The Senator's Wife Read online

  “Oh, Nate, I'm pregnant,” she said. “Or I think I am.”

  There was what felt to Meri like a long silence. Then he said, softly, “Whoa.”

  “Actually, honestly, I know I am.”

  “How?” His voice sounded hollowed out. “How do you know?”

  “Well, I took a test. A drugstore test. And failed it, twice.” She smiled sadly in the dark. “Or else I passed it with flying colors. Blue being the operative color. A little blue cross, which means yes.” He didn't say anything. “But also,” she shrugged. “I am. I missed my period. I feel strange.”

  He cleared his throat. “Strange how?”

  “Strange pregnant.”

  He hadn't moved since he sat down, and she couldn't see his face clearly.

  “I think it was probably the day I got my job, that first day you went over to the college.”

  “What makes you think so?” he asked. He reached up to the floor lamp next to his chair and turned it on.

  She squinted in the sudden bright light, and put her hand up to her forehead, as though looking off into the deep distance. “I didn't have the diaphragm in. I was cutting it close. It was too close.” She dropped her hand and made a rueful face. “I kind of knew it was too close, I think. But I wanted you.” She was remembering their sweaty, urgent love, his coming up the stairs after her.

  “Ah, no.” His voice was gentle. “I wanted you,” he said.

  Suddenly she felt safe.

  Neither spoke for a minute. Then Nathan set his briefcase down on the floor and said, “So?”

  She looked up. Their eyes met. “So, it would screw a few things up,” Meri said.

  “But you want to do it? To have it?”

  He said this in a tone so open to the possibility that Meri was suddenly sharply aware of loving him, as she hadn't been in a while—they'd both been so distracted by their separate lives. Her Nathan. Her throat tightened.

  She cleared it and said in an exaggeratedly shocked voice, “Children are a gift of God, Nate.” This was something Nathan's mother had once told them.

  He grinned at her. “Yeah, but so, apparently, are pestilence and floods. And the odd boil.”

  Meri laughed, and went to him. She sat on his lap, straddling his legs. He smelled of chlorine—he'd been swimming today. She held his tilted-up head in her hands, her hair tenting his face. His expression had grown grave. He was beautiful to her.

  “So, yes?” he whispered. She nodded, and bent over him.

  When they made love that evening, under Meri's old quilt—the night air was chilly now—she welcomed him into her in a way she felt she hadn't ever before. It wasn't just a matter of holding her legs wide apart for him, though she did that; and it wasn't just that they didn't have the diaphragm between them. It was that there seemed some increase of openness deep inside her, though she would have said such a thing was impossible, that she couldn't have felt more open to Nathan than she already did. Yet it seemed almost that some actual barrier of flesh had given way between them as he moved in and back—that he was of her, that the child they'd begun to make had, in its turn, made them one. Dizzyingly, overwhelmingly so. This was a sensation so charged for Meri that she was silent and tearful for a moment after they had finished. She didn't have the words to say to Nathan what stirred her.

  And then because that was a feeling she was never comfortable with, she made a joke: “Did you hear the angel choir singing when we came, Natey?”

  WITHIN TWO WEEKS, none of Meri's jeans fit her. Her waist had thickened, her small breasts were weighted and tender. She was startled by this. She had thought she would have months before she had to accommodate her pregnancy physically. Her sister, Lou, had never showed at all until the fifth or sixth month, and then had only a discrete and increasingly rounded protuberance you couldn't imagine making its way down through her narrow hips.

  Meri seemed to be expanding generally. Even her fingers looked fat. The flesh of her face seemed heavier to her when she looked in the mirror. Pete Rose indeed.

  Worse, she felt slightly nauseated all the time. She began to carry a large baggie of unsalted crackers in her purse, pulling them out one by one through the day and taking small nibbles, nibbles that she alternated with swigs of water from the bottle she also took with her now wherever she went.

