The Silent Wife: A Novel

by A. S. A. Harrison

  Gerard: Yes.

  Jodi: I didn’t expect you to ask me that. Well, maybe I do. Sure. Of course I feel responsible for him. On some level, I suppose.

  Gerard: Why do you think you feel that way?

  Jodi: Wouldn’t you? I mean wouldn’t anybody? Under the circumstances?

  Gerard: How would you describe the circumstances?

  Jodi: Okay, maybe what I feel is not exactly responsible. Let’s just say I worry. I’d like to be able to help him, but I can’t help him. He won’t let me.

  Gerard: What do you think is the reason for your worrying?

  Jodi: I want him to be happy. I want him to be fulfilled. When he’s an old man looking back on his life, I want him to feel that he made good choices, didn’t waste his opportunities, had a goal of some sort and followed through and accomplished something.

  Gerard: Let’s talk about your goal, the goal of your worrying.

  Jodi: What do you mean?

  Gerard: What would happen if you quit worrying about Ryan?

  Jodi: You think it’s a problem that I worry?

  Gerard: What purpose do you think your worrying serves?

  Jodi: Does worrying need a purpose?

  Gerard: Do you think it helps Ryan when you worry about him?

  Jodi: Okay. Touché. I get it. I see your point. Of course it doesn’t help him; it helps me. As long as I worry about him I can feel that I’m at least making an effort, that I haven’t abandoned him.

  Gerard: Do you think that’s what you would feel if you didn’t worry? That you’d abandoned him?

  Jodi: Probably. Yes.

  Gerard: What else would you feel?

  Jodi: I guess I’d feel that I’d broken our connection. I’d no longer feel connected to him. Because, think about it, the reality is that I hardly ever see him and have no way of keeping in touch. So how are we connected if I don’t worry?

  Gerard: So when you worry about Ryan you feel connected to him. And if you stopped worrying, if you lost that feeling of connection, what would happen then?

  Jodi: I’d worry about the loss of connection. I guess that sounds ridiculous.

  Gerard: Not ridiculous. But there may be better ways than worrying to keep your connection with Ryan alive within yourself.

  Jodi: For instance?

  Gerard: I’d like you to think about that. Let’s call it your homework assignment.

  20

  HIM

  Natasha calls as he’s on his way to the gym. She wants him home by seven, she says, and would he bring some wine for dinner. That’s Natasha for you. Jodi never had him running last-minute errands. Not that he minds getting the wine; what bothers him more is how she puts it, as if it’s expected, as if she’s in charge. Where’s the give-and-take is what he’d like to know. It’s not as if she keeps the house clean or even cooks the dinner. The minute he walks in the door she sets him to work in the kitchen.

  He turns off Michigan onto Adams and doubles back to the wine store in Printers Row. The place is crowded, and there’s a lineup at the cash register. By the time he’s out of there his workout is getting away from him, and he decides to grab a beer instead. It’s been far too long since he sat in a bar and drank a beer. In the beginning he didn’t mind so much the way she kept tabs on him. Given that she’s half his age and oversexed, he found it reassuring. But that sort of thing can’t go on indefinitely. And things are different now. Now that she’s pregnant and not going anywhere.

  He’ll stop for a quick one and to hell with it. At least he’ll be home in time for dinner. She’ll smell it on him and she’ll make a fuss, but it won’t be as bad as the time he came in at three in the morning after his visit with Jodi. Natasha didn’t believe that he’d spent all that time with Harry, though in his own mind the way he told it made a perfectly plausible story: “We stayed at the bar till closing and then we went to an all-nighter for bacon and eggs.”

  “You’ve been with Jodi,” she said clairvoyantly.

  In the end she forced him to admit it. But he’d seen Jodi only briefly, he maintained, and it was before, not after, his meeting with Harry. This at least explained the clothes he’d brought away with him. And he wouldn’t have felt the need to hide it from her, he added, if she weren’t so damn controlling.

