Husband and Wife Read online

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I assumed he was with you.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t explain that Smith had still been there, that because his presence had so obviously upset Nathan I was happy to prolong it, telling Nathan that I didn’t want him to stick around that day, that Smith would help me a little while longer. I didn’t explain that Smith went to run some errands that afternoon and then came back to help me with dinner, that he held Binx while I put Mattie to bed, and then gave me a good-night hug before he went to meet Holly, his actual girlfriend. I didn’t tell her I was entertaining domestic fantasies about Smith, and romantic fantasies about Rajiv, and meanwhile believing, despite everything, that a magic spell would somehow deliver my marriage back to me, intact, Nathan once again the guy I’d always believed him to be.

  Normally I would have told her all of this, all of this and more. But I couldn’t. Because I was mad at her, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that. Not mad at her because she hadn’t called, because her explanation was reasonable. Mad at her because when he’d showed up, she’d taken him in. Okay, she hadn’t even been there when he’d showed up, and Adam had probably taken Nathan’s call. But Adam would have asked Alex if Nathan could stay at their house, so she must have said Yes, of course, when she should have said, Hell, no, tell that bastard to get a hotel room. She’d had sympathy for him, even before he went on and on to her about his metaphorical well. And why should she have sympathy for him before she witnessed his distress? Had she known? Had he poured out his heart to her and made her promise not to tell me, and had she agreed? Or did she have sympathy for him because what he had done was understandable? Was it understandable because she, too, knew the strength of such urges, or was it understandable because she thought it would be awfully difficult, after all, to stay married to me?

  She’d felt sympathy. She’d taken care of him. Was nobody loyal to me?

  “Maybe he went for a walk,” she said. “Maybe he just drove around.”

  “Maybe he climbed down an actual well, like the guy in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Just to compare his feelings, the fictional representation, and, you know, experience.”

  She smiled. “How’d he get back up then?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe somebody threw him a metaphorical rope.”

  “He got out of an actual well with a metaphorical rope?”

  “It’s all blending together,” I said. “I’m a little confused.”

  The amusement fell off her face. “What can I do for you?” she asked. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Turn back time?”

  “Barring that. Anything in the present?”

  “Turn back time,” I said. “Seriously. Drop in on that writers’ conference and put Nathan in a chastity belt. Or should that be a chastity jock strap? A chastity strap?”

  “Can you make one of those for a man?”

  “Add that to your to-do list. Time machine. Chastity strap.”

  “I’ll work on it.” She put her arm around me. I leaned my head on her shoulder. It was one more thing to hold against Nathan, this feeling that, despite her words of sympathy, her presence here beside me, the weight and warmth of her arm, she was no longer quite mine. After a moment I moved away, and she stood up.

  “You going to go work on it now?” I asked.

  “I’m going to the bathroom.”

  “You can’t work on it in the bathroom?” I smiled at her, to make it clear I didn’t begrudge her a trip to the bathroom, despite the note of aggrievement I couldn’t quite erase from my tone.

  She laughed. “You’re right,” she said. “I should work on it all the time.”

  “Every minute,” I said.

  While she was in there I got up and went into the guest room. The room showed signs of Nathan’s habitation. Normally the bed was made neatly, the extra quilt folded across the end. Nathan had left the quilt dangling off the bed, the decorative pillows in a pile on the floor. When he’d gathered up his laundry he’d missed a stray sock under the desk. I moved, automatically, to pick it up, and then I stopped and left it there.

  I sat down on the bed. It was an old four-poster that had belonged to Alex’s grandmother, and it creaked beneath my weight. Alex had had the bed for years, and so I knew from experience that it groaned every time you turned over, in a way that started to make you self-conscious, because you worried that Alex might think the sounds were made by headboard-banging sex. And your husband would say, “So why don’t we? I mean, if she already thinks that.” And then when you did have sex in that bed, you were so careful, your movements so small, that sex was quieter than simple restless sleep. I lay down. I rolled on my side. The quilt smelled clean yet musty, like everything else in Alex’s house. Nathan slept here, I thought, as though that were special, as though I had not spent ten years of nights in a bed that Nathan had slept in. I closed my eyes and listened to the wall clock tick.

  I woke an hour later, sleep-drunk and confused, and shoved myself out of bed as if after a shameful one-night stand. I’d left the shape of my body on the quilt, so I smoothed it out, moving frantically, my heart caroming off my ribs, and then I punched the pillow to erase the imprint of my head. I stumbled down the hall to find Alex on the couch, her laptop on her knees.

  “I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” I said.

  “I didn’t want to wake you,” she said. “Nathan told me you haven’t been sleeping.”

  I didn’t like the thought of them discussing me. I picked up the book on the coffee table. I read the line, I don’t want to lose you. Ah, I thought. That story again. I closed the book and set it down, taking a petty satisfaction in the thought of Nathan being unable, however briefly, to find his place. “Aren’t you late for work?” I asked.

  “I called and told them I wasn’t feeling well and I’d be in later. I’m sure they don’t believe me, first day back after my honeymoon. Or now they all think I got pregnant on my honeymoon.” She gave me a rueful smile. “What about you? Did you call in sick?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh no, you’re really late then,” she said. “Should I have woken you?”

