The Red Book (12 page)

A man might appear to live a conventional life—to adhere to the standards of what her French colleagues call “
métro/boulot/dodo
” (subway, work, sleep)—but his thirst to break free, she fears, can never truly be slaked. It lies waiting for an errant hair tucked behind an ear, a tender word. Under certain conditions, it may even take action. And then, if the conscience feels bad enough for setting the beast free, the subconscious might even do what Bruno’s did six months earlier and send an e-mail meant for his young Irish
stagiaire
’s box into Jane’s.

My dear Siobhan,

I write to tell you, simply but perhaps without eloquence, that I must to not see you once more. This time with you, during the absence of Jane, was been full of tenderness without doubt, and you maked the difficult period bearable, but the fact stays that I still love her. Enormously. And yes, I know that we have spoken of this, my libertarian beliefs concerning monogamy, but these beliefs are in battle counter to my emotions as I have been feeling like an asshole fucking you while she is elsewhere caring for her mother. It is cliché, this behavior, embarrassing also and not correct to Jane. In plus, it is irresponsible professionally, especially on my part. So I say, it is sufficient. It must to end now.

With all my affection,

Bruno.

“With all my affection?
All
my affection?” Jane screamed, transcontinentally, into Bruno’s cell phone, the day she opened the e-mail with its ironic subject header, “
La fin inévitable
”—the inevitable end—which she assumed would be another one of her partner’s eloquent missives, in French, on death and dying: the kind he composed without fail every morning before dutifully walking Sophie to school. “You couldn’t have just written ‘
Bises’
and been done with it?” Jane knew that “
Avec toute mon affection
”—with all my affection—was simply a standard, informal closing in a French letter, but somehow, translated into English and placed at the end of such an e-mail, the words appeared sinister, cruel.

“It means nothing. I was breaking it away from her!” said Bruno. “I was telling her to go for a hike.”

“To take a hike,” Jane corrected him.

“
Peu importe!
I was telling her I loved
you
! If you read it again, without the shock of the news, you will to see that clearly. Look, I know, it was a terrible mistake.
I make
a terrible mistake, and I am really very sorry about it, very sorry, but can you not see beyond the words themselves to the sentiments they express?”

“
Why?
” Jane cried, the closing diphthong stretching well past its normal length then breaking into a staccato and purposefully muffled sob. Muffled, because she wanted to keep her mother’s path to death free from the kind of debris a daughter’s sudden marital crisis might engender.

“Sweetheart,
ma biche
—” Bruno tried to say, but Jane cut him off.

“Fuck your sweetheart!” she said, realizing the double entendre only after she spat out the words.

Since then, they’ve been sleeping in separate beds, though Bruno has often begged her, on his knees, to reconsider.

“Jonathan?” she now says, handing over a cup of steaming tea and collapsing into her mother’s Eames chair, the one Claire moved from her office into the house when she realized she was too sick to continue seeing patients. “Let me ask you a serious question. What would you do if you found out Mia had started sleeping with one of those old boyfriends you claim you don’t fear?”

“Wait,” says Jonathan, blowing into his teacup. “Do you know something I don’t know?”

“No, no, no,” says Jane, smiling. “Sorry, nothing like that. I’m just . . . curious. Theoretically, what would you do?”

“Well, I guess that would depend on how I found out about it. Does she tell me or do I discover an errant text on my own?”

“You discover a text. Or maybe, you know, she accidentally sends you an e-mail she meant to send to her lover. And that’s how you find out.”

“Jane, your mother was a shrink. You know there are no accidents when it comes to this stuff. If Mia sent me an e-mail meant for her lover, some hidden part of her must have wanted to confess. So let me ask you . . .” He takes a quick sip of his tea. Allows the silence between them to linger, for to break it will inevitably take his heretofore uncomplicated relationship with his wife’s friend to a more intimate level. “Have you been cheating on Bruno? Is that what this is all about?”

“No, not at all,” says Jane. “It’s . . . it’s just that he . . .” Her bottom lip, which has for the greater part of her life remained—as friends point out with mild concern behind her back—virtuously stiff since childhood, begins to quiver.

