Single Wife

by Nina Solomon

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Grace Brookman's husband is missing. He wasn't kidnapped or murdered (she's fairly certain); he just seems to have run away from home. He got up one morning, and with an offhand Gracie, I'll be back in a little while, he was gone. Laz had left before, but this time, when several weeks pass and he doesn't return, Grace copes with the situation by pretending to family and friends that he's still around.

At first, Grace covers for Laz in little ways: rumpling the sheets on his side of the bed every morning for the housekeeper, turning up his favorite music so the neighbors will hear it, leaving the doorman a daily cup of coffee, just as Laz always did. Soon Grace's life is completely consumed with re-creating his life.

Over time the deception takes on a life of its own as her charade becomes more elaborate and she begins lying to friends and family, even her overbearing, ever-present Upper East Side parents. Grace finds herself steeped in denial about the truth of her husband's disappearance--and the truth about him, as clues arise to suggest that he isn't the man she thought he was.

In the spirit of Laura Zigman and Jennifer Weiner, Nina Solomon gives us a portrait of a young woman unraveled, who attempts to pull herself back together in the face of a most unusual crisis.

Release date: June 12, 2003

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

When Grace and Laz got married, her parents gave them twelve Duro-Lite lightbulbs for their dining room fixture. “They’ll last till your twenty-fifth wedding anniversary,” her mother had promised, kissing her cheek. Grace shrank at these unscripted tender moments. Her father added with a wink, “I’ll put my money on the bulbs.” This, Grace knew, had more to do with her father’s utter and complete faith in the Duro-Lites than lack thereof in their union.

November would mark their fifth anniversary. They had been one of those presumptuous couples who get married on Thanksgiving weekend, forcing all their closest friends and relatives to wear black tie after gorging the night before on chestnut stuffing and pecan pie. “Just roll me home,” Laz’s oldest friend, Kane, had joked as he adjusted his cummerbund, but even he got into the spirit after a few cosmopolitans. At the very least, their anniversary was easy to remember. Only three more weeks.

Laz had been gone since Halloween. It wasn’t the first time he’d left with no explanation, but then only for a night, a couple of days, a week at the most.

She remembered the day he left—how intently he had been studying his cereal as if reading tea leaves. “Gracie, I’ll be back in a little while.” He left as if he were going to the bank or to buy the Sunday Times (although they had it delivered) or to walk the dog (but they had none). An ordinary good-bye.

“SEÑOR BROOKMAN IS AWAY?” Marisol, their housekeeper, had asked Grace the Friday after he left.

“Yes,” Grace responded. She’d covered for him before—calling his editor, rescheduling his Tuesday squash game, turning down the invitations that seemed to come with more ferocity whenever he was gone. She once even edited one of his articles, which his editor later told him was some of his best work. Laz was always so grateful when he returned, lifting her in his arms into the bedroom and making her forget his absence. And without hesitation, Grace added, “But he’ll be back on Sunday.”

“So I’ll make some of his favorite custard for him before I leave.”

“I’m sure he’ll love that,” Grace said automatically. Marisol made the most perfect caramelized custard. Laz liked to eat it warm right out of the serving bowl, one heaping spoon at a time.

“I can die now,” he would tell Marisol and kiss her hand.

GRACE HADN’T INTENDED for the deception to continue this long. She’d assumed he’d be back in a matter of days and everything would return to normal.

And yet Sunday arrived, and Laz did not. Grace went into the living room, carrying a ramekin of Marisol’s custard and a large spoon, and played one of Laz’s favorite CDs. She blasted it just as he would have done until the coffee table vibrated and the doorman called up to say the neighbors had complained. Just as if he were home. Grace’s father once gave Laz a pair of headphones, thinking he’d solved the problem, but Laz never used them. He said he preferred to be surrounded by the music as if in the eye of a tornado.

It began with these small things. Monday, she left a knife with peanut butter and an empty orange juice glass by the sink. Tuesday, his unedited manuscript on the coffee table. Wednesday, a bouquet of sweet peas on the windowsill behind the baby grand, some loose change on the hall table. Thursday, a cigarette butt in a seashell from their honeymoon in Belize, his rumpled tuxedo shirt over the side of an armchair.

“It’s nice to have him home again—the house is filled with joy,” Marisol commented, as she swept the remains of the ashes with a soft rag.

Laz’s presence began to feel tangible. It was easier than Grace had expected. Easier than telling everyone that Laz had left and she didn’t know where he was or when he was coming back. It was all in the details. She began to see Laz as an accumulation of habits and idiosyncrasies, things left out, half done, out of order.

