American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “I haven’t talked to her.”

  “Well, I just was thinking about your family.” I paused. “Dena, I miss you. I’m sorry and I miss you.”

  She was silent. Then she said, “Are you still seeing him?”

  “I understand why you’re angry at me, obviously, but this shouldn’t ruin our friendship. I didn’t set out to spite you.”

  “So you are still seeing him?”

  “Dena, you’ve dated a lot more men than I have. It just seems like—Well, you’re so pretty and dynamic, and I’m a hundred percent confident that you’ll meet someone you really click with. You’ll be glad you didn’t end up with Charlie.”

  “It must be nice to be clairvoyant.” Her tone was dry.

  “What I have with him, it’s not like anything I’ve experienced in the past,” I said. “I wouldn’t be cavalier about our friendship, but this just feels different.”

  “That’s what you called to tell me?”

  I was sitting at my kitchen table, and I looked down at the place mat, orange vinyl with a butterfly motif, and I knew Dena wouldn’t forgive me. Still, I said, “Is your sister all right? A few weeks ago, my mom mentioned—”

  “Alice, just stop,” she said. “Okay? Stop it.”

  “If you change your mind—” I began.

  She cut me off. “Leave me alone. That’s all I want from you.”

  THE FOLLOWING EVENING, as we were standing in line at the co-op, Charlie turned and said, “Wait—didn’t you buy a house?”

  I froze, but only for a second or two. “It didn’t pass the inspection.”

  “What was the problem?”

  “A beam in the basement had shifted, and the whole foundation was unstable.” Nadine had once told me about other clients who’d made an offer on a house where the inspection had revealed this exact problem. The lie made me uncomfortable, but how could I explain to Charlie the chain of events that had led me to change my mind—how could I tell him about my mother and the investment scam before he met her and saw for himself that she was not flighty or flaky, and how could I possibly explain my family’s relationship to Pete Imhof ? I had never told either Wade Trommler or Simon Törnkvist about Andrew; particularly with Wade, I’d wondered if he’d find out on his own because I wasn’t the only person from Riley living in Madison, but as far as I knew, he hadn’t.

  “That’s a bummer,” Charlie was saying.

  “I guess it wasn’t meant to be.” We had reached the front of the line, and I began unloading our purchases. I had decided to make lentil salad to go with our steak that night, and Charlie had come with me to the co-op; apparently, he had never been inside, and as we’d entered, he’d said, “I had my suspicions you were a hippie.”

  I set down the lentils and garlic and feta cheese, the walnuts and olive oil and fresh dill. Charlie was not looking at me when he said, “How much do you think it would cost to fix the foundation?”

  “Oh—” I hesitated. We were, I sensed, approaching a delicate topic with many complicated subtopics. Two days earlier, at Charlie’s apartment, when I had carried my plate of steak from the kitchen into the living room, I had noticed on the living room table a typed check made out to Charles Blackwell for twenty thousand dollars. But it also was from Charles Blackwell—his name was printed in the upper-left-hand corner. I had never seen a check for anywhere close to that amount, and I couldn’t imagine what it was for, or what it meant that it was both to and from him. I did not touch it but scooted back on the couch, waiting for him to join me. When he did, carrying his own plate, he sat, flipped the check over without acknowledging it, and we continued the conversation we’d been having in the kitchen.

  In the co-op, I said, “Fixing the foundation would probably be as much as buying the whole house. It’s not worth it.” The cashier started ringing us up, and behind us, the next customer was setting down her items. She was a slender woman around our age, wearing a short-sleeved blouse and a wraparound skirt, and she had the freckles and bright red hair that people never seem to like in themselves but that I’d always found quite charming.

  “Was that your dream house, or were you so-so about it?” Charlie asked.

  Trying to remain composed, I said, “I was so-so.” I couldn’t continue this conversation much longer, or I would start to cry. Not because losing the house had been devastating—I honestly hadn’t thought about it that much—but because this all felt so fraught and strange. If I said Please do buy the house for me, if you wouldn’t mind, would Charlie agree to it? I noticed then that the red-haired woman was buying the food you eat when you live alone: a box of cereal, a few apples, a plastic container of plain yogurt. As we waited for the cashier to tally our total, Charlie said, “I’m looking forward to our hippie salad,” and he leaned in and kissed my neck.

