Husband and Wife

by Leah Stewart

  “Busy doing what? What’s going on there?”

  “What do you mean?” I went cold.

  “I mean, how long are you planning to stay? When are you bringing my children home?”

  I didn’t answer. I had no idea. I couldn’t imagine. I couldn’t look past the next day.

  “Hello? Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Because I’m not exactly talking about what I had for lunch.”

  “No,” I said. He was referring to an argument we’d had a month before, or maybe longer. “No, you’re not.” I paused.

  “Hello?” he asked. “Are you there?”

  “I’m here,” I said. “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?” And then I hung up the phone. How strange that he was still thinking about that argument, given everything that had happened since. I’d been having a bad day and he’d called me at the office, interrupting me in the middle of some task that had, at the time, seemed important. He’d started telling me about his morning, then he took a breath and I assumed he’d finished, and I said OK, I’d talk to him later. “I wasn’t done,” he said.

  “What,” I snapped, “you weren’t finished telling me what you had for lunch?”

  Because he had a tendency to do that, you know. If he had half a can of lentil soup, I knew about it, and, alas, I didn’t particularly care. He likes details, Nathan. He thinks a story should start at the beginning—of course, of course, but many times we’ve differed on what the beginning is. To understand the story I’m telling now, he might think you needed to know about the first girl he loved, what she wore to the prom, what her face looked like when she broke his heart. He once told me that the driveway of his childhood home sloped down at a thirty-seven-degree angle. Sometimes we could laugh about his predilection for minutiae, but not that time when he called me. That time he was furious. That time he said, “You could at least pretend to give a shit about how I spend my time.”

  I said, “I do.”

  He said, “You do give a shit, or you do pretend?”

  “Both,” I said, which was the accurate, but unwise, answer, and the fight went on from there, to such places as whether it took longer to do the laundry (my job) or the dishes (his). If there’s anything we’ve learned from the endless parsing of everything, it’s that nothing is ever about what it seems to be about. Depending on what the meaning of is is. There’s subtext to the subtext, every argument a rabbit hole. Do we know why we’re angry? Do we know what we’re fighting about?

  “You are self-absorbed and inconsiderate,” he said, and I said, “Funny, that’s what I was thinking about you.”

  For every good memory there’s a bad one. And the reverse. The reverse is also true.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  It had been so long since I’d lived outside the regimented world of work that I still found it disconcerting to wake up on a weekday morning without any sense of what the day would hold. Was it possible I missed going to work? That I liked my job after all? Yes, it was possible. There was satisfaction, wasn’t there, in the daily accomplishment of tasks, in the neat organization of files and spreadsheets. And I missed Tanya and Kristy, who continued to believe, or at least pretended to, that my family and I had been struck down by the rotavirus. “Nasty stuff, the rotavirus,” Kristy said when I talked to her that morning, and I agreed that it was. “Don’t come in and give it to me,” she said, and I promised I wouldn’t. It never ceased to amaze me, how easily all of us were fooled.

  “How are things there?” I asked.

  “Falling apart without you,” she said. And then she laughed.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “No, seriously, we miss you. I’m working a lot harder than usual. And Tanya and John are pissed at each other. He wants her to print out his e-mails and put them on his desk, then he dictates his answers for her to type. Then she’s supposed to print them out so he can correct them, then make his corrections, then send the e-mails from his account. I am not making this up.”

  “Jesus.” I could hear her sucking on a drink, probably Bojangles sweet iced tea. The straw made that pool-draining sound, a squeak against the plastic lid. I could picture her pulling it in and out, looking for more tea. “Seriously, Kristy,” I said. “Refills are free.”

  “Shut it,” she said. “I’m only allowed one. That’s the diet I’m on. I’m fat as a cow.”

  “You’re pregnant,” I said.

  “Yeah, I noticed,” she said. “Plus, I can’t be running off to Bojangles every five minutes, what with having to do your job. If you don’t come back soon, Tanya might start sending crazy e-mails from John’s account.”

  “Like what?”

  “Dear Professor Buttface,” Kristy said. “Please join me in an experiment to enlarge my penis.”

