The Stager: A Novel (12 page)

The first two bottles go down nice and neat, and I feel a surge of something like euphoria. (Funny that they don’t mention
this
as a possible side effect, instead of dwelling on the negatives.) I push the call button to summon the steward; given how much there is to celebrate, why not one or two or three more tiny bottles of gin?

Outside the window, I imagine below some cows and sheep and rolling dales, even though in reality we are probably over the ocean. The strangest part of this is that even though I am nicely insulated inside this metal tube, and actively trying
not
to think about my wife, the Bella transmission becomes increasingly clear, and even intrusive. No matter what I do to try to blot her out, she is right inside me, crystal clear.

I study the label to see if it might offer insight, but all it says is that it’s been distilled in the U.K.; that it contains 47% alcohol and is 94 proof. The more I drink, the worse it gets. I see Bella in the taxi, even though it’s pouring and the windows are clotted with rain. She is tapping in frustration at her phone. I see the chip in her red nail polish on the fourth finger of her left hand, beneath which is the wedding band she’s twisting in circles, a tic that doesn’t require a psychotherapist to deconstruct. I know that she is about to ask the taxi to pull over and drop her a few feet away, which seems to me a bad idea, given that she has only an already battered fold-up umbrella that will be useless in this sort of blustery, sideways-slashing rain. Also, she is wearing heels. She looks at her watch, fishes from her bag a twenty-pound note, and tells the driver to keep the change.

*   *   *

DID I TELL
you that Bella and I first met on an airplane?

We met in business class, which, with hindsight, is a pretty soulless place to meet, and arguably all the detail that you need about Bella and me. I’d been on the circuit that summer, en route from the Hamburg Masters to a match in Cincinnati, which included in the itinerary a nonstop flight from Frankfurt to New York. Bella had been connecting home circuitously from Florence, where she’d gone on holiday to visit the family she’d lived with ten years earlier, during her junior year abroad. That’s the wrong place to meet, at thirty thousand feet, sipping port and sampling runny French cheeses on someone else’s dime. We both feigned sophistication, pretending to be the sort of discriminating travelers who could tell a Pont l’Évêque from a Brillat-Savarin, when in fact we were people who were privately content with Kraft cheese and cheap Pinot Grigio.

I wish I could say that a feigned enthusiasm, and then the eventual need for luxury items like five-star boutique hotels with high-thread-count sheets and Patek Philippe watches, is what led to our undoing, but it was much more complicated—or, really, maybe much more simple—than that. In fact, once I had been corrupted, the embrace of high-end consumer goods actually became a helpful balm.

Bella had been bumped up to business class the day we met (although it wouldn’t be long before she was a regular on first-class manifests), and, me, I was deep into my fifteen minutes of fame, and had I only realized how short-lived they’d be, and how swift my descent, I would have doubled my consumption of port and smelly cheese that day.

It’s hard to fathom, looking at me now, but as I may have mentioned, back then I turned heads. I had that celebrity rock-star glow.
Le Monde
had said of me just that week, “If the Romans were to name a God of Tennis, they would likely have named him Lars Jorgenson.”

I was not the sort of obnoxious celebrity who wore mirrored aviator sunglasses indoors, but I admit that my habit of wearing an Adidas headband, even when I was in a suit, was its own version of swaggering. I was so giddy back in those days that I couldn’t even say who was footing my bill. I had an agent who took care of those sorts of things, and I just speed-dialed him whenever any scheduling snags arose or some financial reckoning needed to be done.

Bella had had one of those enlightened but slightly dull, solidly middle-class childhoods somewhere in a San Francisco suburb famous for its staunch embrace of mid-century functionalist housing, a style she grew to hate. Now the place has been overrun by the newly rich, and the last time Bella and her sister went to visit and worked up the nerve to knock on the front door of their childhood home, they learned it had been purchased by a twenty-five-year-old who had designed an interactive beer-bong app. Bella’s parents had both been academics, and from what she’d described, it was not the sort of hot-blooded household where hideous things were ever said, or dishes were flung; to the contrary, emotions were as repressed as the architecture, and it sometimes felt like she was living in a PBS series, or some reality show about whether a family could set out to raise two children in a community resembling some Scandinavian-inspired ideal. The most traumatic incident she ever reported was her sister falling off a swing and breaking her arm. Bella had been a model child—good grades, no miscreant teenaged behavior. Her only act of rebellion was to move back east to attend Barnard, even though her parents had pleaded with her to stay on the West Coast.

