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by Matthew Klein

  ‘It’s a bit uncomfortable,’ she said.

  Timothy frowned. They had held many uncomfortable conversations in the past, but never had she pre-announced that one would be uncomfortable. What every uncomfortable conversation had in common was that it was a surprise, that it began with an innocuous comment or a flip remark, that it arrived like the monsoon, sudden and violent.

  ‘I’m very interested,’ he said.

  ‘I need a project,’ she said. ‘Something to do. While you’re at work.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. It sounded unobjectionable so far.

  ‘I think about why I get sad sometimes, and I think it’s because … because I have too much time, too much time to think, too much time to stew. I always stir things around in my mind. While you’re at work, I’m alone at the house, and maybe that makes me a little crazy. So if I had something to do …’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. It hardly even matters. But I need a project. Something to occupy my time.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. But it was clear she already had something in mind.

  ‘I was thinking about redecorating the house. You know, updating the look a little. Making it a little more …’ She searched for the word. ‘Contemporary.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I would hire a decorator. You know, and work with him. And that would give me something to do.’

  ‘That sounds fine,’ he said.

  ‘But, Timothy, I want this to be my project. I don’t want to keep asking you permission, asking for money, getting you to sign checks. I think I need to be, you know, in control of something.’

  ‘What are we talking about, exactly?’ Somehow, life always came down to money. One person extracting money from someone else.

  ‘Don’t worry. We would agree on a budget up front. Nothing extravagant. But once we agreed, I would ask you to trust me, to let me manage everything.’

  ‘Give me a number.’

  ‘Two hundred thousand dollars,’ she said.

  ‘To decorate? That’s crazy.’

  ‘Well, maybe it’s a little much. But that’s the worst-case scenario. I’d try to spend less. But there’s so much we could do. The house is full of dead space – the living room, the dining room. We could make it so much warmer.’

  ‘You’re saying I should just put two hundred thousand dollars in your checking account, and let you spend it however you see fit.’

  ‘That would make me happy,’ she said.

  ‘I would like to make you happy,’ he said. ‘But Katherine.’

  ‘Please, Timothy.’ She reached across the table and took his hand. ‘It would mean so much to me.’

  He looked into her eyes. They were still the pretty blue eyes he had first looked into more than twenty years ago, but now there were crow’s feet at the corners, and fine dry lines etched around her mouth. Maybe what she said was true, that she needed a project, something to keep her busy, something to call her own. She had been cooped up in the house for so long, while Timothy was able to enjoy his life, to come and go as he pleased, to travel, to work. And two hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money to most people, but to him it was one month’s worth of management fees for his fund. It was one good trade.

  ‘What the hell. Don’t spend it like a drunken sailor.’

  She smiled. ‘Thank you, Timothy. I think this will really help us.’

  ‘I’ll take care of it at work on Monday. The money, I mean.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘While we’re on the subject of love and money,’ he said, ‘I have something for you.’ He removed the jewelry box from his blazer and held it out between his fingers, as if offering a cigar. ‘Happy anniversary,’ he said.

  She touched her hand to her mouth. Her hand shook nervously. She opened the case and stared at the necklace. The diamonds and sapphire glittered in the sunlight. ‘Oh God,’ she said.

  ‘If I had known about the whole house redecorating plan …’ he said.

  She ignored him. ‘Timothy, this is beautiful.’

  ‘Well, after twenty years,’ he said, ‘you’re more beautiful than ever, and you deserve something equally beautiful.’ Timothy looked around the room for the waiter. He needed more coffee. ‘I hope you enjoy it,’ he said. He made eye contact with the ballerina waiter, gestured to his coffee cup. ‘I think this is going to be a great year – a great year for us,’ he said, hoping. ‘Our best year yet.’

  And then something strange happened, something Timothy was not expecting. Katherine began to cry. A younger couple at an adjacent table looked up at her and then down again, quickly, embarrassed.

  ‘Katherine,’ he said. He leaned over the table and grabbed her forearm. ‘Katherine, what’s the matter?’

