“Do you know anything about this red wine stain?”
She shakes her head.
“If it was you, it’s okay to tell me. You won’t be punished.”
“I don’t drink wine!”
She said it charmingly. I would love to kiss her now on both cheeks, but I think about the camera and leave things be. “And?” I ask instead. “Learned it all? Well prepared?”
She shrugs her shoulders as if she doesn’t believe I’d be interested. This upsets me. Because even though it really doesn’t interest me, I do my best to act like it matters.
I notice a tiny spider — a little dot working its way up the wall by the door. What does it live off, what does it eat, what does it drink, or don’t spiders drink? I would like to ask Marie, she’s bound to learn things like that in school, but instead I ask, “What’s up for today? Have you got as far as differential calculus?”
“What’s that?”
“You don’t know?”
“I’m ten, Papa.”
She has an answer for everything. Meanwhile the spider has worked its way over to the other side of the door; how did it get there so fast?
“What?” she asks.
“ ‘Excuse me.’ You must say ‘Excuse me,’ not ‘What.’ ”
“Excuse me?”
“What?”
“What sort of spider, Papa?”
Did I talk out loud? For heaven’s sake!
“You said—”
“No!”
“But you did—”
“I didn’t say a word!”
That came out too loud. I don’t want to frighten my daughter, and I mustn’t forget the camera. Stricken, I run my hand over Marie’s head. She smiles at me, then turns around and leaves, the way children always do, with a hop, a step, and a leap.
“Hurry up!” I call after her. “You’re late, school’s about to start!” I have no idea when school starts. But it’s bound to be true.
What will she think of me when I’m in prison? On the way to the dressing room upstairs I ask myself yet again why I don’t pluck up the courage to cut things short. So many have managed it: guns, pills, a leap from a high window. Why not me?
I’m actually too strong. Being strong isn’t just an advantage. You can tolerate more, you can get into even deeper trouble, and it’s harder to give up. The washed-out, the empty, and the spineless, who have nothing to lose if they lose themselves, can all just hang themselves someplace. But there’s something inside me that won’t allow that.
I like being in my dressing room, there are very rarely problems in here. Seventeen black bespoke suits hang in a row, thirty-nine white shirts are stacked on the shelves, and the tie rack holds twenty-five flawless ties in the selfsame shade of red. Sometimes people give me other ties, mostly with sophisticated patterns, and I throw them away. I have one black one, for funerals. On the floor there are twenty-one pairs of well-polished shoes.
It’s weekends that are hard. On your free days you can’t wear a suit, nor can you keep wearing the same checked shirt. It would be sensible and rational, so of course if you did it people would think you were weird. So I have a closet for weekends, days off, and holidays. In it are all kinds of colorful shirts: solid colors, checked, striped, even one with dots. Laura doesn’t like it, but I claim it’s my favorite. People ought to have a favorite shirt, it’s expected, it’s appealing. The closet also houses jeans, corduroys, leather belts, every kind of jacket, sports shoes, hiking shoes, fishing boots, though I’ve never been fishing and have no intention of ever changing that.
Luckily today is a weekday, so I’m done in five minutes. Black suit, white shirt, red tie. Everything feels better when you’re dressed in a suit. I nod into the mirror on the wall, my reflection nods back without hesitation. The world is functioning.
As I step into the hall, Laura is standing there.
“Did you sleep well?” I ask. I ask her this every morning, although I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean. Either you’re asleep or you’re awake, but I know from television that people ask one another these questions.
She takes a step back, in order to leave room for the answer.
How beautiful she still is! I nod and say, “Aha!” and “Oh,” while she talks about a journey and a magician and a rose bed. Thousands upon thousands of roses, a whole wide sea. Can you really dream any such thing? Perhaps it’s all invention, the way I invent almost everything I tell people.
“Are you listening to me?” she asks.
“Of course. Bed of roses.”
As she talks on, I stealthily log on to my phone: August 8, 2008, two thousand seven hundred and thirty unopened emails. And even as I’m looking at the screen, in come another two.
“Is that more interesting than what I’m talking about?”
“Darling!” I hastily stow the gadget. “Princess! It couldn’t be less interesting! Do please go on.”
This is in fact true, I haven’t read a single email for weeks, but because it’s the truth she takes it as a lie and sticks her lower lip out in a sulk.
“Laura! Please go on! Please!”
Obviously I’m not managing to hit the right tone today, for her brow furrows reproachfully. “Marie needs tutoring in math. You have to find a teacher. Mr. Lakebrink says it’s urgent.”
This is all going too fast for me. First roses just now, and here we are already with Lakebrink. “Is that her teacher?”
Her frown deepens.
“Lakebrink,” I say. “I know. That Lakebrink. That man.”
She takes another step back.
“Okay, so who is he?”
“Eric, what’s the matter with you?”
“Shall we just fly off somewhere?” I ask hastily. “Next weekend, just you and me …” Now I have to think of a really hot place, and quick. Where have we been recently? “To Sicily?” It was Sicily, or I’m pretty sure it was. Or just possibly it was Greece. Damp and hot as hell, absurdly high prices, impudently whispering servers, mangy cats staring down from sharp rocks like gargoyles, but Laura was in heaven.
She opens her arms, lays her head on my chest, and hugs me. Her hair smells sweet — a little like sage, a little like lemon, in fact she always smells good. She murmurs that I’m wonderful, generous, one of a kind; I can’t hear her that well, because her face is buried in my jacket, and I stroke her back.
“The headmaster,” she says.
“What?”
“Mr. Lakebrink is the headmaster of Marie’s school. You talked to him last week. At the parents’ meeting.”
I nod, as if I’d always known that. Of course I’ll have to come up with a convincing reason why we can’t go to Sicily. She’s going to be so disappointed that I have to come up with an even bigger promise, to sweeten her up, and then I’ll have to break that one too. All of it because of this parents’ meeting, that I can actually remember all too welclass="underline" low ceiling, some kind of artificial flooring, harsh lights, and a poster with a slogan about getting yourself inoculated against something as soon as possible.
“Just one more thing, Eric!” She strokes my cheek. Her emotion makes me recall just how much I desired her even recently. “The day before yesterday, you told Marie the most important thing is never to stand out. Never to arouse other people’s jealousy.”
“So?”
“She took it very much to heart.”
“Okay, and?”
“But yesterday you told her that one should never make compromises. Keep fighting, keep trying to be the best you can. Never duck a fight.”
“And?”
“Now she’s confused.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a contradiction!”
“Sicily!” I cry.
Her face lights up at once.
We embrace again, and I am overcome by a sense of déjà vu so powerful that it makes me dizzy. I remember that I stood here once before and held her in my arms and had exactly this conversation with her, in a dream or in another life or even in this life, two or three days ago. And soon we’ll be standing here once again, and then probably Mr. Lakebrink will appear again, and the ax will fall, and the police will storm in, and the loop will finally stop replaying itself. I give her a horribly damp kiss on the forehead, head quickly for the stairs, and say “I love you” without turning around. Why, when it’s true, does it feel like a lie?