The Adultery Club

by Tess Stimson

  I think I knew we’d end up here from the moment Cora and Ben failed to turn up at the airport this morning—“Crisis at the restaurant,” Trace said carelessly. “They’ll join us tomorrow”—and, recklessly, I decided to come anyway. Perhaps I even knew when he paid for my Max Mara frock; such an intimate thing to do, to buy a woman clothing—Robert Redford knew precisely what he was about when his indecent proposal started with the purchase of a cocktail dress. And then again, this afternoon on the Via Condotti, the exquisite burnt umber gown in the window of Armani: I only stopped to look, I’m a woman, it was reflexive; I certainly didn’t mean for Trace to go in and buy it.

  Afterward we sat at a chrome bistro table in Piazza di Spagna, sharing a plate of delicious antipasti vegetale between us, the achingly expensive dress in its discreet cream cardboard bag sitting in state on a chair of its own.

  “You’ll have to take it straight back, of course,” I said, spearing a piece of carciofi alla provenzale. “Oh, have you tried this?”

  Trace opened the cardboard bag, took out the receipt for the dress, and ripped it in two, and then four, the pieces fluttering onto the cobbles. “Can’t return it now. You’ll just have to wear it and look stunning and think of me.”

  “That,” I said with a sigh, “is precisely the problem.”

  “I can’t see why.”

  I teased a sliver of prosciutto from its companions. “Trace, you are so completely impossible sometimes. I’m married, I can’t go around wearing clothes another man has bought me all the time. It’s—it’s—”

  “Inappropriate? Unseemly? Improper?”

  “Well,” I said, half cross, half amused, “yes. Yes, it is.”

  “Christ,” Trace exclaimed. “Women. Why do you have to make everything so damn complicated? You see a dress you like, you can’t afford to buy it—and Jesus, you actually don’t; does Nicholas know how unique that makes you?—and so I buy it for you, because I want to and I can. Why can’t it just be that simple?”

  He raked his hand exasperatedly through his thick blue-black hair, his T-shirt rising with the movement of his arm and exposing several inches of firm, tanned stomach above the low-slung waistband of his threadbare jeans. Every female heart in the square simultaneously missed a beat, including mine.

  The waiter exchanged our decimated platter of chargrilled aubergines, peppers, and asparagus for a bowl of fagiolini al parmigiano. I heaped a scoop of the beans into my mouth—heaven!

  “When someone loves you,” Trace said suddenly, dropping his fork abruptly and putting his finger across my lips, “the way they say your name is different. Did you know that?”

  And the careful, casual friendship we’ve both nurtured these last few months was blown wide open in an instant.

  When you’ve loved each other as much as Trace and I have done, and when those feelings have been cut off in their prime and never given the chance to grow and change into a different sort of love, the softer, less concentrated kind of love you find in a marriage, moderated by time and familiarity; never given the chance, perhaps, to fade to white nothingness like a Polaroid photograph and gently disappear—when you have had that kind of love, can you ever go back and share something less?

  After lunch, we strolled around the Eternal City as if we had nothing on our minds but touristy pleasure. We admired the pavement artists in Piazza Navona, threw coins into the Trevi Fountain, and gazed in awe at the marvels of the Forum. We ate hot chestnuts from a street stall and bought little leather handbags for the girls, we washed down our delicious dinner with cleansing grappa, and we talked about everything but the only thing we each could think about: What happens next?

  The ornate carved bed creaks as I stand up. Automatically, I turn and smooth the wrinkles in the damask bedspread. Somehow, I have to find a safe path for us through this minefield of nostalgia and unfinished business. I have to keep my head, even though my toes are tingling and my stomach is fizzing with excitement: because of course new love is intoxicating, addictive, in fact; and that is where we are, the stage we’re still at, the heat between us preserved all these years like a fly in amber. But it isn’t real. I have to keep telling myself that. None of this is real. However vivid and dizzying it seems.

  Trace forgets that we aren’t irresponsible teenagers anymore. Other people are affected by the decisions we take, and the mistakes we make. And so—

  “Get up, you twit,” I scold, deliberately refusing to take him seriously. “It’s a bit late for bended knee.”

