Part 22 (1/2)

Irene Maitlock paused before her computer, thinking she heard Mark on the stairs. She listened, trying to pa.r.s.e her husband's mood from the meter of his tread, the trochees and spondees he made while climbing the four tiers of steps to their apartment. before her computer, thinking she heard Mark on the stairs. She listened, trying to pa.r.s.e her husband's mood from the meter of his tread, the trochees and spondees he made while climbing the four tiers of steps to their apartment.

Jangling keys, the complaining door. Irene heard her husband wrestling his coat into the overstuffed closet, breathing hard from the climb. ”Hi, baby,” she called.

”h.e.l.lo.” Wiping rain from his big shoes. Irene swiveled around at her desk, which faced one of the two windows in the living room/dining room/kitchen/office of their tiny one-bedroom apartment, and looked at her husband, whose expression of defeat was palpable even through the gauze of her nearsightedness. ”How did it go?”

”Okay.” He crossed the room and hugged her in her chair, holding her head to his stomach. Irene felt him sway a little; he'd been drinking, probably from nervousness.

”Not so good?” she said.

”No, it was good. It was fine.” The party had taken place at the East Seventy-eighth Street duplex of Gadi Austenhaus, a composer who for many years had been Mark's mentor and champion. Irene had stopped just short of begging Mark to let her come along-he was so shy in groups, and there had been a time when her presence had relaxed him. But now, Mark said, having her with him at such events made them harder. It was her own fault, Irene knew, for as this lean middle period befell her husband, this era when commissions were routed around him, past him-right through him, it almost seemed-on their way to other, younger composers; as a whiff of anxious isolation began to infect this man who had written his first sonata at the age of six, she found herself scrutinizing her husband's behavior more closely in the presence of his colleagues.

Physically, he had altered: in three short years, Mark's uplifted sweep of glossy black hair had vacated his head, leaving behind a saddle of baldness. And this sudden evacuation of hair revealed more than just the pallor and slight k.n.o.bbiness of her husband's skull (k.n.o.bs Irene kissed at night and covered with her hands to protect them)-it revealed how critical that layer of raffish black hair had been to the emphatic figure Mark had formerly cut. Now his vast height-six-four-had been reduced to another component of his baldness, the lengthy wand at the end of which his denuded pate was brandished at the world. And he'd developed an unfortunate corollary habit of shoving his hands backward over his nearly bald head with such force that people naturally must a.s.sume that this violent pawing itself itself had induced the hair loss. And so, when Mark's hands rose inadvertently to his skull while he chatted over plastic cups of wine after someone's recital, Irene would spear him with a fierce warning glance that made him feel as if his last ally in the world-his wife-had turned on him. had induced the hair loss. And so, when Mark's hands rose inadvertently to his skull while he chatted over plastic cups of wine after someone's recital, Irene would spear him with a fierce warning glance that made him feel as if his last ally in the world-his wife-had turned on him.

”Who was there?” she asked.

”Everyone. Everyone was there.” He crossed the room to the half-kitchen and poured himself a gla.s.s of vodka from the freezer. ”Saw John Melior.”

”And?”

”He didn't bring it up.”

”Did you?”

”There was no opening, really. He didn't give me one.”

”But that doesn't necessarily mean it's off.”

”No,” he said, and lowered himself onto the piano stool. Lately, to make money, he'd been giving lessons in the apartment on nights when Irene was at Charlotte's. ”But it doesn't seem good.”

Incongruously, he smiled. So exceptional had Mark been for so much of his life, so unaccustomed to being ignored and disregarded, that the normal responses-anger, bitterness-seemed never to have developed in him, and he reacted to each new slight and disappointment with an almost childlike bafflement. He didn't understand. He didn't understand and there was no way for Irene to explain what she barely understood herself: that fas.h.i.+on was ruthless, reputations variable, that the slightest intimation of failure could drive people away. Lately she had begun forcing herself to see these things coldly, dispa.s.sionately, because one of them had to; otherwise they would be trampled underfoot by everyone else.

”If it does come through with Melior,” he said, ”you could quit that b.i.t.c.h.”

”She's not so bad,” Irene said, over his grunted objection. ”And think about the money. If it comes through.” She added, mostly to herself, ”No one will know I had anything to do with it.”

Mark soon retreated to the bedroom-to read, he said, but more likely he would be flattened by sleep and have trouble rising in the morning. The thrum of fear he'd brought with him into their tiny home surrounded Irene now; she looked anxiously at the familiar artifacts of her married life, the musical instruments she and Mark had bought in India hanging on the wall, two sitars, a mridangam drum, a sarod, a shruti box, the kanjira tambourine, the zither Mark could play so beautifully; all of them he could play, he lifted them from the wall and played them. But not lately. Irene taunted herself with these thoughts; they galvanized her with an energy she'd never felt in her life, some combustive agitation of love and anger and f.u.c.k you and not so fast, buddy! She wasn't Mark, exhausted by fear-she would win. Win for both of them. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. She would sail their little boat. And when Mark stopped being afraid, his luck would turn, because that was how luck worked, and then the world would favor him again, because that was the world. He didn't have to see it. She would see for both of them.

Before Mark's return, she'd been longing for bed herself. Now, thus electrified, she stared at her screen. Ten days ago she had delivered Charlotte's background to Ordinary People, but there had been no response. She'd had trouble concentrating since then, kept sliding into academic jargon whenever she tried to compose.

I, she typed. Then consulted her notebook, letting the memory of Charlotte's voice soak her mind until, with a ventriloquism that still amazed Irene, words tumbled from her in a voice that wasn't her own or Charlotte's but a hybrid, an unholy creature that was Irene's creation, too, fed by the cheap detective novels she still gulped down when she had time. She could hardly type fast enough.

