The Senator's Wife (9 page)

Oh, bullshit. She wouldn't have been smoking here anyway. It was a smoke-free workplace. She blew her nose again.

It was just that she was missing it, her old life. Which she'd given up, she reminded herself, well before she got pregnant.

No, it was more than that. Much more, she thought. It was that several times a day she struggled with a sleepiness so profound that her head felt cottony, her limbs heavy and difficult to move. That she went through every day with a more or less constant sense of nausea. That she often had a sharp headache, centered over her right eye.

She sat for a moment, thinking. No. No, here's what it was, she thought. Here: that she no longer liked the way her body looked and felt—her body, which she'd always taken such pride, such pleasure in. Which was the only beauty she had.

It would pass, she told herself. It will pass.

But she couldn't help it, she hated what was happening to her. She hadn't known it would
feel
so awful. She was frightened.

She didn't want it. She didn't want to do it.

N
ATHAN WASN'T HOME
yet when she got there. It was dusky in the house. She turned the lights on in the kitchen, and suddenly, reflected in the wall of windows, there she was, Meri, in her big sweater and a pair of Nathan's corduroy slacks, moving jumpily across the multiple panes of glass—a herky-jerky version of herself anyway.

She got the plastic-wrapped chicken out of the refrigerator in the pantry and set it on the drainboard. She turned on the tiny stove to preheat. She washed some lettuce, bending over the low sink. Then she took a key from one of the top bureau drawers under the door-table and went outside and into Delia's house. She'd done this six or seven times now, the house-sitting chores they'd agreed to. It had fallen to her, mostly because Nathan got home later, but maybe partly because it seemed to both of them a woman's task.

It was cool in here—Delia had the thermostat set low. Meri picked up the mail from the floor where it lay scattered and carried it back to the kitchen. She separated it—catalogs and magazines into one of the baskets Delia had left out, letters into the other.

Delia had gathered all the houseplants back here onto a plastic tarp in front of the windows. Meri didn't need to be careful watering, Delia had told her. And she shouldn't worry if something died. “I'm fond of the plants, but I'm fickle too,” she'd said to Meri. “I've been known to underwater if a plant seems too demanding, just to let it know who's the boss.”

Standing in Delia's kitchen, squirting the plants with the special hose Delia had attached to the sink faucet, Meri looked around the room, so much smaller than their expanded version on the other side of the wall. It was square, with two standard-size windows at the back and two along the side, and a glass-paned door opening out onto the driveway. There were sheer white curtains at the windows, pulled back, and paintings on the walls, along with a few family photographs.

Meri realized abruptly that she liked this room better than their vast kitchen. The whole house, actually, with its smaller, enclosed, unrenovated spaces, with all the wood trim painted white and the warm wall colors, was prettier than theirs was.

When she was done with the plants, she walked back into the living room and switched on a lamp on the table just inside the door. The walls in here were a deep yellow. The curved white bench under the windows had seat cushions in pale green and more pillows at each end to lean against. The coffee table in front of the couch had a wide green bowl set on it that had been filled with yellow pears the day Meri came over to learn what her chores would be while Delia was away.

It was cozy, she thought. Welcoming. Something that wasn't true of the open rooms on her side of the wall.

She turned and stepped back into the hall, looking around her there too. On an impulse, she crossed to the stairs and started up.

This was the first time she'd ventured above the first floor.
Probably
an inevitability though,
she thought, mounting the stairs. She was insatiably curious about other people's lives, down to the way they arranged their things, down to what those things were. The first time Nathan had left her alone in his place, she had surveyed everything he owned. She looked through his medicine chest, she went to his desk and read several pages from the book he was working on. She'd also read a summary sheet of his student evaluations. All the female students adored him—no surprises there—but the boys too seemed to be dazzled. He was “totally into it,” he made everything so real. “He made me care about it because he cares so much, and I
hate
history.”

When she quoted this later, he was startled. “You
read
the stuff on my desk?”

“Of course. Wouldn't you? Haven't you?”

