The Reasons I Won't Be Coming

  But I cry out loud for you into the brittle nighttime air in my twelfth-floor apartment, so low no one can hear me, so high I can’t get over it. Nobody knows any of this and it’s been this way for two years or more. I have wanted to tell everybody but I have no one to tell. My colleagues, those distended alimentary canals in three-piece suits, would not understand. Weak, bigoted and sanctimonious, their tolerance is exhausted by a few intoxicated weeks in shorts and T-shirts patronizing the people in Southeast Asia they will not accept as immigrants. They glide around their leafy suburbs in four-wheel drives and vote for the codification of social inequality when it is marketed to them as freedom. Nor can I tell my friends, the friends I grew up with. They would understand. And so I cannot tell them, either.

  We were foolish not to take proper precautions, not to take any precautions. Foolish, negligent and unlucky. Those morning-after pills have a ninety-five percent success rate. I checked, not because I didn’t believe that you had taken them but simply because I’m, well, me. That’s what they pay me for. One of the best around. So how could I let this happen? Yes, let it happen, not make it happen. Do you really think that I thought you would leave him if I made you pregnant? You would leave me. And you have.

  I have been alone before but now it will be worse. I am hungry for you, for your voice, your touch, your hand on my face. It is as real as anything I have ever experienced, and nothing—no sleep, no conversation, no idea or image—can hold this hunger at bay, not even for a moment. You are with me as I dress, as I go through the motions, becoming by day again a suited man with suitably qualified opinions recommending for or against some or other suit just to kill time in the hope that the hunger will dissipate, in the hope that I may feel some slight diminution in the need I have to be with you. I have never been sure that you knew quite how much I loved you.

  I loved the smallest things about you, things you did not recognize in yourself, your little-girl’s grin, your embarrassment in the face of my recognition of it. While you may call it arrogance, I really did want to assuage your smallest sadness, your slightest irritation. That is how it was that not only did I listen to all your concerns but I offered solutions, I tried to fix everything. This annoyed you.

  I bought presents for your children. This could annoy you too. They were inappropriate, too old or too young for them; but worse than this, they were my attempt to come into your home. I wanted your children to take pleasure or comfort from something I had bought for them. But the presents made you angry because the children were not mine. They never would be. They were your husband’s, and my gifts brought your guilt right to your door, and inside, into their bedrooms.

  There is a certain beach I cannot pass anymore. Near the city, we walked on it together only once, but that hour or two so contained what I have always wanted that the sight of it now even from the car splits my chest till the salt stings like a fresh wound every time. You remember the time I speak of. I watched the wind push your hair away from your shoulders.

  I want to hold you. It has never been like this. Yes, I have ached for you many times over the years, at my desk, at the supermarket, at home on the couch, in bed alone at four in the morning; but now, this time, I can no longer tell you about it because you do not speak to me. You do not speak because I made love to you and I stayed too long inside you. You think it was a ploy to have you leave him. I had no such ploy in mind. I would never try to trap you, much as I need you.

  How many men need you? I could list them: clients, colleagues, junior and senior to you, plus the many I do not know about. I often list them, especially the ones I don’t know about. I know how men look at you. I have seen them. But how many of them know the sound of you as your blood stirs and you cry out, how many know the touch of your hand, of your tongue, how many know the damp feel of you when you are ready to consume someone who really knows how to say your name, how many know the taste of you?

  I always knew that I could never compete with the mistakes you made over ten years ago: the mistake of marrying a man whom even at the time you were almost tired of and then having children with him, cementing your place beside him with them, loving them as you do and with them loving him. Your life became so full with work, with the children, cocktail parties and the every now and then flirting with fidelity that kept me hanging on. You suspected that I always knew you could not bring yourself to leave him and so we always changed the subject. This is why you think I have done this deliberately. You feel your body changing and now you do not speak.

  But I hear you in the middle of the night. You come to me and won’t let me sleep. I put out my hand to touch the side of the bed that you have known. The sheets are cold. I will grow old in them. I have been alone before, but this is worse because now I have you to remember and nothing like you to look forward to. Even when I had you I cried for you, just looking at you. Do you remember? In one of those stolen moments I looked at you on the bed in a country hotel and was overcome with the strength of my feeling for you. You didn’t say anything, you just put your hand to my cheek.

  You would make me laugh and then express a child’s dismay at the power of it, your power. But your power was always greater than that and still is. I am distracted. I cannot concentrate. I cannot work. I can barely pretend to work. I am panicking. I long to see you but we do not even speak. Longing to see you is not new to me. I have spent far more time waiting for you than you have spent waiting for me. Whenever you have said that you will call me after a certain time, each minute between that time and your call was felt twice: once as anyone would feel the minute and once again imagining that you have left me. It is my problem; it is not your fault. It is the foolish way I have loved you for years now.

