Authors: Eli Gottlieb
The Face Thief (9 page)
They bid good-bye, and on the two-hour drive back he found himself returned to a chatty, flirtatious warmth with his wife that felt like a restoration of some primary and long-gone sentiment. He’d forgotten how lovely she was as she smiled and allowed the thickening sound of desire back into her voice. The eros of their early years together had gradually become cluttered with the busywork of life—and it wasn’t until this weekend that he realized how much he’d missed it.
Neither of them had turned on their BlackBerrys since arriving at the retreat because they wanted to give the weekend a full chance to work its magic on them without distraction. But twenty-five minutes after having left the compound, having flicked them on in the meantime, they were rounding a seemingly endless turn around a large forested mountain and laughing hard about a comic mishap involving a ne’er-do-well cousin of hers when the crisp electronic beeps sounded out of the machines, reestablishing contact. Lawrence watched as she picked his up with a glancing laughing look in her eye, as if daring him to interrupt her. The sunshine flared against the screen and effectively rendered it opaque. She twisted it a moment in her hands, and the writing became visible. Stacked in the middle of the page were four identically titled e-mails to him. Even though he was proceeding around a large curve in the road at that moment, he saw them clearly.
In capital letters glowing blackly on the screen were written repeatedly the words
I BURN 4 U,
leading like a small, inevitable staircase down the page.
M
en spoke a stench, and none more so than her pious, sentimental fraud of a dad. After he died—lingeringly, horribly—she moved, with great relief, to New York. She was done with Northampton, with eking out a living padded with the occasional theft of her family’s funds; with seething at her friends whose cards and letters continued somewhat tauntingly to float into her mailbox. She’d had it with that sense of slowing orbits and deepening boredom relieved only by the stray overcompensating numskull wandering into her bed.
Through friends, she procured an internship at a small up-and-coming fashion magazine named
Cachet
. She bunked with some acquaintances on the Lower East Side and entered the mouth of the subway each morning at a shabby intersection and exited it twenty minutes later like Venus on the half shell into a zone of affluence and pretension. The magazine was housed in a landmark building on the Upper East Side and was known for its outlandish mix of street and couture. It was there that she met Lulu Bach.
Lulu Bach, her boss and the editor in chief of the magazine, was a tall, physically powerful woman whose face wore the perpetually wide-awake stencil of plastic surgery. Swathed most often in clingy black couture—Marc Jacobs, Prada, or her old friend Michael Kors—she was quick-witted and foghorn-loud and appeared to savor her own falsity. The phonier she was, the more everyone liked it. It was the first time Margot saw how badly irony beat candor in New York; she would never forget the lesson.
“Good morning!” That familiar, cheery voice again. She opened her eyes. Dan France the unshakable was there, giving his openhearted smile. He reminded her of certain rock formations. He reminded her of large midwestern corporations with conservative bottom lines. He was insistent on hanging around with the same old buzz in his pants and itchy fingers, while pretending to live exclusively among higher, drier, purer things. Men! She smiled at him, prettily. At least he was handsome. She was feeling better and better each day.
“Good morning, sharpshooter,” she said.
“I’ve got news for you,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“You’re getting out of here.”
“Really? Where?”
“To rehab. You’re ready for the big time now.”
She studied him, carefully.
“When?” she asked.
“Some time in the next few days. The facility is nearby. You’ll still have restricted movement, of course, and will be on meds, but you can get out of this white box and into a place with a bit more life in it. You like?”
He was nearly panting with excitement.
“Um,” she said.
She was remembering how she fetched Lulu’s coffee every morning; brought her pastries and memos, ran errands, sat mostly silent at the weekly staff meetings, and observed the daily operations of her world. Lulu had nicknames for everyone and quickly dubbed her Smith in deference to her college, and in that honking loud voice that Lulu seemed to relish for how strikingly it was out of keeping with the rest of her white-powdered cloisonné features, she would shout, “Where’s my damn Smith!”
