The Silent Wife: A Novel

by A. S. A. Harrison

  “I thought I heard you come in,” she says, lifting her sunglasses to squint at him.

  She has an economy about her—physical, emotional—that has always drawn him in. Her self-possession rarely deserts her; she’s a woman who rises to the top of any situation. And even after all the years he feels that he knows her hardly at all, that he can’t really grasp what lies beneath the surface. As a force in his life Jodi is polished, a virtuoso who works on him artfully, whereas Natasha plugs directly into his primitive brain. If Jodi is up, Natasha is down. If Jodi is a gentle lift, Natasha is a ten-story fall.

  The country innkeeper, when he and Natasha showed up to claim their room, did nothing to mask his disapproval. He asked them to repeat their names, looked grimly at his register, and said, shaking his head, “You’re booked into the honeymoon suite,” as though urging them to change their minds. “The one with the king-size bed and the Jacuzzi,” Natasha affirmed. Based on the churlish stares that followed them through the weekend, you would have thought that Todd was having it off with his own daughter. When he and Natasha emerged from their suite at noon on Saturday and walked into the dining room for lunch, he might as well have been naked with lips rubbed raw and a giant erection. The way people were carrying on, Natasha could have been a girl of twelve.

  That first day, on arriving back at the inn, hot and thirsty after a walk in the woods, they wandered into the lounge, an airy room with bamboo blinds and rustic maple furnishings, where the paunchy bartender, having taken their order, gave Todd a wink as he put Natasha’s Manhattan down in front of her, a wink that meant, in bumptious macho parlance: “Get her drunk enough and even an old guy like you can get lucky” or “I made this extra strong because you’re going to need all the help you can get” or “Maybe I can have a go when you’re done with her, whaddaya say?”

  He could almost feel that Natasha was to blame, the way she let it all hang out—breasts rising from their moorings, navel ring winking, hair tumbling—and the way she liked to posture by deepening her lumbar curve till it bowed out her torso, as if she were Nadia Comaneci working the balance beam.

  Twirling from side to side on her bar stool, she looped her fingers through his belt and nuzzled him like a newborn calf. “If we’re getting married in June, and you promised me that, then we need to start planning the wedding,” she said. “And we need to look for a place to live.” Tugging on his belt, her lips approaching his ear, she added that spending the night together—the whole of the night in the king-size bed in their honeymoon suite—had changed things, that now there could be no going back. They had crossed a threshold, she said, and the old routine of sneaking around and hiding their love would no longer do.

  Had he promised to marry her in June? Not that he could remember. As a way of putting her off, he said that he would have to talk to his lawyer before they could make any plans.

  —

  Jodi gets up from her lounge chair and moves past him into the apartment. He catches the scent of her warm flesh layered with suntan oil and watches her walk away toward the bathroom. Her body is small and slight, in striking contrast to Natasha’s with its broad back and deep curves. She returns wearing a short silk wrapper tied at the waist. When she sits down the robe falls open, revealing her thighs and the swell of her breasts.

  “How was your weekend?” she asks.

  “It’s good to be home,” he says evasively. “What did you do while I was gone?”

  “Nothing much. Did you catch any fish?”

  When she mentions fish her eyes crinkle up with merriment. If she knows or guesses the truth, she’s at least not going to punish him with it.

  “I wish I could tell you that I’ve stocked the freezer with pickerel,” he says. “But I’ll take you out to dinner if you like.”

  They go to Spiaggia and work their way through three delicious courses, washing them down with a robust amarone. He’s wearing a dinner jacket and she’s in an off-the-shoulder cocktail dress and a double strand of pearls. That night they make love for the first time in a month.

  —

  The next day opens with a series of misadventures. To begin with he gets to work at his usual early hour only to find that one of his keys—the one that opens the street door—is missing from his key ring. Standing on the sidewalk with his mobile phone he curses when he fails to connect with the janitor. He doesn’t know how this could have happened; keys don’t detach on their own from a steel ring. He nonetheless walks the three blocks back to his Porsche to search the seats and floor and then calls Jodi, waking her up, to ask if she’ll have a look around at home. After that he waits in front of his building thinking that sooner or later someone will come along and let him in, but it’s still early, and before long he gives up and goes for breakfast.

  Starting time for the janitor is supposedly eight o’clock. At five to eight Todd is back at the building with a takeout coffee, but it’s another twelve minutes before the janitor shows up. The twelve-minute wait finishes off what was left of his patience, and the entire responsibility for his wasted hour and a half comes down on the janitor’s head. A quiet, mostly reliable man who’s held his position for some years, the janitor quits on the spot and leaves without producing any keys. More minutes pass, another nineteen to be exact, before a tenant arrives and lets Todd in. By the time he’s broken into the janitor’s room to get at an extra set of keys, he has a message from Stephanie saying that one of her kids is sick and she won’t be in to work. He spends the rest of the morning dealing with things that Stephanie would normally be doing, and when Natasha calls at lunchtime to ask him if he’s spoken to his lawyer, he tells her that the world doesn’t operate according to her whims.

