Seven Types of Ambiguity

by Elliot Perlman

“Joe, I know you don’t believe me, but I have not been having an affair with Simon Heywood. I’ve barely seen him since we got married. Actually, I don’t think I have seen him at all since we got married. I know things haven’t been so good between us for some time, but this whole business with Sam and Simon is a crazy nightmare for me, too; it’s as much out of left field for me as you say it is for you.”

  “As I say it is? What do you mean? Do you think I knew something about this in advance?”

  “No. But—”

  “But what? Jesus Christ, Anna! It was your ex-boyfriend who took him.”

  “That’s true,” she said quietly. “That’s true, Joe, but who was he with?”

  She was right. The police found our son with her old boyfriend and a woman I saw regularly for sex. I could not explain that. Perhaps she really could not explain Simon Heywood. Whether she could or not, I felt ashamed. I have certain needs and these needs do not, of themselves, make me a bad person. I have no choice with respect to them. People make a big deal of it but it’s just like eating, sleeping, or going to the toilet. What if your wife wouldn’t let you go to the toilet? You cannot force your wife to want you. In the beginning, you choose a woman who wants you but if she changes and you’re the last to know and you’re married, what do you do? I’m sure she tells Sophie everything. How long has Sophie known that her beautiful big sister married a mistake?

  “Do you still have sex?” Sophie would have asked.

  “Hardly ever.”

  Hardly ever. Almost never. Just a bit of comfort, even a caress, would have been a sign of hope. If you have these needs and you cannot force your wife to want you, what do you do? I have been seeing a woman, the same woman, a lovely young woman, every week for what must be well over a year, maybe two years. We talk. I have made her laugh. She’s bright, funny. Sometimes I concentrate on her pleasure. Sometimes she focuses on me. I pay her. I pay the house, and I tip her. Over time you grow to know each other, a little anyway. This was never meant to affect my son.

  “Joe, I have to know this.”

  “What?”

  “When you see that woman, is it . . . are you protected?”

  “Of course it is . . . was. It always has been.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Anna, you do believe me?” It was true. Angelique likes the slogan “If it’s not on, it’s not on.” She remarked on the cleverness of the same words meaning different things but being clearly understood by everyone. I don’t even try. I tried once. She wouldn’t agree to it, and she was right. It made me feel better about seeing her regularly because I knew then that she was safe. A small momentary frustration ultimately kept me coming back. It was good business.

  We were in our bed. Anna had not spoken for a while. I had just tried to assure her that I was safe, that I was clean. I never thought I would have to do that.

  “Anna, I had always hoped that you’d want me again . . . unprotected and I . . . wanted to be . . . ready. I wanted to be safe for you.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “With the woman . . . with the prostitute, what did you do?”

  “Oh, Anna. Let’s not talk about that.”

  “I want to know.” “No, you don’t.”

  “Don’t you think I’ve got a right to know?”

  “Oh, Anna. Let’s not talk about rights. I’m your husband.”

  “Is it too private?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. Yes.”

  “What, it’s just between you and her?”

  “Anna!”

  “What do you do?”

  “Anna, this humiliates both of us.”

  “You mean both you and her?”

  “Anna!”

  “Do you do it all positions? Does she let you do it anally?”

  “Anna, I’m not answering this.”

  “Do you get her to dress up?” She was crying. I leaned over to comfort her but she recoiled and her voice grew louder and raspier through her crying.

  “Do you hit her, just a bit? Does she piss on you?”

  “Oh, Anna, please!”

  “Does she piss on you?”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Anna! Let’s not do this to each other.”

  She threw the covers off her side of the bed in one quick, agitated movement and leaned halfway up on her elbow.

  “She does, doesn’t she?”

  “Anna!”

  “You won’t answer the question because she does and you can’t even lie straight in bed.”

  “Anna, you’re getting hysterical.”

  “Just answer the question then.”

  “Will you calm down if I do? Why are you asking these questions? You’re the one who turns her back on me. How long has it been, Anna? How long?”

  “Fuck you, Joe. Answer the question.”

  “Once. Once she did. I didn’t ask her to. She just did it.”

  “You’re disgusting. Get out of my bed!”

  15. Years ago, in the period after our first son had died and I was trying to rejuvenate an intimacy between us, I had once, during a thus-far unsuccessful lovemaking session, suggested that she sit on top of me and just let herself go. She was horrified. I was just casting around for anything that might spice things up, just trawling my mind for anything at all, flailing around, desperate to ignite her. What was wrong with that? I didn’t particularly want it. I thought she might like it. She didn’t and obviously she had never forgotten it. But it was a random, private sexual suggestion from a husband to a wife made in an attempt to catch a spark. It was wrong to convict a man for something like that. I didn’t take other people’s children.

  On reflection, her questioning seemed consistent with the position she had taken from the moment Sam was returned to us. I could not really believe that she hadn’t been having an affair with Simon Heywood. Everything pointed to it. Her anger, her indignation, was clearly genuine but it would have us both at fault in order to mitigate what she had been doing for years.

