Among the Dead (3 page)

If she didn't leave immediately, and he expected her to forgive him, there would still be two or three days of terrible sensitivity. Yes, and there was something even to be happily anticipated in the prospect of suffering, an exhaustion, a bath in strong feelings that would leave both of them raw, open, and then, with a little help of a few more good days, they might even be tender with each other. If Anna demanded proof of his love, he would tell her that it was time to have the second child he had always refused her. What more could he offer her? And when she asked him, when she told him to look her in the eye and promise fidelity, would he mean it, in his heart, what he promised? Or would he say, ‘I hope so'? And if he equivocated, no matter how much hope was carried on his sincerity, would that be too clever a way out of the pledge? If he wanted her forgiveness, if he wanted the marriage to last, he would have to swear his faith, and he knew that he would have to make this oath in the court of eternity.

Besides, he was tired of seeing his family through gauze. He wanted to be a man, and if being a man is doing more than what is expected, he would tell the truth. He would tell his wife the truth all the time, otherwise how could it be the truth? Something in the threatening power of this vow made him drunk; he saw himself standing on the mountain of truth, hands joined with the righteous. And then he felt the tug of a wonderfully happy thought, that the reward for this perpetual exposure, this unveiling, would even lead to an increase in their passion. Was that selfish? No.

He said goodbye to Anna and Madeleine after breakfast.

‘Where are we going today?' he asked his daughter.

‘Where are we going?' she said. They had shown her pictures of Mexico, and she had chosen the bathing suits she wanted to take.

‘We're going to Mexico,' he told her.

‘We're going to Mexico,' she said. Was she repeating what he said because she was learning to talk, or was she making fun of his condescension? He patted her on the head and then bent down to kiss her nose. He kissed Anna goodbye.

‘I'll see you at the airport,' he said, and he was out the door.

It was such a dreadfully mechanical moment, three robots brushing their electrodes for a data exchange. Everything will be different in a few days, he thought. We will be alive.

At work in the morning he spoke to his brother about their store in La Jolla, and whether the manager might be stealing. He looked at the plans for an expansion of their Palm Springs store. He spoke to a friend at a record company. These are the things I do during the day, he thought.

On the way to lunch he worried about what he would tell Mary. The affair had a boundary: Mary knew that he wasn't going to leave his family for her, and he knew she wasn't going to leave her husband. Why were they together like this? It continued for the excitement, he supposed. It was fun to be naked with a new person, but he pursued this affair with the same flat affect that he felt with his family. He was going through the motions of lust. He would have to tell her the truth just as he had to tell Anna the truth. If he lied to Mary, then whatever he told Anna would also be tainted by that lie.

Mary was already at the table in the restaurant. He thought that she looked ordinary and tired before she saw him. She was drinking a glass of grapefruit juice, or orange juice from yellow fruit, and he wondered if, knowing that she was going to hear him say what was inevitable, Mary had ordered something with vodka in it. She was staring at the table, and her skin looked loose on her face, but when she saw him, she smiled, and it bothered him to know that he made her happy. Her feelings for him made her beautiful. Of course, she was probably scared to be in public with him, even though this was not a restaurant where anyone from their lives usually went. They had never run into friends here. Once they had kissed at the table, but neither was happy when the kiss ended. Their fear of attention reminded them of their guilt. Had she thought of her husband at that moment? During the kiss he imagined his wife and daughter coming into the restaurant and seeing him with Mary Sifka. He probably did love her. But what could they do with that love? If he left Anna for Mary, and Mary
left her husband for him, would they get married and stay together until they died? Or would they leave each other, and then end their lives with a third, or a fourth, marriage, or no marriage, end their lives single, alone? And could he leave his daughter?

He kissed her on the cheek and she didn't seem to expect more. They ordered their food.

‘When is your flight?' she asked.

‘At three.'

‘You're cutting it close.'

‘I'll make it.'

‘It should be nice there.'

