Chapter Six
Six
Whereupon Miles, standing in the kitchen, William Blake open before him, Giuseppe stirring in his living-room crate, found himself thinking not of the fabled double-dancer, not of the text, not of how long this had been going on and how and where, but of two other moments when he had also felt his heart wobble on its axis, and sensed the unforeseen fragility of something he had never thought could fall apart.
—
The first time was during graduate school.
They’d been dating for two years. Kate was in remission.
They had recently returned from a conference in Southern France, sunburnt, sleepy, the fragrance of the maquis still hanging on their clothing, when one of her advisers, a Byron scholar, recently hired, had asked her to join him at the faculty club.
This alone was no cause for alarm—it was not uncommon to meet one’s adviser for lunch.
But rumors had already begun to swirl around Paul Kohl and the Byronic magnetism that extended far beyond his scholarly work.
Also like Byron, Paul liked to swim, had seen Kate at the pool, mentioned the open-water swims he sometimes took off the coast in Santa Cruz, a mile back and forth between two beaches, through the kelp, where sometimes he saw otters.
He went with a group, a colleague from UC Santa Cruz, and several others.
Would she be interested? They were always looking for more people.
Did Kate suspect an interest? Already, she was all too familiar with the friendliness of some professors, the suspicious invitations to the distant conference, the visiting Chaucer scholar with the wandering hands.
A lunch, yes. A dinner, probably not. A swim?
There were others going, weren’t there? And Miles encouraged her.
A year before, she’d spent the summer in a wheelchair.
Swimming still seemed like a miracle. They had no idea how long her luck might last.
Left unsaid: Paul was only four years older, as handsome as Lord B. himself.
Except, when Kate showed up, Paul was the only one there.
She’d followed him into the water; nothing wrong with this, of course, it was not like he had invited her to a hotel room.
Swam, and then drove back alone, and didn’t accept another of his invitations.
When Miles asked about the day, she told him everything—he thought—the heaving waves, the otters bobbing in the kelp, pelicans low over their heads.
Her persistent, astonished joy to find her limbs obeying her.
She told him that Paul, at one point, treading water near a secluded stretch of beach, had asked if she would like to go ashore and take a break.
That was all, Kate said, hardly unreasonable—the swim was long and they were tired.
But there was something in the way he asked, and in the Byronic curls that fell across his Byronic forehead, his dark Byronic eyes, and their shared breathlessness, their shared flushed cheeks…
that made her think it was best that they keep on swimming.
That was all that happened: Kate said, and Miles believed her. But he also knew, could see it—could see her, in the moment, buoyed in the water, when she’d understood that she was being offered something different, and by someone who, she knew, Miles would never be.
What she did not say was whether she didn’t trust Paul or didn’t trust herself.
The second time, the circumstances were murkier, and more threatening.
Wesley was five and Olive was two, and Kate had gone to give a talk at UC Irvine, not far from where she’d grown up.
Kate’s mother had come up to the Bay Area to help Miles with the children.
In contrast with the standard prejudices, Miles quite liked his mother-in-law, an energetic and eternally optimistic woman, as well as a master of Brazilian cooking, driven, she would say, not just by love but by saudade, a homesickness, a longing for her native Minas Gerais.
Indeed, there were times when Clelia seemed to visit just to cook for them, arriving with bags full of ingredients, scarcely pausing to kiss her grandchildren before she turned the oven on.
What followed was nothing short of witchcraft, mountains of frango com quiabo, creamy tutu de feij?o, moqueca capixaba, virado à paulista, leit?o à pururuca…
He had no idea what the Portuguese meant, and yet it made him hungry just to say the words.
It was like a cartoon banquet in a starving man’s hallucination; the apartment for weeks would smell of lime, coconut, fried onion, coriander.
And Clelia loved Miles from the start, not only because of his dedication to her daughter, but also his enthusiasm for her creations, such that the man who was 175 pounds upon her arrival was 182 when she left.
And there he would have remained, were they not subsequently visited by his own mother, a blessed woman, who had birthed him, had raised him in the world, and couldn’t cook anything without somehow simultaneously burning it and undercooking it, such that, growing up, Miles and his sister would fight each other for the “mantle,” the thin edible stratum between the frozen and the charred.
All of which is to say that Miles’s reservations about being left alone for four days with two little children were more than compensated by the nourishment he had been thinking of for weeks, nourishment that lived up to every expectation, as steaming heaps of feijoada and moqueca covered his plate.
Kate had been away several times before for job talks, and Miles was used to the ritual: her call from the hotel room after the departmental dinner was over, asking after the kids, what did they eat, when did they go to bed, did Wesley enjoy his playdate, did Olive have her bath.
Except, this time, Kate did not call in the evening, only the following morning, saying the dinner had gone on forever, she had gotten back too late.
As for her talk, it was fine, dinner was fine—same old, same old.
The only surprise was that she’d run into Nick, her old high-school boyfriend, who was working as a bartender at the restaurant.
