Husband and Wife Read online

  The phone rang. It was Nathan. He wanted to know where the diaper bag was. So I told him, because it was just a normal day, and telling him where he could find what he’d lost was one of the things I normally did. I always knew where his wallet was, his phone, his keys, and when I got sick of his pitiful attempts to locate them—he’d drift around the house picking up objects and putting them down with such an air of hopelessness he might as well have been keening softly—I’d walk right over to the pile of newspaper on the table and lift it up and lo and behold, what should be beneath it but his keys. Sometimes his ineptitude annoyed me, and then when he asked where his keys were, I said, “How should I know?” or “If I gave you a million dollars, could you find them yourself?” Recently, not too long ago, Nathan had spent a Saturday morning struggling with a section of the book he was working on and then, much later in the day than he’d intended, was trying to get out to the grocery store but couldn’t find his keys, and when I’d asked that question, he’d snapped, “Why are you being such a bitch?” in front of Mattie, who said, on cue, as if we were all actors in some sort of horrible domestic drama, “Why is Mommy a bitch?” Then Nathan overwhelmed us both with apologies, me and Mattie, who had no idea, really, what he was sorry for, but gleaned from the whole experience that bitch was an awfully exciting word.

  And these are the ways we drive each other crazy, men and women, husbands and wives. He asks me, for the millionth time, if I’ve seen his keys. He wants me, for the millionth time, to drop what I’m doing and tend to his needs. And I snap at him. And his feelings are hurt, because all he did was ask me to help him find his keys, and I know he has trouble finding things and why do I have to get so mad about it, when all he’s trying to do is go buy groceries for his family, and then he trots out the b-word, and even though he apologizes, none of it goes away, not my irritation, not his. It subsides. Yes, it subsides, unless you become one of those couples for whom it doesn’t, who start saying things at dinner parties like, “Well, my wife says I’m a fucking retard,” and “My husband calls me Cruella De Vil,” dragging everyone around them into an Ingmar Bergman film.

  The first year we lived together, Nathan’s keys went missing for weeks, until I found them one morning inside a folded umbrella, which was leaning against the hall table where we normally dropped our keys when we came in the door. I had a flash of inspiration, turned that umbrella over, and they dropped into my hand with a satisfying jangle. Nathan had still been asleep. I’d crept into the room and jingled the keys before his eyes until they opened, and then I watched delighted comprehension dawn on his face before he reached up to grasp the keys, to touch my fingers. He said, “You found them?” and looked at me like I was the one who would always know what he needed, would always know exactly where it was to be found. And how would I have ever gotten to be that person, if he had never lost anything?

  At quarter after seven I walked into a quiet house. Nathan was at the stove, the scent of garlic in the air. “Hey,” he said. He handed me a glass of wine.

  “You already got the kids down?” I asked. “Wow.”

  “I thought you could use a quiet evening,” he said.

  I said that was great and thanked him, though I wished Binx was still awake. Usually I nursed him when I got home, and breasts don’t adjust quickly to a change in plans, so I’d have to pump for the third time that day, and I hated pumping. Funny that in the face of paradigm-shifting events I was still capable of annoyance over such a minor thing.

  “I’m working on my fifties housewife routine,” Nathan said.

  “Shouldn’t you be in a pretty dress then? With your hair all…” I made curls with my fingers in the air. Recently an old magazine article had circulated among our friends on e-mail, one of those shockingly, hilariously sexist pieces featuring advice to women about greeting your husband at the door with a martini, never disturbing him with your problems, keeping every hair in place—one of those things too ludicrous to have ever been something people believed. Who ever took that seriously, this notion that to be a wife was to be a walking mannequin?

  “I thought about the dress,” Nathan said. “But I thought you might find it disturbing if I raided your closet.”

  I laughed. “If I came home and you were wearing my black dress…”

  “High heels…”

  “Lipstick…”

  “A thong.”

  “I don’t own a thong.”

  “Hey,” he said. “I have my own, of course.”

