The Silent Wife: A Novel

by A. S. A. Harrison

  It hasn’t been difficult to keep her friends at bay. The only one making a nuisance of herself is Alison, who has taken to calling her practically on a daily basis. Alison is a good friend; these days she’d have to say her best friend. Certainly the one person who is trying to be there for her. Alison’s concern is endearing, and no one could appreciate Alison more than Jodi does, but right now she needs to stay focused and conserve her energy, devote herself to keeping her home intact.

  After Klara has returned with the vodka and the cash and the bank receipt, Jodi shuts herself in her office and looks at the blinking light on her telephone. She’s been aware of people calling but these days regards the ringing doubtfully, much as she would a barking dog. Every day or two she scrolls through the list of missed calls and listens to selected messages. There are some from Todd, but not the Todd she knows and loves. This is a different Todd, and today this different Todd has called her once, from his cell phone, early in the morning. She plays his message but it’s hard to hear with Klara battering at the ramparts—she has the vacuum cleaner going and is knocking it against Jodi’s office door as she works on the lintel and paneling. Holding a hand over her spare ear Jodi tries to make out what Todd is saying, something about a nightmare, and he sounds distraught, but she can’t really get the gist of it with all the noise, and anyway she doesn’t have the patience and debates with herself for less than a second before giving up and hitting erase.

  22

  HIM

  He’s in his car driving south on Clark Street, heading to the Walgreens at Clark and Lake to fill his prescription for antifungal lozenges. A cotton ball held in place by a piece of tape covers the spot in the crook of his arm where the needle punctured the skin. He’s left behind him, at the doctor’s office, a vial of his blood, which is going to be tested for the full spate of STDs, including syphilis, chlamydia, and gonorrhea, as well as HIV. Dr. Ruben refused to comment on the likelihood of the human immunodeficiency virus being the cause of the lesion, which Todd thinks is bigger now than it was before. “Let’s wait for the test results,” he said. Todd took this as a bad sign, and now he has days to wait, days of worry and foreboding that he’ll have to keep to himself. Of course he can’t say anything to Natasha, who has already accused him more than once of infidelity. What would happen if she got a whiff of this? The irony is that she really has no cause for her suspicions. He’s barely looked at another woman since he’s been with her.

  It took the doctor two tries to get the needle into the vein, but Todd felt almost nothing. He wasn’t thinking about the needle; he was busy with thoughts of HIV, the virus, which he’s come to picture as a kind of mutant disco ball, luridly winking and flashing, an image derived from illustrations found on the Internet. He can only wonder what perverse minds have managed to come up with these depictions. With a diameter of four one-millionths of an inch, the virus is beyond invisible, far too tiny to inhabit the greens and pinks and oranges of the illustrations. To detect it at all you need the Rolls-Royce of microscopes, the one that can enlarge a thing to half a million times the size it actually is. Up to a point, being so minuscule, the virus is harmless. Only in large numbers does it pose a threat. As with ants or bees you need a legion of them before they amount to an imposition. But once inside you it sets up house and quietly proliferates, using your body as a factory, harnessing your natural resources to stamp out copies of itself, establishing its power base, choking out your blood, turning you into a science fiction, and there you are—oblivious—walking around as if nothing were the matter, until one day at the dentist the bottom drops out of your life.

  Not that it necessarily kills you anymore. Nowadays they keep it under control with an antiretroviral cocktail, but it’s still a terrifying prospect. The drugs cost a fortune and there are side effects to contend with and you end up a slave to the medical profession, not to mention the damper it would put on your sex life. His sex life. What would Natasha have to say if he started using condoms, especially now that she’s pregnant? How could he ever explain that he’d put her at risk, and not only her but the baby too? Even if it turned out well and she and the baby were safe, chances are she would never speak to him again. And then there’s Jodi. She, too, would have to be told.

