“It’s too complicated, babe. I’ll tell you when we can sit down.”
She stood up. Her mind raced ahead. He would probably try to get the house, though it was in her name. Let him buy her out—alone she couldn’t afford the upkeep anyway. But if he planned to move Maja in, she’d fight him. And she’d fight him for the children too. They were hers.
By the time she hung up, Tina was whining to be let in. Heather opened the door and stood on the deck peering down the valley at the view that was supposed to make her happy, barely able to guess in the sliver of moonlight at the voluptuous colors of turning leaves stretching down one mountain and up the next. Knowing she wouldn’t be able to read or sleep, she decided to go straight to her study to begin her next column.
She would write on the virtue of never having two of anything when one would suffice.
6 ZOLTAN SLOWLY SCANNED THE long menu. Gorging himself on the night of Maja’s funeral was probably inappropriate; yet he found a certain poetry in being taken to dinner by one of her patrons; and how often did he get to dine at a place like La Mer? The turbot with tiny shrimp was appealing, but the restaurant was famous for its bouillabaisse. As well as the zucchini crepes. Zoltan thought vegetarian would serve his image better than fancy fish; perhaps have them as a starter.
“Sorry,” said Mack, sitting down and signaling the waiter. “I always forget how much later it is back home. Ready to order?”
Zoltan knew that a man who was president and CEO of a corporation probably never had trouble choosing what to eat—much less how to work, where to live, whether or not to get up in the morning. He surely took such things for granted—unlike himself, who had quite forgotten how it felt to rise at the same time each day with a purpose and destiny. Could he even say with certainty that he was still a writer?
As the lantern-jawed waiter bent toward them, his pencil at the ready, Zoltan quickly decided on bouillabaisse, and as quickly switched to turbot.
Mack was amused to recall that the last time he had eaten at La Mer, Maja had picked at her food and self-servingly grumbled about this very Zoltan. “He complained I distracted him. So was I supposed to make myself ugly whenever he wanted to write? God, genius is impossible!” Mack thought Maja had a certain genius of her own for making even her failures sound like conquests. Not content to be exploited by the star, like an ordinary groupie, Maja had mastered the ironies of injury: “Oh, he’s so charming, he can charm the birds out of the trees with one of those slingshot looks of his”—as if charm were nothing but a weapon.
Mack couldn’t fathom her moods. Bubbly over the bouillabaisse, she had turned sad with the salad, spearing and dropping the same asparagus repeatedly. That troubled pout should have been a clue. Did she find him boring? He often wondered why she bothered with him. He presumed that at first she had confided in him about her conquests in hopes he’d repeat every word to Terry, her ex. (He hadn’t.) Or was it just a wily way of reminding Mack that men found her irresistible? Heather once told him that attractive women used that trick to control how they were perceived. Or maybe Maja just liked to be taken to expensive restaurants. He didn’t mind. Even as she sat across the table going on about other men, he was appreciating her round breasts pressing against the invariably low-cut dress, always of some arcane color, mauve or bronze or sea. He wondered if Maja spoke of him to her other friends as she spoke of them to him, and if so, what she said. He appreciated that successful men were valued in part for their buying power, and he was glad he possessed that asset. Still, he did sometimes wish that women—particularly lovely, ambitious ones like Maja—would see beyond the dollar signs. He might lack the sophistication of a Terry or a Zoltan, but he was, after all, a Phi Beta Kappa from Yale who had once, unlike most of his classmates at the Business School, had other aspirations. With his mathematical talent and his artistic turn he could have been an architect, or perhaps even a scientist—both professions that required being tuned in, as he definitely considered that he was, to the mysteries and beauties of the physical world. But he had no comparable trick to let her know it.
When the food arrived Zoltan took a moment to sniff at the fragrant steam with his distinguished nose and admire the visual artistry of the plate.
“Bon appétit,” said Mack. They clicked glasses and sipped before tucking in.
