Switchback

by Matthew Klein

  ‘You know I’m here for you,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll be in my office,’ Timothy said. ‘Kid, why don’t you join me?’

  It didn’t take long – only an hour – for Pinky Dewer to call. Tricia announced him on the intercom, and Timothy decided to take the call, hopeful that the sudden death of his wife might make Pinky more empathetic. It did not.

  ‘Timothy, old boy,’ Pinky said, ‘I know you’ve recently had a terrible tragedy. I’m sorry about Katherine. Did you get my flowers?’

  ‘Hmm,’ Timothy said. ‘I’m not sure. What did they look like?’ There had been a lot of flowers, and he couldn’t remember who sent what, but he wouldn’t put it past Pinky to expect as much and then send only an imaginary bouquet.

  ‘They were very floral,’ Pinky said, his voice echoing on the speakerphone. ‘Very flowery.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Timothy, the reason I’m calling is that I still have not received any funds wired into my account, as I requested. This is now becoming a rather serious matter.’

  Timothy winked at the Kid, who sat silently in the chair across the desk.

  ‘Jay,’ Timothy said, ‘I thought I told you to take care of Mr. Dewer’s request to redeem all but a hundred thousand dollars of his investment in Osiris.’

  The Kid said theatrically: ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Van Bender. It’s completely my fault. With all the events happening here – the tragedy – I just completely forgot. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Jay,’ Timothy continued, masturbating a giant imaginary penis in the air above his desk, ‘I’m very disappointed with you. My personal life should not affect your ability to do your job.’

  ‘Yes, Mr. Van Bender, I’m sorry.’ The Kid joined in, masturbating his own giant imaginary penis.

  ‘All right,’ Timothy said. He rose from his chair and walked to the door of his office. ‘Now get out of here.’ He opened the door and slammed it shut. The Kid remained seated, silent. ‘Pinky?’ Timothy called. ‘You there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that, Pinky. The Kid’s an asshole. I will wire the money this morning. If I hurry, I can make the twelve noon cut-off.’ But I won’t hurry, Timothy thought.

  ‘I would appreciate that,’ Pinky said.

  ‘Thanks for your patience, Pinky.’

  ‘I understand.’

  Timothy returned to his desk, and his finger hovered over the End Call button, ready to hang up. Before he could, Pinky’s voice called out. ‘Timothy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry about Katherine. She was a lovely woman. I can imagine how you must miss her. It’s not easy, losing your other half, is it?’

  Timothy felt ashamed. A moment ago he was pantomiming masturbation, and now Pinky was consoling him about losing his wife of twenty years.

  ‘It’s not easy,’ Timothy agreed, quietly.

  ‘It gets better,’ Pinky said. ‘Not right away. It takes years. You were married for what, twenty years? Keep in mind: twenty years is longer than people used to live, not so long ago. So it may take time. But it will get better. And then one day you’ll wake up, and it will seem like a lifetime ago. All the hurt, all the memories – they’ll fade. She’ll fade. You’ll see.’

  ‘Thanks, Pinky,’ Timothy said. And then he hung up.

  17

  The nights were the hardest.

  During the day, at work, he could lose himself, staring at the green phosphorescent chart of the yen, or backslapping brokers at Il Fornaio over lunch, or taking an investor phone call, or shooting the breeze with the Kid – or even flirting harmlessly with Tricia. Even the failure of his yen bet was not unpleasant – the worry, the fear at least kept his nerves jangling, and kept him from thinking about Katherine.

  But at night, alone in the big Tudor, he had nothing but the quiet. When the sun set, he made a point of walking through the house and turning on all the lights: every low-voltage point spot, every overhead chandelier, every floor torchiere, every under-cabinet fluorescent, every nightstand lamp. But even with the lights, it was futile; even with the white high-gloss paint and the gleaming ceramic tiles, the house seemed too dark, and it felt like the night was pressing in on him and his house, that he was being swallowed by it, a tiny pinpoint of light on a vast black ocean.

