Husband and Wife

by Leah Stewart

  He crouched before Mattie. Her tear-streaked face had a post-tantrum placidity. She regarded him. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Rajiv.” He held out his hand for her to shake. She looked at it. “That’s your hand,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. He turned his hand palm up and wiggled the fingers. “Are you sure it’s not an overturned beetle?”

  She laughed. “No, it’s not a beetle! That’s your hand!”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, in that case can you give me five?” He held his hand out and waited.

  She backed closer to me. “Mommy, what is five?” she asked.

  “Five fingers,” I said.

  “You can’t take my fingers,” she said to Rajiv in the crisp, adult voice she used when scolding.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I have my own.” He straightened up and smiled at me again. This time the smile was better, brighter, a little bit conspiratorial. “And this is Binx,” he said. As he bent to smile at the baby, to play peekaboo, which made Binx laugh, I thought I’d made a terrible mistake. I should have gone to his house. I should have just shown up there with a bottle of wine, I should have taken his hand and led him without a word to the bedroom, making sure the lights were out. I should have pretended we were in a movie, or a fairy tale—love, or at least lust, with no preliminaries. Or maybe I should have left it all to my imagination, maybe I preferred it that way. Because now we had to get to the bedroom from a beginning of tantrums and puzzles and peekaboo, polite chitchat over dinner, a segue that one of us had to be brave enough to make, the question of willingness hanging over our heads, unspoken, as we pressed on through the ordinary. This was all backward, the cinematic embrace normally coming before the screaming children, as it had, of course, with Nathan. And I had no idea what to say. I’d been envisioning kisses, twinkling lights, a rush of emotion. Oz, I’d been envisioning Oz. I’d never considered that I might need to begin by asking him about his day. I didn’t even know if I cared about his day. A few e-mails, one brief kiss—what did I really know about this guy? What good had I thought seeing him would do?

  Binx squirmed to get down, so I bent and set him on the floor, kept my eyes fixed on him as he crawled toward a stuffed animal and flung himself upon it. “He’s fast,” Rajiv said.

  “He’s like a little bug,” I said. “He scurries.” I risked a glance at Rajiv, found him looking at me.

  “It’s good to see you,” he said. I wanted it to be good to see me, of course, so why did I feel disconcerted by the emphasis with which he said this, almost as disconcerted as I was thrilled?

  “It’s good to see you, too,” I said. He was standing awfully close to me. I looked at his stomach, could practically feel the warmth of it beneath my palm. My gaze went back to his face. My God, I’d just given him a once-over, like a pervy old man on the subway, and he knew it, too, his eyebrows up, his mouth cocked on one side in a knowing way. I grinned at him, caught, surrendering. “Hi, beautiful,” I said.

  He looked surprised. He looked delighted. Yes, delighted was the word. Had no one ever pointed out his beauty before? “Hi,” he said. He leaned in like this was our first greeting and kissed me on the cheek, and now I could feel what I’d been waiting to feel, that reckless thrumming beneath my skin, that silent, magnetized acknowledgment of mutual desire.

  But Helen was calling from the kitchen, asking what we wanted to drink, and Mattie and Ian had started squabbling over the toy piano, and Binx decided to chime in, too, crawling toward me and crying in the way I recognized as a demand for milk. I’d spent nearly four years learning to subvert my own needs to somebody else’s, but desire, new desire, competes mightily with a little girl who wants a turn with the toy piano, with a baby who wants his milk. So I tried to set it aside. I sent Rajiv to answer Helen, I moderated over the piano, giving the usual speech about taking turns, and then I sat down on the couch and attached Binx to my breast. I didn’t even think about this latter action until Rajiv returned with two glasses of red wine and his steps faltered at the sight of me in that most maternal of poses. He recovered, handed me my glass from a respectful distance, started a conversation about a novel he’d been reading with his gaze fixed resolutely on my face. I hoped I hadn’t flipped a switch in his brain, so that now he’d think “mother” when he looked at me. There are many uses to which you can put the body, I wanted to say to him. They don’t have to be exclusive, no matter how it sometimes feels.

