Portraits of a Marriage Read Free Page B

they did meet, I felt like a woman who notices an unfamiliar scent on her husband, a scent that clings to his hands even though he has only shaken another woman’s hand. Of course I was jealous of the writer and for a while nagged at my husband to invite him to supper again. It embarrassed him and he dismissed the idea.
    “He doesn’t lead much of a social life,” he said without looking into my eyes. “He’s a loner. A writer. He works all the time.”
    But I discovered that they did sometimes meet in secret. I spotted them in a café one day. I was just across the street. I felt I’d been stabbed with a sharp object, a knife or a needle: it was a wild, sick feeling. They couldn’t have seen me. They were sitting in one of the booths, my husband speaking, both of them laughing. My husband’s face looked so much like a stranger’s: it was quite changed, nothing like his face at home, the face I knew. I quickly walked on and knew I had gone pale. The blood had drained from me.
    You’re mad, I thought. What do you want? … That man is his friend, a famous writer, a special, highly intelligent person. So what ifthey meet sometimes? It means nothing. What do you want from them? … Why is your heart beating so fast? … Are you afraid they will not include you in their games, in one of their peculiar, grotesque games? Are you afraid they don’t think you clever or cultured enough? Are you jealous?
    I had to laugh. But the pounding in my breast did not calm down. My heart was beating just the way it did the day I was to taken to the hospital to have the baby. But that second wild beating of the heart was a sweet and happy sensation.
    I carried on down the street, walking as fast as I could, feeling cheated, left out of something. My husband didn’t want me to meet with this extraordinary man he felt privileged to know from his youth. My husband was not much of a talker generally. I felt I was being cheated, even betrayed somehow. My heart was still pounding that evening when, at the usual time, my husband came home.
    “Where have you been?” I asked as he kissed my hand.
    “Where?” He looked blank. “Nowhere. I’ve come home.”
    “You’re lying,” I said.
    He gave me a long look. He looked almost bored as he answered.
    “You’re right. I forgot. I bumped into Lázár. We had coffee together. You see, I had forgotten. Did you see me in the café?”
    His voice was sincere, calm, and just a touch surprised. I felt ashamed of myself.
    “Forgive me,” I said. “I just feel unhappy knowing so little about that man. I don’t think he is a true friend of yours. Nor of mine. Of either of us. Do please drop him. Try to avoid him,” I begged.
    My husband gave me a curious look.
    “Oh,” he said and wiped his glasses with great care, as always. “There’s no need to avoid Lázár. He is never intrusive.”
    And that was the last time he mentioned him.
    By now I wanted to know everything about Lázár. Having found some of his books—all dedicated, with special inscriptions—in my husband’s library, I read as many as I could. What was peculiar about the inscriptions? They were … how to put it? … disrespectful … No, that’s not the right word … they were strangely mocking. It was as if the author despised not only the dedicatee, but his own books, and himself for ever having written them. There was something a little self-deprecating,ironic, melancholy, in the tone of them. It was as if what he had really written under his name was: “All right, I’ve signed, but I am not quite the person this book implies I am.”
    Up to that point I’d regarded the writer’s calling as a kind of secular priesthood. The book was the solemn pulpit from which such people addressed the world! I couldn’t understand everything he wrote. It was as if he disdained people, even the reader, people such as me, and was determined not to reveal anything valuable about himself. Readers and critics had a