Infidelity (15 page)

( CHAPTER FORTY-SIX )

“You understand what this means, Veronica?”

“It means I'm dying?”

“No, sweetheart, we're far from that. We're so far from that.”

Ronnie's doctor always called her sweetheart. Being called sweetheart by someone in rubber gloves was almost intolerable. Receiving sweetness from someone who only ever touched you with a thin film of latex between you and them was disingenuous.

“I was kidding.”

“What a strange sense of humour you have.”

“Well, what does it mean, then?”

It meant another day, another biopsy. It meant more tests. It meant cancer, that word that had been rattling around in her head for months, for years. It meant, inevitably, surgery. It meant hysterectomy.

From the Greek,
hystera
, meaning “womb.”

From the Greek,
ektomia
, meaning “a cutting out of.”

The surgical removal of the uterus.

May be total or partial.

Removal renders the patient unable to bear children.

A cutting out of.

The parts that were discarded.

At the age of thirty-five. It means telling Aaron they'll never have a baby.

It means being disappointing. Failing again.

They had carved so much out of her cervix in the last year she was surprised there was anything left of it.

“It could mean more treatment. Or it could mean surgery. Either way, we're going to do our very best to ensure you get the best care.”

Despite the reassurances, Ronnie was clear on the metaphor; a woman so unsure of her ability to be good at being a woman gets the part of her that makes her a woman removed.

Can't get pregnant, can't bake a casserole, can't have a uterus.

The thing that surprised Ronnie was that regardless of how much they cut and craved and burned away, her lust never left her. Despite the fact that she had parted her thighs repeatedly for cold metal instruments beneath the flicker of fluorescents, that she had felt the scrape and cramp of every invasive test, she still longed for Charlie inside her. His fingers, his tongue. She felt as if he had a capacity to heal her, that he could blot out all the damage with fingertips and mouth, that he could swallow the cancer, will it away with his hot breath. Even when she was sore from procedures, even when they told her that sex was out of the question.

When it came to the reality of what would certainly be surgery, Charlie was falling apart more than she was. He tried to hold it close, but his grief spilled out of him in bars, restaurants, and hotel rooms. Ronnie would hold him tight to her while he cried, their naked limbs tangled up, clinging in their desperation. There were great stretches where Charlie had the ability to pretend things would be okay. His anxiety had given way to despair and he had accepted it readily. Despair was so much easier to tolerate than anxiety. The depression was a welcome wave, flattening the edges of neurosis out so his relationship with the world became fuzzy at best.

“Love grows in me like a tumour, Charlie.”

“Stop that. Stop. Stop. Stop. What an awful thing to say,” he would cry, clasping his hand over his ears like a petulant child.

“I was kidding.”

“You need to stop kidding. And smoking. I hate watching you smoke. I just think about you dying. You need to eat better. No more steaks. No more martinis.”

“How optimistic of you, Charlie. Way to be a trooper.”

“Do you always have to make a fucking joke? This is serious.”

“What else am I supposed to do? Lie down and die?” Ronnie lit another cigarette from the one she was smoking, just to spite him.

Charlie couldn't go to the hospital with Ronnie, and this fact alone destroyed him. He wanted to hold her hand while they took tiny pieces of her and put them in tiny vials with her name scrawled on them to be sent to be tested. He wanted to be there when they finally cut her open. But that was Aaron's job, and Aaron was stoic. Aaron was good at that sort of thing. He was the kind of boy you took home to your mother when you wanted to prove to her that you hadn't fucked up your life. Charlie was fucking up both of their lives and loving it. Charlie was too far gone and Ronnie knew it.

“Charlie, do you ever think that we are home wreckers?”

“There has to be a home to wreck for that, doesn't there?”

“You have a home. You have a home with Noah.”

“Some days I'm not entirely convinced that Noah knows who I am.”

( CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN )

Ronnie began lying about things she didn't even need to lie about.

She'd lie about what she had for lunch.

She'd lie about the movie she watched.

She'd lie about her clients at work.

She became so skilled at it that each lie she uttered fell out easily, unquestioned.

She pushed and pushed and pushed at Aaron, her deception everywhere, waiting for it to click in his brain. But it never did.

And because Aaron never asked any questions, never rummaged through her things, never called to check up on her, Ronnie grew to loathe him. The fact that she was having an affair and Aaron had no suspicions made her feel like he didn't care, and in turn his lack of care became a good way for her to justify the affair.

“The fact that he doesn't seem to notice just proves that he doesn't really love you,” Charlie said during one of their weekday pints.

“Has Tamara noticed?”

