Days Like Today

by Rachel Ingalls

  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 conversational 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.

  She looked into the mirror and combed her hair a different way. She tried on clothes she hadn’t worn for a while.

  No change would make a difference if hi
s thoughts were with someone else. She’d have become an object. She’d be the thing left behind to stay at home and take care of the children and the house.

  Never trust a betrayer, she said to her face in the mirror. If he did it once, he’ll do it again. Maybe that really was true. People tended to stick to familiar patterns of behavior. In his case … But that was nonsense. She knew that he loved her. And the children, too. He wasn’t promiscuous by temperament. This was all silly. What did it mean? It meant that whether he was in danger and under stress or whether he’d just escaped from the fighting and was feeling good, a pretty girl who made a beeline for him was going to hold his attention and possibly his affection too, for a while. But as long as his wife pretended not to notice, he’d never think of breaking up the marriage. Although why she should have to put up with that … and anyway, how could anyone love that girl, Alice, who looked as blank and empty as a doll?

  Anybody could love anybody, of course. No rules applied. But Joan didn’t think it was love. That might develop. It had happened before and then, without any admission or even discussion, it had ceased to be noticeable, and then it was gone.

  She stamped her foot at the sight of her reflection. What was wrong with her? Everything was still all right. Why was she scared now?

  The one person she could have talked to, who would know about everything, was the first wife: the woman she had wronged. Joan’s part in the business hadn’t been nearly so bad as the wrong Max had done; still, it meant that the two women who loved him could never talk. No trust could be established following an act of such treachery. They would remain enemies.

  It was just possible that if Max walked out, then after he became bored with the insipid, fame-hunting Alice, he’d go back to his first wife, leaving everyone else high and dry.

  What would she do then? She’d be taking care of the children and doing the laundry for the rest of her life; never having the love, never even having the sex.

  Who was it who had once said to her that she’d rather have good sex than love? And the reason given was that love invariably fell apart on you, whereas good sex always gave you a bang. Somebody she’d been to school with. The school reunion. A career girl who liked the footloose life. She couldn’t remember.

  *

  The children were in a rare period of unbroken routine. No crisis appeared near, or even possible, and Joan had the freedom to give in to her worries about herself. When Max was suddenly called out on an assignment again, she was partly taken up with other thoughts.

  Bruno would be setting out a week later on the same job, to follow in Max’s footsteps as far as he and his field team were able to go. Max didn’t have the TV cameras, the connection with NATO forces’ equipment and French army food supplies. He had personal contacts among the people who were fighting and killing. He had his eyes, his voice, the two spiral notebooks, two pens, two pencils and the miniature tape recorder. And his charm. And all his lucky talismans: the other charms, worn into battle like the witch doctor’s pouch belonging to a spear-carrying tribesman.

  She had to admit that the tiny objects annoyed her. It wasn’t just the fact that her husband treasured things given to him by strangers, that he insisted on keeping them by him in his darkest moments and that not one of them was from her – he didn’t, for instance, wear a wedding ring; her dislike of them had more to do with his need. If he had clung to a memento of her in that obsessed, fetishistic way, she’d have been pleased. But he had to have something else: some source of strength that excluded her. Other people’s presents, and their love, retained a magic property that her gifts no longer had; they were never used up or made ordinary. For him to care so much about them was like telling her that she had no magic.

  His need for them also reminded her of their youngest child, who, when he was still a baby, took delight in the bright toys she hung around his crib: his rattle, his twirling clown, his striped ball and the hanging mobile from which depended eight little blue birds that flew in a circle. And if all those baubles weren’t lined up in exactly the same order and height as usual, with the customary width of spacing between them, he’d scream with rage and then cry as if heartbroken: because nothing was right any longer.

  What would happen if Max decided that she was bringing him bad luck? Would he just throw her away, like the dud talismans? Like the first wife?

  *

  He went upstairs to begin packing and then came down to make a phone call. As he reached the living room, she started up the staircase with two ironed blouses and a skirt on a hanger.

  She put the clothes in the girls’ room, moving a few dresses along the closet rail to make room for the skirt, which she hung next to her older daughter’s ‘lucky’ blouse. It had taken hours of persuasion and lecturing before the girl had stopped wanting to wear the blouse every day. The most difficult argument to deal with had been the one following the statement, ‘School is definitely a war zone.’

