The Pilot's Wife

by Anita Shreve

  Kathryn turned her head at a sound. Muire Boland stood in the doorway, watching her from the side. She stepped into the room, crossed to one of the white chairs, and sat down. Immediately, she opened a wooden box on the cocktail table and took out a cigarette, which she lit with a plastic lighter next to the box.

  Jack couldn’t tolerate being in the same room with a smoker, he had said.

  “You want to know how it happened,” Muire said.

  Though she was angular, she might be described as voluptuous. It was the baby, Kathryn thought. The nursing. Perhaps there was just the slightest suggestion of a belly, which would also be the baby.

  Kathryn had another unexpected memory then, a picture, really, that Jack had taken. Kathryn was sleeping facedown in a quilted bathrobe on an unmade bed, her arms tucked under her. Jack, who’d been holding the five-month-old Mattie, had placed the sleeping baby, also facedown, on the hump made by Kathryn’s butt and the dip of the lower back. Kathryn and Mattie had together taken a nap, and Jack, moved by the sight of the mother and her papoose, had snapped the photograph.

  Muire leaned back against a cushion, draped one arm along its back. She crossed her legs. Kathryn thought she might be six feet tall, nearly as tall as Jack. Kathryn tried to imagine what her body looked like unclothed, how she and Jack might look together.

  But her mind protested and rebelled, and the pictures refused to form. Just as the image of Jack’s body as it may have lain in the ocean had at first refused to form. The pictures would come later, Kathryn knew, when she least wanted them.

  “Yes,” Kathryn said.

  Muire took a pull on her cigarette, leaned forward, and flicked an ash. “I flew with him five and a half years ago. I was a flight attendant with Vision.”

  “I know.”

  “We fell in love,” the woman said simply. “I won’t go into all the details. I could say that we were both swept off our feet. We were together for a month that first time. We had...” The woman hesitated, perhaps from delicacy, perhaps trying to find better words. “We had an affair,” she said finally. “Jack was torn. He said he wouldn’t leave Mattie. He could never do that to his daughter.”

  The name Mattie produced a frisson in the air, a tension that quivered between the two women. Muire Boland had spoken the name too easily, as if she’d known the girl.

  Kathryn thought: He wouldn’t leave his daughter, but he could betray his wife.

  “When was this exactly?” Kathryn asked. “The affair.”

  “June 1991.”

  “Oh.”

  What had she herself been doing in June of 1991? Kathryn wondered.

  The woman had delicate white skin, an almost flawless complexion. The complexion of someone who spent little time outdoors. Though she might have been a runner.

  “You knew about me,” Kathryn repeated. Her voice didn’t seem her own. It was too slow and tentative, as if she had been drugged.

  “I knew about you from the very beginning,” Muire said. “Jack and I did not have secrets.”

  The greater intimacy, then, Kathryn thought. An intentional knife wound.

  The rain slid along the bowed windows, the clouds giving a false sense of early evening. From an upstairs room, Kathryn heard the distant squawk of a cartoon character on a television. Still perspiring, she shed her jacket and stood up, realizing as she did so that her blouse had become untucked. She made an effort to push it back into her skirt. Aware of the intense scrutiny of the woman across from her, a woman who may very well have known Jack better than she did, Kathryn prayed her legs would not betray her. She walked across the room to the mantle.

  She took down the picture in its marquetry frame. Jack had on a shirt Kathryn had never seen before, a faded black polo shirt. He cradled the tiny newborn. The girl, the one Kathryn had just seen playing with the construction blocks, had Jack’s curls and brow, though not his eyes.

  “What’s her name?” Kathryn asked.

  “Dierdre.”

  Jack’s fingers were deep in the girl’s hair. Had Jack been the same with Dierdre as he had been with Mattie?

  Kathryn briefly closed her eyes. The hurt to herself, she thought, was nearly intolerable. But the hurt to Mattie was obscene. One could see — how could anyone fail to observe? — that the girl in the photograph was extraordinarily beautiful. A beguiling face, with dark eyes and long lashes, red lips. A veritable Snow White. Had memories that Mattie held sacred been repeated, relived, with another child?

