She thought she might manage going home. Maisie would have eaten lunch by now and gone down for her nap, her tangled hair splayed across the pillow. Putting the letters carefully aside, Jane went through the door into Sigelman’s office and got the roll of packing tape. Tearing off long strips, she taped up the empty box so that you had to look very closely to see where the old layer had been split. She put the shoebox back in the metal egg box and checked the dryer, but the sheets were still damp.
Upstairs she put the letters at the bottom of her purse. She kept a little bound notebook in there that Billy had given her for her birthday, and she tore out one of the last remaining sheets and scribbled Sigelman a note thanking him for his hospitality. How wrong it was, thanking him and stealing from him at once! But everything was wrong today. It was hard to separate out any one wrong from the rest, and, besides, she only wanted to copy the letters. Then she would give them back.
She took a shower in the hall bathroom, but afterward she still felt dirty. She went back down to the basement and checked the dryer again. The sheets were only a little damp now, and Sigelman might be back any time, so she draped the laundry over her arm and went upstairs to make up the bed.
Chapter Fourteen
JANE WALKED back up the street toward her own house, but once she got out to University, she turned right instead of crossing over. She strode fast and kept her head down, fearful of running into anyone she knew.
At the copy shop, she eased the brittle pages open and slid them one by one onto the glass. She hoped the light wouldn’t degrade the paper; if so, it couldn’t be helped. Nothing, Jane felt, could be helped anymore. She was beyond weighing consequences or logically teasing out eventualities. Sigelman stole from the Newberry; Jane stole from Sigelman; Billy slept with a woman not his wife; Felicia slept with her adviser’s husband. They were all the same, unable to keep their hands off things they had no right to. They were like children—worse than children. Maisie, at two and a half, knew better than to steal another child’s toy. She didn’t even take cookies from the cookie drawer without asking.
At the next machine, an older man in gray trousers and a navy blue sweater vest was trying to copy an article he had cut out of the newspaper and taped to a sheet of paper, but the machine kept spitting out blank pages. “Shoot,” he said as yet another blank page slid into the sorter. “Jesus H. Christ!”
It sounded so quaint after Sigelman, this kind of language. But the man’s face was red, his mouth set in a rigid line.
“You have to put the side you want to copy facing down,” Jane said gently.
He jerked his head toward her. “What?”
“The page you’re trying to copy,” she said. “You need to turn it over.” She picked up the sheet of paper and turned it over for him, shut the lid, and pressed the start button. A copy of the article hummed out.
He picked it up and turned to thank her. His eyes were two different colors, one blue and one brown. “Appreciate it,” he said. “Don’t know why I couldn’t—Sometimes it’s the simplest things!” Jane wondered if he had always spoken in this fractured way or whether it was part of the decrepitude of age, a process that seemed to be beginning in her as well, as though at thirty she had already left her youth behind her and begun the long, slow slide toward decay and death.
“Is that you?” Jane pointed to the headline—“RSE PRESIDENT RETIRES AFTER TWO DECADES AT HELM.”
The man nodded. “Big mistake,” he said, half smiling. “Retiring, I mean. Still, my wife says she likes having me around.”
“That’s nice,” Jane said. “You always hear about the other way, wives complaining about their retired husbands being underfoot.” She ran a hand through her hair, trying to fluff it, then gave up. Vanity would have to wait until she got out of this store, or maybe out of this whole squalid stage of her life: the cuckold stage, or whatever the word was when applied to women. Maybe there wasn’t any word, which was even worse—to have become something for which there was no name, something beyond language. She turned back to her own machine.
“Deb’s never been like other wives,” the man said.
Jane looked up again. Without wanting to, she found herself wondering in what way his Deb was different—better, presumably—than other wives. “How long have you been married?” she asked and then wished she hadn’t. She didn’t want to talk about marriage. She didn’t want to talk at all.
“Fifty-three years.”
