by Jenny Offill
It is during this period that people burn their houses down. At first the flames are beautiful to see. But later when the fog wears off, they come back to find only ashes.
“What are you reading about?” the husband asks her from across the room. “Weather,” she tells him.
26
People keep flirting with the wife. Has this been happening all along and she never noticed? Or is it new? She’s like a taxi whose light just went on. All these men standing in the street, waving her over.
I CAN HAS BOYFRIEND?
She falls in love with a friend. She falls in love with a student. She falls in love with the bodega man. He hands her back her change so gently.
Floating, yes, floating away. How can he sleep? Doesn’t he feel her levitating?
I will leave you, my love. Already I am going. Already I watch you speaking as if from a great height. Already the feel of your hand on my hand, of your lips on my lips, is only curious. It is decided then. The stars are accelerating. I half remember a sky could look like this. I saw it once when she was born. I saw it once when I got sick. I thought you’d have to die before I saw it again. I thought one of us would have to die. But look, here it is! Who will help me? Who can help me? Rilke? Rilke! If you’re listening, come quickly. Lash me to this bed! Bind me to this earthly body! If you hear this, come now! I am untethering. Who can hold me?
What John Berryman said: Goodbye, sir, & fare well. You’re in the clear.
These bits of poetry that stick to her like burrs.
Lately, the wife has been thinking about God, in whom the husband no longer believes. The wife has an idea to meet her ex-boyfriend at the park. Maybe they could talk about God. Then make out. Then talk about God again.
She tells the yoga teacher that she is trying to be honorable. Honorable! Such an old-fashioned word, she thinks. Ridiculous, ridiculous.
“Yes, be honorable,” the yoga teacher says.
Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip and then a giant lobster followed him around for the rest of his days.
Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friend calls it.
So she invents allergies to explain her red eyes and migraines to explain the blinked-back look of pain. One day, coming out of their building, she staggers a little from the exhaustion of all of it. Her elderly neighbor comes over, touches her sleeve. “Are you okay, dear?” he asks. Carefully, politely, she shakes him off of her.
Sometimes when the wife is trying to do positions, the yoga teacher will single her out for instruction. The wife can’t help but notice that she never has to correct other students in this particular way.
Do not instruct the head! The head is not being instructed!
How has she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.
27
He sent the girl a love letter over the radio. Later, the wife sees his playlist from that night. It is from the night before she went out of town. The night before it first happened. She listens to the songs he played one by one, ticking each of them off the list.
Afterwards, the wife sits on the toilet for a long time because her stomach is twisting. She feels something rising in her throat and spits into her daughter’s pink plastic bucket. Just a little bile. She dry-heaves again, but nothing. The longer she sits there, the more she notices how dingy and dirty the bathroom is. There is a tangle of hair on the side of the sink, some kind of creeping mildew on the shower curtain. Their towels are no longer white and are fraying along the edges. Her underwear too is dinged nearly gray. The elastic is coming out a little. Who would wear such a thing? What kind of repulsive creature? She takes her underwear off and wraps it around and around in toilet paper, then puts it in the bottom of the trash where no one will see.
When you pick up one piece of dust, the entire world comes with it.
“I am alone,” her student says. “Everyone is tired of this. No one will come anymore.” But Lia is only twenty-four. She is beautiful and brilliant. There are so many more years when people will come.
Your friends and students adore you.
The wife loses a twenty-dollar bill somewhere between the store and home, but she can’t make herself go back to look for it. In the last store, the clerk was unkind to her or at least not kind.
I only wanted you to adore me.
28
She goes to visit Lia in a hospital in Westchester. Her wrists are bandaged but her eyes have a little light in them. “Thank you for coming,” she says formally, as if she is in a receiving line at a wedding.
The wife has been teaching for twenty years. It is not the first time she’s been at the bedside of someone with bandaged wrists.
She brings Lia a notebook, spiral-bound. But they won’t let her take it. No wire, they say. She should have thought of that. Lia called her right before the lights went out. There’s that moment, you know, for most people, where you decide you want to wake up in the world one more day.
Everyone there won’t do something. There is a small flock of dull-eyed girls who hate to eat, who hide measuring spoons in their coats and leave clumps of hair in the sink, and then there are the ones who never answer questions no matter how many different ways you ask them. Sleep is the thing Lia won’t do. She never sleeps unless they drug her. But she never rings the call button in the middle of the night either. “I just wait for first light,” she says. “I watch the window.”
This is how the wife gets through the nights too, but she doesn’t tell her this.
Lia was legally dead for one minute but she said she didn’t see anything, that there was only darkness and a low hum like a vacuum cleaner running.
