The Portrait of a Mirror

by A. Natasha Joukovsky

  This edition first published in hardcover in 2021 by The Overlook Press, an imprint of ABRAMS

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  Copyright © 2021 A. Natasha Joukovsky

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020944997

  ISBN: 978-1-4197-5216-2

  eISBN: 978-1-64700-195-7

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  For Evan S. Thomas

  1979–2018

  O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE, MOBY-DICK

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER I.

  There is no greater compliment in this world than being the uncooperative catalyst of another person’s misery, if not all-out self-destruction. The critical word here is uncooperative. It is easy, lazy, and dishonorable to deliberately distress another human being. But to do so unintentionally, or better yet, unwillingly—for one’s mere presence to cause another pain, not by any act of violence, but by the force of the bottomless pool that is unrequited love, that pool that both draws and prevents the other from moving closer—to be loved and not to love back: this is the definition of power.

  It’s a state of affairs that most privileged, well-educated, self-involved people take great pains to shape in their favor. In the truest mark of artistic mastery, C. Wesley Range IV made it seem effortless.

  So highly attractive to women was Wes that, at first glance, for the many (many) girls he had disappointed, it might have been tempting to paint a twenty-first-century Rick Von Sloneker—tall, rich, good-looking, stupid, dishonest, conceited, a bully, a liar, a drunk and a thief, an egomaniac, and probably psychotic. In reality, he was only about half of these things, and if Wes was a bit of a devil, he was the kind with whom you’d sympathize. At nearly thirty, Wes was still boyishly handsome, with an Ivy League aesthetic perforating his hipster urbanism, and (85 percent of) a Henley-winning physique. He was kind to children, respectful of the elderly, and attentive to dogs. He rarely drank alcohol, precisely because he knew he had the tendency to overdo it. The lies he told were generally engineered to spare hard feelings, and the main recipient of such lies was himself. With the recent tidy valuation of his tech startup, Ecco, one might have predicted an uptick in ego, but his oldest friends would insist there’d been no change. New acquaintances would scoff that he came from money anyway, until they learned the sorry state of his trust, at which point even Zuccotti Park–populist skeptics had been known to forgive him the suffix and develop a crush. Upon closer inspection, they found Wes could almost pass for self-made—if anything, he spent too much time at work. Factoring in his polite yet straightforward general manner, discretion in sexual encouragement and discouragement, discernment in those choices, and, most especially, his unwavering commitment to (albeit serial) monogamy, it was impossible to brand Wes a womanizer, let alone a rake.

  It was a formidable talent, making women feel valued and respected. It shouldn’t have been, but it was. Rarely making the first move, even less often a promise, Wes’s quiet self-assurance and Sadie Hawkins approach tended to attract the kind of women to whom Wes was most attracted: independently minded and forward thinking enough to proposition a man, confident enough in their own desirability for that man to be him. His real specialty, though, was breakups. Wes’s ready willingness to have an uncomfortable thirty-, maybe sixty-minute conversation and be cleanly, respectably done with things starkly broke ranks with long-established practice in male-to-female relationship termination theory. If the great lengths and dramatic unpleasantness his friends accepted to avoid such encounters boggled Wes’s mind, his own compassion and transparency shocked the hell out of them. But to Wes, empathetic, definitive communication was a kind of secular Pascal’s wager, one of those rare pragmatisms with the added benefit of humanistic appearance. In the absence of ugly breakup mechanics, most women ostensibly bore their post-Wes devastation in ironic nostalgia, if not pride of conquest. Those who did resort to the darker comforts of fiction were hardly believed anyway. Such was the sterling reputation of Charles Wesley Range IV: indelible to the point of immunity, even, on occasion, from the truth.

  As the founder and CEO of a company that pinpointed needling errors in vast haystacks of code, Wes would have been the first to admit that with any sufficiently large data set, there are outliers. And as is often the case with outliers, the two women who defied the customary pattern of Rangeian relationship dynamics had a disproportionately large effect. You had to go pretty far back to find the first black swan, a taciturn brunette from—where else—prep school, an upper former two years his senior. It had been an admiration from afar: the obsessive, worshippy sort of lust-love that can only flourish from a distance, but, from a distance, self-perpetuates. Why had he been unable to approach her? Based on the way she’d looked at him a few times, he thought maybe she would approach him. But she never did, and there were always other girls more forwardly demanding of his attentions. Before he knew it, she’d graduated and was gone. Their missed connection was the rare kind of adolescent regret that, with time and maturity, became more rather than less painful. She was now, in his mind, far more than a person. She had come to represent every decision he hadn’t made, every opportunity forgone. She was regret personified. One can get over bad decisions, lovers lost. But it is impossible to get over someone you never really had.

