Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

Thus I had every reason to believe that Amalie would be free for a nice consoling chat, but when I arrived at the house and was let in by Lourdes, and asked where Amalie was, she told me (with what I thought was excessive satisfaction) that Amalie was not available, that she was having a meeting. I could wait in the living room.

So I waited and fumed and wished for more drugs and got tight in the chest for what seemed like hours, but by my oft-consulted watch was less than forty minutes, until I heard voices in the hallway and sprang up and was able to witness Amalie showing out a trio of suits, who looked at me curiously, as at an exhibit (I imagined): unemployed ex-husband, lurking. Amalie, for her part, showed no surprise, nor did she introduce me to the suits but ushered them graciously out the door.

When she came back, I said, “Big meeting?” keeping the tone light.

“Yes,” she said. “What’s wrong, Jake?”

I related the law firm story in the most pathetic and self-deprecating manner possible, sitting on her/my leather couch while she perched primly on the chair opposite. I omitted only the horrible Russian of the previous evening.

“Poor Jake,” she said when I was finished. “What will you do?”

“I don’t know. Take some time off, think about life. Maybe I’ll look for this lost play.”

“Oh, don’t even joke about that!”

“Why not?” I said. “Where’s the harm?”

“The harm is that one man has been killed over this, according to you, and my children are having to be watched by Paul’s gangsters. I cannot stand to live like this, Jake. I have said to Paul, thank you very much, but please no.”

“What, no one is watching the children?”

“No, and there is no reason for anyone to bother with them because you have nothing they want any longer.” She must have observed something in my face that I was not aware of, because she added, a little more forcefully, “Or so you have led me to believe. Is there anything?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Of course not. They have the original letter already and that was all I ever had. It’s over.”

She kept looking at me as if waiting. At last I said, “What?”

“Nothing. I have nothing to say. You are the one who came to my house.”

“I thought we could talk,” I said.

“Upon what subject? Shall we discuss your new woman?”

“There’s no new woman.”

“That would amaze me. Look, we have had a terrible fight, yet another terrible, shameful fight about your lying and your girls, and now you have ruined yourself in your profession because of one of them, and you come back to me for…for what, I should like to know? Punishment? Shall I stand in the door like a cartoon wife, tapping my foot, with my arms folded, holding a rolling pin? Or take you back? On what basis? That you will act like a mutt dog in heat whenever you please, and I shall be waiting with the lamp in the window?”

I can’t recall what I said in reply. I can’t recall what I wanted from the wretched woman. For the past to be erased, I suppose, for a clean slate. I believe I did actually sink to the level where I appealed to her Christian charity: did she think I was beyond forgiveness? Whereupon she pointed out to me what I knew very well, that there is no forgiveness without repentance, and that I had not really repented; and then stopped herself and cried out that I was doing it again, making her feel like a damned prig and a Sunday school teacher, I am not to instruct my husband as to morals, he is supposed to know all this already.

And so on. Early in our relationship, Amalie had revealed to me that when she was thirteen her beloved dad had been discovered with an entirely separate second family on the other side of the Mont Blanc tunnel, mistress and two daughters, à la Mitterand, very high tone and civilized, of course, no question of divorce, just a continuing slow hell of silent meals and separate bedrooms and the children sent away to boarding schools. Amalie thus had a horror of infidelity, why she fled sophisticated decadent Europe for America the puritan, we are fat and stupid and lack culture but American men are perhaps not such hypocrites about their marriage vows. And married me.

Then she changed the subject, standing up, and pacing back and forth, bent over a little, her hands stuck in the pockets of the cashmere cardigan she often wears while working. She told me that the men I saw going out were from the Dow Jones organization. They had been dickering for Mishkin’s Arbitrage Letter for some time and Amalie had agreed just now to sell it for a figure not quite sufficient to purchase a squadron of air-superiority fighter planes. She added that she was going to sell the town house as well and move to Zurich. Her mother was getting on and was lonely and depressed and it would do her good to fuss over the grandkids, and Amalie was angry at my nation, she did not wish to bring her children up in a christo-fascist empire, that was not what she had bargained for when first she flew the ocean to America the free, and she wanted to devote herself full-time to charitable works in the earth’s more desperate regions. And on cue I blurted out, “What about me?”

It certainly hurts when someone you have loved looks at you with pity, as Amalie did then. Now that I think about it, I should have known then that the love was still alive in my heart, or it would not have hurt so much, I could have remained the cool “separated” man about town like all the others one sees in the parks and tony restaurants on Sundays in Manhattan: uncomfortable, phony-jolly, overindulging the unhappy tykes. She lowered her eyes, as if embarrassed by what she saw, and retrieved a Kleenex from the wad that always lurked in the pocket of her cardigan, wiped her eyes, blew her nose. In my wickedness I thought, Ah, she weeps, that’s a good sign! I found myself begging her not to go, that I would be different, etc. She said she loved me and always would, and wished very much that she could be complaisant, but could not, and if I ever decided to return on terms of perfect honor to my marriage, she would see, and I said, Now, now, I have decided, and she gave me a searching look as only she can and said Oh, no, Jake, I am afraid you have not.

Which was true because just before that moment, when I thought she might roll, I was still thinking that somehow I could retrieve Miranda and clear up our little misunderstanding and have both the old and the new Amalie at my disposal. I can’t stand to type any more of this hideous account of what was taking place in my weasel mind. It doesn’t matter.

What did I do after she had, quite properly, shown me the door? I went to the gym, where Arkady welcomed me with a warm handshake, an embrace, and a false look. God knows what Shvanov had arranged to get me back in there, but it was clear that the easy gym comradeship was over. The word had apparently also spread to the other Russian lifters in the place because I was treated like a radioactive prince, no waits for the benches or machines for me! I pumped iron until I was ready to throw up, then took a painfully hot shower; Arkady’s is known for the dangerous heat of his hot water (there are even cautionary signs), and I wondered if you could accidentally on purpose kill yourself in this way. When I was meat-loaf red I turned the hot faucet off entirely and suffered under the icy drench until my teeth chattered.

I was getting dressed when my cell went off and it was my sister. Without preamble I asked her if she knew that Osip Shvanov knew our father. Sure, she said. They knew each other from Israel. What about it?

What about it indeed? The fact filled me with a particularly infantile kind of fear, where you know you have to keep something hidden from the parent without quite knowing why, only that if they found out they would act out of malice, or worse, some unconscious impulse to claim a chunk of your soul, to innocently eat you up .