“That's different. Married people are different. Things become comfortable and you don't worry anymore.” Charlie knew this was a lie, given that Tamara had expressed that she missed him regardless of not actually knowing where he had gone.

“So your reasoning is that Tamara loves you because she's complacent?”

“No. She trusts me. It's almost twenty years of trust.”

“That certainly doesn't make me feel any better about what we're doing, Charlie.”

“What we're doing is necessary. I'm happy when I'm with you. I'm alive when I'm with you. I need to be with you.”

“God, you can be so dramatic.”

“Well, it's true.”

“You just need attention. That's why you surround yourself with pretty young things.”

“Listen, Ronnie, you're not some dewy-eyed undergrad who's cooing at me that she loves my work. Have you even read my work?”

“Will you be angry if I say no?”

“Of course not. I love you because you haven't. I find it refreshing. I find it real. You're real.”

Ronnie laughed.

“What are you laughing at?”

“You,” she answered. “You're . . . I don't know.”

“In love?”

“Yes. That.”

Charlie and Ronnie would send each other messages, inventing more and more ways to see each other. Events and dinners, everything clandestine, everything far enough off the grid that they wouldn't get caught. His email account full, her phone messages deleted.

For Ronnie, there were great, fleeting moments of clarity. She would see herself leaving Aaron—filmic moments that involved her running through a cool evening without a coat, running to Charlie's front door, exclaiming, “I've left him.” And always Charlie would be pleased. He would pull her inside and kiss her hard on the mouth, pulling her clothes from her body right there in the front hall, groping at her like an impatient child.

And caught in all this wanting, Ronnie made a list, written out on a steno pad in the early evening while Aaron was at the gym, while the dog lay at her feet, dreaming of chasing animals through the park.

She made a list of things she'd couldn't do with Charlie. Things she longed to do, rendered impossible by their situation. Things that she dreamed of doing daily, things she fantasized about while twisting her engagement ring around the finger of her left hand, hoping secretly for a random tragedy to make things hard, to make things easier.

1. Read the Sunday paper with you

2. Kiss you in a bar populated by our friends

3. Have you take care of me when I'm sick

4. Take care of you when you're sick

5. Listen to you tell someone you love me

6. Tell someone I love you

7. Slow dance

8. Make breakfast together

9. Do laundry together

10. Hold hands walking down the street

11. Bring you as my date to a wedding

12. Kiss you at midnight on New Year's

13. Try to figure out what to watch on TV

14. Fight with you about domestic duties

15. Have you walk my dog

16. Put new sheets on a bed together

17. Nap in the afternoon while it's raining

18. Celebrate your birthday with you

19. Meet your parents

20. Wake up together on Christmas morning

After scrawling out the list, she rewrote it with careful penmanship on a piece of crisp stationary. One day she worked up the courage to give him this list at another Bay Street bar.

He read it thoughtfully, in silence.

When the empties of their first round were collected, Charlie told the bartender he loved Ronnie.

( CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT )

In the bathtub one evening, submerged beneath bubbles and feeling all too tired, her hair floating like a halo around her, Ronnie finally realized what was wrong with her and Aaron. Why she felt the urge to fill her voids, to lie, to hide away, to hide from him. She plunged forcefully upright, through the surface of the water, the force of the realization like a sudden fist.

Aaron didn't need her.

She sat up in the bathtub, realizing Aaron of course loved her, but he would never, ever need her. He was together and practical and naturally took care of everyone around him.

Aaron was the type of person who would clearly never need anyone.

Charlie needed Ronnie. She knew that when his head was resting in her lap, when she smoothed her fingers through his hair, searching for greys, finding and examining them, and never telling him. She would touch him and he would close his eyes and sigh noisily, groping for her hand and squeezing it tightly when he found it. The force of his hand on hers, the desperate clutch of a man in need, was enough to convince her. Ronnie knew Charlie needed her because he would answer her call in the middle of the night. He would come when she called.

She knew Charlie needed her because his face twisted into a look of pain when she pulled away. Like he was personally wounded that she had somewhere else she needed to be, someone else she needed to be with. When the guilt of what they were doing rose in her throat, Charlie would do everything to convince her to stay, that there was nothing wrong, regardless of how untrue that was. He would press her tightly to him like a vice and tell her how he longed to see her happy, that she deserved to be happy. That he could make her happy. He would fight to prevent her from putting her clothes back on, his hands slowly traversing the map of her back, that closed-eye sigh returning.

