“I understand,” said Ezra. “But it’s like you listening to someone else’s stage direction. It’s just so out of character.”
“Perhaps I’m playing a different character.”
She and Jared had a fight instead of sex that Saturday night. Larissa was upset with him for embarrassing her, and he said, “Embarrassing you? Well, let me ask you, how do you think I feel when Ezra says to me earlier tonight, hey man, can’t believe your wife finally agreed to direct the spring play?”
“So? You’re embarrassed by that?”
“Not by that!” he shouted. Jared never shouted. “But you never told me.”
Why did she look so surprised by this? As if she hadn’t realized she hadn’t told him. “It just happened, Jared. It wasn’t like I was keeping it from you. It happened two days ago. Three.”
“It happened on Monday, and today is Saturday—night—and this is the first conversation you and I are having about it.”
“If you can call this a conversation.”
“It’s more words than we’ve had about it for a week!”
“A couple of days!”
“Stop it, Larissa. I know when I’m being bullshitted.”
“Jared, you were home late on Monday, on Tuesday we had Emily’s cello, on Wednesday, I don’t even know. I wasn’t hiding it.” She stammered a little, then recovered.
“Did it slip your mind?”
“Yes. It slipped my mind. What’s the big deal?”
“Larissa, what’s the big deal? It’s only been the sole topic of conversation between you and Ezra the past two months.”
“Come on, not the sole topic…”
“Ezra didn’t tell it to me like it was news,” Jared said. “He mentioned it to me, as in, isn’t it great that Larissa is doing this. Why would you not tell me?”
“I forgot!”
“You forgot? Like you forgot to tell me about the nav system?”
“Oh, cut it out! Just stop it. I didn’t tell you because I thought you’d be upset, okay? We had decided I wouldn’t take the position, and then I did.”
“So which is it, Larissa? Did it slip your mind, or did you deliber ately not tell me? Let’s not mix up the lamest of your excuses.”
She breathed in and out deeply, like she was training for a scene. “You’re upset.”
“You’re so observant. Why didn’t you talk to me about it first?”
“You told me to take the play if I wanted to! Remember? Those were your words. Take it if you want, Lar. Now suddenly I have to call you on Monday morning about it!”
“You could’ve told me Monday night, no?”
“No! Leroy was about to cast auditions for Godot! It was an emergency.”
“What does that have to do with Monday night?”
“Immediate action was required.”
“Immediate action, yes. But immediate secrecy?”
“Oh, for God’s sake! What are you more upset by, Jared? That I agreed to do it, or that I didn’t tell you?”
“So many things I can’t name them all.”
“Which one would you like to deal with first?”
“None of them, Larissa. Not a single fucking one.” And then a second later: “How about this one? Why would you keep these things a secret from me?”
“How can it be a secret? I was the one who told you!”
“Not about the play.”
“No,” she conceded. “But about the nav.”
“Oh, so now we’re parsing our secrecy, are we?”
“Oh God!”
“And you could hardly keep the nav hidden, could you?”
“I had no intention of keeping it hidden!”
“Your car,” Jared continued, “was not in the garage when I came home. You had to ‘splain that one somehow. And now you’re going to be spending all your time at Pingry. What do you intend to do with our children?”
“Do not be so melodramatic. I have Sheila, I have Leroy. Fred, Ezra. I have my line reader. We’ll be fine.”
“Fine and dandy. You’ll know how to get to Pingry. You’ll have your navigation system, won’t you?”
Without resolution Jared was confounded all Sunday. He felt as if there was a piece of the puzzle he was missing, but he didn’t know what the piece was. He didn’t even know there had been a puzzle! Now suddenly there were missing pieces in it. What was the thing that grated on him, in the scheme of things, in the whole tapestry? He didn’t care if Larissa decided to direct a play. If it worked out, great. And he didn’t really care about the nav system, though he certainly didn’t think it was money well spent. But if she wanted it, then she should have it. No, there was something else niggling him, feeling not right to him. Was it something about Larissa, something about her boots? No. Her jeans? No. Her made-up face, her styled hair? Her smile, the details of the hastily prepared dinner, of Michelangelo’s drawing lying on the floor in the mud room instead of being hung up on the fridge? Something wasn’t quite right…like a razor blade in Jell-O.
