The Book of Two Ways

by Jodi Picoult

  I consider this—how many husbands have walked out in pursuit of some elusive happiness. Men leave their wives and children behind every day, and no one is shocked. It’s as if that Y chromosome they hold entitles them to self-discovery, to reinvention.

  Was that how Brian felt? I wonder. With Gita? It makes me feel unsteady. Brian has always been home base, my anchor, the knight who rescued me. To think of him faltering is to imagine the earth veering from orbit, the seasons reversing. What if he, like me, made the assumption that we were forever—but couldn’t help his thoughts from straying to someone else. If love is, as Win said, just chance, then the only way to feel secure is to never pick up the die again after that first roll.

  Brian was my second roll.

  Felix comes back with buttermilk, and soon the house is filled with the scent of baking. He brings us a plate, biscuits still steaming, honey on the side. Win eats two, and after Felix goes to wash the dishes, she picks up the thread of the conversation. “It’s okay, you know.”

  “What is?”

  “To admit that you think about it. Where you might be now, and with whom. What if. It’s not being unfaithful. It’s not even saying that you wouldn’t make the same choice, if you had to do it over again. It’s just…”

  I meet her gaze. “Part of life,” I finish.

  “Part of life,” Win repeats.

  She taps her fingertip against the center of the canvas. “Acrylics dry fast,” she says, satisfied, and turns the painting toward me.

  Her portrait of death lives in shadows. It’s midnight blue and dusky violet and violent black, but if you stare at it hard enough, you can make out two faint profiles, a breath apart, unable to complete that kiss for eternity.

  “Now,” she explains, “we take it off the stretcher bars.” She reaches for a tool in her fishing box, a staple remover, and starts to pluck out the fastenings that hold the canvas stretched tight. One end begins to curl like an eyelash.

  “You’re going to ruin the painting!”

  “What painting?” Win replies calmly. By now the canvas is a coil of color, a scroll of pigment. She turns it over. “All I see is a piece of stationery for a letter I need to write.”

  * * *

  —

  ONLINE, I FIND all sorts of Thane Bernards who are not the right one. There’s the man who runs a crab-fishing boat in Alaska. The public works director in Johannesburg. The hedge fund employee who is selling his house on the Margaret River in Australia. There are three Thane Bernards who have gotten married in the past year who are too young to be Win’s Thane, and four that have died, but who are too old to be him.

  I find one promising lead—a man of the right age who teaches figure drawing at a university in Belgium, and I pull a photo of him up on my phone. Win, in bed, actually sits up a little as I am doing this. She straightens her robe and dabs a little bit of Blistex on her chapped lips before she takes the screen from me, as if he might be able to see her.

  It breaks my heart.

  “Wait,” she says. “What do you know about him?”

  I know that he has been employed for ten years at this university. I know that he belongs to a rowing club and has competed as part of a master’s division four with coxswain. I know that he wrote a letter to the editor of his local paper about a town ordinance that would affect bike lanes.

  I also know this isn’t what Win wants to know.

  “He’s still married,” I say softly.

  Her hand tightens on the edge of the quilt, and then relaxes. She reaches for the phone. I watch her peer at the photo, touching the screen to enlarge the details of his face.

  Win closes her eyes. “It’s not him.” Her voice is raw, her relief palpable. “It’s not him.”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER DINNER THAT night, I tell Brian I have some paperwork to finish and I go into my office. On my laptop, I receive a notification from another search engine. This one has found the name Thane Bernard in, of all places, a 2009 Rolling Stone magazine. David Bowie had done an interview from his London home, discussing his collection of art by old masters like Rubens, Balthus, and Tintoretto as well as more modern art by Henry Moore and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He also mentioned a recent acquisition by artist Nathaniel Bernard. The painting, sold for $10,500, was called Prometheus, and styled like the famous Rubens, but instead of chains wrapped around the subject’s wrists there were ethernet cables and telephone cords and power lines. The mythical eagle was not picking out the victim’s liver, but instead a beakful of British pound notes. Part of the joy of art, Bowie said, was finding artists no one else had discovered yet—like Thane.

