Husband and Wife

by Leah Stewart

  Nathan, I wrote. I stared at his name. My poems were never so confessional that I would use his actual name. I tore the paper in half, and then into many little pieces, until there was no chance Rajiv might casually glance into his trash can and recognize a part of my husband’s name. Now, again, a blank page confronted me. Lights, I wrote. And then I thought, Camera. Action. Did I wish that I could write a poem? Yes, I did. I would have liked nothing better than to be exactly the person I thought Rajiv was, right at this moment, imagining me to be: spontaneous and exciting and in tune with the large and spiritual movements of the universe. Was I being sarcastic? I didn’t know anymore. I was sincere in missing the rush of inspiration, that brief but pure belief in your own brilliance, the good mood that follows the composition of a good line. I wanted it back. I did. But nothing came to mind.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Maybe,” I said to Mattie, “I’ll write a villanelle.”

  She didn’t know what the word meant, of course, but I said it to her because I took a special pride in her advanced vocabulary and also because I wanted to hear the delightful way she’d mangle the word when she repeated it, as I knew she would.

  “OK,” she said. She was playing with a naked blond doll with ratty hair, whispering something secret and incomprehensible.

  “Can you say villanelle?” I asked.

  “Vill-nell,” she said. She looked up and flashed me a sweet, shy smile.

  “A villanelle is a kind of poem,” I said. “It has nineteen lines and a complicated rhyme scheme.”

  She didn’t answer me, again absorbed in her imagined world, and I strained to hear what she was whispering to that doll. What went on in her mind? What did that doll know that I didn’t? This itchy urge to interrupt her, to make her focus on me—this was what I sometimes felt when Nathan was working, and this must be what she felt when she couldn’t get his attention, or mine. It was a child’s emotion. Maybe I really would write a villanelle. I’d agreed to go with Helen to the coffee shop, which meant I’d agreed to make the attempt to write, and I anticipated the blankness of the page with dread. A villanelle, difficult as it was, gave guidance. You had to repeat yourself. You had to find the words.

  I’d thought that Mattie would be upset when I told her I was going, after days and days of being together nonstop, but she was unconcerned, and when the babysitter came, even Binx went to her without complaint. Didn’t they sense that I was turning toward things other than them, that I was threatening to get lost? Didn’t they want me to stay?

  Look at Helen, blithely concentrating while I loitered on the outskirts of her private world, longing to intrude. The coffee shop was, like so many coffee shops, a repository of funky artiness, and many of the college-age boys sported serious facial air. What an ongoing confusion there was between art and artiness. I wanted to say so to Helen, Helen the stay-at-home mom in her mall-store T-shirt and jeans. Would any of these tattooed denizens venture to guess she was writing a poem? That was why she frowned, sighed, stared at a painting of a dog in a cowboy hat without seeing it. I couldn’t remember how to do that. How to let go so completely of the external world. I saw the bright red eye on a blue mixed-media mask. I saw the girl with the green parrot tattoo who stirred the sugar in her coffee long past the point it needed stirring. I heard somebody say, “You’ve got to be kidding” and somebody say, “When I get back from Germany…” I heard the metallic thunk, the steam-engine hiss of a latte being made. I wanted to snap Helen out of her elsewhere state, I wanted to bring her back to those things, and I wanted to let go of them myself. Could I move from the outside in, could I make my features form the exact expression on Helen’s face—so focused, so laserlike—and in that way begin to write? She didn’t seem at all aware that I was staring at her. If I interrupted her to ask how she was able to concentrate, how she was able to begin, she wouldn’t be able to explain. I knew that. It was inexplicable. There is nothing and then there is something. You just begin.

  You just begin.

  You just begin.

  You just begin.

  I tapped my pen against the table until Helen looked up with the puzzled frown of the emerging dreamer, and I stopped. And she disappeared back into her work, and oh how I envied her. That disappearance, that submergence—when you knew it would come eventually you could persist in the face of the frustration that preceded it, your own inability to make words appear on the page. And more than that, you could persist when you believed, as I’d once so wholeheartedly believed, that there was a point to the struggle, to the existence of your poetry, to my poetry, to poetry at all.

  “Who are your favorite poets?” Rajiv had asked me. Nobody had asked me that in years, what felt like years. Nathan certainly never asked me. He assumed he already knew the answer, and mostly he did, but what if some of them had changed? I gave Rajiv names, a torrent of names. People I knew, people I didn’t know. People whose work I’d loved in grad school, when I read all the time, all the time, some whose work I hadn’t read in years, didn’t even know if I’d like now. He wrote them down, all of them. He laughed at how fast I said them, faster than his pen. He went out the next day and bought their books and read them. I made him close his eyes while I read him Juliana Gray’s “The Man under My Skin,” and, yes, he looked beautiful like that, and, yes, I wanted to touch him. I wanted to touch him all the time. Listen, I had to have him. If it had been possible I would have flung myself inside him, the way you—if you were someone not me—might fling yourself into a skinny-dipping quarry at night off a twenty-foot drop. In the last week he’d taken me to an art-house showing of La Belle et la Bête, which I’d never seen, and when Belle emerged in a glory of fabric out of the wall he turned to me and smiled with the conviction that he’d given me something, that my pleasure would equal his own. We watched the dream episode of Buffy, and then he wanted to watch Persona, and we debated the merits of the image versus the word in direct representations of the workings of the mind. I thought, Oh, this life. This me. Hello, me. Where have I been?

