Seven Types of Ambiguity

  “That looks nice, Joe,” I volunteered.

  “Yeah? It’s got all this fucking cat hair all over it. How the hell does it get cat hair? We don’t even have a cat,” he said, brushing his jacket brusquely with a lint remover.

  I wasn’t trying to be cute. The tits were mine but he thought of them as an asset of his to show off, like his house. Only, unlike his house, he’d owned them outright since the day he married me. We got in the car. He slammed his door shut and proceeded to drive like a man who expected to be refused admission if he were late.

  “Joe Geraghty, this is Peter and Marian Simmonds. You know Peter, of course, and—”

  “This is my wife, Anna, Anna Geraghty.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Sheere.”

  “Please call me Donald.”

  “Thank you.”

  “This is my wife—”

  “Oh, so pleased to meet you, Mrs. Sheere. My husband has told me so much about you.”

  “And I’ve told my husband so much about your husband. Haven’t I, Don?”

  “Oh, my word, yes. Joe has made quite an impression on my wife, and, more recently, on me. I’ve come to depend on him quite a lot. Oh, and this is Dr. Michael Gardiner, on whom I depend even more than on Joe—he’s my cardiologist. It’s on account of his expertise that I’m still alive.”

  “How do you do?” Dr. Gardiner held out his hand. “I have to tell you that Don doesn’t really owe me anything, except perhaps my fee for the last consultation. He’s rather prone to hyperbole, a condition notoriously difficult to treat.”

  A waiter came up with a tray of drinks and momentarily arrested the flow of introductions. Once everyone was armed with a daiquiri, he continued.

  “Joe and Anna Geraghty, this is David Buchanan. David is a partner at Kiersten, Emery, Hemmings.”

  “How do you do, Anna . . . Joe, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very pleased to meet you . . . both. Donald tells me you’re a broker with Gorman’s team,” Buchanan offered.

  “That’s right.”

  “And that you’ve done wonders for Mrs. Sheere.”

  “We just try harder,” Joe said, the merest suggestion of a smile acknowledging the compliment. He couldn’t relax. This was work, and he was working on a number of fronts—Joe was all front—among which control of his sphincters outranked control of his facial muscles. Besides, to have smiled broadly would have been to accord this neophyte too much importance.

  “And what about your wife, Anna?”

  “What about her?”

  “Is she part of your team?” David Buchanan inquired.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Are you a broker too, Mrs. Geraghty?” he asked me, smiling between sips.

  “No, I’m not,” I smiled.

  “Well, no, I’ve never seen a stockbroker who looked quite like you.”

  “Well, thank you . . . I think.”

  “Mrs. Geraghty, I assure you—”

  “Anna.”

  “I meant it in the nicest possible way . . . Anna. You see in my—”

  “You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?” Joe interrupted.

  “Yes, I’m a partner at Kiersten, Emery, Hemmings . . . Joe, isn’t it?”

  I remember reading that the pride of the peacock is the glory of God while the nakedness of a woman is the work of God, something like that. I don’t remember anymore who wrote it. Blake, maybe? Simon would know. He had probably referred me to it. I wasn’t naked but David Buchanan looked at me as if I were, taking his eyes off me only to reassure himself that his plumage not only rivaled that of my husband but that it outshone it. Not only pride but vainglory, envy, and malice, they were there aplenty at the Sheere cocktail party that night. Hypocrisy was there somewhere, too. I caught them only to the extent that I could process snatches of conversation in retrospect. A baby grand was too busy tinkling in and out and around melodies that, with each daiquiri, I was having increasing trouble placing.

  “Mrs. Geraghty, you’re . . . um . . . Your husband has told me what line you’re in, but I . . .” Donald Sheere turned to me and hesitated.

  “I work for a management consultancy firm.”

  “Oh, really? Which one?” he asked, and I found myself delivering an impromptu public seminar on management consultancy generally and our firm in particular. And once Donald Sheere had asked me a few consecutive questions about my work, others in the crowd felt free, if not obliged, to show a similar interest.