  Arriving at the Drake he takes a seat at the bar with a feeling of coming home. He loves the burnished wood and leather, the electric twilight, the glittering rows of bottles and glasses, the drone of voices and jostling for elbow room, the first long pull of the frothy draft that his friend the bartender has set down in front of him. He tunes his antennae to the meeting and greeting going on around him, the sense of release and possibility that happens when people get off work and settle down to the first drink of the day, the drifting ions and pheromones, the waves of talk and laughter, the rising hopes and expectations.

  Seated on his stool after such a long absence he succumbs to a tender devotion, a reverence for this welcoming sanctuary with its quaint accoutrements and rituals, its shakers and strainers, goblets, flutes, and snifters, pickled onions and lemon twists, distinctive paper coasters, a different one for every drink, its buzzing congregation, and the secular priest behind the bar performing the time-honored rites. It makes him think of the church he used to attend with his mother, who raised him Roman Catholic, or tried to. He never could get his head around the old man in the sky, but he was smitten from the start with the glamour and mystique of it: the solemn processions, colorful robes, smoking censer, chanting and singing. He loved the fact that something could be blessed and thereby changed in its very nature: the wine, the water, and the people, too. And he sometimes dreamed about the tabernacle, the queer little ornate dwelling house built to hold the enigmatic sacrament. He connected with the mystery and the rapture, and now he inhabits the bar at the Drake in much the same way. Salvation is here, too, here for the taking. We are all mediums for our own basic truths. All we really have in life is the primal force that moves us through our days—our unvarnished, untutored, ever-present, inborn agency. Life force is the holy ghost in each of us.

  The indwelling presence was strong in him in his younger years—in his childhood as he learned to distinguish himself from his parents, when he broke free and discovered the world at large, the exhilaration of it, and then as he found his feet in business and felt his power and his blamelessness, and when he first encountered Jodi and through her the substance of communion. He’s a lover in love with the world, and when he’s in form the world gives back. It’s how he wants to live every minute of every day. He wants it all unwrapped. He wants to look the barefaced mystery in the eye, be a participant, immersed—not an observer, a packager, a regretter.

  This is not the way some people see it. Jodi, for one. But you can’t live your life by other people’s rules. And Jodi admires him nonetheless. Admires his success, his ability to realize his promise, walk in the field of his dreams. He likes to be admired by Jodi. Her admiration has buoyed him up and given him heart over the years, and with that has come a certain discipline, enough to temper him a little, keep him steady on his course. He could have made his way without her, but with her he had this precious grease for his gears. Not every man has been loved like that. Even his mother’s love was compromised—blighted by her guilt, even a little thwarted by her loyalty to his father.

  So much of his life has had Jodi in it. The days lived, the words spoken, the feelings felt, an accumulated history, a quantum of meaning. His life with Jodi is a hoarded treasure, sewn into a pouch and stowed in the hollow of his chest. It isn’t her fault that she couldn’t save him from himself. What he fears now is that the black hole will open up again. Sometimes he feels its tug. These days the promised land is elusive. He needs to be an opportunist and reel it in where he can. In the dusk of the bar in the afternoon or on a rainy night with the pavement a river of reflections. In a woman’s desiring eyes or in her stupendous nakedness. Love after all is indivisible. Loving one more doesn’t mean loving an
other less. Faith is not a construct but something you carry inside you.

  He takes off his jacket and drapes it over the back of his stool. There’s maybe half an hour before Natasha starts to fret and an hour after that before it’s actually dinnertime. He orders a burger with his second pint and wolfs it down in three or four bites, but he takes his time with the draft. He isn’t a guzzler like his father. Nor is he a mean-spirited son of a bitch, not even when he puts away more than he should. Sitting down to a beer is a small enough reward for a day’s work, a reward well earned and well deserved. He’s a good provider. He takes care of business. Also unlike his father. The old man was a real piece of work, verified by the fact that nobody came to his funeral. At least his mother had a few good years after he died.

