Seven Types of Ambiguity

  I’m too old for the music they play here. Christ, it’s not even music. But once you’re here you can’t ask them to turn it down. You’re lucky if they serve you after that. You’re paying for it, for everything. I pick up a paper. Usually the best parts are missing. What are the best parts? Maybe I should eat something? I wish someone would tell me.

  “Can I help you, sir?” the waitress asks.

  I don’t know if this is the place they were talking about at work, but if it isn’t I might start talking about it. She can’t be more than fifteen. Already so nasty, even as she offers to help me. Every year they bring out a new model. I’m depreciating, done too many miles. It’s unfair. She could help me.

  “What juice seems to hit the spot today?” I ask her with a smile.

  I hear myself ask that question. It doesn’t actually make sense. It doesn’t mean anything except that I have already begun rehearsing. I have begun rehearsing for a role as one of those middle-aged assholes who saunter into trendy coffee shops and cafés alone on weekends wearing veined brown leather jackets, with a recalcitrant newspaper tucked under one arm and ostentatious car keys tossed and caught and tossed and caught in the other hand, calling too loudly to a girl, “What juice seems to hit the spot today?” which doesn’t actually mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything except that I’m a god-awful lonely prick whose very being or way of being has ultimately put off anybody I’ve ever gotten close to, leaving me alone with a nice new smart-ass haircut and the weekend paper, all alone to talk too loudly in a café, reeking of aftershave and divorce.

  Does she think that I don’t know that, this little double-breasted midriff with a serving pad, swishing her ponytail around like it was some kind of . . . pony’s tail? Does she think I can’t see what’s ahead of me? She makes no suggestions. She reels off the juice list from the blackboard menu on the wall. I could’ve done that. Doesn’t she want a tip? Doesn’t she know how it’s meant to go? And she’ll wonder why I pay for it. She’ll feign outrage to hear I pay for it. I have to pay for it.

  “Oh, excuse me . . . Could you put some ginger and lemongrass in with that?” Damn right, it’s not a problem.

  She’s gone. She’s away clearing another man’s table. He is about her age or certainly closer to it than I am, closer to it than I ever was. He is unshaven. I find him ugly. She doesn’t. Actually he repulses me. But not her. What does he drive? What does he make? What can a man so young possibly make that he can sit here and get her to smile like that, sit here without a trace of panic. He’ll have to pay for it one day. Sure as hell. I can’t hear what they’re saying. I can’t understand what they’re saying. She can tell that I pay for it. What can she tell? I have a son. Please don’t clear the table so fast. I have a son.

  I have a son who was taken as part of the most bizarre conspiracy imaginable, a conspiracy between my wife, an old boyfriend of hers, and a prostitute that I have been seeing, to be honest, for quite some time. Longer than I care to remember. So don’t tell me you’ll be with me in a minute and then laugh with that man over there when, plainly, I need you now. She’ll come and go and come and go until, finally, she leaves altogether for another phase of casual employment, casual everything, no benefits, only to be replaced by another one, who will know instinctively how to come and go and come and go and go.

  I never want to leave him again. I am trying to reconstruct how this happened. There had been a message left for me at work telling me to come late for him. Who left that message? Anna gets to make toasted sandwiches for him. Cheese and tomato and cheese and ham. She makes soft-boiled eggs for him, four and a half minutes. He can’t grow up without knowing that I know that it’s four and a half minutes. She cuts off the top of the shell. The cut is always clean. There are no jagged edges. I could do that, but I’ve tended to tap it with the back of a teaspoon till the shell smashes. Then I peel it off. There are often tiny pieces of shell that I’ve missed. He always finds them.

  But it’s faster my way. It’s quicker to use the back of a spoon to smash the eggs, which, incidentally, I’ve got to pay for along with the sandwiches, the marbles and bicycles, the heating, the school uniforms. Anna says it’s faster to cut the top off the egg.

