A Small Indiscretion (37 page)

I could hear your father talking, but I wasn’t really listening anymore. I was caught up in my own turmoil. “I can’t believe Robbie’s been alone somewhere, dealing with all this. It’s been festering. And Mitch knew. And he didn’t tell us. How long have you known?”

“Since … for three days.”

“Three days. Jonathan!”

I walked across the room, away from him. I stood by myself for a long time, breathing in and out, trying to get my heart to slow down. Your father was sitting on the couch with his head in his hands. He lifted his face, and I could tell by the light of the lantern he hadn’t slept. I didn’t know in how long. I stared at him, and tried to remember. I tried to remember that half a lifetime of knowing each other, and loving each other, still rested between us. It was
right there, in the air, a whole history of standing side by side, facing the world.

I was finally able to move toward him. I held the lantern to his face and saw that he was crying.

I took a deep breath. I stood there a minute longer, then I set the lantern down and sat silently beside him. I put my hand on his shoulder. He didn’t shrug it off. We sat and sat that way, saying nothing.

I held the lantern up again. I wiped a tear from his cheek.

“You poor man,” I said.

“I don’t need your pity.”

“It’s not pity.”

“What is it, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“You shouldn’t pity me. You should blame me. It’s my fault Robbie’s disappeared. I knew I wasn’t his father and I didn’t tell him, but he found out anyway.”

“Jonathan,” I said to him softly. “You’re still his father. You’re the one who raised him. And it’s not your fault.”

“Whose fault is it?”

“It doesn’t matter. That’s the one thing that doesn’t matter.”

And saying it, just like that, I saw that it was true.

I pulled his face toward my chest. I held him there, against his will, feeling his tears soak my T-shirt. There was nothing I could say. No words that would describe for him the hard, heavy, certain thing that had come into my chest when I’d seen the tears running soundlessly down his face. It was not forgiveness for him. It was not forgiveness for Mitch. It was forgiveness for myself.

It had been a relief to learn that it was not my indiscretion with Patrick last summer that undid us, but the one from more than two decades before, with Malcolm. How much easier to blame the impulsiveness of youth than the wanton self-indulgence of a grown woman. But maybe even that wantonness was forgivable. We are
only flesh and blood. We are only chemicals mixing and circuits firing, sometimes in disarray. We are, every last one of us, plagued by useless want. The night with Patrick had been a small indiscretion, I saw now, in the sprawling story of our life, and finally I knew that blame had no role to play. It was time to shed it. It was time to step from its fetid pool. It was time to begin the business of healing, so that when you were found, your parents would be whole.

I kissed the top of your father’s head. He turned his face toward mine. I kissed his lips, and he kissed me back.

“There’s something else,” he said.

“What else?”

“I’ve been seeing someone.”

“You have?”

“Yes. But I’m not seeing her anymore.”

He didn’t appear to intend to say anything more about it.

“Who is she?”

“Why does that matter?”

“Is she the realtor?”

“What realtor?”

“Never mind. Just tell me.”

She wasn’t the realtor. She hadn’t painted the girls’ nails. She was someone the girls never met, and I’d never met, but we might have if we’d been paying attention, since your father first ran into her at the pool in Gold Hill on the Fourth of July. He didn’t pursue her that day. He’d barely spoken to her. He didn’t get in touch with her until he had moved out in January. They’d known each other growing up. She was the woman he’d been in love with before he met me. The woman who’d wanted to marry him. The woman I had in some way stolen him from, who, all these years later, was threatening to steal him back. There’s the past again, keeping its foothold, wreaking its havoc.

“Was it serious?” I asked him.

“It was not nothing.”

“Were you in love with her?”

“Back then, or now?”

“Now.”

He looked at the ceiling. “Yes,” he said.

What force in that single syllable. I felt it hit my chest, a sudden blow. It was like the electricity going out—whatever came afterward was not going to be business as usual.

“Is that why you took the girls to Wisconsin?”

His face colored. “I saw her only when they were with their cousins. I never brought her around. I never even mentioned her.”

“Are you still in love with her?”

“No. I don’t know. She’s not coming back here. She’s staying in Wisconsin. I don’t expect to see her again.”

“All right,” I said after a long time. “Thank you for telling me.”

“You’re welcome.”

It was very late. Twice, then a third time, the lights struggled on, whirred for a moment, and shut down again.

“Let’s go to bed,” I said.

I stood up, lifting the lantern off the coffee table and blowing the candles out. I walked toward the stairs, the lantern casting its dim light as Jonathan followed me and we moved together through the familiar house in the unfamiliar darkness. When we reached the bedroom, I turned off the lantern. Your father took my hand and led me to the bed. It was a feeling like the feeling of walking forward into the darkness at the Tate, walking into oblivion to claim love. Only this time the love was of a different order.

W
HEN
I
WOKE
up, it was nearly eight, and Jonathan wasn’t there. His car wasn’t in the driveway, either. I stood for a moment at the
window and felt the stab of the morning’s beauty, clear after the night’s rain, high clouds turned electric white by a brilliant morning sun.

I called his cellphone. “About last night,” I said.

“Never mind last night,” he said. “I shouldn’t have let that happen.”

“Why not?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Just because.”

