After the Fall (20 page)

CARY
•

Cressida phoned me at work. I recognized her voice on the line immediately, though it had been months since we’d last spoken. Even so, the memory of our shared humiliation made me anxious. This couldn’t be a social call.

It wasn’t.

“Kate and Luke have been seeing each other,” she informed me in a voice gone dull with pain. “I had to find out if you knew. I think they’re having an affair.”

I didn’t know, of course, and strenuously denied the possibility. Yet even as I spoke I realized that what she was saying might be true. It would explain so much: Kate’s distraction, her weight loss, our unconceived children.

The voice on the line continued, escalating in panic.

“He denies it, but I don’t believe him. What do you think?”

My mind was racing. I couldn’t answer, just shook my head instead. Cressida went on, in tears now, and I could almost hear the receiver shaking in her grip.

“Can you find out for me, Cary? I have to know. So do you. What are they doing? Is it over? Please.”

I don’t remember answering her; don’t remember hanging up. Instead I went back to my microscope and my slides, forcing myself to finish the job I’d started, squinting down the barrel until my eyes ached and my head pounded. Somewhere, somebody else was also waiting for news, for a verdict that could change his or her life. I concentrated on determining that fate before I allowed myself to think about my own.

KATE
•

The day after I’d said good-bye to Luke, Cary came home from work early. I’d done the same, unable to concentrate on the shards of a clay pot I was trying to date, worried that my trembling hands would drop the artifact or give me away. How was I ever going to work again? I couldn’t concentrate, could barely draw breath without thinking of Luke, going over it all just one more time. Even being at the museum made me ache. There was the phone that didn’t ring, the rug where we’d once lain together, even the blue whale skeleton we’d kissed under on our way out of the building that long-ago night. Relics of our own short history, unclassified, uncataloged. How long till time buried these too?

Cary’s car was in the drive, its hood still warm. I felt a stab of annoyance. I’d wanted to have a bath and a good long cry, maybe call Sarah and tell her what had happened. Now I’d have to continue to act as if nothing were wrong, maintain the facade that was giving me a migraine. For a second I thought about running, but where would I go? The decision had been made, and this was still my home.

I braced myself, then pushed open the door, calling Cary’s name. Maybe he’d want to have a drink—God knew I could use one. I expected him to be at his desk or maybe already busy in the kitchen, but when I finally found him he was sitting in our living room in darkness.

“Are you okay?” I asked, suddenly wary. Something was wrong. The house was cold. Cary hadn’t even turned the heat on.

“I had a call from Cressida today. You remember her. You kissed her husband once at a wedding.”

I stopped breathing, my hand frozen as it reached for the light switch.

“She told me everything. She saw the two of you kissing again yesterday, outside Luke’s office. When she confronted him he confessed it all.”

“All?” The word was little more than a whisper, ash blown on a faint puff of air.

“All of it—that the two of you have been having an affair, sneaking around, deceiving us both.”

Apart from in the earliest days, I had never seriously considered that Cary might find out what I was up to. The possibility had concerned Sarah, but never me. Maybe that’s a common delusion of the adulterer, or perhaps it was because he was just so trusting—always willing to accept every excuse or deception I might offer. I’d grown careless with his faith in me. Now all of a sudden I realized I’d squandered it like change.

“Well?” he prompted as I continued to stand there. The body is an amazing thing, perpetually optimistic in its functioning: though I felt as if my heart had stopped, my eyes were adjusting to the late-afternoon gloom. Cary looked grim and defeated. I cleared my throat but no sound came out. A perilous silence stretched between us. Only words could be more dangerous.

“Talk to me, Kate!” Cary shouted, halfway between a demand and a plea. I thought furiously, trying to come up with a plausible story, a defense of sorts. But it was no use, and suddenly I was too tired for any more deceit.

“I wish I’d told you first,” I said, meaning it. “I was going to, once I got it together in my own head.”

“Told me what? That you slept with him?”

I nodded, ashamed for the first time. The color drained from his face, almost as if someone had pulled out a plug.

“So it’s true?” he cried.

“It’s over now,” I hedged.

“When did you last see him?”

It was dawning on me that perhaps Cary hadn’t really been sure, that he’d called my bluff. Yet he must know something to have made the accusation. Either way I lacked the energy to lie.

“Yesterday,” I whispered, and he buried his head in his hands.

For a long time we stayed like that—me immobile in the doorway by the light switch, Cary slumped in the chair with his face covered. He was so still that I almost feared he was becoming catatonic, but after about half an hour he suddenly rose and walked past me without once looking my way. I heard him leave the house, shutting the door quietly behind him, then start the car and reverse carefully out of the drive. His control scared me more than any show of anger. I began to shake, at first with cold and shock, then with rage. Before I knew it I was dialing Luke’s number. I needed to find out how much had been said and what I could salvage. But more than that, I was furious he had revealed anything at all—that he wouldn’t have me, but wouldn’t let me have my marriage either. I didn’t stop to consider that it wasn’t in his interest to have told Cressida anything himself. She answered the phone anyway, and I hung up without speaking, suddenly terrified.

