by Alon Preiss
“No,” he said.
“Do you have any children from any other marriages?”
“No,” he said.
“I didn’t think so,” she said. “I think my spying’s been pretty good over the years. Do you have any illegitimate children?” she asked.
“Not that I know of,” he muttered. “You?”
She told him that she had three kids. “Thomas,” she said, “who’s a slacker. My youngest. He has some greatness in him, I think. But now he’s a slacker. That’s what the kids say these days. My middle child, Elliott, is doing computer programs. He’s richer than you and me combined, Blake. He started his own company, which designs programs that do very highly technical things for financial institutions, and he charges a lot of money, and his penetration of the market is widespread. And I’m very proud of him. He’s married, and he has one little baby. So I’m a grandmother. Does that make you a grandfather? I guess it doesn’t. My oldest child is Lucy. Not ‘Lucille.’ I planned for her to be informal, which she is. And she’s very beautiful. Not yet married, but widely beloved.”
“How old is Lucy?” Maurow asked, less than idly, and Harriet lied, lowering Lucy’s age by a couple of years. She stared guiltily down at her coffee.
“The fourth time you gave birth,” Maurow asked, “did it become routine?”
“Never,” Harriet said. Then she went back over Maurow’s question in her head; she thought about the way he’d chosen his words. She took a breath. “Blake. There’s something we haven’t talked about. You know. Should we? Clear the air?”
Maurow shook his head. “No,” he replied. “It’s nice seeing you, right? Nice to talk like two old friends. No reason to be sad.”
Harriet Pointer could think of many reasons to be sad — any lifetime of fifty-plus years would yield plenty, she guessed — and she didn’t understand why her former husband would say such a thing. But she didn’t push him any further. She changed the subject.
“In the decades between me and Alice,” Harriet said, a while later, “who comforted you? You know, over the devastation I must have caused you?” Looking up, she laughed, as though she couldn’t possibly have caused him any devastation. But really, she knew that she had caused him the worst sort of pain. She was testing him now, to see if he hated her and loved her at the same time.
“Well,” he said. “There were many years.”
“You must have had some action, right, Maurow?” she asked.
“I suppose,” he said mildly, “that I’ve led a normal existence.”
Harriet nodded. There were many years, after all, and many things that he would not tell her.
Back then, after Harriet left him, he bought a ticket for Paris. He didn’t know why; that just seemed to be a place to go. He bought a place there, a small apartment. He learned to speak fluent French. He took long walks along the Seine, bought wine and drank a lot of it. He took up pipe-smoking. He spent the summer in the South. He wrote to no one, to none of the friends they’d made together. He needed to earn no money; he needed to do nothing. He learned how to survive in solitude, even as crowds pushed by him in the street. He bought a croissant every morning. He sat all afternoon in a café across the street from his home. Sometimes he would sit in his apartment and, peering out the window, work on an oil painting of the street below. He became rather accomplished at night-time scenes, particularly when it was raining. He learned to play the guitar. A year after his arrival in Paris, he met a woman in a little art gallery. An Italian. Her name was Benedetta, which he liked saying, and it made her laugh to hear him say it. Particularly the last two syllables, which he would draw out on the roof of his mouth and the tip of his tongue: det-ta. The gallery had agreed to exhibit one of his paintings. He was embarrassed, but Benedetta said she thought he had promise. Not as a painter, as it would turn out, but as a lover of some longevity. She was older than he, but still young, probably in her early thirties. He would never know for sure. She was also taller, with a big crooked nose that looked beautiful on an Italian but would not have looked beautiful if placed on the face of a girl from Iowa. Or Idaho. Or just about anyone else. He loved her big crooked nose and her big white crooked teeth, and her long legs, wrapped around him. And her lousy French and her worse English, and the way they would both laugh when they couldn’t communicate at all. After a month together in his little Paris apartment, she took him back to Italy with her, to her big house on a lake a few miles inland of the Amalfi coast. Her parents were dead, and now she had the family’s dwindling funds all to herself. She’d opened her own art gallery in a tiny, nearby town, but it didn’t do very well, and it did even worse once she began to put Maurow’s paintings in the window. “It’s just a hobby,” she told him. He learned Italian, fluently. One night, she lay naked in front of her big fireplace, and he sat a few feet away, a glass of wine in his hand. The flames glowed in her dark hair, crackling around the outline of her long body. He had a thought, which he translated into Italian. “Naked,” he said to her, in Italian, “you are like a twisting, winding superhighway that never ends.” She laughed at this; seemed to find it delightful. He thought it sounded good, too, in Italian. In some sort of way, he was very happy in this precarious existence. It was like a movie he’d studied in school: Dodsworth. A man whose wife, obsessed with youth, leaves him out of almost sheer spite. He ultimately settles down with a mature Italian woman of some wealth. She doesn’t treat him shabbily, as his wife had done. He is happy. The End.
