The Senator's Wife Page 5

  By then, though, things had changed between them, eased. And she had changed. She was stronger, more independent. Once she actually said to her old friend Madeleine Dexter that she felt coming to terms with Tom's infidelity, learning to live without him, had been the making of her. And that was how she thought of it. That she'd made herself, remade herself, in the years of her life after he'd wrecked it.

  It seemed too that at some point each of them had begun to think of the odd way they were together as the shape of their marriage. Years later he wrote to her, “You were right 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. So you've kept yourself safe from harm. You've made it so I can love you without hurting you. I can't tell you how grateful I am for that gift, though not a day goes by—not a day, I assure you—when I don't miss you.”

  She hasn't seen him now for almost four months. The last time they were together, he met her for a weekend at an inn in a little coastal village in Rhode Island. She'd arranged it. She usually arranged things.

  They'd spent two nights there. Their room looked out over the harbor. They left the windows open, and the noise of halyards clanking against the masts of the boats rang through the dark, waking Delia occasionally. The night air was damp and cool, but the days warmed slowly after the fog burned off. They walked down to the pier, they walked along the empty beach. They made love the first night, after Delia stroked him to a half erection and helped him come into her.

  Afterward, lying in bed listening to Tom's breathing and the night noises, she wondered whether this increased need of his for direct stimulation, for being touched—hands, mouth—had changed his life away from her, his sexual life. Were there younger women who would be tolerant of these signs of his age? For herself, she liked it, liked the sense of her own importance in it, her control. “Help me,” he had said the first few times he couldn't get hard, and she had turned to him lovingly.

  The second night they drank too much, sitting outside with heavy sweaters on at a restaurant whose terrace looked over the grassy dunes to open water. They were both happy just to sleep next to each other, to wake again in the same bed.

  On Sunday she had driven him to the airport in Hartford and then come back the long way, on country roads, to the house in Williston, dreading its emptiness as she often did after her times with Tom. And then in the first days home, alone, doubting herself, sensing how much she'd lost by arranging things as she had, by shielding herself so carefully from the pain of daily life with him; only slowly, over some days, coming to feel at home again, at peace, with the decisions they'd made—she'd made—and the life she was living because of them.

  IN THE NIGHT, Delia wakes. Something has waked her. What is it? A noise in the house. She looks at the clock, the glowing numbers: 12:03. This amuses her, what suddenly seems absurd in this digital precision. Once you would simply have said, “I woke in the dead of the night.” And it is dead—black, noiseless.

  She lies still, among the familiar shapes and shadows of her bedroom, listening intently. There it is, again, the noise, now repeating and repeating itself.

  She's puzzled for only a few seconds, and then she recognizes it. Of course, it's her new neighbors. They're making love—making love in the noisy, passionate way of young people. She hears it as a series of soft structural whumps. The bed, she supposes, against the wall. It slows, it speeds up. It's slow again. It stops. Or diminishes enough that she can't hear it anymore.

  But she's been awakened now, she's wide awake, and she knows it will take her a long, long time to fall asleep again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Meri, September 1993

  WHEN MERI GOT BACK from the job interview, she wove her way through the packing boxes that were stacked two or three high all over the living room, and went up the stairs to their bedroom to change her clothes. Off with the linen slacks, the slouchy silk top, the bra she'd worn as a kind of good-luck charm, she supposed—a rabbit's foot in the form of underwire uplift. From a pile of dirty clothes in the corner of the bedroom—all the work clothes she and Nathan had been wearing the day before—she picked up her blue jeans and pulled them on. Bare-breasted, she went through her suitcases for a clean T-shirt to wear while she got back to work unpacking. Unpacking and then unpacking again. This was her bargain with Nathan, who was spending his first day on campus, mostly at obligatory meetings. If she would keep on unpacking—keep on untrucking, she thought—he would make dinner. This was a great bargain, actually, as Nathan was a better cook than she was.

  She hadn't said anything to him about the interview. It seemed a bad idea to talk about it ahead of time. She didn't want to jinx it. And she didn't want him to be involved in it either, which is what happened when you told Nathan stuff—he made it his own somehow.

  She came down the stairs. And stopped, on the landing, looking around her in a way she hadn't the day before, they'd been so flat-out busy. This is my house, she said to herself—this big open room below her, that curved bank of windows around the front of the room with the beautiful wooden bench underneath it, the fireplace with a mantel of the same wood.

  And of course all those boxes, Meri. Boxes everywhere. All of them to be unpacked. Step one. She came down the last short flight of stairs.

  In the kitchen, she spread pâté on three of the crackers that Delia Naughton had brought them last night, and stood eating over the solid-core door, scattering crumbs onto it. She'd have to call Delia today to thank her.

  She thought of Delia last night, of how eager Nathan had been around her. It had made him seem like a kid to her, and she didn't like that. But of course, she'd seemed like a flake to him—as he was at pains to tell her afterward—the way she had stuck her tongue out, the face she made. So naturally she'd countered with his doggishness around Delia.

  A fight, sort of. A little fight. A little fight after which, she reminded herself, they had made love. But she wasn't used to fighting with Nathan.

