I liked being married to a mystery because it turned me on. She wasn’t right—she never understood the first thing about Lotte—but perhaps she wasn’t entirely wrong either. At times it seemed to me that my wife was built around a Bermuda Triangle, for God’s sake! Send something in and you might never hear from it again. All the same, I wanted to know—had the boy been back, and what was it about him that made her immediately accept him in? To say she was not a sociable person would be to put it mildly. And yet, no sooner had a stranger at the door introduced himself than she was brewing his tea in the kitchen.
We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.
Lotte was reading in the chair across from me. I meant to ask, I said, where was Daniel from? She looked up from her book. Always the same rumpled expression when I disturbed her from her reading. Who? Daniel, I said. The boy who rang the bell the other night. I heard an accent, but couldn’t quite place it. Lotte paused. Daniel, she repeated, as if she were testing the durability of the name for one of her stories. Yes, where was he from? I repeated. Chile, she said. All the way from Chile! I exclaimed. Isn’t that remarkable! That your books have reached as far as that. For all I know, he picked one up at Foyles, Lotte said. We didn’t talk about it. He’s read a lot, and he wanted someone to discuss books with, that’s all. You’re being modest, I’m sure, I said. He seemed quite amazed to find himself in your presence. He probably could quote whole paragraphs of your work. A pained look crossed Lotte’s face, but she remained silent. He is alone here, that’s all, she said.
The next day the lighter was gone from where I’d left it on the coffee table. But over the next few weeks I continued to find signs of the boy—cigarettes in the rubbish bin, a long black hair on the white antimacassar, and once or twice when I called Lotte from Oxford I thought I sensed in her voice an awareness of someone else’s presence. Then one Thursday night, putting something away at my desk, I found a leather diary, a small black book, warped and badly worn. Inside, it had days of the week on each page, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday on the left, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday/Sunday on the right, and every box was filled to its edges with tiny handwriting.
It was only when I saw Daniel’s handwriting that the jealousy brewing hit me with full force. I remembered him walking down the hall after Lotte, and now, along with the curt little smile he’d exchanged with himself in the mirror, I thought I remembered a certain swagger. Alone here! I thought. Alone here with a leather jacket, a silver lighter, a self-congratulatory grin, and something pressing zipped into his tight jeans. I’m embarrassed to admit to this now, but that’s what came to me. He was almost thirty years younger than she. It’s not that I suspected that Lotte had gone to bed with him—the thought itself was simply too far afield from the laws that governed our little universe. But if she hadn’t welcomed his advances, she hadn’t turned him away either—she had entertained them, or him, some intimacy had been allowed, and I saw, or thought I saw, that this young man in a leather jacket who had made himself comfortable at my desk had brazenly made a fool of me.
I knew that anything I said to Lotte at that point would be met with anger—the idea that I harbored suspicions and had been keeping tabs on her would strike her as an intolerable infringement. What right did I have? You see, my hands were tied. And yet I was certain that something was going on behind my back, even if it was only desire.
I began to form a plan, a plan that might seem counterintuitive but which at the time made perfect sense. I would go away for four days, to leave them alone together as a test. I would remove myself, the tiresome obstacle in their way, and give Lotte every opportunity to betray me with this swaggering youth with his leather and his tight jeans and his lines from Neruda,