by Tom Lutz
When he met her she was a complete enigma. Strong and angry, sexy as hell but untouchable, a flirt who kept you at two arms’ length. She was in love with him, there could be no doubt — he had never been the overconfident type, quite the contrary, but it was a simple fact: no one had ever been so enamored of him. And still, despite that, the ultimate sexual seduction was more arduous than he thought possible this side of the middle ages. They would make out on her couch, with her occasionally slapping his hand away, for hours, after which he’d come home and whack off, day after day, until it settled into something of a routine. After weeks and weeks they actually made it into her bed, only to spend night after endless night sleeping together and barely touching, like colonial kids bundling: her stiff with fear and yearning, him so confused and stymied it looked like patience. Eventually all the stories came out and he slowly proceeded, as if trying to domesticate a butterfly, to win her trust.
Finally, months into the thing, they managed sex. After that, she threw herself into his arms and wept on his neck and shoulder, let him know she had never known a man so sensitive, so strong, such a genius, so competent, so talented — mind you he didn’t think any of these things about himself, and that was why to have her say them was the most surprising and deeply pleasant experience of his life to date.
It can be very addictive, having someone who thinks you’re the bees’ knees, especially if that someone is smart and kind with a wicked sense of humor, and once they got past the mess, the sex was heaven. The only real hitch was the kids — not the ones he sort of still had, and who she loved when they met at Kennedy’s high school graduation, but the ones she wanted to have herself — and as she sat across the table at Versailles, he knew she was wondering whether he had been cured of whatever ailed him by this trip, whether he was ready to settle down and be a real father. It was a dealbreaker for her, and he had been thinking, for a while, that maybe it was for him as well. Kennedy and Lulu were only eight and ten years younger than Isa, which Tracy and almost everyone else thought was either just short of disgusting or worse than disgusting, but hey, was all he could say, it happened. Now, five years later, the kids were both in college, which he was paying for — and he didn’t complain, it was fine, it was part of the deal — and he kept thinking that in three years, no more college, no more support payments, and he’d be a free man. He was seeing the light at the end of that long tunnel, and he wanted to start the next phase of his life, really travel the world, maybe buy that boat after all, get out of the ruts he’d been wedged in all his life: working for a living, the endless attempt at growing up, proving something to Tracy and the doubters, all of that. The idea of starting up the whole big kid machine again filled him with horror — buying cribs, strollers, diapers — Christ, just shoot me, he thought. Plus, if they had two kids now, when was he supposed to sail around the Caribbean or the South China Sea? He’d be in his sixties by the time they got out of college. Game over. Fuck.
So they were headed to a showdown, they both knew it, but they both kept hoping against hope the other one would say, OK, you’re right, you win. He had loved nothing more than imagining sailing around the world with her. Two weeks earlier, before his trip to Taiwan, if anyone had asked, he would have said he was in love and wanted to be with her forever, minus the kid thing. Maybe she could work in a preschool or become a pediatric nurse or something and get rid of the jones she had for babies, let them go on loving each other. He could also still think, once in a while: well, if it’s that important to her, and I really do love her, which I do, don’t I have to plunge in and do it? Don’t I have to let her have her babies? He loved kids, he loved being a father, he loved all the ages, and in his weak moments he could see himself giving in, especially on those nights when in the throes of their commonplace passion, profoundly, truly grateful for her sweetness, her brilliance, her love, her body, her cleverness, her generosity, all of it real — he could almost start to weep in post-coital appreciation — then he’d come perilously close to saying OK, let’s do it, let’s have a kid or two.
“Try to be a little vaguer, Franky.”
“Haha. It’s a long flight, you know, I’m kind of out of it.”
“I’ll say, you look like you did the day those two by fours fell on your head — did you get a concussion over there?”
