The Perfect Wife

A few days after that, someone glanced into Tim’s office and said, “Wow.”

Abbie was in there. She was wearing a wet suit. On every limb were small green stickers—for motion capture, someone said. Tim was videoing her. She was sashaying up and down like a model.

Clearly, Tim was refining the runway tech, and Abbie had offered to help out. In her figure-hugging wet suit, she looked incredible. But some of us felt uneasy. Abbie had been employed as an artist, yet here she was doing a task that could not, by any stretch, be considered art. It was blurring the lines, somehow.

On the other hand, someone pointed out, maybe Tim didn’t want to ask one of his female employees to parade up and down in a wet suit for him.

There was a long silence as we thought about that. The person who made the comment was new, and didn’t understand the ramifications.

But it was great to see Tim so happy, we agreed. Abbie was really good for him. It was a story old as time: Hard-ass falls in love, stops being such a hard-ass.

* * *

—

At one of the boring investment functions, Abbie and John Renton’s ex-wife got drunk and danced on a table. Some of the men gathered around them, whooping, and tucked hundred-dollar bills into their shoes, like they were strippers.

Tim watched this with a strange expression on his face, Elijah reported. It was as if he was half proud of Abbie, half worried she was going too far.

Elijah heard him say to her later, as they were walking out to the parking desk, “I know you’re not a slut. It’s just that none of them know that.”

She linked her arm through his. “And every single one of them was jealous of you,” she teased. “Thinking you might have a slutty girlfriend.

“Which I am most definitely not, by the way,” she added.

“I know,” Tim said. “It’s one of the things I love about you.” And he laughed, that high goofy giggle that always seemed so unlikely coming from his mouth.

The next day, someone glimpsed a PowerPoint Tim was working on in his office. It was titled, Why Polyamory Is Dumb.

* * *

—

Someone who went to Maker Faire saw Abbie’s name on the exhibitors’ list and went to see what she was showing. It was a sculpture made out of six pairs of shopbot legs, walking on a treadmill. It wasn’t her best work, he reported. It was basically just the runway incident, rehashed.

What was more noteworthy was that Abbie was hanging out with a bunch of people who looked like rock musicians—tattooed, long-haired, bearded. They all seemed wasted. Not on alcohol, either, our informant said: It was more like they were on speed or coke. He spoke to Abbie, or tried to, but she, too, was gabbling nonsense, her eyes popping and her forehead shiny with sweat.

We were surprised, and also disappointed. Sure, Abbie had to let off steam occasionally. And sure, she was an artist. She’d probably been around people who did drugs for years. But still…She herself had seemed so clean-living, so wholesome. It was hard to reconcile those clear eyes, that fresh, unspoiled beauty, with any kind of substance abuse.

We all wondered who was going to be the one to tell Tim his girlfriend was a cokehead. Well, perhaps cokehead was a bit strong; recreational user was probably more accurate, but that was not a distinction we imagined Tim would take much notice of. He had a zero-tolerance policy for drugs in the office, with testing a mandatory part of the recruitment process. Even outside of work he rarely touched anything stronger than a glass of wine.

Of course, we told each other wisely, that had been part of Abbie’s appeal for him—her otherness, the fact that she came from a different, more creative milieu. But even so, we predicted the relationship was now headed for the rocks. Tim was not someone who could compromise over a matter like drugs. Or, indeed, any matter. And we felt sad about that, because we’d really liked Abbie. And we’d really, really liked what she did to Tim.

39

When Danny comes to the table for breakfast, you show him the picture menu you made. But today it isn’t working. He gives it a cursory glance, then ignores it.

“Come on, Danny,” you say at last. “There must be something you want to eat.”

Scrambling down from his chair, he goes and fetches one of his Thomas the Tank Engine books. You see him considering. Then, quickly, he slips the book into the toaster and pushes down the handle.

“Hmm. Maybe not such a good idea,” you say, retrieving it. You hand it back to him. Immediately, he tries to take a bite from it.