“Oh, Jane. Janie. Come here. Oh my God, I’ve never seen you like this before. Get over here.” He pats the spot next to him, and Jane moves from Eames exactitude to Pottery Barn comfort. She sinks deep into the sun-faded cushions and accepts the weight of Jonathan’s arm. They remain in this position for what feels like an hour but is probably only five minutes, both of them silent save for the sound of Jane’s sobbing and the almost imperceptible rustle of Jonathan’s hand rubbing small circles on the shoulder of her blouse. “Talk to me, Janie,” he says finally. “I’m as discreet as they come, I don’t charge by the hour, and trust me, I’ve dealt with this same situation with my friends a million times.”

Jane cracks a small, quivering-lipped smile. “Come on. A million?”

“Okay, maybe nine hundred, ninety-eight thousand, but you know, at my age? In my line of work? There’s a ton of extracurricular hanky-panky. If there weren’t, no one would ever buy
US Weekly
. In fact, one friend of mine, this actor who, back in the day before he became a bloated, aging caricature of himself, used to get laid left and right, just said to me recently, he said, ‘Enjoy all of the tortured stories of lust, betrayal, and divorce while you can, because soon enough all you’ll be hearing about are doctors’ visits and death.’ ”

Jane can tell, by the way Jonathan’s face falls, that he immediately regrets bringing any reminders of death into this house. “No worries,” she says, patting his knee. “It’s good advice. Keep talking.”

“Right, so, okay, just think about it for a minute. I mean, I don’t know the exact statistics regarding the incidence of infidelity for the general population, and I doubt anyone does, but if you think about it, it’s a self-selected group who are brave enough to rat themselves out to the scientists who count such things, right? But let’s just assume that if fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce, there have got to be
at least
fifty percent of married people schtupping partners they’re not married to, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. I guess. But Bruno and I aren’t married.”

“A technicality. Besides, whose fault is that, Miss I’m Never Getting Married Again, hmm?”

“Okay, fine. Mine.”

“He’s been wanting to make an honest woman of you for
years
.”

“I know, I know.”

“So strictly speaking, whatever happened—him, you, I don’t give a shit whose body part went where—is kosher, right? Except of course we both know it doesn’t feel that way. Now spill.”

So Jane tells Jonathan the story of the errant e-mail; how she received it the afternoon of her mother’s death; how the grief from these concurrent events has been so traumatizing, she hasn’t been able to eat, to sleep, to work, to be a present mother to Sophie (Jonathan
had
noticed the extreme jut of Jane’s clavicle bones and the circles under her eyes, he tells her, but he’d chalked it up to grief over her mother); how Bruno has all but thrown himself on the ground to try to win back her love, once even hugging her calves as she was putting on her shoes to beg for her forgiveness.

After the recitation of these facts, Jane recrumbles back into the crevice of Jonathan. And though the embrace is not sexual, by any means, its comfort strikes her in the same deep, primal place where love lives. She wonders to herself, as she has wondered many times before, why so few men are able to exhibit this level of empathy, to grasp the inner workings of the female psyche so effortlessly. Before the stray Siobhan e-mail, Jane thought she’d won the empathy jackpot with Bruno. He even does the dishes and folds the laundry. Without being asked.

“Jane,” says Jonathan, pulling back, taking another sip of his tea. “I’m going to tell you a story, but I will simply assume, knowing you, that this stays between us, okay? I just think you should hear it, because I know Bruno, and I know how he feels about you, and I can’t imagine it’s been easy on him while you’ve been traveling back and forth this year, never mind how hard it is, period, when a spouse loses a parent. But first you have to promise, I mean really promise, that this stays between you, me, and the lamppost forever.”

“Of course.”

“As in forever forever. As in, I’ve never told this story, except to my shrink, and I don’t plan on telling it again, probably for as long as I live, unless someone else as near and dear to me as you finds themselves in the same situation, okay?”

“Got it. I won’t say a word to anyone, I promise.”

“Okay, so . . .” He clasps his hands together, starts to absentmindedly knead his palm. “Anyway, it was a while back, when the boys were still pretty young . . .” Now he grabs a pile of old magazines on the coffee table, holds them upright, and taps them lightly on the surface to straighten them before transferring his attention to the next pile.

