We took the road up the hill, past blackberry bushes and purple lupines with yellow, white, and dark orange butterflies fluttering around them. It was warm but not hot, dead still, and the bushes were full of buzzing insects. I just wanted to concentrate on the feeling of Angelina’s hand in mine and her presence beside me.
It seemed she was feeling the same way. We did need to talk, but we knew that once we began the spell would be broken. We walked up to the cemetery, where there was a wooden bench at the side of the road, with views over the countryside, and sat, still holding hands, holding on to the moment.
“You know that line in Casablanca?” she said.
“‘Play it again, Sam’? He never actually says it—”
“No, ‘We’ll always have Paris.’ It’s really quite a profound statement. About how you look at your life. Whether you live in the moment or whether everything you’ve done, everything you’ve said and heard and felt, is there forever.”
I kissed her, she kissed me back for a little while, and we looked over the fields for a bit longer.
I was not Rick in Casablanca, doing the thinking for both of us. She had done her own thinking. Perhaps I could have steered her in the other direction, but that was hypothetical now. Nevertheless, with a man’s distrust of the unspoken, I wanted to talk it through—not the emotions but the practicalities. I wasn’t sure whether to start with the strengths of her marriage or my limitations as an alternative to Charlie. There was one obvious way that involved both.
I was about to say “Tell me about your kids,” but she must have sensed it and put her finger to my lips.
“No. Not yet. I want to have one day with you when all we talk about is what we used to have and how we feel about each other now. Like there’s nothing else.”
So we did that, through late morning and lunchtime, walking all the way to the next village and back, talking about Shanksy and the warehouse apartment and Christmas dinner at the Browns.
“My mum loved you,” she said.
“Right.”
“She thought you were hilarious, with your jokes about Margaret Thatcher. She was so over Richard, by the end. They went out of their way to help him and he couldn’t even manage a thank-you.”
Arguments about the vagaries of memory notwithstanding, there is only so long two people in their forties can sustain a conversation with reminiscences from a three-month affair of two decades earlier, stopping to kiss and saying variations of I love you. By midafternoon, it was only making the elephant in the room more apparent.
“So, what’s all this about, then?” I asked.
“How do you mean?”
“You and Charlie. This wouldn’t have happened if there wasn’t something wrong already. And I don’t believe it’s about Charlie having a heart problem. You’re not that calculating.”
“You don’t know how calculating I am.”
“You knew that actress was waitressing at the restaurant, didn’t you? The one who got the part ahead of you in L.A.”
She laughed. “You do know. But you’re right. I’m not abandoning Charlie because of his health. I looked after Richard when he didn’t have a job. I took him back because he needed me.”
“So, what’s wrong with you two? Tell me if I’m missing something, but you seem like a pretty happy couple—except when you’re talking about leaving him.”
“When was the last time you slept with another man’s wife, under their roof, with his knowledge? And swapped notes with him over a beer afterwards? Or shared a drink while she stripped?”
“We were consenting adults. I thought we all had quite a nice time.”
She stopped and looked at me, perhaps frustrated with more than my attempt to make light of the situation.
“It’s not the issue. Is that what a happy couple with teenage kids looks like to you? Or do you think there might be some underlying problem?”
She had a point. A year ago, Sheilagh and Chad had got into some experimentation with other couples. Sheilagh had been full of how their lives had been revitalized, but in hindsight it was the beginning of the end. Decadence heralding decline and fall.
“You know I have this sexual fantasy,” she said. “But that’s what it is—a fantasy. It shouldn’t have got to the stage where the only way we think we can rescue our marriage is to do stuff that in the end is going to drive us apart.”
“It’s that bad?”
“It’s been rocky. Since before I Skyped you. I’d decided that this week I was going to make a choice: go on trying to fix it or call it quits. Charlie, too. We’ve been giving it our best shot in our own perverse ways. I wasn’t thinking of you as an alternative, but then you split with Claire, and I thought having you here might help bring things to a head. If I’d had any idea you’d loved me for all that time I wouldn’t have. But…”
“So you used me?” I said, doing my best to sound as if it didn’t matter.
