by AnonYMous
How I hated arguing with him like this.
‘Don’t try to restrict me,’ Sergei replied.
‘Look, there’s nothing in it,’ he added. But there was a hesitation in his voice that I noticed. ‘I’ll ring you back.’
When you’ve lived with someone for a very long time, and especially if English isn’t that person’s first language, you become used to the way they use words and phrases and structure their sentences. Sergei had never used this phrase—‘Don’t try to restrict me’—before. It didn’t flow when he said it. It didn’t sound like him at all.
He rang back within minutes. I knew what he was going to say, even before I picked up.
‘Caitt said she wasn’t expecting you, so it’s better for the three of us to eat out.’
‘Fine,’ I replied calmly. ‘Where are we meeting?’
Somehow I wasn’t surprised, when I arrived at the cafe he’d suggested, to find Sergei nursing a glass of wine on his own. Caitt wouldn’t be able to join us for dinner. Apparently something had come up.
‘What?’ I asked.
Sergei shrugged. ‘She didn’t say.’
For all his apparent lack of interest, I could see that Caitt’s abrupt change of mind had unsettled him, and I think that this was because he knew perfectly well why she had changed her mind—although he wasn’t going to admit as much to me.
I saw the same, unsettled look on his face a fortnight later. We had just come home from the party about which I’ve already written: when I interrupted our host’s dangerous liaison with Caitt in the hallway upstairs, the host being Leo, the husband saved from committing adultery on the spot by a brilliantly if frustratingly designed red dress.
I told Sergei about the incident. The story rattled him—it was obvious—but he sprang to Caitt’s defence all the same.
‘She’d had too much to drink, that was all. She has been flat out all week organising a charity function in aid of the kids she works with. It’s the first time in days that she has relaxed,’ he added.
Not for the first time, I was made aware of an ongoing, daily dialogue between Sergei and Caitt. It seemed that he knew everything that was happening in her life. It seemed pointless to tell him the rest of the story, about Caitt’s expression of triumph when I finally walked out of the bathroom after lingering inside for as long as I dared, to find her standing alone in the hall. That expression was her way of putting me on notice: Sergei next.
‘She wants me to go to the function,’ said Sergei, interrupting my thoughts.
‘Aren’t we both invited?’ I asked pointedly.
‘You’ll probably be working,’ Sergei replied.
This was new—both the remark, and the accusing note in his voice. I didn’t work all the time and, up until Caitt entered our life, Sergei had always accepted that my job, like his, sometimes required periods of intense concentration.
The subject was dropped. And we went to the charity event together.
I admit I was curious to see Caitt in her ‘other’ life. Would she be any different in manner? It turned out that the evening would include a game of charades. Each speech pathologist would assume an identity and the guests had to guess who it was. Caitt, announced Sergei, as we arrived at the function, had decided to be Batwoman. Some of the kids were going to the function as well and she knew that the Batwoman character was a favourite of theirs.
‘We’ll get to see Caitt’s natural instincts for comedy then,’ I commented. It was probably fortunate that his phone rang at the same time.
‘She’s nervous,’ he said afterwards.
No need to ask who ‘she’ was.
‘Really?’ I replied in a tone of wonder.
Sergei looked at me sharply but evidently decided not to push it.
The evening turned out to be pleasant enough. Naturally we sat at Caitt’s table and naturally Caitt sat next to Sergei. She was dressed all in white and looked very glamorous and monopolised Sergei as usual. But when it came time for the game of charades, I felt almost sorry for her because no one could work out who she was trying to be. People sat in their seats looking bewildered.
Caitt started out by mouthing the word ‘bat’ and pretended to put on a mask. Then she did lots of furling and unfurling of an imaginary cape. I only knew it was a cape because of my ‘inside’ knowledge, of course. Otherwise I suspect I would have been as mystified as everyone else as Caitt strode up and down in front of the tables of guests, throwing back her hair and striking various poses. At one point she went down in a half squat, then leapt up in such dramatic fashion that I almost called out, ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?’
