The Heat of Betrayal Read online

  I became a beach walker, setting off most afternoons after our siesta along the endless strip of sand that fronted the Atlantic. Once past the bathers, there would be the women in hijabs lifting up their all-covering djellabas to wade in the water. Nearby, the camel guides were touting a half-hour on top of one of their haunted beasts for a negotiable fee. Another two kilometres further south all traces of habitation fell away. I was alone. The beach stretched into infinity, the Atlantic mirroring the declining summer sun, its horizon boundless. How I always wanted to live on a strip of beach, with little hint of the twenty-first century in sight, walking it daily, revelling in the way that the rhythmic pounding of the surf always seemed to smooth out, for a time, all the stress and doubt and anxiety that we haul around with us. We’re a bit like Bedouins when it comes to the trappings of our lives. No matter where we roam, or how far we venture away from our place of birth, we still haul so much of the past with us.

  On an empty beach – especially this empty beach – you could almost convince yourself that it might just be possible to detach yourself from your history and all its weight.

  Given what a productive place Paul found himself in right now – and how free of shadows he also seemed to be – when I got back from my daily two-hour hike he’d greet me with a smile and a kiss and the suggestion that, after my lesson with Soraya, we watch the sunset from the rooftop of a very elegant hotel just inside the city walls. It was called L’Heure Bleue (of all things); very much an old-style travellers’ hotel of the 1920s, redone in subdued, five-star chic style. Totally out of our league, budget-wise, but one glass of Kir at the open-air roof bar wouldn’t break the bank. And it did provide the most ravishing panorama of the red globular sun slowly liquidising into a tranquil ocean.

  ‘Interesting, isn’t it, how the Atlantic is so becalmed here,’ Paul noted one evening as we sipped our drinks, both fixated on the wide-screen sunset.

  ‘Especially when compared to Maine.’

  ‘We’ll be there in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘You sound less than enthusiastic about that prospect.’

  ‘You know how much I love Maine. It’s just . . . well, it’s home, right?’

  ‘My thoughts entirely. So why don’t we extend here for another two weeks?’

  ‘But that means losing Maine – and our deposit for the fourteen days there. Our plane tickets are non-exchangeable and non-refundable . . . and, yes, I know I’m sounding like an accountant.’

  ‘You’re right to do so, especially given my behaviour in that department.’

  I reached out and took his hand.

  ‘That’s all behind us now,’ I said.

  ‘Because you forced me to grow up.’

  ‘It wasn’t about you “growing up”. It was about just exercising a bit of restraint.’

  ‘I know I have this compulsion to spend,’ he said. ‘And I know that the compulsion is rooted in the fact that I allowed life to turn out in a way I never wanted. Until, that is, I met you. You saved me from myself.’

  ‘Happy to be of service,’ I said, kissing him lightly on the lips.

  Just beyond us the sun had been rendered fluid; thawed orange coalescing like spilled paint on the surface of the Atlantic. I shut my eyes and felt tears. Because I sensed a real breaking down of a barrier here; an honesty and complicity between us that had been overshadowed by manifold demons.

  The next morning was pitch perfect. An aquamarine sky, cloud-free, faultless. We awoke from a late carnal sleep to a knock at the door. Glancing at the bedside clock I noticed it was High Noon. Damn, damn, damn. Soraya had asked if she could organise the lesson earlier today (it was a Friday – the Sabbath day in Morocco), and if it could only last one hour. She was catching a two p.m. bus to Marrakesh and a weekend with a friend from university.

  ‘I had to have my friend’s mother phone my mother and vouch that she would keep an eye on me over the weekend. I am twenty-nine years old and am still having to check in like an adolescent,’ she told me in a low, confessional whisper.

  I had agreed to that midday Friday lesson. And now it was . . . two minutes past twelve. Soraya was always punctual. Damn. Damn. Damn.

  As I jumped out of bed and scrambled for some clothes, Paul groaned awake.

  ‘What time is it?’ he asked, half-asleep. When I told him he smiled and said:

  ‘I’m glad you’re succumbing to my bohemian ways.’

