Replacement Wife

by Rowena Wiseman

  ‘What do you have to say?’ Rita said.

  ‘Thank you,’ Evan muttered.

  ‘That’s a pleasure, sweetie,’ I said.

  ‘For what? And look at Luisa when you speak,’ Rita said, really wanting to push the point of politeness. It made me feel awkward for the poor kid.

  ‘Thank you for having me,’ Evan said, his hands on his hips, edging his eyes up to meet my stomach. I was a bit disappointed, to be honest. Rita had a bit of that authoritarian manner about her. I could never quite stand those parents that had to ram manners down their kids’ throats in a way that I actually found lacked any manners.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I said. I walked them back through the house and found Evan’s school bag in the hallway, and bade them farewell.

  Rita said one more time, ‘We’ll have to organise a play date at ours. Evan, say thank you again.’

  I shut the door behind them and sat on a chair in the living room for a moment, wishing she hadn’t gone on so much about the manners thing. I’d forgiven her being a sugar Nazi, but the manners palaver was irritating. I wondered whether I should call off my courtship of her right then and there.

  But then I thought about those handbags of hers, how creative she was, how I liked her sense of style. And I liked the way Evan read at school, so she obviously put an emphasis on their learning, and they read good books like Zac Power. I took a deep breath, settled my stomach, and thought that I’d give her one more go. Maybe we could all learn to love Rita.

  14

  I was starting to get impatient. I had my finger in all these pies, with all these women, but nothing was really happening. I had Jarvis just within reach, but so far away. Our messages to each other had transformed into this other realm. We had travelled from ‘getting to know you’ to phrases that caressed each other’s skin. Our messages were littered with words like ‘thighs’ and ‘flesh’ and ‘lips’ and ‘fondle’, and all of these were making me feel more turned on than I had felt in years. I felt as though I was never going to settle down, relax, and get a good night’s sleep until I lay down in the cradle of his arm.

  And he was clever: all those tunes he had sent me meant he was always singing in my head. He was so deeply ingrained in my subconscious as well as my consciousness. His fingers were always touching me virtually, it was as though I could feel them. I was the centre of a rosebud, and he had peeled off all of my petals, leaving me bare, exposed, vulnerable, wanting more.

  That’s when I made my first mistake: I became too eager.

  Luke said that he was going to be home late one Wednesday night, around 7pm, so I thought I might try shaking things up a bit, getting out of the house with Max, and leaving Luke and Annie alone together. I left some braised chicken in the slow-cooker and some cooked rice in a pot on the stove, and left the following note on the kitchen bench: Had to go and see Great-aunt Helga. Say sorry to Annie. Offer her some dinner and a glass of wine as an apology.

  We did indeed visit Aunty Helga at the nursing home: I didn’t want to be a total liar. She was surprised to see us. My great-aunt still had her marbles, all jingling around noisily in her head, but her body was very frail. It was after their dinner time, so she was already in her pyjamas, sitting in her armchair in a dressing gown, watching some TV. She still had her makeup on: bright pink lipstick and foundation that flaked between her wrinkles. Her hair was dyed blonde and recently styled. Mum said Aunty Helga still had her hair blow-waved by a hairdresser every week. With trembling hands, she offered Max a Monte Carlo biscuit from an Arnott’s tin. I could tell that he didn’t feel like eating it, but he accepted it bravely. Sitting down on the single bed, he nibbled at the biscuit, disinterested, and trying not to look at Aunt Helga or the depressing state of affairs in the room, where one’s life possessions got whittled away to a single bookshelf and a double-door wardrobe.

  When we got home around 9pm, Luke was furious. He didn’t even wait until Max was out of earshot, like he usually would.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘Aunty Helga’s. I left a note.’

  ‘Annie was really mad.’

  ‘Did you offer her dinner? Did she come in?’

