“Was I? I don’t know, I suppose it’s a question of ratio. I was probably less unhappy more of the time.”
“Have you thought about going back to school?”
“So I could do what? Work in yet another job? It’s work itself, Caleb, it’s not the job I happen to be in. I don’t mean to go on and on about it, it’s just, I’m still . . . I’ve been working since I was sixteen years old, except for that one semester at Columbia, and the initial shock of work hasn’t worn off yet. I still have these moments where I think, Come on, this can’t possibly be it. I cannot possibly be expected to do something this awful day in and day out until the day I die. It’s like a life sentence imposed in the absence of a crime.”
“Perhaps you should see someone,” Caleb said. He went to a psychiatrist once a month, and came back introspective and a little dazed.
“How could I see someone? I have no health insurance now, and anyway, I don’t want to see someone. I don’t want to be numbed.”
He was quiet.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay. It must seem like that to you sometimes.”
“It does. I’m sorry.”
He stroked her face for a moment, withdrew his hand and kissed her on the forehead.
“Well,” he said, “we should probably get to sleep. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
Elena couldn’t sleep that night. After a while she got up and went to the kitchen. She turned on the light above the table. The clock above the stove was ticking loudly in the quiet. She was reading a two-day-old newspaper when the telephone rang at midnight.
“It’s okay,” Anton said when she told him. “Everyone loses their nerve sometimes.”
“I’m sorry, Anton. I’ll go back again.”
“You don’t have to,” he said, perfectly aware that his former secretary was incapable of leaving a project unfinished.
“Of course I’ll go back.” She was standing by the kitchen window, which was as far from the bedroom as a person could get and still be inside the apartment.
“Did you get the veterinary records?” he asked. “The vet was supposed to mail them to you.”
“I have them,” she said.
“What’s the weather like there?” He was watching the fishermen preparing their nets, the first few boats gliding out around the breakwaters. He had taken to going to bed early, for lack of anything else to do in the evenings, and rising at dawn to watch the sunrise and the boats.
“Warm,” she said. “Hot, actually. It’s as if it’s still summer.”
“Have you found work?”
“I haven’t tried. I’ve just been posing naked for people.”
“People?”
“Art classes. Borderline pornographers.”
“Does that kind of thing pay well?” His tone was studiedly neutral.
“Not particularly. No. I think I have to do something else soon, or else commit to it completely.” It was impossible to keep her voice from wavering.
“What do you mean, commit to it?”
“I mean actual pornography, not just the borderline stuff.” She was looking at her reflection in the kitchen window and thinking that she looked like a ghost; in the window she was transparent against the fire-escape railings outside. “I don’t know what to do,” she said.
“What kind of job do you want?”
“That’s exactly the problem. The thought of finding another job . . .” She was breathing somewhat quickly; she closed her eyes, concentrating on the idea of five-thousand-year-old pine trees, the first cup of tea and the first line of Gilgamesh, the first sheet of glass ever held up to the light, and forced the wavering part of herself to be still. She laughed in what was meant to be a carefree manner, but it was a strange clenched sound that escaped her throat.
“Elena,” he said, “it’s all going to be all right. I’ll call you tomorrow or the next day, and we’ll figure out what to do. Listen, Sophie has therapy on Thursdays. She’s always gone between five and seven.”
“I’ll go back again.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I can’t tell you how I appreciate it.”
Caleb was awake when she came back to bed.
“I’m sorry,” he said gently, when she reached out to him. It had been months now, a growing distance, like the gradual tec-tonic division of continents.
“Yes, I’m sorry too.” She hadn’t meant to speak so sharply.
“What’s upsetting you really?”
“This,” she said.
Caleb was silent. It was too dark to see his face, but she knew he was staring up at the ceiling unblinking.
“It’s late,” he said. “We should go to sleep.”
Beyond the fact that Caleb couldn’t quite bring himself to touch her anymore, there seemed to be an underlying question of compatibility. He talked about specimens, types of leaves. She found herself grieving for the absolute tragedy of the lost tree in Utah. He talked about cross-sections of bark, the genetic structure of the Lotus japonicus, work that was being done on the plant genome project. Elena listened to him and found her mind wandering, wondering if that Utah geology student who felled the four-thousand-nine-hundred-year-old tree felt remorseful, what kind of person could do that, if a person capable of felling a tree to retrieve a broken tool is even capable of understanding the sheer magnitude of his crime; someone must have pointed out to him that the organism he’d killed had been alive three thousand years before Christ, but can a man who thinks so small perceive anything so enormous?
In the morning after Caleb had left for the university Elena stood in the hallway for a while, watching the movement of the goldfish, trying to think ordered thoughts. Phylum Chordata, with us and the otters and the monkeys and the sea squirts; the phylum for all of us in possession of a nerve cord. Class Actinopterygii, the domain of bright fishes. Order Cypriniformes, of carps and minnows; family Cyprinidae, genus Carassius, species auratus. Fins like orange silk in the water. Memories of childhood cartoons with orange fishes and black cats.
