Straying

by Molly McCloskey

  * * *

  IT TOOK ABOUT a week for me to understand that Cauley had ended it. He didn’t phone the following day, or the day after, or the day after that, and no letter arrived. I tried calling the pay phone in the corridor outside his flat. Once, one of his neighbors answered and said she’d slip a note under his door, but he never rang back. I became convinced that Cauley would ring only if I left the house. And so I would go outside, pull the phone to the very end of its lead, and set it on the front step. Then I would attempt to do something—trim the hedge or read or sweep the path—all the while listening for the phone’s trill, listening with a kind of suppressed hysteria that embarrasses me still.

  I thought of going on the train to Dublin. I tried to tell myself that I had the right, that Cauley’s silence left me no choice. I went over and over the things he’d said to me in our last conversation, as though I might divine from them some direction. And then I went over his silence, trying to read it for signs.

  In the end, I didn’t go to Dublin. I think what stopped me was less the fear that Eddie might lock the door behind me than that Cauley might not receive me in quite the manner I desired.

  I’m trying to be honest here.

  Finally, I drove to Kevin’s house. He invited me in but didn’t offer me a seat. I glanced around, trying to take in everything, as though I might see some clue to Cauley’s whereabouts or thoughts. The house was dark inside; it had lost its love-nest aura and was simply depressing. Kevin, who only a week ago had seemed a benevolent extra in our love story, was now unshaven and shakier than ever.

  I asked if he’d heard from Cauley, and he said he hadn’t, but I didn’t believe him. I’d had the sense, when Cauley and I were here, that Kevin was relishing his part in our drama, and now, in the aftermath, if that was what this was, he was relishing his new part, which was—what? To witness my suffering? To help keep me in the dark? The boys were closing ranks, and Kevin, I suspect, was not without sympathy for Eddie.

  “I just want to know he’s okay,” I said, as if it was all about Cauley’s well-being and nothing about my needs.

  “I’ll give him a ring,” Kevin said. “If I reach him, I’ll tell him you called round.”

  I tried to linger, in the desperate hope that Cauley might phone Kevin while I was there. But there was nothing else to say and no reason for my hanging on, and so I mumbled my goodbyes and got back into the car.

  It amazes me now, that I survived those days of unknowing. But people did back then: there were times when you just didn’t know where your loved ones were, when you couldn’t reach them, and it didn’t mean they were dead or had abandoned you.

  In the meantime, Eddie and I had conversations. We avoided mentioning Cauley by name, but I felt exposed, utterly without privacy, at the thought that Eddie had been, in some sense, an audience to the affair. Whether out of weakness or faith or apathy, he had allowed it to go on. Oh, I don’t mean allowed, as though he might otherwise have put me under lock and key; but he’d never said a word. It was impressive, the discipline that must have required. I hadn’t gotten involved with Cauley in order to test Eddie—it was enough trying to manage my own impulses and confusion without taking on the inner lives of others. But now that everything had screeched to a halt, I found Eddie’s reaction alarming. What I had expected—that he would break down and tell me what he knew, that he would say to me repeatedly, How could you?—wasn’t happening. He behaved instead as though it were all simply beneath him, Cauley and I nothing more than naughty children who had embarrassed him in front of the other grown-ups.

  “Were you not even going to mention it?” I asked one evening.

  “What did you want me to say? What are you doing? I knew what you were doing.”

  “Didn’t you want to know . . . what was going to happen?”

  “Did you know what was going to happen?”

  I sighed and looked away from him. That’s not the point, I thought.

  Another time I said, “Didn’t you want to know why?”

  We were standing in the kitchen. He didn’t answer right away. He crossed his arms over his chest and stared blankly at a flayed, half-eaten chicken going coldly greasy atop the stove. The poor thing looked like we’d taken a hammer to it. This discussion had caught us unawares, triggered by a stray comment, and we hadn’t steeled ourselves sufficiently. He was raw, and I was speaking rashly.

  Finally, he said, “In a way, I guess I didn’t.”

