Husband and Wife

by Leah Stewart

  “Cigarettes,” I said. “Don’t they sound good?”

  “Can’t,” she said. “Was too hard to quit.”

  “The thought made you lose your pronouns,” I said.

  “Daniel would kill me,” she said. “Daniel in a state of self-righteous anger is a terror to behold.”

  “He seems so easygoing,” I said. “It’s hard to picture.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “You have no idea.”

  “No,” I said. I just didn’t know Daniel, did I. Not like I knew Helen. Not like she knew Nathan, the three of us bonded by common experience, classes and classmates and parties and late-night pancakes, the sort of drink- and pot-fueled conversations that make you feel you’ve traveled the highways and byways of somebody else’s mind. “You seem happy together,” I said.

  “I think we’re a pretty good fit.” She sat up, adjusted a pillow behind her back, snuggled back down. “You can check the liquor cabinet and see what we’ve got, if you want a drink.”

  “I don’t want to drink by myself,” I said. “I wanted mutual debauchery.”

  “Ooh,” she said. “I could make iced lattes.”

  The last thing an insomniac needs is an evening latte, but I said OK, because she’d offered it with the same anticipatory excitement with which she used to offer me a joint. She smiled more easily when she was stoned, her eyes got small and her grin got wide, and when she was drunk her skin flushed, redness creeping up her face to spread along her hairline, and I knew those things even though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her stoned or drunk.

  “I got an espresso maker,” she said. “It’s awesome.” The thought of the coffee had rejuvenated her. She walked into the kitchen with a bounce in her step, and I followed, thinking of grad school, afternoons at our favorite café, coffee and cigarettes, a melancholy mood we both wished away and welcomed. Nathan never smoked, but he did occasionally join us for coffee. “In the time you two have spent bitching,” he said once, “you could have written a poem or three.”

  “When’s the last time you wrote a poem?” I asked Helen now, leaning on her kitchen counter while she fiddled with her shiny new machine.

  “Like, worked on one, or finished one?”

  “Either.”

  “I worked on one yesterday,” she said. “I finished one last week.”

  That was not the answer I’d expected. “Oh,” I said.

  She scooped espresso beans into a grinder, counting under her breath. “You sound surprised.”

  “I guess I assumed you didn’t have time to write.”

  “I didn’t, until we hired the babysitter.”

  “You have a babysitter?”

  “I didn’t tell you that? She comes three mornings a week, and I go off to a coffee shop and write.”

  “When did that start?”

  “About six months ago.” She pulled two tall clear glasses from the counter. “It was weird at first. It felt really weird to sit and do nothing, you know? To sit and think. To pay someone ten dollars an hour so I could sit and think. I still feel guilty on the days when I don’t actually produce anything.”

  “That’s part of the process.”

  “I know,” she said. “But it didn’t use to cost me ten dollars an hour.”

  I wanted to ask more questions—I knew I should ask more questions, how it was going, what she was working on. But I was still struggling with the inaccuracy of my assumptions, my notion that we had similar failures of ambition or energy, the feeling of inadequacy produced by the revelation that we weren’t, after all, the same. Ian had been born three months before Mattie, and Helen had been one of my primary sources of support and reassurance. It was OK that I sometimes cried for no reason. It was understandable that when older women urged me to enjoy this time, I felt a flash of anger. It was normal to find the first months of motherhood so hard. Making chitchat with other mothers on the playground, I’d found myself retreating from the ones who refused to complain, the ones who did not seem to feel like a bomb had gone off in the middle of their lives. If they could stand around glowing with love like a figure in a Mary Cassatt painting, then what the hell was wrong with me?

  Helen was holding out the glasses to me. They were still empty. I didn’t understand.

  “Can you put ice in these?” she asked, and so I took them, and obeyed. As I stood at the freezer, ice cubes sticking to my hand, she asked, “So what do you want to do about Rajiv?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I told him you were coming here.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You did?”

  “I thought you wanted me to. He really wants to see you. I said maybe we could have him over for dinner tomorrow night.”

