Breaking Connections

by Albert Wendt

  Over the years, he’s often examined his affair with Beth in detail. Though he expected guilt to accompany that process, it hasn’t. Your genitals (and passions) do not know guilt or observe society’s morality or acceptable standards of fidelity; they merely seek to fulfill what they are meant to fulfill. And God knows, he’d tried to control them. At least that was his rationalisation not long after he accepted Beth’s request to help her with her research. She was at least ten years older than him – that, he’d concluded, was one of her undeniable attractions. She was also black-haired and taller than him, features that attracted him to certain women.

  Even this morning when he woke, he believed he hadn’t intended it to happen. And he wasn’t going to use the excuse that Laura’s absence at the maternity ward, and his longing for her, had made him susceptible to Beth’s advances. It just happened – on the second day, in his office, when he was explaining Nafanua’s genealogy to Beth. She crossed her legs and, leaning back in her chair, almost slipped out of it, and he reached over to steady her. Suddenly her lips were around his, with an urgent desire and heat and openness. Next he was lying back in his chair and her endless hands were wrapped round his genitals and her furious mouth was around him, and he was into an endless ecstasy and desire for more and more that stretched into the days while Laura was in hospital. He visited Laura in the evenings and then, after vowing he loved her more than anyone else, he rushed to Beth’s apartment. It was a delicious, delirious madness of indulgence in sexual pleasure with another woman. New, so new, in her ways of kissing and tonguing, in her smells and tastes and heat, in her rhythms and cries and sounds of coming, in her ways of talking and being with him. Four years with Laura and he’d forgotten the addictive thrill of experiencing another woman and being experienced by her. The illicitness of it intensified it.

  When Laura came home from the hospital with Phillip, he vowed to himself he’d stop his affair with Beth, but he couldn’t: the fact of making love to two women added to the ectastic, compulsive nature of it all.

  Beth suffered no moral qualms about the affair. To her it was merely sex – delicious sex. Handsome, fit younger men were the best for that. The affair lasted almost a year: strangely they both grew bored with it. For the first time, at that point, guilt invaded him, and he almost admitted it to Laura, but then didn’t, after he heard Aaron saying to someone that if your loved one found out you’ve been unfaithful, your relationship would be fucked no matter how long it had lasted. Laura would never know about Beth.

  For two years, his guilt and remorse kept him faithful. Then – and he couldn’t remember her name or put a face to her, because it had lasted only two hurried nights – there was a secretary in one of the university departments, with long silky black hair which tingled with electricity as he ran his fingers through it. She hadn’t enjoyed the sex, though she pretended she had; he remembers that now. He blocks out the memories of the other affairs that had occurred after that.

  He wishes he’d put on a sweater instead of this light aloha shirt as he moves hesitantly up the footpath to the door, barely recognising the garden and house. He straightens his shirt and knocks. No response, so he knocks louder.

  And Laura is in the centre of the doorway, avoiding his eyes. She’s in a simple mauve blouse, jean shorts and jandals, and without make-up. Her usual summer self, he starts recalling.

  ‘Come in,’ she invites, and he steps past her. ‘You want to see the house?’ Before he can reply she starts leading him down the corridor, through the white rays of sunlight that are piercing through the eastern windows. The house even smells different. In their final settlement, he’d agreed to her having the house and everything in it except his clothes, books and private papers, and a collection of family photo albums, which they left in Cheryl’s care.

  She insists on taking him into every room, except the bedroom that, she declares, is now ‘mine and mine alone’ and would be tainted by his presence. That cuts deeply, but he tries not to show it. He realises that she is deliberately showing him that after he left – or, more correctly, after she kicked him out – she altered the house, radically: erasing from it almost every trace that he’d lived there and that they’d lived there together for about fifteen years. He notes that even the wallpaper and colours have been changed throughout the house. When he asks after the collection of Pacific art they’d owned jointly that had been displayed throughout the house, she looks boldly at him and says, ‘Got my share of it stored away. Cheryl has your share.’

