Still Life with Husband Read online

  The fact is, I wished this on Meg. From the moment she first told me, radiating happiness, I felt a twinge of disappointment. I hid it, but I did. I wanted my pregnant best friend not to be pregnant. I wanted to keep her for myself, not to share her with a baby, not to lose her to motherhood. I wished for this, in a way—not this, but there’s no denying it, I wasn’t entirely joyous about her pregnancy. And although I’m not crazy or narcissistic enough to think that I caused her miscarriage, guilt crawls up my spine and reaches its spindly fingers around into my chest. I can feel it: the uncomfortable pressure of selfishness, the realization that my own personal ugliness extends its tentacles and connects to the world, to my best friend.

  “Can I get you a cup of hot chocolate?” I ask. “Or tea?”

  She shakes her head. “This is bad, Emily. I know it.”

  “You don’t,” I say. “You don’t know anything, and all we can do right now is wait for the doctor.” A woman two seats away from us begins to cough, hard. Even after she stops, her thin body seems to vibrate from the effort of it.

  “I’m starting to have cramps,” Meg whispers, hunching over a little bit. I just squeeze my arm around her more tightly. “I thought I’d be coming to this hospital to have my baby, not to lose it,” she says, staring straight ahead. I don’t know how to answer that. And anyway, it’s not a question.

  When Steve arrives, Meg has just gone into an examining room with a stern young doctor. She hadn’t wanted me to come with her. She’d asked me to wait outside for Steve, but I think that she needed to hear the bad news on her own, to let it sink in before anyone else found out, to mourn in private, even if only for a few moments.

  Steve and I spot each other at the same instant. He plows through the sliding doors and races toward me. Steve is a pediatric dentist and a slob. He’s still wearing his white coat, which is wrinkled and flapping open behind him as he walks. His child-friendly purple tie, decorated with laughing bananas, has a big grease spot in the middle of it, and his shoelaces are not only untied, but shredded. He looks like he slept in his entire outfit, a gray oxford shirt and black pants, and in fact he may have. But Steve somehow makes it work. One look at him and you know that he’s not only handsome, which is something that can’t be squelched by sloppiness, but sexy, which is something that can be, and would be if he were someone else. But Steve is just adorable, messy because he lives large and uses a lot of ketchup, clumsy except when he’s gently tending to the tiny teeth of children. Women want to mother him. Meg does, which is both irritating to watch and perfectly apt. She’ll reach over and pluck bits of dirt off his clothes, wipe his face with a napkin. They probably don’t even realize they do it. Kevin and I make fun of them behind their backs: “Should Mommy tie your shoes?” “Do you need me to wipe your bottom, snookums?” Right now Steve is in a barely controlled panic, and I actually do want to reach over to him and smooth his hair down. But I just stand up and take his elbow, lead him down the corridor. “Meg’s in exam room four,” I tell him. “She’s been in there for about fifteen minutes.”

  Steve looks like he’s about to cry. Like me, Steve is a wreck under pressure; Meg and Kevin are the calm ones. “Is she having a miscarriage?” he asks me.

  “I don’t know. She thinks she is.”

  “But she’s going to be okay, right?”

  “Of course.” I feel like I could easily say something stupid or wrong, so I’m trying to say as little as possible.

  Just then, the doctor emerges from the examination room, scribbling something on a chart just outside the door. Fair and blond, he looks like he’s about sixteen years old. Doogie Howser takes long strides down the corridor toward us.

  Steve introduces himself, and the doctor unceremoniously tells us that Meg is in the process of undergoing a spontaneous abortion. The phrase feels like a knife, cold and sharp and unaccountably mean. This process, he tells us without noticeable kindness, will take anywhere from twenty-four to forty-eight hours, after which Meg should stop bleeding. And if she doesn’t, he adds, she’ll need to come back for a surgical abortion. The word—he says it again—makes me cringe, implying choice; but here we are, with no choice in the matter. The information that took this doctor eleven seconds to impart will take Meg and Steve weeks, months to recover from.

