by Alon Preiss
Harriet Pointer shouted out: “A responsible corporate world citizen? Listen, my friends, you’ve all seen with your own eyes — ”
The man in the gray suit tried to drown her out, screaming over her self-righteous, amplified voice until he felt as though his vocal cords would burst. “We’ve cut all ties to Burma,” he shouted. “We’ve created an informational project to help raise awareness of the problems of disadvantaged children in the Third World. We’ve created the Carly Barrows World Fund to distribute food in foreign countries — ”
“Suddenly there are so many good-hearted projects in Carly Barrows’ name!” Harriet Pointer called out. “Suddenly, for the sake of their corporate prestige, they would have you believe, ladies and gentlemen — ”
Her eyes wild, her voice deafening, an enraged Harriet Pointer wished fire and brimstone on Carly Barrows, on the American public with its money and its blinders, and on all the corporate murderers of the world. The man in the gray suit fell to his knees, coughing, his throat parched and sore, his voice gone, his ear-drums popping with the force of Harriet Pointer’s anger.
Then he fell on his face, his world going dark.
The story of the “Carly Barrows Stalker” was reported by a few tabloid television programs and newspapers, but all of them, curiously, omitted Sergio’s name, although it must have been common knowledge. Carly seemed disappointed as the story faded away. She did not want to be stalked. But she didn’t want merely not to be stalked. She wanted to be loved. She wanted to be loved with the sort of intensity that, under another circumstance, would inspire stalking.
Carly could not talk to the other members of the cast. She considered them her enemies. And so, as the story of her obsessor’s obsession slipped from the news, she grew solitary, and more than a bit cantankerous. She returned to her prison in Holmby Hills at night and was swept back to the set under the protection of an armed guard in the morning. Until one day, when she disappeared.
No one knew how Carly Barrows escaped from the watchful eye of the producer’s security guards. Rumors flew that heads would roll. Carly was absent from the set for an entire day. Scenes were shot around her. One pivotal piece of business was shot using a stand-in, photographed from behind, with Carly reaction shots and looping planned for another day. When she finally appeared at the studio, more than twenty-four hours late, she could barely stand straight, and her speech was slurred almost beyond recognition. “You don’ respec’ me!” she shouted at the young actor who played her little brother. “An’ you don’ respec’ me!” she said, pointing at the actress cast as her mother. “You an’ you don’ respec’ me!” she screamed, turning to the man who played Winston Banks and, for some reason, to a gaffer who was present on the set for the very first time that morning.
After fifteen minutes, during which Carly accused every member of the cast and crew of disrespect — each one anxiously anticipating his turn in the spotlight — four security agents appeared to dispatch Carly Barrows just as, sometime earlier, they had defused her alleged stalker. One took her left leg, one took her right leg, and one agent took each arm. She was placed in handcuffs and shackles and tossed into the back of a limo, which ferried her quickly to the producer’s home, where she found herself in her room with a kettle of warm milk with Ovaltine, and several packs of cigarettes. Two unsmiling guards stood at their assigned station just outside the door.
Her stomach filled with Ovaltine, the television tuned to one of the glossy entertainment newsmagazines, and bed spins just beginning to subside, Carly Barrows was nodding off when she heard her name on the television. Her eyes jerked open. “Ms. Barrows, who is unavailable for comment as she is currently involved in international charitable work on behalf of the Trans-African Relief Agency, did not attend the press conference — ”
Blinking drunkenly, Carly muttered, “The Trans-Relief whuh?”
On the tube, a smiling man with perfect hair and phony white teeth said, “Well, you know, Trish, through her company, Carly Barrows has supplied a list of the human rights organizations that she either is involved with or has founded in her own name. And you have to remember, insiders say that Carly’s always insisted on a ten-point test before her name can be associated with any product. She will not support any product that harms animals, children, the environment, or helps to prop up fascist or oppressive regimes. These insiders say that this one just slipped between the cracks.”
