The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  “Is plane ticket.” She smiled, tentatively.

  “I didn’t order any plane ticket,” said Edgar, accepting the envelope through the crack.

  “We must go now. Plane leave in just sree hour.”

  With connections in Lisbon and Hong Kong, it was a one-way to Bangkok. “Who the fuck is this from?”

  “Mistah Ballington.”

  Edgar almost objected that Mistah Ballington was a fabrication of his own diseased mind, a make-believe consort because he was lonely, until he reminded himself once again that he wasn’t that original—that he did not concoct his alter ego from nothing—that somewhere out there might lurk the real thing.

  Chapter 38

  Inversion 102

  NATURALLY THE TICKETS were first class, so Edgar snagged the complimentary toiletries when he deplaned. At Don Muang International, he asked his escort, Mai, to keep his place in line at immigration while he ducked into the head. Inspecting his face critically—lined from the flight’s feverish half-sleep—Edgar ran a comb through his hair, brushed his teeth, and shaved. The fact that in these somber circumstances he could still worry even half-heartedly about making a presentable impression confirmed his intuition that the forthcoming encounter was the consummation of a parallel romance.

  Lacking Barba’s bludgeoning wind and stunted vegetation, the great blazing white house up to which their limousine drew did Abrab Manor one better. Trimming tropical blooms under an indolent sun, three slim brown women waved as Edgar climbed from the stretch. Inside the foyer, the reflective blond flooring, teardrop chandelier, and luminous banister swooping up the stairs all gleamed with the care of industrious underlings. The air was fragrant with fresh flowers, lemon oil, and floor wax. Though he was a stranger here, and might well be asked for nothing more than a cup of tea, Edgar experienced the absurd sensation of coming home.

  Mai led Edgar through the house, in the course of which he glimpsed more willowy Thai women sidling down hallways, narrow hips wrapped in sarongs. Out the other side, mimosa trees framed a capacious backyard. In its center sat a convivial arrangement of wicker chairs in the shade of an umbrella. A glass patio table was arrayed with trays of tidbits, an ice bucket, and a kaleidoscope of liquor bottles. Young ladies splashed together lethal-looking concoctions or giggled with one another as they languished on towels, while one lissome brunette trained a portable electric fan on the central wicker armchair. Striding across the plush lawn, Edgar considered wryly whether the bomb at the Rat might have zapped him after all, and this was his afterlife—a slightly clichéd paradise that beat the dickens out of the hellfire he deserved.

  The figure in the middle chair faced out toward the mimosas, and the broad back in the cream jacket matched the grand scale of the house itself. One hand dangled a highball, the other a cigarillo, whose stale stink reached Edgar at ten paces.

  “Mistah Ballington, I presume,” said Edgar offhandedly to the big man’s back.

  The figure twisted in Edgar’s direction. “How very fortunate,” he said with gusto, “that you have arrived safely, Mr. Kellogg.” Barrington nestled his drink in the grass and rose to extend a hand. “I have read your copy assiduously, and feel as if we’ve known one another for the longest time. You won’t think me presumptuous?”

  The hand was vast, dry, and grainy with a hint of talc; too soft, for a man’s man. Yet the clasp was firm while not irksomely hearty, held long enough to seem gracious, not so long as to seem oily: just right. And the hand was sufficiently large to wrap Edgar’s own halfway around the back, enveloping him in the same home-from-the-wars sensation of when he first alit on the property.

  Meeting the eyes of his host, Edgar found them surprisingly mild—both scintillating, and a little sad. The features of the face all strangely gathered in the middle were familiar from the study photo, though the cheeks had grown if anything a little fleshier, and the incipient double chin could increasingly be deemed a success.

  “You’re not a-tall as I imagined,” said Barrington. “So disgustingly fit. And sleek as a saluki, aren’t you! Silly, of course, but I fancied you’d look more like me.”

  “Yeah, I’m sitting on a bestseller: The Anxiety Diet.” Edgar didn’t wait to be invited, and sauntered to the table for an empty glass. “Thanks for the plane ticket,” he said casually, popping in ice cubes with bamboo tongs.

  “I hoped it would be timely. May I suggest the lemon-grass vodka? With a twist.”

