Husband and Wife Read online

  I snapped my gaze back to his face. He flushed. He hadn’t meant to invoke her. He hadn’t meant to say the dreaded word she. “She what?” I asked. “She was me?” I didn’t sound angry, though. I sounded lost. I snatched the keys from his startled hand, ran past him to his car. Maybe gravel shot up behind the tires as I hit the gas. If it didn’t, it should have.

  I was inches from knocking on Smith’s door when I remembered Holly, who might be there, whom it was much easier to forget. So I looked in his living room window, through the space left between the sill and the bottom of the blinds, and I saw the TV, the couch, and Smith, alone. Why wasn’t she with him, curled up beside him watching Last Picture Show and talking about Alice Munro, as all good women should? I knocked on the window, and he jumped. He came to the door, and when it was open, he looked at me, his expression wary before he conquered it. He wished I wasn’t there. “Come in,” he said, but I shook my head.

  “I just want to ask you something,” I said.

  “What?”

  “What do you really think of me?”

  He stepped out on the porch, left the door open behind him. “You mean do I like you?”

  “You said not so long ago that I was self-righteous and rude.”

  He jammed his hands into his pockets, hunched his shoulders. “I was fired up,” he said. “I was being self-righteous and rude. That wasn’t a general character assessment.”

  “Nathan says I’ve changed. That I don’t care about art anymore. Basically that I’m bad, bad, bad.”

  He sighed. “What brought that on?”

  “We just found out our neighbor is dying. We visited him this afternoon. And later I asked Nathan if he’d fixed our mailbox.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I did that.”

  “You did?”

  “I noticed it was wobbly that day I was watching the kids.”

  I stared at him, speechless. He’d fixed my mailbox. It was all I could do not to fall into his arms.

  “But I have to say I don’t totally follow that story,” he said. “From your neighbor to the mailbox.”

  “Nathan thought I was being shallow and cold, to want to talk about the mailbox after we visited our dying neighbor. He wanted me to be profound.”

  “Nathan,” he said after a long moment, “is in pursuit of self-justification.”

  “Is that what he’s in pursuit of?”

  “Sarah,” he said. He took a breath. “I have to tell you something.”

  “Is it what you really think of me?” It made me nervous that he was avoiding that question. I’d asked for his opinion hoping, of course, that he’d weigh in against Nathan’s claims, but I also wanted an honest assessment of my character. There’d always seemed to be a fairly clear relationship between what people thought of me and what I thought of myself, but in the wake of Nathan’s accusations I was cast into uncertainty. Was Nathan, the person who knew me better than anyone, completely wrong? Or was I, indeed, conventional, materialistic, and cold, and only now cottoning on to that fact?

  Some painful emotion contorted Smith’s features, but when he looked me full in the face his expression was sincere and calm. “I think you’re great,” he said. He held my eyes. I leaned in and kissed him on the lips. He didn’t move, his hands still in his pockets. He made a startled, muffled sound. I could have just given him a swift kiss, a plausibly friendship-and-gratitude-driven kiss, and then stepped back, but I kept my lips pressed against his too long, as though we were in a clinch out of a 1940s movie, where they just keep mashing their faces together and never get an inch closer. By the time I moved away there was nothing to do but say, “That didn’t go well.”

  He took a breath. “We can’t do anything like that.” He swung his pointer finger back and forth between us in the universal sign for “you and me.”

  “Well, we could,” I said. “Technically.”

  “What I mean is that things are complicated enough already,” he said. “I do have a girlfriend, you know.” There was a silence while I refrained from saying something nasty about her. I wasn’t that far gone. Then he said, “I don’t think you really want to kiss me.”

  “Why did I then?” I asked.

