The Unfortunates (21 page)
Then it is many years of dreaming.
Then there is waking.
“You.” She says to the landscaper passing her window. She has gotten her mouth back.
“Good morning,” he says.
It’s nothing to him, that she has made the words and he has heard them. The blue mask is gone. Hedge. Lawn. Lake. Man. Green. Window. Bed. Sky. Door. Herself, where she had been.
“Help me,” she says.
He disappears from the window. Soon a doctor and a nurse are by her side.
The nurse takes her hand and pats it. “You had pneumonia.”
“Of course I did,” CeCe replies. “You think I don’t know?” And as quick as she is able, she turns her face so they will not see her cry.
(
Fall)
“But those types of loans are unstable,” Martha says with a cold, little laugh, like ice cracking in water. “The language is intentionally obscure.”
George is sitting beside her, the smooth brass balcony rail under his hands. He leans out, surveying the empty seats below. He can barely contain his pride. Bob and Martha are the first friends he’s brought to the theater. Iris’s idea, to bring them and go to dinner. Four weeks of rehearsals already come and gone, and here they are, arrived at a preliminary run, with orchestra. No costumes yet, but part of the set is assembled. I can barely contain my pride, he thinks. I can hardly sit still.
“My wife,” Bob sighs, “is fond of reframing the incompetence of individuals as ethical violations of entire industries. No credit, no these United States. Truth. Boom.”
“George,” Martha says, “have you lost weight?”
“A little.”
“Culture of academia’s finally got Martha. Grousing about the powers that be using words nobody knows in undecipherable combinations.”
George had insisted they sit in the balcony—“I need the artistic distance,” he said, as they entered the theater. He’d leaped the curving stairs two at a time and felt Martha’s gray gaze on his back. He also doesn’t want to distract the soprano by sitting too close. He suspects in the last weeks she’s become overwhelmed by the relentlessness of his creativity and has developed a crush on him. What else explains her sudden aloofness, her disinclination to respond to his suggestions?
“What word did I use that was too hard for you, monkey?” Martha says. “
Obscure?
But I agree with you. Something the academics and the businesspeople have in common. Language against clarity. Against its purpose.”
“I probably have the name of the loan mixed up,” George says. “Iris’s agency knows what it’s doing. It’s not like the subprimes. A program, affordable something. Fiscal Future Brighter something.”
“Where is she, anyway?” Bob asks.
“Running late. A closing.”
George looks at his phone, on silent. No update from Iris. A missed call from
RESTRICTED
. Likely a payment he’s fallen behind on. Doesn’t matter. It actually encourages him when the creditors call, which they do with increasing regularity. It’s a jolt, that word,
restricted
. Reminds him he’s got something on the line. The stakes are high. He’s finally in the soup of life. Pursuing something big, he is in turn pursued. It’s practically natural law, this hero’s chase to opening night. How the droning voices of the agents delight him! Unaware of what they’re up against, ignorant of all that’s in store for the man to whom they speak. If only you knew who you’re trying to hook, he thinks, when they call.
“A housing program,” Martha says. “Is it public?”
Her eyes remain fixed on the empty stage. George observes the tight stroke of ash-blond hair behind the pearl screwed into her ear; the blue convexity of her nose; her flimsy, sallow neck jutting from the taupe collar of her suit jacket like the stem of a parched fawn lily. Before he can answer that he doesn’t know, George hears Bernard call, “We’re ready,” from the back of the theater. The lights dim.
“Martha’s practically a socialist in her middle years,” Bob whispers loudly. “Welfare for everyone! Anything makes a profit can’t be trusted! Excepting me, of course. A long way from Delta Gamma, huh?”
George scans the rows below. He doesn’t remember Bob and Martha being so irritable with each other in the past. Where is Iris? He strains to keep the entire room in his vision. Aleksandar and his paisley headscarf appear under the red glow of an exit sign. She’d texted earlier, a mode of communication she employs with enthusiasm even as he disapproves of its putrefaction of language:
SELLER’S LAWYER JKASS. ½ HR DLAY SORRY SORRY SORRY
.
