Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories

The Traveler’s Wife

IN THE CAR on the way home from the Willevers’, Bree said, “It’s funny—” and Harry Dick knew she was about to object to something. She became chatty and opinionated at the wheel, and he was sorry he’d had three drinks because he hated being a passenger, especially her passenger. And what was that odd smell in the back seat?

Harry Dick Furlong, the travel writer, dedicated his books to his wife, Bree; he praised her for her patience in awaiting his return, and the way she ran the house, and coped with the demands of his office when he was on one of his trips — and tonight, as always, at the Willevers’ she had listened to his stories as though hearing them for the first time. He liked to say their marriage was a partnership that worked.

The evening had gone well. The Willevers were good hosts, and grateful to Furlong for agreeing to the dinner so soon after arriving back from his last long trip. In addition to being a reader and a friend, Ed Willever was the Furlongs’ attorney. He was also a tease, and it was a mark of his trust in their friendship that he dared to tease Furlong.

At the meal, Furlong had done most of the talking. He was full of new stories, and though most of them were boasts they sounded authentic. “You couldn’t make this stuff up!” About being starved, stranded, threatened by some rowdy boys, propositioned by a drunken woman at a bar. One about a snake, another about a scorpion. “As a traveler I often feel like a castaway.” At times it seemed it was not Harry Dick at all, but a fictional wanderer named Furlong whom he was recalling with amazement and admiration.

His trips had given him an aura of wizardry, as sudden vanishings and reappearances often do, travel in his way like an accumulation of magic, overcoming dangers as he plunged deeper into the murky world. His books were reports on the extraordinary, news from distant places. His criticism of most travel books was “You could see that sort of thing without ever leaving home.”

He immediately thought “It’s funny—” meant Bree doubted one of the stories he’d told at the Willevers’.

“You don’t believe I had a scorpion in my shoe?” It had leaped out, he’d said, just before he slipped the shoe on.

“Not that,” Bree said. “It was when you talked about not wanting to be known.”

Furlong refused all interviews; he never appeared on television; he avoided book tours — no autographs, never elaborated on his trips, did not answer questions. “It’s all in the book.”

Exasperated, he said, “Haven’t we been through that?”

“But when Ed said, ‘It’s kind of a cheat, isn’t it?’” Bree was driving efficiently, glancing in her rearview mirror, tapping her turn signal. “And then, ‘Being well known for your desire to be unknown.’”

“He was trying to be funny.”

“It got me thinking.”

She had never doubted him before. Never questioned him. And it cut him, because her point — Ed’s teasing remark — was too logical to refute. Was she doubting him now?

He said, “I like my privacy.”

“And everyone knows it. And they talk about you because of it. Like Ed said, ‘The well-known recluse.’”

“You’re taking him seriously.”

Ed had also said something about having it both ways, but she did not remind him. They were in the driveway now, yet Bree remained in the driver’s seat, holding the wheel as though gripping it gave her authority.

“I’m just asking.”

“I got stuck in that village. I told you. I wanted to come home sooner.”

Still she hung on to the steering wheel. “And when Ed said that going on a trip was maybe not leaving at all but making yourself more conspicuous?”

“He was drunk,” Furlong said, sounding drunk himself.

“Making a big deal about hiding from the limelight was a way of attracting the limelight.”

“Please.” The word meant everything, but especially it meant, “This conversation is at an end.”

Bree said lightly, “I don’t know.”

But before he got out of the car, Furlong sniffed and said, “Do you smell something?” He made the clownish face of someone interrogating a smell. He said, “Cigarette.”

“I had a smoke,” Bree said.

“You—what?”

It was the explosive tone he would have used if she had said, I have a lover. He was shocked, almost disbelieving, but the odor lingered as proof, and I had a smoke sounded worse than I had a cigarette—more knowing.

“At Ed and Joan’s, while you were talking. I went outside. Probably my coat still smells. It’s on the back seat.”

“I cannot believe this. No one smokes anymore.”

“I took it up.” She spoke promptly, as if she’d rehearsed the reply.

“I stopped twenty years ago.”

“I had never tried it.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“So is your travel.”

“And it stinks.”

“You won’t smell it. You’ll be away.”

He was so shocked by her casual I took it up, he was too embarrassed to tell anyone. He felt he had to hide her smoking from people they knew, and Bree objected to that. Smoking relaxed her, she said. It aided her digestion. It passed the time. Your own smoke smelled different from other people’s smoke. “Who knew?”

And it seemed to give her confidence. She began to whistle — tunelessly, which made her whistling louder, more intrusive. Her whistling said, I am on my own. It also said, I don’t care. And: I am going to go on doing this until I improve. And it seemed to him, irrationally, as though she expected someone, a stranger, to answer her, whistling back. He had never heard her whistle before, and the whistle was like another voice, but someone else’s voice.

“I never travel with Harry Dick — I’d just be in the way,” she said the next time they were at the Willevers’.

Willever said, “He’s an outsider. Two outsiders is one too many.”

Bree said, “As an outsider, Harry Dick has a hatred of insiders. But if you spend that much time writing about yourself, how can you call yourself an outsider? You’re too big.”

“But what do you really think?” Willever said, as he often did, as another tease, not expecting a reply.

But Bree said, “Travel can warp your outlook.”

Afterward, in the silence of the car — Furlong was driving — Bree said, “I honestly don’t know why I said that.”

Furlong examined her face. She did not look sorry. She was smiling softly, but with unshakable defiance, her lips everted, as though she held a cigarette between them, a smoker’s confident pout.

Feeling whipped, Furlong said, “What is wrong?”

“I don’t know what I was talking about.” Bree spoke in an insincere, silly-me tone — or did she mean it?

