“He may not have changed it yet,” says Alison. “Chances are he hasn’t. He’s getting married, so why bother, that’s what he’ll be thinking. Because the second he’s married any will he has is going to be null and void.” Alison is folding and refolding her napkin, smoothing it out, turning it over, making it into a rectangle and then a square. “The law doesn’t give a damn,” she says. “The law will keep you jumping through hoops till you’ve lost everything, including your self-respect. I’ve seen it happen a million times. Forget the law. I make one call and you get your life back.” Thrusting her napkin aside, she turns her attention to the items on the table—salt shaker, candlestick, water glass, coffee cup—lining them up like soldiers.
Jodi gets up and fetches a bottle from the sideboard. “This is a really nice Armagnac,” she says. Carefully, her movements concentrated and spare, she pours out the amber liquid and hands her friend a glass.
A revolution is taking place within her, as though a lifetime’s experience could be outdistanced in the span of a conversation. Like a molting snake she finds herself shedding her useless defiance, pathetic innocence, and sense of being a noncontender—the butt of a legal joke. The beauty of it is that there is no point at which she has to make a decision. She is not required to decide, for example, if she can overcome her reservations, work herself into enough of a rage, do the deed in cold blood, cope with consequences. Lost in a desert, you drink the tainted water that your friend is offering. Fatally afflicted, you put yourself in the surgeon’s hands. The pros and cons no longer count. The options have run out. Survival is what’s now on the table.
“Renny is blue-chip,” Alison is saying. “He makes a rotten husband but he has a good Rolodex. And he owes me a favor. And could use the money, of course. But don’t worry, he’ll give you a fair price.”
Jodi is captivated by this alternate world in which her problems simply disappear, not just the immediate problem of keeping her home intact, but the prospective problems as well—the problem of putting Natasha in her place, the problem of the endless days ahead and living through them as Todd continues to eat, sleep, and fornicate in another part of town. The world without Todd in it is not just a new concept but a new kind of concept, one that even now is forging a fresh neural pathway within her, like a tunneling worm. But the real surprise is Alison. She has always liked Alison but sees now that she has failed to give her proper credit and at this moment is regarding her with virgin eyes.
“It has to be cash,” Alison says. “But forget about taking it out of the bank or getting a cash advance on your credit card. Those kinds of transactions can be traced. If they see that you’ve made a large withdrawal, they’ll be on you like a pack of wolves.”
Jodi understands that by “they” Alison means the police, the judge, the jury, the prosecutor—the whole law enforcement community. “I don’t have much in the bank anyway,” she says.
“You will. But why don’t you just sell something? Your jewelry. Some of these knickknacks.” Their two pairs of eyes light on various objects in the room. The gold Peruvian figurines, the Matisse cut-paper lithograph, the Rajput painting in its gilt frame. “And don’t go through an agent. Look for buyers online.” She lifts Jodi’s hand and peers at the stone in her ring. “Stick with smaller things that are portable. Insist on cash. You’ll have to move fast. And get enough to take a trip while you’re at it. You’ll want to be away when the moment comes.”
24
HIM
It’s morning. He’s sitting at his desk. His BLT wrappings are in the trash can by his left foot, along with the cardboard cup from which he drank his first coffee of the day. Coffee number two is still on the go. The caffeine notwithstanding, he’s feeling groggy, just barely awake, and yet keenly alert to the small animal stirring in his gut. He’s been helping himself to Natasha’s sleeping pills, but they haven’t affected this gnawing, spitting, scratching presence that never seems to rest and prevents him from sleeping deeply or for very long. It’s a new-old feeling for him, this sense of the fractious lodger within. At one time, not so long ago, he naively believed that Natasha could banish his anxiety forever, as if their love were a form of enchantment that could keep him always safe.