“I was cleared to take you out to lunch today,” Dan France said. “Would you like that?”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll ring for the nurse to help me change. Can you, uh, like, disappear for five minutes?”
“But of course.” He nearly giggled as he scampered out of the room.
Every three months or so, Lulu would have a party at her loft on Mercer Street and select staff would be invited. The high, square space, with coffered tin ceilings, pickled wooden floors and dark walls, had been converted by Lulu into a seashell temple. Armed with a glue gun she had stickered every wall with cockles, razor clam shells, tiny cowries and scallop shells. Amid this stranded sampler of marine life, waiters in half tuxes circulated carrying tiny silver trays, while Lulu moved like a huntress of high spirits, her voice expansive, pitched to impress.
“This is Smith,” she cried to magazine editors, artists, costume designers and the many junior executives in bespoke suits and millimetrically bias-cut hair who were flattered to be out among the “creatives” for a night. “This is Smith and if you don’t watch it, she’ll have your job lickety-split!” she cried. “She seems demure,” she bellowed over the portobello spears, the fried guanciale rolls, and the Kobe carpaccio, “and dammit, she is demure, that’s the thing. But she’s also a tiger, guaranteed!”
“Are you really a tiger?” a man asked her, coming up behind her, and smiling into her face.
She was learning to take the measure of people quickly, on the fly. She’d arrived in New York with a receptive openness that hovered in the dangerous interspace between ingenue and bumpkin. The challenge, she understood, was to judge while not seeming to, like doing the crossword while jogging in place.
“Meow,” she said to the man, “have I seen you before?”
He had the kind of face she liked, where the prettiness was marred or emphasized by a single outsize feature, in this case his nose. He had long, light-colored lashes, like a giraffe. He was tall and about thirty-five.
He bowed at the waist. “If you haven’t,” he said, “then I sincerely apologize.”
The nurse was helping her dress in a white shirt and loose pants. She was moving slowly, because every time she moved quickly, she felt that something might spill. There were names for this condition. She took drugs for this condition. It was a slow road back from a brain injury as serious as the one she’d received. She was placed, with the nurse’s aid, in a wheelchair.
Dan France was waiting in the hall. He looked bashful and excited. “Thanks, ma’am,” he said to the nurse, smoothly cutting in and taking the handles of the wheelchair. He pushed her gently down the long corridor while she inhaled the unpleasant smell of the hospital: organic rot barely masked by pine.
“I’ve decided to look more into your background,” said Dan France, fifteen minutes later, when they were seated at a local restaurant. The wheelchair, at its lowest setting, had been slid under the table.
“Oh?” She felt a reflex twinge.
“Yes, because I’ve been told the occasional thing about you from other people in the department, and I want to make sure everything is shipshape and watertight.”
“What kind of things have you been hearing?”
“Just things,” he said.
The restaurant seemed too large, too loud; the frame of space was off; it billowed. She suddenly wanted to be back in her hospital bed, but she looked down, gathered herself and repeated,
“What kind of things?”
“Inconsistencies in the paper trail, and stuff like that. But let’s not worry about it now. Documents have a way of sorting themselves out. What we want is to have you back on your pins, pronto. Everything else will take care of itself.”
He laid his large open hands on the table in an inviting gesture and smiled. His eyes were resting level in hers. She was remembering, hard. Men could be rotated at will after sex, but it was before sex that the more crucial adjustments were always made.
She touched her hand to his and instantly, like a startled reef fish, it swerved and shut closed on her fingers. “To paraphrase a dead writer I admire,” she said softly, “you have a certain syrup, Dan, and I like the way it pours.”
“O
h Christ, it must be that girl,” Lawrence said, continuing to drive as his wife slowly placed the incriminating BlackBerry down on the seat and he gripped the steering wheel as if bracing himself against a sudden burst of wind.
“Girl,” she said carefully.
“The one I was giving privates to. Jesus!” he said.
“Privates,” she said.
“Yes, you remember, honey.” Keeping his eyes on the road, he went to place his hand on her arm. But the arm was not there.
