Infidelities Page 6

  And of course, it could be.

  Now and then I remembered Marietta and thought how wonderful it would be if I could kayak with her, or hike in the woods, or simply drink wine and talk. I was sure she was much smarter than she let on; it would be great to hear her jokes. Each time I began to daydream about her, I reminded myself that it was all pointless, and that was that.

  A month later, however, the cop stopped by just as I was doing my email—though “stopped by” may not be the right expression.

  I thought I had heard a car, perhaps the mailman, but the days in which I had expected something good in the mail had been long gone, so I kept going through my Hotmail, when suddenly the door bangs open, and the cop, with a gun in his hand, shouts, Freeze!

  It looked so ridiculous, a poor cop-show imitation, that I didn’t get scared.

  Where is she? he shouted.

  Who?

  Don’t play dumb. My wife!

  How would I know?

  You know very well. Don’t play games now.

  I never saw her after that night.

  Sir, you have been calling my wife. Why?

  No.

  Don’t lie. Are you having an affair with my wife?

  No, far be it from me. I am glad I helped you all, but what did I do to deserve this?

  His hand was shaking. That made me nervous, and soon terrified. This guy could pull the trigger. I looked up the barrel, then to his eyes. There was rage, tears: a total madman driven by jealousy.

  Hey, please, calm down, I said. I have nothing to do with your wife. Haven’t seen her again.

  Ah, but you may have seen her before, right? I mean, what would she be doing at four in the morning on this road? I don’t buy the story she was visiting her aunt. She don’t have no aunt anywheres near.

  I didn’t buy that story either, but who knows where she was driving to or from.

  She was visiting you.

  Come on. Her car hit the ditch before my place, she was driving in this direction.

  True, he said. True. But maybe she was just—

  Don’t speculate. That was the only time I saw her.

  Honestly?

  Honestly. Why would I lie?

  Because of the gun.

  You got a point, I must admit that.

  Admit what? You saw my wife?

  No, the point that the gun would scare one into saying all sorts of things. Please remove it, if you want to talk normally. Would you like some coffee?

  Oh, I have heard about your coffee. I hate city slicker coffee. No, thank you.

  I have some Folgers somewhere, if that would make you feel better.

  No. He put the gun into the leather at his belt.

  Have a seat, I said.

  Okay, he said, angrily.

  I was already seated. Sure you don’t want tea?

  No, thank you.

  He remained standing, which gave him an unfair advantage, but it would be awkward to stand up now, with his large black rubber shoes close to my feet. Once I stood up from my rocking chair, I’d bump into him, and that didn’t seem comfortable. The last thing I wanted now was to imitate the postures of two tomcats, one standing and the other cowering, but that was our geography now. I would have to stand up, or this guy should learn to relax, but how can he relax when he is filled with Marietta jealousy?

  You’ve been calling my wife, admit it.

  No.

  Sir, I have the evidence. There’s a collect call made from this phone to mine, and when I am at work at night, that’s her phone.

  I never call collect. I have a good calling plan with AT&T. What would be the point? I am not that poor.

  You sure? he looked around, and his gaze fixed on the computer. I guess you are right, but that still don’t explain it all. And then there’s a call from my number to yours, also at night, and I work night shifts, as I said.

  I don’t remember her calling me at night.

  Aha, but you do remember her calling you! he stood on tiptoe, gaining in size.

  No, I didn’t put that right. She never called here, night or day.

  How can you say that, Sir!? I have the evidence, the phone bill.

  What’s the date? (For a second, it occurred to me that my house sitter may have called her. Who knows, maybe he knows her.)

  He said, November 28, 2000.

  That’s pretty far back. Wait, that was the night of the accident! Of course, she called you from here, don’t you remember? She called collect. And then, since you weren’t sure of the directions, you called back.

  He slackened his shoulders. Boy, yes, yes, that makes sense. Why didn’t I think of that?

  I don’t know, I said. Have a seat?

  Now he cowered, lost his posture, sat down.

  Folgers?

  All right, sir.

  He looked totally defeated.

  Why are you so depressed? Your wife is not having an affair with me, so you should be relieved.

  I just don’t know. She must be having an affair, I am sure. She disappears at night. This was the best clue I had.

