After the Fall

LUKE


I always assumed that Cress would have me back. That she would throw her little fit—she deserved that—but if I behaved myself and said the right things we would go on as before. That was why I had chosen her, after all: because given that I loved them both, it was simply easier to stay with the one I was already married to. Wasn’t a reconciliation what the counseling was about, and all those hideous tests? I wouldn’t have agreed to either if I hadn’t thought they were prerequisites for getting my foot back in the door. Maybe I should have just kissed Cressida that evening after coffee, left her wistful and wanting in the way that had worked so well before we were married. I could have drawn things out until she was so mad for it that continuing the separation would have been the last thing on her mind. But for once I wasn’t working to a plan.
Maybe I should have just kissed her, but the desire I felt for Cress that night was undeniable. Cress is a beautiful woman, and I’d been abstinent for what seemed like years. But the desire was triggered by more than that, by something I couldn’t name at the time: relief. Relief that we had been talking so easily, that she was smiling at me again, that the end was in sight. It’s a heady aphrodisiac, more potent than I could have imagined. She appeared to feel the same way. Her mouth opened when I kissed her; she was ready for me almost as soon as we got home. Right at the end she cried out my name and quivered with pleasure, something that rarely occurred. I wanted to stay but left when she asked me to, figuring it was just another hoop to jump through.
The next day, though, she canceled the rest of our counseling sessions. Didn’t even tell me personally, just left a brief message on my voice mail at work at a time she must have known I wouldn’t be in. I tried to call her, but she didn’t answer the page. I even dropped past our house that night, hoping to speak to her, but the windows were dark and her car wasn’t in the driveway.
Another week went by with no further contact. I reassured myself that it would all be okay, that she was simply playing hard to get. Just in case it was more than that I drafted a conciliatory letter, planning to send it if we still hadn’t spoken in a couple weeks. Really, I should have done that in the first place—I’ve sold more dubious products using such skills. But before the deadline had been reached Tim came home with some news.
I was in the kitchen helping myself to one of his beers when I heard his key in the door. I’d just gotten in from work myself, and was relieved to see that for once he was alone: most nights he showed up with Joan, for whom familiarity was fast breeding contempt as far as I was concerned. It wasn’t that she was boring or unattractive, the two qualities I most detest in a woman. It was just that she was loud. Opinionated, rather. Headstrong. Determined that not only should everyone know her views, but they should share them. We’d clashed more than once, arguing about topics ranging from rain forests to rugby, bickering back and forth while Tim stood between us practically wringing his hands. Some of the time I actually agreed with Joan, yet found myself taking the opposite side just for the pleasure of seeing her rise to the bait. It wasn’t as if I had anything much else to entertain me.
“Luke,” Tim called out in greeting as he unlaced his shoes. Joan had decreed that we all remove our footwear at the door for fear of tracking in dirt.
“Want a beer?” I asked, hastily proffering my own.
“Nah, I’m going out. We’re due at Joan’s parents’ for dinner.”
“Big night then. Sure you don’t need something to dull the pain?”
“Oh, they’re all right,” he replied loyally. “Not as fancy as your in-laws, but her mom’s a great cook.”