  “Speaking of twists,” said Edgar, “what tipped you off that things had queered in the homeland?”

  “The bull-ring bomb, of course,” said Saddler, leaning back into his chair as the wicker groaned. “The only group that would bomb Barba itself was our very own SOB. You’re familiar with the myth of Pygmalion—who so loved his own creation that the statue came to life. Perhaps you grew too enamored.”

  “Not a chance,” said Edgar, sinking into an adjacent chair as a girl slipped a flaxen stalk for a swizzle into his glass. “Calling in those bomb claims got pretty fucking old.”

  “Yes, I found that myself,” said Barrington with interest. “Didn’t really go anywhere, did it?”

  “Oh, it went somewhere all right.” Edgar slumped. While hopped up over meeting Saddler Incarnate, Edgar could only sustain this buzz so long as he forgot, in those spates of seeming amnesia during which you gradually made the intolerable tolerable to yourself, the bomb at the Rat. When Nicola’s pale frown on the flattened round table returned to him, the wind died in Edgar’s sails, and even for-real Barrington couldn’t huff and puff them to life.

  “Yes, the incident was in all this morning’s papers,” Saddler sorrowed. “I’d never pretend that I saw it coming, precisely. But something like it. Yet for Nicola, of all people . . .” He waved his hand in fatalistic despair. “A waste.”

  Edgar stared at Barrington in appreciative disbelief—a little appalled, a little impressed. Barrington might easily have connected this “waste” with his own gratuitous mischief, but the impractical exercise didn’t seem to entice him. Clearly self-castigation would result in no more preferable an outcome, while casting a pall over his day.

  When in doubt, Blame it on Barrington. “If you were so concerned that the SOB would end in tears, why did you leave me a how-to manual?”

  “Mawkish attachment to my own brainchild, perhaps. It was a fascinating experiment.”

  “Not fascinating enough.”

  “No,” Saddler agreed readily. “On departure, I didn’t miss it. And I’d no idea that you’d prove such an able apprentice. You were sure to be a journalist, in which case the chances were terribly high that you’d also be a prat.”

  “I was,” said Edgar glumly.

  Barrington patted Edgar’s injured arm. “Mustn’t be too tough on yourself.”

  Edgar flinched. “You don’t seem too torn up about it.”

  “I am regretful,” said Barrington, his intonation provocatively flat.

  “You’re regretful,” Edgar snorted. “But you won’t apologize, or condemn the bombing outright? I know this script. Vintage Verdade.”

  “A compliment of sorts. Tomás is a master—at whatever it is he does.”

  “He’s a fascist.”

  Saddler smiled. “And I thought I’d been called everything. Mr. Kellogg—”

  Edgar couldn’t stand it; he wanted it to be like the old days. “Call me Eddie.”

  “Eddie,” Barrington continued indulgently, if with a touch of bafflement. “Should you be awaiting a lachrymose display of howling and gnashing of teeth, you’re in for a disappointment. I don’t parade my feelings for public consumption. Nor do I keen on command, like the royal family blubbing over the death of Diana, to prove that I’m not a monster. Not even for you.”

  By every indication, Barrington felt sorry about Nicola, but sorry as in sad, not sorry as in contrite. Missing the accountability gene, he was free to pursue no end of “fascinating experiments” with remorseless impunity. But exploit disengaged from liabil
ity wasn’t very interesting, even to Barrington. All of which helped explain not only his impulsive creation of the SOB but why he was able to abandon the conceit and never look back. Besides, like W. C. Fields’s blind customer heedlessly smashing jars with his cane in It’s a Gift, Barrington was accustomed to shattering folks on either side of him with the oblivious flamboyance of his gestures, and Saddler wouldn’t be Saddler if he looked before he leapt. More, people would forgive him indefinitely for what really ought to be a flaw, because he provided something else that they needed, in trace amounts like a mineral in the diet, besides responsibility.

  Edgar was constructed of more earthly stuff. He’d never done a single thing wrong—from lifting a packet of LifeSavers to lifting the receiver in Terra do Cão—that he hadn’t felt bad about later. Like it or not, he had what Barrington lacked, and could no more rid himself of it than cut off his own head. Nicola was dead and it was mostly his fault and he felt like a sack of shit.

