The Face Thief (18 page)

Dark-wood walls, a faint sour smell of furniture polish and a warm overlay of cooking. She brought him through the sunny kitchen, still redolent of breakfast, and into an adjoining study where a laptop lay on a desk.

“Computer,” she said simply. Bending over it, she opened the case and booted it up. It pinged loudly, and they both started. “Okay?” she said.

“Mmm,” Potash said, noncommittal.

She was bent over the keyboard, still standing, while with light, deft taps of the fingers she punched in her user name and password, when Potash’s phone trilled. He was going to ignore it, but on instinct, allowed himself a peek. It was his mother, he saw.

Any other time, he would have let it ring through. But this was the morning of her first day home from the hospital, and the mortality-flavor of the moment was uppermost in his mind.

Keeping his eyes riveted on the screen, he moved the phone carefully to his ear.

“Mom?”

“Where are you?” was her hello.

“I’m not far, Mom, and should be home soon. How are you, and how”—he slipped the card of the home health aide out of his pocket—“is Luz?”

“Luz has no idea of what the word ‘poached’ is. Can you imagine?”

Potash, despite the gravity of the moment, had to smile.

“Mom,” he said, “if poached eggs are the only problem you’re having, then I know that things can’t be that bad overall.”

“There you’re wrong,” said his mother, but he could hear the smile in her voice as well.

The
New York Times
page had now appeared on the screen. Margot was punching numbers rapidly, and the Chase Manhattan home page appeared. She input her user name and password and hit the log-in.

“John,” his mother was saying, “it’s a good morning to be alive. Your brother is coming over soon, and it would be wonderful if you were here as well, instead of running off on some crazy early morning errand. Where are you again, dear?”

Margot was standing up and inclining her head toward the open door of the nearby bathroom, her index finger raised as in “one minute.”

The rolling bag was parked at his feet. It was 8:21 in the morning. Potash nodded gravely.

“At someone’s house on an errand,” he said. “I won’t be long.”

Margot clopped the ten feet down the hall and shut the door. Potash bent toward the screen.

“You know,” his mother said, “ever since my little stay in the hospital I feel like all I wanna do is spend time with my sons.”

A fresh wave of guilt for his move to California crashed over him, but he said only, “I think your sons feel the same way, Mom. For my part, I’ve gotta head back to Calfornia tomorrow, but I’ll be returning soon. I mean really soon. And there’s always the phone.”

“Yes,” she said, as he pressed the onscreen button for “checking.” The hall toilet flushed. “There is always that,” she added. There was then a silence on the phone, interrupted, faintly, by a barrage of broken, fluting English such as that spoken by a native Spanish-language speaker.

“No,” he heard his mother say, “in the water, Miss, in the hot water,” and then in a tone of exasperated confidence, to Potash: “Can I tell you something?” He thought he knew what was coming but said obligingly, “What?”

“I just hate having strangers in the house, that’s all.”

“It’s only temporary, Mom.”

“Is it? But how can you be sure?”

“Because you’re going to get better, is how.”

Now they were on familiar ground. Potash had already discovered that he was incapable of admitting Death into the picture. Perhaps this was why he’d married a woman whose radiant positivity seemed to outshine his own morbid inclinations. “You’re slowly going to get your strength back, Mom,” he said, “and then you’re going to outlive all of us!”

This was the same phrase he’d used in his father’s declining years. It was as threadbare as the old T-shirts of his father’s, worn nearly to transparency. But he couldn’t help himself.

“Come home, John,” she said in a soft voice.

“I will,” he said, and then a rush of alertness at the extended silence around him in the house prickled the hairs on the back of his neck. “Mom, I gotta go!” he said, and hung up on her in the middle of gabbing something indignant, and trotted the few steps down the hall to the bathroom door.

“Margot,” he said loudly. The silence that met his utterance was like swallowing something cold and feeling it go slowly all the way down.

“Margot?” He rattled the handle of the door, and then called her name louder, “Margot?”

In the ongoing silence, the wave of rage that had been idling offshore for days suddenly stood up and swept forward. Lowering his head, he backed up a few feet and with a running start and putting his shoulder into it, smashed the thin pine door right off its hinges.

The bathroom was empty. The tiles and the tub were spotless, but on one wall, the window had been jimmied open. Potash, sinking to his knees in the antiseptic white confines that smelled faintly of citrus and the bracing terpenes of shower products, began brokenly to weep.

