Husband and Wife Read online

  “Holy shit,” I said. “He dragged you?”

  “These guys came up behind us in a parking lot and one of them jumped Daniel and the other one grabbed my bag, but I wouldn’t let go, so he dragged me.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Did he get the bag?”

  She shook her head. “I wouldn’t let go. I kept thinking, ‘That’s my bag!’ They gave up and ran off.”

  “Was Daniel OK?”

  “Yeah, the guy just kind of held him down. But he totally felt castrated. He kept apologizing for the fact that it happened. I did feel a little like, you wimp, even though I don’t think there was anything else he could have done. I kept saying, You did great.”

  “Must be something primal in those responses.”

  “I know. It really bugs me. I don’t like being subject to biology.” She stepped back a couple feet and listened again. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “And then we can sit on the porch with the door open until your kids wake up.”

  For the past two days I’d had little in mind but my destination, and now here I was and I wasn’t sure why. And why had Helen’s story left me with a lump in my throat? It was scary, yes, but this urge to cry wasn’t about fear for her, it was about my own self-pity, the feeling that this arrival had not been arrival, that I was lost and no one could find me. Helen was trying to shore up her husband’s manhood while simultaneously questioning it, and I was—for the moment? forever?—cut loose entirely from such concerns. Maybe that wasn’t so bad, because I’d always found the whole topic of manhood or the lack thereof tedious, and just a couple of months ago Nathan and I had laughed and laughed at a line in a Flight of the Conchords song: Am I a man? Yes, technically, yes. I hadn’t known she’d been mugged. I felt as though I’d missed some significant moment, like her wedding, like all her other friends and family had gathered to watch her hanging tenaciously from the strap of her bag, determined that nobody was going to take what was hers. From her top step I watched my children sleeping in the back of my car. My children. Mine.

  I heard Helen approaching. Flip flop, flip flop.

  She sat down beside me, and I saw that she was holding a tall glass full of ice and Coke. She handed it to me without a word. I felt a gratitude so deep it was almost painful. I took a sip. It was cold and too sweet, and when I said, “Thank you, Helen,” my voice shook.

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  Nathan had tried to call me not long after I got on the road. I hadn’t answered. I hadn’t answered any of the times he’d called, or listened to the messages he’d left. I’d thought about it. I thought about it again while I sat on Helen’s couch nursing Binx—the three older kids watching Charlie and Lola—and listened to Helen bicker with her husband on the phone. Helen had a sectional couch, and the kids flopped across or leaned on various parts of it in the listless, stunned manner of children in front of the television screen. I wanted a sectional couch. It was on my list of things to buy someday, in that magical future when we were out of debt and could buy such things without remorse. But maybe now I’d never buy a sectional couch. Maybe I’d get fired and never find another job, things being what they were in the world. Maybe I’d end up living in an apartment, too small for such a large and extravagant piece of furniture. Or maybe I’d just rent a room, put nothing in it but a sectional couch, and Mattie and Binx and I would live and eat and sleep on it, tumbled together like puppies in a basket. We could be happy as puppies, if we could manage to be as dumb.

  “You told me six o’clock,” Helen said. “Yes, you did. That’s what you told me.”

  Helen’s husband Daniel had what Nathan and I referred to as a “real job,” by which we meant a job that had something to do with business, a job that required professional clothing, that paid an extravagant amount and played some role in the economy. We weren’t too clear on what it was. I’d confessed this to Helen a couple months before and she had laughed and offered an explanation I hadn’t quite followed. She’d complained at the time that he was working longer and longer hours, even weekends, in anticipation of a promised promotion, and now, tonight, he was late getting back and she was pissed off, as I imagined she was every time, in the usual irritation at each other’s ongoing failures that so often characterizes the relationship between husband and wife.

