There was a sense of violation in his conversation. I could never quite pinpoint it. It occurred after dinner, standing in, or around the pool, sipping aperitifs, sweet vermouths, and biting single malts. I tried to ignore it, to…slough it off, but couldn’t. It botherd me.
“There’s something about Arthur,” I said, driving home.
“What do you mean?” Bea said.
I was driving the Jag, it was monstrously fast and marvelously sleek. There’s nothing like accelerating through a turn, the apex, that surging feeling while your spouse is kneading the extra band of fat that’s mysteriously appeared around your waist.
“He’s always digging,” I said.
She giggled. “Like at the beach?”
“No, you silly thing. Haven’t you noticed? He doesn’t ask normal questions, like, How’s it goin’? or, Planning your next vacation? Does he? It’s always something that strikes deep in the chest.”
“What are you talking about?” Bea said.
“Tonight he asked me if I felt fulfilled.”
“Fulfilled?”
“Yes. You don’t know how to answer do you? Well I didn’t either. I felt like a fool. I mean, how do you answer a question like that? Does anybody really feel fulfilled? And did you see the look on Gloria’s face when he asked? She knew it was weird. Do you think she thinks her husband’s weird?”
“Darling,” Bea said, running her hand up the back of my neck, forcing the short, shorn, razor cut hairs against the grain, “every women thinks her husband is weird.”
Arthur is handsome in that, middle aged, well-greyed-at-the-temples sort of way. He is a writer. His articles appear in travel magazines tucked in the pockets of airplane seats.
“Not even, fleeting?” Arthur had said, flashing that bushy-browed, withering smile of his. “I want to believe everyone feels fulfilled, if only briefly. For example, Gloria, my wonderful wife feels fulfilled, don’t you love-bug?”
“Of course I do darling,” Gloria said, “but God, please, we aren’t going to go through that again are we?”
“Well, yes. We are. Of course we are,” Arthur said solemnly, spreading his arms, embracing us all. “Here we are gathered after a wonderful meal shared with some of our closest friends. Doesn’t that make you feel all is right with the world?”
“All is right with the world,” Gloria deadpanned, scooping up dishes, heading toward the kitchen. “Yes, that’s it, you’re right. All is right with the world.”
“So, what’s next Arthur?” I said, trying to lighten the conversation.
“Next?”
“Travel?”
“Ahh, yes! Zeebrugge! Belgium! Next week. The Knokke-Heist Freedom Museum. It’s a must see. You wanna come? My treat.”
“Sorry, can’t,” I said. “But thanks.”
“Well,” Arthur said, turning towards Bea, “it’s spring break isn’t it? Why don’t you come along? It’ll be fun.”
Bea taught high school English. She looked at me, clearly intrigued.
“Go!” I said, “Go! It’ll do you good. Although I haven’t the slightest idea, what did you call it Arthur? The cocker heimliech maneuver museum is all about!”
“The cocker heimliech!” Arthur said laughing, “And it’s the Knokke-Heist. You’ve never heard of it? It’s world renowned.”
*
There are times when Bea and I simply need to be apart. We’ve learned to embrace time spent apart. Avoiding each other has become, cathartic.
“You’re looking forward to this, aren’t you?” Bea said.
“What do you mean dear?”
“You can’t wait for me to go.”
“What? No. Nothing of the sort,” I said.
We’ve also learned to lie to each other.
I rang up the office, told them I wasn’t feeling well, and drove out to Montauk. There is a woman there who works for the tourist bureau handing-out street maps and whale watching brochures.
Bea discovered my infidelity years ago. It was my fault. I had a pocket full of dinner receipts. “Montauk?” she said, fanning through them. “What…why?”
I could have denied it. The receipts were, after all, innocent enough. But I am quite the idiot and failed to deny things quickly enough.
Bea called from Zeebrugge. She was worried. Arthur was ill. “He can’t even lift himself off the john,” she said, “and by the way, where are you?”
“Home darling,” I said, matter-of-factly. It was our agreed-to communication, our way of cutting things off before they became heated.
“Home,” she said, letting it hang in the air.
“Yes. Darling, home.”
The Knokke-Heist Museum wasn’t quite the world renowned treasure Arthur painted it to be. Bea toured the museum on her own, suffered through its series of lifeless dioramas and stilted mannequins dressed in web belts and floppy berets. Her favorite was a red headed sergeant smiling wickedly with a chicken tucked under his arm and a bunch of stolen eggs clutched in his hand.
“There is a garden of sorts out front,” she said, “the Kutspark Knappen. I went for a walk. It’s not much to look at.”
“Oh?” I said, picturing Bea, my Bea, in a far away place, all alone.
“I’m not quite sure,” she said, “but I think I saw Arthur.”
“Where?”
“On a bench, near a statue.”
“I thought you said he was sick?”
“I did. But there he was sitting on a bench.”
“Are you sure it was him? Maybe you’re mistaken?”
“Perhaps,” she said, willing to drop it.
