“I’m okay it happened the way it did,” he says. “I might have stayed in a kind of half-life, you know? If it hadn’t gotten bad. I’m not political. I’m spiritual.”
“I’m not political either.”
“You know it doesn’t smell anymore? Lincoln?”
“I’ve heard. Was Isabel—”
But there’s a sound and they both look up—maybe it’s a branch snapping against the front door, maybe it’s the dog nosing out front, a disruption she can’t identify, faint, but a disruption nonetheless, and they change the subject.
8
George paces between the front door and the white ash with its strong, sagging limbs. He’s taken off his shoes. The ground is cool under his feet. So much to be done. Vitality—long lost!—returning. He felt the change come over him at last in the hotel room by Oak Park. It’d been slipping toward him at a shimmering, muffled distance for months, spooling through his libretto as he typed away at Hud-Stanton, weaving its pretty thread into the dull and the gray of his office, showing him how pointless his job is and how he must no longer confine himself. At first, he thought it might be a kind of sorrow for his mother. He is sad to have left her at Oak Park. But his energy is bigger. The beautiful, tightening net of becoming. When the opera is fully realized—only a matter of time, no longer a matter of courage—he really will send it to the Met, to City Opera. He imagines the bidding war, the suggestions of this soprano or that, offers of a spot opening or closing the season, the glowing interviews. George, shaking his copper head, modestly accepting it all, flabbergasted by such praise.
He’d left the office to tell Iris his news, about the leap of faith he’s finally ready to make. On the way home, he’d stopped at the bank to secure the last, substantial loan he needs, the bank having already made him several smaller advances. It’s been his little secret, paying Vijay, paying Alexsandar. Talent not coming cheap. This last loan approved in the nick of time: his accounts are tight. He learned at the bank that one is even overdrawn, on a check to something called TruClear Pool Service.
What will Iris say? She’s only known the one version of him. Predictable, abiding. That pussy bore. She’s never seen him at his best. Inspired, a streak of light across the ordinary field of being. As he was his first year of college before the trouble—brave and new to freedom and talking big about big to one lovely after another. She’ll love him more, won’t she? She loves the good man he is, how will she not love the great man he is set to be? He’s found his footing because of her. Not like the other times, which turned out to be false. Iris, his rekindling of possibility. But! What if she doesn’t understand, she, who’s kept him steady without knowing it? Wise to save a few details for later. Better surprise her with The Burning Papers, with his achievement and the happy changes it will bring to their happy life. Best for now to wear the good man’s face but not the great man’s face, to hide anticipation away.
He’d walked into the bank and almost turned right around and left, but a free-roaming representative—not a teller—stood up and waved him over. It was so easy. All that money waiting for him all this time, waiting only for him to finally get some guts. The account his mother has put in his name for her care he can’t withdraw from without the attorney—and wouldn’t, of course!—but that his name is attached to such an account, and that account being attached to the rest of his mother’s accounts, offers him eligibility for a staggering new line of credit. The bank representative, a private-wealth manager as luck would have it, seated him behind a frosted-glass partition. She asked for his information, typed a few strokes, leaned into the glow of her screen, ripped a piece of paper from a notepad with another bank’s name—the name of the bank with which his had recently merged—wrote a number, and turned the piece of paper around on her green felt desktop for him to see. Her expression convinced him. It wasn’t congratulatory or approving or disgusted or conspiratorial. Her face was blank. As if that great big number were nothing. Maybe it was nothing. All of it to his primary checking, yes, thank you. A combined loan leaned against the equity of his house, which his mother had bought outright without a mortgage. Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Of course, there’s something terrifying about this. But to be terrified, to be brave, to again be alive, a speck of gold on the gray wheel of average, he hasn’t felt so clear in a long time. Still, he must be careful. At times like this the world has turned against him. He doesn’t want anyone to worry! As a young man it was—he was at his strongest, his second year at Yale, his will set to emerge. A misunderstanding. Monster or hero, to be a man! Monster, what the girl accused him of. The girl—laid, lied, liar, lie! She’d liked him. She said so! And different problems, later in his twenties, once or twice, he was fired. Fired not even once, really, and now, pacing the lawn, he’s saved from memory twice over: first by the stuffing hand of shame, second by the picture before him, the earth under his feet: his house, his grass, his sunlight. For so long he’s been out of the sun! For so long he’s been on ice! Sleep-skating a dead man’s figure eight, his ears nodding low, slow-looping an infinity under gulfs of mist at the bottom of a mist-shrouded valley. The mist—each minute now!—warming and wicking away. His front door looks peculiar, as if he were seeing it in a mirror. He must be careful. Iris will understand, but not yet. Who will not understand is his mother. How little she appreciates the efforts he makes.
