The Silent Wife: A Novel

by A. S. A. Harrison

  She had to be given credit, and Gerard was lavish with his praise. He applauded her willingness and perspicacity, commended her for challenging herself and implementing change. This was unexpected progress, given that before she’d come to Gerard she hadn’t thought she had a problem because in her mind Ryan was the problem.

  With this achievement under their belts Jodi and Gerard moved on with renewed energy. They talked endlessly about her childhood, how it felt to be the girl in the middle, the fact that her parents had expected less of her, the way she had defied them by excelling at school and proving herself as both a professional and a homemaker. There was no denying that she had a competitive streak. They talked about the traits she had taken from each of them: from her mother a love of domesticity, from her father a devotion to method and detail. She was more the product of her family of origin than she had ever supposed.

  Her sessions were engaging, even enjoyable, but she began to suspect that her insights into her relationship with Ryan were destined to be the apotheosis of her work with Gerard, that there was nothing of any significance left to accomplish. Accordingly, she grew restless, even a little bored, and expressed to Gerard her feeling that she was wasting his time. Privately, she began to fear that she was shallow, tragically lacking in any real depth or substance. It came to the point where she could almost wish she’d had a horrible childhood, an abusive father, an alcoholic mother. What she wouldn’t have given on some days for a history of depression or anxiety, an eating disorder, low self-esteem, mood swings, panic attacks. If only she stuttered or compulsively washed her hands. She wasn’t even a procrastinator. As the weeks went by, her stasis became the subject of banter. She would arrive for her session and say, “Doctor, I love my life and I’m happy. What should I do?” And Gerard would reply, “Don’t worry. I know the cure.”

  And then came the turning point.

  It was not a propitious-seeming day, hardly a day that held out any hope of progress. Outside the consulting room it was spring and there were blossoms on the trees, but inside Jodi was wearing a cardigan over a pullover to fend off the air-conditioning, and Gerard was a little off his game, lacking his usual focus. They’d been jumping from one topic to another, unable to come up with anything of interest, and as the session neared its end they were flagging. She figured they were done. It was time to go home. And then, in a valiant last-ditch effort, Gerard inquired about her dreams.

  Jodi: It’s just been the usual white noise.

  Gerard: Define white noise.

  Jodi: You know what I mean. (Annoyed that he would ask her this question when she’d been using the term all along.)

  Gerard: Humor me. Give me an example.

  Jodi: Oh, well, like, I’m at a party talking to people I don’t know. I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror and notice that I’m half naked, but I feel nothing about it one way or the other. Then I’m at my parents’ house, hunting around for something, but I can’t remember what. Even in the dream it didn’t seem important. Like that. White noise.

  Gerard: (Silence.)

  Jodi: Sorry. I have been making an effort.

  Gerard: I know you have.

  Jodi: (Silence.)

  Gerard: So that’s it then.

  Jodi: I guess so.

  Gerard: (Silence.)

  Jodi: Hang on. I had a dream about Darrell.

  Gerard: You had a dream about Darrell?

  Jodi: I forgot about it till this very minute.

  Gerard: Tell me.

  Jodi: Darrell came to visit. And just as he arrived I was writing down a dream, which was Darrell’s dream. It was a dream of Darrell’s, but I had dreamed it for him. I had a whole notebook of Darrell’s dreams, dating back to his childhood. I’d been dreaming them for him and writing them down.

  Gerard: Go on.

  Jodi: That’s about it. I asked him if he remembered any of the dreams, but he wasn’t interested and didn’t want to talk about them, and then he left.

  Gerard: What were you feeling while this was going on?

  Jodi: Spooked. I was feeling spooked.

  Gerard: What spooked you?

  Jodi: The whole thing. It was creepy.

  Gerard: But you subsequently forgot the dream. When I asked you just now about your dreams, you said there had only been white noise.

  Jodi: I guess I put it out of my mind.

  Gerard: Did you feel anything else? Other than spooked?