At another stage she looked directly at Sergei and me and at that exact moment, Sergei happened to reach over and push back a stray piece of my hair.
It threw Caitt off balance, noticeably so. And as she faltered mid-sentence, I wriggled my shoulders.
She saw it. She got it. She smiled unpleasantly.
And I knew that she was sending me a warning.
At the end of the evening it was Sergei who suggested we not hang around afterwards and join Caitt for a drink somewhere instead. ‘I didn’t know that was part of the plan,’ I commented.
‘It was. Sort of,’ he answered, and then relapsed into silence.
We were still in the car driving home when he said suddenly, ‘She isn’t very good.’
I could have replied that, on the contrary, Caitt was very good indeed at playing charades. But I was more preoccupied with the look she had given me—and the three words that I could almost have sworn had formed in her mouth when I wriggled my shoulders.
Just you wait.
Sergei recovered his health. But his near miss with mortality had a profound and enduring effect on him. Our new-found closeness didn’t last long; well before the end of that year it had become obvious that his attitude towards life, towards me and towards the future had changed irrevocably.
I have no doubt that Sergei’s vulnerability, caused by what had happened to him, was part of the reason for the change in his personality. It certainly played a part in the events that followed. I remember being stunned when he suddenly said out of a clear blue sky after we’d come home on Christmas Eve—after spending part of the evening with friends—that our house and everything we owned together would always be ours and no one else’s. He repeated that last line almost angrily.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked him. ‘Where is this coming from?’
‘Sometimes I might not live here. I might end up not living with you all of the time. But I’m not leaving either, and I expect you to keep living in the house,’ he replied.
When I asked whether this meant we were splitting up, he avoided giving any answers and then, in some awful accident of timing, Lili rang from London to say she suspected Will was having an affair.
I replaced the receiver after the conversation, feeling as if all our lives had suddenly turned upside down. And everything became even stranger as we went through the ritual of Christmas Day and Boxing Day at my parents’ house—staying on the peninsula with them—before returning to the city on December 27.
Friends were arriving to spend the rest of the week with us. We got through the days by putting on a good act in front of them, and spent New Year’s Eve at a party—sans Caitt—with our house guests.
But it felt as if we were merely fulfilling a pattern of living together because that’s what our marriage had become. We had a relationship, and we didn’t. Only a few days into 2007, Sergei suddenly informed me that he wanted to spend more time at the weekends with other people. I defiantly declared that I’d do the same thing. We barely saw each other for the rest of January.
I think that ultimately we might have managed to survive Caitt, if it hadn’t been for Sergei’s brain bleed. It was certainly the primary trigger behind his decision to have an affair—as he himself would admit. The possibility of death had given shape to the disillusionment that had been part of Sergei’s makeup since childhood.
This was it, he said, when he first got home from hospital. Proof that life had no real point.
And then all of a sudden, from the end of January onwards, I was spending hardly any time at home anymore.
Someone else desperately needed all of my attention—the motionless figure whose bedside I’d been at almost permanently since the moment when I had raced out of the house with the car keys in hand, seconds after a frantic phone call from Dad, and only minutes ahead of a newsflash about an accident that had just taken place on the northern peninsula.
A middle-aged woman had been hit by a car that had sped towards her without stopping as she was crossing a road.
Lori. Our sister.
For weeks she lay in an induced coma in an intensive care unit, terribly injured. The police never found the driver who did this to her. The car had been stolen and was eventually discovered, burnt out, on a road leading off one of the freeways that seemed to go on forever west of the city.
She would spend the rest of the summer, and autumn, and part of winter, in hospital. Eve and Lili flew immediately to Australia to help keep vigil by her bedside—and made return visit after return visit after return visit. In the early days, following the accident, we practically lived in ICU—my parents, my sisters and I—until Lori was allowed to come back to life. We were focused on trying to make her aware that she wasn’t alone, especially after seeing her tears as she took in her surroundings, once she had recovered consciousness.
