by André Alexis
On the other hand, what had his actions accomplished? He had forgiven his wife…No, actually, what he had done was to give up mentioning anything that might lead them to talk about her infidelity. He even managed to give up doing things he had done for years: inspecting her bedsheets, surprising her with midday visits, rummaging through her clothes drawers. And yet, despite this, his home life was not what it should have been. He was anxious, resentful, and, yes, still jealous. At his worst, he felt he had accomplished nothing, and he was often at his worst. (Things were only a little better at work. One of his colleagues had, placidly, as if off the cuff, asked
– Everything okay at home, Paul?
– Everything’s fine, he’d answered
politely but barely able to hide his chagrin at being asked.)
Still, all these months later, things were not as bad as they might have been. Walter, for instance, had not (would not?) tell the police about him. Walter was fading from his thoughts. Paul thought of Walter no more than once or twice a week. He was even growing accustomed to his life with Louise, growing used to his own fatigue, resentment, and jealousy. The only really unmanageable emotion was anger, and the problem was he couldn’t predict when anger would overtake him.
Now, for instance: a Monday morning in February. He was at the office early, to read and sign letters, to prepare for a meeting with a prospective programmer. Through the window behind him, the city was white and grey, and the sky pale blue. What reason was there to be angry? None whatsoever. And then
– Good morning, Mr. Dylan.
Sharon, his secretary, had come in with the daily papers and a cup of coffee, for him, from the shop on the first floor. (Black, no sugar.) You could see she was in the mood for an exchange, but he was not.
– Thank you, he said
and looked down at the letter to someone in Seoul:
Dear Mr. Kim,
This letter is to thank you for…
as Sharon blithely said
– Oh, Mr. Dylan? I wonder if you heard what happened to Professor Barnes.
– Who?
– Professor Barnes. You remember, we talked about him. Well, someone attacked him. The father of one of his students.
– Oh, really?
– Professor Barnes must have been doing something with the student, if you ask me. Anyway, I thought I’d tell you, in case you didn’t know. First thing I thought about when I heard about Professor Barnes was how I told you I’d seen him with someone named Louise. You remember? Well, the other day I was talking to a friend from Carleton and she said…the woman I was thinking of?…it wasn’t Louise. It was Adele. Funny, isn’t it? I mean, Adele was one of my close friends. How could I forget? But the really funny thing is my mind must have been telling me something because Adele’s name isn’t really Adele. It’s Løne…Norwegian…Løne Kastrupsen, but she hated it when people called her Lorna, so she changed it. Funny the way your mind works. Løne sounds a little like Louise, I guess.
– Yes, he said. That is funny.
– Isn’t it? she said. My mind works in the strangest ways sometimes.
He was not immediately affected by Sharon’s anecdote. He was startled she’d spoken of Walter when he was trying to think of anything but Walter, but this kind of thing happened all the time. It was synchronicity, nothing more. When she left his office, he tried to put the matter out of his mind and get on with his work:
Dear Mr. Kim,
This letter is to thank you for…
(Still, it was quite a coincidence.)
No, that should be informal, his first name:
Dear Roo,
or
Dear Kim,
(Though he was not the kind of man to make something of nothing.)
If he had been less scrupulous where Walter was concerned, if his actions had been based solely on the word of a flighty twenty-four-year-old, why then, yes, he might have been disturbed by her confusion of Løne and Louise. Hers, however, had been but one piece of the puzzle. There had been the ruined Aquinas, the palpable emotion between his wife and Walter, the palpable shame. This Løne Kastrupsen changed nothing.
He stared at the letter to Seoul for some time before deciding it was best as it had been: formal, restrained, but not unfriendly:
Dear Mr. Kim…
The most surprising thing about his secretary’s revelation, when he thought about it, was how little he thought about it. It was in there, certainly, but in an amusing way. Løne Kastrupsen. He smiled when he thought of the name. But it was insidious, and by the end of the day, he couldn’t stop thinking of the woman’s name.
The most disturbing thing was how the world seemed to conspire with him against himself. In all his years at work, he had thought about Norway how many times? Too few to mention. Yet, here, on the day he first heard the name Kastrupsen, it was as if Norway had overtaken him. There were letters to be sent to Gerd Manne and Hanne Hide in Trondheim. At lunch, he overheard an angry exchange in what he took to be a Scandinavian tongue – Hvor har du vært? Hvor har du vært? And he discovered that an assistant they’d recently hired had been born in Gol.
No doubt, none of this was significant. It was all coincidence. On any other day, the details would have evaporated. He would not have asked where Gol was. He would not have noticed the destination of his letters. He would have ignored the tall, old man crying out at the blonde, young woman. It was all raw nerves and synchronicity, but at each of these moments he thought of Løne Kastrupsen and, thinking of Løne, he heard the sound of buttons falling to pavement, and the sound of falling buttons now meant “Barnes” in the root language of his world.
