The Senator's Wife Read online

They were both in the audience at a lecture given by a former presidential press secretary on post-Reagan politics. Meri was there because she was going to write about it. Nathan came up to her afterward at the reception and said, “Who are you, taking all those notes? You're too old to be a student.”

  From across the room, Meri had been watching him talking to the press secretary, taking him in—his wild hair, his tall, shapely body, the quick, slightly vulpine smile that suddenly made his pretty face interesting.

  “I'm nineteen,” she said in an offended voice. “I've had a hard life, if you must know.”

  He had flashed the smile. He was at least four inches taller than she was, and she was five eleven. “Would you like to have a drink?” he asked. “There's nothing I like better than a hard-luck tale.”

  Though Meri was dazzled by him, she consented to go out with him almost reluctantly, knowing she'd be bored—or that she'd get bored, quickly: she always did with the safe ones—and then she'd have the problem of extrication, which she wasn't any good at. Things always dragged on much too long in her life. It was a waste of increasingly precious time. She was, in fact, thirty-six.

  But that wasn't how it had turned out, once he touched her, once he kissed her, once they made love—which happened, that first time, in her apartment, in the late afternoon, with the sunlight striping across the painted floor and the sounds of the street drifting up occasionally.

  She is thinking about this, her breathing a little irregular, her precious second cigarette of the day neglected, turning to ash between her fingers, when the door opens on the other side of the porch and a woman steps out. She starts, seeing Meri, and then says hello. Meri says, “Hi,” and the woman turns away to lock her door behind her. She must be about seventy, Meri thinks. She's tall and erect and somehow compelling.

  Meri herself is what she thinks of as an almost-pretty woman. A lover had once told her that she looked like an attractive version of Pete Rose. She doesn't think it's that bad, though her features are a little imprecise. Smudgy is a word she's used for them more than once. Because of this, she's learned to invent ways of being noticed, of being found appealing without ever being thought beautiful, and this has made her a connoisseur of other women and their beauty. This old woman—she has turned to Meri again—is someone who was a beauty once, Meri would put money on it. A beauty of the handsome, commanding sort. Maybe a little intimidating, actually. She probably still draws attention walking down the street. Her face is deeply lined, but she has strong, regular, lovely features. She's wearing bright red lipstick. Her hair is a mass of curly white, and there's a quality in her expression and carriage of energy, of curiosity and sexual power. She's dressed irregularly for someone her age—a slightly clingy print blouse and flared skirt. Flat hemp-soled shoes, French-looking.

  “Are you looking at the house?” she asks. There's something patrician in her pronunciation.

  “Yes,” Meri says.

  “But on the other hand”—she tilts her head—“you're not looking.”

  Meri smiles at her, charmed. “We've had a long day at it. I needed a rest.” She waggles what's left of her cigarette. “I needed to be bad for a minute, I've been so damned good all day.”

  The woman laughs quickly. “Ah, yes. Goodness is so hard to sustain,” she says. “Still, when you do finally get around to looking, you'll like it, I think.” She smiles. “But I would say that, wouldn't I? It mirrors mine, and I like mine. I've liked it for almost thirty years.”

  “Thirty years!” Meri says. “Wow. I can't imagine living in any one place for thirty years.”

  “But I doubt you can imagine living itself for thirty years, can you?”

  “That and then some,” Meri says, in a stylized, tough-broad voice.

  “Which I don't believe for one second,” the older woman says.

  “Well, you should. I'm thirty-seven.”

  “Ah, thirty-seven.” She nods. “It's a wonderful age, isn't it?”

  “It is?” Meri flicks the last of the ash off the cigarette.

  “Yes, it is. It's a perfectly balanced age, to my way of thinking. With any luck, you've left foolish youth and vain hopes about your life behind you. You're done with all that kind of pain. But on the other hand, you're still young, you're still strong.” She pauses, she looks out over the front yard, then back at Meri. “Ready for real life to begin.”

  Real life? What does that mean?

  “I'm Delia Naughton,” the woman says abruptly. She steps toward the lion that separates her from Meri, and Meri steps toward her. Over his head, they shake hands, and Meri tells Delia her own name. She spells it too. She always does.

