“You can yell at me all you want, Esther, for anything, and you’d be right, except for not caring about your feelings. Do I have to tell you again how much I care about you? What do I have to do to prove it to you? I don’t know what to do anymore, Esther…Tell me what you want, and I’ll do it, I’ll even disappear forever.”
She fell silent and I read a certain fear in her expression. Yes, she wanted to run, to free herself from me, but doing that would mean going back to square one, because she was too honorable to keep my money. Furthermore, we had signed an agreement according to which she couldn’t access sums of money above a certain figure without my signature. So she would have to go back to being an employee at an advertising agency, to counting every dollar because she couldn’t afford to overspend; she would give up the home that she currently enjoyed, and the car and chauffeur that we had hired for the agency but was really for her to use, and being able to go into any shop without worrying about the price of a pair of shoes or a skirt. And she’d be giving up her family’s admiration. The Sabattis were proud of her. Esther was the one in the family who had succeeded. Her brother worked in the family restaurant; he would spend the rest of his life there.
Going back to square one is difficult. And Esther was human, so she weighed in her heart what she had and what it would mean to lose it.
She could have left me broke if she had wanted to. After all, I had been stupid enough to authorize her signature on all my accounts and I had transferred quite a number of stocks and dividends to her, in addition to making a will favorable to her.
She was too decent to ruin me, but she had also experienced a different reality, the one where you don’t have to worry about the electricity bill.
My statement had been a trap to make her feel indebted to me. So I remained quiet, staring at her and waiting for her response.
“I’m having a bad day today, Thomas, let’s not fight.”
She shut herself in the bathroom for a long time. When she came out she went straight to bed. She didn’t even ask me if we were going to have dinner. I was tempted to go see Olivia, but I made myself a sandwich and sat down to watch television. I didn’t go to bed until I thought she was asleep. She was curled up on one edge of the bed, so I knew that she was pretending to be asleep.
In fact, Esther was hoping for a supreme act of generosity from me. She would have renounced everything I had to offer in exchange for her freedom, but she needed me to give it back to her.
That night I could have sat down at the edge of the bed and taken hold of her hand.
“Open your eyes, I know you’re awake.”
She would have opened them slowly, letting me see the depth of her suffering.
“Forgive me, you’re right. I try to ignore your feelings because I’m scared of losing you. Call Jaime; tell him not to get married, that you love him. You two have the right to make a go of things. You don’t owe me anything, Esther; my generosity to you was just selfishness, my way of holding on to you. Go. You and my brother can’t act as though you were Romeo and Juliet and your love was impossible. It’s ridiculous that you should renounce being with each other. We’ll go to my lawyer’s office tomorrow; I don’t want to leave you with nothing, but…well, you won’t lack for anything with Jaime. We’ll rewrite the will and I’ll instruct them to remove your name from my accounts. Simple as that.”
Esther would have thrown her arms around my neck and drenched me with her tears.
“You’re so good! I don’t deserve you! But I can’t…I can’t leave you. I can’t call Jaime. That girl, Eleanor…They’ve made a commitment to each other, they’re getting married in a couple of weeks…”
“Do you want me to call him? I’m prepared to humble myself in front of my brother. I’ll tell him that I’ll punch him if he doesn’t come and get you right now and take you away with him. You’re in love, nobody in the world has the right to interfere with your love. Go on, Esther, do it; keeping you at my side without you loving me is harder than losing you.”
Esther would have hesitated. I would have picked up my cell and dialed Jaime’s number.
“Were you asleep? Come and get Esther and stop acting like an idiot. You’re behaving like little kids. This doesn’t make sense. How can you think of marrying Eleanor Hudson? She’s not the girl for you. She’s just the spoiled daughter of an arrogant father.”
—
I didn’t free her because I didn’t want to. I preferred for her to suffer at my side rather than for her to be happy away from me. I loved her, but I loved myself more and I wasn’t prepared to endure the loss of her.
Neither of us slept. We got up early. Esther went for a run as she did every morning and I went to the gym, where I didn’t lift a single weight but spent the time breakfasting on whole-grain toast with butter and reduced-sugar jelly, and coffee. Everyone has their own way of letting off steam.
When we saw each other in the office later, Esther seemed in a better mood. She shut herself away with Paul to prepare the estimate for Ralph Morgan. They were driving one of the secretaries crazy with requests to send e-mails to our providers asking them to assess the costs of each strand of the campaign.
I saw a couple of clients and at midday, since she and Paul were still wrapped up in their work, I called Olivia. She was my best option to pass the rest of the day with. Olivia told me that she was making a salad with flowers, one of those dishes she had learned in her cooking class.
When I arrived at her apartment I found her in a bad mood.
“I want to work, Thomas; I want to be on-screen, on the stage.”
“I’ll do what I can, Olivia, but it’s not my fault if your beauty doesn’t come with any extraordinary talent.”
“You’re a pig, Thomas!”
“I’m telling you the truth, beautiful. If you had special talents you wouldn’t have to earn a living off of guys like me. But so far you haven’t convinced anyone you have a talent for performing, except in bed.”