  Drinking helped. Timothy had always had a drink at night, after work – a glass of wine with dinner, a Scotch while watching television with Katherine. But now, alone, without anything else to do or think about except his dead wife, he drank heavily, so much that he would finish an entire 1997 Flora Springs before bed, or polish off a quarter bottle of Dalmore while sitting at the kitchen table, eating spaghetti. The drinks dulled him so that the sharp, sickening feeling in his gut, that inexpressible sense of something lost – of anger and sadness – became nothing but a dull pain, a regular everyday feeling of warm melancholy.

  For nine days after her death, Timothy was able to control himself, but on the tenth, after drinking far too much – a bottle of cabernet from his wine cellar and three neat glasses of Scotch – he made a decision, as much as you can make a decision when you can barely walk, that he would read her diaries.

  He stumbled up the stairs and into the bedroom. Her closet, a large walk-in, was separate from his, a small arm’s-length box. He had not touched any of her belongings since her death. When he pulled open the doors he caught her smell, that sweet familiar odor of apples and honey, which clung to her clothes and, for a moment, made him think that she was still there, behind the blouses and dresses, ready to come forward and display a new outfit. He closed the door behind him to preserve the smell a few days longer, to prevent it from dissipating into the house, to keep from losing her completely into the air.

  The diaries – that neat stack of identical leather-bound journals with gold leaf pages – remained meticulously stacked on the top shelf, among her sweaters and handbags, completely visible and in the open, protected by no more than the threat of her ire. He took the top-most volume and sat down with it on the carpeted floor. He landed on one of her shoe heels, which dug into his thigh. He pushed it aside, into another pile of her shoes, and all the heels clicked together softly, and now, down on the ground, he could smell the shoes too, the odor of leather and polish, the smell of undressing at night after an evening out, of unfastening a shoe strap before having sex, of kissing her ankle and calf and thigh.

  What was he looking for in the diary? He did not know. The last time he had summoned the courage to read her journal, years ago, he was surprised and hurt by her words, by her withering criticism of him, by her icy secret hatred. Now, he didn’t care what he found; he just wanted to have her back in some way, to stare at her tiny meticulous handwriting, to read her thoughts, to relive a day with her, even if through her eyes, and even if it meant seeing himself as a cad, a fool, a bastard.

  He started from the back, flipping through empty pages – white space that represented days, and then months, of sadness; of his shuffling through the house, alone; of drinking himself into a stupor at night; of sleeping beside an empty dark space in bed. Finally, midway through the book, he saw her writing, in that sky-blue ink she always used, the tight letters coiled on themselves, and he stopped flipping and licked his thumb, and began flipping forward instead of back, until he found one of the last entries in the book.

  Thursday, August 12, 1999

  Breakfast: wheat toast and jam, grapefruit. Timothy went to work, oblivious. Tomorrow, we drive to Big Sur. Twentieth A. at Ventana Inn! Twenty! Does he remember? I love him anyway. Sometimes he can be a dummy. Underneath, he is a kind man, and love means accepting. So I accept. Maybe we will find something white for front table in foyer. Marble? We’ll see. Spoke to Mom. She went on and on and on about her tomatoes. She’s like George Washington Carver with her tomatoes. I can’t wait until winter comes to the Northeast and those plants wither so we’ll have something else to talk about. Am I terrible? Yes.

  Well here he comes. Home early. One day you look up and i
t’s twenty years. Imagine that.

  Timothy smiled. He could picture her writing those words, that last afternoon before their trip to Big Sur. It was only two weeks ago, but it seemed like forever, as if years had passed. What had Pinky told him? One day you’ll wake up, and it will seem like a lifetime ago. Could it seem so long ago, already?

  Timothy flipped backwards through the pages, through August and July, and then through June, and he imagined the Northern California seasons running in reverse, the dry heat and undulating hills of brown grass changing back to the bright wet green of spring – and then, in March and April, the rainy season coming, day after day of gray skies and drizzle and bone-chilling winds.