  By the time he gets his results the wedding will be just a few days off. First the results, then the wedding, in quick succession, and the truth is that he’s dreading the one as much as the other. The way he feels about both upcoming events is that things have gotten away from him. He doesn’t know who is in charge of his life these days but it sure as hell isn’t him. He’s beginning to see himself as little more than a witness, standing on the sidelines while everyone else determines his fate.

  As he crosses the river his tires hit the grating on the bridge, and the steady hum of the engine becomes a jarring tremolo. He stops for the red light at Wacker and his hand reaches for his crotch. Damn it all, he meant to ask the doctor about this. It feels like a rash but there are no marks of any kind: no spots or bumps, no welts, no redness, no discoloration. It flares up out of nowhere and feels like an army of centipedes scuttling around on feathery legs under his foreskin. The more he scratches the itchier it gets, but it’s impossible to stop scratching. As he pulls across the intersection, one hand on the wheel, he’s caught in a frenzy of rocking to and fro. The car weaves and pedestrians turn to stare, some of them smiling. It isn’t hard to guess what they’re thinking.

  He and Natasha could be perfect together if only she didn’t keep pushing, trying to force his hand. Like getting pregnant when she did, and the way she’s handling the wedding. Every day she invites more people or adds something to the menu or the table setting. Why does she want asparagus spears when she already has mixed greens? She’s spent a fortune on flower arrangements so why does she need an ice sculpture? Yesterday she took on two more bridesmaids, making it a total of eight, and who knows if she’s going to stop there. Every bridesmaid gets a dress, a corsage, and a pair of shoes. He’s also paying for their hair and makeup. He should have taken control from the start, laid down some ground rules, set some limits.

  He’s not a violent man. He’s not his father and never will be. In all his years with Jodi he barely even raised his voice. But Natasha has to learn that she can’t push him around, that he won’t be pussy-whipped, not by her or any woman. Natasha is bossy and she’s also immature and lacks judgment. There was no need for her to go running home to her daddy, as if his relations with Dean weren’t bad enough already. And the truth is he barely laid a hand on her. A cuff on the ear can hardly be called abuse, and it wasn’t the reason she fell. It caused her to momentarily lose her balance, but that was only because she was taken off guard. It was her who assaulted him, and yet she was surprised when he struck back. That’s a woman for you. Anyway, after she steadied herself she turned to leave the room, and that’s when she stumbled and fell. Yes, it was unfortunate, but seconds later she was already twisting the story. All this because he’d asked her to show some restraint. “You know I love you, but you’re being unreasonable.” That’s all he said. Nothing more than that. And yet she took that tone with him.

  “I can’t uninvite half my bridesmaids.”

  “You shouldn’t have invited so many in the first place.”

  “You said I could have whatever I want.”

  “Natasha. Dearest. You’re dressing your bridesmaids in Armani.”

  “Not all of them. Two are wearing Vera Wang.”

  “Okay. Fine. Have as many bridesmaids as you like. Have ten bridesmaids. Have twenty bridesmaids. Just keep the budget down to three grand. I think that’s fair.”

  “Oh, great. You want us to shop at Target. Or maybe we should go to the Goodwill.”

  “Shouldn’t your father be paying for this? Doesn’t the bride’s father normally pay for the wedding?”

  “Don’t, Todd. Just don’t go there.”

  “Why not? Why am I picking up the tab for your deadbeat father? That’s some
thing we’ve never even discussed.”

  “Now you’re being impossible. I don’t know why I’m even talking to you.”

  “He’s got to have at least a million stashed away. He owns his house. What does he even spend money on?”

  “Leave my father out of it. You know he hates you.”

  “Hates me so much that he gets out of paying for the wedding.”

  “I thought you wanted this wedding. I thought it was important to you.”

  “This is not a wedding. This is a shopping spree.”

  “Maybe you don’t want to get married.”

  “You’re acting like a child.”

  “Yeah, well, who knew you were such a cheapskate.”

  This took place over dinner, and with most of the food still on their plates, she left the table and slammed into the bedroom. He got up and followed her. He couldn’t understand why she was acting this way. “Why don’t you stop being such a bitch?” he said. She was lying facedown on the bed, and when he said that she leapt up and came at him like a cat, all teeth and nails.