“Slibetweendacracks?” Carly gurgled. She reached under the bed, pulled out a bottle of scotch, took a gulp, and lit another cigarette. “Waddafuk?”
On the television, the radiantly blond Trish continued: “Ted, my sources tell me that as soon as Carly was informed of these conditions, she demanded that all ties to Burma be cut.”
“And,” Ted said, “Carly is looking into the possibility of portraying jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi in an upcoming television miniseries.”
Carly, in bed, chewing on her cigarette: “See saw sushi?”
“The oddest moment of the evening — see, Trish, look at the videotape. One of the executives of the Carly Barrows Designer Label’s parent corporation, Blake Maurow, burst into tears during Harriet Pointer’s moving description of conditions in Burma, and then he ran out of the room in something of a tizzy. His bizarre behavior remains a mystery.”
“Fokinshit,” Carly said.
Vomit flew out of her mouth, splattered across the television set. She clenched her jaw shut, and green puke shot out between her teeth, up her nose, hitting the walls, the window panes. The cigarette flew through the air and stuck to the wall in the middle of a clump of vomit. Carly dropped her drink on the bedspread, her left hand fell out of the bed, and she slumped back into the pillow.
She passed out, and she slept.
The phone rang at the Maurow home. Sitting on the edge of the bed, the television flickering, Alice hesitantly reached out to pick up the receiver, but then she held back, listened to the voice on the machine. It was her agent. Bidding was done, he told her. One million dollars. They had made a deal on advertising, on a publicity tour. He listed the details.
She sighed, and she picked up the telephone.
“Thanks Toby,” she said. “You done good.”
“I want squeals of delight,” he said.
“It’s a hundred fifty thousand for you,” she said. “I’m glad I can finally pay you back for all your time and effort on my behalf.”
“It’s almost a million for you, Alice. Just say it out-loud. A million dollars.”
She smiled, tears staining her vision. “I’m sorry, Tobias, dear. This is supposed to be our big day, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” His jubilation had faded, but he still sounded happy.
“I’ve got 1959 Chateau Lafite in the cellar. I wish I could invite you to come over right now and drink it with me and Blake.”
“A million dollars, Alice. Think of it. Just say it out-loud once.”
“I already have a million dollars, you know.” She laughed sadly. “But I only have one husband, and he’s cracked up on TV, and I don’t even know why. In every paper, my good week will be paired with his bad week, and I don’t even understand what’s going on.”
Maurow wandered through the streets. His tears were on one of the local eleven o’clock newscasts, but not on any of the others, but he didn’t know that. If his life were a movie, he would have passed an electronics store with fifteen television sets in the window, and a crowd of curious passersby would have been standing on the sidewalk, watching Maurow cry. Maybe they would have been laughing. Maurow would have flipped up the collar of his trench coat, pushed down the brim of his hat, and walked quickly by. But because this was his life, and this was not a movie, Maurow walked aimlessly and in total anonymity through the light evening mist of the city.
When he returned to his apartment, it was 4 a.m. He briefly imagined that Alice might have gone to sleep. That he would wake up the next morning, and his little episode would be on some
gossip column page of some tabloid paper that neither one of them read, and that Alice would say nothing about it. That they would then live on in relative happiness for a few years, or decades. That maybe when he was seventy-five, he would ask Alice whether she knew the story, and she would say, That? Oh, yes — but everyone has things in their life that aren’t pretty, and you’d always been a good husband. He thought his little scenario was unlikely, though momentarily comforting. Alice would get a big divorce settlement and he would be alone and sad. He trudged mud into the front hallway.
Alice was sitting at a little table in their big kitchen, wearing jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt. She was drinking a cup of coffee and watching a black and white movie on their little kitchen TV. A thermos sat on the table beside her coffee mug. She had been drinking coffee all night to be awake to give him hell.
She stood, the kitchen chair scraping against the floor. Her hands were behind her back, her face white, mouth tightly shut.
