Husband and Wife

by Leah Stewart

  “I wouldn’t cheat on you,” he said. “Not all men cheat.”

  “I know that. I’m only saying, it gets harder. It gets complicated. And what you don’t understand is that when I wake up in the morning it’s early, much earlier than I want to get up, and a little face is right there two inches from mine saying, get up, feed me, and then there’s a baby crying, and Nathan gets up, too, and he feeds Mattie while I nurse Binx, and then we rush around, together, getting everybody dressed, and then I go to work and I’m sitting at my desk with the breast pump running while I’m trying to type with one hand, and then I come home and it’s just this mad dash of feeding and bathing and reading books and then they’re finally in bed. And Nathan cooks the dinner, you know? He asks me what I want, and he cooks it. And then he does the dishes. And then he comes and sits with me on the couch and puts my feet in his lap and asks me what happened at work that day, tells me something funny Mattie said, and then we watch TV.”

  “You’re going back with him because he cooks dinner.”

  “I didn’t say that. I’m just trying to explain. That’s what our lives are now. Our days are ordinary, and exhausting, and irritating, but I really care, I really care, what funny thing Mattie said. And nobody besides Nathan cares as much as I do.” He was silent. Into the silence I asked, “Can I come see you?” because all I really knew at that moment was that I didn’t want to get back in the bed where Nathan slept. Rajiv didn’t say he was too tired. He didn’t say it was one in the morning. He led a different kind of life. He said yes.

  On the way over there I thought about the poem I’d written, the one I’d showed him, the one he’d said he loved.

  Loving the word mystery,

  but finding few occasions

  to send it rolling

  across my tongue,

  let me settle for secret

  and tell you this:

  when you come to me,

  my fingers go searching

  for the curls at the back of your neck,

  the dampness of your bath

  held there for hours.

  I want to cut a dark, wet curl

  and keep it in a locket

  like a baby’s first ringlet,

  or a tender frond of a fern

  that grows in a foreign country

  I might never visit again.

  “I love it,” he’d said. “It’s beautiful.” But that last line—what about that last line, Rajiv, with its suggestion of departure? Why did I show it to you with that last line, and why didn’t you say a word? And why, really, did you not want me to go back to Nathan, even if I didn’t stay with you? Did you not want to think of me as domestic? Did you want me to stay the version of myself I’d been with you, surrendered to desire, twined in bed until midnight, ruminating on art? I can’t blame you. Part of me wanted that, too.

  When I was in his arms, he asked me, his mouth on my neck, his speech a little muffled, what I would say if Nathan realized I was gone. “I’ll tell him I had insomnia,” I said. “I’ll tell him I went driving.”

  “And you did,” he said.

  “And I did,” I said. I closed my eyes. What would happen? What was going to happen now?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  In the morning I woke alone. No Nathan, no kids. For a confused moment I thought maybe I was still at Rajiv’s, but no Rajiv either. Understand that this day—this day I had before I had to decide—was all about looking for signs. This was one, maybe, this waking alone. But what did it mean? Yes, there was the obvious loneliness of being alone, but, too, there was the luxury of being alone, the fact that with no child screaming from two feet away I might just be able to go back to sleep. And a bed is a lovely spacious place with no one else in it.

  But I couldn’t go back to sleep. Was that the sign? I had to get up, because I kept wondering where they were. I wondered, too, if Nathan had noticed my absence in the night. He hadn’t seemed to. When I’d gotten back in bed he’d rolled over and spooned me without even seeming to wake, as automatically as if nothing had ever happened at all.

  Nathan was in the kitchen with Helen and all four children, and in the chaos I had a minute or two to watch them unnoticed from the door. Nathan chatted with Helen while spooning yogurt into Binx’s mouth. Look how expert he was, no hitch in the movements of scoop and insert and swipe the extra yogurt off the lips with the spoon, even as he reached for the box of Cheerios with his other hand to satisfy Mattie’s demands. Then Helen saw me and fell silent, and Nathan stopped talking, too, and followed her gaze. Strange that I was the one who silenced the room, as though I were the subject of gossip, a monster, a queen. “Hi,” I said.

  Nathan stood up, like a courtly gentleman. “Did you sleep well?” he asked. I heard no sarcasm in his tone. I nodded, swamped all at once with shame. Swamped was the right word. A marshy feeling, shame, all sticky uncertainty. “We were thinking about going to the zoo,” he said. “I thought we could all go, or if you wanted a break…”

  “I want Mommy to come!” Mattie said.

  “We can all go,” I said.

  He looked as pleased as if that sentence had ended with the word home. We can all go, I’d said, and maybe that was foreshadowing. Those words in my mouth were the sign. But I felt no more certain than I had before I’d said them. One day to decide. Going home was an option. Staying here was an option. Fleeing back to Cincinnati and the comfort of my parents’ house was an option. Nathan was an option. Rajiv was an option. Single motherhood was an option, if a particularly unattractive one. So many options. So many doors to open. “The Lady, or the Tiger?” How I’d always hated that story. Which, for God’s sake? Which? Why would I read someone else’s story if I wanted to be the one to decide?

