Sam’s departure for university gave us a short respite. She’d spent the early part of the summer waitressing at one of the pizza joints in the town center, then bought herself a cheap flight to — of all places — South Africa, a country I was still unused to thinking of as a tourist destination. She returned soon after we did, happy and sunburned, to fill the house with loud music and stories about her adventures, which seemed mainly to have involved her and her schoolfriend Ally climbing up or jumping off or into things with the clean-cut boys whose pictures now took pride of place in the collage of snapshots above her desk. I tried not to speculate about whether she’d lost her virginity to one of these variously grinning white teenagers, the one in the striped
rugby shirt, the one with the shark’s-tooth necklace and the sunglasses pushed up like a headband into his streaky blond hair. None of my business if she had, of course. As Sam occasionally reminded me, usually just before slamming her bedroom door, I wasn’t her real dad. She was the product of Miranda’s monthlong fling with a musician, a drummer in an Australian band who’d gone home at the end of their tour not knowing about her pregnancy. I’d been around since Sam was two years old, and though I loved her very much I was annoyed to find myself so clumsily possessive. I felt ambushed, tripped up by fatherhood, a ridiculous and slightly creepy cartoon of a stepdad.
With Miranda so busy — increasingly her trips to London seemed to involve overnight stays — I was the one who oversaw Sam’s preparations for university, helped her decide which of her clothes to take, which textbooks she absolutely had to buy before she got there. We made piles and lists, and when Miranda was around, the three of us colluded in putting a happy face on things. Miranda and I drove Sam to Bristol, carried her bags into the hall of residence and sat through an interminable restaurant lunch watching her sigh and fidget, visibly wishing we’d vanish and let her get on with her new life. Afterward we watched her run away from us up a flight of concrete stairs; sitting in the car, Miranda leaned her head on the wheel and burst into tears.
“Now what?” she asked. I knew what she meant. It wasn’t just that her little girl had grown up. It was us. We were going to have to face each other.
In old cartoons, the Hanna Barbera shorts I used to watch as a child, Wile E. Coyote would frequently run off a cliff. When this happened, he’d stop moving forward, his legs windmilling in the air, but it was only when he looked down that gravity started to work and he fell. Until then he was magically suspended, held aloft by his conviction that there was still ground beneath his feet. This was how I dealt with seeing Anna again. By pretending I hadn’t. I repressed the memory thoroughly and completely, and when it struggled to the surface I pushed it back down, telling myself that
with my relationship to Miranda crumbling, the last thing I should have on my mind was the reappearance of someone from my political days. But it wasn’t just someone. It was Anna. Dead Anna. In those first weeks, the point I kept making to myself, neurotically, repetitively, was that, though I’d seen her, she hadn’t seen me: if I could just forget what had happened, the meeting would be an event without consequences, a mirage.
It meant she’d survived Copenhagen, of course, which seemed impossible. The news reports had been unequivocal. They’d published photos, disgusting prurient photos of her corpse, the arms spread wide, a bloodstained suit jacket hiding her charred face and torso. Somehow a living Anna made less sense than a dead one. In her beliefs, her political choices, she belonged to a past almost geological in its remoteness from the present. Even back then, death had always been on her horizon; that was what I’d understood, eventually. You can’t hate the world’s imperfection so fiercely, so absolutely, without getting drawn toward death. Beyond a certain point it becomes the only possibility.
So, instead of thinking about Anna, I tried to mend things with Miranda, ignoring her pointed questions about how I was passing the days while she was out at work. I kept the house clean and the fridge full; I tiptoed around her as she worked on her business plan, and when Bountessence moved into its new premises I attended the opening drinks party and held a glass of cava and tried to pretend, as I applauded the speeches, that I didn’t feel as if I were spinning out of control.
For a while it worked. Our conversations became less strained. We found things we could do together without getting on each other’s nerves, watching whole seasons of American drama on DVD as we ate ice cream on the couch, the very model of the modern consuming couple. We started sleeping with each other again. The sex was good, better than it had been for years, but I cringed from the scratch of her newly manicured nails on my back, which felt to me like a cat clawing at a door, begging to be let in.
Then came the evening when Miranda invited her backers and their wives for dinner. The two lawyers exuded the bland machismo of small-town worthies everywhere. They talked about skiing and their wine cellars and how there was money to be made from the Internet. I’d cooked, which they evidently found amusing; as I served the food there were barbed comments about housework and aprons. The women seemed to find me exotic and slightly unsavory. Where had I learned to make Oriental food? Thai, I corrected. I told them I’d lived in Thailand for a while, during the seventies.
“Mike was in a monastery,” interjected Miranda, trying to make me sound interesting. I wished she hadn’t: from the fake smiles around the table, I could tell I was now seen as a crackpot, some sort of religious cultist. “I was never a monk,” I clarified. “I just worked there.” I tried to make it sound like a tourist destination, as innocuous as a spa or a yoga retreat. There was nothing I wanted less than to discuss Wat Tham Nok with those people. Miranda herself had only the vaguest idea about the place. It had always been a sore point that I’d never wanted to go back to Asia with her. She liked the idea of being shown the “real Thailand,” by which she meant kite festivals and sticky rice and girls making wai, rather than back-room shooting galleries in Patpong. And there we were again, up against yet another barrier to truth, another thing I’d elided in the authorized version of my life story: the way I’d actually lost my lost years.
When the cheek kissing and coat finding and insincere expressions of concern about driving over the limit were finally dispensed with, we closed the front door and wandered around in silence, clearing the table and stacking plates and glasses by the sink.
“I’ll do this, Mike,” offered Miranda.
“It’s fine.”
“Really—”
“Really, it’s fine. Pass me a cloth.”
She flicked down the bin lid and sighed. “I’m sorry I put you through that. It’s just—”
“Business. I know. You don’t have to apologize. I understand.” “I do appreciate it, Mike. You were great.”
“Don’t overdo it. I just cooked a meal.”
“Putting up with them, I mean. I had to have them over. It was beginning to feel awkward.”
“Why didn’t you invite them before?”
“Well, I knew you—”
“I what?”
“Not you. Them. I knew how they’d be with you, the patronizing way they’d treat you.”
“So you were protecting me.”
She kissed me. “I’m not saying you need protecting. They’re major investors. I need them to like — to respect me. You were a saint to put up with them.”
“Ah, I see, it’s about status. So, what do you reckon? Are they driving home talking about what a great couple we are, or about why a successful entrepreneur like you is married to some fucking socks-and-sandals religious freak?”