Millard had arranged to meet Lysander at a restaurant in Morningside Heights, on the roof of a one-time luxury hotel just north of Columbia University. He repeatedly assured himself that the choice of location was largely incidental—selected because his own father had favored the Overlook for business lunches—but as the rendezvous hour approached, day by day, he could not shake his other, quiescent motive: Carol, his first wife, lived in one of the park-front high-rises around the corner. Millard had never, obviously, visited her apartment. He wasn’t even certain which of the several upscale towers she inhabited. But as his final breaths grew closer, he found himself drawn to her mesmerically, like a male mantis inching fatally toward a mate’s open jaws. His plan, nonsensical as it sounded, was to stand opposite her complex, across from the cast-iron gate with its hostile finials, from eleven o’clock until noon, allowing fate to determine whether he encountered her on the sidewalk. He recognized the absurdity of this providential approach—especially for a man who’d exiled the Tooth Fairy from his home and had once written to his state assemblyman urging a ban on commercial fortune tellers—but that insight didn’t prevent him from taking the IRT (emblazoned with its bright red numerals) up to 116th Street. He arrived at Carol’s address with five minutes to spare, although his only appointment was with himself.
Twenty-three years had elapsed since he had laid eyes upon Carol, twenty-seven since he’d last spoken to her. But he kept tabs on her life, intermittently, at a distance. During the first decade following their split, he’d read the wedding announcements in the Times every Sunday, hoping to encounter her name; how much less self-reproach he’d have felt if she’d also found a match. Marriage—heterosexual marriage, at least—he’d come to realize, too late, was a tortuous cat-and-mouse game of implicit contracts between the sexes: You exhausted a woman’s youth and beauty, then kept her company during middle age, eschewing fresher, more alluring mates, until the tables turned once again and she looked after you in your decline. Unless, of course, you breached that contract as Millard had done—absconding with Carol’s halcyon years and then shifting his affections to Isabelle, ten years her junior, ultimately cheating destiny once again by offing himself before he grew dependent upon others. Regrettably, Carol’s name never did appear in the Lifestyle section. He’d gladly have fixed her up, if she’d have let him—but he understood she’d have sooner disemboweled herself with a tachi than accepted such humiliation. As the daughter of an alcoholic bookie who drank on credit, his first wife had cared deeply about pride, appearances. On open school night, she insisted the teachers address her as Dr. Sucram. Never, God forbid, as Mrs. Salter. (I didn’t spend seven years studying signal processing to be Mrs. Anything!) Precisely the sort of woman to suffer the most from his treachery. More recently, as Millard’s plans solidified, he’d taken to scanning for her name in the obituaries, afraid that her demise would forestall his own. Of all the contingencies that might have foiled his ambitions, he’d decided, only two commanded any weight: a miraculous recovery by Delilah, which was implausible, or Carol’s sudden death. He didn’t want his older children, especially Lysander, to mourn both parents in short order. And if that sounded calculated—even cold—he wouldn’t deny it; losing Isabelle and Hal in succession, two final blows along a brutal gauntlet, had ossified whatever remained of his capacity for grief.
The last time he’d seen his first wife had been at Arnold’s marriage. That had been only three years after they’d finalized the divorce. In hindsight, he realized, bringing Isabelle with him to the wedding had been a grave error in judgment. Carol refused to acknowledge his existence. Standing only inches from him in the shadow of the billowing chuppah—his son’s cheerfully committed in-laws beaming at the opposite end of the raised platform—his ex-wife wore a tense, unyielding expression that was neither smile nor frown, just pure pain. His mind revved blindly, searching for some word or phrase to palliate her wrath, but you couldn’t undo high treason with a remark about the balmy morning or the beauty of the Missouri Botanical Garden. (He recalled, bitterly, the hackneyed joke: But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?) During the closing processional, his elbow inadvertently brushed the trumpet sleeve of her gown, and a glacial chill goose-stepped up his arm into the pit of his neck, as though the blood had congealed solid in his arteries. Five years later, when Sally married her naval architect, he’d stayed clear. So that had been a small portion of his penance: shelling out $60,000 for a lavish affair where he dared not show his face. Of course, it wasn’t true penance, because absolution demands remorse. While Millard deeply regretted how he’d betrayed Carol, and especially the eighteen months of deception he’d perpetrated, which had culminated in Maia’s birth, all under the self-serving delusion that he was protecting his wife and children, he did not regret Isabelle—not one kiss, not one stolen caress, not one precious moment of her company. That was asking too much.
