Where or When (24 page)

He finishes the warm champagne, sets the glass on the counter. He has had an extraordinary amount of alcohol to drink today, and yet he has not felt high or drunk or even buzzed. He has been drinking to anesthetize himself, he knows, an exhausting and futile effort. He walks through the living room, observes the classic picture: the stockings at the mantel, the presents arranged artfully under the tree. Only Anna this year believes in the miracle of a white-bearded man who visits every house in the universe with presents on this one particular night. He realizes with a pang that he doesn't even know what is in the brightly wrapped packages. He has not bought a single gift for any of his children, a ritual that in the past used to give him pleasure. In a few hours, his kids will be awake and demanding that he and Harriet join them downstairs to see what Santa has brought. If he doesn't go up to bed now, he'll get no sleep at all.

The room in which he and his wife share a bed is at the front of the house. White gauze curtains cover the windows, letting in only a pale glaze of light from a streetlamp across the road. The dark shape in the bed is unmoving; he is certain she must be asleep. At dinner, Harriet was cordial but not animated. He thought she seemed preoccupied, distracted, possibly annoyed by the dinner, which, in the end, did not really work as a whole. The children barely ate anything apart from the duck. The others seemed confused by the menu, as though presented with a puzzle in which certain key pieces were missing. The crème brûlée was a hit, however, and he felt inordinately pleased with this finale—the delicate sugar crust flambéed to translucent perfection.

He removes his sweater, a clean shirt he changed into before the relatives came, his shoes and socks and slacks. In his underpants, he slips under the heavy quilt, a practiced and delicate movement that disturbs the covers as little as possible, the movements of a thief stealing into a house undetected, the movements of a man who does not want to engage his wife. He knows instantly, however, that he has been heard. When he holds his breath and listens intently, he cannot hear his wife breathing, as he ought to. He turns slowly so that his back is to her, so that he might, with luck, fall asleep at once, but as he does, he feels the covers tug and pull, hears her turn in his direction. A hand is at his back, moving up to his shoulder. He turns his head, but not yet his body.

“Harriet?”

She pulls gently at his shoulder, asking him to face her, a request he cannot deny. He rolls over, his head on the pillow, and looks at her. Her face is grave, as he knows his must be to her. They examine each other in this way for what seems like minutes. She does not speak, but he knows that she will.

“Harriet, what is it?”

She says quietly in the thin artificial light, a light in which he can barely make out the expression in her eyes, “I want you to make love to me.”

He opens his mouth to protest, to say, reasonably, that it's after two in the morning and they will have to be up at dawn, to say that he's exhausted after all that cooking. To say that he'll make her come, or rub her back. But he knows he cannot say any of those things, that his voice alone will give him away, will announce that he has betrayed her. Instead he draws her to him, embraces her tightly.

“I've been waiting for you,” she says, the words muffled into his chest, and he understands instantly that she means more than just this night.

“Oh, Harriet,” he says.

And there is no help for him now. He begins to cry. He holds himself still, not breathing, so that she won't detect his tears, holding the ache deep in his chest and in his throat, but she has known him too long, knows the context of every sigh, of this stiffening of his body. She pushes herself away, studies him. She seems alarmed now, even more alarmed than she appeared to be in the kitchen earlier.

“Charles, for God's sake, what is it?”

He rolls onto his back, his arms out, looks up at the ceiling. The tears leak out of the corners of his eyes, trail down his checks. He knows by the tone in her voice that she will not let this go. He knows, too, that he cannot lie to her, not now.

“I have something to tell you that's going to make you sick,” he says.

She sits up abruptly, kneels on the bed facing him. Her bare arms are white in the dim light. He winces as he sees for the first time that she has worn her black silk nightgown, a revealing nightgown with lace at the breasts, which she wears when she wants him to make love to her.

He cannot say what he has to say from a supine position. He sits up, puts on his shirt.

“Where are you going?” his wife asks quickly.

