The Heat of Betrayal Page 2

  I opened my eyes. Paul’s fingers remained gripped around the armrests, his face now the colour of chalk. We reached for each other’s hands. Then my husband spoke.

  ‘I wonder – is this all a mistake?’

  Three

  THE IMMIGRATION HALL at Casablanca. Controlled chaos. Hundreds of new arrivals being corralled into two different lines: one for non-Moroccans, another for the rest of humanity. Every historical epoch – from the Middle Ages to our current hyper-connected, cyber-world reality – seemed to be represented. There were sharply suited businessmen and women everywhere, at least half of whom, with their Italian tailoring and their black iPhones, were from North Africa. There were backpacker types, all grungy and twenty-something, looking spaced and eyeing the suits with zonked amusement. Just in front of me was a gaunt man in a dusty brown suit, his teeth blackened by cigarettes, holding a travel document from Mauritania in his right hand.

  ‘What’s the capital of Mauritania?’ I asked Paul.

  Without a pause he replied:

  ‘Nouakchott.’

  ‘The things you know,’ I said.

  ‘This line is insane. When I last came thirty-three years ago, there were no computer checks – the world wasn’t as paranoid as it is now.’

  ‘Zen, zen, zen,’ I said, stroking my husband’s face.

  ‘This is Casablanca airport, not some fucking Buddhist retreat.’

  I laughed. But he stood there, bouncing from foot to foot, an ongoing fugue of impatience and anxiety.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ he suddenly said.

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘I do.’

  Silence. I felt myself tense.

  ‘How will we go home?’ I asked.

  ‘Get the next plane.’

  ‘You’re not serious.’

  ‘I think I am. This is all wrong.’

  ‘Because of the long line?’

  ‘Because my instinct tells me – go home.’

  ‘Even though it was your “instinct” that told you we had to come here?’

  ‘So you’re angry at me.’

  ‘If you want to go home, we’ll go home.’

  ‘You’d think me a loser if I did that.’

  ‘I never think you a loser, my love.’

  ‘But I know I am a liability.’

  Liabilities. That was the word which ricocheted around my head when I discovered, several weeks ago, the extent of his debts, despite his having promised me, months earlier, that he would curb his spending habits. There was a knock on our door one Friday evening around six. A man from a collection agency was standing on our front porch, asking to speak with Paul Leuen. I explained that my husband was at the gym. ‘Ah, so you are Mrs Leuen? Then you might be aware of the sixty-four hundred dollars that your husband owes to the Vintners Wine Society.’ I was speechless. When had he bought all that wine, and why hadn’t I seen it anywhere in our house? The collection agent was explaining that the Wine Society had sent close to ten letters demanding ‘a conversation’ about the unpaid sum which had accrued over two years. Now they had run out of patience. If the bill wasn’t settled forthwith, legal action would follow, and could involve a lien on our home.

  Instead of going inside and getting my cheque book (as I had done on several previous occasions) I simply said:

  ‘My husband is at the Gold’s Gym on Manor Street, about five minutes from here by car. Ask for him at the reception desk – they know him. And—’

  ‘But you could settle this matter straight away.’

  ‘I could, but I won’t. You need to speak directly with my husband.’

  Repeating the address of the gym I excused myself and closed the door. As soon as the collector had driven off I went into our bedroom, packed a small weekend bag, and called my old college roommate, Ruth Richardson, in Brooklyn and asked if I could use her fold-out sofa for a few days. Then leaving Paul a note – The wine debt must be paid off by the time I am back late Tuesday night – I got into my car and drove the seven hours south-east to the city I had always promised myself I would one day call my own. I kept my cellphone off and spent the next four days trying not to bore Ruth with the cocktail of anger, guilt and sadness that was coursing through me. Ruth – a professor of English at Brooklyn College, divorced, no kids, disappointed in love, wickedly funny and hyper-cultural (‘High art is God’s apology for men,’ she’s often noted) – was, as always, a great friend. She steadied my resolve when I suggested that perhaps I should check in on Paul, see how he was bearing up.

  ‘When he landed himself in debt last time,’ she said, ‘what did you do?’

  ‘I dug into my retirement fund and found the ten grand to get him out of trouble.’

  ‘What did he promise you in return?’

  ‘You know very well. He admitted that he’s got a sad pathological compulsion when it comes to spending, spending, spending . . . and he promised to curtail it.’

  ‘A compulsion that is eating away at your marriage. It’s all so sad. Especially as I rather like Paul.’

  ‘And I do love him madly, despite this one very bad habit. He still makes me laugh. He is so bright and engaged and intellectually curious. He still thinks me hot – or, at least, that’s what he says all the time.’

  ‘Still trying for a child?’

  ‘Of course.’

  When I met Paul three years earlier, I was thirty-seven. Within six months of declaring our love for each other, and talking about the wondrous possibilities of a shared future together, I delicately raised the fact that I did not want to pass through life without becoming a mother; that I was entering the now-or-never phase. I knew that I was bringing a certain degree of ‘beat the clock’ pressure to our relationship, and said I would perfectly understand if Paul felt this was all too much too fast. His response astounded me:

  ‘When you have met the love of your life, of course you want to have a child with her.’

