The Affair

by Bunty Avieson

  Sorry, love. Held up at work.

  Sorry? Love? Held up? Nina felt like kicking him, as he lay there gently snoring, oblivious to her hurt. She stood and stared at him for a long time, various thoughts flicking through her mind.

  The honeymoon was over already. This was marriage and she had better get used to it. She had made a dreadful mistake and this is how it would always be. He didn’t love her any more. He had never loved her. He was having an affair. They shouldn’t have married so quickly. Her father was right. She didn’t belong here. She had a home and people who loved her in Canada. Her husband had turned out to be a selfish pig and she didn’t have to put up with it. How dare he!

  Anger welled up inside, temporarily obliterating her loneliness. The anger felt good, releasing some of her tension. It made her feel stronger and more empowered than the heavy, dull ache of loneliness. She raged silently against his snoring mound.

  The next morning James skirted around her, avoiding meeting her eyes. He poured himself a coffee, sat down at the table and apologised again for missing dinner, adding almost as an afterthought that he was sorry for not calling. His voice was distracted and he addressed his apology more to his coffee than to her. Then he had lifted up the business section of the newspaper and that was that. The end of any discussion as far as he was concerned. Nina thought how insufferably like his father he could be.

  He hadn’t even sounded apologetic. Nina searched for it in his face and in his voice, but couldn’t find it. He seemed to be mouthing the words and sentiments that were expected of him, but he wasn’t there. She didn’t know where he was, but it wasn’t in the sunlit living room of their apartment with her.

  Nina was right. James wasn’t sorry. That was a feeling beyond him at that point. He was consumed by the implications of Felix’s words. They’re calling in the names. The threat inherent in those five words had set off a chain reaction of possibilities in James’s brain. He felt as if he were standing on the tip of a precipice. The world he had so carefully constructed around him was about to be blown apart.

  The ramifications were so vast and horrific that James was having trouble taking them all in. Missing dinner, being late home, seemed so inconsequential in the face of it. He didn’t mean to hurt Nina even though at some level he was aware that he was doing just that. But he didn’t have the energy to pursue the thought. So he avoided it. And he avoided Nina.

  James scanned the newspaper. Surely something so monumental would dominate the news. He found it on page three of the business section. Aussie names owe millions. It was a short account of the meeting that Felix had attended the previous afternoon. The reporter hadn’t paid nearly as much attention as Felix had and seemed to have only half the story.

  Nina watched her husband, her eyes narrow and accusing. She knew he was disengaging from her. She just didn’t know why. It felt like a cold, hard, stinging slap. She felt utterly and wretchedly alone, sitting opposite her husband of eight months, watching him ignore her. She wondered how to communicate that to him. She sat with her hands neatly folded in her lap, perfectly in control. She wasn’t going to become emotional. She wouldn’t raise her voice. And above all she wouldn’t cry. But she wanted to tell him how she felt, how she hurt. She needed to share it with him. He was her husband, her lover, her best friend. But for months now he had been busy at work, then exhausted at home. It had been ages since they had talked, really talked.

  She twisted her hands in her lap as she thought through different ways to broach the subject, trying them out in her mind. And then, before she had a chance to voice her thoughts, he was gone, out the door. Back to the office, he said. Had some orders he had to finish. Was meeting Felix in there to go over some business. Sorry, love, he had said, avoiding looking her in the eye. I won’t be late. Nina had been too shocked to respond as he announced, ‘I’ll leave you the car and I’ll walk into town.’ Nina found herself once again alone at home.

  Well, not really home. Alone in James’s parents’ apartment, where they lived. She didn’t think of it as home. There was a difference. Nina supposed she should feel grateful to be allowed to stay here rent-free. But she didn’t. She resented it. This apartment, with its breathtaking views across Rushcutters Bay and its still-new modular furniture, straight out of an Ikea catalogue, never felt like home.