But then on Monday, Prudential’s second quarter results showed a drop in revenue of twelve percent, and Jared spent the day going over every department’s budget after a directive to cut costs by a commensurate twelve percent; the conservation of assets required his direct participation in every facet of revenues, expenditures, and payroll and took his every available brain molecule. To implement the short-range goal of resolving the unknowable mystery that was his complicated yet complete marriage to Larissa required strategy and planning, but all week he developed projects and programs that lowered the operating costs of a multi-billion-dollar business. Analyzing cash flow and pinpointing weak investment product lines took all his time and his mental resources. A week passed.
The second week was all about the auditing safeguards. With the personal tax liability deadline looming, he stayed at work till seven or eight at night to enact guidelines that would make an audit by the Treasury Department not frightening but welcome. He welcomed the transparency of a more streamlined organization, the diversification of the company’s assets into other ventures around New Jersey that masked some of the heavy tax burden the company was carrying. This was no small undertaking. And no one knew New Jersey’s financial regulatory statutes better than Jared. The company depended on him and he would not let them down. By the time the crisis at work was averted—by him—and costs were brought under control, he tried once again to reach for the bug that had niggled him, but it was gone. And at home, Larissa was her old smiling, cooking, pleasant self, the kids were dressed, homework was done, chores, TV, everything ticked along smoothly. It was just an aberration, Jared said to himself, after she had apologized yet again for forgetting to tell him about the play, about the stupid navigation. He had been anxious about other things and took it out on her. Filled with remorse, he had bought her something extra beautiful for her birthday on April 4, a white gold necklace with her name etched in diamonds. “Does this mean we have to give the car back?” she said. “Because technically you already gave me a birthday present.”
Three weeks later on a glittering Saturday night in late April he drove her in her Jag to a belated celebration dinner in New York. Maggie, Ezra, Evelyn, Malcolm, Bo and Jonny met up with them. They reserved a round table in the middle of Union Square Cafe like knights of the Algonquin. It was a raucous, loud evening, and it wouldn’t be a get-together between old friends if there weren’t a passionate altercation about one thing or another. This time it was about altruism. But before altruism, Ezra proclaimed that Larissa was doing a bang-up job with Much Ado; once again, another tinge of remorse for Jared. There he was yelling at her, while the kids at home and at school adored her. He made a mental note to be nicer to her, to cut her some slack. Look how beautiful she was, with the diamond necklace, her face young and gleaming, laughing at some stupid thing Ezra said, or Malcolm, quoting verbatim from Shakespeare, her long hair shiny, silky, all of her shiny, silky. She didn’t look forty, that was for sure, as her melodious
soft alto sang counterpoint to the tune of Ezra’s argumentative reasoned tenor.
“Is that what you want to be?” Ezra was saying. “An altruist? You don’t believe you have any right to exist for your own sake, for the sake of existing? Must you only find value in your own existence by becoming a slave to someone else’s? Why is everything about self-sacrifice? You are not an animal, Larissa, why are you acting like a burnt offering? And why do I suspect you’re just being a devil’s advocate? Don’t smile. I know I’m right. What about you? Have you got no intrinsic value of your own? No worth inherent to you simply by the virtue of your own existence?”
Malcolm intervened. Malcolm loved to intervene. He had a mustache that he twirled, a disagreeable gesture that was very good for intervening. “But, Ezra,” said Malcolm, twirling the fervent brown ‘stache, making Larissa laugh from across the table, “Ezra, you’re talking nonsense, no?”
“No!”
“Wait.” Malcolm took the hand away from his face to raise it patiently to an excited Ezra. “You have to help other people. We are a community, this is what makes us a civilization.”
