THE GOOD WIFE
By Tahira Naqvi

One morning Doctor Suleiman Alim looked up from the Business Section of the New York Times and saw his wife. He was hit solidly, as if it were a blast of hot air, with a feeling he could only think of as surprise.

He saw his wife every day, every morning she placed a cup of tea before him and muttered a question about toast, every night he slept next to her in their queen-size bed, a framed print of over-sized crimson flowers above the ornate mahogany headboard looking down on them. Sometimes they also made love in the dark, if that is what one could call it, for their performance, devoid of passion or ardor, was as routine to him as the perusal of the paper, or watching the Six-Thirty News on CBS, or taking his blood pressure pills after his one cup of tea in the morning.

But today he saw his wife as he hadn't seen her before. He was observing her, in astonishment, with eyes that seemed not his own.

Her back was to him so he glimpsed only a part of her face. But it was the hair, and the way her loose silk shirt dipped into the hollow of her waist before gently swelling over her rounded hips that first wrested his attention. The hair gleamed with dancing lights, narrow beams sometimes and sometimes half-moons or crescents that would not hold still, the ends curved inwards, hugging her long white neck.

He cleared his throat. She stiffened. The face was turned away completely, the hair bristling as she tossed it back over her shoulder with a quick flip of her hand.

"Is there any more tea?" he said hoarsely, unable to soften the thorns that appeared to have strung themselves on his tongue.

She moved away from the sink and, leaning against the counter, faced him. Suleiman Alim felt his stomach convulse. Was he ill? Why didn't he recognize her? Why did she look so, well, so different? Was his blood pressure elevated again? Was he dreaming?

"Another cup?" she asked in a voice that he barely remembered because they spoke so little to each other. Her long, black brows rose in surprise. This too he had forgotten, that her brows were long and could arch like the curved end of a bow.

Suleiman Alim was forty-five when he married Sabira. She was twenty-eight. His mother and sisters had arranged the match in Pakistan. Why not, he had thought after his mother sobbed on the phone that she and her husband were going to die without ever seeing the faces of grandchildren. In attempting to placate her he forgot that she already had grandchildren, six as a matter of fact, three from one daughter and three from the other. But he was the only son. His father's line would end if he didn't produce progeny. Unable to endure any longer his mother's intractable hysteria and his father's stony acceptance of what he repeatedly termed "fate's harshness," he relented. All right, he said, he would come to Lahore in two weeks and meet the woman they had found for him.

According to those who knew about such matters, Sabira was past her prime. But she didn't look a day older than twenty, Suleiman Alim thought. Maybe she had seen so little of life and the world, her experience of living had been so nascent that her face still bore signs of girlish innocence. The stamp of virginity, Suleiman Alim thought with some satisfaction. Was she really twenty-eight? he later wondered somewhat apprehensively as he accepted the cup of tea she extended shyly toward him at their first meeting in her parents' house. Had his mother and sisters lied in the fear that he might turn down someone so much younger than him? They were clever, his mother and sisters, and he didn't always trust them.

"But she doesn't look a day over twenty," he protested when he was alone with them in the car later.

"Just listen to him!" The mother threw up her hands in an exaggerated gesture of despair, her voice squeaking in mock anger.

"So you want a wife who looks forty?" his sister asked sarcastically. "An old hag?"

Suleiman Alim didn't want to marry an old hag of course. In his heart he was happy that kismet had presented him with a young wife. So he grunted agreement to the match.

Sometimes, after he married Sabira and had comfortably installed her in the white fifty-year-old colonial in Pleasant Hills, a little Connecticut town where he had been practicing medicine for nearly ten years, he wondered why she had married him. True, he was a doctor and that played into her decision no doubt. Doctors were the favorite choice of husband for every Pakistani family with unwed girls. The rare ones who clamored denial were only hypocrites.

But there had to be something else as well that motivated Sabira to accept him. His hair had begun to thin and there was the question of the age difference, after all. Could it be that she had told herself she might end up a spinster if she was too fussy? However, as time wore on, Suleiman Alim ceased to ponder that question and accepted that since she was twenty-eight when she married him and not some child bride, she could not have been forced.

Sabira was a woman of few words, he discovered. When he tried to draw her into conversation, she smiled with a slight upturning of the corners of her lips and made brief, cautious comments. Suleiman Alim sensed a fear in her, a quiet reticence that he attributed to the strangeness and newness of her surroundings. After all, Pleasant Hills was nothing like dusty, tumultuous, animated, sun-lit Lahore where centuries of history slapped your being like an everyday wind and where you were never alone, even when you shut yourself in your room and pulled down the shades. And Sabira, when she talked to him in those days, talked only of Lahore. Suleiman Alim had no experience of women, except what he had gleaned from the brief, rather unsatisfying forays into the phenomenon called 'dating,' and which had never led to intimacy, partly because he placed tremendous value on virginity. But he felt he understood Sabira. Since he wanted her to be happy, he gave her an allowance, which started off as twenty-five dollars a week and then, as their marriage began to show signs of an effortless familiarity he increased it to fifty. Finally, after a year had passed and she had shown herself to be a good wife he raised her allowance to two-hundred dollars a month. He did not want her to feel burdened, so he kept her out of the intricacies of a joint account and as for credit cards, they were a horror he certainly didn't wish to submit her to.

