Days Like Today (3 page)

When he came home, he wanted to tell her about what he’d seen and what he thought about it – everything he’d been through. She understood that and it saddened her that the constant interruption of children’s complaints and questions, the ringing of the telephone with urgent messages about mothers’ meetings and car-pool dates and so on, interfered with her desire to know his news, his mood and his heart; with her capacity for listening and his to tell; and eventually, with their ability to keep in step with each other.

She didn’t mind the professional bond that drew him to seek the company of fellow newsmen and television cronies as soon as he arrived home. What began to make her anxious was the knowledge that two or three of his favorite lunching companions were pretty young women in the business. As soon as she was certain that he’d slept with one – and then another – of them, she felt a spectral presence beside her of the first wife: the one to whom she’d so casually done a greater wrong than at the time she could have imagined being done to her. How could the same thing ever happen to her? She was the one who loved. And if you loved, you were in the right.

He had a friend named Bruno. Ever since she was introduced to him, Bruno had flirted with her in a way that was more than just single-minded: he was hoping to start something up with her that would be serious enough to threaten her marriage – to get her away from Max and to marry her himself; or not to. Maybe what he had in mind was to seduce her, expose her to Max and drop her without
warning while her husband walked out on her with any one of the many women who were in love with him.

She’d seen from the beginning that what Bruno wanted was to outdo Max and because he didn’t have the drive, the brilliance of expression or the quality of mind to equal Max professionally, he’d always be willing to take a stab at his personal life instead. The flirtation had nothing to do with her, although often – especially when a party ended up with Max being surrounded by good-looking, younger women for whom he was putting on a show – she was glad of the distraction. Her party talks with Bruno could sometimes make her feel desirable and, because she was always saying no in the nicest way, respected. This game of lies had been carried on between them for years. Since both of them were getting something out of it, she’d developed a kind of fondness for Bruno in spite of what she thought of his motives and what she suspected was his real opinion of her.

At Max’s most recent homecoming party, she and Bruno spent the end of the evening sitting side by side on a staircase and looking down into a room filled with a loudly animated crowd of guests. Bruno said, ‘I can’t stand it any longer, Joan. There’s never been anybody but you. Why do you think it broke up between me and Pam? I keep thinking about you. I dream about you.’

She turned to him sweetly, as if not wanting to hurt him. Beyond his face puffed with drink, his hangdog eyes beginning to water, his whisper trembling with urgency, she saw a flash of malice that would have made her nervous if she’d been on her own. There was nothing this man wouldn’t do,
she thought, to pay Max back for being better. What Bruno needed was victory. All the wars Max had observed were caused by quarrelsome, greedy, envious and petty men like this one: he thought that taking her away could damage Max. And if it destroyed her, he wouldn’t care. He despised her anyway.

For the first time she understood how intelligent she’d been to remain gentle, to play dumb, to pretend that she felt sympathy and believed him to be an honorable man who was struggling with his passions. She said lightly, ‘You’re supposed to be my husband’s friend.’

As soon as he realized that she was definitely saying no for the evening, he pulled back, pretending to be drunker than he was. He had the look all of a sudden of a man who was about to say something really wounding because it would give him such pleasure to get it out. She added quickly, ‘It isn’t that I mind being asked, because I’ve always liked you, so I’m flattered. But I don’t want to start doing what everybody else does – and against a husband I love.’

‘He does it, too. With Alice. You know – that girl on my team. There she is, over there.’

She looked. She saw Alice: face to face with Max, a packed mass of noisy people around them. The fact that they were nearly close enough to be dancing could have been excused by the crush of other guests, but not that – as he was about to raise his glass to his lips and the girl began the same gesture with her own glass – Max brushed his hand against hers, the knuckle of his little finger rubbing back and forth against the edge of her hand.

It happened so quickly that the next moment all anyone could have seen was two people sipping their drinks and talking.

The speed and minuteness of the movement helped to make it seem the kind of intimate contact two illicit lovers might feel they could get away with: allowing themselves the indulgence of touch while the rest of the world looked on.

Nothing Bruno had to say could have made her so unhappy as seeing – from all the way across the room – that tiny joining of finger and hand. It was a love gesture. What caused Joan such pain was not that it was something Max had done before, with her – part of their private code: on the contrary, it was new. He’d thought it up for the other woman at that moment, or perhaps he’d invented it at some earlier party and now it was incorporated into their special language. Maybe it had even been started by the hateful Alice. And now the two of them were using it between themselves like a wink.

She’d have liked to storm down there, push the girl aside and tell her, ‘Get your own husband.’

‘See what I mean?’ Bruno asked.

He couldn’t be referring to what she’d seen. She said, ‘Even if he did, I still don’t see why I should start to act that way too, just to make other people feel better about being unfaithful.’ She smiled, and said, ‘You were only offering to pinch-hit anyway, weren’t you?’

He started to protest. She stood up. He promised to change the subject. He spent the rest of the evening telling her entertaining anecdotes about his colleagues. She con
centrated on remembering what he was saying while her mind was on Alice and Max.

She was still good-looking and nowhere near middle-aged. And it wasn’t as if anything had ever gone wrong with her marriage. Everything was fine.

Bruno shouted something at her. She mouthed that the music was too loud and she couldn’t hear. She didn’t even want to know what he’d said. She was thinking that there hadn’t been anything wrong with Max’s first marriage either, except perhaps that his wife hadn’t been willing to make a full commitment until she’d been sure. If you risked everything, you could lose everything.

