Husband and Wife Page 9

  And we go get Chinese, even if not a one of us want it, because after years of smashed-up chairs and screams of I hate you! we are beaten down. We fly under her radar, and I can’t speak for the rest of my family, but I know that I’m wary in her presence, guarded, muted, unfunny, not myself. I am detached from her because otherwise I cannot bear to be around her. Was that how I would be, from here on out, with Nathan? Would that be doing what I had to do? To be a wife, to be a walking mannequin.

  The next night Nathan wanted to go to our favorite restaurant for dinner, and I didn’t, but he looked so hopeful when he made the proposal, as if he was trying to recapture the good times, the pleasure on my face the first time he fed me a bite of the specialty of the house, a spicy, chocolaty chicken mole. So I said fine, okay. The Fiesta Grill was one of the few business establishments near our house, along with an ice cream place and a gas station or two, so we thought of it to some degree as ours. Alas, the restaurant’s virtues of authenticity and affordability had recently been extolled in the local paper, so that night it was nearly full, and Nathan found the crowd stressful, more so because Binx wouldn’t stop screaming no matter how many Cheerios we gave him, and when it came time to pay and the line at the cash register was long, Nathan, my Nathan, ran out on the bill. I learned this when I got outside, hauling both children and their accessories—bib, sippy cups, toys, wipes—and found him already in the car. He had his forehead pressed to the top of the wheel, which he clutched with both hands, as if he were driving without looking, willing or daring himself to crash. I wanted to forgive him. I did. A strong desire rose within me to do him some kind of physical harm.

  Instead I buckled the children into their car seats. Instead I lifted the check from where Nathan had abandoned it on the dash. Instead I went back inside and waited in line, counting to ten over and over in English, French, and Spanish, until it was my turn to pay. The Fiesta Grill was our favorite restaurant. I wanted to be able to go back.

  Ah, but there is a price to be paid for such calm, such relentless accommodation, and I discovered what mine was when I woke later that night, just after midnight. I had an alert, startled feeling, but Binx hadn’t cried. No lights danced on the baby monitor. Of course I didn’t know that this sleepless night would be the first of many. Even now it frightens me a little to talk about that time, my capital-I insomnia, because of the possibility that to invoke its name is to invite its return. Oh God, I hope that doesn’t happen to me again, you think, and then, because you thought that, it will, and you’ll wake once more into a bleak, remorseless stillness. You’ll wander in a panic through the rooms of your mind and find them just emptied, as if your thoughts were bugs that scattered as soon as you entered.

  But I meant to talk about the first night of my insomnia, which in my memory comes after the incident at the Fiesta Grill. I woke and lay there for quite some time in the innocent expectation that sleep would soon return. I felt the reverberations of every move Nathan made, each shift in position a radical upheaval of my terrain. Our queen-size bed seemed far too small. Because more than once I drifted off, only to jerk awake at his inadvertent touch, I did my best not to have any contact with him, camped out on the cliff edge of the mattress. Still I couldn’t escape the brush of his foot, the nudge of his backside, as though his body sought me out, groping toward me in the dark. Maybe he just wanted the familiar, soothing intimacy of my body, the rightness of his legs tucked into mine, his right hand cupping my left breast, his breath against my neck. What it felt like was that he didn’t want me to sleep. What I wanted was to push him out of the bed. I lay awake and imagined the satisfying thud of his body against the floor. I lay awake and remembered when the two of us, Nathan and I, could sleep together all night in a twin.

  What was the point of lying there? I got up. I had the claustrophobic’s choking desire to escape. What I needed were clothes and car keys. What I needed was to drive really fast. I got on the interstate and hit the gas, and before I slowed back down the speedometer had edged up to 100. I felt better. Better enough to get off the interstate in Durham and start making my way back toward Chapel Hill. I drove down 15-501, a road segmented by stoplights that one by one turned red just in time to stop my car. On either side the strip-mall staples: Wal-Mart, Barnes and Noble, Lowe’s. On hot days, when cars were packed so tightly together there wasn’t room to go on green, and the sun stabbed merciless light through the windshield, it felt like the road through the middle of hell. Late at night, it wasn’t so bad. Look, there was the old mall, finally defunct after the long exodus of shoppers and stores to the new mall. Poor thing. Was it jealous of the new mall? It seemed a distinct possibility.

