Replacement Wife

by Rowena Wiseman

  She had Dave wrapped around her little finger. How could he undermine me like that? We’d always had such a strong professional relationship. Yet, with Suzi, he seemed to not care about any of that. How dare she go behind my back to him after I’d spoken to her? She was a spoilt brat.

  ‘On the good ship lollipop,’ Luke greeted her, smiling like a fool.

  She did a goddamn curtsy, holding out her dress in each hand like a princess. She looked at Luke. ‘There are no new steps!’

  Oh, such clever banter, the two of them. Finally, she turned to me. ‘Hello, Fran,’ she said coldly.

  ‘Shirley.’

  I knew Dave could feel the icy nature of our exchange, but Luke was clearly oblivious to it. He was under Suzi’s spell, looking at her adoringly, with his mouth slightly ajar.

  ‘Good crowd,’ I said to Dave, just to keep some sort of conversation rolling.

  ‘Yeah, we’ve had a great response to the review copies we’ve sent out. And Gina has a lot of friends. There’re a few bloggers here, and that’s the book reviewer from The Guardian over there. Not bad for a Thursday night.’

  ‘What’s with the dressing up?’

  ‘I don’t know. But she was adamant about it. You know how authors are.’ He leaned in and whispered this to me, as though he was on my side against the authors, when really I knew that he was like a slimy real estate agent who was working for both sides and the only person he was looking out for was himself. ‘Just wait. She’s also insisted on some dancing later on.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ I said, rolling my eyes.

  The runner-up from the last season of So You Think You Can Dance launched the book with a passionate, but somewhat misguided, speech about other crimes in dance. She spoke about costume disasters and the catastrophic consequences of getting together with one’s dance partner. Gina Patterson — dressed in an unflattering white tutu, as Anna Pavlova two decades past her prime — read part of her chapter on the belly-dancing killer. She thanked all of the people who had helped her with the book: relatives of the victims, a prisoner, and — especially — God (I hadn’t picked her as the religious type), and made special mention of my attention to detail, support and enthusiasm for the book. It always feels pretty special when an author acknowledges my work, because in the main it’s invisible.

  After the speeches, they turned on the music and set the disco ball to rotate. The strangest mix of Gina’s friends and relatives, other true-crime writers, journos and fans of her books took to the dance floor in their makeshift costumes to celebrate a book about dancers who had killed or been killed. It was the weirdest sight. I thought about all of the things that I wanted to write to Jarvis about the night. I was itching to be in front of my computer screen relaying all my impressions: ‘Gina Patterson danced holding two copies of her book to her chest like Gladiator breastplates. And you should have seen this fat Michael Jackson ex-cop trying to do the moonwalk backwards with a pint of Guinness spilling in his hands. He took out Gina. She managed to hold onto those two books of hers even as she slipped over.’

  I was sitting on a seat, a true wallflower, content-narrating in my head an email to my lover whom I never saw. It was almost as though I’d forgotten how to think for myself: every thought was constructed as a sentence to Jarvis. ‘And then there’s Dave. We’ve worked together for years, but I didn’t find out until tonight that his wife ran off six years ago to join the roller derby. True story.’

  But then I noticed my husband on the dance floor. It was only the second time in my life that I had seen him dancing, but he was truly going for it, swinging Suzi around with such enthusiasm I thought he was almost going to attempt a Patrick Swayze airlift.

  And for the first time I felt something that I hated to admit was jealousy. She had got him to dance. I thought of all the rejections over the years, my hand outstretched to him, pleas of ‘come on, it doesn’t matter what you dance like’. Here he was, completely lost in the moment with Suzi, unselfconscious and having fun. She had achieved what I hadn’t been able to do since the very first time I had met him. I felt like throwing myself on the floor and crying.

  Instead, I went to the bar and ordered a shot of vodka, from a man who had let his beard creep down his neck in a very unappealing way. I slammed down the shot, then asked for another, and all of a sudden I had the most amazing craving for a cigarette. So I slipped out the front and loitered until a half-normal-looking guy appeared from the pub next door with a packet of cigarettes.

