When Tito Loved Clara (20 page)

“Definitely. We're going to have the notebooks OCR'd by a subcontractor in Bangladesh.”

“You're sending the notebooks to Bangladesh?” There was a note of distress in her voice.

“No, just the page scans. By FTP.”

“Ah,” she said, vaguely. “I don't mean to rush you. It's just that I can't sell the house until you finish.”

“You're selling the house?” Thomas didn't know when her husband had died or where in the grieving process she might be. He knew well enough how people could become unmoored by losses of this kind and briefly had a picture of Melissa wandering the world's sunny spots in grief, living off the million or more she was bound to get for the place.

“This summer. It's too big for just me. Besides, I've never really loved the suburbs. I'm more of a city person. Stephen grew up in Newark and always wanted a place like this. He'd already bought this house when we met.”

“I see,” said Thomas. He remembered Epstein as being midfifties, smart and assertive, a little portly and graying, but hardly in decline.
What killed him?
Thomas wondered. He would have to look it up. This was going to be the strangest job he had ever worked. Out of the office, with no colleagues around, the trappings
of the professional world gone. Somehow, it didn't feel quite legitimate. Anything might happen.

“You shouldn't have any trouble selling this place,” he said.

I
N HIS MIND,
that week was when the affair, which was not consummated until early March, had begun. Not during the lunch itself, but during the nights that followed, when he found himself behaving in peculiar ways. There were many things about this new job that he did not discuss with Clara—things that got overshadowed by the larger discussion of his pending unemployment. For one, he did not tell her that the widow was young and attractive; he simply let his wife assume that he was working for some crone who'd been married for half a century to a Seton Hall professor. He also did not tell Clara that the widow was making him lunch every day. Thomas even went so far as to pack himself a decoy lunch sometimes, saying it was too cold to leave the house to get something in town. These small deceptions and omissions added up, over time, to the big lie. The affair, which began as a guilty dalliance in his imagination, an escape from job loss and other troubles, eventually manifested itself, weeks later, in reality.

As the days passed, he looked more and more forward to going to work. While the long-term forecast was gloomy, there was warmth and light in the short term. He was pleased and surprised at how much time Melissa spent with him. She would bring him coffee, sit in one of the leather chairs in the study, and read one of her husband's books while Thomas worked, sometimes calling out a bit of information. “Did you know that Napoleon put buttons on the sleeves of his soldiers' coats to stop them from wiping their noses on their uniforms?” There were also stretches of time when she was not there. She had a twice-weekly tennis game at an indoor court in Montclair. Through the Tudor windows, he saw her departing in her form-fitting sweats and a puffy down jacket, the Prince bag over her shoulder. When she was out of the house, he fought hard
against the temptation to nose around. Once, he gave himself a tour of the upper floor. The house was well kept except for the master suite, which was in disarray. There were bags and clothes piled up on the carpet, towels left on the floor. It looked like she might be going through her husband's things, or maybe she'd already started packing for when she sold the house. He touched nothing but stood in the room with the blunted winter light coming in through the blinds and briefly imagined how his own house would feel if Clara and Guillermo suddenly vanished. Stillness would come to mean sadness. The mundane sights of his existence would suddenly seem melancholy. He could see himself looking for company, becoming chatty with the UPS driver or the plumber, desperately wanting relief from loneliness and emptiness.

When she returned from tennis, she was not alone. At first he thought it might be a man she'd brought home, and he was simultaneously relieved and jealous. But it was a woman she led into the library, the pair of them holding bottles of Vitaminwater. Melissa's tennis partner was a little older, with thick auburn hair, wrinkles in her cleavage, and a big shiny diamond on her ring finger.

“So
you're
Tom! Nice to meet you,” said the woman, who was introduced as Lynne. He had the sense of being evaluated by her.

“You, too,” he said. “Good game?”

“No game. We just knocked the ball around for a while.”

Later, he heard them laughing in the kitchen, but he couldn't make out what they were saying. It was the first time he had heard Melissa give a full laugh. Something was making her happy.