I had begun to make myself a sandwich but looked up at that. Tim hadn’t mentioned Cress or anything to do with her ever since our conversation when I had first moved in. He sat down on the couch with his back to me, ostensibly flicking through the newspaper. I knew there was more.
“Speaking of which,” he continued, choosing his words carefully, “I caught up with Cressida today.”
“Oh, yeah?” I replied nonchalantly. Two could play this game. Hell, I could best Tim at any game I chose.
“Yeah. She said she’s accepted the fellowship—you know that she was offered it?”
I nodded, though he couldn’t see me. It had been something we’d discussed over coffee, though at that time she’d confessed she still didn’t know what to do. Her doubt had given me the confidence to make my move.
“Anyway,” he said when I failed to respond, “she’s off to Michigan sometime next month. It’s all happening pretty quickly. I suppose she’ll have a farewell drinks night or something.”
I almost cut my hand off with the bread knife. Michigan, next month. I couldn’t believe she was doing it, and without me. Nice to have been told.
“Luke? You okay?” asked Tim, finally turning around.
“Yeah, great,” I replied, quickly shoveling the sandwich into my mouth so he wouldn’t expect me to talk. I tried to escape to my room, but Tim hadn’t finished.
“I assumed you probably knew,” he said with more than his usual lack of insight. “Listen, I don’t want to sound rude, but maybe once she’s gone you could move back home? I’m sure you’re ready for your own place again, and it’s getting pretty crowded with all those boxes in the hall….”
I was chewing furiously but I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, as if the bread were made of bubble gum. People were lining up to throw me out of their lives. I nodded in reply and tried to swallow, though the last thing I felt was hungry.
My immediate reaction was to get Cress on the phone and beg her to reconsider. I even went so far as to dial the number, only to hear the answering machine click in as it had every day for the last few weeks. I hung up without leaving a message. She knew I’d been trying to reach her, yet had made this decision regardless; must in fact have made it a while ago to already have a departure date. Then another impulse: call Kate. Throw myself on her mercy, plead that I’d made the wrong decision. Obviously I had anyway. Yet even as I tried to remember her phone number I came to my senses. It had been over two months since we’d spoken, and that hadn’t been the most encouraging of good-byes. I’d thought about her every day since; truly I had. But what would that count for against the decision I’d made, the weeks of silence, choosing—eventually—Cress over her? Kate had a fierce pride, and would never settle for being second best. She would hang up before I had a chance to tell her that I still loved her.
I finished my sandwich sitting on the floor of Tim’s spare room, my back against the door. I didn’t think he’d try to come and talk to me, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I didn’t want his sympathy. From two to zip, with only myself to blame. My marriage was over; Kate would never speak to me again. She suddenly seemed far away, ethereal, like a dream I once had and had woken up still believing. Cressida was more real, but moving quickly in the same direction. And all I felt was numb, too tired from chasing one, then the other, to realize I’d lost them both.
The light outside had faded, but I didn’t bother to get up and close the blinds. I wasn’t going to sleep anyway. My agency was looking for employees to relocate to the office they were setting up in the U.S. Morning would come. I’d let them know then.