But living with her did not change him as he had thought it would. He liked to read his paper in peace, undisturbed by conversation, and he continued to watch the news on television on his return from his clinic, also devoting as he had always done, a major portion of his time to the New York Times crossword puzzle. Unaware at first of his schedule, Sabira made the effort of sitting with him to give him an account of her day the first evening he returned to his routine. But he brushed her off, kindly, telling her as he would a child, "I have to watch the news first. We'll talk later." He was grateful she left him alone after that and didn't complain or throw a tantrum. He had heard women were prone to tantrums when they felt ignored.

Their marriage fell into a routine. Lahore must have receded from her mind because she no longer made wistful comments about the city where, during his one-month stay, he had been plagued by diarrhea, mosquitoes, and noise. Every evening Sabira occupied herself with the chores in the house while he, stretched out on his comfortable Laz-e-Boy chair, his feet resting on an ottoman, read The New York Times, pored over the crossword puzzle and watched Dan Rather on CBS. Once or twice he noticed that she sat on the kitchen table and wrote in a notebook. The accounts, he thought, although what accounts, he couldn't figure since he did all the shopping himself. Perhaps her own personal accounts. There was the sum of two-hundred dollars that she had the liberty to spend as she wished.

In the morning one day, when he came down to find Sabira putting away garbage in the garage, he saw on the kitchen counter a notebook with a flowered design on the cover. Red and white roses, perfectly shaped, entwined as if in an embrace. He was tempted to lift the cover and see what she had been putting in the notebook, but he heard her footsteps just as he moved closer to the counter. She was standing in the doorway and she knew, he could see, that her notebook had tempted him. After that he never saw her writing again.

Two years passed. His mother and sisters waited, and although not as obvious in his impatience as they were, he waited as well. But there was no sign of progeny. Medical tests yielded nothing definite. Both husband and wife seemed healthy. Time moved with reckless speed. The seasons in Pleasant Hills travelled their course with unwavering regularity. Raging fall colors were followed by a murky pre-winter period when everything became purple and then came the snow, faithful, falling fast, piling up in mounds everywhere, drowning the murkiness in swathes of chilly whiteness. Finally spring wafted over, slowly at first, seemingly hesitant of its reception as the ground heaved and swelled with the weight of dead leaves and melting snow, and then with flagrant ardor; suddenly nature began its coupling, intense, fervidly orgasmic, perpetual, unmindful of the petty uncertainty of human life.

Suleiman Alim watched Sabira recast herself with the movement of the seasons, but he perceived only the shadowy outward forms of these changes. Something deeper inside her, some inner core, was never apparent to him. Like the patient, considerate man he was, he left her alone.

His mother had begun sobbing on the phone again. His father sighed and wrote him letters in which he stressed the dogged acceptance of God's will. One of the sisters came to visit him in the little Connecticut town and taking him aside one evening, suggested 'drastic measures.' A divorce. Remarriage. He cowered under her probing gaze.

"Don't be absurd," he stuttered. "I'll be fifty soon."

And he was fifty now. He suffered from hypertension and was on a regimen of an aspirin-a-day and Vasotec. His stomach leaned forward as if burdened with some great weight, his hair, except for a thin, peppery growth behind the ears and above the neck, had long disappeared, and the lines on his face had deepened into dark crevices. Today, he was conscious of how his body had betrayed him, leaving him unprepared for what he was feeling.

"Yes, another cup," he said, noisily folding the paper in his lap, his gaze faltering over Sabira's face for a moment before he averted his eyes. If only he could hold a lock of her hair and slowly close his fist over it, feeling its tingling electricity, the lights dimmed as they disappeared inside the darkness of his curled fingers. "There isn't any more tea left?"

Sabira turned away from him. The dupatta, diaphanous and pink, slipped from her shoulders. She raised a hand and adjusted it back on her shoulder.

"No," the unfamiliar voice again. "I only made three cups and I'm having the last cup. I'll make another pot if you really want more." Her back to him, she began rinsing the teapot.

Suleiman Alim watched her. She was still lean, as lean as a teenager. Her hips moved slowly as she swished the water about in the pot. Sparks flew about in her hair as it caught the light from the sun filtering through the kitchen window, bright sunshine falling across her narrow shoulders and down to her feet. She was wearing sandals. She couldn't wear closed shoes at home and she hated wearing socks. The bare heels like oval moons, the clear, white line of the shins. He wanted to get up and lift her feet and caress the smooth skin, the soft white, smooth skin.

"In five years you haven't had more than one cup in the morning. What's the matter today?" Sabira filled the kettle and placed it on the stove. Then, leaning against the sink, she looked at him directly.

