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It was a warm night in late spring of 2010. The end of May, I think, or maybe it was early June. It was already hot; we'd turned on the air conditioning and it blew gently into the room, a motor sounding a deep note somewhere in the background, far away. I was wearing some skimpy little nightgown or T-shirt and had pushed the sheet down to my midriff. With one hand I was lazily caressing my chest, my fingers sliding underneath the thin cotton. Perhaps I was wiping the day's sweat away from between my breasts; perhaps I was vaguely thinking I might like to have sex with my husband. Maybe it was both, that sense of end-of-day achievement giving way to nighttime pleasure. I can't remember exactly why I was feeling my breast but afterwards, after it was known, after it became a thing that was out there between us, my recollection of that disastrous first moment, that horrible, sickening sense that something was wrong, was always associated in my mind with the not unpleasant feeling of the slightly damp skin beneath my caressing fingertips.
"I have something to tell you." My husband sounded unrushed, unalarmed. I remember those first words but not how he phrased what came next. The student, the one who was doing the research. They had become close. He had crossed a line. I do remember those words. He had crossed a line. It sounded so benign, so insignificant. So I had to ask, "What does that mean?"
"You know," he said. "Gone, well, further than …"
He was having an affair with one of his students. I lay there numb, shocked, unable to believe the gap that had opened in my life, the gap between five minutes ago, the pleasantly minor drama of an early heat wave, the barely registered sound of the air conditioning, the drops of perspiration on my fingertips and the lazy thoughts in my mind, and now, him, our girls asleep across the hall and me. Who was I? Well, clearly not someone he was about to have sex with. I gathered up my pillow and stumbled out of the room.
"Oh don't … Don't go. Surely we can talk this through," he said. I had no idea what words he thought we might have used. I lay on the living room couch, covered by a shawl I found in the hall closet, until finally at dawn my tears began. I cried for weeks.
In all my life, I had never known anger like this. A passerby drops a cigarette butt into your front garden. Your spouse forgets the teacher's name again. Your sister-in-law makes one of her little remarks. Brief annoyances, simmering resentments, they blend together and leave you self-pitying and sharp-tongued at day's end, ready to throw an unco-operative corkscrew across the kitchen counter or snap unfairly at a recalcitrant child. But what I experienced in those weeks after Al first left was something not merely of a different magnitude but also of a different quality. This was murderous rage.
I saw her pretty face, that face I had glimpsed once at some university Christmas party where I was the glamorous wife, the established author, the exotic adornment who confirmed for them all that the professor lived a charmed life in some rambling old house where his spouse presided graciously over the comings and goings of friends, children and contractors. And the pretty face was just another grad student suffering through a Ph.D. in a studio apartment she shared with a cat. Did I detect then an unearned note of self-consciousness? Did she seem a trifle too aware of herself, as though she thought she had some larger role to play or knew something I didn't? If there was a ghost of some complication there, I put it down to snobbery, hers, not mine: I assumed she had realized, like Al's university colleagues before her, that the novels I write are of the type that feature a gauzy picture of a woman's face on the cover. Still, she must have impressed me in some way because, from that one encounter, I could remember her face and see it as I imagined the laundry bleach pouring down her throat or the garden spade crushing her skull.
In the first weeks after Al had left, when my confused and tearful little girls had finally gone to bed, I would go down to the basement to empty their cotton panties and pink T-shirts from the dryer and, out of earshot of children and neighbours, I would find that I was raging to myself out loud. Yelling and cursing her name, spitting it across the cracked linoleum floor, turning it into some horrendous expletive again and again, until I would break down, choking on my tears.
I would wonder at myself sometimes. I had become a cliché, the scorned woman so furious that Hell itself has no place for her. In rational moments, in daylight hours, I would think surely we can all come to an understanding; we must do what is best for the children; they are what matters, after all. Or I would resign myself and say, What is all the fuss about? He no longer loves me; I am not sure I love him. It happens all the time. Families reconfigure themselves. We just need to be civilized.
But at night, I was a different beast. I would lose touch with the sensible woman who walked her daughters to school and promised them they would see Daddy tomorrow. I understood now all those stories, the murders, the suicides, the babes slaughtered by their own warring parents, the gawking neighbours insisting they always seemed like such a nice family. I could kill.
I wouldn't, of course. My daylight self held me back; I had not yet relinquished all sanity and all control. But I knew the feeling well enough to think it through. So I murder her. I probably won't get away with it. I would think of various methods – mainly I would imagine that I might travel to an insalubrious neighbourhood where I suppose one might be able to buy a gun, go to her apartment and fire off several bullets – but I couldn't think of any way to hide the crime. Say I just leave her body there, or manage somehow to drag it to a nearby dumpster, the most cursory police investigation will surely find her professor, some e-mails and start to take a look at both the professor and the professor's wife. I'll be arrested. My brother will get me a good lawyer, but I'll probably have to plead guilty and wind up spending at least 10 years in a women's prison. The girls will grow up knowing me only from conversations through a glass screen. Or perhaps they let children visit in the same room with the prisoner. I think I saw that in a movie once. At any rate, I will have separated myself from my children, traumatized their young selves, done the very opposite of what I want and left them entirely to their father and her, their new stepmother, their young, pretty … Oh, except she would be dead because I murdered her. Well, he would probably find another one, and I would be the crazy woman, the jealous wife locked up in a jail cell.
And with that thought, the unfairness of it all would descend on me with a weight that threatened to crush my spirit and my rage would begin again.
Some nights, I did my best to contain it. I tried to read a book or concentrate on chores. I talked myself down; warned myself not to make myself sick, not to wake the children, not to lose control. I searched the Internet for helpful articles that would explain my emotions to me. And other nights, I simply felt them raging through me like a disease I could not fight.
Excerpted from Serial Monogamy by Kate Taylor. Copyright © 2016 Kate Taylor. Published by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved.
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Q&A with Kate Taylor
What can you tell us about the narrator? We don't even learn her name.
She's Sharon Soleymani – we learn her name a bit later. She's a popular novelist living in Toronto, the mother of twin girls and wife to Al Soleymani, a Dickens scholar of Iranian extraction. At the beginning of the book, she learns that her husband is sleeping with one of his students; later, she is diagnosed with breast cancer.
This takes place in the present day, but I understand half the novel is set in the past; how do these two threads come together?
Sharon is commissioned by a daily newspaper to write a piece of serialized fiction to celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Dickens' birth. The story she chooses to tell is that of Ellen Ternan, Dickens' much younger mistress, and that serial makes up the other half of the novel, alternating with the modern story.
As a writer, what fascinates you about the subject of infidelity?
Well, it's ubiquitous and can be painfully dramatic for those concerned and I have often wondered how people do it. But as a writer, I'm particularly interested in why and how we tell stories about ourselves: An extramarital affair can be a situation when all three sides seek to justify themselves and accuse others. It's an occasion for fiction.