Payback

by Mary Gordon

  She wiped her eyes; she bent her head as if to accept a pail of freezing water dumped from a high window, or a sudden hailstorm pelting her with cold hard pellets.

  Is it only sadness, she wondered, is that the word for it? Sadness, what is lost is lost and there is nothing to be done. Sadness is such a difficult thing, she thought. How pathetic to think of oneself as a sad person…no one wants to be the one of whom it is said…She’s a sad woman, what a sad woman she is.

  All her past happiness was now only making things more painful, as if she were far out to sea in a boat that leaked and listed and those happy times were highly colored stakes set down in the sand at the shore, of no use except to make clearer how very far out she’d gone.

  More than anything that had happened, more than Pietro’s death, or Jasper’s, or her father’s, this leave-taking made her understand that she was going to die. So long, see you tomorrow…and what was that but a belief in immortality. Leaving for good. So long.

  She sat on the floor of the kitchen, where she had prepared so many thousands of meals, and let herself say out loud, “It’s over.” She thought of the moment when, as a child, she turned the television off. She pressed a button; the picture would disappear; a black screen would replace it, but in the center a small white dot that grew steadily smaller until at last there was nothing but blackness. And it was simply gone.

  As she would be.

  She closed the door on an empty apartment. Donatella would come by and sweep the empty rooms, dust the windowsills, the countertops, polish the kitchen faucet till it gleamed, wash the sheets she slept on…her last night in what had been her marriage bed, where Maeve very well might have been conceived, five years now a widow’s bed, the husband’s place taken up by books.

  Agnes stripped the bed with a purposeful and unnecessary roughness, stuffed the sheets into a pillowcase, and dumped them in the corner of the room.

  She left the keys in an envelope on the marble countertop. Wrote the new owners’ names on the envelopes, a Dutch couple, retired, perfectly nice people, but she didn’t understand why they needed so many rooms. Pietro and her bedroom, Maeve’s, the study where Pietro had played his cello and paid bills and where Agnes wrote letters, lately more and more letters of condolence.

  She pulled the heavy wooden door shut, refusing to look at the mailbox with the new owners’ names on it, angry that their name was gone, her name, Pietro’s, Maeve’s, as if they’d never been there.

  * * *

  THE BUS MAKES its final stop at the Stazione Termini. She will not miss the Stazione Termini, always chaotic, now the home of high-end shops, pushing out the Asians and Africans selling plastic Romulus and Remus, snow globes of St. Peter’s and the Coliseum, postcards of the last three popes. She buys her ticket for the Leonardo Express.

  From the train window, she sees the ugly new housing and the old walls covered with graffiti. Graffiti tests the limits of her understanding and her tolerance. She hates it, and it is difficult not to think of hating the boys—they are always boys—who defile plain beauty with an impulse to record their names. The sight of laundry hanging outside a window reassures her. A few sheep graze only feet from the train…a quarter mile from the airport. What changes for good, she wonders, and what remains?

  She sits next to a young American woman, on her way home after a year abroad.

  And she thinks: When I came here I was a young woman. In despair, incapable of imagining anything like the life that I’ve been given. But by whom? The life, that is to say, that I have lived. And whatever life is left to me, I will live it as, whatever else I am, someone no longer young.

  She won’t say to the young woman, “You have your whole life ahead of you, and you have no idea what it will bring.”

  Because she doesn’t wish, at her age, to be considered strange.

  She has lived here more than half her life and will be going home a stranger.

  Going home.

  But to what?