  “Is it red and lacy?” I asked. “I hope it’s red and lacy.”

  “Of course,” he said, “because I—” The phone rang. It was sitting on the kitchen counter. I picked it up and checked the caller ID, saw it was Smith, and without thinking handed the phone to Nathan.

  He answered. “Hello?” A beat. His expression changed from lingering amusement to puzzlement, worry. My throat clenched. He gave me an apologetic look, held up one finger, walked out of the room. I heard the door to his study close. I walked over to the kitchen table and sat down. I listened to the murmur of Nathan’s voice, which kept spiking louder in ways that did not bode well. I drank my glass of wine. I got up, turned the stove off, and poured another glass. I pictured myself squeezing the stem of the glass until it shattered. I pictured the mess that would make. I imagined the sticky wine, the blood. I waited.

  “Can I help?” Rajiv had asked, the night before Nathan and I moved away from Austin. He’d been surveying the nearly empty room and drinking a beer while I struggled to pack a box with exactly the number of books that would fit. We had a great many books, and only so many boxes.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” I said. I glanced up at him, and then back down. Rajiv, when he gave you his attention, gave it to you entirely. Mr. Intense Eye Contact, Nathan liked to call him. Because of this, and the extremity of his beauty, I’d always been prone to nervous giggling in his company. I wasn’t quite sure what he was doing here, on our last night in town. We’d been friendly the last year or so, ever since Helen had introduced us, but he was really her friend. And he wasn’t in our program—he was studying film—so I saw him only from time to time. He’d come tonight with Helen, who was in the bathroom helping Nathan sort through the cabinets. I could hear the murmur of Nathan’s voice, the words feminine hygiene, then her laughter.

  “I brought you a going-away present,” Rajiv said.

  I sat back, surprised. “It’s not a book, is it?”

  “Well, yeah.” He grinned. “It is a book. Not just any book. It’s the book.”

  “The Bible?”

  He laughed. “Kind of.” He held out a small black paperback.

  “Where did that come from?” I asked, and at his puzzled look, I added, “Looked like you conjured it.” On my feet now, I took the book. It was a copy of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, dog-eared in several places. And why was he giving it to me? I flipped open to the first marked page. The door opening, I read. The beautiful stranger. The torn moon mended. “It’s my copy,” said Rajiv. “The one I used to carry on the T.” And then a lightbulb—I remembered a long conversation in the corner of a party, me and him, this book and how much we loved it, the two of us quoting lines back and forth. He told me how he used to carry a copy in his coat pocket on his way to the office job in Boston that he’d hated, how it was a comfort to know it was there. I’d never seen Rajiv passionate—he was a relatively quiet guy, the kind who fades a little at a party until suddenly he drops the perfect quip and steals the scene. Did I really think fades? No, honestly, I didn’t, because his appearance was so striking that when he was in my vicinity I never stopped being aware of him, and I was certain no other woman did either. Look how they giggled. Look how they put their hands on his forearm when he unleashed that dry wit, how they leaned forward so that their breasts brushed against his skin.

  “How can you not want him?” I’d asked Helen, not long before.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I think looking at him too long might blind y
ou.”

  “Wow,” I said to Rajiv. “Thanks.” I took my time closing the book. “I’m not sure I deserve this.”

  He said, “I’m a little in love with you.”

  “What?” I said. “No, you’re not.”

  His eyebrows jumped. “I thought I was so obvious.”

  “You? You’re not obvious about anything.” I thought, but had the sense not to say, that the short film of his I’d seen had been so subtle, I’d struggled to grasp its meaning. At another party he’d described for me the plays of Horton Foote, whose dialogue was entirely about what went unspoken. Maybe that was why he liked me—the same reason Nathan did—because I showed great interest in conversations like this. You’d think everybody in school for film or writing would have, but no, there was too much talk about romance and money and television and posturing about one’s own torrid past and heady future. I liked—Rajiv liked, Nathan liked—to stand around and talk about dialogue. “You’re never obvious,” I said.

