by Jonathan Dee
“No,” said Ben.
“Yes,” said Helen, looking at her husband in amazement. “Yes, he was. He was emotionally unstable. We have a doctor who will surely testify to that. Well, not a doctor, really, but close enough.”
“Stop it,” Ben said coolly to her. “I don’t want to be a coward now. Let it fall on me. If I’m going out, I don’t want to go out as one of those guys claiming he’s not responsible for his actions.”
Which Helen actually found somewhat moving, insofar as she could be moved by anything to do with Ben these days; but when she looked over at Bonifacio, he wore a smirk like he was enjoying a bad TV show. How he must have hated guys like Ben, Helen thought—lawyers who rode off to Manhattan every morning while he climbed the stairs beside the hardware store and tried to act outraged over whatever sad grievance one of the locals might bring in.
“Here’s the thing to remember, though, Ben,” he said. “It doesn’t all fall on you. If you want to go the noble route, while you’re off in jail writing your memoirs or whatever, your wife and your daughter will be put out of their house, and any money you have anywhere will be taken away from them faster than you can say ‘mea maxima culpa,’ all right? Now I am sure you would like to avoid their having to suffer for your sins any more than absolutely necessary, and if you want to avoid that, or at least negotiate it, the only way to do so is to find a way to contest the idea of your guilt.”
Ben’s response was an acquiescent sigh. His usual practice was trusts and estates, but at bottom, Helen saw, both men were lawyers, and shared an acceptance of the immutable truth of what Bonifacio was saying.
“So here’s what we do. Ben will be voluntarily committed to an institution in Danbury called Stages, maybe you’ve heard of it, where he will be treated for his chronic depression, bipolar syndrome, attention deficit disorder, panic attacks, alcoholism—”
“I don’t really have a drinking problem,” Ben said.
“Did I ask you if you did?” said Bonifacio, not unkindly. “You’ll recall I said there are two things you need to do, and that’s number one. Now, as to the rape charge.” Helen winced but did not correct him. “It’s my opinion that they know there’s no there there, in terms of evidence, and that their plan is to withdraw the charge before trial no matter what. They just threw it because they know that you’ll never get the stink of it off you. And the reason that’s smart, as I’m sure Ben has figured out, is that it softens the ground for the civil case, which in my opinion is where this whole flaming bag of poo has been aimed from the beginning. We have to start insulating you against that judgment as best we can, and we have to start today. So forgive me if I seem to overstep my bounds here, but thing two, Helen, is that you file for divorce immediately, on grounds of infidelity. Ben will not contest it.”
Ben frowned. “Does it have to be infidelity, though?” he said. “Because, not to get all Talmudic about it, but, as Helen knows, I was not actually, literally unfaithful to her.”
“As Helen knows?” Helen said. “What the hell do I know about anything? I only know what you say.”
“It’s the truth,” Ben said. “No reason to lie anymore.”
“If I may,” Bonifacio said, tossing his Starbucks cup in the waste-basket behind his chair. “The two of you are straying down a path which, while of course I understand and sympathize, is not really constructive to our purpose. You’re getting worked up about how to know the difference between what appears true versus what is true. You might as well forget about all that for a while. Everything you say or do now, no matter how intimate, is being performed for an audience, namely the jury pool here in town and in the rest of the circuit. It would be good for you to get used to that as quickly as possible.”
“Look,” Ben said weakly; Helen could see he was tiring. “I know this isn’t a very lawyerly thing to propose, but just in terms of, as you say, softening the ground, I think if you could just get me in a room with her—”
Bonifacio was already shaking his head. “If what you want is to let everyone know how sorry you are,” he said, “then good luck, God bless, and get yourself a new lawyer. But I’ll tell you what I will do. Since you seem to need to get it out of your system like that, why don’t you say you’re sorry right now?”
“Right now?” said Ben.
“Right here and now. And then never again.”
Ben looked down at the floor, and then, with great difficulty, at his wife. He did seem changed, Helen thought, but only in a kind of animal way, wounded and in pain and without his usual instincts. “Please believe me,” he said to her. “Even though I don’t necessarily understand everything I’ve done, I take total responsibility for it. You and Sara don’t deserve any of this. I am so sorry.”
“I don’t know why,” Helen said quickly. “You got what you wanted. It’s all destroyed now. I don’t know why you don’t go back to the house and put up a big Mission Accomplished banner.”
“Feel better now?” said Bonifacio. “I didn’t think so. Still, if you get the urge again, you can repeat as necessary. Just as long as it’s always in this office, and always in front of me.”
Helen drove home (Ben’s license was now suspended) faster than she liked; she wanted to beat the school bus and be home when Sara arrived, and also to minimize the time spent near him. Ben asked to speak to Sara alone when she got home, and Helen almost agreed to it, just to spare herself the guilt and agony of seeing her daughter’s face at the climactic moment of their betrayal of her, a betrayal the girl might have seen coming years ago if she hadn’t been so young, too young to anticipate or even, very likely, to imagine it. But it had to be borne, for her sake. Sara didn’t cry; instead she withdrew solemnly, deep inside herself, nodding at all the appropriate times, her face a mask, never once contradicting or mocking them, as she would have done in almost any other sort of conversation. Then she went into her room and closed the door and played music (nothing sad or angry, just the same pop music she always played) while Ben packed his suitcase to check in to Stages, and Helen sat in the kitchen and her anger gave way to a meditation on her own role in having failed to prevent the end of life as they had all known it up to now.