  PART IV

  Brimston, Arizona

  April 2018

  “The bitch acted like she was doing some huge fucking favor. She was my assistant, for Christ’s sake. I was the one who encouraged her. I sent her to Steven to have her boobs done…I mean they were halfway to her knees…disgusting…and she had to go into hock for the tummy tuck. I was the one to give her the idea to get a black woman and an ex-hippie and do her version of the View thing, I mean yes, the black was a no-brainer, you might say that, but I thought: Get some kind of conservative black chick, straightened hair, pull yourself up by the bootstraps like I did, but the ex-hippie, that was me knowing my audience…Willow Moonstone…but everybody just eats it up, all her old friends and their rehab stories and their suicide kids…it makes me want to throw up. It’s everything I’m against, this sanctification of victimization…it’s practically all people want unless they want a kind of mud wrestling and I won’t do that either…it’s almost as bad as the saint-victim thing. You have to give them what they want and what they seem to want now isn’t what I wanted…not that I ever thought I was doing some kind of fucking service to humanity…I did it because it worked…I’m slipping a little and I need to do something to get back on track…which is the whole reason I’m doing this whole goddamn Disney World, because everything is getting more and more over the top…she’s got better ratings than me this month. The stupid bitch. It’s that ex-hippie, I have to get my market share back…now there’s going to be a lot of boomers just retired with too much time on their hands…they worked for years and never watched daytime TV and I know just what I want, which is why I know this thing with Agnes Vaughan will be just the thing to get me back on top.”

  “Oh, sweetie pie, not to worry,” Rich says. “You’re the champ, you’ll knock—what’s her real name, Veronica Semolina or something—out of the park, they’ll see who the real powerhouse is…and then…what’s important is, you’ve got the buzz out about your bombshell. Your buzz bomb—I do think this new avocado toast thing is genius, by the way. But it’s not the easiest thing in the world to make a really good poached egg.” He presses the buttons on the elaborate Italian espresso machine with attachments for cappuccino or latte.

  “Oh, darling, the challenges of your life. Hurry up with it, it doesn’t have to be for the cover of Gourmet…oh, didn’t that go bust…but I have to have some good clean protein…no low blood sugar for this.”

  They eat in silence, and, saying nothing to him, she goes upstairs to her part of the house, her bedroom, bath, and study. A luxury they both insisted was not a luxury but a necessity…separate quarters, separate wings.

  A good investment, Rich MacParland. She’d hired him first as a trainer; he was certainly good looking, exquisitely fit, and not afraid to be demanding of the pathetic ones who all desired him and so would do anything he asked. How much he wanted what money could buy; his covetousness for fine clothes, good wine, good cars was palpable, slightly dangerous, like a jungle cat circling prey. And his vanity. He had, of course, wanted to be an actor, tried Hollywood, failed. His covetousness made him ambitious and quick to learn. Soon she had made him assistant manager. And then, when her TV show took off, she broached it to him: marriage, she needed it for her image; he needed her money to live the way he wanted. He could have any kind of sex with any boy he wanted—just make sure they were of age, only he had to be ferociously discreet: one slip-up and he was out. He agreed to everything. He was excellent in the kitchen. She contributed lavishly to his amateur dramatic group. As a couple, they cut an exciting, almost threatening dash. A good trade; a good investment. And how much cleaner, how much simpler marriage was without the mess of sex.

  * * *

  —

  She showers quickly…she takes no pleasure in her showers…scrubs her skin with rough loofahs and pumices and hard, stiff brushes. She dries herself thoroughly with towels that her guests find surpris
ingly rough, surprisingly unwelcoming to the skin, and, slipping into her black terry robe, sits in front of her makeup table. The makeup girl—she’s good, what’s her name…Estrella, surprising that a Hispanic would have such a good sense of white skin tones…she must have to depilate like mad, they’re all very hairy, it must be disgusting to have to deal with all that body hair. But she admires Estrella’s matte surface, and when she pays a compliment, Quin can allow herself to believe she means it, although probably it’s as false as anything that comes from the mouth of someone who’s paid to make you look good.

  She regards her face in the mirror as she has always regarded it: a problem to be solved. “There will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” Where did that come from…oh, she remembers now. That stupid poem that Mrs. Gould taught them…she thought it was so profound. T. S. Eliot. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Some old guy trying to figure out whether he should live or die. Die, then, she’d wanted to say, and wants to say it now. Get it over with. She’s annoyed that something from that part of her past, the Lydia Farnsworth School…the Lydia Fuckworth School, she calls it, whenever it enters her mind…is presenting itself now. Well, it’s because she’s going to be confronting Agnes Vaughan.

