The Faithful Couple

by A. D. Miller

‘What are you doing?’

  He could hear the fear in her voice.

  ‘Adam?’

  He found the keys. It was a warm dry night, not yet dark. He left his jacket behind.

  ‘Adam, where are you going?’

  He slammed the door behind him.

  Adam had turned the key in the ignition before he realised that he didn’t know Neil’s address. His seatbelt was pulled halfway across his torso, his father’s standard driving posture for several years after belts became mandatory (his mind went back to his father, even now, with an irksome canine loyalty). He had a pain in his back (sedentary work, carrying the kids, the same overconfidence regarding his chassis as he had always harboured about his weight). The sensation ran across his shoulder to his neck, then to the middle of his spine, but hurt differently in different places: sharp and neural in his neck, duller and achier lower down, as if the pain had matured or learned something along the way.

  ‘Fuck,’ Adam said, letting the seatbelt snap back.

  He knew approximately where the building was. Neil lived in a red-brick mansion block in Bayswater, near a hotel, Adam recalled, with an elegant stairwell and an old-fashioned, sliding-grille lift. His was an internally plush but externally nondescript building, of a type Adam associated with foreign kleptocrats on the lam and their overindulged offspring or mistresses. Neil had only just moved in when Adam had visited; there was almost nothing in the flat besides an inherited bamboo bar and accompanying leather stools, screwed to the floor in the living room, fixtures that incited ribald speculation about the key parties the previous occupants might have hosted. Adam didn’t like the place much (even discounting for his instant, envious calculation of how much his friend must have paid for it, he had been fairly certain that he didn’t like it). High-ceilinged rooms, but boxy and over-regular, set off a faintly ominous corridor: the apartment felt more like a medical consulting suite than a residence, the kind of architecture that seemed designed to prevent anyone experiencing the place as home. But it was Neil’s, and Jess had left him, and Adam had discharged friendship’s duty of compassionate dishonesty, the kind lies you mixed with the dependable truths, and told him it was lovely.

  He hadn’t been there since. Neil had never asked him again, let alone invited Claire and the kids, a failure that Adam inwardly resented but never mentioned. He might be able to find the building, just. But third floor? Fourth? Sitting in the car, he had a bathetic vision of himself patrolling the pavement, waiting to accost Neil as he arrived or left, or hurrying through the doors when another visitor was buzzed in – like the fare-dodgers who sometimes squeezed through the ticket barriers with you on the Tube – then pacing the corridors and madly banging on strangers’ doors. He could hardly ask Neil for the address: Dear Neil, you are a cunt, please could I have your address so I can come round and throttle you?

  Two police officers, one of each sex, walked past his car, their hands clasped meditatively behind their backs, looking quaintly approachable, stab vests notwithstanding. Adam raised his buttocks from the seat to fish his phone from his trouser pocket. He would text:

  Neil, Claire told me what happened today. I can’t believe you would do that to me

  Or: You scumbag. You total scumbag

  Or: Rape, Neil. It’s called rape. Statutory rape, but still rape. You are a rapist

  Neither of them had ever applied that word aloud to what happened in California, though it had often resounded in Adam’s head when they were together, as, he expected, it had in Neil’s – the legalistic modifier mitigating the noun to a greater or lesser extent according to his mood. A seventeen-year-old boy with a fifteen-year-old girl: that was more a technical than a moral offence, towards which the law and common sense were inclined to indulgence. But Neil’s twenty-three to her fifteen were at the wrong end of the moral continuum. Neil had been a man. They both had.

  So: Rape, Neil.

  Or perhaps, he thought, just Goodbye

  He navigated to Neil’s number in his address book. Dear Neil.

  Not Dear. Just Neil. Or N.

  He abandoned his message. Texting would be uncivilised. Adolescent. He would call.

  It occurred to Adam that he would be less encumbered in the passenger seat; he opened the door and walked around the bonnet to the other side of the car. A supermarket delivery van had pulled up outside a house along the street, blocking the road while its driver unloaded, hazard lights flashing in the dusk. From the other direction he heard the wail of an ambulance. Two men jogged past his car, the squatter of the two straining to keep up.

  Do it. His hand shook, the phone quaking in his palm as he aimed his thumb at the keys. The connection was slow – Neil might be out of range, or out of juice – but then the number was ringing. This wasn’t what he had expected. He had intended something dramatic, yes, and distressing, but less sudden, something he would have more time to think about and rehearse.

  He grew stronger as he neared the safety of voicemail. ‘You’ve reached Neil’ – something gratingly American in that formulation, as if modernity required a transatlantic accent – ‘please…’

  Adam hung up. Voicemail would be as undignified as texting. Hi Neil, this is Adam, you are a terrible bastard, don’t bother to call back

  He caught himself untensing in relief. He dialled again.

  Neil answered on the third ring.

  ‘Hello?’

  That tone… Neil would have seen on his screen that it was Adam – everyone was pre-announced these days, like guests at a courtly reception – and yet the disingenuous innocence, that nonchalance.

