The Stager: A Novel (6 page)

I can hear a voice saying “Hello?” I try to ignore it, but then the voice says “Hello?” again, and it’s very loud, because I’ve accidentally hit the speakerphone button.

“That’s not your phone,” Nabila says.

“No.
Duh
. It’s the Stager’s phone.”

The voice in the background is still saying “Hello, hello?” So I turn off the phone and put it back in the bag.

“What are you playing at here, Elsa, darling?” Nabila says in a fake sweet voice. “I talked to your mom, and she said she thought it was creepy that the Stager was playing with you and your dolls, and she said that she was going to call Amanda and ask about this Stager person and that I should keep a close eye on you.”

“You talked to my mom?”

“I did.”

I couldn’t believe my mom had time to talk to Nabila but not to reply to my “socks” message.

“What were you doing with that lady’s phone?”

“Telling her she left it here.”

“Obviously, she knows her phone is here. She’ll get it tomorrow. And if she needs it before then, she knows the way. Now, young lady, you need to pick up this mess and get yourself into the shower and finish your homework and get ready for bed!”

Nabila has never spoken to me like this before. She takes the phone and the lady’s bag and tells me to pick up the mess right now.

“Don’t you tell me what to do,” I say. “I didn’t make this mess, and I don’t see why I have to pick it up!”

“Now, miss, don’t you be talking to me like that. Your mum said…”

“My mom isn’t here, is she? And you’re not the boss of me, so don’t tell me what to do.”

Nabila takes a deep breath.

“I’m going to go downstairs to finish up some chores, and when I come back up, I expect you to have cleaned up this mess. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

She leaves the room, and I sit on my bed, thinking about what to do. My parents are gone, Nabila is being mean to me, the Stager is no longer here, and it seems like, if this was a television show or a book, this would be the time when the kid packs a bag and runs away. I consider it, but it doesn’t sound like much fun: Where would I sleep? What would I eat? And also, how much would I miss at school? Still, I have an obligation to my rabbit. Even if no one likes him, he does not deserve to be out there all alone.

I’m tying my shoes and thinking about how I can get out the door without Nabila’s noticing when I hear my phone beep. There’s a text message from my mom. It says, “Sorry sweetheart, it’s really late here. I’ll call you tomorrow!” I thought it was earlier in London, but then I realize maybe I’m confusing the time in London with when we went to Mexico over Christmas, where it was earlier. Or was it earlier in Rome, where we went last summer? Or maybe it was earlier on the long weekend we went to California for Presidents’ Day. I wonder why they can’t just make the whole world the same time, even though I know the answer, of course, which has to do with the sun. Then I hear another beep from my phone, and it’s a second message from my mom. It says “SOCKS!!! SOCKS!!! SOCKS!!!”

I notice there are three SOCKS, with three exclamation points each. This seems possibly meaningful, and I want to tell the Stager about it and the Rule of Three, but it will have to wait. I bring Bennett into bed with me, and try to think happy thoughts about Dominique. I hope he’s found someplace warm to stay.

LARS

Our Bethesda home is sixty-two hundred square feet. It is so big that there are times when I have trouble locating my family. This is why, when we first moved in, I looked on the Internet and found a company that could install an intercom system. The wiring process became a little fraught, and with hindsight perhaps I should have asked for references. An unexpected glitch required drilling through the just-painted living-room wall, and when that failed to locate the trouble spot, they cut a jagged hole through the drywall. A few minor related installation issues caused a circuit breaker to pop, resulting in a small fire in the garage. These things happen—there are growing pains in home improvement, after all—but in this case it’s true that the intercom system never worked very well, or maybe we just never figured out how to use it.

Bella doesn’t reference this directly, but I sense the intercom incident looming in the backdrop of our Jorek conversations. But that is not why I mention it here. I mention it here to contrast the size of our Bethesda home to the size of our hotel room in London, where we occupy a mere five hundred square feet and we can hear each other respire.

I don’t expect to find Bella back at the hotel when I return after Jorek and I purchase the skylights, but she’s stopped in to change into evening attire for her dinner. She is on the phone. (She is always on the phone, my wife.) When she sees me enter the room, she looks a little startled, puts her index finger in the air to signal to me that she’ll be back in a minute, and goes into the bathroom and closes the door. Logically, at first, I think that the reason I can still hear her talking, even with the door closed, is our close, really our too-close, proximity in this tiny hotel room. But soon I will come to understand that, thanks to certain peculiar and extraordinary circumstances, I can hear her talking from any place at all. No matter where she is physically located, the transmission is as clear, barring static or other atmospheric disturbance, as if she is standing right beside me. It’s like she’s inside my head.

