Chapter 8
“I saw your wife yesterday.”
All around, the laughter of women—white women drunk on white wine—ripples over the manicured golf course of Anopsia Country Club, where, at the eighteenth hole, Mr. and Mrs. Dunning are celebrating their son’s engagement.
Behind, the Club House rises majestic: an alabaster estate girded by a large wraparound porch.
Bodies move impressionistic, pastel blurs of familiar and almost-familiar faces, and everything is perfect except for the missing space where Susan should be, the vacant area between Al’s breastbone and his hip, his empty back pocket where, when she’s happy, she sometimes slips her hand.
She was supposed to be here by now. Her flight was supposed to get in around noon, and she was just supposed to be an hour or two late, but now it’s been three and everyone’s tipsy and loose under the afternoon sun, finding excuses to say the things they’d been wanting to say for hours.
Maybe she was delayed, Al thinks, or maybe the plane crashed.
He’s started having bad dreams after seeing pictures of the smoldering fuselage in Sioux City.
Stop, he tells himself, it could be a million things.
She probably stopped to get a milkshake or can’t decide what to wear.
Despite the increase in her filming trips, Al is still unused to her absence.
He has come to rely on her in so many unanticipated ways; her coffee is stronger and deeper, she fills the kitchen with fresh, juicy fruit, which he never thinks to buy but always reaches for when it’s there.
She makes him laugh so hard he forgets himself—small tragedies become a source of silliness: their evil downstairs neighbor, the slow demise of his car.
She rescues him from his tendency to ruminate.
Skillfully, she handles the rodent problem, somehow catching them without killing them using only empty rolls of toilet paper.
When she is gone, he resorts shamefully to the traps.
Their corpses sicken him, and he has to hold his breath while taking them to the dumpster.
It’s going to be haunted by mice ghosts in here!
she cries, when he confesses. Well, I guess you should never leave, he jokes, though really he couldn’t be more serious, because how else is he supposed to convey the discomfort of situations like this, in which Sloane Roberts is swilling her lemonade and looking at him sidelong, setting him up to be the butt of a joke. I saw your wife yesterday.
“Tell her I say hello.” He’s learned this much: get ahead of the punch line.
If you laugh at yourself first, you seem in control.
And the joke of his wife’s absence has become common enough among his friends that he can smell it from a mile off.
He smiles now as though he’s in on it, as though the insinuation isn’t pissing him off.
“She was on the TV,” Sloane says knowingly.
Al can feel the skin of his neck flushing, a few beers threatening to give him away.
He hasn’t watched an episode in months. He’s begun to flick through channels while she’s away, hoping to catch her, hoping he won’t.
Only once in a blue moon does Susan sit him down to watch one together.
And even she’ll admit that watching them makes her squirm: the strange hyper-awareness of her own voice, the back of her head.
The dissonance, perhaps, between the wife on the couch and the woman in the scene.
Resting against Sloane’s engorged bosom, a four-month-old infant wipes its face against her chest, threatens to wake.
“Hang on, is that what you’ve been doing all day, left to your own devices? Watching soaps?” Her husband, Rod Roberts, an investment banker by birth, feigns shock. “I thought we were going for partner!”
“Well, I just stumbled across it when I was looking for the news…” Sloane colors with embarrassment.
God forbid anyone at Arrow and Munch discover their senior associate has succumbed to the intellectual poverty of daytime television.
Come on. It’s one thing to think it, but another to insinuate it so nakedly.
“Anyway,” Sloane deflects, “she gave me quite a shock.”
“Did she?”
“I assume you’ve seen it.”
“Of course.” Sloane raises a litigious eyebrow and Al is filled with the childhood queasiness of having missed something important, of being the last to watch the latest Western or hear about a girl he liked dating someone else.
He thinks back to the scenes that Susan showed him: would he describe them as shocking?
She testified in a kidnapping case, manipulated a shopkeeper.
But the smirk on Sloane’s face suggests something else.
He is sick with unknowing, with needing and not wanting to know what the hell she is talking about.
“Well, it’s spicy stuff!”
Nightmare images: other men, her skin, her mouth, their promise (to have, to hold)—how, how is Susie being discussed like a thing for public consumption when he has only ever known her as his most private friend?
A person of bedtimes and mornings, of soft conversations and furtive weekend escapades.
A person who writes him bright postcards with pictures of beaches and bridges, who dwells in his most vivid imaginings of the future, a someday mother, someday grandmother.
Capable of anything—this is the gift and the curse of her.
