“Goodness, dear, turn on a lamp!”
“Yes.” What a strange, drowsy way her daughter-in-law moves from one light switch to another. Something has changed. Something is wrong. The room is brightened.
“Have a seat. Let me wake George.” Iris goes upstairs.
With the lights on, CeCe notices a copious streak of bird shit down the outside of the glass. She hears the door at the top of the stairs open and Iris murmuring. CeCe tries hard to see what she is seeing. A house missing half its furniture. There’s dust and dog hair rolling in the corners of the room. Paw prints and footprints the color of gristle layer the kitchen floor. She peers into the mudroom. In a neat row, some ten heaping recycling bags sit uncollected. Back in the living room, she sees little rips of paper, scribbled notes, scattered on the floor. Clothes are piled on the far end of the sectional on which she sits, and an empty laundry basket is tipped on its side beneath. The dark, faint smell of the crushed pipes is unmistakable. A white rectangle on the wall marks where a picture must have been. No, a television—below is a console stacked with DVDs. She wanders to the kitchen area. Area, for the impractical democracy of these types of houses does not allow for separate kitchens. It seems altered, barren of appliances. All that’s on the counter is a can of air freshener and a bag of dog food. She opens the refrigerator. Milk, sandwich bread, a door full of condiments, and the makings of what must be today’s lunch for her—a bunch of arugula and a tomato and a wax-paper bundle with an expensive price tag that reads Alaskan King Salmon. She gingerly opens a cardboard box. A glistening, dense chocolate torte. Nothing else. She hears George’s voice. Her son, his voice. She has missed him? This faint sound—she hears it more with her body than with her ears. She is his mother. Clearer is Iris’s voice, rising in a hushed, desperate pitch: “But you can’t use the bathroom.” And, lower, but not low enough: “Don’t make her wait. You should be the one waiting for her. Please get dressed.”
“You know what, dears?” CeCe calls up the stairs. “You know what, George? I shouldn’t have crept up on you like this. How about a rain check? I’ll let myself out.”
She’ll make it back by herself. It will be fine.
Iris pads fast down the stairs. She overtakes CeCe at the front door, a crooked, unconvincing smile on her face. “I’m so sorry. Can I walk you? I’ll walk with you.”
Together, they cross the lawn. The path is dense and cool, with bright velvet moss and twigs under their feet. As it climbs the gentle hill, the sun shafts through the leaves. Soon they can hear the lapping of the tide going out.
As they step onto the lawn, CeCe takes Iris’s hand. “We’ll make it right. Do you understand?”
Iris lowers her eyes and shakes her head. Then she nods, but does not speak. CeCe leaves her at the edge of the path. When she turns, Iris is still there, nodding at the ground.
36
It’s a strange kind of justice. Or a strange kind of injustice. Or, stranger still, justice and injustice have nothing at all to do with how the following week CeCe restores their finances. As if all the last months Iris has been inside a dream. It’s seems as easy for CeCe as paying the hairdresser. The hairdresser is holding a white envelope and kissing CeCe goodbye when Iris arrives at the house. The accountant waits in the dining room.
“Iris,” CeCe says, “you sit beside Mr. Pitt so you can read together, dear.”
CeCe sits on his other side. Mr. Pitt gently takes the stack of battered, rubber-banded folders Iris is clutching to her chest. The folders in which she’s tried to hold everything straight, keep both her and George’s sanity ordered, keep chaos shut inside. Like trying to keep a folder full of dirty water. Mr. Pitt spreads the papers on the table. Bill by bill, she explains. At CeCe’s insistence, she eats a dry piece of shortbread from a gold-banded tea plate painted with songbirds.
After a silence the accountant says, “I can manage it from here.”
CeCe adds, “With the lawyers’ counsel.”
“Yes, and with your final.” He slides the bundle into his briefcase. It’s all over in under an hour. Iris remains in her seat. The right thing to do, to wait for the door to close behind Mr. Pitt so she can thank CeCe, as properly as one can for such a bailout. But when no one stands and she sees that CeCe and Mr. Pitt are staring at her, pleasantly and with the slightest puzzlement, she understands that it’s she who’s been dismissed, that Mr. Pitt and CeCe have other business to attend to. Empty-handed, she heads back home. She tries Victor as she walks and hangs up at the voice mail. She’s left enough messages—four, five, six?—since running into Bill.
