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Heather rolled her eyes. The traffic was as impersonal a topic as the weather.

When he asked her to drop him off at the Times Square subway station, she said, “That's not necessary. I'll take you wherever you want to go.” But he insisted that Times Square was “exactly where I want to go.”

“But Zoltan, you don't know the subways and I'm willing to drive you.”

“No thank you. I do know the subways. I taught one semester at the New School, remember? Yes I need you, my darling, but not for
everything
.”

“Fine! Our restaurant is in Hell's Kitchen. I'll park the car and you can go wherever you please.”

As they left the garage, she had the feeling that he thought she planned to spy on him. Unfair! He was the one deceiving her and she was catching the blame. No kiss on the hand tonight, not even a wave, just a short, curt bow and good-bye. By the time they parted she was close to tears.

14
       
MACK, BARBARA, AND ABE
Rabin were already seated at a table in the colorful main dining room, drinking mojitos, when Heather arrived. Rabin, a hefty man with a dense mane of prematurely gray hair, large moist hazel eyes magnified by thick glasses, and a muscular neck and double chin, stood up while cheek pecks and air kisses were exchanged all around.

“Where's the houseguest?” Barbara asked. “Mack said he was driving in with you.”

“I dropped him at Times Square.”

“Then he's not joining us?”

“He had another date,” chirped Heather, trying to sound unperturbed.

“Too bad!” Barbara's disappointment was visible in the droop of her narrow shoulders and downturn
of her full pretty lips, belying her usual offhand cool.

“He's spending the weekend in the city,” offered Mack.

“Oh, really? With a woman?” asked Barbara.

“No. With friends of his, a couple named Shaffer,” said Mack.

“I didn't know that,” said Heather. Relieved, she hailed a passing waiter and ordered a margarita, then picked up the menu. “Does everybody know what they're having?”

For a while they concentrated on the menu, but once they'd placed their orders, the conversation returned to Zoltan.

“Frankly, I didn't really expect you to bring him,” said Barbara. “Abe believes you want to keep him to yourself.”

“No, you're wrong there,” said Mack. “I invited him to come tonight. But Zoltan does whatever the hell he likes, regardless of what we might want. He's actually quite mysterious about his comings and goings.”

“I'll say,” said Heather, sipping her margarita. “I've never met anyone so secretive.”

“Heather says he's difficult. What I want to know is
how
is he difficult?” asked Barbara, tapping a long silver fingernail against her glass.

“So many ways!” said Heather. “For one thing, he's a master of double messages. And contradictions. Like, he's stone broke but he brings us bottles of vintage wine. Or he needs every minute to work but he sleeps half the day. Or he longs to be part of a ‘real family' but he can't remember the children's names. I think he snoops in our drawers when I'm out.”

“How interesting! I wonder why,” said Rabin, a psychiatrist, whose profession it was to wonder why.

“Oh, come now, Abe, you know why,” said Barbara. “Writers are born snoops. They're always looking for material. They justify everything they do, no matter how bad, by telling themselves they're doing it for art, and then they use it in their books. They're shameless. Remember Henry James's prescription for writers?
Try to be one on whom nothing is lost
. If it has to do with their intimates or their family, so much the better, they think it rightfully belongs to them. And who knows, maybe they have a point.”

“You two better watch yourselves or you'll wind up in a book,” warned Rabin, wagging a plump finger. He picked up a chip, scooped up a large dollop of guacamole, and popped it in his mouth.

Unlike Heather, who sometimes feared being material for Zoltan, Mack harbored that very hope. “I'm not worried about it. He's asked me to be his business manager, so I expect I'll have a chance to vet his manuscript before anything damaging sees print.”

“You don't get it,” said Barbara. “Not even their editors have veto rights, only the lawyers, who can stop publication if necessary to prevent a lawsuit. They know how dangerous writers can be, even if you don't.”

“Hardly more dangerous than developers,” said Rabin, playfully punching Mack on the arm. “Look how many developers get indicted. Whereas the papers served to writers are mainly awards.”