“I'm not going anywhere. I'm just putting on my shirt. I'm cold.”

“What is it? What is this thing you have to tell me?”

He buttons his shirt, sits on the edge of the bed, half facing her, half turned away.

“I'm in love with another woman,” he says.

He waits for the ceiling to fall, for a tree to smash against the windowpanes. He has been imagining these words, cannot hear even his voice saying them without also hearing a crash of cymbals, the pounding of timpani. The silence then, the absolute silence of the bedroom, astounds him. He is afraid for a moment that he did not actually say the words, that he will have to repeat them, louder this time.

But he hears a sharp intake of breath, sees Harriet's hand rise to her mouth.

“Oh my God,” she says.

“Harriet, I'm so sorry. I never meant for this to happen.” He shuts his eyes, appalled at the sound of his own voice. The words are offensively trite, each syllable a lie. Of course he meant for this to happen. He
made
it happen.

“I'm going to leave you,” he says, more honestly. “I'm in love, and I'm going to leave you.”

He dares to look at her now, at the shock on her face. He, too, is stunned by his words, by the baldness of them, by their incontrovertibility. He cannot take them back, should not take them back. He does not want to hurt his wife, but he has to make her understand that this is not casual.

“What are you saying? Who is she?”

“She isn't anyone you know. She lives very far from here.”

“Then how do you know her?”

“I met her thirty-one years ago. We spent a week together at camp when we were fourteen, thirty-one years ago.”

“You spent one week together thirty-one years ago and you love her?” she asks incredulously. “Or have you known her all along?”

“No. No. No. I just remet her a few weeks ago.”

“A few weeks ago?” He hears the bewilderment in his wife's voice, knows how truly mad this must sound.

“Have you slept with her?”

It is, of course,
the
question, the one he has anticipated, dreaded. He hesitates. He will not lie. “Yes,” he says.

He hears the moan, the single note of pure pain in his wife's voice.

“How many times?” she asks bravely.

“Not many,” he says. “Four times.”

“Four times?” she asks incredulously. “You've been with her four times? When? When were you with her?”

“Harriet, does it matter when?”

“I trusted you,” she says, loudly now. He cannot ask her not to shout, not to wake up the children. It is her right. He realizes with horror that of course he should not have done this now, not on Christmas Eve, not when the children are in the house, not when they will wake up soon, anticipating the stockings and the presents, and will find what instead—a mother devastated? Harriet slips off the bed, stands up. She shivers in her nightgown. He, too, stands up, reaches for her bathrobe on a hook at the back of the door, hands it to her. She bats it away to the floor.

“I love her,” he says, as if to explain. “I always have loved her. We were lovers, even as children, all those years ago.”

“And what about me? I thought you loved me.”

“I do,” he says, “but it's different.”

“What's different?”

“It's just different.” He hears the evasiveness in his own voice, but he knows he will never tell his wife that it's different because he never really loved her, because he believes that he and Siân were meant to be mates. This is the worst heresy, not something that Harriet ever needs to know.

“Is she married?”

“Yes.”

“And does she have children?”

“Yes. She has one, a girl. She had a boy, but he died when he was nine.”

“And you're going to be a father to someone else's child?” This last is said in a high-pitched wail, as though this, more than any other betrayal, hurts most. She flails out at him with her fists held together, like a tennis player grasping a racket for a tough backhand shot. She hits him in the rib cage. He holds his arms aloft, does not stop her. She hits him again, and then again. She whacks him a fourth time, then whirls around, sobbing.

“How could you?” she cries.

He cannot tell her why. The why is clear and not clear, as simple as animals mating, or as complicated as a physics problem—a labyrinthine equation of time and distance.

She falls back onto the bed, puts her hands over her face. He cannot tell whether or not she is crying; he thinks she may still be too stunned for tears. He reaches down on the floor for his pants, puts them on, buckles the belt. Hearing the clink of metal on metal, Harriet takes her hands away from her face, watches him dress himself.