Chapter Thirty-Six

G
lynis’s arrival home was preceded by a lone e-mail that in its entirety read, “I’m returning tomorrow.”

Having passed an anxious twenty-four hours unsuccessfully disguised to himself as a husband with nothing particular on his mind, Lawrence was sitting reading in the living room the next afternoon when he heard the low chuckle of the key in the lock. He shot to his feet, unnecessarily brushing lint off his pantlegs as he crossed the living room floor. But before he could get to the door she had opened it and taken a step forward into the room, her travel bag behind her.

“Hi,” she said calmly.

“Glyn.” He reached forward to hug her, but she only partially accepted the embrace, stiffening while he clasped her to him and then pulling back to pivot slowly in place while saying, “Wow, the place looks . . . nice.”

“It should look nice. I worked at it.”

“I can tell.”

She’d been gone only five days and yet she was more put-together, sharper, more composed than he expected. Clearly she hadn’t passed her time—as on the previous two marital furloughs—shedding tears.

“You bought flowers?” she said.

“Yes, jonquils.”

“I’m touched, and migod, the windows too?”

“That’s right,” he was nodding, “and the crawl space as well.”

“
The crawl space?
What’s got into you, Lawrence?”

“Hey, I had to do something.” He smiled as he shrugged his shoulders. “A hundred years ago I might have torn my garments. In this case, I just cleaned the place.”

“I should go away more often,” she said, and laughed.

“And you?” he asked.

“Me?”

“What penance did
you
perform?”

He was trying for humor himself, but she only peered through the window out at the garden a long moment and said, “God, there’s nothing like being away to help remember how lovely this house is.”

“Yes,” he said.

She swiveled her face slowly back to his. After his last “slippage” of many years earlier, they’d seen a marriage counselor who had spoken of the need for “individuation” in the partners in a long-term marriage. Psychic unity, if it was to survive, apparently needed regular breaks of breathing room. But all he wanted, passionately at the moment, was to kiss and hug her.

“What did I do?” she asked. “Well, Marley is a wonderful woman, but she runs with a pretty fast crowd.”

“So I gather,” he said. “And you ran along with them?”

“After a fashion,” she said.

“What’s that mean?”

“Lawrence?”

“Yes, Glyn.”

“This is not the time for that conversation.”

“Right. Would you like something, a tea or anything?” he asked.

“No, I’m fine.”

He felt vaguely a fool for having overshot the natural rhythm of their chat, but she was smiling at him.

“You didn’t notice,” she said.

“Didn’t notice . . . what?”

She touched her hair and he saw it had been cut and highlighted.

“Of course!” he cried, with overemphasis. “And it looks lovely.”

“Do you think so? I was afraid it was too short.”

“No, not at all. It makes you look . . . French?”

“Like those dancers we saw at the Crazy Horse club in Paris.”

“Well, you do have the legs for it,” he said, laughing.

“Did you see the girl while I was gone?”

The words seemed to explode in the air off the side of his head and momentarily deafen him. Slowly he put his hands up on either side of his head and held them there, as if measuring the size of his surprise.

“Okay, let’s begin with this, first,” he said in his professionally calm voice. “The first thing is, you’re entitled to be disappointed in me. I understand that now and want you to know. What I did was a silly, stupid no-account thing at bottom, but of course you’re sensitive after our . . . past.”

“But did you?”

“What?”

“See the girl.”

He dropped his hands back to his sides. Alone in the two days since his dinner with Margot, he’d decided that when this moment came, he would lie about it, as repugnant as that was to him. He would lie about it because to explain what he’d done would be impossible.

“Of course not.”

“I see.”

“But I can assure you,” he said, “that she won’t be a problem in our lives anymore.”

“I thought you said you didn’t see her.”

“I didn’t.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“Glynis.”

“Yes.”

“Relax.”

“I’m just saying you seem awfully sure about the fate of someone you’ve had nothing to do with.”

“Do we really want to do this?” he asked, “now, the very first moment you’re back?”

But instead of responding directly, she cast her eyes in another circuit around the house.

“Thanks for keeping everything so tidy while I was away,” she said, leaving Lawrence with the feeling they’d been slammed, infuriatingly, all the way back to exactly where they’d been before she’d left. She was regarding him for a moment with a faint, indecipherable smile, and then she turned and walked up the stairs with her cart bumping after her. Though he wanted to, he knew better than to call her back.

