The Unfortunates (12 page)

Her father. She misses and hardly remembers her father. Georgie had taken the helm as John Stepney became ill. At least John’s death, the family maintained, spared him the pain of witnessing his business erode as his son adjusted haltingly to responsibility, and as the economy buckled: the Amazonian rubber market began its collapse in 1912. Georgie and his brothers neglected the plantations—empty jungle, ghost shelters, overgrown tracks. The tens and the twenties of the new century, they enjoyed a gentleman’s business, content with the diminished Amazon-based company and the Connecticut processing factories. Georgie was a playboy, a buyer of fantastical properties, a commissioner of musical reviews, a collector of actresses at the Barrow Street Playhouse, famous for his charm, his bootlegged parties, his brokering of unusual alliances, his generosity to politicians on all sides, the ruined women in his wake. But saner than his brothers. The Somners had mostly left the game by the rubber-market spike of the First World War. Oldsmobile and Ford contracted to other manufacturers. Georgie did eventually get into the manufacture of sneakers, a new kind of footwear that wasn’t catching on. He never told her what focused his ambition, but in the decade preceding the Second War, Georgie shifted from South America to South Asia—importing rubber from Malaysia and Sri Lanka for processing in Naugatuck. (Rubber, natural rubber, had long before left South America in the coat of a man named Wickham, who smuggled the seeds of the tree to England. Soon the tree grew in Malaysia, in Africa, and every other tropical destination England controlled or could broker with.)

Then, the Second War. The war needed rubber wheels to roll on. Rubber for the bandage companies, rubber for the hospitals, rubber for the boot makers, and rubber for the planes. When the Japanese threatened the Pacific theater, along with all its rubber trees, the Somners’ dormant Brazilian plantations became vital to the effort. Georgie remanned them. At the same time, in Naugatuck, Somner Chemical collaborated in the government’s initiatives for the better development of synthetic rubber, so that issues of territory might never again jeopardize U.S. production.

This is why there must be some mistake, her, stuck in this room. Another mistake—the nurse neglected to pull the curtain before she made her escape, and the man’s still working outside. She can hear the snip of his shears. She won’t change out of her suit after all.

The chain saw cuts off. Maybe she really will try to rest, now that the racket’s stopped, now that the dresser is clear of petals, now that she’s decided she won’t touch the tray, will never eat from such a tray. She’ll see what they do for lunch.

10

At the sight of the door swinging open, Iris’s heart leaps. She’s missed George! She didn’t know how much, until this instant. She throws her arms around him. She gives him a multitude of indiscriminate kisses—side of mouth, eyelid, underside of chin, side of the head, each trailing an exclamation as if he’s returned from some distant expedition. “It’s you! What the hell! You handsome dummy! Why are you here?”

“Oh, my, God,” he says, dropping his bag and shrugging his crumpled linen jacket to the floor. “My poor mother. I’ve never felt so tested, been asked— Victor, how are you? Didn’t see you there. Sorry to interrupt. Good to see you. Don’t you look well.”

How kind George is, even when he’s exhausted and probably wanted to come home to her alone. Helping his mother, asking after Victor. Always putting other people’s cares above his own. Abruptly and formally, she steps back and shakes his hand. They all laugh. Away only a few days and he’s new to her again—how well made he always looks, his easy, strong-shouldered grace, the color in his cheeks, his features firm and lively. She loves how his sharp green squint suggests something rude or reckless meant only for her. How he runs his hands through his flop of hair, how she should remind him to get a haircut, but not to let them cut it short. She even likes the slack way he tossed his jacket down, the way he takes over the room. He picks the jacket up and folds it over the back of the chair. It is the same one he’d handed her to check at the golf club. These things—the chair, the jacket—belonging to her more as time goes on. She loves how he shifts his weight, his gaze dashing from her to Victor with a look like guilt, like the anxious kid he says he was: so respectful of rules he spent his childhood certain he’d just broken one. She can see he had a hard time at Oak Park. Only as good a person as George. Once he told her that if suffering is the precondition for sympathy, and sympathy is the precondition for love, then love required the continued suffering of the loved one. She wasn’t sure she understood. She’d poked him in the ribs and said, “Smart garbage, Dr. Professor,” but thought about it for days. It
was
smart, but too smart to be true, and neither of them could possibly believe it. He told her it was only with her that he’s been able to cast off the world. Honest to a fault. She loves that he always looks the same, always like himself.

