The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller

Author:Sue Miller
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307268723
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-01-08T10:00:00+00:00

“DON'T YOU HAVE something that makes you look less like . . . Barney?”

Meri paused, putting the coat on over her fuchsia blouse. This didn't seem to be an attempt at a joke, which she could perhaps have rolled with. She looked at Nathan, so perfect, so beautiful in his tweed winter coat—so very unpregnant—and felt a pinch of anger. “The short answer is no,” she said.

As they were getting into the car, Nathan said, “What's the long answer?”

“It's a little more ad hominem. I don't think you want to hear it.”

They sat silently as he drove. Meri was waiting for him to apologize. Maybe he was waiting for her to apologize. They were going to the dean's party, held in her house, one of the nineteenth-century frame mansions lined up across the street from the campus.

When the door opened, they were assaulted by the sound, the general hubbub. A student wearing a white shirt and black slacks pointed them to the back of the room-size entrance hall, where their coats were taken from them by another student, also wearing a white shirt and black slacks; and Nathan was given a numbered chip, which he pocketed.

They headed to the bar, in one of the two facing parlors on opposite sides of the hall. As they hitched their way through the clots of people, Meri put her hands on her belly so it wouldn't get bumped. All around them, people were greeting one another with pleasure, standing in little groups, catching up, gossiping. Nathan knew some of them—people spoke to him, and from time to time they paused to talk and he introduced Meri. As she stood, smiling and nodding, Meri took in the spacious, comfortable room. The lamps gave off a gentle light, and in its glow everyone looked pretty and well. There were groupings of large, soft chairs and couches everywhere, and paintings—modern, vivid, well lighted—hung on the walls. It was impossible to imagine this as a home, the scale of everything was so immense, the taste so impeccable and impersonal.

Meri got her Perrier and slipped away from Nathan, who was talking to a colleague of his who looked just like Danny DeVito, but bigger. She moved her immense blouse around, standing at the edges of groups, waiting to be recognized as a stranger, to introduce herself. And people were kind. They turned to her, they asked her about herself. Mostly, though, Meri listened. She listened to the jokes they were in the middle of telling, to the long stories—about trying to get on a bus in New York City with a cello, about waiting in Ecuador for months to adopt a child.

She was waylaid several times by Nathan, who had forgotten she was supposed to be angry at him and wanted to introduce her to someone or other; and twice more by women she'd met at earlier parties. One of them, a young colleague of Nathan's, tried to recruit Meri for a departmental baseball team in the late spring.

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