  Remembering Natasha, he pats the phone in his pocket. If she calls he’ll try to make her feel good. There’s been too much fighting and not enough of the old fun and tenderness. She’s basically insecure; that’s the problem. She ought to take a lesson from Jodi, who never tried to run his life and didn’t pick fights.

  By the time she calls, he’s finishing off a second burger, and before picking up he washes down the last of it with a slug of beer.

  “Sounds like you’re in a bar,” she says.

  “I stopped for a drink on the way home.”

  “You didn’t go to the gym?”

  “Didn’t have time.”

  “You’ve been in the bar since you left work?”

  “You know how much I love you,” he says.

  “That’s hardly the point,” she says.

  “I think it is the point. You’re beautiful and I love you and that’s what matters.”

  “If you loved me you’d be here. We’re having dinner guests. Did you forget?” Her voice is verging on shrill.

  “Try to calm down,” he says. “I’m just having a drink.”

  “Is anybody with you?” she asks.

  “No,” he says. “I’m alone.”

  “I suppose you forgot to get the wine.”

  “Not at all.”

  “You have the wine?”

  “Yes, I have the wine.”

  “I want you to come home now.”

  “Fine. If you want me to come home, I’ll come home.”

  “I’m going to wait on the phone while you pay your tab. Have you paid your tab?”

  “No. But I’ll pay it if that’s what you want.”

  “I want you to pay your tab. I’m going to wait.”

  “I’m doing it now. I’m paying my tab.”

  He signals to the bartender, gets out his wallet.

  “Tell me when you’ve paid your tab,” she says.

  He completes the transaction and drinks what’s left in his glass. “Okay,” he says. “I’ve paid my tab and I’m leaving the bar.”

  “Are you standing up?”

  “Yes, I’m standing up.” He gets off his stool. “I’m walking to the door.”

  “You were talking to someone,” she says.

  “I was talking to the bartender.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him to keep the change.”

  “Have you left the bar yet?”

  “Yes, I’ve left the bar. I’m going to hang up now.”

  “I want you to come straight home.”

  “I’m hanging up now.”

  21

  HER

  She hasn’t left the apartment in eight days. She would not have thought it possible, but all her requirements have easily been met. For most of her daily essentials—groceries, toiletries, DVDs, and the like—she can shop online. The doorman brings up her mail, and the dog walker now comes three times a day—morning, afternoon, and evening. Much of what she needs she already has on hand because she likes to buy in quantity and keep things well stocked. Nonetheless, spending every minute of her time at home is taking its toll. With the loss of the activities in the wider world that she normally counts on for stimulation, ordinary life has taken on a dreamlike quality. There’s an awareness of reality fading. And having too little to do makes the autumn days, already compacted, shorter than ever. With so few demarcations and little sense of time extending through places and events, the daylight hours tend to vanish in a snap. The sun comes up, the sun goes down, and not enough happens in between. Her nights, on the other hand, are unaccountably long, in spite of their utter emptiness.

  In her solitude she’s taken to playing out possible future events in her mind, scenarios that frighten her more the more she dwells on them. She contemplates a raid of the kind she’s seen in war movies, with thugs in uniform breaking down the door and dragging her off in the night. She imagines an act of betrayal by one of the people she habitually opens the door to: a client, the doorman, the boy who delivers her groceries. In lucid moments she understands that these worries are irrational. If they’re going to come for her they’ll come during the day, and Todd will let them in with his key. But it’s at night that she feels most afraid. Between sunset and dawn there is no period of time when she feels safe.

  The one thing she needs to get her hands on is sleeping pills. The OTC brands don’t work, and to get a prescription she would need to see a doctor. She’s thought about trying an Internet source, but buying drugs online would be like buying them on the street. Sleeplessness has never been a problem in the past, but lately it’s gotten so bad that she’s been blanking out and seeing double. She wishes now that she had saved Natasha’s eszopiclone. Giving it to Todd accomplished nothing.

