Menage

by Alix Kates Shulman

  “Tony Agasian,” said the man, extending his hand. “I thought that might be you. We met years ago at the Aspen Institute, on a panel on Writers in Exile? Remember? But what are you doing here? I thought you were in California writing for the movies.”

  Zoltan swallowed. As he was systematically searching his memory bank, Agasian sprang on him the Forbidden Question: “So what are you working on?”

  Zoltan was aghast at such a breach of etiquette. Writers had been known to choke on their food or spill their drinks in face of such a blatant demand to justify themselves. Those who could brag of a recent success or a book in press were exempt, but everyone else felt assaulted by the intrusion. Even the phenomenally prolific John Updike once confessed in print to resenting it; how much more so the bulk of writers who exerted their maximum labors to produce one or two books in a decade. On the early advice of a friend, Zoltan had prepared a response to the Question, especially when asked by a layman—which presumably described this meddling Mr. Agasian. Either that or, if he too was a writer, he was perhaps a sufferer of Asperger’s syndrome, a major symptom of which was a lack of empathy and social grace.

  Before Zoltan could deliver his rehearsed response—I am currently working on a very long project that I am not at liberty to discuss—his interlocutor’s cell phone began playing Beethoven, and he gestured to be excused.

  With relief, Zoltan moved quickly away. The decibel level of the room was high enough to give him a headache; big parties always brought back to him the inescapable noise of prison. As he made his way toward an open window, he spotted a clutch of people who had been at MacDowell with him and Rebecca. (Did she stay in touch with everyone she ever knew? Was that the secret of her social success?) Among them was Sophie something, an up-and-coming poet who had been working on her second collection. At the first composers’ recital in the colony library she had come on to him by inviting him to visit her studio for “tea,” but the timing was wrong; Rebecca had two more weeks left at the colony, and by the time she was gone Sophie had hooked up with someone else. Tonight she looked better than he remembered. He quickly searched the room for Heather before approaching her but was stopped abruptly by the insistent ring of silver spoon on crystal goblet, wielded by Rebecca, who thwarted him once again.

  “People! People! I have an announcement,” she shouted, flanked by her tall, hunky neurosurgeon of a husband.

  People began exchanging signs. Zoltan swiveled in his tracks and urgently searched for Mack, to signal his desire to leave.

  “I am so glad that you could all join us tonight to tip a glass to our guest of honor, my dear friend Orville Lask, one of our most distinguished public intellectuals, who has kindly agreed to grace us with a brief reading from his new book, published just last week.”

  There was a sudden scurry of bodies as some claimed choice seats on one of the leather sofas or grabbed a chair, while others began inching toward the coatroom.

  Rebecca continued: “This book is bound to make an important contribution to the cultural life of our city, in fact the debates have already begun, as you will see in next week’s Times Book Review … Yes! Isn’t it wonderful? A page four review! And no, I did not write it; we are far too good friends. This is the Times, not n+1.” (Laughter.) “But don’t take my word for it, you will see for yourself. Now, if you’d like to refresh your drinks before Orville begins …”

  Mack, who had just emerged from the bathroom, caught Zoltan’s signal and went immediately to the bedroom to retrieve the coats while Heather, flushed with happiness, picked up the signal from across the room and went to summon the elevator. In the few moments between Rebecca’s finishing and Orville’s beginning to speak, Zoltan commandeered his hostess’s hand for a parting kiss intended to convey their regrets at being unable to stay for the reading and discussion. Rebecca shook a remonstrative index finger at her “naughty boy” but in the end relented, bestowing on him her signature white, coy, sparkling, flirtatious smile.

  Zoltan hurried to the elevator. Rebecca, performing magical action at a distance, zinged her smile across the room to dazzle the departing three before they were swallowed by the elevator doors, then swiveled to beam it on the waiting guest of honor.

