My Lovely Wife Read online

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 2019 by Samantha Downing

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Downing, Samantha, author.

  Title: My lovely wife / Samantha Downing.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Berkley, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018016347 | ISBN 9780451491725 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451491749 (ebook)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3604.O9457 M9 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018016347

  International edition ISBN: 9781984804631

  First Edition: March 2019

  Cover art: Woman by Matthias Ritzmann / Corbis Collection / GettyImages; Male reflection by Markus Moellenberg / GettyImages; Graphic waves by Sergei Sidin / Shutterstock

  Cover design by Emily Osborne

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-one

  Chapter Sixty-two

  Chapter Sixty-three

  Chapter Sixty-four

  Chapter Sixty-five

  Chapter Sixty-six

  Chapter Sixty-seven

  Chapter Sixty-eight

  Chapter Sixty-nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-one

  Chapter Seventy-two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  One

  SHE IS LOOKING at me. Her blue eyes are glassy, they flicker down to her drink and back up. I look at my own drink and can feel her watching, wondering if I’m as interested as she is. I glance over and smile to show her I am. She smiles back. Most of her lipstick is gone, now a reddish smear on the rim of her glass. I walk over and take the seat next to her.

  She fluffs her hair. It is unremarkable in both color and length. Her lips move, she says hello, and her eyes are brighter. They look backlit.

  Physically, I appeal to her the same way I would appeal to most women in this bar. I am thirty-nine, in excellent shape with a full head of hair and a deep set of dimples, and my suit fits better than any glove. That’s why she looked at me, why she smiled, why she is happy I have come over to join her. I am the man she has in mind.

  I slide my phone across the bar toward her. It displays a message.

  Hello. My name is Tobias.

  She reads it and crinkles her brow, looking back and forth between the phone and me. I type another message.

  I am deaf.

  Her eyebrows shoot up, she covers her mouth with one hand, and the pink rises on her skin. Embarrassment looks the same on everyone.

  She shakes her head at me. Sorry, so sorry. She did not know.

  Of course you didn’t. How could you?

  She smiles. It is not quite whole.

  I am no longer the picture in her head, no longer the man she imagined, but now she isn’t sure what to do.

  She picks up my phone and types back.

  I’m Petra.

  A pleasure to meet you, Petra. You are Russian?

  My parents were.

  I nod and smile. She nods and smiles. I can see her mind churning.

  She would rather not stay with me. She wants to go find a man who can hear her laugh and does not have to type out his words.

  At the same time, her conscience tells her not to discriminate. Petra does not want to be the shallow woman who refuses a man because he is deaf. She doesn’t want to turn me down the way so many others have.

  Or so she assumes.

  Her internal battle is like a three-act play unfolding before my eyes, and I know how it ends. At least most of the time.

  She stays.

  Her first question is about my hearing, or lack of it. Yes, I have been deaf from birth. No, I have never heard anything—not a laugh, not a voice, not a puppy barking or a plane overhead.

  Petra gives me a sad face. She does not realize this is patronizing, and I don’t tell her, because she is trying. Because she stays.

  She asks if I can read lips. I nod. She starts to talk.

  “When I was twelve, I broke my leg in two places. Bike accident.” Her mouth moves i
n the most exaggerated, grotesque way. “Anyway, I had to wear a cast that went from my foot all the way up to my thigh.” She stops, draws a line across her thigh in case I have trouble understanding. I don’t, but I appreciate the attempt. And the thigh.

  She continues. “I couldn’t walk at all for six weeks. At school, I had to use a wheelchair, because the cast was too heavy for crutches.”

  I smile, half imagining little Petra with a big cast. Half imagining where this sad story is heading.

  “I’m not saying I know what it’s like to live in a wheelchair, or to have any permanent disability. I just always feel like . . . well, it feels like I’ve had a small taste of what it would be like, you know?”

  I nod.

  She smiles with relief, afraid her story might have offended me.

  I type:

  You are very sensitive.