She knew Charlie needed her because he would tell her any lie to get her to stay. She could see the lies in his face, the way he chose to make up reasons why what they did was not wrong, if only to see her slip the clothes from her body and have her curl up next to him. Charlie needed her because when she curled up naked beside him in whatever hotel bed they were in that week, he would make promises he couldn't and wouldn't ever keep.

She knew Charlie needed her because he would do everything in his power to pretend that the real world failed to exist when they were alone together. And she knew she needed him back because she would allow herself to believe him.

That was need.

So, in the name of need, Ronnie stepped out of the bathtub and ran out of the bathroom—naked, dripping wet—and into the bedroom, her feet leaving wet footprints down the hall. The dog looked up at her from a snug, tightly curled ball on the bed, sensing her sudden urgency as Ronnie quickly pulled her clothes on, still soaking, soaking through her blue jeans and T-shirt, her hair matted against her face in damp webs. The dog, assuming a walk, followed her, watched as she rummaged in the hall closet to grab a coat, and stared as she escaped out the front door and into the street.

It was raining.

Every fantasy she had about Charlie and her finally being safe together involved the rain. It was always raining in her head when she decided to leave Aaron.

Aaron didn't need her. Ronnie wanted only to be needed.

Through the rain Ronnie ran to catch the streetcar, paid with quarters, and walked to the back of the car, soaked through. The other passengers stared, the rain dripping from her lashes, her forehead, her fingers onto the floor. She suffered the endless ride down Queen West, to Spadina, onto another car heading north. She pushed through the doors before they were fully open, and peeled off the car into the street.

Maybe Ronnie was bad and maybe that was enough. Maybe she needed Aaron to take care of her, fix her, fight her battles for her, make her better.

All of these things that I have done.

But maybe she needed Charlie to need her. Maybe she needed Charlie to mark up menus and lament cancer and say inappropriate things to waiters. Maybe she didn't need someone to be strong for her, to fix the pieces of her that were supposedly broken, to help her pull through. Maybe she could try to do that for herself. Maybe instead she simply needed someone like Charlie to fall apart at the mere thought of losing her, to mindlessly finger the graffiti on the table at the thought of biopsies, to outline aimlessly the bursting arrowed hearts of other people's love carved into tabletops, to misguidedly correct the typos in the menu, to tell the bartender he loved her, to bring her back from the brink, to vice grip her into believing she'd done nothing wrong, to touch her in every moment they were together, incapable of not being connected to her when she was in sight, afraid of the excruciating possibility that they would be parted, wounded by the table between them when the were in public, kissing her in empty elevators, in the back of a bookstore, in a deserted restaurant . . .

Turning a corner, running through the rain. Still decidedly aimless. Careless.

Reckless.

Maybe she needed Charlie to tell her that her bad was enough for her.

More than enough for her.

Always enough for her.

Nothing to fix and nothing to mend.

That her brokenness was something beloved.

That it was enough. To be needed. That being needed was more than enough.

She ran down Charlie's street. The rain blinded her, made her temporarily unsure of where his house was. After he finally told her where he lived, she would sometimes request that cab drivers take her on a route past his house if only to get a glimpse of it. She remembered the red door with the brass knocker. The crooked mailbox and the maple in the front yard. Up to the front path and to the door. She eyed a few of Noah's toys strewn across the front lawn: a red wagon, a soccer ball, a basketball hoop. Ronnie lifted her fist to knock and froze.

She felt so old. She felt that she had missed everything, that as she got older she had tried so hard to be good that she had forgotten herself. She longed for her youth, the sweet misery of being young and misguided, the sweet taste of blood in her mouth in the morning after she had destroyed everything, not knowing where the blood had come from, not knowing the source of the wound, the bile of the mistake, the guilt and regret of all those flawed choices. And never caring. She missed never caring.

With her fist raised; she knew that this moment would obliterate everything. That the earth would be burned and the building would collapse and the world as they knew it would shift into an orbit unknown. The fire around her was about to spread to the house, and with her fist raised she knew she would ignite the failure of ten years, twenty years of work. That when her fist hit his front door, on his charming Annex house that he lived in with his wife and his “special needs” child, where he wrote his books and wondered about his reviews and admirers, where he jerked off in the shower over thoughts of her, where he kept her photo in the bottom of a desk drawer, where he called her quietly from his cellphone in the middle of the night.

The fire was destined to spread, and as she knocked she felt the ignition.

She heard feet in the hall, light and quick, too light and quick to be Charlie's, and the fear of Tamara opening the door rocked through her immediately. The doorknob turned and the door swung open.

Noah.

“Pretty,” he said, blinking up at her, his small, thick finger pointed upward.