Doctor's Wife

by Brian Moore

  But the Paris flight was called on time. Two hours later, when he had landed at Orly and cleared French customs, he went to a telephone and rang the number she had given him. It was, as he suspected, the same hotel to which he had telephoned previously. He took down the address and, later, on the bus going into town, lettered it carefully on one of his prescription pads.

  GRAND HÔTEL DES BALCONS

  6, RUE CASIMIR-DELAVIGNE

  This pad he showed to a driver in the taxi rank at the Invalides, searching the man’s face to see if he understood. When the man nodded, Redden climbed into the back seat and sat, oblivious of the passing streets until the taxi came up toward the Place de l’Odéon and stopped before the unprepossessing entrance to the hotel. He paid off the driver and went into the lobby, carrying his raincoat and overnight bag. He had rehearsed his questions as though preparing for an oral examination and now, in his indifferent French, he began his inquisition.

  “Pardon, Madame. Quel numéro de chambre, Madame Redden?”

  The middle-aged woman at the desk looked at him, then answered in an English as accented as his French, “Madame Red-on. Fortay-eight.”

  “Is she in?”

  “No, Monsieur. She go out.”

  “Do you know when she will come back?”

  “No. Most days, after lunch, they come back to the room.”

  “What time?”

  “Two, three o’clock.”

  He looked at his watch. It was one-thirty. He looked behind him and saw a small table and two easy chairs in an alcove. “Maybe I’ll wait a while.”

  “As you wish.”

  He crossed the lobby and sat in one of the chairs. Most days, after lunch, they come back to the room. He thought of his honeymoon, long ago, in Villefranche. We used to do it then, after lunch, with the wine in us. Well, she won’t get any fucking done today. He did not go beyond that thought. He sat in his best dark suit in a hotel lobby in a foreign city, waiting for his wife to come in with her lover. All at once he felt like a man knocked down in an accident and brought into the emergency ward of a hospital. He knew where he was, and what had happened. He did not know what would happen next.

  But when he had been sitting there for half an hour a new anxiety took him. What if she came in, saw him, and ran out again, forcing him to chase after her? He got up, smiled at the woman behind the desk, who did not notice him, then went outside and looked up and down the narrow street. He crossed the street and stood in the doorway of a neglected shop which seemed to sell orthopedic shoes. He pretended to examine the plaster foot casts in the window, but kept an eye on the hotel entrance. The important thing was to let them go upstairs, then knock on the door and confront them. He would tell the Yank he had to talk to his wife alone and then stay with her in the room. That way, he would have her some place where she could not walk away from him. At home she always broke up rows by running upstairs and going to her sewing room.

  The sky darkened. It began to rain. He buttoned up his raincoat and shifted restlessly in the doorway, looking up and down the street. He realized that, suddenly, he was shaking. It was as though, unknown to himself, he had worked into a rage. You mustn’t lose your temper. Yet as he tapped out this warning, it became a code, not understood by his other self, that stranger who trembled and wet his dry lips, who stared up and down the street like a criminal awaiting his prey.

  •

  Shortly after two o’clock, a sudden thunderclap sounded its warning in the Luxembourg Gardens, where, arm-inarm among a small group of spectators, Mrs. Redden and Tom Lowry watched an Algerian, a Ghanaian, and an Indian who squatted on the steps of a deserted belle époque military band shell, playing two flutes and a sitar for their own pleasure. Lightning blazed above the trees, leaving the sky darker for its passing. Almost at once, rain sheeted down, bringing the music to a stop as performers and audience hurried up the steps of the band shell to shelter under its hexagonal roof. There, looking out at the downpour, Mrs. Redden thought of Ireland, of holidays long ago, when rain, implacable, inevitable, would end the picnic, the game of tennis, the afternoon on the strand, banishing the holidaymakers to the prison of a seaside boardinghouse lounge. She shivered and tightened her hold on Tom’s waist. On the last morning of those summer holidays, she and the other children would wake to see their father already loading the car and know they would sleep that same night in their own beds at home. Inevitable, implacable, the rainstorm wept itself out. She saw Tom look at his watch.