Whenever my sisters temporarily returned to the lives we’d all put on hold, I often went back to my parents’ house with my devastated parents and slept there.
Sergei told me right from the beginning that he couldn’t bear the sight of my sister lying motionless in ICU, especially after his own stint in hospital—and I understood that, but I still wished that he would come with me to see Lori more often. He came only a few times, usually on a Saturday afternoon, and only if it was ‘my’ hour to visit, but he always seemed to be in a hurry to get away before my sisters or parents arrived. And if I rang him in the evenings, on the nights when I stayed with my parents, he rarely answered his phone, although he would always ring back by midnight.
I didn’t want to think about Caitt, or what might be happening. So it came as a shock when I realised that my mother, with her unerring instincts, had guessed that Sergei and I were adrift.
I know that, because one evening Sergei surprised me by phoning and saying that he’d meet me at my parents’ house on the peninsula—and when he walked in, my mother’s face lit up with relief and she said, ‘It’s lovely to see you.’
Neither of us wanted to disillusion her.
This was in March, just after Lori had been moved into the step-down unit of intensive care and had begun to speak weakly but clearly. For the first time in years, we saw a softness return to her face as it began to sink in that she still had a family who cared about her. One night I watched as she hugged our parents—and saw a sense of peace envelop all three of them.
Grief, and relief, can fine-tune the senses, and I think this might have been why I finally phoned Sergei and asked him whether he was having an affair with Caitt—and he said yes.
I no longer knew the man I’d lived with for so long, and this, as I’ve already described, had been the case for some time. Even before his affair with Caitt began, Sergei had started flying into rages for no reason. Or else he would simply act as if I wasn’t present, becoming remote and withdrawn to the point where he had turned into a stranger—most of all, I suspect, a stranger to himself.
Even so, it was me whom he rang early one evening when he was clearly in shock. I had just left the hospital and was on my way home. Lili, in Sydney for three weeks, was keeping Lori company. Sergei told me that he’d just shouted at a woman after she had left her car partially blocking our driveway. Horrified when he saw fear in her face, he’d gone back inside the house, shaking. ‘What is happening to me?’ he asked.
Despite the mystifying changes in his behaviour, I was completely thrown by this phone call. Sergei had always been the kind of man who drew people to him, who delighted in the company of others. He had a generosity of spirit and a unique personality that captivated everyone he met. He was also a very kind person, one who treated women with an old-fashioned gallantry. His friends, male and female, loved him.
Nothing he’d just said made any sense.
Was Sergei’s tendency towards melancholy resurfacing? He had once told me that his father had suffered a depressive illness for years. Amazingly, and probably because what had happened to Lori was taking up most of my energy, I didn’t immediately think of Caitt as being the cause of his mood swings, although this probably sounds contradictory.
I know now that she was a lot more manipulative than I had wanted to believe. But I am also convinced that part of Sergei’s behaviour was due to his own emotional turmoil about having an affair in the first place.
At one stage later on he rang Eve—after I’d let both my sisters know what was happening—and said that he hated what his affair with Caitt was doing to me. ‘Then stop it,’ said Eve. But he didn’t—not then, anyway. There’s good reason to believe that having an affair was causing Sergei a great deal of anguish, while at the same time rekindling memories of the anguish I’d caused him when I’d had an affair. Emotionally, it was incredibly complicated for both of us.
The right time will come in this story when I’ll be able to explain what I mean. But not yet.
Long before I knew the truth about Sergei and Caitt, I had asked Sergei if they were sleeping together. Sergei was outraged at the question—and so was Caitt, he said later, when he repeated to her what I’d said.
‘We think you have a sick imagination,’ he added.