  “Early miscarriages are extremely common,” the doctor continues, backing away from us slightly. “They’re usually the body’s healthy response to a nonviable pregnancy,” he says, his words starting to jam together. “Very common. Most women go ontohavesuccessfulpregnancies.” He’s halfway down the hall; he’s gone.

  “I’m so sorry, Steve.” I say. “Do you want me to stay?”

  He looks at me as if he’s forgotten I’m there. He nods and shakes his head at the same time, so I let him go into Meg’s room on his own, and I lean against the cement wall, waiting. I close my eyes and try to think about what I had planned to do today. It feels like nothing else exists, like there is no other world outside this hospital, this hallway. The heavy door clicks shut behind Steve.

  After a few minutes, they come out, arm in arm. Meg blinks as if she is emerging into bright sunlight. Steve looks stricken, but Meg seems resigned.

  “Thank you for everything,” she whispers, hugging me.

  “Oh,” I say. “I’m so, so sorry….” I stop talking. I’m about to cry, but I don’t want Meg to have to comfort me, so I swallow hard and try to contain it.

  “Steve’s going to take me home now. I’ll call you later.”

  “Emily, thanks,” Steve says dully. He and Meg are leaning against each other, facing me, forming their own tiny constellation. Before I can say anything else, they turn and head off toward the exit, and I’m standing by myself in the middle of the hospital corridor.

  I’M SITTING HERE AT WHITE’S, FEIGNING CALM. There is only one outward sign: I have bitten my fingernails down to jagged little nubs, and I’ve gnawed my cuticles into ripped edges of skin—and all in the last ten minutes. It’s disgusting, and as I sit here with my cup of coffee and my book, trying to look as if I am just sitting here waiting for an old pal, trying even to look a tiny bit bored, I resolve to keep my hands hidden from David Keller as much as I possibly can. This will serve a dual purpose, since I’m wearing my wedding ring, and I don’t want him to see it right away. I realized yesterday, on my way home from the hospital, that I obviously do need to tell him that I’m married. Meg’s miscarriage threw my situation into sharp relief. Life is hard and painful and full of losses we can’t prevent. I’ve been a silly, ridiculous girl. This daydream I’ve been sucking on like a lollipop has been poison. A poison lollipop! Kevin is a loving, kind man, and I have been fantasizing about ruining his life, breaking his heart. I need to confess to David, but in my own time. Because telling him that I have a husband—“husband!,” what a strange word!—will nip this in the bud, exactly where it should be nipped; I just need some time to ease my way into this reality. I have to give up my stupid little fantasy, but slowly, because after it’s gone, I imagine I’ll be a little bit bereft. When I woke up this morning, I resolutely slipped the gold band onto my finger.

  Besides, I haven’t even seen the guy, haven’t talked to him for more than five minutes. It’s a little premature of me to conceive of this as an affair, even a gestating affair. How am I going to keep my hands hidden, though? I need at least one hand to drink my coffee. I could drink coffee only with my right hand, I suppose. But I might also want to gesture, perhaps to emphasize a point: the bathroom is over there. It will look strange and suspicious if I spend the next hour, thirty minutes, two hours?—how long do two people spend together when they’re on a date that is not a date and one of them is married?—sitting on my hands.

  My entire body is clammy and sweaty; I feel like I’ve had six cups of coffee, but I’ve barely even had two sips of one. Maybe I should just put my ring into my pocket for a while. I know that I would rather tell him, would rather speak the words than let this silly symbol clue him in b
efore I’m ready. I glance up as the door swishes open, and my heart jumps up into my throat, but it’s a woman wearing a coat that looks like a cape and pushing a baby carriage. It’s 9:50, prime women-in-capes-pushing-baby-carriages time.

  Is it going to be all about rationalization from here? Am I preparing to think my way clear to doing something heinous? I decided yesterday: absolutely not. But now, today, as the doors swoosh open every few moments and I surreptitiously look up from my book every time, turning back to it and reading and rereading the same paragraph, as I watch a steady stream of coffee drinkers and scone eaters walk up to the counter and unzip their children’s jackets and find their tables and sip their coffees and nibble on their scones and chat with their friends as if this were any ordinary morning, I’m not so sure.