“Don’t worry about it,” Jane says. “I’m just going to recycle them on Monday.”

“Huh?” Jonathan says. Then he smiles. “What, you mean you don’t want your magazines anally organized by title and date while I sit here stalling?”

“No,” Jane laughs. “I’m good.”
I’m good
: another freshly unearthed addition to the American idiom that strikes Jane with its utter American-ness, with its elevation of virtuosity over indulgence, denial over satiation. Hungry? No, I’m good. Thirsty? No, I’m good. Randy? No, I’m
good
. As if goodness were even a rational counterpoint to need.

“Okay, so . . .” Jonathan takes another sip of his tea and finally dives in. “Fuck it. Here we go, Janie. It was back in 2001, okay? September. Yes, that day. I was in New York. In the middle of shooting
Jack and Jill in Clinton Hill
, but we were actually doing a scene in Manhattan that day. Mia was back home in LA with the kids. The planes hit the towers, all hell breaks loose. Cell phone service went out for a long time. Hours, at least, I don’t remember exactly how long, but it was a significant enough chunk of time that I felt completely cut off, from my family, from reality, you know, from everything. I mean, it was only five
A.M.
in LA, so really Mia had no idea what was going on yet, but I needed to talk to her. As in, I
needed
it, probably more than I’ve ever needed anything. Ever. I kept trying to reach her, you know, just to hear her voice. To tell her I loved her and that I was okay, everything was going to be okay. I can’t tell you how crazy it was there, how completely unhinged I was just being there. I mean, I know you’re used to this kind of stuff with your job and all, but I’m not. As in utterly, completely not. I get unhinged when Whole Foods runs out of my granola, okay? Big sissy here.

“Anyway, we’d been setting up an exterior shot in SoHo at the time, not close enough to get covered in ash, but you know, close enough that people around us were either booking north or crying or walking around in a daze or thinking about hoofing it up north or panicking. We heard this woman screaming. She wasn’t hurt, she was just, I don’t know, traumatized. We could smell the fire. I mean, you could smell it all over the island. You couldn’t escape it. I swear to God, all I kept thinking—in the way your mind goes to its craziest places when the shit hits the fan—all I kept thinking was, huh, this must have been what Auschwitz smelled like. And then that song, what’s the name of it—shit, the one by R.E.M. about the end of the world as we know it—that song kept going through my head in a loop. I couldn’t shake it. I couldn’t shake anything. My mind kept folding in on itself, like a bad acid trip, only it was real. So I finally get a signal on my cell phone, I finally reach Mia, and I blurt out, before she even knows anything—she hasn’t even turned on the TV yet—I say to her, ‘Oh my God, I love you I love you I love you,’ and she’s out there, totally disconnected from what I’m experiencing, unaware of the news, and she tells me she’s so glad I called because we needed to make a decision about which color tile we wanted for the backsplash in our kitchen.”

“Yikes.”

“I know. Total yikes. But okay, understandable, since she hadn’t yet heard the news. But then? Even after I told her what happened, even after she turned on the
Today
show and had absorbed the basic timeline of events, the fact that I was safe and breathing was enough for her. She still wanted to know what color we should use for the backsplash tiles. She even used the word
urgent
, as in ‘The contractor said he needs to know today. It’s urgent.’ I snapped at her, and she couldn’t understand why. I said something like, ‘Whatever the fuck color you want!’ I mean, I never talk to my wife that way. Or, hardly ever. I hung up the phone, and I was just numb. Completely numb. I’d had this unbelievable urge for an emotional connection with the one woman in the world who’s contractually obligated to be that go-to person for me, and she’d failed. As in utterly, completely, miserably failed. So there I am, alone in my hotel room, disconnected, feeling imprisoned by New York and desperate for . . . well, I don’t know what to call it other than love. Clearly I wasn’t the only one feeling that way, because, you know, nine months later, the hospitals were overrun with 9/11 babies, so you know, it’s not like I was a statistical anomaly. Not that I’m rationalizing or anything. Okay, yeah, maybe I am rationalizing. Fine.”

“Oh my God, quit stalling. So, you were in your hotel room and . . . ?”