  The reason I haven’t been able to find Professor Thane Bernard is because he isn’t teaching art. He is creating it, and signing the pieces with his full first name.

  I keep searching, using this new information, and find sales from auctions in France, Belgium, Italy. An announcement of a show at a Gagosian gallery. An appearance at Art Basel. Although there is an e-trail of his career, there is almost no personal information about him. He doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. I can’t find a photograph.

  But then, in Google Images: a picture from a charity auction in London to raise money for a homeless shelter. There are five men in black tie. From l. to r.: A. Rothschild, T. Haven-Shields, H. Ludstone, R. Champney, N. Bernard.

  N. Bernard.

  When I blow up the image, it’s grainy. His head is bald. His eyes are dark as night, the pupils and the irises almost indistinguishable.

  I print a copy of this photograph so that I can bring it to Win tomorrow.

  Then I reply to the original email from the site that found the original reference. For another fifty dollars, do I want them to find a last known address?

  Yes. Yes, I do.

  I click out of my mail app. I’ve done what Win asked; I should close my laptop and go to my husband, who is in bed, watching Stephen Colbert. But instead I find myself opening Facebook. My fingers find the search bar of their own accord, and type in Wyatt’s name.

  I’m not sure if I’m relieved or upset when there are no results.

  That should be it. I should feel like I’ve dodged a bullet. But then I think of Win’s voice: Picture the person you thought you’d wind up with.

  It isn’t cheating, if I loved him first. It isn’t cheating, if I never act on the information. It isn’t cheating, if Brian was the first to look away.

  There are so many ways to lie to myself.

  If my relationship with Brian has any chance of stabilizing, and we can’t go backward, maybe I need to even the distance between us. As Brian said: nothing happened. But for a heartbeat, he wondered what it might be like to be with someone else. And so will I.

  Unlike Thane Bernard, Wyatt Armstrong has a robust Internet presence. He finished his dissertation in 2005 and published a book that analyzed the text and grammar of the Book of Two Ways. He became the head of Yale’s Egyptology program after the death of Professor Dumphries—I skim the eulogy he wrote in our alumni magazine. I read about his search for the missing tomb of Djehutynakht, and his discovery of it five years ago. To date, he hasn’t published his findings.

  Then I click on the link for images.

  It feels like a punch to the gut. Wyatt is still lean and long, folded like a jackknife as he looks over his shoulder in the cramped chute of a tomb toward a camera. His face is familiar and unfamiliar at once. His searing blue eyes—the ones that look into you rather than at you—are tempered by a wariness, and there are lines at the corners now. I am reminded of everything that has come between us: people, distance, time.

  As if this was done to us.

  As if I didn’t do it to myself.

  “Oh.” I hear a soft voice behind me, and I turn to see the wound of Brian’s face.

  For a sinking, terrible moment, I wait
for the ground to swallow me whole, and when it doesn’t I follow Brian back into our bedroom and close the door. My mind is spinning so fast for an explanation that the words are already tumbling out of my mouth. “I was looking up Win’s old boyfriend—”

  “And you found yours instead?” Brian interrupts.

  The pain in his expression is so acute that I stumble. “You…you know who Wyatt is?”

  “I’m not stupid.”

  I sink onto the bed. “I don’t understand.”

  “That makes two of us,” Brian murmurs.

  He sits down beside me. I glance at his dark hair, the raw knuckles of his hands, the slope of his shoulders, and wonder when I last really, truly, looked at Brian; when I saw him, instead of just seeing who I needed him to be.

  “Are you going to leave me?” Brian asks.

  “No,” I say immediately, but it’s just a reflex, like when the doctor taps your knee with a hammer and you can’t do anything but watch it jump.

  “Why were you looking him up, then?”

