Inside the room Minh lay on the couch. She too had changed clothes while Leon was away. Her silky nightdress parted in a split to the top of her thighs. He walked to the couch and kissed her brow. She dropped her head backward to kiss his lips, but when she caught sight of what he was wearing she sat up straight, knocking against his head.
“You’re not wearing that? How am I supposed to hold you?”
The brace was snug around his chest and had pads to protect the front and back of the cavity.
“It won’t get in the way.”
“You want me to hug a medical brace? You think we can be intimate with that between us?”
“But my heart . . .” He trailed off and watched as her fingers began to undo the side straps.
“I am a doctor. I look after you. I want to make love with you, not with some piece of S-and-M equipment.”
With Minh in her nightgown before him, he raised his arms as she undid the brace and lifted it away. She dropped the brace on the floor and led him toward the window.
“Here.” Minh spread her hand and pressed it against the hole in his chest, where the moonlight had been shining through. “I will not let anything happen to the gizmo. But I need you to pay attention to me, not to what your heart is doing. It is a machine, Leon. It is not you.”
He had put his arms around her and absorbed the warmth of her body, the transfer of her energy into his own flesh.
Now he stood strapped into his leather brace before her on his way to the gym. Minh picked at her nails as she spoke.
“It’s hard for me to say this, Leon, but I can’t see the point in being together.”
Leon shook his head, confused. What was she saying? “We love each other. We’re together because we love each other.”
“That’s what I used to think was enough. But you know what? It’s been almost a year and I don’t know you any better than when we married. I shouldn’t have said yes to such a quick wedding.”
“You do,” he said without thinking. “You know me better than anyone.”
“No, I understood for sure when I read what you wrote to Susan. I don’t know you, and you don’t know me. We’re not getting closer, we’re running on a parallel track. I am your wife. You sleep with me every night. We spend most days together. How is it that a letter to a stranger reveals more about you than I have learned in a year? I think the only way you can know someone is through a screen or a speaker. You mediate your whole life so that you will never actually have to reveal yourself. I thought you were coming into the world more, Leon. So wrong. And you know what else? I wonder if you only married me because I’m a doctor. Your very own live-in doctor.”
“Not true, not true.” The light shining from her, that’s what made him love her.
“And I don’t understand why you aren’t thinking about the future. You can’t be a Wonder forever. Your only role right now is to be seen and to carry a metal heart around, and that can’t sustain anyone.”
“But I’m . . . we’re writing a book. That’s for the future.”
“A self-help book, right? A self-help book that you don’t even believe in. All that pain and suffering and the redemption of your bodies, and you three do nothing but perform onstage. In the olden days a miraculous rescue like yours would have meant conversion, radical change. You’d have had an epiphany and vowed to commit yourself to life as a monk or doing good works. But you—all you’ve done is make money.”
Bewilderment was lending Leon a sensation of weightlessness. “We’ll be finished soon. I’ll do something else then. What do you want, Minh? What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know. Because I don’t know you.”
“But I had no idea . . . ,” he protested. “If I’d realized you were unhappy I would have . . .” No, in truth he didn’t know what he would have done.
He was sure it was a mistake. She’d calm down. They had been married less than a year. He would work at it, make things better, tell her whatever she wanted to know.
She spent all day in the studio and the medical office. Leon resisted the urge to search through the old self-help books or find advice online. He guessed she would accuse him of falling back into the old ways. What irony that she was waiting for him to figure this out himself, while the ghostwriter was in the study, waiting for the same thing. At night Minh crept into the room late and slipped onto the edge of their bed, leaving a slab of cold sheet between them.
On Saturday he found her packing clothes in the apartment. She had changed everything about the rooms since she’d moved in. What had been spare, book-lined rooms with white walls and unexceptional timber furniture had become shades of cream and avocado, overstuffed reading chairs and vases of flowers from the garden, the aroma of chili oil and lime and mint, music drifting through the rooms.
Leon watched her taking blouses and skirts off hangers. She smoothed her skirts out flat on the bed and rolled them into tubes that tucked into the gaps in the suitcase. Her shelves in the bathroom were already empty.
“I’ll move to my old garden cottage until the shows are finished,” she said.
“Don’t, please.” He moved behind her and put his arms around her waist. “Stop packing.”
She pulled a tissue from her skirt pocket and blew her nose, then began to shake out each blouse and hold it against her body in order to overlay the sleeves into the bodice and scroll it into a neat bundle.
“I’ll learn. I want to be the man you love.”
He still didn’t believe she would go until she lifted her framed sketch of Maisie and Maximus off the wall.
She zipped the suitcase shut, and Leon found himself falling to his knees. Minh sat on the bed, refusing to meet his gaze. His knee slipped, and he fell forward, then pushed himself up and walked ahead on his knees until he was resting his hands on Minh’s legs. His throat swelled with tight swallows. He had never known emotion could inundate the body this way. Even when his father died and he watched the coffin slide away at the funeral and heard his mother beside him heave a sob into her tissue-crammed hand, he had not felt his whole body spasm with desolation as he did now. His blazing skin, his aching head and sore cheeks, the watery rush to his nose and eyes compensated for what his metal heart could not do. He begged Minh to stay. He took her hand and laid his damp cheek on it.
