by James Hornor
“That will do. Mostly we need to get out of these wet clothes.”
I had no idea what she meant by that, but without any discussion we entered the side door of the hotel and walked down the long corridor to my room. As we entered I was reminded of my paralysis of indecision just ninety minutes earlier, and how I could have scarcely guessed that my return would not be alone, but rather, with Teresa.
“I’m getting a hot shower.”
She disappeared into the bathroom, carefully shutting the door until it latched. I sat on the bed and listened as the muffled sound of the shower filled the space in the room.
There may have been a time ten or fifteen years earlier when I would have jumped to all sorts of wild assumptions about what might happen next. But I had learned through countless awkward situations that to assume or expect anything was folly. The best thing to do was literally to do nothing. It relieved the tension and allowed life to occur with all its possibilities fully intact.
She emerged from the bathroom wearing a white terry-cloth robe that had been hanging on the back of the door. Her hair was wrapped in a white terry-cloth towel, and her face was flush from the warmth of the shower.
“Why don’t you get a shower and that will give me a few minutes to dry my hair?”
“If you want a drink, the whiskey is on the nightstand,” I said, as nonchalantly as possible about having a married woman in my bedroom in the middle of the night. But, as yet, I reasoned, Teresa and I were still just acquaintances who had been thrown together by the unlikeliest of circumstances.
When I turned off the shower I could hear her talking to someone on the phone. Whoever she was talking to was very upset, and she just kept repeating, “You have got to calm down.” Of course it was Richard, and I immediately wondered if he had somehow discovered that she was in my room. Either way, I thought of my own stupidity in inserting myself into their marital quarrels. I was in complete violation of my own dictum of not getting involved, and I thought longingly of how I could at this moment be sleeping quietly in the comfort of my bed if I had not ventured out just one hour before. Perhaps vainly hoping for an easy resolution to the conflict, I buttoned up my pajamas and quietly opened the bathroom door.
Teresa was propped up on my bed underneath the mosquito netting with a mountain of pillows behind her and the phone just inches away from her right hand. She was one of those women who look really put together even with damp hair, and I couldn’t help but notice one of her long, beautiful legs as it was languidly revealed from the folds of her robe.
“Were you talking on the phone?”
“Richard called. He must have awakened and was worried I hadn’t returned. As a last resort he called here to talk to you, and of course I answered the phone.”
“So, I assume you are headed back over?”
“Nope. I told Richard I would see him in the morning.”
“But you really can’t stay here until morning.”
“Why not?”
“Look, Teresa. You are a married woman and I don’t want to come between you and your husband.”
“You aren’t coming between us in any way. Richard knows that I have both male and female friends that I love to be with. He’s angry now, but he’ll be fine in the morning.”
My mind raced back to my initial impressions of Teresa on the airplane. She was completely independent and fearless. In my bed was a tigress—a lithe African animal with the magnetism to attract both men and women alike. And now Richard was her cuckold, seemingly helpless to control her. I pitied him as I now began to pity myself for my insertion into this African savanna of survival, where the natural laws of the veld dictate that all animal confrontations end in either disgrace or death.
“Aren’t you coming to bed?”
And now I felt like the one who had been cleverly trapped as prey. My heart was pounding. I suddenly felt completely out of my league, and in that fog of confusion I remembered another line from Hemingway that the opposite of fear is beauty.
I slid in next to her and allowed myself to accept her tenderness and warmth, the softness of her embrace. My heart was still pounding, but as our legs intertwined it became an intoxication, a euphoria where I allowed myself to be completely given over to her sheer physicality and her magnificent beauty. Neither of us said a word, but when we both awakened several hours later the sun was streaming in through the glass-paned door that led out to the small deck. What had occurred between us now seemed in complete harmony with all of the events of the previous day—our chance meeting on the airplane, dinner at the hotel, the falls at 1:00 A.M., and holding each other after the bizarre conversation she had with Richard on the phone.
But I was already formulating my exit plan. The yellow lights in my head were blinking wildly at breakfast when Teresa dared to mention to Richard that she had slept better than she had slept in weeks. His eyes had darted across the table—first at Teresa, then at me. I felt ashamed and embarrassed for both of them.
They and their children were scheduled for a boat ride above the falls late that morning, and I somehow begged off from Teresa’s persistent invitations to join them. I promised to meet them again for dinner, but as soon as they were gone I packed up and checked out of my room. The next train for Harare was not leaving until 3:00 P.M., so I stored my luggage at the hotel and walked over to the magnificent bridge that Cecil Rhodes had built across the Zambezi in 1906, a key link in the Cape to Cairo railway envisioned at the height of British colonialism. Standing on the bridge and watching the constant parade of bungee jumpers, I could see the walkway that Teresa and I had navigated the night before and the small observation platform where I had found her.
As I walked back to the hotel, the Flight of Angels lumbered overhead, and I suddenly felt an intense loneliness that often arrives unexpectedly when I repeat a pattern of behavior that has left me feeling empty in the past. I saw myself in several hours, sitting on the train and staring out of the window, happy for my breakaway from a potentially messy relationship, but sad because the trajectory of my life had not moved an inch from where it was a month ago or five years before. I was moving through space and time, but my moral compass had only moved from magnetism to magnetism, destined only to point me to the next misadventure that would ultimately bring the same sense of loneliness that had been the motivating influence in the first place.