  Your occasional cruelty did not help. This was not a matter of my loving you all the more for keeping me on my toes. As well documented as this strategy might be, it has not worked on me since I was an adolescent. No, I loved you in spite of the things you would say or do every now and then. I loved you when you hated yourself most. On the eve of a rare planned weekend alone together, you went out drinking with a client, first at a nightclub, then at his hotel. You came to my home late the next morning looking blue and sick, telling me it was “business,” he was a business associate, an important client, telling me it was okay because other people saw it, other people were there, not telling me that you had been with him in his hotel room till six in the morning.

  What did I do when you came to me this way? I took you in and put you to bed. I gave you black tea with honey and lemon, an analgesic and Berocca. I closed the curtains and whispered to you. You were tired but did not want to sleep, you did not want me to go. So I lay down on the bed by your side. I was deeply hurt but I swallowed it all. Should I have kicked you out? You half expected me to. If I had, or if I had been more that way, would you have left your husband by now? I don’t know. Possibly, possibly not.

  But if I had been more that sort of man, I would have been a different person. You have said that it was this quality of understanding or the way I tried to love you that you had never known before. It helped you to love me. When you told me this I was greatly relieved, because I often thought you didn’t understand it: She doesn’t get it. I wanted to create an atmosphere of calm around you, to love you unconditionally, not only like a lover but like the very best parent, forgiving, gentle, knowing your weaknesses, trying to understand the core of you. I cared for you that much. And now you do not speak.

  You do not speak and there is no one I can tell. Nobody knows. For your sake and, I suppose, for mine, we have told no one. So now I sit here alone, while in your house you make grilled cheese on toast for your children, your husband watches television and inside you something of ours lives. Not yet a child, nothing yet showing. You knew straightaway, certainly by the next morning. You felt as you had with your other two.

  “I always know,” you said on the phone in that last conversation. And you did. I didn’t think you could know—not so soon. What w
ere the chances? People try and try, but not us. We made it in one. What will you do now? You wanted another anyway, but if you keep it and tell Tom the child is his, you will be punishing me for the rest of my life. There will be a son or daughter I will see glimpses of, snapshots pulled out at the firm’s Christmas drinks, if I am still invited. I will be one of a number of people with a drink in their hand making a semicircle, admiring photographs of your sweet children, except that in my case one of them will be mine. Nothing I have done or could ever do would warrant such cruelty to any of us, to me, to Tom, or to our child.

  I do not think you will keep it even though part of you wants to. Part of me wants you to. I say it although, at first blush, it appears an admission against self-interest. I have gone over it many times. You must know that I have. Why did I not pull out? If only I had. How could I have been so stupid? Perhaps you will never believe this but, that last time, after you had climaxed, I felt so free, so relaxed, so full of how good it was to love you, to know your body intimately, to know you wanted to spend the rest of your life with me, that I forgot that I was not free at all. I let myself go. It is not freedom when it is forbidden, when it is stolen, when it comes hardly ever between the hours of x and y. I did not forget for long but it was long enough, and now you do not speak.

  You do not speak, and I, with so much work, so many colleagues, such responsibilities, such a fine reputation, I am paralyzed. I am afraid to return any calls lest someone hear the panic in my voice. I am afraid to go to court for the smallest application because I might see you, perhaps in another court, through the glass or talking with clients or other lawyers. I could not bear for you not to speak to me. I feel now as if I shall never be able to bear it. The thought of it terrifies me. I am not breathing well. I cannot sleep. I cannot live without being in touch with you.

  This will not die for me. Having known you as I have, I will always want to know how you are, what you are doing. This will not dissipate for me. But you, who are so much more skilled in the art of putting up walls, you will have managed some distance already. One day I will find myself talking to you again and the tone of your voice will be light, matter-of-fact, with barely a hint of unfriendliness, and I will know that I am dead to you. If it is on the telephone I will want to slam it down. If it is in person I will want to run. In public you will come as close to ignoring me as you can without arousing suspicion that I ever meant anything to you. I can see it now and so can you. You are a survivor, you have told me. I thought I was too. I am not sure anymore.

  Alone, in private, you will not always be so safe. Before, and even after you leave him, perhaps even when you are with someone else, or with the one after that, you will find the little notes I sent you. They were always inadequate. I knew that. They were not the love letters you wanted. I was too afraid of being caught to write a proper love letter. This is it now: you are holding it in your hand. But those little notes, you will look at them once or twice in the next ten years before finally throwing them out. No one will ever mention me to you, at least not in the context of the man you wanted to marry, to have children and grow old with. You will look at those notes a little wistfully and think of me. The thought will last until another thought which you prefer replaces it. We will hear many things about each other. Mostly they will be untrue. They will hurt.