“Alice,” he said, nodding. He walked into the kitchen, sat down at the table. She sat, too. He smiled. Not too difficult. He had a knack for it, smiling with reassuring grace when things seemed darkest. “I heard about your book auction,” he said. “Congratulations.” Then he said some flattering things about her writing, abstractly enthusiastic compliments muttered in a voice buttered with his usual charm.
“Blake,” she whispered. “Where were you?”
“Walking around.” His overcoat was still on, flecked with raindrops and mist. “I didn’t acquit myself well at the news conference,” he added.
“I know.”
“Couldn’t help it.”
“I would assume,” she said. “You’re nothing but control, Blake. I can’t imagine what sort of pressure would make you stop controlling yourself.”
He shrugged. Looking at the kitchen darkening, a hazy world that seemed, now, like a dream, like something he’d feared for a long time, something that still hadn’t happened. “A little coffee, please. I’m exhausted, completely.”
“Get it yourself.” Not angrily, just matter-of-fact. She wouldn’t get him his coffee mug, and she wouldn’t pour his coffee.
He stood up, walked to the cabinet. Got his favorite coffee mug, something he’d bought in Italy, on his last trip there, five years before he met Alice, when he’d searched in vain for Benedetta and the big house he’d once lived in with her. Looking at the coffee mug, he thought about Benedetta for a moment, abstract, ungrounded thoughts. Benedetta. Oh yeah. Remember her? Looked over at Alice. “Don’t need to have this conversation,” he said. “I don’t want to. Made a fool out of myself, and I’m sorry about that. It hasn’t happened before. Probably won’t happen again.”
He walked back over to the table, just stood there, looking down at her.
“Now I know what it’s like to make a fool of myself. I didn’t like it. Won’t do it again. We’ll go to the bedroom, sleep, wake up, and forget about it. Okay?”
For a moment, he thought she might accept this.
She shrugged wearily, took a sip of coffee. He wondered why she was still drinking coffee. She seemed to be thinking it over.
“Come on, Blake,” she said at last. “I can’t have a kid. I write little silly stories that barely interest me. The only future that I have is you.” A little tear formed in the corner of her left eye. “Tell me that’s not a terribly sad thought.”
He sighed, poured half a cup of coffee from the thermos into his mug.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s do this.”
He sat down.
“Where should I start?” he asked. “What do you want to know?”
“You know where to start,” Alice said.
He nodded okay, and he took a gulp of his coffee
“A little while ago,” he said, “we went to a wedding. I saw a place card sitting there on the table. Harriet Blakely. This name had a lot of resonance for me. You picked up on that. I was embarrassed, and I pretended years later that you had misunderstood. Of course, it was a different Harriet Blakely, a girl you’d gone to college with. Of course, I knew even when I saw the name that it would have to be a different Harriet Blakely. But just seeing the name made me shake.”
“Who was Harriet Blakely?” Alice asked.
He didn’t answer. “Later,” he continued, “at your surprise party, I wanted to be someone else. Someone I used to be. So I just said I was. Your agent asked me: Are you Blake Maurow, the writer? I said yeah. I said I was. You said I wasn’t. Shut up, Blake. Excuse me, I’m sorry everyone. Forgive my husband. Shut up, Blake. Don’t embarrass me.” He almost sounded angry, but only almost.
“Go on. What would you have told everyone, had I not interrupted you?”
“Nothing much more. Maybe nothing more. I am or was Blake Maurow the writer. I said that already. I stopped writing because I didn’t want to keep telling children that magic would protect them from the world. I also said that already.” He frowned at Alice. “I wouldn’t have said anything else.”
“Where are your books?”
“Destroyed in the fire. The fire that destroyed all my memories. I sometimes wonder if I set it myself. I know I didn’t. But if this were a movie, I’d have set the fire myself, so that I wouldn’t have to remember my old life. Maybe, for all you know, maybe I did set the fire. I wouldn’t tell you if I had, so maybe you’ll never know.” He shook his head. “But all of a sudden, in the middle of that party, I wanted to be my old self. It struck me like crazy. Young pregnant wife. Beautiful pregnant wife, with whole married life in front of us. Lost baby. Me standing there with a drink in my hand with all the publishing phonies running around.”
