Infidelity (8 page)

( CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO )

After the day Veronica went to Charlie's office and laid on his desk as an invitation, she began to think about kissing Charlie with unending frequency. It was the kind of kissing that leads nowhere and everywhere. The groping, desperate kisses of teenagers before they've explored anything else to do with their bodies. People who have fallen into the motions of predictable sex . . . the kind you roll into while drunk or exhausted . . . they yearn only for the aimless grinding of youth.

The thoughts would leave her panting and nauseated.

Ronnie closed her eyes in the bathtub, behind a locked door, while Aaron was in the house, and thought of Charlie in a variety of inappropriate ways and a variety of inappropriate situations. Her capacity to fantasize amazed her, and the frantic detail in which she did disturbed her. After years of living with Aaron—after the unending, mechanical efforts to breed—fantasy had left her, and she welcomed it back with sticky, sweaty fervour.

Now that they had slept together, their coffee dates seemed foolishly innocent, so they graduated to later evenings, to cocktails, with more elaborate lies and more obscure locations. They had something to hide now, so they needed a way of numbing that feeling and a place to hide it that wasn't a campus coffee shop.

Ronnie would watch foolishly transfixed, a voyeur, as he lifted his pint glass to his lips. She would reimagine that single action over and over, recreating it in complex detail and at varying speeds. She would review the action as if they were both in slow motion, frozen in a slow, creeping, clandestine moment, over and over again. She wanted to sink her teeth into the fleshy pink of his bottom lip. She found herself putting her fingers in her mouth while he spoke, gnawing at them, pinching them between her teeth, occupying her tongue, trying to stave off the urge to reach across the table and swallow him whole.

“When I'm with you, Charlie, I just want to kiss you over and over and over again.”

He never talked about anything particularly interesting, or at least anything she could fully understand, but it failed to matter. Ronnie knew nothing about poetry nor was she particularly interested in it, and she could tune out the stories of university things and university people she cared little about. While his lips moved she took the time to scrutinize every reason she wanted to taste them. Certainly she'd considered that her attraction to Charlie was absurd, but beyond that the visceral, nauseous nature of the desire was foreign to her. Charlie had an ability to make her sick to her stomach, her head light, her clichéd knees weak. She wasn't sure how she'd managed. She'd spent so many nights lying next to Aaron wondering if this was the way things went. She'd spent so many mornings in bed with her thoughts, imagining things she could never do with Aaron, the kinds of things that Aaron would never believe her capable of. Things she could do with Charlie.

It seemed that Aaron's body was always turned away from her, curled up facing the wall, breathing deep. He fell asleep so many hours before her, and as a result woke up so many hours before she did. He chastised her for this, lightly called her lazy in a way she loathed. It was the kind of criticism Aaron would raise jokingly in front of mutual friends, thinking he was being loving and comical, but Ronnie would seethe with anger as their brunch or dinner party companions laughed jovially over her laziness. As she became more and more enamoured with Charlie and his every gesture, she began to despise Aaron. His voice became grating and his requests intolerable.

In her mind she had already left Aaron. In her mind she had moved out completely . . . packed up every last thing and found a new space in the crook of Charlie's neck. In her mind every piece of her was Charlie's, broken or otherwise. And was it enough that she was his in her mind? Would she have to sever herself in real life as well? Because the idea of dividing up her life and telling those laughing, joking brunch companions destroyed her even when she simply thought about it. The heartbreak of severing she could tolerate. It was the logistics of moving on, the shame of judgment she couldn't bear.

She pondered these things while she watched his mouth, wet with ale, that pink shiny mouth, that beautiful plump—

“Ronnie, are you even listening to me?”

“Yes Charlie. The university. They're screwing you.”

“Nice synopsis.”

“I'm sorry. I'm distracted.”

“Where are you?”

“I'm sorry. I was thinking about Aaron.”

The words, the lie, came out of her mouth before she had a chance to consider them. Charlie frowned. Ronnie wasn't entirely sure why she had said it. Perhaps to wound him? To remind them both about their bad behaviour? She often said Aaron's name out loud to remind herself that he wouldn't want her to be there. When she was with Charlie, it was easy to forget that Aaron existed, that he kissed her goodnight and kissed her good morning every day. The acknowledgement of his existence was important.

“Why do you always have to bring him up?”

“I don't
always
bring him up.”

“That was the third time today.”

“I bring him up because he's at home waiting for me. Because he thinks I'm ‘running errands.'”

“He's not waiting for you, Ronnie. He doesn't know you exist.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, fuck you.”