She had a brazen look on her face. No, he thought, it was more like defiance. Her eyes, dark and almond-shaped, flashed. Her lips, full, ruddy from the lipstick she had worn the day before, curved in a malicious grin. Was she mocking him? Did she see in his face his fawning? Was he transparent to her in his longing for her?

"Well, a man's entitled to change, isn't he?" Rubbing the back of his neck with one hand, he tried to match the flippancy in her tone. His mature, professional self, so cocky always in its power to control his every move, seemed to be slipping away from the edges of his consciousness. He felt like a teenager. My queen, my beautiful beloved, a voice sang in his head as he helplessly grasped for sobriety. My tormenter, the voice continued insistently, my cruel one! What frivolous words were these that clouded his lucid perceptions. Surely this was a hitherto unknown side-effect of the Vasotec he had been taking all these years. If drugs could numb sexual desire, they could also make it keener, could they not? He knew better. But the voice pressed on. "Who does not understand love, what does that cruel one know of passion?" A line from a song he had once hummed when he was in high school in Lahore, jumped at him, clutching at his heart. Bewildered, he groped foolishly for the second line: "What does she know of the melody that is played upon the strings of the heart/. He had not known he still remembered the song; Talat Mahmud's voice floated into his memory, paralyzing his thoughts. Surely he was going mad. She knows only how to torment and destroy/ Who was killed, and why, what does the blade know of that."

"Is something wrong?" Sabira moved toward him with an anxious look on her face. "Did you forget your medication? You look very pale." She placed a hand on his forehead. "God, you're burning. You must be coming down with the flu. I think you should cancel your patients today and get some rest."

"Will medicine help, or the poison given by the tormentor/ The ailing heart knows not what the cure is." Like an obedient child he allowed her to speak protoctively, and covered her hand on his forehead with his own. She snatched her hand away quickly.

"Do you want some Tylenol?" she asked.

What happened next was like a dream. Suleiman Alim stumbled to his feet and tried to seize his wife, whimpering like a child making a demand for sweets. Sabira struggled within his embrace. The fragrance at the roots of her hair as he buried his face in it, travelled into his head and drove him to a frenzy of passion. It wasn't just that he wanted her, that his muscles hardened painfully with longing as she wriggled within his grasp. There was something else. He felt he wasn't the man he remembered himself to be, the physician who sat at a desk in an office and dispensed health and life to people. He was another man. A man whose body was not his, nor his mind, nor indeed the very actions of his hands. This is what possession must be, he told himself idly, the thought floating in a dimly-lit portion of his mind where some reason still seemed to lag.

"Have you gone out of your mind Suleiman?" Sabira freed herself from his hold. She took hurried steps toward the living room, away from the kitchen, her hair flying about her face in a wild dance, the dupatta swelling behind her in a swoosh.

He followed her leadenly, in a daze.

"Sabira, why do you run from me?" He stood in the entranceway to the living room and spoke in a pleading voice. His heart hammered against his ribs and he feared his blood pressure might rise dangerously. Take your pill before you continue this, the tiny voice of reason, having found its way past the cacophony of the singing voice, warned. He stood unmoving.

"I don't know what's wrong with you Suleiman. Please try and calm yourself, your blood pressure ..." Her voice trailed as she busied herself with the dried flower arrangement on the mantlepiece.

"Damn my blood pressure!" he thundered. Sabira recoiled as his voice rose. She grew pale. He stretched out his hands and continued in a milder tone. "Why do you run from me?"

"I'm not running from you. Why should I? Where do you think I'm running to?" She straightened a cushion on the sofa, moved toward the rattan chair and gave it a nudge.

Suleiman Alim was a boy again. His marbles had been stolen, swiped by a friend who had perhaps lost his in a game to another friend. He was desperate. What's a day without marbles to shoot? He grunted, as if in pain.

"This is silly, Suleiman. You'll be late for work. It's past nine." Sabira pointed to the large clock on the mantle. She sat down on the rattan chair, her eyes blazing, her voice even more unrecognizable.

He stared at her without comprehension, confused by her tone and her words. Did she have a lover? His blood froze. Yes, another man, a younger man. But who?

She sat arrogantly, her hands clasped firmly in her lap, her back straight. In her eyes was a brightness he had never noticed before. Perhaps it had always been there and he had missed it simply because he had never watched her closely, never gazed into her eyes, never seen them shed a tear or gleam with joy. Her lips curled into a secretive smile.

"Finish reading your paper and I'll make you another cup of tea," she said, and that was when Suleiman Alim saw the notebook beside her, half hidden under the cascade of her dupatta, the flowers on its cover camouflaged like chameleons by the floral print on the tapestry of the sofa. Her hand caressed the notebook as she gazed up at him. The lover's missives were in there, concealed artfully. He was sure.

In Suleiman Alim's mind arose a fog that shrouded his eyes and his thoughts. She was lost to him. "Implore, strike your head against a stone, give up your life/ What does cold-hearted beauty know of the tormented heart?

Songs of love and loss mercilessly pounded his heart.