Husband and Wife Page 4

  The wedding was outside, at an old farm now rented out for events. Alex and Adam had chosen the location largely because they could have a live band there—Adam was a musician, as were many of his friends, and a number of them were to play—and because the climate was temperate enough in North Carolina that an outdoor wedding in October seemed a good bet. By the time we arrived, though, hustling through a field from the dirt parking lot, the gold in the sky was darkening, the clouds standing up like belligerents considering a fight, and I feared Mrs. Dodson had been right about the weather. The rows of white folding chairs were set up under a canopy, the food inside the small barn, but if the skies opened up, the ground would turn muddy and the music would have to move inside, and the guests would get wet going between the tent and the barn. The vision Alex and Adam had had for their wedding—of sunset giving way to the twinkling light coming from globes strung between the trees, guests drifting through the field with drinks in hand while light breezes toyed fetchingly with the women’s skirts and hair and musicians sang songs of love—would come to naught. “I hope it doesn’t rain,” I said to Nathan, a normal comment I would have made if we were still living our normal lives.

  He turned to me, his face distraught, like he was lost in a city where he didn’t speak the language. “What?” he said. I didn’t repeat myself. I didn’t ask what he’d been thinking about.

  The bassist in Adam’s band was sitting in front of the rows of chairs, playing Cat Stevens on his acoustic guitar. The minister stood with her arms at her sides, smiling beatifically. Everyone was in their seats except us and Erica and Josh, another perpetually late couple who were right behind us. Erica’s heel sank into the earth, and when she stepped out of her shoe she let out a startled, muffled scream, loud enough to make the wedding crowd turn to stare at us. Coworkers, parents, aunts and uncles, college friends—this motley assortment of people gathered once and never again—they looked at us as one and thought, Who the hell are these people? I knew it was some brand of hallucination—I knew many of my own close friends were among that group—but none of those faces looked familiar, and not a one looked friendly. They could see what we brought with us, smoke trails of unhappiness, one enormous dose of bad luck.

  We slipped into back-row seats. Erica gave me a sheepish, commiserating smile, and I did my best to return it, hoping my face conveyed no other concern but that we were, once again, late. I always blamed Nathan for our lateness, but we’d been together so long I no longer truly remembered whether I’d been prompt without him. I supposed if I were right, and we divorced, I’d start being on time. If not, I’d be divorced, and late, and wrong.

  Alex and Adam had no attendants, and nobody gave anybody away. They walked up the aisle together, not even arm in arm but hand in hand—“like hippies,” Alex had told me, quoting her mother. We, the guests, stood, the way we always do, and I smiled in the general direction of the aisle, in case Alex happened to look over and see me. I was having trouble experiencing the proper emotions—the rush of romantic feeling, the aesthetic pleasure of seeing people in dress-up clothes. Alex did look beautiful. Her dress was long and strapless and white. Earlier that day, when I’d taken her to get a pedicure, she and I had laughed and laughed because her friend from Germany had asked, “Are you going to wear white, like a real virgin?” I remembered the laughing as though it had happened a very long time ago, and yet it had been only a few hours earlier, which meant that time, the time before Nathan told me, was still accessible, still present, still possible. The hem of Alex’s dress was collecting dirt, and the wind picked up.

  The storm held off a few more minutes, until the vows, at which point the skies opened as though God himself were objecting to the marriage. The wind whipped itself into a sudden frenzy that pulled the tent stakes from the ground. A couple of men were clinging to the tent in an effort to keep it from becoming airborne. I think a woman was screaming, although I may have been hearing a desperate, frightened human voice when it was only, after all, the wind.

  I had a narcissistic conviction that my emotions had been made manifest. Except that the weather was more like what I should have been feeling. To match my actual feelings it should have been one of those humid days when there’s no movement in the air and the sky is cloudless but tinged with gray, the whole world dulled and waiting.

