The Senator's Wife (29 page)

He pedaled up next to the car and stopped. He stepped away from the bike, letting it fall. He came toward her. He was panting. He pinned her against the car and she felt the entire length of his strong body push against her, damp, hot. His mouth tasted of beer and of his own sweet saliva. He grabbed her buttocks and lifted her, pressed into her.

“Natey,” she whispered to him. She put her fingers into his hair and pulled his head back. “Nate, we have to get Asa.”

“No. No, we don't. We can get him after,” he said. She let go of him and he bent to her neck again.

“You think?” she said.

He moved his mouth up her neck to her cheek, her ear. “We've only been gone an hour and a half or so,” he whispered. “Come on, come on, let's go in.”

He was right behind her on the kitchen steps, his hand between her legs. They stumbled across the dark kitchen together and into the main room. He pulled her by the hand over to the hulking shape that was the couch. They fell onto it and he pushed her skirt up, even as she was fumbling at his belt, then at the multiple steel buttons of his fly. Together they pulled his jeans below his hips. Meri got her panties off one of her legs. He lay on top of her, kissing her neck, settling himself, and then he pushed into her.

She cried out in pain, and he froze.

“What?” he breathed. He rose up on his elbows above her. “What, what is it, Meri?”

“Oh, Jesus, it's the scar!” she whispered. “The tear, where the stitches were.” It had felt like a knife cutting her again.

He cocked his hips and pulled slowly out of her.

“God, God,” she whispered, and curled slightly away from him, pulling her legs up.

“I'm so sorry,” he said. His head was buried in her hair.

She could feel his wet penis, getting soft against her thigh. “Oh,
I'm
sorry,” she said. “I'm sorry.” She turned and lifted his head. She held his face. Her eyes were used to the dark now and she could see him, but his expression was unreadable. He lay down again, wedged against the back of the couch. They lay spooned together for a few minutes, his arm around her.

He whispered, “If I licked you? If I made you wetter?”

“But I
am
wet, Nate. Feel.”

Their hands met, his fingers slid slightly in her, and she inhaled sharply again, flinching away.

“Jesus,” he said.

After a moment, Meri said, “She said it might hurt a little.”

He was silent. Then he said, “This seems like more than a little.”

“It is. Yes.”

They weren't touching now. After a long moment, he said, “I can't stand this, Meri. I can't stand how hard this has all been.” His voice was hoarse, anguished. “How awful the labor was, and now, to hurt you with sex . . . I can't. I just can't. I can't stand it.”

“I know,” she said.

They lay next to each other on the couch for a while, not speaking. Then Meri sat up and pulled her skirt down.

Nathan was still lying with his jeans around his shins, his arm thrown up over his face. She could see the white length of his body, his penis a dark shadow across his thigh.

“I'd better get Asa,” she said.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Delia, July 5, 1994

S
O TOM HAS
just been asleep the whole time?” Delia asked. She and Meri had just sat down at the kitchen table to have some iced tea. It was Meri's third time sitting with Tom while Delia was at the Apthorp house.

“So far as I know,” Meri said. She had the sleeping baby perched on one curved arm, his head turned sideways on her shoulder. Delia could see the bottoms of his feet, smooth flat little pads, silky and unused. “At any rate, he went into his room and shut the door, and I've heard nothing since. Just like last time.”

“Well, they work him hard at rehab,” Delia said. “It exhausts him.”

“He's walking so much better though,” Meri said.

“He is.” He was. Everything seemed better to Delia, even just these few weeks along. He could almost completely dress himself—though it was true that she still had to help him with buttons and zippers. He'd graduated from the walker to a cane, one of those peculiar metal canes with multiple prongs fanning out at the tip. His right leg dragged, his right arm dangled and flopped, but they could be made to work when he concentrated on them. Even his pronunciation was clearer.

It was only the sentence structure that wasn't there. The nouns came, and the verbs, but no pronouns, no prepositions, few adverbs, few adjectives. It was like the speech of a two-year-old.
Go hospital
.
Eat
supper
.
Want radio
. They had told her this was one form the aphasia could take, and that it was one of the more difficult to work with.

And yet he got her jokes, he got her stories if she went slowly enough and more or less acted things out as she spoke. He was himself, responding, thinking—yet still unable to convey any complexity to her, except through his eyes, his gestures. But when she looked at him, everything seemed to be there, in his face. Everything she loved.

“It must be strange to have him home all the time after all these years of living apart.”

Delia looked at the younger woman. Her eyes were steady, looking back. This moment had happened before, a moment when Meri seemed to be probing, trying to get Delia to be more open, more explicit about Tom or the history of her marriage. Delia wasn't sure what that impulse was, what it was that Meri wanted to know, exactly, but she didn't welcome it.

But Delia was good—she
felt
she was good anyway—at the honest answer that still didn't reveal much. “Do you know,” she said confidentially, smiling, “it truly feels as though he'd always been here.”

“Really?” Meri said. The baby stirred now, turning his little face against her neck.

