The Silent Wife (15 page)

In the end he decided that the best tactic was to simply spring it on her, hoping that she might just concede in a spirit of spontaneity, and he tried this many times, but she never would take him seriously. He'd say, “Let's get married,” and she'd say, “Can we stop at the supermarket first?” He was a little stung by it, but there was something to admire in her resolve. Anyway, boys don't grow up dreaming of their wedding day. Having her
promise—hearing her say the words, take the vow—would have meant something to him, but her love and devotion were never in doubt. She belonged to him; they belonged to each other. And they were happy. She took care of him in surprising ways, making an art of their household arrangements, easing the burden of day-to-day life, and it was new to him, this domestic gratification—that she was there for him when he got home, how pretty she looked, how delicious the dinner, that his clothes were clean and pressed when he needed them, that she wanted to do this for him. He found it so tender, so exquisite that he feared it couldn't last, but the two of them together had a surprising innate stability. With Jodi it was never about the sex—or not mainly about the sex. Or let's say it was about much more than the sex. Jodi had emphatic core values, knew what she wanted. With Jodi you could relax. There was no hidden agenda, nothing jumping out at you. And yet there was more to her than just this. There were depths that he couldn't fathom, fires that didn't warm him, places beyond his reach. There was substance to her. She was everything a man could want and so much more.

9

HER

“Mrs. Gilbert?”

“Yes.”

“This is Natasha Kovacs speaking.”

There's a pause while Jodi considers cutting her off. She is not going to benefit from having this conversation.

“Please don't hang up, Mrs. Gilbert.”

What can she possibly want? Jodi wonders.

“I'm not the person you think I am,” says Natasha. “Please believe me, I feel terrible about what's happened. Todd and I both do. I guess in a way I'm calling to say that I'm sorry. That we're both sorry.”

How is it that her life has arrived at this implausible culminating moment when she's done her best for so many years to
make things work, to be helpful and accommodating, a good wife and companion, often in adverse and trying circumstances? Todd is not an easy man to live with, and yet she's made a success of it, held things together, created and maintained a peaceful, agreeable life for the two of them.

“I wanted to tell you that I appreciate everything you did for us, for me and my father, after Mom died,” says Natasha. “Please don't think I've forgotten. The birthday presents. The time you took me shopping for school clothes. You went the distance, Mrs. Gilbert. You were the only one who stepped in to fill the void, and it made a difference. I always think of you fondly and I never wanted to—”

She can't allow this prattle to continue. What can the girl be thinking?

“Natasha,” she says. “You do realize that this is going to end badly for you. And you can stop thinking of me as a mentor. I no longer wish you well, and there's nothing we need to discuss.”

In spite of this Natasha persists.

“I can understand how you would feel that way,” she says. “Maybe you hate me, and I wouldn't blame you if you did. But you've got to give me credit for trying. It wasn't easy for me to call you, Mrs. Gilbert. I didn't know if you'd even speak to me, in spite of what Todd says. He tells me that you're happy for us, but maybe that's just wishful thinking on his part. You've been with him a long time. I know you're going to miss him. At least until you get used to it. He did tell you, didn't he, that we've leased an apartment in River North?”

She stops, waits for a reaction. Met with silence she forges on.

“I'm sorry if that comes as a shock, Mrs. Gilbert. We need to make a home for the baby. It's a beautiful apartment. Maybe you'll come and see us once we've settled in. We'd love for you to visit. In a way you'll be a kind of auntie.”

Jodi has been pacing, marking out a warped figure eight. Clockwise around the sofa and chairs that face the fireplace, past the wall of windows, counterclockwise around the dining table, and back again. Now she comes to a standstill. Todd is the one at fault here. It's Todd who has exposed her to this. Shame on him for picking on this child, so naive and spiteful, so desperately insecure. Todd can be insensitive, but how can he string the girl along so heartlessly, his best friend's daughter, too. The poor thing has no idea who Todd really is or how he operates.

