The Unfortunates: A Novel

by Sophie McManus

“Taller and louder. Back to school, thank God.”

  “Of course. I forgot. September still feels like summer to me. County Day?”

  “No, we moved back to the city. George didn’t tell you? Sixty-Third and Second, right between the boys’ school and work.”

  “Convenient.”

  “Sure is.”

  “How’s Martha?”

  “Fine. What the hell’s happened to George? Haven’t heard a bark from him in a month. More than a month. I miss my drinking buddy.”

  “He’s so busy. He’s consumed. The opera’s in rehearsal. It’s all he talks about.”

  “Lucky Iris.” Bob laughs, reaching his big hand idly into her shopping cart, lifting out a yogurt. “You must be short on company. You a fan of opera? Between you and me.”

  “We went a few times last year. It’s not my thing, but I get having the bug. I was in bands as a kid. I’ve never seen him so—driven, I guess is the word.”

  “Look at you! Slick. Nice and evasive. You’re learning, kid. Sounds like George doesn’t know you ain’t froufrou enough, am I right?”

  She can’t help smiling. “Bob! I am learning. About opera. Maybe you’re a little right. He’s excited. I’m excited for him. Really.”

  “And I’m excited three. Now, how about I could use your help? If you don’t mind.”

  “My help?”

  “Let’s say George was in the doghouse. What would he buy you here to cheer you up?”

  “Here? At the supermarket? I don’t know about here.”

  “All the other shops are closed. So early, these small towns. It isn’t even dark. I’ve been visiting a client, but by the time I get back to the city, all those shops will be closed, see?”

  “They have flowers up front. But they’re tired. You could go across the lot to the wine shop.”

  “Could we take a look?”

  “At the flowers?”

  “Wine gives Martha a headache.”

  They move to the front of the store. A few plastic buckets of roses and daisies sit among mixed bouquets already rolled in tissue paper and tinted plastic.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he says, looking at the daisies.

  “Let’s try to fix something together.” She pulls two clumps of browning pink roses from the water and then four bunches of lilies. “Hold these.” She pulls the baby’s breath from the roses and plunks it back in the display bucket. She removes the browned outer petals from the roses and puts the little pile in her cart. She gestures for Bob to unwrap and loosen the lilies.

  “I’m going to hand you a few roses at a time. Mix them all up and make them fall together,” she says.

  “You can’t be doing that,” a cashier calls from the register.

  “It’s okay,” Iris says. “We have two bunches of roses and four lilies. We’ll be right over.”

  “What do I do next?”

  “You hold it and I’ll wrap it up. The plain white paper from the roll. See? Not so bad. The twine, not the ribbon. Fancier the girl, plainer the string. I only learned that recently.”

  She pulls the six neon price stickers from where she’s saved them on the back of her hand and holds them out to the cashier.

  “My hero, Iris. Why don’t we all have dinner? Guilt George into it. Next week.”

  “You think Martha will have forgiven you by then?”

  “Hope so.” He raises the fat bouquet and they say goodbye. When she turns at the far end of the aisle, she sees he’s right where she left him, still under the surveillance of the checkout woman. Iris wonders what keeps him from stepping forward to pay, what it is he forgot.

  18

  Something isn’t right. It’s hard to breathe. She sees a rolling hill of daffodils. It is in her eye. She is aware—there’s a flickering, a bird flying close to her over the field, a red hawk torquing low, too close to her face—oh, it’s not the wing of a hawk but her own eye coming open. A flat field of dandelions—dandelion, daffodil, dandelion, daffodil, but which is the yellow word? Over there—is it? The black button lost off her sweater, shining in the field. She will sift the field and catch the button up. But now everywhere is white. Is it snow? No, she’s so hot it can’t be snow. White with blue. Not lines. Dots. Dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot—dots make a line. Cloth. A gown. A hospital gown for sleeping. Yellow again, rolling past, skipping under the side of her eye. The floor. Oh, no. The floor is sick! Poor sick floor! I are lying in a bed and I are moving. There are people by her side and they are moving too. Now they’re in a metal—she—a freight elevator? It clangs! Gurney. Gurney is a word that must be related to whatever is going on. Out of the hot refrigerator and down a hallway. Small windows at the top and gray pipes in the ceiling. Basement. Underground! Bags of trash, passing a pile of black bags of trash. She cannot hear! Air, a swinging door—a different hall, brighter. Woosh, another hall, brighter still. A room. Stopped. Something beside her breathing like an animal, wheezing like a dog, but made of plastic. The dog is bright red plastic! A man giving an order. In the fluorescent she sees two silver spears, one under each of her hands. Now, why are they so silver? Someone puts a mask over her mouth and nose. It’s blue and hard and attached to a tube. It hisses and makes mist into her nose and throat and tastes bitter and is frightening and what, she tries to say, why? The silver spears must be for her to save herself. They are beautiful. But why can’t she gather them up? She must pull, like Arthur. She pulls but they do not come free. A man—a doctor?—directs her: “Get up! Borrow the arms and legs of your children for that is why you made them!” No, she pleads, that’s not why I made them. I don’t know why I made them. I didn’t have a reason! Guardrails. So stupid! Stupid, stupid. Guardrails in the sides of the bed.

