He came back upstairs with a cup of tea for each of us. He set mine down on the bedside table beside me and took his back to his own side where he got into bed and started sipping, slurping away. The slippers were gone. Thank God for that. I was better off without them. He said something but I didn’t register the words, only the sound. I knew I’d better start. But what did I want to say?
“Joe.”
“Anna, what’s going on?”
“Joe, we have to talk.”
“This guy Simon, you know him?”
“He was my boyfriend a long time ago.”
“Have you slept with him?”
“When we were going out. We went out . . . I don’t know . . . ten years ago or something. I’d just finished going out with him when we met.”
“Are you sleeping with him now?”
“No.”
“Are you seeing him now?”
“Seeing him? No.”
“You’re fucking lying, Anna. You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not.”
“He says you’re in a relationship. Simon says, ‘Fuck your ex-boyfriend behind your husband’s back and steal his son.’ ”
“Hey, don’t talk to me about ‘behind your husband’s back.’ ”
“We’re talking about Simon here.”
“Oh, are we? Have you spoken to him?”
“No, I haven’t fucking spoken to Simon.”
“So what are you talking about?”
“The police.”
“The police?”
“The cops said you were fucking him.”
“Bullshit! Now you’re lying. They didn’t say that.”
“They said he says he was picking Sam up from school, picking up my son from school because . . . because you asked him to. Because you’re still seeing him.”
“Stop shouting. I’m not seeing him. You’ll wake Sam.”
“I’m not shouting.”
“You are.”
“You’re fucking this Simon guy.”
“That’s bullshit, Joe. I’m not.”
“Well, what’s he doing picking up Sam ten years after you split up with him?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you look at me and lie like this? Do you think that I’m that fucking stupid? Do you think you’re that much smarter than me that I’ll believe any crap you give me?”
“Let go of me, Joe. Let go of me.” I could see the frustration in his eyes. He had my arms and was squeezing. He wanted to hurt me.
“I’m not touching you. Christ, who could that be?”
“Let go of me.” The phone was ringing but he wouldn’t loosen his grip. On the fourth ring he let go.
“Answer the phone, for fuck’s sake. I feel sick.”
It was his mother. She could affect me the same way his slippers could, only more so. She had read about Sam and was crying. We had made the papers. I had my own parents’ response to look forward to. Joe’s mother wanted to see her grandson before she and Joe went off, as they regularly did, to visit her institutionalized younger son, Roger. Tell her about the whore, I thought, but didn’t say. My breathing was shallow. Sam appeared in the doorway in his pajamas. How much of the guilt I was feeling had I earned?
In the month or so that followed, Joe threw himself into a deal he was involved with. It was big. It was going to change everything, but everything was already changed. He didn’t believe me about Simon, but the distraction of the deal kept him relatively quiet. There were, however, consequences of the kidnapping I couldn’t escape. Among them was the pleasure of being interviewed by Detectives Threlfall and Staszic. Despite the leering and brusqueness of Detective Staszic, the questions they asked were all of a kind I could answer truthfully and without embarrassment. I knew Simon Heywood. He had been my boyfriend at university but not since then. Yes, I was sure. I told them I resented the implication. Detective Staszic seemed to be able to live with that. He had to stifle a grin meant for other occasions.
Michael made what I thought was a perfunctory attempt to keep in touch. It bothered me that it was less to inquire about Sam’s or my well-being than to sound me out about a weekend away, something I was not at all interested in so soon after what had happened. For one thing, a part of me felt that Sam’s kidnapping was a punishment, or at least a warning. It was the sort of stunt the God I remembered went in for. After all, who knew better than Him how much Sam mattered to me? Still, I called Michael to try to at least arrange lunch, just to keep my hand in. He seemed to be very busy and we weren’t able to schedule lunch. I wondered about that. Was he punishing me too?
It occurred to me that perhaps he genuinely was busier than usual. Joe certainly was, judging from his frequent explosions of verbal enthusiasm for the highly lucrative deal he said he could almost taste. It had something to do with private hospitals, health insurance, managed care, and, of course, every businessman’s god, Donald Sheere. There were phone calls and meetings at all times of the day and night. As it was, I was busy at work as well, but it wasn’t a lucrative deal that I could almost taste. It was the bitterness of all-day-stewed coffee repeating on me as I benefited from one opportunity after another to contribute to the marketing of “the people people.” We have a newsletter that goes out to clients and to potential clients to keep them up-to-date with our desire to remind them that we exist. While nearly all the senior people in the firm and some of the juniors were expected to draft pieces of the newsletter, it felt to me that the expectation was falling on me more often and more heavily than on many of my colleagues. And the more pieces I drafted, the more they got me to draft.
Joe was going to be away on the weekend coming up. It was his firm’s corporate retreat. Of course, it crossed my mind that he was lying and that he was taking his whore away for the weekend. I thought I would be able to gauge from his response to a few pointed questions where the truth lay. Did I care? I’d be able to judge this from my response to his response. So I asked him.
