“No, really. I should start my interview with Mr. Mallard.”
“Well, I could be mistaken, but I think Jimmy’s in the tub. Earlier today he was outside making furniture, and I think he probably worked up quite a sweat. He was expecting you, you know, and after waiting for a while for you, and you didn’t come, he went outside, and now he’s back. He didn’t expect you to be late.”
“Yes,” Krumholtz said. “I’m very sorry about that.” Had she really just touched him on the cheek with the tips of her fingers? Why would she do such a thing?
“Why don’t I show you around the house first?”
“All right. But if you don’t mind my asking, what did you do before you met Mr. Mallard?”
“Me? Oh, that.” She laughed humorlessly. “The past life. That’s over, that life. I was a model. And I did some acting. Some TV movies and whatnot.” The interior walls consisted of poured concrete, and now, when she touched part of the wall, it gave way under her hand—it was actually a door, invisibly hinged—and they stepped into another entryway, and then into a classroom, where two rather beautiful children were sitting at a long table, writing under the eye of a young Asian woman with straight black hair and reading glasses. Beyond them, the window, from floor to ceiling, gave a view of the woods. The young woman, the teacher, was also a great beauty. “That’s our hired tutor, Ping,” she said under her breath. “The children are homeschooled. Bonjour, Ping!”
“Bonjour, madame.”
“Ping is from Beijing by way of Paris,” Ellie Mallard said to Krumholtz. The children, Angus and Gretel, glanced up quickly at Krumholtz and, finding nothing in particular that interested them, turned back to their writing. They were dressed in identical shirts, trousers, and shoes. “All their classes are taught in French and Mandarin.”
“Except science,” Angus said sourly without looking up. “We do science in English. We just learned that when scientists split the atom, God got killed.”
“Do you have children, Mr. Krumholtz?” Ellie Mallard asked, gazing directly into his eyes. He forced himself not to look away. What a weapon beauty could be, and only the rich could own it.
“Yes,” he said. “I have two daughters.”
“Jimmy and I, we believe in public schooling,” Ellie Mallard said, waving her hand at the schoolroom and the overhead projector and maps of the world, “but the local school is much too far away, and the school bus doesn’t even come out here, as you can imagine. So there’s no way to get there. We’re just lucky to get the mail! Besides, I think children should learn foreign languages, don’t you? Given the world that they will be entering?”
“Maybe so,” Krumholtz said. “But French? I understand the need for Chinese, but French …”
“Mandarin for work, French for play!” Ellie Mallard said brightly. “Well, we mustn’t take up any more of the children’s time.” She closed the concrete door behind her. Krumholtz heard Gretel saying good-bye as the door silently shut.
“I’d be teaching them Spanish, myself,” he said.
“Oh, Spanish is so easy, they can just pick it up along the way. And, what, they’re going to live in Mexico?” She threw her head back and laughed. “It’s just a hobby language, don’t you think? Or of servitude?” Krumholtz’s older daughter was learning Spanish and finding it difficult going. “Now here,” she said, returning to the main hallway, “is one of our Bento Schwartz photographs. Do you like it?” She gazed at it thoughtfully. “I think it’s quite marvelous.”
The photograph was large, three feet by about five feet. It appeared to be a photograph of a trash heap. “What is it?” Krumholtz asked.
“Well, it’s part of a series called Disposed,” she said. “This one, by coincidence, since we were just talking about Mexico, this one is of the Mexico City landfill. It’s a digital photograph, but Bento has personally colorized some of the objects in it, such as that bucket in the foreground. Isn’t it a beautiful blue? I think it’s ravishing. He paints over certain objects to give them, I don’t know, a feeling. I always find something new in the photograph to study every time I look at it. It has quite an aura. Because of the colors. And the detail. And the dynamic negative space. Do you know Bento’s photographs?”
“No,” Krumholtz said. “Bento Schwartz?”
