Husband and Wife Read online

  I opened my personal e-mail account. I kept a folder in it labeled “Austin Friends,” and though I’d added some e-mails from other people to it—not because Nathan was paranoid but because I was—mostly I kept it to collect the e-mails from Rajiv. Hey lady, the last one said. I’ve been rereading you, so lately you’re in my head. How are you? R. He’d written it more than a year ago, and I had never answered. Why had I never answered? There was something of the love note, of the secret, in the use of that initial rather than his name. Wasn’t there? I looked at all eleven of his e-mails. All signed like that. He’d written ten times over a period of about a year, between the last time I’d seen him and my wedding. And then once about two years ago—a brief, belated congratulations on Mattie’s birth. Then, a year ago, I’ve been rereading you. Then nothing.

  Dear Fan of Me, he’d written once, in reply to an e-mail I’d sent, congratulating him on acceptance of one of his films to a festival, a piece of news I’d gotten from Helen. Thank you for your adoration. Though Central Headquarters of Rajiv Asthana are closed today in observance of Labor Day, I nevertheless labor in this response to cast a little of my light on your life, as do my brief but dazzlingly intense films. If you have not yet experienced the profundity of my work, my wisdom, go now, to festivals across the land, and seek it out. May it be an incredible journey full of twists and turns, peaks, valleys, and plains in between. And may you, in the end, discover that the very thing for which you had been searching was right there in front of you all along. Yours ever so sincerely, R.

  And then he’d written, all alone at the very end, the small word hi.

  Didn’t he have a serious girlfriend now? Wasn’t that what Helen had said? I quit the account. I had things to do. At work it was just a normal day.

  But, no. There was no normal anymore. There was no safe. Because as I was doing my job, catching up on e-mail, my throat relaxed without my having noticed it, I was all at once visited by the memory of my drunken confession to Smith at the wedding. My throat seized shut again. Smith knew. In my own effort to forget what Nathan had told me, I’d forgotten Smith knew. And who might he have told by now? His Hitchcock girlfriend, that psycho gal? Was the word even now speeding along a network of Web designers and part-time painters and NPR fund-raisers and editors, on its way to everyone I knew? If everyone knew, and Nathan found out that everyone knew, he would crumple, and our fragile experiment would come to an end. There were few things Nathan feared more than other people thinking badly of him, and under the combined weight of guilt and judgment he wouldn’t be able to function, he wouldn’t be able to stay. He’d realize, if he hadn’t already, that publishing the book or not publishing the book was not just about me. He’d realize that he couldn’t endure a book tour if everyone knew, couldn’t endure standing behind a table piled with books that announced Infidelity, couldn’t endure the questions about how much was real, how much was true. Or could he? Could he endure that?

  I started three or four different e-mails to Smith, but it was too delicate a thing to phrase properly, and finally I surrendered to the inevitable and looked up his number at work. I didn’t have it—why would I have it? I’d never before felt the need of any communication with him that couldn’t be dispatched by e-mail. We didn’t have a phone-call friendship. At home, when I saw his name on the caller ID, I didn’t answer. I said, “It’s Smith,” and Nathan picked up the phone. Dialing his number now, I was as nervous as a twelve-year-old girl calling a boy in her Spanish class with a made-up question about the homework.

  He picked up. “This is Smith,” he said.

  “It’s Sarah,” I said. “I need to talk to you about the other night.”

  A brief silence while, perhaps, he absorbed not only what I’d said but the fact that it was me on the phone. Then he said, cautiously, “OK.”

  “I don’t really want to discuss it,” I said. “I just want to make sure you don’t repeat it.”

  “Repeat what?”

  I had failed to consider that he might have been too drunk to remember. I could have smacked myself in the face for my stupidity. “If you don’t know, then we don’t need to talk,” I said. “Are you saying you don’t know?”

  “No,” he said. “I know.”

  “Well, then why are you pretending you don’t?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Never mind. I just wanted to tell you that Nathan and I are going to work through this, and I think it would make things easier if nobody else knew about it. Otherwise we’ll both feel like we’re being watched, you know?”