“Bother that telephone!” he says distinctly.

You look at him, thinking hard. Those words he just said—you recognize them. They’re from Toby the Tram Engine—the same book he’s just tried to eat.

Coaxing the book from him, you find the page where the Fat Controller—as he was called in those days—is being served toast and marmalade by his butler when the telephone rings, interrupting his breakfast.

“Is that what you want, Danny?” you ask. “Toast and marmalade?”

“Well blister my buffers,” Danny says. He seems almost startled that you’ve been able to follow his circuitous thought processes.

Startled, and also pleased.

* * *

—

After Sian’s collected Danny to take him to school, you get out your phone. You don’t know exactly when you made the decision to call Lisa, but having made it, it feels right.

You find her name in CONTACTS and press CALL. So simple. You imagine your sister picking up her own phone, staring at the caller ID. There’ll be a few moments of shock, you imagine. But after all, she’s seen you on TV now. At some point, she’ll answer.

But she doesn’t. After a few rings, the call goes to voicemail. You can’t bring yourself to leave a message. Your first contact with her after so long shouldn’t be a recording.

A few minutes later, you try again. This time it cuts out after one ring. You imagine her holding the phone, waiting for your name to appear, her finger jabbing down at the button to cut you off. To get ABBIE off her screen as quickly as possible.

Sighing, you send a text. Lisa, it’s me. It’s REALLY me, whatever you may have read or heard. I’m going to call again. Pick up this time, will you?

Delivered, the phone tells you. Then: Read. Three dots appear, meaning she’s typing. But no reply comes. She must have deleted her answer before sending it.

Encouraged, you try dialing again. And this time it’s answered. She doesn’t say anything, but you can hear her breathing.

“Leese, we need to meet,” you say into the silence. “I know you think this is weird—I do, too. But it’s not like I had any say in the matter.”

“Jesus,” she whispers disbelievingly. “Jesus. It sounds—it sounds—” She starts to cry.

“Why don’t I come to Spikes?” you say, naming the coffee bar where you used to meet up sometimes, halfway between your houses. “Say at eleven?”

She doesn’t reply, just sniffs back tears.

“Look, I’m going to be there anyway,” you say, after a while. “Please come. I need to see you.”

FOURTEEN

It has to be said, we couldn’t spot any signs of Abbie’s alleged drug use at work, no matter how closely we looked. What we saw instead was someone immersing herself in a new creative project. There was a full-sized 3-D printer in the workshop, a very expensive piece of machinery for making prototypes. At Abbie’s request, Darren showed her how it could be used to make perfect replicas of almost anything.

She ordered in a load of Newplast, a soft modeling putty favored by stop-frame animators. Then, for a whole week, she took over the printer booth. We didn’t know what she was doing in there, but she started arriving late and working through the night. Tim was cool with that, we gathered.

As with the punching bags, she made no fanfare about this new artwork when it was finished. We simply came into work one day and found Sol, who usually got in earliest, in a state of high excitement.

“You have got to come and see what she’s done this time,” he told us.

He led us to one of the meeting rooms. And there it was—a life-sized, 3-D replica of Abbie, fashioned out of flesh-colored putty. Apart from the briefest of thongs, she was nude. She stood with her hands on her hips, her torso turned slightly sideways, as if looking at herself in a mirror.

“Holy fuck,” someone breathed, and indeed it was a remarkable sight. Nobody wanted to look uncool by commenting on it directly, but Abbie really did have an awesome body. It was more than that, though. It might only have been a 3-D printout, but you really got a sense of what kind of person she was: vibrant, optimistic, even somewhat innocent.

It was only after we’d been staring for several minutes that someone spotted the printed card fixed to the nearby wall.

DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!)

3-D printed modeling putty and wireframe

Interactive installation

Dimensions variable

“How is it interactive?” someone else wondered. “It doesn’t do anything, does it?”