American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “That isn’t satisfactory,” I said.

  We looked unpleasantly at each other, and he shook his head. “You have some nerve, I gotta say. What are you really accusing me of here, fucking over your family? When you of all people should understand that mistakes happen.”

  It was his ace card. And hadn’t I, in my way, forced it? Because then the situation could, at core, be my fault instead of his, and I could feel guilt instead of anger. And wasn’t guilt much more ladylike, didn’t it fit me far more comfortably? Yes, no matter what Pete Imhof did or said, no matter how manipulative or crude, I would always have done worse. This knowledge was what prevented me from upending his coffee table, from throwing his ashtray across the room or clawing his face. As I left his apartment, all I said was “Never come near any of us.”

  I MADE IT a few blocks before I began to cry, and I was so worried about being seen by someone I knew that I immediately ducked into the narrow alley between two houses; presumably, I was trespassing. I stood there, leaning against one house’s white aluminum siding, and my shoulders shook, and I was grateful for the blasting noise of an airconditioning unit above my head. It wasn’t even that I believed I didn’t deserve to be punished; sure, I deserved it. Almost fourteen years had passed since the evening I’d slammed my car into Andrew Imhof’s—the dread that gathered in me every late August, as September approached, would come in a few weeks, as reliable in its annual arrival as dogwood blossoms or fireflies—and Andrew would still be dead, and I would still be shocked by the enormity of my mistake. Andrew would always be dead, and I would always be shocked. It never went away.

  And the problems that had arisen for me in the last forty-eight hours, my mother losing twenty thousand dollars while I unexpectedly found myself drawn to a man Dena was interested in—what right did I have to complain about either situation? On the whole, I was far more lucky than unlucky. But it was hard not to wonder what I could have done differently, how I could have prevented this sequence of events. I went out of my way to be considerate and responsible; it wasn’t as if I didn’t care what people thought or how they felt.

  Don’t, I told myself. Don’t be self-pitying. You’re fine. The tears had begun drying up—really, the older I got, the less I cried in either frequency or duration. Be practical. Think of which steps you need to take, address each problem on its own without lumping them together. You have not committed a new wrong toward Andrew; it is only the same wrong arising again. You can’t undo anything; you have to live your life forward, trying not to cause additional unhappiness. Immediately, it was clear to me that I couldn’t go through with my purchase of the house on McKinley and that even if Charlie did call, I couldn’t see him again; there were my solutions, and they hadn’t been remotely difficult to figure out.

  I swallowed, wiped my eyes with a tissue from my purse, and stepped out from between the houses. Long ago, I had become my own confidante.

  I HADN’T DECIDED ahead of time to do so—I’d had the dim notion that I’d go to a store that sold estate jewelry—but on 94 heading into Madison, after I’d passed the third billboard for the same pawnshop, I pulled off. It surprised me that the proprietor was a woman or that, at any rate, it was a woman behind the counter that afternoon. The aisles were cramped with television sets and stereos, with motorcycles and leather jackets and, on a shelf behind glass, a large jade Buddha.

  My mother had given me the brooch by itself, not even wrapped in brown paper, and as I passed it to the woman, I immediately wished I’d waited and put it first in one of the three or four small velvet jewelry boxes I’d acquired over the years (they always seemed too nice to throw away). That surely would have given the brooch a classier aura.

  “I’d like to sell this,” I said. I thought it best to speak as little as possible, lest I reveal my ignorance of pawn lingo. I was the only customer in the shop, so at least I didn’t have an audience.

  The woman was about my mother’s age, wearing several bracelets and rings (her nails were long and dark red) and a large silver cross on a silver chain. Her hair was a brassy shade, short but voluminous, and her voice was deep and friendly. “Hot as blazes out there, huh?” she said as she inspected the brooch.

  “Wisconsin in July,” I said agreeably. Please, I thought. Please, please, please.

  She was peering at the brooch through a magnifying glass. “I’m taking my granddaughter swimming this evening, I bet you the beach is packed. I’ll give you ninety bucks for it.”

