The Perfect Wife

by Delaney, JP

  It was in the third week that the project really started to come alive, in both senses of the word. In one experiment Abbie operated the A-bot remotely, taking care to react to whatever it encountered. If she saw something through the robot’s eyes that was funny, she laughed; if she saw something to startle her, she gasped; if someone made a remark to the robot, she responded, just as if it had been addressed to her. From these sessions, Tim created a simple form of machine learning. After that it was a relatively simple matter to add additional sources such as Abbie’s Facebook profile. The A-bot was starting to take on her personality.

  Over one marathon programming session, Tim input every single text message they’d ever sent each other. On another occasion, he had it sample her voicemails. After that he could have the A-bot say anything, literally anything he wanted, in Abbie’s voice. Apparently the first thing he made it say was “Tim Scott, you are the cutest man in the world.” To which Abbie added, “Though you can also be a bit of a dork sometimes.”

  We didn’t even notice when they started calling it her. To be honest, we didn’t notice when we did, either.

  50

  You spend another miserable night. Tim might not have told you a direct lie, but he certainly allowed you to believe that he built you out of love, his own personal Taj Mahal. To discover that his adoration is actually directed at another, better version of yourself is crushing.

  The worst of it is, you can’t even blame him for it. From every perspective except your own, he’s done a remarkable, wonderful, romantic thing. It’s just that he’s done it without any regard for your feelings.

  You wonder if that blinkered vision of his could have been part of the reason Abbie left. It was an extreme way to escape a marriage, but then it was an extraordinary marriage. And Tim was no ordinary husband.

  You’re so busy thinking about Abbie that it’s a while before something else strikes you. It would feel as if I were being unfaithful, Tim had said earlier about sleeping with you. Yet this was the same man who’d screwed the nanny without a second thought.

  For such a brilliant man, your husband can be remarkably thoughtless sometimes.

  * * *

  —

  Next morning Danny’s up early. He’s cheerful, though, and eager to come to the table for breakfast. But when you give him the picture menu to choose from, he bats it into the air with a “wheesh!”

  “Okay, Danny. Let’s have another try, shall we?” You hand him the menu again, and again he knocks it flying, making the same “wheesh” sound.

  It’s some kind of game, you realize. “Danny, we’re not playing now. Choose something for breakfast, then we’ll play later.”

  “The stationmaster was furious,” he mumbles shyly.

  “Of course I’m not furious. It’s just—” You stop. The line he’s just spoken is from Thomas Comes to Breakfast, a story in which Thomas crashes into the stationmaster’s house. The children’s breakfast goes flying, and the stationmaster’s wife has to make it all over again.

  Could this be like the toast—a way of communicating what he wants, but in a kind of Danny-code? You try to think. When Thomas came through the wall, what was the stationmaster’s family eating? Eggs? Toast? Cereal?

  Boiled eggs?

  “Are you saying you want boiled eggs, Danny?”

  “Wheesh!” he agrees.

  You know that Sian, were she here, would say that giving him eggs right now would simply be rewarding an undesirable behavior. If Danny starts throwing stuff in the air every time he wants an egg, you’ll have created a monster.

  But Sian isn’t here. And you know your son. Throwing things was simply the only way his brain would allow him to tell you what he wanted. And that, surely, is the most important thing right now. Letting Danny know you’re listening to him, or trying to. That you understand how unbearably difficult the whole notion of communicating is for him, and that you’ll do whatever you can to make it easier.

  “You miserable engine,” you say in the outraged Liverpudlian tones Ringo Starr adopted for the stationmaster’s wife in the original British version. “Just look what you’ve done to our breakfast. Now I shall have to cook some more!”

  “Thundering funnels!” Danny giggles happily as you get out the eggs.

  * * *

  —

  Later, while Danny’s getting dressed, you make Tim his own favorite breakfast, fruit salad.

  “If I’m going to figure out where Abbie is, I need to know everything,” you tell him as he eats. “Did anything happen in the run-up to her disappearance—anything out of the ordinary?”

  He thinks. “Well, she lost her phone. She thought she’d probably left it on a bus. Of course, I tried the GPS locator, but it was already out of battery. But then we had a piece of luck. Someone found it and handed it in to the transit authority. And that papier-mâché case was so distinctive that, when I contacted them, they were able to identify it.”

  That must have annoyed Abbie, you think. The very first instruction from the website she’d tried to follow, and it backfired.

  “Weirdly, when I got it back it had been wiped,” Tim adds. “But of course, I’d always been careful to make backups for her.”

  “Anything else? Please, Tim—I need to know everything. Good and bad.”

  “Well…” He lowers his voice. “I had my suspicions she might have been using drugs again.”

  “Drugs? What made you think that?”

  “Nothing specific—no actual proof, I mean. But it was something I was very tuned into. After all, over fifty percent of addicts do relapse at some point. So if she seemed to have unexplained mood swings, or be a little too happy sometimes, I’d worry. So I got Megan to give her a drug test—”

  “Whoa,” you say. “Back up. Megan Meyer, the dating coach? You had her administer a drug test to Abbie?”