She looked back into the crowd and wasn’t able to find Max and the girl. While Bruno had held her attention, they’d moved. It took only a second for her to locate them off in a corner. Love was so quick to discover. And jealousy. And fear: all those things. She couldn’t lose him. There wasn’t anything else, only him. As she began to panic, the dislike of Bruno and the girl seeped over other parts of her life and memory until, at last, it touched Max himself. She blamed him. He was treating her badly.

For the next few days Max talked to her as he used to before their marriage, when he’d come back from an assignment needing to get everything out of his system by talk even more than by sex. For once the children didn’t interrupt; one was staying at a friend’s house and the other two were away on a school trip over the weekend. She listened. She didn’t try to tell him about the failed exams, the trips to the doctor, the broken friendships and quarrels, the
bicycle that ran into a brick wall, the nosebleed and so forth. His worries were on an altogether grander scale: they were international. And somebody else’s.

She pretended that everything was normal. And he appeared to be the same as usual. Their life together still seemed to be all right.

Max was always complaining that the networks refused to broadcast the most upsetting parts of his war coverage or to show certain film clips or even stills from some of the footage Bruno and his friends brought back. And they wouldn’t schedule broadcasts at lunch or supper, when most people switched on to look at the news.

They should, he said. People ought to be made aware of what was going on in the world, particularly if there were crimes being committed in their name.

He’d begun work thinking that you could show the truth and make people change things for the better. But he’d soon realized that it was hard enough to get anybody to do something about what was happening in the next street. You had to shove it in their faces, make them feel threatened or ashamed or sickened: shocked, appalled.

When his first marriage was at last beyond help, his wife had struck exclusively at his belief in his work. The affair with Joan hadn’t been mentioned; everything was supposed to be a problem of work. She’d said that far from helping people, Max was nothing more than a pornographer; he showed everyone pictures of horror – agonies about which they could do nothing. His broadcasts were accompanied
by photographs of burned cities, starving children, the beaten and limbless, the disgraced, homeless and bereaved – and these images were set out in front of the rich, safe, happy citizens of a more fortunate part of the world so that those viewers could eat, drink and go to parties with more enjoyment, knowing how lucky they were: lucky enough to be free from all those miseries as well as being free of responsibility, since there was certainly little they could do about someone else’s war taking place thousands of miles away. She’d told him that the people seated in front of their television sets around the world were exactly like the crowds that used to attend games at the coliseum in ancient Rome. They were there for the spectacle. To imagine anything else was dishonest. It was wrong. His work was just entertainment. People could hear him, and watch what Bruno filmed, and be able to imagine from a position of comfort what it might be like to be caught, inescapably, in a different life. The effect was the same as that of a television drama, only more unpleasant and less memorable. Did he himself, she asked, do anything about these crises? No. His job was to package and present. And to become famous: the man with integrity, who gave the balanced view. The view wasn’t truly balanced because the military leaders of all sides had their reasons – sometimes tactical and sometimes propagandistic – for not wanting certain information to be let out. That too annoyed Max. More than once he’d been told point blank that no army intended to allow some news-hungry crap-merchant to divulge facts whose release might cost the lives of military personnel, not to mention the civilians.

What he was really famous for, the other wife had said, was going through dozens of grisly scenes and coming out alive. And the fame was what he liked. He wasn’t driving an ambulance and staying out there all year, year after year, for the whole of a war. He’d drop in for a look and go home again.

Joan knew that she herself had been at the root of these accusations. What the first wife had really meant was:
You’re mendacious, superficial and a hypocrite because you’re
unfaithful
.
You’re no good because you’re no longer good to me.
You don’t love me any more, therefore nothing you do can have
any validity.
It was jealousy.

And now she was the wife. But she was still on his side. And again there was the new girl and once again she was changing places.

Now he’s sleeping with her and talking with me. Maybe that
will make him fall in love with me again, the way he did with her
– and with me – back at the beginning: through talk. Or maybe
I’m being let down gently and this is the start of solely conversa
tional intercourse for the rest of our lives.

As she stirred a pot on the stove, the picture of Max and Alice – their hands touching – came back to her, the gesture quick, charged, alive.
Don’t do that,
she thought. Once you allowed jealousy, you began to like it. You became the kind of person who saw things in that way – one of the envious, who thought that everything missing in their lives was absent because of someone else’s fault.

The caress between their hands as they’d raised their glasses – had it really been so special?

She was at the stage where she was doubting that she’d actually seen anything. What she expected to believe was beginning to change what she knew to be fact.

On one of their sightseeing trips – before the children – they’d visited a great cathedral of the Renaissance. She’d been overcome by the building and by the paintings, chapels, altarpieces and the many pilgrims and worshippers. She’d never been able to believe but she’d always felt that something was there and that it was responsible for the good things in her life. By the time she met Max she would have described herself as a non-believer or – more accurately – would have said that above the neck she was an atheist, but her heart knew better.

As she’d stepped back out into the daylight, she’d said to him, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to believe?’

He’d said, ‘Why? You’d just be deluding yourself.’

‘You’d never be afraid again, or even uncertain.’

‘Of course you would. That’s what the whole thing is about. That’s why people go to church.’

‘But I knew a woman, a friend of my parents – one of the nicest people I’ve ever met – and she told me once that she loved going to church because it just made her feel happy.’

‘But organized religion means you have to accept the whole kit and caboodle. What about life after death?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on, Joanie.’

‘Well, no. I don’t see how there could be.’

‘Exactly,’ he’d said. ‘Ridiculous.’

He was what she believed in. He knew that. And, in a different way, millions of others believed in him, too. Public broadcasting had made him a kind of god.

He might have the public glamor, but she was attractive too, and still young. She could pay him back in the traditional manner by having a fling with one of his friends. She could think of several. Not Bruno.