American Wife

sarcastically, “Oh, shit—we forgot to do the dollar dance!” In Riley, if not in Madison, I had attended many weddings where dollar dances occurred; Charlie, I suspected, had never attended one.

We were to stay overnight in a bed-and-breakfast in Waukesha, a Victorian house painted blue-gray. “It looks haunted,” Charlie said as we turned up the gravel driveway.

I was the one who had chosen it, based on a recommendation from another teacher, and I replied, “Then you should have picked out someplace else.”

“Are you always so grumpy when you get married?” he asked, and we grinned at each other across the front seat.

Around three in the morning, I woke to find Charlie shaking me. “I’ve gotta take a leak,” he said.

I shooed him away. “I’m sleeping.”

“Come with me, will you?” The bathroom was outside our room and down the hall about twenty feet. He leaned across me and switched on the light on my nightstand. “Just come. One minute. I’ll be fast.”

I was covering my eyes with the inside of my elbow. “Turn it off,” I said.

“Come on.” His tone was both cajoling and whiny. “This place gives me the creeps.”

I lifted my arm. “You seriously want me to go with you to the bathroom?”

“Lindy, you’ve known since the night we met that I’m afraid of the dark. There was no false advertising.”

I shook my head, but, just the tiniest bit, I was smiling. In the hall, a night-light stuck into a plug gave off a weak glow, but neither of us could find the main light switch. I walked in front, and when a floor-board creaked, Charlie whispered, “You hear that?” and I whispered back, “Calm down. This house is probably a hundred years old.”

In the bathroom, I perched on a low radiator against the wall while he stood over the toilet. After he was finished, he turned and kissed me on the lips. “I knew I married the right woman.”

“Wash your hands and let’s go back to bed,” I said.

WHEN I FELL asleep again, I dreamed, as I had not for many years, of Andrew Imhof. We were in some sort of large, vague, crowded room—the poorly lit auditorium of a school, possibly—and we did not speak or even make eye contact, but I was acutely conscious of every place he moved; really, he was all I paid attention to, though I was pretending otherwise. Then, abruptly, he was gone, and I was deeply disappointed. I had been planning to approach him, I’d known he wanted me to, but I’d put it off so long I’d missed my chance. When I awakened, it was half past six, and our room in the B and B was just getting light; we were sleeping on a high, canopied bed, beneath a patchwork quilt so heavy I had broken into a sweat. The feeling of disappointment stayed with me—that what I wanted was the boy in the dream. Without turning my head to look at Charlie, I knew. Not this. That. Andrew. To be with Andrew would have been utterly natural; everything had been set in place, and I’d needed only to give in. And that feeling of being adored by a handsome boy, that feeling of being seventeen, of life being about to happen—how was it all so long ago, how had my path gone this way instead? My sense of disappointment wasn’t because I’d had to escort Charlie to the bathroom—that was practically endearing. It was because of everything else: I was now married (married ) to an aspiring politician from a smug and ribald family, I had a mother-in-law who didn’t like me, my husband was a man who basically (I rarely, even in the privacy of my own head, admitted this) did not hold a job. I’d been meant to grow old in Riley; I’d never been meant for ribaldry or riches.

Charlie stirred then, pulling me to him, and when I finally looked at his face, the dream began to dissipate. I rolled toward him, feeling the tops of his feet with the bottoms of my toes, feeling the hair on his calves against the skin of my own legs, and his bony knees—they almost hurt me sometimes, when his legs were bent—and I pressed my torso to his, I huddled beneath his chest and shoulders. I recognized the smell of his skin, and he was handsome; he was not as handsome as Andrew Imhof had been, because Andrew had been a teenager, perfect and golden, but surely, had Andrew lived, he would no longer be handsome the way he’d been then. If what I had with Charlie did not feel as ripe with promise as what I’d had with Andrew—well, of course it didn’t. That earlier promise had hinged on never being realized. Charlie and I already knew each other far better than Andrew and I ever had. If Charlie couldn’t name the bakery on Commerce Street, or give the reason why Grady’s Tavern had caught fire in 1956, if he didn’t fully understand where I came from, he understood who I was now—he knew how well done I liked my steak, knew the color of my toothbrush, the expression I made when I realized I’d forgotten to roll up my car windows before it rained. And if I’d been meant to stay in Riley, wouldn’t I have? Charlie wasn’t the reason I’d moved to Madison—I was the one who’d chosen to go over a decade earlier, and I’d rarely doubted my choice.

There then occurred the first and only paranormal incident of my marriage. Charlie shifted in his sleep, opened his eyes, looked at me, and, without preamble, said, “You have to forgive yourself for killing that boy.” (He was the first one who had ever said killing—though I had used the word plenty in my own thoughts, no one had used it with me. Years later, that was how people put it in articles and especially on the Internet, but Charlie was the first.) “For your own sake but for mine, too,” he was saying, and his voice was hoarse from sleep yet also certain and insistent. “If you don’t forgive yourself, you’re making that accident too important, you’re making him too important.” Charlie paused. “And I want to be the love of your life.”

I was so surprised that I don’t recall what I said—probably nothing more than “Okay”—and we fell back to sleep, Charlie first. When we awoke over an hour later, we did not refer to the exchange. We chatted idly, Charlie tried to persuade me to have sex—“We need to consummate this thing pronto”—but I didn’t want to until we got home that afternoon because the walls of the B and B were so thin we’d heard the owner sneeze the night before. For breakfast, we went downstairs to eat biscuits and cherry jam. The bewilderment my dream had left behind, that jarring sorrow—they were gone, and now that we were up and dressed, walking around, now that it was an ordinary day, I could see the dream’s utter irrationality. I did love Charlie; I was extravagantly lucky.

But the dream came back—the truth is that it has come back and come back and come back. For the entirety of my marriage, I would estimate I have dreamed of Andrew Imhof every two or three weeks, almost always as he appeared to me the night of my wedding: present but elusive. He stands nearby, we do not speak, and I am filled with exquisite longing. When I wake, the longing takes more time to fade than the dream itself.

But the dream is also, I have thought, a kind of gift: It allows me to remember Andrew without the memory being overwhelmed by my own sense of guilt. Perhaps Charlie’s exculpation had some effect, along with the passage of time. By my wedding night, it had been so many years. I was scarcely the same person I’d been that September evening in high school, and because it was no longer me, exactly, who had crashed the car, I could forgive the girl it had been as I would have been willing, much sooner, to forgive a classmate who’d been driving.

And so the dream was the first time that I experienced our separation not as Andrew’s loss but purely as mine.