TIM


I hadn’t imagined Joan to be a gossip, but she’d been unable to restrain her curiosity about the whole Luke/Kate thing. Ever since Cressida had first phoned a month or so ago, waking us both in the early hours, the topic had never been far from her mind. What did I know? Had Luke done the dirty on his wife? Who started it? When did it end? I suppose I disappointed her with my lack of inside knowledge, the truth being that Luke had never confided in me. In retrospect I was glad of that—Cressida was my friend too, and at least I had never had to agonize over whether I should tell her. Besides, I had pointed out to Joan, she should have been at least as well informed as myself, Kate being an old friend of hers. In return she had just laughed.
“It was our mothers who were friends, not us,” she scoffed. “I always thought Kate was too fond of herself, and a shocking flirt. She had it coming.”
I thought this was rather callous but said nothing at the time, still struggling to assimilate the terrible news. Now, as we drove home from dinner at her parents’, she was onto the subject again.
“So do you think Luke knew about the fellowship?”
I sighed. Dinner had been relaxed, soothing, and now I just wanted to steep for a while in the fading glow of good wine and conversation. It had been hard enough broaching the subject with Luke earlier that evening without having to dissect it all over again for Joan’s benefit.
“I assume so. They’ve been going to counseling together, so it must have come up there.”
“Uh-uh.” Joan shook her head. “Not in the last few weeks, they haven’t. Apparently Cressida ended the sessions.”
“How do you know that?” I queried, surprised.
“I asked Luke,” Joan replied without looking over. She was driving; she often did if I had a drink or two, though I was nowhere near the limit. It meant she could dictate when we left.
“Asked him what?”
“How the counseling was going, of course.” She spoke slowly, as if talking to an idiot. “He told me that it wasn’t going at all. Supposedly Cressida had deferred all future appointments. Guess she won’t be rescheduling now.”
Despite myself I felt a twinge of sympathy for Luke. My beloved was more tenacious than a terrier when she wanted something, and while I knew he had no desire to talk about his personal life, Joan had obviously managed to extract some information.
“You’re incorrigible,” I mumbled, awed and appalled at her audacity.
“Why?” she asked, sweeping me a hazel-eyed glance of innocence. “He’s your friend, so of course I’m worried about him. Besides, I don’t know why you’re so determined that we tiptoe around this and act as if nothing ever happened. No one died, you know.”
“I just figure that if Luke wants to talk about it he will. I read him the riot act when he first moved in. Now I just want to be his friend.”
“You? Read someone the riot act?” she asked in disbelief, though her tone was fond. I smiled but didn’t react. Joan made the long U-turn onto the Eastern Freeway, concentrating as she changed down through the gears. For all her eagerness to get behind the wheel she wasn’t a natural driver, though I would never have told her so. For a few minutes there was silence and I hoped we could leave it there, but as the freeway entrance receded she started up again.
“I mean, just imagine if he hadn’t known she was going to go to America. What a shock! I bet the poor sap was assuming she’d want him back.”
“I doubt Luke ever assumed anything.”
Joan went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Still, it’s no more than he deserves, after cheating on her like that. I wonder what’s up with Kate and Cary. Have you heard?”
I shook my head. I worried about them too, how Cary had taken the news, whether Kate was still seeing Luke. Funny to be in such a position. A year ago I had envied both couples: their confidence, their direction, their bright, sparkling marriages. Twelve months later all of that had come undone. All those years of love gone, and nothing to show for them except pain.
“You’re quiet,” Joan remarked, her voice softer, almost solicitous. “Tired?”
“Mmm,” I replied, looking out the window. Our exit was still some miles away, but already Joan was changing lanes in preparation. Tired, yes, but it was more than that. Watching everything unfold had lurched me from anger to disgust and finally sorrow, had reminded me that love is fleeting and precious and should never be taken for granted. All of a sudden I felt the need to seize it with both hands, to assure myself that the same pain wouldn’t be mine. Joan glanced across, checking her blind spot, and in the lights of the car behind her profile was as pure as a relief on a Grecian temple. She might be a gossip, but she was also forthright and funny and staunchly loyal. It wasn’t how I had imagined my ideal woman, but what does ever turn out exactly as we expect? There are so many ways to fall in love, and then after the fall …
It was a spontaneous decision, but why not? One thing Luke’s little episode had taught me was that there are no guarantees. As we made our exit from the freeway I swallowed once, then spoke.
“Pull over,” I said, “as soon as you can. There’s something I have to ask you.”



