The Silent Wife (12 page)

6

HIM

He sits on the toilet, elbows on knees, face in hands, urinating in a fetid stream. It's all he can do to stay upright. He thinks about coffee, the smell and taste of it, and that propels him from the toilet to the shower, where he turns the taps to cold. The icy pellets are pure unmitigated pain but a poor match for the jack-hammer going off in his head. He lifts his face to the spray, takes some in his mouth, gargles, and spits it out. He hawks up some phlegm and spits that out too.

When he's finished towelling off he stands at the sink to lather his face. His fingers are numb and clumsy with the razor. He has an idea that he's overslept, and this is confirmed when he returns to the bedroom to dress. Jodi is already up. It must be
later than he thought. Still, it's not until he's fully clothed and pulling on his wristwatch that he checks the time.

He finds her in the kitchen, beating eggs with a whisk. “My watch is running slow,” he says, hovering. “Battery must be dead.”

“Coffee's ready,” she says. She fills a mug, stirs in cream and sugar, and hands it to him.

“What time is it?” he asks. “My watch says half past one.”

“It's half past one in the afternoon,” she says.

“You're joking,” he says.

“That's what time it is,” she says.

“It can't be,” he says. “I'm meeting Cliff at ten.”

She shrugs. “You'll just have to call him and tell him that you overslept.” She pours the eggs into a sizzling pan and moves them around with a fork.

“But that's crazy,” he says. “Why didn't you wake me up?”

“You needed to sleep it off.”

“Jesus,” he says. He drinks some coffee, presses a hand to his temple. “I must have really tied one on. I can't remember getting into bed.”

Hit by a wave of fatigue, he takes his coffee to the table. She has it set with a place mat, a knife and fork, and a napkin.

“I had to help you get undressed,” she says. “You couldn't even get your shoes off.”

She turns the eggs onto a plate and adds bacon and potatoes from a pan that's been keeping warm on the stovetop. She carries the plate to the table and sets it down in front of him. He picks up his fork.

“Thanks,” he says. “I'm starving.”

As he eats, his tongue gets in the way, a foreign body in his mouth. He shovels in the food nonetheless, feeding his weakness and fatigue. He'd like to collapse—go back to bed, curl up on the floor—and compensates by sitting up straight and planting his feet.

“I didn't think I drank all that much,” he says. “No more than usual, anyway.”

He tries to remember what happened at the bar—what time he got there, how long he stayed, how many rounds he ordered—but the math eludes him. What he does remember is his celebratory mood. And in the spirit of celebration, it's possible that he overindulged.

“I mean, okay, it might have been a little more than usual,” he says.

“You probably needed the extra sleep.”

“Tell that to Cliff. And Stephanie.”

She brings the coffeepot to the table and refills his mug.

“Jesus, Jodi. I don't understand why you didn't wake me up.”

“Are you planning to be home for dinner?” she asks.

“The way I'm feeling,” he says.

“I'll make you a nice cassoulet. Pork is full of iron.”

His phone starts up as he's lingering at the table, and he follows the sound to the bedroom. Natasha's number on the call display gives him a little boost. One thing he does remember is that last night she wasn't speaking to him.

“Where are you?” she asks. “I've been trying to reach you all morning.”

“Sleeping off a hangover.”

“You're still at home?”

“Almost out the door.”

“What did she say?”

He struggles to grasp her meaning. His mind feels stuck, a burned-out engine sunk in a pool of sludge.

“Maybe you can't talk right now,” she prods.

He glances at the open door. Hears the tap running in the kitchen. “Only for a minute.”

“So? What did she say?”

“What did who say?”

She gives a noisy little sigh. “How upset is she? Is she going to be decent about it?”

The pregnancy, he thinks. Did he promise to tell Jodi?

“I got home late,” he says. “I haven't had a chance to talk to her.”

He's resting a forearm on his dresser. Its white surface is mottled and cracked, an antique effect that cost him more than he would have paid for the real thing. “You know I love you,” he says.

