A Separation

8.

Among Christopher’s things was an old copy of the London Review of Books, from June of that year. This was hardly surprising, back issues of this and other publications accumulated everywhere in our apartment, the bathroom was overflowing with issues that were as old as a year. That particular issue of the London Review had several interesting articles, which I think Christopher would have enjoyed and no doubt had read—he had brought the issue all the way to Greece, perhaps he had even read it on the plane.

In general, he had with him a considerable array of reading material, a suitcase full of books, journals, notebooks, papers. He must have been intending to stay in Greece for some time, perhaps he genuinely had hoped to finish his book during this trip. At that point, I had not yet gone into his computer, opening the files, looking through documents, checking to see if there was anything that might be publishable, at the behest of his agent and editor and Isabella too—she was, of course, to be involved in all of this. I had been reluctant, postponing the task, from the start I had suspected that it would be an unsettling experience, like prying into the mind, the private thoughts of the dead.

When I finally did sit down in front of the machine—a familiar object, I had seen it daily when we were living together—I was reminded of how abrupt and unnatural death always is, at least as we experience it: always an interruption, always things that are left unfinished. This was manifested in Christopher’s laptop, the desktop was covered in an intricate mosaic of files and documents, there were at least a hundred different and sometimes oddly named folders—other people’s work, internet. You name a folder without thinking, there are obvious names for some—accounts, articles—but others have the quality of junk drawers, you hardly remember their contents, you never imagine that one day someone else would be rummaging through them.

And yet I was now doing precisely this. In amongst the junk drawers, as I hunted for the documents that Isabella and the agent and the editor all insisted were there—a partial manuscript, nearly complete, which unbeknownst to me Christopher had promised to deliver within the next six months, a deadline that passed shortly after his death, an uncanny affirmation of a lie I had told Isabella, about Christopher’s work and the near completion of his book, a lie that had somehow come true or at the very least been reiterated by Christopher himself—I found other things. Things that presumably Christopher would never have wished for me to see: for example, a folder filled with pornographic pictures he had downloaded from the Internet.

On the surface there was nothing too painful to discover, he did not have a penchant for a particularly violent kind of fetish porn, nor was he collecting gay erotica or visiting sites called Black Beauties or Hot Asian Anal. I had heard such stories, which in the end were stories about a single realization, the understanding that you had never fulfilled or even addressed the secret desire, the most vividly imagined fantasies, of your partner. That you had never been, on some level, what he or she had been looking for, your partner’s mind always elsewhere or making do, something that cast the record of your sexual encounters into a paltry and humiliating light, he had always been trying not to see you, not as you actually were.

There was nothing like that. And yet I remained tense, I clicked on maybe four or five JPEGs before I closed the folder, heart pounding. The images were not even particularly lewd, given that they were pornographic, nor were they especially personal—pornography proves the generalized nature of desire, it appeared that Christopher had the same desires as many other men, a predilection for threesomes, blow jobs, that sort of thing. Several of the files I opened contained images of two women, but it was hardly very shocking, on the contrary, it was a predilection I already knew firsthand.

Most of the images were meant to look like what in England had once been called Readers’ Wives—that is to say, amateur photographs of ordinary people—but which had now become the predominant aesthetic of Internet pornography. The quality of the photographs was poor, the lighting was harsh and unflattering, the setting had the crude luxury particular to the suburbs, large living rooms furnished with pleather sofas and glass-and-steel furniture. And the girls, while pretty, could hardly be mistaken for ordinary porn stars, they wore very little makeup and there was no visible enhancement to their figures.

Still, they were clearly at ease in front of the camera. They behaved as if they were professionals, that was a function of the age we lived in, people took photographs of themselves all day long, in every act and situation, eating their breakfast, sitting on the train, standing in front of the mirror. The effect was not a new candidness or verisimilitude to the photographs that proliferated—on our phones, computers, on the Internet—but rather the opposite: the artifice of photography had infiltrated our daily lives. We pose all the time, even when we are not being photographed at all.

Two of the photographs—neither professional nor amateur but something in between—featured a woman who was stark naked except for a pair of knee-high sports socks. I would not have thought that socks were especially Christopher’s thing, but the girl was young and attractive. In one photograph, she sat on the edge of a chair with her legs wide apart, she had thrown her head back and her mouth was open, as if she were in a state of ecstasy. In the second photograph, she cupped her breasts with both hands while leaning forward, her mouth was still open but in a manner that was more pragmatic, there was only one thing really to do with such a mouth, and that was to put something in it.

