I was relieved that the hike was only two days. I had woken to discover that hiking used different muscles from jogging, and the second day was tougher than the first. I had a fuzzy head from drinking, though the rain set that right, and I found myself walking with Mandy again.
“How are things with you and Claire?” she asked.
“Not too bad. Actually, pretty good.”
“That’s the way it looked last night. I must say it’s a relief. I’d got the impression you two were having problems. Claire’s needed a bit of support with all the stress she’s going through at work.”
“We’ve both been pretty flat out. What’s the story with Ray?”
“You noticed. He’s a bit funny, at first, but he’s all right. He lost his wife a couple of years ago. You’ve nothing to fear. As long as you take care of Claire.”
I wanted to press her, confirm that there definitely was nothing to fear from an unattached man who had declared an interest in my attractive partner who was feeling unsupported at home, but we had apparently talked enough about me.
Mandy launched into the divorce story without prompting—a long tirade about the custody dispute. The problem, to my simple way of thinking, seemed to be that they wanted to live in different countries, but the story she told was a litany of complaints about someone I had once counted as my best friend. I interrupted as the muddy track up the hill robbed her of breath.
“You know, as a friend, someone who likes both of you, it’s pretty sad to see it come to this. If you add up all the good things—”
“You’re a T, aren’t you? A Myers-Briggs Thinking type? Am I right?”
We did not spend all the time at those team-building retreats singing around the piano.
“INTP,” I said. I remembered the result of the personality test but not what all the letters stood for.
I for introvert, of course—a surprise for those who confuse a love of performance with a desire for intimacy with strangers.
And there was the tolerance for uncertainty. P for perceiving rather than J for judging. That one had stuck for obvious reasons: “Ps often don’t understand that Js need to get closure, to have a decision: Js would prefer the wrong decision to no decision at all,” the facilitator had said. Was that all it was? Had one different letter determined the course of my life?
“Right,” said Mandy. “T. So you make decisions based on cold, hard facts. You and Claire. I’m an F. Feelings. I make decisions based on values.”
I remembered this one now. “And emotions.” Ha. That didn’t sound so superior.
“Whatever. Randall violated my values.”
I waited.
“We went to a marriage counselor and he asked us to rate our marriage on four dimensions.”
“Sounds like he knew his audience.”
“Sorry?”
“Models. Grids. Speaking your language. A two-by-two matrix, right?”
“No, it wasn’t. If I’d meant a matrix I would have said two orthogonal dimensions. And he uses it with everyone. The four dimensions were Emotional, Practical, Intellectual, and Physical—meaning sexual. And what do you think he rated me as sexually?”
“The therapist?”
“Yes, the therapist. I slept with the therapist so he could score me.”
Ha-ha. Except someone once had sex with me to find out if she was any good.
“No,” said Mandy. “Randall. We had to rate each other.”
“Out of what—a seven-point Likert scale? Somewhat satisfied? Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied?”
“Out of ten. What do you think he said? I suppose you guys talked about that sort of thing while you were doing the barbecue. What did he say to you?”
Women will never believe that men don’t spend a lot of time talking about their partners, and that when they do it’s seldom in a negative way. In all the hours I had spent drinking Coors and marinating ribs with Randall, neither of us had ever asked the other: “What’s the missus like in the sack?” Randall was the only person I had shared the Angelina story with, but I had never mentioned her sexual journey, which had been an important part of it, let alone any of the details.
I knew more about the San Francisco Giants than I did about Mandy’s performance in bed. I was happy for things to stay that way. I made an attempt to convey that sentiment without appearing uncaring. She ignored it.
“I’m not trying to say I’m something special. I’m just normal. I mean, I don’t think most women want to—”
“Too much information. What did he score you?”
“Seven. He gave me a bloody seven.”
“Better than zero. Or six. I’d have thought that was all right. Leaves room for improvement.”
She wasn’t smiling. “You know, on the NPS, a seven isn’t even a recommendation.”
“What’s the NPS?”
“Net Promoter Score. Rating whether customers will recommend you.”
“Right.”
“The point is, there I was trying to look after twins who took turns in staying awake. I didn’t have time for sex, and then he criticizes me for it.”
“I suppose if you’re not having it at all…”
“That’s the bloody point, isn’t it? He was rating me on how I was before it stopped. Explains everything. I felt like asking how he rated her.”
“Her?”
“Her.”
“You’re talking about…”
“There’s only one person I’d be talking about, unless you know about others.”
“From what he told me, it was pretty awful.”
It had certainly been awful after Randall had confessed. If he had been in England, he might have talked to me instead of a therapist about his guilt over a drunken one-night stand. And I might have told him about a recording my dad had of a Lenny Bruce performance from about 1960—a triple album on vinyl. I used to play it from time to time, partly to wind up my mother with the bad language. There was one routine that stayed with me, about a guy in an ambulance who has lost his foot in a multi-fatality road accident, and he’s coming on to the nurse. She can’t understand how he can be interested in sex at a time like this. “I got horny,” he says pathetically.
It was probably a better explanation of what Randall did than anything his therapist came up with. Lenny Bruce laid some further advice on my twelve-year-old self: Never confess. Even if your wife catches you in flagrante, deny everything. That, he implies, is the social contract.
Things have changed since then, and Randall’s therapist helped him reach a point where he could share his story with Mandy, explain that it was impulsive and meaningless and that he was terribly, terribly sorry, so the marriage could continue on a basis of openness and trust. And the rest is history. When it comes to infidelity, every partner becomes a Myers-Briggs F-for-Feelings with their values violated.
“How did you rate him?” I asked.
“How do you think? After what he’d done and then having the hide—the sheer bloody hide—to compare me to her on sexual performance, I rated us emotionally as zero. So everything else was zero, too. If you’ve got no relationship, the rest doesn’t matter.”
Message conveyed, Mandy strode ahead, the rain came down again, and I was left inside my hooded jacket with my thoughts. How would I rate my own life at the moment?
Practical was a nine, only missing a perfect score because of the commute to London. That wasn’t such a bad thing. Best of both worlds. Call it ten. Claire and I had the domestic arrangements down pat. The absence of children might have been a problem in some other dimension, but not here.
Intellectual: the job was keeping me sharp and I had a mind-exercising pastime with the pub quiz. Claire was a smart, rational, and pragmatic partner. The issue of moving overseas was a case in point. She had taken my request for time to think about it at face value, rather than making an argument of it. Couldn’t do much better: another ten.
Sexual: better than it had been for years. Did it matter that some of the stimulation might have been coming from outside? It was fantasy—any sex therapist would acknowledge the role of fantasy in spicing up the routine of a long-term relationship. I might well be doing the same thing for Angelina and Charlie.
Emotional: Claire and I had a connection, but most of it was under Practical. I could not deny that the emotional side had faded with the years and our failure to have a family. Surely that happens to everyone, but for us it had never been easy, because of Claire’s background. I had filled the gap in my own life with music, but doing so involved memories of a past that had come alive again. If the wall between fantasy and reality broke down—if I became romantically involved with the present-day Angelina—I would be in the same position as Randall and Mandy, with all the rest counting for naught.