“Can we . . . do you mind if we just talk for a bit before I try to . . . explain anything?”
“Yes, I suppose so. I’ve never been anywhere . . . like this before.”
“No, I . . . didn’t think you had . . . How are your parents?”
“They’re fine, thank you. Your mum came around but . . . I wasn’t there.”
“I know. I heard.”
“You were . . . are a teacher?”
“Yes.”
“I read about that little boy.”
“Carlo.”
“Yes, that must have been awful.” “Yes, it was.”
“I was going to call you but . . . I’m sorry I—”
“That’s fine. I understand. You’re probably very busy. How’s your work?”
“Good, thanks. Busy. Too busy sometimes . . . sometimes I think that . . . This is . . . Simon, this is so weird.”
“What exactly is it that you do?”
“What do I do? Let’s see. That’s a good question. I suppose I’m what’s broadly called a management consultant, but that’s so . . . I mean whatever that used to mean . . . the job has changed so much even in the years I’ve been doing it.”
“So you work for a firm that recruits people for other firms and . . . counsels people who’ve lost their jobs. You help people.”
“Yes, but it’s more than that now, more than just . . . what you said.”
“There’s something I’ve never understood about that kind of work.”
“What?”
“Well, you said you counsel people who’ve lost their jobs.”
“Yes, people whose positions have been outsourced, or downsized, nearly always receive some counseling. I don’t do that anymore myself but, yes, that’s part of what we do.”
“But you’re paid by the employer, right, not by the freshly out-of-work?”
“Yes, their employer . . . former employer, pays us for the counseling.”
“That’s the part I don’t understand. Why would the employer pay you to do that? I mean, that person has left them, obviously, otherwise you wouldn’t be seeing them.”
“Well, you might say it’s out of a sense of corporate responsibility.”
“What, a kind of corporate pastoral care, do you mean?”
“Yes, in a way. Of course, it’s not entirely altruistic.”
“No, I didn’t think so, but how does the employer benefit at all?”
“Well, they don’t want the employee bad-mouthing the firm around town.”
“No, but you can’t prevent that.”
“No, you can’t prevent it completely but you can try to . . . I don’t know . . . head it off at the pass.”
“How do you do that?”
“You point out to them, gently, the ways in which it might not be all the firm’s fault that things have turned out the way they have.”
“You mean, you implicate the economy?”
“Yes, that and the role they played themselves. Not everybody gets outsourced or downsized. Get them to ask themselves if they were really meeting their goals, earning their pay. Was there really any synergy between their personal style and the culture of the firm? . . . This is so weird.”
“These firms you deal with would all have different cultures, I suppose?”
“Yes, sure, but they all value success. Success is a core value of any corporate culture, any successful one. But I don’t do that sort of work anymore . . . which is a bit of a relief.”
“What do you do now?”
“Oh, you know . . . all sorts of things.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for example, we just ran a series of two-day workshops at some of the major accounting firms to demonstrate to their staff how to turn social occasions into marketing opportunities, how to turn friends into clients. We try to get them to exploit their emotional intelligence, get them to see that their address books could be among their biggest assets. Simon, this is so weird . . . I feel so strange talking to you like this . . . nervous. We . . . we generally help professionals target other professionals in relevant markets.”
“You do what?”
“We . . . it’s about professionals, placing them, targeting them. We fragmentize the market for them and—”
“Anna, do you hear yourself?”
“What?”
“Do you hear the way you talk? Do you feel anything when the words come out, or are you on automatic, spitting out this . . . shit?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Everything. Where do I start? With the powerful lure of the suffix -ize, maybe? Fragmentize?”
“Simon, what is it? What’s your problem? I know you’re criticizing my . . . Is ‘criticize’ okay with you? Is it what I do or how I describe what I do? Fragmentize—it’s a word. People use it. Jesus! This is so . . . surreal.”
“People might use it, but it’s ugly. Why not ‘fragment’? Look at the people who use it.”
“If people use it often enough, it’s right. It becomes part of the language. Language is dynamic. You know that.”
“If the wrong thing is done often enough by enough people it becomes right?”
“I’m not saying that. It’s not wrong. It’s a word. You knew what I meant.”
“Anna, that’s not how we were taught.”
“It’s the way it is now. It’s . . . how I speak.”
“You would never have said any of that when we were . . . us.”
“I wasn’t working then.”
“You wouldn’t have willfully missed the point when we were—”
“Simon, I don’t know anyone like the people we used to be. We were students then.”
“When people say ‘We were students then,’ I’m never sure whether they’re attempting to excuse the way they were then or the way they are now. Perhaps they mean ‘We were students then; it was easier to care about doing the right thing’?”
“Simon, caring about the ‘right thing’ is easy. But what do students ever really do about it?”
“What are they supposed to do? They’re students. To really change the world for the better they have to wait until they’re grown-up enough to marry a stockbroker.”
“Simon, I didn’t come here to be lectured at or preached to.”