  “You’re not an emotional exhibitionist?” Edgar muttered. “That’s not what I heard.”

  “You must have heard a great deal. A little bird tells me it couldn’t all be dead-on.”

  “Win Pyre said—how’d it go? Saddler won’t take a dump without someone watching.”

  “Is that so?” said Barrington politely. “Forgive my prudery, but take a dump is one American expression I’ve always found distasteful.”

  “Oh, and you’d like Ordway’s theory. I guess when hounds are retired from fox hunting, they get a bullet through the head, right? They’re pack animals. Isolated from the pack, they pine. You can’t keep them as pets, because they’ll tear up the house. So Ordway claimed that if you failed to find yourself another entourage pronto, you’d have to be shot.”

  “I may get a bit restless, but I’ve yet to sink my claws into the furniture.” With that, Barrington shifted to one side and glanced off to the mimosas with a manufactured-looking yawn. Funny—Edgar always found what people said about him behind his back irresistible.

  Edgar regrouped. It was exasperating: on the one hand he knew this man backward and forward, down to his prissy preferences in shampoo; on the other, they’d just met, and propriety dictated tact. But Edgar didn’t want to talk about Barban politics; his genuine curiosities were of an intimate sort. Circling the lemon-grass swizzle through his ice cubes, he inquired with strained nonchalance, “Did you ever ask Nick to come with you? To Thailand?”

  “Considered it. I refrained, in the end.”

  “Why?”

  “I was afraid she’d say yes, of course.”

  It was so trite it was dull. The old only-wants-what-he-can’t-have. Christ, no wonder women were always badgering men to grow up. “You’d get tired of her?” Edgar didn’t conceal his scorn.

  “Heavens no. She’d get tired of me.” Saddler intently relit his Café Crème, which had never gone out.

  “False modesty doesn’t suit you, Saddler. You know very well that of all the folks who couldn’t stop yakking about everyone’s favorite missing person, Nick was the worst of the bunch. It got a little trying, if you don’t mind my saying so. Mooning by the silent phone . . .”

  “Yes, I’m sure my absence was an assist in this department. A flesh-and-blood paramour can interfere awfully with the smooth conduct of romance.”

  Come to think of it, maybe up close Nicola really would have burned out on Barrington’s bluster and savoir faire. Even for a self-confessed aesthete, pure style was more durably appealing in objects. At second glance, Saddler’s dolorous faith in Nicola’s inexorable disaffection looked sincere. Like Tomás Verdade behind the façade of the SOB, Barrington, too, must have worried that behind his own mystique crouched a carny pulling strings. Since any mystique was part hogwash, it stood to reason that most Great Characters lived in mortal terror of being found out.

  “You should have seen her when she got that postcard,” said Edgar, trying to be a comfort. “She was beside herself.”

  “A moment of frailty on my part, I’m afraid,” said Saddler. “It’s simply, few of these young ladies speak intelligible English, and I was . . .” If the word lonely beckoned, Saddler let it go. “I had misgivings the moment I gave the card to Mai to post in Saigon. I even considered, too late, that the gesture might have been unkind. High hopes may be nutritious, but a little hope is surely debilitating.”

  Rashly, Edgar asked, “Did you love her?”

  “I couldn’t afford to, could I?” Whether Barrington was blasé or injured it was impossible to say. “I assume you two became fast friends.”

  The jealousy was unmistakable, a hint of weakness that Imaginary Barrington would never have allowed. Edgar said coolly, “We got pretty close.”

  “You’re bluffing!”

  “I guess you’ll never know,” Edgar tossed back with a smile. “Anyway, you don’t seem to be suffering here. Like, correct me if I’m wrong—” one of the girls brought Edgar a tray of shrimp toast—“but isn’t this an upscale cathouse?”

  “Not precisely. Oh, you correctly surmise that our attendants are whores. And had I the entrepreneurial spirit of you enterprising Americans, I might indeed have assembled my talented workforce into a nice little earner. But while trolling Patpong for household staff, I confess that however infatuated I became with these charming young ladies, I became conversely repelled by their customers: sweaty foreign dissolutes with their zips down.”

