Salman Rushdie - Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

But Teresa Saca! Nobody had gone near that girl for years, not since she snared AdVenture Capital’s iconic chief Elián Cuartos. She latched onto him in his senior years when all he wanted to do was leave AVC to his protégés and have a little overdue fun; got the ring; had his baby thanks to the miracle of in vitro; and waited him out. Now old Elián was gone and she had his cash, sure, but she had the bad rep to go with it also. For a brief moment the financial titan Daniel “Mac” Aroni tried her out “just to see what all the fuss was about” but he ran from her after a couple of weeks, complaining that she was the most bad-tempered, foulmouthed bitch he’d ever laid hands on. “She called me words I’d never heard, and I have a pretty good personal thesaurus in that area,” he told everyone. “She’ll try to tear your heart out and eat it raw, right on the sidewalk, and me, I was brought up right, I don’t talk to women that way no matter the provocation, but that woman, in five minutes you’re over the body and the sex, which they’re both something, this is undeniable, but nothing’s good enough to make up for her bad character, you just want to throw her out the car door on the Turnpike and go home to eat meatloaf with your wife.”

Oldville as it happened had a perfectly good wife at home, Cindy Sachs as was, a wife widely admired for her beauty, taste, charitable work, and great goodness of heart. She could have been a dancer, she had the gift, but when he asked for her hand she made him her career instead, “Like Esther Williams,” she told their friends, “giving up her Hollywood career for the Latino man she loved, who wanted her at home.” Big mistake, Elián used to joke, settling for me, but lately there was no humor in her answering little smile. They had married young, had a string of children quickly, and remained, it must be said, each other’s closest friends. But he was a man of a certain standing and type for whom the taking of a mistress was par for the course. Teresa Saca must have seemed like perfect mistress material, she had her money now so she wouldn’t be after his, she had lived in the world of discretion for long enough to understand the consequences of kissing and telling, and she was lonely, so a little companionship from a big man would please her and encourage her to do a lot of pleasing in return. But Oldville soon learned what his friend Aroni already knew. Teresa was a raven-haired Floridian firecracker with an anger in her towards men whose origins didn’t bear examining, and her gift for verbal abuse was tiring. In addition there were, as he told her in their break-up conversation, just too many things she disliked. She would only eat in five restaurants. She disliked clothes in any color other than black. She was unimpressed by his friends. Modern art, modern dance, movies with subtitles, contemporary literature, all types of philosophy, these she abhorred, but the mediocre neoclassicist nineteenth-century American pictures at the Met, those she much admired. She loved Disney World but when he wanted to take her to Mexico for a romantic getaway at Las Alamandas she said, “It’s not my kind of place. Plus, Mexico is dangerous, it would be like vacationing in Iraq.” This, with zero self-irony, from the daughter of Spanish immigrants living just one step up from the trailer park in Aventura, Florida.

Six weeks after he took up with her he kissed her goodbye on the lawn of his place on Meadow Lane, Southampton (Cindy Oldville loathed the seaside and stayed firmly planted in the city). There was a man mowing the lawn riding a garden tractor wearing a windbreaker with the words Mr. Geronimo on the back but he didn’t exist for the fragmenting couple. “You think I’m sorry? I have options,” Teresa told him. “I won’t be shedding a tear over you. If you knew who wanted to date me right now you would die.” Seth Oldville began to shake with repressed laughter. “So we’re fourteen years old again?” he asked her but she was burning with injured pride. “I’m getting lipo next week,” she said. “My doctor says I’m a great candidate, he doesn’t have to do much and after that my body will be insane . This I was doing for you, to perfect myself, but my new boyfriend, he says he can. Not. Wait.” Oldville began to walk away. “I’ll send you photographs of what you can’t have,” she shouted after him. “You will die. ” That wasn’t the end of it. In the weeks that followed a vengeful Teresa called Seth’s wife repeatedly and even though Cindy Oldville hung up on her right away she left voicemail messages so sexually explicit and detailed that they pushed the Oldvilles towards divorce. Super-lawyers geared up for the fight. Wildenstein-divorce-settlement-type numbers were bruited about. People settled down to watch. For this bout you wanted a ringside seat. Seth Oldville looked crushed in those days. It wasn’t about the money. The guy was genuinely sorry to have hurt his wife, who had done nothing but good things for him. He didn’t want the war; but now, she did. She had spent a lifetime turning a blind eye, she told girlfriends, but now she had new glasses and saw everything in sharp focus, and enough, really, with her husband’s entitled alpha-male crap. “Go get him,” the girlfriend chorus sang.

On the weekend before the storm Seth was out at the beach place by himself and fell asleep in a reclining chair on the lawn. While he was asleep somebody came up to him and drew a red bull’s-eye target on his forehead. It was the gardener fellow, Mr. Geronimo, who pointed it out to him when he woke up. In the mirror it looked like somebody was trying to simulate a Lyme disease tick bite but no, that wasn’t it, it was plainly a threat. The security personnel were embarrassed. Yes, Miss Teresa had talked her way past them. She was a persuasive lady. It was a judgment call and they had gone the wrong way on this one. It wouldn’t happen again.

Then the hurricane struck, and there followed the falling trees, the thunderbolt overload, the outages, all of it. “All of us were distracted by our own affairs in those days,” Daniel Aroni said at the memorial service at the Society for Ethical Culture, “and none of us thought she was truly capable of fulfilling her threat, and in the middle of the storm at that, when the whole city was trying to survive, it was, let me confess, unexpected. As his friend I am ashamed that I wasn’t more alert to the danger, that I didn’t warn him to raise his guard.” After the eulogies the same image was in everyone’s mind’s eye as they spilled out onto Central Park West: the rain-bedraggled woman at the door of the townhouse, the first security man blown away, a second coming at her and sent toppling backwards, the woman running through the house, up towards his sanctum, screaming Where are you, motherfucker, until he just walked out in front of her, sacrificing himself to save his wife and children, and she murdered him right there and he toppled down the red-carpet stairs like an oak. For a moment she knelt by his body soaked to the skin as she was and weeping uncontrollably and then she ran from the house; nobody stopped her, nobody dared approach.

But the question nobody could answer, not at the time, not at the memorial, was the question of the nature of the weapon. No bullet holes were found in any of the three dead bodies. All the bodies, when the police and the emergency medical teams arrived, smelled strongly of burning flesh, and their garments too had been burned. Cindy Oldville’s testimony was scarcely credible, and many people discounted it as the forgivable error of a woman in a state of extreme terror, but she was the only eyewitness and what she said her eyes witnessed was what the less reputable parts of the news media seized upon and magnified into two-inch headlines, the lightning bolts streaming from Teresa Saca’s fingertips, the white forking voltage pouring out of her, doing her deadly work. One tabloid called her Madame Magneto. Another preferred a Star Wars reference: The Empress Strikes Back. Things had reached a point at which only science fiction gave us a way of getting a handle on what the formerly real world’s non-CGI mundanity seemed incapable of making comprehensible.