Jean opened the attachment. It took a long time to download. Luckily the boy next to her left before the full-screen image appeared.
Jesus! Australia didn’t waste time. She wondered how much a chest like that might weigh. At almost life-size, it was a not-so-good pair, she thought—big nippled and uniformly bronzed. Jean believed in the essential sexiness of untanned triangles—the idea, at least, that not just anyone enjoyed this view—not that her skin ever turned anything but redder, or that she ever wore a bikini. But these were undeniably young and undeniably large. And what was that black thing? The edge of a tattoo? A whole generation of young people—including Victoria with her lizard—in painful pursuit of decoration and emphasis, just what they didn’t need. Their inkings should warn off persons from their parents’ era, Jean thought. In fact, that might be just the sort of boundary tattoos were there to demarcate—noli me tangere.
There were a couple of other photographs, all with elaborate captions. “Giovana” promised Mark L.O.V.E.—long overdue experience, even fucking that up; but then Giovana with one n couldn’t even spell her own name. Which was probably Joan anyway. Or Jean—who just now remembered that, when she was about fifteen and yearning for instant glamour, she’d briefly insisted on being called Gina.
Giovana thanked him for the “replacement” underpants, which she gamely modeled on her round bottom—fat, Victoria would’ve said, taking her mother’s side. A red ribbon was threaded through chubby cheeks—buried, actually—reappearing at the top to bloom into a triangular swatch of white trimmed with red, like a yield sign. What happened to the first pair? Were they the same, or cut to resemble a different traffic warning: a red octagon of phony protest (stop!), or maybe a slinky something in yellow and black (slippery when wet)? Helpless against the tide of imagining, Jean stolidly went on, in punishing detail. So, underpants #1, given, and kept, as a souvenir? Ripped by his teeth in the heat of the moment? Tossed from a moving taxi? Ridiculous. Right?
Another photo—headless like the first two—gave a side view of the same body, this time pantyless and bending at the waist, wearing a frilly white apron that served as a sling for heavy breasts, with a giant birthday-present bow tied at the back. An unfamiliar hand trained the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner on the crescent seam of her buttocks. What was Jean supposed to make of that? Had Mark put in a request in the housewife department? The crassness of these offerings stunned Jean, though she couldn’t say if she’d be any less stunned by tasteful nude shots of Mark’s lover. Her ability to think clearly about any of this was hampered by the much more upsetting thought that, after twenty-three years together, she didn’t really know her husband.
Plainly, this was a spoof of some kind. She could see you weren’t supposed to take it seriously. But affairs were always corny, always an imitation of other affairs. What would be the point of a highly original affair? Repetition was the whole idea, with thrilling (and repetitive) limits on time and place. Nothing like a marriage, with all its unrelieved specificity unfurling over the years, in a variety of landscapes, public and private, rural and urban, in the long roll from innocence to…loss of innocence. (Jean wasn’t sure anymore about knowledge: what did she know?) But being corny didn’t make it harmless, even if that’s what he’d told himself.
Before she knew it, she was typing her reply.
Thing 2: Is it really you? (I’d forgotten how wonderful you look: was that—rather, were those—really you? More! Never 2 soon. PLEASE.)
Write back. Telling detail, please, so I can be sure its you.
T1
Darling Munyeroo, bella stella giovanela, you slut! I adore you!
She didn’t pause. And when she was done she read over her reply: not bad, she thought. Mark could be whimsical, uncertain about punctuation; his favorite word was “wonderful,” and “adore” his second favorite. Jean didn’t resist matching Giovana’s stray numeral—“4 your eyes only”—a rotting fish tossed to a trained seal. She had wavered between “slag” and “slut,” worried that the latter was too American, but finally decided it was somehow jollier, and above all she could hear him saying it. Finally, she trusted the recipient’s vanity to weaken her sleuthing skills.