KATE


We left for Europe on the last day of August. Through the haze of packing and the incessant ache in my chest I wondered if Cary had chosen that date on purpose. There were almost too many portents to ignore: the end of winter, the coming of spring, a season of regrowth and rebirth. It should have been a propitious choice, but when we arrived on the other side of the world I realized that the opposite, in fact, was true. The days were shortening, autumn was coming on. Cary swore it was the best time to travel, free from crowds and the extremes of heat. Instead I found myself feeling miserable in the world’s most beautiful places.
I tried not to think about Luke. I couldn’t bear imagining him having a life that I wasn’t part of. But it didn’t work, and I missed him. He turned up in all the obvious spots—in the smile of a Giotto Madonna, in every cool, marbled sinew of the David. But he was also there when I least expected it, the chance encounters leaving me shaken. A furtive cherub in a dusky corner of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling had his eyes; his hands, incongruously transplanted to a gelati vendor in the Piazza Navarone, counted out my change. My body yearned for him. Longing washed over me in a strange sort of sexual homesickness, a melancholy lust. It wasn’t the act I missed so much as his physical presence: his hand on my forearm as we talked, his fingers smoothing back my hair. Luke and I had always been touchers, reaching out to make contact with the other regardless of whether we were eating, walking or just in conversation, a reassurance of existence and possession. He still possessed me.
But I missed Cary too. He was right there beside me every hour of the day, but it wasn’t like it would have been a year ago. I didn’t know what he was thinking, what he wanted, whether he was truly moved by what he was seeing or if, like myself, he was just traipsing from one sight to the next to pass the time. He conscientiously took photos, wrote postcards, practiced phrases that he thought he might need but never seemed to use. What was there worth the effort of saying anyway? “That fish was very tasty, thank you.” “Where is the post office?” “My wife is a whore.” At dinner we had little to talk about save for planning the next day’s sightseeing. Every night the question of sex hung like the drapery from the four-poster beds in the palazzos and pensiones Cary had booked, suffocating and heavy. Nothing happened. Each new bed we encountered was a reminder of my infidelity, of all those other beds I had so recklessly climbed into with a man not my husband. Checking into our hotel made me shudder, listening to Cary stammer out his request for a double room. Un letto matrimoniale, the marriage bed. Even the furniture had expectations. We saw breathtaking scenery and ate fabulous food and I had never felt so wretched.
Cary tried; he really did. Tour guide was a natural role for him, our time flawlessly balanced between cultural activities and R&R. The first month was reserved for Italy, with Rome, Florence and Venice segueing seamlessly into France. On our last night we would celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary in Paris. The schedule was as predictable as the diamond he would have bought for me when we got engaged, and I began to feel sick just thinking about the weeks ahead. Some mornings I wondered how I would drum up the enthusiasm for breakfast, never mind days and days of more of the same. Often the only thing that sustained me through those long hours of cathedrals and galleries, the stifling evenings of small talk, was something I had learned from my work: that all pain is erased in the passage of time. Not just by, but in. Ten decades hence it would be as if nothing had ever happened. There would be no relics, no scars. No jug to piece together, no bone fragments to date. Emotions fade and leave no trace. Only the inanimate remains.




CARY


I knew I wasn’t the only person who had ever been hurt, though sometimes it felt that way. I found myself wondering if Kate felt pain too. I knew she used to, but I wasn’t so sure now as she sat opposite me at dinner, beautiful and distant, or listened attentively to whatever I suggested without hearing a thing.
The trip didn’t start well. I wasn’t under any illusions that things were going to get back to normal the moment we left, but I was unprepared for how bad they really were. As soon as the plane took off from Tullamarine, Kate took a sleeping pill and knocked herself out. I have no idea where it even came from. She usually eschewed drugs—the exception, of course, being alcohol—but she swallowed the tablet as blatantly as could be, not even bothering to hide it from me. At least, I think it was a sleeping pill. Maybe she just pretended to sleep. I didn’t trust anything anymore.
I should have realized it was an omen. Kate was sleepwalking through the first half of our time overseas. There was nothing I could complain of directly, no hostility, no sulks—quite the opposite, in fact. She was too conciliatory, too obliging. The spark was gone, and it was that which had attracted me to her in the first place. I loved her more than ever, loved her in the way a drowning man loves the flotsam thrown up around him, but it was interspersed with great surges of anger. I have never been a violent man, but at times I itched to hit her, and hard. Some days my fingers ached from the effort of keeping them uncurled.