  The second outlier was just downstairs, the damn incendiary making all that rack
et: the catalyst of his misery, the love of his life, Diana Whalen. Wes’s wife.

  Diana took a sip of coffee and set it on the credenza. The mug hit the marble top with an edgy clink followed by the hollow little thud of full contact. Wes knew she knew he was awake. She was doing that thing where she was pretending to be trying to be quiet, so that if he dared mention her inconsideration, she’d have just enough room to get wide-eyed with hurt, theatrically offended by the affront.

  Much like Diana, the loft was built for special occasions and editorial photoshoots, not everyday life—and certainly not sleeping in. “Understated luxury in the heart of the Flatiron District,” the listing had said. “Fully renovated prewar building with some of the best views in the city. Whimsical architectural details in a supremely versatile space, dripping with charm and character.” And “only” $2.3 million; Wes distinctly remembered the broker calling it “a total steal,” and repeating, for the fiftieth time, in his affected, reality-TV accent, “this is New York.” Later that night, Wes and Diana had found countless, sidesplitting mock applications for this catchphrase, reveling in the reflection of each other’s cleverness and the competitive rush of one-upmanship. It remained, to this day, one of their most flexible and reliably funny inside jokes.

  The broker had the last laugh. It was a purchase that reflected not who Wes was, but who he wanted to be, who he wanted his friends to think he was. Wes had bought a loft for the formal-living-room version of himself, and was suffering the consequence of having to live in an apartment that was all formal living room. “Whimsical details” meant the bed was exposed and raised practically to the ceiling, photogenic in the abstract, but nearly impossible to make, never made. “Supremely versatile space” stood for one big room with wowing dinner party potential but radically insufficient closet space. On most mornings, including this one, the picked-over remnants of the previous week’s wash-n-fold spilled out of gnarled cling wrap on the coffee table, migrating precariously close to a mountain of empty take-out containers. The absolute worst, though, was the “charm and character.” Like a former war hero turned flatulent geriatric, the loft was well decorated but involuntarily announced every action of its inhabitants. The price of high ceilings and “industrial chic” was the end of privacy, the reverberating din of your wife at quarter to six when you didn’t have to be up until eight.

  A late spring sunbeam rose above the window sash, refracting into Wes’s eyes through the glass, and this new architectural indignity seemed to be Diana’s fault, too. In an indulgence he regretted almost immediately, Wes allowed himself the satisfaction of the tiniest little groan.

  Why did he do that? A lapse of self-control with Diana was never worth the dopamine. Self-control was the currency of their marriage, the critical resource in their wars of attrition, and she always seemed to have more of it. Cunning, moreish, and borderline manic-depressive, Diana had a way of teetering on the edge of things, of effortlessly laughing off faux pas or changing the rules to a game midway, never falling herself but leading you off a cliff. She was willful, playful, stubborn, and frank. Coy in her warmth, and sly in her openness. She used her beauty as a weapon and rendered sex a competitive sport. Most concerningly, her spurts of wild ebullience—her utterly outrageous youth—masked a disciplined mind that no one besides Wes seemed able to see. They were all too enamored with the formal living room.

  And so as Diana exposed the problem of the apartment, the apartment exposed the problem of Diana. This was a particularly infuriating conundrum for an expert in the resolution of system-compromising infinite loops. Wes’s life was unraveling in a manner he was uniquely well equipped to solve, and he was powerless to stop it; he hated the loft for all the reasons he’d bought it, and hated his wife for the reasons he’d married her. His greatest affirmations were drawn from the same well as his personal disappointment, and his brain boiled with the specific kind of regret paradoxically associated with success.

  —I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.

  At mezzo piano, Diana’s voice cut through the chirr of her original hardwood steps. As if the loft were in collusion with her and willing to take the fall, the timbre and contrast in volume alone provided evidence of her endeavored consideration, while her words cloaked pettiness in civility, calling him out by allegedly letting it go. This was classic Diana, saying things by saying she wasn’t going to say them, attacking in retreat, punishing Wes, yes, but without staining her hands—by making him punish himself.

  Had Diana not been Diana, the solution would have been implemented many Mondays and hundreds of clink-thuds ago. Wes would have gotten out of bed, gently taken the hands of his hypothetical wife, and lovingly informed her that their marriage was over. He would have weathered the heartfelt hysterics and gasping, blank apologies, maybe even skipping his first appointment of the day to comfort her, taking the time to steady and reinforce the idea in her mind. At a respectable interval, Wes would have had a satisfying rebound fling with Sara Khan, Ecco’s attractive Brooklynite CTO, lasting either until he met someone else or the sneaking around lost its excitement and started feeling like an obligation—whichever came first—and at which time Wes and Sara would have had a definitive thirty-to-sixty-minute conversation.