Spicy stuff. It’s a good thing she isn’t here because God knows what he’s supposed to do with all this anger that’s keeping him from finding anything polite or funny to say, freezing up the whole charmed moment.
A gentle voice pipes up. “Well, I just think it’s great that you let your wife get along with her career.
Some men can be so controlling.” Angelic, petite Tillie Summers shoots a silly look at Rod, who shakes a fist at her, and everyone laughs even though they all know she’s really referring to her own husband.
Al laughs too, relieved for a break in the tension, and smiles at Tillie gratefully.
“Well, she’s very talented,” Al adds, a closing remark, because it’s the one thing he knows to be true.
By the time Susan arrives, most of the partygoers have left, and all that remains of the hors d’oeuvres are pastry flakes and drooling pots of dip.
This is bad news. Susan is starving. The plane had been delayed by two hours and by the time she made her way through arrivals and into a cab back to the apartment, she was so tired that she sat down in the shower and nearly fell asleep.
She might have forgone the whole engagement party had there not been a part of her that so missed Al, that needed his clean smell and warm arms, that would feel like it was still in permanent motion until she arrived at the stable point of him.
Besides, he would worry if she didn’t show.
So she covered her hands in sticky volumizing product and ran them through her hair and called another cab to take her to the club.
Scavenging for something worth eating in the apartment (no apples, only an overripe banana), she discovered in the cereal cupboard a small half-decapitated mouse, its tiny teeth poking over its lower lip.
Her appetite vanished. Only now, alighting at the club, does she remember again her horrible hunger, her stomach disintegrating from the inside out.
“Fashionably late,” one of Al’s friends calls as she crosses the green to the vestigial party, the stragglers practicing their swings with invisible clubs, women trying to wrap up conversations.
She is aware of their gaze, her trail of California stardust as she cuts across the rippling lawn wearing a pink dress with puff sleeves, a costume that is almost but not quite right, the slit in the thigh slightly higher than appropriate for a place like this, for people like these.
They don’t see much of Al’s friends, for reasons that she can’t quite grasp.
Most of them are snobs, Al says, which Susan thinks is funny because a lot of people would say the same about him, being an academic and all.
Still, they all seem smart and good at what they do, so why shouldn’t they watch her with interest, a woman who has also proven to be good at what she does?
“Sorry,” she says, explaining how they sat on the runway for an hour and the pilot had joked that he was also trying to get home for dinner because his wife was making cream pie, which had been amusing at the time but was somehow hilarious when she retold it now to this crowd of boozed-up preps looking for anything to keep the party going.
And all the while she is looking at Al, reaching for his hand, which he loans for a brief squeeze, the touch of his normalcy almost breaking her before he retracts, hardly making eye contact, hardly managing a smile at her story.
She is filled with guilt at leaving him here so long on his own with all of these couples, for the minutes she wasted in the shower and sitting on the edge of the bed in a towel and changing from one dress to another.
How she resents all the people preventing her from collapsing into him, cajoling him into forgiveness.
Fine, she thinks, steeling herself toward the only other means of winning him over: a charm offensive.
Susan suppresses her hunger and sets about being delightful, making everyone laugh as she points out Rod’s new tie and Dan’s new almost-married-man handshake.
She compliments the blonde, Tillie, on the coordination of her dress and her shoes.
She takes the baby off Sloane, who looks relieved, and she smiles and glitters while she talks to it.
It reaches its pudgy hands up to claw her face and she meets them with kisses.
“Tick-tock,” someone says, and they all laugh knowingly, including Susan, even though having children is the last thing on her mind, not when life is just getting started.
But still, the Blessed Madonna act is melting away Al’s sulk, so she keeps talking to the baby about everything it has yet to do in the world.
“Someday, you can ride in a hot-air balloon,” she says. “And drive a car really fast down the highway. And go swimming in the ocean and talk to cute boys.”
“And if you’re lucky, you can even be a hooker on TV.”
“Rod!” Sloane exclaims. “Sorry, Susan—”
“No, no, he’s right of course. I do consider myself lucky.”
She smiles at Rod like she’s in on it, like this is the kind of thing good friends tease each other about, not daring to look at Al, whose mortification is radiating dire waves.
Remember when he defended her? His silence makes her feel as though she’s lost something.
It would only make it worse if he agitates, she tells herself.
She doesn’t need saving. Smiling, she hands back the baby and moves closer to him—close enough to feel the static between them without touching—until, at the first possible moment, they can agree it’s time to leave.