  But if I tell David I’m married, what will he say? Will he be shocked, indignant? Or will he whisper, I don’t care, in a voice so sexy and soft that I’ll have to move my face mere inches from his just to hear? Or will he nod, unfazed, never having considered me anything more than a potential colleague, a possible friend?

  I could barely look at Kevin this morning. He didn’t notice, just went about his business, muttering to himself about the hot water situation in the shower. The faucet with an H produces cold water, and the one with a C provides hot, a glitch that never would have happened if Kevin had written the pipe-installing instructions, and one that periodically sends him into fits of frustration. I spent forty-five minutes in the bathroom, as opposed to my usual five, applying a light coat of mascara and then wiping it off and then reapplying it, and then wiping it off again until there were dark, raccoony circles under my eyes and I had to wash my face and start all over.

  Sometimes I think that Kevin and I just wander around the rooms of our apartment. There is something unfixed about our marriage. We’re like two planets come loose from their magnetic pull. Is this it? Is this what the rest of my life will feel like?

  Well, this is true: I wouldn’t mind making a new friend. I’d like to have a buddy in the journalism world, someone to talk to about the frustrations and pleasures of writing. Can’t I just be here, do that? Can’t I just connect with David Keller on that level, maybe start up a friendship, possibly even somewhat of a charged friendship, but leave it at that? My mom used to tell me that if I liked a boy, I should just march right up to him and say, “Whaddya say we start up a friendship?” Of course, I scoffed at that, and anyway I always favored the flirt-so-subtly-that-it-was-unrecognizableas-flirting-and-then-pine-in-vain approach, the nurse-a-festering-obsessive-crush approach, but now, why not? I’m not some kind of hyena, lacking control of my instincts, unable to resist the lure of another pheromone-emitting hyena, for God’s sake! I can allow myself to establish a relationship that may even contain some physical attraction, that may not include, for example, long discussions about my marriage, without letting that relationship spiral out of control. Yes, I can! I’m too conscious of my motivations to embark on an affair. In my life, one thing never just leads to another. But a friendship? A friendship I could do. A friendship might even be easy.

  About two miles from my parents’ house, just off I-43, there is a place called Jupiter’s Palace of Cheese. In a sea of strip malls, it stands bravely alone and unchanging, set back from the road, protected by the moat of its oversized parking lot. When I was growing up, we would drive past Jupiter’s Palace, sometimes as often as two or three times a week—on the way to the grocery store or to Heather’s violin lesson or to the ice cream parlor nearby. It’s still a regular part of my geography: every time I visit my parents or go to the dentist or do an errand in their part of town, I see it. But I’ve never been inside. As a child, on every car ride, I would stop bickering with Heather as we’d approach Jupiter’s Palace of Cheese, and I’d watch its spires and colorful flags loom closer, tiny in the distance and growing larger, until we’d zoom past, and I’d crane my neck as the turrets and minarets receded in the distance. Jupiter’s Palace of Cheese! I pictured a fairy tale world full of dazzling, dairy-rich interplanetary surprises: a fabulous fortress of cheese, soft mozzarella stars gently twinkling in the sky and—naturally—a green cheese moon shining. I imagined a Brie princess trapped in one of the towers, while all sorts of complicated magical passageways paved with dangerous Swiss, or maybe more solid Gouda, led to her prison. And a cheddar king ruled over his fantastic galactic domain with a string-cheese scepter. I was a strange girl with an active internal life and many imaginary friends with whom I conversed under my breath and exchanged complicated jokes.

  We never stopped at Jupiter’s Palace of Cheese. We could have, easily; my parents would have been happy to indulge me in this, as they did in every other way. But as a child, it never occurred to me to ask. It was as if I knew, on some level, that Jupiter’s Palace wasn’t real, and not just the universe of otherworldly cheese, but the part I could see, with my own eyes. How could anything so wonderful be true? And then, as I got older, I developed a nostalgia for it, even though it continued to exist, even as we continued to drive past it on our journeys. I realized that Jupiter’s Palace of Cheese would probably turn out to be a tacky little store, a flimsy prefab hut full of displays of cheese molds in the shape of castles and, well, I couldn’t bring myself to conjure what other fantasy-killing products would be plied there. Martian Muenster? An assortment of cosmic jams and jellies? These days, I pass by it with a pleasant longing: I both want to, and never want to, step inside. Jupiter’s Palace of Cheese has become for me the one fantasy I can harbor boldly because it will never bludgeon me with its lumpy reality. Jupiter’s Palace of Cheese is all the things that will never disappoint me, all the things I will never do.