  “Because finding Win’s ex made me wonder what Wyatt is doing now.” I try Win’s question on him. “Isn’t there someone in your life you thought you’d wind up with?”

  “No,” he says. “But by some miracle, I did anyway.”

  “I am a thousand percent sure Wyatt doesn’t even know I’m alive.”

  “Why would you say that? He could be in a pyramid or God knows what looking you up, too.”

  “I didn’t realize you even knew his name.”

  He hesitates. “He sent you letters that I found in your mother’s bin of junk mail. I should have given them to you. But by then, I loved you. And you seemed to love me.” He looks up. “I’m a physicist, Dawn. I know what makes things move. You came here for your mother—but no one rockets that hard and that fast unless there’s a force driving them away.”

  I would do anything to erase the anguish threaded through his voice. “I wanted you. I chose you.”

  “Back then,” he says. “And now?”

  I bite back my response: You decided you didn’t want me first. But this is not a game of one-upsmanship. This is not an eye for an eye. This is two people, peeling back veneer, to discover that the wall they expected to find underneath is disintegrating.

  “Don’t you think we have a happy marriage?”

  He considers this. “Can you have a happy marriage if your spouse doesn’t think so?”

  I wonder if he is talking about me, or himself. “I obviously had a life before I met you,” I tell Brian. “I wasn’t trying to hide it.”

  “I never asked you to. But my wife told me recently that not talking about something can be just as bad as flaunting it.”

  My cheeks burn. “After fifteen years, do you really think I don’t love you?”

  Brian is silent for a long moment. I can see pieces moving in his mind. “After fifteen years, love isn’t just a feeling,” he says. “It’s a choice.”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER A SLEEPLESS night, I take the coward’s way out, and drive to Win’s before Brian even wakes. When Felix opens the front door, he looks just as exhausted as I am.

  “Rough night?” I ask.

  “She couldn’t get comfortable. No matter what I tried.”

  “Let me see what I can do,” I offer.

  Win is tossing and turning on the rented hospital bed when I enter, her legs kicking at the light cotton blanket. Her eyes open when she hears me.

  “I’m still here,” she says.

  “I noticed.”

  “Dawn.” Her voice is small, boxed, neatly folded. “I didn’t think it would be this hard.”

  In the weeks I’ve been with Win, she has been plucky, angry, and pragmatic, by turns. But I’ve never seen her defeated, until now. “What’s hard?”

  Her fingers clutch at the bedding. “Letting go. All those times you read an obituary, or a neighbor tells you someone you know has died. It’s so bizarre to think that I’m that person now. That I’ll be the next one.”

  “I know, Win,” I say simply.

  “This world is such a mess. Who would have guessed I’d want so badly to stick around?”

  “I would. Because, like me, you don’t give up easily.” I pull the piece of paper from my pocket and smooth it out.

  Win picks up the printed photo. She brings it closer to her face, close enough to kiss. But instead she stares at Thane Bernard as if the world has just changed from black and white to color.

  She rests against her pillow, the paper still clutched in her hand. She closes her eyes, and a single tear tracks down her cheek. “Dawn,” she says, “I’m going to write that letter now.”

  ON PAPER, ANYA Dailey is the perfect partner for Wyatt. She is technically Lady Anya, a distant cousin to the queen or something like that, who was present at Prince William’s wedding and whose baby gift for Princess Charlotte was the first item of clothing in which she was officially photographed. She went to boarding school and then King’s College. She is on the boards of a dozen charities. Her father owns half of the land that London is built on.

  She met Wyatt at the British Museum, where she was planning a fundraiser; Wyatt was giving a talk. She heard his voice as she walked by the auditorium, and as she put it, he was honey. She was the fly.

  She had grown up hearing about Egyptology, because her grandfather had been friendly with the late Lord Carnarvon, and when she was a little girl he’d taken her to visit Highclere Castle, before it became a set for Downton Abbey. In the bowels of the building was a treasure trove of artifacts from Lord Carnarvon’s various concessions—the objects that hadn’t been sold to the Met. Her grandfather had been an Egyptomaniac; when he’d passed away, she’d thought: What better way to honor his memory than to invest in a current excavation? She had entered the relationship as Wyatt’s business partner. One thing led to another.