“You’re not serious. Anna, you can’t be serious?”
“Why? Under the circumstances it’s not a stupid—”
“Just because you and the teacher were going away for the weekend doesn’t mean—”
“Okay, think about it, Joe, and you don’t need to be Einstein to figure it out—”
“Maybe not Einstein,” he interrupted, “but it does help to be a teacher, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Joe! How does it make any sense that I’m having an affair with this man if the two of us plan to go away together for the weekend but then when the weekend comes we can’t go because he’s been arrested for kidnapping our son? Does that make any sense? Does it, Joe?”
“Anna, I never said I was Einstein or even a teacher but—”
“Joe, I’m sorry, I’m not trying to—”
“Maybe I only know one thing, but I really know it, and on the basis of it you’re fucked. You know that?”
“Joe—”
“There was no conference.”
“What?”
“The weekend Sam was taken you weren’t going to any work conference.”
“Joe, I think we both know why you’re suspicious.”
“What the hell are you talking about now?”
“Well, I think her name is Angelique, but perhaps you have another name for her.”
“Jesus, Anna!”
“Do you have a special name for her?”
“You’re changing the subject. You’re very clever, aren’t you?”
“Joe, I have to know this.”
“What?”
“When you see that woman . . . is it . . . are you protected?”
“Of course it is . . . was. It always has been . . . Anna . . . what . . . you do believe me?”
It was a fruitful line of questioning but its pursuit would have to wait until night-time when we were alone. Sam was standing at the door listening to his parents arguing. Joe looked at me looking, and then he saw him too.
As it happened, Joe really did go on a corporate retreat that weekend.
15. For years I had awoken each morning and gotten out of bed in a state of denial, not simply denial of the act we were as a couple, but denial of the impossibility of keeping up the performance until Sam was old enough for the issue to be peripheral to the din of his own private concerns. The denial was the analgesic with which I palliated the mistake that was us. That is, until the day Simon took Sam, when I ran out of denials.
Every time I looked at Joe over breakfast, in the living room, or in bed, I imagined him walking into that same brothel every week, week in, week out, for two years and being greeted by all the women there in their various states of tax-deductible undress: the lace, the hosiery, the underwear. He would have been going there longer than many of the women. Every time I looked at him I imagined this with only slight variations and I would feel ashamed, ashamed of him, ashamed of us. Then I would picture him with her and though my picture of her would change in each of my imaginings, her name was always the same: Angelique. I thought it probably wasn’t even her real name, and that was right. I knew better than anyone else how capable Joe was of seeing a woman for two years and not knowing her real name, capable of not even being curious, and I was ashamed of that too.
I would picture them together. He was always the same, but she was always changing. I couldn’t get a grip on her. At times she was a blonde, then a brunette, redhead, dark and subcontinental; sometimes she was black. But in certain ways she was always the same. She was always younger than me. Younger and thinner. I could imagine him entering her from behind. He liked that. She’d be able to close her eyes or look away. That’s what I did, always. I could imagine him going down on her. I had no trouble imagining that. I could even imagine the way he might talk to her. He would talk to her the way he spoke to young waitresses. Picturing him sweating over and into the ever-changing Angelique would make me very angry. I’d picture him this way as he buttered his toast in the morning in his underwear and I would want to lean over and hit him. But since Sam would hear or, worse, come in and see, I would just turn away from him, even when he was in mid-sentence about something quite innocent.
But there was one thing I wasn’t able to imagine, and that was how it was
she pleased him. I didn’t know what she could do, other than to be her, that would really work for him, really set him alight. What exactly did she do to him for two years to keep him coming back so faithfully, other than not be me?
Joe had his own denial routine. Begun after Sam’s kidnapping, it allowed him to ignore that he had, as he thought, been cuckolded for years by his wife and his predecessor. This denial was made possible in large part by money, in particular by the prospect of more of it, by the chase for it. But the chase and, by extension, the denial seemed to come to a crashing halt the day he came home from his firm’s corporate retreat.
His distress was apparent from the moment he marched into the house and straight up the stairs without responding to Sam’s “Hi, Dad.” Something was clearly wrong. Normally, Joe couldn’t resist playing with Sam the minute he got home. He would wrestle with him or cuddle him even when it was late and Sam was nearly asleep. But not that day. Curious, I went upstairs. Perhaps it had something to do with me. In the time it took to go from the kitchen to our bedroom I scanned my guilt for something he might have found out about me. Who at his firm knew anything about me? I was being paranoid. I didn’t know any of those people and they didn’t know me. What’s more, they didn’t know anyone who knew me, other than Joe, of course. Just before the top of the stairs who else they knew hit me so hard it hurt, and my palms grew a little moist. They knew Donald Sheere, and he knew Michael Gardiner. Had Michael been talking? Surely not. I was panicking. I had to calm down.
Joe was agitated. He sat at the foot of the bed staring straight ahead of him at nothing, his eyes focused on the middle distance. His bag was on its side as though he had flung it or kicked it across the room.