Was his tone regretful or proud? Maybe some of each. He looked like an ordinary man to her—on the street she would have passed him without a second glance—but obviously he had hidden qualities. Staying power. Good sense, intelligence, a prophetic vision of the future? She wondered what RSE was. She assumed he must have been a good president or he wouldn’t have lasted twenty years. She guessed he was a good husband, but who knew? She wanted to ask him if he’d ever been unfaithful to his wife. She wanted to ask whether they still made love, and if so, how often. She felt she didn’t know how other people lived, with what assumptions or intentions. She only understood characters in books, people made of words and ideas and hidden agendas rather than flesh and bone.
Instead she said, “Fifty-three years! That’s a real accomplishment.”
The man smiled. “What’s that you’re copying?” he asked.
She looked down at her stolen property. Her face got hot, but she found a handle of steely detachment within herself and clung to it. “Just some old family letters.”
He squinted over, interested. “What language is that, Russian or something?”
“Bulgarian,” Jane said.
* * *
When she got home, the car was gone. That was something to be thankful for. She knew she would have to face Billy, but she had a few things she wanted to get done first.
Inside, the house felt chilly and damp, and everything was in confusion. The living-room rug was scattered with plastic animals, zebras and lizards and cheetahs toppled on their sides as though they’d all succumbed to an epidemic. The couch pillows were scrunched and old socks lay on the armrests. Clothes were balled up on the chairs, and shoes and boots were scattered among dirty footprints on the floor. The table in the dining room still held what seemed to be the remains of Maisie’s lunch: half a peanut butter sandwich on a plastic plate, a bunch of grapes that looked as though it hadn’t been touched, another plate empty except for cookie crumbs. Jane picked up the remaining sandwich half and ate it. The bread was stale but the peanut butter was sweet and salty. She ate one grape, then three, then the whole bunch was gone. She wished Maisie had left some cookies. Going into the kitchen to get some seemed like too much work, and, besides, she had so many things to do.
She wondered if Sigelman had gotten home yet, and whether he could possibly suspect what she had done. She picked up her purse and took out the letters. She had made two copies of each, and now—like Sigelman before her—she had to decide where to hide them. She thought of folding them into the extra sheets they never used on the high shelf in the storage closet in Maisie’s room, but she didn’t want to involve Maisie in any way. She didn’t even want to use the same parts of her brain to think about Maisie as she used to think about the letters. She considered and discarded several more hiding places: behind the cleaning supplies in the cabinet under the sink, in her underwear drawer, in a plastic bag in the backyard under a rock. At last she went up to the attic, opened a carton containing their camping stove and nested pots, and slid one copy inside a battered skillet. The other copy she would keep out of the house—somewhere secret and sensible, like a safe deposit box. The originals she filed in her desk under “Maria Karkova materials,” right where they belonged. She had told herself she would give the originals back to Sigelman, but now she wasn’t so sure. Should she give the Newberry letter to Stefan Valdes, even though he claimed it had never existed? And what about the other two? Unable to sort out these questions in her current state, she went into the bedroom, locked the door, strip
ped off her clothes, and threw them in the hamper. She pulled on sweatpants and a T-shirt and got into bed. It was almost four o’clock; where had Billy taken Maisie that they still weren’t back? To the library? To the children’s museum? Had she fallen asleep in the car as she sometimes did, and was Billy driving up and down the Belt-line or out Route 18 toward Verona so that she would stay asleep? There was something soothing about aimlessly driving a car with a sleeping child in it, not deciding in advance where you were going, not knowing how long until you stopped, always something new coming into view—houses and parking lots and fields of corn that were left, almost immediately, behind.
Billy wouldn’t have taken Maisie away, would he? Suddenly panicked, she got out of bed and opened the drawers in Billy’s dresser, but there was no way to tell if anything was missing. She went down the hall to Maisie’s room. She knew these clothes more intimately—the little T-shirts and miniature overalls and stretchy pants. Allowing for what was lying around in corners and slung over chairs or in the laundry basket, everything seemed to be there. Besides, Ducky was lying on the unmade bed, and Maisie wouldn’t go to sleep without him.