  The nasty girl-child with the ponytail and the skintight T-shirt sees my platinum credit card. I pretend I’m out of cash because I want her to see the card. I want to see her wonder whether she’s missed out on a tip because she wasn’t more attentive. There’s a momentary flicker in her eyes, the sullen realization of a missed opportunity that’s disguised as a smile, which leaves her face as soon as it arrives. Of course I tip her generously. I might be back here again and, anyway, there’s no point having the card if you don’t tip well.

  I know, once it’s over, that wanting the young waitress to acknowledge the privileges attached to my credit card is a pitiful sign of my discontent and insecurity. But the realization always comes too late. As it’s all happening, I want her to see the card, to see my reflection in the shiny part that not everybody gets. I want her to see the car but there’s no reason for her to look at it before I come in and afterwards it’s too late. Too late for this time. I parked a little too far south down Chapel Street, out of her view.

  I am walking to my car, remembering a sour-tasting fragment of a nightmare in which Angelique is in league with Anna’s ex-boyfriend. I almost walk into a couple carrying the sharp-cornered shopping bags of the designer stores. They hold the bags in each of their outside hands, and their inside hands clutch each other. But how firm is the grip? Is he, on closer examination, slowing her down? Do the bags contain an apology or do they hold a bribe? Do they expiate guilt? Do they obfuscate? Is there anything more to their relationship than the contents of the bags? Do these people speak to each other now only through the labels?

  Years ago when Anna and I first started seeing each other she used to chide me for my poor taste in clothes. We made a date to go to Country Road so she could choose some things more to her taste. Nothing too radical—shirts, pants, jacket, and shoes, a whole new wardrobe. Actually, it wasn’t prearranged. We’d just come out of an afternoon movie. Those were much better times. She still wears the same perfume but its smell is different now. Every now and then I can smell it as I did then. I can smell it that way right now. I dragged her into Country Road to choose some clothes for me. She’d said that she didn’t care what I wore but she often joked about it, that my clothes were out of date or else that I kept wearing the same things over and over. So when we came out of the movie that afternoon and I noticed the store, I suggested this was the time, right then. She could mold me, put my money where her mouth was.

  We went inside and I followed her around to the shirts and pants. She pulled items out and held them up to me. Then a young salesman came and offered to help. Anna pointed at me, and the salesman looked me up and down for a moment. Before showing me anything, he asked me questions. What did I have? Where did I want to wear it? How about something more like this? I didn’t know the answers to these questions. I looked to Anna but she was gone. At first I didn’t know where she was. Then I saw her way down at the other end of the store. She had quit. I called out to her. “What about these?”

  She didn’t answer. I called again and saw her from a distance fan away the air in front of her face, briefly and dismissively, just once, and then return to whatever she was looking at. In the car she denied it, but something had happened, something had snapped or clicked inside her. She’d had to leave. She could not have the salesman or maybe the other people in the store see us together with me depending on her completely for my wardrobe. Suddenly, perhaps for the first time, I was pathetic to her.

  We argued bitterly about it. She kept denying what seemed obvious to me, that the shopping had induced an almost chemical reaction in her. Irritation, shame, contempt—I’d delivered them subcutaneously. From then on I knew it could happen at any time without warning and there would be nothing I could do about it. I had the capacity to look ridic
ulous and pathetic to her. All my life, all my efforts, my defenses, my skills, my wiles, they had all been devoted to distancing myself from the hapless son of an often absent drunken father and a sad, ineffectual mother who thought that tasteless hard candy could hide from her children the threadbare nature of their miserable existence, a family even Jesus had abandoned. But Anna had found me out. She took a still picture of me that day which she cannot get out of her mind. This was way back, before we were married, before we were even engaged. This was before the seventeenth day when our first son stopped breathing one morning, before I started sleeping with whores, and before Anna went back to Simon, that teacher I think she wishes she had married, a man who took my son.

