The Wife
"Mom," she said a little louder, scandalized. "You're drunk."
"A little, honey," I whispered back. "I'm sorry, I mean, I'm sorry if I'm embarrassing you."
"You're not. But let's go somewhere," she said and I let her steer me away from the Big Top for a while. We walked down to the street there in uppermost Manhattan, where a few taxis loitered and a man stood smoking outside a bodega. We sat on the stoop of a building in our formal clothes and I drank a bottle of guava nectar that she bought me at the bodega, and tried to sift through the fog so I could return to the festivities.
"If you're so miserable," my daughter said delicately, "then why won't you leave him, Mom?"
Oh, my darling girl, I might have said, what a good question. In her worldview, bad marriages were simply terminated, like unwanted pregnancies. She knew nothing about this subculture of women who stayed, women who couldn't logically explain their allegiances, who held tight because it was the thing they felt most comfortable doing, the thing they actually liked. She didn't understand the luxury of the familiar, the known: the same hump of back poking up under the cover in bed, the hair tufting in the ear. The husband. A figure you never strove toward, never worked yourself up over, but simply lived beside season upon season, which started piling up like bricks spread thick with sloppy mortar. A marriage wall would rise up between the two of you, a marriage bed, and you would lie in it gratefully.
What I actually said to Susannah was "Who said I'm miserable?"
She looked at me pointedly, silent. "when I get married, I want it to be so easy that everyone will look at us and understand exactly why we ended up with each other," she said.
So she married a man who was different, but not, as it would turn out, satisfying, Mark was attractive, built like a whippet with a runner's body, golden filings of hair on long tan wrists. But the man never read a book unless it was a biography of Jefferson or Franklin or a true story of an Arctic expedition; fiction was outside his realm, and so in fact was art of any kind.
A NY Times recommendation. Not very interesting but not bad enough to abandon. In the end, I found the novel to be mostly uninteresting. |