  “I’m not cooking, then,” she said. “No, we’ll go out to dinner.” She was close enough that, while I couldn’t hear exactly what Daniel was saying, I could make out the placating tone in his voice. He was a nice guy, Daniel, an optimist, someone who knew how to choose a course of action and cheerfully go forth. Helen was a natural pessimist, inclined to brooding and bouts of depression that, in grad school, had manifested as episodes of obsessively watching Matlock or Star Trek: Next Generation. A yen for Matlock might not seem fitting for a depressive artistic type, but what is depression but the unwelcome conviction that the world will never be what it should? People saw her as a cigarette-smoking cynic dressed all in black, and in some ways she certainly was that, but she craved the honorable, earnest Matlock, the honorable, earnest Picard. She wanted to let the sun shine in, and so she married Daniel, and more than once I’d watched her glower at him and seen him smile back as though there was nothing but love in her eyes. “We’ll choose the place,” she said. “We’re the ones who have to haul all the kids there.” She stepped on a toy car, grimaced, kicked it under the couch. “Yeah, well, maybe I’ll call you and maybe I won’t,” she said, and then she hung up the phone.

  She came round to the front of the couch and sat, pulling her daughter Abby up into her lap. Abby was twenty months old, between child and baby. She rested her head on her mother’s leg, her eyes still fixed on the television. She pointed, babbled some earnest nonsense that lilted up at the end like a question. “That’s right,” Helen said. She combed a tangle out of Abby’s hair with her fingers. To me she said, “He’ll meet us at a restaurant. Where do you want to go?”

  “Remember how we used to go out for pancakes at midnight?” I asked.

  “I don’t really want pancakes,” she said. “How about barbecue?”

  “What was the place that had the brisket?” I asked. “Remember that?”

  “Oooh, yeah,” she said. “Brisket sounds good. Which place do you like?”

  “I can’t remember,” I said. We sat for a moment and listened to Charlie relate his polite exasperation with his little sister Lola, whose flights of fancy were at once charming and aggravating. I remembered a wooden building—maybe near water? An outside deck, but every place in Austin had that. I remembered Nathan feeding me a bite with his fork. He’d been the one to order the brisket, and it was tender and juicy, while my pork was a little dry, and he’d shared his meal with me. “A lot of my good memories of Nathan have to do with food,” I said.

  Helen nodded. “Living with someone else is all about food,” she said. “What are you going to eat and when are you going to eat it and who’s going to cook it or should you go out.”

  “You told me you knew you wanted to break up with Sam when he asked you whether he should eat a banana.” Sam had been Helen’s boyfriend in our second year of graduate school. He was a fiction writer, friendly with Nathan, and for a few months we’d enjoyed a paradise of foursome-ness. Postbreakup, Nathan and I made one or two awkward attempts at hanging out with Sam, and then we stopped, because no matter what you say in the wake of a breakup, you almost always choose. Who would choose me? Who was I going to lose? Maybe Alex and Adam. Maybe Smith, who’d be angry I’d told Nathan about that kiss. But I didn’t want to think about that. Those people were hundreds of miles away.

  “I don’t remember that,” Helen said. She sounded like she didn’t believe me.

  “We were standing in your kitchen, in that house on Thirty-second. You said you didn’t care at all whether he ate a banana, and you couldn’t stand being asked to care about things like that anymore. I think you also said you didn’t like knowing what he had in his medicine cabinet.”
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  “I remember the part about the medicine cabinet,” she said. “There was nothing strange in there, I don’t think. I just didn’t want to know what his prescriptions were.” She was stroking Abby’s hair, her gaze fixed unseeingly on the television. “That house had a stained-glass window.”

  “That’s right. When the sun came through, there were colors on the walls.”

  “What I remember is having a fight with Sam because he said he was sick of Korean food.” She frowned at me as if I had said it. “Koreans eat it every day.”

  “I remember that one, too.” I sighed. “Not only do I remember my own squabbles, I remember yours.”

  “Once you and Nathan had a fight about falafel.”