  “Here? Really? But I don’t know if I want the kids to meet him.”

  “They wouldn’t be meeting him as your boyfriend. It’d be just like meeting us.”

  “I know, but it’s also, I don’t want to mix up flirty mode and maternal mode. I don’t want to be thinking, ‘Oh, baby. Now I have to go breast-feed.’ I want him to see me without the kids.”

  “You want to be Sarah, not somebody’s mother.”

  “Not somebody’s mother,” I said. “Not somebody’s wife.”

  “Wife,” she said. “I hate that word.”

  “It’s not a good word,” I said. “Girlfriend was better.”

  “I can watch the kids tomorrow night. You could meet him out somewhere.”

  “That would feel so datelike,” I said. “Is that too much?”

  “Well, the other option is to go to his house,” she said.

  “You mean just show up there?”

  “Show up there, say, ‘Hello, I’m here for the sex,’ and ask him where the bedroom is,” she said. “What are we talking about here? Did you drive across the country for this guy or what?”

  I brought her the glasses, and she dumped in the dark espresso, the white milk. We watched the colors swirl. Did I really drive across the country for Rajiv? Was that why I had done it? I didn’t know. But if so, wasn’t that—really, truly—a little on the crazy side? “What are we talking about here?” I asked.

  “Sex?” she said. “Marriage? Motherhood? No longer being twenty-two?” She handed me my glass, lifted hers. “Cheers,” she said, and we clinked.

  We wandered back to the living room. I said, “My mother was twenty-two when she had me.”

  “My mother was twenty-five.”

  “Can you imagine? That was when we were in grad school. Can you imagine having had kids at that age? I didn’t even know who I was.”

  She settled back into the couch cushions. “Don’t you think knowing who you are makes it harder? I mean, you know who you are, and then it becomes really hard to be who you are.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “Excellent point.” On her bookshelf she had the same set of Proust she’d given me. “Have you read these?”

  “What?” She leaned forward to see those elegant, reproachful spines. “Oh, God, no.”

  “Me, neither,” I said, and I sat down beside her, relieved.

  “Someday,” she said. “Maybe.”

  “Someday maybe,” I said. “Do you miss graduate school?”

  “What do you think? Don’t you remember Janelle and her sisterhood circle?”

  “I totally forgot about that! She really wanted you to be her sister.”

  “Did she ever. Goddess this, goddess that. She used to come up behind me at parties and start braiding my hair.”

  “Remember when Tony kept trying to romance you by suggesting you both sign up for karate?”

  “What an idiot. Karate isn’t even Korean. He should at least have said tae kwon do.”

  “If only you’d succumbed to his charms. You could be a black belt by now.”

  “Remember when Brian implied he’d been a male prostitute?”

  “Was he hitting on you, too?”

  She shrugged. “Kind of a misguided approach, if he was.”


  “Did we ever find out whether that was even true?”

  “I don’t know. It made his poems seem cooler, which was what he was going for.”

  “I remember all the gossip after his reading, everybody trying to parse what his poems meant. They were elliptical in the extreme, but we were all convinced we saw truth in them.” I sighed. “I think back then I had a tendency to confuse the art and the life.”

  “A lot of people did.” She smiled. Then suddenly she intoned, “I rode a great sadness today.”

  I stared at her. She looked back at me, solemnly. “Are you trying out a poem on me?” I asked.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” She leaned forward. “You don’t remember that? The party at Brian’s house, everyone sitting around stoned, and suddenly out of nowhere he pipes up and says—”

  I finished the thought: “I rode a great sadness today.” The scene rushed back, the dimly lit apartment over a liquor store, the orange velour couch and extensive vinyl collection. Brian had once worked for a museum, and along the hall he had put up detergent and tinfoil and cookie boxes alongside typed descriptions of each object and its significance. An ironic facsimile of a box of tinfoil, this box of tinfoil challenges us with the question: Did I or did I not once contain tinfoil? Hung nonchalantly on the wall, much like a box of tinfoil in someone’s home, this box of tinfoil is, remarkably, indistinguishable from an actual box of tinfoil. Asking where life ends and art begins, this box of tinfoil is a box of tinfoil.

