“You’ve left him?” I said.
“I’d rather not talk about it,” Rachel said.
A few days later, she called me again. Martin would not be joining her and Jake on their Christmas trip to India; accordingly there was a vacancy, accordingly Rachel wondered if I could fill in. There was no question of canceling the holiday. Jake had already packed his bag and notified Father Christmas of his Indian whereabouts by postcard to the North Pole. “I can’t disappoint him,” Rachel said.
I bought a ticket within the hour.
We flew to Colombo and thence, as travelers used to say, to the Keralan city of Trivandrum, which on a map can be found almost at the very tip of India. I was worried about Jake catching a strange Indian disease; however, once we were established in a simple family hotel colonized by darting caramel lizards and surrounded by coconut trees filled, incongruously to my mind, with crows, I was quite content. This was at a seaside place. There was a lot to look at. Women wrapped in bright lengths of cloth walked up and down the beach balancing bunched red bananas on their heads and offering coconuts and mangoes and papayas. Tug-of-war teams of fishermen tugged fishing nets onto the beach. Tourists from northern parts of India ambled along the margin of the sea. Foreigners lounged on sunbeds, magnanimously ignoring the sand-colored dogs dozing beneath them. Lifeguards, tiny slender men in blue shirts and blue shorts, attentively inspected the Arabian Sea and from time to time blew on whistles and waved swimmers away from dangerous waters; and indeed on one occasion an Italian yoga instructor, a long-limbed male, became stuck in a web of currents and had to be rescued by a lifeguard who skimmed over the water like an insect flying to the rescue of a spider.
And there was Rachel to look at — in particular, Rachel’s back, which I’d forgotten was spotted with unusually large, lovely freckles, as if she were part Dalmation. Most afternoons we relocated by motor rickshaw to the swimming pool of a luxury hotel, and as we zipped through the coconut groves that covered the entire coastal region and gave one the false impression of a jungle, I’d peek over at my wife, think about offering a rupee for her thoughts, and think again. Very often during those rickshaw rides her eyes would be closed. She slept indiscriminately: on the beach, by the pool, in her room. It seemed as if she were trying to sleep her way through the holiday — even through Christmas morning, with Jake tearing open the gifts Father Christmas had left for him on my balcony. On somebody’s recommendation, I went with my son to a nearby fishing village for a Church of India Christmas service. The church, by far the proudest building in the locality, sat on the top of a hill. It had a tall creamy tower and a cavelike interior painted in pinks and blues. Other than the floor, there was nowhere to sit. From time to time a crow flapped in to join the congregation, perched on a ceiling beam, and flapped out again. All proceedings were spoken in Malayalam, a chattering language filled with buzzing and drilling sounds — until, at the conclusion of the service, the children’s choir suddenly struck up a rendition of “Jingle Bells” and the words “snow” and “sleigh” flew up into the heat.
I wanted to tell Rachel all about it; but when we returned, at noon, she was still in bed.
Occasionally she was communicative. The poverty troubled her, she said — as did her perception that I, by contrast, was not at all troubled. When I haggled, pro forma, with a lungi salesman, she broke in, “Oh, for God’s sake, just pay him what he’s asking for.” It was I who had to deal with the fruit hawkers, because Rachel could not bear to look into their mouths, abounding in rotted black teeth, or their eyes, abounding in unthinkable need. She half apologized one evening. “I’m sorry. I just find it oppressive being an economy. The nanny”—we’d hired an English-speaking Assamese woman to babysit for Jake for a few hours every morning—“the drivers, the waiters, the deck chair boys, all these people selling stuff on the beach…I mean, every stupid spending decision we make has a huge impact on their lives.” We were sharing a nightcap bottle of Kingfisher on the balcony of her hotel room. Jake was asleep in my room. Before us, at eye level, were palm fronds. Between the fronds, on the sky-black sea, fishing boats lined up dozens of lights. Rachel swallowed directly from the huge bottle. “You don’t seem at all bothered,” she said. “You’re just happy splashing in the water.”
That much was true. I was very taken by the waves, which had a sweet, sickening taste and were ideal for bodysurfing, an activity I’d never even known existed: you waited in waist-deep water for the large benign breaker that might carry you, coasting on your torso, all the way to frothing shallows. It’s fair to say that I became a little obsessed. At lunch, invariably taken on the second floor of a restaurant overlooking the water, I’d interrupt Rachel’s reading in order to say, Look, that’s a great wave there.
Rachel said, funnily, “You’re becoming something of a wave bore, did you know that?”
One afternoon I approached the sea and saw that seaweed was washing ashore, and also that the sand was littered with triangles of purple matter which I took a moment to identify as fish. I walked on, into the sea. All kinds of things were floating in the water — coconut shells, a comb, a rotting flip-flop. A storm had done this. Seeing a white plastic bag ahead of me, I resolved to pick it up and throw it out onto the beach. It was not a plastic bag. It was a dog — a sizable puppy, turning to pulp, drifting with its four legs dangling plumb. I withdrew to the land.
The next day, women wearing glum municipal jackets over their saris swept up the sand and disposed of the storm trash. The sea cleared up. When I reentered the water in the afternoon, Rachel, as tiny and pale and skinny as I’ve seen her, came with me. “All right,” she said, frowning and smiling at once, “show me how it’s done.”
“There’s nothing to it,” I said. Along came a slightly menacing wave, perfect for surfing. “Here we go,” I said. “You just push…”
I raised my arms, put my head down, and caught the wave. I surfaced twenty yards away, exhilarated.
Rachel hadn’t moved. Rejoining her, I said, “You’ll catch the next one.”
“I think I’ll swim for a while,” she said, and she floated away from me on her back and closed her eyes. She slept even in the ocean.
On the first day of 2005, I set off with the boy to the mountains. The driver of our mock Jeep took us through rice fields and thereafter, climbing up, up, up, successively through shadowy forests of rubber trees, and tea farms, and spice gardens. Jake sat between me and the driver, thrilled and talkative at first but eventually falling into silence and car sickness. The journey was slow, bumpy. It was evening by the time we’d checked into an old colonial hunting lodge.
That night, as my son slept among his new toys — these toys peopled his somnolent mutterings, as did dinosaurs and monkeys — I sat on the veranda and thought about his mother. “No messages,” the hotel manager had volunteered before our departure earlier in the day. “Messages?” I said, puzzled. Laughing, he replied, “Your wife is always asking if I have received a message for her.” “Have we?” “Not yet,” the manager said. “But if it comes, I will let you know immediately.”
In this way I received confirmation of my suspicion, which was that Martin had jilted Rachel.
I’d met him only once, on a damnably sunny day six months earlier. The encounter was a trap, because — and this had been my only sticking point in our parental cooperation — I’d refused to have any contact with him. Without prior consultation (Rachel said, “You’d only have got yourself into a tizzy”), I found myself attending a barbecue held in the back garden of Grandma and Grandpa Bolton. While I skulked around, desperately prolonging my interactions with food and drink and pressing Charles Bolton for his views on the new rugby season, my rival made himself at home at the grill, making only the most modest, self-effacing, family-friendly fare. Jake appointed himself his sidekick and, wearing an apron that came down to his feet, waited for the word to turn a sausage. The gift I’d brought — one of the most prestigiously obscure, hard-to-find members of the Thomas the Tank Engine clan — lay unattended on the patio. I was conscious for the first time of a cuckold’s prickling pair of horns.