As if it were a dream. And she, the only one unconscious enough to believe it real. By the next week their bank accounts are replenished. Soon, most of the collectors stop calling. The lawyer instructs her when any do call to refer them to him and not to give it another worry. Without notice or comment, a housekeeping service is sent by CeCe, to be supervised by Esme. (Esme explains that Erika is at a summer essay-writing program in preparation for her first semester at Vassar, Esme raising her eyes skyward to convey CeCe has had a hand in this too.) The house is clean and stocked again. One morning, a large box containing a new television is delivered. Appointments are made with various psychiatrists and psychologists and substance-abuse specialists for George, though he protests the last. Iris learns he is no stranger to intervention. What is new, what has been different, the last years, was George being on his own. Early on, he’d decided Iris was all he needed. Without telling her, he had dropped away from the therapy and the medication that kept him steady. Love required sympathy, he’d said, and sympathy required suffering. But if he believes this, then why did he hide who he was from her? How hadn’t she seen?
When, in three weeks, the tree man returns to assess the Vaporooted ash and tells her that they’ve hacked back the root structure without endangering the tree, Iris finds, to the man’s discomfort, she’s weeping with relief. “Ripped contact lense,” she says. She’s often in a confusion of tempers, one hour crying in front of the tree man; the next, carefree; the next, furious—though, with the exception of the breakdown under the ash, she’s fairly good at keeping it to herself. Mostly, her fury and relief mingle and take the form of a continuous, boiling impatience. She is confused, some days, by the flickering reappearance of the George she’d fallen in love with. One day he said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been a jerk,” and smiled at her with his old ease, shook the hair out of his eyes, asked her where she’d been all his life. It doesn’t help that mornings now, she drifts along the sticky swell and ebb of nausea, corpse-limbed with exhaustion.
A month ago, they’d been bankrupt. Now they are safe. More than safe! To have plunged so fast and been bounced back up again as if she were on a trampoline. She must be an idiot. She felt like one, sitting next to Mr. Pitt! How smug CeCe is, sweeping back in! As if here is another rule about the rich no one explained to Iris—when they lose their money, they’ve only misplaced it, like a set of keys. Nothing isn’t nothing. A rule written in invisible ink. And so her marshaling of resources—selling their things, battling the creditors, confessing to Bob, her certain panic that they would be turned out of their house—are, in hindsight, all a product of her stupidity and her misunderstanding. A madness of her own creation. One thing she’s learned. She could’ve gone back to being broke. But not with George.
And how is it CeCe’s restoration of their finances has cheered George right up? Back from the brink! Not all the way, but he’s better. He’s clean and well dressed. He’s sleeping eight hours, and at night. Can money and sleep be all it takes? Is he so spoiled, he can exist no other way? He tells her it’s because he’s given up the concentration aids skittering around the backs of his office drawers.
“Concentration aids. It’s just speed, you asshole!” she said.
He’s no longer afraid to leave the house. Often she finds him outside, reading in the sun. He’s stopped suggesting they hire private security. (A habit he’d developed toward the end of Ma
rch, after claiming to have seen “a suspicious vehicle parked in the drive,” and hearing “intruder noises in the garage,” and another time, simply, on “good information that someone is watching.” He’d snuck their last functioning credit card from her purse and used the balance to crown the house with cameras.) Seldom now does she catch his eyes flat with suspicion. She still doesn’t know what he is doing, hunched at the computer all day. But he’s begun cooking dinner for her in the evenings. Where he got this idea she doesn’t know, but he is eager to learn how to dice an onion, to try to make her laugh. On her thirty-fifth birthday, he makes her tacos and apple pie and they eat at dusk by the pool. He calms more with each passing day. She’s relieved. But she can’t stand him. His well-being, determined by the state of his income more than by the love of his wife. Her devotion these past months, dirt. And how is it he is still barely noticing what happened to them?
