Lesje is doing something seedy. If someone, one of her friends, Marianne for instance, was doing the same thing and told her about it, she would think: seedy. Or even tacky. Very tacky, to be having an affair with a married man, a married man with two children. Married men with children are proverbially tacky, with their sad stories, their furtive lusts and petty evasions. Tackier still to be doing it in a hotel, of necessity a comparatively tacky hotel, since Nate is, as he says, a little broke. Lesje hasn’t offered to pay the hotel bill herself. Once, long ago, her women’s group might have sneered at this reluctance, but there is a limit.
Lesje doesn’t feel tacky. She isn’t sure whether Nate does or not. He’s sitting in one of the chairs (there are two, both cheap Danish Modern with frayed corners, to match the blue frayed bedspread which is as yet undisturbed), telling her how terrible he feels that they have to be in this hotel instead of somewhere else. The somewhere his tone implies is not another, more acceptable hotel. It’s a summer field, a deserted sun-warmed beach, a wooded knoll with breezes.
Lesje doesn’t mind the hotel, even though the hum from the air conditioner is beginning to get to her. It’s spewing out thick hot air which smells of upholstery and cigar butts, and they haven’t been able to find the switch that turns it off. If this hotel had been a choice, she’d feel differently about it, but it’s a necessity. They can’t go to Lesje’s apartment because of William, who was out when Lesje left but who may reappear at any moment, to find the note Lesje has thoughtfully propped on the card table: Back at 6:00. They can’t go to Nate’s, ever, unless Lesje takes time off work during the week. She works the same hours Elizabeth does, though Elizabeth probably has more flexibility. But today is Saturday and Elizabeth is at home. Not to mention the children. Nate hasn’t mentioned the children, but even so he’s managed to convey to Lesje that although he respects her, admires her and desires her, to his children she represents an evil from which he must protect them.
Hence this afternoon hotel. They’ve come to it by subway, since neither of them owns a car. This fact also rules out necking on side streets, which is what they should be doing at this preliminary stage, in Lesje’s opinion. They have in fact necked on side streets, but it’s been uncomfortable: feet freezing in slush, passing cars splattering them with brown sludge, arms hugging the bolster shapes of each others’ winter coats. But no groping in the front seat.
Lesje considers groping in the front seat almost an essential. The only other affairs she’s had have been with William, champion groper, and before him a geologist in fourth-year university who even then, in 1970, had a crew cut. Neither of these affairs was exactly romantic; both had been based on mutual interests, of a sort. It was hard for Lesje to find men who were as monomaniacal about their subjects as she was about hers. They existed, but they tended to go out with Home Economics types. After a day of pondering surds and pingoes they wanted to put their feet up and eat grated carrot and marshmallow salads. They didn’t want to talk about Megalosaurus tibias or whether the pterosaurs had three-chambered or four-chambered hearts, which was what she wanted to talk about. The geologist had been fine; they could compromise on rock strata. They went on hikes with their little picks and kits, and chipped samples off cliffs; then they ate jelly sandwiches and copulated in a friendly way behind clumps of goldenrod and thistles. She found this pleasurable but not extremely so. She still has a collection of rock chips left over from this relationship; looking at it does not fill her with bitterness. He was a nice boy but she wasn’t in love with him. She is not exactly a paradigm of modish chic, she knows that, but she could never quite fall in love with a man who says “wow.”
As for William, what they have in common is an interest in extinction. She confines it to dinosaurs, however. William applies it to everything. Except cockroaches; a cockroach has been found living in a nuclear reactor. The next age, according to William, will be the age of the insects. On most days he’s quite cheerful about this.
Lesje isn’t sure what she means by in love. Once she thought she was in love with William, since it upset her that he did not ask her to marry him. But recently she’s begun to question this. At first she welcomed the relative simplicity, even the bareness, of their life together. They were both committed to their jobs, and they had, it seemed, easily met expectations and only minor areas of friction. But Nate has changed things, he has changed William. What was once a wholesome absence of complications is now an embarrassing lack of complexity. For instance, William would have lunged as soon as they were inside the door. Not so Nate.
They sit on either side of the large double bed which looms like fate in the center of the room, each with a cigarette, drinking out of the hotel glasses which contain Scotch from Nate’s pocket flask mixed with tap water. Gazing across the bed as if it’s a fathomless gulf, while Nate apologizes, Lesje listens, veiling her face with her hand, smoke making her squint. Nate doesn’t want just an affair, he says. Lesje is touched by this; she doesn’t think to ask what he does want. William has never been at such pains to explain himself.
Lesje feels that something momentous is about to take place. Her life is about to change: things will not be as they have been before. The walls of the hotel, patterned with greenish lozenges, are dissolving, she is moving through the open air, no longer snow-filled and tinged with exhaust fumes but clean and sunny; on the horizon there’s the glimmer of water. Why then doesn’t Nate stub out his cigarette, stand up, take her in his arms? Now that he has her in this tacky bedroom.