  Someone puts a clipboard on her chest for a long, a very long, time. She forgets. There is a nurse whose head is a balloon tied to the silver rail of her bed. Through the mask she tells the nurse, where there are rules, there are secrets, nurse, where there are rules, there are secrets! But the nurse does not notice and the effort exhausts her and—here’s the hawk again, the awful ripping sound of a hawk and her arm has been caught up in its talons and—it’s not a hawk but another nurse, holding a knife or a pen or a spoon to her arm and she knows: this woman is communicating something to me. This is a secret way of giving me a message. But what does this nurse try to say? Ah, the nurse tells her, through the spoon pressing the inside of CeCe’s elbow—You’re not white, didn’t you know? You’re black. And you are very young and plump and you are here to make some babies! She looks down at herself and sees, yes, indeed, she is young and plump and black—why, she’s Patricia’s friend from school, that dear fat friend, and she is there to have some babies. How lucky for them to be having babies the same time! And it’s not just Pat who loves her, there is a man who loves her too, and he will come and sleep with her and then they will have the babies, which is why she is at the hospital, for there is no glad reason to be in a hospital but the coming of babies, and why didn’t they tell her this right away? Happiness and peace envelop her—she’s hot and it’s hard to breathe but it’s all for babies. And! She’s free to be anything she likes, young and black as she is, and what will she become—a singer, like that woman in Paris with the beguiling name? But in peace there is danger, for—she almost forgot them, they are so slippery—now have arrived the men in the suits. There are three of them and they are trying to kill her. Their suits are dark gray. They come when no one else is in the room. Ah, they are lawyers! They talk to her like she is a little baby. They push a pen against her hand and want her to sign a paper. She wishes one were her son, but none is her son. There’s something she is thinking she must tell Patricia. Dear Pat, where have you been? But it’s not Pat, it’s the woman with the spoon. The woman says, There, there. But where does she mean? She looks there and there, and the dog, the wheezing red dog is still beside her. He is very unnatural. And! He’s found her button in the field of daffodils. He’s going to the clapboard shed at the edge of her p
roperty to meet her and to give it back. The shed is very low. She crouches inside. She is naked and there are a pair of oars and a wooden box of heavy iron hinges and gate hooks and door knockers and lock tumblers and the window is broken and the dog is there and he stands atop the pile of rusted license plates and he has the black button from her sweater for his left eye. Here is your button! He shakes his head and out it comes. Why aren’t you at home? he says. Go home. You are safer at home. If you stay here, the man who stands outside the window and watches will come to the bed and eat you. Oh, Dog, she tries to say, I am so thirsty! But when she looks around the shed and tries to read the license plates, not anywhere can she find the word thirsty and her button has rolled away. Esme, help me, Esme. Now she is so mad at Esme! Why didn’t you clean upstairs like I asked? It’s dirty upstairs and because of you I have to live down here in the basement. What am I paying you for? Bring me water, and bring my husband a Scotch and flat ginger ale, his stomach is bothering him. Esme, please-oh-please. Esme—no, it is the woman with the spoon. Thirst is the most terrible madness! She must make the idea of thirst come through her eye because her eye is all that’s left of her mouth. Other people are in the room too, but none of them listen.

