I couldn’t give Esther any reasons to leave me, especially not now. If Olivia made our relationship public, my wife would not hesitate to do it, not because she cared or didn’t already know, but because she wouldn’t be able to tolerate being openly insulted.
In the same way, Olivia knew that Jerry wouldn’t be able to stand knowing that I supported her and that her meager acting career didn’t rake in enough to pay even half of the rent for her apartment. Nor would Jerry like to know that Olivia had earned a living as an escort for mature gentlemen who visited New York for business or pleasure. We both had plenty of ammunition to annihilate the other.
One of those afternoons, when Esther went to Jaime’s house to play sympathetic auntie because my brother was once again upset with Charles for getting bad grades at school, I called Olivia to tell her that I was coming to see her. I knew it was her day off from the theater.
“I wasn’t planning on seeing you today, Thomas. Jerry called me. He’s going to pick me up for dinner. He wants me to meet a couple who he says are his best friends. It’s important to him that they like me; they were also very good friends of his late wife.”
“Tell him you can’t make it, Olivia. Make something up.”
“No, Thomas, I can’t. I want to marry him, and I know I need the approval of the people who are important to him, and these friends are.”
I insulted her for a long time. Olivia listened to me patiently. I guessed she was filing her nails or waxing her legs the whole time. That’s how she was. But she didn’t budge. We were both being very stubborn. If there were to be an ending it would be like that of the fable of the scorpion and the frog. We would both perish, and she knew that I did not want to perish.
I telephoned Doris, the young and charming Doris, who never said no and did her best to please me as long as I paid generously.
I spent the afternoon with Doris; I’ve actually been spending many afternoons in the past two or three years with her. I suspect she thinks she’s getting the better of me and I find it amusing to allow her to believe that.
She listens rapturously to anything I have to say and looks at me as if I were the most attractive man on earth, but I know that what she sees in me is power. On one occasion Olivia explained to me why young and beautiful women sometimes fall in love with guys like me. “It’s because of power,” she said. In the case of Doris it was the power to turn her into a somebody in the concrete jungle. The power to open my wallet and give her a three-thousand-dollar Gucci handbag; the power that emanates from a man who drives a Ferrari Testarossa. That’s why in her eyes my love handles fade away, and she doesn’t pay attention to the mottled skin around my torso, arms, and legs, nor does she look at my hair, which has been thinning for some time.
In reality, when she embraces me she isn’t embracing me, she’s embracing my money, my car, who I am in Manhattan.
Doris is twenty-three years old; she has soft skin, blue eyes, and a spectacular body. I labor under no illusion, I’m not like those mature gentlemen who believe they’ve really made a young lady fall in love with them. I assume she goes to bed with what I have, not with my aged body.
There really is nothing more ridiculous than a man of advanced age who believes that he has won the heart of a younger woman. No—I don’t want to deceive myself. That’s why I prefer to admit to myself that my young lady sells herself for the sake of the reward she’ll obtain. It’s better than indulging in the childish illusion that a twenty-three-year-old girl might prefer my flaccid body to that of a young man in the prime of life. This is one of the lessons I learned from Olivia.
My relationship with Esther began to deteriorate. She didn’t need me. My place in her life was diminishing. She found the weekends as interminable as I did. In my case because I got bored with her; in hers because she wanted to be at Jaime’s home with him and his sons, playing the wife and the mother she was not.
She made no secret of the fact that she spoke with them several times each weekend. She even took her phone to the bathroom in case they called her. And they did.
One Sunday morning, I began to feel alarmed. Esther got up early and made breakfast. Sundays were Mrs. Morrison’s day off, and she went to sing at a church in Harlem.
“I’ll be back for lunch, I’ll try not to be late,” Esther announced, hurrying to the door and leaving me gobsmacked.
“Where are you going?”
“Geoffrey, your brother’s youngest son, is playing an important basketball game and asked me to come. He wants me to see how good he is.”
“You could have let me know sooner.”
“You’re right. The truth is I was hesitating but I thought you wouldn’t mind me being away for a couple of hours. I’ll be back for lunch. I can’t say no to Geoffrey. Charles is a lot better at basketball than he is, and, well, he needs someone to encourage and support him.”
“You’re not their mother, Esther,” I said harshly.
She bit her lip. I saw it all in her expression: she was sorry she wasn’t the mother of those two boys but sometimes thought she was.
“I know, Thomas. I can’t take Eleanor’s place. Those boys adored their mother. I’m only trying to lend a hand.”
“You can’t keep devoting yourself to them as if you had a responsibility to meet; they’re abusing your kindness.”
“No, it’s not like that…It actually makes me happy to be with them.”
She regretted putting it like that. I know because she lowered her gaze, and if she could have, she would have erased what she had just said.
“So I should be jealous of them. I wish it made you happy to be with me.”
She approached me and threw her arms around my neck while she ran her fingers through my hair.
“Please, Thomas, don’t ruin it!”
Ruin it? What was I ruining? I didn’t ask her and she left without giving me time to respond.
She arrived a little before lunchtime. We spent the rest of the afternoon together but in reality she was miles away, still with Jaime and his sons. She even called them a couple of times.