  His expression darkens. “Would it have made a difference? If I’d asked you to marry me before you—before?”

  “No, Trace,” I say softly, “it was never about that.”

  He gets to his feet, and throws wide the doors to the roof garden. I follow him out onto the terrazzo. We stand side by side without touching, gazing over the starlit roofs of Rome, breathing in air that smells so very different from the air back home: city air, yes, but with rich, deep low notes of roast chestnuts and spicy lemon, mimosa, bougainvillea and heady, feminine perfumes. Easy to get intoxicated on a midnight terrace in a foreign country with a man who, still, has the capacity to make your soul sing.

  “You’ve put me in an impossible position, you know,” I say quietly. “I can’t stay here in Rome alone with you. Much less in the same room.”

  “You could.”

  I sigh deeply. “Yes. I could. But we both know it would be a terrible mistake. What happened thirteen years ago—it’s in the past, Trace. We can’t go back. Too many people would be hurt; people I care about very much. You can’t build happiness on someone else’s misery.”

  Furiously, he swings round to face me. “What about me? What about my misery?” he says fiercely. “Tell me you don’t still love me, and I’ll never mention it again. I’ll be the dearest, most respectful friend a very proper married woman could ever have. Just tell me, Malinche, and I swear, I’ll never ask you for anything again.”

  “I love Nicholas,” I say steadily.

  “More than me?”

  He really is so beautiful. Tall, lean, just the right side of louche with his bare feet and faded jeans and layered T-shirts—really, he should be whizzing down a snowpipe in Colorado—and that black, black hair sweeping back from his forehead in a startling widow’s peak; and then of course those extraordinary hazelnut-whirl eyes, fringed with lashes that no man has a right to. It’s about symmetry, isn’t it, beauty: our unconscious mind busy again, matching, measuring, weighing up, looking for patterns and points of reference. In a chiseled jaw or the curve of a cheekbone; or a relationship between two people who once believed themselves destined for each other.

  “I love Nicholas,” I whisper.

  He steps closer, so that we are drinking in each other’s breath.

  “Then why the tears?” he says softly.

  Our gaze snags and hangs in the air, a dewdrop on a blade of grass. The smell of him—cedar, spiced rum, and clean sheets—drifts over me like woodsmoke from an autumn bonfire.

  I shiver, and the next moment Trace has caught my head with both of his hands and bent his lips to mine. His kiss is so familiar, and yet so other. He tastes cool and minty and smoky and honey-sweet. His stubble grazes my chin; I feel the rough calluses of his thumbs against my cheeks. My arm snakes around his back and tangles in his hair and as he scoops me up and carries me back into the bedroom without breaking our kiss, a kiss that speaks roughly to every cell in my body, as he lays me gently on that damask bedspread and starts to unbutton my dress, it’s as if the long years without him have been the betrayal, and this, this is where I’m meant to be.

  Of course I can’t stay in Rome now. I call Nicholas and explain that we have, Trace and I, foolishly failed to take into account the fact that it’s Easter, and this very Catholic country has effectively closed down; apart, of course, from those bits of it making huge sums of money fleecing the hordes of devout tourists. I tell him I will be returning home that afternoon, which Nicholas seems to a
ccept without demur, without any real expression of his opinion at all, in fact, something I would find very perplexing were I not so caught up in this hideous, hideous guilt.

  Which is only exacerbated when Nicholas then organizes, for the first time in our married life, a birthday party for me the following week, and even includes Kit, which must have pained him.

  Grown-up birthdays have never been very big in our house; not for want of trying on my part. Nicholas belongs to the half of the population (generally male) who thinks they’re a big fuss about nothing. Which is rather a disappointment to the other half (generally female) who thinks fax machines and new vacuum cleaners are not the way to celebrate being another step closer to forty.

  As we all sit down to dinner, which he has, astonishingly, refused to let me cook, he hands me a long, thin, scuffed cardboard box.

  “Oh, Nicholas!” I exclaim, as I draw out the string of exquisite hand-blown Venetian glass beads. “It’s the loveliest thing you’ve ever given me!”

