Cotton

by Paul Heald

  He walked up dozens of steep steps to the front door of Simmons’s house, a multi-tiered brick ranch that crawled halfway up a hill looking down on the small reservoir that gave the area its name. He knocked and after a long minute, a white-haired woman dragging an oxygen tank struggled to open the door. Despite the tubes inserted into her nostrils she managed a friendly smile, but before he could introduce himself, she shouted backward in a surprisingly strong voice to someone unseen who was chiding her for answering the door for herself.

  “These nurses don’t think I should do anything!” She pulled a face and cast a glance behind her. “What can I do for you, young man?”

  Stanley extended his hand and gently shook the delicate fingers proffered by the old woman. “Are you Mrs. Simmons?” When her face registered nothing more than confusion, he added, “I’m looking for Mr. William Simmons … He used to live here.”

  “Oh, Billy!” Her face beamed. “He used to rent the apartment above my garage. Lovely young man!” She pulled her oxygen tank back, opened the door, and invited the professor inside. “Are you a friend of his?”

  “No,” Stanley confessed, “I don’t really know him.” He repeated the trademark purchase story he had told Quintana. “I think he might be interested in a business deal that I have to offer him.”

  “Oh,” she nodded knowingly, “you must be in the computer business too, then. I’ve never seen so many computers in my life! When he moved out, it looked like he was going off to open a Circuit City.”

  His heart sank. “When was that, ma’am?” When she cupped her ear with her left hand, he leaned forward and rephrased his question. “When did he move out of the apartment? Was it long ago?”

  “Oh, about six months. He was here for almost three years and always paid his rent on time.” She continued, as if sharing a secret, “There’s a lot of money in computers, you know. He never had a regular job, just running those websites of his out of the apartment.”

  Stanley wondered whether the landlady knew what sort of websites had constituted the livelihood of her tenant and decided that it didn’t matter. What he needed was further contact information.

  “Ma’am, did he leave you with a forwarding address of some sort?”

  “Oh, yes.” She turned around and yelled up the stairs from the small foyer. “Cecilia, could you bring me down my address book?”

  A voice with a heavy Spanish accent assented, and soon a large woman in nurse’s scrubs lumbered down the short flight of stairs. “Here you go, Ms. Cora.”

  The old woman took a small spiral-bound book from the aide’s hand and showed a page to her guest. In neat block letters was William Simmons’s name and a postal box number in the main office in downtown Los Angeles. Stanley suppressed a groan. He was back to square one. Unless he wanted to stake out the post office box indefinitely in the hope of seeing Simmons, the trail was a dead end. Even if he asked the woman with the sexy voice in the Atlanta US attorney’s office to help identify the box’s owner, he bet that the only information on file would be Simmons’s name and his old address in Silver Lake.

  He wrote down the box number on the back of a business card in his wallet and thanked the old woman for her time. “Ma’am,” he paused as he turned to go, “is there anything that you can remember about Mr. Simmons that might help me track him down? Anything at all?”

  “Well,” she drew out the final consonant with a long exhalation of air, “he was trying very hard to learn Spanish. He would talk with Cora whenever he could, and he left a bunch of Spanish-language magazines in the apartment when he left. All in a neat pile, of course.” She gave Stanley a wistful look before he departed. “He really was a lovely boy.”

  XV.

  GENEVA, 2009

  Elisa van der Vaart had never seen Brenda so excited. Her English flatmate was usually quite self-possessed about men. They flocked to her, and she either deigned to give them her attention or deftly moved them out of her orbit, but the impending visit of Jacob Granville had her positively babbling. They sat waiting for him in the corner of a brightly lit café, sharing a pot of press coffee and chatting excitedly about his arrival and the latest developments in their respective departments at the WTO. From Brenda’s beaming expression Elisa would have thought that George Clooney was about to walk in and take her friend to his house on Lake Como for a long weekend in a hot tub.

