The Unfortunates: A Novel

by Sophie McManus

  Four o’clock. He hasn’t dressed. Here arrives his second, daily, panic—when did this numbing time-suck suck him almost all the way to evening? What can he recall having viewed or written or read? Shame, shame, shame, the scouring of self-wanking and the scouring of self-googling melting into one raw-eyeballed morosity, and maybe he’ll have a little pick-me-up, and that’s a little better. Who isn’t taking a pill for something or other these days, except his perfect wife, who should not be blamed for her perfection? A little help from science, if one is capable, if one is disciplined, if one takes science by the horns and uses wisely what the market has to offer, instead of being told. Why not admit unto the body those few pleasures the modern terror of technological advancement has to offer?

  He leaps from the chair and marches upstairs to dress. “Enough!” Time to take charge of his affairs. He returns to the great room in a powder-blue pullover and khakis. “Hello, jerkface,” he says to the recumbent 3D, his red, spindly legs hanging off the couch, a rubber grenade Iris sometimes fills with peanut butter on the cushion beside his ear. “Care to join me?” He slaps the dog’s flank as he heads back to his office. No. The dog never wants to join him. He and the dog have now been alone in the house over sixty days in a row. Not once has 3D shown interest in George’s company.

  Now! Where best to start the noble task of Taming Life but with a cleansing dispatch of the e-mails he’s been avoiding? Here he is back with Pat. Pat, pretending to be on his side. Gloating. Aren’t they doing well. Aren’t they full of exciting news. He didn’t know Iris sent Pat and Lotta a gift. He doesn’t know what Iris does these days. For example: Why the hell has she fired everybody? The house is a goddamn mess.

  He has a hunch, though. The black pebble of an explanation. He doesn’t dare ask her, but maybe, just maybe, she fired them because they can’t be trusted. Because Iris loves him and is protecting him. They were spying, maybe. Rifling through his effects, looking for a story to sell. Things have gone missing from the house. More than the chairs and the televisions, Iris on this decorative cleanse. Were they stealing? Or talking to who knows? Collectors, reporters. Good riddance. Especially to Victor. Yesterday, for example, a man called and asked for Iris and refused to leave a message. It hadn’t sounded like Victor, but the voice was familiar. And all the week before someone calling and hanging up. His unease is like a whisper at the back of his ear, like the faint beating of papery wings coming at him from behind, far away, not so far away. Three days before, a car he didn’t recognize came up the drive and turned around. And yesterday, Audrey called from Hud-Stanton, apologized for calling, her voice distant and, it seemed, tense (Was someone standing behind her?), with a question about where some grant files might be stored in his old office computer. A likely excuse! What’s left for Hud-Stanton to accuse him of? Could it be someone is checking to see if he’s home? It isn’t inconceivable that he’s being watched. Today he suspects he hasn’t been entirely alone, that somehow, somewhere, someone’s watching. He stays mostly in his office, away from the great room’s wall of glass. He keeps the curtain drawn. “Are you hiding in your room?” his mother used to say to him when he was a boy, when she was having a party and he didn’t come out in a timely fashion to greet her guests. He mustn’t hide! This is his house. His house. He must be brave. He’ll check the road. If anyone’s there, once they see him, they’ll go.

  Outside, he fills his lungs with cold air. The snow’s melting in smeared patches on the lawn. Cautiously, he makes his way down the long, steep, curved drive, sweating in the cool. In the stillness, he’s listening—what’s he listening for? He stands quietly in the middle of the drive, for a long time. He hears only the rustling of the bare trees and returns to the cave of his office. He texts Penny, SPRINGTIME!!!!!!!! He’s texted and called Penny, a few times, more than a few times, this past month, for no real reason beyond general self-loathing. He doesn’t even want to see her. She never responds. This makes him sour, and sometimes he asks the air, asks the dog, “Do you feel sorry for me? Do you feel sorry for me now?”—until ruminating about Penny slides into worrying that Iris and Victor are having an affair. For if George transgressed without notice, how can he be certain that Iris too has not transgressed? And why wouldn’t she, being married to such a smear, such a seedy humiliation? No, he’s being paranoid—paranoid, a word they’d used against him when he was young and in trouble, called paranoid what he called truth. He’s aware of his mother’s secret intervention at Yale: paid off the security guard he punched in the mouth on the dark path behind the library. The security guard, who turned and maybe did, maybe did not, see the girl scrambleupandrun, eyes like an animal. The guard, and a sizable donation. Toward a cause his mother would surely not otherwise have supported, a Puppet Laboratory for the Drama Department, facilitating his return to school from his ski break with a clean record. To the disciplinary committee, to his mother, to the psychiatrists, he agreed he’d been wrong when it came to the guard. The girl, though. Who knows why she was telling such a destructive lie. And, whatever: she dropped out the following semester.

