My Other Life (64 page)

Looking back, our affair seemed hardly significant. I suspected that it meant more to her, or that she wanted it to mean more. Yet she was all right now. The postcard said that much. She had wrongly felt that I was my old self—still married—regarding the marriage as indestructible because, as she had not managed to destroy it with her tears and her threats, who could?

My pain had liberated me. I now felt strong enough to reply to her postcard.

Dear Wanda,

What a surprise to hear from you! I can't imagine where you got that old postcard, but I'm sure that

And then I faltered and stopped. It occurred to me that there was no return address on the postcard. I had no idea where she was. Seven years later was she still in New York City? I looked at the postmark:
DANBURY CONN.

I could not continue writing this letter to her until I knew her address. I called her at her home number, the only number I knew, and was told by the telephone company recording with the female disciplinarian's voice that the number was no longer in service. Information for Manhattan said there was no listing for her name.

I called NYU. Her old secretary said, "Dr. Fagan is no longer a member of this department."

"Do you have a number where she can be reached?"

"Just a minute." She sighed; she had wanted to hang up on me. When she returned to the phone, she said, "Who is calling?"

I said I was a book dealer; that I had found a book order that had been mislaid; that I wished to send it to her.

"But you asked me for her telephone number."

This was a very shrewd secretary.

"Her street address will be fine. I'll just pop this in the mail."

"She is not Wanda Fagan anymore. She is Wanda Falkenberg."

Her new name was spelled slowly by this cranky woman, and her new address was in the New York City area. I called information and got the number. I tried it over several days, at different times. Finally, a man's voice: "She doesn't live here anymore."

But that voice said everything: this might be her ex-husband. He was glum and defeated-sounding, wondering who I was. I wanted to talk to him much more than I wanted to find her. But I knew I had to talk to her first.

"I have a parcel for her"—I gave him my book dealer's spiel.

Rather crossly—annoyed that he had to bother—he gave me her street address. It was in Danbury, Connecticut. That explained the postmark.

"I am sending this Fed Ex, so it would help to have her phone number."

He ratded it off—only an ex-husband would know it that well and say it so disgustedly. I put the phone down, then picked it up and dialed the number.

"Hello."

It was that small old tentative voice of a person who was accustomed to receiving unwelcome telephone calls. Wanda Feskowitz Fagan Cole Falkenberg. What a lot of names even a young woman can pick up.

"It's me."

"Paul?"

And then the sparring began.

"How did you get this number?"

"One of your old friends."

I had never known many of her friends. That was another problem with the affair—just the two of us. Or maybe it was not a problem. It exposed and isolated us, and so we got to know each other quickly. The few friends I knew were so much like Wanda they frightened me.

"Who was it?"

"I don't want to get her into trouble, so I don't think I'll reveal her name."

It seemed the right thing to say, and it worked.

"What do you want?"

"I thought I'd send you a note in reply to your postcard, but I didn't have your address."

"Where are you?"

She had always been anxious, but these questions revealed an even deeper intensity.

"Oh, I'm just traveling."

If she knew where I was, she would call me back. Selfishly, I wanted to control the situation.

"Are you still married?"

"You seemed to think so when you sent me that postcard."

"I think you're divorced—or else why would you be calling me?"

In her logic, a person who made a call like this, out of the blue, was weak or desperate.

"I am separated. But that's not why I called. I was just wondering how you are."

"I wish you hadn't called."

"Are you married?"

There was another long silence, which was like the weariest sigh imaginable.

"I don't want to talk about it."

That said everything: she had been married, she was now either separated or divorced. She was easier to read than my wife of twenty years.

"I just want to get on with my life."

That was the title of yet another of her insincere and muddled marching songs. It was not that I objected to her clichés, it was that she did not really mean them. She still had no life, she was still on the lookout for someone else's.

"I was glad to get your postcard. That windmill."

"I thought you'd like it."

Having a poor memory helped lessen a person's woe. Everything connected with the windmill had been miserable. If she had remembered anything, she would never have sent that picture.

"It was nice of you."

"I have my points."

"You sure do," I said. "You sound well."

"So do you."

"It's great to think that after all these years we're still strong."

"I manage."

"Do you have any children?"

Silence again. But it was a direct question, and she had to answer or be found out. She hesitated a fraction too long, her silence meaning yes.

"How many?"

"A little girl."

Her voice was pride, defiance, anger that I had asked, irritation that she had replied, a kind of sorrow, and great confusion. This was not a troubled young woman anymore. This was the troubled mother of a tiny and probably demanding daughter. God help the man who became involved with the daughter of this woman.

She was a new woman; she had a new name and a new life. She did not want to be associated with her past. This was a woman I did not know.

"How long have you been separated?" she asked.

She could not resist, she really wanted to know. My marriage, in her view, was the one thing that had kept us apart. Yet I knew better. It was my only excuse for keeping her at arm's length. I had used my marriage in order to be irresponsible. After I was separated I didn't dare. So I was the coward. My love for Alison had gone beyond the marriage, and that was why when the marriage ended I was so bereft, because I wanted to remain friends with her.

"I'll tell you how long I've been separated if you tell me the same thing."

"I don't want to play games."

Another of her feeble clichés, and one of her most insincere, since all we had ever done was play games. And what was this conversation except a game, in which each player was lying in order to extract the maximum amount of information, while revealing the minimum?

"You don't have to tell me anything. But I've been separated for about a year. It was sad and I'm sorry. If you've been through the same thing, I know how painful it was, especially with a little child."

A milder, less reproachful silence had no sigh in it, only sadness.

