Replacement Wife

by Rowena Wiseman

  She looked tired. Her Spring Racing orders were piling up and she was trying to do everything herself. She said she’d been up until 2am the night before trying to finish a headpiece for Rebecca Judd.

  ‘You’re a beautiful, intelligent lady. Someone’s going to fall crazily in love with you.’

  She flicked back her hair and took a drag on her cigarette. I hadn’t seen her smoking in something like ten years.

  ‘I think I’ve finally crashed, you know. I didn’t mourn my relationship with Brad: I just got on with it. I moved out, joined up with the meet-up group, played around for a bit, met Briar . . . I didn’t have time to reflect on everything that I’d given up.’

  ‘But what did you give up with him?’

  ‘We were together for eight years. Some marriages don’t even last that long.’

  ‘I know, sweetheart. But you’d wanted out for a long while. You should have written down all the reasons why you broke up with him, so that you’d remember them when you were feeling like this. And anyway, what are you really? Are you into men or women? Or both?’

  ‘Women. Definitely women. But maybe they’re more difficult than men. Maybe men are easy. Look at you and me — we’re complex, yeah? Maybe I’ve picked the more complex sex to be with. I might be more attracted to women, but I don’t want the mind-fuck that goes with it. Maybe I’d prefer to be with a man whom I’m less attracted to but who is easier to get along with.’

  ‘You’ve just had one bad experience. I’m sure there’s some simple women out there.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, name one.’

  It took me aback. Actually, I couldn’t think of one simple woman. All the women I knew had issues. We were all generally dissatisfied with life, burnt by something or other, plagued with mental health issues, chasing appointments with our therapists, fielding stresses from our children, juggling work and family and life. We had poor body image, residual resentments from our upbringings, disappointments with those surrounding us . . . Maybe women were more complicated. I’d certainly heard comments at school from the mums who had daughters about how their girls were manipulative and uptight, how their sons seemed so easy in comparison. I didn’t know, because I didn’t have a daughter, but I remembered being a teenager and the grief that I’d given my parents, whereas Chris was just this easy-going big guy who needed two servings at dinner.

  ‘I can’t think of any,’ I finally admitted. ‘Shit, it’s going to be hard for me to find someone acceptable for Luke, isn’t it? All women have issues: you’re right. I guess it depends on what you can tolerate. At least they don’t fart in bed so much. I’d probably rather wade through a mind-fuck, than a cloud of male farts.’

  At last Hattie cracked a smile.

  ‘And hey, an intense, passionate woman will at least be stimulating, right? At least it won’t be boring, yeah?’

  We ended up going out for Thai afterwards, and by the time I got home Max was in bed. Luke, as usual, was in his grey tracksuit pants, feet up on the coffee table, watching the TV. He didn’t so much as look at me when I walked in the door.

  ‘I’m naked,’ I announced.

  Luke looked up at me distractedly. He was watching one of those awful footy shows again, and he actually paused it on the remote so that he wouldn’t miss a second of it while he had to listen to his wife.

  ‘How did you go this afternoon?’

  ‘He ate all his dinner, so I gave him ice-cream afterwards—’

  ‘No, I mean with Rita. How did it go?’

  ‘Fine.’ He looked back to the still image on the TV screen, desperately willing the moment when he could activate it again.

  ‘Did you help her out with that thing?’

  ‘She didn’t know what I was talking about.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, disappointed. ‘You didn’t wear your tracksuit pants did you?’

  ‘No.’ At last he looked up at me, his brow crinkled, annoyed.

  ‘What was their place like?’

  ‘Nice. Neat.’

  ‘Are they renting?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are we ever going to fuck again?’ I was getting annoyed with him, I wanted to push some buttons — and not the play button on the remote.

  ‘Not this again.’

  ‘Would you be with me if we didn’t have Max?’

  ‘What kind of question is that?’

  ‘What do you love about me?’

  ‘Lots of things. I love that we share this life together, the way we’re bringing up our son together—’

  ‘Yeah, but what do you love about me?’

