by Lisa Unger
“I have to go,” she said, moving to him, resting against him.
“What’s going on?” He put a gentle hand on her arm, looked at her with concern. “A family emergency, you said.”
She hated when he did this, acted like their relationship was real, not some asinine mistake they were both making. He always wanted to chat and cuddle, or talk about his feelings like some teenage girl. Didn’t he understand? She just wanted to forget about herself for five minutes. When they first started seeing each other, what thrilled her the most was that her worries about the kids, money, her career, disappeared during these little romps. If the relationship evolved, all those worries would just carry over into this new place. The euphoria, the blessed escape of it would disappear; it would become just another thing to worry about. And that she couldn’t manage.
She told him quickly about Marcus and her sister, tried not to be curt or dismissive. Someone knocked on the restroom door; it was the only one in the back of the small coffee shop. Outside, she heard the clinking of silverware, the mutter of conversation. The aroma of bacon and maple syrup made her remember she’d skipped breakfast.
“I’ll be just a minute,” she called. There was no answer.
“What do you think happened to him?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, pulling her phone from her pocket and glancing at it, looking for messages.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” he offered. “I know the crime-beat reporter pretty well.”
She’d met Ben at a gallery opening for her work. He was an art critic who’d been less than kind to her in an earlier review. Common, maudlin, were the words that stuck in her mind. But still, she found herself drawn to him. He was a tall, powerful man with close-cropped dark hair and a neat goatee, a small silver hoop in each ear. From the nastiness of his written comments and his striking appearance, she expected him to be verbose, loud or overbearing. Instead she found him soft-spoken, carrying an aura of vulnerability. She found herself watching his face, for that moment when he thought no one was looking, when the muscles shifted and relaxed, revealing the true man. It never came. He was guarded, always.
“Seems like it’s always the people who do the least with their lives who have the nastiest things to say about those who do the most,” she’d said to him the night of their meeting, having had a bit too much to drink. The circle of people standing around them went silent, but she could feel Erik smiling beside her. He liked it when she got feisty.
Ben gave her a slow nod, took a sip of wine. “I’m sure it must seem that way. But how do you feel about all those critics who have nice things to say? Do you hold them in such disdain?”
She had to laugh. It came out deep and throaty and she saw his eyes shine at the sound of it.
“Of course not,” she answered. “Those critics are obviously brilliant.” And everyone joined in their laughter, relieved that the tension had dissipated.
“I love your work, Linda,” he said, and she saw a flash of arrogance. The way he talked to her in that group, the way he said her name as if they were old friends-it gave her a strange charge. “I hold you to a very high standard. That’s why I’m so disappointed when your work doesn’t meet your abilities. Which, admittedly, isn’t often.”
He raised a glass to her and the others in their group did the same. She could have been gracious here, but she wasn’t.
“So, are you a failed photographer, like so many critics? Do you have stacks of photographs somewhere that no magazine would buy, no agent would represent?”
Linda felt Erik give her a little warning squeeze on her lower back; they both knew wine changed her personality a bit, made her more aggressive, prone to saying things she never would sober. She held Ben’s eyes, enjoying the slow smile that spread across his face.
“No,” he said. “Even as a child my only ambition was to stand in judgment of artistic achievement.”
The group let out a roar of laughter that caused everyone else in the gallery to look at them.
Linda and Ben were fucking within the week.
“That would be great,” she said, moving into him, wrapping her arms around his middle. He was much bigger than Erik, broader through the shoulders, fuller in the middle. She liked this about him, his size. It made her feel safe, even though there was nothing safe about him or anything they did.
“I’ll text you,” he said into her hair.
She broke away from him and unlocked the door, peered out and didn’t see anyone waiting in the slim hallway leading back to the restaurant dining area. She cast him a backward glance and saw a sad look of longing on his face that made her heart catch.
“I’m sorry,” she said, though she didn’t know why.
“Me, too,” he said.
