The Other Half of Me

by Morgan McCarthy

  “How you doing?” Before I could reply he said, “Just look at you. My good-looking grandson. You’re tall, aren’t you? Do the girls like you? ’Course they do. You got your grandmother’s eyes. The only one who has, right?”

  I had brought him photographs of the family and Sam inspected Theo with admiration. “She’s a pretty thing. You look after her. Not a safe world for women.”

  “True,” I said, frowning at the photograph.

  Sam continued to flip through the rest of the photographs and ask about “the family.” I wasn’t sure how much he really wanted to hear about Eve but ended up talking about her for too long anyway, trying to avoid mentioning Alex and Alicia, as I wasn’t sure what to say about either of them. For his part Sam seemed puzzled by the very concept of Alex, and didn’t ask much about him. “Inna-lectual,” he said with a shrug that reminded me for the first time of Eve. He also didn’t seem interested in discussing Alicia: I told him cheerily that she was enjoying her gardening and that watching films was another of her hobbies—as if trying to gloss over a difficult family member in the annual Christmas card update—but he looked at me peculiarly when I said her name, as if looking for something in my face, and then dropped his eyes, expressionless, so that I had no idea whether he had found what he was looking for.

  “I appreciate you coming out here to see me,” he said finally. “You didn’t have to be here, right?”

  “Right,” I said. Following the media attention given to the protest, Anthony & Crosse had received a letter from the U.S. developer to the effect that we would not be invited to participate in the tender process for the Tang Tower design. “But we’ve got some other things we’re working on instead, which I can’t say too much about, naturally.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said Sam, as if my words were analogous to my spirit, and not something neat and insincere and devised only for ending conversations such as this one.

  My work had become more difficult: formerly swift-moving, it had begun to hitch up, getting caught, needing unraveling. My personal assistant divorced her husband and started making mistakes that I had to fix. She had also taken to crying quietly at her desk, and I felt incapable of speaking to her about her lack of professionalism. Then a major restaurant project in Germany that Felix and I were meant to be working on was shelved when the client was taken into custody for apparently having murdered his wife. Felix was working independently on some sustainable apartments and offered to have me join him, but it was a small project and seemed too much like deceleration.

  Sam took me on a tour of the house, which was more of the same expensive whiteness. He seemed most at home in the large private cinema, where he showed me some of his studio’s new films. In the dark warmth of the room and the obliging red plush of my chair I fought a jet-lagged doze; emerging unsure of how many films I had actually watched. I thought two—a spaceship with a large-breasted and feisty captain, a mummified pharaoh doing battle with blond cheerleaders—but it could just as easily have been one, or three.

  Sam did not talk much; he would comment briefly on the films and then look at me, as if hunting for something. “That dress—with the lights—that cost three hundred thousand dollars. Caught on fire in the last take. Nearly had a lawsuit on our hands.”

  He told me about his girlfriend; an inadequate, frilly word for the dignified forty-year-old who had been living with him for ten years. Marina came home while we were in the garden, waved, then disappeared, so that I only saw a slice of her good looks; a dark profile like a Roman matron.

  “Yeah, we get on,” Sam said, watching her go. “She don’t speak much English. She could be a goddamn inna-lectual for all I know.” As he said this he peered at me suddenly, as if struck by the suspicion that I too might be an intellectual. “We’re happy,” he carried on, “I ain’t living with some up-and-coming actress. I want a bit of peace.”

  While he talked I looked at the white hair at the sides of his smooth head, the reflections of his floor, the pool, so perfectly flat it looked painted onto the pink patio, a chemical blue like the sky, the color of dead, polluted rivers. More palm trees, a rocky slope. Eve had looked out on this view once, slowly drifting and shivering in the rising heat.

  In the morning over bacon, pancakes, and maple syrup Sam asked, “So how’s that business of Eve’s going? I don’t hear from her much—she must be busy, right?” I told him about Charis, and he nodded along with me as I was talking. “Nothing stops her, does it,” he said, with barely hidden delight. “She don’t need any help now. I did a lot for that woman, I would have done more.” He stabbed a piece of pancake at me, with severity. I felt uncomfortable.