“I wouldn't, unless I asked first.”

She had shrugged. “To me, all that says is that I'm more deeply curious about you than you are about me.”

“You are?”

“It would appear so,” she said.

Now she walked slowly down the wide upstairs hallway in Delia's house. The rooms off it were more like hers and Nathan's than the ones downstairs, though the bathrooms had been redone—something that would be their first project, Nathan had told Meri. But like the downstairs, everything up here felt arranged more for comfort than at their house. There were curtains on the windows in each room and old Oriental carpets or rag rugs scattered everywhere. The rug under her feet in the hall was a kilim of many rich colors. Pictures were hung on the hallway walls—old oil paintings or watercolors of the ocean, of fields and woods. There were some family photographs and a few antique maps.

Delia's bedroom was painted a yellow that must have been a just slightly lighter version of the color in the living room. There was a large, deeply cushioned chair, a round gateleg table next to it, a lamp on that. The bed was queen-size, big enough for two, a puffy duvet laid across it. Meri counted five pillows stacked against the white wooden headboard.

She walked back down the hall, looking into the smaller bedrooms. They were guest rooms clearly, set up for Delia's children and grandchildren. One of them had double bunkbeds in it. Photographs of infants, of young people, of mothers and babies, fathers and kids, decorated the walls.

Meri studied them: happy, then happier, then happiest. In one of them, a framed black-and-white shot, Delia—a very young version of Delia—was holding a tiny baby, almost a newborn. She was just as Meri had known she would be, stunningly attractive, every feature strong, well defined. Her dark hair was done in the style of the forties, parted on the side, nearly shoulder length. She was wearing lipstick that looked almost black in the photograph and a strand of glowing pearls around her neck. She was looking directly at the photographer—looking with such powerful intensity, such love, that Meri felt certain that Tom Naughton had taken the picture.

The last room, the one just over the stairs up from the kitchen, the one that would be the nursery in Meri and Nathan's house—though they'd bought nothing for it yet—was clearly Delia's study. There was a wide, old-fashioned desk in front of the window that looked out over the backyard. Meri stepped slowly around the room, examining everything—the books on the shelves, mostly novels, arranged alphabetically. The worn chair with a plaid shawl thrown across its high back. There were very small pictures on the far wall—framed paintings, watercolors—and Meri went close to them to see them better.

She made a little noise, a sharp inhalation.

They were of women, pornographically posed, their legs spread wide or held open in astonishingly gymnastic dancer's positions, their genitals penciled or inked in delicately. There were perhaps a dozen. She looked at each one closely. One was of two naked women in an embrace, their limbs entwined. In another, a greenish nude with red hair was in profile doing a backbend, her long locks nearly touching the ground behind her. There was one of a woman lying down, her legs and sex splayed open for the artist.

This was a surprise. It was a surprise about Delia. It startled Meri.

She went to Delia's desk and sat down in the chair. The light from her own kitchen windows lay on Delia's terrace, on the empty wooden chairs out there. The fallen sycamore leaves were piled on the seats and gathered against the box hedge. The desk was neat, everything in seeming order. She imagined Delia herself sitting here, reading letters, doing paperwork, so private and self-contained.

And that was how she thought of her, she realized. Delia was funny and welcoming, she beckoned you with her charm and seemed very open, very candid and spontaneous, but you got nothing, fundamentally, that she hadn't planned to give you. This was a feeling she couldn't have expressed until this moment, but somehow the pictures on the wall had confirmed it for her: Delia was unknowable. She was private.

She didn't let you in.

Meri switched the desk lamp on. She was facing her reflection, her round, determined face, her straight, limp hair. The desktop was bare, but along the back of the writing surface there was a row of cubbyholes full of papers of one sort or another, and Meri watched her hand reach forward and pull an envelope from one of them.

The name in the upper corner was familiar to her—it was one of the sons, Brad, the second one on the list of emergency contact numbers downstairs.

