Husband and Wife Page 3

  “This is the writing life,” I said to Helen.

  “Apparently,” she said.

  “God help us,” said a male voice, and we turned to see a guy wearing an old Pixies T-shirt and grinning at us. Nathan. His hair was long then, to his shoulders, and he had facial hair that might have been the deliberate beginnings of a beard or might have been just a few too many days without a shave. “Can I join you behind the table?” he asked. “I don’t like it out here.”

  Obligingly we edged farther behind the table to make room for him. He surveyed the food on offer, cheap graduate student fare—chips and salsa, nuts, Goldfish crackers. “What are we, five?” he asked, spotting the bowl of crackers. He picked it up and offered it to us, and we each took a handful and crunched. “They’re actually pretty good,” he said. He poured himself a cup of the pink stuff and washed down his crackers. “This is something alcoholic anyway,” he said, holding the cup up to the light. “So.” He looked us each in the face, seriously, as though taking our measure. “Who are your favorite writers?”

  “We’re poets,” I said.

  He laughed. “Poets are writers, aren’t they? You use words. You write them down.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I type them. I’m a typer.”

  “On a typewriter?” he asked.

  “God, no,” I said.

  “This is the computer age,” Helen added.

  “I write on a typewriter,” he said. “That’s why I asked.” He moved his fingers like they were on a keyboard. “I like the clackety-clack,” he said. It was incredibly dorky and yet endearing, and, too, there was something attractive about the sort of confidence Nathan had, the kind that allowed him to be incredibly dorky in a way that suggested that he knew he was being dorky and just didn’t care.

  “You should talk to the guy who lives here,” Helen said. “He’s a typewriter romantic, too. There’s one on the kitchen table, an old manual. He typed a line of poetry, and he wants everybody to contribute their own.”

  “I can’t decide,” I said. “Is that cool, or is it pretentious and stupid?”

  “It’s cool,” Nathan said. “Even if it’s pretentious and stupid. I mean, come on, this guy is so into poetry he’s making it communal, he’s making it a party game. You could say he’s doing it self-consciously, but who cares? I’d rather see somebody self-consciously trying to share a love of language and be an artist than self-consciously refusing to do anything that’s not one hundred percent cool.”

  “Are you scolding us?” I asked.

  “Was I?” He looked genuinely alarmed. “I didn’t mean to. Here, let me fill your cups.” He grabbed the ladle from the punch bowl. “Drink up, drink up,” he said, slopping out more pink stuff. “Then you’ll forget anything I said. You might even start to think I’m cute.”

  “You are cute,” I said, and then I grinned at him. I could feel the smile on my face, and I knew it was the biggest, most genuine version I had.

  “You know,” Helen said, her mind still on our host, “he’s still trying to be cool. He’s trying to be bohemian cool, Left Bank cool, instead of ‘I refuse to be a poseur’ cool.”

  “You’re right, you’re right,” Nathan said, but his eyes stayed on me, and his smile, too, I could tell, was his best and brightest one.

  I wrote poems about him, for God’s sake. I even brought them into workshop, thinking somehow that nobody would know what they were about, even though it was a small program and everybody knew we were an item. I remember a line from a poem about Nathan just out of the shower: “Warm, warm and wet, his soft furred belly.” Embarrassing stuff. The poet teaching our class that semester was thrilled. She loved the sensual in poetry—she said “sensual” with an unsettling emphasis on the s’s, as though the word itself stirred her blood—and I got a lot of unwarranted praise for my work just by virtue of being unable to turn my attention to subjects other than my new boyfriend. The way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled. The space on his neck that was so sensitive he cringed away, laughing, before my lips even touched it. The curls in his hair, which snagged and held my fingers. I loved him madly, and I loved the poetry I wrote about him, and so did he. He loved that I inspired his stories, which he wrote feverishly in the middle of the night. How lucky we felt to have found each other. How deeply understood and understanding we felt. My God. The reverence with which we gazed into one another’s eyes.

  I don’t know what it’s like to be in your twenties and not want to be an artist, but I can tell you that when you’re in your twenties and you do want to be an artist and you find a community of like-minded types, it’s a pretty heady time. It’s all hope and anticipation and a conviction of your own potential greatness, and you know that nobody reads poetry anymore, but you think maybe somehow in some inchoate way you haven’t bothered to articulate to yourself that your poetry might change all that. Helen said to me not long before Nathan broke his awful news that adulthood had been all about a gradual lowering of her expectations, and I agreed, but when I thought of all of us at that unsuspecting time, I didn’t feel sorry for us. I didn’t think we were fools. I didn’t want to go back there either, but I suspected that Nathan did. After I found out he’d cheated, I was certain I was right. I imagined that he’d said to this woman, as he’d once said to me, “Literature is my religion,” and she’d gazed at him with the intense understanding of a fellow zealot, instead of saying, “Did you feed the baby a snack? Why not? Why do I have to remind you every single time to feed the baby a snack?”

