The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  Edgar reflected that if his own surfaces were as pleasing as hers he’d have no motivation to probe beneath them himself, but didn’t know how to say as much without sounding oily. So he trotted after her fringed train as it shivered down the stairs, mouth open like a dog’s. God-fucking-damn it. She would have to be married.

  The moment Edgar entered Nicola’s living room he felt the collective resentment of her guests so forcefully that he came physically to a halt. It wasn’t as if he had gatecrashed a genuine ho-down; a mere desultory murmur ceased when he walked in. Yet the dozen people scattered around the room turned to greet the National Record’s fill-in stringer with one long synchronized sneer. Meanwhile, “Famous Blue Raincoat” droned its tuneless, depressive best: Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair . . . Real party music.

  Nicola’s eyes darted the room; if she was deciding to whom it was safest to introduce him, she was having a hard time. Stranded by the table of booze and eats—intricate open-faced sandwiches, individually assembled into one-of-a-kind Miros—Edgar was keenly aware that his shirt was crumpled, his jeans smelled stale, his teeth were furry, and the gale had tossed his hair to salad.

  “You can always go local.” A rangy fellow gestured at the bottles, having eased off his stool and gimped to Edgar’s side.

  “What constitutes going local?” asked Edgar warily.

  “Try it,” the weathered American dared him, uncapping a brown bottle labeled CHOQUE.

  Though alerted by a sadistic twitch in the older man’s face, Edgar felt eyes on him and swigged. Before the beer was down his gullet, Edgar’s oral membrane had constricted into a dry pucker, like mouth eczema. Slamming down the bottle, he scrubbed his lips with a napkin, then stuffed down a sandwich. Edgar was reminded of the time he sneaked into his parents’ bathroom to swill what he thought was codeine-laced cough syrup, and instead chugged his father’s prescription anesthetic for rectal itch.

  “Cerveja de pera peluda,” the man explained. “Choque means what it sounds like, ‘shock,’ but you get used to it.”

  “What the hell’s a putrid pera?” Edgar gasped, still scouring his lips.

  “Barba’s only thriving native fruit: the hairy pear,” said his new acquaintance. “It grows in such abundance that it would provide a cash crop, only no one else wants it—so they export terrorism instead. There’s more of a market. Meanwhile, they put peras peludas in everything. The fruit ferments like a bastard. Some of us old-timers have acquired a sick addiction to hairy-pear beer. Speaking of which—Durham! Did the Independent run your fluff piece?”

  “They spiked it,” said Henry. “With Barba dropped out of the news and that, the foreign desk didn’t think a feature was timely.”

  “Curious,” the tough old hand observed, “the way Saddler took the party with him—like the Grinch that stole Christmas. Not an incident since he dearly departed. Hardly thoughtful. The rest of us have to make a living. Reuters just e-mailed that they’ll close the bureau in three months if nothing blows up.”

  “I thought Henry’s feature was better than fluff,” Nicola intervened. “Barbans’ taste for peras peludas made a trenchant metaphor. The way a bitterness runs in their blood—”

  “Nick, nobody gives a rat’s ass about the cultural niceties of this toilet bowl if the Soldados Ousados aren’t releasing nerve gas in Paris metros,” the Reuters man overrode. “If the Sobs slaughter enough innocents, Henry can sell a feature on how Barbans tweeze their nose hairs.”

  “I thought the piece provided good color,” Nicola maintained staunchly.

  “So your husband doesn’t get his hundred quid,” the leathery wire-service man noted with a cynical squint. “The rent will be late?”

  Nicola hung her head. Henry’s face remained impassive. Whatever this razzing was about, Henry was used to it.

  “Win Pyre.” The man extended a hand, its palm callused, his veined metacarpus tinged the gray-brown of a cancerous tan. “Where you last posted, Kellogg?”

  “The States—freelancing.” Freelancing prompted the usual smirk. Not wanting to be taken for a complete loser, Edgar added, “I’m a lawyer. Or was a lawyer. Actually, I’m still a lawyer.” Made a hash of that bio. But is, was—tense was tricky. The fact that Edgar remained a member of the New York bar in good standing was surprisingly important to him.

  “Criminal law?” Pyre fished.

  “Corporate,” said Edgar defiantly.