From every exam she took to every fellowship she applied for, Bella’s trajectory was a steady upward arc. She got every job she wanted, as well as every man. Nothing got in her way until the day, two years into our marriage, that she met Raymond Branch.

What a difference those two years made! The Bella I met that day was humble, so giddy at her luck of being bumped up to business class, of being seated next to me (might I remind you that I was, back then, a handsome, famous tennis player?), that you might have supposed, as she settled into her seat, sorting out her belongings (laptop, newspapers, a novel called
Independence Day
), that coach was the only deprivation this woman had ever known.

So there we were, as fate would have it, sitting next to one another in 4A and 4B, in one of those subpar business-class situations lacking in the proper degree of privacy, which in our case turned out to be a plus. Before the plane became aloft, we had already discovered one another, and wasted no time in acknowledging our fierce attraction, clinking glasses of champagne, toasting—what?—we weren’t quite sure—the few dazzling moments we sensed we’d experience in the forthcoming months, tinged with the slight foreboding that they would quickly turn ruinous? (The career-ending knee injury, the weight gain, the depression, the scum of the affairs, the child, the rabbit…) If there is a moral to the story, it is perhaps only this: people who are going to commit themselves to spending their lives together ought to be grounded at the moment of inception. I say this with no pun intended. A neighborhood barbecue, a college classroom, the aisle of a bookstore, or some sort of cute meet, like the accidental bumping of carts in a grocery store, dogs colliding in a Frisbee chase at the park, a mix-up of orders at the doughnut shop—those are good ways to meet, ways that might provide some sweet shared memory to lean into when things get rough. Of course, it’s possible that the fissure already present at our inception might have had less to do with the empty trappings of United business class than with the fact that at least one of us was engaged.

Oh, it was real, all right. I fell in love with Bella, and, for the record, I am still in love with my wife.

I went back to Stockholm and called off the marriage to my childhood sweetheart. That these things happen every day does not diminish the heartbreak, and all these years later, I am not sure that my own mother has forgiven me. My family and friends all gossiped that I had been hijacked by my ego, and they may well have had a point. Such is the price of fame. Bella and I married shortly thereafter. It was a big, blingy wedding and I think we were happy for a time. We bought a new house in an exclusive suburban enclave. Although it was a bastardized Tudor, it was close enough to the sort of phony colony I dreamed about as a child who’d been raised on a diet of beamed-in American television. And though it has now become fashionable to disparage this style of living—to suggest that a place like The Flanders is the embodiment of excess and sprawl, and that this, combined with my own gas-guzzling Lincoln Navigator, is contributing to the breakdown of American society in general—that misses the point. What could possibly be wrong with living in a house one has earned, particularly when one is an upstanding citizen who pays his taxes and minds his own business and just wants to live a quiet life on a little patch of land? That this is how we live these days in the wealthier suburbs of Washington, D.C.—some of us, anyway—well, I can only say that this way of living was not my own very bad idea.

Digging into and embracing this life was my version of making the best of things once I could no longer do what I love after blowing out my knee in a practice tournament. I had three surgeries, first to reconstruct the cartilage, then two more to attempt to isolate the infection. Then the other knee collapsed in solidarity. I couldn’t walk for months. I put on thirty pounds in less than a year, and once you put on thirty pounds, the next thirty practically puts itself on you, and ditto for the next, and then, before you know it, you are, by definition, clinically obese. So I think I deserve a little credit for trying to be happy with the things that money can buy: titanium golf clubs and a fourteen-cup Cuisinart Elite Food Processor, among my latest spoils.

