Husband and Wife Page 14

  I’d read enough of Nathan’s drafts to know that when he couldn’t find the right word for something he just put XX or ?? and moved on. Many times I’d helped him fill in those blanks. “Quiet,” I said now. “Thrumming, the thrumming dark. The watery dark. The steamy, steamy illicit-sex dark. The guilty dark. The moonlit dark.” I typed that last one in. She took off her clothes in the moonlit dark. And she had, hadn’t she. That was exactly what she’d done. I hit save.

  If you spend any time with a writer there will inevitably come a moment when he tells you a story you recognize from something he’s written, or you read something he’s written and find a story you’ve already heard. My own work was not confessional in a blow-jobs-and-suicidal-thoughts kind of way, but it was clearly about me, about my experience of the world, and maybe partly because of that I always made a point of not indulging the temptation to get double duty out of my material. I never wrote an e-mail, as one of my poet friends did, that began Spring lies heavy upon the doorstep. Nathan was a perpetrator of this particular crime. It used to drive me crazy when he told a story at a party that he’d used in his fiction, especially when he got confused, as he usually did, about what details came from the true-life source and what were embellishments he’d added in translation.

  Or maybe he didn’t get confused. He always said he had, when I pointed out to him, as I could never resist doing, that he’d told an anecdote from one of his novels to people who’d likely read his novels, that by using fictional details rather than the real ones he’d confirmed an impression that every word he wrote was true. But maybe he said he was confused because he didn’t want to admit that he knowingly used the refined details, the fictional ones—his social life as much of a performance as his work. Or maybe it was the reverse—maybe the work was as real to him as the life. Why can I summon without effort the emotions of Meg Murry as she shivers in her bed during a storm, fearing for her picked-on baby brother, her vanished father, when there are whole stretches of my own life, my actual life, that have blurred into alarm clocks, cars, staircases and elevators, streaks of color, streaks of light? Stories are experience, dreams are experience, your parents talk about a childhood event until, though the details are vivid in your mind, you no longer have any idea whether you actually recall it. What does it matter what really happened? Sometimes you don’t know if you remember the moment, or the photograph.

  I was a writer myself, I lived with a writer, I knew some things were lost and some things gained when experience was transmogrified into phrases. I knew that in a writer’s work you both find and fail to find that writer’s life, and when people asked me whether it worried me that Nathan’s work so often featured infidelity and unhappy marriages and ambivalent parenthood I said no, and when they asked me if any of it was true, I said no. No was a much easier answer to give than the actual one, which was that sometimes he might feel something that he wouldn’t act on and give that feeling to a character who did act on it, and sometimes he’d take something he actually did or felt and make it bigger, an irritated retort to his mother becoming an argument in which two characters laid bare the resentments of years, and really, just, it’s complicated, okay? People never asked me if the things in my poems really happened. Maybe they just assumed they had, and so Nathan had to contend with our friends and families knowing he cried in the parking lot of the movie theater after we saw Titanic.

  And now I had to contend with this. Not just the know ledge that I’d been wrong not to worry, that he’d transformed a betrayal into fiction, that he’d let another woman inspire him, but this. This paragraph, this snippet of the true. It wasn’t in Nathan’s usual prose style, which was verbose and exuberant, treading the line between comic and poignant. This was compressed, concise, matter-of-fact, an unadorned rendering of actual experience, a snapshot of the moment when he chose. I wanted there to be more, I wanted details, the way we want to know the nasty things that have been said about us, listening with our stomachs hot and sick, the blood pounding in our ears, and at the same time I was sorry to have read even this, to have seen the moment from his point of view. I didn’t want to see his point of view. I didn’t want to inhabit him as we inhabit the characters we read about. I didn’t want to stand there, wet and naked, and look at that woman and attempt to shore up my loyalties against the tidal wave of yearning. I rejected empathy. I didn’t want to see the moonlight on her body, the otherworldly romance of that. Now I knew, as I knew so many other things about him, how it felt to my husband to want someone else.

  Listen, buddy, you’re not the first, OK? You’re not even the first to write it down. I myself have written it down, in a poem I never showed you, about an event I never described to you, because unlike you I know what and what not to reveal. Remember how I came home from that visit to Helen and suggested we get married? You want to know why? Because of Rajiv. I went there knowing I would see him, of course. You and I had seen him the last time we’d gone, but we were together, and he was with a girl who twined herself around him like a vine. But on the next trip he was single again—Helen had told me—and I’d be there alone. I didn’t plan for anything to happen. I just wanted to know if anything would.

  I couldn’t tell, at first, whether he still felt what he’d claimed to feel for me. And then one night Helen took me to a party, and when I bumped into him outside, and said in my best Katharine Hepburn, “Hello, you,” he grabbed my hand and pulled me farther into the dark of the yard. He told me—again! and you didn’t even know about the first two times—that he was a little in love with me, and, oh, in that moment, drunk on gin and abuzz with desire—my own or his, I couldn’t have told you—I believed him. And then I kissed him, and I felt what you felt, and oh, believe me, I wanted to do what you have done. But I didn’t. I stepped back, though every nerve ending resisted the stepping back, and on the plane on the way home I thought that if I could resist someone I’d spent years finding attractive, if I could resist what I wanted that badly, because of you, because of you, then I should be your wife.