CRESSIDA
•

I’d moved out within the hour after Cary called back. Had me paged, actually, at the hospital, where I was still going through the motions. Fortunately my shift was almost finished. I cut it short, abandoned the charts I had yet to write up and broke every speed limit to get home. Luke wasn’t there. Still at work, I presumed, though after what Cary had told me anything was possible. Despite everything I was disappointed not to see him. I felt jagged and edgy, off center somehow. I needed to fight and scream, to rid myself of some of the adrenaline. Instead I packed. Clothes for work, pajamas, my cosmetics. Underwear, ten pairs. Who knew when I’d be back?

The phone rang once as I moved about the bedroom. I swooped on it, hoping it was Luke, still feeling strangely high. But the line went dead and no one called back. Not his style. Maybe Cary? I doubted it. He’d been so devastated when we spoke the second time that he couldn’t end the call fast enough. No details, just the facts. That they had slept together, probably more than once. That Kate had said it was over. That he didn’t know what to do. Those were his last words. Just a statement, articulated as precisely as any theorem. He wasn’t looking for advice, and I couldn’t have given him any. But I knew what
I
had to do. Get out, leave Luke. Put as much distance between us as I could.

The house was quiet as I locked the door behind me. I wasn’t sure where I was going, but probably the hospital. The residents’ quarters, or one of the rooms they kept for parents. Of course the house was quiet. It was always quiet. We were rarely home, either together or apart. I was out of control, less myself than I’d ever been. Like Eve must have felt after the fall, I reflected as I drove away. Leaving Eden for a land unknown.

CARY
•

Can I bear to recount the weeks that followed? A year later I could still taste the pain, rising to the back of my throat like bile: wretched, sour and indigestible. I literally felt gutted, as if someone had hollowed me out, removed my core. Patients in the final stage of dementia revert to an almost neonatal state, their brains so atrophied they can only breathe and digest, suck and pout. That was how I felt. I continued to function, but only at the most basic level, my existence little more than a collection of primitive reflexes. If I ate I’d need to defecate straightaway, stomach cramps tying me to the toilet for an hour at a time. If I slept it was only through the work of my reticular activating system, craving some respite from the constant ache. That I breathed at all was a miracle.

For almost two weeks I remained dry-eyed. Then one day Kate came into work, still trying to talk to me. As soon as I saw her I cried. Maybe it was the setting—the only place up until then that didn’t remind me of what had happened or how much I’d lost. I cried in front of Steve and a new lab assistant, tears coursing down my face to smudge notes and contaminate petri dishes. Kate looked as though she wanted to comfort me, then turned and fled instead. Later I blamed the incident on hay fever, and my colleagues were kind enough to appear convinced.

I hadn’t told Steve, of course. I hadn’t told anyone. Partly I suppose it was pride, though that wasn’t the whole reason. Somehow it seemed that talking about it would make the whole thing more real. Thinking about it was bad enough and something I avoided at all costs, attempting to simply live through the pain as if it were a toothache. But to actually articulate the words, to admit out loud that Kate had slept with someone else, been unfaithful, undressed for him when she’d promised me … I couldn’t even continue the thought. There were deeper implications too. I need to care for someone before I slept with them, be involved emotionally as well as physically. I knew that for Kate that hadn’t always been the case, but her track record was small comfort on the long nights that I lay without sleep.

I suppose I could have asked her. Technically we were continuing to live together, though only because neither one of us could work up the momentum to move out. It was never discussed. I had no intention of doing so—it was originally my house, after all—and Kate continued to turn up each night regardless. Instead, I shifted into the spare room. I couldn’t bear to lie beside her every night, angry when she slept, torn when she tossed and sighed as I did. Once or twice she had reached out, tentatively, to touch me, as if testing the heat of an iron. “Cary,” I’d hear her whisper, “I’m so very sorry.” I couldn’t bring myself to respond.

The spare room was comfortable enough. We’d left a double bed in there—ironically, it was Kate’s from before our marriage. Six months ago I had begun referring to the room as “the nursery” and collecting the paraphernalia I was sure we would soon be needing. Stuffed toys, a changing table that somebody at work was getting rid of, a wooden mobile made up of bright black-and-yellow bees. Kate had indulged me, though I realized now that she’d never contributed anything herself. Most nights I’d barely see the room, hiding out at work and often eating there too, staying away until it was so late I could be sure that fatigue would allow me to sleep. But not always. Some nights, no matter how exhausted I felt when I put my key in the door, just being at home rendered rest impossible. Instead, I’d find myself lying in bed staring up at those bees, their incessant and unproductive circles paralleling my own dark thoughts, the red-painted smiles seeming to mock and jeer as they sailed through the air above me.