  “How could you?” Kathryn cried, spinning, and she might have been speaking to Jack as well.

  Her fingers, slippery from perspiration, lost hold of the frame. It slid out of her hands, crashed against an end table. She hadn’t meant for that to happen, and she felt the small breakage as an exposure. The woman in the chair flinched slightly, though she did not turn her head to look at the damage. It was an unanswerable question. Though the woman wanted to answer it.

  “I loved him,” Muire said. “We were in love.”

  As if that were enough.

  Kathryn watched as Muire put out her cigarette. How cool she was, thought Kathryn. Even cold.

  “There are things I can’t talk about,” Muire said.

  You bitch, Kathryn thought, a bubble of anger popping to the surface. She tried to calm herself down. It was hard to imagine the woman in the chair a flight attendant in a uniform with little wings on the lapel. Smiling at passengers as they entered a plane.

  What were the things Muire Boland couldn’t talk about?

  She put her hands on the mantle, leaned her head forward. She breathed in deeply to calm herself. A distant rage made a sound like white noise in her ears.

  She pushed herself away from the mantle and crossed the room. She perched near the edge of the wooden chair, as if she might, at any moment, have to get up and leave.

  “I was willing to do whatever it took,” Muire Boland said. She fingered her hair away from her forehead. “I tried once to throw him out. But I couldn’t.”

  Kathryn folded her hands in her lap, considering this self-confessed lapse in character. The voluptuousness of the nursing, the slight suggestion of a belly, combined with the height, the angular shoulders, and the long arms, were arresting, undeniably attractive.

  “How did you do it?” Kathryn asked. “I mean, how did it work?”

  Muire Boland raised her chin. “We had so very little time together,” she said. “We did whatever we could. I’d pick him up at a prearranged spot near the crew apartment and bring him here. Sometimes, we had only the night. At other times . . .” Again, she hesitated. “Jack would sometimes bid schedules in reverse,” Muire said.

  Kathryn heard the language of a pilot’s wife.

  “I don’t understand,” Kathryn said quickly. Though she thought, sickeningly, that she did.

  “Occasionally, he would be able to arrange it so that his home base was in London. But, of course, that was risky.”

  Kathryn could remember the months Jack had seemed to have a terrible schedule. Five days on, two days off, only the overnight at home.

  “As you know, he didn’t always get London,” Muire continued. “He sometimes had the Amsterdam-Nairobi route. I took a flat in Amsterdam during those times.”

  “He paid for this?” Kathryn asked suddenly, thinking: He took money from me. From Mattie.

  “This is mine,” Muire said, gesturing to the rooms. “I inherited it from an aunt. I could sell it and move to the suburbs, but the thought of moving to the suburbs is somehow rather chilling.”

  Kathryn, of course, lived in what might be described as a suburb.

  “He gave you money?” Kathryn persisted.

  Muire looked away, as if sharing with Kathryn, for a moment, the particular treachery of taking money from one family to give to the other.

  “Occasionally,” she said. “I have some money of my own.” Kathryn speculated on the intensity of love that constant separation might engender. The intensity that being furtive and
secret would naturally create. She brought her hand to her mouth, pressed her lips with her knuckles. Had her own love for Jack not been strong enough? Could she say that she had still been in love with her husband when he died? Had she taken him for granted? Worse, had Jack ever suggested to Muire Boland that Kathryn hadn’t loved him enough? She winced inwardly to think of that possibility. She drew a long breath and tried to sit up straighter.

  “Where are you from?” Kathryn asked when she trusted her voice.

  “Antrim.”

  Kathryn looked away. The poem, she thought. Of course. Here in the narrow passage and the pitiless north, perpetual betrayals . . .

  “But you met here,” Kathryn said. “You met Jack in London.” “We met in the air.”

  Kathryn glanced down at the carpet, imagining that airborne meeting.

  “Where are you staying?” Muire asked.

  Kathryn looked at the woman and blinked. She could not recall the name of her hotel. Muire reached forward and took another cigarette from the box.

  “The Kensington Exeter,” Kathryn said, remembering. “If it makes you feel any better,” Muire said, “I’m quite certain there was never anyone else.”

