Seven Types of Ambiguity

by Elliot Perlman

  “Does he know what’s happened to you? Maybe he doesn’t know they’ve—”

  “He’d know. If he gave it any thought, he’d know.”

  “You can’t be sure, and anyway, maybe he can help you with something else.”

  “Anna, are you listening to me? He won’t take my calls.”

  I was having similar problems with Dr. Gardiner. It seemed Anna and Joe Geraghty had been delisted. I tried calling Michael several more times and each time I was only able to leave a message. Anna Geraghty called. Joe was drinking every day.

  “They can’t just dismiss you summarily,” I said.

  “Of course they can. I’m on contract.”

  “Have you read the contract?”

  “Nobody reads the contract. You don’t have to read the contract to know you’re fucked. They draft the contract. It’s a fucking weapon.”

  “Maybe you can sue them?”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know, but maybe you should take the contract to a lawyer.”

  He assured me that this was a waste of time and I assured him that things couldn’t continue as they were and when I said that, we both stopped for a moment and looked at each other. As I was saying it I hadn’t meant what we both took me to mean at the moment that we both stopped to listen to the words as they hung in the air.

  But nothing could continue the way it had been, even outside our marriage. Joe’s mother, who had slowly been getting scattier, was suddenly substantially worse, I discovered, when I took Sam to see her. She was sitting in the kitchen in her dressing gown, her hair disheveled, drinking a cup of tea.

  “Annie, you’re so early,” she said. The curtains were drawn and the lights were on.

  “Do you want me to heat this up?” I called out to her as Sam swung his legs from one of her kitchen stools. She had gone to open the curtains.

  “It’s bolognese sauce. I told you on the phone I’d be bringing it. You like my bolognese.”

  “Oh, I do, Annie, very much, but I can’t eat that for breakfast.”

  That was probably the first time I got a true sense of what was happening to her. It was five-forty in the afternoon. She had been asleep all day thinking it was night. She hadn’t eaten. When I explained what time of day it really was she looked crestfallen, ashamed. Her eyes filled with tears. I went over to hug her and, seeing this, Sam came over to the two of us. He put his arms around our legs, gripping tighter and tighter as she sobbed. He buried his face in my skirt and then he was sobbing.

  I pulled back and picked him up in my arms, which wasn’t so easy anymore.

  “Hey! There’s nothing wrong. We’re just happy to see each other, that’s all,” I said.

  “Oh no, there’s nothing wrong,” Joe’s mother chimed in, wiping her face against her sleeve. “You’re such a good boy, aren’t you, such a lovely big boy. Here, open your palm out flat and close your eyes. I’ve got something for you,” she said, then reached over to a tin on the bench.

  “There you are!” she said, placing a candy wrapped tightly in cellophane in his palm. “You’re a good boy, aren’t you, Joey?”

  “Dad is Joey, I’m Sam,” he corrected her, putting the candy in his pocket.

  “Why don’t you have a shower, and I’ll boil the pasta,” I suggested quietly.

  At home I told Joe how I had found his mother.

  “It’s not good, Joe.”

  “I know.”

  “She’s worse than you think. She’s really unwell. You know, she told me some story about the police rescuing her from an island. There was no convincing her that it was untrue.”

  “It’s true.”

  “What do you mean, it’s true?”

  “It was a traffic island on the Nepean Highway. She was in a sea of traffic. The police found her there near Tommy Bent’s statue. She was singing hymns, they told me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t know. It was the night before the retreat. There’s been a lot going on. I must have forgotten.”

  “Forgotten?”

  “There’s been a hell of a lot . . . I don’t know, Anna . . . she’s my mother.”

  She was his mother and we were just as Dr. Klima had described us, separate people, all of us separate. Joe had been to see a lawyer but the time for the appointment had come before he’d been able to find his employment contract within all his files and papers. He was told to find the contract and then make another appointment. I found Joe searching for it among his papers. He looked up at me and I knew he felt like an idiot.

  I started thinking about Michael; what had happened to make him change so suddenly? He had wanted me fiercely, with a self-destructive hunger that was literally palpable. I called him again, more out of curiosity than anything else, but he failed to return the call.

  There was, however, somebody who was bombarding me with phone calls. It was Simon’s archangel, Dr. Alex Klima. At first he was calling me to see whether I would tell their lie. When it became obvious that I was unwilling to become a martyr to his favorite patient’s madness, he went for something less. Would I agree to visit Simon?

  “Anna. . . ,” he entreated.

  “No, Dr. Klima, you listen to me,” I whispered from my desk.

  “You should call me Alex by now.”

  “You shouldn’t be calling me at all.”

  “Yes,” he said with a certain sadness. “Don’t you think I know that?”

  “Alex, I’m angry with him. You didn’t know him when I did, before he was . . . sick. He was so sane, so bright.”

  “Anna, you mustn’t punish him for becoming unwell.”

  “Nor should I sacrifice myself for him and reward it. I’m sorry, Alex. You’re a nice man. I can tell. But you’re asking, he’s asking, way too much. I can’t do it. Please excuse me. I don’t mean to be rude, but I really have work to do. Good-bye now.”