Mack couldn’t get over the coincidence that his dinner companion on the night of Maja’s funeral was the author of the very book—a novel called Fire Watch—she had pressed on him the last time he’d seen her. A gold sticker on the jacket announced that it had been short-listed for a literary prize, and there was a strong blurb for another book from Susan Sontag. Then maybe Maja did see something more in him than his balance sheet? He had planned to read the book on the plane, but what with the amazing pink-to-magenta sunset that accompanied them east and his laptop beckoning, he never got around to it. The truth was, like everyone else, he no longer had time for books. He’d intended to return it to Maja tonight, but since Zoltan had abruptly entered his life upon Maja’s exit, Mack decided to give it another try. If he still couldn’t get through it, he’d present it to his wife to impress her, as Maja had perhaps used it to impress him.
Watching Zoltan greedily consume his fish as if he hadn’t eaten in days, Mack wondered what would be his price. Not that he knew exactly what Zoltan offered for sale, but he did know everyone had a price. How much? And for what? Whatever Zoltan had on offer, Mack wanted a piece.
Zoltan savored each succulent bite of turbot. Whenever he ate fish in the seafood palaces of France or America, perversely he thought of the river fish he had caught as a boy to present to his mother, which had invariably been small and bony, with large, useless heads. He smacked his lips. “Excellent! First-rate. Rich people know how to live.” He put down his fork and stared at Mack, head atilt. “Exactly how rich are you, McKay?”
“Rich I’m not. But I have enough for everything on this menu.”
Zoltan stuck out his lower lip, awaiting a better answer.
“All right, I’ll tell you. I have buildings or projects in four states and prospects in two more. Not bad for someone who founded my company less than eight years ago. I built myself a home on a mountaintop that won me some awards, and next spring I’m adding a tennis court. In that house I have a good and beautiful wife, two small children, one of each. Last month I got my pilot’s license, which permits me to fly my little Piper whenever I like. Of course, no one around here knows my name, Maja wanted me only as a dinner companion, and I’ve never written a book. Hell, I’ve never even written an article. But I don’t think I’ve done too badly, considering.”
Zoltan raised one eyebrow, pursed his lips, fixed Mack with a deep and glittering stare, and slowly shook his head, producing a strange cross between a smirk and a smile, his guru look. “Considering? … Considering?”
“Considering I’m only thirty-six,” said Mack, feeling stupid the moment it was out, given the age at which people made their fortunes nowadays. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Biz Stone—practically babies when they earned their first million, or billion. But they weren’t in real estate, he kindly reminded himself.
Zoltan colored his voice with familiarity. “Come clean, McKay. Tell me who you really are.”
Mack looked puzzled.
“Your card says ‘President and CEO.’ Is that who you are?”
“Well, yes, partly …”
“Is that how you define yourself? Your real self?”
“Well, not really—no, of course not.” Mack felt stripped a little barer with every word he spoke. How had he got into this?
“Then who are you, McKay? Exactly who are you?”
Mack hesitated under the piercing gaze, which seemed to penetrate straight to his soul. “I … I don’t know what you mean.”
Seeing Mack begin to squirm, Zoltan concentrated his gaze even harder. He knew that everyone wants to be seen, to be known. And to see was Zoltan’s gift—enhanced by the combi
ned techniques of prison interrogator and Hollywood guru: to keep asking questions, preferably in the subject’s own words, until the subject gave himself up.
“You say President and CEO are partly you, but not entirely you.”
“That’s right.”
“And?”
“And what?” said Mack, mustering the requisite show of belligerence for this dangerous line of questioning.
Zoltan ignored it. His voice softened. “You are afraid of something, Mack. It’s on your face. What are you afraid of? Say it.”
“You talking about the economy?”
“No.”
What was he getting at? Mack put down his fork and leaned closer. “Then what?”
Zoltan raised an eyebrow. “You tell me.”