  That’s when he struck her.

  It doesn’t help that he hasn’t been sleeping, that he wakes up night after night with the same goddamn nightmare. This is entirely new for him. He never has nightmares. He rarely even dreams. Jodi says that everybody dreams, but when he wakes up in the morning, as a rule, he remembers nothing. And this is the nightmare to end all nightmares. Jodi would be impressed. Not only that, she could help him. She’d have a take on it. Jodi works with her clients on their dreams, and she has a way of making sense of them. He really needs to talk to her—about that and other things. The loss of control he’s been feeling and the worry about his health and his future. Too much is happening and it’s happening too fast.

  In the nightmare he’s running on a treadmill at the gym. It’s an ordinary day and an ordinary workout, but even so he has a sense of approaching doom. And then, abruptly, the scene changes. The gym has disappeared, the treadmill is gone, and there he is like Bugs Bunny, still running, but now suspended over a void, feet paddling in midair, arms spinning like windmills. The sustained motion somehow holds him aloft, and he keeps at it, frantic to save himself, but his muscles are tiring, his strength is giving out, and he knows that he can’t keep it up for very much longer, that it’s only a matter of time before he drops like a stone.

  23

  HER

  In retrospect she’d like to say that it was all Alison’s doing, but she knows that if she hadn’t played her part it wouldn’t have happened. And it was more than just going along with Alison; she actually fell to fawning on her friend, and she hates herself more for the fawning, just as in eighth grade she hated herself for being teacher’s pet. Still, she has to allow that she was under duress. Isolated, vulnerable, run-down, drinking a lot and not eating, trying to hold herself together but in reality falling apart.

  Alison’s way of talking about it was so offhand that Jodi’s alarm bells never sounded. As if it were a basic household repair, like stopping a sprung leak; or a minor surgery, the removal of a troublesome appendix. Get a plumber, find a surgeon, come up with the money, problem solved. It was easy. Alison made it easy. When Jodi finally understood what was on offer, she felt grateful and relieved, so much so that she nearly broke down and cried. It was the perfect moment for the floodgates to open and all the grief and sorrow to come pouring out. But tears rarely fall in Jodi’s personal biosphere. The benefits of a good cry are known to her—the release of pent-up emotions, the clearing of static from the system—but as the years go by she finds herself less and less able to let go, becomes more and more accustomed to the brittleness that goes with endurance. The day will come, she imagines, when fine cracks appear in her skin and go about branching and splitting till she comes to resemble the crackle-glaze vase on the mantel.

  She’s glad now that Alison broke through her hermetic seal. After such a long spell of not cooking and not eating it felt good to get into the kitchen and make dinner for the two of them, engage in routine tasks like slicing and chopping, the process of rendering bulky roots and gourds into tamer domestic forms: a mound of ribbons, a pile of cubes. The kitchen provides the simple satisfaction of exact measures and predictable outcomes, and yet in the business of precision there is also alchemy, something she learned from her pharmacist father. In culinary terms it’s the alchemy of applying heat or a whisk or pounding something in a mortar. What’s tough and impenetrable becomes yielding and permeable. A viscous liquid ends as a mass of froth. A pinch of dry seeds releases an unexpected, outlandish perfume.

  Alison arrives in full makeup and stiletto heels, in spite of it being a quiet dinner at home. She smells like heaven, and her silver bracelets festively clink as she lifts her arms to fix her hair. Jodi has never seen Alison in any other mode. It’s like she always has a party or a hot date lined up for later. Alison can make an occasion out of anything.

  She accepts a glass of wine and says how worried she’s been. “You can’t do this to me. Last time I saw you, in case you’ve forgotten, when we left the restaurant you could barely even stand. Would it kill you to pick up the phone and call?”