“Aren't you forgetting the libel suits?” said Barbara.

“And invasion of privacy,” said Heather, licking salt from the rim of her glass.

“And plagiarism,” said Mack. “If you ask Zoltan, though, it's not writers
or
developers, it's women who are the dangerous ones. He sometimes refers to Heather as a ‘dangerous woman.' Though I think he means it as a compliment.”

“He said that?” asked Heather brightly. “You never told me that.”

“What he actually says, I believe, is that when I let you out of the kitchen you're dangerous.”

“Then he's not worried that you'll poison him,” said Rabin, filling another chip, this time with salsa.

Heather turned to Barbara for sympathy. “Once he said to me, ‘With a kitchen like that I would think you would spend more time there.' Some of the things he says are unbelievable!”

“What a throwback! He's not the only Eastern European writer with old-fashioned ideas about women. Think Kundera. Does he ever offer to help you?” asked Barbara.

“Are you kidding? I doubt he'd know how. He acts completely helpless.”

“Not when he's alone, I'll bet,” said Rabin. “He's a bachelor isn't he? Bachelors have to eat too, so they can usually find their way around a kitchen. Unless they can afford to eat out every night.”

“My impression,” said Mack, “is that this bachelor has always had women to do his cooking.”

“And he's quite particular about the food he eats, too. You could even say finicky,” said Heather.

“Go on, babe,” said Mack, grinning, “tell them about the strawberries.”

“Ah yes, the strawberries.” Heather drained her margarita glass and licked the last bit of salt from
the rim, while the waiter set their entrees before them: beef fajitas, enchiladas with ground pepita sauce, and the house specialty, duck breast with mole negro.

“Well, after Zoltan had been with us a few days, Mack suggested I take him food shopping with me so I could find out what he likes to eat.”

Mack interrupted: “He'd been barely eating, just picking at his food. He's thin as a rail to start with, so you can understand that I didn't want him wasting away on my watch.”

“So I took him to Organic Eden, the best market in our area,” continued Heather. “He pushed the cart through the aisles like it was some big novelty, picking out an item here or there, just like the children, until we reach the fruit section. Now he gets all excited. (Remember, he's just come from California.) Oh, what gorgeous strawberries! he says. How he loves them! He can't believe we have such big luscious strawberries on the East Coast when it's nearly winter.

“Of course, they were way overpriced, but since he made such a fuss about them I bought two boxes and for dessert I arranged them on a platter with some other fruit. He took some of everything—except strawberries. Take some strawberries, Zoltan, I said, I bought them specially for you. No thank
you, he says, I'm allergic to strawberries. I couldn't believe it. But you told me you love them, I said, that's why I bought them. And he smiles his naughty-boy smile—show them, Mack—and says, yes, I do love them very much, but I cannot eat them, they give me hives and headaches.”

Rabin slapped the table and laughed loudly. “Classic passive-aggressive behavior. If he wasn't famous he couldn't get away with that shit.”

“See?” cried Heather. “Didn't I say he's trying to drive me crazy?”

Barbara pushed her glasses up onto her head where they rested securely in her thick black Afro. “So then what?”

“Then,” said Mack, “our tough-broad Heather burst into tears right at the table.”

“I don't believe it,” said Barbara. “That's not Heather.”

Heather shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. “I know it's not. But it may be soon. Because that is what I did. And probably not for the last time, either.”

For a while the conversation turned to the Rabins' recent trip to Mexico. This mole, the Rabins agreed, though better than usual for New York, was not nearly as complex as the moles they'd
regularly had in Oaxaca, which prides itself on having eight different classic mole sauces. Which somehow led Mack to speak of Zoltan's adventure with the starlet in Mexico, which led in turn to the subject of Maja's suicide, until once again Zoltan was in their midst, dominating the conversation.

