The Red Book (24 page)

Jane fixates on the cleft in Lodge’s chin, watching this indentation—this absence of chin—become an animated presence as he talks. She thinks of the hole in which her mother was buried; the months-long vacuums Hervé’s work left in his daughter’s life, such that it took Sophie almost a year to understand that her father was actually gone for good and not just somewhere else that wasn’t home.

“. . . I was bereft after she sent me that letter. Completely bereft, as if she’d died. No, worse than if she’d died, because if she were dead, I remember thinking, I could have at least mourned the loss and moved on. Knowing she was still out there, that she still loved me but was unavailable to me? It was, well, some days, it was all I could do just to crawl out of bed in the morning and drive to my office. I was so distracted, I even lost a couple of patients. The more sensitive ones, who could tell their shrink was incapable, at the moment, of listening.”

Lodge remembers the anger with which an elderly widower he’d been treating for nearly a decade stormed out of his office, never to return. “The only thing I’ve ever asked of you, the only thing I pay you for, is your presence,” he’d said. “I have enough walls in my house I can talk to for free.”

“So what happened after my dad died?” says Jane. She remembers the funeral more vividly than her father himself; it was the first and probably only time she saw her mother break down.

“All bets were off,” says Lodge. “We started seeing one another again a few months later, tentatively at first, and then whenever and wherever we could, often in the evening at your house, after you’d gone to sleep. I’d make up some excuse to my wife as to where I was going, which wasn’t hard, since she didn’t really seem to care whether or not I was around anyway. She may have even been having her own affair at the time, I have no idea, and I never asked, though I’m pretty sure my wife was simply incapable of real physical intimacy. It was during this period when I proposed to your mother once again, and this time she seemed game, although still slightly wary about what people would think and how my sons would react and of course how
you
would react, although at that point she seemed willing to throw caution to the wind. She even came around to the idea of the benefits of you having my sons as your part-time siblings and me in your life as a father figure, just to have a little more raucousness and chaos around you. You were such a serious child, always doing your homework days before it was due; always cleaning your room, as if you didn’t want to leave any traces of life behind. Your mother told me you were an obsessive pencil sharpener?”

“Guilty as charged,” says Jane, remembering the unique pleasure of that first electric pencil sharpener her mother bought. How she diligently dumped out the shavings whenever the trap was edging toward full. “Dull pencils made me nuts. They still do. I know. It’s not normal. It’s just who I am.”

“Totally natural reaction to your circumstances,” says Lodge. “But back then your mother was worried about you. For almost a year after your father died—maybe you’ll remember this—you refused to sleep anywhere but in her bed, because you wanted to make sure she was still breathing. I told her I thought you’d actually benefit from having more people in your life. That it was hard for a child who’d already lost so much to be left with only one person standing between her and yet another upheaval. And let’s face it. My sons weren’t learning anything about modeling a love relationship by living in our house. If anything, they were learning a bunch of really bad habits, which of course I’m now seeing repeated in my eldest son’s marriage, and it kills me.
Kills
me.” Zithromax, he thinks. He promised his eldest he would call in a prescription for Zithromax for his grandson. He scribbles a
Z
on a notepad as a reminder. “Anyway, I gradually wore your mother down. She finally accepted my proposal contingent on my divorce. But just as I was getting ready to open the floodgates on all of this with my wife, literally that same week I was trying to compose in my head how I would word my ‘I want a divorce’ speech, Kiki was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Your mother was adamant: For me to divorce her under such circumstances would be heartless. Even cruel.”

“What about the affair itself ?” Jane all but snaps. “Wasn’t that heartless and cruel to your wife?”

“No, Jane, under the circumstances, it wasn’t,” Lodge says gently, accustomed and acutely sensitive to quick and often violent shifts in emotional temperature in his cozy office. “My wife gave up on our marriage years before I did. If anything, my affair with your mother allowed me to be a kinder, less angry person at home, both to Kiki and my kids.” Lodge pauses for a moment, studying Jane’s body language, the way she seems to be curled into herself. “If you don’t mind my asking . . . what else is going on with you right now?”

