Infidelity (14 page)

( CHAPTER FORTY-ONE )

Ronnie decided to cut hair because she didn't know what else to do. She'd simply never had any real interest in anything, no passion or calling, and the idea that as a hairdresser she could work flexibly and independently appealed. It was also easy to learn and do while she was being reckless or sick. Or both.

She'd never been the kind of girl who was preoccupied with fashion or beauty, but her ability to make people feel good, happy, and attractive was immediately gratifying. It fit. It was easy. The feeling that she could fix something, make something better with a skill she had acquired, that people trusted her, told her their secrets, relied on her to symbolically overhaul their lives—all of these things made the profession a perfect place for her to be.

It was for this reason that she asked Charlie if she could cut his hair. Her feelings for him, for the situation, had lost their footing, escaped reason. The floor was falling out from beneath them. Cutting grounded her. Brought her clarity. It was a way to save them both.

“But I have so little hair to cut,” he said, half smiling.

“I want to do it. I've sat here and watched you write.”

Here
was an ever-changing hotel room. Home, for them, was club sandwiches from room service and white towels and concierge requests.

“I want to share what I do with you,” she pleaded.

He smiled at her, soothed by her simplicity, and relented. “I want you to.”

This particular excuse to be missing for an afternoon was an easy one. “I'm going to get a haircut,” he told Tamara.

Ronnie laid a bath towel down on the floor, and after he came from the shower in a complimentary bathrobe, she slipped her scissors and combs from her backpack and placed them neatly on the bed. Charlie sat in an office chair facing the mirror, over the desk, next to a window with an endless view of the city.

She put her hands in his hair and then put one on each of his shoulders.

She stared at him seriously in the mirror. “I love you, Charlie.”

“I know you do.”

“Do you trust me?”

“Always.”

“I want you to leave your wife.”

“I know you do.”

They hadn't spoken about her tests, the possibility of cancer, the possibility of surgery, since the crying jag at the pub. Ronnie had decided not to push Charlie to deal with reality until it was indeed reality. When she had results, when she had a plan, she would bring him in, but for now she wanted to protect him. To care for him. To hide it all from him.

They were silent for a moment, and when it was obvious that Charlie was going to say no more, she slowly ran her fingers along one side of his neck. He closed his eyes and let out a long, low sigh.

When he opened them again he nodded and she began cutting, carefully at first, and then with an intensity and speed that suggested she was lost in it.

She worked in silence, and he watched her in the mirror, her furrowed brow, the flicker of her eyes as she scanned and then confirmed each cut, soothed by the knowledge that when they went down, they would go down together.

And in that moment everything that was out of control wasn't anymore.

( CHAPTER FORTY-TWO )

Fidelity becomes infidelity so quickly.

One touch becomes another. One word becomes another.

Safe becomes unsafe so quickly.

Pre-cancerous becomes cancerous so quickly.

One test becomes another. One treatment becomes another.

Safe becomes unsafe so quickly.

You nod through conversations about outcomes and expectations, and you know you can't have your lover care for you in a hospital bed. It's simply not practical. Despite the fact that you love him more than anyone else in the world, that he is the subject of songs and movies and visits you in dreams, that you smell your clothes in the hopes of catching the scent of him on them, that you have given your heart and soul to him in hotel rooms across the city on a weekly, almost daily basis, have suffered every risk and regret, perpetuated every lie to have him in your life, it's difficult to explain the stranger at the foot of your bed, doting on you, as you lose weight and your hair falls from your head and your eyes sink back into your skull.

If you're honest, you know how little this narrative means in the greater scheme. While your love is scandal, and has the capacity to wound so many, it's all so meaningless. Your lives so small and insignificant. People tell lies and betray the people they love every day. Your mistake is thinking you are somehow special in this regard. You're simply two extra people groping to find meaning where there is little to none.

The beauty of infidelity is that you love so quickly. There is nothing to lose in confessing the enormity of your love.

Everything is already lost.

( CHAPTER FORTY-THREE )

Ronnie was at the meat counter in the supermarket and something made her cry. Made her wonder if she was being punished for what she had done in hotel rooms and steakhouses, at university cocktail parties, in Bay Street bars.

Surrounded by endless cuts of meat, flesh segmented, carved up, shrink-wrapped and frozen, sliced and served on Styrofoam, all the parts of her that had been poked and prodded, all the parts that had been cut up and put in tiny plastic jars, labelled
Veronica Kline
, to be sent off to labs. The parts they had burned off. The parts that were discarded.

At the meat counter, she started to cry. She cried for the time she had shamefully bled all over the floor of the hospital room, and the nurse, sympathetic, handed her a maxi-pad and her jeans. She cried for the many med students who hovered above her, with their clipboards and busy questions, their vague interest and vaguer statements, their endless chorus of “we don't know anything yet.” She cried for the time a male med student, likely ten years younger than her, said, “I know how you feel,” when he clearly didn't and never could. She cried for the time the doctor threatened to put her out, put her under, if she didn't “calm down.” She cried for the time she had cried from the moment she lay down on the table until well after they were finished. It always took so long for them to be finished. Took them so long to slice out the parts that they wanted and take them away for safekeeping. She cried for every question unanswered and every test inconclusive.

