Probably faithful spouses were just spouses without choices. Anyone in their right mind would be an adulterer, if the right temptation came knocking on their door. Within a month, he convinced himself he was actually a kind of saint. That Colette was doing his marriage a huge favour. That, given his wife’s extravagance, the sudden burden of his nephews, his sinless marital track record and human nature itself, he was entitled to Colette.
Billie didn’t know about the New Year’s Eve kiss, but she knew about Colette. She hadn’t noticed much since Louise had left – it’d been a teary blur of a year – but of course she noticed. She knew her own husband, didn’t she? He was in love, it was as clear as day. It began with the phone calls. His animated voice, the giggling. Jack was not a giggler, not unless she was tickling him. But all this wouldn’t have given the game away, if he hadn’t lied so badly.
‘Who was that?’ she had asked after he hung up the phone.
‘Who?’ A second’s beat. ‘It was Peter.’
With those two syllables, Billie had felt herself slip into a fearful place.
‘Peter? What did he want?’
‘Oh, nothing. Just the time of the meeting tomorrow. You know Peter, so forgetful.’
Then he walked away, and a minute later she heard him whistling in the garage. He was converting it to a bedroom for Elisabeth, and always hammering or drilling. But now, that traitorous whistle! He was not a whistler; that’s who she was. Though weirdly, she’d stopped whistling since Louise left. As if without Louise to witness her, the whistling side of Billie did not exist. Sometimes she hummed, but not the whistling any more. Jack’s whistle was traitorous, and anyway, Peter would never have elicited a whistle or a giggle. And if it wasn’t Peter, why lie about it?
While her husband learned new ways to deceive, she did too. Furtively, she went through his pockets, letters, the credit card bill. She did not confront him, though at first she almost did. Louise certainly would have, she thought, then bit down hard on the thought. Where had Louise’s methods got her? Or indeed, her mother’s? Instead, she rehearsed the confrontation.
Jack, I know, she’d say calmly.
Know what?
Don’t play the fool with me. I know about…her.
She’d get her hair cut, wear her Chanel red lipstick, her new jean skirt, her powder blue sweater with the ivory buttons. Gird herself with the only real weapons she had. She’d shave her legs, to tell her husband she knew he was unfaithful. But something stopped her, and it took a whole week to realize what. She overheard him on the phone again, when he thought she was in the shower. (She’d left the water on – part of her new devious system.) The tone of his voice, liquid with sex, was pouring into the ear of the invisible recipient. She stood just out of sight, frightened. Indeed, this felt like a battle for her very life. For her children’s lives too. Just imagining them the children of divorce was enough to make her weep. Removing her wedding ring, not signing her name Mrs J. MacAlister – unimaginable tragedy. So she surreptitiously watched her husband, to not lose him. She often watched him watching something else. Television. The newspaper. She was so aware of him, the children and their demands became an unwelcome static, which she batted away impatiently. Yes, yes, yes, she said to sixteen-year-old Sam, fifteen-year-old Danny, fourteen-year-old Elisabeth, thirteen-year-old Donald, and her baby son, Willy – whatever you want, fine by me, just please shut up, okay? Can’t you see I’m busy?
Yes, she was distracted, but she had noticed that Danny had tacked a photo of his mother and himself to the wall above his bed. His little brother didn’t ask about his mother any more, and seemed almost defiantly cheerful whenever she was mentioned. Billie had been reading Louise’s occasional letters to the boys, and sometimes pinned them to the kitchen bulletin board, but they rarely elicited comment, aside from grunts and nods. She didn’t allow herself to think about Louise much, but she sometimes wore one of the sweaters she found when she cleared out her apartment. Red with large green glass buttons and a floppy collar. It was big and saggy, and perfect for certain moods. It had a coffee stain down one sleeve; she’d not washed it, nor she did she intend to. It was a staying-home sweater.
Sometimes she caught Jack staring out the window, but it wasn’t like him to look at the view. She made a careful note of his decreased appetite, but made no comment on his half-eaten dinners. She was losing weight too. She noted the extra time he took in the bathroom, and the way he’d begun to grow his hair a bit longer. He did daily Canadian Air Force exercises and spent weekend afternoons painting abstracts with vivid colours and jagged shapes, or working on the sailboat alone. He played records full blast, an eclectic mixture – Ella Fitzgerald, Kingston Trio, Harry James, West Side Story, Simon and Garfunkel. He appeared home with shopping bags full of new shirts and boxer shorts, and she bit her tongue when she wanted to remind him she usually bought his boxers.
One day, she was suddenly inspired.
‘Jack! I’ve got a great idea. Let’s invite Ernie and Bernice for the weekend. It’s been ages.’
Billie had often been jealous of Jack’s devotion to Ernie, but now she saw him as a possible ally. Jack respected Ernie. If Ernie disapproved of this dalliance, if he scoffed at it, Jack would drop it instantly. Wouldn’t he? But:
‘Not now, Billie. Maybe next month. Got too much on.’
