The Anomaly(62)

No sound from the other side.

I didn’t know what Ken thought I was going to be able to find to say. There didn’t seem to be anything worth articulating. But I decided I may as well think aloud, try to talk myself through the story, as I had often done years ago: pacing around the study in the house Kristy and I shared, walking miles along the beach promenade, wandering the backstreets of Santa Monica and Venice Beach—talking aloud, coaxing a movie plot to emerge by forcing it to manifest in words.

“You’re not dumb, so I’m going to flat-out admit that Ken thinks I might be able to find something to say that’ll change your behavior. I think that’s unlikely. You’re locked on course. The only question is what that course is. And why you won’t simply tell us. You said you weren’t allowed. But if we’re never going to make it out of here, who cares what we know? Who’s going to find out? Corpses keep secrets very well.”

I thought about that for a moment. “But there’s you, I suppose. You’d know you’d done something you weren’t supposed to. Which could imply that you’re worried someone would get that information out of you sooner or later. So…fear of future punishment is a possibility. Or else you know yourself well enough to understand that guilt would be bad for you. That it would eat away. Undermine whatever you’d achieved here, even if it stayed your dirty little secret forever. Yeah. I think that’s it. And God knows, I get that.”

There was no sound from up the corridor, nor any sign of light. I guessed the others were still exploring the passages, being thorough. And slow, probably, moving sluggishly, supporting themselves with a hand on the wall, blinking in the darkness. Either that or they’d all been sliced into slivers by some huge swinging ax-knife and I was here all alone, talking to a woman who wasn’t even there.

“I broke my life in half that way,” I said. “By not wanting to have a secret. Kristy…turned out she was having an affair.”

Only when the words were out of my mouth did I realize how seldom I’d articulated the fact out loud. To Ken, yes. To a couple of mutual friends who needed an explanation for why Kristy + Nolan suddenly wasn’t a thing anymore. To most, I just shrugged and said, you know, shit happens.

“I’m not even sure it was that big a deal. I mean, of course it’s something of a deal. You’re married to someone and they become intimate with someone behind your back, that’s a deal. But a big deal, once you get past the betrayal and hurt pride and all that crap? Depends. Tying two people together for life is a hell of an ask. People change, inevitably. Even if most of the time you walk in the same direction, there’ll be times when one of you wanders off the path. I wouldn’t even have known about it if a friend of hers hadn’t emailed me. And after I got that note…I could have let it go. Trusted that it was part of life’s mysterious process. I’m not dumb. I could guess what the affair involved. Afternoons in motels. A feeling of connection and engagement and gleeful surprise. The kind of guilt that bonds. Sex that felt fresh and new and real. The promise of different horizons, however illusory. The fever dream of novelty. Secrets. Liking the smell of someone’s skin.

“So there would be all that, of course. But for all I knew…Well, the guy she was seeing was kind of a friend of mine. He’s smart, funny, good-looking. He’s talented and committed. He gives a shit about the environment. For all I knew, he could actually have been the one for her, right? In the grand scheme of things I could just have been a step on Kristy’s path to him. The old love isn’t necessarily better or more important or real than the new one. He could have been where she was destined to be. Who knows?

“So I didn’t know what it meant, and that’s where uncertainty kills you. I could have chosen to hope it’d all turn out okay. I wanted to believe that. But I didn’t know. I couldn’t be sure this was merely a tough stretch of road, and not the end of it. The guy I am, two years later…Now, I would have the sense to let the thing run its course and see what happened. We loved each other. I’m pretty sure that would have won in the end. And if it didn’t, well, that would have proved or at least suggested we didn’t love each other enough anymore, which would have been information we could have done something with. But instead…instead, one night, after a couple too many drinks, I stopped by her friend’s house.

“My only intention was to double-check the source. Make sure that she was sure. And she let me in and we talked, and yes, she was certain, and a couple things she said convinced me, too. Things I should have noticed myself, but…My mind was always on some script or other, and after a while you just take things for granted. And I know what you’re thinking—an hour later, me and the friend are having sex on the couch, right? But no. We had a couple glasses of wine, agreed that life sucks sometimes, and I got a cab home.

“Couple days later over dinner I asked Kristy if there was something going on. She froze. She asked why I was asking. I said I had a weird feeling, had picked up on a couple things. She admitted to the affair.

“There was a lot of talking that night, and straight through to the next day. The kind of talking that makes you think, when you’re done, that you don’t ever want to talk again. But over the next weeks we started to make headway.

“Except, and this is the dumb fucking thing, the fact that I’d lied was picking at me. Not because I’m an angel. I’ve lied before and survived. It was more that the sole thing I had to feel good about in the situation was inhabiting the moral high ground. She was the bad guy here, and I was the good. But the tiny little lie I’d told undermined that, and so it pecked at me. If we were going to get to the other side of this thing, I thought, then everything needed to be out in the open. I was asking her, all the time, to be honest. But I wasn’t being honest. And so I told her. And that’s what fucked us up.”