  I turned in its entryway, directed by the sign toward stores that were no longer there. There’s something eerie about a giant, empty parking lot, but that night the whole place just seemed sad. Waiting for us all to come back, and you know what? We never, ever would. Right after we moved here, Nathan had taught me to drive a stick shift in this parking lot. He’d been so patient. “I can’t do it,” I said, after an infinite number of stalls, and he said, with total certainty, “Yes, you can.”

  I circled round the lot for hours until I could ease up on the clutch and push down on the gas pedal with the exact balance of pressure and speed, and now I circled round it again, like I was trying to catch that other car, but I couldn’t, and so I couldn’t laugh at Nathan’s bad gearshift puns or hear him clap when I finally got it right, and I certainly couldn’t stall. This car was an automatic.

  “Yes, you can,” he’d said.

  Oh, Nathan, Nathan. Where did you go? Why’d you do that? Why’d you do that to me?

  Smith lived in Carrboro, in an old mill house. I had little occasion to visit it, but whenever I did, I was struck by how stark the furnishings were. No pictures of people on the walls, only a black-and-white of the dog who’d died five years ago and never been replaced. Smith did not take back his heart.

  When I pulled up, he was sitting on his porch, smoking a cigarette. I was surprised for two reasons: I hadn’t expected to see him smoking, and I hadn’t expected to see him. It was two a.m. Why had I driven to his house if I hadn’t expected to see him? Just an urge, an impulse. Why was I driving around at all? There was a moment when I could have kept going, a dark car sliding by on a dark road. He might have squinted through the smoke and the streetlight haze and thought, “Isn’t that…?” He wouldn’t have risen slowly from his chair, as he was doing as I climbed his porch stairs. He wouldn’t have said, with that tone of wary and puzzled surprise, my name.

  “You smoke?” I said.

  His cheeks pinked. “Sometimes,” he said. “Secretly.”

  “You are a complicated dude,” I said.

  He put the cigarette out, although it was only half smoked, and moved to a stool so that I could take the solitary chair. “You really are a gentleman,” I said. “A complicated gentledude.”

  “Gentledude,” Nathan would have repeated, drawing the word out, pleased and amused.

  “What are you doing out?” Smith asked.

  “I thought maybe I’d drive to Tennessee,” I said.

  “What would you do there?”

  “Visit the scene of the crime,” I said. “Look for clues.”

  “Clues to what?”

  I sighed. “Motive.”

  Smith said nothing. He stared out at the street, and I stared at him, willing him to speak if he had something to say. “I was a little annoyed with you the other day,” I said after a moment. “I told you not to tell anyone, and there you were on the phone with Nathan.”

  “Why wouldn’t I tell Nathan?” he asked. “He already knew.”

  “Did you mean what you said to him? That you were on my side?”

  “I meant it,” he said.

  “What does it mean to be on my side?”

  “It means I think he was wrong, of course.”

  “Yeah, I know that,” I said.

  He was silent a long moment. “
It means…I don’t know. What should it mean?” He glanced at me, away. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  Kiss me, I thought, but didn’t say, of course, because why had I even thought it?

  “I’m serious,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  What could he do for me? What could anyone do for me? Turn back time, oh yes please. Turn back time. But where would I stop the clock? I considered this, nursing Binx on the couch at six a.m. I’d walked in the door to the sound of him crying. How long had he been wailing, poor motherless thing? Long enough for his face to be as wet as if I’d doused him with a bucket. Now he ate ferociously while I stared at the seven volumes of Proust lined up on the top shelf of the living-room bookcase. They’d been a gift from Helen when I first got pregnant. She said she figured I might need a lot of reading material for nights when I’d be up nursing the baby—neither of us knew yet that in the early weeks you don’t seem to have enough hands to get the baby on the breast and keep her there, let alone hold a book, let alone heft a seven-hundred-pager. She joked that if I ever got through all seven volumes, I’d be a qualified Proust scholar.

