American Wife (16 page)

I flushed the toilet, and when the water had resettled, Dena spat a few times into it. Her voice was matter-of-fact, already more sober, when she said, “Charlie Blackwell doesn’t like me.” She stood, turned on the faucet, cupped one hand beneath the stream, and brought her hand to her mouth. When she’d swallowed, she said, “He seems like a guy you’d meet on the East Coast more than someone from around here. Real full of himself.”

“I just talked to him briefly,” I said.

“Another Saturday night down the crapper, huh?” She almost but didn’t quite smile.

“This isn’t the time to analyze your life,” I said. “Let me thank the Hickens and I’ll drive us home.”

“I need to lie down.” She opened the bathroom door, and I followed her into the living room. The Madeline book was still on the sofa, and I moved it to an ottoman. I would have preferred for us to leave instead of me waiting while Dena passed out, which I felt reflected badly on both of us.

But Kathleen Hicken seemed practically tickled when I found her in the kitchen and told her that Dena wasn’t feeling well and was resting. “Must be the sign of a successful party,” Kathleen said.

“I’ll give her half an hour,” I said.

“Oh, jeez, leave her until morning.” Kathleen waved a hand through the air. “You don’t want to wrestle her into bed by yourself.”

“Really?” I bit my lip. “If you honestly don’t mind, then I can walk home tonight and give her car keys to you so she has them tomorrow.”

“Well, she won’t need an alarm clock.” Kathleen smiled as she wiped down the counter with a rag. “The girls will make sure she’s awake before the rooster crows.”

IN THE YARD
, the party seemed to be breaking up. Most people were standing, some had already taken off, and I joined the other women who were carrying in the bone-laden paper plates, the bowls of chips and empty wineglasses and beer cans. A few minutes later, when I went to thank Kathleen before leaving, I said, “Are you sure about Dena?” and she said, “Alice, don’t give it a thought.”

I thanked Cliff, too, collected my bag, peeked in at Dena—she was lying on her side, snoring—and walked out the front door; I lived about three quarters of a mile west of the Hickens. I had gone half a block when I heard quick footsteps behind me. I turned, and over my shoulder, I saw Charlie Blackwell. “Got somewhere better to be?” he asked.

“I’m pretty sure things were winding down,” I said.

“Fair enough. Can I offer you a ride?”

It
was
buggy out. I tried to scrutinize his face, which, in the glow cast by the streetlight a few yards away, was both flushed and sallow.

“How many drinks have you had?” I asked.

“You’re certainly direct.”

Since high school, I had never ridden in a car with a driver who might be so much as tipsy. “You know what?” I said. “I’ll walk. But it was nice to meet you.” When I turned around again, Charlie stayed beside me.

“You’ve at least got to let me escort you. There’s only so much rejection a fellow can withstand in one night, Alice.”

We continued walking, and he said, “I take it you’re not afraid of the dark?”

I gave him a sidelong glance. “Are you joking?”

“I’ll tell you a secret, but you’ve got to promise not to repeat it. You promise?” Without waiting for my reply, he said, “I’m
terrified
of the dark. Scares the living bejesus out of me. My parents have a place up in Door County, and I’d rather chew off my own leg than spend the night there alone.”

“What are you so afraid of ?”

“That’s just it—you have no idea what’s out there! But hey, you know what? I’m not scared right now, and it’s because you’re beside me. Dainty as you are, you seem extraordinarily capable. If something terrible befell us, I’m sure you’d take care of it.”

“Do you always lavish compliments on women you hardly know?”

“Hardly know you? Good God, I thought we were old friends by now.” He brought his hand to his heart as if wounded, then made a rapid recovery. “Here’s what I’ve got: Number one, you just bought a house by yourself, which means you’re independent and financially solvent. Number two, you’re already getting your school papers together even though it’s July, which means you’re responsible. Or you’re a liar, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.” He was raising one finger for each point. “Number three, you’re a crackerjack charades player.” This was untrue; my enactment of
The Sound of Music
had been particularly abysmal. “Number four, either you have a boyfriend but are pretending not to because of your overpowering attraction to me, or you don’t have a boyfriend and are letting me down easy. Whichever it is, these are challenges I’m willing to surmount. In conclusion, I know all about you.” As we walked, I could feel Charlie looking at me, grinning. “I understand you, I sense a long and happy future for the two of us, and I’m sure you sense it, too. Oh, but you have to like baseball—you like baseball?”

