Seven Types of Ambiguity

  Sometimes, lately anyway, I noticed that I could sound like a bitch when I really hadn’t meant to. Even I heard it that way but once Joe had there was nothing I could say to put everything back together.

  “I’m going to have to find a place for her.”

  “Who, your mother?”

  “Yep.”

  “What happened? Has something happened, Joe?”

  “She can’t be left alone. I’ve got to find somewhere that can take her but all those places really cost—that’s if you can even find one with any room, one where they don’t fucking bathe them in kerosene.”

  “Oh, Jesus, did she get lost somewhere again?”

  “She set fire to the curtains.”

  “Oh, fuck. How?”

  “She was in the kitchen, cooking. You know the window near the stove?”

  “Oh no, not those curtains?”

  “She said she just turned around for a moment and all of a sudden . . . I don’t think that’s what happened at all. I think she had something on the stove, and then left the room for some reason and forgot all about it. She denies this, but all the food was burned. It wasn’t just those curtains that had caught fire.”

  “I can cook for her, Joe. She doesn’t have to cook. She could just heat it up.”

  “You already cook for her.”

  “Yes, but I could make something for her each day and label it, ‘Monday,’ ‘Tuesday,’ et cetera.”

  “She’d forget you’d done it and, anyway, there’s nothing to stop her setting fire to the place with your food. She’s not choosy about her fuel.”

  “But she’d just have to put it in the microwave.”

  “You know those wheat-filled heat packs you put on sore muscles?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re supposed to go in the microwave for, I don’t know . . . two minutes. She put hers in for two hours. There was smoke coming out of the kitchen when I got there.”

  “When was this?”

  “A couple of weeks ago.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I don’t know. You were out when I got home, and then Sam was upset, and . . . I probably forgot.”

  “You didn’t forget. Come on, Joe. How can I help if you don’t tell me?”

  “How are you going to help her if I do tell you?”

  I couldn’t say anything at the time, but I knew exactly how I was going to help him. It was time to deposit my father’s check. I told Joe I was expecting a raise at work, a raise and a bonus. I said we were all getting one. It was a stupid thing to say because even the combination of the two would be insufficient to keep up the repayments on the mortgage for long or to pay for a place in a retirement home for his mother. But it was all I could think of on the spur of the moment and I had to do or say something to give him enough hope to stop drinking long enough to look for some kind of job, long enough to do something to help his mother. She couldn’t live with us. Not even we could. He said he couldn’t go back to the bank again to talk about reducing the payments still further until he could tell them he had a job. He did promise to keep looking. Then he asked me why I hadn’t suggested that my firm try to place him. I didn’t know what to say. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me.

  “Well, it had occurred to me.”

  “Then why didn’t you . . . you should’ve said.”

  “Don’t give me that. I know why you didn’t suggest it.”

  He was right to be angry about this. I didn’t have an answer for him, not one that would placate him.

  “Come on, Joe, do you really think I’d rather lose the house than risk the embarrassment of my colleagues knowing you were out of work? People are losing their jobs all over the place. I see it every day.”

  But that wasn’t the embarrassment he was referring to, and both of us knew it.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll think of someone suitable and I’ll set up an appointment for you as soon as possible. Jesus, it’s not as if they don’t owe me a favor.”

  “Anna, I’m not anyone’s favor.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. You know how many hours I’ve put into that place and . . . I just meant they don’t appreciate me. Not for the work I do.”

  “But they’re giving you a raise, right—and a bonus?”

  “Yes, they are. They are, but . . . they’re giving them to everyone.”

  We agreed that in the meantime he would keep the appointments he’d made for job interviews. He was also to take his mother to look at retirement homes. I told him not to worry about the cost. He had to find the best place for her as soon as possible. His mother needed more than a little persuasion. She kept insisting she was able to take care of herself. Then when he finally did get her to agree at least to come and look at some of the places with him, she suddenly changed her mind all over again, ostensibly because their first appointment was for a Sunday. Sunday was the day she went to visit her other son, Roger. Joe told her that Roger could miss a week, but still she resisted. What if they visited Roger later that day? No, it had to be the same time every week, otherwise Roger got upset. That she often visited him on a Saturday didn’t seem to matter. It was as though there was something sacred about seeing him on Sunday. Both Joe and I had our final appointments with Simon’s prosecutor in the coming week. I got Joe’s mother to agree to look at the retirement home with Joe on the Sunday. I offered to visit Roger myself at the regular time in her place. She had wanted me to take Sam along but I went alone. I got Sophie to stay with Sam. She had said he was the only thing that could get her up before noon on a Sunday.

  Roger was sitting in a chair half facing the window. I could see Joe in him. Another patient, a cigarette in his hand, was standing nearby, rubbing himself against a chair.

  “Uh . . . Roger, hi. Hi, Roger . . . You know . . . You remember me?”

  “You’re Annie. Joe’s girlfriend.”

  “Yes, that’s right. I’m Joe’s wife.”

  “Yes, Annie. I know. So pretty, Annie. We’re so lucky, aren’t we?”

