Infidelity

by Stacey May Fowles

  “You were just made too sensitive for this world,” she said when he confessed his panic attacks and obsessive thoughts to her one night over champagne post-sex. “That’s what makes you beautiful.”

  The collection of poetry about all the girls that came before Tamara won acclaim and some small awards, and then a two-book deal, back when you could garner a two-book deal from a poetry collection. His success meant that Tamara began to cultivate a sense of pride that she knew all of the beloved poet’s failings.

  Tamara had been stunning then. She was petite and blonde and more intelligent than any woman he had ever met. She had a quickness about her, as if she was impossible to pin down, and impossible to intimidate. Her body was firm and curved and Charlie would run his fingers gingerly from knee to ribcage to drink her in. She laughed endlessly with her big beautiful laugh, managing to charm all of the same people Charlie managed to repel. She also had a stability about her, a firmness that echoed her solid, unyielding body, and Charlie clung closely to her in those early years of his illness. She acted as an anchor, and he would grasp her arm at events and readings, navigating those first flashes of success under her careful guidance.

  While most assumed it was Tamara who benefited from Charlie’s suddenly found fame, his private shame was that she was the only reason for it. She was the one who was able to push him through the tight spaces of life, to find him all the exits, to convince him that it wasn’t cancer, that no one hated him, that the reviews were good even when they weren’t. And when he couldn’t be convinced, she coddled him, told him that it didn’t matter, that there was much more to be done.

  The ongoing, crippling anxiety was finally assuaged with a rather costly investment in intense cognitive behavioural therapy, a fee that Tamara’s blue blood, WASPy parents had quietly paid when Tamara convinced them that this was the man she planned to marry, whether they liked it or not. They viewed it as an investment. It was important that he was well. Charlie would have bobbed along on an endless sea of despair—despair of his own making—if he hadn’t met Tamara so early in life.

  So naturally, he married her.

  After he had been pulled from the worst, no one ever acknowledged the investment her parents made in the partial cure, and their marriage was blessed, however unenthusiastically. They married at city hall on a Friday afternoon in October. The bride wore grey and the groom threw up beforehand.

  Charlie was loath to admit to himself that he married Tamara out of that sense of obligation and repayment.

  It was because of Tamara that Charlie tattooed a small anchor of the inside of his wrist, right after they were married, a reminder that she was rooting him to earth. The tiny totem mocked him now with its early romanticism, its inability to predict a mundane future.

  Noah was conceived more than a decade after they first met. They had had no intention of having a child, initially because both were focused on their careers and then later because their relationship had soured. He was an accident, but an accident that was never acknowledged because marriage made calling a child a mistake impossible. There was money, stability, and no reason not to have Noah beyond crippling fear, so they went ahead.

  When he was born, Noah had the immediate ability to bring Tamara and Charlie closer together. Ten fingers, ten toes—this squirming pink mass that proved they could make something together that actually worked. He was a perfect, beautiful child, and Tamara was suddenly beautiful again, her bitterness subsiding. Charlie stayed home with Noah when Tamara went back to work after a brief mat leave. The newborn gave Charlie purpose, made him feel like he was finally contributing to a marriage that had risked falling apart via pure malaise. His anxiety dissipated because he had something real to worry about, something that depended on him to be fearless.

  And Charlie was excited to discover that while he was generally terrible at being alive, he was actually very good at being a father.

  But as Noah grew older and missed the developmental milestones, Charlie’s anxiety returned. It came at first like a slight tap on the shoulder, tiny waves of doubt that slipped in, and Charlie knew the paralysis would come again. It was only a matter of time. He watched his child, the one that had been a symbol of so much false hope for both of them, and knew only doom would come.

  Noah was late to walk and speak, refused to smile, and didn’t have interest in other children. He would scream and cry without reason, organize his toys methodically, and although he could count beyond a hundred at only twenty months, he couldn’t create sentences or respond to his name. When Noah was finally diagnosed with autism, Charlie learned the statistic that eighty percent of parents of autistic children divorce, and he took that as a challenge.

  In crowded spaces and dark theatres, Tamara had become adept at pulling Charlie out of the tight corners of life, but it was Tamara who wept uncontrollably for days when they learned Noah’s fate. Charlie held her, and though he felt guilty for thinking it, he was happy that for once she was the wounded bird and he would be forced to take care of both of them.

  ( CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO )

  After the day Veronica went to Charlie’s office and laid on his desk as an invitation, she began to think about kissing Charlie with unending frequency. It was the kind of kissing that leads nowhere and everywhere. The groping, desperate kisses of teenagers before they’ve explored anything else to do with their bodies. People who have fallen into the motions of predictable sex . . . the kind you roll into while drunk or exhausted . . . they yearn only for the aimless grinding of youth.

  The thoughts would leave her panting and nauseated.

  Ronnie closed her eyes in the bathtub, behind a locked door, while Aaron was in the house, and thought of Charlie in a variety of inappropriate ways and a variety of inappropriate situations. Her capacity to fantasize amazed her, and the frantic detail in which she did disturbed her. After years of living with Aaron—after the unending, mechanical efforts to breed—fantasy had left her, and she welcomed it back with sticky, sweaty fervour.

