The Silent Wife (7 page)

“How is that even possible?”

“They would talk. They just wouldn't talk to each other. And if there was nobody around, if it was just us kids, then sooner or later it would be, like, Jodi, could you please tell your father that he needs a haircut. And he'd be right there in the room of course.”

“So would you tell him?”

“Stupidly, most of the time, yes, I would repeat the message. I guess I was too young to figure out that I could stay out of it.”

“They must have really hated each other.”

“Sometimes it seemed like they did. But other times everything was fine.”

“My folks were at least consistent,” he said. “He bullied and she cowered. Always the same.”

“I wouldn't have thought that.” She was shocked and searched in her bag for her lip balm while her picture of him changed again. “Did he bully you too?” she asked.

“Not really. Mostly he just ignored me.”

“What did he do, your father?”

“Worked in the parks, but it was seasonal. In winter he was mostly home. Hung out in the basement, had his chair down there and his stash. You'd hear him muttering, and you knew that by dinnertime he'd be dead drunk, and you'd be creeping around praying that he'd fall asleep and stay where he was.”

“That sounds tough,” she said, still adjusting.

“It was a long time ago. He's dead now. They both are.” He stopped to tie a shoelace, bending over stiffly in the cold.

“In my family I think the hardest part was the pretense,” she said. “I mean, a lot of the time things were great, but even when they weren't, he would go to work, she would get dinner, we'd all sit down to the family meal, they'd talk to us kids about what we did at school, and every night they'd get into bed together. Nothing was ever said. We'd all just pretend that it wasn't happening.”

“What was their problem exactly?”

“Oh, you know, the usual. He wasn't good at monogamy.”

“Monogamy wasn't designed for men. Or men weren't designed for monogamy. However you want to put it. Both things are true.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

“Did your parents have the same problem?”

“My old man had one love and that was whisky.”

“So why do you say that about monogamy?”

“All men cheat sooner or later, one way or another. My father cheated with the bottle.”

Remembering this exchange in retrospect, she thinks that it ought to have caught her attention, made her stop and think. But the alarm bells that should have been sounding in her head were oddly silent.

As they headed north on LaSalle, past the Board of Trade, past banks and shops and the city hall, there was an overwhelming sense of walking through a tunnel, the single-point perspective created by the office towers that rose like cliffs on either side of them, the sliver of sky at the end with its magnetic forward pull. He talked about his father's dying, how his mother had devoted herself to his care. Up from his basement lair he wasted away on the sofa, and because he was dying anyway she let him have his bottle.

“He was yellow and he stank of alcohol and urine,” said Todd. “His hands shook and he couldn't control his bladder. The day they carried him out of the house I had to put the sofa out in the trash.”

“Your mother must have been a saint,” she said.

“She should have left him years before.”

“Why didn't she?”

“Some kind of perverse loyalty? Who knows? You can't get inside of somebody else's marriage.”

“I get that. However things look to other people, the marriage bond can be indestructible.”

“I suppose your father was a doctor or a professor or somebody important,” he said.

“Not exactly. He's retired now, but he was a pharmacist. We
had a drugstore at the corner of Park and Main. I used to work there after school. The whole family did. Well, me and my brothers. Not my mother.”

“Why not?”

“I guess she had enough to do around the house. I don't know. Maybe it had to do with her disappointments in life. My mother trained as a singer, but she never got beyond the church choir. Her dream was to be in a Broadway musical. She knew all the songs and used to sing them around the house. My mother is a little zany. A little fanciful, let's say.”

“Aren't girls supposed to take after their mothers?”

“That's what they say. But I think I'm more like my father.”

“So which of your parents is the bad driver?”

She later developed a theory about why they'd stayed out in the cold for so long, but she can't remember it anymore, just that it had something to do with endurance and bonding. She does know that by the time they found a place to eat and were warming their hands on their coffee cups while they waited for their food, there was a feeling of unbending, a sense that barriers had broken down. And that come midnight they were back in the Bucktown mansion lighting candles and shaking out the sleeping bag.

4

HIM

He drops Natasha at her door and drives on toward home. The day is sultry with a hot sun and no breeze, a provisional return to summer. The Porsche is littered with garbage—crumpled napkins, discarded wrappers, empty cardboard cups, the evidence of the return trip—and too little sleep has left him bleary, but the smell of her clings to his clothes and skin, an intoxicating fug of her secretions laced with her perfume, lotion, and hair gel. Parts of him are still swollen, and he's already dreading the hours that have to pass before he sees her again. Spending continuous time with her has altered his brain chemistry, and the synapses are firing painfully in her absence.

Warily, he projects into the trial ahead, the evening at home with Jodi. First will come the dinner of measured conversation
and moderate drink, to be followed by the bedtime ritual of turning out lights and sliding under covers fully clothed in freshly laundered pyjamas. When was it that his home life became a penance? He can't recall the turning point, the moment when he lost his taste for the kind of comfort that Jodi so ably provides.

But when he reaches home his mood changes. He's greeted with such boisterous abandon and wanton affection that he bursts out laughing. How could he forget the dog? The rooms are cool and filled with the dulcet scent of roses, which bloom profusely from scattered vases. In the kitchen he finds an open bottle of white wine, cold to the touch, and beside it a plate of crackers topped with smoked oysters. The effect of these enticements comes as a revelation.

Jodi is not immediately visible, but the balcony door is standing open. He strips down and steps into the shower, turning the taps on full so the water pummels his skin, creating a pleasant sensation of numbness and washing away the cloying scents of the weekend. When he's towelled off and dressed in clean khakis and a fresh shirt, he snacks on the oysters and pours himself a glass of wine.