  Actually it was the first time we’d overslept since arriving here; Paul always wanted to get to the café by eleven to capture the souk at its most manic.

  ‘That’s Soraya,’ I said. ‘I’ll do the lesson downstairs.’

  ‘No need. Do it in the front room and I’ll slip out in around twenty minutes.’

  So I quickly dressed and let Soraya in, apologising for the slight delay. As she set up her books and pens and papers in the small living area I went running downstairs and asked for coffee and bread and preserves to be brought upstairs. When I returned to the room I could hear the shower going in the adjacent bathroom – and Soraya looking just a little uncomfortable with the notion of a naked man in the immediate proximity.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ I said. ‘I should have suggested we go elsewhere.’

  ‘No problem.’ She was clearly relieved to have me back in the room. ‘Shall we start?’

  We began by discussing the verb ‘vouloir’ – to want – and variations of its usage. Especially in the conditional. Would like. The great aspirational hope. I began to recite:

  ‘Je voudrais un café . . . voudrais-tu un café aussi? . . . il voudrait réussir . . . nous voudrions un enfant . . .’

  At which point the bedroom door swung open and Paul emerged, dressed, his hair still wet from the shower. He greeted us with a big smile.

  ‘Tout à fait, nous voudrions un enfant,’ he said, coming over and kissing me on the lips. We would definitely like a child.

  Then greeting Soraya, he asked her in French:

  ‘And how is my wife progressing?’

  ‘She’s doing fantastically. Really gifted with the language. And she works so hard.’

  ‘That she does.’

  ‘You think too highly of me,’ I said.

  ‘She doesn’t think well enough of herself,’ Paul said. ‘Maybe you can help her in that department, Soraya.’

  I told him that breakfast would be here in a minute, but saw that he had his satchel over his shoulder, stuffed with his sketchbooks and pencils.

  ‘I’ll let Fouad provide that for me. Come find me after the lesson. Je t’adore.’

  With another kiss on the lips he was gone.

  Once the door was closed behind him Soraya looked away as she said:

  ‘Je voudrais un homme comme votre mari.’

  ‘Mais plus jeune?’ I added.

  ‘L’âge importe moins que la qualité.’

  I would like a man like your husband.

  But younger?

  The age is less important than the quality.

  ‘I am sure you will find someone of quality,’ I told her.

  ‘I’m not,’ she said in a near-whisper.

  And then:

  ‘All right, essayer in the subjunctive. Give me an example in first person singular.’

  I considered this for a moment, then said:

  ‘Il faut que je voudrais d’être heureux.’

  Soraya did not look professorially pleased by my answer.

  ‘I must would like happiness,’ she said, translating my sentence into her excellent English. ‘You can do better than that.’

  ‘Sorry. The problem is the use of the subjunctive with “would like”. As you noted you can’t “must would like” something.’

  ‘So if you were to talk about wanting happiness . . .’

  ‘Je voudrais le bonheur.’

  ‘Fine. And in the subjunctive?’

  ‘I would sidestep vouloir and use essayer. To try. As in: “Il faut que je essaie d’etr
e heureux.” I must try to be happy.’

  Soraya then had another one of her thoughtful pauses.

  ‘It is all about “trying”, isn’t it?’ she said.

  Breakfast arrived and she shared the coffee with me. We worked on until one p.m. Then I paid her for the week and wished her well in Marrakesh.

  ‘Entre nous there is a man – French – whom my classmate wants me to meet. A banker working at Société Générale. My parents would half-approve – the banker, not the French part. But I am getting ahead of myself here, aren’t I?’

  Then, telling me she’d see me on Monday at the usual time, she headed off for her weekend and her meeting with the Frenchman who might, or might not, become a conduit into a new life. Travelling hopefully is the key to so much.

  When Soraya was gone, I took a long shower and changed into fresh clothes, then checked my watch and thought that, if I moved quickly, I could still join Paul for a late lunch at Chez Fouad. But as Friday was the one day when I read my email I decided to quickly scan this week’s dispatches before heading out to the souk.

