The Silent Wife (2 page)

“It's not a restoration,” he said. “It will all be overhauled and modernized. Oak floors, solid-core doors, double-pane windows … This will be something that everybody wants, an old house with personality but one that's absolutely solid and up-to-date.”

He had taken it on single-handed, he said, learning the trades as he went along. He was doing this instead of university, had borrowed money, was living on credit and optimism. She understood just how stretched he was when she saw the rolled-up sleeping bag in one of the bedrooms, and in the bathroom a razor and a can of foam.

“So what do you think?” he asked, when they were back downstairs.

“I'd like to see it when it's done,” she said.

He laughed. “You think I'm in over my head.”

“It's ambitious,” she conceded.

“You're going to be impressed,” he said.

By the time she hears him come in, both lake and sky have receded into a velvety dusk. She switches off the overhead fixture, leaving the valance lights to orchestrate a mellow glow, removes her apron, and licks her fingers to smooth the hair at her temples, a gesture that is pure anticipation, listening all the while to his movements in the foyer. He fusses over the dog, hangs up his jacket, empties his pockets into the cast bronze bowl on the console table. There's a brief silence as he looks through the mail. She arranges a smoked trout on a plate with a fan of crackers.

He's a big man with hair the colour of sand, slate-grey eyes, and a whopping charge of vitality. When Todd Gilbert enters a room people wake up. That's what she would say if someone asked her what she loved most about him. Also that he can make her laugh when he wants to, and that unlike a lot of men she knows he's good at multitasking, so that even as he's taking a call on his cell phone he can do up the clasp on her necklace or show her how to use a two-step sommelier corkscrew.

He swipes her forehead with his lips, steps around her, and reaches into the cupboard for the cocktail glasses. “Looks good,” he says. “What is it?” Referring to the golden, pastry-encrusted meat, which is out of the oven and resting in the pan.

“Beef Wellington. We've had it before, remember? You like it.”

It's his job to make the martinis. As she whisks together a marinade for the vegetables, she's aware of the clatter of ice cubes and the sharp fragrance he makes with his knife, cutting
into a lemon. He bumps against her, knocks things over, gets in her way, but she likes having him near, the comforting bulk of him. She takes in the smell of his day, gravitates to his body heat. He's a man whose touch is always warm, a matter of animal significance for someone who is nearly always cold.

Having set her martini in front of her on the counter, he carries his own, along with the trout, to the living room, where he puts up his feet and opens the paper that she's left for him on the coffee table, neatly refolded. She places the French beans and baby carrots in separate steamers and takes the first sip of her drink, liking how the vodka instantly hits her bloodstream and streaks through her limbs. From the sofa he throws out comments on the day's news: the next Olympics, a hike in interest rates, a forecast of rain. When he's swallowed most of the trout and the last of his martini he gets up and opens a bottle of wine while she carves the beef into thick slabs. They take their plates to the table, where they both have a view of the lustrous sky.

“How was your day?” he asks, loading up his fork.

“I saw Bergman,” she says.

“Bergman. What did she have to say for herself?” He's shovelling in the beef with steady concentration and speaks without looking up from his plate.

“She reminded me that it's been three years since she made the pudding commercial. I think she had it in mind to pin some of the blame on me.”

He knows her clients by the code names she gives them. Since they come and go while he's at work he's never encountered
even a single one, but she keeps him up-to-date, and in a sense he's intimate with them all. She doesn't see any harm in this as long as their real names remain secret. Bergman is code for the out-of-work actress whose last job—the fabled pudding commercial—is a distant memory.

“So now it's your fault,” he says.

“She gets that it's her desperation that's putting people off, and why haven't I helped her with that, she wants to know. Hell's bells. We've been working on that for weeks.”

“I don't know how you put up with it,” he says.

“If you could see her you'd understand. She's feisty, a real fighter. She'll never give up, and eventually something will change for her.”