He looked up, saw the confusion in Alice’s face.
“Why would your books be a secret that you’ve kept from me?” she asked.
“I illustrated books, too,” he said, not answering. “I used to be quite an artist, Alice. My paintings were displayed in a few galleries.” He smiled at the memory. “Well, one in Paris, one in Italy. A few people bought them. I wasn’t really ‘quite an artist,’ I guess. I’m tooting my own horn too much now. But at least it’s true that probably somewhere, someone owns Blake Maurow originals.” Then a thought struck him. “Well, the owners of my paintings could have tossed them out, I guess. Died, or something, and maybe their heirs didn’t want them. Just threw them out.”
He smiled, his eyes not on her.
“Never thought about that possibility,” he added.
Alice didn’t smile, and she didn’t move a single muscle in her face.
“Benedetta gave my paintings a prominent place in her gallery,” he said, and he laughed. “She is no longer in business, and that’s probably what did it to her.”
Alice’s heart jumped when she heard Blake say the name Benedetta, spoken with such familiarity. Alice didn’t know exactly who Benedetta was, but she didn’t really need to ask. Clearly Benedetta was some woman Blake had known in Italy. Probably someone of some significance in his life, one of those women Blake wouldn’t tell her about, and about whom, now, Alice did not want to know. She looked into her husband’s eyes, she could almost hear his mind crunching slowly through his life, wondering what to tell Alice, what he could say, what she could hear.
They were both silent.
Many years ago, years that stretched into decades ... many dead decades ago, a boy named Blake Maurow met a girl named Harriet. Her full name was Harriet Blakely. They met the way young people meet — in class, or at a party, or sitting next to each other in a library that stank of dusty books, or wandering lost through the carefully-tended, dark green campus — and their meeting inspired in both of them the feelings that such meetings inspire in the young. Goose bumps, chills up and down the spine. All that. They started talking, and maybe they were even halfway through their first date before she told him her last name. They both thought that was funny, and she said that if they ever were married, he should take her last name instead. In his mind, in later years, Maurow would rec
all that the idea stuck in his head at that moment: they would marry. Blake Blakely. It wasn’t funny when he thought back on it, as an older man, but as a boy just graduated from high school, it was funny, for some reason.
Harriet was young and slender, and she was pretty the way slender eighteen-year-old girls tend to be. She had a smile that could light up a room, and mischievous eyes that counteracted the unblemished joy in her smile, and a vicious, cutting wit that seemed almost remarkable coming from one so young, and so small. Maurow believed that she seemed the sort of girl likely to sum you up and dismiss you at the end of fifteen seconds, and that she found something within him worth exploring made him feel that he was a remarkable fellow, in that way, and for the very first time. This was a feeling that often kept him awake for hours, and woke him with a smile on his face.
At the end of their junior year, when Harriet learned that she was pregnant, it came as neither a shock nor a surprise to either of them. Their parents slapped together a big wedding that cost a lot of money, put on a big production before Harriet really began to show. She dropped out of school for the time being, and Blake finished up, turning in a mediocre performance. His mind wasn’t on his work, just on taking care of her. Money was no problem. He was rich. Harriet was rich, too. He didn’t need a good grade point average and a marketable skill, and he was glad of that. He bought a house. She gave birth to a baby boy, and they named him Timothy Maurow, which wasn’t very thoughtful, but seemed to fit. With no job to distract him, Blake spent all his time just looking after his boy, and hugging his wife. They lived in Colorado, in a house he would never sell, a house that would one day grow as a sort of legend in the mind of his second wife, at the end of a long road in the middle of the woods, with the mountains peaking up over the trees. Blake realized one day that, contrary to everything the poor and middle class hear in the media, or from their church — despite what anyone might say — it was great being young and rich.