SUSPICIONS

The reason Julia didn’t hire a private detective, apart from expense, was that she liked not really knowing what she was all but sure she already knew. Of course, there were also other reasons; principal among them was that she was not that kind of person. Or at least she didn’t want anyone who knew her to suppose she was. But the main reason, the reason among reasons, was that she hadn’t yet made up her mind as to what to do with what intuition told her were the hard facts she would one day have to face. And as long as it was merely a supposition, no matter how compelling a supposition, she was not obliged to do anything that would upset her becalmed marriage of twenty-two years. There was also the odd chance—the very odd chance—that she had misread the evidence littered in her path and that Henry, her psychology professor husband, was not using his ostensible Thursday night at the gym as cover for a relationship with another woman.

The above is what she told her closest confidant, Marcia A., needing to talk to someone other than herself, but that was before she had begun to suspect that Marcia was the one (or might well have been) her husband was seeing on the sly. The thing with suspicions is that, once you give way to them, they tend to occupy you like an infectious rash. “That’s your guilt talking, honey,” Marcia had said to her. “You can’t put too much stock in anything your guilt tells you. You know that as well as I do.”

“And what do I have to be guilty about?”

“What does anyone have to be guilty about,” she said. “I only know what you told me.”

WHAT JULIA TOLD MARCIA AFTER MARCIA SAID I HAVEN’T SEEN YOU LOOK THIS HAPPY IN I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG

It’s hard to talk about this because I don’t understand it myself. I ran into someone at the AWP conference in Boulder, someone I once knew and hadn’t seen in ages. Look, this is not to be repeated to anyone. To no one. Okay? You know, or maybe you don’t, that I did a poetry writing MFA at Stanford in the seventies. I suppose everyone that goes into publishing saw herself in college as some kind of poet or story writer. Anyway, it was in my last quarter at Stanford that I got involved with one of my teachers. He was my instructor in a course in the metaphysical poets and was, not the least of his attractions, a poet himself. We got on very well, maybe too well, considering that he was married. I don’t even remember how it started, but almost every afternoon we used to meet at my apartment and read poems to each other, mostly other people’s, sometimes our own. We also made love, but I really think it was the reading of the poems back and forth that was our most indelible connection. I loved the way he read. He had unusual phrasing and he had this melodious voice. He was also very smart without being pretentious about it. I remember being impressed that he refused to call himself a poet even though he was publishing his work in prestigious places. He merely said that he wrote poems. I liked that about him. At the end of the spring quarter—this was something like thirty-one years ago, so my memory is vague on particulars—we separated while still being emotionally attached. I went to Paris, which had been an arranged thing long before we got together, and he took a job somewhere in the east, at Tufts I think it was, and that was it. We never saw each other again. That is, we never saw each other again until a week ago in Boulder, Colorado.

I never got to his reading, which I had checked off in the program listings as something I planned to attend—missed it accidentally on purpose, I suppose, by remembering the date wrong. I thought with a mix of regret and relief that I had avoided him, but he showed up at my event and came forward after my talk to present himself. He seemed greatly altered, not like an older self but like someone else altogether. I didn’t recognize him when he came up to say hello, though I had the sense that I knew this man from somewhere. I was trying and failing to figure out from where so I missed much of what he was saying. He had affected a kind of scruffy style that I tend to find obnoxious, three days of beard, abbreviated ponytail—I think they call it a rattail—the bags under his eyes an advertisement for the romance of sleeplessness. And he was thicker, slightly stooped, with a modest paunch that said he had more important things to do with his time than keep fit—the phrase that came to mind was pregnant with self-importance—so that he looked every bit his age and then some. It was when he asked me, something in the voice, if I would have a cup of coffee with him that I realized who he was. Of course I already knew he was at the conference, but the image I had of him in my head was the long-lost, mostly forgotten version of him that in another lifetime I imagined I loved. It’s possible that I had even seen a picture somewhere. On the back of his first book, possibly. I don’t remember saying yes to his invitation, but as he had assumed my acceptance I saw no reason to disappoint. Thirty-one years had passed without a word between us. It was time to catch up, and surely there was a lot to catch up on.

So there we were, sitting across from each other in the Boulder cafeteria, making small talk with a kind of unearned ease that unsettled me. This time I was the married one and he wasn’t, though he had three failed marriages to put on the table for my consideration. I was relieved at how painless it all seemed, and then he announced, forty-five minutes or so into our conversation, that he tended to think of me as “the great love of his life.”