  But I still thought about him, because my experience of him never faded into the everyday the way it did, of course, with you and me. Two months before our wedding I wrote this:

  White Christmas lights,

  scattershot of stars on a Texas night,

  leading me, if not astray

  then stranded—

  what was that boxwood hedge,

  that greeny-scented maze,

  doing behind a shabby rental dive

  in Austin?

  What was that man

  doing with his mouth

  on my mouth, my mouth

  kissing back bourbon and want?

  That maze wants so badly

  to be an allegory,

  rather than a fact

  upon whose leaves I pricked

  my fingertips

  as he pulled me inside—

  thinking Christmas, Christmas,

  looking for a navigator star,

  wishing to be lost.

  It was good, too. I knew it was good. I never sent it out. I never showed it to anyone. I’d changed the gin to bourbon, and I hadn’t really pricked my fingers or thought about Christmas, but all the rest of it was true, and I’d had rules, you see. I never exposed anything that would hurt you, Nathan, no matter what you sometimes claimed. But now I will. I’ll write a poem now, I really will, an unabashed, nakedly true poem about you and what you did. The shoe, the wedding toast, the crying at the Fiesta Grill. The missing, missing, missing. The moonlit dark. There is no point in resisting. That’s what the title can be.

  I opened a new file. I drummed my fingers on the keyboard. I waited for concentration to settle on me like a cloud, to focus me like a laser beam—oh, my similes had gotten stale. How long had it been since I’d entered that mental space, the one that cannot bear interruption? Interrupted, you try to check your irritation, one part of your brain struggling to hold steady, like a paused screen, on your last thought, another part
coping with whatever minor daily concern the person in your space has brought along to trouble you, this person who’s crashed through the wrong door into your dream. Nathan and I used to understand that look in each other, the impatience that would sharpen the speech of the interrupted one. Listen, if you came into my study when I was writing and spoke to me, you were stepping into the lion’s den, and it wasn’t my fault if you lost your head.

  You can’t be that way with children, though. Or shouldn’t be. Or anyway I thought you shouldn’t be, and Nathan more or less agreed. Sometimes even when he wasn’t working Mattie spoke to him and he didn’t hear her, lost in thought, and though when he came back from wherever he’d been he tried not to sound irritable, it was nevertheless true that sometimes she stood by his side saying, “Daddy,” five or six times before he dragged his gaze outward and saw her there, and even then it was usually because I’d said, with some sharpness, “She’s talking to you. Your daughter’s talking to you.” Was this something I should hold against him? Would she grow up feeling less than important, would she choose to marry a negligent man? Or was it good for her not to assume that attention was automatically granted, so she wouldn’t turn out a princess of entitlement, certain of her eventual fame, like, according to the media, all the young people of today? How was I supposed to know?

  The cursor blinked. You, I typed. Mattie appeared in the doorway. “You didn’t come,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I called you, and you didn’t come,” she said. “You never do anything I want.”

  “Who says I have to do what you want?” I said. “That’s not the deal.”

  “The show was scary,” she said. “It had dinosaurs.”

  “I thought you liked dinosaurs.”

  “Well, I don’t like the scary ones.”

  “Why don’t you go back in there now? Maybe the scary ones are gone.”

  “They’re not gone, actually,” she said. “I don’t want to. What are you doing?”

  “I’m writing a poem.”

  “Is it scary?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She advanced on me, cautiously, as though the monster of my poem might at any moment spring forth from the screen. “Lift me up so I can see,” she said. I hauled her into my lap. Her hair smelled like peanut butter. “Read the word,” she said.

  “Mommy, will you read the word, please?” I said.

  “Mommy, will you read the word, please?” she repeated.

  “I’d be happy to,” I said. “It’s you.”

  “No,” she cried. “Read the word.”

  “That is the word. The word is you.” I pointed at the screen.

  “That starts with y,” she said, and I agreed. We sat a moment and looked at that one word, the only word it appeared I would write. Then I deleted it.

  What I didn’t know, I decided later that day, driving around with the kids in the backseat in hope that they would sleep, was what Nathan thought of me. It had been years since it had occurred to me to ask. He loved me, I’d assumed. He thought I was “pretty good,” he thought I needed to “take a leap.” But no—he hadn’t quite meant that, or so he’d said, and I’d allowed myself to accept his explanations. “It’s not you,” he’d said, about the character in his novel with my job, and I’d decided to believe him. But maybe it was me, this woman satisfied with being ordinary. Maybe her story was Nathan’s attempt to understand me, the person I’d become. Maybe because he thought I was ordinary, and content to be so, it was OK for the ordinary to befall me, the banality of a drunken husband, a willing woman, a moonlit reservoir.