  8. I am walking to the car and it’s taking forever. I cannot feel my own face. Then suddenly I can and it feels flushed, hot, burning. It warms my hands as I stop in the street to cover my face to get the temperature right and to see if I might not feel like an orphan anymore when I take my hands away. But when I take them away, they get cold again and my face stays at a temperature that would fry an egg. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to do normal things anymore.

  I can’t remember what I’ve got to do. There’s a corporate retreat coming up. Have we got the Sheeres tonight? No, that’s in two weeks. Anna wasn’t going to be here this weekend. That’s why the Sheeres are in two weeks. Is that why? Who else is coming? Will Donald Sheere get to hear about this, about all of it, about Angelique and me? What would Sheere say if he knew everything? The commission I have made trading for Donald Sheere alone would have paid for our house twice over. More. It started with his wife. Two or three years ago Gorman called me into his office with great solemnity. I thought I was going to lose my job. He asked me what I knew about Donald Sheere.

  It was a rhetorical question. Gorman already knew what I knew about Donald Sheere. Sheere has been in the financial pages for at least the last fifteen years. His family has been in the social pages more or less since the beginning of European settlement. It didn’t matter if you didn’t know quite how or when the Sheeres made their money originally. Your children, their babysitter, and the foreign woman who cleans your house would know who and what Donald Sheere is.

  Sheere is a man for whom the acquisition of money is an autonomic activity. It is to him like breathing air is to all of us. We do not notice we are doing it unless we find that the air is unclean, in short supply, or unless we find ourselves falling through it. Donald Sheere has never found money unclean or in short supply. He regularly falls through it only to land on a thermal and soar even higher. I have seen him do it. I have since helped him to do it. He is always grateful, charmingly grateful, charmingly, patricianly, Protestantly, unexuberantly grateful. If there is any physiological change in him upon the attainment of some objective, it is undetectable to the people he employs. Perhaps that’s what they mean by breeding.

  At the end of Gorman’s question—what did I know about Sheere?—was the announcement that I had been chosen to be his wife’s broker. I had been working my way up through the private-client division and this, he explained, quite unnecessarily, was an opportunity to get to the very top of that division. But I’d have to do the right thing by her. I’d have to service her to within an inch of her life. I knew that too. There was a time not so long ago when a woman like Elizabeth Sheere would have occupied herself with charity work. She was still involved with a number of charities and volunteer organizations but now only as a patron or honorary president, with no administrative involvement other than to be reminded to consult her diary for luncheons and balls. Elizabeth Sheere had become a brand name eagerly sought by a panoply of organizations that collect money on behalf of people and causes she paid someone to brief her about. But now that her children had grown up, and she a little with them, this had all become rather tiresome. She owed her standing entirely to the wealth and success of her husband. That the success had been his and not hers had not mattered to her before. But now it did. She wanted her own. Not wealth. Donald had assigned her enough of his. She wanted success. She wanted to play the market. That’s when Gorman called me.

  I took her out to lunch a few times and flirted with her just enough for her to enjoy it but still be unsure whether it was actually happening. This takes great skill. Then I made her a lot of money. This took less skill, at least on my part, but she was left in no doubt that it was actually happening. She wanted the excitement and the success. And in something that would engage her husband’s interest, something that had a more than ephemeral and ornamental connection with the world that occupied his day-to-day attention. It wasn’t just that she bought appreciating stocks, and in large parcels, and not always blue chip either. I also had her sell against her feminine intuition right before certain collapses. How did I do this? How did I know when to come in and when to go out? I didn’t know. I guessed. But it was an educated guess. Who educated me? Dennis Mitchell, the prince of analysts.