  “Will you be doing something at the college?” Delia asks. Her eyes are a piercing, hard blue.

  “Well, I'm not sure about myself,” Meri answers. “I've got a job hunt ahead of me. But my husband will. He'll be teaching. In political science and history.” She's proud of this, glad to be able to announce it.

  “Ah!” Delia says. She nods, several times. “Well,” she says, “I hope you are interested.” She steps back, gesturing at the house. “It would be lovely to have young people on that side of the wall. And if you do buy it, I'll be happy to help you get settled however I can. At the very least direct you to the grocery store and the dry cleaner and that very boring but essential kind of thing.”

  “Thank you,” Meri says. “You're very kind.”

  “Not at all,” Delia answers. She goes down the stairs, a little slowly, gripping the decorative iron rail. She starts walking down the brick path. Meri finds herself wanting to stop her as she moves away, to offer her something. “Mrs. Naughton!” she calls out.

  The older woman turns. She takes a step back toward Meri. “Please call me Delia.”

  “Delia,” Meri says. “I just wanted to say that my husband”—she tilts her head back toward the house behind her—“is apparently a great fan of your husband.”

  Something changes in Delia Naughton's face. She looks a little blank for a few seconds, as though she's forgotten she has a husband, a husband Nathan might have heard of. At any rate, Meri sees that this isn't quite the gift she intended it to be.

  But now she smiles. “Ah, well,” she says, and looks away, down the block. “He joins a multitude of great fans, I'm afraid. They are my husband's specialty.” She waves her hand and continues down the walk. At its end, she turns right, toward the busier street that leads, Meri knows, to the college and the center of town.

  Meri watches her until she disappears. Then she puts the filter, which is all that remains of her cigarette, into the little box she carries in her purse for butts. She gets up and goes inside.

  She's more interested now. She feels suddenly energetic, a feeling given to her, no doubt, by Delia Naughton. She tries to tell herself that after all, Delia was just being polite, but she can't help her response. The attention of older women always does this to her. Makes her feel, somehow, blessed. This is what comes of maternal deprivation, she thinks.

  She stands in the living room. She can hear footsteps and doors opening and closing upstairs, and then the low murmur of Sheila's and Nathan's alternating voices. She looks around. The room is large, but in some ways awkwardly arranged. It sits open to the front door—there is no hall—and it features a long curving bench under the six front windows. The bench is made of the same yellowish wood as the wide, ornate mantel. This wood is everywhere. It continues past the mantel as wainscoting, and then as a panel on the side of the landing of the stairs, which projects out into the living room. The next room back, which Meri takes to be the dining room, has three windows that form a bay. She goes through it, her footsteps loud on the bare wood. Just after it there's a closet, then a lavatory, and opposite that, a dark butler's pantry with glass-fronted cupboards. She works the old-fashioned latch on one of the cupboard doors. There's a musty but not unpleasant smell as it swings open. The shelves are lined with a faded, figured paper, splotched and stained here and there. A large
refrigerator with chrome trim sits in the pantry too, its door hanging slightly ajar. She hears Nathan laughing somewhere upstairs.

  Meri goes into the kitchen itself, which is a long room, full of light. The back of it is almost like a greenhouse, it's so windowed. The yard outside this wall of windows glows radiantly green—a sycamore arches over it, with its beautiful pale, scaling bark and the sun filtering through its leaves. Meri steps over to the glass and looks out. The yard is weedy and overgrown. A weathered stockade fence separates it from the Naughtons’ yard next door. Their kitchen doesn't extend as far back as this one, and directly below where Meri is standing, they have a wide fieldstone terrace, rather formal, encircled by a box hedge. Two wooden chairs bleached to a silvery gray sit on it, and Meri thinks of Delia Naughton there, having a drink with someone older and distinguished, someone like Ted Kennedy, only much, much thinner.

