The Heat of Betrayal (2 page)

We are often attracted to whatever runs contrary to our nature.

Did I see in Paul – this rail-thin, six-foot-four-inch artist with long grey hair, his black leather jacket and black jeans, his black hoodie, his Converse high-top sneakers – the possibility of change; a way out of the humdrum that so much of my life had become?

During our first professional meeting Paul made a joke about his financial affairs being somewhat akin to a Jackson Pollock painting, and then said that he was the living embodiment of the French word
‘
bordélique
'. When I looked it up after our meeting I discovered it meant ‘like a brothel' and ‘all over the place'. Then there was the way he was almost apologetic about his ‘financial absurdities', and how he needed someone to take him in hand and ‘turn me into a proper functioning grown-up'.

‘The books will tell all,' I said.

What the books did tell me was that Paul Leuen was accruing serious debt. I was direct with him:

‘You like to show yourself a good time. The fact is, your income from the state university leaves you – after state and federal taxes – with around fifty thousand a year to live on. Your house has been mortgaged twice. You could be facing a tax bill of sixty thousand plus penalties if the IRS has its way. And since you have virtually no savings . . .'

‘So what you're saying is – I am a disaster area.'

He was all smiles as he said this; a certain bad-boy cheerfulness as he acknowledged his imprudence, his need to mess up. I knew this smile: my father was all charm and wit and an inability to get the bills paid. He was a so-called entrepreneur; a corporate guy who could never hold down a job, who always had a get-rich-quick scheme on the go, who made me and my mother move five times during my adolescence in his search for the next executive position, the next business scheme that was going to finally get us ‘on easy street' (an expression he used so often). But that reversal of fortune, that manna-from-heaven moment, never materialised. My mother found ongoing work as a geriatric nurse everywhere we went, infirmity and ageing being two of life's great constants. She kept threatening to leave my father whenever he had another setback, another financial loss that propelled us to yet another city, another rented house, a new school for me, a sense of ongoing uncertainty counterbalanced by the fact that my dad loved me and I just adored him. He was the sort of guy who, when he had money in his pocket, would indulge me and Mom relentlessly. God knows I preferred my father's absurd sunny outlook on life to my mother's bleaker perspective, even though I knew that hers had a certain credibility. When my father died of a sudden heart attack the first week I started at the University of Minnesota I was beyond crushed. Phoning me with the news, she masked her distress with steely coolness. Telling me:

‘There was a will. You'll get his Rolex – the one thing he never hocked, along with his wedding ring. But don't cry for him. No one – not you, not me – could have saved your father from himself.'

But cry I did, long into that night and many thereafter. After my father's death, my mother and I began to detach from each other. Though she was the parent who got the bills paid and somehow kept the roof (or series of roofs) over our heads, I never felt much in the way of love from her. I still spent part of most major holidays with her and dutifully called her once a week. I remained the responsible daughter. And embraced, in my own way, her rigorous standards when it came to financial caution and saving for a rainy day. But when, just a few years ago, I got together with Paul – and finally brought him to meet her – my mother afterwards was bluntness itself:

‘So you're finally marrying your father.'

‘That's not fair,' I said, my head reeling from the slap-across-the-face nature of her comment.

‘The truth is never fair. If that makes you think that I am being, as usual, merciless, so be it. Don't get me wrong – it's not that I don't find Paul charming. He's charm itself. For a man eighteen years your senior he's not in bad shape, even if he dresses like Woodstock was last week. Still, he does have a certain charm. And I know how lonely things have been for you since Donald walked out.'

Donald was my first husband – and it was me who ended our three-year marriage, as she well knew.

‘I left Donald,' I heard myself telling my mother.

‘Because he gave you no choice but to leave him. And it destroyed you. And now you are with a man much older and as irresponsible as your father and—'

‘Paul isn't as irresponsible as you think.'

‘Time will tell.'

Mom. She died a year ago; a stroke from out of nowhere that killed her at the age of seventy-one.

