Infidelity

by Stacey May Fowles

  So you chose the things you took with you carefully. Just enough to last if she doesn’t ever let you come back, but just too little to ensure that you’ll have a reason to return.

  “I need to pick up my electric razor, Tamara.”

  She will ask you to come to the house, the house you once shared, when she’s at work, when Noah’s at the playground with Amanda, when it is completely empty. She will not want to know that you came and she will not want to know that you looked through old photos and touched Noah’s toys and laid down in the bed the two of you slept in together and breathed in the scent of what was once your bodies entwined. The smell faint, because it rarely happened, if ever. But now that you’re living in a shitty hotel room in a bad neighbourhood, you remember it fondly. It wasn’t thrilling or remotely sexual or even exciting, but it was safe and warm and real, so much more so than this cold hotel room and this chipped wineglass and this moment where you wonder why you bothered in the first place.

  ( CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX )

  “So you’re gonna write a whole book about me, eh?” Tamara had said that first night, while draining her third pint.

  “For such a little thing, you certainly can drink.”

  “There’s a lot of things I can do. Likely better than you, anointed one.”

  “You need to stop calling me that.”

  “Does success make you blush, Mr. Stern?”

  “Certainly more than my compliments make you blush.”

  “Call me cynical, but I don’t trust your lot.”

  “Men or poets?”

  Tamara laughed. “Probably both, actually. Never trust a man who has a way with words.”

  “Would you prefer me a grunting fool?”

  “I think there’s a dirty joke in there somewhere.”

  “You know, Tamara, I think that you may bring out a masterpiece in me,” Charlie said, drunkenly yet with complete sincerity.

  “But honey, you just met me.” Tamara stood up, removing her soft grey cardigan from the back of her chair and attempting to thread her arms into it. She stumbled a bit, grasping his shoulder to steady herself. “Thanks for the drinks by the way.”

  Charlie realized it was her intention to leave and downed his own pint a little too quickly. His companions had all gone home one by one, each of them giving him that knowing glance of good luck in bringing Tamara back to his place for the evening. He had his mind set on it now and was groping for a reason for her to come with him.

  “Hey, Tamara. Do you want to come back to my place and I can read you some more of my poems? There’s some new things I’ve been working on that I think you might like—”

  Tamara burst into a fit of laughter. “Oh god. You are joking, right?”

  “Well, I just thought, given your new interest in poetry you might want to hear a few more.”

  Charlie was embarrassed, but Tamara bent down slowly and touched the side of his face with her soft hand.

  “Listen. I’ll come home with you, Charlie. And I don’t need the promise of poetry to do it.”

  ( CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN )

  “I want custody of Noah. Entirely.”

  Charlie and Tamara were seated across the dining room table from each other. So many dinners, so many evenings where they loved or hated or tolerated each other across the same table flashed in Charlie’s mind.

  “You cut your hair. It looks good,” he said, trying to change the subject, trying to soften the mood.

  She self-consciously put a hand to her head, her hair now a full five inches shorter after her own stylist corrected the half-haircut Veronica had given. Charlie took the haircut as a bad sign, a purging of him from her life, when really he should have recognized it as a much worse sign. He hadn’t yet been informed that Tamara and Ronnie had together decided his fate.

  Charlie had a tumbler of whisky and Tamara a glass of milk. Noah was snug in bed, put there by a beleaguered Amanda, who knew something was afoot but hadn’t been officially told. Charlie himself looked dishevelled . . . tired, unshaven, his clothes wrinkled. He smelled bad, a function of his limited access to laundry. She had invited him to the house via email, refusing to speak to him on the phone for countless days, saying they needed to discuss things. Charlie had assumed it would be a moment where he could plead his case to return, but it was evident immediately that the meeting was about dividing assets.

  “Tamara, I want to come home.”

  “I don’t give a fuck what you want.”

  “Please. We can talk about this.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about. I want custody of Noah. I’ll let you know when you can visit him.”

  “I have no plans to fight you,” he said meekly.

  “I want the house. All of it. You can take your records and your books.”

  “Tamara. I—I can’t afford the hotel anymore.”

  “That’s your reasoning for coming home? Because you need me to financially support you?”

  “No. I just . . . I can’t do it anymore. I need to see you. Every day.”

  “You just said you wouldn’t fight me.”

  “Please . . .”

  “I spent my whole life taking care of you. Being the dutiful wife. I’m done.”

  “I can’t do this. I can’t do this without you,” Charlie said, on the verge of weeping.

  “What is this about? Did Veronica leave you? Did I scare her off?”

  “What do you mean? Scare her off?”

  “Charlie, don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”

  “What do you mean, Tamara?”

  The horror of what this implied sunk in, and Charlie suddenly realized why he hadn’t heard from Veronica. He decided not to press, despite the fact that the idea of his wife meeting his lover was enough to bring on the panic attack that was creeping up his spine.

  “I just want to see you,” he said, changing direction.

  “Well you’re seeing me now and I’m telling you . . . I don’t expect any support from you, not that you could provide it anyway. In exchange I want sole custody of Noah. And I want the house. I don’t care where you live. Go live with Veronica for all I care.”

