WHAT BECAME especially difficult was that none of what he had done seemed to have the power to come back to him. He had his misgivings after the run-in with Mrs. Farrell, but in a matter of days, he stopped feeling bad about it.
In the last week of his assignment, he was not once accosted by anyone who had twigged to the terrible things his idle plotting had wrought. His co-workers and his crewmen treated him with respect, shared their jokes with him, and began reminiscing about the intense two months it had taken to bring this job to completion. A sense of common accomplishment filled the office, and he was brought into its warmth and accorded credit.
Mrs. Farrell said goodbye to him on his last day, shaking his hand and telling him she was sure they’d meet again, but hopefully somewhere with better restaurants. It was as if neither he nor Mrs. Farrell had been connected to Claudia in even the most peripheral of ways. Later that morning, he noticed some of the cubicle offices were being dismantled, and for the first time he realized that these offices didn’t permanently belong to the company. They set up office simulacra wherever they needed to and then pulled them down. It wasn’t an uncommon thing to do, but he’d arrived after the project had started and had never realized that he’d been on a kind of set. Next week it would belong to a theater festival, and maybe after that, to a political campaign. All evidence of his work here, and the site of his love affair, was to be taken apart and reassembled for the pageant of some other set of histories. He shook hands with his office mates, some of whom had chipped in to buy him a fine pen as a goodbye gift. They had liked him, and he hadn’t noticed.
On his last afternoon, he walked slowly along the mall where he had bought Claudia her hat, and wondered if she had gone home from Yellowknife. He hoped that somehow she had come back to Calgary and that he would run into her and explain how what had happened had happened. But the streets were quiet in the afternoon, and the hat store was closed—for a family funeral, said a sign in the door. At least she would never have second thoughts now, he told himself. At least she is free of me. He allowed himself to imagine a series of worse outcomes. That they had been caught. That he had left his wife. That Claudia had rejected him.
Yet none of these things seemed remotely possible, and not just because they hadn’t happened, but because what he’d done had had no consequences.
BERGMAN RETURNED to the city where he lived with his wife, and that summer they carried on with the rituals they had established among their friends, having barbecues and playing golf. During the time he’d been away, Renata had slimmed down a little, and this he imagined had been done for him, although she told him at one point that she felt better and liked fitting into some of her old clothes.
It was a bright, temperate summer. His tomatoes did well, and some mornings, looking out the window, the world he lived in seemed hallowed. At times, when he and Renata argued, as they did in their way (he never thought of it as anything more than one of the benign commonplaces of marriage), he would think of telling her what he’d done. It would happen during a silence—as she was looking at him, her head tilted, waiting for an answer to something. In those few moments, suspended between responding to what was at hand and revealing what she did not suspect, Bergman felt that he could bend the entire future in his hands. Just a word, and everything would change. Two years earlier, he’d taken a phone call from Renata’s father and learned that Renata’s mother had passed away. Bergman walked toward the den where his wife was reading. Her father was waiting on the line. But she didn’t see Bergman standing back from the doorway in the hall and as he watched her, he thought, She is still in the old life. He could wait silently and give her a few more moments in a time and place where her mother was still living. He stood there for what seemed like many minutes, watching her so peacefully, so happily involved in her book.
HE NEVER told her about Claudia. The summer ended. In the fall, work became busier, as it usually did, with new services being introduced and the expansion of existing ones into the burgeoning suburbs of various cities. Bergman had done his tour of duty, however, and other mid-management personnel were sent to Edmonton, to Halifax, to Ottawa. He stayed in the home office, in his true office, the one with the pictures and the diplomas. He’d chosen the carpet in that office, with an allowance the company had given him. He returned to his usual lunch places and ate with the usual group of co-workers.
Bergman still thought about Claudia, but mostly to go over in his mind the story he’d constructed for her life after Calgary. She had bounced back. She worked for another company, a strong, young competitor on the west coast that would give her more than the old company ever would have. She was meeting new people. There was a man, her age, who found the richness of her spirit and body a marvelous bewilderment. As work became more consuming, he found that he thought of her less and less. He picked the last of his tomatoes. The leaves fell.
As they did most autumns, he and Renata took a weekend and drove into the States, looking at the changing colors down through the Finger Lakes. They spent an evening in a colonial inn, near a dry riverbed, and walked among the identical stones of the Revolutionary dead that rose on a hill beside the stone inn. That night, the inn’s restaurant made a mistake on another couple’s dinner reservation, and there was no room for them. Bergman gallantly offered them the other side of their tiny table.
They were from Amherst, upstate, and newly married. The man was probably in his mid- to late twenties and he had the face of an altar boy. His bride was their age—a grown woman, as Renata would say. The couple sat down with words of thanks and tried to allow their “hosts” some privacy, but it was not possible. Renata, an excellent conversationalist, drew them in, and the four of them passed a pleasant two hours, talking of the history of that part of the country and their experiences in towns nearby. The woman collected antiques and shared with them a couple of choice locations off the beaten track. She modeled a ring that her new husband had bought her at one such store, old Irish silver.
