by Paul Theroux
“My name is Andre Parent. I believe my wife works here?”
I had never been there before.
“Surprise, surprise,” one of the older women said in a stage whisper. And still smiling—friendly and malicious in the English way—“These men who make unannounced visits to their wives at work!”
But Jenny was unperturbed. She said that she would not be through for two more hours. We agreed to meet at The Black Friar for a drink after work. When she arrived at the pub she was more relaxed and friendly than I had seen her in a long time, and she said, “We should do this more often,” and kissed me.
We went home together on the train, holding hands, and while I made dinner and paid off the babysitter, Jenny said she was going to have a bath. As the spaghetti sauce bubbled on the back of the stove, I considered Jenny’s bag. I would not look—not after the pleasant hours we had just spent. But when I heard the door slam and the shower running I could not resist; my habit was too strong.
And I was so used to the paraphernalia in her bag that I immediately found the note, folded in half.
I would like to say in the nicest possible way that I love you in the nicest possible way. XX
No signature, no name.
I brought it into my room to examine it under my desk lamp.
“Daddy,” Jack called out. “You didn’t read me a story!”
I was not looking at the note anymore, but rather at the picture of Jenny and Jack. Who the hell took that picture?
3.
Jenny came out of the bathroom in her robe, her wet hair tangled, her face pink with dampness and heat, a bit breathless from the exertion, and self-absorbed in the way that people are when they wash themselves—completely off guard.
I said, “I know you were having an affair while I was away.”
She said, “It’s all over.”
She had been surprised into the truth.
“So there was someone.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
She walked away, toweling her hair. I followed with my questions.
“Who is he? Do I know him?”
“It doesn’t matter.” She seemed very calm.
I had not mentioned the note I had found, or the snapshot I was sure he had taken. I had simply blurted out my accusation, and she had not denied it.
“How could you do it?” I said.
She was not apologetic. She reacted sharply. She said, “You went away. You left me—I was all alone. You didn’t even ask whether it was convenient—you just left.”
“And you went to bed with this guy!”
“What did you expect me to do?” I was astonished by the way she so easily admitted it and defended herself. But it annoyed me that she was not contrite. “Did you think that after you were gone I would spend night after night alone in this house?”
“I spent night after night in crummy hotels alone.”
“Perhaps you should have found someone to sleep with. I would have understood that.” She said it almost tenderly, but her voice became resentful when she added, “It was winter in London, and so dark and cold it was diabolical. You were in Turkey and India. Burma. Japan. Fantastic places.”
“They were awful! I was alone—I hated it.”
She rounded on me. “You chose to go. ‘My trip, my trip.’ I got tired of hearing you talk about it. And you didn’t have to go. I begged you not to.”
“We needed the money.”
“That’s not true. I have a job.”
“I had nothing to write. I had nothing to do. I couldn’t face the thought of sitting around.”
“I didn’t want you to go, but you went. You have to accept the consequences.”
“You’re incredible,” I said. “You couldn’t wait for a couple of months, until I came back.”
She said in a correcting and teacherlike tone, “Four and a half months.”
“You couldn’t wait!”
“Why should I? You were doing what you wanted. You weren’t waiting—you were having a good time.”
“It was miserable,” I said. “I can’t tell you how awful it was. You know that. I wrote to you almost every day—”
And now I saw her opening the letters. She stood by the front door and put her fingers under the flap of the envelope and clawed it apart. She pulled the sheet of paper flat, looked closely at the hotel letterhead—something misleading like Grand Hotel, Amritsar—and then glanced down and saw missing you very much and can’t wait to see you. After that, she went off and met the man.
“And you hardly wrote to me. Now I know why.”
“I told you why. It was as if you had died. I didn’t want to think about you. It just made me miserable.”
“Anyway you were screwing this guy, so I guess you had your hands full.”
“I knew it! I knew that’s all you’d care about—the sex. You can’t imagine that it was anything else.”
“If you have a lover what else is there?”
She was determined to make her point, for the sake of her pride. She said, “There are a lot of other things. There’s friendship. You wouldn’t know anything about that—you have no friends, you’re too selfish. And there are practical things. One day the car wouldn’t start. He started it by getting the battery charged—”
“He charges the goddamned battery and you hand him your ass,” I shouted. “Where was he sleeping that night? Huh? You woke up with him and the car wouldn’t start. He was sleeping in my bed!”
She had gone sullen. She squinted at me and said, “I’m not going to say another word. How dare you talk to me that way.”
I wanted to hit her. It was not kindness or compassion that restrained me, but rather the thought that if I started I would not stop until I had beaten her brains out—hurt her badly, throttled her, or killed her. It was not the gentleman in me that stopped me but rather the cunning murderer, who knew what violence I was capable of.
So I didn’t hit her then. We went to bed, and without warning or any preparation I rolled her over and pushed her legs apart. In silence—but daring her to resist—I entered her and bore down on her in a rapid and brutal way.
