Still Life with Husband Read online

  “Hey,” he says, meeting my eye for a second and then looking down. He’s adorable up close, darker than he looked from across the room, and a little bit younger: no older than twenty-eight.

  “Hey,” I answer. It’s all I can think to say.

  “I, um, I’ve seen you here before.” This is awkward and, at the same time, it feels scripted. But I haven’t acted this part in a long time. “I come in here some mornings,” he continues, “for a break from work.”

  “Oh. What do you do?” I’m trying to act interested but not too eager, cute and mature, but not too mature, all at the same time. But it’s taking up all my energy, diverting the blood flow from my brain.

  “I’m a writer,” he says, loosening up. “I’m a reporter for The Weekly. Have you heard of it?”

  “Of course I have. I read it all the time.” Right, this is how you do it.

  His face lights up. “I write the ‘Local Beat’ column, and I write the cover story about once every two months or so, and I fill in as features editor.”

  “Well, that’s…So you’re…” I’m trying to picture the byline underneath his column, but I can’t. The truth is, I only occasionally glance at the paper. We pick it up mostly for movie listings.

  “David,” he says. “Keller.” He offers me his hand and I have to shake it, which ruins my advantage, because my palms are still sweaty.

  “Emily Ross,” I say, sounding more formal than I mean to. “Actually, I’m a writer, too.” He’s staring at me now as if I’m telling him I’ve just won the Pulitzer and, in my spare time, have worked up the cure for cancer. “But freelance. For magazines. Women’s magazines.” Oddly enough, although this fact embarrasses me, it seems to impress him.

  “Wow, that’s a hard market to break into, I’ve heard. Which ones do you write for?” We’re like old friends now. Except that we’ve just met, we’re having an incredibly awkward conversation, and if I weren’t married, I’d want to sleep with him. I mean, I do want to sleep with him, or at least kiss him, but I am married. It’s the strangest thing.

  “Hi!” Without warning, Meg has appeared at my side. I hadn’t noticed her approach, I’d been so wrapped up in our brief conversation. She’s smiling at us, but it’s not the same conspiratorial smile as before; she seems slightly irritated, so very slightly that only her best friend could read it. “Emily, sorry to interrupt, but didn’t you say you had a meeting at ten today?” It’s nine forty-five. I don’t, of course. I give her a little shrug. She narrows her eyes back at me.

  “Oh, hey, yeah, I do. Thanks.” I set my mug down in one of the gray tubs reserved for dirty dishes. “David,” I say, as we maneuver awkwardly, the three of us, away from the counter and back in the general direction of our tables, stopping in the middle of the coffee shop like a disoriented herd of elk. “This is my friend Meg.” They shake hands.

  “So, Emily,” David continues, still focused on me; I’m completely sucked in. He reaches into his front pocket, pulls out a pen and a scrap of paper, and scribbles something on it. “Here’s my number and my e-mail address. Give me a call sometime. Or send me an e-mail. It’d be nice to talk more. And, if you’re interested…we don’t pay as well as what you’re probably used to, but maybe you could write for me. For us. For the newspaper.” He’s blushing again. I take the paper and our fingers touch. I pull my hand back fast, as if I’m recoiling from a flame.

  “Thanks,” I say. Meg takes my elbow and leads me toward our table, where we gather up our things and head for the door. Suddenly, my long-lost bat radar is activated; I know that he’s watching me as we leave. Fortunately, I have excellent posture.

  Outside, Meg is quiet. We start walking back toward my apartment, where her car is parked.

  “Well, that took an odd little turn,” she says finally, halfway down the block.

  “What do you mean?” I keep my voice light.

  “Emily, that was…you were…I heard you. That guy asked you out and you basically said yes.”

  “Meg! That is not what happened. First of all, he’s a writer for The Weekly, and we were talking shop. That was harmless flirtation!” I stop for a second, turn and face her. “Do you really think I’d…what are you thinking? It was harmless,” I repeat. “Why are you being so judgmental?”

  “Sorry.” She starts walking again, links her arm through mine as a peace offering. “There’s a line, you know, and it seemed like you crossed it. But I guess you didn’t. Sorry,” she says again.

