Manhattan Noir 2 (26 page)

He sipped his orange juice. Whole Foods. Good. Well, like so much in life, everybody knows it’s the best. Except it wasn’t. Too pulpy. You’re interviewing the chairman of Delta and suddenly there’s a giant strand of orange fiber attached to a mini-blob of pulp that’s flossed its way between your teeth and feels Velcroed to your gums and you forget your follow-up question.

When Bob got to the
Times
, lesser reporters, Williams and Wu and even Shapiro, developed ten sources to his one just because nobody could remember his last name. Who wanted to call the paper and say,
Oh, operator, give me the guy in the Business section with, uh, the German name—Gibbelhoffer or Sauerkraut or some damn thing?

“Almost ready!” Chrissie Geissendorfer chirped. Or maybe trilled. Some adjective to describe a cute voice. Cute, even though once any woman who happened to have a brain turned twenty-five, she’d know enough to turn her back on cute. She’d march, shoulders back, boobs front, directly into life.

But not his wife. Here she was, back toward him, busy at the six-burner stove she’d had to have.
Almost ready,
he mimicked to himself. With that voice like one of the “Christmas Don’t Be Late” chipmunks. That was the problem with short women: They embraced Cute, or, to be fair, maybe had it foisted on them, and then, when other women were becoming interesting or sensual or elegant, they couldn’t let go of Cute. About ten years ago, when he asked her casually, “Hey, would you like me to call you Christina now?” she doubled over and pretended to throw up. Then she tweeted, or possibly twittered, “Christina? Couldn’t you just kill my parents? Way back when, like when I was nine or ten years old, I remember thinking my name sounded like I had grandma denture breath.”

Steak and eggs, his ritual birthday breakfast. Early in their marriage, he must have made a positive reference to steak and eggs, although why he couldn’t imagine. But that’s what he got on his next birthday, along with her Alvin the Chipmunk rendition of the Happy Birthday song. Same thing the following year. Right then and there, he said to himself,
Oh fuck, this is what I’m going to be facing 365 mornings from now and for the rest of my life. Unless I can get rid of her. Divorce. Or maybe she’ll die young: nothing painful, something quick.

And here it was, before him, the egg whites thicker than liquid, yet runnier than mucous. The yolks—three of them, for God’s sake—were more orange than yellow and shadowed by ripples, as if they were lying above some egg-world fault line about to give way. Two over easy did not mean three under-fried eggs that probably came from some organic farm where chickens ran amok and pecked particles in cow shit. Another thing: Chrissie had cut the steak into an inch-high rectangle before broiling it, so it looked like a bad joke birthday gift—a greasy brown box rather than a piece of meat.

She was singing, “Happy birthday to yoooou …” although with her accent, it was more like, “Hyappy beerthday …” He suppressed a groan—
I’m getting too damn good at groan suppression,
he mused—and offered her his I-dazzle-women smile. Naturally, Chrissie flashed one in return, her show-every-tooth-while-you’re-at-it smile emphasized how the Crest Whitestrips hadn’t worked on her molars.

Well, he couldn’t
not
act appreciative. She was trying so hard, and she loved him so much. Truth be told, Bob ached for her. Christina Johnston Geissendorfer was a genuinely decent human being. Yet he’d stopped loving her six months into their marriage.

No reason: Maybe his feelings changed when he realized that what he’d first viewed as a warm personality and lively mind turned out to be no more than extravagant perkiness.

He asked the question he posed himself frequently: How did I talk myself into believing she had a mind when she’d been in the marketing department of a costume jewelry company. Her Great Moment was renaming the six hundred “Big Apple” bracelets from an order cancelled by Macy’s “Original Sin” bracelets and selling them to Victoria’s Secret.

He should have turned his attention back to his plate right then, but he caught sight of the crumbs embedded among the fibers of her terry cloth bathrobe, crumbs the unmistakable dark amber of Pepperidge Farm cookies. Over the years of their marriage, what had once been Chrissie’s hourglass figure had spread into the boxy solidity of a grandfather clock. Sex was largely a defensive act now, because if he gave in to feelings for her—namely, utter indifference—she’d start demanding to know if she was doing something to turn him off, and,
Please, Bob, be straight with me; don’t worry about my feelings
. Or she’d be suggesting to him—in what she thought was her gentle voice—
Maybe you should go to see Dr. Gratz and ask for a testosterone count. You don’t have to feel self-conscious, it’s more common than you know with guys your age
.

