The work I did was cutting edge back then, twenty-three years ago, but today all my knowledge is archaic, troglodytic. Nowadays people have laptop computers and swap mountains of information across the fiber-optic Internet highway faster than anyone can monitor.
Over the years, my coworkers died, retired, moved on to different jobs, transferred and learned new systems that came into vogue and then faded away like rap stars and reality-TV celebrities. My department winnowed down and down until only I was left.
Every year a new systems manager comes in and tells me that he, or she, wants to "migrate the system" to a newer database that will allow more-modem computers and computer systems to take over. But banks are conservative places in spite of their new friendly names. My systems mull over hundreds of millions of dollars every night. My salary is in the very low six figures and I'm the only employee. A new computer system would cost millions. And the glitches and bugs in the transition would also be quite pricey. So all I have to do is have a well-documented job sheet so that if1 drop dead they can hire an expert just like me (for twice the salary) to keep the old programs running well into the twenty-first century.
I spent the day locating a bug in an old assembler program. It was a branch-and-load-register command that compensated with the wrong command length, found a valid op-code in the data field, and went on its merry way, ignoring all the carefully laid plans of my predecessors.
I fixed the problem and felt fine. It was a good day and I hadn't spoken a word to anyone. Most of the people on my floor didn't know who I was. The only person I answered to, Brad Richards, worked on the sixty-second floor and rarely bothered with me because I did my job, did not complain, and never asked for a raise.
When I got home, there was a note left for me on the butcher-block dining table off the kitchen.
Ben,
My mother called this morning and asked if I could come take care of her. She's got bronchitis and the doctor told her to stay in bed for two days. Call me there after six on my cell.
We should talk when I come home.
Love you,
Mona
I read the note through twice, three times, put it down on the sink, got some ice water from the refrigerator, drank that, and then read the short but pregnant message again.
Why hadn't she called me at work? That was the main question in my mind. She could have asked me what I was going to do for dinner, if I wanted to help her with her mother. And what was this "We should talk"? Was she mad about the night before? She never asked me to stop. I would have backed off if she had only said "no more."
I didn't mind that she wasn't home. I liked being left alone to stare out the window. Many nights Mona went to events with magazine clients. She was often sent out of town to do research or conduct interviews. But there had never been just a note on the table.
I didn't love Mona. But then again, I didn't love anyone: not my parents, who were like strangers after I came to New York; not Seela, though I was very fond of her; not Svetlana. I didn't feel bad about my lack of feeling for Mona because I wasn't secretly giving love somewhere else.
We weren't passionate but at least we were civilized. We took walks together and raised Seela well. We ate a sit-down dinner every night we were both in the house.
And now there was just a note on the dinette table.
It was five to six and so I called her cell phone.
"Hello?" she said in her clipped, I'm-in-a-hurry tone.
"Hey, honey? What's going on?"
"Oh . . . Ben."
"Yeah. How come you didn't call me?"
"Didn't you see my note?"
"You usually call."
"I was in a hurry."
"The phone is faster and better than a note," I said.
"I was upset," she confessed.
"About what?"
"Ben, I have to take care of my mother and I have a new assignment at work. I'm going to be busy all night and for the next few days. So can we put this on hold for a while?"
"Just tell me what's wrong. It's only a few words. A sentence. You're married to a man for over twenty years, have a daughter with him, and you can't spare a few words?"
She sighed as if greatly put upon and then said, "I can't do this. I have to go," and disconnected the call.
I pressed the redial button but the call went directly to her answering service.
You have reached Mona Valeria. I cannot take your call right now. Please leave a number or call back.
It was only after I threw the cordless unit down, shattering it on the kitchen tiles, that I realized how enraged I was. And there was something else: I wanted a drink.
This also was something new. I never wanted a drink. Never in all the years after I went off alcohol. I craved cigarettes aplenty, but it wasn't until after that phone splintered on the floor that I looked around, the way I used to do, for a bottle with a government seal on its neck.
"Hello," she answered sweetly.
"Hi, Lana," I said.
"Ben." In the silence after my name I thought I might have heard a hesitation. But I was so upset that I had no room to contemplate any new suspicions.
I was using Mona's home-office phone.
"I need to come over, baby," I said.
"Sure. Now?"
"If you don't mind."
"It's your house too. You could come here and live with me if you wanted."
The thing about Svetlana was that she was what I called "emotopathic." She could read the feelings rolling off almost anyone and say the things that they needed to hear.
She didn't want me to come live with her. She didn't pretend that there was anymore to our relationship than there was. She only knew that she heard loneliness in my tone and so she made up a happy little family for us-her and me together in a tiny studio on the West Side.
* * *
I made it to her place in a little under forty-five minutes. Rush hour traffic meant I had to ride the subway instead of getting a taxi, and the train always takes longer than it should.
I had a key, but I rang from downstairs. She was at her door waiting, looking worried.