  If I wanted to, I could take this further, make it escalate. Look who’s talking about line-crossing! I’ve seen you take men’s phone numbers lots of times before! But I don’t. “That really was nothing,” I say instead. “I would never.” We walk in silence for the next few steps. “Why didn’t he notice my wedding ring, I wonder.”

  “Because you’re not wearing it, sunshine.”

  I unhook my arm from Meg’s and stare down at my left hand. It’s true. I’m not.

  LAST YEAR, KEVIN AND I TRAVELED BY TRAIN FROM MILWAUKEE to Minneapolis to visit my sister, Heather. On the way over, Kevin sat in the window seat, and I took the aisle. We sat across from a couple, about our age; the woman also sat in the aisle seat, and her husband had the window. After about an hour, as we rattled through the Wisconsin countryside, both Kevin and this man (Marcus, I learned later) had fallen fast asleep, lulled by the rocking of the train. So, leaning across the space between the seats, the woman and I began to talk.

  Amy and I became fast, if temporary, friends, and we exchanged our stories, the way people do who vaguely look alike, who carry the same brand of handbag and wear the same kind of shoes, who know they will have pretty much in common. Still, we were astounded by just how specifically our lives resembled each other’s. Amy and Marcus had met, just as Kevin and I had, at school in the Midwest. Marcus was from a small town, just like Kevin, studying architecture in Chicago. Amy, who was from Ann Arbor, had changed her major six times before she finally settled on political science, mostly because her parents had threatened to cut off her tuition money. Right after college—quickly, too quickly, Amy said—they had moved in together, and, because they’d been in such a rush, they ended up struggling over when to get married. But then they did get married, and now, Amy confessed in a whisper, they were busily trying to get pregnant, which immediately and unfortunately caused me to picture them having sex. Marcus was building a reputation for himself as an architect in a large Chicago firm, and Amy was an assistant to the assistant director of a small nonprofit consumer advocacy foundation. They went to Nebraska every summer, she told me, to visit his family.

  Naturally, we overdisclosed to each other. It was as if we had met the physical manifestations of our own private diaries, and we knew that, for the next four-and-a-half hours, or at least until Marcus or Kevin woke up, we could divulge anything to each other. Anyway, try as we might, we weren’t the sort of girls who had all that much to reveal. We told each other about our families (both overprotective, both loving), our jobs (unfulfilling), and we giggled about ex-boyfriends (I tried to make the most out of my three dull former relationships, one at the end of high school and the other two in college). We cast glances at our sleeping mates as we told our secrets.

  After an hour and a half, near Tomah (the Cranberry Capital), we started to wind down, began to grow a little bit bored with each other, as much as we were probably both a little bit bored with ourselves, and our conversation circled back to when we first met the men who would become our husbands. I was trying to remember what it felt like to know that Kevin and I were going to be together. I was thinking, trying to call up the emotional details of it, from our first kiss (which was unspectacular and concluded with Kevin telling me he knew I’d had onions for lunch and me not telling him that tongues were not meant to be used as plungers), to the first time we said “I love you” (which was somewhat more spectacular, and involved fireworks, occurring as it did on July Fourth).

  “I always thought I’d get married,”
Amy said, interrupting my daydream, “to whatever man I happened to be dating when the time felt right.” She glanced again at her sleeping husband, but affectionately, not surreptitiously; if he happened to wake up and hear this, she obviously wouldn’t have minded. “I thought I’d be twenty-five or twenty-six, or maybe a little bit older, be involved with a guy, someone decent and nice enough, and it would be time. And we’d get married.” She took a slow pull from the bottle of iced tea she’d been nursing for the past two hours. “But what I never predicted was that I’d fall so crazy in love. In college! I never thought I’d meet my soul mate.” She laughed, a little embarrassed, turned again to still-sleeping Marcus. “I never even believed in the concept. But there he is.” She paused, waited. Was I supposed to say something now? “You know what I mean,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Sure!” I said. “Definitely I do,” and I cast the same puppy-dog look at Kevin, who, in his sleep, had maneuvered his long legs halfway across my space. But I didn’t. I had no idea. Of course I loved Kevin, and more than I’d ever loved anyone. But crazy in love? My soul mate? It wasn’t that, like Amy, I didn’t believe in the concept. It had never even occurred to me.