  Night, it is night. Bed, she is in a bed. Something beside the bed. A bag. A red plastic bag that is big and has words on it she can’t read. Stupid as always. Her legs are locked but they want to be unlocked. It is always shameful in the dark. The men in the suits are under her bed. One of the men has left his violin case on the chair. It is filled with birdseed. She will kick it away. A violin case filled with birdseed is an evil thing. Red, red, she must be inside her own eyes. Open. Maybe it is Son who is across the room. Son is sitting in the dark, watching her, far away. George! George, look at me, I am here! George is not looking at her. Inside her racking tremor there is no tremor. Inside where there is no tremor, there is a child. She is in the hospital, and she will have a batch of babies, and after she has them her hair will turn white. Come here, Son, come to me. I am having a nightmare. Son’s face is a stone that waits for water. Hands at her throat. Not the lawyers, but her own hands, the sides of her hands are beating up against her throat. Hands, do please take this mask off me, hands, oh, please. Son in the chair so far away. My son, what has happened to your legs that you sit and do not come to me? Son must be hurt! Son would come flying if he still had his legs. Oh, so sad. She is so sad for her son. How did this happen to her George, did they never tell her he was in the war? Now it is day. So bright her eyes will not open. Back in her room upstairs! She was this close to firing Esme. A man at the window. Green in the glass rectangle. Green at the bottom and blue at the top and the man in the middle. A lawn. Green and sounds like hrrr hrrr hrrr hrrr hrrr. There is a helicopter. Walter is in it. Walter says, evil is made of all the things you forget. Walter says, the more you forget a thing, the more beautiful it can make itself in the dark. A hand in her mouth. Cleaning. Fingers inside her mouth. Water. Water on her forehead. She’s on the beach. She has slid down the sandy dune. Here is her tremor. Racking every limb. She looks into the sky. Walter’s helicopter is gone. She stands where the surf has made a white line of sputum. They will never let her get out of bed. She will lie and shake until she is a paper husk, and rising on her own, she will tear like the shell of a dried chrysalis.

  Then it is many years of dreaming.

  Then there is waking.

  “You.” She says to the landscaper passing her window. She has gotten her mouth back.

  “Good morning,” he says.

  It’s nothing to him, that she has made the words and he has heard them. The blue mask is gone. Hedge. Lawn. Lake. Man. Green. Window. Bed. Sky. Door. Herself, where she had been.

  “Help me,” she says.

  He disappears from the window. Soon a doctor and a nurse are by her side.

  The nurse takes her hand and pats it. “You had pneumonia.”

  “Of course I did,” CeCe replies. “You think I don’t know?” And as quick as she is able, she turns her face so they will not see her cry.

  II

  THE BURNING PAPERS

  (Fall)

  19

  “But those types of loans are unstable,” Martha says with a cold, little laugh, like ice cracking in water. “The language is intentionally obscure.”

  George is sitting beside her, the smooth brass balcony rail under his hands. He leans out, surveying the empty seats below. He can barely contain his pride. Bob and Martha are the first friends he’s brought to the theater. Iris’s idea, to bring them and go to dinner. Four weeks of rehearsals already come and gone, and here they are, arrived at a preliminary run, with orchestra. No costumes yet, but part of the set is assembled. I can barely contain my pride, he thinks. I can hardly sit still.

  “My wife,” Bob sighs, “is fond of reframing the incompetence of individuals as ethical violations of entire industries. No credit, no these United States. Truth. Boom.”

  “George,” Martha says, “have you lost weight?”

  “A little.”

  “Culture of academia’s finally got Martha. Grousing about the powers that be using words nobody knows in undecipherable combinations.”

  George had insisted they sit in the balcony—“I need the artistic distance,” he said, as they entered the theater. He’d leaped the curving stairs two at a time and felt Martha’s gray gaze on his back. He also doesn’t want to distract the soprano by sitting too close. He suspects in the last weeks she’s become overwhelmed by the relentlessness of his creativity and has developed a crush on him. What else explains her sudden aloofness, her disinclination to respond to his suggestions?

  “What word did I use that was too hard for you, monkey?” Martha says. “Obscure? But I agree with you. Something the academics and the businesspeople have in common. Language against clarity. Against its purpose.”

  “I probably have the name of the loan mixed up,” George says. “Iris’s agency knows what it’s doing. It’s not like the subprimes. A program, affordable something. Fiscal Future Brighter something.”

  “Where is she, anyway?” Bob asks.

  “Running late. A closing.”

  George looks at his phone, on silent. No update from Iris. A missed call from RESTRICTED. Likely a payment he’s fallen behind on. Doesn’t matter. It actually encourages him when the creditors call, which they do with increasing regularity. It’s a jolt, that word, restricted. Reminds him he’s got something on the line. The stakes are high. He’s finally in the soup of life. Pursuing something big, he is in turn pursued. It’s practically natural law, this hero’s chase to opening night. How the droning voices of the agents delight him! Unaware of what they’re up against, ignorant of all that’s in store for the man to whom they speak. If only you knew who you’re trying to hook, he thinks, when they call.

