Replacement Wife

by Rowena Wiseman

  Yet somehow Jarvis saw my banal life as sexy. He once wrote that he would like to be a fly on the wall and watch me do the vacuum cleaning.

  Seeing him with those two people, whoever they were, I was filled with doubt. He said that he found me so fascinating, so smart and intriguing, but could I compete with people like that? I was intimidated just looking at those two. What would I have to say to them? We couldn’t talk about the Mathletics app for the iPad or new ideas for school lunches. I felt as though I wanted to crawl back into my little motherly burrow where I was safe and comfortable.

  I wanted to shut down this whole thing with Jarvis, it was all becoming too painful, and the pain was outweighing the pleasure. I could unfriend him from my social media accounts, block him from my email, delete his number from my phone. It was simple. I could shut it all down.

  Yet I knew in my heart I couldn’t do any of that. I was too curious, and too scared to miss out on the rare, beautiful opportunity I felt him to be.

  As painful as it all was, he did make me feel like a better woman, a smarter, sexier version of myself. Even if I felt drab alongside his friends, in my own world he made me walk around feeling smug about my beauty and desirability — he’d reawakened a sleeping giant, and I loved him for this.

  Back home I checked my email and text messages at less than ten-minute intervals. I could hardly make dinner that night; my head had been transported elsewhere. I remember having two glasses of wine and spilling one over the bench while stirring the risotto. Instead of grabbing the tea towel to wipe it up, I grabbed my phone to check whether Jarvis had messaged me in the three minutes since I’d last checked. We ate our dinner, Luke and Max bantering as usual, but I couldn’t so much as utter a word in the conversation. I felt this kind of drained feeling, as though I was living an abstract reality, stuck in no-man’s land, between one place and another and I didn’t know whether either of them were any good.

  After dinner, I cleaned up with a sense of urgency. I scrubbed the sticky rice off the bottom of the red Le Creuset cast-iron pot. It had cost over $300, and Luke and I had rationalised that it was a great investment: it would last our lifetimes. But who would get it if we split up? And that set of three silver pots, would we split them up, or would one person get the whole set? That lime-green carpet I loved it so much, I never wanted to leave my lime-green carpet. Or that deck that Luke built. Or our silly little kitchen. Fuck it, I should call it all off, I thought. All of this was far too hard. I should just stay in this house, love my son and put up with my husband.

  I’d made up my mind to stop all this nonsense, but then finally Max was in bed and Luke was working on some accounts for the Patch. I made my usual excuses about an urgent project that I was behind on and escaped to the study. By then I was certain there’d be a message from Jarvis, because I hadn’t checked in at least twenty minutes. I often felt this drumming in my chest, like we were connected, and I telepathically knew that he had written to me. I entered my password, logged into my email, and there it was: his name in bold in my inbox.

  Today was wonderful and fabulous, but I felt as though something was missing without you by my side. I wish I could have had your fingers intertwined with mine like lattice today. I wish we could have been there together, like a true couple, not just secret infatuates.

  I wanted to reintroduce you to my parents, and you could have met my family friend Paula. Do you remember her? She came and saw the band once, years and years ago. I think Chris had a thing for her back then. It was a shame you had to go so quickly. You would have liked my friend Anthony. I had a couple of other friends there, too, from art school and I was desperate for you to meet them. It’s like the greatest thing is happening to me and it’s so hard living this secret life with you, when I want to tell the world how happy I am. We’re meant to be together, I know this more than anything. None of it’s going to be easy, but we’ll make it work. Everyone will be happy in the long run, I promise you.

  I could breathe again, and I felt like such a fool for running off like that, letting my insecurities get the better of me. Although I had promised myself less than half an hour before to end it all, I sent Jarvis back a gushing email, reassuring him of the happiness that would be ours when we got together. I may even have mentioned how much I loved that sculpture of his, how the gold tinsel swayed in the wind, how it reminded me of parting curtains at the theatre. I was genuine about everything, except for that sculpture of his.