  “He’s so different from English men,” she confided. “My last boyfriend in London could not understand why I took this job. He’s so chained to his local pub that he thinks adventure is a bloody dirty word.” She gestured expansively. “Here we are in Geneva working for the World Trade Organization, ninety minutes away from the ski slopes.” Brenda didn’t ski, but that was clearly beside the point. “This is why I worked so hard at Uni, not to trudge through the rain every day to work for some stuffy upper-class twit in a brokerage house! Jacob totally gets it—he’s got big dreams too.”

  Almost a year had passed since the young American had dropped unexpectedly into their lives, and Brenda had carried on a satisfying Internet romance with him ever since. Although it was mostly a friendly swapping of photos on Facebook, she talked about him frequently, and more than once her laugh burst across their apartment followed by an explanation that Jacob had just posted a funny link or status update. Over time he had become more and more important to Brenda, and no subsequent suitor managed to hold her attention for more than a few weeks. Even though she did not physically spend time with him, she claimed that he was the best boyfriend she had ever had.

  Elisa looked across the table with a touch of envy. Even an absent lover was better than the boring parade of technocrats whom she attracted. She felt like someone had tattooed “nerds eat for free” on her forehead, and she meant real nerds, not the heroic kind in movies who really turn out to be handsome and endearing underneath their clunky black glasses.

  Brenda and Elisa still shared the same apartment, but it was now better furnished, and a yearly pay raise let them pool their money for a small washer/dryer unit. Elisa had also bought a used car, which enabled her to get back to Amsterdam more often and to spend some time in the Swiss countryside when the weather was fine. All in all, life was good, even if it wasn’t raining men.

  Elisa had begun to travel a great deal for work, consulting with various developing countries on how to comply with the intellectual property provisions of the massive international treaty system that governed what sort of trade laws member nations could and could not impose on businesses. Even relatively simple issues sometimes justified an exciting trip to a distant locale. Just two weeks earlier, she had attended a conference in Dakar, Senegal, on patent law novelty rules. She learned that in the United States, an inventor had one year to file an application with the US patent office after the invention was revealed publicly. In the European Union, an inventor had to get to the EU patent office before any public revelation. The major international treaty was silent on the issue, so developing countries like Senegal had a choice. Which made more sense, the American or the European approach? It was her job to gather up the economic literature on the issue and make recommendations to policy makers in affected countries on behalf of the WTO.

  She did not think that Brenda’s work was as interesting. Her roommate was involved in complex subsidy cases, analyzing whether nations were providing too much support to their local industries at the expense of worldwide competition. Countries often helped out their own businesses through convoluted exceptions buried deep in their tax codes. Elisa did not envy Brenda the task of plowing through foreign tax regulations, many of which were implemented through obscure administrative rulings. She found her own Dutch tax laws impenetrable; she could not even imagine working through tax issues in a foreign language as Brenda did.

  Elisa saw Jacob first, as he strolled down the pedestrian alley looking for the café chosen by Brenda for their rendezvous. He looked the same, still lean and hard, striding toward them with efficiency and grace. She lif
ted up a hand and he saw her, his tanned face creasing into a warm smile. A large camera hung from his neck, and he stopped to take a picture about twenty feet from their table. Brenda turned and she smiled broadly at the sight of her boyfriend. He snapped the shot and quickly closed the distance between them, planting a quick kiss on Elisa’s cheek before giving Brenda’s lips a warmer welcome. He then showed them the picture he had captured, an excited English woman and her sphinx-like Dutch friend, shoulders together, sharing a secret that the camera hinted at but did not reveal.

  “You must send that to us!” Elisa exclaimed. “It’s perfect.”

  “Oh my God,” Brenda objected as she clung to his shoulder, “I look like a stunned cocker spaniel.”

  “No, you don’t,” Jacob kissed her again. “You look great.”