  “She’s not returning my calls,” Charlie said. As soon as he did so he realized the statement was unwise.

  “I knew it.”

  “But I wouldn’t want to see her anyway,” Charlie said, backpedalling.

  “Whatever. I couldn’t care less. Noah. The house. I’m done supporting you. You can do whatever you like.”

  “Tamara. Please. Listen.”

  “It’s over. Please, if you have anything good left inside you, just let me move on.”

  He wondered, Is there anything good left?

  Tamara began to cry, and as Charlie raised the tumbler to his mouth for a final burning gulp, he caught a glimpse of the inside of his wrist.

  A tiny tattooed anchor, grounding him to nothing.

  ( CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT )

  Tamara is good. Aaron is good. Ronnie is bad. Charlie is bad.

  Noah is good. Noah is better than all of this.

  If you want to make a real go of life, to become something accepted and acceptable, and you are bad, it’s best to go out and find yourself someone good and fake it. Pretend you are good enough for them and just go with it. Pretending is your only way out. Let their perfection blot out the ugly parts of yourself, hide in their beauty so no one notices how truly flawed you are.

  It can be excruciating, sitting through dinners with in-laws and friends (good friends) where you pretend to be good and good enough. It will be hard to listen to people tell you how lucky you are to have found someone so good. (Note how they never say “good for you” or that the other person is lucky to have found you. No. You were someone who was destined to end up nowhere and instead was rescued by one of the good. You are blessed. Y
ou are a broken thing that has been salvaged. Remember that.)

  Feel blessed.

  Sure, you may have an initial feeling of being a fraud. Feeling so alien. And it’ll fuck you right up. But that feeling will go away eventually. You’ll numb yourself to it in time. In some ways you’ll numb yourself to everything. You’ll be numb to all the things you wanted before, the adventure you thought you’d carve from life, all the desires for something more than this mundane life of being “good.”

  You’ll be loved and accepted and an “acceptable member of society.” There will be a quiet calm. You’ll go to bed early and wake up early and pay your bills on time and have good, normal, acceptable sex in a good, normal, acceptable bed an acceptable number of times a week. And you’ll actually start to believe you’re happy. The mediocre will grow on you. The limp way you hold hands in the supermarket. The way you get a light kiss in the condiments aisle for saying something slightly witty. You’ll be told you’re cute and smart and you’ll finally feel worth loving.

  You might even begin to forget you’re bad. You might even begin to think that it was all a phase, that you’re finally ready to be good.

  That everything will work out okay in the end.

  But the key to maintaining this kind of happiness is to never again get too close to someone who is bad like you were. Even if they’re reformed bad, the two of you together will just sink down into your former cesspool, like alcoholics relapsing together is a fuzzy haze of feel-good despair. You’ll remember the familiar feelings. You’ll remember the freedom of four a.m. whisky shots. You’ll remember the way lies tasted sweeter than the truth, and inevitably you’ll end up in a hotel room at one in the afternoon with your clothes strewn around the room. You’ll end up grasping at something and being completely unsure what it us, you’ll just scratch and dig at it until there’s nothing left. And despite the destruction, the discomfort, you’ll know it’s so much better than your current, “good” life. Your credit card will be maxed out and the sheets will be fine and filthy and the taste of him on your mouth sweet. And you will long for him in ways you never even imagined possible. You will yearn and ache and cry drunk in bathroom stalls. You’ll break down inappropriately in grocery stores. You’ll run away in the middle of the night. You’ll never want to come back. You’ll crave him in ways you never thought possible to crave another human being. You’ll see him and be torn in two.

  And he is bad. He is bad for you. He is everything you knew it was best to stay away from. You watch him shake and twitch with anxiety over the smallest, most insignificant moments. You don’t know how to help him and you’re not sure you want to. He exhausts you. You are exhausted. You want him to love you but you find yourself not caring if he does. You feel yourself creeping from good to bad. You feel the weight of your double life. You feel it all. You feel everything in a way you never did before. And you hate him for it. And you love him for it. You remember the days when you were numb to everything. Where nothing could hurt you. And then all of a sudden he is hurting you. He is hurting you with his distance and he is hurting you with his closeness and he is destroying you by merely being alive.

  And he is worth it. And he is not worth it. And you are sorry. And you are not sorry. And you feel guilty. And you don’t feel guilty. And it doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter.

  It will never matter.

  Because you are so small and insignificant and no one will remember and no one will forget.

  Because no one really cares that you made love to Charlie in a bed at the Westin Harbour Castle. Or the Garden Hilton. Or the Marriott. Or on his desk in his office. Or in a bathroom stall at Robarts.

  And you realize the promise to be good gets you nowhere. Being good gets you unhappy and it gets you lonely and it gets you a life you never wanted in the first place. It gets you loveless. And empty. And numb.

  And it doesn’t get you Charlie.

