Chapter 7 #2
It turned out I didn’t have to wait long to figure out what I’d say because a little before noon Phil showed up at my door.
He knocked and clearly spotted me on the back porch through the windows and rapped on the door again.
I couldn’t very well pretend I didn’t hear him.
As I shuffled through the cottage, it occurred to me that he might want to hurt me in a physical way.
I doubted it, but who could say what people did in this kind of situation?
All kinds of crazy things happened, even among otherwise reasonable people.
If he’d arrived to hurt me, I at least wanted to make sure he didn’t get in a good punch to my face.
“Hi, Phil,” I said, opening the front door a crack.
“Hi, Arthur,” he said.
“You doing all right?” I said.
“I’m not sure, Arthur,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“You want to come in?” I said.
“If it’s all right, yes.”
I let him in. The air was crackling, but already I could tell Phil wasn’t going to attack. Now that I saw him up close, he looked the opposite of angry. He looked depleted, confused. His eyes were downcast. He hadn’t shaved. He didn’t seem to know where to stand.
“You want a drink?” I said. “I just made some lemonade.”
“That would be great,” he said.
“I’ll bring it out to the back deck,” I said.
I went and poured him some lemonade. From the kitchen, I could see him pacing around on the deck, literally clutching his hair.
The canopy of walnut and oak filtered the golden, smoke-softened light.
It was a beautiful scene, but not so beautiful for him.
I wondered if this was an elaborate performance on his part.
What if he was trying to catch me in a lie?
What if he only suspected something but didn’t actually have any proof?
I told myself I wouldn’t give him anything he didn’t already have.
I went out and handed him a glass of lemonade. He took a long drink. The birds were panting in the trees. You could feel the earth baking, turning into a brittle crust.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last, putting down his half-empty glass. “I know you’re busy. But I had to come over. I have to talk to you about something.”
“I’m glad you came,” I said, girding myself. “What’s going on?”
Phil stared out into the valley, as if seeking words on the faraway hills. He’d called me, and now he’d shown up unannounced, and yet he seemed unprepared to say whatever he had to say. I wanted to be there for him, assuming his problem had nothing whatsoever to do with me.
“I guess I should just say it,” he said. “I think Sarah’s having an affair.”
“Oh,” I said calmly. I was convulsing inside, but also immediately put at ease. If he thought I was involved in the affair, I doubted he’d be phrasing it like that. We were deeply embroiled now, but also looking at each other from different realities.
“What makes you think so?” I said, and found my acting surprisingly nuanced. My tone suggested at once surprise and a priori doubt about any theories he might have. I sounded ready to explain away any suspicions, as a real friend would.
“Little changes, little signals,” he said.
“I couldn’t even tell you what they are.
It’s just the way she talks to me lately, the way she sits.
I mean, things have been hard between us before.
Don’t get me wrong. Every couple goes through those periods.
You wait them out. You give them time. But this one is different.
It isn’t hard. It’s something worse. It’s like she’s already gone. ”
“How long have you been feeling this way?” I said.
“A while,” he said. “It takes a while to understand that you know something is wrong, you know? There’s no one thing that tells you. It’s all so small. But at some point, you can’t really deny it anymore. There’s something.”
I made a sound that didn’t require a response, just a noise of general sympathy and regret. I wanted to keep the conversation as abstract as possible, separate from any actual activities or protagonists. We were only talking about a theory here, not a particular accusation of any singular person.
“I think I know who it is,” he said, surprising me.
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Does it matter, really?”
“I think it’s her meditation instructor,” he said.
“Ah,” I said. Again, the flying hatchet had passed.
“He’s a very attractive guy,” Phil said, “very friendly. I can see how they’d have a lot in common.
She’s been wanting new experiences in her life, I know that.
She doesn’t love living here. It’s been hard to make friends.
I can’t say for sure, but I think that’s why she went on this retreat, to be with him.
It’s very hard, Arthur, thinking about it all the time.
I think about it, I try not to think about it, I think about it anyway. I imagine things I don’t want to see.”
