After the Fall (23 page)

TIM
•

I hadn’t imagined Joan to be a gossip, but she’d been unable to restrain her curiosity about the whole Luke/Kate thing. Ever since Cressida had first phoned a month or so ago, waking us both in the early hours, the topic had never been far from her mind. What did I know? Had Luke done the dirty on his wife? Who started it? When did it end? I suppose I disappointed her with my lack of inside knowledge, the truth being that Luke had never confided in me. In retrospect I was glad of that—Cressida was my friend too, and at least I had never had to agonize over whether I should tell her. Besides, I had pointed out to Joan, she should have been at least as well informed as myself, Kate being an old friend of hers. In return she had just laughed.

“It was our mothers who were friends, not us,” she scoffed. “I always thought Kate was too fond of herself, and a shocking flirt. She had it coming.”

I thought this was rather callous but said nothing at the time, still struggling to assimilate the terrible news. Now, as we drove home from dinner at her parents’, she was onto the subject again.

“So do you think Luke knew about the fellowship?”

I sighed. Dinner had been relaxed, soothing, and now I just wanted to steep for a while in the fading glow of good wine and conversation. It had been hard enough broaching the subject with Luke earlier that evening without having to dissect it all over again for Joan’s benefit.

“I assume so. They’ve been going to counseling together, so it must have come up there.”

“Uh-uh.” Joan shook her head. “Not in the last few weeks, they haven’t. Apparently Cressida ended the sessions.”

“How do you know that?” I queried, surprised.

“I asked Luke,” Joan replied without looking over. She was driving; she often did if I had a drink or two, though I was nowhere near the limit. It meant she could dictate when we left.

“Asked him what?”

“How the counseling was going, of course.” She spoke slowly, as if talking to an idiot. “He told me that it wasn’t going at all. Supposedly Cressida had deferred all future appointments. Guess she won’t be rescheduling now.”

Despite myself I felt a twinge of sympathy for Luke. My beloved was more tenacious than a terrier when she wanted something, and while I knew he had no desire to talk about his personal life, Joan had obviously managed to extract some information.

“You’re incorrigible,” I mumbled, awed and appalled at her audacity.

“Why?” she asked, sweeping me a hazel-eyed glance of innocence. “He’s your friend, so of course I’m worried about him. Besides, I don’t know why you’re so determined that we tiptoe around this and act as if nothing ever happened. No one died, you know.”

“I just figure that if Luke wants to talk about it he will. I read him the riot act when he first moved in. Now I just want to be his friend.”

“You? Read someone the riot act?” she asked in disbelief, though her tone was fond. I smiled but didn’t react. Joan made the long U-turn onto the Eastern Freeway, concentrating as she changed down through the gears. For all her eagerness to get behind the wheel she wasn’t a natural driver, though I would never have told her so. For a few minutes there was silence and I hoped we could leave it there, but as the freeway entrance receded she started up again.

“I mean, just imagine if he hadn’t known she was going to go to America. What a shock! I bet the poor sap was assuming she’d want him back.”

“I doubt Luke ever assumed anything.”

Joan went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Still, it’s no more than he deserves, after cheating on her like that. I wonder what’s up with Kate and Cary. Have you heard?”

I shook my head. I worried about them too, how Cary had taken the news, whether Kate was still seeing Luke. Funny to be in such a position. A year ago I had envied both couples: their confidence, their direction, their bright, sparkling marriages. Twelve months later all of that had come undone. All those years of love gone, and nothing to show for them except pain.

“You’re quiet,” Joan remarked, her voice softer, almost solicitous. “Tired?”

“Mmm,” I replied, looking out the window. Our exit was still some miles away, but already Joan was changing lanes in preparation. Tired, yes, but it was more than that. Watching everything unfold had lurched me from anger to disgust and finally sorrow, had reminded me that love is fleeting and precious and should never be taken for granted. All of a sudden I felt the need to seize it with both hands, to assure myself that the same pain wouldn’t be mine. Joan glanced across, checking her blind spot, and in the lights of the car behind her profile was as pure as a relief on a Grecian temple. She might be a gossip, but she was also forthright and funny and staunchly loyal. It wasn’t how I had imagined my ideal woman, but what does ever turn out exactly as we expect? There are so many ways to fall in love, and then after the fall …

It was a spontaneous decision, but why not? One thing Luke’s little episode had taught me was that there are no guarantees. As we made our exit from the freeway I swallowed once, then spoke.

“Pull over,” I said, “as soon as you can. There’s something I have to ask you.”

KATE
•

We left for Europe on the last day of August. Through the haze of packing and the incessant ache in my chest I wondered if Cary had chosen that date on purpose. There were almost too many portents to ignore: the end of winter, the coming of spring, a season of regrowth and rebirth. It should have been a propitious choice, but when we arrived on the other side of the world I realized that the opposite, in fact, was true. The days were shortening, autumn was coming on. Cary swore it was the best time to travel, free from crowds and the extremes of heat. Instead I found myself feeling miserable in the world’s most beautiful places.