  I felt during those weeks that I knew nothing about my husband, because I did not know the most essential thing: whether his steadfast refusal to corner and accuse me had been proof of his love, of his faith and his patience, or whether it meant that he was essentially indifferent to what I did, and that what mattered in the end was only that order should prevail. I believed what Eddie wanted was to forget that any of it had ever happened, when what I needed was an investigation, a verdict, a chance for expiation.

  * * *

  AS THE DAYS and weeks passed and summer turned to autumn, we grew wearier and more estranged. Eddie’s silence seemed to harden, and every day I tried to imagine my future and went blank with panic. One night—it was the last time we went out together socially—we attended a party in the flat-roofed hotel on the bridge. An old friend of Eddie’s had returned from America to celebrate the fiftieth wedding anniversary of his parents, a couple who had treated Eddie, when he was growing up, like another son. Eddie insisted I didn’t have to come, and I insisted that I wanted to. I think I was trying to stage civility between us, to put us in a situation where we had to act the part. I thought it would give us some relief from ourselves. And though the choice of occasion was a bit masochistic, a fact we acknowledged with the exchange of a brittle smile, I was trying to feel, too, that I didn’t have to hide; lately, I had avoided town as much as possible. There are no secrets in a small Irish town, not for long, and I knew there’d been gossip about us. The previous week, I had met Eddie in town for a lift home, and as we walked from Wine Street to the car park on the quays, I realized that I was trudging behind him, in the manner of a bad dog, and I gave myself a quick mental slap—Look sharp!—and straightened up and met the eyes of anyone we passed.

  What I remember of the party that evening is a low red sun, visible from only one corner of the room, through the picture window, but suffusing the whole room, briefly, with a rose-colored light. I remember feeling cut off from everyone, as though I were behind glass. And I remember a moment when Eddie caught my eye. He was talking to someone, and he offered me the tiniest, most intimate smile, and it was clear that for a split second he’d forgotten the state we were in—it was the old habitual smile, the old warmth—and then, very quickly, the smile vanished and his eyes went blank, and it was as though he were looking right through me.

  We didn’t stay long. I think we both felt the awfulness of being there. On the way home I said that I was sorry I had gone, and he said that he hadn’t forced me, and I said, “No, I mean I’m sorry—I should have let you go alone. You might’ve enjoyed it more.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said quickly. And then, after a moment, “But you’re right, you should have.”

  * * *

  IN THE END, we simply wore each other out. We agreed that it was over and began the odious task of dismantling our marriage.

  The autumn saw us ambushed by nostalgia. I suspect it’s not unusual. We were spent, and, in our exhaustion, all the minor grievances fell away and a kind of tenderness rolled in. The weather colluded. The heat, which by late August had had us itchy as caged beasts, finally receded. The tar on the roads hardened, the air thinned and grew cool, the earth itself seemed to mellow. In the evenings, the mountain tended toward a pale pinkish yellow. I had a brief fit of domesticity, as though something in me knew that this would be the last proper home I would have for a long time. I made jam from our own raspberries. I weeded the front garden. I even sanded down a desk in the shed, something we’d bought one day at an antique shop
in Wicklow with the intention of restoring. It was like bad triage—letting the very worst thing happen while I busied myself with trivialities.

  We didn’t cook much. Eddie worked late, out of what felt like courtesy, then we’d meet for a bite down in the nearby village, because the thought of facing each other for an entire evening at home cowed us. We were frightened and sad, no longer at ease in our own home. After so long at odds with each other, it felt, bizarrely, that we were in this thing together—the shepherding through of our dissolution—and I had to work not to slide back into love with him.

  * * *

  WHEN I LEFT him that October, I went to Dublin. My mother assumed I’d move back to America after the split, but I had no desire to do that. It had been seven years since I’d lived in that country, and already I’d lost the sense of it. I think I believed, too, that I didn’t deserve such a clean getaway. Ireland felt sticky to me, like a room in a nightmare, a purgatory I had to earn my way out of.