*
About a week after their return Arthur invited us over to share a preview of his article.
“I thought you were sick?” I said.
“Awfully! Terribly!” he said, “ I thought I was gunna die right there on the toilet!”
“So what’s this?”
“The article,” he said.
“Yes, but, where did it come from?”
“I wrote it.”
“How?”
“I rang up the museum director. He was awfully kind. I only needed a few details, and of course Bea told me all about it.”
“Oh,” I said, arching my brows, looking at Bea. Bea nodded her head.
Arthur was fond of margaritas and in the habit of midnight swims. We gathered ’round him in the shallow end.
“This, is salt,” he said, reaching out, towards us, turning a crystal shaker over in his hand. The up-light from the pool fractured the angular glass. “It comes in a shaker. Or does it?”
“Of course it does,” Bea said.
“How do you know?” Arthur asked.
“How do I know? I just know.”
“But how do you know?” Arthur said with finality. “Have you held it in your hand? Have you used it to apply salty goodness to the rim of your glass? I have.”
I raised my glass and ran my tongue along the crusty, salty rim.
“I have not,” Bea said. “But I know it’s a salt shaker.”
“So you are allowing my experience to color your opinion,” Arthur pointed out.
“Come again?” I said.
“My experience, that of using this shaker, is unique. I know it’s a salt shaker because I have experienced it. I hold it, here, in front of me, and pronounce, This is a salt shaker!”
“Yes, it is,” I say, raising my glass, “and I stand proudly beside my loving wife echoing sound agreement! Yes! That is a salt shaker! And,” I added, licking again the jagged rim of my glass, “it sure is salty!”
“But salt shakers are a subjective experience,” Arthur said. “You haven’t touched it or held it in front of you as I am now have you?”
“Nooo…” I said, playing the game, nodding profusely.
“So how do you know? Is it a salt shaker? Or have I just convinced you it is?”
“But it is,” Bea said. “I know it is.”
“Are you sure? It is to me,” Arthur said. “I am experiencing it. Holding it. Turning it over in my hand, but I’m only now showing it to you. My experience is coloring your perception. But what if you could ignore my experience, my perception? Is that possible?
“What if I’d served you a naked Margarita? Would you still believe in the shaker? How could you? I wouldn’t be holding it, and you wouldn’t be tasting any salt.”
“Oh come on!” I said.
“What if it simply…didn’t exist?” he said, dropping the shaker in the water, watching it sink to the bottom. “What if you embraced the very absence of the shaker? What if you looked at my now empty hand without any preconceived notion of a salt shaker?”
“That’s impossible,” Bea said.
“Is it?” Arthur said.
“Did you know,” Gloria said, “when Arthur was a young and handsome man he stood straight and tall hawking BP gasoline on TV?”
“What? No,” I said, trying to picture it.
“Yes. He was an actor. His commercials were a big hit. And now he’s returning to screen.”
“Oh that’s wonderful!” Bea said.
“He’s roles have changed. He did the BP, and then as he aged, V-8 commercials. Then later Ducolax, for constipation.” Gloria said. “In this new one he tosses footballs through tire swings and battles erectile disfunction.”
“It’s a practiced skill,” Arthur said.
“But what if the swing wasn’t there?” I said.
Arthur smiled.
“What if the erection wasn’t there?” Bea said.
We all laughed.
“Well I’m not about to hold it in my hand to prove it,” Arthur said.
*
Arthur was heading to Chile to write a piece for the Wine Spectator, something to do with drip irrigation and south warming slopes. He wanted me to come along. “It’s a wonderful place,” he said, “Bring Bea. She’ll love it.”
Bea found the invitation nauseating.
“I don’t trust him,” she said.
“Trust him?” I said. “It’s Arthur for god’s sakes.”
“Arthur? The one in Brussels who was so sick he couldn’t get up off the toilet? Arthur, the one who miraculously appeared in the Kutspark? You aren’t going with him, are you?”
“Well, yes,” I said. “I think I am.
*
The mountains were magnificent, and etched beneath, row upon row of endless, colorful vines. At the front end of each row stood a single rose bush.
“The roses are like canaries in a coal mine,” Arthur said, “they’re very fragile. Any threat, any illness, will show itself in the roses before they infect the vines, which gives the vintner time to combat the problem before it reaches the grape.”
We dined on grass fed beef, drank the finest vintages, and napped through the afternoon with a promise to gather for drinks before supper.
I woke early and prowled the streets. I bought a fine leather handbag for Bea and a belt for myself, then settled down to enjoy a cafe con leche beneath a shaded portico on the Camina Centura.
I spotted Arthur seated on a bench. There was a woman beside him. He handed the woman an envelope. The woman stood, said not a word, and disappeared.
The coincidence was too much to believe.
First Bea’s Kutspark incident, and now this.
When I got back to the hotel Arthur asked how I’d slept.
“Like a baby,” I said. “Must have been all that vino!”