  Mrs. Gould told her that her satiric poetry was very accomplished but not appropriate for class presentation. Ridiculous Mrs. Gould with her glasses on a string that sometimes got caught up with the cross she wore…the girls knew she would grab onto it—thinking no one saw—when she felt she was losing control of them, which of course made them wilder, more determined to rebel. Miss Vaughan had praised her poetry and sympathized with her disappointment. One of her lies, that cheap, easy sympathy that Heidi had mistaken for real understanding. That she had fallen for. That she’d been weakened by. Her problem was that she hadn’t had contempt for Agnes Vaughan’s false promises. Well, Agnes Vaughan will be getting her payback now.

  Admiration could be turned into contempt; sometimes it was easier than others. The change with Agnes Vaughan had been painful, like a tooth pulled out without anesthetic: bloody and disfiguring. But sometimes the transition had no pain attached to it at all, as with her brother. With her brother, the change from admiration to contempt had been like a child’s tooth falling out because she’d bitten on something hard, and painlessly, the gap appeared, followed soon by the sharp point of the new tooth pushing itself up with a pain you could induce or stop by biting down or not: it was up to you.

  Lawrence Russell Stolz. The Marine. The oh-so-successful businessman. Thirteen years older than she, and she’d hardly known him. If she believed in luck, which she resolutely did not, she would have said she’d connected with him again because of good luck. But she didn’t believe in luck; it suggested the kind of mystical gobbledygook that Ayn Rand so despised. There was chance, random, unconcerned, neither malevolent nor benevolent. And you either took the chance and made something of it because of the strength of your will or you let it go and called yourself a victim of fate. She had taken her chance, and it had, almost literally, paid off.

  Face up to it. She’d admired it because that was, her brother said, the motto he lived by. As if everyone had a motto, needlepointed, framed, hung over the oh-so-comforting hearth. Well, in the end he hadn’t lived by it. Died pathetic, whimpering, asking her to hold his hand. Which she did not. And he had cheated her; she’d learned this only after he’d died and the lawyers had let her know.

  She won’t think about him now. She’ll tell Valerie she was an only child. Which, to all intents and purposes, she was.

  She’d never had contempt for Edwina…when Edwina comes into her consciousness she banishes her as quickly as she can, because, impervious to contempt, Edwina has the power to wound her. Edwina had never written back. Was it that Heidi—Scotty—wasn’t interesting enough, wasn’t important enough? But no, that wasn’t it, she was sure that wasn’t it. Edwina had never promised to keep in touch. Edwina with her perfect ivory skin, her long honey-colored braid that Heidi tried to imitate, the high forehead, the eyes that blinked and blinked when someone said something she didn’t like. Edwina had promised nothing, suggested nothing, suggested, even, that she wouldn’t write back. “I’m lousy at that, Scotty,” didn’t suggest goodness or kindness, the goodbye—cool and final—always on the table like an invitation or a thank-you note. There was no false offering, and the meagerness of the terms was attractive. Because true. Edwina, offering little, hurt little. The memory could still pierce, but Quin understood. It was not betrayal. To be hurt by something whose terms had been set out clearly was only a weakness in which she would not allow herself to indulge. The one person she fears seeing again is Edwina; if she saw her, longing would follow, impossible longing, the diminishment and the sense of failure, of inadequacy, of not coming up to the mark.

  What she has to be sure of, what she has to be careful not to be surprised by, is what she’s going to conceal about her past. The face that she prepares to meet the faces that she meets. It has to be the face she wants seen; she can’t be tricked, caught out. By some memory that will trip her up. Her mastery has always been complete; always she has been cool, hard, dry. Now coolness, hardness, dryness is called for. So she has to relive it all, remember it all, which she has refused for many, many years—a temptation to weakness.