  ‘Can I bum one?’ I asked. He looked a bit hesitant. He was young, probably a student, probably poor and living on some kind of youth allowance. But he handed me a cigarette eventually and offered me his lighter.

  ‘My husband is in there falling in love with another woman,’ I said, taking my first drag. Of course, he didn’t know what to say, so I filled in the silence. ‘It’s what I wanted. I set it up. It’s the moment I’ve been waiting for, because I’ve been wanting to get rid of him. But it’s kind of bittersweet, you know?’ I looked at him, appealing for some kind of understanding, but he was only a kid really, probably in his first year at Melbourne Uni, clean-shaven, innocent, full of stupid, youthful hope, his whole life ahead of him. ‘This was my plan, to get my husband to fall in love with another woman. And now it’s working. It’s working! And I picked her. I thought I liked her. I’ve got an eight-year-old son, so I had to choose someone carefully. But she’s a bit of a spoilt brat. A bitch. She’s cunning and pretty. And I’m starting to think that I’m the only mother for my son.’

  The poor kid. He must have thought that I was truly insane, because he dropped that precious cigarette of his on the ground, butted it out with his heel and bolted back into the pub, probably to tell all his friends about the loopy lady he’d just met outside. I could feel myself coming unstuck, so I did something that I never did: I called Jarvis.

  ‘Jarvis? It’s Luisa.’

  ‘Luisa? Hey there. What’s up?’

  ‘My plan, it’s working. Luke’s falling in love. They’re inside at the book launch now. Dancing! He never dances. Have I told you he never dances? I can’t remember if I’ve ever told you.’

  ‘Sweetie, are you okay?’

  ‘It’s working. We can be together soon. I promise you. You know that I love you?’

  ‘I love you, too. Madly. Insanely. But are you okay?’

  ‘I’m okay. It’s great, isn’t it? He’s dancing. He’s fucking dancing. And did I tell you he has a beard now?’

  ‘Are you okay? You sound strange. Do you need me to come and get you or anything?’

  ‘Nah, nah, I’m fine. I’m going back inside. I’ll email you. You should see this place. This night is crazy: true crime, dancing, killers, dress-ups, ex-cops, Dave’s wife joined the roller derby. It’s insane.’ All of a sudden, I couldn’t properly articulate any of those things that I’d been narrating in my head to him. It seemed easier to write them, not say them. ‘I’ll email you. I love you.’

  ‘Love you, too.’ And we hung up.

  I stumbled back inside, only to find that Luke hadn’t yet exhausted himself with Suzi. They were still making moves on the dance floor. I was about to extract him when another author I had worked with began a conversation about his next book: Cluedo Killers, subtitled The Candlestick, Dagger, Lead Pipe, Revolver, Rope and Spanner.

  His breath was intense, perfumed with the sour smell of stress and too much coffee and an overdose of kabana sticks from the rather ordinary nibbles platters. He’d taken a stand against the dressing up and was wearing a red polo top that had sweat patches at the creases of his man boobs. He was a ratbag to look at, but his manuscripts had been some of the best I’d worked with. They were incredibly well organised, and it was hard to even find a spelling mistake. He always delivered everything on time and I’d never had to chase him up for a thing.

  Although I liked working with him, he was an incredible bore in real life. He was obsessed with his subject matter and likely to lure one into the most
depressing and shocking tales of murder and mayhem. And that night he wasn’t going to let me out of his sight until he’d told me about the Samoan rope killer whom he’d discovered while researching his latest book. The rope killer, you guessed it, only used ropes to kill women. Like a boa constrictor, he wrapped the women up while they were still alive, and then pulled and pulled on the rope until the air went out of them.

  Because I wasn’t being paid to listen to that kind of story right then, I made an overblown excuse about my son and his upper respiratory system, and how the babysitter had just rung. ‘I have to get my husband. He’s dancing, he never dances. We have to go. I just have to go, okay?’ I was perhaps ruder than I meant to be. But the view of Luke and Suzi in my peripheral vision was getting to me. I wasn’t so upset about their flirty looks at each other; it was the fact that he was dancing that bugged me.

  I stormed onto the dance floor and grabbed Luke by the hand that wasn’t holding onto Suzi. ‘Where have you been?’ he asked. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

  He hadn’t been looking very hard, obviously.