“Oh, he's changed, of course, and then he's not changed. In some ways he's still the same old charming, imperious Tom. While being the complete Democrat, of course.” She smiled.

Meri picked up her glass with her free hand and drank. The ice cubes made a light noise as she set it down.

“How are you doing with
your
charge?” Delia gestured at the baby.

“Oh,” Meri said. “All right, I suppose. He's still up two or three times a night, so I feel as if I more or less stagger through the days.”

“But your husband is a help, is he not?”

“Oh, Nathan's been wonderful. He does the shopping and the dinner. He even sort of cleans.” She made a face. “But that's mostly because he can't stand the way things look if he doesn't.”

“Well, this too shall pass.”

“Actually, that part of it probably won't. I've always been a slob. It's just that in the olden days, I had only myself to care for.”

“Well, yes, I know how that is.” She shifted in her chair. “One more or less loves one's own messes.”

Meri looked up and smiled in what looked like surprise. “We do, don't we?” She nodded, and then turned to the window. She frowned, looking at something, and then she turned quickly back to Delia. “My God, Delia, what happened to your car?”

“Oh.” Delia felt a pulse of shame, of embarrassment for herself. “I had an accident.”

“Well,
yes,
” Meri said. “But what happened?”

“It was my fault,” Delia said. “I was lost in a dream and I ran a red light. The other car plowed right into me.”

“God. How terrifying.”

“Yes, it was. It was a very strange experience. Have you ever had that, been hit out of the blue? I mean, without anticipating it, or seeing it coming?”

“No.” Meri shook her head, and her limp hair swayed.

“This was quite . . . bizarre.” Delia shivered, recalling it. “It was as though the world had suddenly blown up. I couldn't imagine for about three seconds, probably, what had happened. Three
long
seconds. This horrible loud noise, and the car flying through the air, sideways—I simply didn't
know
anything for a moment. I barely knew who I was.”

“But you weren't hurt.”

“No, and neither was the poor woman who hit me. The
car,
on the other hand . . .” She raised her eyebrows.

“But you can drive it.” Her face made it a question.

“Oh yes, I
have
been. I'll have to get it fixed at some point. But first I have to get the insurance man to come and look it over. I just”—her hand waved—“I haven't got around to it yet.”

“It'll take a little while, I would think. Fixing it.” Meri was looking out the window again.

In profile, Delia thought, she looked very young. The fatigue just vanished. “Yes, I'll have to time for it when I won't need it for at least a few days.”

“Well, you can always borrow ours for errands and the like.”

“Thank you, dear. That's kind of you, but I don't want to impose.”

“It wouldn't be, imposing.”

“So you say. But I'll manage. I thank you, but I'll manage. I feel I've imposed on you enough, asking you to take on this sitting for Tom.”

“No, Delia. No.” She said this firmly, looking right at Delia. “No, I looked forward to this all day. To be in someone else's house—a place where there are no . . . chores left undone. No messes that are my responsibility.” She smiled. “Messes. Yes indeed. Do you know, I dropped a bottle of olive oil on the floor in the pantry this morning, and I still haven't wiped it all up? There are footprints all over the first floor now. It looks like . . . a ghost has been walking around.” She smiled sadly. “That ghost would be me.”

Delia didn't know quite what to say. She was aware of feeling that Meri was asking something of her, and she was aware of her own resistance to that.

Meri was swaying her body slightly back and forth, patting the baby's back. “No, I loved sitting here in the quiet,” she said.

Delia was relieved that the subject seemed to have changed, that they'd moved on.

“And the driver does everything anyway, just as you said he would. He gets him into his room, gets his shoes off. He's very kind. I can hear him talking to Tom.”

“He does seem lovely, doesn't he?”

“Well, maybe not exactly
lovely
.” Meri made a face.

“Oh, I know, I know,” Delia said. “He
does
have that wretched pompadour. A man with a pompadour is a man who thinks too much about himself.”

Meri smiled at her and moved to get more comfortable in her chair.

“Well, I'm glad then,” Delia said. “I'm glad if being here is actually a momentary haven.” She looked at her own hands on the table, the ridges of greenish veins running across them. “I remember when the children were small, I used to love taking them to the doctor's office because there were toys and other children and they'd play, and I'd be able to sit there utterly idle for five or ten or even fifteen minutes. No chores to be done. Sometimes I'd actually have time to read some ridiculous article in a magazine,
Ladies’ Home Journal
or something like that, and I'd think, ‘Why, this is utter
bliss
.’ ”

Meri was looking intensely at Delia. “But you loved your children.”

“Well, of course I loved them. I mean, there were moments with each of them when I didn't. Moments, you know.” And Delia was suddenly remembering them, those moments. Remembering how it had felt, the rage at something your child was doing or saying in public—doing or saying with what must be a kind of instinctive canniness regarding the upper hand he held, an inborn sense of how deeply embarrassing his behavior would be to you. The shrieks at the checkout line in the grocery store over the candy and gum they perversely stacked by the cash registers. The wails, the collapse on the ground when she would announce it was time to leave the park. She remembered turning to one or another of her children when she had them alone finally, in the car or at home, turning to them and
paying
them back
with her own real anger, her rage.