  “I think she managed to get that article set right quite quickly,” I said.

  “That was a cheap shot, that piece of crap,” Sam said meditatively. “These things make me laugh. There’s one little bit of truth in there and the rest is just stretched and twisted and”—running out of inspiration, he gestured a convoluted path in the air with his fork—“that little bastard Wymans said what he had to say to get the money. Guess I can’t blame him too much for that. That’s what we all do, ain’t it?”

  “So you don’t know who killed Marilyn Monroe?” I said lightly.

  “Nope, and Eve wasn’t fucking JFK neither. Excuse my language.”

  “Where was the one little bit of truth?” I asked, becoming curious, encouraged by his genial waving of the fork.

  “Well, we was friendly with gangsters. But that was Hollywood, and who the hell wasn’t?”

  “I thought the worst bit of it was about Freddie,” I said. “The way he died was hard enough for you and Eve without lies being made up about it.”

  Sam put his fork down with sudden and complete anger; dropping his affability like a napkin, like the last vestiges of civility. “Yeah, that was the worst fucking bit of it alright. Making out that I was a friend of that rotten little bastard. That goddamn too-white WASP prince. Like I’m the one with the Mafia connections and he’s just caught in the fucking crossfire.”

  I could only stare at him, startled. “I thought he was your friend.”

  “I wouldn’t have pissed on him if he was on fire. Matter of fact, I wouldn’t have saved him from drowning. Freddie Nicholson”—he pronounced it grandly—“was a woman beater. Had to see Eve showing up with her bruises like she was just fucking clumsy or something. That woman never spilled a drink or tripped up in her life. She’s not your clumsy bimbo type, right?”

  “But—Eve wouldn’t have . . . she never said anything like this to us,” I said. My voice sounded strange, harsh, like the bark of an animal. The pancake and syrup and bacon and coffee had collided poisonously in my stomach.

  Sam’s anger appeared to lose force. “Yeah, well. They had kids together. Don’t want them to think bad of their pa. Coulda affected her political career.” His eyes moved off mine: he looked uncomfortable for the first time. He picked up his fork again as if wondering how it had been dropped. “I didn’t mean to say anything. I just can’t stand to hear you—her grandson—talking about that bastard like he was a hero or something. Okay? Better forget I said anything.” Understanding this to be a command rather than a request, I nodded.

  I spent the rest of the morning in a vaguely shocked state as Sam regaled me with Hollywood gossip, real-estate speculation, and a list of which of his friends had died of cancer. The only reference he made to our conversation was just as I was leaving, the taxi dawdling outside, watched by the twin mirrors of the security guard.

  “I was a good husband to her,” Sam said, gripping my hand hard. “I would never have stopped treating her right.” Then I understood what was missing for him: it was the big love, now gone out of his life.

  On the plane, a night flight, I lay awake and unsettled under the quiet yellow light, trying to think about what Sam had told me. I didn’t think he was lying, which left two possible explanations. The first being that he had seen bruises on Eve, of a perfectly innocent nature, an
d assumed they were the marks of an abusive marriage because he was envious of Freddie and in love with Eve. After all, he hadn’t said that Eve had actually confirmed his theories. The second explanation was that Freddie had hit Eve and she covered it up, in the time-honored tradition of mistreated women, and continued to safeguard him after his death for the sake of Alex’s and Alicia’s memories. Doing this must have cost something, required some strange and pure internal reserve to be tapped, and I found myself moved imagining what she had done, without really believing it to be true. By the end of the flight I had settled on the first explanation, but the rill of unease still ran over me, tensing my skin as it went, pressing my eyes open.

