No special pleading is what he says.
36
Even the stars look different now. The girl is outdoorsy, the husband has told her. The wife keeps imagining the two of them going camping in the mountains. How he’d name the constellations one by one, the girl alert in her softest sweater, nodding, looking up at all that sky.
The adultery book says to say affirmations of some sort each day, about yourself or your marriage. The wife doesn’t like the ones that are suggested so she makes up her own.
Nerves of Steel
No favors for fuckers
The wife tries to repeat this to herself in the morning as she brushes her teeth. Sometimes she doesn’t manage it. Sometimes she pulls back her lips and looks at her bloodied gums instead.
One day in the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings the husband announces that he would like to try a separation. The wife is stunned. He has said nothing to her until now. But the shrink discourages it. “You might as well just get divorced,” she says. Later, the wife remembers that they are supposed to fly to Ohio in two weeks to see his family, the whole blond band of them. “I guess I’ll be skipping that trip,” she says. “No,” the husband tells her. “You should come.” She looks at him. “Why would I?” He waves his hand magnanimously. “Because we still are?” Married, he means.
What Rilke said: I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
A year ago the philosopher’s brother died suddenly of an aneurism. He had a wife, no kids. He lived in Colorado and made wooden mailboxes that he sold through a catalog printed on newsprint. The next day, the philosopher flew to the little town where his brother had lived. He went to the lumber store with his sister-in-law and bought pinewood for the coffin. Then in his brother’s shop he drew a sketch on cardboard and began. After a few hours, she came out to watch him. He put a blanket around her, made her tea, but he didn’t try to make her go in. All night she watched him saw and hammer. We could see our breath, he said.
The wife sends a note to the philosopher at 2:30 in the afternoon. “I am very awake. Are you?”
“Maybe it’s you?” she thinks of writing to him.
Some mornings the wife goes to the philosopher’s house and sits in his kitchen with him. Together, they come up with a theory of everything. The air feels electrified. She keeps wanting to ask if he can feel it too or if it is just some kind of weather in her head. “Tell me the truth. Do I seem crazy?” she says. He makes her an egg, puts it down in front of her. He pauses for a long time, then shakes his head. “You seem very, very awake,” the philosopher says.
She imagines how she would feel at his funeral. How she would feel at the husband’s. She puts her hand over her heart for a moment and leaves it there. Yes, still beating.
What Martin Luther said: Faith resides under the left nipple.
37
And then there is another fight. “Us,” he says about the girl again. The wife leaves in the middle of the night and goes to a hotel. She takes a car across town to a Holiday Inn Express because she can’t bear to sleep on anyone’s couch, to see husbands, to see children. She watches herself sign the register. She watches herself check in. She wanted him to feel something when he saw the door slam behind her, but did he?
She left without a toothbrush. Without a book. Without sleeping pills even. She has her phone on. He doesn’t call her. She texts to say where she is. In case she needs me is how she phrases it. Nothing then. Nothing. She waits, watching the door as if it might open. She hears herself making noise, a soft sound, half cry, half croon.
I am in a hotel, she thinks. In a hotel you can do anything. Now she goes through every drawer in the room. What is she looking for? A gun? A needle? She shifts from bed to chair to desk, but there is no place that will stop her head.
It is dawn when she goes out into the street again, when she calls a car to get her. The man who picks her up thinks she is a hooker. He smiles at her in the rearview mirror. She says she needs to get home before her daughter wakes up and he speeds through the quiet streets for her.
But it doesn’t matter that she returns. He is asleep and when he wakes up he won’t even look at her. “You left,” he mutters. “You left.” A whisper fight and then he is up and dressed. There is something about his eyes that stops her. “You’re not thinking of going there, are you?” she asks him. From his face, she sees yes, he is thinking this. For the first time, she plays the unplayable card, her daughter’s name. “Leave if you want, but not like this. If you do, you are going to change who she is.”
What she means by “like this” is, with your face shaking and your hands trembling and your eyes like a hunted animal. She puts her hand on his shoulder, but he shakes her off of him.
The babysitter comes to take the daughter out of the house. The wife calls the philosopher and he comes right away. She is waiting outside on the street for him and he has to hold her up, keep her from falling. A group of Pakistani men looks on impassively. “Keep him,” she pleads. “Just for tonight. Don’t let him leave. Promise me.”
The philosopher keeps him at his apartment. He doesn’t have a couch so he takes the husband to Ikea and they go shopping for an extra bed. It sounds like a sitcom, the wife thinks when she hears this. But where to put the laugh track? At the store while they are trying them out or later at home when they are assembling it?
It is easy in retrospect to see why he’d want to go. There are two women who are furious at him. To make one happy, he must take the subway across town and arrive on her doorstep. To make the other happy, he must wear for some infinitely long period of time a hair shirt woven out of her own hair.
38
Her ex-boyfriend calls her. He says he wants to talk. She meets him on a bench in the park. She has been up all night, thinking, testing out conversations. “You look great,” her ex says. “Amazing actually.” Everyone has been saying that to her lately. That she looks radiant, glowing. She refuses to mention the yoga. It isn’t that. It’s that the scrim has fallen away. All right, all right, maybe it’s the yoga. It’s true that it’s hard to work the scrim thing in conversationally. She smiles at him. He sits beside her, their knees almost touching. They talk about little things. He is smart and funny as always and now, incredible bonus, no longer a speed freak. People walk by with their dogs. Leaves fall prettily. The wife alludes to her situation, obliquely at first, then nakedly. As she talks, her ex is looking at her, smiling, laughing, but then suddenly she sees his eyes dart away. It is possible that she is talking too fast, that her hands are shaking. “My heart is like a paper bag,” she says. “See?” She sees him register that she is not what he had thought she was. Something crosses his face. Fear? Pity? She forces herself to stop talking. He is twitchy now, ready to leave and go to a meeting, she thinks. “I think I need a sponsor,” she says. “That’s what everyone says,” he tells her. They stand up. Then there is a long walk to the subway. She should take another path, walk another way. Someone else would make an excuse, exit gracefully with a wave. But no, horribly they round the corner, horribly they pass the arch and the benches and the newsstand. “Take care,” he says as she lurches oddly away. It hurts her eyes to look at these buildings. Greener, she thinks. There are the trees and the water. The expanse of lawn, overly peopled. She walks through the park, holding herself carefully. There is a sense of being unprotected in an open space. I am at the mercy of the elements, she thinks.