“He’s very well known,” she said doubtfully. Krumholtz had taken out his small notebook and was writing down the names of the artists he had heard her mention, and he was making an effort to get the details about the photograph. Squatters’ shacks rested on the landfill, and Krumholtz could see the squatters, miserable wretches, inside them. Krumholtz felt an old familiar hatred of the rich welling up inside him. They were all obtuse in an almost comical way. He looked down and saw that Mrs. Mallard was barefoot. “Why did you ask me about angels?”
“Excuse me?”
“When I was in the car, at the gate, before you buzzed me in, you asked me whether I believe in angels.”
“I did? No, I don’t think so. Why would I do that? I didn’t buzz you in. It might have been Lorraine. Lorraine is the other woman. Incidentally, I should have asked you whether you’d like to freshen up.” She turned and gazed at him again. “The bathroom’s right here.” She pointed at the opposite wall.
“Oh, okay,” he said. “Where is it? I don’t see it.”
She touched the wall, and the concrete gave way again, and Krumholtz, who now felt like an angry resentful ambassador-without-portfolio from a Third World country, walked in. The lights flickered on automatically, as did the exhaust fan. He was surprised to find an ordinary toilet, humiliated by its functionality, in front of him, but on the wall above the toilet was a small signed pencil drawing by Paul Klee, and near the washstand and toilet was a waist-high table on which were piled several books. At the top was a signed first edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. Beneath it were other signed editions of James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Adrienne Rich’s Selected Poems, and T. S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday, just the book to have around when you were scrubbing your hands. So far, he hadn’t seen books anywhere else in the house. Krumholtz washed up, splashing soapy water on his face before soiling the hand towels, and when he returned to the hallway, Ellie Mallard was standing in exactly the same spot where she had been before, smiling pensively, her right foot half raised and planted with the arch on her left leg, a dancer’s position. “Do you believe in angels?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
“Well, neither do I, but I used to,” she said, proceeding down the hallway toward an open doorway. Krumholtz followed her and noticed a Bonazzi painting next to a Hockney—no, it wasn’t a Hockney, though it looked like one, with a nude male swimmer underwater—and a Dentinger, a Fabian, and a huge Dierking that went all the way up to the ceiling, the dirty-brown and grayish paint mixed in with what looked like rusted metal fragments expressive of terrible agony on an epic scale. When he turned the corner, he found himself in what appeared to be a master bathroom placed in the middle of the hallway with a large whirlpool bath built into the floor. Leaning back in the bathtub, with his eyes fixed on Krumholtz, was the winner, James Mallard.
“Ah, so at last you’re here,” Mallard said. “We thought you must have been a little lost, being late. As you were. What happened to you?”
“Yes, I’m sorry,” Krumholtz said, putting his notebook away.
“Oh, that’s all right.” Mallard stood up and stepped out of the whirlpool bath. He was quite magnificent, still in possession of a sculpted athlete’s body, classically muscled and proportioned. Somewhere else in this house, Krumholtz knew, would be a fully equipped gym and possibly a full-time personal trainer. “We wondered what had gone wrong with you,” Mallard muttered flatly, as if Krumholtz’s absence actually had been a matter of the greatest indifference. Without a trace of shyness, and still wet, Mallard stepped toward Krumholtz and shook his hand, hard. He had a strong wet grip and large, thick fingers. Having finished with the handshake, Mallard stepped back
ward toward a grooved section of wall, where he pressed a recessed button. Hot air came blowing out on him from louvers in the wall, drying his body as he pivoted, his arms held slightly up. Krumholtz glanced over at Mallard’s wife, who was gazing appreciatively at her husband. Like the gods, these people had no timidity or shame. “Darling,” Mallard said to his wife, “would you hand me a towel?”
She reached over for a red bath towel, with a JM monogram, and handed it to her husband, though not before giving him a peck on the cheek. Mallard dried the backs of his legs and his hair, still in full view of Krumholtz, whose hand was now sopping wet. After drying himself, Mallard tossed the bath towel onto the floor.
“Well,” he said. “How shall we conduct this interview? This little interview?”