  He looked up at me: so tired, worn out after a long day, his one bit of peace catastrophically ruined. His face was grey, flat, lifeless. ‘You live in a fantasy land,’ he said at last. ‘You will never find a man who will give you everything that you want. I’m pretty good.’

  ‘When are we going to go out together again? Do something fun?’

  ‘We go out all the time.’

  ‘I mean just you and me. What was it that we liked about each other?’

  ‘You’re very difficult,’ he said, turning back to the frozen TV image.

  ‘I know,’ I said, defeated, unable to even hold his attention in an argument. I walked out of the room.

  17

  Suzi’s new book Parricide (subtitled, for the less erudite, Parent Killers) was a nightmare. Dave had rung to give me a token forewarning, ‘It’s not as polished as it usually is. You might need to do a bit of extra development work on it. We’ll pay for the extra hours; just let us know if the budget begins to totally blow out.’

  Not as polished as it usually was? It was practically submitted in dot-point form. If I were Dave, there was no way I would have accepted a manuscript like that. I scrolled through two hundred pages of what I felt were just research notes. It traversed centuries, continents, from myths to reality, from Oedipus to Matthew Wales, from Roman Emperor Nero to Nepal’s Crown Prince Dipendra. There was no order and no flow, and her image briefs were scrappy: ‘See society killers article in The Age, November that year, I think, picture of Wales outside court’.

  Without consulting with Dave, I arranged to meet her for coffee, so we could talk about the manuscript and how it should be better ordered. Together we figured out different chapter headings and a tighter chronology to follow.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s such a mess,’ Suzi finally admitted. ‘It’s just that things are rather tricky at the moment. I’m working my other job four days a week, just to pay the bills. I’ve got Brodie most of the time. His dad has him from Friday to Sunday, but after I catch up on all the housework it doesn’t give me much time to work on the book. You must be really frustrated with me.’

  ‘No,’ I lied. ‘What happened with you and your husband? I’m only interested because I’m going through a rocky patch myself.’

  ‘Are you?’ she eyed me curiously. ‘Well, we simply fell out of love with each other. We were arguing more than we were talking. It wasn’t a healthy environment for Brodie.’

  ‘How did you make the leap to breaking up?’

  ‘It was just a steady decline. It wasn’t just the one conversation, it wasn’t like this is it, this is the moment when we’re breaking up. It went on for years. We were both very practical people, so we eventually acknowledged it.’

  ‘That sounds civil,’ I said.

  ‘As civil as it could be. But it’s still not easy.’

  ‘Are you glad you broke up?’

  ‘Some days yes, some days no.’

  I sighed. ‘Luke is such a great guy, but I feel as though we have no future together. It’s like our relationship has gone to seed and all our good times are in the past. Sometimes I find myself wishing he’d meet another woman. He’d be happy and we could split up and I’d be free to get on with life. Did you ever feel like that?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘I don’t think I actually wished Anton would meet someone else. I don’t know. I just wished we could break up easil
y. But there’s no easy way out. What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m sort of hoping some beauty will come along and I can quietly exit stage left without him noticing.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I’m serious.’ And I wish that beauty was you, I thought, because although her manuscript was a pile of shit there was something quite charming about her. I liked the sensible nature of her separation from her husband, without the high drama.

  I didn’t know whether I’d be able to do that with Luke. Although he was a really calm guy, I suspected he would fire up if I suggested we separated. And the fact that I truly didn’t know how he was going to respond showed me how little I actually knew about him. You might live with someone, share a meal every night, sleep in the same bed, but it’s impossible to know how they are going to react to news like that. I felt as though he was living in this constant state of denial, like he couldn’t even see how I was feeling, although I was always trying to be frank with him. It was as though he thought because we had Max he had me for life. He’d given up trying, because he’d given me an anchor, a chain that bound us together until death. But he didn’t know I was carrying around an industrial-sized bolt-cutter with the name of Jarvis.