"Are you all right?" she asked with that exquisite hint of a Russian accent.
She was wearing the short turquoise dress with the red flecks down the left side. That was my favorite. Her face was made up and I could smell coffee brewing.
Realizing that she had done all that in response to my mournful tone made me a little teary; this in turn disturbed me more—I was losing control and there seemed to be nowhere I could turn.
"Oh, darling," Svetlana said, and she put her arms around my neck, thrusting her small breasts against me.
I stood there, trying to find a way into that embrace, a place that would allow me to yield to an open heart.
"Lana," I said after coffee and sex.
"Yes, my darling."
"What did I say that night?"
She didn't ask me what night. She knew. Our moments together were more predictable than a timetable. There was only one night that stood out.
"I don't remember—not exactly. Why?"
"I don't remember anything," I said, "except that you were asking me something and then I was standing there and you were on the floor."
"I asked you about when you were a child in California."
"And what did I say?"
Svetlana sat up in the bed and hunched over, her large, pointed nipples just touching her slender thighs. As I watched her body, I began to feel nervous, uneasy.
"You said. . . let me see, you said, 'It was all a long time ago and there's nothing anyone can do about it,' and then you threw me." "I threw you?"
She nodded, the pain of the fall reflected in her face.
"I didn't just stand up and send you sprawling out?" I asked.
"No," she said, shaking her head. "You, how do you say, heav-ed me like a sack of wheat. You went down and came up pushing your arms out."
Svetlana hit me with the palms of her ha
nds, pushing me over on my side in the bed. Then she crawled up on top of me and licked my face like a friendly cat.
"I liked it," she said in a deeper voice. "The next night I masturbated four times thinking about how strong you were."
I was simultaneously aroused and petrified. Svetlana's almost masculine admission, her leaning there on top of me, reminded me of something that, at the same time, I could not remember. It was naked desire with none of the little modesties and lies that I was used to.
"Fuck me, Ben. Do it right now."
In the morning Svetlana was already up and dressed in T-shirt and jeans when I roused sleepily.
"What time is it?" I asked.
"Go back to sleep. It is early."
"No, no. I'll go."
"No," she said. "You don't have to. This is your house. I am your woman. You can stay in my bed. Why not?"
"You goin' swimming at the gym?" I asked, just to be saying something, trying to feel like I belonged.
"Yes. Then I go to class. Will you stay again tonight?''
There was something in her voice, or maybe it was in my mind, something that was asking more out of me. The expectation, hers or mine, exhausted me and I fell back into a troubled slumber.
In my dream Barbara "Star" Knowland was standing before a medieval room with a thousand tables. There were acrobats and clowns, jugglers and fire-eaters. One man was selling whole, full-feathered ducks; a dozen of them were hanging by their necks from a bloody cutting board that was somehow attached to the man's chest. He had a crazed look in his eye and an evil curved blade in his left hand.
"That's what you call a dead duck, huh, son?" my fither joked.
"Dad?"
He was there at the table and so was my mother, Svetlana, Seela, Mona, a man I had never met before, and Cassius Copeland. The strange man, a white guy wearing a cowboy hat, was looking off toward the back of the room, which was very far away.
My parents were sitting side by side, deep satisfaction radiating from them. They loved each other. They loved me—they said. I sat there watching them and feeling that I was somehow in that faraway distance that the stranger at our table was looking into.
The man I didn't know turned to me and asked, "Are you interested in real estate, Ben Dibbuk?"
"What kind of real estate?" I asked, wondering why he used my full name. Why not say "Ben" or "Mr. Dibbuk"? I was stuck thinking about his use of my name when Barbara Knowland began speaking.
"I've seen thousands of people die," she announced. "I've seen them shot and hacked, knifed and blown up, poisoned and beaten to death with steel batons. I've seen whole towns annihilated, countries decimated by famine. I've walked through infirmary halls with the smell of death so thick that if you cut it with a knife, it would bleed all over you."
Everyone was rapt in her hypnotic hyperbole.
What nonsense! I thought.
But the man I didn't know leaned over and whispered, "Only the innocent can deny sin, my friend.'' Then he gave me his card. The name was written in runes but the title Cowboy was in plain type.
I got to work five minutes early. I was about to use my card on the turnstile when someone called to me.
"Ben."
It was Star, standing near the coffee concession that made its business out of a nook in the east wall of the huge entrance hall.
She was wearing dungarees and a tie-dyed T-shirt of mainly purple and yellow. Her hair was down and she wore no makeup. For a moment I thought I recognized her from another time, but that flash of insight faded.
I stayed where I was and she approached me.
"Ben."
"What?"
"You're still saying that you don't know me?"
"Lady, I don't have the slightest idea who you are," I said. "I saw you the night before last. I read a review of your book online . . . but I don't know you."
"We spent almost twenty-four hours living on whiskey and sex," she said. Her green eye seemed to shimmer while her brown one receded.
