Husband and Wife Read online

  “I want to go outside, too,” Mattie said to Nathan. “I want to go with you.”

  “I need to talk to Mommy,” he said.

  “Grown-up talk?” she asked.

  “Grown-up talk,” he said, as though there had never been such a miserable concept.

  I walked outside first. I bypassed the chairs and the hammock, where on frisky occasions we had sex. I waited for Nathan in the middle of the yard. He managed somehow to be a good two or three minutes behind me—perhaps he’d paused to comfort Mattie? to say some suspicious words to Smith?—and as I waited I resolved on kindness. Holding him to account, yes, but with sympathy for our mutual distress. I said to myself that our love was bigger than any of this. I felt good about believing it. When Nathan finally arrived, he seemed slightly beside the point. Nevertheless there he was, squaring off with me in the arena of our backyard. “You look like you’re getting ready to box me,” I said.

  “Box you?”

  “You know.” I jabbed a couple of times, bouncing on the balls of my feet.

  He hunched his shoulders, put his hands in his pockets as though to disprove this notion. “Aren’t you going to yell at me?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I’m really tired,” I said.

  He looked away from me, gave himself a shake, looked back, and asked the question I could tell he’d been dying to ask, even as he told himself he had no right to. “What’s Smith doing here?”

  “He’s been helping me out in your absence,” I said. “He watched the kids on Friday. Like you were supposed to do.” Love, love, I reminded myself, hearing my own bitchy tone.

  “He watched the kids?” Nathan seemed as unmanned by this as if I’d announced that Smith had assumed his duties in the sack.

  “He did. And meanwhile, you were…where were you?”

  “I was at Alex and Adam’s,” he said.

  “Ah!” I said, like someone finally given the answer to a riddle. “I never thought of that.”

  “I had their key,” he said. “For feeding the cat. I had the key.”

  “Right,” I said. I paced a little, fighting the anger that rose at this information. “You just stayed at their house without telling them?”

  “No, I told them.”

  I stopped. I stared at him. “What?”

  “I called Alex right after I left here.”

  “You called them on their honeymoon to tell them I’d kicked you out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you tell them why?” I wouldn’t have thought it possible for him to make himself smaller, but somehow he did, and I got a glimpse of how he might age.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I can’t believe you did that. You ruined their honeymoon.”

  “No, I didn’t.” He looked worried. “You think I did?”

  “Yeah, I think you did. I think they spent the rest of their honeymoon and the whole trip home talking about us, worrying about us, and seeing a bad possible version of their future.”

  “Well, they didn’t say anything like that,” he said. “They still told me about their trip, showed me pictures—”

  “What do you mean, they showed you pictures? You’ve seen them?”

  “They got back last night.”

  “I thought they were getting back today.”

  He shook his head. “Last night.”

  “They got back from their honeymoon, and you were in their house?”

  “I don’t get why this is what you’re mad about.”

  “It’s not!” I snapped. “I just can’t believe you called them on their honeymoon and then were at their house when they got home.”

  “I couldn’t just stay at someone else’s place without asking.”

  “Oh, well, excuse me, I guess I lost track of how exactly your morality operates.”

  He took this like a body blow. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you,” he said. “I just couldn’t. I fell down a well.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He met my eyes. “When I left here, it was like I’d drifted out into space. And the phone seemed to be ringing from very far away.”

  It sounded to me like he’d planned this speech. “Which metaphor are we going with here?” I asked. “Down a well or out in space?”

  “They’re not exclusive,” he said.

  “You fell down a well on another planet.”

  “I’m just trying to tell you how I feel.”

  “How you feel about cheating on me?” I asked. “Or how you feel about me saying you couldn’t publish your book?”

  “You think that’s all I care about?”

  “I think you said I could decide that, but you never thought I would. I think you fell down your outer-space well because I said you couldn’t publish the book, and not because I asked you to leave.”

  “That’s not fair,” he said. “It’s all my life.”

  “No,” I said. “This is your life.”

  “I’m a writer,” he said. “Like it or not, that’s my life, too. And I’m under a lot of pressure here. My agent—” He stopped. He pressed his lips together.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Tell me how your agent’s calling you. Tell me how upset she is. Talk about the pressure. I bet you can make me cry.”

  “I’ve ruined everything,” he shouted. “I want to kill myself. Is that what you want me to say?”

  In all my favorite fantasy stories—Buffy, A Wrinkle in Time—the human, fallible hero always has one thing the villain does not. Love. It’s always love, often offered to a person at their ugliest. The ultimate weapon, love. The thing that always wins, always brings the lost one back from the dark side, the whole world back from the brink.

  “Fuck you” is what I said.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Nathan said. “Fuck me.”

  Neither of us screamed, but we spoke loudly, and our voices echoed. I wondered if Mrs. Dodson could hear us, the way I sometimes heard her visiting daughter arguing with her own kids in the yard. I looked down the hill toward her house. A tranquil scene, the only movement a bird lifting off a tree, landing on a wire.

  “I’m sorry about Friday,” Nathan said. “From now on I’ll take care of the kids like always. If that’s what you want me to do. What do you want me to do?”