  “Except right now,” he said. “Now I’m obvious.” He waited. He was not going to try to kiss me. He was not going to ask me for anything. I knew that. He was not the sort to press. He just waited to see what I would say. And what would I say? My God, there was nothing to say, was there? And yet wasn’t it nice to be loved? And wasn’t he beautiful? Wasn’t he funny, wasn’t he talented, wasn’t he smart? Wasn’t he not unlike Nathan, the man packing my tampons in the other room?

  “You’re an amazing guy,” I said. The clichés sprouted in my mind: You’re a great friend, maybe in another life. But there was no other life, only this one. For a wild moment I thought I should just kiss him. I opened the book again, another dog-eared page. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you, it said.

  “So I know the last thing you need is another book,” he said briskly, “but it’s small, and I think we can fit it in.” He crouched, peered into the box, reached a hand up for the book, not looking at me. I handed it to him and watched as he made room. “Just fits,” he said.

  I’d been unhappy about leaving Austin, though I’d tried not to say so to Nathan. But right then, my eyes on Rajiv, I was relieved. There’d be nothing I could do about what he’d just said, no temptation to consider it at all.

  For years I kept the book underneath a pile of junk in one of my desk drawers at home. Not that there was any need to hide it. Nothing about it would have caused Nathan a moment’s suspicion. But I liked having it hidden, secret, a talisman. I liked, sometimes, on bad days, or days when nostalgia rose up and briefly seized my heart, to take it out and flip to the dog-eared pages, trying to guess what line Rajiv had meant to mark. When I moved out of my study I put the book on the shelf next to our other copy. “Oh,” Nathan said when he noticed it there. “I didn’t know we had two copies of this.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and that was all.

  I found Nathan sitting on the floor in his study, cross-legged with his head in his hand. The phone was in his lap. He’d neglected to turn it off, so the busy signal beeped angrily. He lifted his head when I came in, his face a picture of misery.

  “I’m sorry, Nathan,” I said. “I didn’t mean to tell him.”

  “Don’t apologize to me,” he said. “I don’t deserve that. I should be apologizing to you, a thousand times a day, a million times a second.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible,” I said. This was supposed to be a mild joke, but Nathan gasped like I’d punched him in the stomach.

  “He said he doesn’t know who I am anymore,” he said. “He said if there’s a side to take, he’s on yours.”

  I didn’t know what to make of that statement, or of my reaction to it, which was surprise and gratification and a dash of anger. “There’s no side to take,” I said. I sat on the floor beside him. His eyes searched my face. “There’s no side,” I said.

  “Are you sure you want this?” he said. “Are you sure you want me?”

  “Yes,” I said, because although at that moment I really wasn’t sure, it was hard to see what good any other answer would do. The only thing I was sure of was that I didn’t want every evening to end with him crying. So I touched his cheek, and we had sex, the kind of tender, grateful sex that sometimes happens when you’ve come very close to believing it’s over, and I managed somehow, miraculously, not to think about him and the other woman, what we were doing and what he’d done with her. I found that I didn’t much want to kiss him, though. I didn’t really want to look him in the eye.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Why’d you do that? That’s what we asked Mattie when she dumped her plate on the floor, or hit the cat, or threw a toy. And she said her food was too hot, when it hadn’t been, or that the cat had been about to scratch the couch, when he’d been sleeping peacefully on the floor, or that honk monsters were trying to get the toy, when unless we were very wrong about the world honk monsters didn’t exist. She had no clue why she did these things. She was three. But we kept on asking. For some reason why was the main thing we wanted to know. We taught her to offer explanations even when they made no sense at all. Maybe it doesn’t matter why you do something. Maybe it just matters that you do it. What good does it really do you, the why?