  There are times when she dozes off, but then she starts to dream and it’s all turmoil and confusion. When she wakes up she feels worse than before. Without a good sleeping pill to knock her out it’s better not to sleep at all. More and more she’s taken to sitting at her computer into the small hours playing game after game of solitaire, or else she carries her bedding to the sofa, where she watches movies. In her former life she used to read herself to sleep, but these days she lacks the concentration to read. It helps to keep a tumbler of vodka beside her and sip from it as the hours creep by. She likes its bitter, raw taste and the way it makes her feel, like a rag doll that’s lost its stuffing.

  But come morning she’s exhausted and still half drunk. To get herself ready for clients she spends a long time in the shower and drinks a full pot of coffee followed by a swill of Listerine. With her security threatened it’s vitally important that she not alienate her clients, and she’s doing her best to keep up appearances, but her troubles have erupted on her face for all to see: the deathly pallor, worse than before, the swollen eyelids, dark circles, pinched flesh—universal signs of things gone wrong. She’s upgraded her relationship with makeup, but blush and concealer can only do so much. None of her clients have said a word, but they must be wondering. With her concentration shattered it isn’t easy to follow along during sessions, and on top of that she’s been moody and irritable. Most days with most clients she’s on the verge of losing it by midsession.

  What she’s doing now is standing at the window looking out at the view. The mottled sky squats low over the lake, spitting rain like a large animal relieving itself. The water, choppy and sludge colored, makes her think of boiling sewage. This is not her fault. None of this is her fault. She did her best to make it work with Todd. She was tolerant, understanding, and forgiving. She was not grasping or possessive. Unlike the women you see on the Dr. Phil show, who fall to pieces when the randy fellow happens to stray. Boo hoo. Women the world over have been putting up with far worse for centuries. Soul mates is a nice idea but rarely borne out in practice. Marriage coaches like Dr. Phil raise the bar too high, teach women to expect too much, and end up breeding discontent. We live alone in our cluttered psyches, possessed by our entrenched beliefs, our fatuous desires, our endless contradictions—and like it or not we have to put up with this in one another. Do you want your man to be a man or do you want to turn him into a pussy? Don’t think you can have it both ways. She did not make that mistake with Todd. S
he gave him plenty of space. He had nothing to complain about. This is not her fault.

  Today is Wednesday, the day Klara comes to clean. Klara is a married woman with teenage children who cleans part-time to supplement the family income. She arrives at one o’clock and spends four hours scrubbing, polishing, vacuuming, changing sheets, and doing laundry. Klara’s approach is to work on all the rooms simultaneously, which means that steering clear of her is next to impossible, so Jodi has always made a point of being out when Klara arrives. At least that’s how it used to be, before she became a shut-in. Today, Klara let herself in as usual and nearly jumped out of her skin when she came across Jodi in the kitchen. It was the first time in months that she and Jodi had actually laid eyes on each other.

  “What are you doing here, Mrs. Gilbert?” she asked. “Are you sick?” She is careful to enunciate her words. Her English is good, but she speaks with a strong Hungarian accent.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” said Jodi. “Please just carry on as if I weren’t here. I’ll try to keep out of your way.”

  At the moment Klara is temporarily absent because Jodi has sent her on errands. She gave her a sheaf of checks to deposit in the bank machine and asked her to take out some cash and pick up a bottle of Stolichnaya. She could have asked one of her friends to help her out with errands, but that would involve explanations, and so far her friends don’t know about the latest developments. Nor do they need to know. They don’t need to know, for instance, that she is not the person she thought she was, the sturdy branch that bends in the wind and doesn’t break, the one who laughs things off and has made a profession of helping others to be more resilient, like her. In the past she has always been open with her friends, but that was when she was on top of things. Jodi not coping is something they don’t need to witness. Besides, she can barely acknowledge even to herself the vast, unkind thing that is happening to her. Most of the time she’s looking only as far ahead as the next hurdle in her day: the client, the shopping list, the searching look on the doorman’s face when he hands her the mail, the compromise she makes between eating a proper meal and eating nothing at all.