Mack pushed back his chair and crossed his legs, no longer interested in the food. Not that he wasn’t flattered to have his business card analyzed by Zoltan Barbu, but in the process his defenses were being undermined. Had they been Indian wrestling, he would be getting creamed. Yet somehow it didn’t matter, as he felt himself suddenly, exhilaratingly exposed. It was those eyes. Could Zoltan see in him something that he was too close to see himself? Could he see right through him? With effort, Mack managed to marshal the pushback required to remain upright. “No. You tell me.”
Like a bodhisattva, or a sniper, who has mastered the art of patience, Zoltan waited, toppling Mack’s defenses with his gaze.
Mack was now incapable of waiting; he crumpled under the scrutiny. “An impostor? Is that what you think I am?”
“Thou sayest it, my friend,” Zoltan replied as gently as possible, stifling the triumphant grin pressing against his lips. “Too much easy success, too soon. Right? Makes you feel like impostor, afraid to be found out.”
Mack was stunned. Hearing aloud the secret thoughts that he sometimes whispered to himself shocked him into silence. How had Zoltan guessed?
Sometimes Mack claimed his success was a matter of random luck—good contacts (he was a Yale man), a calculation error that had made him low bidder on a key contract during his first year in the business, unearned honors. But could those advantages really be counted as luck? Luck was the shiny side, sham the tarnished side of the coin of success. Getting something for nothing—in fact, as much as possible for as little as possible—was the essence of the game. Risk and reward: the greater the risk the less deserving of reward. The opposite of what they taught you in school. It was the same with any gamble: in the long run you lose unless you have an in or load the dice. No matter how hardworking or conscientious he might be (and he decided he was), success like his was not deserved. That was the beauty and the ugly of real estate, maybe even of capitalism. But he tried to defend himself in his usual way: “I’ve just been lucky, that’s all.”
“Same thing,” said Zoltan, as if reading his mind. “Luck, cunning, charm, fraud—everything counts. Even your pose of modesty: all part of it. Now tell me, Mack, is that who you really are? If so, you must live with it. Or give it up.”
Mack blushed. “Give what up?”
“You know.”
Oh, he knew. The bravado. The bluff. The pretense of being someone he wasn’t. He’d once dreamed of a life in science, or of a life in art. But graduating from college deep in debt (he was the first member of his family to graduate from any university, much less Yale), Mack was not so reckless as to join his classmates to denounce the fathers—not with an uncle offering to initiate him into the mysteries of real estate. He was still in debt, of course, with mortgages and promissory notes and a sometime cash-flow problem (even Trump had his cash-flow problems). But those very debts somehow enhanced his status, enabling him to expand. Yes, he knew what Zoltan meant. The Phi Beta Kappa key in his wallet, his superb collection of opera CDs, the Hockney, the Motherwell, the Wesley, the small bronze De Kooning, even the house—none of them made up for his recurrent feeling of being an impostor, an incipient failure, a fraud. He knew it as well as Zoltan did, and if he should forget it for a moment, his wife was there to remind him. But how could he change? His life was built on it. How could he “give it up”?
“How?” he whispered. “Tell me how.”
Zoltan shrugged. “My telling you will not help you. Everyone must find out himself. Anyway, you would not believe me. I could maybe show you, but … always people resist.”
“Try me.”
“But you leave tomorrow?”
“We still have the rest of tonight.”
The waiter cleared away their plates and handed them dessert menus.
“Come on,” urged Mack. “It’s a beautiful night. I’d like to see the ocean. Whenever you want I’ll take you back.”
“Okay. I accept. With pleasure.”
Mack let out a sigh of relief. “Good. Then it’s settled. Now, what’ll it be for dessert? Maja particularly liked the chocolate decadence.”
Zoltan closed the menu. Having found his stride, he allowed the postponed grin of triumph to spread across his lips as he proposed, “Soufflé Grand Marnier for two.”
