Straying

by Molly McCloskey

  I thought I saw him today. Eddie, I mean. He was coming out of Buswells Hotel, and he had a little girl with him, she must’ve been six or seven. He was putting a cap on her head while she stared vacantly across the street with an attitude of forbearance.

  My heart began to thrum. My palms prickled. My first instinct was to call his name. Immediately after, I thought to turn away. Instead, I stood there, captivated. He was like a memory given dimensions, a dream made material. I wanted to stare and stare, to stay rooted in the stark sensation of seeing him. And then something in his stance, a turn of his head, and I saw it wasn’t him. He took the girl by the shoulders, then buttoned the top button of her coat and straightened her hat and gave her a quick rub on the head. He looked left, then right, and they headed off toward Dawson Street.

  It hardly surprised me, my mistake. Lately, I’ve been seeing him everywhere—not thinking it was actually Eddie, as I did this morning, but catching glimpses of him in the profiles and gaits and gestures of other men. I pass a man with a child, and I think about the children Eddie and I didn’t have, the ghosts of our unchosen future. I think of the history we didn’t accrue, as though it were a country we have yet to visit. I have imagined, in the most absurd and proprietary way, Eddie in our home, alone, holding down the fort till my return.

  We camped once, Eddie and I, on a patch of lakeshore near the Leitrim border. When I woke in the morning, a yellowy-green light hung low over the grass, and the sky was a powder blue. The lake was blue, too, smooth as a pane, and along the shore, reeds pierced the water’s surface. I had never seen such stillness. Eddie hadn’t woken yet, and I lay there looking at the sky, the sunlight spangling the trees, and felt sorry for anyone who wasn’t me.

  I think about that day and others like it, when I felt at the heart of the world and wished for nothing more than my life, exactly as it was. I think about why, having found that feeling, I couldn’t hold it.

  There was a week, between the day I left Eddie and the day I went to Dublin, when I stayed with Jane in Sligo. One afternoon I bumped into Eddie on Quay Street. If you have ever been married and then separated, I hardly have to tell you how disorienting the first chance encounter is. The shock of meeting each other and not saying the most habitual things—about what to pick up for dinner or where the car is parked—was such that I felt utterly severed from him. The marriage, our love, the day-in, day-out intimacy of those years, felt like a dream we’d had together and remembered only hazily, if at all.

  I get back to Monkstown around seven o’clock. It is the first evening of the year when there is a perceptible trace of spring in the air. My time in this house is winding down. I have begun looking for somewhere to rent, probably in town. I will stay for a while, I have decided. I will keep working as a consultant. Last week I got an email from an old friend I knew in Kosovo who’d been asked to go back to Priština for six months to fill a gap. He’d declined and was writing to see if I’d be interested. When I told Harry about the offer, which I didn’t intend to accept, he winced. Harry found Kosovo insistently depressing. He said the entire place, even the open fields, even the sunny days, felt dark and cursed. He said the only good thing about Priština was that it was the one city in the world where you could say: I’ll meet you on the corner of Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa.

  I make dinner and read until ten in the sitting room, then step out back to smoke a cigarette. Overhead, a crosshatch of bare branches against the moonlit sky makes me think of the brain, its axons and dendrites. I hear movement in the darkness, a scuttling in the hedge to the left of me. And then a cat emerges from the shadows. It pauses in the middle of the back garden, its front paw raised, and looks right at me before vanishing into the opposite hedge. I think of Olivia. She was my cat, but there was no question of my bringing her to Dublin with me when I left. She was a country cat, invigorated by the outdoors. I was in awe of her double life, hunting and killing in the blackest of nights and the next day curled snugly on the sofa, looking pampered as a pasha. Before having her spayed, we had allowed her, one time, to go into heat and have a litter. I had never seen a cat give birth before, and I promised Eddie I’d find homes for the kittens, which, with much effort and cajoling, I did. I don’t know what I’d been expecting from Olivia. I suppose I thought going into heat would be a discreet or hidden process, like a woman’s menstruation. I wondered if I would even know it was happening. In fact, I was shocked by both the suddenness and the intensity of it. Late one night, she got up from where she lay on the sitting room rug and headed with her usual mincing prowl toward the front door—she was all business, like when she detected a mouse or a bird in the vicinity, and I assumed that she had murder on her mind. But when she reached the door, she stopped, her back arched and her body elongated, tensile. Her rump rose slightly, and the most astonishing sound issued from her: a scalded, involuntary yowl. I had never witnessed anything like it, and what I felt for her was pity. She looked at the closed door and then back at me, with such imperiousness that in my haste to do her bidding I stumbled. The night was dark purple, and it swallowed her.

