The Perfect Wife

—

There’s a customer in the phone shop, so you wait for her to leave before going in. As soon as Nathan sees you, he comes out from behind the counter and locks the door.

“I was wondering when you’d show up again. I’ve unscrambled some more material.”

“First things first. I want a burner phone.” You’d meant to get one before, but the argument over whether Nathan could look at your code had distracted you.

He raises his eyebrows. “Know all the lingo, don’t we? What sort of burner?”

“What have you got?”

“That depends on whether you need international roaming.” He starts describing different models. But you’re not listening.

You’ve had an intuition—a flashback, almost. You were here once before, buying a secret phone, just as you are now.

Which, when you think about it, makes perfect sense. This is the nearest phone shop to the house on Dolores Street. It’s only natural that this is where Abbie would come.

“Well, you tell me,” you interrupt. “Did I get international before?”

You stare him out.

“Yes,” he says, dropping his eyes. “You got one of these.”

He passes you a small blister pack containing a cheap flip phone. It would have looked dated even back then.

“It comes with data preloaded,” he adds. “And you can use it anywhere in the world. You were very insistent about needing that.”

So is Abbie abroad now? Your instinct says not. Your instinct tells you she wouldn’t have trusted Nathan, just as you don’t. She wouldn’t have wanted to give him even the smallest clue of where she might be headed. So she chose the phone that narrowed it down the least.

Something else occurs to you. Not a memory this time, but a small leap of logic. “I bought the iPad here as well, didn’t I? And I bet, later, she asked you to wipe it for her. Only you didn’t do it properly. Just like you never told anyone about the secret phone.”

“I respect my customers’ privacy,” Nathan says uneasily. “Some women, they buy a burner for dating, so they don’t have to give out their real number. If they’re married…well, discretion becomes even more important. So I don’t ask questions. Just like I’m not asking you why you need that.” He points at the flip phone.

You think. You’d assumed Abbie had just been following the instructions on the website by getting the burner phone. But if she was having an affair, maybe she had one already. As Nathan said, a married woman had to be discreet. “When was it that she bought the phone?”

“November. I remember because it wasn’t long after I’d started working here. I don’t get many customers who look like she did, believe me.”

Almost a year before Abbie vanished. Yet another thing that suggests she was cheating on Tim.

“And the iPad?”

“A couple of months after that.”

“You’d better show me what else you’ve found on it.”

* * *

—

He takes you into the back room. Again, there’s a printout waiting, tucked into a see-through plastic binder. His laptop and a cable, neatly coiled, lie ready on the workbench.

You think of him preparing for this, getting everything ready for you, like some disgusting parody of a date.

He hands you the printout. You start to read. After a moment’s hesitation, his hands go to your waist, looking for the ports.

53

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54

After so many clues leading in this direction, you shouldn’t be surprised. But you are. Quite apart from anything else, there’s the sheer number of sites Abbie was active on—the printout runs to several pages. She’d clearly been inundated with replies, too. It makes you wonder how many of those men she actually met up with.

And of course, it doesn’t solve the mystery of why she left. Quite the reverse. Sites like these were explicitly aimed at married people looking for casual hookups. One was even called Brief Encounter. By definition, they were for people who wanted to have affairs undetected but stay married. Not people who wanted to disappear forever from their partners and their lives.

Unless—you think—someone she met online turned into more than just a casual liaison. Had sex turned to love, and love turned to plotting to run away together? In which case, perhaps it hadn’t been Abbie who’d needed to take the nuclear option of faking death. Perhaps it was the other party.

The more you learn, the more puzzling this gets. Call it snobbery on your part, but there’s something seedy about a cheating site, something that seems tacky and furtive and at odds with everything you know about Abbie. What happened to turn the confident young artist who painted that self-portrait into SecretLover5589?

“Do that again,” Nathan says, smirking.

You’d almost forgotten he was there. “Do what?”

“Whatever you were thinking—it made a kind of pattern. All the code just clustered together and stopped.”

You stare at him. “Are you saying you can tell what I’m thinking about?”

“Not exactly. But there are shapes that seem to recur. I guess with enough— Hey!”

You’ve reached down and unplugged the cable.

“That’s enough,” you say sharply. The last thing you want right now is for Nathan, or anyone else for that matter, to have access to what’s going through your mind.

55

Back home you unpack the shopping—you stopped by Gus’s to buy ingredients on the way. Then you go and get the book that was hidden behind a false cover, Overcoming Infatuation, and look up Galatea syndrome.

Sure enough, there’s an entry. And when you turn to it, you find a whole section that’s been highlighted in pencil.

Galatea syndrome is, at root, a manifestation of profound ambivalence toward female sexuality. For some men the “perfect” woman will always be their mother, a woman with whom they necessarily enjoyed an asexual relationship. Such men mentally assign all women to one of two categories, Madonna or Whore: the idealized “good” woman they can put on a pedestal, or the disposable and despised object of their sexual urges.

Where such men love, Sigmund Freud wrote, they cannot desire, and where they desire, they cannot love. This split may become more pronounced after the birth of a child: The woman he married is now no longer his girlfriend but a Mother, whom he refuses to dishonor with his baser desires.

For the woman, being idealized in this way may be a frustrating experience. She may feel inadequate in her sexuality, or that she cannot excite her man anymore. She may interpret his emotional distance and lack of intimacy as lack of love. She may feel she can’t reveal the ways in which she doesn’t live up to his grand expectations. Above all, she may feel confused. Society sends out many contradictory signals about women’s sexuality—from pretending it doesn’t exist at one end of the spectrum, to “slut-shaming” at the other—while at the same time valuing women principally for their thinness, youth, and overall sexual desirability. In such situations, some women will inevitably seek other ways to validate themselves as sexual beings.

So this is how Tim saw her, you think. This was the canker eating away at their marriage. You understand now why he was able to say with a straight face that sex with you would be betraying Abbie, when he’d screwed the nanny without a moment’s thought. Women like Sian, women who wanted it, were just sluts. Abbie was the revered mother of his child.

Just for a moment you feel another unfamiliar emotion. You feel superior. When all’s said and done, humanity’s a joke.

You push the thought aside. Abbie isn’t the one facing extinction on some laboratory workbench. She isn’t the one Tim only created as a means to an end.

The issue here isn’t whether you’re superior to her. It’s whether you can convince Tim you are. And Overcoming Infatuation, you realize, may be a very good guide to doing exactly that.

* * *

—

As you put the book down, you remember the burner phone. You’re going to have to hide it somewhere. You decide to take a leaf out of Abbie’s book—literally.

Pulling a hardback from the bookshelves, you rip the cover off and toss away the contents. The phone fits neatly between the empty covers, the perfect hiding place.