  “I have to make all the decisions,” I said, and he said, “Don’t you want to?” I looked at him. He’d gone away somewhere since that suicidal outburst, and now he spoke from a very great distance, his voice uninflected. “I always thought you wanted to,” he said. “You like people looking to you, counting on you. You like to tell me I screwed up. You like being the responsible one.”

  I turned away from him, back toward the house, an invisible hand squeezing and squeezing my throat. I wanted to ask, “You think I’m enjoying this?” but the hostility I heard in his insinuation robbed me of speech. How could he fail to understand that I, too, was down a well, each of us in our separate wells, barely able to hear the shouts of the other. I was unmoored, undone. Me, the responsible one.

  “Why did you have to tell me?” I asked.

  “I tell you everything,” he said.

  On the other side of the glass doors I saw our daughter looking at us, her palms pinking against the glass, her hands up above her head as if in surrender.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I meant to go to work on Monday. I really did. I drove to Durham as if I was going to, but then I turned where I should have gone straight. Alex and Adam lived in Durham, on Pickett Road, in the sort of house usually described as “cute,” a 1940s-era bungalow with a porch swing and rosebushes in the front yard. “Pickett Road,” I’d said when they found the place. “Sounds very American domestic.”

  “No picket fence, though,” Alex said. “Don’t get any ideas.”

  “Does it have an apple tree?”

  “No, but there’s a taqueria up the street.”

  “It has a taco tree.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  I’d
been the first person of their acquaintance, besides the realtor, to see the house. I’d helped Alex paint the living room purple, the dining room blue. I was at their house so often I kept a bouncy seat, a bib, and a baby spoon there. And of course I had a key, as I’d had a key to every place Alex had lived in the last six years, from the Carrboro mill house with the slowly descending ceiling to the tiny house in Durham that had once been a corner grocery store. And yet Nathan had made me feel like her house was on the other side of a border I couldn’t cross. Nathan country.

  I don’t know what I had in mind when I drove there. Nothing very much, because if I’d thought it through—if I’d acknowledged and considered that intention, rather than just obeying the impulse—I wouldn’t have done it. Adam’s car wasn’t there, which surprised me because it was only nine o’clock and he kept rock-star hours. I parked behind Alex’s car in the driveway and took a weird satisfaction at blocking her in. “I’ve got you now, my pretty,” I said aloud, but then I just sat there. I thought about The Wizard of Oz, how in the movie they made Dorothy’s adventures a dream, when in the book they were as real as the spit-up stain on my shirt, the Cheerio dust covering the backseat of the car. Maybe the filmmakers felt it was too subversive to tell the audience that Oz was an actual place, with its witches and castles and poppy fields, that you could leave black-and-white Kansas and go there, lead a daily life in a place so extraordinary it rendered the ordinary impossible. You can go there in your mind, they said, but then you have to come back home. You always have to come back—you want to come back! What does Dorothy want most in the world, after all, but to click her heels and go home? Ah, but I read all the Oz books, even the later ones not written by L. Frank Baum, despite my troubling sense of their inauthenticity, and eventually Dorothy moves to Oz. She takes her family and moves there. No more Kansas. Kansas begone.

  The front door opened, and Alex stepped out. She was dressed for work in a skirt and blouse, but her feet were bare. She’d clearly looked out the window and seen my car because she waved, walked to the edge of the porch, and waited. I imagined she was wondering why I didn’t get out of the car. I got out of the car.

  “Hi,” she called.

  I didn’t say anything. I walked to the edge of the porch and looked up at her. Normally she would have said, “Are you stalking me?” or “What are you doing, you weirdo?” but out of respect for my current situation she said nothing. She held out her hand, like I was in an action movie dangling off a cliff or out a window and she was the one to rescue me. I always wondered, watching a scene like that, how one person could possibly support the weight of another, holding them by the hand over an abyss, and how they could possibly haul them up, as they so often did, except for the times when they let go. Why were scenes like that so common, anyway? The drop, the look of terror, the last-minute grasp of hand on hand. Again and again the hero proves he’ll always show up just in time to save you. Again and again he proves his nobility by catching even the tumbling bad guy by the sleeve. We must really like to see people dangling in midair. The movie makers keep giving it to us. We must really like the look on the bad guy’s face when he slips—through no fault of the hero’s, unless what we have is an interestingly ambiguous hero—and begins to fall.

  There were stairs up to the porch around the corner, but I took Alex’s hand and hoisted myself up with one big, awkward step, and then she pulled me into a hug. “Oh, honey,” she said.

  My head was pressed to her substantial bosom. I could have closed my eyes and let her comfort me. Instead I said, “This is like that scene in Sixteen Candles when the foreign exchange student and the tallest girl in school go to the dance.”

  She stepped back, her hands still on my shoulders. “Sure, make fun of the tall girl,” she said, smacking my shoulder lightly. The gesture was not unusual. She was a woman comfortable with physical proximity. She pressed knees, kissed cheeks, squeezed arms, smacked shoulders, and, on particularly drunken occasions, pinched asses. But that time the moment her fingers flicked against my skin, her expression morphed into horror. “Oh God,” she said. “I’m sorry. I forgot.”

