The Replacement Wife

By Rowena Wiseman

After years of being ignored in her marriage, Luisa has fallen for Jarvis. She comes up with a plan to find a new wife for her husband Luke so she can exit her stagnant marriage while keeping everyone happy.

It's been no easy task, but she has finally connected Luke with a suitable replacement wife and stepmother for eight-year-old Max, and the new relationship is taking off.

What Luisa's careful plan hasn't taken into account is the renewed spark of emotion when she sees Luke at his best again, rising up out of his slump to show another woman the care and attention he hasn't shown Luisa for years. She starts to remember what it was about Luke that she originally fell in love with ... but is it too late?

'This is more than a simple romantic comedy -- Wiseman aims for something much truer and deeply honest about modern marriages' Kate Braithwaite, author

'I know far too many Luisas and Lukes, making this all the more painfully real' Raven Haired Girl

'A serious, sobering and thought-provoking story ... a painfully real read with flawed characters and plenty of heartbreak' Bookaholic Confessions

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781460705902

Rowena Wiseman

Rowena Wiseman writes contemporary fiction, young adult and children's stories. She was recently named as one of the 30 most influential writers on Wattpad. Rowena’s blog 'Out of Print Writing', about writing and publishing in the digital revolution, has been selected for the National Library of Australia’s archive program PANDORA . She works in the visual arts sector and lives on the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria.

Book preview

1

It was my brother Chris’s fortieth birthday party, and I was in the kitchen helping my sister-in-law prepare salads. I was chopping spring onions when I saw Jarvis walk through the back gate. He’d grown a beard, so at first I wasn’t sure it was him. I asked Melissa, ‘Is that Jarvis?’

‘Yeah. He’s finally coming along to something,’ she responded. I watched through the window as Jarvis greeted my brother with a hefty handshake and a six-pack of ciders. It must have been at least a dozen years since I’d seen him, but it appeared now that my long-ago crush had left a tiny cavity in my heart. Distracted, I turned my attention to grating carrots for the Ottolenghi sweetcorn slaw, but ended up grazing my knuckle.

An hour later, after we’d eaten, I was sitting on the back deck. My best friend, Hattie, had just left when Jarvis walked up and sat beside me.

‘Hey there,’ he said, cautiously.

‘Hey.’

Greetings dealt with, an awkward silence fell.

‘I always wondered what had happened to you,’ I said at last. ‘I haven’t seen you for years.’ My voice felt trapped in my throat.

‘I’ve been around. It seems I prefer my own company to most people. I was curious about you, though. Your brother said you’re married now.’

I pointed out my husband, Luke, and my son, Max, who were over by the shed. Luke was standing with his arms crossed, watching Max hurl water balloons at his cousin Thomas.

‘I always took you as a free spirit,’ Jarvis said, smoothing a crease in his pants. ‘I thought it would’ve been hard for you to settle down.’

Gathering words seemed to be like catching fairy dust in the air. ‘What’s that Coelho quote? If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It is lethal.’ I had a strange urge to show him that I wasn’t living in domestic bliss, that my window was open to the fragrance of adventure.

He smiled, his mouth betraying his serious, thoughtful eyes. His plain blue shirt was buttoned all the way up to his neck, his beard was obsessively neat, and his chunky black-framed glasses reminded me that he read more than the sports section of the newspaper. With my nerves expanding in my chest, making breathing difficult, I cursed myself for being a mouth-breather. My words came out as though they were colliding with a road train. ‘What are you doing now?’ I finally managed.

‘I’m a sculptor. Well, working at an abattoir pays the bills. But sculpting’s my thing. I’m working on a major piece to enter in the McClelland Sculpture Award. Fourth time lucky, perhaps. I’m thinking maybe it’s my artist’s statement that’s letting me down: I can get carried away with my writing sometimes.’

‘I could help you, if you like,’ I said, skidding over my own enthusiasm. ‘I’m an editor. Words are my thing.’

‘Really? That would be great.’

‘You can email it to me.’ I reached into my handbag to get out my purse, but pulled out Max’s cricket box instead. ‘Oh, this is Max’s . . . He played cricket this morning; I don’t always carry dick-protectors in my bag. Joys of being a mother — you end up with all sorts of crap in your handbag. It used to be sultanas or Matchbox cars—Ah, now I’m rambling . . .’ Jarvis’s laugh was as confident as steel.

Eventually, I found my purse and took out my business card. My hands were trembling just slightly as I handed Jarvis my card.

‘Luisa, let’s go. Max is all wet,’ I looked up to see Luke’s face staring down at me impatiently.

‘It’s only water, he’ll dry off,’ I said, my neck feeling flushed.

