Serial Monogamy (6 page)

F
or three miserable months during the summer that culminated in our separation, Al lived in the house and slept on an inflatable mattress in the basement, his own solution to the impossibility of my getting any sleep if we remained in the same bed. I suppose he had been managing to fall asleep beside the woman he was betraying for some months—he was evasive when I asked when his affair had begun—but in the first few nights after his announcement my anger kept me tossing about, seething in silence or starting up bitter denunciations until he quickly removed himself to the living room couch. The basement, a dank, unrenovated space filled with stray pieces of hardware and boxes of musty books, was not a comfortable alternative, but the girls seldom ventured down there so Al could go to bed after they were asleep without alerting them to the situation.

In the morning he would rush off to the campus, although he wasn't teaching any summer courses, while
I took the girls to the various day camps for which I had signed them up back in the winter, a lifetime ago. I would make their sandwiches and smear on their sunscreen and drop them off with cheerful hugs—and the minute I pulled the car back into the driveway, I would burst into tears. I couldn't work; my own emotions trumped those of my latest characters; so I would fill the days with long, sad walks or shopping trips for things I didn't need. I had decided these were much safer occupations than staying in the house after I had spent one morning hunting through Al's desk drawers and unsuccessfully guessing possible passwords for his university account because I had discovered you couldn't instantly call up his office email on his home computer. The thought of what I might have found in his email had I read it frightened me, leaving me with a nasty churning in my stomach, and I was mainly relieved I hadn't managed to get into it.

Whenever I found myself alone with Al, I alternated between ostentatious silence marked by heavy footfalls or the loud manhandling of objects and noisy attempts to draw him into a discussion of our relationship, which he avoided as best he could and which usually ended with me in frustrated tears. I would demand to know if the affair was still continuing, if he did not love me, if we should not try marriage counselling, questions he mainly answered with sorrowful silence since he knew I wasn't going to like the answers he might give. Marching down to the basement to confront him at night, I would denounce his
betrayal, or begging him to stay behind on his way out the door in the morning, I would demand we discuss our marriage. I would quote to him statistics about the failure rate of relationships between older men and younger women, I would tell him his faults and admit to mine, I would insist we work things out. I could not possibly, for my own sake as much as the girls', just show him the door.

I would persist with talk in the face of his silence, clawing away at the subject, growing more and more desperate as I sensed I was losing the argument, that neither my angry passion nor my reasoned pleading was carrying the day. He would give me a hearing, as though that were his duty, but his answers were brief and unrevealing, little more than “I don't know” or a shrug of the shoulders. I had this panicky feeling of being outflanked or arriving too late, like one of those dreams when you run into a station with a half-packed suitcase only to see the train pulling away from the platform. I would try to draw him back into old arguments because at least if we were arguing, he was still here. But he would close down my approaches by saying, “It's too late” or “I think you just have to accept we aren't compatible.”

“Compatible. What does that even mean? Nobody is compatible. Every person is different from everybody else.”

“Well, some people seem to get on better than we do. We're too much alike to be together.”

“I thought you said we weren't compatible.”

“Yes, because we are too much alike. We both have these egos that need…I don't know…Air? Space?”

“Fuel. Your ego just needs fuel…” My voice was rising. He never yelled; he could be hurtfully dismissive in an argument but he never lost his temper. These days, he would go very quiet and look sad, which made me feel all the more desperately certain I was losing.

When I was furious, he always seemed a bit surprised, taken aback that things might possibly get ugly. It was as though he had not anticipated my anger, or at least did not have any particular plan, any idea about what happened after you tell your wife you're sleeping with one of your students. I wondered if she was pressing him hard for a resolution, just as I was, and if his preference might not have been to never tell me at all, and to keep going in the old-fashioned way, with a wife at home and a mistress in an apartment, for as long as he possibly could. A strong, decisive figure who had always exuded self-confidence—we'll be going here; we'll be doing this—he now seemed at a loss, unable to take control of a situation he had created.

It was an impossible, miserable time and we got a brief respite when I took the girls out to Nova Scotia to visit my mother for a week, but since I did not confide in her what was going on at home, the holiday had a surreal quality for me as I played at being the happy mother and dutiful daughter.

Still, the break from immediate, daily anguish calmed
me and I returned determined to have it out with Al, to fight to give our marriage a second chance and our girls the home they deserved. Of course, in retrospect, I can guess he probably spent the time in the arms of his grad student, strengthening his resolve to leave, but after weeks of obsessing about her obvious lack of character and manipulative wiles, I happened at that moment to have achieved a bit of distance on the subject of Al's lover. She was just a symptom of some middle-aged malaise that Al and I could fix together. I went home almost hopeful.

And at first things seemed better. Al greeted us cheerfully off a midday flight and I unpacked while he mucked about with the girls. Did the bedroom closet seem a little less stuffed than usual? I suppressed my rising panic and kept going with my chores. Dinner seemed normal, filled with the girls' accounts of the seaside, but as soon as they were asleep, Al was waiting for me downstairs.

“We need to talk,” he said. “This isn't working.”

“Of course, it isn't working. How did you possibly expect it to work?”