“No,” I said, not because I didn’t believe he meant it, but because I had once fantasized this very conversation and had, at some cost, willfully outgrown it.

And if his first confession wasn’t offensive enough, he added, “For long periods I don’t think of you at all, but when I do, it’s always with regret at having lost you.”

I got out of my seat in a hurry and stormed off. He caught up with me in the hallway outside of the cafeteria and apologized. I can’t say why, but I put my arms around him then and we stood there— people walked around us to get by—holding onto each other. “No,” I said again, this time in a whisper, though I continued holding on. “I hate your rattail,” I told him, “and why the hell don’t you shave like everyone else.”

“Let’s go sit in my car,” he said, and I made an uncharacteristic noise that was meant as a laugh though failed its intention.

Instead of going to his car, which was a half-mile walk as it turned out, I went with him to his hotel room. It wasn’t what you think. He was gentlemanly to a fault. We didn’t touch in the hotel room but sat notably apart reminiscing—our memories often at odds—on what went on between us at Stanford. I made the mistake of confessing that I would have cancelled the Paris trip had he asked me to. “I thought of it,” he said, “but I couldn’t. I think you understand.”

“I didn’t understand any of it,” I said. And I still don’t.

I returned to my hotel room that night to sleep and didn’t, replaying our various conversations in my head, past and present. It was only after I resolved not to see him again that I fell asleep. Somehow we had breakfast together—I may have phoned him—and we spent almost all our uncommitted time in each other’s company for the next two days, but that’s as far as it went.

My flight was earlier and he waited with me at my gate and then gave me his card, which had his e-mail address. I gave him my e-mail on the back of a cocktail napkin. His parting words, which of course I remember, were: “Is it possible, Julia, that we’re making the same mistake all over again?”

“Maybe it wasn’t a mistake the first time,” I said.

“Really I have nothing to feel guilty about. I almost wish I had. Nothing happened. I told you nothing happened. Why would I lie?”

“Obviously something happened,” Marcia said. “Sex isn’t the only currency between lovers. You know that.”

“All right, nostalgia happened, but why should feelings of guilt come into play? I did nothing wrong. And I still don’t think my suspicions about Henry have anything to do with my brief encounter with this man.”

“You can’t even say his name, for God’s sake. Is it a name I would recognize?”

“I don’t think so, though it’s possible. He’s published a book of stories and three or four volumes of poems, though nothing in the last eight years.”

“Do you appear in any of his work?”

“No…I don’t really know. I’ve read very little of his work.”

“You weren’t curious?”

“Look, I don’t know. I just didn’t think about it.”

“And why do I find that hard to believe? Do you want to know why I think you avoided reading him?”

He was coming to New York to see his daughter and he asked her if he could meet up with her while he was in town. She didn’t see why not, or rather she did see why not but decided finally that it was better to see him than to avoid him. By denying him she had been holding onto him, or at least that’s what Marcia seemed to think. So it followed that by not denying him, by spending time with him, she could get rid of whatever tenuous ties continued to bind them. Her goal, as she saw it, was to exorcise his ghost and perhaps at the same time, with any luck, keep him as a friend.

When she saw him waiting for her at Sixty-Fourth and Fifth, looking off in the opposite direction (she had been uncharacteristically late), she was thinking of how she would describe her first impression of him on approaching. The man waiting for me was not the one I was expecting to meet, she would say to Marcia. He was an imposter, someone who had stolen my former friend’s identity. I had seen him as this older self in Boulder, but I nevertheless expected to see a considerably younger man waiting for me. Then he turned around. He turned around before I actually reached him and looked at me as if my being there surprised him. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I didn’t expect you,” he said.

“I said I would meet you,” I said. “Who were you waiting for if not me?”

“Should we walk along,” he said, “or would you rather sit on a bench?”

Always decisions to be made. “I don’t care,” I said. “We can walk if that’s what you want.”

Though he seemed frail, he took long strides and I had to struggle to keep up. The wind swallowed whatever we tried to say to each other, which wasn’t much. Anyway, it was hard to talk while walking as quickly as we were. At some point, a somewhat younger woman, coming the other way, called to him. I thought it must be his daughter but it turned out to be a former wife, which was not an altogether pleasant surprise. They talked a few minutes as if I were invisible and then she went on and we continued, though I found myself unreasonably angry at him.

