The Senator's Wife Read online

  She made a little noise, a sharp inhalation.

  They were of women, pornographically posed, their legs spread wide or held open in astonishingly gymnastic dancer's positions, their genitals penciled or inked in delicately. There were perhaps a dozen. She looked at each one closely. One was of two naked women in an embrace, their limbs entwined. In another, a greenish nude with red hair was in profile doing a backbend, her long locks nearly touching the ground behind her. There was one of a woman lying down, her legs and sex splayed open for the artist.

  This was a surprise. It was a surprise about Delia. It startled Meri.

  She went to Delia's desk and sat down in the chair. The light from her own kitchen windows lay on Delia's terrace, on the empty wooden chairs out there. The fallen sycamore leaves were piled on the seats and gathered against the box hedge. The desk was neat, everything in seeming order. She imagined Delia herself sitting here, reading letters, doing paperwork, so private and self-contained.

  And that was how she thought of her, she realized. Delia was funny and welcoming, she beckoned you with her charm and seemed very open, very candid and spontaneous, but you got nothing, fundamentally, that she hadn't planned to give you. This was a feeling she couldn't have expressed until this moment, but somehow the pictures on the wall had confirmed it for her: Delia was unknowable. She was private.

  She didn't let you in.

  Meri switched the desk lamp on. She was facing her reflection, her round, determined face, her straight, limp hair. The desktop was bare, but along the back of the writing surface there was a row of cubbyholes full of papers of one sort or another, and Meri watched her hand reach forward and pull an envelope from one of them.

  The name in the upper corner was familiar to her—it was one of the sons, Brad, the second one on the list of emergency contact numbers downstairs.

  She took the letter out and started to read it. He addressed Delia as Dearest Mother. Her eyes moved down the page. She turned it over and read the back. It was just a note, really, a newsy, chatty letter, the kind of letter no one in Meri's family would ever have written, the kind Nathan often wrote to his mother. It described Delia's grandchildren for the most part, their lives as school started up for them.

  Imagine it, Meri thought—the wish to convey this, the knowledge that the recipient would actually be interested. It seemed amazing to her. It seemed privileged beyond words.

  Meri had just finished it when she heard, and felt, a noise—a structural thump. She started, her heart seemed to slam in her chest. For a half second she thought that it was somewhere in Delia's house, she thought that someone had come in.

  And then she relaxed. It was Nathan, of course, Nathan, next door, coming home, shutting the door hard.

  After a long moment she turned the desk light off. Slowly, carefully, she went down the stairs, not wanting to make any noise on her descent that Nathan might hear through the wall. She turned Delia's living room light off too and stepped out onto the cold front porch, hearing the click of the door's lock as she pulled it shut behind her.

  THINGS CHANGED. The exaltation Meri had felt the first few nights they made love after she knew she was pregnant disappeared as her body changed, as the sense of thickness and dullness claimed her, as she grew, in her own eyes, fat and ugly—as the project of staving off the faint and then sometimes sharp nausea that threaded through her days absorbed her more and more. Sometimes the very idea of making love exacerbated it. Once she actually recoiled when Nathan reached for her.

  “Don't!” she said, too loud. It was escape from her body Meri wanted, not to experience it more intensely.

  And there seemed to be a reciprocal withdrawal on Nathan's part, though he masked it as concern, as courtesy. Or Meri felt it as a mask, felt the polite questions as a way of seeming loving while holding himself away from her.

  But maybe it was just that their lives too had changed so much from their lazy, sexy days in Coleman. Here, he was up later and later every night in his study, preparing for classes, reading, making notes, grading papers. They didn't have wine with dinner anymore, because she wasn't allowed to, because he needed his head clear to work in the evenings, so their meals were less leisurely, less enjoyable. Once the dishes were cleaned up and put away, he disappeared. When she went to bed, sometimes barely making it till nine or nine-thirty, she could hear him up there, the creak of the floor under his desk chair, the sound of his repeated trips across the room to his bookshelves. When he came to bed, when he slid up against her under the covers, the cool of his long body waking her, beckoning her, as often as not she didn't respond—she would have had to come up from too deep a sleep, she was too stunned with exhaustion, her arms felt too impossibly heavy.

