Menage

by Alix Kates Shulman

  Startled by the knock, thinking it Zoltan, she called, “Come on in. I’m out here.” When the door opened a crack, it was Jamie’s small head peeking through.

  “Daddy! I found her!” he said triumphantly into the phone. “She’s on the deck.”

  “Good work, James.” Mack was relieved that she was not upstairs bothering Zoltan, whose comfort he considered his responsibility.

  Jamie went through the room and tugged open the sliding door to the deck where his mother, smiling, beckoned to him. “Here. It’s Daddy,” he said proudly, handing her the phone. Mission accomplished. Tina took the opportunity to slip through the open door into the house.

  “Thank you, sweetheart.” Heather tousled his curly hair. “Hello? Mack?”

  “I’m so glad you’re there, babe. I was starting to worry.”

  “But why? I’m always here, you know that. I’m not the one who disappears.”

  A mistake; an opening he should not have given her. “I only meant I didn’t know where you were, since you didn’t answer the phone.”

  “I’ve been working on the deck since lunch, so I didn’t hear it ring. I find I suddenly have a deadline. What’s up?”

  “I’m afraid I’m running late again, babe. I’m stuck here in traffic, so I don’t know when I’ll get home. I’ll try to make it to dinner, but don’t count on me.”

  There they were again, those familiar stomach-churning words that she could never get used to no matter how often she heard them. But though she felt the usual sinking disappointment, this time it was balanced by the equally elevating prospect of an intimate dinner with Zoltan. Which of the feelings was stronger she could no more say than she could tell which image, a pair of profiles or a vase, the famous optical puzzle depicted. Each depended on the other, and no sooner did she focus on one than the other snapped unbidden into view.

  “Oops, another call coming in,” said Mack. “Love you, babe.”

  She pressed OFF and handed Jamie the phone. “Will you be my big helper-man and hang this up for me? I’m going to finish this one paragraph and then I’ll come up. If you like, you and Chloe can play in the kitchen garden, where I can see you while I get your dinner.” Before she could manage to kiss him he was running down the stairs off the deck. “The phone!” she called after him. “Don’t forget to hang up the phone.”

  Jamie hit his head and made a silly face, then raced back up the stairs, across the deck, and into the house, leaving Heather to slide the door closed after him.

  SIPPING WINE AND NIBBLING olives at the kitchen table, Zoltan looked out the window to see the girl raking dead leaves into piles on which the boy was stomping, leaving the earth with both feet at once. One moment this Breughelesque autumn pastoral, and the next moment Heather, who had been filling the children’s plates with food prepared earlier by Carmela, was flying out the door. He watched her snatch up a rake from the leaves, then hug the girl. The enchanting sight of mother and children romping in the windswept yard excited him, making it hard to believe that the serpent in this Eden might be Eve herself, conniving to get them both kicked out.

  It wouldn’t happen if he could help it. That afternoon he’d conceived a plan, a plea bargain, to enable them to live out their sentence in peace. In the brief moments she was outside he went over his pitch once more.

  She returned flushed and breathless. “One of them could have punctured a foot on that rake, or worse yet, the handle could have snapped up and hit someone in the head. Or the eye.” She covered her eyes and winced.

  “I see. Another dangerous weapon,” said Zoltan slyly. “But sit down Heather, please. I wish to make a proposal.”

  As she took a seat, he switched on the brights in his eyes.

  “This morning you said that you want me?”

  She winced again. What madness could have possessed her? Although she was now half ashamed of the entire brazen encounter, at this moment she was too curious about where the conversation might lead to deny or explain away her words.

  “Then my darling you shall have me. All parts of me I am able to give.”

  Had he forgiven her, then? Either that or he had never truly objected. “And which parts might those be?” she asked, relaxing.

  He stood up behind her chair, placed his hands on her shoulders, and began gently kneading the muscles and vertebrae. “Listen carefully. What I say now is important. You know I have made a monk’s vow against sex and writer’s vow of discipline. That is why I left California, that is why I came here. It is my highest priority. But—” He stilled his hands. “If vows are fulfilled I can be yours.”