“I wouldn't have the patience.”

“You would if you cared about them. You know my clients are like my children.”

A shadow crosses his face and she understands that the mention of surrogate children has reminded him of the actual children he doesn't have. Reverting to Bergman she says, “I worry about her, though. It's one of those cases where she can't believe in herself if no one will hire her, but no one will hire her because she doesn't believe in herself, and the thing is I don't know if I'm actually helping her. Sometimes I think I should fire myself as her therapist.”

“Why don't you?” he says. “If you're not getting anywhere.”

“Well, we're not getting
nowhere.
Like I said, she's at least figured out that she's doing this to herself.”

“I love this beef,” he says. “How did you get the meat inside the pastry?”

As if it were a ship in a bottle, but she knows he isn't joking. For a man who can raise walls and sink foundations, he's surprisingly simpleminded when it comes to cooking.

“It's wrapped,” she says. “Think of insulation around a pipe.”

But he's staring into space and doesn't appear to register her answer.

He's always been prone to these lapses, though it seems to her that lately they've been more frequent. Here one minute, gone the next, carried along by a river of thought, conjecture, worry, who knows? He could be silently counting backward from a hundred or mentally reciting the names of the presidents. At least she can't fault his mood. For a while now he's been distinctly more cheerful, more like his old self, to the point where she's starting to think that his depression is a thing of the past. At one time she feared that it might be permanent. It went on for so long and not even Freud could snap him out of it. Freud as a puppy, with his goofy antics, was as good as a court jester.

At least he could always fake it at a dinner party—keep the liquor flowing, turn on the bonhomie, make people feel good. Women respond to Todd because he's so ingenuous and openhanded.
Rosalie, you've been drinking from the fountain of youth again. Deirdre, you look good enough to eat.
He gives it up to the men, too, letting them talk about themselves without competing, and he gets people laughing with his mimicry: the East Indian naturopath (
You are taking too much tension … you must go slowly slowly
),
the Jamaican mechanic (
De car wan tree new tires … fly di bonnet, mon
).

He's definitely better now, more alive, ready to laugh even when they're alone, more easygoing and relaxed, less of a worry, more like his old self, the way he was in the early years—although the days are gone when they used to get naked in bed to read the paper and watch the game and share a bowl of cornflakes, the milk carton balanced on the bedpost, sugar spilling out of the Domino bag onto the sheets. Back then they had the freedom of knowing each other barely at all; they were in gleeful possession of a leisurely future with all the doors still open and all the promises still fully redeemable.

“Penny for your thoughts,” she says.

His eyelids flutter and he gives her a smile. “This is delicious,” he says. He reaches for the half-empty bottle and refills their glasses. “What do you think of this wine?”

He likes to talk about wine. At times, what they are drinking can form the hub of an entire dinner conversation. But now, instead of waiting for her answer, he smacks his palm on the side of his head and says, “I meant to tell you. There's a fishing trip this weekend. Some of the guys are going.”

“A fishing trip,” she says.

He's polished off his two slabs of beef and is mopping up the juices with a piece of bread. “Leaving Friday after work. Back Sunday.”

Todd doesn't go on fishing trips, and as far as she knows neither do any of the guys. She understands immediately—
there's no doubt in her mind—that he's using the term “fishing trip” euphemistically.

“Are you going?” she asks.

“I'm thinking about it.”

Still working on her meal, she's trying to hurry now. The way she sometimes eats—taking minuscule bites and holding them captive in her mouth—can try his patience, she knows. She swallows a tidbit that's only half chewed and it lodges in her throat, triggering her gag reflex. Gallantly, he leaps up and pounds her on the back as she sputters and heaves. At last, the shred of matter that caused the problem erupts into her hand. Without looking at it she places it on the edge of her plate.

“Let me know what you decide,” she says, using her napkin to blot the corners of her eyes. “If you go I might have the carpets cleaned. And make some marmalade.”