“Perhaps in your den?” Krumholtz asked. “I have a digital recorder—”
“Wouldn’t you rather be doing something?” Mallard asked. “Something physical? Do you hunt? It’s deer season, and we could go hunting. Actually, no. Unfortunately for us, the light is going, and it’s too late in the day. We could go out tomorrow, if you wish.”
“Well, no, I don’t hunt,” Krumholtz said. Here I am, he thought, talking to this naked man, while his wife looks on.
“We could chop some wood,” Mallard said. “There’s time. We could do that.”
“But you’ve just washed. And I have to take notes.”
“You mean there’s a rule?” Mallard laughed. “Didn’t know there was a rule.” He walked into the bedroom on the other side of the bathroom and put on the worn clothes he had apparently just taken off. “There’s never a rule. That’s the first thing you have to learn. Come on.”
Outside, in the backyard, Mallard, or someone, had set up a small platform of slatted wood and, a few feet away, a sawhorse. Off to the side were axes, hatchets, a steel wedge, and a chain saw neatly arranged inside a wooden holding-frame with pegs at the top from which to hang other tools. A large pile of unsplit logs had been dumped nearby, and now Mallard picked up a log and stood it up on the platform. He took out an ax before stepping away from the log. With one powerful blow, he raised the ax and brought it down on the log, splitting it cleanly in two.
“Is this your hobby?” Krumholtz asked. “Splitting wood?”
“It’s not a hobby, no. Hobbies are for others. It’s an activity, a physical exertion, that we like to engage in,” Mallard said. Again he placed a log vertically on the platform, and again the ax came down in one clean arc. The two parts of the log dropped away on either side. “A few minutes, and then you can take over.”
Krumholtz took a long look at Mallard’s face, which now, in the diminishing light, seemed to have a rock-jawed solidity, with eyes set far apart and a heavy five-o’clock shadow over a thick neck. Wherever Mallard turned, he gave off an air of command: the velvet glove over the iron fist had grown very thin with him. He split logs with efficiency, Krumholtz thought, but also as if he were in a permanent rage.
“So, you have questions? Ask questions,” Mallard said, his breath coming out in snorts. “Ask me questions.”
“Why did you move out here? It’s a bit remote.”
“We didn’t want to see any neighbors. So we bought up the entire valley. You can look in any direction, and you won’t see anybody. It gives you a … freedom, you know?”
“Yes, well. Something else I meant to ask right away. This can be on or off the record, but your wife mentioned something about ‘the other woman,’ and I think she said her name is Lorraine. When I came to the gate—”
“Lorraine?” The ax came down. “Are you doing a gossip sheet? I thought this was for Success magazine. Well. This isn’t for publication. Lorraine’s my girlfriend. My mistress, if you will.”
“She’s here?”
“Of course she’s here. You didn’t meet her? Sometimes—” He set up another log, then took off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. “Sometimes Lorraine stays down at her end of the house. Or she’s out in back.” He waved his arm at the air.
“Your wife doesn’t mind? Your having a live-in girlfriend?”
“Off the record? Or on it? Well, write what you please. We don’t care. No, she doesn’t mind. She knows that a man like me needs more than one woman. That’s how it happens to be. Always has been. From the start. We simply choose not to lie about it and not to indulge in the usual middling hypocrisies. I could tell you about men who have a different mistress every month. If you can afford it, you can do it. Everyone knows and nobody cares. So. Have you met Lorraine?”
“No.”
“Why don’t you go back into the house and go back toward the other wing and introduce yourself to her and get her version of things, then come back and split some logs? Obviously, you need to get the girlfriend thing out of the way. Then we’ll have a drink.” Mallard pointed at the door.
