My Other Life

by Paul Theroux

  He was now completely clean and sober, studying for his doctorate, running every day, working part time in Boston, still seeing a counselor, living quietly, reading voraciously. And after a long period of sadness and brain ache I had begun to write again. I had something to write.

  "You took risks," I said the last time I saw him. "And yet you seem the same person you always were."

  "You told me that before," George said. "But, like I said, that's good and bad. You've got to move. I wasn't caring about money. It was about being in the world. And the story isn't over. We're not at the end. Me, I'm not laying down. I'm putting some order in my life—enjoying whatever this thing is. I know I'm going to move on to something pretty soon."

  "I've got the same feeling," I said.

  "Yeah. Some people are meant to do things—not watch, but do things. This is what we do. A lot of people live through us."

  He was thinking hard.

  At last he said, "I'm a vehicle."

  SEVENTEEN

  My Other Wife

  1

  JUST AFTER my miserable drifting period, I received a postcard at my house on the Cape saying, I found this picture of our old stomping ground. I think of you often. My life has changed quite a bit. I imagine yours is as serene as ever. And at the bottom, the initial W.

  W stood for Wanda Fagan.

  "I hate my name," she had said. "Probably because I hate my father."

  "Use your mother's," I said.

  "That's worse," she said. "Feskowitz. And I hate her too."

  Another woman—not The Other Woman. If I had told her story earlier, it would have seemed like the reason Alison and I split up. But I did not want to exaggerate its importance. A single instance of infidelity was not the reason. Marriages end when love and hope are gone; a period of obsession and fantasy is not the end of love.

  It was not a long story. I was needy, I was unfaithful, I was found out. There was a spell of upheaval—anger, misunderstanding, tears. It ended and life went on, our marriage continued, and I was inexpressibly grateful. I looked at Alison and thought: How could I have ever thought of leaving you? and sometimes I said this to her.

  "Maybe you would have been happier if you had left," she said.

  "No, no," I said, and I meant it.

  I was allowed back home. I never speculated on what life might have been like with Wanda Fagan. I told myself that we had had our love affair—and didn't it have the odd mimicry of a marriage, the same shape, except shallower and shorter? Somehow, Alison forgave me. She had always said, "These things don't matter. What matters is where you are in the end. I feel you do love me. But don't push me too far."

  Years later, when Alison and I were apart, instead of all the vivid memories of marriage, it seemed strange to me that my mind went back to its satisfying monotonies, returned again and again to revisit its most prosaic routines. I was moved more by remembering the shopping trips to the supermarket than the weekends in Paris. It was something about sharing the burden, solving the problems, performing tasks together—painting shelves or wallpapering, putting down a carpet or cleaning the attic. Not any particular voyage, but rather our bobbing at our mooring.

  The memories of the long hours we had spent this way moved me most because they ought to have been a kind of hardship, and yet I treasured them because they were precious in their difficulty. Taking pleasure in them was the evidence of love. The home we had made like two busy birds, taking scraps of dead grass and bits of old string and turning them into the rough symmetry of an unshakable nest. All the time we had spent in this apparently unromantic work amounted over the long term to devotion, almost to passion.

  In the course of our breakup I never thought of calling Wanda Fagan and saying "Let's get together"—or rather, I thought of it but immediately rejected it as unwise. The broken marriage was on my mind. I felt awful. I knew that Wanda Fagan was ill equipped to share my misery. Long before, her attitude towards Alison had put me off her. She had called me at home, she had threatened suicide, she and Alison had had several acrimonious conversations. And the whole terrible mess was all my fault. One of the worst times, at a family dinner—Alison carving a turkey, the boys serving hors d'oeuvres, everyone merry and bright, so festive, it must have been Christmas or Thanksgiving—the phone rang.

  "It's for you, Paul."

  I said, "Hello?"

  And a woeful voice said, "I'm coming apart."

  "I'll have to get back to you—"

  "Don't hang up!"

  "Thanks very much."

  "Don't do this to me!"

  "Listen, we're just sitting down to eat."

  "What about me? I can't take this. I'm losing my mind. Didn't you hear what I said? I'm coming apart!"

  Somehow, I managed to end the call without revealing my fear, and I sat in terror the rest of the day, expecting another call. No love affair can survive threats and pleas of that kind. Humiliation kills desire by scorching the heart, and a call like that made us both ashamed and afraid. On another day she shrieked into the phone, "I can't deal with this!" and it bothered me and made me cross, because I imagined that she had heard someone else say it just that way.

  Anyone with sense who has been through this once never ventures upon it again, or if he does, deserves to be destroyed. I had learned how close I had come to losing my life.

  Unhappy, sniffing and blinking like a bunny, she would say things like, "I hated my body when I was growing up," or "I had to come to terms with my sexuality."

  "How are you?" I would ask at the beginning of one of our many lengthy phone calls.

  "If you had asked me that question this morning I would have said, 'Fine,'" she said. "This afternoon I was very low." There would be a pause, and then a doom-laden "Now I don't know whether I can handle it."