Grace put a pair of his socks and underwear in the laundry basket each night. Sometimes she’d sleep in his undershirts to give them a semblance of having been inhabited by a warm body. And each morning she’d take out one of his button-down shirts from the closet, slit open the plastic cellophane from the dry cleaner’s that he said kept the shirts crease-free but which Grace thought didn’t allow the fabric to breathe, apply some Old Spice to the underarms, and throw the paper collar in the garbage. One of the hardest things to do was learning to leave the toilet seat up in the second bathroom, but that, too, eventually became habitual. She found she could be quite meticulously unruly if she put her mind to it.

Laz was often out late, coming home long after the night doorman was off duty, usually leaving before José came on in the morning. Sleep was at times inconsequential to him; he was fond of saying it could never be too late or too hot, but there were those times when he’d sleep for almost two days straight and nothing could wake him. Grace now began to get up early—a practice against her nature, as she needed a lot of sleep in order to feel like herself, and then not fully until around midday—so that she could run to the deli and get José the cup of coffee that Laz always left him on the concierge desk.

She had a growing feeling of being overwhelmed by these details, but continued with a strong sense of purpose. In order to streamline her morning routine, she bought a supply of the coffee cups they used at the deli with the Greek motif We Are Happy to Serve You, and prepared the coffee herself. She worried that José would notice the difference, so she made inquiries after the first couple of days.

“How’s the coffee?” she asked.

“Just the way I like it,” he answered. “Mr. Brookman is so thoughtful.”

EVERYONE LIKED LAZ. Not just in a superficial way, either—they each considered him among their closest friends. At Grace’s ten-year high school reunion, at least a dozen people had come up to him, certain that he had graduated with them. When he said that he was just accompanying Grace, they looked at her as if trying to place her. Didn’t you leave after tenth grade? or Weren’t you a grade below? or You used to be blond, right? After some awkward attempts at small talk, they turned back to Laz. It may have been the way he listened, so people felt understood, or how he seemed to be sharing his soul with them, or the way he remembered minute details, or how he always made them laugh.

One rainy, waterlogged Sunday, after a week of not hearing from him, she discovered his hammered-gold wedding band—the one they’d had made in Florence—behind a rusting can of shaving cream. She had been on a rare cleaning binge that morning, having just finished polishing the silver and wiping the dust from the moldings, and thought the medicine cabinet could use a bit of reorganization. She didn’t expect to find Laz’s wedding band off his finger. She sat down on the edge of the bathtub. Grace remembered how Laz had haggled with the Florentine merchant until they not only reached a fair price but also were invited to his house for a lunch of bruschetta and veal shank, along with receiving three bottles of Chianti Classico and a private tour of San Gimignano the following day.

It was conceivable that the ring might have been there for months. Grace did not consider herself to be the most observant person (sometimes it took her weeks to notice that a particular store had closed on their block, having been replaced by a Pinky’s nail salon or a Starbucks coffee shop). But the ring? She knew better. Laz had abandoned the ring as sure as he had abandoned her—at least for the time being. She steadied herself on the edge of the tub. Her thoughts spiraled, caught between longing for his return and the desire for its deferral. She held the ring in her palm, the light glinting off its uneven surfaces. How could something so light carry so much weight? A symbolic circle of gold now marooned beside an aerosol can.

As she placed the ring back in the medicine cabinet, she ruefully acknowledged, after wiping away a smudge on the mirror, that Laz was going to be gone longer than she had anticipated.

ON HIS BIRTHDAY, twelve days after he left, Grace had a Greenberg cake delivered and two bottles of Veuve Clicquot and cassis for kir royales as usual, and she found it not too difficult to polish off almost an entire bottle by herself. All major events for Laz seemed to occur in November—his birthday, the publication of his first book, the signing of the movie deal, their wedding day. He always called it his lucky month. They may have even met in November, although it was still up for debate. It was at a Halloween party, and Laz swore it was just minutes after midnight.

Grace set the cake on the small glass table by the window and lit the candles, letting them burn just long enough for tiny drips of blue and yellow wax to adhere to the mirrorlike dark chocolate icing. She had fielded phone calls from friends and family all afternoon. She thought that she would most certainly be discovered in her charade when his mother called with birthday wishes, but Mrs. Brookman hadn’t heard from him, either, which was not that unusual, so Grace just said he’d call her soon. Grace insisted the doormen take the remains of the birthday cake. Even though she’d always said the cake was too rich for her, she’d eaten two slices, just as Laz would have done.