  With an abrupt clarity, I saw how I had been launched into another category. I had been the red-haired woman; for a decade of my adult life, I had bought cereal and yogurt, I’d stood near couples and watched them nuzzle, and now I was part of such a couple. And I would not be launched back, I was nearly certain. But I recognized her life, I knew it so well! I wanted to clasp her freckled hand, to say to her—surely we understood some shared code (or surely not, surely she’d have thought me preposterous)—It’s good on the other side, but it’s good on your side, too. Enjoy it there. The loneliness is harder, and the loneliness is the biggest part; but some things are easier.

  A FEW MONTHS back, Rita Alwin and I had bought tickets to see Romeo and Juliet at a small experimental theater, and when we went that week, we realized the experimental part was that all the actors were nude for the entire play. They also were not particularly skilled performers. Rita and I kept glancing at each other and giggling, and at intermission, she said, “Think we’ve seen enough?”

  We went to get a glass of wine at a bar around the corner, and sitting across from me, Rita said, “Something’s different about you.”

  “I got a haircut.” I jokingly fluffed it. My hair was chin-length then, still thick and dark (I took secret pride in not having needed to pluck a single strand of gray), and I had it feathered a bit on the sides. I’d been told the previous spring that I resembled Sabrina on Charlie’s Angels, but this was an observation I’d found alarming more than flattering because it came from a third-grade girl.

  “It isn’t your hair,” Rita said. “It’s more like a glow.” She leaned in. “Are you in love?”

  “What? No. No, but I’m a little sunburned.” Then I said, “Well, I’m seeing this guy named Charlie.”

  “I knew it!” Rita was sixty and had never been married, and though she was attractive, she didn’t seem to date. She had known about Simon, but I rarely mentioned to her the more casual setups I found myself on—it struck me as tedious when women ceaselessly discussed their romantic entanglements. “Bring him to the back-to-school picnic,” Rita said. “What’s he like?”

  “He’s cute and funny and—I don’t know, he’s fun. He’s really cute.”

  Rita reached out and patted my forearm. I was surprised by how excited she seemed. She said, “I knew it would happen for you.”

  I WOULDN’T HAVE thought it possible, but Charlie’s place in Houghton made his Madison apartment seem like a triumph of interior design. I accompanied him there one Friday afternoon for no particular reason—because now we were going everywhere together—and discovered that he’d rented, or Hank Ucker had rented for him, a unit in a soulless four-story complex a few blocks from downtown. Charlie’s was a two-bedroom with a galley kitchen, brown wall-to-wall carpet, beige drapes, a wheat-colored sectional sofa flecked with small blue and red zigzags, and a low glass coffee table. An unplugged television sat on the floor in a corner. The closets were bare, the cupboards were empty, and there was no soap in either bathroom, no towels, no dish towels in the kitchen, not even napkins or tissues; there was a full container of dish soap at the kitchen sink, and when I washed my hands with it after using the toilet, Charlie thrust ou
t his midsection and said, “Dry them on me.” As I rubbed my palms against the oxford fabric, he said, “Oh boy, now you’re turning me on.”

  “Why do you need two bedrooms if you never even stay here?”

  “Eventually, some reporter will come sniffing around.” Charlie grinned. “A one-bedroom might look suspicious, like I’m just renting a place here to establish my eligibility in the district. I would hate to seem like a cynical politician to the good folks of Houghton.”

  “We should go shopping,” I said.

  “That’s what you women always say.”

  I made a face at him, and he said, “I’m kidding. Maj has promised to spruce up the place before I move in, but if you’re that keen to add your feminine touch, be my guest.” Maj was apparently what Charlie and his brothers called their mother—short for Her Majesty. And she actually liked the nickname, Charlie claimed; he’d said he couldn’t remember when it had started but probably when his oldest brother was in high school and Charlie was in fourth or fifth grade. I asked what they called their father, and as if no other possibility had ever occurred to him, Charlie said they called him Dad, though he did add that the grandchildren called him Pee-Paw; they called their grandmother Grandmaj.

