The Silent Wife (6 page)

Todd, in the meantime, has slipped into a world of his own. His sense of a benign essential self—his aura, his largesse—has been swelling and expanding and has now realized something like room-size proportions. In his magnanimity he makes no judgments and excludes no one, neither Dean nor the enemies Dean is busy cultivating. Everyone present is contained in the bubble of Todd's benevolence. This is Todd when he drinks. When Todd drinks he has a silent life as a priest, absolving and redeeming all humanity.

Having lost interest in the red-lipped girl, Dean now turns to the woman on his right at the bar. She's overweight and closer to his own age, and in the murk of his alcohol-infused brain this adds up to a good chance that she'll take an interest in him. The fact that she's engaged in conversation with her escort, who is seated on her other side, fails to register with Dean, who puts his mouth close to her left breast and makes lapping motions with his tongue. She has already taken note of Dean and edged her stool away. Now she gives him a look of disgust and tells him to screw off. Dean picks up on the word
screw
and comes back at her with a proposition, whereupon she and her date—a foxy man in designer glasses—stand up and trade places. This man, who now forms a barrier between Dean and the woman he is pursuing, says nothing to Dean, but Dean objects to him on principle and pokes him in the ribs.

“Hey, buddy,” he says. “I was just exercising my rights as a male of the species.”

“Yeah, well, go and exercise them somewhere else,” says the man.

Dean turns to Todd and says, “I was just exercising my rights as a male of the species. It's a free world, isn't it?”

Todd has been a witness to Dean's scrapping since high school. If Dean were in a seriously pugnacious frame of mind, Todd would take him in hand and get him out of there, but in Todd's view Dean's posturing is harmless. “Try to stay out of trouble” is his only remark.

To which Dean loudly replies, “She's a dog anyway. I can do better than that.”

Todd laughs and says, “That's the spirit, buddy,” and Dean snickers, pleased with himself.

Todd knows that Dean only gets like this when he's drinking. Some people can hold their liquor; Dean is not one of them. You wouldn't know it but Dean is sensitive, the kind of guy who cries easily and likes babies. When Dean finished high school he went in for the marines, but he wasn't red-blooded enough to see it through and left before he got a posting. That's when he went into sales. On the whole you'd have to say that Dean is easygoing. He's been known to lose his temper, but it takes a lot to provoke him. So it's really just a question of how the news is going to strike him, and Todd is finding that hard to predict. He can only hope that Natasha breaks it to him gently.

When it's nearing midnight and Todd is back in his car, he calls one of his cached numbers and after a brief conversation makes his way to the Four Seasons, just a few city blocks away. His date is one of several he keeps on tap, all with enough class
to pass muster at a five-star hotel, all available at a moment's notice, especially when a man of his generosity is asking. It's on nights like this, when he hasn't seen Natasha and is too energized, too full of grace to go straight home, that he likes to take advantage of the luxury goods and services the city has to offer.

3

HER

Come Friday morning Jodi is still without plans for the weekend. Not her usual self, she hasn't been thinking ahead. During the week her habitual confidence gave way to doubt and hesitation and the guileless hope that Todd would change his mind and cancel his trip. But that's all over now. He packed his bag last night and took it with him to work this morning, planning to leave for the country directly from the office.

She takes her phone to the window and stands looking out at the view. The day is bright, with the blinding glare of a white sun glancing off white water. Needles of light penetrate her eyes and the sensitive skin of her face and neck. She's feeling raw and exposed, a bat faltering in daylight, but still she stands there, scrolling through her list of friends.

She calls Corinne first, then June, then Ellen, leaving each
of them the same message: “What are you up to this weekend? Let me know if you're free for dinner. Tonight could work. Or tomorrow. Lunch would be good, too. Love to see you. Call me back.” She turns away from the window, walks around the room, inspects the sideboard for dust, trailing a finger over the polished wood surface. Then she calls Shirley and leaves the message again. Shirley used to be a mental patient. Jodi met her during a practicum and liked that she was smart and zany, a poet who had won some prizes for her work.

