Infidelity (17 page)

( CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR )

A toothpaste-blue open-backed gown and a pasty white shower cap for her hair. Aaron in a paper face mask, clutching her limp hand apologetically.

She had consoled him, told him it would be okay, she would be okay, but he had cried regardless, looking haggard under the unforgiving fluorescents.

While he waited he ate from the vending machine and masochistically wandered through maternity.

“Veronica. I'm going to need you to count backward from one hundred for me, okay?” the pretty blonde nurse with the IV said sweetly as the others prepared below.

One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven . . .

Everything was.

Ninety-six, ninety-five, ninety-four, ninety-three . . .

And then it wasn't.

Ninety-two, ninety-one, ninety . . .

It was. Then it wasn't.

“Veronica?”

It was. And then it was gone.

( CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE )

People who commit infidelity all seem to end up in the same shitty hotel room. There's no room service and the concierge charges you a “glass fee” when you bring your own wine in from the Wine Rack on Wellesley. You have to sign a form promising you're not going to smoke, and when you've had enough of that bottle of wine, you contemplate paying the $300 cleaning fee just to take a few hauls off a Marlboro. You remember how you used to tell her not to smoke, but now you no longer care, because it feels like she no longer cares about you. You no longer care about yourself.

The shitty hotel is always in a bad neighbourhood and it is always grossly overpriced. It is definitely across the street from a park where people deal drugs and fuck for money.

The shitty hotel room is not like the grossly overpriced beautiful hotel rooms you made love to her in. There is no room service menu here and certainly no adjacent spa. No terry cloth bathrobes that slip from her shoulder as she raises her glass of champagne or sucks on a strawberry.

Instead there are crack whores on the street outside and screaming white trash children in the fluorescent-lit “dining lounge.” There is a paper bag of bad takeout on the chipped coffee table. You watch the drug deals from the window. You have twenty-two channels and there is no pay-per-view. There is certainly no her. She is “giving you some time and space to think about things” because she knows that your wife has figured things out. The fact that your wife has figured things out has rendered you immediately unattractive.

She knows that really you're figuring out a way to get back to your wife. You're ashamed of this, but it's the truth. You wanted them both the way you wanted them, and you hate yourself for this.

And your wife does not call you, nor does she care where you have gone. There are no emails, no text messages, no smoke signals. She came home and gave you twenty minutes to pack a meagre bag without any indication of when she will let you come back, if at all. She didn't speak. She just hovered over you while you packed, made sure you didn't take anything that wasn't rightfully yours.

So you chose the things you took with you carefully. Just enough to last if she doesn't ever let you come back, but just too little to ensure that you'll have a reason to return.

“I need to pick up my electric razor, Tamara.”

She will ask you to come to the house, the house you once shared, when she's at work, when Noah's at the playground with Amanda, when it is completely empty. She will not want to know that you came and she will not want to know that you looked through old photos and touched Noah's toys and laid down in the bed the two of you slept in together and breathed in the scent of what was once your bodies entwined. The smell faint, because it rarely happened, if ever. But now that you're living in a shitty hotel room in a bad neighbourhood, you remember it fondly. It wasn't thrilling or remotely sexual or even exciting, but it was safe and warm and real, so much more so than this cold hotel room and this chipped wineglass and this moment where you wonder why you bothered in the first place.

( CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX )

“So you're gonna write a whole book about me, eh?” Tamara had said that first night, while draining her third pint.

“For such a little thing, you certainly can drink.”

“There's a lot of things I can do. Likely better than you, anointed one.”

“You need to stop calling me that.”

“Does success make you blush, Mr. Stern?”

“Certainly more than my compliments make you blush.”

“Call me cynical, but I don't trust your lot.”

“Men or poets?”

Tamara laughed. “Probably both, actually. Never trust a man who has a way with words.”

“Would you prefer me a grunting fool?”

“I think there's a dirty joke in there somewhere.”

“You know, Tamara, I think that you may bring out a masterpiece in me,” Charlie said, drunkenly yet with complete sincerity.

“But honey, you just met me.” Tamara stood up, removing her soft grey cardigan from the back of her chair and attempting to thread her arms into it. She stumbled a bit, grasping his shoulder to steady herself. “Thanks for the drinks by the way.”