  Adam opened his mouth to speak, but it was dry and nothing came out, as if the nightmares he periodically suffered of muteness at a viva exam, or some uncanny capital trial, were being realised. He could feel his heart thrashing in his chest. He could hear it.

  ‘Hello? Ants?’

  ‘Neil, I… I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Just a second.’ The hand over the mouthpiece, Adam’s last chance to reconsider or reformulate. ‘Yup. Ads?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Charity thing at the Dorchester. You weren’t there and… It was free booze or channel-surfing, you know.’

  ‘Haven’t you had enough to drink?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You had a few earlier, didn’t you? With Claire.’

  ‘Look, Adam, let’s talk tomorrow, all right? I’m supposed to be schmoozing. Tony’s here. I’ll give you a call in the morning, okay?’

  ‘I don’t give a shit about your schmoozing. Or about Tony. Fuck Tony. Christ. I want to know what the fuck you think you were doing with Claire.’

  Better: he was entitled to this.

  ‘Hang on,’ Neil said. Again the muffle, other blurred, male conversations, once or twice a bump of the phone against Neil’s leg – Neil presumably leaving whatever banqueting suite he was stuck in, understanding that this was serious.

  ‘Okay. Ants. What were you saying?’

  Here we go, Adam thought, the same shenanigans as with Claire: the stonewalling and lies that had to be got through, before the only-half-lies and reluctant confession. He felt like a detective, or a torturer. Onto the second prisoner, who can never be sure what his accomplice has admitted. How bored they must get of this routine.

  ‘It’s Adam. And Claire’s already told me.’

  ‘What has she told you?’

  Adam resisted saying, She’s told me everything. Instead he said, ‘She told me about… the sofa.’

  Silence. Odd to be sitting in his car with his phone pressed to his ear, neither speaking nor spoken to. Embarrassing, somehow.

  ‘Christ, Ad, nothing happened. Ad? Nothing happened.’

  ‘Adam.’

  ‘Fine, Adam.’

  ‘No harm done?’

  Another silence. To his own ear Adam’s voice sounded caustic and distorted, the timbre more synthetic than human. He waited for the apology.

  Neil said, ‘We were rehearsing.
We’re doing a skit for your birthday. Casino Royale. No, Wedding Crashers. We’re doing a scene from Wedding Crashers and we were rehearsing. Artistic licence. Adam?’

  Adam smiled. He liked the lie. He had always enjoyed their lies, all the way back to San Diego. We’re hairdressers. We’re masseurs. He’s a set-designer. The two of them versus. This was a classy gambit, he gave Neil that. A lie about coming on to his wife that was also, in their private code, an expression of loyalty.

  A fly buzzed against the window. Adam reached over, turned the key in the ignition, and opened the window to let it out.

  ‘Adam?’

  The nicknames and the nostalgic humour: they were like the practised advances an old lover might make when she tries to re-seduce you, ingratiating with their echoes of everything you and the lover once had together, and once were.

  ‘Don’t, Neil. This isn’t… just don’t.’

  ‘Look, it was just a silly moment, really. Three glasses of wine in a hurry. I’m sorry, okay?’

  Damn right you’re sorry.

  Neil should have opened with that, Adam thought. He said, ‘No, it isn’t okay. I mean, what have I… I’ve always been… there for you, haven’t I? Haven’t I? I’ve always… encouraged you. Haven’t I? I’ve never… I’ve never… I can’t understand how you could do this to me,’ he lied.

  ‘You’ve never what?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What, Adam? What have you never? Looked down on me because I hadn’t heard of Dante, is that it? Judged me for my horrid money-grubbing job? Yeah,’ Neil said, ‘you’ve always been very charitable, milord, I’m ever so grateful.’

  ‘Is that it, then? Is that why?’

  ‘No,’ Neil said. ‘No. Fuck’s sake.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Look… never mind.’

  One of them had to say it: ‘California?’

  Adam heard Neil’s exhalation, long and sad.

  ‘You said that was nothing.’

  ‘It isn’t like that – it doesn’t go in a straight line. You know why it happened, I’m sure you do. I don’t even mean what her dad told you about her that night. It wasn’t only that. Even apart from that it happened because of us. And then you couldn’t drop it, could you? I mean, you had to keep bringing it up. Finding her again, going on about contacting her, all that bollocks about what he said to you in the morning. What did you want me to do, kill myself? Turn myself in?’

  Rape, thought Adam. He said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘And then when you told me – to be honest, I wouldn’t say you were sorry, not as sorry as you should have been.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Neil, I was insanely sorry – I was paralytic with it.’

  ‘I mean, sorry for me. You were sorry for her and for yourself. Very sorry, sure. And for Ruby. Jesus. Did you ever think, how was I supposed to feel, all that guilt pouring out of you, when all the time I was the one who…’

  ‘You already knew she was… You already knew that. You said it was nothing.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I changed my mind. It isn’t nothing, okay? You win. I regret it, Adam, okay? If I could undo it, I would. If there was anything I could do, I would.’

