The melody haunts Eve. She wrote back only “Thank you,” nine quick strokes. She couldn’t face another compositional task, like the email to Larry.
In the end, Larry emailed before she managed to come up with anything she felt good about sending. “Dear Eve,” he wrote, “You need to know that I’m going to be staying in Arizona for a while. I don’t give a shit about pill coatings. I need to do work that feeds me. I’ve taken a job as head of web development for Blaine.” The spirit-animal guru. “I was waiting to see if I got the job before letting you know. Blaine went out last night to make sure he was making the right choice. His spirit animal is a javelina. Arizona is three hours behind New Jersey, so that’s why it took so long.” It was unsigned.
Eve hardly knew what to make of it. The unnecessary, jumbled facts; the lack of apology or any evidence of remorse; the total absence of emotion; the ambiguity about whether his departure is temporary or permanent. If it doesn’t work out, does he expect to just pick up this life again where he left it?
She imagines him typing “Sorry for the silence, love Larry” and deleting it, since a wolf would not apologize. She cannot believe that he wouldn’t at least have thought those words.
Her mind is whirling. Can a marriage end this way? Just stop, without even a whimper?
A follow-up email, a few hours later, details their savings: stocks, IRA, investment account, and the heavy borrowings against them. He informs her that he will be opening a new bank account. He does not mention the house or the mortgage or any intention of helping her with the bills.
The passive-aggressiveness of this sends Eve into a fury. They were a team, a unit, as long as it suited him; now that he’s found himself a new identity, all that has been tossed away. Yet even so, he’s keeping his options open, dodging the decision of divorce or no divorce. If he forces her to make it, later he can throw it back in her face.
So she won’t make it, at least not for now, despite the waves of rage and disgust that sweep over her. But she takes off her ring and stashes it in a drawer of her dressing table, wondering how much the gold in it is worth. And she emails Allan, asking him to call her. This is the kind of news that has to come with the warmth of a living voice.
“I’m not sure how to say this, honey,” she begins, “but I think your dad has left me.”
Silence, then Allan repeats, with emphasis, “You think?”
“He didn’t say it, in so many words. Just that he’s staying in Arizona. But he’s taken half the money from our savings, so that seems pretty clear.”
“Yeah. Wow is right.”
“Are you okay, Mom? When did this happen?”
“Yesterday. And yes, I’m fine.”
“Really?”
The concern in his voice brings tears to her eyes, tears that Larry could not make her cry.
“Yes, sweetheart. Really.”
“Good.”
There’s a silence on the other end. She imagines Allan, in his calm, deliberate way, rolling out the meaning of it all.
“I’m sorry, Allan. I never wanted this to happen.”
“I know, Mom. You’d have gone to your grave pretending everything was fine, but it wasn’t. I was hoping you guys would work it out. But if you couldn’t, then you know? I’m glad. I hated seeing you like that. You and Dad both.”
That astounds her. Until this moment, she’s thought of the failure of their marriage as exactly that: a failure. Her failure, and Larry’s. As Allan talks, level-headed and comforting, the separation sounds more like an achievement. Which, strangely, she will have to credit to Larry.
She feels her skin go cold. What if Allan asks whether Larry has been having an affair? It wouldn’t occur to him that she might be the one with a lover. Even if she answers truthfully, she’ll feel like she’s lying. Thank God he doesn’t.
“I love you, Mom. You’re strong and you’re brave. Maybe you don’t feel strong right now, but I know you will.”
“Thank you, honey,” she says, longing to hold him again, to feel his thick hair, and the way he clasps both her hands in his, which reminds her of Bill.
When they hang up, her mind drifts back to that surge of panic and relief. How can she possibly tell her son that she has a lover only four years older than him? Maybe she will never have to, but that doesn’t feel right either. A lie of omission is almost as bad as one baldly told.
As the days pass, that qualm is overcome. She spent mere hours with Micajah—they meant nothing in the scheme of her life with Larry. His course of departure was already set. And they will mean nothing in her future—whatever that is.
Best of all are the mornings.