  20

  I needed an emergency dance session with Hattie and a dump truck to offload all the emotional baggage I was carrying. After our No Lights No Lycra dance hour, we went to the same bar as the time before and ordered a glass of Pinot each. I was about to launch into all my unforgiving angst when she announced, ‘I have a happiness hangover.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m so happy, it’s still lingering. I had the most fabulous weekend. I’ve met this girl, Tess, an interior designer, short cropped brown hair, such a lovely smile, I could get lost in her eyes. She was wearing a mustard-yellow Fedora when we met.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A Fedora hat.’

  ‘Oh, right. So, tell me more.’

  ‘She’s so sweet, we spent the whole weekend in her bedroom. No joke, we didn’t get dressed all day. And then it went on until the next evening. And all those times with Briar came in handy. Tess doesn’t think I’m sloppy at all. I don’t know, I just felt comfortable with her, it just felt right, you know? It’s like finding the right person to bounce off. Some people make you uncomfortable in a conversation, make you shut down and not be yourself, whereas other people bring out the best in you. It’s like that — she brings out the best in me.’

  ‘I’m so pleased for you. Truly, I am.’ I was. They sounded like the perfect couple: Hattie the hat maker and Tess, the beautiful interior designer with a mustard-yellow Fedora. It sounded like a match made in heaven. And that staying in bed all day thing had me seriously drooling. I didn’t feel like launching into all my issues now, but she drew them out of me anyway.

  ‘So, what’s happening with Jarvis?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing . . . Just the same. Well, I went to the opening at McClelland on Saturday . . . I was so proud of him. Things are starting to happen for him.’

  ‘That’s great.’

  I took a sip of wine. For some reason I suddenly felt uncomfortable talking to her about Jarvis. I’d spent the whole day looking forward to offloading about him, but then when I got the chance to, I felt self-conscious about it, fearing judgment and damnation. So I underplayed all my feelings and made everything sound lukewarm. No wonder she wasn’t my personal cheerleader, telling me to go for it.

  ‘I wanted to tell you about Sandra,’ Hattie said. ‘She came down from Sydney and stayed with me for a few days last week. Anyway, she’s met this guy from Melbourne. They spent a day together in Sydney and time together in Melbourne, and then he was up in Sydney again, but all they had done was kiss and they never spent the night together. Anyway, when she was here last week it was like D-day, she was starting to wonder why he wasn’t busting to get her into bed, and he finally reveals that he’s impotent. And it all made sense.’

  I wasn’t sure why she was telling me this right now, but I suspected it had something to do with Jarvis. ‘So what did she do?’

  ‘Well, she’s going to stick with him, see if they can work it out together. He’s forty, an architect, she’s extremely attracted to him. She’s going to see if they can work through it together.’

  I finally got the point. ‘Jarvis isn’t impotent,’ I said. Although I couldn’t know for sure, his messages definitely suggested otherwise.

  ‘I only meant that often if someone is left on the shelf that long, maybe there’s something a bit . . . I don’t know, wrong with them perhaps? Like what’s Jarvis’s story? What’s his past like?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. I had tried to ask a few questions here and there, but he didn’t seem to hav
e any girls of note in his past. To be honest it had been a bit flattering to think that I may have been his first true love.

  Hattie screwed up her eyes at me, like she was suspicious of the fact that I didn’t know about Jarvis’s past romances. ‘Has he ever lived with anyone?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . I mean, I don’t think so. He likes solitude. It’s good for his work. He lives this bohemian lifestyle.’

  ‘But how do you know that you’ll be a good match? Mad, passionate, intellectual love is one thing, but how do you know that you could make life work together?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly.’

  ‘Then why don’t you just stick with Luke, because you two work really well together? I’m just being devil’s advocate here, because . . .’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, all this from the girl who had recently renounced half the population, and I had supported her and encouraged her through everything, even when she broke off her engagement. It was all different for me because I had a child. Childless couples can break up and it’s a shame, but it’s not a tragedy.

