Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

I sat down on the grass with, I counted, my fifth glass of the Hungry Dog’s best Grüner Veltliner. Just as I’d decided to lie on my back and impersonate a dad grabbing forty deserved winks, Martin joined me.

He gave me a sheepish blokey smile and pulled a tuft of grass out of the lawn.

He said, “Bit awkward, this.”

I didn’t reply. We must have sat there for a full minute without a word passing between us. Jake ran over and leaped on Martin’s back and began pawing at him.

“Don’t tickle me, you little so-and-so,” Martin said, seizing him and pinning him down.

“Come play, come play,” Jake shouted.

“In a minute, I’m just talking to your dad, all right? In a minute, Jake.” To me he said, “I’ve got one of my own.”

I’d heard this already: a fifteen-year-old daughter by the first Mrs. Casey. Rachel, if he married her, would be wife number three. This was my chink of light. I couldn’t picture Rachel as a third wife.

“She’s a good girl,” Martin said. “I’ve got her working at the Dog.” He said clumsily, “Business is good.”

Oh yeah? I wanted to say. Get back to me when you’re grossing ten thousand dollars per working day, asshole.

“We’re thinking of opening a place in your old neck of the woods,” Martin said. “New York, I mean.”

“You should think about Flatbush,” I said. “In Brooklyn. It’s the hot neighborhood. East Flatbush,” I added viciously.

“East Flatbush?”

“Very funny, Hans,” Rachel said.

The great moment had arrived. My wife had joined us in her flowery skirt. She lowered herself into a nonaligned space. It was quite the fête champêtre as the three of us sat together.

“Try the carrots,” Rachel said. I hadn’t touched the food on my plate. “They’re very good.”

I didn’t want to make trouble, but neither did I want to eat. “Fuck the carrots,” I said.

The predictable silence followed. Martin rose to his feet. “I’d better start cleaning up my mess,” he said.

Rachel and I watched him leave. “Thanks for that,” Rachel said.

I said, “This is my weekend with Jake. I’ll spend it how I choose. This is the last time you do this.”

My wife got up and brushed cuttings of grass from her skirt. “You’re right,” she said, and she went over to Martin and kissed him on the cheek.

The kiss was an attempt, very possibly altruistic and certainly characteristic, to deal in truth.

Once, in the forthrightness of our earliest, most robust moments, she’d sought to belittle an old boyfriend by describing him as an “expert.”

“What do you mean, ‘expert’?”

“Oh, you know, one of those men who prides himself on getting any woman to come like a porn star.”

“And did he?” I was scandalized.

She gave no reply, and I heard myself insisting.

Rachel said, “Well, yes, but…”

“So I’m not an expert?”

We were in bed, as was practically obligatory at that time. She propped her head on her hand as she gave my question her consideration.

“No,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. “But you’re better. More passionate.”

She had decided that I could handle the truth, or that I should handle it. I did, just about. And though I cannot say it made me stronger, I have the comfort of knowing, with the benefit of hard-won hindsight, that something is going right if I am a little nervous as to what my wife may say next.

However, on my Indian mountaintop, stirring a gin and tonic and pondering like Menelaus and King Arthur and Karenin my errant heartbroken wife, a stupider and far less generous thought came to me: What goes around, comes around.

A monkey appeared. He was a gray-green, white-bellied, fluffy little fellow with a center parting and a frankly displeased expression. He crouched on the paling of the veranda for a few seconds, stared at me with his furious red face, and rolled away like an old tennis ball into the darkened grounds.

The truth, since we were on the topic, my imaginary interlocutory wife and I, was that the Hans van den Broek drinking gin in the Western Ghats was not the same man as the New York Hans van den Broek. On an autumn morning a few months previously, I’d woken up with a whistle at my lips and a sense that I was…fine. The stock advice of the columnists in the women’s magazines had been vindicated: time had healed my wounds. A gloss: time spent in London, my matter-of-fact city. A notable consequence was that I began to see other women. (With little ado a couple of dates were consummated: there was an actress and there was a personnel manager, both met in wine bars, both cheerful and game, and both, incredibly, makers of the statement, “Well, that was jolly.”) Another consequence, since we found ourselves in the realm of stock situations, was that I conceived of myself no longer as the idiomatic man who stands between the rock and the hard place but as the more happily placed idiomatic man who can take it or leave it: “it,” here, being my marriage.

Rachel and I hardly exchanged a word for the rest of the holiday.

After the holiday, one Sunday afternoon in February, I dropped Jake off at his grandparents’ house. I was about to set off when his mother ran out to ask for a lift: her car was at the mechanic’s and she needed to drop by her office.

It had been a very long time since we’d been truly alone with each other: a month back, in India, there had been Jake or, in shadow form, the jilter. Rachel wore a blue coat and a blue scarf and blue jeans, a new combination. The situation was so thick with novelty that it felt natural to ask her straight out about Martin.

“He’s fucking someone else,” Rachel said.

“Good,” I said. “That means I can fuck you.”

She seemed to be searching for something in her coat pocket. “OK,” she said.

We went to my flat. The arrangement repeated itself, about once a week, for two months. We fucked with the minimum of variety and history: our old bag of tricks belonged to those other lovers and those other bodies. I didn’t kiss Rachel’s mouth and she didn’t kiss mine; but she smelled me, smelled my arms and hair and armpits. “I’ve always liked your smell,” she stated in all neutrality. We hardly spoke, which worked in my favor. She remarked about Martin, “He’d say things that were actually stupid. It almost made me puke.” There was a thoughtful silence, and then our first shared burst of laughter in years.

It wasn’t long afterward that we kissed. Rachel murmured mid-kiss, “We should see a marriage counselor.”

Six months later we bought a house in Highbury. Chastened by the price—“Astronomical,” the estate agent admitted — I took it upon myself to wallpaper Jake’s room and two guest rooms. I became an expert wallpaperer and as a consequence something of a ponderer: few activities, I discovered, are more conducive to reflection than the unscrolling and measuring of a length of wallpaper, the cutting of it and the painting of glue on it, and the gluing of the cut paper to a wall so as to produce a pattern. Of course, I also found myself patterning the events that had led to the mysterious and marvelous business of my putting up wallpaper while Rachel’s voice sounded through a house that was ours.

It was not the case that I’d heroically bowled her over (my hope) or that she’d tragically decided to settle for a reliable man (my fear). She had stayed married to me, she stated in the presence of Juliet Schwarz, because she felt a responsibility to see me through life, and the responsibility felt like a happy one.

Juliet turned her head. “Hans?”

I couldn’t speak. My wife’s words had overwhelmed me. She had put into words — indeed into reality — exactly how I felt.