  He really was sorry the clue was failing him. Not that I wanted to comfort him, but certainly to placate him.

  Maybe she goes on a drinking spree with her buddy Shelly.

  How would you know?

  She said so. I regretted that I had said that much. It’s best not to know anything about him and his wife, clearly.

  I have no idea what your wife does. Sorry not to be able to help. Or rather, glad I can’t help you.

  I’ll get to the bottom of it all yet, he said, more to himself than to me.

  Hey, mister, listen, I help you and your family, and I get this in return? Next time strangers in trouble knock on my door at four a.m., maybe I shouldn’t answer the door.

  Correct, he said. I meant to tell you that. Someone knocks at the door, even if they don’t look armed and dangerous, like two women, don’t open the door. Instruct them to go back to their vehicle, and you make the nine-one-one call for them. That’s better for you, safer. You never know about people.

  I couldn’t agree more at that point, at least about the last statement.

  He abruptly stood up. Thank you for the information.

  But the coffee is not done yet.

  It’s the idea that counts, he said. I appreciate it. He looked me coldly in the eye. I’ll be seeing you, he said.

  As he walked toward the door, his eye caught the sight of my underwear lying loose. My Italian underwear, light purple, was on the floor near the bathroom entrance. I had always been a slob, I must admit that, and although I hated this kind of underwear, I had run out of clean Fruit of the Loom, and from my last trip I had the clean foreign underwear, to which I resorted rather than to doing laundry, anything but laundry.

  There! That’s hers! Sir, how do you explain that?

  No, it’s mine.

  I know she wears that kind. It’s not men’s. Who do you take me for?

  It’s men’s. Italian. We wear it.

  Sir, I’ve had it with you. I don’t care if I shoot you, just don’t lie to me anymore.

  You don’t believe me?

  Fortunately I remembered that under my jeans I had on a pair of Italian underwear. I let my pants drop, and there it was, a blue pair, smaller than a swimmer’s Speedo. My pubic hair wasn’t covered, but I didn’t care. This could save my life.

  Yuck! he said. You a pervert or something?

  Yes, sir, a certified masochist, with a Ph.D.

  His eyes popped and he backed toward the door.

  Good-bye, I said.

  He rushed out, laughing. He jumped in the car and honked.

  My dog, who usually chases cars, didn’t chase his, but only stood there, staring with his jaws open. Maybe he could smell the gun and he knew what it meant, from the hunting season. Why didn’t he warn me about the cop’s arrival? Same thing, probably; he smelled the metal. Usually he barks. Come to think of it, he hadn’t barked when the strange women came. Di
d they have guns? Actually, he likes women, so he was just glad there were women to sniff. Such is his loneliness; no female dogs in a mile radius.

  Later, I retold this story to my former house sitter, John, as an anecdote, and he said, Boy, cops are dumb. You know that in Massachusetts, they aren’t allowed to be above average in intelligence?

  I remember that, I said, and maybe he is dumb in some ways.

  In some ways! guffawed John. Dumb as a doornail.

  I didn’t say anything. It’s the idea that counts, he had said about coffee, and maybe he didn’t say it about coffee, but had figured it out. He could see the idea in my head about Marietta. He got the details wrong, but he got the essential idea right. Maybe that’s brilliant. Maybe that’s the universal brilliancy of jealousy, to see stuff like that. No he wasn’t far off. I had committed the Jimmy Carter kind of adultery, in my heart, not the Billy Clinton kind, but, essentially and biblically, what’s the difference?

  Luckily, I hadn’t done anything. Well, of course, I wouldn’t have done anything. Maybe she had that idea too, and he could see that? Now, that was even flattering, that a young animal would consider an old animal like me. But forget that kind of flattery. I didn’t like looking into the darkness of the gun barrel in a shaking hand of a jealous cop. No, that is not a good situation. I was surprised I hadn’t got terrified more then, because the sight of it in my mind even now gives me shivers.

  And what does he expect? Of course, with him hounding her around like that, with guns, she must like to fly off, to get a taste of freedom, and maybe she is having an affair somewhere, or maybe only the idea of it, while she drives around and knocks her head with her friend. I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out.

