The Unfortunates (7 page)
* * *
“You ready now?” Victor says, nodding toward the empty cup in the sink. 3D pants around and collapses on his mat, his legs caked in mud. He’s protecting something under his paws.
“He’s destroyed it. You’ll see.” Victor gently extracts 3D’s bounty. The stick, chewed to pulp.
When Iris asked around town, Victor’s was the first name given. All his services were praised: personal training, certified massage, dog walking, meal preparation, hairdressing, property maintenance. She hired him Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays for the first three services, as she likes the daily ritual of cooking and has no interest in hair. There’s already a gardener, a woman named Fay, who appeared the week they moved to Somner’s Rest, in a blue chambray button-down and red lipstick. Sent by CeCe, who’d said of Iris, “She isn’t a gardener, she’s a bartender!” Fay and her fleet of assistants had spread out over the lawn like a search-and-rescue team, installing minimalist, low-maintenance clumps of shrubbery and grasses that hardly needed tending.
“Have you seen the pile of sticks 3D’s made under the tree out front?”
“He’s a problem hoarder,” Victor says.
She laughs. 3D tips onto his back, exposing the buttercup swirl in his armpits. “He isn’t much for pride.” Victor nods. “Exactly what I’ve been discussing with him all morning.”
She excuses herself and returns wrapped in a sheet. Victor sets up the massage table. She hops up and closes her eyes. She becomes aware of the starlings singing in the rustling leaves at the window, a car passing in the distance, 3D’s blubbery sigh. Victor is causing pain to her shoulder she trusts is therapeutic. She tells herself quiet between friends is good. A sign they are real friends, not afraid to be peaceful together.
“Don’t your hands get tired?”
“In the beginning, but not anymore.” He lifts her left leg and shakes it.
“Did you hear the rain last night? You saved me from the worst dream.”
“Supposed to rain all week.” His thumbs jam into her spine, but he doesn’t ask about her dream.
“Rain makes me miss smoking,” she ventures, with a sigh.
“Smoking’s the best. After-rain smoking is the best of the best. It’s the humidity in the tobacco. You never heard me say that. I’m a trainer. But we have our memories. When did you quit?”
“Right before I met George. More or less.”
“Convenient.” He pounds the back of her thigh.
“George’s mother’s probably keeps me from picking it back up. The look she’d give me.”
“Scared by the in-laws.”
“What do you know from in-laws?”
“I had a wife,” he says, surprising her, working the back of her neck. “Isabel. But I never got to know her family. New Zealand, too far. You liking the Davis? Keeping you off the streets?”
“The what?” He’s changing the subject. The book he loaned her,
The Bluest Ribbon
. She turns and raises her face so it’s not smashed against the table. “I like it okay. Maybe I missed something, but nothing’s actually happening, right? I mean, what’s her name is all—‘I love this one, no I love that one.’ But all she’s doing is sitting on a ship and staring out to sea? Having a rough think? Both guys are basically assholes and they aren’t even on the ship with her? And it’s a two-year voyage? And it seems, I’m not sure, like she might already be dead? Does anything happen?”
“Yeah, something happens.”
“Like, she gets out of her chair and walks over to the other side of the boat?”
“No, no, she has to choose! Dax-Fabian or Piers! What a choice! Or, she doesn’t choose. I see how you almost tricked me there. I’m not telling. Maybe she can’t decide. Then life will decide something for her. That usually doesn’t turn out well.”
Iris doesn’t like
The Bluest Ribbon
. Every time she wades forward a page, it pushes her back. But is it her fault or the book’s? Then it’s out of her hands—upstairs when she’s down, inside when she’s out. The last time she looked, she hadn’t been able to find it. She’s hardly opened a book the last three years. When Victor pressed this one into her hands, its dreamy cover of a woman looking out over ocean waves dissolving into blue ribbons, she accepted it anxiously and hopefully, as it dared out of memory her old love, the pleasure of other people’s thoughts.
“How about the part where the baby falls over the rail, into the ocean?” Victor asks. “How long does that bassinet take to sink—ten pages! Terrible, didn’t you love it?”
“But that was so upsetting!”
“It’s a book. The more upsetting the better.”