“Nothing,” Jane says. “Just sometimes I think men are pigs.”

“Men are pigs. Okay. Would you care to elaborate?”

After some prodding, Jane tells Lodge Waldman about Bruno’s affair with his Irish assistant; about finding out, not two hours earlier, that her late husband Hervé, whom she, in her own words, had “held on a fucking pedestal” since his early demise, had had a lover as well.

“Is that when you called me?” says Lodge. “After finding out?”

“Yes,” says Jane, picking a cuticle.

“Janie . . . do you mind if I call you Janie? It’s what I used to call you, remember, that summer we spent in Nantucket?”

Jane recalls the photos of Lodge and her mother, framed so expertly by her father, the light haloing their hair just so. Her dad must have seen it. He must have understood that he was on the outside, looking in. She wishes he were alive today to compare notes. “It’s Jane,” she says. “Please call me Jane.”

“Okay, Jane,” says Lodge. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you other than that what happened between your mother and me, while not uncommon, is its own unique story, with its own specific set of circumstances and absurdities, and to try to draw any overarching conclusions about the nature of man, marriage, or even monogamy, for that matter, from this one story or from any individual story is to miss the point. Narrative is much less about the facts of the tale itself—who did what where, when, and why, which I know are the tools of your trade—than it is about how the narrator frames the story, what she feels about the story, when she chooses to tell it, where and why she tells it, in whom does she confide. Now, from the little you just told me, it sounds like your current partner—Bernard, is it?”

“Bruno.”

“Fine, Bruno. I mean, I don’t have his e-mail in front of me to draw upon, but from your description of it, it sounds as if Bruno was simply reacting to your being gone. I know how much time you spent here while your mother was dying, because I had to make myself scarce whenever you were around.”

“You did? That’s so weird. Why didn’t Mom just tell me about you at the end? What did she have to lose?”

“Your respect,” he says. “She feared losing your respect as she lay dying. She thought you would judge her.”

“That’s crazy! I wouldn’t have judged her.”

“You’re judging her right now.”

“I am not. That’s totally unfair.” Jane steals a glimpse at her watch. She should really be going soon if she’s going to feed all those kids dinner and get to tonight’s festivities on time. There’s never enough time.

“Look,” says Lodge, trying to deflect Jane’s defensiveness. “No one knew. Not my wife and certainly not my sons, and we were intent on keeping it that way. It was our private pact. Your mother did tell a couple of her more discreet friends, and I confided in my brother and in a fraternity buddy from college, but as far as everyone else was concerned? We kept our love a secret for more than thirty years.”

“So, what, you just stayed inside our house and never went out?”

“When we were here, yes. Mostly. Sometimes we’d drive a few towns over to have dinner out. And we managed to take a few vacations together over the years, which was nice.” He sees Jane shaking her head in disbelief. “Look, Jane, it’s not as strange as it might sound. I loved being in your house with your mother. And after you left for college, well, we didn’t have to sneak around so much anymore.”

“That just seems . . . I don’t know, crazy. I mean, you’re the shrink.
Is
it crazy?”

“It is what it is. Or what it was. And I don’t think it’s useful to try to label it. I loved your mother. She loved me. I am grateful for every moment we were able to have together. It makes me sick that I wasn’t able to be with her on her last day. Not that she was cogent, as you know, but—”

“
I
was with her,” says Jane, cutting him off.

“I know you were. And that was important to her. I’m just being selfish here. I had plenty of time and space to say good-bye when you were back in Paris. I’m not angry about not being with her the day she died, I’m just . . . what I’m saying is that the circumstances of our situation prescribed the boundaries of our love. Not a day went by when I didn’t wake up in the morning and wish I could be waking up in your mother’s arms instead. But I had a wife who couldn’t get out of bed by herself, let alone scramble her own eggs. By the end, she was totally dependent on me. In retrospect? Yes, the whole arrangement was probably foolish. I should have just put my foot down and hired a full-time nurse for my wife and married your mother and dealt with the consequences and social reprobation, end of story. But we don’t live our lives in retrospect. We live them minute to minute, and sometimes something that
seems
like the right thing to do at the time turns out to be misguided. Short-sighted.”