  THAT NIGHT, WHILE MACK punctuated boozy sleep with loud apneatic snorts, Heather, still high on the party but brought low by its revelations, lay awake reeling between hope and resignation, gratitude and defeat. Just like college, where the triumph of being at Yale was marred by the humiliation of being treated like a coed—two sides of a single experience she could not reconcile. Her parents were so proud of her being there that she couldn’t admit her distress even to herself; instead she became engaged soon after graduation, taking the easy out. Throughout the party she’d been swamped by double messages, unable to tell if she and Mack were more envied, pitied, or scorned. At the very moment Zoltan seemed ready to include them in his glamorous life, she got a glimpse of the formidable competition ranged against her.

  The next day she could hardly wait to ask Zoltan about Mack’s cufflinks. When she did, he shrugged it off as if it were nothing. “Shirts Mack bought me have cuff holes but no links. So I borrowed Mack’s.”

  “You just opened his drawer and took them?”

  “What could I do? He was not home. Is there problem?”

  “No, except he had no idea where they were. He thought maybe they’d been stolen. You could have mentioned it.”

  “Stolen! By thieves!” he said sarcastically, widening his eyes in mock alarm. “I tried to put back, but drawer was locked, key gone. Mack has many cufflinks. Does he need also those?”

  “I’ll say this for you, Zoltan. You’ve got great taste. You took his best pair. They’re diamonds.”

  Zoltan stuck out his lower lip. “Proudhon says property is theft.”

  Heather could only shake her head.

  “Give me key and I will change them for others.”

  “No, you give me the cufflinks and I’ll do it.”

  “Why?” he said, feigning innocence. “Mack says I should treat this house as mine.”

  “Including the contents? Come on, Zoltan, at least you should ask before you borrow something precious.”

  “You mean,” Zoltan whispered, bending to brush her ear with his lips, “like his precious wife?”

  20 “THIS IS NOTHING BUT a mess of disorganized notes, some letters, and maybe a couple of chapters at best,” sputtered Mack, swatting the top paper on the pile with the back of his hand. “Where’s the book?”

  Heather shrugged. “Good question. There are hardly any traces of it anymore in the trash. Maybe it’s on the computer. Maybe he doesn’t print out.”

  “Impossible. These things are printed out.”

  “Then maybe he—Wait!” Heather cocked her head, but decided the shrill cry was only a blue jay, not one of the children after all. She didn’t want them to discover their parents rummaging in Zoltan’s room. Not that there was much danger of their mentioning it to him, since he never spoke to them. But why take a chance? She considered it her right, in the course of cleaning up, to glance at the screen of the laptop or to peruse the papers lying bare and unprotected on the table or tossed out in the trash. But, so far, she’d drawn the line at opening an envelope or a drawer. Mack had no such scruples.

  “Let’s hurry up, okay?” said Heather.

  “Don’t be silly. He’s gone to stay with—what’s that name again?”

  That name, which Zoltan had surrendered to Heather only reluctantly, was seared into her mind in bold caps. “Elaine. Glinka.”

  “Well, he’s not coming back until tomorrow. And whose house is this anyway?” Mack’s only regret was having waited so long to investigate. “Look at these. He keeps writing to editors asking for advance money. Bad planning. While he’s living here for free, he should stop worrying about money and just write. Unless,” said Mack, recalling the unproduced screenplays, the spent advances, “he didn’t really come here to write at all.”
r />   “Of course he did. I know for a fact he used to work on his book, because I found crumpled-up scenes in his wastebasket. But now that he’s got that girlfriend”—Heather spat out the word as if it were spoiled fish—“he’s never home, so how can he possibly write a book? Or even letters.”

  Things were not working out as Mack had planned. The happiness Zoltan had offered them hadn’t materialized; Heather was plainly in a state, and Mack too had little to show for his trouble. The gregarious houseguest of the early weeks had morphed into a sullen adolescent. Was this a taste of what awaited them when their kids matured?

  “How do you know they were scenes?”

  “You can tell—descriptions, snippets of dialogue. I’m talking about the pages that were in English. There was also stuff in other languages that I have no idea about.”