A while later, Maurow left Benedetta. He saved no photographs of her. He left behind his oil paintings. He moved to Tunis. But there was not much for him there. Then he moved back to the little house that he and Harriet had shared in Colorado. He stayed there one week. Then he moved on again. On a business trip to Italy five years before he met Alice, he took a detour to the little town that once housed one of the very very few galleries ever to display Blake Maurow originals. The town was filled with American tourists, mostly college kids with backpacks. He asked the locals about Benedetta, but he could find no one who remembered her or her gallery. He tried to find her home, but he could no longer remember the way. He began to wonder if it had ever happened. Like his marriage to Harriet.
One year before he met Alice, he was leaving a business dinner on the Upper West Side. He asked a woman on the street for the time; his watch had stopped. She didn’t know. “Are you going to the opera?” she asked. He couldn’t recognize her accent. She was vaguely Asian, wearing a full fur coat. He said that he wasn’t going to the opera. She said that she was, but only because she could think of nothing else to do. She was from Kazakhstan originally. She had married a Turk, and now they lived together in Istanbul. Her husband had been called back from their American vacation two days early. He had seemed more worried than she had ever seen him. She didn’t know why, and for this reason she was very afraid that she would return to Turkey to discover that his empire had crumbled, that she was destitute. She had a second ticket to the opera, which was supposed to have been her husband’s. Maurow joined her instead. Basically opposed to adultery, he slept with her anyway, in the big suite at the Plaza that she’d shared the night before with her husband. Afterwards, she told him that her husband was horrible — ugly, mean, physically and verbally abusive, casually flatulent. All of this, and more, she whispered in Maurow’s ear, as though to justify to them both the various immoral acts they had just engaged in together. Lying with another man in a cold embrace, talking about her husband’s seemingly infinite variety of flaws in a dull monotone of broken English. Maurow tried to change the subject. “Let’s order some champagne from room service,” he said. “Very romantic, champagne.” She agreed. “It will help me,” she said, “in this terrible time of trauma and fear, to get very drunk.”
When Maurow awoke at 8 a.m., she was crying. “I am such a slut,” she said. “A tramp.” Maurow left her room that morning, shaken. He never learned her last name. From time-to-time he would wonder whether her husband’s busines
s had collapsed, and whatever had become of her.
When he had first gone to work at the corporation, he was surprised at the number of “functions” he was expected to attend, and he quickly acquired the first in a series of girlfriends, women who would stand beside him when he needed someone to stand beside him, and who would laugh when necessary at not-very-funny jokes. He had a lot of money, and was not very bad looking, after all. Women liked him a lot; women had always liked him, always would like him. Nothing lasted long. One year, sometimes two. They all smelled good, and each of his girlfriends felt very nice and soft when she hugged him. Once he stayed with a woman for five years. He grew older.
“You don’t want to discuss this?” Harriet asked.