  I learn all this within five minutes of meeting her.

  I am bouncing along in the Land Rover, sitting in the back behind Anya and Wyatt because he has ordered Alberto and me to accompany them to the dig site. Anya wants to see the discovery her money has funded.

  I am shooting daggers at the back of Wyatt’s head as he drives. I know why he wants Alberto there—so that they can get some press photo coverage of the benefactor and the archaeologist. But I cannot figure out why he wants me there, except to suffer.

  Now that we’ve taken the most valuable treasures out of the tomb, there is only a gaffir at the site, dozing on a piece of cardboard at the entrance. “Sleeping on the job?” Anya murmurs, as Wyatt helps her out of the Land Rover. The gaffir scrambles to his feet. I wonder if she even knows what portion of her funding goes to this man—a pittance, really, that wouldn’t be considered a livable wage in a first-world country. “Mudir,” he says, nodding to Wyatt, opening the locked gate to the tomb so that we can get inside.

  Because we have all been focused on the coffins back at the Dig House magazine, the generator that provides light in the tomb is off. It is stifling and dark in the main chamber, so I shine a floodlight on the painted walls. Wyatt translates some of the hieroglyphs when Anya points to a spot that interests her. When he starts talking about a scene of fishing and fowling, her eyes start to glaze over. Suddenly she jumps, crashing into his chest. “Spider,” she says.

  Alberto and I look at each other behind her back, our first meeting of the minds.

  When Wyatt begins to describe the excavation of the coffins, Anya peers down the tomb shaft. The rope ladder is still staked at the top, unraveling its way down. “Come, I’ll show you,” Wyatt says.

  “Oh, I couldn’t—”

  “You want your Indiana Jones moment, don’t you?” he asks, grinning. He puts his hand on her waist. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  He asks Alberto to monitor the sta
kes where the ladder is secured, and then turns to me. “Dawn, you’ll go down first with the torch,” he instructs. “And to prove to Anya that it’ll hold.”

  I read that statement so many ways: I am the sacrificial lamb. I am to do what I’m told. I’m heavier than rail-thin Anya, so if the ladder can bear my weight it will certainly bear hers. I jam on my headlamp and set my foot on the first rung and suddenly realize whose boots I am wearing.

  Jesus fucking Christ.

  I scramble down the ladder into the hot throat of the tomb and turn on the lamp, shining it up so that Anya can delicately pick her way down the shaft. I am convinced she digs her heel into the rock wall intentionally, so that I will suffer a rain of debris. But I stand my ground, watching her come closer.

  By the time Wyatt has crawled down, I’ve backed myself into the tomb chamber. There’s not much to see here, now that it has all been excavated. Wyatt begins to describe to Anya what it looked like when he first pulled away the limestone blocks that covered the entrance. For a moment, I forget where we are, and let Wyatt’s story settle over me. I fill in the details that he leaves out: the moment when I was pressed up against him, peering over his shoulder. The way he swung me around in the tomb chapel when he realized that there was a Book of Two Ways inside the coffin. I tuck these details away, savoring them.

  “Here,” Wyatt says to Anya. “Give me your phone.”

  Since Alberto is still above us, extra assurance that the ladder won’t mysteriously unwind itself from its posts and leave us buried underground, Wyatt offers to play photographer. He waits for Anya to pose and smile, and then takes a few photos. She grabs the phone from him and scrolls through. “Do it over. The light’s not right.”

  She looks directly at me as she says it.

  Wyatt turns to me and clears his throat. I shine my headlamp directly in her eyes. “Oh,” I say, unapologetically. “Sorry.”

  He eventually takes a photo of which she approves. “Now one of us both,” she insists. She hands me the phone.