American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  We waited, and waited some more, and then the class of ’65 passed by, the class of ’66, the class of ’67—they were to our left, they’d been beside us all this time—and at last it was our turn. We fell into step behind them, and Ella got Charlie to start up a ’68 locomotive: Hip! Hip! Rah! Rah! Rah! . . . All the classes younger than Charlie’s cheered as we walked by, and we waved as if we were dignitaries. The parade route ended on the baseball field, where we stayed—Ella insisted, so that we could see Harry—until the last class, the graduating seniors, sprinted out and were officially decreed by the university president to be Princeton alumni. “When I go to Princeton, I want to live above Blair Arch,” Ella said.

  “Then you better get a good draw time,” Charlie replied.

  “And you better work hard in school,” I added.

  BECAUSE I TRIED to be an organized person, I had always appreciated organization in others, and I must say this: Princeton reunions were spectacularly well executed. All those tents and temporary fences and folding chairs and tables, the beer kegs and matching outfits, the academic talks and the a cappella groups performing around campus at thoughtfully scheduled intervals! The planning that went into the weekend boggled the mind, yet it all proceeded beautifully, seamlessly. For kids, two movies were being screened that night in McCosh 10, Back to the Future and Splash, while a Beatles cover band played in our tent for the adults. As we ate dinner—tonight it was barbecued pork, potato salad, corn on the cob, and corn bread—Charlie was both fidgety and extremely affectionate. I ended up in a long conversation with a classmate’s wife, Mimi Bryce, whom I’d first met at the tenth reunion and who was a fourth-grade teacher at a private girls’ school outside Boston; we spoke for probably forty minutes, during which Charlie approached me three separate times, saying, “Come on and shake your groove thing, Lindy” or “Charlie Blackwell waits for no one, and he won’t wait for you.” Finally, he just tugged at my hand, and I apologized to Mimi as I let him pull me toward the dance floor.

  “I was enjoying talking to her,” I said.

  “They’re playing ‘Can’t Buy Me Love,’ and you’d rather discuss a fourth-grade curriculum?”

  The band was actually near the end of “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and they segued into “Twist and Shout,” which Charlie knew all the words to and animatedly serenaded me with, pointing at me, contorting his face into soulful expressions: “You know you twist so fine (twist so fine) / Come on and twist a little closer, now (twist a little closer)—” He beckoned with one finger, and when I stepped forward, he twirled me. For the “shake it up” part at the end, he raised his arms above his head and really shook them—he wore the orange warm-up pants and a white polo shirt, and there were large sweat spots beneath his arms. At the conclusion to the song, he pulled me to him, grabbing my rear end, kissing me hard on the mouth, and he said, “You want to go fuck in the dorm really fast before Ella gets back?”

  “Charlie.”

  He grinned. “Why not? Won’t take long, I promise.” And then he reached up and squeezed my left breast. “It’ll be fun.” I took a step backward. The dance floor was crowded, the whole tent was crowded, and no one seemed to be paying attention to us, but still, I was stunned.

  “Charlie, we’re not animals,” I said. “You can’t do that in public.”

  “Maybe you’re not an animal. I’m a tiger, baby.” His face was flushed.

  “I hope you won’t drink anymore.”

  He smirked. “Why don’t you go talk to Mimi again? I hear she has some fascinating insights on Dr. Seuss.”

  I took a deep breath. “I’ll try not to ruin tonight for you if you try not to ruin it for me.”

  He still was smirking. “Lindy, you couldn’t ruin it for me if you wanted to.”

  At that moment, a classmate of his named Wilbur Morgan approached us and jabbed his thumb toward Charlie—he seemed unaware we’d been arguing—and said to me, “Word on the street is that this guy just bought a major league baseball team.” He turned to Charlie. “All right, Mr. Hotshot, true or false?”

  “Morgy, I’m hoping you’ll play shortstop.” Charlie patted Wilbur’s gut. “You need to start training, buddy.”

  “No fair!” Wilbur shook his head, smiling widely. “It is no fair that you ended up with the best freakin’ job in the world. I’d give my left nut!”

  “Funny, I never thought you had a left nut,” Charlie said, and Wilbur said to me, “Has he changed one iota?”

  I smiled wanly. “If you’ll excuse me.” I headed toward the water tent and had just accepted a plastic cup when I turned and found Holly Goshen, Dennis Goshen’s wife, beside me. “You’ve got to stay hydrated on a night like this, huh?” she said. Dennis and Holly lived in New York, where Dennis was a trader on Wall Street and Holly was an aerobics instructor. We had been at their wedding in the early eighties, at the Rainbow Room, and Holly was, as one might predict of an aerobics instructor, thin and attractive, with wavy blond hair. We stood there sipping, observing the activity. To make conversation, I said, “I assume you two are headed back to New York in the morning?”