Meticulous planning has its merits. Life at its best proceeds in a stately manner, with events scheduled and engagements in place weeks if not months ahead. Scrambling for a last-minute date is something she rarely has to do, and she finds it demeaning. It feels to her like begging. Why not stake out a spot on the street and do her soliciting there? She could make up cards and hand them out.
Abandoned woman seeking dinner date. Desperate so not fussy.
She doesn't have much hope that Corinne or June or Ellen or Shirley will be free to see her. Corinne and Ellen have kids, June travels a lot, and Shirley—well, Shirley doesn't always pick up her messages. But there's a limit to how many calls she's willing to make.

It isn't till later in the day—when no one has gotten back to her—that she decides to go ahead and try Alison, even though there's almost no chance that Alison will answer her phone or even respond to a message before next week. In fact, Jodi is so sure that calling Alison is a lost cause that when she hears Alison's voice on the phone she thinks for a second that she has a wrong number.

“You just caught me,” Alison says. “I should be at work but it's one of those days. You won't believe the string of disasters, so I'll spare you the details. When I called J.B. to say I'd be late you'd have thought the sky had fallen in. It's silly because we don't get busy till after five. Men are such children. I guess throwing their weight around makes them feel important. It's a good thing women have the real power, right? Anyway, I'm doing double shifts this weekend, but Monday is free. How about dinner?”

Dinner on Monday does not solve Jodi's immediate problem, but she is happy to write it in her daybook. Alison is another one of her oddball friends, an outsider like Shirley, not someone she knows from university or her professional circle. She met Alison in a cooking class, the one where she learned to clean squid and butterfly shrimp. Alison doesn't cook but went through a phase when she thought she should make an effort. Jodi doesn't exactly know what Alison's job entails but has to assume that—even though Alison is a server and not one of the girls—private dealings with customers come into it. Alison may get good tips for waiting tables, but she's got to be doing more than that, judging by her taste in restaurants and the wine she likes to order—vintage bottles that even Jodi finds pricey.

The next day, Saturday, she is client-free. After a wakeful night she fell asleep at dawn and stayed in bed till midmorning. Now she's dawdling over breakfast and the paper. It makes no sense that she feels at such loose ends. It's normal for Todd to be gone during the day, even on Saturday, when he generally spends
the morning at his building site and then goes for a haircut and takes his car to the carwash. Whereas Sunday is another matter, a day to share a leisurely brunch and take the dog on a long walk by the water, something she looks forward to all week. But it isn't going to happen tomorrow.

Wishing that one of her friends would call her back, she turns the TV on and skims through the channels till she comes to a
Seinfeld
rerun. She's seen this episode before but has forgotten nearly all of it. Lately, it's been that way with movies, too. A year or two passes and it's almost like she has amnesia. It makes her think that if she had her life to live again—the exact same life with events unfolding in the exact same sequence—most of it would take her by surprise. As the episode comes to an end and she's seeing the final scene as if for the first time, she is hit by a landslide of loss and regret.

She takes refuge in a bath, a ritual that involves lowering herself into scalding water up to her neck. The clouds of steam, the cocooning heat, the sense of weightless yet heavy immersion (the body suspended, the water pressing in) are powerful tonics that can overthrow maladies of all kinds, but even though she soaks until the skin on her finger pads is puckered and white she emerges feeling peevish, abandoned, and tired. She falls asleep on the couch and wakes up an hour later, shivering in her damp bathrobe.