  When he resumed massaging her shoulders, she leaned back into his hands and closed her eyes.

  “Six hours a day I work, no interruption, no distraction. Distraction is most dangerous tyrant to depose and slay. Distraction will drive me away.”

  Heather stiffened. According to Mack, it was Maja’s constant distraction that made Zoltan dump her.

  “But,” he continued, “after those six hours, I can be yours.” He moved his hands to her arms and bent his mouth to her ear. “Our consummation will be spiritual, not carnal. That is better, you will see. The Dalai Lama has said that in order to achieve subtlest levels of consciousness the rougher levels must cease, that when sexual energy is controlled, as in tantric practice, subtler levels become active. Of course, that requires much concentration and control, but if successful, the superior bliss of true spiritual union can be ours.”

  Could that explain it then? she wondered. Could that morning’s apparent ineptitude have actually resulted from discipline and control? Is that what he meant by “monk”—some California thing to enhance pleasure that he was now offering to bring her in on? She wanted to believe in it, though at the same time she wondered if the spiritual consummation he was promoting wasn’t just a cover-up for his failure.

  He dropped his voice to a trancelike purr and returned his hands to her shoulders, then down her upper arms, sometimes brushing with the lightest touch against the sides of her breasts. She felt her nipples stiffen through her T-shirt.

  He continued: “During the day, you and I in a spiritual marriage. But at night we will be one family—you, me, Mack—not of blood, but of affinity. Elective affinities.”

  Could that be what had gone on between Zoltan, Mack, and Maja? she wondered.

  “Family of affinity,” he repeated, moving his hands down to massage her ribs.

  Once more she relaxed into it, like a dog being stroked by its master—tongue lolling, legs in the air. Her breath grew regular, her lips parted, her eyes fluttered closed. She could hardly believe the turn things had taken, the pleasure and relief she felt. One minute disgraced, and the next full of hope again.

  A late-night movie she once saw played in her mind: two people meet in a diner, fall instantly in love, and plot to murder the woman’s husband, whose only fault is being in their way. What made the movie so terrifying was the way the outcome of the story was foregone from the moment the lovers laid eyes on each other. One look, one word, and everything followed. Like Lot’s wife, turning back for one forbidden look at the burning city of Sodom only to become a pillar of salt. For eternity. Heather did not want to be Lot’s wife. She didn’t want to look back or become a pillar of salt. She wanted to move fluidly forward, become something new, extraordinary …

  Perhaps this feeling was what he meant by spiritual bliss.

  At last Zoltan pressed his palms to her ears and kissed her chastely on the crown of her head. “You are fascinating woman, as Mack says.”

  “ ‘Quite a number,’ I think you told him.”

  He laughed. “Quite a number, yes.”

  “But ‘dangerous,’ you also said.”

  “Very dangerous.”

  At that moment a drumroll of children burst through the kitchen door. Seeing Zoltan bent over their mother, they stopped their forward lunge until he moved aside, giving them an unobstructed shot. Heather’s euphoria spilled over her squealing
pups, now tumbling into her open arms and onto her lap.

  Zoltan took the moment to pick up his glass and slip out of the kitchen. He had managed to pacify her, but could it last? It was entirely possible that their sexless truce would only renew her desires or stir up new ones.

  If he hoped to live here as a free man perhaps the time had come to speak to Mack.

  17 ZOLTAN STOOD IN THE doorway of Heather’s makeshift downstairs office wearing a brown tweed jacket, tan shirt, and black string tie, over his usual black jeans and scuffed shoes. His hair, which had not been cut since he’d moved east, grazed his shoulders.

  Heather was alarmed. “Why the getup? Where are you going?”

  “To Manhattan.”

  She stood and circled him, tilting her head in mock appraisal, while he squared his shoulders and pulled at his tie. He looked even more exotic to her in his not-quite-business clothes than he did in his Mephisto garb, like an actor turned magazine salesman. Falling into their new parody of marriage, she straightened his collar, turned him around, smoothed the fabric of his jacket across his shoulders, picked at lint.

