The Affair

by Colette Freedman

  She wanted to pick up the phone and scream at him.

  But not yet.

  Not yet.

  She would confront him, but in her own time and on her own terms. The last time she’d raised the subject of his relationship with Stephanie Burroughs, he had managed to convince her that she was obviously going out of her mind. She’d had no real evidence last time, only a woman’s intuition that something was amiss. She would not make that mistake again.

  It gave her a certain small pleasure to use the scanner—his scanner—to make copies of the speeding ticket and the Visa bill. When she did confront him this time, she would have the hard evidence in her hands.

  Kathy carefully replaced the papers in the wire basket and turned to the desktop computer. Robert loved his technology. If he were conducting a relationship with anyone, she would certainly find the evidence in his computer. The only problem was, it was password protected. “In case it was ever stolen,” he had told her, “or the kids get into it.” She realized now that he’d never volunteered the password.

  Kathy remembered the last time she’d watched Robert turn on the machine. She had been standing against a filing cabinet looking for a copy of the most recent letter they had sent out to their accountant. The IRS was claiming they had never received a tax return for the previous year. Robert had sworn he’d written to the accountant and then had sat down at his desk and booted up his computer.

  Kathy now crossed the room to stand against the filing cabinet, in the same position she’d held when she’d spoken to him. She closed her eyes, remembering. Robert had been sitting directly in front of her, facing his computer screen. The log-on screen had appeared, and his fingers had rattled in the password. Except . . . except only the fingers on his right hand had moved, and they had been positioned at the right top of the keyboard.

  Kathy stepped up to the computer and looked at the keyboard. The possible keys he could have used were P, O, I, U, Y, H, J, K, L, 7,8,9,0.

  Pulling out his ergonomic Herman Miller Aeron chair, she sat at his desk and looked around for a combination of letters or numbers, just in case he had left the password scribbled somewhere. But there was nothing.

  She closed her eyes and concentrated again, remembering. She hadn’t really been looking at him . . . but she had heard eight distinct taps, hard and definite. She opened her eyes and grinned, scanning the potential letters. Robert was nothing if not predictable. Most people used combinations of letters or figures that were familiar to them. Or that had some emotional meaning. She’d lay money that Robert’s password was the name of his beloved childhood beagle. A dog whose framed picture he kept alongside the family pictures on the mantle. He had been a silly little dog with an even sillier name.

  Kathy brought the machine to whirring life and then waited while the screen flickered, blinked, and then cleared again.

  Please Enter Password

  She hesitated, wondering whether, if she were wrong, the machine would lock up and Robert would somehow know that she’d been into it. Then she discovered that she simply didn’t care what he thought.

  Please Enter Password

  She tapped the letters in carefully, Poppykoo, then hesitated a moment before hitting Enter. Kathy nodded. She was right; she knew she was. Her little finger brushed the Enter key.

  A light on the front panel of the computer flickered yellow, indicating that the hard disk was working, then the machine chimed musically and opened up to a desktop of icons.

  She was in.

  CHAPTER 8

  Two hours later, Kathy stepped away from the computer. There was a tightness across her shoulders, and her eyes felt gritty and tired. She had been convinced—absolutely certain—that she would find evidence of Robert’s affair on the machine.

  She hadn’t found what she’d set out to find. There had been no illicit e-mails, no secret dating accounts on Match.com, no concrete evidence. However, what she had discovered had disturbed her. Frightened her even.

  She’d gone for the My Documents folder first, painstakingly and systematically going through folder after folder, reading letters and memos, all to do with business. It left her feeling depressed and a little guilty; she hadn’t quite realized that Robert was working so hard. Nor had she understood just how precarious R&K’s situation was. He’d said nothing to her about the state of the company, but from what she was seeing, while they were not exactly in trouble at the moment, they were certainly heading that way. There seemed to be less business out there, and the independent production companies were constantly undercutting one another simply to get the jobs. He was taking on more and more subcontracting work, most of it funneled through one of the large agencies in the city. She came across one letter to a record label that documented how Robert had been forced to cut nearly three and a half thousand dollars off the quote for a job simply to get the work. She noted that he’d sent out the e-mail at two o’clock in the morning. She discovered other e-mails sent out at two thirty, two forty-five, even three ten in the morning.

  Robert worked late, both in the office and at home. She’d grown used to it over the years. He worked on into the night, claiming that he got his best work done when the house was quiet and the phones had stopped ringing.

  Last night, lying in bed, with visions of that red flag still throbbing in time to the migraine headache behind her eyes, she’d imagined him conducting his affairs by e-mail and phone late at night. Her fears had drifted into fragments of dreams in which she stood outside Robert’s office door, her ear pressed against the cool wood, and heard whispers of intimate conversations, the muted chatter of phone sex, the frantic tapping of his fingers across the keyboard as he sent out erotic e-mails and furtive sexts.

  Yet, there was nothing; she found no evidence of a single untoward letter.