“I didn’t think you’d have a problem with a week of fine wine and sex. Especially as it turned out to be more sex than I’d intended. I thought you’d be on my side, but Charlie’s been working on that. He’s an expert. But, really, I had no idea. You’d never written—you’d never given me any indication.”
“Tell me about Stephanie and Samantha and … Anthony.”
“How do you know their names?”
“Charlie told me. If we’d ended up together I’d have had to know them. I’d have been their stepfather.”
Would have been. I had slipped into past tense, and Angelina nodded slowly. It really was only going to be this one day.
“Did he tell you about Anthony?”
“The Douglas thing? Seemed a bit of an … overreaction.”
“We both overreacted. It was a tough time. His dad was dying and my parents split up. And—” She put her hand up to stop me interrupting. “Did he tell you about Samantha?”
“Is she the older one or the younger?”
“Three months younger. She’s Jacinta’s daughter. Jacinta died when Samantha was two.”
“Oh, shit. I’m so sorry.”
I had stopped in the middle of the road. I wanted to hold Angelina, to comfort her, but the time to do that had long passed. I wanted her to hold me, and could not ask her to. The years had pulled us apart in ways I had not imagined.
Angelina waited while I took it in and then answered my unasked question. “Depression and drugs. Don’t really know which came first.”
“Overdose?”
Angelina shook her head. “Jumped off the Westgate Bridge. How do you make sense of that?”
“Fuck.”
“I mean, you know about us and heights. Me and Dad and Meredith. Jacinta had it too. What was she saying? This is how much pain I’m in: bigger than the biggest fear you can imagine.”
“But too late.”
“Way too late.”
“That’s why your parents split up?”
Angelina nodded. Her mother in a cartoon with the caption You had one job.
“Samantha barely remembers her mother. It’s been a bit of a challenge with two girls so close together. Tough for Stephanie, too.”
I was finally beginning to see beyond the twenty-three-year-old to the person she had become and the journey she had taken to get there. With Charlie. He had supported her through tragedy, adoption, and a new career. He must have seen his children born, driven Angelina home from the hospital with the new babies, got up in the night for them. He had taken on Angelina’s sister’s daughter as well as losing his own. They had twenty years on me. If my life with Claire had been less rich than theirs, it was my own fault.
What could I offer that warranted Angelina walking away? A year or two down the track, she would think that Charlie had done more for her than I would ever do. And she would be right.
There was the other thing.
“How did you feel when your parents split?” I said.
“Pretty devastated. It was a bad time, anyway. Samantha’s dad wanted custody, but he was a complete dropkick. We were lucky we had my dad on our side.”
“And you were how old? When your parents split up?”
She managed a laugh. “Thirty. Thirty-one. I didn’t need my parents to take me to the school play anymore.”
“I was fourteen.”
I knew I was about to wade into deep water, but I needed to say something.
“It could have been a lot earlier. My dad didn’t beat my mother or anything, but he cheated on her. And put her down. She put up with it—I know she had the right to leave and all that, but she didn’t, and I’m eternally grateful to her for the time I got to have with my dad.”
I had never said this to anyone, least of all the person who needed to hear it.
It seemed Angelina needed to hear it, too. Having held herself together as we talked about her troubled marriage, her sister’s death, and our own impossible love, she burst into tears at the story of my mother’s fortitude. It was lucky we had found somewhere private to fall apart.
The day was starting to cool by the time we headed back toward the village.
“This morning was the best sex I’ve ever had in my life,” I said, and she laughed.
“Me too. At forty-five. That’s something, isn’t it?”
We walked in silence for a few minutes.
“I love you so much,” she said.
“I love you more than you can possibly imagine,” I said.
“I doubt it. I have a good reference point. Say it again.”
“I love you, Angelina.”
“I love you, Dooglas. But we’re not going to be together, are we?”