  Here was the trouble, I thought at the zoo. Nothing about Nathan had changed. I watched him demonstrate with his good humor and willingness to enter into Mattie’s childish joy that he was a good father. That I already knew. I watched him demonstrate with his conscientious efficiency about diapers and strollers and snacks that having another parent around was a lot easier than not. That I already knew. I watched him demonstrate with his careful attention to me, his determination not to pressure me with questions, not to appear to notice my peevish and distant mood, that he hoped to win me back. And Nathan himself—he was Nathan. He was my Nathan, just as he always had been, and by that I mean not so much that he belonged to me, although in some way he did, but that he was the person I had always known him to be. My memory had not had him wrong. He was generous and selfish and loving and inconsiderate and attentive and distracted and faithful and not. But what would we have together, he and I, from this point forward, if I went back? That I couldn’t answer, couldn’t know, and so how could I decide?

  Then it was naptime, then it was dinnertime, then it was the children’s bedtime, the day just tick-ticking away, Rajiv’s calls appearing unanswered on my phone. Nathan had taken the lead on dinner, on herding Mattie toward the bath with threats of tickling, and now we knelt together on the other side of the tub while I washed the children’s hair, nothing decided, nothing discussed, and his flight at 2:30 tomorrow.

  “Make a loop,” Mattie demanded, and so I did, sweeping her soapy hair up and over. Binx laughed in a slightly hysterical way and smacked the water with his hands. “No splashing,” Mattie shouted, and then she changed her mind and started splashing herself.

  “Hey, hey,” I said, leaning away from the tub with my hands up, and then I saw that instead of reacting to the children, instead of intervening, Nathan was kneeling with a lost look on his face, staring at me. “What?” I said.

  “I wrote a story about you,” he said.

  “No splashing, guys,” I said. I leaned in and trapped Binx’s hands in one of mine and he tried to twist away. Mattie splashed again and caught me in the face. I grabbed her hands as well and she struggled, too, and I felt their tiny fingers straining against my palms, both of them striving mightily to escape.

  “It’s
the only thing I’ve written since you left,” Nathan said.

  “Let go!” Mattie shouted, and Binx screamed his high-pitched scream.

  “Okay, bathtime’s over,” I said. I rinsed their hair. I picked up Binx and handed him to Nathan, dripping wet and screaming, and then I hauled Mattie out and wrapped her in a towel. She was complaining that she was cold, that she didn’t want me to dry her hair, that I wasn’t wrapping her towel right, but I didn’t answer, my hands doing their mechanical duty. A story about me? A story about me? I picked Mattie up and put her on the stool and squirted neon blue toothpaste on her toothbrush and handed it to her, and Nathan said, “I know I said I hadn’t written anything since you left, but that wasn’t strictly true. I wrote this story. It’s the only thing I wrote.”

  “What does it say?” Mattie asked around her toothbrush.

  I handed her a cup of water. “Rinse,” I said.

  “Do you want to read it?” Nathan asked.

  I looked at him in the mirror. He was holding our baby wrapped up in a towel. The whole front of his shirt was wet. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You said you wanted me to write something about you.”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said.

  “You implied it.”

  “I just asked if you ever had.”

  He took a breath, said nothing, watched me in the mirror until I looked away.

  “Let’s go put pajamas on,” I said to Mattie.

  “I want Daddy to put me to bed! I want Daddy to put me to bed!”

  “Whatever,” I said, and I turned and took Binx from Nathan. The baby was shivering a little, so I held him tight against my chest as we went out of the warm bathroom. I laid him down on the bed to diaper him and he started to cry, so I tickled his belly with the top of my head, and he laughed and clutched my hair so tightly I knew it would be painful if I tried to get away. I’d just stay here forever. He was warm and clean, his laugh was delightful, he was happy, he was mine. The trouble was, I hadn’t gotten the diaper on him yet, and if I stayed like this too long he’d pee on me. There was always a drawback. There was always a flaw in the plan. Did I really want to meet the version of myself that lived in Nathan’s mind?

  “What are you doing?” Nathan asked, carrying Mattie into the room.

  “He’s got my hair,” I said, and Nathan set Mattie down and said, “Here.” Gently, gently, he pried the baby’s fingers from my hair. I stood. Binx reached, straining, wanting to tug on me again. “My flight is tomorrow,” Nathan said.

  I wrapped my hand around the baby’s ankles, lifted him onto the diaper. “Ba ba ba,” Binx said.

  “My flight is tomorrow, and you still haven’t made up your mind.”

  I slathered on the diaper cream. I pulled out and fastened the tabs.

  “How about we go out to dinner?” Nathan asked. “Helen told me about a place with a great house band and funky cocktails. Hendrick’s gin, she said.”

  “I don’t know if we should be spending money on that,” I said.

  “Sarah. I know we need to save money. I know we have to figure out the situation with your job. I know all that. But can we just not talk about it now? Can we just go out to dinner and talk about you and me?”

  “I have to change clothes,” I said.

  “OK.”

  “I mean, I have to do it now, before the kids are asleep.”

  “Can you get Binx in bed first?”

