Seven Types of Ambiguity

  I rang the intercom and waited. The carefully manicured bushes, all dressed up for other occasions but with nowhere to go to escape the beating, convulsed in the wind. Only the massive pillars supporting the open gates to the Sheere mansion remained unmoved. Eventually a small middle-aged foreign woman, a housekeeper, opened the front door. They must have been expecting someone or she’d have screened me on the intercom. I trudge up the drive.

  “Hello, my name is Anna Geraghty,” I said, shivering and disheveled. “I was wondering if I might have a few moments with Mr. Sheere?”

  “Sorry, what did you say your name was again?”

  “Mrs. Anna Geraghty.”

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “No, not really. He knows me and my husband, Joe, Joe Geraghty, and I need to speak to him quite . . . suddenly, no, not suddenly but . . . er . . . urgently. It’s so terribly windy, isn’t it?”

  “Mrs.?”

  “Geraghty,” I offered again.

  “Garatee,” she said, looking for the approbation I gave her immediately with a little smile of unearned gratitude.

  “Please, just a moment.” The woman closed the door sufficiently to attach a chain to it. The sound of her footsteps attenuated with her retreat into the cavernous interior. After some minutes she returned, took the chain off the door, and opened it.

  “This way, please, Mrs. Garatee,” she said as she led me across the mottled white-marble floor of the foyer into a private study slightly off to one side. I didn’t remember seeing it on the perfunctory and perhaps obligatory tour of the house we had been given on our earlier visit. The room seemed very masculine to me, all wood paneling and leather chairs. In place of the usual photographs of children or grandchildren there were plaques recognizing the family’s charitable works.

  “Mr. Sheere will be with you shortly.”

  True to his housekeeper’s word, within thirty seconds, Donald Sheere imposed himself on the room with all the weight of his wealth. My knees weakened. What the hell did I think I was doing there? He closed the door behind him firmly.

  “Mrs. Geraghty, to what do I owe this pleasure?”

  “Please, call me Anna. I must apologize for this intrusion. I’ve tried to phone you a number of times but I haven’t been able to get through.”

  “What can I do for you, Anna?”

  “I . . . I came to see if you could help my husband, Joe. He’s lost his job. Gorman got rid of him and his friend when you pulled out of that health-insurance company share issue.”

  “Yes, I heard.”

  “Mr. Sheere, he’s out of work and we can’t service our mortgage. It’s only a matter of time before we lose the house. You bear some responsibility—”

  “Mrs. Geraghty—Anna. I made a strictly commercial decision to opt out of that purchase. It was based on the best information available to me at the time. That Joe lost his job on account of it is unfortunate. But it’s not my fault. These things happen. It’s part of the game. Joe’s a good broker. One of the others will pick him up. Gorman had to do what he did and so did I. There’s nothing personal in any of it.”

  “There is something personal, Mr. Sheere. I have a son—”

  “Ah yes, that . . . that must have been a terrible experience, even if you knew the man who took—”

  “I knew him ten years ago, not—”

  “Mrs. Geraghty, it’s none of my business. It’s your business, and Joe’s.”

  “He doesn’t have any business, Mr. Sheere. That’s why I’m here.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Can’t you help him . . . with a job?”

  “Anna, there’d be nothing I could say to Gorman that—”

  “I don’t mean that—”

  “I’m not a stockbroker, Mrs. Geraghty. I don’t have any need to employ a dealer. I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”

  I sat in the car for a moment, more in shock at what I had tried than at the way it had turned out.

  On the way home I stopped at Sophie’s. Unusually for her, she was home. And alone. Unusually for her also, she looked concerned when she saw me.

  “You look terrible,” she said. “Anna, what’s wrong? What’s wrong? Come here, big sister. What’s wrong, sweetie? Why are you crying?”

  “I’m so sorry you . . . I’m just . . . I’m so stupid.”

  “Oh, Anna, what are you talking about? I wish I had your . . . you never do the stupid things I do all the time. You’re so . . . levelheaded. You’ve got your life so . . . together.”

  “Are you kidding, Sophie? I’m married to a man the public knows via the newspapers as the man who was having an affair with his son’s kidnapper’s whore. My life is . . . My marriage is a wreck the public gets to view every so often. It’ll be on display soon again during Simon’s trial.”

  “You’re married and you’ve got Simon. I always liked Simon.”

  “What are you talking about? I haven’t got Simon.”

  “Maybe not now but—”

  “Doesn’t anyone fucking believe me?”

  My family didn’t believe that I hadn’t been having an affair with Simon. Not that this meant, as far as my parents were concerned, that I didn’t have to let him languish in prison rather than admit the infidelity. Family honor and the sanctity of marriage are what one had to protect, not one’s lover. Joe was the husband, the provider, and he had to be forgiven. Mind you, not if they knew I wasn’t on the title of the house.

