A Small Indiscretion (31 page)

W
E WENT TO
dinner at a restaurant in Covent Garden. The table was in the center of the room under too-bright lights. He ordered wine. Food was delivered. Crusty rolls. Crab cakes. Sashimi. It sat on the table between us, barely eaten. We drank the wine. I couldn’t remember, afterward, what we talked about. I could remember only that his features were familiar, but that it was as if I had never really seen them before. The angular face. The wiry hair. The large ears. The silver chain around his neck. The neck itself—thin and pale. But mostly, his hands on the table. Elegant hands. Too soft. Too tender. Lacking in vigor, somehow. Not at all like Jonathan’s hands.

Jonathan, whom I loved. Jonathan, whom I wanted. His body in my bed. His hand in mine. Forever and ever and ever.

Was it to be only about bodies, after all?

Skin. Lips. Tongues.

Hair. Faces. Fingers.

Ears. Hands. Breath.

Like Clara’s sketches, the disembodied parts that somehow represented the whole.

What you can stand and what you can’t stand. The material you wish to pull from the bucket of love again and again.

But what you can stand, for the duration, is not the same as what you want right now. It is also not the same as what you wish, for reasons that remain mysterious, to offer up.

He excused himself and pushed his chair back and went to the bathroom. I watched him walk away, struck by the narrowness of his waist and the new stoop of his shoulders. Struck by how he seemed to have grown older over the course of the few hours we’d spent together that evening. Was it wanting that had aged him? Wanting and not knowing whether this time he was going to get what he wanted?

While he was in the bathroom, I began to eat the barely remembered
food. I found I was ravenous. I ate the crusty bread. I devoured a crab cake dipped in thick sauce. I downed my water, then his. I found myself joyous at the return of everyday appetites. I didn’t touch my wine. I didn’t want it now that I saw I no longer needed Patrick to love me.

He sat back down. He seemed sad. It was not because of me. I knew that. It was because he was a lonely man staring down the second half of life.

“Would you like a coffee?” he asked me.

“No, thanks.”

“I won’t have one, either, then.”

“Your choice.”

Then we were outside walking again. He stopped abruptly after a few blocks. “Would you like to come up?”

“Come up where?”

“Here. My flat. This is where I live.”

The sensible thing to do was to kiss him goodbye and return to the hotel on Park Lane, but I already knew I was not going to do the sensible thing. It was not like before. I was not hungry for Patrick’s love. But I was hungry for something—for both getting it and giving it. I was hungry for one night.

I let him take my hand and I followed him into the lobby, then the elevator. He pushed the button and the doors closed. He pressed me against the wall and kissed me with something of his old abandon, and my body responded. It was not just my body; it was the whole of me moving forward. It was as if the terms of our indiscretion had already been negotiated by history, and according to those terms, I would make to Patrick an offering of my years of wanting him. In that way, the wanting would be reinterpreted in the record of my life. It would be no longer a foolish intemperance, but a permanent and valuable gift, and I would finally be able to grant myself a pardon for having indulged it for so long.

The elevator opened. He fumbled with the key to his flat. He made a tense little joke. Inside, he lit candles and put on music and pulled me into bed.

Clothing was removed. I never looked at his body. He insisted on examining mine, naked, from every angle, by candlelight.

“So beautiful,” he said. “Still so beautiful.”

I tried to look inside myself for the gift I’d glimpsed in the elevator, but the terms seemed already to have changed. I found no pardon. I found only hard bones and hard breath and lust. My own lust, I discovered, had a selfish, conscious quality. It was as if I could predict my actions, and their effect, in advance. The licking and sucking. The hard kissing, then the soft kissing. The thrashing. The noises I made. The noises he made in return.

I suppose it was very good sex. Yet it seemed vaguely theatrical, on both our parts. It was hot, but immediately afterward, I was left cold. Whatever novelty had existed between us years before had vanished into this—a story we’d witnessed in a hundred dark theaters on a hundred big screens. Persuasive enough, but you never really forgot it was a fiction. You never really forgot it was all happening for the benefit of an audience, even if that audience was only the body locked on to yours. I willed myself to come, then lay beneath him listening to him moan, and gasp, in just the way I remembered.

Afterward, I knocked a water glass off the bedside table and it shattered on the concrete floor. The floor had an abstract mural painted on it, all sharp edges and angles and primary colors, and it was as if the points of the mural themselves had shattered the glass.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’ll sweep it up. Do you have a broom?”

“Leave it,” he said. “I order you not to abandon this bed.”

But I insisted. I found the broom in the kitchen. Naked, I swept up the shards. It has always amazed me how far broken glass can
fly—and how often you find a sliver long after you’ve swept the mess away.

“That’s good enough,” he said. “I’ll use the Hoover in the morning.”

But I was bent on finding every piece of glass. On whose behalf was I being so diligent? Perhaps only my own. Perhaps I was thinking of the soles of my own feet, waiting, even as I swept, to set themselves in motion and flee.

“You know,” he said, “I never stopped thinking about you. Never in all these years.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Well, it’s true. Such a mistake, letting you get away.”

“You didn’t let me get away. You dropped me for Mary McShane.”

“Mary McShane?”

“The girl from Montmartre. With the tambourine.”

“I know who Mary is,” he said. “But it wasn’t like that between us. She was more like a sister to me. More like a little broken bird that needed a resting spot for a while. She’s married. Big family. Settled in Howth. She’s gotten a bit—how shall I put it—plump.”

“Oh,” I said. “I thought … I always assumed—”

“No. Never.”

Then I asked the question I’d been waiting to ask. I asked if he was the one responsible for the photograph of the four of us at the White Cliffs ending up in my mailbox in June.