He stops in front of the house and catches the ghost of his reflection in the wide window set in the flagstone beside the front door. Behind him, the branches of the ash sway. He’s holding the clutch of primary balloons at his back. He’s smiling, openmouthed like at something funny. Funny around the mouth and surprised around the brow. He cuts it all right, looks-wise. Broad at the shoulder, narrow at the waist. Dash enough for someone who has more important things to tend to than vanity.
He’d had the car drop him at the bottom of the driveway so he could creep up the drive. The balloons were a sudden inspiration—on the way home he’d asked the driver to turn off Route 22 into a low-slung complex with a jewelry store and a children’s toy store nestled amid the take-out joints. He’d chosen the toy store and made a rubber rainbow heap on the counter that the saleswoman and his driver helped him fill from the helium tank. Silver balloons had bobbled so cheerfully at the entrance to the bank, where they’d been tied to the leg of a folding table stacked with blue brochures. Come to think of it, he has been fired more than once. The firm of Jerk, Jerk and Blaustein. He was a different man. Fifteen years ago, a junior analyst. They’d released him with a careful and glowing recommendation, not worth antagonizing the Somners. The security guard looked like a broom. His career subsequently reinvented by a claustrophobic but résumé-building stint at his mother’s fund. And another kind of expulsion—a hotel, in a Riviera town, what was its name? A name his mind has lost. A hotel by the sea—the hotel asked that he not return. His mother’s house is by the sea. His house is in the woods. He’s left his mother by a lake. Fitzgerald drank summers at the Belles Rives—that was the hotel’s name. Antibes. CeCe’s lawyer had called the head of guest services. The hotel welcomed his return, even sending him a hefty, four-color coffee-table book—La Bête Merveilleuse dans le Tableau: Artists of the South of France—sent it all the way to New York, across the sea. George sent it back. Other sadnesses too. The women who’d fallen in love with him—how later, all promised to remain his friend, but not one remained his friend! Juan-les-Pins. The name of the town. Before that, worst—his break from Yale: a three-month ski trip in Jackson, Wyoming, they called it, though where he was there wasn’t any skiing.
The clouds shift and his reflection vanishes. The great room becomes visible, as if he were at the beginning of an old-fashioned play, the curtain rising on an interior. The kind of play where everything inanimate has meaning, signifies—the worn armchair, the big radio on the mantel, a bundle of flowers wrapped in paper thrown across the sideboard. A table set for three, a hat on a hook. Except, the uninhabit
ed space of this play features his own gleaming, modern kitchen. The star of the play will be his wife and then it will be him. He’s memorized the rhythms of his house—this makes it his house, more than any deed. Any moment, Iris will stride the room right to left, begin making lunch. He’ll enter and tell her his news, slightly modified: the financing for his opera has been secured. Backers. Iris knows he’s had more trouble finding backers than expected. Now he’s found them, hasn’t he? A car passes on the road below. For a nonsensical moment he thinks it’s his mother, come to yell at him. The balloons bump and drift in the breeze above his head. Iris crosses the room.
