The Perfect Wife

“And why dimensions variable?” asked one of the girls.

“Maybe,” Kenneth suggested, “we’re meant to—you know—play with it?”

There was silence while we digested this. Someone bent down and gave the sculpture’s foot a tentative squeeze, just above the toes. “It’s soft, all right,” he reported.

“Hey, don’t ruin it!” Marie Necker protested.

“But I think that’s the whole idea. I think we’re supposed to—refashion it.”

Sol placed his thumb halfway down the sculpture’s right hip and pressed. When he took his hand away, it left a small dish-shaped dimple containing his thumbprint.

“I don’t think you should have done that,” Marie said nervously.

“Why not?” Sol retorted.

“Has Tim seen it yet?” someone else wondered aloud. That brought us all up short. Whatever we were meant to do with the sculpture, no one wanted to be the one who did it before Tim had had a chance to decide what the right reaction was.

40

You get to Spikes early. Lisa’s late, so late you start to wonder if she’s coming at all. But you’re confident she’ll show in the end. Somehow it’s just one of the things you know about her.

While you wait, you look through the video clips stored in your phone. They’re of Danny, mostly. In one, taken the morning of his fourth birthday—just a few months before his regression—he’s singing “Happy Birthday” to himself in his excitement. His face is almost broken in two by his toothy smile as he reaches the end: “Happy burfday dear Danneeeee….Happity burfday to meeeee!”

Your voice, behind the camera, can be heard correcting gently, “Not burfday, Danny. Birthday.”

“Burfday!” he repeats eagerly. “Vat’s what I said.” He had a slight lisp—a result of hooking his front teeth over his bottom lip, the speech therapist told you. She said he’d almost certainly grow out of it, but you could help by modeling correct pronunciation.

You sigh at the memory. But then you remember that tiny moment of connection at breakfast over the toast this morning, and you can’t help smiling. Danny might have changed almost beyond recognition, but he’s still your child.

* * *

—

Lisa eventually turns up at half past, staring at you through the window. You give her a tentative wave and a rueful smile that says, I didn’t mean for it to be like this.

She doesn’t get coffee, just comes straight over and sits down. Physically, she’s not like you—you somehow got her share of good looks as well as your own, she used to say wryly—but you have exactly the same eyes. Most people wouldn’t even notice, but looking at that one part of her is like looking into a mirror. Of course, she’s five years older than when you last saw her, but Lisa always dressed middle-aged anyway.

“I saw you on TV,” she says abruptly. “But somehow in the flesh…” She swallows. “Christ, what am I even saying? There’s no flesh involved.”

“They deliberately made me look terrible on TV. But at least it means I don’t get recognized in places like this.”

She gives herself a little shake. “It sounds like you. Like her, I mean.”

“It is me. At least, I think it is. It’s my mind, Leese. A very small sliver of it, I gather, but enough to feel like me. You can debate whether that makes me AI or transhuman—and believe me, Tim’s friends debated it for an hour over dinner only last night—but the point is, I’m not just some electromechanical look-alike.”

“What was the name of your first doll?” she demands.

“Trick question. Grafton. Our parents insisted all our toys were gender-neutral. They were pretty advanced like that.”

She stares at you.

“But to be fair, my memories are patchy,” you add. “You’d be amazed how few you actually need to retain a sense of self. I’m like an Alzheimer’s sufferer in reverse—slowly filling in the gaps.”

She shakes her head. “This is so weird.”

“Tell me about it.” You reach forward and take her hand. “I’ve missed you, Leese.”

She snatches her hand away. “Oh God,” she whispers. “God.” She starts to cry.

“This is all his fault,” she adds through her tears. “That bastard.”

“Tim? He’s given me a second chance at life. He loves me. How does that make him a bastard?”

“This isn’t love. This is—this is necrophilia.”

“Hardly,” you say drily. “He hasn’t given me any genitals.”

Lisa snorts. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s a control freak,” she says bluntly. “Always was. One of the ways he liked to control you was by withholding sex.”

You frown. “I told you that?”

She swipes at her tears. “Not in so many words. That is, you defended him. It was a sign he respected you, you said. Personally I always thought it was a sign he didn’t care about your needs at all. Just this grand, narcissistic passion of his. Loving you was all about him—how romantic he was, how forgiving, how much adoration he was capable of. But God help you if you ever stepped off your pedestal.”

“Did I ever try?”

“Sometimes. But never particularly hard, it seemed to me.” She looks at you for a moment, thinking. “Okay—here’s an example, off the top of my head. This one time, you were really, really tired—Danny hadn’t been sleeping. But Tim wanted sex. Since he wasn’t actually going to come—too messy, too out-of-control—sex usually went on until you came. So, on this occasion, you faked it. But you obviously didn’t do it too well, because he picked up on it. He went on at you about it for days. If Jack had done that to me, I’d have given him his marching orders. But you were always so damn understanding. Anyway, I told you Tim’s attitude was outrageous—I couldn’t understand why you’d felt obligated to have sex in the first place, let alone fake an orgasm, but since you had, it was none of his business. I must have convinced you I was right, because that’s what you eventually told him.” She shrugs. “Hardly a big deal, right? But Tim didn’t talk to you for weeks. Just cut you off. Then when he did start talking, and you told him it came from me, he wouldn’t have me in the house. He got mad if you even spoke to me on the phone.”

You wait to see if the memory of what Lisa’s describing comes back to you. But there’s nothing. “How are you and Jack these days?”

She gives a short, bitter bark of laughter. “Well, there’s the thing. We separated a few years back.”

“Tim and I must have been doing something right, then.”

“I guess.” She gives you a glance. “Or you were too scared to leave him.”

You frown at her. “What makes you say that?”

“You always tiptoed around him. Everyone did. The brilliant Tim Scott, the boy wonder who was going to change the world. He didn’t have employees. He had acolytes. Like a cult. I always thought it was a shame you met him in that environment—all those yes-kids falling to their knees whenever he so much as walked past their desks. Personally, I can’t imagine anything worse than living with someone like that. There was something creepy about the way you always had to live up to this perfect image of yourself that he’d created in his head.” She shudders. “But if you were having second thoughts, you probably wouldn’t have told me. You’d have hated me to have been right about him.”

You think of that book hidden in the bookcase, Overcoming Infatuation. Perhaps it wasn’t you who was the infatuated one, after all. Perhaps you were simply trying to understand the man you were married to.

You push the thought away. Lisa always did this. She enjoyed being the all-knowing, sensible older sister. It was one of the things that, growing up, made you delight in being reckless. Whenever she said something was too dangerous, you just went right ahead and did it anyway.

“And do you remember how you cut off all your hair that time?” she’s saying. “You decided braids were impractical now that you were a mother. Plus there’d been some stuff on social media about it being cultural appropriation or something. So you took a pair of scissors to them. It looked stunning, actually—everything looked stunning on you. But you hadn’t consulted Tim. He was furious. You had to get extensions and braid them exactly the way they’d been before.”

You shake your head. “I don’t remember that, no. Are you sure that really happened? Perhaps I was exaggerating.”

“You didn’t exaggerate. If anything, you had—what do they call it?—Pangloss syndrome. Everything was always beautiful and brilliant and so damn perfect in this amazing new world you and Tim were building together. Arrgh.” She mimes sticking her fingers down her throat.