The Senator's Wife

by Sue Miller

  Carrying her bag on the way home in the misty rain, she was thinking of her reflection under the lights in the dressing room—her pale, stippled flesh. Flesh that looked corrupt, she thought.

  Corruption, that was the word for what was happening to her. She'd entered the biological procession, the one that ends in total corruption. She'd been claimed, by time. By birth and death. She'd been changed.

  But this was what happened. This was what women did. She thought of the mothers she'd known. Her own. Nathan's. Lou. Delia. Several of her friends. They'd all had to give up some sense of themselves as inviolably who they were, physically. They'd all had to learn to watch their bodies change in ways they had no control over. To learn to share their bodies with the stranger taking shape inside them. Why should she be any different? If her mother—mute, incapacitated before the complications of life—could manage this, surely she could.

  She tried to imagine her mother, pregnant. Had she been afraid? Had she been as reluctant as Meri was? Certainly she had said, more than once, “I wish I never had you kids.”

  Meri thought of the crying little boy, of the anger she had expected his mother to feel. Maybe her difficulty with all this was her own history, her past reaching into her present to claim her. Her life becoming in this way like her mother's too.

  She couldn't let that happen. She would do better than that. She absolutely had to do better.

  AT THE OFFICE PARTY, of course, everyone was dressed as usual. Only Shirley, one of the producers, had any sense of style anyway, and this usually consisted in some scarf draped around her neck, or long, dangly earrings. In early September, it's true, she'd often sported strappy little high-heeled sandals, but now, like everyone else, she wore boots—boots and jeans and big sweaters. They all looked like those New Yorker cartoons by Koren, Meri thought, hairy and fuzzy and funky. Of course, she reminded herself, she did too.

  To call it a party, as Brian had pointed out when they divided up preparation chores the day before, might have been an exaggeration. “It's going to be, like, a regular meeting, but with alcohol.” And as the afternoon meeting was coming to an end, James carried in a large cardboard box with three cold bottles of champagne and a bag of plastic glasses. He popped open one of the bottles and started around the table with it.

  Should she have a glass?

  Here, among her coworkers, she wanted to be in the party, of the party. She thought of Delia, of Delia telling her how she drank through her pregnancies. She'd take that as her permission for tonight, she decided. She held up her glass as James passed behind her. But she was still self-conscious enough to feel a need to explain herself. “This will be my fourth drink since I got pregnant,” she confided to Burt Hall, who was sitting next to her at the conference table. And then, remembering, “Oh wait, maybe my fifth. Or sixth. Or tenth. But that was because I had some before I knew I was pregnant.”

  “Is that a big deal?” he asked. Burt was a geek, tall and much too skinny. Nerdy. Sometimes he forgot and wore his bicycle clips around his ankles all day. Now, sitting next to her, he was concentrating so hard on unwrapping a tube of goat cheese that he didn't look at her when he spoke. He'd pierced the outer layer of plastic with a ballpoint pen, and he was trying to pull this covering back. The cheese was blue where the pen had gone in, and his fingers were covered with white goo.

  “Well, the doctor was dire about it,” Meri said. “But I think the rule was constructed for people who drink like fish.” The champagne fumed in her glass, tasted sour and sweet at once.

  “Who are breathing, actually,” Brian said above them. He reached over their heads to set down a paper plate with crackers arranged carefully around the rim.

  “Did you do that?” Natalie asked. “So pretty.”

  “Who?” Burt asked, looking around. “Who are breathing?”

  “We're all breathing, Burt,” Shirley said. “You too.”

  “Fish,” Brian answered, taking his seat at the table. “When fish are drinking, they're actually breathing.”

  “Well, thus the metaphor, I suppose,” Meri said. The champagne was so cold her nose ached with each sip.

  Meri had had two stories on the show today, both holiday related. One was on unsafe toys, the other on a lawsuit brought by a local atheist who objected to the town crèche and menorah. He was a phoner, as they called them. Both pieces had gone well, and she felt lighthearted. She loved her work. She loved her colleagues. This was the best party of the season, she decided preemptively.