Once they had started on their second bottle of wine (this was the most Bergman had drunk for many years), they relaxed thoroughly. They learned more about the other couple’s histories—he was originally from Washington State, and she was an east coaster who had written a couple of books about Italian food. He and Renata told their own, well-rehearsed story, a happy one now that it was practiced. Bergman asked how it was that the two of them, from opposite sides of the country, had found each other.
“It’s a bit complicated,” said the woman simply. “We met at the university.”
“You met in a class?” said Renata.
“No, no, not exactly.” The couple shared a brief look. It made Bergman flinch. “It’s a little embarrassing,” said the woman.
“That’s all right,” said Bergman. “Let’s have another glass of wine.”
The man held up his glass and Bergman poured, then filled the other glasses in turn. He felt suddenly displaced, and his movements were jerky. He was having a déjà vu, it felt. “I took Barbara’s Italian class,” the man said, bringing his wineglass away from his mouth. He looked over at his wife for a signal, and seemed to get one. “I guess we got a little too demonstrative with the transitive verbs.”
They all laughed at this—it was done now, their transgression, and now it was between adults—and Barbara put her hand on her husband’s and squeezed. Suddenly, a shape swam down into Bergman’s mind, a whole flock of birds materializing above a wire and settling onto it. He’d never seen this woman before, but he felt he knew her, as if she were from his future, and had arrived here to show him where he was headed and what was waiting for him. And it was this: it was the company of the fallen. He was having a feeling, but it was also a form of knowledge, as if a series of words had been transformed into an electrical wave.
Renata put her hand on his arm and he flinched. “Honey?”
“Sorry,” he said and he stood up as if stung, his chair squeaking along the parquet floor.
“Where
are you going?”
He was in a restaurant, in New York State, with his wife and two strangers. He was going to turn forty in two weeks, and then the winter was going to come. “I’m making a toast,” he said, and he turned himself back toward the table and reached for his wineglass. “Yes,” he said, “to our new friends, on the occasion of our meeting.”
“And to love,” said the other husband, leaping up to join the gallantry. Both wives remained in their seats, watching their drunken husbands with affectionate looks. And after a moment waiting, the two men clinked their glasses and drank.
Logic of Reduction
Josh, who isn’t getting married in September or December, won’t be marrying Evelyn.
—DELL LOGIC PUZZLES #78
THINGS WENT FARTHER OFF IN THE WRONG DIRECTION WHEN Robert said, “What do you think of getting married?” and in order not to think about it Rebecca had got into the car and come into town even though it was late at night and almost everything was closed. The Rickshaw was open, and so was the bar at The Arms, but Rebecca wasn’t sure if The Arms would have food. When she was a kid, there always seemed to be faintly threatening men standing around outside under the buzzing beer signs, and although it was also a hotel, she’d never seen anyone come or go with luggage.
The Rickshaw served Chinese and Canadian food, and by Canadian the management meant pizza slices, hamburgers and fries, and all kinds of omelettes. Rebecca’s parents had once convinced her that French fries were from China, but that, as with a lot of things (gun powder, noodles), other people took credit for Chinese ingenuity. They’d never gone into The Rickshaw, only made fun of it when passing by on the way to their cottage, pointing at the sign outside that showed a wooden cart being pulled by a boy. To be there now, drinking a cup of coffee and eating a very good piece of lemon pie, seemed a kind of rent in the fabric of her life. She lifted the cup to her mouth and the smell of the coffee calmed her nausea, but even so, sitting there alone and seemingly tranquil now, her pulse still sped up every few minutes, like coals touching off little spits of flame in a dead fire.
She’d left Kevin back at their friends’ cottage, which was the opposite direction to where her family’s place had been. She hadn’t come this far north of Toronto in almost ten years, since they sold the old place and her father and mother split, and a lot of the things that seemed to have fit together for a long time came apart. It was strange to her, what began to feel “normal,” but her parents living apart felt normal. Visiting them in their separate homes felt normal. Their individual tastes had come to the fore in such a way that the two homes seemed to represent an odd type of cell division. The silky lamps and deep velvety couches her mother favored blossomed into a sort of Victorian den when left unchecked, while her father’s apartment was a paradise of right-angled practicality: CD drawers that tilted out, tall thin lamps, a glass table supported by a hollow, wrought-iron box.
What didn’t feel normal was this place, where the waitress hovered behind the counter, waiting for the night to end. It made Rebecca feel guilty to sit there, mulling things over, when everyone else was ready to go home.
ROBERT AND Diane were Kevin’s oldest friends, and a more established couple. Robert had been a senior partner in the firm that Kevin came to after completing his M.B.A.: now, five years later, the two men were good friends. Rebecca was aware of a complex history between the three of them—she knew they’d seen Kevin through a difficult breakup—but Rebecca did not ask questions about a past she hadn’t been a part of. During the year or so that she and Kevin had been together (they were about to buy a house, after a successful cohabitation since the end of the previous summer), they’d seen the other couple once or twice a month. Now, coming up to their cottage for the second time this summer, she could feel that she was on the verge of becoming a known quantity. She’d some time ago stopped feeling that she had to prove something to this older couple, but even as she relaxed more into their company, she also felt something being drawn tight around her.