  Charlie laments the way the waitress fails to bring the creamer, the way his meeting got cancelled, the way the cab driver gets lost on a Sunday afternoon when you both have nowhere to be. Charlie disappears for days, weeks at a time. Charlie doesn’t reply, and when you are not available Charlie panics. You loathe the way he looks away from you, fear the way he ignores you when he’s with his family, with Noah, but as soon as he is with you, as soon as you wrap your limbs around his and hold on tight, the hate is gone.

  Because he is forgiven. Because you are forgiven. This is forgiveness, being this close to love, however far away it seems. This is the kind of forgiveness for being human you cannot get from mediocre handholding in supermarkets. This is the kind of love you were always so sure existed when you were a child. This is the kind of real your mother claimed could never be true. This is better than taking what you are given, which is what you were always instructed to do.

  This, with all the lies that keep it together, is more truth than you have ever known.

  ( CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE )

  “Charlie, we have to end this. For good. You need to stop calling me.”

  He had known it was coming. That it had in fact already come, but that he needed to hear her to say it.

  “It’s not healthy for either of us, and I need to take some time to take care of myself right now.”

  “Why, Ronnie? Why do you need to take care of yourself right now?”

  It had been weeks and weeks and he had been sending message after message to Ronnie with no response. While he was making real efforts to repair things with Tamara from his hotel room across town, he obsessively checked his email for a sign from Ronnie.

  “Tell me you’re okay, Ronnie. I worry about you. I miss you so much. Please. I just want to see you.”

  “Charlie, you know I can’t do that. Not after what happened. Now that your wife knows. Now that you’ve decided. Now that you’ve chosen.”

  He wanted to know if she was crying. It would mean something if she was crying.

  “I just need some time, Ronnie. Some time to fix things. I told you that. I need you to be patient.”

  “Too many things have happened, Charlie. Things are different now.”

  In his messages he had explained at length how he was sorry, how important it was to try to mend a marriage, that there were so many more people to consider than merely himself. That people were counting on him to be a good husband and father and he couldn’t let them down.

  Ronnie was pretty sure that this was all a lie, that the reason he was attempting to repair his marriage was because he was terrified of losing the comforts he had grown accustomed to, financial and otherwise. That he was terrified of what other people would think of him. Charlie was gifted at the cultivation of shame; the idea that colleagues, friends, and family would see him as the man whose wife left him and took their child with her was more devastating than the loss of Ronnie in his life.

  “What has happened, Ronnie? Tell me what has happened.”

  All the freedom he needed to see Ronnie was finally his, in his hotel room where he was never expected to go home, and she was nowhere to be found. The colliding of his life with hers, how real it had all become at his front door and at her place of work, had proven too much for her to handle.

  “Answer me, Ronnie. What has happened?”

  “Nothing. It just isn’t right anymore. It isn’t fun anymore,” she said.

  Fun? he thought. What a strange word to use.

  “Will it do any good if I ask you to come back to me?” Charlie asked, defeated.

  “No, Charlie. It’s too late for that now.”

  Ronnie knew that love couldn’t conquer all. It certainly could conquer most, but it could never erase the reality that Charlie would need to be housed and fed when he was writing poetry. Ronnie’s insecurities that she was somehow lesser than Charlie because she didn’t have a “calling,” as she put it, were entirely false. Charlie�
�s calling had made him weak and needy. It made him dependent on Tamara and the stability she constantly provided.

  “Charlie, we have to end this. For good. I don’t think you should email or call me anymore.”

  “Please don’t. Please don’t go. Please just see me one more time. Just one more.”

  “It’s no use. There’s no point.”

  “I want to kiss you one more time. Touch you one more time.”

  “Don’t embarrass yourself, Charlie.”

  “There’s got to be something worth saving. Anything?”

  While it seemed Ronnie had achieved what she had been looking for . . . Charlie without wife . . . she knew the split only increased his longing for his family. Ronnie was wary of consoling him while he lamented the loss. While Charlie spoke mostly of missing Noah, Ronnie knew it was more than that.

  When an affair ends, it is difficult to pinpoint why and how it started in the first place.

  A witty joke, a shared cookie, and a shot glass in a pocket?

  The brashness of writing an unsolicited letter?

  A flask of peach schnapps?

  A lemon-yellow dress and a fuck in the afternoon?

  Ronnie knew Charlie wanted his wife, his life, and while Charlie sobbed Tamara’s name and drank himself to sleep in that terrible hotel room on Jarvis, Ronnie spent time convincing herself that she would find away to dissolve the affair.

  She was convinced.

  “There’s nothing real to hold on to here. There never was.”

  ( CHAPTER SIXTY )

  Charlie stumbled around U of T campus in the early spring rain a wounded, lost man, a bottle of whisky concealed in his jacket. He knew that Tamara had Noah and Ronnie had Aaron and that he only had a whisky bottle and a manuscript about a girl he could no longer fuck. The idea of finishing the novel was terrifying; excessive amounts of time spent in a world he’d created to celebrate Ronnie.

  A waste.

  He would attempt to work in the library, in a café, at the bar, anywhere but the sad, dark hotel room that had become his home, an award-winning author without a real place to write. The time he spent pretending to work was bearable, but when he returned to his room on Jarvis Street he found he would fall into a pit of longing that only drinking could float him out of.