  “Is that a lucrative field?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “The people are clamoring.”

  At the time she herself had been enamored of the prose of Gertrude Stein, whose childlike repetitions seemed to me silly where they were supposed to be profound, a response that Helen said proved something about me, something bad, the particulars of which I now couldn’t recall. We’d fought about Gertrude Stein. Helen was the sort of combatant who turns on you suddenly, unexpectedly, like a cat who lets you pet it until it suddenly turns to sink its teeth into your hand, ears back, eyes wild with the jungle. I remembered the lash of anger in her voice, but not what she’d said.

  In Austin? Was that where I would stop the clock? Not before Austin, certainly. I had no desire to go back to the person I’d been then, too embarrassed to call myself a poet, sure that it would be seen as presumptuous, pretentious. In the year between college and grad school I worked my first nine-to-five job, tried to teach myself to write without deadlines. When people asked me at parties what I did, I said, “I’m a secretary,” and watched them struggle not to reveal their reaction, waiting for me to offer the caveat we all offered in our twenties, But what I really want to do is… “But what I really want to do is rock,” a guy had once said to me and a friend at a party. Oh, my Lord. As soon as he was gone, I turned to my friend and said, “What I really want to do is rhyme.” What I really wanted to do didn’t much seem to matter, as I wasn’t doing any kind of work not required by my job. I was in a bit of a muddle without teachers to tell me what to do. My sister wanted me to move to Gainesville, where she was in medical school, and live with her. She would take me in, and take me over. I knew just how it would go. I wasn’t in that much of a muddle.

  And then Austin. Austin. Austin was not a place, it was my dream of another life, my Oz, and for years after I left, whenever I wished for a tornado, that was where I imagined it taking me. Days there were hot and slow. All the coffee shops had wooden porches strung with Christmas lights. A girl wearing a bright green bikini and flip-flops forever rode by on a bicycle. The temperature of Barton Creek was always sixty-eight degrees. I was a poet there. People seemed to take that for granted, and after a while so did I. And I hadn’t had to leave. I’d left for Nathan, because he’d gotten a job and we were together. Without Nathan, I could have stayed. I would have stayed. But I never really got to choose.

  In Austin I lived a life of late nights and late mornings, sitting at the kitchen counter in the house Helen rented with her cousin Jane, smoking pot and talking about how things seemed and what they meant, the life of an artist, the prose of Virginia Woolf. Sometimes Jane got out the video camera to record these conversations. The lens trained on my face made me self-conscious, made me feel like not just the conversation but the whole way we were living was staged. But still I admired our commitment to that life. That life! We fought about Gertrude Stein. We went out for pancakes at midnight. We watched Imagine, about John Lennon, and at the end we cried. We watched a documentary about Marvin Gaye, listened to Smokey Robinson’s attempt to explain the singer’s troubles: how tortured he was by his fraught childhood, his thwarted desire to be a sweater-wearing crooner like Perry Como. From Smokey, the camera cut to Marvin Gaye’s mother, deep-voiced and weary in a hospital bed, who said, “Marvin did a lot of drugs.” Cut away. We agreed on the truth of both assessments.

  Helen and Jane stayed in Austin after Nathan and I left. I’d go back to visit, and find the house exactly as it had been, a museum to my memories. Fragile pyramids of cigarette butts rose from the ashtrays on the arms of all the chairs, trails of ashes on the floor, the countertops. Dog hair like a plague upon the futon. The sharp, piney smell of pot smoke seeping from the walls. A strong aroma of garbage in the kitchen, flies on the half-eaten pizza left in an open box on the stove—sure, OK, but the point is that Helen and Jane didn’t notice, they didn’t see it, they were living the life of the mind. Jane repainted the whole house, without the land-lord’s permission, to give it the color scheme of her childhood home, and over a period of weeks she shot her student film there, both she and Helen living in her childhood on a movie set, headshots on the table of the actors playing her parents, the life and the art twined like DNA strands.