“No. Why did you come here?”
“I came here to find out why you did what you did.”
“I did it to get you to come here.”
Why was I doing this? It was as though I were two people, one angry and itching for a fight over anything, no matter how petty or how little it had to do with her, and the other just sitting opposite her in the visit center listening incredulously to the first guy and unable to stop him. I had never thought to rehearse this conversation. As much as I had wanted her to come, rehearsing it had always seemed too humiliatingly futile, even to me. I had rehearsed only the outcome, the one in which she saves me.
She was right. It was incredibly surreal. We had not seen each other for ten years yet all I could do was to bicker with her while several feet away convicted murderers talked calmly to their loved ones. I heard my rant continue without knowing what had gotten me started. I think I was attacking the power of the stock market over the lives of ordinary people, something like that, attacking her husband, and attacking her for marrying him, and for everything else.
“They’re slaves to the vagaries of a global casino that has no commitment whatsoever to, or any notion of, the common good.”
“Do you do what other people with these views do—demonstrate, join groups, picket the World Economic Forum or the World Trade Organization or whoever?”
“Anna, you have become one of those people who expect everybody to do what other people are doing. Even in protest you want uniformity. Well, I can’t march in the street one of ten abreast shouting in unison with a fist in the air. It’s like that line in Kundera—”
“Kundera! That’s so eighties—”
“No, no. No, Christ no!
Kundera, whether you like him or not, whether you liked him then but no longer do, you cannot say Kundera was the eighties. Steinbeck wasn’t the thirties and Dickens wasn’t the eighteen hundreds. They were of their times but for the ages. Their writings are not products marketed for a brief time until they’re out of vogue and discarded on the scrap heap. They’re not silver scooters or Hula Hoops, Slinkies, Rubik’s Cubes, or breast implants. They’re not trivial pursuits to be enjoyed when you think you need something new and amusing to fill the emptiness of your pointless job and your sham of a marriage.”
“Listen to you! Are you so crazy that you’re angry at absolutely every institution there is?”
“On a good day, yes.”
“Simon, when did you get so angry?”
“Anna, you’re one of the few people I know who knew me when I wasn’t angry. In fact, you’re one of the few people I know.”
“You’re angry with yourself, and if I were you I would be too. You had everything going for you, and you blew it.”
“Anna . . . What exactly does it mean to ‘blow it’? Have you ‘blown it’ if you do anything for a living other than convince people that it was their fault they lost their job or that their friends are really clients or consumers in disguise? Is it possible to live a fulfilling life by doing something other than persuading people to gamble on shares in certain companies you really know nothing about?”
“Jesus, Simon! You can’t take my son, for God’s sake, and still claim some sort of moral superiority.”
“No, no, I can.”
“I don’t know . . . Maybe it’s a male thing but . . . you have more in common with my husband than you could possibly know.”
“You.” “What?”
“We have years of you in common.”
“Not just me, it seems.”
“Yes . . . I’m sorry. I . . . I wasn’t thinking of . . .”
“You know her very well. And it seems . . . so does he. I can’t think of her name right now—”
“Angela. Her name is Angela, and I had nothing to do with her seeing—”
“What do I care what her fucking name is. She’s the whore that you both . . . It’s absolutely unbelievable. A whore!”
“Anna, get it straight. Her name is Angela. She’s my friend, and she’s Joe’s prostitute. To support herself she sleeps with many men, one at a time, for short periods in return for relatively small amounts of money. You, on the other hand, agreed to sleep with one man repeatedly, indefinitely, for a huge sum. Common interests, humor, shared worldviews, compatibility of temperament, affection, respect—they’re not part of the equation for either of you. You both made compromises, but you feel better attributing immorality to hers.”
Would I really hang myself to win an argument? That wouldn’t be very clever and I am so clever, too clever for words, too angry to even have access to them. I can kill with them at twenty paces. She had her head in her hands. I thought that perhaps she was crying.
“Anna, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .” She lifted her head up. There were tears.
“Simon, you’ve ruined everything for me. Why would you want to do that?”
“What have I ruined?”
“You took my son, for God’s sake.”
“Let’s be very clear about this. I picked him up from school. I gave him some chocolate milk and he had a nap. He was never in any danger. You . . . you know that . . . It was wrong, a stupid, insane way to get your attention but I took good care of him.”
“You’ve ruined my marriage.”
“I didn’t, Anna. You know I didn’t. I simply shone a spotlight on two unhappy people going through the motions.”
“What right have you got to interfere in my life? You’re in no position . . . What would you know? How can you even begin to—?”
“Anna, Joe went to see Angela about once a week. It wasn’t me who sent him there.”
“You can’t possibly—”
“I’m glad you still wear the bracelet. You got it fixed.”
“What? Yes, he was able to . . . This is too weird. Did you have my house bugged?”
“No. You had it fixed by the jeweler I bought it from. That’s how I found out.”
“Found out what?”
“About your . . . affair.”
“I’m not having an affair.”