I’m a wreck, man, but I think I might have rebounded with a little more support. But there you have it, yet another of those classic chicken-and-egg situations (like improving the lighting of the London house and whether to do it before or after we move in). Would Bella have fallen in love with Raymond Branch had I not gone down the tubes? Or was it because Bella fell in love with Raymond Branch that I was ruined?

*   *   *

IT DOESN’T OCCUR
to me, or obviously to Bella until after she’s stumbled along four blocks of uneven cobblestone in the rain, her heel twice getting caught in the grout, that she doesn’t have the keys to the new house. I have one set of keys up here, tucked in my trouser pocket, and Jorek has another. The third is in our kitchen drawer, back home.

At least, by the time she arrives at East Heath Road, the weather has begun to lift. She takes a scarf from her bag (the same one she used a few days earlier to mop my sweat, I note tenderly) and dries as best she can the stone bench outside the house, then sits down and contemplates what to do. She looks at her phone, puts it in her pocket, and stares up at the sky (perhaps looking for me?). After a moment, she stands up and walks around to the back of the house and peers in the window. She looks stricken. There’s water on the living room floor. An inch or so has seeped in through the roof, either from the poorly fitted skylights or from the gash I made while having my euphoric turn with the power tool. She feels that thing called stress again, then silently curses Jorek. She pulls out her phone, intending to call him, but realizes she doesn’t have his number. She considers calling me, then remembers I am up in the air, so she has no one with whom to share the news that there seems to be massive water damage to our new house.

She moves toward the ladder that Jorek has left leaning against the brick, but has the good sense not to climb to the roof to inspect or attempt any DIY repair. Instead, she makes a loop around the house, inspecting each of the ground-floor windows, running her finger along the brick like she’s marking her territory with a trace of her perfume. She then goes back to the bench again and pulls out her phone. She stares at it contemplatively before dialing Elsa.

Her call goes to voice mail: “It’s Elsa, yo, leave me a message and I’ll get back to ya!” Bella winces at the sound of the word “yo,” and also at the word “ya,” and waits for the beep. “Hi, Elsa. It’s Mom. Just saying hi. Listen, when Dad gets home tonight, can you do me a favor and have him call me right away? I know it will be very late, so, if you are going to bed, maybe just leave him a note, okay? I’d leave him a message or send an e-mail, but you know your dad. Tell him there’s a problem at the house. The new house. Well, not a problem, nothing you need to worry about, just some water seepage. Tell him I need Jorek’s phone number. Okay, that’s all. I miss you, Elsa. No more running off. Okay, darling? Hugs and kisses and socks!”

Bella sits for the longest time, and I think the look on her face, and the stuff churning through her head, might best be described as
wistful
. She is trying to visualize us here, a new beginning, light streaming in through the new double-glazed skylights, the water in the living room gone. She’s thinking hopeful thoughts, imagining me stabilized, possibly even with a job or a constructive hobby that does not involve home repair. She sees Elsa bounding out of the house in the tartan skirt and blue blazer that are her new school uniform, safely on the other side of whatever phase she’s currently transitioning through. Whatever it is, it’s probably documentable: “At age ten and nine months, girls become somewhat moody and recalcitrant and are apt to record subtly snarky voice-mail messages with the subconscious goal of unnerving their mothers.” Of course, Bella understands that Elsa is managing a lot right now. On top of the normal bodily changes, there’s the indisputable fact that moving is hard. Bella feels awful uprooting her, but this is one aspect of things, possibly the only one, that she can’t beat herself up about. Families move. This is a reality. Life goes on. In this world, Elsa is lucky to have a roof overhead, even one in which the rain is seeping through.

*   *   *

WITHIN MOMENTS, BELLA’S
phone vibrates with a text from Elsa. It says, simply: “Socks!!!”

My wife smiles and texts back: “Socks!”

She puts the phone away, still smiling, but it vibrates a second later, and when she looks at the screen, it says: “You need 3!!!s. Things shld come in 3s. Like the 3 blind mice.”

Bella types: “!!! xxx”

“Or like, the pig, the naked starving person, and the bowl of tulips.”

“?”

“You mean???”