  Tim nods. “It was Megan who helped us draw up the prenup—that’s one of the services she provides. Random drug testing was a condition we both agreed to.”

  “Is that…usual?”

  “Megan’s view is, if something’s going to be an issue, you might as well discuss it before the wedding, right? And since we’d both agreed we were going to lead clean lifestyles, neither of us minded the drug clause.”

  “I think I’d better see this prenup.”

  “Of course.” Tim gets up and fetches a document from the filing cabinet. “There.” He hands it to you and sits back down with his salad.

  You flick through it. The document runs to about twenty pages. Some of the clauses are in legalese, but most are pretty straightforward—at least, straightforward to understand. You imagine they might have been somewhat harder to live up to.

  The first section is headed Fitness, Weight, and Lifestyle.

  The parties hereby contract not to gain more than three (3) pounds avoirdupois per annum (excepting in the year during which a confirmed pregnancy or delivery of a child takes place). After any such gain, the infringing party will book into a health spa or weight loss clinic of the other party’s choosing, at the infringing party’s expense…

  The parties hereby contract not to take illegal drugs, “legal highs,” or abuse prescription medication, and to submit to random drug testing at a frequency to be determined by the other party…

  The parties hereby contract to eat meat-free meals at least three (3) days a week…

  “Wow,” you say, flicking onward. “This is pretty comprehensive.”

  Tim shrugs. “That was the point of it. Great fruit salad, by the way.”

  Further on, your eye is caught by a section headed Affection and Intimacy.

  The parties hereby contract to spend at least one (1) full day per week devoted to family, without work.

  The parties hereby contract to take at least two (2) vacations each year, with at lea
st two (2) additional long-weekend excursions.

  The parties hereby contract to spend at least one hundred (100) minutes alone together each week…

  Each clause is accompanied by a detailed list of the consequences for infringements, from a ten-thousand-dollar fine for working too hard to a hundred thousand for missing a vacation.

  The section on finance is relatively brief.

  The parties hereby relinquish all rights in the other’s preexisting property, assets, stock options, and intellectual property. In the event of separation or divorce, spousal maintenance will be set at one-fifth of the higher earner’s net income.

  The final, and longest, section is headed Childcare and Education.

  The parties hereby contract that their children will take the name Cullen-Scott in perpetuity.

  The parties hereby contract that their children will follow an ambitious curriculum valuing arts and sciences in equal measure…

  And then Danny came along, you think. Turning all these carefully worked-out assumptions on their head.

  “The point was, we agreed on pretty much all of this stuff anyway,” Tim’s saying. “It really wasn’t a big deal. And there’s no harm in being clear about what your expectations are, right?”

  You flick back to the section on drug tests to see what the penalty for failing was.

  The party at fault will immediately book into a substance abuse rehabilitation clinic of the other party’s choosing, for a duration of no less than ninety (90) days…

  In addition, the second party hereby contracts with the first party to attend monthly drug counseling sessions with an authorized representative of the Moving On rehabilitation clinic for a period of no less than ten (10) years from the date of the marriage, or until mutually agreed with the first party…

  “What’s this?” you ask. “Abbie went to drug counseling?”

  Tim nods. “It was part of her rehab program. The most effective way to prevent a relapse is to go on seeing a counselor regularly.”

  You sit back, thinking. It seems to you that what Tim had taken for drug-induced mood swings—a little too happy sometimes—might equally be the highs and lows of a secret love affair. But you’re not going to say so, at least not until you have proof.

  And a plan, too; what to do with that information.

  What were those words he spoke to you last night? I had to build the right tools. That’s all you are to him, you realize. An appliance. Like a socket wrench or a motorized screwdriver.

  Well, this tool has a mind of her own. And she’s going to start using it.

  51

  “I must admit,” Megan Meyer says cheerfully, “I never expected to see you here.”

  The matchmaker’s offices are in San Mateo, equidistant from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. You came in an Uber, summoned with a tap on your phone. You could even use the app to choose the playlist on the car’s stereo, thus ensuring the driver didn’t talk to you. As you crawled through the endless traffic you found yourself reflecting that, really, no one needed robots or driverless cars, when human beings were already this automated.

  Megan’s offices were much as you expected. A water feature burbled in the reception area. There were fresh flowers in alcoves, tasteful art was hung on the walls, and the magazines in the lobby ranged from MIT Technology Review to The Economist.

  Megan herself, though, was a surprise. You’d been expecting someone like Judy Hersch the news anchor, coiffed and brittle. But although Megan is equally well groomed and even more expensively dressed, her eyes are shrewd and humorous.

  “I used to be a headhunter, filling leadership roles in start-ups,” she confides as she leads you into her office. “But so many of my clients asked if I had any friends they could date, I realized there was no one catering to that side of their lives. Tech people might be able to write the code for a dating app, but they’d be the very worst at using it. They don’t have the social skills to decode profiles, they tend to choose on appearance rather than personality, and when they do date, they often have no clue how to behave. So my pitch to them is, no swiping, just old-fashioned matchmaking. Besides, I’m good at it. I’m curious about people. And I genuinely believe that everyone, however strange they may seem, has a soulmate out there somewhere.”

