The Infinite Tides (27 page)

My wife Jennifer? Really?

Around him, faint curls of steam extended upward from every visible surface: the closely shorn lawns, the asphalt and concrete, the streetlamp post at the end of the cul-de-sac. In the near distance, past the houses, the visible horizon was ringed with a faint blaze of dark green trees and the rooflines of an older and more distant subdivision, all of which had been cast flat and shadowless by the slantlight of early morning.

He knew that the information about Jennifer should not have surprised him but it had nonetheless. He was having an affair with a married woman. Someone with a daughter no less. The irony was not lost on him. How could it be? Nor was the sense that he had been, and continued to be, a fool, although how the vector upon which he had always envisioned himself had become so entangled remained impossible for him to understand.

Sally Erler called soon after he returned to the cool interior of the house to tell him that she had lined up a potential buyer for the late morning. He nodded, although she obviously could not see him, and repeated “That’s fine, that’s fine,” not even hearing her now, not even really understanding that the call had ended, instead thinking of the last time he had shared Jennifer’s bed—a bed she shared with her husband, as it turned out—and the abruptness with which he had been asked to leave. She was married. He was not. He tried to make this into a kind of justification but he could trace no such argument.

On the counter before him rested the paperwork the process server had delivered to him the previous day. A quick knock on the door just after noon and he had been handed a few sheets of paper and had signed his name in receipt and the man told him to have a good day
and was gone. The paperwork that facilitated his divorce. It had been as simple as that. A voice-mail message and a few sheets of paper that denoted the end. Now he did not know who she was to him. His wife? Hoffmann had called her his ex-wife, although that still did not feel true. Someone between states of being, in some interstitial zone. Perhaps that.

He ate his breakfast cereal and when he was finished he pulled the sheet of plastic clear of the sink, tearing it free of its blue-taped edges, and wadded it up and then stood looking at the gap it had made. Then he reached up and began pulling the plastic from the nearest cabinets in a kind of frustration, throwing each scrap into the living room where the sofa’s footprints were still apparent on the carpet. When the cabinets were clear he removed the plastic from the kitchen island and then knelt and peeled back the masking tape that ringed the linoleum and the various strips that still clung to wall, window, and cabinet edge, moving without any clear thought or purpose other than his own anger and frustration.

The stepladder had been folded against the far wall of the living room and he retrieved it to pull the loose strips of masking tape from the tops of the cabinetry and the edge of the ceiling, wadding it into a series of sticky balls and tossing them in the general direction of the increasingly large pile of refuse. How carefully he had placed each line of tape, following the bound coordinates of clear precise points he had charted to keep his mind occupied with something tangible. How futile that project seemed to him now. He had not even completed the job. There was a single coat of paint here and if he looked carefully he could see the blotchy yellow of the original color where it soaked through the eggshell like fresh yolk but he just did not care now, nor could he imagine caring in the future.

It took him an hour to remove all the tape and plastic sheeting and when he was finished the loose pile of trash in the living room seemed much larger than was possible, given the compact stack of supplies it had been generated from. He thought for a moment that he might
simply leave it there, a strange replacement for the sofa he and Peter had moved out to the field, but the thought was just as soon gone and he scooped up an armload of plastic and tape and walked to the door, opening it awkwardly and then stepping outside into the sunlight, his eyes clamping shut against the blazing light of the morning and the sudden onslaught of heat.

By the time he was in the shower the whining sound had come again and this time it was more present than it had been in all the weeks he had spent in the cul-de-sac, a long and endless and shrill sine wave moving toward him from some distant place. He had hoped that the migraines were gone altogether, that he had been miraculously cured of whatever medical mystery had beset him, and yet here again was the sound of his mind in its tinny unraveling. He would take another pill, thinking—praying even—that if he took one quickly enough it might be sufficient to stop what already felt like an inevitability, the whine, the sine wave, already bearing down on him from some initial point he was ever unable to locate.

