The bidding reached its estimated $135,000. Lee’s representative bid again, and the bidding stalled at $140,000. Then a new bidder at the back of the room raised her paddle, and Petr squinted into the lights to see her. He must not have known who she was, a certain blow to his ego. A dark horse, bidding the price up to $145,000. Petr acknowledged her as the “woman in the blue suit toward the back.”
Then Relay raised her paddle for $150,000. This was a bit uncouth. No one liked a buyer to sweep in at the end of a bid. Elm found herself silently critiquing Relay’s outfit—Ann Taylor Petites for sure, pearls as accessories. Were you allowed to wear pearls without irony anymore?
Apparently, Petr knew her, because he supplied her name on the first bid. But Elm guessed that as a Lacker, Relay had been around art royalty since she could be relied on not to drool on it.
Between volleys, Relay hunched over, leaning on her elbows. She bid by raising the paddle high, like a cat springing to action. When Petr awarded her the drawing, at $207,500, Relay looked estatic, beaming like a child who finally got the pony she’d been begging for.
Then Indira’s Mercat, the crown of Elm’s contribution to the auction, made its appearance. The audience gasped. It was indeed beautiful; the texture of the pastel glinted in the stage lights. The woman’s eye, the dog’s tail, the blue sky, the scales of the fish for sale glistening. It was a magnificent lighting display and Elm was proud at having orchestrated the arrangement with facilities. If she’d left it up to them, they’d have just shined a fluorescent bulb straight at it like they were interrogating a prisoner.
The woman in the blue suit who bid on the first sketch raised her paddle, and now Petr, who had learned her name in the interim (his staff was nothing if not competent and swift, delivering updates into his earpiece), called her Mrs. Kostlestein and then shortened it to Mrs. K in subsequent acknowledgments like he’d known her for years.
The piece, which had been on reserve for $750,000 and expected to fetch as much as $850,000, managed to reach $900,000 before being awarded to the woman in the blue suit. Elm let herself hope, near the end, that it would reach seven digits, that magical threshold that would really make people stand up and take notice. But bidding had petered out, and Elm tried to remember that it had done well, better than she’d expected.
Elm smiled. Finally, she let herself relax, and realized she had been worrying a hangnail on her index finger and a bright spot of blood had formed. She stuck her finger in her mouth to stanch it. She looked up and could see Greer staring down at the proceedings from the private room. Ian winked at her from across the room, smiling widely. It was his victory too.
Other lots came up and were purchased. Two mediocre Callebaut sketches didn’t make their reserve. Indira’s esoteric postcard oils sold to a miniature fetishist. Then, though it seemed that no time at all had passed, all the lots had been presented. The auction was over.
Elm called Indira as soon as she got back to her desk. “Good news!”
“It sold well, then?” Indira tried to rein herself in, but the anxiety sounded in her voice, which rose squeakily at the end of the sentence. Elm wondered what she needed the money for. Medical bills? A debt?
“Very … $900,000.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful!” Indira sounded, like Elm, more relieved than happy.
“You’ll collect about $550,000 when all is said and done,” Elm half-apologized, though she had been careful to explain the terms to Indira in front of her lawyer to make sure she understood. Though Indira was a famous artist, she was still an Attic and had to be treated like one. “Plus the Woodridge and the oils.”
Elm went back to her office to shut down her computer and collect her purse. An e-mail had arrived from Greer, asking her to lunch the following day. Elm sneered at it. Now he wanted to be a relative, now that she’d had some success. She left it in her in-box. Let him sweat it a little.
Ian stood in her doorway. “Grab a drink?” he asked.
“Can’t,” Elm answered. “I haven’t been home in years, it feels like.”
Ian smiled, the ends of his mouth turning up disingenuously. “All right. We’ll celebrate another time. It was smashing, wasn’t it?”
“Smashing?”
“I’m trying it out,” Ian said. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Elm said, standing and reaching for her purse.
“Gnarly auction, dude.” Ian led the way to the elevator.
