“You do realize that when this breaks—and believe me, it will break, Mrs. Gluckstein—it stands to be one of the biggest lawsuits this country has ever seen? It will also be a victory of the small man over the corporation, a long overdue victory.”
It was here that John Stutton, an unemotional man in his late fifties who had been fighting Safecom for over two decades, began to lose control.
“You have to understand that I have clients who have lost sons, daughters, spouses—all deaths that could have been prevented if this…” he pushed the file forward, “if this information had been acted on.”
“I lost a husband, Mr. Stutton.”
“Well, maybe now there’s a chance to get a little bit of him back,” the lawyer concluded smugly, thrilled with his own rhetoric. The young widow couldn’t help but wonder what the attorney would say if he knew that little bit had already come back, although not in a way he could possibly imagine.
Miriam returned to the house to discover the place ransacked. Tables and chairs had been overturned and papers fluttered down the staircase like disorientated doves. Myra’s two Japanese carp (almost as old as she was) were flapping on the carpet, their bowl smashed, along with several vases. Miriam stood in the middle of the room stunned, wondering whether the chaos could somehow be an imagined extension of her own recently disturbed life. A book, splayed and broken-spined on the edge of an overturned chair, tottered and fell to the floor. The thud brought her back to reality. Safecom, it had to be. She ran up to the bedroom.
As she’d suspected the filing cabinet was on its side, contents spilled everywhere, and Aaron’s desk drawers had been pulled out and emptied. She scanned the contents quickly—the thieves hadn’t actually taken anything. What they were after was now safely in the hands of Stutton, Stutton & Jobain. Below, the front door slammed.
“Oi vey!” Myra shouted. Miriam ran back out to the landing to see her mother-in-law clutching at the wall for support.
“We have been robbed and desecrated!” she yelled, holding her two dead carp up to heaven. “Enough with the misery! When is it going to stop, tell me this, you sadistic schmuck!”
Realizing Myra was addressing God, Miriam took her to the kitchen and sat her down. She gave her a sedative.
“Take this and then you sleep, okay? We’ll deal with the mess in the morning.”
“Sure, as if life is always that simple,” the old lady muttered cynically but allowed herself to be led to bed like a lamb.
As soon as Myra was safely tucked in, Miriam called John Stutton, who immediately sent a security guard over.
“Mrs. Gluckstein, these people are playing very serious hardball. They’re not going to be worrying about religious etiquette when they break your door down in the middle of the night, therefore I suggest you don’t worry about it either.”
The security guard arrived within twenty minutes: a huge Latino with the friendly name of Jesus Hosé Mandelis. Deeply religious himself, he insisted on staying by the front door, even when gratefully consuming the snack of chopped liver and bread Miriam made for him. She couldn’t help but be relieved by the fact that along with a collection of crucifixes and evil-eye charms, he wore not just one gun but two and seemed to keep in constant contact with a network of fellow security guards all over New York City via his pager.
Finally, exhausted, Miriam collapsed onto her and Aaron’s bed, still fully clothed, still surrounded by the pandemonium the intruders had left. It was only as she was drifting off to sleep that she realized Aaron’s snore was far fainter than before.
“So you approve,” she whispered, smiling, before curling up on his side of the bed.
The next morning at Stutton, Stutton & Jobain, John Stutton recorded Miriam’s statement and warned her that she would be expected to make an affidavit in front of a judge. Then he ushered in a middle-aged couple. The husband, his face a road map of twitches, seemed incapable of meeting Miriam’s eyes. The wife, a tall, thin dried-up stick of a woman clutched at her handbag as if she were drowning and it was a life buoy.
“Mr. and Mrs. Halston’s son and daughter-in-law were both killed in the SVU 450,” John Stutton explained. “Their three-month-old son survived only to die in a coma a week later. I believe the car design flaw described in your husband’s file was directly responsible. We filed an action five years ago; we lost. On behalf of the Halstons and fifty other plaintives I have relodged a legal action, one that I am confident we can now win. I have also issued a press statement that will hit the stands tomorrow morning. Believe me, Mrs. Gluckstein, this will be big news, very big news.”