“Natasha,” she says. “I understand that you are in over your head and don't quite know what to do about it. What are you—twenty, twenty-one? Your father tells me you're still in school. He says you're bright, too, but I have to tell you that I'm not getting that impression, based on the choices you're making. Based on where you seem to be headed in your life.

“Anyway the point is that none of this is really my problem, and I don't like you or care about you enough to try to help you, and I'm busy and have to go now, and I strongly discourage you from calling me again.”

There are times, and this is one of them, when she thinks that not marrying Todd might have been a mistake. Sometimes it's hard to remember why she objected to marriage so emphatically.
A reaction more than a decision. Aversion, distaste, something on a visceral level. He wanted to marry her and even proposed. He proposed more than once, she recalls, but the time she remembers best, the time it was special, happened on a day in August, a day of brilliant sunshine and sweltering heat.

They were standing waist-deep in the lake, watching a sailboat moving off into the distance. They'd been watching it for a long time, caught up in its slowly diminishing size, and now it was little more than a speck, tiny and formless, buoyed up by the swell of the horizon.

“You'd never know it was a sailboat,” he said. “It could be anything.”

“It's so small,” she said. “It could be a grain of salt.”

“A grain of salt. That's about the size of it.”

“Balanced on the edge of the world.”

“See how it's almost vibrating?”

“Shimmering. As if it were humming.”

“Getting ready to dematerialize.”

“Vanish into eternity.”

“It's going to be spectacular.”

“Like seeing the impossible.”

“Like seeing into the cosmic works.”

Clinging to each other, giddy with anticipation and eyestrain, they were doing their best not to blink for fear of missing the beat in time when the laws of physics would collapse and the impossible would happen—a sailboat disappearing right before their eyes. Still wet from their swim, young, in love, sheltered by the overarching sky, they absorbed this experience as
something
,
an exaltation, a moment of breaking through and coming together, a celebration. And when miraculously it happened, the sailboat disappeared, and there was no gap—not an instant—between when he saw it and when she saw it, when they shouted out in unison, a spontaneous cheer, that's when he said it. “Let's get married.” An exuberant thought for an exuberant moment. A moment that she would like now to recapture and reconsider.

10

HIM

On the morning of October first Todd wakes early. He lies on his back holding his penis, grasping at the trailing wisps of an erotic dream. When the dream is finally, irrevocably lost he turns on his side and shimmies across the expanse of bed that separates him from Jodi. She has her back to him, knees drawn up. Wrapping an arm around her waist he moulds himself to her curled spine. She makes a sound low in her throat, but her rhythmic breathing is not disrupted. Filled with the scent of her, a blend of clean hair and warm skin, he closes his eyes and sinks into a drowsy torpor. It isn't till he wakes for a second time that the trouble he's in overtakes him, bursting on his thoughts like a thunderclap.

Moving Day.

He sees the words in block letters on a blinking marquee, as a wispy banner in a blue sky, drawn with a stick in wet sand. At no point did he actually come to a decision, and even now he can't say that his mind is made up. But he feels a forward momentum, an urge to make a break for it, get out of his comfort zone, shake himself up. It's something like pulling up roots and moving to a foreign country, the feeling that people must have who do that, an appetite for the exotic, an impulse to create themselves anew. He knows that his restlessness is partly biological but favours a story of renewal. He knows, too, that what he's about to do will make him a walking cliché, but his instinct for self-forgiveness is strong.

Natasha has insisted that he take the day off work. He's agreed to show up at her place around ten, to coincide with the arrival of the movers. Her junky furniture and kitchenware will at least give them something to start with. One thing Todd is not going to do is fight with Jodi over household goods. Whatever happens he will not turn this into a petty squabble. The breakup is going to cost him, that much he knows, but the fear he has about his financial future is still indeterminate, a spectre without shape or form. He's avoided giving it substance in the same way that he's avoided a lot of things. Calling his lawyer, for instance. Telling Jodi that he's leaving.