“I’m through walking,” I said.

“Do you want to sit down somewhere?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said. “That line you gave me about being the great love of your life. I don’t think so.”

“I wasn’t lying,” he said. “If it offended you, I take it back.”

His taking it back of course made things worse and I said some things that may have overstated what I actually felt. I gave him this tongue-lashing, called him a gigolo, accused him of issuing false compliments as a form of control, said he was the worst kind of woman abuser because he kept his hands to himself, and it kept getting worse until he said, “Please shut up.”

Julia felt so bad she ended up apologizing to him, and they made up or at least went through the motions of reconciling before separating. She was sure that after her jealous rant he’d be more than happy never to see her again.

Nevertheless, he sent her an e-mail the day after he returned to Newton, which included the draft of a poem he was working on. At first she thought it was about her—why else would he send it?— which seemed consistent with his presumptuous stance in regard to her. On second reading, she saw that it was not about her at all, which in its own way was even more bothersome. And then she wasn’t sure whether she liked the poem sufficiently to offer an opinion, not wanting to say anything she didn’t feel. So rather than comment on the poem, she thanked him for showing it to her and sent back in exchange one of her own, one of her more recent efforts, something she had completed or stopped fussing with about five months ago.

The next day her poem made a return visit with a few suggested changes in italics under the original lines while making a meal out of how much the sender admired its sensibility. She accepted two of his five suggestions, made a few changes of her own (inspired by his critique), and, against her better judgment, e-mailed him the revised version. She had no idea what to expect, appropriate silence most likely, and was happily surprised to find a message from him the next time she checked. “Julia, it’s terrific,” he wrote, while making one further emendation, “and I hope you’ll forgive me my unsolicited suggestions. It’s what I do and it’s a difficult habit to break.”

Perhaps she was half kidding when she wrote back in apparent dudgeon, “If you’re trying to seduce me with false flattery, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

A day and a night passed before she got an answer to that one. “False flattery was genuine,” it said. “And what gave you the idea I was trying to seduce you?”

“I’m glad you like the poem, along with the sensibility,” she wrote back. “Your comments were helpful to me.” She thought it best to let the seduction issue die of its own accord.

A twice-weekly e-mail correspondence followed, a period in which Henry’s presumed transgressions seemed increasingly provocative.

One Thursday, an hour after Henry had left for the gym, she called Marcia, who had gradually emerged as Julia’s prime suspect. Marcia answered, seemed uneasy, said she couldn’t talk at the moment and would call back later, which provided Julia with the evidence she had told herself she wasn’t looking for.

To avoid obsessing about Henry and Marcia, and not wanting to concede any more of her life to the time-killing distraction of TV, she decided to phone the man she had e-mailed a new poem to that very morning.

He picked up on the fourth ring and seemed, this professed devotee, not to recognize her voice. She had identified herself as “me,” assuming (and why wouldn’t she?), given the intimacy of their dialogues, that “It’s me” was sufficient calling card.

He was discreet enough not to ask who “me” might be, hoping, she assumed, he would figure it out along the way. Betrayed on all sides, she resolved to give him no help. Several minutes into the conversation she said, “You don’t know who this is, do you?” But saying that in just the way she said it—she listened to its echo—was a tipoff in itself.

“I’d know you anywhere,” he said

“Right,” she said, laughing without amusement. “You still haven’t called me by my name.”

“I thought the point was, we didn’t use names,” he said. “You never call me by my name.”

It was true that she didn’t. “That’s because you’re an imposter,” she said. The silence on the other end troubled her. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out,” she said, as close to an apology as she could get without humiliating herself.

“I am an imposter,” he said, “but you weren’t supposed to know that.”

“It takes one to know one,” she said.

“Look, I haven’t read your poem yet,” he said. “I was just about to pick it up, really I was, when you called to check up on me.”

“I called because I wanted to hear your voice,” she said. “I don’t mind that you haven’t gotten to my poem, but if you love my work, as you say, I’d think you’d want to read it as soon as it arrived.”

“I wanted to clear my head before looking at it. You might say I’ve been saving it in the way a child saves a favorite food for last.”

“What a sweet thing to say,” she said. “Would you tell me if in fact you didn’t like my poem?”

“Since I tend to like what you do a great deal, there’s virtually no chance of that. I will tell you if I think your poem needs work. Does that satisfy your question?”

