She doesn’t answer. I press my ear harder to the door and wait. I hear her sigh and move away. A tap is turned on. I wait. My knees are stiff. I feel a coppery taste in my mouth, a hangover in the making.
Finally she speaks, ‘I want you to think very carefully before you ask me the question, Joe.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You want to know if I fucked Dirk? Ask me. But when you do, remember what’s going to die. Trust. Nothing can bring it back, Joe. I want you to understand that.’
The door opens. I step back. Julianne has wrapped a white towelling robe around her and cinched it tightly at the waist. Without meeting my eyes, she walks to the bed and lies down, facing away from me. The mattress springs barely move under her weight.
Her dress is lying on the bathroom floor. I fight the urge to pick it up and run it through my fingers, to rip it into shreds and flush it away.
‘I’m not going to ask,’ I say.
‘But you still think it. You think I’ve been unfaithful.’
‘I’m not sure.’
She falls silent. The sadness is suffocating.
‘It was a joke,’ she whispers. ‘We worked really late to close the deal, tying up the loose ends. I crashed. Exhausted. It was too late to call London so I emailed Eugene with the news. He didn’t get the message until he arrived at the office. He told his secretary to call my hotel and order me a champagne breakfast. She didn’t know what to order so he said: “Order the whole damn menu”.
‘I was asleep. Room service knocked on my door. There were three trolleys of food. I rang the kitchen and said there must be a mistake. They told me my company had ordered me breakfast.
‘Dirk phoned from his room. Eugene had done the same thing to him. I was too tired to eat. I rolled over and went back to sleep.’
My left hand is shaking in my lap. ‘Why didn’t you mention it? I picked you up at the station and you didn’t tell me.’
‘You’d just watched a woman jump off a bridge, Joe.’
‘You could have told me later.’
‘It was Eugene’s idea of a joke. I didn’t think it was very funny. I hate seeing food go to waste.’
My tuxedo feels like a straightjacket. I look around the hotel room with its pseudo luxuries and generic furnishings. It’s the sort of place that Dirk would bring another man’s wife.
‘I saw the way he looked at you… staring at your breasts, putting his hand on your back, sliding it lower. I didn’t imagine that. I didn’t imagine the whispers and innuendos.’
‘I heard them too,’ she replies. ‘And I ignored them.’
‘He bought you lingerie… and that dress.’
‘So what! You think I sleep with men who buy me things. What does that make me, Joe? Is that what you think of me?’
‘No.’
I sit on the bed next to her. She seems to flinch and move further away. The alcohol has hit my head, which is pounding. Through the open bathroom door, I barely recognise my own reflection.
Julianne speaks.
‘Everyone knows Dirk is a sleaze. You should hear the jokes in the secretarial pool. The man puts his business card in the women’s toilets like he’s touting for clients. Eugene’s secretary, Sally, called his bluff in the summer. In the middle of the office she unzipped Dirk’s fly, grabbed his penis and said, “Is that all you’ve got? For someone who talks about it so much, Dirk, I thought you’d have something more substantial to back it up.” You should have seen Dirk. I thought he’d swallowed his tongue.’
Devoid of emotion, her voice is a monotone, unable to raise itself an octave above disappointment or sadness.
‘In the old days you would never have let a man get away with touching you like Dirk did tonight.’
‘In the old days I didn’t need this job.’
‘He wants people to think he’s sleeping with you.’
‘Which is only a problem if people believe him.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me about him?’
‘I did. You were never listening. Every time I mention work, you turn off. You don’t care, Joe. My career isn’t important to you.’
I want to deny it. I want to accuse her of changing the subject and trying to deflect blame.
‘You think I choose to be away from you and the girls?’ she says. ‘Every night I’m away, I go to bed thinking about you. I wake up thinking about you. The only reason I don’t think about you all the time is that I have a job to do. I have to work. We decided that. We chose to move out of London for the sake of the girls and for your health.’
I’m about to argue but Julianne hasn’t finished.
‘You don’t know hard it is… being away from home.’ She says.’ Missing things. Calling and finding out that Emma has learned a skip or hop on one leg or to ride her tricycle. Finding out that Charlie has had her first period or is being bullied at school. But do you know what hurts the most? When Emma fell over the other day, when she was hurt and scared, she called for you. She wanted your words, your hugs. What sort of mother can’t comfort her own child?’
‘You’re being too hard on yourself.’ I say, reaching across the bed to hold her. She shrugs my hands away. I have lost that privilege. I must gain it back. I’m normally so good with words, but now I can’t think of anything to free her from her disappointment in me, to win her heart, to be her boy.
Countless times I told myself there had to be an innocent explanation for the hotel receipt and the lingerie and the phone calls, but instead of believing this, I spent weeks trying to prove Julianne’s guilt.
I stand, swaying. The curtains are open. A cold stream of headlights is edging along Kensington High Street. Above the opposite rooftops I see the glowing dome of the Royal Albert Hall.
Julianne whispers, ‘I don’t know you any more, Joe. You’re sad. You’re so, so sad. And you carry it around with you or it hangs over you like a cloud, infecting everyone around you.’
‘I’m not sad.’
‘You are. You worry about your disease. You worry about me. You worry about the girls. That’s why you’re sad. You think you’re the same man, Joe, but it’s not true. You don’t trust people any more. You don’t warm to them or go out of your way to meet them. You don’t have any friends.’
‘Yes I do. What about Ruiz?’
‘The man who once arrested you for murder.’
‘Jock, then.’
‘Jock wants to sleep with me.’
‘Every man I know wants to sleep with you.’
She turns and gives me a look of pity.
‘For such a clever man, how do you manage to be so stupid and self-absorbed? I’ve seen what you do, Joe. I’ve seen how you study yourself every day, looking for signs, imagining them. You want to blame someone for your Parkinson’s, but there’s nobody to blame. It just happened.’
I have to defend myself.
‘I am the same man. You’re the one who looks at me differently. I don’t make you laugh because when you look at me, you see this disease. And you’re the one who’s distant and distracted. You’re always thinking about work or London. Even when you are at home, your mind is somewhere else.’
Julianne snaps back, ‘Try psychoanalysing yourself, Joe. When did you last truly laugh? Laugh until your stomach hurt and you got tears in your eyes.’
‘What sort of question is that?’
‘You’re terrified of embarrassing yourself. You panic about falling over in public or drawing attention to yourself but you don’t mind embarrassing me. What you did tonight- in front of my friendsI’ve never been so ashamed… I… I…’ She can’t think of the words. She starts again.
‘I know you’re clever, Joe. I know you can read these people; you can rip apart their psyches and target their weaknesses, but these are good people- even Dirk- and they don’t deserve to be ridiculed and humiliated.’
