Lucinda did not answer them, at least not in the way they wished to be answered. She merely said that it was what she wanted and she was sorry if it hurt them but she had to do what made her happy with what she had left of her own life. Then she smiled and changed the subject to something trivial and pleasant: the flowers she was planting in her window boxes, the outings she took with her friends to go shopping and to the movies. She seemed content.
For his part, Fred was extremely upset and bewildered by Lucinda’s decision to leave; he could offer his children no insight at all into what had happened between him and their mother. After Lucinda moved out, he remained living in the apartment they had shared, surrounded by the belongings they had acquired through their long years together: the many souvenirs from their trips abroad, the photographs of their children, the gifts they’d been given by friends — a hundred daily reminders of his wife’s vanished presence. After his initial shock, he settled into a solitary routine; he would breakfast alone, then spend the morning reading the paper. Then he would go down and swim slowly up and down the pool in the recreation center until he was tired. Then he would have dinner with other people from the retirement community, friends, or sometimes one of his kids. He rarely had to dine alone. Occasionally he would run into his wife in one of the restaurants in the complex or in the community center where classes and lectures and musical events were held. The first few times this happened, she approached and asked him how he was. But since he either glared silently at her or stood up and walked away without a word, she soon stopped trying to be friendly and ignored him, too. This went on for several months. But one day, when he came back from supper, he found a note that had been slid under the door of his apartment. It said: Come and meet me by the lake. It was in Lucinda’s handwriting. He read it over, surprised, and decided to follow its directions. There was an ornamental lake on the grounds of the retirement complex and he put on his coat and went down in the elevator and walked over to it. He saw Lucinda waiting on a bench looking out over the smooth surface of the water. She was half-lit by the lamps that stood on posts alongside the footpath, and something about the way she was sitting made him remember how she had looked when they first met: tall and slender with an upright, formal posture and tidy movements and gestures. He came and sat beside her on the bench. Then he could see that her face was not the face of the young woman he remembered; it was lined, the skin delicate and fissured with veins. She turned to look at him.
She said: “I found the letters.”
For a moment he couldn’t think of what she meant.
“What letters?” he asked. She didn’t reply. Then it came to him.
When he’d been a young man, shortly after he was married, he had developed an infatuation for a woman at the insurance office where he worked. There had been letters exchanged, a brief affair conducted in hotel rooms around town, then contrition and a return to his marriage from which he had never strayed again. Shortly after the affair, his former mistress had moved to another state. Lucinda had never even suspected anything as far as he could tell, and he had not felt compelled to confess to her because the affair had never meant very much to him and was not a sign of any deep unhappiness at home so much as an accident of circumstance and immaturity — in other words, a mistake.
But for some reason he had kept the letters. He did not know why, but he had kept them locked in the top drawer of the desk in his study through all his and Lucinda’s subsequent years together. And sometimes when they were fighting or when they were at odds with each other, he would go into his office and touch the handle of the drawer where the letters were and this would make him feel stronger, separate from his wife, a person with a secret. He felt the need to do this less and less as they aged, until he almost forgot about the letters altogether. Sometimes he would think of them and say to himself that he really should get rid of them, but he never got around to actually throwing them away; it just never seemed that important. In fact, the letters and the affair they chronicled seemed so insignificant that, when they moved the last time and he sold the desk, he had not felt it necessary to take any special steps to hide them. At their age, what did it matter? It was so long ago that he could not remember the woman’s face, only that she’d had dyed red hair and a birthmark down near her collarbone; sometimes he could not even recall her name right away. So he put the letters in a box along with other books and papers; he had not thought of them again until this minute.
“Is that what this is all about?” he asked. “That’s ridiculous.”
Lucinda shrugged. “I knew that would be what you’d say. I knew the children would say that too. That’s why I didn’t tell you until everything was arranged for us to separate.”
Fred persisted: “But don’t you see? It doesn’t matter now — it didn’t even matter at the time. Why didn’t you tell me that was the problem? Are you really that angry at me for something that happened so long ago?” He paused from speaking and an idea came to him: “Are you angry with me because I didn’t tell you? Because I kept the secret all this time?” he asked.
“No,” Lucinda said. “That isn’t it, either. I was unhappy to find that you’d had a love affair, of course. And I was also upset that you kept it secret for so long. But those things I could have forgiven, I think.
“It was when I saw that you had stopped trying to hide the letters from me that I knew you no longer thought that I was a person capable of jealousy. You had stopped thinking about me as a woman and had begun to see me as just an old person who shouldn’t feel the same things as other people. If that is true then what is the point of being married?”
“For companionship,” Fred said. “To keep us from being alone. Because it’s better than nothing.”
Lucinda looked at him but didn’t answer. Then she stood up and smoothed down her skirt with both her hands. Without speaking another word, she turned away and walked along the lakeside path back toward the apartment building where she now lived and she did not turn around to look at him again.
2.
Karen and David were considered by their friends and families to be as close to a perfect couple as any of them had ever known. Both attractive but not so beautiful that it overwhelmed their other qualities, both clever but not unbalanced by a particular extraordinary talent or passionate calling, they met in college in New England, where they were students at a prestigious private school with a reputation for its programs in foreign languages and literature and for its proximity to wonderful ski resorts which the students often visited when they weren’t busy studying. They met in a class on Russian literature in translation. They dated during their final year as undergraduates and found that they had many things in common. They both liked hiking and tennis; they both had studied French and liked to travel. After they graduated they went together to do a year of social-service work in a school in rural Senegal, then moved to New York, where David began law school and Karen got a job in the editorial department of a women’s magazine. With help from their parents they bought an apartment in Manhattan. They married the fall that David took the bar and got his first job working for a big law firm headquartered in midtown.
They lived like this for several years, David working at the law firm and Karen editing articles about interior design and fashion and women who ran nonprofit organizations in countries in the developing world. They had lots of friends in the city who had gone to the same college as them and whom they often met for drinks or dinner and with whom they went away for long weekends at the beach or up to Vermont to ski. They visited with Karen’s parents Lucinda and Fred at their house up in Connecticut often; David’s parents, who lived out in Colorado, did not like New York and did not come to visit much. David worked longer hours than he would have liked, and Karen felt from time to time that her job did not provide enough of an intellectual challenge for her. But generally they considered themselves to be very happy. They talked in a noncommittal way about starting a family in a few years’ time.