  She sighed. It was no doubt inevitable. So life begins. They couldn't have stayed sealed up in her apartment forever, showing each other only their shiny, best selves.

  She poured water into the coffee machine to make herself another cup. While the machine was percolating, she walked around the first floor reading the labels on the cartons that sat everywhere, and thinking about the interview. It had gone well, she thought. At least she was pretty sure it had gone well. She felt comfortable, anyway, as soon as the receptionist led her into the warren of hallways that comprised the radio station. The people passing said hi. She could see groups of two or three talking by their desks in the big open office space. As they walked past one of the rooms off the hall, she saw through a window a bunch of people sitting around a table together, talking, laughing, making notes. She realized that this was exactly how she'd imagined it would be, though she'd never worked in radio before. But what had attracted her to the job description was the sense of familiarity she'd had as she read it. She thought that it might be very like her old job on the alumni magazine, the same combination she'd loved there of schmoozing at the planning stage, and then solitary research. It was reassuring that the schmoozing part, anyway, looked the same.

  She'd said as much in her interview with James, the producer of the show she was applying for—an hour-long newsmagazine that aired at noon each day. She said that it seemed to her that the work might be substantially the same, “but faster, of course, and, I don't know, maybe a little shallower?”

  He had laughed. “That sounds about right,” he said, nodding his head several times in a diminishing motion. He was a short, slightly overweight man perhaps in his late twenties, with a patchy blond beard and shoulder-length hair of a thickness and texture Meri would have killed for.

  And she had made him laugh. A good sign.

  But enough, enough of that. She didn't want to get her hopes up. She went back to the kitchen and poured
some coffee into her chipped blue mug. Moving through the boxes, sipping coffee, she tried to focus on the chores ahead—the things, the endless things, to be unwrapped and put away.

  About half of the furniture in the house and at least fifteen of the largest cartons scattered around had come from Nathan's mother—possessions she'd had in storage since her move to an apartment in a retirement community. Possessions she'd held on to to give to her only child when he settled down. Which he'd done now, with Meri. Which she'd done too, she supposed. Settled down.

  She said it out loud. “Settled down.” And then remembered that this was a favorite phrase of her mother's. “You girls settle down,” she'd call up to them at night. “Don't make me come up there, or you'll be sorry.”

  God, how unbridgeably different her childhood was from Nathan's!

  She thought of his mother—so unfailingly soft-spoken. Nathan had once told Meri that he'd never been hit, by either parent. Well, there you had it.

  The thing that bothered her most about the gifts from his mother, Meri thought now, was that there had been no discussion between her and Nathan about them. She hadn't even known about them until she discovered that the movers were making a stop in New Jersey to pick them up.

  “But what are they?” she'd asked.

  “What does it matter?” he said. “We need everything.”

  That was true, of course. Nathan had been living in a furnished apartment in Coleman, with a few of his own things, but mostly with books. Books stacked on the floor, books piled on his desk. They filled dozens of boxes when he packed them up.

  Meri had more furniture, but they would leave much of it behind—it was too marginal, too shabby to be worth the expense of moving it. So he was right: it made sense to take whatever his mother had to give them. They could use it, whatever it was. And yes, she said to him, it was generous of his mother.

  Still, there was a part of her that was pissed off about this. That felt, again, excluded from decisions that affected her. They had talked about this too, and he pointed out that she had agreed in the end—and that he'd known she would agree—so what difference did it really make?

  “A big difference,” she said. But even to herself that sounded petulant, childish. So she'd said, “Oh, grow up, Meri.” And then she said, “Thanks, Meri. I think I will,” and he had smiled at her, the hungry smile that made him look dangerous and exciting.

  And the truth was that she could hardly complain about the unpacking work involved. To her surprise, it had taken boxes and boxes to contain her own stuff, her accumulation of things in this life. Things: her own boxes and boxes of books. A couple more boxes of CDs and tapes. A rusty toy sewing machine that made her think of her mother—she had bought it at a flea market. A large pale pink shell from an old lover, a shell whose two halves fit together in a way he had found sexual. A few old LP records—Sgt. Pepper, Bruce Springsteen, Muddy Waters—though she had no way of playing them anymore. A woven-straw cigarette case of her mother's and several pairs of earrings she'd hardly ever worn. Meri had found these in her mother's top dresser drawer when they cleared the house out after her death.

  All this, and much, much more. She wasn't quite sure why she'd kept any of it, since the way she felt about her past was that she had somehow come into being who she was without any connection to it. As if floating in naked and unencumbered on some shell, she thought now. Her mouth twisted: the only difference being she was not quite so beautiful as that.

  Oh, of course she remembered the way it had been. Of course she was the person who emerged from that forlorn little house with the dented aluminum siding and the overgrown lawn and the gas station next door. With the dirty screens that crumbled and smelled of rust when you pressed your nose to them. With the sunlight only dimly filtering through the stale curtains that were always pulled closed. She remembered it all—the air inside thick with cigarette smoke, the TV on day and night, the way they would all stop occasionally in the midst of doing other things to watch it for a moment, as if being beckoned by another world. What she, anyway, imagined as the real world. She remembered even as a kid wondering how she could get there—there seemed no possible connection between her world and that one.