  At home, Nathan and I were as schedule-oriented as Supernanny could ever want. Bedtime was between seven and seven thirty, and every night we repeated the ritual of baths and songs and storybooks. Helen and Daniel were much more casual; their children often stayed up snuggled against them on the couch until they carried them, asleep or half asleep, up to their beds. I was experimenting, rolling with the punches, and so I let my kids stay up, too, Mattie and Ian watching TV while we ate, Binx passed around from lap to lap, putting his fingers in people’s mouths and laughing. Would Jack Kerouac have put his children to bed on time? A ridiculous question, which made me smile in a way that Rajiv noticed. “What?” he asked.

  “I was just thinking how cute Binx is,” I said, because the truth would require too much explanation, and Rajiv might not grasp how funny it was anyway, the whole idea of On the Road with Kids. Before Nathan and I had children, we had the usual difficulty understanding why our friends who procreated became, to our minds, incredibly uptight. Why we had to eat dinner at five. Why we couldn’t flush the toilet after the kids went to bed. Nathan and I said to each other that when we were parents we wouldn’t be like this. Nor would we let our children monopolize a guest, insisting on constant horsie rides that said guest felt obligated to supply, all the while longing for a seat on the couch and a beer. Nor would we let our children talk back to us, or refuse to eat vegetables, or a whole host of other things that seemed, in retrospect, like the rose-colored hopes of crazed idealists. Once, we’d gone to the beach with kid-toting friends, and we were astonished when they got up to leave after only an hour, after all the effort it had taken to sunscreen the children and load up the gear. The children needed to nap, they said, and Nathan said, “Why can’t they just nap on the beach?” And our friends the parents gave him a weary smile, a smile I now recognize as saying, If you have children you’ll understand, and until then I’m too tired to explain it to you. Sunlight and sunburn and sand in the diaper. A baby who won’t stay where you put him, who flips right over and crawls away. A little girl who can’t sleep without her covers over her head, the stuffed octopus she’s named Bob.

  Two hours past his bedtime Binx grew fussy, wanting to nurse constantly, finally falling asleep at my breast, milk running out of his slack mouth. I carried him into the room we all were sharing and put him gently in the Pack ’n Play, and then Helen came up the stairs carrying a sobbing Mattie, and it took me a long time and three books to console and calm her down enough that she could go into the room with the sleeping baby. “Nap on the beach,” I whispered in her ear, and she repeated the phrase and laughed.

  When I came back down Helen and Daniel were doing the dishes, their children dozing against each other in front of the television, and Rajiv was standing by the back door staring out into the yard. He turned when he heard me. “I’m going outside for a smoke,” he said. He waited. My God, he was good at waiting.

  “Can I come?” I said.

  It was a starry, starry night. Without discussing it, we walked to the back of the yard, just outside the pool of light spilling from the windows, where no one glancing out from the house could see us. Of course I didn’t tell him I no longer smoked. He handed me a cigarette and I took it, and then when he held up his lighter I put the cigarette in my mouth, my hand trembling a little, and he leaned forward and lit it for me. Nathan had never been a smoker, but he wasn’t the only man I’d ever dated, and I’d known the pleasure of having a man light my cigarette, of feeling for a breath of time like Lauren Bacall in black and white, wielder of a sultry gaze.
I’d forgotten that feeling, and I enjoyed its return. What a shame that the cigarette tasted terrible, that I inhaled too heartily and the smoke assaulted the back of my throat, making me sputter and cough like a teenager failing in an attempt to seem worldly wise.

  “Are you okay?” Rajiv asked.

  “Fine,” I said, and though I coughed out the word he seemed to accept that response. I held the cigarette and watched the smoke rise upward and hoped he wouldn’t notice if I didn’t inhale again. Why did I think I had to pretend for him? I thought that to get what I wanted I had to be the old me, and at that moment I remembered the old me as one in tune with the rhythms of smoking, drinking, flirting. The old me was the girl in the maze, the girl he’d loved a little, and even though I was five years and ten pounds and two kids heavier than that girl, I wanted him to see her when he looked at me. I wanted to be her. She hadn’t had a husband who’d chosen another over her. She’d been a poet. She hadn’t had a husband at all. Rajiv didn’t ask me about Nathan, or recent events, or what I planned to do next, questions surely almost anyone else would have posed. Only later did it occur to me that he wanted to pretend, too.