  ‘She’d eaten her bloody dinner. What the—?’ He threw up his hands as though he was talking with a madwoman. ‘She was really upset that you hadn’t called her and that you wasted her time. She’s not coming back.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s not coming back — she’s had enough. This time never suited her. She’s got two young girls.’

  ‘Annie’s gone?’ For a moment, I had this pang of hurt, as though I’d just been dumped.

  ‘Good. I can’t stand maths,’ Max said, yawning. Luke took him by the hand to get him changed into his PJs. I helped myself to a glass of wine from the pantry, to commiserate strike one.

  15

  I’d been thinking about breaking my rule and seeing Jarvis at the weekend Luke had the conference in Sydney. It was a self-made rule, in any case: that I shouldn’t see Jarvis until the time was right. With Luke out of the city, it felt as though maybe the time was right. But then I worried. If I saw Jarvis once and we did all those things we’d been talking about, there would be no going back. Once we opened the floodgates, how could we shut them? As it was, ever since the gluey thigh conversation had started, there had been a torrent of imagery flying back and forth between us which was almost impossible to rein in. Once he’d had me in the flesh, I suspected he would want more and more, and become needy and dissatisfied. I didn’t want to have to start being deceptive and finding ways to escape the house unnoticed, lying about going out with friends. Anyway, I was a dreadful liar, with a terribly guilty conscience. I couldn’t have stomached any of that — it would have been my undoing.

  Nor did I want desperate phone calls in the middle of the night or ‘I want you now’ kinds of text messages and emails. I knew he was lonelier than I was, although we were both starved for affection. He had more time on his hands. At least I had Max to keep me busy, and clients who were always pestering me, and dinners to make and a shower screen to scrub once in a while. Although he was constantly on my mind, I also had distractions. Whereas, when Jarvis wasn’t at work those couple of days a week, he was in his studio, indulging in classical music, working on a sculpture — a figure like a human, but one who couldn’t talk back to him. For six months he’d been working on one of those zombie-like pieces. He had carved the life-size shape out of high-density foam, and was hand-sticking on each piece of tinsel individually. It must have been a painstaking process. I wondered whether there was something obsessive-compulsive about taking on a project like that. But I wasn’t an art-maker; I was just an editor. And maybe there’s something obsessive-compulsive about any good art.

  Although I was trying to keep Jarvis at bay, I was also curious to find out more about how he lived. Sending each other messages was one thing, but I wanted to see inside his apartment to find out how tidy or messy he was. I had the feeling he would have all his shirts ironed and hanging on matching clothes hangers, all hanging the same way in his wardrobe. But how could I ask him this? And I wanted to find out whether he was handy or not. Luke was very handy: he’d built the deck all by himself and he loved doing projects around the house. He’d designed and built lots of things at the Patch. I didn’t think I could stand being with someone who couldn’t fix a leaking tap or put an Ikea Expedit bookshelf together. But I supposed that as Jarvis worked with sculpture — welding, moulding, that sort of thing — surely he would be handy as well?

  But would he do the things that I asked him to do? Would he look after me without it becoming a problem? Or would I have to look after him? Over the years, Luke and I had settled into some kind of domestic balance. Sure, he didn’t wipe the rubbish juice out of the kitchen bin sometimes, but he always took out the recycling and put the bins on the nature strip. He cooked meals at least two nights a week, he paid most of the bills, and he folded the washing once I’d brought it
in from the line. We’d been together a long time and had fought out these battles long ago . . . these things were now done quietly, without resentment.

  I couldn’t help but feel that I was sacrificing a lot more than Jarvis was. In fact, he had everything to gain and nothing much to lose. It wasn’t simply an uneven playing field; it was as though we were on two different sports fields altogether, different countries almost. I was worried that one day I would hate him for everything that I had given up. What if it was all a mistake?