  Before bed, I brush and floss, attending with unusual care to the ritual. This morning I was at the dentist and am feeling the renewed commitment to my teeth that a good dentist will inspire. My dentist is youngish, mid-thirties. He has a diploma on his wall from Chapel Hill, and we talked about the American South, and he told me he loved Faulkner. It was my first time seeing him. I liked him. He wasn’t, you know, dentisty. He donned his latex gloves and flexed his fingers like he was about to crack a safe. Then he hooked his thumb under my jaw like a clamp and placed his index finger in my mouth and pressed down on . . . something. A molar, maybe, or just the back bumper of a gum. I was wearing those safety glasses, the ones that are always a little greasy. His finger was thick in my mouth, traversing the terrain, probing. I could feel the jelly of my tongue on it. I closed my eyes and tried not to mind about the pleasure. It seems like such a long time since anyone has touched me.

  I SLEPT IN THE spare room the night I came home from Kevin’s house. It was on the ground floor, below our bedroom. I left my bag on the table in the hall so that Eddie would know I was home, and I closed the door. When I heard him getting ready for work the next morning, I didn’t venture out and was relieved that he didn’t knock.

  That day, I tidied up the house. Then I went out front and pulled some weeds from the rockery, while Olivia lay curled under a shrub, sheltering from the sun. After a while, I gave up doing anything and sat in the living room and tried to imagine what would happen when Eddie came home. I thought that within a marriage—I mean, one’s own marriage—there are currents that operate independently of us and of which we seem remarkably ignorant. I didn’t know what to expect, from either of us. I wasn’t sure I knew what I wanted.

  I thought of phoning my mother. During the last conversation I’d had with her, she had sensed, not for the first time in recent weeks, that something was wrong. She believed that it had to do with sex. She told me I needed to take care, that I shouldn’t give Eddie cause to stray by becoming disinterested, and I had wondered, after hanging up, whether this thing with Cauley was just a cheap solution to a commonplace problem: the anticlimax of settled domesticity. It was a question I had asked myself in the beginning of our affair but that I felt I’d answered, and I was bothered by how the conversation had set me doubting again.

  We rarely talked about sex, my mother and I. From the age at which I’d first understood that I had been the product of a brief liaison, I’d had a discomfort with her sexuality that went, I think, beyond the unease people commonly feel about their parents’ erotic lives. Because I had no evidence of my parents’ prehistory—no photos, for example, of the two of them together prior to my arrival—the one act I could be absolutely sure they had shared in assumed unwelcome prominence in my mind.

  I was thinking about all this that afternoon, about my mother and my father and what the two of them had or hadn’t meant to each
other. I felt a sudden wave of empathy for my mother, for whatever hopes she’d brought with her into my father’s bed, and I decided that I would call her. I wasn’t going to tell her what was happening. I knew I couldn’t bring myself to do that. I only wanted to hear her voice.

  I went upstairs to our bedroom, which I had entered only briefly, and uneasily, earlier that day. There was a phone on the bedside table, but instead of dialing, I sat down on the bed, which Eddie had made very neatly. It looked sealed, the way other people’s beds do. The sense of trespass was so strong that I felt incited to go further. I wanted to rifle through Eddie’s things. I felt the sort of intimacy with him that I imagined a thief might feel with the stranger whose bedroom he was burgling. Very slowly, I lay back on the bed, as though unsure it would support my weight. It was about four in the afternoon; the sun was still warm through the skylight. There was a glass of water on the bedside table. Eddie’s wedding ring was sitting on the window ledge. I didn’t call my mother. I closed my eyes and lay there, the air from outside so clean and light on my skin it was hard to believe there was anything amiss with the world. When finally I stood, I was unsteady, as though the house had tipped on its foundations.