On the balcony, Jodi is lying half naked in the lounge chair, her bikini bottom a marvel of crimson spandex that clings like a second skin to her jutting hips and rounded mons. Her legs are in an elongated V that pulls his gaze to her crotch and up the centre divide of her rib cage. Her breasts, small to begin with, are splayed and flattened by her prone position, the nipples inert in the heat of the day, presented for show like lucky silver dollars. She rarely sunbathes, he knows, because she doesn't tan.
Her skin is tinted with a rosy flush that will chafe her later on, but she isn't in any danger now because the sun has moved on and left the balcony in shade.

“I thought I heard you come in,” she says, lifting her sunglasses to squint at him.

She has an economy about her—physical, emotional—that has always drawn him in. Her self-possession rarely deserts her; she's a woman who rises to the top of any situation. And even after all the years he feels that he knows her hardly at all, that he can't really grasp what lies beneath the surface. As a force in his life Jodi is polished, a virtuoso who works on him artfully, whereas Natasha plugs directly into his primitive brain. If Jodi is up, Natasha is down. If Jodi is a gentle lift, Natasha is a ten-storey fall.

The country innkeeper, when he and Natasha showed up to claim their room, did nothing to mask his disapproval. He asked them to repeat their names, looked grimly at his register, and said, shaking his head, “You're booked into the
honeymoon
suite,” as though urging them to change their minds. “The one with the king-size bed and the Jacuzzi,” Natasha affirmed. Based on the churlish stares that followed them through the weekend, you would have thought that Todd was having it off with his own daughter. When he and Natasha emerged from their suite at noon on Saturday and walked into the dining room for lunch, he might as well have been naked with lips rubbed raw and a giant erection. The way people were carrying on, Natasha could have been a girl of twelve.

That first day, on arriving back at the inn, hot and thirsty
after a walk in the woods, they wandered into the lounge, an airy room with bamboo blinds and rustic maple furnishings, where the paunchy bartender, having taken their order, gave Todd a wink as he put Natasha's Manhattan down in front of her, a wink that meant, in bumptious macho parlance: “Get her drunk enough and even an old guy like you can get lucky” or “I made this extra strong because you're going to need all the help you can get” or “Maybe I can have a go when you're done with her, whaddaya say?”

He could almost feel that Natasha was to blame, the way she let it all hang out—breasts rising from their moorings, navel ring winking, hair tumbling—and the way she liked to posture by deepening her lumbar curve till it bowed out her torso, as if she were Nadia Comaneci working the balance beam.

Twirling from side to side on her bar stool, she looped her fingers through his belt and nuzzled him like a newborn calf. “If we're getting married in June, and you promised me that, then we need to start planning the wedding,” she said. “And we need to look for a place to live.” Tugging on his belt, her lips approaching his ear, she added that spending the night together—the whole of the night in the king-size bed in their honeymoon suite—had changed things, that now there could be no going back. They had crossed a threshold, she said, and the old routine of sneaking around and hiding their love would no longer do.

Had he promised to marry her in June? Not that he could remember. As a way of putting her off, he said that he would have to talk to his lawyer before they could make any plans.

Jodi gets up from her lounge chair and moves past him into the apartment. He catches the scent of her warm flesh layered with suntan oil and watches her walk away toward the bathroom. Her body is small and slight, in striking contrast to Natasha's with its broad back and deep curves. She returns wearing a short silk wrapper tied at the waist. When she sits down the robe falls open, revealing her thighs and the swell of her breasts.

“How was your weekend?” she asks.

“It's good to be home,” he says evasively. “What did you do while I was gone?”

“Nothing much. Did you catch any fish?”

When she mentions fish her eyes crinkle up with merriment. If she knows or guesses the truth, she's at least not going to punish him with it.

“I wish I could tell you that I've stocked the freezer with pickerel,” he says. “But I'll take you out to dinner if you like.”

They go to Spiaggia and work their way through three delicious courses, washing them down with a robust amarone. He's wearing a dinner jacket and she's in an off-the-shoulder cocktail dress and a double strand of pearls. That night they make love for the first time in a month.

The next day opens with a series of misadventures. To begin with he gets to work at his usual early hour only to find that one of his keys—the one that opens the street door—is missing from his key ring. Standing on the sidewalk with his mobile phone he curses when he fails to connect with the janitor. He doesn't know how this could have happened; keys don't detach on their
own from a steel ring. He nonetheless walks the three blocks back to his Porsche to search the seats and floor and then calls Jodi, waking her up, to ask if she'll have a look around at home. After that he waits in front of his building thinking that sooner or later someone will come along and let him in, but it's still early, and before long he gives up and goes for breakfast.

Starting time for the janitor is supposedly eight o'clock. At five to eight Todd is back at the building with a takeout coffee, but it's another twelve minutes before the janitor shows up. The twelve-minute wait finishes off what was left of his patience, and the entire responsibility for his wasted hour and a half comes down on the janitor's head. A quiet, mostly reliable man who's held his position for some years, the janitor quits on the spot and leaves without producing any keys. More minutes pass, another nineteen to be exact, before a tenant arrives and lets Todd in. By the time he's broken into the janitor's room to get at an extra set of keys, he has a message from Stephanie saying that one of her kids is sick and she won't be in to work. He spends the rest of the morning dealing with things that Stephanie would normally be doing, and when Natasha calls at lunchtime to ask him if he's spoken to his lawyer, he tells her that the world doesn't operate according to her whims.