“Have you asked her about it?” I said.
“She doesn’t want to talk about it,” he said. “I’ve asked her in a million ways if something is wrong. She says nothing is wrong. She says I’m imagining things. Maybe I am. I don’t know.” He sighed wetly.
“It sounds hard,” I said.
“I mean, I want to believe what she says,” he said. “I just worry she’s trying to be kind. She wants to protect me from whatever it is. I don’t know. It’s not that I don’t believe her. I’m sure she has her reasons.”
“You want to know the truth, though,” I said.
“It’s the not knowing that’s so difficult, exactly,” he said.
“I can handle whatever it is. Just let me know so we can move on. There’s nothing I can’t take.
We’re just people here, trying to get through our lives, doing the best we can.
I only want her to feel like she can tell me whatever she needs to tell me and know I’ll support her in whatever way she needs.
I love her, Arthur. I don’t want to stand in her way. ”
He gave a choked sob and pinched the bridge of his nose. Tears flowed over his fingers, and he wrestled himself under control. The buzz of a hummingbird’s wings zipped in the air. The faraway traffic of I-5 whispered. The heat of the sun bore down everywhere.
Within an hour, I was in the car, driving to the Wy’East Resort, an august spiritual retreat on the southern slope of Mount Hood.
It was a five-hour drive, north on I-5, east on 22, then up winding roads into the monument of Mount Hood National Forest. I didn’t want to be making the trip—I hated losing my precious writing time or crashing Sarah’s private vacation—but I felt like I had to go and tell her what was afoot.
Phil’s visit had transformed our affair in a moment.
We were no longer living inside a closed system, safe in our secret room.
Our actions had somehow seeped out into the atmosphere and infected Phil’s consciousness.
Now, because of us, he was suffering. It seemed like our duty to make it stop.
All the way up I-5, hot wind whipped me through the windows.
I spent the first hour trying to convince myself that we hadn’t actually done anything wrong.
Again and again, I tried carving the facts into some self-exculpatory storyline.
I’d met a woman. We’d had an affair. Where was the crime in that?
The love between two people wasn’t a betrayal of the third; it was something between the two lovers alone.
Whatever Sarah and I had done, whatever we felt, didn’t touch Phil or reduce him in any way.
No one owned Sarah. She owned herself. But as much as I rationalized our actions, I could never quite get the arguments to click.
There was no getting around the fact that we’d lied to someone we cared about, cheated on a person we both, in our ways, loved.
For all our careful subterfuge, we’d let our pleasures blot out our basic decency, and caused Phil harm.
It was in the second hour that I moved on to thinking about the situation in more practical terms. As far as I could tell, there were a few paths forward, none of which were simple or attractive.
Most obviously, we could simply continue lying.
We could keep duping Phil, convincing him nothing was happening, and go on with our trysts at the Barn as we’d been doing.
We could live in a state of secrecy as long as possible, enjoying ourselves as if no one else mattered.
But it was hard to see that as a real possibility anymore.
After Phil’s conversation, the innocence—or ignorance, whatever you’d call it—was gone.
Another option was breaking things off. Sarah and I could go back to our lives and pretend nothing had ever happened.
We could reestablish normal boundaries, maybe find some new, less compromising rapport.
But that life looked paltry and sad now.
From what Sarah had been telling me, she’d been looking for a way out of her marriage before I’d ever come along.
She loved Phil, and they had an affectionate partnership, but she’d realized their time together had an end point.
For years, she’d been plotting an exit, seeking the right opportunity, and then I’d appeared like the key to her escape, the tool of her transformation.
But I’d turned out to be more than she’d bargained for.
I’d arrived at the right time, but I’d exceeded her needs.
Now the old order of things was no longer possible.
At this point, the path forward became trickier and harder to comprehend, and it quickly subdivided into multiple tracks.
In one version, all of us went our separate ways.
No one ended up with anyone. Sarah left us both, maybe with Phil never the wiser.
Our tryst became the fuse that destroyed her marriage and exploded all the bonds. That seemed like a waste.