  “I won’t tell anybody,” he said. “You know I won’t tell anybody.”

  “That’s true,” I said. Of course he wouldn’t tell anybody. Smith, Man of Honor, was what Nathan liked to call him. “I should have remembered that.”

  “I wish I didn’t know myself,” he said. “I can’t believe Nathan would do that. I mean, my God, it changes my whole conception of him. Who is he? How could he do that, when you were pregnant? You were pregnant, for God’s sake! Can I even still be friends with him?”

  I couldn’t answer. I tried, but my throat was so tight now I couldn’t even speak, and so, in surrender, I started to cry.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hey, that was really stupid, I’m sorry.”

  I took a deep breath. I tried to remember the last time I’d cried—not just teared up at anything on television about children, but really, truly cried.

  “I won’t tell anybody,” he said again.

  I couldn’t remember. Strange. Before I had children I used to cry out of frustration or anger every once in a while, and now I didn’t do that anymore. Had becoming a mother made me tougher? Now it took adultery to make me cry.

  “Listen,” Smith said, sounding desperate, “can I take you to lunch? We can talk more. Maybe you need to talk.”

  “I don’t want to talk,” I managed to say, but he must not have understood me, because he said he would pick me up at twelve thirty and hung up the phone.

  My job, as the business manager of the Department of Neurobiology, was one I’d arrived at more or less accidentally, and then proven to be good at. I’d started as a secretary in the department, as a charity hire. The husband of the then-chair was friends with my thesis adviser from graduate school, and my adviser said, “Hey, can you help a starving poet find a job?” It didn’t hurt that I could type eighty-two words a minute, a skill that would have been more suited to a fiction writer like Nathan, who still typed with two fingers after years at the computer. I’d never written a poem at eighty-two words a minute. I was slow. I was agonizingly slow. More than once I’d spent a week on a line.

  But at work I was fast, and efficient, so much so that when the grants manager left, they offered me his job, and when the business manager retired, they offered me hers. Now all the administrative types in the department were my employees, something that had by this point almost stopped seeming strange. Two of those employees had been working there long before I had, and had, in fact, treated me as upperclassmen treat a freshman when I’d first arrived, alternately teasing me and taking me under their wing. One of the women, the receptionist, Kristy, was actually younger than I was, but she’d grown up faster—married at nineteen, first kid at twenty-one, and now she was pregnant with her third. The other woman, Tanya, who was the chair’s secretary, was in her late thirties, but she, too, seemed older, or at least older than my friends seemed at that age. Kristy and Tanya belonged to a culture that, before them, I’d observed only in passing—they wore fake nails, went to church but drank hard, supported certain NASCAR drivers. Kristy had a Jeff Gordon jacket, which she wore on race days with a hairpin that had his number sticking out of it, a red 24 balanced at the apogee of her curly bleached-blond hair. For years they’d been telling me they were going to take me to a local track and show me how to parade around in a tank top and Daisy Dukes, eating fried bologna sandwiches. Once, on Valentine’s Day, they’d taken me to the local sex shop, where they’d debated bu
ying lingerie to please their husbands and I’d marveled at the vast array of dildos, and then to Bojangles for greasy, salty biscuits and fries. They’d both come over strange when I’d been made the business manager, but they were over it now, or at least I thought so. Kristy liked to call me “Boss” when I asked her to do things, to remind me that even if I was in charge she retained the right to tease me.

  She wasn’t at her desk when I went out at 12:28 to meet Smith. I assumed she was on her lunch break, but she wasn’t. She was outside smoking a cigarette, something she persisted in doing even though she was six months pregnant. If I’d smoked while pregnant, I would have done it in secret, ashamed—I didn’t even drink wine in public in my third trimester, though I had an occasional glass at home—but Kristy just stood there, three feet from the entrance to the building, puffing away, apparently oblivious to the looks she got. Was she making a statement? Did she just not care? It was hard to say, but I thought it was the latter. I disapproved of her smoking, but admired her “I am what I am” attitude.