Disoriented, a lost dream stirring in her mind, she gets dressed, snaps a leash on the dog, and walks to the lake, joining the Saturday throng on the waterfront trail. The water is iridescent in the midday sun, and people are out in force, drawn by
the escalating warmth, running, cycling, and rollerblading, or just strolling, most of them in couples or family groups, their arms and legs tanned, their voices ringing in the clear air. Freud ambles along at her side, wagging his tail at the children who ask for permission to pet him. She takes him across the grass to the strip of sandy shore, throws a stick, and watches him swim after it. The dog, at least, has an appetite for the day. He's an adaptable creature, easily distracted and easily gratified. He knows that Todd was not at home last night, but as he navigates the lake, nose up and ears trailing, Todd is the furthest thing from his mind.

When she's home again she swallows an Advil and checks her messages. Ellen has called her back, suggesting lunch one day next week. She changes into sweatpants, draws the drapes in the bedroom, and burrows into the unmade bed, taking up her novel, a story of three generations of women whose hardships include brutal husbands, ungrateful children, and the social and cultural deprivations of a small rural community. The story of their dreadful lives distracts her for a while, but when she's read to the end and closed the book, the return to reality is harsh. The sky in her window is a flat grey, the room is sunk in shadow, and the temperature has dropped. It's clear that none of her friends will call her back now; their dinner plans will be firmly in place, their evenings already in motion. She discards her rumpled clothes and puts on jeans and a flannel shirt, capitulating to her night at home.

In the fridge she finds half an apple pie and eats it out of the pie plate, first the apples, scooping them out with a spoon, and
then the crust, picking it up with her fingers. Todd is not going to call her either. There will be no checking in to say that he misses her, no asking after her welfare. She somehow knows this, and with the knowledge comes a feeling of something unstoppable, like birds flying off before a storm. Twenty years ago their love erupted in a blaze of passion and shot like a rocket into orbit. That its momentum has lately been slowing is a shabby fact that she hasn't been able to face. Often it seems to her that the years from then to now have folded in on themselves, collapsed together like accordion pleats, bringing distant memories near.

On their second date they went to see
The Crying Game
and afterward stood outside the theatre talking about the movie, shuffling their feet, bantering and laughing. A second date is territory unto itself, an energy field with laws and conditions all its own. By the third date certain things are understood, whereas a first date is an undisguised raw experiment. But the second date, the date in between, is a minefield of groping and fumbling, a trial of high hopes and rampant skepticism. A second date is a mutual frank admission of interest with no getting past the fact that it could blow up in your face at any moment, that everything about the two of you is tentative, merely conjectural. A second date is a sea of ambiguity in which you must swim or sink.

It was not warm that night; spring was not well advanced. Still, it was a time of year when people were optimistic about the weather and failed to bundle up the way they should. Jodi and Todd were no exception—she in a cardigan, he in a sweatshirt—
but even so they started to walk, having a cursory notion of getting something to eat but no actual destination, and soon fell into a profound moving inertia, a hypnosis of ambulation they were helpless to break. They walked south on Michigan, wandered into the park, wandered out of the park, and circled back through the Loop. They did not hold hands or even link arms but applied themselves in earnest to the immediate task, the task of the second date, with an ongoing series of personal revelations and frank admissions.

“As a kid I used to be fat,” he said as they crossed the Michigan Avenue Bridge.

“But not really fat,” she said, unable to picture it.

“My nickname at school was Tubbo.”

“Wow. How long did that last?” Not long, surely.

“Oh, till I was twelve or thirteen. That's when I started stealing cars.”

“You stole cars?”

“Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned it.”

“But you didn't really
steal
them.”

“How do you mean?”

“You put them back when you were done.”

“Hardly.”

“But you didn't, you know, strip them and sell the parts or anything like that.”

“No, no. Nothing like that. I'd just play the stereo and drive around. Pick up a friend, pick up girls. Pretend for a while that I was some rich bastard who had it all.”

“Did you ever get caught?”

“Never did. Lucky I guess.”

She hadn't seen him that way at all. There was something about him, something—well,
lordly
was the word that came to mind—that defied this unexpected picture of his youth. Her view of him underwent an adjustment.

“When I was growing up,” she said, “my parents went through cycles of not speaking to each other. One time it lasted almost a year.”