  The scolding is benign and makes Jodi smile. They take their glasses into the living room where the panorama of the sky, ashen and sickly throughout the day, has deepened to a lusty blue-black. Jodi circles the room switching on lamps. She turns up the flame in the fireplace and settles next to Alison on the sofa. On the coffee table in front of them is a plate of canapés that Jodi placed there earlier: slices of toasted baguette topped with a savory olive relish.

  Alison knows nothing of Jodi’s present dilemma. The last thing they discussed was Natasha’s pregnancy and the possibility of Todd and Natasha getting married. Alison doesn’t know that—according to Dean—a date has been set for the wedding. She hasn’t heard about the eviction notice and is unaware that Jodi has dug herself in like a hobbit. She doesn’t know what Barbara Phelps had to say or even that Jodi has been to see a lawyer. Jodi has kept these things to herself in the belief that even Alison, the most indulgent of her friends, is unlikely to support her decision to protect her home by never leaving it.

  But she is wrong about Alison. Given her line of work, Alison has witnessed a lot of injustice, from everyday petty tyrannies (girls having to dance in the blast from an air conditioner; girls required to remove even their G-strings on stage) to out-and-out abuses of power (girls entertaining the manager’s friends; girls providing special services to officers of the law), and she does not take a philosophical view of such matters, does not hold with playing the game or going with the flow or following the path of least resistance. Alison has a history of sympathizing with the underdog and taking on other people’s problems. She is not a vigilante; she knows better than to kick up a fuss and call attention to herself in her place of employment. It’s more Alison’s style to short-circuit a switch or spike a drink or place an anonymous call to a man’s wife or mother. She’s even been known to take advantage of an officer’s improper behavior by relieving him of his weapon. Jodi has heard that Alison can get out the bigger guns, too, but until tonight she had not formed an image in her mind of what that might mean.

  They move from the sofa to the table and tuck into the seafood risotto. Alison talks about Crystal’s ex-boyfriend’s bad behavior and the restraining order that Crystal is trying to get. She goes on to describe a feud taking place between two of the girls, Brandy and Suki, which has escalated to the point where they’re shredding each other’s costumes. Jodi listens politely but can’t help feeling inwardly distracted. It’s her own fault of course that Alison is focusing on other people’s problems when she, Jodi, is in such terrible straits. She longs now to open up to her friend, tell her everything, but still she prevaricates. Alison will laugh at her for burrowing in the way she has, making things harder than they need to be, when it can’t make any difference in the end.

  But then, after dinner—after they’ve pushed back their
chairs and recrossed their legs and switched from wine to coffee—Alison surprises her by saying, “Is Todd going to marry that girl?”

  And here’s where Jodi understands what Alison is made of, because as the story comes out in all its humiliating detail—especially the part where Jodi becomes a pathetic shut-in—Alison is nodding and agreeing, could not in fact be more approving or supportive.

  “You’re doing the right thing,” she says. “You can’t let him get away with it.”

  “But he will get away with it,” says Jodi. “Nothing I can do is going to stop him.”

  “Wrong,” says Alison. “We can make this problem go away.”

  “We can make this problem go away?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “Ha ha,” says Jodi. “That would be nice.”

  “You think I’m joking,” says Alison.

  “Not joking. But how is it possible? Even the lawyer couldn’t help me.”

  “It’s possible,” says Alison. “We just need a little time to arrange things.”

  “Okay,” says Jodi.

  “How much time do we have?” asks Alison.

  “I don’t follow you,” says Jodi.

  “Do we know when they’re getting married? Because once that’s done, your options are going to seriously drop off.”

  “You want to know the date of the wedding?”

  “Didn’t your friend tell you? Dean?”

  “The second Saturday in December.”

  “What’s today? Okay. I think we can cope. The one thing we need to be sure of is the will. As long as you’re still the beneficiary . . .”

  “Well, I am. As far as I know. I mean, he could have changed his will.” She hasn’t given any thought to Todd’s will. The realization that he’ll undoubtedly be revising it in favor of his wife and child, if he hasn’t already done so, is a new kind of slap in the face.