Ladies and Gentlemen

by Adam Ross

  Maria paused for a moment. We’re close friends, so the silence was comfortable. I poured myself more wine and looked around the room, at all of Nicholas’s books, at the bicycle rack and the reading stand he’d made with rollers on its legs and an adjustable desktop so that Maria could work while sitting in their club chair. To make ends meet, she’d been moonlighting regularly at Veterans Hospital, Baptist, and Vanderbilt, seven months pregnant and still picking up killer shifts, twenty-four and sometimes even thirty-six hours on call. And you could look at these things Nicholas had built, these enhancements, as his way of either assisting her or goading her—I wasn’t sure which. According to mutual friends, three years ago, before we knew them, Nicholas had an affair with one of his graduate students, and he and Maria separated for a time. One afternoon, after he ran out of fellowship money, he snuck over to her apartment, stole a credit card application from the mail, and applied for it under her name. He used this card to fund his life for the next several months, running Maria into enormous debt. And still, after all this, they reconciled. This was a mystery to me. Why had she forgiven him? Why had he come back? Could people really forget or get over such things? Had he crippled her self-esteem? Or were they willing to go to these lengths simply because they loved each other? “They’re either the cursed or the blessed,” Carla once said to me, “but I’d have kicked that son of a bitch out long ago”—which at the time I took as a warning. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure it was so cut and dried. There’s a photograph of the two of them in their living room that I always like to look at whenever I’m over. Nicholas and Maria have their backs to the camera, walking hand in hand along the ridge of some valley in Germany—nothing but mountains beyond and below them for miles. It’s fall, so they’re wearing sweaters and stocking hats, and because they’re on a slope and Nicholas is standing downhill from his wife, they seem the same height, two happy little people, married since forever. And every time I consider this photo, what’s clear to me is that it’s easier to understand what makes two people let go than what keeps them together.

  “Where was I?” Maria said.

  “Unlimited options,” said Carla.

  “Anyway, by the end of that fall I’d already applied to medical schools, and Nicholas was applying to programs in philosophy. But Lisa, I don’t know how to describe it. She just shut down. It wasn’t exactly a nervous breakdown, but something close. She just withdrew—from me, from school, from everything. All her energy left her. Her enthusiasm. Maybe the weight of her options started to overwhelm her or—”

  “Oh, come on,” Nicholas said.

  “What?”

  “You’re telling it completely wrong.”

  Maria hunched slightly, and her eyes went blank.

  “Weight of her options?” he said.

  Maria wouldn’t look at him. “Story police,” she said.

  “Don’t make her such a victim.”

  Carla and I had never witnessed them quarrel openly, but we’d seen portents, harbingers of fights waiting to happen the minute we left. “You tell it,” she said, sitting back in her chair. Maria stared into space while Nicholas smiled at the two of us. His teeth were spaced widely apart. I tried to catch Carla’s eye but she took a long drag on her cigarette and wouldn’t look at me.

  “First of all,” Nicholas said, “you have to understand that Lisa wasn’t some picture-perfect genius. She was a bit of a head case. You’d agree with that, wouldn’t you?”

  Maria didn’t appear to be listening.

  Nicholas shook his head. “Lisa could be way out there,” he said. “She had this need for extravagance, so everything she did had to be extraordinary. And if it wasn’t she abandoned it—no matter what it was, or who. That fall she was talking about writing a novel, and she even started one at the beginning of the semester. She signed up for a creative-writing class and when she came back after the first session she was so excited she could barely contain herself. She was going to write a novel like no one had ever written before, she told me. She thought it was amazing that a narrative form several hundred years old was still chained to linearity and psychological realism—the same Joycean rant all the smart kids make before they bother to write a word. Then she went to her room, closed the door, and set to work—just like that. I’m pretty sure she was up most of the night. Being manic like that, she’d have made a great surgeon. I was basically living with Maria by that time, so when Lisa left for class the next morning, I went in to have a look at what she’d done because I was dying of curiosity.”

  “Jealousy,” Maria said.

