“What’s with the horses?” Pablo asked.
I shrugged. “Horseshoe-shaped magnets, I guess. I don’t know. It’s a metaphor.”
“I don’t know,” Laura said, “I don’t think it’s actually a metaphor.”
“Just tell me we’re not going to dump a bunch of iron filings on a card and rub a magnet around underneath it,” Devin said, flipping her pen around her thumb.
“Why not?” Sage asked without moving the comic. “That stuff is retro-cool.”
“It’s pretty Mr. Rogers-y if you ask me,” Laura said dismissively.
Sage’s eyes flared, and everyone knew at once to scoot away from him. “You leave Fred Rogers out of this. You are nothing compared to him. Nothing. Dust of the planet. Not stardust. Just human skin and dandruff,” he growled, his comic book down, and the skin around his sideburns looking as if it might burst into flames.
“Whatever you say, but we can’t do television that way anymore. He’s a dinosaur,” Laura said. “He’s got heart but no style.” At this point, Sage nearly leapt across the table, but he ended up flopping on it like a sea lion. Devin looked to me for leadership, but I just watched while Sage slunk embarrassed back to his chair. Pablo then told Laura that Mr. Rogers was dead and she’d probably better show some respect.
“We have to go into the studio on Monday,” Devin said. “And we’re going to need more than horse magnets. This isn’t 1974. What’s the hard science here, Emily?”
“Easy, except for there’s really no way to tell kids where magnetism comes from without sounding like Yoda.”
Sage threw his arms into the air and hissed, “What is wrong with Yoda?”
Before anyone could yell at him, I stepped in. At first it was to settle the squabbling around the table, but it fell apart quickly. “Let me tell you people a little something about magnetism. In 1600 William Gilbert published a book on lodestones. In it he lays out everything that anyone had written on the principle of magnetism since people started thinking about it. Most of what they had to say was nonsense, and Gilbert said as much. The man had a spine, the best information of the day, and style. There’s a chapter in that book about magnetic coition—you know what coition is, don’t you, Sage?” He shook his head. “It’s what you get when you put a scheming, malcontented, borderline-OCD harpy in the same room with a blackguard know-nothing ex–drywall contractor from Coral Gables, Florida, and let the positive pole attract the negative pole. That’s when you get coition, Sage. That’s when they have to start hauling in the towels because the old black art of magnetism is strongest when you’re right there with it, when one pole is hovering right there.”
I was shaking. The room was confounded by my outburst. Devin interrupted me, which saved me from descending even more. “Max, how are we going to involve the Junior Science Corps in the magnetic coition part of the show? Could be over their heads, right? Not without the basics, first.”
I looked her in the glasses and said, “They used to put magnets under the pillows of suspected adulteresses. If they were guilty, the power of the stone would drive them from their beds.”
I WAS STILL SEETHING WHEN I set my slice of pizza on the counter and climbed onto the stool next to Asa. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “You look like you’ve been run over by a garbage truck.” I motioned to the billboard sitting atop an electrical supply warehouse across the street. It was one of the newer ones that showed Barb in an embroidered shirt with feathered earrings. She was arranging flowers in a slender glass vase. Her hair was bright red and curly, and someone had airbrushed away most of her crow’s-feet. The billboard gave the new time of her show and her tag line: CHANNEL 6 AT 9:00—AIN’T LIFE SWEET.
“Oh,” Asa said. “There she is again.”
“She’s everywhere.”
“And yet, somehow, also nowhere …”
I gave Asa a look, to which he said, “Every time we see a picture of Barb, it reminds us that she is somewhere else. Reproductions do that. In so many ways we have to wonder if our senses give us reality or just another reproduction of it.”
I wasn’t going to argue with him. Those are the kinds of things he says. He’s not putting on a show for anyone, but I figured I could cut through his philosophizing with something a little more direct. “Barb has been screwing Vogel.”
“Sy Vogel with the deli in Queens?”
“No, the home show guy with endorsements.”