  She’d gone through his Outlook program. She’d read every e-mail he had received and sent. She’d checked his deleted files and his archive folders. And she’d found absolutely no evidence of anything illicit going on. On the contrary, all the evidence pointed to a hardworking and conscientious man. If he was sending e-mails to Stephanie Burroughs, he was obviously using another e-mail account, but she had no way of checking that. She turned to look at the empty space on the table. Unless he kept that data on the laptop. Robert carried the laptop into the office with him every morning and brought it home again every night; maybe it would contain the evidence she was looking for.

  But maybe, just maybe, there was no evidence, the rational side of her brain insisted. Maybe the few scraps of paper she had collected so far were all that would be available. Maybe there were even reasonable explanations for all of them. No, there were too many maybes.

  She sat back down at the desk and blinked her eyes a few times before focussing her attention back on the computer screen. She moved the mouse onto the Contacts section of Outlook and quickly scrolled through the names until she came to the B’s and then slowed.

  Stephanie Burroughs.

  There was a little red flag pinned to the name. She double-clicked on the name, and Stephanie Burroughs’s details opened up. Her name, address, phone number, mobile, e-mail . . . and a little photograph of the woman. Kathy stared long and hard at the picture. It had been six years since she’d last set eyes on her, and if this was a recent photograph—and she suspected that it was—then those years had been kind. A round face was dominated by huge dark eyes and framed by deep brown, almost black hair. Kathy guessed she was now in her early thirties. She imagined that she would still be slim and elegant.

  But what struck her now—as it had struck her all those years ago, when Robert had first introduced them—was how much they resembled one another. They might have been sisters. She had always thought that Stephanie Burroughs was a younger, prettier version of herself. She clicked on the Details tab. It was another page of contact details, including Stephanie’s birthday. The sixth of November. A Scorpio.

  Kathy hit the Print button, and the little laser printer whirr
ed to life, and almost immediately the page of Stephanie’s details whirred out of the machine. She added it to the rest of her evidence.

  She went to the Calendar page. It was a mirror of the calendar she had seen on his phone, and she realized that the programs on the computer and in his phone were probably synched. The same flags appeared on the same days. She scrolled back to the month of November, looking for the sixth, Stephanie’s birthday. There was a little red flag pinned to the day, and a single notation: NYC.

  New York City.

  Kathy remembered the day now: Robert had taken the train down to New York to meet with a potential client. He’d been due back that night, but had called late in the evening to say that he’d had a few drinks and was going to spend the night. The following day, which was a Thursday, he’d phoned to say that he was going golfing on Long Island with the client and would not be back until Friday morning. He had finally arrived home late Friday evening.

  Kathy sat back in the creaking chair and stared at the screen, remembering. There had been a lot of meetings over the years. A lot of overnights in a lot of cities. She’d never thought about it before, but she couldn’t remember if any of those meetings had ever resulted in a new client’s signing up with R&K Productions. In fact, considering what she’d just discovered about the state of the business, she could definitively say that none of these trips with clients had resulted in extra business.

  Which meant . . .

  Which meant that either Robert was a very poor salesman or perhaps this affair had been going on far longer than she had thought. The last she’d heard about Stephanie was that she’d moved away and was working somewhere in Florida. Or had she? Kathy couldn’t even believe that anymore. Had Stephanie left, or had Robert just told her that to lull her into a false sense of security? Had he been seeing her all these years, sneaking off to cities and towns dotted along the East Coast to conduct his sordid affair, meeting his mistress in places where they would be least likely to be recognized? Or had he simply been heading off to—she checked the address on the sheet of paper—to an apartment in Jamaica Plain where Burroughs lived?

  She had no way of knowing. Circumstantial evidence certainly, but no proof.

  Kathy wrapped her arms around her body, feeling sick and chilled. She realized now that she could not believe a single word her husband had told her.

  And the doubts, the questions, the confusion were tearing her apart.

  CHAPTER 9

  “You were always such a procrastinator.”

  Kathy moved the phone away from her mouth and took a deep breath. Sometimes her older sister’s schoolmarmish tone set her teeth on edge. “I know, I know. Can you do it?”

  “Seriously, Kathy? Brendan is seventeen, and Theresa is fifteen. I really don’t think they need a babysitter. . . .” Julia Taylor began.

  “—Fine,” Kathy interrupted, a little more sharply than she’d intended. “I’ll ask Sheila.” Sheila was Julia and Kathy’s younger sister, and Kathy knew that Julia was always a little envious of the amount of time Sheila spent with Kathy’s kids.

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it,” Julia said hurriedly. “I was just saying that I thought they were old enough to take care of themselves.”

  “I know they are, but at least if you’re here they’ll both study for their last few exams, instead of vegging out in front of the TV all night.”

  “I suppose Robert is out.”

  “He’s entertaining a client,” Kathy said smoothly, the words tasting bitter and flat in her mouth.

  “And you’re left to do the Christmas shopping, I suppose.” Julia never made any secret of her dislike for Robert.

  “Can you do it or not?” Kathy allowed a little of the terrible, bubbling anger that seemed to be caught in the pit of her stomach to come to the surface. “Yes or no? I don’t need the lecture.”

