Sue Miller - The Senators Wife

Contents

The Senator's Wife

The Senator's Wife

For Jordan and Maxine

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2008 by Sue Miller
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miller, Sue [date]
The senator's wife / by Sue Miller.1st ed.
p. cm.
This is a Borzoi bookT.p. verso.
1. Married peopleFiction. 2. MarriageFiction.
3. Female friendshipFiction. 4. Middle classFiction.
5. New EnglandFiction. 6. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.I421444S46 2008
813'.54dc22 2007014659

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

eISBN: 978-0-307-26872-3

v3.0

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Meri, February 2007

M ERI IS SITTING in the bleacher seats that rise above the indoor pool at Williston High School, waiting for Asa's event to start. She and Henry have barely made it here in timeshe was late leaving work, and he dawdled, as usual, leaving preschool. He had to say good-bye to two friends. One, Davidhis beloved David (What does he see in the guy? Meri had asked Nathan not long ago, and they had discussed the improbability of most childhood romances); and Jeff. Jeff, because he was too shy, Henry explained in the car.

Wait, I didn't know this, Meri said. So you're in charge of the kids who are too shy?

No! he shouted, grinning in delight. He's the only one who still believes in her great wit. Then he sobered. But I am not shy.

Henry is her angel, the last child she will have. She looks over at him. He's large for a three-year-old, sturdy and blond, unlike the older two boys. An enthusiast, unlike them too.

Yes, she said. I know that.

It was twenty-one degrees outside, and the heater in the car had only just started to blow tepid air over them when she parked and she and Henry made their dash from the sidewalk into the gym.

In here the air is heavy and warm, the bleachy, clean odor engulfs you, the tiled walls make every noise reverberate. They're calling out the times of the previous race, while those boys, their hair wet, their noses pinked, stand around with towels draped over their shoulders. But these races don't really count: Asa is a freshman, on the freshman team. The important competitions of the day are overat this point in the meet, the bleachers are only about a third full. Meri feels that this makes it especially important that some members of the family be there to watch Asa. She and Henry are the only ones todayNathan has an afternoon class, and Martin, her eleven-year-old, is at his clarinet lesson.

She spots Asa down among the other freshmen, wearing a tiny red Speedo. This is the closest to naked she gets to see him nowhe was swamped by modesty at about age twelve. With his own money, he's actually bought a hook and eye for the inside of his door so the younger boys can't barge in on him.

She watches him. He's very tall for his age, like all of their children, and his body is just beginning to widen out a bit after his last spurt of growth, helped by the muscles he's developed swimming. He's fourteen. His voice has changed within the last year, without awkwardnessjust slipping lower and lowerand his face is changing too. His jaw is suddenly strong, like Nathan's, and his eyebrows have come in full and dark.

He looks up at the stands and she catches his eye and waves, points to Henry next to her. Asa nods almost imperceptibly, and his eyes shift quickly elsewhere.

Henry has been describing a game to her, describing it at length and in great detail. It's a game he and David invented at preschool. First they were robbers in the game, and then they became super-heroes trapping the robbersbut not like the superheroes he has dolls for, he says, and he lists them and all their superpowers. He and David were a different, a better kind of superhero.

Hold that thought and pay attention, she says. They're going to start. See? She turns Henry's head in Asa's direction and points. The gangly boys are lining up, getting ready, shifting their weight from foot to foot and shaking out their hands. Now they hunch over on their starting blocks, and then there's a pop! and the noise of their hitting the water, all at once. Yelling fills the room.

She and Henry yell too. It's one of his favorite things to do.

Asa does the breaststroke, that wastefully extravagant way of moving through water. His head and shoulders come heaving up out of the pool with an astonishing circular lift of both his arms, and then the arms disappear underwater, pulling down and back, his body rushing forward. With all this dramatic upper-body motion, the action of the boys lower bodies is regular, just a steady rocking of their buttocks in and out of the water, a motion that startled Meri when she first saw it, it was so like fucking. Even now she's unable not to take note of it. She wonders whether the boys even think about it, whether they sometimes joke about it with one another.

Asa turns underwater at the end of the pool and comes up again. He's ahead of everyone else, way ahead, which isn't surprising. He's the largest boy in the pool, and a fine swimmer. Nathan taught him. He's taught all the boys. Even Henry can do the crawl better than Meri, who didn't learn to swim until she was an adult.

Ace! Ace! Beat all of the others, Ace! Henry yells.

Come on, baby, Meri calls out. Go, go, go, go!

Everyone is yelling, whistling, clapping. A girl on the bench directly below them is standing, stomping her feet frenziedly and squealing in what sounds like either pain or ecstasy. The din in the tiled space is overwhelming. Henry laughs in joy.

At the second-to-last lap, someone else on the Williston team starts to catch up to Asa. He actually makes the final turn only a second or two after him, but Asa pulls ahead easily at the close, and then suddenly he's hanging at the end of the pool, panting, grinning up at his coach and waiting to hear his time amid the screams of the crowd.

When the meet is over, Asa disappears with the other boys into the showers. Henry and Meri bundle up before they go out to the car and start home. Asa will come home on his bike.

In the car Henry says, My throat is burned from my yelling.

Mine too.

He's quiet a minute. Then he says, Why do you call Asa your baby? He's not a baby.

She looks at him. He's frowning under his thatch of blond hair, hair she still trims herself, at home. Who is a baby? she asks. Are you my baby?

No. You don't even have a baby.

Ah, but you used to be my baby. Even Asa was my baby once upon a time.

But that was too long ago.

Well, you're right. I should just cut it out, shouldn't I?

Yes, you should, he says, sternly.

They drive along. Meri is thinking, as she does at least several times a week, of Asa as a baby, thinking of him with the usual pang of sorrow for how little she was able to give to him then, to do for him. Her love for the other two boys as newborns was instant and completeshe was ready to adore them even as they emerged, bloody and gummy, from her body. But she had to learn those feelings slowly and reluctantly with Asa, and she's never stopped feeling guilty for what he missed out on. When Nathan wanted to have a second child, Meri had at first resisted, out of that guilt, out of the sense that Asa should have all of her love forevermore because she was so incapable of loving him at the start, so frightened and closed in.