  The first email I saw had been sent just twenty minutes earlier from my ever-scrupulous book-keeper Morton. It read:

  Now that we have your husband’s audit problems with the IRS out of the way I’ve been doing his books in an attempt to bring them up to date so we are not in a ‘beat the clock’ bind at tax time next year. You know how he throws all his receipts and invoices and credit card statements into that box file you gave him. Well, I started working through it on Wednesday and came across this invoice this morning. I debated about whether I should send it to you now or wait until you got back in a few weeks. But I decided that – as this was something of an ethical/moral call – I should err on the side of immediate transparency.

  I clicked on the attached file and found myself staring at an invoice from a Dr Brian Boyards, MD, Urologist. The invoice was for a patient named Leuen, Paul Edward. His date of birth – 04-11-56 – was the same as my husband’s. So too was the home address. And the Blue Cross/Blue Shield health insurance policy that he used to defray 80 per cent of the $2,031.78 charges for the procedure listed on the invoice.

  Outpatient Non-Scalpel Deferentectomy.

  What is a deferentectomy?

  I switched over to Google and typed in that exact word.

  And discovered that a deferentectomy is the clinical term for a very common bit of urological surgery . . . also known as a vasectomy.

  And the date on which this Outpatient Non-Scalpel Deferentectomy was performed on my husband? September 7th of last year. Around the same time that we both agreed we should start trying for a child.

  Nine

  I SAT IN front of my computer screen, trying to convince myself that what I had just read was somehow false. A fabrication; an invention dispatched by a malevolent individual who wanted to see my marriage thrown completely off course.

  The problem with hard-and-fast evidence – and an invoice from a doctor in the wake of a surgical procedure is about as irrefutable as it comes – is that you can’t negotiate with its black-and-white veracity. It’s a bit like a client of mine who had run up around $10k of Internet porn charges on his MasterCard one year. All the transactions were marked Fantasy Promotions Inc., and the time codes showed they were all late in the evening. His wife had seen the MasterCard statements and was just a little appalled. My client entreated me to provide him with an alibi for these purchases. As I told him at the time: ‘How do you explain over one hundred and fifty dealings after midnight with an online company called Fantasy Promotions Inc.? There’s no wiggle room here. It’s the smoking gun.’

  Strange how that client – who was divorced with extreme prejudice by his wife thereafter – popped into my head as I found myself staring at the document from Dr Brian Boyards, MD, Urologist. All the facts in front of me. Facts which I must have reread a dozen times, trying to find a way of reinterpreting the irrefutable:

  Patient: Leuen, Paul Edward.

  Date of birth: 04-11-56

  Home Address: 5165 Albany Avenue, Buffalo, NY 10699

  Insurance: Blue Cross/Blue Shield A566902566

  Procedure: Outpatient Non-Scalpel Deferentectomy

  Date of Procedure: 09-07-14

  The seventh of September last year. Around ten months ago. A few days after the Labor Day weekend, which we spent in a friend’s cottage in the woods fronting Lake Placid. My husband and I making love twice a day. And me, after a candlelit dinner at some nearby inn, stating that, after two years together, and with my fortieth birthday looming, I wanted to come off the pill . . . though it would be, as my gynaecologist told me, at least two weeks until I would be moving into a fertile cycle.

  Paul did not blanch or talk about joining the merchant marine when I brought this up. On the contrary, he told me that having a child together was ‘the essential bonding of a couple in love’ or some such rhapsodic line. Back in Buffalo a few days later he returned from the gym one evening limping slightly, telling me how he’d pulled a muscle in his groin and was worried that he’d given himself a hernia. With my complete understanding, he absented himself from sex for several days, saying that he’d be going to the university infirmary the next day to get himself a medical opinion. Then when he got back that night he informed me that, though it was only ‘lightly herniated’ – I remember his exact words – he was advised not to exacerbate it and to refrain from sex for another week. Which we dutifully did.

  Now, here I was, all these absurd months later, on the website of Dr Brian Boyards, MD, reading all about this seemingly simple, no-fault surgical procedure:

  Over 500,000 vasectomy procedures are done each year in the United States.