  “Where are you off to?” she said when she saw me. I usually packed a lunch and ate it in the tiny break room, next to the tiny fish tank Tanya maintained.

  “I’m going to lunch.”

  “With Nathan?”

  “No, he’s home with Binx.” I was reluctant to tell her who I was going with, and reluctance like that was the sort of thing she was hardwired to notice.

  “Who is it, then? Your boyfriend?”

  Smith’s car turned into the drive, and he waved as he went past us, turning around in the circle to return facing out.

  “Cute,” Kristy said. “Does Nathan know?”

  “Ha ha, Kristy,” I said. I couldn’t look at her. “Shouldn’t you be working?”

  “Nothing going on in there,” she said. “I’ve been reading People all morning.”

  “Shh,” I said. “Don’t tell your boss.” I headed for the car, tossing a “See you later” over my shoulder.

  “See you,” she called.

  When I opened the car door, Smith was leaning toward me, but looking at Kristy. I could tell from his face he could hardly believe what he saw. I got in the car and shut the door hard, as though sufficient force could make Kristy and her stomach and her cigarette disappear, and forestall the conversation I knew Smith and I were about to have.

  “Should she be smoking?” he asked.

  “Of course not.” I put on my seat belt with unnecessary care, strangely reluctant to look at him. “She says it will keep the birth weight down.”

  He reacted with such horror his body jerked backward. “That’s why she’s doing it?”

  “She’s doing it because she’s addicted. That’s a joke she makes.”

  “You think it’s funny?”

  “No, Smith, Jesus. I don’t think it’s funny. I think she should quit smoking. What would you like me to do, call Social Services?”

  Smith jerked up the parking brake and got out of the car. It was a mark of his agitation that he didn’t turn the car off, seriously as he took the environmental strictures of Al Gore. It was a mark of my shock that I did nothing, just sat there and watched through the window with my mouth hanging open as he crossed behind the car and up the sidewalk to Kristy. She looked at him with a curiosity that hardened into anger as he said whatever he said, and I watched as he gesticulated and she moved her head from side to side in that “Oh no you didn’t” way—a pantomime of middle-class liberal righteous ness colliding with working-class conservative righteous ness. She inhaled elaborately and blew the smoke out in his face, and then he snatched the cigarette and dropped it on the ground. She was yelling, her mouth open, her arms flapping out at the sides, a giant pregnant bird. I reached for the door handle, steeling myself to enter the fray. I had no idea what I was going to say. Did I think she should be smoking? No. Did I think he was right to tell her so? No. The only statement that came to mind was, “I can’t handle this right now,” which I didn’t imagine would be particularly useful. And then, abruptly, her arms stopped flapping, her hands went to her face, and she started to cry. She rocked forward, and Smith caught her, patting her on the back. They stood there a moment like that, strangers embracing on the sidewalk, and he murmured something in her ear.

  The sight of Kristy in tears astonished me. I thought of her as brash, tough, the sort of girl who got into parking-lot fights in high school. She was hardly a candidate for a public meltdown, although of course she was pregnant, and there were the hormones to contend with. And really, I had no idea what went on in her life. That thought hit me with the force of a new idea. I knew her husband drove a tow truck but not whether he cheated on her, or hit her, or loved her like there was no tomorrow. Really I had no idea what went on in anyone’s life, not even Nathan’s. What had made Nathan value the moment over the lifetime? Why was Smith hugging Kristy, a woman he didn’t even know, when he hadn’t hugged me in my moment of crisis, though he’d known me for years? There he was in full view through the windshield taking her and her extra weight against him and, just for a moment, holding her up. Why wasn’t somebody, anybody, holding me right now? Why was I sitting alone in a car watching two strangers embrace?

  Abruptly, as if remembering herself, Kristy pushed away. She wiped her face on the back of her hand. She pulled open the heavy glass door, refusing Smith’s attempt to help her, and disappeared inside.

  Back in the driver’s seat, Smith wore an expression of self-satisfaction as he eased the car out onto the road. “You left the car running,” I said. “What would Al Gore say?”