On this particular occasion she seems to be talking to my doctor, and what I hear her say is this:

“Maybe his reaction to the new house and this whole light business has to do with his Swedish childhood? They’re big on light over there. Summer solstice and all that stuff.”

The voice on the other end asks what she means by this. (Full disclosure: I am only guessing at this. I don’t know for sure what the other person is saying, since I can only hear Bella.)

“Well, maybe it’s just
too British
? What with the chintz curtains and the Aga … Oh, it’s a fancy English oven, sort of a status symbol here, like a hearth version of a fancy car, kind of hard to explain, I’m not sure I really get it myself. But anyway, my point is that the house he grew up in was right out of Swedish central casting. Honestly, you could use it for an IKEA catalogue photo shoot. You should see it … It’s a small, sleek, unassuming rambler, the furniture’s all spare straight lines, absolutely stark, and now that I think about it, with those sheer white panel curtains in every room, it’s like a Nordic winter itself. Last time we visited his mom, there was even a Volvo in the driveway, and nothing but wheat fields as far as the eye could see. His mother still lives there with his thirty-seven-year-old brother, something I obviously should have paid closer attention to when we first met, although I get that I can’t blame this entirely on genetics. Well, maybe a little bit.”

The doctor then asks more about my brother, I assume.

“I don’t know. He never married. I don’t know if they ever diagnosed him. Maybe he’s just … off somehow. I never thought about it too much before, but you’re right, it’s a little strange.”

There is a long silence as the doctor responds, and then Bella, sounding disappointed, says, “I see. So you think maybe just give in … that his behavior, this whole light thing, isn’t necessarily indicative of some sort of psychosis?”

Bella sounds skeptical, and although I only hear half the exchange, my guess is that the doctor is taking my side. He understands that my reaction to the light is a reasonable response to the new family home. What is happening here is that we are having a petty domestic dispute, and not a mental-health crisis.

“Look, I hear you,” Bella says in frustration, “but my concern is that, okay, maybe the house is a little dim, but I honestly don’t think this is about the light. My theory—and, please, just hear me out here—is that he’s having some kind of adverse reaction to the new medication. Or maybe he’s taking everything in the wrong order—would that make a difference, do you think? Or maybe the dosage is off? I’m not saying that would be your fault, of course. Maybe the pharmacy screwed up?… What?… Oh sure … Let’s see, he’s got about a dozen prescription bottles here. We’ve got Zuffixor … Romulex … Luxemprat … Zumlexitor … Praxisis—and I’m a little worried about that one, the bottle is almost empty and we just refilled it. He eats those like candy … Also there’s Volemex, Zaxivon—although I’m not sure if he still takes that one—and Amulerex. There’s more at home, I think. That’s a lot to be taking, isn’t it? We had trouble clearing customs. I mean that literally. We were brought into a back office and we had to talk to the police.”

She listens for a while longer, then says “okay” and then “uh-huh” and then “okay” a few more times, and then she hangs up the phone.

All this while I’ve been feigning absorption with my computer. Jorek has sent me the link to a YouTube video on skylight installation. He says that although he has never done one before, he has Googled around and found this demonstration, and it looks so simple he’s sure he can do it on his own. We’ve agreed to each watch this, and then to meet back at the house in the morning to get started.

After Bella gets off the phone with the doctor, I urge her to come watch the video with me. I tell her that Jorek has suggested that installing a skylight is a piece of cake, and that, with my help, we can do it in a day.

“Really, Lars? You’re going to help install a skylight?”

My wife is evidently in a bad mood.

“I’ve never seen you so much as change a lightbulb without causing some catastrophe!” (This is not true, but in a marriage one has to allow for occasional hyperbole of precisely this sort.) Also, I have just popped a Praxisis (she is right about that part—Praxisis is, hands down, my current drug of choice), and I am therefore feeling rather mellow. And one more also, and this is sad to say, but I am used to being treated like this by Bella. I know she cares about me in her way; she treats me with kindness—just not with warmth. She addresses me in a different tone than she does Elsa. With Elsa she is pure sweetness; with me it’s just duty.

