the next hour and a half while I nursed her brother and bathed them both and left her in the tub to play while I put his pajamas on until, against my instructions, she climbed out on her own to track small wet footprints into his room, where she stood, naked and dripping, singing that song, until she grew impatient with my ministrations to Binx and began to cry that she was cold. When he was finally down and she was finally down, and I closed the door to her room, I could still hear her singing, her little voice and its merciless question trailing me down the hall.

  Rajiv had written me back. Hit eject was the subject heading. You should come back to Austin, the message said. Every little thing is better here.

  Of course I shouldn’t have gone driving that night when I couldn’t sleep, not with the children asleep in the house and Nathan gone. I’ll say so before anyone else can, although I realize that will forestall no one’s judgment. What can I say about why? Sometimes an urge comes, and you give in to it. That’s what this whole story is about. Nathan gave in to physics, and sixteen months later so did I. At three a.m. I drove eighty miles an hour down Old 86. I’d crashed a car once, on this road, years ago. The stick shift, the one Nathan taught me to drive. I’d gone onto the shoulder, and when I heard the crunch of gravel under the tires I panicked, overcorrected, lost control of the car. I zigzagged into the other lane, yanked the wheel again, shot back through my lane and off the side of the road, spun around, hit a tree, sat there stunned in the new reality. After a while I stumbled out, sat down in the ditch. A couple of men came running across a field. They’d heard the impact. One of them gave me his cell phone and I called Nathan. My memory of this is hazy, except for the clarity of the look on Nathan’s face when he arrived and ran toward me, not sparing a glance for the totaled car. I was all he cared about. He came to touch me, to make sure I was real, and his hands on my face, on my shoulders, were both fierce and gentle. “Tell me you’re all right,” he said.

  Now I hit a rise and felt the car lift. It was a scene out of The Dukes of Hazzard, except that I was in a Toyota Camry, which was far too reasonable a car for running from the law. But there was the cop, taking his cue, pulling out from the clearing where the cops liked to park, often t
wo of them, cruisers pointing opposite directions so that they could chat out the windows.

  For a brief, wild moment I thought about not stopping.

  “Do you know how fast you were going?” the cop asked.

  “Yes,” I said, and even in his impassive face I thought I detected surprise. He was an older man, dark-skinned, with an air of polite weariness. He swung his gaze from my face to the back of the car, where the two car seats sat like stand-ins. I watched him coming to conclusions. “License and registration, please,” he said.

  I handed them over. He studied the photo on the license, then my face, then the photo again. Any sign of suspicion, and I felt I’d done the thing I was suspected of. I fought a hysterical urge to confess that the photo wasn’t me, see if he believed it, see if he hauled me off to jail. “Be right back,” he said.

  It had been years since a cop had pulled me over, but I recognized this feeling, which was always exactly the same. Agitated suspense and suspension. Scattershot anger at both cop and yourself. The outcome in another’s hands, and nothing to do but wait. Funny how some experiences recur and disappear entirely, like bubbles that form and pop. Most days you forget the feeling of sliding your heels into the metal stirrups at the end of the doctor’s table, of a sinus headache just behind the eyes, of the dull, flat drive between here and elsewhere, of lying awake in the eerie stillness of the middle of the night. And then there you are again, back in that bubble, and you think, Oh, this. I remember this. Same as it ever was, even as everything else rushes away.

  Now, now, was probably when the kids were waking, now that I could no longer choose to go back to them. “Mommy?” Mattie called. “Mommy, the deepness!” And Binx, startled into awareness, cried out his displeasure in consciousness. Lightning hit the house. Windows rattled as a tornado approached. Someone in the woods threw a match, and it arced in a flare of light. A tree began to topple slowly toward the roof. Mattie climbed up her dresser, which pulled in slow motion away from the wall. Binx stuck his head between the bars of his crib. Chokables, chokables everywhere.

  The cop was back, passing me my license and registration, and that was all. “No ticket?” I asked.

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “I think you need to get on home. I don’t think this is where you want to be.”

  “Shouldn’t you give me a ticket?”

  “You have some other things you need to worry about,” he said. “Don’t mess up what you’ve got at home.”

  “I deserve a ticket,” I said.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “I’m letting you go.” He stepped back from the car.

  “I deserve a ticket,” I said again, but he was done with me, walking sure-footed back to the cruiser. “I deserve a ticket,” I shouted out the open window, because I did, I really did. “Come back here!” I shouted, but only after he’d already driven away.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In the morning, after I called every hotel and hospital within a thirty-mile radius and learned that none of them contained Nathan, at least not under his own name, I went into his study. Binx was taking his morning nap. Mattie was watching Blue’s Clues in the living room, and as I picked up a paperback copy of A Sport and a Pastime that had been lying facedown on Nathan’s keyboard, I heard, “A clue! A clue!” burst forth in piping television voices.