CRESSIDA


My sister called early one morning, before I’d even left for work. I guess she didn’t have to worry about waking Luke—I’d told my family that we’d separated and he’d moved out. They had offered sympathy but didn’t ask for details, each no doubt assuming that one of the others was comforting me.
“Hi, Cress, did I wake you?” she asked without waiting for a reply. It was Carolina, my oldest sister, named after the U.S. state where my father had been completing his postdoc at the time of her birth. She hated her unusual moniker, but my parents must have liked it, at least enough to grace their subsequent children with a comparable combination of letters. All our names began with C and ended with A, as if we were different models of the same car. I complained about it to Luke as we lay in bed one night early in our relationship, but he pointed out that there were plenty of C/A choices that could have been worse. Wasn’t I glad that I wasn’t a Clara or a Camilla? A Cora or a Cynthia? For a week or so it became a game for him, to see how many his word-happy brain could come up with. I’d arrive home from work to a note on the kitchen table: Cecelia. Clarissa. Cassandra. Or receive a message on my pager of just one word: Carlotta. It had made me giggle in ward rounds, something I hadn’t done in years.
Now Carolina was using another C-word. Cancer, she was saying. Probably started in his liver, though mets had already been found in his lungs and spine. My father. Six more months. He’d never even been a drinker. Just a glass of wine with dinner and a nip of Scotch later. “All things in moderation,” he had repeated night after night as he settled before the fire and Mother brought the tumbler in. It had been Waterford, of course. As a child I’d been fascinated by the way it had refracted the light, loosing the odd brief rainbow as he lifted it to his lips.
“You’ll have to take care of him. Cressida, are you listening?”
I had hardly said a word, yet still she went on.
“He needs to be nursed. Mother’s got no idea about that sort of thing. Cordelia and I were wondering if you could move back in with them. We’ve got our families to think of, and you …”
The words were left unsaid, but the implication was clear. I had no one, just a too-large house that I’d planned to fill with children and empty spots on the mantelpiece where my wedding photos were once displayed.
“I’m moving to Michigan, though, remember?”
Silence on the other end of the line. She remembered.
“Can’t you put that off? Just a year or so? Cordelia can’t take any leave if she’s to keep tenure, and since David made partner we’ve been so busy I’ve had to hire another nanny. Mother’s counting on you.”
Then why hadn’t she called me herself? Too struck by grief, or shame? The phone felt like a gun pressed to my head.
“I’ve got a lot on my plate too, Carolina,” I said, stalling for time.
“I know,” she replied, sounding almost embarrassed. “But maybe this would be good for you too. You know, for company, someone to talk to.”
As long as it didn’t have to be her, I thought, nursing our father or comforting me. Coming face-to-face with messy human emotions. No wonder she’d gone into dermatology.
The receiver hummed expectantly, but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of an answer. I was worried for my father, annoyed at my fickle sister, angry that my own personal tragedy had been pushed aside so quickly.
“I’m going to Michigan,” I heard myself say. Then I hung up the phone before she could argue.




KATE


We’d been away for almost a month by the time we got to Venice. By that stage Italy was just a blur of paintings and churches, and I hadn’t expected to enjoy it any more than Florence or Rome. But to my great surprise I did. The water softened everything, the lack of traffic was refreshing and the galleries were blessedly small. I loved, too, how compact the city was, how you could find yourself among real Venetians and not just tourists only ten minutes’ walk from St. Mark’s Square, how you never knew if one of the narrow curved streets would open out into a grand piazza or a tiny back canal. Cary hadn’t let me out of his sight in the previous cities, but in Venice he relaxed a little. We were on an island; where could I go?
So when he suggested that we separate for a morning I jumped at the chance. There was a fresco he wanted to track down in a chapel past the Lido. He’d mentioned it the previous day, but must have seen my face fall at the prospect of yet another church. Religion meant nothing to me, the relics and vials that Italian basilicas are stuffed with too reminiscent of my own work to be interesting. Instead, I told him, I would go shopping. It was the first thing that came to mind, but really I just wanted some time alone, a break from feeling his eyes on me every minute of the day, silently and continually gauging whether I was happy or sad, amused or bored.
I felt free that morning, free and happy for the first time in weeks. Everywhere I looked Venice charmed me. A small altar set in the brick wall of a public walkway, lit by flickering electric candles; multicoloured chocolate bars stacked like the Parthenon in a shop window; three nuns on their way to Mass, the wind toying with their veils. For a while I just walked, taking it all in. Then a display of Murano glass caught my eye, glossy and brittle. Perhaps I would go shopping after all. It was the perfect souvenir, providing it survived the journey home.
I was coming out of the shop with my purchases when I was approached by a beggar, a young girl carrying a baby. Normally I would ignore such requests, but I was feeling so unaccustomedly happy and she looked so young that I reached into my purse for change. To my horror, as I handed her the money she stole my watch—one minute her fingers were on my wrist and the next my watch was gone, all without losing her grip on the child. Then she fled, leaving me alone in a deserted backstreet, still proffering my foolish coins.
The watch had been a twenty-first-birthday present from my parents. That said, I can’t say I was overly attached to it. It was expensive, but not particularly unique, and it was insured. All the same I felt like howling. What else could I do? There was no point in going to the police—I didn’t speak Italian and such crime was commonplace. So commonplace that every guidebook I had read had warned me to be careful, not to sightsee alone, to pay no heed to beggars. It was my own fault, and twice as hard to stomach for that. I experienced an instant of overwhelming, unbearable grief. For the watch, I suppose, but also for Luke, my thoughts unbidden and irrational. This would never have happened if he had chosen me.




