15
His absence, however, had a surprisingly salutary effect on Lauren Sara and me. Or maybe his absence only happened to coincide with an improvement in our relationship. I suppose that without Johnny around, I felt freer to behave as he’d accused me of behaving: more normally—to behave, in any case, with greater conformity to the ordinary expectation of how a man of my age and income should behave around his girlfriend. In fact, it occurred to me that I was only just beginning to think of Lauren Sara as my girlfriend, even though we’d been seeing each other for the better part of a year.
I was working late a lot. I suddenly had work, or something very much resembling my idea of it. Not long after my promotion, Mark had reappeared in another expensive suit, still wearing a VISITOR badge, and spirited me down to the twenty-third floor, which had been filled, seemingly overnight, with the apparatus of a busy company, and I’d been there ever since. Should I say something to someone? I’d asked him. About what? he said. About, you know, moving offices or whatever. Say, he said, whatever you like. But I hadn’t had anything to say, and that’s what I said.
So anyway, I was working late a lot; a group of Mark-like lawyerish beings from Vandevoort, some American, some British, some Dutch, with a few other Europeans and a South American or two, rotated through the office; they all looked alike to me, as if they’d been grown in the same alien hatchery or bred from the same tub of DNA—the effect was made more unsettling by the fact that they called themselves the V’s; that derived from Vandevoort, obviously, but still. They brought me personnel files, which seemed to me like it might be illegal, and asked me my opinions on such-and-such and so-and-so, and though it made me a little uncomfortable, there was no denying the allure of knowing that the Other Peter made more than Leonard or that, despite his claims to the contrary, the company was not paying for Ted’s MBA. The one woman among them, a thin, beautiful, terrifying Czech named Assia, who smelled like delicate perfume and indelicate European cigarettes, would tell me to call John Boland at the Post-Gazette or Larry Meigel at the Trib to talk on background about the company’s plans to move its global headquarters to Pittsburgh, about the creation of jobs, about the contribution to the local economy. Do we intend to locate the global headquarters in Pittsburgh? I asked. What the fuck does that have to do with anything? she asked. She had a slight Irish accent from doing her graduate work in Dublin. Well, I said, I’m a little uncomfortable lying to these people. Oh Christ, oh fuck me, she said. You’re telling them the current truth, Mark said. I hadn’t even noticed him there; I hadn’t known he’d been listening. The truth is an artifact of the present. It’s time that changes. He put a comforting hand on my shoulder. Assia rolled her eyes and walked away.
Mark appeared intermittently, always in those slim suits with that sticker on his breast. He was usually trailed by Global Solutions executives or trailing the tall, thin-jawed Dutch execs who came in from Rotterdam. We rarely interacted on these visits, although he’d often flash me a wink and that thin smile that bordered on a sneer without becoming one as he passed, as if he and I were the only two in on some joke or some secret; he liked to come by my office—I had my own office now—at lunchtime bearing soups and sandwiches and chat about nothing in particular as if we were old friends. Sometimes I’d return from a meeting to find him camped at my desk as if it were his own, talking into a cell phone in Spanish or German, a laptop open in front of him. Once I found him this way in the middle of an elaborate French joke that seemed to my poor ear like it had to do with a blow job; he was flipping through a glossy publication. While I sat in my visitor’s chair and waited for him to get off the phone, I picked it up and glanced at the cover. Prepare the Way, it said. It was a Vandevoort Corporate report. Underneath, the now-familiar astrolabe was printed as a pale watermark; over it, a glossy, shadowed image of two fiftyish men whose broad teeth implied prosperity piloting an expensive sailboat off a Maine-like shore and the bright corporate slogan: There for Your Business at the Turn of the Tide.
Around this time I confessed to him that I still had no idea what I was doing. What am I doing? I asked him. I know that sounds completely lame, but seriously, I’m so busy, and I have no idea doing what.
You’re a real materialist, Pete, he told me.
You’re not the first person to say so.
You’re involved in the production of wealth.
I’m involved in answering weird questions and writing complicated emails.
Yes. It’s like alchemy. It’s magic. It takes hundreds of fingers typing thousands of emails to utter the spell that turns lead into gold.
That’s some magic spell, I said, if it turns Global Solutions into gold.
He laughed. That’s the truth, he said.
Are we going to fire people? I asked.
Oh, probably, he said.
Like, a lot of people?
The smell of burning flesh has to reach the heavens, Mark said, and they’re way the fuck up there. The gods of commerce have to smell blood in the water.
You know, I said, you don’t talk like any lawyer I’ve ever met.
I told you, Mark said, I’m not exactly what I seem. On an unrelated note, let’s have dinner again. You and me and the ladies. Maybe we’ll all see another flying saucer.
Sure, I said.
Great, said Mark. Thursday, then. Our place.
Okay.
Speaking of flying saucers, you know, Helen has not been the same since all that. He peered at me, and I felt as if I were being appraised from the inside out.
Huh, I said.
He blinked. Making lots of art, though, he said. Which is good. She needs a hobby. Weird stuff. She’s been having dreams, she told me.
Really, I said.
Strange dreams, he said.
That seems to be going around, I replied.
