Husband and Wife Read online

  “Why don’t you go by yourself?” I asked.

  “I want you to come.” She turned the volume on her voice up a notch, and I could see by the set of her jaw that my choices were to acquiesce or face down a tantrum. At that moment the baby shrieked. He woke up demanding, unlike his sister, who as a baby had lain in the crib babbling happily to herself until we went in to get her. “Mom,” Mattie said. “Your baby’s crying.”

  “Let’s just lie here,” I said, “and pretend he’s not.”

  She regarded me a moment.

  “Ignorance is bliss, little goose,” I said.

  “But he is crying,” she said. “He is.”

  “I know.”

  “He is crying.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  I changed the baby’s diaper—an operation he protested vehemently every morning, firm in his belief that no activity should come before his milk—and took the kids into the kitchen, glancing, as we passed it, at the half-open door to Mattie’s room, through which I could see only a pile of half-naked baby dolls on the floor, a jumble of limbs. In the kitchen I looked for the advance copies of Nathan’s book—they had been on the table where we dumped the mail—but there was no sign of them either.

  Mattie had some Cheerios and Binx had some milk and then some Cheerios, and I ventured a few tiny swallows of water. Nathan slept on, or maybe he lay there listening to Mattie say that she wanted to wear her striped dress and her party shoes, to Binx bang the tray of his high chair and shout, “Ah! Bwah!”—normal, everyday sounds from the normal, everyday scene that suddenly felt as fragile as a bubble headed for a pin. I was as alert to sounds of Nathan waking as I normally was to sounds of the baby. Part of me waited, and listened, and tried to guess what would happen when he finally emerged, while Mattie chattered happily and my hangover increased in amplitude and the strain of being on watch became increasingly difficult to bear.

  Then I heard him stirring. A thump. A rustling. I tried to identify the movements that made the sounds. I heard him cross the hall into the bathroom. The toilet flushed. Footsteps approached. I seemed to be holding my breath, like I was the girl in the closet and he was the guy with the knife.

  “Hi, Daddy,” Mattie said, as casually as ever. Nathan stood in the kitchen doorway. Instead of his usual morning garb of boxers and a bathrobe he was wearing some of his clothes from the night before, his dress shirt and his suit pants now as rumpled as if he’d first balled them up in his hands. Maybe he’d slept in them. We looked at each other and I saw trepidation in his face. Like I was the guy with the knife.

  My voice, when I spoke, was surprisingly neutral. “Good morning,” I said.

  He took a breath. Surprised? Relieved? Who knew what the hell he was thinking? “Good morning,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Extremely unwell,” I said. He flinched. “By which I mean hungover.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I thought that might be the case. I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “Thanks.” I’d made no conscious decision to be so formal, but now I seemed to have committed to the mode and couldn’t swerve from it. We were like two embarrassed college freshmen in a morning-after dorm room. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “No hangover,” he said, which was not, I noted, an answer to the question. “I didn’t drink that much.”

  “Mommy doesn’t want me to drink too much,” Mattie said.

  “Oh, no?” Nathan said. His eyes darted to her face, like he was relieved to have an excuse to take them from mine. He went to her, moving fast, scooped her out of her chair, and hugged her hard. “Who’s my little goose?” he said. “Who’s my goose?”

  “I’m not a goose!” Mattie said. “I’m a kitty.” She meowed, and Nathan meowed back.

  I looked at Binx, who was grinning at the two of them, spasming his body in delight. “Ah!” he shouted, and Nathan turned and shouted it back and Binx laughed, and Mattie did, too.

  “Nathan,” I said. “What happened to your galleys?”

  He looked at me, the smile dropping off his face. “I threw them away,” he said. My gaze went to the kitchen trash can, and he said, “Not in there. Outside. In the Dumpster.”

  We didn’t have trash pick-up, out in the county as we were, and so we had a big plastic storage bin outside, which we referred to as the Dumpster and treated as such, and when it got full Nathan hauled the disgusting, odiferous bags to the dump. Sometimes in hot weather he neglected this task long enough for maggots to erupt. “Outside?” I repeated. “With the maggots?”

  “Yes,” he said, and looked at me in such an intense and serious way I understood that throwing the books away was not, as I’d first thought, an attempt to keep me from searching for clues, but an attempt to prove to me that his offer not to publish had been genuine. He would, symbolically, throw the book away. He was willing to say that maggots were what it, and he, deserved.

  “You said it was up to me?” I said. “You’ll do whatever I want?”

  His lips moved like he was saying yes, but he didn’t quite make a sound. I felt like the judge addressing the defendant. The whole world hung on my next words.

  “I want to work it out,” I said. “I don’t want anything to change.”

  He set Mattie down, steadying her with a hand on her shoulder. Then he crossed the kitchen to me and bent to hug me, burying his face in my neck. I put one hand on his back and then the other in his hair, and something inside me let go. My whole body sighed. He dropped to his knees and held on.

  “What are you doing, Daddy?” Mattie asked.

  “I’m thanking Mommy,” he said, and I believed—I believed—that everything would be all right.