Jane could see she wasn’t getting any rest this afternoon. She wanted to call someone, someone who would give her sympathy, who would listen to what Billy had done with appropriate outrage. Her mother? Helen? Catherine, back east, whom she hadn’t called once since she’d moved out here?
She thought about the letters again. So Karkov had slept with boys! She tried to think of male friendships or homoerotic tension among any of his male characters, but nothing came to mind. No doubt he had taken care to disguise any inklings in the writing. Still, she knew she would reread the books with interest. Sex always spiced things up, whether you liked it or not.
Suddenly Jane knew who she wanted to talk to. She went to her study, picked up the phone, and dialed. It rang and rang. Jane knew not to expect an answering machine or voice mail, but she couldn’t seem to let the connection go, tenuous as it was—not really a connection at all, just an unrequited reaching out on her part, a link of the imagination.
And then, after fifteen rings—or maybe more, she had lost count—the phone was picked up. There was a rattling and a fumbling, a loud exhalation of breath. “Hello?” a voice said.
In the long period of ringing, Jane had forgotten what she was going to say. Now she had to fight the startled impulse to hang up. “Professor Shombauer?” She forced the words out, stumbling over the syllables. “It’s Jane Levitsky. Did I get you at a bad time?”
She could have been out and just got back into the house. She could have been sleeping or in the bath. Or maybe she’d been having sex—with a nice widower from the neighborhood or a colleague from a university in Europe visiting for a conference or (who knew?) a middle-aged woman schoolteacher with a pouf of white hair to match Shombauer’s own. In her heart, though, Jane didn’t believe Shombauer ever had sex with anyone, but rather that she drew strength from abstinence, like a priest.
“Jane,” Shombauer said. “What do you want?”
What do you want? No preliminaries or niceties. Everyone always wanted something every minute, after all; why pretend otherwise? Jane felt a little better, a little calmer. Here was life cut down to the bone.
“I found some letters written by Maria Karkova,” Jane said. “I found them in Otto Sigelman’s basement. He stole them—or at least, one I know for sure he did, from the Newberry. He doesn’t know I read them. I made copies. They prove that Masha’s life was the basis for the plot of Lady of the Snakes and also that Karkov had sex with men.”
That was it: a brief cogent summary, just the way Shombauer liked.
There was a long pause. Jane could picture her adviser in the high-ceilinged Victorian house with the fussy furniture and heavy oil paintings, the amethyst-colored decanter set on the octagonal coffee table next to the amber cut-glass candy dish. She could picture Shombauer’s forehead slightly wrinkling, the corners of her mouth turning down, her fish eyes narrowing.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” Shombauer said. She spoke slowly, thoughtfully, so that Jane could picture the information filtering down through her mind, ordering and reordering itself as it fell so she could examine it from every angle, explore all the possible interconnections.
Jane tucked her feet up under her on the desk chair and looked out the window. The sun was low in the sky, and the long shadows of the houses and trees spread across the muddy lawns. A few cars splashed through the runoff down the street, but none of them was her car. What was the beginning? Her trip to the Newberry? Her questions about Masha’s death? The week in college when she read Otto Sigelman’s translation of Dmitri Arkadyevich for the class in which she’d met Billy? The spinning, magical silence of her father’s study filled with books in strange languages she longed to decipher?
“I’m wondering what I should do with them,” she said, declining for the moment to try to answer Shombauer’s question. “I’m wondering, for instance, if I should go to the police.”
“About Sigelman?” Shombauer snorted. “Unless he’s much stupider than he used to be, they won’t be able to prove anything! Say what you like about him, he knows what he’s doing. Now tell me everything.” She stretched the word out, her German accent emphasizing the harsh consonants, giving the word a rough, pitiless overtone as though to imply that the world was, in all its expansiveness, a bitter place.
Jane knew Shombauer didn’t really want to hear everything. She didn’t want to hear about Billy and Felicia, or Maisie’s illness, or Jane’s sense that her carefully constructed life had melted away like the unseasonable snow. You can’t serve two masters: hadn’t Shombauer said so from the beginning? So again, instead of answering, Jane asked the question that was bothering her most.
