Everyone there won’t do something. There is a small flock of dull-eyed girls who hate to eat, who hide measuring spoons in their coats and leave clumps of hair in the sink, and then there are the ones who never answer questions no matter how many different ways you ask them. Sleep is the thing Lia won’t do. She never sleeps unless they drug her. But she never rings the call button in the middle of the night either. “I just wait for first light,” she says. “I watch the window.”
This is how the wife gets through the nights too, but she doesn’t tell her this.
Lia was legally dead for one minute but she said she didn’t see anything, that there was only darkness and a low hum like a vacuum cleaner running.
Now the wife is sitting with her on a porch, looking at the trees. There are trees everywhere you look at this place. Someone, long ago, must have believed that trees could solve anything. The other patients take turns blowing bubbles from a small container because they are not allowed to smoke or drink here. “The great green earth,” Lia calls it, but not as a joke, more like it breaks her heart to say it. “Stay,” the wife tells her. “Just stay.”
29
Enough already with the terrible hunted eyes of the married people. Did everyone always look this way but she is just now seeing it?
Case in point: The wife runs into C at a party, a brilliant woman married to a brilliant man. She has just had a show at a major gallery. Her husband is in the MoMA permanent collection. Brilliant, brilliant. But C does not talk to the wife about brilliant things. She talks about her dissembling contractor, about spa treatments, about waiting lists for private kindergarten. Later the husband asks, “Oh, you saw C, how was she?” “She was radiating rage,” the wife says.
If only they were French, the wife thinks. This would all feel different. But no, feel isn’t the word exactly. What is it that the grad students say?
Signify.
It would all signify differently.
General notes: If the wife becomes unwived, what should she be called? Will the story have to be rewritten? There is a time between being a wife and being a divorcée, but no good word for it. Maybe say what a politician might say. Stateless person. Yes, stateless.
Either way it’s going to be terrible for a long time, the shrink says.
Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad. K tells the wife the story of a childhood friend who wears too much makeup now, who seems always to be sweating. This friend asked if she could come and cook a meal for K and her husband at their housewarming party. “No, no, just bring yourself,” she said. “We have everything.” The woman arrived at the party, sweating, carrying a bag of kale and raw meat.
The wife is afraid. She is afraid again in the old way. She’d thought it was done. Until he died. (“If he died,” she almost said. “If” she loved him so much she contrived to say.) She did say “loved,” she noticed.
“Tense! Tense!” the wife has always said to her students, trying to explain that it matters, that it illuminates things.
They used to send each other letters. The return address was always the same: Dept. of Speculation.
All of the letters are still in their house; he has a box of them on his desk, as does she.
“I just feel …,” she says. The shrink cuts her off. “I know, I know, everyone always knows exactly what you feel, don’t they?”
“What about me?” Her daughter likes to ask this whenever the conversation veers out of her comprehension. “What about me?” A chip off the old block, the wife thinks.
The wife has taken to laughing maniacally when the husband says something, then repeating the word back incredulously.
Nice????
Fun????
She has seen this rhetorical strategy used before by a soon-to-be ex-wife talking to her soon-to-be ex-husband. Poor creature, she thought then.
30
The undergrads get the suicide jokes, but the ones about divorce go right over their heads.
You’re a truth bomb, a cute guy said to her once at a party. Before excusing himself to go flirt with someone else.
Q. Why couldn’t the Buddhist vacuum in corners?
A. Because she had no attachments.
The wife is advised to read a horribly titled adultery book. She takes the subway three neighborhoods away to buy it. The whole experience of reading it makes her feel compromised, and she hides it around the house with the fervor another might use to hide a gun or a kilo of heroin. In the book, he is referred to as the participating partner and she as the hurt one. There are many other icky things, but there is one thing in the book that makes her laugh out loud. It is in a footnote about the way different cultures handle repairing a marriage after an affair.
In America, the participating partner is likely to spend an average of 1,000 hours processing the incident with the hurt partner. This cannot be rushed.
When she reads this, the wife feels very very sorry for the husband.
Who is only about 515 hours in.
31
In Epirus, there is a kind of spider called “the sunless one.” The Cypriots called the viper “the deaf one.” The idea was to give such dangerous creatures a sort of code name, one that is calculated to leave them unaware that they have been mentioned. The fear was that to mention such a creature was to cause it to appear.
Her sister has a deal with her husband. Whatever happens, keep it like in the fifties. Not one word ever. Make sure she’s a nobody.
Towards the end, the baby hadn’t been growing quite as she should be and so once a week the doctors had the wife come in to be tested. She’d sit in a recliner, hooked up to the machines, waiting to hear the heartbeat. Each time, the wife feared she wouldn’t hear it, but then there it would be, a sound like horses galloping. The way he looked at her when they heard it. It seemed impossible to feel more than they did.
Always always, he wrote in the book he gave the wife last Christmas.
The sunless one? The deaf one? The cubicled one?
The wife gets an expensive haircut. She shops for something to wear to the husband’s office. She is going to meet him there for lunch; they have decided to try this. This civilized French-seeming thing. In the end, the wife buys only a pair of boots and takes them home without even trying them on. Later, she opens the box and looks at them. The heels are higher than she usually wears. They look uncomfortable. So why does she want to wear uncomfortable shoes on this the most uncomfortable of all days?
Oh, right, she thinks. Evolution.
BECAUSE I AM A BIGGER BIRD THAN YOU!
She wears her black sneakers and jeans and a shirt someone cool once said was cool.
32
She would not have let one of her students write the scene this way. Not with the pouring rain and the wife’s broken umbrella and the girl in her long black coat. To begin with, she’d suggest taking out the first scene on the subway, the boring one, where the wife pretends to be a Buddhist. (I am a person, she is a person, I am a person, she is a person etc. etc.) Needed? Can this be shown through gesture?