  Yes, Paul was a great romantic. Such a romantic that he proposed marriage shortly thereafter, even though I told him that, having been there once before, I wasn’t pushed about a return visit. But I was so swept up in the wonder of finding love at my age, and with such a talented and original man, and in Buffalo, that I said yes. He did say that though he realised the clock was ticking we needed some time together before becoming parents. I agreed to his request, staying on the pill until last autumn. At which point we seriously began to ‘try’ (what a curious verb) for a baby. We went about the task very robustly – though sex was, from the outset, one of the aspects of our marriage that always worked. It wasn’t as if we were having to motivate ourselves into making love every night of the week.

  ‘You know, if I don’t get pregnant naturally there are other options,’ I said six months later when nothing had happened.

  ‘You’ll get pregnant.’

  ‘You sound very certain about that.’

  ‘It’s going to happen.’

  That conversation took place ten days before the debt collector arrived on our doorstep. As I headed south in my car towards Brooklyn, my cellphone off, my piercing sadness about Paul was underscored by the realisation that he was my last chance at having a baby. And that thought . . .

  Ruth splashed a little more wine into my glass and I took a long sip.

  ‘He’s not your last chance,’ she said.

  ‘I want a baby with Paul.’

  ‘That’s a definitive statement.’

  Friendship is always a complex equation – especially a friendship where it had been agreed early on that we would never sugar-coat things; that we would speak what we felt to be the truth.

  ‘I don’t want to be a single mother,’ I said. ‘If I can get him to just accept that he has certain obligations . . .’

  ‘Paul had problems with money before you. Even though you’ve tried to organise his personal finances, he refuses to play smart. At the age of fifty-eight, he is not going to have some sort of epiphany and transform himself. He is what he is
. Which therefore begs the question – can you weather his ongoing recklessness?’

  All the way home that question nagged at me. Life, they say, is a great teacher. But only if we are truly willing to shake off our illusions and self-deceptions.

  Love, however, always muddies clarity of vision. And a life without love is a bit like the balance sheets I gaze over every working day: far too concrete, too reasoned. My love for Paul was as bound up in his recklessness as in his talent, his intelligence, his ardour for me.

  I got home just after six p.m. to the nineteenth-century Gothic place we’d bought together. His car was parked out front. When I entered the house I was startled to find that order had descended upon chaos. In recent weeks Paul had started treating our home as a happy dumping ground. However, in the days I had been out of contact, not only had he divested the house of his mess, but all the windows glistened, all the wood surfaces were free of dust and had been polished. There were fresh flowers in several vases and I could smell something pasta-esque in the oven.

  As the door slammed behind me, Paul emerged from the kitchen, looking just a little sheepish. He couldn’t make direct eye contact with me. But when he did once look up in my direction I could see his sadness and fear.

  ‘Smells good,’ I said.

  ‘I made it for you, for us.’ Again he avoided my gaze. ‘Welcome home.’

  ‘Yes, I came back. But—’

  He held up his hand.

  ‘I sold all the wine.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I found a guy here in town. Big-deal collector. Offered me six thousand dollars for my cellar.’

  ‘You have a cellar?’

  He nodded, looking like a little boy who had just been caught out in a very big lie.

  ‘Where?’ I asked.

  ‘You know that shed behind the garage? The one we never use?’

  The shed was something akin to a bomb shelter, with two folding steel doors that lay flat to the ground. When we were negotiating to buy the house we naturally had it opened for us, and found a damp semi-lined cave. As the house already had a renovated basement we simply put a lock on the two doors after we bought the place and left it empty.

  At least, that’s what I thought.

  ‘How long have you been building up this wine collection?’ I tried to sound reasonable.

  ‘A while.’

  He came over and took me in his arms.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want apologies. I just don’t want another repetition of all this financial mess.’

  ‘And I don’t want to lose you.’

  ‘Then don’t. Because I do want you, us.’

  To Paul’s credit he became industrious again after the wine incident, spending all free non-teaching hours on a new series of lithographs. It was the first time that he had settled down to serious creative work since our marriage. Though his gallery owner in New York was enthusiastic, the general downturn in the market and Paul’s lack of visibility in recent times meant that the sort of prices he could demand had shrunk decisively. Still, he did manage to find a buyer. Though Paul was disappointed with the negotiated price, part of him was clearly thrilled with the fact that he still ‘had the chops’, as he put it, when it came to his art. After paying off most of his credit-card debts he then took me out to dinner at a most upscale (for Buffalo) French restaurant where he ordered a far too expensive bottle of wine and told me the gallery owner had another client interested in a new series.

  ‘The buyer is willing to plonk down fifty per cent up front – so that should be another ten grand to me in a couple of weeks. What’s a bottle of Paulliac compared to that?’

  I’m not that into wine. Still . . . why not celebrate? Especially as Paul was making good on paying off his debts. When we got home that night, he lit candles in our bedroom, put on a CD of Miles Davis playing ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’, and made love to me with the ferocity and sensuality that only he could.