“Did I see your friend there?”
“Who, Relay? Yeah. We had a chance to catch up. It was nice.” Ian leaned over and pushed the elevator call button, then looked at something down the hall.
“What?” Elm asked.
“Hmmm? I didn’t say anything.” Ian flashed her the same smile he gave the really dumb cashier at Starbucks who always charged him for an au lait instead of a latte. The smile that actually meant its opposite.
“What’s wrong?” Elm asked.
“Not a thing.” Ian put his arm in front of the elevator door, making sure it stayed open for Elm. “Have a lovely evening.”
For two weeks Elm had been giving herself shots of Lupron and estradiol/progesterone in the bathroom after Colin left for work. She hid the medication with the stinky cheese in the refrigerator, one place she felt confident Colin would not look, as he hated any kind of blue cheese, claimed its smell of decay upset him and that it made no sense to eat anything rotten. He was irritable. He wouldn’t tell Elm what was going on at work, which would have worried her in the past. But she wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to her husband, occupied instead with deceiving him.
She blamed her inattention on hormones. She felt swollen, perpetually about to get her period, a little crampy, and so, so tired. Her ass was sore from her inept poking with the needle, and she had flashes of anger at Colin because he wasn’t sharing this with her, wasn’t helping her through this time, wasn’t giving her the injections himself, then rubbing the pain out of the flesh with the heel of his hand.
Intermittently, she was subsumed in an enveloping heat. She fanned herself and undid another button on her too-tight shirt. The side effects of the fertility medication made her a teenager again—mood swings and breast tenderness. She had almost thrown a coffee cup at Colin the previous morning when he ate the last piece of raisin toast.
Elm hadn’t anticipated that seducing her husband would be so difficult. She had a very small window, she realized, to pretend to get pregnant before she flew back to France. Michel had given her explicit instructions when he called to tell her they’d successfully extracted and replicated DNA from the samples she’d left with him.
She asked Wania to stay overnight with Moira and booked a fancy dinner and a hotel room in Midtown. But though it was Friday, Colin got stuck at work and didn’t make it back to the city until after nine p.m.
When he walked in, Elm and Wania were watching television. Moira lay in her pajamas in a sleeping bag on the living room floor.
“Hi,” Colin said sheepishly.
“Hello,” Wania whispered. “The baby’s asleep.”
“Not a baby,” Moira mumbled, barely conscious.
“Then let’s go sleep in your big girl bed,” Elm said, ignoring Colin’s hello. “Wania can take you.”
Moira was too tired to argue. Wania lifted her up and carried her down the hall.
“I’m fucking knackered,” Colin said, falling onto the couch, not bothering even to set down his briefcase. “And we missed dinner.”
“Well, I ate,” Elm snapped. “Pizza with Wania and Moira.”
“I’m so sorry,” Colin said. “I know you went to a lot of trouble.”
“Yeah, well …” Elm focused on the television.
“Is this Finding Nemo?”
“It’s oddly compelling,” Elm said. “Even the five-hundred-and-first time.”
There was a silence that lasted so long Elm wondered if Colin had fallen asleep. “Can we go, still, to the hotel?” she asked.
“Ummm,” Colin considered. “Okay. I’ll just shower, then.”
“No,” Elm said. “Shower there. I’ll help you.”
Colin smiled tightly in a way that showed more politeness than interest. He stood and went over to the table where the leftover pizza was oozing onto the cardboard box. He rolled up a piece and shoved the whole thing into his mouth, chewing as he went down the hall to the bedroom.
Elm peeked into Moira’s room. Wania was lying in the trundle, reading a gossip magazine. “We’re going now,” she said.
Wania nodded. “Okay. Have a good time, then.”