I tried not to think about Luke. I couldn’t bear imagining him having a life that I wasn’t part of. But it didn’t work, and I missed him. He turned up in all the obvious spots—in the smile of a Giotto Madonna, in every cool, marbled sinew of the David. But he was also there when I least expected it, the chance encounters leaving me shaken. A furtive cherub in a dusky corner of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling had his eyes; his hands, incongruously transplanted to a gelati vendor in the Piazza Navarone, counted out my change. My body yearned for him. Longing washed over me in a strange sort of sexual homesickness, a melancholy lust. It wasn’t the act I missed so much as his physical presence: his hand on my forearm as we talked, his fingers smoothing back my hair. Luke and I had always been touchers, reaching out to make contact with the other regardless of whether we were eating, walking or just in conversation, a reassurance of existence and possession. He still possessed me.

But I missed Cary too. He was right there beside me every hour of the day, but it wasn’t like it would have been a year ago. I didn’t know what he was thinking, what he wanted, whether he was truly moved by what he was seeing or if, like myself, he was just traipsing from one sight to the next to pass the time. He conscientiously took photos, wrote postcards, practiced phrases that he thought he might need but never seemed to use. What was there worth the effort of saying anyway? “That fish was very tasty, thank you.” “Where is the post office?” “My wife is a whore.” At dinner we had little to talk about save for planning the next day’s sightseeing. Every night the question of sex hung like the drapery from the four-poster beds in the palazzos and pensiones Cary had booked, suffocating and heavy. Nothing happened. Each new bed we encountered was a reminder of my infidelity, of all those other beds I had so recklessly climbed into with a man not my husband. Checking into our hotel made me shudder, listening to Cary stammer out his request for a double room.
Un letto matrimoniale
, the marriage bed. Even the furniture had expectations. We saw breathtaking scenery and ate fabulous food and I had never felt so wretched.

Cary tried; he really did. Tour guide was a natural role for him, our time flawlessly balanced between cultural activities and R&R. The first month was reserved for Italy, with Rome, Florence and Venice segueing seamlessly into France. On our last night we would celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary in Paris. The schedule was as predictable as the diamond he would have bought for me when we got engaged, and I began to feel sick just thinking about the weeks ahead. Some mornings I wondered how I would drum up the enthusiasm for breakfast, never mind days and days of more of the same. Often the only thing that sustained me through those long hours of cathedrals and galleries, the stifling evenings of small talk, was something I had learned from my work: that all pain is erased in the passage of time. Not just
by
, but in. Ten decades hence it would be as if nothing had ever happened. There would be no relics, no scars. No jug to piece together, no bone fragments to date. Emotions fade and leave no trace. Only the inanimate remains.

CARY
•

I knew I wasn’t the only person who had ever been hurt, though sometimes it felt that way. I found myself wondering if Kate felt pain too. I knew she used to, but I wasn’t so sure now as she sat opposite me at dinner, beautiful and distant, or listened attentively to whatever I suggested without hearing a thing.

The trip didn’t start well. I wasn’t under any illusions that things were going to get back to normal the moment we left, but I was unprepared for how bad they really were. As soon as the plane took off from Tullamarine, Kate took a sleeping pill and knocked herself out. I have no idea where it even came from. She usually eschewed drugs—the exception, of course, being alcohol—but she swallowed the tablet as blatantly as could be, not even bothering to hide it from me. At least, I think it was a sleeping pill. Maybe she just pretended to sleep. I didn’t trust anything anymore.

I should have realized it was an omen. Kate was sleepwalking through the first half of our time overseas. There was nothing I could complain of directly, no hostility, no sulks—quite the opposite, in fact. She was too conciliatory, too obliging. The spark was gone, and it was that which had attracted me to her in the first place. I loved her more than ever, loved her in the way a drowning man loves the flotsam thrown up around him, but it was interspersed with great surges of anger. I have never been a violent man, but at times I itched to hit her, and hard. Some days my fingers ached from the effort of keeping them uncurled.

CRESSIDA
•

My sister called early one morning, before I’d even left for work. I guess she didn’t have to worry about waking Luke—I’d told my family that we’d separated and he’d moved out. They had offered sympathy but didn’t ask for details, each no doubt assuming that one of the others was comforting me.

“Hi, Cress, did I wake you?” she asked without waiting for a reply. It was Carolina, my oldest sister, named after the U.S. state where my father had been completing his postdoc at the time of her birth. She hated her unusual moniker, but my parents must have liked it, at least enough to grace their subsequent children with a comparable combination of letters. All our names began with C and ended with A, as if we were different models of the same car. I complained about it to Luke as we lay in bed one night early in our relationship, but he pointed out that there were plenty of C/A choices that could have been worse. Wasn’t I glad that I wasn’t a Clara or a Camilla? A Cora or a Cynthia? For a week or so it became a game for him, to see how many his word-happy brain could come up with. I’d arrive home from work to a note on the kitchen table:
Cecelia. Clarissa. Cassandra
. Or receive a message on my pager of just one word:
Carlotta
. It had made me giggle in ward rounds, something I hadn’t done in years.

