“Oh sure, he eats worse than that every day at school. What do you say to the gentleman, Sam?”
“Why do you have a num—?”
“Say thank you to the gentleman, Sammy,” I said to shut him up.
“Thank you.”
“We’ll have to go, I’m afraid.”
“So okay, you go and leave it with me. I’ll find a link for you, and then you’ll come back . . . with Sam,” he said, looking up at me. Sam had put the candy in his pocket and was transfixed by the number on the man’s arm. I made a point of not looking at it, although I had never seen one before. Instead I looked back into his eyes. The gleam, the sparkle, was tiny but always there, like a permanent tear.
Outside on the window above the door it read in small print, PROPRIETOR—SAMUEL J. LEIBOWITZ. I had never noticed it before. As soon as we had left the shop, Sam asked me why the man had a number on his arm. I didn’t know where to start with the answer to that. I thought that he was probably too young then to hear any kind of historical explanation. But I would have to tell him one day, even though I, myself, had trouble understanding how it could have happened. And if I didn’t tell him, who would—my father? How would Joe explain it? It dawned on me with a certain horror outside the little jewelry store that I didn’t know anyone I could trust to teach him even a tiny but accurate and unadulterated grain of the truth about man’s capacity for inhumanity. I certainly couldn’t. But wasn’t I just like everybody else in this, and anyway, did what happened then still matter that much? Could we let it not matter that much? There were Simon’s fingerprints all over this sequence of thoughts. That bastard, that madman. One day he took my son, just like that. Now I see his fingerprints all over my life.
I thought I’d have to tell Sam something, but I didn’t want to frighten him or give him nightmares. It was a problem I wasn’t expecting, and as a parent I was ill equipped to deal with it. I was ill equipped and alone. The one thing I did know to tell Sam was that he mustn’t say anything about the number on the jeweler’s arm when we went back to pick up the bracelet. But we didn’t go back to pick up the bracelet. Nor did I go on my own.
It was Michael Gardiner who picked up the bracelet for me. The cardiovascular clinic was not far from the jewelry shop. He insisted, a small favor. His efforts to have me agree to spend a weekend away with him were unsubtle and relentless. True, the attention was flattering, at times even embarrassing, and the prospect of being caught was a little frightening. But, to be honest, it was a little exciting. More than that, it was distracting, and I wanted to be distracted. I was ready to be distracted. And it was guilt-free, at least thus far. I wasn’t doing anything; he was. He was reeling me in. But I couldn’t keep not doing anything. What the hell were all the squats and crunches for anyway. I had a pancake-flat stomach. I’d sweated for it. I wasn’t dead yet. We agreed that I was to have a “work-related conference,” this time for an entire weekend, and we’d go away somewhere. We would fly somewhere. I had told Joe my lies. I was packed. I was nervous. I didn’t know what to expect, but I hadn’t expected it not to happen. That was the Friday that Simon came rushing back into my life. All bets were off.
13. “Will passenger Anna Geraghty, passenger Anna Geraghty, please make her way to the information desk, passenger Anna Geraghty, please.”
It’s never good, and always a little surreal, when they call your name over an airport’s public-address system. It was to get progressively more surreal. The message I was given at the information desk was so bizarre it defied understanding, let alone belief. Unable to wait for Michael to get there—he’d been held up—I called him on his cell phone to explain.
“An old boyfriend of mine, from years ago, has apparently just taken my son from school. I have to go home immediately. I’m sorry . . . Yes, taken as in kidnapped . . . Yes, I’m serious. Why would I make something like this up? . . . Look, if I didn’t want to go I’d tell you . . . I would . . . I certainly wouldn’t come up with something like this . . . Michael, I’m telling you the truth. Where do you think? I’m in a cab right now . . . Going home . . . You’ve got to believe me. This is my son. It’s got nothing to do with . . . No, it’s got nothing to do . . . with us. I am calm . . . Well, you wouldn’t sound too calm either if someone had just taken . . . No, I think he’s okay, but I want to see for myself obviously . . . completely out of the blue . . . Not for ten years . . . Really . . . Well, he was perfectly sane last time I saw him. A teacher . . . I told you . . . ten years . . . You’re not serious? . . . Michael, for God’s sake! No, no one else . . . I am not making any of this up, I wish I were . . . Nothing like this has ever happened to you! Nothing like this has ever happened to me! . . . Well, soon as I can but I just . . . I just want to see that he’s all right. Well, yes, whenever my son is kidnapped I am apt to cry. Please, Michael, bear with me. I don’t know what’s going on.”
The reception cut out on my cell phone in the backseat of the cab. As I wiped my eyes with a tissue I’d found in my bag the phone rang and, thinking it was either Michael or Joe, I hurried to answer. But it was neither of them. This was the first in a series of calls from a man whose mix of formality and intimacy, discretion and impertinence, was unlike any I had ever experienced. It was Dr. Alex Klima. He had been put through to my cell phone by one of the receptionists at work, and he begged me not to hang up. He was Simon’s psychiatrist, and he wanted to talk to me about the madness that had alighted on my son and me. I took down his details. He couldn’t really discuss it over the phone. Would I be able to meet him? I felt dirty.