Both poses had been replicated thousands or possibly millions of times, the Internet was overflowing with pictures of women in those exact positions, even their facial expressions would be identical—but I knew that was no impediment to stimulation and arousal, in general one doesn’t worry too much about clichés when in the grips of or seeking excitation. Christopher must have masturbated to these images—what else was pornography for, why else would he have taken the trouble to download these images, if not for reliable titillation?

But perhaps it was not so obvious or forlorn a scenario as that, Christopher hunched before the computer, his face illuminated by the light of the screen. Perhaps these images had led to arousal that was then fulfilled with a living, breathing partner, a woman or perhaps two, waiting in the bedroom or maybe looking at the computer with him, at one point, it might even have been me. A woman with whom he would then proceed: the pornographic image still fixed in his imagination, a supplement to the living and breathing body, which in itself was no longer enough, the live sex that followed always something of a disappointment compared to the limitless promise of the pornographic fantasy, the boundlessness of the Internet.

But I only went into his computer weeks, months later, whereas the June issue of the London Review of Books I saw perhaps only a few days after his death, or rather, after I was informed of his death. By that point Isabella had arrived. I had called her from the police station, after I had seen Christopher’s body, laid out on a steel table, the entire thing covered with a sheet, including the face. This unnerved me yet further, although there was no reason why I should have expected the body to be arranged any differently, for the sheet to be drawn up to the shoulders for example, as if he were lying in bed, he looked as if he were sleeping.

He did not look as if he were sleeping. His face, when the police officer drew the sheet back, was fixed in the same expression as I had seen in the photographs—again, a trick of the imagination, which is always stupid and slow in such situations, I had thought his face would be different, look different, but it was exactly as in the photographs, the eyes askew, the mouth propped open. And yet the wound at the back of his head, with its black crust of blood, was larger and more open than I had expected, it seemed to be ongoing, as if it were continuing to cause distress, as if he were still experiencing pain, right there in front of me.

I turned away from the table. As he drew the sheet up again, the police officer said he assumed the body would be shipped back home rather than buried or cremated here in Greece. I nodded, although in truth I did not know, I had not the least idea what Christopher would have wanted, I could not believe he would have wanted anything at all. You will need to inform the embassy, the body will need to be embalmed, the sooner the better, the police officer said. There are procedures. I nodded again and said that as soon as Christopher’s mother arrived we could proceed, and he turned away, satisfied.

He did not ask why it required Isabella’s arrival, perhaps to him, this deference to the mother seemed only natural. At any rate, she arrived soon enough. Isabella and Mark took the first flight out of London, the very next morning. Isabella’s manner, when I called her from the police station, was strangely calm. She said, Oh no, and then was silent for so long that I thought she must have fainted. I said her name several times and then Mark took the phone and I had to say it again, Christopher has been found dead, he is dead. In the background, I could hear Isabella sobbing, a low and terrible sound. I pressed my hand to my mouth. There was a thud, as if she had collapsed to the ground. I closed my eyes. I’m going to have to call you back, Mark said, I will call you back.

Less than twenty-four hours later, I stood at the hotel gate as the car drove up, Mark and Isabella sitting frozen in the back. They must have instructed the driver to make good time, it was only a little past noon. When she got out of the car Isabella did not look at me but looked around her, at the road, then up at the hills and the sky, as if trying to understand what had drawn her son to this place. I watched her from the gate, one hand shielding my eyes from the glare of the sun. The temperature was dropping by the day, I saw that Isabella and Mark were wearing light coats, they had clearly checked the weather forecast before packing, despite their distress. Nevertheless, the sun was still bright.

At first, Isabella seemed to look at the landscape around her with an expression of bemusement—the mystified expression with which a beautiful wife confronts the face of a vulgar mistress, the face of her betrayal—but gradually I realized she was looking not with wonder but with hatred, the same enmity the wife always comes to feel for the mistress. She would hate this place for the rest of her life, until the day she died. As I stepped forward with my hands outstretched—we embraced, but cautiously, as though we were both incalculably fragile—I understood that although she had always hated me, her hatred had now dissipated and found another object. I had taken him away from her but never completely, not like this.