  I blinked. She looked up, and I tried to compose my face in a normal way.

  “Really, you don’t think—” I paused. “I’m pretty sure it’s Victorian.” Standing there next to an oversize television set, I sounded ridiculous even to myself.

  “Ninety bucks,” the woman repeated, and she seemed a degree less friendly. Surely she had heard countless stories of financial woe; flintiness was a quality that would serve her well.

  I took back the brooch. “I’d like to think about it.”

  “Offer’s good till eight tonight. After that, bring it in, and it gets reappraised.”

  “Thank you for your help.” And then, because I didn’t want to seem desperate or resentful, because I didn’t want to be desperate or resentful, I added before I stepped outside again, “Enjoy swimming.”

  I CALLED NADINE from my kitchen, and when I’d identified myself, she said, “How’s tricks?”

  “I feel terrible doing this,” I began. “I’m so sorry, especially after how hard you worked to help me find the right house, but can we retract the bid? We can, right? That’s legal? And the seller just keeps the earnest money?” I had put down five hundred dollars for this—not nothing, but a good deal less than a down payment and a monthly mortgage would be.

  “Are you pulling my leg?” Nadine asked.

  What I felt most aware of in this moment, far more than the loss of the house, was the social awkwardness of reneging on a person who’d been good to me. Equally powerfully, I felt a fear that I wouldn’t be able to renege, that it was already too late.

  “Alice, everyone has second thoughts.” Nadine sounded upbeat. “Here’s what I want you to do. Make a list of your concerns, and we’ll go through them together and see if they check out. Buying a house is a big step, but I know you’ll be happy as a clam.”

  “I can’t buy the house,” I said. “Something has come up.”

  “Are you worried about the inspection?” Nadine asked.

  “It’s not this house. I can’t buy any house.”

  For a long, excruciating moment, Nadine was silent. Then she said, “You know, there are some nutso clients out there, but I never thought you were one of them.”

  “I’m sincerely grateful for your help,” I said. I did not consider telling her the reason for my change of heart—it would have been a violation of my mother’s privacy—but I decided that later in the week, I would write Nadine a note. That would make the situation at least a little better. “I’m wondering if there’s a penalty besides the earnest money. Do I need to pay you any sort of fee?”

  “Nope.” Her voice was cold in a way I had never heard. “You’re free to walk away. All you gave was your word.”

  I WAS IN my apartment working on Babar—he wore a papier-mâché green suit and red bow tie, a yellow papier-mâché crown—and I was delighted with how he’d turned out, except for the not insignificant problem that the weight of his trunk made his whole head fall forward, as if he were asleep. My solution was to attach a weight to a string around his neck; the weight, which in this trial run was a can of chicken noodle soup from my cupboard, would be hidden behind his back, but unfortunately, the string was still visible and looked like a very small noose. Maybe a better solution, I thought, would be to attach some sort of wire loop to the back of his head (I could set him against a wall so the children wouldn’t see it) and then to run a hook from the wall to the loop. As I considered all this, there unfolded in my mind a simultaneous consideration of Charlie Blackwell and ho
w he hadn’t called yet and how, if he didn’t call at all, it would be insulting—it would show he hadn’t really been interested in me, he’d just been hoping to spend the night—but it would also make things far simpler; I wouldn’t have to explain to him why we couldn’t see each other again. Either way, I had decided not to say anything about him to Dena. To confess would be indulgent, an attempt to absolve myself more than to enlighten her. As my brain skipped among Babar and Charlie and Dena, the phone rang and my heart seized a little (Charlie?), but when I answered, it was Dena who said, “If you come over tonight, I’ll make ratatouille. I have an eggplant that’s about to turn against me.”

  “What can I bring?” I asked.

  “I never say no to a bottle of wine. Shit, I have a customer. Let me call you in a second.”

  A few minutes later, the phone rang again. “Red goes better with ratatouille, right?” I said.

  There was a pause, and then Charlie said, “Alice?”

