The Silent Wife

As the novel hurtles towards the murder forecasted in chapter 1, Jodi’s deliberation contrasts with Todd’s repetition of old philandering habits and self-delusion; he does not see his end coming until his last seconds alive. The alternation between their two perspectives heightens the drama, bringing the Tension between Perception and Reality to a breaking point. The narrative voice continues to be clinical and detached, expressing neither disapproval of Jodi’s actions nor any particular sympathy for Todd.

Still, the couple’s shared tendency towards rationalization is on full display. Todd wonders if the itching is God’s punishment for what he’s doing to Jodi, but justifies it to himself by saying that he’s “trying to live his life as best he can,” describing himself as a “generous” and “good” man who “doesn’t hold grudges or kill insects, a man who spends money on water-saving toilets even though big industries in this country waste more water every day than his toilets will save in a lifetime” (274-75). He once again falls prey to the Attraction of Novelty in the form of the waitress Ilona. He decides on the basis of nothing other than his own projections that “Ilona is the chosen one, the one who will save him from the mess that he’s so haplessly fallen into. Ilona—skinny, undiscovered, wary like a cat, credulous like a child, with little sense of her own beauty and power—is the answer to all his problems” (302). Nothing about his actual interactions with Ilona suggests that this is true or even remotely plausible.

While Todd still clings to the Desire for Legacy in the form of both buildings and babies, the incident where he strikes Natasha—even if it is as minor as he claims—presents an uncomfortable parallel with his own father’s violence against his mother: a darker form of inheritance. Jodi, too, becomes invested in Todd’s legacy in the form of the will still written in her favor. The desire to establish herself as Todd’s heir marks an ironic reversal for Jodi. Through her deliberate disavowal of her family background, she has displayed, if anything, an aversion to ideas of legacies and inheritance throughout most of the novel. In this section, however, Jodi sets aside her compunction about agreeing to Alison’s plan, focusing instead on its practical aspects: selling her possessions, making plans to attend a professional conference in a different state. Embracing the idea of having Todd killed enables her to sidestep—albeit in a violent, excessive manner—the ongoing debate about the Drawbacks and Benefits of Marriage; as long as Todd remains unmarried at the time of his death, Jodi will reap the financial benefits of their long relationship.

Jodi’s childhood sexual abuse is also revealed, though without being explicitly articulated, in this final section of Part 1. Her recollection of being abused by Darrell is nested within the recollection of the aftermath of one of her sessions with Gerard. It returns to her gradually, but with the “actual voltage” of physical sensations, and at the time Jodi realizes that she will not be able to maintain the fiction of her perfect childhood—at least not in future psychoanalytic sessions. At the time of this recollection, Jodi had searched for a way to make herself “complicit” because, as she explains, “then maybe she could love him still and nothing would have to change” (287). The language of this rationalization eerily echoes Jodi’s previously-articulated descriptions of her relationship with Todd, even as the acknowledgement of her victimization—the impossibility of her complicity—remains unanswered at the chapter’s end.