  It did not make her feel any better.

  “How would you know?” Kathryn asked.

  The outside light grew dimmer in the flat. Muire turned a lamp on and put a hand to the back of her neck.

  “How did you find out?” Muire asked. “Discover us?”

  Us, Kathryn heard.

  She didn’t want to answer the question. The search for clues seemed tawdry now.

  “What happened on Jack’s plane?” Kathryn asked instead.

  Muire shook her head, and the silky hair swung. “I don’t know,” she said. But there was, possibly, an evasive note in her voice, and she seemed noticeably more pale. “The suggestion of suicide is outrageous,” she said, bending forward, putting her elbows on her knees, her head in her hands. The smoke curled through her hair. “Jack would never, never . . .”

  Kathryn was surprised by the woman’s sudden passion, by a level of certainty she thought only she had felt. It was the only emotion the woman had shown since Kathryn had entered the flat.

  “I envy you having had a service,” Muire said, looking up. “A priest. I would have liked to be there.”

  My God, Kathryn thought.

  “I saw your photograph,” Muire said. “In the papers. The FBI is assembling its case?”

  “So I’m told.”

  “Do they talk to you?”

  “No. Did they call you?”

  “No,” Muire said. “You know Jack would never do this.” “Of course I know that,” Kathryn said.

  After all, Kathryn had been the first wife, the primary wife, had she not? But she wondered then: In a man’s mind, who was the more important wife — the woman he sought to protect by not revealing the other? Or the one to whom he told all his secrets?

  “The last time you saw him...,” Kathryn began.

  “That morning. About four A.M. Just before he left for work. I woke up . . .” She left it there.

  “You’d been out to dinner,” Kathryn said.

  “Yes,” Muire said, looking slightly surprised that Kathryn knew this. She did not ask how.

  Kathryn tried to remember if there had ever been an occasion when she had seriously suspected Jack of having an affair. She didn’t think so. How devastatingly complete her trust in him had been.

  “You came here just for this?” Muire asked, picking a stray sliver of tobacco from her lower lip. She seemed to have recovered her composure.

  “Isn’t that enough?” Kathryn asked.

  Muire exhaled a long plume of smoke. “I meant will you be traveling on to Malin Head?” she asked.

  “No,” said Kathryn. “Have you been?”

  “I couldn’t go,” she said.

  There was something more. Kathryn could feel it.

  “What is it?” Kathryn asked.

  The woman rubbed her forehead. “Nothing,” she said, shaking her head lightly. “We had an affair,” she added, as if to explain what she had been thinking. “I became pregnant and took a leave from the airline. Jack wanted to be married. It wasn’t as important to me. To be married. He wanted to be married in the Catholic Church.”

  “He never went to church.”

  “He was devout,” Muire said and looked steadily at Kathryn. “Then he was two different people,” Kathryn said incredulously. It was one thing to be married in a Catholic church because a lover wanted it, quite another to be devout oneself. Kathryn intertwined her fingers, trying to steady them.

  “He went to mass whenever he could,” Muire said.

  In Ely, Jack had never even entered a church. How could a man be two such different people? But then a new thought entered Kathryn’s mind, an unwelcome thought: Jack wouldn’t always have been two different people, would he? As a lover, for example. Mightn’t some of the intimacies he shared with Kathryn have been the same as those he shared with Muire Boland? If Kathryn could bring herself to ask, wouldn’t there be some recognition on the part of the woman sitting across from her? Or had there been an entirely other play? Another script? Different dialogue? Unrecognizable props? Kathryn unlinked her fingers, pressed her palms against her knees. Muire watched her intently. Perhaps she, too, was speculating.

  “I have to use the bathroom,” Kathryn said, standing up abruptly. The way a drunk might do.

  Muire stood with her. “It’s just upstairs,” she said.

  She led Kathryn out of the sitting room and through the hallway. She stood at the bottom of the steps, gesturing with her hand. Kathryn had to pass in front of her, and their bodies almost touched. Kathryn felt diminished by the woman’s height.