She remembered the time she cried when Charlie fucked her. The time she cried when Aaron fucked her. And how the two times were so different. How they both let her cry and didn't ask any questions.

She remembered the time she left the house and went to a dive bar by herself in the middle of the night and drank half a dozen whisky shots and had to have Aaron come to get her. The time she wished she could have called Charlie instead. But Charlie was with his wife at a dinner party, and Charlie's wife didn't have cancer. Charlie's wife was beautiful and not sick and not spending her afternoons being carved up on a gynecologist's table.

Ronnie was at the meat counter and she wondered how, when the time finally came, she was going to tell Aaron that she couldn't have children. When the doctor called to tell her surgery was the only option, how she could look Aaron in the face and explain that she could never give him what he really wanted. She wondered if that would be a good enough reason for him to leave her, because she longed for him to leave her. Longed for the relief that would finally bring. She of course could never leave him. He was beautiful and good and perfect and everyone loved him. She would never be able to explain.

Surrounded by cuts of meat, seeping, bleeding onto their Styrofoam trays, Ronnie cried for a baby she didn't want, and a husband she didn't want, and someone else's husband that she did want.

The butcher wiped his hands on his apron and asked her if she was okay.

“He's never going to leave her,” she said to the butcher with the clean hands.

( CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR )

Despite the fact that Charlie and Ronnie had moved their meetings to various hotel rooms across the city, far from the heavy, creaking wooden desk of his University of Toronto office, Sarah still had her suspicions and was bored enough with her own life to pursue them with calculated interest.

She decided to invite Tamara and Charlie to a dinner party at her home one Friday evening. There were other guests, various writers and professors picked at random, merely characters in the play she sought to direct, the one where Charlie slipped up and Sarah could publicly reveal his indiscretions.

It was for this reason Charlie was reluctant to attend, but Tamara was excited to socialize with colleagues of his she hadn't met. “I like being part of your work,” she said, smiling affectionately.

Charlie cringed at this, feeling she was clinging to an act they were no longer any good at. “But these people are so boring.”

“Please, Charlie. I never get to hang out with adults. I'm always with Noah.”

Generally Charlie would have been terrified by a scenario like this, given Sarah's accusatory phone call and her consistent penchant for meddling, but lately he felt a lack of concern as he openly sent emails and took phone calls from Ronnie at his end of the couch.

As Tamara got dressed that evening, carefully doing her makeup and hair in the upstairs bathroom, Charlie was reminded of how beautiful she was, remembered how in those early days together she was the most stunning girl he had ever seen. How he had been amazed that for even one moment she had wanted him that night at the campus bar, that she had taken care of him, taken pride in being the writer's understanding girlfriend.

“I imagine I'll write a whole book.”

As he watched her run a brush through her hair he realized he had never written that book he promised her, wondered how things had so unravelled, how he had forgotten to look at her this way. The love he felt for her was deep in his bones, the kind that never goes away no matter how many hours are spent with someone else in a paid-for room.

“You look lovely,” he said from the doorway.

She half-smiled in a way reserved for insecure girls. “Thank you, Charlie.”

They left Noah at home with Amanda and barely spoke on the cab ride over to Sarah's apartment. Their weeks of bitter awkwardness and resentment had descended into silence, both of them deciding that it was simply better not to speak than to inevitably get into an argument.

Regardless, when they arrived for dinner, Tamara fell easily into her old role of the comically patronizing writer's wife, a routine the academics and their wives and husbands greeted with consistent wine-soaked laughter.

“Charlie wouldn't know how to drive a car let alone fix one,” Tamara said lightly as Sarah refilled her wineglass.

“I imagine the poet mechanic could be a lucrative gig, Charlie,” one dinner companion offered. “You should really look into it if the old writing gambit doesn't pay off.”

He smiled at the painfully awful jab, realizing his writing was a gambit that didn't pay much of anything.

“So Tamara, what do you do with yourself while your husband is gallivanting around?” Sarah asked abruptly.

“I keep busy. Although it has been hard with him doing all these events lately.”

“Events? Really? Charlie, you hadn't mentioned.”

He shifted, uncomfortable for a moment. “Nothing special, just the usual,” he said, searching his mind for a lie.

Tamara thankfully interjected. “Such is the life of a writer's wife, I suppose. You know what you sign up for,” she said, giving her most sparkling smile. Another guest offered a toast to writer's wives and husbands, and everyone but Sarah smilingly raised a glass.

For the rest of the meal—largely jovial with light conversation and a few too many drinks—Sarah stared severely at Charlie from across the table, trying desperately and unsuccessfully to find a chink in his armour. To everyone else Tamara and Charlie were the perfect couple; him the bumbling genius and her his devoted caretaker.

The evening wound down and Sarah called Charlie and Tamara a cab, lingering with them in the front hall as they put on their shoes and waited for it to arrive.

