Among the Dead

by Michael Tolkin

  Something in the letter made him happy as he copied it. He was pleased with the choices he had made, and if the care he took meant that he hoped to tilt Anna’s attention away from his adultery towards something general, something about the two of them, he was sure that she would know that he was, finally, sincere. It was important that Anna not stumble over a single word trying to make sense of his writing. Usually he wrote in a scrawl, but now each word was separately crafted.

  When he finished copying the letter, he took the card upstairs.

  He went to the bedroom and undressed. Anna always slept deeply. He was not afraid of waking her up. The luggage for tomorrow’s trip was open on the floor. He took his letter to her and slipped it into a pocket inside his suitcase.

  He was thirsty and went back down to the kitchen. He drank from a bottle of grape juice, leaving enough for Madeleine. He wanted more and drank it, with the excuse that in the morning she could have milk or water, and her mother could buy her juice at the airport.

  Then he regretted this theft, and he went upstairs, to see her sleeping. She was on top of the sheets, and her hair was damp. What made her sweat? he wondered. Dreams of exercise, or just the heat of growth?

  Perhaps he should have written ‘heal the family’. Certainly he needed time not just with his wife, but with his daughter. He was afraid that she hated him. She was three now, but how long did they have before her character was so formed that part of it would always be made of contempt for her father? If it wasn’t contempt, it was something close to it, not all the time, but when he talked too much, say, if he drove through an area he didn’t know and stopped to look at the map, and he told her everything he was doing, she would tell him, from the baby-seat in the back, to stop talking. Whenever she told him to stop talking he could suddenly hear himself, and what he heard was the tiring drone of a bore. And if I sound like this to a child, he asked himself. No wonder I have so few friends. He talked so much to her because he thought she would like the comforting sound of his voice, and that she would grow up to be a better person if he paid her the respect of explaining what he was doing. He thought he was being helpful, a good father. She had no interest in his explanations of things.

  He would look at her in the rear-view mirror, and he would see her distance from him, and he would tell himself that the little bit of detachment of hers in which he saw himself was a reflection of his detachment from his marriage. He blamed himself for what he thought would be the foundation of his daughter’s general misery when she was older, estranged from the world, unsure of love. She would finally understand, probably through a long and expensive analysis, how it was her father’s example, and the forces driving that example, that moulded her character.

  Now she was asleep, and smiling, her favourite white teddy bear under her arm. Those seeds of future misery were tucked deep inside. What would he change in her if he could? A few times they had been to the mountains, and when they walked in the forest she screamed to be carried. She was happy only indoors, or on the beach. She was afraid of trees. It was a small fear, and he told himself all the obvious reasons why a child who loves to run through airports would hate the terror of trees, shadows, trails. She was born into a world of right-angles.

  So was that all he despised in this daughter who despised him, her fear of trees? He was willing to say that he loved her hatred of him, a feeling so precocious that she might escape a family trait to hang on to people rather than to know when to leave, that she would become a woman who demanded respect. The trip to Mexico was as much to help him find a way to win her love as it was to win his wife’s.

  He showered and then got into bed beside Anna. He rolled a leg over her hips, and when she didn’t move, not that he expected her to, he rolled away. But it’s the honourable thing, he told himself, to leave a space between us until she allows me into her embrace.

  In all the months of the affair, he had never spent the night with Mary Sifka. She was the assistant to the insurance agent who handled the business that Frank shared with his younger brother, Lowell. Together they owned twenty music and video stores in California. Lowell was homosexual and had never been married, and because Frank had a family, and wanted to stay in Los Angeles, Lowell was in charge of the stores outside of the city. Although he kept a condominium in Santa Monica, now he was living in San Diego, where they had three stores. It was part of the family mythology that Lowell always went to the city with the newest stores because he was homosexual, and could more easily travel than Frank, but it was easier for everyone to agree on that story than on the truth, which had nothing to do with Lowell’s homosexuality. Lowell watched over the business’s expansion because he was the better businessman. Everyone knew this, but no one ever said it, because to admit this might allow everyone to reflect on Frank’s incompetence in business. It was possible that the family had accepted Lowell’s homosexuality because of the convenient excuse it gave for Lowell’s position. In a bad moment one night, when Frank came home after Lowell had yelled at him for some kind of mistake in the way he had managed an inventory, Frank wondered if he would have been a better businessman if he also had become homosexual, or whether Lowell would have been so good if he had been straight. But there are plenty of good businessmen who are straight, Frank cried to himself that night. And there must be incompetent homosexuals.

  Lowell always took care of insurance, but on a day when Lowell could not fly back to Los Angeles and something had to be signed by one of them, Mary Sifka came to the office with the papers. She was married too. Her husband was a lawyer. She had no children. She didn’t want them.