  Sam himself hadn’t been what I expected—not at all. Not just the fact of his being in a wheelchair, which he had evaded discussing, but who he was, the composition of his soul, the metal workings so bare and strenuous. I couldn’t see anything in him that Eve would love—I could only assume that he had been different back then, in some undefined way, but he didn’t give off even a clue as to what that once-loved Sam might have been like. It was astonishing to me that they had ever been married.

  I felt sorry for Sam because he seemed to be the only person who didn’t see how unlikely his marriage to Eve was. But layered over this pity was another, less simple feeling. I had gone to see Sam as the sole survivor of Eve’s stories; I wanted to marvel at his heroic autonomy. But—like Freddie Nicholson, George Bennett, my own father—it turned out Sam was nothing more than another part of the narrative, a chapter, an anecdote. Sam hadn’t survived being in her story at all; he was beached like a ship in the hills, static and pointless. The story had moved on, and left him behind.

  I closed my eyes and let the noise of the flight, the judder and growl, move over me; sanding away the flat blue pool, the flat blue sky, the great door closing on Sam in his wheelchair, waiting for Eve to come back for him.

  Not long after my visit to Sam I ran into Alex on the street in London. We both saw each other at the same time, realized conversation would be inevitable, and nodded awkwardly. It was odd how much he resembled Alicia these days; both of them were wasting, consumed, as they aged; Alicia like a pale, dry chrysalis, Alex like a fanatical monk.

  “How are you?” I asked, wondering whether to make reference to the years that had passed without us meeting, or to adopt Eve’s usual technique of pretending that hardly any time had elapsed. Alex didn’t seem to care either way. He was preoccupied with a recent problem: he had just read a colleague’s criticism of his new book—apparently it was too personal, too fervid. I nodded sympathetically while trying to work out what the book might have been about; Alex seemed to have assumed I’d read it. I guessed that it concerned crime, or possibly religion. I offered a few vague opinions, then finally offended him by saying without thinking, “Eve is probably quite well informed about America’s moral history.”

  “I personally am not sure what Eve has to offer on the subject of morality.” Alex was abrupt.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, surprised.

  “Excuse me,” he said, frowning. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  I wouldn’t let it go. My hands were tight and I tried to stop myself from glaring at him.

  “But what made you say it at all? I’ve always thought Eve to be very moral—one of the most moral people I know.”

  But Alex was thin-lipped and, I guessed, sorry he had spoken, because he wouldn’t say anything else. We left each other excessively politely. Alex walked away down the street, his legs like the spindles of a bicycle wheel, flickering and hasty, his coat pulled uneven by the fitful wind. I pulled my own coat together and set my shoulders, which wanted to shiver, back to their usual attitude, rigid and unconcerned.

  When I got home I called Maria to discuss Nick and Emily’s wedding. This was only a few weeks away but Nick and Emily had called it off so many times that nobody seemed to quite believe in it anymore; they discussed it with a raised eyebrow—as, indeed, did Nick. I wasn’t interested in the nuptials, but it seemed a good excuse to talk to Maria, have her voice in the apartment even if it was only an imperfect transmission from another country. These days, without the prospect of Antonia turning up at short notice, my apartment seemed large and strange. My own company was too small for it; arriving home now I suddenly didn’t feel enough for the stare of the television, the two long sofas facing each other like icebergs on the vast floor.

  “Are they really releasing doves?” I asked her.

  “It’s true,” Maria said. “One of the bridesmaids has been put on dove duty. I get to carry the train. All ten feet of it.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “Aren’t weddings strange?” she continued. “The idea that a big fat diamond or doves or a coach has anything to do with a relationship. I suppose it’s just this obsession with the grand romantic gesture. But covering a bed in flower petals isn’t love—proposing at sunset isn’t love. People think the gesture is the feeling; they think the show is the truth. And how does it all end up? With me in a powder-blue satin dress, running for a bouquet I don’t want.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” I said enthusiastically. “This whole idealized love thing annoys me—the insistence that there’s this grand passion out there that’s more important than everything else in life. But there’s no such thing, and people find anything they can to fill that space—they get married based on lust or neediness and pretend it’s fate. No wonder everyone ends up divorcing.”