  “You want to make Nathan jealous, maybe. Even the score. Or maybe you just want to feel something besides what you’ve been feeling. I know when my college girlfriend cheated on me, the first thing I did was make out with some random girl at a party.” He went on talking—“perfectly natural, blah blah blah”—but what I heard was, I don’t want you, and what I felt was humiliated. Maybe I didn’t really want him. Maybe he was right, and all I wanted was a different emotion. But I felt like I wanted him, and I didn’t like being told I was wrong about my own feeling. Even if my explanation meant what had just happened was a humiliating rejection of a genuine come-on, while his explanation meant that it was just the honorable response to the unhinged behavior of a bereft and betrayed wife. Either way it was humiliating. He wasn’t attracted to me, or I was crazy, or possibly both.

  I interrupted him. “Did I tell you I’m going out of town this weekend? The kids and I are going to my aunt’s. She lives in Wilmington. It’s a little cold for the beach, but it’ll still be nice to walk it, and maybe the kids can play in the sand…”

  “You’re going out of town?” He wore the expression of a patient with a bad diagnosis. “Oh,” he said.

  “What?”

  “This is all just too fucked up,” he said. “I really need to tell you something.”

  “What?” I asked again, and when he hesitated, I said, “What?” again. I had time to guess what the something was, and I thought maybe he was going to confess that he did like me after all. That’s exactly how I put it in my head, that he liked me, as though I was in junior high circa 1986.

  “That woman,” he said. “The woman who Nathan—”

  I held up my hand. Stop. “I know who you mean,” I said.

  “She’s coming here. This weekend. Or not here, exactly, but to Raleigh. She’s giving a reading at Quail Ridge.”

  “Quail Ridge?” I repeated stupidly. I knew Quail Ridge, of course. Nice bookstore. I liked it. I would have gone there more often if it hadn’t been so far away. “Quail Ridge?” I said again.

  He nodded.

  “You think that’s why he said I should go out of town?” I said. I was awestruck by the magnitude of Nathan’s perfidy, beyond anything I could have imagined. I stood amazed, like Buffy at the Hellmouth, while a hole in the earth opened up beneath me. I looked down into nothingness. I couldn’t see the end. “Oh no,” I said, my voice small and insufficient. “Oh no.”

  “He said you should go out of town?” Smith repeated, and whatever he said next sounded indignant, but I was falling and the words were wind rushing past my ears. I gripped his arm. He was in the middle of a sentence, but he stopped talking. He looked down at my hand. Then he lifted it, gently, and brought it up high, as if he was going to kiss it, and gave it a little squeeze. “I’m so sorry,” he said. He made as if to release my hand, but I tightened my fingers on his.

  “Can you kiss me?” I asked. “Just kiss me one time.”

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “Please,” I said.

  I’d never seen a person look more miserable. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “I know why you need that, but you have to find somebody else.”

  “I need you to kiss me,” I said. “Just one time right now.”

  He looked away, expelled a breath, looked back at me. “Just one time,” he said.

  “That’s it,” I said. “I promise.”

  He could have just pecked me on the lips and called it a day, but once Smith committed, he committed. He didn’t stint on the kiss. He brought his mouth to mine slowly, and his lips were soft and parted, and the kiss started out tender and then got passionate. I lost myself in it, and, you know, I think he did, too, because his hands came up to cup my face. But it was as if that touch reminded him of everything that was wrong with th
is picture, because he brought those hands down to my shoulders and he pulled away, just as slowly as he’d approached. He closed his mouth. I should have recognized, when I looked in his face, that a door that had opened in the last week was now shut, once again, against me, that I’d reached the end of what he was willing to give me, what I’d be able to take. Instead I said his name in a pleading way, I tried to pull him back, so that he had to brace himself against me, and the embarrassment I felt at my own clingy desperation fueled my anger at Nathan, without whom none of this would have happened, without whom I wouldn’t even have this life. All the way home I cried, cried until my face was wet and sticky, my throat sore from the release of inhuman noise. She was me. That was why he’d done it. She was me, and I was gone.

  When I got home that night Nathan was asleep on the couch. He didn’t wake. In the study I found the computer on. I e-mailed Rajiv. Do you remember what you liked about me?