T
HE JOB TURNED
out to be easier than he thought, requiring less time than he'd predicted. (Epstein was, not surprisingly, a very organized man.) Thomas had looked him up on Nexis. He'd died of a brain aneurism in November, aged 49, survived by his wife, Melissa, 31. Thomas hoped that the collection would tell him more and searched the books for underlining, highlighting, marginalia, and ephemera, but the books were pristine. They
looked unread, like books in a bookstore, except each volume had a bookmark on the last page, and the bookmark—a three-by-five index card—held a list of page numbers. Next to some of the page numbers were symbols, such as an asterisk, a question mark, or a check. On the card for the first volume of Shelby Foote's
Civil War: A Narrative,
he found the following:

36

37

293*

305

335

580

792

794

That wasn't many numbers for a very long book. As Melissa had said, Epstein was hard to please. Thomas followed the asterisk to page 293 and saw the tiniest of dots in the margin next to a sentence about how Jefferson Davis had once imported camels to try to facilitate populating the southwestern United States. It was an interesting enough historical anecdote, but it told him nothing about Epstein. Many of Thomas's investigations wound up this way, which is to say inconclusively. Nor were there many revelations to be found in the log books from the battles. They were a bore to read, no more than chronicles of troop movements, feints, attacks, counterattacks, casualty tables, wins, and losses, the handwriting so exactingly precise that OCR was a breeze. Thomas wanted the human element—evidence of fear, dismay, and, occasionally, triumph—but he suspected, from the evidence of the library and the logs, that Epstein's goal in life had been to squash such things. About the only thing Thomas gleaned from his work on the library was Epstein's admiration for certain generals: Grant, Rommel, and Pershing. And so, maybe the library did tell him something in the end: that Epstein had been all about control.

Thomas slowed his pace of work in February; he began lingering over the lunches with Melissa. He began pausing to read passages from some of the books. He was dreading his looming idleness, but even more he was dreading not having a reason to come to Melissa's house every day. The scans arrived from Bangladesh, where they had been sorted into a fielded database, searchable by date, nationality, commanding officer, and so on. Thomas had never been to BiblioFile's facility in Dhaka, but he had often spoken to the staff there, Bangladeshis with Anglophone (and probably bogus) names like Rupert, Winston, and Matilda. Business hours in New York meant that it was the middle of the night in Dhaka, but he could always hear the hum of the call center in the background, the sound of hundreds of BiblioFile clients across the United States receiving customer support. He could not help thinking that the workforce in Dhaka was also partly to blame for his downsizing.

Melissa seemed to be aware of his dawdling, seemed to welcome it. A kind of heightened conspiratorial intimacy had developed between them. Two of Thomas's college love affairs had begun in the last weeks of the academic year, when nobody seemed to care about consequences and everybody was bent on not letting opportunities slip away. As he neared the completion of his work on the Epstein library, he had the same feeling. During one of their February lunches, he asked her how she had met her husband.

“Ah,” and here she hesitated, dipping her spoon into her soup. “I worked for him. After college, I was with a temp agency and they sent me to Norse McConnell to replace his secretary, who was on maternity leave. He dismissed me after a week, called me into his office on Friday afternoon, and I remember thinking how upset he looked. I thought he was going to ream me, to tell me I'd been doing a terrible job, but he explained that he was transferring me to another department because he wanted to ask me out on a date and it wouldn't be appropriate for him to do so while I was working for him. He said he hadn't been able to concentrate all
week because of having to talk to me and walk past me every day. ‘Look at me,' he said. ‘I fire people all the time and never give it a second thought, but here I am talking to
you
and suddenly I'm all flustered.' ” She dropped her voice to imitate her deceased husband, fretted her brow and clutched her fists. Thomas loved it.