  Damn Luke. Everybody loved him with his kind and funny nature; I feared even my own family would snub me if they discovered what I was doing. I couldn’t even persuade my oldest friend Hattie to be compassionate about the way I was feeling.

  I changed the topic because I didn’t feel like getting into a debate, and I decided that I wasn’t going to talk about it anymore with her. My therapist was the only one I could talk to, because she was paid to listen and to be even-handed and non-critical in her judgments.

  21

  Rita must have worked a lot, because I never saw her around at school drop-offs or pick-ups. I was beginning to think that her boys were probably in afterschool care. I was keen to see her so that I could have a similar conversation with her as the one that I had with Suzi: the kind where I let her know that I would be fine with Luke hooking up with someone else, that in fact it would be a blessing.

  Once again, I let my impatience get the better of me. I had been keeping my eye out for Rita for a few weeks, to no avail, so when I saw her at the school sports day I bounded up to her straight away and stole a position, uninvited, on the concrete step beside her.

  ‘How have you been?’ I asked.

  ‘Good,’ she said.

  ‘How’s Evan?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘What’s he in today?’

  ‘The relay, long jump.’

  ‘How’s the business? The bags and stuff?’

  ‘All good.’

  ‘Things aren’t great with Luke and me,’ I said. It was a bit of a leap from handbags to marriage dramas when we weren’t really friends, but I didn’t know how much time we had before she would need to leave to watch an event. ‘I sometimes wish that he would find someone else. You know, go off and be with another woman. Did you ever feel like that?’

  ‘Never. That’s what my husband did. He found someone else.’ Eek, my foot was so far down my throat I was practically gagging. ‘You should be careful what you wish for, because it’s actually not very nice at all.’ She gathered up her aqua-blue bag, swung it over her shoulder and started moving away.

  ‘Sorry, Rita,’ I said, walking after her. ‘That was incredibly insensitive of me. I didn’t know. Truly, I didn’t know. I would never have said that—’

  ‘You should be grateful for what you have with Luke. He seems like a very nice guy,’ she said, striding down the steps. ‘Don’t go destroying it. It’s hard on your own. I probably should have even stayed with my lying, cheating husband. It would have been easier than being on my own.’ Suddenly she paused and composed herself. ‘Sorry, Luisa. I wasn’t listening to you. I was making it all about me. Relationships are tough. If you’re having troubles you should get some counselling, see if you can get your marriage serviced before it gets too far out of control.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said anything—’

  ‘Don’t worry. It seems as though everyone who has a rocky relationship wants to speak to the divorced woman. You’re not the only one. You’d be amazed at how many people want to talk to me about this sort of stuff: even women I hardly know.’ She stood there looking thoughtful, as though she was about to say something else, but she must have changed her mind because she didn’t say anything more.

  ‘Let me know if you ever need any help with the boys. We live so close; I could help with drop-offs and pick-ups if you like.’

  ‘Thank you, that’s very kind of you.’ She stepped out onto the edge of the running track. I watched as her dark hair bobbed away from me and sat myself back down on the concrete steps. I took my figurative foot out of my mouth and tried placing it back down on the ground, wishing with all my might that I could find some way to ground myself back in reality somehow. The old Luisa would never have offended someone so carelessly like that. I realised that I had become like a teenager, thinking that I was the centre of the universe, that everything revolved around me, that it didn’t matter whose feelings I hurt along the way. My boy was about to become a teenager in a few years’ time. We couldn’t have more teenagers than adults in the same house. I needed to grow up again.

  22

  Suzi and I worked really closely on Parricide, meeting every week or so. She actually had a lot of the information in her head, and I was amazed at her capacity to file things in such an orderly way in her brain. It was only a shame that she didn’t write in that manner.

