The Adultery Club (41 page)

The link between us, such as it was, dissolves.

“What did you mean,” I ask abruptly, “when you asked if I wanted him back?”

The grandfather clock ticks loudly in the hall. Somewhere beneath my feet, Don Juan scrabbles, his claws clicking on the stone floor. I don’t like her perfume: strong and synthetic. It makes me feel slightly sick.

“I need to know,” she says finally, staring into her mug. “I can’t make a go of things until I do. I don’t want to come home every night wondering if he’s gone back home to you.”
The strap of her bag slides off her shoulder and she pushes it back. “That’s all. I just want to know it’s over between you.”

She isn’t here to put things right. She hasn’t come to apologize:
If you want him back, here you are, he’s yours
. She isn’t going to tell me it’s all been a terrible mistake. She’s here for reassurance: that I won’t steal him back from her.

A bubble of hysterical laughter rises to my lips. I cover my mouth with my hand.

“You expect me to
help
you?” I demand incredulously.

Her cheeks stain. “I know it seems ridiculous, me coming to you. I know you must hate me. I’ve given you every reason. But you have Trace now,” she pleads. “You don’t need Nicholas anymore. Can’t you let him go? Can’t you let him be happy with me?”

I lean both arms heavily on the sink, my back toward her. “I’m not stopping him.”

“But he needs to know you’ve moved on. He can’t shut the door otherwise. You have to tell him—”

“I don’t,” I say coldly,
“have
to do anything.”

She swallows hard. I pull the edges of my dressing gown a little closer.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbles. “I didn’t mean it like that. Of course you don’t have to say anything. It’s just—I don’t understand. Your marriage was dead, you have a new life now, I know you must be upset that things worked out as they did, but it wasn’t my fault—”

I spin round.

“What makes you think my marriage was dead?”

“But—” she flounders. “But there’s Trace—”

“No,” I say tightly, “there isn’t. For a few weeks, perhaps, after Nicholas left, he filled the gap. Or rather, tried to.
Nothing, actually, can mend the rip in my heart that losing my husband to you has made. Nothing.”

She bites her lip. I’m suddenly reminded how young she is; how little she knows.

Old enough.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve
done?”
I demand fiercely.
“Do you?
The damage you’ve caused? Do you know what it’s like to listen to your child sob herself to sleep in the next room because her father’s left and she thinks that somehow it must be her fault?” My body trembles with anger. “Do you know what it’s like to face her in the morning and see the accusation in her eyes, because you couldn’t protect her from this pain? You’ve taken away from my children the
one
thing I wanted to give them more than anything else: a happy, stable home.” I close my eyes, misery rising in my throat like bile. “You’re not a mother; you can’t know. They’ll carry the scars with them for the rest of their lives. They’ll take this baggage with them into every relationship they ever have. A mother wouldn’t do this. A mother wouldn’t smash three little girls’ childhoods just for the sake of a quick roll in the hay.”

She seems to shrink back in her chair with each word, as if I’m pelting her with rocks.
Good
, I think bitterly. Let it hurt.
Good
.

“You think my marriage is dead because he slept with you?” I challenge. “Well, let me tell you something, Sara. Marriage is hard work.
Very
hard work. If you don’t both put everything you have into making it a success, it fails. Sometimes it’s wonderful and romantic and everything you ever dreamed it would be when you stood at the altar and made your vows to love and cherish until death parted you.
And sometimes,” I say, my voice hard, “it’s dull and frustrating and difficult and you can scarcely bear the sight of each other. Sometimes you bore each other to tears. It only takes one trip, one stumble, and it can all come crashing down.”

I push my hair behind my ears, my hands shaking with anger. What can
she
know of seeing ten years of your life wiped out in a few short hours? Of watching the man you’ve loved, whose children you’ve borne, walk away from you to another woman?

“My marriage was very much alive until he met you,” I hiss. “But you didn’t care. You saw someone you wanted, and you took him.
You took him
.”

“I didn’t make him,” she protests. “He had a choice. He
wanted me.”