Minh brushed the hair from his sweating forehead. “I didn’t know you could be like this.”
It was all Leon could do to breathe. “Love,” he whispered between gasps of air.
After a wait that nearly emptied him of hope, she agreed to try a little longer.
“It was you who wanted to be a husband,” she said. “Can you do it?”
AT THE SHOW in Paris, when Leon began to recite his story and the crowd scrambled across the room to his booth, a small man remained behind and moved closer to Kathryn’s booth. Leon noticed the lone spidery creature pressed up against the glass, staring intently at Kathryn, so he moved his foot to the alarm button and pressed. He delivered his monologue as he kept an eye on the two of them. The man stood motionless in front of Kathryn. Inside her booth, transfixed by his stare, Kathryn quivered like a plucked guitar string. She seemed afraid until she jumped off her stage and ran toward the glass. When she reached the place where the man was standing, she slammed her hands flat against the glass wall. He fell back.
Her mic was off—Leon’s voice was coming through the speaker system—but the words she shouted still resounded around the space.
“If you try to contact me, speak to me, come near me, even fecking think of me again, you will regret it for the rest of your life. You have nothing on me now.”
Now Leon recognized him. It was her husband, the one who had exploited her, photographed her and sold the images, gone on talk shows to express his disgust at what was happening to her. The man who was still trying to extract money from Rhona.
Kathryn pressed her hands hard against the booth wall until the palms whitened and the lines were maps, and stared do
wn her ex-husband. Leon could have punched the air in triumph. He wanted to race from his people-proof booth and call Minh immediately and tell her what he’d seen: that Kathryn was no longer afraid of her barbarous ex-husband. But Rhona, together with his performance coach, the booth shows and the dinner bookings, had trained him into a professional. He raised his voice to keep the attention of the audience while from the corner of his eye he watched the husband slope away, his arms gripped by two security guards. Kathryn banged her fist one more time against the glass behind him.
After the show, Leon asked Rhona what the guards had done with the creep.
It was under control. Kathryn had asked that he be charged if possible. If not, warned and put on a flight back to Dublin.
“When she heard he was trying to get a share of her profits, she told me to do whatever it takes to make sure he gets nothing. Which demonstrates,” Rhona pointed out, “that she’s stronger than she’s ever been. I’m more proud of her every day.”
And there it was, two days later, all over the net. Footage of the filthy demon standing at the wall of the booth and Kathryn slamming her hands against the glass. Even though ticket holders were scanned at every show for devices that could capture images. Even though they had to surrender all electronic equipment at the cloakroom before passing through the scanner. How had the paparazzo gotten so close? Who was betraying them?
Back at Overington the next week, Hap arrived to report on his investigations. He had hired a cybertracking firm to trace the origin of the images and footage. It had taken time, but finally they had located the source, a computer that moved from place to place around the world, that used sophisticated software to dissemble its identity and the route of its transmissions. The three Wonders were sprawled in their respective chairs in the common room. Kathryn sighed loudly.
“I don’t care who it was. Why do we have to have a meeting? I’m so tired of meetings. You’ve done your job, congratulations and toodlepip. Can’t they charge him with something and be done with it?”
“Maybe it was a her?” Christos drawled from his supine position. “That would make it more interesting.”
“You’re not going to be happy,” Hap said. “So I won’t try to make it easier. The leaker is Kyle. It’s been Kyle all along.”
Leon clutched Minh’s hand, awash with vindication and fury. “I knew it. I knew, I knew it, I knew it.”
“He knew it,” Minh repeated drily.
Leon squeezed her hand once again and rose from the chair. He went to the window, stared out, tried to calm himself. “I knew it,” he said once more, even though the feeling of triumph was subsiding. What was the use of his having known it when he never told anyone?
“Well then, Kyle has to go.” Christos shrugged. His leaked images had only ever shown him primping and preening, except for one low-light shot in which he was draped on a banquette in a nightclub in an unflattering position that revealed a shadowy layer of flab. After that he redoubled his efforts at the gym until a month later, when he could demonstrate that the flab was gone.
“You bet he has to fecking go. He was one of us! What a prick. Did he do it for money?” Kathryn jumped up and went to stand in front of Rhona, hands on hips with her fists balled. The Irish accent always grew more pronounced when she was angry. “No payout for him, Rhona. None of that golden handshake that arseholes get. He must have broken some clause in his contract?”
“Sure. He broke the confidentiality clause.”
“There.” Kathryn turned to Leon and Minh. “The little worm will get nothing. We were supposed to be a team!”
Rhona, seated in her favorite armchair, uncrossed and recrossed her legs. She pushed back her hair and rubbed circles on her temples with four fingers before closing her eyes. Her tiny cowgirl boots sat neatly beside her plump stockinged feet. She told them Kyle was in his apartment, waiting.
“We have to make a decision about his future with us,” she said.
“What future? That traitor has no future here!” Kathryn danced backward and forward in a two-step of frustration.
Rhona sighed. “Please sit down again, all of you.”
