American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

“Good for them.”

  When we reached the Marcus Center, we parked in a lot on Water Street and hurried inside. The ushers were closing the doors of the theater, but we were able to slip in and take our seats as the lights went down. I had never seen The Seagull, and I thought it was quite good—the actress playing Madame Arkadina was superb. It was not until the second act that I was overtaken by an uneasy feeling. Where was Charlie? Was it safe to assume he was at the baseball game, or could he be somewhere else entirely?

  At intermission, I found a pay phone in the lobby, but again there was no answer at his office, and at home, Shannon said she hadn’t heard from him. I hovered between irritation and anxiety. The fact was, I had more reason to think he’d simply forgotten about the play, or even purposely avoided it, than I did to think something was wrong. In the last few months, Charlie had accompanied me to the theater increasingly grudgingly, and sometimes we skipped events altogether when I didn’t want to see a performance enough to try persuading him. The truth of our lives was that for close to two years, he had been in a bad mood; he was almost always restless and disagreeable.

  To a certain extent, Charlie had been restless since I’d met him—he drummed his fingers on the table when he felt we’d stayed too long at a dinner party, he’d murmur to me, “I bet even God has fallen asleep” during sermons at church—but in the past, it had been a restlessness that was physical, situational, rather than existential. His bad mood was different. It wasn’t directed toward me, but it had become such a constant that the times when he wasn’t in its grip were the exceptions.

  I’d tried to pinpoint when it had all started, and it seemed to have been around the time he turned forty, in March 1986. To my surprise, he had not wanted a party—he, Ella, and I had celebrated with hamburgers and carrot cake at home—and in the months before and after his birthday, Charlie talked often about his legacy. He’d say, “I just have to wonder what kind of mark I’ll make. By the time Granddad Blackwell was my age, he’d founded a company with three dozen employees, and by the time Dad was forty, he’d gone from being the state attorney general to being governor.” If I were to be completely candid, I would make the following admission: There were many things about Charlie that I knew other people might imagine I’d find irritating—his crudeness, his healthy ego, his general squirminess—and I didn’t. But his fixation with his legacy (I even grew to hate the word) I found intolerable. It seemed so indulgent, so silly, so male; I have never, ever heard a woman muse on her legacy, and I certainly have never heard a woman panic about it. I once, in the most delicate manner possible, expressed this observation about gender to Charlie, and he said, “It’s because you’re the ones who give birth.” I did not find this answer satisfying.

  Whatever the source of Charlie’s discontent, in late 1986 and the first half of 1987, it had been exacerbated by three quarters in a row of declining profits at Blackwell Meats. There ensued a many-months-long debate about taking the company public, an idea Charlie favored, and his brother John, who was still the CEO, opposed. The five other members of the company’s board of directors were Arthur, Harold, Harold’s brother, the brother’s son, and Harold’s sister’s husband, and their votes were evenly split, with Harold siding with John. This meant the decision came down to Arthur, who, after much back-and-forth, voted with John and against Charlie. Charlie spared his father and Arthur and saved his anger for John, and the previous November, we’d all experienced a rather strained Thanksgiving, with Priscilla seating John and Charlie as far apart as possible. Although the chill seemed to have thawed in the six months since—John and Charlie saw each other every day at work, after all—Charlie still privately seethed about what he saw as John’s ignorance (a particularly sore spot for Charlie was that John had never attended business school), and the rancor was a vivid reminder that if someone else criticized a Blackwell, it wasn’t acceptable, but a Blackwell criticizing a Blackwell was just fine. Meanwhile, I had tried not to let the conflict affect my relationship with John’s wife, Nan—I invited her to lunch more often than usual, or I’d suggest we drive together to Junior League meetings—and Ella, with no idea that her father and uncle were sparring, was worshipful of her girl cousins: Liza, who had taught me string figures during my first visit to Halcyon, was now twenty and finishing her junior year at Princeton, and Margaret was seventeen and would enter Princeton in the fall.

  But Charlie was less and less inclined to participate in family gatherings—he certainly didn’t initiate any—and he could be guaranteed to show up for a Blackwell brunch or dinner only if his parents were in town, which wasn’t more often than every six weeks. A month before, in April, John and Nan had bought a table for eight at a benefit for the art museum and invited us to sit with them, and Charlie hadn’t gone at the last minute; it was a Saturday evening, he’d been drinking heavily while watching a baseball game in the den, and when he came upstairs and saw that I’d hung his tuxedo on the back of our bedroom door, he said, “No way I’m putting on that monkey suit.”