“Oh, please. Community is just a way for people to judge you. Doesn’t it matter what else you’ve done? You could’ve created the wireless radio. The wheel. The guy who spends all his time watching rabbits mate, you think he’s doing it for civilization? Or the guy who sits in a dank room pining after his dead child and writes a bitter treatise on the randomness of the beginning of life, changing the course of civilization—why didn’t they tell him to serve in a soup kitchen? The man thought organic matter could grow from inorganic things! Do we judge him? Civilization has always moved forward on the backs and with the sweat of those who recognized their internal needs as equally worthy of the community’s needs. More worthy.”
“Why can’t you do both?” Maggie piped up.
“That’s a woman’s answer,” said Ezra, looking at his wife with frank affection.
“Why can’t you do neither?” asked Larissa.
Ezra laughed. “That’s a Romantic’s answer,” he replied. “Is that what you are?”
“A woman can do both,” Maggie persisted.
“A woman can’t!” Ezra exclaimed. “From ancient times, the woman has made the choice that subservience for the greater good is more important than her own interests. You know this to be true, for biological reasons, for sociological reasons. Which is why women are to be found almost nowhere in the progress of civilization. Women defend the status quo. The nest. The offspring. Women have given themselves over to this purpose.”
“Yet without women all life would come to a grinding halt.”
“I’m not saying you don’t serve a purpose, Mary-Margaret,” Ezra said solemnly.
“Women have made a choice to do this, to take care of their young!” Maggie said. “Because it is for the ultimate good of mankind—so that bastards like you could spend all their time reading idiotic books and playing with your test tubes.” Maggie scored major points with the two women at the table.
“Yes,” said Ezra with amusement. “It is for the good of mankind. But what about the good of the woman?”
“Yes, for the good of her, too, Ezra,” said Evelyn. “Larissa and I were discussing this just the other day, right, Larissa?”
“Right, Ev.”
“Women are saved through childbirth,” said Evelyn, smiling, with Larissa blinklessly nodding.
“Exactly,” said Ezra. “But you know why they can be saved? Because someone else hunts and gathers. Someone has to get up each morning, slog to work, deal with people he doesn’t like, do crap things, answer to crap bosses, make boring phone calls, attend numbing meetings. Right, Jared?”
“I know you love to mock what I do, Professor,” said Jared, “but I run the finances of a company that has global assets totaling $485 billion.” Malcolm whistled. Evelyn looked at him impressed. Maggie glared at Ezra with a “pwned!” expression. Bo glared at her Jonny as if to say, why can’t you get a damned job, even as a dishwasher? Only Larissa was playing with the umbrella in her Sangria and didn’t look up. “We have thirty-five thousand employees,” continued Jared. “That’s a lot of men and women I pay who hunt and gather for their families. I’m not even talking about all the money instruments we offer so an English teacher like you can put Dylan through college. That’s got to be worth something, isn’t it, Ezra?”
“It is,” Ezra assented. “Because of that, your wife is home. Larissa bakes, which smells good and tastes delicious. She takes care of your offspring, most of whom I assume you love because they do not bang the drums at two in the morning. Larissa, tell us—to take care of things you love, is there slog in that?”
“There is no slog, Ezra,” agreed Larissa, drink thoroughly stirred.
“But, Ezra,” said Maggie, “you were just arguing that the woman is a more pathetic creature than man because she lives to serve other people. Yet you paint man as also serving, except serving those he doesn’t love. So who’s got the better life?”
“Without a doubt, the woman,” said Ezra, and they all laughed. Voices calmed down, emotions ran slower, Jared poured more red wine, the music overhead switched to reggae jazz, quite the combo. When Jared glanced at Larissa sitting on his right, the smile was frozen on her porcelain face, her white teeth as if in a lion’s grimace, her made-up eyes glazed by—drink? And then she spoke in a non-sequitur. She said: “We can do it on a sunny floor…Roll on our backs screaming with mirth, glad in the guilt of our madness.”