Almost the first thing she said, once she had been shown to her room and the door had closed behind us (she had sent Mark out on a mission, obviously invented, to the local chemist, she claimed to be suffering from upset stomach, from nausea, motion sickness from the drive), was, Why did he come here? She was standing by the window, Kostas had put Isabella and Mark in a suite, although not the one that Christopher had occupied. I looked at her, I couldn’t remember the last time we had been alone with each other. She looked back at me, for a moment it was as if the primary relationship were between us, the men having died or been sent away. Perhaps now that was true.

I don’t know, I said. I didn’t find him in time, I was too late.

She shook her head, the muscles around her mouth tightened. It would have been about a woman, Christopher never could keep his cock in his pants.

I was stunned, I had never heard her use such vulgar language and I had never heard her speak about her son in such aggressive and critical terms. She spoke not as if he had died but as though he had merely run away, as if she would be giving him a lecture upon his eventual return, I saw that she was in a state of complete denial.

She stood by the window, she was staring out at the water with a fixed expression, a woman filled with rage, at the situation, at the place, at the fact of her son’s death, which she could not accept. At her son, who’d had the audacity to die on her, to put her in the unnatural position of outliving her only child, the nightmare of every mother. It was horrifying to look at her face, which had collapsed beneath the grief she was unable to directly express, I was entirely sympathetic to her predicament, and yet as she continued to speak, I wished she would stop.

I think nowadays they call it sex addiction. Men who can’t stop chasing women, even when they are making fools of themselves. It gets worse with old age, you know. There’s nothing worse than a panting old man. Of course, you must take some responsibility for the situation, she said. But I don’t blame you, I know my son, I’m not sure that any woman would have been able to keep him from straying.

Her eyes suddenly filled with tears, as if she were speaking not of her son’s infidelity but of his death—that was what she was really talking about, and she was right, no woman could have kept him from dying. Things must have been strained between you, Christopher never said a word but I felt it. She paused. If only Christopher hadn’t had reason to come to this place.

He came here, I said, to do research, to finish his book.

Isabella shook her head sharply. The book was only the excuse, she said, Christopher was never serious about his work. He was always running away. He always had somewhere to go, he made his life very busy. I think he was worried that if he stopped, he would realize that his life was empty.

This was unfair—although she loved him to excess, Isabella had never been able to take her son seriously. Now that he was dead, she would never have to acknowledge the depth of his ambitions, the fact that in death he had left things undone. She was not looking at me. I said that he had been close to finishing his manuscript (a lie), that I had read whole chapters (another lie), that in fact there was a critical link (even the phrase sounded false) in the book that could be made through the research he had been doing here in the southern Peloponnese.

Isabella did not respond, perhaps she did not hear me. Standing by the window, she looked like the saddest woman in the world. At any rate, she said, still looking out at the sea, you loved him. Despite his flaws. And that is something. He died loved. She did not look at me for affirmation—perhaps it was not even necessary, it was understood that I loved Christopher, what wife didn’t love her husband? Even when her husband gave her sufficient cause not to? There was an appreciable pause, which Isabella seemed not to notice, before I said, Yes, Christopher was loved by many people, there is no doubt that he died loved.

But he was loved by you, she said insistently, the love of a wife is different, it’s important.

More important than the love of his mother? I asked. I immediately regretted it, I would have taken the question back if I could, the woman’s son had just died, if I could not be generous to her now, when would I? But she replied, somberly, Yes, it is the most important love, the love of the mother is a given, it is taken for granted. A child is born and for the rest of his or her life the mother will love the child, without the child doing anything in particular to earn it. But the love of a wife has to be earned, to be won in the first place and then kept.

She paused, and then added, although I thought without malice, You don’t have children, perhaps it is difficult for you to understand. And I said in reply, Yes, I loved him, Isabella, he died loved, and she said, Ah. That’s all I wanted to know.

And yet her words returned to me, as I went through Christopher’s belongings, packing them up so that they could be taken back to London (the hotel staff had merely placed his things in boxes, they were in a state of total disarray, it was not a task I could have asked Isabella to perform. Isabella, whose grief had already taken precedence over mine, both because of her natural egotism and because the secret of my estranged status from Christopher meant that I did not believe my grief had any claims to make of its own, I allowed the situation to happen).