  Home was her parents’ neat two-storey house on the main street of Eyebrow, the country town in Saskatchewan where she spent her first eighteen years: the cosy weatherboard with its mismatched furniture and marks on the laundry doorjamb where she and her elder brother Larry had measured their childhood in inches hewn into the wood.

  Nina wished she had brought more of her own things with her. Pieces of home, pieces of her past, reminders of the person she was: winner two years in a row of the Saskatoon Junior Trout Fishing competition, winner of the 1978 tapdance championship for the whole of Saskatchewan province. Why hadn’t she brought that trophy with her? Things that screamed NINA LAMBERT, interesting individual, person in her own right.

  She felt she had been absorbed into the Wilde family. She’d been left with no identity or existence of her own independent of them. Nina wandered around the small apartment. It was just 9.30 am. The day stretched endlessly in front of her.

  She did the calculations in her head. It was 4.30 pm on Friday in Canada. Her mother would be bringing in the four dogs, giving them their dinner, then she would start peeling vegetables for the evening meal. Nina imagined the smells of dinner filling the house. If it was Friday night her father would be singing at the Raymond Hotel with his barbershop chorus. They were four men, old friends, dressed in pin-striped shirts like old-fashioned barbers, who sang harmonies together, unaccompanied. They had been singing together every Friday night for sixteen years. The locals loved them. Nina had loved them as a child, singing along, knowing all the tunes. When she hit her teenage years she had been embarrassed to watch them, ashamed to admit to her friends that, yes, Jake Lambert was her Pa. In her twenties, seeing them through adult eyes, they somehow touched her. Four old codgers, their voices starting to crackle and break, still crooning about their sweethearts. Nina remembered the look on her mother’s face when she watched the show. Smiling serenely, tapping her foot, perfectly secure in her husband’s devotion, taking it as her due. The older Nina got, the more poignant those Friday nights became.

  Nina sighed as she looked out across the bustling bay, busy with weekend yachts and the Saturday morning traffic. She had thought that security and devotion were what marriage was all about. Were her expectations unreasonable? Had she got it so wrong? She had never felt less loved and secure. She felt she was on the outside looking in, not in the driver’s seat of her own life any more. Years of feeling that way, lonely and trapped, stretched before her.

  It seemed like just a minute ago that she and James had been so desperate for each other they couldn’t live a moment apart. What had happened? Why had James withdrawn from her?

  Being married was nothing like being lovers, wild, passionate and carefree. James no longer made her feel special. In fact she felt more insignificant than she had ever felt in her life. Perhaps it wouldn’t have seemed so bad if she had been able to find a job in interior design, her great love. But she didn’t have the contacts in Sydney to get started. Instead she worked as an office manager for a group of architects. She spent most of the day answering the phone and making coffee, being bored and hating it. It was just for the moment, she reminded herself a dozen times each day, until she found a job she really wanted. Lately she had been too dispirited even to look.

  Nina had no friends, no career to throw her energies into and, she felt, a husband who was too busy to notice her. What had happened to their love, that intense, driving need that had all but consumed them, compelling them to be together every possible minute of the day? Where did James go? And when exactly did he leave?

  Nina remembered her last day at Whistler ski resort in Canada’s south-west coastal range. It was just ove
r eight months ago. James had been like a madman, crazy with love for her. And she had felt the same. Those last few hours they spent together, trying to say goodbye, to gently disengage from each other, had been the most emotionally charged hours of her life.

  It was just as the ski season had ended. Patches of rock and dirt were beginning to show through on the slopes of Whistler and Blackcomb. Nina’s job as guest relations manager of the ritzy Chateau Whistler was seasonal and, with the ski season finishing, she was no longer needed. This was the day she was supposed to leave and move to Toronto to start a new life. She and James had both known it would happen. And yet, in spite of logic and necessity, her heart cried out for another way.