  He sat down and ordered a beer. Brenda peppered him with questions about his trip, while Elisa looked at Jacob’s camera. She loved the heft of the full-sized digital SLR. She had only a small pocket camera purchased before mobile phones came routinely equipped with a picture-taking function. The Nikon in her hand looked just like a traditional camera from the front but had all the features she associated with digital photography in the back, including a large view screen that let her scroll through other photos he had taken.

  The first thing she noticed was that he had seen them before she had seen him. Right before the lovely shot of Brenda and Elisa came an unposed photo of Elisa raising a cup to her lips. He must have used the telephoto function, since the picture included only a wisp of Brenda’s hair. The picture before that one was also of Elisa, smiling and chatting with her friend. She stole a glance at Jacob, remembering their rather creepy walk through the park overlooking Annemasse. He appeared wholly engrossed in Brenda’s description of her brother’s recent wedding and the ridiculous amount of alcohol the wedding party had consumed before, during, and after the ceremony. She wondered about the two candid shots and concluded that he had not chosen Brenda as his subject because he could only see the back of her head.

  She kept scrolling backward through his pictures. He really did have a keen eye for people. He had snapped at least a dozen photos of unsuspecting travelers in the airports he had passed through between Atlanta and Geneva, and each one caught something of the personality of its subject. One particularly striking picture showed an exhausted mother staring into space while her child leaned against her and happily ransacked her purse.

  Then came images captured before his travels began, an entire series of pictures of a beautiful woman with long dark hair, photos in a park, on a tree-lined street, in a dance studio, and in a brick-walled apartment. Were they lovers? If not, she was the perfect muse, as each shot was a revealing study of the woman’s inner presence and palpable grace. If he did not love her, his camera certainly did.

  She slid the Nikon back across the table toward him and cast a glance at Brenda, wondering if her friend was in for a disappointing visit.

  That night, the gasps and cries coming from Brenda’s bedroom gave no sign of disappointment. Although Elisa had dined with the young couple, she had declined their invitation to join them at a dance club afterward and instead snuggled up with Sophie Kinsella’s latest novel and a cup of hot chocolate. She had a presentation to give the next morning and made an early night of it. The boisterous and drunken entrance of her friends in the wee hours of the morning woke her up, and a series of giggles and ineffective shushings ushered the couple from the front door and into Brenda’s bedroom. The muse back in Georgia had some serious competition, Elisa decided, as she slipped in her earbuds and switched on her insomnia mix, a multi-hour loop of Haydn symphonies.

  Although Jacob was scheduled to stay only a few days, his visit stretched into a week and beyond. Once again, he was on good behavior, cleaning up after himself in the bathroom and offering to help out in the kitchen. Elisa saw little of him. He made it a point to meet Brenda after work and they spent time together in cafés and strolling on the lakeside esplanade. Dining out was so expensive that they mostly ate at home, but Elisa usually gave them space even when they cheerfully invited her to join them. Her roommate was so enthusiastic about Jacob that Elisa tried to like him, too, despite the uncomfortable vibe he had given her during his last visit. She was happy for her friend, who was clearly falling hard for the young photographer.

  Usually, Elisa was the first to leave for work, a habit that predated Brenda’s desire to steal a few extra minutes every morning wrapped in the arms of her lover, but the Friday morning during the second week of Jacob’s stay, a meeting of the Sub-Committee on Subsidies had been called and Brenda had no choice but to drag herself out of bed early to make an eight o’clock presentation. Elisa was left sitting alone at their small kitchen table enjoying a madeleine and a glass of grapefruit juice when Jacob emerged from the bedroom in a pair of boxer shorts, stretching like a languid cat.

  He touched her shoulder and wished her good morning as he walked by and filled a kettle with water for his coffee. Elisa watched him warily. A man in his underwear was hardly a scandalous sight for a modern European woman. Indeed, she appreciated the taut stomach that flashed before her when he sat down at the table, but she nonetheless wished her roommate was there with them.

