A Small Indiscretion (11 page)

T
HE DAYS AT
the Mermaid Inn merge together in memory, but I do vividly recall waking the first morning after your accident beneath the scratchy white sheets. I remember staring at the stains on the ceiling and listening to the roar of traffic on El Camino Real, a sound that seemed to lay the fact of your accident on my chest like a stone.

I got up and dressed quietly, letting your father sleep. I walked in the already-warm morning to the Starbucks. There was a woman standing at the counter barking out one of those ridiculously precise and long-winded orders, a nonfat decaf triple-shot mocha, extra hot, no whip, or some such thing. While her “coffee” was being prepared, she went outside to check on her dog. By the time I’d ordered my coffee, she was back. She took a sip of her drink and made
a face. It didn’t taste at all like it normally did, she told the barista. It tasted all chocolate and no coffee, and was the barista certain it was decaf, because usually they do such-and-such to the decaf, and usually it doesn’t look like this, and, by the way, could she have some water for her dog?

The barista apologized to me for the long wait, and handed the woman a cup of water. She stuck her finger in it, and made another face. “It’s really not like me to be fussy,” she said, “but this is awfully warm. Do you think you could get me some cold water for my dog?”

It occurred to me that not so long ago, my concerns had been like hers—trivial enough. But I had been set straight about what could go wrong in a life, and you were lying in a hospital bed with a compromised kidney, and I couldn’t waste another minute. So I pushed my way through the glass door, leaving the coffee I’d paid for behind.

T
HE DAY AFTER THE NIGHT
I met the man with the crumbling tooth, I was sick with the worst hangover of my new drinking life. I forced myself to sit at my desk, typing the final revision of the costings for the bid, sneaking away again and again to the bathroom to be ill. The hangover never ebbed, even as the day did, even as the windows darkened and Malcolm looked over at me, pacing and glancing at his watch. Then I heard quick, light steps on the stairs and the door banged open and a woman stood in the doorway.

It was the woman from the photograph on Malcolm’s desk—his wife, Louise. She struck me as less like a woman than a doll, carved in miniature. She had smooth, high cheekbones and small, perfect ears that dangled with diamonds. She had china-white skin and blue-gray eyes and short, shiny blond hair. She wore a blue velvet sequined dress that clung to her tiny waist and flared out at her ankles. On her feet were black patent-leather heels as high as any I had ever seen.

I felt like a giant as I stepped toward her to offer a greeting. But she seemed not to have registered me standing there.

“The engine’s smoking, Malcolm,” she said in a wild, accusatory voice. “I told you last week there was something wrong with the
car. You never believe me when I tell you these things. You hardly listen when I speak to you.”

She turned back toward the stairs. Malcolm raised his eyebrows at me.

“Louise,” he said. “My wife.”

He followed her down the stairs.

I sat in my metal chair, the wind blown out of me. It was so undignified and unnecessary, the way married people behaved. The indiscriminate airing of grievances, the incessant flinging of blame and complaint. Of course, I had no idea back then what a marriage required. How the resentments and oversights and misunderstandings could pile up, sometimes moving ordinary kindness beyond reach. Love piled up, too, if you were lucky, but it seemed to be locked away in a separate compartment, sometimes unreachable when it was needed most.

In ten minutes, Malcolm was back.

“Is the car all right?” I said.

“It was only a little engine oil,” he said, then he cleared his throat. “In any case, Louise wondered if you’d like to come along for a drink. Bit of a party we’re having over at the Photographers’ Gallery, where Patrick works.”

His voice had halted a little before leaping over the name
Patrick
.

“What’s the occasion?” I asked.

“Our twentieth anniversary, actually.”

I could not tell whether he wanted me to come or not. But he was already collecting my coat and holding it open for me. “Louise doesn’t like the idea of you here alone at the weekend. And don’t be put off by her, just now. It’s not that she doesn’t want to get to know you. It’s only the way she is about the car. Any sort of engine trouble puts her into a state.”

I could have refused. I had been refusing Malcolm for weeks. The
invitation had not come from him, though, and I found myself unwilling to turn Louise down. There was something else, too. I had begun to feel, as the afternoon wore on, that an alternative to sleeping off my hangover would be to drink it off. I could not very well go to the pub on my own, after the night before, and I was not so far gone as to drink alone in my room. A party, on the other hand, was ordained. A party might be a reasonable justification for putting off, for another day, the vow I had made that morning never to drink again.

Malcolm slipped my coat over my shoulders and I followed him to their car. Louise sat in the front seat.

“I’m so happy to finally meet you,” she said, turning and squeezing my hand, her small fingers feeling very cold over the hot tips of mine.

I
T WAS NOT
just a few friends, as I’d imagined. It was a fancy cocktail party, and I was hideously underdressed. That was the first hardship. The second was that I was not immediately offered a drink. The third was Patrick—the first sight of him at the bar, the shock of him under my ribs. His dark suit and open collar. His lean body and long legs and long, thin hands. His narrow green eyes and dark, curly hair and marbled skin. His full pink lips. The way those lips moved suddenly into a smile when he saw us, and the way his body leapt into motion. How he rubbed his hands together when he reached us, as if now that we’d arrived, the fun could finally begin.

He was not handsome—his face was too pale and his ears were too large and he was too thin—yet by the time he reached us, the lens through which I’d perceived the world of men had been altered. Malcolm, ten years Patrick’s senior, seemed no longer mature and
distinguished, but staid and used up. Malcolm’s attentiveness was no longer comforting, but overbearing. His voice was too tender, his manner too hesitant, his face too square.