  And of course there was more. I should have guessed, when I noticed that our phone calls always lasted one full hour, that she was used to talking, usually in a monologue, to her psychiatrist.

  She hated her name more than I could understand. "A name is just a name," I told her. I mentioned some of the names in the news—Walter Tkach, Ed Custard, Robert Abplanalp, Murray McAdoo, Sherman Pinsker, Lech Walesa, Lawrence Eagleburger. I said, "Fagan's probably Irish."

  "I don't want to talk about it."

  But all she did was talk. This was some months after the phantom offer of a part in a movie. I understood the meaning of illusions and the importance of my work to my sanity.

  As time passed I wondered what had become of Wanda Fagan. Strangely, when Alison and I split up, I stopped wondering—didn't dare to. Being single made me feel vulnerable. I felt weak. Perhaps some desire still remained, but it was a haggard and desperate fugitive, a nocturnal creature—why stir it and rouse it and drag it into the daylight to show all its nervous yearnings? Better to let it slumber and dream and drool—let it die in its sleep.

  Alive, it was lust like a pile of greasy rags which, left in the darkness to stink, begin to heat up, as though from the growing density of their very gases and smells, and without warning burst into an orange flame, throwing off soot. As an affair with a beginning, a middle, and end, it might have been like a marriage, but a bad marriage. Ours was. Perhaps less bitter than most bad marriages—perhaps longer than many marriages. She knew that, too: in graduate school she had been briefly married to a man named Harry Cole, also a graduate student. I heard about his beard, his old car, his debts. I had a Philip Glass tape in my car. "Harry liked him too," she said. I knew little else. His mounting debts ended the marriage.

  Of the great deal I learned from our affair, the most worrisome was how easy it is to underestimate a lover's ambition. For me it was an indulgence in fantasy. I was hardly aware of time passing. But Wanda Fagan—like most other women, perhaps—thought constantly about her age. Such women's frequent reference to aging, to their looks, to the passage of time, is an unsettling challenge, as distracting as the tick of a loud clock with a wagging pendulum. Not long after I met he
r, she was talking about our old age. She saw us retired, two oldies holding hands, rocking on the porch. She was looking for another life.

  She was disgusted and maddened by her own life—saw her own life as negligible—hated her name, disliked her body, had no money. In her terms she did not exist. Her attaching her half-life to mine would, she felt, totally redeem her.

  "It's not your writing—you're much more than that," she said.

  She was mistaken. But I could not interrupt. She was still talking.

  "I love who you are—you're a good man," she said. "You're rational and generous and compassionate."

  Wrong again, Wanda. Why would a person with those qualities, so complete and good and loved, have any pressing need to become a writer of the things I wrote?

  She did not know that. She did not know me. Only an irrational or desperate person would see matters her way. So as we took a turn into the short, furious cul-de-sac of desire, it was obvious that this affair could have only one conclusion. Afterwards, Alison and I shared a grim celebratory mood, as though after a painful illness a difficult friend has gone away, into the unknown. Or a houseguest has left and the house is again large and liberated. Now she did not have to think of Wanda Fagan, and as my shame and guilt diminished I thought: Never again.

  Then Alison and I separated. I fled. I suffered my own half-life. That cold winter and its sorrows and its signs: Medford—Next 3 Exits. The Queen. George Davis.

  But when the postcard came I was better—more than better. I was about to embark on a long Pacific journey. Travel is only possible in a mood of optimism—I knew I was well. I was going away intending to come back, not looking for a new life. It was a realm of travel I hardly knew.

  I had never been happy about Wanda Fagan's handwriting, so uncertain in its form, always looking as though it had been done in a hurry. People wrote like that on moving buses, children wrote that way, unhappy people. It lacked design, it seemed to reveal everything—insecurity, unhappiness, haste. It was not intelligent script. You would never have known you were dealing with a Ph.D. in computer science, and yet that was the degree Wanda Fagan had earned, and she had tenure in a large university, NYU to be precise.

  How I hated that expression "our old stomping ground," referring to the postcard picture, a windmill on the Cape, the one in Brewster. It showed that her memory was as wobbly as her handwriting. Hadn't she remembered that we had had a furious argument on the way back to my house? It was her old eternal subject: What about me?

  If I surrendered everything and she had my life, she would be happy. Then what would I have? In true romantic love such questions are seldom asked—it is all delirious risk, and often, as in the case of Alison and me, it blossoms, and only withers after a long time. I was too old to take that risk. She was young enough to take any risk at all. And so I felt we would not last. I recognized our condition from the extensive and self-serving literature of men gloomily betraying their wives by taking a mistress: there were some few moments of peace, but the rest was fatigue and anxiety.

  I sensed a great apprehension in realizing that I liked her a bit less after we made love, and sometimes did not like her at all. At times I did not know her afterwards. Who was she and what was I doing with her? I was sure she had the same ridiculous questions about me. So we were both disgusted strangers until the next fever made us lovers again. So much for the self-serving literature of betrayal.

  Looking back, our affair seemed hardly significant. I suspected that it meant more to her, or that she wanted it to mean more. Yet she was all right now. The postcard said that much. She had wrongly felt that I was my old self—still married—regarding the marriage as indestructible because, as she had not managed to destroy it with her tears and her threats, who could?