Part of the dream was that she might leave. She wills herself to believe this won’t carry over, that their life is beginning again. George hasn’t detected the change in her shape. Her clothes still fit. She isn’t showing and won’t for some time. Why she can’t tell him, she can’t think. The last few days, he’s been asking her tricky questions about where she’s been, as if he knows she’s deceiving him, but can’t figure out how. It’s something, probably something terrible, how forgetful she is of what she hides. Except when he asks for her to cook a pungent dish with him—lamb curry one evening almost did her in. But then the meal is done and another day passes without her confession.
She almost forgets one other shred of the dream, until the day she takes a call from a 212 number she doesn’t recognize. Bob’s office. Not Bob, but his assistant, the woman who sat at the smaller white desk. The assistant tells her 125K is to be transferred into the checking account Iris opened in March, per Bob’s instruction. The funds should clear by the end of the week. Iris can’t believe it, the ordinariness with which the woman delivers the news.
“Thanks so much. Bob, is he there?”
“Not at the moment. But I can take a message.”
Two days later, at dusk, George is swimming in the reopened pool, keeping his head above the water, cautious of his ears. It isn’t quite swimming weather, but he’d set the pool’s thermostat to eighty-seven and waited all day for it to get there, marching several times across the lawn (once yelling at a robin in his path) to pull the thermometer out and check. Iris is making a salad in the kitchen, watching him through the window. The phone rings: CECE on the caller ID.
“Hi, CeCe. You want to join us for dinner?”
“Iris. It’s Esme. It’s okay, everything’s fine okay. I know he saw her yesterday, but tell George it’s time to come over. The drug’s no good. Nobody gets it. They’re taking her off. She found out this morning. She’s mad at me for calling. She didn’t want to ever say.”
37
The taxi lurches through the warm, dark streets. They turn onto East Sixty-Third. While George pays, she leans against a large concrete planter at the entrance to the high-rise’s courtyard. It was easier to convince him to take the trip into the city than she’d thought.
“Why wouldn’t I?” he said, as if he hadn’t holed up in Stockport all spring. She worries he’ll be strange with strangers, too quick to defend himself against made-up barbs; it is his first trip since The Burning Papers closed. The doorman in his cap and long, gold-buttoned coat ushers them into an onyx lobby. They ride the elevator up to Bob and Martha’s apartment.
How could she refuse Bob’s invitation? How long since she and George have been to a party? Since the investment came through, she’s no longer ignored Bob’s calls but is again obligated to take each one. Again, she puts off his requests for them to meet. Whenever the phone jumps in her pocket, she hopes it’s Victor. He’s still not returning her calls. She needs to talk to him about Kingsgate. It’s always Bob. The last time he called she was in Stockport, passing the church, its bell ringing the hour. He was more businesslike than the night before, when he’d called her from inside a whiskey bottle and told her a winding, indignant story about a fight and a movie theater. She’d had trouble understanding if the fight was in a movie theater or about a movie theater, if it had just happened or if he spoke from memory, or if he was recounting a movie with a fight in it. She’d crept down to the guest bedroom, to murmur affirmation, to hang up, but the movie bit turned into something about how Thierry was about to lose a front tooth, and she fired up the new second television on mute.
But when Bob called her the following day, he sounded bright and clean as morning itself and made no mention of the previous night’s ramble. He invited them to come to his apartment, to kill Friday night as Friday night should be killed.
They can hear the party from all the way down the long, carpeted external hall. No one answers the doorbell. They let themselves in and do not find the dinner party she expected, but a fratty zoo—crowded, oppressively hot. Through the open balcony doors, cigar and cigarette smoke blow back into the room on a warm wind. In one corner, a red-mouthed woman with a braided topknot and black nails tends bar. In the other is a tattooed DJ behind a turntable in headphones and a short, glittering dress. To her left, through the door to the dining room, the table under an artichoke chandelier holds a lavish array of neglected catering, sushi on a lattice of banana leaves and lotus flowers. They shove in, George behind her, and see Bob across the room, in jeans and a polo shirt, his arms spread over the back of a couch, in shouting conversation with two louse-faced young men in suits. A man beside Iris untucks his dress shirt and pulls it off over his head, raising his balled fists in the air.