  18

  Around this time, Max started talking back to me. It took me by surprise. Up until then, Max and I had had such a great relationship, with nothing but love and respect. As Max was an only child, we were bonded at the hip. I’d sunk all my Titanic-iceberg-sized love and affection into him. I’d had a bit of a shaky start with him as a newborn, but by the time he was three months old he lit up my world. There was nothing that could make me happier than his little fingers around my forefinger, the curve of his smile or seeing the dimples in his legs.

  I was completely unproductive for that first year, almost unable to do any of the chores around the house, because I simply didn’t want to miss out on a single precious moment with him. I sat and admired him for hours, as he kicked his legs on a play-mat, sucked a rattle in his bouncer, or stared out the window at the silver birches swaying in the wind. Watching him, I was filled with wonderment, and often lapsed into a blissful state of contentment, where everything he did seemed magical and otherworldly. I witnessed every one of his milestones with joy. I held his hands as he squeezed out his first poo on the toilet (and every other poo for the next year). I cried for a week before he went to school. I was right by his side in the bathroom when he spat out his first loose tooth while brushing his teeth.

  Max had always been a sensitive and caring boy. As a toddler, if he did something wrong and received a scowl from me, the first thing he would say was ‘Are you happy, Mama?’ When he was three he liked to hop on top of my bed and sit in the washing basket. He’d pretend he was a dog while I read to him. His head on my shoulder, sometimes he would raise his little eyes and say, unprompted, ‘I love you so much.’ He was none of the stereotypes about boys. He wasn’t rough, he was careful with his toys, he liked sitting down and concentrating on things, doing craft, drawing for hours, reading. He liked walking around art exhibitions with me and going out for chocolate milkshakes. He was a perfect, gentle boy.

  So this new talking-back shocked me. If I said anything to him, he would do the opposite. If I asked him to get dressed in the morning for school, he would roll his eyes at me as I spoke, and mimic me with a head wobble. He began storming into his room and shutting the door and insisting on putting himself to bed at night without being kissed.

  All of this scared me, and of course I blamed myself. I’d been distracted lately, and I knew that you get out of relationships as much as you put into them. I needed to wind myself back into the present with Max and find a way to reconnect. But all my attempts were in vain. The more I tried to get back into his life, the more he pushed me away.

  I’d always had a rule that after school we would sit down together while he ate his snack and talk about his day at school. Usually he would tell me things, about who had said what, who had gotten a warning in class that day, what had happened on the oval. But he started just sitting there, eating his snack silently, annoyed by any of my attempts at conversation.

  Max wasn’t like this with his dad, though. Their relationship was the same as always; light, jovial and full of love. I felt as though I was being pushed to the side.

  But maybe I was looking at this all wrong. I started to question whether I had been doing the right thing putting Max first and foremost in my life for the past eight years. Had it really done anyone any good? Perhaps it was time for me to put myself first. At the end of the day, he might end up rejecting me anyway. What if I was to give up on this real chance of love, a partner who would see me through until the end of my days, for Max’s sake? Don’t kids end up resenting their parents anyway, no matter what their parents do? Maybe it was time for me to concentrate on my own happiness.

  19

  Jarvis’s gold tinsel zombie figure got selected as a finalist in the McClelland Sculpture Survey Award. It was his first breakthrough. The piece was larger than life and had taken over eight months to complete. I was the first person he shared this news with, in an email littered with exclamation marks and with the word ‘excited’ used an overwhelming number of times. I owe this to you, Luisa. You’ve given me the confidence I’ve needed for years. When I’ve been tired and feeling hopeless, it’s like you’ve been sitting at my shoulder, whispering sweet encouragement in my ear. You’ve been such a positive force in my life. Things are starting to happen for me. For us. For a moment, I did feel like his Sunday Reed, even if I was just a virtual one that sat at my laptop and pressed the ‘send’ button once in a while.