Charlie was being cruel and Ronnie knew it. He'd managed to build a caricature of this man he'd never met, someone who he believed to be a despicable, abusive, neglectful man, in order to justify the cuckolding. Every so often he'd casually suggest that Aaron didn't really love her, or that if he did, he wasn't very good at it. Despite Ronnie's assertions that Aaron was a “good person,” Charlie continually convinced himself that Aaron was an abusive monster. She knew it was because it made their actions easier for him to bear, that he never considered himself to be the type of man who would sleep with someone else's . . .

“If I could have you I wouldn't neglect you.”

But you can have me, Charlie. You just don't want me.

Charlie tipped back his pint dramatically, empowered by his own statement, and motioned impolitely for the waitress to bring him another.

“Don't do that.”

“Do what?”

“Motion at the waitress like she's a fucking servant. It's like you think anyone who doesn't have some creative calling is beneath you.”

“Creative calling? What are you even talking about?”

“I'm not beneath you, you know.”

“Oh, is that what this is about?”

“Don't say it like that. Like you've known it all along.”

“I don't think you are beneath me, Ronnie.”

“And he doesn't neglect me.”

“Why are you even defending him? Half the time you come and meet me you've been crying or you start crying. If you're so miserable all the time, I don't understand why you don't leave.”

“Probably for the same reasons you don't leave.”

Charlie broke eye contact and began to fidget.

“I want to go,” Ronnie said.

“I just ordered another beer.”

“Then stay and drink your beer. I want to go.”

( CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE )

“What's wrong with the dryer?” Charlie asked, coming up the stairs from the basement clutching a pile of his wet clothes.

“Maybe if you were around more, you would know that the dryer needs fixing, Charlie,” Tamara replied from the kitchen, her voice thick with resentment.

Charlie pretended not to hear, dumping his damp shirts, pants, and underwear on the living room rug and collapsing on the couch. He stared past the television, which was showing the six o'clock news piece on the dangers of escalators, through the glass sliding door and into the backyard.

“Please tell me you're not just going to leave that pile of wet clothing there on the rug, Charles,” Tamara said.

“No. I'm not going to just leave it there. I'm going to leave it there for now.”

“I'm happy to get someone in to fix the dryer during the day, Mrs. Stern,” Amanda offered, stirring a pot of soup on the stove for Noah's dinner. She seemed consistently unmoved by their bickering, perhaps because it was happening more frequently, and with much more mutual disdain. Amanda had a knack for making herself a casual, unobtrusive observer of their marital woes, and Charlie often wondered what kind of conversations she had with friends over beers about the disastrous marriage she had a hand in maintaining. How she promised them and herself she'd never turn out that way.

“Absolutely not. It is most certainly not your job to get the dryer fixed. Charlie, you need to get it together. I can't do everything.”

“That's right. Because I do nothing.”

It seemed to Charlie that Tamara was angry all the time, frustrated that he was never around, never contributing, never aware of the larger concerns of the family. It seemed to Charlie that Tamara had been this way not just since he had met Veronica, but for years and years, perhaps since the very beginning.

“I'll take care of it, Amanda,” Charlie said flatly without turning his head toward the kitchen where she and Tamara were preparing dinner.

“Unlikely,” Tamara added.

She had punished him for so long that he couldn't remember where and when it started. For so long he had been a disappointment that he didn't know how to be anything else.

The nightly news was now reporting on a shooting that had happened at a high school in the east end. Charlie thought for a moment about how pointless damp clothes on the living room rug were in the face of a crazed gunman.

“You know, Charlie, Amanda has been forced to take Noah's things to the laundromat. That's really not fair to her.”

“I heard you the first time, Tamara. I'll get it done.”

“It's okay, Mrs. Stern.”

“No, it's really not.”

“If you could do something about that sooner rather than later—you know if you're not too busy with that book you're writing every fucking night.”

With each strained conversation, more of his marriage was chipped away into a rubble they both wilfully ignored. Where once Tamara lived to care for his neurosis, to celebrate his gift, to proclaim herself the wife of a writer, she had become wary of his neediness. Where once he felt important to another human being, he now felt like a burden unworthy of being carried.

Perhaps it had always been this way and only in having Ronnie had he noticed.

“Really, Mrs. Stern. It's no trouble. I'll get someone in to repair the dryer first thing.”

Charlie breathed a heavy sigh and wished Amanda had not pushed. That she would shut up. He watched in the reflection of the glass door as Tamara furiously and wordlessly retreated upstairs, slamming the bedroom door.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Stern.”

Charlie switched off the television. “You can go home now, Amanda. I'll feed Noah. If you could pour me a glass of Scotch before you go I'd be grateful.”

( CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR )

RONNIE

In those naked moments in his office, while Charlie was drawing lines with his fingertips across my skin, I would tell him stories about my childhood. He encouraged it, asked me questions like “when did you first think you were in love?” and “tell me about your first kiss.” While he would run his hand lightly over my breast, my belly, my shoulder, he would watch me speak like he was an eager student in a classroom.

High school stories seemed to be his favourite. He loved hearing about me in a Catholic school uniform, in a wool beret and fingerless gloves, smoking weed with the boys.

“Weren't you ever worried? Weren't you ever afraid?” he would ask.

He would kiss the parts of me that he had touched and tell me that if he had known me then, he would have fallen deeply in love with me. And I knew he was already deeply in love with me.

I began to know the right stories to tell. He was aroused by my recklessness, would sigh heavily when I told him stories of me drunkenly scaling fences or stripping my clothes off in the rain. I would pick out moments of my life where I pushed hard at people who loved me and the people who did not. He had a fetish for me breaking things in the name of feeling alive, I assumed because he lived in a fear of his own creation every day.

“You're an amazing woman, Veronica,” he would say, finally kissing me on the mouth, long and deep, pressing himself against me, his thigh slipping between mine.

Inevitably after a story was told, we would make love in a way that was soft and sweet, in contrast to the usual desperate groping of our initial interactions.

It was the violence in me that Charlie desired the most.

( CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE )

“Happy Valentine's Day, beautiful.” Aaron held up a small box, wrapped in heart-printed paper and tied with an obnoxiously large, shiny red bow.

“I thought we agreed we weren't going to give each other anything? With saving for the baby and all that.”

Despite their recent lack of sex and her general lack of fertility, Ronnie had made an appointment with her doctor and gone back on the pill earlier that week. They expressed vague concern over her precarious health but she insisted.

“Weren't you and Aaron planning—” her doctor asked.

“Things change,” she said and her doctor, of course, didn't persist.

The last thing she wanted was to get pregnant and then have to figure out whether it was Aaron's or Charlie's.

She kept the pills in a cigar box at the bottom of a ten-gallon plastic Rubbermaid container full of moth-eaten clothes in her closet so Aaron would never find them. She refused to admit to herself that Charlie was the reason for that. All she knew was the moment she had drunk that shot of peach schnapps, any interest in reproducing had left her completely.

“Yeah, but this is kind of for the baby,” he said, beaming.

The baby. The baby. The baby. Sometimes Charlie called her baby. After she came on his desk he had stroked her forehead, called her “good girl” over and over while she panted and squirmed.

Ronnie ripped at the paper to find, much to her horror, a black velvet ring box. Aaron suddenly descended from his seat at their tiny kitchen table to one knee on the linoleum floor. She resisted a sudden urge to vomit, swallowing hard, and clicked the box open to reveal a small diamond ring.

To cope, she made a joke. “I don't think a baby will be able to wear this, Aaron.”

“No, silly. I mean that the baby gets married parents. A baby needs married parents, don't you think? And stop making jokes.”

“No, actually, I don't think that a baby needs married parents.” Ronnie was surprised it came out. Aaron's face sank.

“Aaron, I'm sorry, I didn't mean—I just thought we decided—”

Ronnie had always been convinced that a marriage, or any commitment, that was a reaction to illness, tragedy, threat, or strife was always suspect.

“Please don't speak, Ronnie. Let me do this.” His tone was slightly harsh despite his smiling.

Her only thought was that Aaron was proposing because he knew Ronnie was having an affair. That was the only explanation. He had never been interested in marriage before, so he must have somehow discovered that she had gone to Charlie's office in the middle of the afternoon and removed her pink cotton underwear on his desk, that she had let Charlie touch her until she came, that Charlie had firmly clasped his hand over her mouth while she had done so to prevent any of the professors or students in nearby offices from hearing.

He must have proposed because he knew that she had loved it, that the guilt she had read about and been told about that came over people after they had cheated never came over her. That she had not regretted it and would likely do it again, and again, and again, if only because having a secret of that magnitude made her feel like she had an identity severed from the life she shared with him. A life that, if she was honest with herself, she could never get comfortable in.

Of course Aaron did not know what she was really doing with her afternoons and evenings, but he had felt her distance, the way she occasionally flinched when he touched her, ever so slightly, and had opted to solve it by giving her what he assumed every woman would want.

“You've just seemed off lately, with our not being able to have a baby and all. But, honey, I'm sure it'll happen for us. I promise it'll happen for us.”

Aaron removed the ring from the box and took Ronnie by her left hand. She resisted the urge to pull away. She stared at a space on his forehead simply because it was much too difficult to look him in the eye.

“Veronica Suzanne Kline, will you be my wife?”

She said yes because it was the quickest way to get him to stand up.