  What did we talk about? I have no idea. It was a stream of pointless chatter. I was talking in a nervous, hiccupping way, my sentences stop-and-start, my voice rushed and high-pitched, my laugh too quick and too loud. All the alcohol I’d consumed seemed to be rushing through my head like whitewater.

  “You know,” he said after a while, and I knew by the way he hesitated that something honest was coming. “I thought about you a lot, after the last time I saw you.”

  “You wrote great e-mails,” I said.

  “Oh, those.” He grinned. “I slaved over those.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Hours and hours!” he said. “Checking every word in the thesaurus. Because there might be a better word.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said, and he gave me his secret smile. “Well, I have a little microphone right here”—I touched my ear—“telling me what to say.”

  “Interesting. Who’s on the other end?”

  “Hmmm. I haven’t thought this joke out enough. James Bond? The president? Shakespeare?”

  He laughed. “I can’t imagine a more schizophrenic combination than that.”

  “One minute it’s poetry, then it’s spy talk, then it’s a bunch of nonsense about coexisting with fish.”

  “Pretty much,” he said. He inhaled, exhaled. I watched the smoke drift upward. “So what I’m gearing up to tell you,” he said, “is that I made a short film about you.”

  “This time you sound serious.”

  “This time I am serious. It was sort of a losing-the-dream-girl thing, but, you know, the importance in your mind, the ongoing importance…” He sighed. “Now I’m babbling.”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I know babbling, and that was not babbling.” I was inches from saying more about babbling, the sounds Binx made, and then I remembered, no babies, not with him.

  “Anyway,” he said.

  “Anyway,” I said. “Can I see it?”

  He laughed. “Oh God no, it’s terrible. I’m embarrassed by it now. It’s really overwrought.”

  “I don’t think of you as capable of overwrought. Or,” I said, remembering, “of obvious.”

  “Obvious,” he repeated. He dropped his cigarette and rubbed it out. “Yeah, but sometimes I am.” He looked up. And there was the intense eye contact. And there, oh no, was the nervous giggle.

  “I don’t think of myself as a dream girl,” I said, and hoped that it was only to myself I sounded high-pitched and breathless.

  “Maybe that’s what makes you one.”

  “Hmmmm,” I said. “If that were the only requirement a lot more people would be dream girls.”

  He laughed. “There are other requirements,” he said.

  “What are they?”

  He smiled. He stepped closer. He didn’t answer me. Nathan liked to explain things. We had that in common. If he had been the one with me in the garden, he would have made an effort to explain. He might have listed my good qualities. He might have made a joke about big bazongas. He might have done both, because we had in common, too, a tendency to conclude a bout of sincerity with a joke. You couldn’t just let the emotion lie there, all naked and newborn and strange.

  Rajiv explained nothing. Rajiv, I was beginning to see, had a weakness for the inexplicable, the ineffable, the sweet abandonment to things beyond our ken. He kissed me. Though I responded, for a moment my thoughts hovered with Nathan: Did Nathan really want to undercut emotion with a joke? Or was that just me? Had I made him uncomfortable with sentiment, the way he always made me late?

  Rajiv was kissing me. I stopped thinking about Nathan. I stopped thinking about anything.

  “Your mouth is all red,” Helen said.

  Rajiv was gone, Daniel upstairs with the kids. Rajiv had left not long after we’d returned from our kissing interlude, for which I was grateful, because it was a struggle to stand there making chitchat with him and Helen when all I wanted to do was touch him again.

  “Really?”

  “Mmm-hmmm,” Helen said. “Actually, half your face is red. He must be quite the kisser.”