  Adam held onto Alex as though the wind might blow her away. A few petals lifted off her bouquet and spun wildly in the air. I dropped my head to my knees, like a child of the 1950s in a nuclear-disaster video. I didn’t even realize I’d done it until I felt Nathan’s hand on my back. I realized this was the first time he’d touched me since he told me. Why was he doing it? To comfort me? To protect me? To apologize? I tried to pretend his hand wasn’t there, but even though the wind summoned goose bumps on my bare legs and the rain slanted in under the tent to give us cold, hard kisses, the weight of his hand was all I could feel.

  I don’t know how long it lasted. When it was over, it was totally over, the storm gone, poof, magic, as though a chorus of voices sang “Ahhhh,” the clouds parted, and a golden light shone down from heaven. A murmur of relief went through the crowd. People righted their clothes as though they’d been engaged in a fight, or hasty, backroom sex. They turned toward the front to find the bride and groom, if not their hairstyles, intact. “Welcome to marriage,” the minister said.

  And then it was the cocktail hour, when all the guests hit the open bar and Alex and Adam posed for endless snapshots of marital bliss. A lawyer friend of Alex’s who wanted to be a writer and so always cornered Nathan showed up to corner him, and though in the normal course of things I would have attempted a rescue, I took the opportunity to slip away to the bar. I got myself a vodka martini with a twist and some company—Erica and our friend Sally, who were sitting on a bench on the outskirts of the party, their high heels already kicked off, bare feet in the grass. They both looked wrung out, as though they should have been sprawled beside a basketball court in sweaty gym shorts, rather than sitting in cocktail dresses with their knees pressed together, highball glasses sweating in their hands.

  “Kids keep you up last night?” I asked, addressing either of them, or both, and together they said, “Yes.”

  I joined them on the bench. We talked about our kids, and how Erica had read an article about pedophiles and had what she thought might have been a panic attack, and how Sally felt like she should have another kid even though she didn’t want to because she didn’t want her daughter to be an only child. We were all good friends, but we didn’t see each other as often as we once had, partly because Sally and I worked and had no time and Erica had taken to hanging out with the women in her moms’ group. I used to see Sally as indomitable, but lately she seemed flattened, as if her life was a car that had run her over. Erica, on the other hand, had been spiky with anxiety ever since she had her kids. I wondered how I seemed to them. How had I changed? From the time I was eighteen until I got pregnant I smoked cigarettes, and even after we started trying to conceive I smoked them, sneaking them on the way to work with the windows down. If Nathan ever smelled them, he pretended he hadn’t. And then I got pregnant, and the faintest whiff of cigarette smoke tortured my nose, my mouth, my stomach. Every puff I’d ever taken seemed to float before my eyes like a tiny ghost prophesying emphysema. I’d tried to smoke, once, after Mattie was born, looking to recapture that old, lost pleasure, but it was a joyless experience, the burn in my lungs, the sharp ashy taste in my mouth, the nauseous buzzing in my brain. Which was the essential self? The self who smoked cigarettes? The self who wanted to, but couldn’t, so she just stopped wanting to?

  Erica had eaten the cherry out of her drink, and now she sat twirling the stem between her forefinger and thumb. “Do you know I used to be able to tie a knot in a cherry stem with my tongue?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I said. “You used to do that all the time. It was your party trick.”

  She looked at me with astonishment. “Really?”
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  “You don’t remember that?”

  “Yeah,” Sally said. “Every time you got drunk you used to do that. Don’t you remember that bartender who used to call you Cherry?”

  “That is so weird,” Erica said. “I don’t remember that at all. What has happened to my brain?”

  “We thought he was creepy,” Sally said.

  Erica held up the stem, squinted at it. “I can’t do it anymore,” she said. “I don’t know why.”