“Can you stop the car, please?” I called to the driver, but we were still on the freeway and he showed no signs of even slowing down.
“Will you pull over to the side of the road—stop the fucking car!”
This time he heard me. He pulled over and, with the cars whooshing past us, I opened the door and vomited in the emergency lane.
Sam was untouched other than by me. I wouldn’t let him go. He didn’t seem to know what the fuss was about. I sat him down and made him go through everything that had happened, moment by moment. It had been after school. He had been playing with a few boys in the school yard.
“Who were they?”
“Some boys.”
“Are they your friends?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sam, this is important. What do you mean, you don’t know? I know you’re upset, but who were they?”
“I’m not upset.”
“Were these boys your friends?”
“I don’t know. They’re okay. They’re older.”
“How much older?”
“Grade three and grade four and some grade two.”
“Did they make you do something?”
“No.”
“Anything?”
“No.”
“Did they make you go with him?”
“We played marbles.”
“Really, Sam, you can tell me the truth. Is that really—”
“No.”
“It’s not the truth?”
“They played marbles but I didn’t really.”
“What did you do?”
“They wouldn’t let me have a turn.”
“Were you upset?”
“No, I just watched and waited.”
“What were you waiting for?”
“My turn.”
“And what about going home?”
“I was waiting for Dad to pick me up.”
“And when Dad didn’t come?”
“I went home with the other man.”
“But, Sam, what have we always said about strangers?”
“Don’t talk to strangers. I know.”
“So why did you—?”
“He wasn’t a stranger, Mum. I know him. I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m not in trouble, am I?”
Sam insisted that Simon wasn’t a stranger, although he couldn’t say who he was or where he’d seen him. It didn’t make any sense but he seemed perfectly unha
rmed. He had played with a dog, been given some chocolate milk by a lady, and then had gone to sleep till the police came and then, after a little while, he saw his dad. Joe claimed that one of the receptionists at work had left him a memo of a phone call from the school informing him that Sam had gone on a school excursion and should be picked up somewhat later than usual. I shouted at him. I told him I didn’t believe him. He couldn’t produce the memo.
“Don’t you fucking blame this on me!”
“Don’t be angry, Dad. Dad, don’t yell at Mummy, Dad.” Sam was crying. I put my arm around him.
“It’s all right, my little Sam.”
“You’ve been seeing him again, haven’t you?” Joe said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Of course you have. How long?”
“Joe—”
“How long have you been seeing him?”
“Joe, I don’t know what the hell is going on, but it’s not that.”
“Has this got something to do with the conference you were supposed to be going to this weekend?”
“Joe, can we talk about this later? I just want to get him—”
“Just tell me the fucking truth!”
“I am telling you the truth. Please, just let me get him ready for bed and then maybe we can figure this out. I swear I don’t know any more than you do.”
Once Sam was in bed, I spent about an hour trying to convince Joe that I had not been having an affair with Simon Heywood, and that I was as much at a loss to explain what was going on as he was. I told him I wanted to go and speak to Simon’s parents, perhaps they could shed some light on what had led him to take our son. This was only partially a lie. I did go out that night to try to learn what had made him do it. I met Dr. Alex Klima and for two hours I listened in silence as he told me all about Simon, and even a little about me.
On the way back home I stopped at the police station in St. Kilda. The investigating officers weren’t there. Simon was there, but the police wouldn’t let me see him. I didn’t know if I wanted to see him. The sergeant at the desk confirmed that there had been a woman there too. She was somehow involved, but she hadn’t been charged. They had let her go. The woman was the prostitute Dr. Klima had told me about. She was the link between Simon and my husband.
When I got home Sam was still asleep and Joe was drunk. I could smell it in the house as soon as I opened the front door.
“They still got your boyfriend locked up?”
“Joe, I know everything.”
“I’m sure you do. Maybe you can start telling me some of it.”
“You can cut it out, Joe. I know about her.”
“Who?”
“I know about your whore, Angelique.”
We lay beside each other in bed that night, two hostile strangers married to each other. I kept thinking about Simon, about what the psychiatrist, Alex Klima, told me had become of him. And about what Klima had suggested. He’d asked, pleaded, that I tell the police that Simon and I were having an affair and that Simon had had my permission to take Sam. This psychiatrist needed help himself if he thought I was going to tell the police that. He was just the sort of psychiatrist Simon would get: worldly, mellifluous, well spoken, and completely unhinged by a loyalty to Simon bordering on love. That would be the one, all right.
He had asked me if I would save Simon by telling the lie Simon wanted me to tell, a lie that even he, Klima, acknowledged could, would, cost me my marriage. “So this is where we are now—all of us separate people,” he had said toward the end. What the hell right did he have to be critical of me, particularly on the very day that all this worldliness had come crashing down, the day his star patient had kidnapped my son? The gibe was unambiguous. If he thought this was the way to win friends and influence people, he was crazier than Simon.