Further proof of Jack’s affair. He was afraid of seeing his best friend. Billie was now convinced Ernie would be shocked. Disgusted. In fact, she was on the verge of phoning him herself, when she was derailed by an urgent need to know who she was. Who was this other woman? Really, it shouldn’t matter, but it preyed on her. Sometimes she felt quite nauseous with jealousy. It made her stomach clench and her brain stop. She forgot to buy milk, forgot to meet the school bus, forgot to flip over the pancakes when the bubbles stopped filling in. She didn’t have many close women friends these days – her husband, she’d hoped, was her best friend – but this was the point at which she began to look at them differently. Was Margery really just wanting to come for a cup of coffee, or was that a suspiciously happy smile she gave Jack when he walked into the kitchen? And newly divorced Karen, with her sexy walk and nice clothes. Divorced women were dangerous, everyone knew that. She phoned her mother.
‘Oh, baby,’ she said.
‘What, Mom? You think I’m just imagining it?’ She couldn’t read her tone, but some small hope rose.
‘No, no. I believe you.’ Pause. ‘I believe you.’
‘You do?’
‘Oh, Billieboo. Of course I do. He’s a good-looking man, and you’re tied to all those fucking kids.’
Billie slumped inside, but also felt irritated. And why did her mother always have to swear?
‘Does he hit you?’
‘Of course not! No!’
‘Is he a binge drinker?’
‘No. He drinks every day.’
‘Well, that’s something. Has he joined some kind of cult?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Then what’s the problem?’
Then came the announcement:
‘Honey, I’ll be away next Friday night, all right? We don’t have anything planned, do we?’
‘What do you mean, away?’
‘Oh, some silly staff training session down in Santa Barbara. I really don’t want to go, but it’s compulsory. All the editors and marketing people. Team-training garbage.’
‘Can I come? Just for the evening?’
‘Afraid not, sweetie. Wish you could. No spouses allowed.’
He smiled at her and gave her a hug, but now it didn’t mean a thing. Worse, it felt insulting. A patronizing hug. She was a fool, an undesired woman, and he felt sorry for her. She wanted to kill him and felt tears welling up. Darn it! Here they were, pouring down. She felt incontinent with self-pity.
‘Billie honey, what’s the matter? It’s only for a night. I’ll phone and kiss you goodnight, okay?’
He looked so sincere. Maybe she was wrong. Wo
uldn’t it just spoil things to tell him her suspicions?
‘Okay. I’m being silly. Sorry.’
‘Anyway, you’ll be busy with the kids.’
‘True,’ she said, sniffing. Willy was teething again; she couldn’t even leave him with a babysitter.
‘Go get yourself a Kleenex. Come on, my girl.’
He never called her my girl, but it had come out so naturally, as if he said it all the time. Maybe that’s what he called her. The evening petered out unmemorably, except it was the night his fling was spelled out in the air for her to read and reread. When she pictured her life a few years ago – contentedly married with two children, and a sister she loved and hated – well, that seemed like a very faded postcard now. She was on an overloaded boat with a dead engine, and the rip tide was pulling them further and further away from that place in the postcard. She was seasick.
Time passed. Elisabeth moved into her new bedroom in the garage. Willy moved out of his parents’ bedroom, into Elisabeth’s old room. The three boys grumbled that they still shared a room, so they moved into the larger master bedroom. A man walked on the moon and everyone sat on the sofa and floor to watch it, while Billie stood by the set, twiddling the vertical knob and wriggling the aerial whenever the picture started flipping up. Three weeks later, a music festival happened on a farm on the east coast. The older children talked of nothing else and began wearing headbands, and making the peace sign whenever possible. Hellos and goodbyes were fingers flipping V’s, and for days Billie thought they meant victory over something. Everything seemed to be happening at once, fastfastfast, and meanwhile her husband was loving some other woman. She could hardly pay attention to it all, and still get dinner on the table every night, still keep clean socks in drawers and spare toilet rolls in the bathroom cupboard. The world made a rushing noise in her head, and she hunkered down inside herself. Focused on the essentials of day to day life.
Soon Billie could not remember a time when she was not aware of the affair. She lived with this invisible third party always present. For Jack, it was the same, so each of them – separately and secretly – had more in common than they’d ever had before. They were each living a double life. Jack with Colette, and Billie with the idea of Colette. But all affairs have their lifespan, their own plot line, and finally came the climatic night. Billie had been sensing an increasing urgency, coupled with an increasing carelessness. Did Jack want her to find out? It seemed like it, with his openly flirtatious phone conversations, his coldness in bed, his transparent excuses for everything from a late night home to yet another overnight meeting in Santa Barbara. It was a Saturday night, a night that still had some of the heat of the day, and flies were buzzing in circles in the kitchen. No one noticed them usually but tonight Jack ran around with a fly swat, cussing and slapping. He tried to mend the screen door, but it still wouldn’t close all the way.
The phone rang. Billie was standing right next to it, but before she could answer it, he grabbed it, covered the mouthpiece and hissed to his wife:
‘Do you mind? This is private.’