Sitting in front of his Cuban pork at Versailles, jetlagged like only an Asian flight can jetlag you, Isa ribbing him, he was both clearer about things and more confused. He felt like a murderer, like he was killing her dream, and maybe their relationship, for an apparition, a chimera. How did Dmitry manage to go from bed to bed to bed? Frank had barely even talked to Yuli, had spent only moments with her, and yet he already felt like the foul betrayer he only dreamed of being, someday, somehow. How did Dmitry do it?
“It is really different.” That was it. The most he could muster.
“Different how?” She knew something had shifted. And when she realized it, so did he. He definitely was not going to start another family in Los Angeles. He ordered each of them a second beer. He told her about the fight club, about the neo-imperialist steakhouse. That Dmitry owned a Starbucks.
“And the missus?” Isa asked, as if in a flash of clairvoyance. “How is she bearing up with the Dmitry-ness of it all?” Whatever she thought or knew, whatever hesitation he was having, he saw that she hated him, Frank, right at that moment, maybe even more than she hated Dmitry.
Soon after he got back, he started to get a few jobs from his regular clients installing the latest security gear, and he could see a whole new lucrative revenue stream appearing. One of his rock-star-wannabe actors — a real prick, actually, a fairly talentless, spoiled brat — had gone on a bender with pills and booze while Frank was putting the finishing touches on the guy’s make-believe studio. The actor had managed to get two clueless, adventurous high school girls up to watch him pretend to be a rock star, playing along with a tape of his magnum opus, this cheesy punk number that made Frank’s fingernails hurt. Then the actor realized he was too high to even play badly and wandered out to the hot tub with the girls, leaving all the equipment turned on. When the guitar started to feedback, Frank went into the booth and shut everything down.
Half an hour later the girls came running to him, almost naked, hysterical, because the actor had passed out. Frank pulled him out of the loud, bubbling water onto the deck, called a doctor whose name was on the empty prescription bottle floating in the pool, drove the girls down the hill when the doc got there, and didn’t tell anyone. This cemented his reputation as a discreet guy, which was a serious boon as he developed the security wing of the business — first job: this very same brat actor decided he needed cameras, motion detectors, the whole shebang, paranoid after his near brush with jailbait jailtime. His friends followed suit. He hired a couple more guys and the business was in hyperdrive. Not Dmitry money, but for Frank, more than enough; he was charging rates based not on his cost and a margin, like in the old days, but based on his clients’ fear and checkbooks. He was officially on easy street.
What he wanted, he knew, was to sail, and it looked like soon he would be able to do it. He had had a pathological pit of wanderlust since he was a kid, stoked by reading Conrad and Melville and García Márquez and Hemingway and Graham Greene, but back then he assumed that this was the way imagination worked. It was called a dream because it wasn’t ever going to become real. Frank’s dream, since that first hour on Lake Hopatcong, was to live sailing from high seas port to port, sometimes on a full-sized clipper ship, sometimes in a schooner, sometimes whatever fancy sloop he saw in the harbor that day. Window-shopping on the internet over the last few years, the reverie had narrowed down to a particular ship — he wanted a sixty-foot wooden ketch — and now a specific place: he wanted to sail it around Southeast Asia, through those mushroom-like islands off Vietnam in The Man with the Golden Gun, and around the rest of the Andaman Sea and the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand and the Strait of Malacca. He had
the charts up over his desk and he would stare at them for hours, plot courses, study the weather and the prevailing winds, calculate how long it would take to sail from Kota Bharu to Jayapura, from Jolo to Balikpapan.
The dream had moved to Asia, but Frank didn’t think it was in order to do the things Dmitry did. He might be a little perverse, but not perverse like that. “There’s a man in Bangkok, Franky,” Dmitry had told him a couple years into his first job in Hong Kong. “I fly over and call him from the airport. I say Hello, Thaksin, I would like, tonight, let me see,” and he pretended to be considering some elaborate mental menu for a couple seconds and then talked again into the pretend phone in his hand. “I would like you to get me a very old guy with, let me see, yes, with a really fat girl, and I would like to see him fuck her. The oldest guy you can find and the fattest girl. And then when I arrive at my hotel room, Franky, they are waiting by the door, a really old man and a really fat girl. How does he do it? The airport is an hour away, but he doesn’t even need the hour. I can call him from the room and say, Now I would like, Thaksin, a sixteen-year-old Laotian boy and two old wrinkled women, preferably twins from Nepal, and Franky within fifteen minutes they will show up, and within twenty, the seventy-year-old Nepalese twins are performing double fellatio on the Laotian boy. How does Thaksin do it? How does he do it!”