Now Carolina was using another C-word. Cancer, she was saying. Probably started in his liver, though mets had already been found in his lungs and spine. My father. Six more months. He’d never even been a drinker. Just a glass of wine with dinner and a nip of Scotch later. “All things in moderation,” he had repeated night after night as he settled before the fire and Mother brought the tumbler in. It had been Waterford, of course. As a child I’d been fascinated by the way it had refracted the light, loosing the odd brief rainbow as he lifted it to his lips.

“You’ll have to take care of him. Cressida, are you listening?”

I had hardly said a word, yet still she went on.

“He needs to be nursed. Mother’s got no idea about that sort of thing. Cordelia and I were wondering if you could move back in with them. We’ve got our families to think of, and you …”

The words were left unsaid, but the implication was clear. I had no one, just a too-large house that I’d planned to fill with children and empty spots on the mantelpiece where my wedding photos were once displayed.

“I’m moving to Michigan, though, remember?”

Silence on the other end of the line. She remembered.

“Can’t you put that off? Just a year or so? Cordelia can’t take any leave if she’s to keep tenure, and since David made partner we’ve been so busy I’ve had to hire another nanny. Mother’s counting on you.”

Then why hadn’t she called me herself? Too struck by grief, or shame? The phone felt like a gun pressed to my head.

“I’ve got a lot on my plate too, Carolina,” I said, stalling for time.

“I know,” she replied, sounding almost embarrassed. “But maybe this would be good for you too. You know, for company, someone to talk to.”

As long as it didn’t have to be her, I thought, nursing our father or comforting me. Coming face-to-face with messy human emotions. No wonder she’d gone into dermatology.

The receiver hummed expectantly, but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of an answer. I was worried for my father, annoyed at my fickle sister, angry that my own personal tragedy had been pushed aside so quickly.

“I’m going to Michigan,” I heard myself say. Then I hung up the phone before she could argue.

KATE
•

We’d been away for almost a month by the time we got to Venice. By that stage Italy was just a blur of paintings and churches, and I hadn’t expected to enjoy it any more than Florence or Rome. But to my great surprise I did. The water softened everything, the lack of traffic was refreshing and the galleries were blessedly small. I loved, too, how compact the city was, how you could find yourself among real Venetians and not just tourists only ten minutes’ walk from St. Mark’s Square, how you never knew if one of the narrow curved streets would open out into a grand piazza or a tiny back canal. Cary hadn’t let me out of his sight in the previous cities, but in Venice he relaxed a little. We were on an island; where could I go?

So when he suggested that we separate for a morning I jumped at the chance. There was a fresco he wanted to track down in a chapel past the Lido. He’d mentioned it the previous day, but must have seen my face fall at the prospect of yet another church. Religion meant nothing to me, the relics and vials that Italian basilicas are stuffed with too reminiscent of my own work to be interesting. Instead, I told him, I would go shopping. It was the first thing that came to mind, but really I just wanted some time alone, a break from feeling his eyes on me every minute of the day, silently and continually gauging whether I was happy or sad, amused or bored.

I felt free that morning, free and happy for the first time in weeks. Everywhere I looked Venice charmed me. A small altar set in the brick wall of a public walkway, lit by flickering electric candles; multicoloured chocolate bars stacked like the Parthenon in a shop window; three nuns on their way to Mass, the wind toying with their veils. For a while I just walked, taking it all in. Then a display of Murano glass caught my eye, glossy and brittle. Perhaps I would go shopping after all. It was the perfect souvenir, providing it survived the journey home.

I was coming out of the shop with my purchases when I was approached by a beggar, a young girl carrying a baby. Normally I would ignore such requests, but I was feeling so unaccustomedly happy and she looked so young that I reached into my purse for change. To my horror, as I handed her the money she stole my watch—one minute her fingers were on my wrist and the next my watch was gone, all without losing her grip on the child. Then she fled, leaving me alone in a deserted backstreet, still proffering my foolish coins.

The watch had been a twenty-first-birthday present from my parents. That said, I can’t say I was overly attached to it. It was expensive, but not particularly unique, and it was insured. All the same I felt like howling. What else could I do? There was no point in going to the police—I didn’t speak Italian and such crime was commonplace. So commonplace that every guidebook I had read had warned me to be careful, not to sightsee alone, to pay no heed to beggars. It was my own fault, and twice as hard to stomach for that. I experienced an instant of overwhelming, unbearable grief. For the watch, I suppose, but also for Luke, my thoughts unbidden and irrational. This would never have happened if he had chosen me.