  Vasectomy is a simple, safe surgical procedure for permanent male fertility control. The tube (called a ‘vas’) which leads from the testicle is cut and sealed in order to stop sperm from leaving.

  The procedure usually takes about 10 to 20 minutes.

  Since the procedure simply interrupts the delivery of sperm it does not change hormonal function – leaving sexual drive and potency unaffected.

  The No-Scalpel vasectomy is a technique used to do the vasectomy through one single puncture. The puncture is made in the scrotum and requires no suturing or stitches.

  The primary difference compared to the conventional vasectomy is that the vas deferens is controlled and grasped by the surgeon in a less traumatic manner. This results in less pain and fewer postoperative complications.

  This procedure is done with the aid of a local anaesthetic called ‘Xylocaine’ (similar to ‘Novocain’).

  The actual interruption of the vas which is done with the No-Scalpel technique is identical to the interruption used with conventional techniques.

  The No-Scalpel technique is simply a more elegant and less traumatic way for the surgeon to control the vas and proceed with its interruption.

  So my husband murdered my chance at motherhood with him by opting for ‘elegant and less traumatic’ surgery. The child I so wanted.

  I snapped my eyes shut, caught somewhere between desolation and pure unalloyed rage.

  ‘Tout à fait, nous voudrions un enfant.’

  The bastard actually said that at midday today. Just as, for months, he’d kept reassuring me that it was only a matter of time before I got pregnant . . .

  I slammed down the lid of my computer and began to sob. I was in free-fall. Beyond stunned. Stupefied. As if this new life we’d built together was nothing more than a house of cards. Built on the lies of a man I had been dumb enough to trust. How could I – Ms Forensic, Ms Extra-Scrupulous, Ms Exhaustively Thorough – not have sniffed out the con behind all his declarations of intimate commitment?

  I knew the answer to that question.

  We only see what we want to see.

  I understood from the outset that Paul Leuen was, on certain fundamental levels, incapable of proper adult responsibility. But I chose to sidestep such realisations and embrace the bohemian lu
re, the romantic effluence, the hallucinogenic sex. I was so desperate for love that I shoved all doubt into that mental basement room and plunged right into the delusion of domestic bliss and child-rearing with a man who . . .

  Who? Who?

  Can I even define him now? If he had betrayed me in such a fundamental way, if he had deliberately had himself fixed while assuring me passionately that he wanted a child with me . . .

  I went to the bathroom. I threw cold water on my face, avoiding the mirror. I didn’t want to cast a cold eye on myself right now. I returned to the room and went out onto the balcony, staring out at the North African world below. This could have waited until our return, Morton. But decent rabbinical Morton had, no doubt, done a considerable amount of soul searching before deciding to send me the urologist’s invoice. And he had finally decided: cards on the table. But leave it to my disorganised husband to have thrown the doctor’s invoice into his box of financial paperwork, forgetting that I would eventually see it – because I was still his accountant.

  I clutched the balcony railings, steadying myself, rage trumping sorrow; a certain clinical clarity asserting itself. I returned inside to my laptop. I opened it and wrote a fast email to Morton:

  Knowledge, they say, is power. But it’s also often a sorrow beyond dreams. Can you please look around his MasterCard statements for September 2014 and see if there is an insurance excess payment for $400 to Dr Brian Boyards. Then scan it to me. I sense I will be back in Buffalo in a matter of days. Alone.

  As I awaited a reply I dug out our plane tickets and discovered (through some further searching on the Net) that Royal Air Maroc would change my flight before the return date for a charge of 3,000 dirhams – around $350. Yes, I had paid for the entire month at the hotel, but we were already into the third week. Paul could stay behind and finish his drawings and remind himself what it was like to be alone once more. I was pretty certain that this was the outcome he privately desired. When he’d had his secret vasectomy part of him must have known that all would eventually be revealed. Surely he had to figure that after, say, a year of trying with no success, I’d insist that we go to a fertility clinic for tests. At which point . . .