Jean sat upright and looked blankly through the window. Outside, the blinding day. She was acting almost robotically, but she couldn’t stop. The moral high ground held no appeal—and no information. She would continue even though, before she sent a single line, she knew that soon she would be like the boy who’d just left—foolishly awaiting replies she would then foolishly return, in a gripping, humiliating dunces’ volley. She checked her reply once more and pressed the send button. And she was, however briefly, euphoric.
Driving home around the outskirts of Toussaint, Jean thought how much of her day so far had been about the body—a particular strain considering she’d always felt most herself with the smallest amount of movement: reading, thinking, writing; and watching, absolutely frozen, birds through binoculars. Very early on she’d discovered you could learn a great deal if you just stayed still and more or less left your body out of it. Suddenly it was all bodies—and breasts were in the air! Blown up and plastered on posters and billboards, or plumply rolling by on the sides of public buses, perfect pairs assailed her, incongruous and looming in this lapsed, rust-encrusted, weedinfested, sugarcaning community.
The ads, featuring skin tones not seen here except on tourists, weren’t much noticed by locals, who passed them by in threes on mopeds and bicycles, or on foot, balancing barrels on their heads or bent under back loads of kindling. Jean passed a flock of schoolchildren in checked uniforms, skipping alongside leaching salt beds; she tracked broken-down farms and roadside food stands and tabagies and, in and among all this, stationed at regular intervals, the local prostitutes, their breasts spilling from front-tied halter-neck tops. Gift wrapped, she thought, helplessly slowing down to look.
Out on the coastal road, the bay flashing beside her like a vast mirror, she was blocked by a delivery truck attempting to turn. She stopped right under a breast-festooned billboard. “There you go,” she said, as if it was proof of a general conspiracy, this one an ad for fizzy orange drink, in the photograph falling from some height, like a waterfall, into the mouth of an ecstatic bosomy teenager.
The side of the long truck was blazoned with a hand-painted globe, denoting worldwide scope in the local style. Jean stared at the homely planet as the truck inched through its dangerous maneuvers, shielding her face from the wall of sunlight beaming from the west. And she felt, sitting under a womanly chest the size of her car, that she herself was stuck, and not just in this wedge of narrow road, with the wild ocean storming below. It seemed to Jean there were no facts; that rules might give way to exceptions and that everything was open to interpretation, the play of the light, the smacking waves of further revelation. The trapped feeling reminded her of a terrifying childhood episode: out of her depth, caught in the tides, she’d been thrashed between two volcanic boulders, scraped, sick and gasping for air, gulping salt water from a lurching horizon. That time, Dad plucked her out and brought her in, carrying her tight against his huge chest back to shore. And this time?
Over the next two and a half months, Jean exchanged dozens of juicy e-mails with Thing 2, with Munyeroo, with My Own Mountain Goat, with Ginger, who didn’t have red hair, or with just plain Giovana. She watched for reactions from Mark. She worried when he went to London—and surely met his mistress—that her interference would be revealed. But in her compulsion to follow the trail, she persuaded herself that, even if Mark could do such a thing, he’d never, ever talk about it—and his characteristic cheer on his return seemed to confirm her hope. She explained her frequent trips to town (and the Internet café) as a newfound passion for fitness—the gym. She did feel energized, as if she’d run a mile.
Anticipation, in particular, was better than any treadmilled endorphins. Yes! There was something in her in-box. Every time she opened the account she felt the flush of excitement,
like a child spying the glint of colored foil across a garden, a chocolate egg “hidden” by a parent directly in her line of sight. Her pleasure in the moment was embarrassing, or it would have been if she’d been less engrossed, and less anonymous. She could forget that she wasn’t supposed to see these letters, and Giovana abetted her illusion by never using Mark’s name. Though Jean often cringed at the names she got, she never retreated from the feeling that she was Thing 1, Lover, Big, Huge, Gigantor, Master, Manster, Bun, Boss, Rod (Rodney, Rod Stewart), or, and in the end best of all, just Sir. Giovana’s e-mails were almost exclusively about sex, and each included at least one photograph—a contraband brownie smuggled into her lunch box.