  “Oh, shit,” he said. “I guess I was fired up.” He smiled at me, this oddly hopeful smile, and all at once I was furious.

  “If you think she’s going to stop smoking,” I said, “you’re batshit insane.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But at least I said something.”

  “What you did was upset a pregnant woman and create another problem for me. I called you to talk about a problem, and you made me another one.”

  “Why would she hold what I said against you?”

  “That’s a dumb question.”

  “I think the health of her baby is a little more important than tension between the two of you.”

  “Which brings me back to my original point. She’s not going to quit because you told her to.”

  “You don’t know that, do you,” he said. “Sometimes when we realize how other people see us, we see ourselves in a new light.”

  “Well, what light do you see yourself in if I tell you that you’re unbelievably self-righteous?”

  “I’d say maybe you should look in the mirror.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re self-righteous,” he said. “And you’re rude.”

  I stared at him. He stared back, still flush with the proselytizer’s zeal. Rude? “That’s great,” I said. “That’s just great. Let me out of the car.”

  Now he looked sorry. “Sarah—”

  “Let me out of the fucking car!”

  He pulled over. In my agitation I forgot to unbuckle the seat belt and strained against it for a full five seconds trying to climb out, and then he tried to help me by unbuckling it just at the moment I realized and reached for the buckle myself, and I ended up smacking his hand away before I tumbled out of the car, as if this was a first date gone wrong. “Sarah,” he called again, but I started to run, and I ran back to the corner where you turned for my building, and then I slowed to a walk in case anyone saw me, running and desperate and disheveled in my professional clothes. Thanks a lot, Smith. You’ve been a big help.

  Kristy wasn’t outside anymore, and I hoped she’d be in the break room eating lunch so I could make it back to the sanctuary of my office without encountering her. But when I walked in she looked up from People with a fighting expression. “Who was that asshole?” she said, in a loud and carrying voice.

  “I’m sorry about that, Kristy,” I said. “He had no right.”

  “No shit he had no ri
ght. Who was he, anyway?”

  “He’s my husband’s best friend.”

  “Oho.” She lowered her voice, beckoned me closer. I stepped up to her desk. “So he’s giving me a hard time about smoking when he’s running around with his best friend’s wife?”

  I blanched and said, “No,” a reaction that did nothing to persuade her she was wrong.

  “What’s worse?” She looked around like she was playing to the audience at a talk show. “A cigarette every now and then, or putting it to your friend’s lady on the sly?”

  “That depends on your point of view,” I said.

  “Oho, point of view,” she said. “Point of view. Is that what you call it?”

  “Kristy,” I said. “Just stop it. Stop it now.”

  She looked at me in some surprise. “Hey,” she said, “I’m just messing with you. I know you and Nathan got a good thing going.”

  I took a breath. I closed my eyes. I felt my head shake a little, more like a tremor than a no. Then I opened my eyes. She was looking at me with a combination of alarm and curiosity. I pushed off from her desk like it was the wall of a swimming pool, propelling myself toward my office. “Hey,” she called after me, sounding genuinely worried now. “Hey, Sarah. Look, I was just—”

  “It’s OK,” I said without looking back. I shut my office door.

  I’d started an e-mail to Tanya, before the phone call to Smith. It was still up on the screen. Remind me, it said, and nothing else, and I could no longer remember what I’d wanted her to remind me. And it didn’t even say Remind me, I saw now, but Rewind me. An interesting typo, although given the distance of the w from the m, you couldn’t really call it a typo. More of a Freudian slip. Yes, please, rewind me. Be kind, rewind. No fight with Smith. No unwanted honesty from Nathan. No Nathan ever doing what he had done at all. I closed my eyes and pictured casters turning, and the idea of going backward was so compelling that when I opened my eyes I nearly believed I’d achieved it. The mind’s experience of the world, that’s all that matters. If you smile, you’ll begin to feel the corresponding emotion. If you tell yourself something never happened, then it never ever did.