  Now here I was, trying to write a poem. The girl with the green parrot tattoo smiled at the woman approaching her table, a quicksilver smile, a nervous smile, a smile that said Here I am for you.

  “I read an article in the New Yorker once,” Rajiv had said to me the night before.

  “Yeah?” I said. He had his camera trained on my face, and I felt very conscious of my expressions, the way my brow darted in as I waited for his point. “Was it the only one you’ve ever read?”

  “Well, you know, the New Yorker is usually so lightweight,” he said. “I like my weekly magazines to take at least six weeks to read.”

  I laughed. “You are quite the intellectual.”

  “We know that,” he said. “But back to my story. That is, if you’re done making fun of me.”

  I bowed, flipped my hand palm up to say, Go on.

  “So the article was about this guy, this linguist, who studied some disappearing language—in Iceland, I think. It was an Eskimo language, maybe, and only two or three people, or maybe it was just one, still spoke it.”

  Two or three or one? I wanted to say. Do Eskimos live in Iceland? But no more joking. I offered the camera lens a nervous smile.

  “Anyway, this guy was trying to record it, to make a lexicon and a grammar, and the interviewer asked him why. Why bother?”

  “Seems like a reasonable question.”

  “See, that’s the point. He didn’t think it was a reasonable question. He looked at the interviewer like she was crazy. And he said, ‘I do it because I’m me, and Inarak is Inarak.’”

  “Inarak?”

  “I don’t remember what the language was called.” I felt him leaning even closer with the camera. What reaction shot was he hoping for? “But you get the point, right?”

  “I get the point.” I kept my gaze on his bedspread, which was striped with bright pieces of silk, and I wondered what woman had given it to him, because it didn’t look like the sort of t
hing a straight man would buy. I got the point, but he said it anyway.

  “You’re you,” he said. “And poetry is poetry.”

  True, true, but still two separate things, and why was he so sure they’d taste great together? He’d read some of the poems I’d published here and there, but there had been none of that in quite some time. What’s important, he’d said the other night, is not the product but the production. “Easy for you to say,” I’d said. “Mister I Make a Living Doing Film Work.”

  “Some of that’s ads,” he said.

  “Mister I’ve Won Awards at Film Festivals. Mister I Got a Grant from the Sundance Institute.”

  “Wow,” he said. “I’m pretty awesome.”

  And I’d agreed. Easy for you to say, I’d thought. Mister I Hit the Best-Seller List. Mister Poised for Even Bigger Success at the Expense of My Wife. Mister generous and genuine and human and heart.

  “What if you had to convey how you’re feeling in this moment?” Rajiv asked now. “What would you say?”

  I looked at him. My, my, he was beautiful. I should do my best to concentrate on that. “In this moment?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Or this one?”

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  “I’d say I wanted you to put the camera down.”

  “But that could sound full of innuendo, or it could sound annoyed.”

  “Or both,” I said. “How would you convey what you’re feeling?”

  “I’d try to make the viewer feel what I feel by showing you looking at me.”

  “Looking at you how?”

  “Looking at me how you look at me.”

  “But how am I looking at you?”

  “Just like that. I want to film you.”

  “You are filming me.”

  “I mean, I want to put you in a movie.”

  “But I’m not an actress.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll be dead.”

  I laughed. “What an offer.”

  “And I’ll use this footage for a flashback, for the hero thinking back on his lost love.”

  I didn’t like the notion of being filmed, or being dead, or being a lost love. I tried to put him off, but he went on persuading me, long after he’d put the camera away and reached for me, and as I was getting dressed to go, he started up again. All right, I said. Fine. I said the filming had to be at night because I wouldn’t leave Helen alone in the day with all four kids. “I always make sure my kids are asleep before I come over here,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said in a slightly puzzled manner, and I realized I’d spoken that sentence too emphatically, as though he were judging me, as though I had to prove something to him. But of course I didn’t. Rajiv didn’t come close to realizing how hard it would have been for Helen to put four kids to bed alone when she was only used to two. He had no reason to think I was a bad friend, or a bad mother. If anything he might have wondered why I couldn’t get to his house any earlier than I did, why I insisted on being back at Helen’s by midnight. He had never crept into the room where his children slept, shutting the door as quietly as he could behind him. There—Mattie sprawled on her back, her arms flung wide on either side of her, her hair damp with sweat against the pillow. Abandoned to sleep, like I wished I could be. There—Binx on his stomach, his head turned to one side away from me, the dim glow from the nightlight picking up the bald spot on the back of his head where the mattress had rubbed his hair away. Carefully I’d lay my hand on his back, nothing more important in the world than to feel the gentle pressure of his breathing against my hand. Inhalation. Exhalation. The children loomed so large in my life, and then I crept in to find them sleeping and I saw again, again, again, how small they were.