  “I’m talking about shopping for soap, which some people would consider hygienic rather than decorative,” I said. “This place is depressing, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s depressing, and it seems fraudulent.”

  “It is fraudulent.” He leaned forward and kissed me.

  “Charlie, if you’re running for Congress in this district, you should spend time here. There are worse places in the world to live than Houghton.”

  “You think they’ve considered that as the town motto?”

  “Believe it or not, I’m trying to be helpful.” I looked around. “I’ll make a deal with you. We settle you in for real. We go buy sheets and towels and food—not anything that will spoil, but a few items to keep in the cupboard. And then we can spend the night here.” We still hadn’t spent an entire night together, which felt increasingly silly on my part.

  Charlie said, “How about if we snuggle first and then go shopping?”

  “I’m not snuggling on a bed with no sheets.”

  “You drive a hard bargain, Lindy.” Lindy was Charlie’s new nick-name for me, an abbreviation of my surname. “You’re not secretly on the payroll for the Houghton Chamber of Commerce, are you?”

  But we were smiling at each other, and this was the thing about Charlie—that my impatience with him was always tinged with, if not overshadowed by, amusement. That he entertained me, that I enjoyed trying to cajole him. I felt like I really could help him, that my organization and calmness complemented his energy and humor, and vice versa.

  “If I am on their payroll,” I said, “I’ll never tell you.”

  WE DID MAKE love late that afternoon, though we ended up using the sofa, because even after we’d bought sheets, I’d wanted to wash them before making up the bed. “Who does that?” Charlie said, and I said, “Everyone.”

  He furrowed his brow. “But they’re brand-new.”

  Naked on the sofa, he had stroked me until there was that warm rapid internal uncoiling, and then he’d plunged into me, and when we were finished, we lay there, the sweat that had risen on our skin drying, and I said, “Poor Hank Ucker will probably sit on this sofa someday with no idea what’s taken place,” and Charlie said, “Nothing would please Ucks more. When my mother sits here, on the other hand—”

  “Don’t even say it. That’s so embarrassing.”

  “You’ve gotta meet my folks soon,” he said. “They’re out in Seattle now, but everyone’s gathering in Halcyon, up in Door County, for Labor Day. Oh, and Christmas, you gotta come for Christmas. Maj makes a fabulous goose. The trick is to baste it in ginger ale.”

  My impression was that Charlie’s parents were traveling more often than not—technically, they lived in Milwaukee, but they were visiting friends in Denver or Boston, staying in Door County (apparently, there was yet another home, a third one, in Sea Island, Georgia), flying to a university in Virginia for Harold Blackwell to give a speech or to a business conference in Oklahoma City for him to deliver the keynote address. It sounded exhausting to me, though admittedly I was someone who had traveled by plane exactly twice: At the age of twenty, I’d gone with my parents and grandmother to Washington, D.C., and my father and I had climbed the stairs to the top of the Washington Monument while my mother and grandmother rode the elevator; and at the age of twenty-six, before I started saving money for a house, I’d gone with Rita Alwin to London during our spring break, a trip on which we had ridden a double-decker bus and attended performances of The Merchant of Venice and The Mousetrap. Charlie himself was extremely well traveled. When various places came up in conversation, he’d mention casually, as if it didn’t occur to him that another person might be either impressed or put off, that he’d been there: Honolulu and Charleston and Palm Springs, Martha’s Vineyard and Dallas and Nashville and New Orleans. Baltimore, he declared, was “filthy.” Portland, Oregon, was “a snooze.”

  “My brother Arthur’s starting to guess that something’s up,” Charlie was saying. “He’s been trying to introduce me to a girl for weeks, and the other day I told him to forget it, which was, shall we say”—he grinned—“out of character.” Arthur, I had gathered, was the brother Charlie was closest to in both age and friendship; all of his brothers were married. “You’d say no if a fellow asked you out, wouldn’t you?” Charlie said.