I waited for him to say more, but he was silent, and I could not bear the sound of it, so I hung up the phone. I sat on the bed and waited for him to call back. I looked at the place next to me where he had spent the night. I laid my hand, in his absence, on the white sheet.

He’d said he did not expect to see this other woman again, but what is life if not fueled by the unexpected? A rush of blood came into my head. I stared at my hand on the sheets, and at the wedding ring on my finger. I had been married to Jonathan for more than two decades, but I had not even had the new ring, with its old stone and its three new stones, for a year. I had slipped it on my hand just as our troubles began, and it seemed, right now, like terrible bad luck to keep wearing it. I took it off and stared at it in my open palm. With my other hand, I touched the inside of my wrist. I ran my hand along the bare flesh of my arm and felt again what I’d felt the night before. I was naked. I was human. I was fallible. I deserved to be forgiven. We all did.

I opened the drawer of the bedside table and dropped the ring in. But it seemed too risky, too tentative a place to leave it. I found an envelope in the drawer and placed the ring in the envelope and sealed it and walked to the hall closet and pulled out the step stool
and lifted down the hatbox. I fished out the photo of the White Cliffs of Dover and stared at it. I had not been able to make sense of it last summer, because I’d been asking the wrong questions. I’d been asking who I was, and who I had been, instead of who you were or might become. I had not been experiencing our shared history as a case to be cracked, or a puzzle to be solved, but instead as inside the arc of an already-finished story, a fairy tale shaped out of hope and inexperience—and, of course, love. I picked up the photo taken at Christmas, the one that captured our whole family together. Even petrified memories, it seemed, even buried fossils, could degrade over time. You stood at the top of the stairs, took a step, dropped the cane and made us all clap and laugh and cry. After dinner, Mitch graciously lifted the camera out of my hand and snapped the photo. But before the evening ended, he’d told you that Jonathan was not your father. He’d saved your life and captured our happiness, then he’d compromised both.

I replaced the two photos and laid the envelope with the ring inside it in the hatbox. There would be time, later, to concern myself again with the question of my marriage. After all, who knew better than I how to salvage a lost thing and give it new light? But for now, I decided to let it rest.

I put the lid on the hatbox, then for no good reason at all, I lifted the lid off again and slipped my hand into the envelope taped to the inside, which held the receipt for the pillbox hat with its beaded veil that I’d worn on my wedding day. I felt the paper with my fingertips and pulled it out. But it wasn’t the receipt from long ago. It was a clue, one that appeared to have been placed there quite recently—for me alone to find.

M
OTHER
’
S
D
AY
. The girls won’t be home until this afternoon. There will be no breakfast in bed this year without your father here to orchestrate it. No tray delivered to my room laden with scrambled eggs and fried potatoes, and a flower from the yard in a bud vase, and a chocolate in gold foil. I don’t care about any of that, but I can’t help nursing a secret hope that this will be the day the phone will ring, and I will pick it up, and I will hear your voice. Or the front door will make its familiar groan and you will be standing on the step with a bouquet of grocery-store flowers in your hands. You will walk into the house. The dogs will pounce. I will take the flowers and thank you. I will say that I am sorry. I will begin to tell you the truth.

T
HE
D
EEP
F
OREST
Meditation Center, sixty-five miles north of Yangon in Myanmar, the country formerly known as Burma. That was the clue that had been left in the hatbox. Or at least that was what was printed on the flimsy business card I pulled from the envelope taped to the inside. I stared at it a long time before I remembered that I had seen that name on a brochure in the squalor of the loft, the
weekend I built the arc light, when I thought I might sleep in Emme’s bed.

Here she was—Emme, Daisy, Marguerite—making another invasion.

I found the website. I called your father and read to him from its home page:

“The Deep Forest Meditation Center is a sacred retreat intended to allow residents to walk the Buddha’s True Path to Spiritual Liberation. The generosity of Dhamma supporters in Burma and throughout the world promise that all meditation instruction, room and board and travel for worthy candidates are given freely in the spirit of meritorious deeds. Residents’ stays begin with a mandatory hundred days of silence, including no contact with the outside world. Stays can continue as long as many months or years, or even a lifetime commitment.”

“Do you think Emme is there, even though her uncle said she was in Paris?” I asked your father.

He said nothing for a minute, and I could almost hear the machinery of his brain doing its work. “No,” he said. “I think she’s where he said she is. But I think Robbie is in Myanmar.”

It was like the maternity ward all over again—your father seeing something I was too close to see, and stepping in to save us.

Your father dialed the number and conferenced me in, and that one phone call was all it took to inform us that you were indeed at the Deep Forest Meditation Center in Myanmar. You could not receive our call, we were told, since you had committed to one hundred days of silence. But a message could be delivered to you, letting you know that your parents were trying urgently—desperately—to reach you.

Did I thank your father? I did. I thanked him until I was sure he knew I was grateful.

M
AY
20. The day of the annular eclipse. I was in the backyard with the girls. Your father had joined us for an early picnic. We ate hot dogs and corn on the cob on a blanket on the lawn and, at five o’clock, the yard was folded in a strange blue half-darkness. The girls sat on a blanket, not seeing the change, oblivious to the universe’s important event. We had forgotten all about our plan to make viewing devices out of cardboard and foil.