  “I don’t know, Zoltan. Are you trying to pass for someone else?” How she wished he would offer to tell her where he was going and with whom, so she wouldn’t have to ask! But he offered nothing, forcing her hand. “May I ask who you’re meeting?”

  Zoltan stiffened. She had no right to ask him that. She was not his mother. More like his jailer. As it happened, he was meeting an agent referred by a friend. There was no reason such a meeting should arouse Heather’s jealousy, although it seemed everything did. But as he wanted to avoid setting a precedent, he remained silent for what seemed a full minute before giving in. “I am meeting an agent. Mack will bring me home.”

  Heather was dumbfounded. Why hadn’t Mack mentioned it? She wondered whether this agent was a woman—maybe the one who had phoned, maybe someone unsuspected.

  “I’ll drive you to the station.”

  Or maybe he was lying to her and not meeting an agent at all. If so, how was Mack involved? Perhaps Zoltan’s move east was less innocent than they let on; maybe Maja was not dead after all but instead ensconced in a Manhattan flat alternately receiving Heather’s two men. Maybe that was why Zoltan wouldn’t fuck her. Who, she suddenly wondered, was deceiving whom?

  As soon as Zoltan disappeared inside the station she felt abandoned. It was the first time that he had gone off and left her behind. When each of her children had started preschool she’d also felt bereft, though at the same time joyously free; she had celebrated her freedom by taking her first freelance job. Now she felt only forsaken.

  After lunch, while the children were drawing and coloring in the playroom, Heather took a sponge and a rag to her—now Zoltan’s—study. With Carmela out sick, she had a perfect excuse. She had not crossed the threshold of the room since the day of her botched seduction (as she thought of it), although she had sometimes listened at the door.

  Throwing open the door, she saw that much had been changed: furniture had been repositioned, pictures moved, books rearranged. She read each change as a clue—as if the room were a poem whose meaning was traceable through its several drafts. He had pushed the sofa bed toward one wall—to command a better view? She looked out the window trying to capture the inspiration for the sake of which he had violated the room’s symmetry. The laptop she had lent him was no longer on the desk but sat on a table near the window with her old printer. Neglected flowers, parched in barely an inch of scum-covered water, drooped their heads toward the table, now dusted with the fine yellow powder of their withered stamens. She blew it to the floor. Running her cloth across the shelves, she studied the book titles for illumination. Wherever she looked papers and folders greeted her—proof of the creative life that flourished inside this room while her own creative life was on hold.

  She ran hot water in the bathroom sink and scrubbed the porcelain with a sudsy sponge. Zoltan’s toothbrush—a sad specimen, with splayed bristles that had lost all spring—aroused her pity; but then, she reminded herself, he had called himself a monk and chose to ignore his body. She folded the crumpled towels, lifted each of the odd bottles on the sill to wipe the woodwork underneath. Opening his aftershave, she found herself breathing in his singular astringent aroma. She glanced inside the medicine cabinet at a cryptic array of pills and salves; but though she examined them closely, searching for clues to maladies, she could not extract their secrets. Nor did the act of dusting the chair he sat in or wiping away his fingerprints land her any closer to the mysteries of his life. He sat writing in this room; he crumpled up sheets of paper; he read, he thought, he slept—and he went out.

  She carried the overflowing wastebasket to the utility room and was about to empty it into the appropriate recycle bin when her eye caught a scrap of blue paper bordered in green—a page from the notepad she kept beside the telephone. Discarded trash could hardly claim privacy rights. She straightened it out and read: E.—Thu 1, Endicott lobby.

  Today was Thursday!

  She recrumpled and discarded the note and without a scruple picked up another sheet—this one of lined legal paper covered in cramped vertical script—and began to read.

  “PLEASE HAVE A SEAT and I’ll tell Mr. McKay you’re here,” said the sloe-eyed receptionist through glossy puffed lips.