  My pain had liberated me. I now felt strong enough to reply to her postcard.

  Dear Wanda,

  What a surprise to hear from you! I can't imagine where you got that old postcard, but I'm sure that

  And then I faltered and stopped. It occurred to me that there was no return address on the postcard. I had no idea where she was. Seven years later was she still in New York City? I looked at the postmark: DANBURY CONN.

  I could not continue writing this letter to her until I knew her address. I called her at her home number, the only number I knew, and was told by the telephone company recording with the female disciplinarian's voice that the number was no longer in service. Information for Manhattan said there was no listing for her name.

  I called NYU. Her old secretary said, "Dr. Fagan is no longer a member of this department."

  "Do you have a number where she can be reached?"

  "Just a minute." She sighed; she had wanted to hang up on me. When she returned to the phone, she said, "Who is calling?"

  I said I was a book dealer; that I had found a book order that had been mislaid; that I wished to send it to her.

  "But you asked me for her telephone number."

  This was a very shrewd secretary.

  "Her street address will be fine. I'll just pop this in the mail."

  "She is not Wanda Fagan anymore. She is Wanda Falkenberg."

  Her new name was spelled slowly by this cranky woman, and her new address was in the New York City area. I called information and got the number. I tried it over several days, at different times. Finally, a man's voice: "She doesn't live here anymore."

  But that voice said everything: this might be her ex-husband. He was glum and defeated-sounding, wondering who I was. I wanted to talk to him much more than I wanted to find her. But I knew I had to talk to her first.

  "I have a parcel for her"—I gave him my book dealer's spiel.

  Rather crossly—annoyed that he had to bother—he gave me her street address. It was in Danbury, Connecticut. That explained the postmark.

  "I am sending this Fed Ex, so it would help to have her phone number."

  He ratded it off—only an ex-husband would know it that well and say it so disgustedly. I put the phone down, then picked it up and dialed the number.

  "Hello."

  It was that small old tentative voice of a person who was accustomed to receiving unwelcome telephone calls. Wanda Feskowitz Fagan Cole Falkenberg. What a lot of names even a young woman can pick up.

  "It's me."

  "Paul?"

  And then the sparring began.

  2

  "How did you get this number?"

  "One of your old friends."

  I had never known many of her friends. That was another problem with the affair—just the two of us. Or maybe it was not a problem. It exposed and isolated us, and so we got to know each other quickly. The few friends I knew were so much like Wanda they frightened me.

  "Who was it?"

  "I don't want to get her into trouble, so I don't think I'll reveal her name."

  It seemed the right thing to say, and it worked.

  "What do you want?"

  "I thought I'd send you a note in reply to your postcard, but I didn't have your address."

  "Where are you?"

  She had always been anxious, but these questions revealed an even deeper intensity.

  "Oh, I'm just traveling."

  If she knew where I was, she would call me back. Selfishly, I wanted to control the situation.

  "Are you still married?"

  "You seemed to think so when you sent me that postcard."

  "I think you're divorced—or else why would you be calling me?"

  In her logic, a person who made a call like this, out of the blue, was weak or desperate.

  "I am separated. But that's not why I called. I was just wondering how you are."

  "I wish you hadn't called."

  "Are you married?"

  There was another long silence, which was like the weariest sigh imaginable.

  "I don't want to talk about it."

  That said everything: she had been married, she was now either separated or divorced. She was easier to read tha
n my wife of twenty years.

  "I just want to get on with my life."

  That was the title of yet another of her insincere and muddled marching songs. It was not that I objected to her clichés, it was that she did not really mean them. She still had no life, she was still on the lookout for someone else's.

  "I was glad to get your postcard. That windmill."

  "I thought you'd like it."

  Having a poor memory helped lessen a person's woe. Everything connected with the windmill had been miserable. If she had remembered anything, she would never have sent that picture.

  "It was nice of you."

  "I have my points."

  "You sure do," I said. "You sound well."

  "So do you."

  "It's great to think that after all these years we're still strong."

  "I manage."

  "Do you have any children?"

  Silence again. But it was a direct question, and she had to answer or be found out. She hesitated a fraction too long, her silence meaning yes.

  "How many?"

  "A little girl."

  Her voice was pride, defiance, anger that I had asked, irritation that she had replied, a kind of sorrow, and great confusion. This was not a troubled young woman anymore. This was the troubled mother of a tiny and probably demanding daughter. God help the man who became involved with the daughter of this woman.

  She was a new woman; she had a new name and a new life. She did not want to be associated with her past. This was a woman I did not know.

  "How long have you been separated?" she asked.

  She could not resist, she really wanted to know. My marriage, in her view, was the one thing that had kept us apart. Yet I knew better. It was my only excuse for keeping her at arm's length. I had used my marriage in order to be irresponsible. After I was separated I didn't dare. So I was the coward. My love for Alison had gone beyond the marriage, and that was why when the marriage ended I was so bereft, because I wanted to remain friends with her.