Among the Dead (2 page)

This would keep her calm for two or three days, and then she would say to him, ‘I think I'm going crazy. I feel paranoid about everything and everybody.' He recommended therapy. He told her that he loved her.

It hurt him every time he denied her intuition, and he wanted to throw the whole problem at her feet and beg her to help him with this demon that made him cheat and lie, but he didn't want to take from Anna the right to be the one who was hurt. He could so easily say, ‘Help me, Anna, help me get over this disease which
makes me do nothing but tell lies.' Against the impulse to degrade himself, he felt sucked down by a terrifying weakness, which he took to be the first tremors of the muscular dystrophy that waited for him if he continued to steal the attention from his wife's right to hate him. Unless he could tell her the truth in the right way, so Anna could hate him, so there would be no other issue than his lies, and not his feelings about his lies, he would rather keep on lying. How could he confess without pride? How could he make amends? Each lie gave Anna more reasons to punish him, but what punishment could erase the memory of the fun he and Mary Sifka had ripped from each other's bodies? Unless she left him, he wondered what she could do to him that would finally make him feel the pain he had caused his wife.

He sat at his desk and took out his diary. This was not a journal of events, but each day he tried to write down a few words that summed up whatever the day had meant to him. He hoped, some day, to go back through the diary and fill in the spaces between the words, but as time passed he usually forgot whatever it was that had inspired him to write down whatever words he had written down. Yesterday he had written,
HOPE – BRIGHTER – LETTER
. Now it was time to write the letter itself. He would compose it in the notebook, and then, when it was ready, he would copy it on to a note-card he had bought at the County Museum's gift shop. It was a Mexican painting, of a woman carrying a basket of flowers. He began:

Dear Anna,
This is difficult.

Or is that already begging for mercy?

I'm on the beach now. I know you'll be upset when you read this.

Still not direct. Don't presume to know her feelings. Maybe she'll be relieved. Maybe she's been having an affair and can at least leave me, now that the masquerade is over. Do I believe she is seeing someone else? She would have to be a better actor than I am, and I don't think she is.

I love you. You asked me why I was so desperate to take this vacation and I said that I needed to get away from the
office for a while, and that's true, but there's more. For a few months

No, this was a denial, a few is not enough; he had to tell the truth.

For six months you've noticed that I've been distant, and I have been. I had an affair. It's over now. Completely. I wanted to take this trip so that we could find a way to heal ourselves. I don't know how you'll take this, and all I can say is that I beg you to forgive me, but if you don't want to, I will understand.

He crossed out the last sentence. Somehow he thought the letter was stronger if he didn't ask Anna for anything. Saying that he didn't know how she would take the news implied that he had already anticipated a set of possible responses. If she studied the sentence and the letter with the intensity with which it was written, how could she miss the strategies that lay behind each measured word? He wanted her to think that the letter came out of his heart, quickly, a confession for his heart alone, not for hers. If he left off the last sentence and ended with the two words ‘heal ourselves', how could she feel anything for him but pity? In the ‘heal ourselves' was a plea for his wife to join him in work they both needed to do. The subtle gravity of that phrase pulled his wife, her behaviour, her attitude to him, into the reasons for the affair. So he was that much more sure that he should drop the plea for her understanding. In ‘heal ourselves' he forced her to be his equal. The sacrifice of those two words granted her a position superior to him. Would she appreciate the gift? Perhaps some day, he thought, I can show her the early drafts of this letter. No.

He knew that Anna's first question was going to be, ‘Who was she?' or, more likely, ‘Who
is
she?' He couldn't say, ‘That doesn't matter, it's over now,' because of course it did matter. Unless he gave her the answer to the question without her provocation, how could he defend himself against the charge that he was protecting the other woman, and if he was protecting her, how could he say the affair was over? He went back to the letter and copied it over one more time, keeping the sentence that ended with ‘I will understand ...' Now the letter read:

I love you. You asked me a few weeks ago why I was so desperate to take this vacation and I said that I needed to get away from the office for a while, and that's true, but there's
more. For six months you've noticed that I've been distant, and I have been. You asked me if there was another woman, and I said no, but I was lying. I had an affair with Mary Sifka. It's over now. Completely. I wanted to take this trip so that we could find a way to heal ourselves. I don't know how you'll take this, and all I can say is that I beg you to forgive me, but if you don't want to, I will understand.

