Katie Kitamura - A Separation

I hesitated—the words were simple enough to say, Christopher and I had separated, that is why I did not come to Greece— and yet the words were impossible to say, they were repulsive to me, a truth I could no longer bear to articulate. I would have sooner invented some perpetual fiction, an alternate reality, in fact we had been talking about having a child, Christopher had been hard at work on his book, he had been very close to finishing, as soon as he was finished writing we would start trying in earnest.

Abruptly, she turned away.

It’s terrible to think that Christopher left nothing behind.

There is his work, I said. He was so close to finishing the book. He came to Greece on his own because he needed to concentrate on his writing, he got so much more work done when he was alone.

There is his work, she repeated.

Perhaps we could set up a fund in Christopher’s name.

Isabella sniffed.

A fund for what? I find that I’m tired of foundations and scholarships. They never really commemorate the person. We can talk about this later, Isabella continued after a brief pause. I only wanted you to know that your situation is in no way precarious, I can’t imagine that you earn a great deal of money from your work, but it’s the last thing you should be worrying about, in the current circumstances.

And I saw that contrary to what I had previously imagined, the tie between us would not simply dissolve, that it would persist for some time. There were material things that kept us together, as the bereaved, even without a child. There would be lunches with Isabella and Mark, telephone calls, this money that I was being offered, that was not rightly mine. It formed one link in a chain that would not break, throughout I would be playing the role of the grieving widow. A part I was already playing—the legitimated version of what I was, my grief, my emotions, labeled and adequately contained.

But in reality, my grief was not housed, and it would remain without address. I would be constantly aware of the gap between things as they were and things as they should have been, afraid that it would show its face in my own, in my way of speaking about Christopher, I would be constantly reminded of how inferior my record of love was to a stronger and more ideal love, one that would have sustained the marriage, even in the face of Christopher’s infidelities, a love that could have saved him. I could have been more self-sacrificing, I could have shown the kind of love that Isabella would have expected, that Isabella did expect, to see in the wife of her child.

How many times are we offered the opportunity to rewrite the past and therefore the future, to reconfigure our present personas—a widow rather than a divorcée, faithful rather than faithless? The past is subject to all kinds of revision, it is hardly a stable field, and every alteration in the past dictates an alteration in the future. Even a change in our conception of the past can result in a different future, different to the one we planned.

We stood up not long after. The car will be here in half an hour, Isabella said. And then tomorrow we will drive to Athens and fly back to London, I’ve already booked the tickets. Mark has booked the driver you used yesterday—Stefano, I think his name is. I stopped, it was impossible for Stefano of all people to drive us to the site of Christopher’s death, I placed one hand on her arm.

What is it?

Would you ask Mark to book a different driver?

But why? I thought you had used him before.

I would prefer another driver. He made me—I hesitated, I did not know exactly what to say—uncomfortable.

It was the right thing, a word that said nothing but insinuated much, immediately Isabella was sympathetic, she linked her arm through mine. Yes, of course, she said. It is difficult being a woman on one’s own, men can be such a nuisance. Mark will request another driver. I realized, as soon as she said it, that Stefano would interpret the cancellation as a confirmation of his suspicions, Mark was as he appeared, another xenophobe in his country. Nor could I expect my fabrication—although in some ways it was simply the truth, Stefano did now make me uncomfortable—to dissuade Mark’s own tendencies to prejudice.

Still, it meant that we would not be driven by Stefano, and that was the important thing, I did not wish to see the driver again. We made our way from the terrace restaurant. As we entered the lobby a peculiar expression crossed Isabella’s face, and I stared at her a moment, perplexed. Her eyes were fixed and she had pursed her lips, she looked perturbed and she was pale, almost as if she had seen a ghost.

I turned to see what she was looking at. The lobby was empty, there was only Maria, who was standing behind the desk and looking straight at us, I had not seen her since Christopher’s body had been found. I realized that she was not looking at me but at Isabella, with an intensity that must have been startling to Isabella, who of course did not know the first thing about Maria or her relationship with Christopher, who did not know that Maria would look at her and see not a hotel guest, another visitor to these parts, but rather the mother of the man she had loved.

And just as Stefano must have looked at Mark and seen a phantom of Christopher himself, Maria must have looked at Isabella and seen the feminized and therefore perverted version of her foreign lover, it must have been disquieting to see Christopher in the soft and feminine curves of Isabella’s face, the same eyes with the same insistent gaze. They continued to gaze at each other, I watched Isabella’s expression change from perplexity to one of vague disdain and disgust, perhaps she thought Maria overly insistent.

Except that it did not appear to be the case, as Isabella continued to look at Maria with an expression of distrust that was too pronounced for a stranger, I began to suspect that she had somehow managed to apprehend (a mother’s intuition) the nature of the relationship between Maria and Christopher, the reason for the fixedness with which the girl was now regarding her. It was as if Maria could not look away, as if the sight of Isabella were too fascinating.

Isabella flushed and turned away. She made an audible sound of disapproval, Strange manners that woman has, and I was reassured, it was entirely in my imagination, how could Isabella have guessed at the link between Christopher and Maria, the fact that he had more recently been intimate with the severe young woman standing behind the hotel lobby reception desk than he had been with me, his wife, by a measure of months?

She continued, That’s exactly the kind of woman Christopher would have liked. I was startled, despite myself I was impressed, she knew her son well, far better than I had known him, how many times had I seen Maria before I had really seen her? Isabella looked at me with a quizzical expression, as if we were merely discussing the peculiarities of a mutual friend, I shrugged and said that I did not know, I could not say, obviously we had nothing in common, this woman and I. She gave Maria another troubled look and then turned away, as if the matter were closed.

It had been closed, until Isabella had incautiously pried the door open again, however briefly. She clenched her jaw as she proceeded in the direction of the stairs as if to say, Enough, no more, and I saw that her mourning was an act of will, just like everything else with Isabella. She said that Mark would tell the concierge to request a different driver, she asked if I would be ready to go in an hour, and I said that was fine, that I would meet her and Mark in the lobby.

Another driver was sent to escort us on our journey. Mark gave no indication of surprise at having been asked to make the alteration, it was true that the previous encounter had not been felicitous, uncomfortable was in fact exactly the word for it. Mark was not the kind of man who liked making a scene and he had done precisely that in the back of Stefano’s car.