They are behind me, watching me, waiting for me to make a mistake.
So far I have made no mistakes.
What, one might well ask, has become of my first ex-wife? Why, if the other two choose to pursue me, doesn’t she? Is it simply that, time having passed, she neither cares for me nor despises me as do my two more recent wives? Perhaps she is merely indifferent?
Until a few weeks ago, it had been years since I had word from a single one of my trinity of ex-wives. I was living, alone and isolated, in peace near the sea — white stone, blinding sun — when I received a letter from my first ex-wife. This letter was written in a hand that, although admittedly familiar, did not seem her hand. Had my first ex-wife not burnt all my possessions upon leaving me — believing as she did for no sane reason that I was having an affair with the woman who would become my second wife (and, later still, my second ex-wife) — I could have compared her handwriting to that found in the letter, which struck me as the work of a decidedly male hand. My first ex-wife had many faults, but she was by no stretch of the imagination manly in either person or voice. To see her name signed in a masculine script surprised me. No, to find an ex-wife who could be described, in the mildest of ways, as masculine, one would have to look to my third and most recent ex-wife, but even she wrote in only a marginally masculine hand, what one might call a hermaphroditic hand. But no, as to my first ex-wife, no. True, it was her name scrawled at the letter’s end. True, many of the letter’s turns of phrase were, if not definitively her own, not outside her habits of speech as I remembered them, but no, the hand, no: either this was not a letter from my first ex-wife or this was a letter dictated by her to an amanuensis.
As to the contents of the letter, those are hardly important. In any case now, having driven for so long, I can recall only a smattering of details: expressions of affection (perhaps mere formalities) slowly decaying into veiled insults and accusations. This was perhaps not so surprising a combination to find in a letter from one ex-spouse to another. What surprised me was that she had chosen to write at all. For a decade, I had had only silence from her. At the divorce proceedings — held with her manacled and wearing prison garb because of her incendiary spirit and the jail time it had earned her — she had voiced not a solitary word, nor had a word for me escaped her during the entire course of her prison sentence, nor indeed after her release. But now, suddenly, ten wordless years later, she posts an epistolary outpouring crammed with affection and hatred? And not in her own hand but in the hand of another, a hand decidedly male?
There was, as well, wedged between blandishments and attacks, a puzzling request; viz., that I stop persecuting her. Persecuting her? I wondered. I had had no contact with her for more than a decade. And, despite its conflagratory difficulties, I looked back on our time together, our marriage together, with a certain melancholy fondness. I had nothing but the kindest of feelings toward her, had no desire to cause her any pain or discomfort whatsoever. Just the opposite. Yet here was a letter whose deep, low voice told me, Stop persecuting me and leave me alone. It was such a baffling accusation, considering the facts, that I could read her words only against themselves, as a statement of an unconscious desire to be persecuted by me, as an appeal to see me again. This, coupled with the maleness of the handwriting, was enough to propel me immediately in search of her.
Yet now, pursued by my second ex-wife, unless it be my third ex-wife after all, I wonder if I read her veiled request correctly. True, were it only a question of one ex-wife operating in a vacuum, I would have been, undoubtedly, correct, but when you add a second and then a third ex-wife into the equation, particularly when one or both of the latter pair seem to be pursuing you, the psychology at work becomes a decidedly murky affair. People clustered in twos or threes or fours, I have come to believe, both constitute creatures in and of themselves and, together as tandems or triunes or packs, form another sort of myriad-minded creature whose actions are far from predictable. Thus, I find myself exponentially more shaken thinking that I might be simultaneously pursued by a pair of ex-wives than I would knowing myself pursued by either one alone, and much more shaken by the combination of my first ex-wife with the male hand in which her letter is inscribed — which suggests a second, shadowy presence — than I would be by the same letter inscribed in her own feminine hand.
But I am losing myself. I intended merely to say that once I had realized I was being pursued, I began to realize the situation was perhaps more complicated than I had initially supposed. Initially, I merely thought that perhaps my first ex-wife was being persecuted in my name but by some other party, or else that she had simply gone insane.
I set out to find my ex-wife, planning to question her face-to-face about the letter and to determine if it had actually been from her and, if so, to discover either who had transcribed the letter for her or how it was that her hand had become so masculine since I had last seen her. My intentions were, it should be clear, innocent. I simply wanted to verify, clarify, confirm.
I had no expectation of a long journey. I packed only a small overnight bag, which I placed on the seat beside me, where it still remains. I drove the car along a winding road up from the sea and into a series of rocky hills described in the better guidebooks as picturesque, twisting and turning through them until they gave way to mountains. I slid from one nation into another, and from there soon passed into a third. I passed through a squalid metropolis, made a steep ascent to the alpine town inscribed as the return address on my first ex-wife’s envelope. I spent the night there, in a strangely dreamless sleep at a small makeshift guesthouse, with no guest register and a shared bathroom, and woke up refreshed. From there it was easy work, after deploying a few well-placed questions gleaned from a pocket Berlitz, to follow a narrow gravel road edging across the mountainside perhaps thirty meters above the town itself, a road that dead-ended at my first ex-wife’s residence.
In the town I had bought, I will admit, flowers — but not from any intention to renew our intimacy. No, these were simply a peace offering, a device to render her more tractable, to forestall any burning. I climbed out of the car, carrying the flowers in their cone of paper, and approached the front door. There was no bell. I knocked, received no response. I knocked again. Still receiving no reply, I depressed the poignet. It levered down gently and the door slid open. I saw no reason not to enter.
Inside, the house was brightly lit, a generator slowly humming just behind a rear wall. Beside the sink was a bucket of silty water and into this I placed the flowers. The cone of paper I removed and smoothed flat, intending to use it to write a note, and this I would have done had I not noticed, just then, the line of blood trailing from the fireplace grate to the bedroom door. I approached it and prodded it with the tip of my shoe. It was mostly dry, but somehow that did not reassure me.
At times one wants to assert one’s connection to one’s ex-wives, at other times one reminds oneself they are ex-wives for good reason.
I am by inclination a curious man but have learned through the years, plagued by three wives in turn, to squelch this curiosity. Perhaps my first ex-wife was lying dying on the other side of the door, or perhaps she was already dead. Perhaps this was not her blood at all but the blood of another and she was there beside the cold corpse of the man (assuming it was a man) she had killed. Perhaps it was the same man who had written the letter. To find out, all I had to do was step across the room, perhaps four modest strides in all, and open the bedroom door.