  Perhaps it was having all of these questions yet no answers to any of them that made me impotent. I knew all of this was bad for me. It was a dirty habit, like smoking. I knew it could kill me in the end, but I wasn’t able to break it off completely, stop those messages, return to my normal life. Yet I also wasn’t able to take the next step. Because the next step meant changing my whole world and turning Max’s life upside-down. And I wondered whether once I’d taken that next step I’d ever be able to return to any type of normal life.

  So Luke went away to Sydney for two nights, and although it was the perfect opportunity — and a limited one, because he usually never went away — I wasn’t able to commit an act of adultery. The Friday night, after Max was in bed, I indulged myself in Jarvis’s words instead. After I’d panicked that day in the kitchen and deleted all of the messages, it had felt as though I had destroyed a precious manuscript from the State Library’s archives. I’d been unable to continue deleting his messages, and had started filing my favourite ones in a subfolder titled ‘Style Guides’ on my email account. I created a new password-protected document and saved it in a hidden folder on my computer. I started cutting and pasting my favourite lines of text from Jarvis’s messages, correcting his spelling mistakes, polishing some grammar here and there, deleting anything that was too over-the-top, but keeping the more intelligent and arousing bits. This document became my prized manuscript — a stream-of-consciousness from the author feeling the depths of passion. I was connected to him through his words; they played a magic flute that stirred my soul, turned me on and made me believe in a love as powerful as Greek mythology.

  Love had died in my own marriage. We were only together because of Max. I’d read somewhere that there was less divorce in China because their marriages were built around a sense of duty. And that was all Luke and I had: a sense of duty to each other, because we had brought another human being into this world. But I had been brought up on a diet of fairytales, and I loved reading fine literature, so I wanted something more than duty. I desired desire.

  My love for Jarvis went against common sense. It was closer to madness than to sanity. It had detached me from the things I valued most, it had built a speaker in my head that spoke to me all day long about how the future would be with him: sitting on his lap after a hard day while he stroked my back and listened to me, late meals in the moonlight, making love on wet grass after it had rained ...

  This was the manuscript I had always wanted to work on. A piece of beautiful fiction with prose that was all about the image of me. I stayed up past midnight, working on all the messages that I had saved in the subdirectory. It must have filled up ten pages. Jarvis was unstoppable. His messages were getting longer and longer, as though he wanted to capture every thought he’d had about me in the past twenty-four hours. I read them over and over again, and believed wholly in that image of me — of us — that he painted.

  On the Saturday night, just as Max and I were about to sit down and eat the pizza we’d had delivered, the doorbell rang. It was Hattie. She was in a complete state — Briar had broken up with her. Hattie stumbled into our kitchen with a bottle of bubbles, ate four slices of pizza and somehow kept it together until Max was in bed. But then she erupted.

  ‘Women can be such bitches,’ she said, once we were sitting together on the couch. ‘I let my guard down, gave her my whole heart. This is all new to me. She said she was going to go gently and help me explore this new identity.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She doesn’t think I’m gay enough.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s questioning my sexuality. She doesn’t believe that I could have come to this so late in my life — by the time she was twelve she knew that she preferred women. Well, she’s had lots of time to explore who she is. I’m more than twenty years behind her. She says she finds me juvenile, lacking in experience; I can’t do the things to her that other women can. She says that I need to go forth and be with other women before I can be with her. Briar doesn’t want to be my teacher.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She said that being with me is sloppy. Like pashing a kid at a blue-light disco.’

  ‘Ouch. She said that?’

  ‘I’m a woman, yeah? I know how to touch myself.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s just I get nervous when I’m with her. I mean at first it was okay: I drank a lot of gin and I thought I was doing okay. And she was kind to me, showed me what to do. But I didn’t evolve as she’d expected, and I lost my confidence.’

  ‘But you connect on an emotional level, an intellectual level, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. But she says that’s not enough. She wants a real woman, not a teenager. She doesn’t want to be my test case.’

  ‘So it’s over?’

  ‘It’s over. I’m a lousy lover. So it’s over.’

  I filled up her glass with more bubbles.