  I do wonder, though, I can’t help but wonder, why I tried so hard in the days after Nathan’s confession to proceed like everything was fine. Wasn’t I supposed to throw him out immediately and burn all his possessions in the yard, according to the new story of Western womanhood, the one that doesn’t accept infidelity, that doesn’t make standing by your man the primary virtue—that, in fact, holds women who stand by their man in contempt? I should say that when my grandmother told me, “You do what you have to do,” she was talking about her own mother’s efforts to keep her family intact while her husband slept with his secretary and otherwise lived out the masculine cliché. Here I was, eighty supposedly liberating years later, making the same attempt.

  But I didn’t have to keep him around, did I, not like my great-grandmother had to keep her husband, the provider, the man of the house. I wasn’t even reliant on Nathan for financial support, although it would be awfully hard to manage the bills if we had to pay for two places to live. And I didn’t know how we’d handle the child care, or how I’d be able to do his chores in addition to my own. How I’d ever get to see a movie, or run out to meet friends for a drink. How I’d pass the lonely evenings. How I’d meet somebody else and bring myself to take off my clothes in front of him. Because I’d want somebody else, wouldn’t I? Sooner or later I would. The truth is, it’s hard to go it alone. Few of us are exempt from the longing for another. Each of us half of a heart locket, a lonely puzzle piece. If we weren’t we wouldn’t be so determined to jam ourselves together.

  Would it help to know that I’m a middle child? That I’m a Pisces? That my older sister was an agent of chaos, and as a result I am deeply conflict-averse? In grad school Helen and Nathan liked to joke that I had a strangely sanguine temperament for a writer. Where were my debilitating depressions? My wild convictions of genius? Sometimes I worried that my lack of emotional upheaval meant my work wasn’t any good. I thought perhaps my sister should have been the poet, though I hate you I hate you I hate you was all I could imagine her writing.

  It’s not that I don’t have a temper. It’s not that I can’t be mean. I am just as capable of it as my sister ever was, and isn’t that the horror, the horror? When Mattie reached two, the age of defiance, I started to feel anger at her that strained toward release like a dog that wants off the leash. Once, she bit me, and I bit her back hard enough to leave the imprint of my teeth in her skin. I’d never before hurt her in any way. Before she started to cry, she said, “You bit me,” in a voice of utter astonishment, and I knew that I’d radically altered her sense of the world. I’d revealed what I was capable of, to her, my tiny child, and I hadn’t wanted her to know.

  The incident confirmed what I already knew—it wasn’t safe for me to get angry. Nathan used to say I had no cruising speed
. I was Princess Pliable or I was Queen Demented Rage. Those were his names, not mine, and you have to wonder why the nice me was only a princess while the nasty me got to be a queen. Queen Demented Rage—only Nathan knew her. I never fought with anybody else. For a long time he saw that as a sign of the health and openness of our relationship, and then he started to see it as a sign that I managed to hold back the worst of myself from everyone but him.

  I’m happy to talk more about my family, since we now believe that the family explains nearly everything, which is one reason it’s so terrifying to have children. Sometimes I looked at Binx and thought that whether he turned out a diplomat or an actor might depend entirely on whether we chose to have a third child.

  I grew up in Cincinnati, in a four-bedroom house in a neighborhood called Mount Lookout. My father is an engineering professor and my mother is a psychologist, which Nathan liked to say was the perfect combination to give rise to a poet. My parents are nice people, my younger brother, too. The only time I ever heard my parents fight was about my sister. My mother wanted to make her see a therapist; my father thought that would make things worse. She was twelve. Don’t get the idea that this was about drugs or sex or any of the usual things. At school she was a well-behaved child. She was a good student. But at home she was angry, all the time, at all of us, and nobody knew why. Sometimes when I was off my guard, sitting on the floor watching television, she’d smack me as hard as she could in the back of the head, barely slowing her steps as she passed through the room.

  Even now when we’re together, the rest of us can spend an hour trying to decide where to go for dinner, everybody trying to suss out the others’ preferences before they state their own. Where would you like to go? Oh, I don’t care. Where would you like to go? Not my sister. Jesus Christ, she’ll say. You fucking people. We’re having Chinese.