The shower had been hot and he turned the water off in a fog of steam that had covered every surface of the bathroom and when her voice came out of that fog—“Hey there, neighbor!”—he turned abruptly enough to bang the shower door closed with a crash.

“Shit,” he said. He grabbed a towel and wrapped it around himself quickly. “What are you doing in here?”

“The door was unlocked,” Jennifer said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

He looked at her. She was once again dressed in her workout clothes: skintight purple this time. Black shorts over tan thighs. “What’s going on?” he said.

“What’s going on?” she repeated.

He was silent, staring at her. “You’re in my bedroom,” he said at last.

“You’re right.”

“Is there a reason?”

“Not really. Just thought I’d come by to say hello.”

“OK,” he said.

“I saw you talking to Walt,” she said.

“Yeah, Walt,” he said. “You might have mentioned him.”

“I might have mentioned Walt?”

“Yeah, it would have been good to know.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t know you were married.”

She laughed. “Oh don’t be so dramatic. It’s not like you’re divorced.”

“You knew exactly what was happening,” he said. “And you lied to me.”

“I did not,” she said. Her hands were on her hips.

“You did, Jennifer. It’s not right,” he said. He realized just how absurd he probably looked, standing there in the steaming bathroom, gesturing with one hand while his other gripped the hem of the towel he had wrapped around his waist.

“You didn’t seem to mind,” she said.

“That’s not the point,” he said.

“Really? I thought that was exactly the point.”

“I’m going to get dressed now.”

“Don’t let me stop you, Astronaut,” she said.

He shook his head and as he did so a lump of pain rolled back and forth, sloshing against the sides of his skull. What was he doing? What was happening? Who was this woman and why did he know her at all?

“Look, I’m sorry you found out about Walt so … abruptly,” she said. “But, hey, it’s fun, right? It’s not like we have something serious.”

“It seems more serious now,” he said. He opened the chest of drawers and pulled out a T-shirt and underwear and then pulled the underwear on under his towel.

If Jennifer had some response to his statement she did not
acknowledge it. Instead she looked around the room and clicked her tongue against her teeth. “She really did clean you out,” she said. “The furniture, I mean.”

“That’s not what we’re talking about.” He let the towel drop and pulled the T-shirt on over his head.

“I don’t know why you’re so mad,” she said. “It’s just for fun, you know?”

“I’m not mad. But you’re acting like this isn’t something important and you’re wrong. It is important. My wife had an affair. I know what that feels like.”

“So do I,” Jennifer said.

He was quiet for a moment, standing there in his T-shirt and underwear, staring at her. Then he said, “I don’t understand why you’d want to do that to someone else, then.”

“Yeah? How do you think I know what that feels like?”

He did not respond.

“And guess who he was having an affair with?”

“I have no idea,” he said.

“Your fucking wife.”

He looked at her, frozen now, his slack-jawed disbelief replaced by belief and then disbelief and belief again and then finally an exhaling of breath as if the wind had been knocked out of him and the same question that seemed to ride with him always in the empty house in the cul-de-sac under the pressure of a gravity that would not release him: Why? Why marry someone if this was what it would be? Walter Jensen. And right across the street. He wondered if Quinn had known about it. The thought made him feel sick, the whining buzzsaw of his impending migraine rising all at once. He needed to get to his medication. He needed to get to it without delay.

“Christ,” he said. Just that one word. He did not move.

“Yeah,” she said. “And then she moves out and a couple of weeks later he’s out on business for a month? Am I stupid? Does he think I’m an idiot? I know what’s going on. He’s off with that whore in Atlanta.
He’s not even good at hiding it either. He’ll just pay for hotel rooms and dinners on the same credit card bill that comes right to the house. Get a post office box at least.” Her eyes glassy with tears, her voice a thin monotone that rose in volume and intensity at random moments, as if she was very nearly unable to keep control at all.

