“Say the name.”
“I can’t. But he took this special interest in me, and he told me something. I think you may know it.”
“Say it.”
“That he killed someone. That there was one other person he’d told, and it was you. And then I gave up on finding my father and I wanted to leave, and he told me to come here. He was afraid you wanted to expose him. He sent me an email attachment. I knew what it was, and I opened it anyway. But I swear to you that’s all I did.”
Tom pressed his fingertips to his forehead. “And why would you do this for him?”
“I don’t know! I felt bad for him — he came on really strong with me. I thought I had to respond. I did respond, I was bad. I mean, he’s really famous, I couldn’t help it. But then I didn’t like him, and he was hurt, and, I don’t know, I guess I felt I owed him something. And then I was so happy here — the whole thing started seeming like this horrible dirty dream.”
“Dirty.”
“I didn’t sleep with him. I didn’t.”
“Why would I care who you sleep with?”
The phone rang. Tom looked at it, unplugged it, and continued to look at it.
“Well, anyway,” she said. “I was a willing accomplice. You can call the police if you want.”
“What would that serve?”
“To punish me.”
“I admit that I have no patience with liars. I think it’s best if you hand in your resignation and go home to your mother. But I’m not interested in punishing you.”
Pip had never been arrested, never sent to a principal’s office, never yelled at by a father. She’d done some bad things in her life but nothing so bad that she hadn’t been able to get away with it by being cute, or pitiable, or obviously well-meaning. She’d always managed to avoid scenes of harsh discipline; and now she was getting what she deserved. But still it seemed cruel and unusual that Tom was the man she was in trouble with. She couldn’t think of anyone whose standards she would have wanted less to run afoul of. His maturity and manliness, his fleshy shaved cheeks, his bald head, his crookedly knotted tie, his fashion-defying glasses all seemed to brook no nonsense. She felt wretchedly sad that this had to be the man, of all men, whom she’d betrayed and disappointed.
He was flipping through one of the IT reports. “The office breach doesn’t worry me too much,” he said. “The guy’s whole business depends on protecting his sources. I think he’ll protect mine. At worst, he’ll try to poach them. What concerns me is the home computer.”
“I’m sorry,” Pip said. “That was so dumb of me. One of the Project girls sent me an email attachment. I never should have opened it.”
“Have you had access to my home computer since then?”
“Me? No! I mean, how could I? Don’t you have passwords?”
“The software records keystrokes.”
“I don’t know anything about it. I didn’t even know there was spyware. I mean, I was worried, but I wasn’t sure.”
“He didn’t send you any passwords?”
“No.”
“So you haven’t seen anything on my hard drive. He hasn’t sent you any documents from it.”
“No! We broke off contact!”
“Why should I believe you? You’ve done nothing but lie to us.”
“You and Leila are my heroes. I would never spy on you. I would never read anything I wasn’t supposed to. I adore you guys.”
“And what if he sent you a document now? What would you do?”
“If I knew it was yours,” she said, “I wouldn’t read it.”
Tom released a long sigh, his shoulders caving inward around the loss of the air that he’d been holding in. Again he was staring at some invisible presence. Pip wondered what document of his could be so explosive that he had to worry about her reading it. She couldn’t imagine that he, of all men, had anything to hide.
[le1°9n8a0rd]
My affair with Anabel had begun as soon as our divorce decree came through. In exchange for stipulating that I’d abandoned her—“abandonment” being one of the few grounds for divorce that New York state law recognized, and the one that Anabel felt best captured the wrong she’d suffered — I’d been permitted to reclaim our valuable rent-controlled tenement in East Harlem while Anabel went off to live by herself in the woods of New Jersey. Since there could be no talk of inflicting Manhattan on her, I had to take the bus across 125th Street and the subway up to 168th, followed by a much longer and invariably nauseating bus ride over the Hudson and out through increasingly raw developments to the hills northwest of Netcong.
I’d made this trip twice in February, twice in March, and once in April. On the last Saturday in May, my phone rang around seven in the morning, not long after I’d gone to bed drunk. I answered it only to stop the ringing.
“Oh,” Anabel said. “I thought I was going to get your machine.”
“I’ll hang up and you can leave a message,” I said.
“No, this is only going to be thirty seconds. I swear I will not get drawn in again.”
“Anabel.”
“I just wanted to say that I reject your version of us. I utterly reject it. That’s my message.”
“Couldn’t you have rejected my version by just never calling me again?”
“I’m not getting drawn in,” she said, “but I know the way you operate. You interpret silence as capitulation.”
“You don’t remember me promising I’d never interpret your silence that way. The very last time we spoke.”
“I’m hanging up now,” she said, “but at least be honest, Tom, and admit that your promise was a low trick. A way of having the last word.”
I laid the phone on my mattress, next to my ear and mouth. “Are we at the point yet where I get blamed for this conversation lasting more than thirty seconds? Or do I still have that to look forward to?”
“No, I’m hanging up,” she said. “I wanted to say for the record that you’re completely wrong about us. But that’s all. So. I’m going to hang up.”
“OK, then. Good-bye.”
But she could never hang up, and I could never bear to do it for her.
“I’m not blaming you,” she said. “You did consume my youth and then abandon me, but I know you’re not responsible for my happiness out here, although in fact I’m having a good time and things are going pretty well, unbelievable as it may sound to a person who considers me, quote, ‘unequipped’ to deal with the, quote, ‘real world.’”
“‘Consumed my youth and then abandoned me,’” I quoted back. “But this is not a provocation. You just wanted to leave a thirty-second message.”
“Which I would have done! But you reacted—”
“I reacted, Anabel — do I need to point this out? I reacted to your picking up a telephone and dialing my number.”
“Right, I know, because I’m so needy. Right? I’m so pathetically needy.”
I couldn’t have named one instant of happiness or ease from our previous togetherness binge, four weeks earlier. I emerged from these binges feeling bruised and harrowed, with worrisome bomb craters in my memory but also a vague, sick craving for a do-over.
“Look,” I said. “Do you want to get together? Do you want me to come out? Is that why you called?”
“No! I do not want to get together! I want to hang up the phone if you would please just let me!”
“Usually, in the past, though, when you’ve called,” I said, “you’ve started out saying you didn’t want to get together, and then, after a couple of hours on the phone, it’s come out that you did actually, all along, underneath, want to get together.”