  “What time is it?”

  “Twenty past two. Want to go back to the hotel for a while?”

  “All right.”

  They walked out of the gardens and down the rue de Vaugirard. This holiday, unlike those holidays long ago, would not end with her sleeping at home. Two nights from now I will be high over the Atlantic Ocean and on Saturday I will be walking around in the Other Place. I am going to America. I am starting my life over again. But as she said these words to herself, she found it hard to imagine what the new life would be like. And, again, she was afraid.

  As they came through the Place de l’Odéon and into the rue Casimir-Delavigne, she stopped and looked at him. “Tom, supposing you go on to New York alone this week?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Wait. Supposing I follow you, say two weeks from today? That would give you time to think about things. And if you still want me to join you then, I promise I’ll come.”

  “Do you know what that plan is?” he said.

  “What?”

  “It’s fear of flying,” he said, and laughed. “You’re afraid of flying, that’s it, isn’t it?”

  “No, no.”

  “Oh yes, it is,” he said and laughed, and looking at him, she did not want to leave him, she did not want to spoil things now, so she laughed, too.

  “Maybe so,” she said.

  He took her hand and they went into the hotel.

  •

  When Kevin Redden saw his wife coming down the street hand-in-hand with a stranger, his first instinct was to retreat farther into the doorway of the orthopedic shop because it would be shameful if he were seen spying on them. This shame, which he did not understand, was counterbalanced by an insatiable, eye-glaring curiosity about the Yank who had stolen his wife. And so, dodging about, peering through the glass of the window, he discerned that the stranger was much younger than he, about the same height, and not at all the sort of caricature American his fantasies had created. He looked like someone from home, an intern off duty, perhaps even a med student.

  They were laughing. Oh yes, the heartless bitch getting ready to abandon her only child was laughing! For one disquieting moment she seemed to look across the street directly at him, hiding in the doorway. Then, hand-in-hand, she and the man went into the hotel. He stepped out from his place of concealment, his breathing shallow as though he had run up the street. I must calm down. He turned back to the shop window and tried to mirror himself in its reflection, but the window was dull and the sky gray, and all he caught of himself was that he was standing there in his raincoat, carrying a small bag like some door-to-door salesman. He waited for a moment, then crossed the street and went into the hotel. The middle-age woman was still behind the desk. He did not go direcdy to the desk but walked into the little alcove and took off his raincoat, because he did not think he looked well dressed in it. He put it and the overnight bag down behind one of the easy chairs. If they were stolen, what matter: he did not want to knock on her door and be opened to, standing there with a bag in his hand. When he had straightened his tie and patted his handkerchief to make sure it was in place, he went over to the desk.

  “Is Mrs. Redden back yet?”

  “Yes, sir, she just came in.”

  “Forty-eight, you said?”

  “Yes, sir. Do you want I telephone?”

  “No, no, I’ll go on up. She’s expecting me,” he said, and hurried to the stairs before the woman had a chance to reply. He took the stairs two at a time. On
the top step he stumbled, catching his heel in the carpet runner. As he went down the corridor, searching for the number, he took his second handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped his palms, which were clammy. When he got to the door marked 48, he knocked gently. Two knocks.

  “Allo, oui,” a man’s voice said. “Entrez.”

  They must be expecting a maid. He opened the door and, as he did, saw her standing by the window, her back to him, closing her raincoat about her. He saw why. She had already taken her dress off, the dirty bitch. There it was, lying on the chair. The boy friend had his coat off. She turned around. “Kevin!”

  He did not answer her. He looked at the man. “Do you mind?” he said. “I’d like to have a word with my wife.”

  The man looked over at Sheila.

  “Tom, I wonder, would you wait for me downstairs?”

  “Are you sure?” the man said. He was a Yank all right, a bloody Yank with a flat, twangy American accent.