  For several bleak months I lived with an austerity that strikes me now as melodramatic, but which I know meant simply that I had no idea how to proceed. I rented a bedsit off Haddington Road. I sent my patchy CV to dozens of media outlets and even some advertising firms. Eventually, I got an admin job for an architectural trade magazine housed in a lane off Fenian Street. Within a few weeks I was writing product features on wallpaper and timber and floor tiling. I felt moored by the work’s banality and the ritual of nine to five. Occasionally, I joined my office mates for after-work drinks, but I always slipped away after the first or second round. I was determined not to lose control. I was trying to put some distance between myself and what had happened.

  All around me, I saw the city being gutted and rebuilt. There were cranes that looked like giant scissors, poised to slice the air, and others that stood straight and proud like T-squares, and others that dangled drunkenly. Buildings seemed to vanish overnight, and in their sudden absence I could not remember what had stood in the now-empty spaces. I thought of a day when Eddie and I were heading out of the city, driving toward the N4, toward the setting sun—I had actually been with Cauley that day, I was not long from his bed—and it seemed the streetscape was rising and falling around us as we went. From everywhere at once came the sound of pneumatic drills ripping through concrete, like the rumblings of war. I think we both felt it, the strangeness and the violence of it all, and neither of us said a word.

  The winter wore on. At the weekends, people left the city in droves for wherever they came from down the country, and Dublin felt desolate and empty. I’d buy a phone card and call my mother, working hard to sound upbeat, like I was on the cusp of a new life and knew exactly what I was doing. Every time we spoke, she said that if it was really over with Eddie, then why didn’t I come home, and every time the question was harder to answer. I couldn’t say to her—it would’ve embarrassed me—that I believed there might be some nobility in hanging on here, that going back to America would only compound my shame. I thought about Eddie all the time. I wondered how he spent his evenings, what he ate, how he felt when he went to bed at night. I thought of how we never have to face our own absences—the pain they cause, or whatever rushes in to fill the space. I tried not to think about Cauley, then I tried to think very hard about him, as though I could blow a hole right through him and he would disperse, like pollen, and drift away.

  IT’S A COOL, low-skied April day. Sooty gray clouds have gathered in a rush, and now rain is threatening. Harry and I have just had a sandwich at a coffee shop on Baggot Street and are walking in Merrion Square. We stick to the tree-lined outer path, which even on the sunniest days has an air of brooding and damp. Harry has been talking about his marriage and its demise. The last time the subject came up, he said something about the traveling having taken its toll. He and his wife had met in Tanzania, and she had followed him to his next duty station. But once their daughter was born, his wife had wanted to make a home in Dublin. He’d stayed on in Tanzania. When I asked why he hadn’t moved back with his wife, he said, “It was the eighties. There weren’t a lot of jobs in Dublin for someone like me. There weren’t a lot of jobs full stop.”

  Today he says, “I thought it would be for a year or two, and then I’d come back.” But he delayed. His visits home became fraught. “I felt in the way. I was convinced she’d fallen in love with someone else.”

  “Had she?”

  “I think she did for a time. But the damage was already done.”

  I wonder if Harry wanted out, if he chose to absent himself until the marriage was no longer tenable. I want to ask him this. I want to ask why, if the marriage had died, he’d dragged it out like that.

  Finally, I say, “Was there someone else for you, too?”

  Harry looks surprised. Till today, we’ve talked around these things, and what I notice now in my hesitation is less a respect for his privacy than a reluctance to hear him speak longingly of someone else.

  “My wife didn’t want her life to be following me around while I lived my life. I didn’t want that either, but neither of us had figured out how to live otherwise. And by the time we might’ve learned that, we had both done things that damaged the marriage and pushed us apart.”

  I think of my mother, her broken engagement when she was young, the knowing what’s not wanted without the knowledge of what is.

  I tell Harry about the end of my own marriage, the affair with Cauley, how Eddie couldn’t bring himself to talk about it, how I got angrier and angrier.

  “So how did it end?” Harry says.

  “He asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I thought I should go, and he sort of . . . acquiesced.”

  “Was it what he wanted, for you to go?”

  I think for a moment. It was all so long ago, and I’m not sure I’ve ever known what Eddie wanted. “Yes and no, I think.”