  “Good-bye, Anna.”

  I put the receiver down and sat there for a moment before someone went past my door and reminded me I had better get down to work. I had to stick with one thing and finish it before starting something new. That was the way to maximize my efficiency. “It’s Not What You Know but Who You Know.” No. I couldn’t bring myself to write that, not now. What else? What about “Getting More Out of the Most—Ten Handy Tips for Performance Assessments”? I was too tired for ten. What about seven? What about five? Could I get away with five? What could I get away with? I was getting older. A man once wanted me quite desperately, now he wouldn’t return my calls. Less and less could I get away with.

  16. Sam came home from school with a note from his teacher asking me or Joe to call her. This was the second such note. Was it the virtually unattended birthday party we had invited his class to, his parents’ arguing, or his paternal grandmother’s unraveling before his eyes that had led to whatever it was that had led to the note? Apparently Sam had become uncharacteristically inattentive and disruptive in class following Simon’s offer of chocolate milk and Joe’s reduction of the photographer in our backyard to a bloody pulp.

  “What’s he done?” I asked his teacher, a pretty young woman, younger than me, gentle and concerned, of Greek extraction. Sam had always seemed to like her. We were lucky Sam was in her class, the other mothers had said at the end of the previous year.

  “Well, he’s been calling out, a lot . . . lately.”

  “What do you mean, ‘lately’?” I asked the young teacher. “Well, since the . . . since the troubles.”

  Since “the troubles,” she had said, not being able even to say the word kidnapping, so afraid, as the school had informed us in a carefully worded letter, were they of saying anything that might cause us offense and provoke litigation.

  “What, he’s been calling out since the beginning of inter-religious hostilities in Ireland?” It was an off-the-cuff smart-ass remark of the kind Simon could’ve made. The taste one gets for them resurfaces in moments of stress.

  “Pardon me?”
the young teacher asked, completely at a loss.

  “I’m sorry, you said since ‘the troubles,’ which is the name given to the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Ireland. I’m sorry, I was just being flippant. Things have been—”

  “No, I’m sorry, for my insensitivity. Geraghty? Of course, Sam Geraghty. I have to admit I’m not always up-to-date with my world events. Have you lost family recently in Northern Ireland? Did Sam know the deceased directly or is it a sort of . . . vicarious pain? We can schedule grief counseling if you like. It can be for the whole family if you think it would help everyone . . . or anyone.”

  Sam had been calling out at school, sometimes the answers to questions, sometimes silly comments to get a laugh. He’d also been accused of pushing some of the other kids. He had never been at all like this before. I vacillated between denying everything his teacher had said, blaming the school, blaming Simon or Joe or both of them and their little puttana, as my father would have put it, before finally settling on blaming myself as a mother.

  17. Joe had found his employment contract and gone back to see his lawyer. He took the finding of the contract as some kind of turning point in his luck. But it wasn’t. It turned out that, technically, he wasn’t actually employed by the firm he had been working for. Instead, he was contracted to another company which, his lawyer suspected, probably held a contract with the stockbrokerage firm he’d been working for.

  “I’ve never heard of this other company, the company I’d signed the contract with. Can you believe it?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “If your lawyer can find an angle—what do they

  call it?—a ‘cause of action’; I think they call it that—then you can sue the other company.”

  “I already thought of that. I asked him if I could sue the other company, but he said it was a shelf company.”

  “What does that mean exactly?”

  “It’s a two-dollar company. Even if you sue it and win, it doesn’t have any assets. There’s no point suing it.”

  “So you can’t sue the real firm because you didn’t have a contract with it, and the other company, the one you did have a contract with, doesn’t have any money?”

  “That’s what he’s telling me.”

  “I’m sorry I recommended you see a lawyer. He’s probably going to charge you for this.”

  “Yeah, right. See how fast I pay. Anna, there’s something I’ve got to tell you, and you’re not going to like it.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “Look, Anna, if I could hold off telling you I would but . . . I mean, I know you’re going to leave me anyway—”

  “You’ve got another woman, I mean other than . . . not just Angelique?”

  “No, it’s got nothing to do with that. I wish it did.”

  “Yeah, I bet you do.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, Anna.”

  “You kiss her . . . You pay your money, you kiss her; God knows where you kiss her, and then you come home and kiss—”

  “Anna, how long has it been since you kissed me, since we kissed each other?”

  “Sam . . . you fucking bastard.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Sam’? What about him?”

  “You come home from her . . . once a week . . . and you kiss him good night.”

  “Do you know where your Simon has been?”

  “I haven’t seen him for ten years.”

  “I’ll tell you one place he’s been. He’s been with her. He’s been with her too. So . . . add it up, Anna. He’s as filthy as I am and just as unfaithful. That’s your teacher for you. But you didn’t deny him the way you denied me. He had no cause to see her or anyone like her, whereas I had you. And if I’m unfaithful, so is he, and so are you. And if I’m unclean, so is he and then, of course, so are you. And you come home and you kiss Sam good night too. So don’t stand there all fucking holier-than-thou as though you’re our lady of the stuck-up virgin bitches because you’re no fucking better than me. Except that you’ve got a job.”