  “Please. The pages were on her desk—fifteen, maybe twenty, drafted in one sitting. She wrote this very mannered prose, but it had a kind of energy that immediately hooked you. But it wasn’t really a story per se. It began with this long description of an old doorman in the service elevator of an apartment building. He’s collecting tenants’ trash and going through it, spinning tales in his mind about what he finds while remembering things he’s overheard during his rides with these same people. He’s got a portable radio with him in the elevator that’s tuned to a call-in show, and the narrative shifts from these on-the-air conversations into what’s going on in the guest’s head. He’s a doctor who’s explaining the process of separating conjoined twins, giving all this technical material in layspeak, but then it goes into his memories of the actual operation, passages that only someone with Lisa’s knowledge could pull off. That’s as far as she got, but it was fantastic stuff. It really was. And I wanted to tell her this. But when I stopped by that evening, she was sitting at her desk holding her hair in one fist and striking through line after line with a black marker. She was crossing everything out in utter disgust. So I knocked lightly on her door, and she glared at me wild-eyed and said, ‘I’m working,’ then reached out and slammed it in my face. She dropped the class a week later.”

  Maria stood up; both dogs, suddenly agitated, rose too. “I need some water,” she said, and went to the kitchen. Carla was looking at Nicholas, slightly amazed, as if she’d never seen him before. She was still ignoring me, and I felt a tightness in my gut, something close to fear. Occasionally, a night with Nicholas and Maria could touch off tensions between the two of us. Carla was twenty-eight and had been practicing law for two years. I was thirty-three, teaching the LSAT, bartending, still struggling to wrap up a novel I’d been working on for a long time. When she got frustrated with me, when we really got into it, she’d say I’d been finishing the book ever since we met—an ungenerous, simplistic accusation, I thought, if not entirely inaccurate. What was inarguably true was that there was a growing list of things we couldn’t talk about—the hours I’d put in writing that day, if I’d gone for a run, if Nicholas and I went out for coffee. “It must be nice,” Carla might say, “to meet for a leisurely chat in the middle of the afternoon.” I didn’t dare answer. I started editing out all sorts of daily information, minimizing conversations with my family, growing wary of phone calls that tied up our line. “Who were you talking to for so long?” Carla might ask when she got through. Bitch was often on the tip of my tongue, and I would’ve said it many times if her questions weren’t apt, her frustrations and fears not justified. Worse, these elisions were changing me: I was a miser with good news, with friends’ pregnancies, promotions, new homes. When Carla called me out regarding this pettiness, we sometimes spiraled into vicious argument. In the past few months, we’d said unforgettable things.

  Maria came back. “You didn’t have to wait,” she said.

  Nicholas watched her sit, but she wasn’t backing down and I thought they might have it out right then. He wanted some acknowledgment from her, even at our expense. He was so unyielding that in a strange way I admired him. He made no apologies. He just took. Yet he never talked to me about Maria, as if their relationship was sacrosanct. Once, over drinks, I’d told him about the problems Carla and I were having; bitter, I offered more details than were necessary, all of which he considered thoughtfully. B
ut finally he replied, “Never underestimate a woman’s loyalty.” I felt so ashamed that I promised myself I’d never discuss my marriage with him again.

  “But Maria’s right,” he said, relenting. “Lisa did shut down for a while, but not because she had unlimited options. She just had no follow-through. Everyone around her was making choices on the fly. Plenty of us had no idea what we were getting into, but Lisa didn’t understand commitment. She couldn’t accept that making a choice eliminates other choices. She wanted to step up and hit the bull’s-eye on the first try. She was so talented, so quick, she had no clue how long it really took to get somewhere.”

  At this, Maria and Carla simply looked at each other.

  “So she overcompensated. We come back from Christmas vacation after Lisa’s had her little meltdown, and she’s all better. She seems completely restored. We’re having dinner together that first night, and out of the blue she announces she’s getting married.