  Now that they had slept together, their coffee dates seemed foolishly innocent, so they graduated to later evenings, to cocktails, with more elaborate lies and more obscure locations. They had something to hide now, so they needed a way of numbing that feeling and a place to hide it that wasn’t a campus coffee shop.

  Ronnie would watch foolishly transfixed, a voyeur, as he lifted his pint glass to his lips. She would reimagine that single action over and over, recreating it in complex detail and at varying speeds. She would review the action as if they were both in slow motion, frozen in a slow, creeping, clandestine moment, over and over again. She wanted to sink her teeth into the fleshy pink of his bottom lip. She found herself putting her fingers in her mouth while he spoke, gnawing at them, pinching them between her teeth, occupying her tongue, trying to stave off the urge to reach across the table and swallow him whole.

  “When I’m with you, Charlie, I just want to kiss you over and over and over again.”

  He never talked about anything particularly interesting, or at least anything she could fully understand, but it failed to matter. Ronnie knew nothing about poetry nor was she particularly interested in it, and she could tune out the stories of university things and university people she cared little about. While his lips moved she took the time to scrutinize every reason she wanted to taste them. Certainly she’d considered that her attraction to Charlie was absurd, but beyond that the visceral, nauseous nature of the desire was foreign to her. Charlie had an ability to make her sick to her stomach, her head light, her clichéd knees weak. She wasn’t sure how she’d managed. She’d spent so many nights lying next to Aaron wondering if this was the way things went. She’d spent so many mornings in bed with her thoughts, imagining things she could never do with Aaron, the kinds of things that Aaron would never believe her capable of. Things she could do with Charlie.

  It seemed that Aaron’s body was always turned away
from her, curled up facing the wall, breathing deep. He fell asleep so many hours before her, and as a result woke up so many hours before she did. He chastised her for this, lightly called her lazy in a way she loathed. It was the kind of criticism Aaron would raise jokingly in front of mutual friends, thinking he was being loving and comical, but Ronnie would seethe with anger as their brunch or dinner party companions laughed jovially over her laziness. As she became more and more enamoured with Charlie and his every gesture, she began to despise Aaron. His voice became grating and his requests intolerable.

  In her mind she had already left Aaron. In her mind she had moved out completely . . . packed up every last thing and found a new space in the crook of Charlie’s neck. In her mind every piece of her was Charlie’s, broken or otherwise. And was it enough that she was his in her mind? Would she have to sever herself in real life as well? Because the idea of dividing up her life and telling those laughing, joking brunch companions destroyed her even when she simply thought about it. The heartbreak of severing she could tolerate. It was the logistics of moving on, the shame of judgment she couldn’t bear.

  She pondered these things while she watched his mouth, wet with ale, that pink shiny mouth, that beautiful plump—

  “Ronnie, are you even listening to me?”

  “Yes Charlie. The university. They’re screwing you.”

  “Nice synopsis.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m distracted.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m sorry. I was thinking about Aaron.”

  The words, the lie, came out of her mouth before she had a chance to consider them. Charlie frowned. Ronnie wasn’t entirely sure why she had said it. Perhaps to wound him? To remind them both about their bad behaviour? She often said Aaron’s name out loud to remind herself that he wouldn’t want her to be there. When she was with Charlie, it was easy to forget that Aaron existed, that he kissed her goodnight and kissed her good morning every day. The acknowledgement of his existence was important.

  “Why do you always have to bring him up?”

  “I don’t always bring him up.”

  “That was the third time today.”

  “I bring him up because he’s at home waiting for me. Because he thinks I’m ‘running errands.’”

  “He’s not waiting for you, Ronnie. He doesn’t know you exist.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “No, fuck you.”

  Charlie was being cruel and Ronnie knew it. He’d managed to build a caricature of this man he’d never met, someone who he believed to be a despicable, abusive, neglectful man, in order to justify the cuckolding. Every so often he’d casually suggest that Aaron didn’t really love her, or that if he did, he wasn’t very good at it. Despite Ronnie’s assertions that Aaron was a “good person,” Charlie continually convinced himself that Aaron was an abusive monster. She knew it was because it made their actions easier for him to bear, that he never considered himself to be the type of man who would sleep with someone else’s . . .

  “If I could have you I wouldn’t neglect you.”

  But you can have me, Charlie. You just don’t want me.

  Charlie tipped back his pint dramatically, empowered by his own statement, and motioned impolitely for the waitress to bring him another.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Motion at the waitress like she’s a fucking servant. It’s like you think anyone who doesn’t have some creative calling is beneath you.”

  “Creative calling? What are you even talking about?”

  “I’m not beneath you, you know.”

  “Oh, is that what this is about?”

  “Don’t say it like that. Like you’ve known it all along.”

  “I don’t think you are beneath me, Ronnie.”

  “And he doesn’t neglect me.”