  He skimmed her words as he turned. He flipped a few pages, and then slowed down, read an entry, and then continued flipping the pages. He was looking for some hint of sadness, some explanation about why she killed herself, but there was nothing. Just wheat toast and jam, every day – so often that he wondered why she bothered recording it – and lunches with Ann Beatty, and tennis and riding at the Circus Club. Gifts purchased for friends; gifts returned. A shopping trip to the Stanford Mall. Dinner at Spago.

  Every now and then, a jibe at Timothy – his callousness, his selfishness – always thinking about himself and not her. The way he flirted with the Asian hostess at Tamarine (how had she noticed that, Timothy wondered?) – and the suspicion, occasionally lurking under her words, that Timothy was not very smart, that he had managed to get where he was by sheer accident of birth (‘Thank you, Gabriel,’ she wrote meanly one day, in an imaginary paean to Timothy’s father, after Timothy bought her a new dining room set). But interspersed with those flashes of anger was the Katherine he remembered, the kind woman, the accepting wife, who was ready to forgive him for being who he was – who was more likely to see her husband as kind rather than slow (‘I think Timothy would have been a wonderful dad,’ she wrote, after they spent an afternoon with the Weavers and their children), who was more likely to view his success as the result of a good heart and warm smile than genetic luck (‘he is full of grace, and the people around him respond to that,’ she wrote about Timothy’s toast to their guests at the Thanksgiving meal).

  But what he did not find, as he pored over the pages, as he read entry after entry, was any mention of sadness, of suicidal despair. And there was no mention of illness. No mention of doctors or even a flu or a sore throat. This woman who was dying did not seem terribly concerned about that fact, which struck Timothy as odd, even though he was drunk on a whole bottle of cabernet and fifty dollars’ worth of scotch.

  He clapped the leather book shut with a thump and tried to stand. Off-balance, inebriated, he fell backwards into her shoe pile. He tried again. Now he felt very tired, but – strangely – giddy. Despite the oddness of some of her entries, he was pleased with what he had read. It wasn’t as bad as he feared. She loved him. Reading her tiny handwriting was like a magical incantation, a spell that had momentarily brought her back to life. He felt close to her now – closer even than on some days when she had been alive – and it was as if he had spent a few hours with her in the dark, lying next to her in bed, in a post-coital rambling stream-of-consciousness chat.

  He considered for a moment replacing the volume he had just read, and continuing with the next journal on the pile, but then he stopped and thought better of it. Did he want to spoil such a wonderful night, a pleasant evening with his wife? Perhaps the next journal, written longer ago, was less charitable to him, less kind. Maybe it would be better to stop there, basking in his love for her, and in her love for him. Why ruin it? Maybe this was a perfect goodbye, a beautiful way to remember her.

  And then he made a promise to himself, the rash kind of promise people make drunkenly, full of alcoholic purpose and resolve, that he would not read her journals again until their next anniversary, and that he would put them away, safely in the attic, so he would not be tempted to read them; he would practically bury them in the upstairs darkness, to give her the kind of proper burial that her suicide at sea had unfairly denied him.

  And so he gathered together the bundle of journals – years of thoughts and criticism and insecurity and happiness and hope, all contained in light-blue ink in tightly wound script – and carried the heavy pile in his two arms in front of him, like a sleeping child. He left the bedroom, his footsteps creaking across the second-floor hallway, and he came to the doorway that led to the attic.

  He opened the attic door and flipped on the light switch. He walked up a cheaply carpeted flight of stairs, brown and orange like nutmeg, and the air was humid and stale, and the light dim – just a solitary bulb in an enamel socket, without a fixture. He had to bend down to avoid the steep slope of the ceiling. Bent, he walked further into the attic, past cardboard boxes full of hardcover books that they had never unpacked after their move from New York; past two old coffee makers, for some reason being saved, perhaps in the hope that they would spurt back to life; past an old computer monitor, its power cord limply hanging over the cathode tube. He stepped past lacquered decorative baskets and holiday wreaths, through a tangle of Christmas lights, and finally to the rear of the room, where a tall, narrow window, lined with old lead caulk and brittle putty, was filled with the moon. He looked through the panes. Down below, he saw the dark outline of the old apricot tree, and further on, streetlights humming a sodium buzz.

