Husband and Wife

by Leah Stewart

  Rajiv’s furniture had the scavenged, eclectic look of items found at thrift stores and yard sales. He had one of those basket chairs that had been a staple of my friends’ postcollege apartments, and an ornate coffee table made of some kind of shiny black stone with an elaborate Asian scene in shiny white stones inset on the top. “Wow,” I said, pointing at it.

  “Somebody had put that out with the trash,” he said. “Can you believe it? It probably belonged to somebody’s grandmother. Maybe she even brought it back from a trip to China or something. It just looks to me like the kind of thing somebody loved and displayed proudly, and then it ends up on the street.”

  “But you rescued it,” I said.

  He pulled me close, abruptly, looked at me seriously for a moment, and then smiled. “And that was an impressive feat,” he said. “It’s really heavy.”

  “I’m impressed,” I said. I was as breathless and ready to be kissed as Marilyn Monroe, but again, again, he didn’t kiss me. He released me, positioned the basket chair directly in front of the television, ushered me into it, and moved to put in a DVD. He’d invested in his entertainment system—a wide-screen plasma TV, surround sound speakers. His DVD library took up an entire wall. Remote in hand, he stepped back from the television and looked down at me. “You know how I told you I made a film about you?”

  “You don’t forget something like that.”

  “So I decided I should show it to you.” He took a breath. “But I want you to remember it’s kind of maudlin and over-dramatic and I’m totally aware now that it’s not good.”

  “Be careful,” I said. “You’ll raise my expectations too high.”

  “All right,” he said. He aimed the remote at the television and looked over at me. I waited. “Oh, what the hell,” he said finally, and pressed the button. As the figure of a man filled the screen, he whispered, “I can’t watch this,” and left me alone with his film.

  A man climbed a hill in a desert, alien landscape. He was moving quickly, and the look on his face said he was in pursuit of something, although for a moment I had no idea what. Then he came around a curve, and up ahead a flash of long hair and trailing skirts before the woman who possessed those things disappeared around the bend. The film wasn’t yet working its spell on me, and I knew this because I found myself wondering if this woman wore heels in addition to her long and filmy skirt for a grueling trek up a sandy incline. I remembered thinking, once, when some horrifying news story had spun me into a catastrophic mood about the perils facing my daughter, that much of women’s fashion was designed, on some level, to make us easier to catch: long hair for pulling you back, skirts for constricting your movements, heels for making you fall. None of these things seemed to slow down the woman in the film. She escaped easily from the man, who quickened his pace after his glimpse of her, his breathing growing louder on the sound track. He stumbled, clambered on hands and knees, and rose again, faster, faster, his eyes fixed on the path ahead where the woman appeared, glanced back, and disappeared again.

  Finally he reached a place where the trail narrowed and became only a foot wide. The camera swooped down dizzyingly into the drop on either side. But a few yards away the trail opened into an inviting circle, a resting place where the view became beautiful rather than terrifying, and there the woman waited. Or at any rate, there she was. The camera showed her only from a distance, from his point of view. Was she looking back at him? Was she looking past him at the vast and gorgeous sky? Was she waiting or was she trapped? Impossible to tell.

  He stepped, his foot slipped, sand sliding down the side, and as he wobbled a montage of images filled the screen. The woman dove into waters rippling with moonlight. The woman swooned on a sickbed like a consumptive, a handkerchief fluttering from her hand. The woman stood in front of a window, unfurling a river of long, dark hair. The woman posed in silhouette, smoking from a Holly Golightly cigarette holder. The woman waited at the front of an empty church in a wedding dress. Then back to the man. He’d regained his footing, and he looked, again, at the woman. Now she was naked. He walked toward her, and as he did, the images from the montage flashed. He’d nearly reached her when she took a step backward, and another, spreading her arms in a crucifix pose, and as he quickened his pace she stepped off the edge, as easily as if into a pool. He ran, slipping and sliding, while she floated in midair. Her eyes were closed, and then she opened them and fixed him with an intense and unreadable gaze—was it reproach? regret? invitation? The image faded until she was gone. The film ended on a close-up of the man’s agonized face. Roll credits. The end.