  I have friends. You don’t know them, couldn’t know them. Most of them I have mentioned. They’re not lawyers. I have known them for over forty years. We grew up together, stayed over at each other’s houses as children. We used to get up in the middle of the night at each other’s parents’ houses, go into the kitchen and eat our parents’ jam out of the jar with teaspoons, in the dark. We grew up doing this. They got married, became architects, doctors, businesspeople. I became an “uncle” to their children.

  I would arrive early at dinner parties and play with their children, watch the kids crawl all over their parents while the parents humored me, feigning interest in some case I was involved in which had been reported in the papers. The children, shiny hair, ready for bed, would be allowed to stay up a little later than usual. Wrapped in their dressing gowns, they would take tiny slippered steps around and around the room offering hors d’oeuvres to the guests, to their parents’ friends.

  “Thank you,” I would say with exaggerated gratitude, perhaps interrupting some anecdote which was never really funny and which irked me even as I told it. Eventually the children would kiss the guests good night, one by one. I would ask my friends if I might read the younger children a story or tuck them into bed. I am their “uncle.” I would read to them, thinking of your children, thinking of you. A mouse, a train, a cat; do your children know this one?

  I would read them stories until they were sleepy and then I would turn out the light. On my way back to the adults, I might hear one of the older children in another bedroom whisper to their father, my old friend.

  “Is Uncle gay?”

  “What?”

  “Is Uncle gay?”

  “No, he’s not gay.”

  “Then why doesn’t he have any children?”

  “Shhh! He’ll hear you. He doesn’t have any children. Go to sleep now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. It’s late, past your bedtime.”

  “No, why doesn’t he have any children?”

  “He’s . . . he’s a very successful lawyer. He’s very smart. You should try to be like him when you grow up. He gets into the newspapers. Now go to sleep.”

  My friend might catch me in the hall and put his hand on my shoulder on our way back to the dinner guests.

  You do not know these people. I had always hoped that one day you would. They don’t know you, either, but I have at times insinuated your name into conversation, albeit in a professional context. They wouldn’t remember my doing it, but I have heard myself. I have longed to tell them about you, to tell them how I feel about you, to bring you to their houses, for your children to play with their children. Your children. I have never even met them.

  You might not even like these people. We have stood beside each other at our parents’ funerals. They have let me sleep on their couches, drunk, wearing nothing but their bathrobes. I have woken up in the middle of the night on their couches thinking of you, asleep naked, beside your husband. Or perhaps awake. Perhaps it was his turn, for the sake of convention, for the sake of appearances, to allay any suspicion. Perhaps he is having you now.

  There are friends who have older children. Two of them are old enough to be studying law. I watched these kids grow up. Now and then I am asked to their law schools to give guest lectures. If I have time I go and stand there in front of the students. They make me feel old and so I talk to them about old cases, old principles of law, principles they’ll forget or never use. But they ask me questions because something or other might just turn up in one of their exams. And you know how I love to give advice.

  At one of these guest lectures some smart-arse kid drops a Latin maxim which I translate along the lines of Equity says keep your hands where I can see them. Nobody laughs. Someone asks about Restitution. Can you imagine that? You wouldn’t want to know about that now. Someone wants to know the difference between rescission and repudiation. I tell them it all depends on whether your brief is to enforce the contract or to get out of it. Some of them laugh—hardly any. They sit there dumbly, type-A serious bastards already, shitting themselves about where they’re going to find work. They’re right to be scared. But some of them, a handful, will find work with you and one or two young men will fantasize about you while the young women will either be afraid of you or else want to be you.

  Questions come from everywhere, anywhere, ranging all over the syllabus. Someone asks me to go over the Hong Kong Fir doctrine. By go over they mean teach from scratch because they either didn’t understand it, skipped the lecture or haven’t read the case. You missed my tutorial on the Hong Kong Fir doctrine, didn’t you? You sure screwed that up in the exam.

&nbs
p; I always meant to explain it to you. When two parties agree to contract with one another and then the first party breaches the contract, how does the second party know whether it has to continue fulfilling its contractual obligations, being entitled only to damages, or whether, in addition, it can treat the first party’s breach as putting the contract at an end? Before the Hong Kong Fir case the courts divided contractual terms into conditions and warranties. Conditions were said to be those terms which go to the essence of a contract, whereas a warranty was only incidental to the contract. Accordingly, if the first party breached only a warranty, the second party was entitled only to damages. But if the first party breached a condition, then, in addition, the second party could treat the contract as being at an end.

  The problem was that the distinction between a condition and a warranty was an artificial one. It wasn’t always easy to determine in advance which terms actually went to the heart of an agreement, which terms were merely deemed as such or which terms were merely incidental to the main purpose of the agreement. The court in the Hong Kong Fir case said, in effect, stop wasting time over the question of whether a term is a condition or a warranty. Instead, look at the effect of the breach of that term. If a breach of the term so goes to the root of the contract that it makes further performance impossible, makes the whole contract frustrated, the innocent party may treat the contract as at an end.