  When dinner was served, Nathan came for me. Erica and Sally had already wandered off in search of their husbands. Nathan held out his hand as if to help me up from the bench, and after a moment of staring at him like I’d never seen him before, I took it. We ate in the barn, crowded together at picnic tables. I got hot and took my sweater off, and then tried to keep one arm crossed artfully over my thickened midsection. The entire length of my thigh was pressed against Nathan’s—given the seating, I couldn’t avoid this—but I did my best to ignore him, talking to everybody else. I was like a manic-depressive cycling at an alarming rate, one minute talking loud and making everyone laugh and the next staring blankly into space as an invisible hand squeezed my throat. As the meal wound down, Alex’s brother appeared at the front of the room, tapping the top of a wireless mic. The people who noticed him began to clink their silverware on their glasses, and the noise of the crowd rumbled into silence.

  “Oh, God,” Nathan said beside me, and I turned to look directly at him for what seemed like the first time in days. Beneath the table his leg began to jiggle, and the table shook in response. I put my hand on his knee, automatically, to stop him, and he turned to look at me. “I can’t do it,” he said.

  “We have to,” I said.

  Alex’s brother made a joke about the weather—the crowd laughed loudly—and then started talking about his sister. I caught the word childhood. I caught the word love.

  “Do you love her?” I said.

  “Who?” he asked. “Kate?”

  “Don’t tell me her name!” My voice shot up, and Erica glanced my way. I caught her eye, waved, smiled. Everything okay here. My heart was pounding like Nathan had just told me the day I was going to die.

  “And now,” Alex’s brother said, “we’ll hear from Nathan and Sarah.” In two strides he was in front of me, holding out the microphone. I took it. I stood. Nathan didn’t. I didn’t look at him. I looked out at the audience. That woman there—I didn’t know her, but I recognized her from Alex’s photos as a college friend. Just recently Alex had been telling me some awful story about that friend’s life, how her husband left her in the hospital after their son’s traumatic birth to go to a football game, so when she began to bleed out he wasn’t there, and if the nurse hadn’t come in, she might have died. And I’d felt pity for her, and self-righteous indignation of the Damn, I’d never put up with that variety. Now I had an absurd urge to wave at her.

  How long had this silence been going on?

  “Nathan,” I said into the microphone. The word boomed back at me. I’d said it like the beginning of a sentence, the start of something. They were all waiting. Nathan what?

  “Nathan,” I said again, but this time to him. I risked a look at him. He looked at me like I was the teacher and he was a student who hadn’t done the reading. I smiled at him, made my voice low and amused. “Are you ready to talk about marriage?” A low rumble of laughter from the audience. They thought this was part of the act, and I hoped it was. A small but maniacal part of me rooted for turning the moment into a scene from a female-empowerment movie, in which I’d announce that Nathan had cheated on me, then call for a toast, snatch somebody’s glass off the table and then somebody else’s, until I’d drained a roomful of champagne. “Nathan and I have been married four years,” I said. “We have two small children, and we’re waiting for Alex and Adam to join us in propagating the race so that they’ll start to understand why we never return their phone calls, why we want to go out to dinner at five.” More tittering.

  I looked again at Nathan, who was still sitting down, and I knew the second my eyes met his that my ability to walk the line between playful and embarrassing had just exited the building. The next thing I said into that microphone was going to be hopeless and unhinged. He must have known it.

  He said, “But that’s not the subject of the toast.”

  I said, “What do you mean?”

  He stood, leaned into the microphone. He said, in a stage whisper, “But that’s not what the toast is about, remember?”

  “What’s it about?”

  Nathan looked at the crowd, shook his head, playing it big. “We’re supposed to talk about the love.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right. The love.”

  “We’ve known Adam and Alex a long time,” Nathan said, “and we’ve spent a lot of time in their various homes.” This was the opening line of the speech we’d written.

  “So when we were thinking about their relationship,” I said, on cue, “we started talking about the kind of home Adam and Alex have already started creating together. We’d like to offer some of our predictions about what that home will be like.”

  “You will always find, on the back of every toilet, a Robert Christgau consumer guide.”

  “Unlike in our house, all the copies of the New Yorker will have actually been read.”