Patrick said something to Louise about the food, which was being passed on trays by servers. Then he said something about the new installation on the far wall, photographs by a little-known but promising photographer—he grinned—Patrick himself. If he’d been not only charming but incontestably good-looking, perhaps he would have been better behaved. He might have been accustomed to his gifts, like old money is accustomed to wealth, and been modest and generous and less careless with others. He might not have been so set on extracting every ounce of pleasure for himself before the game was up.

The gallery proper was upstairs. The party was being held in the café that made up the ground floor, transformed that evening with round tables and candles that softened the sparse white walls. I did not much like the look of Malcolm and Louise’s friends, especially the women. Their features and bodies seemed dragged down by effort and gravity. Louise, on the other hand, looked beautiful, and I was deeply envious of her dress and her shoes.

Malcolm brought me a drink and told me I looked lovely. I did not, at all, believe him. My face felt crumpled and I had a terrible headache and I hated my cheap skirt and shoes. But I kept drinking, and after two glasses of champagne, I began to feel better. Malcolm and his friends seemed not so bad, and perhaps my outfit was all right, and I liked sitting on the bar stool, keeping an eye on Patrick.

Then Patrick himself sat down beside me. He faced away from the bar, toward the room, so that in order to speak to him I had to shift around on my stool until my legs were stretched out beside his.

“You must be bored silly,” he said. He did not ask me my name or offer his, and I assumed—correctly, it turned out—that he had
been informed of my identity and he assumed I had been informed of his.

“I’m all right,” I said. “The champagne helps.”

“And how are you finding your stay here?”

“I’m loving it.”

“Good,” he said. “But you mustn’t spend all your time in London. You must see Ireland, too.”

“You’re Irish?”

“I am,” he said. “I come from Howth, in North County Dublin. I came here for university, initially. Then work. Malcolm has been good enough to give me a place to sleep.”

I replied without thinking, and without checking myself. “And you’ve been good enough to sleep with his wife.”

What had possessed me to speak so boldly? The champagne, which had seemed to reconstitute the drunkenness of the night before, and his knee touching my thigh, and an instinct I had about Patrick, that I would need to act boldly to win him. I would need to be not so much myself as the person I felt inside me who had so far not been unleashed.

He grinned. “You’ve been apprised of that situation, have you?”

“I have.”

“Malcolm told you?”

“He did.”

“You two are on intimate terms, then, are you?”

“Not exactly.”

He looked at me intently. “Well, it’s ancient history, that is. I suppose it was a mistake.”

“Really? I don’t believe you.”

“That it’s over or that it was a mistake?”

“Both.”

He laughed. “It’s true—I don’t really believe in mistakes. There’s
only what you do, and what you don’t do, isn’t there? It was a mistake to the extent anything like that is a mistake. The before and after of it looking differently from each other. In any event, you can believe or not believe whatever you like.”

“Thank you for your permission.”

“You are very welcome, so you are. An odd pair, our Mr. and Mrs. Church. You’d have to feel a bit sorry for them, wouldn’t you? For Louise, at least. Beneath all her fierceness she’s a timid bird.”

I said nothing. I was trying to work things out in my mind, to understand whether Patrick’s sentiment was sincere or condescending, and, more important, whether he was available to me or not. He was watching me closely, and for a moment it seemed he might lean in and kiss me. I felt that would be the right thing, for us to fall upon each other immediately.

“Stand up a minute,” he said.

“Why?”

“Stand up and let me look at you.”

Did I hesitate? I don’t know. Probably I didn’t. I simply stood and presented myself to Patrick.

“You are attractive, aren’t you?” he said, as I sat down again. He spoke as if my appearance were a difficult but unavoidable burden. I imagine it was a line he used with women, a line he’d perfected over the years. But I didn’t suspect that then, and it made an impression.

H
E SHOWED ME
his photographs hanging on the gallery walls. They were black-and-white images with blurred backgrounds, each with a single swipe of color painted by hand. He told me the series made use of an effect called solarization, which was the process of reexposing photographic paper in the darkroom. Areas that had been exposed the least in the original print were affected the most during
reexposure. Silver outlines emerged, and light and dark were reversed.

“I’ve seen a photograph like this,” I said. “At the office. On Malcolm’s desk.”

He smiled. “I took that years ago, when I was an art student.”

He described each image for me, speaking with authority, pointing out how the foreground was transposed against the background, and how solarization, along with the swipe of color, called the subject’s integrity into question, creating what he called dissonance. I didn’t really understand what he meant, and I’m not sure he did, either. If I met him for the first time now, I’d challenge him. I’d think him pretentious. But I didn’t do either then.

Late in the night, he sat down at the piano. I don’t remember what song he played, but I remember Louise watching him, how bright her eyes were and how flushed her cheeks as she smiled. She looked across the room at me, still smiling, and I felt as if I had seen into her soul. I did not know what I was seeing then, but I imagine I do now. Not dashed hopes so much as helpless want. Want like a small dirty creature, waiting all the years of her marriage for a sign. Patrick was not the sign; she herself was, her own blue dress, her tiny waist, her small, round breasts. And her want was not for dogged faithfulness—and not even for love—but for unfamiliar flesh, for bone against her own bone.

T
HE END OF
the evening at the gallery was like my dream of the library cards last summer. I could borrow Patrick for a little while, but I would not be the one to keep him. He was waylaid by Louise, and I by Malcolm, who’d made an elegant toast to Louise early in the evening, then proceeded to get so drunk he shed his usual restraint. Each time he approached me, he was more demonstrative.
He took my hand. He whispered in my ear. He once slipped his arm around my waist and tried to embrace me. I was embarrassed. I was afraid Louise would see us, and I would be blamed.