  “Of course. Charlie, I don’t sleep with someone lightly.”

  “No, that’s what I thought. Just making sure we’re in agreement is all.”

  “You know, we’re very close right now to where my family lives,” I said. “Maybe we ought to go over there tomorrow.”

  “You think I’d pass muster with the Lindgren ladies?”

  “If you behave yourself.”

  Charlie laughed. “I shouldn’t ask your grandma to pull my finger?”

  It was six-thirty by then, and we rose and dressed and made dinner. We’d bought plates, silverware, pots, and pans at Scorilio’s, which was Houghton’s only department store—I insisted on washing these, too, before we used them—and we’d stopped by the grocery store for spaghetti and marinara sauce and bread. (Charlie had whispered, “You think the other customers are looking at you and thinking what a loose lady you are for staying overnight with your boyfriend?”) Back at the apartment, cooking dinner, it all felt very languorous; we brought out the clock radio from the bedroom and tuned it to a jazz station, and in the middle of all of this, a thought solidified itself that had previously occurred to me more than once but always in a shadowy form: the near-certainty that the kiss I had witnessed all those years ago between Gladys Wycomb and my grandmother had been postcoital. I had not recognized it at the time; it had been enough—too much—to view the embrace by itself, without knowing it was either a precursor or a wrapup to anything else. But in retrospect, it was undeniable: that leisurely, affectionate, spent quality that arises between two people when they’re no longer building up to the act but have completed it, that happy relaxation. It’s unlikely I would have made such an assertion in the first weeks of my courtship with Charlie, but with age, I have decided that the denouement is the best part. The potentially fraught negotiations of intercourse are replaced with pleasantly shallow concerns: when to get out of bed, or where you left your shirt, or what to eat. Neither of you is trying, any longer, to convince the other to either go through with or delay it; you’re not trying to achieve anything, and you can simply enjoy each other’s company.

  AROUND THREE IN the morning, I awoke to find my hand at Charlie’s groin. We both were naked beneath the sheet, which he had persuaded me we ought to be on our inaugural night together. He was on his back, and I was on my side next to him, my head on the same pillow, my palm on his upper thigh. I was mortified. But if I moved my hand, would that alert him to the fact that it had been
there in the first place? As slowly as I could, I slid my fingers a few inches away, and he stirred, as I’d feared he would. He had one arm set around my back, and without opening his eyes, he turned his head, kissed the part in my hair, and immediately seemed to fall back to sleep.

  I lay in the dark with my eyes open. Had I not, in fact, been attempting something? Wondering, if only subconsciously, what I could get away with, what would be indecorous, how much we could casually encroach upon each other? And he either hadn’t noticed or had been unfazed. I moved my hand back to where it had been, and I, too, fell asleep again.

  WHEN WE ARRIVED at the house in Riley the next day, I knocked on the door, and my grandmother answered wearing an orange sleeveless acrylic dress, sheer panty hose, and orange heels. A skinny white leather belt was cinched around her tiny waist, and her bare arms were painfully scrawny. She looked back and forth between Charlie and me several times—she had to crane her neck—and then she clapped her hands together once and said, “Oh, this’ll be good!” She held out her cheek for me to kiss.

  “This is Charlie,” I said. “Charlie, this is my grandmother Emilie Lindgren. Granny, I thought of calling, but we were in the area, and I—”

  “My dear, I love surprises.” Her voice contained a note of mischief as she added, “I hope you do, too.”

  The reality was that I had purposely not called ahead, not only because I didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that Charlie and I had spent the previous night together in Houghton, but also because I didn’t want my mother to feel as if she had to prepare an elaborate meal on short notice. They ate lunch every day at twelve-thirty, and it was a quarter to two as we entered the house.

  “Mrs. Lindgren, I’ve promised your granddaughter I’ll be on my best behavior,” Charlie said, but before my grandmother could respond, my mother called, “Who is it, Emilie?”