What He's Poised to Do: Stories (17 page)

That night, Lisa agreed to drive me home. “I just don’t understand,” she said.

“What don’t you understand? He botched it.”

“There’s no way to salvage it?” Her tone was pained. “I feel like I’m on the line.” That night, trying hard not to help Jeff, I helped Lisa. I knew how to rescue the model, and came in early the next morning to explain the solution to Mortenson. He was instantly alive with the idea. “We put a camera right up against the model and give the jury a projection? This could work. This could work. Beautiful.”

We took it to Schiff, who was in the conference room with the model. “I don’t think it works,” he said. “I think it’s wrong to take to a jury.”

“What do you mean?”

He wasn’t the sort of man who was accustomed to explaining himself, but it was not for lack of skill. “It’s just wrong. Putting a little camera in there and projecting the image on a screen would turn it into a show. The jury will feel it was made with a kind of pleasure, and that’s the wrong message to send.”

“I disagree,” Mortenson said. “I think it’s great.”

“Do you talk so much so that you don’t have to listen to me,” Schiff said, “or to yourself?”

Ordinarily, Mortenson would have returned fire, and the volley would have gone on. But he just picked up the model and walked past Schiff silently. To ignore him outright was one of the most final things he could have done.

I
WAS GLAD
I
HAD NO GRASP
of the practical details of my plan, because it gave me a justification for involving Lisa again. She was good with those kinds of things, and she helped rig the camera and test the projection. The effect, the white model on the white screen, was both alienating and intimate. Mortenson was immensely pleased.

But Schiff was right. Schiff was always right. Whatever magic there had been in the idea—and in the office there had been a considerable amount—came off as legerdemain in the courtroom. I did not know this firsthand. I did not go to court. I could tell from the stormy look on Mortenson’s face as he entered the office the day of the verdict. Schiff followed, triumphantly defeated. They had Stacy cut a check to Jeff and send it off and that was the last of him. Lisa began to work hard again in all things, convinced that she needed to prove her worth again. She also began to allow me more latitude in romantic matters, but it was the concession of a defeated woman. I accepted it nonetheless.

Over the next few weeks, Schiff and Mortenson grew apart. Lisa noticed first, and reported the breach in an aggrieved tone. I nodded sadly. But perpetrators always think of victims: though Lisa had suggested Jeff, I had suggested Lisa, and when Jeff had failed the first time, I had rescued him so that he could fail a second time, more profoundly, and by doing so bring down the entire house. I knew that Lisa would figure this out soon enough, and that when she did, she would be gone.

It took a week. One Thursday night we were in her car, doing what we always did, when she announced that she felt something missing. “Is it your blouse?” I said. She laughed and drew close to me, but in drawing close she pulled away for good. She was giving me a farewell gift. The next evening, she left early. “I’m going out with friends,” she said. “See you Monday.” It put me in a black mood that permitted me to see everything else all the clearer, as a man in a darkened room at night has full vantage of the sky outside.

My situation, at any rate, was trivial compared to what happened to that little world I had inhabited. It had been teetering, I now saw, and before I could truly understand what that meant, it fell. Schiff and Mortenson were through with each other. It happened very quickly: one shouting match in the conference room in which the model was mentioned as proof of incompetence, withdrawn, and then thrust forward again with a stabbing motion. Mortenson stormed out and did not return, not the next day or the day after that. When he did, it was with a stack of papers that he said were for the purpose of dissolving the partnership. None of us could believe it, and we believed it less when they began to sign the documents. Schiff’s signature on top, Mortenson’s on the bottom: It was difficult to understand this togetherness in the service of separation.

Mortenson was the one who left, which was predictable. He was mobile. In fact, he could not stop moving, and the minute he was gone it seemed like a small miracle that he had ever been there at all. Schiff never regained his balance, morally speaking. After he parted ways with Mortenson, he became sullen and capricious. He would not come out of his house except to go to his office, and vice versa. Two weeks after Mortenson’s departure, Lisa left to return to school. That was how my summer ended, and how the things in it ended, too. I went back to school. I graduated, aged, did my best not to let time do its worst to me. I wrote Lisa one long letter that I never mailed and eventually threw away, keeping only the envelope, which was addressed to her but not stamped. Years later, I drove by the building, checked the nameplate, relived that summer. Then I returned the car to the airport and flew back home.

A
BOUT FOUR MONTHS AFTER
my visit to Florida, I was traveling by train to my sister’s home in Delaware, and as we pulled out of the Philadelphia station, I looked up and saw Lisa standing in the aisle. I had already experienced a sense of displacement, thanks to a young man I had seen when I was boarding the train. His hair was uneven to the left, as if put to the side by an idea, but other than that he was exactly what I was at that age. I put up my bag. I sat down, read a little bit of history, looked up, and Lisa was there.