  She nodded. “This is awful to say, but Alice, I’m so glad I’m not the only one here whose husband still does blow. You’re such a nice, normal person that seeing you is really reassuring.”

  “Whose husband still what?” I repeated.

  “I didn’t mean it like—” She laughed nervously, and I could tell she thought she’d offended me. “Boys will be boys, that’s all I meant. Some of the guys Dennis works with, they’re freebasing every night of the week, and he can’t do that anymore, thank God. He’s forty-two!”

  “Are you telling me that Dennis and Charlie used cocaine tonight?”

  “I thought—” She seemed increasingly uneasy. “I saw them headed off together before dinner, so I just assumed—I’ve put my foot in my mouth, haven’t I? Can we forget I said anything?”

  I felt a strong desire to say, Charlie wouldn’t use cocaine, but as soon as I thought it, I also thought of his odd behavior this evening, his physical forwardness.

  And it wasn’t Holly’s fault, she had nothing to do with it, really, but I’d been drained of the energy necessary to smooth over this moment. I set down my plastic cup. “I have to go.”

  THOUGH I NEARLY collided with Joe Thayer outside the tent, I didn’t recognize that it was him for several seconds, until after he’d said, “You’re just the person I was looking for. I caught sight of you in the P-rade, but I was being carried along with the current and I didn’t—Are you all right? Alice, my goodness, what’s wrong?”

  I’d been trying very hard not to cry, but I didn’t succeed. It was the sympathetic expression on Joe’s face, the kindness of his features. People were steadily entering and leaving the tent, and I probably knew many of them. Though a few tears had escaped already, I pressed my lips together and shook my head.

  “How about humoring me by making me think I can help in some way?” Joe said. “Shall we stroll for a bit?”

  I nodded, still unable to speak, and he set one hand lightly at my elbow, guiding me down the stairs and through the arch that led to the dorm where we were staying, except that in front of Campbell, we veered left, heading toward Nassau Hall. The campus was dark, the night air warm; it smelled like early summer. A good ten minutes must have elapsed before either of us spoke. Early on in the silence, I felt that I needed to pull myself together and say something, but I realized at some point that Joe wasn’t waiting for an explanation—it was more that he was offering his presence, his company. I had stopped crying well before we reached Firestone Library when I said, “Have you ever tried cocaine?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I realize it’s trendy in certain places, but I just—I never thought—” Back in our twenties, Dena had told me that she’d done it a few times during her years as a flight attendant, but she and possibly her sister Marjorie were the only people I knew who had.

  “Would it be forward of me to
ask why this has come up?” Joe said.

  We were between the library and the chapel, an imposing Gothic cathedral that looked a bit haunted in the dark, and I pointed at its steps. “Should we sit?” We took seats side by side. The moon was half full, the stars tiny and far above us. I said, “I think Charlie may be high right now, that he may have—You say snorted, that’s the terminology, isn’t it?”

  “I believe it depends on the form of cocaine, but sure.” If Joe was startled by what I’d told him, he didn’t show it.

  “You don’t think he’s in danger healthwise?” I said. “He isn’t about to have a heart attack, I shouldn’t call a doctor?”

  “I’m out of my depth here, too, I admit.” Joe crossed his ankles. “But as far as I know, the real threat is overdosing, and if he’s upright and able to carry on a conversation—”

  “He makes me feel so silly,” I said, and Joe did not immediately respond.

  After a while, he said, “I don’t think you’re silly for being concerned. Is this a habit with him?”

  “I wish I knew. I found out about tonight a few minutes ago, and he wasn’t the one who told me. I don’t think—forgive me, Joe, for saying this to you of all people—but I don’t think I can stay with him. Every day, every few hours, I go back and forth, as if everything he says or does is proof that I should either stick it out or leave. It’s starting to make me fear for my sanity.”

  Again, Joe was quiet for over a minute before saying, “You never know the nature of another couple’s marriage, do you? I’ve always thought the two of you seem wonderfully complementary. But I’ll tell you what else—that weekend you and Charlie got engaged, we were stunned. My extended family, I mean. We heard about it, and we were only just getting to know you, but we thought, That sweet, sweet girl is marrying Charlie?”

  Simultaneously, I felt my lips curve up and my eyes flood. With the back of my hand, I wiped my nose. “The engagement didn’t happen in Halcyon,” I said. “We were already engaged, but we didn’t tell people right away.”

  “I met you down on their dock, remember that?” Joe said. “I came back from fishing with Ed and John, we puttered up, and you were standing there in a yellow dress”—(he was right, that yellow knit dress with the collar, I had forgotten all about it)—“and I thought—I suppose I’m only admitting this because it was so long ago and because I’ve consumed more than my share of Bud Light tonight—but I thought, Who’s that gorgeous girl? I was dumbstruck. Then Charlie took your hand.”