  “I see.” The smirk curled into a pitying simper. “So you’re taking a break from the drones to see the world.”

  If Edgar had just branded himself an unimaginative robot, that’s just how Edgar perceived his own legal persona by the time he quit. Still the dismissal smarted, just as any outsider would raise hackles criticizing a family that you yourself detest. Besides, suits in high-rises ran “the world” that Pyre seemed to think Edgar was glimpsing for the first time; they paid this cowboy’s salary. The footfall of the financial colossus shook the ground a reporter walked, and if Pyre discounted the fee-fi-fo-fum of corporate giants as humdrum, then Pyre was incompetent, and Pyre was the one to be pitied.

  “How enterprising,” Pyre added archly. He meant how impudent. He meant, I can’t wait to watch you fall flat on your face, you presumptuous dullard. He meant, You may be accustomed to throwing wads around with your drab business cronies, but around here all that counts is copy and you just demoted yourself to boot camp, buddy.

  Edgar buried his right fist in his left palm, and changed the subject. “So is the wind often this howling? In ten seconds off the plane, it had ripped open my nostrils, torn down my throat, and whistled out my ass. Free rolphing.”

  “You’re on your maiden assignment to a notorious cradle of international terrorism,” Pyre said incredulously, “and you want to talk about the weather?”

  “Why not?” said Nicola. “Gauging o vento insano is a local preoccupation. There’s an unstable high-to-low-pressure interface between the Med and the Atlantic that creates a near-permanent sirocco across the Barban peninsula. And no, it’s not always this bad, Edgar; it’s generally much worse. Some days advisories are issued not to leave your house. Most natives learn to protect themselves, but others give over. There’s a certain stupefied idiocy you’ll find around here that results from gross exposure to the atmosphere. Vento-heads extend their arms to let the gale keep them aloft. Their eyes glaze and dry out. Sometimes they fall asleep, since the wind props them up. O vento insano can get into your head. Like tinnitus.”

  “Or like Creamie propaganda,” said Pyre. “It’s incessant, it never varies except in decibel level, and subjection to enough of it turns you into a moron.”

  “Sweetheart?” Nicola looked about rapidly, her long hair flailing, before she located her husband. It wasn’t such a large room that she should worry about losing him, physically at least. “Would you like another Diamond White?”

  Henry ignored her, and collapsed indolently into an armchair. Surprisingly, on close examination Nicola’s husband was probably about thirty-five. Slight and gangly with a cowlick and freckles, in charitable light Henry might have passed for a kid, except for a telltale hardening of his adolescent features, as if a seventeen-year-old had been sculpted in wax. If he looked a little careworn, his Happy Days face appeared frozen in perpetual distress that he didn’t have a prom date. By contrast, ever since the Celery Wars Edgar’s brow had been plowed with mature furrows, the grooves from his nose to the corners of his mouth scored with the gravity of a stock-market crash.

  One aspect of the Madame Tussauds teenager was intriguing. Money has an eye for money, and Edgar not long ago had a lot of it. That watch on Henry’s wrist was gold, and not plate. Clean lines, sweet dial: classy, and three thousand bucks if it was ten cents. Someone had taste, and Edgar bet it wasn’t Henry. Yet the clasp was fastened carelessly loose, and the face dropped around his hand. Likewise that salmon raw-silk shirt was Yves Saint Laurent, the blond suede vest Gucci, but the sleeves were crudely bunched above h
is elbows, and the suede was filthy. Whoever had spent a lot of dough on that gear, it now roused only Henry’s indifference.

  “Henry? Sweetie? Let me get you a cold one.” Nicola scurried to the kitchen.

  Pyre tsked at her back. “Poor Nick and Henry. They used to be so repulsively happy. Now they just seem that way, like everyone else.”

  “What happened?” asked Edgar.

  “With couples, it’s more often who.”

  “Let me guess,” said Edgar.

  “You’re quick,” Pyre conceded. “You’ll need to be. Those aren’t easy boots to fill.”

  “Another devoted fan?” asked Edgar dryly.