She sat across from him, resting her elbows on the rough wood table that the decorator said came from an olive-grower’s house near Sienna. Another idiot extravagance, but then his Aunt Beryl had left him enough that they could live in a CFO-of-a-NASDAQ-listed-company manner rather than managing on his
Times
salary. Chrissie’s chin perched on the heels of her upturned hands. What the hell was she sitting there for? To watch him eat? He cut a large slice of the egg, figuring he had to do it now. If he waited, he’d probably gag on cold egg-white slime, and she’d spend his entire birthday leaving apologies on his voice mail about how truly sorry she was that breakfast had been a fiasco, then call back to say she hoped her messages hadn’t sounded passive-aggressive.

“I have that cabinetmaker coming over today for an estimate,” Chrissie said. “On the wood paneling for your library.” Bob nodded, and noted that she’d said “your library,” which was appropriate because her idea of reading was “25 Treasures in Your Garbage” in
Real Simple
. “You want to know something? You’re the only man I know who’d want a library.” Was this a compliment? A criticism? Compliment, he decided, because her eyes had that I-love-you Hallmark greeting card haze.

A library. Their daughter Jordana was graduating from NYU Law School, and as there was no way she’d ever live at home again, they were turning her bedroom into his own private space. Wall-to-wall bookshelves and a sound system designed to resonate off wood. “Everybody else’s husband would want a media room. Do you know what a library says?
This man has class.”
He nodded and swallowed quickly, so egg ooze wouldn’t coat his throat. “Bobby,” she went on, “since the cabinetmaker is coming anyway—”

“No.”

“Could you please just hear me out?” she squealed. Whenever her voice rose this high, stretched by tension, he wanted to cover his ears to protect himself, the way people did in news footage when bombs plunged to earth, from her screeching.

“No, because whatever it is, we can’t do it now. You yourself said let’s go with custom shelves because in the long run it’s the same price as buying and installing, but it’s costing—”

“It’s not! And if we give him cash, he won’t charge us tax.” She smoothed back her hair, preening, as if she’d just come up with a financial coup worthy of Jay Gould. “It’s simple economics. Tell me if I’m wrong: You know better than anyone. He’ll be here, so isn’t this the time to put a new front on the medicine cabinet, so it’ll look like an old mirror in a fabulous antique frame—not a real antique, but distressed wood—instead of just an ugly piece of crap from Tacky Bathroom Expo 1967 or something?”

Bob realized then that his thinking of Chrissie as a genuinely decent human being had been a momentary lapse brought on by birthday sentimentality.
The truth, the real truth? She does love me, as far she is able. Except she has the emotional range of a pigeon, and ultimately she’s never been able to think beyond feathering her own nest. Now, with Jordana finishing law school and James at Hampshire at $45,000 a year, happy though still unsure whether he wants to continue making clay pots (citing Picasso’s success in ceramics) or switch to Asian Studies, it’s within my power to be free. Not to have to hear that voice—“Good merrning!”—as the first human contact every single day of my life.

“You probably think I’m terrible,” she said, “asking for something on
your
birthday. But number one, this is for both of us, our medicine cabinet, and number two …”

Babble, babble. If the Apocalypse came in their lifetime, she’d jabber right through it, then look around and ask:
Did something happen?
Bob lowered his head and eyed the rectangular box, the steak, that sat on his plate. A small, broiled curlicue of fat hanging from the left corner. When he glanced back at her, he saw an almost-fifty-year-old woman who not only didn’t get the meaning of life, but didn’t care whether or not there was one.

A genuinely decent person? Forget it. He was being too decent, talk about decency. Chrissie was now and always had been completely self-absorbed. And superficial? She should have her very own superlative adjective:
superficialest
. If she could have, she would have demoed the kids along with the kitchen and redesigned them to fit her banal vision of what was desirable. Turn Jordana into an editor at
Vogue
instead of an aspiring intellectual property lawyer. As Chrissie saw it, “property” was good, but “intellectual” demoted it to a topic impossible to introduce as dinner party conversation. (Jordana’s unduly hairy boyfriend Clark was a lawyer, Harvard, which made him okay in Chrissie’s view, along with the fact that the
Times
’s Style section had called his father
the
go-to radiation oncologist at Sloan-Kettering.)