  She shook her head, wiping the tears from her face. Other patrons in the restaurant turned to look. She sniffled, stopped crying. She dabbed at her eyes with her napkin. The waiter arrived with the coffee decanter, saw her eyes, and walked away without pouring.

  ‘Katherine,’ he said again, ‘what’s wrong?’

  She shook her head. Timothy chalked it up to female emotion: the pretty restaurant, the anniversary weekend, his agreeing to her decorating scheme, the necklace. It was not until later that he realized it was something else, something he could never imagine. But for now he sat quietly, and wondered if he would ever be able to get that second cup of coffee.

  6

  Despite his initial dread, Timothy enjoyed the anniversary weekend. Outside the house, alone with her husband, away from the familiar landmarks that reminded her of her own unhappiness, Katherine was a different woman – or, rather, she was the woman that she used to be, before the years had worn her down. The weekend reminded Timothy of what he loved about her: her cool, reptilian insight – the way she could size up other couples from across the room and tell Timothy their story. ‘Look at them,’ she said, sitting in the Ventana Inn restaurant, during Saturday’s dinner. ‘He hates her. You can see it the way he won’t look at her. He’s embarrassed by her.’ Or: ‘You see that couple? Third marriage. She’s too young to be the first, and he’s ignoring her too much to be the second.’

  He liked the way Katherine’s plain, fresh-scrubbed looks made her look more wholesome than the other older wives at the Ventana Inn, and the fact that, away for the weekend, she didn’t bother covering up the freckles on her cheeks. He liked her sarcasm, the way she mocked the New Age pretentiousness of the resort, with its ‘Spa Menu’ that included a Sea Enzyme Organic Mask (‘Seagull poop,’ she said to Timothy through clenched lips, as the masseuse plopped it on her face) and ‘Astrology Readings’ and ‘Color Energy Analysis,’ whatever that was.

  On Saturday they hiked through Point Lobos Park. They parked their car in a small lot and walked a quarter-mile to the beach. (‘Come on, Gimpy,’ she called over her shoulder to him. ‘Don’t let that war wound slow you down.’) At the beach, they removed their sneakers and flats and padded through the sand, weaving a path of wet footprints through seaweed and stranded jellyfish. It was low tide: it smelled of sulfur and salt. They were the only people on the shore.

  The beach ended at a rocky promontory, a solid wall of stones a hundred feet high, which jutted into the sea. A sign indicated the beginning of a trailhead. It said ‘Use Caution,’ and stressed the point with an illustration of a stick-figure man leaning precariously over the edge of a cliff.

  Katherine’s gaze followed the trail up into the rocks. ‘Can you make it to the top?’

  He wasn’t sure if she was teasing or genuinely concerned. Either way, that forced his hand. ‘Of course.’

  They followed the trail away from the water and up onto the wall of rocks. The trail started off steeply and then pitched even steeper. At times it was not even a trail at all but rather a set of tiny steps carved out of the rock, a WPA project from back when chiseling sandstone by hand was a good day’s work and shoes only reached size six.

  By the tenth step, Timothy’s kne
e hurt. He looked down and saw that he had managed to climb only twenty feet. Only another hundred to go.

  The stairs ended and deposited them on a dirt path, which weaved back and forth, a long vertiginous switchback, with a heavy chain running along the ocean side of the path to keep hikers from falling down the cliffs.

  After ten minutes they reached the top, a plateau on the crag. They looked down. One hundred feet below, beyond the switchback trail, the ocean pounded against the jagged seawall, throwing foam whitecaps into the air.

  They stood there for five minutes, silently, at the edge of the cliff. Timothy held Katherine tightly from behind, his hands locked around her ribs. They watched the ocean crash and ebb. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, loudly, so he could hear her over the waves.

  She took his hands and guided them down to her belly. She pushed them into her flesh. ‘Empty,’ she said.

  He understood what the word meant. The word represented the greatest source of sadness for her, that they could never have children. It was one more strange thing about Katherine: every time she saw something beautiful, instead of being happy, she felt sad, as if she couldn’t allow herself a moment of peace, and needed instead to remember the awful parts of her life.