  When I learned that Nathan had cheated on me, I supposed that if I were still a poet, my subject would again be him. For several years it wasn’t, and then of course I stopped writing. But even if I’d been writing at the time, it wouldn’t have been about him. It would have been about my children, I thought, or what had become of my body, because I’d always been inclined toward the personal. Or maybe I would have taken to writing what Helen and I called “flowerpot poems” about the hummingbirds at the feeder outside my window, or the fungus tree. But the cheating—that would have made me go back to writing about Nathan. The way he held his shoe in both hands when he told me. Or maybe I’d have changed that detail. I didn’t know. What was the best way to talk about heartbreak? Would it be better if the detail was more in keeping with the content of the moment, if I gave him something unavoidably symbolic, like a knife, to hold? Or was the contrast of that insignificant shoe to those significant words the way to go?

  I wondered how my old poetry teacher would feel about my work, if I still wrote it, if Nathan was still and once again all I could talk about. We gain love, we lose love. We tell what stories we have.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Before Nathan’s confession, my primary concern about the wedding, besides our inevitable lateness, had been that I looked fat in my dress. I still had ten pounds of baby weight to lose, but more importantly my second pregnancy had stretched out the skin around my midsection in a way I feared was grotesque, but which Nathan swore was normal, and fine, and no reason for immediate and expensive plastic surgery. Just a few days before the wedding I’d been flipping channels and seen a promo for an afternoon talk show about postpartum bellies. They’d shown photos of the guests’ stomachs, wrinkled as crumpled tissue paper, and the audience gasped in horror—genuine horror—at the sight, as if the photos were of deformed babies, or victims of a war. This intensified my feeling that what had happened to my body was a shameful, terrible secret, had somehow made a monster out of me—just in time for me to put on a dress and go out in public among people who would no doubt discuss how I looked, not because my friends were especially superficial but because all people discuss how other people look, especially women. And I cared what they would say. And it made me angry that I cared. And now I felt like this discussion of how I looked would be augmented by discussion of whether my appearance had any relationship to Nathan’s infidelity, even though that infidelity had happened more than a year before, and in all the mental confu
sion I started to feel angry at Nathan for drawing more attention to my shape.

  “Don’t tell anyone about this,” I said to Nathan. We were still in the car, about halfway to the wedding, and this was the first thing either of us had said since we pulled out of the drive. “I don’t want people thinking about whether you cheated on me because of the way I look.”

  “That’s cra—” He stopped, seemed to think better of it.

  “I’m allowed to be crazy,” I said. I gripped the door handle as if the ride was wild, which it wasn’t. Nathan is a very safe driver. He can be counted on for that.

  “You’re right,” he said.

  “You just wrecked my life,” I said. “I’m allowed to be crazy.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t tell me I’m crazy,” I said. “Don’t tell anyone what’s going on.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “I won’t.”

  “Good,” I said. Out the window the sky went on looking bright and golden, and the trees dropped their leaves as we rolled by.

  There was another, more important, reason that I didn’t want anyone to know, but it was a reason I didn’t want to voice to him. If he didn’t leave, if I didn’t leave, if I kept him and he kept me, if we were able to keep each other—and at that moment, despite everything, I wanted this so badly I thought the wanting might turn me inside out—I knew just what sort of talk this would provoke among our friends and family, and I shuddered at the thought. Should we or shouldn’t we, they’d ask, and would he again, and was I weak to stay with him or was I strong, and how could I, and well, the children, and on and on it would go, as we became a small-time tabloid sensation for everyone we knew. I’d known that a book called Infidelity would make people ask, if not us, then each other, whether Nathan might have strayed. I had joked about it, and Nathan had laughed, and I would have noticed, wouldn’t I, if there had been anything pained in that laugh? It was one thing to laugh, to shrug, at the notion of everybody’s wrong idea, and entirely another to imagine the way they would read that book if they knew, the way they’d search it—as I was doing in my head now, as I knew I’d do later with the book in my hands—for evidence, for truth. They’d wait for it like those eager readers of the nineteenth century had waited for the next installment of Dickens.

  I looked fat in my dress, and I wasn’t a poet anymore. I had a role in the world, OK, sure, but not in the writing world, not anymore, not like in grad school when it didn’t matter that a fiction writer might make money someday and a poet never would, when we were all writers and that was what mattered, we were the same. Now I was Nathan’s wife. His betrayed, blinkered, stretched-out wife. If the truth came out and that book came out, everyone would look at me, and that was what they’d see. I couldn’t let him publish it, not if I stayed with him, not if people knew. Maybe he could publish it if I left him. Because if it sold like the publisher thought it would, that money would help support our children, and could I take that away? Could I allow myself to take that away? Maybe he could publish it and I could stay with him if nobody ever knew, if I could manage to pretend that I never knew. Fiction, fiction, all of it was fiction.

  “Oh, God,” I said, as all of this hit me like a wave. I couldn’t breathe. I felt hot and cold at once. I thought, I’m going to have to divorce him, and simultaneously I thought, I can’t, I can’t. I struggled against those two opposing currents. I drowned. Then, thankfully, the wave receded. I told myself everything would be all right. We could work it out. We’d always worked things out. Over and over in the days before my day job I’d thought us on the brink of financial ruin, and yet we’d never been ruined. Perseverance was the key, perseverance and faith.