It exhausted me. She had not uttered a sound the whole time. I realized soon afterwards, as I was dropping off to sleep, that she was crying softly.
“What’s wrong?”
She tried to stifle her sobs. She said nothing.
The only regret I had was that she might be feeling sorry for herself rather than for me.
In the days that followed, every moment we were together it was on my mind. In the middle of the most innocent conversation about such matters as Jack’s progress at school, or the loose slates on the roof, or should we buy a new carpet for the hall, I would say, “Who is it?”
“I told you—it’s over.”
“Did he sleep here?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“He took you out. He took you to the park.”
“Please stop. If we go on like this you’re just going to end up screaming at me.”
“Crystal Palace Park—I know he did. And Greenwich, too. Don’t lie—I know it.”
It was Greenwich Park in the snapshot. I had studied it with a magnifying glass and seen the hill and a corner of the Observatory in the background. And I resented such a good picture of Jenny and Jack, both of them smiling and happy. I knew it was taken with an expensive camera—something about the size of the print, the clarity and color. We had a cheap camera; we had no money. His was obviously a 35mm, and he probably had a shoulder bag with lenses and filters, someone serious and at the same time very egotistical, the way I imagined all obsessed photographers to be, sticking his nose in everything, because everything belonged to him, and believing he was bestowing a great favor on my wife and child by taking their picture. He had slept with my wife and played with my child.
Look at the dinosaurs, Jack. Let me hold you up so that you can see them. Here you go—
That same day, in Rang
oon or Calcutta, or some other pitiful place, I was sitting in my underwear on the edge of my bed, with a book on my knees to write on, and beginning my letter, Darling—
“I know he slept here,” I said. “How could you let him? Sleeping in the same house with Jack! You let your son see you screwing another man. You are a bitch, and what a whore—”
But she had started to cry. That was what I wanted, to reduce her to tears. It was the only satisfaction I had: that she might be sorry and ashamed, that she might be afraid.
She said, “If you want to leave me, go on. But please don’t hurt me any more than you have done. Go—”
I didn’t want to go, nor did I want her to go. What I wanted was impossible. It was a wish for the whole affair to have been imaginary. I wanted it never to have happened. I wanted her, I think, to deny it. But in her sorrowful honesty and her anger and her tears, she admitted everything.
I said, “Poor little Jack.”
Jenny was crying.
“He knows all about this. He has seen everything. He will always remember it.”
Jenny’s tears were like a further admission that this was so.
“Please leave me alone, Andy.”
She knew she was weak, and that my anger gave me strength; but her weakness was my only hope. It was no good my knowing one or two distorted details. I thought: If I know more, if I know everything, it might make it easier.
“He works in the bank, I know that.”
I didn’t know that. It was simply the thought that only someone in the office could have passed her the note. I was sure it had been handed to her—slipped somehow—and not sent.
She was sobbing—she didn’t reply.
“It’s probably someone I’ve met.”
Her eyes were red, and the flesh around them was loose and raw. They were like two wounds, still bleeding.
“As soon as I was gone you took up with him, and all those letters I wrote meant nothing—”
“I loved getting your letters,” she said, and I was hurt because I wanted her to deny the other thing. “I saved all of them—even all the postcards. I have them upstairs. You don’t believe me.”
But I did. I had seen my letters in the back of one of her drawers, all neatly stacked. I knew everything that was in those drawers.
I said, “He slept here, you cooked for him—I’m sure Betty knew about it, too. That’s probably why she left—”
Jenny’s face was in her hands. Was this true? I thought: Deny it.
“—and I know that the day I called you from Siberia—early that morning—you were with him in bed. You had been out the night before. You hated my waking you up. That’s why you were so snappy with me, even though I’m your husband. He was in the bed, on my side of the bed, waiting for you—”
She was still crying bitterly, and I thought: Say something.
“—And he’s waiting for you now. He writes you notes. You’re still seeing him!”
She said, “No—it’s over!”
It was her only denial, and it was a terrible one, coming just then, because it meant that everything else I had accused her of had probably been true.
4.
It was not only the thought that someone else had made love to her—though that appalled me and wakened in me a primitive insanity: a man with a hatchet got to his feet and began to dance in my mind. There was something worse. In many ways, mine had been a dangerous trip. I remembered the bad episodes, the rickety buses on mountain roads; the poisonous food and water; hotels that were firetraps; the abusive and crazy people I had met; Vietnam.
I might have died. It had always been a persistent worry of mine that I was doomed to die in a casual accident in a dismal place, where I had no business to be. I often dreamed of train smashes, of my arms being hacked off by an angry mob, of catching fire. I always traveled as a stranger. But I reassured myself with the sentiment that my family was waiting. It was a methodical superstition, like singing to keep my spirits up, and as long as they were thinking of me I would be safe—they were keeping me alive; and if I died they would be brokenhearted.