  She walks away from the windows to explore the cooking area of the room, such as it is. Wedged against the common wall, there's a tiny white enamel stove with four burners and a narrow oven door, and next to it, a wide low porcelain sink on legs, clearly from some earlier era. That's it. There's no counter to speak of. It reminds Meri, actually, of the kitchen area at the back wall of her apartment in Coleman. There she had made a counter and storage out of a solid-core door placed over two bureaus she bought at the funky antique shop in town. Here, of course, Nathan will have a say in all the arrangements, and she realizes that she has no sense of what his inclinations will be, his taste. Will they junk her bureaus? She hopes not. She's fond of them.

  Maybe more important, they're hers.

  There's a closed door on the wall the pantry backs up to, and Meri opens it. A narrow, steep stairway twists up to the left. She mounts it, using the handrail. On the second floor, she looks quickly through the four bedrooms and two baths that open off the long hall. They are pretty rooms, nicely shaped, especially the largest one at the front, which has the same curved row of windows as the living room. They're all in need of new wallpaper and fresh paint, though. The ghosts of old paintings sit as brighter squares or rectangles on the faded walls, and here and there the edge of the wallpaper is curling back, showing another color or pattern beneath it.

  The bathrooms are old-fashioned, with linoleum floors and claw-foot tubs. Meri likes claw-foot tubs. One of the sink faucets has a steady, slow drip that has marked the porcelain with a wide rust stain.

  She finds Sheila and Nathan on the third floor in an open, finished room lined with bookcases. Nathan turns to her. He looks happy. The sign of this, besides the grin, is the dishevelment of his hair. When he's excited, he can't keep his hands from running through it, pulling it. Sometimes when she meets him after a class that's gone well, he looks as frazzled as when he first wakes in the morning.

  “Be a nice study, wouldn't it?” he asks her, sweeping his arm out.

  Clearly he and Sheila have been talking about this. She's primed. She jumps in, pointing out the skylights, the view out into the trees that line the street. She speculates about the logical place for a couch, a desk.

  “And tell Meri about the owners,” Nathan says to her.

  Obediently, Sheila narrates, in her childish, prim voice. The husband was an architect. “A noted architect,” she says. The wife was a musician. No children. They lived here all their married life. He died in the sixties, and she lived on alone until her death the year before. He was the one who'd changed the house, Sheila says. This room, for instance, was the attic before he converted it into his office. He'd taken out the walls on the ground floor and expanded the kitchen, all in the late fifties. “After that, nothing. I don't think it's even been painted since then.”

  “That's why it's so cheap,” Nathan says, smiling at her.

  She stares at him for just a moment. Cheap?

  It's clear that the decision has been made. She gets a breath mint out of her bag, and smiles at Sheila and Nathan as they go on talking.

  BACK AT THE INN, as they mount the stairs, as they walk single file down the long, narrow corridor to their room, Nathan is excited, throwing his observations on the merits of the house back to her. Almost as soon as they're inside, he excuses himself to call his mother—he'll need to ask her about the price, which is more than she had counted on. Meri pulls a chair over by the window and peels an orange while he talks. He describes the house lovingly—the crown moldings, the leaded glass windows in the kitchen, the height of the ceilings. “It's beautiful, its bones are right there, but it's also the kind of place where the lights in the bathroom are those overhead fluorescent circles. That's what makes it so great,” he says. “It just needs sprucing up, but it's basically very solid, very distinguished.”

  Their room is on the second floor of the inn. The floor is bare wood. It creaks as Nathan paces back and forth, needing motion as he always does when he's happy. She's seen him teach, and he's always in motion then too.

  The window in front of Meri is open. She props her bare feet on the sill. The curtains rise and fall around her, sometimes brushing her legs as she listens to her husband. Oil sparks out from the skin of the orange as she bends it, sparks out and disappears in the air, leaving its scent behind. There's white pith under her fingernail. She eats the sections slowly, carefully peeling off all the threads. Nathan and his mother are talking about money now, about interest rates and monthly payments. Outside, someone passing by is whistling, and across the street, the canopy of leaves on the town common moves slowly in the wind, one mass of green. There were four or five students playing Frisbee on the lawn under these trees when they came in.

  Nathan and his mother have agreed on things, it seems. At least Nathan is making agreeing noises, winding-it-up noises. He hangs up, and the room is quiet for a long moment except for the students’ faint cries floating in from outside.