  Frank was in love with Mary’s bitterness. Had he ever kissed a woman with so clear a philosophy of the world? Anna was a casual optimist, like everyone he knew, and if she thought the world might end in her lifetime, she buried the idea quickly. Mary was different. He was ready to grant that her sense of global doom might not be the sum of an equation whose every clause represented logic and reason, and that the world wore the colours of her own dark spirit because the world had been brutal to her, but he didn’t want to diminish the achievement of her unhappiness by finding the location for her view of things in psychology, because he needed her to be smart and strong. He liked her because she had a dull job that she took seriously. She worked hard because she was afraid of falling quickly into a state of decay. She worked harder than he did, and they both knew it, and he paid himself in three months what she made in a year.

  Now it was time to not love her. He would miss her, but the woman beside him was more important to him, and so was the little girl down the hall.

  He went to sleep with the feeling that he had prayed, and in that meditation had made a true offering of his heart; there was nothing left. He had been generous.

  The flight was at three in the afternoon. He was going to meet Anna and Madeleine at the airport. Anna asked him to take the day off, but he told her that since he was taking off a week and a half, he had to go to the office. He would take a limousine from the restaurant where he was meeting Mary Sifka.

  At breakfast Madeleine asked to sit on his lap while he fed her cereal from his bowl. He thought about the breakfast the next morning, in Mexico, a big buffet with fruit, cheese and pitchers with fresh juices on a long table in the dining room of the hotel, one wall open to the ocean beyond. Madeleine would ask for jams and jellies, and he would let her have them, even though he tried to keep her from eating sugar at home. These treats would come in little stainless steel bowls, three or four on a rotating trivet, with little spoons. There would be other families at breakfast, and Madeleine would find, as she always did, a boy or girl three or four years older, and force this child to be her friend. The parents would talk, the usual chat about children’s ages, schools, habits good and bad, and Anna would make a date with them for dinner that night, both families together. After she read the letter, there would be no other families at the table, but he would allow her a day and a night before he gave her the surprise, b
efore she knew about Mary Sifka. They would be in Mexico for a week and a half. He owed her one day of peace.

  If she didn’t leave immediately, and he expected her to forgive him, there would still be two or three days of terrible sensitivity. Yes, and there was something even to be happily anticipated in the prospect of suffering, an exhaustion, a bath in strong feelings that would leave both of them raw, open, and then, with a little help of a few more good days, they might even be tender with each other. If Anna demanded proof of his love, he would tell her that it was time to have the second child he had always refused her. What more could he offer her? And when she asked him, when she told him to look her in the eye and promise fidelity, would he mean it, in his heart, what he promised? Or would he say, ‘I hope so’? And if he equivocated, no matter how much hope was carried on his sincerity, would that be too clever a way out of the pledge? If he wanted her forgiveness, if he wanted the marriage to last, he would have to swear his faith, and he knew that he would have to make this oath in the court of eternity.

  Besides, he was tired of seeing his family through gauze. He wanted to be a man, and if being a man is doing more than what is expected, he would tell the truth. He would tell his wife the truth all the time, otherwise how could it be the truth? Something in the threatening power of this vow made him drunk; he saw himself standing on the mountain of truth, hands joined with the righteous. And then he felt the tug of a wonderfully happy thought, that the reward for this perpetual exposure, this unveiling, would even lead to an increase in their passion. Was that selfish? No.

  He said goodbye to Anna and Madeleine after breakfast.

  ‘Where are we going today?’ he asked his daughter.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she said. They had shown her pictures of Mexico, and she had chosen the bathing suits she wanted to take.

  ‘We’re going to Mexico,’ he told her.

  ‘We’re going to Mexico,’ she said. Was she repeating what he said because she was learning to talk, or was she making fun of his condescension? He patted her on the head and then bent down to kiss her nose. He kissed Anna goodbye.

  ‘I’ll see you at the airport,’ he said, and he was out the door.

  It was such a dreadfully mechanical moment, three robots brushing their electrodes for a data exchange. Everything will be different in a few days, he thought. We will be alive.

  At work in the morning he spoke to his brother about their store in La Jolla, and whether the manager might be stealing. He looked at the plans for an expansion of their Palm Springs store. He spoke to a friend at a record company. These are the things I do during the day, he thought.

  On the way to lunch he worried about what he would tell Mary. The affair had a boundary: Mary knew that he wasn’t going to leave his family for her, and he knew she wasn’t going to leave her husband. Why were they together like this? It continued for the excitement, he supposed. It was fun to be naked with a new person, but he pursued this affair with the same flat affect that he felt with his family. He was going through the motions of lust. He would have to tell her the truth just as he had to tell Anna the truth. If he lied to Mary, then whatever he told Anna would also be tainted by that lie.