“Where are you going?” she asks quietly from the bed.

“I don't know,” he says. “I can't stay here now. Not tonight.”

“But the children. It's Christmas tomorrow.”

The realization seems to strike her even as she announces the import of the morning to her husband. She twists her head and moans again, a terrible, plaintive sound that he has never heard before from his wife, not even when she was in labor with Hadley, the worst of them. Harriet throws an arm across her face, covering her eyes.

Charles looks at his wife on the bed, at the black silk nightgown on the white sheet, at his wife's breasts, small and flat under the open lace. It is conceivably the last time he will ever see his wife's body. No, he thinks again: It is positively the last time he will ever see her body. A body that he has made love to thousands of times. A body that carried and bore and nursed his three children.

“I'll come back,” he says. “Before the kids are up. I'll spend the night, or what's left of it, someplace, maybe a motel, and then I'll come back to be with them when they open their presents. We'll tell them together, tomorrow night or the next day.”

She lies still on the bed, her face shielded. He thinks she will not speak, that she acquiesces with her silence, as bewildered on this foreign territory as he is. But then she sits up sharply, facing him. Her mouth is tight, a thin line of anger. There are vertical lines above her upper lip that he has never seen before.

“Don't you dare to come back here,” she says evenly. “Don't you come back here ever. You want your things, you can send someone else for them. Or I'll put them out on the street. This is my house now, and you are not to come here again.” She turns her head away, puts a hand protectively across her stomach—an unconscious gesture she used to make when she was pregnant.

“But, Harriet, the house . . .”

As soon as he has said the words, he knows he has made an unforgivable mistake. She twists quickly around, poised for more pain. He can see it on her face, in the fear in her eyes. It was her mentioning the house that caused him foolishly to blurt out the one thing he has not intended to tell her yet, certainly not on this night. His mind leaps, somersaults. He tries desperately to think of how to extricate himself.

“What?” she says anxiously. “What?”

“Harriet . . .”

“What?” she cries. She turns, springs off the bed. She faces him, her arms locked across her chest. “What?” she cries again, defiantly.

“Harriet, I feel sick about this. You can't know how bad I feel about this. . . .”

“For God's sake, spit it out,” she screams. “We've lost the house, haven't we?”

He walks around to her side of the bed, extends his arms to embrace her. For a moment, she lets him, leans into him.

“How could you . . . ?” she asks. “How long have you known this was coming?”

“I've known for a while,” he says. “But I just found out for certain this morning. I was at the bank.”

She sits down abruptly upon the bed, as if she has fallen.

“I'll take care of you, Harriet,” he says. “I'll always take care of you and the children. And they've got to give us at least sixty days before they foreclose. Perhaps . . .”

“I'm going downstairs,” she says, almost in a whisper. “I'm going to sit down there until you're gone. Don't be long, because I'm very, very tired.”

She stands, walks slowly to the other side of the bed, bends to the floor, and retrieves her robe. She slips her arms through the sleeves, wraps the robe tightly across her chest, securing it with the sash, as though she realized she was exposed, does not want him to see her skin.

Charles watches Harriet leave their bedroom, shutting the door behind her.

He stands for a time in the center of the room, staring at the shut door. Numbly, he turns, puts on his shoes and socks. He takes a jacket from a hanger in the closet. From the drawers of his bureau, he makes a pile of socks and underwear and ties and shirts. He is barely aware of what he is collecting; he simply wants to make a pile. He slips another suit jacket from a hanger, wraps the untidy bundle in the jacket, knots the bundle with the sleeves of the jacket, puts the bundle under his arm. He does not look again at the bed, or at the bedroom that he has shared with his wife for sixteen years. He opens the door, listens intently for sounds in the hallway. He passes the rooms where his children are sleeping, knows he cannot bear to look at Jack in his bed, instead opens the door to Hadley's room. He sees her head on her pillow, her brown hair spread out behind her. Her eyes are open—watchful brown eyes, so like his own.