“You have blood,” Iris shouts to the man, pointing at his nose.
“Aw, no!” He tips his head back and pushes toward the kitchen.
“This music is hurting my soul,” George says, frowning.
“It’s not bad, actually.” She sees Bob shouldering toward them, an oversize diver’s watch on the thick arm he holds high in the air to keep his drink safe from the crowd. A smile on his face, until he sees George.
“George-man. I didn’t think you were coming.”
“Why?” George yells, brushing imaginary lint from his white pant leg. “Should I leave?”
“No, it’s great you’re here. Let’s go find you a drink. Hey! I want to show you something. Remember the Marilyn? The Marilyn I was trying to buy? I got the fucker. It’s a fraud. Old bag grifted me good. I don’t care. I love it. Life is all about how hard you fight for what you want, am I right? Come on.” He puts his arm around George’s shoulder, glaring at Iris.
“I’ll give this to Martha,” she says, prying the bottle of wine they’d brought from George’s hands.
“You’ve got quite a trip. She’s in Costa Rica with the boys. Come on, you reclusive fuckhead,” Bob says to George, and escorts him away.
Three years have gone by since she answered her phone and the man on the other end said his name was George. They met at the club, he said. Did she remember? All that came to her was his linen jacket and the intensity of his eyes. She lied: of course she did! And as it happened, she was in the city. Why not meet for a drink the following day? She took a five-hour ride on a Coach USA that belched her into the dirty sleeve of Port Authority. It had been a bad year and she had nothing better to do. On the phone, he’d been so courteous and direct. He’d sounded like a grown-up. As she exited onto the blare of Eighth Avenue, having done something so weird and rogue, she decided she might as well get her money’s worth, whoever this George might be. Over gimlets in a subterranean bar on Morton Street, she rallied their date to a pitch of genuine, hysterical fun, and their laughter carried out before them as they walked for many hours after, taking turns deciding right or left at the curb. As the night wore on she watched—with amusement and near disbelief—George fall in love. Too fast, like a man struck by virus. The next morning, as she was leaving his apartment, she rapped on the pointy, blue-glass sculpture by the door and made a face. He sa
id they’d get rid of it when she moved in. And then, how she’d loved him too! But now she thinks maybe the truth is that at first, what she liked most about George was how much he liked her. How that night she’d pretended to be someone better than she was, and he’d believed her.
From across the room, the man with the bloody nose points to his cleaned face and gives her the thumbs-up. “Nice work,” she yells, and begins jostling through the crowd as if she has someplace to be, the bottle of wine in her hand. She imagines getting back on the bus, taking her trip in reverse, finding her little bedroom at the foot of the college campus, with her roommate in the kitchen and 3D in the yard.
She’s standing alone by the sushi. She smiles at some women picking at the rolls, women so young they are small-craniumed, almost girls. They smile wanly back but don’t speak. She turns to a different group and says hello. They open up to include her.
“No, vegans can’t have anything,” one says.
“But milking doesn’t hurt the cow.”
“It does hurt the cow.”
“It would be, like, if a vegan saw you milk a cow, as bad as you seeing someone milk your wife.”
“Happy wife, happy life!”
Despite the smoke, she heads for the terrace, where she’ll feel less like a flop for being alone. She’s leaning over the rail, watching the cars below, when she hears her name.
“Martha hates my friends,” Bob thunders into the back of her neck. “Do you hate my friends?”
“Bob, hey. When’s the family coming back?”
“Nope. They’ve got the whole summer mapped out.”
“In Costa Rica?”
“I’m paying a brick for them to save the turtles. Ecotourism, my penance. I suspect they aren’t saving the turtles so much as noticing the turtles. Poor turtles hauling their wrinkled asses up the beach, and twenty feet away a bunch of pasty bipeds are appreciating the shit out of them. Must be fucking baffling. You know I’m a little in love with you.”
The Unfortunates: A Novel Page 30