Dept. Of Speculation

by Jenny Offill

  His mistress. (Because his wife will never understand.)

  34

  The wife is reading Civilization and Its Discontents, but she keeps getting lost in the index.

  Analogies

  bare leg on a cold night, 40

  cautious businessman, 34

  guest who becomes a permanent lodger, 53

  Polar expedition, ill equipped, 98

  When she tells people she might move to the country, they say, “But aren’t you afraid you’re going to get lonely?”

  Get?

  Imaging studies have found that the pain involved in romantic breakups is not just emotional. Similar areas to the ones that process physical assault light up in the brains of the recently jilted.

  What John Berryman said: I’m too alone. I see no end. If we could all run, even that would be better.

  At night, they lie in bed holding hands. It is possible if she is stealthy enough that the wife can do this while secretly giving the husband the finger.

  Grow old with me. The best is yet to be, say the cards in the anniversary section.

  But there are other lines from Yeats the wife keeps remembering.

  Consume my heart away; sick with desire

  And fastened to a dying animal

  Things fall apart.

  “The girl had red hair,” the wife tells her sister. “The same color I used to dye mine.”

  The wife stopped dyeing her hair when she got pregnant. (Because of the monster babies with no hands that the vain hair-dyeing women have.) But she never went back to it and for years now her hair has been streaked with gray.

  Spell for invocation of divorce: Greener! Greener!

  Sometimes she talks to the husband in her head. You think I don’t know. I know. Once I was sleeping next to that boy and a mouse ran through my hair, but I didn’t move. I didn’t want to risk him getting out of bed.

  The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)

  I was hoping your happiest memory might include me.

  Later the wife realizes what that was, why he placed that special emphasis on each word of the sentence.

  Ladies and Gentlemen, the prosecution rests.

  In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations that contradict prior beliefs.

  “You’ve made me into a cartoon wife,” she tells him. “I am not a cartoon wife.”

  The Buddha named his son Rahula, which means “fetter.”

  The Buddha left his wife when his son was two days old. He would never have attained enlightenment if he’d stayed, scholars say.

  As for us, our days are like grass.

  “We don’t know, but the cards know,” her daughter says when they are playing a game later.

  Are you going to leave him? Is he going to leave you? Do you think you’ll make it?

  It is her married friends that ask these questions. The single ones don’t. They think it’s simpler. Sometimes the wife cries. Sometimes she shrugs.

  The cards know.

  35

  The wife has never not wanted to be married to him. This sounds false but it is true.

  She has wanted to sleep with other people, of course. One or two in particular. But the truth is she has good impulse control. That is why she isn’t dead. Also why she became a writer instead of a heroin addict. She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts. A character flaw, not a virtue.

  Do you have a secret life? This is what she asks all her friends. Hardly any of the other writers do. But a few people avert their eyes before answering. No, they say. Either that or they tell her everything.

  She has never had a secret life. But after all of this, she does a little. But the secret part seems too small to tell anyone who might be a true secret lifer.

  Like how two guys are sending her music, how she is taking yoga, how she has borrowed $400 from the philosopher that she keeps hidden in an envelope in the closet, how she has received but not cashed her royalties check.

  “Sometimes I think of revenge,” she tells him. He winces. “What would that look like?”

  In Africa, they tied the couple together and threw them into a river of crocodiles.

  In ancient Greece, the punishment was a root vegetable inserted into the anus.

  In France, the woman was made to chase a chicken through the streets naked.

  Door #3?

  How did you meet? Go back to the beginning.

  This is what the worksheet in the adultery book says.

  It will be a long time before one of the Voyagers will encounter another star. And even then it won’t come very close. There is a red dwarf star called Ross 248. In 40,000 years, Voyager 2 will come within 1.7 light-years of it, still far enough away that it will seem like no more than a dot of light. Astronomers say that if you looked at it through the porthole of Voyager 2, it would seem to slowly brighten over the millennia, then slowly dim for many more.

  There is one thing the wife tells the philosopher which she isn’t sure anyone else will understand. If she tells it to someone else, they might think she is being self-deprecating. But she isn’t being self-deprecating. She is being religious. The thing is this: Even if the husband leaves her in this awful craven way, she will still have to count it as a miracle, all of those happy years she spent with him. “It was a fucking miracle that I found him,” she tells the philosopher. “A fucking miracle. Past tense.” They are sitting cross-legged on the floor like they used to in their dorm rooms. “I think I was afraid to go all in,” she says.

  “Because all in is terrifying. With all in, you lose everything.” He nods and suddenly they are both crying a little.

  He calls her up later. “Get him up to the country. You can leave him in six months if you want, but get him out of here.”

  The adultery book says it’s unwise to make any big moves in the aftermath of such an event. There is, unfortunately, no geographical cure.

  Bullshit, her sister says.