  Phillip’s bedroom is the only male one in the house, and he is surprised by how neat and clean and clinical it is. ‘He gets that from me, as you know!’ She laughs. ‘I’ve never had to pick up after him, like I did for you.’ He looks swiftly: no, no photo of him in Phillip’s room.

  ‘Yes, I hated you so much, I changed even the gardens and backyard,’ she declares, when they reach the back veranda. He inhales the strong smell of drying soil.

  They stop at the veranda railing and survey the backyard, which is aglow with sunlight. A lush kōwhai tree stands at the centre of it, shading a white canvas chair. He doesn’t recognise the garden any more. She has even removed the three Tahitian pōhutukawa he planted near the back fence on her thirtieth birthday. ‘I wanted you totally out of my life, but I forgot we share two children and a planet of memories I can’t get rid of.’ When he senses her turning and gazing across at him, he dares not look at her, not knowing how to react to her last accusation. ‘Am I now nothing in your life? You can’t even look at me?’ she continues.

  ‘You’ve never left me, Laura,’ he starts. ‘I too have a storehouse of memories I wish I hadn’t betrayed.’

  ‘Come and have some coffee,’ she says, and they shift and sit at the wooden table, on which she has placed their morning tea, under a large blue beach umbrella. ‘You still have your coffee strong, with milk and one spoonful of honey?’ she inquires. He nods. She pours his coffee.

  He confesses, hesitantly, ‘Every Friday at dawn, I suffer a nightmare of you shooting me three times in the centre of my forehead.’

  ‘Great,’ she says, smiling. ‘Bloody great!’ For an awkward while they drink their coffee in silence.

  ‘I saw Ripeka and Mason last night, and I think they’re going to cause trouble,’ he informs her. She glances up at him. ‘I don’t think they’re happy with the fact they didn’t see Aaron’s will first …’

  ‘… And you being the sole executor?’

  ‘They’re so different from the people we knew.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They never really attacked Aaron directly, but everything they said about him was an attack.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asks. He hesitates, and then tells her what they said about Aaron. ‘Do you believe any of it?’ she asks. ‘How can they be so mean to Aaron? He was so generous to them all their lives.’ She pauses, and then adds, ‘So, if they’re not Aaron’s brother and sister, they’re not entitled to anything. But you should talk to Kath Mills and Mere about it.’

  So they talk – she, mostly – carefully avoiding what they really want to discuss. How do you untangle your whole complicated relationship? How do you start unthreading it without causing pain and regret and blame? She is so beautiful; older, of course with more pronounced pouches and wrinkles round her eyes, a now visible sag under her chin, and more weight round her hips. He knows every detail of her body and she his, and as those details and memories of their marvellous sexual life cruise into his thoughts, he focuses on her every move. She talks in that animated, open manner he loved all their married life, her voice and eyes bright with an urgent vibrancy.

  ‘Have you been missing me?’ he thinks he hears her ask, but he doesn’t quite believe he heard it. He gazes into her face, which is pained with uncertainty. ‘Yes, that’s what I asked,’ she says, and looks away.

  ‘Yes … yes, I have missed you,’ he hears hims
elf confessing.

  ‘Hah!’ she scoffs. ‘Good, because I’ve been in pain missing you.’ She pauses and, smiling cynically, adds, ‘For a second there, I forgot you’re a gifted liar. And stop stripping me in your head. I know you so well. You’ve been thinking that maybe you and I can get back into bed, right?’ He tries to smile. ‘Well, forget it!’ He wants so much to hold her and ask for her forgiveness, and he senses, even in her anger and rejection, she too wants that, but he knows she isn’t going to relent. ‘I hated you,’ she says. ‘Wanted to kill you and kill you, pay you back, but mixed in with all that was my crazy need for you, to see you, be with you.’ She is on the verge of tears, but he knows she isn’t going to cry in front of him. ‘I’d not felt such pain before – it was like an endless madness of hate and anger and desire for revenge, mixed with my need to have you with me, for me to forgive you and forget again about your infidelities. All the clichés are true. I couldn’t sleep, and suffered a recurring nightmare that my bed was opening up and wrapping its arms around me and smothering me, and I’d wake up screaming. I couldn’t eat; all I wanted was to stay in bed and die.’ She pauses and then, turning her gaze on him again, says, ‘But you don’t give a damn about that, do you?’ He moves to protest, but she almost shouts, ‘Don’t! Don’t you dare!’ Tense silence falls between them like a wall. ‘It’s been almost two years, and look at the mess I’m still in,’ she admits eventually. ‘Mere didn’t work for days – she and Cheryl stayed with me; helped me out of bed each morning and made me walk to the kitchen and make a cup of tea. I was a wreck.’

