The Adulterants

by Joe Dunthorne

  I received an airmailed death threat written with highlighter pens. I also received a letter of support saying these people shouldn’t be allowed to own shops in our country.

  Reddit detectives quickly assembled a cache of images of me during the disturbances. I was wearing such easily identifiable clothes. They found a phone video of me outside the town hall, working my house key into the palm of my hand. The one benefit of this video was that some people then suggested I needed clinical help and that took some of the heat off.

  My biggest fear was that an internet lunatic would track down Garthene. I received Google alerts whenever someone on the web used her name. This was distressing because, up until then, she had had almost no online presence. Searching for Garthene Henderson used to locate just the one article she wrote at nineteen years old while on unlikely work experience with UEFA.co.uk. A thoughtful piece about changes to the seeding criteria for the qualifying rounds of the Europa League. Even Garthene on its own offered only 2,105 hits, mostly new cemetery listings from the American South. It was clear that there had once been a generation of Garthenes but they were dying fast. Garthene Dickson, Mount Hope Cemetery, Bangor, USA, 1926 to 2011. It used to make me happy to think that soon my wife would be the last one carrying the burden. I used to text her: Your tribe lost another elder. But now her name was multiplying in the jokily evil and evilly jokey depths of Reddit. Let’s set up a Kickstarter to pay for Garthene’s divorce lawyer, who’s with me?

  I called her every two hours.

  “I’m alive,” she said.

  “Just checking.”

  Then, on the afternoon of the second day, she didn’t answer. I texted but got no response. I let that go and, two hours later, called again. Voicemail said her phone was unreachable. I waited ten minutes and called again. Then I waited no minutes and called again. Marie and Lee were on a twelve-day trip to Kyoto, reliving one of their formative holidays, so Garthene was alone in their house and, it seemed immediately clear, had been murdered by vigilante justice-bringers from the dark web. I left the flat and ran. Running through the streets was normal for me now.

  When I got to Marie and Lee’s, Yuku did not open the gate. He put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Have any weirdos tried to get in?” I said.

  “You’re the first one.”

  “I just need to see her.” I held on to the bars of the gate and called her name.

  “Get some sleep,” Yuku said.

  I ignored him and started to climb, wedging my right foot into the ornate swirls. He yanked me down to the tarmac and rested his weight on me, knelt on my arms. What impressed me most was that he managed to pin me to the floor while still giving the clear impression that he didn’t want to, that he felt sympathy for my situation, and it was only his professionalism crushing the air from my lungs.

  “You’re okay,” he said. “And so is she.”

  When I looked across I could see Garthene, completely alive, watching at the window.

  The next time I saw her in the flesh was at the hospital. Jenny called us in for an extra scan because the placenta was still too low, probably because of how I had ruined our lives. Garthene was bigger now, a hint of the cowboy walk as she moved across the car park.

  “You look fantastic.”

  “I’m a beast.”

  “A fantastic beast.”

  I was wearing my most generic adult clothes: navy shirt, straight jeans, shoes that resisted description. They were just shoes.

  She observed my new maturity. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m improving.”

  “Have you been sleeping?”

  “Not if I can avoid it.”

  “I can get you some pills.”

  Her kindness was unsettling. It occurred to me that she agreed with those on the internet who thought I was mentally ill.

  “What are those?” she said, looking down.

  “I call them shoes.”

  In the low-lit room, she sat in a special reclining seat, the young female sonographer took a chair on wheels, and there was an inanimate one for me. Garthene pulled her T-shirt up over her bump. The tube of conductive gel farted as the technician squirted it on, which I found not at all funny on the assumption that both the sonographer and my wife were far beyond finding anything in the hospital rude or amusing.

  The young sonographer barked with laughter and said: “Excuse me.”

  On the screen, our creature emerged, squirming in a pool of static, showing off its insides. I watched the sonographer jab the device into Garthene’s pelvis.

  “Placenta’s risen slightly but it’s still low,” she said. “We’ll have to wait and see on that one. Do you want to know the sex?”