Is it?
What about you? I said. Sleeping well?
Only when the frailty of this human form compels me. I prefer to be productive.
I would go home after work on the quiet nine o’clock buses. Sometimes Lauren Sara would be at the apartment watching TV or using my computer; sometimes she’d arrive shortly after me, smelling of flux and turpentine. We’d walk over to the Orient Kitchen on Baum and eat fish ball hot pots and jellyfish and fish head soup. Something made us want to eat strangely. We’d drink Tsingtaos with dinner, and then, instead of heading off to the bar or going off separately with our friends, we’d walk back to my apartment. We’d lie in bed with the window open and the fans going, and we’d watch streaming movies on a laptop perched at the foot of the bed until one or both of us fell asleep. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and find her kissing my neck. Honey, I have to pee, I’d say. Hurry, she’d say. And I would, so that I could get back before she fell asleep again. I was not sure how any of this happened, but it did.
16
No, that’s not entirely true. In addition to the whole deal with Johnny, there was the fact that Lauren Sara had noticed how often I’d been searching for Helen Witold online. You have a little crush, she told me. It didn’t seem to bother her. No, I don’t, I said. I’m just interested. That’s a crush, she said. Is it? I said. It’s cute, she told me. Yeah? I said. I didn’t know that you had it in you, she said. Ouch, I said. Come here, she said. And although I’m no expert in affairs or the fascinations that lead us into them, I do know that the one thing missing from almost all the literature on infidelity is the frequent, concurrent effect it has on the principal, preexisting relationship; there must be some truth to the old saw about the rising tide and the whole harbor.
17
We’d become frequent dinner guests, actually. Mark would text me at eight p.m. on a weeknight to ask if we’d eaten yet. We usually hadn’t. We’d arrive at their place around nine. It won’t surprise you to learn that Mark was an excellent cook. We’d end up in their tall kitchen with its big windows looking out over the Allegheny, drinking wine and watching Mark’s long-handled knife move t
oo fast and too close to his fingers. He had the habit of chopping without looking at his hands, and I never figured out how he managed never to cut himself. His cooking reminded me of Nana’s, actually. Neither of my parents was much use in the kitchen; my mother could roast a chicken with a recipe; my father could grill a steak and make a surprisingly adept omelet; but Nana, before her eyesight and coordination had really started to decline, was ingenious in the kitchen. Among the hostesses of her social set, she was the one who never hired caterers, and when I was a little boy, I can remember standing beside her in her kitchen with a piping bag, helping her to assemble hundreds of little tarts or savory pastries. Mark’s cooking was rarely so dainty, but, like her, he enjoyed odd cuts and greasy little fish and offal. He was a show-off; he’d poach sweetbreads in white wine from a bottle that cost three times as much as any bottle of white wine I’d ever bought, and he seemed to be a carnivore; although he prepared beautiful vegetables and sharp salads of sorrel and frisée, he never seemed to eat them; or, maybe he ate them, but something about the way he ate them gave the impression that he was just pushing them around the plate. He’d served lamb at our first dinner together; he’d frenched the rack himself and just barely seared the outside. His eyes narrowly watched Lauren Sara over the rim of his wineglass as she poked the bloody meat with her knife. He’d served it on purpose. I think she knew it, and she cut a bigger piece than she had to and chewed it deliberately. Wow, she said, this is amazing. Later, he told me perhaps he’d misjudged her.
They lived in a condo in the Strip District in an old industrial building that had been converted into housing for rich people. Their neighbors were a weird mixture of young bankers and aging foundation heads who knew my grandmother. The apartment—Mark didn’t like the word condo, which he said reminded him of cheap vacations on the Gulf Coast—was big and awkward; the architects or developers or whoever put the building back together hadn’t been able to decide if they were lofts or not, and what walls there were seemed reluctant to be there. But the kitchen looked over the water, and the big room for living and dining looked over the Strip and past the convention center’s sailboat roofs to downtown and the sun setting over the Ohio River beyond.
At that first meal, sometime between the lamb and the tarte aux pommes, Mark had begged a cigarette from Lauren Sara and the two of them went off to smoke on a balcony somewhere. Helen was wearing a light sweater cut wide and square around her neck; it showed off her collarbones. During the meal, we’d been chitchatting about work; Lauren Sara was making gentle fun of the undergrads she taught as a graduate assistant; Helen had told us about the first time she’d met Mark. It was at a bar, she said. Of course. In Brooklyn. I know he doesn’t seem like the type to go to Brooklyn. Ha! Mark said. I’m an explorer, a pioneer. Not the type, she said. I’d just come from an absolutely terrible opening. I was with a bunch of friends and we were completely drunk, and I notice this guy, all alone, at the end of the bar. I swear he hadn’t been there a second ago, but now he looks like he’s always been there. He’s wearing a suit, so of course he doesn’t belong, and he’s staring at me, and I think, he either wants to fuck me or murder me, which is totally hot. So I ask my friend Beth [She looked like a Beth, Mark interrupted], Is that guy staring at me? and Beth fucking, she stumbles right over to him and is like, Are you staring at my friend? Do you like her? So eventually I go over, too, and then Beth disappears, and we’re talking and talking, and then it’s last call. And I’m like, should I go home with this guy? He’s had, like, six whiskeys, and I can’t believe he’s not drunk. And then he says, I bet you don’t even remember my name. I say, it’s Mark. Then I’m like, What’s mine? And he says—
Beth, said Mark.