The word was that Robert and Diane were failing, the marriage was breaking apart. They’d been together for more than ten years, and every time Rebecca had seen them they’d been as jolly as camp counselors, finishing each other’s sentences, telling stories in which the other had charmingly proved human in some way. Diane was colorful in the sense that Rebecca’s mother would have meant it—i.e., weird—but Rebecca thought the older woman an interesting puzzle. She was unnaturally cheery, carrying on as if all the bruises life had to offer were just part of the fun. She suspected that Diane would be bright and bouncy in any situation. She might say, “Just heading off to put a bullet in my head! Have another drinkie in the meantime!”
The more reserved of the two was Robert, but compared to either Rebecca or Kevin, he seemed almost as merry as his wife. Half of what he said made no sense to Rebecca—it was as if he spoke a parallel language that spun off into figures from some tongue Rebecca had never encountered. He once described Diane as being so drunk that “she was hanging off the wall and talking like a duck.” The other two got him just fine, so Rebecca sometimes felt like a square in their company, party to a dialect she ought to have been able to decipher but couldn’t. Her laughter was always catching up.
They’d reassured Kevin in private that everything was going to be okay with them. But as he drove north with Rebecca, Kevin told her it probably wouldn’t be.
“Maybe they want to talk to us about it,” she said.
“I doubt they want the advice of two people who still kiss in public.”
“Maybe they’re looking for inspiration.”
“Let them bring it up, okay? I don’t want to force them to talk about anything. Maybe they just need an injection of the old times.” To Rebecca, their “old times” was a concoction she couldn’t imagine the ingredients of, except that she was sure she wasn’t in the recipe. In her experience, people always spoke swooningly of the old times, but they would rarely be willing to repeat their pasts. She was one of the people, so she thought, who would go back. To some of it, at least.
When Kevin and Rebecca arrived, their friends were waiting at the top of the driveway, and Diane broke into a trot down the little incline under the trees. Rebecca noticed she had to drop Robert’s hand to start running. “Hello, hello!” she cried, her hair flying all over. She tore open Kevin’s door and leaned in and kissed him even before he’d had a chance to turn the car off, and then she flung herself across his body to give Rebecca a hug. “Come!” she said. “My directions were good?”
“We’ve been here before,” said Kevin. “Are you drunk already?”
Robert had arrived behind his wife. “You look delicious,” he said to Rebecca.
Inside there were drinks already made. The ice in the bucket had fused into a big lump, as if they’d been expected earlier.
“You’re meat, right?” Robert said to Rebecca.
“Sorry?”
“We’re barbecuing the hell out of a giant slab of beef tonight. I just forget if that’s okay with you.”
“Oh, I’ll eat anything,” she said, and her mind went, omni: everything, nulli: nothing. “Whatever you’re making is fine.”
He went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, then stood back from the door to make a game-show sweep with his hand. One shelf was burdened with the whole length of a piece of tenderloin, its silver sheath gleaming. They all applauded, and Robert took the big hunk of meat out of the fridge with his bare hands and held it upright so that he could make it bow to them. “You really like me!” he shrilled.
(She often thought her sense of disconnection from Robert might have come from an early experience she’d had with him. The first time she went up to their cottage, one morning just after sunrise, she left the little cabin that she and Kevin always slept in, to get a glass of juice, and found Robert standing naked in the big front window. He turned to her and asked her how she’d slept, then rubbed his hands together and got glasses down for both of them. Rebec
ca poured and tried to act normal as the two of them stood there drinking—she in her underwear and a T-shirt, Robert like some cumbersome animal not used to being upright, a bear trained to hold a glass. It wasn’t the first time in her life she’d had to still a swirl of fear in herself, a fear that she had lost the horizon and didn’t know where she was. He’d put his glass in the sink and padded back into his and Diane’s bedroom, waving to her without turning around again. No doubt such an encounter had ripple effects, she thought.)
ROBERT BARBECUED the meal. There was the beef, and corn that had been soaked in water and then thrown on the grill in the husk, and oiled vegetables that he took care to turn so that they burned evenly on both sides. There was nothing going on the table that wasn’t going to get barbecued. Maybe they’d grill breakfast, too.
She and Diane and Kevin stood nearby, Diane’s back against the railing. Rebecca was answering questions about work—she taught undergraduate English Literature—trying hard to make her personal experiences sound vital and interesting. She described her students as “eagerly terrified,” but to her own ears, her phrases sounded flat. There was mainly the drip and sizzle of the meat, and the papery rattle of the cornhusks being turned. The air filled with stringy ash every time Robert touched them.
“How do you like her being surrounded by hard-bodied frat-boys there, Kev?” asked Diane.
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