  She shrugs. Beams at the compliment.

  We have another drink.

  I tell her a story that has nothing to do with being deaf. I tell her about my childhood pet, a frog named Sherman. He was a bullfrog who sat on the biggest rock in the pond and hogged all the flies. I never tried to catch Sherman; I would just watch him, and sometimes he watched me, too. We liked to sit together, and I started calling him my pet.

  “What happened to him?” Petra asks.

  I shrug.

  One day the rock was empty. Never saw him again.

  Petra says this is sad. I tell her it isn’t. Sad would’ve been finding his dead body and being forced to bury him. I never had to do that. I just imagined he went to a bigger pond with more flies.

  She likes this and tells me so.

  I do not tell her everything about Sherman. For instance, he had a long tongue that darted around so fast I could hardly see it, but I always wanted to grab it. I used to sit by the pond and wonder how bad of a thought that was. How terrible was it to try and grab a frog’s tongue? And would it hurt him? If he died, would it be murder? I never tried to grab his tongue and probably couldn’t have anyway, but I thought about it. And that made me feel like I wasn’t a good friend to Sherman.

  Petra tells me about her cat, Lionel, who is named after her childhood cat, also named Lionel. I tell her that’s funny, but I’m not sure it is. She shows me pictures. Lionel is a tuxedo cat, with a face divided between black and white. He is too stark to be cute.

  She continues to talk and shifts to her work. She brands products and companies, and she says it’s both the easiest and the most difficult thing. Difficult in the beginning, because it’s so hard to get anyone to remember anything, but as more people start to recognize a brand, it becomes easy.

  “At some point, it doesn’t even matter what we’re selling. The brand becomes more important than the product.” She points to my phone and asks if I bought it because of the name or because I like the phone.

  Both?

  She smiles. “See. You aren’t even sure.”

  I guess not.

  “What do you do?”

  Accountant.

  She nods. It is the least exciting profession in the world, but it is solid, stable, and something a deaf guy can easily do. Numbers don’t speak with a voice.

  The bartender comes over. He is neat and clean, college-aged. Petra takes charge of the ordering, and it is because I am deaf. Women always think I need to be taken care of. They like to do things for me because they think I am weak.

  Petra secures us two more drinks and a fresh bowl of snacks, and she smiles like she is proud of herself. It makes me laugh. Silently, but still a laugh.

  She leans toward me and puts her hand on my arm. Leaves it there. She has forgotten I am not her ideal man, and our progression is now predictable. It’s not long before we go to her place. The decision is easier than it should be, though not because I find her particularly attractive. It is the choice. She gives me the power to decide, and right now I am a man who says yes.

  Petra lives downtown, close to the bar, in the middle of all the big branding signs. Her place is not as neat as I’d expected. There is clutter everywhere: papers and clothes and dishes. It makes me think she loses her keys a lot.

  “Lionel is around here somewhere. Hiding, probably.”

  I don’t look for that stark cat.

  She flits around, dropping her bag in one place and removing her shoes in another. Two glasses appear, filled with red wine, and she leads me into the bedroom. She turns to face me, smiling. Petra has become more attractive—even her plain hair seems to sparkle. It is the alcohol, yes, but it’s also her happiness. I get the feeling she has not been this happy in a while, and I’m not sure why. Petra is attractive enough.

  She presses up against me, her body warm, her breath soaked in wine. She takes the glass out of my hand and puts it down.

  I do not finish drinking it until much later, when we are in the dark and the only light is from my phone. We type back and forth, making fun of ourselves and the fact that we do not know each other.

  I ask:

  Favorite color?

  Lime green. Ice cream?

  Bubble gum.

  Bubble gum? The blue stuff?

  Yes.

  Who says that?

  What’s your favorite?

  French vanilla. Pizza topping?

  Ham.

  We’re done here.

  Are we?

  Wait, are we still talking about pizza?

  We are not talking about pizza.

