The Perfect Wife
Mike, ever loyal, told us the style consult had been because Tim wanted to smarten himself up for an important meet-and-greet with some potential investors. Nobody really bought that, of course. But out of respect for Mike, we pretended we did.
That day Tim left the office at five o’clock. No one knew where he was. He’d stopped working early, Morag, his assistant, explained.
Again, we were confused. The whole idea that Tim might actually “stop working” was problematic. Tim sent us emails at three, four in the morning. He would call us on Sundays to yell at us for some tiny glitch he’d just spotted in our coding. He once famously phoned Gabriella Pisano while she was in the early stages of labor to locate a file he needed, having forgotten she was on maternity leave. Even when she told him that’s what she was doing, he didn’t hang up.
Abbie, meanwhile, was working on a new art piece. But we noticed she was also talking a lot to Rajesh. Rajesh was one of the developers, a quiet vegetarian in his mid-twenties no one knew a lot about. But when we saw the warmth blossoming between him and Abbie, we realized something we hadn’t noticed before: Rajesh was a very beautiful young man. And cool. Rajesh was one of those people whose quietness masked a deep inner confidence. Someone looked up his personnel record and discovered he’d received the Dean’s Award at Stanford.
Abbie’s new piece, when she unveiled it, was an installation of three leather punching bags suspended by thick ropes from the ceiling of one of the conference rooms. At first, no one knew what to make of it. Unlike the firebot, she didn’t present it to us. She simply left it there, along with three beaten-up pairs of boxing gloves. A small card on the wall said: GOLDILOCKS. LEATHER, ROPE, ELECTRONIC CIRCUITS.
It wasn’t long before someone pulled on the gloves and started hitting the larger of the punching bags. Then they stopped, surprised. The punching bag had cried out, as if in pain.
The puncher hit the punching bag again. “Ow!” the punching bag yelled. The puncher laughed, and rained a series of blows, Rocky-style, left-right-left. Each time, the punching bag yelled and hollered.
Someone else joined in on the next punching bag. But they only landed one blow before they stopped, embarrassed. The second punching bag had also yelled out, but in a woman’s voice.
So we tried the third punching bag. This time it was a child who screamed.
No one wanted to go near the punching bags after that. We all agreed it was a much less successful art piece than the firebot. That had been fun, we decided. This one was making some kind of statement. It felt naïve and mean-spirited and a little bit obvious.
25
You stumble out of the beach house blindly, almost tripping over yourself in your haste to get away. You have no idea where you’re going. You just know you can’t stay there, in your house—the place where you got married—while your husband has sex with another woman.
Questions tumble through your mind. When did this start? Is Sian his girlfriend? His mistress? Have there been others?
How long was he even celibate for, after your death?
When you get to the security barrier and the fork in the drive, there’s only one way you can go. Turning right would take you to the highway. You have to go left, down toward the ocean.
Unlike the drive leading to your house, this road is old and potholed, zigzagging down a steep incline. You pass houses—not grand, ultramodern properties like yours, but smaller, older vacation homes. Most are in darkness. At the bottom, overlooking a rocky beach, is a ramshackle old diner. The windows are boarded up, their frames corroded from salt water.
You go and stand on the boardwalk, holding on to the rusty rail for support, staring miserably out to sea. Not for the first time, you find yourself wishing you could cry: anything to release these pent-up emotions. Instead you yell, something shapeless and wordless, your agony and despair flung out at the endless ocean, the wind ripping the sound from your mouth almost before it’s formed.
The waves churn and roil, their crests collapsing onto the sand in a crash of phosphorescence, only for that to be swept away in turn. Even through your misery—perhaps because of your misery—you can appreciate how beautiful that motion is. It feels like the waves must have a pattern to their endless movement; something almost unfathomable but deeply harmonious—
v = f • λ
The wave equation. You don’t know how you know, but it comes to you with yet another clunk.
“Danny used to stand right there and watch the sea like that,” a voice says behind you.
You whirl around, startled. A man of about sixty is standing a few yards off, watching you, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his waxed-canvas jacket.
“I hope I didn’t scare you,” he says conversationally. He nods toward a house a little way up the hill. “I saw there was someone down here and thought I’d take a look. We don’t get many night visitors. Not since your husband installed the electric gates.”
“You know who I am, then.” You almost stumble over that who. But the stranger only nods.
“I saw you on the news. Don’t worry. I won’t tell any journalists you’re here.” He holds out a hand. “Charles Carter.”
“I’m Abbie,” you say as you shake it. You can’t help adding miserably, “At least, I was. I don’t know what I am now.”
He nods calmly. “The news item mentioned that, too.” He turns, putting his own hands on the rail as well, so you’re both looking out to sea. “You used to surf out there,” he observes. “All hours of the day. Nights, too, sometimes. It cleared your brain, you said.”
“I know. That was what I was doing the night I disappeared. Surfing.”
“So they say.” His tone is still conversational, but something makes you turn your head and look at him. He’s a handsome man, you realize: His hair may be silver, but his jaw is rugged and the skin creases attractively around the corners of his eyes.
“What do you mean?” you ask.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to imply anything. Just a lawyer’s natural caution of speech.”
With a sudden flash of insight—not like the way the wave equation came to you, but equally sure and certain—you think: There’s something he’s not telling me.
He probably thinks you’re Tim’s creature, you realize. He thinks you’ll report back anything he says.
“So you’re a lawyer?” you say, to break the tension. “What kind?”
“Large-scale corporate mergers and acquisitions, mostly.” You must look surprised, because he adds, “We used to have a big house in the city as well. But after my wife passed, I decided to relocate here. I can work from home, mostly.”