  “Why, Roger? Why are we lucky?”

  “Joe calls me, he says, ‘Hi, Roger-Dodger,’ and I’m the one. I’m Roger-Dodger.”

  “Why are we lucky, Roger . . . Dodger?”

  “Mum says we’re so lucky, Annie.”

  “Why?”

  “Mum says we’re so lucky to have you. So pretty and she loves little Sam. I have pictures. I have pictures. My mum gives me pictures. Little pictures . . . of little Sam . . . and little baby . . .”

  “Who’s the baby?”

  “Jesus. You silly! Where’s Mum? Annie, where’s Mum?”

  “She couldn’t come today.”

  Joe managed to find a place that his mother seemed to like, at least at the time she saw it. There was a vacancy, but they had two other people who were interested. They wanted $20,000 in advance. He promised them he would be back the next morning with the money. I went to the bank that afternoon and deposited my father’s check. Back home, I wrote one of my own for $20,000 made out to the retirement home, and gave it to Joe.

  I had to decide which of my colleagues was going to get Joe as a client. Nobody ever liked being given a member of a colleague’s family as a client. It put extra pressure on you. It was like having someone from the firm watch you while you worked and then report on you and, worst of all, the consequences of the job placement would come back to you in installments five days a week after that. Since it all really boiled down to luck and to how well Joe sold himself at interviews, all my potential choices were equally good, or ungood, as Orwell warned we might say. So I decided to set him up, while I still had authority over her, with the young communications graduate.

  My father was still waiting to hear from Joe. That he’d given me a check for the amount we needed urgently had not lessened his determination to, as he put it, make Joe learn the hard way. Joe, on his part, wasn’t going anywhere near him. Fortunately, my father wasn’t home when I dropped in to see them that evening. H
ad he been, he would have started on me about not hearing from Joe. My mother would have tried to calm him down, but ultimately she would have backed off when he told her to. She did as she was told. That’s how their marriage worked. That’s how it had worked for decades. Talking over coffee about Sophie’s biological clock, as my mother was wont to do, I asked her why they hadn’t had more children. She said she hadn’t wanted more although my father had. He had wanted a son.

  “But you had to have slept together more than twice.”

  “That’s not a subject for mother and daughter.”

  “Mum, what are you telling me?”

  “I’m not telling you anything.”

  “You’ve been a practicing Catholic all your life, haven’t you?”

  “Of course I have.”

  “So then—”

  “Anna, there are ways to not get pregnant. It was a trade-off. You get used to it.”

  My father’s unexpectedly early return home saved my mother’s face from reddening further. But it did nothing for mine.

  “So where’s Joe? He has to come and talk to me like a man. Why don’t he come, Anna? I give you the check. Why don’t he come?”

  He was getting angrier by the word. Stupidly, I tried to mollify him with the truth.

  “Dad, he’s ashamed to talk to you.”

  “I know all that. I know he don’t have a job. But he has to be a man.”

  “Yes, but there are things you don’t know, things he’s embarrassed about.”

  “What things?”

  “Well, the title, you see—”

  “The title, there’s a mortgage, I know all that.”

  “Yes, but . . . I’m not on it. That’s what he’s—”

  “What? What do you mean you’re not on it?”

  “Dad, the house is . . . It’s entirely in his name, and the bank’s, I suppose. I’m not on the title.”

  “The bastardo, he did this to you? I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him! It’s not too late, I’ll fix him.”

  There was nothing I could do to stop him shouting, so I left.

  Simon’s trial was starting the following week. I was due to have my final briefing or preparation session with the prosecutor at around the time of the appointment I’d made for Joe with my young colleague. My story hadn’t changed, but my comfort in telling it had and I wondered if the prosecutor noticed. Of course, I didn’t tell any of them I’d visited Simon. Nonetheless something about my manner, about the way I gave my evidence, must have made them all a little wary. Mr. Henshaw reminded me about Ms. Serkin’s cross-examination at the committal hearing.

  “Do you remember how she asked you that whole long series of detailed questions concerning your relationship with Simon in your student days?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, she’s going to do that again, you know.”

  “So, I’m supposed to tell the truth, aren’t I? And, anyway, you said those questions weren’t relevant.”

  “Yes, but they might be deemed relevant by the trial judge. Ms. Serkin will use them to try to make it sound more likely that you were still, that is at the relevant time, having an affair with Simon.”

  “But I wasn’t.”

  “No, but if a jury thinks you were, they will also think it more likely that Simon did have your permission to pick Sam up from school. It raises, or helps to raise, a reasonable doubt. We don’t want that.”

  “Look, I’m . . . I’m only telling the truth. It’s all I’ve ever done.”

  “That’s all we want,” Mr. Henshaw said, before a new addition to their team, a woman I’d not seen before, suddenly put her hand on my wrist and said, “Anna, there’s the truth and . . . the truth. If you really want to see this animal locked up for a long time, you don’t have to agree that your earlier relationship was quite so peachy.”

  I looked at this woman for a moment.

  “Have we met?”

