The Perfect Wife

It was in the third week that the project really started to come alive, in both senses of the word. In one experiment Abbie operated the A-bot remotely, taking care to react to whatever it encountered. If she saw something through the robot’s eyes that was funny, she laughed; if she saw something to startle her, she gasped; if someone made a remark to the robot, she responded, just as if it had been addressed to her. From these sessions, Tim created a simple form of machine learning. After that it was a relatively simple matter to add additional sources such as Abbie’s Facebook profile. The A-bot was starting to take on her personality.

Over one marathon programming session, Tim input every single text message they’d ever sent each other. On another occasion, he had it sample her voicemails. After that he could have the A-bot say anything, literally anything he wanted, in Abbie’s voice. Apparently the first thing he made it say was “Tim Scott, you are the cutest man in the world.” To which Abbie added, “Though you can also be a bit of a dork sometimes.”

We didn’t even notice when they started calling it her. To be honest, we didn’t notice when we did, either.

50

You spend another miserable night. Tim might not have told you a direct lie, but he certainly allowed you to believe that he built you out of love, his own personal Taj Mahal. To discover that his adoration is actually directed at another, better version of yourself is crushing.

The worst of it is, you can’t even blame him for it. From every perspective except your own, he’s done a remarkable, wonderful, romantic thing. It’s just that he’s done it without any regard for your feelings.

You wonder if that blinkered vision of his could have been part of the reason Abbie left. It was an extreme way to escape a marriage, but then it was an extraordinary marriage. And Tim was no ordinary husband.

You’re so busy thinking about Abbie that it’s a while before something else strikes you. It would feel as if I were being unfaithful, Tim had said earlier about sleeping with you. Yet this was the same man who’d screwed the nanny without a second thought.

For such a brilliant man, your husband can be remarkably thoughtless sometimes.

* * *

—

Next morning Danny’s up early. He’s cheerful, though, and eager to come to the table for breakfast. But when you give him the picture menu to choose from, he bats it into the air with a “wheesh!”

“Okay, Danny. Let’s have another try, shall we?” You hand him the menu again, and again he knocks it flying, making the same “wheesh” sound.

It’s some kind of game, you realize. “Danny, we’re not playing now. Choose something for breakfast, then we’ll play later.”

“The stationmaster was furious,” he mumbles shyly.

“Of course I’m not furious. It’s just—” You stop. The line he’s just spoken is from Thomas Comes to Breakfast, a story in which Thomas crashes into the stationmaster’s house. The children’s breakfast goes flying, and the stationmaster’s wife has to make it all over again.

Could this be like the toast—a way of communicating what he wants, but in a kind of Danny-code? You try to think. When Thomas came through the wall, what was the stationmaster’s family eating? Eggs? Toast? Cereal?

Boiled eggs?

“Are you saying you want boiled eggs, Danny?”

“Wheesh!” he agrees.

You know that Sian, were she here, would say that giving him eggs right now would simply be rewarding an undesirable behavior. If Danny starts throwing stuff in the air every time he wants an egg, you’ll have created a monster.

But Sian isn’t here. And you know your son. Throwing things was simply the only way his brain would allow him to tell you what he wanted. And that, surely, is the most important thing right now. Letting Danny know you’re listening to him, or trying to. That you understand how unbearably difficult the whole notion of communicating is for him, and that you’ll do whatever you can to make it easier.

“You miserable engine,” you say in the outraged Liverpudlian tones Ringo Starr adopted for the stationmaster’s wife in the original British version. “Just look what you’ve done to our breakfast. Now I shall have to cook some more!”

“Thundering funnels!” Danny giggles happily as you get out the eggs.

* * *

—

Later, while Danny’s getting dressed, you make Tim his own favorite breakfast, fruit salad.

“If I’m going to figure out where Abbie is, I need to know everything,” you tell him as he eats. “Did anything happen in the run-up to her disappearance—anything out of the ordinary?”