  I felt dual surges of pleasure and anxiety. “Sorry—I was expecting someone else.”

  “Should I call you back?”

  “No—no, I mean—” I paused. “I can talk now, if you can.”

  “Well, I did call you.” He sounded amused.

  There was a silence, and at the same time, he said, “What’s up?” and I said, “I’m working on Bab—” We both paused, to let the other reply first.

  Finally, he said, “So I had a thought about our plans tonight.”

  We had plans tonight? It was Tuesday, the night he’d first suggested, but hadn’t I declined that invitation, and hadn’t he neglected to offer another?

  “I’m thinking the Gilded Rose,” he continued. “I have a speaking engagement up in Waupun, so if you don’t mind, let’s make it on the late side. Eight-thirty all right with you?”

  The Gilded Rose was the fanciest restaurant in Madison, practically the only fancy restaurant, and I had never been; my friend Rita, who’d been taken there by her nephew and his wife, had told me they had a shrimp cocktail for five dollars. “Charlie, I can’t go out with you,” I said.

  “Haven’t we been through this already?”

  “I had a chance to think about it, and it’s not that you aren’t appealing or that I’m not—” I paused, but there wasn’t much reason not to be frank with him, especially if it would spare his feelings. “It’s not that I’m not attracted to you. But Dena is my best friend, and this would be unfair to her.”

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

  I had expected him to agree, or at least to see this as an argument not worth having. I was making myself seem neurotic, and why would he persist with someone who showed her neuroses so quickly? But his utter dismissal of my concerns wasn’t insulting; on the contrary, it gave me a lift of happiness, a hope that he might be right. This hope ran against my certainty that he was not.

  “I met your friend about ten minutes before I met you,” he said. “If she thinks she staked some kind of claim on me, she’s crazy, and if you believe her, you’re even crazier than she is.”

  “Charlie, questioning a woman’s sanity probably isn’t the most effective way of wooing her,” I said. He laughed, an embarrassed laugh. “But I bet our paths will cross again,” I continued, “so how about if we say goodbye as friends?”

  “You know the last time I invited a girl to the Gilded Rose?” He still didn’t sound annoyed; he sounded determined. “Never. I’m a stingy dude, but that’s how hard I’m trying to win you over.”

  “I’m flattered, Charlie, I really—”

  “Okay, how about this,” he interrupted. “Forget dinner. Come to my speech. It won’t be a date, it’ll be a civic field trip.”

  “Your speech tonight?”

  “It’s one of those Lions Club gigs. Didn’t you mention that you enjoy listening to people who have nothing to say?”

  “Is this because you’re running for Congress?”

  “Who says I’m running for Congress? This is how rumors get started, sweetheart.” He was all breeziness and good cheer; when I was talking to him, the world did not seem like such a complicated place. “I promise it won’t be a date,” he said. “We’ll have a lodge full of septuagenarian farmers chaperoning us.”

  “Are women even allowed at those things?”

  “You kidding me? The Lions love their Lionesses. I gotta go up early and talk with a few folks, so if you’re okay meeting there, the address is 2726 Oak Street, right off Waupun’s main drag. Speech starts at seven.” I could hear him grinning. “Earplugs are optional.”

  THAT AFTERNOON, I went by a store near the capitol that sold not only estate jewelry but also antiques. I felt more comfortable there than I had at the pawnshop, but the man behind the counter—he was about sixty, a thin fellow with a thin mustache and exaggerated inflections that made me almost sure he was homosexual—offered me seventy-five dollars for my mother’s brooch.

  “But it’s real, isn’t it?” I said. Here, I was less shy of showing my ignorance about jewelry resale.

  “It’s fourteen-carat,” he said. “It contains more base metal than gold. I’d guess it’s Victorian.”

  At the pawnshop, my unrealistic sense of hope, my hunch that the brooch probably couldn’t solve my mother’s financial problems but my lack of certainty that this was so—they had made me vulnerable, priming me for disappointment. This time my expectations were low. I wouldn’t try to convince this man of anything.