“Stephen was a gentleman,” she went on. “He had these very old-fashioned manners, wore a pocket square, all that. All of that stuff was very important to him. He'd grown up poor—he was a self-made man. He took me once to the street in Newark where he'd spent his early childhood. It was one of the streets that was burned in the riots in the sixties. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but there are still blocks of Newark that haven't been rebuilt from the summer of 1967.”

Thomas
had
seen them. Not long after he and Clara moved to Millwood, he'd taken a drive through Newark. The city frightened him.

“So, did you feel like a prize?” he asked her.

“You mean a trophy wife?”

“Sort of, but more than that.”

“No one has ever had the guts to ask me that, though I'm sure most people think it. You know what? Yeah, sometimes. And, you know what else? I didn't think it was so terrible to be his prize. To be valued that way. Whatever else happened, I always felt important to him, cherished.” She paused. “I'm only starting to figure some of these things out now that he's dead. Do you ever feel that way with your wife?”

“Like a prize? No. It's different—” Thomas got up from the kitchen table and the vegetable soup they had been eating to answer his cell phone, which was ringing in the library. He thought it might be Anderson checking in with him, but the caller ID showed an Essex County area code with a number he did not recognize.

“Hello?”

“Thomas?” It was Clara's voice.

“Yes?”

“I'm at Summit Hospital. I need you to get over here. Dr. Simeon's office.”

“What is it?”

“Just come. Now.”

“I'll be right there.” He knew what this meant. He flipped his phone closed and went back into the kitchen, where Melissa had stopped eating.

“I have to go,” he said.

“Is everything OK?”

“That was my wife,” he said. “Sorry. Family emergency.”

Melissa held up both hands in a gesture of surrender. “Go,” she said.

Thomas felt ashamed of himself. He wanted to get the hell out of there. He did not want to have to explain what was going on.

“I'll see you tomorrow,” he said.

He drove out to Summit. The hospital was on a large campus with landscaped grounds and lots of new construction. He took the elevator up to the OB/GYN offices and failed, at first, to spot Clara in the waiting room, which was crowded with pregnant women turning the pages of magazines like some kind of bizarre, silent book club. Already he felt an unreasonable dislike of them, the bloated fertility so proudly flaunted, clutching at their bellies as they moved, wearing their babydoll tops to show off their enhanced breasts. Then he spotted his wife.

“Hello Clarita,” he said, feeling the need to use the diminutive.

She looked up at him. “I'm being punished,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“There's no baby in there, Thomas.”

“What? The pregnancy test was wrong?”

“I've got what they call a blighted ovum.”

“Blighted ovum,” he repeated. Sometimes he longed for more euphemism in medicine. And then he wondered what the opposite
of euphemism was. What was the name for a word that made something sound worse than it actually was?

“The egg was fertilized, but nothing ever developed inside it. It's an empty shell. Apparently it happens a lot.”

“If it happens a lot, how come neither of us has ever heard of it?”

“Because people don't talk about this shit. ‘How are you?' ‘Actually, not so good, I just learned I have a blighted ovum inside me.' ”

Thomas wondered how anyone ever got born. He noticed a woman nearby glance up at them from her copy of
Fit Pregnancy.
“Come on,” he said. “Let's go.”

They went back out to the car and drove home. She was inconsolable. It seemed worse even than the miscarriage the year before. Not for the first time, he had the sense that there was something he did not fully grasp about his wife, some depth of pain or loss he had not reckoned with, that she had deliberately kept from him, perhaps because she was afraid of scaring him away, perhaps because it was difficult for her to relive the memory.

T
HEY BOTH TOOK
the next day off. He tried to convince her to see a movie, but she lay on the couch watching home decorating shows. That night, she broke from routine and let him put Guillermo to bed. By the time he was done, Clara was already asleep. He lay in bed, full of futility. Unable to make a second child, unable to console his wife, unable to keep his job.

In the morning, Clara got up and went to work as if it were just another day. As she was going out the door, she turned to him and said, “I can't take any more of these. I'm going to call a fertility clinic and set up an appointment so we can find out what's wrong with me.”