  “And we’re floored. We were like, ‘Married? To who? When?’ And she says she just wants to get married, she has to get married. We think she’s joking. But Lisa’s like, ‘I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life. It’s what I want. It’s what my mother did, and she’s happy. I don’t want to be one of those women who have to compete in the rat race. I don’t want to work insane hours. I want children. I want to be a homemaker. Is that such a dishonorable goal?’ And then she lists all the qualities she’d come up with for her ideal mate. She really had a list. He had to be financially secure enough to support her comfortably. She wanted him to be handsome, absolutely. She felt strongly that he should have a solid religious background—Catholic, Jewish, it didn’t matter, as long as he believed and practiced something. It got a lot more specific than that. She’d really put her mind to it. It was all so hyperconscious that I honestly thought she’d gone nuts. And when Maria and I told her she was being obsessive, that this was a misguided grasp at certainty, at a direction, she shot us down. She said we were being hypocritical because we were married already, even though it wasn’t official, which was true.

  “She went out almost every night that spring, hunting for a husband. It became her job. Her new major. It was the sole purpose of everything she did. She trekked into Seattle and hit the town. She joined a gym off campus. She started going to openings at galleries, to restaurant openings. She asked about the family backgrounds of classmates. She became a database of who was who and who had what. She dragged Maria and me out with her occasionally. And the nights we came along, it was fascinating to watch her size men up, approach them, talk to them or wait until they approached her. And within an hour or sometimes just minutes she’d come back to where we were sitting and compare the guys against her criteria and describe how they’d passed or failed. And the whole time she seemed completely happy.

  “But none of them made the cut. I don’t think she even slept with anybody. One guy, Thomas, was part of the Heinz or Hellmann’s family—directly related to some condiment. Anyway, he took her out regularly and spent many late nights at the apartment, but always left scratching his head. I mean literally. He looked so puzzled that Maria and I started calling him Doubting Thomas during those last few weeks he held on. And suddenly we stopped seeing him altogether.

  “By then we were graduating. Maria and I both got into schools in Oregon and Lisa took a job with a think tank in Washington, DC.”

  “No husband?” Carla asked.

  “Not even a boyfriend,” Nicholas said.

  “Can I see the card?” Carla whispered to Maria, even though I was holding it. Her indirectness made me mildly furious, but I passed it to Maria, who handed it to her, both of us keen to see her reaction to the image—which was one of total indifference.

  “Over the next few years,” Nicholas said, “we began to drift apart. We were busy. She and Maria didn’t speak often. She’d gotten into medical school but dropped out after a year and a half. She took a high-paying job in pharmaceutical sales, then quit. She moved to San Francisco and worked for a dot-com startup and was traveling coast to coast all the time. When she and Maria did manage to talk, Lisa mostly discussed the men in her life. If she was still on her quest, she’d made a real mess of it. She’d had an affair with the married CEO of her company, who was going to leave his wife, then he wasn’t, at which point Lisa fell into the arms of some journalist she was involved with back in New York. And I thought she’d arrived at the perfect solution to her own character, because I couldn’t imagine her tolerating anyone long enough to get to the point of marriage.

  “But maybe a year later she calls to tell us that she’s in love. His name’s Uzi Levi, an Israeli investment banker. They’d been together for two months, and she goes on and on about how successful and handsome he is, that he’s everything she could ever hope for, et cetera. She described this whirlwind romance, how on their first date they flew down to Los Angeles for the evening, had dinner in Santa Monica, then drove to a house he’d rented in Malibu. How when she woke up the next morning the view from the bedroom was of nothing but the Pacific, the dolphins swimming, the whales breaching, all typical Lisa-extravagance. And when we asked her what he was like she said, ‘All questions will be answered at our wedding.’ Again just like Lisa to make such an announcement.