  After a few minutes of small talk, he surprised her by mentioning their meeting in the café after he got off of the train. “I noticed you scrolling through the photos on my camera.” He casually bit off a corner of a pastry that Brenda had left on the table. “Thanks for not saying anything to Brenda.”

  “About what?” Elisa remembered the photos of the Georgia muse.

  “You saw those pictures of Diana in the camera,” he replied, “but you didn’t mention them to Brenda.”

  “Why would I?” Elisa wondered what the point of the conversation was. Failing to pass along her wild guesses about Jacob’s love life back in Georgia was hardly something that required a thank-you. “You have a lot of excellent photographs of many different people.”

  “But Diana’s different … It shows in the pictures. At least I hope it does.” He got up and grabbed his camera from the kitchen counter. He took a moment to find a particularly striking picture of the Georgia girl as she leaned against the side of a large stone building with a pensive expression in her eyes. “She’s my girlfriend.”

  This was not a conversation that Elisa wanted to have. “I thought that Brenda was your girlfriend.” She pushed the camera toward him and scooted her chair back.

  “She is,” he replied with a curious look. “I haven’t made promises to either one of them.”

  “Maybe not,” she snorted, “but I’ll bet Brenda feels like you’ve made some kind of commitment.”

  “After just a week of great sex?” He popped the rest of the madeleine in his mouth and brushed the crumbs off his fingers over the table. “Brenda’s a big girl. She knows the score.”

  Elisa shot him a judgmental look, but he absorbed it easily and smiled as if she were trying to seduce him instead of shame him. He got up, stretched again, and walked around the table behind her. She felt his large warm hands on her shoulders, gently massaging the stiffness he found there.

  “You’re a big girl, too, Elisa.” His fingers found a little knot to the right of her neck and went gently to work. “There’s no reason why we couldn’t have a little fun together this morning.”

  She shook her head at the sleazy proposal and reached back awkwardly to push his hands away. She felt his lips brush against the side of her neck as he whispered, “You’re an attractive woman, Elisa.” She flinched and he moved his mouth to the other side of her head, “I’ve wanted you for a while now.”

  He took her earlobe in his mouth and she jerked forward. She hated when anyone played with her ears.

  “Sorry, Jacob.” She stood and gathered up the breakfast dishes with a hurried clatter. “I can’t do this.”

  “I didn’t know you were such a prude.” He leaned back against the kitchen counter, blocking her way
to the sink with an amused expression on his face. “I thought European girls were more modern than that.”

  “Modern has nothing to do with it!” Being mocked by a cowboy from the land of George W. Bush was indescribably galling. She pushed past him and dumped the dishes in the sink. “Brenda is my best friend. If you think that I’m going to hurt her in order to fuck an American with a cool camera, then you’ve got as much shit for brains as your president.”

  Before she could react, he reached forward and grabbed the belt loops of her jeans, pulling her toward him and pressing his mouth to hers. She put her hands against his chest and tried to push him away.

  “You know you want this,” he said as he grabbed the back of her head.

  Elisa’s first instinct, developed after several years of tae kwon do, was to raise her leg and pound down her heel on the arch of his foot. That would teach the smug bastard a quick lesson. Unfortunately for Jacob, her knee rose with the rest of her leg and came into solid contact with his scrotum before she ever stomped. He went down like a tasered thug and lay on the floor moaning. “You bitch,” he spit at her, “you fucking bitch.”

  She did not wait for him to follow through on any of the threats that began to pour from his lips. She grabbed her briefcase and ran out the door without a backward glance.

  * * *

  Elisa spent a distracted day at work and returned to the apartment late, hoping that Brenda would be there alone to offer news that Jacob had suddenly left, but instead she was met with the happy scene of the young couple laughing and sharing a bowl of pasta at the dining room table. Elisa almost bolted back out the door, but Jacob saw her before she could react and waved her toward the table with a bottle of Chianti. “Please, eat with us,” he insisted. “We have enough for five at least.”