Ezra and Malcolm looked at her blankly, but Jonny went ooooh, ain’t Lar so fly quoting Morrison, because Jonny was a music freak and knew everything, and Evelyn responded by quoting Chesterton, and then Walker Percy. They had been talking about the angst of life, or perhaps the emptiness of living only for yourself, or what it meant to be a working man, a working woman, to be parents…and suddenly the little bug Jared had been searching for crawled out from wherever it was hiding, on Jim Morrison’s back, dragging the navigation system and the play and the secrets with it, because in the twenty years he had known Larissa, she had never quoted Morrison. Ever. And tonight, voila, a whole punctuation-ridden sentence, like a bawdy limerick, straight from the Lizard King’s mouth. Were The Doors and Shakespeare in any way related? But he couldn’t ask because the moment had passed. The waiter brought the cake, and it was her birthday celebration, after all—he didn’t want to seem churlish—and in the car Larissa slept, having drunk too much, and Jared drove home with the radio on, and of course, what else playing…Of our elaborate plans, the end, of everything that stands, the end…
“I never heard you quote Morrison before,” he said to her that night in bed. “What made you quote him?”
And she replied, her back to him, “I’m reading Wonderland Avenue. A memoir by Danny Sugerman. You should read it; it’s the most fascinating book.”
“I don’t read about Morrison. I’m not a fan,” Jared said. “He is too self-indulgent.”
“Who? No.”
“Oh, it’s all so beautiful and lyrical,” continued Jared. “He free verses, he rhymes, he combines death and thighs, Mexico and storms. What does it mean? Ultimately he’s got no philosophy to hang your Mexican hat on. He’s just a gifted stoner, being pretentiously superficial.”
“He’s not pretentious—what are you talking about?”
“Who’s going to read Jim Morrison and say, ooh, man, that shit changed the course of my life? He doesn’t make a lick of sense. He’s about nothing. But unlike Seinfeld, he’s not even remotely funny.”
Larissa remained completely silent, her back to him.
“You know why?” Jared went on. “Because there is no there there. At its heart it’s empty. It’s shallow. Because in the end it’s nothing more than drug-addled lunacy.”
“Well, I like him,” Larissa said. “Why does everything have to be profound? Why can’t it just be?”
“Yes, but what does it mean?”
“Why does it have to m
ean anything?”
“If it doesn’t mean anything, then why write it?”
“Why do anything?”
“Good question. Morrison himself said all he wanted to do was to fuck away death.” Jared smirked. “How’d that turn out for him?”
Larissa had no response.
And on Monday Jared became mired in managed money and retirement accounts, and a pesky variable annuity that involved a nearly insolvent commercial real estate account in Hoboken. There was no time to think about the guilt of her madness.
It wasn’t a question of him reading Wonderland Avenue. The only thing Jared had been reading the last eight years of his life were the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, the annual reports of the Fortune 500 companies, and the templates for auditing safeguards. By keenly analyzing the relationship between regulation, quality attributes, and diversification, Jared was sure he could keep at bay that most undesirable of events, a tax audit—an unwelcome intrusion by the public into your private business.
Chapter Four
1
Glad in the Guilt
Larissa was crushed against the hard white wall and her hands were up, perhaps around his neck, or flayed against the wall, like she was flayed, her gasping coming out in hot bursts of disbelief and ardor. One of his hands cupped her face as he kissed her, and the other…she was pawed, her dress, her arms, her hips; he raised her dress, put his hand under it, and if she breathed out, she wouldn’t know because his lips were on her, and she lost her head, everything was lost but the hand under her dress, his full palm pressing against her. She wanted to put her own hands up but not in surrender, perhaps in a maybe; say wait, too fast, not fast enough, say, I have to go, though not yet, move away from his lips? though moving away from his lips was impossible, or moving away from his fingers and his spread out hand under her whimsical spring dress, so when she moaned, she moaned into his mouth, barely able to stand up, clutching him as he was panting. Oh, Larissa, he whispered, touching her; with his body he stopped her from falling, he just kept her pinned and confined, his tongue in her moaning mouth, his relentless fingers troubling her into a climax so unexpected and intense, she was condensed to sliding down onto the wooden floor while he kneeled down close by her, rubbing her thigh in earnest comfort, though there was no comfort for her.