Free Husband and Wife by Leah Stewart Page B

sandwiches. Hard to believe that this person could have not only cheated on me but written a book about having done so, and then could go on living with that brand of ruination now, could make oatmeal for everyone in the morning and remember that I didn’t want raisins in mine. I was relieved, of course. I ate my oatmeal and watched Nathan read the Times , absentmindedly doling out Cheerios to Binx, and debated with Mattie the wearing of sundresses when it was under sixty degrees. I was relieved.
    What was it, after all, that could be said to be ruined? I’d rubbed Binx’s head and kissed Nathan good-bye and dropped Mattie at preschool with five magic hugs and five magic kisses, and now I was driving the usual way to work, the usual trees flying by outside my window. Life was going on as it always did. In troubled times, I still hadmy children and my house and my job and apparently my marriage, and as long as no one found out what had happened, Nathan could still have his book, and I wouldn’t have to fork over $50,000 like a blackmail victim. I wasn’t going to look at the book, I wasn’t going to think about the book, the book would be published, the book might bring in some money and so was just a means to an end. Fiction, fiction, it was all fiction. I still loved Nathan, and he said he still loved me. I believed that if Nathan could keep it together, everything would be fine. I didn’t give much thought to whether I could keep it together. I was used to the answer to that question being, on a large scale, yes, automatically yes, no need to even ask. The ability to keep it together was my essential quality.
    It wasn’t as though we’d lived together, in the years before this, in an eternal bliss of peaceful intimacy. I knew as well as anyone the rhythms of life with another person, the days of kisses, casual touches, easy familiarity, the days of snappish voices, rolling eyes, weary familiarity, the way that as one state of being gave way to another, the other seemed distant and fantastical. I’d thought, How could I ever have married you? And I’d thought, How could I ever have been mad at you? And then I’d thought those things again and again and again.
    This was different. No, it wasn’t different. The offense was larger, yes, than any previous ones. So what? Husbands, wives—countless others had survived it.
    He said he still loved me. The ruination was in my phrasing. He still loved me. I corrected myself. He loved me. That was what he’d said.
    What is it , anyway, this thing that we keep together, or lose?
     
    And then, at last, I was at my desk, in my safe, functional office with its ergonomic rolling chair, everything I needed to know neatly labeled in a file. I sipped the coffee I’d made an hour ago but not yet tasted—still hot, in the heavy-duty travel mug Nathan had bought me—and watched the e-mail messages pop up on my computer screen. A normal day. At work it was just a normal day.
    I had never cheated on Nathan. Why not? I could have. I could have chosen to. Like anyone I’d had those moments—too much to drink, the man lighting your cigarette, meeting your gaze a little too long. There had been that guitar player promising he’d teach me to like Rush, if I just gave him a chance, that French poet murmuring about my eyes, my smile. And there had been Rajiv.
    I opened my personal e-mail account. I kept a folder in it labeled “Austin Friends,” and though I’d added some e-mails from other people to it—not because Nathan was paranoid but because I was—mostly I kept it to collect the e-mails from Rajiv. Hey lady , the last one said. I’ve been rereading you , so lately you’re in my head. How are you? R. He’d written it more than a year ago, and I had never answered. Why had I never answered? There was something of the love note, of the secret, in the use of that initial rather than his name. Wasn’t there? I looked at all eleven of his e-mails. All signed like that.