There was silence in the room. He wondered if he should step into the closet and get a shirt and his jeans and then thought better of it. He wanted to pull the blinds and get into bed and hide. His mind and its thin wire of buzzing, the painkillers doing nothing to stop the onslaught now, the tide of his pain lapping up the beach. What time was it? Wasn’t there something happening today? “I don’t know what to say, Jennifer,” he said at last. “I’m sorry that happened.”

“No shit,” she said. “Walt never did anything like that. He’s not that kind of guy. He wouldn’t do that unless she just shook it in his face, you know?”

“OK,” he said.

“OK? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s not supposed to mean anything,” he said and when she said nothing in response he said, “I’m getting a shirt.”

He stepped backwards into the closet and pulled a short-sleeved button shirt from the rack and a pair of khaki pants and then stepped back into the room and put on the shirt and then stood buttoning it slowly, the pants draped over his arm. He looked at her, this beautiful woman whose husband had betrayed her. Indeed, they were more similar than he thought, not Jennifer and Barb but Jennifer and him.

“Look at me,” she said abruptly. “I’m actually tearing up over that asshole.” She closed the gap between them and embraced him and set her head lightly on his chest and was quiet. He put his arms around her, just as lightly, out of a fundamental instinct that was humanity itself.

“It’s OK,” he said.

She did not speak for a long time. Then she lifted her head from his chest.

“It’s fun, you and me, isn’t it?” she said.

It was an odd question but he answered it: “Yes.”

“We can keep it going,” she said. She kissed his neck. “Not at my house but maybe we can find a nice place to go to. A nice hotel or something.” She slid her hands up his shirt so that her warm palms moved lightly against his stomach. “Maybe not even in this town but somewhere else. We can go away for weekends sometimes.”

“I don’t think I’m up for that, Jennifer.”

“Really? Feels like you’re up for it,” she said.

“It’s complicated,” he said.

“Complicated?” she said. “How complicated is it, really? I like you. You like me. We get together. We have some fun. Then we go home. That doesn’t sound very complicated.” As she said this she dropped to her knees. In one fluid motion she pulled down his underwear and took him into her mouth. It was so fast that he barely had time to mutter a faint, weak, “Wait,” an utterance that was more abstract sound than word. He wanted to say, “I have a headache,” but the sentence sounded so absurd that he managed to hold his tongue and besides, with her own tongue on him all possible sentences faded quickly from his mind.

She paused only for a moment, to look up at him from where she knelt and to say: “Does it still seem that complicated?” Then she was at it again.

Keith closed his eyes. He knew that he should be telling her to stop but his mind was already blank and empty of anything—even his pain—and he looked down at her, the top of her head, her lips where they covered him, where they pulled him into and out of her mouth. Then he closed his eyes again. His migraine was a dull rumble somewhere far away.

And it was exactly at this moment that Sally Erler entered the room, the young couple to which she was showing the house just behind her. Keith heard her voice just a moment before she appeared in the doorway, heard it as part of the sharp and distant buzzing of his
oncoming migraine, as an annoyance. She was saying something about “potential” as she turned into the opening and Keith looked over at her, without speed, without concern, and she took three clear steps into the room before she stopped and at last understood that there were already people in the room and what they were doing.

Then she screamed.

“Let’s not talk about what happened,” Sally Erler said over the phone. “Let’s just say I happened in on something. In the real estate business you hear stories about things like that. I’ve never … it’s never happened to me before … but let’s just say I happened in on something and we’ll leave it at that.”

“OK,” he said. “Let’s leave it at that.”

“I just don’t know what happened. I wasn’t early was I? Was I early? Maybe I was early.”

“I don’t know,” Keith said. “Does it matter?”

“No, I guess not,” she said. “Maybe it does. I don’t know. No, I guess not.”

It was later in the day now, cresting toward evening. He had not been surprised when his mobile phone rang and it was Sally Erler on the line. He assumed that she was calling to remove her name from the house but she had been talking for some time and no such stoppage of services had occurred; instead, a constant affirmation that she
would not talk about what she had stumbled in on and then talking incessantly around the occurrence despite her various statements to the contrary.