LUKE
•

I didn’t think Cress would move out for long, and I was right. Trouble was, I hadn’t anticipated what she would do next. One afternoon, about ten days after I had first come home to an empty house, I arrived at one that I couldn’t get into at all. An envelope was taped to the door, my name carefully printed on it in her slanting script.

Luke
, I read,
why should I be the one to leave? I’ve put your things in the toolshed. Call me if you think I’ve missed something
.

I tried the door but my key wouldn’t fit. She’d had the locks changed while I was at work. When I eventually gave up pounding on the door and searching for a window where I might gain access I made my way to the old corrugated iron shed at the end of our garden. Inside were at least fifteen boxes: socks in one, shoes in another, belts and ties spilling out of a third. My T-shirts had been pulled still folded from their shelves; shirts and suits had been thrust into boxes still on their hangers. All my books were there, as was my camera—even a half-empty box of condoms from my bedside table. Despite myself I was almost impressed. She’d been thorough.

For half an hour I lugged boxes from the shed to my car, then gave up when it became apparent that they weren’t all going to fit. Some were quite heavy, and I wondered if she’d had assistance. The question was who? Cress had few close friends, only colleagues, and I couldn’t imagine her asking her family to help. I wasn’t even sure that she wasn’t indeed inside the house, though her car was absent and no one had responded to my hammering on the door. Once or twice as I tottered up the driveway I thought I saw a curtain twitch, heard stifled glee. Well, let her laugh. I’d be back soon enough, and she was the one who would be helping to unpack all these boxes.

Meanwhile, though, where was I going to go? I had no desire to involve my family, nor anyone to whom I’d have to explain the situation. I had plenty of friends—people at the office, guys I’d kept up with from school—but how could I tell them that my trophy wife had thrown me out? After some thought, I decided on Tim. We had shared an apartment in our college years, and I knew he could mind his own business if necessary. Joan would be around a bit, I imagined, and her relationship with Kate might make things awkward. But I’d been Tim’s friend for years, and surely that counted for something. Besides, it was only temporary.

KATE
•

Cary came back later that night. Much later: around three. He opened the bedroom door and I lay there feigning sleep, terrified of a confrontation or questions I couldn’t answer. But he was only checking to make sure I was there, then padded away back down the hall. I heard the CD player being switched on, followed by him gently closing the door to the living room. Such consideration, after all I’d done to him.

He was gone again when I awoke the next morning. Sleep had been a long time coming, then hardly refreshing when it finally arrived. I woke hoping the whole thing had been a dream, that Cary would be already up and in the kitchen as he was every other day, reading the paper and conscientiously chewing his way through a bowl of bran. But his briefcase was gone, the house cold and accusing. He must have left for work in the clothes he’d worn yesterday rather than come into our room.

I didn’t go to work myself. I wouldn’t have achieved anything, and I wanted to be at home in case he returned. Instead, I spent the day watching TV in my pajamas, checking my cell phone hourly in case Luke had called, starting every time I heard a car in the street. I phoned Sarah but only got her answering machine. She was probably off doing kindergarten duty or at a prenatal checkup, and for the first time such a straightforward life appealed. I tried to think about the whole sorry situation, to work out what I should do or say or what I even wanted. But it was all too hard. Easier to let the daytime soaps wash over me, to lose myself in a world where adultery was once again about passion and excitement, not this constant nausea at the back of my throat.

I tried to apologize; really I did. At night, in the dark, when I couldn’t see his face, on the one or two occasions Cary came back to our bed. I’m not sure he even heard, never mind believed me. Soon after that he started sleeping in the spare room. Though it was all a bit late in the piece to be thinking of Cary, I really was sorry. He’d done nothing wrong, and it wrenched my heart to see his face cloud over every time our eyes met. I’d barely cried myself, too numb to shed the tears. Besides, I still wasn’t sure what I was mourning—the loss of Luke or of my marriage.

After three days I went back to work. It was getting awkward to be away any longer and it was time I got on with my life. Luke hadn’t called, and I suspected he wasn’t going to. Cary came home every night, but usually after I had gone to bed, leaving again before I got up the next day. If I made him dinner I found it untouched the following morning, as if he were afraid I would poison him. I left him notes that he didn’t answer, even went to the hospital to try to talk to him there. But nothing got through, and after a week we settled into a routine of living like estranged roommates.

Of course, all the love I’d ever felt for Cary flooded back as soon as I saw how upset he was. That was predictable, I guess, but what I hadn’t anticipated was that it didn’t stop me from loving Luke as well…. I spent my days going through the motions, hoping that one would call while simultaneously wishing that everything could be smoothed out with the other. Walking around bleeding from two wounds.