As for their son James, Chrissie would grow him five inches taller, give him some career she could drop at cocktail parties: astrophysicist, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes. Actually, Bob had been taken aback when his son reached five-footeight and nothing more happened height-wise. He himself was five-eleven, but you don’t think about having your son only come up to your ear in family pictures when you marry a short woman.

She was resting her chin on her hands to hide the froggy sac that was developing. Ribbit. Ribbit. Distaste barely surfaced before it turned into disgust, and an instant later a wave of hatred rose within him and pressed against the inside of his skull until he had to stifle a moan of pain. God, did he hate her! Honestly, he wasn’t at all a violent man, but he’d like to put his thumbs right under her froggy chin and press on her … What the hell do they call an Adam’s apple in a woman?

He didn’t even try banishing these sorts of thoughts anymore, and had long stopped feeling guilty about having them. Like a sex fantasy, it gave him pleasure and it didn’t hurt anybody. “… it would give the whole room a look of … I don’t know. Solidity. Elegance.”

“What?”

Chrissie gave him her weary, stoic reaction. Flared nostrils, followed by a sigh blown through her nose. He hated her nostrils; they were isosceles triangles. “The mirror. Framing the medicine-cabinet mirror.”

No, not throttle her. Truth be told, on and off over the years he played a kind of whodunit game about getting rid of her. Not seriously, because obviously that would be immoral. His ideas were more like putting poison into those giant antioxidant capsules she took every morning with a hideous
glug.
Oh, and the old defective electrical appliance business, tossing it into the bathtub. If he really wanted to be nasty, he’d buy a plug-in vibrator, so the cops and people from the medical examiner’s office would snicker. No, then they might think she died because he couldn’t satisfy her. Anyway, ninety-nine percent of the time, the husband was the top suspect and he was never able to think of a way he wouldn’t be.

“Look, it’s my birthday and I don’t want to get into a whole discussion, but we did what you wanted to do. The kids’ bathrooms.” He waved his arm in a grand gesture, like a conductor introducing a hundred-piece orchestra. “The kitchen. We agreed to hold off on the master bath and do the library first. One project at a time.”

Her nostrils flared again, but she managed a smile, and that seemed to bring back her perkiness. “You’re not enjoying your cholesterol festival?” she asked.

“No, no, it’s fine,” he said, smiling back. “I appreciate the fuss.” He cut through the steak and wondered how he was ever going to get down enough of it—it must be close to a pound of meat—to stop her from asking a million times,
Didn’t you like it?
It looked good, as if she’d gone to one of the chic, boutique butchers on the Upper East Side. But it was good for a big-deal dinner, not for breakfast. She knew he could never eat this much, but she probably didn’t want the butcher thinking she could only afford four ounces of sirloin or tenderloin, whatever the hell it was. It was a little too well-done for him, but at least not her usual revolting, underdone beef-as-wounded-flesh. He’d thought about telling her he wasn’t going to eat red meat anymore, but of course that would mean he couldn’t order it in restaurants where people actually understood the meaning of medium-rare.

“Oh, speaking of fuss, when we go out with the McDevitts and the Schottlands Saturday night for your birthday, would you mind if I asked Jordana and Clark to join us?” Bob knew exactly where this came from: the
Times
. They had run something about how people with younger friends live longer and they’d run shots of a couple of gatherings where kids in their twenties were mingling with what appeared to be forty- and sixty- and eighty-somethings.

“No. It would be inappropriate. I mean, we’ve been doing birthdays with these people for years, so how, all of a sudden, can we suddenly say, ‘We want to bring our daughter along’? Anyway, they’re just dating.”

“Living together and, in my humble opinion, very, very serious. Don’t the names Jordana and Clark sound great together? Very modern but not too hip. I only wish he wasn’t so hairy. I hear his father is too. When he’s sitting down and I walk around in back of him, I can see the hair on his back kind of merging with the hair on his head, except it’s curlier …” Endless babble. But the steak wasn’t bad, and at least she had stopped salting it before putting it under the broiler, which would have turned it into striated muscle with rigor mortis. “…but he’s really very impressive, on the partner track at one of the top firms, and don’t forget he’s thirty, so he can hold his own in conversation. I was a little surprised, frankly, that someone like him would look at a summer associate, but she does keep herself in fabulous shape and …”