  I sat down in Nathan’s chair with the book in my hand. Suddenly it is quite clear how acrobatic, how dangerous everything is. It seems not to be his own life he is living, but another, the life of some victim. A clue, a clue, but to what? Was this about Nathan or me? A Sport and a Pastime is a book—a sensual book—about an affair, but so is every third book on the planet, and I’d known for more than a decade that it was one of Nathan’s favorites. Nathan liked to ask other writers what book they wished they’d written—it was the fastest way, he said, to learn their sensibilities, the nuances of their ambitions, maybe even something about their very natures—and when they turned the question on him, as they almost always did, he’d sometimes answer that it was this book. Sometimes The Moviegoer. Sometimes The Great Gatsby. And I knew that when he answered with the Percy or the Fitzgerald he was comfortable with his own accustomed mode, the wised-up romantic still longing for the greater reality of myth, and when he answered with the Salter he was wishing he saw the vicissitudes of love and sex with a colder eye. So what did it tell me, finding this book on his desk, at the end of a time in which he’d confessed an affair and disappeared? That Nathan thought about sex. I already knew that. And what would it have told me to find Gatsby on his keyboard? That sometimes Nathan succumbed to romantic notions at odds with the dailiness of our life, of any life, and blurted out that he wanted to leave me to live in Paris. I already knew that. I even knew that this happened especially when his work wasn’t going well and he wanted the excitement he got from high-flown inspiration to be generated by his own life. What did it tell me to sit in his chair, my body against the contours that usually shaped his? That he was taller than me. That, too, I already knew.

  Nathan’s first book—a short story collection—was about romantic yearning, about sex. This is the book that did well in France. He tried to expand one of the stories—a fable-like thing about a guy who forms a family with his current wife and all his former girlfriends—into his first novel, and ended up with his first major misfire, a book that never saw the light of day, characterized by the intensity of its sincerity about a situation that Nathan just could not render believable outside the compressed, metaphorical confines of a short story. The next book, the one he actually published, the one that spent three weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, was about a guy who has to choose between his soulfire love for an artist who doesn’t want to procreate and marriage to a lawyer who wants, as he does, to have children. And, of course, the third book—the one he’d written in a delirious rush that had looked like inspiration at the time but now seemed more like rechanneled passion, or an exorcism of guilt—that one was about infidelity.

  Now he was working on a book about a missing child—one, unlike the bulk of them, from the father’s point of view. He was sensitive about this book, because of the proliferation of novels with the same subject matter, because of their success, and his fear that people might perceive him as trying to cash in. He’d made many a speech to me and to his friends about how his desire to write it had nothing to do with best-seller dreams, how he wasn’t going to use the mystery in a cheap or obvious way, how since having children he’d discovered a new seriousness and this book was simply the result of that, an expression of his fears. I hadn’t read any of it yet. In fact I’d hardly read his work at all in these, our child-rearing years. The edit I’d done on Infidelity was the only exception. That—my lack of knowledge about, of participation in, his work—was another of the many things about our life together that had changed. Time was, he read to me a paragraph he’d just finished. He called me into his study to determine whether “he handed her the flowers” or “he thrust the flowers at her” was a preferable construction. I read draft after draft of his earlier work, and, oh, the knock-down-drag-outs we had about that polygamy book, not the least of which was over my insistence on calling it a polygamy book and his insistence that the book wasn’t about that, wasn’t about the desire of a man to have multiple sex partners but the desire to maintain connections to those we otherwise lose, the endless possible permutations of love.

  I tried to remember the last time he’d asked my opinion, the last time he’d read a paragraph aloud to me moments after it left his brain. I couldn’t. I remembered testy exchanges—a couple? several?—in which he’d asked my opinion and then argued with it and I’d said I didn’t have time for argument. This kind of thing began to happen after Mattie was born. It was hard to care whether flowers were thrust or handed when I needed to use what little free time I had to get blueberry stains out of baby clothes. So I’d grown impatient. Without my even noticing, he’d stopped asking, and maybe that was what I didn’t know anymore—not
him, not the essential him, but where he went in his mind these days when he was working, and who he saw there, and what kinds of things those people wanted, and what kinds of things they did. Why had he asked me to edit that book? Had he wanted that connection back, the one we used to have? Or had he thought I’d be suspicious if he didn’t ask? If so, he was wrong. I’d trusted him, trusted him so completely that a book called Infidelity had raised no doubts in me.

  The computer came to life when I touched the mouse—still on, of course, because it had been on before I’d asked him to leave, and he hadn’t had reason to think he wouldn’t perform his usual prebedtime ritual of checking e-mail and the news. I opened the “Fiction” folder again, and then another one labeled “Current.” I opened it and saw four files: missing.doc, missingnotes.doc, missingcuts.doc, and?. “Missing, missing notes, missing cuts, question mark,” I said out loud, seeing in the file titles, in the subject matter, some kind of sign. Missing, missing, missing, and a mystery. I clicked on the question mark file, and found one paragraph inside.

  I didn’t mean to kiss her. Maybe she kissed me first. Let’s say that. Yes, she kissed me first. We’d been skinny-dipping in the reservoir. I didn’t look when she took off her clothes in the XX dark, I didn’t look when she cannonballed into the water, or when she clambered out, slipping and saying, “Whoops!” and then laughing with drunken embarrassment. OK, I glanced up then, at the “Whoops!”—I had to make sure she wasn’t hurt—but all I saw was the shape of a body, a body white with reflected light.