  “But you did. You wanted to go?”

  “I must’ve,” I say.

  Harry offers me a little smile.

  “I ended up feeling like he’d watched it go on,” I say. “The affair, I mean. I hated that. I know this sounds crazy, but I felt abandoned.”

  “Affairs have a rather terrifying momentum,” Harry says wryly. “Sometimes it’s wisest to just get out of the way.”

  Harry is warming to Eddie, and I can hardly blame him.

  “Maybe,” I say. I think of a moment from that summer, one I recall vividly, though nothing else of the evening has stayed with me. Eddie and I were drunk, and I remember his eyes on me, his look of alarm and confoundment, and my own inner state: I felt feral, like an addict, all stealth and unreason. He couldn’t have reached me if he’d tried.

  “What happened to the other guy?” Harry asks. “Did you see him after that?”

  “I saw him once,” I say.

  It was that winter, a few months after it ended. I had expected to run into Cauley—the city is so small—but as is the way with such things, it didn’t happen at any of the moments when I was braced for it. It was on Kildare Street, about four in the afternoon on an unforgiving February day, leaden and grim, a clammy wind blowing. He was coming out of the National Library and I was walking toward Nassau Street. He stopped when he saw me, shifted a canvas bag to the other shoulder, and greeted me with excessive surprise. I tried to bandy it back. We both glanced around then, furtive as spies, as though anyone cared anymore what we got up to. The last time I’d seen him, he was standing in the bedroom doorway at Kevin’s house. I had kissed him goodbye, weak with the want of him, and certain that, in that instant, he hated me. Not for going back to my husband, exactly—we hadn’t made any promises to each other, nor had we ended anything—but for having pretended that this moment would never arrive, that we could go on playing house for as long as our hearts desired.

  And now here he was, standing in front of me as though none of that had ever happened—as though we hadn’t lain in his bed under the open window, slick with our mingled sweat, as though a mere look from the other hadn’t render
ed us weak-kneed—saying something about Synge, about research he was doing at the library for an adaptation he was hoping to direct.

  When he asked what I was doing, I said that I was living here now, and he nodded and said he’d heard, but he didn’t elaborate. I told him I’d come to Dublin for a job, as though it were some kind of career move. I didn’t say that I was answering phones and writing about floor tiles. He nodded and looked me in the eye. That was the point at which, if one of us was going to say it—that we should talk sometime—it would’ve been said. But neither of us suggested it. Instead, we had a tricky exchange in which we each managed to determine the direction the other was heading and then said, “Oh, I’m going the other way” or some such thing, and then we said goodbye, and that was the end of that. We didn’t touch, not a squeeze of the hand or a kiss on the check or a consolatory embrace.

  I was shaking when I walked away, my whole body, as though I had just witnessed a terrible accident. And yet there was a distinct sense of anticlimax, too. Why is it that what we so often find on meeting someone we’ve loved is not a residue or an after-image but a feeling more like foolishness? I’d stood there, close enough to touch him, and it seemed the moment should have been marked by the opening of the heavens, a clap of thunder—anything but this small, vague embarrassment.

  Harry has stopped walking and is staring at one of the benches along the path. There is a woman asleep on the bench, and sitting up beside her, or sort of sitting up, is a man. He is pitched forward, and I think at first that he is actually falling, that he’s going to tip headfirst onto the tarmac path and split his skull. But then I see how slowly he is moving, and I realize he’s leaning over, he has his hand extended toward something—a rag, it looks like—lying atop a canvas satchel on the ground. Down and down he goes, his advance barely perceptible. Midway to his goal, he lifts his head a fraction and swivels it tentatively, dumbstruck, as though only having landed on this earth. I wonder if, in the state he’s in, the world seems positively frenetic to him as it goes about its business, or if, instead, everything happens at the speed of treacle. Harry and I are engrossed in his progress, but before the man reaches the item, he actually falls asleep, gently and seamlessly and rather impressively. He just freezes. I feel like clapping, as though we’ve been watching a piece of improv theater, and am immediately horrified by the impulse.