Fidelity

by Michael Redhill

  “What I meant by what?”

  “The lark thing. Do you think I’m not serious?”

  “Have you never seen a lark? They’re larger than hummingbirds and more confident. That’s all I meant. You’re a poor city boy, aren’t you?”

  “No, I just thought you were trying to tell me something.”

  She lay back down and tilted her head at him on the pillow, then made a faint cheeping noise. “You’ve robbed the nest, lark. You’ve been very bad.”

  “Stop it. I was worried.”

  “Why worry?” she said, and she closed her eyes.

  He tried to sleep. But he was kept awake by the thought that what he’d really wanted was to feel as if what they were doing mattered to her, if only to satisfy himself that she was involved. Emotionally, he told himself.

  FOR ANOTHER couple of weeks, the work continued apace, even though when Bergman riffled through the morning reports and the numbers (which translated into hubs and switching stations and wires and houses) they now seemed a little less transparent to him and more like a code. Perhaps, he realized, he was hoping a mistake or two would slip by and force an extension in his stay. He spoke distractedly of progress whenever he was consulted by head office. Sometimes he sat at the gleaming black meeting-room table with a number of his colleagues and spoke into a conferencing camera about signal strengths and NAS lines and subscribers. On the television screen, which was usually propped at the end of the table, a disembodied head listened and nodded sometimes and spoke to people off-camera on its own end. Invariably, it all ended with an encouragement to continue the excellent work.

  And Claudia was doing well in the eyes of their superiors; there was some talk of making a position for her somewhere else in the country. She reassured him that the relocation would take months, that there was no need to think of it now. So he didn’t, and they continued their affair as if it were untouched by concerns of the external world. When they were together there was no company and no work. It had reached the point that neither of them knew the status of the other’s project anymore. He didn’t realize that their love affair had put her somewhat behind; he had risen far enough that the managerial competence he demonstrated almost obviated work for him, whereas she was still learning. And now floundering a little. One weekend evening, she had even borrowed a spare keycard to gain access to the office so that she could finish a report. She came back though, in the early dawn hours, and to his delight had woken him with her mouth.

  He began to share his age-old stories with her. The calcified tales of childhood (army bases, drowned brother, hockey), then his adolescence, and up to the middle of his twenties. It amazed him to see his early life rebloom after so many years of never having the need to speak of it. The richness of those years, and the sheer amount of experience in them, made him feel as if the earlier parts of his life had been compacted for storage. It had been so long since he’d been more than his daily life. He recalled his earliest experiences with women, the clumsy carnality, and he made her laugh, playing this older, life-scarred man, depicting his younger self as an inept lover, a bumbler. But he stopped before his marriage. He did not want to speak about Renata.

  “You can talk about your wife, you know,” she’d said. “I won’t be jealous.”

  “I’m not sure you’d have a right to be.”

  “I’m just saying, I can take it. It’s all a part of you.”

  She was democratic in this, as in most things. A function of not being old enough to know what could hurt her. And so he told her how he and Renata had met, sanding down some of the more loving details, making it sound like it was a low-grade passion that had brought them together, and mostly pleasing, if bland, ritual that sustained them. (As he said all of this, he realized that it was not true, not even remotely. He thrived on routine, and whenever he was away from home for any length of time he craved it and he craved Renata. It was possible, it came to him, to be perfectly content in a marriage and still be capable of infidelity, and this surprised him. It meant that a person’s feelings could develop along parallel tracks. He thought, as he was talking to Claudia about Renata, that he actually still loved Renata, but that the still loved was a false kind of continuance; there was no need to presume he would have stopped. He was buoyed by this thought.)

  He told Claudia of the houses bought and sold, the failed attempt at adoption, the death of his mother, and then Renata’s. Claudia nodded through it all, but he saw that, despite her brave reassurances, it was too much for her. It wasn’t the fact of Renata that was bothering her, he realized, but the fact of their history. There was a great deal of it.

