He had had no children in that first marriage and they had no idea where she, the woman, was — gone to South America, when last her name came up somehow. Unlikely by example of his earthy experience of mayhem with her, that she was still with the man who’d taken her to Peru or wherever. It was agreed between the two who had found the treasure of each other that they had been both naïve and culpable — no excuses — in those marriage episodes; maybe these had even been an initiation for their own: an experience of everything a mating should not be, so that they would be freed to make a real one, theirs.
So she knew, from her experience doubling with his, what emotions, illusions and disillusions, impulsive responses, compromises (how could any intelligent person have been deceived by such obvious contradictions) could bring about so-called marriages. The woman was a Beauty, and the classic case of the disturbed childhood never left behind, taking revenge on the world through the man who had chosen her; her chance of savage rejection. He had tried to make something of what was the hopelessness of the marriage, refused to recognise this, tried to persuade the woman to go with him to psychiatrists and psychotherapists, marriage counsellors, and when she cursed and jeered at him, went alone to lie on the couch.
In their emotional blunders, what she (is it possible she now has the archaic category Widow, out of the range of Miss, Mrs, Ms) had not experienced as he had, was his affair with one of his own sex. How it came about she could and had fully entered with him; the ‘unnaturalness’ of it — not in the sense of some moral judgment on homosexuals, but that she knew, in the exalted gratification he found in her femaleness, that this was what was natural to his sexuality. It had happened as part of the ugly desperation and humiliation of the first marriage. He would accept any distraction, then. Any invitation to attend gatherings and conferences anywhere. Get away. At an architectural conference he was lined up in the inevitable group photograph; found himself at breakfast next day taking the only free seat, at a table with the photographer. Then talking to him again when encountered in the evening at the hotel pool. The photographer was virtually the only person he had any real exchange with in three days; he himself made no contribution to discussions, he heard but did not follow his architect and town-planner colleagues’ discourses, he was cut off in parched despair of his failure to create some bearable relationship with the woman who was supposed to be his wife; and filled with self-disgust at his failure. The photographer — well, of course — had an unexpected lens on life. An interesting man. He saw wars and floods, nature’s disasters, the features of strikers and politicians, not a Fury whose image blocked all else. The two men were the same age in years, but not in their conception of themselves. The photographer offered in place of emasculating catastrophic rejection a simple acceptance of something never imagined, unthinkable in relation to oneself as a man: her man. In that state, she supposed, you could have been grateful for any recognition, any tenderness from a fellow human being: something hardly believed possible could happen.
I’m not bisexual, he had told her long ago, in the confessionals of their beginning. It has been the only time ever. It was some months but to me it’s the blank you had a day when you were young and had been drunk all night, your friends told you.
Now that she has seen him dead, felt him cold, she finds there’s something she can’t quite remember — what does it matter — whether he divorced before or after that lapse that was like the blankout of alcohol. Must have told her which, but told nothing else, was asked nothing else by her. No more than he would have put any value on hearing details of her love affairs — and her marriage, unlike his, had no traumatic drama to recount, was amicably ended through mutual agreement that each was leaving youth by differing signposts, shouldn’t foolishly have set out on zigzag footsteps.
But now that her man can exist for her survival only through piecing him together in what is available for recall, there is a gap — yes, a blankout. She can make the re-creation for herself whole only if she can recall what is not hers to recall.
Whom to talk to. There’s only one. One who can recall.
IF nobody knows or cares where the Beauty has gone to grow old the one who was the photographer has not disappeared. As if her eye, now, were programmed to react to the small print of the name appearing in accreditation to a series of newsprint photographs, there it is, Hayford Leiden. She had been told this name in the lovers’ confessional, long ago. Over the years the modest byline must have appeared here and there in the local and international newspapers she and her man read, but who notices the minute print below the picture?
She wrote in the dark of her head a letter that never got to paper, addressed care of a photographic agency called Magnum whose name often appeared in attributions in place of that of an individual photographer. Where did he live? If she received his address, what would the unwritten letter convey to him? Would he know that the man of the affair, her man, was dead. Probably not, since their circles had not overlapped in all the years of the marriage. She taught history at a university and knew how the alternative history of private lives goes unnoticed by those concentrated on public events; and a news photographer is one such. So the letter was there, as if waiting to be printed out, so to speak, from a word-processor.
She thought of travelling — friends prescribed it — to move away for a time from the environment of her grief, and perhaps to remove her from their necessity to contemplate it. She, in her turn, could accept invitations to conferences as a substitute way of life as her man once had resorted to. There was one from Canada she passed over, but she overcame her reluctance to leave the rooms, the house where his presence was still recognised by his hairbrush in the bathroom and the grubby chairarms where his hands had rested, and accepted the invitation to a conference in an English university city, which perhaps would seem to be less interesting. She didn’t know whether this was so; and whether she had made the choice because the byline of the photographer whose name she was aware of appeared in newspapers from England that she read. She might visit some friends in England although she had not told any of them she was coming. To pass the time while waiting for the call to board her flight she wandered around the dutyfree shop and passing the wine section saw a red wine she and her man had particularly liked, picked up a bottle. Friends might enjoy it as a reminiscent taste of the home in Africa they had left behind.
Once in the provincial English city, an intention came clear to her: she called various photographic agencies in London and was given his address and telephone number. So the voyage admitted its purpose. She stepped back from herself: in half-disapproval. The letter never was written but the telephone call was made. The first time there was a reprieve; an answering service at which she left no message. The next time a man said yes, Hayford Leiden speaking. She gave her name, so-and so’s wife, in a calm, friendly voice, might have been a caller about to make a sales-pitch. Could she come and see him, briefly. His surprise (or lack of comprehension — what does this woman want) was well disguised; he was no doubt accustomed, in his work, to bizarre encounters. Totally tied up for the coming week, but if she cared to come to London, say, the following Friday… yes, he remembers her man, met him some years ago.
He is dead, she said. Not long ago. Oh, he was sorry to hear… She would like to talk; nothing personal, she assured, just some dates, events, places, his architectural activities in a period of her man’s career when she had not known him. Nothing personal.