Our Wives Under the Sea (34)

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The therapist sends us a bill for the session Leah missed and a note requesting clarity on whether we plan to continue. The Centre, apparently, is willing to bankroll sessions attended but not sessions skipped or rescheduled. Leah is in the bath when I get the invoice, though she has left the door unlocked, which is new. When I come in, she looks up, head back against the lip of the tub, and her skin seems to shrink and then reshape before me—the stretch and settle of a rubbed eye, briefly off-center, then nothing unusual at all. I sit down on the toilet seat and we regard one another for a moment.

“What are we supposed to do,” I say, at last, “about what’s happening.”

“I don’t want a doctor,” she says, anticipating my suggesting it again.

“But what if it gets worse?”

“It isn’t.”

She isn’t being unkind, or sharp, or dismissive, not like she has been recently. Her tone is perfectly reasonable, even kind. Beneath it, however, there is little enough in the way of feeling, a chilly blank where the rest of her voice, as I know it, should be. There is nothing of the previous night, when she dipped her head into my shoulder. Something has crested the surface between us and sunk again, the water closing over its head. She moves her hands through the water—the soft and semitranslucent blue at her hip and thigh—and I know she is only talking because I am making her talk.

“I don’t know how you can know that,” I continue, and she shrugs, a squeeze and pulse of unnatural color around her neck and shoulders, as though water is massing beneath the upper layers of her skin.

“I feel basically OK today,” she says, then keeps talking before I can interrupt, “and when I don’t, it usually passes.”

I look at her, at the way she tries to smile and then seems to give up, ducking beneath the water and holding herself there. I look at her and feel unusually sure that the Leah of the previous night was my Leah, but that this one almost certainly isn’t. If I cut her, I’m not altogether sure she would bleed. I feel, at once, a sense of cavernous terror at being left alone and then set it aside. I reach for the plastic vase on the windowsill and ask if she wants me to wash her hair.



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When we first moved in together, Toby and Sam helped us with the boxes and afterward sat on the floor and drank wine and ate oven pizzas off mismatched plastic plates. Sam was wearing dungarees, which was odd, as she typically didn’t dress that way. Toby had tied a bandanna around his forehead, made a jokingly chivalrous point of carrying the heaviest pieces of furniture. The upstairs neighbors were playing their television loudly—a game show or a nature program, I forget which—and we commented on this only in passing, unaware of what a permanent fixture it would turn out to be. By the time we stopped for pizza, the furniture was mostly in place, though we still had to put the bed together, still had to construct two of the three flat-pack bookcases we had bought in a panic on realizing the flat didn’t come furnished as previously described. Toby uncorked a second bottle of wine, told a long story about running into Poppy at the train station, about all the issues she seemed to be having with her boyfriend, Dan. Something I find incredibly boring, Sam said, is everyone’s conviction that love is different for them. Somehow harder. Do you know what I mean? I just don’t think it’s that complicated, honestly—if you’re with the wrong person, it’s hard. It’s just another way of thinking you’re special, the way everyone does when they’re a teenager. You think you aren’t able to love, except that of course you are. You think you aren’t able to love correctly or the same as everyone else, except that of course you are, you just haven’t had a chance to do it yet. You’re not special, you’re just waiting. Toby nodded, poured wine into plastic cups. In fairness, babe, I don’t think Poppy was saying she’s unable to love. Just that she hates the way Dan eats with his mouth open.

Much of the furniture we had was my mother’s. She had died three months previously and people were still not past the point of tilting their heads to one side and nodding sympathetically when I said almost anything at all. I had brought a Welsh dresser from my mother’s house, a wine rack, a large oval mirror. The latter was a mistake—it seemed to haunt me about the flat as I tried to find a suitable place to put it, appearing at times to reflect not me but my mother’s empty house, as though on a time delay. I tapped the second knuckle of a finger lightly against the glass and it sounded like something knocking to be let in.

We had combined our books, our spices, mixed up my table salt with Leah’s jars of nutmeg and rosemary and herbes de Provence. We found we had too many table lamps, not enough cutlery. In the chaos of moving our boxes up the stairs, a full set of dishes were smashed. Do you think, Toby said over the pizza, that this is your forever place? Leah rolled her eyes at him, asked how anything could be your forever place when it was only a rental. That’s true, Toby said, suddenly narrowing his eyes at Sam, when are you going to buy us a forever place? Sam snorted, leaned back on her elbows, and surveyed me upside down. Haven’t I got a bitch of a wife? she said, and laughed.

Later on, when Toby and Sam had left, we found ourselves too lazy to put the bed together and so stacked sofa cushions on the living room floor, curled up with the new internet contract, which neither of us could make sense of, finishing the second bottle of wine. In the dark, the room was strange-shaped, shadows feeding my anxiety. I imagined us freshly moved into a place where things might walk about at night, where a knock might sound at the door at any moment, where a hand might emerge from behind the curtains to pull either one of us away. It will be fine, won’t it, I asked in the dark, and Leah locked her ankles around mine.