The Affair (8 page)

I
t was close to two thirty in the morning when Robert finally returned home.

Kathy wasn’t asleep. She’d tried reading for a little while—the new Patricia Cornwell—but she gave it up when she discovered that she’d read the same paragraph at least half a dozen times and it still didn’t make any sense. Dropping the book on the floor by the side of the bed, she’d flicked off the light, then climbed out of bed, pulled back the heavy curtains, and stood by the window, staring down the road. Watching. Waiting. Though she was not entirely sure what she was watching or waiting for.

For the first few years of their marriage, she had never gone to bed until Robert returned home. As the clock ticked on beyond midnight, she’d feel her tension increase as she began to imagine the worst: a drunk driver, a car accident, a carjacking. She couldn’t remember when she had stopped waiting up for him. When he had started staying out regularly, she supposed, when it became the norm rather than the exception.

Finally, chilled through to the bone, she had climbed back into bed and had lain on her back, staring at the patterns cast by the streetlights on the ceiling. She was trying to make sense of the last two days, but she couldn’t.

It kept coming back to questions, with one question dominating all others: Why?

Why would Robert have an affair?

Was it something she’d done? Something she hadn’t done?

Why?

Kathy dozed off with the question buzzing in and out of her consciousness.

 

The dream was formless, incidents from eighteen years of marriage running together into an endless sequence. In the dream she was always alone, alone in the house, alone with the kids, shopping alone . . . alone, alone, alone.

Weekends alone, weekdays alone, vacations alone.

Alone, alone, alone.

 

Kathy came awake with a start, suddenly snapping from disturbing images to consciousness.

Even fully asleep she’d heard a key turn in the lock. She was out of bed and at the window before she realized what she was doing. A curious mixture of emotions—relief and disappointment—flooded through her when she saw Robert’s car in the driveway. Then she slipped back into the warm bed and pulled the blankets up to her chin.

Alone.

Listening to Robert moving around downstairs, trying and failing to be silent, she realized that the abiding emotion of the dream had remained with her. And it overpowered her.

She felt lonely.

Where had the boyfriend she’d married gone? What had happened to the man with whom she’d shared everything? Where was the man she’d fallen in love with?

A flush of emotion brought tears to her eyes. She blinked furiously, then brushed her fingers roughly across her face, wiping away the moisture. And suddenly, she was able to identify that empty feeling she’d been living with for the past few years.

She was lonely. She was just so, so lonely.

She filled her time—she took classes, she volunteered—but there was always something missing. She had the children to keep her busy, friends to keep her company, her sisters to confide in and fight with . . . but it still didn’t fill the emptiness.

She heard Robert start up the stairs.

And then she knew that if he walked away and left her in the morning, she’d miss him certainly, miss his presence in the house . . . but probably not much else. He’d withdrawn from her a long time ago, little by little. She was only realizing it now.

Would his departure make any real differences to her life, she asked herself? She didn’t even have to think about the answer, and it burned in her stomach. If he left, it would make very little difference to their lives.

And that realization disturbed her more than any other.

 

“I wasn’t sure if you were coming home tonight.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t wake me,” Kathy said.

She watched the vague outline of him pull off his tie and fling it in the general direction of the dressing-table chair. She heard the silk hiss as it slid to the floor.

“I only had a couple of drinks, and the roads weren’t too bad.” He pulled off his jacket, folded it over the chair, and began to unbutton his shirt.

“I called earlier.”

“I didn’t get it.”

“It went straight to your voice mail.”

“We went to the Union Oyster House—bad place to get a signal.”

Your precious girlfriend had a signal, she wanted to add, but didn’t. Instead she asked carefully, “How’s Jimmy?”

“Jimmy’s fine. He sends his love.”

“I’m surprised he remembered me.”

“Of course he remembered you.”

“So you didn’t get into Top of the Hub?”

Robert’s white shirt reflected brightly in the streetlights. He peeled it off and dropped it on top of his jacket. “I’m going to call and complain in the morning. They said there wasn’t a reservation.”

“That’s strange. Maureen usually doesn’t make mistakes like that.” Maureen had manned the front desk of R&K from the very beginning, and Robert always said employing her was the best decision he had ever made. She’d started out in the City of Boston Film Bureau as a production assistant, and had spent twenty-five years there before she went freelance. She knew just about everyone in the business.

“It may have been the temp who made the booking. Maureen’s out sick at the moment.”

“You never told me!”

“Oh, I’m sure I did.”