Instantly she knows it’s true, but why she can’t quite grasp. The way he says it makes it sound like something everybody knows. She’d felt it in the dark lecture hall as she listened to the professor in her square of light, but she’d never had the words for how something that was upsetting doubled back and became something else, how this seemed to be what people called art. When she first got to know George, she imagined they’d have conversations about ideas the way the undergraduates did, that their kind of talk, broad and deep and open-ended, was the prize of every college degree, that the door to George’s apartment in Washington Square would be another door into this kind of life. But George was happy talking of nothing beyond the chalk outline of their day. He owns and seems to have read a lot of books. But she’s only seen him read the news, or about opera. When he does begin a book, she soon finds him asleep. And his music—this belongs to him alone. Maybe his apartment should have tipped her off—a cool, professionally decorated bachelor’s co-op with buttoned-black-leather-and-steel-framed seating, untouched gym equipment, solar blinds, a pointy blue-glass sculpture by the door, a massive opera-churning stereo system, and a trio of black-slashed prints—Franz Kline, she learned—and the hunter-green bedding a surprising number of straight men, when shopping alone, thought was the only color they were allowed to buy. But she said to herself, some people just don’t know how to make a place nice. She grew busy with early love, and later with what it meant to become a Somner, and forgot that his lack of curiosity had disappointed her; later still, when she was reminded of it, she scuffed it away again, best she could. When Victor gave her the book, she was surprised. She didn’t think he was the reading type. She didn’t think he thought
she
was the reading type.
“We need books,” Victor says now, “because we are all, in the private kingdoms of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend.”
“That’s beautiful.” But how, she wants to ask, can books be good friends and good when they are upsetting? Who wants upsetting friends?
“Tell me that scene right after they get off the ship and she’s all ‘Where’s my hat!’ didn’t kill you. And when—”
“Stop, I haven’t read that far! Victor, I might have lost it. I’m so sorry! If I can’t find it, I’ll get you a new one. I want to finish it.”
“You’ve been feeling guilty this whole time? It’s only a book. Put it out of your head. Hey, I saw the Vargas place is up for sale. Great house. You doing that one?”
“Our agency, but not my listing. I’m all condos. I’m up to my elbows in condos. Or, I will be in a month or so. They’re setting me up on a development. But I’m part-time. I help the other agents, mostly. Which is, whatever. You’re being nice by changing the subject.”
A high, whistling lamentation rises from under the table.
“Don’t worry, I promise. Look, you’ve got 3D worried too.” Together they comfort the dog.
“All I know about real estate,” Victor says, “is that
sun-drenched
means ‘small.’ Why does
sun-drenched
mean ‘small’?”
“Hmm, let’s think. Maybe because the windows are so close together the sun reaches all the way in, all day long?”
A few months before the wedding, CeCe and her friend Nellie Turner—of the Turner Group, LLC, where Iris is employed—encouraged her toward this line of work after she told George she would apply for a hostess job one of the local restaurants was advertising. Over iced tea on CeCe’s veranda, they suggested that if she wanted an activity, residential sales, rentals to start, might be more appropriate. A career, and only as much of a career as one liked. Nellie spoke about the historical legacy of the houses in and around town and implied the business of finding people homes was both feminist and feminine, a feminism split down to smaller and softer domestic units, atomized to the prettiness of drawer pulls and doorknobs, finials and joists, and even as Iris found this argument depressingly retrograde, she agreed to give real estate a try.
“My problem is,” she says to Victor, “I imagine every house being my home. Even the sun-drenched shoeboxes. I fall in love and then they’re gone.”
“Doesn’t that make you a good agent? When you pitch it, you mean it?”
“You’d think. But no, they said I don’t have the right tone. ‘Too much enthusiasm doesn’t project discernment,’ that’s how they said it.”
“Who are you getting your advice from, Nell Turner? The Duchess?”
“The Duchess? My mother-in-law?”
“You haven’t heard? Whoops.”
“I love it. You like not smoking?”
“I do. Even though it makes me sad.”
“You don’t want the old life,” she says, “but you miss it anyway.”
“Is that what we’re talking about? Smoking? Let’s cheer up. Tell me a bad joke. Make it better than last time.”
“Okay. I bought a box of animal crackers. It said, ‘Do not eat if seal is broken.’”
“That’s awful.” Victor’s slim, tattooed forearm is pressed against her spine. His tattoo, a mountain lion—or is it a dog?—nobly astride the back of a giant shrimp, together riding the crest of a wave.
“Now you tell me a joke.”
“I can never remember jokes. I’m thinking, I’m thinking!”
“I
am
sorry I lost your book.”
“I have one! A dentist, a priest, and a hangman go to a gun show. Turn over please.”
