Husband and Wife by Leah Stewart Page A

not.”
    “Never mind. I just wanted to tell you that Nathan and I are going to work through this, and I think it would make things easier if nobody else knew about it. Otherwise we’ll both feel like we’re being watched, you know?”
    “I won’t tell anybody,” he said. “You know I won’t tell anybody.”
    “That’s true,” I said. Of course he wouldn’t tell anybody. Smith, Man of Honor, was what Nathan liked to call him. “I should have remembered that.”
    “I wish I didn’t know myself,” he said. “I can’t believe Nathan would do that. I mean, my God, it changes my whole conception of him. Who is he? How could he do that, when you were pregnant? You were pregnant, for God’s sake! Can I even still be friends with him?”
    I couldn’t answer. I tried, but my throat was so tight now I couldn’t even speak, and so, in surrender, I started to cry.
    “Hey,” he said. “Hey, that was really stupid, I’m sorry.”
    I took a deep breath. I tried to remember the last time I’d cried—not just teared up at anything on television about children, but really, truly cried.
    “I won’t tell anybody,” he said again.
    I couldn’t remember. Strange. Before I had children I used to cry out of frustration or anger every once in a while, and now I didn’t do that anymore. Had becoming a mother made me tougher? Now it took adultery to make me cry.
    “Listen,” Smith said, sounding desperate, “can I take you to lunch? We can talk more. Maybe you need to talk.”
    “I don’t want to talk,” I managed to say, but he must nothave understood me, because he said he would pick me up at twelve thirty and hung up the phone.
     
    My job, as the business manager of the Department of Neurobiology, was one I’d arrived at more or less accidentally, and then proven to be good at. I’d started as a secretary in the department, as a charity hire. The husband of the then-chair was friends with my thesis adviser from graduate school, and my adviser said, “Hey, can you help a starving poet find a job?” It didn’t hurt that I could type eighty-two words a minute, a skill that would have been more suited to a fiction writer like Nathan, who still typed with two fingers after years at the computer. I’d never written a poem at eighty-two words a minute. I was slow. I was agonizingly slow. More than once I’d spent a week on a line.
    But at work I was fast, and efficient, so much so that when the grants manager left, they offered me his job, and when the business manager retired, they offered me hers. Now all the administrative types in the department were my employees, something that had by this point almost stopped seeming strange. Two of those employees had been working there long before I had, and had, in fact, treated me as upperclassmen treat a freshman when I’d first arrived, alternately teasing me and taking me under their wing. One of the women, the receptionist, Kristy, was actually younger than I was, but she’d grown up faster—married at nineteen, first kid at twenty-one, and now she was pregnant with her third. The other woman, Tanya, who was the chair’s secretary, was in her late thirties, but she, too, seemed older, or at least older than my friends seemed at that age. Kristy andTanya belonged to a culture that, before them, I’d observed only in passing—they wore fake nails, went to church but drank hard, supported certain NASCAR drivers. Kristy had a Jeff Gordon jacket, which she wore on race days with a hairpin that had his number sticking out of it, a red 24 balanced at the apogee of her curly bleached-blond hair. For years they’d been telling me they were going to take me to a local track and show me how to parade around in a tank top and Daisy Dukes, eating fried bologna sandwiches. Once, on Valentine’s Day, they’d taken me to the local sex shop, where they’d debated buying lingerie to please their husbands and I’d marveled at the vast array of dildos, and then to Bojangles