Serial Monogamy
Authors: Kate Taylor
COPYRIGHT © 2016 KATE TAYLOR
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisherâor in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agencyâis an infringement of the copyright law.
Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Taylor, Kate, 1962-, author
Serial monogamy / Kate Taylor.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN
978-0-385-68562-7 (bound).â
ISBN
978-0-385-68563-4 (epub)
I. Title.
PS8589.A896S47 2016
C2015-906516-X
Â
C2015-906517-8
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
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v4.1
a
For Joel
T
hese pages are for you. I want you to read them. And after that it's up to you, the two of you, to decide. File them away and forget about them. Burn them if you want. Publish them if you think that's useful. I had no specific plans for them; I suppose I just wrote them for myself, these various bits and pieces. But I have brought them together here for you.
My darling daughters. It breaks my heart that I cannot know who you are as you read this. My bright-eyed Goli. My wavy-haired Anahita. What did you study? Did you stay in Toronto? Have you chosen professions? Is Goli still my gentle girl? Anahita, the stubborn one? Have you found love? Perhaps not yet. You are still young. There's lots of time and when it arrives it's always complicated. You'll see.
Please don't think I wrote this to take revenge on your father. If he betrayed me once, he has also stuck by me again and again. And don't let these pages poison your
relationship with the woman who I imagine is now your stepmother. I bear her no ill will for events that already seem long in the past. Whatever I may have written here, the truth is that I have too little time now to indulge in extraneous emotions. But I want you to know me and I can think of no other way.
Has your father kept these pages safe for you? Are they still as crisp and white as they were when the printer churned them out yesterday and I squared them into a tidy pile? Or are they now yellowed and dog-eared, timeworn for all their waiting? I suppose you still have paper, do you? Perhaps printers have been replaced by some lovely new technology. Just six or seven, you girls would laugh at me. Egged on by your father, you would joke that I barely had a phone and then would forget to take the pathetic thing I did have when I went out for a walk and nobody could reach me. You couldn't believe that when I was a girl phones were anchored to houses and we would venture outside the range of communications for hours every day. I suppose by the time you read this all those devices will be implanted directly in the brain. There are some things I really don't mind missing.
I am a writer. Of course, I am a mother, your mother. And a wife, your father's wife. A lover before that, I suppose. But before it all, underneath it all, I am a writer. I don't know if you will have read any of my books. There's a whole shelf of them in the living room. All the different editions. It wasn't my ideaâI would have happily kept
them in my officeâbut your father liked to see them on display. He was always amused by the notion I had been translated into Swedish.
But perhaps the shelf is not there any more and you all moved to another house. Did the books make the move? Did he take these pages with him?
I wonder if you will remember that I was writing that story for
The Telegram
, during those good months we had before I got sick again, a serial for a newspaper, a historical piece. It was a bit of a crazy idea. It won't be sitting on any shelf, but I have included it here. And then I've added some other chapters along the way, things I've been working on that were never intended for print.
I hope you'll understand as you read it. Sometimes I misjudge my audience, tell them stories they are unready or unwilling to hear. Do you remember how I tried to tell you tales from
The Thousand and One Nights
? It's an impossible project, you'll understand now; the Nights are filled with sex and violence, sadism and sodomy. They are wholly inappropriate for little girls, but I so wanted you to know about Scheherazade, the woman who could save her own life and those who might have followed her simply because she could seduce a man with a story. I wanted you to have that piece of your father's culture; he said it could wait until you were teenagers at least, but I wanted so much for you to hear those tales. Maybe I somehow knew that I would not be there to tell them to you when you grew older.
It's been a while since we've had a session. I am too tired these days, but remember how we would squeeze together into the bottom bunk of your pink bedroom: Goli squished against the wallâhow you would squeal, Goli: “You're squeezing me!”âand Anahita giggling as she all but fell off the edge of the bed. And I would lie in between you, repeating the tales from memory and bowdlerizing like mad, turning vengeful tyrants into loving husbands and giving the magic genie a merciful disposition, until I would see your eyelids growing heavy and I would stop wherever I was.
You always loved the ending, always the same ending, “â¦and so, Scheherazade stopped her story there. The King begged to hear more. âWhat happens next?' he demanded. But Scheherazade would not be swayed. âIt is almost dawn, you must sleep,' she said. âI will tell you the rest tomorrow night.'â”
I
t was a warm night in late spring. 2010. The end of May, I think, or maybe it was early June. It was already hot; we'd turned on the air conditioning and it blew gently into the room, a motor sounding a deep note somewhere in the background, far away. I was wearing some skimpy little nightgown or T-shirt and had pushed the sheet down to my midriff. With one hand I was lazily caressing my chest, my fingers sliding underneath the thin cotton. Perhaps I was wiping the day's sweat away from between my breasts; perhaps I was vaguely thinking I might like to have sex with my husband. Maybe it was both, that sense of end-of-day achievement giving way to nighttime pleasure. I can't remember exactly why I was feeling my breast but afterwards, after it was known, after it became a thing that was out there between us, my recollection of that disastrous first moment, that horrible, sickening sense that something was wrong, was always associated in my mind with the
not unpleasant feeling of the slightly damp skin beneath my caressing fingertips.
