The Unfortunates (41 page)
“All right. All right, calm down. You want to know the truth? The truth is, everything’s clean as a whistle, which is why I took your call. And I
am
sorry you got roped in. Deeply.”
“I don’t believe you. You’ve been calling my wife? You paying my wife? You sleeping with my wife? You know what she calls you? Mr. Pig. Smug Mr. Pig. A cover, I guess. Oh, she’s clever. How long have you known each other? Everything’s a cover-up.”
“George, I’m—Mr. Pig?”
“Fat, fucking Mr. Pig.”
“Yeah? Hmm. Okay then. Listen, I don’t want to speak ill of another man’s wife. But, Iris, you know what? She tricked
me
, man. She said you were broke. You want me to explain the money? I was trying to help you out. You, not her. She came to my office and she said, George needs this, George needs that. And then, after. After, man. I mean, weeks after, at my party, remember? She lets it out that it was for somebody named Victor. I never touched her. And that’s the truth. You’re looking at the wrong guy.”
George throws down the phone. When he trusted no one, he’d trusted Iris. When he hadn’t trusted Iris, the clearer part of him had. When his mother was cold to Iris, those early days, when his mother had said, “You met her where?” and “She’s a coat checker? A bartender?”—every question of Iris’s motivation for marrying him was right. His mother, always right. Oh, to have thought he was loved. Every memory, black. Every memory, burned.
Where will he go? He has to go. Maybe he’ll go to the south of France and find his father, who probably
is
dead, but if he’s not dead, George will kill him, tell him how he’s ruined his life and then throw his old ass off a cliff. Or maybe he’ll go to Buenos Aires, change his name and buy a new face, become a man none of them can find. Maybe he’ll go—anywhere!—and come back when everything’s sorted out. If it’s safe. Whatever, three o’clock, he won’t be there. He’ll have to miss his meeting with Annie Mason. Bullshit gig, anyway.
He googles Iris and finds nothing.
He googles himself and finds the malicious old things, nothing new. He googles NewGenA and Astrasyne and his mother, but there’s no connection. He googles his mother’s foundation. The result is an unending list of articles about all the ways she’s made the world better—bah. He shuts the laptop and finds his briefcase and shoves in the laptop. He opens the desk drawer—what does he need? He needs his watch and his passport and his wallet and a copy of the libretto and his notebook and his good pen and his checkbook and his integrity and he’s already wearing a suit and he’ll buy clothes on the other end, and he finds everything but the watch, where is his watch? He still isn’t wearing shoes. He swipes the blade of grass from his foot and takes the bag and drops it on the living-room couch, next to the dog. The dog eyes him, chews on its peanut-butter grenade. If there were any justice, he would bite the dog, but he’d never bite the dog, he is kind and he is just, a good man in a bad world. Instead, he pets the dog, somewhat frantically; then he’s up the stairs to fetch his shoes and socks, down the stairs wondering where Iris keeps the keys to the second car, to the Lexus he never drives, but drive it today he will, and he’s just spotted them, right on the hook with all the others, when the doorbell rings and here is Victor, holding the blue leash.
“Hi, George. How’s it going? I’ve had this in my glove compartment forever. Um, are you okay?”
“Iris isn’t here.” He’s dimly aware that he is shaking.
“I can wait. Or, should I come back?”
“I’ve lost my watch.” George’s voice shakes with the rest of him. “Maybe when I was getting the paper this morning. Somewhere in the grass, maybe.”
“You want help looking?”
“Yes.” They step outside. Victor bends over and squints into the grass, his hands on his thighs. “Here’s something!” he cries, turning his back to George. “No, it’s only—” George slugs Victor with all his might, a sideways blow that half misses, cuffs him at the throat. Victor staggers, blinking with surprise. He steps backward, his gold medallion swinging. His foot catches in the exposed roots of the tree. He twists at the waist and falls. There is the satisfying sound of his head knocking against the trunk, but also the unsatisfying truth that he fell because he tripped, and not from the strength of the blow.
“What the fuck,” Victor says.
The dog, inside the house, begins to bark. Bark, bark, bark. His nails drag against the inside of the door. Victor is lying on his back as if he were looking for bunnies in the clouds, next to the glinting bullet of a sprinkler head poking out of the ground.