  He bent over and laid the stack of journals on the floor, and when he stood up again he knocked his head into the ceiling. He backed up a step, regained his balance. He looked again at the pile of journals. He thought that he would return to them in exactly one year, on his twenty-first wedding anniversary. Perhaps, he thought, this will become an annual event, to be repeated each August: a glass of wine, and then a few hours alone with my wife, reading her innermost thoughts. He tried to imagine this – this secret ritual to be repeated one dark night each summer. But even then, standing in the attic, bent over, with his head brushing the ceiling, he wasn’t sure he could bring himself to do it again.

  18

  While Timothy drank in his dark house, across the world the sun was shining in Tokyo, and the yen continued its strange rise.

  That it should keep rising was more than unexpected, it was unfathomable, because everyone in the world agreed that it could not possibly rise, that there was only one direction it could go: down. And this Timothy found odd, because if everyone agreed it was going down, who was buying yen futures, anticipating that it would go up, driving up the price?

  By August 27, Osiris total loss had reached twenty-seven million dollars. A few million more, the Kid explained to Timothy, and the margin calls would start: the brokers – fearful about being on the hook for unrealized losses – would start liquidating Osiris’ positions whether Timothy agreed or not, and of course would do so at the worst possible prices, creating even larger losses and driving the prices even further against them.

  So it seemed queer to Timothy that, given the fact that his fund had lost almost a third of its value, and that nearly thirty million dollars of investor wealth had been destroyed, he was more concerned about the relatively small one hundred and fifty thousand dollars that had vanished from his bank account days before Katherine died. There was something strange about it. He started thinking about it the morning after reading her journal, after remembering what the journal did not contain: any mention of sickness, or of doctors, or – for that matter – of interior decorators. Katherine had asked him for two hundred thousand dollars in order to begin remodeling the house. But the money had vanished. No decorator called Timothy sheepishly to return it; no contractor wrote him a letter asking when to start work. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars had disappeared. And Katherine, who scrupulously recorded each grapefruit she ate for breakfast, had not written a single sentence about it.

  That morning at work, Timothy called his attorney at Perkins Coie, Frank Arnheim.

  ‘Timothy,’ Frank said. ‘How are you holding up?’

&
nbsp; ‘I’ve been better, Frank,’ Timothy said. Over the past week he had refined his answer to that question, since he had been asked it, in one form or another, hundreds of times. He appreciated that people bothered to ask, but he knew that, secretly, they did not want to be burdened by the truth, which was that he blamed himself for his wife’s death, that he was sad and lonely, and that he drunk himself into a stupor each night and often cried. On the other hand, Timothy knew he could not simply ignore his grief or make light of it. So he had settled on the ‘I’ve been better’ line – a laconic, honest admission that he hurt like hell, but business was business – and so let’s not waste too much time on facts that we can’t change. Like the fact that my wife killed herself.

  ‘I understand,’ Frank said. ‘I can’t even imagine what you are going through.’

  ‘Thanks, Frank.’ With that out of the way, he got down to business. ‘Frank, the reason I’m calling is that I need a little help tracking down some money.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘About two weeks ago, I wired a hundred fifty K into a Citibank account, for the benefit of a company called Armistice LLC. I want you to find out who owns the account – who exactly is Armistice LLC? – and how to contact them.’ Timothy rattled off the account number at Citibank that Mike Kelly at Union Bank had given him. ‘Can you do that?’

  ‘Give me a couple hours.’ And then: ‘Got any lunch plans?’

  He had somehow managed to avoid Tricia his first days back at work – just a terse hello as he walked to and from the elevator, a brief exchange of pleasantries when she brought him coffee in the morning – and she too at first tried to keep her distance, as if standing too close or talking too much might somehow shatter his fragile recovery, might remind him of the Monday night before Katherine died, and start the pain rushing back.

  But that afternoon Tricia came to his office and brought him coffee, and turned to leave. She stopped at the doorway and turned to him. ‘I’m worried about you.’