Hearing Stephanie come in he looks at his watch. Stephanie has always put a loose interpretation on the notion of office hours, but lately she hasn’t even bothered with excuses. He resents the presumption on his good nature and generosity. He ought to speak to her, outline his views on punctuality. In a better world he might even give her a warning. The trouble is she could conceivably walk out on him, the way she’s been. Distant verging on rude, which no doubt has to do with her loyalty to Jodi.
He can hear her moving around out there—rinsing mugs in the washroom, picking up her voice mail, making a call. Her cherry-gum perfume hits his nostrils with a twang, soon followed by the darker aroma of the coffee she’s brewing. Stephanie, never without a coffee at hand, lives in defiance of the coffee break. Every week she goes through two or possibly three bags of a premium Starbucks blend that must be costing him ten dollars a pound, taking the position that she buys and brews it for the office and overlooking the fact that he drinks his entire daily quota of coffee before she arrives in the morning, which leaves only Valerie, the bookkeeper from 202, and Kevin from the printing operation in the basement to join her in a cup, which they are happy to do on a regular basis. He ought to be docking her pay not only for the coffee but for the time she spends gossiping with his tenants.
He makes up his mind to confront her, but when she appears in his doorway, coffee mug in one hand, files and notepad in the other, he takes one look at her churlish expression and decides not to push his luck. Besides, he’s distracted by the sweater she’s wearing, one he hasn’t seen before. The scoop neck reveals more of her collarbone than usual, and her breasts—nipples foremost—assert themselves against the soft weave. The urgent feelings that arise from Stephanie’s daily presence in his life can at times leave him groping and bankrupt. On an ongoing basis he fantasizes more about Stephanie than he does about any other woman.
What she says as she traverses the room and sits down facing him across his desk is: “I don’t know why you drink that crap from the deli when our office blend is as good as it gets. What are you paying for that—a buck fifty, two bucks a cup? It adds up, you know.”
Blood rushes to his head but he holds his tongue and lets the moment pass. “Am I still underwriting Jodi’s credit cards?” he asks.
“Of course. Nothing has changed.”
“How many are there?”
“Six. Seven. Seven if you count Citgo, which you also use.”
“I want you to close out all her cards. Pay them off in full and cancel them.”
“Citgo too?”
“Yes. Anything she has access to. Make sure you get them all.”
She hesitates, pen poised over paper.
“What?” he says.
“I hope you’re going to forewarn her about this.”
“She’ll find out soon enough.”
Stephanie drops her eyes to her notepad and says nothing, but he gets her disapproval, plainly conveyed in the set of her shoulders and tilt of her head. Too bad. Her defiance doesn’t affect him as much as she would like it to. Stephanie should tend to her own affairs. He needs to get serious with Jodi, show her that her freeloading days are over, that he’s not fooling around, that he means business.
With the meeting at an end, as she gathers up her files, he says, “I hope it goes without saying that what happens in this office is strictly confidential.”
He waits for a reply but doesn’t get one.
When Stephanie has gone and shut the door behind her he gets up and moves around the room with clenched fists and an odd gait, doing his best to defy an urge that is all but irresistible, a defiance that crumbles in less than a minute, giving way to a fit of scratching, frenzied and hysterical. It’s like he has electrodes taped to his balls or a live wire siz
zling in his pants. His poor little penis could light up the world. And even in his pain he feels ashamed—that he can’t keep still, can’t keep his hands off his crotch, as if he were a dirty old man with a case of the crabs. Which is not even the worst of it. The worst of it is that his frenzy is marbled with terror. What if it never goes away? What if it doesn’t just persist but worsens and spreads until he can’t think or eat or sleep, can’t do anything but scratch? What if he has to go to the hospital, and even so what could they do for him there other than bandage his hands or strap him to the bed or put him in an artificial coma?
The other component of his terror is the thought that this would not be happening unless there were a deeper underlying condition, such as the HIV that he no doubt has. He needs to face up to the HIV because he’s come to see that it’s the only plausible explanation for his lesion. When the immune system fails it’s like pipes going dry—there’s an end to the rinsing and lubrication, and things start to grow in the dim, dank places—fungus, for example. In biology, fungus is a kingdom unto itself, a documented land of rot and decay, a place for yeasts and molds and spores and every manner of thing that grows in the dark, a fairy tale gone wrong. In the Kingdom of Fungi there once lived a little spackle spot named Thrush who made a home for himself in the mouth of . . .