  “Other languages? For all we know he could be a foreign agent or a spy. Even a terrorist. Maybe he was never a writer at all, maybe he just plagiarized some poor Balkan schnook.”

  “Come on, Mack. If he were a spy, wouldn’t he know his way around a computer? He needs way too much help for a spy.”

  “Don’t laugh, Heather. If he were a spy, that would explain a lot.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like his sneaking in and out. His unbelievable secretiveness. Those surreptitious phone calls at all hours. The fact that he seems to do almost nothing. Another thing—why didn’t I think of this before?—he asked me to give him flying lessons. Flying lessons!”

  “Oh Mack, that could be perfectly innocent.”

  “Yes, but it might not be. And remember, he served time in prison. How do we know there wasn’t some secret deal to let him out?”

  “Come on, you know he was jailed because of his book. Of course he’s a writer.”

  “Okay, maybe so, but so what? Look at all those first-rate German writers who it turned out were keeping dossiers on their friends for the Stasi. Maybe he has some secret arrangement with the CIA or the FBI. They hire the shadiest characters as informers.”

  Heather rolled her eyes, but Mack still wanted to know: was there a book or wasn’t there? If not, then Zoltan, not Mack, was the impostor.

  He began searching the drawers. “There must be a manuscript here somewhere. Whenever I ask him how the work is going he says it’s coming along fine. Why would he lie about it? Why would he waste this perfect setup? Unless he is something other than he pretends.”

  “Maybe he took his manuscript over to Elaine’s.” (Poison word!)

  “Do you know his password? Can you get into this laptop?”

  “Of course I can. It’s my laptop and my password.”

  “Okay. Boot it up.”

  Heather sat down at Zoltan’s (that is, her) desk, opened the laptop, logged on, and surveyed the list of folders. Then she opened up the documents folder.

  “Here’s a folder for Realms of Night.” She clicked on it. “Look how small the files are. Some are thirty kilobytes. And how few of them.”

  “What’s this?” said Mack, pointing over her shoulder to a folder named “Projects & Prospects.” “Open it. Or better yet, move over and let me.”

  He practically shoved her out of the way in his determination to get at the screen. The folder in question contained half a dozen files: one named Writing Projects, another named Titles, one marked Names (with subheads, male and female), a list of Publishing Contacts, another of Women, one of Sources, and one headed Housing, with annotated entries for artists’ colonies, house sits, and various people. He ran his eye down the screen, then stopped. “Look, Heather! Here we are.”

  Heather followed Mack’s finger to their names and read across: “Bourg lux, priv bth, vu 2 hrs nyc free bd, stipend.” Below was a cryptic note that read, “pot dang sit.”

  “ ‘Pot dang sit.’ What the hell does that mean?” asked Mack.

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” said Heather. Then in a flash it hit her. Suddenly nervous about what else Mack might discover about the potentially dangerous situation if this impromptu search continued, she looked up and said, “Did you hear that?” Tina, who had been washing herself on the windowsill, looked up too.

  “What?”

  “Didn’t you hear something? Could be Chloe. Would you mind checking on them, please?”

  “In a minute,” said Mack, tapping his index finger on the screen. “This stipend business—what’s that about? Stipend from whom, do you suppose?”

  Heather took a deep breath and like a threatened head of state launched her distracting attack. “From you I suppose, who else? Haven’t you given him money?”

  “I sent him a couple of C-notes with his ticket from L.A., and every so often I slip him a few more. I did tell him not to worry about cash. But no stipend. And oh, yes, I gave him a check for that political foundation of his.”

  “What political foundation?”

  “You know, the Fund for Balkan Freedom—something like that. The FBF or BFF. Didn’t he hit you up too?”

  “I think he mentioned it once. I thought it was Baltic, not Balkan.”

  “Baltic, Balkan … maybe it’s a front,” said Mack, scrolling down and down until he found a file labeled “$.” “Look here. Here’s a page headed FBF with an entry for two thousand dollars from me, and here’s one for a thou from Paul Shaffer.”

  “Did he give you a receipt?”