CARY


I didn’t sleep well in Italy. Maybe it was jet lag, though I’d never suffered from it before. Our hotels were comfortable and quiet, so it couldn’t have been that. Admittedly, though, something about being in a hotel makes me uneasy. How can you fully relax knowing that others have a key to your room?
Of course, there were other things on my mind as well. Had Kate slept with Luke? Really slept, I mean—I had to accept that they’d made love. Somehow, though, sleep was more intimate. A surrender, borne out of trust or abandon or exhaustion. Had his lovemaking worn her out? Had they lain in each other’s arms? What did they talk about afterward? I disciplined myself not to think about it during the day, but at night, when my defenses were down, and the insomnia kicked in …
Kate, however, slept. Every night, without fail, and it bothered me. Was she taking the tablets she had used on the plane? Was she tired from our sightseeing? Could her conscience be that clear? Questions followed one another like conga dancers. At the worst moments, when it was three a.m. and it seemed everyone in the world was asleep except me, I even had my doubts about the whole reconciliation. I didn’t actively wish her pain, but she slept so soundly! I needed to see that she was hurting, or felt some remorse—anything but this anesthesia.
Then again, if she had tossed and turned maybe I would have worried that she was missing Luke, or wondering if staying with me had been the right decision. At least while drugged she wasn’t reconsidering. And no matter how long I lay awake worrying about Kate, each morning would still dawn the same as the one before it, and the one before that. We were together, and that was all that mattered. I told myself that everything else would pass.



LUKE


So I moved. Tim didn’t want me, Cressida didn’t want me and Kate was gone, so I left for Boston. No point in half measures. Moved, in fact, before Cress’s own departure date—just walked into the office, told them I could go, and had a time and a ticket just two weeks later. I’d hoped for New York, but not surprisingly others had had the same idea. Instead, the company offered Boston or Seattle. I opted for the former—I liked that it had history, plus I’d watched my share of Cheers. Then, too, I have to admit that somewhere deep in my subconscious I’d also calculated that it was on the same side of the map as Michigan. Maybe Cress would soften away from the scene of the crime, need me to come over and change a lightbulb or dig her out one day…. It wasn’t until I’d been there a month that I found out she was still back in Melbourne after all. Tim called to tell me, embarrassed for us both. Oh, whatever. Tim and his dingy apartment were behind me now; Cress was trapped in her family home, nursing her dear papa. I should be glad I hadn’t had to get involved in any of that.
Meanwhile Boston was opening up to me like a ripe, juicy mango, like a showgirl at one of the gentlemen’s clubs on Lagrange, near the Common. I visited one once or twice when I was at a loose end, but it only made me feel as dirty as the city’s begrimed sidewalks. I hadn’t realized how clean Australia was when I lived there. Even the Charles River, which sparkled blue from my office window, was littered with beer cans and used condoms up close, its surface smeared with a film of sunscreen and boat grease throughout the warmer months. Then there were the sidewalks themselves, littered with dog droppings and drunks, devoid of anything so quaint as a nature strip. Still, that was the price of living in the city. For all its filth I didn’t miss the suburbs, loved having the bars and the clubs and the restaurants at hand, no lawn to mow, no gutters to clear. Settling in was easy. I walked everywhere, made friends, saw the sights. Work was no more demanding than it had been in Melbourne. And Melbourne seemed a long, long way away.