Elm paused. She suddenly had an overwhelming desire to confide everything to Wania, to hear her calm, lilting acceptance. She was outside of Elm’s world, and Elm wanted Wania to take her in her arms the way she did Moira when the little girl was upset about something. This was a skill Elm had never mastered, the art of comforting. She felt how inept she was at it every time Moira attempted to seek solace. But the desire to tell Wania that she was attempting to get pregnant with Ronan’s clone faded just as quickly as it had arisen, and Elm realized how stupid it would sound. When she had the baby, if she had the baby, she could never tell anyone who he really was. Ever.
When Elm walked into the bedroom, Colin had changed from his suit into a pair of jeans and a collared shirt. She walked over to him, sorry for being so cold to him earlier. She hugged him to her and heard him sigh heavily, felt his breath hot on her neck. He pulled away. “I—” he started.
Elm said, “Let’s just go.”
She checked them into the hotel while Colin waited just behind her. Once in the minuscule room he flopped down on the bed facefirst. “I should shower,” he mumbled, sounding much like Moira’s sleepy insistence.
Elm lay down next to him on the bed. “I miss you,” she said.
He rolled over; his eyes remained closed. “I miss you too. Work’s been … I don’t know if I can take it any longer, Elm.”
Elm didn’t say anything. He couldn’t quit now. They’d need the money, especially after she’d raided their accounts to pay Michel.
“It’s bad, Elm.” He pulled his knees to his chest, fetal style. “I haven’t told you because, well, it’s not that I don’t want you to worry, rather … it’s proprietary, but more than that, it’s just that it’s borderline, well, fuck, it’s … it’s one of those things it’s better not to know.”
“Okay …” Elm stretched the word out. She didn’t really understand what he was saying. She knew it was important. She knew she should pay attention, but she was so singularly focused on her goal that she was having trouble concentrating.
“They might call me in to testify,” he said.
Elm drew in a sharp breath. Had she really been paying so little attention that Colin had done something illegal? Hidden evidence of a drug trial that would require the drug to be pulled from the market? Had he embezzled funds, or helped someone embezzle them?
“Could you be charged with something?” Elm asked. She permitted herself a horrible fantasy image of being a single mother with an imprisoned husband, asking Wania to move into the apartment so she could care for Moira and the new Ronan full-time while Elm worked her ass off to make ends meet. Then Greer Tinsley would really have something to hold against her.
“God, no. Elm!” Colin opened his eyes and looked at her incredulously. “What are you thinking? No, I’m not a criminal. It’s my department that’s in trouble, not me. For chrissakes!” He was offended.
“Sorry,” Elm said. She decided to pretend that she’d been joking. She smiled and his face softened.
Colin was so earnestly honest. When they wrote their vows for their wedding, he insisted on including an honesty clause—it was that important to him. And here she was not only deceiving him but forcing him to abet her. She had been hoping, she realized, that he would confess to having committed some crime, or at least an indiscretion. She also saw, equally as surprisingly, that her recurring worry that he was having an affair was her desire to see him humbled by a poor decision or a regret, the same way she was every day of her existence. She felt relieved that he might be capable of deceit as well. She understood then that she would never tell him about Ronan, that she would always have to keep it a secret until their graves. Her chest collapsed with the weight of it.
“I’ll go shower. Then we can talk more,” Colin said.
She watched him sit up from her position on the bed. He took off his shoes and placed them next to the nightstand, a gesture of neatness he never managed at home. Then he pulled his button-down over his head. He was still thin, but doughy in a way that he hadn’t been when she married him. He had a small belly, which bulged over the belt of his pants, and his chest was fleshy with sparse hair. He turned away from her—residual shyness, after all these years?—and took off his pants. He walked in his boxers to the bathroom and closed the door. She could hear him pee, then the rush of the shower.
She took off her skirt and top as well. She’d bought new lingerie for this excursion, black lace with small red bows. When he emerged with the towel wrapped around his waist, he uttered a caricatured fake whistle in appreciation. Then he pulled back the covers and dropped the towel, revealing the same boxer shorts.
He lay down and Elm scooted toward him, putting her leg up over him and rubbing her mouth against his neck. He sighed and did not stir.
