A Second Chance Read online

  The house is now ready for summer. The pool is painted, the grass is manicured, the dandelions have been uprooted. In a corner of the backyard he installed a gazebo because of the mosquitoes that proliferated in the hedge.

  The cortège is blocking the street, even though we organized ourselves in such a way as to use as few cars as possible. The undertakers take the casket half way out of the hearse, but they refuse to open it. We get out, group ourselves around Dora and the casket and look at the two maple trees and the flower-beds for a few minutes. The front door is wide open, and the cat is lying on the threshold.

  The cemetery looks creepy, just a strip of land between two streets in western Laval.

  The priest holds a brief farewell Mass and asks the men to light their pomnets. Gusts of wind blow the candles out, and the men are so busy keeping them alight that they can hardly watch the casket being lowered into the grave.

  We go back to the funeral parlour for the last feast. Nelly is not happy about the catering, finding the decorations ugly and the sandwiches ordinary.

  We’re shunted over to the tables. Marta was in charge of the coliva – the funeral cake we make out of boiled wheat seeds and nuts. She prepared ten trays, and there’s none left over, for we all take some home in the plastic cups that have been set out for this purpose.

  I get home by four in the afternoon to find Adam sunbathing on the patio. I had told him to take advantage of this wonderful day and he did. It’s very hot, but there’s supposed to be a heavy storm later and possibly some icy rain overnight.

  I bring the plastic cup of coliva and a fork outside to him, but he puts it aside after one taste, saying it isn’t sweet enough. I tell him that there are a lot of nuts in it though, and it smells good because of the cinnamon. He replies that he likes it sweeter.

  I assure him I’m taking note.

  I’m dozing in the living room on the sofa when the telephone rings. I wonder who it could be and consider letting whoever it is leave a message, but I decide to take the call.

  It’s Peter, calling from his house. He says he’d like to see me and talk.

  “What do you want to talk about, Peter?” I ask, in a temper. It isn’t twenty years ago. Can’t he get that?

  I want to hang up. I don’t want to talk. But I cannot abandon him. I have a religious fear of doing wrong.

  There’s a long silence before he speaks again.

  “We’ve decided to get a divorce. Lara has gone to a women’s centre for a few days while I get my things out of here.”

  “It may be for the best.”

  My God. Why do I talk to him like this?

  I don’t know, but I can’t pretend to feel compassion or any other good feeling. Peter has finally figured out that he should have left Lara a long time ago. Why would I comfort him for such an overdue decision?

  He decides to leave me alone. He doesn’t know what more to say.

  The tone of my voice has alerted Adam. Peter’s calls have a destabilizing effect on him, too. I catch his frightened gaze and see he’s no longer watching TV. He must have heard Peter’s name. Does it jog his memory? Does he remember this man?

  “It was Peter,” I tell him. “Lara’s husband. They came over in the winter.”

  He doesn’t remember, but asks, “What does he want?”

  “I couldn’t understand. There was a lot of interference on the line.”

  Adam understands this explanation; he gets it quite often.

  Sometimes he draws what has alarmed him. One day, he drew tunnels with cars that were trailing white clouds like the speech bubbles that come out of the mouths of comic strip characters. He told me this was traffic on the telephone wires.

  This time he draws two people at a table, a man and a woman, apparently on a restaurant terrace. There are some passersby, too, and some sort of bus with two sticks on top attached to hanging wires. Probably a trolleybus.

  I was twenty-six years old when I got the call that every woman fears.

  Instead of dreading that they may be cheated on, what women really dread is their own reaction when they find out. Is there any comfort in getting the news from a close friend? Some people say there is, especially when the messenger is also the cuckold.

  When Peter called to tell me that Adam was having an affair with his wife, I asked him if he was in his right mind. I took advantage of this short moment of disbelief to remain polite, before my brain started the long process of digesting the news.

  When this happens between friends, there are lots of questions you don’t have to ask, such as when and where the affair started. It was all there, right under our noses, at our weekend get-togethers, our outings, our daily conversations, the visits we missed, the mention of this excuse and that one. We just had to scratch the surface a little to know what certain looks, smiles, pretences, and insinuations actually meant.

  Peter still made me smile with his Russian accent. The more distressed he was, the more hilarious he sounded. I even wondered if he was doing it on purpose to spare me. He wasn’t. He was too upset to care about my feelings. He’d been here a long time, but he just couldn’t shake his accent, and when he was nervous, he spoke terrible Romanian. I think he never really put his mind to learning the language properly; he lived in the hope of one day returning to Moscow. What stopped him was Russia’s instability since the fall of Communism – that and its ex-KGB leaders. After he got his PhD, he worked as a university professor in Bucharest; Lara worked for a foreign company. There were in-laws and their connections, a big flat in a pricey neighbourhood, twin girls, and a bunch of new friends – Adam and I among them. He was popular, too, as fifty years of Communism had isolated Romania so much that foreigners were welcomed, even Russians. We hated Russia but never the Russian people.

