To be liked by her was worthwhile but to be liked by him seemed somehow of even greater value. There was something about him that discounted the world. He appeared in a way to care nothing for himself, to be above that.
He didn’t make much money, as it turned out. He wrote for a business weekly. She earned nearly that much selling houses. She had begun to put on a little weight. This was a few years after they were married. She was still beautiful — her face was — but she had adopted a more comfortable outline. She would get into bed with a drink, the way she had done when she was twenty-five. Phil, a sport jacket over his pajamas, sat reading. Sometimes he walked that way on their lawn in the morning. She sipped her drink and watched him.
— You know something?
— What?
— I’ve had good sex since I was fifteen, she said.
He looked up.
— I didn’t start quite that young, he confessed.
— Maybe you should have.
— Good advice. Little late though.
— Do you remember when we first got started?
— I remember.
— We could hardly stop, she said. You remember?
— It averages out.
— Oh, great, she said.
After he’d gone to sleep she watched a movie. The stars grew old, too, and had problems with love. It was different, though — they had already reaped huge rewards. She watched, thinking. She thought of what she had been, what she had had. She could have been a star.
What did Phil know — he was sleeping.
AUTUMN CAME. One evening they were at the Morrisseys’— Morrissey was a tall lawyer, the executor of many estates and trustee of others. Reading wills had been his true education, a look into the human heart, he said.
At the dinner table was a man from Chicago who’d made a fortune in computers, a nitwit it soon became apparent, who during the meal gave a toast,
— To the end of privacy and the life of dignity, he said. He was with a dampened woman who had recently found out that her husband had been having an affair with a black woman in Cleveland, an affair that had somehow been going on for seven years. There may even have been a child.
— You can see why coming here is like a breath of fresh air for me, she said.
The women were sympathetic. They knew what she had to do — she had to rethink completely the past seven years.
— That’s right, her companion agreed.
— What is there to be rethought? Phil wanted to know. He was answered with impatience. The deception, they said, the deception — she had been deceived all that time. Adele meanwhile was pouring more wine for herself. Her napkin covered the place where she had already spilled a glass of it.
— But that time was spent in happiness, wasn’t it? Phil asked guilelessly. That’s been lived. It can’t be changed. It can’t be just turned into unhappiness.
— That woman stole my husband. She stole everything he had vowed.
— Forgive me, Phil said softly. That happens every day. There was an outcry as if from a chorus, heads thrust forward like the hissing, sacred geese. Only Adele sat silent.
— Every day, he repeated, his voice drowned out, the voice of reason or at least of fact.
— I’d never steal anyone’s man, Adele said then. Never. Her face had a tone of weariness when she drank, a weariness that knew the answer to everything. And I’d never break a vow.
— I don’t think you would, Phil said.
— I’d never fall for a twenty-year-old, either.
She was talking about the tutor, the girl who had come that time, youth burning through her clothes.
— No, you wouldn’t.
— He left his wife, Adele told them.
There was silence.
Phil’s bit of smile had gone but his face was still pleasant.
— I didn’t leave my wife, he said quietly. She threw me out.
— He left his wife and children, Adele said.
— I didn’t leave them. Anyway it was over between us. It had been for more than a year. He said it evenly, almost as if it had happened to someone else. It was my son’s tutor, he explained. I fell in love with her.
— And you began something with her? Morrissey suggested.
— Oh, yes.
There is love when you lose the power to speak, when you cannot even breathe.
— Within two or three days, he confessed.
— There in the house?
Phil shook his head. He had a strange, helpless feeling. He was abandoning himself.
— I didn’t do anything in the house.
— He left his wife and children, Adele repeated.
— You knew that, Phil said.
— Just walked out on them. They’d been married fifteen years, since he was nineteen.
— We hadn’t been married fifteen years.
— They had three children, she said, one of them retarded.
Something had happened — he was becoming speechless, he could feel it in his chest like a kind of nausea. As if he were giving up portions of an intimate past.
— He wasn’t retarded, he managed to say. He was. . having trouble learning to read, that’s all.
At that instant an aching image of himself and his son from years before came to him. They had rowed one afternoon to the middle of a friend’s pond and jumped in, just the two of them. It was summer. His son was six or seven. There was a layer of warm water over deeper, cooler water, the faded green of frogs and weeds. They swam to the far side and then all the way back, the blond head and anxious face of his boy above the surface like a dog’s. Year of joy.
— So tell them the rest of it, Adele said.
— There is no rest.
— It turned out this tutor was some kind of call girl. He found her in bed with some guy.
— Is that right? Morrissey said.
He was leaning on the table, his chin in his hand. You think you know someone, you think because you have dinner with them or play cards, but you really don’t. It’s always a surprise. You know nothing.
— It didn’t matter, Phil murmured.
— So stupid marries her anyway, Adele went on. She comes to Mexico City where he’s working and he marries her.
— You don’t understand anything, Adele, he said.
He wanted to say more but couldn’t. It was like being out of breath.
— Do you still talk to her? Morrissey asked casually.
— Yes, over my dead body, Adele said.
None of them could know, none of them could visualize Mexico City and the first unbelievable year, driving down to the coast for the weekend, through Cuernavaca, her bare legs with the sun lying on them, her arms, the dizziness and submission he felt with her as before a forbidden photograph, as if before an overwhelming work of art. Two years in Mexico City oblivious to the wreckage. It was the sense of godliness that empowered him. He could see her neck bent forward with its slender nape. He could see the faint trace of bones like pearls that ran down her smooth back. He could see himself, his former self.
— I talk to her, he admitted.
— And your first wife?
— I talk to her. We have three kids.
— He left her, Adele said. Casanova here.
— Some women have minds like cops, Phil said to no one in particular. This is right, that’s wrong. Well, anyway. .
He stood up. He had done everything wrong, he realized, in the wrong order. He had scuttled his life.
— Anyway there’s one thing I can say truthfully. I’d do it all over again if I had the chance.
After he had gone outside they went on talking. The woman whose husband had been unfaithful for seven years knew what it was like.