The Face Thief (19 page)

Chapter Thirty-Eight

T
he whole ride back to California from New York on the red-eye, Potash was unable to sleep, and awake in the dark, he found himself screening sad confessional scenarios in his head. He saw his wife and himself on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, with the harp-shaped waves hissing, and the birds screaming, while they held hands across a tablecloth strewn with figs, prosciutto, and baguette crusts, and he whispered the words. “Honey, we’re broke.” Or facing each other over a glass of wine, in a restaurant with long views of vineyards, as he gave a winsome smile, preemptively summoning tenderness from her, before saying, “I’m afraid I’ve got something to tell you.”

And watched as the light died slowly away from her face.

A rich literature existed of the impact of sudden bankruptcy on marriages. Potash, as he ate his inflight meal of stringy beef and lukewarm rice, mentally reviewed the literature. He knew that the statistics gave him only a 50 percent chance of getting through the upcoming months, undivorced. He knew that educated opinion concurred nearly unanimously on the gravity of the situation. And he knew as well that one educated opinion in particular begged to differ. The day before, when he returned to her house from his futile mission in Queens, his mother had never looked frailer, nor more transparent, nor more already halfway to the next world. But that didn’t stop her from greeting him with the verbal equivalent of a shot across the bow.

“Money,” she said flatly, as he stood in the doorway.

“Money?” asked Potash, who having first canvassed Margot’s neighborhood on foot and then fruitlessly in his car, now had a headache beginning at the very base of his spine.

“Yes, money,” she said. “I’m here to tell you it doesn’t matter.”

He made a sound somewhere between a cough and a groan.

“Seriously, John. What happened in the hospital made one thing veeeery clear. You, son, are lucky.”

She patted the couch next to her for him to sit down.

“Lucky,” he said, crossing the room and lowering himself slowly down to the cushions, “is not how I feel at the moment.”

She smiled at him coquettishly. “You’re lucky because you have true love, John. And how many people have that, ever? Do you think your father and I had that? No, we did not.”

“This is all very nice to hear, but really—”

“Romance”—she looked over his head and into the middle distance where the ancient memories were stored—“wasn’t on the menu for Dad and me. Oh, a little bit maybe, at the very beginning. After all, there’s got to be some reason to get together. But life swept in pretty quickly and put out those flames, oh yes it did. A stern teacher, life. And it keeps repeating the same lessons till you cry uncle.”

“Mom,” he said.

Tremendously canny, she fixed him with her smoky green eyes. “A brightness has gone from the world,” she said, “and I don’t think that’s just me being old. Look around. The wars, the bad faith, the sense of menace like a disease—I’m happy I’m not a young person today. But you’ve got a great marriage, John. That’s my point. A marriage like that you don’t walk away from just because you lost your dough. Especially in this day and age.”

“Thank you,” he said miserably, “for the advice.”

“You’re welcome.” She sat back up straight. “And now, if you don’t mind me butting in, you should call her and tell her everything.”

“
What?
” he cried.

“Yes.” She was nodding in that same knowing way that had dependably infuriated him as a child. “She’ll be hurt, she’ll be disappointed, maybe she’ll cry. No, she
will
cry, poor thing. Anabella’s like that. She feels things strongly. But then she’ll get over it.”

“Are you really,” he said in a voice of suppressed fury, “telling me what to do with my own wife?”

“And why not?” She shrugged, utterly indifferent to his anger.

His mother was eighty-seven years old. In a familiar movement of feeling, he drew the displeasure at her down, down, through the bottommost point of his belly, where it dissolved as warmth. Then he looked up, put his hands on the pointy twists of her shoulders where the bones ended, and with a certain difficulty, smiled.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said.

“No, I
am
right.”

“Well, there’s no denying I screwed up royally, that’s for sure.”

“Who hasn’t? What’s important is what you do now, post-mess, John.”

“Agreed,” he said.

“Good,” she said. But this last bit of jaunty buoyancy with her eldest son had evidently cost her, because she suddenly made a small, sour crimp of the lips as if tasting bad food, and her eyelids lowered over her eyes. After a moment of panic, he realized that she had simply fallen asleep.

The warping sound of the jet engines changed pitch, and Potash, waking up out of a fitful sleep as they began making their descent to San Francisco International Airport, girded himself afresh. He never had made that call to Anabella, and his reckoning with her still lay a few hours ahead of him. Meanwhile they were dropping through the immensity of dawn skies toward the tiny strip of runway, and not long after, he was exiting the plane into the slightly more humid, saturated air of the West Coast. He passed through the security checkpoint back into the concourse where a row of drivers with shakily lettered signs held at their chests stood as if posing for mug shots. His step quickening, he was about to get on the mobile walkway to the parking garage when he suddenly stopped, amazed. About fifty feet away, unseeing, her head inclined into a cell phone, was his wife.