  “You’ve been through a lot together,” she said.

  “We’ve been married for some time.”

  “In the olden days,” she said, “men had wives and mistresses. But the mistresses were always alone when they got old. Discarded.”

  “I won’t discard you,” he said, and he felt he meant it. He noticed that her eyes were wet now. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  She shrugged and then touched the corner of her eye and sucked the tip of her finger. He leaned over and kissed the other eye, tasted the trace of salt there. She lowered herself into his lap and sighed theatrically, then laughed. “I’m being dramatic,” she said, but she didn’t sit up and he saw her ribs shaking. Some whole other part of her was suddenly present then, and he did not know what to say or do. He rubbed her side and her back, and in comforting her he felt frightened. Here was a woman silently weeping in his lap! Because of him. A strange comparison rose to mind, and he recalled himself, just the previous night, holding Claudia’s hips tight to his own, not allowing her to move, and she’d come with a cry of astonishment. That seemed a much more complicated physiological reaction to set in motion than making someone weep, but now the weeping seemed immensely personal, much more personal than being inside someone’s body. He gripped Claudia by the shoulders and lifted her up and told her he would drive her home. “I’m fine,” she said, and indeed she had collected herself. Another cloud passing.

  “No,” said Bergman. “I think we need an evening apart.”

  “Because I cried a little? Come on now.” She sniffed once and looked at him with dark eyes. “Girls like to cry sometimes. It’s cleansing. Let’s go for our walk.”

  “We can walk tomorrow,” he said.

  She straightened herself. “You know what? You promised to buy me a cowboy hat. You can’t take me home. You have to buy me a hat and bring me back to the hotel and see what I look like with it on.”

  He immediately pictured her cavorting in nothing but the cowboy hat, her long black hair tucked up underneath it so she looked like a cascade of bright skin. It moved him to pull her to her feet and take her down to one of the stores, where he bought her a Stetson as close to her skin color as he could find. As if programmed to draw her close even as he’d been trying to push her away. Back in the hotel room, shaking, he tucked her hair under the hat, and undressed her, and she stood at the foot of the bed, one hip cocked, pretending to shoot him and then blew smoke away from her finger. After they made love, he insisted on driving her home, and she sat in the passenger seat of his rented car with her bottom lip sucked into her mouth.

  “I have work to do,” he told her.

  “That’s okay.” She was determined to sound as if there was nothing wrong. She got out of the car and doffed her hat to him. A good sport.

  Back at the hotel, where Bergman had no work, he stood at the window that overlooked the western end of the city and followed the main road with his eye until it reached the scrubby edge of town and then flattened out before it rose up into the mountains. He realized that if he was not, by definition, a bad man, then he probably wasn’t a good one, either. His mind felt gluey. He had not called his wife in many days. When he dialed the number, she answered sleepily and asked him to call again the next day. He wanted badly to keep her on the line and talk to her—amazing, he thought, that he would reach out
to her at a time like this. What am I doing, he wondered. He told his wife he loved her and she sleepily said she loved him and they hung up.

  BERGMAN MADE himself difficult to reach at work. He crumpled up the sticky notes that Claudia left on his divider, and involved himself in intricate, sometimes imaginary conversations on the phone when he heard her voice or her laugh on the floor, or saw her coming his way. A few days after he’d bought her the cowboy hat, she stopped his elevator and got in with him. “I won’t be hurt if you want to end this, but you could say something.”

  “I think I do want to end it,” he said, surprising himself. “I feel like I’m doing something wrong.”

  “I thought that’s what you liked about it. That someone would let you behave like this.”