"What can I say? I did that a hundred times when I was drinking and rambling around."
"Why did you come to my talk?" she asked.
"I told you. My wife is working for Diablerie."
"I know. I called her office. I asked her why she brought you and she said that you usually didn't come to things like that.''
"Did she also tell you that she made me go this time?"
"What are you up to, Ben?" Star asked. "Are you trying to hurt me? Do you want something?"
"NO. NO. I don't even know you."
Once again the suspicion shone in her face. She backed away a few steps and then turned. She walked a few steps more and turned again.
It all seemed very dramatic, histrionic.
She left and I went up to work.
There were a few lines of code in a tax percentage program that I had to m o w almost every year because of ever-changing tax laws. I wanted to work on the subroutine but there was too much on my mind: Mona's abandonment, Lana's openness, and now Star's paranoia. Maybe I should have asked her what happened all those years ago. Maybe I should have pretended that I remembered her, that I missed her.
But why bother? What could she do to me?
I couldn't imagine any danger she might present but still I was uneasy, panicky even. I tried to concentrate on the printouts but for once they gave me no solace. I couldn't hide behind the jury-rigged logics, the objective commands that were perfectly precise but often wrong.
I was lost that day, but I told myself this feeling would pass. Over time Mona would come back home and Star Knowland didn't matter. Whatever she remembered, or thought she remembered, was more than twenty years ago and a thousand miles away.
At noon I gave up trying to work. I called my manager, Brad Richards, got his answering machine, and said, "Hey, Brad. This is Ben Dibbuk. I have some kind of virus or something so I'm going home. I should be better by tomorrow."
I hadn't been free on the street before five on a workday in years. I went out to lunch with Cassius every now and then, but that was always with the idea of coming back to work.
At first I walked toward our apartment because that's what I did every day. But somewhere around Forty-ninth Street I realized that the apartment would be lonely without Mona.
Lonely without Mona. The words swirled in my head, holding other meanings. I never missed Mona. She could go out every night for weeks, and often did, and I never felt lonely. She was once working in San Francisco for three months, getting a new publication off the ground, and we barely called each other once a week.
But now, after less than a day, I was missing her.
I headed south. I had a destination, but not consciously. It wasn't until I got to Thirty-sixth Street that I realized I had been headed for Maria Valeria's apartment building.
Maria's husband, Isaac, had died when Mona was only eight. He and Maria had come from Jamaica in order to make a new life. They loved their daughter and even now Maria stayed in New York to be near Mona.
I rang the bell downstairs even though I knew Mona would be angry at my just showing up. But I missed her; I wanted to see her.
No one answered and I thought that I should leave and call her on her cell phone. But I had the keys to Maria's apartment in my pocket. Mona made me carry them in case she was out of town and there was an emergency.
I opened the downstairs door thinking that I'd knock, in case the bell was broken.
No one answered. I stood there a moment, knocked again, looked at my watch—it was 1:21 and I had nowhere to go.
I opened the door telling myself that Mrs. Valeria was sick with bronchitis, maybe she'd Men or had some kind of asthma attack.
But the apartment was empty. The kitchen was clean. Maria's bed was made and neat. There were no medicine bottles on the night table or extra blankets at the foot of the bed, no humidifier or oxygen tent, no evidence of respiratory illness at all.
The guest bedroom also doubled as Maria's office. It was
where she knitted and wrote letters on a wobbly cherry table/desk that I had made when I was studying woodworking at the Y.
Mona's little satchel was at the foot of the bed. It was obvious that she just wanted to get away from me for a while. Maria wasn't sick.
I knew that I should leave, but Mona's desertion of our home, her lie about her mother's illness, made me suspicious. That's why I emptied her satchel out on the bed.
A toothbrush, her favorite yellow towel, cartridges for the Mont Blanc Mozart fountain pen, aspirin, Ambien, and a package of six ribbed condoms were arrayed on her neat blankets.
It was not possible for me to explain away those condoms. We hadn't used them for years. Her tubes were tied after Seela. The pregnancy was so hard on her that we both decided to be happy with one child.
Mona had a lover somewhere. For how long? Had it started with that trip to San Francisco? Was it only one, or was it many lovers?
Little hints came back to me as I knelt there next to the bed so as not to muss her tightly tucked covers. For a while she had talked during our nightly dinners about a man named Tom Inch. He was a journalist, and she let it slip one day that they had gone to see a film while in Las Vegas at a convention.
I was a little bothered by this and said so.
"It was nothing," she told me. "We were doing a profile on that young actress Jessa Sterling. She had a small role in the film. It was just business."
I forgot about it before dessert.
Then there was another guy, I had forgotten his name. He was an artist, I remembered, and used to call the house. They had long talks on her office phone. She laughed loud and hard while talking to him. Once, after a brief talk with the artist, she told me that she was going to her mother's for the evening. I didn't think about it at the time. It seemed . . . ordinary. And I didn't ask a lot of questions.
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