  “It’s really come along, hasn’t it? As a science, I mean,” Peter Simmonds chipped in earnestly. “Indispensable tool of business nowadays. Certainly nowadays . . .”

  All this attention seemed to be pleasing Joe. His asset was yielding a far-higher-than-forecast dividend. He would have been content to let me dangle from the ceiling like a spinning mirror ball, fielding questions from men he either wanted to impress or depress while he went to work on Mrs. Sheere. I shot glances his way occasionally just to check on how well he was doing. He seemed pleased with himself, that is, till David Buchanan placed his hand just below the small of my back. I was somewhat taken aback, so to speak, and didn’t know how to react. So I waited and he waited, and so did his hand. To be brutally honest, I was a little excited by it, by the audacity of it as much as by anything special about David Buchanan. We were standing next to each other, part of a circle. Anyone could have seen what he was doing. Suddenly I thought I could feel the slightest movement of one of his fingers against my skin. Then he abruptly took his hand away, obviously seeing before I did that Joe was rejoining the circle. Joe made a point of putting his arm around me, and before too long he was helping me on with my coat. When he walked a little away from me to say something privately to Mrs. Sheere before leaving, I reached in my pocket with my right hand to find David Buchanan’s business card. How he had managed that was beyond me, but clearly he was reckless to the point of being dangerous, or even unhinged. Did he really think I was going to find the card, look at it, and call him? I almost wanted to call him just to ask.

  By the time we got home Joe was in a foul temper. It wasn’t merely that he was convinced that I had been flirting. He felt he had gone to an important cocktail party and had lost. He had lost the cocktail party. By the time I had paid the babysitter and seen her out, he was already in bed. I probably would have thrown out the business card there and then had I not felt that my having had it would infuriate him were he to see it in the wastebasket. So I left it in my coat pocket and made a mental note to take it to work on Monday and throw it out there.

  I thought about David Buchanan’s business card for the first time on Monday when an unexpected call came through to me from reception, just before lunch.

  “Anna Geraghty?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Michael Gardiner. We met on Saturday night at the Sheeres’?”

  “Yes, Michael. How are you?”

  “Fine, thank you. I wondered when you might be free to have lunch?” Persuading myself that he wanted, as the director of the cardiovascular department of a large public hospital, to talk about engaging our firm, I found myself agreeing to have lunch with him. I put the phone down and just sat there stunned for a moment. Then I tore Buchanan’s card in two and threw it away. That’s how it started with Michael.

  10. It began with lunches, just long slow lunches with long intervals in between. In this way it was easy never to feel too guilty about any one of them. On the contrary, I felt somewhat exhilarated and almost—I am embarrassed now to remember it this way—almost noble. Noble precisely because nothing ever happened. Here I was having these long and irregular lunches with a softly spoken, attractive medical specialist and all we ever did was talk and eat.

  We talked about art, theater—he was a member of everything. He told amusing anecdotes about politicians and various celebrities, he knew people most other people never glimpsed outside a magazine or a newspaper. He might take my hand for a moment at the table or kiss me briefl
y on the cheek when we met or when we parted, but that was the full extent of it for nearly a year. His was an old-world charm, but its potency was very contemporary. He would preface a comment with “This is not something I could say easily to my wife,” and I would listen even more intently, the two of us slightly leaning toward each other. Had I thought about it, I would have realized that it was never clear why the thing he would then say next could not be said easily to his wife but, at the time, I didn’t think about it. I was enjoying the experience too much. But I did wonder, why me? He could have ensnared just about any woman, and I wasn’t sleeping with him. I was nowhere near sleeping with him, and it didn’t seem to bother him at all. He never even broached the possibility. He saw something in me, he told me, something he rarely found in other people. I was smart enough not to ask what it was, defining it implicitly for myself as “that something that he saw in me.” Simon would have liked the tautological certainty of that.

