The show must go on

When my surprise kept me from answering right away, he said, “How are we ever meant to get over you if you keep coming back and getting our hopes up, only to dash them every time?” in a tone of such openly plaintive despair that I felt immediately guilty, which was ridiculous, when none of this was bit real! And how had I ever missed what an incredibly histrionical spurned lover Curry apparently was!

I cast about for something, anything, I might say to settle him down from this tumult, to a point where he’d let me work on getting his fever down. It had gone easier, with the Mivian nonsense before, just to play along with it. “Magnus,” I said urgently, trying to strike the right tone of penitent, dramatic desperation it would probably take to bring him back from this brink. “I’m here because I was wrong—I had to find out if you can ever forgive me enough to… take me back?” I was actually crying a little for real by now, just because of exhaustion, and how strange and upsetting it was to see him so worked up at me, so I leaned into that and used the momentum it gave me. “Please let me come home,” I cried, then bowed my head and rested it on his arm in as supplicant a gesture as I could manage while still standing at his bedside. “I can’t live another single day without you,” I added when he didn’t reply right away, half-worried that was too over the top, and half-staggered at the absurd lengths I was going to, just to convince a grown man to let me give him a sponge bath.

“What if you change your mind again? How do I know I can trust this is for good?” Curry wanted to know.

I had no idea what to say to that, since in this bizarre fantasy apparently neither of us knew what had facilitated my sudden loss of interest in the marital state, and since in reality I had none of that interest to begin with, and little idea what would make a persuasive argument.

“I guess you can’t know,” I said after a moment. “I thought I needed to experience life on my own again—but now I’ve had a taste of being without you I just can’t bear it.” I eyed him, trying to decide if this speech was winning him over, or whether he would notice that I was mostly borrowing this from a stage play we saw a few weeks ago—then had a sudden burst of improvisational inspiration. “I’m so sorry for before, truly I am—I was so overwhelmed I thought I couldn’t go on,” I said, working some more of the exhausted tears back into my voice. “Being a mother is so much harder than I thought. But can we work out how to make it more manageable? Together?”

Curry turned back to me, with a bit of difficulty, and gave me a long look. It didn’t take him much time to come to some internal decision, upon which he did his best despite his weakness to gather me into his arms. “Let’s try,” he said. “If you’re willing, I am. And I’m sorry for the things I said before—I thought I was losing the person I love most. My life is really nothing special at all, without you. We’ve all been wretched over it.”

This sounded, well, extremely fucking weird. But promising too, in that at least he’d come around pretty quick.

I tried to decide what the fastest and most organic segue would be, to take Curry from this hard-won, topsy-turvy reconciliation with the love of his life and the mother of his minimum two children, into letting that same person wipe him down with a cool rag in the hopes that he would forget all of this just like he’d forgotten that silly business about Mivian siege warfare.

Curry raised himself up on his elbow, and for a second I was deeply worried that he expected me to kiss him the way a reunited soulmate perhaps might naturally do, but to my incredible relief all he did was gently kiss the top of my head. “I love you,” he said weakly. “I promise to be a better partner to you. I just… need you to talk to me, when things don’t feel right.”

“I will,” I promised. “I love you too.” I let him hug me against him, while I worked out my next move.

In the end I couldn’t think of any way for this scenario to feasibly transition straight to: _glad that’s all settled—_now will you let me rub you down with cool water? So I simply asked him, “Say, Mag, are you feeling quite right? I think you have fever,” and he paused, as if considering for the first time his physical condition.

“Actually, I think I might have,” he said in surprise. “I thought it was just all the other business, but I really don’t feel very well.”

“I had better get that fever down,” I told him, packing as much wifely authority into my tone as I could manage. “You need to drink a cup of willow tea, and then I’m going to wet you down to cool your skin off. It’s not good for you to stay feverish like this.”

