“It’s not as important as raising a family, having a life together, building something that lasts. It’s not as important as love.”
“So sex is not that important to you. Which means that for the last few years, I’ve mostly done without it.”
Fucking slut, he thought. He wasn’t entirely sure who he meant—his wife or the other woman? They were both fucking sluts! Which made him think, What can that fucking slut do for you that I can’t do? He stared furiously at Eliza, thinking exactly those words. Fuck her. He didn’t want to know what she could do that he could not. Besides, she was a woman. She didn’t have a cock.
“We do have good sex. When we have it.”
That turned the key; anger opened in him as he stared at her lying naked on top of the sheets. He leaned close to yell in her face, “How can we have good sex when you’re off fucking someone else?” Then he reared back, straight up, and lowered his voice. “This is not even about sex. It’s about you lying to me. For months. Listen to you telling me what I’ve done wrong. How I’ve failed. It’s unbelievable. I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“I’m not saying that you have.”
“Think about what we just did together. Wasn’t that good enough? I cannot believe that I’m in our bed discussing this.”
The pause that followed was excruciating; she knew what he was thinking. Have you ever been with her here?
She whispered, “She’s never been inside the house.” She put a hand on his thigh.
“Don’t. Do not touch me.” He caught her eye. “I hope you don’t think I should be thankful you kept it out of the house.”
“No. I just wanted you to know.”
For a long time, neither of them said a word. Then Andrew spoke again. “It’s not the sex. It’s not even that you lied to me. I don’t want to think about how many times. Attraction is human. Lying is also human.”
She heard him breathing. It was the first time she had noticed him breathing in a long time. How could she have stopped hearing that?
“It’s…It’s…” The breath hooked in his throat and became another sound. He began to cry, which shamed her. She had seen him cry only twice, each time she had pushed their babies into the world. When he saw them unfold, covered in that white waxy stuff, and watched the arms, with fisted hands, shoot out like sprouts from their curled bodies, when he heard their shocked cries at the light and the cold air, Andrew had wept, his face transformed.
He coughed. He cleared his throat, wilfully drying up. Part of her wanted to cry again, pathetically this time, angling for sympathy.
She waited for him to jump out of bed and leave her. He didn’t. They maintained their positions, her lying naked, him sitting up, his long elegant feet sticking out from under the sheets. She closed her eyes again, saw dark purple lights on the insides of her eyelids. She was coming apart again, unforming. She didn’t know what she was doing.
She had destroyed her marriage, just like that. By being truthful. Too late. Was it wrong to tell the truth? She opened her eyes; he looked different, too, partly because he was so angry. She scrutinized his face, thinking she might not ever be here this way again, naked in bed with her husband. Yet he was the only man she had ever loved fully, completely.
He swore under his breath.
“What did you say?”
He put up a hand, as though to silence her.
“No, please, go ahead. Let’s get it out in the open.”
He met and coldly held her eye. “I said, ‘You fucking slut.’ ”
The curse floated lightly in the air between them. Which was peculiar, for two words with such hard consonants. “I have to agree with you. I think I’ve been brave, mostly. In my life, I mean. And honest. But with this, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to break up our marriage over, as you say, just sex.” She was still being untruthful, in her heart. But “just sex” was the simplest, most acceptable thing to call her passion for Shar.
“What are you going to do?”
“Shouldn’t I be asking you that question?”
Andrew looked away. With the side of her head pressed against the pillow, what she heard most insistently was the surge of her blood, its swooshing pulse inside her head. She closed her eyes again; the noise became more intense.
“Eliza. Open your eyes. What do you want to do?”
She opened her eyes. “I want her to come to dinner.”
As though stung by a wasp, Andrew leapt out of bed, yelling, “Is that supposed to be funny? Don’t fucking joke about this.”
She was completely still, staring up at him, pinned to the bed by her own audacity. And stupidity. It was possible, she realized, to take a hammer to what you most loved in the world and bring the hammer down and shatter it. What had she been thinking? Andrew did not move to cover his nakedness; his soft cock hung there, not so far from her face. He said something else now, but his words didn’t penetrate as much as the sight of his penis did. She saw how recklessly far she had gone; she did not know what he would do now. But after he got to the end of his rant, she said, “I’m not joking. I want you to meet her.”
“You’re out of your fucking mind. Do you hear me?”
“You’re yelling. The boys are going to wake up.”
“Why the fuck would I want to meet your lover?”
“From the beginning, she told me to tell you. That it was wrong to keep it a secret. That it didn’t have to be a secret.”
“Jesus Christ. What planet does she live on?”
He put one leg after the other in his boxers, carefully, not wanting to be further humiliated by losing his balance. He pulled a holey T-shirt over his head. “Good god, Eliza! You may think you’re Anaïs fucking Nin, but I am not Henry Miller. I don’t want to share you. That was not the agreement when we got married.”
Eliza sat up and pulled the sheet over her belly and breasts, buying time. She tucked the bedsheet under her arms like a woman in a movie. “Did we ever talk explicitly about monogamy? How boring it can get?”