“I wouldn’t say I’m a die-hard fan.”

“You will be.” Charlie swung an imaginary bat through the air. “The Brewers are finally pulling it together. A lot of young talent on the team, and you mark my words, this could be a winning season.”

“Truthfully,” I said, “the only reason I went to the Hickens’ party tonight was to help Dena catch your eye.”

“Dena?” He sounded puzzled. “You mean the divorcée?”

“Who told you that? No, never mind—you’re as bad as Rose and Jeanette. Dena’s a wonderful person. She was a flight attendant for more than five years, and she’s traveled the country.”

“Yet she still hasn’t learned to hold her liquor.”

“She didn’t have much to eat,” I said. “That’s why.”

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You can look at her face and know she’s done some hard living, but who am I to throw stones? She seemed like a perfectly nice girl. But she does not, if you catch my meaning, strike me as marriage material for a rising star of the Republican Party.”

His arrogance was really rather extraordinary; it was amusing, and it was also irritating. “I’m a registered Democrat,” I said. “That’s something you might want to include in your dossier on me. And I have to say that you’re remarkably confident for someone who’s about to run against a forty-year incumbent.”

Rather than being insulted, Charlie appeared delighted. “I always appreciate someone who’s done her research. You know who does seem like ideal wife material?” He pointed toward me.

“You’re ridiculous,” I said.

“How is it that a woman as—as
lovely
as you hasn’t been snapped up by now?”

“Maybe I don’t want to be snapped up,” I said. “Did that occur to you?” Needless to say, I wanted it very much: I wanted to get married and sleep in a bed with a man at night, I wanted to hold his hand while walking downtown, to prepare the meals for him that were too much trouble for one person—roast beef, and lasagna. I wanted children, and I knew I would be a good mother, not perfect but good, and I’d already decided I wouldn’t let my daughters have hair longer than chin-length because I’d seen in my students how it made them vain, the maintenance of one’s locks as a family project. Still, despite all this, it felt gratifying to lie to Charlie Blackwell.

“Don’t tell me you’re one of those feminists,” he said. “You couldn’t be, because you’re too pretty.”

I stared at him. “That’s not even worth dignifying, and frankly, I’m not sure why my romantic status is your business.”

“Oh, it’s most definitely my business. It’s my business because I’m bewitched by you.”

Part of the reason he was frustrating was that his comments were so close to what I wanted to hear from a man, but I wanted them to be real. I yearned for genuine emotion, not this banter and jest.

When we arrived in front of the house where I lived, Charlie said, “I think you ought to invite me in for a cup of coffee. There’s a rumor that I’m drunk.”

I shook my head in exasperation and let him follow me into the small entry hall and up the carpeted stairs to the second floor. He stood behind me as I unlocked the door to my apartment. In the kitchen, I went to turn on the coffeemaker when he said, “You got any beer? Because if it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer it.”

I pulled two cans of Pabst from the refrigerator and passed him one. When we’d pulled the tabs off, he tipped his can toward mine. “To Alice,” he said. “A woman of beauty, virtue, and outstanding taste in alcohol.”

“Has anyone ever told you you’re relentless?” I asked, and then I watched in horror as he walked out of the kitchen, down the hall, and toward the bedroom where I worked on my book characters.

“Please don’t go in—” I started to say, but he was well ahead of me and obviously not listening. Besides, the door to the room was open. When I caught up with him, he was standing in the room’s center, turning to look at the papier-mâché figures one by one.

“They’re for the library where I work,” I said, and my voice was loud in the silence. I couldn’t imagine how he’d react to the characters or even how I wanted him to. He was not, I reminded myself, the intended audience. He was quiet for a full minute, and then, in a completely serious tone, he said, “These are amazing.”

I swallowed.

“I recognize Ferdinand.” He pointed to the bull with flowers woven around his horns. “And that’s Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel, Mary Anne.”

“They’re not exactly to scale,” I said.

“I was madly in love with Mary Anne.” He grinned. “I just knew they’d be able to dig that cellar in one day. Oh, and Eloise—I always thought she was a pain in the ass.”