  He returns to his chair and tries again to read a section of the newspaper, but the words have gone impenetrable. It’s like when he was a boy, playing the piano for his teacher, kind Mr. Foley, who told George he had talent, natural grace, if only he’d apply himself. But to try to be good at the only thing anyone had ever told him he was good at was too consequential a charge. If he failed, it would mean he wasn’t good at anything. At the keyboard, in his mounting distress, he’d find the notes closing off to him like little iron gates, slammed and locked. The harder he looked, the more it felt he was trying to see behind them, but of course he was trying to see into them, to read them. Impossible, once they were gates that closed. Soon enough, he came to dread the dull yellow paper of the music sheets, their crackle as the teacher turned the page. How he envied Pat her sinewy, untouched violin, the amber cube of resin neglected in the case.

  Now Pat has a son. He wants to have a son. Badly! These days, it is the only happy longing left to him. A month back, when everything was at its worst, he googled his father and found nothing new. He’ll try again, he decides, closing his e-mail and the window with the woman over the recliner. When will Iris be home? He needs Iris. They went broke overnight, he imagines people saying, a whisper in his ear, a whisper and a lie. The mother with all that money.

  The search of his father’s name pulls up, as always, little more than the half-page profile Life magazine ran as part of a series in 1964: “New York Artists: Breaking the Landscape.” Here’s the black-and-white photo of the wiry man in the white undershirt leaning against a ladder in his studio, a cigarette between his knuckles, his pants belted high. Someone would tell him if Walter was dead, wouldn’t they? And the search would turn up an obituary, wouldn’t it? Walter’s work had been a little famous in the sixties. Walter had fought at Okinawa. He presumes his father still lives in Mougins, in the hills above Cannes. If he isn’t dead, he’s ninety-five. The last time George saw his father was in 1989, when George was eighteen and his father was seventy-three. Maybe Walter’s tan has faded and he has a tacky nurse, a nurse like a hooker. Maybe he does not.

  Not that the previous visit had gone so well. George had flown to Nice, CeCe having relented and arranged it by phone with Walter. At the last moment, by a message left at the front desk of the hotel, his father changed the date and would not see George until the following night. George strolled the marina and the streets under the palm trees in Cannes. He took a taxi a half hour west and spent the day on the beach, marveling at the bronze, topless women on the white, imported sand. He returned and had dinner outdoors, by himself. Lapin à la moutarde in the warm, dark breeze on the balcony café of his hotel, overlooking the sea. A fine night’s rest in the plush and tasseled room CeCe’s travel agent had booked for him. From the wheels of the plane bumping down on the tarmac to waking in a sumptuous and sunny hotel room—only twenty-four hours it took him to be certain he
was no longer a child, but a man of the world. To walk and walk and walk, a stranger in a strange place, the happiest he’d been. The next day he awaited his father at the appointed place and time: the bar at the grand entrance to Casino Croisette. He could hear the dull roar and clang of the game floor. The venue too had been changed from the one CeCe agreed to, a sitting room at George’s hotel.

  He took a stool at the end of the bar under a potted palm and ordered a martini but received a syrupy cup of sweet vermouth without ice and drank it down with mortified haste, trying not to breathe. He then ordered a whiskey, having read Hemingway that year in school. After the better part of an hour, George spotted Walter crossing the room. He looked worse than in the photos. Shorter, brown as bacon, oiled and papery, like a discarded lunch bag twisted around a soda straw. A spectacular, rickety wreck. He appeared no more interested in George than anything else in the room. His expression was set in a fierce but diffuse neutrality, like a politician’s under fire. He sat down on the stool next to George. In good French he ordered a beer, pushing up the sleeves of his linen jacket and putting his elbows on the bar. He looked a decade older than he should, his hair grizzled and white, but to George his sinew contained a mesomorphic power. He was, George decided, a Great Man, in the way only men of his generation could be. Walter received his beer in a delicate glass.

  “Hi,” George said. “Thank you for meeting with me.”

  “Yes.”

  There was a silence, in which George became aware he was not breathing. But then they spoke about George’s flight and his hotel and of the beauty of Cannes and of Mougins, though Walter did not invite him to Mougins, saying only, “That bastard Haitian’s moved next door, but I don’t think he’s got any real money and I don’t think France will let him stay.”

  “Oh,” George said.

  And after another silence: “Your mother every few years tries to sell what she’s got left of my work. All at once. Know what that does to my market value? This is not its decade. Tell her to cut it out. She’s pissing out my legacy.”

  George tried to meet his father’s gaze, but Walter spoke looking at the bottles lined up behind the bar. Even in profile, above the livery pouches, Walter’s eyes were ice, smeared with pink. George couldn’t think of anything else to say. Walter didn’t seem to want him to say anything. Later that night, in the final entry to his youthful diary, the last time he would write anything for a long time, George wrote, The milky veins across the cool watery blue were like the drag strokes of the wet remains of animal prey freshly pulled across the warming surface of a slowly melting glacier.

  “I didn’t know she was doing that,” George said.

  “No.”

  “Do you ever come to New York?”

  “Sometimes. New York is over. New York ate itself.”

  “I think so too.”

  “Well”—Walter took a sip of beer—“a bridge only ceases to be a bridge by falling.”

  “Uh-huh, yes.”

  “I’m glad we understand each other.” Walter put a ten- and a five-franc note into the wet circle his beer had left on the brass rim of the bar and lifted and shook George’s hand.

  “Wait. What is your life like? What do you do? Where do you live?”

  “I told you all that.”

  Before George could protest, his father had crossed the room and disappeared into the casino.

  The bartender came to collect the franc notes.

  “But I’m not done, I’m not done yet!” George cried. The bartender lifted his hands away from the money with a little twist of a smile and went away.

  George spent forty-five minutes wandering the casino, through the drifts of smoke and talk in many languages and the ringing bells and the whir of the roulette wheels. He jostled between the tables and worked his way up and down the rows until he found Walter playing roulette at a full table, holding a fresh beer. A man at the table with a glistening beard and merry eyes looked up at George, smiled warmly.

  “Ça c’est votre nouvelle Coccinelle?” the man asked, turning to Walter.

  “Why can’t I see where you live?” George asked. “Why don’t you want to know anything about me?”

  “Something wrong with you, boy,” Walter said, his glance flitting only briefly over George before returning to the red-and-black-checkered felt.

  “A pity the table is full,” the bearded man continued, as the croupier pulled the chips in with his silly miniature rake. The man pointed to Walter and said, smiling, “Last night I beat him like a borrowed mule! Oh, là!”

  “Come on,” Walter said. He stood and began moving through the crowd. George found himself hustling to catch up. Then they were in the men’s room, standing at the sinks. George looked at his father’s face in the mirror, and at his own. There was a resemblance. The strong jaw, the high set of the cheekbones, the shape of the skull.

  “Here.” Walter took George’s hand. He pried George’s fist open and pressed five one-hundred-franc notes into his palm. “Do it up the rest of your stay. Have a good time. If you don’t think that makes a dent in my pocket, well, it does.” Walter washed his hands and left.

  He hadn’t any paint on his hands, the phony. Not that that meant anything. Not that anything meant anything. By the time George collected himself and returned to the casino, pocketing the money as the men’s room door swung closed behind him, he didn’t see Walter. But he didn’t really look.

  Something wrong with you, boy. The awful thing about this was that when he’d heard it, George’s soul had leaped up, waved its hands high in attendance, and shouted, “Here!” Known at long last. Walter was right. But who says such a thing to another person? Exiting the casino with an eyeful of the bright evening sea, for a moment he sided with his mother. Her attendance to formality, her calcified politeness, her evasions—not the bitter bird’s way of keeping the world ordered, but rather a kindness, displeasure used to hold the obvious-terrible at bay with all its bland strength, to spare and protect the soul.

  Enough with the glowing, cluttered screen. He slams the laptop closed. He shall tend to his house, if he’s the only one left in it! Iris, going every day to that stupid job. Why aren’t he and Iris on a boat someplace dipping their hands in the water, squinting into the sun, sails whipping against the mast? That’s what a man in his circumstances should be doing. They should be making a baby on a boat off the island of Mykonos. He should be recovering in dignity, in warm, luxurious isolation.

  “Come on,” he says to the dog, back in the great room. “Come!” 3D raises his head, lifts his black nose, exhales once, forcefully, and puts his head back down. What dog, alone in a house, doesn’t want a master to follow from room to room, to curl up under the desk of, to join on a walk? Fine. He will without the mutt survey what the house needs for the coming of spring.

  First of all, there’s the murky grotto under the glass wall. Its waterfall is full of iced leaves. He goes though the mudroom, puts on Iris’s rubber gardening boots, rolls up his khakis, and descends into the shallow pool. He pulls the brown tangle from the pump and throws it up the embankment onto the lawn. He wades around, collects a raft of more brown leaves and scum, and tosses this too onto the mini-embankment. Done! Are you interested? You, who may or may not be watching? Is this of any interest? He goes to the garage to find the switch that will activate the burbling fountain. He succeeds in switching off the power to the house, room by room. He likes it better that way, he decides. Dim and quiet, disconnected. Silence, spectral data! Away, invisible hum!

  The front of the house could also use an assessment. He drips across the living room and exits the front door, slamming it shut. He sets to untangling the balloon strings still twisted around the low branch of the ash, now tatty and faded. 3D comes around the house, the rubber grenade in his mouth. How did he get out? 3D drops the grenade at George’s feet.

  “You want the ball?” he hears himself say. “Yes?” He throws it once, twice, again, again, until they have, by way of toss and
retrieval, shifted across the lawn to the swimming pool, still wearing its cover. Had Iris said something the other day about not opening the pool this summer? About how they hardly use it?

  He tosses the grenade onto the pool’s cover. He watches 3D dash out onto the vinyl, the vinyl, meant to hold a blanket of snow but bowing and bouncing under the dog, who looks back, uncertain, but fetches the grenade and leaps out after it onto the sagging cover, again and again, until they hear a car and pause. Ah, it’s Iris! George is so relieved it’s Iris. He’s so relieved she’s home. He watches her car curve up the drive and out of his vision again, hears her park in front of the garage and slam the door. He and dog united in this leaping relief. He resumes their game of fetch.

  “Come join us!” he shouts, as she crosses the lawn.

  “My God, my God, what are you doing? Don’t do that!” she cries, but he’s caught her in his arms and 3D is circling with the grenade in his mouth and George is kissing her feverishly and she looks at him, appalled, and at first she twists away. She smells like fatigue. But it’s okay, because finally she gives in.

  32

  CeCe walks a half-moon around the lake, a determined expression on her face. The cherry blossoms and one of the dogwoods have begun to bloom, white and pink. The grass under her feet has turned from straw to green. The morning sun is pale as a wafer. As she’s trained herself these last months, for ballast her arms are lifted high away from her sides, bent in the attitude of a marionette pulling its own strings. This and the crooked yank of her legs under her black coat—what she must look like from afar. A broken spider; a vigorously expiring crow. She’s left the walking stick against the bench. She walks around the lake every day, sometimes twice. She is, relatively speaking, swift. Last evening, wearing instead the bright red jacket Esme brought, she watched the sun set in the water, the molten color of a monarch’s wing. The lake has melted, save the twiggy ice slushing the far reeds. She’d like to feel the bracing green-black water, to smell the brine on her hands. She can’t bend far enough, but soon she may be able. She reaches the farthest cherry tree and rests lightly against its trunk, the closed petals dipping above her head like balloons. Across the water, she sees her French doors. I was never there. Yesterday they told her: the study is expanding. She is going home.