The next time I saw Z, I got near enough to reach for the spot where I'd seen the wire inside his s.h.i.+rt. There was nothing this time. Just the spokes of his ribs and a hard stomach. It was the kind of hardness that can mean a few things. Devoted gym attendance. Subsistence living.He put his hand over mine and held it to his chest.

”Charlotte?” came the faint drowning call from the cistern of a speakerphone. ”Thomas Keene.”

”Thomas!” I said-yelled, actually, into my cell phone over the chumming of the Circle Line, which was pa.s.sing close to me. Tourists lined its deck, waving merrily. I waved back. It was late April, and I was sitting in one of my new haunts: a bench facing the East River on a spit of land across the FDR from my apartment building; the same spit of land, in fact, where I had dashed in a panic last winter, shortly before leaping off my balcony.

Having switched to a regular phone, Thomas said, ”So. I spent last night reading your background.”

My stomach pitched. I knew Irene had turned something in-I'd signed an accompanying letter she had written in my name. ”And?”

”The material was incredibly thorough, very professional.”

”Good!” I said.

”Very ... realistic.”

”Good.”

”There is one thing. It's-it's not a problem, exactly,” he said. ”It's just, I have trouble believing you wrote this, Charlotte.”

I was prepared for that. ”You mean it doesn't sound like me.”

”No, it does sound like you. A lot like you-too much like you in a way,” Thomas said. ”Too much like you for you to have written it.”

”What the h.e.l.l does that mean?”

”See, I have no problem with you using a writer. Frankly, I'm delighted-you've saved me the job of finding someone to clean it all up at the end. But I want to get Cyrano out from behind the curtain and bring him to the table. I'd like to work with him.”

”So you liked the”-what had he called it?-”material?”

”Oh, my G.o.d, it's fantastic! A thousand percent better than I expected.”

There it was: the insult I'd sensed lodged in the middle of all this like an infected tooth.

”It's a her,” I said. ”The writer. But she won't want to meet you.”

”Why not?”

”She's a journalist,” I said, with pride. ”For an extremely well-known paper that you probably read-”

”I get it, I get it,” Thomas said. ”Tell her not to worry.”

”I'm not sure you-”

”She doesn't want to compromise her name. But see, I don't want to compromise yours, so we're fine. She's off the record, guaranteed.”

By the time we hung up, I had promised to bring Irene to Thomas's office within the week, a promise I knew she would deplore, having told me repeatedly that she wished to remain, as she put it, a ghost.

I had come to the river that afternoon from my other new haunt: Gristede's, where I had a job bagging groceries. This unlikely turn of events had transpired for two reasons: First, I was desperate for money. Second, I was itching for something to do, being not merely jobless and friendless, but unable to afford or justify the myriad self-grooming activities that once had comprised a sizable portion of my schedule. Of course, my professional aims had initially been much higher: TV anchor, fas.h.i.+on editor, executive a.s.sistant. But I'd discovered the existence of traits that, in my old life, I had regarded as dull, invisible and pointless. These traits had a name, I now learned: ”skills.” And I didn't have any.

I knew powerful people, of course, any of whom I could ask for help. But after one disastrous attempt-lunch with a financier whose jet had ferried me to ski slopes and islands over the years, who flinched when I identified myself at the restaurant bar and glanced distrustfully at my face throughout lunch; who left me standing on the curb as he was driven away in his car, then ignored my calls to obtain the leads he'd promised-after that, I couldn't bring myself to try again. The calls from my old life had winnowed away, like calls to a prior tenant whose forwarding number has finally made the rounds. All that remained were Grace, Irene and Anthony Halliday, who called a couple of times each week, usually at night, for conversations whose main ingredient was silence. Yet I looked forward to his calls. Afterward, I felt a kind of peace.

I accepted the bagging job for minimum wage because I was tired of looking and because Gristede's, where I had shopped for years, was just around the corner. Since Sam, the waxen-mustachioed deli man, and Arlene, the cat-eyed manager, didn't recognize me as the woman they had sold groceries to for many years, there was no shame in it. I even took a certain pleasure in being an expert grocery packer, making a careful pyramid of each bag in which the most fragile items-eggs, raspberries, chanterelles-floated weightlessly at the top. And Irene approved of the job. Its jarring contrast to my prior line of work would help, she said, to make me sympathetic.

Two nights each week, she crossed my threshold, bringing with her smells of the city, the newspaper where she worked; she sat on my sectional couch with a notebook in her lap, and asked me questions. I had intended to lie as much as possible, but I was thwarted by an unforeseen impediment: I lacked the imagination to invent another person's life. My own was all I could think of. So I told the truth, first awkwardly and in a kind of agony, then ploddingly, and finally, to my own surprise, with a feeling that edged, at times, toward pleasure. I began looking forward to her visits-she was my only visitor. I tried questioning Irene about herself, in part just to change the subject, also out of real curiosity about the life of a New York Post New York Post reporter. But Irene was tight-lipped; she disliked talking about herself as much as I did, and she wasn't being paid to. reporter. But Irene was tight-lipped; she disliked talking about herself as much as I did, and she wasn't being paid to.

Shortly after I hung up with Thomas, Pluto, one of a handful of homeless people who lived in tents and garbage bags near the mouth of the tunnel, appeared at my bench carrying a sack of laundry, which he washed in a First Avenue high-rise during the s.h.i.+fts of a particular doorman who believed he lived there. He sat down gloomily and opened a paper bag containing eight beers from an obscure micro brewery. He offered me one, but I declined. The beers were expensive, and Pluto needed them.