  “Charlie, it’s blacktie,” I said, and he said, “Tough titty. I’m wearing what I have on, or you can go without me.” I had thought at first that he was kidding, but he’d maintained his refusal to change clothes, which was the same as refusing to go. When I’d asked what I was supposed to tell John and Nan—I knew they’d paid a hundred dollars a plate—he shrugged. “Tell ’em the truth.” Instead, I said he’d come down with the stomach flu. When I got home that night, he was still watching television—some police drama—and he smiled impishly and said, “Do you forgive your scoundrel husband?” Because it wasn’t worth it not to, I did, but that Monday, I ordered pamphlets from two treatment facilities for alcoholics, one local and one in Chicago. When I showed the pamphlets to Charlie, he said angrily, “Because I didn’t want to change my clothes the other night? Are you kidding me? Lindy, get a fucking grip.”

  At some point during the spring, Charlie’s malaise had expanded to include not just his brothers but also his upcoming twentieth reunion at Princeton, which would occur in early June. In advance of the event, he’d received a bonded leather book in which alumni provided updates about their professional and personal lives, and before bed, he’d taken to reading aloud from it in tones of scorn and disbelief: “ ‘Having made partner at Ellis, Hoblitz, and Carson was an achievement outmatched only by the indescribable pleasure of seeing the sunrise over Maui’s Haleakala Crater as Cynthia and I celebrated fifteen years of marriage . . . ’ I’m telling you, this guy didn’t know his asshole from his elbow in college. Oh, here’s a good one: ‘I find it humbling to think that my oncology research literally saves lives . . . ’ We all knew O’Brien was a homo.” I did not find these excerpts or Charlie’s editorializing enjoyable, mostly because I’d be trying to read my own book, and they were interruptions. We didn’t have to go to the reunion, I pointed out once, eliciting a snappish rebuttal: Of course we had to go! What kind of chump skipped Reunions? (That was what Princetonians called the event—not the reunion, just capital-R Reunions.) It was clear that the book had touched a nerve, that while working for a family-owned meat company sufficed in Maronee, at least on good days, Charlie questioned how impressive it sounded in a more national context. Though I tried to be sympathetic to his insecurities, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was, on balance, a rather fortunate problem to have.

  In recent weeks, he had been coming home from work later and later and rarely calling to say where he was. Sometimes, it would turn out, he’d been at the country club, sometimes he’d stopped at a bar for a drink (this bothered me most, because it seemed seedy—in Riley, husbands and fathers frequented bars, but they didn’t in Maronee), and sometimes he’d driven directly from the office to a Brewers game. The Blackwells had four season tickets, formerly Harold’s, which were shared among Charlie and his brothers but often went unused. On these nights, when I asked whom he’d gone with, once it was Cliff Hicken (he and Kathleen, the friends who’d held the backyard cookou
t where Charlie and I had met, had moved from Madison to Milwaukee three years after we had, when Cliff had taken a job as vice president of a financial advising company), and once Charlie had gone to a game with a younger fellow from work, but several times, it sounded like Charlie had gone alone. He’d arrive home as I was going to bed, and I’d feel simultaneously angry, distressed, and too tired for a confrontation. I’d postpone a real conversation until morning, by which point I didn’t have the heart to begin today with what was worst from yesterday. In any case, though he never said as much, I had the sense that on many of these mornings, Charlie was too hungover to do more than force himself out of bed and into the shower.

  It had occurred to me that he could be having an affair, but I didn’t think he was. We still had sex regularly, if not with the frequency we’d enjoyed early on, and he was, in smaller ways, as affectionate as he’d ever been. In the middle of the night, he’d take my hand and hold it while we slept; the previous week, I’d awakened around three to find him rubbing his feet against mine. When we got up, I’d asked, “Were you playing footsie with me last night?” and he’d said, “Lindy, don’t pretend that footsie isn’t your favorite game.” His ongoing bad mood had not obliterated his usual personality; it was more that it accompanied it, like a sidecar on a motorcycle. And as for the possibility of him having an affair, really, he seemed more preoccupied than secretive.