  Jodi: Not really. No. I was just spooked. Scared, I’d have to say.

  Gerard: Of something in particular?

  Jodi: Scared on Darrell’s behalf, I guess. It’s like I had him on life support or something, but he was bloodless, totally disengaged. There was something horrifying about it. That he wouldn’t participate in his own dreaming. As if he were absent. As if he didn’t exist.

  Gerard: And you had been doing this on his behalf.

  Jodi: Yes.

  Gerard: And you had been doing it because . . . ?

  Jodi: Because I loved him.

  Gerard: In the dream, did you feel your love for him?

  Jodi: Yes. I did.

  Gerard: So in the dream you felt scared, and you also felt your love for him.

  Jodi: Yes.

  They let it idle for a moment, and then Gerard looked at his watch and said, “Let’s return to this next week. I’d like you to write the dream down in as much detail as you can and bring it to the next session. That’s your homework.”

  She stood up to go, removed her cardigan and put it in her satchel, took her windbreaker from the coat rack, and thanked Gerard on her way out. She walked to the elevator and pressed the down button. As she waited she looked at the elevator doors, at her feet in their Doc Martens, at the pattern on the carpet—a geometric design in blue and orange on such a minuscule scale that the overall color effect was beige. She felt a caustic wind rising up within her, unobstructed, as if her insides were nothing but a barren landscape. She thought of taking the stairs but felt as though she were stuck to the spot, as if the carpet and the soles of her boots had fused together in the manner of a skin graft. And even as she stood there she knew there would be no going back, that the simple uncomplicated times of just moments before were lost to her now. There would be no more sitting around with Gerard wondering what to talk about. No more banter about her perfect childhood. The dream had been retrieved and the memory with it, inevitably, like a bunch of tin cans tied to the back of a wedding car, and she could not now reverse the process—close her mind around the images and reabsorb them into the tissue of forgetting.

  The memory had borne its burial well, had returned to her intact, untarnished, fully dimensional, part of her living history, complete with visceral analogues—tastes, smells, sensations—actual voltage. It was a sightless memory, however, clothed in darkness, which she took to mean that the remembered events had taken place at night. Either that or the girl she had been was resolutely shut-eyed, had decided from the outset to curtail the offensive sensory input. Initially, the explosion within had been all pain and alarm, but later on she learned the trick of surrender, came to understand that capitulation was her means of disengaging, her ticket out. Her only hope now was that she might have been complicit, played a part in making it happen, because if so then maybe she could love him still and nothing would have to change. But she was only six when Darrell was twelve, and she didn’t see how it could have been her fault.

  26

  HIM

  Natasha is home again, but she has not forgiven him. In many ways things are back to normal—they sit down to dinner, she studies, he cleans up, visitors come and go—but she’s taken to undressing in the bathroom and falling asleep before he comes to bed, and she has him on a strict curfew, which strains his goodwill, and she continues to try his patience with incessant talk of centerpieces and seating arrangements, not to mention strollers and car seats, none of which has anything to do with loving each other or loving their son—whose name by the way has become the subj
ect of intense speculation and debate involving all her friends and all the neighbors. She won’t be satisfied until she’s wrung out every last entry in the boys’ half of an encyclopedic volume titled A Century of Baby Names in English-Speaking Countries. She refuses to accept that names like Herschel and Roscoe are not worth discussing, and she keeps both Clarence and Ambrose on an ever-expanding short list. Post-its bearing names like Chauncey and Montgomery are stuck to the bathroom mirror and rearranged as one or another gains or loses precedence. “You can’t veto a name just because you don’t like it,” she tells him absurdly.

  There comes a point in the evening—with dinner over and the apartment an overheated closet crawling with stale odors and unwanted guests—when all he can think about is flinging himself out the window. It would help if there were someone he could talk to the way he used to talk to Jodi. But Jodi won’t speak to him now, and with his buddies it’s mainly bravado, and anyway his time with them has been curtailed. “If you want to see them, Todd, why don’t you ask them to dinner?”