Charlie realized it was her intention to leave and downed his own pint a little too quickly. His companions had all gone home one by one, each of them giving him that knowing glance of good luck in bringing Tamara back to his place for the evening. He had his mind set on it now and was groping for a reason for her to come with him.

“Hey, Tamara. Do you want to come back to my place and I can read you some more of my poems? There's some new things I've been working on that I think you might like—”

Tamara burst into a fit of laughter. “Oh god. You are joking, right?”

“Well, I just thought, given your new interest in poetry you might want to hear a few more.”

Charlie was embarrassed, but Tamara bent down slowly and touched the side of his face with her soft hand.

“Listen. I'll come home with you, Charlie. And I don't need the promise of poetry to do it.”

( CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN )

“I want custody of Noah. Entirely.”

Charlie and Tamara were seated across the dining room table from each other. So many dinners, so many evenings where they loved or hated or tolerated each other across the same table flashed in Charlie's mind.

“You cut your hair. It looks good,” he said, trying to change the subject, trying to soften the mood.

She self-consciously put a hand to her head, her hair now a full five inches shorter after her own stylist corrected the half-haircut Veronica had given. Charlie took the haircut as a bad sign, a purging of him from her life, when really he should have recognized it as a much worse sign. He hadn't yet been informed that Tamara and Ronnie had together decided his fate.

Charlie had a tumbler of whisky and Tamara a glass of milk. Noah was snug in bed, put there by a beleaguered Amanda, who knew something was afoot but hadn't been officially told. Charlie himself looked dishevelled . . . tired, unshaven, his clothes wrinkled. He smelled bad, a function of his limited access to laundry. She had invited him to the house via email, refusing to speak to him on the phone for countless days, saying they needed to discuss things. Charlie had assumed it would be a moment where he could plead his case to return, but it was evident immediately that the meeting was about dividing assets.

“Tamara, I want to come home.”

“I don't give a fuck what you want.”

“Please. We can talk about this.”

“There's nothing to talk about. I want custody of Noah. I'll let you know when you can visit him.”

“I have no plans to fight you,” he said meekly.

“I want the house. All of it. You can take your records and your books.”

“Tamara. I—I can't afford the hotel anymore.”

“That's your reasoning for coming home? Because you need me to financially support you?”

“No. I just . . . I can't do it anymore. I need to see you. Every day.”

“You just said you wouldn't fight me.”

“Please . . .”

“I spent my whole life taking care of you. Being the dutiful wife. I'm done.”

“I can't do this. I can't do this without you,” Charlie said, on the verge of weeping.

“What is this about? Did Veronica leave you? Did I scare her off?”

“What do you mean? Scare her off?”

“Charlie, don't make this harder than it needs to be.”

“What do you mean, Tamara?”

The horror of what this implied sunk in, and Charlie suddenly realized why he hadn't heard from Veronica. He decided not to press, despite the fact that the idea of his wife meeting his lover was enough to bring on the panic attack that was creeping up his spine.

“I just want to see you,” he said, changing direction.

“Well you're seeing me now and I'm telling you . . . I don't expect any support from you, not that you could provide it anyway. In exchange I want sole custody of Noah. And I want the house. I don't care where you live. Go live with Veronica for all I care.”

“She's not returning my calls,” Charlie said. As soon as he did so he realized the statement was unwise.

“I knew it.”

“But I wouldn't want to see her anyway,” Charlie said, backpedalling.

“Whatever. I couldn't care less. Noah. The house. I'm done supporting you. You can do whatever you like.”

“Tamara. Please. Listen.”

“It's over. Please, if you have anything good left inside you, just let me move on.”

He wondered,
Is there anything good left?

Tamara began to cry, and as Charlie raised the tumbler to his mouth for a final burning gulp, he caught a glimpse of the inside of his wrist.

A tiny tattooed anchor, grounding him to nothing.

( CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT )

Tamara is good. Aaron is good. Ronnie is bad. Charlie is bad.

Noah is good. Noah is better than all of this.

If you want to make a real go of life, to become something accepted and acceptable, and you are bad, it's best to go out and find yourself someone good and fake it. Pretend you are good enough for them and just go with it. Pretending is your only way out. Let their perfection blot out the ugly parts of yourself, hide in their beauty so no one notices how truly flawed you are.