He said, “I think Ed knows you smoke.”

She laughed — the laugh was new too, a cartoon cackle that went with the whistle.

He said, “How will you explain it?”

“I’ll say how much fun it is. I never knew that.”

They did not have children, a conscious decision, because a child would have hampered his travel. To “Any kids?” Furlong said, “We’ve got a really energetic Lab. It’s like having a five-year-old who never grows up.” But it was Bree who looked after Lester when Furlong was away.

It seemed to him that Bree was content. She did not discuss her plans with Furlong. But this apparent reticence marked the onset of a new habit, like the smoking, like the whistling. Instead of talking about her plans, she made announcements when they were in the presence of other people, usually the Willevers, sometimes the Jimmersons, now and then the Woottens — his friends, not hers. When they asked about a book he was writing, Furlong said, “I’m in Addis Ababa.” Or “Just leaving Rangoon.”

This happened one night at the Willevers’, soon after her whistling improved. “I’m still in Kunming,” Furlong said, and when (to be fair) Willever asked Bree what she was doing, she said, “I’m going to Las Vegas.”

“Good for you,” Ed said.

Furlong laughed. “That’s Bree. Great at improvisation.” But in the car on the way home he said, “You’re not serious.”

She said, “I don’t know. It just came out. After I heard myself say it, it seemed like a great idea. I might go this weekend.”

Furlong felt carved up, as with the revelation of her smoking. He said, “You don’t gamble. You hate shows.”

“But you can smoke there. And I’ve heard there are a lot of restaurants.”

“And you hate to go to restaurants alone. You’ve said so.”

“I’ve gotten used to it. From you being away.”

Furlong uttered a skeptical sound through his nose that was meant to convey disbelief. But on the day he drove her to the airport, she said, “You’ll be able to work better with me away. You can do whatever you want. You’ll be brilliant.”

It was what he had said to her once on one of his departures. And he had also written how, in Italy, if a person praised a baby’s health and didn’t say “Bless him,” the praise was like a curse. He felt that way now, that in praising him she was blighting his luck.

It was just a weekend, she said. He sat at his desk, imagining Bree in Las Vegas doing — what? She didn’t call. He dialed her cell phone. No answer. But that had been their agreement. “I don’t want to disturb your writing.”

Her silence, her absence, did disturb him — terribly. He wrote nothing — or rather, he wrote pages that, after he reread them, seemed to him forced and unreliable and lifeless, and he tossed them. He walked Lester, and found the dog demanding and indecisive. He fretted. What did people do in Las Vegas if they didn’t throw money away gambling? Did they gamble in other ways? He imagined himself in Las Vegas, and Bree at home, and he became anxious.

On her return, Furlong said, “What were you doing all that time?”

She said, “What do you usually do?”

She seemed rested and chatty, not about Las Vegas but about her next trip, a longer one, to Disneyland. “I’ve always wanted to go.”

Disneyland! The word suggested a world of frivolity and wasted money and bad health, a relic from the age of smoking. But she went. And in the five days she was away Furlong could not work. Worse, in the middle of that week Joan Willever stopped in.

“I just wanted to see how you were making out with Bree away.” A girlishness in her tone, something coquettish, disturbed him deeply.

“Where’s Ed?”

“Home. I didn’t tell him I was coming over. I thought he’d be funny about it.”

Furlong could only think that when he was away Ed Willever dropped in on Bree, and that a pattern was being revealed to him. He wanted to say Bree smokes, but he was ashamed to, and she might blame him for her doing it.

“You don’t need me?” Joan said.

What did this mean? He stared at her and said, “I’ve got work to do.”

“The traveler at home,” Joan said. “Strange concept.”

After she left, he sat with his fists pressed against his cheeks as though trying to force a sentence from his head. Nothing came, or only falsehoods came, as he awaited Bree’s return; and he hated the thoughts that were crowding his imagination.

The last sentence he’d written was “The Nepali in the shop sat under a long sticky screw of flypaper, its curls black with bodies.” He could not continue, or extend it. He kept seeing it, more and more bodies accumulating on the hanging paper.

Bree said nothing to him on her return, but the next time at the Willevers’ she spoke up, mentioning the rides, the restaurants, the features of the hotel. Furlong sat, dumb, confused, with growing anger.

Ed Willever said, “You’ve got competition, Harry Dick.”

Bree said, “Of course not. I’d never write about it.”

And that confused Furlong further. He could not help but think that in her absences she’d taken over his life, that her travels were his own trips, but with a difference — she didn’t write about them, she hardly spoke of them, but in a fragmentary way he believed her to be editing, in a spirit of concealment.

When she said she wanted to drive to Seattle, Furlong said, “Take a plane.”

“You can’t smoke on a plane.”

“I want to come with you.”

“No,” she said. “I want to smoke in the car and you won’t like it.” Then, “You have to write your book.”

He did not have the heart to tell her that he couldn’t write.

Bree drove to Seattle, whistling as she left the house. She was out of touch for ten days. She vanished in the way he had always done; and when she was away a part of him vanished — the confident part of him, the risk taker, the wizard, the storyteller; and he was left idle, feeling undermined, staring at his unfinished sentence, following her progress in his head, knowing what he would be doing on that road.

He could only think she had another life, that she dallied with other men in motels and told them lies or half-truths. He made the accusation but she denied it, laughing, blowing smoke at him, tapping her cigarette into a saucer. That maddened him. He saw a wickedness in her smoking. When she told stories of her travels at dinner parties, he did not believe them. Surely she was embellishing, improving, falsifying. And that suspicion — that her real life was out there, wreathed in cigarette smoke — finished him, as a traveler, as a writer, as a husband.