  Neighbors

  Marko Sakic drove to his grocery store on the street of Proletarian Brigades in Nizograd. Ordinarily he walked the five blocks to his work, but now he didn’t want to face the people in the streets. Croatia had declared independence, and he as a Serb didn’t know what that amounted to for him. He wanted to be inconspicuous in the street, but even in his Volkswagen Golf that proved difficult. He nearly backed into his neighbor, a retired math teacher, who had limped from the blind spot, obviously fully expecting the advantages accorded to pedestrians by law and order, as though any law and order had remained. When Marko suddenly spotted the torso in gray, he braked, and stopped a couple of feet before the tilted geometrician, who circumscribed his threats in the air with a knotty walking stick. The teacher had ordinarily been friendly.

  Marko had voted, secretly, as most Serbs in Slavonia (northeast Croatia) had done, for the secession of Krajina (the former military borders between the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires). Milosevic in Belgrade and the Serb political leaders within Croatia claimed that if Croatia became an independent country, Krajina should become Serbia to protect the local Serbs from the Croatian army—although there was not much Croatian army yet. If Krajina became Serbia, Marko thought he’d be right at home. He was at home anyway. More so than he’d be in Serbia, where he’d visited only a couple of times, and where he’d been insulted in a bakery for using the Croatian word kruh for bread (rather than Serbian hleb); to live there, he’d have to change his speech. Moreover, his wife was a Croat and he couldn’t rightly say that his two kids weren’t Croats—they were after all raised in Croatia and spoke Croatian.

  In the streets, he was circumspect, with the new Croatian police, and the red chess board, a Croatian emblem from medieval times, lurking on the walls, beneath new street names (Proletarian Brigades became Toni Kukoc Street). Croatia for Croats! How about others? These slogans stood below pictures of Tudjman, who, instead of looking like a father of a nation, looked like a vengeful law professor.

  When Marko walked into his shop, he became cheerful. He flirted with women, and did it not just to sell to them, but because he loved the mutual ego boost and cheer that often resulted from it. (After a good flirtation, he felt handsome, and if there was no customer around, he combed his hair upward; it was still strong and black, with only a few grays above his ears; his blue eyes contrasted well with the black hair and eyebrows.) He loved seeing each customer enter and scrutinize his shelves, and he attempted to guess by how the eyes moved, where the hands were, and how calm they were, whether and what the customer would buy.

  Croats and Czechs and Hungarians kept buying in his shop even after the war began, but Serbs who remained in the town didn’t. They avoided the appearance of banding together, and if they shopped, they went to the large ill-lit state-owned store in the center of the town.

  When the Serbian army advanced in Eastern Slavonia and along the Dalmatian coast, Marko was glad. When a dozen MiG jets flew over the town, he relished the mighty resonant vibrations; the explosions of the sound barrier delighted him. As he stared out the windows, somebody supposedly overheard him saying, “Now you Croats will see whose land this is!”

  Later, he didn’t remember saying this, although it was possible, since he had gotten drunk out of his mind, but one old friend of his, Branko—a former soccer player for Dinamo Zagreb—came to his shop, and joked,

  “Could I have some patriotic beer, Nizograd Pivo?”

  Marko laughed. “Maybe you’d like some plum brandy? That’s even more patriotic.”

  “So,” said Branko, still smiling, “I hear that you’re happy about the Serb invasion?”

  “Oh, no, my friend, where do you get that idea?”

  “People overheard you gloating when Yugoslav jets flew over the town. And if the jets bombed, do you think the pilots would have worried whether you were here? They assume that most real Serbs have left anyway.”

  Marko sulked. Yes, Serb militia men did come to him once urging him to join their ranks or at least to move out of town. He’d heard stories in a nearby village about Serb soldiers killing the fellow Serbs who had refused to leave the village and cutting off two fingers from the hands of the surviving villagers so they’d keep showing the Serb three-finger victory salute, always. Villages that had no Serbs left in them could be set on fire and bombed by the Serb army without fear of hurting their own. Still, there were so many Serbs left in town that the idea of bombing struck him as far-fetched.

  “So you have any Nizograd Pivo?” Branko said as if repeating the question, and maybe he was repeating it. Marko piled five half-liter amber bottles over the counter.

  “Why don’t you come over to drink a couple of these?” said Branko. “Like in the good old days. We could play a game of chess and compare our new stamps.”

