topic/infidelity

“Do you want to be with him instead of Harris?”

“No.” That was still easy and true. “He’s not a rock like that. I love him as my lover. I just want to dance with him, I don’t want to raise a child together.”

“So maybe it’s okay.”

“And fuck him. And kiss him. And lie in bed in his arms all day.”

“If you were a French man this would all be perfectly acceptable,” Jordi said.

She was a really good friend.

On the day after our arrival, I received a cable from New York City, informing me, by a prearranged code, that I had a new son by a woman not my wife. I can’t remember that I was flustered. I went to a press conference and did my best to “push” my film.

Molly enjoyed the hotel, the excellent food, the service, our being alone together. She spent her afternoons playing solitaire and planning for the new apartment we’d bought, which was being prepared to her specifications. Since our children, all except the youngest, had gone their ways, Molly thought of this apartment as our last home and final resting place.

Molly, of course, knew nothing about the recent event in the city where our apartment was being prepared and what had led up to it. An expert dissembler, with a lifetime of practice, I’d covered my tracks perfectly. What had been most effective in the deception was that I no longer gave a damn if I was caught. The singular aspect of the situation was that I took it in stride. I’d become so accustomed to a life in layers that nothing could penetrate my indifference to personal danger and possible disruption. I’d anesthetized myself.

Catherine wasn’t laughing anymore, but looked as if she might start again at any moment. “It’s funny,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “There are things you’re just positive will happen to you. Then there’s that second when you realize, Jesus Christ. Maybe they won’t.”

She was watching me closely. Her eyes, I noticed, were bloodshot. I shifted the ski pole under my leg.

“Have you ever had a feeling like that?” she asked.

“Not exactly,” I said, uneasy. “I guess I have most things I wanted.”

“You’re lucky.”

I felt her envy, sharp as the tang of her cigarette smoke on the cold air. We were far apart, I realized then, and this filled me with relief.

Catherine flicked her half-smoked cigarette into a snowbank. “Of course,” she said, “getting what you want is only the beginning. The hard part is holding on to it.”

I was annoyed. “How do you know?”

Catherine took a while to answer. She seemed deep in thought. “I just know,” she finally said.

I am telling myself that I did what I was told. Claire told me to stay. Jane wanted me —she pulled me towards her. Why am I being so weak? Why am I blaming the victim? I ask myself, did you ever think you should stop yourself or someone else but in the moment you couldn’t or didn’t? Now I understand the meaning of — it just happened. Or — it was an accident.

She trips fussing about the dormitory, bothering other girls for puffs off of stale Woodbines, nylon-repair kits, sparrow-bright war-wisecracks passing for sympathy. Tonight she'll be with Jeremy, her lieutenant, but she wants to be with Roger. Except that, really, she doesn't. Does she? She can't remember ever being so confused. When she's with Roger it's all love, but at any distance—any at all, Jack—she finds that he depresses and even frightens her. Why? On top of him in the wild nights riding up and down his cock her axis, trying herself to stay rigid enough not to turn to cream taper-wax and fall away melting to the coverlet coming there's only room for Roger, Roger, oh love to the end of breath. But out of bed, walking talking, his bitterness, his darkness, run deeper than the War, the winter: he hates England so, hates "the System," gripes endlessly, says he'll emigrate when the War's over, stays inside his paper cynic's cave hating himself. . . and does she want to bring him out, really? Isn't it safer with Jeremy? She tries not to allow this question in too often, but it's there. Three years with Jeremy. They might as well be married. Three years ought to count for something. Daily, small stitches and casings. She's worn old Beaver's bathrobes, brewed his tea and coffee, sought his eye across lorry-parks, day rooms and rainy mud fields when all the day's mean, dismal losses could be rescued in the one look—familiar, full of trust, in a season when the word is invoked for quaintness or a minor laugh. And to rip it all out? three years? for this erratic, self-centered—boy, really. Weepers, he's supposed to be past thirty, he's years older than she. He ought to've learned something, surely? A man of experience?

Barbara is the name of the waitress at the Arkade. She’s tall, and taller when she puts her hair up. Two coffees and two glasses of Rotkäppchen, please, Barbara. A celebration. It’s their third 11th day, their trimensual anniversary, and if Katharina had a wish, then she would wish that fate never ran out of elevens. Nine years, three years. How long will she and Hans be good for? Is what they have nothing but a so-called affair? Will he be sitting with someone else in ten years’ time, showing off a snapshot of her, Katharina, and saying: that was Katharina, she was my lover? How to endure the way that the present trickles down moment by moment and becomes the past? So why did he show her the photos? Of course he’s been with other women, he’s been around that much longer. Even she’s had three or four others, plus Gernot. What makes her so jealous is the secrecy around the other women, the trouble Hans must have gone to to keep each relationship going: rubbing the lipstick off a wineglass after a meeting in his apartment, or telling Ingrid, we were working late in the office, using her hairdresser’s appointment for a phone call or taking advantage of a moment at night when the wife’s gone to bed to whisper into the telephone: O darling, O beautiful, O sweetheart. The way he does now, with me. Little Ludwig was revolted by it, she recalls. And isn’t he right to be? And now she’s a part of this tissue of deceit. And even thinks of these little treacheries of Hans’ as a distinction. Not long ago, when Hans went to the cinema with Ludwig, she sat three rows behind them, just to have some proximity to the man she loves. In the general crush when everyone filed out, Hans brushed against her hand.

None of them could know, none of them could visualize Mexico City and the first unbelievable year, driving down to the coast for the weekend, through Cuernavaca, her bare legs with the sun lying on them, her arms, the dizziness and submission he felt with her as before a forbidden photograph, as if before an overwhelming work of art. Two years in Mexico City oblivious to the wreckage. It was the sense of godliness that empowered him. He could see her neck bent forward with its slender nape. He could see the faint trace of bones like pearls that ran down her smooth back. He could see himself, his former self.

— I talk to her, he admitted.

— And your first wife?

— I talk to her. We have three kids.

— He left her, Adele said. Casanova here.

— Some women have minds like cops, Phil said to no one in particular. This is right, that’s wrong. Well, anyway . . .

He stood up. He had done everything wrong, he realized, in the wrong order. He had scuttled his life.

— Anyway there’s one thing I can say truthfully. I’d do it all over again if I had the chance.