  I wished in vain that I could have been right by Jarvis’s side at the opening. I would have liked to have held his hand and shared that amazing experience with him. Luke was working at the Patch that Saturday afternoon, so I had to take Max along. He found the speeches boring, and he was right: they were too long and too pretentious. We hovered up the back, hardly able to hear a thing, and I kept on looking around, wanting to spot Jarvis’s face in the crowd, but I couldn’t find him. Max was restless, and I couldn’t even keep him occupied with games on my smartphone. He kept complaining that his legs were feeling tired after playing footy in the Under-nines that morning. He was starting to have his own opinion about things, and it wasn’t so cool hanging out with his mum anymore.

  The judge announced the winner: it wasn’t Jarvis. Nevertheless, it was still an honour to have been selected for the show. They opened up the pathway so that we could all go and have a look at the sculptures. Eventually Max let me put my smartphone away in my bag and he walked along with me, still complaining about his legs as though he had the greatest sporting injury of all time.

  The leaves and twigs on the bush path cracked under our shoes. Max played with a few of the interactive sculptures; he danced in front of some sensors that played music or the sounds of chirping birds, he pulled on different levers and crawled under a spider’s web made from fabric suspended between trees. He finally forgot about those aching legs.

  We discovered Jarvis’s work, tucked away between two gum trees, halfway along the trail. I’d only seen photographs of his works before, so it was nice to finally see one in real life. I couldn’t say that I liked it any more than the pictures I’d seen, but I guess I got a new 3D perspective. Max ran his hand through the gold tinsel, as if he was playing a harp. I could see that this piece was going to be a magnet for kids. A strand of tinsel fell to the ground and I cautioned like a commonplace mother: ‘Don’t touch.’

  Just then Jarvis stepped up beside us. ‘Hi there,’ he said, so normally.

  I think I blushed. I had not expected to see him right at the moment when my son was running his fingers through his work.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘This is fantastic.’

  ‘Thanks for coming along,’ he said, repositioning his glasses on his nose.

  ‘This is Jarvis, Uncle Chris’s fri
end,’ I said to Max, in a strangled voice. ‘He made this sculpture.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s sort of a zombie,’ Jarvis said.

  ‘Oh’ was all Max could say, looking it up and down again.

  The three of us stood awkwardly on the path, Jarvis with his zombie creation and me with the boy I’d created. Jarvis put his hands in his back pockets and stood with his feet stepped apart, as though he was waiting for a revelation. He looked timid, unsure, innocent and slightly dazed. My heart felt as though it had been dropped in a brown paper bag; crinkly, rough, shaken. Everything felt wrong.

  I noticed a woman with his parents. Was it his sister? I couldn’t remember what his sister had looked like. Who was this ’fifties pin-up model with them, with her thick eyeliner and mascara, and a push-up bra heaving up her cleavage in that bright red dress? Her arms were thick and her hips were wide, but she wore her extra weight as seductively as a model in a Titian portrait. Her skin was pale like marble and her faux-burgundy hair was pinned in a side-part victory roll.

  Someone else came along, a bald guy with a black t-shirt and tattoos all up his arm. He shook hands with Jarvis with such vigour that his veins almost erupted from his forearm. This guy and that girl were too edgy for me. I felt drab in my loose navy-blue smock dress with white polka dots. And I sure didn’t have makeup on like that girl over there. I felt like plain Jane, like I didn’t belong here with my eight-year-old son. I felt something close to panic. ‘We’ve got to go,’ I blurted to Jarvis. ‘Well done again.’ And I took Max’s hand and we high-tailed it out of there. I wouldn’t even let him stop and look at any more sculptures.

  I was silent and distracted on the way home, weighed down with a feeling of impossibility. How were Jarvis and I going to make all this work? How were we going to fit each other into our lives, lives that seemed so completely different? My life was so tame, it was school drops-offs and pick-ups, sports games, picking Max up from play dates, wiping up milk spillages on the carpet, parent–teacher interviews, preparing shopping lists for weekly shops; there was nothing glamorous about it.