‘Yes.' It was dangerous territory under any circumstances: they didn't talk to each other about their families; neither complained that home was insufficient. He didn't really know anything about her husband.

He wanted the opening line to be right, but the impulse to say, ‘This is going to be difficult,' was almost impossible to resist. Maybe it was the right thing to say, and it was the truth.

‘This is going to be difficult.'

‘Oh dear.' She knew immediately what he wanted to tell her.

‘I think ...' He stopped. Already he was proposing the breakup in terms of a debate. If he
thought
they should break up, she could say that she
thought
they shouldn't, and they could argue about it, and perhaps she could persuade him. There was no other way to say this quickly, and be done with it. He checked his watch, a gesture she observed, and now he was ruined for her, he had revealed to her his new attitude towards her, that she was an expedient, something in the way. Of what? His wife, or a new mistress, the woman who could be perfect, the woman he had not yet met.

‘I'm going to Mexico so that I can connect with my family again. I've been feeling all wrong for the last few months. I love you, but I didn't know how hard it is to split the heart between two women. Three if you include my daughter, and I do.' Writing the letter to Anna had given him a new sense of pleasure of words, and it was easy to talk, it was a pleasure to talk. He could have gone on, but it was only fair to give her a chance.

‘So it's over? Is that what you're telling me?'

‘Yes.'

‘I guess it's for the best.'

‘There's no good way to end something that's probably wrong to begin with.'

‘I probably love you too, you know.' She said this defiantly, as though it was something he might have overlooked, her feelings, that he could hurt them, that she would miss him, that she needed him.

‘What are we supposed to do?'

She smiled. She was letting go of him. ‘We're supposed to say that it couldn't have lasted for ever, we had fun, whatever it was that we needed we got, and now it's time to eat, and not talk about it any more.'

The food was at the table. He asked for a saké; it didn't matter if he got a little drunk since he was taking the limousine to the airport. It was time for the vacation to begin.

They were so comfortable with each other that he thought they might now be able to continue as friends, but he knew that Anna would never permit this. Why not, though? No, the temptation would always be there. Would it, really? Yes. Was it there now? Yes.

It was time to say goodbye. The conversation drifted along. The relief he felt when she let him break it off – and what had he expected, what scene, what tears? – had followed its own course and now he looked at Mary and knew that he could leave her and not miss her. So perhaps he had not loved her either. The letter he had written to his wife, for all that he meant it as he put it in his suitcase, had been composed in a spirit of some fraudulence, since he had not yet told Mary Sifka that he was ending the affair. He should have broken with Mary first, because the letter, as he wrote it, said that the affair was over.

What if he had died of a heart attack in his sleep, last night, before he had been able to say goodbye to Mary, and Anna had found the letter? She would have assumed that he had said his goodbyes to Mary, but Mary would not have known about his change of heart unless Anna showed her the letter, and would Anna think of doing that, something so cruel, while she was grieving? Or would she show Mary the letter so she could understand just who it was she had shared a child with? But when would she have discovered the letter? It was in a pocket in
his
suitcase, not hers. If his heart had stopped that day, she would have unpacked the case, or someone else would have done the job, maybe his mother, and would they have found the card slipped into a pocket
with nothing else? It might have stayed hidden for months, or longer, or for ever. Perhaps on a vacation years later, perhaps with a new husband. Perhaps she would remarry, and her new husband would pack the suitcase she had never thrown away, and at the hotel, when they got there, she would have unpacked both her suitcase and his, and found the letter. This was an interesting scenario, thought Frank. Anna reads the letter two years after I am dead, but does not realize the note is from me and thinks that her second husband is making this confession. She confronts him, she screams at him, and he says he doesn't know what she is talking about. She shows him the letter. ‘But I didn't write this.' ‘Then who did?' she says. ‘Look at the handwriting.' She looks. ‘Frank,' she says. ‘Frank?' he asks.

