Adios, Scheherazade

It wasn’t an ordinary diary. It was a very special sort of diary, not reflecting reality in the way that an ordinary diary reflects reality.

This diary was a wish-fulfillment diary.

As with all men, Paul Trepless occasionally lusted after one passing woman or another, occasionally had fantasies in which he actually seduced this woman or that woman. A baby-sitter, a friend of his wife’s, a secretary at the office, someone seen on the street.

Paul Trepless had a very vivid imagination, and his lecherous fantasies were sometimes very broad and detailed, and in about the second year of his marriage he began to write them down.

In a diary.

As though they had happened.

He had woven entire affairs, completely imaginary, into the true fabric of his real life. Innocent trips to the store became assignations. Business trips became orgies. Afternoons at home alone became the scenes of fortuitous seductions.

All false. But all mixed together with his real life.

And mixed also with his feelings about Beth. His feelings about her had been increasingly negative in recent years, and at times he had worked out his feelings toward her the same way he worked out the feelings toward other women, by recording them in his diary. The diary was full of reminiscences, of their meeting, their early dates, their marriage, their life together since they married, all colored by sarcasm and dislike, all putting Beth in the worst possible light.

All of this was the very bottom of him, the very worst of him, bled away harmlessly on pieces of paper, a secret diary hidden away in his desk, like the portrait of Dorian Gray tucked off in an attic, the evil portrait allowing the real man to appear good. Only in this case, the diary, recording all his evil thoughts, all his gripes about Beth, all his letches for other women, made it possible for him in reality to be something very close to the model husband, in deed if not in thought.

The fact of the matter was, he had been faithful. Once, at a party, he had kissed the wife of a friend, but that was all. Other than that, he had never actually done anything of which Beth could disapprove, and he had certainly never gone to bed with another woman since their marriage.

The diary had gone a long way toward making all this possible, in the years of the long decline, those years when the first flush of their romance had paled toward gray. Now that the romance had been rekindled in his marriage, of course, he would have no further use for the diary, and it would probably have lain forgotten in the bottom drawer of his desk for twenty years, no longer of any use whatever.

Except for one thing.

Beth had read it.

Paul could see how it had happened. Beth had never taken much interest in this den of his, because for several years she hadn’t taken much interest in anything concerning Paul, but Paul’s rekindled enthusiasm for her had met an answering spark, her own reawakening, and she had become once again passionately concerned with him, with everything he did, everything he touched, everything about him.

He could see it, as though it was happening in front of him. Beth walking in, coming in here to his den, where she had practically never been before, except occasionally to remove half a dozen coffee cups or beer glasses, after they had piled up sufficiently to have their absence noticed in the kitchen. He could see her coming in, looking around, this time looking at things with interest, because they were his.

Sitting down at his desk.

Touching her fingers to the keys of his typewriter.

Opening the drawers of his desk.

Not to be nosy, not to snoop behind his back, he knew it hadn’t been that at all. She’d come in here out of a desire to be close to him, closer and closer, to be somehow in his aura even when he wasn’t in the house. It had all, he was sure, been perfectly natural.

She had opened the center drawer, the side drawers. The bottom drawer would have been last, and the manuscript box in there would have piqued her interest. She would have taken it out, opened it, glanced at a few of the pages inside...

...and then she would have started to read it all, from beginning to end, every mythical affair, every slighting reference to herself, every passing seduction.

And how could she possibly have believed for a minute that it was anything but the literal truth? How could she have been expected to suppose that all of it was invention? How could she have found her way through the weaving of truth and falsehood, in her moment of shock, to be capable of picking the truth from the falsehood?

But even if she had, what then? He had told lies when he should have told the truth, but he had also told the truth when he should have told lies. Those things he’d said about Beth, he’d believed them at the time, he thought they were true, he thought she’d trapped him into marriage and that he didn’t really and truly care for her.