  In late October she prepared a segment for the show on a writing program at the prison in Goffstown, which was about twenty miles south of Williston. She made two visits there to sit in on the sessions, both times driving cautiously through heavy rain, clutching the wheel so tightly her hands hurt afterward.

  There were strict rules about female visitors at the prison. She couldn't wear open-toed shoes, blue jeans, an underwire bra, or anything tight. No skirts above the knee. Before she was allowed in, she had to put her purse, her raincoat and umbrella into a locker they provided. Then she had to go through a metal detector and several vestibule-like cubicles whose back doors closed behind you before the doors in front of you would open. There were surveillance cameras mounted on the walls everywhere.

  She had been given permission to tape the sessions and to interview four of the prisoners afterward. The class met in a large room with a cement-gray linoleum floor and irregular rows of metal desk-chairs, the writing surfaces attached to their right arms. The windows in this room were barred and so dirty you couldn't really see out them. The lights were fluorescent and harsh.

  The inmates seemed shockingly young to her, almost all of them. They were mostly Hispanic, a few of them black, two white. The white guys were the oldest in the room—perhaps in their early thirties.

  All of the men were writing memoirs under the supervision of a large, soft-spoken woman named Mary Anne, who was in charge of special programs at the prison, and two junior faculty members, both men, from the English Department at the college. The prisoners took turns reading their pieces out loud and then having them discussed by the group.

  Most of the writing was about their crimes or about getting caught, though one of the white guys wrote about his grandmother—a completely predictable, sentimental piece. Hallmark card stuff. Everyone loved it.

  The most beautiful boy, a Hispanic kid who had the slow beatific smile of an angel, wrote about alcohol—about his love for it, his addiction to it—in an almost erotic and completely compelling way. That one was well written, remarkably so, if with the occasional awkwardness; and there were others that were okay. But Meri could hear that most of them would have been unreadable if you had had to look at the text—if you didn't have the inmates’ voices and passionate commitment to help you get them.

  All the men seemed to care deeply how their work was received. On Meri's second time out, she watched one of them almost give way to tears because of the criticism his reading got. Mary Anne stepped in quickly and softened the tone. She reinterpreted several of the most negative remarks and offered encouragement.

  After she'd taped the second session, Meri interviewed the four inmates, with Mary Anne still in the room. The next day she brought her tapes in to be edited. She also turned over her pre-interview notes and suggestions—the instructors and Mary Anne were going to be on the program, the two instructors in the studio, Mary Anne by phone.

  The segment ran longer than they usually allowed. Jane and James had done a graceful job piecing together a narrative from the tapes and interviews. At the meeting afterward, everyone was excited about how good it was, almost jubilant. There had already been a record number of phone calls about it. They congratulated Meri. She had the sense of finally having made it.

  She and Jane were slower than the others in gathering up their things. As Meri was leaving the room, Jane spoke her name. Meri turned around. Jane said quietly, “You're pregnant, aren't you?”

  Meri smiled. “You know,” she said, “it would be a big embarrassment for you if I wasn't. If I was just getting fat, say.”

  “Yeah, but you're not. Just fat. You're pregnant.”

  Meri heaved a
fake sigh. “It's so.”

  “God!” Jane said, making a face. “You know . . .” She stopped, and shook her head.

  Meri was taking it in, that Jane might actually be angry. A part of her couldn't believe this. Hoping somehow to make light of it, to make it okay, she said, “I didn't think sex was considered that big a taboo anymore.”

  “No, but getting pregnant?” Jane said. “Now?”

  “It wasn't planned,” Meri said defensively.

  “Oh! Fine.” Jane got up and started toward where Meri was standing, in front of the door.

  “Come on, Jane. I'm a grown-up. I know this isn't ideal. . . .”

  Jane stopped right in front of her. “Hmmh!” she said. She was a tall, horsey woman, with large black-rimmed glasses. She wasn't homely, but she dressed as though she were, in baggy jeans and men's shirts.