I reached the hotel lobby; Teresa was standing at the front desk, undoubtedly now aware that I had checked out. By her body language I guessed that she was asking for forwarding information related to my checkout, and the concierge was becoming annoyed at her persistence.
Unfortunately, he also had the keys to the luggage closet. I glanced at my watch. It was 2:47. My train was scheduled to depart in less than fifteen minutes, and the station was a five-minute walk from the hotel. Teresa continued to linger.
Not knowing what I was going to say to her, I finally approached the concierge with about five minutes to go before the train departed.
“James, we have been looking all over for you!” She said it as if I was a recalcitrant child who was lost on the playground.
“I have a gift for you, James. Something I should have given you last night.”
The concierge now turned away to help another customer.
“That’s sweet of you, Teresa, but I’m actually on the three o’clock train to Bulawayo and then on to Harare. Something’s come up.”
At that Teresa took her hand and lightly touched my face, repeating the same action that she had made exiting the plane.
“There must be a later train,” she said, almost whispering.
And although we were standing in the hotel lobby, I felt completely enveloped by her physicality.
She sensed that I was hesitating.
“You saved me last night, James; I don’t want you to leave.”
I checked my watch. It was 3:03. I got my bags from the concierge, booked another room, and headed down the corridor to unpack. I wasn’t lea
ving Victoria Falls that evening. It felt as if I might be there forever.
CHAPTER TWO
CHARLIE BENJAMIN GLANCED AT THE CONSOLE CLOCK of his BMW 5 series coupe.
“Almost 1:00 A.M.,” he thought.
He had left Winnetka almost five hours earlier, and the blur of St. Paul, Minnesota, signs on I-94 had moved almost imperceptibly from three hundred miles to thirty.
He had originally planned to leave Winnetka at 4:00 or 5:00 P.M. at the latest, but the home health-care worker caring for his father had shown up late, and Ryan’s indoor soccer game had gone into overtime.
“Keep your phone on,” Heather had shouted from the upstairs balcony, and Charlie had blown her a kiss, a gesture that both of them had found ironic in its perfunctory acknowledgement that they hadn’t connected in weeks, and now he was heading to Canada chasing a hunch that he might finally meet his real father after thirty-eight years of blissfully believing that Richard Benjamin was his biological dad.
His partners at Williston, Hughes and Meyers had expressed moderate concern when he told them that he would not be back until the following Monday, and he felt a modicum of guilt that he had concocted a story about going to Alberta to help Heather’s brother in his transition to single parenthood. Heather’s brother actually lived in British Columbia, but Charlie was confident that once he mentioned Canada, all of the particulars would dissolve into a general accession that he would not return for almost a week.
He thought about his last extended absence from the firm: the ten days in October that he spent in New York with his mother—“the death shroud visit”—in Room 317 at Sloan Kettering, where he had camped out for thirty-six hours, holding his mother’s hand as she quietly slipped away.
Even at age seventy, his mother, Teresa, was still a beauty. In the months before she died, she insisted on ordering new clothes from Saks, and two days before she died, she wore an azure blue Hermes silk scarf that Charlie had helped her to carefully tie around the nape of her neck to accent her white cardigan sweater, carefully buttoned as if she had received death’s invitation complete with a suggested dress code. The day that she died was one of those late October Indian summer days in New York when the entire city seems to relish New York’s prized location at the southwestern tip of New England. A city and a climate with a destiny for all things bright and prosperous—the shadows of the skyscrapers carefully outlining the design of success that seemed especially lucid on a day perfectly balanced between the onslaught of winter and the intoxicating vestige of late summer.
On the third floor of Sloan Kettering, you can hear the ubiquitous honks of taxis and the shrill of police whistles moving along 64th Street—the constant flow of humanity just three floors below. It was somehow appropriate that Teresa Benjamin chose to die on an exquisite autumn afternoon when the bright rays of sunlight were able to mask for one last time the changing of the seasons.
An hour before her death, with Charlie at her side, her eyes suddenly widened as if she were actually glimpsing the prism of eternity that was now filtering into the room.
“Charlie, come close to me.”
Her voice was at a whisper, and as her son hovered over her, she seemed to gather herself for a proclamation that she had waited a lifetime to reveal.
“Charlie, Richard loves you dearly, but he is not your real father. Your real father is a man named James Monroe who I slept with in Africa.”
The room was completely still save for the street sounds below. It was one of those moments fraught with meaning that struggles to find a context, and in the seconds that passed with her face so very close to his, he managed to respond with his deep love for her that transcended the sterility of the room and even her earlier courage to finally reveal the truth.
“It’s OK, Mom.”
The two of them sat quietly after that, allowing the import of what had just occurred to distill into their final moments together.
“Does he know about me?”
But Teresa was already gone; content that her son finally knew the truth, she was now ready to accept the end of her fantastic life. Charlie sat there alone with her for twenty minutes until a nurse finally arrived to check on her patient.