It wasn’t just that Larry left the bathroom door open, so that she could hear what he probably thought of as the manly, or wolfish, stream of his piss. He had a whole array of morning noises: snorts and hacking gargles, followed by loud spitting and blowing his nose into the sink (which he did an inadequate job of cleaning up). This was thanks to the guru, who had borrowed from Ayurveda the practice of clearing the ama, the toxic residues that accumulate overnight, and added to it an animal’s lack of delicacy about bodily functions. Hardly surprising, Eve thinks, luxuriating in her peaceful house, that men find his philosophy so irresistible: it gives them permission to do all the things their mothers tried to drill out of them.
In the last year, Larry had also begun to let out his belches and farts full blast. She’s not sure she can blame this on the guru; she suspects it was Larry’s own coded fuck-you. I will not repress myself for you, they said; I will not apologize for being physically present in this room. She knows he blamed her for the end of their sex life, even though it seemed to come about by mutual agreement, or rather, mutual apathy. His inner wolf was not unbridled enough to actually rape her, on the rare occasions when he might have wanted to; he probably also considered this insufficient alpha-ness her fault.
Still, she cleaned his bathroom, bought his food, cooked his meals, did his laundry, thinking that making his life easy would satisfy him. In reality, she sees now, she just made herself his housekeeper.
When she listened for Larry’s noises and didn’t hear them, the silence was a chink that she could slip through unnoticed and find a few hours of freedom. This silence feels like a vast expanse of open country, with no walls or fences to hem her in. As the day ages, agoraphobia sneaks up on her. In her low moments, the wide-open spaces of her new single life are more like a windswept desert, studded with question marks like saguaro cactuses. Known misery felt safer than this.
Her panics focus on money—that, at least, is a subject she can tackle. Larry’s mid-level corporate job insulated her from worry, but it didn’t leave much extra. The only income she can rely on now is whatever she can make from her garden design business. Looking back, she sees that she took it about as seriously as an eight-year-old takes her lemonade stand. She’s going to have to amp it up, fast. She makes a list of architects to meet with and public and professional buildings with landscaping that needs help—certain, though, that none of this will happen soon enough.
She finds herself buying fat loaves of ciabatta, stopping at an anonymous Italian restaurant for a plate of fettuccine Alfredo, ordering a scone with her latte. The doughiness is like padding around her. It blunts the sharp edges of reality, and of her own thoughts.
When she weighs herself on Saturday, the scale shows an extra three pounds. I am sinking, she thinks. I’m pretending I’m holding it together, but I’m not.
There is one, long-shot chance: the instrument. She joked to Deborah that it could be worth thousands. What if she was right?
Eve makes her way through the display rooms of the auction house, which is lined with paintings under individual spotlights and sculptures on plinths. The effect is plush at first glance, threadbare at second: it conveys both money and thrift. We will sell your property for thousands, maybe millions, it whispers, but our commission barely covers the cost of carpeting.
A few brawny men are heaving crates and canvases in and out. Hope flashes through Eve that she might see Micajah: he said that his day job involved moving art. Even if she can’t see his face—even if she sees him from behind—she will recognize the lanky frame, the unruly dark hair, the fine strength of his arms and hands.
But he isn’t there. Of course, he wouldn’t be. He said he worked for a gallery. Galleries do their own selling, don’t they?
Down a hallway, the carpet gives way to linoleum, the warm spotlights to cold fluorescents. A strange mix of people mill in front of a long, high counter, carrying an even stranger mix of items: paintings and etchings, pottery both beautiful and hideous, primitive artifacts. The ones carrying jewelry are easily identifiable by their furtive looks, as if the jewelry they want to sell is hot, which maybe it is.
A young woman emerges. The pillowy bouclé of her jacket announces it’s genuine Chanel. She isn’t buying those clothes on the wages she makes here, Eve thinks idly. This is the kind of job rich girls do to kill time and make contacts before marrying well and joining the board of the Met. She doesn’t want to touch the case. It still has the stink of an ethnic junk shop on it.
“Leave it with me, please,” she says. “You can collect it at five. We close at five-thirty. We’d appreciate it enormously if you’d be prompt.”
She disappears through a door which a uniformed porter holds open for her, carrying the instrument at arm’s length. Eve almost admires the magnificently rude politeness with which she’s been dismissed. That inbred sense of superiority is something Eve will never possess. She imagines the girl at six years old, ordering something princessy from a maid: fresh strawberry juice, maybe, spiked with the blood of butterflies.
