by Alon Preiss
“Am I torturing you?” her husband asked her.
Alice shook her head. “No. I like real emotion. Even when I hate it.”
He nodded, but not in agreement — just something to do with his face.
“The former Harriet Blakely, of course, reappeared in my life recently.”
She remained silent.
“I have not been faithful to you as promised,” he said.
Alice didn’t know how to respond to this formal announcement. It came as no particular surprise. She just sat there at the table. She shrugged. The admission annoyed her. That was all.
“I’ve realized that I still love Harriet,” he said, almost musing to himself. “I have realized how much I still love Harriet.”
He rested his head in his hands, embarrassed and regretful and, at the same time, a little bit blissful in the middle of his cloud of love. Alice looked hard at Blake’s face.
“She won’t take you back,” Alice said. “If she would take you back, that would be the first thing that you would say. ‘I am leaving you for Harriet.’ But she won’t, so you don’t. Am I right?”
“Yeah.”
She walked around the kitchen table, stood behind him, put her hands on his shoulders, leaned forward and pressed her cheek against his.
“This was so unnecessary, Maurow,” she said. “It’s okay if you’re in love with someone else. Isn’t it okay to be in love with someone else? Can’t I be in love with someone else? Darling? Someone from long ago? Can’t I remember moments that could never come again? Isn’t that just human? You would have still known how I felt about you. I still would have known how you felt about me.” Her code. Still sticking to the contractual rules of the marriage.
He didn’t answer.
“I would have wanted to comfort you,” she said.
“You couldn’t have done that, Alice.”
Maurow packed up a week’s worth of clothes, called for a car to come get him and take him away. Alice didn’t argue with him — she was not certain where they could go from here — but she needed to be hugged and kissed, and so she hugged and kissed him; grabbed him from behind, pulled him back as he headed toward the door, kissed him on the back of the neck, tugged on his hair and ran her fingers through it. “I’ll miss you,” she said. “And you’ll miss me too.” She was worried about him, she said, and she was also worried about herself.
He turned around.
Maurow congratulated her again on her book auction. He did not say that he’d stopped loving her, Alice noticed. Then again, maybe he’d never taken that promise seriously. Still, she thought, a promise is a promise.
With a sad smile full of warmth, he looked into her eyes and kissed her lips, a kiss filled with tenderness and regret. Alice wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back strongly and insistently, as though by the strength of her kisses she could somehow erase the last few weeks. She pushed her body against his; their lips rubbed roughly together. Now her tears streamed down Blake’s cheeks, dripping onto a suit still spattered with raindrops. After a while, he broke free, gently but unambiguously, and a little while after that he was gone, speeding away in a big sleek black car to a big white sleek expensive hotel someplace very nearby but very far away, too.
Installed in his room, Maurow picked up the telephone and dialed his office, had central reception page the computer genius who worked on the twenty-second floor. The genius called him back fifteen minutes later, trying hard not to sound just awakened in a bedroom out in Scarsdale. Maurow briefly explained the situation concerning Carly Barrows, the unions, the Burma connection, and the pushy human rights lawyer who was causing so much trouble. “I need you to track Harriet Pointer’s whereabouts and her travel plans,” Maurow concluded, as though that were only logical, given the sensitive public relations issues involved. The genius grunted out an affirmative response, and he didn’t ask any questions, as though he, too, considered all this a perfectly reasonable request to make in the middle of the night.
The guy called back forty-five minutes later. Maurow looked up from his room service — a big plate full of pheasant, of all things, which he’d chosen for a post-midnight snack — and he clicked the remote. A hissing voice, distorted through speaker phone, filled the room.
“Harriet Pointer is still in New York,” the genius yawned. “She’s staying at the Marquis. She will take a 9 a.m. flight back home tomorrow morning, from Kennedy.” He told Maurow the airline and the flight number, and then, after a brief pause, he added, “Will there be anything else you need to know?” A completely ingenuous question — how he kept his job, made everyone happy. He would stay up a few more hours for Blake Maurow if necessary and still plunk himself down at his desk at 8:30 in the morning.
“That’s all,” Maurow said. “I’m sorry to wake you up for this.”
The genius said it was okay. “I was awake anyway,” he muttered. Maurow laughed at this, and so the genius joined in, too, laughing tiredly but good-naturedly at his own half-hearted, sycophantic lie.
He wanted a nap, but he was afraid that he wouldn’t wake up in time to catch Harriet at the airport. So he called for a car, which met him downstairs ten minutes later. They sped along the highway, too fast, zipping past headlights suspended in the darkness of very early morning that burned greenish smears across Maurow’s eyes. He was desperately tired, and only vaguely aware that he was engaging in what could only be called an act of passion, and not even slightly aware that it was doomed to failure. Success wasn’t the point, after all. Maurow did realize that, tonight, there was something more than faintly ridiculous about him. The rational lobe of his brain hovered at the car ceiling, looking down at Maurow, tonight a ragged unglued whirlpool of passion, sitting in the backseat, face white and pale and frozen into an expression of regretful shock, the left side of his mouth curved slightly downward, quivering, like a silent stammer.