“I'd be curious to meet him,” said Rabin. “Interesting-sounding case. I'll also be curious to see how long you two can put up with him. It's not a good sign when someone's lover kills herself.”

“I actually knew her fairly well,” boasted Mack. “It was through her I met Zoltan. That suicide—I'm not sure it's fair to pin it on him. First of all, he wasn't her only lover by any means.”

Heather could hardly believe what she was hearing. She put down her fork and stared at Mack.

“And remember my friend Terry?” continued Mack. “When he left her she tried to kill herself, too. In my opinion she was never all that stable. Complicated family, immigrant, troubled relationships with men.”

While Mack paraded his expertise, Heather was quietly appalled that her husband had just admitted his own involvement with Maja—in front of not only his wife but also their closest friends.

“Of course suicide is never someone else's ‘fault,' ” said Rabin.

“As for our being able ‘to put up with' Zoltan, as you say,” continued Mack, “you're wrong, there, Rabin. True, he can be unpredictable, but he is also incredibly stimulating. He's like no one I've ever met. He's also been through a lot of bad stuff in his life—prison, exile, no money. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and chalk up his strangeness to cultural differences. Right now he needs us, and we're delighted to have him. Aren't we, Heather? Let him put us in his book if he wants to, I for one would be honored.”

“All the same,” said Rabin, “I'd advise you both to develop some defenses pretty soon. Especially Heather, since he seems to go after the ladies.”

“Are there some pills you can prescribe for me, Rabin? No, don't laugh.”

“Maybe an antistimulant?” quipped Barbara.

“You want to try some Xanax?” offered Rabin. “If you can wait, I've got a drawerful of samples of this and that in the office. Meanwhile …” He took a pen and prescription pad out of his pocket and began to write.

15
       
HEATHER HAD JUST RETURNED
home after dropping the children at school when she was confronted by the ring of the phone. She flung her coat on the hall bench and dashed to get it.

A woman! A self-assured, husky-voiced woman asking for Zoltan.

Heather stiffened. “Who shall I say is calling?”

“Just say a friend.”

She had a strong urge to tell that woman that Zoltan was writing now and could not be disturbed, but she didn't dare. She knocked on Zoltan's door and opened it. “Sorry to interrupt you, but you've got a phone call.” Seeing him seated at the desk in his kimono, with the mussed, open bed behind him, she wondered if he had been in bed until hearing her drive up and only then, in order to deceive her, had rushed to the desk.

Zoltan followed Heather to the hall telephone. While he held the receiver to his ear, she busied herself straightening up in the vicinity. Ashamed to be hovering but too curious not to.

With his back to her he conducted the conversation in a low voice, then bent to write something on the blue notepad kept there for the purpose. As he tore off the note and thrust it into his pocket, she realized that in all the weeks she'd had him to herself, she had done little to secure her position. She had failed to see that it was only a matter of time until rivals would begin turning up. Without warning, time had turned against her. She imagined her advantage dissolving in a stream of phone calls from hopeful women: the artists and writers he'd known at the colony; aspiring students from the New School; editors, critics, literary groupies. Why hadn't she thought of them? One phone call and he was already acting like a cheating husband; if she didn't do something, he could start disappearing, like Mack.

“You're rather popular for a monk, aren't you?” she tossed at him.

“One phone call hardly makes one popular. Anyway, my darling, you are already taken.”

“Be careful. I can be very jealous,” she teased, pretending to be merely playing at jealousy. She
offered to take messages for him instead of calling him to the phone, but he declined.

As she watched his tall frame recede toward his room she felt her hold on him—and on herself—slipping away with each step. If she didn't act quickly he would be lost to her.

Impulsively, with the nerve that had once prompted her, alone of all the girls in her entire high school class, to apply to Yale, coupled with the decisiveness Mack had modeled as a man of action, she stripped the band from her ponytail, shook out her hair, stepped out of her shoes, and followed him to his room.

When her knock drew no response, she turned the knob and opened the door.

Back in bed, a startled Zoltan clutched at the covers.