  “A housing program,” Martha says. “Is it public?”

  Her eyes remain fixed on the empty stage. George observes the tight stroke of ash-blond hair behind the pearl screwed into her ear; the blue convexity of her nose; her flimsy, sallow neck jutting from the taupe collar of her suit jacket like the stem of a parched fawn lily. Before he can answer that he doesn’t know, George hears Bernard call, “We’re ready,” from the back of the theater. The lights dim.

  “Martha’s practically a socialist in her middle years,” Bob whispers loudly. “Welfare for everyone! Anything makes a profit can’t be trusted! Excepting me, of course. A long way from Delta Gamma, huh?”

  George scans the rows below. He doesn’t remember Bob and Martha being so irritable with each other in the past. Where is Iris? He strains to keep the entire room in his vision. Aleksandar and his paisley headscarf appear under the red glow of an exit sign. She’d texted earlier, a mode of communication she employs with enthusiasm even as he disapproves of its putrefaction of language: SELLER’S LAWYER JKASS. ½ HR DLAY SORRY SORRY SORRY.

  “You’re confused about what socialism is,” Martha whispers.

&nbs
p; Iris’s following text had been: BILL=BEUTIFL SUIT. VICTOR=SOCCER SHORTS. HAHAHA. BIG DAY SORRY.

  Nothing since. The curtain stirs. George hears—backstage, stage left?—a thud like a piece of furniture being dropped.

  “Aren’t you a twitchy, fucking mess,” Bob says, reaching over his wife and slapping George’s bouncing thigh.

  “He really is,” Martha agrees.

  “Don’t jump, like what’s his name.”

  “He fell,” Martha corrects.

  Earlier that year at Lincoln Center, a man had plunged from the fifth ring to the orchestra and died where he landed, during the final act of Coppélia.

  “My people say he jumped,” Bob whispers loudly.

  “You don’t have ballet people,” Martha replies, leaning over George, folding her hands tightly in her lap. “I know because I have ballet people and they’ve never heard of you.”

  “Martha,” Bob says, still in a hoarse stage whisper, “had a sex dream about the guy.”

  “Shhh,” George says.

  “After he fell. The dream was about after.”

  Bob sticks his fat hands out over the theater like a diver.

  “Go for it,” whispers Martha, without parting her blue incisors. “Send us a postcard.”

  The conductor strides to the podium and bows to the empty room. The spotlight shafts through his hair and sets it ablaze, the dust around his head lit like a galaxy. For a moment, George is jealous. The conductor turns his back to them, lifts his arms. The violinists begin to play. PLEASE LET ME KNOW WHERE YOU ARE, he texts Iris, frowning, soldiering clumsily through the keystrokes. The overture ebbs and crests. The curtain lifts into the rafters. No reply. The spotlight sun of the New Desert races across the first few rows as if eight to noon is but a second’s passage. Here’s the exterior of the harem—the simulacrum of a glass and steel skyscraper, fronted by two sphinxes, which he insisted on because the first opera he’d seen had been Aida. At that opera’s intermission, twenty years ago, he’d stood under the lamplight outside the theater where everyone was smoking—when everyone still smoked, except George. He leaned toward his date, an equestrian copy editor for the Hampton Classic Newsletter, to kiss her. But she recoiled and, wiping the back of her hand against her mouth, admitted their mothers had conspired to bring them together but she’d heard stories about George her mother hadn’t. And that it was weird how all through the first act he’d burst into laughter each time a high note was achieved. He tried to explain how it embarrassed him, so much feeling let into the world. More important, what stories had she heard? The school had cleared him of any wrongdoing. But she turned her bare shoulders and bummed a cigarette from the man standing next to them. So alive, leaning over the glowing match. She hadn’t said goodbye, but instead looked at him with a deep smoke-spilling frown and took off, almost at a run, down the street. For years, this humiliation would rise before him each time he entered a theater, but moving to his seat, he’d recast the moment in his favor: pity her as she fell in love with him, dismiss her advances, comfort her as she wept and begged and stomped out her filthy cigarette, put her in a cab, and return to the jostling lobby, where another woman, a less judgmental and more pornographically endowed woman, would be waiting for him at the bar. He came to feel a righteous, galvanic pride as he crossed the threshold of a theater, an impassioned swell of fellow feeling for the fellow that was himself. After that night, he never missed a season. He doesn’t even remember her name.