“It might,” she said. “We’ll see.”

“Why are you so distrusting?”

“Is that what I am? I might ask in return, why all the extravagant compliments?”

“I’m not aware of what you’re referring to. You seem to think that I’m insincere, which is certainly unflattering to me.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, regretting the apology, which seemed to have made its way on automatic pilot. “I think the problem is that, whatever else is going on between us, we don’t know each other well enough to have the conversations we’ve been having.”

“Of course we do,” he said. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be having them, would we? Where’s your husband?”

“He’ll be back in about thirty minutes. This is his extracurricular night out.”

“His what? What are you telling me?”

“It’s just an idle suspicion. Henry is a good man.”

“I believe he is,” he said. “You wouldn’t have married him if he wasn’t. You wouldn’t have stayed with him this long if he wasn’t a good man.”

“Come on,” she said. “I’m not as perfect as you pretend to think I am. I’ve been known on occasion to make mistakes. Particularly, you might say, where men are concerned, I’ve been wrong once or twice.”

“Sometimes good men also cheat on their wives.”

She heard herself laugh while not being especially amused. “Are you talking about yourself now?”

“I’ll take the fifth on that one,” he said. “It’s hard, I know from personal experience, to carry around unprovable suspicions concerning people you’re close to. I’m sorry.”

“My friend, Marcia, thinks it’s all your fault.”

“My fault? How so?”

“You should know,” she said. “I thought you understood me better than that. Marcia thinks it’s because I feel guilty about meeting you that I’ve taken it into my head that Henry is having a fling.”

“And what do you think?”

“In my worst moments, I believe it’s Marcia that he’s seeing. At other times, at the same time sometimes, I think I’m probably wrong about that.”

“What do you believe at this moment?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know.”

“At this moment, I believe he’s in bed with Marcia even as we speak. I’d like to drop the subject now…. Actually, I hear his key in the door, so I’ll get off. Bye.”

He hung up without a word, or perhaps she had cut him off. She had called to suggest that they meet again, perhaps in the Boston area this time around, but it had never gotten said. And besides, she would have to get an assignment from the magazine to make such a trip possible without having to lie to Henry or, which would be even more difficult, having to tell him the truth.

Marcia called her at work to ask if they could meet for lunch. “The reason I didn’t get back to you last night was that a friend was over. Someone I had met in an elevator of all places.”

“Was it anyone I know?” Julia asked.

“I don’t think so. He’s some kind of lawyer. Actually, he’s quite nice for a lawyer. I’ll tell you about him when I see you.”

Julia listened for subtext, but heard only what she was primed to suspect and perhaps not even that. The earliest they could get together was the following Monday.

The magazine was sending her to the Athenaeum in Hartford to interview the new director and she e-mailed her old friend, mentioning the assignment, offering it as an opportunity to get together. Since their extended phone conversation, she had not received an e-mail in almost two weeks.

Late in the day, when she had all but given up hearing from him, she got her answer. “As much as I’d like to,” he wrote, “I’m going to say no. I’ve spent hours shaping my reasons for you, but I suspect sending them to you would probably be redundant. I believe you understand probably better than I do why I can’t (or won’t) show up in Hartford to see you.”

“You give me more credit than I deserve,” she wrote back. “It would not be redundant to tell me why you won’t come. There’s a lot I don’t understand, your reasons not the least of them.”

A week passed without response, and she went off to the Athenaeum wanting to believe that he would show up unannounced and explain his silence, or apologize, or both. Or something. His almost presence haunted her day and a half in Hartford, and she found herself missing him and furious at him and expecting to run into him at every turn.

On her return, she wrote a draft of a poem about being rejected at a museum while standing in front of a portrait of George Washington.

At lunch with Marcia, whom she had either forgiven or no longer suspected of treachery, she said there seemed a kind of raw justice in his breaking off with her this way since it was she, walking on imaginary glass in Paris, who broke off their correspondence thirty-one years ago.

“And what about your suspicions concerning Henry?” Marcia asked.

“What suspicions?” she said. In any event, they seemed less troubling now. Whatever Henry was into, he was not going to throw her over on the basis of nothing much or whatever and perhaps she had imagined Henry’s sly infidelity because some part of her wanted him to behave badly.

Marcia, on the other hand, was more interested in her own story at the moment.