Two days later she stood in the photographer’s apartment on the Upper West Side, blinking in a flood of sunlight with dust motes drifting bright around her. She hadn’t been sleeping well. Her eyes were heavy. She remembered posing here five years ago, but the memory was so distant that it was almost third-person: the five-years-ago girl had insisted that the blinds be closed even though the sunlight in the room was perfect when they were open, the five-years-ago girl had taken off her clothes but lain on her stomach on the sofa and had to be gently persuaded to turn over. Elena shied away from nothing now, but the difference was more frightening than liberating; she could feel the five-years-ago shadow staring at her from the sofa while she stood in the window in full view of the neighbors across the street, naked from the waist down except for her most perilous pair of high-heeled shoes, alarmed by how little the thought of strangers seeing her in the window concerned her.
“That’s beautiful,” Leigh said. He was moving around her, taking picture after picture, the faint digital beep of the shutter sounding over and over again. “Now take off your shirt.”
She did this, and stood naked except for the shoes. She turned her face toward the camera, but she was looking at dust motes drifting through the light.
“Close your eyes,” he said, and when she closed her eyes it was harder to balance; she touched the window frame and felt the warmth of sunlight on her hand. “Can you touch yourself a little?”
She found that she could, but that was more or less when the nausea started, and an hour later she threw up in a Starbucks bathroom near the subway.
13.
“You can dispose of my luggage as you see fit,” Sophie had actually said, a half-hour before boarding the ferry to Naples.
How does one dispose of luggage? For the first few weeks Anton kept Sophie’s suitcase in the wardrobe beside the bed, but its presence was oppressive. On a bright clear afternoon in late October he came up from
the piazza and was bothered yet again by the way the wardrobe wouldn’t quite close. He lifted the suitcase onto the bed and unzipped it. He was overcome for a moment; sweet, faint, her hair, her skin. She was the kind of preternaturally organized girl who remained packed for entire vacations, extracting a set of clothes every morning and leaving everything else folded neatly, hand-washing the previous day’s clothing in the sink and hanging it up to dry on the hotel balcony overnight, re-folding it the following morning. Everything was clean. There were three pairs of pants, several shirts, a skirt, the blue linen dress she’d worn in Naples. He laid it all out on the bed like evidence. There were t-shirts, a wrinkled blouse, underwear, socks. A bra the color of daffodils, a biography of Jim Morrison; he read the first few pages and then returned his attention to the suitcase. It was empty now but for a wadded-up pair of socks, so he began methodically checking the outside pockets. In the first pocket was an Oxford Italian-English dictionary, two blank postcards from Rome, an article about nuclear ethics torn out of a newspaper, and a packet of sugar with a picture of Capri on the back. In the other pocket were two folded maps (Rome and Naples), a partially consumed bottle of water with condensation clinging to the inside, and an envelope addressed to Sophie c/o the New York Philharmonic.
The envelope been opened. Inside was a typed note on San Francisco Symphony Orchestra letterhead, dated August 15th:
Dear Ms. Berenhardt,
As per our telephone conversation of August 4th, it is with great pleasure that I acknowledge your acceptance of our invitation to join the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra for our upcoming season. As discussed, Jacob Neerman from our personnel department will contact you within the next two weeks to work out the details. We are happy to provide a stipend to offset your expenses in relocating to San Francisco this fall. Jacob will discuss the details when you speak with him.
Sincerely,
Arthur Gonzalez
Administrative Director, San Francisco Symphony Orchestra
“San Francisco,” Anton said. The room was silent. He carried the letter out to the balcony, where he read it again and then stood for a while looking out at the sea. After a few minutes of this he went back inside. His cell phone was flashing a low-battery warning on the desk, so he picked up the keys and his wallet and ran down the hotel stairs and around the corner to the piazza, where a tourist was using the pay phone. He stood nearby, impatiently shifting his weight, and realized that the page was still in his hand. He read it over a few times and then lost himself for a few minutes watching a passionate soccer game being played by boys on the beach. They were the children of fishermen, of restaurant workers, of the woman who ran the newsstand, and they played on the beach all day while their parents worked, an emotional society of small tanned boys in swim shorts who formed and broke alliances, went swimming individually and came back together again, organized themselves into soccer teams and then disbanded to pester their parents for ice cream.
“Ich vermiss dich so sehr,” said the tourist, on the phone.
He wanted to call Sophie and ask when exactly she had planned on telling him that she was moving to San Francisco. As per our telephone conversation of August 4th. He remembered August 4th. He had stood in front of his bathroom mirror that morning, extracted a piece of glass from his face with a pair of tweezers and held the shining transparent thing up to the light. Sophie had stood in the doorway and asked if he’d been shaving with glass and then hadn’t wanted to talk about it later. Had she really decided to leave him that day? But married him anyway? He’d gone off to work, she’d stayed home and placed a call to San Francisco and then behaved as if nothing was wrong that night? He was incredulous. The whole thing seemed pathetic. He was disgusted with both Sophie and himself. A yellow-and-blue boat was coming into the harbor.