“Is she . . . still alive? Your wife?”

“No, she died three weeks after your mother.”

“Wow. I’m sorry.”

“It’s been a rough year. Two funerals within the span of three weeks.”

“Wait. You were at Mom’s funeral? I didn’t see you there.”

“Jane, there were five hundred people at your mother’s funeral. I was there, in the last row, suffering silently. You gave a beautiful eulogy, by the way.”

“Thanks.”

“I loved your description of going from door to door with your father’s clothes. As if they were Girl Scout cookies. That was so Claire . . .” Lodge feels the lump in his throat enlarge. He tries, in vain, to swallow it. “Look, if there’s anything worthwhile that you can take away from your mother’s and my story it is that humans
need
love. It’s not a luxury. It’s a necessity. And they’ll endure extraordinary circumstances in order to get it. That being said, they also need sex, and though the two are often intertwined—love and sex, I mean—they’re just as often if not more often not, which is what I was getting at before vis-à-vis your husband Bruno.”

“Partner. He’s my partner,” she says, thinking, he really
is
my partner. She has no doubt that, given those games of trust she used to play in summer camp, when you fall back and hope your unseen partner will catch you, Bruno would be standing right there at her back to break her fall. Hervé, on the other hand, offered support sporadically, making it very difficult to know when it was safe to collapse and when it wasn’t. She solved that particular problem simply and cleanly, by never collapsing.

“Husband, partner, you share a bed and a home, that’s all I care about. Look, all I’m saying is that people—and let’s not forget, women included—seek solace outside a monogamous dyad for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with falling in love. They’re bored. They’re lonely. Maybe they’re trying to get back at a spouse who in some way wronged them. Maybe the sex with their current partner leaves them unsatisfied: There’s not enough of it, or the practices of one partner are distasteful to the other, or one partner’s body is no longer attractive to the other, which is something I hear in this room all the time. ‘My husband’s body repulses me.’ ‘My wife has put on fifty pounds.’ Recently, I’ve been treating a whole spate of women who married for money, but now, with their husbands out of work or going bankrupt, well, let’s just say they’re finding out that there’s not much else holding the marriage together. There really are so many distinct, individual reasons why an infidelity occurs that it’s a fool’s errand to draw any conclusions about one instance and apply it to another.

“As for your late husband, I can only conjecture here, because I never met him, nor would it be prudent for me to draw any conclusions about his reasons for seeking sex outside the marriage, but I will say that I have treated several patients, in this very room, whose jobs frequently put them in harm’s way, whether overtly or obliquely, and the one universal thing I can say about such people is that part of them gets off on the danger, or else they wouldn’t be doing the jobs they’re doing. One of my colleagues is even researching a thrill-seeking genetic marker, not that we are all necessarily victims of our genes, but you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.” Jane sighs. “I get it. But I guess I thought Hervé was above all that. I mean, you think you know somebody, and then . . .”

“You don’t?” says Lodge.

“Yeah,” says Jane. “I guess it sounds really naïve when you put it that way.”

“It’s not so much naïve as it is simplifying something that’s a bit more complicated than: You think you know someone, but then you don’t. I think we
do
know people, better than we think we do, but our brains choose to create a cleaned-up version of the person that fits our own narrow worldview. Did you honestly think your mother wasn’t having sex these past thirty years? Did it never occur to you that Hervé would be tempted by others during his months on the road? Is it really all that shocking that Bruno got lonely while your mind and body were checked out?”

“Of course not, it’s just . . . God, how could I have been so naïve? It seems like willful ignorance on my part. As if part of me refused to, I don’t know, grow up or something.”

“Well, you did have to grow up pretty quickly, didn’t you?”

“Sure, but . . . that seems a little facile, doesn’t it? My childhood was cut short, so I try to elongate it through obliviousness?”