  They had tried several times to have children. She had first miscarried when they had been married for three months. They waited to try again. A year and a half later, she had her second miscarriage, this time at four months. She was devastated. All the women around her – at church, at her college reunion, in the supermarket – were having children. Some of her peers had already had a second, and dinner parties suddenly became new parents’ forums, where the talk revolved around issues about which Katherine had no idea: teething, first steps, nursery school, doctors’ visits, sibling rivalry.

  Another year passed and Timothy convinced her to try again. This time, when she reached six months of pregnancy and she was showing, they thought she would make it. They decided what to name the child: if it was a boy, Connor, after her grandfather; if a girl, Lisa, after her grandmother.

  At the end of the sixth month she knew it would be a boy, could feel it in her bones, and she and Timothy talked about Connor, imagined what he would look like, pictured him as a schoolchild, then as a teenager. The miscarriage came a day before she started her seventh month. The child was stillborn.

  Katherine stayed in the house for the next month, refusing visitors, turning away company. Timothy cared for her as best he could, but didn’t know what to say, whether to commiserate with her or to downplay the tragedy, to be sad or to be strong. So he did nothing, and instead just waited for her sadness to pass.

  It did, eventually. When Timothy concluded they would never have children, he was disappointed at first, but the feeling passed. He realized that he was secretly relieved: relieved that the problem wasn’t his fault, relieved that he could continue to enjoy his life – going to the office, putting in six-hour days, flying to New York to meet with investors, playing tennis at the Circus Club on the weekend, traveling to St. Bart’s once each year – without the burden of children.

  At first there was some talk of fertility specialists, or of adoption, but Katherine dropped these ideas and stopped speaking about the subject of children altogether. Soon the entire matter was put away, never to be spoken of, just one more item in that cluttered attic that held their marriage’s disappointments.

  ‘It is beautiful,’ Timothy agreed, as they stared at the ocean below, crashing against the rocks. ‘And I love you.’ Which was the only thing he could say when confronted with her sadness.

  That evening, back in the hotel room, they had a few unscripted hours before their dinner reservation. Katherine suggested that Timothy have a massage in the Ventana’s spa – to ‘work on those soldier’s knees’ she said. Timothy said that they should go together, but she insisted on staying behind, alone, in the room.

  ‘I could use some quiet time,’ she said.

  He didn’t complain. A couple hours of separateness were welcome. As he strolled across the Ventana grounds, following the signs for the spa, he tried to conjure a picture of his masseuse. He decided she should be a young Swedish girl – tall, with strong hands. A firm grasp of English was of secondary importance.

  So he was disappointed when the matron at the spa’s front desk informed him that only one masseuse was available on such short notice, and that he was a ‘gentleman’ named Tony.

  He may indeed have been a gentleman, Timothy decided as he lay naked under Tony’s pounding fists – but only if the Crips of Compton made a habit of opening car doors for their ladies. Tony was a large black man, handsome and muscular. Although he was clean cut, he had a raised scar carved along his jaw line, like a long lyrical paragraph written in Braille. Timothy decided it was probably not a massage-related injury.

  But, after some initial discomfort at being naked and rubbed by another man – and one who had possibly been at the receiving end of a filet knife – Timothy soon relaxed, and was surprised to be awakened from sleep fifty minutes later at the end of the session.

  ‘I hope you enjoyed that, Mr. Van Bender,’ Tony said.

  ‘I certainly did,’ Timothy said. ‘Those are some powerful hands.’ He realized that last remark could be construed as homosexual, so he added: ‘Much better than my wife.’

  Tony smiled. His look said: Don’t flatter yourself. ‘Take your time getting dressed.’ He left the room.

  Timothy put on his clothes, returned to the front desk and put the bill on his room tab. He left Tony a fifty-dollar bill in a small envelope.

  Then he headed back to his room.

