The Slap (53 page)

He didn’t answer. She stroked his hair.

‘I didn’t wait. I just honked till the bitch in front of me made some room and I did a U-ey and got the hell out of there.’

‘What happened to Melissa?’ Her voice was now sharp, panicked.

He started to laugh. She wanted to hit him.

‘What happened to Melissa?’ She was not far from screaming at him.

Through hysterical whoops of laughter, he spluttered out his story.

‘I took the car home.’ Laughter. ‘I walked back to the school.’ Howl. ‘The black four-wheel drive had still not reached the gate.’ More hilarity. ‘I found Melissa and we walked back home.’

He was now on his back on the bed, screaming with laughter. She would wait it out. She caught her reflection in the mirror on the dresser. She was smart and attractive and good. She did not deserve this. This was not what she deserved at all. The body next to her on the bed was now still.

‘I’m sorry, Aish.’ Hector’s voice was low, quiet. She did not yet turn around. She was still drawn to the reflection of the assured, attractive woman in the mirror.

‘I’m sorry,’ his tone now firm again, insistent. ‘I can’t continue to live like this.’

She froze. He was going to leave her. She stared back at her reflection. She was good looking, yes, she was intelligent, with her own business. She was forty-one. She did not want to live alone. When she spoke it seemed to her that her voice came from somewhere outside of herself, from the woman in the mirror. ‘Do you want a divorce? ’ The word sounded heavy, a deadening load. At the same time, expressing it made her feel light, weightless.

‘No.’ Hector’s response was again resolute, there was no doubt in his voice. Aisha breathed out, experiencing a moment of blessed relief; and, for an instant that flashed by so quickly she barely registered it, she also felt a pang of regret.

Like the morning after an abortion, is how she would later describe it to Anouk, who would nod her head and say, yes, I understand. What couldn’t be, what you didn’t ever want to be, but in which you could not also help wondering what could have been.

Hector looked straight at her. ‘I don’t know anything at the moment except that I want to be with you, that I love you and that you are the only thing I am sure of in my life. I’ve been so stupid. I don’t know what the fuck is happening to me but I do know that I don’t want to lose you.’

The ordeal of weeping had exhausted him. His face was puffy and red. He looked his age.

She kissed his wet brow. ‘I’m going down the street and I’m going to get us some food. You take a shower and when I get back we’ll talk, alright? We’ll talk about whatever you want, we’ll talk about whatever you need.’

He nodded. ‘Hold me tight before you go,’ he whispered.

She held him, his grip desperate. He would not let her go. She gently disentangled herself from him. ‘I won’t be long.’

 

It was a relief to be back in the muggy Ubud streets, away from Hector, away from his need for her. She ordered nasi goreng from a small, crowded café and sat outside on a crate looking across at the rice fields over the road. It would be a full moon the night after next and every stalk of grass, every tree, leaf and branch, every silhouette of a house or a temple was clearly etched in the radiant silver light. An American voice said something loud, sharply, from inside the café, and she gave herself over to fantasising. She was with Art, she had come to Montreal. He fell into her arms. He would divorce his wife and she would divorce Hector. She would learn French, they would open a practice in the city and both work only half-time. They would have long weekends in New York City. Then she thought of her children and brushed the sweet, impossible fantasy aside. She picked up her order and walked back to the hotel.

 

They talked for hours, lying next to each other on the bed. Hector had ripped through his meal, ravenous, and then he had begun to talk. He talked first about Hugo, about how he did not hate the little boy. It is impossible to hate a child, he said, and she agreed. He did talk about his anger at Rosie and Gary. He was sceptical about their professed commitment to active parenting, to the supposed enlightened and child-focused philosophies that underpinned Rosie’s approach to motherhood. Hugo is lonely, Hector argued, and what he really needs is a brother or a sister, cousins, kids to put him in his place. He spends too much time around fucking adults. But Gary’s too selfish to have another child. Aisha agreed.

