American Wife

speech or to a business conference in Oklahoma City for him to deliver the keynote address. It sounded exhausting to me, though admittedly I was someone who had traveled by plane exactly twice: At the age of twenty, I’d gone with my parents and grandmother to Washington, D.C., and my father and I had climbed the stairs to the top of the Washington Monument while my mother and grandmother rode the elevator; and at the age of twenty-six, before I started saving money for a house, I’d gone with Rita Alwin to London during our spring break, a trip on which we had ridden a double-decker bus and attended performances of The Merchant of Venice and The Mousetrap. Charlie himself was extremely well traveled. When various places came up in conversation, he’d mention casually, as if it didn’t occur to him that another person might be either impressed or put off, that he’d been there: Honolulu and Charleston and Palm Springs, Martha’s Vineyard and Dallas and Nashville and New Orleans. Baltimore, he declared, was “filthy.” Portland, Oregon, was “a snooze.”

“My brother Arthur’s starting to guess that something’s up,” Charlie was saying. “He’s been trying to introduce me to a girl for weeks, and the other day I told him to forget it, which was, shall we say”—he grinned—“out of character.” Arthur, I had gathered, was the brother Charlie was closest to in both age and friendship; all of his brothers were married. “You’d say no if a fellow asked you out, wouldn’t you?” Charlie said.

“Of course. Charlie, I don’t sleep with someone lightly.”

“No, that’s what I thought. Just making sure we’re in agreement is all.”

“You know, we’re very close right now to where my family lives,” I said. “Maybe we ought to go over there tomorrow.”

“You think I’d pass muster with the Lindgren ladies?”

“If you behave yourself.”

Charlie laughed. “I shouldn’t ask your grandma to pull my finger?”

It was six-thirty by then, and we rose and dressed and made dinner. We’d bought plates, silverware, pots, and pans at Scorilio’s, which was Houghton’s only department store—I insisted on washing these, too, before we used them—and we’d stopped by the grocery store for spaghetti and marinara sauce and bread. (Charlie had whispered, “You think the other customers are looking at you and thinking what a loose lady you are for staying overnight with your boyfriend?”) Back at the apartment, cooking dinner, it all felt very languorous; we brought out the clock radio from the bedroom and tuned it to a jazz station, and in the middle of all of this, a thought solidified itself that had previously occurred to me more than once but always in a shadowy form: the near-certainty that the kiss I had witnessed all those years ago between Gladys Wycomb and my grandmother had been postcoital. I had not recognized it at the time; it had been enough—too much—to view the embrace by itself, without knowing it was either a precursor or a wrapup to anything else. But in retrospect, it was undeniable: that leisurely, affectionate, spent quality that arises between two people when they’re no longer building up to the act but have completed it, that happy relaxation. It’s unlikely I would have made such an assertion in the first weeks of my courtship with Charlie, but with age, I have decided that the denouement is the best part. The potentially fraught negotiations of intercourse are replaced with pleasantly shallow concerns: when to get out of bed, or where you left your shirt, or what to eat. Neither of you is trying, any longer, to convince the other to either go through with or delay it; you’re not trying to achieve anything, and you can simply enjoy each other’s company.

AROUND THREE IN the morning, I awoke to find my hand at Charlie’s groin. We both were naked beneath the sheet, which he had persuaded me we ought to be on our inaugural night together. He was on his back, and I was on my side next to him, my head on the same pillow, my palm on his upper thigh. I was mortified. But if I moved my hand, would that alert him to the fact that it had been there in the first place? As slowly as I could, I slid my fingers a few inches away, and he stirred, as I’d feared he would. He had one arm set around my back, and without opening his eyes, he turned his head, kissed the part in my hair, and immediately seemed to fall back to sleep.

I lay in the dark with my eyes open. Had I not, in fact, been attempting something? Wondering, if only subconsciously, what I could get away with, what would be indecorous, how much we could casually encroach upon each other? And he either hadn’t noticed or had been unfazed. I moved my hand back to where it had been, and I, too, fell asleep again.

WHEN WE ARRIVED at the house in Riley the next day, I knocked on the door, and my grandmother answered wearing an orange sleeveless acrylic dress, sheer panty hose, and orange heels. A skinny white leather belt was cinched around her tiny waist, and her bare arms were painfully scrawny. She looked back and forth between Charlie and me several times—she had to crane her neck—and then she clapped her hands together once and said, “Oh, this’ll be good!” She held out her cheek for me to kiss.

“This is Charlie,” I said. “Charlie, this is my grandmother Emilie Lindgren. Granny, I thought of calling, but we were in the area, and I—”

“My dear, I love surprises.” Her voice contained a note of mischief as she added, “I hope you do, too.”

The reality was that I had purposely not called ahead, not only because I didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that Charlie and I had spent the previous night together in Houghton, but also because I didn’t want my mother to feel as if she had to prepare an elaborate meal on short notice. They ate lunch every day at twelve-thirty, and it was a quarter to two as we entered the house.

“Mrs. Lindgren, I’ve promised your granddaughter I’ll be on my best behavior,” Charlie said, but before my grandmother could respond, my mother called, “Who is it, Emilie?”

Then my mother walked into the living room, and her eyes widened. “Alice, how lovely, but I wasn’t expecting you until next weekend.”

“We’re just stopping by,” I said. “I wanted to introduce you to—This is Charlie. Charlie, my mother.”

“Dorothy Lindgren,” my mother said, and she and Charlie shook hands. There was an extended silence, and then my mother said, with less enthusiasm than I might have anticipated, “Why don’t you two come sit in the other room?”

Had this been a bad idea? It wasn’t until we’d entered the dining room, where they didn’t usually linger this long after lunch, that I understood: There, sitting at the table, wearing a plaid short-sleeved shirt, sipping from a coffee cup that seemed especially dainty in the grip of such a heavyset man, was Lars Enderstraisse. Without looking at her, I immediately sensed my grandmother gloating; I also sensed my mother’s twittery discomfort. “Honey, you know Mr. Enderstraisse,” she said. “Lars, you remember my daughter, Alice, and this is her friend— What’s your last name, Charlie?”

“Blackwell,” I said quickly.

“By all means, call me Lars,” Mr. Enderstraisse said.

Charlie and I sat at the chairs without place mats or plates in front of them. “Can I get you two some ham?”