Free Summer Lies by Bernhard Schlink Page A

because I should have known it, it should have been significant for me too and I shouldn’t have done it. I understand that. But it really is insignificant. I know that …”
    “Settle down. Do you want …”
    “No, Anne, please let me say it all. I know men keep saying, and women say it too, that a little infidelity is meaningless, that it just happens, that it’s a fleeting opportunity, or loneliness, or alcohol, that it leaves nothing behind, no demands. They say it so often that it’s become a cliché. But clichés are clichés because they’re true, and even though infidelity is sometimes something different—often it is nothing, and that’s how it was with me. Therese and I in Baden-Baden—it was meaningless. You may …”
    “Can you …”
    “In a moment you can say whatever you want to say. I only want to say that I understand if you don’t want someone to whom a little infidelity means nothing. But the part of me to which a little infidelity means nothing is only a small part of me. The larger part of me is the one to which you mean more than anyone in the world, which loves you, with which you have been together for years. And before Baden-Baden I never …”
    “Look at me!”
    He looked up and looked at her.
    “It’s fine. I called Therese and she confirmed that nothing happened. Perhaps you want to know why I didn’t believe you and yet I believe her—I can tell better from a woman’s voice whether she’s telling the truth or lying than I can from a man’s. She felt you weren’t honest with her or with me, and if she’d known how long you and I had been together and how close we were, she wouldn’t have wanted to see you so often. But that’s another story. In any case, you didn’t sleep together.”
    “Oh!” He didn’t know what to say. In Anne’s face he saw hurt, relief, and love. He ought to get to his feet, go to her, and hug her. But he stayed sitting down and just said, “Come here!” and she stood up and came to sit on his lap and lean her head against his shoulder. He put his arms around her and looked out over her head at the rooftops and the church tower. Should he tell her about his afternoon with Renée?
    “Why are you shaking your head?”
    Because I’ve just decided not to tell you about the other little infidelity this afternoon … “I was just thinking that we almost …”
    “I know.”
13
    They didn’t say any more about Baden-Baden, or Therese, or truth and lies. It wasn’t as if nothing had taken place. If nothing had taken place, they would have felt free to fight with each other. But they were taking care not to bang into each other. They moved cautiously. They did more work than they had at the beginning and by the end she had completed her essay on gender differences and equal rights, and he had his play about two bankers sitting trapped in an elevator for a whole weekend. When they had sex, each of them remained a little reserved.
    On the last evening they went again to the restaurant in Bonnieux. They watched from the terrace as the sun went down and night came. The deep blue of the sky darkened to absolute black, the stars glittered, and the cicadas were loud. The blackness, the glitter, the noise—it was a festive night. But their imminent departure made them melancholic, and on top of this the star-strewn sky reminded him of moral law and the hour with Renée.
    “Are you still holding it against me that I didn’t tell Therese more about you and you more about Therese?”
    She shook her head. “It made me sad. But I don’t hold it against you. And you? Do you hold it against me that I suspected you and used blackmail? Which is what I did, I blackmailed you, and because you love me, you allowed it to happen.”
    “No, I don’t hold it against you. It makes me anxious that things escalated so fast. But that’s something else.”
    She laid her hand on his, but instead of looking at him, she looked out across the countryside. “Why