She let him talk. She was unsure why it was Rosie and Hugo he was talking about, but the incident involving the child had greatly disturbed him. He talked of loving the responsibility of being a father but hated the fear he felt for his children, detested the notion of status that had become part of their social world, their friends, their family, when it came to raising children. I want my kids to walk home from school, I want them to play in the streets, I don’t want them to be so protected that they are made to be scared of the world. The world has changed, she argued, it’s dangerous. No, he contested, the world hasn’t changed—it is we who have changed. He made it clear that he would not consider private schools for their children. This had been a source of disagreement between them for years and at first she thought it would replay itself as it had done every other time, with each side fought for and no decision made. But that night he was resolute and convincing. He explained that he loved his children but he thought private schools elitist and he wanted nothing to do with them. He could not trust what his children would become at such schools. It was not a matter of money—he was happy to spend twice what they would spend on fees to take Adam and Melissa to Greece and India, all over the world. He was only too happy to do that for his children. But he did not like the cold, selfish new world and, even if his allegiances were nostalgic, no longer relevant to that world, he wanted to hold tight to some vestige of morality and political belief. Otherwise he feared he would drown. That’s your choice, she tried to point out, but your children shouldn’t suffer for those beliefs. He groaned at that. They’re not suffering—they are very lucky kids. He took her hand. They are going to do alright. You knew when you married me that this was the way I felt. I’m not going to change. I can’t be a man who sends his children to private schools. I can’t be that man because I’m not that man. She saw that she could not move him, and though she felt it impossible to understand because she had grown up in a family in which wealth was a virtue and politics were unspoken, she realised that she would have to acquiesce to him. So she negotiated. If Adam, or Melissa, she added quickly, are not doing well at their high school, are you prepared to move to another area with better state schools? A suburb away from your folks, a suburb in the east? Yes, he had answered, and lying there, husband and wife had negotiated, had come to an agreement.

He then confessed that he had been unfaithful to her, with a young university student, a nineteen-year-old social sciences undergraduate called Angela who had joined his unit on a placement. He had thought himself in love; there had even been moments at the height of his obsession when he had thought of leaving Aisha, his children, his work, his life, to run away with the girl. And then he had realised that she was, indeed, only a girl. He was struck by how close to calamity he had come. Abandoning Aisha would have been death. The girl was sweet, intelligent, she would be a good woman, a great woman, but she had only been a cipher for him: what he wanted from her, he realised, had been her youth. He desired her in order to believe that he was still young. But she had shown him that he was an ageing man and that one day he would die. She had meant nothing to him—he was disgusted now by what he had done, the risks he had taken. I promise you, he told Aisha, I promise you that we were only together twice and neither time had they had intercourse. He was so ashamed. Since he had told the girl that it had to end, he’d been waking up every morning at 3.14, without fail. Every morning his eyes would flick open, alert, and the red numerals on his electric alarm clock would read 3.14. Not wanting to wake Aisha, he would get up and go naked into their garden, where he would shake and start to weep. He was convinced that he was going to die—the beat of his heart seemed so tenuous, so irregular, his breath short, strained. He was going to die and what would his life have been worth? With that question he began to sob again. I’m scared, Aish, he shuddered, I’m so fucking scared.

She had listened to his monologue without anger or jealousy or scorn, feeling nothing. She watched her husband cry and put out her hand to stroke his shoulder. She felt nothing at all. She watched him as though from afar and tried to examine her own reaction.
A nineteen-year-old?
The girl’s age had first sounded shocking to her, but now the ridiculousness of it was all she could think about. She did not even feel jealousy. Men were ridiculous. She had not even experienced relief at his confession, that his affair might somehow cancel or nullify her own infidelity. She had suspected for years that her husband fucked around. That gutter expression aptly summed up how she conceived of his affairs. He was lustful, had an enormous sexual appetite that had intimidated her from the start. She knew that in allowing the subject of monogamy to remain unspoken she had given tacit agreement to his anonymous or casual encounters with whores, one-night stands, with God only knows. As he poured out his confession, she had asked herself the question: Why are you telling me about this? In any other circumstances his choosing to tell her would have aroused her suspicions, that this woman meant something to him. But she was convinced this was not the case. He was terrified, a little boy confronting the immensity and indifference of the universe. You’ve had a long adolescence, Hector, she thought to herself as she stroked her husband’s heaving back, a long adolescence. It is time to grow up. She did not mean this cruelly, she was not angry. She felt nothing. It was a fact. Just a fact.