He nodded, took a gulp of coffee that she could tell was too big and adventurous, cringed as the coffee burned his mouth, then burned the back of his throat. He shut his eyes and gasped for air.
“Why,” she asked, “can’t you tell me about that? I won’t laugh at you. I won’t be hurt, or jealous. I’m just curious.”
“I somehow think that to talk about that ... not fair to Alice, or something. I’m very happy with Alice, or content, or whatever. Everything has reached its conclusion. Fade-out. Credits. You know. Like in the movies.”
“You wanna reminisce?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “About what?”
“The old days,” she said.
“Of course. What about the old days? Will we be careful? Avoid dangerous areas?”
“Well,” she said, “I brought along some photographs. My sister had kept some. A few that we sent with our Christmas cards. Some that she took of us. I was careful in going through them. I kept out all pictures of the two of us fighting, or signing divorce papers.” With a smile. “You won’t believe it, but I left the photographs upstairs. So I’ll invite you in for a night-cap.”
He shook his head. “Not me,” he said.
“I’m not trying to lure you into bed,” she insisted. “For God’s sake, I don’t want you to re-live any traumatic memories.”
“Nope. Not going up there.”
He signaled to the waiter across the room.
She sighed. “All right, Blake.”
“I don’t want to look at old Christmas cards, I guess,” he said, “and I should be going.”
“You shouldn’t be going,” she said. “But go. Go ahead.”
He stopped, stared very hard at her. Almost too quietly to be heard: “I see you in there,” he said. “The girl I married.”
She nodded. She put her hand lightly on his. “Since you’re not coming up to my room, I can tell you something that would have threatened you otherwise.” She leaned forward and said, in a low near-whisper: “My God, you’ve barely aged. You’re incredibly handsome, Blake Maurow.”
Then the waiter arrived. The moment was broken. She grabbed the check, scribbled her room number on it, tossed a fifteen-dollar tip on the table.
“Well,” Maurow said, just a few minutes later, standing up from the table. “Bye.”
This end was too sudden, and she was afraid that it was for good. She could not help but be very sad, and almost angry, that he wouldn’t come up to her hotel room to look at pictures of themselves as young married children. She didn’t think it was fair that he would deny her this. And so when she said goodbye to him, it was not with the casual friendliness that she heard in his voice. Probably, she sounded angry, and she probably sounded sad too. Because she could see her anger settle onto him, she could tell the impact it had on him, and she saw sadness grow in his eyes.
Sitting at the little breakfast table in the kitchen the next morning, Alice told Blake that he had spoken in his sleep, and that he had woken around 3 a.m. whispering in a scared voice about the terrible nightmare he’d had. Alice had soothed and comforted him, hugging him, running her fingers through his hair.
“Do you remember that?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Not really.”
Alice wondered if he had heard her. He was listening to the radio, trying to figure out how to get across town.
She smiled. “It was touching. Like you really needed me.” She was in her bathrobe, and he was already in his suit.
Not looking at her, swallowing the last bit of coffee. “Of course I need you, Alice,” he said.
She stopped smiling at him and looked away. His absent-minded assurance left a chill.
Harriet flew back home early the next morning, and she fell asleep on the plane, lost in the very center of the airplane engine’s rumbling vibration. When she woke, she had no idea where she was. Then she remembered. For a moment, she thought Blake was on the plane in the seat beside her. But he wasn’t, and she was surprised to discover how terribly the realization disappointed her, and how deeply, now, she missed him.
Took a cab from the airport, drove out an hour, and after a time saw large homes rising up over the hills, and then continued on further, until the trees over the spanking clean street met just above the orange-yellow line, their branches twisting together and blocking out the sky, and Harriet and the cab descended into this tree-tunnel, emerging thirty minutes later in the village that had sheltered Pointers since their migration west. For a moment, her old name flashed through her mind — Harriet Maurow — and it just made her laugh. Now, after so many years here, so many years in this big house, she felt a solid part of the sweep of Pointer family history.