The car drove off, and Maurow walked into the great half-empty airport, drained of its life and energy in the early hours of morning. He plunked down onto a stool at a breakfast place and ordered a cup of coffee from the sleepy-eyed man behind the counter. He read a copy of yesterday’s Daily News, wondered idly if the new issue was out yet, and more idly wondered if he were in it.
After a while, the sun came up, and Maurow kept glancing at the list of flights, poised and ready to dash off to Harriet’s gate and make a scene at a moment’s notice.
At 6 a.m., shifts changed, and a new guy appeared behind the breakfast counter. He kept telling Maurow jokes, just terrible puns, at which Maurow would smile politely but weakly, wanting to be left alone with his thoughts, such as they were. “What’s the difference between a house of spirits and an elephant’s or other large animal’s gaseous extirpation?” the guy asked, feigning a teasing sort of intellectual pose. Maurow said he didn’t know, and the guy said that one was a bar-room while in contrast and contradistinction the other was a BAROOM! “That’s a good one,” Maurow said, and the guy behind the counter replied, “I keep gettin’ ya’!” and Maurow nodded and said, “Yes, you do.” And so the guy told another joke.
Maurow kept drinking coffee, non-stop, at first afraid of falling asleep, and then later because he had nothing else to do. The guy behind the counter kept pouring him more coffee and telling him more jokes. Maurow must have been aware that there were other little Formica lunch counters dotting the airport, but it wasn’t until later, until well after dawn, that he finally wondered why he hadn’t gotten up and left. Perhaps he’d enjoyed the company after all, Maurow would muse, realizing that he might have learned something new about himself, or rediscovered his inner child, the small boy from decades ago who’d once been genuinely amused by his father’s brother, the family funny guy, the old man with funny faces and funny voices and, from time to time, a funny prop. Uncle Bob, the cut-up.
Then the flight was announced, Gate 12. Maurow tossed twenty dollars on the counter and dashed out into the main corridor of the airport. The guy behind th
e counter called something after him, probably a farewell of some kind, but Maurow didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t really try to figure it out.
Turned left, then down an escalator, then another left.
Then, in front of him, he saw Harriet, lumbering along, pulling a suitcase on little wheels.
He sped up, walked alongside her. Gate 12 was still far away.
He said nothing. She turned and looked up at him.
“Maurow,” she muttered. “Sneaking up on me. Quiet, like the Shadow.”
“I couldn’t think of what to say,” he explained.
“Oh, well.” She looked off into the distance. “Sorry about that scene. If it makes you feel better, I lost the account.”
“It doesn’t make me feel better.” He shook his head. “Why would that make me feel better?”
“An emotional topic for me,” she said. “That’s why I took the client, because it was a very emotional topic for me.” She looked over at him, then quickly away. “And emotional for you, too, I guess.”
The two of them walked slowly together, floating along in the fluorescent lights, translucent specters shrinking and fading in the rising din of airport morning.
“It was a mean thing for me to do to you, I guess,” she said.
“I think so,” he agreed, no rancor in his voice.
“Well,” she said. “I suppose that I regret it, now.”
Maurow started to ask her a question, then he thought better of it, and he shut his mouth. Then, all at once, he blurted it out: “What do you think happened to him?” he asked.
“How should I know?” she said testily, annoyed more than saddened that this shared tragedy had been mentioned for the first time.
“I didn’t say you should know,” Maurow replied. “I asked what you think happened.”
“It was the biggest mystery in Colorado history,” she said. “Maybe one person knows. Maybe two. Maybe nobody alive knows.”
“Do you think he’s alive?” Blake was insistent. He was sure she knew what he meant. He still didn’t say their son’s name. Couldn’t, maybe.
“How can I have any opinion on that, Blake?” she asked. Now she looked very sad. “How can I have any view when there are no facts? Just empty space. You know what we say in law? ‘A patch of blue sky.’ That’s all he left behind.” She smiled sadly at this.
“What does your heart tell you?” he asked plaintively.
“What does your heart tell you, Maurow?”
“It changes, day to day. Sometimes, I just know he’s alive. When you and I arrived at the island, Harriet, I knew it as well as I know my first name. Then when you left, the certainty left with you. Right now, I feel like he’s looking down on us from heaven and crying.”
