A Small Indiscretion (9 page)

Then, in the same halting tone he’d been using all evening, he told me that Patrick and Louise shared other interests, too, not just photography.

He raised his eyebrows. “If you can guess what I mean,” he said.

I set my beer down on the table.

“But it’s all on the up-and-up. It was never hidden from me. In fact,” he said, “I engineered it, in a way.”

“You mean they’re having an affair?”

He laughed a funny little laugh. “If you want to call it that.”

I must have looked shocked, because he took pains to explain that it had been his own idea, intended to bring Louise up out of what he called “a midlife malaise.” This malaise had been brought on by turning forty and being alone in the house after Daisy went off to boarding school, where she was not adjusting as well as they’d hoped. The worry over Daisy had gotten to Louise, or Daisy’s absence had, or some combination of that and turning forty and confronting the future in a new way. Malcolm thought what she needed was a distraction, an outside interest, and he’d suggested the Horticultural Society, but that hadn’t helped. Then Patrick moved in, and Malcolm observed a mutual attraction, and engineered an encounter, or at least encouraged it, after their annual summer party. He’d even thought to go upstairs and get a condom and bring it out to the cottage, knowing that under the circumstances Louise wouldn’t think of it herself.

I leaned close, not wanting to miss any inflection or detail. I was
not shocked or disgusted by his confidence. I was intrigued, and impressed.

“We were young when we met, you see,” he said. “When we married. Neither of us had a chance to come into our own, romantically speaking. More than anything, it’s a decision not to be threatened. In a way, it’s been invigorating.”

There was a tentative, almost helpless quality in him that affected me. There were also the low lights, the thick mugs of beer and the rowdy abandon of a London pub on a Friday afternoon. A wave of feeling rose in me. I wanted to comfort him. I wanted to offer him something. I wanted to reach out and lay my hand over his. I did reach out and lay my hand over his, and I smiled.

He leaned in toward me, without warning, and delivered a kiss that landed not on my lips but on the crease under my nose. He laughed self-consciously. He folded his other hand over mine and began to stroke my knuckles with his thumb. I looked at his hand and, perhaps under the influence of the beer, I studied it with some absorption. His thumb was extraordinarily large, something extra he’d been given, a special piece of bone and flesh moving back and forth across my skin. I wanted to remove my hand. I wanted to undo, unequivocally, what I had done. But I did not want to put an end to the action before it had begun. I was ever conscious of my virginity, a burden that seemed more weighty and ridiculous the longer I carried it with me, and Malcolm was a man in a suit, married, twice my age, wholly unsuitable on several counts and therefore able to offer me precisely the sort of romantic entanglement I’d envisioned when I set off for Europe—one that could be indulged in, then abandoned without further complication. I took what seemed to me the middle ground. I liberated my hand slowly, then reached for my pint and downed what remained of my beer.

“But you’re married,” I said.

It was an entirely fabricated moral sentiment, but I put it forward that night, and over and over again as the autumn ebbed and winter took hold, because it was convenient to claim the high ground while I decided what I wanted. In this way I set down a pattern—advance followed by halfhearted retreat—that pursued us all day in the office as he talked into the Dictaphone and I typed, as we assembled the bid, the mammoth document, the tables and drawings and photographs, then as we revised and reassembled and resubmitted. We retired more and more often to the pub in the afternoons, always drinking the same bitter beer and always sitting in the same corner booth. Malcolm left the pub dutifully each evening at seven, encouraging me to leave when he did and walking me to the tube, or sometimes giving me a ride home on the back of his motorcycle. I’d wrap my arms around his waist, the sky pressing down overhead, any words attempted between us lost to the wind. It was at the end of these rides, when he’d ridden onto the sidewalk in front of Victoria House, that I often nearly invited him to my room.

What stopped me? I was not afraid of getting hurt. I was not worried about offending his wife, though I pretended I was. I was afraid something would change. I liked my job very much. I liked having my own key and my own desk and my own computer, and I didn’t want to risk losing that, or the camaraderie we had settled into, our bantering and our flirtation, our friendship. His devoted efforts to win me, not only by complimenting me often, and anticipating my needs, but by doling out more and more responsibility for the bid, and by giving me raise after raise and even a new title, “office manager,” which he had printed on thick white business cards. If I gave in to him, if we consummated our flirtation, our days together in the office would be changed. And if we went to bed together, I might not live up to the expectations that had been building in him all this time. I would be a disappointment, or worse, he would be, and I would have to pretend he was not.

“Let me walk you up,” he’d say.

“That’s all right.”

“Are you certain?”

“You’re married, Malcolm.”

“So is my wife.”

But he did not push me. He was a gentleman, and I loathed and admired him for it. He must have had no idea how easily I would have given in, if only he’d taken me in hand. Once, standing outside Victoria House in the cold, he told me that in a perfect world he would begin again with me. I would be the woman with whom he made a family. I knew for certain, at that moment, that I had been right to refuse him.

