My Other Life

by Paul Theroux

  "I'll tell you how long I've been separated if you tell me the same thing."

  "I don't want to play games."

  Another of her feeble clichés, and one of her most insincere, since all we had ever done was play games. And what was this conversation except a game, in which each player was lying in order to extract the maximum amount of information, while revealing the minimum?

  "You don't have to tell me anything. But I've been separated for about a year. It was sad and I'm sorry. If you've been through the same thing, I know how painful it was, especially with a little child."

  A milder, less reproachful silence had no sigh in it, only sadness.

  "We weren't getting along."

  Why did this statement irritate me so much? It was her tone of voice, uninvolved and dull and dismissive, and it was the ready-made expression. Even if she had met this man soon after she and I had split up, she still could not have known him long, or been married more than—what? Allow a year for courtship, take away a year or so since she left him, and what would you have? Maybe three or four years of marriage. I thought mainly about her child.

  "But it's so hard—it shouldn't happen," I said.

  I kept on in this sorrowful and sentimental way until she interrupted sharply.

  "I didn't love him anymore."

  It was her dismissive tone again, and when I heard this trite expression as a summary of the marriage a chill went through me. Yes, my fears of her shallowness were justified. I had always been suspicious of her, fearful of her dependency and her moods. Yes, if I had left Alison for her, it would not have lasted. But would it have been a disaster?

  Perhaps, with that child, but I did not know.

  Her dumb, perfunctory I didn't love him anymore sounded to me like, I changed my mind.

  It was what I had disliked most in her, the very argument that day on the Cape when we had been heading for Provincetown and she got suddenly bored and irritably said, "Isn't there anywhere nearer we could go?"

  "You said you wanted to go to Provincetown."

  She had seen a restaurant review. Single women are tremendous readers of such reviews. It had less to do with food or eating than it did with their fantasizing about a safe and stable world where, dressed up, they might allow themselves to be chaperoned.

  "It's too far."

  "But I've already made the reservations at the restaurant."

  "You can unmake them."

  "I was looking forward to going."

  "See? Now it's all about you."

  "This trip was your idea. The restaurant that was mentioned in Bon Appetit."

  "I changed my mind."

  I got angry. She got upset. My anger proved I didn't love her—so she said. She began to cry. She seemed physically very small, like an ugly dwarf, when she cried. I thought: Leave her. I felt like dumping her by the side of the road. I was also afraid and had the distinct sense that she would grab the wheel and wrench it and send us into the path of an oncoming car.

  For about ten minutes, overwhelmed by this hysteria, we said nothing. Then we came to Brewster and I pulled off the road, fearing that my ability to drive had deteriorated. It was just a tourist attraction—the real windmills of the Cape were gone. But she believed in it.

  "I wish I had a camera."

  So she was gullible as well. Unreasonably, I held that against her.

  And here was her windmill again, on her postcard. She had forgotten the argument that had led to my wanting to leave her. Her saying "I changed my mind" was something I feared; that she would tell me one day, "I don't love you anymore." I knew that now.

  This whole recollection was a silence that had frozen our telephone conversation.

  "Are you still there?"

  How long had she been saying that?

  "I'm here. Just thinking."

  "I thought we got cut off."

  She had forgotten the cause of my reverie, that she had said, I didn't lave him anymore.

  "What you said sounded perfunctory," I told her.

  "You know all the put-down words."

  "That you didn't love him anymore."

  "He was in denial. He had been codependent. You can be such an asshole."

  "So that was that. 'Guess I'll move on. "

  "I didn't have to process that relationship."

  "Time for me to move on."

  "So you just called me up to torment me with all your sick writer's questions."

  "No. I wanted to thank you for the postcard."

  "Oh, that. So where are you traveling to?"

  "Maybe New York."

  "I'm not that far away."

  "Where do you live?"

  An idle question—nothing on earth would induce me to see her. It was first the idea in her mind that I was separated, and that there might be a resumption of our affair. But more than anything our little affair had been a lesson in the danger of trifling with someone's emotions.

  And she had a life now—perhaps the one she had always wanted. She was a single parent, had a child. She had not wanted to be denied anything. In those years since we had split up she'd had it all—she was a fiancée, a bride, a wife, a mother, a divorcée, and an employee. All that! It was an elaborate form of conquest—total transformation. I guessed her ex-husband had filled her with the confidence and given her the money she needed in order to leave him. That was what fascinated me: she really was different from the young woman I had known.

  My life has changed quite a bit.

  She had truly found a new life. It obliquely gave me hope, but perhaps you had to be very shallow or calculating or greedy to make it work.

  Now she and the child remained, and she was back to earth. She had gotten what she had asked for, even if it was not what she wanted. It was hard for her to be needy now—the child came first, and life could not have been easy. She was not young anymore and, as for her beauty, you had to subtract the child from her looks.

  I was glad I had called her, because now I knew I never wanted to see her again. She sensed this. She had the instincts of an intrusive animal, the reflexes of a rat, always sniffing, always looking up, always alert and twitching.