  Within ten minutes I had my answer. Everything.

  I let Nathan think I was sticking to the plan. I packed. He loaded the suitcases into the car. I nursed Binx. I sent Mattie to the potty. And then we were ready to go. Nathan carried Binx outside and strapped him into the car while I was strapping in Mattie. “So when are you coming back?” he asked.

  “Never,” I said, not looking at him.

  “We’re not coming back?” Mattie asked. She squirmed, twisting the car-seat strap.

  “Hold still,” I said.

  “We’re never coming back?” she asked, volume increasing.

  “I was just teasing Daddy,” I said. “Ha ha ha.” I snapped the last buckle into place.

  “When are we coming back?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer. I stepped away from the car, my hand on the door.

  “Tell me!” she cried. “Tell me, tell me, tell me!”

  Nathan said, “You’re coming back Sunday, sweetheart. On Monday Mommy has to go to work.”

  I shut Mattie’s door. Over the top of the car I could see Nathan, and behind him the tree line where our backyard disappeared into the woods. “I’ve made a decision,” I said. “You can publish your novel.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Publish away.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Don’t ask me again,” I said. “I’m sure.”

  Relief on his face, and pleasant expectation. Like I’d told him everything would be better from now on. Like he’d believed it.

  “You should also know that I haven’t been going to work,” I said. “I haven’t gone in a week.”

  He gaped at me. “Where have you been going every day?”

  “Shopping,” I said. “But don’t worry, I didn’t buy anything.” I climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. He pulled open the passenger door and leaned inside. “Slow down. So did you quit? Are you serious?”

  “I didn’t quit,” I said. “But I won’t be surprised if they fire me.” I watched the emotions come and go on his face. Ah, yes, Nathan. Confusion. Dismay. The nauseating lurch into a new perspective. And I enjoyed it. I savored it. Who doesn’t want to punish the person who’s punished them? Who doesn’t want to hurt the one they love? Isn’t that the essential problem with humanity, the kick we get out of spreading the misery around?

  “I kissed Smith,” I said.

  He flinched. “What?”

  “I kissed him.” In terms of poetic meter, the sentence was an amphibrach, emphasis on the middle word. “Last night I drove to his house, and when he came to the door I kissed him.” Where in Nathan’s face, and how, would his response reveal itself? Would his eyes widen or narrow, would his mouth tighten or fall slack? He looked sick. He looked like he was going to throw up. Yes, the nauseating lurch. I reached over and grabbed the door handle. I pulled a muscle in my shoulder yanking the door out of his hand. “I had to tell you,” I said, though I wasn’t sure if he could still hear me. “I tell you everything.”

  PART III

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Mattie wanted to stop. She wanted to go home. She was hungry, she said. She wanted french fries. She wanted a different movie. She was hungry. I did not want to stop. Going, going, gone—that was right. That was the thing to be. My hands were made to grip the wheel. I explained that I wanted to get a couple hours down the road before we stopped, because we had to time our drive to avoid rush hour in the various cities we’d be passing through. She wanted to know what rush hour was. I told her it was a bunch of cars blocking your way. She said, “Why do the cars want to block your way?”

  Because they’re motherfuckers, I thought. “Everybody just wants to get where they’re going,” I said.

  We drove and drove, and Mattie kept up her complaints. Then Binx, who hated the car, decided to express that emotion, and launched into high-pitched screaming, which I knew from experience could last up to an hour. Usually when this happened Nathan was driving, and I was free to jiggle Binx’s car seat, or crawl into the back and talk to him, let him hold my finger. Usually this didn’t help, and he went on screaming with his face red and his eyes frantic, but at least it made me feel like I was doing something. Now, with him sitting in a rear-facing seat, I couldn’t even catch his eye in the rearview mirror. I thought about pulling off at the next exit to nurse him, but in the past this had produced only a temporary cessation of hostilities. As soon as he sensed my intention to return him to the car seat, Binx would stiffen, arch, scream bloody murder again. Before long Mattie started to cry, too, and I gave up on my plan and pulled off at the next truck stop I saw.