But instead he pours himself another drink and continues to explain. He wants everything to be clear at the beginning. He doesn’t want Lesje to think she’s breaking up a marriage. As she no doubt knows, Elizabeth has had other lovers, the most recent of whom was Chris. Elizabeth has never made any secret of that. She thinks of Nate as the father of her children but not as her husband. They haven’t lived together, he means slept together, for several years, he isn’t sure how many. They’ve stayed in the same house together because of the children. Neither of them can stand the thought of living apart from the children. So naturally Elizabeth will have no objection to his doing what Lesje wishes he would hurry up and do.
The mention of Elizabeth startles Lesje, who realizes that she hasn’t been thinking about her at all. She ought to be thinking about her. You don’t just stroll into another woman’s life and take over her husband. Everyone in the women’s group agreed, in theory at least, on the reprehensibility of such behavior, although they also agreed that married people should not be viewed as each other’s property but as living, growing organisms. What it boiled down to was that man-stealing was out but personal growth was commendable. You had to have the right attitude and be honest with yourself. These convolutions had discouraged Lesje; she hadn’t understood why so much time was being spent on them. But at that point she’d never been in such a situation, and now she is.
She certainly doesn’t want to play Other Woman in some conventional, boring triangle. She doesn’t feel like an other woman; she isn’t wheedling or devious, she doesn’t wear negligées or paint her toenails. William may think she’s exotic, but she isn’t really; she’s straightforward, narrow and unadorned, a scientist; not a web-spinner, expert at the entrapment of husbands. But Nate no longer seems like Elizabeth’s husband. His family is surely external to him; in himself he’s single, a free agent. And Elizabeth is therefore not the wife of Nate, she isn’t a wife at all. Instead she’s a widow, Chris’s widow if anyone’s, moving unpaired and grieving down an autumn avenue, leaves from the over-arching trees falling on her faintly disheveled hair. Lesje consigns her to this mournfully romantic picture, frames her, and then forgets about her.
William is another matter. William will mind; he will definitely mind in one way or another. But Lesje doesn’t intend to tell him about this, at least not yet. Nate has implied that although Elizabeth would give the seal of approval to what he’s doing and may even be pleased for him, since in a way they are good friends, now is not the right time to tell her. Elizabeth has been making an adjustment, not as quick an adjustment as he’d like to see but definitely an adjustment. He wants her to finish doing that before he gives her something new that she has to adjust to. It has something to do with the children.
So if Nate is going to protect Elizabeth and the children from Lesje, Lesje is entitled to protect William from Nate. She feels tender towards William when she considers his need for protection. He’s never needed it before. But now she reflects upon the unconscious nape of his neck, the vulnerability of the hollow at the angle of his collarbone, his jugular veins, so perilously close to the skin, his inability to tan instead of burn, the wax in his ears unseen by him, his childlike pomposity. She has no desire to hurt William.
Nate puts down his glass, grinds his cigarette into the hotel ashtray. He’s come to the end of ethics. He negotiates the perimeter of the blue bed, walks to Lesje, kneels in front of her where she sits in her Danish Modern chair. He takes her hand away from her mouth, kisses her. She has never been touched with such gentleness. William’s style has a lot of adolescent roughhouse, she now realizes, and the geologist was always in a hurry. Nate isn’t in a hurry. They’ve been here two hours and she still has all her clothes on.
He picks her up, places her on the bed, lies down beside her. He kisses her again, tentatively, lingeringly. Then he asks what time it is. He himself has no watch. Lesje tells him it’s five-thirty. He sits up. Lesje is beginning to feel slightly unattractive. Are her teeth too large, is that it?
“I have to phone home,” he says. “I’m supposed to be taking the kids to dinner at my mother’s.”
He lifts the telephone from the table and dials. The cord trails across Lesje’s chest. “Hello, love,” he says, and Lesje knows it’s Elizabeth. “Just checking in. I’ll pick them up at six, okay?”
The words “home,” “love,” and “mother” have disturbed Lesje. A vacuum forms around her heart, spreads; it’s as if she doesn’t exist. When Nate puts down the phone, she begins to cry. He folds his arms around her, soothing her, smoothing her hair. “There’s lots of time, love,” he says. “Next time will be better.”
Don’t call me that, she wants to say. She sits on the bed, feet over the side, hands dangling from her wrists, while Nate gets their coats, puts his own on, holds hers out for her. She wants to be the one going to dinner with him. To his mother’s. She doesn’t want to stay here on the blue bed alone, or walk out into the street alone, or go back to her apartment where she will also be alone whether William is there or not. She wants to pull Nate back onto the bed with her. She doesn’t believe there is lots of time. There is no time, surely she will never see him again. She doesn’t understand why her heart is beating so painfully, gulping for oxygen in the blackness of this outer space. He’s taking something away from her. If he loves her, why has she been exiled?