Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

Soon after that, I got another letter from her. She’d left the lawyer. She wanted to see me. We can work something out. No strings. I’m free most afternoons. And again she wrote her telephone number.

I began to dial her number, thinking, My lips are so sensitive, but before I finished I heard the front door open. My wife. “Walter, give me a hand with the groceries,” and the spell was broken. I wrote a short note: I don’t think I can help you.

That was not the end of it. Months later, I heard a loud knock at my door. It was the woman.

“I’m being evicted! I have no place to stay! You’ve done well — look at your nice house. I can’t get any work. You owe me. People have helped you — you have to help me. I’m going to be on the street! Don’t just stand there gaping at me. Do something, you bastard!”

Screaming, crazy, demanding. I was shocked, and as I closed the door on her ranting, I thought, What if I had acted on my temptation? And that night I wept in my wife’s arms, though she had no idea.

My husband, Byron, was a terrible diplomat. He quarreled with his colleagues, performed his work badly, drank too much at parties, and neglected me and the kids — and yet he got a promotion. This was in Germany, where he was a public affairs officer. The head of his department was a man named Jay, who was very dapper and good-looking and devoted to his wife, Marina. He and his wife went everywhere together, which made me feel bad, because I spent so much time at home looking after our three small children. My husband said that if I showed up at the embassy parties, his professional life would be easier.

One night we went to dinner at Jay and Marina’s. I sat next to Jay. It was quite a large party, but after the other guests left, Jay kept filling my glass. He was very solicitous and complimentary. I must have had a lot to drink because after a while I realized that I was sitting alone with Jay. We were talking about Germany, and children, and the weather, and then he put his arm around me.

“Please don’t,” I said. “What if Byron sees us?”

Jay laughed. “Where do you think he is?”

I had no idea. I didn’t know what to say.

“He’s upstairs with Marina!”

In my drunken state it took me almost a full minute to work this out. Byron was with Marina, therefore it was permissible for me to go with Jay, and somehow Byron’s job depended on my agreeing to this.

But I sat there coldly until Byron appeared. “Let’s go.”

“They’re swingers,” Byron said, as though that excused his behavior. Some months later, after Byron had been demoted for a petty infraction, I had a brief affair with the nineteen-year-old son of some embassy friends. Byron and I have been utterly faithful since.

After my wife and I split up, when we had nothing to lose by being truthful, she told me that she had suspected that I had a mistress, because I no longer made love to her with any passion or desire. And what convinced her was that I was so kind to her, as though because I was guilty of infidelity I was trying to cover it up with displays of kindness. I just smiled.

“Were you ever unfaithful to me?” I asked.

She shrugged and said that when she was sure I was being unfaithful, she went one night to a bar alone. Naturally a man came over to her and asked her if she wanted a drink. They talked awhile. She did not go home with him, but she agreed to meet him again. That was the night they made love. “He was very rough with me,” she said somewhat dreamily. He tied her to a bed, forced her to perform several extreme sexual acts, and then spanked her.

We had never done anything like this. Her describing it (in more detail than I expected) aroused me.

I said, “He sounds like an animal.”

She said, “He knew how to please a woman.”

I thought, What? And there was more, she said. He had a girlfriend. He made no secret of her. Sometimes they went out together, my wife, the man, his girlfriend. One night while drinking at his apartment, the man demanded that my wife and his girlfriend make love while he watched. My wife got into bed with the woman.

“What did you do?” I said.

“We cuddled. What women do.”

“And then what did the man do?” The anguish in my voice terrified me.

She smiled but wouldn’t tell me any more. “It was a couple of years ago. You had your own girlfriend. It was retaliatory.”

But it wasn’t. I had no girlfriend. My feeling had been that my wife had lost interest in sex. How I longed to be that man. And my wife — now my ex-wife: I had never believed this respectable schoolteacher capable of such debauchery.

I had arranged to meet Susan on a particular evening. She was a successful advertising executive, highly intelligent and yet easygoing. “I’ve been too busy to get married,” she said. But she seemed perfect to me. We had been going out for a few months and she gave me to understand that tonight would be special — in fact, that she was going to let me stay the night. Sex at last. And not only that, but the sex would be passionate. She wasn’t subtle: she conveyed this to me by various expressions, by touching me, the look in her eyes, the tone of her voice — the wonderful anticipation of lovers.

“Let’s meet at my conference and we can go on from there.”

This was, she said, a weekly meeting at a colleague’s house. I said, “Fine.” I went to the house at the appointed time. The conference was all women, six of them. They were business types. At first they were polite to me, and then I could see that they disagreed with everything I said. It was just before a state election. They supported the most right-wing candidate. We talked about capital punishment. They were in favor of it — electrocution. “All murderers are men,” one said. To change the subject I asked what they did for work. “I’m involved with start-ups.” “I design websites.” “I do marketing.” Susan just smiled and mentioned an advertising campaign she was doing on behalf of a man. “People talk about his wealth, but he earns every bit of it.” They talked about money, venture capitalism, interest rates.

On the way home, Susan and I got into an argument about her friends. I hated them. She defended them. But at her house, when she said, “Coming in?” I said no, made an excuse, and never saw her again.

I am sixty-two and know I look my age, but I am also the head of a well-respected department of political science at a famous university. I brought some of my foreign students to Washington, D.C., for a few days, to meet lobbyists, senators, and bureaucrats; to give these young people a notion of the political process firsthand; and to do some sightseeing. One of the students, Klara, was Polish, about twenty-four, rather small, with the classic Slavic look: clear skin, good cheekbones, a pouty mouth, and a slyness in her blue eyes. She stayed near me throughout the trip, was always friendly and respectful, but spoke to me only when no one else was around. She had read my work, she said; she was an admirer.

We were alone one of those days, walking along the Mall after visiting the Washington Monument. She said, “What if I told you I wanted to get you into my room and—”

And with a twinkle in her eye she described in detail one of the most extraordinary perversions I had ever heard. She was quite matter-of-fact, yet it was something altogether new to me and almost unimaginable.

This shocked me, but I managed not to show it. All I could say in reply (my mouth very dry) was “I suppose I’d ask you why you wanted to do this.”