“A dentist, a priest, and a hangman.”
“They get to the firing range. They have AK-47s. They stand side by side and the priest says, ‘Dentist, how long has it been since you—’ Shit, I can’t remember. No it’s—no. It goes something, something, something, alligator. Forget it.”
They laugh, but an unexpected and urgent worry for her mother-in-law springs up in her chest. It has the same texture as the worry of her dream.
After dinner with his mother in the dining room—“The napkins are maroon,” she’d said, with a quiet and sage disgust, as if their color foretold all humanity’s pending griefs—George spent the night at a nearby hotel. He’d promised to return to Oak Park for breakfast and goodbyes and to make sure there was nothing more he needed to request in person on her behalf—the quality of the soundproofing between rooms, for example, she’d need the night’s sleep to discover. But alone at the hotel, with the television chattering in the cabinet and the curtains pulled, as the evening wore on, a vital nervousness began to net his thoughts. So much to be done, and none of it in that gray room! Well past midnight, he called the car service and asked them to pick him up as soon as they found a man to drive out to him; yes, extra for the distance and the hour. How could he stay a moment more? She doesn’t need him. He’ll be back soon enough. She’s already having a good time, outfoxing the staff, inventing demands. That routine, rolling into the closet. As he’d followed her down the hall, he’d experienced an unfamiliar, mixed-up feeling. But then he entered the closet and she said, “Oh, it’s only you.” And so at 4:00 a.m. he stole across the dim lobby and slid into the backseat of the car. Fast to cover the miles, fast back to life. Still, five hours on the road, two in asphyxiating traffic with the city just out of view! At last, the car turns onto the George Washington Bridge and Manhattan appears in the weak early sun across the wide churn of the Hudson. Tuesday morning. He’ll go straight to work, put in an appearance, ensure everything is clanking along on schedule and then attend to his libretto. From the backseat of the car, with the partition to the driver closed so the air-conditioning circulates an optimally tight flow around him, the skyline is stalagmite, elemental, each building a slice edge of steel. Looking at the city from the bridge, it’s hard to believe anyone’s
in
there. How nice, he thinks, the city would be if the streets were empty. To slide through gray midtown without seeing another soul, without hearing a sound but the click of the traffic lights. The car plunges into the stink and speed of summer in New York. They pass through neighborhoods where George would variously be the wrong kind of man—West Harlem, the Upper West Side. He looks away, to the yellow legal pad on the leather seat beside him. He takes it up and balances it on his knee and begins to write.
UH crossing Federation Europa in search of exiled leader of Climate Refugees, rumored hiding in principality formerly known as France. Abandoned court interior. Hall of mirrors—broken! UH sits at a table with Agent X, ambassador to the EAST. Table with skinned animals, candle. UH & X study large map.
George’s vision is of a future where rain falls only in a thin, temperate band around the world; the rest is famine and fire. He’s still impressed with the originality of his story, its moral clarity. But he can’t quite get X and UH’s duet right. UH must convince X that he is not the marauder—Murderer! Rapist!—the queen’s regime has, upon his escape, broadcasted him to be. The car curves under the brownstone arches of Central Park, past a group on horseback trotting a dirt path, down the Upper East Side with its green awnings and pristine esplanades. They pass the John Stepney Somner Library, a gray, French-neoclassical hulk on the corner of Fifth and Seventy-Eighth. Incredible, always, to think his mother lived there as a girl. An only child, thirty-seven rooms. The smooth marble steps up to the columned entrance, under a sculpture-nestled pediment: her front door. Wrought-iron balconies girding the upper stories. Now it’s a museum and an archive, exhibiting the history of music, open to the public. No coincidence his love of opera. It’s deep in his young education, in his genes—when John Stepney Somner, George’s great-grandfather, commissioned the residence in 1911, moving the family uptown from lower Fifth Avenue, half the downstairs was dedicated to music. Among the libraries and drawing rooms and gallery and dining rooms there was a music room—in honor of his wife, Fanny, an accomplished pianist—and a formal recital room with murals depicting the interior of La Fenice in the 1830s. John Stepney, too bad for him, lived only a year in his elegant fortress, killed by cirrhosis in 1913; when Fanny died fifteen years later, CeCe’s father inherited the house. By the time CeCe was out of school, Edward George—Georgie—and his third wife (the marriage to CeCe’s mother being his second and least discussed) had moved to less drafty accommodations nearby and dedicated John’s House, as the family called it, to the public.