  “Do you think he could get the NIH to fund that?” I asked.

  “He probably already has,” Kristy said. “They’re probably spending half their day enlarging their penises.”

  “Who’s they?” I asked.

  “The faculty. The professors so-and-so.”

  “What about the women?” I asked.

  “Oh shit, it’s John,” Kristy said. “I’ve got to go.” She hung up, just like that. She had to work, you know. And what did I have to do? Sit around with Helen drinking coffee, idly debating what to do next. And that was strange. It was strange, walking a wide trail through a park, pushing the babies in their strollers while the older kids ran ahead, without the beat of my to-do list in the back of my brain: return e-mails, weed garden, make phone calls, clean stove. Around us college kids played Frisbee golf, and I watched them, their laughter, their investment in the game, the way nothing about them suggested that they might have homework or troubles waiting at home. I’d spent my high school and college years, and then my twenties, trying to get somewhere, and then at some point, without quite noticing the change, I’d begun to assume there was nowhere left to get. I had two kids and a job and a marriage and a house. I lived on a plateau and went around busily maintaining it. Now here was a new reality, the path ahead disappearing under golden trees, like paths do in fantasy novels, on their way to magic and swordplay. What would happen next in my life? In the world? I couldn’t even pretend I knew. We never really know, do we, and yet we manage to live as though we do, as though there is some permanence to our routines of waking and breakfast and school and work and afternoon coffee and television and bedtime and the same person sleeping every night on the other side of the bed. What a shock it is, that there is no permanence. But it has to be a shock, right? Without the magic trick of belief, it would be too hard to live.

  “So tomorrow the babysitter comes,” Helen said.

  “Oh, right,” I said.

  “Do you want me to ask if she can watch your kids, too? I mean, you’d have to pay her.”

  “I don’t know. What would I do?”

  Helen shrugged. “You could go to the coffee shop with me and work.”

  “Hmmmm,” I said. “What are you working on?”

  “A series of poems about my parents—hey!” Ian was waving a large stick in the air, dangerously close to Mattie. “Stop that right now, or no TV time!” Ian shot her a mutinous look but dropped the stick.

  “Do you have trouble going back and forth between TV time and work? I mean, switching from kid mode to writing mode?”

  “Um…” She was still watching Ian, who lingered near the stick, looking back from time to time to see if she was still watching. “Don’t you dare,” she called to him. Ian turned and stomped off down the path. Mattie ran after him, and we quickened our pace to keep them in view.

  “Kids just make you so present in the moment,” I said. “When I’m with them, I feel like I’ve never been so attuned to what’s going on around me in my life. Because you have to be. You always have to have half your mind on them.”

  “That’s true,” Helen said. “Some days I can’t concentrate, and instead I’m wondering how Ian’s doing at s
chool, or whether the babysitter remembered to give Abby her morning snack. But there were always days when I couldn’t concentrate. I was just thinking about different stuff.”

  “But the ability to concentrate is still there,” I said. “You can still lose yourself in your work.”

  “I found it harder when I was still breast-feeding,” she said. “Maybe it was the hormones. But now, yeah, that’s back, like it used to be. On good days I look up and see it’s time to go and I have no idea where the hours have gone. I enjoy the experience even more than I used to because that kind of time, when you can just get lost in your mind, is so rare these days.”

  “I don’t know if I can do it anymore,” I said. “Let go like that.”

  For a moment we walked in silence. Binx had fallen asleep, his head lolling to one side like he had no bones in his neck. Abby sucked contentedly on the collar of her jacket, watching the world go by. The older kids were chasing each other, laughing, around a tree. Helen said, “You know how you said you used to confuse the art and the life? Maybe you’re still being too romantic about your work, like you have to live a certain way to produce it. Maybe you’re making it black and white: you have this kind of life or you have this kind of life.”

  “When would I write?” I asked. “I’ve been at work, or I’ve been with the kids. And don’t say at night, because I know you know I don’t have the energy for that.”