“Vaguely,” she said. “And?”
“And nothing,” he said. “She was a crazy girl who wanted something from me, and hounded me, and called and kept coming to privates and paying for them of course, and then one day, she tried to kind of push matters with me.”
“Oh, really,” his wife said to the windshield of the car.
“Yes,” he said. “Problem was, I pushed back.”
Out of the side of his eye, he watched her lips open and then her face turn down.
“She thrust herself on me, honey. I mean aggressively.”
“Uh-huh.” Her voice was dangerously soft.
“Darling?” He swiveled his eyes toward hers in time to see her
corrugators supercilii
muscles firing in the classical eyebrow contraction of grief, and he felt a sudden murderous gust of rage toward the girl, Margot.
“What I’m about to tell you is the utter truth,” he went on calmly, “and I will say it as many times as you need to hear it. This person attacked me physically, making advances during one of our private lessons, and, yes, I kissed her briefly back but then I pushed her away. The rejection seems to have made her nuts and driven her into some kind of revenge strategy where she’s pretending we’re actually an item. I don’t think she’s used to being rejected is my hunch, and so she’s lying to try to damage me. And that’s it.”
But instead of saying anything, all she did was look down into her lap, swallowing audibly several times.
“Honey!” he said, touching her trembling back while squelching the desire to shout,
I was preyed upon, dammit! I was ambushed by a miserable creature who used the traction of a single kiss to try to wound both of us!
That’s the truth!
Instead, in an uncertain voice, he asked, “Glynis?”
When she said nothing, he went on in a low voice, “Agreed that I should have told you. But it seemed so very little, at bottom. I mean, really.”
There was a long silence.
“Did you sleep with her?” she asked suddenly, swiveling her head around on her neck and intercepting his glance with an impact that traveled down from his eyes to his hands like a twitch along a length of rope. The car veered to the left.
“Of course not!” He brought the car back to center.
She returned to looking straight ahead, giving him absolutely no sign that she’d heard. The car purred along the interstate. He fiddled uselessly with the controls of the AC. Twice over their marriage of eighteen years he had slipped and fallen all the way down the long, tumbling chute of lust into the bed of a young female student. Both times he had terminated the affair within a week, tearfully telling all to his wife, and both times she’d left not long after, taking an extended vacation with a girlfriend devoted to “reconsidering” their marriage. While she was away, Lawrence, determined to find the bright side of his infidelity, had told himself these dalliances were “contrast gainers” of a sort, which allowed him, from the far side of the chaos and pain they’d engendered, a new appreciation of the calm, deep-water harbor of his marriage. In the aftermath of this perception, he threw himself into reconciliation with renewed ardor. And Glynis, who invariably returned from her trips puffy-faced beneath her tan and with a sad, high-hearted desire to separate, both times let herself be swayed by his contrition.
Outwardly impassive, he continued heatedly to argue his case to himself as they drove. By the time they were nearing home, nearly an hour had drifted by in perfect silence. They were turning into their home street when a violent gust of hatred of Margot again tore through his heart. But that was crazy too, said a wiser, older voice in his head. His wife was understandably gun-shy, even though this had been merely a kiss, and what was needed now was the grace of pardon—of himself, mainly, but of her as well.
Gently, he touched her shoulder, as they moved toward the door down the winding flagstone path. Hadn’t his prior delinquencies—because he thought of them that way, as youthful indiscretions like cutting school or stealing cars—eventually been reabsorbed into the larger mass of their married happiness? Of course they had. Time was absorptive; it had always handily blotted up difficulties in the past. Somewhere in the not too distant future, holding hands, perhaps, and on vacation in one of those mountain towns he loved in the American West or Europe where the sheer immensity of space acted to shrink the human drama to bearable dimensions, they’d be seated on a little wooden bench in a fieldstone inn, toddies in hand, and would revisit this moment, and laugh their heads off, with the rueful, easy laughter that accrues exclusively to partners in long-term marriages.
Then he opened the door.