“No. Not in this life.”
Angelina looked away for a few moments. Her eyes were still red from crying.
“It’s probably a good thing. It’s probably a good thing that I married Charlie, regardless of what happens now. I really love my kids, you know.”
“Tell me something great about them,” I said, meaning Tell me about the twenty years you spent as a family.
We detoured and walked for another hour while Angelina talked about her kids: stuff they did as toddlers, school, their friends, Stephanie’s snowboarding achievements, Anthony’s acting lessons, Samantha’s plans to study law.
It hurt. It was unlikely I would ever have children, and there was a hole there. And, with every memory, Angelina was slipping away. A transient and impractical fantasy built on nostalgia, the romance of a torch carried for twenty years, and a drunken bonding over the piano was fading in the light of the day.
In the village, we bought a shoulder of pork and some charcoal for the kettle barbecue.
“Not finished,” I said as we climbed the hill to the house. “Now tell me about Charlie.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You said you were deciding whether to leave him. I’m your sounding board. Start with the good things.”
We had to walk back to the house, where we dropped the shopping, then down a muddy track to the lake and back, to make room for stories of Charlie’s devotion that had surely been recounted around dinner tables countless times. I was not the sort of person who could fill that space. Whatever Angelina said about Charlie’s indulgence, she had become accustomed to it. As Sam Spade might have put it, she was high maintenance, and I wasn’t a maintenance man.
A few days earlier I had wondered if all this giving and taking was compensating for some deficit in their relationship. Or if it was a deficit in itself—some sort of codependence. Apparently it was, but for twenty years it had worked: adoration in exchange for appreciation—or idolization. If the problem was that Charlie had run out of rabbits, I was not going to be able to top him. He had done all he could to make himself unmatchable.
“And the bad things?” I said.
“Don’t worry. I understand what you’ve done. It’d be a horrible waste if I didn’t do my part. There’s nothing I can’t get through. Just me being selfish. No surprise there.”
“You’re going to stay with Charlie,” I said, “give it your best shot?”
“If he’ll have me.”
“He will. I promise.”
Charlie had said it: At the end of the week I want her to stay with me.
“And if he won’t? Will you be there for me?”
“He will.”
Christ. If she wasn’t secure with Charlie’s ring-every-birthday, special-coffee-in-the-morning, let-me-organize-your-ex-lover-to-shag-you level of adoration, how the hell would she have coped with me?
Then, because it struck me that there might be some substance to her fear, given what Charlie had been exposed to this morning and for the past few days, I added, “And you have to promise to do something.”
“Write to you every year?”
“When Charlie gets back, you have to talk to him. Tell him in words of one syllable, because he’s a guy, that you love him. Exclusively. Unconditionally. You expect that of him, right? It cuts both ways.”
She took a long time to answer. We were almost back at the house, and had stopped in the road, facing each other. I had thought this would be unbearably hard for me. Focusing on Angelina had got me through. But I could see that the promise to recommit to Charlie was harder for her than I was expecting it to be. Which made it harder for me to watch.
“Okay.”
“Promise you’ll do it?”
“Promise.”
“It’s going to be okay for you?”
She took a deep breath, looked out across the fields, and exhaled. “It’s going to be great. It’s been great. I’m such a screw-up. Thank you.”
I had the resolution I had come for and perhaps left a relationship for—a confirmation that we loved each other but could never be together. Two of the three components were not news: I had already known at some level that I loved Angelina and had not expected we would be reunited. Angelina loving me in return meant that when I next listened to a sad song I would know that the longing I felt was reciprocated. Did that halve or double the pain?
“Hey,” she said, as we approached the gate. “Do you want to talk about Claire?”
Claire. That would have been the coffee I got in bed every morning, even when I was sleeping in a different room and she was the one working, and the hand across my belly with you’re looking trimmer and stay and finding the piano tuned the morning I left her and the trip to Paris after I’d lost our house and the talk when you’re ready.
“Same sort of stuff,” I said.