The difference between them was that he wasn’t happy in his marriage. Love had left his relationship long ago. He told her that he stayed with his wife because of their two daughters, ages six and eight. She’d seen pictures of them, both sweet faced, one dark, one light, just like her and Isabel. The sight of them made her feel such acute shame that she had to force herself not to look away when he trotted out whatever new photographs he had with him. She couldn’t imagine bringing pictures of her kids to these meetings, couldn’t understand why he did that.
Linda didn’t know which of them was guiltier in this affair, though she was fairly certain she was doing the most harm. Here she was, someone blessed with love and success and still unsatisfied. As she walked through the restaurant, no one noticed her-none of the diners, not the waitress at the busy counter or the cook over the grill. She loved the anonymity of New York City. You were always alone; no one cared what you did, what you wore, with whom you were sleeping. Everyone was so wrapped up in the dream of their own lives and what they wanted to be that they never saw you at all.
She called her sister again from the cab heading uptown. No answer.
10
I did as Detective Breslow suggested, starting checking my accounts. At the accountant’s office, there was no answer and no voice mail, though business hours were well under way. Not a good sign. With our computers gone, my normal way of checking accounts and credit cards was out of the question. So Detective Crowe and I walked down to the ATM on Broadway. It didn’t take long to confirm their suspicions; all our accounts had been reduced to a hundred dollars. I stared at the glowing numbers on the small screen and felt a burning in my chest, as if bile was coming up from my empty stomach. Four accounts-a checking, a savings, and two money markets-all empty except for a hundred dollars each, the minimum required to keep the accounts opened.
“I don’t believe this,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” said Detective Crowe, scribbling in his little book.
“Hey, are you done?” Some guy waiting impatiently behind us, shifting from foot to foot, gripping a cell phone in his hand. “You’re holding up the line.”
We moved from the queue and I ducked into a doorway, just so that I could lean against something, get out of the sidewalk crowd. People hurried past; the traffic on Broadway was a river of noise.
“How much are we talking about here?”
“Those are just the liquid accounts,” I said. The concrete beneath my feet felt like sand, shifting and unstable. “I don’t know, maybe around seventy thousand between the four of them?”
He nodded, not offering judgment, just writing, always writing in that stupid little book. I wanted to say something, but inside I was in a free fall, wondering about everything it had taken me so long to earn and grow. I wondered about the investment accounts-the IRAs, the pensions, the stocks. Of course, they would all be gone, too. The weight of it was starting to hit me; everything was gone. A hollow space was opening in my middle and I thought of my mother again.
MARGIE HAS THESE perfect long fingers, always bejeweled unapologetically with all manner of chunky gems.
“An old woman should wear jewels, big ones,” she says. “She’s earned them and they dis
tract from her fading looks. I may not be young anymore, but at least I’m rich. And that’s something.”
That’s Margie.
Except for the night she told us that she planned to marry Fred, I have never seen her lose herself-not in happiness, not in grief. She would smile but never indulge in a belly laugh. She would frown but never yell. As a younger woman, it was hard for me to imagine her as a girl buffeted by the same passions, desires, and ambitions that rocketed me through my education and career. I couldn’t imagine her lost in passion or crushed by disappointment. She seemed as stoic and steady as a stone column. This was a comfort in some ways, because she was always a place to moor in rough weather.
Years after I left home, after I’d graduated NYU and made my first real money, my mother told me about the months after my father’s death, about the staggering debt of which she’d been ignorant, the gambling addiction that drained him of everything he owned, including his will to live. It only took a week for her to discover that our home was about to go into foreclosure, our vehicles about to be repossessed, that everything she thought she owned, down to the new range, belonged to a bank that hadn’t been paid in months.
In the throes of grief for her husband, she was forced to face the reality that during their marriage he had lied about everything, spent all their money and beyond, and then abandoned us to live with his deceptions and mistakes. We were weeks from being homeless.