He goes for the antifungal lozenges in his desk drawer, shakes one out of the packet, puts it in his mouth, and holds it in the pouch of his cheek, but he knows that it’s a stopgap at best, that it won’t reverse the conditions that enabled Mr. Thrush to set up house in the first place, won’t breathe a fighting spirit into his mucous membranes, won’t prime the pump of his immune system, won’t stop the diabolical itching. Is this his punishment for what he’s doing to Jodi? If he were Catholic, if he’d stuck to the path, he could go to confession and ask God’s forgiveness. And he would, too, because he’s sorry, he really is, but how then would he go on with his life? What changes could he make that would set things right? He can’t leave Natasha now, not while she’s pregnant, and keeping up two households is not within his means. He’s trying to live his life as best he can, wants to do what’s right, and yes, he’s made mistakes, but you can’t say that he’s not a good person, that he’s without a conscience, that he doesn’t try to be the best that he can be. He’s a generous man, damn it. He’s just not as rich as everyone seems to think he is. And he’s a good man, too, a man who doesn’t hold grudges or kill insects, a man who spends money on water-saving toilets even though big industries in this country waste more water every day than his toilets will save in a lifetime.
He slows his pacing, comes to a tentative halt, clasps his hands together, holds his breath, waits and endures. The deception is that, if you scratch it, the itch will go away. Isn’t that how it normally works? But this is no ordinary itch, and only through resistance will he ride it out and cross the bridge to sanity and peace. There. You see? It’s subsiding now to a feeble tremor, the dying vibration of a stringed instrument, the quivering of a leaf, the purring of a kitten. But this is when the deception arises again in force, the notion that it’s just a little itch that needs scratching, and the urge to scratch it is overwhelming. He’s on his knees now, head bowed, tears splashing onto the granite tile, begging God for the will to endure. And then all at once and without formality it’s over, gone as it began, suddenly and unannounced.
He stands up feeling like a ghost, runs a hand through his hair, breathes into his abdomen, circles the room, comes back to his desk, and picks up the phone to call Natasha.
The slump they’ve fallen into—he’s willing to concede that it all comes down to him. He needs to relax and take a longer view. What he tends to overlook these days is his son. His son is of course ever present in the form of his mother’s distended abdomen and volatile moods, but what he needs to bear in mind is his-son-the-person, the unique individual with fingers and toes and a God-given (if microscopic) shooter, as he saw with his own eyes in swirling, grainy black-and-white at the radiology clinic. He would have been okay with a daughter—this is not a time to split hairs—but the fact is he has a son, and his son is the future, the forward momentum, the paradox whose birth will put an end to the fighting and commotion. His son, when he arrives, will bring them to their knees.
And Natasha will be different with a baby to look after. Her focus will shift from him to the needy infant. He’s looking forward to that, but in the meantime the least he can do is make an effort to be more tolerant and more compliant, because basically she can’t help herself. The fact is she’s a bubbling sea of hormones with instincts out of control driving her to fight for the best nest and exclusive rights to the male provider. What she’s going through may be a form of temporary insanity, but the last thing he wants is to thwart or obstruct her, given that her purpose is also his purpose. He’s been premature in asserting his rights as a free agent—he sees that now. What he needs to do is tell her he loves her and ask her to come home.
25
HER
Finding buyers online is easier than she thought it would be. There’s a thriving market out there for the items she has to sell; in fact, people are practically lining up for the chance to meet her at the Art Institute or the Crystal Gardens and count out their bills in exchange for her wares. In order to conduct her business she has to leave her home unattended, but it must be done, and as it turns out she enjoys the outings immensely, revels in the icy winds that make her eyes tear up, the smell of food venting out of restaurant kitchens, the sight of strangers milling around in public spaces, starved as she is for any kind of sensory input.