That night, he cooked chicken Djibouti. Having perfected it in her absence, he adjusted the spice mix to a milder heat for her, and from a culinary point of view it went over wonderfully. But the exotic entrée seemed only to underline their domestic disconnect. In the past, after spats, they had often taxied along commonplaces for a few hours or a day before lifting back up into the air of their accustomed affection for each other. But on this night their marriage felt to Lawrence like a frightened animal, a humpbacked, hissing cat stuck in a tree.

In bed afterward, she was friendly but somewhat distant. Lovemaking, which especially since their retreat of sexual yoga he believed the ultimate reboot of a relationship, was now clearly off-limits. But even sleeping next to her under the circumstances felt restorative and a small step toward eventual reconciliation. The next morning he was up early, determined to have a good day.

Dotingly, he served her breakfast in bed, having made her pancakes with blueberries drenched in maple syrup. She was touched by the gesture, and though they hadn’t made love, the house itself, the warm, accustomed routines and the sheer beauty of the surroundings were working on her, he could tell. Her face was plumped and smooth from a good night’s sleep and she reached out while they ate and touched his hand with hers and kept it there. They would have a bracingly candid conversation soon, he was sure, and be that much closer to a return to the fullness of previous.

As to the question, What had finally happened with the girl—well, what did it matter? He kissed his wife’s hand and then got up to make her a coffee. Five minutes later, Lawrence was clumping back out to the breakfast nook in his Crocs, steaming cup in hand, bending forward in the relieved certainty of being at last back on solid ground.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

A
s soon as she hit the dirt outside the bathroom window, she ran as fast as she could to the nearest cross street, where she almost immediately caught a cab. She gave the driver directions and shut her eyes against the sick, spilling feeling in her head while the car seemed to leap, light as a locust, across the Queensboro Bridge and into Midtown Manhattan.

She asked the cabbie to stop at a store where she could buy a small rolling bag. Not long after, the cab was pulling up to her destination near Herald Square. She got out gingerly, the chased bronze doors of the bank opened before her like two tall sentries, and she stepped into an elevator that drew her swiftly upward. The sudden shift of altitude worsened her queasiness, but she recovered in time to step out of the elevator as it hissed open and present her credentials to the woman at the desk. She was then escorted by a man wearing an official blue blazer of a sort to a room bare save for a green lamp on a heavy lacquered wooden table. She sat down and folded her hands on the table, waiting until the man returned and placed before her the grey rectangular shape of her safety-deposit box.

The night before, lying in bed in Dan France’s house after dinner, she’d watched as a starburst of recollection, widening outward, slowly lit up a landscape of memory. Down the center of that memory there poured a small river, carrying her attention forward. The water wrinkled a little bit as it picked up speed along the widening part of the river and then it gathered mass and power as it poured off an outcropping and fell thundering against the truth.

The truth was now sitting two feet from her face. Reaching forward and opening the safety-deposit box, she found what she was looking for: more than a million dollars in nontraceable Guatemalan government bearer’s bonds, redeemable at nearly any bank in the world, along with a credit card, a phone, and a passport. The sound wrenched from her diaphragm was a feral moan of joy.

At her request, the cab had remained waiting downstairs. With the contents of the safety-deposit box zipped securely into her rolling bag, she asked the driver, a Sikh by the name of Jai Dev, to head straight to Kennedy Airport. He zoomed away with a speed that gave her that nauseous feeling in her head again, and she rapped on the partition, telling him to slow down, and then sank back into her seat, and braced a hand over her eyes. In her head was a branching candelabra of European cities inhabited by clusters of the black-clad girlfriends from college, with whom occasionally she was still in touch. Successfully transplanted, they were now bringing up children in foreign languages. Beyond them, vast, beautiful belts of beachside homes striped the coasts of islands in the chain of the Dutch Antilles and the British Virgin Islands, where wealthy men had once upon a time flown her for extended dalliances. Somewhere, in one of those places, or at least a dozen others, a special, unmolested peace was waiting. The soft pull of that peace was already in the air and coming toward her. It was sized to fit her exactly and tricked out with all the correct details. The future and the past were connected by an infinitely long string, and as one yanked shut, the other slammed open.

And then, not long after, they were pulling up to the airport.