But, Frank asked himself, who wants this? Who wants to watch old people having sex with young people? Dmitry, he supposed, on the odd weekend getaway. But not him. He didn’t want Dmitry’s life, at least not his surreal sex life, even if it made his own existence feel like black-and-white TV, boring, out-of-date, passé. Before his trip, he had decided that life was different out there in the big wide world, and not just different like California was different than Massachusetts. Really different. More colorful, more realistic, weirder. The reality wasn’t at all like he had pictured it — which wasn’t surprising, since his notions were based on nineteenth-century novels and decades-old magazines — but still, he knew he needed to get out there again, and soon. He needed to sail to Bali, Rangoon, Papua New Guinea and a hundred spots in between.
So it had nothing to do with Dmitry. And yet, if he was honest with himself, he’d have to admit that Dmitry’s troubles kept him up at night not because he was worried, but because, if he were to find out Dmitry had disappeared, some not so small part of him would have rejoiced.
He was not, in those days — and it seemed to be hardening into a habit — completely honest with himself.
The old maxim about time and heels is right, and as a couple of weeks went by, he and Isa fell back into their easy way with each other. Things were OK, he inching in her direction, both of them managing to avoid talking about any of it. He was busy, and that helped. They had no money trouble, and that helped too. They eased back into sex together, and that exerted its magic. Life was good, he kept saying to himself, why fuck it up? Especially for an illusion. What kind of future is that?
Then Isa’s father came to visit. Herbie was a nice enough guy. Ending up a single father of sorts — his five kids ranging from fifteen to twenty-five or thereabouts when their mother died — he had kept it all together, either developing or maintaining a habitual equanimity, and he was generally known as a mensch. At dinner a couple nights after he arrived he played a different role instead, that of the protective father. They had gone out to eat — by design, in retrospect, so they would be on neutral ground. They went to a little pasta place they liked, Osteria La Buca on Melrose. La Buca had been a tiny six-table hole in the wall, with Mama in the back rolling out fresh pasta and slicing guanciale, and Isa had been so excited about it she invited a friend who was a restaurant critic. The critic raved about the food and the mad rush that followed meant they had moved into the space next door, made it five times as big and dolled it all up. Now it was hard to get a reservation. Frank missed the old place.
“So,” Herbie said. “It’s been five years now, is that right? Isa said you have an anniversary coming up.” He didn’t like the sound of that. He looked over at Isa and she was staring at her plate, not dejected, it seemed to him, but conspiratorial, even kind of hopeful.
“Yes,” he said, purposely terse.
“Are you two talking about marriage?” He knew damn well they’d been talking about marriage for years. Herbie wouldn’t be talking about it himself, with her obvious preapproval, if he didn’t know that.
“Yes.”
“You know Isa wants children.”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t?”
He looked at Isa again, but she wouldn’t look at him. He felt a wave of anger, pissed that she would let Herbie butt in, that they would gang up on him. “I guess it really is that simple,” he said, although nothing actually felt simple.
“I mean, I don’t want to tell you kids how to run your lives,” he said, no less a lie because he delivered it as if he were a nice, harmless Jewish Mr. Rogers. It occurred to Frank that perhaps one reason he and Isa had no problem with their age difference — except for this kid thing — was because she was a little too attached to her father. It also occurred to him that it was backfiring at the moment. “And I hate to say this,” Herbie went on, “but it seems to me that if you don’t want to be the father of the children she wants to have, you probably need to step aside.”