  But, I wanted to say to him, if I could find him, I am not the person this happens to. Don’t you remember the bohemian dark, a grad school party, one of our classmates reciting, from memory, Andrew Hudgins’s poem “Blur”—and more than joy I longed for understanding / and more than understanding I longed for joy—and then a poem of her own, with that line about being as small as a star, and as we listened to her there lived in the two of us, in all of us in the room, the transcendent?

  The Nathan in my head said that that didn’t matter, the transcendent, the memory of it, up against the facts of my life. As I thought this, my idiotic brain queued up the theme song to the TV show: the facts of life, the facts of life. We are not special, you know, most of us, no matter what our parents say. We should all sit down and look at ourselves in the mirror and see an ordinary soul. We are going to get married and have children and have jobs. We are not going to be rich. We are never going to be on television. There is no reason for us to have—for us to try to give our children—such unseemly quantities of self-esteem.

  Rajiv was at that grad school party. I was almost sure I remembered him there.

  “Where are we going?” Mattie asked.

  “We’re just driving around,” I said. “We’re looking at things.”

  “Are we going to see my mother?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My mother lives far away.”

  I glanced at her in the rearview mirror. She had a blank yet rapt look on her face, like a medium channeling a spirit. “I’m your mother.”

  “You’re not my mother,” she said, her tone so definitive that for a moment I believed her, I felt what it would be like to look at this child and have no connection to her at all, and I wondered how we came to be here together, driving around in this car.

  “Why would you say that?” I asked.

  “I’m pretending,” she said. “My mother lives in Kentucky. Her name is Lola and her cat’s name is Sophie. She fixes furniture. She takes me to see grown-up movies. She took me to see a silly grown-up movie. There was a monster and a child and the monster wanted to eat the child but the lion ate the monster before he could eat the child.”

  “So I’m not your mother?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Who am I?”

  “You’re a writer who came to see the movie.”

  I was not her mother, I was a writer. See—even she knew it was impossible to be both. “Why did I come to see the movie?” I asked. “What kinds of things do I write?”

  But she’d lost interest, or lost the thread of her narrative, or both. “Where are we going?” she asked, and then she put her fingers in her mouth and let her face go slack, as though she despaired of the answer.

  She was right to do so, because by then I’d begun driving to places where I’d known Nathan to go, in the order they occurred to me: his doctor’s office, the Regulator, the coffee shop that served its coffee in a French press and posted descriptions of its beans as full of sensual adjectives as a food and wine magazine. In the coffee shop parking lot, I nursed Binx in the front seat, his head propped awkwardly on my bag, and he pinched my stomach and my breast, rolling the skin between his tiny fingers, and I said, mechanically, “No pinching,” but made no effort to stop him, just sat there feeling the tug at my breast, the small sharp pains. A man glanced into the car as he walked by and did a double take, clearly not expecting to witness lactation. He reacted with the mingled pity and embarrassment of someone who’s just barged in on you in a public bathroom, and quickened his pace on his way inside.

  Mattie began to complain that she was hungry, so when Binx was sated I drove to Weaver Street, a food co-op and café where Nathan liked to go for jazz Sundays, part of me still thinking that if I just went to one more of his haunts, just one more, I’d find him. By the time we arrived both kids had fallen asleep, so I sat in the parking lot and stared at the passersby. From what distance would I recognize Nathan? That guy coming up the street, far enough from me to still be featureless, if he were Nathan would I know it? I would, I believed I would. I knew his gait—the hunch of his shoulders, the hands in his pockets, the way he stared at the ground, lost in thought, giving him a propensity for collisions with poles. I knew the geometry of him, the breadth of his shoulders and the length of his hair. And if I rolled down the window and closed my eyes—like this—how readily woul
d I recognize his voice? Would I know him from a shout? From a laugh? From a sigh? I believed I would. I would. I knew him as a shape. I knew him as a sound.

  But she didn’t. She didn’t know his body, hadn’t seen him naked before that night at the reservoir when he shed his clothes. He’d been new to her, each flash of naked back or buttock a glimpse into the mystery. And he’d liked that, I knew that. It hadn’t just been about looking at her. It had been about her looking at him.

  The shape of a body. The moonlit dark.

  White Christmas lights strung along a hedge in the back of a rental house in Austin. The taste of gin in my mouth. A hand catching my fingers, tugging. “Come on,” he said. “Come on.”

  “What is this?” I asked, a little breathless, as though we were running.

  “He calls it the secret garden,” he said.

  “Who does?”

  “The guy who lives here. Joe. Didn’t you meet him?”

  I laughed. “I have no idea.”

  And then we were through a gap in the hedge, and I saw that a path opened up and then rounded a corner and disappeared, and I said, “A maze!”

  And he said, “Told you,” and I said, “I’m amazed,” with the ironic tone that acknowledged I was making a terrible pun but allowed me to make it anyway. But I didn’t laugh, because of the way his hand tightened on mine, not casual anymore, and the inexorable pull, closer, closer, the white lights starry around his face, his beautiful face, his not-Nathan face.