My wife could be unbearable when she was pleased with herself — I think she knew this — so it was unfortunate she was such an accomplished woman. She was an artist — wiry strong, lean, all bones and muscle — and very busy. The fees she collected for lectures and appearances provided for our lifestyle, but that also meant she was expected at parties and openings most of the year, in far-flung conference rooms and auditoriums. Her profession demanded she travel. I travelled with her. She needed me to keep her grounded, to talk back. That’s why I had to go with her on airplanes; that, and because she feared we’d die apart. She couldn’t stomach the idea of dying without me.
Jacq was supposed to visit a gallery in Savannah the next day where a collector had bought one of her collages. This was a seminal piece for her, one she hadn’t seen for years, and she was eager to reconnect with it. Jacq’s meme consisted of landscape art she made with tufts of prairie grass and matted buffalo hair. She had a peculiar relationship with her patrons, I thought, because of her medium. Most people knew her from her early work, when she reconstructed the sediment record of canyons with menstrual blood and acrylics. The pieces were really quite accurate, in a way. She often overstated line and could have made bolder use of color and space, but it didn’t really matter what I thought. I did product descriptions for a conglomerate of online specialty stores. It was all niche stuff — we rode the coattails of SkyMall — nothing I’d buy myself. The job was done mostly through e-mail and that meant I could travel freely. I didn’t need to work, but I liked having something to do. There’s joy in being recognized as good at something, no matter how insignificant that thing is.
Maybe that’s why I couldn’t stand being around people who adored Jacq’s work. I didn’t exist to her admirers. Actually, it was worse than that. They saw me, they knew I was Jacq’s husband, and just wished I wasn’t there. At galleries, museums, private showings, art schools, universities — it was all the same. Whether they were trendy or rustic, retro or futuristic, queer or confused, they all made vile faces at me, using the tannins of a bitter wine to twist their mouths. They’re sinister people.
I assumed Jacq messed around. She’s an artist, after all, and it was easy to believe in the trappings of that identity. Beautiful, stylish people could be persuasive, young men whose pants bulged, experienced women who did interesting things with their smiles and stroked Jacq’s jaw with their long fingers. She might have had flings, spontaneous encounters, maybe in a gallery restroom while I was occupied at a crowded opening night soirée. It was possible such things happened. Most people would understand how that worked. Jacq had a history, a notorious past her friends liked to reminisce about, a young woman in the city. You can do the math.
When we met, Jacq said she liked me because I was stable. “A nice, trustworthy man,” she called me. It sounded like an insult coming from her.
Sitting out on the hotel terrace in Atlanta that first night, ruminating over a neat bourbon, I thought that an affair of my own was a distinct possibility. If Jacq had done it, so could I. I watched the girl with the toy radio stare off into the distance, listening to talk; I worried about what Jacq might do with the assistant dean, or a visiting professor from Lyons, if there was one. There’s something noble, isn’t there, about being the second one in a marriage to stray. If you are the aggrieved and you stand up for yourself, people should applaud.
Jacq went to Savannah the next day in a hired car. Riding in cars she managed fine without me. She liked talking to the driver, finding out about his family and where he came from. It’s different with pilots, who you’re not allowed to see work. With a driver, you know if they’re paying attention, or if they’ve had a few drinks, or if they’re sleepy. If they’re sleepy, you can chat to keep them awake. Drivers like to chat. They never seem to be from the place where they are, so you can ask how they ended up in Georgia, driving Lincoln Town Cars. That’s what Jacq would do. She grew up in Ohio, the third daughter of auto workers, and ended up spending most of her life in New York City, painting with her menstruations. She understood better than most how funny life could be.
I saw the girl on the hotel terrace again that evening. She was at the same table as before. When I asked about her, the waiter told me she’d been there all day. “All week, sir, to be exact. Hasn’t moved as far as I seen. She just sit with that radio.”
She was pale, which was odd for a young woman in that climate. She sat near the rail, dabbling at ranch dressing with raw vegetables, drinking some sour cocktail through a straw. A wispy linen dress hung from her shoulders. She held the toy radio, the drawstring loose around her wrist. I asked if there was any way I could help.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “With what?”
“You seem stifled. Are you all right?”
“Me?”
“That radio, for example. It’s such a strange thing. Something a kid would carry.”
“This? It’s nothing,” she said. “Just the news. I like to hear the weather. Though they’re arguing over the school board now.”
“Do you mind?” I asked, scraping over a cast-iron chair to join her.
She extended her hand. “I’m Anna,” she said. She turned off the radio and dropped it into her purse.
Anna told me she was visiting from St. Louis while her house was under reconstruction. Her husband suggested, and she consented, that it would be more enjoyable for her to take a vacation than wait until the house was no longer a disaster area. He would summon her when the work was done.
She asked if I was married and I didn’t lie — I was an apparent tourist, middle-aged, in khaki shorts, wearing my wedding band. I had a walker’s physique: fit in some places, not so much in others. I told Anna that my wife was an artist. Anna’s husband worked in government, she said. He wanted to be elected to high office some day. He worked campaigns for principals in the local party now, as many as he could get in on. In fact, that’s how she met him. She’d been an intern for Kit Bond while an undergrad at SLU.
“Wish I could do more for him,” she said, “career-wise. Besides making a family, I mean. We don’t have babies,” she added, quietly.
When Anna talked about how practically everyone who mattered in St. Louis knew who her husband was and what he wanted, it sounded like she despised him for his ambition. She had a habit of glaring at her hands when she spoke. She confessed that she had no idea what she was doing in Atlanta.
“My neighbor set up the trip, honestly. Rita came over and used our computer to do it. What did she call this place? Hotlanta?” Anna grinned as she said this, hand over her mouth. “She said something about the heat and how it made folks hunger. My neighbor is a lonely woman, I think. I don’t know why I trust her.”
Anna picked at celery stalks as she talked. She somehow managed to not take bites when she put food to her mouth — she bit without biting through — there were teeth marks in the carrots on her plate. She’d only ordered because the waiter kept asking if she wanted something.
We talked about marriage a long time. The good stuff, then the bad, then the qualifications and excuses. Our conversation followed a plot arc. Something happened to Anna, she was emotional, she calmed down, something else happened a few weeks after that, and it wasn’t until later that she remembered the first thing, the original outrage, and by then it was too late for her to do something about it. Her resentment piled up. My stories were the same, structurally. We turned listless and bleak, hearing about each other’s marriage wounds. They lacked finality. We wanted firm endings and closure.