We were in our fifties by then. Or rather, I should say that I saw with a start that she was, and I realized that I must be, too. I debated whether to reach out and tap her on the hip, and when I realized that the only thing deterring me was the idea that the gesture might be perceived as flirtatious, that was enough to push me forward. She turned and smiled even before she saw who it was. Then her smile vanished and returned, somewhat dimmed and thus more powerful. She sat down next to me. I tried to see her as she was, hopeful that it would help her see me as I was. Can a man be happy in memory or only lonely?

We had a grand old time, looking out the windows until night fell and making light of what we saw. After that we traded stories about the lives we had lived, and those we had failed to live. She had married a man who owned a small lumber company. The two of them had been through good years and bad years. They had two children who gave them equal parts joy and trouble. “I’m happy, but like everyone, I didn’t do nearly what I wanted to do,” she said. She did not, despite her story, look like a woman who had made sacrifices.

For my part, I told her that my first wife had been a poet, by which I meant an heiress, and that the union had ended badly, and that I had spent quite a bit of time living the bachelor’s life before eventually finding a second wife. “No children,” I said. “That’s maybe the one abiding regret.” We got, after a time, on to the matter of the office. I told her about my recent visit. “Same little building,” I said. She asked me if I had heard that both Schiff and Mortenson had died. I said no but that I had assumed so. We sat in silence for a little while. She hummed, and I tried to recall her as a younger woman, when her papery skin was a pliant pink and the clothes she wore suggested their own absence.

“I remember that summer so well,” she said. “Do you?”

“A little,” I said, lying.

“Remember Jeff?” she said. I nodded. Now she was back in the past with me, or more accurately without me. “We had such a wonderful trip that week. I’m afraid I didn’t let him work on the model even for a minute.” She smiled at me. “You and I had quite a discussion about it, if I remember correctly.”

We had not, of course, at least as far as I remembered. And I would have remembered. Still, it didn’t surprise me; I may have suspected as much at the time, and by now I was far past being harmed even by confirmation. Still, and despite all the wisdom I believed I had acquired, I was overcome by a sense that all the time since had been miserably misspent, and that fear propelled me up from my seat.

“I could use something to wet my whistle,” I said.

“Wet mine while you’re there,” she said, laughing. Her eyes went up coyly, as if she were a much younger woman.

I went off to the dining car. At the far end I noticed the young man I had seen boarding the train, the junior version of me. He was pushed up close to a young woman, speaking animatedly. “I don’t know how you feel about me, exactly,” he said. “You don’t say.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I don’t say.”

His head bowed in sadness. He was better than me at being me, right down to the failures.

I walked farther down the train, bought two small bottles of gin, and walked back up the train, and Lisa and I poured ourselves drinks and came back to the past. She had given me a story and so I gave her one in return. At forty I had thought I would remarry, but I lost the woman I loved—not to another man but to illness. At forty-five, I thought I would never remarry. At fifty, I met a woman in a downtown bar. I was with a man who fancied himself a poet. She was a dancer twenty years my junior, so beautiful she made me feel both too old and too young. I drank too much, as I always did in those days—“how else to ascend / the twin peaks of Truth and That Which Could Not Be Said?” as the poet had it—and I treated Mary, for that was her name, to a recitation that, I am ashamed to report, contained a rather lavish description of her physical charms. “It was as if my entire personality had its shirttails out,” I said.

“And how did she respond?”

“She married me,” I said. I put a twinkle in my eye.

“Wonderful,” she said. “Just wonderful.” She settled back into her seat. The train clacked along. I felt guilty for having lied. Or rather, for having told the truth without telling the whole truth. Mary was the kind of woman who was easily mortified. She had a distaste for confessionals, outsized announcements, and any other type of behavior in which decorum fell under the wheel. That day she had looked at me with dread and left the bar. She married me, but only after nine months of silence, and nine more months of begrudgingly cordial conversation. I was not restored to anything approaching amity until we had spent a chaste summer in the company of some friends on the Cape. Then came the romance, and the rigors, and the loss, and the retrenchment, and the courtship, and the comedy, and the declarations (mine) and the withdrawal (hers) and the reiteration of the declarations and the marriage.

I did not explain any of those things to Lisa. The past cannot learn from the present, no matter how much it aspires to. As we neared Delaware, I let the string of the conversation out to her. She was funny on the matter of her children, one of whom was adopted. She told me about vacationing out west when they were young and how the boys invented a game called “square-ball.” I helped her stand when the train came into the station. Her arm was frail beneath my fingers. Time had taken its toll on the young bodies we remembered using for disreputable ends.

