So, I said, a few things are going through the mom’s head here. At first, because the nurse was so matter-of-fact, the significance doesn’t completely register. She has an image of a needle in the baby’s arm and a tube filling with blood, which sounds awful, but she’s mainly exasperated, because the next day she’s running a big conference she can’t possibly be late for. Then it hits her, that her baby might be brain-damaged, so there’s this stomach-clenching guilt, that they had let this happen in the aftermath, the baby’s level going from one, where it was a week after work stopped, to fucking seventeen, which, if she remembered correctly, wasn’t quite hospitalization high, but close enough.
Our guests were wincing. I had their full attention. From there, I could have left out the extracurriculars. But it’s hard enough to leave a story partially told, more so when a reckless little voice has dared you to tell it whole.
And then, I said, there’s this underlying surrealness to the situation, because the mom has been planning to tell her husband tonight that she wants a divorce.
“Whoa!” said the husband, whom I had already judged as unlikely to be a strict practitioner of marital fidelity. “Holy shit.”
“No,” his wife said.
“Wait a minute,” my wife said.
“Yes?”
“Who is this woman? How do you know all this?”
As my wife’s roughly one million friends will tell you, I married above myself in every way that matters and some that don’t. She’s not just a better person than I am, not just the one in our relationship who makes all the sacrifices of time and energy, but I also worry that people sometimes take us for father and daughter. We’re both thirty-eight. What my wife’s friends might not know and definitely wouldn’t tell you is that she is prone to unhinged fits of a certain type of jealousy.
By “certain type,” I mean that she doesn’t fixate on women she’s afraid I might desire or be desired by. She doesn’t probe, doesn’t try to limit my activities. If extreme jealousy is the compulsion to tell yourself one nightmarish story after another, she doesn’t bother with entirely fictional ones. The mere thought of an ex-girlfriend, however, turns her brain into a narrative torture chamber.
My main character’s actual identity wasn’t important, so, clearly, this was the place to do the right thing, the sensible thing, and put my wife at ease by saying It happened to one of my graduate students, she’s turning it into a screenplay and asked me for feedback, but…that little voice.
“It’s Audrey Farmer,” I said.
“Audrey Farmer.”
“Yeah.”
The husband broke the ensuing silence. “Audrey Farmer?”
“She’s the chair of my department,” I said, not mentioning that she was also my mentor and patron. While getting my MFA in Film I took two classes and an independent study with her, and after I won some festival prizes and produced a couple of her short films, she shepherded me through the hiring process. My wife was aware of all this, vaguely, but hardly knew Audrey, and had no concept of how much time we had spent together. “A couple of years ago she tried turning the whole episode into a screenplay and asked me for some input. She ended up telling me everything.”
True statements.
“Okay,” the husband said.
“Okay,” my wife said, but she started watching me the way you might watch a magician who has told you he’s going to pick your pocket before the night is over.