“Me too,” Arthur said, “I feel great! Let’s eat. I know a spot. It’s just around the corner on the Camina Centura.”
*
“Arthur lied to you,” Bea said, “and he lied to me too.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“He was never sick, and that was him in the Kutspark! Same shit!”
“I don’t know,” I said, “I mean, I’m not sure. It could have been him. Maybe not.”
“Bullshit!” Bea said. “You saw him. I saw him. What the fuck was he up to?”
We gathered, as was our custom, to share Arthur’s prose and the photos I’d taken on our trip. Arthur gushed about my images and promised to feature them in the publication.
“Oh cut the crap,” Bea said, “you weren’t really sick were you Arthur?”
“What do you mean dear?” Arthur, always the gentleman, said.
“In Zeebrugge. I saw you in the park.”
“The park? What park?”
“And now Santiago,” she said. “What were you up to?”
“Bea,” Gloria said, “are you alright?”
“Perfectly fine,” Bea said. “You had a meeting didn’t you? You dumped me, and then you dumped my husband too. Why?”
Arthur looked at me.
I played it all back in my head. Arthur feigning sickness, Bea spotting him in the Kutspark, and then Arthur, my best buddy Arthur, lying about a woman in Santiago.
“I’m sorry,” Arthur said, “I was sick in Brussels. Truly sick. I don’t know who you saw in the park but it certainly wasn’t me.”
“I saw you,” I said quietly. “You were speaking with a woman. Somebody I’d never seen before.”
Arthur leaned forward and sipped his drink. He studied the cut glass tumbler in his hand and gently placed it down on the table. “You saw me,” he said to Bea, “in the Kutspark? I can only say you are mistaken. And you,” he said, turning towards me, “saw me…where?”
“On the Camina Centura,” I said, “on a bench near that cafe where we had dinner. I was shopping.”
“Ahh,” he said. “the Camina Centura. I was asleep in my room. You know that. Are you sure you saw me? I mean, clearly, you and Bea have talked this over no? And Bea told you, I expect, long ago when she got back from Zeebrugge, that she saw me meeting with some stranger in a park?”
I nodded.
“And you, her husband, are duty bound to believe her. She had after all experienced just that, me in the park, did she not? Think about it. Me, traveling half way around the world to meet up in some strangely clandestine way with a person, on a bench, just outside the very museum I invited Bea to tour.
“And now, you say you saw me on a bench. A bench which happened to be just outside the very restaurant in which you and I enjoyed a late night, and might I say, rather inebriated, dinner.
“Did you really see me? Or are you mistaken? Was I really there? Or is Bea’s experience clouding your perception? What if she’d never brought this up? Could you put it out of your mind? Accept that it never happened? Can you? I bet you could, unless it was you who visited, say, Bern or Prague? Not for a meal, or a long weekend, but simply to sit on a bench and share a few words with a veritable stranger, someone you’re not supposed to know or ever will know. I certainly have.”
*
There was again, on the drive home, that sense of violation.
“What was that all about?” Bea said.
“About?” I said, “It’s Arthur. His whole…existential thing. His salt shaker thing. I can’t believe it.”
“What are you saying?”
“He’s telling us about the shit he pulls, but he won’t just come out and say it. Of course he was in the Kutspark, you saw him, and I sure-as-shit saw him on the Camina Centura. His writer thing is a dodge and he’s using us as cover. But he slipped-up! Did you catch it? All that mysterious crap about meeting strangers in Bern and Prague,” I said, getting angry.
“Watch the road,” Bea said, “you’re starting to scare me.”
I let up on the gas and thought about Arthur, my buddy Arthur, who used us, got caught, twice, and tried to slough it off with his subjective experience bullshit.
“You realize he blamed this on you right?” I said.
“How?”
“He wanted me to disbelieve your experience in the Kutspark, and he wanted me to convince myself that your experience, was influencing my experience, in Santiago.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Yeah. Crazy. Like a fox,” I said.
“So Arthur is —”
“Some sort of operative. He’s making drops. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s money? Or information? I don’t know. But he’s making drops.”
“My God,” Bea said.
“Do you think his wife knows?”
Bea thought about it. “Yes, clearly,” she said. “But she’s the type of woman who can ignore things.”
“Ignore things?”
“Yes. For her, it’s simple. She’s trained herself, to, as you say, disbelieve. Arthur and his disappearances? Not a problem. They never happened. And his drops?If she didn’t see it, she can certainly make herself believe they never happened.
I pictured Arthur in the pool, goading us on, letting the shaker sink to the bottom.
“She’s much stronger than I am,” Bea said. “I have trouble.”
“With what?”
“Montauk,” she answered. “I’ve never been there. I’ve never seen it. So it can’t be happening can it? Trouble is, I just can’t get myself to deny it.”
***
Brian R. Quinn is a multiple Emmy Award winning TV news journalist living in Manhattan who has spent the last thirty years covering news in New York City and overseas. Much of his work is rooted in those experiences.