Harriet listened to Maurow speak, and she realized for the first time that he still saw Magic in the world, even if he didn’t know it. He still believed that his life was a spell that he could unravel. He was a believer, the last true believer in the fantasies of childhood, and this realization made her very angry.
“All these years,” she whispered, “you’ve been trying to hope. You’ve thought that if Tim turned up, we’d be together again. Or if we fell in love again, it would revive him. Deep down, that’s what you thought.” This seemed to make her angry, or disgusted. She turned away, moving ahead more quickly, lugging her suitcase behind her. He heard her say, “Can’t take this,” before her voice faded away, lost in the crowd and the noise of the planes, taking off and landing, and the loudspeaker, calling out again and again the names of relatives lost somewhere in the airport.
Maurow started moving quickly, and he soon caught up to her, walking along just a few inches behind her.
“Remember what we imagined?” he whispered to the back of her head. “Remember how we used to talk about the last years of our lives? Just step into your old skin. Start calling yourself Mrs. Blake Maurow. Or call yourself whatever you want, but readjust your mind. We can go live someplace by the sea, Gloucester, or something like that, with the waves crashing against the cliff that our house is built on. As though we’d lived our whole life together.” She kept walking, now faster. “We were the best parents,” he said. “So briefly, but we were the best team in the world. Remember?” A little out of breath, Maurow added: “I’ll start writing the books again. I’ll bring him back. Timmy, and I’ll bring back Rabbit. Right after they defeated the pirates. I’ll bring them both back.”
She stopped walking, just stood there. Finally she turned around, her face now streaked with tears.
“You can bring nothing back.” Her voice shifted unsteadily between anger and a sad sort of guiltiness, and she blurted out thoughts that seemed strung wildly together. “I walked out on you. I left you when we should have been comforting each other, I left at just the time when you had a right to expect me to stay. But I chose to forget — to get a new life, get a new name. I left you with everything. I did a very bad thing to you, Blake, something that should make you very angry at me, angry forever. I never thought the last thirty years were just an interruption. I never viewed my whole adult life as a detour in the original plan. I loved Pointer. Even since his death, I have always considered him the great love of my life. I am not the woman for you to spend your late afternoon years with, Blake Maurow.” When she said this, she seemed as though she regretted it. Then a little mental shrug — nothing left to say, and no time to be sorry, not when she had a plane to catch. “I am not the woman for you.”
Uncertainly, she turned and moved on.
“Yes, you are,” Maurow said softly, not as a passionate declaration of emotion, but just as a simple fact, as something he had always known and never doubted during all of these years, something as definite as the past they had lived together. He knew that she heard him, because her saw her muscles stiffen, saw her gait slow. Then she sped up again, and she vanished into the airport crowd, pulling her luggage behind her.
When she faded from view, he suddenly realized, and for the first time, that this was his life. From a beginning that seemed to have promised decades of happiness, he’d had this life thrust upon him. This was his life. It was not going to change back. He would not slip silently into another universe and awaken a young man in his big marriage bed in Colorado, Timmy pounding on the bedroom door, the sound of eager little fists gradually seeping into his dreams and shaking him into consciousness. Alice had never been an invitation to re-live his childhood. She was not some mysterious figure beckoning from another land. In spite of the similarities — the unexpected pregnancy, the hurried wedding — Alice was not a rerun of Harriet. She had always just been Alice. The little girl in her womb was not a second chance to save Timmy and nurture him to adulthood. Alice’s fetus was just another little person destined not to survive. This was it; that other world, a world painted in bright colors and smiles, was not coming back. And Blake Maurow never saw his Harriet again.
After Maurow left, Alice paced around the apartment, watched some television. Tried to sleep in bed, distracted by her habit of flipping over to the left. Tried to sleep in the middle of the bed, instead of on the left, and could not. She went out to the living room, and she tried to sleep on the couch, but her eyes flew open at every little noise from the city outside, at every creak within the old building. Went out to the terrace in her robe, curled up in a sheet, and eventually fell asleep in a big reclining beach chair.
The next morning at ten, Eden’s door buzzed.
“Hello,” Eden said through the speaker.
“Get your phone fixed!” Alice shouted irritably at the other end. Her voice came out in a series of pops, buzzes and hisses. “Let me in, dammit.”
A moment later, she heard Alice lugging a big bag up the stairs. Inside, Alice tossed the bag in the corner.
“To make a long story short,” Alice barked, “Blake walked out on me, I haven’t slept, the apartment is driving me crazy. I need to crash someplace for a few days and I need some company. Okay?”
&nbs
p; “Um,” Eden said droopily. “Um ... okay.”
Alice collapsed on Eden’s bed.
“My book sold for really big bucks at an auction yesterday afternoon,” Alice said, “but don’t ask me how much because I won’t tell you. Then Maurow totally freaked out.”