  “And you…” She grinned, and I grinned, and then she started to laugh, her laughter bumping her words along. “You said…”

  I was laughing, too, the laughter catching me up. “‘What?’”

  “And he said, and this time he seemed a little sheepish, ‘I rode a great sadness today.’ And again you said…”

  I was laughing hard now. “I really didn’t hear him,” I managed to say.

  “‘What?’ You made him say it a third time! Then, poor guy, he just rushed it out as fast as he could, ‘Irodeagreatsadnesstoday.’ And just dead silence.”

  “Well, what are you supposed to say to that? I rode a unicorn?”

  “Oh, that poor guy,” she said, laughing.

  “I felt a great human emotion tonight,” I said.

  “Oh, me, too,” she said. “Me, too.”

  “I really didn’t hear him,” I said again, no longer laughing, suddenly visited by remorse. For the first time I felt sympathy for Brian, who wanted so badly to be a certain kind of person that he ended up an actor on his own carefully designed stage. It seemed to me now that there had been pathos even in the way he wore his hair, like Bob Dylan circa 1965. No doubt he had been depressed that day. I remembered him as a depressive guy. But how genuine was his emotion if he could transform it so readily into a line, display it like an accomplishment? How great could his sadness have been if he could say it aloud?

  “Do you miss graduate school?” Helen asked.

  “I don’t miss the place, or, really, most of the people, or, God knows, workshop. I miss, you know, conviction. My youthful conviction.”

  “Which youthful conviction?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe all of them.”

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay there for a while listening to my children breathe. Binx had a phlegmy rattle in his throat. In her sleep Mattie murmured something about doorways. I got up. In the living room I brought the set of Proust over to the couch, and for the next three hours I flipped through the volumes, reading a little bit here and there. Proust was an insomniac, a piece of information that startled and unnerved me. How eerie it felt, in the middle of the night, to have a hundred-year-old voice tell me exactly how it felt to be awake in the middle of the night. Proust couldn’t sleep. He retreated from the world to ruminate on the minutiae of its pains and pleasures, our experience of art, of nature, of other human beings. He elevated that minutiae, he made it the only thing. A phrase of music, played again, less transient than love. Who, after all, can hope to hold all of her life in her mind, with so much forgotten, so much given away? There is no life, in the way we often mean the word, as one person’s story, a coherent narrative. There’s this moment and before it another one and after it another one and layered behind it another one. Experience echoes and retreats, a Coke when I needed it ten years ago, and another now, offered because the original experience endowed it with meaning. But only when the Coke passes from Helen’s hand to mine does it have that meaning. Without Helen it’s just a drink, liquid bubbling in a glass, a sweet taste, then gone.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  In the morning Helen found me on the couch with the first volume of Proust on my chest. “This is quite a sight,” she said, gesturing at the rest of the books, splayed around me. “You got drunk on Proust.”

  “I don’t know if you can get drunk on Proust,” I said. “He’s too detail-oriented for that. You can get stoned on Proust.” When I sat up, my brain seemed to shift inside my head. “Did you know he was an insomniac?” I felt awful. The day loomed before me like an obstacle course. “Are my kids awake?”

  Helen shook her head. “I haven’t heard them. Abby’s up.” She nodded toward the kitchen, and I peered around her to see Abby wandering by with a piece of toast in her hand. She had half of it stuffed in her mouth and she didn’t seem to be chewing it, just carrying it around like a dog with a bone. “Abby’s always up.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Just after six. I’m sorry I woke you. I wasn’t expecting to find you here.”

  I shook my head to say, don’t worry about it, and she asked if I wanted a latte, and I nodded to say, Yes, please God, I do. She started to walk toward the kitchen, but I stopped her with her name. She waited. “Let’s invite Rajiv to dinner,” I said. If I had been her, I would have teased me about my change of heart, about this being the first thought I had upon waking.

  “OK,” she said.

  “I love you, Helen,” I said, but I wasn’t sure if she heard me.