  Peter knew he would never go back to live in Russia, even after he found out Lara was cheating on him, but her betrayal ruined his adoptive country for him. He felt like an outsider with no family connections and no support. He turned Lara’s treachery into a general betrayal. He was paranoid people were plotting against him, and he was afraid of being humiliated in public settings. He suspected his colleagues of shunning him and his friends of talking behind his back.

  I pitied him, but his irrational distress also made me very uncomfortable.

  That afternoon, I agreed to go out with him and have a coffee. He was insistent that we see each other face to face, discuss the situation, and figure out a strategy. We would meet at a coffee-house or a restaurant, ideally, so we could avoid minefields that would hurt our feelings even more. Was it at our place or at theirs that Adam and Lara had been sleeping together?

  We chose a small café near the university. It didn’t seem to dawn on him that some of his students might see him in such distress.

  It was the end of June, so warm and pleasant, but the joy of the young just added to our misery. Our partners’ disloyalty robbed us of our youth. Our loss of confidence made us skeptical and suspicious.

  I was disappointed, and yes, wounded, but Peter’s torment made me aware of my responsibilities. Why does a man still take his wife’s betrayal so hard? Is adultery such a recent invention that men have not had time to figure out how to deal with it? Let’s face it; a woman can cheat on her husband, too. How could I say any of this to Peter, who was weeping and attracting a lot of attention to us?

  If it hadn’t been such a ridiculous situation, I would have tried to comfort him. What did he want to hear? What does one say to a cuckold? That his wife would come back to him? That it wouldn’t last? That the other man, the lover, deserved no consideration?

  Why do men and women look for adventure outside of marriage?

  Stupid as it may seem, this is the key question, and there’s no good answer. What is passion made of? What subtle mechanism shifts a double life into gear?

  The reason I hadn’t figured out what A
dam was doing is that I had never asked myself if my husband would one day betray me.

  We were young and still in love. We had a young daughter, good salaries, a nice downtown apartment. We were well off, compared to people we knew, and we had the support of watchful families and good friends. We had both had happy childhoods, and our youth spanned two regimes, which allowed us to make the transition from one to the other without significant trauma. Why go looking for catastrophe? I would have led this uneventful life until the end of the time, with no complaints. I wasn’t looking for any extra excitement.

  Peter was. He discovered his wife’s affair because he needed that frisson. He needed an extreme situation, and he got one. Not me. I resented him for disrupting the course of my life. He should have known the affair couldn’t go on. There were too many watchful eyes and they couldn’t keep an affair hidden for long. They would have called it off to save their marriages.

  Peter was not convinced. He was sure they would ask for a divorce and move in together. I told him that if it that were the case, they’d have done it sooner. If you don’t leave your partner quickly, you’re not going to leave at all, for the new relationship will start to feel like the first one, with the same kinds of predictability and the same kinds of demands, reproaches, and disputes.

  I was ready to face both eventualities. If Adam wanted to leave me for another woman, there was nothing I could do about it. How could we keep on living together if he no longer loved me? And, if the affair was just a fling, why create a stir and destroy everything we had?

  Peter was appalled by my reasoning. Was I made of stone?

  I was almost ashamed of my own insensitivity. Unlike Peter, I was preoccupied by things that required my full attention. I was in the midst of my final exams, I had a mountain of papers to correct, a hundred school reports to write, and a graduation ceremony rehearsal to attend. After getting my diploma in teaching foreign languages, I was among the fortunate few who got a job at a very good high school in the centre of Bucharest. Challenges at my new workplace were counterbalanced by my pride in this accomplishment. My life wasn’t easy with so many young people sapping my energy. When I ran into them in the halls, their young bodies stripped all vigour from me. I had to make a big effort to protect myself against the magnetism of their youth. Was I getting old?

  I asked myself this question at twenty-six; I don’t do that any more.

  What could I say to comfort Peter?

  I urged him not do anything for now. We had to act as though nothing had happened. Whether from fear or for some other reason, he agreed. I suspect he didn’t feel ready to face a scandal. And this hesitation turned out to be his final verdict. He had already effectively decided to accept the situation as it was.

  We decided that the best way of dealing with the shock was to avoid face-to-face meetings with Adam and Lara. We had to find ways of cancelling rendezvous plans and be sure not to plan any others.

  When I left Peter, I went back to school to finish my day’s work. My colleagues were in a good mood; the school year was nearly over. Marking so many exams was a big job, but we preferred that to our classes.

  At day’s end, we had got together in the staff room over a pot of coffee and a cake one colleague had brought. I laughed heartily at the bawdy jokes and talked about my holiday plans. I almost completely forgot Peter and his gloomy face.

  It was only on the trolleybus, on my way home, that it all came back to me. Adam was cheating on me. He did not love me anymore. Our life together was a lie.

  I saw myself as I was, sitting on the red plastic seat, broken, staring through dirty windows, my body shaken as we crossed trams rails and potholes. I looked old.

  When I stood up at my stop, I met the eyes of a woman standing beside me and realized I had been crying.

  As I drew near to our building, I tried to compose myself. I was sure I’d bump into Lara’s mother, as I usually did.