“Yes, we did. And we agreed that some boredom was the price to pay for stability. That we would be creative and enjoy ourselves no matter what and that we wouldn’t have sex with other people. That was the agreement.”
Eliza didn’t remember that conversation. As she opened her mouth to say so, Andrew whipped around. “Don’t you dare tell me that you don’t remember we agreed to be monogamous. Maybe it wasn’t explicitly stated in our vows, but obviously we were monogamous. And that’s not even the point here. If you wanted to start having sex with someone else, you should have told me.”
“So it’s only me. As if you’ve never been attracted to anyone else.”
He looked at her with disgust. “I’ve never been seriously attracted to anyone else. Never in a way to betray you. It has never once entered my mind.”
“What about your brilliant student, the one you often talk about? What about Kajali?”
“One of my students and one of my colleagues. My oldest, most trusted, happily married colleague? Can’t you do better than that? You won’t find any dirt on me because I’ve never cheated on you…” His voice began to rise. “And I’ve never lied to you, I’ve never abused your trust in any way. Don’t try to bring me down to your level.”
“My level? My level?” It was impossible to answer her indignant, rhetorical question, because Andrew was right. She had fallen into someone else’s arms, body, life. And she had lied. Andrew did not lie about important things. His body aligned rightly to his moral compass. His true north was reason modulated by common decency. She said, “It’s hard to be married to someone who is basically perfect.”
He turned away and opened the slats on the blinds. On one side of their back garden was the well-lit laneway, on the other side, their neighbour’s messy backyard. “Don’t try to make me feel guilty.”
“I’m not. I know I’m in the wrong. I haven’t stopped feeling guilty for a second.”
Still staring grimly out the window,
he said, “I’m sure guilt was the farthest thing from your mind much of the time.”
It was almost two in the morning. One of them would have to get up in four or five hours. He closed the blinds and sat down. “I’m not sleeping in the spare bed.”
Eliza rolled away, pulling the sheet behind her. “I’ll go.”
“No.”
She remained, wrapped up, on the edge of the bed.
He said, coldly, “You don’t want to leave me?”
“Andrew, no, I don’t. I never—”
“Don’t say anything else.” When she moved to touch him, he said, “No. I am really angry. And hurt. You’ve lied to me over and over again.” He felt wrecked by it. “But I’m willing to see if I can still sleep in this bed with you.”
She nodded. They said nothing else. They each went to the bathroom, separately, closing the door behind them. They came back to bed and lay down without touching, each of them altered, confused. They were also tired, spent by the emotions of this night. Side by side, they slept the deep sleep of exhaustion.
—
He woke before she did, into sweet forgetfulness. Then the wall rose up as though in a nightmare, but he was fully awake, remembering. Her lies threw him against that wall, and threw him, and threw him. Their life, as they had once known it, was over. The dislocation was physical; the pain retracted and re-entered him like a blade not once but repeatedly. After a few stabs, he was livid. He was furious with himself that he had let her sleep in the bed with him.
He was turned on his side, as usual, facing away from her. He could hear her breathing and hated the sound of it. Lying, fucking bitch.
It was past six. The light was pushing through the blinds. He would get up and dress and leave the house. He could not hear the boys stirring downstairs. She could get them ready on her own, take them to school alone. Let her see what life without him would be like. He listened for a few breaths more, getting ready to slide out of bed and go. He was done. The marriage was over. He was leaving.
But, instead, he carefully turned over to watch Eliza’s sleeping face.
34
Endless
IT WAS A PERIOD OF IMMEASURABLE TIME, TIME WITHOUT end, yet apocalyptic, in the ancient Greek sense of the word—apo, from; calypso, to uncover. Their lives were laid bare. Eliza and Andrew experienced time as the most unfortunate European polar explorers experienced it: trudging through the heart of a frozen immensity, the compass lost or broken, the supplies gone. It was a place they did not understand. Would they perish? Or would they survive?
Eliza lay beside her tall, golden husband and wept, some of the tears catching in her ears but most of them sliding into her hair. Once, returning from Annie’s, Marcus had given her an uncharacteristically gentle, long hug, touched her hair, pulled his hand away. “Why’s your hair so wet, Mom? Have you been swimming?”
Because they had never suffered greatly as a couple, they were unprepared for this long, horrible travail. Andrew’s bitterness and anger astonished them both. One Saturday afternoon while the boys were at simultaneous playdates—two different friends’ houses at the same time constituted a minor miracle—after a conversation that turned into a loud argument that lasted for two hours, Andrew fell back, spent, and said, “This is worse than all the renovations we’ve lived through.”
Which made them laugh. Then they stopped laughing.
Most often they talked in their bedroom, sometimes lying on their bed, or sitting in the rattan chairs by the window. The children had to be sleeping, or outside playing, or at Annie’s. Andrew and Eliza lay on their backs, not holding hands, or holding hands tentatively, and talking, or not talking, though surely there was some other verb for the anxiety of pulling words out of silence, or holding down that silence like a rabid animal, frightened of it. They discussed their lives together, their children, Eliza’s attachment to this shadow woman named Shar. Eliza used the word “attachment.” Andrew said “love.”