Turbulence in the cabin. I peered out the window. The plane was trying to break cloud cover, and rocking with its downward shift towards land. The man in the aisle seat shut his eyes tightly as the plane did a dangerous lurch.

‘Do you think the pilot knows what he's doing?' Paul whispered to me.

‘I'm sure he has a wife and children he'd like to see.'

‘Or not.'

For the next five minutes the aircraft was like a prize-fighter having a bad night, as it took ongoing body blows from the storm enveloping us. The children's cries hit new levels of discord. Several of the masked women began to keen. Our neighbour's eyes remained tightly shut, his lips now moving in what seemed to be silent prayer.

‘Imagine if it was all to end right now,' Paul said. ‘What would you think?'

‘If you're dead you're not thinking.'

‘But say this was the moment before death hit. What would your last thought be?'

‘Is this line of questioning supposed to distract me from the fact that the plane might crash?' I asked.

Paul laughed; a laugh instantly silenced as the plane seemed to go into momentary free fall. I gripped the armrests so tightly my knuckles felt as though they just might perforate the skin. I kept my eyes slammed shut until, out of nowhere, order and calm descended on the world. We had hit calm air. Moments later, the runway was beneath us.

I opened my eyes. Paul's fingers remained gripped around the armrests, his face now the colour of chalk. We reached for each other's hands. Then my husband spoke.

‘I wonder – is this all a mistake?'

THE IMMIGRATION HALL
at Casablanca. Controlled chaos. Hundreds of new arrivals being corralled into two different lines: one for non-Moroccans, another for the rest of humanity. Every historical epoch – from the Middle Ages to our current hyper-connected, cyber-world reality – seemed to be represented. There were sharply suited businessmen and women everywhere, at least half of whom, with their Italian tailoring and their black iPhones, were from North Africa. There were backpacker types, all grungy and twenty-something, looking spaced and eyeing the suits with zonked amusement. Just in front of me was a gaunt man in a dusty brown suit, his teeth blackened by cigarettes, holding a travel document from Mauritania in his right hand.

‘What's the capital of Mauritania?' I asked Paul.

Without a pause he replied:

‘Nouakchott.'

‘The things you know,' I said.

‘This line is insane. When I last came thirty-three years ago, there were no computer checks – the world wasn't as paranoid as it is now.'

‘Zen, zen, zen,' I said, stroking my husband's face.

‘This is Casablanca airport, not some fucking Buddhist retreat.'

I laughed. But he stood there, bouncing from foot to foot, an ongoing fugue of impatience and anxiety.

‘Let's go home,' he suddenly said.

‘You don't mean that.'

‘I do.'

Silence. I felt myself tense.

‘How will we go home?' I asked.

‘Get the next plane.'

‘You're not serious.'

‘I think I am. This is all wrong.'

‘Because of the long line?'

‘Because my instinct tells me – go home.'

‘Even though it was your “instinct” that told you we had to come here?'

‘So you're angry at me.'

‘If you want to go home, we'll go home.'

‘You'd think me a loser if I did that.'

‘I never think you a loser, my love.'

‘But I know I am a liability.'

Liabilities. That was the word which ricocheted around my head when I discovered, several weeks ago, the extent of his debts, despite his having promised me, months earlier, that he would curb his spending habits. There was a knock on our door one Friday evening around six. A man from a collection agency was standing on our front porch, asking to speak with Paul Leuen. I explained that my husband was at the gym. ‘Ah, so you are Mrs Leuen? Then you might be aware of the sixty-four hundred dollars that your husband owes to the Vintners Wine Society.' I was speechless. When had he bought all that wine, and why hadn't I seen it anywhere in our house? The collection agent was explaining that the Wine Society had sent close to ten letters demanding ‘a conversation' about the unpaid sum which had accrued over two years. Now they had run out of patience. If the bill wasn't settled forthwith, legal action would follow, and could involve a lien on our home.