  Then she feels his hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” he says gently. She reaches up and touches him with her own orange-smelling fingers.

  “Hey, turn around,” he says.

  Meri does, gripping the arms of the chair, picking it up and turning it with her. She sits back and looks at him. Nathan is beautiful. You shouldn't love someone for the accident of his beauty, Meri knows this, but it's what drew her to him. How could it not? His eyes are a brown so light as to be nearly gold. He's sitting on the edge of the double bed, facing her. Their knees are almost touching. They would be touching if the bed weren't so high. It's a four-poster, with a white chenille bedspread.

  “It's all okay with my mother,” he says.

  “I gather.”

  “Are you ready to own a house?” He reaches over and strokes her leg, her jeans. “This is something you want to do, right?”

  Meri nods.

  He rocks her leg back and forth a little. “Right?” he asks again. He wants more from her.

  “Oh, you know me, Nate.” Meri makes a face. “I'm always nervous about change. I'd have had us grow old in my apartment.”

  “I would have had that commute, though. Hard on me.”

  “Yeah. That would have been the wrinkle.” She feels the curtains around her like a quick caress, and then they die back.

  “Don't be nervous,” he says softly.

  “Oh,” she says brightly. “Okay.”

  He laughs. Then his face grows serious and he says, “It's our house, Meri. I wouldn't have wanted a house if we weren't together. It's for us.”

  She offers him a wedge of orange, and he takes it. They're quiet for a moment, eating.

  “Let's celebrate,” he says abruptly. “I'll call Sheila and make the offer, and then let's go downstairs and have champagne.”

  “You think they have champagne downstairs?” The inn's bar is dark and utilitarian. At lunch it was full of people who might have been faculty, having hamburgers and iced tea or beer in heavy mugs.

  “We can but try. Put on something hot. Let's be festive.”

  As she's changing out of her jeans, she calls to Nathan, washing his sticky hands
, “Maybe it's because I don't have a job yet. Maybe that makes me feel . . . less real about living here.”

  He's come to stand in the doorway to the bathroom, holding a towel. “You'll find a job.”

  She opens the closet to get her dress out, smiling at him. “I'm so glad that's settled.”

  “Well, it is.”

  Downstairs, the bar is half full. They sit at a square table, its surface a single thick slab of wood, scarred and fissured, with a shiny finish. Nathan goes over to the bar and leans on it. She watches his back and his strong rounded buttocks as he shifts his weight to rest one foot on the rail. The window next to her is open. In the distance, there's the sound of someone running a leaf blower.

  Nathan comes back with two champagne glasses, the bubbles coursing frantically upward in each. He hands one to her and sits down. Though it has the weight of glass, Meri's flute feels like plastic to her, and when she touches it to Nathan's to toast the future, there's a dull noise, nothing musical.

  But it's good champagne, dry and flavorful. “Yum,” she says.

  “You are yum,” he answers, and raises his glass again. “My mistress of the house.”

  “Now, why does that sound so much more interesting than wife?” she asks.

  “It doesn't,” he says.

  She snorts and has another sip of champagne. As she sets her glass down, she says, “I have another question: who's Tom Naughton? Besides being an ex-senator.”

  “You don't know?”

  “I'm asking.”

  “He's one of the really good guys. He was. I think he had two, but it might have been three terms at the time of all the Great Society stuff in the sixties and seventies. He was part of the whole discussion on poverty, of how it should be dealt with, which was the argument for the few seconds they had all that money to throw at it. He was always known to be a straight shooter. Even the guys who disagreed with him respected him.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, basically I think he just retired. Maybe he saw the handwriting on the wall.” He frowned. “Or there might have been some personal issues, I'm thinking. I can't quite remember. Anyway, the whole thing died in the seventies, and his heyday was over.” Nathan twirls his glass slowly. He shrugs. “He's still around, with some fancy D.C. law firm, part of various commissions. You hear about him every now and then, advising, writing policy papers. Like Hart. Or Rudman.” He looks at Meri and grins. “It'll be neat to meet him.”