Millard seated himself on a bench opposite Carol’s complex. Someone had abandoned a partially consumed sandwich on the adjoining bench; flies circled the wax paper and a company of red ants carried off grains of what looked like roast beef and pastrami. A homeless young woman and her dog, a well-tended beagle, dozed on a slab of cardboard under a nearby linden. From the park below rose the shouts of toddlers scampering through sprinklers. Pedestrians emerged from the ivy-coated walkways on either side of the speared gate—an elderly couple holding hands, a bare-chested jogger with a mynah bird atop his shoulder—but not Carol. Lurking at her door in his necktie and sweater on the warmest day of the summer, his sport jacket draped over his forearm, an uneasy self-consciousness overcame Millard. He’d hoped to appear inconspicuous, just another old man out for a harmless bask, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he looked like a stalker—a deranged ex-lover come to spy on his former spouse. Rationally, of course, he understood his fears to be groundless: He’d sat on countless park benches on summer mornings, clad in identical clothes, and not once had such a fear crossed his mind. Deep down, he realized that had he been seated on the very same bench, engaged in the very same behavior, but for a different purpose—let’s say, waiting to pick up his granddaughters from ballet—he’d have felt perfectly at ease. Context, alas, proved defining. Murder, as they say, will out. And prowling too. Strangely enough, waiting for Carol also had a regressive effect on his psyche—he momentarily felt like her husband once again, beset with all of the fears and anxieties that had cleaved them apart.
A particular experience with Isabelle came to mind: They’d attended her fiftieth high school reunion at the Hotel Pennsylvania. Millard had been there once before—with his father, in 1964, to cheer Robert Kennedy during his run for the Senate. In his memory, the gold-lacquered balustrades had glistened, as though polished hourly, while the ceilings in the grand ballroom had towered twenty yards. One could easily picture Glenn Miller on the bandstand or the Boswell Sisters warbling “I Found a Million Dollar Baby” beneath the cut-glass chandeliers. In contrast, the hotel they actually entered that evening had a shabby, poorly tended aura of evaporated swank. Plastic plants poked from oversized brass tureens in the lobby. “I don’t think Glenn Miller would be caught dead in this place,” he whispered to Isabelle—knowing that she would jab his side, her cue that she wanted him to behave himself. He tried his darnedest. He rocked his hips to Martha and the Vandellas, slow-danced with his wife to Dean Martin crooning “Everybody Loves Somebody,” listened with clamped tongue to her childhood girlfriend, Linda Blauer, extoll the virtues of Ayurvedic medicine. He even took his turn at the karaoke mic, belting out “Under the Boardwalk” in the wrong key. Isabelle, who looked truly radiant in her strapless evening gown, appeared to be enjoying herself, so Millard was dumbfounded when, in the cab on the ride home, she burst into tears.
“I know this is crazy, dear,” she explained, “but I’m still not popular. I’m sixty-eight years old and those girls—women—still made me feel like a gangly, unwanted teenager.” She’d even cursed several of these sexagenarian matrons by name. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I don’t know what’s come over me . . . . One too many Mai Tais, I’m afraid . . . .”
Millard had helped Isabelle laugh off the episode with an onslaught of kisses. Now, regressing to his former married self, he understood what his late wife had experienced. Even the act of standing impotent opposite Carol’s development, rather than ringing her bell, aroused feelings of inadequacy that he hadn’t stomached in decades. He could imagine his former spouse storming onto the sidewalk, fists balled, ranting at him for his cowardice. “Spineless as ever,” she’d declare. “You’re going to take the easy way out and you don’t even have the courage to face your own ex-wife before you do it. Do you really expect to build up the pluck to loop a belt around your neck?” And she’d have him dead to rights: He still dreaded her displeasure.
The homeless young woman stirred on her makeshift blanket. All that was required were a few words from him and the disheveled girl could be napping on his sofa, freshly soaked in his brass-fitted bath and wrapped in Isabelle’s favorite magenta robe, the one he’d withheld from Goodwill, despite the instructions in the red notebook—whose terrycloth he still pressed to his nostrils in moments of yearning. He might, on a whim, leave his entire estate to this unfortunate creature. Arnold and Sally certainly didn’t need the money, while Maia, who’d nearly completed her chemistry PhD, already had six-figure job offers from industry. So the only person who’d really suffer was Lysander—and who could say that a surprise disinheritance wasn’t precisely the kick-in-the-pants the boy required. Anyway, his mother would always help him in a pinch, so he was unlikely to end up starving or street homeless. How easily a few kind words to this dozing stranger could reload the dice. Yet some primeval, clannish instinct kept Millard from acting. Instead—as though to protect his estate from the pull of her misery, he launched himself off the park bench and made a beeline for the elevated security post that guarded Carol’s sanctuary.
The stout, acne-scarred guard slid open a pane in the booth.
“I was just wondering . . .” said Millard.
His words caught somewhere about his Adam’s apple. Inside the guard booth, on the radio, two voices argued in Spanish. Water trickled from the head of a nearby hydrant. Millard reached for the side of the security post, catching his balance on the metal rail.
“You okay?” asked the guard.