  “I get why you haven’t been writing. I’m just saying you act like you’ve given it up for good, and that I don’t get. What you need is time, but you seem to think it’s something more than that. It’s like you’ve bought into the idea that a mother can’t also be an artist. Or shouldn’t be.”

  “I just find it hard to go from breast milk and peekaboo and diapers to, you know, bigger things.”

  “But that’s saying breast milk and peekaboo and diapers aren’t bigger things, or don’t represent bigger things, which seems like a very male point of view. A fixation on your mother is a subject for literature, but actually being a mother isn’t? Well, guess who set those rules? If obsessive interest in your own penis wins you the Pulitzer, then what’s wrong with obsessive interest in your own breasts?”

  “Are you writing about your breasts?”

  “No, but I could,” she said. She glanced down at them. “At this moment I can’t think of what I would say.”

  “Poopy!” Abby suddenly shouted from her stroller. “Poopy, poopy, poopy!”

  Helen sighed. “That’s Abby’s contribution,” she said.

  “She’s a fan of the trochee,” I said.

  Helen pulled off the trail and unfolded a changing pad from her diaper bag. I corralled the older kids, I joked, I smiled. But I was hurt and angered by this characterization of myself, as submitting to the views of the oppressor, surrendering my identity. I’d been busy—I’d been, often, overwhelmed—and so the activity for which I had no time and made no money had fallen by the wayside. Did Helen agree with Nathan, that I no longer cared about art, that my values had changed? It was as though I made them uncomfortable not writing anymore, like my quitting called into question the necessity of the whole enterprise, like they no longer quite knew who I was.

  Helen’s cell phone rang while she was in the middle of changing Abby’s diaper. She held Abby’s feet in the air with one hand and picked up the phone with the other, tucking it between her ear and her shoulder. I wasn’t really listening, watching the kids planting a stick in the ground, talking earnestly about how it would grow into a tree, and then suddenly Helen said, “Here,” and thrust the phone at me. I assumed it was Nathan. I’d left my cell phone at home, and maybe he was no longer willing to wait for my calls. I braced myself and said, “Hello,” and a voice much deeper than Nathan’s said, “Hey, lady,” and I knew it was Rajiv.

  “Lady” was what he’d called me in the e-mails he’d written after the visit when he’d kissed me, e-mails always addressed Hey lady just like he’d said and which I’d been able to hear him saying when I read the words on the screen—lady not with an angry edge, the lady of a New York City construction worker, but with a caress. The first time I met him he had a girlfriend, and I’d heard him refer to her as “my lady,” and so when he used the word for me I saw it as a coded endearment, just one small pronoun away from being his.

  “Hi,” I said. It wasn’t Nathan. Thank God it wasn’t Nathan. Why wasn’t it Nathan?

  “I’ve been thinking about you all day,” Rajiv said.

  “You have?”

  “And all last night.”

  “I’m with my children,” I said, “or I’d ask what you were thinking.”

  He laughed. “Do you think you could come by tonight?”

  “Tonight?” I looked at Helen, and she nodded. Tonight. A word that rang with anticipation, that spoke of living in the now. A word for Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, for Fred and Ginger, for pop songs, for swooning into his arms despite everything, because of the stars and his eyes and of course the champagne. A word for what I wanted. “Sure,” I said.

  The house was one of those low-slung southwestern houses that looks like it’s all roof. It was set back from the road and had a big front yard, the grass brown and crisped. Near the house, a red hammock was strung between two trees. Hanging from the roof of the porch was a hammock chair, this one multicolored, and I pictured Rajiv spending his days moving between the two hammocks—was he in the mood for red or rainbow, upright or reclined? I pictured our hammock at home, hanging between posts in our carport-porch. Time was, I used to spend hours lying in it, rocked by the breeze, wind chimes and birdsong the sound track to whatever book I was wandering through. Now it seemed eons since I’d done any such thing. I climbed into the red hammock. Above me the sky swayed. Here I was at last, and I was too nervous to go inside. What if he wanted to sleep with me? What if he didn’t? I closed my eyes. I’d just lie here a moment, and then I’d go knock on the door. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I wouldn’t do that at all.