  UPON HANGING UP after my conversation with Charlie, I’d called Dena and asked if we could postpone the ratatouille until the following night—I’d claimed I’d forgotten that I had prior plans with Rita Alwin—and Dena had said, “Okay, but I’m warning you that the eggplant’s best days are behind it.” I tried to justify the lie by telling myself that when we’d been on the phone earlier, she’d hardly given me the chance to confirm that I could come. But this felt like a weak defense, and I was uneasy as I showered and applied mascara and lipstick. My mood lifted in the car, though—Jimmy Buffett was on the radio, and it really was a nice time for driving, the evening sun a fuzzy gold medallion over the fields.

  The Waupun Lions Club was a low brick building that shared a parking lot with a title company. When I walked inside just before seven, about forty people were sitting in sixty chairs, and most members of the audience were in the rows farther from the front. (Something I was to learn quickly is that a turnout’s success can always be judged proportionally. It is better to have twenty-five people and twenty chairs than a hundred and fifty people and six hundred chairs. Though now, I also must confess, the idea of a public audience of either twenty-five or a hundred and fifty makes me quite nostalgic.) I sat halfway back in an aisle seat, and when Charlie saw me—he was standing in front by the podium, wearing a blue-and-white-seersucker jacket, khaki pants, a wide-collared white shirt, and a fat red-and-brown-striped tie—he gestured for me to come closer. In as unobvious a way as I could manage, I shook my head. He tilted his head—Why not?—and I had a flashing realization of how little we knew each other. If he thought I was a person who’d want to sit in the front row or, heaven forbid, a person who’d like to be singled out in any way during a speech, then he had no sense of me whatsoever.

  He was introduced by a gentleman who identified himself as the club president, and upon my hearing Charlie’s biography, I was also reminded of how little I knew him; as the summary of his degrees and accomplishments gained momentum, it occurred to me that I didn’t have the slightest idea what his job was, or whether gearing up to run for Congress was a job by itself. He had graduated from Princeton University in 1968, I learned, and worked from ’68 to ’73 in the hospitality industry out west. Then he’d gone on to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1975. (Business school? I thought.) For the last two years, he’d been executive vice president of Blackwell Meats, where he oversaw product management and sales (so he did have a job) and was currently making his home in Houghton. But
wait a second—Houghton?

  Charlie stood before the podium and adjusted the microphone. “Those of us in Wisconsin’s Sixth District are a strong citizenry,” he said. “We are a self-reliant people, a salt-of-the-earth people, proud but not prideful, forward-looking but respectful of the past.”

  I turned my head to the left, scanning the faces in my row. How could anyone mistake this for anything other than a campaign speech? Not that, as a campaign speech, it was bad. He wasn’t electrifying, but he seemed confident and intelligent, and—I could admit it now—he was remarkably good-looking. “It is no secret that we face challenges,” he was saying. “Our state needs more jobs, more comprehensive health care, fewer expenses for working families. These have long been priorities for all Blackwells, and they are important priorities for me.”

  When he was finished, questions came from a few men (except for two grandmotherly types, the audience was all men), but it was a typical midwestern audience, polite and deferential. Even the most potentially confrontational question—“How about if you drum up some jobs by opening a Blackwell factory here in Waupun?”—seemed to be meant as a joke or was, at any rate, met with laughter. I stayed in my seat until the lodge had cleared out, leaving only Charlie, the club president who’d introduced him, another man who began folding up the chairs, and a younger man who was standing next to Charlie. From my purse, I pulled the book I was reading—Rabbit Redux, which I had started the night before—and after a few minutes, the young man approached me. When he was still a few feet away, he stuck out his hand. “Hank Ucker. You must be Marian the Librarian.”

  “Alice Lindgren,” I said, standing to accept his handshake. I didn’t acknowledge the Marian reference—I heard them often, usually from men and especially from men I’d just met. The references tended, of course, to be accompanied by allusions to buns, glasses, and frigidity that concealed sexual wildness.