‘What do you mean? Who do you need to be private with?’
‘Work! It’s Bob from work, about the new writer he signed up. He gets pissed off if he thinks anyone’s listening.’
‘It’s not a work day. It’s Saturday night,’ she answered limply.
She left the room, and two minutes later he went out too, saying offhandedly:
‘I’ll be back later honey, don’t wait up.’
Impossible to be forty years old and feel this way, but here he was, driving like a teenager, heart pounding, head bursting, to his lover’s house. She’d given him an ultimatum.
Leave Billie.
Leave her and live with me.
Do you love me? You said you loved me.
He might never again in his life have such great sex, and he could easily die of this deprivation. He knew this sounded melodramatic, but he couldn’t help it. If he said no to Colette, he’d be saying no to life. Imagine if he’d never slept with Colette! He’d never have discovered how amazing it felt to do this to a woman, and have that done to him. And he used to scoff at D.H. Lawrence, think nothing was really that horny. People didn’t really act like animals, not in his experience. It was all pretty hot, especially in the honeymoon period, but even then there’d been no torn clothes, no begging for it in coarse vocabulary, and certainly no anal sex. Colette called it love. He didn’t have a word for it. Sex with Colette was like being stunned by gunshot. Violent, thought-stopping, cutting to the bone every time. He slammed on the brakes in her driveway, hurtled to her door, which was locked. Knocked loudly, indifferent to the neighbours. At first he thought he was too late. He stood there and called her name, with a world of wretchedness in his voice.
Six thirty in the morning, and Billie heard the car. Without thinking, she got up and pulled on a coat – his raincoat, because she was too upset to see what she was wearing – and slipped out the back door onto the deck. Huddled in the dawn, behind the barbecue. She heard him walk in, switch lights on, use the bathroom. Then through the closed door, she heard his voice call her name. She heard her name in his voice, and it was like an executioner’s voice, cajoling the prisoner to place his head in the noose. Indifferent. Impatient, even. It was a midsummer morning, not a cloud in the sky. It was going to be hot later, hot enough for a swim, she thought. She thought of that time she and Louise dared each other to jump off the bridge into the Sacramento River, and they’d held hands and jumped together.
Her bare feet were wet from the dew, and all she had on under the raincoat was her thin nightgown. A mourning dove in the lemon tree sang those elegiac notes, high for one count, then low for four counts. LA la-la-la-la. LA la-la-la-la.
‘Billie? Billie!’
She shivered. Held her breath. Inside the house was her life, her old life. There it waited, and she would not go in to say goodbye to it. She would not. More footsteps, more doors opening and closing. He’d wake the baby if he wasn’t careful. Then she’d have to breathe again. Finally, he called in a tone she recognized from way back. From those days by the Bay. Her red dress with the yellow roses, and his Old Spice cologne. It was as if layers had been stripped off him during the catastrophic night and dawn, and here he was again at last. A skinny, shy kid who hated to be alone in the house.
‘Billie? Hon?’
LA la-la-la-la.
Eighteen Months Earlier
If You Come to San Francisco
July 8th, 1967, San Miguel, Marin County
5:32pm
Early evening, but still in the low nineties. The blinds had been closed all day, the windows all wide open. Jack sat in the living room in his white T-shirt and khaki shorts while she cooked. He drank a cold martini, an especially strong one, and watched the news. Viet Nam was heating up again. The world was going to hell. Did Johnson know what he was doing or not? Jack was a loyal democrat; hated these doubts. Yesterday, six reported American casualties, forty-two Viet Cong casualties. Helluva word for it, casualties. Euphemisms made him cranky.
He went into the kitchen and made another drink. He carefully peeled the lime, added one green olive to the glass, measured the gin and vermouth in a tiny silver cup, then poured it and added two ice cubes. Tasted it. Added another dollop of gin. Tasted again. Yes! Absent-mindedly he kissed the back of Billie’s head as she peeled potatoes for mash. This made him happy too. He loved mashed potatoes. Then he went back to his chair and watched a clip of an anti-war demonstration in San Francisco. Thousands marching down Market Street, then up Powell to Union Square. Disjointed chanting and singing, and under the words, steady drumming on something metallic. And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn. We’re off to Viet Nam. It was amazing how many pretty girls were marching – and even without his glasses he could see they were not wearing bras, most of them. Unbelievable. Nipples just out there, poking through tight T-shirts for anyone to see. Sure, t
he war was upsetting folk, but look at them – all the marchers had happy faces. These days the world was a fun place all right, and San Francisco in summer was the centre of the universe. Everyone said so. Lots of songs did, anyway. If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. From all over the country, everyone was coming here for a…love-in? He could hardly think the phrase without smirking. Jack had smelled patchouli dozens of times before he heard the word patchouli, and it was another three months before he knew how the word looked on the page. He imagined Union Square now in a patchouli cloud. It reminded him of sex somehow.
Wait For Me Jack Page 19