  James had been having similar thoughts. Why did he have to be here at Whistler for the next week? So what if the bosses were flying in from Toronto to go through the books with him. They were up to date. It had been a smasher of a season, better than any previous year. They were happy with him. Didn’t he deserve a week off? It was a rhetorical question. His sense of duty was too much part of his nature to allow him to consider putting his love interests ahead of work responsibilities. And yet he couldn’t let this woman just walk out of his life. Not now that he had found her.

  James had known many women. Being fit, good-looking, a former Olympic champion and working at Whistler meant he was surrounded by opportunities – young women looking for a little après-ski fun with the jovial Aussie. James had always been only too happy to oblige.

  But Nina was different. For a start, she hadn’t been interested in him. It took weeks of James showering her with charm before she agreed to go out with him. Their first ‘date’ had been to a burger bar, surrounded by unshaven locals in lumberjackets, in Squamish, a redneck logging town an hour south of Whistler. The kitchen in Nina’s little studio had caught fire and she needed to replace her toaster, kettle and some crockery. Whistler stocked such things but they were marked way up in price, so Nina had been planning to catch the bus to Squamish on her day off and shop there. When James heard this he had offered to drive her. It had taken some juggling for him to get away in the middle of the week during the height of the season, but he had managed. To make it seem less like a favour, he had fabricated an urgent job he had to attend to in Squamish.

  A beautiful crisp winter morning and the snow-covered forest along the spectacular Sea to Sky Highway provided the perfect romantic backdrop. Away from Whistler with its pseudo-Swiss village appearance and emphasis on money and glamour, James and Nina were able to enjoy the real Canada, wild and untamed. As Whistler grew smaller and smaller behind them and the pristine beauty of the unspoiled countryside started to work its magic, Nina felt herself relax.

  That drive turned out to be a revelation for them both. Nina had seen the women hanging around James and dismissed him as a pretty boy, a lightweight philanderer, too good-looking to be taken seriously. She had met the likes of him before. All he would be interested in was his next lay. Not her type. She was surprised to discover a deep-thinking, kind man with a strong character. He was playful, with a wonderful sense of the absurd, which had her laughing from the moment they set off. She was delighted to discover that he was, in fact, exactly her type, more so than anyone she had ever met.

  James could see Nina’s impression of him changing before his eyes. He had sensed that she somehow disapproved of him, though he had no idea why. She was so beautiful and serious and decent, it became very important to him that she like him. She was different from the bed-hopping snow bunnies he had grown used to spending his time with. James and Nina got to know each other over lunch at Squamish’s legendary Mountain Burger Bar, which boasted no pretensions, just good honest prime beef and a clientele of rough and ready loggers who swore there was nowhere else in the world you could get a real burger, a man’s burger.

  It was the start of a conversation that they never seemed to finish. The day ended all too soon when James dropped her back at her little apartment on the other side of Whistler from his own. He stopped by Chateau Whistler the following day to lend her the rare early Van Morrison tape that she had been unaware existed; they caught up that night for a drink and she lent him the book by Italo Calvino she had told him about. Soon they were spending all their free time together, as easily and naturally as if it had always been that way. And all the time they talked and talked, endlessly fascinated with each other’s thoughts and way of thinking. James had never met anyone he felt so comfortable with. Nina was sharp. She challenged him, kept him on his toes. And he responded to it. He liked himself when he was with Nina.

  Being a former Olympic skier had given James much public kudos but even more private angst. While it seemed to impress the majority of people he met, and James happily accepted whatever benefits went with that, in his own mind he had failed, big time. He hadn’t brought home a gold medal. He had spent years of single-minded dedication and focus only to fall short. He didn’t find what he regarded as his failure easy to accept. It was an uncomfortable paradox for him that the more lauded he was, the more he felt like a fraud. But with Nina it was different. He saw himself through her eyes and he liked the man he saw. He could respect him.

