The Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    I knew how he operated; I knew everything about him, the way wives do. I even knew the inside of him, having been there that day in Dr. Ruffner’s office to review the footage of Joe’s colon. We sat and watched light travel through his most intimate inner tubing, and after that we were really bound together for life. When you watch your husband’s colon at work, at play, see the shy, starburst retraction of his sphincter, the amble of barium through an endless human hose, then you know that he is truly yours, and you are his.
    And then, years later, in the company of a small, elegant, Brahmin cardiologist named Dr. Vikram, I had the chance to see sonograms of Joe’s heart, that defective, overachieving fist, its mitral valve closing sloppily, almost drunkenly.
    And I knew him again tonight, could see the way his mind was forming ideas, hunches.
    “I might actually have won this time,” Joe had said to me at dinner. We were eating Cornish game hens, I remember, with their pileup of tiny bones on the plate afterward. “Harry thinks so. Louise does too.”
    “Oh, they always think so,” I said.
    “Don’t you think it even might be the case, Joan?” he asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Just give me a percentage,” he said.
    “You want me to give you a percentage of your chances of winning the Helsinki Prize?” Joe nodded. On the table stood a milk container, and at that moment my eye happened to leap to it and so I said, “Two percent.”
    “You think I have a two percent chance of winning?” he asked glumly.
    “Yes.”
    “Oh, fuck it,” he said, and then I shrugged and said I was sorry, and told him I was going to bed.
    So there I lay, knowing I had extraordinary power in this moment of withholding, knowing that I ought to go to him, to keep him company as he kept vigil. But instead I just lay there, fully awake, and a very long time passed, and finally I heard his footsteps on the old, narrow stairs. If I wouldn’t come to him, then he would come to me. Wives are meant to be sources of comfort, showering it like wedding rice. I used to do this superbly for him and for all three of our children, and mostly I enjoyed the job.
    I always sat up with Joe when he agonized, and with the kids during their various bad dreams, and even during a mescaline trip our daughter Alice once took, in which all of her childhood stuffed animals came to life and mocked her. She was so frightened that night, and she clung to me like a marsupial, or like a much younger child, saying, “Mom, Mom, help me, please, help me!”
    Her cry was plaintive and almost unbearable, but like all mothers, I held on tight with racing heart and poker face, babbling an endless cycle of motherly white noise at her, and eventually she came down from the trip and was able to sleep.
    And I did this kind of thing again and again during our son David’s explosive outbursts, which have taken place periodically over the years. In school, where they told us he was brilliant but emotionally troubled, he lashed out at other kids. In his twenties and thirties there have been bar brawls and street fights, and once he repeatedly hit his recovering-heroin-addict girlfriend with a heavy loaf of bread. This is our heartbreak: David is a rangy man in his late thirties now, alternately indifferent and angry, a handsome nighttime word processor at a New York law firm who has no other ambitions, no hopes for happiness or glory. But he is one of my children; Joe and I made him. And so when, in moments of repentance, he has come to me, I’ve negated his claims of worthlessness, countering them not with any hard evidence, but simply with my quiet, effective presence in a nightgown, and the compassion that rolls out easily in the face of the suffering of one’s own child.
    I always made myself available, both to David and to his sisters, Susannah and Alice, and I was good at it. I spoke softly to them, and when the situation called for it I would stroke their