Eve is at a loose end for the day. She could go to the Public Library, but that seems silly. The instrument is in the hands of an expert, who will tell her more in five minutes than she could research in five months. The Metropolitan Museum? She’s already been through the instrument room, and it’s summer so the main galleries will be crowded. Back to the outer boroughs? But she’s dressed to look like someone who sells expensive items at auction; these are not clothes for bargaining in.
As she turns to go, she notices a pile of art magazines on a side table. On a whim, she sits in a plastic chair and leafs through one. It’s full of ads for contemporary art galleries. That’s probably the kind of art that Micajah moves, she thinks: that’s what the oligarchs and criminal billionaires buy. She’s seen pictures of Jeff Koons pieces in Time—giant shiny toys in pink and silver—and didn’t get the point. It’s time to broaden her mind.
The streets of the West Teens are eerily quiet. There is little foot traffic, few cars or cabs. Nobody lives here; in daytime, at least, nobody shops here. The place seems to exist purely on its own fumes, requiring no sustenance from beyond its borders.
Eve expected the galleries to be like stores, with window displays that she could study and learn from, but mostly the windows are frosted or painted white, and the names of the dealers are so discreet they have to be hunted for. Some fronts have no name at all, and no windows. If you don’t know who we are, they say, we don’t want you.
Eve’s senses are on hyper-alert for Micajah. She tells herself that she didn’t come here hoping to bump into him; she came to see the art. She dares to enter a gallery with blanked-out windows. Inside is a cavernous space, with more attendants than artworks. A trio of twenty-something girls give her the same disdainful look in triplicate. Like the girl in the auction house, their clothing—in this case radical, downtown, artsy, daring—is a calculated offensive weapon, garments that differentiate the wearer from everyone who is not as rarefied as they are. Eve’s natural shape would always have disqualified her from their company.
It’s cold in this gallery. The concrete floor and white walls remind her of a mausoleum. The few artworks in sight are displayed with a reverence that makes her think of idols worshipped by an extraterrestrial tribe in a science fiction movie: harshly spotlit, protected by these fabulously dressed guardians with their icy stares. She imagines they have some acrid green liquid running through their veins.
She cannot picture Micajah in this company. He is nothing like them.
It’s a relief to be outside again. There is a van parked down the street, a couple of men moving crates out of a building. Her heart leaps at the possibility that Micajah might be one of them. What she would do if she saw him, she’s not sure: disappear into a doorway, maybe. She wants him to be the one to catch sight of her, to call her name, to be delighted to see her. She walks with her eyes casually averted, as if she is lost in thought or admiring the art—that won’t work as an excuse, though, since there’s so little of it to be seen. A dialogue plays out in her head, as if she’s being cross-examined on a witness stand; she needs excuses, needs to be able to claim innocence of contacting him again. If she is the defendant, who is the plaintiff: Larry? Micajah? Both? Neither?
She does not hear Micajah call her name.
For a moment, she worries that the reason for this is that he deliberately ignored her; he’s had second thoughts, he’s embarrassed by what happened between them and has wiped her from his consciousness. But, no, it’s simple—he didn’t call her name because he isn’t here. There are thousands of galleries in Manhattan. He may not be working today. He may not even move art anymore, now that his record deal is signed. An imp in her brain prods her with the thought that maybe it’s not even called a record deal anymore, since nobody makes actual records. His world is another world in which she doesn’t belong.
She walks west, toward the Hudson. There is a kayaker out there, playing with the current: fighting his way upstream, then spinning on the nose of his boat and letting the water speed him south. She watches him for what might be half an hour. Seagulls wheel overhead. She manages to adjust her hearing, change foreground for background, so that the seagulls drown out the roar of traffic on the West Side Highway.
She decides to walk back uptown to the auction house. She keeps a steady pace, which makes her feel strong and confident. Still, she finds herself glancing into the faces she passes, hoping that among the millions she will see the one face she craves.
She doesn’t. It’s a good thing, she tells herself. I am rebuilding my life, and I cannot rebuild it with him.
“Extraordinary.”