  “I want french fries!” Mattie said, and Binx continued to scream. I got out of the car and extricated him from his seat, and then I bounced him on my hip outside Mattie’s open door while he wiped his wet face on my shoulder and Mattie cried to be let out and begged for fries, and I got Helen on the phone. As soon as she answered, I said, “We’re coming there.”

  “Great! When?”

  “Now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m driving there now. The kids and I hit the road about two hours ago.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “We were supposed to go to the beach,” I said. “But I’m coming there instead. I took 40 West instead of 40 East.”

  “Okay,” she said slowly. “I’m happy to have you, of course. But you know it’s a long way to Austin.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. She was silent. She was much better than I was at silence. She could be silent for minutes at a time, and then she’d make the one neat quip that exposed the nervous verbosity of everyone else, including me, for the nattering that it really was. I waited with some anxiety for her to speak again. Believe me, Helen could convince you you were being stupid if she wanted to. She had a particular expression of amused derision—sometimes that was all it took. But that was reserved for ill-considered comments, grandiose claims. True emotional distress brought out the maternal in her. The summer between our years of graduate school, I worked an exhausting waitressing job while Nathan spent six weeks at an artist’s colony I’d failed to get into, and after my shift I’d stop at Helen’s apartment, worn out with discouragement, and as soon as I sat down she’d pull a Coke from the fridge, pop the pull tab, and hand it to me, and I’d be revitalized by the sweet taste, the sizzle of carbonation on my tongue, her concern for me. Surely she knew how much I needed her to tell me she couldn’t wait to see me, and to go put fresh sheets on the guest bed.

  She still hadn’t spoken. “Remember in grad school when you used to give me Coke?” I asked.

  “This is a long way to come for a Coke,” she said.

  “If you don’t want me, just say so,” I snapped, and realized only after the words had left my mouth that I’d said, “If you don’t want me,” when I should have said, “If you don’t want me to come.”

  “Listen,” Helen said, “I want you to think a minute, that’s all. I’m thrilled to have you come.
God knows you could stand to get away, and God knows you could use a hookup with Rajiv. Anything I can do for you I want to do. But you’re sleep-deprived and emotionally distraught and you’re talking about driving for two days in the car with two small children by yourself, which would be hell on wheels under the best of circumstances. I just want to be sure you’re up for that.”

  “I can’t turn around, Helen,” I said.

  Mattie wailed, “We’re going the wrong way!”

  “I’ve got to go,” I said into the phone. “I’ll call you when we’re closer.” I hung up before she could dissuade me. “Listen, Mattie,” I said, unbuckling her with one hand. “We’re going on an adventure. This is going to be fun. When I was a grad student there was this guy who thought he was Kerouac—liked to go around with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and talk about the thrill of the asphalt rolling away beneath him—and I thought he was a big-time loser, but now I see his point. We’ll learn, we’ll grow, we’ll roll with the punches. You’ll see.” All right, all right, I was saying in my head. All right, all right.

  “What about gas prices?” she said.

  So she had been listening yesterday, when I’d told Nathan I wanted to get away from him. I was traumatizing her. I could only hope that at three she was too young to retain any of this in memory, that in the years to follow I could make up for any future need for therapy I was creating now. Could I? Or would she always have a deep insecurity, the kind that sends people careening from one disastrous romance to the next? And why did I have to live my life obsessed with these kinds of concerns, this constant attempt to control the most uncertain of outcomes, my own effect on somebody else’s mind? Parents have always worried about the damage the world might do their children. When did they begin to obsess about the damage they themselves might do? And mightn’t that obsession itself lead them to do the damage? “Don’t worry,” I said. “I get a small rebate for gas on my credit card.”