“Victor,” George whispers, squatting down, putting his face beside Victor’s face, “I know why you’re here.” The grass tickles George’s nose, smells sweet. As if the world has slowed, the life teaming around him reveals itself—an ant climbing an emerald blade beside Victor’s ear. Victor’s closing eyes. Two squirrels, chasing each other up the ash, into the rustling leaves. A gleaming black beetle on the cuff of George’s light gray pants. The bright sound of the crickets and the dark sound of the cicadas. The dog barks through the window and the bees rise heavily from the purple-flowered weeds, not so many bees, anymore, and the mosquitoes float and somewhere hopping the lawn are sweet field mice and adorable chipmunks and hawks and starlings and the asshole blue jays rocketing the sky and once Iris told him about a skunk hiding by the pool and once Iris told him a pair of box turtles live behind the artificial waterfall but he’s never seen them and he never will and he hears himself saying, “Victor, Victor.”
Victor’s eyes snap open and he touches the back of his head. “What did you do that for?” He gets unsteadily to his feet.
“You can have her.” George springs up. “Don’t hit me!” He leaps away. He dashes back into the house and slams the door. Through the plate glass over the flagstone beside the door he shouts, “Know what I think? I think
you
stole my watch. A lot of things have gone missing! You think I haven’t noticed? What else of mine have you taken?”
“You people are unbelievable,” Victor says, his hand on the glass. Or, George is pretty sure that’s what Victor says. Louder, so there’s no doubt George can hear, Victor says, “I could but I won’t.” He points at George. “Not worth it.”
“Now I know everything!” George screams, pounding his fists on the glass. “I’ve figured it out! Thief!” The dog is a fury of sound behind him.
“I didn’t steal anything from you, you ass.”
“My watch has been missing a long time!”
“I was trying to help you find it.” Victor seems about to say more. He shakes his head.
“What?” George says, holding his hand to his ear. “Speak up!”
“Never mind. I don’t need this shit.” Victor turns, and with the care of a man who is injured, he walks down the driveway, against the high, howling pleas of the dog.
George dashes upstairs and yanks his cell phone charger from the wall socket beneath the night stand. He returns, grabs his bag and keys. He looks cautiously out the window. He doesn’t see Victor, though Victor’s car is still parked out front. Whatever, what the fuck, asshole, George thinks, as he fires the Lexus to life and scrapes out of the garage. He swerves around Victor’s car and is on his way.
Pat’s arrival at Booth Hill, three days before, did not encourage in CeCe much hope for the rest of the visit. As Pat climbed out of the taxi with Douglas nestled against her, CeCe cried, “Let me have him!” stretching her arms out toward the baby, over the gravel.
Instead of handing her the boy—almost five months—Pat shrank back against the taxi door, her big-lidded eyes, round and sparsely lashed, blinking, a lattice of wrinkles above her brow. Wrong, that her daughter had aged, that her children would ever age. Pat’s style certainly hadn’t changed: her hair was in a high bird’s nest of a straw bun. A hook of silver curled at the top of each ear. Her dress was a sleeveless, billowing tent, hemp or burlap, with a pattern meant to evoke the word
indigenous
, solemn and festive, but likely indigenous to nothing. “Do you know how to hold a baby?” Pat asked.
“
Meu Deus
, Patricia!” Lotta said, stepping around the suitcases at the back of the cab, closing her wallet. “Where do you think you came from? Of course she does!”
Lotta whisked Douglas from Pat’s arms and pressed him toward CeCe. But Pat had the truth.
Did
she know how to hold a baby? CeCe wasn’t sure, and now she might topple over if she tried. So she took Douglas’s socked feet in her hands and pumped them up and down, saying, “Hello, young sir.” She petted the top of his head. Without meaning to, she scowled at him, because Pat had been right. His eyes grew wide and fearful. He began to cry.
“Leave the bags,” CeCe said, feeling dull and dreadful. As they entered the house, she caught between the women a private glance, Lotta’s brows raised. But once they were arranged in the morning room and had dispatched with pleasantries about the flight, Pat said, “I’m sorry.
Would
you like to hold him?”
Her daughter! She remembers her daughter at eight, carrying an orange cat across the lawn, who knows where she found it. A private, sentimental child. She remembers Pat’s look of stony tolerance when CeCe made infrequent passes at doing the mother things—pulling back the hair only to find she could not make a braid; tugging the sweater over Pat’s head without seeing the neck was too tight. Only occasionally would Pat give in and curl up against her, silently handing over whatever book or toy she clutched. There was the year after Walter left that CeCe woke each morning to find Pat, her strapping, bare feet poking out from the long nightgown, sleeping wretched on the floor at the foot of CeCe’s bed.