  As she passed down the hallway again, she looked through the bedroom door. There on the bedspread was Max’s security belt and, visible through the unzipped opening of its pocket, his special package of charms: a narrow, flat triangle made by folding a handkerchief the way a flag is packed up, and at each crease adding a charm. The convenient shape and firm binding wouldn’t allow anything inside to jiggle around or fall out. Next to the charms was a pile of handkerchiefs and the front door keys, which Max kept separately and always left at home when he was traveling. Seeing the keys gave Joan the idea. There was an extra set up on the closet shelf.

  She brought down the spare keys, took one of the handkerchiefs, flattened it out and began to fold a section of the material until it formed a shape almost identical in appearance to a corner of the original. She wound the keys into the rest of the cloth, making a loose knot that could be mistaken for a natural entanglement: the result of one thing covering up another when all the clothes were being moved. The carefully constructed point could be taken for the remaining lines of ironing.

  She slid the substitute into the pocket of the security belt, leaving the zipper still open so that Max could check, just by looking, that the triangle was inside. And she put the one containing the charms up into the closet where the keys had been.

  And now they’d see, she thought. Maybe he’d never know. And then afterwards she could say, ‘See how silly that is. You didn’t have them this time and everything went fine.’

  If he did notice that the charms were gone, would he think it was an accident and that he’d grabbed up the wrong thing before rushing off to make his telephone call; or that she’d rearranged his packing in an effort to help?

  He’d have to think something like that, unless he noticed within the next few minutes and thought she was playing a joke on him. He wouldn’t suspect her of deliberate sabotage. Otherwise, the first thing he’d do when he came back would be to go straight to Alice’s place, where he’d spend five days talking, relaxing, winding down and of course giving that Alice plenty of what he didn’t seem to think his own wife needed very much of. That was how his first marriage had broken up. She ought to know. First came being taken for granted, then the complaints started. It was always better to stop talking and start doing something that made an improvement.

  If he discovered the keys, they might inspire him: he was a man who was stimulated by danger. It was possible that a happy, predictable family life was too safe for him.

  *

  Early in the afternoon he looked at his watch. He ran his hand over the outline of the security pocket under his belt. Then he checked that he was carrying or wearing every essential official document and that the two bags were on or under the front hall chair.

  He gathered everything up. She opened the door. He moved out on to the step, set the big bag down and put his arm around her.

  As she kissed him goodbye, she told him, ‘Don’t forget: you hold the keys to my heart.’

  ‘Mm,’ he said. ‘Behave yourself while I’m gone. Lay off the ice crea
m. Don’t speak to strangers.’

  ‘Bye, darling,’ she answered. ‘Don’t sleep with strangers.’

  ‘I said, “Speak to”.’

  ‘I can’t tell you not to do that. It’s your job.’

  He picked up the duffel bag again, backed down the front path and waved. From twenty feet away she got the full force of the famous smile, with the warmth of his personality aimed straight at her. She waved and blew kisses to him, all the time thinking: Don’t get hurt, don’t go near the shooting, don’t come back dead, don’t disappear out there, lost somewhere in a mass grave or a muddy field. Don’t go till tomorrow. Let’s be happy a little longer.

  That night she dreamt that he was shot, that they sent his body home in a coffin and that she had to go to the airport to pick it up. The coffin came around on the luggage carousel and, when it reached her, all movement stopped. She heard a faint hammering from deep inside, under a large keyhole right over the place that would line up with the heart of the corpse. Max had been put into the coffin while he was still alive: he was trying to get out but the key to the lock had been shut in with him. It was one of the keys she’d wrapped up in the handkerchief that was in his security pocket. As she listened to his struggles, she realized that he was never going to get out; he was going to die and she was to blame.

  In the morning she still felt shaken. After getting the children off to school, she telephoned three friends and two relatives, telling them that she might have to park the kids on them at some time during the next few days. She started to organize a list of clothes to pack into the children’s travel bags.

  She was standing in the kitchen and about to put a load of laundry into the machine, when she sensed that something wasn’t right. She caught no faintest smell of smoke or gas, no sinister tiny dripping or cracks or creakings that sounded out of place. And yet something was wrong. Her uneasiness increased. She turned slowly, going all the way around in a circle – not really looking, but just checking her surroundings – and stopped. The answer came to her: Max.