  “Did we?”

  “I can’t remember the details.”

  “A fight about falafel,” I said. “Falafel. Crunchy outside, chewy inside. What could we have fought about?”

  “Maybe he thought it should be chewy outside, crunchy inside.”

  “Oh, I doubt it. We always agreed about falafel.”

  “On our first date Daniel and I had ice cream sundaes, huge ice cream sundaes. He ate his and then finished mine.” She shifted Abby a little, grimacing. I imagined some sharp point—a tiny chin, an elbow—was digging into her thigh. “I know working late is not really his fault, but it still pisses me off,” she said. “I can’t seem to stop being mad about it.” She lowered her voice. “He’s been refusing to have s-e-x. He says it’s because he’s tired and I’m pressuring him, but I think he’s punishing me for being mad.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s not the usual configuration for that problem.”

  “I know,” she said. “I should have brought that up when he was fretting about his manhood.”

  “What happens?” I asked. “Do you do the rub-and-touch thing, and he gives you that look, that oh-no-not-now look?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s exactly the reverse. It’s exactly the look I’ve given.” She demonstrated, her expression a wary recoil. “It’s exactly the look you’ve given, I bet.”

  “Why do we all give the exact same look?” I said. “It’s depressing.”

  “Depressing is getting the look,” she said. “It’s my job to give the look.”

  “Nathan likes to pretend he just wants to snuggle up, you know, but then his hands start creeping—” I heard my use of the present tense and stopped. For a moment I’d forgotten I was now outside of the normal conversations of wives, the complaints about husbands that again and again reveal the surprise of our commonality, the ordinary sameness of our lives. The looks we all give. The arguments we all have.

  “I guess it gives me more sympathy for them, to be the rejected one,” she said. “But I’d like to go back to being the woman. If I’m going to get the look, I think he should do the child care.”

  Daniel was a good-looking guy—he had bright green eyes and the lithe build of an actor—and it was odd to picture him with that look on his face, as I did as soon as I saw him. He was waiting at a table when we got to the restaurant. Helen and I had sat on the couch a long time feeling already exhausted by the steps necessary to departure—the trips to the potty and the diapering and the gathering of bottles and bibs and sippy cups and toys. He expressed no annoyance at our late arrival. He had two high chairs waiting, and crayons and kids’ cups of milk, and after he kissed the tops of his children’s heads, Helen’s mouth, my cheek, he said he’d gone ahead and ordered assorted items off the children’s menu so the kids wouldn’t have to wait. These days I counted such thoughtfulness as a seduction technique. Helen seemed jostled out of her bad mood. When she leaned across Ian to kiss Daniel again, I found, suddenly, that I could hardly look at them. For the first time it occurred to me that it might be difficult to be around them, engaged in their own version of the more or less happy life I had so recently thought I had. We had so much in common, Helen and I, we had for so long, and now my life had jolted right off the track that hers continued to chug along.

  They kissed. She was talking to me, but just for a moment she let her hand rest on his shoulder. He fed her a bite of his food. They retained the necessary ability to move in and out of irritation and companionability, offense and forgiveness, distance and intimacy, the ability that keeps a marriage going, the ability I perhaps no longer had. To know something and yet live as though we don’t know it, the way we all do, friends, parents and children, husbands and wives. How many secrets had I been told about the marriages of my friends and my friends’ friends? The couple who shoved each other in a drunken argument. The couple who confessed to each other they were sorry they’d ever had the children. The husband who told his wife he was paying the bills, until she came home to an eviction notice on their apartment door. The one who threatened suicide. I glimpsed the depths of other people’s lives, in which they nearly drowned, these wives who told me these stories, and then we all struggled back, gasping, to the surface. How do you know when to leave? Is it after one drunken shove? After two? Does it matter who shoved who first?