That night, in one of his dove-gray Calvin Klein T-shirts, she felt strangely closer to him than she ever had before.

THE DAY AFTER LAZ’S birthday, one of the Duro-Lites burned out. Grace wasn’t sure whether to take it as a sign of fate, a dimming glimpse of the future, or the futility of a modern warranty. She stared at the bulb long and hard, and rubbed her eyes as if she might still be dreaming. Laz had seemed so close the night before—almost there. She thought of the trick candles they’d had at his thirty-seventh birthday last year—twenty friends, a pot of Grace’s vegetarian chili, and the chocolate cake.

“Make a wish, Laz,” Kane had prodded.

“Why? I have everything I could possibly want,” he said, squeezing Grace’s hand. He’d meant it, too, she was sure of that. But that night, as on numerous others, she had dismissed the signs that something was amiss. When the candles began to flicker and rekindle, Laz’s expression changed. A look flashed across his face that she’d never seen before. He suddenly seemed absent or like a stranger, as if in that unguarded moment a glimmer of someone else had surfaced. Grace kissed him on the cheek, and just as quickly, he was back to his old self—everything as always.

Grace found she was holding her breath, waiting for the Duro-Lite to reignite as the candles had. Then the phone rang, and she heard her father’s voice on the answering machine. Fitting. Her father had won the bet—Laz had left before the bulb had given out—but she wouldn’t let her father know that. Instead, there was a big commotion and a heated discussion about whether to sue the company for selling them defective bulbs or the possibility that they had bought a case of pirated bulbs. Conspiracy theories were very popular in Grace’s family. Nothing like a good plot to keep the family united.

“What does Laz think?” her father asked.

“He thinks the wiring was faulty, so he said we should call in an electrician to check it out,” she said.

“He’s such a levelheaded fellow, that Laz is,” her mother added from the extension. Grace’s mother was usually listening in on the extension, for some reason, perhaps having to do with wanting to hear what people said when she wasn’t around. She pretended not to be eavesdropping, but that was pointless; as much as she tried to be unobtrusive, she couldn’t help but interject.

“I think we bought bum bulbs,” her father said, exhaling slowly. He sighed often, especially over the telephone. Grace could picture him in his worn leather chair, looking as if he might deflate like one of those surrealist Edvard Munch Scream balloons they sell at party stores. “Not even five years. I told you we should have gotten the Satcos.”

“Laz said he’ll take care of it. Write some sort of letter to the company,” Grace added. “As soon as he gets back from London.” Grace found that sending him on a trip now and then served her purposes well. It gave her a chance to refuel the energy necessary to sustain two lives and provided a break from her new reality, which was quite time-consuming. “He’ll be back the day after tomorrow,” she said. She suddenly felt like a character in one of Roald Dahl’s dark tales, in particular the one about the landlady who stuffs her boarders so they’ll never leave. Grace hadn’t realized how accessible her own dark side was, and she found a degree of comfort in following the dictates of her new role as if it lay already mapped out for her.

THE FOLLOWING EVENING, the night of their weekly Scrabble-cum-potluck dinner at her parents’ house, was the first true test for Grace. The week before, to her relief, the game had been called due to the imminent approach of Tropical Storm Irene, even though it had still been miles off the coast of the Carolinas.

Weather was of vital importance in her family. The telephone number for the National Weather Service was on speed-dial and was consulted each morning. It was important to get the most up-to-date weather report, so calling a few minutes after the hour was best, and only then could plans be finalized. Otherwise it was “We’ll have to see.”

When Grace was a child, her father used to give her “rain showers” in the bathtub. Grace, her Mary Poppins umbrella poised above her, would wait for the approaching squall as her father flashed the lights on and off to simulate lightning. In the sixth grade, she had been kept home from school for a total of eighteen days because of wind, rain, ice, snow, or bitter cold. “You never know when the picture windows from one of those skyscrapers will fly out,” her father would say. Grace knew then not to question it, and even now on exceptionally windy days found herself looking up, just in case.

GRACE’S PARENTS HAD moved to an Upper East Side building from Stuyvesant Town when Grace was thirteen years old. Her parents loved the building for all its amenities, most notably the in-house dry-cleaning service, their glass-enclosed terrace, and the sleek, ultramodern kitchen. Space-age, her mother still said when referring to the now twenty-year-old interior design, which included white leather chairs and a chrome banquette.