Now the wife is sitting with her on a porch, looking at the trees. There are trees everywhere you look at this place. Someone, long ago, must have believed that trees could solve anything. The other patients take turns blowing bubbles from a small container because they are not allowed to smoke or drink here. “The great green earth,” Lia calls it, but not as a joke, more like it breaks her heart to say it. “Stay,” the wife tells her. “Just stay.”
29
Enough already with the terrible hunted eyes of the married people. Did everyone always look this way but she is just now seeing it?
Case in point: The wife runs into C at a party, a brilliant woman married to a brilliant man. She has just had a show at a major gallery. Her husband is in the MoMA permanent collection. Brilliant, brilliant. But C does not talk to the wife about brilliant things. She talks about her dissembling contractor, about spa treatments, about waiting lists for private kindergarten. Later the husband asks, “Oh, you saw C, how was she?” “She was radiating rage,” the wife says.
If only they were French, the wife thinks. This would all feel different. But no, feel isn’t the word exactly. What is it that the grad students say?
Signify.
It would all signify differently.
General notes: If the wife becomes unwived, what should she be called? Will the story have to be rewritten? There is a time between being a wife and being a divorcée, but no good word for it. Maybe say what a politician might say. Stateless person. Yes, stateless.
Either way it’s going to be terrible for a long time, the shrink says.
Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad. K tells the wife the story of a childhood friend who wears too much makeup now, who seems always to be sweating. This friend asked if she could come and cook a meal for K and her husband at their housewarming party. “No, no, just bring yourself,” she said. “We have everything.” The
woman arrived at the party, sweating, carrying a bag of kale and raw meat.
The wife is afraid. She is afraid again in the old way. She’d thought it was done. Until he died. (“If he died,” she almost said. “If” she loved him so much she contrived to say.) She did say “loved,” she noticed.
“Tense! Tense!” the wife has always said to her students, trying to explain that it matters, that it illuminates things.
They used to send each other letters. The return address was always the same: Dept. of Speculation.
All of the letters are still in their house; he has a box of them on his desk, as does she.
“I just feel …,” she says. The shrink cuts her off. “I know, I know, everyone always knows exactly what you feel, don’t they?”
“What about me?” Her daughter likes to ask this whenever the conversation veers out of her comprehension. “What about me?” A chip off the old block, the wife thinks.
The wife has taken to laughing maniacally when the husband says something, then repeating the word back incredulously.
Nice????
Fun????
She has seen this rhetorical strategy used before by a soon-to-be ex-wife talking to her soon-to-be ex-husband. Poor creature, she thought then.
30
The undergrads get the suicide jokes, but the ones about divorce go right over their heads.
You’re a truth bomb, a cute guy said to her once at a party. Before excusing himself to go flirt with someone else.
Q. Why couldn’t the Buddhist vacuum in corners?
A. Because she had no attachments.
The wife is advised to read a horribly titled adultery book. She takes the subway three neighborhoods away to buy it. The whole experience of reading it makes her feel compromised, and she hides it around the house with the fervor another might use to hide a gun or a kilo of heroin. In the book, he is referred to as the participating partner and she as the hurt one. There are many other icky things, but there is one thing in the book that makes her laugh out loud. It is in a footnote about the way different cultures handle repairing a marriage after an affair.
In America, the participating partner is likely to spend an average of 1,000 hours processing the incident with the hurt partner. This cannot be rushed.
When she reads this, the wife feels very very sorry for the husband.
Who is only about 515 hours in.
31
In Epirus, there is a kind of spider called “the sunless one.” The Cypriots called the viper “the deaf one.” The idea was to give such dangerous creatures a sort of code name, one that is calculated to leave them unaware that they have been mentioned. The fear was that to mention such a creature was to cause it to appear.
Her sister has a deal with her husband. Whatever happens, keep it like in the fifties. Not one word ever. Make sure she’s a nobody.
Towards the end, the baby hadn’t been growing quite as she should be and so once a week the doctors had the wife come in to be tested. She’d sit in a recliner, hooked up to the machines, waiting to hear the heartbeat. Each time, the wife feared she wouldn’t hear it, but then there it would be, a sound like horses galloping. The way he looked at her when they heard it. It seemed impossible to feel more than they did.
Always always, he wrote in the book he gave the wife last Christmas.
The sunless one? The deaf one? The cubicled one?
The wife gets an expensive haircut. She shops for something to wear to the husband’s office. She is going to meet him there for lunch; they have decided to try this. This civilized French-seeming thing. In the end, the wife buys only a pair of boots and takes them home without even trying them on. Later, she opens the box and looks at them. The heels are higher than she usually wears. They look uncomfortable. So why does she want to wear uncomfortable shoes on this the most uncomfortable of all days?