For the next few weeks, everywhere she went—which, she realized with the sad, clear vision brought on by misfortune, wasn’t really that many places (the Starbucks, the Price Chopper, the middle school, the dry cleaner, the dump)—her neighbors and casual friends pretended not to see her, or to be busily on their way elsewhere across the street, not because they condemned or looked down on her but because the level of disgrace she’d been subjected to was so epic that they weren’t even sure how to acknowledge it and thus how to talk to her in the way that they used to. Only her closest friends made a show of everything being just as it was before, which was worse, in a way. There was now an element of performance to their friendship, even when no one else was around to see or be upbraided by their example, which brought home to Helen that it was really themselves these friends were performing for—burnishing their estimation of themselves as people who would not abandon an unjustly scandalized friend.
And in truth it was that notion of herself as a victim that put Helen off too, that made her come up with excuses when friends called to invite her forcefully to lunch or to ostentatiously offer her a ride to the next Parents’ Coffee at school. She had genuinely no idea of the depths to which her husband had been descending over that summer, but did that exonerate her—having no idea? It had been well over a decade since she’d had any job other than to maintain a happy home and family environment for their only child, and she had failed at that job rather decisively. So spectacular was her failure that the mushroom cloud over her happy home environment was featured in the newspaper every day for a week, not just at home in Rensselaer Valley, where there was never much going on, but even in Manhattan, where the destruction of some rich Brahmin at the hands of his own perverse compulsions was always a tabloid chestnut.
Every day was a limbo, in w
hich the house—a white, weathered, green-shuttered ranch with a finished basement, which everyone always said was more spacious inside than it looked from the outside—served as both prison and fortress. Ben had not contacted his wife and daughter since passing through the doors of Stages—quite likely he was forbidden to, for a while anyway, according to some twelve-step protocol—and Helen made no attempt to contact him. Though they’d never discussed it, or even said goodbye, it would not have surprised her terribly if she never saw him again. When eighth grade began for Sara a week or so after his departure, it was still much too soon for anyone there to have forgotten anything; at the end of the first day Helen asked her how it had gone, seeing her classmates again, and Sara gave the worst, most distressing answer possible, which was that she didn’t want to talk about it.
Then there was the question of money. It hadn’t disappeared, exactly, but it was hard to trust that the seventy-five thousand posted for bail would ever grace their account again; and then a Manhattan judge, at the request of Cornelia’s lawyers, had taken the extraordinary step of freezing all of Ben’s assets, including the house, which prevented them from selling it, for financial or any other reasons. The lawyers argued that Helen and Ben’s pending divorce action was nothing more than a cynical attempt to shield themselves from future civil liability, and the judge, without deigning to ask Helen or anyone who knew her whether she was the sort of person who would break up her child’s home as a legal maneuver, agreed. Stages cost $850 a day, and there was no timetable for Ben’s discharge. Bonifacio’s retainer was sixty-two thousand dollars. Helen had a checking account with about eight grand left in it. Her life was such that her only expenses were food and gas, but still.
She would have to go back to work, and she had to do it somewhere other than Rensselaer Valley, because there were no jobs there outside the service industries and because they needed a fresh start anyway, out from under the dark umbrella Ben’s madness had opened up above their lives. They needed to begin again. It was just the two of them now. Helen thought about returning to Manhattan after fourteen years and permitted herself to get a little excited, despite the fact that her previous, and really only, job experience had been as a sales manager at Ralph Lauren, a job she’d quit during her second pregnancy when a doctor had consigned her to bed. She had little sense of how employable she might now be in the city (or anywhere else, really), and so she decided to set up a few exploratory interviews. On a Monday morning in mid-September she dropped her daughter, sad and stoic, outside the front doors of the junior high school, then sped home, changed into a suit, and drove herself to the train station.
It had been a long time since she’d held a salaried job. Not that she’d been idle all these years; on the contrary, being a young, bright housewife of means in a community like Rensselaer Valley meant that your commitments gradually expanded to fill your days and then some. People found you; they called you up and invited themselves over on behalf of an array of local organizations: the elementary school, the library, the pool club, the book club, the Democratic Town Committee. She’d even written some stories for the local weekly. All that, of course, was shot to hell now, less by scandal than by the toxicity of pity. Helen had four interviews lined up for today and high hopes for none of them. She was forty-three and had had to go online to learn how to put together a decent-looking CV. No one to help her with that stuff now, and only herself to help Sara with it when the time came. Helen took a deep breath and shook herself to ward off the pessimism she felt settling over her. The train, after all, was full, even though it was past the start of the workday. All these people were headed to the city, yet none of them, or very few, could have had the pretext of a nine-to-five job there. So she wasn’t alone. There were plenty of others in the same position which now seemed so marginal to her, even if none of them had gotten there quite the way she had.