  “Yes, please,” she said. The Yank nodded, then looked angrily at Redden. “Excuse me,” he said, making Redden give ground in the doorway. Redden shut the door and, as he did, saw the hotel key in the lock, a wooden ball hanging from it. He turned the key, locking the door, then put the key in his pocket.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Making sure you don’t walk out.”

  “Give me that key.”

  “Shut up,” he said. “And sit down.”

  You mustn’t talk like that, don’t lose your temper, he warned the unpredictable person who was now in control of him, but it was too late, he had lost his temper. He had already made an enemy of her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to sound cross.”

  “You have every right to be cross,” she said. She sat on the bed and looked at him. “Kevin, I told you not to come. It’s no use.”

  “But it’s got to be some use,” he said. At home, lying awake these past nights, he had planned to say this, to be both sensible and kind, yet threatening in a quiet, professional manner. But she was not one of his patients: she did not even seem to be his wife any longer, and so, in his panic and anger, that unpredictable person took over inside him, and that person, that bloody fool, spread out his hands like a peddler and smiled, and tried to get a bit of a laugh into his voice, as he said, “I’m wearing my good suit. Did you notice that?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Do you know why I’m wearing my good suit, Sheila?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m wearing it because I want you to come home. I’ve been hoping that maybe when you see me you’ll think I’m not so bad, ha ha. I thought to myself, This boy friend, this Yank, must be stiff competition. He probably looks like a film star, ha ha.”

  “Kevin, don’t.”

  “Mind you, he is a good-looking chap. And he’s a lot younger than me, ha ha. I hear he has a degree from Trinity. You and he can natter away about modern writers, and other matters of interest, ha ha. I can’t compete there, I’m afraid.”

  “Kevin, stop it.”

  “I’m sorry. I am sorry. I was hoping to be very nice about all this. I thought, you see, that I’d come here today and talk to you and then maybe go away and spend the night some place, and then come back and talk to you again tomorrow morning before I go home. Of course, it was a bit of a shock to see you here with your dress off and another man in the room, ha ha. But that’s all right. I’m over that now. I realize I’ve lost the battle. When are you going to America?”

  “Soon.”

  “Then you’ve already got your American visa?”

  “Yes.”

  He whistled. “So nothing I can say or do would change your mind, is that it?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, Kevin. I’ve treated you— I’ve been rotten to you and to Danny. But it happened. I fell in love with somebody else.”

  And now the unpredictable person inside of him could no longer smile and try to win her over. “Indeed. Just like they do in books. Yes, exactly. It’s books, of course, that you got all your notions from. Not from real life. All those novels and trash that’s up there in your room at home. I wonder sometimes if some of these authors who write that stuff shouldn’t be prosecuted. Or maybe we should hand out prescriptions for books the way we do for drugs. Not to be taken by mouth. Not for people who can’t read right from wrong. Yes. Because you’re not the heroine of some bloody book. And that wee boy back in Belfast is not just something in a book. He’s sitting there in the den in the Somerton Road this minute, expecting his mummy to come home. And I’m not the buck stupid husband in some bloody novel. No more than you and this Yank fucking each other blind for the past two weeks is some great romantic love story.”

  “Don’t say ‘fuck.’ We can talk without that.” “Ah yes. Listen to the Child of Mary, will you? Don’t say ‘fuck,’ but do it. But I say ‘fuck’ because that’s all it is. Sex and nothing but sex. Young Yankee Stud Meets Lonely Married Lady in Secret Riviera Affair. Abandons Family to Elope to America. I can just see the headlines in the News of the World.”

  “All right,” she said. “It’s true, sex is a big part of it.”

  Suddenly he hit her. He did not know he was going to do it until he had knocked her back with a slap on the jaw.

  Her raincoat fell open and he saw her panty hose and her bare breasts. “Sex, is it?” he heard himself shouting. “Is that what you want, is it sex you want?” And as he did, to his shock, he felt an erection. He caught her and pushed her down on the bed, spread-eagling himself over her, beginning with his left hand to pull down her panty hose.