  “Why are you even defending him? Half the time you come and meet me you’ve been crying or you start crying. If you’re so miserable all the time, I don’t understand why you don’t leave.”

  “Probably for the same reasons you don’t leave.”

  Charlie broke eye contact and began to fidget.

  “I want to go,” Ronnie said.

  “I just ordered another beer.”

  “Then stay and drink your beer. I want to go.”

  ( CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE )

  “What’s wrong with the dryer?” Charlie asked, coming up the stairs from the basement clutching a pile of his wet clothes.

  “Maybe if you were around more, you would know that the dryer needs fixing, Charlie,” Tamara replied from the kitchen, her voice thick with resentment.

  Charlie pretended not to hear, dumping his damp shirts, pants, and underwear on the living room rug and collapsing on the couch. He stared past the television, which was showing the six o’clock news piece on the dangers of escalators, through the glass sliding door and into the backyard.

  “Please tell me you’re not just going to leave that pile of wet clothing there on the rug, Charles,” Tamara said.

  “No. I’m not going to just leave it there. I’m going to leave it there for now.”

  “I’m happy to get someone in to fix the dryer during the day, Mrs. Stern,” Amanda offered, stirring a pot of soup on the stove for Noah’s dinner. She seemed consistently unmoved by their bickering, perhaps because it was happening more frequently, and with much more mutual disdain. Amanda had a knack for making herself a casual, unobtrusive observer of their marital woes, and Charlie often wondered what kind of conversations she had with friends over beers about the disastrous marriage she had a hand in maintaining. How she promised them and herself she’d never turn out that way.

  “Absolutely not. It is most certainly not your job to get the dryer fixed. Charlie, you need to get it together. I can’t do everything.”

  “That’s right. Because I do nothing.”

  It seemed to Charlie that Tamara was angry all the time, frustrated that he was never around, never contributing, never aware of the larger concerns of the family. It seemed to Charlie that Tamara had been this way not just since he had met Veronica, but for years and years, perhaps since the very beginning.

  “I’ll take care of it, Amanda,” Charlie said flatly without turning his head toward the kitchen where she and Tamara were preparing dinner.

  “Unlikely,” Tamara added.

  She had punished him for so long that he couldn’t remember where and when it started. For so long he had been a disappointment that he didn’t know how to be anything else.

  The nightly news was now reporting on a shooting that had happened at a high school in the east end. Charlie thought for a moment about how pointless damp clothes on the living room rug were in the face of a crazed gunman.

  “You know, Charlie, Amanda has been forced to take Noah’s things to the laundromat. That’s really not fair to her.”

  “I heard you the first time, Tamara. I’ll get it done.”

  “It’s okay, Mrs. Stern.”

  “No, it’s really not.”

  “If you could do something about that sooner rather than later—you know if you’re not too busy with that book you’re writing every fucking night.”

  With each strained conversation, more of his marriage was chipped away into a rubble they both wilfully ignored. Where once Tamara lived to care for his neurosis, to celebrate his gift, to proclaim herself the wife of a writer, she had become wary of his neediness. Where once he felt important to another human being, he now felt like a burden unworthy of being carried.

  Perhaps it had always been this way and only in having Ronnie had he noticed.

  “Really, Mrs. Stern. It’s no trouble. I’ll get someone in to repair the dryer first thing.”

  Charlie breathed a heavy sigh and wished Amanda had not pushed. That she would shut up. He watc
hed in the reflection of the glass door as Tamara furiously and wordlessly retreated upstairs, slamming the bedroom door.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Stern.”

  Charlie switched off the television. “You can go home now, Amanda. I’ll feed Noah. If you could pour me a glass of Scotch before you go I’d be grateful.”

  ( CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR )

  RONNIE

  In those naked moments in his office, while Charlie was drawing lines with his fingertips across my skin, I would tell him stories about my childhood. He encouraged it, asked me questions like “when did you first think you were in love?” and “tell me about your first kiss.” While he would run his hand lightly over my breast, my belly, my shoulder, he would watch me speak like he was an eager student in a classroom.

  High school stories seemed to be his favourite. He loved hearing about me in a Catholic school uniform, in a wool beret and fingerless gloves, smoking weed with the boys.

  “Weren’t you ever worried? Weren’t you ever afraid?” he would ask.

  He would kiss the parts of me that he had touched and tell me that if he had known me then, he would have fallen deeply in love with me. And I knew he was already deeply in love with me.

  I began to know the right stories to tell. He was aroused by my recklessness, would sigh heavily when I told him stories of me drunkenly scaling fences or stripping my clothes off in the rain. I would pick out moments of my life where I pushed hard at people who loved me and the people who did not. He had a fetish for me breaking things in the name of feeling alive, I assumed because he lived in a fear of his own creation every day.

  “You’re an amazing woman, Veronica,” he would say, finally kissing me on the mouth, long and deep, pressing himself against me, his thigh slipping between mine.

  Inevitably after a story was told, we would make love in a way that was soft and sweet, in contrast to the usual desperate groping of our initial interactions.