——
HEATHER CONCLUDED HER DRAFT and closed her laptop. Why did she find it so easy to write her columns but so difficult to compose her stories? The need to save the planet was urgent, and the market for fiction fading; yet it was to art, not politics, that she aspired. Irrational, she knew. An audience for her columns was practically guaranteed, while her stories, if they were published at all, would probably find homes only in obscure literary journals, supposing there were any left to publish in by the time she was ready to submit them. Still, to her, one was a job, the other an achievement, perhaps a calling. Even if she were reduced to self-publishing, which reputedly no longer carried the stigma it had before the Internet, she was determined to try. Self-indulgent? Anachronistic? Doomed? She didn’t care.
But she was getting ahead of herself. As of now, she had no stories; she had a family. She turned off the light on her desk, then walked downstairs to check on her sleeping babes. Chloe lay supine, with her hair fanned out across her pillow and her arms spread wide, like a tiny diva. Her wondrous eyelashes, dark and thick, fluttered as Heather tenderly tucked in the flannel sheet. In his room, Jamie, tush elevated and thumb resting inches from his half-open mouth, emitted periodic grunts. Were they intimations of a grown man’s snore or the dream sounds of construction equipment? The moment she tried to cover him he kicked himself loose.
She tiptoed out of the room and across the hall. In her giant marital bed she brooded about what stories she would write when the time came. In college she had written one about a sophisticated girl’s alienation from her loving but hopelessly clueless Midwestern family, whose only god was money, and another, called “An Embarrassment of Riches,” which won the senior fiction prize. Back then, her teachers had encouraged her, but now she was on her own.
With Mack unreachable and her mind churning, she sought the soporific satisfaction of self-love—nothing compared to what Mack could have any time or place he liked, but preferable to Ambien.
7 MACK PARKED THE RENTAL car in the turnaround and walked down to the beach. Waves rolled onto the shore and out again, leaving a luminous edge of white foam. Zoltan kicked sand; Mack scooped up pebbles and tossed them back to the sea while they exchanged stories: one of ascent, the other of decline.
“I had been working badly for some time. I thought Maja would be good for me, make life stable. But she made life worse. So needy, so manipulative! Took every chance to subvert me until I could not work at all. Did you know we both come from same city, I knew her parents?”
“Yes, she told me.”
“Maybe because we talked in our own language, she never stopped talking. Left me no space to think. Finally, I offered to compromise: once a week I will be hers. Whatever she wants, I will do. Go out, stay home, I sleep at her place, she comes to spend night in my humble attic—whatever she wants, as long as in morning she leaves. Weekly, regularly, and otherwise she leaves me alone to work.
“She agreed. For one week. Then she started backslipping, as if one little foot inside my door could keep it always open.”
“This is so different from what she told me,” said Mack. “She told me she’d been living with you but you exploited her and then kicked her out.”
“Living with me! What imagination! I permitted her to leave nothing more than one toothbrush and one nightgown. But she thought that being my mistress permitted her to say anything to anyone.” He scowled his face red. “One day I saw that if I wanted to work I must break with her, not even let her stay one night per week.” He pulled his cloak more tightly around himself.
“I hated to do that. I had so much hope to start with. I hoped she could cure me of depression, help me write again. She said she wanted to, but she really didn’t. All she really wanted was attention.” He sighed. “She was movie-star beautiful, you agree?”
“Yes, Maja was a beautiful woman.” Mack shook his head. “What a waste.”
“Beautiful but, even more, infuriating,” said Zoltan, narrowing his eyes. His words, now ornamented with accent, rose over the surf. “After I broke off with her, she still would not leave me alone, she kept calling me morning and night so I couldn’t work, driving by in her red car, Mini Cooper, making scenes, dripping tears. She was the most impossible, aggressive, seductive, manipulative woman. Her suicide is a triumph of manipulation and revenge!”
Mack was surprised by Zoltan’s venomous outburst at the newly dead. “The way she told it,” he said, “the more she gave, the more you withheld. She thought you didn’t appreciate her. But then she probably thought no one appreciated her.”
“Possessive, grasping female. She wanted to possess a writer but made it impossible to write. Killing the hen with gold eggs. You know that fable?”
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