  23. I was giving Sam his dinner when Joe came home after his interview with my young colleague, way after. He had obviously stopped off somewhere to drink the rest of the afternoon away.

  “How did you find Céleste?” I asked him.

  “She’s good, but she’s eleven.”

  “Is she, Dad?”

  “No, Dad’s joking. Aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I’m only joking.”

  “She’s young, but she’s determined. She’s very eager.”

  “Oh, I thought so,” he said, and that was all we said about it until Sam was in bed. Then he took his dinner out of the microwave and ate it standing up while I did the dishes.

  “Anna.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The money, the advance for the retirement home.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I told you, we got a raise.”

  “And a bonus?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Pretty much everyone, uh-huh.”

  Then he slammed his plate down and the food rose and fell, not all of it falling back on the plate.

  “What the fuck is going on?” he shouted.

  “What’s wrong? What are you talking about?”

  “Anna, are you going to tell me the truth, about anything?”

  “I don’t understand, what are you talking about?”

  “I spent about two hours today with your colleague, the lovely Céleste. She’s really going places, right?”

  “Joe, she’s at least as good as anyone else there.”

  “Probably better than some, right?”

  “For sure.”

  “Then why didn’t she get any fucking raise? Why didn’t she get a bonus?”

  “You asked her about that?”

  “Yes, I asked her about that,” he said at the top of his voice. “She didn’t get anything, and she hasn’t heard of anyone else getting anything. She said it’s not even the right time of the year for it. You got your bonuses at the end of the financial year. So are you going to tell me where you now want me to think the money is coming from? I don’t know what your game is but—”

  “How did you even get to talking to her about that?”

  “Well, to be honest, Anna, I had money on my mind when I walked in there. Then Céleste started asking questions about lifestyle. What are my main avenues of expenditure? Well, I thought of the mortgage, of course. But even before that came to mind, right at the forefront, right before my very fucking eyes, was my mother’s retirement home. It’s funny, isn’t it? I walk into my wife’s place of business, am greeted by this gorgeous kid, with hair and a cleavage you could build a country estate in, and all I can focus on is my dear mother’s retirement home.”

  “Why?”

  “Because not long before my appointment I got a call from them.”

  “Oh no. Is she all right?”

  “The check bounced!”

  Sam was standing quietly in the kitchen doorway. His pajama bottoms were wet.

  My check had bounced. My father must have stopped his.

  Joe, even when on the verge of an alcohol-induced stupor, as he frequently was then, was still sometimes able to cross-examine me to within an inch of my life. He had caught me lying about where the twenty thousand dollars for the retirement home was supposed to be coming from. He pressed me for the truth, and the truth was that I wasn’t so good at thinking on my feet. At first, without it making any sense, he suspected that Simon was somehow supposed to have come up with the money but hadn’t. The trial was days away. Joe would be called yet again to give his version of events, and he was particularly Simon-conscious. It didn’t take me long to convince him it had nothing to do with Simon. Joe didn’t know where the money was supposed to be coming from and he didn’t know why his son was picked up from school one day by my ex-boyfriend of a decade earlier. He was just attributing the things he couldn’t explain to a single cause. Joe was using Occam’s razor, Simon’s weapon of choice. But if the money
wasn’t coming from Simon, who was it supposed to be coming from? I wasn’t fast enough. I panicked and grasped at the truth, yet again. I must remember to stop doing that.

  “There’s nothing sinister in it, Joe.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “I got the money from my father.”

  “Anna, don’t bullshit a bullshitter. Your father wanted me to beg him for it. He wouldn’t have given you a bean till I did. And maybe not even then.”

  “Well, I did the begging for you, Joe. And he lent me one hundred thousand beans.”

  “So why did the check bounce?”

  “He must’ve . . . He’d been after me for days wanting to know why you still hadn’t been to see him. The only thing I could think of telling him was that you were embarrassed about me not being on the title. When I told him that he went berserk. He must’ve stopped the check he’d given me.”

  “You idiot, Anna. He’ll hold that against me forever, that jumped-up little—”

  “Watch it, Joe. I’m one of them too. So is your son.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have fucking gone to him for help!”

  “Joe, I’d tried everything else. He was our last resort.”

  “You’d tried everything else? What the fuck does that mean? What had you tried?”

  “Lots of things. Just take it from me, Joe, I’d tried everybody else.”

  “Who else had you tried?”

  “Joe, I . . . I even tried Sheere.”

  “What? You asked Donald Sheere? Are you telling me you asked Donald Sheere?”

  “Yes.”

  “You asked Donald Sheere? Are you out of your mind?”

  “Think about it, Joe. After all the money you’ve made for him and his wife, the ungrateful bastard pulls out of an attempt by you to make him still more and you lose your job and our house on account of it. Why shouldn’t I ask him for help?”

  “How did you even get through to him? He wouldn’t take my calls.”

  “He wouldn’t take mine either.”

  “Anna, what did you do?”

  “I . . . I went to his house.”

  “You went to his house?” “Yes.”

  “Jesus, Anna! Uninvited?”

  “Joe, what did I have to lose?”

  “My reputation.”