  “No,” I said. I looked at him. I was wearing him down, I thought. Any minute now he would stop being so patient, stop being so nice. He sighed. “OK,” he said.

  So I changed clothes while he read first to Binx and then to Mattie, and then sang to them both. I put on a dress. I pulled on tights. I sat on the bed with my shoes in my hand. I put one on and sat staring at the other. The children were fussing. Nathan went back and forth between them, patting Binx on the back, giving Mattie another magic kiss, saying, “Shhh, shhh,” to both of them, until they quieted down for sleep, and the whole time I just sat there holding my shoe.

  “What are you doing?” he whispered.

  And this was the moment to tell him. I knew it was. That was why I hadn’t put on my shoe. What would I say? What was I going to say? Would I say, “Nathan, I cheated on you,” and would he recognize his own words in my mouth? And would I feel triumphant or despairing? And would he feel sad or angry, would he think I’d done it only to bring us to this moment, to take his betrayal for myself? I could hurt him, I could punish him by telling him, I could punish him by not telling him. I could put us on equal footing of offense and forgiveness, and maybe that would be for the best, but was that reconciliation or just bringing this particular struggle and story to an end? What if he had never told me, what would have happened then?

  The moment yawned around me. Anything could happen now. Did I need past tense or present tense for this piece of news? I cheated on you. I am cheating on you. Or would I use that word? Did it still count as cheating if he’d cheated first? I’m seeing someone, or I saw. I met someone else, or am meeting. I had a fling. I flung.

  The thing is, you make choices. You do some things and you don’t do others and in the end there’s not much point in asking what different choices might have gained you, and lost you, unless you have a time machine. You become those choices, you embody them. When you write poetry, you’re a poet, and when you have children, you’re a parent, and when you marry someone you’re a husband or a wife. Whatever else you can quit, you can’t quit yourself. What had saved me from temptation when I’d first known Rajiv was my nature, unchosen, irreducible. How had neither Rajiv nor I recognized what the last lines of my new poem meant? I’d known I couldn’t stay, just as I’d known years before I couldn’t be with him, even as I’d gone on pretending I had a choice. I was who I was, and I wanted what I already had.

  “What’s the matter?” Nathan asked.

  I swallowed what I had to say. I swallowed the truth, I swallowed the words that contained it. “Nathan,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I wish you hadn’t done it.”

  “Sarah, believe me,” he said. “I do, too.”

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I said. To Nathan, that man, my husband. And he knew what I meant, the way he so often knew what I meant—that I didn’t know what was going to happen not just in the next few minutes, not just in the next few days, but in the world, in our lives.

  “Of course you don’t,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Nine days since his wife’s car had disappeared around the bend of the drive, taking his wife and children with it. Nine days in a house so full and yet so empty of them: her, and her, and him, or rather Her, and Her, and Him. His people. His family. Gone and gone. And what had he been doing with his time in this enormous empty space? He couldn’t account for a minute, not one minute, and yet somehow those minutes had found a way to pass. Now it was indeterminate night and the fireflies would be doing their airborne mating dance, fallen stars, Christmas lights. Or would they? Maybe it was too late in the year for that. His wife would know, if she were there to tell him. How many days had it been since he’d gone outside? Nothing marked the hours. Never mind the clocks.

  The doorbell rang and he skyrocketed out of his chair, certain from the millisecond he registered the sound that it was her. Her. She was back—he was certain, certain, never stopping to remember that of course she had a key. He went to the side door off the kitchen, which was the door they always used, but there was no one there but the usual great and tragic moths beating themselves senseless on the window, and only then did he realize that the doorbell was at the front door and therefore the person who had rung it was not, and never had been, his wife.

  A girl, though. A person of the female persuasion. A blond with her hair in a ponytail—and here he remembered with a prickling in his eyes that his daughter referred to this hairstyle as “a bundle.” This girl had her hair in a bundle, and big, trust-me eyes, and a
persuasive smile. She wore some sort of badge around her neck. “Hi,” she said. She handed him a small slip of paper which he took without thought. He, like so many others, automatically took things that were handed to him—that’s what the people who handed him things were counting on. The girl said, “We’re offering homes in your neighborhood a free cleaning.”

  “Neighborhood?” he repeated. He looked past her at the fields around his house, half-expecting to see cul-de-sacs. Maybe they’d appeared in the last nine days, a flurry of construction happening unnoticed on the edges of his misery. Neighborhood? was the least of what he wanted to ask her. You’re offering this cleaning to homes? he wanted to ask. What do the homes say? And where the hell did you come from? He didn’t see a car.

  “We’ll clean one room for free, carpets and upholstery,” she said. She looked past him into the house. “Free,” she said again. “If I could just come in and take a look.”

  Well, the right answer was no thank you, wasn’t it? That much was obvious. And yet there she was in his living room, pro-claiming with great confidence that she could “brighten up” the rug, calling her boss from his phone and uttering the ominous and mysterious words, “I need the machine.”

  Oh help, he thought. What was the machine? Why was Bundle Girl—whose name, appropriately, was Candice—in his house? Where was his wife? Could he just run out of the house and leave it to Candice and her machine? Would anybody care?