  There were two places where Meri could find relief from all this. One was at work, where she was often so absorbed in what she was doing that she actually sometimes forgot, for an hour at a time, how rotten she felt.

  The other, increasingly, was at Delia's house.

  She had begun to make time to be there, to linger, usually in the late afternoon before Nathan got home, or on the weekends when he was in his office at the college, slaving away on his book. The house was chilly, but Meri came prepared, in extra sweaters. She sat in different rooms, she lay on Delia's bed. Like Goldilocks, she thought, sneaking around where she didn't belong, trying everything on for size, for her own comfort.

  But she couldn't help it, she liked being in Delia's house. She liked looking closely at the paintings on the wall, at the family photographs. She loved the old maps hung here and there, with their absurd guesses about the shape of the world. She loved walking through the spaces, learning the way the light fell at different times of the day.

  And increasingly over these weeks she gravitated to Delia's study—to puzzle at the sexual watercolors there, to sit at Delia's desk, to read through the innocent letters and papers Delia had tucked into the cubbyholes at its back.

  It was an appetite—she thought of it that way—this wish to know more, and then more than that, about Delia's life. She felt it as she did the need for the crackers and water that carried her through the day. She thought of it, actually, as being connected to her present state as much as they were.

  Her state: her pregnancy. Yes. But something else too. Perhaps her sense of being alone in her state. Her need for something, something she couldn't have named. She remembered what Delia had said the night she was at their house for dinner about her own curiosity about Anne Apthorp's life—about how her wish to know more was connected to something primal in herself. Meri felt she understood that now. That she was living it.

  ON A RAINY, cold Saturday morning, Nathan off to the office until late afternoon, she crossed the front porch around the lion, she went through her routine downstairs—the mail, the plants. Then she climbed the stairs and went directly to Delia's study. She sat again at Delia's desk. This time, for the first time, she opened one of its lower drawers.

  There they were, more letters, in file folders labeled with the names of her children—Nancy, Brad, Evan. But this wasn't what Meri was looking for—though when she'd mounted the stairs, she hadn't allowed herself to know she was looking for anything. She shut that drawer and opened the one opposite it on the right-hand side of the desk and read the label there—Tom. She felt her breath quicken.

  After only a moment's hesitation, she pulled a letter out and read it. And then another.

  Later she would ask herself how she could have done this. She would feel such a sense of shame as she remembered these hours alone in Delia's house—as she remembered everything that happened after that between her and Delia—that she would think of this time in her life as cut off, separate from who she was before it and who she became afterward. An island of something. Desperation. Need. Occasionally through the years she would wonder about her own mental fragility at this period of her life, about hormones run amok, about depression. She wouldn't know. She won't know. She will never tell Nathan, or anyone else.
She will never feel comfortable with this memory.

  There were perhaps fifty or sixty letters, some unfolded and filed flat, others still in their envelopes. Over the remaining time Delia was away, Meri read through most of these letters more than once, and slowly, hungrily, she was able to piece together a story, a history of Tom and Delia.

  She learned that they hadn't lived together in twenty years, that there was no plan for them ever to live together again. But also that they were still seeing each other at least occasionally, that they still made love. That they had always made love, even through the hardest times between them. That there was still, then, a marriage in some sense—or a love affair—one whose shape Delia seemed to be in charge of.

  She learned that Tom had at first begged Delia to forgive him for his infidelities—or for the one infidelity in particular that seemed to have caused their separation. In the early letters, he blamed himself, he described himself as a sinner and beyond help in his weakness. He also never stopped expressing the hope that she would find a way to take him back.

