Jack Ketcum. Do You Love Your Wife?
“Sometimes I feel like you’re… I don’t know, not really there anymore,” she said. “Like no matter what I do, it wouldn’t make any difference, would it. Know what I mean?”
They were lying in bed. He was tired and a little buzzed from the scotches after work. Greene’s The Power and the Glory lay open on her lap. He was halfway through Stone’s Bay of Souls.
She was right. Stone could obviously rouse himself. He could not.
She was heading to California in a few days, leaving behind the chill of New York and his own chill for a week or so. Her ex-lover beckoned. Perhaps he’d become her lover all over again. Bass hadn’t asked.
“I’m not complaining,” she said. “I’m not criticizing. You know that.”
“I know.”
“And it’s not just you and me. Seems like it’s everything. You used to write. Hell, you used to paint. It’s not like you.”
“It’s like part of me obviously.”
“Not the best part.”
“Well. Maybe not.”
She didn’t say the rest of it. Even after three whole years it’s still her isn’t it. She hadn’t the slightest urge to hurt him with it. She was simply observing and leaving him an opening should he wish to talk. He didn’t. It wasn’t precisely the loss of Annabel that was bothering him these days anyhow. It was what was left of him in her absence. Which seemed to amount to less and less — a subtle yet distinct difference. He continued to feel himself rolling far beneath the whitewater wake of their parting. Way down where the water was still and deep and very thin.
“Confront her,” Gary said.
“Annabel?”
“Yes, Annabel. Who else?”
“After all this time?”
“My point exactly. You’re not getting any younger.”
“It’s easier said than done. She’s married now, remember?”
“So are you and Laura. In your very odd way.”
He was referring to Laura seeing her old lover again. Gary didn’t approve and didn’t mind saying so. It was four in the morning. They were closing The Gates of Hell. It was a hot summer night and the thirtysomething crew had come at them fast and furious despite the nine-dollar well-drinks.
“Confront both of them then, what the hell.”
“I don’t even know him. We met once when she was bartending for all of about five minutes. I’m not sure I’d recognize him if he were sitting right in front of me.”
“So maybe that’s part of the problem. You don’t know the guy. So you don’t know what he offers her. You don’t know why him. I mean, sometimes you meet the other guy and he’s not all that much, you know? Brings her down a notch. Sometimes that’s just what you need.
“You miss her and you think you’re missing this… enormous personality. But you’re only seeing her in the context of the two of you. You’ve got no perspective. You’re in there yourself, churning things up. Messing with the perspective. You think you know somebody but you don’t — not until you either live with them or see them in some whole new situation, like with somebody else. That’s my take on it, anyway. And I still think you’re fucking crazy letting Laura fly away to some clown in California.”
He ignored the last bit. He couldn’t tell Laura what to do and wouldn’t want to anyway. He had to figure that she knew what she was doing.
But he thought it possible that Gary might be on to something regarding Annabel. When she left she’d insisted on cutting him off completely. No phone calls, no e-mails, no letters. A clean break she called it. He remembered wincing at the raw cliche.
At first he didn’t believe she was capable of such draconian thinking — not when it came to them — so he tried anyway. But it became apparent that no confrontation, no follow-up of any sort short of appearing at her apartment was about to happen.
He knew where that little visit would lead. Access to her home was by invitation only. It would only earn him the humiliation of having a door once wide open to him slammed shut in his face.
The very last e-mail she’d sent him was calm and deliberate — informing him that she’d thrown out all her photos of them and suggesting he do the same. That it would speed up the healing process. Yet another cliche but he let it pass. Three months later she’d married a guy she’d known and dated off and on for a long time before they met and that was the last he’d heard of her.
He’d been angry, hurt and surprised over both developments. First the cutoff and then the marriage. But there was to be no court of appeals nor any use howling in the wind. It had seemed intolerable to simply stop, to surrender all communication. For a while Bass damn near hated her.
Yet three years later he felt no anger anymore. He could only wonder where it had gone. Because back then you’ll get over it in time along with making a ckan break of it and speeding up the healing process had seemed the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of useless psychobabble. They disgusted and infuriated him.
But maybe in the long run they’d obtained after all. Victory through inanity.
Because here he was.
Curious in a passive sort of way about what if anything could possibly wake his dead ass up again, ressurect his sense of engagement in Life After Annabel. But the operative word was still passive. Confrontation? Three years ago, in a minute. But now he wasn’t even sure he had the energy anymore. It was possible that the time for explanation and understanding and that most odious of all suspender-and-bowtied words closure had simply come and gone.
He’d never thrown out his own photos.
So he went through them for the first time in a long time over a corned beef on rye for lunch the following day. He felt a brief twinge looking at them. The pinch of a muscle you could stretch a moment later and be rid of.
Still it was something.
He decided to search her out on the Internet. He’d thought of doing that before but resisted it, wary of any further humiliation.
He punched in her maiden name and got nothing. Then tried her married name. What came back was a single photo. A wedding picture two and a half years old — Annabel and her husband, Gerard, standing smiling beneath a canopy of healthy green palm fronds in front of some old New Orleans hotel. Annabel looking lovely in a pale green shoulderless gown, her husband slightly shorter than she and balding, wearing a white silk short-sleeved shirt, lopsided grin and a crisp new panama hat. She gazed not at the camera but into the sky. And that was exactly like her. Annabel was a painter and the sky was her true north, her canvas.
It was the only thing familiar.
The caption read INTRODUCING MR. AND MRS. GERARD POPE AT MARDI GRAS. LOOK WHAT WE WENT AND DID!
The photo was off her husband’s Web site. Bass had no reason to think he even had one. No idea that what he did for a living was write detective novels — fairly successful ones from the look of it. He roamed the site. Book covers and reviews and a bibliography and message board and quotes from Publishers Weekly and Lawrence Block. Not too shabby at all. He had a series character who’d appeared first in six paperback originals and then more recently in two hardcovers, presumably with paperbacks forthcoming.
There was that twinge again.
Possibly the twinge was jealousy. Bass had seriously hoped to write one day himself — the bartending was supposed to have been temporary.
Or perhaps it was the fact that she and Bass had talked about New Orleans together too, while the farthest south they’d ever gotten was Cape May in the spring their very first year.
But more likely he was beginning to experience what Gary had talked about.
Context.
Here she was, Annabel embraced within the photo. Another, different Annabel. Far beyond the scope or influence of that entity which had once been Annabel and Bass together. With a man he barely recognized, to all purposes a total stranger. And in this man’s presence — on that day at least — she was happy.