His condemnation hit hard. Before Caitt came along, I had never been suspicious of other women. I wasn’t the type. Sergei had a number of female friends, whom I’d always considered friends of mine as well. I would have considered it unnatural if he’d had no women friends!
So when he did finally confess—and added that they were, indeed, already having an affair when I’d first asked him the question—I was devastated that someone who usually never lied, and had always been the most straightforward of men, would have come out with such a twisted response. Sergei had never been malicious and he certainly never played mind games of this sort. In fact, deceitfulness was so out of character for him that I think his statement—‘We think you have a sick imagination’—shocked me far more than finding out about the affair, once I had.
It’s significant that ultimately Sergei’s honesty won out.
I kept thinking about the incident when he had shouted at the motorist who’d parked her car badly. I couldn’t get it out of my mind, nor his remark about a sick imagination. Something never rang true about that particular accusation. And even without all of this, the fact that he was spending more and more time with a woman who had become openly hostile to me was extraordinary. Anyone else in my position would have asked the same question—‘Are you sleeping with Caitt?’—long before I did.
Even so, another couple of weeks must have passed after Sergei had shouted at the motorist before I picked up the phone one afternoon and rang him on impulse.
‘Are you having an affair with Caitt?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘It started five months ago.’
‘Please let her know that you’ve told me,’ I said. And then, unable to speak any more, I hung up.
Perhaps I wanted to hear Sergei say ‘yes’ to the question I had asked him. Perhaps I needed an excuse to further distance myself from a situation that had become too difficult to handle, on top of what had happened to my sister. Both Sergei’s and my emotions were at stretching point, and as the knowledge sank in that he and Caitt had been sleeping together while I was sitting at Lori’s bedside in ICU, I felt a rage at Caitt, and at Sergei. I wanted desperately to vanish. I wished that I could feel nothing, I yearned to be a deserter. I even wished, briefly, that
I didn’t have a family. But of course I couldn’t abandon the one I had.
To this day I have no idea when Sergei’s affair with Caitt really started. Perhaps he’d been lying when he said it had begun five months earlier. Perhaps not.
I thought, after making that phone call to Sergei, that he might stay away until late—hoping that I would have driven back to the hospital by the time he came home. But I was incapable of leaving the house—and in any case, he walked through the door about an hour later. I don’t think either of us knew what to say. We just looked at each other. Oddly enough, I think we both felt closer to each other at this moment than we had for a very long time—and indeed, we treated each other with great gentleness that evening, almost as if nothing had happened. We mentioned Caitt only in passing. We even watched an old movie on TV. It was bizarre, although I do remember asking at one stage, ‘What now?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sergei replied.
Later, I wondered whether he would opt to sleep in the spare room—or whether I should—but we both went into our bedroom as usual at the end of the evening. However, rather than slip under the sheets, I lay on the far side of the bed wrapped in a beautiful old Turkish blanket that I loved for its comforting softness.
Once or twice during the night I looked at Sergei’s sleeping figure and wondered what would happen to us in the future. By now Caitt had played such a destructive role in our life for so long that his affair with her seemed almost an anticlimax.
Sleepless for most of the night, I got up at dawn and was out of the house within thirty minutes. It was early summer, and not yet too hot to walk through the empty streets of McMahons Point into the city.
Clearly, I couldn’t work in the house. I needed space, and silence, and time.
Climbing the steps leading to the Harbour Bridge pedestrian walkway, I imagined creating a life of impermanence, one that would mean never settling down anywhere and keeping constantly on the move, like a fugitive. The idea appealed to me enormously.
In another good—or bad—accident of timing, I was flying overseas the next day to start a series of interviews with a Brazilian environmental activist whose name seemed to be everywhere all of a sudden. This was the biography that I’d begun researching some time earlier and could no longer put off starting to write. It was an unusual assignment, since most of the biographies I ‘churned out’ were on Australians. There was only one reason why I knew that I would come back to Sydney, rather than make an excuse to keep travelling.