  * * *

  I WAS IN the living room when Eddie came home. He set his briefcase on the floor, dropped into one of the armchairs, folded his hands in his lap, and looked at me.

  I asked if he wanted a drink, and he said a gin and tonic would be lovely.

  In the kitchen, I tried to gather myself. I mixed the drink and took a swallow, then brought it in, placed it carefully in front of him like some housewife from the fifties, and retreated to my chair.

  “You’re not having anything?” he asked.

  I shook my head. I already regretted not making myself one, but I was trying to appear virtuous.

  He sipped at the drink and winced with pleasure, then set the glass back on the table. He looked ridiculously coolheaded, like someone in a film. “You were seen, you know.”

  It seemed an odd thing to say, and the delivery so out of character, but maybe any opening would’ve been strange.

  “Yesterday?” The word sounded wrong. Was it only yesterday that I had been with Cauley?

  “Not yesterday, no.”

  “When?” I heard a meekness in my voice that perturbed me. I thought I shouldn’t compound my misdeeds by groveling. I could be nervous, I could even shake, but I shouldn’t cringe, and I shouldn’t cry.

  With a flick of his hand, he dismissed the question, as though it were a subject we’d already covered.

  “Where?” I asked.

  He picked up his drink and said nothing.

  “You’re not going to tell me?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Did it? I suppose it didn’t. What mattered was that he wasn’t going to tell me. I wondered was he bluffing. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  He let out a long, elaborate sigh, and his whole being seemed to soften with the exhalation. He looked over to where the sliding glass doors were open. “I was waiting for you to say something,” he said, more gently now, and I almost believed him and was flooded with remorse. It was very effective, whatever he was doing.

  Neither of us spoke. We were both staring out the door now, at the rockery and the fence we’d been meaning to replace and the firs that marked the border of our property. I wasn’t sure why I’d come back last night, whether out of guilt or fear, or maybe out of love, or the end of love, which is perhaps more powerful, in its way.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  Eddie gave that quick upward tip of his head, the look of martyred acquiescence that covered just about everything. I had no idea whether he meant we should put all this behind us or that we were past the point where apologies could make a difference.

  I waited for him to speak.

  When he did, he said, “We should eat.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You have to eat.” He said it as though I’d been refusing food for days.

  “I don’t want to,” I said. “You eat if you’re hungry.”

  We sat there in a very focused silence, like two people stumped on a quiz show as the clock ticks. I felt there was something I should say, something specific, that this was the moment when I asked him whether he wanted me to leave, but that seemed more than we were ready for. Eventually, he said that I could do as I pleased but that he needed some dinner, and he got up and went into the kitchen. I retreated to the spare room, where I remained, silent and immobile, as though if I were quiet enough, he might forget that I existed.

  About an hour later, I heard him make a phone call, and when he hung up, he went out without saying goodbye. I emerged from the spare room and walked into the hall, and then the sitting room, and then the kitchen. Everything looked different, in a way I couldn’t put my finger on, like when you’ve let people stay in your house while you’re away.

  * * *

  CAULEY PHONED THE next morning around eleven. He sounded distant but intimate, as if we were two people touching base after a heist. He didn’t ask how I was. He said, “Did you tell him?”

  “I didn’t tell him,” I said. “But he says he’s known for a while.”

  “How, if you didn’t tell him?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “All he’ll say is that we were seen.”

  “The other day?”

  “No. Sometime before. He won’t tell me where or when or who told him.”

  Cauley scoffed. “That’s a bit perverse.”

  Was it? To me it seemed mean but fair. But that was because I was still assuming that Eddie would tell me sooner or later, and we would go over all the gory details.