“Anabella?” he yelled, but in the roaring concourse she couldn’t hear him. He began walking rapidly toward her, smiling despite everything because, bankruptcy or no, the sight of her fresh, familiar face in the chilly anonymity of the airport gave him a charge of pleasure. But when she raised her eyes to his she communicated to him a bolt of such sincere sadness that it actually caused his stride to falter as he drew up to her, kissed her quickly on the lips, and then pulled back, brow furrowing, his hands on her elbows.

“But what are you—?”

“Not good,” she interrupted him. And then in a hoarse voice, “Oh, I wish I wasn’t here for this, but your mother died, John. Not long after you left, apparently. Sweetheart, I’m just so sorry.”

The grief arrived instantly, centered in his body. While his mind was still processing the conversation, his abdomen had already clenched tight and begun driving hard, racking sobs through his throat. These continued violently as his wife held him and repeated his name, kissing his ears and neck. When the worst of the first flurry had passed, she gave him a clump of tissues, and then led him by the hand—even in extremis, she was organized—to the conveniently nearby airport chapel. After the frenzy of the terminal, the silence of the small, dim carpeted space was absolute. Potash felt himself floating rather than walking over to a nearby riser. They sat down, holding hands, and she began to speak.

“This isn’t only a sad moment,” she said softly, “and I want you to remember that over the next days, John. Your mother left life on her own terms. She knew exactly what she was doing until the very end, and she did it all without pain. The home health aide was very moved. There is such a thing as a good death, and she had one. Really, she left like a goddess.” She began to cry herself. “She was a fierce, very special person, and I’ll miss her.”

Through his chest, which had about it the dull ache of extended shouting, Potash felt the fresh charge of his tears massing, and shut his eyes. He’d been dreading this moment since that afternoon, age nine, when he’d looked out the window of his suburban home and first seen death already stalking the bright insignias of daylight—home, parents, cars, the world. All of that, down to its very last fizzing atoms, would one day go away. Yet now that it had come to pass, his first perception was that the death of his mother was not only sad but weirdly
roomy
somehow. There was space there. Massaging his neck, touching his ears and temples, his wife was pulling him closer, whispering something consoling. But what was consoling him at that moment was only partly the familiar drawling tones of her voice. He was also thinking that in the Bardo or interspace where the recently dead souls loitered while nostalgically looking back over the landscape of their works and days, his mother was not only serene, but probably happy as well. Her role in life, below that sense she gave him of always being in burden to an obscure sorrow, was to protect him from his own foolishness. And wherever she was in her passage to the next world, she was certainly taking satisfaction from the fact that she’d done it yet again. The sale of her house would entirely make up for the loss of his savings.

“Dear Lord,” said Potash, wanting his mother to know this, praying in some way that she did. Did the soul ever grow older? That nine-year-old boy was still looking out of his eyes. Life was deeper, more punishing, more deliciously fraught than that child could have ever imagined, and filled with redemptions in the least likely of places. The towering wave of tears was about to fall, but there was still time for him to bury his face in the fragrant glen of his wife’s neck, and mutter the words “Thank you” out loud. Even better, in the quiet space of the chapel, in the moment before the rest of his life began, there was still time to mean them.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“W
e lie to our spouses, our bosses, our friends, and to ourselves most of all.” Lawrence stared out at the dark, spreading sea of faces and drew a tired breath. “Lying,” he said, “is human nature, alas. It’s as hardwired into us as the gag reflex or the contraction of the pupils of your eyes in bright light.”

There was the familiar soft fluttering of laptop keyboards and of pens scratching paper in the dark.

“The truth, my friends, is that, despite all our so-called psychological sophistication, there still are no hard and fast markers to determine whether or not another person is telling the truth. What we do know,” Lawrence said, “is that the lie cuts you off forever from its recipient. It walls you off in the alternate universe of your falsehood, and whoever you’ve just lied to is a little farther away from you than they were before, and as often as not stuck there permanently. Is this clear?”

He paused. He was breathing hard. Differently from before, he now tended to get exercised on the podium, working himself up, and occasionally, when the mood took him, defensively reeling off lists of statistics. His wife had suggested yoga. He’d begun taking Ativan, nights.

He cleared his throat. “ ‘Every violation of truth is a sort of suicide,’ said a great American named Ralph Waldo Emerson. But he didn’t mean that literally, of course.” He paused. “Or did he?”