  Around this time, Max had gotten in with a boy called Lewis at school. I’d always been wary of Lewis, with his three rough brothers. And my fears were being realised. Max had stopped drawing or doing craft, all of that stuff had become ‘for girls’. My gorgeous son with his long pianist fingers started arguing about doing his piano practice each night (‘this music is boring’). He listened to Top 40 music in his room with headphones on, and criticised me for my taste in music when I played Daniel Johnston on the stereo.

  Then he started lying about having eaten his lunch at school, and he continued to play football every lunchtime even though he’d hurt his Achilles tendon and the doctor had told him to keep off it. No longer was I allowed to be in the bathroom when he was showering: he’d become self-conscious of his growing body. He was obsessed with football, his footy cards, and knowing the stats of all the different players and teams, and I was starting to fear that I had lost my beautiful, sensitive boy. He was becoming more and more like all the rest of them.

  I knew that people change; human relationships change all the time. Nothing stays the same forever. People grow, they become different shapes and sizes, they realise they want different things to what they once wanted. Some people wake up one morning, look at their partner in bed and think ‘What the fuck have I done?’ And life is long. Lots of people live to eighty or ninety these days. I had been married to Luke for nearly twelve years, but I might still have had another forty or fifty years to go with him. It felt like a life sentence.

  Things were going well at the Patch. All of the plots were fully booked and Luke had a waiting list of over forty people. One wall of Luke’s office was plastered with reviews from major newspapers, lifestyle magazines and printouts from fashionable blogs. He’d been called a visionary. The Patch had been featured in three or four different TV segments. These always made Luke feel nervous. He preferred doing print media, he found TV intimidating. He didn’t like how the crew would be there for three or four hours just to shoot a three-minute segment, and how he never knew which part they would select for use.

  ‘I saw Luke on Coxy’s Big Break last night,’ Suzi said at one of our café meetings.

  ‘You watch that show?’ I asked.

  ‘I was just flicking.’ Thank God, I thought to myself. Coxy’s Big Break is the epitome of all that is wrong with this world. ‘It was a good segment. Luke certainly sold the idea.’

  ‘He’s good at that. He’ll get loads more visitors to the café. It’s amazing to see the cause and effect of publicity.’


  ‘I really admire what he’s done,’ Suzi said. She had a dreamy look in her eyes, and I wondered whether my chat to her had resonated, whether she was starting to imagine herself as the beauty he could walk out the back door with.

  ***

  I wasn’t surprised when Luke came home a week or two later and said that Suzi had been at the Patch.

  ‘Who was she with?’ I asked excitedly.

  ‘Just herself. She said she had a meeting in town.’

  ‘Really?’ This was fantastic — my plan was working. ‘What did you talk about? Did you talk much?’

  ‘Just a bit. She’s a real green thumb, did you know? We were talking about how undervalued kale is.’

  ‘Kale?’ It didn’t sound riveting, but whatever got their socks off, I guess.

  ‘I helped her pot up some strawberries to take home.’ Now here was an image for me: the two of them out the back of the tool shed, working side-by-side at the wooden bench with their garden gloves on. Did he stand behind her and hold her hand as she dropped some dirt into the biodegradable pot with her trowel? Did he lean his body into her? I couldn’t decide whether I was excited by this idea or repulsed by it. It was starting to feel strange.

  His face didn’t look so grey or downtrodden that night. He looked something akin to happy, and was even chatty, sitting at the stool at the kitchen bench while I made dinner. He drank a European beer with a slice of lemon on the rim, and we hung out, talking like we were friends, not inmates.

  ***

  The next time I saw her, Suzi didn’t mention that she’d been to the Patch. I waited to see whether she would say something, but she didn’t, and I don’t think it simply slipped her mind.

  ‘Would you like to come over for dinner to celebrate getting these manuscript changes finalised?’ I asked her. I was keen to witness my husband together with her. There was something so intriguing about it. ‘You can bring Brodie along, too. Just casual. Nothing fancy.’