When I found the June issue of the London Review of Books, it was open to the back pages. Those pages contained personals and real estate listings—colonial-style house on the coast of Goa, four kilometers from Monte San Savino, own wheels essential, life-enhancing writing holiday at luxury retreat. In the bottom left-hand corner, on the page to which the issue was opened, the binding torn at the staples as if the pages had been folded back for some time, was a boxed ad that had been circled with a pen, reading:

The ad went on to include both a landline and a mobile phone number. As I read it through a second time, I thought, somewhat mechanically, that the copywriter had no ear to speak of—why, for example, somewhat stale rather than simply stale, why missing special spark rather than missing spark? Perhaps it didn’t matter in most circumstances but the ad had been placed in the London Review of Books, which had an educated and sophisticated readership, a readership who thought of itself that way. The tone of the advertisement was a complete mess, on the one hand it read like a proposal from a bank or an investment opportunity, for example there was the use of the word scheme. On the other hand it sounded like a badly conceived free-love experiment, why describe it as a unique project, why refer to it as alternative?

I smoothed the paper, my hands were trembling a little. It was the final line, the injunction to call James for a private friendly chat, that struck me as the most bizarre, particularly the inclusion of both a mobile and a landline number. I imagined this James, constantly on call, ready to drop everything should his telephone ring, either one, always prepared to enter into private and friendly conversation at any time of day or night, the more I thought about it the more the inconsistency of tone troubled me, on the one hand it was professional, bespoke, on the other hand it was a chat, it was friendly.

Christopher’s agent was also called James, a charming and charismatic man in his sixties and a well-known figure in the publishing world, a man more different from this James could not be imagined. And yet perhaps the services they offered were not so dissimilar, discretion, sympathy, a kind of professional intimacy—I began to imagine Christopher’s avuncular agent moonlighting as Infidelities James, writing the copy on his laptop, sending the form to the ad department of the London Review, waiting for the calls to come in, an absurd but nonetheless amusing image, perhaps it had been the echo of the name that had prompted Christopher to note the ad in the first place.

But what exactly was Infidelities offering to someone like Christopher, for example, who did not need any assistance in arranging his infidelities, or require any introductions—they happened to him, the way depression happened to some people—but who had nonetheless paused to note this ad? What could this scheme have provided? The kind of assistance Christopher would have needed was more in the management of his trysts and mistresses, an administrative service of some kind, orchestrating affairs was a headache, there were stories to be kept straight, diaries to be coordinated, evidence to be concealed.

Yes, Infidelities James would have had more luck if he’d advertised services that were more along these lines, that would have truly been bespoke (the advertisement was trying to give the impression of being upscale and sophisticated but in fact merely sounded suburban, essentially tawdry). Then Christopher might have stopped to pick up the telephone and say, Hello, I need help with my infidelities, more specifically, I need help managing them, they are becoming a bit of a headache. And then Infidelities James would have made a series of helpful suggestions or proposals, things that would smooth the potentially rough course of faithlessness, whether it was a second mobile phone or well-timed spousal gifts.

Above all, friendly and discreet as a priest, he would have condoned Christopher’s faithlessness. And I knew then that this was the real reason Christopher had stopped to circle the advertisement. It didn’t require a telephone call or a conversation with James, the mere fact of his advertisement and its brazen message was enough—there were others doing it, there were even people who wished to be unfaithful but did not know how. Christopher must have been reassured, he must have thought it was entirely natural, this compulsion of his, which had gone beyond pleasure and into something far more terrible. Toward the end, he had become like Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes, forced to dance, past pleasure or joy and into the realm of death.

How many had there been, exactly? Christopher never could keep his cock in his pants. I knew about three, for all our sakes I had pretended to myself and to him that it was only three, that it was a finite number. Three was bad enough for such a short marriage, three was infidelities, multiple affairs rather than an affair or two. And yet I had always known there had been others, possibly many others, I don’t blame you, I know my son, I’m not sure that any woman would have been able to keep him from straying. Isabella had seen his faithlessness as a kind of cancer, for which the prognosis was always bad.

And which I had not succeeded in curing—I understood this now, and I understood that the coldness of her grief, the inexplicable and matter-of-fact vitriol she directed toward her son, would eventually find its true target. I pushed the paper away. Eventually Isabella would come to blame me, she was blaming me now, even if she didn’t know it yet. My heart contracted—I could not think of anything to say in my defense. Christopher was dead, and I was living with another man, I had left him to his faithlessness—yes, in the end, I had been the one to do the leaving.