Unknown - The Genius

“I’m not going to stand here and listen to you make a fool of yourself.” “You walk out of here and you do not know what I will do.” “Please calm down.” “Tell me you fucked her.” “Who?”

“Stop that,” she screamed.

A silence. “Tell me.” “I fucked her.”

“Excellent,” she said. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” I said nothing.

“You can’t lie to me. I know. I get reports from the field.” “What are you talking about?” Then I said, “Isaac?” “So don’t bother.” “Jesus Christ, Marilyn.”

“Don’t act so goddamned entitled,” she said. “That’s your problem. You’re spoiled.”

“Yes, well, I hate to break it to you, but you’re not getting your money’s worth with him. I slept with her once, and that was before any of this got started.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Believe what you want, that’s the truth.”

“You weren’t fucking me,” she said. “You have to be fucking someone.” “For God’s sake I was in the hospital.” “So what.”

“So I wasn’t—I’m not going to indulge this.”

“Tell me you fucked her.”

“I already—do you have to keep saying that?”

“What.”

” ‘Fuck.’ “

She started laughing. “What would you call it?” “I call it none of your business.”

In a single motion she was up out of the chair, tumbler in hand. I ducked and it shattered against the wall, bits of glass and water and scotch spraying across the top of her copy machine.

“Say that again,” she said. “Tell me it’s none of my business.” I stood up slowly, my hands raised. In the carpet was a wet spot where the tumbler had been.

“When did you fuck her.”

“What’s the purpose of this.”

“When.”

A silence.

“About two months ago.”

“When.”

“I just tol—”

“Be more specific.”

“You want the time and date?”

“Was it during the day? Was it at night? Was it on a bed or a couch or the kitchen counter? Do tell, Ethan, inquiring minds want to know.”

“I don’t remember the exact date.” I paused. “It was the night of the funeral.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, well, that’s extremely classy.”

I quashed the impulse to snap at her. Instead I said, “You can’t be this upset. It’s not as though you haven’t slept with anyone else in the last six years.”

“Have you?”

“Of course I have. You know that.”

She said, “I haven’t.”

I didn’t know what to say. Under normal circumstances I doubt I would have believed her, but just then I knew she was telling the truth.

She said, “I want you to leave.”

“Marilyn—”

“Now.”

I stepped into the hallway, into the elevator, my head racing with esprit d’escalier. Obviously, there had been some sort of miscommunication, a root misunderstanding of the terms of our relationship. Someone had not spoken up. Mistakes were made. I reached the first floor. The doors parted and music flooded in. The party was in full swing. I got my coat and went into the street. The snow was like cream, and I could see we were in for a blizzard.

interlude: 19Ç9.

Like most people, doctors tend to fear him, and in that fear, they never come right out and say what they want. It drives him mad. The one on the telephone, the superintendent, keeps talking in circles, such that Louis cannot fathom the reason for the call. More money? Is that it? He can give them more money. Already he pays fees that Bertha deems extortionate, a peculiar position for her to take, considering that the arrangement was entirely her idea, and that those fees come out of bank accounts to which she has never contributed a penny.

Louis would not mind paying more. He would, in fact, be happy to pay much more, give and give and give until he has left himself bloody and shattered. But here is the punch line: he has too much money to ever be broken. Writing checks will never be an effective method of expiation, and unfortunately for him, he knows no other way.

As Louis listens to the superintendent, he tries to convey the message to Bertha, who stands nearby, grinding her teeth impatiently.

“He says—one moment. He says that she—what was that?”

Fed up, Bertha seizes the receiver. “In plain English, please,” she says. Over the next minute and a half, her face shifts from exasperation to incredulity to fury to determination and finally to the blank, chill mask she puts on during difficult times. She says a few short words and puts down the phone.

“The girl is pregnant.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Well,” she says, pushing the button for the maid, “obviously, it isn’t.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t see what choice we have. She can’t stay there.”

“Then what do you inte—”

“I don’t know,” says Bertha. “You haven’t given me much time to think.”

The maid appears in the doorway.

“Call for the car.”

“Yessum.”

Louis looks at his wife. “Now?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s Sunday,” he says.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

He has no answer.

She says, “Do you have a better idea?”

He does not.

“Then run along. You’re not dressed for an outing.”

AS HE PERFORMS HIS TOILET, he wonders how he has gotten here. The events of his life do not seem connected in any way. First he was there, then somewhere else; now he is here. But how did he arrive? He does not know.

He reaches for his comb; his valet steps forward and hands it to him.

“That’s all right,” Louis says. “I’ll be alone now, thank you.”

The valet nods and withdraws.

Once he has gone, Louis removes his shirt and stands bare-chested. The last eight years have aged him. Once he had ringlets so dense that the teeth of the comb would get stuck. He had smooth skin, not the elephantine wattles that appear at his waist as he bends. His is not the dense, cannon-ball belly men of wealth and power should have but a soft paunch, a loosening around the ribs. His hips are wide and feminine, and his trousers must be let out at the seat. He repulses himself. He did not always look this way.

He puts on his shirt and his shoes and descends to the foyer.

The Home is near Tarrytown, a few miles off the Hudson. Once they leave the city, the roads become lined with deep ruts that the car is ill equipped to handle. The drive takes several hours; his suit is stuffy and his back stiffens; by the time they arrive, he can hardly move. It’s hard to say what would be worse, getting out of the car or turning right around and going back to Fifth.

The superintendent stands outside the gate, indicating where they may park, a gesture that annoys Louis, insofar as it implies that this visit is the Mullers’ first. Bertha might not come, but he does, at least once a year.

The grounds are lush and colorful, thick with wildflowers and weeds that make Louis’s sinuses buzz. He blows his nose and glances at his wife, staring impassively out the window at a building that did not exist the last time she was here. He knows this to be true because he paid for a portion of its construction. Anonymously. Bertha would not allow him to disgrace the family name. Another irony, that little bout of possessiveness, for it is he who turned her from a Steinholtz into a Muller.

She has changed, too, although he has a hard time putting his finger on how. Everything that made her a beautiful girl has lingered, more or less, into middle age, without the need for heavy investments in cosmetics. Other women spend half their day staving off wrongs done by time and childbearing. Not so Bertha.

What, then? Louis watches her gazing out the window and notices that all of those lovely features are still there—but more so. The beauty mark a touch larger; the nose a trifle rounder. It is as though the real Bertha, for years tightly wrapped in youth, has pushed her way through to the surface, causing tiny ruptures all over, individually imperceptible but together enough to render the whole grotesque. Perhaps these changes are real, or perhaps familiarity has bred contempt. Whatever the case may be, what scant desire he could conjure up for her, back when he was supple and highly motivated, has long since dried out and blown away. His appetites in general have waned, leaving in their stead regret, a multipartite regret made up of all his poor decisions. Because although he has a hard time understanding how he came to the present, if he is honest with himself he will say that the path has been of his making. What seemed like inevitabilities he now understands as choices. When, so many years ago, they brought him into the room to meet her and they told him she was to be his bride, and he agreed, and the whole machine swung into motion—that was his choice, wasn’t it? His father said to him: marry or go to London. Well, why not London? At the time he told himself that marriage would follow eventually, so he might as well accept his fate and be allowed to stay on. But perhaps his father had been giving him an out. Perhaps he could have spent his life in bachelorhood, like great-uncle Bernard. What might have happened in London? Louis wonders. And when Bertha sent the girl away—hadn’t he had a choice? He argued and argued and finally gave in, but he could have stood his ground. He could have done something. What, he does not know. But something.