Seizing on the word that had caused them trouble so long, CeCe answered, “I’m sorry too.” It hung in the air—too soon, too much feeling, and Pat looked away. “Well, aren’t those practical,” CeCe continued quickly, appraising Pat’s shoes, a pair of felt boulders lumping out from under her voluminous smock, tapping the silk Persian as Pat bounced the baby on her knee. Worse footwear even than the pair of oiled pilgrim’s hats buckled to Lotta. “I hope the pregnancy didn’t give you flat feet?”
“I guess that’s a no.” Pat sighed and grumbled something about being thirsty, mumbled and grumbled as she had as a teenager. She handed Douglas to Lotta and clumped off in the direction of the kitchen.
“You might wait for Esme! On its way, with a moment’s patience!” CeCe called after, to no effect.
“An extraordinary house,” Lotta said. “I can’t believe your family called this a cottage. Custom is crazy, wherever you go. My work’s informed by a different history, but incredible, this ceiling!”
CeCe looked, with her eyes but not her stiff neck, to the gilded vaulting and the circular medallions, the central octagon of pale blue mosaic, the chandeliers like sprayed ice at regular intervals. When she lowered her gaze, she found Lotta was upon her, plunking the baby into her lap.
“Do you mind?” Lotta, already across the room, was inspecting the scrollwork above the door, a droll smile on her face. CeCe clutched Douglas by the armpits. He squirmed but didn’t look unhappy.
“He’s tired.” Lotta said. “Turn him face in. Send him up the mountain. Rub him on the back.” CeCe did, and Douglas tucked his heavy head into her neck. It didn’t take much to learn. To learn or to remember, she wasn’t sure.
They grew easier by the end of dinner, on the wisteria-wrapped end of the veranda, Yasser’s stick hooked over CeCe’s chair, the table facing the dark ocean. Douglas asleep, tied to Lotta’s chest in some kind of felt Chinese puzzle.
“Look at how strong your mother is,” Lotta said, putting her hand on CeCe’s shoulder. “Fierce. A fierce woman.” Lotta, unmoved or unaware of the Somners’ inexperience with spontaneous encouragement.
“Thank you.” CeCe pulled her back straight as she could at the word
fierce
. Comforted, despite herself, by the weight of Lotta’s hand.
Their stomachs full, they talked about Pat’s work supporting the microeconomies of the favelas and about clean-water access. On her phone Pat showed CeCe photos of narrow streets and water pumps. The word
proud
did not occur to CeCe, but she saw how Pat had made a family, simple instead of complicated. They insisted she tell them about Oak Park. “Tell us one good thing and one despicable thing,” Lotta said.
For good, CeCe described Yasser’s garden. For despicable, she said, “That nurse, Jean—I was trapped! Every day, summarizing at length—
television
.” She did not trust she would maintain her composure if she told the truth, if she described getting her hopes up and trading away a year for nothing. The pneumonia, George’s evil Queen, Dotty, all the days in a row she was alone.
Pat laughed. “Did you give the nurse that eye of yours?”
“I did.”
“The American health system is criminal,” Lotta said.
Douglas woke and arched in the sling. “No,” Lotta said to Pat. “Sit. We have the bottle.” She took Douglas inside.
Pat looked glum again and poured herself half a glass of wine. “It isn’t fair.”
“What isn’t?”
“You. What’s happening. I can’t stand it.”
“Nothing’s fair. Children complain of unfairness, not adults.”
“You’re right. I’m right too. Hold on, we brought you a present.”
Pat fetched a box from inside. In the tissue paper was a thick earthenware pitcher, brown with blue polka dots and a heavy base.
“This?” CeCe tipped it and looked inside. “Why are you giving me this?”
“We know the woman who makes them.”
“I hate it.”
First she, then Pat, burst into a laugh.
* * *
Now, three days later, and what a fine morning she’s having with the baby! Even if she’s tired and the previous day’s visit to George was as grim as it was brief. (On the drive back from Somner’s Rest to Booth Hill, Pat looked out the window. “Shit, shit, shit,” she said softly and to herself. To distract them, CeCe asked Lotta her opinion of George’s house. Lotta raised an eyebrow above her glasses and said, “I understand what it’s trying to be.”) A fine morning, even if none of them—not Pat or Lotta or CeCe—is looking forward to having George and Iris for dinner. Even if CeCe woke with her head pinned sideways to her shoulder. Even though Pat and Lotta will return to Seattle in four days and are making plans for S
ã
o Paulo.