T
HE WOMAN INSPECTS HER HAND
. S
HE HOLDS IT AWAY FROM
her face and looks at it as if it does not quite belong to her, as if its history is something she has read. Thirty-two years before, the hand had gone into her mouth regularly. Sixteen years before, it had unbuckled the belt of a young man who was watching television nervously in the basement of her parents’ home. Eight years before, it had enveloped the tiny hand of her son as he put his lips around her nipple for the first time. Four years before, it had opened up the mailbox at her home, and everything had changed. The hand had survived the mailbox and the postcard it found there, the painful moments clutched in the other hand that followed closely behind, the jeweler’s efforts to cut the ring off. It had been in flour and in water and in leather and in blood, in duress and in ecstasy. It had been in the garbage looking for a credit card that her son had accidentally thrown out. It had been between her own legs as a form of forgetting. Now things are back to normal, give or take. She withdraws the pile of mail, carries it to the kitchen table, brushes the cat with her other hand, sits down. She is looking for a letter from her son. It isn’t the first thing off the pile, which is a flyer for singles cruises, or the second, which is a political circular. Third off the pile is a catalog for home furnishings; she considers going right past it, but she is charged with maintaining the household, and that is what you do when you maintain a household: you visualize possible improvements, rehearse the process of each item entering your house, try to imagine how it will affect the space. She’s regretful by page three: there is an heirloom cherry sleigh bed that looks as though it belongs exclusively to winter. She feels certain she would wake one morning to find a reindeer curled on the floor beside her. There is a flat black dining table with green stone insets; it is majestic but would be too much at half the cost. On page nine she finds something she likes, despite its name: a “moon-shade wall/floor lamp,” available in black or white. She rehearses the process of the lamp entering her house, tries to visualize it existing among the other elements. There is a word for this kind of exercise, the forward-cast of thought, but she can’t remember it. She lifts her hand from the catalog and places it on her forehead.
Prolepsis
: that is the word. How would a moon-shade wall/floor lamp change the room? The couch would exhibit no reaction. The cat might turn away in chilly indifference. Her son would likely object;
horrendous
is his favorite word these days, and he finds plenty of opportunities to use it. Sometimes, when he calls home from camp, she tries to use the word back at him, to see if she can get him laughing at himself. But he is a great stone face on the telephone. His tone is flat and black. Her son has not always been this way. During the first four years of his life, he was a sweet boy, generous with his affection. She liked to watch him with his father, playing games of their own invention; she remembered telling people that it was nice to see a good

father at work, and she remembered continuing to tell them that even after the good father declared that he was stepping down from the position. When her husband wasn’t playing with his son, she remembered, he was usually complaining: about how life hadn’t taken him far enough, about the shoddy work of others in his field. Once he wondered out loud if he would still be married in two years. Then, finally, engorged with his own doubt, he had retreated to a hotel in another city and announced that he was reconsidering the marriage. She was serious with him on the telephone, but as soon as she hung up she found herself laughing. She knew he had already decided as much as he was capable of deciding. Still, when the postcard came, she trembled, and when she finally worked up the courage to read it, she held it at arm’s length as if to protect herself from the poison of the thing. After a few days, she told her son that his father was not coming home, at least not right away. She misrepresented his absence as a kind of vacation. When her husband did show up, it was only for a week, after which he moved out. He did several terrible things to her, mostly sins of omission, though his dedication as a father never waned, which filled her with a mix of gratitude and killing rage. She flips through the mail more rapidly. Bill, bill, bill. No letter from her son. Catalog, bill, magazine. Had the postal service slowed down? Magazine, political advertisement, bill. The letter has to be there, but it isn’t. Her hand pushes away the mail; she goes to the couch, lies down, switches off the small red lamp on the side table, and forgets. She gets up, makes herself a snack, and goes back to the mail with renewed resolve. She shakes out every magazine in search of the letter and finds nothing. Finally it falls out of a lingerie catalog. But it isn’t a letter. It’s a postcard. She kneels, trembling, and inspects it. The handwriting is like her husband’s, but it’s her son’s. It has to be, and so it is. She picks up the postcard and reads it. Her son is writing about a new friend he has found, and how thrilled he is to be at camp, and how he wants to visit the friend over the winter, and how he is sorry that he acted so churlishly the first few weeks of camp. Churlishly? she thinks. She stares at the back of the postcard and tries to visualize her son writing the word. Then her hand sets the postcard down on the flat white surface of the kitchen table, locates a letter-opener, and starts to slit the bills open, one by one.