As a jealous man, it was not unusual for disparate things to speak of one thing. When he was in the jaws of jealousy, he could not see a cloud, hear a jackhammer, taste salt, touch metal…without thinking, Louise. That was painful, in its way, but he had come to think of it as love, and it was tolerable because it was love. It was not tolerable that the world should mean Walter. That was an intimacy he could not bear, but what was he to do? Though months had passed, it was again as it had been immediately after their encounter. He could see the man’s face, his broken glasses.
It did occur to him that Walter might have been innocent, but, if anything, in the days that followed the unveiling of Løne, he hated Walter even more than he had, and imagined him guilty of more (and worse) than he (Paul) thought. After all, Walter had refused to bring charges against him. What was that, if not an admission of guilt? He resented Walter more deeply because he was forced to hold more desperately to the idea of Walter’s guilt.
So, how were things at home?
Things at home were worse than he thought. Paul was convinced his wife knew nothing of his humour. Not true. He had managed to keep quiet about his anxiety, but every word he spoke had a shadow. Behind everything from the bland
– Good morning
to the quiet
– Good night
there was a hint of things he might have said and, though she was often distracted, Louise understood something was being withheld.
She had not been happy for some time, but this new, darkly distracted husband had been poisoning her home since the fall when he’d come back with his hand broken from what he called a car accident, though there hadn’t been a scratch on the car, and he wouldn’t tell her where he’d gone or how he’d done the damage. Darkly distracted? Yes, she could sense that what he withheld had something to do with shame or, perhaps, guilt. She knew her husband well enough to recognize those emotions in him. (Her first thought, on seeing Paul hold one hand in the other as if he were carrying a wounded bird, was that his “accident” had had something to do with Walter, but that idea was dismissed because Paul injured himself right around the time she’d begun a faintly ridiculous affair with a man named Enzo Cardotti [“ridiculous” because even she realized she was not o
ver her feelings for Walter], and she wondered if Paul had found them out, though she and Enzo had not gone beyond a handful of earnest conversations and hopeful kisses. She’d called Enzo at home, to make sure he was all right, only to discover there was a Mrs. Cardotti, not his niece, not his aunt, but his wife, with whom he still lived. Her conversation with Mrs. Cardotti was the end of her involvement with Enzo and she blamed Paul for the loss. It was petty to blame Paul for her disillusionment, and she knew it, but there you are: her heart was intractable on the subject, this despite the secret relief she felt at breaking with Enzo.)
In fact, Paul had been distant for some time before his accident: staying up nights to work, sleeping in the basement, barely able to speak to her. She’d been certain that she had betrayed Walter in some intangible way – the copy of Aquinas she’d destroyed in frustration and thoughtlessly thrown in the garbage, for instance. She had always been careful about such things, because she knew how thorough Paul was. He inspected her clothes and their bed, and came home during the day, unpredictably, to catch her copulating, you’d think, though she’d have to have been…what? callous to entertain a lover at home.
Oh, as to lovers…there had been none after Walter. Though she’d vowed she would not pine for a man who did not want her, she could not help her feelings. The end of their relationship had been final proof (as if it were needed) that she had been in love with Walter, that she was in love, her emotions refusing to acknowledge the end, her memory tethered to their time together, her feelings a government she was waiting to outlive. In the meantime, it was almost shameful to share a life with Paul, her feelings for him, now, little more than a strained friendship. As a consequence, though she had not been unfaithful to her husband for some time, it felt as if she were.
After Paul’s accident, it was as if he were trying to make up the distance between them. That only made matters worse. He slept in their bed. He kissed her again, though there’d been weeks when he’d stopped doing that and she’d wondered if he were having an affair, an idea that upset her more than she thought it would. They even resumed lovemaking, though that was most disturbing of all. It wasn’t that he changed what he did, but rather how he did it. He was now precise. He knew what she liked, but it was too obvious he knew, not just going through the motions but going through them in an order, as if there were a list above their bed, a list that included directions for proper lighting and time to be spent at each station on the way to completion. It all worked, but after the third or fourth session, she had the horrible, and horribly sad, feeling she was entirely predictable, and she was convinced he must be as unhappy as she was.
Why, then, were they married?
There it was, the question. It was a question she’d considered for years, taking it constantly up, as one would a smooth, black stone. The question first came to her just after their marriage. It had come the moment she realized that Paul would always do the dishes, wash the floors, cook, clean, and buy things for the house. His idea of home included the presence of a wife, and he treated his wife well, but it had little to do with her. Or, rather, it did. He always asked what she wanted. He knew her favourite colours, textures, food, and drink. Their home looked exactly as she might have wanted, except that, perversely, she didn’t want, because, somewhere in the back of her mind, she suspected the home was more important to him than she was. It wasn’t the kind of distress you could easily voice. What could she say?
– I wish you were less attentive (?)
– I wish the house were an unholy mess (?)
– I wish, for once, we could eat something dreadful (?)