  ‘He doesn’t usually dance,’ I shouted above the music to Suzi, wanting to dispel any grandiose images she was concocting in her head. ‘Even at weddings. He never dances at weddings. He’ll sit at the table and drink beer. You’ll have to dance with the uncle of the bride or the single girls.’

  She looked at me wide-eyed, as stunned as a Japanese manga character.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said. Luke’s feet were planted to the floor. ‘Let’s go,’ I said again. ‘I want to go. I’ll speak to you next week, Suzi. We’ll have to work out a way to get that book of yours back on track before it implodes.’ I grabbed Luke by the wrist and pulled him outside with me.

  ‘You were so rude,’ he said to me once we were in the car. ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘I’m not drunk.’

  ‘What’s your problem? We were having fun. Like adults. Like you wanted.’

  ‘Are you kidding me? We weren’t having fun together.’ I was gesticulating wildly with my pointer finger, like I was fanning the wind. ‘It wasn’t you and me. It was you and . . .’ I couldn’t even say her name. ‘You were dancing. I can’t believe it. You were dancing.’

  ‘What’s the big fucking deal?’

  I should have been happy. This was all my idea, another great step in the plan I had to carry out in order to be with the man I had fallen in love with. Yet I really didn’t like that my understudy was performing so much better than me, so quickly.

  27

  The next week Luke was especially sweet. He was either ashamed of his behaviour at the launch and wanted to make it up to me, or he had a new spring in his step that a certain redhead had given him. He took us out for teppanyaki in Collins Street mid-week. As we were catching wagyu beef in our bowls, he announced that he had booked us flights to Hobart in the school holidays to go to MONA, the new art museum that had put Hobart on the map and reportedly redefined the gallery experience. He knew I’d been wanting to go there for ages.

  ‘Tasmania? You mean like on a plane?’ Max asked. He hadn’t been on a plane since he was four and we’d visited his aunt in Sydney.

  ‘On a plane,’ Luke said. ‘And we’ll find a nice place to stay in the city. We’ll have some proper family time.’

  ‘What are you going to do about the Patch?’ I asked.

  ‘Mike can look after it for a few days. It will still be there when I get back.’ We hadn’t had a holiday in over two years, so it was so nice to think about the three of us getting away together. And I was so keen to spend a whole day at MONA.

  I hadn’t followed up yet about Parricide, because I was still feeling so annoyed with Suzi. Dave had said that he’d pulled it back from the designer, and I guessed that he’d sent pages on to Suzi to mark up the changes she’d wanted again. By Friday morning I had a nagging feeling that I should find out what was going on with it. We were now a whole two weeks behind schedule. I called Suzi on her mobile and tried to resurrect my more professional editorial tone, ‘Hi, Suzi, it’s Luisa. I was wondering how you’re getting along with the book.’

  ‘So sorry. I’ve marked up most of the changes. I’ve just got another couple of things that I’m double-checking. I’ll get the pages to you by the end of the day. I’ve got to get it finished anyway, as we’re off to MONA for the weekend.’

  ‘You’re off to MONA?’ My heart sizzled.

  ‘Yeah, with Brodie.’ I couldn’t believe it. Luke’s spontaneous trip to MONA had been inspired by Suzi, not me. She’d trumped me again.

  ‘Well, I’ll need to speak to Dave about how we’re going to make up the time now. It’s a full two weeks behind. Since I’m only going to get it tonight, it’s going to be tricky for me to fit it in with all my other projects next week. I’m at capacity. I’m not sure if we’re going to get it into shops before Christmas.’

  ‘I really need those Christmas sales.’

  ‘What can I say, Suzi? We’ve lost so much time now with all these added bits and pieces. You shouldn’t still be developing your manuscript — we’re way past that point. Dave is going to have to figure something out. I can only do what I can do.’

  ‘I’ll call Dave.’

  ‘Good. You do that.’ I slammed down the phone. I knew I’d crossed a professional line in my tone with her. I began to fear the call I would get from Dave the moment he got off the phone with Suzi. Sure enough, it came six minutes later.