  But what if I do, someday, venture inside? Who knows what will greet me? It may turn out to be everything I dreamed of. That’s the thing. The shiny mystery of it.

  David Keller walks through the door and unwraps his long scarf from his neck. He’s tall. His longish dark hair flops just a little bit in his eyes. He looks like someone I’ve known forever. I close my eyes for a second. My hands are in my lap. I slip my wedding ring into my pocket, and then I wave.

  “Hi!” he says, before he’s even made it all the way over to me, and a wide smile colonizes his face. Something inside me gives way—like a mudslide, like when you are very happy, or about to throw up.

  “Hi!” I say back. I feel goofy, overcome. He stands near me, pulls out a chair and drapes his blue wool jacket over it. He smells like outside, like air, like wind. I have never, ever felt like this before: I’m collapsing in on myself. I’m the universe, expanding, contracting. I see him in front of me, and at the same time I see myself in his arms, feel his rough cheek on my neck. God, I want him inside me; I want to be inside him. I want to wear him. What is this?

  He sits down, then bounces right back up, nervously. “I’m going to get a cup of coffee. Can I get you one?” he asks. I smile, tilt my head toward the cup in front of me. “Oh, right, you have one. I’ll be right back.”

  I have always fallen for guys the way smart girls do, the way not-beautiful girls do, with my brain. My first boyfriend was a revelation. We met at the end of high school, at the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Debating finals. His team was in favor of the death penalty, ours was against it. When we talked on the phone, late at night, after our parents were asleep, we whispered about our SAT scores and the AP classes we were taking. In college, the first boy I loved sat next to me in Pre-Eighteenth Century Lit, and he asked me out after reading my essay on the Wife of Bath (the First Feminist!). A year later, I met boyfriend number three, the one before Kevin, at a political rally. Mark and I leafleted against our local Republican councilman together and argued politics before, after, and sometimes during sex on the single futon on the floor of his bedroom at the co-op. And Kevin, well, Kevin. This is different from that, different from love, of course, but different, too, from the brainy entanglements of my past.

  David sits down across from me. He takes a sip
of his coffee, puts his cup down, and meets my eyes. We look at each other for a long second. As my brain seizes up, I realize that I should have prepared something to say.

  “I’m really glad you e-mailed,” he says.

  I have a husband. “Thanks,” I say. “Me, too.” Now that that’s finished, we stare at each other in silence again. I look down at my hands, my pale, naked hands. I have a flash of Meg in the hospital waiting room, the way she looked drowned, wrung out. I called her yesterday and left a message. Nobody answered, but I’m sure they were home.

  After a few moments, David finally breathes life into the dead air between us. “So, what kind of writing do you do?” I want to lick him.

  “Well,” I say, wondering what will come out of my mouth, “I write about relationships, I guess, and I happen to have just finished a short piece for Me, the magazine Me, not myself me, on hats…but really what I try to do, when I can, when I have some free rein, is show evidence that the world is as weird as I think it is.” I’m a tiny, strange bird, chirping nonsensically at the sky. For some reason I hear myself continuing to talk. “I wrote a review a few months ago of this new book that argues that your astrological sign determines your interior decorating style.” I stop, abruptly, mortified at the stupidity of it all.

  David laughs, but gently, I think. “I’m a Taurus,” he says. “What does that say about my living room?”

  That I am suddenly imagining us on your plush sofa, you on top of me. “You’re into natural materials and natural colors, like sky blue, and textured fabrics. You’re tactile.” I feel myself blush immediately. Tactile! I might as well just have asked him to run his hand up my thigh!

  He smiles. “It’s true, actually. I am kind of tactile! But, you know, my decorating style is more old stuff left behind by former roommates than anything else. Well,” he continues, “if I’d ever given a second’s thought to it, I guess I would be into textured fabrics.”