  Here is where we should have had a fade to black. But this was life, and there were no merciful cutaways, only the two of us—his chin pressing rather painfully into my clavicle, his weight bending my upper back forward in an increasingly uncomfortable way—and within seconds of that glorious moment of happy conviction I felt myself drifting back toward the restless ambiguity that characterized my emotional state at that time and for a long time after. Picture a wrestling ring. Around the edge circled relief and love and anger and despair, and every so often a couple of them jumped into the ring and tangled and one of them emerged the victor, but mostly it was just them circling that blank gray ring in the center, the empty battleground.

  Still, in that moment, with his breath warm against my skin, my hand in his hair, I wanted relief and love to stay with me. I willed them to. I thought of standing in the backyard with Nathan during a nighttime snowfall, years before, both of us with our faces turned up to watch the snow come down. He said, “Light speed,” and I knew what he meant—that the sensation of watching those white flakes fall toward us, catching the light from our bright warm house behind, was like those moments in the Star Wars movies when they jump to light speed and all the stars rush in. But none of that needed to be explained, because we had the same mind.

  “Why are you thanking Mommy?” Mattie said, and then, when Nathan didn’t immediately respond, she said it again, louder.

  “Um,” he said, lifting his face. While I’d been watching the snow in our backyard, he’d clearly gone someplace too, a place from which it was a struggle to return. The thing about children, we’d often noted, is that they drag you relentlessly back to the here and now, which in our childless days Nathan and I had spent much of our lives escaping.

  Matttie started bouncing on the balls of her feet, chanting, “Ay-ay-ay,” in a robotic, unnatural voice. This was a tactic she used to get our attention, because, as much as we tried to hide it, she knew it drove us crazy.

  “Hey, Mattie,” Nathan said. He pushed off me, and squatted at her level.

  “Ay-ay-ay,” she said into his face, her teeth bared like a little animal’s.

  “What would you like to do today?”

  This question stopped her. She cocked her head. “Why are we not going to school today?�
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  “Today is not a school day,” he said. “It’s Sunday.”

  “Why is it Sunday?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned and went over to her play refrigerator, whispering to herself as she opened the door. Now that she had his attention, she felt free to wander away. In that we seemed to be alike.

  The baby ran out of the Cheerios he’d been happily eating and began to cry. Nathan scooped him out of the high chair and lifted him into the air. “Can you shake your head?” he said, demonstrating, and Binx shook his head wildly in return, laughing, showing his one hillbilly tooth. “So,” Nathan said without looking at me, “do you still want to go to that festival, or do you feel too sick? Because I could just take the kids if you want to nap or something.”

  For a moment I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I remembered—there was a street fair in Chapel Hill, the sort of thing Nathan hated and which, up until this moment, he’d been strenuously refusing to go to, leading to the sort of argument in which I said he was only thinking of himself and not of the children’s pleasure and he said I was stressing everyone out by insisting we do so-called fun things with the kids when they’d be just as happy at home. Now he was not only offering to go, but offering to take both kids by himself. I swear if a hair shirt had been available, he’d have donned it in an instant.

  “That sounds good,” I said. “Let’s all go.”

  “Mattie,” Nathan cried, “we’re going to a festival!” And she, who probably had no idea what a festival was, caught the excitement in his voice and began to do what we called her happy dance, her little feet flying, and Nathan swung the baby in circles, and the baby shouted, “Ah!” and Mattie and Nathan shouted it back, all three of them laughing. I realized I was holding onto the seat of my chair with both hands, as if to keep myself in it. I looked at this delightful domestic scene—two children and their adoring father—and my heart broke and broke again. I thought, I’m a mother. A mother, a mother, a mother. I thought, Remember this. This is what you’re trying to keep.

  Funnel cakes and African dancers and bongos and beaded necklaces. Mattie was at her most delightful, dancing to the music and announcing to everyone that she was three and obsessed with party shoes, both of our children eliciting from strangers those high-wattage smiles you never see until you go out into the world toting a baby. Nathan pushed the stroller and I held Mattie’s hand, and every so often Nathan reached for my free hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed it. The sun was out and the air was crisp. The fatty, greasy funnel cake had helped ease my hangover, and it was hard to remember why I’d ever held anything against anyone. We saw one of the other children from Mattie’s preschool, a sweet, shy blond boy who liked to tell Mattie he loved her and hug her tightly, attentions she seemed to accept with a certain amount of perplexity. His parents were about our age, and they had a baby girl about Binx’s age, and we stood together chatting in a pleased mirror reflection of each other while the preschoolers ran circles around us. Binx demanded to be picked up, so I held him near the other baby. They smiled at each other and touched hands, and then Binx put both his hands on her shoulders, leaned in, and gave her the gentlest of kisses on the mouth.

  “Oh, so you love her, and her brother loves your sister,” the father said. “This is going to work out well.”

  The mother laughed. “Boys start early, don’t they?” she said.

  “And they never stop,” the father said. I laughed, but this more-or-less innocent moment gave me a pang, and for a little while my throat closed up again, and I had to watch the babies intensely because I couldn’t look at anyone else, tears behind my eyes. Look at those babies, though. A moment I could live in, watching little fingers meet and part, the joy of those gummy smiles.