Her anger didn’t bother me. I was too lazy to look for someone else like her.
“I’ll help you, Olivia, I promise. I’ll come up with a way to get you a job.”
We reached an agreement. She didn’t have a particular gift for acting, but she wasn’t stupid and she didn’t want to depend exclusively on me. She wanted to keep trying to make her way in movies or television. She wanted to earn her own money, even if it wasn’t enough to pay for the apartment and buy herself designer clothes. What she earned for herself would be her insurance for the future, for the moment when the light in her green eyes was overshadowed by wrinkles. She was a smart girl.
Had I become monogamous? I was happy with Olivia; yes, as long as I had Esther with me. I didn’t want more, but I was worried that, in spite of everything, Esther might someday break her ties with me, because of Jaime or someone else.
It didn’t take me long to confirm what I had already guessed during our first meeting with Ralph Morgan. Esther was attracted to him. Ralph also liked her because of the confidence she exuded. I understood why when we met Constance, Ralph Morgan’s wife.
The day we signed the contract, the aspiring congressman came in with his wife and daughter, Ellen, as well as Nicholas Carter.
I liked Constance. Blonde, of average height, fragile-looking, and with huge blue eyes, she was like a porcelain doll. Everything about her was harmonious, including her tone of voice, and I noticed the coolness of her skin when we shook hands.
Yes, I really liked her. I decided that I needed to have her. Surely a woman like her would feel lonely, given that her husband was dedicated heart and soul to carving out a niche in politics. And if the responsibility of caring for her sick child also fell to her, it seemed to me that it would be easy to seduce her.
She didn’t speak but seemed interested in everything we had to say. And when Ralph Morgan asked for her opinion, she simply agreed that no doubt everything would work out well.
“Mrs. Morgan doesn’t have much free time, but
she’ll do her utmost to support her husband,” Nicholas Carter explained. “As you know, little Ellen has a heart condition and needs all her mother’s care and attention.”
“Does she go to school?” Esther wanted to know.
“Of course. We try to give our daughter as normal a life as possible, but unfortunately she can’t cope with a full school day. Sometimes she has episodes and it’s necessary to take her to the hospital immediately,” Ralph Morgan explained.
“I’ll do everything in my power to help my husband,” Constance added.
“No doubt you’ll be a great asset to his campaign, Mrs. Morgan. The public values nothing more highly than family, and you, your daughter, and your husband are a beautiful family,” Paul Hard declared.
Esther got along well with Constance. In truth, you couldn’t help getting along with her: she had such an aura of sweetness and serenity that she made the whole world want to protect her.
As for little Ellen, the girl looked more like her father: she had inherited his brown hair and dark eyes, and was extremely thin. Though seven years old, she was very quiet and didn’t disturb us so we almost forgot she was there.
“Will Ellen be able to go to any rallies with her father?” I asked, conscious of the effect this would have on the voters.
“Our intention is to keep our daughter away from her father’s political activity, but she might want to go and watch her father onstage, isn’t that right, darling?” Constance said.
“That is none of our business, Thomas,” Esther reminded me.
“But good advice is always appreciated,” Ralph commented with a smile.
So Carter and the Morgans became a part of our lives in the same way that Roy Parker and Suzi had been part of mine in the past. They started to become integral to our routine, an important element in our conversations and concerns. We had signed a valuable contract so we couldn’t let them down.
Esther decided that Paul would be responsible for communicating with Carter, warning him not to put even a toe over the boundaries established in the contract.
“You like Morgan, Paul, but I don’t want us to end up tripping up his opponents. No politics. Our job is just to make sure that when he meets his supporters the microphones work, the stage is well lit, and the same goes for preparing for his television appearances. But we will not advise him on what he should say or how he should challenge his rivals,” she stressed, looking at us both.
“His wife and daughter have great potential…They could win him a lot of votes,” said Paul, ignoring Esther’s recommendation.
“Listen to me, Paul. I don’t want us getting involved any further than is stipulated in the contract we signed.”
I decided to remain neutral. My main priority was to reestablish my relationship with Esther. Since the day she told me that my brother was getting married she had avoided me in bed. If she had been anyone else I would have forced her, but had I done that to her she would have left me.
That night I suggested that we go out for dinner and she agreed without enthusiasm. We spent a good part of the meal talking about the Morgans and it wasn’t until dessert that I openly stated my disquiet: “Are you angry with me?”
“No, don’t be stupid.”
“Come on, Esther, you always tell the truth; or at least I think you do.”
“No, I’m not angry, Thomas, although I am rather upset.”
“Just because I don’t want to go to Jaime’s wedding? For a start, my dear brother hasn’t invited me. You’d like things to be different, Esther, but they are what they are. You are very close with your family. I never have been with mine. You have to accept that.”
“Yes, I suppose I don’t have a choice.”
She said it in such a way that she seemed to have given in. The shadow of unhappiness fell between us again. She had loved me when we were very young, but that love had evaporated; and yet she was bound to me, I had bound her, and she didn’t know how to release herself without hurting me.