  “I deplore the man,” said Pyre, and for the first time Edgar warmed to the veteran hack. “He’s everything that gives journalists a bad name: arrogant, irresponsible, inaccurate. He thinks he’s bigger than his story. Barba, well, he thinks he owns Barba, as if he made the place up. He’s unserious. Saddler’s seen a lot of the world, and at its worst. But I have, too—Lebanon, Somalia—and it’s the dickens not to simply turn nasty. But Saddler, Saddler’s reaction has been hysterical. I mean he finds everything funny. Me, I’m not amused. Saddler covers terrorist incidents as if they’re practical jokes. But I’ve had one pulled on me.” Pyre patted his bad leg. “In eighty-three, I was conducting an interview near that Marine barracks car bomb in Beirut. Though I got off light, I’ll never play tennis again. Saddler thinks that’s a hah-hah. But I liked playing tennis.”

  “You still talk about him in the present tense.”

  “Barrington Saddler would never submit to anything melodramatic without an audience. I doubt he takes a dump without someone watching.”

  “Even flamboyant fatheads get run over by buses,” Edgar countered.

  “Saddler would more likely run over the bus himself.”

  “He’s that much of a load?”

  “He’s that determined that nothing get in his way. Now, can I introduce you to a few of your colleagues? Though don’t expect overnight fast friends.”

  “How did I manage to step on toes from twenty feet?”

  “By not being Merry Barry. Since Saddler jumped ship, the pulse of this town has slowed to hibernation levels. Truth is, I kinda miss hating the guy.”

  Chapter 7

  Edgar Meets His New Little Friends

  “ARE WE STILL playing, or not?” asked the blonde, whose face had that clear-eyed, clear-skinned symmetry used to sell moisturizing cream, but that for the life of him Edgar could never find sexy.

  Win Pyre thumped his cane on the carpet and made introductions.

  “Am I interrupting something?” asked Edgar.

  “Yes, thank God. Party games.” The reporter for the London Guardian, Roland Ordway, spewed a thin stream of smoke. His spiky black hair sprayed at the cleverly balanced Katzenjammer angles of a pricey designer cut. Young and sleazily good-looking, Ordway kept the arms of his sports jacket jammed above his elbows, and his jeans were ironed with a crease. As for the cowboy boots, Ordway was the sort of Brit who thought Americana was hip so long as Americans didn’t come with it.

  “What’s the game?” Edgar bounced onto the balls of his feet, literally on his toes.

  “To name the game is to lose it.” Sucking his ciggie, Ordway pinched the butt from underneath.

  “Let Trudy explain, then,” said the frump on the loveseat, a correspondent for the Washington Post whose name was Martha Hulbert. “She adores losing.”

  Martha was one of those women who look terrible on purpose. Her shapeless dress was scalloped with chintzy gold-painted plastic chain at the waist, its fabric the corrupted green of aged broccoli florets; imagining any woman walking into a store and choosing this spoilage-colored sack boggled the mind. Martha might have looked presentable if she lost twenty pounds, but Edgar knew the sort: all her life she’d hug those twenty pounds like a kid with a stuffed bunny.

  “We’re timing ourselves,” said Ordway. “To see how long we can go without mentioning He Who Is No Longer With Us. There. A black mark for me.”

  “It’s a stupid game,” said Trudy Sisson, the cover-girl blonde whom Pyre had introduced with a curdled lip as a “freelance photographer.” In this case “freelance” appeared to mean “bankrolled by Daddy,” and in Pyre’s mind Trudy Sisson’s bowling-pin calves and syrupy Southern accent must have dropped her IQ thirty points. Edgar had ridiculed his share of secretarial bimbos at the firm, but like the smell of your own armpits prejudice is less obnoxious when it’s yours, and for the moment he felt sorry for her. He’d get over it.

  “Leastways when Barrington comes up it’s a little like he’s still here,” Trudy went on. “For a few seconds we have some energy. And I wanted to hear about the twins.”

  “I gather they’re still not speaking,” said Martha.

  “Lucky us,” said Ordway. “Remember what they said?”

  “Sorry.” Martha glanced dutifully at Edgar. “Bear had an affair—”

  Ordway began to singsong, “Bear had an affair with two twins—”

  “A team, once upon a time,” Martha persevered.