  I laughed. “No,” I said, and didn’t explain the laugh. This was my chance to take her into my confidence, to let her be who she always had been to me, someone I could always turn to. I said, “I’d better go.”

  Smith’s office was upstairs in one of the old tobacco warehouses in downtown Durham, resplendent with exposed brick and heart pine timber. I’d been to restaurants in the building, but never up to Smith’s office, and I battled nerves as I climbed the stairs. I slipped past the receptionist, who was staring out the window, and peeked into cubicles until I spotted Smith. He was on the phone, cradling it between his ear and his shoulder while he sorted through a pile of papers on his desk. His eyebrows shot up when he saw me. “Hey,” he mouthed, and then he held up one finger.

  He was going to ask me what I was doing here, and what was I going to say? I stared out the window myself. Nothing out there but sky, trees, buildings, and power lines.

  He hung up. “Hey,” he said, this time out loud.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” I said. “It’s bad for you.”

  “What is?”

  “Holding the phone like that. Bad for the neck. Bad for the posture. Not at all ergonomic.”

  “I know,” he said. He took a breath. What are you doing here? I thought, but instead he said, “You want to sit?” and without waiting for me to reply he got up and pulled a chair over to the side of his desk. I sat. He sat. We faced each other. He waited.

  “I’ve been doing something strange,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You can’t tell Nathan.”

  “I won’t. You know I won’t.”

  “I haven’t been going to work.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t go Friday and I didn’t go today. I called in sick before I came over here. I didn’t want them to call t
he house and get Nathan, you know. I told them I had the stomach flu. And then for some reason I coughed, like that was going to sell it.”

  “I think you deserve a day off,” he said.

  “But what if I never go back? What would we do for money?”

  “What are your savings like?”

  “We’ve got about fifteen thousand in the bank, but we’ll owe some of that in taxes. We pay the credit cards five hundred a month. We were already going to be in trouble if he had to get an apartment, and now we’re going to run out of money for the original place. I guess he’ll have to move back in. Or I guess he’ll have to get a job, or I’ll have to get another job.” The tightness in my throat choked my voice.

  “You didn’t quit, though?”

  I shook my head.

  “So you can just go back?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t seem to. I know that sounds crazy.”

  “You don’t have to tell them what’s really going on.”

  “You know my boss, the chair, he kills songbirds?” I said. “For his research, I mean. I wonder if he ever has nightmares about it. Tiny songbirds poking at his brain. Let’s see what makes him tick, tweet-tweet.”

  “I don’t think you should say that,” Smith said.

  “I’d have to tell them something.”

  “How about your favorite aunt died and it traumatized you?”

  “Smith,” I said. “Are you telling me to lie?”

  “I’m telling you to consider the possibilities. Maybe you should see this as a chance to find something closer to home. Or get a job more in your field. I mean, you told me last week you’d always thought that job would be temporary. Why not look for something in the arts?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve got two small children. The economy is in the tank. It’s not exactly the moment for finding myself.”

  “Granted,” he said. “But you should be able to live on your savings for three months. So if you can’t go back to that job, go ahead and apply for whatever job you think you can get, but it doesn’t hurt to try for a little reinvention while you’re doing it.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “That’s right.” For a moment I imagined myself working here, with Smith, surrounded by warm red brick, popping down to the Greek place for lunch. Or maybe I could work for the documentary film festival, or for the art museum, or one of the university magazines. Then I pictured myself sending out résumés and then I wondered where my résumé was, if I’d even moved the file when I’d gotten a new computer, and then I thought about how I’d have to update it, anyway, and figure out who at my old job was going to be my reference, which would necessitate explaining my disappearance after all, and the thought of all these necessary steps made me very, very tired.

  “I’ll help you look,” Smith said. “And you know, Nathan doesn’t have to get a place right away, he can stay with me, or he can move back in without moving back in, sleep in his study or something.” He stopped. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  I shook my head, for a moment unable to speak. I managed to say, “I can’t believe this is my life.” I leaned forward as though I was going to put my face in my hands, but it was like I’d pitched over a cliff and I just kept falling until my head came to rest on Smith’s knees. I sobbed with abandon into his jeans. This made him extremely uncomfortable—I could feel the tension in his legs—but nevertheless he brought both of his hands up and cupped the back of my head as tenderly as…well, a mother, I’m tempted to say, but why not a father? Fathers can be tender. Fathers like Nathan. He cupped my head as tenderly as Nathan would.

  Later that day, I went home to the actual Nathan, except that he wasn’t the actual Nathan. The actual Nathan didn’t speak to me with sorrowful politeness, didn’t put the children to bed and then tell me good-bye. I couldn’t have the actual Nathan, the Nathan I wanted, the Nathan who could comfort me.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Thursday as I pulled up to the house Nathan was coming out the glass doors, bumping Binx in his stroller down the porch steps. Mattie trailed behind, sucking her fingers and twisting her hair. When she saw me, she brightened up, and did what Nathan and I called her “cavort” up to the car. I got out and picked her up, and she insisted I spin her around, so I did, until we were both dizzy. Nathan watched, standing with both hands gripping the handle of the stroller, wearing a melancholy smile. I put Mattie down and then stumbled in an exaggerated way and she swayed on her feet and laughed. “We’re going to check the mail!” she said.