  “It's not even good,” Meri said quickly. “I know that. I know that, in terms of the job. But I had to make a choice. I'm thirty-seven. I got pregnant. I'll do a maternity leave, and then I'll come back.”

  Jane took a step back. “Let me just say something, Meri.” She looked tired. Meri knew—James had told her—that she'd come to this job after losing one at a big NPR station in Boston. That she was disappointed in her career. Her voice was gentler now, it had that pretty quality again. “I'm happy for you personally, and I promise I won't bring this up again.” She opened her hand, palm up. “The thing is, things were easing up around here, which is why we hired you in the first place. This will take us right back to where we were, which none of us liked.”

  Meri shrugged. Her lips parted for a moment, but she didn't have anything to say.

  “And to be quite, quite honest”—Jane's mouth made a sour shape—“if you had said, ‘Well, I might get pregnant within a few years’—not to mention two months!—we would have said, Oh, no, no, no, no. No! No thank you.”

  “I get it,” Meri said. Her throat ached. “I got it.”

  “And now I'll shut up,” Jane said, and left the room. The door closed slowly, silently behind her.

  Meri cried for only a minute, and then she blew her nose. At least she'd been able to hold it together until Jane left. That, anyway, was good, she told herself.

  She sat down and reached into her bag for a cracker. Her fingers brushed against the small cardboard box: cigarettes. That's what she wanted, she thought. A cigarette. As she moistened the dry cracker in her mouth with the bottled water, she lovingly imagined lighting up, inhaling. She hadn't had more than one or two cigarettes since suspecting she was pregnant, but she hadn't thrown this almost-full pack out either; and somehow, over these weeks, it had come to seem emblematic to her of everything she was giving up.

  Oh, bullshit. She wouldn't have been smoking here anyway. It was a smoke-free workplace. She blew her nose again.

  It was just that she was missing it, her old life. Which she'd given up, she reminded herself, well before she got pregnant.

  No, it was more than that. Much more, she thought. It was that several times a day she struggled with a sleepiness so profound that her head felt cottony, her limbs heavy and difficult to move. That she went through every day with a more or less constant sense of nausea. That she often had a sharp headache, centered over her right eye.

  She sat for a moment, thinking. No. No, here's what it was, she thought. Here: that she no longer liked the way her body looked and felt—her body, which she'd always taken such pride, such pleasure in. Which was the only beauty she had.

  It would pass, she told herself. It will pass.

  But she couldn't help it, she hated what was happening to her. She hadn't known it would feel so awful. She was frightened.

  She didn't want it. She didn't want to do it.

  NATHAN WASN'T HOME yet when she got there. It was dusky in the house. She turned the lights on in the kitchen, and suddenly, reflected in the wall of windows, there she was, Meri, in her big sweater and a pair of Nathan's corduroy slacks, moving jumpily across the multiple panes of glass—a herky-jerky version of herself anyway.

  She got the plastic-wrapped chicken out of the refrigerator in the pantry and set it on the drainboard. She turned on the tiny stove to preheat. She washed some lettuce, bending over the low sink. Then she took a key from one of the top bureau drawers under the door-table and went outside and into Delia's house. She'd done this six or seven times now, the house-sitting chores they'd agreed to. It had fallen to her, mostly because Nathan got home later, but maybe partly because it seemed to both of them a woman's task.

  It was cool in here—Delia had the thermostat set low. Meri picked up the mail from the floor where it lay scattered and carried it back to the kitchen. She separated it—catalogs and magazines into one of the baskets Delia had left out, letters into the other.

  Delia had gathered all the houseplants back here onto a plastic tarp in front of the windows. Meri didn't need to be careful watering, Delia had told her. And she shouldn't worry if something died. “I'm fond of the plants, but I'm fickle too,” she'd said to Meri. “I've been known to underwater if a plant seems too demanding, just to let it know who's the boss.”

  Standing in Delia's kitchen, squirting the plants with the special hose Delia had attached to the sink faucet, Meri looked around the room, so much smaller than their expanded version on the other side of the wall. It was square, with two standard-size windows at the back and two along the side, and a glass-paned door opening out onto the driveway. There were sheer white curtains at the windows, pulled back, and paintings on the walls, along with a few family photographs.