He looked at me with wide eyes. “My God,” he said. “You got one, too?”

A
S
I
LEFT THE HOTEL
on Park Lane for Heathrow in the morning, the weather was brilliant and clear. I was quite the opposite. I was filled with regret, not only for the night with Patrick that had just ended, but for the indiscretion with Malcolm so many years before that Louise had apparently wanted to remind me of with a photograph. But why? What was the message she wanted to impart? Not the same message for both of us, presumably, since Patrick’s copy had been treated differently from mine. Both had been subjected to solarization, the reexposure of the print, the same trick Patrick had used on his photographs years ago. But in mine, it was Malcolm and me cast in silver light. In Patrick’s, it was Louise and Patrick.

Stepping from the taxi at Heathrow, I was unsteady on my feet. I had had very little to drink the night before, but I felt as if I had a hangover. I was sick to my stomach, and I felt sullied. I had given away the one impeccable element of my life—the faithfulness of my twenty-one years of marriage.

I bought gifts at duty-free. Aftershave for you. Cuban cigars for your father. London Underground pins and stickers for Clara and Polly. A purple burlap bag with a big ribbon to carry it all home in.

At home, I presented my gifts, and two days later, I told Jonathan. Not everything, not the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but the critical point: I had had sex with another man. Why did I tell him? Why punish him? Why cause him to recoil from me, as if I were a snake he’d found hidden in his bed? Why throw up between us terrible silences, terrible hurt? Why threaten the bedrock upon which I’d built my life?

I operated on impulse, without premeditation. It was as if once again, the terms of indiscretion had already been written, and I could not move forward with my life keeping this secret from your father. I was muddled and unhappy. I had lost track of my place in the world, and the only way to get it back was to have Jonathan put it back for me. I told him because I wanted what everybody wants—to be known. To know oneself, and to tell the whole story of that self, and to be loved anyway.

Someone else, too, helped tip the scales. Polly.

I was tucking her in the night after I’d returned from London. She was telling me the baked ham I’d made for dinner had been “too ham-ish,” and the weather had been too “warm-ish.”

I nuzzled her neck. I nestled her tender, hot body against mine. Then I remembered, again, what I had done, and I felt a constriction in my face. She ran her hand down the center of my cheek. She touched the crease between my eyebrows and the fine lines at the corners of my mouth.

“This is what happens to a mommy’s face when it gets old-ish,” she said. She pressed her finger gently against the lid of my left eye, then my right. I was trying hard not to cry. “And this is what happens to a mommy’s face when it’s sad-ish.”

I closed my eyes against the tears I finally could not keep from coming.

“Love, love,” she said. “So much love.”

It was exactly what I’d said to her every night of her life. Even the intonation was the same. And here it was, word for word, coming back to me. That was the way it was supposed to work, with love.

I rubbed Polly’s back until she was nearly asleep. Then, seeming to remember something, she said, “Mommy, what does it mean, breaking your heart?”

“Breaking your heart?”

“How can you break it if you can’t see it?”

“Oh, it doesn’t really mean breaking. Not like an arm or a leg or a nose. It doesn’t bleed. People say you have a broken heart if someone, or something, has made you really, really sad.”

“Oh!” she said. “I would never, ever, ever break your heart. And you would never, ever, ever break mine.”

“I’d try not to,” I said. “I’d try not to make you very, very sad. But I might. Without meaning to. That can happen. Between mommies and kids. Between mommies and daddies, too.”

“But then you’d say you’re sorry.”

“Yes,” I said. “If I broke your heart, or Daddy’s heart, I would definitely say I was sorry.”

I
OFFERED ONLY
the most relevant details. I told Jonathan I’d run into Patrick at an art gallery. I had to remind him who Patrick was—the man who had been having the affair with my boss’s wife, in London, before we met on the ferry. The one who had come along to Paris. The one we bumped into in the pub in Howth. The one who had told me Malcolm was dead.

“I remember,” he said finally.

I told him about the beer in the pub and the exhibit at the Tate. I told him about dinner. I told him about spending part of the night in Patrick’s flat. I didn’t go into any specifics, but I said we’d used a
condom, which we had. I told him about the broken glass. I told him the whole thing had been pointless, but that I supposed I’d had to get it out of my system. I admitted that I’d always been hung up on Patrick on some level. I told him I did not love Patrick and maybe never had, and that I never needed, or intended, to see him again.

I didn’t tell him about the photograph. I didn’t say that someone—Louise—had sent one to me and one to Patrick. I didn’t explain how Patrick had stood up out of bed and retrieved his copy from a drawer in the desk in his flat, and that I saw that it was indeed the same photograph—the White Cliffs, the chalk down—but differently exposed.

I didn’t tell Jonathan that Patrick said he hadn’t heard from Louise in years. Last he knew she’d remarried and moved to Paris with Daisy.

There were other things I left out when I made my confession. I left out all the nights with Patrick in the blue room in Victoria, and I left out the morning with Malcolm in Paris. I left them out because I had left them out then; I didn’t want your father to think I’d been lying to him since the beginning. And it was all ancient history now, anyway.

Of course it is upon the rubble of ancient history that the present stands.

L
ATER
, I
FOUND
Jonathan on his knees in the garage blowing up a camping mat.

“What’s that for?”

“I think you know what it’s for.”

He couldn’t bear to sleep in the bed with me. I did not try to talk him out of it. I let him recoil into himself. I let him shrink from me into an impenetrable silence. I stepped around him, on the mat on
the floor beside our bed, when I got up to go to the bathroom in the night.

T
HE NEXT NIGHT
, I said, “You’ll get a crick in your neck sleeping on that. Let me give you a pillow, at least.”