She couldn’t even ask if he loved her, because he so passionately loved the idea of her, it seemed petty to insist on the difference between her and his image of her. They were married. And then ten years passed; ten years of irreproachable economy. And she was not unhappy exactly, but…unencumbered by happiness, say. If she hadn’t taken a job at the library, she would have gone mad. And, so, the question had become harder to put down.
Why were they married?
– No reason. It just happened that way.
Yes, it just happened. There had been a feeling it was the thing to do. They had been seeing each other for two years and there seemed nowhere else to go. It was either marriage or life without him, and though she didn’t love him exactly, his enthusiasm had been enough to carry them forward. If she reproached herself for anything it was that, even then, at the very beginning, she’d had an inkling that this was how it would turn out, that his feelings would not sustain their marriage. She could clearly remember an afternoon with Fredrika, her closest friend, the two of them walking along the promenade towards Dow’s Lake, Fredrika saying of her engagement
– It’s so exciting, isn’t it?
and she had answered
– Do you think so?
when what she meant was
– It isn’t, and I don’t know why
though she couldn’t have said that without betraying those who believed she and Paul were a perfect couple. And she had enjoyed being part of the “perfect couple.” She’d had her own vision of marriage: a shared enterprise, a gentle folly. She could remember herself at twenty-one saying things that made her wince even now:
– Men don’t want…
– Men don’t like…
As if she knew the secret to men. What did she know about it? Nothing. She knew nothing, and when Fred asked
– Don’t you love him?
she’d answered
– Yes, of course I do.
If she could find her twenty-one-year-old self, she would throttle her. But why should she blame the twenty-one-year-old? As the years passed and the life she wanted was suffocated by the one she had, she could have left at any age: at 22, 23, 24…Any of her selves might have acted. Instead, she woke one morning, in her forties, to find that a city of selves had conspired against her. No, that’s not true. She had, in her way, tried to leave, but she had failed. When had she first slept with another man? Years into her marriage, just after her twenty-eighth birthday.
And was that leaving?
Well…she wouldn’t have called it leaving, at the time. She wouldn’t have known what to call it. She had met Fredrika and Vé for a drink and then for The Gold Rush and Modern Times, at the Towne. She’d stayed only for The Gold Rush, though, finding it unbearably sad to watch the Tramp eat his shoe. (Had anyone else ever cried at The Gold Rush? she wondered.) It was the first evening of a week when Paul was away, and she’d decided to walk home from Vanier, the long way round: over the bridge to Rideau, past houses and apartment buildings she’d ignored for years. Certainly, the walk did her good. It was May, the day after her birthday, so it was the fifth, and it was important that it was the fifth, important that it was 1972, because time had never been so important to her before. That night was the beginning of a terrible ache…as if she had become time, and her own passing were a wound.
These days, she could remember more about the night (the evening star, black water under the bridge, the smell of smoke from a fireplace) than she could about the man she’d slept with. Of him there remained the memory of his white teeth, his straight brown hair, and her amusement at how his penis curved to the left when he was erect. There was also the smell of him (raw carrot) and the fact that the collar of his shirt stuck up like a broken wing over the collar of his jacket, and he had seemed to her the kind of man who would not trouble to do things for her.
It still seemed very little to remember about a man with whom she’d spent two days in bed. She wouldn’t remember him if she passed him in the street, and if she did she would have no more to say to him now than she’d had then. There had been no intimate exchanges, no revelations, no longings divulged. She hadn’t wanted anything of the sort. She’d wanted to be lost where someone wanted her, and he had wanted her, and it had all been, she now realized, unusually straightforward:
a gift, a restoration of her physical self and her self-confidence. Hours and hours lost in sensation and selfishness and consideration for a complete stranger. If she felt guilty about anything, it was the pleasure she’d taken. It had been more intense than she imagined it would be and the part of her still faithful to her husband disapproved of it.
Having done something so contrary to her nature as she then understood it, she felt exhilaration and shame and, most important, a conviction that she could not go on as she had, that she had discovered something about herself that made it impossible to stay with Paul. If Paul had been home, if he had returned a day or two after her affair, she would certainly have told him everything and, knowing him as she thought she did, there could have been no going on. But, as the days passed, as the exhilaration dimmed, she was not quite convinced the direct approach was best. She could have told him anytime during those early days, but it seemed wrong to do such a thing long distance. And, the more she thought about it, the more practical concerns occurred to her: where would she go, what could she afford, what would she take with her? She worked at the library, yes, but that was part-time. She was a woman with a doctorate in comparative literature and no immediate prospects.
As if gloom at her prospects weren’t enough, she also found herself thinking about her husband’s needs in all this: what would Paul do, how would he feel, would he be all right? The more she thought about him, the more cloudy her own feelings became until, after a few days, it occurred to her that, now she was a different woman, there was the possibility of a different marriage with the same man. Though she knew it was a ridiculous and small idea, it was an idea she couldn’t stifle, so that, by the end of the week, as she drove to the airport to pick up her husband, it was the only idea that remained with any clarity: she had changed, so they would change.