  He started back across the Ventana grounds, whistling a Puccini aria and windmilling his arms, savoring the feeling of relaxed muscles and loose joints. He came to his room. He turned the key in the lock and pushed open his door. Katherine sat cross-legged on the bed, with her back to him. She was leaning over, writing in her diary, a thick, leather-bound journal with gold leaf pages. She continued writing, and studiously ignored him.

  Katherine was a prodigious diarist. For as long as he had known her, she had carried out her strange daily ritual: scrupulously recording each day’s events, her feelings, her longings, in a tightly wound script that practically required a magnifying glass to read. Sometimes, after fighting with Timothy, she would retreat to her bedroom like a sullen teenage girl, and write. Once, two years into their marriage, when Katherine had left the house, Timothy skulked into her closet and stared at the neat stack of journals, the identical leather-bound volumes piled in obsessive rows, between old sweaters and purses – and he couldn’t resist. He carefully removed the top volume, flipped to a random page, and read.

  It was a strange experience: first, the sheer tediousness of it, the obsessive detail – what she ate (‘for breakfast: muesli and skim milk; one half grapefruit; one piece wheat toast; jam’), what she wore (‘blue floral Ralph Lauren sun dress; straw hat’), where she went, whom she saw on the street (‘saw Betty inside Gristede’s; later, said hello to Nancy Stanton in the parking lot’). Interspersed in the monotonous catalog were startling, mean-spirited observations, which flashed and lit the dreary page like lightning on a moonless night. He remembered one passage in particular, about an incident that occurred when they drove to the opera in San Francisco: ‘When the police officer pulled us over, Timothy smiled at him and tried to bribe him. He did it in his usual charming way, so that it hardly seemed like a bribe. It was, of course, typical of him. Why does he feel that he is above all rules, that he can get away with anything, that the laws of the universe do not apply to him? I suppose it gives the people who work for him a kind of comfort – that this man is so clearly in charge, and able to navigate the world without impediment. But, truthfully, it disgusts me.’ She underlined the word ‘disgusts’ twice, hard enough that the pen indented the vellum.

  When he read that passage, he felt dazed. He remembered the incident, when he had managed to extract himself from a speeding fine. It
surprised him that he recalled it as a small achievement, as a victory of his panache and calmness under pressure. That his own wife had a different view – a hateful one – was shocking. He closed the diary and replaced it on the shelf. He was careful to replace it exactly as he had found it: the corner askew, out of alignment with the rest of the pile, a yellow sweater arm resting carelessly on the edge of the leather binding.

  How had she figured out that he had read the journal? He was never sure, but somehow, she did. When she arrived home that day, she was surprised to see Timothy in the kitchen. She ascended to the bedroom, but returned a moment later, paprika red, the vein in her forehead bulging. ‘How dare you! This is the most despicable thing you have ever done.’ She spat out the words. Then she added in a low, menacing voice: ‘And I know you have done many despicable things!’

  Timothy refused to admit that he had read the book. She was testing him, wanting him to plead guilty, but he knew that – as angry as she was at that moment – any admission, any hesitation, would make things worse. He was unrelenting: he had no idea why she was accusing him.

  Finally, she shook her head. ‘Typical,’ she said, as if she knew the exact page of the diary he had read. ‘So typical.’

  She stormed off and hardly spoke to him for days. He continued to pretend to be hurt and outraged – how could she falsely accuse him of something so low? – but his protests were wan and thin. He just wanted the incident to blow over.

  It did, eventually. But he never read her diaries again. He was afraid: afraid that she had some kind of secret system for protecting the books, semiotics involving minute hair follicles, or traces of talcum powder, or ultraviolet light. More than that, he was afraid of what he might read, that perhaps the paragraph was just the beginning, the overture in a much grander symphony. Sometimes, he realized, it’s best not to know the truth.

  Now, back in the hotel room in Big Sur, he walked up behind her. Clearly she heard him enter, but made a show of continuing to write in her journal, unhurried, not threatened by his presence. When she had finished her thought, she underlined a word on the page and pressed down an emphatic period. She recapped her pen and closed the book gently. She pushed it a few inches away from herself on the bed. She turned around, finally, and looked at him over her shoulder.