  He fastens them about my neck, dropping a light kiss on my cheek. I certainly can’t complain about his attentiveness. I don’t think I’ve felt so cherished since our honeymoon.

  Which only makes me feel so much worse.

  “Come on, Evie,” I whisper, as Nicholas moves to the sideboard to carve. “It’s your turn to say grace.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” Evie hisses back.

  “Duh!” Sophie says scornfully. “It’s only the same every Sunday!”

  “Just say what I always do, sweetheart,” I encourage.

  Evie respectfully bows her head. “God,” she intones gravely, “why on earth did I invite all these bloody people to dinner?”

  “It wasn’t funny,” I say to Kit later as he helps me wash up, while Nicholas drives his parents to the station to catch their train back to Esher. “I know you and Louise think it’s hysterical, but Nicholas’s parents probably won’t accept an invitation here for the next five years.”

  “I would imagine—”

  “Sssh! Little pitchers, Kit.”

  Sophie lolls against the kitchen island, ears waggling avidly. Kit is always so wildly indiscreet; I dread to think what outrageous gossip they pick up when he’s around.

  “Mummy?” she asks, “when’s the right time to get married?”

  I’m grateful for the change of subject. I dunk a copper saucier into the sudsy water.

  “I don’t know, darling. Why?”

  “Evie says she’s never going to get married. She says you have to kiss boys if you get married. Mummy, when is it OK to kiss someone?”

  When your husband isn’t looking.

  “When they’re rich and handsome as sin,” Kit quips, watching me carefully.

  “Kit! You have to date someone a bit first, Sophie darling,” I explain, elbowing him in the ribs. “Dates are for having fun, and people use them to get to know each other.”

  “On the first date, you tell each other lies, and that usually gets people int’rested enough to come back for a second date,” Evie opines. “Even boys have something int’restin’ to say if you listen long enough.”

  I try not to laugh. “Not lies, exactly, Evie—”

  “Daddy wishes he wasn’t married,” Sophie says casually, running her finger around the birthday cake plate to scoop up the last of the icing. “I heard him on the phone yesterday; he said everything would be different if he wasn’t already married.”

  My chest tightens. Nicholas was no doubt talking to Giles, all boys together, moaning about the wife, that kind of thing. But for no reason that I can think of, an image of the gold lipstick I found in Nicholas’s pocket a month ago swims into my mind. He found it in the corridor at work, he told me so. And of course I believe him. That horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach is my guilt, not his.

  “I can’t see why you feel guilty,” Kit complains, after I’ve shooed the girls upstairs to bed and we stand on the kitchen doorstep enjoying a furtive smoke. “It’s not like you did anything to feel guilty about.”

  “Kit! I kissed another man! And what’s worse, I enjoyed it—very much, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Darling girl, if that was the criterion for adultery, there’d be very few people left married at all. Temptation isn’t a crime.” Thoughtfully, he watches me stub out my cigarette and carefully wrap the butt in a piece of kitchen foil. “You sweet romantic child, did you really think you could sail through to your golden wedding anniversary without the odd little slip now and again?”

  “I’m sure Nicholas hasn’t slipped,” I say miserably.

  “Dear one,” Kit chides, “you didn’t go to bed with the man, you silly girl, which if you ask me is where the real crime lies, but that’s a different matter. In the end you Just Said No, like the good little girl you are, and ran back home to Mother, no harm done. Although if you’re going to cut up this rough about it, you might as well have thrown caution to the winds and bonked him silly.”

  “I very nearly did,” I admit. “Oh, Kit, you can’t imagine how much I wanted to—”

  “You’d be surprised.” Kit sighs.

  “We were kissing and kissing and it was wonderful, and then at the last minute he stopped and said, ‘Are you sure?’ and of course I wasn’t, and he was very sweet about it, said of course he understood, it didn’t matter at all, he didn’t want to rush me into anything I didn’t really truly want—”

  Kit exhales. “Oh, he’s good.”

  “He was,” I say, deliberately misunderstanding. “He was very good. He slept on the sofa—it was too late to book another room—you should have seen him, his feet hanging off the end—and then he very kindly ran me to the airport in the morning and—and—”

  Suddenly it’s all too much. I flee inside and crumple on the kitchen sofa, wailing like a child.