  AT THE END of intermission, I rejoined Miss Ruby in the theater and said, “What do you think?” and she said in a guarded way, “It’s interesting.” When the play was over and the lights went on, I was approached by several people Charlie and I knew, and when I introduced Miss Ruby to them (instead of calling her Miss Ruby, which felt peculiar in this context, I said, “This is Ruby Sutton”), I could tell some of them wondered who she was; the only person who seemed to recognize her was an older woman named Tottie Gagneaux, who squinted and said, “Aren’t you Priscilla’s helper?”

  Quickly, I said, “Did you know they’ll be in town this weekend? They’re coming from Arizona, if I’m not mistaken, although it’s hard to keep track with how much they travel these days . . . ”

  It was raining lightly as we left the theater, and Miss Ruby gave me directions to her house. She lived in Harambee, it turned out, in a modest one-story shingle house on a hill, with a steep concrete staircase leading to the door. As I let her out, I could see, at the edges of the curtain in the front window, the flickering blue light of a TV. A figure carrying a baby—Yvonne, obviously—lifted the curtain from one side and peered out the window at my car. “Thanks so much for keeping me company tonight,” I said, and Miss Ruby said, “Yes, ma’am.” Before she shut the car door, she added, “Good night, Alice.” I was nearly certain that in the eleven years since I had met her, it was the first time she’d ever used my name.

  DRIVING HOME, I felt an odd, happy lightness. The evening had gone in a different direction than I’d expected, but it seemed like it had been a good direction—while Charlie would have been bored by The Seagull, I sensed that Miss Ruby had enjoyed it. When I pulled into our driveway, though, I felt a flicker of doubt. Shannon’s car was gone, and after I’d pressed the garage-door opener, I saw Charlie’s Jeep Cherokee. Had the baseball game been rained out?

  I unlocked the front door, and as soon as I stepped inside, I heard the approach of heavy footsteps. Charlie met me in the hall. “I hope that was a damn good play.”

  “Is Ella all right?”

  “She’s fine. I sent Shannon home at nine, and I’ve been waiting for you ever since.”

  “I called here and spoke to her at intermission, so you must have gotten in right after that.”

  “Intermission, huh?” He folded his arms. Whenever he left for work in the morning, and whenever he came home at night, we always hugged and kissed, sometimes repeatedly. So far, we had done neither. In a sarcastic voice, he said, “You get your daily dose of the fine arts?”

  I said nothing.

  “You didn’t maybe wonder where I was?” he added. “Just for a minute or two, while you watched the actors recite their lines?”

  “I assumed you were at the ball game. Charlie, I called the country club, I called Arthur and Jadey, I drove over to your parents’, and I’m sorry, but this isn’t the first time I’ve been left in the dark on your whereabouts.”

  “So it didn’t cross your mind for even half a second that something might be wrong?”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think?” You’ve screwed up, his expression said, and I’ve got all the time in the world to wait for you to realize it.

  Simultaneously, I felt a sincere fear, a bone-deep apprehension, and I felt a surge of resentment. If something was wrong, why was he toying with me? And if something wasn’t wrong, the question was the same—why was he toying with me?

  “Don’t do this,” I said. We looked at each other for several seconds, and I did not smile a coddling smile, I did not smile at all. I was willing to coddle Charlie when he thought everyone else was plotting against him, but I wouldn’t do so when he acted as if I were plotting, too.

  At last, in a surprisingly casual voice, he said, “The company’s royally fucked.” He turned and walked past the living room and into the back den, and I followed him. (Really, I was not so stern at all—I would follow, I would coddle, in exchange for the smallest amount of respect and sometimes in exchange for less than respect, for mere neutrality. Had anyone been watching, I probably would have seemed like a doormat, but I believed in picking my battles, and there was rarely anything I wanted more than I didn’t want to keep fighting.)

  The TV was on, set to the game he apparently hadn’t gone to, and on the table in front of the TV were an open bag of Fritos, a half-empty bottle of whiskey, and an old-fashioned glass with an inch of amber liquid in it. Charlie took a seat in the center of the couch, in a spread-out posture that did not invite joining him. I sat in one of the two heavy armchairs on either side of the couch.