  When Elizabeth Sheere started making money out of stocks no one had ever heard of and, even better, selling stocks everyone else was enamored of right before they crashed, her husband suddenly found her as interesting as he had when they were courting. That’s when Donald Sheere started calling me. He called me directly. There were no preparatory visits to Gorman’s office. One afternoon I’m at my desk. The phone rings and a beautifully modulated, crisp, older man’s voice, a gentleman’s voice, asks, “Is that Joseph Geraghty?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “This is Donald Sheere.”

  I came home that night, parked the car in the garage, took a shower, had a drink, and told Anna that we’d be moving.

  She told me not to get my hopes up but I could tell she was impressed, at least momentarily. We moved. We bought and renovated an old two-story house near the beach. We put in a pool and tennis court. I delivered as I’d said, and so did Donald Sheere. I became his personal broker for pretty much everything he traded: stocks in the old and then also the new economy, futures, options, hedge funds, anything going that Mitch so much as winked at. Then Sheere started recommending me to his friends.

  When this began to happen, Gorman had no choice but to shelter me from the mum-and-dad investors who can rob a dealer of his time, his most valuable asset. I say rob because they call up and slowly ask a million questions all based on the unarticulated proposition that the law of gravity does not apply in the commercial world. When you have finally convinced them of the invalidity of this deeply held conviction, they want to know why, if you know so much, you cannot make them into Bill Gates in the next week or two. They never buy anything, not in any substantial quantities, not these long-talking, inquisitive ones, but you have to keep smiling and talking over the phone as you age rapidly, all in the knowledge that these are the people standing between you and a healthy retirement. They don’t really want to talk to a dealer. They want a social worker with stock tips. The ever-so-slightly-rich Volvo- and Saab-driving new-moneyed ones are the worst, worse than the retirees. They’re always going on about corporate responsibility and ethical investment, which is all very well. I just don’t see why I have to talk about it every day while I’m trying to pay off my house. And they love to mouth off about Donald Sheere or Rupert Murdoch as if they were still in university. Little self-righteous new money hates big self-satisfied old money more than either of them are hated by never-had-any money.

  9. We are having the Sheeres to dinner in a couple of weeks. Anna begged me not to invite them. She said she couldn’t stand the pressure of an evening with them and people like them. People like them! I thought she wanted to be people like them. If not, which people did she want to be like? She used to want to be people like them. I think she did. We seldom have sex. Never kiss. I make her cups of tea sometimes on weekend mornings and she leaves notes in large print for the foreign woman we employ, telling her the food I like. She no longer takes my hand under the table when we’re out. She no longer reaches for me at night. She can have the Sheeres to dinner.
I’ve paid for it, many times over. They’re busy people. It’s taken a long time to arrange it. It’s taken my whole life. I would ask Mitch if I thought he’d come.

  On my way to the car, the telephone rings shrilly in my pocket. I ought to throw the thing away.

  “Hello.”

  It’s Anna. Sam is crying in the background.

  “Where are you? You’ve got to come home,” she says.

  “What’s wrong? Why is he crying?”

  “There are journalists photographing him through the windows.”

  “What?”

  “Can’t you hear me?”

  “What are they doing?”

  “It’s the papers, Joe. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing. People want to see him, interview him.”

  “Interview Sam?”

  “Or us. I can’t get rid of them.”

  “Have you called the police?”

  “I’m calling you, Joe. Are you coming home?”

  You buy a house in spring. The warm air, smelling of blossoms, reawakens that tentative mood of hope which winter so nearly extinguishes every year. You try not to be influenced by anything the real estate agent says but you fail in this. His words, chrome plated, reflect what you already hope to see in the house. You had not counted on spending this much, but the location is great and it does have so much potential. You and your wife have so much potential. You’ve got to take risks. Surely you will grow into the mortgage. You can see it now. Knock down that wall for an extra bedroom. You will drive your car into the three-car garage at the end of the day. It will never rain here. You will never speed into the driveway and screech to a stop in the hope that you have arrived in time to catch and assault a man who is trying to photograph your crying little boy.

  “Hey!” I call out, slamming the car door shut.