Kathryn and Leon returned to their seats. As Leon eased into his deep sofa, he noticed how worn the armrest had become. The suite had been brand-new when they arrived at Overington. Over their time together the chafing of people sitting and moving about had rubbed away the plush brown velvet pile and now he could see the cords under the upholstery material showing through like the tendons in a stressed neck. Everything was wearing thin: the furniture, the shows, the lifestyle, their relationships.
“Was it revenge?” Minh asked. Leon had told her about what he saw in Kathryn’s apartment. “Because Kathryn rejected him?”
Rhona, Christos and Yuri all shifted in their seats and stared at Kathryn.
“No,” Kathryn answered crossly. “It’s nothing to do with any of that. The leaks started last year.”
“She’s right.” Rhona turned the rings on her fingers, one rotation each finger. “I’ve talked to him. He showed me some paperwork. It’s been a part of his strategy all along. He never wanted us to know it was him because he guessed you’d all react this way. But the public needs the salacious stuff too. If you’re all perfectly wondrous all of the time, your followers lose interest. A touch of ugliness and bad behavior makes them crave you more.” Rhona laughed. “He did say it would have been much better if one of you had been to rehab.”
“You think it’s funny?” Kathryn stared at Rhona. “I don’t believe it. He lied to us all—even you. If we’d known what he was doing none of us would have cared. But he lied.”
“You would have cared. You three would have wanted to pretty up the shots, make yourselves look better.”
“No, we’re smarter than that. And he’s a slimy liar. Why do you want to keep him?”
“Come on, face it, until now you liked him. His strategies work, we’re doing better than I dreamed. I know you’re all tired, but we’re nearly there. We only have five more shows. And Kyle has said that’s the last of the leaks. There have been enough, he won’t do it anymore. He’ll be focusing all his efforts on the finale now.”
No one knew before this whether Kathryn could cry, whether the treatment that triggered her wool growth had also affected her tear glands. She’d sat dry-eyed through movie screenings that had every other one of them dabbing madly at their eyes with tissues; she’d broken a toe once by tripping on a paving stone in the grounds and not shed a tear; she’d rehearsed her routine until she was so exhausted she collapsed. This was the first time Leon had seen the giveaway of fast blinking and sniffing.
She turned, swiped her eyes as she faced away from them. “I’m worn out. I can’t wait till this is over, Rhona.”
IT HAD BEEN an uneventful booth show, the third from last, in a newly built venue next to a shopping mall in the Brazilian capital. Eight hundred audience members already fizzing with excitement from the circus, charging around the booths, dropping their sweets and popcorn and drips of sauce and trampling them into the sawdust floor. To the Wonders it was the same old show, same old music, same old awe and astonishment. In the final scene, Christos cut short his performance by thirty-two seconds and left the tech fumbling with the sound and lighting and projections to bring the show to a close without its being obvious that they’d messed up. Back in the dressing room, Kathryn stomped around on the glossy parquetry.
“Call yourself an artist, Christos? You think these people don’t deserve a proper performance? Or do you only care about some art collector in fecking Soho?”
“I don’t care about any of them. And you don’t either. You hate them. You said so last night. You said they are stupid shits who’d pay to see a turd if it was celebrity endorsed.”
Leon laughed. He loved Kathryn’s smart mouth—when it wasn’t used on him. That was exactly what she had said the night before at the rooftop restaurant in the hotel as they looked out over the sleek modernist buildings of Bras�
�lia. They were squabbling and toying with their food. They had seen enough of the world, at least the world they inhabited, one of vectors and passages and windows. Enough of bird’s-eye views from the top floors of hotels. Enough of countries where the language meant nothing and the food tasted too fruity or too fatty or too thin or of nothing but dusty old spices. And enough of each other.
Christos had thrown four tantrums in a month about trivialities: whole milk instead of half-and-half; the width of the seats on their private jet; Yuri’s failure to master English grammar; Kathryn’s noisy heels on the floors at Overington. Furious, Kathryn had ordered forty pairs of wooden Swedish clogs delivered to Christos’s apartment. Christos responded by hiring a bouzouki orchestra to play in the common room for five hours. When Rhona arrived home to find Christos and Kathryn shouting at each other over the music, she joined in the yelling herself. After a house meeting, where she once again explained the penalties in the fine print of the contracts that meant that early departure or expulsion from the Wonders would result in a massive depletion of percentages, they settled into an uneasy truce.
At night Leon and Minh lay in the quiet darkness whispering about what was to come for each of them. Minh wasn’t worried about Christos, who reminded her of the spoiled proud boy children of her neighborhood when she was growing up. “Those little kings,” she said to Leon. “Someone always picks up after them.”
But Kathryn was her best friend, and as the end of the Wonders drew closer, Minh had begun to talk about Kathryn’s plan. What was the point of buying a Caribbean island if you had to live on it by yourself? Kathryn’s wool had lost its glossy sheen. She often finished dinner early if they were dining together, or got up and left the room in the middle of group conversations. Between shows she threw herself into long bouts of reading where nothing could penetrate her concentration. She was the most famous woman on the planet, and she was preparing to become the most alone.
The Wonders Page 19