The Perfect Wife

Things going well here. OK if I stay another day? xx

His reply came just a few minutes later:

Of course. As long as you like. x

You scroll up further, stopping at random.

Still up for date night? Reservation’s @7 Axx

Tim’s answer was badly typed—under the table of a meeting, perhaps:

Sadly mty date toniht will b w Ted’s bozo coders. Going tp pull a late one.

No worries. Takeout? Xx

I’ll piuck up grocries. Steak? candles? wine? choc dess?

You had me at choc dess. Xx

It was a happy marriage, you think. Despite Danny, despite Tim’s type-A personality, the two of you made it work.

You scroll on, stopping occasionally, until you reach a whole decade ago.

Thank you for a beautiful evening. And an even more beautiful night. Tim x

The pleasure was all mine, believe me! Axx

You feel a sudden pang of emotion. Eventually you and Tim may be able to go on date nights together. You can dance, hold hands, even kiss. But the special physical connection of lovemaking is another matter.

Unbidden, the exact word for what you feel about that lands in your thoughts, ready-made.

Your emotion about those texts is envy.

* * *

—

You’re about to put the phone down when you spot the Safari icon on the menu bar. You tap it and a search engine appears, the box blank and inviting.

At last. Quickly you type in Abbie Cullen-Scott San Francisco death accident? How?

An agonizing moment while it searches. And then—

Page Blocked.

You look at it, wondering. Blocked by who?

Then you realize. Tim must have set up some kind of filter. Like one of those parental-control apps, with the details of your own death as the blacklisted content.

It’s because he loves you, you tell yourself. He guessed the temptation would be too great. It’s a sign of how well he knows you. How much he cares about protecting you from pain.

You wonder if he’ll get sent some kind of alert now. You hope not. It would be nice to keep your weakness to yourself.

And nicer still if my husband had trusted me in the first place, you can’t help thinking. Even as you ruefully acknowledge that he was right not to.

You wonder what else he’s screened from you. Picking up the phone again, you try Facebook, then Twitter, then Instagram. Only Instagram loads, and even then, links to certain accounts seem to be blocked.

Are there horrors here he has chosen to shield you from? What insinuations does he not want the roiling, restless multitudes of the Web to whisper in your ears?

Then you remember the disgust in the eyes of the Prius driver who brought you home. Imagine that, being flung at you online!

Tim’s right, you decide. Too much reality right now might not be a good thing.

THREE

Abbie Cullen didn’t do very much, to begin with. She sat at a spare desk. We pointed out to her the break room, the free bagels and tubs of cream cheese, the restrooms, and where to put the recycling. Jenny Austin—Mike’s wife—brought over a spare laptop, and there was a rush to be the one to help Abbie connect it to our network. (Tim refused to have an IT administrator, on the basis that if you weren’t smart enough to do that kind of stuff yourself, you shouldn’t be working for him.) And then she just kind of sat around, chatting.

There was a pool table in the office, but it almost never got used. Nobody wanted to be the person who was shooting pool when Tim Scott walked by. It was generally just a convenient place to stack late-night pizza deliveries, and its soft blue baize was stained like an old mattress with their leakings. But when Abbie Cullen picked up a cue, turned to the nearest person—who happened to be Rajesh—and said “Wanna play?” we not only tolerated it, we went to watch.

She was not even quiet. When she won a shot, she whooped.

Pretty soon she developed a program of going around and asking people to explain to her what they did. She would squat down next to our chairs, so she didn’t tower over us, or sit on our desks, swinging her long legs, asking us questions. And she seemed genuinely interested, even amazed, by what to us was now fairly everyday and mundane. She was sweet. She had a way of reaching out and resting her hand on our arms to make a point that was—well, flirtatious would be the wrong word. It was more like she saw no reason not to be tactile, and no one in her life had ever seen any reason to make her feel self-conscious about it.

We didn’t, either, of course. We were charmed.

The second day, she wore a Debbie Harry T-shirt under an old leather jacket, and ripped jeans. Some of us did wonder if that was a bit too casual, for the office. But then she was an artist, not a regular employee.

Someone asked her if she knew what her first project would be, and she shook her head. “I’m still waiting for an idea.” Not I’m working on it, or even It’ll come, just that she was waiting for something to show up and announce itself. We admired her confidence, but we also worried for her. What if no idea ever came? At what point would she give up? And if she gave up, would she leave us?

So we waited along with her, and gradually What Abbie Might Do became a topic—perhaps even the topic—of conversation in the break room. “She’s talking to the form-cutters this morning. I expect she’ll want to use the three-D printer.” “I heard she’s thinking of doing some portraits of us.” “She’s interested in how the bots are coded. I bet she’ll incorporate that into her project.”

It was when she started talking back to Tim, though, that she reached another level in our affections.

It was quite a small thing, the first time. Tim was tearing a strip off one of the new developers. We felt for the guy: We had all been in his position, though we also experienced a secret thrill that it was now someone else’s turn. We called these bawling-outs Tim-lashings or Getting Timmed, just as we called all-nighters Tim Time and predawn was Tim O’clock. And to be fair, his outbursts were rarely unwarranted; merely excruciating. With Tim, the particular failings of the task you had messed up on were never merely errors. They were much worse than that: an indication that you didn’t subscribe to the same perfectionist worldview as him, that your standards or your commitment were somehow eternally compromised. He could move from the particular to the philosophical in a nanosecond.

“We don’t do workarounds,” he was snapping at the hapless developer. “We don’t do betas. And we particularly don’t do failure. If something’s not good enough, don’t fix it—reinvent it. You think Elon Musk set out to build a better car? Wrong. He set out to build the thing that would replace the car. While you, my friend, are still polishing fenders.”

To which Abbie said, “What’s wrong with a bike?”

It was not a particularly smart or witty remark. But the fact she said it at all—that she acknowledged the way Tim was yelling at the poor guy within earshot of everyone—broke the unwritten rule, the fourth wall that separated us from him. And silently, inwardly, we applauded her for it.

He gave her a blank look. “Nothing’s wrong with bikes. Anytime you want to invent a self-driving bike, feel free.”

And so it began.

10

Upstairs you spread out some old sheets and get to work on the bookcase, methodically removing a shelf’s worth of books at a time. The tops are grimy—clearly, no one else has touched them in years. You wipe each one with a cloth before separating out those you intend to read. With the more interesting ones, you flick through in search of notes or annotations, too. For a moment you can’t recall the right word for that kind of thing. Then it comes to you. Marginalia. Of course. You are a person who enjoys such words, you are discovering.

You wonder if you always did, or whether it’s something to do with your new deep-learning brain.

The big shelves at the bottom mostly contain cookbooks. Happy Abbie-versary, Tim’s written inside a book of Venetian recipes, Best trip ever! Inside The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook you find the cryptic inscription, Present number thirty-seven!! A copy of Dishes from India is inscribed To Ms. Abigail Cullen, soon to be Mrs. Cullen-Scott. From the happiest engineer in the world.

Tucked into the flap is a theater program, something experimental at the Cutting Ball. Scribbled on the back, in your handwriting and Tim’s, is an exchange:

Asleep??

Not quite.

I’m thinking about food.

Mmmm…

Italian?

Oysters!

Bail?

I’m right behind you.

And a hand-painted Valentine in the shape of a heart. Dearest Tim, I give you my heart.

Another word comes to you, equally satisfying. Ephemera.

* * *