  Mary was already at the table in the restaurant. He thought that she looked ordinary and tired before she saw him. She was drinking a glass of grapefruit juice, or orange juice from yellow fruit, and he wondered if, knowing that she was going to hear him say what was inevitable, Mary had ordered something with vodka in it. She was staring at the table, and her skin looked loose on her face, but when she saw him, she smiled, and it bothered him to know that he made her happy. Her feelings for him made her beautiful. Of course, she was probably scared to be in public with him, even though this was not a restaurant where anyone from their lives usually went. They had never run into friends here. Once they had kissed at the table, but neither was happy when the kiss ended. Their fear of attention reminded them of their guilt. Had she thought of her husband at that moment? During the kiss he imagined his wife and daughter coming into the restaurant and seeing him with Mary Sifka. He probably did love her. But what could they do with that love? If he left Anna for Mary, and Mary left her husband for him, would they get married and stay together until they died? Or would they leave each other, and then end their lives with a third, or a fourth, marriage, or no marriage, end their lives single, alone? And could he leave his daughter?

  He kissed her on the cheek and she didn’t seem to expect more. They ordered their food.

  ‘When is your flight?’ she asked.

  ‘At three.’

  ‘You’re cutting it close.’

  ‘I’ll make it.’

  ‘It should be nice there.’

  ‘Yes.’ It was dangerous territory under any circumstances: they didn’t talk to each other about their families; neither complained that home was insufficient. He didn’t really know anything about her husband.

  He wanted the opening line to be right, but the impulse to say, ‘This is going to be difficult,’ was almost impossible to resist. Maybe it was the right thing to say, and it was the truth.

  ‘This is going to be difficult.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ She knew immediately what he wanted to tell her.

  ‘I think ...’ He stopped. Already he was proposing the breakup in terms of a debate. If he thought they should break up, she could say that she thought they shouldn’t, and they could argue about it, and perhaps she could persuade him. There was no other way to say this quickly, and be done with it. He checked his watch, a gesture she observed, and now he was ruined for her, he had revealed to her his new attitude towards her, that she was an expedient, something in the way. Of what? His wife, or a new mistress, the woman who could be perfect, the woman he had not yet met.

  ‘I’m going to Mexico so that I can connect with my family again. I’ve been feeling all wrong for the last few months. I love you, but I didn’t know how hard it is to split the heart between two women. Three if you include my daughter, and I do.’ Writing the letter to Anna had given him a new sense of pleasure of words, and it was easy to talk, it was a pleasure to talk. He could have gone on, but it was only fair to give her a chance.

  ‘So it’s over? Is that what you’re telling me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I guess it’s for the best.’

  ‘There’s no good way to end something that’s probably wrong to begin with.’

  ‘I probably love you too, you know.’ She said this defiantly, as though it was something he might have overlooked, her feelings, that he could hurt them, that she would miss him, that she needed him.

  ‘What are we supposed to do?’

  She smiled. She was letting go of him. ‘We’re supposed to say that it couldn’t have lasted for ever, we had fun, whatever it was that we needed we got, and now it’s time to eat, and not talk about it any more.’

  The food was at the table. He asked for a saké; it didn’t matter if he got a little drunk since he was taking the limousine to the airport. It was time for the vacation to begin.

  They were so comfortable with each other that he thought they might now be able to continue as friends, but he knew that Anna would never permit this. Why not, though? No, the temptation would always be there. Would it, really? Yes. Was it there now? Yes.

  It was time to say goodbye. The conversation drifted along. The relief he felt when she let him break it off – and what had he expected, what scene, what tears? – had followed its own course and now he looked at Mary and knew that he could leave her and not miss her. So perhaps he had not loved her either. The letter he had written to his wife, for all that he meant it as he put it in his suitcase, had been composed in a spirit of some fraudulence, since he had not yet told Mary Sifka that he was ending the affair. He should have broken with Mary first, because the letter, as he wrote it, said that the affair was over.

  What if he had died of a heart attack in his sleep, last night, before he had been able to say goodbye to Mary,
and Anna had found the letter? She would have assumed that he had said his goodbyes to Mary, but Mary would not have known about his change of heart unless Anna showed her the letter, and would Anna think of doing that, something so cruel, while she was grieving? Or would she show Mary the letter so she could understand just who it was she had shared a child with? But when would she have discovered the letter? It was in a pocket in his suitcase, not hers. If his heart had stopped that day, she would have unpacked the case, or someone else would have done the job, maybe his mother, and would they have found the card slipped into a pocket with nothing else? It might have stayed hidden for months, or longer, or for ever. Perhaps on a vacation years later, perhaps with a new husband. Perhaps she would remarry, and her new husband would pack the suitcase she had never thrown away, and at the hotel, when they got there, she would have unpacked both her suitcase and his, and found the letter. This was an interesting scenario, thought Frank. Anna reads the letter two years after I am dead, but does not realize the note is from me and thinks that her second husband is making this confession. She confronts him, she screams at him, and he says he doesn’t know what she is talking about. She shows him the letter. ‘But I didn’t write this.’ ‘Then who did?’ she says. ‘Look at the handwriting.’ She looks. ‘Frank,’ she says. ‘Frank?’ he asks.

  Perhaps she remembers a woman at his funeral who stood in the back, and lingered at the grave as the family walked away. And that was Mary Sifka. Does she remember when he had packed the suitcase?

  Does she remember the trip to Mexico cancelled by my death?