He reread the letter and cut out the word ‘completely' because the emphasis, the word as a sentence by itself, called attention to his style, it was a useless rhetorical flourish. If he'd already said that the affair was over, how could the word ‘completely' help him? Either it was over or it wasn't, and if it was over, then it was over completely. Satisfied with the letter, he took the note-card out of its envelope. The card opened sideways, like a book. The other card he had considered, of a Rothko, two large fields, one black, one muddy red, above a smaller field, dark green, had opened from the bottom, to rest like a tent on whatever mantel where it found a home, and now he wished he had bought that card, since it would have been easier to write from the top of the card to the bottom, instead of on the two sides of this card. And the choice of the Mexican art now seemed sentimental and predictable, although at the time the Rothko, with its brooding sense of something final, seemed to him also pretentiously serious. Wasn't he giving Anna flowers? And a woman. She would think about the woman, and her burden. But he didn't want to write across the two sides. If he wrote carefully, and slowly, and if he didn't dedicate the letter to her, ‘Dear Anna', but just began at the top of the card, with narrow margins, then the letter could fit on one side.

Something in the letter made him happy as he copied it. He was pleased with the choices he had made, and if the care he took meant that he hoped to tilt Anna's attention away from his adultery towards something general, something about the two of them, he was sure that she would know that he was, finally, sincere. It was important that Anna not stumble over a single word trying to make sense of his writing. Usually he wrote in a scrawl, but now each word was separately crafted.

When he finished copying the letter, he took the card upstairs.

He went to the bedroom and undressed. Anna always slept deeply. He was not afraid of waking her up. The luggage for
tomorrow's trip was open on the floor. He took his letter to her and slipped it into a pocket inside his suitcase.

He was thirsty and went back down to the kitchen. He drank from a bottle of grape juice, leaving enough for Madeleine. He wanted more and drank it, with the excuse that in the morning she could have milk or water, and her mother could buy her juice at the airport.

Then he regretted this theft, and he went upstairs, to see her sleeping. She was on top of the sheets, and her hair was damp. What made her sweat? he wondered. Dreams of exercise, or just the heat of growth?

Perhaps he should have written ‘heal the family'. Certainly he needed time not just with his wife, but with his daughter. He was afraid that she hated him. She was three now, but how long did they have before her character was so formed that part of it would always be made of contempt for her father? If it wasn't contempt, it was something close to it, not all the time, but when he talked too much, say, if he drove through an area he didn't know and stopped to look at the map, and he told her everything he was doing, she would tell him, from the baby-seat in the back, to stop talking. Whenever she told him to stop talking he could suddenly hear himself, and what he heard was the tiring drone of a bore. And if I sound like this to a child, he asked himself. No wonder I have so few friends. He talked so much to her because he thought she would like the comforting sound of his voice, and that she would grow up to be a better person if he paid her the respect of explaining what he was doing. He thought he was being helpful, a good father. She had no interest in his explanations of things.

He would look at her in the rear-view mirror, and he would see her distance from him, and he would tell himself that the little bit of detachment of hers in which he saw himself was a reflection of his detachment from his marriage. He blamed himself for what he thought would be the foundation of his daughter's general misery when she was older, estranged from the world, unsure of love. She would finally understand, probably through a long and expensive analysis, how it was her father's example, and the forces driving that example, that moulded her character.

Now she was asleep, and smiling, her favourite white teddy bear under her arm. Those seeds of future misery were tucked deep inside. What would he change in her if he could? A few times they had been to the mountains, and when they walked in the forest
she screamed to be carried. She was happy only indoors, or on the beach. She was afraid of trees. It was a small fear, and he told himself all the obvious reasons why a child who loves to run through airports would hate the terror of trees, shadows, trails. She was born into a world of right-angles.