“Elm,” he said, craning his neck back, “would you be angry if we didn’t …”
“No,” she said, a little too brightly.
He didn’t catch the disingenuousness in her voice; he murmured, “Thanks, grand,” and fell asleep.
Elm turned over onto her back and put her arm over her eyes. She felt tears start and clenched her teeth to hold them back. Why was she crying? How was it possible to feel so lonely with your husband of over a decade snoring softly beside you?
It was a big decision, choosing to lie. And she had done it so cavalierly. This must be what adulterers felt—caught up in the moment and hit by the magnitude of their duplicity. She felt almost sorry for cheaters at that moment. Certainly their pain was worse than that of the faithful spouse who suspects nothing.
She had known, though, that of the two of them she would be the one to betray. A friend of hers from college had made the astute comment, wise before her years, that in each relationship there was one who loved more than the other, the belover and the beloved. It was easier in medieval times, she said, when the roles were defined, the inequality accepted. Now it was among our neo-romantic myths that love should be equally distributed, like communal wealth.
In Elm’s first real relationship, she had been the belover. She had loved Jason so intensely that she told herself it didn’t matter if his love was less ardent, less pressing. She would have sacrificed anything for him. And when he broke up with her (kindly, he was always kind), his flaw was that he didn’t love her enough, and she swore she’d never be the one to give more than she got again. When Colin came into her life, and loved her with a passion equal to that she’d felt for Jason, she found herself in the position she considered correct. She loved him, very much, and she liked him too. But there was something about his love for her—patient, completely unconditional—that Elm knew her love for him couldn’t match. And here was the proof. She was willing to risk her marriage on a science experiment.
In the morning, Colin woke her up by pressing an erection into her back and they made love. In the moment, Elm was able to convince herself that this act was creating Ronan; this merging of bodies and souls in this Midtown hotel was sparking the life that would soon grow inside her. But as she lay there while Colin ordered Continental breakfast, wondering aloud as he did each time they stayed in a hotel about why it was called Continental breakfast since no one he knew from the Continent ever ate like that, not even those German wankers, Elm reminded herself that she was taking hormones to sync her cycle with the egg donor’s, and that as much as she wanted to believe that they could re-create R
onan by themselves, it was science that would ultimately provide them with the son that nature had taken away. Colin looked at her and smiled in such an innocent and unadulteratedly happy way that she was almost able to forgive herself.
On the plane from JFK, Elm sat with her head against the window, holding a James Patterson novel she’d bought in the airport. She watched the ground recede and then the clouds bounce off the wing. A drop of water formed on the window, rolled across its plastic surface, and flew off into the expanse of air. Elm was startled when land appeared three hours later, but then remembered that the fastest way to Europe was to fly north and east before turning south again. So that large island would be Greenland, or Nova Scotia. Then she fell asleep and woke, unrested, to the smell of baked croissants coming from the first-class section of the plane. Cruel, to do that to economy passengers. Self-moving freight, she heard they were called by airline staff. Such contempt we all have for our clients, she thought.
Elm had liquidated all the stocks she could, sold her Magritte sketch to a private collector, and emptied her 401(k) (with penalties), but she still needed to come up with $150,000. So far, her deal with Relay had earned her $30,000. She was contemplating taking out a home equity loan, if she could manage to do so online so Colin wouldn’t know about it. Of course, by tax time, he would. But by then she’d be pregnant. She knew she was digging herself into a hole, but she wanted this so badly that she would endure a prison sentence, torture, to have the opportunity to see Ronan one more time. If he could just come home once, after playing baseball in Central Park, and she could smell the outdoors on his hair, the mowed grass and the slightly sweet scent of child perspiration, fragrant, not sour like adult sweat, she would give anything.
Calm down, she told herself, knowing that her hope might be too strong, that it was possible she would need two or three implantations before she got pregnant. Where she would come up with that extra money was beyond her. Maybe she would start stealing art, she joked to herself. At least she knew what was worth stealing.
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