Elizabeth and he were bound by “passionate hatred,” Paul explained the next day, still abandoning Corina under a stunning light in a notorious bar. We are sitting at the big dining table, where we have just had breakfast, feasting now on purple grapes. “If we separated, we wouldn’t be able to torture each other so easily. We were not yet through.”
“Still in Constantinople?”
“Yes, yes,” he said, and went on with what Elizabeth had told him: “‘If you killed me,’ she proposed, ‘I would die ecstatic.’ I did not ask her why; she was eager to tell me: ‘Because I would know that you would be sent to prison, probably for life, and forced to wear a drab uniform, probably striped, and made to live in a cramped disgusting cell,’ she said, licking her lips, as if she could taste the pleasure that would bring her. ‘Or’—she went on, inspired—’perhaps, you would be executed in the electric chair.’ She made a hissing sound in my ear, imagining the electric current that would sizzle through my body. I said to her, ‘I’ll be sure never to kill you. But, then, Elizabeth’—this had occurred to me and I was excited to say it, to trap her—’how would you balance the universe if I were to kill you? It would remain askew, chaotic. I’m sure that Dr. Spitzer would agree and be outraged. The only way to retain the balance of the universe—which is your noble goal and Dr. Spitzer’s, isn’t it?—would be for you, then, to kill me and you would go to prison, forced to wear an ugly uniform, probably striped, and live in a cramped, disgusting cell. But that wouldn’t be possible, would it?—since I had already killed you.’ I had upset her stupid game; I knew she would be discussing it at length with her quack doctor, the author, believe me, of his second self-published book, A Radical Theory 2: Permanently Retaining the Psychic Balance.” He laughed raucously.
I laughed, too, at the absurd situation he had delineated with contempt—and, too, at the trap Elizabeth had set for herself in the proposed entertainment.
“Elizabeth and I celebrated our separation.” Paul picked up his account when we were sipping wine on the deck after dinner. “‘No, no,’ she said, ‘not with champagne. With cheap whiskey, that’s what our marriage calls for—the cheapest whiskey’—and that’s what we drank.”
Later than usual, Sonya and Stanty had gone swimming, attempting to cool off from the hovering heat. I envied their exuberant shouts and laughter, which I listened for.
“But, man,” I ventured, “out of all that, what finally made you leave Elizabeth?”
He looked at me as if befuddled by an obvious question. “Because,” he said emphatically, “she was.” His frown eased. “Because she existed, that’s all.”
He was so fucking sure of himself and everything he said. (He had located himself so that his angular profile was etched against the dim moonlight, which struggled out of sudden dark clouds.) “But you fell in love again, with Corina?” I thought that would annoy him, the assumption that he could “fall in love,” as much as he must detest that phrase.
Instead: “Yes, deeply,” he said, perhaps because he had figured out my intention. “I fell in love with her when I first saw her.”
“In the notorious club where she was standing under a display of light,” I furnished the rest.
He said, thoughtfully: “I did fall in love with Corina. No.” He backed off. “I fell in love with her beauty. I loved her fucken beauty—”
“—and her wealth,” I said.
“Of course, man,” he said, unperturbed.
Would he soon move on to deride Sonya? I had seen hints of her rebellion. I was becoming apprehensive when he insulted his wives so brashly, because I didn’t want to hear anything like that about Sonya.
Yet despite my recurrent trepidation of where his anger might lead him in his ranting—we were drinking the same white wine we had at dinner—I was feeling, this hot night, the camaraderie that occurs between people drinking together, feeling that camaraderie, and quite as powerfully rejecting it.
I heard a vague stirring at the dark edge of the deck. It would be Stanty—back from his swimming with Sonya and eager to irritate us in some way. He would have been hiding, listening—as he had been when he saw me and Sonya lying on the grass. No, it was the sound of a boat on the lake. A startling breeze had swept onto the deck accompanied by the sound of water stirring, a coolness soon banished by an ambush of heat.
With my silence, I encouraged Paul to continue his saga, and he did, but still without any reference to Stanty’s birth although his narrative was departing from Constantinople.
Corina, the beautiful young heiress, claimed to be superb at betting on new artists before they were “discovered widely,” Paul said. “She told me she was ‘collecting tomorrow’s great art.’ What she was actually collecting was today’s fake art. She had a refined talent for buying bad but expensive forgeries. I guided her away from her reckless purchases; I advised her carefully because I knew that eventually I would claim all the art as mine.”
“What a cunning son of a bitch you are.”
He was pleased: “Yes, I lived by my wits—like you, man.”
I added to my conjectures about his motive in inviting me: he was “collecting” artists—a “promising” young writer—and courting an allegiance to him.
“Throughout all your sexual encounters, man, did you ever steal?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I answered truthfully.
“Then you, too, are a son of a bitch,” he drew his equation.
I resented the connection he was trying to establish between us. There had been again an intimation of judgement—for him, a welcome cherished judgement, a celebration of his cunning. But his self-approving judgement had once again stirred another judgement, a powerful one, on myself. I would have to extricate myself from any overlapping of our lives, an overlap he seemed determined to assert.
“How did you feel after you stole?” he asked.
“Sometimes … guilty,” I said. The word had come easily in answer to his question; but as it echoed—and it did echo in my mind—I knew I had lied. In all those fleeting encounters, I had felt a sense of triumph to be desired on my terms, nothing else.
“Guilty!” Paul rejected. “For stealing from willing victims?”
Willing victims—again. His claim jolted me anew. Later, I would explore my feelings about what he had deduced, what I had really felt about guilt and non-guilt, and why I felt either. Or neither.
“Your turn,” he said.
Did he imagine he would go slumming through my memories of hustling turfs? His silence awaited a response. But I didn’t want to explore what he was asking for. I said I preferred that he continue with his narrative.
“Your turn, man,” he insisted. “The streets, the alleys, the sex …”
It was my turn, yes—my turn to match his maneuver of extending interest by delivering installments left pending at a dramatic high, the inception of a crisis.
“I was arrested once for—” I halted. “You go on, man,” I said.