His Perfect Wife

by Natasha Bell

  “What do you mean?” Marc said.

  “Any holidays or trips, any time she stayed overnight or left the country.”

  “We’ve been over this. We do things as a family.”

  “If you could just have a think, Marc, and compile a list of dates over the past few years, that would really help us cross-reference.”

  “Cross-reference what?”

  Nicola didn’t answer.

  “What is this about?” Marc growled into the receiver.

  “Even if we find Alexandra alive,” Nicola said, “you may have to face some unpleasant facts…”

  Marc couldn’t listen to this. Nicola continued talking, but he stared at the muted TV and slipped inside his head. The more he talked to Nicola and DI Jones, the less he felt they were on his side. They had information they were keeping from him, thoughts and ideas about our family that didn’t match his own. That didn’t match us. But Marc knew us; he knew me. The police were burrowing down the wrong rabbit holes. He kept trying to tell them, but they didn’t understand. They didn’t have access to our world. They couldn’t glide, like Marc, into our memories. Nicola couldn’t rewind ten years like he could right now. She couldn’t follow him to Edinburgh to walk beside me along the Royal Mile, to discuss the terrible piece of Beckett we’d just witnessed in a makeshift basement theater. We were batting away windswept actors offering us flyers, on the cusp of our new lives, my swelling stomach making me a harsher critic than usual. We were heading back to our hotel, debating jacket potatoes on the way. We had no other thoughts. We were happy.

  My husband had lost me. That’s what he wanted to say. But it was what you said when somebody died too. Only they were not lost. They were very firmly found: present and correct in their coffins or urns. The people left behind knew where they stood. They could grieve. But he had no idea. He had lost his soul mate. But was that right? It sounded like he’d misplaced me, put me down and forgotten where he left me, like it was his doing. Had someone else contributed to it? Was I stolen from him in far more violating circumstances than someone smashing our bathroom window and rifling through our belongings? Was I in need of his help?

  Or should he be considering Nicola’s advice? That the best-case scenario was that I was somehow complicit in remaining gone? If I myself knew where I was, was I lost at all? Was I lost to anyone but him? He couldn’t believe he was thinking this, not about me. He’d watched all the videos on the Missing People website and felt sorry for the poor parents and children willing their loved ones to return. He thought it sad that they cried over people cruel enough to leave on purpose. But he couldn’t relate that to himself. He couldn’t imagine that being me. It didn’t even make sense, with my blood and belongings found on the riverbank.

  Nicola wouldn’t let him ignore it, kept saying if he was sure I was alive, then it was a possibility he must consider. But I wouldn’t desert them. I couldn’t abandon the girls. He knew me. If there was any way I could have got in touch, I’d have taken it.

  “And why hasn’t she got in touch?” he said, his voice too loud for the quiet house. Why, if I wasn’t being held somewhere against my will, tortured and—and—all sorts of things my husband couldn’t bring himself to imagine, why wouldn’t I have rung? It was absurd. Nobody could do that to their family. The woman was insane if she thought I could put them through this voluntarily. He shouted. I had to have been taken. Nicola said they’d discuss it another day. They would not. There was no discussion.

  “Find my wife!” He shouted that too and hung up.

  * * *

  I wake holding my stomach. I know it wasn’t real, but still I am sobbing. Marc was there. We were at the hospital. I was pregnant, just a little at the start, then more and more like some giant blown-up balloon. I floated through the corridors, glowing and proud, and lay on the bed for the nurse to cover me in jelly. But her little screen stayed blank. Then the doctors and Marc and Lizzie and Charlotte all started poking me, shouting, “Where is it? What have you done with it?” And my balloon stomach popped, leaving me splayed before them like a gutted fish.

  I try to breathe evenly. It was just a dream. This sense of emptiness isn’t real. My babies are safe. I roll over and see the tray. My stomach cramps. It’s only been four days without food. Pathetic, really. I stare at the slices of toast, focusing and unfocusing my eyes until the room swims like a kaleidoscope.

  My time used to be regimented. Structured around school days and term-times, clubs and appointments. I had calendars and diaries. Now I have a little sliver of light telling me a new day has arrived, a clock ticking round and round with nothing but his visits to distinguish the hours. I try to remember what I used to think about, how I filled my days, entertained my brain. But it’s a muscle, isn’t it? I tried to jog between the walls yesterday, collapsed after a dozen back and forths.

  There are cultures that believe enduring bodily deprivation is the only route to the Other, be that a god or one’s own subconscious. Physical suffering can be transmuted into power. To control suffering is to control everything.

  2001

  12/11/01

  Al,

  You’ve no idea what New York is like right now. The whole city is walking around in a fog. People are being kind to strangers, holding doors and letting each other get on the subway first. It’s surreal. I toyed for a day or two after the event with making a piece, but couldn’t bring myself to even brainstorm without feeling dirty and crass. I think it needs leaving to the heavyweights. Laurie Anderson played the gig she had scheduled for September 11th. Or maybe it was the day after, I’m not sure. Either way, it was labeled an elegant move, a beautiful decision. I doubt anything I could come up with would be elegant or beautiful, just angry and confused.