“For God's sake, Todd. What happened after she spoke to my father?”

“Jodi didn't speak to your father.”

“Yes she did. Yesterday. He told her everything.”

“That's impossible.”

“How is it impossible? It happened. What's going on there? Are you okay?”

He sits down heavily on the bed. He's starting to wonder if he's caught some sort of bug. “I'm fine,” he says. “There's nothing to worry about. I'll have to call you back.”

He breaks the connection and it dawns on him that this is typical of his and Jodi's life together: the stubborn pretense, the chasms of silence, the blind forging ahead. He must have known this, but the weirdness of it, the aberrance, has somehow never struck him. Other couples are loud, vocal, off and on again, working things out, but with Jodi and him it's all dissimulation. Put up a front, go through the motions, don't say a word. Act as if all is well and all
will
be well. Jodi's great gift is her silence, and he has always loved this about her, that she knows how to mind her own business, keep her own counsel, but silence is also her weapon. The woman who refuses to object, who doesn't yell and scream—there's strength in that, and power. The way she overrides sentiment, won't enter into blaming or bickering, never gives him an opening, doesn't allow him to turn it back on her. She knows that her refusal leaves him alone with his choices. And yet he can see that she suffers with it.

He understands suffering; he was raised Catholic. What he understands is that life has suffering in it, can't not have suffering in it, because in life there is everything. Life is a mosaic of everything, and there are no clean edges either. In the mosaic of life things overlap because nothing is all one way. Take, for instance, his father. He came to despise his father, and that's a given, but there were times with his father he can think of even
now with something like pleasure. An afternoon at the airport watching the planes come and go. He must have been seven or eight at the time. He loved seeing the rotund bodies of the jumbo jets lumber across the tarmac and then lift off with effortless grace, the sunlight glancing off their wingtips. For years afterward he wanted to be a pilot, and his father encouraged him, told him he could be whatever he wanted to be. There was something like love between them then, love mixed with other things of course, getting back to the principle that nothing in life is just one way. The old man had goodness in him, even laughter and fun, but the darkness at the centre was growing, always growing, and when your father is at bottom a drunk and a bully, there comes a sense of biding your time, waiting for the day when you'll be big enough and strong enough to intervene, and you look forward to that day as one of ultimate liberation, which it does turn out to be, but that's not all, and here again is the lesson that life is a mixed bag.

The day came when Todd was sixteen. By then he was growing tall and husky, had gained strength and confidence working construction over the summer, heaving sacks of cement and buckets of tar. It was a Saturday in fall, cold and rainy, a day of hanging around the house doing homework and watching TV. The old man had been restless, testy as a land mine and surfacing at intervals from the basement to nag and carp at his wife. Anyone could see there was a storm brewing. It was just a matter of when it would erupt. But there was always this underlying optimism, a stubborn disbelief that things could go very badly wrong, something his mother felt, too, he knew, because
she said to him as she peeled potatoes, “He'll settle down when he's had his dinner.” But then, when they were sitting with their plates in their laps watching something on TV (an episode of
Bewitched
is what he remembers), and meek as she was his mother reached out with her napkin to dab at a spot of gravy on her husband's chin, they were suddenly, all three of them, on their feet with their dinner overturned and the old man holding her hair in his fist, and in Todd's ears there was a rushing sound, and with black spots decimating his vision, he swung his fist, throwing a punch, as wild and clumsy a punch as ever there was, and one that landed he knew not where, and his father without ceremony folded up like a collapsible chair and fell to the floor and lay there bleeding from his nose, and in the days that followed, the boy, now a man, was overcome with grief, despising how it all lay bare between them, how there was no more father and no more son but just two adult men in hateful and impoverished proximity.

Now, at home in the afternoon on a weekday, when he ought to be at work, sitting on the bed holding his phone, confused by what Natasha has told him, his eyes roam idly around the room taking in the height and breadth of it, the ample proportions, tall windows, receding ice blue of the walls. There's no sound anywhere in the apartment and no sound from the outside. When you're this high up you don't even hear the birds. It couldn't be more peaceful, and yet he feels his weight dragging him down and his spirit besieged as if by devils or wild dogs.