Millard had planned to ask whether Dr. Sucram was home, but that sounded shady, he realized, possibly even illicit, unless he planned to visit, so he had little choice. “I’m here to see Dr. Sucram,” he announced. “I’ve forgotten the apartment number.”
“East tower or west?”
Millard shook his head. “It’s been a while . . . .”
The guard did not appear persuaded. He opened a three-ring binder and ran his thumb down a list of residents until he found Carol.
“And your name?”
“Lysander,” Millard lied quickly. “Lysander Salter.”
What a farfetched moniker: Lysander. He’d wanted a distinctive, indelible name—Carol had already gotten her way with Arnold and Sally—and calling the boy after a Spartan navarch seemed, at the time, both dignified and ambitious. Maybe also a slap in the face to his wife, who’d sought something “simple and all-American.” In hindsight, of course, the name proved a farce, as improbable as a city-state run by two kings, and Hal Storch—never one to hold his tongue—had pointed out that the original Lysander had been an assassin and a pederast. Yet the most substantial irony was that Millard’s son, named after the greatest admiral of the ancient world, had never learned how to swim. According to Jewish tradition—as related by Rabbi Steinmetz—this fact alone confirmed Millard an abject failure as a parent in the eyes of God, for Talmudic law required that a father pass along only three skills to his sons: a knowledge of Torah, a trade, and a steady Australian crawl. Or, at least, enough dog-paddling know-how to keep his head above water, explained Steinmetz. There’s no consensus among the commentaries on precisely what is meant by swimming. Steinmetz, of course, hadn’t used the words “abject failure”; that was all Millard’s self-scourging. What the rabbi had actually said, when Millard had sought his wisdom on the subject of parenting, was that different men marched to different drumbeats. Is he killing anybody? Is he worshiping idols? No. Then let him find his way. Easy enough to say when your son wasn’t the one whose drumbeat wandered onto an ice floe.
The guard dialed Carol’s number. He looked as though he might yawn when he announced Millard’s false name, but betrayed no surprise when instructed to send him up. “East tower. Apartment 15-C. Follow that path on the right to the second set of doors and take any elevator.”
“That’s right. 15-C,” said Millard. “On the tip of my tongue.”
The guard gave him a curious look—a look that said, I’m on to you, Mister, but he slid the pane shut without comment.
Millard advanced into the courtyard. Judiciously manicured stands of hydrangea and viburnum guarded the brickwork—but the atmosphere was overly lush, almost oppressive, like the interior of a hothouse. Squirrels, gray and black, gamboled raucously on the adjacent lawn, where signs warned pedestrians off the grass. A trio of luxury sedans lazed nearby, two wheels banked indifferently atop the curb. Nothing prevented Millard from darting back through the entryway, past the security booth to freedom—nothing except his own will, somehow warped and corrupted by Carol’s proximity. He did not have the mettle—the impudence—to turn back. Rather, he sensed that, all along, his psyche had secretly intended this visit, that each step closer to Carol’s lair was a manifestation of what Hal Storch called a “fit of the unconscious.” What could he do? Opposite the second set of doors, a solitary mockingbird chirruped from the depths of a rhododendron. He crossed into the air-conditioned vestibule and glided up to floor fifteen.
The door to 15-C stood slightly ajar. He pressed the bell.
“Come in,” cried Carol—more command than invitation.
He dared not cross her threshold under false pretenses. He thumbed the bell again.
“It’s open! I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Millard waited what felt like an hour and rang a third time.
“All right, all right,” called his ex-wife, her voice laden with pique. “I left the door open for a reason,” she said, her words growing closer. “Really, Lysander, I don’t—”
And then they were facing each other in the doorway.
How old Carol looked—how old, and yet, still beautiful, her skin stonewashed and her hennaed hair bound in a no-nonsense bun.
“I should phone the police,” she said. “This is trespassing by deception.”
That sounded like one of those ersatz offenses from television crime dramas.
“There’s no such thing.”
“Well, there should be.”
A new notion unsettled Millard: she might not be alone.
“If you’d like me to go . . .” he offered.
Carol shook her head. “No, you don’t need to go,” she said.
She stepped out of the doorway, effectively inviting him inside.
Her apartment was spare, almost austere, furnished as though ready to let. A plinth coffee table. A wall-mounted television. Jonquils in a countertop vase. Carol’s color scheme ran a narrow gauntlet from ivory to obsidian. She’d insisted on moving out after his infidelity, although he’d offered her the apartment. From you, she’d said, I want nothing.
“Let me look at you,” he said.
She sported a chambray blouse and a knee-length burgundy skirt. While he appraised her—as though admiring a fine work of art—she blushed ever so slightly.
“When you’re finished ogling,” she said, retreating toward the window, “would you mind telling me to what I owe this honor?”