At least that conversation managed to relax the tension for the next few days, so we went back to normal.
We didn’t mention Jaime again until the Sunday morning when the papers published news of his marriage to Eleanor Hudson in the society pages.
“He’s gotten married,” Esther murmured while we were eating breakfast. We had gotten up a bit later than usual and I had just made coffee.
I didn’t need to ask whom she was talking about. The pain gradually transformed her expression until it dominated her face. I saw that she was trying not to cry, but her nerves betrayed her and she dropped her cup of coffee.
While she got up to pick up the cup I glanced at the paper. There was a photo of the couple. Eleanor looked stunning and wore a happy smile, but my brother’s expression was as serious as if they’d dragged him to the altar.
When we finished breakfast, Esther gave me the surprise of my life.
“Do you still want to marry me?” she asked.
I was left speechless. I was about to tell her no, to take revenge for needing her, because that made me weak. I hated her, yes, for a second I hated her.
“Yes,” I said without adding a word more.
“Then let’s do it. We can get married this week.”
“We can’t organize a wedding in a week.”
“It’s a matter of you and me getting married, not of putting on a show. I have absolutely no intention of wearing a white dress or of organizing a reception.”
“Your parents won’t be happy.”
“They’ll be angry, I know that. But I’m not going to have an Italian wedding surrounded by relatives. I haven’t been to a church in years. It would be ridiculous. Do you want a religious ceremony?”
“No, I’m fine with going to City Hall.”
I said it with apathy, as if getting married to her was no longer a priority for me. I wanted her to feel vulnerable, to feel disoriented. She had lost Jaime and she could lose me. I reveled in the role of the man who’s no longer enthusiastic about getting married. She was shocked. I read it in her eyes. She suddenly felt lost.
“Perhaps we could have a party here, invite our closest friends. What do you think?”
“If that’s what you want, then fine by me.”
I looked down at the paper and began to read as if it were the most important thing for me to do. She got up and left the kitchen. She came back in a few minutes wearing a tracksuit.
“I’m going for a run. Are you coming?”
“No, I’d rather stay here and read the paper and enjoy some quiet time. We’ve had an exhausting week.”
“We could go out to celebrate that we’re getting married.”
“Not today, I’d rather stay home.”
She looked at me with concern and came over to kiss me goodbye on the cheek. I noticed she was upset because her upper lip was trembling.
—
We got married two weeks later, the amount of time it took us to get a license and organize a cocktail party at home, to which we invited a number of friends as well as Esther’s parents and brother.
Paul Hard and Miriam, one of Esther’s childhood friends, were our witnesses. When the judge declared us man and wife we had to steel ourselves to kiss each other.
“I never imagined I’d attend your wedding,” Paul told us when we left City Hall.
“Well, I always thought they’d end up getting married,” Miriam asserted.
Neither Esther nor I replied. We both knew why we’d gotten married, and it had nothing to do with what other people might think.
Although I didn’t appear to be happy, in reality I was. I had achieved my goal. Esther was even more mine and that was what I wanted. It didn’t bother me that she didn’t love me in the way I knew she could love. It was enough for me to know that she would always be there, that I could count on her, that she would watch my back. That as long as she existed, I wouldn’t be alone, that her maternal instinct would make her protect me, even from myself.
&n
bsp; I had wished for this moment and I savored it privately because I didn’t want her to enjoy it. She had agreed to marry me only because Jaime had married Eleanor. In truth I hadn’t given them a choice. Jaime had promised his father that he wouldn’t come between me and Esther, and, very much in spite of himself, the fool had kept his promise. As for Esther, she had become more and more entangled in my web and she had lost all hope of escape some time ago.
Jaime needed someone by his side and had chosen Eleanor Hudson. The Spencer family approved of their union. Aunt Emma had organized a big wedding up in Newport. Esther would have liked a wedding like that, but she punished herself by insisting on a nondescript ceremony that had lasted barely a few minutes. I didn’t care either way. The important thing was that I had achieved my goal: Esther Sabatti had become Mrs. Spencer.
Esther’s parents protested at how hurriedly we had organized the wedding and at their daughter’s refusal to celebrate it in accordance with Catholic ritual.
During the cocktail party that we gave at home, her mother approached me and politely complained: “This isn’t what I’d expected my daughter’s wedding to be like. We have a mountain of relatives who don’t understand why she didn’t invite them and I don’t know what to say to them.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Sabatti. All I want to do is make Esther happy. This is what she wanted.”
“But at City Hall it seemed so sad…You didn’t even know the judge so he wasn’t able to say a few words about you both, something more personal than declaring you husband and wife.”
I avoided her as much as I could. Her disappointed-mother complaints bored me.
The party lasted well into the night. I had given in on everything except the catering. I ordered lobster, oysters, roast beef, and French champagne. There wasn’t a single bottle left over.
Esther and I barely spoke all evening, but she surprised me once the last guests had left. That night she was the one who took the initiative. I knew that she was exorcising all the rage she felt because it was me and not Jaime, because he had married another woman, because she was with me and felt nothing for me.