  “Adam will make sure that in the kitchen, the trash can is placed in a sensible relationship to the refrigerator.”

  “And that Alex always puts cut-up onions away in the proper container.”

  “Alex will make sure the bathroom never again looks like it did when Adam lived alone.”

  “There will be an abundant garden.”

  “And abundant guacamole.”

  “There will be good beer.”

  “And spirits.”

  “You will find music by the following ten thousand artists…” I took a breath, as though to begin listing them, and as we’d planned, Nathan leaned over and pretended to whisper in my ear. “Nathan says there’s not time for that. But one of the artists is Dwight Twilley.”

  And so we went on, as if we’d spent our lives treading the stage, as the toast segued from funny to sentimental. We mentioned their cooking, their tastes in books, their storytelling. We said that any child born into their house would be lucky, and tall. And then we were almost at the end. I said my second-to-last line: “When Nathan and I are at Alex and Adam’s house, it can be guaranteed that at some point in the evening I’ll look up and see Nathan and Adam standing side by side reading CD liner notes.” I used the future tense.

  Nathan said his line: “And that at some point Adam and I will glance up from reading CD liner notes, see our wives talking passionately on the couch, and think to ourselves, ‘After all this time, isn’t it nice that we married women who get along so well.’” He used the future tense.

  I said, “And we’ll know that, in the way you are when you’re with really good friends, we’re home.” Future tense.

  Nathan said, “Here’s to Alex and Adam,” and when he lifted his glass he looked at me, as though it was me he was toasting. Future tense, I thought, willing him, now, to think the same thing at the same time. Future tense. We clinked glasses. We drank.

  People applauded as we dropped, exhausted, into our seats. I felt somebody’s hand clap my shoulder—for a moment I couldn’t even remember who was sitting next to me—but I kept my head down. Nathan leaned forward like he wanted to kiss me. He put his hand on my thigh. I felt his breath against my ear as he said, “No, I don’t love her. In my whole life I’ve never loved anybody but you.”

  I put my hand on his but said nothing. They were still applauding, and I thought about the picture we must be making to people ready and willing to be moved, our heads together, my fingers tucked loosely over his.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t be sorrier. And whatever happens next is up to you.”

  “OK,” I said. I tilted my head, let it bump lightly against his.
“OK.”

  “Anything you want,” he said.

  “And now,” Alex’s brother said, “the first dance, to ‘Hallelujah,’” and I looked up.

  “I’ll do anything you want,” Nathan said.

  Alex and Adam advanced hand in hand onto the dance floor, her skirt so long she seemed to float. They rotated toward each other, placing their hands with a practiced, military precision that made them both laugh. When the music started and they took those first few steps, they smiled at each other like co-conspirators.

  “Honey,” I said. “Could you get me a drink?”

  I had two more martinis, which I shouldn’t have, because after pregnancy and months of breast-feeding my tolerance was nil. For a while I felt expansive and euphoric, prone to sweeping generalizations and declarations of affection, and in this mode I persuaded myself that my problems were eminently solvable, and was even tempted to tell my friends that, as if a public declaration would make it true. At some point I lost track of Nathan, for which I wasn’t exactly sorry, as his actual presence was a hindrance to my drunken narrative of harmony and forgiveness. I danced with my friends, noting that I was drunk enough not to feel inhibited by my unhappiness with my physique, feeling that that was a good thing until a number of bright flashes of light slowly alerted me to the presence of the wedding photographer, at which point I left the dance floor and went walkabout in the dark.

  “Psssst,” I heard, and turned to see a tall figure, the red tip of a cigarette. I heard the rustling of skirts in the grass and identified the bride, hiding in a dark corner of her wedding, drinking a beer and sneaking a forbidden smoke. “Hey, baby,” she said as I joined her. “How’s it hanging?”

  I looked at her cigarette and wished that I wanted it. “I can’t stand the smell of those anymore,” I said.