“Oh, man. I’m sorry, Max. What’s his name? Chuck?”
I nodded.
“Chuck,” he repeated, then he shook his head. “The rhyme is unfortunate—”
“Yeah, it is.”
Asa apologized. “You catch them at it or did you find some letters or something?”
“What kind of question is that?”
Asa wiped his mouth and turned to me. “A man can’t find peace by turning his head, Max.”
“It doesn’t matter how I know. I just know.”
“How you know matters. It really does.”
I looked down at my pizza and lifted it to my mouth. Outside in the street, a woman flung a shopping bag into the air. It sailed into traffic and landed on the roof of a taxi. Then she began pointing at the cab and screaming.
Asa shook his head. “You see that?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I told him. The woman had run into the street and was climbing on the hood of the taxi.
“If we could see the world as God does, that woman out there would make sense to us.”
“Which woman,” I asked? “The one who’s there or the one we might not be able to see?”
Asa didn’t answer.
WHILE I WAS NEW TO my rage, I didn’t want Barb to make sense to me. I wanted to invent new horrors I could unleash upon her. It was the first time I had felt truly violent, maybe ever. Those impulses kept me from being able to concentrate on any one thing for more than a couple of minutes. In public I would eat like a bird, but in private I was ravenous. I was reluctant to speak, and then suddenly I would spew forth diatribes and venomous streams of consciousness. For all of my adult life I despised Hamlet because I did not understand why he wouldn’t just walk up to his uncle and run a sword through his belly.
What I did not tell Asa during lunch that day was that I had, in fact, caught them, not in bed but on the kitchen floor, with one of Barb’s fancy stools knocked over and some red lentils scattered across the marble tiles.
When I came in, Vogel cursed and looked up at me with this gold cross slapping his shaggy chest. Barb was still wearing her garden clogs.
“How about some privacy,” Vogel said, as he settled against my wife’s body.
“Get yourself out of her,” I growled.
Barb covered her face, then her breasts.
“Classy way to talk, friend,” Vogel said, drying his face with his forearm.
“Friend? Nobody in here is friends,” I said.
“Max,” Barb said, “you’re not making any sense.”
“In Brazil,” I said, “I could bludgeon you both to death and walk out of the courthouse a free man.”
By this point I was looking away from them and up at the ceiling fan, but I couldn’t make myself leave. Vogel hoisted his pants and began gathering up his clothes. Barb pulled an apron from one of the lower drawers and put it on. Her bra was on the toaster. They kept saying my name, telling me it’s not what it looks like, that I’ve got to understand, that things got out of hand—they’d been working on a pitch for a new show that combined his world and hers. Oh, I couldn’t stand it. I had nothing more to say to them, but I kept thinking of Barb’s trademark, “Ain’t life sweet.” The more I thought of it, the more I raged, and the more I raged, the more focused I became, like an industrial laser.
“I think I should actually kill you both. It’s the best choice,” I said. “Yes, the best choice, definitely the best choice, but it wouldn’t actually be my choice because it would be caused by your choice, which was not the best choice. No, right? Because l
ife is so sweet. Who cares? Max is a schmuck—he didn’t see this coming because he is always thinking about his fancy science projects.”
This outburst left them bewildered. I know it did. It left me bewildered, too. After that, I sort of blacked out. During my blackout, Vogel left, but after a couple seconds popped back into the kitchen for his phone. Barb left the kitchen and went to our room. As she left, I saw her eyeballing the spray of lentils, so I took a step and crushed them into the tile with my shoe. I watched my wife’s naked rear end, framed by the edges of the apron. It was like I’d never seen her before. She bolted from the room, and in the distance, I could hear her cursing as well. Cursing, not crying.
So, how would I tell Asa about that? How would I tell him that Merilese came over to the apartment that afternoon and hauled four of Barb’s suitcases out to the Range Rover and drove her to the airport, where she flew to the Charleston house, which she set up as her new HQ? I would not have known where she was if the neighbors in Charleston hadn’t called to ask when I was coming down to join her.