KATE


The robbery shook me up. My first instinct was to run, to get back to the hotel as quickly as I could and slam the door shut behind me. By the time I was once more in the tourist area, though, I had forced myself to reconsider. Don’t overreact, I told myself, don’t let this beat you. I’d already survived worse than the theft of a watch.
So I went to St. Mark’s, drawn by the safety of the crowds pushing through the carved portals into the building. Cary and I had already visited the church on our first evening in Venice, just before midnight. Mass was being said and the sanctuary was dark, lit only by candles. The floor, shaped by years of water lapping at its underside, dipped and crested under my feet, causing me to reach out for Cary without even thinking about it. Despite my avowed atheism I was enchanted. I’m not sure what I was hoping for when I entered it the second time—probably to be similarly distracted, to be soothed by someone else’s faith. But Venice had been ruined for me that morning, and so was St. Mark’s. Tourists oozed over every surface like an oil spill, obscuring the mosaics, soiling the columns with their greasy hands. The uneven floor that had charmed me on our previous visit now seemed dangerous, unstable—proof that everything was flimsy, even this great house of God. All the gilt and the gold were just garish, overdone as a disco in daylight. I escaped to the balcony, but the famous horses were covered for restoration, every available surface swathed in mesh and spikes in an attempt to deter pigeons.
Leaning against the balustrade I looked down at where my watch had been and felt bereft. Against the rest of my tanned arm the newly exposed skin appeared ashen, shocked. Panic swelled inside me and I gripped the rail hard, suddenly afraid I would cry. Then, through my smarting eyes, I saw Cary in the piazza below. It was crowded and I don’t know how I spotted him—he doesn’t stand out like Luke. Yet there he was, taking a photo for a family on vacation, pulling faces to make the smallest boy smile. Nothing was ever too much trouble for Cary. He would have been happy to be asked. As I looked on, it occurred to me that as smoothly as the thief had removed my watch she could easily have taken my engagement ring too. For the first time in months I lifted my hand to study the blue-green globe intact on my fourth finger, then turned and ran down into the square.




CARY


Things began to improve in Venice, where we made love for the first time since I’d learned of Kate’s affair. My libido had been one of the casualties of that ghastly discovery, though initially that was hardly an issue. But as the months lurched on I began to yearn to touch her again. Not so much for the sex as to connect somehow, to be somewhere that only the two of us existed. By the time we left for Europe, though, we hadn’t even resumed sharing a bed, never mind anything else. Once there, all our rooms were doubles, but something else held me back: the fear of a rebuff, or even worse, a pained acceptance. I couldn’t bear the idea of her enduring me, tolerating my attentions, couldn’t bear that she might fake something she didn’t feel or, conversely, not even bother with that. Every night I would steel myself to approach her, my body homesick for the old silk of her skin, the habit of her mouth; every night she would fall asleep while I was still in the bathroom, or simply turn her back to me before I had even had the chance to frame the question.
In the end it was her decision. It had to be, didn’t it? Kate had always set the agenda. One afternoon she suddenly sought me out in St. Mark’s Square, tugging my sleeve and whispering, “Now.” It wasn’t a command or a question, and I couldn’t say what prompted it. We hadn’t even spent much of that day together—she’d gone shopping while I’d done my own thing. I don’t know, maybe she even missed me. I kissed her then, suddenly as shy as in that feed shed more than seven years before. Something made me leave my eyes open, and the look on her face was that of a child at the local pool who has just stepped gingerly off the high board for the first time ever. She clung to me as if she were falling.
Later, at the hotel, it was good. There were no fireworks, but no shocks either. Our bodies remembered what to do and turned to each other like old friends, delighting in their reacquaintance. Afterward I slept soundly, then awoke feeling revived for the first time in months. The best way to describe it is that it was like eating Vegemite toast again after weeks of rich foreign food and complicated sauces—good and satisfying and familiar. I’ve always loved Vegemite toast.