  Jane had started in on suicide by drowning—which famous people had done it. Meri pointed out its delicious ambiguity, since you couldn't ever know for sure whether it was intentional or not. They all speculated on Natalie Wood.

  “I bet it isn't as bad as you'd think,” Jane said. “The only really hard part is that first long inhalation of water.”

  “How would you know anything at all about this?” Meri asked.

  “I read it.”

  Brian laughed, and Shirley smiled at him and said, “Oh, well, then it must be so.”

  “You know,” he said, “I read somewhere that there are more suicides at Christmas or around the holidays than any other time of year. If that's true, that might be a story we could check out.” The cork exploded from the second bottle.

  “This is not cheerful talk for our party,” Shirley said. “It's Christmas. Let's have some Christmas cheer.”

  “Christmas. Big deal,” James said. “I'll be sitting home with my roomie.”

  They talked about plans for Christmas. They talked about the day's show. Brian told several Jesus jokes. “How seasonal,” Jane said, inflecting it oddly. They started to talk again about tomorrow's show, but James made them stop. “The meeting is over, folks. No more planning.”

  Someone poured Meri another glass, and she drank it, more quickly this time, while the conversation meandered. She felt a little dizzy, actually. How could she be? How could she be tipsy?

  She leaned over and said to Jane, “How could I be tipsy?”

  “Easy. You're unacclimated to drink.” Jane said this so slowly and incorrectly—nun-acclimated—that it struck Meri that she might be tipsy too.

  “What have you eaten today?” Jane asked.

  Meri pondered it. Not much. Since she'd stopped feeling nauseated all the time, she'd stopped eating crackers all the time too. And though in her joy at beginning to be able to eat normally again she had sometimes put away vast quantities at meals, she also sometimes forgot to eat at all when she was busy, and she'd been busy today. She took a cracker and asked Shirley to pass the plate of inky cheese.

  At a point slightly later, the first person got up to leave. Meri began to help Natalie and James pick up glasses and debris. Then they were all putting on coats, wishing one another a good weekend. Meri had a sense of munificence, blessing. How kind they were, these friends of hers.

  Outside, they called good-bye into the chilly night. James offered Meri a ride, but she said no, she wanted to walk.

  She started across the dark campus, her breath pluming in front of her. She strode rapidly down the walkways, then across the road and past all the shop windows on Main Street, and finally, down the shadowy length of Dumbarton Street. She felt better, stronger, as she went along. By the time she got home, she had warmed up and she was sober.

  Nathan wasn't back from work yet. She went upstairs to brush her teeth, to find her polar-fleece socks. She came back down to the kitchen. When she turned on the light and saw herself in the glass, she was startled for a second or two by her reflection—for the last few hours, she realized with surprise, she hadn't thought of herself as pregnant.

  “DON'T YOU HAVE something that makes you look less like . . . Barney?”

  Meri paused, putting the coat on over her fuchsia blouse. This didn't seem to be an attempt at a joke, which she could perhaps have rolled with. She looked at Nathan, so perfect, so beautiful in his tweed winter coat—so very unpregnant—and felt a pinch of anger. “The shor
t answer is no,” she said.

  As they were getting into the car, Nathan said, “What's the long answer?”

  “It's a little more ad hominem. I don't think you want to hear it.”

  They sat silently as he drove. Meri was waiting for him to apologize. Maybe he was waiting for her to apologize. They were going to the dean's party, held in her house, one of the nineteenth-century frame mansions lined up across the street from the campus.

  When the door opened, they were assaulted by the sound, the general hubbub. A student wearing a white shirt and black slacks pointed them to the back of the room-size entrance hall, where their coats were taken from them by another student, also wearing a white shirt and black slacks; and Nathan was given a numbered chip, which he pocketed.