“You’re confused about what socialism is,” Martha whispers.
Iris’s following text had been:
BILL
=
BEUTIFL SUIT. VICTOR
=
SOCCER SHORTS. HAHAHA. BIG DAY SORRY
.
Nothing since. The curtain stirs. George hears—backstage, stage left?—a thud like a piece of furniture being dropped.
“Aren’t you a twitchy, fucking mess,” Bob says, reaching over his wife and slapping George’s bouncing thigh.
“He really is,” Martha agrees.
“Don’t jump, like what’s his name.”
“He fell,” Martha corrects.
Earlier that year at Lincoln Center, a man had plunged from the fifth ring to the orchestra and died where he landed, during the final act of
Copp
é
lia
.
“My people say he jumped,” Bob whispers loudly.
“You don’t have ballet people,” Martha replies, leaning over George, folding her hands tightly in her lap. “I know because I have ballet people and they’ve never heard of you.”
“Martha,” Bob says, still in a hoarse stage whisper, “had a sex dream about the guy.”
“Shhh,” George says.
“
After
he fell. The dream was about
after
.”
Bob sticks his fat hands out over the theater like a diver.
“Go for it,” whispers Martha, without parting her blue incisors. “Send us a postcard.”
The conductor strides to the podium and bows to the empty room. The spotlight shafts through his hair and sets it ablaze, the dust around his head lit like a galaxy. For a moment, George is jealous. The conductor turns his back to them, lifts his arms. The violinists begin to play.
PLEASE LET ME KNOW WHERE YOU ARE,
he texts Iris, frowning, soldiering clumsily through the keystrokes. The overture ebbs and crests. The curtain lifts into the rafters. No reply. The spotlight sun of the New Desert races across the first few rows as if eight to noon is but a second’s passage. Here’s the exterior of the harem—the simulacrum of a glass and steel skyscraper, fronted by two sphinxes, which he insisted on because the first opera he’d seen had been
Aida
. At that opera’s intermission, twenty years ago, he’d stood under the lamplight outside the theater where everyone was smoking—when everyone still smoked, except George. He leaned toward his date, an equestrian copy editor for the
Hampton Classic Newsletter
, to kiss her. But she recoiled and, wiping the back of her hand against her mouth, admitted their mothers had conspired to bring them together but she’d heard stories about George her mother hadn’t. And that it was weird how all through the first act he’d burst into laughter each time a high note was achieved. He tried to explain how it embarrassed him, so much feeling let into the world. More important, what stories had she heard? The school had cleared him of any wrongdoing. But she turned her bare shoulders and bummed a cigarette from the man standing next to them. So alive, leaning over the glowing match. She hadn’t said goodbye, but instead looked at him with a deep smoke-spilling frown and took off, almost at a run, down the street. For years, this humiliation would rise before him each time he entered a theater, but moving to his seat, he’d recast the moment in his favor: pity her as she fell in love with him, dismiss her advances, comfort her as she wept and begged and stomped out her filthy cigarette, put her in a cab, and return to the jostling lobby, where another woman, a less judgmental and more pornographically endowed woman, would be waiting for him at the bar. He came to feel a righteous, galvanic pride as he crossed the threshold of a theater, an impassioned swell of fellow feeling for the fellow that was himself. After that night, he never missed a season. He doesn’t even remember her name.
How late is Iris? Iris understands. Iris understands he listens critically because he believes simply, because he believes in music’s potential for perfection. Isn’t this the optimism of high standards, and not pretension, as the horse woman had implied and yet another girlfriend had claimed? To have aesthetic disappointment mistaken for arrogance! Now she’s missed the entire overture. I am queasy with dread, he thinks, patting his stomach. Two years ago, nothing could have caused him such fear. His thoughts rise on the first aria. All day he’d planned what to whisper to her tonight, about the music, about their future. How much there is for them to do together. If they can get away the coming winter, to celebrate the opera’s reception, he’ll take her to the bluest sea. Santorini, or Sicily. Could she have e-mailed instead of texted? He opens his in-box, holding his hand over the screen.