White-brick buildings were just coming into vogue at that time, with no thought whatsoever to how emissions or other things in the air might eventually sully the pristine exterior. But her parents chose instead the only blue-brick building in existence at the time, which her father thought blended perfectly with a clear blue sky. Grace thought it more closely resembled the tube of her mother’s creamy cerulean-blue eye shadow that she once mistook for a crayon when she was a child, and which her mother still wore for special occasions.

As Grace walked into her parents’ building, she saw the usual cluster of elderly widows wearing their best outfits as they lounged in the lobby, and she was struck by a wave of recognition, as if they, too, were just filling the time since they’d lost their husbands. It’s just that theirs were dead, and hers was simply missing. And yet there was a finality to both. As she passed by them, she felt sorry that their husbands, unlike Laz, would not soon return.

THE SUGARMANS HADN’T yet arrived, although they lived less than five blocks away. Grace’s parents and the Sugarmans had been neighbors in Stuyvesant Town, and both couples had long ago decided to stay no farther than a zip-code distance from each other, whether it be in Manhattan or Delray Beach, Florida, where they had adjacent condos. It would have been easier if Grace and Laz had opted for the same proximity to her parents, but Laz preferred the West Side, and Grace’s family had had to come to terms with that.

“By the way, how did he like the sweater we sent him for his birthday?” her mother asked as she set out the Scrabble board. She was petite, dressed in what she called her uniform, which consisted of a knee-length skirt, sweater set, a gold pendant, sheer stockings, and low-heeled shoes. Her hair was swept up off her forehead, accentuating what she considered to be her best features—her large, deep-brown eyes and small, straight nose. She had been a brunette, like Grace, but now her hair was golden-honey blond, from a tube of Loving Care. Other than her hair color, Grace had inherited only her mother’s eyes. The rest of her features, including her height, her slightly off-center nose, and her wide smile, were from her father.

“He loves the sweater,” Grace answered. Until now, she had rarely found it necessary to lie, even by omission. Her mother had always told Grace when she was growing up that when Grace wasn’t being honest, a red splotch the size of a thumbprint would appear right above the bridge of her nose between her eyebrows. Grace thought she was beginning to detect a furrow line right in that same location.

Grace had forgotten to wear the special Scrabble shirt her mother had had printed. It was a black shirt with white lettering arranged in a crossword pattern: Grace’s name interlocked with the first A in Lazarus, along with Milton and Paulette, and Bert and Francine Sugarman in connecting block letters, complete with a small registered trademark symbol at the bottom.

“Not to worry, Laz left his last time he played. Why don’t you wear it?” Her mother said this so reassuringly that Grace wished, as she slipped the shirt over her head, that she could believe this would somehow make everything all right.

“SWEETIE, TELL LAZ that they’re predicting a bad storm for late tomorrow. Is he flying into Kennedy?” her father asked.

“I think so,” Grace answered.

“Could be long delays. He may even have a layover. Tell him to call ahead to make sure the flight hasn’t been canceled.” As she listened, Grace thought the three of them made a good, if unwitting, team.

By the time the Sugarmans arrived, her father had printed out two copies of the five-day local forecast from the National Weather Service.

Francine Sugarman was a renowned cook among their circle of friends, and these Sunday Scrabble games were often more about food than etymology, although Bert always faithfully lugged his Oxford English Dictionary from their apartment on East Sixty-fifth Street in case of any disputes, which he clearly relished. Bert and Laz shared a love of words. For Bert, his dictionary was like a thirty-pound, two-volume security blanket, while for Laz, words were the source of some greater understanding, as if when the roots of a word were traced back to its source, there was order at last.

“Your mother tells me Laz isn’t going to be joining us,” Francine said to Grace in the kitchen. Francine’s silvery white hair had recently been cut severely short, further accentuating her pale blue eyes and her distinctive nose, which Grace’s mother suspected had been “done.” “And I made my famous sweet-and-sour meatballs just for him,” she added. And they were for Laz. Certainly not for Bert, who was diabetic and for whom the meatballs were supposedly off-limits (although he was known to sneak a few when Francine’s back was turned), or for Grace, who was a vegetarian. “You know you can freeze them and then thaw them out when he gets back. I’ll send you home with a container of them.”

Francine’s containers had her name embossed both on the lids and the bottoms, and with masking tape, their contents labeled in indelible ink. As Grace looked at the assortment of containers on the kitchen counter, she wondered when this meal had actually been prepared. In Francine’s skilled hands, thawing had been elevated to an art form.

“Your microwave heats much more evenly than mine,” Francine commented as she and Paulette watched a serving bowl turning inside the microwave oven.