Perhaps she remembers a woman at his funeral who stood in the back, and lingered at the grave as the family walked away. And that was Mary Sifka. Does she remember when he had packed the suitcase?

Does she remember the trip to Mexico cancelled by my death?

But if she found it, he trusted Mary to behave well, not to embarrass him, even if he was dead. After all, this was why he had loved her. And his wife, when she found out about the other woman after he was dead? How could any woman, reading the letter he had written, not love him even more? He was happy that the letter was so careful and transparent. In a way, he thought, I should die now, tonight. Then I would fulfil my obligation to her, to make things right.

He said goodbye to Mary on the sidewalk. He wished now that he had, not now, but earlier in the affair, bought her something precious, a necklace or earrings. But a gift on parting would have been vulgar, a kind of severance pay. Yes, it was part of her attraction that she wanted nothing from him – and anyway, how could she explain an extravagance to her husband? – but now he regretted never having given her a relic, even something small and insignificant, for her to treasure secretly. So they had their memories. So be it.

She gave him a shy, patient smile, and when he saw that the moment saddened her, he hugged her and kissed her on the lips. His tongue left his mouth and flicked her teeth. So she was opening herself to him too. They stopped. He knew he was cheating a little, already bending his resolve to be pure for Anna for ever, but he decided to forgive himself. He would even tell Anna about this
goodbye if she asked him; it was here that his problem, his weaknesses, could be brought into their life; after they had repaired the marriage, why couldn't he tell her about his temptations and his struggles? He couldn't expect himself, or he couldn't imagine Anna expecting him, never again to look at another woman, or even meet a woman and fall a little bit in love, and have her fall a little bit in love with him. What was to be expected was self-discipline, and an eventual cessation of uncontrollable desire. Why that? Because as the years passed, and there would be years, the attention to only one person, the devotion to the other, would focus the heart, and in the end become an obsession. This would be love, he told himself, the great project of his life, now that he was rich, what other work was more important? Charity? Yes. I will give to good causes, thought Frank. And not only the popular charities. I will give money to the library. I will give to the poor.

It was two o'clock when he left the restaurant, and the traffic was slow. He hated himself for taking so long to say goodbye to Mary. And he could still taste her, still smell her. Well, if I get there just in time, Anna will be angry with me for almost screwing up, and she won't want to kiss me, not on the mouth. She won't taste Mary. She might smell her. He thought of asking the limousine driver to smoke, to cover Mary Sifka's scent, but he would have had to leave the back seat and sit next to him, and how could he ask for that?

Frank asked the driver for a cigarette. The driver gave him one, and Frank lit it. He had once smoked for a few years, in college, and he took a few puffs, and let the cigarette burn near him, for the smoke, or the ash, to settle on his jacket and in his hair. He didn't want the cigarette on his breath, but Anna, in the frenzy of getting ready for the flight, would not likely feel romantic. He was sure she suspected something; the rush to take the trip had betrayed a necessity greater than the need for relaxation.

He took another puff of the cigarette, and the little charge of the nicotine, a pleasant dizziness, bought him a moment's happiness. This is a drug, he thought. No wonder people still use it. He took a few more drags and put the cigarette out. Will I smoke again? It was impossible to say.

The traffic was slow, and the plane was leaving at three o'clock. At two-thirty he knew he would never get to the airport in time. At 2.45 he was still a mile away. He would never make it. This was going to be a mess, since Anna had his ticket and his passport.
He would have to ask her to find someone at the airport to hold them for him, and who knew if that kind of request could be honoured? There was a phone in the back seat of the limousine, and he called Information for the phone number of the airline. There was no number for the terminal, but the reservations clerk gave him another number. He asked to have his wife paged, and explained why, although he wasn't asked for a reason.

Anna was on the phone quickly, in less than a minute.

‘I have your ticket and passport, and you're going to miss the plane,' she said, without any introduction. It bothered him that she didn't even ask how he had found her. How had she known it was him? Who else could it be? People knew they were going away, but nobody knew which airline they were flying.