The Unfortunates: A Novel

by Sophie McManus

  How late is Iris? Iris understands. Iris understands he listens critically because he believes simply, because he believes in music’s potential for perfection. Isn’t this the optimism of high standards, and not pretension, as the horse woman had implied and yet another girlfriend had claimed? To have aesthetic disappointment mistaken for arrogance! Now she’s missed the entire overture. I am queasy with dread, he thinks, patting his stomach. Two years ago, nothing could have caused him such fear. His thoughts rise on the first aria. All day he’d planned what to whisper to her tonight, about the music, about their future. How much there is for them to do together. If they can get away the coming winter, to celebrate the opera’s reception, he’ll take her to the bluest sea. Santorini, or Sicily. Could she have e-mailed instead of texted? He opens his in-box, holding his hand over the screen.

  Sept 18 (4 hours ago) to bcc: me

  Patricia Somner

  dear loved ones,

  i’m SO happy to share that Lotta’s been commissioned to design the annex across the street from the Sao Paulo Museum of Art! it’s official, so i can let the cat out of the bag! 218,000 square feet dedicated to three-dimensional work from around the world. babies and buildings, what a year!

  w/love and pride,

  pat

  More good news from Pat. Well, isn’t that loathsome! Isn’t she obnoxious! Isn’t Lotta the best! What an achievement! Everyone on Pat’s bcc must be so impressed! He thrusts his phone into his pocket. He must focus on what’s important, what’s happening onstage—the soprano’s kneeling in the waters of the catacomb, where she’s been caught attempting to escape by the chief eunuch. An hour gone, and no Iris! The soprano is lamenting harem life, and lo! She is beheaded. Martha’s making a clucking sound beside him. She loves it. He’s thrilled. And yet, he’s distracted, listening and not listening, worried about Iris, angry with Iris. Iris in Santorini—with him in a bleached rowboat, floating among the black volcanic stone that rises in mountainous clusters out of the water. They’re drawing the shoreline with bits of the stone they’ve broken into their hands as they float by. She’s leaning back, the sun on her collarbones. In happy silence they admire the whitewashed houses terraced up into the old hill. For a moment he forgets she’s not beside him. A crash of the cymbals and he remembers. Looking at the dull velvet of the empty seat, his vision mingles with a nightmare of why she is late: a car accident! She falls out of the boat. He dives in to rescue her, her hair ghosting around her sinking blue forehead, her hands twining above her. Back in the car, terrible vision, do not look. Now, out of the water, dead and streaming wet. Back in the car, the car no longer wrecked, but she’s fucking someone who isn’t him, hiking her dress up in the garage, leaning her dripping hair over the hood of the Lexus and singing his libretto, her mouth twisted with malicious joy.

  Despite the small size of the theater, Bob has produced a pair of binoculars, alternating which end he presses to his eye.

  George touches Martha’s shoulder. “I’m so worried about Iris,” he whispers into her ear. “I’m imagining all kinds of terrible things.”

  “I know,” she whispers back, leaning toward the stage to signal her concentration. “You’ve been jabbering away over there for the last ten minutes.”

  “What should I do?” he asks, louder, for now there’s the insistent call of trumpets as the Unnamed Hero sings of how the queen has slandered him, sent out the alarm, border to border. Sings of how he will prove her wrong and gain his honor back. How he will tear apart her house, how he will break her rule.

  20

  “I’m so bummed I missed it,” Iris says, a little out of breath.

  They’d watched her dash diagonally across the busy street, the concrete wet with rain, Iris ignoring the white lines of the pedestrian crossing and the DON’T WALK sign ticking zero, to catch them as they entered the restaurant, a new brasserie designed to appear as richly worn as an interior by Manet. Through the crowd at the bar, past the red banquettes and smoked mirrors, they pick a round table over square.

  George takes her hand under the table. “I had this horrible idea you were in an accident.”

  “George, I was! I was already late and—”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “What happened?” Bob asks, sounding serious for the first time that evening.

  She explains they closed on the house at the lawyer’s office and drove out of the generic office park, she in her car, Victor and Bill behind. They had a ways to go in the same direction and the cars stayed together. Victor got Iris on his cell and put her on speaker. They were all happily discussing how ugly the tiles in the downstairs bathroom were when a deep, low fog covered the road, unexpected for the middle of a warm September. She saw the flock of wild turkeys too late—fifteen of them maybe, but it seemed like fifty—lumbering across the road. She caught one under her front left tire.

  “I screamed, ‘Putain!’—the only French I have from my mom comes out when I’m in trouble. She never spoke it with me. Anyway, I panicked and I turned the wheel. I heard Victor brake.”

  All she could see, another and another russet fringe of wing bursting in and out of the mist.

  “Drove right into a ditch. One tire sunk, the other plastered with blood and feathers. Horrible.”