  Rajiv didn’t know any of that. He didn’t know that the sight of the children sometimes made me want to call Nathan, and that sometimes I followed through on that impulse. He didn’t know that Nathan waited up until three in the morning in case I called, that he answered the phone on the first ring, as if he always had it in his hand.

  Last night Nathan said to me, “I have to admit I thought you’d have come home by now.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “You thought I liked my job.”

  “I guess I thought you liked it pretty well.”

  “Like the woman in your motel story?”

  “That wasn’t about you,” he said. “I told you that.”

  “Has anything been about me?”

  “Did you want it to be? I thought you wanted to write your own work, not be immortalized in mine. I’m pretty sure I’m quoting you.”

  Nathan thought I wanted to write my own work. Rajiv thought I should. But did I? Should I? Why was I sitting here in this café drawing a series of tiny flowers, putting loops in the letters of my name? I’d stopped writing for a reason so prosaic, so petty, it was embarrassing to name it—I no longer saw the point of continuing. What did I gain from all those hours spent? What was the return on my investment? Occasional publication in small journals. The right to call myself a poet. Not money. Not success. And only limited personal satisfaction that, for me, had dwindled without affirmation from the outside, as did my conviction that the work was good. And now I’d put my job at risk, now the economy was crumbling—now we were all on the verge of hopping freight cars with our canned beans and our bindles. Maybe no poem of mine was worthwhile in the face of that.

  But poetry was poetry. Inhalation. Exhalation. An irresistible tautology. Look at me how you look at me.

  And at last, the external world gave way to the internal one. I sat in that café and wrote. I wrote quickly, in full conviction of the words’ necessity, their need to be arranged in just this way, and I thought of nothing, I felt nothing, but that need. What is it like, that feeling? What’s the right phrase, the right word? Try this: it’s like running, if running is for you a bliss of speed and color, and not a pounding of knees, the strain of ragged breathing. It’s like what running looks from the outside when you watch an Olympic race and one of the runners is just so fast, so breathtakingly fast, that there seems no effort at all in the forward motion, and she wins, of course she wins. She has to win. She is the distillation of herself, the embodiment of speed. Look at the exultation on her face. She flew out of her body and yet stayed in it. She has never been more perfectly what she is.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  There are distinct categories of what a person will do for love. What had I done for Nathan? Had his children. Matched pair after pair out of pile after pile of nearly identical white socks. Read nineteen different versions of the same damn paragraph. For Rajiv I was lying in a ditch at sunset with my neck at an awkward angle, sticky with corn-syrup blood. Would I have done that for Nathan? No, I would not. Oh, hell no, I might have said, or, You have got to be fucking kidding me, and in fact I would have been hurt that he didn’t know me well enough not to ask.

  For Rajiv I had written a poem. My first poem in two years. I’d even showed it to him. He’d said it was beautiful, and when I asked him what I should change and he said, “Nothing,” I decided to believe him. To believe he meant it, anyway. Another thing I would not have done for Nathan—I would not have believed he really thought there was nothing I should change. Had I ever written a poem for Nathan? I’d written about him, but for him? I had written, he had written. His books were dedicated to me. For Sarah, they said, right there on the page. But I was there when he was writing them, and he didn’t seem to be writing them for me. The dedication was a thank-you for my support, a gesture of affection. I said as much to him once, and to my surprise he seemed offended. He said the books were for me, that I was his ideal reader. I was the one whose opinion mattered the most.

  “The light is just perfect,” Rajiv exulted. He walked around me, examining my corpse through the lens, and though I was supposed to be dead, I couldn’t help the way my fingers twitched out of the way of his feet. “Don’t step on the died girl,” I said.

  “What?” Rajiv said.r />
  “Something Mattie said.” I closed my eyes, because it seemed easier to be dead that way. I couldn’t help but notice that, where Nathan’s interest would have perked up, where Nathan would have asked for the story, would have listened with his eyebrows raised and a smile at her amusing phrasing and a wince that she’d said it at all, Rajiv just said, “Oh, OK,” and knelt beside me, studying my face. Because she wasn’t his child. And you’re just not as interested in the funny things a child says when she’s not your child. Why was I thinking about Nathan? I was supposed to be thinking I was dead. What did a dead person think about? The question struck me as humorous, so I tried to think of something sad, because I couldn’t be lying here all covered in fake blood with a goofy smile on my face. Let’s see. Sad. I could think about the economy, about what would happen to my family if I got fired and couldn’t find another job. I could think about Kristy’s voice mail from that morning, asking with a note of impatience how I was, and how I had yet to return it. But that wasn’t good, that was too upsetting, and if I started down that path I’d set in motion anxiety that would last all night and ensure I didn’t sleep.

  “You’re frowning,” Rajiv said.

  I opened my eyes. “Sorry. I was having anxious thoughts.”