  They headed to the bar, in one of the two facing parlors on opposite sides of the hall. As they hitched their way through the clots of people, Meri put her hands on her belly so it wouldn't get bumped. All around them, people were greeting one another with pleasure, standing in little groups, catching up, gossiping. Nathan knew some of them—people spoke to him, and from time to time they paused to talk and he introduced Meri. As she stood, smiling and nodding, Meri took in the spacious, comfortable room. The lamps gave off a gentle light, and in its glow everyone looked pretty and well. There were groupings of large, soft chairs and couches everywhere, and paintings—modern, vivid, well lighted—hung on the walls. It was impossible to imagine this as a home, the scale of everything was so immense, the taste so impeccable and impersonal.

  Meri got her Perrier and slipped away from Nathan, who was talking to a colleague of his who looked just like Danny DeVito, but bigger. She moved her immense blouse around, standing at the edges of groups, waiting to be recognized as a stranger, to introduce herself. And people were kind. They turned to her, they asked her about herself. Mostly, though, Meri listened. She listened to the jokes they were in the middle of telling, to the long stories—about trying to get on a bus in New York City with a cello, about waiting in Ecuador for months to adopt a child.

  She was waylaid several times by Nathan, who had forgotten she was supposed to be angry at him and wanted to introduce her to someone or other; and twice more by women she'd met at earlier parties. One of them, a young colleague of Nathan's, tried to recruit Meri for a departmental baseball team in the late spring. “You'll have the kid before the season starts, right?” she asked.

  Meri crossed the hall to the parlor on the other side of it. She moved around, offering her opinion on various things she'd never thought about before. A man no younger than she was got up and gave his seat to her, and she took it and was suddenly part of a group of people discussing Bill Clinton and his sex life. At a certain point in this discussion, just after the woman next to her said, “I hear that the man is in thrall to his own prick,” Meri realized that she needed to pee. As usual. And, abruptly, that she was tired too. She wanted to go home. They'd been here for almost two hours, and Nathan had promised they'd stay for only one. She got up to find him.

  The crowd had thinned a little now—others had also counted on less than two hours—and she walked more easily through the room she'd been in and out into the hall—and there he was, his back to her, leaned against the arched opening to the opposite parlor, easy to spot because of his height, because of his wild hair.

  The hall was crowded, though—people out here were getting coats and taking their leave—so Meri had to thread her way across it. She could see that the woman facing Nathan, talking to him, an older woman in a green dress, was a person from the department—she'd met her before, but she couldn't remember her name. She had a drink and a napkin in one hand, and she was looking up at Nathan and listening intently to what he was saying.

  It was something—Meri was so close she could hear him now—about rolling with the punches.

  What punches?

  “It's no one's fault, of course,” he said. “Or it's both of our faults.” He gestured with his drink. “But it's a disaster for me with this book. The timing couldn't have been worse. It's due at the end of the summer, and of course the baby's coming at the beginning.”

  The woman started to ask him some question about his progress, but Meri was turning away, moving back toward the other room. She could feel her throat tightening. She willed her face to be normal.

  In the opposite parlor, she stood silently, her back to the noisy room, facing out the dean's windows toward the white wooden chapel across the street, gleaming in the spotlights trained on it. Its steeple pierced the black sky. She was telling herself that this was not news, that she'd known that Nathan felt this way. He'd as much as said this very thing to her, and she'd as much as said it to others—that it was bad timing. For him. For her too. Maybe she had actually said this exact thing.

  Why shouldn't he be allowed to say it? Why shouldn't he be allowed to speak to a friend about his reluctance, his ambivalence?

  He should, she thought.

  But another, more lost part of her was thinking, He shouldn't. He just shouldn't.

  OCCASIONALLY, mostly in the evenings when she was making dinner, Meri had heard a noise from the other side of the wall, from Delia's life now that she was back—the sound of something dropped on the floor. The running of water, and then the little thump! in the pipes that happened when the water was turned off. The almost inaudible murmur of a radio voice, inhumanly steady.