It can be excruciating, sitting through dinners with in-laws and friends (
good
friends) where you pretend to be good and good enough. It will be hard to listen to people tell you how lucky you are to have found someone so good. (Note how they never say “good
for you
” or that the other person is lucky to have found you. No. You were someone who was destined to end up nowhere and instead was rescued by one of
the good
. You are blessed. You are a broken thing that has been salvaged. Remember that.)

Feel blessed.

Sure, you may have an initial feeling of being a fraud. Feeling so alien. And it'll fuck you right up. But that feeling will go away eventually. You'll numb yourself to it in time. In some ways you'll numb yourself to everything. You'll be numb to all the things you wanted before, the adventure you thought you'd carve from life, all the desires for something more than this mundane life of being “good.”

You'll be loved and accepted and an “acceptable member of society.” There will be a quiet calm. You'll go to bed early and wake up early and pay your bills on time and have good, normal, acceptable sex in a good, normal, acceptable bed an acceptable number of times a week. And you'll actually start to believe you're happy. The mediocre will grow on you. The limp way you hold hands in the supermarket. The way you get a light kiss in the condiments aisle for saying something slightly witty. You'll be told you're cute and smart and you'll finally feel worth loving.

You might even begin to forget you're bad. You might even begin to think that it was all a phase, that you're finally ready to be good.

That everything will work out okay in the end.

But the key to maintaining this kind of happiness is to never again get too close to someone who is bad like you were. Even if they're reformed bad, the two of you together will just sink down into your former cesspool, like alcoholics relapsing together is a fuzzy haze of feel-good despair. You'll remember the familiar feelings. You'll remember the freedom of four a.m. whisky shots. You'll remember the way lies tasted sweeter than the truth, and inevitably you'll end up in a hotel room at one in the afternoon with your clothes strewn around the room. You'll end up grasping at something and being completely unsure what it us, you'll just scratch and dig at it until there's nothing left. And despite the destruction, the discomfort, you'll know it's so much better than your current, “good” life. Your credit card will be maxed out and the sheets will be fine and filthy and the taste of him on your mouth sweet. And you will long for him in ways you never even imagined possible. You will yearn and ache and cry drunk in bathroom stalls. You'll break down inappropriately in grocery stores. You'll run away in the middle of the night. You'll never want to come back. You'll crave him in ways you never thought possible to crave another human being. You'll see him and be torn in two.

And he is bad. He is bad for you. He is everything you knew it was best to stay away from. You watch him shake and twitch with anxiety over the smallest, most insignificant moments. You don't know how to help him and you're not sure you want to. He exhausts you. You are exhausted. You want him to love you but you find yourself not caring if he does. You feel yourself creeping from good to bad. You feel the weight of your double life. You feel it all. You feel everything in a way you never did before. And you hate him for it. And you love him for it. You remember the days when you were numb to everything. Where nothing could hurt you. And then all of a sudden he is hurting you. He is hurting you with his distance and he is hurting you with his closeness and he is destroying you by merely being alive.

And he is worth it. And he is not worth it. And you are sorry. And you are not sorry. And you feel guilty. And you don't feel guilty. And it doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter.

It will never matter.

Because you are so small and insignificant and no one will remember and no one will forget.

Because no one really cares that you made love to Charlie in a bed at the Westin Harbour Castle. Or the Garden Hilton. Or the Marriott. Or on his desk in his office. Or in a bathroom stall at Robarts.

And you realize the promise to be good gets you nowhere. Being good gets you unhappy and it gets you lonely and it gets you a life you never wanted in the first place. It gets you loveless. And empty. And numb.

And it doesn't get you Charlie.

Charlie laments the way the waitress fails to bring the creamer, the way his meeting got cancelled, the way the cab driver gets lost on a Sunday afternoon when you both have nowhere to be. Charlie disappears for days, weeks at a time. Charlie doesn't reply, and when you are not available Charlie panics. You loathe the way he looks away from you, fear the way he ignores you when he's with his family, with Noah, but as soon as he is with you, as soon as you wrap your limbs around his and hold on tight, the hate is gone.

Because he is forgiven. Because you are forgiven. This is forgiveness, being this close to love, however far away it seems. This is the kind of forgiveness for being human you cannot get from mediocre handholding in supermarkets. This is the kind of love you were always so sure existed when you were a child. This is the kind of real your mother claimed could never be true. This is better than taking what you are given, which is what you were always instructed to do.

This, with all the lies that keep it together, is more truth than you have ever known.