She allowed a snap of anger in her voice. “You did not! I most certainly would have remembered. I worked with Maureen, remember?” For a long time Maureen had been their entire staff, and the two women had worked closely together. When Kathy’s mother had died suddenly and unexpectedly eighteen months earlier, leaving the three sisters distraught, Maureen had made all of the funeral arrangements. “How long has she been out sick?”

“I dunno. Three weeks . . . four,” Robert mumbled.

“And you never told me!” Her voice rose, and she lowered it again with a deliberate effort. “You never told me. I would have called her, visited her.”

“I’ve been busy. I must have forgotten.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Chest infection or something. Doctor’s note says she won’t be back until January. And it’s the busiest time of year,” he added almost petulantly.

“You make it sound as if she got sick deliberately. I can’t remember the last time she was ill. Can you?” she accused.

Robert didn’t answer. Naked, he stepped into the bathroom, pulled the door closed, and clicked on the light. She heard the buzz of his electric toothbrush. That was another of his tricks: When he was confronted with a question or situation where he knew he was in the wrong, he simply would fail to answer, or he’d change the subject.

“Who’s the new receptionist?” Kathy asked when he came out, flooding the room with light, temporarily blinding her.

“A temp. Illona. Russian, I think. I got her from an agency. She’s very good.”

Kathy had used the few moments while Robert was in the bathroom to cool her temper. She had been close to losing it when she’d learned that her friend Maureen was out sick. For a moment, the conversation had threatened to drift, and she needed to keep it on track.

“Maybe Illona made the reservation?” she suggested.

Robert pulled out a fresh pair of pajamas and tugged on the bottoms. “Maybe. But it was about four weeks ago; I’m pretty sure Maureen was still around then. It’s not a big deal. I’ll complain to the restaurant in the morning, if I get a chance.”

“Do you want me to do it for you?” she asked, expecting him to say no.

He shrugged into the top. “That’d be great. Table for two, Friday night, seven thirty, in either my name or Jimmy Moran’s. I used his name too just in case he got there first.”

Robert got into bed, wafting icy air under the sheets. He leaned across and kissed her politely on the cheek, and she caught a hint of alcohol on his breath. Nothing else. No perfume, no scents of soap or shampoo that would indicate that he’d recently had a shower.

“Night,” she muttered and rolled over, utterly confused, second-guessing herself. Was she completely wrong? Had he really been having dinner with Jimmy Moran?

Robert’s breathing quickly settled into a gentle rhythm, but Kathy couldn’t sleep. Was she being nothing more than the paranoid, mistrusting, insecure wife of a handsome man?

Or was she slowly unraveling half-truths from a tissue of lies her husband had so carefully crafted?

Saturday, 21st December

 

 

K
athy sat in the car facing the Mount Auburn Cemetery and stared through the windshield at the Bigelow Chapel outlined against an eggshell-blue sky. She was chilled through to the bone, but it had nothing to do with the icy December air; it was the cemetery. She hated the finality of the place, the huge headstones, the carved angels, the great slabs of decorated concrete placed over the graves.

Her mother and father were buried there, sharing a grave in the heart of the old cemetery. Scattered in other graves, some marked, others without a marker, were various aunts and uncles and assorted cousins. Kathy hated the place, always had. She possessed a vivid imagination, and it was easy—too easy—for her to imagine the bodies in the ground, some still clothed in flesh, others nothing more than bones. In her imagination, they always had eyes that snapped open to look at her.

When she and her sisters were kids, it was a Sunday family ritual to come and visit Mount Auburn. Every week, as they walked through the gates, her father would make the same joke, the “dead-center-of-Cambridge” joke, and every week she, and her two sisters, would groan aloud in unison. It became part of the ritual.

They would start with the graves of her grandparents and gradually work their way, Sunday after Sunday, to the graves of all their dead relatives, cleaning them up, plucking out weeds, washing down the headstones with soapy water from lemonade bottles. She knew all the names by heart, all the dates, and even though she had never met any of the people, she felt she knew them intimately. She knew that Aunty Mae had fought with Cousin Darren and that they didn’t speak for nearly thirty years; she knew that Cousin Jessica—who wasn’t really a cousin at all—had been left at the altar by Tim, who later went on to marry Aunt Rita, and that Uncle Fitz had a special coffin made because he was so fat. It was only later, much later, that she realized that was how her father had kept alive their family history. Even now, all these years later, she would have been able to find each and every one of those graves. She knew for a fact that her own children wouldn’t be able to find their grandparents’ graves. They knew precious little about her side of the family, and even less about Robert’s.

But Kathy wasn’t planning to go into the ground with a stone slab raised over her head. When she died, she was going to be cremated and her ashes scattered in the Boston Harbor.

The clock just inside the gate clicked onto nine, and Kathy checked her watch. She’d wait another couple of minutes.