In one message, which Jean then particularly feared would give her identity away, she forgot her impersonation of Mark and tried, with all her native and professional usefulness, to neutralize her rival with advice.
You’re not bad looking, Gio, she found herself typing. You have lovely hair. You should be more self-confident. Really, you needn’t try so hard…
In addition to recommending two esteem-building manuals and a hairdo that didn’t cover half the face, she’d thought it worth pointing out, gently, that extruding your breasts through the slash holes of a tightly laced PVC bodice was a plausible definition of trying too hard. But maybe Mark disagreed. (Giovana, anyway, was exasperatingly humbled: under a picture of herself in a puff-sleeved dress and licking a lollipop, she had apologized. I did bad. XXX Tell me how I am to be punished.) Jean wondered what kind of experience PVC bustiers promised—if, just possibly, all this theatrical strut and know-how went beyond sex toward a counterintuitive, postfeminist liberation. Would she, in her own future happiness, dress like this? The word “negligée” could mean “neglected,” Jean thought while examining Giovana in a filmy transparent babydoll of tan-enhancing blue, but it might also mean “to give little thought to”—to be cool.
She skated over the notion that she was having her own affair with Giovana—flirting and fantasizing like deluded typers all over the world. (Did it matter, really, about her hidden quest or the murderous nature of her fantasies?) Far from busting Mark, maybe she was actually backing him up. She was Mark; she was Thing 1; of course she knew how he felt. Sometimes, her interest drew mainly from her own side of the conversation—a challenging diversification for any columnist, who was, inevitably, something of a persona. And her Thing 1 was, if she said it herself, debonair. As Mark could be—an amalgamation of Christopher Plummer, Roger Moore just past his prime, with a pinch of revamped, upper-class Terence Stamp, whom Mark, with his bright pale eyes and wide brow, inescapably did resemble. This was more or less where she pitched it—she had a perverse wish for Mark to be worth having an affair with—and she was justly proud of her creation.
Mark didn’t seem to notice her obsession, but her work was suffering. One column about healthy minibreaks hardly lifted above the industry standard, recommending, under a banner of “ecotourism,” short hikes and the reuse of hotel towels, while the next one promoted a seaweed cure-all of absolutely no use to her readers, none of whom lived within a thousand miles of a source of magic algae. And strangely, though no more strangely than a lot of other things these days, she missed Mark.
What would he say if she let him in? Imagine getting beyond denials and the tawdry local phenomena of whens and wheres. He’d probably tell her that, if only she’d left things alone, been less proactive (“less American,” he would surely have said), he’d have been onto a leggy Swede before the original letter arrived in Christian’s sack, and finished with her, too.
She wondered if he ever wrote to Giovana himself, from the St. Jerome Hotel where he went to play tennis and check his office e-mail. Certainly there’d been a few unexplained endearments: Bubischnudel was one that stuck in her mind, along with other Teutonic notes—bis bald—see you later—and tschüss! Maybe this was just the residue of his German projects, but it was new. Jean had heard the lovers on the phone—she’d walked in on them mid-conversation. She specifically heard him whisper “darling”—softly, as if he was talking to a child, one he was trying to jolly back from a tantrum. Thinking it must be a distressed Victoria calling for comfort, she’d waited, and was surprised when he abruptly hung up with a bizarre yet perfunctory “Got to run, Dan”—obviously some preestablished code. Mark called lots of people darling, men and women, including everyone whose name he couldn’t remember. But he didn’t whisper it.
A feeling too good to last: Jean had been right about that. In the days and weeks following the discovery, she found herself soberly trawling through the past—hers, Mark’s, and theirs, plus the parents’—combing for any warning of impending calamity and, less hopefully, for any solution. In addition, Jean took on the hard work of cold-shouldering her panic. She weeded her garden and she yawned a lot, just couldn’t stop yawning.
And though she didn’t know why, earlier desolations—newly revealed as practice panics—bubbled up to consciousness with seismic force: as when Jean was packing to go up to Oxford and her Anglophile mother, hot at the prospect of vicarious pleasures, presented her with a taffeta ball gown—immense, and yellow.