  "I have to go. I'm having a drink with someone."

  "You're such a fucking snob."

  Believing that I was rejecting her, she had to insult me—her pride demanded it. I let it pass.

  "Sorry I intruded."

  "You're so insincere."

  "Do you really want to know what I have to do?"

  "No, because you're too fucking anecdotal."

  I pitied her. I pitied all people who helplessly raged at life and its injustice, never guessing that, however unfair it seemed, it was justly deserved. If her nose was in a trap, it was because she had been sniffing greedily for more cheese. That was the piteous part.

  "See you later."

  "Not if I can help it."

  That was my reward for calling when I shouldn't have. It had been a mistake. I deserved her clumsy insults.

  3

  Who was he, this man she had married and divorced, the father of her child? I told myself it did not matter. But the longer I thought of it, the more profound my feeling that he mattered. In the end I was preoccupied by him, because whoever he might be, he was the man I would have become; whatever life he was leading would have been mine.

  And though I did not know Wanda anymore, I understood that she had not merely been married and borne a child but that she had gotten a life. Yet what had happened to the man who had supplied that life? What she had left him with was what she would have left me with. Had she been my other wife, I would have been that man, and his life would have been mine.

  In my speculative frame of mind the only way I could determine the caliber of the bullet I had dodged was to see the man it had hit.

  The secretary of a lawyer friend of mine once told me, "I can find anyone," and it seemed to me an absurd boast. That was naive of me. One of the greatest skills a person can have in the commercial world,
and not only the commercial, is the ability to locate the whereabouts of a particular person—a debtor, a patron, a client, a customer, a felon, a friend. Your whole working life depends on such people. Only writers, dealing in the realm of the imagination, are content to find people in their heads. That is the writer's boast. We invent them. Everyone else goes looking.

  But in the active search for my other life I was operating in the world of reality. I needed to find this man in order to finish my story. I realized that the ability to find someone—to locate a stranger lost in the darkness—approaches an art, since its nearest analogue is in the writer's searching his imagination for a character.

  I strongly suspected that the man I had spoken to when I was trying to find out Wanda's address was her ex-husband. But I needed to be sure. So I called my friend's secretary and reminded her of what she had told me.

  "I think I can find the guy," she said. "Tell me everything you know."

  "Just his last name and his telephone number."

  "Area code?"

  "Nine one four."

  "Does he work in New York City?"

  "Why do you ask?"

  "Because that's White Plains," she said. "What else do you know?"

  "He might be in computers." Wanda undoubtedly was. And these computer nerds—"tech weenie" was her expression—tended to gravitate to each other.

  "That helps. There are directories."

  "And I think he used to live in Danbury." Surely if she got his life, she got the house.

  "Tell me where he used to be, and I'll tell you where he went."

  I liked that, because that had its literary parallels, too.

  His name was Todd Falkenberg. He worked for Global Teletronics, in the sales and marketing division. The company was one of the leaders in telecommunications and had developed a range of portable satellite telephones. The Global brochure depicted these phones as being convenient as luggage—one was a suitcase, another a briefcase, the last the size of a laptop computer.

  I decided to ask Mr. Falkenberg for a demonstration. I called him, but—worried that Wanda might have told him about me—said that my name was Edward Medford and that I was coming to New York.

  He said, "I'm in the city Tuesdays and Thursdays. How about next week? I can do Tuesday afternoon. Let me make a suggestion."

  That voice was almost certainly the one that had given me the Danbury number.

  He was accommodating, he was manipulative, he was a salesman, and when I met him I was pleased to see that not only was he talkative, he was also informative and observant—brand-name conscious in the way that competitive people are; not necessarily accurate, but I could do the subtraction. He was smiling at my briefcase.

  "That an Orvis bag? I buy their stuff all the time. Our newest model satellite phone will fit inside that puppy."

  "Is it on the market?"

  "I'll lay it all out for you."

  Salesmen never gave a straight answer, and the words "yes" and "no" were not in their vocabulary.

  We were in his office on Lexington Avenue in the Seventies, a busy neighborhood because of the large hospital nearby, and in spite of the hospital, very noisy. The office he said was temporary—he was in the process of moving. True, there were cartons stacked at the side of the room, but I had the feeling he was not going anywhere.

  In contrast with the provisional look of the office, he was careful about his appearance, very tidy. Everything about him was studied—the shoes, the belt, the tie, the suit. He knew how to make an impression, though it was lost on me. I saw only a man who wanted to be regarded for the way he was dressed; this was not something I valued at all. He was a bit older than me, but he was in much better shape. That did impress me. I wanted to know more about that.

  I was on the verge of asking this when I was distracted by the framed photographs of the little girl on his desk. Three photographs—in a pink blanket an even pinker infant; on all fours, like a wind-up toy; a portrait of a woman as a little girl. She had Wanda's looks—the pale eyes, the willful mouth, and there was something of the diet-prone Wanda in the little girl's chubby cheeks.