  The umbrella above the table is protecting them from the sun, which is getting hotter. With trembling hands, Laura pours him another coffee, and complains about the heat. He isn’t finding it uncomfortable because he has acclimatised to the tropical temperatures of Hawai‘i. ‘But as you can see, that wreck is now – is now almost whole again.’ She glances at him. ‘And I’m at last able to see other men. There.’ Before he can control it, a spark of jealousy lights up his eyes. She smiles and says, ‘So, the mighty philanderer is jealous.’ Her mellow laughter wafts through the garden. He looks away. ‘Yeah, Dan, I’ve been seeing other guys.’ When he doesn’t react, she says, ‘And of course I don’t need to ask if you’re fucking other women. Dan, you’ve always been such a sick hypocrite: you’re jealous of me being with other men, yet you see nothing wrong with your infidelities. You won’t even forgive your mother for hers.’

  He’s cornered again: unable to resolve the moral and emotional contradiction he’s known for years about himself, between what his head and upbringing told him was proper moral behaviour and what his passions dictated. ‘I know you’re absolutely right, Laura.’ He pauses. ‘I’m trying, Laura.’

  ‘Like you’ve been trying, Dan, for most of our life together!’ she says. But he senses some resignation – forgiveness? – in her accusation, and he starts to hope.

  An hour or so later, after Cheryl comes and takes him away, Laura clears the table, refolds the sun umbrella, and retreats to her favourite canvas chair in the shade of the thickly foliaged kōwhai tree. The lavender-scented heat is lifting and buzzing with the sound of bees, and the dark clouds over the Waitakere are shredding. For the last two years, since Daniel left for Hawai‘i, while she was trying to recover from their divorce, the chair and the kōwhai have become Laura’s sanctuary; what she now refers to as ‘my place of healing’.

  When Cheryl told her Daniel was coming for Aaron’s tangi, the desperate breathlessness, the loudly pounding heart and the swirling panic in the centre of her belly that she’d experienced when her marriage had shattered threatened once again to overwhelm her. She dreaded the real possibility his appearance would revive the intense love/alofa she’d felt for him for most of their life together. Seeing him and being with him over the past few days, and especially this morning, she has to admit to herself, has been what the singularly honest and original Cherie would describe as ‘a mixed bag of masochistic, sweet and sour shit and Pasifika fruit salad’. Laura is sure of one thing though: in her moa a healing gladness is becoming. Being with Daniel, despite the pain, is a start in dealing with her tangled feelings about him and their relationship. Today convinced her that Daniel wanted to sort out their shit.

  That morning, when she deliberately attempted to hurt him, make him jealous, by claiming she was now able to have relationships with other men, she also realised that none of those relationships had been satisfactory, fulfilling; not even sexually. Why? Because the memories of Daniel and their life together were always present, even in the most intimate moments, and none of the men measured up to those. Cherie had once claimed that Laura was a one-man woman, incapable of loving any other man. Laura had refused to believe that, adamantly, and had protested, ‘How can I continue loving a philanderer who lies, cheats, claims he’s overloaded with guilt about it and that he’ll never do it again, and then re-offends?’ Perhaps he was affected by his mother’s behaviour, Cherie had offered. ‘He kicked out his mother because of her infidelities,’ Laura had insisted. ‘And has kept her out for almost thirty years. How do you reconcile that to his serial philandering? How? He condemns his mother for infidelity and goes right ahead fucking any women in sight?’