  “Have you ever been to a wedding that feels like a horrible mistake? Where every accident seems like an omen? The reception’s held outside, and it pours. The bride’s father’s toast is uncomfortably short. A child wails during the vows. We meet this Uzi Levi and he’s thin, balding, charmless—as blunt as a lot of Israelis can be. He had these three girlfriends he’d known since childhood, and they hovered around him the whole time like a bizarre chorus. During the rehearsal dinner, they gave a weird, inappropriate toast, this poem they’d written in couplets full of innuendo about his sexual past with them and his decision to marry outside the fold. And of course it was wrong of us to hold anything against him, because he was the victim of our own expectations for Lisa. Everybody’s a social Darwinist at a wedding: you want the perfect pairing for a friend. But we just didn’t get it. And to see them under the chuppah and watch their two families circle up for the hora—Lisa’s WASP contingent and Levi’s clan—it was like some bad comedy of intermarriage, the most insane mismatch. I know it sounds like I’m some closet anti-Semite, but that’s not it. They were just so completely different it was hard not to think about them in almost animal terms. Meanwhile, the spectacle of it all was off the charts, and god knows how much it cost. When Lisa and I danced she kept me stiffly at arm’s length, and when I asked what her plans were she said, ‘Go on my wonderful honeymoon, take care of my wonderful husband.’ Everything was so wonderful it was depressing. She smiled, thanked me after the song ended, and then she made her way around the room. Maria and I watched her talk with the other women, putting her hand to their pregnant stomachs and oohing and aahing and showing off her enormous ring—and if this all seems clichéd, it was, and that’s what stunned us, that she’d transformed herself so utterly. And when she wrote us a thank-you note for our wedding present, she described the private island where they’d honeymooned in excruciating detail: how every couple had an open-air hut and put up a flag when they wanted a meal, how the owner of the resort bred yellow Labs that swam in the surf and ran free in honey-colored packs. I guessed she’d finally gotten what she wanted.

  “After that, we heard from her only when we got the birth announcements. And holiday greetings like that card there—pictures of Lisa and her husband and their kids. Until, a few years later, we get another unexpected phone call.

  “She’d latched onto the idea of buying a dog for her children, a German shepherd, and as soon as she said this I could envision her mind working through a series of associations back to us. We had two Shepherds and would be the ideal resource to consult about this important decision. She made a little small talk but then went right into it: ‘How are your dogs with kids they meet? Are they too protective with you? Did you ca
ge train?’ It was painful talking with her. She’d done some Internet research and was full of the concerns that come with superficial knowledge. What about Schutzhund shepherds? Should she buy from a German breeder? It wasn’t surprising that she needed a best-in-show dog with impeccable bloodlines. We got a slew of calls from her over the next few weeks—questions about what to look for in terms of temperament, personality, conformity standards, training techniques—but never any sense that she realized we hadn’t spoken in years. Did we use treats or vocal praise? Would a male dog recognize a woman as alpha? Did we let our dogs on the furniture? Were they afraid of blacks? Until finally, after this endless back-and-forth, she called to say she’d bought a puppy, as if we were dying to hear what she’d decided. Naturally, it was a bitch Shepherd she’d had shipped from Germany and paid an arm and a leg for, maybe four thousand dollars, and she was going to train it herself. The children loved the dog, and she was so enjoying their bonding with it and would send us a picture—and that was it. We didn’t hear from her again, though a few weeks later we did get the photo, and of course the puppy was gorgeous, and on the back Lisa had written her name: Eva.

  “So a few months later, Maria and I had a wedding to go to in San Francisco. We hadn’t seen Lisa since she got married, so we called the week before our trip and made arrangements to stay an extra day afterward to visit with her and meet her kids. We were very curious. I remember how giddy we were as we drove up to Pacific Heights. You always have this preconceived idea of luxury that’s rarely fulfilled in reality, but not in this case. It was a white house perched on the highest point in the neighborhood, with incredible views of the Golden Gate and the bay. It was surrounded by a huge brick wall and had a roof deck like a crow’s nest—a widow’s walk—with a wrought-iron fence around it. Inside, everything was immaculate and the furniture ultramodern: Viking range, Sub-Zero fridge, shower with jets from five angles, the whole works. After the tour we met the children, who were with the nanny in the third-floor playroom. You could tell the daughter had all of Lisa’s intelligence, and the boy was unusually self-possessed, but they were both so odd-looking. I don’t want this to sound mean but Lisa’s perfect features had combined with her husband’s in such a twisted way that it made you realize how close beauty can be to its opposite.