  Natasha’s readiness to take offense, her proclivity to cry, to pout, to withdraw—this is all new to him, and he finds it wearing. Jodi doesn’t behave this way. What is Natasha’s problem? He’d like to take it up with her but prudently holds his tongue, and although the day is slipping away he talks her into meeting him for lunch.

  When he shows up at Francesca’s in Little Italy—a regular spot of theirs because it’s close to the university—Natasha is seated by the pillar, reading a menu. As he settles into the chair across from her she fails to lift her eyes or otherwise take any notice of him, sticking with her menu as if she doesn’t already know it by heart. Why can’t she act her age and talk to him, call him a name or two, get it out of her system? On the other hand, meeting him here was no doubt a big concession for her to make, after the way he spoke to her. Ever so gently he takes the menu out of her hands and sets it aside.

  “Let’s not fight,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  Based on the look she gives him—unsmiling, apprehensive—he understands that she intends to break up with him. But it was such a little spat. There must be something else going on. Of course there is. The something else he’s always feared. It’s finally happened, and how could it not, given the throngs of likely young men who rub shoulders with her every day at school. He never believed that she would stay with him forever, in spite of what she says. The talk of marriage, that was just a sideshow, something to try on for size. She’s like that, Natasha. She likes to speculate and presume, just to see what will happen. And why not? She has her whole life ahead of her and needs to figure out what she’s going to be doing and who she’s going to be doing it with. Whereas he is more than half done. Forty-six. Over the hill. A few more years and he’ll be popping vitamin V. He can’t compete with a rival half his age. He has to face the facts and let her go.

  “I can’t let you go,” he says. “I love you.”

  Her eyes widen. She gives a little laugh. “Don’t be silly,” she says.

  “Aren’t you breaking up with me?”

  “No. As much as you deserve it.”

  Their server appears and Natasha orders a meatball sandwich, so Todd gets that too, even though he has no appetite. Then he breaks his lunchtime rule and orders a beer. She isn’t leaving him and he should be feeli
ng relieved, but something isn’t right.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  Ignoring the question she starts to talk about school: her nine o’clock class, what the professor was wearing, what he said about the Fauvists. At least she’s decided to speak to him, but when the food arrives she digs in and falls silent again. He talks about his morning, the string of mishaps starting with the lost key. He’s trying to entertain her, get her laughing, but there’s something on her mind. He drinks down his beer and orders another. She doesn’t come out with it till after she’s eaten her meal, every scrap of it, and has a cup of tea in front of her. When she tells him it’s like a kick in the head.

  “How could this happen?” he yells. “I thought you were on the pill.”

  She shushes him. She’s turned pale and seems confused. “I thought you wanted children,” she says.

  “Of course I want children,” he shouts.

  Of course he wants children, though children may not be the word for what he wants. Natasha wants children, meaning helpless little beggars who need her constant attention and bring her a sense of kinship and belonging. What he wants is not that. What he wants is descendants, heirs, or just one heir, preferably a son, someone who shares his DNA, a variant of himself to replace him when he’s gone. As a younger man he never gave this any serious thought and would have kept on like that had he not awakened one morning with a lust for progeny that shot through him like a virus, and then, when he met Natasha, mutated into a rampant longing that never left him. It made him feel that his life, as it stood, was a wasteland. It gave his pursuit of her an urgency that was unrelenting. That she could love him meant that it was not too late.

  “Of course I want children,” he repeats. “Just not like this.”

  “Not like what?”

  “Like this. With you springing it on me at lunch.”

  “When should I have sprung it on you?”

  “We’ve never even discussed this.”

  “Yes we have. You want children.”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  He’s shouting again, and he can see from her face that he’s lost her. She stands up, takes her knapsack from the back of her chair, and leaves the restaurant. He gets out his wallet, slides some bills under a plate, and hurries after her, fearing that she might have run off and disappeared, but there she is, standing idly by.

  “I have to get to class,” she says.

  He drapes an arm across her shoulders and keeps it there as they walk up Loomis Street toward Harrison.

  “I can have an abortion,” she says.

  “You would do that?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  It’s a ray of light, and with the hope it brings his panic subsides a little. He stops walking and swings her around to face him. “How far along are you?” he asks. “I mean, is it doable?”

  She gives him a look of such intense hatred that he physically recoils.

  “You’re the one who brought it up,” he says.

  As the bickering continues he forgets to press his point about how this could have happened. It doesn’t occur to him that she might have done it on purpose. He is not by nature suspicious or vindictive, and without knowing it he moves past blaming her and starts on the process of puzzling things out, much as he would a plumbing leak or a bad debt. Now he’s saying things like: “Don’t worry . . . we’ll get it straight . . . it’s going to be okay.” But this kind of talk falls short.

  “You’re still talking about it like it’s a problem,” she says.

  “Okay, fine. But I’m not twenty-one. I have a history and that complicates things. I’m not, at the moment, a free man.”

  “Whose fault is that? You were supposed to tell her about us ages ago.”

  He wonders if this could be true. He doesn’t recall any discussion with Natasha in which he agreed to talk to Jodi. He only knows that Natasha has been pressuring him to talk to Jodi.

  “I don’t think I was supposed to tell her,” he says. “But I’ll have to tell her now.”