  I’ve been thinking a lot about loss, though. About how losing someone steals not only the person, but the memory of the person too. Imagine if you lost someone as suddenly as in the towers, how it would affect your perception of them as a person. The day before you might have been struck by a twenty-year-old memory of something lovely but insignificant while doing the dishes. But the day after, your love is tragic and all you can feel is the loss. All you can remember is their death. I bet not one of those people left behind could conjure a random, happy memory right now. What haunts them is their loved one’s suffering and their own loneliness. How long will it be before they take a moment to smile at the memory of a hand held or a kiss hello?

  This is sounding tragically sentimental, isn’t it? Not like me at all. Perhaps I’m going soft in my old age. I guess it’s this city at the moment. It’s full of pain, but it strikes me everyone feeling sad about losing someone is only capable of that emotion because they had a bond special enough to lose. It seems doubly tragic if they forget that too.

  So don’t forget it, okay? You’re about to create the most intense bond there is. And, as long as you don’t get so bogged down in puke and poop that you forget about me, I truly hope it makes you happy. Maybe we could turn your baby into a piece. I mean, he’ll be your creation, right? (Do you want a girl or a boy?) Allan Kaprow: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct as possible.” There’s nothing more lifelike than pushing a 10lb baby out of your cooch, now is there?

  I’ve started doing these little video projects with my mom. I’m still meditating on those fairy-tale narratives we used to talk about and the expectations they create that are totally inaccessible to most people. We’ve had a difficult time in the past, my mom and I, but she reached out again and, with the world as it is right now, I’m glad I gave her another chance. She’s being weirdly supportive. I put her in front of the camera and she tries anything I ask, doesn’t care if I’m manipulating her or pressing old bruises. Afterward she says she gets it, she understands it’s about the art and she wants me to push myself, to be the best I can be. I think she secretly resented being a housewif
e and giving up her career ambitions for my dad. She moved to be with him and then just ended up hanging out at home with me. She used to paint when I was really little, so maybe me being an artist makes up for her not sticking at it. I remember I used to scream at her that she didn’t “get” me, that she didn’t have any idea who I was and that she was trying to control me. Now I wonder if she’s the only one who truly understands.

  The idea is to get her to act like herself on camera by re-enacting idealized versions of herself as a mother. We’ve started watching all these clichéd films—things like The Sound of Music, Steel Magnolias, Stepmom, Anywhere But Here—anything with a mother figure, anything that might have contributed to the totally saccharine cultural image we have of “MOM.” I’ve had her watching and staging some of the scenes and developing models of self-construction and social interaction, monitoring the relationship between her in front of the camera and me behind it. Even when she’s acting from a script, there’s this very visible subtext of the real person performing for her real daughter, which I find kind of exciting. I want to examine how the fairy-tale narrative we eat up from films has this passive agenda in our real lives, how damaging it is to roll it out in this one-size-fits-all way. I want to highlight and exploit the gaze of the camera (mine and the movie-maker’s) by addressing it directly, turning a private relationship into a public performance, hopefully to create a sense of invited voyeurism.

  I don’t know what I’ll do with the videos, they might end up being research for something else, but this whole mother–daughter thing is so rich, so complex. I hated my mom for years, but now, when it seems we might not have many years left, she’s begun to surprise me. She’s been amazing really; in a weird way, I’m not sure my life would be possible right now without her.

  I hope your baby grows up to feel the same about you. I worry I’m neither selfless nor selfish enough to give everything I have to a child. When you’re a mom, you have to sacrifice all your dreams for theirs and all the world for you and your own. I hope you can do that.

  Am x

  SUNDAY, MAY 6, 2001

  “When we win the lottery,” I said, twisting Marc’s fingers between mine, “we should buy this place and turn it into an arts center.”

  “We don’t even play the lottery,” he said.

  I looked at the side of his face and then back to the building. I pulled my hand from his. “Let’s look inside.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Come on, we’re already late for lunch.” He continued pacing toward town, confident I’d reappear by his side any moment.

  Instead, I pulled at the boards covering one of the ground-floor windows until one came loose at the bottom. I cast a glance around, checking for witnesses, then thrust my right leg through the hole. Finding my footing on the other side, I pulled my torso and head through, my left leg following and the board banging shut behind me. I blinked, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Sucking my bottom lip between my teeth, I tiptoed across the debris-littered floor.

  “Alex!” I heard Marc hiss from outside. He must finally have looked around. “Alex! Get out of there!”

  “You come in,” I said. “It’s amazing.”

  “You’ll get us arrested.”

  “Only if you keep standing there like an idiot. Come on, I want to explore.”

  I heard him mumbling about rotten floorboards, health and safety requirements and our friends waiting for us, but eventually I saw a leg appear through the entrance I’d used, followed by the rest of him.

  “Over here,” I said, thrilled he’d actually followed. “Isn’t it beautiful?” I reached for him through the gloom, placed a kiss on his pursed lips. “Look,” I said, leading him farther inside. “We could make this a theater space and upstairs we’d have artists’ studios. And a kitsch American-style diner over here, with the waiters on roller skates—”

  “Al—” Marc said.