  She goes to visit her and writes the husband a letter from London. She isn’t sure if she should use the old return address, but then at the last minute she pencils it in. She is after all, speculating.

  Dear Husband,

  Forget the city. There is nothing for us anymore. The birds are leaving even. I saw two pigeons on the runway when my plane took off yesterday.

  She’ll leave the city to her students, the ones whose shoes are held together by electrical tape, the ones who tear up at the sight of discarded umbrellas, the ones who buy the inscrutable Russian candy and the halal goat meat. Just last week, one was outside her office memorizing all the categories of clouds (in case this proved necessary).

  “What is the worst thing that ever happened to him?” her sister asks her. And the answer is nothing ever has.

  “That’s the problem,” she says. “He’s just a nice boy from Ohio. He has no idea how to fix something like this.”

  There is a pause and the wife thinks they are both wondering what it would be like to grow up like that. Their mother died when they were young. Their father was elsewhere. What would it be like to make it so late into life before trouble hit? To always have someone on the front porch, calling you to dinner? The husband doesn’t have even a touch of this raised-by-wolvesness.

  But the girl does, she bets. Something in her past that makes her want to tear things to shreds.

  Is it possible there is some alternate universe in which the wife and the girl would be friends? She has heard such stories before from her grad students, of the sad-seeming married man, of the unkind wife, of the “all I did was send him music” variety.

  She imagines having lunch with her and hearing the story of this married guy she thinks she’s in love with. Should she get him drunk and say something? She is almost positive he feels the same. The way he looks at her, the way they walk back
together from lunch, their hands almost touching.

  What Ann Druyan said: Compressed into a minute-long segment, the brain waves of a woman newly in love sound like a string of firecrackers exploding.

  Recent Posts

  Why do we age?

  Where is the best place to live?

  Which rules are right?

  Do aliens exist?

  There are many ways in which she has been a good wife, some that would hold up under cross-examination even. But when she thinks of listing them, she keeps hearing the voice of a TV lawyer in her head.

  No special pleading is what he says.

  36

  Even the stars look different now. The girl is outdoorsy, the husband has told her. The wife keeps imagining the two of them going camping in the mountains. How he’d name the constellations one by one, the girl alert in her softest sweater, nodding, looking up at all that sky.

  The adultery book says to say affirmations of some sort each day, about yourself or your marriage. The wife doesn’t like the ones that are suggested so she makes up her own.

  Nerves of Steel

  No favors for fuckers

  The wife tries to repeat this to herself in the morning as she brushes her teeth. Sometimes she doesn’t manage it. Sometimes she pulls back her lips and looks at her bloodied gums instead.

  One day in the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings the husband announces that he would like to try a separation. The wife is stunned. He has said nothing to her until now. But the shrink discourages it. “You might as well just get divorced,” she says. Later, the wife remembers that they are supposed to fly to Ohio in two weeks to see his family, the whole blond band of them. “I guess I’ll be skipping that trip,” she says. “No,” the husband tells her. “You should come.” She looks at him. “Why would I?” He waves his hand magnanimously. “Because we still are?” Married, he means.

  What Rilke said: I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

  A year ago the philosopher’s brother died suddenly of an aneurism. He had a wife, no kids. He lived in Colorado and made wooden mailboxes that he sold through a catalog printed on newsprint. The next day, the philosopher flew to the little town where his brother had lived. He went to the lumber store with his sister-in-law and bought pinewood for the coffin. Then in his brother’s shop he drew a sketch on cardboard and began. After a few hours, she came out to watch him. He put a blanket around her, made her tea, but he didn’t try to make her go in. All night she watched him saw and hammer. We could see our breath, he said.

  The wife sends a note to the philosopher at 2:30 in the afternoon. “I am very awake. Are you?”

  “Maybe it’s you?” she thinks of writing to him.

  Some mornings the wife goes to the philosopher’s house and sits in his kitchen with him. Together, they come up with a theory of everything. The air feels electrified. She keeps wanting to ask if he can feel it too or if it is just some kind of weather in her head. “Tell me the truth. Do I seem crazy?” she says. He makes her an egg, puts it down in front of her. He pauses for a long time, then shakes his head. “You seem very, very awake,” the philosopher says.

  She imagines how she would feel at his funeral. How she would feel at the husband’s. She puts her hand over her heart for a moment and leaves it there. Yes, still beating.

  What Martin Luther said: Faith resides under the left nipple.

  37

  And then there is another fight. “Us,” he says about the girl again. The wife leaves in the middle of the night and goes to a hotel. She takes a car across town to a Holiday Inn Express because she can’t bear to sleep on anyone’s couch, to see husbands, to see children. She watches herself sign the register. She watches herself check in. She wanted him to feel something when he saw the door slam behind her, but did he?

