“Do you care about that?” Bernie manages. “Our daughter is gay.”
“Why would I care?” Chloe seems surprised.
“What will happen to the Christmas decorations?” Bernie asks. He considers their holiday ritual. Chloe and Gnat selected new ornaments for their permanent tree legacy, one for each family member, one each year. The two-hundred-year-old brocade angels with twelve- carat gold threads around their wings from Belgium. The gingham elves with pewter crowns. The silver maple leaves. The glass snowflakes, each with intricate individual facets and panels.
“Nat will take them no matter what. If she goes butch. If she opts for artificial insemination. She’ll take the ornaments. And she knew you’d ask that.” Chloe is leaning against the wall, her eyes partially closed.
Bernie pours coffee. He removes a bottle of amphetamines from his suit jacket pocket. He takes three tablets and offers the bottle to Chloe. She moves toward it with such unexpected rapidity, he can’t determine how many pills she extracts. Bernie watches her hands, following her fingers to where they terminate in glazed nails translucent like the undersides of certain tropical seashells.
“Remember the glass snowflakes?” Bernie asks.
“From Tibet? With triangular amber panels like medieval cathedral windows?” Chloe recalls. “I thought they’d look good as earrings. I imagined them on a young wife on a pyre. Of course, that wouldn’t work for me anymore.”
“That’s what you were thinking? In front of the goddamned pedigreed twenty-two-foot Colorado blue spruce? Ritual incineration?” Bernie places his hands over his eyes. There are numerous anecdotally reported cases of sudden stress induced blindness. He puts on his sunglasses.
Chloe pours herself a cup of black coffee. Her movements are slow, listless, stalled. The room is a series of sea swells. He realizes they are floating like the petals of the flowers that are not lotuses just above the koi.
“And you’re putting the fucking suitcases in your car and driving away?” Bernie is incensed. “Sam Goldberg is your lawyer?”
“He can represent both of us. Or I’ll take Leonard and you can have Sam.” Chloe offers.
“Leonard is my golf partner,” Bernie says.
“We know where all the bodies are buried. It’s a cemetery. When in doubt, just keep it, Bernie.” She studies the interior of her porcelain cup.
Then Chloe goes upstairs. She returns, slowly and methodically, with suitcases. He’s surprised by her muscular arms. She knows instinctively how to balance her torso, shift her weight, and bend her knees. She is barely sweating. She has replaced the kimono with a short beige linen dress with spaghetti straps that accentuate her tanned shoulders. 20 years of yoga and tennis. Then the bags of groceries when the maids disappeared, were picked up by immigration, or beaten up by boyfriends. In between, they had babies and abortions. They visited relatives in their home villages and often didn’t return for months. Then the gardeners vanished. Chloe spent days in the garden with a shovel. Yes, she could easily load the baggage into her car. Even the inexplicable cardboard box of shoes. And that is the next step. Bernie considers the heavy carved oak front door that leads to the circular cobblestone driveway.
“What about the jewelry?” Bernie inquires. He always gave her a necklace on her birthday. Rubies in Katmandu. Pearls in Shanghai. Silver and turquoise in Santa Fe. Gold in Greece. He can remember each separate composition of stones and the rooms above plazas and rivers and lagoons where he unwrapped his offerings and fastened the clasps around her throat. Sometimes there were cathedral bells and foghorns, drums from carnivals and parades, waves and sea birds
“I took the diamonds. I left you the rest. They’re in my safe. The key is on my pillow.” Chloe pours another cup of black coffee.
“Why leave me any?” Bernie wonders.
“You may need them for bartering purposes later. Sometimes a strand of Colombian emeralds really hits the spot.” Chloe lights another cigarette. This is not the behavior of a novice. This is no small stray gesture of recidivism. Does her yoga instructor know? Her aromatherapist? Book Club and the hospital board? And what does she mean by barter? That’s a curious concept.
“Wait a minute. Look. This is for your birthday. I got it early.” Bernie is excited. It’s the amphetamines, cutting through his fatigue, his heavy and unnatural disorientation. Airports are terminals of contagion. A maximum exposure situation. He might be incubating a malevolent viral mutation. Still, he is clarifying his thinking.
“I can’t wait.” Chloe gazes at her watch.
Bernie walks into his study, the only room Chloe permitted him to decorate, and returns with a small wooden box. “Here,” he says. He feels wildly triumphant.
“I’m not interested,” Chloe informs him.
Her voice has more energy now. The amphetamines. Perhaps they should take two more. Bernie produces the bottle. Chloe allows her fingers to reach into the pills. She stands near him while he opens the box. A single grayish stone.
“I’m going to have it set,” Bernie explains. “It’s an agate from the beach in Chile. From Isla Negra where Neruda lived. I went there. I skipped Rio. Didn’t you wonder why I went to a river parasite conference in Brazil? I needed an excuse. I changed planes for Chile at the airport. Then I drove. I walked beaches for miles. I found it for you. I pulled it out of the water.” Bernie holds the pebble in his palm. His hands are shaking. “Now you can tell me what the stones know.”
“Bernie, you’re a lovely man.” Chloe touches his cheek. “You’ve made it a wonderful job.”
“I want to know what the stones know,” Bernie says. “That was your goddamned dissertation. Your personal grail. You were going to decode Neruda’s stones and explain them to me.”
“That’s pre-history, Bernie. You’d need an archeologist to dig back that far. A paleontologist.” Chloe turns away from the agate. It looks lonely and ashen. It knows it is an orphan.
“What about the house? The furniture? The paintings? The sculpture? Each sofa a distillation of your personal evolution? That’s what you said,” Bernie remembers.
“I tried to amuse myself. Forget it. The house is too big for you,” Chloe determines. “The kids are never coming back.”
“They’re never coming back?” Bernie finds himself repeating. The afternoon is a kind of three-dimensional mantra. Phrases are recited, but they are like howls people make on roller coasters, ludicrous vows and confessions. Words came from their mouths, but they are sacraments in reverse, staining the air. They are curses.
“Not for more than a day here and there. Now there won’t be the plague of holidays to entice them.” Chloe glances around the downstairs rooms, detached and calculating. “Unload it. The market is good now.”
“Chloe.” Bernie takes a breath. “I love you.”
“It’s been terrific, really. This is my terminal performance of prophecy on command. My final act of analysis and emergency emotional counsel. OK. I’m gazing into my crystal ball for the last time. It’s the goddess of real estate. She says sell.”
“Chloe. Let’s talk this out. There’s more to say. I can say more.” Bernie tastes the amphetamines now, an unmistakable metallic sting between his lips. It’s spreading through his body; microscopic steel chips, hard-wiring his muscles, his reflexes and agility. She can load the suitcases into her car. But he outweighs her by seventy pounds, and he is wearing leather shoes. One must not discount the element of surprise. Chloe can do head and shoulder stands, she has mastered all the strength and flexibility postures, but she has never been in a street fight.
“OK.” Chloe is unexpectedly agreeable. “One final note. That stricture I gave you about only wearing black and gray Armani?”