“I didn’t take enough clothes,” he said matter-of-factly without looking at me.
“What?”
“I didn’t pack enough.”
“What’s wrong, Joe? You look terrible.”
A colleague of his, a friend apparently, had been hurt at the retreat.
“Is it serious?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Who was it?”
“Mitch.”
“Mitch? Have I ever met him?”
“Mitch, Dennis Mitchell. You haven’t met him. I don’t think you’ve met him. He’s a senior analyst.”
“Is he a friend of yours? I don’t think . . . You’ve never mentioned him.”
Joe wasn’t making much sense, but I could wipe my palms. Whatever was wrong had nothing to do with me or Michael.
“Mitch. Dennis Mitchell. Mitch is a senior analyst. I’ve mentioned him. I mention him all the time.”
“Maybe to someone else.”
“Oh, don’t start with me, Anna. I really wouldn’t start with me today.”
“I’m sorry. Is he all right? Mitch . . . he’s your friend?”
“Mitch and I work very closely together, very close. We’re good friends. He’s possibly my best friend at the firm. He’s always looked after me. This house, most of the clothes you wear, they’re all courtesy of Mitch. I have mentioned him. You should get down on your fucking knees and thank him, the way he’s looked after this family.”
“All right, calm down. Maybe you have mentioned him. What happened to him? You said it wasn’t serious.”
“No, I don’t think it is.”
“So what’s wrong? You look terrible, Joe. You don’t have to talk about it, but if you’re going to—”
“Anna,” he said, looking directly up at me for the first time, “in the next few days, certainly by the end of the week, I’m going to be out of a job.”
“Why? What are you talking about?”
“They’re going to get rid of me.”
“Is it Mitch?”
Joe let out a long breath. “Mitch. Yep, Mitch.”
“Do they blame you for whatever happened to him? What happened to him? You didn’t do something stupid to him, did you, Joe? You’re too old for practical jokes. They’re stupid and dangerous. I sure as hell don’t want Sam—”
“It’s got nothing to do with that. But thanks for the support.”
“Well, what are you talking about? Why are they going to get rid of you? You’re doing so well for them.”
“Because I just stopped doing so well for them.”
“What do you mean? What about the deal, that health-care business—?”
“You were listening.”
“Sure, it was health care, managed care, something . . . with Don Sheere and Sid Graeme.”
“Listen to you,” he said from the bed.
“What?”
“You meet him once and you’re calling him Don.”
“Don, Donald, what about that deal? You said it was—”
“It’s off. It’s fallen through.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re going to get rid of you.”
“Couldn’t you just take my word for something, for once in your life? There are some things you don’t know better than me. Trust me on this. I’m finished there. They’re finished with me.”
“There’ll be other deals.”
“There won’t be other deals!”
Joe explained what had happened. Some of it I’d already half heard before. He and Mitch had talked Gorman and the firm into underwriting a share issue by a health-insurance company. The success of the issue—it was to fund a buy-up of private hospitals, the profitability of which was predicated on the introduction of U.S.-style managed-care legislation—depended on Donald Sheere, at Joe’s urging, taking up a large parcel of shares. Unfortunately Sheere got wind of a development that threatened the passage of the legislation through t
he Senate and refused to go ahead with the purchase. This meant that the underwriting firm, Joe’s firm, would have to take up the unsold shares. The cost to it would be huge. The firm had been talked into taking a beating by Joe and his friend, and now they were going to have to pay for it with their jobs. That was the way Joe put it.
“But can’t you explain to Gorman?”
“There’s nothing to explain. We took a chance with the firm’s money and it didn’t come off.”
“But surely this sort of thing must happen all the time?”
“It does, and people get iced all the time. And, anyway, this time it really was a lot of money. The firm is going to take a bath. We’re through.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I thought I’d get drunk. What about you, got any plans?”
He believed that he was finished. I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps he was exaggerating, perhaps he’d survive. I was wrong. By Thursday he was carrying boxes of papers from his car to the house.
“This is my career,” he said, holding aloft a few pieces of paper before stuffing them back into a cardboard file in the box.
“Why don’t you call Donald Sheere?” I suggested. “He’s always . . . You said you get on well with him. Maybe he could help you.”
“Anna, it was his pulling out of the deal that cost me my job.”
“Well, maybe, but it was a business decision, right? I mean, it wasn’t anything personal . . . was it?”
“No, it was business, strictly business. It’s always business with guys like him. Even when it’s personal, it’s business.”
“What do you mean?”
“He doesn’t want to know me now, I’m no use to him anymore.”
“You don’t know that, Joe.”
“Anna, I know it. He won’t even take my calls anymore.”
“You’ve tried calling him?”
“Of course I have. I tried to get him to change his mind, to stay in, to take the risk. But he said he didn’t have to and he’s right. It makes sense.”
“What do you mean?”
“He can always buy in again later if the legislation gets through the Senate. There’s no reason for him to take the risk now.”