  Nathan had once said to me, “If there’s one thing that women like, it’s competence. Don’t you think that women like competence?” And I had to agree that we did. It didn’t matter whether a man knew how to build a fence or write a love song, there was something undeniably attractive about the successful application of a skill. And Rajiv’s images were beautiful. Clearly he knew what he was doing. But different as this film was from the one I’d seen in grad school, with its repressed characters refusing to say what they meant, I still struggled to grasp its meaning. Did he present those iconic images of feminine desirability and unattainability in order to comment on their unrealistic nature? Was that why the woman vanished, because the man had conjured her as an impossible ideal? Or did he want all of that—the beauty, the mystery, the pursuit—to be taken as unabashedly romantic, completely sincere? And was I supposed to go find Rajiv now, or was he coming back? In the wake of the film I suddenly felt that I myself was in a movie. Me. Rapunzel. Doomed Camille. Holly Golightly. A bride. Why a bride? Why were some images of the lost woman, and some of the waiting one? Was that complicated or just confused? And if he knew it wasn’t successful, why had he wanted to show it to me? He’d handed me all the power, making me his audience, his critic, his dream girl. I was used to the audience part, the critic part—hadn’t I been that for Nathan for years and years? The dream girl part I wasn’t used to. I was nobody’s idea of an unattainable ideal, a fairy-tale princess. Except, inexplicably, Rajiv’s.

  I stood, and saw him waiting at the edge of the room. He gave me a nervous smile. “Help me out here,” he said. “I’m terrified.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “The way you framed the shots…” I shook my head. “It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s totally dumb, though,” he said. His hands were fists in his pockets.

  “No,” I said. I shook my head. “No.” But it had unnerved me, made me feel a little pity, a little doubt—was I looking at a man awash in juvenile romantic fantasies? Or was I the one having one of those?

  “You don’t have to say anything nice,” he said. “I just wanted you to see it.”

  Why? I wanted so badly to say, and then I saw how he waited. He was waiting, again, for me. He’d wanted to hand me power over him, power to wound him, the power of knowing what he felt. He wanted me to know he’d been waiting.

  So now what? Here I was. I’d driven all this way, and here I was, with a man who wanted me badly enough to show me a film like that. If I slept with him—if I really slept with him—would that make me the person I used to be? Would it make me Nathan? Was that why I was doing this, to feel what he felt? Or was it revenge—an eye for an eye? Maybe, I thought, and, maybe, I thought again, that wishy-washy word. If Nathan hadn’t done what he did, I wouldn’t even be here, and maybe that meant I should go. But Nathan had done it. And I was here. I was tired of maybe. I was sick of myself. I was here, and so was Rajiv.

  About the sex, I have to say that it was very, very good. Some of that was sheer newness, the revelations of somebody else’s body. But newness could have meant awkwardness, an irritating or uncomfortable touch, collisions of noses and knees, and it didn’t. I had to fight the urge to dart under the covers as soon as my shirt came off, or to stop the action and explain the loosening effects of pregnancy on skin, which I assumed he’d never witnessed before. But the urge dissipated with the things he said. Things like, “I
can’t believe you’re real,” like “I can’t believe I get to touch you,” things I was embarrassed to repeat to Helen later, when she wanted details, but which did, indeed, make me bloom like a flower. What had I done to inspire all this devotion? I still had no idea, and by nature I was skeptical of what did not seem earned. But the rush of words formed a current, a rip tide, and I let it pull me under. It felt very much like inspiration.

  “So,” he said later, next to me in his bed. “Tell me what’s going on with your work.”

  “My work?”

  “Your poetry.”

  “Oh.” I’d honestly thought he meant my job, and that right there said something about how I’d redefined myself, for good or bad. “I…” Quit, I almost said, but the word I’d used often enough in my head sounded so final out loud, as though I’d told poetry to fuck off before I stormed out. I didn’t want to say anything so definitive to Rajiv. “I haven’t been writing much lately.”