  ‘But whenever I —’

  ‘I said, I’m sorry about it. I’m fucking sorry, I’m ashamed. Understand?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you felt like this?’

  ‘I just… I couldn’t, Adam. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘What do you… I was scared, Neil. All right? I was scared.’

  They were quiet again. A man in sunglasses, jacket slung over his shoulder, walked past Adam’s car, talking on his phone. Adam had composed messages to the girl, revising and perfecting them, but he hadn’t sent one, at least, not yet.

  ‘So that’s it, is it?’ he continued. ‘That’s why you’ve done this? All of a sudden you regret what happened fifteen years ago, and to make amends you try it on with Claire?’

  ‘I didn’t… Look, you asked me and I’m trying to explain, that’s all. It was mostly the booze, we got carried away.’

  Rape, Adam thought. He said, ‘Maybe we should have said goodbye at the airport. I’ve often wondered about that. That could have been the end of it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Neil countered, ‘well, I sometimes think, if that old man hadn’t been at home, the guy with the car… Or if you hadn’t asked me that night on the beach… We could have left it in San Diego, couldn’t we? Nice little one-night stand. We would never have met her.’

  Strangers were laughing in the background at Neil’s end. The renunciations hung on the line between them.

  ‘Look,’ Neil finally went on, ‘can we get together tomorrow to talk about this properly? After work?’

  ‘Sorry to have distracted you.’

  ‘No, I just mean it would be better to talk in person.’

  ‘No,’ Adam said. ‘Not tomorrow.’ And then he said, ‘I don’t think I ever want to see you again.’

  Adam looked out through the windscreen. There ought to be witnesses or an audience for this. But there was only, on the opposite pavement, a woman in a burqa pushing a buggy. She’s trying to get it to sleep, Adam thought reflexively.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Don’t say that. Ad?’

  Even to Adam the threat seemed safely theatrical, free, an ultimatum he would never be called upon to enact. More a rhetorical flourish than an irrevocable event. Somebody will say something, he thought. Somebody will do something to stop this.

  ‘Goodbye, Neil,’ his voice said.

  ‘What? Ad —’

  He heard Neil say something else as he lowered the phone from his ear, but the words were too quiet to decipher. He pressed the button and looked at the screen. The call’s duration was 6:23. He held the phone in both hands, expecting it to ring again. But it didn’t.

  He reopened his electronic address book and scrolled down to Neil. Are you sure you want to delete this number?

  Was he sure? To purge Neil like this might be tantamount to killing him, in Adam’s life anyway. To kill Neil would be a kind of self-mutilation or partial suicide. So much of his last decade and a half were stored in Neil, shameful times and halcyon. Without his friend as his repository and witness, part of Adam’s past – part of him – would perish, too.

  He pressed Yes I want to delete Neil. He felt a queer kind of lightness or liberation. I will never see Neil again, he thought. Neil is dying, even though he is still alive. He will be dead and alive at the same time.

  Adam stepped out of the car, closed the door gently and locked it with his key.

  Neil took another glass of wine from a waistcoated attendant and drank half of it in one unprofessional gulp. He didn’t believe this. Not that Claire had told Adam, nor that Adam was livid: he believed all that. They had been busted by his drunk-texting, but she might anyway have felt guilty enough to confess. Splashing his face in the bathroom in his cavernous flat, he had thought, You idiot, Neil. You cunt. You could have left – twice – easily. How could you even have thought about her that way, let alone… He came out again to this deathly reception, networking and tax relief dressed up as benevolence, to avoid confronting his sinful self any further.

  He didn’t believe Adam’s goodbye. They had a tacit but firm agreement, Neil thought, to be always in each other’s lives; it was much too late for either of them to rescind it.

  With his free hand Neil retrieved the BlackBerry from his inside pocket to phone back. He dialled, but aborted the call almost instantly – before it rang, and, he hoped, before his number had flashed up on Adam’s screen. Better not to. Not today. One of them might say something worse. It was bad enough that he had counterattacked when he should have stuck to plain apology (Damn right you’re sorry). And that absurd Hail Mary joke about Wedding Crashers. Better to email.

  He rolled and clicked with his thumb until the email template appeared (scientists of the future, Neil had thought, biologists or whatever, would wonder at the dramatic leap in th
umb musculature made by Western man in the early twenty-first century). Dear Adam… Dear Ads… Adam… Mate… Ants… Adam, I’m sorry… Adam, I’m so sorry…

  ‘Who are you hiding from?’ Tony McGough called to him. ‘There’s gold in them thar hills.’

  Tony put a heavy arm around Neil’s shoulders and rotated him to face the convocation of suits, shape-shifting yet cohesive like penguins huddling against the cold, individuals sometimes peeling off and scuttling along the group’s perimeter before burrowing back into the mass.

  ‘One of the Kumars is here,’ Tony said. ‘And a Levene, I think, or a capo from their office, anyway. Go get ’em, kimosabe.’