Dept. Of Speculation

37

And then there is another fight. “Us,” he says about the girl again. The wife leaves in the middle of the night and goes to a hotel. She takes a car across town to a Holiday Inn Express because she can’t bear to sleep on anyone’s couch, to see husbands, to see children. She watches herself sign the register. She watches herself check in. She wanted him to feel something when he saw the door slam behind her, but did he?

She left without a toothbrush. Without a book. Without sleeping pills even. She has her phone on. He doesn’t call her. She texts to say where she is. In case she needs me is how she phrases it. Nothing then. Nothing. She waits, watching the door as if it might open. She hears herself making noise, a soft sound, half cry, half croon.

I am in a hotel, she thinks. In a hotel you can do anything. Now she goes through every drawer in the room. What is she looking for? A gun? A needle? She shifts from bed to chair to desk, but there is no place that will stop her head.

It is dawn when she goes out into the street again, when she calls a car to get her. The man who picks her up thinks she is a hooker. He smiles at her in the rearview mirror. She says she needs to get home before her daughter wakes up and he speeds through the quiet streets for her.

But it doesn’t matter that she returns. He is asleep and when he wakes up he won’t even look at her. “You left,” he mutters. “You left.” A whisper fight and then he is up and dressed. There is something about his eyes that stops her. “You’re not thinking of going there, are you?” she asks him. From his face, she sees yes, he is thinking this. For the first time, she plays the unplayable card, her daughter’s name. “Leave if you want, but not like this. If you do, you are going to change who she is.”

What she means by “like this” is, with your face shaking and your hands trembling and your eyes like a hunted animal. She puts her hand on his shoulder, but he shakes her off of him.

The babysitter comes to take the daughter out of the house. The wife calls the philosopher and he comes right away. She is waiting outside on the street for him and he has to hold her up, keep her from falling. A group of Pakistani men looks on impassively. “Keep him,” she pleads. “Just for tonight. Don’t let him leave. Promise me.”

The philosopher keeps him at his apartment. He doesn’t have a couch so he takes the husband to Ikea and they go shopping for an extra bed. It sounds like a sitcom, the wife thinks when she hears this. But where to put the laugh track? At the store while they are trying them out or later at home when they are assembling it?

It is easy in retrospect to see why he’d want to go. There are two women who are furious at him. To make one happy, he must take the subway across town and arrive on her doorstep. To make the other happy, he must wear for some infinitely long period of time a hair shirt woven out of her own hair.