  Edgar hazarded, “Men like you.”

  “Quite. And I really could not stick more than one of us in my house at one time.”

  “So this is a harem.”

  “What an excellent choice of words! Yes, I do like that very much. My harem. Don’t they cheer the place up? And while I’m sure the girls turn the odd trick for pocket money, it’s quite unnecessary. I have many a shortcoming, but I am generous.”

  “Is it called generosity when you’re giving away someone else’s cash?”

  “Good question! Though recall that Henry Durham was frantic for something on which to spend his fortune that didn’t do more harm than good. Shifting attractive women from working the street to dusting my furniture is as well as he’s likely to do.”

  “Is there anything you can’t rationalize?”

  “I should hope not,” Saddler purred. “Besides—” the pillowed hand swept the lawn—“at least I understand why they like me.”

  Reflectively, Edgar chewed on his swizzle with his front teeth; the fibers tasted like Lemon Pledge. “Nick said that adulation was the bane of your existence.”

  “Oh, self-pity on this point would be entirely inappropriate. How much more disagreeable to be universally detested. Nevertheless—” Barrington raised his pink drink into the sun and viewed the yard through its rose tint—“simply because someone fancies you doesn’t mean that you fancy them back. Simply because some breathless tosser wants to visit doesn’t mean that you wish to be visited. By the time I stepped from the frame, my pied-à-terre on Rua da Evaporação had become a year-round summer camp for underemployed hacks. I’d never a moment’s peace. And Eddie—have you ever been worshipped?”

  Edgar was about to guffaw, You must be joking, and pulled up short. Like most people, he preferred caricature to characterization, especially when depicting himself. In the terms of this cartoon, shat-upon Ed had suffered a string of entrancements from childhood, translating into a string of crushing disappointments. Edgar had fallen head-over-heels for every girl he’d ever dated, and they’d each ditched or betrayed him. Equally, he’d been held in ceaseless thrall to larger-than-lifers of his same sex who, to a man, had let him down. Little wonder, then, that Edgar was hard-bitten and cynical. It was a portable self-portrait that he was quite attached to, and that he kept in good order with some effort, since maintaining this degree of perceived consistency by almost forty was quite a job.

  Exceptions were chucked in his mental Dumpster, like Mary—he couldn’t remember her last name—a pretty but fragile functionary for the New York City Counci
l, who had fallen hard for Edgar in his late twenties. While obviously aching to marry him, she officially moved in with him for a trial period. But Edgar was starting to feel his oats at the firm and didn’t want to be constrained, especially by a woman so suffocatingly selfless. She seconded his every opinion, and he was forever obliged to decide on the restaurant, film, or erotic position. Her steady assault of presents put him off buying her knickknacks in return. And Mary’s adoration was boring. So he’d no sooner provided a drawer for her panties than Edgar called it quits.

  Mary was distraught. She sobbed. She flopped on the floor. She washed his bare feet with her tear-soaked hair. Edgar didn’t change his mind; if anything, this display was the last straw. But before kicking Mary out of his apartment and his life for good, he fucked her first.

  “Yeah, you could say I’ve been worshipped,” Edgar conceded heavily.

  “Remember how you felt?”

  “Ashamed of myself,” said Edgar, paling and wishing the memory would go away.

  “Yes,” said Saddler dolefully. “It seems so awfully unfair.”

  Since Edgar had arrived, his eyes had continually shunted between Actual Barrington and his own makeshift mock-up, with whom Edgar had shared a villa in Cinziero. The biggest difference between the confection and this—well, stranger, presumably—was that the stranger was confoundingly warm.

  “Saddler—” Edgar leaned forward—“I’ve never lost any sleep over where you disappeared to. But I have wondered why. I know that you blackmailed Henry Durham—”

  “Nonsense! Blackmail?”

  “It’s still called a ransom, whether it’s forked over to get someone back or to get them to leave. Durham never bought your hokey Sob story for a minute. Paying you to make yourself scarce didn’t do him any good with Nick in the end, but he was desperate. Still, you already had a nest egg from the black market in Moscow. You’d never vanish just for cash. So why’d you give everyone the slip? Were you sick of that crowd? Was that all?”