His mirror heart seizes. She’s looking at him but she doesn’t see. The sunlight’s on his side. Iris, from the other side of the wide and spotless window, a stranger. Beautiful, unmade—she stretches. Lifts her arms, drops her arms. How rare to see her, to see anyone, making the no-face face of being alone, the posture of unconscious and solitary absorption. Her secret face, his secret now. He makes his thoughts loud so she might hear, a child’s trick—the sublime confusion of love and telepathy—fine piece, cunty bunny. Fine and bunny, piece and cunty, words filtered from the grate-trap of his brain like sediment. She doesn’t notice. She’s getting something from the closet. Weights. Her hands are wide and worn, knuckles like knotted wood. He can read her age only in the knots in her hands and in the incandescent parchment under her eyes. Her eyes—marine with gold flecks out-of-doors, sky-in-the-sea. Violet in the house. He has forgotten; he can never recall the precise look of her, even when she lies beside him and he has turned away.
3D bounds in and bumps heavily against her calves. She pets him. He rolls onto his back, paws cycling. She disappears into a part of the room he can’t see. George decides he will creep around the back and—Iris reappears with Victor. Victor! They sit at the kitchen counter. 3D’s head jerks toward George. 3D is pivoting his gaze between the two men, Victor and the ghost at the window. Iris’s mouth moves. Victor smiles. George ties the balloons to the lowest branch of the tree. He steps back, into a strange pile of sticks with his bare feet, and curses. The dog’s velvet eye marks him again. 3D seems to consider what to do with George. To consider and to dismiss. With a jowly and tongue-stretching sigh, 3D pushes out from under Iris’s hand, turns his back to George, and disappears from the frame of the window.
It is a play, and he should go in. But then she laughs. Victor—shiny black shorts, shiny jet hair—must be telling a story, gesturing as he speaks. A muscular man with a sporty buzz-flop, a white T-shirt, a clean towel folded over his shoulder. Victor, taking up the gold medallion and chain that was spiraled on the kitchen counter and lifting it back over his head. What a jerk. Jerk jewelry. Why was his chain off in the first place? Their heads are bent together. Iris touches Victor’s arm. For a second she looks, what is it, sad? Sad, and George can’t imagine what they could be—Iris, putting her hands in her hair. Respect is an errand run in the dark.
But isn’t it rare, the opportunity for a man to be sure he is respected? Good to stay under the tree a little longer. And wasn’t he going to be the first to make her laugh today?
Victor and Iris are smiling. For a second, they look in George’s direction, as if they heard him. George grows bored. Now she’s at the sink. She hands Victor a glass of water. George would like a glass of water. No, what George would like is a glass of orange juice and a glass of mineral water. Now he’s really bored! Victor is folding up the massage table. They must have just had the twice-weekly massage. George pays for it. Iris disappears and reappears wearing her favorite gray sweatshirt. George is less bored but also suddenly ravenous. And then—is it? Her cheek is a bright stain. Did she put on blush when she got her sweatshirt? She doesn’t wear much makeup. He loves this about her. When she’d moved into his apartment in Manhattan, she brought only clothes, a toothbrush, and a bar of alkaline soap—castile. Cleans both hair and face, she said. Holding her all-purpose soap in his hands, a few days after she’d found a scrap of his libretto, he’d told her more about The Burning Papers. Maybe he’s imagining it, the stain on her cheek. She’d said, “Sounds crazy,” but smiled, and told him all the bands she’d been in, with names so foreign he found himself too shy to ask what inspired them: the Peepholes, the Dimmer Switches, Everything Feels Great. When she moved in officially, from where, from some place low and highway, he showed her the various bathrooms she could choose from. She was quiet that day and the day after, as if she were considering something grave.
The balloons are making the sound of a children’s birthday party. The air under the tree warms and gathers mosquitoes. Victor is readying himself to leave. George must go in, but something keeps him. The fear she might betray him? No. He’s watching her as a stranger might. He’s visiting the hypercolor world of love’s beginning. His mother was wrong. Iris hasn’t changed. She won’t drop him or lose him or let him go, no matter what he confesses. He’ll open the door and—the dog. Here is the dog, sitting in front of the front door, watching George.
“Away, away,” George whispers. 3D’s eyes—intent. No bark, no blink, no shucking of the head side to side. Must have gone out the back and come around the house.
“Dummy. What do you want? Use your Mandarin.”
This is Iris’s joke, an elaborate joke about 3D’s speaking every language but English.