  The reality of this is dawning on him. If Natasha won’t consider an abortion, people will have to know. Maybe not immediately but eventually. Jodi will have to know. And Dean.

  “I don’t think you should tell your father,” he says. “Not right away.”

  Natasha has started walking again. She’s several steps ahead of him. “I’ve already told my father,” she says, tossing the words over her shoulder.

  He lengthens his stride and catches up with her. “You told Dean? When did you tell him?”

  “After I spoke to you.”

  “I can’t believe you would do that.”

  She shrugs, and he understands that she did it to spite him, because he was short with her on the phone when she asked if he had called his lawyer.

  “What did you say exactly? You didn’t tell him about me—about us.”

  “What do you think? I’m going to tell him and not say who it’s with?”

  “You didn’t need to tell him at all.”

  She shrugs again, her pique and pride and truculence all packed into the single insolent gesture. As she walks on at a steady deliberate pace he has to make an effort to keep up with her. He feels like a cockroach scuttling along at her side.

  “Slow down,” he says. “Talk to me.”

  “What’s to say?”

  “Lots. There’s lots to say. How far along are you? When did you find out?”

  “I don’t know how far along I am. I found out this morning.”

  “You found out this morning? I thought you had a class this morning.”

  “I did it first thing, when I woke up. That’s when you’re supposed to do it.”

  Todd, who has never heard of a home pregnancy test, says, “You did what when you woke up?”

  “There’s this plastic stick that you pee on. You get it at the drugstore. If it’s positive, a pink line comes up.”

  “A plastic stick?”

  “That’s not all. My period is late.”

  “But you need to see a doctor to know for sure.”

  “You so want it not to be true.”

  They’re on Harrison Street now, heading east. The sidewalk is crowded with students moving in both directions. They’re getting jostled in the congestion.

  “When you told your father, how did he take it?” he asks.

  “How do you think?”

  “He wasn’t happy.”

  “No.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said that he was going to wring your neck.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It’s not enough?”

  “He must have said more than that.”

  “Oh yeah, I almost forgot. He said that he was going to talk to Jodi.”

  He waits for her to disappear into Henry Hall and then turns back toward his car, already regretting the hash he’s made of things. Clearly this is a sensitive situation, one that’s going to follow him, and he should have been more tactful. Not that it would have made any real difference. Women have babies or not according to their whims—and what some guy wants, even the guy responsible, is completely beside the point. There’s no recourse for the men of this world. Men are a race of suckers who don’t realize that having sex is the biggest risk they’ll ever take. His whole world changes as of now, and there isn’t a damn thing he can do about it. He ought to have a voice here, but things don’t work like that. In spite of what anyone says it’s women who make the rules. In this case it’s Natasha who makes the rules. And now she’s upset with him, and he still has Dean and Jodi to face. Regardless of his feelings about fathering a child or an heir or whatever you want to call it, this right now is too complicated, too fraught, and moving too fast. It’s like he’s in a car that’s careening along in the wrong lane, heading into oncoming traffic. It makes no difference that he doesn’t know how he got here. It’s going to be him who’s held accountable.

  As he passes in front of the UIC P
avilion he has his phone in hand and is speed-dialing Dean’s mobile. He ought to take some time to get his thoughts in order, figure out what he’s going to say, but time is passing and he needs to get to Dean before Dean gets to Jodi, if it’s not already too late. He thinks he has a chance because Dean has only known for a few hours. The main thing is that he’s willing to be humble, willing to give Dean plenty of space and take a certain amount of flak. Dean can be a little wild and a little unruly, and Dean can be stubborn, but he’s not a blockhead. He may not like what’s happening, but given time he’s going to adapt because if Dean is anything he’s loyal, and Todd is Dean’s oldest friend.

  But Todd is mistaken if he thinks that Dean has had enough time to come down to earth and have a rational conversation. Before Todd can form a single word Dean lets him have it.

  “I thought you were my friend, you slimy son of a bitch. What the fuck are you doing with my daughter?”

  Todd wants to say that he’s sorry, that he didn’t mean for this to happen, that he never wanted to hurt Dean or put their friendship at risk, that Dean has every right to be upset. He wants very much to say these things and be forgiven, but most of all, right at this moment, he wants to ask Dean if he will please not speak to Jodi, if he’ll give Todd a chance to talk to her first. Dean, however, is not in a listening mood.

  “I’ll rip your head off, you stinking turd,” says his friend. “I’ll have you arrested for sexual assault.” And with that he breaks the connection.

  Todd is riled now. The son of a bitch has got him going. He needs to simmer down, and it helps that he’s striding along. Walking is a known remedy for getting a grip on yourself. Go for a walk, they say. Get outside and shake it off. It’s one of those days when the sun is breaking through low-lying clouds and the odd spatter of rain hits the pavement with a hiss. Scattered showers. They moisten his head and shoulders and raise the smell of the pristine lawns that dominate the grounds of the university. He needs to focus on the future. Not the distant future—although that, too, is at stake—but the hours just ahead. Where will he be eating dinner? Jodi was planning to cook. And where is he going to be sleeping? Something has to be done, but what?