Adultery(9)

I ask him to tell me more about himself, about his personal life. I’m not here as a journalist, I say, but as a woman and a former girlfriend.

I stress the word “woman.”

“I don’t have a personal life,” he says. “I can’t, unfortunately. I’ve chosen a career that has transformed me into an automaton. Everything I say is scrutinized, questioned, published.”

This isn’t quite true, but I find his sincerity disarming. I know that he’s mostly seeing how the land lies, that he wants to know precisely where he’s putting his feet and how far he can go. He suggests that he is “unhappily married,” and goes into an exhaustive explanation of how powerful he is, just like all men of a certain age once they’ve hit the wine.

“In the last two years I’ve had a few months of happiness, a few of difficulties, but most are just a matter of hanging in there and trying to please everyone in order to be reelected. I’ve had to give up everything that I used to enjoy—like going dancing with you, for example. Or listening to music for hours, smoking, or doing anything that other people deem to be wrong.” That’s absurd! No one cares about his personal life.

“Perhaps it’s the return of Saturn. Every twenty-nine years the planet returns to the same point in the sky that it occupied at the moment of our birth.”

The return of Saturn?

He realizes that he’s said more than he should, and suggests that it might be best if we went back to work.

No, my Saturn return has already happened. I need to know exactly what it means. He gives me a lesson in astrology: Saturn takes twenty-nine years to return to the point in the sky where it was at the moment we were born. Until that happens, everything seems possible, our dreams can come true, and any walls hemming us in can still be broken down. When Saturn completes this cycle, it puts an end to any romanticism. Choices become definitive and it’s nearly impossible to change direction.

“I’m not an expert, of course, but my next chance will only come when I’m fifty-eight and Saturn returns again. Although, if Saturn is telling me it’s no longer possible to choose another path, why, then, did you invite me to lunch?”

We’ve been talking now for almost an hour.

“Are you happy?” he asks suddenly.

What?

“There’s something in your eyes, a sadness I find inexplicable in a pretty woman like you with a nice husband and a good job. It’s like seeing a reflection of my own eyes. I’ll ask you again: Are you happy?”

In this country where I was born and raised, and where I’m now raising my own children, no one asks that kind of question. Happiness is not something that can be precisely measured, discussed in plebiscites, or analyzed by specialists. We don’t even ask what kind of car someone drives, let alone something so personal and impossible to define.

“There’s no need to answer. Your silence says it all.”

No, my silence doesn’t say it all. It isn’t an answer. It merely reflects my surprise and confusion.

“I’m not happy,” he says. “I have everything a man could dream of, but I’m not happy.”

Has someone put something in the water? Are they trying to destroy my country with a chemical weapon designed to create a sense of profound frustration? Why is it that everyone I talk to feels the same?

So far I haven’t said anything. But tormented souls have this incredible ability to recognize and approach one another, thus compounding their grief.

Why hadn’t I noticed this in him? Why did I see only the superficial way he talked about politics or the pedantic way he tasted the wine?

The return of Saturn. Opposition. Unhappiness. Things I never expected to hear Jacob K?nig say.

At that precise moment—it’s 1:55 p.m., according to my watch—I fall in love with him all over again. No one, not even my marvelous husband, has ever asked if I’m happy. Perhaps in my childhood, my parents and my grandparents asked that question, but no one has since.

“Shall we meet again?”

I no longer see a boyfriend from my adolescence sitting in front of me, but an abyss that I’m blithely walking toward, an abyss from which I have no desire to escape. The thought flashes through my mind that my sleepless nights are about to become even more unbearable now that I really do have a problem: a heart in love.

The red lights in my mind start to flash.

I tell myself: You’re a fool, he just wants to get you into bed. He doesn’t care about your happiness.