Now I knew better. I knew that if I had died it would have made little difference. They would have been sorry in the guilty way that people are when some awful thing they desire deep down actually occurs. It might have been convenient, my death, for someone else had already taken over and totally displaced me. He had sat in my chair, written at my desk, probably used my books. He had put his feet on my Chinese stool. He had slept on my side of the bed, and made love to my wife, and played with my child. I imagined it in the simplest way. My vision was of the dining table, and a sticky spoon in the jam jar. It was there when I left; and then I died, and someone else was at the table. But the jam jar hadn’t moved. It remained, with the smeared spoon in it. The pronouncement It doesn’t matter if you die is devastating. She hadn’t said that, but I knew she was thinking it.
And I saw now that my death would not have mattered. I was a fool for ever believing in my importance. I felt I didn’t count. Knowing all this was like dying; not cut down with one swipe of a blade, but going slowly as the truth sank in and spread like an infection.
I had always thought the most cynical lines in literature were in the Jacobean play The White Devil, by John Webster, and went something like: Before your corpse is cold your wife will be screwing:
O man,
That lie upon your death-bed and are haunted
With howling wives! Ne’er trust them; they’ll remarry
Ere the worm pierce your winding sheet,
Ere the spider make a thin curtain for your epitaph.
It had seemed too cruel and taunting to be true.
It was true. I believed my case was worse, for I had not died but had only gone away.
She had said: I pretended to myself that you were dead.
She also said she had told me everything. Could that be so? I thought: There must be more. She said there was nothing.
“What’s his name?”
“What good will it do if I tell you that?”
“I’ll know who it is.”
“It’s all over,” she said. “You’re back. It’s different now. Don’t you see that I love you?”
“If you loved me you wouldn’t have done that.”
“I didn’t realize you’d take it so hard,” she said. “I hadn’t guessed it would hurt you.”
“It’s killing me.”
“I wish you wouldn’t be so melodramatic,” she said.
I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, and then pushed her against the wall, abruptly banging her head. She was shocked, but she made no sound except a sudden gasp, so I did it again. This time she was frightened and hurt, and she began to cry.
“Please—”
“Melodramatic!” But I knew that melodrama is nearly always the result of that accusation.
My instinct was brutal. I only knew the effect of my anger on her after I was violent. I wanted to hit her again. I could only prevent myself by picking up an ashtray and smashing it on the floor. I succeeded in frightening her—indeed, she was terrified. Her terror gave me no pleasure, but it did calm me, by making her passive.
From the little room upstairs came Jack’s just-woken voice. “Daddy, what’s that noise?”
I knew that if he had not been there I would have gone much further.
How many times after that did I tell him, “I dropped something”?
He wanted passionately to hear me say that, though he knew it was a lie. Lying made me responsible. He feared that one day he would be burdened by the truth.
It was a storm that had broken over us. In old folktales witches have the gift of being able to whistle for a wind. I saw Jenny as having this witch’s gift, but the wind was still blowing, long after she wanted it to stop. We were all afraid; we all wanted it to be over.
In my jealous anger I looked for more proof and when I could not find anything I was only the more suspicious, because finding nothing at al
l seemed like definite proof that something was being concealed.
“Stop—you’re hurting me!”
“Tell me his name!”
“Daddy—Mummy!”
We were angry voices and thuds and screams. We were the worrying couple you hear from a window late at night, their voices so loud you can’t tell which window. Screaming at each other, screaming at the window so that someone might hear. At their most desperate they want everyone to hear them fight. And you think: They’re ignorant, they’re dangerous. We were them.
She said, “Why shouldn’t I have done that?”
I said, “I wanted you to be better than me.”
She said, “It’s absurd that you should hate me because you find I am just the same as you.”
“It’s not absurd—it’s logical,” I said. “But you’re worse!”
And in between these quarrels we sat down and ate, we watched television, we slept together. I did not hate her. We were in love, and I was dying.
Death was in all my dreams. I opened doors on familiar rooms and there was no one inside. I searched the woods for my son and saw him far-off, holding someone else’s hand. And when I looked down I saw that what I had taken to be a side of raw beef in a ditch was my corpse in a grave. There were never any mourners in my dreams, there was no grief, there was no evidence that I had ever existed. I dreamed constantly of flying—soaring low over hills and keeping to their contours. When I crash-landed, exhausted by the speed, my bones broke like chair legs snapping.
I woke from such dreams as if I had not slept, my body ringing with aches. And then I could not do anything except follow the brainless routine of an angry housewife. I took Jack to school, I dusted, and did the dishes, and then I met Jack and fed him and I forced him to have a nap because I needed one. I disliked the entire day, but was not capable of anything else. When Mrs. Trevor, the charlady came, I went out alone—usually to Drummond’s Bank, where I lurked, often following Jenny home, shadowing her, and then at the station hurrying to the ticket barrier and pretending that I was meeting her.