  “Great,” I said. “Let’s go.” I offered her my hand and she took it. Nathan started down the drive, and she and I fell in behind him. He hadn’t said anything to me. I hadn’t said anything to him. I watched the back of his head, lately my primary view of him.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said.

  He stopped the stroller and looked back at me, a strange expression briefly contorting his features, gone too quickly for me to read before the blank-faced Nathan-bot returned. Was that an agony of hope I saw? Of fear? Did he think I was going to say he should move back in? That he should get his own place? Which would he hope for, and which would he fear? He’d said he wanted to work it out, but nothing in his behavior this week had suggested that. Interacting with me was just a duty, like all the other ones that dragged him through his days. Maybe he thought I was going to say he could publish his book after all. “Yeah?” he said.

  “I don’t know what to do about the weekend,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. He looked back down the drive, started walking again. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, should I be alone with the kids all weekend? Should we try to spend it together? We’re having trouble maintaining a civil conversation for more than five minutes, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “That’s not my fault.”

  “Maybe not locally,” I said. “But globally.”

  He kept on walking. Mattie pulled her hand from my grip and stuck her fingers back in her mouth, her brief burst of energy evaporating. She slowed her pace, and Nathan quickened his. I walked a little faster to keep up, calling to Mattie to come on. Then Nathan said, “Why don’t you go out of town?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Go to the beach. Stay with your aunt. You can get out of here and get some help with the kids and get away from me.”

  “What about gas prices?” I said.

  “You don’t have to go,” he said. “It was just a thought.”

  I thought about a three-hour car trip, parenting solo, no one to hand the baby his bottle when he dropped it, no one to pop My Neighbor Totoro out of Mattie’s player and put in a new DVD. Then I thought about hours alone in the house, parenting solo, with nothing to distract any of us from Nathan’s absence, or perhaps his presence, which might be just as bad, or might be worse. “I think you’re right,” I said. “It would be good to get away from you.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that in front of Mattie,” he said.

  “Didn’t you just say it?”

  “Not in that tone,” he said.

  “Oh, tone,” I said. “I would love to never have another discussion about tone for the rest of my natural life.”

  “The point is—” He stopped. He looked at me again. “You know,” he said, “just because I’ve made mistakes doesn’t mean I forfeit the right to the high ground on anything.”

  I pointed back at Mattie. “She’s not listening anyway,” I said. She was letting her feet carry her down the road, eyes on the ground, in the oblivious manner that often led her to bonk into people in the grocery store.

  “Hey,” Nathan said. “There’s Mrs. Dodson. What’s she doing?”

  I looked ahead to Mrs. Dodson’s house. She was standing in the middle of the yard by the clothesline, which often flapped with T-shirts and underpants but today was empty. She wasn’t hanging clothes, as she often was, or taking them down. She wasn’t bending slowly to pluck a weed from her car
efully tended garden. She was just standing there. When we came even with her, I saw that her gaze was fixed on a hole in the ground.

  “Hi, Mrs. Dodson,” Nathan called.

  She lifted her face, and her eyes were so blank that I had the sudden, startling impression that she was blind. She stared at us for a moment before she seemed to register our presence. Then she said, “We’ve got a mole.”

  “Oh dear,” I said. I found that I often adopted old-fashioned exclamations in her presence. Oh dear. My Lord. Goodness me.

  Her gaze moved to the stroller, and then at last her face registered emotion—pleasure at the sight of the baby. “There he is,” she said. “Let me see that baby.” She started moving toward us, now looking at Mattie. “Let me see that sweet little girl.” At the stroller she bent to Binx and said, “Hi there, hi there,” and then to Mattie she said, “Ain’t you pretty,” and Mattie popped her fingers out of her mouth and said, “I wanted to wear a sundress but Daddy said no.”

  “True story,” Nathan said.

  “I haven’t seen Mr. Dodson lately,” I said. “I’ve been hoping to run into him, so I could thank him for fixing the mailbox.”

  Mrs. Dodson looked up at me. She blinked, once, twice. She eased herself back up to standing. Then her face collapsed and she began to cry.

  I just stood there in blank astonishment, staring at her with as much rudeness as Mattie. Binx began to cry in sympathy, his complaining, keening cry. I didn’t move to pick him up. I didn’t move to comfort Mrs. Dodson. I just stood there, wholly inadequate. Nathan, my Nathan, he stepped forward and took Mrs. Dodson in his arms.

  “He’s dying,” Mrs. Dodson sobbed. “He’s dying. I wanted to let you know but I didn’t want to upset you with your new baby.”

  “He’s dying?” I repeated.

  “What am I gonna do?” she wailed into Nathan’s shoulder. “Oh, what am I gonna do?”

  “Mommy,” Mattie said, “what does a dead elephant look like?”

  I didn’t want to answer, but I knew if I didn’t she’d just repeat the question, louder and more insistently. I bent to tug her closer so I could whisper in her ear that we’d talk about it later.