“Paulette,” Milton called from the dining room, where he was arranging the tiles upside down and in a diamond pattern, “remember what the doctor told you about your eyes.”

“What?” Francine asked.

“Oh, nothing, just something about microwaves causing cataracts,” Grace’s mother answered, dismissing him as if she were shooing a fly. She opened the door to the microwave and gave the meatballs a stir.

“You could always try smoking marijuana,” Bert chimed in from the dining room.

Grace had heard this exact exchange dozens of times, and she could predict what Francine would utter next with more accuracy than the National Weather Service could predict tomorrow’s weather.

“Honey, I told you before—that’s for glaucoma,” Francine called back from the kitchen.

THE GAME PROCEEDED uneventfully, at least in terms of Grace and her dissembling. Her husband was mentioned throughout the game in statements such as Laz would have gotten the triple-word score, or Milt, save some meatballs for Grace to take to Laz, or Doesn’t Laz’s shirt look cute on Gracie? Bert won the game, which he attributed to the fact that Laz was not there. In the final round, Grace had a q, y, x, r, blank, m, and w, but she was challenged by Bert when she put down quim, which would have been her highest score of the game.

“That’s not a word,” her mother said. “Don’t you have a t or something?”

“It’s a word all right,” Bert said, with a customary downward swivel of his head, which looked more like he was trying to suppress a burp than an illegitimate word.

“What does it mean?” her father asked.

“Oh, never mind,” Grace said, snatching the tiles off the board. She felt as if she had been caught by the principal kissing a boy in the stairwell at a high school dance. Laz often read aloud to Grace from obscure nineteenth-century volumes he found at the Strand bookstore downtown. Some of the books were on the racy side. Quim was one of their favorite words. Like buzz or gargle, it sounded as it felt. Grace wondered if Bert’s dictionary contained the archaic word for G-spot as well.

“It is a word. But it’s slang and therefore not permitted,” Bert said officially.

“Good, honey,” her mother said. Grace looked at her mother, who obviously thought she had bestowed upon her daughter the most lavish of compliments. “Next time you’ll get it right.”

THAT EVENING, WHEN Grace returned home, she put the container of Francine Sugarman’s sweet-and-sour meatballs in the freezer. Francine said the meatballs would keep for over a year. Hopefully, that wouldn’t be necessary, Grace thought, as she drifted off.

The dimness in the dining room was bothersome to Grace. So in order to compensate for the burned-out Duro-Lite, the next morning, after leaving coffee for José, she carried in a standing lamp with a pink bulb that she found especially pleasing. When she plugged it in, she discovered that the outlet was not near enough to the table, and went into the pantry to find an extension cord. Grace was absolutely certain that there was one in the utility cabinet above the broom closet. The cabinet smelled of old rubber cement and lemon oil as she pushed aside rolls of duct tape, tins of shoe polish, and old rags.

After several minutes of searching to no avail, she began to grow testy and felt a sudden craving for Saltines that she attributed to having had two cups of tea on an empty stomach, which often left her queasy. She reached farther in the cabinet, thinking the cord might have been shoved to the back. Laz referred to the cabinet as the black hole of household products, and now Grace understood why. She was trying to think of other likely places an extension cord might be when the telephone rang.

“Grace?” It was Kane. “You sound out of breath. Something wrong?”

“Hi, Kane,” she answered, brushing the hair off her face. “I was just looking for an extension cord.”

“Literal or figurative?”

“Kane, really.” She was not in the mood for his playfulness. “I’ve turned the apartment upside down looking for it.”

“You lost it?” he inquired.

Grace could practically hear the wheels in his head turning. “What are you implying?”

“Just that maybe it’s time that you cut the cord.”

“Kane, I’m talking about an extension cord.”

“So am I.”

“And anyway, I didn’t lose it, I misplaced it,” she said.

“My point exactly, but you’ll never admit it. I’m just calling to let Laz know hockey’s canceled this week because of the Peewees.”

“I’ll tell him as soon as he gets back.”

After Grace hung up the phone, she returned to the cabinet, rummaging around a little, but still unable to locate the missing cord. She did find several odd items and miscellany, like a beaded evening bag with a broken strap, several remote controls with no batteries, a pumpkin carving kit, and a mismatched glove she thought she might someday make finger puppets out of.

Just as she was about to close the cabinet and step down, she caught sight of a photograph. She’d never been fond of the picture. Kane had copied it for them. It was taken seven years ago at the Halloween party at which Grace had first met Laz. They were all in costume. She was standing next to Kane, and Laz had his arm around Grace’s friend Chloe. There was a layer of dust over the plas. . .