With just the two of us, I didn’t know what to say. Helen poured us both another glass. So, she said. You’re working for Mark now.
Apparently, I said.
Hm, she said.
Hm? I repeated.
Keep one eye open, she said.
I will do that, I told her.
You think you will.
No, really.
I was not quite famous when we met, you know. Now I’m not famous at all.
All those museum types seem to know you, I said. You still get lots of search engine hits.
You’ve checked? she said.
Well, I said.
It’s not the same thing. But you know, when we first started seeing each other, people would meet Mark and say, Oh, you’re Helen Witold’s boyfriend. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. She said, When I was a little girl, I told my dad I wanted to be a famous artist, and he said, Wouldn’t you rather be rich? Can you believe that? All of the men in my life are such dicks.
That sounds like something my mother would say, I said.
She smiled at me. I’m boring you. Don’t tell Mark I called him a dick, please.
No, I said.
I like your girlfriend.
I couldn’t decide if she meant something more by it, so I said, Yeah, she’s all right.
Then she stared at me like she had at the museum the first time we’d met. Her stare was unlike Mark’s, who left you feeling flayed and dissected. It was less as if she were searching for something than hoping to see something she already knew she wouldn’t find, and it was so sad that I had to turn fractionally away again, but it was alluring, too, and it seemed to me then, and still seems to me, that what she suffered was less an absence of love than a surfeit of want and desire. She said, You ought to come over sometime and see what I’m working on. I’m working on some interesting pieces.
Oh? I turned back, and she was still staring.
I’ve been having these really vivid dreams, she said. I’m illustrating them.
And I wanted to ask, What dreams? Describe them to me, but Mark and Lauren Sara were walking back into the room, and Mark was saying, Who wants dessert?
On the way home after the second or third of these dinners, Lauren Sara had commented to me that Helen drank a lot. I said that I hadn’t noticed, but I had; at least, I noticed her wineglass getting refilled more frequently than the rest of ours, and I noticed that she usually had something stronger than wine before dinner, and after. Well, we all drank a fair amount, and I wasn’t really sure that I believed in addiction and alcoholism and all that anyway—I admitted to its existence, but found the categories hard to apply as practical observations about anyone I knew. I did, however, notice that despite the precision machinery of Mark-and-Helen’s host-and-hostess routine, as the evenings lengthened into nights an uneasy energy crept into the room; they never fought, not in front of us, but somehow they often seemed about to. Helen would usually offer us some blow after dinner; Mark always participated, but always seemed slightly aggrieved to participate. Lauren Sara always did a bit, but that girl was immune to the allure. Coke makes me sleepy, she said. Sleepy? I was incredulous. Totally, she said. How is that even possible? I said. She said, I don’t know; maybe just because it’s boring. As for me, I always felt guilty about doing it; I’d been hearing reports here and there that Johnny was in a serious hole; some of the old gang from our early twenties, whom I still ran into at the bars from time to time, had mentioned that Johnny may have propositioned them with offers of extraordinary new drugs that would send you through the wormhole and introduce you to the real Illuminati. But I don’t know, said Paul Rauth, who’d actually lived with Johnny for a few years in college in a disgusting house in Garfield; I just like to get stoned, you know? What with all this, I’d resolved to stay away from drugs, but Helen was so guileless and generous about it. How could you turn her down?
18
I even asked Tom about Helen. I’d asked Julian at the gym one evening after he’d kicked my ass at racquetball, but he said he didn’t know. Ask Tom, he said. Your boyfriend sucks, I told him. He laughed and slapped my shoulder and said, Fuck you, Peter. So I dropped Tom an email. Hey Tom, it said, You’re the expert. What’s the deal with Helen Witold?
Even though Tom hated me, I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist (a) showing off his art knowledge, and (b) gossiping.
He wrote back: She used to be a big deal. Saatchi bought a couple things she did in the early 2000s which was crazy because she’s American. She was supposed to be in a Whitney biennial, maybe, too. But then she did all this shitshow crap, probably after she got hooked up with whats-his-name, that asshole you work for. Also maybe she parTied a little too much? Arnovich’s X still reps her in NYC, but I think she’s pretty much over, or anyway, she’s not making anything new.
19
But I knew that she was making something new. She’d said so. She’d never offered to show me again after that first time, and I’d never figured out how to sneak across the hall to the studio that occupied the other half of their floor. But I’d been dating an artist long enough to recognize the scent of art being made. This seemed hugely significant to me at the time. A little later, when I did actually see it, I recognized immediately that it wasn’t good, although of course I said otherwise. It was the work of someone who’d fallen out of practice, who’d forgotten how to practice, or what practice is. But, as you can imagine, the smell of oil and mineral spirits filled me with intimations of mad genius, and it made me want her even more.
The Bend of the World: A Novel Page 14