Lisa Unger - Smoke

“Where’s your wife?” she said. He looked up at her.

“She left.” He sighed and hung his head. “She can’t stand the sight of me.”

Lydia bit back an impolite comment but he must have seen it on her face.

“Yeah, imagine that. Right?” he said.

Lydia raised her eyebrows at him but said nothing.

“Time for you to come clean with us, Mr. Samuels,” said Jeffrey, sitting across from him. “For Lily’s sake. And by the looks of it, for yours too.”

“You don’t understand,” he said, looking up at them with red-rimmed eyes.

Jeffrey showed Samuels his palms. “Make me understand. Make me understand what’s happening here.”

Tim Samuels was desperately unhappy. So he had an affair with a twenty-two-year-old stripper and bought a Ferrari. When that didn’t work, he went looking for God.

“I just started getting this feeling like everything worth doing was already behind me,” he said quietly. He looked beaten as he sipped from the glass of ice water Lydia had fetched him from the kitchen.

“The kids were grown, living their lives. Much more fulfilling, exciting lives than I ever dreamed of, I might add. Monica and I, we love each other, you know. She’s my best friend. But after twenty-five years, things were not exactly hot… if you know what I mean.”

Lydia hoped he wasn’t going to go into detail and she shifted in her seat on the couch across from him. Jeffrey stood by the hearth, watching Samuels in that way that he had. Listening carefully, critically. Looking for all the cues that Lydia looked for, the shifting eyes, the tapping foot. It was the furtive gesture, the uneasy glance, the unconscious tick that told you the most about a person. Words were chosen. But the body never lied. Tim Samuels gave her the impression of someone who’d been crushed. He slumped in his chair like he didn’t even have the energy to sit upright anymore.

“When I retired a year and a half ago, sold my business, I made a killing. I mean like, more money than I ever dreamed of.”

He let out a little laugh. “It was what I had worked for my entire life… to have enough money so that I didn’t have to work. It took about a year of golfing and drinking, sleeping late, watching soaps, to realize that I didn’t know anything about myself. All my life I had always done what I was told to do, the right thing, work hard, marry well, send your children to college. I was always so busy working, or working on the house, or raising the kids, or taking care of my marriage. I’d never had any time to really think about myself, my life. Do you know how scary that is? To realize that your life is more than half over and that you are a stranger to yourself? It scared the shit out of me.”

He was looking at them both with pleading eyes. He wanted compassion, sympathy. Jeffrey nodded solemnly and sat on the hearth.

“I understand,” he said. Lydia looked at him and back to Tim Samuels. She couldn’t imagine two men more different.

It seemed like Samuels’ generation of men, men in their late fifties, early sixties, had been robbed in a way, that they’d never really been given the tools to be happy. They’d been taught to work, to provide for their families, to accrue wealth. But no one had really taught them how to love, how to reflect, how to communicate. So many of them held onto sexism, racism, elitism as crutches to make themselves feel better, feel bigger. They seemed clueless to Lydia, lost and wandering with these outdated ideas in their heads and unexpressed emotions in their chests and no idea what to do with either of them.

“So I’m embarrassed to say I started acting like a typical jackass having a midlife crisis. I bought a 575M Maranello Ferrari, started staying out late or not coming home at all. I met this young girl at a strip club in the city; she made me feel like I was twenty-one again.” A wide smile spread across his face as he thought of her. Lydia felt like smacking it off his face.

“Mariah,” said Lydia, fishing the picture from her pocket.

He hung his head and didn’t say anything for a second. “I didn’t know her as Mariah. I knew her as Marilyn.”

“But you recognized her when we showed you the picture?” asked Jeffrey.

He nodded. “Yes.”

“Where was your wife during all of this?” asked Lydia.

“Here. She kicked me out; I stayed in the city. A friend of mine divides his year between New York and Paris. He has a nice place on Park Avenue South. For a few months, I was having a ball… hot car, hot woman, clubs every night. Then suddenly, it all started to seem a little hollow.”

“Imagine that,” said Lydia. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jeffrey shoot her a look. It wasn’t a good idea to be judgmental when someone was spilling his guts. You might dam the flow. “Sorry,” she said.

“No,” said Samuels. “You’re right. I walked away from this beautiful life that Monica and I had constructed over twenty-five years together, looking for whatever it was I imagined was missing. And then I realized that the only thing missing was gratitude. But it was too late. It’s amazingly easy to walk away from your life; it’s almost impossible to go back. When you tear the fabric of trust, it never feels the same again.”

He released a heavy sigh, seemed to sink even deeper into his chair.

“So by then I was lower than when I started what I called my ‘vision quest.’ That’s when Marilyn told me about The New Day.”

Lydia leaned forward. “Did you join?”

“She took me up to Riverdale and I met some of the members at this old house off of Broadway behind the train yards.”

Lydia nodded. “We’ve been there. Mariah or Marilyn-her real name was Michele LaForge-had that address on her driver’s license. We received information that a black SUV was seen waiting outside the bank for Lily as she closed all of her accounts. That vehicle was registered to Michele LaForge.”

He nodded. “I see,” he said. He looked at some space on the wall behind Lydia. Maybe imagining Lily at the bank, with Michele waiting outside.

“So what happened at the house?” asked Jeffrey.

“I’ll tell you what. It’s a powerful message. They make a lot of sense. They tell you that everything you’ve been taught will make you happy is exactly the opposite of true. Possessions, the craving for more possessions, attachments to unhealthy relationships, media-generated low self-esteem, chronic busyness are elements of the deep sense of despair so many people feel. Most people are completely divorced from themselves. I really related to it, considering how I was feeling when I left Monica. And how none of the things I’d done to make myself feel better had helped.”

Lydia nodded. The message was powerful, because it was so deeply true. But The New Day was only using that truth as a hook for desperate people… not to help them, to own them.

“After meeting with her friends a couple of times, Trevor Rhames sent for me. We talked for hours . I told him things about myself, about my life, that I had never told anyone else.”

“Did you drink the tea they gave you?”

He looked at her, surprised. “Yes, I did.”

“We had it analyzed,” said Jeffrey. “It contains a very mild tranquilizer. Nothing that would knock you out and nothing that you would notice more than, say, if you’d taken a cold medicine. But it makes you very relaxed, very receptive to suggestion. A psychiatrist might prescribe it before a session of hypnosis.”

He nodded. “That makes sense. Because, you know, they never force you to stay. You can always leave when you want to, at first. But the more often you go back, the more you talk to Rhames and the other members, the less you want to go each time, until finally you find yourself staying at the dorm.”