I started to build up a contained anger toward both Esther and Olivia. With Olivia I could occasionally release it, but with Esther I had to pretend.
But while Esther seemed to have infinite patience for our situation, and had even stopped insisting that I accompany her to Jaime’s house, Olivia was pressuring me to end our relationship. She was terrified at the possibility of losing Jerry.
Destiny weighed in on my side and allowed me to take revenge on both of them.
One morning when I was at the office dictating a few letters to my secretary, Esther interrupted us. Her intense gaze revealed that she was preoccupied.
“Thomas, something terrible has happened.”
At first I was alarmed. I thought Paul had died or that one of our best clients had gone over to one of our competitors. But fortunately it wasn’t either of those two things.
“Jaime phoned me. The poor thing couldn’t take it anymore…He had to tell someone.”
“Tell what?” I snapped.
“Well, it seems that the bank is about to seize his assets. It’s not that things aren’t going well at the office, but he invested everything he earned with Lehman Brothers and he’s lost everything. He hadn’t told me anything until now. Eleanor’s father helped them at first, made their bank give them a loan to help cope with the situation…But things haven’t gone the way he was hoping and…Well, he told me he mortgaged his home, and even the house he inherited from your aunt in Newport. It was repossessed a few days ago. He lost it. That beautiful house…I’m so sorry, I loved it so much! But the worst thing is that he still owes the bank a large amount of money and he doesn’t have it, and Eleanor’s father doesn’t want to help him. He has agreed to pay his grandsons’ expenses but nothing more. I think that…well, I think we should help him.”
“Help him? You want us to give away our money to him?” I asked, raising my voice.
“No, it
’s not about that, but you could speak to somebody at the bank, offer some kind of guarantee so they stop pressuring Jaime and let him get back on his feet. You could also talk to his father-in-law, ask him to help, say that you can act as a guarantor for your brother. Eleanor’s father knows that our company is solvent. We can do that, can’t we? That’s what I want.”
I couldn’t believe that Esther was asking me to save Jaime, that brother of mine I’d always compared myself with as a child, feeling I was ugly and clumsy. The brother praised by everyone as a good boy, a good student, and, on top of everything, good-looking. The brother sought after by all the best colleges, who went to Harvard Law and graduated with honors. The brother praised by all the newspapers as a brilliant lawyer. The brother who married the right woman, Eleanor Hudson, an East Coast aristocrat as proud as she was beautiful. And now Esther had just revealed to me that this upstanding man was a failure. I had to hold back a chuckle. Nothing could make me happier than what I had just heard. James “Jaime” Spencer was bankrupt. Not only had he lost his wife, he had also lost his fortune.
I imagined his suffering when the bank took control of the Newport house. Aunt Emma’s house, where the Spencers had been happy, where I myself had spent some of my best childhood moments. The only place where I didn’t feel the impatient, fretful gaze of my mother, because Aunt Emma wanted her house to be a space for freedom, even for the young ones.
No, I wasn’t planning on helping him. I wouldn’t lift a finger to free him from the suffering he was experiencing and restore his sense of peace.
Esther looked at me expectantly. She knew I never said no to anything she asked—I had never done that—but she also knew that asking me to save Jaime might be more than I’d be willing to concede.
I could have done it. Yes, I could have told Esther not to worry; I could have sworn to bail Jaime out:
“Don’t worry, dear, of course we’ll do anything in our power to help out my brother and my nephews. I’ll talk to the bank—the president holds us in great esteem. He knows that we’re solvent. As for Mr. Hudson, well, I don’t know Eleanor’s father very well, but I could go and see him. Perhaps between the two of us we can fix this. Are you happy?”
She would have hugged me gratefully, feeling guilty for not loving me as she should, willing to continue to sacrifice her life next to mine, a price she’d have to pay in order to save Jaime.
—
Yes, I could have told her I would do what she wanted. But I didn’t. In fact I didn’t agree to anything, although I didn’t refuse outright. I was going to play my cards in a way that would destroy Jaime and make Esther suffer along the way, at least a little, for making me suffer on Jaime’s account. Since he had installed himself in our lives, I felt Esther grow more distant with each day that went by. It was only a matter of time before she would abandon me for the opportunity to act as Jaime’s savior, which according to Paul is what women are like: they give it all, expecting nothing in return. And there was nothing more romantic than trying to save a widower and his two sons from ruin.
“Will you do it, Thomas? Tell me you will.” Her voice carried a note of supplication.
It took me a few seconds to respond as I searched for the right words—words that wouldn’t oblige me to do anything I didn’t plan to do.
“I’ll interest myself in his situation.”
“That’s not enough,” Esther said sharply.
“First, I want to know exactly what situation he’s in, before we commit to something we can’t follow through with. Don’t ask the impossible, Esther.”
“You’re right…Yes, that’s the sensible thing to do. Talk to the bank, they’ll advise you on what can be done, and we’ll take their advice into consideration. Thank you, Thomas. I knew I could count on you.”
She hugged me. For a few moments she held me close, breathing on my neck. I felt her warmth and her agitation.