  I turned to Garthene. Her body, her choice. Months ago we had agreed that we wanted the sex to be a surprise because, in our privileged lives, there was so little beyond our control and wouldn’t it be exhilarating for just one moment to feel utterly dazed and adrift.

  “I was thinking it might be quite good to find out,” she said.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “One less thing to think about.”

  “Of course.”

  The sonographer nodded and started scanning again. “Okay then, let’s see.”

  It did not take long. On the screen we saw what looked, at first, like a tiny brain resolve itself unmistakably into a pair of testicles, the fractal walnut of a ball sack. And like that, a whole timeline fell away. All our intelligent, beautiful daughters, their sarcasm at breakfast, were gone. Goodbye Lily, goodbye Nancy, goodbye Ruby. In their place, the blocky monosyllables—Dave, Tom, Rob—thinking with their nuts. I hadn’t realized how badly I wanted a girl until then. I was sure that Garthene felt the same, but I had not seen her in some time and I wanted to make this moment positive.

  “Did you see those beauties?” I said.

  “I did,” she said. “King cojones!”

  She was also trying to be upbeat.

  “Ha ha ha,” I said. It felt good to celebrate together, even if neither of us meant it.

  “The massive balls of a champion,” she said.

  It was only now, hearing her make these basic jokes, that I realized how long it had been since I’d seen her enjoy herself. My dumb behavior over the last few weeks had forced her into being the grown-up one, and it was great to be reminded of the childishness I fell in love with.

  Garthene cleaned the conductive gel off with two tissues, one to wipe, one to polish. Out in the waiting room, I put my lips against her neck and kissed the charming, harmless mole she has there. She didn’t fully reciprocate but did rub my back. She didn’t hate me, that was clear. She something else’d me, but I did not know what.

  As we made our way slowly back through the corridors, blinking beneath the box lights, Garthene got out her phone and started texting. I watched a small, private smile gain weight on her face. I recognized it, the smile of someone trying not to, which is the worst one. She caught me looking at it, the smile, and banished it to her eyes.

  I allowed myself to glance at her screen. There were three small words that I couldn’t read, then a couple of kisses. Knowing she reserved xx for expressions of true and lasting love, it would have been easy for me to become jealous. But I wasn’t that person any more and so I decided it was probably just hormones allowing her to xx more freely. Or perhaps the xx were not kisses but XX chromosomes and she was just texting a colleague the news of our child’s sex. That latter thought had a lovely shape and it was the one I decided to believe as I walked slowly over the linoleum, keeping pace with my wife, enjoying the way the corridor mellowly replicated itself.

  But then, as we passed by the Diabetes Center, I had a challenging thought.

  Is XX a girl or a boy?

  Instinctively you’d think XY was female because it has a girly ending, though the idea of endings being gendered was exactly the kind of horseshit I would not be passing on to my boy. Garthene’s phone buzzed in her hand. The person had replie
d straightaway and, as she read the message, the private smile came back for a curtain call.

  “Who’re you texting?” I said.

  “A friend,” she said.

  “Your boyfriend?” I said, giving her the chance to run with a joke.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” she said.

  That did not feel good.

  “Bet he’s handsome though?” I said, giving her another opportunity.

  She put the phone in her pocket.

  That meant I had to look up XX on my phone and learn it meant female, not male, and this meant she was texting kisses, not chromosomes, and that meant, with sincere regret, that I would have to stalk her.

  The next day I wore jogging bottoms and a black NYC baseball cap—clothes that would make me invisible to Garthene—while I waited at the bus stop near the hospital staff exit. She emerged a little after five, used the handrail to descend the three steps to the car park, then headed south-east, walking slowly with her legs wide, her bump entering sunlight before her. There were no cars, but she waited for the beeps before crossing the road.

  Resting on a bench by the war memorial, she received another smile-inducing text. In all honesty, I didn’t really think she was having an affair but, by acting as though she was, I could allow us both to experience the texture of my melodramatic actions. That way we could enjoy discovering how madly I loved her, how my love was a sickness, how I was crazy from loneliness and jealousy, all without the time-consuming rigmarole of having her actually fuck around.