  He misses coming home at night and walking the dog by the water, an interlude that banished the cares of the day and helped him get down to the business of sleep. In the deep of the night, with the city dozing and muted, he’d walk along the shore and feel himself alone in a wilderness, listen to the water’s breath, its snorting and sighing, submit to the immense hollow of the sky, its infinite folds cascading down to the very horizon. On clear nights he could pick out the Big Dipper and the North Star. He used to know Orion and Cassiopeia and Pegasus and so many more, and when there was no moon and it was very dark, he’d look for the Milky Way. As a boy he dreamed of a sea of stars and being in their midst, not in a spaceship but floating free, doing a backstroke through the thick of them, a billion trillion pinpoints of light that crackled and popped against his skin like cool fire.

  So much pleasant musing has been crowded out and all but forgotten. The sound he hears in absolute silence, a hissing sound—he thinks of it as atmospheric pressure. As a boy he imagined that everything, absolutely everything made noise, if only he could hear it. In autumn, the leaves turning color, a different sound for turning yellow and turning red. The falling snow in winter. Buds forming on the trees in spring. Clouds drifting. Small birds intent in their flight, their shadows moving on the ground beneath them. He likes to be in tune with things as they are, move through the world in step with its music. When it’s working for him he can do and be anything. Some people call it luck.

  There’s not much point anymore in restricting his drinking to the evening hours, and he’s taken to seeking out watering holes at lunchtime. His new find is a sports bar in Humboldt Park, an out-of-the-way haven with old-timers in the front drinking cheap draft and playing dominoes and a worn-out pool table in the back—an establishment where the air has been motionless since 1980, to judge by the smell of it. He likes it more because nobody he knows would ever go there. An elderly Spaniard in a crumpled fedora, the owner, spends his days on a stool at the cash register, while the work of pouring and serving is done by a single waitress. When he first wandered in here last week he thought he’d have a quick one and leave but discarded this plan the minute he caught sight of her. Since then he’s been back every day, holding down the table by the jukebox, facing into the room with his back to the wall.

  Today he’s focused on tracking her movements—covertly but with GPS precision. At any given moment he knows her location, route, speed, and schedule of stops. As she orbits the room she could be deaf and blind for all the notice she takes of him, but the signals she emits peal like church bells calling him to worship.

  The way she looks—gaunt with lank hair and hollow cheeks—makes him think of an undernourished child. She has a long torso with a flat chest, jutting hip bones, and a concave belly. Feet like planks but narrow. Eyebrows unplucked. In the hours he’s spent here fewer than a dozen words have passed between them. She has a Mediterranean look but speaks without an accent. Her voice is toneless and her words run together, as though she lacks the energy to enunciate. She never looks at him.

  “Tell me your name,” he says as she waits to take his order. He’s been meaning to ask her this and biding his time, taking his cue from her indifference. But he’s not a stranger anymore. He’s a regular now; she’s used to him. When it comes to women he has pretty good horse sense.

  “Ilona,” she says, her eyes alighting briefly on his face, possibly for the very first time.

  He wants to tell her she’s sensational, stunning. Everything about her says she doesn’t know this. He feels the burden of wasted time, an urgency that doesn’t compute but drives him nonetheless. What he’d like to do is lead her into the men’s room and lock the door. What he can conceivably do is ask when her shift ends, take her to a good restaurant, and impress her by throwing some money around. All women like money. Any woman will give in to you if you spend enough money on her. Whatever the rule books say, it’s money that gets a woman in the mood.

  She shifts her weight to her right foot, thrusting out her hip. Her eyes are fixed on something at the front of the room.

  “A pint and a shot,” he says. It’s practically the only thing he’s ever said to her. She starts to walk away.

  “Ilona,” he calls.

  She turns and comes back.