  Meri realized abruptly that she liked this room better than their vast kitchen. The whole house, actually, with its smaller, enclosed, unrenovated spaces, with all the wood trim painted white and the warm wall colors, was prettier than theirs was.

  When she was done with the plants, she walked back into the living room and switched on a lamp on the table just inside the door. The walls in here were a deep yellow. The curved white bench under the windows had seat cushions in pale green and more pillows at each end to lean against. The coffee table in front of the couch had a wide green bowl set on it that had been filled with yellow pears the day Meri came over to learn what her chores would be while Delia was away.

  It was cozy, she thought. Welcoming. Something that wasn't true of the open rooms on her side of the wall.

  She turned and stepped back into the hall, looking around her there too. On an impulse, she crossed to the stairs and started up.

  This was the first time she'd ventured above the first floor. Probably an inevitability though, she thought, mounting the stairs. She was insatiably curious about other people's lives, down to the way they arranged their things, down to what those things were. The first time Nathan had left her alone in his place, she had surveyed everything he owned. She looked through his medicine chest, she went to his desk and read several pages from the book he was working on. She'd also read a summary sheet of his student evaluations. All the female students adored him—no surprises there—but the boys too seemed to be dazzled. He was “totally into it,” he made everything so real. “He made me care about it because he cares so much, and I hate history.”

  When she quoted this later, he was startled. “You read the stuff on my desk?”

  “Of course. Wouldn't you? Haven't you?”

  “I wouldn't, unless I asked first.”

  She had shrugged. “To me, all that says is that I'm more deeply curious about you than you are about me.”

  “You are?”

  “It would appear so,” she said.

  Now she walked slowly down the wide upstairs hallway in Delia's house. The rooms off it were more like hers and Nathan's than the ones downstairs, though the bathrooms had been redone—something that would be their first project, Nathan had told Meri. But like the downstairs, everything up here felt arranged more for comfort than at their house. There were curtains on the windows in each room and old Oriental carpets or rag rugs scatter
ed everywhere. The rug under her feet in the hall was a kilim of many rich colors. Pictures were hung on the hallway walls—old oil paintings or watercolors of the ocean, of fields and woods. There were some family photographs and a few antique maps.

  Delia's bedroom was painted a yellow that must have been a just slightly lighter version of the color in the living room. There was a large, deeply cushioned chair, a round gateleg table next to it, a lamp on that. The bed was queen-size, big enough for two, a puffy duvet laid across it. Meri counted five pillows stacked against the white wooden headboard.

  She walked back down the hall, looking into the smaller bedrooms. They were guest rooms clearly, set up for Delia's children and grandchildren. One of them had double bunkbeds in it. Photographs of infants, of young people, of mothers and babies, fathers and kids, decorated the walls.

  Meri studied them: happy, then happier, then happiest. In one of them, a framed black-and-white shot, Delia—a very young version of Delia—was holding a tiny baby, almost a newborn. She was just as Meri had known she would be, stunningly attractive, every feature strong, well defined. Her dark hair was done in the style of the forties, parted on the side, nearly shoulder length. She was wearing lipstick that looked almost black in the photograph and a strand of glowing pearls around her neck. She was looking directly at the photographer—looking with such powerful intensity, such love, that Meri felt certain that Tom Naughton had taken the picture.

  The last room, the one just over the stairs up from the kitchen, the one that would be the nursery in Meri and Nathan's house—though they'd bought nothing for it yet—was clearly Delia's study. There was a wide, old-fashioned desk in front of the window that looked out over the backyard. Meri stepped slowly around the room, examining everything—the books on the shelves, mostly novels, arranged alphabetically. The worn chair with a plaid shawl thrown across its high back. There were very small pictures on the far wall—framed paintings, watercolors—and Meri went close to them to see them better.