  Another thing she learned at Lydia Fuckworth…that Michelangelo, all the great sculptors, saw what they needed in the block of stone, and their art was getting rid of what they didn’t need, turning it to dust and rubble at their feet, and presenting to the world the figure that had to be discovered within the mass of what wasn’t needed. This is what she would do now. Get rid of everything that wasn’t part of the figure—it was more than a face, really, it had a body—she was going to present to the world.

  Who was she going to be today for the TV audience? The audience who had made her place in the world, her fortune—not a great one, but not nothing. The audience for whom she had such contempt, a contempt so layered, so shellacked with a concealing varnish, that no one could see it for what it was. They mistook it for tough-mindedness, clear-sightedness, realism. Reality TV. There was nothing real about it. It was an invention, a shape-making, as fictional as any fiction, more so because it denied its fictiveness, made a fiction of truth, a truth of fiction.

  What no one understood about her was that she thought of each show as a work of art she was constructing. You have to construct the victim; she has to be sympathetic but not pathetic…she didn’t always get it right, some of them just didn’t make it and she had to pay them anyway and now she’d have to do it to herself: present herself as a victim, which she loathed, but it was all a construction anyway, so what did it matter, because in the end she would not be forgiving, although she might appear to. For the camera.

  One of the hardest things about her construction of each show was that she had to control, to calibrate, her contempt. Contempt—no one was honest about it, people were afraid or ashamed to say that contempt was delicious, how exciting it was on the tongue, the palate, against the dome-like roof of the mouth. Contempt had been her dearest friend, her most dependable ally. No, it was more: her glamorous, accomplished, dangerous inamorato. Contempt had sheathed her, allowed the soft pulp of attachment to harden into a dagger, or a sword. It had been the cold impermeable steel that covered the swamp of helplessness, of loneliness, of paralyzed abandonment. What people never understood, or never admitted if they understood it, because it made you sound inhuman—but human, what did that mean, usually something weak, “I’m only human,” meaning, “I didn’t hit the mark.” What people never understood was that contempt was a pleasure, a deep pleasure, perhaps the deepest.

  Was it such a bad thing to be fueled by contempt? Didn’t it show, really, a sense of rightness, a refusal to cover up what stank and rotted when you covered it up? Contempt was a shield, but it also made things possible that otherwise would not
be. She was the knight, crusading for justice, ARMED in the impermeable metal of contempt. She liked thinking of her foot shod in a pointy metal, cutting into the ground, making a mark that was perfectly shaped, a perfect point.

  She did have contempt for her audience…but that didn’t matter. She often had contempt for the people on the show, particularly the ones who seemed oh so ready to forgive, those are the ones she couldn’t help but she tells herself she’s helping them, she’s pulling them up from that slough of victimization…she’s being hard on herself when she says it’s just contempt, she’s really doing them good. What good does it do to say, “Oh, boo hoo, let’s sit down together and weep”…and then what? That was the point of her show. That was why people loved it. It was about justice, not mercy. The quality of mercy is not strained. The quality of mercy is strained, like baby food. She was offering people a clean, hard diet of nourishment—clean protein: see that someone who has hurt you is also hurt and then you are free of them, you can move on, stop worrying about them. They didn’t worry about you, did they? That was the point. The interviews she couldn’t use were the ones where the victimizer made himself a victim: “I’ve thought of you all my life, a day never passed when I didn’t think of you.” Bullshit. What did you do about it? You thought about me: blah blah blah and boo hoo hoo. Now you’re going to pay.

  She had been a contemptuous child, a contemptuous girl. And then Agnes Vaughan had tempted her away from the place of contempt, the high dry place where she was safe, where she had a clear view of everything. It was Agnes Vaughan’s time to be paid back.

  What was unbearable, what was truly hateful, was what contempt had replaced. Yearning, longing, pleading, the little match girl, so disgusting. Blah blah blah and boo hoo hoo. Her trademark. A knight with a foot shod in iron, pointy, cutting into the earth, leaving a mark.