  “Because of all this turmoil?”

  “If by turmoil you mean everything that’s happened in the last, let’s see…” How long, exactly, had it been? When had I last put one word after another and called it a line? “My God,” I said. “Two years. It’s been two years. I don’t think I’m even allowed to call myself a poet anymore.”

  “Once a poet, always a poet,” he said. “That’s your sensibility, right? That’s your nature.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t even know why I wanted to be a poet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why did I ever think I had something to say?”

  “If not you, then who?”

  “Helen,” I said. “She’s very authoritative.”

  “Nobody gives you authority. You just have it,” he said. “You just have conviction. You choose them.”

  “And then you become a crazy loser convinced he’s a misunderstood genius, like the guy in my program who used to cry because he was trying to improve our moral understanding, or something like that, and couldn’t understand why we were hung up on the fact that his poems were terrible.”

  “Art is like love,” he said. “You have to be willing to make a fool of yourself.” He made these statements without quotes around them. How did he do that? Nathan, too, could do that—be sincere without the ironic inflection that allows one to be sincere while acknowledging the joke of sincerity. Nathan and I used to quote an exchange from an episode of The Simpsons, between two characters at a music festival: “Are you being sarcastic, dude?” “I don’t even know anymore.” Nathan and I, we loved that exchange. And at two a.m. the night before this one I’d read Proust’s description of a character speaking as though in quotes when he talked of serious things. I’d felt the contemporary nature of that observation like a jolt of electricity. It reminded me again that Proust had actually been alive, that what I was reading was not a calcified history of people whose experience of the world was so different from my own as to, for all intents and purposes, be nonexistent. He was alive. He couldn’t sleep. He listened to someone speak as though in quotation marks, and he noticed it, just as I did, and see, Nathan, I still took something from art, this sense that we are all connected, we are communicating, person to person and century to century, this sense that is so easy to lose, caught in the maelstrom of our own involving troubles. Art shows us ourselves, in ways both flattering and not, and it lifts us out of ourselves, like astral projection, and who doesn’t crave an out-of-body experience from time to time? The body is, after all, a cage, and if there was anything I’d learned lately, it was that so is the mind.

  I touched the inside of Rajiv’s elbow, just because I could. “When I was in college,” I said, “a lot of my friends wanted to be writers, too. And I remember one time I was walking with two of them—we were actually walking past the student center, right by the ATM, I can picture it clearly—and one of them, the guy, said, ‘If you could write something great or be happy, what would you do?’ And the girl said, ‘I’d write something great,’ and the guy said, ‘Me, too.’ And they both seemed really smug about it, like they were pleased to contemplate their future of tortured and melancholy genius. And I said, ‘I’d be happy.’”

  “So are they still writing?”

  “No. That’s my point. I’m the only one who kept writing. Up until recently, anyway.”

  “Maybe their expectations were too high.”

  “Maybe. But that’s not the point of the story.”

  “Are you saying you stopped because you were happy?”

  “I’m saying that would be a perfectly good reason to stop. I’m saying those two liked the idea of being artists more than the daily reality of working at it. I think the only real reason to keep at it is because you’re less miserable when you do it than you are when you don’t.”

  “Less miserable,” he repeated. “Is that the same as happy?”

  “Haven’t you ever heard the Freud quote, that his goal was to help people achieve ordinary unhappiness, rather than hysterical misery?”

  “Ordinary unhappiness, is that the best we can do? It’s not a very inspiring slogan.”

  “Maybe if you put it on a big banner,” I said. “Like ‘Mission Accomplished.’”

  “I’d like to do better than that,” he said. “I’m going to put ‘Extraordinary Happiness’ on my banner.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ll hang it from the cottonwood tree.”

  “Which one is that?”

  “The one at the front of the yard.”

  “That tree could handle a big banner,” I said. “It’s a big-ass tree.”

  “Wait until July, when it lets go of its cotton. It’s like movie snow.”

  July? I thought.

