She would ask for more details of the girl’s appearance. She’d cut the implausible handshake and point out how stilted the dialogue is. (You have caused my family great pain. I don’t want to be an abstraction to you anymore.) She might pencil in the girl crying or saying some small thing. Surely she feels something? Wasn’t there hand-wringing? She’d slow down the moment before the girl turns on her heel without a word and leaves them. Nothing else here?
She’d point out that what’s interesting is actually the lead-up to the scene. How the wife takes a picture of herself before she leaves the house, how she looks somehow as if she is standing in a wind tunnel, how the husband calls her just as she gets off the subway and says, “Don’t come here. A change of plans. I’ll meet you outside.” The husband says he couldn’t help it; he told the girl she was stopping by. “She’ll come out here instead,” he says. But the girl doesn’t do it. She stays and hides in the office. Perhaps a bit more about how the wife feels? How she feels something she’s never felt before surge through her body, how she stands on a corner in Midtown at one in the afternoon, kicking a newspaper machine, screaming, “You fucked a child! She’s a fucking child! Tell her to come out here!” This is very emotionally charged, she’d write next to the moment when the husband calls the girl and softly tries to convince her. Softly saying, just come, please, so tender his voice, so sorry to cause the girl pain, and all because of the scene his crazy wife is making, his wife yelling in the background. Yelling and yelling. Then the wife stops yelling and says slowly and clearly to the husband, “Tell her if she doesn’t come, I’ll come to her job, and if she quits this job, I’ll come to her apartment and if she leaves that apartment, I’ll come to her new one. Tell her I’ll find her. Tell her I’m great at research. Tell her I’m fucking great at it. I’ll fucking find her one way or another.” People avert their eyes as they pass. “Just come out,” he says. “Please? Please? It’s going to happen sometime.”
It is raining harder now. They are getting drenched. “Ten minutes!” the wife screams in the background. “Ten fucking minutes! That’s all I want!” His wife who has hardly ever yelled at him and never in public. It’s important to note the POV switch here. The wife notices that her foot hurts from kicking the newspaper machine. She wonders if she’s broken it. Add a pause here. A little beat before the action continues. The husband hangs up the phone. His hands are shaking. “She’s coming,” he says. “She’ll be here in a bit.”
But it’s a long time still. They stand on the designated corner. There is, of course, the theatrical rain. The wife knows which direction the girl will be coming from and she thinks that she should stand back in the doorway, that it would be kinder that way, because it will be hard for this girl to walk towards her. So she lets her husband stand out there in the street and then when she knows the girl has come from the look on his face she steps out and greets her in the rain. The girl is shorter than she expected. Long red hair. Glasses, fashion-forward ones. She stands there shaking. With fear, the wife thinks. Or no, something else maybe. The girl stands there rigidly as the wife speaks. Then the moment the words stop she turns and walks away.
The husband and wife walk in the other direction. It is a block before they speak. “She has pretty eyes,” the wife says. They walk towards a bar, prearranged. He holds the door open for her. “Wait, did she have bangs?”
33
“Haven’t you punished us enough?” the husband says a few days later. Us? the wife thinks. Did he say us? Holy shit.
She learns something new, something that sends a chill through her. The girl made him go for a walk with her the next day. Correction — he went on a walk with the girl the next day.
The husband doesn’t volunteer this. Like every detail it is eked out of him in the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings. “She was furious,” he explains. “She felt ambushed.”
Sorry, the wife thinks of saying. Sorry, sorry.
But that night, in the taxi, she does not concern herself with his voice, which is low and grievous, but only with the position of the moon in the sky. How she can make it disappear with one small movement of her thumb.
Hahahahahahayoustupidcunthahahahahaha
“Am I winking?” the daughter asks them when they get home. One of her eyes is closed, the other twitching.
“Not quite,” he says.
“Now? Now?”
Two Jokes
1. A man is standing on the bank of a river when it suddenly begins to flood. His wife and his mistress are both being swept away. Who should he save?
His wife. (Because his mistress will always understand.)
2. A man is standing on the bank of a river when it suddenly begins to flood. His wife and his mistress are both being swept away. Who should he save?
His mistress. (Because his wife will never understand.)
34
The wife is reading Civilization and Its Discontents, but she keeps getting lost in the index.
Analogies
bare leg on a cold night, 40
cautious businessman, 34
guest who becomes a permanent lodger, 53
Polar expedition, ill equipped, 98
When she tells people she might move to the country, they say, “But aren’t you afraid you’re going to get lonely?”
Get?
Imaging studies have found that the pain involved in romantic breakups is not just emotional. Similar areas to the ones that process physical assault light up in the brains of the recently jilted.
What John Berryman said: I’m too alone. I see no end. If we could all run, even that would be better.
At night, they lie in bed holding hands. It is possible if she is stealthy enough that the wife can do this while secretly giving the husband the finger.
Grow old with me. The best is yet to be, say the cards in the anniversary section.
But there are other lines from Yeats the wife keeps remembering.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
Things fall apart.
“The girl had red hair,” the wife tells her sister. “The same color I used to dye mine.”
The wife stopped dyeing her hair when she got pregnant. (Because of the monster babies with no hands that the vain hair-dyeing women have.) But she never went back to it and for years now her hair has been streaked with gray.
Spell for invocation of divorce: Greener! Greener!