  But Diana was Diana, and his relationship with her had been so intensely exciting and explosively sexual at first that even as it crystallized into the deep-seated mutual dependence of a far deeper marital entrenchment than its few short years would suggest, there remained a startling kind of urgency to it. They fought about the same things over and over, sure—money, time, sex, tone of voice, what to get for dinner when they were both already hungry; the things almost all couples fight about. But every iteration of the cycle still carried weight. For Wes and Diana’s vast disagreements across the banalities of life were never really about their titular controversies: they were about winning.

  Her skill in debate was almost the first thing Wes had noticed about Diana, the kind of marvel so attractive it made him want not just to get close, but to enmesh her. They shared the unapologetic pleasure of keeping score, so often observed in those accustomed to victory, and hovering beneath their mutual captivation was undoubtably the sense that in concert with the other’s powers, each would become undefeatable. What Wes lacked in natural dialectic ability he more than made up for in competitive drive. Diana was heinously smart, but also lazy, and while it was understood that she was still the superior wit, he was more than good enough to be an uncommonly satisfying sparring partner. Wes had literally been training for the Olympics when they’d met, and for him, spending time together came to seem like an essential aspect of his training—rowing being, akin to love, a sport of mental as well as physical acuity.

  It was hard to pinpoint when the shift happened, when she started keeping score against him. Six months or a year into their marriage, maybe, but the trend toward it had been too gradual to say for certain, too multivariable and all in concert with the escalating quotidian practicalities involved in sharing a life. Money could smooth such tensions, but never as evenly as Diana expected. Yes, Wes would receive an ungodly inheritance from his mother via his maternal grandparents—eventually—but he felt guilty even thinking about this sum, considering the circumstances under which he’d get it. His own trust fund had been disgorged as “ill-gotten gains” before he’d ever seen it, along with pretty much everything his parents themselves ever had. Diana made a fine salary, but Wes’s current net worth was almost wholly wrapped up in Ecco. They lived a certain lifestyle—the certainly expensive kind—and between Diana’s student loans and their mortgage were pretty heavily leveraged.

  Poor, poor Wes, with his tony Manhattan apartment and pending hereditary wealth! Every time he laid out their cash-flow problem for Diana, he could feel the justice of his arguments, and he wondered if this wasn’t some part of her growing vexation—that he’d narrowed the dialectic gap between them. When she inevitably mounted some blistering rationale for exception, he could often d
econstruct precisely how she was trying to manipulate him. And yet, his passionate awe of her mind extended even to her opposition of his; it doggedly followed him from the height of his wrath into fury and cold hate, even into exhaustion and bitterness.

  While the terrifying word itself—divorce—hovered often in his consciousness, it never, never, entered into his lexicon. Too great was Wes’s fear, stored in some safer, less accessible part of his brain, that he needed and loved Diana more than she loved and needed him. That if he took her hands and lovingly informed her their marriage was over, she would look up at him, understandingly, maybe even with pity, squeeze back, and say, lovingly, “okay.” She’d only cry later. The fuck-you Antigone tears of strong women: persuasive, transcendent, coalition-building tears. The kind that would all but force mutual friends to wholeheartedly take her side and render him a criminal ingrate; not just an asshole, but also a moron. No, unlike every other relationship he’d ever thought about terminating, Wes did not actually want his marriage to end. In a desire so foreign he would have been personally unable to articulate it, what Wes really wanted were those heartfelt hysterics and gasping, blank apologies that with every other woman had just seemed like an inconvenience. He didn’t want to divorce Diana, he wanted her to beg him not to.

  And so Wes, caught between fighting with and for his wife, vainly endeavored to compute a response to her in the face of mathematically incompatible constraints and inversely correlated decision criteria. His brain overheated and blue screened. He couldn’t move, but felt like he was using a lot of energy trying not to, lying in wait until Diana’s suitcase bumped toward the door. It opened with a prewar whine.

  —Okay, Wes, I’m off. I love you. See you Thursday. Call me tonight?

  Diana waited in the doorway for a response. Wes’s answer slid down the back of his throat and stuck in his esophagus, expanding like a balloon between his sternum and his lungs. He wanted to tell his wife that he loved her, and yes, he would call her that night, that he hoped she had a safe trip and the hotel was nice, that he missed her during the week and was sorry he hadn’t made it to brunch and that once her new project was over maybe they could go on vacation and that he loved her, again. But if Wes kept silent, absolutely silent, he could still present the unconvincing but theoretically possible case that he hadn’t heard her at all, that he’d been asleep the whole time. Lots of people groan in their sleep. That was a thing that people did, certainly.