  “You’ll get one, Joe. You just—”

  “Do you want to hear what I’m trying to tell you? We need money. We’re going to have to get some money pretty quickly.”

  “We can tighten our belts for a while, till you get a good job.”

  “I need one hell of a good job, and quickly.”

  “You’ll get a job, Joe, but you’ve got to stop putting all your eggs in one basket.”

  “I’ve no idea what that means, but—”

  “Your whole idea of yourself, your self-esteem, is entirely dependent on how much money you’ve got.”

  “No more than anyone else’s.”

  “That’s not true. I’m not like that.”

  “Oh, Anna, come on. You’re not serious. You married me for money, for a start.”

  “That’s not true. You didn’t have much when I met you.”

  “No, not a lot, but you took a chance because you knew I was going places and sooner or later you’d be able to live very, very well.”

  “No, you’re wrong, Joe. Money has never been that important to me. Yes, it’s nice to be able to live well but—”

  “Well, I’m glad you feel that way because we’re probably going to lose the house.”

  “What are you talking about? We own the house.”

  “No we don’t. We haven’t paid off the mortgage. And since I lost my job I’m not going to be able to keep up the payments for very long unless something very good comes up pretty quickly.”

  “How long have we got?”

  “I don’t know. It depends. Not long.”

  “Well, how long? What does it depend on?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to work some things out. I’ll have to sell everything, but even then it’s just a matter of time. All the credit cards are maxed out, mine anyway. That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “You’re talking about using your credit cards to make mortgage repayments? How long do you think you can keep doing that?”

  “Not long. That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “But we own the house.”

  “Anna, do you have any idea of anything? What do you think our equity is in this place?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Joe, I want to know.”

  “How do you think it was we could just move in here overnight, into a place like this, near the beach, with all these bathrooms and empty fucking bedrooms waiting to be filled by the kids we never had or the kids we had who died?”

  “How much?”

  “How much what?”

  “How much is our equity in the house?”

  “We’d be lucky if we owned twenty-five percent of it ourselves.”

  “Oh my God!”

  “That’s why the repayments are so high.”

  “Isn’t there someone you can talk to?”

  “Who can I talk to, Jesus?”

  “But you know so many people in investment, in the finance industry. Can you talk to someone at the bank?”

  “Anna, I don’t have a job. How can I talk to them if I don’t have a job? What can I possibly offer them?”

  “I have a job. Do you want me to talk to someone at the bank?”

  “You can’t talk to someone at the bank.”

  “Why the hell not? Because I’m a woman? Joe, this is no time for macho—”

  “Anna, for Christ’s sake, don’t give me that feminist bullshit now.”

  “Why can’t I talk to someone at the bank?”

  “Because your name is not even on the title. The house and the mortgage, it’s all in my name.”

  “Joe! What are you saying?”

  “Well, what did you think, Anna? You think I’m an idiot when I can’t find the stupid contract? Do you remember signing anything at the time we bought this place?”

  “No.”

  “Anything at all?”

  “No.”

  “W
ell, now, how big an idiot are you? Think yourself lucky you’re not responsible for the debt.”

  “What? My father gives us the deposit for the house and you go and put it in your name, not both our names? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a fucking bastard, Joe! And you’ve got the gall to tell me you were doing me a favor? I’m not that much of an idiot. Don’t you think I know the debt is covered by the house, not by you? Jesus, you’re despicable.”

  “Well, when wasn’t I, Anna?”

  “Is there anything we actually own outright?”

  “Just my car.”

  “Your car! What about my car?”

  “Do you remember paying for that, remember signing anything? I bought it for you.”

  “I thought the money . . . I thought it all came out of our joint account.”

  “It did. I put down the deposit and all the payments came out of the joint account.”

  “That’s where my salary goes, into the joint account,” I said incredulously.

  “Then you were helping to pay off your car. It worked out better tax-wise, believe me—”

  “Joe, you’re a fucking bastard.”

  “Yeah? You didn’t think so till I lost my job.”

  “I just didn’t say it.”

  “No, well, you didn’t say it till I lost my job.”

  “What about all those shares? You used to brag about making money from following your own advice. What about them?”

  “I borrowed to buy them. You’re not responsible for that debt either . . . Look, I know you’re going to leave me sooner or later, and I know that losing the house isn’t going to—”

  “We’re not going to lose the house, Joe. There’s my salary. What about that?”

  “It’ll take more than your salary.”

  “Look, you can’t expect me to have the answer right away. You’ve just dumped this news on me.”

  “Well, I couldn’t think of a gentle way of telling you we’re going to lose the house.”

  “Let me think about it. Just let me . . . We’ll figure something out.”

  18. At work it occurred to me to try to get through to Donald Sheere myself. A call from me might be unexpected enough to excite his curiosity. I tried a number of times over the next few days but my calls were all fielded by minions skilled at doing just that. While I was at it I tried calling Michael again, to similar effect. Surprisingly, my failure to get through to either was less distressing than I would have thought. Somehow the loss of the lover I never really had was being palliated by the impending loss of the house I never really had, and vice versa. The total pain was proving to be less than the pain of either of them alone.