I’ve always forgiven Esther for not truly loving me. It was enough to have her nearby, to believe that I could share my life with her. She never deceived me about her feelings toward me or toward Jaime. In some ways she had loved me, yes, but the love she felt for me was a pale reflection of what she had always felt for Jaime. Again I remembered that Paul used to say that women sublimate the impossible, and Jaime had always been impossible, at least until he became a widower. From that moment on, Esther began to dream about the possibility of sharing a life with Jaime. It was just a dream, but a dream that fully occupied her mind, a dream that she devoted all her energy to. She was making it come true in a sense by formalizing her status as concerned and generous sister-in-law to my brother and his sons. She still didn’t dare to take the big leap, but if I lowered my guard, she would.
Esther was still talking, but I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about my revenge, and I was startled when I heard her mention Olivia.
“I’ll call her. If that’s all right with you?” she asked me.
“I’m sorry…I didn’t quite catch what you were saying.”
“Poor thing! You’re thinking about Jaime, thank you, dear! Well, I was saying that I’m thinking about using Olivia for the diamond commercial.”
“We’ve used her too many times,” I replied.
“Yes, but in this case she’ll be perfect, she has beautiful hands, don’t you think? I thought the camera could follow some woman’s hands throughout the day…Getting out of bed, putting on makeup, hugging her son before he goes to school, running a meeting, at a romantic dinner. The figure of the woman will be out of focus, we won’t really see her features, and the important thing will be her hands, the diamond ring glinting on one of her fingers. It’ll be subtle and elegant.”
I realized that Esther was trying to repay me for the effort she was asking me to expend in helping Jaime. Paul was right. My wife knew what was going on between Olivia and me. The most painful part was that she didn’t seem to mind and was willing to be gracious to me by hiring my lover once again.
“Do whatever you want, I don’t care,” I replied drily.
“Yes, we’ll hire her,” she insisted.
—
That same afternoon I called Mr. Hudson. When I told his secretary who I was, she hesitated before putting the call through.
“What do you want, Spencer?” he offered as a greeting. His tone of voice was icy.
“To speak to you. I won’t take up much of your time.”
“About what?”
“About my brother’s financial situation.”
“Talk to him. I have nothing to do with your brother’s ill-judged decisions…Don’t even think about asking me for one dollar.”
“I’m not planning to do that, Mr. Hudson, believe me.”
He asked me to meet him the next morning at eight at his office, warning me that he would not waste his time with me for “more than ten minutes.”
Hudson had grown old since I’d last seen him. The death of Eleanor, his only daughter, had turned him into an old man, although he kept telling the same terrible jokes that he had told throughout his life.
I got straight to the point. I wanted to know my brother’s real financial situation: loans, mortgages, investments, bonds, everything.
He told me. To my surprise, he gave me a detailed report on Jaime’s precarious financial situation.
“Your brother wanted to blow Eleanor away, to prove that he could give her the same kind of life she’d had before they were married. The fool! He couldn’t think of a better way than to mortgage all the properties he had and invest the money in options that turned out to be a disaster. He lost everything. The worst thing is that he asked my advice beforehand and I warned him not to buy junk bonds. When they went bankrupt, my daughter asked me to help her and that’s what I did while she was alive. I made sure that they were able to continue enjoying the same lifestyle. I wasn’t going to allow my Eleanor not to be able to afford even going to the hairdresser. So I subsidized all their domestic expenses. I also asked his banker, an old fri
end of mine, to give him a loan. Eleanor was convinced that her husband would get back on his feet. But your brother made another mistake: he thought that if he speculated with that money he could suddenly recover everything he had lost. He didn’t consult with me and ignored the recommendations of his banker. He invested and lost. Everything. My daughter suffered at the end because of what was happening to them. Your brother paid no attention to me when I asked him to not add financial worries to her illness. But he is a weak man and told her how badly things were going. He needed my daughter’s strength, even knowing that she needed what little strength she had left to fight cancer.
“A few days before she died she made me promise I would never abandon her two sons. I swore I wouldn’t and I will keep my promise. They are my only grandchildren, in both of them there is a part of Eleanor. But I will not save your brother. He ruined her. She died in anguish.
“I’ve proposed to your brother to have my grandsons come live with me. They won’t lack anything. If he doesn’t accept, then I’ll do what I’ve done over the past few months: pay their school tuition, buy them clothes, invite them on vacation…And don’t say any nonsense like ‘the boys need their father.’ ”
“I wasn’t planning on saying that, Mr. Hudson,” I admitted.
“So what do you want?”
“Only to know the details of my brother’s financial situation. The extent of the debt, what banks he has issues with…that kind of thing.”
“What for?” he asked me distrustfully.
I wasn’t sure if I should lie to him. I concluded that it wasn’t fully necessary to lie, so I decided to tell him almost the whole truth.
“Mr. Hudson, I have been working hard all these years. My companies have withstood the crisis. We have not had losses. I am not willing to lose my money, not even for my brother. That’s why I want to know it all, because he has asked for my help.”
“I know your brother is very close to your wife,” he said spitefully.
“If you say so.”
“My Eleanor didn’t like your wife.”