“But, George,” she says, “where are your shoes?”

“Ah,” says Victor, “they were so in love, the sky stuck to them. Now what’s that from?” He’s rolling up the blue leash, hooking his travel mug to his belt, tucking the gold chain under his shirt. “I’m well, thank you, George.”

“I hope you are! If a man of the country like you isn’t well, we’re all in trouble!” George cries, crossing the room to slap Victor on the back. Something about this is unlike George, she thinks. CeCe must have put him through the ringer.

“I hope we are
all
well,” George continues. “The kind of trial I just endured reminds a person—”

“‘A man of the country’?” Victor asks.

“You know, so skilled with the dog, and the hiking and exercising and being so handy and capable and, for example, this arm”—George thumps Victor’s arm—“rugged as barbed wire, not babysitting a desk like me, not babysitting, what?—
ideas
. No, you’ve a certain rusticity I wouldn’t even aspire to.”

“A what? What did you say?” Iris asks, looking not at George but to Victor, who turns sharply at the word.

A look passes between them. What are they saying? They are conferring without any need for language, like twins, or house cats. George suspects her—not of adultery, no, certainly not, probably not, but of having a bond with this man that he can’t guess. “Believe me, it’s a compliment. I’m jealous of guys like you. Keeping it simple. Balance and all.”

Victor presses his lips together, but George is certain he is saying something important, getting to a truth overlooked. “Needing so little, none of this plastic feel-better we allow to pile up around us.” He waves in the general direction of the large, chrome espresso maker he recently put on the AmEx, a delightful machine that reminds him of a Victorian train. “When the earth is nothing but fire and garbage and drought, it will be people like me relying on people like you for our survival! And I bet no one had to teach you the things you know. I bet you just know them. I bet you could survive out of doors for a week without help. I bet you were born with all the wisdom and courage you ever needed. And good on you.”

“Thank you. I’m sure that isn’t true.”

“Incapable of lying too! Convincingly, anyway. I wish my office had guys like you. But you don’t find ’em like this on the elevator going up.” He stops, for Iris has put her arms around him again.

Victor disappears into the mudroom.

“Hon,” she says, “I didn’t think you were coming until tonight. Sit, sit down, how are you back so early?”

“I missed you too much.”

“How was it—wait, let’s see if Victor needs anything. Victor?”

“It was,” George says, not waiting for a reply from the other room, “the worst thing in the world! But I got through it. I had to be strong for my mother. And for you and for us! I looked it straight in the eye. Hospitals make a person sick. Hospitals convince you by their smell that you are dying! I’m especially sensitive to that. You look extra beautiful today. I got you a present. It’s outside. It’s weird. It’s a joke. I’ll give it to you later.”

“You helped your mother,” she says, putting her hand on his cheek.

“Anyone would do the same.”

“Speaking of, Pat called. She wants to know how it went.”

Victor returns, wearing his backpack. 3D clicks in behind him on long black nails, and after several turns, arranges himself in a doughnut on top of the folded massage table. “That’s all for today?”

“Yes,” Iris replies. “Victor, we need to pay you.”

“Not excited to see me, is he?” George says, nodding at the dog.

“I tired him out this morning. Lots of running,” Victor says. “In the woods. Where we primitive folk track lunch.”

“Pardon?” George says.

“3D’s made a pile of sticks by the tree out front. We’ve been monitoring its progress. We think 3D is very advanced. Did you see it?” Iris asks quickly.

“He’s a smart dog,” Victor says.

“No, I didn’t.”

“It’s way too late for this.” Iris gestures to her sweatshirt and gym clothes and heads for the stairs. “I’m getting dressed.”

George opens the front door. Victor scoots the dog off the massage table.

“Nice balloons,” Victor says, nodding at the tree.

Iris calls down, “See you Thursday!”