It's going to be awkward now; he gets that. With something like this it's a bad idea to wait until the last possible moment. When it comes to any sort of change or disruption, women are very involved with timing. But who knows, maybe Jodi will be
understanding. She is good-natured, not possessive or territorial, and she has a way of taking things in stride.

He gets out of bed and dresses without waking her. It's hard to grasp that this is happening, that tonight he won't be coming home, that he'll never again sleep next to her in this familiar room, that their life together, which he always envisioned as something like rolling hills, was really a train on a track, moving toward a final destination. He tries and fails to picture the rental apartment in River North. He was in it for fifteen minutes at most, and for ten of those minutes he was getting things settled with the landlord.

When Jodi makes her appearance he's sitting at the table thumbing through the morning paper and working on his third cup of coffee.

“You're still here,” she says.

An explanation is required, but although he's been dawdling for close to an hour, he's given no thought to what he ought to say.

“Are you going out with the dog?” he asks.

“Yes, why?” She's holding a leash in one hand and keys in the other.

“I'll come with you.”

She frowns. “What's going on?”

“Nothing. Just. I need to talk to you.”

“Tell me.”

“Wait till we get outside.”

In the elevator they stand three abreast facing front: him,
Jodi, the dog. Someone should be waiting with a camera in the lobby, ready to snap them when the doors open. This moment in time is worth capturing, the family group just before it breaks apart, tectonic plates once aligned shifting into disjunction. Everything different. No going back. It could be worst of all for the dog, who won't understand what's happened and will sleep with one eye open, expecting him home at every moment. As they head toward the water tears are streaming down his face. Jodi doesn't comment. Maybe she hasn't noticed. She's said nothing since they stepped outside, when she remarked that it was a bright day and put on her sunglasses. She must know what's coming, especially if she spoke to Dean, as Natasha claims. Her silence strikes him as dense and purposeful, a barricade.

They cross the bike path to the grass verge by the lake and let the dog off leash. The waterfront is busy for a weekday morning. People are taking in the early autumn sun, storing it up for the winter ahead. She stands facing inland, framed by the luminous backdrop of sky and water. He sees himself in the lens of her sunglasses, shoulders slumped, runnels glistening on his cheeks. Her eyes are hidden but he senses that her mood has changed, that she somehow knows and understands.

“I'm sorry,” he says.

He draws her to him and sobs into the top of her head. She makes no move to resist and slackens in his arms. They share a moment of wracking grief, pressed warmly against each other, breast to breast, heartbeat to heartbeat, together as one in the morning light. Only when they break apart and she changes position, making a quarter turn and taking off her sunglasses,
does he see his mistake. She is dry-eyed and scowling, brows drawn together, eyes full of suspicion.

“What is it?” she asks. “What did you want to tell me?”

He's sorry now that he got himself into this. It would have been better to leave her a note, something brief and inconclusive to ease her into the new arrangement. Why have a confrontation when no confrontation would be kinder to them both? The face-to-face encounter is too harsh, the finality it's bound to create. There's no need to build a wall out of talk. Words are like tools, easily turned into weapons, creating closure where none is needed. Life is not words. People by nature are awash in ambivalence, swept along by winds that are fickle and skittish.

“I thought you knew,” he says. “I thought you talked to Dean.”

Her expression doesn't change. The look she's giving him is narrow and flinty. He feels as if he's shrinking, withering from within.

“Don't,” he says. “Don't make it hard for me. It's not like I planned this. It's just the roll of the dice. We don't decide everything that happens to us. You
know
that.” He feels like a jerk. She hasn't said a word but she has him on the run. He turns away from her and looks across the grass to where two men are tossing a Frisbee back and forth.

“What exactly are you saying?” she asks.

“Listen. I'm sorry. I won't be coming home tonight.”