So was that all he despised in this daughter who despised him, her fear of trees? He was willing to say that he loved her hatred of him, a feeling so precocious that she might escape a family trait to hang on to people rather than to know when to leave, that she would become a woman who demanded respect. The trip to Mexico was as much to help him find a way to win her love as it was to win his wife's.

He showered and then got into bed beside Anna. He rolled a leg over her hips, and when she didn't move, not that he expected her to, he rolled away. But it's the honourable thing, he told himself, to leave a space between us until she allows me into her embrace.

In all the months of the affair, he had never spent the night with Mary Sifka. She was the assistant to the insurance agent who handled the business that Frank shared with his younger brother, Lowell. Together they owned twenty music and video stores in California. Lowell was homosexual and had never been married, and because Frank had a family, and wanted to stay in Los Angeles, Lowell was in charge of the stores outside of the city. Although he kept a condominium in Santa Monica, now he was living in San Diego, where they had three stores. It was part of the family mythology that Lowell always went to the city with the newest stores because he was homosexual, and could more easily travel than Frank, but it was easier for everyone to agree on that story than on the truth, which had nothing to do with Lowell's homosexuality. Lowell watched over the business's expansion because he was the better businessman. Everyone knew this, but no one ever said it, because to admit this might allow everyone to reflect on Frank's incompetence in business. It was possible that the family had accepted Lowell's homosexuality because of the convenient excuse it gave for Lowell's position. In a bad moment one night, when Frank came home after Lowell had yelled at him for some kind of mistake in the way he had managed an inventory, Frank wondered if he would have been a better businessman if he also had become homosexual, or whether Lowell would have been so good if he had been straight. But there are plenty of good businessmen
who are straight, Frank cried to himself that night. And there must be incompetent homosexuals.

Lowell always took care of insurance, but on a day when Lowell could not fly back to Los Angeles and something had to be signed by one of them, Mary Sifka came to the office with the papers. She was married too. Her husband was a lawyer. She had no children. She didn't want them.

Frank was in love with Mary's bitterness. Had he ever kissed a woman with so clear a philosophy of the world? Anna was a casual optimist, like everyone he knew, and if she thought the world might end in her lifetime, she buried the idea quickly. Mary was different. He was ready to grant that her sense of global doom might not be the sum of an equation whose every clause represented logic and reason, and that the world wore the colours of her own dark spirit because the world had been brutal to her, but he didn't want to diminish the achievement of her unhappiness by finding the location for her view of things in psychology, because he needed her to be smart and strong. He liked her because she had a dull job that she took seriously. She worked hard because she was afraid of falling quickly into a state of decay. She worked harder than he did, and they both knew it, and he paid himself in three months what she made in a year.

Now it was time to not love her. He would miss her, but the woman beside him was more important to him, and so was the little girl down the hall.

He went to sleep with the feeling that he had prayed, and in that meditation had made a true offering of his heart; there was nothing left. He had been generous.

The flight was at three in the afternoon. He was going to meet Anna and Madeleine at the airport. Anna asked him to take the day off, but he told her that since he was taking off a week and a half, he had to go to the office. He would take a limousine from the restaurant where he was meeting Mary Sifka.

At breakfast Madeleine asked to sit on his lap while he fed her cereal from his bowl. He thought about the breakfast the next morning, in Mexico, a big buffet with fruit, cheese and pitchers with fresh juices on a long table in the dining room of the hotel, one wall open to the ocean beyond. Madeleine would ask for jams and jellies, and he would let her have them, even though he tried to keep her from eating sugar at home. These treats would come in little stainless steel bowls, three or four on a rotating trivet,
with little spoons. There would be other families at breakfast, and Madeleine would find, as she always did, a boy or girl three or four years older, and force this child to be her friend. The parents would talk, the usual chat about children's ages, schools, habits good and bad, and Anna would make a date with them for dinner that night, both families together. After she read the letter, there would be no other families at the table, but he would allow her a day and a night before he gave her the surprise, before she knew about Mary Sifka. They would be in Mexico for a week and a half. He owed her one day of peace.