  She left without a toothbrush. Without a book. Without sleeping pills even. She has her phone on. He doesn’t call her. She texts to say where she is. In case she needs me is how she phrases it. Nothing then. Nothing. She waits, watching the door as if it might open. She hears herself making noise, a soft sound, half cry, half croon.

  I am in a hotel, she thinks. In a hotel you can do anything. Now she goes through every drawer in the room. What is she looking for? A gun? A needle? She shifts from bed to chair to desk, but there is no place that will stop her head.

  It is dawn when she goes out into the street again, when she calls a car to get her. The man who picks her up thinks she is a hooker. He smiles at her in the rearview mirror. She says she needs to get home before her daughter wakes up and he speeds through the quiet streets for her.

  But it doesn’t matter that she returns. He is asleep and when he wakes up he won’t even look at her. “You left,” he mutters. “You left.” A whisper fight and then he is up and dressed. There is something about his eyes that stops her. “You’re not thinking of going there, are you?” she asks him. From his face, she sees yes, he is thinking this. For the first time, she plays the unplayable card, her daughter’s name. “Leave if you want, but not like this. If you do, you are going to change who she is.”

  What she means by “like this” is, with your face shaking and your hands trembling and your eyes like a hunted animal. She puts her hand on his shoulder, but he shakes her off of him.

  The babysitter comes to take the daughter out of the house. The wife calls the philosopher and he comes right away. She is waiting outside on the street for him and he has to hold her up, keep her from falling. A group of Pakistani men looks on impassively. “Keep him,” she pleads. “Just for tonight. Don’t let him leave. Promise me.”

  The philosopher keeps him at his apartment. He doesn’t have a couch so he takes the husband to Ikea and they go shopping for an extra bed. It sounds like a sitcom, the wife thinks when she hears this. But where to put the laugh track? At the store while they are trying them out or later at home when they are assembling it?

  It is easy in retrospect to see why he’d want to go. There are two women who are furious at him. To make one happy, he must take the subway across town and arrive on her doorstep. To make the other happy, he must wear for some infinitely long period of time a hair shirt woven out of her own hair.

  38

  Her ex-boyfriend calls her. He says he wants to talk. She meets him on a bench in the park. She has been up all night, thinking, testing out conversations. “You look great,” her ex says. “Amazing actually.” Everyone has been saying that to her lately. That she looks radiant, glowing. She refuses to mention the yoga. It isn’t that. It’s that the scrim has fallen away. All right, all right, maybe it’s the yoga. It’s true that it’s hard to work the scrim thing in conversationally. She smiles at him. He sits beside her, their knees almost touching. They talk about little things. He is smart and funny as always and now, incredible bonus, no longer a speed freak. People walk by with their dogs. Leaves fall prettily. The wife alludes to her situation, obliquely at first, then nakedly. As she talks, her ex is looking at her, smiling, laughing, but then suddenly she sees his eyes dart away. It is possible that she is talking too fast, that her hands are shaking. “My heart is like a paper bag,” she says. “See?” She sees him register that she is not what he had thought she was. Something crosses his face. Fear? Pity? She forces herself to stop talking. He is twitchy now, ready to leave and go to a meeting, she thinks. “I think I need a sponsor,” she says. “That’s what everyone says,” he tells her. They stand up. Then there is a long walk to the subway. She should take another path, walk another way. Someone else would make an excuse, exit gracefully with a wave. But no, horribly they round the corner, horribly they pass the arch and the benches and the newsstand. “Take care,” he says as she lurches oddly away. It hurts her eyes to look at these buildings. Greener, she thinks. There are the trees and the water. The expanse of lawn, overly peopled. She walks through the park, holding herself carefully. There is a sense of being unprotected in an open space. I am at the mercy of the elements, she think
s.

  What Kafka said: I write to close my eyes.

  39

  Once ether was everywhere. The crook of an arm, say. (Also the heavens.) It slowed the movement of the stars, told the left hand where the right hand went. Then it was gone, like hysteria, like the hollow earth. The news came over the radio. There is only air now. Abandon your experiments.

  The wife wants to go to the hospital. But she does not want to have gone to the hospital. If she goes, she might not come back. If she goes, he might use it against her. But when she is alone, the objects around her bristle with intent. This is fascinating to her but it must remain a secret. She packs her daughter’s lunches and reads her to sleep. On the playground, she impersonates a reasonable mother watching her child play in a reasonable way. She goes to work, hovers above herself as she speaks about all manner of things. She is as canny as an addict. She covers up when she misspeaks. She goes to the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings once a week and talks reasonably about the future, but secretly she is squirreling away money in books and journals. She stays up half the night, her brain whirring and whirring. She looks up school calendars in other cities. She investigates the cost of cars, of heat, of health insurance. She makes a plan a, a plan b, a plan c and d and e. Of these, only one involves the husband.