  The doors opened and they walked out silently. He realized immediately that he had lied to her about wanting to end it, but it made him feel noble. Doing the right thing. She walked away toward the revolving doors. It was getting harder to determine what was cowardice. That he had taken up with a young girl and told himself that he loved her? Or that now, pushing her away from him, he was turning away from life? Yes, it was wrong to do what he had done, but in listening (so it seemed) to these imperatives, had he not determined to stay fastened to the force that until very recently appeared to drive him and every other bit of nature as well? He watched her cross the sun-bright parking lot, waving and smiling at a co-worker about her age, a man named Davis, whose wife Bergman had met. The two of them out there seemed co-conspirators in something he once knew the rules of. He had pushed her away because it felt, for a moment, that he was ruining them both and participating in an act so dishonorable that he would never be forgiven for it. Now he regretted it. For the rest of the afternoon, he bearded himself. You are a fool. You did treat this as a lark, didn’t you?

  THAT NIGHT, the conversation with Renata did not go well. It was as if they had both forgotten their roles. She did not ask him about the pain in his hand that was one of his general conditions. He’d called the previous night, forgetting that Wednesday evenings she volunteered at the local community center and refereed the girls’ indoor soccer league, and so had also forgotten she most often went to bed early on Wednesdays. He had been gone most of two months now, and his body had adjusted to Claudia’s: his mouth to hers, his pelvis to hers, her back to his chest. But also, he saw, his rhythms to hers: their way of speaking. So he cut off his wife continually in their conversation, pausing to ask her to go on, and then waiting until he was sure he could speak without interrupting. He manufactured more stories of the local pub, something about an outdoor league that he realized was triggered by the soccer games Renata had officiated. There wasn’t much of him now that wasn’t completely made up. He told her about an imaginary meeting in the morning that was to start early, and she read him as he’d intended: “Go to bed now, then,” she said. “We’ll talk again on the weekend.”

  The next day, he got in to work resolved that his momentary loss of faith in the elevator would be corrected, and he went immediately to Claudia’s cubicle. She was writing quietly behind her desk and cast an anxious glance first toward him and then at the woman in the cubicle immediately beside her. He gestured with his head toward the supply room, and they went in and shut the door. Right away, he put his hands behind her neck and drew her in to kiss her, but she went stiff and pulled away.

  “You can’t drop me one day and then have me the next!”

  “That was wrong, what I said to you yesterday. I’m in love with you.”

  Her face screwed up in horror. “No you’re not! You’re not at all.”

  “I am, Claudia. I was just beside myself yesterday after we spoke. I felt awful. It’s because . . . my emotions—”

  “Your emotions what?” she said, and stared at him with her hands on her hips. After a silent moment she looked up toward the ceiling as if she couldn’t stand to witness his confusion any longer. “Fucking hell,” she muttered, and she put her hands on his shoulders and drove him down into a chair. “You don’t love me, you just want me,” she said. “It’s not good enough that I’ll sleep with you and listen to your stories and spend all my time with you. You want some part of me that you can really hurt so it feels real to you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Do you think I’m in love with you? Have you thought about that at all?”

  “Look, I’m trying to tell you how I feel,” he said, bewildered, but with that, she turned and pulled open the door, leaving him sitting there in the tiny room.

  THE NEXT morning, Claudia’s desk was cleared and her cubicle empty. Panicked, Bergman went around her floor asking after her in as casual a voice as he could muster, but no one seemed to know where she was. He tried her cell, but she didn’t answer, and instead of the personal message she’d recorded, an operator’s voice (he’d actually met this woman, she worked for the company as well) said the party you have dialed is not available. For a few days, he chalked up her absence to a cubicle change that was no doubt connected to their run-in in the supply room. The company had three buildings in the city, and she could have plausibly requested a change of scenery to help her develop her grasp of the firm’s workings. She could have cleverly arranged the move with no questions asked. But at the beginning of the next week (after a harrowing weekend in which he and Renata had argued about retiling the master bathroom, and he had wandered in the vicinity of each of the company’s offices, thinking perhaps he would find Claudia), he went to her supervisor and told her he needed to contact Claudia, wherever she was. The woman, Mrs. Farrell, folded her hands under her chin and regarded him.