  I knelt in the bandstand beside a street-sleeper who was not sleeping. The flagstone beneath him was a darker color and worn smooth. While I watched Garthene, the street-sleeper watched me and I felt I needed to justify myself.

  “I think she’s having an affair,” I said.

  He squinted at her. “It’s not an affair if she’s not your wife.”

  “She is my wife,” I said.

  He looked at my face, then at my NYC cap, then at the bulge of my ankle tag. I emptied the coin section of my wallet on to his sleeping bag. He counted the silvers and golds and examined the two-euro coin.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now you’re married.”

  Garthene got up and I followed her all the way to Marie and Lee’s place, where Yuku saluted her and opened the gate while I hid in a phone box. Soon there will be no phone boxes left and where will all the creepy people go?

  The second day, I started packing up our stuff and putting our books into boxes, pausing to flick through the photo album from our wedding day. The best image was of us laughing at the vows.

  I spent the afternoon sitting at the bus stop. I watched the smoke rise from the hospital incinerator: tumors and appendixes. You’re not allowed to keep them, even if you want to. When Garthene came out she walked the same route, stopped on the same bench, but this time made friends with a young woman’s tiny dog, a mini sausage, holding its paws in her hands, doing a little rock ’n’ roll dancing. I mention this only because even the Garthene I fell in love with—fun-time Garthene—still despised tiny dogs and their owners and, most of all, fools who would crouch in the street and indulge them. But she was more open these days.

  The street-sleeper said: “That is a damn cute dog.”

  I explained how inbreeding for cuteness causes untold health problems. Pugs can’t breathe through their adorable faces. Harnesses keep their eyeballs in.

  He shook his head. “Don’t be like that,” he said.

  I went home and continued to clear out the flat and my inbox. Behind the bed, I collected a handful of fluorescent earplugs that must have fallen from Garthene’s ears in the night.

  Day three, no sign of Garthene. I stayed sitting at the bus stop and got sunburned. On a nearby bench, two blue-gowned inpatients smoked and ate boneless popcorn chicken, their IVs beside them on wheelie stands. I liked the look of the chicken and they saw that in my eyes. I’d been awake most of the night, apologizing, and was constantly hungry for yellow food. One of the men held out his paper box and shook it. I picked up a lump and gobbled it down. That’s one great thing about being an unusual person. All the other unusuals are totally on your side.

  Across the road was the Hospital Tavern, a pub prized for an older clientele who all seemed in some comforting way to have made terrible choices in their lives. It had red-tinted windows and a gray parrot in a cage and it was not unusual for Jean, the landlady, to ring the last orders bell then yell, “I’m pretending it’s last orders,” which was thrilling, though it was important not to appear thrilled. Garthene and I used to call it the Scary Arms because one of the regulars wore sleeveless vests to show off the scars up the insides of his wrists, home-made tattoos distorted through the thickened flesh. He wore decorative hospital tags on both wrists. He was out there now, smoking a Superking.

  “You’ve been waiting for that bus for days,” he yelled to me. “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere,” I said.

  A bus was coming. It stopped and the doors hissed back. From my seat, I asked the lady driver if she was going nowhere and she said Leytonstone and I said no thanks. It was exhilarating to make Scary Arms laugh.

  Day four, I went up into the attic. The air made me feel like I was breathing through a pillow. In the half-light, I could make out the shapes of our discarded dreams: Garthene’s pedal-powered pottery wheel; my five-octave Roland with keys weighted for a more nuanced, emotional performance; evidence of the shameful summer we thought we might get into kiteboarding. I tried to remember what kind of people we were when we bought a tin of beeswax and a swatch of corduroy to keep our real-leather walking boots supple. At the far end of the space, I saw our neighbors’ workbench, touring bike and valve amplifier—different dreams, different failures. In every direction, the ceilings angled down.