  Afterward, she dozes off first. I think about leaving, then about staying, and the idea bounces around so long I doze off.

  When I wake up, it’s still dark. I slip out of the bed without waking Petra. She is sleeping facedown, one leg askew and her hair spread out on the pillow. I cannot decide if I really like her or not, so I don’t decide at all. I do not have to.

  On the nightstand, her earrings. They are made of colored glass, a swirl of blue shades, and they look like her eyes. After getting dressed, I slip the earrings into my pocket. I take them to remind myself not to do this again. I almost believe it will work.

  I walk toward the front door without looking back.

  “Are you really deaf?”

  She says it out loud, to my back.

  I hear her because I am not deaf.

  And I keep moving.

  I pretend I don’t hear her, go straight to the door and shut it behind me, then continue until I am out of her building, down the block, and around the corner. It is only then that I stop and wonder how she figured it out. I must have slipped.

  Two

  MY NAME IS not Tobias. I use that name only when I want someone to remember me. In this case, the bartender. I introduced myself and typed out my name when I first walked in and ordered a drink. He will remember me. He will remember that Tobias is the deaf man who left the bar with a woman he just met. The name was for his benefit, not Petra’s. She will remember me anyway, because how many deaf guys could she have slept with?

  And if I hadn’t made a mistake, I would have been an odd footnote in her sexual history. But now she will remember me as the “fake deaf guy” or the “possibly fake deaf guy.”

  The more I think about it, the more I wonder if I slipped twice. Maybe I froze when she asked if I was deaf. It’s possible, because that’s what people do when they hear something unexpected. And if I did, she probably saw it. She probably knows I lied.

  On the drive back home, everything is uncomfortable. My car seat feels scratchy, and it hurts my back. Everything on the radio is too loud, almost like everyone is screeching. But I can’t blame that all on Petra. I have been irritable for a while now.

  At home, all is quiet. My wife, Millicent, is still in bed. I have been married to her for fifteen years, and she does not call me Tobias. We have two kids; Rory is fourteen, and Jenna
is one year younger.

  Our bedroom is dark, but I can just about see the shape of Millicent under the bedcovers. I take off my shoes and tiptoe toward the bathroom.

  “Well?”

  Millicent sounds wide-awake.

  I half turn and see the shadow of her propped up on an elbow.

  There it is again. The choice. From Millicent, a rarity.

  “No,” I say.

  “No?”

  “She isn’t right.”

  The air between us freezes. It doesn’t thaw until Millicent exhales and lays her head back down.

  * * *

  • • •

  SHE GETS UP before I do. By the time I walk into the kitchen, Millicent is organizing breakfast, school lunches, the day, our lives.

  I know I should tell her about Petra. Not about the sex—I wouldn’t tell my wife about that. But I should tell her that I made a mistake and that Petra is right for us. I should do it because it’s a risk to leave Petra out there.

  Instead, I say nothing.

  Millicent looks at me, her disappointment hitting like a physical force. Her eyes are green, many shades of green, and they look like camouflage.

  They are nothing like Petra’s. Millicent and Petra have nothing in common, except they’ve both slept with me. Or some version of me.

  The kids tumble down the stairs, already yelling at each other, fighting over who said what about so-and-so at school yesterday. They are dressed and ready for school, just as I am dressed for work in my tennis whites. I am not and never have been an accountant.

  While my kids are in school and my wife is selling houses, I am outside on the court, in the sun, teaching people how to play tennis. Most of my clients are middle-aged and out of shape, with too much money and time. Occasionally, I am hired by parents who believe their child is a prodigy, a champion, a future role model. So far, they have all been wrong.

  But before I can leave to teach anyone anything, Millicent makes us all sit together for at least five minutes. She calls it breakfast.

  Jenna rolls her eyes, taps her feet, anxious to get her phone back. No phones are allowed at the table. Rory is calmer than his sister. He makes the most of our five minutes by eating as much as possible, then stuffing his pockets with whatever doesn’t fit in his mouth.