  Kit sinks down next to me and gently rubs my back. “Sweet girl, don’t cry. Not on your birthday. Nothing happened, it was just a silly little kiss, everything’s going to be absolutely fine—”

  I raise my head. “But I wanted to sleep with him, Kit, don’t you see? It doesn’t actually matter if I did it or not. I wanted to go to bed with Trace, which is just as bad as if I’d gone ahead and done it. It’s worse than if we’d had meaningless sex and forgotten about it in the morning. That would’ve just been physical, but I’ve betrayed Nicholas emotionally. I’ve got involved with another man; to all intents and purposes I’ve committed adultery. Whether we got our kit off doesn’t really matter.”

  “Bullshit,” Kit says succinctly. “If you really believe that’s true, why didn’t you sleep with him in Rome?”

  I hesitate, sniffing noisily. Kit hands me a tissue.

  “You don’t jail people because they think about robbing a bank. This kind of self-flagellating nonsense is what keeps the bloody Church in business. You didn’t fuck him. You thought about it, you kissed him, and then you backed off.”

  “But—”

  “Malinche, get over it already. Worse things happen at sea. Just try not to call your husband Trace in bed, he might not be quite as understanding as you were—”

  We both startle as Nicholas lets himself in through the kitchen door.

  “Well, I think I got them to see the funny side by the time we reached the railway station,” he says, shrugging off his jacket. “I’m not sure my mother’s entirely forgiven us, but if we promise to—” He stops, one arm still caught in his sleeve, as he sees my reddened, blotchy face. “Malinche? What’s the matter? Has something happened?”

  “Bit of a ding-dong with Louise,” Kit says cheerfully. “I’m sure it’ll all blow over by the morning.”

  Nicholas frowns. “Things seemed fine when I left.”

  I feel absolutely wretched. Oh, what a tangled web we weave! I hate deceiving him; and yet the lies keep growing, spiraling out of control, each one sprouting two more like some mythical Greek monster.

  “Mal?”

  “It’s nothing,” I mumble. “Like Ki
t said. It’ll all blow over in the morning.”

  “I hope so,” Nicholas says, hanging up his coat. “It’s the Law Dinner next week, and Louise said she’d babysit for us since Kit’s in New York. It’d be a nuisance if you couldn’t come; Will Fisher asked for you especially. And with this mess over buying out his partnership, I do really rather need you to be there.”

  “You are one of the few women I trust within a ten-foot radius of my husband,” Meg Fisher tells me sadly. “Look at him. Bee to a blasted honeypot.”

  We both watch Will all but disappear into the cleavage of a rather flashy young girl in a plunging blue dress. My heart goes out to Meg. Does Will have no shame, that he treats his loyal wife of twenty-five years like this in front of everyone? And yet, in every other respect, he’s a very likeable man.

  “He doesn’t mean anything by it,” I say kindly.

  Meg sighs. “You’re so lucky with Nicholas.”

  I glance at my husband, talking shop with Sara. I know Nicholas wants to buttonhole Will this evening, to get to the bottom of this problem over his partnership share; now would be the perfect time to distract the old rogue from his shapely companion.

  “So nice to meet you again, Mrs. Lyon,” Sara says brightly as I join them. “I love your dress.”

  Heat rises in my cheeks. Kit said it was silly to refuse to wear the dress just because Trace had bought it when it’s so perfect for me; but I feel as if I have a huge red A for Adultery painted on my frock.

  “You don’t think it’s a little, well, orange?” I say, flustered. “I was in Rome a few weeks ago—the Italians wear color wonderfully, don’t you think, but then the light there is so luminous—of course I got it home here, not the same light at all.” I tweak my skirts. “I feel rather like a giant nasturtium. Rome is such a wonderful city, but don’t ever go over Easter weekend, just heaving with tourists, I can’t imagine what I was thinking.”

  It’s quite clear from her bemused expression what she is thinking, and I can’t blame her. I have verbal diarrhea. Even Nicholas is looking at me strangely.