  Except the door opened and closed, all on its own. And I didn’t move. I heard footsteps on the porch, and then on the grass—how would I describe the sound of his approach? Was rustle the right word? I kept my eyes closed. Every nerve ending in my body seemed to anticipate his touch. He stopped beside me. I could hear him breathing. Then I sensed movement, I felt the approach of warmth, and he pressed his lips to mine. The hammock swayed as he braced himself on it, and I tilted toward the ground, grabbed at the webbing, opened my eyes. He steadied the hammock, one arm on either side of me. There he was, smiling, dark curls falling forward around his face. “Sleeping Beauty,” he said.

  “Well, hi,” I said. I’d never considered before how easily the Sleeping Beauty position could segue into the missionary position, what with the woman already supine on the bed.

  “Hi,” he said.

  I sat up and scooted over, and he sat next to me. It’s impossible to sit together in a hammock without touching. Our legs pressed together. Our arms. I pretended not to notice, though I could think of nothing else. It was like being back in high school, squeezed into the crowded backseat of somebody’s car with a boy you like, sitting on his lap, your heart beating fast, your laugh louder than usual as you fake interest in the conversation, and it feels like no part of your body exists except the part that’s touching his. “Sleeping Beauty was my favorite of those movies,” I said. “The early Disney ones, I mean.”

  “Did you want to be her?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think it was that. I think I liked the song she sings.” I launched into it—“I know you, I walked with you…”—and unbelievably he joined in, “once upon a dream.” I stopped. “You know that song?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I had three older sisters. I loved all those movies as a kid. It was my secret shame.” He picked up my hand like he was going to read my palm. Instead he rubbed his thumb over it in a slow circle. “So ‘Sleeping Beauty’ was your favorite fairy tale?”

  “My favori
te of those movies,” I clarified. “My favorite fairy tale was ‘Beauty and the Beast.’”

  “Really,” he said. “Now that’s psychologically interesting.”

  “I guess it is,” I said.

  “You’re looking to transform somebody. You’re looking for the virtue other people can’t see.”

  He seemed a little too pleased with this assessment. “Or a magic castle,” I said. “With a talking teapot.”

  “I don’t think the teapot is in the original story.” He turned his head toward me, which put his mouth inches from mine. I thought he was going to kiss me again, and I was all for it, under the spell of the hammock and his hand on mine and oh my God was he beautiful. But instead he said, “Come inside.”

  “So I can see your etchings?”

  He laughed. “You should be so lucky,” he said.

  It was awkward getting out of the hammock. My memory of this time with Rajiv vibrates with desire, but I can’t deny there were awkward moments, made more awkward by the investment we both had in maintaining the thrill of new romance. Stars and kisses fit the bill, and scooting out of a hammock and nearly falling and yanking down my shirt after flashing a pooch of belly did not. As he got out, he accidentally pressed on my hand and pinched my finger, and the way it throbbed was not romantic, but what about the way he brought it to his mouth as he said he was sorry? It sounds like nothing, it sounds almost silly, like he was offering to kiss my boo-boo the way I did for my children, but we all know that when you’re in the grip of desire there’s nothing silly about eyes meeting your eyes, lips on your finger, murmured words, the warmth of breath. If Nathan had pinched my finger I probably would have said so, and probably in an aggrieved tone, and depending on his mood and how irritably I spoke and how well we were getting along that day he might have said, “Oh, honey, I’m sorry, are you all right?” or he might have snapped, “I’m sorry, OK? It was an accident.” When Rajiv did it, I said nothing, just winced, and he noticed without my speaking, and made his apologies. I said nothing, I felt no irritation, and at the time I didn’t wonder how long we’d have to be together for the way I reacted to Nathan to become the way I reacted to Rajiv. There’s the appeal of the new romance, when you’re so accustomed to the old one. It’s not just that you don’t snap at each other, that you’re so ready to forgive offenses you barely notice them, that you look at each other with starry, starry eyes. It’s that the snapping, the irritation—they don’t even seem possible. Nothing that happened before will happen again. Can’t you see that this is a different life?