  The truth was that I didn’t remember meeting Joe. I remembered meeting Charlie’s parents that day, and Jadey later that night, when I’d foolishly allowed myself to get drunk, and I remembered knowing Joe later on, talking politely to him, when he seemed handsome and reserved and maybe the slightest bit dull, when it never occurred to me that I registered with him more than anyone else’s wife. Did I register with him more than other wives?

  “That was an overwhelming visit,” I said. “God bless the Blackwells, but—I’m sure you understand. That’s what’s so nice about talking to you, Joe, that I don’t have to explain.”

  Joe shook his head. “Look at us,” he said. “Do you think we should find some undergraduates and warn them to be careful whom they pick to spend their lives with?”

  “As if they’d listen.”

  We sat there on the steps in companionable silence; we could hear the distant songs of a few bands playing at once in different tents. “I suppose I’ve always nursed a small crush on you,” Joe said. “In light of both our circumstances, it’s made me stay away. Not literally, I don’t mean, but to keep myself at a distance.” When I didn’t reply, he said, “I hope I’m not making you uncomfortable.”

  “Joe, I’m honored.” I patted his knee in what I meant to be a friendly way, though as soon as I’d done it, I realized it might have seemed flirtatious, and in fact it may have been flirtatious. I had lost my bearings—I had started losing them before, at some indeterminate point, and now they were gone entirely.

  “I won’t try to advise you on what’s happening with Charlie,” Joe said. “That’s none of my business. But if there was ever a chance, and I know, with Halcyon and my family and his family, I know we’d be opening a can of worms, I’m well aware, but if you ever thought the two of us—”

  I cut him off by kissing him. I leaned forward abruptly—gracelessly, I suspect—and I pressed my mouth against his, and we kissed hungrily, and at first it was all-consuming, it was forbidden and wrong and exciting, but very little time had passed before I became aware of an unflattering comparison between the way he kissed and the way Charlie did. Joe was not as adept. It had been so long since I’d kissed anyone besides my husband that I’d forgotten there could be variations on it, or skill involved, but Joe—I felt cruel noticing this—drooled a bit, there was an excess of saliva that accompanied his tongue and lips. I pulled away and quickly stood. I brought a hand to my chest. “Joe, I—I don’t—I need to find Ella.”

  He stared at me with passion.

  At a loss as to what else to do or say, I made a gesture that was not unlike curtsying. “Forgive me,” I said, and I hurried away. I did not even have the excuse of attributing my behavior to alcohol: Joe, by his own admission, had been tipsy, but I’d been perfectly sober.

  BACK IN THE dorm, once Ella was asleep, I packed—our flight out of Newark was at one on Sunday—and the questions that sprang up in my head felt clichéd and overwrought, as if perhaps I’d heard them asked by a naive wife in a movie, or a public service announcement on TV about drug addiction: How many times before and how often and why? Maybe when I said why to Charlie, my voice would quaver, and that would reveal just how betrayed I felt.

  But no—I did not want to be that wife, did not want to have that conversation. It was beneath me; it would give his worst behavior an attention it didn’t deserve.

  He returned to the dorm earlier than I expected, before midnight. More matter-of-factly than angrily, he said, “I didn’t know where you’d gone,” and I brought my finger to my lips, indicating Ella, now asleep. He lowered his voice. “Kind of a crappy band, if you ask me. Just the idea of a cover band is pathetic when you think about it, living off someone else’s glory.”

  Did he have any idea? He had no idea. What other conclusion was there to draw? I was folding a pair of his pants, and I set them in our suitcase.

  He stepped close to me, half whispering. “You’re not pissed about before, are you?” So he had some idea, but such a narrow, watered-down one—it was close enough to having no idea. “You know how being around these goons gets me riled up.” He leaned in to kiss me. “Brings out my inner eighteen-year-old.” He grinned, and I felt both astonishment—how could our experiences of our relationship be so grossly different?—and also a relief at having chosen not to confront him. It was the right choice.

  He kissed me some more, my cheeks and neck, he set his hands on my hips, and I realized he wanted us to have sex. I pointed to the wall and said, “Ella’s on the other side.”

  “We can keep it down. Well, you might not be able to.” He pulled the peach-colored blouse I was wearing (a nod to orange without being the real, aggressive thing) out of my white pants and stuck his hands beneath it. He reached around and unfastened my bra.

  I acquiesced. It was easier than talking, it would be a balm to the discord of the weekend. The mattress springs were squeaky, which I found distracting, but I was distracted anyway. Lying on top of me, pumping in and out, Charlie gazed down and said, “You look beautiful, Lindy.” He smelled of sweat and beer and some essential Charlieness, the smell of himself, that I was very accustomed to.