  Victor and Bill pushed while she steered the car—a silver Range Rover she’d chosen because it seemed to be what she was supposed to choose, a popular model in town, both showy and restrained—backward out of the ditch. She began to cry only when Bill set about making sure the tire wasn’t damaged or off the axle. The way he was kicking the tires—this, inexplicably, was what did it. “What’d you think you’re looking at?” she said to Victor, in her best wiseguy voice, to stop him from consoling her. “Wild turkeys, dumb as rocks!”

  He nodded and left her alone to stare angrily into the trees. That morning, as she’d dressed for the closing, rain dripped through a crack in the skylight and rolled down the mirror, onto her glasses, where they sat beside the bed.

  “I was so embarrassed.”

  “You should never be embarrassed,” Bob says, his hand a thick crescent around his glass, “to have a feeling.”

  “Why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you text?” George asks.

  “You forget to turn off the sound. I didn’t want to interrupt. I was fine.”

  “Dumb as rocks. They are, indeed.” Martha says.

  “I can see you on the road, you poor girl,” Bob says, “with all those birds.”

  George can see it too. Not too, better. There she is, dabbing at her lashes with the knuckle of her index finger, the birds lumbering past her into the misty shroud of the woods. It was a premonition he had had in the theater. He knew. Nothing separates them. Not even the usual impossibilities of time and space.

  Iris looks at Martha’s prim outfit. “Oh, God, I’m super overdone,” she says, in the same affable, self-deprecating voice with which she’s been telling her story, gesturing to the short, sequin-dotted meringue she changed into after the closing. “It made sense at home.”

  “It’s lovely,” Martha says.

  “Bill drove my car and Victor drove me home. I called the car service and, George, it was that nice man, the nice older man, who keeps his hat on?”

  “I knew something was wrong!” George cries.

  “We were worried about you,” Bob says.

  “No, no, the salad’s for me, over here.” Martha waves. “And I’ll have a look at the wine list now, please.”

  “Doesn’t wine give you a headache?” Iris asks.

  “No, you?”

  “Maybe?” Iris answers, confused. “If I drink too much of it.”

  “Now, George,” Martha says. “Your opera. It’s about—is it about the end of civilization?”

  “That’s right.” Happily, modestly, he studies the glistening mound of steak tartare that’s appeared before him.

  “And what were those blinking things o
n wires?” asks Martha. “Towards the end? During the battle?”

  “Nano-drones. Weren’t those neat? Operation Tinkerbell, in the annotated version.”

  “No whiplash?” Bob asks, looking at Iris. “Nothing like that? You’re sure?”

  “I’m fine. I want to hear about rehearsal. I bet the music was”—Iris tries out a word she wouldn’t have used a year before—“glorious.” She regrets it immediately.

  “You mean, you haven’t heard it?”

  “He’s very secretive.”

  “I didn’t want her to hear bits and pieces of it until I was satisfied. I want her to experience the full effect. Tonight was to be, but … There are as many chances as we like from here on out.”

  “That’s why I couldn’t stand I was missing it!”

  “There was some Spanish or Italian?” Martha asks.

  “Cazzo, Monkey. My money’s on George doesn’t speak either,” Bob says.

  Iris laughs. It seems to be what’s expected.

  “You know what that word means?” Bob asks, surprised. “Where’d you pick that up?”

  “Oh,” she says. “Oh, no, I don’t know what it means.”

  Bob and Martha smile at her in the warm light. They look alike, Iris thinks, though Martha is thin and Bob is not. Mineral-blue eyes, turtled and almost lashless; translucent skin; chinless as pilgrims. Expensive teeth. Hairlines high up their foreheads, alien, royal. Though Bob has the scrambled nose of a gin man and Martha’s is as long as the fingers tapering around her fork. Odd that Bob’s fingers are delicate too, considering his thick, square palms and the plump, womanish ferocity of his big frame.

  George clears his throat noisily and leans back in his chair.

  “Please, go on, George.”

  “Well, it began with the harem—I thought, Wouldn’t a harem make a good chorus. Fooling around, but Iris urged me to take myself seriously. So I found a composer. Sometimes I set the text to the music Vijay sent me, sometimes I wrote the text before I got the music. The point is, it’s not a story laid over a sound, you see? Our bid, Vijay’s and mine, was to make the union in-di-visible.”

  “They were e-mailing each other for months before George told me,” Iris says.

  “She wasn’t even jealous when she found out.”

  “Why would she be?” Martha asks.

  “I suppose—well, what Vijay and I came to understand was, how to put it, in a foreign country you hear the language all around you like music. Right now, you understand what I mean, so you don’t hear the sounds. But when you can’t use a language, its color, its chroma, appears—my partner’s phrasing is a bit romantic—he says that the ‘language undresses for you,’ it reveals its sounds and rhythms, its form. Its innate musicality. To write, at least parts, anyway, in a language I don’t know for a score I haven’t heard—the mystery may be returned. We are writing about a fractured world, after all. The process reinforces that. We tried to keep the meaning from each other as we went, so we might have a shot at—how can we return the sound, how can we put sentiment, real sentiment—by divesting the creator of the ability to create! So he—I should say, I, would have to be smart enough to know—an expert, but not in what he is doing—so he stumbles in the dark, so he may experience the revelation—if the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing, it is only in the dark that we may—” He circles his hands in the air.