Does he mean that the instrument itself is extraordinary, or that it’s extraordinary that anyone could have the gall to waste his time with it? The expert’s tone could convey either. He wears a tweed suit that is foppish rather than academic, with a pale aquamarine pocket square and no tie. The skin of his throat is yellow and bumpy, like a chicken’s.
“Extraordinary piece. I must ask how it came to be in your possession.”
“I bought it in a secondhand store in the Bronx. It was shoved away in a corner when I found it.”
He examines her face, gimlet-eyed, as if this is an obvious lie. The case is on the high countertop between them, lying open.
“It’s badly damaged.” This is said in an accusatory tone, as if Eve had smashed the instrument herself.
“I know.”
“That makes it unsaleable.”
“I thought you might say that.”
“However, the damage is, thank Jupiter, confined to the reverse. An expert repair . . .” He shrugs. “But an expert repair, I beg you. Not a botch job.” His voice quavers.
Despite herself, Eve feels a glimmer of pity for him. He’s an odd creature who doesn’t belong here, and he has made himself odder in order to claim his space.
“And if I did get it repaired?”
He stares at her. “Damn the expense?”
“That’s not possible.”
“I see. You could perhaps induce someone to fund it, with the promise of a percentage of the proceeds. A business proposition.”
“I would need your estimate,” Eve says.
“Sadly, that is something I cannot give you until I see the quality of the repair.”
“Assuming an expert repair. Please. It doesn’t have to be on paper.”
“Hmm.” He probes around the edges of the instrument. “Restored. With wood of the right vintage, original materials, animal glue . . .”
He leans close, and whispers in her ear. “Six figures, I would suggest. With the right competition, of course.”
Eve gasps.
“You have, I am sure, heard of the great composer Antonio Vivaldi, who was choirmaster of a girls’ school in eighteenth-century Venice. It was, in fact, an orphanage. Naturally, you are aware that orphanhood does not discriminate between the sexes. So there were boys’ orphanages as well, with similar music masters, and the boys were taught trades. One became luthier to the doge. There’s no question in my mind that he is the master craftsman who made this. For, I would guess, the Ottoman court, by whom he is known to have been commissioned. The jasmine suggests an Oriental client. That particular instrument, which history records as a viola d’amore of elaborate design, is considered lost. A case could be made that this is it.”
Eve’s head is spinning.
“Your next question is, can I recommend a restorer. Here is the name of a man in Paris. His English is excellent. He communicates by electronic mail.” He gives her a card.
“I’ve been told about a restorer here, named Yann Logue,” Eve says. “Do you know of him?”
The expert’s face tightens. “His work is excellent. However, I cannot recommend him.”
He snaps the clasps of the case shut, and gives Eve a slight bow before disappearing through the door behind the counter, leaving her question unanswered.
Paris. Even if the man does communicate by email, she will have to take the instrument there personally. There’s no way she can afford that, under present circumstances. And she knows nobody who might be willing to fund such a repair. Nobody who can help her at all—except Micajah.
He has been sending one text a day: a photo of a jacaranda tree in blossom, remarking that he wishes one would grow in Brooklyn; a video clip of elephants mourning their dead; lines of poetry by Hafiz and John Donne. At first, she didn’t reply because of her better-or-worse commitment to her marriage. Then, because of the absurdity of such a relationship, the impossibility of explaining it to Allan. Besides, she does not want to run from one man to another, distracting herself from Larry’s absence with fantasies of a future with Micajah. They have no future. She should accept the universe’s verdict, as given in the gallery district, and never see him again.
And after a week of no replies, his messages stopped.
When Micajah gave her Yann Logue’s number, he said he did not want her to feel beholden to him. Surely he cannot mind if she calls it. However she looks at her situation, this man is her only hope. How difficult can he be? She is willing to offer him a generous deal: half of the proceeds. Surely he cannot say no to that.
So, the following day, during business hours, she phones Yann Logue. He listens as she describes the instrument and its damage. Then she tells him what the expert at the auction house said, and makes her offer.
He flies into a rage. “Instruments are for making music, not for making money! You find this lovely creature which has suffered so, and you want me to clean it up before you put it on the block, like a slave stolen from Africa and made to sing? You make me sick!”
“Please, Mr. Logue—” Eve starts.
“Do you even care what it sounds like? No. You care only to find some vampire millionaire who will suck out its soul. Parasites, all of you!”