Eliza had just dumped the clean laundry out on the long storage bench at the foot of their bed. Andrew was sitting against the headboard, his legs stretched toward her. As she folded one of his undershirts, he said, “But if you’re in love with her—”
“I told you, I have never used that word.”
“Avoiding the word doesn’t erase the feeling. I feel it when you talk about her.”
When Eliza answered this only by trying to unknot a bunch of thong panties—underwear she would never have worn, pre-Shar—Andrew asked, “How can you love many people at one time? Love requires enormous amounts of energy.”
“Love is elastic, isn’t it?” The word came to her directly from the stretchy material in her hands. She quickly stuffed the tangled ball of panties into the bottom of the pile and pulled out a clump of boy T-shirts and jeans. “If we had five children, would we love each of them less?”
“Shar is not our child. She’s outside our family.”
“I know that.” Two shirts, folded. Three. A pair of pants. “You say ‘our family’ a lot lately, have you noticed that?”
“I think you need reminding that you have one.”
Eliza nodded, then changed her mind. “That’s not fair. I still do everything I did before. More. I never stopped putting them to bed, getting their teeth brushed, doing their homework with them. I never stopped fulfilling all my motherly duties, and there are many of them!”
“I wasn’t talking about the kids.” The hurt was plain on his face. “I was talking about me. Aren’t I part of this family?”
“Yes! And—I haven’t stopped being present for you, either. I’m here.”
“But not always. And you don’t always want to be here. You want to be with her.”
“Not only. I don’t only want to be with her.”
He stared at her, incredulous.
“You know, she’d be open to sleeping with both of us.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind? The sex therapist who does threesomes? Don’t these people have any oversight? Isn’t there some sort of code of conduct from the sex therapists’ association?”
“I’m not her client.”
“Thank Christ!”
“Anyway, I’ve never brought that up before because it’s too much. I’ve always told her that you weren’t into—”
“You mean you’ve discussed this with her? Eliza!”
“No, I haven’t discussed it with her. I said that we were conservative. But I’m telling you about it so that you can understand what she’s like. Sexually she lives in a different universe. She’s extremely…adventurous. And independent. And she knows that I don’t want to leave you. That I love you.”
“I don’t understand how you can be so naïve. Don’t you see that if you continue this relationship with her, whatever it is, it changes things between us? Between you and me? That it already has changed things? Your emotions for her might become stronger than…this.” His hand swirled around, gesturing toward the whole house. “Bringing a third person into a marriage is dangerous. That’s why people choose monogamy, despite the boredom. Don’t you see that?”
“It doesn’t have to be that way. Who is truly monogamous?”
“Most people, I think. Most of the time. Some unhappily, maybe, but a little unhappiness is worth it. You think you can just decide to end your relationship with Shar. What if you can’t? For all I know, during these past few weeks, you’ve still been sleeping with her.”
“I have not. I told you I wouldn’t see her and I haven’t. We’ve spoken on the phone. A few times. And I told you about that, too.”
“But I never asked what you said.”
Eliza did not answer the implied question.
“So, what did you say? That you’re working as hard as you can to get your husband onside? Or into bed with her? Jesus Christ.”
“No. I’ve told her that you know the truth, finally. That we’re talking about it. You and I. That I’ve been honest. Finally.”
“But what if I decide, Fuc
k it, I can’t share you? What if I want to end the marriage? Is that fair to Marcus and Jake? No. I don’t want our kids to live through all that crap just because of sex. Ugh! Suddenly our ground as a whole family has shifted.”
“I shifted it,” she said guiltily.
“What’s new? You like change. The reason I married you is because you were willing to change. You let go of Thalassa and started a new career from scratch. You upended your life and you liked doing it. But it’s different now, because of the boys. My life, Marcus’s life, Jake’s life, they’re so intertwined with yours. I’m trying to understand how to keep you and let you go at the same time.” He shook his head. They stared at each other.
Andrew saw the way the familiar curve of her cheek looped around to her mouth, her chin. Eliza’s face! He knew it would be easier to hate her if he didn’t like her so much. Most of the time. But that was not what he chose to say. Instead, he emphasized his own magnanimity. “I am an idiot. But the fact of the matter is, I want you to be happy.” He swung his long legs over the side of the bed. “We can try. I am trying. But no more secrets. And your relationship with her cannot interfere with our family life. I don’t want to feel like I’m babysitting our kids while you’re out with your lover. We’ll either figure it out or…we’ll separate.”
“No, we won’t. I’ll end it with her.”
He expelled a short, loud roar. “You don’t get it! Separating isn’t only your decision.” He stood up, and walked around her. She was almost finished folding; the thongs were still there, the last of the pile. He glanced at them briefly as he picked up the boys’ stacks of clothes. “It would break my heart if our marriage ends. It would be the biggest mistake of my life. And of yours. But I don’t know how I’ll feel about anything in a month’s time. What hurts me is that you are willing to take that risk.” He shook his head, at a loss for words. With the boys’ clean clothes in his arms, he left their bedroom.
Eliza stared down at the ball of lace and elastic that she still had to untangle.
35
The Change Room Page 26
