‘Nice to have you back, Jeremy.’
‘Do you really mean that?’
‘Yes, it’s good to have you here. I’ve missed you.’ She punched my arm in the way she always had, with more force than she realized, and the slight pain of impact was as familiar and welcome as her ageless face. This, I thought, this is someone I can trust, no matter how much time passes, I will always be able to come back to her, even if we are no longer living together she will listen to my panics and hallucinations and paranoia and know exactly what to say to calm me because there were so many years spent together and so many hours learning the habits of the other person’s mind that so little now needs to be said to find our way back into the territory we shared, and which — it seemed then, in our daughter’s apartment — began to expand once again the parameters of my own sanity, to make that boundary recede into a remote and nearly unreachable distance, because Susan has always, since we first met as graduate students at Princeton, given the impression of being among the sanest people I know, despite her choosing to bring our marriage to an end, which felt at the time like an act of insanity, or at the very least a bout of passionate violence. I had believed up until the time when she began to avert her eyes every time I looked at her that we shared a perfect life, because there was so little hidden between us, or because I believed, wrongly as it turned out, that she knew everything of substance about me and that I knew everything of substance about her.
‘Is there anyone now?’ I asked.
‘No, not now. Not since before the wedding. You know me.’
‘Choosey.’
‘So choosey.’ She shook her head and looked down into the lipstick-rimmed china cup, swirled the dregs, and finished the coffee. ‘And you? Found anyone?’
‘Not now, not anymore.’
‘But there was someone?’
‘At Oxford. A few flings, and one that lasted longer. More serious.’
‘But came to an end.’
‘Yes, I think, although there may still be fallout, of a kind, I don’t know. I’d rather not—’
‘I’m sorry. That must have been—’
‘It’s not your fault. It wasn’t anything.’
‘That sounds like a lie.’
‘Yes, it is. It was something. And I was foolish.’
‘God, you sound so British now.’
‘Don’t say that. I haven’t changed, not fundamentally.’
‘Poor Jer.’
‘Please, Susan, no pity.’
‘What’s wrong? You look—’
‘I—’ At that moment I was about to tell Susan what had happened in the previous few days, believing she might have some insight into the matter, or at least be able to share in my worry, but then I saw Michael Ramsey come across the room towards us and I felt as though I could say nothing for as long as we were that close to each other. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and black sweater so that from behind he might have been mistaken for a particularly hip class of priest. ‘Do you know that man?’ I whispered to Susan, nodding in Ramsey’s direction, hoping she would offer some reassurance that he was a harmless asshole friend of Peter’s, another trust-fund frat kid with too much time on his hands but nothing really out of the ordinary. Instead she shook her head and scowled as if the very look of Mr. Ramsey left a bad taste.
‘I’ve never seen him, but the truth is I don’t know anyone here except you and Peter and Meredith. I think I recognize a few people from the wedding, but no one was very interested in me then and I don’t expect they’d be interested now.’
‘So you don’t know him?’
She shook her head. ‘Who is he?’
‘A friend of Peter’s. I’ve encountered him twice in the last few days, on Saturday, down in the Village, and then coming here. I suppose running into him on the way here isn’t really the same, but it seemed like a weird coincidence.’
‘What, like he was following you?’
‘Sound crazy?’
Susan shrugged. I wished she had not shrugged but had instead told me it was completely crazy to be so paranoid about the friend of our son-in-law, or had at least been more dismissive, less ambivalent, less willing to countenance the possible sanity of my paranoia. It is horrible to begin to imagine that what seems like paranoid delusion might be anything but, that suspecting you are being followed and monitored and manipulated is, in fact, the height of sanity, perhaps the very definition of sanity in today’s world. What is crazy is to imagine we are living private lives, or that a private life is a possibility any longer, and this is not just true for those of us living out our sentence in the developed world, but anyone anywhere, except perhaps those hidden underground, for the satellites we have launched into space and the aircraft, manned and unmanned, patrolling the air above the earth, gaze down upon us, producing finely detailed images of all our lives, watching us, or perhaps you could say we are merely watching ourselves, or at least the governments we allow to remain in power are watching us on our own behalf, as well as the corporations who do so only for their own behalf, even as they insist on the public service they claim to provide, and which we use, often for free, spending nothing to look at satellite images of our neighbors’ own backyards and roof terraces or street views of their front windows and doors, trading this free access to all knowledge of the world for the recording by such corporations of the habits of our activity and making ourselves susceptible not only to the collecting of this data and its potential monetization, that is to say its sale to other entities collecting their own kinds of data about us, but also to be bombarded with advertising that, however much we may struggle against it, inserts its messages deep into our thoughts, influencing us one way or another, even though I insist I am not receptive to advertisements for fast food establishments where I haven’t set foot since I was in my teens but nonetheless, and despite the fact I no longer eat meat, I look at those burgers and have to struggle against the desire their images produce.
‘I don’t think much of anything sounds crazy these days,’ Susan sighed, switching from coffee to champagne. ‘But I don’t see how one of Peter’s friends would have any reason to follow you, unless he actually works for Peter, and Peter is checking up on you on Meredith’s behalf, through this proxy, whoever he is, but that’s kind of a fanciful explanation, don’t you think?’
‘Or the explanation of a fantasist.’
‘You said it, sweetie, not me.’ She patted my arm and gave me such a look of sympathy, a look the like of which I had not seen since our marriage began to unravel, that I felt my eyes water and throat harden. The relief of having such a rapport again, however little we said, allowed me to believe things really might not have changed, or the clock had been reversed and it was still fifteen years ago and we were only stumbling but could see how our relationship was going off the map and we had to correct our course and keep within the known limits, because the wilderness of any relationship is a place both of potential and profound existential risk. Leaving the charted territory between you can either lead to the kinds of adventures that will reinvigorate a dying relationship or, quite the opposite, take a thriving and more or less happy one and nudge it into a place of peril out of which it is impossible to escape, a slough of despond, a bog, a wasteland of quicksand and mire. I had no knowledge of the relationships Susan might have had since the end of our marriage, just as she had not been privy to the details of my affairs, such as they were, and because I had never confided much in Meredith, who at first was too young to be told about matters that would only upset her and later because I was waiting to see if the relationship took hold and was going to be permanent enough to publicize, to make a part of my daughter’s own life, because she had never even known the names of the few women with whom I shared a bed in Oxford I was fairly certain Susan did not know either, possibly could not imagine that I am able to count those foreign relationships on two hands and still have fingers to spare.