Digging Out (38 page)

Knowing now that Gabriella was already ensconced in Marc’s life, I have to wonder about that trip and then, of course, every trip after that. But I stop myself from going any further. No matter what the story might have been, Marco and I were still together. What we experienced in Nice was ours—mine now. I buy the map, perhaps
meaning to fortify myself with something of Marc’s presence in the face of his lover.

A turbaned man in white trousers and a long white silk shirt bows me through the door. Gabriella is seated in the restaurant’s brightly lighted foyer, waiting for me. She is more beautiful than I remember. She is wearing a black suit, the jacket open, and a tight white lace blouse that shows off her figure. Her long burgundy-black hair is pulled up in a chignon. She wears a double strand of pearls and her lips are clenched, like the opening bloom of a red tulip. She is definitely a stereotype of Latin beauty.

“Hello, Gabriella,” I say, as casually as if I’d met her just days before. In her presence I have an almost physical memory of all those years I didn’t
consciously
know anything was going on, when Marc was half there with me, behaving as if he were tired, overworked, unavailable. Nine years of her in my life without actually knowing it. In a weird sort of way, we are sisters.

“Hello, Alys.” She stands up, stretching her long, elegantly fingered hand toward me. I see a diamond ring on her wedding finger and wonder if Marc gave it to her. Years ago, when Marc asked me if I’d wanted a diamond, I’d laughed and said, “Me, diamonds? I don’t think so.”

Gabriella’s eyes are black, her long lashes made thicker by the heavy black mascara she wears. She leans toward me, her hand firmly around mine, her smile crinkling her eyes a bit near the temples, making her beauty a little less forbidding. “Thank you for suggesting this,” she says.

I wonder at our differences—her low, resonating voice and flamboyant presence, while I am small, almost mouselike next to her, dressed in my short black skirt, tweed jacket and cowboy boots.

The maitre d’ leads us downstairs to a corner table.

We immediately order drinks: for me, a glass of cabernet sauvignon, and for Gabriella, merlot. She raises her glass and I raise mine. Exactly what are we drinking to? I wonder.

After several moments she says, “Well, Alys …” Her Portuguese-accented English is beautiful. I sip on my wine and nod, still not speaking.

She glances down into her glass when the turbaned waiter appears again, giving each of us a menu.

Gabriella’s threat has stared me in the face since I left Wales. I have decided to tell Dafydd about her, so if she should call again, he will know why. But I haven’t yet.

The way I come to their story now is different from when I first found out. There’s something that makes me believe their situation was, as Gabriella herself told me, “not meant to hurt me.” Perhaps it was as simple as Marc needing more than I was able to give him, and then Gabriella presenting herself. She was everything I wasn’t; she filled in with all the emotion and flamboyance I didn’t have. Marc fell in love with her, but maybe not out of love with me.

“How are you, Gabriella?” I ask, noting that it’s not just a polite inquiry. I am really curious.

She looks at me, waiting perhaps for my animosity to rise, but I say nothing else.

“I am still struggling but”—she shrugs, shaking her head—“I’m a little stronger.”

I nod. “So am I.”

“Please, Alys, it was not what you must think. I want to tell you.”

“I don’t need to hear.”

“But I need to tell. Please.”

I don’t know if I am strong enough for the details. But I let her tell me.

“In the beginning, our relationship was as casual as you can imagine. Neither of us took it seriously. After all, we were both married,” she said. “It was … how do you say it? A moment, a fling. And then, when Marc made another trip to Rio, and still another, I gave him my ultimatum. I wanted him to choose.”

She continues. “He wouldn’t hear of it. He all but laughed at me. I was furious he wouldn’t divorce you. Furious. By then I’d fallen deeply in love with him and I wanted to be with him morning, noon and night. He’d already told me, warned me in fact, that he would never leave you, how you’d suffered enough in your life and he would never be the cause of further suffering for you.

“After we’d been involved for some time, it became obvious to me it wasn’t only because he didn’t want to hurt you, but much more complicated. He was an honorable man, a loyal man, yes. But he admitted to me he couldn’t leave you because he loved you. And then there were Hannah and Dafydd to think about.” She raises her hands
as if to say,
That was it.
“And so it was I had to learn to make do. He made it crystal-clear that if I wanted any of him, I had to learn to live alongside you.”

I swallow, holding myself together, hearing much as I had imagined it.

“I had no choice. It was that or nothing.” She smiles halfheartedly. “I will tell you, though, he always felt he loved you much more than you loved him. He once said he didn’t think you were able to love too deeply because of all you’d been through as a child. Whatever the reasons, I’m sure what I got from him was not nearly what you had of him.”

I know what she says is true.

“I don’t know how you imagined us,” Gabriella says. “But I can assure you it was not at all what I wanted, particularly in the beginning. I mean, the beginning after I fell in love with him.

“At first I would have done anything to have him to myself. Anything. And then things changed for me. The more I concentrated on Isabel and was with Marc when he was with us, the less you and your family disrupted my life. Of course, if I allowed myself, I could get wildly jealous and then not speak to Marc for days at a time,” she adds. I lift an eyebrow and she answers the unspoken question. “We spoke to each other a few times a week—mostly just to say, ‘Hello. How are you.’ “

“What about
your
marriage?” I ask.

“Oh, that.” She rolls her eyes. “Yes, I was married to Carlos Romeros. If you could call it a marriage.”

Carlos had been at the dinner party Marc and I had thrown years ago for all of his Brazilian “network.” He was movie star handsome, with dark hair and wild black eyes. His voice was smooth, like twenty-five-year-old Scotch, maybe even smoother, a born crooner. He was one of the most popular singers in Brazil.