Oh, right, she thinks. Evolution.
BECAUSE I AM A BIGGER BIRD THAN YOU!
She wears her black sneakers and jeans and a shirt someone cool once said was cool.
32
She would not have let one of her students write the scene this way. Not with the pouring rain and the wife’s broken umbrella and the girl in her long black coat. To begin with, she’d suggest taking out the first scene on the subway, the boring one, where the wife pretends to be a Buddhist. (I am a person, she is a person, I am a person, she is a person etc. etc.) Needed? Can this be shown through gesture?
She would ask for more details of the girl’s appearance. She’d cut the implausible handshake and point out how stilted the dialogue is. (You have caused my family great pain. I don’t want to be an abstraction to you anymore.) She might pencil in the girl crying or saying some small thing. Surely she feels something? Wasn’t there hand-wringing? She’d slow down the moment before the girl turns on her heel without a word and leaves them. Nothing else here?
She’d point out that what’s interesting is actually the lead-up to the scene. How the wife takes a picture of herself before she leaves the house, how she looks somehow as if she is standing in a wind tunnel, how the husband calls her just as she gets off the subway and says, “Don’t come here. A change of plans. I’ll meet you outside.” The husband says he couldn’t help it; he told the girl she was stopping by. “She’ll come out here instead,” he says. But the girl doesn’t do it. She stays and hides in the office. Perhaps a bit more about how the wife feels? How she feels something she’s never felt before surge through her body, how she stands on a corner in Midtown at one in the afternoon, kicking a newspaper machine, screaming, “You fucked a child! She’s a fucking child! Tell her to come out here!” This is very emotionally charged, she’d write next to the moment when the husband calls the girl and softly tries to convince her. Softly saying, just come, please, so tender his voice, so sorry to cause the girl pain, and all because of the scene his crazy wife is making, his wife yelling in the background. Yelling and yelling. Then the wife stops yelling and says slowly and clearly to the husband, “Tell her if she doesn’t come, I’ll come to her job, and if she quits this job, I’ll come to her apartment and if she leaves that apartment, I’ll come to her new one. Tell her I’ll find her. Tell her I’m great at research. Tell her I’m fucking great at it. I’ll fucking find her one way or another.” People avert their eyes as they pass. “Just come out,” he says. “Please? Please? It’s going to happen sometime.”
It is raining harder now. They are getting drenched. “Ten minutes!” the wife screams in the background. “Ten fucking minutes! That’s all I want!” His wife who has hardly ever yelled at him and never in public. It’s important to note the POV switch here. The wife notices that her foot hurts from kicking the newspaper machine. She wonders if she’s broken it. Add a pause here. A little beat before the action continues. The husband hangs up the phone. His hands are shaking. “She’s coming,” he says. “She’ll be here in a bit.”
But it’s a long time still. They stand on the designated corner. There is, of course, the theatrical rain. The wife knows which direction the girl will be coming from and she thinks that she should stand back in the doorway, that it would be kinder that way, because it will be hard for this girl to walk towards her. So she lets her husband stand out there in the street and then when she knows the girl has come from the look on his face she steps out and greets her in the rain. The girl is shorter than she expected. Long red hair. Glasses, fashion-forward ones. She stands there shaking. With fear, the wife thinks. Or no, something else maybe. The girl stands there rigidly as the wife speaks. Then the moment the words stop she turns and walks away.
The husband and wife walk in the other direction. It is a block before they speak. “She has pretty eyes,” the wife says. They walk towards a bar, prearranged. He holds the door open for her. “Wait, did she have bangs?”
33
“Haven’t you punished us enough?” the husband says a few days later. Us? the wife thinks. Did he say us? Holy shit.
She learns so
mething new, something that sends a chill through her. The girl made him go for a walk with her the next day. Correction—he went on a walk with the girl the next day.
The husband doesn’t volunteer this. Like every detail it is eked out of him in the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings. “She was furious,” he explains. “She felt ambushed.”
Sorry, the wife thinks of saying. Sorry, sorry.
But that night, in the taxi, she does not concern herself with his voice, which is low and grievous, but only with the position of the moon in the sky. How she can make it disappear with one small movement of her thumb.
Hahahahahahayoustupidcunthahahahahaha
“Am I winking?” the daughter asks them when they get home. One of her eyes is closed, the other twitching.
“Not quite,” he says.
“Now? Now?”
Two Jokes
1. A man is standing on the bank of a river when it suddenly begins to flood. His wife and his mistress are both being swept away. Who should he save?
His wife. (Because his mistress will always understand.)
2. A man is standing on the bank of a river when it suddenly begins to flood. His wife and his mistress are both being swept away. Who should he save?