Instead of going inside and getting my cheque book (as I had done on several previous occasions) I simply said:

‘My husband is at the Gold's Gym on Manor Street, about five minutes from here by car. Ask for him at the reception desk – they know him. And—'

‘But you could settle this matter straight away.'

‘I could, but I won't. You need to speak directly with my husband.'

Repeating the address of the gym I excused myself and closed the door. As soon as the collector had driven off I went into our bedroom, packed a small weekend bag, and called my old college roommate, Ruth Richardson, in Brooklyn and asked if I could use her fold-out sofa for a few days. Then leaving Paul a note –
The wine debt must be paid off by the time I am back late Tuesday night
– I got into my car and drove the seven hours south-east to the city I had always promised myself I would one day call my own. I kept my cellphone off and spent the next four days trying not to bore Ruth with the cocktail of anger, guilt and sadness that was coursing through me. Ruth – a professor of English at Brooklyn College, divorced, no kids, disappointed in love, wickedly funny and hyper-cultural (‘High art is God's apology for men,' she's often noted) – was, as always, a great friend. She steadied my resolve when I suggested that perhaps I should check in on Paul, see how he was bearing up.

‘When he landed himself in debt last time,' she said, ‘what did you do?'

‘I dug into my retirement fund and found the ten grand to get him out of trouble.'

‘What did he promise you in return?'

‘You know very well. He admitted that he's got a sad pathological compulsion when it comes to spending, spending, spending . . . and he promised to curtail it.'

‘A compulsion that is eating away at your marriage. It's all so sad. Especially as I rather like Paul.'

‘And I do love him madly, despite this one very bad habit. He still makes me laugh. He is so bright and engaged and intellectually curious. He still thinks me hot – or, at least, that's what he says all the time.'

‘Still trying for a child?'

‘Of course.'

When I met Paul three years earlier, I was thirty-seven. Within six months of declaring our love for each other, and talking about the wondrous possibilities of a shared future together, I delicately raised the fact that I did not want to pass through life without becoming a mother; that I was entering the now-or-never phase. I knew that I was bringing a certain degree of ‘beat the clock' pressure to our relationship, and said I would perfectly understand if Paul felt this was all too much too fast. His response astounded me:

‘When you have met the love of your life, of course you want to have a child with her.'

Yes, Paul was a great romantic. Such a romantic that he proposed marriage shortly thereafter, even though I told him that, having been there once before, I wasn't pushed about a return visit. But I was so swept up in the wonder of finding love at my age, and with such a talented and original man, and in Buffalo, that I said yes. He did say that though he realised the clock was ticking we needed some time together before becoming parents. I agreed to his request, staying on the pill until last autumn. At which point we seriously began to ‘try' (what a curious verb) for a baby. We went about the task very robustly – though sex was, from the outset, one of the aspects of our marriage that always worked. It wasn't as if we were having to motivate ourselves into making love every night of the week.

‘You know, if I don't get pregnant naturally there are other options,' I said six months later when nothing had happened.

‘You'll get pregnant.'

‘You sound very certain about that.'

‘It's going to happen.'

That conversation took place ten days before the debt collector arrived on our doorstep. As I headed south in my car towards Brooklyn, my cellphone off, my piercing sadness about Paul was underscored by the realisation that he was my last chance at having a baby. And that thought . . .

Ruth splashed a little more wine into my glass and I took a long sip.

‘He's not your last chance,' she said.

‘I want a baby with Paul.'

‘That's a definitive statement.'

Friendship is always a complex equation – especially a friendship where it had been agreed early on that we would never sugar-coat things; that we would speak what we felt to be the truth.

‘I don't want to be a single mother,' I said. ‘If I can get him to just accept that he has certain obligations . . .'

‘Paul had problems with money before you. Even though you've tried to organise his personal finances, he refuses to play smart. At the age of fifty-eight, he is not going to have some sort of epiphany and transform himself. He is what he is. Which therefore begs the question – can you weather his ongoing recklessness?'