  Other than neutral questions—“Are you making coffee?”—or innocent statements of fact—“My car is making that funny whirring sound again”—all our more lengthy conversations since Sam was taken ended in shouting and the verbal equivalent of one of us hanging up. The more I thought about it the more I became convinced that she had been seeing Simon. Looking back, there had been signs. I can’t remember what they were anymore, but I remember the idea of her seeing someone flickering across my mind. Did it bother me? Of course it did, but you content yourself with the uncertainty. In all likelihood, I would not have given her the benefit of the doubt had she been a stock I was advising on, but I gave myself the benefit of my doubt about her just to put it out of my mind. Even if it was just for the sex, she had to be seeing him. We never slept together anymore and, despite these cold troubled phases, she was essentially a passionate woman. Even during those times in the past when she would have nothing to do with me, say between our first son’s conception and Sam’s, even then, she used to satisfy herself, at least occasionally, with a battery-operated toy I had bought her once from a little dive in St. Kilda. She’d ducked into a cake shop and I told her I’d meet her at the car. When I showed it to her at home, she pretended to be shocked and embarrassed, but I know she’s used it. She thinks I don’t know.

  I was even skeptical about the conference she was supposed to be going to the night Sam was taken. But then, that had to be genuine because she couldn’t have been off for a weekend away with Simon the night he took Sam. And he had planned it. He had chosen the day carefully. It wasn’t an accident. Unless she was supposed to meet him at his place with Sam? That was unlikely. It didn’t make any sense. And where did Angelique fit in? You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

  Neither of us was sleeping much in the period after Sam was taken. I tried to tell her that there was something exciting, something big I was working on at the office, something potentially career advancing. She was as poli
te as one could be and still exhibit unequivocal indifference. It had been years since she had once or twice shown any real interest in my work, or even in the market generally.

  “Isn’t it exciting?” she had once said. “No one really knows what’s going to happen.” This was before we were married. Now she couldn’t care less. Occasionally she spouts some undergraduate nonsense about the environment or the homeless or something, as if she, or any of us, could be players in those arenas. She has said that she regrets not studying further. The money she makes is not bad at all for a second income, but we don’t really need it. We haven’t needed it for years, not that I ever discouraged her from taking a postgraduate course even when we did. She’s not serious about it. I secretly suspect Anna is afraid, like most people, that she’s an idiot, which is crazy. It couldn’t be further from the truth, but of course I wouldn’t tell her that, not anymore.

  There is an old fire station near us that was recently turned into an art gallery. She thought that was a good thing. We argued about it. She called me a philistine under her breath. I heard it.

  “Well, if I’m such a philistine, how come a man like Donald Sheere respects me? He’s on all these boards that you have respect for, patron of the arts, a regular Medici.”

  “He respects your capacity to make money for him.”

  “You know this, do you? Anyway, listen, you can do worse things for somebody than make money for him.”

  “He called today, you know.”

  “When? Donald Sheere called?”

  “His office called. The Sheeres send their apologies. They can’t make the dinner party.”

  “What are you talking about?” She could not have said anything that would hollow me, gut me more immediately.

  “Something must’ve come up. I don’t know.”

  “No reason? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “They just called today. I’m telling you now.”

  “You know this is important to me, to all of us, and you’re giving me shit about art galleries . . . about the community’s need to express itself. Jesus, Anna!”

  I had been trying to talk directly to Sheere ever since my meeting with Sid Graeme but he had been, even for him, unusually hard to get. Mitch had been calling me repeatedly to find out what Sheere thought of Sid Graeme’s plans for Health National, and I kept having to tell him that I hadn’t been able to get hold of Sheere. It was embarrassing, bad enough in front of Mitch, but Sid Graeme was positively strung out when he called. “Were you the right man for the job?” Sid wondered aloud. I started to wonder too. Sheere had always returned my calls fairly promptly and never before had I so stressed the urgency of my need to speak to him. I started to doubt the “special relationship” with Sheere that had led Sid Graeme to rely on me. How could I get people so wrong, or had something changed? Had I inadvertently done something to offend him?

  The funny thing was that my disappointment, each time I put in a call to him and was told that he would call me back, was tempered by a certain calm. It was a calm born not of confidence but of relief. I was calling him about as often as I could without stalking him. I was doing my job up to that point. As long as he was unavailable for me to pitch the Health National managed-care thing to him, he couldn’t reject it. And I couldn’t fail. But it was the postponement of a failure that would in a short time itself become a failure.

  The dinner party was my insurance policy. It was my guaranteed opportunity to pitch for Sid Graeme. It had also been the only thing I could offer Sid and Mitch to placate them. When Anna told me they had canceled I was suddenly at sea.

  “How much do you need, Joe?”

  “What?”

  “How much money do you need to make? When will it be enough for you?”

  “Anna, what the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Well, Don Sheere doesn’t actually need any more and you have the house you wanted, the car you wanted. Yet you’re so agitated when a couple pulls out of a dinner party.”

  “Jesus, Anna! It’s not just any couple.”

  “You don’t really like him, Joe. You don’t really even know him.”