  In the late morning we took the kids to IKEA and Helen bought things while I chased the children, for whom the place represented not a frenzy of consumerism, not a cavalcade of fabulous deals, but an endless playground of beds and chairs and tables, a dollhouse big as life. We ate meat-balls for lunch. We took the kids home and put the babies down for naps and read to Ian and Mattie and then turned the TV on for them and drank some more iced lattes. All day I thought about the end of the day, which would bring Rajiv. Helen had called him that morning, and he’d been delighted to come. “Did he really use the word delighted?” I had asked, more than once, and more than once Helen had confirmed he did. Delighted. A positive word, of course, but also a slightly silly one, with its overtones of foppish effusion. Or perhaps he’d said it ironically, in a faux-uppity way. Had he said it ironically?

  “No,” Helen said.

  “You’re getting sick of this already, aren’t you,” I said.

  She shrugged. “I remember what it’s like.”

  “I haven’t done this in a long time,” I said. “It feels really weird to be doing this.”

  “There doesn’t have to be a this,” she said. “It can just be dinner, if that’s what you want.”

  What I wanted was to click my heels three times and return to the maze where he’d kissed me, the one and only time he’d kissed me, the white lights twinkling above us, around us, behind. What I got was a seat on the floor among the strewn pieces of a puzzle, Binx with a puzzle piece dampening in his mouth and me gently trying to tug it out while I also reached for Mattie, who was picking up the other pieces and throwing them, screaming because Binx had come crashing through her puzzle like Babyzilla after she’d spent a painstaking half hour constructing it. I never failed to be surprised by how strong Binx was, his hand and the puzzle piece incredibly difficult to tug away from his mouth as he made the guttural sounds of an animal disturbed at the food dish. Ian was watching with interest, plinking at an electronic toy piano in a d
esultory way. “Mattie,” I was saying, “Mattie, stop that right now,” but she couldn’t hear me over her own frustration and despair, and I’d failed to hear the doorbell, or notice that Helen had gone to answer it, Abby at her heels, and so when I looked up to see Rajiv standing just inside the living room, it was as though he’d appeared out of thin air. I recognized the look on his face as the shell-shocked one I used to wear years ago when confronted with a chaos of children. There was no yes, yes!, no swept-away feeling. There was screaming, and a look of alarm, and me cross-legged on the floor with my stomach pooched out over my lap, looking far far fatter than I did standing up.

  Mattie noticed Rajiv seconds after I did, and abruptly her screaming stopped, although for a moment the air still seemed to ring with it. I hauled Binx to me, wrested the puzzle piece from him, and handed him a toy phone at the same time. Then I stood, held Binx in front of my stomach, and said, “Hi.”

  “So…,” Helen said, and then Daniel called from the kitchen, “Helen, that pot is boiling!” and she broke off and exited at a jog. Abby toddled along behind her, arms held out, crying, “Mama, Mama, Mama.”

  “Hi,” Rajiv said. “Long time no see.” His eyes were on mine, and then they flicked away, to Mattie. He wore a small, odd smile that might have been nervous, might have been secretive, might have been…oh, who knows. It didn’t seem good. He wore a white, short-sleeved button-down shirt, just see-through enough to show the ribbed undershirt clinging to his stomach, which looked, yes, as taut as ever, like you could press your palm there and feel the ripples of muscle underneath the warm, dark skin. I was wearing my favorite shirt, one that augmented my milk-amplified breasts while falling in loose generosity over my stomach, and I’d taken care with my hair and borrowed a pair of Helen’s earrings, and still I felt slatternly, slovenly, exposed. Carrying extra weight felt like wearing my weaknesses on the outside. You could tell by looking at me that I had succumbed to too many pints of ice cream. I had stopped going to the gym. I had failed to be, as a book I’d seen recently exhorted me, a “yummy mummy,” and, of course, there was the small matter of my straying husband. Maybe Rajiv thought, No wonder, when he looked at me. Maybe he thought, Good Lord, what was I thinking? Maybe he looked at me with pity, a copy of a copy of someone he once knew.