Paul Theroux - My Secret History

She said, “It’s lucky for you I’ve got a good job.”

It was true. I also felt secure because she was working, and she was proud to be working. Her conception of labor was that it liberated you. I believed that she had it slightly wrong — that her work liberated me and gave me time. And now it seemed there was a coherence to my life. There was also a completeness. I suspected that she knew I wasn’t working. Perhaps she was proud of being the breadwinner. I did not dispute it. For about a month after I returned I was happy and had no other life.

And then it ended. We were at Crystal Palace Park, late one afternoon towards the end of January. It was a cold day, and darkening — the sky against my eyebrows. But I was keeping a promise to Jack. I had the sailboat under my arm as we entered the park by the great brick gateway.

As we walked towards the pond, Jack tugged my hand and said, “I want to see the dinosaurs.”

I thought he was confusing this place with Hyde Park. The Natural History Museum and its dinosaurs were near there.

“There’s no museum here,” I said.

“Not the museum — the dinosaurs.”

“Do you mean the zoo?”

“No! Not the zoo — the dinosaurs!”

“Listen, Jack, there aren’t any dinosaurs here.”

“Yes!”

It was terrible to hear him insist. He then began to sob in frustration, and ran ahead of me, along a path, towards a garden I had never seen before. And there in the garden was a large greeny-bronze stegosaurus (it said so on a sign) with a long tail and horns, seeming to claw its way past a rhododendron. In the twilight it looked half alive, like a creature that came out at night.

“There,” Jack was saying. His face was white. “I told you!”

He was a lovely boy, but he had the crowing pedantry of most bright children; he was infuriated by contradiction. And he showed me more dinosaurs in the shadowy garden. I was touched, because the creatures were five times his size.

My next question simply slipped out in a kind of admiring way.

“How did you know about these things?”

“I came here with Mummy’s friend.”

I struggled to say, “Is Mummy’s friend a woman or a man?”

He answered promptly and all at once I was freezing.

Jack had said, “What are you looking at, Dad?”

I said, “Nothing,” and meant it.

He had seen a change in me that instant. I talked to him glumly, trying to decide what I should do next. I could not think. My mind was a blank. I had no plan.

The next day I took up my notebooks and began to reread them closely, and all the sadness and difficulty of my long trip came back to me. I felt sorry for myself, because I had been right in Siberia: my suspicions were confirmed. I had been fooled. I felt I was back in Siberia, and it was then that I remembered the entire telephone conversation, and all of it upset me.

The thought that I had suppressed then, and that I allowed myself to consider now, was that my call had been a great surprise to Jenny. It had been six in the morning. I never wanted this to be true, because it had been my gloomiest and most tormenting suspicion, but while we had spoken on the phone she was with someone else. He was lying on my side of the bed, waiting for her.

Perhaps it had not awakened them, but only interrupted them.

Let it ring .

No, it might be him .

So what?

He’d wonder where I was. Let me up, darling .

That was why she had been worse than noncommittal; she had been cold.

Who was it?

It was him. Don’t worry. He’s in Siberia .

Now I had a secret, and it was like an illness. My habit of concealment was so highly developed I was able to accommodate it. But it was painful — hiding it, living with it. The secrecy re-created the double life that I had once been used to. But it was not simple, and it was not the game I had invented as a teenager. I was thirty-two. I knew that a double life is not an alternating existence of first one then the other, like an actor changing clothes. It is both lives being felt and led simultaneously.

And so all the time I was with Jack, watching television or meeting him after school; or cooking for Jenny, or shopping, or going to the laundromat, or telling stories, or listening, or making plans, or making love — all that time, the secret twitched within me.

I believed that she too was leading two lives and that, unused to doing so, she would be careless. I could not wait for her to slip. I searched for proof.

First I looked in the house. There was her dressing table in the bedroom, full of drawers. All burglars and housebreakers go for the main bedroom and make straight for the dressing table: they know it contains everything. I sifted through and found foreign coins, hairpins, broken pens, her passport (she had not left the country in my absence), receipts for gas and electric bills, used checkbooks and jewelry. I recognized all the jewelry. So she had not been given that kind of present. I studied the check stubs — nothing there.

Her clothing was more revealing. Did the fact that she had bought quite a lot of new underwear mean something? I felt it did. But it was all I found. She seldom threw anything away. This meant her drawers and shelves were full. But it was junk, it meant nothing — it was old bus tickets, and out-of-date season tickets and timetables and broken pencils and cheap watches, and old clothes. Looking through this pitiful stuff only made me sad. I found a snapshot of her holding Jack and taped it to the wall over my desk.

Jack said, “What are you doing, Dad?”

“Cleaning out these drawers.”

“Can I help you?”

“No,” I said sharply, and then more gently, “No.”

Leaving Siberia I had imagined a long story about a man in a road humiliated in front of his son. I remembered it now, and thought of the man’s pain, and how the American who had watched it all from his window had taken his revenge.

Jack knew something and because he was unaware of what he knew it was the one subject I could not raise with him. My questions were impossible, though I often looked into his lovely clear eyes and thought: Tell me about Mummy’s friend — did he often take you to the park? Did he play with you? Where did he eat?

Then he would know. The questions would alert him and then he would have a secret. He would have to live with that.

Where did Mummy’s friend sleep?

Jack smiled at me. He knew everything and none of it was wrong.

What was his name?

I had the power to take his innocence away. Just a suggestion from me and he would be brought down. How simple and true the Bible story was, about Adam and Eve wanting to know too much.

I was tempted; but I loved the child too much to involve him in this. Instead, I developed a routine of looking through Jenny’s handbag and briefcase. I usually did it twice. As soon as she came home from work she rushed to see Jack, and she usually read him a story. Then I went swiftly through her bag — keys, receipts, money, tubes of mints, scraps of paper, stamps, address book. I scrutinized these. And her briefcase held accounts-sheets, computer printouts, photocopies of exchange rates to four decimal places, financial analyses, and her Evening Standard .

Later in the evening, she washed her hair or had a bath. Then I looked again more carefully. I had studied every name in her address book. Nothing.

Every day I searched her bag and briefcase, and the only question in my mind was why, after all these weeks, did she keep these meaningless scraps of paper, and the foreign coins and rubber bands? Why didn’t she throw away the stale tube of mints?

“I can’t find my season ticket,” she said one morning.