He’d spotted her the day before, and though he’d tried, per his new arrangement with himself, to look away, those shining eyes, now picked out of the darkness on his far left, caused a Bump, and no mistake about it. Slowly, for the first time since she’d arrived, she raised her hand.

“Yes, Miss . . .”

“Livia,” she said. Incapable of not noticing, he espied a pair of full breasts, levered into prominence by the action of her raising her arm.

“I think the full quote,” she said, shutting her eyes, “is ‘Every violation of truth is not only a sort of 
suicide
 in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.’ ” The eyes flew open, triumphant. “I’m doing my thesis on Emerson,” she said by way of explanation, smiling.

Lawrence was nodding up and down and applauding with small taps of his hands. “Very good, Livia,” he said softly. “No, I mean
very
good.”

His BlackBerry buzzed. Normally he placed it on silent, but he must have forgotten and set it to vibrate. He ignored it.

“Our culture is running scared,” he said, looking out over the room and doing his best to avoid the girl’s shining face, which had now positioned itself for that beautiful airborne game of catch and volley of glances he knew so well. “Scared,” he said, “in part because of the plague of falsehoods afflicting us from the ground up. Did you know that styles of lying have what academics call a gender bias? That women lie more often to make someone feel good and men to make someone
look
good?” A hum, detaching itself from the audience, rose into the air of the hall. “That high school kids from nonreligious schools cheat significantly less than their more religious counterparts? Or that ninety-five percent of college students say they would lie to get a job.”

His BlackBerry buzzed again and then pinged with a text. He pulled it out, saw that both the call and message were from his wife, and slid it back in his pocket. Ever since what they both referred to as the “crisis,” they’d grown newly delicate and attentive to each other, and the frantic makeup sex which had followed upon her return from Marley had recovered its calm, custodial twice-monthly frequency. Sometimes he felt that, post-crisis, they were watching themselves enact idealized versions of their own lives, a little bit like a couple writing letters to each other while sitting at the dinner table.

“I wanna shift gears,” he said, “to the demo phase of things. In this phase we’ll be getting up close and personal with that part of our body which has the densest, deepest quantity of readable details of all: the human face. To do that we’re gonna need a volunteer from the audience.” A crop of hands shot up, among them Livia’s. He deliberately swiveled his attention from her and chose a heavyset woman with chopped blond hair.

“You, please, if you don’t mind.”

Gratified, the woman got to her feet and began making her way effortfully down the central aisle to the small raised stage. She was drawing near when in the darkness of the back of the room a door opened, letting in light. Into that light stepped a uniformed policeman and a man in a dark suit jacket and tie.

Lawrence’s chest was suddenly invaded by a sensation of intense cold. As calmly as he could, he cleared his throat and held out one hand, traffic-cop style. “Miss,” he said to the woman about to mount the stage, “would you please return to your seat? Let’s take a ten-minute break, and then we’ll get right back to it.”

The two men were standing silent at the back of the small theater, carefully studying Lawrence. The audience members, who would have normally been already heading to the nearby cafeteria, remained glued to their seats, making a low, excited murmur of conversation. Lawrence understood exactly why the cops were there. In some strange way, he’d been waiting for them from the moment he’d heard the thick, deep thunks of Margot’s head hitting the stairs as she fell. Over the days and weeks since, his many kindnesses and small acts of marital loyalty had been at least in part propitiatory. They’d been addressed to these men and others like them in the hope that they might collectively see his goodness of heart and desist from their pursuit. But it hadn’t worked.

Lawrence drew a deep breath and made a tunnel in front of his eyes. He knew that people were a marble of malice and generosity, and that all the good intentions in the world couldn’t pry them open when they’d been sealed shut by childhood trauma, and wishing with all one’s might couldn’t turn a bad person into a good. On the small stage of its life span, the human animal pretended to know its own nature; this was its special charge, its species destiny. Twenty-five years ago, he’d hit the man. The man had banged his head on the ground. Two months ago, after having kept that impulse under wraps for all that intervening time, he’d repeated the violence. Below everything humankind could do to make of it an orderly place, life was still a lottery where goodness wasn’t even minimally a precondition of success. His fate, however, had been to pick a winning ticket, hadn’t it? In the larger scheme of things, definitely. He loved his wife, who seemed suddenly islanded in a sunny, carefree place that was rapidly receding out of sight into his future. It was presently a dot so small he could barely see it anymore. The cops in the back of the room were looking at him levelly. Their gaze communicated both the gravity of the situation and their shared desire to avoid a scene. The tunnel in front of his eyes was holding steady. He raised his head, threw back his shoulders, and walked into it.