  “What a load of shit,” Bob says, pointing his fork at George. “High concept, why not? One day Martha and I will be at a party and your name will come up and we’ll say, That edgy fuck? That guy? That guy used to be our friend.”

  “Thank you,” George says, genuinely moved.

  “Bob, language!” Martha cries. “George, that portion when the harem women were attacked by the gypsies was striking. Is that how you meant it, for the treatment of the women to be so degrading?”

  “You are thinking of the chorus in Italian where the women sing yes? Because they’re enslaved, so that’s all they can say, sure. And when they go up and down the octaves, sí, sí, sí—”

  “Is that your mother’s name?” Martha asks.

  “Where?” He glances around at the adjoining tables.

  “And that,” Bob says, “is what you get when you’re married to an analyst.”

  “I’m not an analyst. I’m a professor of clinical psychiatry.”

  “How clever,” George says.

  “But that’s not why,” Iris prompts. “Tell them like you told me.”

  “Okay, as we see it, after so many iterations, the word becomes a pure color wash of sound. In this way, the women are freed. Metaphorically. By accepting their yes. That’s Vijay’s. I can’t take credit. Try it: sí, sí, sí. Say it again.”

  The three sit silently looking into each other’s face, mouthing the words.

  “Still, I wonder—” says Martha.

  “God, yes,” Bob says. “Another bottle, the same.”

  There’s a long pause, punctuated by the rigorous motion of silverware.

  Iris laughs, suddenly and without precedent. “What does cazzo mean?”

  “Cock,” Bob says.

  “Tell us something about yourself, Iris,” Martha says.

  “Oh, hum. I’ve got nothing. I like hearing about George’s opera.”

  “Iris also has a musical background,” Bob says.

  “You do? What kind?”

  “Not any real thing. A couple of bands. Punk. Glam, for a second. Ridiculous. The glam wasn’t—it was mostly about the makeup for us, so it didn’t work out. Turns out glam on women is just women.”

  “You were the singer?”

  “No way. Too shy, no pipes. I played bass. Shitty bass.”

  “Wait.” Bob puts down his glass. “Tell me you were into the Pist.”

  “Yes! I worshipped the Pist. I wrote this extremely bad song that was a total rip-off of ‘Threat.’ Remember ‘Threat’?”

  “What’s Pist?” George asks.

  “Best band,” Bob says, “ever.”

  “We played CBGB’s once.”

  “You’re breaking my heart,” Bob says. “What were you called?”

  “That was when we were the Peepholes. But we were booked to play so early, like five people were there.”

  “How’d you trick it up? Eye makeup and a serious belt? Everything else shit? Shit jeans, shit T-shirt?”

  “Yes, yes, yes.”

  “Record deal?”

  “Not really.”

  “I bet you signed your rights away to some slug. If I go buy your album on Amazon or whatever, you wouldn’t see a dime, right?”

  “Not a dime. But we never had a real album. I don’t think the slug made much off us.”

  “CBGB’s,” Bob says, shaking his head.

  “Was that the coffeehouse?” George suggests.

  “I don’t miss it,” Iris says. “Stage fright.”

  “When does the opera open?” Martha asks.

  “Three months. Christmastime.”

  “Get the tourists. Smart.”

  “Will CeCe be hosting something?” Martha asks. “To celebrate?”

  “I didn’t tell her,” Bob says, staring at Iris.

  George explains. When he’s finished, Martha shakes her head and offers her condolences.

  “We hope she’ll be coming home soon. But you understand, she doesn’t want the word out. Not until she has a sense of how she’s doing, one way or the other.”

  “On the upside,” Martha says, “it’s good to hear her trial’s phase two. And that it’s open label.”

  “I’m not clear what that means,” George admits.

  “It means they’ve got a lot of money under it,” Bob offers. He lifts the lemon peel from his espresso saucer and chews it noisily.

  “True.” Martha continues, “At this point, sometimes a drug’s already on the market for something else and they’re working on a different application. Label expansion. Viagra was like that. Sometimes regulatory submission is pending
and they’re looking to see if benefit exceeds risk. These tend to run over longer periods of time, like your mother’s. But a fair shot at FDA approval. Phase three, the number of trial participants expands. Phase four is postmarket surveillance. Open label means you know what she’s getting. She’s not getting a sugar pill.”

  “Pull a few strings, George?” Bob says. “Who’d you sleep with, business or medical?”

  “That’s not how it works, Monkey.”

  “Who’s developing?” Bob continues. “It’s called Astrasyne? Bad name. Come on, I’m curious.”

  Iris notices a blotch flowering on Martha’s pale neck. “No,” Martha says. She flips her napkin onto the table. She stands abruptly, heads for the bathroom.