  “No, listen,” I said, unlinking my fingers from his and cutting him off. “Artists would come and stay and work in the diner or whatever for a couple of hours a day to earn their room and food, but the rest of the time they’d just make art. We’d have actors and playwrights and workshops and installations all around the building—anyone could just rock up and try something out. The whole place would have this magical air of experimentation. Naturally, everything would also be brilliant, so the critics would love us and there’d be a waiting list and funding would just pour in…”

  I’d wandered away from Marc, toward the bowels of the building. I navigated an area of missing flooring and wove through a narrow doorway into an even darker room. I stepped toward the far windows, seeking a crack in the boards to peer out on to the river and the path opposite. My heart continued to hammer with the adrenaline of adventure and the excitement of imaginings, even as my brain began to wind down and remind me that I’d never have the millions necessary to do anything like that and, anyway, York was not exactly renowned for being on the cutting edge of anything. I thought about Fran and Ollie waiting for us at the restaurant. I thought about our flat and the letter that had been sitting on the dining table since Monday morning. I thought about my mum’s thick handwriting. About the slim chance of her being sober when she’d written it. About her apologies and pleas and how even after everything a part of me still wanted to believe them. I thought about the phrase she’d used, so medical and detached, yet impossible to read without a flood of emotion. About what it must have been like to write those words to the daughter who hated her. About the uneasy feeling that I may have inherited more than her cheekbones and hair color.

  Early-onset Alzheimer’s.

  Turning back to the derelict room, I was temporarily blinded.

  “Marc?” I said.

  “I’m here,” he replied from the darkness.

  I heard him step toward me, imagined him drawn by the silent code of my heart and the secret language of husband and wife. Then I heard a thud and the tumble of limbs.

  “Shit!” he shouted.

  “Marc!” I raced back into the other room, grabbing the splintered door frame to steady myself around the missing flooring. Marc was on the ground by one shadowy wall, a string of swear words tumbling from his mouth.

  “Shit, are you okay?”

  “Do I look fucking okay?” he yelled. “I think I caught my arm on a nail. I’m bleeding.”

  “Oh God, what do we do?”

  “It’s okay,” he said, his voice calmer but strained with pain. “Just, uh, I need to put pressure—”

  “Yes,” I said, adrenaline kicking in, realizing my role. I tried to remember the first aid course work had sent me on. I shrugged off my jacket, but it was all zips and pockets. I pulled off my T-shirt and knelt beside him in the gloom. He held up his arm for me. Palm to elbow was wet and black. “Fuck, there’s so much blood.”

  “What not to say when giving first aid,” Marc said weakly.

  “Sorry.” I pressed my T-shirt to his skin. “I can’t see. We need to get you out of here. I think we need to go to hospital.”

  Marc groaned, but managed to lean on me with his other arm and stumble to his feet.

  “Keep it elevated,” I said as we picked our way back to the window. I pulled at the boards and got two fully loose so Marc could climb out a little more gracefully than we’d entered. Outside, I took his arm and inspected the gash. It was deep, running from the knuckle of his little finger all the way down the side of his wrist. I pressed my bloodied T-shirt more firmly to the wound, placed Marc’s good hand over it to hold it there. “Should we call an ambulance?” I said.

  Marc shook his head. His face was pale. “Let’s just get a taxi,” he said. Then he attempted a smile. “You can’t go like that, though.”

  I looked down at myself. I was standing in the middle of the pavement in my bra, Marc’s blood smeared on my skin. I could have burst
into tears, but instead I started to laugh and Marc did too. I looked at my husband, holding both his arms above his head like an ungainly dancer. I thought of my jacket abandoned in the gloom, of Marc’s DNA dripped on the dusty floorboards, of how mad Fran must be growing waiting for us. I thought of the cocktail of genes my parents had shaken to create exactly me, and the equally baffling genetic accident that had formed the exact man before me. I thought of the natures and nurtures and the flows of fate that had brought us to this exact moment together, yet the strange unknowns of our future.

  “Marc?” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “I think I want to have a baby.”

  Two Months Gone

  Marc phoned Dorset once more. Caitlin answered, said he was lucky to catch her, she was sorting through my mum’s things. He tried to picture the house I’d described, wondered what would happen to its contents. The first time I visited after the diagnosis, I got back on the train after only a few hours in her company. We’d tried to sit in a café, neutral territory, but found ourselves sniping at each other, each waiting for apologies the other wasn’t willing to give. Eventually she’d burst into tears. I’d stared at her, wondering what right this woman had to cry. Then I’d grabbed my bag and left her there, making my peace on the journey home with the idea that I’d lost my mother a long time ago, that I was already an orphan. But she persisted. She wrote to me, again and again, finally saying the words I’d waited almost a lifetime to hear. I wrote back and, eventually, against Marc’s advice, we tried again. We spent a weekend walking the cliffs and sobbing. Nothing was resolved or forgiven, I told Marc, but she was finally sober and I’d agreed to return. On my next visits, I told him, we spent time making food and watching films, neither discussing nor quite ignoring the hurt between us.