  “Do you still love me?” I asked, as though I was just now following up on what he’d said as we got in the car. Two hours ago it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to ask this question. Now I heard how tremulous my voice sounded when I did. I stared at his profile. The corners of his mouth turned down, as in a child’s drawing of a sad face.

  “Of course I do,” he said, but this time he didn’t sound sure, and I said so. “It’s just…” He shot a look at me, gripped the wheel with both hands. “Sometimes, part of me wishes I didn’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I wish I could say I didn’t love you, or we were unhappy, or I was in love with her. At least then I’d have a reason for doing what I did.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That would be much better.” “You’re gazing at me adoringly!” I used to cry, when I caught him looking at me, and he’d deny it, and then I’d insist that he stop, that he was freaking me out, and I’d pretend to flee his presence, and he’d chase me and tickle me and fix me with wide eyes, a goofy smile, and say, “I love you, I love you, I love you, you can’t get away.”

  “Let me go!” I’d shriek, laughing and squirming. “Let me go!”

  “I’m sorry,” he said now. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I don’t really mean any of that. I love you. I just feel so bad.”

  I said nothing, though what I wanted to say was, Yes, you love me, you do, and how could you ever for one moment wish that away? I wanted to list every profound or merely pleasant moment I could think of in the last six months. I wanted to remind him of the birth of our children. I wanted to make a speech on the enduring value of our marriage, the importance of our family—because it wasn’t just about us, we were a family—and that desire reminded me that at the wedding we were supposed to give a toast, the two of us, together, because our friends the bride and groom had asked us to.

  I’d forgotten, when I’d been envisioning how awful it would be to send the babysitter home, to envision how awful it would be to stand in front of a hundred people with Nathan and attest to the joys of marriage, taking turns reading lines of the toast we’d written, which was both humorous and sentimental and which Nathan had been editing up until that very morning. I thought, I don’t think I can give that toast.

  “Everything’s such a mess,” Nathan said. “I don’t think I can give the toast.”

  There are things that are wonderful until they’re awful, and our tendency to think the same thing at the same time was suddenly one of them. He had no right to know what I was thinking, not when I’d so radically failed to know what was on his mind. Abruptly I was as annoyed with him as I’d been thirty minutes before, when I still believed our relationship secure. I was disgusted and scornful and sharp as a tack. “If we go to the wedding, we have to give the toast,” I said.

  “Then I don’t want to go to the wedding,” he said. “I can’t give that toast.” His eyes were welling up again. “I’ll feel like a fraud. I’m a terrible person. I’ve hurt you, I’ve hurt the children. All I ever wanted to do was—”

  “All you ever wanted to do was what?” I snapped. “Was what?”

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  “Let me tell you how it’s going to be,” I said. “We’re going to stand up and make this toast and act like there’s nothing on our minds but how much we love our friends and how happy they’re going to be. We’re going to read every line just like we wrote it because we are not going to ruin their wedding with our problems. And after that we’ll go home and we’ll work this out, we’ll work all this out, we just have to work it out.” I was using the matter-of-fact voice I used to calm the hysterical at work, as though fixing the mess he’d made were equivalent to making changes to the budget or finding extra classroom space, calling someone to come fix the copier again. The problem we had was just a problem, and we would solve it. If I believed that, I could stay calm, could endure this wedding, could make this toast. Could smile. If I believed otherwise, then the life I thought I had had been nothing but a thin layer of ice over a bottomless despair, and with one wrong step we’d plunge so far down we’d never see the light again. And if that was the case, then all there was to do was sink.

  Sink, I thought, and then something new occurred to me. “Nathan,” I asked, “if you don’t publish
the book, will we have to give the money back?” By “money” I meant his advance, of which he’d already received $50,000, much of which was gone, gone, gone.

  “Oh, God,” he said, and I knew that he, too, had failed to think of this. “Oh, God,” he said again. “I think we would.”

  We were actually responsible for this wedding. We’d been friends with Alex; we’d been friends with Adam; we’d introduced them. One morning after a party at our house that had lasted well after I’d gone to bed, I found them entwined on our couch. They were tall people—both of them topped six feet—and our couch was small, so this was a sight to see. I was several months pregnant with Binx. My back hurt. My hips hurt. My feet were starting to swell. When I saw them on my couch, clutching each other even in sleep, for a moment I fell out of time. I might have been in graduate school, I might have been in college, I might have been curled up on a couch with Nathan, clutching him just like that. I remembered how that felt. What brought me back to the present was the thought that I didn’t want my two-year-old to see Mommy and Daddy’s friends clinched half-naked in the living room in a John-and-Yoko pose. I was a mom. That’s when I knew it. Not Mama, as you are at first, when having a baby doesn’t preclude wearing a funky T-shirt to the food co-op, baby kicking her feet in the Bjorn. Mom. Mom who gets handed the used-up gum on car trips. From now on that was me.