How could I tell him I spent three hours behind a power buffer trying to erase this memory from the tiles?
I WOULD HAVE STAYED CATATONIC like that, probably forever, if my brother hadn’t called. He’s ten years older than me, a Vietnam vet who smoked his larynx to smithereens. Now he talks with one of those robot voice wands.
“NO TIME FOR SMALL TALK,” Boyd said. “I’M GONNA LOSE MY HOUSE.”
“What is it this time?”
“YOU HEAR ME? THEY’RE GOING TO TAKE THE HOUSE … AWAY.”
The last time I got a call like this it is was Boyd’s gambling. Every time I get a call like this it’s his gambling, never something else. He’s gone bust three times in his life, had two wives leave him over it. The last one died of a heart attack. Asa said Boyd’s addiction must have broken her spirit, right in two. That’s how Asa’s mother died—his father’s drinking made her just up and quit living. She got too tired of worrying.
“Are you gambling again, Boyd?” I asked.
Silence.
“Dammit, Boyd,” I said. “I don’t have time for this anymore.”
“BANK GOONS ARE OUTSIDE RIGHT NOW,” he said. “GOT TO MAN THE STATIONS.”
“I can’t do this today, Boyd.”
“THEY’RE AT THE DOOR.”
“Boyd, Barb’s been sleeping with—”
“I NEED TWELVE GRAND, YESTERDAY. WIRE IT. SAME ACCOUNT AS BEFORE. THEY’RE COMING. WE’RE FAMILY. FAMILY IS EVERYTHING, MAX.” Next thing there was the sound of broken glass and shots. The phone hit the floor, and then there was nothing.
THEY SAY PROBLEMS COME IN threes, that the universe is fixated on that number and it wants, more than anything, to seek this trinity. Then again, three people in a photograph is bad luck. So, I gather, is three people in a marriage. Asa says that the whole thing with problems coming in flocks of three is God’s way of reminding us that He does not play at dice with the universe.
“These patterns are a kindness, Max,” he told me once on the phone. “Like the rainbow. He wants us to know where we stand in the world, what is within His command. The world seems random if we don’t look carefully at it, or if we look without faith. God did not wait for Moses to go to the mountain before He set the burning bush aflame.”
“He didn’t?” I asked.
“It was always burning. Moses was the first to notice. That was his calling.”
“You lost me.”
“Everything is spiritual, Max. People have it mixed up. They think God despises this world for being physical, which doesn’t make sense. Why would He labor to create this world only to hate it? He’s not a moody painter. He is God. Our perception of His creation comes between us, keeps us from understanding where He’s coming from. We separate the spiritual from the physical. That rift is our doing. If we learn to see what’s really there—the burning bush, love, Higgs boson particles, gravity waves—if we learn to take note of the order with which God acts and look past the chaos that we impose on His creation, then we will come to know Him. This is why He says, ‘Be still and know that I am God.’”
“I can’t be still. I’m pissed off.”
“You’ve got to release yourself from that. And you can.”
“Asa, my brother has declared bankruptcy three times. If I bail him out again, he’s just going to piss it away.”
“He might. But your job is not justice, it’s to forgive. How else will you find peace?”
“I’m not sure I want peace,” I said. “I want to make Barb and Vogel pay.”
At this point neither of us said anything for a very long time. It was late, and I knew Asa had to be in the studio early. He was good to put up with me. I think in some way it gave him a chance to put his faith into practice. I was a better crucible for his ideas than temple or prayer. Asa was in it already, living it, but I could be changed. I might come around and find enlightenment. But other materials respond weakly, right? I didn’t want the attraction. I just wanted to hear Asa talk about these things. And maybe I was “other materials.”
“God is testing your brother, Max,” he said finally, “but He is also testing you.”
“What if I fail?”
“You might. That’s why you must be careful.”
“Is God testing Barbara?”
“He’s been testing Barb her whole life.”
“How’s she doing?”