Now, clad in her usual grubby gardening gear, Jean could hardly countenance the existence of such an item, let alone its place among her possessions.
But this parting gift was exactly Phyllis’s idea of fun or, rather, fun in an ancient European setting. In her worldview, it was axiomatic that if you had the clothes, the experience would surely follow. At that moment, Jean, holding the bunched yards of dully shining silk with both hands, came to know a couple of things she had not yet even suspected. The first was that her mother—pretty, neat, and short, though Phyllis preferred “petite”—had married too early to get in her fair share of fun. Jean’s father, William Warner, attorney-at-law, was shrewd, thoughtful, droll, and arguably dapper, but not the kind of fast-talking high-spirited fun her mother seemed to want. It was Jean who’d taken his advice to go to Oxford and follow him in the study of the law, even though she’d already completed a perfectly good American degree in English literature; it was Jean who admired and shared his crackling brand of humor, so dry you might miss it, this wit that made Mark’s punsome ways seem like slapstick. The other thing Jean understood on the presentation of the dress was that she wouldn’t be going to the ball. Not ever.
Nevertheless, she’d kept the spinster gown, old but unworn, rolled in mothballs and stowed now for decades in a box marked may. Jean never considered offering it to nineteen-year-old Victoria, already launched in her own weightless selection of slinky, shimmery dresses worn as tight as Ace bandages—and not just because it was yellow and dated, out of the dance at Twelve Oaks in Gone with the Wind. Jean passionately wished not to press any freighted idea of allure on Victoria, particularly not one she herself had rejected.
But the unflattering dress, with its explosion of fabric just at the hip, had done its work, and perhaps this is what saved it from Oxfam. For it was while not attending her own year’s May Ball that Jean had met Mark, deep in Crime and Thriller at the back of Iffley Road Video.
“I grew up in this town, but I don’t go to the university,” he’d told her, answering the evidently obvious question on her face. “I make collages, you see. In London.” Jean hadn’t known what to say. He seemed so much older than her fellow students and even her tutors. He’d been to Camberwell art school in South London and, that May, he was on a rare visit home, for his first solo exhibition at a new gallery in Jericho. As they waited for their videos at the cash register, he held out an invitation to the opening.
“You must come,” he said, refusing to dilute his command with an ingratiating smile, both of their hands on the card. “Just exactly as you are: don’t change a single thing.” She remembered how she’d looked down at her bumpy brown hand-knit sweater and jeans. And that, from the beginning, was Mark: he’d had a vivid and unshakable idea of her qualities and, even better, his compliments gave pleasure long after they’d
been paid. She wasn’t just beautiful; to Mark, hers was a “refreshing beauty.” He didn’t just adore her; she “filled the sky.” His clarity of purpose, and the apposite phrase, were talents he shared with her father, perhaps the only things they had in common, and for Jean that was enough, the nonnegotiable minimum.
For the first time in decades, Jean wondered what her father had said that caught her mother’s attention the first time they met.
“Worse ski accident I ever had,” he joked after the divorce, twenty-eight years later. He’d met Phyllis Jean Amery by chance, in Aspen, Colorado, in February 1955, in a lift queue. So what had Bill said to her mother as they rose through the cold mountain air, suspended between slope and sky? Jean thought he’d probably begun by trying to impress her with some interesting fact about the natural world—too absorbed to notice, as he should have, that conversations with no people in them made Phyllis fidgety. Once, also on a chairlift, he’d told Jean that it took a snowflake eight minutes to complete its fall to earth, the same amount of time it took the image of the setting sun to reach the human eye. And, like Mark in the video store, her father had only had about that long to make his pitch, to make Phyllis want to get back in line with him. Jean’s brother, Billy, was born in November the same year, on Thanks-giving Day; still, she had the idea that whatever her father had come up with on that chairlift also contained the seed of her parents’ separation: the fact of it encoded in that first encounter, imprinted, unalterable.
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