The first interview was at Condé Nast. She’d subscribed to some website that listed an editorial assistant’s job at Condé Nast Traveler, but apparently all the job openings at all the Condé Nast magazines funneled down into one big slough of HR despond that didn’t differentiate between one magazine and another. Too bad, because work at a travel magazine sounded attractive to Helen, but it scarcely mattered in the end because it seemed she had grossly misunderstood the nature of an editorial assistant’s job in the first place. She thought it had to do with assisting in the editing of the magazine, a notion of which the HR person disabused her with the exaggerated patience usually reserved for dealing with the very old. The second interview was for a fundraiser’s job with the Mercantile Library. It seemed to go well enough. At least there was no condescension or hostility involved, not on a visible level anyway. She did notice a sort of quizzical cock of the head when she answered the interviewer’s question about the size of the average donation she’d solicited in her work for the town library in Rensselaer Valley. Still, asking for money was asking for money: how different could it be?
She ate lunch at a Chipotle—horrible, but she didn’t want to go anywhere nicer and ask for a table for one. Her dignity had taken enough hits as it was. Nervously she checked her cell to make sure there was no emergency call from Sara or from Sara’s school. The way her life had been going lately, it would figure that such a call might come on the one day she was two hours from home and didn’t want anybody to know about it. Her third interview was in the neighborhood of the Empire State Building, in a shabby little office building with a lobby about as wide as a walk-in closet. Judging from the framed directory she perused as she waited a minute and a half for the one elevator, it seemed mostly full of accountants and tax preparers; she was headed, though, for Harvey Aaron Public Relations. They had advertised, in the Times, for an entry-level position as junior vice president, which was confusing, though less so after she walked in and saw that the office consisted of two rooms of identical size, one of which belonged to Harvey Aaron and the other to everyone else—three desks, two of which were occupied by bored-looking young Latina women reading magazines. The third desk, presumably that of the junior vice president, had a pair of running shoes on it.
When Harvey stood up to greet her as she entered, he was still holding a plastic fork and a container of some sort of pasta salad. “Come in, sit down, excuse me,” he said, looking around for something suitable on which to wipe his fingers, eventually just giving up and waving her into the room’s only other chair. He was older than Helen, maybe sixty or a dissipated fifty-five, and she was comforted by that, since her other stops that day had contributed to the sense that no one worked aboveground in Manhattan who was over the age of forty. He wore a beige suit and a blue tie, a rather stylish one (though it had a new oil stain on it), which suggested the attentions of a Mrs. Aaron. He seemed a little nervous just to see her walk in, as if she weren’t the kind of person who normally came around during the day, and maybe for that reason she felt like she could relax a little in front of him.
“Sorry to interrupt your lunch,” she said.
“Well, you weren’t. I mean you sort of were, but as Mona out there will tell you, I don’t really have a set lunchtime, I’m just kind of picking at food all day. Helps me think. Mona?” he said suddenly, much louder. “Any napkins out there, by any chance?” Mona didn’t appear, not then or for the remainder of the interview. “So where do we begin? I never know where to begin these things. I know I have your résumé on the computer somewhere.” He tapped a few keys and sat back hopefully. “No,” he said. He typed something else and hit Return with a flourish. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered, and then flinched guiltily. Helen unsnapped her bag and slid him another copy of her CV.
He looked it over. “Computer skills are obviously a big requirement around here,” he said. “Just kidding. Anyway, I don’t see any sort of public relations background here, and for this job, even though it could technically be an entry-level thing, I am kind of hoping for someone with some experience in the field. Of course I may not get that. You
have no experience at all in the field?”
“Not in public relations per se,” Helen said gamely.
“Not per se? What do you mean? You have experience that’s whatever is the opposite of per se? Per don’t say?”
Helen laughed. There was something very unassuming about him, both cheerful and apologetic, even as he was in the process of brushing her off just like everyone else had. “Well, I guess what I mean,” she said, “is that I’m actually not entirely sure what it is you do.”
He raised his eyebrows. “ ‘You’ meaning me, or ‘you’ meaning what the hell does ‘public relations’ mean in general?”
“Both,” she said, surprising herself with her bravery. If this had happened at Condé Nast, she would have smoothed out her skirt and left by now.
He pursed his lips. “Rensselaer Valley,” he said, surprisingly. “Nice town. I have a house in New Paltz myself. May I—I hope you won’t think I’m presumptuous if I ask you something?”
“Not at all.”
“There is a certain thinness to this résumé,” he said, quite kindly, “a certain, um, provincial quality, that suggests to me that you have a life—a married life, a family life—in which circumstances have maybe changed recently?”
Helen colored, and nodded. She had meant for the CV to cover that up, not reveal it.
“And you have children?” he went on. “Because this is the résumé of someone who has spent the last ten or fifteen years raising a family—”