  Tonight as she was standing at the sink, she was startled to immobility for a moment by the faint sound of a deep voice, a male voice, talking, and then, a few seconds later, the softer female response. These were the first voices that she'd ever heard from that side of the wall, Delia had been so solitary when she was home.

  It had to be Tom Naughton—Delia had said he was coming “for a quick visit,” and she'd invited them for drinks the next night to meet him. Meri had somehow assumed—hadn't Delia even suggested it?—that Tom wouldn't arrive until then. But here he was, apparently.

  The voices alternated lazily, almost inaudibly, on the other side of the wall, and Meri turned the radio on—doom and gloom from NPR—so she couldn't hear them. As she moved around the kitchen getting supper ready, it dawned on her that their own lives, hers and Nathan's, must always have been audible to Delia in her kitchen at this same dim, distanced level.

  When Nathan came home, she turned the radio off before she kissed him, before she held her finger to his lips. Before she said, “Shhh. Listen.” They stood there in a loose embrace, Nathan frowning in concentration, and then they could just hear a man's laugh.

  “That's your senator, I'm pretty sure,” Meri said. “Tom Naughton, in the flesh at last.”

  Throughout the meal they continued to hear from time to time a voice, a laugh on the other side of the wall.

  “You know what it means that we hear them as much as we do?” Meri said. They were doing the dishes. She was drying. Because she was pregnant, she always got to dry. Nathan was the one washing, the one bent uncomfortably over the low sink.

  “I'm afraid I do.” He looked up at her sideways and made a face.

  “It means she's had the odd earful ever since we moved in.”

  “It means that, unbeknownst to us, we've been leading a rather public life, wouldn't you say?”

  “One little old lady is hardly the public.” He handed her a dripping plate. “But maybe we should learn to live our life more quietly anyway. It'd be a good exercise for us to learn restraint.”

  “Never my forte,” she said as she wiped the plate.

  “Do tell.”

  “Hey!” She swatted him with her damp towel.

  He smiled up at her from under the thatch of hair hanging over his forehead. “Mine either, I know.”

  They began to speculate about what Delia might have had to listen to, calling up the possibilities as they remembered them. The one or two loud arguments they'd had. The night Meri came down to the kitchen in despair about something or other and wept loudly until Nathan came down too
, to talk to her, to bring her back to bed.

  “But that was really late. Delia was probably in bed already.”

  “Sound asleep, we can hope.”

  Both of them were quiet at their tasks for a moment. Then Meri said, “You know, actually, I think she might have been gone then. She was gone for a lot of all of this, when you think about it. I think she was in Paris then.”

  They remembered the night they'd put on music, loud, and danced barefoot in the living room until they were both damp with sweat. It was before they knew Meri was pregnant, when there were still unpacked boxes in the living room—boxes they moved around, incorporating them into the dance. That one Delia had definitely heard.

  THE SENATOR himself opened the door and announced to them that they must be Nathan and Meri. His voice was strangely light for a man his size, Meri thought, light and dry, a little parched-sounding. He was taller than Nathan, though slightly stooped. He had a strong nose, a little flattened at the bridge—it had been broken at some time in his life. Meri liked that. His mouth was small and amused, almost smirky, his hair was as white as Delia's. He had tangled white eyebrows over deep-set pale eyes—grayish, greenish. He was wearing a suit and tie, a very expensive suit and tie. Meri felt both dazzled by the warmth he brought to simply saying hello—he gripped her hand in both of his when he greeted her, he stared deeply into her eyes—and embarrassed for her frumpy self. She was back to one of her uniforms: the corduroy maternity pants and a big wool sweater of Nathan's.

  Tom Naughton turned to Nathan and gripped his hand in the same way. Nathan said, “I would have known you anywhere, sir.”

  She might not have, Meri thought, though he did look like the man in the Watergate photo, only older, thinner, a little frailer, maybe. But she would have known he was someone important no matter what—he had that air.