“I felt as though I’d swallowed drain cleaner,” she told me. “Everything inside me burned. I’ll never forget those nights, how I worried. How angry I was at your father, at myself for being so ignorant and weak. I had nowhere to turn. No one in our family had the kind of money I needed in order to save us. But then, of course, there was Fred.”
He’d loved her for years, she said, respectfully, from a distance. They’d met at church, where my mother had always gone alone on Sunday mornings. He was a wealthy man, came from money, inherited several very successful grocery stores, then made a fortune selling out to one of the big chains, made wise investments. He paid off all the debt my father left behind, the mortgage on our house.
“I don’t know what would have happened to us if it weren’t for Fred.”
“But did you love him, Mom?”
A pause, a sip of coffee where a monolithic emerald glinted in the sunlight. We watched Fred from the window as he filled a birdhouse with seed in their expansive backyard. Their Riverdale home was palatial; I’ve never heard them fight.
“I learned to love him. He’s a good man,” she said finally. “Anyway, it’s overrated, romantic love. Maybe it doesn’t even exist.”
I remember them holding hands while Fred drove us all in the Mercedes to the city for lunch and museums, plays. He was always kind to us. But he was not my father. For years I neither loved him nor disliked him. We did, however, form a friendship over time, a kind of mutual tenderness and respect that was somehow forged by our love for Margie.
“Why are you telling me this now?” Sitting there with her, I suddenly, vividly remembered that night when she told us she planned to marry Fred. These were the things she wouldn’t share then.
“Because you’re a grown woman, just starting out in your life. I want you to know things no one ever taught me.”
She got up and walked to the coffeepot on the counter, warmed her cup and carried the pot back to the table and refilled my mug, too. She was still beautiful; the years hadn’t robbed her of that, though she claimed they had. She complained about her neck, the skin under her eyes. But she was too afraid to go under the knife for vanity. Her words. “It’s like asking God to punish you for your silliness and then laying yourself out on a table for His ease.” She was more regal, more powerful than I remembered her when I was growing up.
“Money is power, Isabel,” she said, looking at something above and beyond me. “It’s freedom. It’s choice. No, it won’t buy you happiness. But it will buy you everything else. Unhappiness is a lot easier to bare when you have money.”
“Mom,” I said. She held up a hand.
“In my love for your father, I turned everything over to him. I never wrote a check in all the years of our marriage. I didn’t even know how much money he made. It seems foolish now, but I suppose I was a foolish girl who went from my father’s house to my husband’s house. I never learned to take care of myself.”
“You took care of us. Not everyone can do that.”
She nodded. “I knew how to do those things-bake cookies and bandage knees, listen to worries and sew up dolls. But this is something more important. Something I have to tell you because I couldn’t show you.”
“Don’t worry, Mom. I have my own money,” I said. She reached for my hand and gripped it hard.
“That’s good. But hear this. When you find the right man and fall in love, Izzy give yourself heart and soul, if you must. But don’t ever give him your money.”
She was watching me urgently, the same way she had when she told me never to get in a stranger’s car or never to get behind the wheel if I’d been drinking, the dire consequences of those actions having already played out in her mind. I found myself growing annoyed, uncomfortable. I wasn’t the same kind of woman she was; I didn’t need a man to take care of me.
“Okay, Mom, okay,” I said, drawing my hand back from hers. “I get it.”
STANDING ON THE street with Detective Crowe, I felt the first dawning of a terrible anger. Around me, lampposts were wrapped with green garland, people were carrying festive bags packed with gifts, and an electronics store was blaring “Jingle Bells” from outdoor speakers. I barely registered any of it. The depth and breadth of my husband’s betrayal was opening a chasm to reveal a dark abyss. I found myself ticking back through the years of our marriage and realized that there had been signs for me to see, places where I might have asked questions but didn’t. I had to ask myself now: Had I written the story of my marriage to Marcus, unwilling, unable to see the man I’d cast in the vital role of husband? I found myself backing away from the detective, panic fluttering in my chest like a cage of birds.