Jerking her arms free from her handbag Mrs. Halston suddenly grabbed Miriam’s hands and squeezed them in gratitude.
“My wife says thank you. She hasn’t spoken since the accident,” Mr. Halston translated, turning his mournful bloodshot eyes to Miriam for the first time.
Outside, the burly security guard insisted on walking the young widow back to the subway. It was cold but the faint hint of spring was buried deep under the chill.
“Mrs. Gluckstein, you don’t know the evil that is lurking in these streets,” Jesus Hosé explained. “If they want to take you out they will take you out—but now…now you have done the right thing; now they can’t touch you.”
As they turned the corner Miriam saw O’Brien leaning up against a limousine. He seemed to be waiting for her. Jesus Hosé caught sight of him in the same instant. “Keep walking,” he instructed, his hand tightening on the pistol hidden in his waistband.
But O’Brien didn’t move. Miriam looked over and locked eyes with him. His steely blue stare displayed nothing but utter disdain. He spat slowly and deliberately into the gutter. But the young widow didn’t care; she had broken her fear of him, she had won.
Shivering with this new sense of power she hurried along to the Fulton Street subway, her slim body bent against the icy wind as it blew straight off the Hudson. “May the Rebbe save us all,” she said to herself as the ghost of Aaron rose up before her, smiling.
That night, in the tidied bedroom, she cleaned her face with cold cream and slipped on the heavy nightgown. It was a quarter to ten. A growing anxiety gnawed at her stomach as it had for the past few weeks at this time. “Have faith,” she muttered to herself as she slipped between the chilly sheets. At three minutes to she could bear it no longer and leaned over to switch off the bedside lamp. She lay in the dark and waited. The silence was deafening.
At half past ten Myra knocked on the bedroom door and entered.
“It’s gone,” she said, before sitting down on the bed. “I can’t believe it, it’s gone.”
They both listened. Somewhere a dog barked; next door a baby started wailing. Then, suddenly, a distinctive, explosive sneeze sounded out from above Aaron’s side of the bed.
“Myra, please tell me that was you.”
“It wasn’t.”
Myra’s voice sounded very small indeed. Again the sneeze echoed out, followed by several others, as loud and as identifiable as the first.
“Oi gevalt! Is it for this that I had a son?”
“And I a husband?”
It was then that the two women started laughing and weeping—just a little.
Hair Shirt
I guess I never imagined I’d get so involved with a married man. I mean, it’s not like I don’t have options. Maybe it’s this city: there doesn’t seem to be a straight man who’s not bad, sad, or mad east of Parramatta. Maybe it’s just the way I see things, but the bitter truth is that at the age of twenty-six I find myself deeply, undeniably, and totally in love with my married lover of three years. Okay, this is going to sound really clichéd because, yes, he is my boss and yes, he is forty-seven, but I know we are meant to be together. It’s an organic bonding I can’t explain. He’s my soul mate: we have the same energy, the same ambitions, the same sense of humor, and the sex is transforming.
His name? Robert Tetherhook and we work for Pear Records. Actually Robert set up Pear Recor
ds in the late eighties; he was manager of a couple of really sick acts and one band went platinum internationally and the next thing Robert has his own company. But that’s Robert—entrepreneurial.
He’s good-looking, five foot ten, with hair, a little overweight but I like that, the way the curve of his belly fits around my back in bed—not that he ever sleeps the night, except when we’re on tour with a band or at some marketing conference. When we’re away together legitimately. I love those times, when I can pretend I’m his wife. He has hair on his shoulders and a long gray ponytail that he hasn’t cut in years.
When we make love we have this ritual. I unplait his mane and brush it from the top of his head in long, luxurious strokes that reach all the way down to his waist. Yum. It’s our special foreplay. I crouch over him with my breasts touching his back. As the hairbrush bites into his scalp tremors of ecstasy vibrate through his whole torso and he makes these little whimpers, purring noises in the back of his throat. I love brushing his hair; it’s the only time I have power over him.