‘He’s soaked,’ Luke said. Then he leaned in and said, ‘Thomas is a bully. Let’s go, he’s not being nice to Max.’ I knew the real reason Luke wanted to go was that he expired at social functions somewhere between two and three hours. He’d make any excuse to get back to the comfort of his own home; to a TV programme he liked, his feet on the coffee table, and four squares of Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate at hand.

‘I’ll email you,’ Jarvis said, half waiting to be introduced. But Luke was in a hurry, and didn’t care to meet whomever I was talking to. No doubt he was already imagining his feet up on the coffee table.

‘Nice to see you,’ I said to Jarvis, gathering my handbag up off the ground before trailing after my husband pathetically. I left the party forgetting my salad bowl, but carrying a new seed of pleasure in my otherwise routine life.

2

One email from Jarvis led to another, and another, and before long his messages were sustaining me like an umbilical cord. After a few weeks he dropped a bomb on me. Luisa, I have feelings I shouldn’t have. I knew exactly what he was saying, because I felt it, too. I weighed up the consequences overnight before typing my reply. I feel the same. It’s horrible and wonderful. Let’s not lose our heads. I have a son and I don’t want to do anything silly. I wondered whether I should leave the message at ‘I feel the same’, but it felt important to say the rest. I was a package; I had a lot riding with me.

In the following weeks, I told Jarvis I’d never imagined myself as an adulteress. He promised not to put pressure on me, and said he understood that I wouldn’t see him in person because I didn’t want to get physically involved with him. He said he’d wait for me; I could take my time. He said he knew that we were born to be together, that it would happen when the time was right, and if it wasn’t right yet he would wait.

Sometimes he didn’t say much at all, he simply sent me a link to a song, a quote from a book he was reading, an image of a work he was sketching. I truly became his the day he sent me a line from a John Donne poem: more than kisses, letters mingle souls.

3

Hattie was the only person I could tell, apart from my therapist. She was going through her own crisis, having recently broken up with her fiancé, Brad, and discovered she had a thing for women instead. We were on the same page, both realising that our lives had somehow become frauds.

Even so, Hattie was shocked when I first told her that I was falling in love with another man. ‘Jarvis?!’ she said, slamming her coffee cup down on its saucer. ‘Your brother’s friend?’

‘Yes. I’ve always had a thing for him.’

I hadn’t expected I’d be able to shock her, given her own situation.

Hattie leaned forward. ‘Have you done anything about it?’

‘No, we haven’t done anything. We just got talking at Chris’s fortieth. Jarvis is a sculptor now. I said I could edit an artist’s statement he was writing for an award submission. It started off professionally, but then I guess it crossed a line. Before long we were emailing each other every day. Then he said he woke up one day drenched in feelings for me. And I told him I was feeling it, too. He says he’ll wait his whole life for me. You’ve never heard such passion.’

‘But what about Luke?’

I sighed. ‘We’re stale. It’s like every interaction we have together leaves me feeling disappointed. He hardly even notices me, and when he does it’s because we’re debating whether to order an extra green waste bin or something. I can hardly remember what it was that we liked about each other.’

‘Really? I thought you two were solid.’

I leaned back in my French bistro chair. We were sitting in Degraves Street, having seen a film in town. It was a mild autumn night, and the laneway was full of people drinking red wine or coffee under the warm glow of outdoor heaters. I was feeling uncomfortable: while I wanted to tell Hattie what was going on, I was scared of being judged.

‘And what about Max? What will this mean for him?’

Aaah, the very thing I didn’t want to talk about.

‘I’m not running out on Luke tomorrow; I’m not that heartless. And I’m not going to have a tacky love affair. In fact, I’ve got a fabulous idea. I’m going to find someone for Luke, too — a lover — and maybe she’ll turn into his new wife one day.’

‘What?’ Now Hattie was shocked. She was looking at me as though I was completely mad.

‘No, Hattie, listen . . . If Luke has an affair, he’ll be more likely to be reasonable during a divorce. He’ll be kinder to us financially, because he’ll feel like he owes us. Plus, I want some say in the type of woman who’s going to play a role in my son’s life. There are too many nutcases out there. I don’t want to leave anything to chance. Or to desperation.’

Hattie screwed up her eyes and rearranged her hair off her face. I had the feeling I wasn’t winning her over to my great idea.

‘This is what’s really bugging me. Max is a sensitive boy and he’s only eight, he’s still got his teens to go through. So if we’re going to have some blended, extended, Brady Bunch-type of family, I want to help create it. The new woman can’t have more than two children — Max will get lost in a bigger family — and she can’t be too authoritarian or a know-it-all. She has to be creative and cultured, and she mustn’t be needy or selfish and view him as competition.’