Miles knew as much as he wanted to know about Nick, whom Kate had dated most of high school and continued, as she said, “to see” on visits home from Yale.
She made no effort to hide that she’d been very taken with him, even as their paths in life had separated, Nick working construction with his older brother and attending community college while Kate burrowed more deeply into her books.
Miles also knew that she had lost her virginity to Nick, which bothered him, no matter how much he told himself that it would be unreasonable to expect, or want, her to be a virgin when they’d started dating.
Just as Miles was bothered that she couldn’t hide a look that came into her eyes each time she mentioned Nick.
No, “bother” was too soft a word; what Miles felt was a surge of primitive, almost existential fear.
And it was more than that. Nick had known her when she was healthy, truly healthy.
Nick had been the one to take her to the emergency room for the chest pain the doctors had dismissed as a panic attack.
Had helped her inject her medication during times when she’d grown sick and tired of injecting it herself.
Like Miles, later. But Nick had been there during those early, rawest days, as she’d faced the immensity that life had just served up.
So she’d seen Nick.
And maybe he wouldn’t have thought anything about it, except, when he came home later that afternoon from teaching, something had changed about Clelia—she was playing with Olive and she didn’t look up when Miles entered, and when Miles went to kiss his daughter, Clelia rose in a way that kept Miles from seeing her face.
Had she heard from Kate? he asked.
Yes, said Clelia, now busying herself in the kitchen. She’d heard, Catarina was coming back tonight.
Clelia, he knew, had never hidden her sadness that her daughter, in kindergarten, jealous of the Kristins and the Jennys, had opted for the American version of her name.
Grudgingly, Clelia had tried to learn to use it.
Juliana, Kate’s older sister, had chosen Julie; this was 1996.
But there were times—their marriage, Wesley’s birth, and Olive’s—when Clelia slipped.
“Tonight?” said Miles. “I thought she was coming back tomorrow.”
But Kate had changed her flight, and he knew, watching his mother-in-law, hearing “Catarina,” that she’d closed ranks against him, had joined her daughter’s side.
That Kate had told her something that Kate hadn’t told Miles, something she couldn’t tell Miles, either because it involved Miles, or because what had happened had made her once again the person that she was before he came into her life.
Perhaps, he wondered, with a sickening feeling, her multiple sclerosis had returned, brought on by the heat of summer, the stress of travel, publication.
By then she was almost eight years into remission, the sole mark of her disease the lingering colds due to the immune suppression.
The doctors pleased, if cautious. No one saying what they all knew. That there was no such thing as a cure.
Part of Miles, that afternoon, hearing of Nick, even wished that she had relapsed.
How horrible this thought, and how he hated himself for thinking it.
But some part of him could not help but recognize its perverse logic.
There were treatments for relapses, many of them.
Whereas it was not clear his family would survive intact if she had slept with Nick.
He’d insisted on picking her up at the airport, though UC Irvine would have paid for a cab, and when she got into the car, she kissed him, very forcefully, in a way she hadn’t kissed him in a long time.
As they drove she talked, without stopping, about the trip, the lecture, colleagues, everything, except the one person he was waiting for her to mention.
Thinking of the hours unaccounted for, between her dinner and her phone call late that morning.
“And Nick?”
“What about Nick?”
“Come on.”
Nothing, she said. It was strange to see him, that’s all. There was so much history; it had shaken her a little, nothing else.
Shaken you? Miles thought. Had Miles ever shaken her?
In the mountains, swimming to that spot behind the boulder resting on the water?
Lying in her hospital bed beside her when she couldn’t sleep?
She loved him—he told himself. He was dedicated and dependable, and good, and never once did he sense that he’d unmoored her, in the way he knew she’d been unmoored by Nick.
Silence rolled over them, and stayed there, and for the following week, whenever Miles came home, whenever Miles awoke, whenever Miles heard her speak, he waited, for something, for her to tell him what had happened.
But she didn’t tell him, and one morning after Clelia had left, Miles, sick with envy, had opened Kate’s computer and read her email, opened her phone and read her texts, even pulled up their shared telephone statement, looking for any sign that she wasn’t telling him the truth.
He had never done anything so desperate, but he was long past caring.
He found nothing. Had she hidden the evidence?
She was a humanist specializing in the pre-industrial poetics, not very good with technology.
She lost emails, couldn’t remember how to back up her computer.
Drafts littered the desktop of her laptop.
Most everything on her phone—the home screen, the ringtones—had been set up by her five-year-old son.
But it was more than this. She wouldn’t have bothered to hide anything, because she did not think he was the type to snoop.
Once or twice over the weeks that followed, it seemed like she was ready to tell him something, but she didn’t, and, slowly, the trip had retreated into the past. Slowly, he began to wonder if he had made too much of nothing, and if his insecurity had less to do with her than with himself.
If maybe he could believe her. And perhaps he never would have heard of Nick again, had he not come home one evening to find Kate crying, and learned that Nick had died, had fallen from the roof of a house he’d been working on with his brother, and Miles could say nothing, just put his arms around her and let her sob into his chest.