The Silent Wife: A Novel Read online

  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 gray, 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 theater 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.”

  “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 whiskey.”

  “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 hav
e 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 pajamas. 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 toweled 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 center 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.