  “If he’s a spy or this is some kind of scam you wouldn’t expect him to give out receipts, now, would you? Anyway I have the canceled check. I could look up the endorsement. If it’s a legitimate foundation, some officer other than Zoltan would have endorsed it.”

  “Come on, Mack, you know no one but Zoltan endorsed that check. He’s the only Balkan or Baltic whose freedom counts here. No wonder he can take so many taxis from the station. Taxis, cufflinks, money—what else does he take? He takes and takes and gives nothing back. When he’s here he barely comes out of his room, he hardly speaks a word to me anymore, the children no longer know he lives here. What a joke! I hear him talking on his cell half the day, and he stays out all night. He comes home in a taxi to shower and pick up his mail and goes right to sleep. Since he spends half his nights at his girlfriend’s place anyway, since he’s practically living there now, let her cook for him. Let him move his stuff out of here and give me back my study.”

  Glad to be getting some sleep again, Mack didn’t really care where Zoltan spent his nights. But when he thought of the nonexistent manuscript and that “stipend” business he felt duped.

  “Wait,” said Heather. “I really did hear something. I’m going to check on the children. Right back.”

  As soon as Heather left the room, Mack, following an intuition, reached into the back of the top drawer and pulled out a small maroon notebook written mainly in a foreign script. Seeing dates in the margins as he turned the pages, he thought it must be some sort of diary and, feeling diaries were out of bounds, suffered his first small qualm. But when he saw “McK” sprinkled here and there with an occasional English word or phrase in quotation marks (“finance/build,” “Eve in Eden,” “enterprising as hell”), curiosity trumped qualm. Either this was some kind of spy journal or Z was taking notes on them. When Heather came back into the room he shoved the notebook in his pocket to study later.

  “Heather, I’ve made up my mind. I think it’s time we had a talk with him. Ask him about this so-called book of his.”

  “You know he’ll just talk his way around it, so why bother asking? Look, Mack, he had his chance and he blew it. We should just tell him it hasn’t worked out and ask him to go.”

  Mack hated failure almost as much as he loved success. “We can’t just kick him out without notice. Just when he’s beginning to feel at home.”

  “He’ll never feel at home. Ask him. He says he’s a permanent exile and can’t feel at home anywhere.”

  If Zoltan was planning to write about him, Mack didn’t want to act precipitously. “What if there is a book somewhere after all? And
a Balkan fund. We could at least show him the courtesy of asking.”

  “Courtesy! Does he show us any courtesy?” Feeling herself once more on the verge of tears—whether of disappointment, hurt, or anger she didn’t know—she turned to the window with her back to Mack until the feeling passed. She missed her room, her view, especially at this hour when the fading light turned the woods melancholy. When she trusted her voice again she said, “Go ahead and ask him if you want. But you know he’ll concoct some story to make you do what he wants. Just the way he did in California. That’s how he is. He gets his way.”

  Mack remembered their night together at the beach and that it was actually Mack’s idea for Zoltan to come stay with them, not the other way around. Heather didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “And you know what?” continued Heather. “Even if there is a manuscript somewhere, and a legitimate fund too, three months is long enough. Don’t you think we’ve done our turn? Let him find his own place now.”

  “With what, babe? Be realistic. He has no money.”

  “Then how come he buys expensive wines and takes all those taxis? He must have some money. If he isn’t getting it from you he’s getting it from—”

  “His handler?” quipped Mack.

  “Let him start spending his money on rent. Or move in with his girlfriend. Or go down his Prospects list. Or get a job.”

  “Maybe the manuscript’s with some agent or editor—”

  “Didn’t he plan to discuss it with you before showing it to anyone? Mack, think about it. You’re probably right and there is no manuscript. Anyway, not enough of one to sell.”

  “All the same,” said Mack.

  “Look,” she said with urgency, “we agreed he’d stay only as long as I want him. I don’t want him anymore.”

  21 ZOLTAN HAD EXPECTED TO slip into his room undetected, but Heather was waiting for him in the hall. Caught. “Ah. Good morning,” he said, backing away.