And yet, as the weeks wore on, I imagined it unjust that at seven every night he left me to collect his wife. I imagined I was lonely in my blue room at Victoria House, and maybe I was lonely, but I also remember a singular happiness and relief returning there in the evenings as long as I had not had too much to drink. When I was drunk, I sometimes became indignant thinking of Malcolm abandoning me to make his way to the Horticultural Society to collect Louise and drive her home. Was Malcolm’s devotion the result of obligation or duty? Did he perceive Louise as a noose around his neck, or did he love her? Did he refuse to keep her waiting because he was afraid of her, or because he did not want to make her unhappy? I suspect it was the latter—he wanted her to be happy—and what is that, if not love?

I wonder now, too, whether he wasn’t a little relieved to leave me at the end of the day. Perhaps Louise was relieved, too, when she found herself in her own bed, with Malcolm, instead of in the cottage with Patrick. Their arrangement was intoxicating, but it must have been burdensome, and wearing, too.

T
HIS MORNING
I
WOKE
to a silent house. I checked the girls’ rooms, first Polly’s, then Clara’s, and found them empty. Had they been taken from me in the night? Who would take them? Jonathan? Why would he take them when he has them half the time?

I called out their names. Silence. I called again, growing frantic, opening and closing the front door, then the back. I had misplaced you, and now I was losing them, too.

Then I heard them scream “April Fools!” and they threw the living room curtain from over their heads and emerged, squealing and beaming. They’d been hiding over the heating vent, impressively silent, sheltering themselves from the frigid spring morning.

Later, Clara said, very seriously, “Can I tell you something?”

“Yes,” I said, “tell me something.”

“There are a lot of answers to one question.”

“Which question?”

“Well, like, what’s black and white and red all over?”

“What is black and white and red all over?”

“Well, a newspaper. That’s the easy answer.”

“And what are the hard answers?”

“A penguin in a blender,” Clara said.

“Ooh. Ouch.”

“A zebra with a sunburn,” she continued.

“My goodness. What else?”

“That’s all,” she said, and she reached out and hugged me around the waist. She’s begun to hug me differently than she used to. She doesn’t turn her face to the side but keeps it straight ahead, so that her nose is pushed directly into my belly.

I leaned down and whispered: “Did you miss me when you were at Daddy’s?”

“Not really,” she said.

I kissed her on the forehead. “Good,” I managed to say. And I almost meant it. I’m happy she’s independent. I’m happy Polly is, too. You weren’t when you were their age. Sleepovers, school trips, me going away to work in the store: You used to throw your arms around my neck and hang on until I detached you limb by limb.

O
N THE FIFTEENTH
day of your stay in the hospital last September, you were taken off propofol. The trauma-center doctor expected you to emerge from the coma within a matter of hours, or a few days at the very most. It was a week shy of your twenty-first birthday, and I was already imagining my mother and father bringing the girls to the hospital to see you on the big day. I was anticipating the joy on your face, and theirs, when they presented you with a birthday cake you would not be able to eat, but that you would know had been baked in your honor.

I refused to leave the hospital while we were waiting for you to emerge from the coma, and a room was found, a closet, really, into which a hospital bed was rolled for your father and me. We slept in the bed together the first night, the only night I can remember that autumn that our limbs were entangled the way they had been the rest of our married life.

At the end of your second day tapering off propofol, Mitch came
to check on you and ushered me out of your room by the elbow. “Go get something to eat,” he said. “We can’t have you fading.”

So I walked to the cafeteria, but the smell of food made my stomach turn. I returned to the waiting room outside Trauma. I hadn’t minded the space before. The sea-foam-green carpet. The gold pendant lights over the receptionist’s desk. The chairs patterned in silver and teal. But during those days we waited for you to regain consciousness, the heavy quiet of that waiting room made me feel like I was going mad.

On the third day, the trauma-center doctor’s brisk reassurances began to lose some of their briskness, and I felt panic rise in my gut.

We paged Mitch. He grilled the trauma-center doctor, whom he himself had hand-picked. He moved around your bed, studying your chart, checking your vital signs, touching your body—your head and eyelids and ears and chest and neck and belly and knees and feet and toes. He moved like an athlete, or a dancer—the steps he took so practiced as to take on a stylized grace—but his hands were an artist’s hands, imprinted with a vision of a healthy human body, and gifted with the power to bring that vision to life.

When Mitch finally spoke, it was to your father, not the trauma doctor. “I would recommend putting him back in a coma.”

“Why?” your father asked.

“I’ve never seen that done before,” the trauma doctor interjected.

“Well, now you have,” Mitch replied.

Mitch took us aside. He explained to us that he suspected the doctor had been too ambitious in bringing you back. He was of the opinion you had experienced a kind of cognitive overload, and your body, as a defense, had clung to its unconscious state. His view was that sedating you again would actually allow you to recover consciousness more quickly than if you remained on the path you were on, which he was afraid was going to cause seizures, or even a stroke.

A memory came to me of Mitch sitting in my store, years ago, after his wife left him, fat tears falling down his face. How could a man with such powerful intuition in the matter of human health have so badly miscalculated in the matter of human love? Could a man like that be trusted now to be infallible?

I could not stand my own doubt, and I could not stand the certainty in Mitch’s face or the uncertainty in your father’s. So I turned away and let them decide.

If a mother is only as happy as her least happy child, that day began a series of the most unhappy days of my life.