Walking down the hallways in a kind of trance, with the artwork appearing to register his presence—here was another video installation, switched on possibly for his benefit, this one by an artist, Frederic Winkelman, whose work he recognized, the flat screen showing a woman staring straight out at the viewer, this same woman wearing a slightly antique stained silk chiffon bridal gown à la Miss Havisham but posed sitting in a folding chair on a busy urban sidewalk (it looked like midtown Manhattan somewhere near Forty-second Street) while all around her the blurry pedestrians parted and then reclustered—walking away from this visual disturbance, and making his way past more artistic plunder perfectly mounted and framed, Krumholtz thought first of his wife, Cathy, working at her desk at the agency, and then of the remote castle in Beauty and the Beast, not the Disney version (his daughters’ favorite movie, both of them addicted to princess figures), but the Cocteau film with the hallway chandeliers consisting of bare human arms holding candlesticks, and all the other inanimate objects down to the cups and saucers having taken on resentful life as servants, everything under a spell that could be broken only by love, by a kiss. Cathy would be headed home about now, picking up the girls at after-school care, driving them homeward while she tried to quiet them and think of what to serve for dinner, and he wondered if she would have a thought for him out on this assignment, and at that particular moment he turned another corner near an open door and saw a woman, the one who must certainly be the girlfriend, Lorraine, lying back on a fainting couch. She was reading a glossy magazine and glanced up when Krumholtz entered.
“Oh,” she said. “You must be that guy.”
After a moment Krumholtz realized that this woman, this Lorraine, was wearing flowered pajamas. The roses on the pajamas had a slightly sinister efflorescence. “Yes,” he said, “I’m that guy.” He examined her. Unlike the wife, she was not particularly beautiful. On her left cheek was a birthmark in the shape of a candle flame. “I’m the guy you asked about angels. You were at the intercom.”
“The guy from the magazine? You didn’t answer my question.”
“No, I suppose not.” He pointed at her. “You’re wearing pajamas. It’s midafternoon. Been napping?”
“What did you say your name was?”
“Krumholtz. Jerry Krumholtz.”
“Jerry, did you think Jimmy looked okay?” Lorraine asked. “I’m worried about him. He hasn’t been himself lately, and no one knows why.”
“He looked all right. What do you think could be bothering him?” Krumholtz asked, getting out his notebook.
“Me? What do I think? It could be anything. He’s restless. I think he’s run out of worlds to conquer. And that makes him sick.” She tossed the glossy magazine onto the floor. “He’s got everything. What would you do if you had everything?”
What a preposterous question. Krumholtz took out his pen. “Doesn’t Ellie—doesn’t the wife—mind that you’re here?”
“What did you say your name was?” She was unapologetic about her forgetfulness, apparently.
“Jerry Krumholtz.”
“Oh, right. Where did you ever get a name like that?�
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A moment passed while he absorbed her question. “My parents gave it to me. I think I was asking about whether the wife minds that you’re here.”
“Here? In this room, or here in the house? No. Oh, you mean my existence, here on earth, taking up the sexual slack? Why should she mind? Maybe you don’t understand about men like Jimmy. He’s just bigger than other men. Everything about him is bigger and stronger than they are. Those herd men. All the little Shmoos. So unimportant. He’s just richer and smarter and more … beautiful than they are. He’s at the top of the pyramid. The rules for the little doofuses don’t apply to him. Do you understand that? If you don’t understand that, Krumholtz, you don’t understand anything.”
“So this is the harem?”
“Because otherwise,” she continued, as if she hadn’t heard him, “there’s no point in your being here. Or doing this story. He loves both Ellie and me. He has more than enough love for both of us, and the children. And the previous wife and the previous children. He flies to see them. He has a private jet. He’s not like ordinary men, is what I’m saying. I satisfy some of his needs, and Ellie satisfies other needs, and that’s how it is, and if it isn’t bourgeois enough for you, that’s too bad.”
“What needs do you satisfy?” Krumholtz asked.
“What sort of question is that? Is this going into the article?”
“It might. We’ll see.”
She stood up and walked over toward him. “You don’t get it, do you?”
“Maybe I do. So explain it to me.”
“I don’t have to explain it,” she said. “I can do a demo.” She leaned in to him, reaching around his back, and, in what Krumholtz could tell instantly was a cruel practical joke, brought her face close to his and planted a long kiss on his lips, with the slightest suggestion of tongue. The kiss constituted sheer mockery of his unimportance. She might as well have been kissing a lampshade. “That’s what I give him,” Lorraine said, leaning back. “And that’s just for starters. Get it now?”
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