  “Anna, what do you know about what I know? You sure as hell don’t know what I like.”

  “No, I’d have to be a prostitute to know that.”

  “Why are you trying to goad me? You want an excuse to run off with the schoolteacher? You never needed one before.”

  “How many times have I got to tell you? I haven’t seen him in almost ten years.”

  “Anna, you were planning to see him the night Sam was taken. You knew all about it. That’s why you weren’t worried about him.”

  “Wasn’t worried about him! Are you out of your mind? I wasn’t planning to see Simon the night Sam was taken, not that night or any night. You’re paranoid, Joe.”

  “I’m paranoid, am I? My son is stolen by my wife’s ex-boyfriend only to be found by the police—”

  “Joe, the police—”

  “Let me finish. The police say that the ex-boyfriend’s story is that the two of you are lovers. That’s what they told me when I picked Sam up from the police station. When I ask you about it, you continue to deny it and when I have my doubts you say I’m paranoid. But you don’t offer any alternative explanation. Really, Anna, with intellectuals such as the two of you, I would have thought you’d get your stories straight. You’d better talk to him.”

  “He’s in prison.”

  I looked up at her. She looked horrified at her own words.

  “You tried to talk to him.”

  “No.”

  “You tried to get your stories straight.”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Well, how did you know he was in prison?”

  “The police told me. Anyway, it’s in the papers.”

  “You asked them.”

  “Yes, I asked them. I wanted to hear it from them. Someone taking Sam without our permission, I wanted to be sure I knew where they were.”

  “You were talking to the police?”

  “They called today. They want—”

  “Have you told them everything?”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Did you tell them you were on your way to a conference the Friday Sam was taken?”

  “Joe, they didn’t call to—”

  “You’d better at least get your story straight for the police. If I could find out, so could they.”

  “Find out what?”

  “You had no conference to go to. There was no conference.”

  “Joe, the police called for you.”

  “What do you mean they called for me?”

  “They want to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “I don’t know. They wouldn’t say. Why don’t you ask the prostitute?”

  “Anna, just tell me the fucking truth.”

  “The truth is the police want to talk to you.”

  16. I put on my jacket. It was about eight o’clock at night when I got into the car feeling suddenly and quite wrongly as if I had nothing to lose. Anna probably thought I was driving to the local police station. I don’t know what she thought. I didn’t particularly know what I was thinking either, but I straightened my tie when I stopped the car outside the ivy-covered walled city that was Donald Sheere’s Toorak house. I took a deep salesman’s breath.

  Would he offer me a drink? I needed one. All those manicured shrubs and stepping-stones, ascending quasi-ancient pillars of rock off to the side of the stepping-stones, all from someplace Jesus never reached. They did their job on me as I waited, first to finally press the doorbell and then for someone to open it. The security camera was perched high in the corner above the doorway and to the right of one of the two Roman columns that guarded the front door. Who was it that looked down at me on a screen? Were Elizabeth and Donald Sheere in the same room? Were they watching television? What programs did Donald Sheere watch? Were they home?

  A middle-aged foreign woman
I assumed to be a housekeeper opened the door. When she had trouble repeating my name, I reached into my wallet and gave her my card. She read it slowly, mouthing the consonants of my surname incorrectly, almost in a whisper. Ger-ag-kh-tee.

  “For Mr. Sheere?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” I said, trying to hide my lack of patience, my exasperation, my nervousness. I was still saying it when she closed the front door.

  I stood waiting outside his front door silently rehearsing my spiel. If he was busy I could come back later, but I had something to talk to him about that I really thought he would want to hear. The ring of my cell phone startled me. I had forgotten to turn it off. The caller display indicated my mother’s telephone number. Why was she calling me on my cell? I let it go through to my voice mail. Sorry, Mum. I’m working. Why did I feel as though I were auditioning for something? I was trying to make the man some money. He could only say no. That was the worst he could do. I could survive that.

  I wondered what my mother wanted. I turned my back to the door and looked at the shrubberies and the Sheeres’ own little Stonehenge. I thought of our fathers, Donald Sheere’s father and mine. The distance between them was reflected in the time it was taking for the housekeeper to come back to the door. She could’ve just told me he wasn’t at home. That wouldn’t have taken so long. I would’ve gone away having done all I could have done to get hold of him and maybe more than I should have done. He would have learned that I had visited his home at night. Surely that would have made him curious enough to return my call. I started to wonder if the housekeeper had forgotten me. I couldn’t just leave in case, after all that, he was available. I was wondering what I should do, if it hadn’t been a huge mistake to come to his home like this, when, without warning, the door opened.

  The housekeeper invited me in and asked me to wait in the foyer. I’d been there before, but nothing looked familiar. The floor was mottled white marble. On one side of the front door was a winding staircase and on the other was a bust on a pedestal, presumably of some dead family member. Behind it the wall was almost entirely taken up by an oil painting of a bear being torn apart by five or so wolf-like dogs, with some seventeenth-century-looking men thrusting spears into the bear for good measure, all of it encased in a thick baroque frame. I was straining to see the name of the artist when I heard his voice.