She took the letter out and started to read it. He addressed Delia as
Dearest Mother.
Her eyes moved down the page. She turned it over and read the back. It was just a note, really, a newsy, chatty letter, the kind of letter no one in Meri's family would ever have written, the kind Nathan often wrote to his mother. It described Delia's grandchildren for the most part, their lives as school started up for them.

Imagine it, Meri thought—the wish to convey this, the knowledge that the recipient would actually be interested. It seemed amazing to her. It seemed privileged beyond words.

Meri had just finished it when she heard, and felt, a noise—a structural thump. She started, her heart seemed to slam in her chest. For a half second she thought that it was somewhere in Delia's house, she thought that someone had come in.

And then she relaxed. It was Nathan, of course, Nathan, next door, coming home, shutting the door hard.

After a long moment she turned the desk light off. Slowly, carefully, she went down the stairs, not wanting to make any noise on her descent that Nathan might hear through the wall. She turned Delia's living room light off too and stepped out onto the cold front porch, hearing the click of the door's lock as she pulled it shut behind her.

T
HINGS CHANGED
. The exaltation Meri had felt the first few nights they made love after she knew she was pregnant disappeared as her body changed, as the sense of thickness and dullness claimed her, as she grew, in her own eyes, fat and ugly—as the project of staving off the faint and then sometimes sharp nausea that threaded through her days absorbed her more and more. Sometimes the very idea of making love exacerbated it. Once she actually recoiled when Nathan reached for her.

“Don't!” she said, too loud. It was escape from her body Meri wanted, not to experience it more intensely.

And there seemed to be a reciprocal withdrawal on Nathan's part, though he masked it as concern, as courtesy. Or Meri felt it as a mask, felt the polite questions as a way of seeming loving while holding himself away from her.

But maybe it was just that their lives too had changed so much from their lazy, sexy days in Coleman. Here, he was up later and later every night in his study, preparing for classes, reading, making notes, grading papers. They didn't have wine with dinner anymore, because she wasn't allowed to, because he needed his head clear to work in the evenings, so their meals were less leisurely, less enjoyable. Once the dishes were cleaned up and put away, he disappeared. When she went to bed, sometimes barely making it till nine or nine-thirty, she could hear him up there, the creak of the floor under his desk chair, the sound of his repeated trips across the room to his bookshelves. When he came to bed, when he slid up against her under the covers, the cool of his long body waking her, beckoning her, as often as not she didn't respond—she would have had to come up from too deep a sleep, she was too stunned with exhaustion, her arms felt too impossibly heavy.

There were two places where Meri could find relief from all this. One was at work, where she was often so absorbed in what she was doing that she actually sometimes forgot, for an hour at a time, how rotten she felt.

The other, increasingly, was at Delia's house.

She had begun to make time to be there, to linger, usually in the late afternoon before Nathan got home, or on the weekends when he was in his office at the college, slaving away on his book. The house was chilly, but Meri came prepared, in extra sweaters. She sat in different rooms, she lay on Delia's bed.
Like Goldilocks,
she thought, sneaking around where she didn't belong, trying everything on for size, for her own comfort.

But she couldn't help it, she liked being in Delia's house. She liked looking closely at the paintings on the wall, at the family photographs. She loved the old maps hung here and there, with their absurd guesses about the shape of the world. She loved walking through the spaces, learning the way the light fell at different times of the day.

And increasingly over these weeks she gravitated to Delia's study—to puzzle at the sexual watercolors there, to sit at Delia's desk, to read through the innocent letters and papers Delia had tucked into the cubbyholes at its back.

It was an appetite—she thought of it that way—this wish to know more, and then more than that, about Delia's life. She felt it as she did the need for the crackers and water that carried her through the day. She thought of it, actually, as being connected to her present state as much as they were.

Her state: her pregnancy. Yes. But something else too. Perhaps her sense of being alone in her state. Her need for something, something she couldn't have named. She remembered what Delia had said the night she was at their house for dinner about her own curiosity about Anne Apthorp's life—about how her wish to know more was connected to something primal in herself. Meri felt she understood that now. That she was living it.