The dog sounds a resonant hmmmmmmmmmm. Not a growl, but not altogether approving. 3D looks like the dogs of Saint Martin George knew as a child, the rough mutts that ran the length of the beach in snapping packs, haloed by flies, sand packed into their paws and fur, sand spun out behind them when they lunged at each other. This makes George nervous around 3D sometimes, still. Those dogs had kept to their crews, uninterested in humans, and this disinterest disturbed young George, whose heart held that domestication was the price all creatures, boy or animal, paid for their survival. Dogs without rules could not be punished. He and Pat and his mother repeated this vacation for many years, beginning the spring his father left them. The year he was ten, wishing he remembered his father, George fell in love with one of the dogs. Tawny, gentler than the rest. He lured her away and fed her, and each day after, he and Lucy (he named her Lucy instantly and without thought) sat in the shade of a lime tree set back from the path to the beach. The birds the Dutchmen called sugar thief, small and yellow, alighted on the concrete balconies of the hotel. The mild ocean contained itself and they thought what dogs and boys may think together, until one day in a red flash he and Lucy were pulled apart, and all the plane ride home he was scolded for playing with the bandage.
“Go away,” he says. “I’m busy.”
“You don’t look right,” 3D says.
“Fuck off. I haven’t shaved.”
“Iris is smarter than she knows.”
“Yes,” George says. “Probably. I think it’s going to rain. Do you?”
“You are an unfortunate person.”
“What do you mean?”
“Anybody has a look at you knows what I mean.”
Silent, a yellow-toothed sigh. 3D stands, stoops to lap a drainpipe at the corner of the house, turns the corner, and trots away.
Any luck, there’s lead in that pipe. George opens the door to his house, his house, and steps inside.
9
Her first night at the clinic, CeCe dreams of the iced mountains of the Crimea, which she visited with her father once as a child. The nettle is carpeted in snow. Snow gusts up the trees along the high forest path. She’s eighteen, nineteen, standing alone in the dark under the moon, wearing a sable over a pencil skirt. Two black horses come pounding down the path. They race into view without master or cart, bulging throat to throat. They bear past her into the thicket. They run an hour, a day, a year. She chases them over the black curve of the dark half of the world and all the way to dawn—blue between the trees, then bright between the trees. The sun’s rays break over the side of the sky. She falls. Her little black shoes twist in the snow. The horses leave her behind, bu
rst from the thicket into white open country down into the valley like a powdered bowl of moonlight, where the one with the palsy will be an easy mark. The rifleman waits on the other side, the shadow of his hat a pinhole against the snow.
She wakes and doesn’t know where she is. She remembers and covers her face with her hands, waiting for courage to find her. Courage or not, she must get dressed; she’s to have breakfast with George before he goes. When he doesn’t come to her room, she gathers the two canes beside the door and with slow purpose locates the awful dining room with the dusty light and the spider plants. She accepts tea but refuses food. She frowns politely at the other residents as they file in and out, her back straight as a pin, in stiffness and in pride. After an hour, she returns to her room to call George’s hotel, but how to dial out? Pound 2, star 2, wait for the tone. She can’t make it work. Trading the canes for the chair, she wheels to the lobby and asks if she has any messages. “Just this once,” the receptionist says. “I’m not your personal secretary, dear.” No messages. The receptionist calls the hotel. George has checked out.
Back in her room, she practices her appeal to Dr. Orlow. I will stay in the trial, but at home. I will come up twice a week, four times a week, no matter the distance. I will buy whatever equipment is required. I will hire a nurse. I will hire a doctor, if you like. Hell, if you like, I’ll hire you. No, that’s not the right tone. Controls? I can replicate the controls. The rules of the trial have already been explained to her—to receive the Astrasyne and its army of auxiliary medications, a participating facility must supervise the data pool—nursing home, clinic—until preliminary FDA approval. “Almost unheard of,” her physician, an old family friend, had said. “Requiring that trial members be in-facility. They must want to monitor the heck out of it. Multiple quality-of-life applications, maybe. I imagine they’re confident in the drug’s efficacy. I’d try to place in, if I were you.”
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