  Gesturing at the Fritos, I said, “Did you see there’s chicken marsala?”

  “I had a steak.”

  He grabbed a throw pillow from beside him, a pillow covered in dark brown corduroy, and clutched it in a way that was so childish it might have been funny or sweet were he not seething. He was looking at the television screen as he said, “Eleven people in Indianapolis puked their guts out after a high school sports banquet Monday night, and what do you suppose was the banquet’s entrée? If you guessed chili made with Blackwell ground beef, then ding, ding, ding, you win first prize! Now the USDA has gotten involved, John has decided to do a recall—we’re talking, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of pounds of chuck, maybe millions, in at least five states—and you want to know the best part? I bet you dollars to doughnuts it’s not our fault. For all we know, the dipshits in Indiana bought expired meat, but hey, if the big corporation up in Milwaukee can take the fall for it, why not?”

  “Charlie, I’m sorry.”

  He lifted his head. “You and me both. I spent an hour talking to some jackass from the Sentinel tonight when I don’t give a shit about any of this. I’ll grill meat, I’ll eat meat, end of story. I’m sick of pretending I care about the integrity of sausage—I didn’t go to business school to oversee quality control.”

  “How are Arthur and John doing?”

  “Arthur and John can go fuck themselves.”

  As he spoke, a player for the Brewers struck out, ending the inning, and Charlie hurled the pillow he’d been holding at the TV. Then he leaned forward, setting his head in his hands, and I stood and went to sit by him. I placed my palm on his back, rubbing it over his white oxford shirt, saying nothing.

  With his head still in his hands, he said, “I’m tired of this bullshit.”

  “I know.” I kept rubbing his back. “I know you are.”

  “I’m this close to quitting. I’ve had my fill.”

  “It’s fine if you quit,” I said, “although I’m sur
e you’ll want to do it as diplomatically as possible.” Relatively early in our marriage, I’d had the strange realization that Charlie’s income didn’t affect our standard of living. It turned out that at the age of twenty-five, Charlie had inherited a trust of seven hundred thousand dollars, and though he’d spent twenty-seven thousand dollars of his own money on his congressional campaign in ’78 and a hundred and sixty-three thousand when we bought our house, he’d hardly touched it besides that, and he earned a good salary. With the exception of the precipitous stock-market drop in October 1987, our investments had done well, and there was now in various accounts over a million dollars. I still thought it was important that Charlie hold a job—important for his sense of himself, his ability to give an answer when people asked what he did, and I also couldn’t imagine anything more disastrous for our marriage than if we were both in the house all day—but it didn’t matter to me what his job was, and I agreed with him that he could probably find something he found more engaging than the meat industry.

  Having quit my own job eight months after our wedding, I had contributed a negligible amount to the family pot, and I never lost sight of the fact that our money was not exactly ours; I was, however, the one who wrote the checks for all our bills, and I also kept files for the accounts. I sometimes thought back to that check I’d seen for twenty thousand dollars one of the first times I visited Charlie’s apartment, how bewildered I’d been by it. Certain things, I now knew, required checks with many zeroes: painting the outside of our house, making a respectable contribution to the annual giving fund at Biddle Academy, acquiring my Volvo station wagon outright, monthly payments being a phenomenon with which Charlie appeared to have little experience.

  I suppose it was because the taxes we paid each April on dividends from our investments were greater, even accounting for inflation, than my salary as a teacher had ever been, that I felt it was all right to quietly, and without mentioning it to Charlie, make occasional donations to charities that I suspected would have appealed less to him than they did to me. The donations were in the amount of two or three or, at most, five hundred dollars: I’d read in the paper about an inner-city food pantry, a literacy program, an after-school drop-in center for teens that was in danger of closing, and I’d feel a swelling uneasiness—familiar to me by this point—as I sat in the den or kitchen of our five-bedroom house on Maronee Drive. I’d write a check, send it off, and the uneasiness would subside for a while, until the next time. Although Charlie looked over our finances only once a year, when taxes were due, I did not include my donations in the list of deductions I gave our accountant. Of course, after you make a donation, it seems you remain on an organization’s mailing list in perpetuity, and Charlie did once, when rifling through the mail, hold up an envelope from the food pantry and say, “Have you noticed that we get something from them every fucking month?”