  “Yes, I’ll do it.” There was a long pause, then Julia added, “Are you all right? You sound upset.”

  “I’m just tired. It’s too close to Christmas, and I’ve barely done anything. I guess I’m just panicking a little. All the stores are open late, and if I cross a few more presents off of my list, I’ll be happier.”

  “No problem. What time do you want me to come over?”

  “Right now.”

  “Aw, Ma, not Aunt Julia!” Brendan was halfway through buttering what looked like an entire loaf of bread. He was making himself a quick snack. “I’m seventeen!”

  Kathy gathered up the clean laundry from the dryer and dumped it into the cracked plastic basket. Brendan was a younger version of his father and looked and sounded enough like him to disconcert her on occasion.

  Theresa burst into the kitchen in a billow of icy air. She too had inherited her father’s looks, but not his height. “Practice got out early. I’m starving,” she announced and snatched a slice of buttered bread from the pile Brendan was busily creating. Normally it would have instigated an argument.

  “We’ve got Julia babysitting us tonight,” Brendan said glumly.

  “Ma!” Theresa turned the single word into an accusation.

  “I know, I know,” Kathy snapped.

  The two children read the warning signals and kept quiet.

  “It would be great to be able to go out and trust you both to get your homework done. But I can’t. That’s why I’ve got to get your Aunt Julia to watch you. Trust me, I like it even less than you do. I’m the one who had to listen to her lecture me.” Hugging the basket of clothes like a shield, she hurried from the kitchen before she said anything else.

  Kathy thumped up the stairs, angry with herself for getting annoyed with the children. It wasn’t their fault. She’d spent the day trying to make sense of what she’d discovered in her husband’s office. All the bits and pieces went around and around in her head, a hideous jigsaw of half-truths, suppositions, and lies. By the time the kids had come in from school, there was a sick headache sitting behind her eyes and a ball of acid indigestion lodged in her stomach. Even watching Brendan butter the bread was enough to nauseate her.

  Balancing the laundry basket on her hip, she dumped the clothes on her bed and began to sort through them, the simple, mundane task distracting her. Theresa’s socks—every one a different shade; Brendan’s school tee shirts, all of them stained yellow beneath the arms; Robert’s boxer shorts. She stopped and held them in her hands. The material was still warm from the dryer. When had he started wearing boxers?

  It was another question. Suddenly, she had nothing but questions. She’d been married to Robert for eighteen years and had known him for three years before that. Twenty-one years. She knew a lot about him—she had thought she knew everything. But now it was becoming apparent that she knew damn little about the man she’d married. She shook her head suddenly, the savage movement setting off the pain behind her eyes. This wasn’t the man she had married. The Robert she had married would not have lied to her. The Robert she had married respected her. Loved her.

  She wondered when that had changed.

  When they’d first married, he had worn Jockey briefs. Always the same brand, always plain white. She frowned, trying to remember when that had changed. A year, no, almost two years ago. About the time he’d started going to the gym.

  He’d taken up going to the Boston Sports Club on Bulfinch, near Government Center. He had told her the three-year membership came courtesy of a client. Then one day he had come home with a packet of boxer shorts that he’d bought at the Gap in Coolidge Corner. All the guys in the gym were wearing them, he told her; he felt a bit out of place wearing briefs.

  Wadding the boxer shorts into a ball, she shoved them into Robert’s underwear drawer. Was it a lie? Was it the truth? Nothing made sense anymore.

  Kathy then did something she rarely did: she turned the lock in the bedroom door, locking herself in. She then took off all of her clothes and looked at herself. Really looked at herself, naked, vulnerable, exposed. Standing with her back against the wall, she stared at h
erself in the unforgiving mirrored doors. She saw the pasty, slightly flabby body of a forty-three-year-old woman who looked at least three—maybe even five—years older. Her breasts were heavy. They were a nice shape; however, they had already lost their elasticity and were hanging lower than she would have liked. Her belly was similarly full, soft, with a circle of baby fat that had never quite disappeared. Her legs were good, Kathy thought, and she allowed herself a brief moment to admire her long legs before she glanced at her unmade face. There were lines around her eyes, etched into the corners of her mouth, tiny vertical strips on her top lip. The bags under her eyes looked bruised, and the whites of her eyes were threaded with burst veins from crying. When she looked at herself from head to toe, fully exposed, naked and raw, she saw someone who looked like her late mother.

  Was that what Robert saw?

  Her lips moved, shaping the next question: What do you see when you look at me? She didn’t know, because he never told her. He rarely told her she was pretty. He used to compliment her all of the time. Not that she needed to be complimented . . . but occasionally, it was nice. Especially from the man you loved. She frowned. When was the last time he had told her that he loved her?

  When was the last time she had told him that she loved him? The question blindsided her. “I always tell him,” she said aloud. Reflected in the mirror, she could see the lie in her eyes. She didn’t always tell him, nor could she remember the last time she’d told him.