  But eventually he recognized that this wasn't going to happen. He conceded Delia's power, even her wisdom. “You were right,” he wrote, “to want to keep things as they are, because much as I love you, I couldn't have been faithful. I know that now, and if I were honest, I'd have to say I probably knew it then too.”

  Only a few years earlier, he'd written, “Wherever you are is home to me, Delia. Lying with you is the deepest and most thrilling comfort I can know. Simply put, I'm myself with you as I am nowhere else in my life, and I'm happy that, clear-sighted as you are about me at other times, you can still love me in those moments.”

  One note, undated, maybe a note that came with a gift, or flowers, said simply, “Delia. My wife.”

  Sitting in Delia's house, in Delia's chair, reading Delia's letters from Tom, what Meri was most aware of at the time was a muddled kind of envy. Envy of Delia and Tom together. Envy of their sad, powerful story. Envy of something in it that she would have liked for herself.

  Sometimes when she came home and was having a quick meal with Nathan before his evening in his study started, a meal in which they each talked about their work, in which each of them was a little preoccupied—maybe, she thought, even a little bored by the other—she would be aware of the yearning to have, to have had, even the pain that Delia clearly had, if that's what had made it possible for her also to have something as moving, as thrilling, as rich as the love that existed between her and Tom. In what seemed to her like the hollowness of those moments, she felt that the kind of emotion Tom wrote about to Delia wouldn't be like anything Nathan could ever feel for her, or she for him. That there was a way in which she held herself too distant from him—she was too cold a person—to allow such deep feeling, such deep knowledge to live and grow.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Delia, Christmas, 1971

  THE HOUSE WAS COLD, as it always was when they came back after an absence in this season. While Evan unloaded their suitcases and took them upstairs, Delia turned up the thermostat. Then she went out again to the car and carried in the bags of Christmas gifts each of them had brought, four for her, one, half filled, for Evan. She set them in the living room. Still wearing her coat, she walked back into the kitchen and quickly sorted through the mail that had accumulated here and been piled on the table by Marta, the cleaning woman. It was bills, mostly, and dozens of Christmas cards. She looked at the return addresses. Only a few of them were from what Delia thought of as real people—the rest just politics.

  She'd come up to Williston from Washington five days early to get everything ready for Christmas. Evan, who was on his semester break from business school, had met her at the train station and driven her home. It was five o'clock, the sky completely bled of light by the time they got to the house. The year was 1971, it was the twentieth of December. Snow was predicted for the next day. A white Christmas, then. Delia felt almost a child's delight in the thought.

  Tom had stayed on in Washington, but he was pretty sure he'd get home within a day or two. He was a senator now—he had been for five years. Next year he would run again, and though he didn't yet know who his opponent would be, he didn't expect much of a contest. He was widely popular in the state. He'd managed to walk a line between the traditions of old-fashioned liberalism—which were like a religion to him—and the new and ever-shifting demands of the civil-rights movement, the antipoverty movement, the feminists, the advocates of participatory democracy, the antiwar groups. A fancy dancer, he called himself—sometimes despairingly, she thought. He spoke of doing “the new Democratic two-step.” It occasionally made his life a difficult balancing act in Washington, but it seemed to work at home with his mixed-up constituency.

  When she came into the living room, Evan was crouched at the fireplace, wadding up newspaper to start a fire. “Oh, let's go out, honey,” she said.

  He turned, still squatting, looking over at her. “Yeah? You don't want to have something here by a fire?”

  “No. It'll be cold in here even with the fire, and there's not much in the pantry but canned soup and crackers.”

  “Canned soup is good by me.”

  “No. It'll be my treat. Let's go out.”