She said, “But everyone has those moments.” She waved her hand. “You have to forgive yourself for those moments. You need to, or you can't go on. Forgiveness is essential. Forgiveness of yourself, first. Then it's easier to forgive others.”

Meri's mouth made an odd shape. “Neither is a great gift of mine, I'm afraid.”

“I find as I get older that they are, of mine. Interesting, isn't it?” And Delia felt it suddenly as a point of pride, an accomplishment. She felt, she realized, that having Tom here now was connected to her having forgiven him all those years ago. Having let go of so much. It was like a reward for that, for that generosity. She smiled. “Maybe I
am
trying for sainthood, as my daughter suggested.”

“Did she?”

“She did, but she was mad at me at the moment. It wasn't meant kindly.”

The baby made a little noise and Meri began again to sway her upper body from side to side. She said, “I think I remember Tom describing her as formidable, didn't he?”

“When was this?” Delia asked. She was surprised by this, by Meri's calling up of Tom, whole. How would she know?

“When we came over just before last Christmas. When he was visiting. When your son came.”

“Oh, yes!” Delia said. She'd forgotten that Meri had met Tom then. Now she thought back to that evening. She remembered it clearly. Most of all, Tom's presence then. His elegant presence—she could recall even the color of the shirt he was wearing, a pale gray. She remembered too the night before, which was the last time they'd made love before the stroke. “That seems another universe, doesn't it? It
was
another universe.” They sat for a moment. “Well,
formidable
Nancy is,” she said.

Meri sighed. “It's so hard to imagine, having grown children who actually have
characteristics.
Who are people, people you've helped to make.” She shook her head. “Part of what's difficult for me now is that I can't really believe anything I do with Asa has anything to do with him as a person. I mean, I feel I'm just doing chores when I care for him.”

“You are a very conscientious mother, dear,” Delia said.

“Well, of course I'm conscientious. He's my
job.
I always do a good
job.
” Her eyes seemed to be glittering. She looked down at the table.

Delia waited.

After a few seconds Meri said, “It's just that I feel so . . . well, brain-dead, I suppose. So much that I'm just this, animal. This . . . body.” She gestured down her side with her free hand.

She started to speak, and stopped. Then she said, “Did you feel that? when your children were babies?”

“Of course. It's one of those times, isn't it? when you're reminded of your animal nature—labor, and then the kind of fog you live in for a while after the baby comes—one of those times when you're so
aware
that you live in your body. We get to forget it most of the time. But we
are
our bodies after all. We may feel full of lofty concerns most of the time, but it all comes down to that in the end. We live in our bodies, and we get reminded of that from time to time.”

“God, don't tell me there are times when I'm going to feel this way again. I don't want to know it.”

“Ah, but there are, of course,” Delia answered. “In old age, for example, when the body begins to go wrong, to fail in any of a variety of interesting and depressing ways.” She snorted lightly. “You wake up every morning, I assure you, very much in your body. Very aware of it. And in illness, with something like what's happened to Tom. It forces you to understand how provisional it all is—the body's working correctly.”

Meri's lips tightened. Her head moved, bowed almost, in what seemed a kind of apology, or concession.
Okay.

“Yours, now,” Delia said. “The feeling you have of . . .
bodiliness,
of being overwhelmed by it—yours is actually the kindest version of that, I would think.” She smiled. “Because it's just that your body is working so hard. But it's working
well
—it
is
working correctly—and that's something to be grateful for.” She was aware that part of what she was telling Meri was that she shouldn't complain, that she should be braver than she was; and she was aware that she felt some unkindness toward the younger woman as she did this. But she couldn't help it. Life was hard, hard for everyone. One never stopped having to work at it. Meri was of an age when she ought to know that.

Meri looked as though she was beginning to say something, but then there was a noise, a cry from Tom in the dining room. “Dheee!” Delia.

Delia smiled at Meri. “Ah,
my
baby,” she said. She stood up.

Meri stood up too, more slowly, adjusting the baby on her shoulder. Delia walked with her to the living room, where Meri carefully lowered Asa into his bassinet, trying not to wake him. They stood together over the basket and watched him as he unfurled himself spasmodically. His eyes opened, he seemed to gasp, as though surprised by what he saw. Then they closed again, he curled slightly to his left, and his little fist rose to his mouth.

Meri sighed in relief. She picked the basket up by its handles, and Delia followed her down the hallway to the front door.

“Well, thanks for the tea, Delia.” There was a pregnant pause, as though she wasn't sure what to say next. “And for the company.”

“Oh, please, not at all.” Even though she felt an itchy impatience, Delia was trying to keep her voice gracious and unrushed. “And thank
you,
again, for staying with Tom,” she said.