And then, how many months later, I noticed his name in someone else’s copy of The Village Voice while riding the subway home from work. I wondered if it was a misperception, so I picked up a Voice from a freebie distribution box when I got off the train to check it out. When I thought of him, which was not often, which was not all the time, I worried that his extended silence betokened failing health. Why else would he stop writing?

It took a while to find the item, but Julia had seen what she had seen. He was in fact giving a reading of his poems—he was the featured reader in a group of three—in a small theater in the East Village from a new book recently published. And why hadn’t he mentioned that he had a book coming out? It was possible that he had and she had been too self-involved to take it in. She was eager to hear him read but she was uncomfortable with the idea of him seeing her in the audience, which invited—she was no stranger to the experience—a kind of decisional paralysis. A late-hour choice: she called Marcia and urged her to go to the reading with her.

“Oh,” Marcia said, “I wish I could. I have something else on that I have to go to. I so much wanted to see what he looked like.”

And so the burden was all hers. And, after two other unsuccessful calls, after going back and forth on the question, she decided to go to the reading solo.

She arrived late—a male reader in his early fifties was at the podium—and she stood in the back until the performance was concluded. At first she didn’t look for him and then when she did, when she methodically searched the crowd, she didn’t see him anywhere.

There were six rows of folding chairs, eight to a row with an aisle in the middle. It was a substantial crowd for a downtown poetry reading. All but three seats were taken—two of the unoccupied chairs in the first row, which had always seemed to Julia like putting oneself on display. Nevertheless, in the brief interstice between the first reading and the second, she ducked into one of the empty seats in the first row. The second reader was a younger woman who had recently published her first book. She read with her eyes on the page in a hushed, somewhat embarrassed voice. There was a shout of “louder” from behind Julia and the reader looked up from her text as if she had been slapped.

The procedure, it seemed, was for each of the poets to introduce the succeeding one. Though there was still no sign of him, the second reader, with considerably more aplomb than she delivered her own work, introduced him.

A flash of guilt passed through Julia, as if in imagining the worst (and how different, really, were imaginings from wishes?) she was responsible for whatever version of it had come to pass.

He walked on a cane, though made an effort to appear vigorous, taking exaggerated strides as he approached the podium, entering from some back room where he had no doubt been gathering his strength.

Though he had what she thought of as “hospital pallor,” he looked younger somehow than the last picture of him she had filed away in her memory. He caught her eye and smiled at her or at the woman on her left or at the elderly couple directly behind her.

This is the fantasy she had while she half listened to him read his passionately ironic verse with a worked-up energy that seemed hollow and perhaps even desperate, his musical voice cracking from time to time: She imagined herself taking a sabbatical from work (also from her marriage, which was harder to conceive) and moving to Newton to look after him. If he was dying, which seemed at the very least a possibility, she would stay with him until the end. Otherwise—this second scenario was more difficult to envision—she would care for him until he was on his feet again, however long it took, and then return home or stay with him, whichever seemed at the time the right thing to do. In any event, she sincerely doubted Henry would take her back after her leaving him as she had no matter what she decided.

The last poem he read was about a man waking up in a hospital room after an operation and perceiving himself in some version of the afterlife commensurate with what he deserved. The last part went something like, “The ghost he was rose from his bed and crawled hand upon hand into the greater dark.”

When the reading was over, he got an extended ovation that moved her to the verge of tears. She had to wait in line to get to see him—he was stationed behind a table, signing books, a younger woman she had seen in the audience posted alongside him. She had no idea what their relationship might be. In resisting jealousy, she found its impingement inescapable.

“Julia,” he said to her when she handed over his book for him to sign, “I can’t say how grateful I am that you came.” She exchanged suspicious nods with the younger woman standing to his right. He seemed even more deathly pallid up close. “Oh,” he said after returning the signed book, “this is my daughter, Kate. Kate, this is Julia, who was a student of mine at Stanford over thirty years ago.” A nod was exchanged between them.

“Kate,” she said, taking a step to the side in prelude to walking away, feeling obliged to say something, “your father was absolutely the best teacher I ever had.”

Though she usually resisted such extravagances, she took a cab home without once glancing at the inscription he had written. Henry was waiting up for her, watching a movie on television when she arrived.

“I was at a poetry reading,” she told him, “by a poet who had once been a teacher of mine.”

“I wondered where you had been.”

Julia removed the book she had been carrying in her purse and handed it to her husband, who was a talented reader of poems, for his inspection.