  Lost for a rational answer, Cherie had asked, ‘so how come you can’t stop loving him?’

  Laura had broken into sobs, clutching her long hair round her face, and Cherie had wound her consoling arms round her head. ‘Do you think he still loves me?’ Laura asked her.

  Now, in the safety of her canvas chair, she persuades herself that Daniel does still love her, or that, if he doesn’t, he wants to find out if he still does.

  It is then she recalls the last time she saw Aaron alive. Why Aaron, and why at that time, she would never be able to explain to herself.

  33

  She heard the key slotting into the front door lock, and realized it was Phillip returning from his league training. When she heard Aaron’s voice, surprise gripped her breath: Aaron hadn’t visited her home since Daniel went to Hawai‘i. She’d also heard Aaron was on what they referred to as one of his ‘long inexplicable trips’. Sometimes he was away from home and the Tribe for months.

  ‘Mum, Uncle wanted to come and see you,’ Phillip said. Aaron stepped from behind Phillip, with that smile that always reminded her of an innocent teenager trying to disguise his misdemeanours. On his back was his trademark blue haversack, which he took almost everywhere and in which they knew he carried his life: a toothbrush, a razor, a comb, a change of clothes, the latest book he was reading, a laptop, a small black notebook of addresses and phone numbers, a black pallpoint pen and a pencil. Laura stepped over to embrace him, but he just shook her hand and kissed her quickly on the cheek. ‘Uncle came to see our final practice this afternoon,’ Phillip added.

  ‘Yeah, and we’re going to devastate the Tigers on Saturday, eh?’ Aaron said. (Phillip’s team, the Kiwi Kings, was playing the Tigers in the finals of the senior league competition.) Phillip said he was going to have a shower and left, carrying his hefty sports bag.

  To Laura, in the old days, Aaron had looked like Al Pacino, especially when Pacino was playing the role of high-powered gangster. He was always in top physical condition. But now the Pacino resemblance and mana were almost gone. Over the past decade or so, he’d taken to wearing a uniform of black jeans, black polo neck and black Spanish boots, but the uniform now looked ill-fitting, out-of-date, as if he’d outgrown it. His long wavy hair was now thinner, more grey than black, and he was gaunter, muscle and flesh stretched tightly round his skeleton, as if he’d been on a severe diet. But most noticeable was the sickly pallor that now permeated his skin.

  She took him into the sitting room, sensing his wary discomfort. ‘Anything wrong, Aaron?’ she asked.

  ‘Things are great. I’m really looking forward to seeing Phil playing in the finals,’ he replied. But she knew his mind wasn’t on any of that.


  She sat down on the main sofa. He took off his haversack and slid into the armchair opposite her. ‘You’ve been away for a while,’ she started carefully, knowing how sensitive he was about being questioned.

  ‘Been to Bali,’ he said. ‘Strange mix of great beauty and generous people and poverty and corruption.’

  ‘On business, holiday, what?’

  ‘All those.’

  ‘And?’ she demanded, smiling.

  He gazed up into the ceiling, his hands clasped in his lap. ‘Went on my own. Was hosted by some associates there. High quality dope; the best, high-quality food. Loved their coconut octopus, raw fish …’ He paused and then said, ‘Was a waste of time, really. Ended up with Bali belly and almost shat myself to death.’ He chortled freely. He was lying, she discerned, but she needed to find out why he was really there, what he wanted from her and what was troubling him.

  In the immediate aftermath of her divorce from Daniel, only Mere of all the Tribe continued discussing him openly with her; the others avoided it, believing any such discussion would worsen her pain. During that initial period of her self-pity, remorse and anguish, that was what she wanted. But as her remorse had changed to anger, she’d wanted them to take her side, and put the blame entirely (and correctly) on Daniel. Apart from Aaron, the others had done that, and she didn’t doubt their sincerity.