BRUCE: I work for the Department of the Interior, and my wife is proud of me. How pathetic. You know, Lynne, this is some very nice Scotch you have here, but I am drunk. And no one is fun when they’re drunk. My son is due in four months, and I work for the Department of the Interior. I am a man he will come to admire, not for what I did, but for what I wanted to do. I have to use the john.
LYNNE (standing): There’s one down the hall.
BRUCE (sniveling): A documentarian cries. Okay? He cries. This is me crying.
“Mute one.” And the room was silent but for the snuffles of the documentarian, who rallied and said, “How did you get so rich? How does it happen? Did you inherit? What do you do? What does your husband do? Is there something for me to learn here?”
She appeared to depress a button under the coffee table. The parted wall reunited. Not one of the paintings was askew for it.
She called for Martin and said, “Make Mr. Bollinger some tea and bring it to the green room, where he will be resting.”
“I don’t want to rest.”
“Don’t worry. And don’t despair. Life sometimes offers up solutions when you least expect them.”
Bruce could not control the slack of his lips, but some part of him smiled, and later, ensconced in a guest room that was all green, he crawled into a bed, thinking: A grant! This incredibly odd, rich woman is going to give me a grant. The hours passed; he slept through them all.
ESME SAID, “Martin, just look at this.”
He looked. And what he saw sacked his self-esteem for the year. It had taken him months to perfect the anchoring system of her face. So much trial and error, but in the end, it held. She’d worn it nine times. It had even survived exposure to wafts of sweat and BO in a gym carnival. So why today? Her left cheekbone had mutinied. It was actually falling away from her face. And her nose — my God. It was released from the bridge and tilting floorward.
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say: Esme, I am sorry. This will never happen again.” She began to laugh. “Can you imagine what Bruce must have thought? Good thing he was drunk. Good thing, for me—” She looked at Martin with reproach. “Get him home, okay?”
“I’ll do that now.”
“You’ll need the sleds. For them both, I think.”
Martin nodded and left, but at the door, Esme said, “Be careful.” It was cold out — the wind panned across the fields in great sheets — and Esme felt for Bruce and Rita. A couple expecting a child. She’d been part of such a couple once, and she remembered its pleasures. But also the ruination that came before and after and, in this arrangement of feeling: a reminder that nothing is ever as it seems.
On TV: the Great Hall. The meeting was long over, though the room was half-full. If she rewound tape of its highlights, she would have heard about weaponry and nation-states and living as one in a socialist community severed from the body elected. How was it Thurlow couldn’t prune from his ranks people who believed in stuff like this?
On another TV: Ida reading under the covers with a flashlight. Esme considered paying her a visit. She wouldn’t be home from school forever. Plus, no child should be up this late. Why was Ida still up? Esme frowned. Whatever the reason, it was, she feared, just the open eyes of anxiety atop a body of trauma nine years long.
She turned off the monitor. If she tried to comfort her daughter, she might end up exposing herself instead. Since Thurlow, she had not once turned on anyone with a look that might reveal the effluvia of her heart. Its overflow. The puffery of loss and guilt acquired in the span of her time on this earth. She worried now that for having waited so long she might turn that look on Ida, on her little child, and then what?
She just did not have a frame of reference for the happy stuff of intimacy, and it had been many years since she had tried. She’d been on her own since eighteen, though more properly thirteen, which was when her brother had an accident that left her emotionally abandoned and, in essence, without family. Though in the last couple of weeks, that phrase—without family—had succumbed her to variations of loss that shamed what she’d associated with the concept before.
Her brother had been a surfer, world-class, and had trained every day. Their parents drove them to the beach — mornings before school and on the weekends — because when there’s manifest talent condensed in only one child, you spend all your time and money on that child and hope the other one knows you love her anyway. They were only one year apart.
His friends were surfers, too, a little older, and one day the eldest, who was fifteen, got fresh with Esme behind a shed of garbage cans, she gathering fish bones for a spell she wanted to try that night — Spirit of distaff and fertility, make my breasts grow now! — and he asking if she wanted to see something and maybe to touch something, and, wouldn’t you know it, she kind of did. At first she was shy, but she cottoned to it pretty quick. So did he, since he ejaculated on her bathing suit in seconds. Next thing, she was back to the fish bones when her brother showed up, taking her by the wrist and saying, “Ez, don’t be stupid, we are assholes,” and her thinking he was jealous because his friend liked her more than him. Probably, she said as much. Probably, he was hurt.
An hour later, they were in the hospital. The kid who saw him go down said he didn’t know, just that Chris seemed distracted. Took a bad part of the wave, but still, there was no way to know there was a sheet of fiberglass down there and that Chris would crack his head. Or that he’d stay under for the extra seconds that are the difference between relief, brain damage, and coma. The doctors did not bullshit around. Chris was indeed in a coma and, barring a miracle, would never come out.
In the twenty-four years he slept, Esme saw him six times, all in the first six months. Her parents? Maybe they saw him once. Was she to blame for what had happened to him? In a word: yes.
A tear dribbled down her cheek and settled at the base of her throat. People liked to say the greatest distance on earth was between your head and heart. And say it as if this distance were a problem. What problem? Esme would have been glad not to know anything of what went on down there. Because once in a while, a feeling would cover the distance, usually while she was on the job and stretched thin on emotional resources, so that when she got home: there it was, a feeling on her mind. Nine times out of ten, this feeling was about Ida, and the feeling said: You are ruining her life. And then she could not breathe. And the feeling, in triumph for having made it this far, would parade about her head, crush what forces she deployed against it, and lord over the place until another job came in. Which meant that, while she liked to think she was saving lives, it was really the job that saved her.
And so: Do not think; work. This was not work but rescue.
Olgo Panjabi, 2315 hrs: Nodding off in an armchair. Palm concealing his face because only old men nodded off in their chairs. He did not want Kay to come home to a drooling, narcoleptic husband. It was after eleven, and she was out. He did not know where. She had not returned his calls. She had not left a note. Still, he refused to worry. If he worried, he would call Erin, and that was a no-no. On the other hand, if he worried, it meant he still thought there was a chance Kay had been abducted, hurt, lost, instead of on a date. If that was what one called such a thing at her age. Could one still date after fifty? Of course. Every night with her had felt like a date, down to the weakness in his knees when she’d come out of the bathroom wearing a low-cut dress or black sheer stockings. He had always loved her legs. Lean and beautiful, and willing to part for him, always. They had had a wondrously sensual life together. He could not swear his experience had been a cut above the rest, but he guessed as much, given what people said about marriage over time.