  “I’ll try,” said Marko. Although they had often drunk beer together and compared their stamp collections, Marko knew that this time he would not visit. Maybe there would be a trap in Branko’s place—maybe a couple of thugs would knock him down. Sure, they were friends, but this was a new world; what was more important, friendship or patriotism? How could you trust anybody anymore?

  Branko laughed in good cheer as though guessing his thoughts. “There are many new stamps now—Slovenian, Croatian—and soon there’ll be Macedonian, Bosnian; wonderful times for us philatelists, wouldn’t you say?”

  THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, Marko remembered what Branko had said about bombs not being able to tell your nationality. When the sirens came on, he went into the basement with his wife and two kids, partly because that was the martial law, and partly because he felt uneasy, scared.

  “Dad, will nuclear bombs blast the town?” asked the five-year-old, Danko.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So why are we going into the basement?”

  “To play war games, to pretend that we are bombed.”

  “Cool!” Danko said. “But I wish they’d drop at least one.”

  “Shut up, you rascal,” said Dara.

  “Why do we all have to play stupid boy games now?” asked Mila, the six-year-old daughter.

  “Good question,” said Dara. “That’s because some boys grow to look like men but remain destructive boys.”

  “Is t
here any other kind?” asked Mila.

  “Kind of what?”

  The kids were bored and they wanted to keep the light on to play checkers. The phone rang upstairs.

  “Who could be calling now?” said Dara.

  “I’ll go and see,” said Marko.

  “No, don’t. It might not be safe.”

  In the meanwhile, the phone rang the fourth time, and the message machine came on.

  “We know you are there. That’s all right. But please turn off the light. Or do you want us to turn it off for you?”

  Marko turned off the light.

  “Sons of whores, those damned cops. They probably think I keep the lights on to signal to the pilots!”

  Just then there was an amazing explosion that shook the foundations of the house with the ground, as though a major earthquake had struck, as though different layers of the earth struggled, quarreled, and ground over each other. Shards of bricks shattered their basement windows. Half of a brick flew in and smashed a ten-liter bottle of homemade wine from Marko’s little vineyard in the hills. The red wine splashed them all, but none were hurt by the flying glass. The smell of wine was too weak to wash out the smell of fire and explosives and smoke. Before they could orient themselves, there was another blast that sent waves of hot air through the cracks in the basement windows.

  “Damned bandits!” shouted Marko. “Damned Serb bandits!”

  Dara’s teeth chattered.

  “I’m not going to forgive Milosevic this,” he said. “I take this personally.”

  “Why, there’s nothing personal in this. Bombs dropped…”

  “There would be if I were personally dead. Or if you were.”

  An hour later, there was another round of bombing. Half-ton bombs were being dropped on the machine-parts factory.

  In the morning Marko, exhausted and jittery, surveyed the air-raid damage. His house had lost one side of the roof, which was plainly blown off, and all the windows were shattered. Half of the stucco on his brick walls had peeled off, and many bricks were damaged.

  The house next door didn’t exist, and instead of it, there was a hole in the ground lined up with red and charcoal bricks, shattered pipes. Smoke arose out of the ashes, and in that smoke, Marko thought he discerned burnt-out plastic, rubber, and flesh, yes, no doubt flesh, perhaps human, perhaps animal, probably both. His neighbor, the retired math teacher, had lived with his ten cats. Thirty-five years before, he’d taught Marko fifth-grade math, in a reign of terror, which Marko resented then, but appreciated now; in his business it helped to be able to calculate quickly in his head. And as the old man had aged, Marko had liked him more and more, and occasionally they had stood in front of their homes, and chatted, looking across the street at the town market, or into the park with steam rising in the distance from a hot spring. Now, the neighbor’s cats, that was a different matter; they raised hell in their mating in February, and they were so needy that they came over to Sakic’s doors and windows, and meowed. Mila and Danko, even as toddlers grabbed the cats, and carried them, sometimes by the tail, sometimes by hind legs, and rarely right. Once, an orange tabby scratched Mila’s face, and even got her eyelid. As the eyelid swelled, the parents rushed to the hospital atop a hill, and fortunately the eye was intact. So Marko was not about to feel sorry for these cats, but for the neighbor he did.