He thinks. “Well, she lost her phone. She thought she’d probably left it on a bus. Of course, I tried the GPS locator, but it was already out of battery. But then we had a piece of luck. Someone found it and handed it in to the transit authority. And that papier-maché case was so distinctive that, when I contacted them, they were able to identify it.”

That must have annoyed Abbie, you think. The very first instruction from the website she’d tried to follow, and it backfired.

“Weirdly, when I got it back it had been wiped,” Tim adds. “But of course, I’d always been careful to make backups for her.”

“Anything else? Please, Tim—I need to know everything. Good and bad.”

“Well…” He lowers his voice. “I had my suspicions she might have been using drugs again.”

“Drugs? What made you think that?”

“Nothing specific—no actual proof, I mean. But it was something I was very tuned into. After all, over fifty percent of addicts do relapse at some point. So if she seemed to have unexplained mood swings, or be a little too happy sometimes, I’d worry. So I got Megan to give her a drug test—”

“Whoa,” you say. “Back up. Megan Meyer, the dating coach? You had her administer a drug test to Abbie?”

Tim nods. “It was Megan who helped us draw up the prenup—that’s one of the services she provides. Random drug testing was a condition we both agreed to.”

“Is that…usual?”

“Megan’s view is, if something’s going to be an issue, you might as well discuss it before the wedding, right? And since we’d both agreed we were going to lead clean lifestyles, neither of us minded the drug clause.”

“I think I’d better see this prenup.”

“Of course.” Tim gets up and fetches a document from the filing cabinet. “There.” He hands it to you and sits back down with his salad.

You flick through it. The document runs to about twenty pages. Some of the clauses are in legalese, but most are pretty straightforward—at least, straightforward to understand. You imagine they might have been somewhat harder to live up to.

The first section is headed Fitness, Weight, and Lifestyle.

The parties hereby contract not to gain more than three (3) pounds avoirdupois per annum (excepting in the year during which a confirmed pregnancy or delivery of a child takes place). After any such gain, the infringing party will book into a health spa or weight loss clinic of the other party’s choosing, at the infringing party’s expense…

The parties hereby contract not to take illegal drugs, “legal highs,” or abuse prescription medication, and to submit to random drug testing at a frequency to be determined by the other party…

The parties hereby contract to eat meat-free meals at least three (3) days a week…

“Wow,” you say, flicking onward. “This is pretty comprehensive.”

Tim shrugs. “That was the point of it. Great fruit salad, by the way.”

Further on, your eye is caught by a section headed Affection and Intimacy.

The parties hereby contract to spend at least one (1) full day per week devoted to family, without work.

The parties hereby contract to take at least two (2) vacations each year, with at least two (2) additional long-weekend excursions.

The parties hereby contract to spend at least one hundred (100) minutes alone together each week…

Each clause is accompanied by a detailed list of the consequences for infringements, from a ten-thousand-dollar fine for working too hard to a hundred thousand for missing a vacation.

The section on finance is relatively brief.

The parties hereby relinquish all rights in the other’s preexisting property, assets, stock options, and intellectual property. In the event of separation or divorce, spousal maintenance will be set at one-fifth of the higher earner’s net income.

The final, and longest, section is headed Childcare and Education.

The parties hereby contract that their children will take the name Cullen-Scott in perpetuity.

The parties hereby contract that their children will follow an ambitious curriculum valuing arts and sciences in equal measure…

And then Danny came along, you think. Turning all these carefully worked-out assumptions on their head.

“The point was, we agreed on pretty much all of this stuff anyway,” Tim’s saying. “It really wasn’t a big deal. And there’s no harm in being clear about what your expectations are, right?”

You flick back to the section on drug tests to see what the penalty for failing was.

The party at fault will immediately book into a substance abuse rehabilitation clinic of the other party’s choosing, for a duration of no less than ninety (90) days…

In addition, the second party hereby contracts with the first party to attend monthly drug counseling sessions with an authorized representative of the Moving On rehabilitation clinic for a period of no less than ten (10) years from the date of the marriage, or until mutually agreed with the first party…