The cemetery was busy, and the woman selling flowers outside the gates had a huge display of Christmas wreaths and poinsettias. Kathy glanced over her shoulder at the backseat. She’d brought a small bouquet of flowers, and suddenly it seemed too small, too inconsequential to mark her parents’ grave. She’d get a wreath, she decided.

It had been six months since she’d last visited the grave. She could come up with any number of excuses why she’d stayed away so long, but the truth was simpler: She hadn’t wanted to come. This wasn’t the way she wanted to remember her parents, cold and dead in rotting wooden boxes in the ground. To her, they would both always be alive and vital. She remembered a quote she’d read somewhere: Nothing ever truly dies while it remains alive in the memory.

Except love. Love can die.

She didn’t want to think about that just now. She opened up her purse and fished out the two small memoriam cards she carried tucked into the front pocket. Holding one in each hand she looked at the fuzzy, slightly out of focus photographs of her mother and father. Her father’s card was cracked and faded, the paper slightly yellow; her mother’s card still looked new. Margaret Childs had died only eighteen months ago. There had been no reason, no illness. She simply went to bed and never woke up. Johnny, her father, had died seventeen years ago, a year after she’d married Robert. Johnny had been a smoker all his life, and a third heart attack had finally taken him.

A tap on the window made her scream and physically jump.

Kathy rolled down the window. “Jesus Christ, you almost gave me a heart attack!”

“Well, you’re in the right place for it.” Smiling brightly, Sheila Childs leaned into the car to kiss Kathy’s cheek, filling the car with cold air and a slightly bitter floral perfume. Then she saw the cards in her sister’s hand, and the smile faded. Sheila lifted their father’s card from Kathy’s palm and tilted it to the light. “I was thinking about him only the other day, and I couldn’t find my card.” She handed the card back to Kathy.

Kathy shoved both cards into her purse, rolled up the window, and climbed out of the car. “I think about him a lot,” she said. She reached into the backseat to lift out the small bouquet.

The two sisters linked arms and darted across the road. They could not have been more dissimilar. Sheila stood at least three inches taller than her older sister and was thin to the point of emaciation. The color of her hair tended to change with the seasons, but lately she’d been going back to her natural deep red, adding golden highlights to emphasize her pale, flawless complexion. Kathy was sensibly dressed in a three-quarter-length black leather coat, black trousers, and low-heeled black boots, while Sheila was elegant in a cream-colored belted Marc Jacobs raincoat and impossibly high-heeled ankle boots. She looked like she’d just stepped off of the runway.

They were through the cemetery’s tall, wrought iron gates before Kathy remembered her intention to buy a wreath. Suddenly it didn’t seem to matter.

This section of the cemetery was deserted, and they had the narrow pathways to themselves. The air was crystal clear, and although the winter sun was without heat, it painted the tumbled stones and ancient trees in sharp relief, making them look almost artificial. Frost and frozen snow glittered in the shadows and dusted the tops and crevices of some of the more ornate headstones.

The two women walked in silence, turning right down an avenue of evergreens, heading into the heart of the old cemetery. A robin darted into the middle of the path, cocked its head at them, then twisted away. Sheila turned her head to follow its path through the trees. “It’s so peaceful here,” she said. “I love it.”

Kathy looked at her in surprise. “You love it?”

“Always have. Remember those Sundays when we were younger, when Mom and Dad would take us here to clean all the graves?”

“I hated those trips.”

“I loved them. I loved the peace and tranquillity of this place. No matter how hot it was, it was always cooler here.” She gripped her sister’s arm and stopped. “Listen.”

Kathy stopped. “I can’t hear anything.”

“Exactly,” Sheila smiled. “That’s what I love about this place. It’s like a cocoon.”

“You always were weird.” Kathy squeezed her younger sister’s arm to take the sting from the words.

The two women wound their way past the crypts of the cemetery’s more famous historical residents like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Winslow Homer and turned left, long shadows dancing ahead of them. The graves in this section were old, most no longer tended and forgotten, but dotted amongst them, like strange blooms, were newly dug graves, a profusion of colored wreaths and cards amidst the withered grass.

“Are you going to tell me what you wanted to see me about?” Sheila asked finally. “It’s not every Saturday morning I get a call from my favorite sister.”

“I’m glad you said favorite sister. Your big sister was asking after you last night.”

“Your? Don’t you mean
our?
”

“When she’s in one of her moods, you can have her all to yourself.”

“I’m afraid to ask. . . . How is she?”

“Wants to know if you have a boyfriend yet.”