  My first husband, Donald, had always had issues about intimacy. He was a super-bright, endlessly anxious man; an old-school journalistic muckraker on the Buffalo Sun who covered local politics and was widely considered to be one of the great specialists on municipal corruption in the state. Just out of college, having done a stint on a paper in Madison, Wisconsin, after getting my BA from Minnesota, I was delighted to have landed the job on the City Desk of the Sun. Donald was completely committed to Buffalo. I was so smitten by this five-foot-six-inch whirlwind that I too became committed to Buffalo. But the sex – when it happened – was, at best, perfunctory; at worst, it flat-lined.

  ‘Not good at this, never been good at this,’ he whispered the first night we slept together and he had what could be politely described as ‘performance-related issues’. I reassured him that this happened to all men from time to time, that it was no big deal, that things would come right. The truth is . . . even when he was able to complete the act it was never satisfying. He was endlessly anxious, caught up in his fears about appearing inadequate and inferior, and no amount of reassurance could assuage such ingrained self-doubts. But I chose to overlook the fact that our bed became a sort of cross upon which Donald crucified himself. By the end of our first year of marriage, our lovemaking (if you could call it that) had dwindled to twice a month. I suggested that Donald seek counselling. He agreed and then refused to go. Though he remained brilliantly engaging company, that crucial part of our married life went into permanent decline.

  But I continued to reason that, given even more love and support, all those intimacy issues would vanish and our marriage would steady and . . .

  It is extraordinary, isn’t it, the way we convince ourselves all will be well in a relationship that we privately know to be doomed.

  The end of my marriage to Donald came the evening he showed up late from the newsroom, with eight whiskies too many in him, and informed me:

  ‘The fact is, even if I did get counselling or go to my doctor and let him prescribe me something, all the little blue pills in the world wouldn’t stop the repulsion I feel every time you come close to me.’

  I snapped my eyes shut, trying to tell myself that he had not said what he had just said. But when my eyes opened the look on Donald’s face was a strange little half-smile. The sight of him, quietly enjoying the hurt and confusion now ricocheting within me, led me to the following uncomfortable truth: he said that because he knew, once it was uttered, we would have passed the point of no return.

  ‘Now you can really hate me,’ he finally whispered.

  ‘I just pity you, Donald.’

  I asked for a meeting with our newspaper’s editor-in-chief the next morning. I told him that, if the paper was still offering the voluntary redundancy packages mentioned some months earlier during a wave of cutbacks, I would be willing to accept one.

  Ten days later – with one year’s salary in the bank – I got into my car and drove north to Montreal. I had decided to learn French and live in a city that hovered somewhere between a European and New World sensibility. It was also cheap. I found a small apartment in the decidedly francophone confines of the Plateau, and went to daily French lessons at the Université de Montréal where I worked hard at mastering that challenging and intricate language. My proficiency improved considerably when I started having an affair with a man named Thierry, who ran a used record store on the rue Saint Denis and was intermittently trying to write the great québécois novel. His charms and reasonable sexual confidence – especially after Donald – were subsumed by unapologetic laziness.

  After a year I was able to renew my student visa. As my prowess in French grew, I began to hatch plans about perhaps moving to Paris and working out some way of landing a carte de séjour and reinventing myself professionally as . . .

  This was the dilemma. What was I going to do next in my life? I set up an appointment at the French consulate in Montreal and found myself facing a very petite fonctionnaire who discouraged me from even thinking about f
inding work in Paris without a European passport or a French husband. My Canadian student visa allowed me to take on work for the length of my sojourn there at the university. I found a temporary post as an administrative assistant in a firm of bilingual accountants – and started finding myself fascinated by the world of numbers. I knew that, by retraining as a certified public accountant, I was again landing myself in the world of other people’s narratives that I had said I would dodge when I left journalism. Nonetheless, after eighteen months in Quebec, I decided to cross over the American frontier again and enter a CPA course in Buffalo. I knew why I was running back there. Buffalo was safe. It was the only place to date in my life where I had put down roots. No longer being at the newspaper meant that my chances of running into Donald were nominal. I still felt a deep lingering sadness about the end of the marriage, coupled with the thought that I should have been able to change him. Just as my need to do something practical or serious with my life was also a larger reflection of all the residual things I felt about Dad. In Buffalo I had some good friends and many contacts – so there was also the prospect of being able to set up my own small accountancy firm and have enough people to reach out to as potential clients.

  Just to prove that I was a responsible young woman I found a job with a local CPA while doing the two-year accountancy course. This allowed me to take what was left from the redundancy money and put down a 50 per cent payment on a nice apartment in an old Victorian-style house (Buffalo is so cheap), and even renovate the kitchen and bathroom while furnishing it with funky second-hand items. When the time came – and I was indeed an officially certified public accountant – I had seven clients who joined me on the day I first opened my office.

  Then, two years later, Paul walked in.

  ‘I wonder – is this all a mistake?’

  His words as we landed in Morocco. A journey that was his idea, his surprise which he sprang on me just two weeks after he had cleared a significant portion of his debts and had sworn off compulsive spending. I’d just come home from my bi-weekly yoga class to find Paul at work in the kitchen, the aromatic aromas of North Africa wafting everywhere. Approaching him at the stove I gave him a kiss and said: