I was not looking at the note anymore, but rather at the picture of Jenny and Jack. Who the hell took that picture?
3
Jenny came out of the bathroom in her robe, her wet hair tangled, her face pink with dampness and heat, a bit breathless from the exertion, and self-absorbed in the way that people are when they wash themselves — completely off guard.
I said, “I know you were having an affair while I was away.”
She said, “It’s all over.”
She had been surprised into the truth.
“So there was someone.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
She walked away, toweling her hair. I followed with my questions.
“Who is he? Do I know him?”
“It doesn’t matter.” She seemed very calm.
I had not mentioned the note I had found, or the snapshot I was sure he had taken. I had simply blurted out my accusation, and she had not denied it.
“How could you do it?” I said.
She was not apologetic. She reacted sharply. She said, “You went away. You left me — I was all alone. You didn’t even ask whether it was convenient — you just left.”
“And you went to bed with this guy!”
“What did you expect me to do?” I was astonished by the way she so easily admitted it and defended herself. But it annoyed me that she was not contrite. “Did you think that after you were gone I would spend night after night alone in this house?”
“I spent night after night in crummy hotels alone.”
“Perhaps you should have found someone to sleep with. I would have understood that.” She said it almost tenderly, but her voice became resentful when she added, “It was winter in London, and so dark and cold it was diabolical. You were in Turkey and India. Burma. Japan. Fantastic places.”
“They were awful! I was alone — I hated it.”
She rounded on me. “You chose to go. ‘My trip, my trip.’ I got tired of hearing you talk about it. And you didn’t have to go. I begged you not to.”
“We needed the money.”
“That’s not true. I have a job.”
“I had nothing to write. I had nothing to do. I couldn’t face the thought of sitting around.”
“I didn’t want you to go, but you went. You have to accept the consequences.”
“You’re incredible,” I said. “You couldn’t wait for a couple of months, until I came back.”
She said in a correcting and teacherlike tone, “Four and a half months.”
“You couldn’t wait!”
“Why should I? You were doing what you wanted. You weren’t waiting — you were having a good time.”
“It was miserable,” I said. “I can’t tell you how awful it was. You know that. I wrote to you almost every day—”
And now I saw her opening the letters. She stood by the front door and put her fingers under the flap of the envelope and clawed it apart. She pulled the sheet of paper flat, looked closely at the hotel letterhead — something misleading like Grand Hotel, Amritsar—and then glanced down and saw missing you very much and can’t wait to see you. After that, she went off and met the man.
“And you hardly wrote to me. Now I know why.”
“I told you why. It was as if you had died. I didn’t want to think about you. It just made me miserable.”
“Anyway you were screwing this guy, so I guess you had your hands full.”
“I knew it! I knew that’s all you’d care about — the sex. You can’t imagine that it was anything else.”
“If you have a lover what else is there?”
She was determined to make her point, for the sake of her pride. She said, “There are a lot of other things. There’s friendship. You wouldn’t know anything about that — you have no friends, you’re too selfish. And there are practical things. One day the car wouldn’t start. He started it by getting the battery charged—”
“He charges the goddamned battery and you hand him your ass,” I shouted. “Where was he sleeping that night? Huh? You woke up with him and the car wouldn’t start. He was sleeping in my bed!”
She had gone sullen. She squinted at me and said, “I’m not going to say another word. How dare you talk to me that way.”
I wanted to hit her. It was not kindness or compassion that restrained me, but rather the thought that if I started I would not stop until I had beaten her brains out — hurt her badly, throttled her, or killed her. It was not the gentleman in me that stopped me but rather the cunning murderer, who knew what violence I was capable of.
So I didn’t hit her then. We went to bed, and without warning or any preparation I rolled her over and pushed her legs apart. In silence — but daring her to resist — I entered her and bore down on her in a rapid and brutal way.
It exhausted me. She had not uttered a sound the whole time. I realized soon afterwards, as I was dropping off to sleep, that she was crying softly.
“What’s wrong?”
She tried to stifle her sobs. She said nothing.
The only regret I had was that she might be feeling sorry for herself rather than for me.
In the days that followed, every moment we were together it was on my mind. In the middle of the most innocent conversation about such matters as Jack’s progress at school, or the loose slates on the roof, or should we buy a new carpet for the hall, I would say, “Who is it?”
“I told you — it’s over.”
“Did he sleep here?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“He took you out. He took you to the park.”
“Please stop. If we go on like this you’re just going to end up screaming at me.”
“Crystal Palace Park — I know he did. And Greenwich, too. Don’t lie — I know it.”
It was Greenwich Park in the snapshot. I had studied it with a magnifying glass and seen the hill and a corner of the Observatory in the background. And I resented such a good picture of Jenny and Jack, both of them smiling and happy. I knew it was taken with an expensive camera — something about the size of the print, the clarity and color. We had a cheap camera; we had no money. His was obviously a 35mm, and he probably had a shoulder bag with lenses and filters, someone serious and at the same time very egotistical, the way I imagined all obsessed photographers to be, sticking his nose in everything, because everything belonged to him, and believing he was bestowing a great favor on my wife and child by taking their picture. He had slept with my wife and played with my child.
Look at the dinosaurs, Jack. Let me hold you up so that you can see them. Here you go—
That same day, in Rangoon or Calcutta, or some other pitiful place, I was sitting in my underwear on the edge of my bed, with a book on my knees to write on, and beginning my letter, Darling—
“I know he slept here,” I said. “How could you let him? Sleeping in the same house with Jack! You let your son see you screwing another man. You are a bitch, and what a whore—”
But she had started to cry. That was what I wanted, to reduce her to tears. It was the only satisfaction I had: that she might be sorry and ashamed, that she might be afraid.
She said, “If you want to leave me, go on. But please don’t hurt me any more than you have done. Go—”
I didn’t want to go, nor did I want her to go. What I wanted was impossible. It was a wish for the whole affair to have been imaginary. I wanted it never to have happened. I wanted her, I think, to deny it. But in her sorrowful honesty and her anger and her tears, she admitted everything.
I said, “Poor little Jack.”