Free The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller Page A

Tom Naughton seemed not, in any real sense, to be their neighbor, and she couldn't help wondering if in some way he felt he'd been tricked into buying the house. She didn't want to ask him that though—in part because she sensed the question would be connected to something faintly and reasonlessly vindictive in herself, something she didn't quite understand. For why should she take any pleasure in his disappointment?
    The Xerox, then, was a gift, a way of commiserating, a way of sharing in his puzzlement.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Meri, September and October 1993
    T HE CONVERSATIONS Meri had had with Delia on the front porch as they came and went were the usual kinds of exchanges, cordial but empty, that people who don't know each other well have. But Delia always brought something extra to them, a certain style.
    “Suicidal yet?” she'd asked Meri cheerfully a couple of days after their arrival, when it seemed they'd barely begun to unpack. And told her, in the ensuing conversation, where the best liquor store in town was. “I find that the influence of alcohol makes anything more tolerable,” she'd said in a comforting tone.
    And on a rainy day, as she and Meri each stood at her own front door, Meri fumbling with the trickiness of the old lock on hers, Delia having trouble collapsing her umbrella, she had turned to Meri and said across the lion, “Don't let them wax rhapsodic to you about autumn in New England. There are about six wonderful days, and then”—she gestured up at the gray sky—“
this.
”
    These exchanges confirmed for Meri the feeling she'd had when she first met Delia. “She's eccentric,” she told Nathan. “But in a warm way.”
    “As opposed to?”
    “Eccentric in an egocentric way, or a chilly way, natch.”
    They were bicycling home together when they had this conversation, weaving slowly through the wide, untrafficked streets. She had stopped by his office after work to rescue him from office hours. He had them every Wednesday, and every Wednesday he was late getting home. When she'd opened his door—after knocking, after being invited in—he was sitting across the desk from a girl so lovely that Meri had been momentarily stabbed with jealousy. But then she looked at Nathan—Nathan, whose face was lifted in relief and pleasure at seeing her—and she forgave him instantly for the student's beauty.
    “Her eccentricity invites you in, that's what it is. It's not self-regarding, the way so much eccentricity is.”
    “You've got a crush on her, I think.” He'd pulled up next to her and they were bicycling side by side. They both had old three-speed bikes they'd bought used in Coleman, and she loved the way he looked, sitting up straight with the wind blowing his hair back.
    “I've got a crush on you,” she said.
    On the third Friday after they'd moved in, there was a message from Delia waiting for her on the answering machine at the end of the day. She was going to drive out into the country tomorrow morning, to a farmstand she liked, and she wondered if Meri would like to come along—it was supposed to be beautiful weather.
    When Meri told Nathan about the invitation, he smiled. “Hey. Nice,” he said. After a moment though, when he'd gone back to what he was doing—they were in the backyard, and he was grilling fish for supper—he said suddenly, “How come, do you think, she didn't ask us both?”
    Meri looked down at him from the stoop where she was sitting. “Natey,” she said. “Shame. You're jealous.”
    “Well, I suppose I am. But I'm the one who'd really like to get to know them, after all.”
    “What? And I don't?”
    “But you know what I mean.” He picked up a saucer of olive oil and started to brush some on each fish. “I'm the one who cares more about who they are. Who
he
is, anyway.” He replaced the lid on the grill. “Not that he's ever even there.” He made a moue.
    “Well, maybe that gets tiresome for her, everyone's abiding interest in ‘the senator.’