  “Your call,” he said, and stood up. Unfolded himself, really. Evan, like Tom, was tall, four or five inches taller than her other son, Brad. Several years earlier he had remade himself physically, he'd become more or less a new person. It was after the Peace Corps, which he'd entered as a scruffy kid, his beard always half grown in, his hair hanging down his back—his costume, as she thought of it, unvarying and to her mind unflattering: jeans that sagged off his narrow hips, ribbon-like woven belts in solidarity with who knew what tribe of Indians, and T-shirts, half of them torn or stained. Over this, as a concession to the weather and perhaps to some notion of elegance, he sometimes wore a motorcycle jacket—never anything more, even on the coldest days. It hurt her to look at him in winter.

  She knew that the Peace Corps had asked for neatness and had insisted on a haircut and general cleanliness, but on his return she was startled at how much further Evan had gone. Tonight, for example, he was wearing slacks, and they were pressed. His hair was short by the standards of the day. He was clean-shaven, though he did have the full sideburns everyone sported now. His long narrow face looked sculpted. He wore rimless glasses and a fitted V-neck sweater over his striped shirt. This was his uniform now, and she preferred it. She told herself that she preferred it because it made him more beautiful, but who knew? Maybe she liked it because it was conventional—the way men had once been expected to look.

  He was in his first year of business school, where he'd gone because he was interested in development on a human scale, in small projects that might be of actual help to the people he'd met and loved in South America. For the moment, though, he was learning about plain old raw capitalism, and almost in spite of himself, he was doing well at this.

  Evan was the child Delia felt most comfortable with, though she had the tenderest love for Brad, her younger son. But everyone in the family felt that way about Brad—he was their baby. What she felt for Evan—on account of his beauty, his self-containment—moved her with a maternal pride that sometimes felt almost sexual in its intensity.

  These feelings had to do also with her sense of something she found touching in what he seemed to feel toward her. It was typical of him to have arranged his schedule to pick her up. Ignoring a few years in adolescence when life with him was as much like hell as she imagined it, he had always been in some way protective of her—even, she would have said, adult around her.

  Once when he was small, only about two and a half, she and Tom were having a terrible fight—yelling, enraged at each other; and in the midst of it, Evan had come out of his bedroom in his blue sleeper, the plastic bottoms of its feet kissing the floor. He'd walked straight over to her and climbed onto her lap. Of course they had stopped, the moment they heard his approach.

  “E
vvie,” she'd said. “It's way past your bedtime. You need to go back to your room.”

  “No, Mumma,” he said pleasantly. “I'm staying right by you.” And he had. He was holding on to her arm, smiling across the room at Tom. She could feel the tendons like wires in his compact body.

  Later, after he'd been reassured, after he'd been put to bed again and she'd lain down with him until he slept, she and Tom, shamed, took up whatever the issue was between them in reasoned, even hushed tones.

  In the car, they decided to go to the Peking Palace—mediocre food, crummy decor, but they both liked the pan-fried ravioli and imported beer. As they settled into one of the booths, Delia looked around at the colored paper lanterns strung from the ceiling, the Formica tabletops, the framed panels on the walls with bucolic scenes of an imaginary Chinese past—scenes that actually looked suspiciously Japanese to her.

  “Nothing ever changes at the Peking Palace,” she said.

  He looked up. “So you say,” he answered, and went back to the menu.

  For health's sake—vegetables—they split an eggplant dish in addition to the ravioli. This turned out to be so spicy it made Delia's nose run. She had to ask for extra paper napkins. They talked easily, as they always did. Evan told her about a couple of cases he'd studied this quarter, about his exams, which he was pretty sure he'd aced. They talked about movies, and what kind of coffee they liked best. They talked about skiing—Delia was supposed to come up to New Hampshire in January and try to learn how, something she'd attempted several times in the past with no success. But Evan assured her the skis were shorter now than in those days, that the whole way of teaching it was different. He guaranteed her she'd enjoy it.

  “When's Nan getting here?” he asked.

  Delia was waiting for tea, though she knew it would keep her awake. “Not until midevening Thursday—she has to work that day. Oh! And did I tell you that she's bringing the beauteous Carolee with her? Some family thing means she can't go home for the holiday.”