A Separation(27)

She was younger than I had initially thought, perhaps as young as nineteen or twenty, a mere child, with a child’s audacity. The waiter brought our main courses, she had ordered the steak, the most expensive entrée on the menu, I suppose once I had invited her to dine with me, she had thought she ought to make the most of it.

How old are you? I asked abruptly.

Twenty. My birthday was in August.

She said this with some pride, perhaps because twenty was a milestone, you were no longer a teenager once you reached that age. Or perhaps the pride came from the fact that she was so much younger than me, she must have been aware of what that was worth.

And Christopher, he was more than twice her age. Of course, at twenty girls do not care so much about age, a woman of thirty would think twice before embarking on an affair with a man more than two decades older, should the affair develop into something more serious—and the odds of a woman wishing for it to become something serious grew exponentially as she aged—then a gap of two decades would become critical, nobody wanted to marry a man who would soon be at death’s door.

But death is still abstract when you are twenty. The age difference would have meant nothing to Maria, this was possibly why men were attracted to women who were so much younger than they were. They made them feel young not because of their own youthful bodies, but because they were incapable of perceiving the meaning of their lovers’ aging flesh. The body of a forty-or even fifty-year-old man is not always so dramatically different from the body of a twenty-five-year-old—for this, we have the wonders of diet and personal trainers to thank—but the differences are nonetheless there, it is only that a woman needs to be of a certain age in order to understand their true meaning.

And for this understanding, I thought, Maria was too young. She chewed on her steak and then, almost reluctantly, began to ask me questions about Christopher. I realized that this was what she had sat down to do—to ask me about my husband, to learn more about the man who had captured both her hope and affections. But I also saw that it was difficult for her, in doing so she was ceding ground to me as his wife, anything I said, even the fact that I could say anything at all, had the potential to devalue her experience of the man, which it was evident she wanted to safeguard.

And yet she needed to talk about him—for example, she was filled with the desire to say his name, I saw that it gave her a thrill, just pronouncing the three syllables, Chris, to, pher, which she did again and again, a sign that she was truly infatuated, when you are infatuated even speaking the name of the loved one is excitement enough. It had also been like that with me once, I had mentioned Christopher excessively in conversation, expounding on his views, his small acts and opinions (which at the time I had thought highly individualistic, I was a fool), it must have been very tedious for those around me.

And it was now no different with Maria. It was only her desire for more—of him, I think—that had led her to seek me out, she wanted to know everything about him, no detail could be too mundane, even if the source from which she acquired this information was inherently troubling. She was willing to pay the price for that information. But at the same time, her desire was fragile, too specific, she did not want to know anything that might disrupt the fantasy she had created in her head. She began asking questions, very basic ones, where had Christopher grown up, did he have siblings, did he like animals, dogs, for example, did he like dogs, he was always carrying books, did he really enjoy reading so much?

Her questions were careful to exclude the life we had together—she never asked, for example, how we had met, where we lived, or if we had children, that was a dead zone as far as she was concerned—the entire exercise had been devised in order to allow her to elaborate on the image she already had of Christopher. Toward whom she appeared to feel no anger, despite the fact that he had upset her, reduced her to tears. I became more and more convinced that nothing concrete had taken place between them, she seemed to me more like a love-struck teenager than a scorned lover, a teenager was very nearly what she was.

But of course, it is possible to be both. We finished our dishes—although she did much of the talking, often talking over my responses to the very questions she was so keen to ask, she had eaten her steak with impressive rapidity, I was much slower to eat my plate of pasta. My answers were not especially illuminating, I was reluctant to say anything that might hurt her, she was a child after all. And although what she wanted was information about Christopher, the more I assented to her demand, the greater the reality of our marriage, the more painful the evidence of its history.

At one point she stayed her barrage of questions in order to say, with a nod at my plate, The pasta is not good here, you should have ordered something simple, they try to cook in the Italian way but it is not their strength, they don’t do it well. I nodded, she spoke in an admonishing tone of voice, doing so appeared to give her some small pleasure, I didn’t think it worth saying that I would have thought a salad and a plate of pasta were simple enough, as she was obviously correct and had managed to eat much better than I had, although, I couldn’t help but notice, at far greater expense.

I stood up without asking if she would like coffee or a dessert. It was childish but I had taken umbrage, it was something about the peremptory manner in which she had criticized my order—advice that came too late, her words would have been more useful at the outset, when we had been ordering our food for example. Of course, I knew even then that it wasn’t her order or the meal that I was going to pay for. This was all just a cipher for another infraction, whether she had intended to or not she had flaunted what was, at the very least, a flirtation between her and my husband, and she had done it as though I had no right to feel in any way nonplussed.