  ‘I just got off the phone with Suzi. What did you say to her? She was really worked up.’

  ‘She’s not going to send me the changes until tonight. She’s taken over a week with it. We’re two weeks behind now. Next week I’ve got a full schedule of projects I’ve committed to. I’m not a magician: I can’t make up the time on this one.’

  ‘Well, maybe we need to find another editor if you can’t be more flexible.’

  ‘If that’s what you want to do.’ I was steaming.

  ‘It’s not what I want to do. It would be far better if you could see it through. Can’t you shuffle some things around next week? I don’t want to have to pull someone else in on it at this stage — you know the book better than anyone.’

  I took a deep breath. Laying my head in one hand, I said, ‘All right, I’ll do it. But on one condition. This is it. No more author corrections. She doesn’t get to see any more pages after this set. It’s her last chance. You have to tell her that.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll call her now. Thank you. I appreciate it.’

  ‘No worries. Bye.’ I’d never been that assertive with a publisher before. It was authors who were supposed to be the drama queens. The editor was meant to be understanding and accommodating, always conciliatory. If you wanted to get more work from the publisher, then nothing was too much trouble. I wondered whether Dave would ever hire me again. I wasn’t even sure that I cared. As long as I never had to work with Miss Suzi again.

  I opened up my private Jarvis email account. There were three messages there from him, full of yearning and mentions of our thighs, and how he would look at me with his eyes wide open when we made love for the first time. It was all as soppy as wet toilet paper, and equally as unappealing for some reason. I realised that I didn’t even think thighs were a sexy body part. I deleted the three messages quickly, feeling annoyed by them.

  ***

  After dinner, I sidled up to Luke in the study. He was working on some figures for the Patch in a spreadsheet on his laptop. He was sipping his 7.40pm coffee and nibbling four squares of chocolate. His coffee and chocolate were as predictable and comforting to him as a bottle was to a baby before bed.

  ‘Suzi’s going to MONA this weekend,’ I said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, she took over a week with her corrections to the book, and now I’ve got two weeks to make up on it. Dave’s put me under loads of pressure. And Suzi’s off to MONA, did you know that?’

  ‘Yeah, she may have mentioned it.’

  ‘Funny that you
booked a trip to Hobart after she mentioned it.’

  ‘I was going to do it anyway.’

  ‘Were you really?’

  ‘You are so difficult. Do you know that?’

  I was about to walk out, as I usually did once I’d made my point. But something made me want to stay and reconcile. I turned back towards him. ‘I’m sorry. I do appreciate it . . .’

  His face softened. ‘I just wanted to do something to make you happy.’ He patted his knee for me to sit on his lap, and I sat down tentatively. He held me around the waist, gently and protectively, and lay his chin on my shoulder. ‘We’ll have fun, the three of us, yeah? Max will love it. I’ve been looking up some nice houses to stay in. I’ll book it all and surprise you both.’

  He stroked my lower back under my t-shirt. I closed my eyes, enjoying this simple affection from him. It wasn’t much, it was just his fingertips over my back, but I’d been craving his caring touch. I remembered how we’d been in the early days before Max; we’d had an L-seater couch and we always sat touching somehow, someone’s head or feet in the other person’s lap. We’d upgraded the couch to a rare Avalon three-seater, but we’d downgraded the intimacy. We now sat at either end of the couch, as if there was a phantom between us.

  ***

  We almost never went to bed at the same time any longer. I was always in bed first, reading, and would often be asleep by the time he came in. That night, my book was already bookmarked with the Kentridge postcard and placed on the pile on my bedside table. I was lying on my side, in my usual position facing the ensuite door, and I was almost asleep. I heard Luke changing into his flannel pyjamas, $16.99 from Kmart two years earlier.

  He got under the covers and moved over close behind me and whispered, ‘Are you awake?’ I turned to face him and was met with a passionate stranger. He was adventurous, travelling to areas he’d never been to before, an explorer trailblazing his way across my body. He was inquisitive, yet confident, but something about that night made me feel as though I was a lab rat and he was experimenting on me. But even that didn’t turn me off. I was ready to take what I could get, however I could get it.