What Robert doesn’t know is that I collect it. Tucked under my futon bed is a David Jones plastic shopping bag stuffed full. Three years’ worth. Little gray clouds fragrant with aftershave, a faint whiff of semen, and a particular underlay of fruitiness that is totally Robert. Sometimes after he’s left, in those moments of abandonment sitting up in my bed with his seed dribbling down my thighs, the pillow roughed up and the duvet still pungent, when the world’s falling away and I’m thinking he’ll never come back, he’ll never sleep a full night with me and I will never have that luxury so many other women have of simply picking up the phone and dialing their man, and my fear begins to creep up from the floor, curling around the legs of the bed and crawling across the bedspread like a hideous slug leaving behind a thick slime of doubt, it’s then that I reach down and pull out that bag to thrust my hands deep into the soft cloud of his fur. I love him. Did I say that before? Well, it’s true; he’s everything—my best friend, my mentor, my family. I wouldn’t survive without him.
My shrink thinks he’s my father substitute. I reckon that’s simplistic; I can’t remember ever fantasizing about having sex with my father. In fact, I can hardly remember my father at all. He was killed in a train accident when I was eleven. I have a vague memory of his face if I really concentrate, and occasionally I dream I’ve met him again, only I’m my age now and he’s his age when he died, which was thirty-six. Also, he was nothing like Robert. For a start, he was a weak man, a clerk in the City Council, whereas Robert is loud, very masculine, and aggressive. Some people in the industry think he’s a bully. The Bull from the North they call him because he’s from Queensland. His brother was that well-known real estate developer who disappeared mysteriously a couple of years ago. Gavin Tetherhook. Robert’s well known too but for different reasons.
Robert’s younger than Gavin. He doesn’t like to talk about his missing brother. Robert refuses to talk about a lot of things, though I’ve really helped him open up over the years. Now he actually tells me about his childhood. Like how awful it was when his father, a sugarcane farmer, went suddenly belly-up. That was a big change in Robert’s life. It made a huge impression on him. I think that’s what drives him now: a terrible fear of poverty.
I know he loves me because I’m the only person who really understands him. Robert’s amazing. Underneath he’s just a vulnerable little boy who’s very very talented. The tragedy is that Robert really is creative. He should have pursued his own career as a composer—it’s just that he’s also a really good manager and he had to make money. But I know his true genius, unlike his wife. I know how to nurture him, like he’s nurtured me.
It was Robert who taught me the biz, how to play off one magazine against another, how a smashed-up hotel room with a singer and a hooker can engineer major CD sales. But most importantly, Robert was the first person to believe I had any talent at all.
Not like Mum. She always wanted me to be something solid like a nurse or a teacher. She lives by herself in a terrace near Summer Hill. She’s pathetic really. She never remarried after my father’s death and has been at the same job for twenty-five years. She works in a branch of the National Australia Bank. Sometimes I think she must be the only person in Australia who’s been in the same job for twenty-five years. Just the thought of visiting her makes me feel nauseated. If there’s anything I’m determined about, it’s that I’m not going to end up like my mother. Ever. Oh, she still has sex. With this creepy guy she met through a singles Website about four years ago. He had tea with us once and he couldn’t stop staring at my tits the whole time. He’s a Jehovah’s Witness or something.
I think she’s guessed about Robert. She’s always on my case about not having a boyfriend and the dangers of married men. The weird thing is that they are the same age. She met him once at the office and she actually flirted with him, it was disgusting. Yeah, there is no way I’m going to end up like her.
Robert’s wife doesn’t understand him at all. I can tell from the way he talks about her. He’s always complaining about how she’s too busy whining about her health or planning renovations on the house to ask him about work or how he’s feeling. Whereas when we’re together we don’t even have to talk, it’s like we just sense when the other is in distress. That’s how I know we’re soul mates. I had our astrological charts done and his Mars is on my Venus—that’s about as good as it gets. It’s a psychic connection, truly. I even bought him a computer for his birthday so that he can compose his electronic music when he’s at my place. He writes beautiful music, he really does. He’s a genius. I think I said that before. He’s going to leave her, I know it. It’s just a question of finding the right time to tell her.