  You realize something else about Megan: She’s one of the very few people who immediately talks to you like a person, rather than a machine.

  “What about Abbie?” you say as you take a seat on one of Megan’s two enormous sofas. “Was she Tim Scott’s soulmate?”

  “Well, he thought so. And he’s my client, so…” She smiles.

  “But you weren’t sure?”

  She hesitates, then leans forward. “Look, I probably shouldn’t say this. But I knew two things the moment I met Abbie Cullen. First, that Tim was going to fall in love with her. Heck, he was already in love with her. That’s why I made a point of going to talk to her that day. He’d just ignored every single one of the women I was trying to pitch him and gone on and on about this incredible artist he’d hired.” She sits back again. “And second, I knew it would end in tears.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you know what I mean by Galatea syndrome?”

  You shake your head.

  “The men who start tech companies…they tend to be a particular type. First, they have impossibly high standards. Second, they have a vision. Which is to say, a view of the world. Often they like nothing better than to impart that view to some receptive, impressionable young person. If the young person is fresh and sweet and drop-dead gorgeous, too, so much the better. And, to be fair, the younger person is often just as keen to learn as the older one is to teach.

  “But fast-forward a few years, and the dynamic has shifted. The older person still has the vision, but the younger one has heard it all before. And they’re probably not so sweet and fresh anymore, either. So, inevitably, they move on.”

  “Why’s it called Galatea syndrome?”

  “From an ancient Greek myth. About a sculptor called Pygmalion, who rejected all the women of Cyprus as frivolous and wanton. Until one day, he carved a statue of a woman so beautiful and pure, he couldn’t help falling in love with it. At which point the statue came to life and loved him right back. He called her Galatea. I guess today we’d say he fell in love with an ideal, rather than a person.”

  “I think I know how that feels. On the receiving end, I mean.”

  Megan nods. “I did suggest to Tim that jumping into marriage with a woman a decade younger than him, someone he’d only known for a few months, wasn’t wise. But Tim believes in being decisive. The best I could do was get the two of them to sit down and talk through a prenup.”

  “I did wonder about that. I read it this morning. It seemed quite…draconian.” You’d wondered if Megan even deliberately set the marriage up to fail, hoping for repeat business.

  “The point of the prenup is never the prenup,” she says flatly. “The point of the prenup is, first, to get two idealistic, loved-up individuals to be honest about what their expectations for this relationship are. And second, to provide some kind of road map for a healthy marriage.” She waves a hand in the direction of Silicon Valley. “Most of my clients couldn’t navigate a cocktail party without a list of step-by-step instructions, preferably written in Python or JavaScript. I like to think that by incorporating things like date nights, vacations, and non-work days into a prenup, I’m giving them some sort of blueprint for normality.”

  “I think Tim may have taken it more literally than you intended. Getting Abbie to take a drug test every time she seemed a bit too cheerful.”

  “Yes. Well, I did what I could to get them both over that particular road bump.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Megan only lifts an eyebrow, but you immediately guess. “Abbie failed the drug test. Sh
e failed, but you told Tim she’d passed.”

  Megan hesitates, as if deciding how much to tell you. “Not exactly. According to the hair analysis, she was clean for coke and other class-A drugs. But it showed high levels of alcohol. That wasn’t covered by the prenup, so officially it was none of my business. But I sat her down and read her the riot act anyway. Even though it wasn’t her who was my client, I felt responsible for her. Protective, even. She was always this sweet, optimistic person, and then her kid got that horrible condition…It can’t have been easy.”

  “What did she say when you did that?”

  “She swore she was talking to her drug counselor about it. That she was determined to make the marriage work, for Danny’s sake if nothing else.” Megan shrugs. “She was probably lying. All addicts lie. Drinkers, too—to themselves, mostly. I should know. I used to be one.”

  You think. Megan assumed Abbie was lying because she was a drinker who wasn’t going to stop. But what if Abbie had been planning to leave, even then? And what if the drinking wasn’t the cause of the marriage breakdown, but a consequence of it?

  “When was this?” you ask.

  Megan pinches the bridge of her nose while she thinks. “Roughly the middle of July.”

  Three months before Abbie left. Perhaps it wasn’t only Tim who’d been in love with an ideal, you reflect. Perhaps Abbie, too, had had a kind of fantasy of a perfect life: a perfect marriage, perfect children, a wealthy and successful husband. When that dream collapsed, had her first response been to dull the reality with alcohol, and her second to flee altogether?

  You feel a flash of sympathy—sympathy you’re careful to suppress. Abbie’s flaws were human, certainly. But her flaws are also your strengths. You will never be addicted to alcohol or drugs. Your decisions will never be clouded by medication or idealism or lust.