  It was inevitable they would become lovers. The tight-knit community of Whistler assumed it had happened weeks before it actually did. But Nina preferred to take it very slowly. Unlike the rest of the hormone-driven young staff working a season at the international ski resort, she didn’t see sex as sport. It had to be special or she wasn’t interested. James had not been celibate for so long in years. And he was surprised to find he didn’t mind at all. He just wanted to be with her.

  When finally it happened it was explosive for them both. The desire had been building for so long that once unleashed it erupted in an uncontrollable fury. At that first instant of naked skin against naked skin they both became delirious, pushing and yielding, trying to absorb the very essence of each other.

  It was erotic, carnal, primal and thrilling. Afterwards they lay side by side, in awe, looking into each other’s eyes, feeling compelled to touch and stay entwined. Their gentle caresses enflamed their passion again and soon they were reaching hungrily for each other, desire building and exhausting itself, then building again, in one long continuous wave that lasted all night.

  The next day Nina should have been exhausted. She wasn’t. She was exhilarated, full of energy and gaiety that rubbed off on everyone she came into contact with. James was the same. He marvelled at everything he saw. Suddenly the world was a most glorious, radiant place.

  Their passion stayed at fever pitch for the next three months. They just couldn’t get enough of each other. A snatched five-minute cup of coffee was excruciating. It only fuelled their desire but they thought it was worth it just to be together for those fleeting moments.

  And while it was never spoken of, it was always understood that at the end of the season Nina would go. She would move to Toronto with her newly acquired qualifications in interior design and start her career. The money she managed to save from her winter role would keep her going till she found a job.

  But her plans hadn’t taken into account falling in love.

  Nina and James’s farewell had been the hardest. It had been heart-wrenching, funny and frustrating. Once Nina had given back her apartment key and her suitcases were at the bus station, they had an hour left.

  The outdoor bars were almost empty, a far cry from just a few weeks ago when the tables had been filled with holidaymakers, laughing and chatting and stomping about in their heavy ski boots after a day on the slopes. Lit braziers kept the chill at bay, turning the outdoor areas into cosy beer gardens. The braziers weren’t lit now and the sun had set but, wanting privacy, James and Nina chose a seat outside in the forecourt of a trendy bar-café.

  They stared at each other, hands entwined, saying silly things. They both knew how the other felt. Words wouldn’t make it any easier. And yet they were engrossed in each other. James stroked Nina’s hand, turning it over in his own, t
enderly tracing the lines on her palm. Nina watched him. She admired again the thick black hair that felt so springy to her touch, the tiny lines around his eyes from time spent in harsh sunlight on the slopes.

  When the waitress brought their order she stopped for a chat. James and Nina didn’t feel like sharing each other and responded politely enough, hoping she would soon leave them alone.

  ‘I leave on tonight’s bus,’ Nina blurted out finally.

  ‘Oh, you probably want to be alone?’ she smiled apologetically. ‘Sorry.’

  No sooner had she gone than a young professional couple from Vancouver spotted James and made their way to him. It was like the world was conspiring to interrupt this most poignant of moments.

  ‘Maaaate,’ said the man, mimicking the Australian accent.

  Luc and his Singapore-born wife Jin were two of James’s personal clients who paid a fortune for the privilege of spending an afternoon heli-skiing with the Olympic champion. James introduced Nina as Luc leaned against the low fence separating the two couples. He was obviously settling in for a chat. For a few minutes Nina followed the conversation about some dotcom millionaire she had never heard of, all the while looking at her watch and feeling helpless as her last minutes with James ticked away. Then she excused herself and disappeared into the café. She visited the washroom and rushed outside to James.

  ‘Sorry, Luc,’ she said cutting across him. ‘It’s an urgent call. It’s Mr Shima. He needs to talk to James now.’

  James was momentarily confused. Shima was the name of Nina’s dog who lived at home with her parents. His lips twitched but he leapt to his feet. ‘Oh, right then. I’d better go. Sorry, Luc.’