  Then came the night that culminated with a sunrise that saw me, born again as someone else, driving north of the river to order an egregiously large breakfast at a café on Brunswick Street. Michael had phoned me a week before to ask whether I would like to join him for dinner. We had never had dinner together before; it had always been lunch. I asked about his wife, and he said that she would be unable to join us. She would be out of town. He didn’t mention Joe, either his inclusion—which would have been out of the question since Joe hadn’t known about any of our lunches—or the requirement for discretion. I told him that I would like to but that I didn’t know what to tell my husband.

  “Why don’t you tell him the truth?” Michael said, after which there was a long pause.

  “The truth . . . that’s . . . interesting. What is the truth exactly . . . here?”

  “The truth is, Anna . . . the truth is, I have never shown you anything but the utmost respect—”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “That we talk very easily—”

  “That’s true.”

  “We have had lunch together—what is it? Quite a few times now.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Each time I feel as if I could keep talking to you forever.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. You know that.”

  “Michael, I—”

  “The truth is, Anna, we’re both constrained, we’re married and this keeps me from seeing as much of you as I’d like, but you . . . you mean so much to me. Each time I see you for one of our lunches it’s . . . well, it’s the highlight of my week.”

  “Really?”

  “You know it is. And I’ll go further. I think you quite enjoy them too.”

  “Yes . . . I do.”

  “Yes, to some people our relationship might seem a little unconventional but, hell, we’re unconventional people, aren’t we?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose that’s . . . true.”

  “I don’t know Joe, but he’s . . . he’s probably more conventional than we are.”

  “Yes . . . he is.”

  “So, okay, you can’t tell him the truth, or not the full truth about everything that goes on inside the complicated mind of the woman he’s lucky enough to have snared. I understand this, but next week my wife will be away without me, and all I seem to want at the end of a long hard day is to have you over for dinner. I just want to have dinner with you. It’s not such a crime, Anna, is it?”

  “No.”

  “I know you can’t tell him that, so tell him something else.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Tell him you have to go out of town for work. You’ll have a long, unhurried dinner with me. We’ll open a bottle or two, forget the time, and when you’re tired you can bid me good night and I can have a cab take you to a room I’ll book for you in a hotel in the city. In the morning, you’ll go to work and we’ll both have had a very lovely time. I know it’s a slightly unusual suggestion but—”

  “What’ll I do with my car?” I asked him suddenly, like a child. It slipped out and in letting it slip out I had, of course, said yes.

  I lied Michael’s lie to Joe. It made it easier to have had it virtually scripted, and once it was partially out, hanging in the air, there was no turning back. Joe didn’t like it. I had never before spent a night away from him and, in retrospect, that might have been the problem. He was definitely suspicious, probably because of what, I now know, he was himself getting up to. He never actually accused me outright of lying about this sudden out-of-town work obligation, but it upset his equilibrium and we argued, but about other things, trivial things. Normally we barely interacted, and if we did it was not with any passion. But when our mutual recrimination reached a certain threshold, we fought, and then sometimes the words would get ahead of us. We would say what was on our minds, and the volume would rise beyond that which the walls and doors were ever meant to absorb. Then Sam would hear. And while he probably didn’t understand most of the words that got away from his parents, he knew well enough why they were said. Even a child not as bright as he was would have understood. Mum and Dad did not like each other very much.

  When I vowed, soon after Sam was born, that I would do everything I could to protect him, I had meant that I would keep the walls from falling in on him, not that I would soundproof them. I had meant that I would stick it out with Joe until Sam was of such an age that the damage my leaving did to him was trivial compared to the damage I had incurred by staying till then, to say nothing of the damage I would suffer by staying permanently. He was my child, and I was responsible for him. I owed him. But despite that, despite the hurt to him as he stood silently in doorways, listening and sensing the vibrations, so trapped was I feeling that I was going to escape for an unabbreviated evening with a charming, accomplished man, a man not of Joe’s world, but of a world that really mattered.