  “But you have him,” she said. Sophie was crying too.

  “Who?”

  “You’ll always have him to love you, and he’ll always love you.”

  “Who?”

  “Sam.”

  21. I was soon to be given cause to wonder yet again at Simon’s luck to have so dogged an advocate as Dr. Klima, so dogged I even contemplated threatening to complain to the police if he didn’t stop phoning me. But I didn’t. However irritating his persistence, he was too reasonable a man to threaten to set the dogs on to. And this time he was being cleverer than usual.

  “Mrs. Geraghty, I know what you must be going through at the moment so I can imagine the effect on you and your blood pressure of a phone call from me.”

  “How good is your imagination, Dr. Klima?”

  “Too good, I’m afraid.”

  “Then I guess you must be either very brave or stupid.”

  “I’m certainly the latter. Anna, I’m calling you for both grave and selfish reasons. And knowing how much you don’t want to hear from me, I’ve fortified myself with a liberal dose of scotch for the purpose.”

  Maybe I was going crazy, but now he even talked like Simon. It was this acknowledgment of self-interest that piqued my curiosity. What was in it for him? He wanted insurance against guilt. He said he knew I would be skeptical about what he was going to say to me but, for his own sake, he had to tell me that he suspected Simon was contemplating suicide. This was not something that had occurred to me, but when he forced me to think about it, it seemed far from out of the question. He was telling me because he thought a visit from me might bring Simon back from the precipice, at least for a while. There was nothing he could do if I didn’t believe him, if I thought it was a trick, but if he didn’t try one last time to get me to visit Simon and then Simon did take his own life, his failure to try would plague his conscience for the rest of his days.

  Was it a trick? I didn’t know. But if it were, in placing this responsibility on me, it worked. The failure to try would plague his conscience for the rest of his days. What would Simon’s suicide do to my conscience for the rest of my days if I didn’t see him? How dare Klima assume that I would be able to live with it with equanimity? Or was he assuming precisely the contrary?

  So tiring is the drive from my office in the city to Port Phillip Prison at Laverton that you barely register the manifest evil at the heart of the building’s architecture when you get there. I was nervous. I had never been anywhere like this before. What if I visited him and it didn
’t save him? Dr. Klima had said I needed only to reaffirm to Simon just how much our student relationship had meant to me. I had already done that publicly in cross-examination at the committal hearing. Presumably it wasn’t enough. As supportive as it might be to talk to Simon in prison about the good old days, what if that wasn’t enough? What if it didn’t work? Alex Klima’s conscience might be clear, but what about mine? I could say the very words that lost him, or I could fail to say the precise words needed to save him. This was not my responsibility; it was Klima’s. I wasn’t his psychiatrist. I was his victim. I was just the one he said he loved, and I felt tricked and angry.

  Already at reception, where you signed in, placed your belongings in your visitor’s locker, and were searched, there was a nauseating smell. It was like some kind of industrial detergent or disinfectant. I had smelled it before, but I couldn’t place it. It wasn’t confined to reception. Despite having to walk outside across a desolate compound to get there, once you were inside the visit center you were again assaulted by it.

  I had seen him in court, but now up close he looked worse. He wore a powder blue plastic uniform. It was like a one-piece body suit. The sound of plastic rubbing against plastic drowned the words that accompanied our handshake. He had to endure a cavity search before and after meeting me, he would tell me in passing.

  I looked around the room at the other prisoners and their families. It was entirely surreal being there, and I said so. Then, to make matters worse, as if they weren’t bad enough already, we started to argue. It was almost as though we were a married couple. We argued about his taking Sam. We argued about our past relationship. And like a couple of pedants, we argued about the correct use of words in the media, and about the ignorant self-righteousness of certain university students. I became tearful. He apologized and when he did it all poured out of me and I blamed him for everything, things I didn’t articulate, things he couldn’t have known about. I even blamed him for the pain that must have driven his mother to visit us and talk to Joe. I did this not only because he had taken my son or because he eerily knew so much about me—little things like where I’d had my bracelet fixed—I did it in large part because he had apologized and nobody else had done that. I didn’t know people who did that anymore.

  We argued about Angelique. Her real name was Angela and I didn’t want her to have a real name. I told him how often and how well I used to think of him, that his reason had become a template for my worldview. This was true but it was also true that it was a template which, for one reason or another, I didn’t use often enough. When we split up, I had felt liberated, free to observe the world and draw my own conclusions, freehand, free to call upon the legacy of Simon’s thinking, or not, as I saw fit. In telling him that this had been the case right up until the day he befouled his standing with me by taking Sam, I was hurting him with the truth, which was an uncharacteristic way for me to hurt people. But I was angry, he was vulnerable, and it was his turn to become my victim. Tearful, angry, and embarrassed, I told him to go fuck himself and got up to leave.