  “Do you think you’ll write again?”

  “I don’t know. Do I have to?”

  He enclosed my wrist lightly in his hand. “Absolutely you do. I expect a poem before I allow you in my bed again.”

  “I see,” I said. “Maybe I should go do it right now, then. Knock out a sonnet of courtly love, maybe.”

  “Good idea,” he said. He yawned. “There’s pen and paper on the desk in my study. And a good view.”

  “I should just sit there until something comes to me.”

  “Just let it flow,” he said. Suddenly I wasn’t sure he was joking. What if he wasn’t deadpan after all? What if he was deadly earnest instead?

  “Flow wasn’t exactly the word to describe my process. Hesitate was more like it. Balk. Struggle. Agonize.”

  “I sympathize,” he said. “Hey, there’s your first two lines. She agonized. He sympathized.”

  “That’s a slant rhyme,” I said, and then I got up out of bed, pulled on my clothes.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “I’m going to write a poem,” I said.

  “Really?” he said.

  “I’m unconventional,” I said.

  He laughed. “Yes, you are,” he said. “You’re wild.”

  I went into his study, sat at his desk, picked up a pen. I looked, as instructed, at the view. The window had an elaborate metal grate like ones I’d seen in Mexico, and the lines of the grate framed the neighbors’ back porch, where two men sat, smoking cigarettes, on the other side of a silver Mercedes SUV and a baby blue Vespa. The men were a couple, and I knew that not just because they looked at each other with affection, which they did, but because of the way, when one of them accidentally ashed on his shirt, the other one rolled his eyes. I watched the eye-roller get up and go inside, and I wondered if he was so annoyed by his partner’s clumsiness he no longer wanted to sit with him, and then he came back out with a wet cloth, crouched before the other man, and began to wipe at his shirt. All the time he was talking, and though I couldn’t hear what he was saying, I imagined he was chiding the other man, as one does a child or a spouse. His partner tipped his face up to the sky and closed his eyes, submitting to the scolding, the cleaning, the gamut of another person’s care. He rested his hand on top of the other
man’s head.

  I looked down at my blank page. Perhaps I could write a poem about the men outside. Rajiv hadn’t been serious—surely he hadn’t been serious—and so what was I doing this for? It felt like I had something to prove. It felt like I was filling out a job application. Taking a standardized test. I wished it were multiple choice. Do you think of yourself as (a) an artist (b) a former artist (c) shallow and materialistic. “Good question,” I said aloud.

  Flow, I wrote across the top of the page, and then I made a cross in the center of the O. I turned the F into a rectangle bisected by a line. I drew rays off either end of the L, I added triangles to the tops of the W. Some part of Rajiv, the part that had made that film, was a rode-a-great-sadness-today kind of guy. He might have wanted everyone at a party to contribute to a poem on a typewriter, like the guy Helen and I had mocked in grad school. The guy Nathan had defended. I had to admit that there’d been truth in Nathan’s defense; there was a kind of bravery in Rajiv’s sincerity. Had Nathan wanted more sincerity from me? Was spontaneous poetry at the window the kind of thing he wished we would do together? Was this what he’d looked for and found in Kate Ryan? If so, why hadn’t he ever proposed anything like this? He was just as guilty of letting life become ordinary—conventional—as I was, no matter what he’d claimed. If he wanted to recapture the life we lived in grad school and for several years after, why didn’t he try to recapture it with me? Maybe we each needed someone who was still living that life, someone to take us by the hand and offer to be our guide to willful ignorance of reality. We couldn’t ignore reality with each other. We were each other’s reality, each other’s history, each other’s daily bread. We were each other’s most important, most necessary person, the one you lean on when life gives you trouble, the one you take the trouble out on, the one person who can help you through it, the person you sometimes hate, partly because you need them so much and they can’t always—who could?—live up to that need. And here I was, being exactly what Nathan said he needed, only I was being it for somebody else. It wasn’t fair of him to need it, though, was it? Maybe not. None of this had much of anything to do with what was fair.