Another long pause. “I don’t really have to answer that, do I, Max?”
OVER THE NEXT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, before the meeting and my lunch with Asa, and for the rest of the day afterward, the phone nearly rang off the hook. It was Merilese, Barb’s assistant, on damage control. The poor girl was a ventriloquist’s dummy. She wanted the mail, Barb’s letters. She was trying to be indirect and very nonchalant about it, but it quickly degenerated into begging and threats. She must have known that I understood how Barb’s mail went to her post office box, where it was handled by her squads of interns and assistants. It was fishy indeed that the mail should be of any concern to Barb, so fishy that I decided to take a look for myself.
It didn’t take long, but eventually I found, in the small bundle of letters and magazines, two envelopes from her stockbroker. They were addressed to Bitya Steinberg, Barb’s real name. Someone was striving to fly under the radar. A few people know Barb cleaned up her name in the eighties. She said it was to be more American. Nobody questioned it because we were in the middle of a recession and trying to wash off the stink of Desert Storm. That’s how my wife turned herself into a shiksa.
I held the stockbroker’s letters up to the window, and in that weak X-ray I could see the simple sheet of paper and nothing else. We were in the middle of a quarter, so it wasn’t likely a statement. I set the letters down, went to the kitchen, and got a beer, but I couldn’t stay there. I returned to the letters.
I know this sounds made up, but they were pulling me, or maybe it was that I was pulling myself to the letters or more accurately, in gravitational terms, that we were pulling each other. It sounds crazy, but that’s how it felt—weak at first, then stronger the closer I got to them. I turned the envelopes over. One was postmarked a week ago and the other only a couple of days.
Let me be the first to say that, under other circumstances, I would have sent the mail along to Merilese, but some quiet and persistent voice enticed me to pick up the older envelope. I also need to say that I am not predisposed to acknowledge voices. I have never entertained them in the past, and I don’t plan to open my thinking to them in the future. I am Dr. Science, after all, which is a secular attainment.
But this one envelope nearly leapt to my hand.
As I methodically opened it, I began to feel a confidence and clarity. The confusion of a few moments ago was gone. I withdrew the letter and opened it. It was handwritten and began with the words: For your eyes only, destroy after reading.
Even though it was unsigned, I could tell that it had come from Simon Barclay, B
arb’s broker. It was not on letterhead. It looked in no way official, no connection to the firm, unsigned, and completely independent.
Simon’s message was simple.
SEC sniffing around your Econo-Mart divestiture.
Do not—I repeat—do not sign Bullseye Emporium licensing deal, or you will go to jail!!!
I reread the letter two or three times. This information was more shocking, more out of the blue than Barb’s affair. That licensing deal with Econo-Mart brought an unseemly amount of money into our lives. That deal paid for the Charleston house, and the boat, and the apartment in Rome, and my Maserati. I tried to take my brother for a ride in that car a few years ago, after his wife died, but he refused. He said it was poison, and it would make him weak.
If Barb was planning to move money over to Bullseye Emporium, the payout would be colossal, no doubt, but it would probably leave Econo-Mart with nothing. In the last year, I’ve read no less than a half-dozen articles in The Wall Street Journal about Econo-Mart’s hubris. While other retailers have diversified, Econo-Mart, out of a sense of duty or stupidity, has pushed Barb’s product line almost exclusively, to the point where it seems like Barb made the deal with them and not the other way around. If she left them, they would be finished, and she’d get what she always wanted: the appearance of upward mobility, the GM model of the American Dream, the trade up.
The only thing I know for sure about corporations is that they can’t stand being left with nothing, and when they get screwed like this, someone in the corporate structure will inevitably dream about or even suggest hiring an assassin, usually a classy one from Europe who has designed his own weapons. That would have solved a lot of my problems, but I could already hear Asa’s position on the matter. It halted my dreaming, and I realized there was another letter in my hands. I opened it. It was in the same format as the other:
You cannot outsmart them
They want to make an example of you
Stay away from Bullseye Emp.
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