Kicked off her shoes, walked through the front hallway, greeted her second husband’s photograph as cheerfully as she had greeted him every day for decades, went upstairs to the bedroom that they had shared for what had seemed, at the time, an endless idyll, and fell into a three-hour, dreamless nap.
“Hi, Mom.” The next day, with the usual bright smile, her daughter Lucy greeted her. The other night, sitting at dinner with Blake Maurow, Harriet had felt a sudden urge to have some sort of honest moment with her daughter, and that honest moment was now still stuck in the front lobe of her brain, a little prediction of the future, playing over and over, an endless loop.
Lucy, her oldest, was for a number of reasons her most special child: the one who drew the most friends to her, and yet the most distant. Lucy was in her thirties, now. Lucy was beautiful, Harriet supposed — thin and full of energy and enthusiasm. Maladjusted, Harriet also supposed, but, from a distance, there was no one who seemed less so.
When Lucy was with her friends, or with Harriet’s relatives, or in-laws, the room seemed to gravitate to her. Everyone welcomed the mirror onto themselves that Lucy’s wide-eyes provided (her father’s wide eyes) and, as they told their little stories — their episodic, bureaucratic, mundane or flamboyantly boring stories — they seemed to smile in anticipation of the supportive laugh they knew would be forthcoming. Lucy had a beautiful laugh, frequent and joyful and spirited as a bell. Yet no one knew her. No one knew what was in her head, buried underneath the appreciative (and increasingly, Harriet thought, empty) laughter in which she bathed her many admirers. If Lucy, her daughter, seemed happy, it was a narrow happiness — she was just a woman who smiled frequently, had many devoted but distant friends, and did not seem to like men, particularly, any more, or perhaps any differently, than she liked anybody else. No one understood little Lucy. Harriet didn’t, either.
Decades ago, pregnant, after her marriage collapsed, Harriet moved in with her sister Bea and Bea’s husband, hundreds of miles away from her old life, and she gave birth to her baby there. She named the child Lucy. Not “Lucille.” She didn’t see the point of naming her little girl something that no one would ever call her.
One week after Lucy came home from the hospital, Bea hoisted her up above her head, then held the little baby close to her face. She made cooing noises, and funny faces.
“She has her father’s eyes,” Bea said.
Harriet took the baby away from her sister, and she held Lucy close. “You’re wrong,” she said. “My baby is beautiful.”
She moved into her o
wn home. She hired a nanny, and she went back to school. She did well. She studied hard, and she scored A’s. The boys liked her. She was a little bit older, but she agreed to date one or two of them, and then a few more. One said: “You have a mystique.” She asked him what he meant, but he wouldn’t or couldn’t explain any further. He stammered and turned red. “Maybe mystique isn’t the word,” he said.
In a car with a boy named Matt, Harriet finally agreed to talk about Maurow.
“He broke my arm,” she said. She held out her left arm. “In three places.” Pointing: “Here, here and ... here.”
Matt took this as a cue for outrage, and he overdid it a little bit, but Harriet was pleased.
“I’ll kill him,” he said. “I’ll find him and I’ll kill him.”
She shook her head. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Well,” Matt said, shaking his head dubiously. “Well, okay.”
When Lucy grew older, Harriet tried to explain the absence of her father. She presented their life as an almost epic struggle of good against evil, and she presented their escape from Blake Maurow’s realm as ripping and exciting.
She told her daughter that Blake Maurow could never find them, and that she needn’t worry.
Lucy, at the age of three, was a skinny little girl with a round face. She frequently looked worried, but she would deny this to her mother. Cartoons on TV made her laugh, but after she laughed, she would look worried again. She told her friends in nursery school that her father was an astronaut, and that he was up in space, flying around. Her teacher fretted about this, and called her mother. Harriet confirmed the story. “He is up in space,” she said. “We’re waiting for him to come down. He just flies around and around. Up there in space. Did you think Lucy would make up such a thing?”