“It had occurred to me,” he said, “that it would not be possible for Simon to get you out of his system without him actually seeing you again, without establishing contact. My thinking was, with respect, that you could not help but disappoint him now. This might hurt him very much in the short run. It might even drive him back to his darkened bedroom. But after a while his despair over the reality of you, as opposed to his idealization of you, would evaporate, and with it a lot of other things. I told him this. I think he was coming around to contacting you. I think you could have helped him—just by being the person you are, with your fears and weaknesses, and him seeing that you have them just like the rest of us. It would not have taken much. He nearly called you several times. You weren’t to know. He nearly called you last night.”
To a background of arrhythmic snoring from a not entirely asleep Joe, I wondered what it was about me that Dr. Klima held “could not help but disappoint” Simon now. What was so disappointing about “the reality of me”? And what kind of therapist, I wondered, permits himself to become the spokesperson for a crazy man, the spokesperson for one of his mistakes? The kidnapping of my son was Simon’s doing and his psychiatrist’s not-doing, and yet its undoing, according to the same psychiatrist, was my responsibility. Only I could help Simon now, he told me, and I didn’t shout him down, I didn’t storm out. I just sat there and listened to my former lover’s passionate intermediary, this highly qualified, articulate stranger.
“You’re the only one who can help him. He wants you to tell them that he is your lover, that he had your permission to take Sam. That is the only course that can save him now. Why would you want to save him? Because he’s ill and because he’s never stopped loving you. Among other things, he is ill because he’s never stopped loving you. I’m not saying you owe him anything beyond that which we all owe each other. But when we are all finished being told that everyone out there must take responsibility for himself—what is it like when we get home? What is it like inside? He had been cast out and he had never done anything wrong, till now. You think it would be the end of everything to help him like this, but it would only be the end of some things. What are you going to do? You’re involved. You are finally involved, after all these years, and there is no way out of it. I nearly called you last night.”
Where do you find advocates like that? At times he even had me feeling sympathy for Simon, which was no mean feat given how angry I was with him for taking Sam. Just what the hell was he saying about Simon anyway, about his motivation? Was Simon really still in love with me or was he just unwell, pure and simple, and was this Dr. Svengali trying to dress it up as something laudable, something a little flattering, at least to me? There was certainly nothing flattering in his depiction of my marriage. But even in that he attributed more fault to Joe than to me. A strangely likeable man, charming, even handsome in a distinguished sort of way; this was the man Simon had character-assassinating my husband on the day that Simon had chosen as perfect for taking my little boy.
14. Was Joe really asleep? Who was this woman, I wondered, and what was it about her that made him choose her not only above me but above all the women on display at the brothel he visited regularly? Dr. Klima said it was always the same girl. That’s my husband—faithful in his infidelity. But, of course, it wasn’t really that. It was his stolidness, his woodenness. Simon had linked up with her, too. She must have had something, this woman. No doubt she was younger than me. She had to be much younger. She probably hadn’t had children, probably wasn’t much more than a child herself. Was she slimmer than me or bigger breasted, or both? Was she more athletic or more supple? I’d done everything I could, given that I’d had a child. He wanted me to have a child. Everyone wanted me to have a child. I couldn’t have worked out any more unless I’d quit my job and done nothing but work on myself. That’s what models do. That’s really what men want, not just men in the abstract, but the men you know, the men who once chose you, Joe and Simon. They want young girls who are professionally young girls. Girls who can’t think, who can’t talk, who can’t even menstruate. They’re not worth more than an hour, but that’s way more than Joe needs.
Maybe it was
more than that. Simon, even half crazy, Simon would want more than that. Technique—it had to be technique. One learns by experience. I thought I’d had a lot of experience. But what kind of experience was it? Had I been too passive? Should I have experimented more? Had I been too concerned with my own pleasure, living for the moment and thinking I had forever to learn when really I had only until I got married, and I got married young because I wasn’t about to spoil or rot. I was ripe fruit. I knew what they did to the fruit that ripened and rotted before it was picked. They crushed it into a concentrate, into instant spinster.
I wondered what would happen in the morning when Joe was tired of pretending he was asleep. He would have to talk. It would be the morning of the first day of the new era Simon had delivered to us when he took delivery of Sam. I lay on my stomach and exhaled involuntarily; I was apprehensive of what it would bring. Joe turned over and looked at me quizzically.
“Sorry. It’s my stomach. I think my stomach is a little . . . upset,” I offered him.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” he counter-offered. He was feeling guilty, and it caught me off guard. I was not accustomed to him feeling guilty.
“What?” I asked, buying time.
“Would you like a cup of tea? It might help settle your stomach.”
“No . . . only if you’re having one.”
He got out of bed, put his slippers on, and went downstairs to make us both a cup of tea. I watched him put his feet inside the slippers, slightly unbalanced, one foot at a time, slightly uncertain in his movements. It was seeing this action of his that made me suddenly feel so sorry for him. They were the slippers I had bought for Sam to give to him for Father’s Day. What I felt was pity and a terrible sadness, and guilt. This was not what I wanted to feel right then. It was dangerous to feel that way in moments of truth. It would have been better to be angry with him for cheating, or at least to be steely. I had to think of the girl, the slut he preferred to me. Think of the whore. Don’t think of the slippers. He kept the slippers for me. She didn’t have to see him stumble into them. What did she do to him that he liked so much?