As he understands suffering he also understands devotion,
and he's made his offerings with an open heart, his offerings to his beloved, to Jodi. He's provided her with comforts, yes, but not just that. He's been attentive, devoted, massaging her feet sometimes for hours when they're home together watching a movie, and spending his weekends in the kitchen helping with her jellies and jams, endlessly stirring the pot, the watery mixture that seems like it will never thicken. She loves it when he puts on an apron and turns domestic. She feels close to him then. It's the kind of intimacy she craves, a companionship that makes her happy. And he's taken it on willingly, even religiously, with a devout spirit, and he'd do more for her if she asked, but Jodi rarely asks for anything. If she asked more of him maybe things would be better. His mother was like that too—didn't ask—but that was for the best because his father would not have responded well. As far as cheating goes the old man was in a different league. Cheating with the bottle is not a mere distraction, not an evening's entertainment, but an out-and-out commitment, a contract, a pledge, and it led him to turn away from his wife utterly and with finality. Todd's mother was a forsaken woman, her loneliness a mist that enveloped him throughout his childhood.

He stands up and braces himself on the doorjamb. This is no ordinary hangover. Maybe food poisoning, the burger he ate at the bar. But if so wouldn't he be throwing up or at least sitting on the can? Instead, he feels like crying, giving up, giving in. Conscious of holding himself together, putting one foot in front of the other, he finds Jodi on the sofa, legs curled underneath
her, not reading a magazine or a cookbook, not talking on the phone, not doing anything. He sits beside her, lets his head drop to her shoulder.

“I'm spoiling your afternoon,” he says.

“Not really.” She seems distracted, a little remote. “I'll do some grocery shopping and then get started on dinner. Maybe a chicken soup would be the thing.”

“You must have other plans.”

“Nothing important. Taking care of you is what matters right now.”

“I feel like getting back into bed.”

“Why don't you? Sleep it off. Get a fresh start tomorrow.”

“Chicken soup sounds good. Are you going to make it with dumplings?”

“Whatever you like.”

“What would I do without you. I'm sorry I'm not a better husband.”

“Don't be silly,” she says. “You're under the weather, that's all. I'll make up the bed for you. Why don't you lie down here until it's ready.”

7

HER

When her kitchen devilry, her little bit of domestic mischief, instead of going down in history retains its status as a private and incidental matter just between the two of them, she counts herself vindicated. The speed of his recovery—within twenty-four hours he was right as rain—was a meaningful confirmation of her good instincts. She didn't think that eleven pills would kill him, and they didn't.

With disaster averted she is back in her comfort zone, able to laugh at her fears. Dean's version of things is almost certainly unreliable; that's what she's decided. She's come to the conclusion that Dean is not to be trusted. For the moment at least, he isn't himself but a man whose basic assumptions about reality have been forced into abrupt revision. His oldest friend turns
out to be a predator; his daughter is not the sensible girl he took her for. It's a given that he's temporarily out of his mind. Besides which Dean has always been too quick off the mark. Prone to theatrics. A bit of a prima donna. She, Jodi, is the one who knows Todd best, and one thing she knows for sure is that home is important to him. Not just for Todd but for most men, home is the counterpoint that gives an affair its glamour. An affair by definition is secret, temporary, uncommitted, not leading to the complications of a longer-term arrangement—and thus its appeal. Todd has no intention of marrying this girl.

As a child Natasha was unremarkable, and after her mother died she ran wild. Jodi remembers her with black lipstick and spiky hair, a potbelly and chewed fingernails. It's hard to imagine that she's grown up to be in any way attractive. What Todd is drawn to is her youth, a girl half his age taking an interest in him. Men are like that; they crave the reassurance. Certainly Natasha Kovacs is not a
force.
Not anyone to be
reckoned
with. Todd is in it for the short term. That's his pattern, and everyone knows that the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour.