“If you like—though it’s technically afternoon. It’ll soon be time for the children’s baths.”
He was amazed at how presumptuously she regarded his comings and goings, as if he were another of her children.
She followed him into his room. Tina followed her and leaped up beside her as soon as she sat down on the folded-up sofa. While Zoltan stood at the window summoning strategies for getting rid of her, she lit one of his cigarettes and announced that she had decided to ask him to leave.
At first he didn’t understand her. But seeing the cocky tilt to her head he divined her meaning. “Leave? You mean, move?”
“Yes.” She blew out a long stream of smoke.
“You cannot be serious.”
“I am, though.” She smiled with satisfaction and curled herself into the corner of the sofa, drawing her legs up under her, just as she used to do before he had banished (or abandoned) her. For the first time since he had come to live with them she felt confident.
“When?”
“As soon as you can.”
“But … why?”
“Did you think you could live here forever?”
“It’s only been three months.”
Would she dare to say it? She dared. “I’m afraid, Zoltan, you no longer charm me.”
He raised an eyebrow at her, smiling, as if at some private joke between them. “And for that you would evict me?”
“You’d expect me to keep you? As if we were married?”
“I would hope so,” he said, falling into their private banter.
“You’re a cheating husband,” she countered. For a moment his hair glowed in backlight, as the sun struck the top of the mountain before sliding behind, and she felt a stab of regret. She softened slightly. “Let’s just say it’s not working out the way we expected, okay? We gave it a good try, but it didn’t work. You’re not a monk, I’m not a saint. So we’ll just go back to how it was before you came.”
“Excuse me. Maybe you can go back, but is not so easy for me. I have no place to go.”
Here was the cue for her best line; she launched it like a smart bomb. “Move in with Elaine, then.”
He whirled around to stare at her.
Bull’s-eye!
He sat down at the desk and drummed his fingers on the edge. “You cannot be serious,” he repeated with an expression of such incredulity that Heather was momentarily taken aback by her own audacity.
She managed to hold on to it. “Why not?”
“Well …,” he stammered, “well, … I know Elaine a short time only. Never have we spoken of living together.”
“You moved in here before you knew me at all. No problem then, right?” she tossed out cockily.
“That was different.”
“How?”
Zoltan got up and began to pace from the window to the door and back again, a large trapped animal, as he had on her first visit to him in this room.
“Relax,” she said. “I don’t mean you have to move out today. You can take your time.”
“Why, thank you, madam,” he said with a sweeping bow. “But it is not only a question of time. Maybe I do not want to live with Elaine. Or Elaine with me. That is a very serious decision, you know, to live with someone. I cannot say that I am ready.”
Heather shrugged and stroked Tina’s back all the way up to the electric tip of her tail. “To tell you the truth, Zoltan, I sort of feel the same way myself.”
They stared at each other in silence. Zoltan concentrated his eye power until Heather backed down. “Anyway, I’m not sure I believe you. You’ve been staying there practically every night for weeks; you’ve almost moved in with her already. It’s only a matter of moving your things over too.”
Zoltan was overwhelmed by her cunning, her blatant exaggeration. How did she know where he slept? But he would not lower himself to dispute the count with her. He sat down again and swiveled the chair around. “I do not stay there often. Her place is too small. Two tiny rooms. In any case, she would not agree.”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
Speechless, he stared at Heather. Then he repeated, “You cannot be serious.”
Each time he said it Heather felt more certain. “Yes, I’m afraid I am.”
“But why? What have I done?”
“Let’s say it’s more”—she looked at him defiantly and slowly exhaled smoke—“what you haven’t done.”
“Are you actually suggesting that if I, if we—” He closed his lips, his eyes. The gall of the woman! Sitting there calmly smoking and petting her cat, she seemed to him truly monstrous. First for what she did to her husband, now for what she was doing to him. An evil monster with ice green eyes.
“Frankly, Zoltan, we feel exploited by you. I kept my part of the bargain, but you haven’t kept yours. You didn’t come through for me.”
“What do you mean?” Would she have the nerve to say it?
“I’m no less lonely than when you came. Certainly more stressed. I don’t see why I should have all the trouble it takes to keep you when you give us nothing in return.”
“I don’t see that I am so much trouble. Often I’m not even here.”
“That,” she said, crushing out the cigarette, “is precisely the point.”
He shook his head. “I can’t believe you are sitting here saying these words. Suppose Mack knew?”
She smiled sweetly. “He does know.”
“What does he know?”
“He knows that I am asking you to leave.”
Zoltan looked around his room. He should never have allowed himself to become attached to this place. The perfection of this setting should have tipped him off; he should have known as soon as he saw the shameless luxury that there’d be a heavy price. His destiny was exile; one exploiter was the same as the next. The humiliation of being at the mercy of everyone with more money than he had. And now, how obviously she was enjoying herself! If he were Mack, he’d know how to deal with her. But Mack was weak. Behind all that bravado he was a wimp.
“When do you want me to go?” he asked with forced politeness.
She wanted him gone now, yesterday! But her heart softened. “I don’t want to make it hard for you. Take as much time as you need.”
Agitated, he resumed his pacing. He would leave tonight, sleep on someone’s sofa, on a park bench, anywhere, rather than submit to the abjections, the humiliations of this arrogant bitch. Maybe Elaine would take him for a day or two while he tried to figure out where to go.
His mouth went dry, he felt his eyes burning in their sockets. He resumed strumming his fingers on the desk. Self-control. “Mack knows you are kicking me out like”—he snapped his fingers smartly—“this?”
“Yes.”
“And he wants me to go? He has said so?”
She wanted no mistakes. “Not in so many words. But he says he’ll back me up whatever I decide.”
“So!” cried Zoltan, grasping at the faint gleam of hope. So it was she, not Mack, who was trying to destroy him. “Then I think I will speak to him myself before I start to pack.”
“You mean you’re refusing to go when I ask you?”
“I go when Mack asks me. I have rights.”
“Rights! What rights?”
Zoltan thrust out his chin and chest, raising himself to his full height. His hands were trembling with rage; he clenched them into fists. Mack was his only hope. Could he count on him? Or would he sell out a brother for the fickle bitch who had once trapped him into marriage. Marriage was beyond him, but even he could see that this marriage was rotten and corrupt. Mack must know it too.
“I came to this house at invitation of your husband; I shall leave at his invitation also,” he announced with dignity. His diction had grown increasingly formal, as if it were a secret source of strength. “Please tell him I have something to discuss. Tonight, if he is free … And now, if you don’t mind to leave my room?”
He still dared to call it his room! Heather strain
ed to contain her fury. “Tonight, then, when Mack gets home. We’ll have one of our fabulous stimulating talks, Zoltan.” She stood up, spilling the cat.
“I will ask Elaine to join us if possible, so Mack can hear from her own lips how preposterous is this mad idea of yours.”
Heather glared. He would dare to bring his girlfriend into her house? “Okay, why don’t you do that. And maybe I’ll invite a second of my own.”
For a moment familiar sparks flashed from the adversaries’ gleaming eyes as they touched gloves before retreating to their separate corners.
“What time?”
“After I’ve put the kids to sleep. Say, nine?”
“Excellent. Now, if you will please excuse me …”
AS SOON AS SHE was gone Zoltan put on a sweater, then another. He felt cold, though his hands were sweaty and his mouth was dry. First you get kicked out for sleeping with someone’s wife, then you get kicked out for not doing so. And just when the book was beginning to take shape, and he’d settled down enough to begin work. Exile was his lot, his realm, his Realm of Night.
He wanted to smash something. He tried pounding one fist into the other. Not enough. Then he picked up the thesaurus and slammed it down on the desk. Better. He did it again. He raked the fingers of both hands through his hair, pulling it back until his eyes were facing the ceiling. Finally, in a burst of rage he turned on the hot shower faucet full force and stripped off his clothes.
Water streamed over his body. They were closing in on him again. What did women want from him? They wanted to control him, bend him to their will, and when he resisted they became hysterical. Making scenes in public, screaming, crying, killing themselves, hounding him out of his home. When all one wanted was to be left in peace. Which was why he couldn’t live with Elaine even if her place were twice as large and she could practice her cello elsewhere. It was as Maupassant wrote a century ago, in that story Orville and his friends knew almost by heart: “when a woman has picked out the lion she intends to bag, she stalks him with compliments, favors, little acts of kindness …” until she has eaten him alive—like “rats in a granary.” Exactly!
He let the hot water cascade off his scalp, his shoulders. He remembered that hideous night he had been sleeping in Loretta’s bed when suddenly a key turned in the outer lock, the front door opened, and there was her husband lumbering up the stairs. By that time the affair with Loretta had long since wound down, and they slept together only occasionally, when her husband was away. Why not? The betrayal had already occurred, they reasoned, and their sporadic coupling would make no difference. But her husband, a large, slow-moving man, seeing another man in his bed, could not possibly have understood. Without even removing his coat or boots he threw himself on top of Zoltan and began to pummel him methodically. Loretta, naked, tried to pull him off, whimpering and squealing; but Zoltan, who had once strenuously resisted arrest and once crossed two borders incognito, seeing the mammoth misunderstanding did not even try to defend himself. From that moment on, he swore off married women.
The hot water pelted his back and legs until steam saturated the air, filling his throat, his sinuses, his eyes and ears. It was almost unbearably hot, but he wanted it hotter still. He raised his arms high and turned toward the stream. As the hot liquid flowed down his chest, all but scalding his genitals, he felt his head begin to clear, his tense muscles relax.
Mack should be held responsible. Mack should give him severance pay and a relocation fee as penalty for being weak, for allowing Heather to rule him. The sort of man who found opportunity in the misfortunes of others, who cashed in on a market collapse, should be made to pay for the misery he caused. At the very least, he ought to use his real estate connections to find another place for him to live and subsidize his rent. He owed him that. Wasn’t a husband responsible for his wife’s debts? Tit for tat. Proudhon’s dictum—Property is theft—certainly applied to Mack’s, which was obtained not by labor but by cunning, even, as he himself acknowledged, by fraud. When the air was almost too thick to breathe, the water too hot to stand, he closed the hot faucet and opened the cold. Like a cold plunge after a sauna, like cold behavior following hot to demoralize your enemy, like the good-cop/bad-cop combo, an icy shower after a scalding one was a triumph of will and a powerful energizer. He needed every bit of will and energy he could command for the approaching trial.
When he was dry and dressed he picked up his cell and phoned Elaine.
22 BY EIGHT-THIRTY THE MOUNTAIN was covered with wet snow. If ever Mack was justified in being late, it would be tonight. No sooner did the wipers clear a swath through the windshield than fresh snow piled up again. The road was winding, with only one passable lane. The Porsche had a powerful engine, but in snow like this he needed four-wheel drive. He peered into the impenetrable dancing light thrown by his brights, then dimmed down to regular, then clicked up to the brights again.
This was one meeting he would not mind being late for. At work he prided himself on his shrewd handling of tricky meetings. But this one would be different. The flicker of hope he had for it was sparked by Zoltan’s having called it at all, but Mack could not imagine an explanation that would satisfy him or pacify Heather. He hardly knew which disturbed him most: Zoltan’s exploitation, Heather’s petulance, or his own hubris. For without doubt he had set the whole thing going, had practically begged to be taken in, taking Zoltan in.
Too bad he couldn’t wave the Projects & Prospects list in Zoltan’s face without giving himself away, demand an accounting of the Balkan Freedom Fund, ask how many heady conversations could pay for each insult. Stipend indeed! On the contrary, he ought to charge Zoltan damages for so grossly abusing them. Patronizing a patron, treating Heather like a housemaid, squandering his gifts. Heather was right. Zoltan teach them how to live? He could teach Zoltan a thing or two.
Even so, part of him was sorry to see the adventure end. It wasn’t only that without Zoltan around he would be less free to concentrate on the L.A. deal, which now required his full attention, or even that he would miss the exhilarating talk, the satisfaction of serving art, Zoltan’s gratitude. He knew that after Zoltan left, the household would probably revert to dull routine and petty resentments, like the charred stubble left after a fire. How quickly Heather’s radiant face would shed its glow. Their sensual knowledge of being powerfully seen would wither. In Heather’s eyes Mack would revert to being an absent father, and in his own eyes an impostor, a hustler, a fraud.
Suddenly the headlights caught a pair of eyes, unmoving, in the center of the road: some small mammal frozen with fear. Instinctively Mack hit the brake. Too hard, too late: instead of stopping, the car, following the heartless law of inertia, continued straight ahead in a steady skid. “Move!” he shouted, frantically turning the wheel one way, then the other.
In an instant the car left the road and thudded into a tree. He should never have swerved to avoid those eyes; he should have hit the little bastard instead; he should have been driving the Subaru, he thought, as he cut the ignition and got out to survey the damage. The front bumper was hanging down, one fender was slightly dented, but miraculously, the headlights still shone. Lucky he’d been driving slowly. He wondered if the eyes had got away, and what kind of creature they belonged to: rabbit? woodchuck? squirrel? possum? He got the shovel out of the trunk and cleared a path behind the back wheels. Then he started up the car, put it into reverse, and after a few scary spins of the tires managed to back onto the road. He heard the front left tire scraping against the fender, but at least he was moving. Immensely relieved, he called Heather to tell her he’d be late and promised her to drive the rest of the way at a crawl.
WHEN MACK TELEPHONED WITH the news of his accident, a feeling of dread came over Heather. Often she had imagined just such an accident, usually fatal. In her dreams Mack would be at the wheel, sometimes in a car, sometimes a plane, sometimes nearby, sometimes far away—and not always while she was asleep in her bed, either. She couldn’t help it, he
was gone so much. She’d see him speeding along, oblivious of the danger, and then the scene would switch to someone somberly delivering the news, forever altering her life. If the dream had been colored blue, it would switch to orange; if silver, to red—the colors, she imagined, of dawn, of hope, of freedom.
Now, hearing about his accident, however slight, her mind’s eye saw black. She could not picture what had happened, only what might have happened. He could have died there—and just when she had come to appreciate that he was on her side. He could have died, leaving her and the children alone to fend for themselves.
Once when she was seven her father had crashed into a tree with her asleep in the passenger seat (the “death seat,” he’d called it afterward). It had been a hot, sultry night and they’d been traveling home from a family reunion in a distant town. Maybe he’d fallen asleep at the wheel—she never knew. Wasn’t her mother also in the car? If so, wouldn’t she have been the one in the death seat, with Heather and her sister asleep in the back? All the details were fuzzy before the moment when she woke to find the push buttons of the car radio rolling in her lap, a great elm tree leaning on the windshield, and her father sobbing as he held her in his arms. Whenever she recalled that scene it was as vivid as if it had just happened; now it returned when she contemplated Mack’s accident. Miraculously no one had been hurt—then and, if Mack was telling the truth, now as well.
She had always been impressed by the power of her dreams. (Hadn’t they brought her Zoltan?—though reality had turned them sour.) Now she was appalled by it. When she hung up the phone she felt so weak she had to sit down, though there was still much to do in preparation for the meeting. Even though the announcement of the accident had been delivered not by a stranger, as in her dreams, but by Mack himself, it was enough like her dreams that she couldn’t stop thinking how close she had come to killing him.
23 HEATHER ARRANGED THE SEATING into two facing groups near the fire and flicked the indirect spots on the high beams, as if for a touring architectural jury. On the mantel sat a vibrant arrangement of seeds and leaves she and the children had collected before they went to bed. She put on a CD of minimalist flute music that Zoltan had once asked her not to play, then stared out the window at the huge snowflakes filling the sky, looking like white ashes as they danced around the path lights. The night was dramatic and portentous. She was pleased.
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