“What kind of scholar would do what he did? He’s covering up important information about Karkov! About his life and about his work. What happened”—here she paused, embarrassed to use the words that had sounded so ringingly in her head earlier, but she pressed on and said them—“what happened to our allegiance to the truth?”
Shombauer sighed, a long exhalation like water gurgling down a drain. “Jane,” she said, not harshly or sadly but matter-of-factly, as though this was something everyone knew: “Fame and fortune—that’s your answer! That’s what it all comes down to in the end, for so many people, not just Sigelman. Maybe he’s convinced himself that the world is the way he sees it, and no amount of evidence can shake that vision. Or maybe it’s more cynical. It hardly matters. It is how it is.”
Jane felt sure no one had ever spoken to her so plainly before in her life. In a minute, if she wasn’t careful, she’d be crying again, and Shombauer didn’t want to hear that, either.
“Besides,” the older woman went on—and now Jane felt that Shombauer was speaking to her in a new way, a way she’d never spoken before, as though Jane were finally old enough to be let in on the family secrets: the crack-addicted cousin and the uncle with wives in two cities. The father who fucked the gray-eyed boy servant in broad daylight. “Besides, you have to remember that in many ways Sigelman made Karkov. Before Otto, no one read the novels! Even in Russia they had fallen into obscurity. In France, in Germany—it was the same everywhere. But Otto saw something in the work. And he saw something in the life that he thought people could be excited about—a large, bristly, enigmatic personality. And he had the energy to animate that vision, to make others see it. He had the instincts to know who to talk to and what to say, and he succeeded wildly! He rode Karkov to the very top, so that now he’s taught in classrooms all over the world, and his name is sometimes mentioned—as it never was in his lifetime—in the same breath as Tolstoy’s or Dostoyevsky’s. Without Otto, I doubt Karkov’s books would even be in print in this country, and you would be studying something else. Pushkin, maybe, or Goethe. Or maybe you’d be working in an office—who knows?”
Jane couldn’t speak. Studying Goethe or working in an office, living in
a different city. Married to a different man, mother of a different child! Or maybe no child at all, no husband. What if Sigelman had died of pneumonia instead of his brother Georg? What if the Nazis had put him in Mauthausen or Auschwitz?
“Jane,” Shombauer said. “Are you there?”
“Yes,” Jane said, rubbing the heels of her hands over her damp cheeks. Outside, the yard was engulfed in shadow. “Yes, I’m here.”
* * *
It was nearly seven before the Honda pulled up the steep driveway. The car doors slammed shut, and then she could hear Billy and Maisie climbing the steps onto the porch and Billy saying, “Stamp your feet, Maisie! Stamp that muddy slush right away.” He opened the door, and they came into the house. His face hardened when he saw Jane. His cheeks drew in and his eyebrows pulled together like caterpillars.
“Mommy!” Maisie said. “I goed to the zoo! I saw the tigows and the elephants!” She swung her arm in front of her face like a trunk, and then she ran over to the plastic animals that still lay toppled and scattered across the rug and began setting them upright. She was wearing a pink T-shirt with a kitten on it, and there was chocolate smeared on her face. Hungry for the weight of her, Jane got up from the couch and went over to her daughter and knelt down to hug her, but Maisie said, “Not now, Mama! Now I busy. I saw giraffes, too, like this one. And a crocodile and a big, big snake! Like ‘Lisha’s snake, only still alive.”
A kind of electric shock went through Jane at the sound of Felicia’s name. She’d known she couldn’t wipe Felicia off the face of the earth just by wishing. She’d known she’d have to face her at work and probably even discuss her with Billy, but it hadn’t occurred to her that Maisie would talk about her—that Maisie would miss her, even. That Maisie would need some kind of explanation of why she had disappeared. Jane stood up and looked at Billy, and he looked at her, and she tried to figure out what she could possibly say to him, here in the chilly living room in front of their child.
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