  I was right: there she was, sitting on a bench with some elderly neighbours. She was fond of me, and I liked her, too. I used to stop to chat with her for a few minutes before taking the elevator to our third floor apartment. She lived on the fourth floor, and Peter and Lara were on the seventh.

  My God, I thought when I spotted her, how cunning of Adam and Lara to dodge the secret police of this place. They must be seeing each other somewhere else.

  Lara’s mother was retired, and she spent her days outdoors, at the entrance to the building. Other old ladies in the building were thought of as shrews, but we all liked Lara’s mother. She was kind, her voice was soft, and she loved the kids she took care of.

  I stopped, as usual, to chat with her.

  However, a brief exchange of a few words was enough for me to understand she knew everything. A timidity in her eyes, her hesitation to touch my arm as she usually did, her impatient movements, and unnecessarily straightening the collar of her blouse all told me that nothing was as it had been.

  She knew it, too. She was ashamed of acting as though nothing had happened. And my response had the effect of letting her know things were not the same from where I stood, either. I was not the same around her. And she could tell that I knew.

  I moved away as fast as I could, pretending I had things to do.

  How long had she known? Had she caught them together, in Peter’s own bed? That was the most likely possibility, as she had a key to their apartment. And Lara? How could she continue carrying on an affair when her mother was aware of it?

  Wicked old witch, I said to myself in the elevator, hitting the button to the third floor.

  I was setting my bag down in our apartment when the phone rang. My heart jumped, as though a shotgun had gone off right beside me.

  It was Adam. I knew it. Before leaving his job, he always called to ask if we needed anything. He had the car, so he did the errands, which was something I was very grateful for.

  I tried to stop my hand from shaking and control my voice. I didn’t want Adam to guess my new mental state – not until I knew what I really wanted. I told him to buy some eggs, milk, and apples. He asked if there were none left, as I had asked for the same things the day before. I said I wanted to make an apple pie.

  After he hung up, I had to lean against the wall. This was not going to be easy.

  I needed something to calm me down. I didn’t know if I needed to drink water, or coffee, or pop a pill. How could I prevent the distress, the rage that had started to grip me? I was feeling the effects of the adrenalin that was pumping through my body to protect me from disaster. I followed the rapid course of the chemicals flooding in my veins, and yelled, “Not yet, not yet.”

  I had to be quick and figure out the gestures and the words that would allow me to play-act my usual self. I had to rehearse normality.

  What did I usually say to Adam when he came home? Did I hug him, kiss him, take his coat, carry the shopping into the kitchen? What did I have to do that very afternoon in order not to betray myself, as I had undoubtedly betrayed myself with Lara’s mother? Or was it only a person who already knew what was going who would notice a change?

  The old woman must have been living for months with the terror of this confrontation. And that day, when she saw me, she understood the time had come for her to protect Lara. It was cruel of me to postpone the quarrel. She would have it in for me for that.

  Adam had no clue about my new attitude. He didn’t seem to realize that I didn’t invite him to eat right away. Usually, the babysitter brought Sara over, and when I got home, I looked after her and prepared a snack for Adam. This afternoon, I’d asked the old lady who looked after her to keep her for a few more hours. She was used to this request when we went out for the evening; she was pleased to get paid overtime, so she never minded. Adam didn’t even seem to realize Sara wasn’t home yet.

  I watched him while he ate. He told me about his day, as usual. I listened closely to s
ee if there had been any change in his routine. Everything sounded so… so normal.

  That day, like any other day, he hugged me when he was done and held me against him for a while to feel his sex getting hard. He bit my neck and touched my breasts.

  He was still my husband.

  Everything Peter had said was pure fantasy. Why had I not asked him for more details instead of believing this nonsense? He could be wrong and he could ruin my life for nothing.

  It had been a long time since Adam’s presence had got me so excited. I wanted to feel his touch and I wanted to see him. I was eager to listen to him talk, not in order to prove he was cheating on me, but in order to prove he still loved me. I wanted so much to be reassured that he was betraying me out of stupidity or because of a craving for novelty, not because I disgusted him, not because he’d had enough of me.

  That evening, watching the news, I laid on the couch with him to feel his body. It was a long time since I had wanted to be intimate with him as much as I did then. His arm held my waist, and his fingers smoothed down my hair so he could watch TV over my head.

  During a commercial break, he pulled down his pants, and we made love. I warned him that I was in my fertile period, and he said that was OK. Sara needed a little brother anyway.

  He was definitely still my husband, body and soul.

  The next day, I decided to forget what Peter had said, but it wasn’t easy. I woke up with the terrible feeling that my body could no longer protect me from myself. The protective hormones had stopped rushing around inside me. Now it was the turn of the black knights of doubt, despair, and disbelief. I managed to pull my body to the bathroom as if it had suddenly become old and decrepit.

  To save myself, I complained of a terrible headache. I just couldn’t carry on making breakfast and getting Sara ready for the babysitter. Adam was not used to this new me, but no doubt he had friends who had warned him it would happen. Sooner or later, a wife stops being a goddess and turns into a shrew. Sooner or later, she starts feeling exploited. Is this what was happening?