“Ich werde niemals zu dir zurückkommen,” said the tourist. She was silent a moment, listening, and then hung up the phone without saying anything else and walked away toward the water. Anton moved in immediately and made the call, but their home phone number in New York had been disconnected. He called Sophie’s cell phone, but it went to voice mail and he didn’t want to leave a message. Anton hung up and dialed a different number but then remembered that he and Gary weren’t necessarily on speaking terms and hung up before Gary answered. He went to the fishermen’s café and read a newspaper until David appeared. It was a bleached-white day, cloudless, the sky so bright he couldn’t look at it.
“Mind if I join you?” David sat down across the table from him without waiting for an answer. He had green paint under his fingernails. He was carrying his own newspaper. He opened it, folded it carefully to expose the crossword puzzle, and ordered a beer from the waiter before he looked up at Anton again.
“What’s the matter?” David asked.
“Something I read.” The letter was still in Anton’s pocket. He unfolded it and gave it to David. “My wife,” he said. “I didn’t know she was going to leave me.”
David took the letter from him and read it through quickly. “She said nothing about it? No hint?”
“Nothing. I found the letter in her suitcase. I mean, to be fair, I guess I left her first.”
“Why didn’t she take her suitcase?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she wanted me to find it.”
“Are you all right?”
“More startled than anything.”
“I would be.”
“I mean, I was cheating on her,” Anton said. “I didn’t think she’d . . .” He trailed off and there was a silence, during which a fisherman climbed into his red-and-white boat and started slowly out of the harbor. “It’s all so pathetic,” he said. “I don’t know why we got married. It just seemed like the right thing to do, but why would either of us . . .” The putt-putt of the motor played counter-point to the calls of the soccer boys on the beach.
“Hey,” David said, “I think Gennaro wants you.” Anton followed the direction of his gaze. The owner of the hotel was coming around the corner into the piazza. The white FedEx envelope in his hand shone almost painfully in the sunlight.
Anton felt as if the envelope were floating toward him, a glaring white rectangle that he found hard to look at dead-on. The wait was agonizing, so he stood up from the table and went to meet it.
“Good afternoon,” Gennaro said. “This envelope arrived for you. I signed for it, thought I’d give it to you in person.”
“Thank you. I appreciate it.” It was addressed to an Ali Merino, care of Anton Waker. He recognized Aria’s handwriting. She’d used Gary’s father’s store for the return address. “It’s for a friend of mine,” he said. “He forgot some papers.”
“Ah,” said Gennaro. “A beautiful day, yes?”
“It is.” Anton raised the envelope to shield his eyes against the sun and tried to smile.
“Well,” Gennaro said awkwardly, “goodbye.”
“Goodbye.” He watched Gennaro recede for a moment before he returned to the table where David was sitting.
“Your package?” David asked.
“After all these weeks.”
“You going to open it?”
“No,” Anton said. Strange to have it before him after all this time, shining innocuously in the sunlight.
14.
On the third Thursday of October in the city of New York, Elena stood on the corner of 81st Street and Columbus watching the slow progress of a moving truck parked halfway up the block. It had arrived an hour earlier and three men were carrying furniture and boxes between the front door and the truck. Five minutes earlier she had seen Sophie come out and speak to them. Sophie had left soon afterward, walking away down West 81st Street in the opposite direction. Elena counted to ten before she ventured up the hill. It was October 20th, but the forecast called for 85 degrees Fahrenheit, here in one of the last countries on earth that still used the Fahrenheit system. Her shirt was wet on her back. She made her way up the sidewalk in the deadening heat, and one of the movers winked as she
approached.
“Hey,” she said, “you know where Sophie is?”
“She went out,” the man said. “Running an errand of some sort.”
“Oh, okay. I’m Ellie, I’m here about the cat. She told you I’d be coming?”
“No.”
“That’s strange. I’m Ellie—” She realized that she was repeating herself, but too late—“and I’m taking care of the cat for a couple days. He’s upstairs?”
“Who’s upstairs?”
“The cat?”
“Yeah, yeah, locked in the bedroom. Go on up.”
She ascended the stairs quickly. Inside the apartment a mover was taking apart a table in the middle of the room. He looked up and grunted when she said hello. It seemed to be possible to walk into apartments that people were moving out of without anyone saying much. Her heart was beating very quickly, and there was a disjointedness about the scene—she was crossing the room with the cat-carrying box, although she couldn’t remember reaching up into the closet to retrieve it, she was opening the door to the bedroom and closing herself in.
The bedroom was empty. The closet doors wide open, the bed and dresser gone, pale rectangles on the wall where pictures had hung. Jim was lying on the carpet by the window, absorbing sunlight. He raised his head and watched her with his one bright eye. She set the box down in the middle of the floor and opened the cage door, but it turned out that the cat wasn’t interested in being inserted into it. He began twisting away from her almost immediately when she grasped him, and he braced his legs on the edges of the opening. By the time she had forced him in headfirst and slammed the cage door shut her arms were stinging with scratches. Jim yowled once. When she looked in through the door he was crouched low, glaring with his single eye.
“I’m sorry,” Elena whispered, to everyone. She lifted the box (the cat was surprisingly heavy), and opened the bedroom door just as Sophie opened the door to the apartment. Two movers were indoors now, disassembling the bookcases.
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