I’ve never met her. I’ve seen photos: she’s about forty, pretty in a slim kind of way, with black hair she wears short and brown eyes. She looks as if she’s Italian or something. Robert once said she had a French mother. They’ve got no children. She couldn’t have them and they didn’t want to adopt. She’s nothing like me. I’m big and sprawly—I mean I have a comfortable body. Some might think I’m overweight but I like the way my hips have curves and my breasts are more than one handful. I used to be really hung up about being fat but Robert changed all that. He’s taught me to be proud of my body. “May thy cup spilleth over and your arse fill my hands forever,” he used to whisper at the beginning. Let’s face it: I’m big-boned. My father was Czech and my mother’s Scottish-Australian. Dad was fat, lumpen, and Slavic while my mother is angular and tall. When I stand naked in front of the mirror I can see both of them in me: the broadness of my father’s cheekbones, his full mouth, my mother’s heavy hips. Plus I’m blond with blue eyes—the complete opposite of Robert’s wife. At least you can say he hasn’t got a type.
I could have met her by now if I’d wanted to. There was a stage when Robert decided that I should, as if an encounter between us would somehow absolve him of guilt. That’s the generous analysis. The ungenerous one is that he’d get off on having the two women in his life in the same room. I refused. She doesn’t know about me. She might sense something, but as far as I know Robert has never given her any reason to suspect and he certainly hasn’t told her. He always makes sure she doesn’t come to office parties or record launches if I’m going to be there. She loathes the industry so that isn’t hard to arrange. I mean, why did she marry him in the first place if she doesn’t enjoy what he does? Don’t get me wrong, I consider myself a feminist, or at least a post-post-feminist. I mean, the word feminism was out of fashion by the time I was born. But I’m not a woman-hater and I know that if I met her I wouldn’t be able to keep seeing Robert. It’s easier to think of her as an abstract; an obstacle to be overcome, worn away by time like water eats into stone. And I’m succeeding, I know I am. It’s just that Robert needs hurrying along.
The trouble is that she’s always ill or too emotionally fragile for him to leave her. Robert’s always trying to encourage her to get a full-time job and gain
some financial independence. He’s been saying that for three years now and I’m sick of it. I guess that’s why I’ve decided to take things into my own hands.
Friday night and he’s just left. It’s raining outside. One of those Sydney nights when all the breeziness of the innocent sky is blown away and suddenly pelting rain traps us in our own nostalgia.
I keep a diary of our lovemaking because I like to look back at the entries and compare notes. I can see patterns. People think relationships are linear, that they progress. I don’t think they do. I think they’re shaped like metal springs, a spiral with decreasing circles. Lately Robert’s gone quiet. I’m frightened he’s going to leave me. Even tonight after we’d come, and he was lying curled up around me, there was this strange silence. He seemed to be whirling away from me like an astronaut who’s severed the cord attaching him to the mother ship and is voluntarily floating into space, the universe reflected in his visor.
“This is ground control to Major Tom,” I whispered in his ear, knowing how much he likes that old Bowie reference, but he just made some excuse about being exhausted and how Georgina would be wondering why he was working so late at the office with his mobile off, and how he should really go. And I let him. Because, my friends, I have stopped waiting. I have seized fate with both hands.
It was this Vogue article that really changed my life: Pursuer or Distancer, Active or Passive—Take Control of Your Own Life. It was about codependent relationships and how they can hijack your life, your career, and your biological clock. There was this paragraph about the tyranny of waiting for the phone to ring, about how 20 percent of all women under the age of thirty-five spend 35.9 percent of their time waiting for the phone to ring and 70 percent of the time it’s the wrong number, which means they spend over 60 percent of their lives waiting for something to happen that just isn’t going to. Scary. That’s me, I thought. The next night I stopped taking the pill.
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