  “Why do you need to contact Ms. Jordan?”

  He hadn’t considered his reason, and then recalled the entry card. Yes, he’d lent it to her, and forgotten about it. “I think she may have one of my keycards,” he said.

  “Why does she have one of your keycards, Mr. Bergman? What happened to hers?”

  “I don’t think she had one yet. She wanted to do some work on the weekend, so she asked me to borrow mine.” He drew back a chair and sat down, giving himself a moment to think. “She’s very keen on succeeding with the company.”

  “Were you entirely proper?” asked Mrs. Farrell.

  “Was I—?”

  “She was not entitled to a card of her own, so why would you think she should be carrying yours?”

  “It’s my fault, definitely,” said Bergman. “I should have seen her into the building myself, but I didn’t think there’d be any harm in it. And of course, I had no idea she’d be leaving.”

  “Well, Ms. Jordan was transferred to the field. She’s in Yellowknife, at least for now.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s great,” said Bergman. “How can I reach her, then?”

  “No need for a long-distance call,” said Mrs. Farrell. “I don’t imagine Ms. Jordan will be able to put your card to any bad use where she is right now.”

  He left the office offering a smile of thanks.

  HIS ILL-CONSIDERED story had repercussions. Within the day, Mrs. Farrell summoned Bergman back to her office. She’d called the Yellowknife operation and spoken to Claudia to see how she was doing. In passing she had mentioned that Bergman had inquired after his keycard, and Claudia had denied borrowing it. Mrs. Farrell pressed her, reminding her that an employee of Mr. Bergman’s long standing would not have a reason to lie about such a thing, and that she, Claudia, was not in any trouble. “But,” said Mrs. Farrell to him, “you know how once you tell a lie, no matter how insignificant, it’s pride to some people to stick to it regardless the consequences. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” he said in a quiet voice. He imagined that Claudia had weighed the situation. The company was looking for his entry card, and perhaps he was in some trouble. If the affair were found out, and the card made a tangible link between them, then perhaps it would be proved that he had fraternized with someone at least ostensibly under him and he would be fired. So she was
protecting him. Or maybe in denying that she had the card, she was trying to flush him out into the open. But it was clear, if she had tried to impugn him, that she had not succeeded.

  Mrs. Farrell looked very stern, and she still had one hand on the phone, where, he imagined, she had cut off Claudia’s voice just before he entered.

  “You were just trying to be a good colleague.”

  “Yes,” he said, his hands and feet beginning to tingle.

  “Well, it’s best to know these things about people before they get too entangled in the company.”

  “I suppose.”

  She took her hand off the phone and looked down at her papers. His chest felt like someone was pressing on it. “And Mr. Bergman?”

  “Yes.”

  “The company card is not a free-for-all.” He wondered for a moment if she thought he loaned his keycards to everyone. “Pay for some of your own dinners, please.”

  “I will,” said Bergman, with some relief, and then turned to leave. From the doorway, he said, “You told her I had come to you?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “What did she say?”

  “What do you mean? She made her bed.”

  “Yes. Thank you,” said Bergman, and he went back to his cubicle as if in a dream. A spreadsheet was on the screen, a tightly ordered array of cells in rows and columns that flooded the edges of the display. Then, as he was staring at it, the program blinked out and the screen went dark and the computer expressed a bright green tube that swept up to the top of the screen, and then came back down, receding into the darkness of the false perspective and back out. He imagined himself entangled in the snaking forms. When he touched the keyboard, the patterns disappeared and the spreadsheet popped back into view. For the first time in weeks, he tried to focus his mind, and he did some proper work. He tried to figure out the amount of time the remainder of the project would take. He read his e-mails and assembled a checklist of items that had been brought to his attention—some weak links and unfinished tests. He e-mailed the foreman this list and then the phone rang and it was the very same man, laughing, telling him it had already been done. He wanted to know if Bergman would join them for a beer, but Bergman said it wouldn’t be possible.