  “Forgot what?” I asked. “That you’re supposed to treat me with nothing but a respectful pity?”

  “I don’t pity you,” she said. “Pity implies condescension. I feel bad for you. I feel terrible for you. I can’t believe this is happening.” She pulled me into a hug again.

  “Enough with the PDA,” I said. “Let’s go inside.”

  Inside the house, I surveyed the scene like a detective. On the coffee table in the living room lay the book Nathan had been reading, a novel that had made the cover of the Times Book Review last year. It was splayed open, spine up. “He never does that to hardcovers,” I said.

  “What?”

  “He never leaves hardcovers like that.” I pointed at the book. “Only paperbacks.” I shook my head. “Poor abused paperbacks.”

  “Can I get you anything?” she asked. “I think there’s some coffee left.”

  “I’d take a cup of coffee.”

  We went into the kitchen. There were three coffee cups in the sink. Three coffee cups, telling their story of morning camaraderie. I walked up and peeked inside them. Two were empty, one still half full. I knew from the creamy lightness of the coffee left inside that that one had belonged to Nathan, because Alex and Adam put soy milk in theirs. I opened the fridge and sure enough, right at the front there was a pint of Maple View heavy cream, which Nathan had obviously bought. He was a cream addict—in fact he loved cream so much it was the only reason he drank coffee. He wasn’t a coffee drinker before the dairy opened. Then, a couple months after he started, came a morning when we ran out of cream, hours before the dairy opened, and he’d refused to drink his coffee without it, and been surprised to find that he got a headache. I’d been a caffeine addict my entire adulthood, and I laughed at him, but fondly, pleased by the sweet vulnerability of his silliness.

  “Did Nathan buy this cream?” I asked.

  Alex came up beside me, a fresh cup of coffee in her hand. “Oh,” she said. “Yeah. We don’t use cream.” She handed me the cup.

  “I know,” I said. I took the cream out, added some to my coffee, put it back. “When did he buy it?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Why?”

  “Because I’m just wondering if it was after I threw him out of the house for screwing another woman, or after we fought about the fact that he’d abandoned his family and he shouted that he wanted to kill himself, that he thought, ‘Hey, I know my life is in turmoil and all, but I should pop by Maple View on my way out,’ or maybe if during the two days when I had no idea where he was he actually came within a mile of our house and didn’t drop by, because your wife doesn’t need to know if you’re alive or dead but God knows you need your fucking cream.”

  “I don’t think it was like that,” Alex said. “I mean, it’s not like he’s not upset, he’s devastated and guilt-ridden and—”

  I shut the refrigerator door. “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “He probably just stopped there automatically, because it’s something he’d normally do, like you go to Target for diapers.”

  “Don’t compare him to me,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re the same. Like he’s not the one at fault.” She touched my arm. “I just feel really bad for you guys.”

  “I know,” I said. I went back into the living room, sat on the couch, took a sip, just like Nathan had earlier this morning, sitting here drinking his morning joe and reading that buzzed-about novel to see if it deserved the praise, taking his time, making himself late, when he was supposed to be at our house. At my house. When he was supposed to be with our children. When he was supposed to be with me.

  Alex hesitated in the doorway, and I could see in her face her confusion and distress at my behavior, and felt sorry for it, although in a foggy, distant way. I said, “I’m sorry we rui
ned your honeymoon.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” she said. She sat down beside me and turned so her knee pressed against mine. “You didn’t. I wish you’d told me at the wedding. I knew something was wrong.”

  “I didn’t want to ruin your wedding. With my own personal storm,” I said. I sighed. “‘Welcome to marriage.’”

  “Oh, what the minister said?” Now it was her turn to sigh. “She got a laugh, anyway.”

  “Kind of uncool, though,” I said. “Is my point.” I put my coffee on the table, put my face in my hands, scrubbed at it. “I thought you were coming back Sunday,” I said through the gaps in my fingers.

  “We were,” she said. “They canceled that flight, so we moved to an earlier one.”

  “How come you didn’t call me?”

  “We got home really late Saturday night, and then Sunday morning was all about Nathan’s downward spiral and bucking him up to face you. I kept saying I was going to call you and tell you he was here, and he kept saying he was going to go tell you himself, and then he’d get this pale, hollow-eyed look and start in on how he didn’t know what to say—”

  “He talked about a well,” I said.

  “Yeah, he said that to me, too.”

  “I thought it sounded rehearsed.”

  “He really seemed to feel that way,” she said. “He said he felt like a useless person, like he should just fall off the earth. Has he had trouble with depression before?”

  I closed my eyes and leaned back against the couch.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to seem like I’m defending him. It’s just hard not to feel sorry for someone who’s so obviously in distress.”

  “Even if he distressed himself?” I said. I didn’t wait for her to answer. “Why didn’t you call me after he came over on Sunday?”

  “Well, I wanted to give you time to talk to him, and then he didn’t get back here until almost ten, and I thought you might be in bed.”

  “Almost ten? He left my house like eight hours before that. Where was he?”