“What man wouldn’t?” I laugh shortly. “You’re beautiful. You’re young. You’re not his wife. Of
course
he wanted you. But did he make the first move, or did
you?”

She looks away.

“You won’t always be twenty-six,” I say bitterly, “with your smooth unlined face and firm body. You think you’ll be young forever at your age. Forty seems as far away as a hundred. But it sneaks up on you when you’re not looking. Nothing happens for years and years—and then suddenly,
wham!
, you wake up one day and your hips have got bigger and your lips have got smaller and your breasts are halfway down to your stretch marks and what the hell happened? But
he
,” I add,
“he
just gets distinguished wings of gray at his temples and
character
in his face and secretaries’ eyes following him as he walks past their desks.”

I wrap my arms around myself, barely seeing her anymore. “You marry a man and give him children and tell
yourself it doesn’t matter that you’re not so young now, that your body isn’t as taut, your face as clear, because he loves you anyway. You let your guard down: You let him see you sniveling with a cold or with your hair in rat’s tails because you haven’t had time to wash it, and you think it doesn’t matter.” I pace the length of the kitchen, frightening the rabbit under the table. “At work you get out of the fast lane to make way for the bright young things without families, reminding yourself that giving him somewhere he wants to come home to is far more important than a corner office or a promotion, that
he’ll
still find you interesting. You know that there are younger women than you, prettier women, more exciting women; but
you’re
the one he chose to marry,
you’re
the one he promised to love forever.” I shiver. “You put him at the center of your life, at the center of your heart, where he should be; and then overnight, it’s all gone. Gone.”

“I’m—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen,” she whispers.

I jump; I’d forgotten she was there.

“You could have had anyone you wanted,” I say helplessly. “Someone free to love you, without a wife and family. Why did you have to take my husband?”

“Because I fell in love with him,” she says simply.

For the first time, I notice the shadows beneath her eyes, the fatigue and weariness in her face. I recognize in her expression the fear and uncertainty that walk hand in hand with love. I can’t bring myself to forgive what she’s done. But with a sudden rush, I begin—just
begin
—to understand it.

“It’s not just about love.” I sigh. “Marriage.”

“No.” She folds her hands in her lap. “No. I see that now.”

My nose starts to run. Using the sleeve of my dressing gown, like a child, I wipe my face.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she pleads. “I know that’s no consolation. But I didn’t mean this. I’m not a bad person. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I kept thinking I could stop it, that no one would ever need to know—”

“Enough. Please.” Exhausted, I collapse into a chair. “Why are you here, Sara? Does Nicholas know?”

“No.” She shoves herself back from the table and stands up. “I told myself you were happy without him. Convinced myself he wouldn’t have come to me if his marriage had been a good one. But that’s not true, is it?”

I shake my head.

And then, “He loves you, not me,” she says clearly.

I can’t breathe.

“He’s never loved me. Not enough, anyway.” She rubs the heels of her hands against her eyes, and I’m reminded of Evie. Somewhere, deep inside, I feel a dim tug of pity. “He wasn’t free to love me. I thought it didn’t matter, that I could love enough for the both of us, but it doesn’t work like that, does it? And it turns out,” she attempts a smile, “that I have a conscience after all.”

She hitches her bag on her shoulder. Her hand shakes, and I realize how much this confrontation has taken out of her, too.

“What are you doing here?” I ask again.

She shrugs, then gives me a sad half-smile. “I’ve been trying to work that one out myself.”

A fragile tendril of intimacy unfurls between us. We are linked, after all, by love: for the same man.

“May I use the loo,” she says, “before I go?”

I point her in the direction of the downstairs lavatory.
She’s come all the way here to offer me a choice: Take him, or give him back to me. Free and clear.

But it’s not up to me. I can’t go to him.
He
has to come to
me
. He’s the one who made the choice to leave: He is the one who has to make the choice to come back. Otherwise I’ll never know; it will undermine everything we try to build. I have to hear that he loves me not from
her
, but from Nicholas himself.

She opens the lavatory door, and dips her head around it. Her expression is a strange mixture of pain, embarrassment—and an extraordinary, fierce relief.

