Bride & Groom

struggling to conceal. The water seemed to take an hour to reach a boil. While she waited to make tea, Judith picked up Uli’s big ceramic bowl of fresh-looking water, took the bowl to the sink, washed it, rinsed it thoroughly, refilled it, and replaced it on the floor. Then she coaxed Uli toward it and rested a hand on his back as he took a small drink. As soon as he’d done so, he looked up at Judith as if to assure himself that he’d pleased her.
    When the tea was finally ready, Judith and I sat at the kitchen table. I was on one of the long sides, and Judith was to my right, at the head of the table. Uli seated himself on her left, between us, not in the manner of a dog who intends to beg at the table, but in the companionable way of a dog who simply wants to be with the one he loves. When Judith had poured my tea, I stirred in two teaspoonfuls of sugar and so much cream that the tea turned almost white.
    I sipped, cleared my throat, and said, “I got an urgent E-mail message from Mac this morning. He asked me to come here immediately. His E-mail said that he needed a great and unpleasant favor that he couldn’t ask of his family. When I got here, no one answered the bell. The door was unlocked. I found Mac on the floor of the downstairs bedroom. He’d taken an overdose of ace. The empty bottle was on the nightstand.”
    The hollows under Judith’s cheekbones deepened. Her full lips thinned. Her face and body were rigid.
    “I called nine-one-one,” I continued. “Two ambulances came. When everyone left, I checked your calendar over there by the phone. And then I looked in the phone book for Sirius. I didn’t want you to have to come home and...”
    “Thank you.” Judith brought her mug of tea to her mouth, but seemed to drink nothing. “Kindness always surprises me, somehow. I’ve had so much of the opposite. It’s a blessing, really, a grace, if you will, that I still know kindness when I see it. And you are kind. In return, I think you’re owed an explanation. I’m tempted to slip into triteness and say that I’ve been worried sick about Bruce, but it’s not true. What I’ve been, really, is worried thin. I saw a therapist this summer. For only a few sessions. But she gave me courage.”
    “It can’t have been easy,” I said with deliberate vagueness. “In a way, it was. Oddly. Really, once I started, it was easier to confront Bruce directly than it had been to overlook things and, once in a while, to ask questions and get lies for answers. I didn’t see the therapist after that. I always knew, in one sense, and at the same time, I didn’t know. Both. Equally. It was a bizarre state. I knew about some of them. Bonny Carr. He talked about her. 'My friend Bonny Carr.’ Endlessly. And Laura Skipcliff, the love of his life. That was strictly an emotional affair. A big deal is made of those these days, but let me assure you that it didn’t even begin to cause me the gut-wrenching pain that the real affairs did. Strangely enough, Holly, Bruce didn’t love those women. He loved Laura. But the others were nothing more than his whores. His real affairs had nothing to do with love.” She paused. “Where was I? Yes. The most bizarre feature of the whole catastrophe was its effect on Bruce. I confronted him. And he went completely to pieces. He begged me to stay.”
    “And you did.”
    “With great ambivalence. Great conflict. He admitted everything. In some ways, one of the worst things he’d done was to send me to therapy. I didn’t actually go. Bruce sent me. For help with my paranoia!”
    “It sounds to me as if Mac was the one who—”
    “He absolutely refused. We needed couples therapy. We needed to talk it all out. Bruce insisted that we had to let bygones be bygones. He wanted us to enjoy what we had now and what we were going to have. But he could not endure the guilt. The sight of me ate away at him. One night, I remember, he began to cry, and what he said was, ‘You’ve never done a single thing to deserve the pain I’ve caused you.’ ”
    “So he tried to undo what he’d done.”
    “He tried to eradicate its causes. He tried to atone.” Judith sighed deeply. “He came to see those women for what they were. This morning, of course, he finally eradicated what he saw as the root cause. I have been dreading this all along.” She bent down to seek solace as I’d often done myself, by burying her face in her beloved dog’s thick, clean coat.
    "Judith, did you