  I went to the mirror. She was right. I looked like a teenage girl who’d been out in the car with her boyfriend, my mouth bright red and the skin around it pink, like I’d worked my lips so hard they’d dissolved into the rest of my face. You just don’t kiss that vigorously once you’ve been together for ten years. You go much faster to the sex. “Wow,” I said.

  She laughed. She seemed a little excited herself—if you’re married, and you’re faithful, you get your thrills vicariously. “So what happened?”

  “He kissed me.”

  “Well, your face tells that story,” she said. “But what did he say?”

  “He said he’d made a film about me, but it was terrible.”

  “Huh,” she said. “Never saw that one, I don’t think. Unless you were the carny in the one about the amusement park.”

  “The carny, huh? Is that what I am to you? Because your friend used the words dream girl.”

  “And you just bloomed like a flower, didn’t you?”

  “That kind of talk—it’s like a drug, Helen.”

  She started reminiscing about a guy she’d dated in college who’d been prone to courtly speeches about how wonderful she was. “But his metaphors were bad,” she said.

  I was only half listening, my mind still on Rajiv. I wanted to ask her if he was so romantic, so certain, about every woman he dated. I suspected the answer would be yes, because if Helen thought his feelings for me were as revelatory and particular as he claimed, surely she’d be worried about the damage I might do him, so obviously indulging the urge to make myself feel better. But I didn’t want to hear a yes. So I didn’t ask.

  “So what now?” Helen asked.

  “Well, I like him,” I said. “Really, you know, for a lot of the things I first liked about Nathan, the way we connect about books and movies and music, the fact that he gets my jokes.”

  Helen said nothing, but she looked at me. Oh, she looked.

  “It’s not weird,” I said. “We’re attracted to the same qualities over and over. Daniel’s got some things in common with the other guys you’ve dated.”

  “Sure,” she said. “But you don’t want to go after Rajiv because you want to get back some version of Nathan.”

  “Get back, or get back at?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Either one.”

  My cell phone began to play “Family Affair,” which meant Nathan was calling me. The sound was muffled and seemed to come from behind Helen. She leaned forward, pulling a couch cushion with her, and my phone tumbled out. One of the kids must have been playing with it. I looked at the screen, though I knew who the caller was. “It’s Nathan,” I said.

  She made an “uh-oh” face. “Are you going to answer?”

  “I don’t know,” I sai
d. I closed my hand over the phone.

  “I’m going to go check on Daniel,” she said.

  The phone vibrated once more in my hand and then stopped. The sound of the ring had been like an alarm clock snatching me out of a dream. Nathan. Oh, right. My husband. The whole reason I was here. What was he thinking, what was he doing, while I was outside in the arms of another man? I was sure he missed the children. A few weeks before all this we’d gone to the movies, a rare night out, and there was a scene in which a man leaned close to a baby, letting the baby grab and squeeze his nose, and the baby looked exactly the age of Binx, who loved to grab our noses, look at us inquisitively when he did so, then laugh. As I watched, my eyes filled up with tears, as they did these days at any media mention of children—happy children, sick children, missing children—and I could feel the goony, lovesick smile on my face. I glanced at Nathan. He watched the onscreen baby with the same smile, and the love I’d been feeling for Binx wrapped itself around Nathan. We loved each other, we loved our children, and we were of the same mind, and at that moment those states of being seemed to stretch forward unstoppably into the future. Why wouldn’t we always feel what we felt at that moment? Why not?

  I called him back. Where before he’d been chastened and prone to silence, now he’d worked himself up to angry. “You haven’t called,” he said.

  And I said, “I’ve been busy,” my own anger spiking in response. Austin was my world now, however temporarily, Helen and Daniel and Rajiv the people who populated it. Nathan—who was Nathan, this asshole on the other end of the phone? Not the man who’d so recently kissed me in the garden, that was for sure. Not the man who’d called me his dream girl. This voice on the phone, sharp with accusation—it belonged to someone very far away. I was here and he wasn’t, and if experience is entirely the mind’s perception of the moment, then he didn’t even exist.