  "Hey, welcome to Global," he said, full of salesman's poise, and he shook my hand and showed me a chair, all the while apologizing for the state of the office.

  There was a great deal in his handshake. It was of course a deliberate grip, a bit overprecise. But his fingerpads were hard, the heel of his hand was hard. He did not have to squeeze hard for me to know that he had a powerful grip. I guessed that he probably rowed or biked. Realizing that he had a sport, at his age, and probably a sport he excelled at, made me judge him differently, as much more complex than the salesman stereotype I had first seen.

  His face was blotchy and sunburned. He was not sleek in the vain way of someone who worked out, but rather, seriously healthy in the manner of a solitary athlete—his muscles knotted and bunched, his neck thick, his knuckles skinned. You noticed his strength because it made his clothes fit awkwardly. He had sturdy shoulders, and patches on the balding top of his head were tanned and peeling, as were the backs of his hands.

  He conveyed the restless impression of an athlete confined indoors, for he had a slight clumsiness, checking himself as he moved in the small space of his office. In this setting his good health was incongruous. He was a big man, and when he squatted to show me the smallest model of the satellite phone, he hitched up his trousers; a guess told me he might be a cyclist. Two solid blocks of muscles were his calves, and the rest was whipcord.

  "You ride a bike?"

  "How'd you know?"

  I was sorry for being so impulsive in my curiosity. But cycling was a generally solitary business. It had little to do with teams and companionship. It was another and almost unknowable life, a kind of monasticism—that was what made me see him differently. I was more respectful, but also warier.

  "Just guessed."

  "You know bikes?"

  "I have a Merlin."

  He smiled. "You know bikes." He looked aside and said, "I had a Kestrel until a little over a year ago. Carbon fiber. It had a few dings but it was incredibly light. A beautiful machine. I had to sell it."

  I filled in the rest. It was a $3,000 bike. He needed the money because of the divorce.

  "Now I'm just riding an old Fuji I had in the garage."

  "You cycle in Manhattan?"

  "I cycle to work from Westchester. I've got an apartment there."

  "I can't imagine many people do that."

  That pleased him. He told me how long it took, the route; how he changed his clothes and got a shower in this office. And with all this talk about cycling I liked him a bit better and he saw me as something other than a customer.

  "I drove in today, because I've got an errand to run in Connecticut."

  Where Wanda lived. He was probably going to make a visit, his once-a-week chance to see his little girl. I was thinking of this, seeing him with the child, when his voice broke the spell.

  "Where's this going?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "You want to talk bikes or you want to talk satellite phones?"

  He said it pleasantly in the bantering manner of a friend, and as he spoke I saw another picture of his little girl: another shrine, Wanda's face distorted and miniaturized. It made me more curious about him.

  To satisfy and detain him, I talked phones. "It's a niche market," he was saying. I found it hard to listen, because I was distracted by his athlete's health and focus. He was two men, the sportsman and the salesman, and they were so different he appeared divided and somewhat clumsy.

  "We're a small company, we started in semiconductors"—Wanda's field, as it happened—"but we began to concentrate on telecommunications. We sold the semiconductor division and—hey, can I give you an analogy? The big companies are like elephants. Ever see an elephant's foot? Big round thing, but if you imagine it in a room it doesn't get into the corners. That's where we are, in the corners, where the elephant's feet of your IBMs and your Tos
hibas and your Motorolas can't go."

  I complimented him on his elephant-foot illustration and said, "I'd like to know more about the satellite phone."

  "I can give you the specs. I'll find a spec sheet."

  "I just wanted to see how the phone works."

  "Right. Why should you be interested in tolerances? Here, let's get someone on the phone."

  "Shall we call your wife?"

  "Ex-wife. No thanks."

  He was hurt. He remembered.

  "I'll try the head office. It's on Long Island."

  We tried three times, and failed.

  "It's not locking on to the satellite. I keyed in the right coordinates." He frowned at the window. "The hospital might be in the way."

  "That must be very frustrating," I said.

  But he smiled. "No problem. I've been in anger management."

  I was so fascinated by this expression "anger management." I was unaware of his repositioning the phone on the windowsill. He had aimed its lid, which contained the antenna, past the upper corner of the hospital. He handed the receiver to me. I heard it ring and then, "Good afternoon, Global."

  It was better, smaller, more efficient than I could possibly have imagined. The fact that I had no use for it, that I had come here only to see the man Wanda had married and divorced, did not keep me from admiring the product he was trying to sell me.

  "Help me with this," he said. "You want one of these phones for what reason? Remote places? Construction site? Secure line? You know, a cellular phone works in so many places."

  "I'm planning to do a lot of foreign travel. I think 'remote places' is probably the best description."

  "I'm not asking you what you do," he said, and it seemed slightly arch. "Only where you do it."

  "New Guinea is one of my destinations."

  "There's some microwave technology out there because of the mining, but you're right, this phone would be very useful."