  ‘How am I now supposed to go out and be with another woman, when I’ve got all these doubts in my mind about my performance in bed? It’s like she’s ruined me for life. She’s a bitch. I may as well go back and be with a man. That was easy. All I had to do was spread my legs and make a few noises. No one’s ever complained before.’

  ‘Sweetie, she just wasn’t the right girl for you. You’ll find someone who’ll enjoy exploring these things with you, someone who will love your innocence. She’s just not the right one.’

  ‘But I loved her.’

  ‘You can find love again. It can sneak up on you when you’re least expecting it: believe me. Besides, you should enjoy this new time in life for you. You shouldn’t get too serious too quickly. There’s lots of things for you to discover out there. It’s like a girl shouldn’t marry her high-school sweetheart. Think of it as you’re just coming out of school, you’re in your twenties, you need to get a few relationships under your belt before you commit to the right one.’

  ‘But I’m nearly forty. What if I want to have a child with someone?’

  ‘You’re a few years off forty. Besides, things can happen quickly once you do meet the right person.’

  ‘You’re so lucky to have Max, even if your relationship with Luke is fucked. You’ve got Max to love for life. Maybe I shouldn’t have broken it off with Brad. I could have married him and loved my children.’

  ‘But that would have been a lie.’

  ‘Don’t we all lie in relationships?’

  ‘I know, I know ... look at me. But we only have one life. We want to live it as honestly as we can.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Nothing yet. I’m still working on it. Annie, the tutor, has gone: she stormed out last week because Max and I weren’t home. I’d tried to set it up so that Luke and she could be alone together.’ And like anyone who had been rejected, I launched into all the things that were wrong with Annie. ‘Anyway, she wasn’t quite right. She was rather serious, too studious; she couldn’t have a laugh. Her ass was over-sized — you know, one of those really awkward pear body shapes? She wasn’t very creative. And she had two daughters; she didn’t know anything about having a boy.’

  As I chatted on, Hattie seemed to cheer up a bit. Perhaps she realised that at least her life wasn’t as screwed up as mine.

  16

  We finally got a second date. It was a couple of weeks later, and I was starting to think that she wasn’t all that keen, but then Rita texted me asking if Max would like to come over to her place for a pl
ay.

  When I told Max, the night before, he said, ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘What’s wrong with Evan? I thought you two got along fine.’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s a bit bossy. He tells me what to do all the time. And he said that I shouldn’t eat ham, that it’s processed meat.’

  ‘He told you what?’

  ‘And he said that Jackson wets the bed like a baby.’

  ‘Well that doesn’t involve you. You should probably go along for this one play date and see how you feel. If you like hanging out with him, that’s okay. But if you don’t, then I’m not going to make you.’

  I organised a drink with Hattie after work and told Luke that he would have to pick Max up from the play date, and gave him the address.

  ‘Rita said something about having a door that was broken or something. I said perhaps you could take a look at it for her. I can’t remember what it was exactly, but perhaps you could ask her whether you could help her out at all. It mustn’t be easy being on her own like that.’ This was my scheme to show Rita how handy and useful Luke was. He could fix something, and she could watch his biceps working: it was the perfect thing to turn a woman on. She could be the lady in distress and he could fix all of her problems.

  ‘What? I don’t want to be the odd-job man for all the single women in the neighbourhood. I can hardly keep up with things around here.’

  ‘Sorry, she just mentioned it. And I said you could take a look when you picked Max up. I said it wouldn’t be any trouble.’

  I met Hattie at the Wesley Anne. Hattie was an altered woman. She wanted to sit in the courtyard so she could smoke cigarettes, and she knocked back three glasses of Pinot in rapid succession.

  ‘I’m not dating anymore,’ she announced.

  ‘That’s crazy. You had so much zest for getting out there a few months ago. You can’t let Briar ruin you like this. How are you going to get the sexual experience you need if you’re not getting any experience?’