“Do you have any Tampax you could give me?” she says. “I wasn’t expecting it, but my period just started.”

Divorce
is a difficult business. Never more so, may I suggest, than when your lawyer looks at you with an expression that suggests in no uncertain terms that all men are bastards, and you’re left shifting uncomfortably in your seat.

Janis Schultz does not have a single photograph or personal memento anywhere in her spartan office. A thick slab of polished glass separates us, atop which rests her computer and one slim manila folder: mine. Its contents currently number a single appointment slip and two sheets of foolscap upon which she has written her notes during this meeting in a uniform, precise hand. I know that once this process gets fully underway, that solitary folder will spawn letters, faxes, forms to be completed, affidavits to be sworn, until the paperwork fills a box eighteen inches deep. We will each, Malinche and I, be required to provide copies of bank and credit card statements, insurance policies and share
certificates, details of our income and our outgoings—not just those you would expect, the standard, ubiquitous expenses like school fees and mortgages, but the intimate, private details of our lives, the window cleaner and the osteopath, gym membership and private proctology examinations: all of it laid bare for consideration and dry judgment.

The carpet is clearly new: The room smells pungently of rubber. It tastes acrid in my mouth. I pinch the bridge of my nose, my head aching.

Ms. Schultz is known for her cool, detached professionalism and tempered approach. I haven’t met her before—one reason I chose her—but by reputation she chases neither headlines nor precedent, and while naturally seeking congenial rulings for her clients, makes it plain from the outset that confrontational terms such as “victory” do not belong in her chambers.

She is perceived as a wife’s lawyer. Her legal obligation will be to me; but her hand may be stayed from the usual gladiatorial excesses by a modicum of sympathy for my wife. It will, perhaps, go some way toward ameliorating my natural advantage in being so familiar with this eviscerating process. I want, above all else, for this to be fair.

“And your wife can’t be persuaded to file a petition herself?” Janis Schultz asks.

“I haven’t asked her,” I say.

She taps her pen against the pad. “You do not wish to wait for two years.”

It is no longer a matter of what I
wish
, but what is
right
. Sara is pregnant with my child; I cannot leave her to twist in the wind. My marriage to Mal is over, that much is clear. The only honorable thing now is to extract myself from it and
attempt to do the right thing by Sara, whose only fault has been to love me.

“Very well. The grounds for our petition, Mr. Lyon?”

I hesitate. Even though Malinche has found solace in the arms of another man, I cannot bring myself to sue her for divorce on the grounds of her adultery: It would be monstrously hypocritical. My options, however, as I am only too well aware, are limited.

“I find in instances such as this,” Ms. Schultz says carefully, “a charge of unreasonable behavior is often cross-petitioned, where there is cause.”

I sigh heavily.

“There is cause,” I say.

We will provoke Malinche by charging her with unreasonable behavior—“On the fourth of this month, the Respondent rinsed out the milk bottles with tepid water instead of hot, as had previously been agreed with the Petitioner from the outset of the marriage”—and her lawyers will no doubt advise her to throw the book at me, to insist that she cross-petitions on the grounds of my adultery. At which point I will concede the issue of blame, and secure the divorce.

Ms. Schultz recrosses her legs. Beneath the glass slab, her crisp gray wool skirt rides up a little, exposing an inch or two of thigh. She is close to sixty; my interest is academic.

I glance up, to find her steely gaze upon me.

“Mr. Lyon. I think that’s all,” she says knowingly.

Her handshake is firm, masculine. She ushers me briskly from her office.

I pause at the door. Atop a low bookcase is a small cream cardboard box, of the kind in which handmade chocolates are presented. A gold label affixing a ribbon in place suggests these originated in Belgium.

A memory ambushes me: Malinche, waiting for me in my office, perhaps a month or two after we first met. It was late; everyone else had already gone home. She had persuaded the cleaner to let her in, and then sat in the darkness until I returned from Court, whither Fisher had dispatched me with a vexatious case with which he did not wish to be troubled.