“Where are you going, Isabel?” he asked, his voice wary, a warning.
“I have to get out of here,” I said, lifting my arm to the traffic. A yellow cab pulled over immediately.
The detective didn’t move to stop me, though he looked as if he wanted to. I saw his arm lift and then drop back to his side. He seemed still, careful, trying not to frighten a butterfly he wanted to net.
“Stay in touch with me,” he warned. “Don’t make me think I have to worry about your role in this.”
I turned and grabbed the door handle and got into the cab quickly. I saw the detective shaking his head-in confusion, in disapproval, I couldn’t be sure-as the taxi pulled into traffic. He put a hand to his jaw, his eyes still locked on the disappearing vehicle.
“Where to?” asked the cabbie. I could see only the back of his bald head; in his picture on the dash he looked like the Crusher.
“I’m not sure yet. Just drive north.”
Only now, alone, in the quiet of the cab, did I allow myself to look again at the text message on my phone. The second one was not from Linda, but from Marcus.
I DON’T WANT YOU TO THINK I DIDN’T LOVE YOU BECAUSE I DID. REMEMBER THAT I MADE YOU HAPPY FOR A WHILE, THAT WE WERE GREAT FRIENDS AND EXCELLENT LOVERS. AND THEN FORGET ME. GRIEVE ME LIKE I’M DEAD. MOVE ON. DON’T TRY TO FIND ME OR TO ANSWER THE QUESTIONS YOU’LL HAVE. I CAN’T PROTECT YOU-OR YOUR FAMILY-IF YOU DO.
My hand started to shake. I knew it was pointless to text him back or try to call. I also knew that was the last communication I’d receive from him. I stared at the words on the screen, still disbelieving that this was happening, still waiting to wake up.
I flashed on scenes, a woman who knew him in a Paris nightclub, who called him by another name and touched him lightly on the cheek before he pushed her hand away and said there had been some mistake. The voice mail from just a couple of weeks ago: Marcus, my
friend, it’s Ivan. Just in from Czech. There’s so much to talk about. His tone, light and friendly, still managed to sound ominous. He left a number to call. Marcus seemed to go stiff as I relayed the message, then claimed he had no idea who it might have been. “Erase it,” he said. “Wrong number.” When I pressed him about it, he said, “Who knows? Someone from Czech, looking for a job, wanting something for nothing, thinking I owed something to a fellow countryman. No thanks.” I let it go, even though I was sure there was more to it. If he didn’t want to talk about it, there must have been a good reason.
There was something else, too. Something recent and strange that I had ignored. I kept receiving bizarre e-mails in the mailbox on my Web site. Normally, I received multiple messages a day from fans, detractors, booksellers inviting me for events, conference invitations, and the like. Every now and again, I’d get an e-mail from someone who wanted me to write his story or from someone with a “brilliant idea” for my next novel. And sometimes the mail was just from crazy people, with threats, rantings about mistakes they thought I’d made, inappropriate requests for pictures, and blatant come-ons.
Over the last few weeks, I’d received two or three messages from someone claiming to have information about my husband. “You’re in danger,” I remember one e-mail reading. “Your husband is not who you think he is.” I’d had so much strange e-mail over the years that I just pressed Delete, without giving it so much as a second thought. Now I racked my brain for the name of the sender, for more of what had been included in the text of the messages. But I’d barely glanced at them; deleted them and forgotten them.
Then, suddenly, I knew where to go. Somewhere safe, somewhere where I could use a computer, get on the Internet and figure out what to do next, try to find those e-mails, which might still linger in my trash folder. The thought gave me a new energy, a feeling of purpose and strength. One thing I wasn’t going to do? Move on. If Marcus thought I was just going to crawl under the covers and grieve him, I was as much a stranger to him as he was to me.