  I called Nathan after the kids went to bed. Helen and Daniel were still upstairs with their children. I paced the kitchen while his phone rang, my heart hammering in my throat. “Sarah?” Nathan said. I heard relief in his voice. Relief and gratitude. I was both sorry and glad for the way I’d made him worry.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Are you OK?” he said. “Are the kids OK?”

  “Everybody’s fine.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Austin.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “Why would you go all the way there?’

  I shrugged, though he couldn’t see me. “You wanted me to be unconventional.”

  “That’s not exactly what I meant.”

  “Well,” I said. “That’s what you got.”

  There was a long silence. Was he struggling, on the other end of the phone, against the urge to yell at me? Or was he just stunned? “We’re at Helen’s,” I said.

  Another silence. “How is Helen?” he asked, finally.

  “She’s fine. She’s good. She got mugged last week.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, but she’s fine. Her foot is scraped up. She actually refused to let go of her bag and the guy dragged her.”

  “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me,” he said.

  “That’s our Helen,” I said. In the silence that followed I felt certain we were both thinking the same thing, hearing the echo of that loaded word our. “How’s Kate?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He sounded miserable. “I didn’t see her.”

  “Oh. I thought that was the whole reason I was going out of town. So you could see her.”

  “I didn’t want you to find out she was here.”

  “Obviously.”

  “No, I mean, she was insisting on seeing me, and I was afraid…”

  “That she’d boil my bunny?”

  “No,” he said.

  “But you were planning to see her, right? Before I left.”

  “Not to…not for any…” He took a breath. “I just wanted to make sure I didn’t have any feelings for her. I wanted to know why…why I let things happen.”

  “Things?” I said. “Things with an s?”

  “If that’s why I let something happen,” he said. “It was only one time.”

  “Only one time,” I repeated, and he met me with silence again. “I don’t know whether to believe anything you say anymore. Do you know that I just used to assume you were telling me the truth? And now I can’t?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That might be the worst thing about this, the thought that maybe everything you’ve ever told me was a lie.”

  “It wasn’t,” he said. “You know it wasn’t.”

  Everything that I’m trying to achieve, I’m trying to do with you or for you, he’d said once, when we were making up after a fight. I want you to think well of me. Without
you my accomplishments don’t mean a thing. “Did you tell them to go ahead with the book?”

  “Yes.”

  “So that’s it, then.”

  “That’s what you told me to do. And then you left. I don’t know if we’re going to have any other source of income. And I can’t keep jerking them around.”

  “I know all that.”

  “So what do you mean, that’s it then?”

  “I mean that’s it. Everyone will know.”

  “It’s fiction, Sarah. I mean, yes, OK, but essentially it’s fiction.”

  “Apparently,” I said.

  “Apparently what?”

  “It depends on what the definition of it is.”

  He sighed. “I’m just doing what you told me to do,” he said. “I don’t know what else—”

  “I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” I said, and I hung up the phone. I stood there in somebody else’s kitchen, in somebody else’s house, in somebody else’s town. He wanted to know if he had feelings for her. He thought he might. He’d said nothing to suggest he’d decided he didn’t. He hadn’t even asked me when I was coming home.

  I heard Helen’s footsteps on the stairs. I put the phone down on the counter and went to meet her. “Let’s go get cigarettes,” I said. “Let’s sit outside and smoke. Or let’s go to a bar and sit at the bar and smoke and drink martinis.”

  “Martinis?” Helen said. She picked up the remote and collapsed on the couch, and half an hour later we were still there, staring at the television with the same stunned expressions that had earlier decorated our children’s faces. Daniel had yet to emerge from putting Ian to bed, and Helen said he’d probably fallen asleep himself. We were watching the news, and the news was bad. “Everybody talks about how complacent Americans are,” Helen said. “But I didn’t really grasp that until lately. How complacent we’ve been. What if Daniel lost his job? What would we do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. My throat was tightening, tightening. “Can we watch something else?”

  She clicked the TV off with a sigh, tossed the remote on the coffee table.