Page 11 of The Echo Wife
In hindsight, I don’t know why I ever thought he wouldn’t choose her. She was perfect—everything he wanted. He made her that way. He must have thought he’d never have to decide between us, but when it came down to it, she was the thing he wanted.
It wasn’t just that Martine was pregnant. That was hard to take in, sure, but it would have been hard no matter what, even if she’d just been some woman Nathan had run off with. Even if she’d been a fling he’d had, the pregnancy would have stung—the permanence of it, the undeniable evidence of his betrayal.
But it wasn’t that.
Martine shouldn’t have been able to get pregnant.
It shouldn’t have been possible.
Nathan had somehow found a way to circumvent the sterility that was built in to the entire framework of duplicative cloning. It was one of the things that made my work legal and ethical: each duplicative clone was an island, incapable of reproduction, isolated and, ultimately, disposable. It was bedrock.
Clones don’t have families.
But somehow, Nathan—Nathan, the coward, the failure, who had abandoned industry for academia nearly a decade before, who shouldn’t have been able to even approach the level of work I was doing—somehow, Nathan had found a way to undermine that principle. To underminemyprinciples.
If only it could have just been those things. If it had just been those things, I could have kept my composure. If it had just been those things, I wouldn’t have said what I said.
But no. It was everything, all of it together, all at once. None of this was happening to me suddenly, but it still felt like a slap. I poured wine into the same mug I’d been hand-washing and reusing for the week prior. I didn’t bother putting the cork back intothe bottle—I just sat down on the floor with the mug full of wine clutched in both hands.
I drank fast, not registering the taste. A text message to Seyed—not feeling well, be home the rest of today, see you tomorrow—and another drink, slower this time. I set my phone on the floor next to my knee, leaned my head back against the wall, and forced myself to look the thing right in the face.
What broke me ran deeper than the professional insult, deeper than the knowledge that Nathan had gotten Martine pregnant while we were still living under the same roof. What broke me was the knowledge that, as it turned out, he hadn’t just created Martine to exercise a fantasy. He hadn’t just created her to be an easier version of his wife, a version who had the time and patience for him that I didn’t have.
I’d known that part already, the part about how Martine was a more navigable rendition of me. I’d absorbed that blow months before, when I first found her, during the screaming sobbing fights that defined the end of my marriage. But now, this new facet: Apparently, Nathan had created Martine to do what I wouldn’t do for him. What I’d refused outright, what I’d gone to great lengths to prevent. What I thought he’d stopped wanting a long time ago, when I’d made it clear that I wasn’t going to budge.
Nathan had created Martine so that he could have a family.
I thought he’d given up on all that. But as it turned out, he hadn’t given up on that dream at all. He had just given up onme.
I drank wine down like medicine and I tried not to regret the things I’d said to Martine. I tried not to feel the cruelty of my words. It had been wrong to say the things I said, I knew that, but it had felt good in the way that vomiting felt good sometimes. It had felt right, getting that poison out of my belly.
You’re not even a real person.
You’re just a science experiment.
You’re just a declawed version of me.
Martine had looked hurt. Shocked, even. It probably wasn’t in her framework to say things that were cruel just for the sake of saying them. Nathan wouldn’t have put that into her patterning. It was one of the things he’d always hated about me. My “needless venom,” he’d called it. “You’re like a hornet,” he’d told me dozens of times, “stinging just because you can.”
After I left Martine at the tea shop, I sat on the floor of my condo with only that wine bottle for company, digging deep into the bruise.
I could have turned away from it, but I was feeling flattened and sad, and, masochistically, I wanted to feel sadder. I wanted to get all the way to the bottom of the hurt, to let the weight of it crush the breath from my lungs. So I let myself curl up around it.
I thought that if I could just cry, maybe I could let go of the anger that had driven me to say such awful things to Martine. I meant the things I said, that was the worst part. Even the cruelest thing, the thing I knew I’d said only because I couldn’t bite it back in time:Why do you think you exist? What are you evenfor?
Martine had rested her hands on her belly, taking the stream of abuse with placid neutrality, until that last one. Her face had crumpled, and I stormed out, not wanting to see my clone shed the tears that I hadn’t been able to muster.
Toward the end of our marriage, Nathan had switched from calling me a hornet to the simpler, more straightforward mode of calling me a bitch. The former stuck with me more than the latter. Partly because it was more unique: I’d been called a bitch any number of times, occasionally for good reason.
Nathan hadn’t been calling me a bitch for any good reason—he had been calling me a bitch the way a cornered dog growls, hoping it will seem bigger if it makes a noise.
I’m embarrassed, still, by how long it took me to notice. Everything was right there in the open, right there in front of me, but it still took me so long to see the person I had married.
It took me so long to hate him.
Now, I pressed the bruise again and again—the way Martine’s chin buckled, the way her forehead had ruched into an expression of bewildered hurt. The way her hands had flown from her stomach and settled on the table.
Shame. That’s the thing I had wanted Martine to feel in that moment, and I succeeded. I watched shame sink into the furrows of a face that was exactly, precisely my own, and I felt satisfaction.