"We weren't getting along."

Why did this statement irritate me so much? It was her tone of voice, uninvolved and dull and dismissive, and it was the ready-made expression. Even if she had met this man soon after she and I had split up, she still could not have known him long, or been married more than—what? Allow a year for courtship, take away a year or so since she left him, and what would you have? Maybe three or four years of marriage. I thought mainly about her child.

"But it's so hard—it shouldn't happen," I said.

I kept on in this sorrowful and sentimental way until she interrupted sharply.

"I didn't love him anymore."

It was her dismissive tone again, and when I heard this trite expression as a summary of the marriage a chill went through me. Yes, my fears of her shallowness were justified. I had always been suspicious of her, fearful of her dependency and her moods. Yes, if I had left Alison for her, it would not have lasted. But would it have been a disaster?

Perhaps, with that child, but I did not know.

Her dumb, perfunctory
I didn't love him anymore
sounded to me like,
I changed my mind.

It was what I had disliked most in her, the very argument that day on the Cape when we had been heading for Provincetown and she got suddenly bored and irritably said, "Isn't there anywhere nearer we could go?"

"You said you wanted to go to Provincetown."

She had seen a restaurant review. Single women are tremendous readers of such reviews. It had less to do with food or eating than it did with their fantasizing about a safe and stable world where, dressed up, they might allow themselves to be chaperoned.

"It's too far."

"But I've already made the reservations at the restaurant."

"You can unmake them."

"I was looking forward to going."

"See? Now it's all about you."

"This trip was your idea. The restaurant that was mentioned in
Bon Appetit.
"

"I changed my mind."

I got angry. She got upset. My anger proved I didn't love her—so she said. She began to cry. She seemed physically very small, like an ugly dwarf, when she cried. I thought: Leave her. I felt like dumping her by the side of the road. I was also afraid and had the distinct sense that she would grab the wheel and wrench it and send us into the path of an oncoming car.

For about ten minutes, overwhelmed by this hysteria, we said nothing. Then we came to Brewster and I pulled off the road, fearing that my ability to drive had deteriorated. It was just a tourist attraction—the real windmills of the Cape were gone. But she believed in it.

"I wish I had a camera."

So she was gullible as well. Unreasonably, I held that against her.

And here was her windmill again, on her postcard. She had forgotten the argument that had led to my wanting to leave her. Her saying "I changed my mind" was something I feared; that she would tell me one day, "I don't love you anymore." I knew that now.

This whole recollection was a silence that had frozen our telephone conversation.

"Are you still there?"

How long had she been saying that?

"I'm here. Just thinking."

"I thought we got cut off."

She had forgotten the cause of my reverie, that she had said, I
didn't lave him anymore.

"What you said sounded perfunctory," I told her.

"You know all the put-down words."

"That you didn't love him anymore."

"He was in denial. He had been codependent. You can be such an asshole."

"So that was that. 'Guess I'll move on. "

"I didn't have to process that relationship."

"Time for me to move on."

"So you just called me up to torment me with all your sick writer's questions."

"No. I wanted to thank you for the postcard."

"Oh, that. So where are you traveling to?"

"Maybe New York."

"I'm not that far away."

"Where do you live?"

An idle question—nothing on earth would induce me to see her. It was first the idea in her mind that I was separated, and that there might be a resumption of our affair. But more than anything our little affair had been a lesson in the danger of trifling with someone's emotions.

And she had a life now—perhaps the one she had always wanted. She was a single parent, had a child. She had not wanted to be denied anything. In those years since we had split up she'd had it all—she was a fiancée, a bride, a wife, a mother, a divorcée, and an employee. All that! It was an elaborate form of conquest—total transformation. I guessed her ex-husband had filled her with the confidence and given her the money she needed in order to leave him. That was what fascinated me: she really was different from the young woman I had known.

My
life has changed quite a bit.

She had truly found a new life. It obliquely gave me hope, but perhaps you had to be very shallow or calculating or greedy to make it work.

Now she and the child remained, and she was back to earth. She had gotten what she had asked for, even if it was not what she wanted. It was hard for her to be needy now—the child came first, and life could not have been easy. She was not young anymore and, as for her beauty, you had to subtract the child from her looks.

I was glad I had called her, because now I knew I never wanted to see her again. She sensed this. She had the instincts of an intrusive animal, the reflexes of a rat, always sniffing, always looking up, always alert and twitching.

"I have to go. I'm having a drink with someone."

"You're such a fucking snob."

Believing that I was rejecting her, she had to insult me—her pride demanded it. I let it pass.

"Sorry I intruded."

"You're so insincere."

"Do you really want to know what I have to do?"

"No, because you're too fucking anecdotal."

I pitied her. I pitied all people who helplessly raged at life and its injustice, never guessing that, however unfair it seemed, it was justly deserved. If her nose was in a trap, it was because she had been sniffing greedily for more cheese. That was the piteous part.

"See you later."

"Not if I can help it."

That was my reward for calling when I shouldn't have. It had been a mistake. I deserved her clumsy insults.

Who was he, this man she had married and divorced, the father of her child? I told myself it did not matter. But the longer I thought of it, the more profound my feeling that he mattered. In the end I was preoccupied by him, because whoever he might be, he was the man I would have become; whatever life he was leading would have been mine.

And though I did not know Wanda anymore, I understood that she had not merely been married and borne a child but that she had gotten a life. Yet what had happened to the man who had supplied that life? What she had left him with was what she would have left me with. Had she been my other wife, I would have been that man, and his life would have been mine.