  “It’s not perverse,” I said.

  “It’s fucked up,” Cauley said, sharper now, and I had the feeling his anger was not on my behalf but was something between himself and Eddie.

  I didn’t dare ask the obvious: what will become of us? It was clear Cauley wasn’t going to raise the subject, and I tried not to read too much into that. Maybe he felt I’d made a fool of him the other night and he needed to get back at me. Or maybe he felt me readying to leave Eddie and it frightened him. I didn’t know whether to reassure him with proclamations of love or, on the contrary, to play down the intensity of what I was feeling, to promise him I wasn’t about to do anything rash, and so I bumbled along in the middle and said nothing that made any sense at all.

  He promised to call again as soon as he could, and we hung up.

  I READ ONCE THAT to commit to love is to commit to love’s diminishment. Which means that commitment is less about optimism than it is about realism—accepting that love is doomed to become less of itself, and proceeding anyway, in the faith that one will be equal to that truth when it arrives.

  Eddie and I spent a week in Lanzarote once. We were only a few months married, just emerging from the wedding and its afterglow, and entering a new phase, tranquil but eager, in which we lived in anticipation of our shared future.

  We stayed in a big white hotel facing the sea in Puerto del Carmen. In the mornings, the multitiered and clattering breakfast room smelled steamy and not altogether fresh, a mix of meat and acrid coffee and bodies not long from sleep—the hirsute men of Mitteleuropa in their netted nylon tops, and their women, bulky and guttural. We spent the first couple of days at the beach, where rows of orange and blue sun umbrellas ran in perfectly straight lines. Underneath the umbrellas, the women rose darkly like mountain ranges, their tanned breasts slablike, or globular, or melting back into their bodies. I don’t like going topless, even in bed. My breasts feel like cupboard doors left open, things vaguely in the way. But I was in awe of the breasts of these women, these fiftysomething women, some even older, born as Europe was rebuilding itself from ruin. I thought that if I were husband to breasts like that, I would be rendered speechless. I pictured those men—not skinny themselves but of far less dramatic proportions than the women—carrying their great big wives through life, hauli
ng them through the years like some kind of plunder they weren’t sure what to do with, and I felt envy for them all, for the husbands and wives and their lack of shame, and all that flesh and history.

  On the third day, Eddie and I hired a car to see the island. The roads were smooth and new, and there were not many people on them. We drove to the port at Órzola and boarded a day boat to the smaller island of La Graciosa. We passed dull green cliffs that dropped like curtains into the sea. On La Graciosa we bought picnic supplies and rented bikes and cycled along the sand-dirt track. As we crested a hill the sea appeared below us, ice blue and alarming in its beauty. The sun was searingly hot. The powdery sand burned our feet as we galumphed toward the water in our flip-flops. There were a couple of dozen people there, but no one was swimming. At the shoreline, the beach sloped steeply. There were no shallows, just large waves breaking right where the beach began. We waded in to our knees, and I felt a fierce pull, and Eddie grabbed my arm and said, “Don’t go farther.” We splashed water on ourselves, then got out and found a shaded bench near the path, where we sat like children, side by side, eating our sandwiches and watching the waves. I felt a peculiar sort of loneliness, intense and perilous and somehow related to Eddie, as though my very survival depended on his existence, but I had no way to communicate this, to make him understand it.

  Late that afternoon, driving from Órzola back to Puerto del Carmen, we passed through the Volcano Park. The day was cooling, the sun where we could no longer see it. Eddie pulled over on a high lay-by off the twisty mountain road and we got out of the car. Spread before us in the distance was an expanse of black gravel where succulents flowered violently. It looked like an exposed seabed, fabulous and otherworldly. Eddie got the binoculars from the car and handed them to me before looking himself. When he took his turn to scan the landscape, I watched him and was overcome with wonder. What I wanted more than anything just then was to live well with Eddie, by which I meant not only to love each other fully but to become, because we were together, better people. I believed absolutely in the possibility and felt an impatience to begin.