“Christ,” said Peter again. He still had the magazine reader in his hand. He looked at it, thinking he should throw it across the room, smash it against a wall. After a moment, he simply dropped it on the couch next to him. It bounced silently against the cushion. “When was the last time?” he said.
“Three months ago,” she said, her voice small. “I’ve been trying to work up the courage to tell you. I — I didn’t think I could. I tried twice before, but I just couldn’t do it.”
Peter said nothing. There was no appropriate reaction, no way to deal with it. Nothing. An abyss.
“I — I thought about killing myself,” Cathy said after a very long pause, her voice attenuated like a predawn wind. “Not poison or slitting my wrists, though — nothing that would look like suicide.” She met his eyes briefly. “A car accident. I was going to ram into a wall. That way, you’d still love me. You’d never know what I’d done, and … and you’d remember me with love. I tried. I was all ready to do that, but, when it finally came down to it, I swerved the car.” Tears were running down her cheeks. “I’m a coward,” she said at last.
Silence. Peter tried to make sense of it all. There was no point in asking if she was going to go with Hans. Hans didn’t want a relationship, not a real relationship, not with Cathy or any woman. Hans. Fucking Hans.
“How could you get involved with Hans? Hans of all people?” asked Peter. “You know what he is.”
She looked at the ceiling. “I know,” she said softly. “I know.”
“I’ve always tried to be a good husband,” said Peter. “You know that. I’ve been supportive in every way possible. We talk about everything. There’s no communication problem, no way you can say I don’t listen to you.”
Her voice took on an edge for the first time. “Did you know I’ve been crying myself to sleep for months?”
They had a pair of bedside fans that they used as white-noise generators, drowning out the sounds of traffic from outside, as well as each other’s occasional snoring. “There’s no way I could have known that,” he said. He’d occasionally noticed her shuddering next to him as he fell to sleep. Half-conscious, he’d idly thought she’d been masturbating; he kept that thought to himself.
“I’ve got to think about this,” he said slowly. “I’m not sure what I want to do.”
She nodded.
Peter threw his head back, let out a long, ragged sigh. “Christ, I have to rewrite the entire last six months in my mind. That vacation we took in New Orleans. That was after you and Hans — And that time we borrowed Sarkar’s cottage for the weekend. That was after, too. It’s all different now. All of it. Every mental picture from that time, every happy moment — fake, tainted.”
“I’m sorry,” said Cathy, very softly.
“Sorry?” Peter’s voice was ice. “You might have been sorry if it had happened just once. But three times? Three fucking times?”
Her lips were trembling. “I
Peter sighed again. “I’m going to call Sarkar and see if he’s free for dinner.”
Cathy was silent.
“I don’t want you along. I want to talk to him alone. I’ve got to sort things out.”
She nodded.
CHAPTER 5
Peter had known Sarkar Muhammed since they’d both been teenagers. They’d lived on the same street, although Sarkar had gone to a private school. They had perhaps seemed unlikely prospects for friendship. Sarkar was heavily involved in athletics. Peter was on his school’s yearbook and newspaper staffs. Sarkar was devoutly Muslim. Peter wasn’t devoutly anything. But they’d hit it off shortly after Sarkar’s family moved into the neighborhood. Their senses of humor were similar, they both liked to read Agatha Christie, and they were both experts at Star Trek trivia. Also, of course, Peter didn’t drink, and that made Sarkar happy. Although Sarkar would eat in licensed restaurants, he avoided whenever possible sitting at a table with someone who was imbibing alcohol.
Sarkar had gone to the University of Waterloo to study computer science. Peter had studied biomedical engineering at U of T. They’d kept in touch all through university, swapping E-mail letters over the Internet. After a brief stint in Vancouver, Sarkar had ended up back in Toronto, running his own high-tech startup firm doing expert- systems design. Although Sarkar was married and had three children, Peter and he often dined out together, just the two of them.
Incongruously, dinner was always at Sonny Gotlieb’s, a deli at Bathurst and Lawrence, in the heart of Toronto’s Jewish district. Peter couldn’t stand Pakistani cuisine, despite Sarkar’s valiant efforts to broaden his palate, and Sarkar had to eat where he could get food that adhered to Islamic dietary laws — something which most kosher fare managed to do admirably. And so the two of them sat in their usual booth, surrounded by zaydes and bubbehs chatting away in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian.
After they had ordered, Sarkar asked Peter what was new. “Not much,” said Peter, his tone guarded. “What about you?”
Sarkar spoke for a couple of minutes about a contract his company had received to do expert-systems for the New Democratic Party of Ontario. They’d only been in power once, in the early 1990s, but were always hoping to make a comeback. Before Canadian socialist governments disappeared completely from living memory, they wanted to capture the knowledge of party members who had actually been in power back then.
Peter half listened to this. Ordinarily, he found Sarkar’s work fascinating, but tonight his mind was a million kilometers away. The waiter returned with a pitcher of Diet Coke for them, and a basket of assorted bagels.
Peter wanted to tell Sarkar about what had happened with Cathy. He opened his mouth a couple of times to say something, but always lost his nerve before the words got out. What would Sarkar think of him if he knew? What would he think of Cathy? He thought at first that he wasn’t telling Sarkar because of his religion; Sarkar’s family was prominent in the Toronto Muslim community and Peter knew that they still practiced arranged marriages. But that wasn’t it. He simply couldn’t bring himself to speak aloud to anyone — anyone — about what had happened.
Although he wasn’t really hungry, Peter took a poppy-seed bagel from the basket and spread a little jam on it.
“How is Catherine?” Sarkar asked, helping himself to a rye bagel.
Peter took advantage of having his mouth full to buy a few seconds to think. Finally, he said, “Fine. She’s fine.”
Sarkar nodded, accepting that.
A little later Sarkar asked, “How’s the second weekend in September sound for our trip up north?”
For six years now, Peter and Sarkar had been going away for a weekend of camping in the Kawarthas. “I — I’ll have to get back to you about that,” said Peter.
Sarkar helped himself to another bagel. “Okay.”
Peter loved those camping weekends. He wasn’t much of an outdoorsperson, but he enjoyed seeing the stars. He’d never really agreed to an annual excursion, but with Sarkar anything done twice instantly became an inviolable tradition.
Getting away would be good, thought Peter. Very good.
But—
He couldn’t go.
Not this year. Maybe not ever.
He couldn’t leave Cathy alone.
He couldn’t, because he couldn’t be sure that she would in fact be alone.
Dammit. God damn it.
“I’ll have to get back to you,” Peter said again.
Sarkar smiled. “You said that.”
Peter realized the whole evening would be a disaster if he didn’t get his mind on something else. “How’s that new brain scanner my company built for you working out?” Peter asked.