  It was also a world of antiques, a Victorian villa, a French garden. Money, yes. But somebody there had taste too. Probably his wife. Unexpectedly, it was not my conscience that troubled me, but my consciousness of my origins. What was the daughter of a migrant banker, a semi-literate peasant, doing here?

  He served dinner himself. It had been prepared by their housekeeper before she left for the day. Why she hadn’t opened her own Hungarian restaurant—she came from Budapest—was a question each course raised anew. Michael and I talked about many things, his work, his parents. His father had been dean of the medical faculty at the University of Melbourne many years before. We talked about my work, which he didn’t belittle despite its unimportance compared to his own. What professional plans did I have? Only the vaguest. I was extremely bright, exceptionally capable, he told me. There was no telling how far I could go. But not that night. We drank too much and talked still more. A little after three in the morning I told him that I really needed to get some sleep.

  He offered to drive me to the hotel in the city he had alluded to when he invited me but I lied and said I was fine to drive myself. He wrote down a number, which I assumed was the number of the room he’d booked, and apparently paid for, on a piece of paper and told me to give it to reception. They would show me to my room and have my car parked. I would not need to sign anything or give a name, even if I wanted room service. We stood close together at his front door and he told me how much he had enjoyed the evening.

  He made me promise we would do it again.

  “You promise me?” he said, running his fingers through my hair.

  “Yes, I would like that. You do believe me?”

  “I want to,” he said, now pulling me closer to him and embracing me. We stood there for a long time, not moving. The house was silent but for the loud ticking of a grandfather clock. He started patting me slowly, running his hand along my side. Then he placed the palm of his hand on the back of my head and guided my face toward his, and we kissed. We kissed for a long time. He ran his hands all over my clothes, the small of my back to my thighs, my ribs to my breasts, everywhere. I could feel him. Once his inhibition
s were completely abandoned, he kissed like a very hungry man.

  “I’d better go, Michael.” He nodded, and I turned and opened the door with two hands. I got into the car, started the engine, and one of Simon’s compilation tapes came on automatically, along with the heating. I had the piece of paper with the number Michael had written on it in my hand between my palm and the steering wheel. It was almost three-thirty in the morning. The city looked somehow different, as if I were observing it but without actually being in it. I parked my car at the entrance to the hotel, took a bag from the back, walked inside past a bar where two men stopped their conversation to watch me approach a tired subcontinental man at reception. I showed him the piece of paper.

  “Hi . . . I was told to show you this?”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” he said. “Do you have a car you would like parked?”

  “Thank you. Yes. I have a car,” I said, slightly slurring my words. “I would like it parked.” I handed him my keys. I felt aroused. This was not my life.

  Another man, almost a boy, spindly in his uniform, pale, with skin like china, densely populated by inexplicable phenomena, took my bag from me and stood a few polite steps away in the elevator. With a quick glimpse he drank in as much of me as our relative positions permitted, and for the next twenty or so floors we tried to hide the assumptions we were making about each other. He could probably smell the alcohol on my breath. We reached my room. He opened the door for me, put my bag down, fumbled for the lights, and then stood there. I thought he might be waiting for me to make a pass at him. For a moment it even crossed my mind to try. I could make this boy do anything for me. Maybe I would test him. I reached into my bag and gave him twenty dollars.

  “Thank you, ma’am. Have a pleasant night,” he said, closing the door behind him.

  The room was huge. I tore off my clothes, theatrically laid out each item until I had covered one of the couches and stood naked on the king-size bed in front of a wall of mirrors. I ran the palm of my hand over my stomach and found it still pancake flat. I was in the very heart of the city, but the sounds of the night-time traffic couldn’t hope to reach me. They didn’t know where I was. I smiled at myself before making the room dark and burrowing into the bed.