  I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could, to distance myself from the nauseating smell, the claustrophobia, the misery that dwelled in the visit center. I stood up and began to walk away. And just as Simon had managed to reintroduce himself into my life, so with the same device did he get me to turn around and sit down again. The device was Sam.

  First he disarmed me by owning to all manner of madness and irrelevance that I might want to impute to him as a person. Then he proceeded to talk about Sam with such searing feeling that I could not but hear him out.

  “Do not assume that the years of coldness between you and your husband, the nearly total absence of animated, amicable, adult interaction—do not assume this leaves your son untouched.”

  His eyes hadn’t changed, piercing, intelligent, he counted on you falling into them and not getting out.

  “Don’t say anything. None of my business. But you, you must have thought about all 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 it is 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. 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, he 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.

  “He saw his parents straining, striving, to never have to rely on any other person. He would have deduced that it was because grown-ups had figured out that it was a cold and lonely place out there, that each of us was on our own and that no one but a fool ever genuinely did anything for anyone without expecting something in return. And if you were looking for something in return, why would you not see to it that you got back a little more than you gave.”

  “So now you’re telling me how to save my son?”

  “I’ve saved him once already.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Anna, he was drowning once.”

  “What?”

  “In your backyard swimming pool. He fell in wearing his school clothes. It was a hot summer day. I was there. I pulled him out. He was panicking. I gave him—”

  “Yes, that’s right. Your psychiatrist told me about this. He said you’d tell me this. I don’t believe you.”

  “Ask him. Ask him, Anna. Ask Sam about the time the gardener rescued him from the pool. He was frightened. He’ll remember.”

  “How come I didn’t know about this?”

  “I don’t know. He dried off in the sun before you came home. Your housekeeper missed it. Joe wasn’t home . . . I won’t be there to rescue him next time. Maybe you’ll save him. You can save him now.”

  This was vintage Simon. I left the visit center and walked back across the compound to reception and the parking lot, shell-shocked by what he’d said and blind to my surroundings. I sat in the car for a while just staring into space before heading back to the city. Sam’s mother had meant well, hadn’t she? I had some Billie Holiday in the car somewhere. It was just a matter of finding it.

  22. Joe wasn’t going to talk to my father. He just wasn’t. He had too much contempt for him. And then there was the small matter of the house being in his name only. What if my father wanted to look at the title?

  “He’s too embarrassed to talk to you now. He feels so demeaned being unemployed. Wait till he gets a job. He’ll talk to you then. He’ll get one soon, you know he will,” I lied to my father when I went to see him. “The thing is, we need help now.”

  I was crying. It wasn’t an act. I was terrified of losing the house. It wasn’t altruism either. Despite not being on the title, I knew I’d be awarded at least half the house were we to separate. Sam had been traumatized enough. I didn’t want him to have to move.

  My father had transferred funds from an investment account into his checking acc
ount in anticipation of what he thought was his impending talk with Joe, a talk I knew was never going to happen.

  I came home with a check for $100,000. It was Joe my father wanted to lambast, not me.

  “My first girlfriend,” Joe said, “my first real one, you know, the first one you’re really stuck on, who you never forget, the one you never really get over, her name was Kirsty, Kirsten. She was all right and I was . . . I was all right, too . . . back then. You should’ve seen me. I was king of the whole damn school and . . . everything. You would’ve, even you would’ve liked me then.”

  He was drunk. I could smell it when I walked into the room, and he didn’t try to hide the evidence: a glass with ice, a two-thirds empty bottle of Teacher’s, and some incoherent reminiscences. It used to be Chivas. This was how Joe dealt with our straitened circumstances.

  “But then . . . I don’t know . . . her uncle died or some bullshit,” he continued, “and her father said she wasn’t where she was supposed to be, which was true because she was with me but it wouldn’t have made any difference. I mean, how did her being with me cause her uncle to die? He’d taken too many sleeping pills.”

  “Joe, why are you telling me this?”

  “Her father gave her a good talking to and we . . . broke up. Just like that! Cunt!”

  “Joe, why are you telling me this . . . about your first girlfriend’s father and all this—”

  “Your father just called.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He wanted to talk to me.”

  “To you? Didn’t you take the call?”

  “I was busy.”

  “Where were you when he called?”

  “I’d just gotten home.”

  “Were you with your mother all that time?”

  “Are you checking up on me?”

  “I’ve never been able to stop you doing whatever you want.”