She doesn't plan on doing either of these things; it's just something to say. She has always counted it a plus that he doesn't lie to her, meaning that he doesn't embroider his accounts of himself with the kind of detail that would turn them into lies. The problem here has nothing to do with his circumlocution. The problem is that he doesn't go away for the weekend, that going away for the weekend is something he's never done before.

“Hey,” he says. “I got you a present.”

He leaves the room and comes back with a package—a flat rectangle roughly the size of a paperback book, wrapped in brown paper and secured with masking tape. He puts it on the table next to her plate and sits down again. He often gives her
presents and she loves this about him, but she loves it less when the presents are meant to placate her.

“What's the occasion?” she asks.

“No occasion.”

There's a smile on his face but the atmosphere is crackling. Objects should be flying across the room; heads should be spinning on their stalks. She picks up the package and finds it nearly weightless. The tape peels off easily, and from a sandwich of protective cardboard she extracts a beautiful small picture, a Rajput painting, an original. The scene, blocked out in blues and greens, portrays a woman in a long dress standing in a walled garden. Surrounded by peacocks and a gazelle, adorned with elaborate gold jewellery, she is evidently not plagued by any material worries or worldly concerns. Leafy branches arch protectively over her head, and the grass beneath her feet is a wide green carpet. They study the scene together, comment on the woman's hennaed hands, her little white basket, her lovely figure seen through the voile of her gown. As they take in the fine detail and flat blocks of colour, their life unobtrusively returns to normal. He was right to get it for her. His instincts are good.

It's nearing bedtime as she clears the table and starts on the dishes. He makes a perfunctory offer of help, but they both know that it's best if he leaves the cleanup to her and takes the dog for a walk. Not that she's so terribly exacting. Her standards are not unreasonable, but when you wash a roasting pan it should not be greasy when you're done, nor should you wipe the grease off with your dish towel, which you are then going to use on the crystal. This is common sense. He isn't careless when it
comes to construction. If he were putting up a shelf he wouldn't set it at an angle so that objects placed on it slid to the floor and broke. He'd pay attention and do the job right, and nobody watching would call him a perfectionist or accuse him of being fussy. Not that she's inclined to complain. It's a known fact that in certain contexts people's great strengths become their epic failings. His impatience with domestic work stems from the fact that his expansive energy overshoots the scale of the tasks to be done. You can see it in the way he fills a room, looming and towering in the limited space, his voice loud, his gestures sweeping. He's a man who belongs outside or on a building site, where his magnitude makes sense. At home, he's often at his best asleep beside her, his bulk in repose and his energy dormant in a kind of comforting absence.

She moves through her lovely rooms, drawing drapes, plumping cushions, straightening pictures, picking lint off the carpet, and generally creating the setting that she wants to wake up to in the morning. It's important to have everything serenely in its place as she begins her day. In the bedroom she turns down the covers and lays out pyjamas for him and a nightgown for herself, smoothing the fabric and folding back appendages to make the garments look less like uninhabited bodies. Even so, something about them gives her a turn—the white piping on the dark pyjamas, the silky ties on the nightgown. She leaves the room and steps outside onto the balcony. There's a raw wind, and in the moonless night the vista is a bottomless black. She leans into the bristling darkness, indulging a sense of isolation, liking the fact that she can control it—linger till she loses her
taste for it and then go back inside. She's grateful for the stability and security of her life, has come to treasure the everyday freedoms, the absence of demands and complications. By forgoing marriage and children she has kept a clean slate, allowed for a sense of spaciousness. There are no regrets. Her nurturing instincts find an outlet with her clients, and in every practical sense she is as married as anyone else. Her friends of course know her as Jodi Brett, but to most people she is Mrs. Gilbert. She likes the name and title; they give her a pedigree of sorts and act as an all-around shorthand, eliminating the need to correct people or make explanations, dispensing with awkward terminology like
life partner
and
significant other.