“Does he know about me?”
His mother had gone to her grave without answering the question.
Charlie was racing across central Minnesota, the lights of St. Paul now way off to the southeast. The recollection of his mother’s death—and even more, the profundity of her life—had managed to envelop him once again, and he realized North Dakota was ahead and by mid-morning he would be in eastern Montana. It was a clear night and the March sky was a crescent of starlight. Already the horizon had lengthened out and Charlie noticed fewer and fewer cars. He clicked on the radio and found an AM station from Montreal. It was signing off for the night, and the crackled sound of the La Marseillaise, the French National Anthem, played faintly in the darkness.
Charlie thought of his own French-Canadian heritage. Teresa had been raised in Montreal, and her mother, who had the French name “Therese,” migrated from Paris to Canada after the Second World War. Teresa’s father died in France—a war victim of embedded shrapnel that eventually led to heart failure. His death awakened an entrepreneurial self-sufficiency in Therese, and she soon became the proprietor of several successful boutiques in Old Montreal. When Teresa completed her secondary education in Canada, she was bilingual, and her penchant for art and art history drew her to Manhattan, where she matriculated at Columbia, a young French-Canadian sophisticate who soon found her way into art openings and receptions where New York’s corporate scions intersected with aspiring artists from Manhattan and beyond.
It was at one of these openings on the Upper West Side that Teresa met Richard. He had recently earned his MBA from the University of Pennsylvania, and he represented a financial worldview that Teresa found both fascinating and (later) incredibly boring. Once they began dating, what Richard lacked in artistic imagination he made up for in his chatter about market buybacks and potential cash flow. He had the knowledge base to hold his own among the elite of Wall Street, and Teresa reasoned that if he knew this much about other people’s money, he would undoubtedly be equally facile with his own.
It wasn’t until year three of their marriage that Teresa discovered that Richard’s theoretical expertise was not matched by an equally potent business acumen. Shortly after their wedding, Teresa’s mother had given him a considerable sum to invest in American markets, and eighteen months later, he had lost thirty percent of its original value. Richard blamed market volatility, but Teresa sensed a pattern. Her husband talked a good game, but he lacked both the scrutiny and the timing to be a successful broker.
They compensated by acquiring the trappings of wealth, but it was a veneer that was paper thin. They borrowed money to go on expensive trips—to Europe, to Africa—and Richard refused frugality even when his income dictated a more modest lifestyle. Teresa suspected that she was a better money manager than her husband, and when income was low, it was often her resourcefulness that rescued them. Instead of being grateful, these moments of financial crisis caused Richard to become insular and bitter. He saw her intercessions as a usurpation of his authority, and his disdain often manifested itself in fits of anger that further compromised their marriage.
Charlie’s two older brothers had gone to prep school, but by the time he was fifteen, whatever money had been set aside for his tuition was long gone. He attributed his own lack of confidence to a high school experience where he was anonymous in a graduating class of four hundred. Richard made up some story about why Charlie preferred to stay home from boarding school, and Charlie always felt complicit in Richard’s elaborate cover-up.
By the time Charlie was almost out of high school, Teresa had resigned herself—as many women do—to a static marital relationship. There was an undercurrent of disappointment and regret that relegated her more to the role of caretaker than spouse. Charlie gradually became the full
object of her affection, and the youthful exuberance that characterized the early years of her marriage was now resurrected and redirected to her son. Charlie essentially replaced Richard as the primary man in Teresa’s life, and reawakened in Richard the latent suspicion that he was not Charlie’s biological father.
Charlie’s job at Williston, Hughes and Meyers was one that Teresa had landed for him through her friendship with Meg Williston. Everyone at the firm suspected that Charlie had been hired because of an inside connection, and they were pleasantly surprised when he turned out to be adept at bringing in new clients. But his job was not fireproof. The culture of the firm punished lack of productivity by withholding year-end bonuses or by not inviting laggards to key client events. “Slugs” were drummed out on a regular basis. When Charlie was hired, Heather became a valuable asset to the firm. Her breezy demeanor and good looks were perfect for drawing in new business. She had a measured flirtatiousness that suggested to prospects that they were the reason for her vivacity.
Lately, however, Heather had become more subdued, often attending events at the firm in an obligatory manner. Customers became aware of her scarcely feigned interest, and privately Charlie lied to colleagues that Heather’s ennui was due to exhaustion or concern for her recently divorced brother. But Heather’s indifference began to seep its way into even the most banal details of their marriage, and Charlie found himself in a defensive posture most of the time. This evolved into a passive-aggressive demeanor, which allowed him a secret satisfaction that he was not being subsumed by Heather’s slide into emotional mediocrity. He often forced himself to be cheerfully upbeat in direct contrast to her sullen moodiness.
His motivation for driving west was partly fueled by his curiosity regarding his real father, but it was also a reprieve from a deteriorating marriage. Neither of them knew how to stop the bleeding. He thought of Heather and Ryan fast asleep back in Winnetka, and how they would soon be waking up for another day of school and soccer. They were his identity, but as he headed west on I-94, something else was drawing him. He couldn’t help but feel that he was finally headed home.