  The bathroom was claustrophobic and made Kathryn’s heart race. She glanced into the mirror and saw that her face had taken on a hectic flush and was mottled. She pulled the pins from her hair and shook it loose. She sat down on the toilet lid. A floral print on the walls made her dizzy.

  Four and a half years. Jack and Muire Boland had been married in a church four and a half years ago. Perhaps guests had gone to the wedding. Had any of them known the truth? Had Jack hesitated when he said his vows?

  She shook her head roughly. Every thought bore with it a pictorial image Kathryn didn’t want to look at. That was the difficulty — allowing the questions but holding back the images. Jack in a suit, kneeling in front of a priest. Jack opening a car door, slipping into the passenger seat. A small girl with dark curls hugging Jack’s knees.

  In the distance, a telephone rang.

  How, Kathryn wondered, had Jack possibly managed it? The lies, the deception, the lack of sleep? One day he had left Kathryn and gone to work, and then within hours was standing in a church at his own wedding. What had Kathryn and Mattie been doing on that day, at that precise hour? How had Jack been able to face them both when he came home? Had he made love to Kathryn that night, the next night, that week? She shuddered to think of it.

  The questions bounced with tiny pings from wall to wall, repeating themselves endlessly. Then she remembered, her stomach lurching, the twice-yearly training sessions in London. Two weeks each.

  If you never suspected someone, she realized, you never thought to suspect.

  She stood up quickly, her eyes skittering around the tiny powder room. She splashed water on her face, dried it with an embroidered towel. She opened the bathroom door and saw across the hallway a queen-sized bed. From downstairs, Kathryn could hear Muire talking on the telephone, the words rising and falling in her foreign lilt. If Jack had not been dead, she would perhaps not have had a right to enter the bedroom, but now nothing could matter. This house was hers to see. Knowledge of this house was owed to her. After all, Muire Boland had known all about her, hadn’t she?

  Kathryn ached to think of that reality. How many details exactly had Muire been told? And how intimate were those details?

  She walked through the doorway and
thought of the effort she had made to please Jack, of the accommodations she had made for him. Of the way she had created an entire theory of diminished sexual intimacy. Of the way she had once confronted Jack with the fact of his withdrawal, and he had denied it, made it seem beneath his consideration, beneath hers. All of this she had thought normal, within the bounds of a normal marriage. She had, in fact, thought they had a good marriage. She’d told Robert they had had a good marriage. She felt foolish, exposed for a fool, and she wondered if she didn’t mind that most of all.

  This would be the master bedroom. It was long and narrow, oddly messy, actually extraordinarily messy considering the neatness of the downstairs rooms. Piles of clothes and magazines were strewn about the floor. There were teacups and a container half full of yogurt on a bureau, ashtrays overflowing with butts. Bottles of makeup on a dresser, which was spotted with liquid foundation. One side of the wood-framed bed was not made. Kathryn noted the expensive linen sheets, the embroidered hem. There were bits of lacy underwear on the comforter. The other side of the bed, still intact, had been Jack’s — she could see this in the bedside stand with the white noise machine, the halogen lamp, a book about the Vietnam War. Had Jack read other books here than he had read at home? Had he had different clothes? Had he actually looked different in this house, in this country, than he had at home? Looked older or younger?

  Home, she thought. Now there was an interesting concept. She walked to Jack’s side of the bed and yanked back the covers. She bent her head to the sheets and inhaled deeply. He was not there; she could not smell him.

  She crossed to the other side of the bed, Muire’s side. On the bedside table, there was a small gold clock and a lamp. As if conducting a search, she opened the drawer of the table. Inside, there were scraps of papers, receipts, tubes of lipstick, a jar of skin cream, loose coins, several pens, a television clicker, an object in a velvet bag. Unthinkingly, Kathryn picked up the bag and slipped off the blue velvet pouch. She dropped the object as if it were hot. She ought to have guessed simply from the shape. The vibrator fell from her hands and into the drawer with a clatter.

  She knelt to the floor, laid her face on the bed. She put her arms over her head. She wanted the questions to stop, and she tried to empty her mind, a futile effort. She rubbed her face back and forth, back and forth against the sheet. She lifted up her face and saw that she had left a smear of mascara on the linen.