Wow, he thought, that was stronger than expected. She sat there, seemingly no more or less perturbed than she was before. They really had worked this all out in advance.
And then, just like that, things actually did seem simpler. They were making it easy for him, giving him an ultimatum. Everything fell into place, the grey area separated into black and white.
“You’re right,” he said to Herbie. Now Isa looked at him, finally, strangely calm. She was stronger than he thought. “You’re right,” he repeated, to no one in particular.
“OK,” Herbie said to Frank, and to his daughter, “OK?” Then to Frank again, “So you’ll decide?”
“I said you’re right, Herbie, what the fuck? You want me to announce it to the restaurant?”
But he wasn’t really angry. He was relieved. So he added, calmly, “I’m sorry, Herbie, and thank you, obviously we were stuck. I couldn’t decide because I couldn’t bear giving you up, Isa. But I will. I can’t have more kids, I just can’t do it.”
“But those aren’t really your kids,” she said.
“Anyways,” he said, imitating Dmitry imitating an American gangster, which he knew, as soon as he said it, was a bad idea.
She looked at him with something less than love, but something less than scorn, too. Maybe it was pity. Maybe it was surprise that he would actually back out. But, and this in turn surprised him, she was fine. He had felt such a responsibility for her, such a fear that if they split, she would clam back up, slam the door on everyone again, get depressed. But no. She’d be fine. She was fine. She could replace him in a week if she wanted to, have her kids, have a great life, a better life. Was he deluded all those years thinking she needed him? He guessed so.
He thought of Yuli.
Not anything specific. She just kept coming up.
The next day, for instance, instead of wondering if he was making the right decision about Isa, instead of worrying about whether he was being an idiot, he asked himself why, why would Yuli be with Dmitry? She couldn’t share his amorality, she couldn’t. Something about her eyes, the empathetic breadth and expertise of that smile — she was the opposite of the unscrupulous conquistador that was her husband. She had made a youthful mistake. That was the only conclusion he could come to.
He was still sane enough to ask the mirror why he was torturing himself. What possible good could it do him? Was he actually wishing his friend dead or in prison? What kind of nasty creep would do that? Not him, he said to himself, not him.
Still, Yuli couldn’t be happy, sequestered in that apartment with her sons all the time. She was a banker. She was a professional woman. She must want a wider field to play than
the little domestic cage she was in. True, she seemed happy enough, but that may have been social skill, another instance of her interpersonal adeptness, whatever private demons she might be facing. Such a shame. He wasn’t sure he could really help her, but he wanted to try.
He’d think all that, and then think: what is wrong with you, you stupid, stupid, delusional putz? Save yourself, numbskull!
Back and forth, back and forth.
Dmitry was in trouble, that seemed irrefutable, but he had invited it into his life, endangering his own wife and kids. At eighteen he was already a Connecticut pimp and an insurance scammer, almost a murderer. His undergraduate banana republic presidency and his fraudulent LSE imposture were all part of the making of a sociopath, the essence of his coming of age. His Asian deals were without a doubt criminal, his dizzying making and losing of fortunes greased by assorted flimflams: how else does a guy make a small fortune, lose it, make a grotesquely large second fortune, lose it again, and then make an even more vast, vulgar, and meretricious one, all by the time he was thirty-one, and do it legally? Frank kept running over their conversations, thinking about the bank in Tokyo, about how ghoulish it was that there was a deposit box somewhere in his name, with what, millions of dollars in it? If Dmitry was in trouble, it had to be either the police after him or whatever horrid criminals he had been consorting with, or both. If there were criminals involved, he kept thinking, were Yuli and the boys safe?
A couple times a day he’d ask himself, Why are you so obsessed about this? as if he didn’t know.
Meanwhile his actual life lurched precipitously along its wobbly track. Isa moved back east, amidst great, mutual sobbing and abject expressions of regret. They divided up the spoils of their five years, wept bitter tears, and Frank, at intervals as regular as Muslim prayers, called down silent imprecations on Herbie’s head, and his own.