  When I could join in the conversation again, I looked up at the parents and thought how happy they looked together, noting the fond glances, the casual touches, the way she leaned against him when he made a joke. Hadn’t I heard that they’d had problems in the past? That at one point they’d come close to divorcing? Or was I making the whole thing up? I didn’t know, but I decided to see them as survivors of a near-catastrophe, now firmly bonded together in the way Nathan and I were from here on out to be. When we walked away from them, in search of the balloon-animal maker they’d told us about, I took Nathan’s hand. He had to push the stroller with one hand and hold mine with the other, which made for awkward maneuvering, but he held on anyway, until Mattie spotted our target and ran ahead, and I had to let go.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I knew my husband. I was confident of that. No matter what, I knew him. I knew that he didn’t like tomatoes until he was twenty-five. I knew that after we saw The Matrix he cried out, “Keanu!” in his sleep, and then insisted that I’d misheard. I knew that his voice softened and his jokes grew sillier in the presence of cute girls, and I knew that this was less true now than when I first met him, so that no one but me might detect the change. There was no undoing my knowledge of him. Mattie would be sure to tell me, when she was sixteen or so, “You don’t know me!” and she’d be wrong, because I’d always know how her voice sounded—weirdly authoritative despite its high pitch—when she was three and said, “From now on when I’m naughty I want to decide my punishment.” And maybe I’d say to Nathan, ten years after our divorce, if we got one, that he didn’t know me anymore, and I’d be wrong, because he’d always know what animal sounds I made in labor, he’d always know I was ticklish only in the arches of my feet. We want to be known when we do, and we want to be unknown when we don’t, just like we want someone to touch us and kiss us until we don’t anymore. We make our bodies off-limits again, but still that other person did touch us, he ran his fingers down our inner thighs, he slipped his tongue inside our mouth.

  Nathan, my Nathan. He was so careful, even self-righteous, about what we owe to others, the sort to overpay when it came to splitting the bill, rather than risk shorting someone, or, perhaps even worse, risk confronting them about their own stingy inclination to put in two dollars less than they owed. He’d once refused to eat a thirty-dollar roast he’d accidentally overcooked because he said he’d ruined it. He’d made what should have been rare and tender into something tough and common, he said, and he threw the meat thermometer into the garbage, claiming it had betrayed him, and it was only my intervention that stopped him from tossing the roast in after it. Finally, after much discussion, he agreed to cut it up and use it for sandwiches. Hard to believe that this person could have not only cheated on me but written a book about having done so, and then could go on living with that brand of ruination now, could make oatmeal for everyone in the morning and remember that I didn’t want raisins in mine. I was relieved, of course. I ate my oatmeal and watched Nathan read the Times, absentmindedly doling out Cheerios to Binx, and debated with Mattie the wearing of sundresses when it was under sixty degrees. I was relieved.

  What was it, after all, that could be said to be ruined? I’d rubbed Binx’s head and kissed Nathan good-bye and dropped Mattie at preschool with five magic hugs and five magic kisses, and now I was driving the usual way to work, the usual trees flying by outside my window. Life was going on as it always did. In troubled times, I still had my children and my house and my job and apparently my marriage, and as long as no one found out what had happened, Nathan could still have his book, and I wouldn’t have to fork over $50,000 like a blackmail victim. I wasn’t going to look at the book, I wasn’t going to think about the book, the book would be published, the book might bring in some money and so was just a means to an end. Fiction, fiction, it was all fiction. I still loved Nathan, and he said he still loved me. I believed that if Nathan could keep it together, everything would be fine. I didn’t give much thought to whether I could keep it together. I was used to the answer to that question being, on a large scale, yes, automatically yes, no need to even ask. The ability to keep it together was my essential quality.

  It wasn’t as though we’d lived together, in the years be
fore this, in an eternal bliss of peaceful intimacy. I knew as well as anyone the rhythms of life with another person, the days of kisses, casual touches, easy familiarity, the days of snappish voices, rolling eyes, weary familiarity, the way that as one state of being gave way to another, the other seemed distant and fantastical. I’d thought, How could I ever have married you? And I’d thought, How could I ever have been mad at you? And then I’d thought those things again and again and again.

  This was different. No, it wasn’t different. The offense was larger, yes, than any previous ones. So what? Husbands, wives—countless others had survived it.

  He said he still loved me. The ruination was in my phrasing. He still loved me. I corrected myself. He loved me. That was what he’d said.

  What is it, anyway, this thing that we keep together, or lose?

  And then, at last, I was at my desk, in my safe, functional office with its ergonomic rolling chair, everything I needed to know neatly labeled in a file. I sipped the coffee I’d made an hour ago but not yet tasted—still hot, in the heavy-duty travel mug Nathan had bought me—and watched the e-mail messages pop up on my computer screen. A normal day. At work it was just a normal day.

  I had never cheated on Nathan. Why not? I could have. I could have chosen to. Like anyone I’d had those moments—too much to drink, the man lighting your cigarette, meeting your gaze a little too long. There had been that guitar player promising he’d teach me to like Rush, if I just gave him a chance, that French poet murmuring about my eyes, my smile. And there had been Rajiv.