Sept 18 (4 hours ago) to bcc: me
Patricia Somner
dear loved ones,
i’m SO happy to share that Lotta’s been commissioned to design the annex across the street from the Sao Paulo Museum of Art! it’s official, so i can let the cat out of the bag! 218,000 square feet dedicated to three-dimensional work from around the world. babies and buildings, what a year!
w/love and pride,
pat
More good news from Pat. Well, isn’t that loathsome! Isn’t she obnoxious! Isn’t Lotta the best! What an achievement! Everyone on Pat’s bcc must be so impressed! He thrusts his phone into his pocket. He must focus on what’s important, what’s happening onstage—the soprano’s kneeling in the waters of the catacomb, where she’s been caught attempting to escape by the chief eunuch. An hour gone, and no Iris! The soprano is lamenting harem life, and lo! She is beheaded. Martha’s making a clucking sound beside him. She loves it. He’s thrilled. And yet, he’s distracted, listening and not listening, worried about Iris, angry with Iris. Iris in Santorini—with him in a bleached rowboat, floating among the black volcanic stone that rises in mountainous clusters out of the water. They’re drawing the shoreline with bits of the stone they’ve broken into their hands as they float by. She’s leaning back, the sun on her collarbones. In happy silence they admire the whitewashed houses terraced up into the old hill. For a moment he forgets she’s not beside him. A crash of the cymbals and he remembers. Looking at the dull velvet of the empty seat, his vision mingles with a nightmare of why she is late: a car accident! She falls out of the boat. He dives in to rescue her, her hair ghosting around her sinking blue forehead, her hands twining above her. Back in the car, terrible vision, do not look. Now, out of the water, dead and streaming wet. Back in the car, the car no longer wrecked, but she’s fucking someone who isn’t him, hiking her dress up in the garage, leaning her dripping hair over the hood of the Lexus and singing his libretto, her mouth twisted with malicious joy.
Despite the small size of the theater, Bob has produced a pair of binoculars, alternating which end he presses to his eye.
George touches Martha’s shoulder. “I’m so worried about Iris,” he whispers into her ear. “I’m imagining all kinds of terrible things.”
“I know,” she whispers back, leaning toward the stage to signal her concentration. “You’ve been jabbering away over there for the last ten minutes.”
“What should I do?” he asks, louder, for now there’s the insistent call of trumpets as the Unnamed Hero sings of how the queen has slandered him, sent out the alarm, border to border. Sings of how he will prove her wrong and gain his honor back. How he will tear apart her house, how he will break her rule.
“I’m so bummed I missed it,” Iris says, a little out of breath.
They’d watched her dash diagonally across the busy street, the concrete wet with rain, Iris ignoring the white lines of the pedestrian crossing and the
DON’T WALK
sign ticking zero, to catch them as they entered the restaurant, a new brasserie designed to appear as richly worn as an interior by Manet. Through the crowd at the bar, past the red banquettes and smoked mirrors, they pick a round table over square.
George takes her hand under the table. “I had this horrible idea you were in an accident.”
“George, I was! I was already late and—”
“Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine.”
“What happened?” Bob asks, sounding serious for the first time that evening.
She explains they closed on the house at the lawyer’s office and drove out of the generic office park, she in her car, Victor and Bill behind. They had a ways to go in the same direction and the cars stayed together. Victor got Iris on his cell and put her on speaker. They were all happily discussing how ugly the tiles in the downstairs bathroom were when a deep, low fog covered the road, unexpected for the middle of a warm September. She saw the flock of wild turkeys too late—fifteen of them maybe, but it seemed like fifty—lumbering across the road. She caught one under her front left tire.