  Of course that was part of her, but she was also the person who willed herself away from it. Not because of any focused ambition, any clear sense of direction. Just that at every step when there was a choice, she chose the thing that led away and let go of where she was, of who she was. And somehow that accumulation of forks in the road—all those roads not taken, thank you, Robert Frost—had given her this. This fancy house. This unfamiliar furniture. These boxes full of someone else's past, someone else's beloved things.

  “But come on,” she said aloud. “This is enviable.” She thought again of the interview, of her ease in talking to James and the others. It was going to work out. She went into the kitchen and rinsed her cup in the old sink. Then she got out a knife and started to slice open the first of the boxes.

  When James called from the radio station at three-thirty, she had to ask him to wait a minute while she turned down the stereo—she'd gotten it set up, she'd found some of their CDs, and she had Eric Clapton on at a high volume to give herself energy.

  When she picked up the phone again in the sudden silence and said hello, he said, without preamble, “Well, it's yours if you want it.”

  Her heartbeat felt irregular for a second or two. “Then, yes! It's mine!” she said. “God, this is wonderful!” She jumped lightly in place. “Oh, I'm really happy.”

  “Yeah, we're all really pleased too,” he said. On the phone he sounded even younger than he looked. “The thing is, of course, that we'd like you to start as soon as you can.”

  Meri looked around her at the room full of boxes. “I think if you give me a couple of days to unpack, I'll be set to go. So, maybe first thing next week?”

  They agreed, and then she talked to Jane and Brian, the cohosts of the show, whom she'd met briefly as part of the interview. Just before she hung up, Jane said, “You ought to be told, in all fairness, that it's an insane place to work, but we thought you'd fit right in.”

  After she'd cradled the phone, she went into the living room and turned Clapton back up. He was singing “Layla.” Perfect. She danced, briefly. Her feet were bare, and she could feel grit on the old floorboards.

  When the song ended, she roamed the first floor searching for her purse—it turned out she'd tossed it on the bench under the windows.

  She extracted her cigarettes and a book of matches and went to sit on the back stoop.

  She loved the way the sulfur smelled as she struck the match. She loved the sensation of the first drag on the cigarette. Music floated out from behind her. The sun through the sycamore leaves was warm, and the cigarette shut her off in a little circle of private pleasure from everything she still had to do. She heard a dog barking somewhere. The breeze pushed at the trees and made the sunlight dance around her. A frenzy of tiny bugs hung like a cloud in the air nearby. She closed her eyes and watched the bloody afterimages slide behind her lids. I am happy, she thought. “As a clam,” she said out loud. And then opened her eyes and corrected herself: “As a lark.”

  SHE DIDN'T HEAR Nathan come in, but suddenly the music was turned down low. Meri was in the kitchen, and she'd gotten almost everything in there put away, into the shelves and drawers in the pantry, into the old bureaus under the solid-core door. The boxes were gone, broken down and stacked flat in a corner of the room. The newsprint that had been wrapped around everything was in many green plastic trash bags, bags she'd tossed with a kind of pleasurable abandon into the backyard for now. She'd put a cotton rag rug down in front of the sink. She'd even hung a few pictures—a Hopperesque painting of the deserted main street in Coleman done by a friend of hers, and a framed reprint Nathan had of a photograph of Lyndon Johnson persuading a much smaller politician of something—the helpless little man bent backward in terror, Johnson looming over him.

 
“Natey?” she called into the silence.

  He appeared in the kitchen doorway, carrying two bags of groceries, one in each arm. He was dressed in his academic uniform—a jacket, a work shirt, and slacks. No tie. His hair was wild. He set the bags down on the door. “Wow!” he said, looking around.

  “What do you think?” she said.

  “Thank you, is what I think.” He grabbed her, kissed her. “You must have been at it nonstop, all day.” He kept his arm over her shoulders, around her neck.

  “It was nothing,” she said lightly. She leaned her head against his. His cheek was slightly bristly after his long day. After a moment, she stepped away from him, out of his embrace. “Tell me what you got us for dinner. I am starving.”

  “A big salad.” He stopped her and rubbed at something on her cheek. “My, you're a dirty girl.”

  “Newsprint, I bet,” she volunteered, holding her face still for him. “It got all over me.”

  When he was done, she moved backward, pulling him along with her. She scooted herself up on the door counter, her face level with his. She wrapped her legs around him. She rested her elbows on his shoulders. “How was your day?” she asked. Then she pitched her voice higher and made it singsong. “How was school, honey?”

  And so he began—the computer meeting, the library meeting, the departmental meeting. After a few minutes, she got down and began to go through the grocery bags, setting things out. Beer. She held a bottle up.

  “Yes, thanks,” he said.

  She got a church key from one of the bureau drawers and opened two of the bottles. She handed one to him and took a long swig herself of the bitter, fizzy stuff. She was thirsty. She hadn't drunk anything since the coffee that morning.