“Anna, I know you are.”
“But I’m not.”
“Then you were.”
“I wasn’t. Anyway, it’s none of your business.”
“That’s true. That’s my real problem, the one that led me here. But still . . .”
“Still what?”
“Someone, a man, not Joe, picked up the bracelet for you.”
“It might’ve been my father.”
“Might’ve been, but it wasn’t.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m having an affair.”
“No, it doesn’t . . . not of itself.”
Neither of us spoke. She looked around the room, the visit center at Port Phillip Prison. Turned away from me as she was, I couldn’t see her face, but I knew she was crying.
There had been that weekend away at my parents’ place in Sorrento. Then she was gone. It was over. For years I mentally revisited those last forty-eight hours looking for what it was I must have said or done. It was only later that I turned to trawling my memory for evidence that she had already decided sometime before then to leave me. As was bound to happen, the images in my mind of what happened that weekend degraded with time; the light, the colors, the sounds, of those two days faded, until now I see clearly only the pathology of my concern with why she left me.
She sat there crying, not for me and my mistakes, but for hers, for her life exposed indelibly, painfully, before her, a life that had gotten away from her. How far was this, as I sat there in my prison uniform, afraid, unable to touch her, from the hypnagogic idyll that that been my home for about ten years.
“You know,” she said, and by this time I could not stem my own tears, “I often thought of you . . . well . . . thought well of you. Your view of the world was like the glasses through which I looked at things, the papers, work . . .‘I wonder what Simon would say about that?’ I’d think. Now I have to see you like this. What the hell happened to you? I don’t even know why I agreed to come. It was emotional blackmail, probably your idea.”
“What?”
“I thought so well of you.”
“What was my idea?”
“Your psychiatrist said he thought you were suicidal. You would have known I wouldn’t want that on my conscience. You know we had the media camped outside our house? . . . He’s my son.”
She got up to leave.
“Go and fuck yourself, Simon.” She turned and started walking.
“Anna, Anna. He is your son. Please listen to me . . . about him. Forget me. To hell with me. Don’t leave before we’ve talked about Sam. I’m a teacher. I know a little about kids . . .” She turned around and stopped where she stood.
“Please, Anna . . . sit down. I can’t shout in here. I don’t want to . . . have this conversation in public.” She walked back slowly and sat down, and I started talking for my life.
“You used to know me. Assume I deserve all this, that it’s due to my arrogance, vanity, egocentricity, stupidity . . . criminality, if you like. Assume mental illness brought on by . . . God knows what. Assume we never meant much to each other, me to you anyway. Assume that I was just a page you quickly turned in a book you probably wish you could exchange, probably thought you had exchanged. Accept that whatever is going on between you and your husband is none of my business and that I don’t even know the half of it. But do not assume that the years of coldness between you and your husband, the years of silences, the nearly total absence of animated, amicable adult interaction—do not assume this leaves your son untouched.
“There was a man—Shh! It’s none of my business. It’s Sam’s business. This man, he might be . . . he might be the man yo
u should be with. Is he a father? What kind of father is he? What kind of stepfather would he be to Sam? Shh! Don’t say anything. None of my business. But you, you must have thought about all of this . . . and Sam. What kind of man would you like him to become? You must have had something in mind when you decided to have a child. You didn’t have him for nothing, he’s a human being, not a whim. Was it to have someone to take care of you in old age, or was it simply to ensure the temporal extension of yourself in lieu of immortality? Or was it to have a friend, a real friend in a not very friendly world? So how tragic is it when the distance between you and him is born and starts to grow?
“Is it now, is this the time of the gestation of that wretched day when you realize that you don’t recognize him? How did your little boy become this man? He’s grown cold, sullen, disaffected. At first it was an act, a pose in early adolescence, a defense, a barrier against the world. Now he really is alienated. Does he ever feel anything deeply, strongly, and would you know if he did? You can’t remember the last time he thought of you without being begged, bribed, or threatened. You don’t even know if he’s happy. He’s innately bright, but nothing and no one ever fostered his intellect or even his curiosity, so he just uses his intelligence as a weapon against others, against himself.
“But then, what did you offer him as a child? There was lip service to parenting fads, and many of the traditional values were mentioned occasionally, but what did he actually see? He saw space filled at times by absentee parents flitting like ghosts around the pauses between the arguments, saw his parents’ lovers maybe, or traces of them, more or less distinct, and a domestic helper, a refugee from the latest country to reap the benefits of globalization. Maybe the housekeeper is the most consistently available adult in his childhood world. No, no, don’t rely on her. He’ll forget her just as quickly as he will forget the few words she taught him of her native language.
“What does he see? He sees his parents straining, striving, to never have to rely on any other person. He’ll deduce that it’s because grown-ups have figured out that it’s a cold and lonely place out there, that each of us is on our own and that no one but a fool ever genuinely does anything for anyone without expecting something in return. And if you’re looking for something in return, why not see to it that you get back a little more than you gave.