  “Kevin, will you stop it. Get off me !”

  But now that unpredictable person inside of him saw a strange woman who had been in bed screwing some young Yank for the past two weeks, a woman he did not know any more, a woman who wanted sex, and a good bloody beating into the bargain. Sex, he’d give her sex, if that’s what she needed, he’d fuck the living daylights out of her. He stared moonstruck at her long white thighs and belly and the dark pubic hair as he pulled down her panty hose, struggling with her, tearing the panty hose, staring at her white, milky skin, which used to make him think of sin.

  “Kevin, are you mad, will you stop it!”

  She wrestled with him. She hit him in the face with her fist as he backed off and stood up, unzipping his trousers, pulling out his penis, which he held like a club in his fist, staring at its red tip, then staring at her. “So you want fucking, that’s what you want, eh? Fucking!”

  “Kevin, don’t! Stop it.” She tried to get up, but he hit her hard, knocking her back on the bedspread, spreading himself over her, pinning her down. “Shut up!” he said. “I’m going to fuck you, do you hear me? Just like the bloody whore you are.”

  And then, as though realizing that she could not push him off, she began to sob, but the sight of her tears only excited him further, and now he had her naked, and he kicked free of his trousers and forced her legs apart, pushing his penis in, beginning to pump and strain, holding back an orgasm which in his terrible new excitement he could barely control: this was not his wife, it was some strange woman in a French hotel, and her weeping, her fear and loathing of him, made his excitement greater. And then, as he worked his hands underneath her, grasping the cheeks of her bottom, pulling her toward him, it seemed to him that she responded, and with a rush of satisfaction, his orgasm began. He heard himself utter a loud, uncharacteristic groan of pleasure.

  Then lay panting, the bed disarranged, the woman moving away from him, getting off the bed, going to put on her dress while he watched her, then going behind him to the other corner of the room. He heard water running in the washbasin. He was no longer angry. He felt curiously at peace. He felt that he was in charge. He sat up and put on his trousers, buckling his belt, pulling down the peaks of his waistcoat, straightening the handkerchief in his suit jacket pocket, using a pocket comb to tidy his thick curly hair. She was at the little washbasin, doing something to her face, just as if th
ey were in their bedroom at home.

  “You’re coming with me,” he said.

  She went on putting stuff on her eyes.

  “Right, Sheila?”

  She took a comb from her purse and began to brush her hair.

  “When you’re ready,” he said, “I’ll take your suitcase and we’ll go downstairs and I’ll tell your friend that you’re going home. We’ll take a taxi to the airport and get the next plane to London. We should be able to get a connecting flight to Dublin tonight. I have the car waiting at Dublin airport. You can be home with Danny before midnight. And nothing will be said. We’ll not mention this again, either one of us. We’ll just treat it as—as if it were something we read about in a book, ha ha. And close the book.”

  She went on brushing her hair.

  “Besides,” he said, “you have no chance of living in America, you know. You won’t be allowed to stay.”

  He watched her as he said it, and saw her look at him through the mirror.

  “Oh, you might be able to go off there now, on a tourist visa. I might, or might not, be able to stop you. But once you’re there, that’s another matter. I’ve already spoken to the American Embassy in Dublin. I know the drill. I simply report the truth to the Americans—that you’re no tourist, that you have no notion of coming back to Ireland, that you’re living in America with a man who isn’t your husband. And, also, I have a letter here from Owen, with information about your mother and brother and their breakdowns. Two breakdowns already in your family. Mental illness is something the Yanks are dead set against. That’s what they told me at the embassy in Dublin. I have a good contact there.”

  He waited. She went on combing her hair.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “You think I’m doing this to get back at you. But that’s not true, Sheila. I was angry, I’ll admit it. But I’m not any more. Because, just look at the facts. Two and a half weeks ago you’d never heard of this kid. You were going on a holiday with me. That’s not normal, Sheila. Surely you must know that?”