“I almost forgot.” George opens and closes his wallet. “Let me get my checkbook, I’m out of cash, been on the road—be right back.”

He heads down the hall to his study, which he is looking forward to seeing—the vintage poster in its gilt frame of Verdi’s
Aida
at the Teatro La Fenice, a watercolor rendering of Wagner’s debut of
Parsifal.
To have caught his wife in the attitude she strikes when he is not around is not a bad way to spend a morning. Every window a mirror, every mirror a window: as a boy, he was sure that when he turned away from his image, that other George remained, the opposite-facing-he was still
in there
, the broken twin, receding out the door of that room, down the street into that world, and that one day his two halves might suddenly reunite and merge, like one drop of water absorbing another. Or like the Rorschach butterflies the psychiatrists held up to him from time to time.

He enters his study and sits behind the desk. Cool and dark. He opens the drawer, looks at the blue checkbook, closes the drawer. He sits a minute longer, gently bouncing the back of his chair, humming the overture to
The Burning Papers
, picturing the standing ovation, the lights finally coming up in the theater, and still the crowd remains. He plots a last addition to the libretto. After he vanquishes the queen, UH will avenge himself against the eunuch to whom, in error, he’d entrusted his purest harem wife. George leaves the office and walks quietly back down the hall. Outside the window by the door, the same window he’d stood at looking in, Victor waits under the tree. The branch to which George tied the balloons almost brushes Victor’s neck, lest George forget Victor is the taller man. The folded massage table rests against his leg, the mug at his hip.

“Hang on another minute,” George says softly through the glass. Victor holds his hand up and nods.

There are decisions a man may make, if he’s got the nerve. George goes upstairs.

“All taken care of,” he says, and begins to undress Iris. “You are the best person ever.”

“Oh,” she says, and she’s everywhere, all around him—legs at his back, arm around his neck. She covers his mouth and covers his eyes, one hand timid, the other brave, and in his mind’s eye, in the dark behind his wife’s hand, in front of the front door, Victor waits beside 3D’s twigs, the mosquitoes rising in the muggy heat, the mosquitoes in full float and menace. Victor looks at his watch, for he probably has another client all the way in the east end and the hour approaches—soon the bell of the town church will ring and the question is, will Victor leave without his money? Iris, George is holding Iris. She exhales, her languid hand at the base of his spine, and the heat outside must by now be getting to Victor, knitting a fine beaded net of moisture across his forehead. George has the sudden bright idea of going clamorous and audible, here beside the open bedroom window, and now she is using him, delightful! He hears a shy knock at the front door. Maybe, he can’t be sure. Again she covers his eyes and all he can see is her foot as it pushes off the floorboards, the weight transferring from him to her foot and down and he flings the clothes still bunched around her hips over her head and her hands lift to the wall, to the bedside lamp, which topples but does not fall, though the sound brings the dog, the dog circles them and she cries, “Go!” And the dog does go, down the stairs, bank, plunk, bank, plunk, pink, pink, pink, and, oh, how he sees Victor’s hands are twisting, twisting with what to do. Surrender his fee or interrupt them and appear the peeping Victor, a lurker of the hedge—
Something’s wrong with him
, George will say, and—ah, here is a bright pain, a stinging purple nova ricocheting off the anterior wall of his eye socket, for his wife has managed to kick him and they are laughing and then he is obliterated and forgets Victor and everything else and finds himself leaning on her warm back, her ribs, her heart, and she looks at him over her shoulder and her teeth are white and she says his face is rough and he apologizes, and he says,
I am, I am, I am
, and she says,
I want you to
or
I want you too
. He’s holding his pounding eye against the damp hair at the nape of her neck and she says,
Do what I say and I say do it
so he yanks her back by the hair and she hears a car firing up and pulling out of the drive, but Victor’s already left, hasn’t he? It must be a trick of sound, a car at the neighbors’ down the road.

*   *   *

Looking vaguely at her husband’s ankle as they lie next to each other in the bed, Iris realizes what Victor was about to tell her. Victor wants to buy a house. He’s always asking about the market. His wife loved their house in Maine. He still loves his wife. How pained he looked, when he said Isabel left him. How he smiled when he tried to imitate her accent.