  “Better to just cohabit with someone rationally,” she said, sounding amused. “Like good friends who have sex.”

  “Well, exactly,” I said. This hovered between us, in the suddenly quiet line.

  “Really,” Maria said at last, “your search for a friend to have sex with is almost more poignant—more romantic—than the search for grand passion, because it’s less likely to succeed. There ought to be a film about it.”

  She laughed, but there was an irritated clip in her voice—or I thought there was, before she carried on, “Oh no! I refer you to the list: a monogrammed set of bed linen. There’s a specified thread count.”

  Disappointed, I hid it and said, “I’ve got a better one—crystal port glasses. Do they drink port?”

  “For the couple who has every other kind of glass,” Maria said, and we carried on in this way, until she said she had to go. After that I sat for a while unmoving, haunting the spot next to the telephone like a disappointed ghost, so I went out with Felix, and drank a lot, and ended up sleeping with a girl with red hair and a top that read “Stop the War,” though when I asked which war she wanted to stop, she said it was just a T-shirt, and in the morning I found I didn’t feel very miserable anymore, and could look back on the telephone call not as a signal ignored, but one that wasn’t noticed: just one of those things.

  An unexpected consequence of not seeing Antonia anymore was not loneliness—as I insisted to Felix—but an increasing sense of being on my own. Arriving home from work (as late as I could) was like rowing out into the middle of a stark lake: hours between myself and the next person. It was probably this that made me grateful for Theo’s frequent, unannounced visits, so grateful that I didn’t remind her of the lost contract, or try to force her to stick to times and dates, or even tell her off when she appeared at the office late in the afternoon (“I thought I would bring you lunch . . . but then I was so excited to see the office and I got lost on the way here, and I saw a homeless man, and he was hungry, so I gave him the lunch”), or at my apartment at night with one shoe missing, or in the morning while I was rushing to finish my coffee and get dressed for work (“Surprise!”).

  I didn’t know exactly why she wasn’t at her job, or who she was friends with now, or where she went at night, and I didn’t ask. It wasn’t hard to guess what she’d been doing with her evenings, stumbling in with large brilliant eyes like a lemur, her words tipping out in halts and rushes, hands quick with her cigarette; at other times silent, trembling
and strange. I felt increasingly like a social worker, checking up on her with my form, ticking the symptoms of drug abuse, or a parent who has read an NHS “Your Child and Drugs” pamphlet for the first time—hunting for the burned tinfoil, the empty plastic bags. And I was rewarded for my suspicion—being right, what a reward. Seeing her jump at nothing, skittish and incoherent, my rightness coiling in my stomach like an eel.

  The worst time was when she came to my apartment at five in the morning, knocking on the door so loudly that I couldn’t pretend to be asleep. I let her in and she clung to me, makeup all over her face. In between the dark stripes her face was white as wax, blurred with fright.

  “It’s him, Jonathan, it’s him again,” she whispered, clutching my arm.

  “Him? Has something happened?”

  “The sign by the pool,” Theo said, not listening to me. She was shivering fiercely. “Is that how he did it? Is it another secret? I’ve found it out now—they told me—they killed him, the ghost, our father. . . . We’re all in danger, Jonathan.” She gripped my arm harder, painfully now, and looked up at me with urgency.

  “Theo . . .” I thought I was angry but my voice, when it appeared, was small and grieving. “Theo, you’re not making any sense. You promised you wouldn’t do this again.”

  The words appeared to wash her off me like a rush of water, carrying her down to the floor, where she put her face in her hands and cried, “Why do they tell me these things? It’s the truth and no one believes me! No one! You have to help me. . . . I can’t—can’t—” She put her hands up as if to pull at her hair; they fluttered around her face ineffectively. I helped her up and made her come to the kitchen, where I gave her water that she drank obediently in between sobs, while I watched, helpless and frustrated, feeling an exhausting, bodiless nausea.