She scowled at me like a cat warning a dog to stay away. I pressed my outstretched fingertips together. “Why?”
It was a genuine question. I was genuinely perplexed. Why would anybody not want this beautiful, divine woman?
Jenny shook her head and took a long slurp of her drink. She’d clearly been asking herself the same question. Jenny shrugged her shoulders. “I met him in his car, like some sort of secret meeting. Yet, we're not having an affair any more, are we? I told him it had been weeks since I told you about our affair, that you’d moved out, and so wasn’t it time we started talking about what happened next? He asked what I meant. I said, you know, with us. He again said he didn’t know what I meant. Felt like I was talking a different fucking language. He said there had never been an ‘us’. Hadn't they just had a fling? Wasn't that why it had been so exciting? He’d never said it was anything else, anything more serious.”
The mug in Jenny's hand shook and I remember thinking – despite myself, because I really didn’t want to think it, not at that precise moment – that she might spill coffee over the pristine carpet.
“You know what the worst part was?” she asked, continuing to glance around the room. I think she was asking herself the question as much as me. “We just sat in his car in silence. The rain was bouncing off his windscreen. He just kept looking at me. He didn’t say anything, but he knew what he was thinking: what you still doing here? I opened the door and got out of the car without even saying goodbye.”
I hated this man – this doctor – right then infinitely more than when Jenny had told me about their affair. Sure, he had destroyed our life together, but what had he done it for? For nothing. And he had abused my dear, wonderful wife. Not physically. No, this was much worse. It would have been more bearable had he dislocated her collar bone or blackened her eyes. He had destroyed her emotionally.
“Where does he live?” I asked, jumping up from the seat.
This was not mere bravado or pumped-up male pride; right at that moment I genuinely wanted to find this man and I wanted to kill him. It had been a long time since I had felt this way about anybody. Since him.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
The words were coming from her mouth, but it was like her soul was someplace else. “I don’t know,” she repeated. “I never went there. He never offered, and I never asked. We always met in different places. There was no routine. He was always mysterious. It was one of the things I liked. Made it exciting.”
“Exciting?”
I paced up and down the room. Felt like punching my fist through the wall. Felt like saying a whole number of things to Jenny, none of them good. But I didn’t. Instead, I let the tension cool down. I made Jenny another drink, and then another. Jenny was drained of energy and I offered her my bed. Not with me in it. I slept on the sofa. In the morning, she left.
We don't tend to talk about the reason our marriage fell apart. It isn't exactly going to end well, is it? We only do so when I can no longer stop the resentment that simmers inside me from boiling over. Only occasionally does it erupt.
“You know I don’t know why, Marcus,” Jenny replies now. “I'd tell you if I knew. You know I ask myself that question every single fucking day when I wake up on my own, without my husband next to me. I ask myself what possessed me to destroy the idyllic life we had together. And I've never - ever - found a satisfactory answer.”
I know she doesn’t know. The girl who sat cross-legged on the floor of my flat that night was bewildered and broken. Now, I squeeze her hand. She smiles. I’m sorry I said anything. As far as I’m aware the matter is closed.
“I guess his mind worked in a different way from me,” Jenny says. I didn’t expect her to keep the subject open, to pursue it any further. “It felt like he looked at the world in a different way, through different eyes. I’ve wondered whether it has anything to do with his education and training. You know; as a psychiatrist I imagine you view the world differently...”
I think I misheard her for a moment. “A psychiatrist?”
“Yes,” Jenny says. “You know. He was a psychiatrist.”
“You said he was a doctor.”
“He is a doctor.”
“You never said he was a psychiatrist...”
Jenny looks at me nonplussed. “I didn’t?” she says. “I assumed I did. To be fair, it isn’t something we talk about much, is it, Marcus?”
We sit in silence, the hot sun burning our reddened, peeling shoulders.
DAY TWENTY-SIX 26TH JUNE 2018
I’ve been fighting against routine for the last five years or so, viewed it as an enemy ever since I split with Jenny, since I began my latest life; now I hang on to it for dear life. I long for some sense of normality.
It seems bizarre to me that, what with everything going on, I should strive to make the appointment with Richard. Cross that. A week ago, it would have made perfect sense. Then I would have clung to his reassurance like a monkey to a tree, fed off his words. But that was before our last session. Last time I met with Richard he destroyed everything we'd created together over the last ten years or so. He made it all a lie, just like Jenny did with our marriage. Maybe that is why I long to see him? Perhaps