  I went out to my bus stop and waited for Garthene, followed her to Marie and Lee’s. She stopped at my street-sleeper, made him laugh, then gave him a ten-pound note.

  Day five. All our belongings were packed and labeled and I’d reached the moment I’d been dreading: inbox zero. I had run out of people to be sorry to. I defrosted the freezer and cleaned the fridge. I never realized you could drink the liquid in the pouches of mozzarella.

  I was two hours early for the end of Garthene’s shift, so I went into the Hospital Tavern and asked for the smallest drink. Jean gave me sambuca. Her hair was dyed a coppery red and so was her scalp. I sipped my sambuca and went to the window, rapped my knuckles on the sill.

  “Who’re you looking for?” Jean said.

  “My wife.”

  “Ex- or future?” she said.

  “Ha ha.”

  Scary Arms was the only other person in the pub. He was playing Millionaire and occasionally yelling out questions. “It’s called the fontanelle!” I said, excited to know the answer to something, my voice suddenly loud. He won twenty quid and bought me another sambuca, this one in a tumbler. It was my drink now. My usual.

  When Garthene came out of the hospital I’d had six usuals and my teeth were woolly. She stood in the car park and phoned someone. They answered immediately and she angled her face to the sunshine. If she had then walked south-east, back toward Marie and Lee’s, I might have left her alone, stayed with my new good friends, finished my seventh usual, but she didn’t. She sat down at my bus stop. Gary and Jean came to the window. Scary Arms’s real name was Gary. I knew that now.

  “There goes your wife,” he said, raising his hands to make air quotes, scar tissue flexing.

  Garthene got on a single-decker W15 and I caught the one after it, a few minutes later. In London, you know you’re going nowhere good if the bus has just one deck. There was bad traffic and I could still see Garthene’s bus about fifteen vehicles ahead. I stayed standing at the front, next to the driver, watching the road, leaning on the perforated Plexiglas screen. That’s where the unusual people always stand. I knew that we had a good chance of catching her because, if you think about it, the bus in front acts as a kin
d of snowplow, clearing away all the passengers so that the bus behind makes ground. That’s why three buses coming at once is not bad luck but cold logic.

  It was a low-speed chase. Both buses stopped at a long light. Her bus squeezed through on a yellow, which was red by the time we got there, but my driver pushed on anyway and I said out loud, “Yes, great driving.” If you’ve never been the bus’s unusual person then you’re missing out.

  Garthene got off on Leyton High Road. We both did. Dan, our estate agent, had always told us this was a surprisingly nice part of town and we’d always said we’d rather die. I tracked Garthene down the high street. All the shop signs had been hand painted on wooden backboards, including Kebabish and Send Money International. She turned onto an uglier road of two-story new builds, a badly fitted paving slab gulping as she stepped on it. I followed, hopping over the loose stone. The houses on this north-facing side of the street had few and tiny windows, presumably to improve energy efficiency, though the impression was dystopian, expanses of orange brick interrupted by mean little peepholes. Garthene stopped at a plastic door. Parked outside was a blue Vauxhall Astra, the same car that had dropped her home the night I got out of jail. The night I got out of jail. I had such sentences inside me.

  She rang the bell and got buzzed in. I followed up to the door and let my finger rest on the bell. The important thing, I reminded myself, was not whether she had betrayed me but that she understand what actions I would take if she did. So it was vital I believed the worst was happening, that she and some ex-patient whose muscle density was just returning were exploring each other’s bodies in an adult softplay room, exuberantly lubricated, coded messages of affection passing back and forth between nonbiological father’s penis and unborn child, like two prisoners knocking on the pipes. I hovered my finger over the bell’s rubbery button. I pressed the bit of door frame next to the bell a few times, to get a feel for it.

  I thought of Lee coming around his marital bed on all fours with another man’s used condom hanging in his jaws. As a direct result of his unstable behavior, he and Marie were now back together, walking through Japanese moss gardens. They would probably soon be trying for a baby. Trying for a baby, as though it would be a chore for the two best-looking people I know to bring each other to nightly, bareback orgasm.