“Tell her if she wants to know she can pick up the phone and ask me herself,” Sheila snapped. “She’s not my mother.” Then she smiled. “She only thinks she is.”

“If it’s any consolation, she’s the same with me. Are you going to her place for Christmas?”

“I might. I haven’t decided yet.”

“You could shock her and bring your boyfriend with you.”

“No way. I’m definitely not bringing Alan.”

“So he has a name. Alan.”

“I told you that.”

“No, you haven’t! You’ve been completely secretive about him. I was beginning to wonder what was wrong with him.”

“There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s perfect.”

“Sure. The last one was perfect. And the one before that. Even the one with the lazy eye was perfect,” Kathy reminded her.

Sheila laughed, the sound loud and startling in the silence of the graveyard. “Okay, maybe he wasn’t perfect. But he was extremely rich and that compensated for a lot of his other failings.”

“Sheila!” Kathy was genuinely shocked.

“What? I’m just being honest. But this isn’t why you asked me here this morning, is it, to talk about my taste in men? I can’t remember the last time you wanted to visit Mom and Dad’s grave. What’s up?”

Kathy walked a dozen steps in silence. “I need to talk to you about something,” she said finally. “I need some advice.”

“Wow, this is a first. You’ve never asked me for advice before in my life.”

“Well, this happens to be an area in which you’re an expert.”

“Which is?”

“Men.”

Sheila started to smile. “I’m not sure that was meant as a compliment.”

The two sisters turned left onto a narrow pathway. Their parents’ grave was about halfway up on the right-hand side, a simple white headstone, with the surface of the grave covered in fine white pebbles. A single black pot stood in the center of the grave. Wilted and long withered carnations drooped from the vase.

“Julia was here,” Kathy muttered.

“But not recently,” Sheila added.

The two sisters moved silently around the grave. Kathy emptied the dead flowers and carried them off to the nearby trash can. When she got back, Sheila had arranged Kathy’s bouquet in the bowl and was rubbing down the surface of the stone with a tissue. They then stood side-by-side and stared at the stone.

“ ‘A loving father. Sadly missed,’ ” Kathy read aloud. “We should have added a line when Mom went down. Something similar.”

“It’s funny—I know he’s been gone longer, but I remember him more than Mom,” Sheila said.

“I have better memories of him. Fonder memories,” Kathy agreed.

In the last five years of her life, Margaret Childs had become increasingly bitter and disillusioned with life. She had found fault with everything, and it had reached the stage that the grandchildren—and indeed her own daughters—had found it difficult to visit with her. Family occasions were a nightmare, and she’d ruined Julia and Ben’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebration with her bickering and fault-finding.

“When I go, I want to be cremated,” Kathy said.

Sheila shrugged. “I don’t care what you do with me when I’m gone. Have a party. I’d like that.”

“You’re the youngest. You’ll outlive all of us.”

“Maybe.” Sheila smiled, but it was the slightest twisting of her lips, and her eyes remained distant. Then she turned to look at her sister. “So?”

Kathy took a deep breath. “So, I think Robert is having an affair.” Her breath steamed on the air, giving the words a form. “I don’t know what to do about it.” In the chill December air, it sounded so cold, so matter-of-fact, so unbelievable. She glanced sidelong at Sheila. “What do you think?”

Her younger sister looked shocked. She finally took a deep breath. “Are you sure?”

“Nearly positive.”

“Nearly positive doesn’t sound too sure,” Sheila said quietly. She took her tissue and rubbed it absently over the top of the headstone, not looking at her older sister. “Tell me everything.”

Kathy sat down, perching on the edge of the stone. It was cold and hard beneath her, but in a strange way she welcomed the chill. The last couple of days had been so unreal, dreamlike almost. This was real: sitting here, now, on the icy stone in the deserted cemetery. She could no longer take anything for granted. The illusion of her safe, secure world had been shattered. Maybe the last week had not been the dream; maybe the weeks and months and maybe years preceding it had been the dream. And now she’d finally woken up.

“Six years ago . . .”

“Whoa, this started six years ago?” Sheila was stunned. How could she not know this? How could she be so close to Kathy, yet know so little about the important details of her life? Then again, Sheila realized, she had her own secrets she’d elected not to share with Kathy.

“Yes. Well . . . in a way it did.” Kathy ran her gloved hand over the pebbles on the grave. “Six years ago, I first suspected that Robert was having an affair. A woman called Stephanie Burroughs joined the company as a researcher on a project, a documentary. Young, about your age, ridiculously pretty, extremely bright. They spent a lot of time together. It was around that time he started coming home later and later at night. Her name kept cropping up in conversation. Eventually, it got too much for me; I confronted him and accused him of having an affair with her.”