Yes, Infidelities James would have had more luck if he’d advertised services that were more along these lines, that would have truly been bespoke (the advertisement was trying to give the impression of being upscale and sophisticated but in fact merely sounded suburban, essentially tawdry). Then Christopher might have stopped to pick up the telephone and say, Hello, I need help with my infidelities, more specifically, I need help managing them, they are becoming a bit of a headache. And then Infidelities James would have made a series of helpful suggestions or proposals, things that would smooth the potentially rough course of faithlessness, whether it was a second mobile phone or well-timed spousal gifts.
Above all, friendly and discreet as a priest, he would have condoned Christopher’s faithlessness. And I knew then that this was the real reason Christopher had stopped to circle the advertisement. It didn’t require a telephone call or a conversation with James, the mere fact of his advertisement and its brazen message was enough—there were others doing it, there were even people who wished to be unfaithful but did not know how. Christopher must have been reassured, he must have thought it was entirely natural, this compulsion of his, which had gone beyond pleasure and into something far more terrible. Toward the end, he had become like Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes, forced to dance, past pleasure or joy and into the realm of death.
How many had there been, exactly? Christopher never could keep his cock in his pants. I knew about three, for all our sakes I had pretended to myself and to him that it was only three, that it was a finite number. Three was bad enough for such a short marriage, three was infidelities, multiple affairs rather than an affair or two. And yet I had always known there had been others, possibly many others, I don’t blame you, I know my son, I’m not sure that any woman would have been able to keep him from straying. Isabella had seen his faithlessness as a kind of cancer, for which the prognosis was always bad.
And which I had not succeeded in curing—I understood this now, and I understood that the coldness of her grief, the inexplicable and matter-of-fact vitriol she directed toward her son, would eventually find its true target. I pushed the paper away. Eventually Isabella would come to blame me, she was blaming me now, even if she didn’t know it yet. My heart contracted—I could not think of anything to say in my defense. Christopher was dead, and I was living with another man, I had left him to his faithlessness—yes, in the end, I had been the one to do the leaving.
9.
Was that why, in the end, I did not tell Isabella and Mark that Christopher and I had separated—because of her question, concealed as a statement—he died loved—and because of the guilt, the obvious guilt of the living, which does not necessarily fade with time as promised? Even as early as that first visit to the police station, I already knew that I would not tell Isabella, that the moment to tell her would come and go, and I would not speak.
After I identified the body and was told I was free to go, when I stepped out of the police station, Stefano was waiting. The officer had ordered a car to take me back to the hotel. Stefano ran to open the car door, his face growing flushed, as if at the sight of me. When I reached the car he stopped and then gripped my hand in both of his, murmuring some words of condolence that I barely heard, perhaps I heard about your husband or Such terrible news, finally he lowered his head and said only that he was very sorry.
I nodded, I saw that he was in a strange position, caught between genuine sympathy—we were not friends, we had only spent a few hours together, and yet he was essentially empathetic, too human not to be able to imagine what I might be feeling—and some emotion that was more compromised, an expression of relief if not triumph. I did not yet suspect Stefano of greeting Christopher’s death with happiness, I believed him to be a sensitive man, and the contemplation of death in anything but the abstract is difficult even for those who are not terribly sensitive.
And yet it was a solution of sorts, even in my stunned state I was able to see this, perhaps I even went so far as to think, At least someone will have benefited from this, there were upsides and downsides to everything, even the most extraordinary and unhappy events. I sat in the back of the car, I felt at once that Stefano was nervous, he did not know what to say, how to behave around the recently bereaved, unlike his great-aunt, he had no experience in the matter. I don’t know what to say, I am shocked, he said.
I nodded, there was nothing to say in response to his comment, mostly I wished that he would stop talking. But he didn’t. I happened to drive by the place where they found his body, he continued, I was working, the man I was driving was in a hurry, that road is the fastest route between the two villages. As he spoke, I covered my face with my hands. I had a headache, my face was hot. I don’t know where the body was found, I said, they didn’t tell me.