“I was so unhappy. Carlos did not know the meaning of the word ‘faithful.’ During our marriage he had dozens of affairs, many of them with my friends—my so-called friends. It seemed every time I looked around he was involving himself with someone else. There was nothing between us anymore, not even our careers.

“Then Marc called and asked Carlos to recommend a woman singer for the title song for a film he was doing. Carlos recommended me,” she said, laughing bitterly. “Always so generous, my Carlos.

“It took us several days to do the recording. And during that time, we got involved. I pursued him. He was a treat for me. Then he became everything. And you must remember I am a Catholic, but I was so sure I could convince him to leave you, I filed for divorce. My mother did not speak to me for a long time. Later, when Carlos and I were finished, Marc still wouldn’t consider leaving you.

“Somewhere in between his first visit to Rio and the others over that next year, I got pregnant. When I found out, I didn’t tell him because you had just had Hannah and I was afraid he’d make me do away with mine, or that he would abandon me all together. I was six months pregnant before I confessed. He was furious.

“But”—she pauses, and waves her hand in that way to show how things always work out—“as time passed and after he saw Isabel, he relented a bit and he got used to the idea. What he never got used to was being away from you and Hannah. You were his ‘life partner,’ he called you. Even now, with Marc gone for a year, and having just said what I said about being able to put you out of my thoughts, I can feel the jealousy.”

With Gabriella’s telling, I begin to understand the mess Marc had gotten himself into. She is like a tropical storm. She whips you up, takes you in and beguiles you with her warmth and charm, her soft beauty. She seems to have no hard edges anywhere—in every way, a complete contrast to me.

The waiter appears again. I am not hungry in the least, and I say so. Gabriella orders Tandori chicken, curried vegetables, dal, potatoes and raita.

“You’ll have some of mine,” she says. “You must. My goodness, you’re so little. You American women are always so concerned about your weight, no? Why do you all want to be so skinny? No breasts!”

I actually laugh.

“You know, as it is, I have been quiet about Marc. There are few people who know that Isabel is Marc’s daughter. He wanted it that way. Now that he has gone, we seem to have lost many of the people who used to come around. I am feeling very alone. And so is Isabel. For her to know that she has a half sister would make things easier, I think. And perhaps even for Dafydd and Hannah. It would be another one for each of them to talk to about Marc.”

I stare at her, and as the anger rises again, I don’t try to hide it, letting it live fully out in the open between us, for just a moment.

“I guess you don’t agree.”

I don’t answer.

“Isabel feels so alone, and sometimes she is so angry with me. I must admit I’ve had a hard time working. Mr. Meyers made it clear that Marc had not taken care of either Isabel or me in his will. But perhaps since some time has passed, I might appeal to you again.” She looks straight at me and then quickly away.

“Isabel is quite good on the piano. She also sings. Where she goes now is a preparatory school for musically talented students. But it is very expensive.”

I think about the small private school that Hannah attends.

“Do you want to see a photograph of Isabel?”

It seems like we are raising the dead. But part of me feels butterflies in my stomach, some strange form of excitement.

When Gabriella holds out the photo, I gasp. Isabel has bright eyes and a soft jawline; her smile is so familiar.

“She’s like him, isn’t she?” Gabriella exclaims as if that is the real prize she holds, her daughter’s likeness to Marc.

I can feel my eyes fill.

“She looks like your Hannah, too, doesn’t she?”

I continue to stare at the photo. Yes, she looks like Hannah, but she also looks like Marc’s sister’s and brother’s children. She is a real Kessler.

“Her birthday is two days before Christmas.”

“So I am wondering again if there might be some way you can help?”

I think about my last conversation with Ed. How he had outlined my own expenses. “If you’re careful, you’ll be all right,” he’d told me. “Your stocks are doing well and we’re managing to put some money aside each month for a college fund.”

“I hope to be working again soon. But, well, you must know how that is. It is quite difficult. I try to be available to Isabel and I don’t like to leave her with the help.”

I imagine her staff. Marc had once said we’d have a magnificent life if we lived in Brazil. Does she have a cook? I would like to have a full-time cleaner, an occasional baby-sitter, but I’ve never wanted a cook. How could I get through my life without cooking?

“You will think about it?”

I glance at the photo of Isabel still on the table. We are very different, Gabriella and I, but we are in the same mess. Marc hadn’t meant for me to find out. Marc hadn’t meant for any of this to happen. But it has. And here we are.

“Yes, I’ll think about it,” I say quietly. I look at her hand, the diamond. If it was mine and I was in her position, I’d sell it. But I am not Gabriella.

“Thank you,” she says.

I wait for a moment. I wait for her to say something more. Anything. But she says nothing.

As I drive home, I wonder at how Gabriella didn’t ask me a single question about my life. It is as if my life, my grief, doesn’t exist. Marc’s death only affects her.

Sometime during the first week in November, I awaken in the middle of the night in a panic.

I turn on the light and try to figure out when I can go back to
Aberfan for another visit. Sooner rather than later, for it is suddenly clear to me that while I am busy looking for myself “out there,” putting my life in order, I might in fact miss Evan again. I glance at the clock; here it is four in the morning, twelve in the afternoon in Wales. Evan will be at school, and he has no answering machine.

I get up and put on a flannel shirt. It has been raining for several days. In November the house is cold. I walk through it, past the tall windows looking out on the canyon, past the Chinese wardrobe in the dining room, where Marc’s ashes have been stored for over a year. In the living room, I turn on the outside lights and slide open the double glass doors, looking down into the vast space below where the coyotes are yelping. A low fog is hanging over the canyon cliffs. I am a little older now than Mam was at the time of the disaster. I want to move into the muscle of my life. I have more than enough proof of how short a life can be.

Back in the house, I call Dafydd. It is after seven a.m. in New York.