  The next moments were slightly awkward, as the rhythm of our conversation had concluded. We each made a few chatty comments, an observation about the scenery, a compliment on a sweater, but neither of us picked up on them. And finally, we stopped talking entirely, only smiling when we happened to catch the other’s eye. As I mused uncomfortably on Amy and Marcus’s crazy love, the impossible depth of their connection, I thought about what Kevin would say if I told him. He would argue against her claim that such an enviable state of love could exist. And that would make me feel better. So did that mean we were soul mates after all? Soul mates who were too analytical to believe in the idea? I didn’t suppose so. But I decided it wasn’t important. Kevin muttered in his sleep, and I rested my arm against his. I hoped it didn’t matter, after all.

  When I get home from my breakfast date with Meg, the apartment is empty. Kevin has scribbled a note and left it on the kitchen table: “MT B LT 2NT,” meaning, he might work late tonight. I pick up the scrap of paper and toss it in the trash, annoyed, despite myself, at his perfunctory communiqué; from someone else, I think, I would at least get a complete word, if not a “See you at eight, sweetheart,” or even a “Love you!” I feel a twinge, a prickle of something at the back of my neck, and I think, unbidden, He takes me for granted. And as quickly as it appeared, the thought is gone. I find my wedding ring on the bedside table where I leave it every night and I slip it back on. It feels bulky, unfamiliar, as if meeting David Keller has created a chemical reaction in the plain gold band, changing its diameter, slightly altering its smooth surface. Crazy, I think, rubbing it against my middle finger, twisting the ring around and around. Overly symbolic! I think, and twist, twist, twist it.

  I have no deadlines today, nothing pressing to do, so I finish an article proposal: “Exploring the Great Indoors: The Things You Can Learn by Staying Inside.” I am an expert on the subject. I’ve accumulated years of important, detailed information, gleaned from the hundreds of daytime hours I have spent in my pajamas. For example, if you stare long enough, you can be a part-time naturalist, with your front-row view of the urban wilderness outside your window. I once watched ants on the windowsill having sex, it looked like, in what I was pretty sure was the missionary position. I witnessed an autumn love affair between two squirrels, one of whom would get despondent whenever his lover wouldn’t appear at their designated tree, and would end up chewing nervously on his own arm like it was corn on the cob. Even your appliances have a thing or two to teach you: milk in the refrigerator has a tendency to freeze if you leave it too close to the edge, whereas Fudgsicles will melt in the freezer if you don’t put them close enough to the edge. I don’t expect that I will get this assignment, but I seem to have reached a critical point where I have exhausted all of my seriously good ideas, my brain like a diabetic’s pancreas. I’m fresh out.

  I call my sister. But it’s the middle of the day and, like most people, Heather’s not home. I check my e-mail. There’s a note from Louise Aslanian, my old college adviser. Louise is a depressive lesbian poet who publishes slim volumes of verse every five or six years with a tiny local press. She writes a lot about getting old and dying, and about her mother dying, and sometimes about how she is becoming her mother and will soon die. She taught until two years ago, when she decided, at fifty-five, to fulfill her lifelong dream of moving to Wyoming and working on a ranch. I don’t even quite know what a ranch is, but Louise and her supportive partner, a painter, sold their house and did it. Now she’s a depressive, lesbian cowgirl poet. Last week I had mentioned to her in an e-mail that I was short on inspiration, knowing that she would have words of real wisdom for me.

  “Dearest Emily,” she writes, “A prolific writer I once knew had a debilitating stroke several years ago. He lost the ability to speak, so he and his longtime companion worked out a system whereby this writer would communicate by blinking. He wrote his last book in blinks. Then he died. Take heart, my friend. Fondly, Louise.”

  My perky friend Sara has written to me, too. She lives in Dallas and is married to the CEO of a large software company that’s been in the news recently for refusing to hire a well-qualified dwarf. She’s written to tell me that she is pregnant with her second child. “We’re hoping for a girl this time, but we’ll take whatever we get!” Except a dwarf, I think, and turn off my computer.