  “And shimmied all four shapely shins—”

  “Roland, if you don’t mind, I’m trying to be polite!” said Martha sharply. “They wrote and photographed for Esquire. Very successful duo—”

  “ ’Til one bim said, ‘Mister! You’re shagging my sister! Confess your identical sins.’ ”

  “Behold the Bard of Barba,” said Martha, rolling her eyes. “Anyway, each found out about the other—how would they not? And you’ve never seen such a falling out. It would have made more sense to turn on Barrington, but they went for each other instead. Operating on the ridiculous premise that the one who tore the most hair would win the two-timing trophy.”

  “I’ve never thought he cared fuck-all for either one of them,” said Ordway. “He just wanted to watch the cat fight.”

  “It was malicious,” said Martha primly. “He saw how close they were. Just like—” Martha glanced furtively around the room, then lowered her voice—“you know. Anyway, they wore each other’s clothes, finished each other’s sentences. Erin told me once that they sometimes had the same dreams. Now they despise each other, and Mary’s defected to Vanity Fair. It was tragic and he did it on purpose. Emotional vandalism, if you ask me.”

  “Oh, don’t be so moralistic,” said Trudy. “Barrington got bored so Barrington slept around.”

  “You should know,” said Ordway.

  Trudy raised her chin. “But can you blame him? I wake up the day after he disappeared—or whatever, I’m too scared to think about it. I look around and think, I’m living in a dump. The food stinks, the beer stinks, you can’t even lie on the beach ’cause it’s too cold, not to mention the wind. I think, one more blast up my skirt, one more whoosh wrecking my hair and I’m booking for the States. Well, it didn’t seem that way before. With Barrington, Barba was exciting. Y’all feel the same way but won’t admit it.”

  “Another beer, Kellogg?” asked Pyre.

  “You just want to watch me commit hairy-peary again,” said Edgar.

  The awful pun cast a pall.

  “Barrington already used that line,” said Trudy, glaring.

  “Definitely going to need that beer,” said Edgar, turning to fetch it himself. Jesus. Saddler had even beaten him to the jokes.

  Edgar lingered by the drinks to look around. As if rendered freehand, everything in the room was subtly imperfect. The cushions’ needlework was lumped with tufty bits. The throw rug beneath Edgar’s feet included one aberrant purple stripe that, while it looked like a mistake, also electrified the pattern and was the sole reason the rug drew his eye. None of the picture frames was quite rectangular, and the original watercolors within were fraught with charming little errors in perspective. The ceramic tiles around the fireplace were crookedly inlaid. The pitcher on the drinks table canted to the left. Spearing a pickled onion, he noticed that the handles of the wooden hors d’oeuvre forks were
whittled into animals, and it was impossible to tell if this one was a lion or a sheepdog.

  At first Edgar assumed that Nicola was a boutiquey sort who shopped at import outlets, except these objects exhibited neither the soullessness of mass production nor the shoddiness of some arthritic Third Worlder hacking out cocktail forks for ten cents an hour. Rather, every curtain, upholstery job, and one-of-a-kind dessert plate bore the indelible imprimatur of the same gently perverse sensibility. Like Martha Hulbert’s frumpiness, the living room’s appointments were flawed on purpose.

  When Nicola rearranged the sandwiches, Edgar commended, “You’re quite a cook.”

  She sighed. “I’m afraid no one has much appetite tonight.”

  “So—you a journalist yourself?”

  “Gracious, no. I’m a housewife.” The admission was cheerful.

  So rarely had Edgar met women in New York who confessed to doing nothing that he floundered for lack of follow-up. “To support you, and this house—which is big . . .”

  “Not as big as yours.”

  “It’s just, Henry must be doing okay.”

  “I wouldn’t say that Henry’s okay.”

  “Financially, I mean.” Instead of nosing into their bank statement he should have asked if she had kids, but he too badly didn’t want her to have any.

  “Even financially,” Nicola reflected, “I’d not describe Henry as okay. In fact, Henry’s financial situation is woeful. That is, full of woe.”

  Edgar was determined not to drop another clangor like, So you weave your own rugs because you can’t afford commercial ones. He held up the dog-lion end of his fork. “Is there anything in this house you didn’t make?”

  Nicola scrutinized the room. “Of course. The wine glasses—I haven’t learned to blow glass yet, but I’d love to . . . And I didn’t make nearly all the furniture, because Henry put his foot down. It takes too long, and he didn’t want to eat off the floor.”

  “This handicrafting. It’s some kind of policy, then?”