  He’s broken into a sweat. A prickly heat is spreading across his chest and burnishing his forehead. “When I was ten,” he says, “I watched my father break my mother’s arm. He held it behind her back and twisted till it snapped. It was her left arm. ‘So you can still work,’ he told her. When he did it he was looking straight at me. I’ll never forget the expression on his face. Like he was showing me something, giving a demonstration. Teaching me.”

  He watches her as he speaks, wipes his brow with his sleeve.

  “I vowed that I would never be like him. I’ve always respected the women in my life. I’m not saying I’m a saint, but I’ve loved women deeply. When I was old enough I got my mother out of there. Looked after her till the day she died.”

  He hates himself for this speech. It’s nothing but a craven bid for sympathy, a shameless ploy. This is not the first time he’s told a woman this story or some version of it. Not that it isn’t fundamentally true; there’s emotional truth in it anyway. And even before he’s done she’s moved a half step closer and a light has come into her eyes. It’s hard to tell if it’s her sympathy that’s been aroused or her contempt. But she hasn’t yet brought him his first drink of the day, and this has to be working in his favor. He isn’t some used-up lush spilling his guts on the floor, some wasted gasbag airing his sour old grievances. Not only is he sober, he’s a notch above any other man she’s going to meet in this dive. He’s relying on his sobriety—along with his calfskin boots, his uptown haircut, and the Rolex Milgauss twinkling on his left wrist—to get his point across.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” he says.

  Again she turns away and again he calls her back.

  “I’m desperately trying to get your attention,” he tells her. “But I’m sorry. I’m sure you hear sob stories all day long, and you deserve so much better—a man who can forget about himself and focus on you. Pamper you. Bring you flowers and gifts. Massage your feet when you get off work. Min fröken, you iss all day oon da foots and now iss riilly sore. Take care of the losers who try to pick you up at work. Don’t vorry, you must telling Boris, ve tekking zis man out of hair, same ve do in Savyetski Sayus.”

  Unexpectedly she laughs, her habitual vacancy giving way to a gratifying sunburst, and after that things between them are subtly different. By the time he’s ready to leave she’s agreed to meet him for lunch on her day off, which is two days before he gets his test results and five days before his wedding. He would have preferred to take her to dinner, but for now at least, with his curfew in place, dinner is out of the question. Once his son is born he’ll work toward making some changes at home. He’ll lay down some ground rules and ge
t his life back to normal. Sneaking around is not his style and no way to live. He needs to be his own man again, as he was when he lived with Jodi.

  He hasn’t been himself in so many ways. Like the way he’s been ambushed by scenes from his childhood. His mother making doughnuts on a Saturday morning, standing over the pot of sizzling fat, frying up batch after batch while he sits at the table eating the ones that have cooled. To please his mother he eats more than he wants, keeps on eating after he’s full and even when he starts to feel sick. Thinking of this brings mixed feelings, as do all his memories of his mother. The way she’d lie down beside him at bedtime and stroke his forehead till he fell asleep. The way she’d lick her thumb to wipe a speck of something off his cheek, even after he was grown. Her loving touch inflected with the smell of garlic on her hands. The way he liked it and hated it at the same time. He’s annoyed that such impressions have lately been flooding his mind, as if a door has opened that was previously shut. He has no interest in these memories, which are pointless and pertain to nothing. Among his other creeping fears is the fear that he’s going soft, losing his edge.

  27

  HER

  At any given time at least a dozen conferences of interest to psychologists are going on in cities around the world. This is what immediately came to mind when Alison suggested that she leave town. In her years as a professional she has only ever attended one such event, a conference on communication that took place some years back in Geneva. She remembers how enjoyable it was, how easy to talk to people, the sense of fellowship she felt, the interesting speakers who came from all over the world, the fun of going to dinner with new people in a foreign city. She came back with renewed energy for her clients and made adjustments in the way she interacted with them, taking more notice of their body language and choice of words, echoing these back to them as a way of creating rapport.