She took his hand, kissed his knuckles, and she told him about Art. Not the truth, only the things that mattered. She did not tell Hector about their lovemaking, but she did describe the intimacy and excitement of being attracted to another man. It was possible—she thought of this later, back home—that she had hoped to hurt him by revealing the details of her near betrayal. He listened intently to her every word and did not attempt to interrupt her. He listened to her describe Art’s beauty, his erudition and charm. From time to time he would get up from the bed to refill their glasses from the duty-free Johnny Walker Black. She continued to talk, a relentless surge of words, except that her voice was steady and her meanings clear-headed. She hardly stumbled as she spoke. The sips of whisky assisted her monologue, steadied her. She drank constantly but did not feel drunk. She told Hector that Art had made her see possibilities, that she had come close to an affair not through fear but through curiosity. Anyway, she added, almost an aside, women feared the deaths of others, the deaths of their children, lovers, family, not the disappearance of self. Even as she glibly produced this statement she thought of Anouk, and, as if reading her mind, Hector asked, How about Anouk? Maybe women without children are different, Aisha conceded. Though they often start a charity or take up a cause; they go off to Africa to save young souls. It is possible the world is divided into three genders—there are men, there are women and then there are women who choose to have nothing to do with children. How about men without children, he answered quickly, aren’t they also different from fathers? She shook her head firmly, daring him to contradict her: no, all men are the same.

She told him that she had been thinking about divorce, that she had been thinking of it long before Art. Once that word had fallen from her lips it was clear that there was a form of release for both of them in its utterance. She spoke the word and looked down at her husband. She was resting on a pillow, her back against the headboard of the bed and Hector was lying at her feet, his head propped on his elbow. She said the word and he smiled weakly at her and, hesitantly, she smiled back. They occupied a strange twilight world now in which their hotel room in Ubud had been somehow set adrift from the real world. There was a humming in her ear that was, she was sure of it, the sound of the universe spinning around and around, ready to fling both of them off into an orbit, one in which they either surrendered finally to each other or were forever flung apart. They both discussed their longing for freedom, for a life without a spouse, a life not dictated to by the whims, joys, petty angers and obsessions of another. Hector laughed and said he wanted to have nights where he could come home, strip to his undies, smoke a joint and watch porn, falling asleep on the couch. What she spoke of was something so much simpler, just to have the bed to herself for one night.

I just wonder what it is like being single sometimes, Hector said, it’s been so long. I could never marry again if we divorced, he insisted, this is the only marriage that could mean anything to me. She kept silent. She was thinking of Art. Hector continued. I’m not going to have other children. This marriage is you and Melissa and Adam, he told her. As he spoke the words he sat up and looked straight at her. I’m not giving this up, I don’t want a divorce. With his mention of the children her thoughts of freedom were banished. They were an adolescent fantasy. She knew he was awaiting an answer and she gave it to him. Neither do I. He crawled along the bed and kissed her. The dawn light was beginning to flutter through the bamboo blinds; a babel of birdsong suddenly rang out, all of it unfamiliar except for the coarse gloating call of the roosters. They were both too exhausted, too stripped to make love. They rang reception to cancel breakfast, swallowed a Temazepam each with their final gulp of whisky, and lying next to each other, barely touching, their shoulders just kissing, they fell asleep. She awoke at the height of midday, sweating, her mouth dry and foul-tasting. She turned her head and Hector’s eyes were on her.