‘Wow, you have thought about this. I mean, of course you’ve thought about it — you’re an organised kind of person.’ Hattie began scooping out the remaining froth from her latte glass with a silver spoon. ‘But are you sure you can’t make it work with Luke?’

‘I’ve tried, really I’ve tried. But it’s like you having discovered a taste for women — it’s hard to go back, isn’t it?’

She thought for a moment. ‘I guess so.’

‘I can’t just switch it on again for Luke. He’s lost his shine. It’s not his fault, but he’s not Jarvis, and he never will be.’ I sat there with a lovelorn expression on my face to rival Juliet Capulet’s. ‘So, what do you think? Could my idea work?’

‘I guess so,’ said Hattie.

Her enthusiasm for my plan was underwhelming. I’d come up with it a week before, and I thought it was the most obvious thing in the world. It was hard to believe other people weren’t doing this!

‘And Jarvis says he’s going to wait for you?’ Hattie asked with a frown.

‘For as long as it takes. He says he’s my Florentino — you know, from Love in the Time of Cholera? He says he’ll wait until he’s eighty if he has to.’

Hattie sighed and put her hand to her chest. Finally it appeared as though I’d stroked a heartstring.

‘He reads García Márquez? No wonder you’ve fallen for him.’

‘He reads everything: Calvino, Carver, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, even Nietzsche. Last week he was reading the memoirs of Casanova. It’s like we’re soulmates.’

That warm feeling surged through me again, like a wave crashing over rocks, washing away my doubts. I felt sure it was going to be okay. I was moving towards my oasis, the joy that was waiting on the horizon, so close I could almost touch it.

‘You’ve got it bad,’ Hattie said light-heartedly, rising from the chair and placing a black velvet cocktail hat on her head. ‘I thought I was having a midlife crisis.’

We walked to Flinders Street Station arm-in-arm. The city was buzzing. Horses trotted down Swanston Street, wearing feathered caps — a little like one of Hattie’s creations — pulling carriages of tourists or new lovers. How I wished I was a young lover with nothing at stake.

4

The morning after I had told Hattie about Jarvis, Luke was standing in the kitchen, preparing sandwiches for Max’s school lunch, and I was cooking some mushrooms in bubbling butter in a pot on the stove. ‘There’s a conference in Sydney that it might be good for me to go to,’ Luke said.

‘How long?’

‘Only two nights.’

‘You should go,’ I said eagerly. Luke never went away, he was always around: always there to pick Max up from school, always hanging around the house on Sundays. In fact, having lost touch with many of his more adventurous friends over the years, he rarely went out anymore. His ideal Saturday night was ordering takeaway from one of his four favourite places and (legally) downloading a movie with a minimum four-star rating from Margaret and David.

‘You might meet a nice lady friend,’ I teased. He raised his eyebrows at me. ‘You know, a bit on the side.’ He wasn’t enjoying this taunting, he was a straight and narrow guy, but I couldn’t stop myself. ‘It could be good for you, especially because we’re not getting any.’ We were two bits of stale toast that had forgotten how to butter each other. And there was no jam or honey being spread either; we’d lost all our sweetness over the years.

‘I’d understand,’ I said to him, assessing his eyes to see whether he would give me the permission to do the same. ‘I wouldn’t blame you.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he asked, glancing over his shoulder at Max at the kitchen table, innocently eating his Weet-Bix.

‘You know, we’re still young. You’re still good-looking enough. We’re a bit dead together. Don’t you ever worry about just being with me for the rest of your life?’

‘No, I don’t.’

I was sensing that I should shut the hell up. I was premenstrual and tired from the night before. I’d had too many wines with Hattie and was probably too fragile for a conversation like this one; one that should actually be carefully navigated rather than steered through icebergs at a hundred miles an hour without any thought or pre-planning.

‘Affairs can be good for relationships,’ I said. ‘Way back when, the aristocrats in Europe were expected to have affairs. It kept marriages together. Men kept mistresses for their own good health.’ Apparently this was true — my therapist, a very clever lady, had told me this just the previous week.

‘Why the hell are you telling me all this?’ He bent down to put the milk back in the fridge, his work pants riding up his calves.

‘I don’t know. Don’t you ever get bored? Wonder what else is out there?’

He straightened up, closed the fridge and looked at me directly with those green eyes of his. ‘No, I’m not bored. I’m content.’ I could see that I’d hurt him, and he didn’t deserve it. He was a good man, and I was a bitch who had somehow fallen out of love with him and discovered someone