“I think I should leave.”

“I think you should break off this nonsense so we can try to fix things.”

“It's too late. You know that; there's nothing here.”

“How can you say there is nothing here?” I ask, gesturing around the living room where the girls had scattered the new toys their grandmother had given them. “Our life is here, the girls' life, my life.”

“Okay, but life has got to be about more than houses and junk, and ours has become about nothing else. Whose turn it is to pick up the girls, whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher. We wind up arguing about trivia. Do you remember that day last winter when we had that fight in the appliance store about whether we needed a front-loading machine? I mean, I really don't care what kind of washing machine we buy and there I was arguing about it. I don't even remember why.”

“We can work on these things,” I plead.

“What, you want to work on how to have more constructive discussions about washing machines?”

“We can work on making more room for things that aren't trivial. I can put the new book on ice,” I offered. It wasn't getting written anyway. “If you feel I'm not paying enough attention to you, let's take a break, get away somewhere.”

“That's not going to solve anything. I just don't think this was meant to be.”

“You used to say I was the other half of your soul.”

“Okay. Maybe we've changed or something. I don't know, people say things like that when they are falling in love. Or they think they are falling in love.”

“Are you saying we were never in love?”

“I think we were both trying to escape things.”

“And now somebody else is your escape. How do you know it's love this time?”

He had no answer to that, or perhaps he had an answer he couldn't give me.

Finally he said, “I just want to leave. I've found an apartment. I can move in Wednesday, the first of the month.”

I tried to dissuade him, tried to get him to promise to wait a bit. The girls were entering grade one in a week's time; it's a big transition, I argued, they'll need stability at home. Better to get all the changes over at once, Al replied.

“I survived changing schools and changing countries. They'll manage,” he said with uncharacteristic toughness.

He went down to the basement and I went upstairs, feeling numb. I opened the closet again; yes, there were fewer clothes. He left for campus early the next morning and didn't come home that night, phoning to say we should eat without him and not to wait up. I told the girls he was busy preparing for the start of term and when he finally showed up the following afternoon, we quietly agreed that we needed to tell them Daddy was going to live in his own apartment for a bit. I wanted to yell and scream and beg, but I didn't want to frighten the children. I was trapped into good behaviour, forced to remain calm to protect them. Everybody says you have to maintain a united front, never battle it out in front of the kids, that's what will really damage the children of divorce, although I was damned if I was going to tell the girls this was my idea. When we sat them down the following evening, I let
Al do the talking. He seemed surprised when the girls began to cry, and he tried rather lamely to reassure them.

“It will be fine, girls. I still love you—as much as ever. We'll see each other all the time.”

The girls were barely six. Al adored them and had treated them as mini adults almost as soon as they could speak. Now, the more they cried, feeding off each other's alarm, the more he tried to reason with them, until their tears overwhelmed his attempts. Anahita flung herself at him while Goli clung to me, and as we sat there, each with one child in our arms, petting and kissing and comforting, he gave me this helpless expression as though somehow this was a situation from which I could rescue him.

To stop the flood, Al quickly agreed he wasn't going anywhere that night. He slept in the basement again and ate breakfast with us the following morning, disappeared for a few hours during the day and then returned in plenty of time for dinner. But then, after the girls were asleep, he got up to leave.

“I have to unpack some stuff at the apartment. Maybe I can come and get them for a bit tomorrow and take them over there. Get them pizza. They'll think it's fun.” He paused a moment and we just stared at each other. “They'll get used to it. Kids are resilient.” His confident self seemed to be returning now that he had made a decision.

“What about me? How am I supposed to get used to it?”

“You'll be fine, Sharon,” he said. “You always are.”

“Oh, look, Mr. Dickens, there they are.” Nelly touched his sleeve and gestured toward a patch of daffodils fifty yards away from them across Hampstead Heath. It was February and they were out looking for signs of spring.

“Yes, right you are,” he agreed and began striding toward the flowers, set in a little dell that must have been providing shelter from the winter cold because elsewhere on their walk they had encountered only snowdrops. “I do wish,” he said as they continued, “that you would call me by my Christian name.” It had become his familiar request now, a not-altogether-happy joke between them.

“Oh, perhaps someday,” Nelly said, shaking her head with a little laugh.

“Someday soon?”

“Well, I am not sure what you mean by soon,” she answered. “And really there is no point to my agreeing to
a future time when I might call you by your Christian name. At that rate I might just as well do it right away.”

“So why not do it right away then?”

“Perhaps I feel that you need something to look forward to,” she said.

“You lead me a merry chase.”

“Oh, no. I think you are the one leading.”

“Right then, a chase for daffodils,” he said, grabbing her hand and running with her the last few yards toward the dell.

“There you go, milady, I present you with spring.”

“Lovely. So thoughtful of you to have arranged it. It always is my favourite season.”

It was not the first time they had walked out together; the first time had been a few weeks previously when he had suggested to her that she might like to join him on his family's regular Sunday walk on the heath. When she had alighted from the carriage he had sent for her, she was not altogether surprised to discover that he was the only member of his family present. They had walked all afternoon, two hours or more, and he had talked to her of the novel he was planning.