“It was really nice to see you, Charlie,” Sarah said. “Considering we don't see much of you at the university anymore. I know you're really missed by the students.”

Tamara looked genuinely confused. “But I thought you were spending a lot of time with them lately?”

There was a moment of brief discomfort, and Sarah assumed she had finally found an opportunity to provoke a confession, but with Charlie the lies never ceased. “Indeed I am. Mostly off-site though. It gets a bit oppressive at the university. The students work better where they feel comfortable.”

Tamara smiled. “See? I knew you'd be great at this, Charlie.” She kissed him lightly on the cheek, a gesture that warmed him and made him temporarily forget that he had fallen in love with anyone but her.

The cab arrived and they sat quietly in the back as it drove them home. Tamara casually unclipped her long wavy hair from its shiny French twist and let it fall to her shoulders. She turned to Charlie slowly, staring at him in silent adoration for a few moments.

“You know, Charlie, you're a wonderful father. Please don't ever forget that.”

He was thankful she had said it, needing the reminder in the mess he had created.

“It's just that I miss this. I miss you,” she said, placing her hand on his knee.

Charlie waited for the guilt but it never came.

“Me too,” he said, squeezing her hand.

( CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE )

Ronnie didn't know what the word ennui meant before she met Charlie. More importantly, she didn't know she was experiencing it before she met Charlie.

One day at the salon a teenage boy in a Smiths T-shirt and a pair of scuffed Converse All-Stars came in for a cut. His hair was long and soft, the kind of hair that teenage boys have because they fail to wash it regularly and never style it. It was light and feathery and beautiful, a sort of non-colour, a uniform grey-brown. He collapsed heavily in her chair and she found herself running her fingers through it lovingly, carefully concealing this love from him as he stared severely at her in the mirror.

“Is there something wrong with you?” was the first thing he said. The question shook her from wherever she was.

“What do you mean?” she said, pulling her fingers quickly from his scalp.

“You don't look well. You look sick.”

In trying to avert his gaze Ronnie noticed his face, naïve yet knowing. Perfect.

“No. I'm fine. What are we doing today?”

“Cut it all off,” he replied emphatically.

Ronnie's eyes widened. She couldn't bear the thought of cutting off his hair. It was beautiful. There was a myth she couldn't remember, maybe a Bible story, about hair and power, this beautiful boy with his beautiful, powerful hair she couldn't bear to cut off.

Cutting hair had become increasingly difficult while the doctors were cutting at her. She couldn't suffer the loss of anything else. And his hair between her fingers was perfect and worthy of being saved.

“Are you sure?” she said, lifting her scissors dramatically from her belt.

“I need you to cut her out of it. I hate her.”

Only teenagers can get away with saying things like that to strangers.

He was heartbroken. Of course. She should have known. His misery and beauty, his suffering palpable. People who were heartbroken always had that same distinguishing glow, as if they were about to simultaneously hug and destroy everything around them.

Ronnie uncharacteristically put her hand on his shoulder. “You don't need to do that. I'm sure it's not that bad.”

“She kissed my best friend.”

Ronnie almost laughed at this; the idea that a kiss could bring this boy so much despair, considering all of the perverse, secret things she'd done. She stifled the impulse, nodding seriously, empathetically.

“Please. Just cut.”

There was a pause, an acknowledgement, and without further question Ronnie cut. The feel of his hair falling around her fingers was exquisite. His miserable, accusing stare exquisite.

After many minutes of silence between them, while Ronnie was working, the boy finally spoke. “Why would someone do that to someone else? Betray them like that?”

The question was actually one she'd had many hours to ponder, so she answered quickly. “Maybe because they need something else. Something different. Something more.”

“But I gave her everything she could ever want.”

“Nobody can give someone else everything they want,” Ronnie said coldly, focusing on cutting.

“Then what's the point? If you can't give someone everything, then why bother trying to be in a relationship? Why bother trying to be in a relationship with anyone?”

“I think you just need to find someone who is happy enough with ‘almost enough.'”

“Someone who wants mediocre?”

“Yeah, there's tons of those people. They're everywhere. Go ahead and let the people who aren't satisfied destroy each other with their wanting.”

She couldn't believe she was saying all this to a seventeen-year-old boy. Regardless, he seemed pleased.

“No one's ever said that to me before. Everyone always says you'll find someone who's right for you eventually.”

“Well, everyone is wrong. Or lying.”

The hair fell from his head and floated around them like confetti. With each cut the boy's face became exponentially more beautiful. He became lighter.

“Thanks for not lying to me. You're the only person who hasn't lied to me. You're the only person who hasn't told me that everything is going to be okay.”

“Because it's not going to be okay. But it's going to be beautiful anyway.”

The boy's hair was gone. She ran her palm across his soft, round head and sighed dramatically, watching his eyes fill with tears.

“I really loved her, you know.”

There was nothing she could say, though he didn't really expect anything further. He tipped her five dollars and skulked off the chair, his scuffed sneakers stepping into the pile of hair that surrounded them.