  Helen told me that the way we lived for the five or six days of our yearly visits was not the way she usually lived. She had a job with a law firm. Five days a week she put on a suit and went to work in an office building down-town, among the upwardly mobile, where young lawyers with shiny cars and a gleam in their eyes asked her out in the copy room. I couldn’t believe that. I didn’t see it. I saw the way the lights strung across the wooden railing of a coffee shop twinkled and blurred after a dose of shrooms, and the way time, too, twinkled and blurred, the days not about vacuuming up the dog hair or taking out the trash but about what we were thinking, what we wanted to say, so that by the time I got home from these trips I had a talking hangover, worn out by overindulgence in the sound of my own voice. The world trembles between light and darkness, we said. Between agony and beauty. The agony of beauty. The beauty of agony. Writing about it is hard, we said. The struggle with your own mind. The pursuit of the elusive, ever-vanishing, perfect phrase. Some years Nathan came with me, and one night he made us sit with our eyes closed while he read aloud Barry Hannah’s story “Even Greenland,” turning the words over in his mouth like caramels. We celebrated the beauty of the sentence. We believed. The light was bright, the weather warm.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Are you sure you want me to go?” Nathan asked, for the thousandth time. He had a date with Smith, a date that, unbeknownst to Nathan, I’d arranged.

  “Yes, you should go.”

  “You’re not just saying that because you think I want to go.”

  “No.”

  “Because if you don’t want me to go, I won’t.”

  “I think you should go,” I said.

  “I want you to be happy,” he said.

  It was the end of a long day, a one-thing-after-another day. The kids were finally in bed. I’d had two hours of sleep the night before. “OK,” I said. “I will be.”

  Old Nathan, my Nathan, my ping-ponging-between-sentimental-and-ironic guy, would have said, “From here on out, you promise? Because this isn’t just about whether I go out tonight, it’s about our lives.” This Nathan said, “That’s all I want,” and I had to say, “I know,” and endeavor to sound like I believed it. And endeavor to believe it.

  He bent to kiss me, a quick peck on the lips, because we never parted without such a kiss and we both seemed to understand the necessity of doing the things we always did. Then at last he was gone. I had big plans: to lie on the couch and tend to no one, to stupefy myself with guilty-pleasure TV, to go to bed early. I’d given Smith a clear mission—to reassure Nathan, to give him the support and comfort he ne
eded to function. And was I hoping that while so doing, Smith would also learn who this woman was and how Nathan felt about her and why he’d cheated on me, all the answers I couldn’t ask for because I had to pretend that everything was fine? Yes, yes, of course. But I didn’t say so. This was a delicate operation. Smith was my man on the inside, but he didn’t like me calling him that, visibly stiffened when I did. “I’m your friend, and his, too,” he said. But doubtless he would learn something, and then the trick would be to get it out of him.

  I wandered the house a while. Passing through the living room, I gave the upright spines of Proust’s seven volumes, with their refined deep blue coloring and tasteful font, the finger. I considered calling Helen. When was the last time I’d talked to her? She still lived in Austin, with her husband and two small children, and our conversations, which had once been leisurely sightseeing trips through the landscapes of our thinking, were hurried, short, and all about our kids. We had not expected to be women like that. We had thought that we really would read all seven volumes of Proust. We had thought we would always care—care to the point of shouting—which of us liked, and which of us didn’t like, Gertrude Stein. We often felt torn between the people we were and the people we had been, or perhaps had never actually been but always thought we should be. We tended to think that motherhood had changed us, but maybe it had just reduced us to our essentials. This was who we were when we no longer had the time to persuade ourselves we gave a rat’s ass about Gertrude Stein.

  I would’ve liked to call Helen, but if I got her on the phone, which was doubtful, and she asked how I was doing, which of course she would, what would I say? Since Alex’s wedding I hadn’t spoken to any of my friends. Alex was on her honeymoon, so that one was easy, but Erica and Sally had called, and I hadn’t called them back. If I told them what had happened, then I would always know they knew, and then how would I be able to forget it? And why would I want to hash out the demeaning particulars of my crisis, so awful, so ordinary, with anyone I knew?