  By the time Kevin comes home, not late, as it turns out, but earlier than usual, I’ve spent the entire day fuming and have officially worked myself up into a foul humor. I hear his key jiggling in the lock. He bounds cheerfully into the apartment like a big puppy dog.

  “Emily!” he calls from the hallway. “Flopsy!” Flopsy, along with Mopsy and sometimes Cottontail, are his nicknames for me. I hate them. I’m slumped on the sofa, where he finds me and climbs on top of me, practically licking my face. “Surprise for you!” he announces.

  “Mmmhmmm,” I say, pushing his head away from me. He climbs off my lap and sits next to me, pulls my feet into his lap.

  “We’re going to Lake Geneva this weekend.” Lake Geneva is a resort town about an hour from Milwaukee. My interest is piqued, but I’m too cranky to let on. “Hasting’s holding a conference for their tech writers,” he says happily. Kevin works for Hasting Electric, writing instructional manuals for their small- and medium-sized electronics and appliances. He’s amazing at his job; his manuals are always receiving company-wide acclaim and being circulated in-house as examples of superior work. Kevin experiences actual inspiration as a technical writer. Where others slog away over “insert tab A into slot B,” Kevin finds elegance, economy, even humor. He can wax lyrical on the difference between “click closed” and “snap shut”; he’s responsible for rewriting the gauche “hold on to the appliance’s plastic base before taking the coffee grounds out and disposing of them” to the graceful “grasp handle before removing filter.” His finest hour is the warning tag he crafted, now prominently displayed on all Hasting hairdryers: WARN CHILDREN OF THE RISK OF ELECTRIC SHOCK! I had that one framed for him for his last birthday. Kevin, God help him, was born to be a technical writer. “They’re updating their entire line of small appliances!” he says gleefully, rubbing my toes. “Dermott asked the guys from engineering and some of the folks in legal and all of us tech writers to attend. I figured, a fancy hotel, free meals…You know,” he adds quietly, “maybe this weekend, maybe this would be a good chance for us to talk more calmly about things. We could talk some more about buying a house,” he says, deftly dodging one issue and pressing down on the bruise of another one. Kevin has recently decided that, in addition to starting a family, we’re ready to buy a house. In the suburbs. More bang for your buck in the ’burbs, he likes to inform me. He’s done his research. “We could think about a timeline, and about where we might want to move.”

  “Where
you might want to move,” I say.

  “Yeah, well, Emily, then we don’t have to talk about it.” He presses his lips together and releases a puff of air from his nose, the first indication that my surliness is getting to him. “But I told him we’d definitely be there.”

  “Did you ever think that I might have plans this weekend?” I ask.

  “I’m trying here, Em.”

  I pause, glance over Kevin’s shoulder at the news on TV for a few seconds. “Fine.”

  “Good, then. We’ll go!”

  ONCE WE’RE ON THE ROAD TO LAKE GENEVA, HURTLING AT TOP speed away from our lives, I have the sense that I can breathe again, although I hadn’t realized I had been deprived of oxygen before. I think Meg was right; I think we do need a vacation. Maybe this trip will be Paris, without the interesting architecture, great art, or fabulous food.

  We cruise through rural Wisconsin, a landscape of autumnal rusts and oranges. Kevin has brought all of my favorite CDs, and has gallantly consented to listening to bluegrass—my pickin’ and grinnin’ music, he usually calls it—for the past forty-five minutes. He’s probably done this to appease me, and it’s working. When we arrive in Lake Geneva, we drive past our hotel’s wooded entrance, take a quick spin through the town for a look at Main Street’s several Ye Olde Fudge Shoppes and all manner of Aren’t We Cute Boutiques, then U-turn back down the road and into the sprawling compound, littered with golf courses, that comprises the resort. I resolve to come back later for fudge, one of my favorite foods. Kevin says that he plans on skipping as much as possible of the actual conference in favor of the whirlpool and the free cable. He raises his eyebrows at me lasciviously. “I know how we can keep busy this weekend.”