In contrast to earlier, Curry was the model of cooperation now, sitting obediently up for me when I brought him the willow tea a few minutes later, taking cough remedy without complaint, obligingly spitting up mucus into a clean rag, and readily tolerating it while I cooled his skin with the water and let him blather a steady stream of contradictory nonsense about our domestic life together, filling me in on everything I missed while away. We had three, or maybe four children—I couldn’t tell—one of whom was a toddler who had recently cried almost two weeks straight because she was cutting her tusks. “You did so well with her,” he praised me, with ample admiration, making me wonder how exactly this motherly performance fit into his narrative when I’d just now ended my period of family abandonment, “considering you never went through it yourself.”

Curry had faced a host of difficulties during his interlude as a single father. He was not quite so handy as me at braiding our oldest daughter’s hair, which made him feel guilty and inadequate, and made her feel ugly and neglected, and put everyone out of sorts. “The boys,” he said, which made me decide we must have four children, since he’d mentioned both an oldest and a youngest daughter, “got on a bit better, except they asked a lot of questions I didn’t know how to answer. Mainly I’m just trying to keep them from running about with those naughty kids from the next street who like to get up to no good.”

When he began telling me how glad our “only son” would be to see his mama, I pressed the second cup of willow tea into his hands, and kept on trying to cool him off. I didn’t know what else to do, and I was getting increasingly eager for this delirious spell to end, not only because the headcount of our fictitious brood couldn’t be reckoned based on anything he said.

Every few sentences, Curry stopped to express again how deeply he cared for me and how grateful he was, that we had decided to work things out. The first time he’d told me this, it had been a bit touching, and now it was just tiresome, and a bit disturbing, since I couldn’t tell whether this was how he actually conducted his romantic relationships, or if it was just that the fever had knocked him completely off his tits. His abiding enthusiasm for the subject also made it more difficult to maintain my certainty that Curry did not in reality have some deeply-buried secret wish to get a whole pile of children on me and live out some bizarre domestic life completely incompatible with either of our personalities.

Instead of debating any of that with myself, I focused on the fact that Curry had never before talked about the Mivian army, or given any evident thought to siege warfare, and yet earlier he had opined on both these subjects with considerable interest. And even though I thought he wasn’t listening, I had just read to him most of that long poem about the lady who wanted so badly to be a perfect wife that she’d decided to die instead of forgoing any part of that dream. As well as that stuff about babies cutting their teeth. And boys and girls going with bad children. With relief I thought back over his gouts of barely sensible babble, realizing most of them sprang somehow from the conversation we’d had earlier before he fell asleep.

“I love you, Fauzia,” he told me earnestly, for about the six thousandth time, in the manner of a special confidence. “Nobody has ever had a wife so good as you, I think, or who made him so happy,” he said contentedly, then made me very happy when instead of pausing to let me dutifully reciprocate the sentiment, he turned onto his side and closed his eyes. “I’m very tired,” he told me sleepily, which was obvious from the fact that he had just decided to take a nap in the middle of being sponged with water by another adult.

I wasted less than half a second debating whether it was safe to let a feverish person go to sleep still delirious, because it definitely wasn’t safe to let him go on endlessly prattling about our two to four imaginary children until I bashed him in the head with a fireplace poker to shut him up. “Let me get that shirt off you,” I said, though, because I’d just realized if he was turning over it meant I could cool his back too and maybe, finally, break the fever. Curry let me take the shirt off, one arm at a time, and if he didn’t quite manage to assist the process, he at least didn’t impede it too badly.

Then he fell asleep and I set back to work, reflecting with vast satisfaction on the blessed fucking silence.

By the time I had him cooled off and he seemed to be resting easier, it was past eleven. I went and washed my hands again in the bathroom, returned to his room and banked the fire, then stood there dispiritedly taking in the dishes that ought to be washed, and the things that ought to be cleaned. I would sit down for just a moment, I decided. A short rest—ten minutes. Maybe twenty. Then I’d attend to all that.