  Zoltan eased himself down onto a low sofa. The reception area was as refined and comfortable as a living room: a small, finely worked prayer rug, visible on the floor through a glass-topped coffee table around which stood two modern sofas covered in velour, compelled his admiration. The warm rusts and reds, the deep blues, the intricate pattern of curves and leaves distracted him from the heavy feeling he carried of being utterly displaced. His clothes, his posture, his very thoughts affronted the elegance of this anteroom of commerce. In place of the highbrow journals and literary reviews casually displayed at their mountain home, here recent copies of Time, Fortune, Contemporary Architecture, BusinessWeek were arranged on two side tables in crisp symmetrical groupings. He flipped through the pages of Fortune observing the square-jawed, tailored, muscular American men.

  “Hey, Z,” said a grinning Mack, extending his hand. “You managed to find your way. Come on back to my office. I have a couple of things to finish up and then I’ll be ready to go. Ruthie dear, could you please call down and ask them to bring up my car?”

  As soon as Ruthie left, Mack looked Zoltan over. “You know, Z, I’m not sure about that tie, or the jacket either. I mean for seeing agents and such. Maybe okay for L.A., but you’re here now, you might as well look it. Don’t you agree?”

  Zoltan bowed. “You are my business adviser, I follow your advice.”

  “Good. Tomorrow we’ll go shopping. I’ll come home a little early. There’s an outlet store just across the highway. We’ll surprise Heather. But you better not pull that shit you pulled with the strawberries. If I buy it, you wear it.”

  “That was entirely a misunderstanding. I do love strawberries. I only—”

  “Forget it.” Mack waved it away and opened the door to his office. “When she sees you in your new duds all will be forgiven. She’ll be so jealous.”

  “Jealous? Why jealous?” Exactly how much, wondered Zoltan, did Mack know?

  “Because she didn’t get to pick them out herself. But tell me, how did things go with that agent?”

  “I will tell you in the car.”

  He followed Mack into a spacious room furnished even more like a living room than was the reception area. A few papers and catalogues were piled neatly upon a large walnut dining table, which served as a desk. While Mack typed on the computer, Zoltan sat down on a graceful loveseat and looked around. The floor was decorated with more Persian rugs and the walls with framed photos of spectacular buildings going back to the Parthenon. The large windows gave out on the phallic tops of skyscrapers against a puffy blue-and-white Manhattan sky. If there were files or drawing boards or equipment, they were hidden behind the paneling t
hat covered one entire wall; only an elaborate phone and the large computer betrayed any sign that this luxurious room was indeed an office.

  Mack hit ENTER with a flourish and turned to Zoltan. “What do you think?”

  “Very impressive, very impressive,” muttered Zoltan. “I especially admire your rugs.”

  “Rugs, nothing. Come over here if you want to be impressed.” Mack led Zoltan to the window, elevated over the city like a throne. Below and beyond them spread a vast peaked range of roofs and spires, dotted with conical shingled water towers like native huts, stretching to the east and west, down to the rivers. Sunlight danced on metal, gleamed off glass. “It always amazes me how almost delicate the tops of the old skyscrapers are. Look at that one over there,” said Mack, pointing to the graceful, silver tower of the Chrysler Building a little to the south of them, seemingly at eye level with their window. “What an achievement! It’s not only the shape that gets me, but all that decorative detail—put right up here in the middle of the sky. When that building went up no one could have expected it to be visible at close enough range to be appreciated. It was done for the sheer beauty of it. That’s some inspiration for a builder, isn’t it? Someone poured a lot of love into that project. Each morning when I come in, I try to start off the day by contemplating those stainless steel scalloped arches just to remind myself that nothing I ever do can match that.”

  Again, Zoltan felt the power of Mack’s ambition surging behind his humble words. Some minutes later, in the car, this impression built momentum. The more gently, humbly, Mack spoke, the more aggressively he drove—gunning at the lights, weaving in and out of traffic, and then, after they left the city, speeding on the highway as if driving were a race and its goal to overtake the greatest number of moving vehicles—while Zoltan, seat belt fastened, sat tense and helpless in the passenger seat.