“How fares the French novel?” she asked now as they continued their way uphill beyond the daffodil dell.

“It fares very well,” he said. “Thank you so much for asking.”

“And did you decide why the doctor was imprisoned in the first place?”

“Well, it's something to do with the aristocratic family, some secret of theirs he might expose, but I was thinking it need never be spelled out.”

“Won't the reader want to know?” she asked.

“Yes, I suppose so, but I think some readers will realize that it's a thing of his past and that his past is gone; he isn't really that person any more.”

“You mean people change?”

“Yes, and also that we can't fully know other people. We only know ourselves. He is a man who has been imprisoned. That is all we can see of him.”

“How very wise that sounds. Each of us a book closed to others.”

“Perhaps not entirely closed but hard to read. I certainly find your thoughts mysterious,” he said.

And yet he was often all too transparent to her, Nelly thought. But she replied nothing and was glad he did not pursue the topic as they were forced off the path to negotiate their way around a muddy patch.

“Let me give you my arm here,” he said. “The frost has made the ground slippery.”

“Did you hear from our friend in Drury Lane?” he asked as they started up again.

“Not yet.”

“Perhaps I might write him another little note.”

“Please don't. I wouldn't want him to give me a part because he felt obliged to you.”

“Of course not, my dear. I would never wish to interfere. But you will excuse me if I am convinced you will shine in a Shakespearean role if only given the opportunity your talents deserve.”

“Yes, well, let's wait a bit to see if the manager agrees with you. And in the meantime”—at this she struck a melodramatic pose—“No, Mr. Waterspout, it was the parrot.”

He laughed. “Yes, you have a great feel for that material too. No doubt about it. I am sure you have numerous admirers at the stage door every night.”

“Oh, dozens. A queue of them all the way down Haymarket.”

“And a special one in a little red waistcoat?” Suddenly his tone was sharper, almost nasty.

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

“Clean-shaven young man. Red waistcoat. He was there the other night.” Mr. Dickens had collected Nelly at the Theatre Royal the week previously and taken her and Mrs. Ternan to supper.

“Oh.” She almost guffawed in recognition. “That's only Robby Strachan.”

“And who is Robby Strachan?”

“Mary, who plays the maid, her brother.”

“Oh, yes, the little Scot. But I don't suppose the fellow has only come to the theatre to see his sister.”

“I have no reason to believe otherwise.”

“No? Really?” He turned and studied her face for a minute and seemed to find the answer he wanted there. “Well then, that's a relief.”

“Why so?” She taunted him now.

But he wasn't to be teased out of his jealousy and replied sadly, “Because it allows me to hope.”

She pouted a moment at that, and then said lightly, as though there were no connection, “My mother was honoured to receive a visit from Mrs. Dickens on Tuesday.” She paused before adding, “Perhaps it is me who has to wonder if I can hope.”

“Oh my dear child. Yes. Let us both hope.”

He suggested they might keep walking as far as The Spaniards Inn and take some refreshment there before finding her a cab. She knew it would be unwise to enter a public house alone with him, but only said that she was already a little footsore and thought they should turn back. In truth, she was tired, but it was the conversation as much as the walking that she found taxing. She was previously unacquainted with the game she now found herself playing and unsure of what outcome might be expected or desired. She knew, as she laughed at a good joke, basked in a compliment or admired a new trinket, that she did not want this excitement to end, but she also found it difficult to achieve the right balance of
encouragement and discretion. She had only the barest advice from her mother, who had said on the occasion of this second walk, “He can do much for you, Nelly, but make no promises as to what you might do for him.”

They were walking back downhill toward the entrance to the heath, admiring the view of the city laid out before them, when Nelly felt her companion stiffen and heard him suck in a short, tight little breath of unpleasant surprise. He said nothing and kept walking the same path without pausing; she looked ahead wondering what might have alarmed him and saw only a young man, his head bent, his gaze concentrated on the ground at his feet, walking straight toward them. As he came closer, Nelly recognized him although his head was still down; she had, after all, rehearsed with him in London and appeared on stage with him in Manchester; it was Charley Dickens, his father's eldest son. Neither father nor son deviated from the path and now Nelly wondered, as he still did not look up, if Charley had not actually seen them but was choosing to avoid eye contact until the last possible moment. That area of the heath was open; neither party could change route without making it apparent that was what he was about and so, with an agonizing inevitability, they came up to each other. As he approached, Charley stepped off the path they were walking, a tract worn into the sandy soil of the heath,
and paused to let them pass. He raised his hat as they did so, saying, “Miss Ellen. Father,” without any intonation whatsoever. His father, meanwhile, grunted slightly but said nothing, neither then nor afterwards as he and Nelly continued downhill. He chatted amiably enough as he found a cab for her, and exchanged some final pleasantries in a friendly tone as he handed her in. He gave the driver precise instructions as to the route he was to follow to Islington and paid him handsomely before stepping back and raising his hat to Nelly, waving discreetly from the cab window. The moment he was out of sight, she leant back thankfully on the hansom's stiff, narrow seat. In a way, she thought with some bitterness, it had been a family walk after all.