In the beginning there was a problem with authentication. The e-mails people sent in response to her ads included comments like: I love the ring but how do I know it’s real? The painting could be a fake. What if there’s a problem? Can I have your number? But as it turns out there are plenty of people who are not concerned. Maybe they’re jewelers or dealers or experts of one kind or another. She doesn’t know because she doesn’t ask.
Sharing her e-mail address, meeting her customers face-to-face—these are risks she can’t avoid, and she compensates by dressing in an old anorak and woolen toque that belong to Todd. The semidisguise completes her sense of drama. While loitering near Magritte’s On the Threshold of Liberty on the third floor of the modern wing watching for a man with a chevron mustache, or sitting on a bench by the high-arching fountains keeping an eye out for a woman in red leather gloves, she thinks of herself as someone who is playing a role, a character on a stage. The acting is a diversion. All she has to do is collect her money; she doesn’t have to think about what the money is for. And when she gets back home she adds it to the growing stash in the black leather Louis Vuitton briefcase—a gift to Todd that he never used—pleased with the way it’s adding up.
She expects that Alison will ask for a deposit but ends up giving her the total payment up front. That’s how Alison wants it, and Alison is the best friend she has right now. Anyway the money means nothing. It might as well be play money, Monopoly money. The items she has traded for it never enter her mind. Somewhere along the way they lost their hold on her, became uninteresting in themselves, significant only in terms of their purchasing power. She has even lost her regard for the briefcase except as a container for her funds. When she pays Alison she throws in the briefcase without giving it a second thought.
Now that she knows how to get cash, she worries less about the immediate future, a timely development as it turns out, because the day after she closes the deal with Alison, Stephanie calls to say: “I wanted to tell you, Mrs. Gilbert—I thought you should know—that he’s canceling your credit cards.”
“I see,” says Jodi. “Well then. Is he really?”
“Yes. All of them.” Stephanie’s tone is low and urgent, the way people talk when they’re sharing secrets. “I thought I should warn you so, you know, you’re not caught off guard. Please don’t tell him I called.”
Unexpectedly, Jodi finds this funn
y. It hasn’t occurred to Todd that two can play at this game. In any case she has a credit card of her own, ironically one that she’s mainly used to buy him gifts over the years. The Louis Vuitton briefcase, for instance, although it was not among her more extravagant offerings. One year on his birthday she bought him a horse and riding lessons. Just an idea of hers. She thought it would give him a break from work, get him outside for some fresh air and exercise. He was keen at first but of course it didn’t last.
When she puts the phone down she does a little dance of exultation, but her mood eventually fizzles, and in the end she is left with the pettiness of canceled credit cards beside the magnitude of the scheme that she has set in motion, the unspeakable future event that she has summoned up and paid for. Voices within are telling her to reconsider while there’s still time, but she’s caught in a sense of destiny unfolding, a reluctance to retrace her steps. It’s in the back of her mind that she’s crossed a line, that she should seek help, and she thinks of Gerard—she could look him up. But she waves the thought of him away. Gerard is undoubtedly retired and living in Florida or Mexico, and besides, what could he possibly do for her now? She should have stuck with him when she had the chance, allowed her therapy to run its course, come to its natural conclusion.
He was good at his job; there was never any doubt about that. It was Gerard who opened her eyes about Ryan, brought her to terms with reality, ended her habit of quarreling with facts. Only because of Gerard did she accept in the end that Ryan was going to live his own life in his own way, that his choices were his to make, that what she wanted for him—the material security, the personal advancement—were worthy ambitions but not his ambitions, that her misgivings about him were founded in judgments, that to judge others was to willfully do them harm. Respecting differences, she gathered, went beyond simply making allowances; it meant giving up your blinkered perspective, your assumption that you are necessarily right and others necessarily wrong, that the world would be a better place if everyone thought as you did.
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