“I have something to tell you.” My husband sounded unrushed, unalarmed. I remember those first words but not how he phrased what came next. The student, the one who was doing the research. They had become close. He had crossed a line. I do remember those words. He had crossed a line. It sounded so benign, so insignificant. So I had to ask, “What does that mean?”
“You know,” he said. “Gone, well, further than⦔
He was having an affair with one of his students. I lay there numb, shocked, unable to believe the gap that had opened in my life, the gap between five minutes ago, the pleasantly minor drama of an early heat wave, the barely registered sound of the air conditioning, the drops of perspiration on my fingertips and the lazy thoughts in my mind, and now, him, our girls asleep across the hall, and me. Who was I? Well, clearly not someone he was about to have sex with. I gathered up my pillow and stumbled out of the room.
“Oh don'tâ¦Don't go. Surely we can talk this through,” he said. I had no idea what words he thought we might have used. I lay on the living room couch, covered by a shawl I found in the hall closet, until finally at dawn my tears began. I cried for weeks.
I spent the next day wandering the house in a daze, throwing myself on the bed, weeping until the sobs shook my
body, eventually snuffling them back and getting up, making tea or a sandwich, running a bath or trying to read the paper, until the sight of Al's shoes in the front hall or the thought of picking up the girls from daycare would set me off again. Al had said nothing more that morning and had left with the girls, walking them to school before heading to the office, so we had not exchanged another word except for “Have you seen Anahita's backpack?” and “You can leave the milk out. I want some in my coffee.” I thought the twins, who were in their final weeks of kindergarten, would surely notice their mother looked anxious and their father vacant; I choked back tears, bit my lip and answered their prattling with monosyllables. I could not imagine any adult walking into that house and not seeing that things were terribly wrong. In one night our seemingly happy, well-regulated home had somehow metamorphosed into something melodramatic and tawdry. In the weeks to come, I would often wonder if Goli was crying because she sensed something was amiss or Anahita was in a temper because she knew her father did not love her mother and then be brought up short when Goli tearfully confessed that Emma was no longer her best friend or Anahita revealed she did not think she would ever learn to read. Their lives, their joys and their fears occupied them utterly; mercifully, they could barely glimpse the pains and pleasures of the adults around them. Meanwhile, I felt oddly distant from the events of my life, no matter how much pain they were causing me.
I was in a fog of disbelief and at certain moments I would split in two, my one half leaning back and observing as my other half gave in to tears. It was only on the second day I realized that, if this was actually happening, I could at least call Becky.
“He's what?”
“Having an affair.”
“With who?”
“Well, you may know her. One of his grad students.”
“Oh, not his research student! Jeesus, Sharon. Not our Al. I thought we could trust him.”
“Apparently not.”
On the other end of the phone, Becky sighed deeply and made the little clicking sound she does when the world has disappointed her. She has a sunny, optimistic view of things, so the world, a place of darkness and pessimism, often disappoints her. She never says so, never likes to utter a judgment of anything or anybody, so she just clicks her tongue. She must be the most patient and forgiving person I know, always giving everybody the benefit of the doubt. So very different from me.
Becky has been my closest friend throughout my marriage. I met her in grad school when she was the newest hire in Al's department, imported from the States to improve the gender balance and teach American lit. She is small, red-headed and soft-spoken; a peaceable character who
others rely on and often underestimate. She is the kind of person who is always getting praised for bringing cookies to meetings instead of her breakthrough work on Nathaniel Hawthorne's guilt complex. As the department grew fonder and fonder of her committee work, the chair seemed to forget very quickly they had hired her because she was the most promising English Ph.D. in her year at Berkeley. I had lectured her on her professional strategies often, but she just shrugged and said, “I like making cookies.” It was hypocritical of me anyway, since I relied on her too, if not for her baking then for talking me down and balancing me out. This phone call was just the first of many filled with my lamentations and her words of comfort.
“How old is Al now? Forty-five?”
“Yeah. Forty-five.”
“And she must be twenty-six or twenty-seven. Men are such clichés.” She paused, then added, “It'll blow over.”
“Do you think so?”
“It's not going to last. She'll make him miserable.”
“Right now he's making me miserable.”
“She'll start to push; he'll get panicky and cut and run.”
“Maybe she is already pushing. He chose to tell me about itâ¦He's not trying to hide it. I think he's going to leave.”
“What about the girls? He's not going to leave the girls.”
“I don't know. I don't think he has even thought about the girls.”
“Well, he will. He'll think about leaving, moving in with a twenty-five-year-old and then he'll realize what it might mean to the girls and he'll go buy a sports car instead.”
He didn't buy a sports car and he did leave home, despite his daughters' tears. But then he came back. What choice did he have under the circumstances?