This is what I think Bella thinks: because she has made this mess of me, she is obliged to take care of me. That’s my working theory most days, but, then, I have a few other theories as well. Is it possible, for example, that each individual is allotted only a certain amount of bandwidth? Like, say, perhaps, a person can be super-brilliant, but only a smidgeon warm?

I’d recently asked her, for example, if she still found me attractive, and instead of saying yes, she’d stared at me for a full minute, considering her reply. “When I look at you, beneath the flesh I still see hints of magnificent bone structure. I see a formerly handsome man who has become too round,” she said.

I had quipped that she could have just told me I was handsome, and that no one was going to call in
The New Yorker
’s fact-checking department to confirm the accuracy of her reply.

But let’s not dwell on the past. That is, I assure you, a black hole, a motherfucking bottomless pit that has, for now, been covered only by leaves. The past is break-your-neck treachery. I gravitate not toward darkness but toward light.

“Of course I can help Jorek with a skylight,” I say. “And I wish you wouldn’t make such a big deal out of this. It’s perfectly normal to want a little more light in one’s house.”

“Things in our life have been so weird for so long, Lars, that our definition of normal has become frighteningly elastic.”

On this point, the fact-checking department would have to agree.

*   *   *

EVEN BY THE
least elastic measure of the word, however, the rest of the day is pretty normal. Bella goes off to her dinner. I order room service, watch a movie, and go to sleep. I dream of animals, and there is even a rabbit, but nothing menacing occurs.

One day at a time, as they say. Two normal days in a row is a lot to ask for, even under normal circumstances, which ours, admittedly, are not. Accordingly, the next morning begins with a predawn phone call, which is rarely a good thing unless, perhaps, you are expecting word from the Nobel Prize selection committee or such, which, again (see above re
not
normal circumstances
, and apologies in advance for the forthcoming word repetition), admittedly, I am
not
. I confess that I hear my phone ring, but I am emerging from one of those deep sleeps that feel heavy, like the fog of general anesthesia, a sensation that I am unfortunately all too familiar with as a result of the multiple operations on my knees.

It takes me a few moments even to remember where I am, but then the scent of Bella moving over me, her lump of a husband wrapped tightly, inertly, a practically calcified man inside a duvet, helps me locate. She fumbles in the dark for my phone—someone is apparently calling
me!
—but not before knocking over a glass of water and causing our accumulated nightstand debris, our miniature marital still life of Bella’s many books that she rarely has time to read yet carts around the world with her, as well as our glasses, watches, and pill bottles, to spill to the floor.

Not that the additional mess is of consequence, given the state of our hotel room. Until Jorek came into my life, I’d been sleeping half the days, explaining to Bella—reasonably, I think—that it made no sense to adjust to U.K. time, since I’d be headed home in a week. I’d put the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the door and drawn the curtains, and turned the maid away whenever she tried to enter our suite. Room-service trays have piled up, the minibar is mostly drained, and all of the towels (really, every last one of them, including the washcloths) lie in a wet heap. I regret this, and the laundry situation as well; even though I’ve promised Bella I’ll take care of it, I’ve forgotten to organize her dry cleaning, and she is now out of fresh shirts. (Because I have nowhere to go, or at least I hadn’t before Jorek materialized, my own laundry situation is less dire.)

My phone is very porous, and I can hear the lilt of Jorek seeping through the tiny speaker as he asks for Mr. Lars. Bella points out that it’s not even 7:00 a.m., that I am asleep and, for that matter, so was she. Poor Jorek; I know he is intimidated by Bella, so, whatever this is, it must be pretty important for him to call this early. He asks again to speak to me, and Bella tries to shake me awake, but my instincts—always sharp except when it comes to my enduring fealty to my wife—tell me to continue to feign sleep; besides, my body feels heavy, as if I am doing all of this listening and thinking from under water. Bella takes my arm and pulls it from beneath the warmth of the duvet and feels for my pulse, a gesture that’s sweet enough to cause me to continue to play dead just to see her reaction, and, I confess, to solicit more of her touch, even if only in the form of her hand on my wrist. If she feels no beat, will she call the British equivalent of 911, or just pull a sheet over my head, order a room-service breakfast, and get ready for work? I do not learn the answer, because she detects the flicker of a life force in me. She asks Jorek if she can take a message, and promises she’ll have me call him back.