“Girls like her more than boys.”

“Who’s that?” He motioned with his chin toward the corner of the room, where bright green leaves—I’d cut them from a bolt of lurid silk fabric—hung atop a brown trunk.

“
The Giving Tree,
” I said. “It’s a book published when we were in high school, assuming—Well, how old are you?”

“Thirty-one,” he said. “Class of 1964.”

“Me, too. That’s the year
The Giving Tree
came out. It’s my favorite book. I’ve probably read it seventy times, and the end still always makes me cry.” Just describing the book, I could hear my voice thickening with emotion, and I felt embarrassed.

“Why would you want to cry seventy times?” Charlie said, but his tone was sweet, not mocking. He gestured to his right. “Who’s the Chinaman?”

“That’s Tikki Tikki Tembo. He’s a boy who falls down a well, and everyone who tries to get help for him has to repeat his name, which is really long. Tikki Tikki Tembo is actually the short version. His whole name is—Trust me, it’s long.”

“Now you have to say it.”

“Really?”

He nodded.

I took a breath. I rarely talked about my job when I was out on dates—though this was not, of course, a date. “Tikki Tikki Tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo,” I said, and when I finished, we were smiling at each other.

“One more time,” he said. I complied, and he said, “That’s most impressive.”

I bowed.

“Those kids you teach must be nuts about you,” he said.

“Well, I’m no fool. Students start rebelling against their teachers in junior high, but in elementary school, they’re fighting to sit on your lap.”

He regarded me—he was still in the center of the room, and I was just inside the door—and the only way I can describe the expression on his face is to say it was one of enchantment; I had no idea why, but Charlie Blackwell found me enchanting. And I recognized, with a pang that was at once sorrow, remorse, and the first stirring of hope, that it was a way no one had looked at me since Andrew Imhof. In the last fourteen years, I had been on plenty of dates, I’d been in relationships, I’d even been proposed to, but there was nobody I’d enchanted.

“Alice, what would you do if I kissed you right now?” Charlie said.

We looked at each other, and the room was filled with shyness and promise. After a long time, I said, “If you want to find out, I guess you’ll have to try.”

I’D MET SIMON
Törnkvist at a shoe store when I was twenty-six; he was buying clogs, and I was buying Dr. Scholl’s sandals. He was six-four and slender, wore John Lennon–style glasses with gold frames and round lenses, and had floppy blond hair, a wispy blond beard, a droopy left eye contiguous to a scar running from the outer tip of his cheek-bone to below his ear, and an amputated left hand. His injuries were from Vietnam, which I guessed before he told me. Because he’d been left-handed, his writing looked childish; this was something I learned later.

As we sat in the store waiting for the salesman to return with shoes, I remarked on the unseasonably warm March weather. After we’d made our purchases, we stood on the sidewalk outside the store, continuing to talk. Perhaps ten minutes passed, and then he held up his left arm. He wore a long-sleeved rust-colored velour shirt, and the sleeve was folded under his elbow and pinned at his shoulder. He said, “Does this bother you?”

“No,” I said.

“Then would you like to see a movie sometime?”

We went to
The Godfather,
and I made sure to sit on his right side, in case he wanted to hold my hand, but he didn’t try. Afterward, we ate dinner at a pub on Doty Street, and he said he’d found the movie overrated, though he did not explain in what way. He was a year younger than I was—this surprised me, because upon meeting people, I had a silly tendency to think of those who were shorter than I was as younger and those who were taller as older—and he was working as the dispatcher for a plumbing company while taking classes at the university. He hadn’t decided on a major yet but was inclined, he said, toward philosophy or political science. He had grown up on a pea farm outside Oshkosh.

I didn’t find our conversation very interesting, but the entire time, I felt a sort of internal shuddering, as if my ribs were about to collapse and I had to concentrate fiercely to hold them aright. I recognized this sensation for what it was: physical attraction. Simon drove me home (I had wondered if he might have on his steering wheel what we’d called, growing up, a “necker’s knob”—Dena’s grandfather, who’d lost his right hand in a tractor accident, had had one—but Simon did not and was a perfectly competent driver with one hand), and outside my apartment I scooted across the seat and kissed his cheek. I had never made the first move, but the fact that Simon was a little younger emboldened me.