“I’m having lunch with your son at the Overlook,” he said. “I was in the neighborhood . . . .”
“You were in the neighborhood and the urge seized you to barge in on your ex-wife?”
Now Millard felt self-conscious. “I guess you might say that.”
She drew open the drapes, bathing the white upholstery in white light.
“Heavens, Millard. Please stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
But he knew precisely what she meant.
“Like I’m about to perform a striptease. That’s like what,” she snapped. “I’m just a woman of a certain age, as they say, and when someone leers at a person at my age, it’s not flattering. Quite honestly, it’s suspicious.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just . . . well, I forgot how beautiful you were.”
Carol snickered. “You’re being ridiculous . . . . I’m just a discarded old lady. You want a cocktail? Now that you’re here . . . .”
“Sure. Why not? I’d love a cocktail.”
Millard couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched anything other than wine. And he would be returning to the hospital later—but it wasn’t as though he were a neurosurgeon. What would they do if he had a nip of vermouth on his breath? Give him the heave-ho? Suddenly, he sensed that Carol was staring at him, expectant. “What kind?” she prodded.
He’d nearly forgotten that cocktails came in varieties. Like women.
“Oh. How about a Rob Roy? Or is that too much to ask?”
“I can make you a Manhattan. This isn’t a nightclub.”
Carol vanished into the efficiency kitchen and returned several moments later with a pair of collins glasses. “A Rob Roy. Seriously?” she mused as she handed him his drink. She settled herself opposite him on the sofa, her legs crossed.
How improbable, it seemed, that in a long-gone age he’d possessed the audacity to propose to this brilliant woman—at once so lovely and so austere. He remembered strolling with her as they examined the mounted butterflies with the exotic names: the chocolate albatross, the tawny rajah, the common Mormon. And right beneath the common Mormon, he’d been seized with the insane notion that he might build a life with this byzantine beauty, only twenty-two years old and already publishing doctoral-level work in array processing—whatever that was. How bold he’d been, and how naïve. Yet he’d certainly gotten what he bargained for. What was that old advertising slogan? “It does exactly what it says on the tin.” Well, Carol Sucram had proven as brilliant and austere and implacable on the last day of their marriage as she had on the first. Only after intercourse, as she lay on her back, eyes shut, lips slightly parted in a faint smile, did he ever sense her vulnerability. Usually, like now, her front appeared impregnable.
“Do you really feel old and discarded?” he asked.
“Good God, Millard. What kind of question is that? Are you a fool . . . ?”
“It’s just . . . Well, I’d like to think you could forgive me.”
Carol rose from the sofa and paced. “Amazing. Just amazing. You still think the universe revolves around your likes and dislikes, don’t you?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Of course, you didn’t. You never did. But you started this, so I’m going to finish it.” She set her glass down on the cusp of a bookshelf. “Do you remember Howard Logan?”
“Vaguely.”
“Widower with a salt-and-pepper beard. His daughter played field hockey with Sally.”
“Wait. Tennis, right? He’s the guy you played mixed doubles with.”
“God, you’re a chump sometimes,” said Carol. “Howard wasn’t my tennis partner. Howard was my lover.”
Carol stood with her back toward him, the knobs of her shoulders fluttering with her diaphragm. He couldn’t process this information—not now, not with her standing only feet away. It was the sort of revelation he’d want to sleep on, to consider fresh on the morrow—only in this instance, there would be no morrow. She turned toward him again; her faced had hardened, its texture like that of a clam shell.
“I don’t understand,” said Millard. “But why? If you also wanted out . . .”
“Who ever said I wanted out?” Carol lowered her voice. “I don’t resent you for the cheating,” she said. “That could be normal—healthy—in a marriage, for all I know. Within certain limits. What I resent you for is the humiliation. For God’s sake, Millard, why do you have to do everything in public?”
“I didn’t think . . .”
“Everything always had to be dramatic with you. All or none. I’m surprised you don’t set yourself on fire in front of an embassy like one of those Buddhist monks . . . .”
Maybe, feared Millard, she had a point. He had a thousand questions to ask: When had her affair started? When had it concluded? How many of his trivial deceptions—a late night at the hospital, a day conference in New Jersey—had actually facilitated his own betrayal? How much guilt had he shouldered for naught? He dared not inquire. An image rose before his eyes of the ouroboros, the serpent devouring his own tail.
“I haven’t seen Howard Logan in twenty years. Last I heard he’d moved to Nevada and was involved in commercial real estate,” she said. “And they’re all yours. All three of them.”
That was so quintessentially Carol. Laying out the facts. Going straight for the jugular.
He sipped from his cocktail, fearful of what else his ex-wife might divulge.
“Now that we have that out of the way,” she said, “why are you really here?”
One had to credit any woman who could degrade you from a contrite philanderer to a cuckolded dolt over midday cocktails—and then change the subject.
“I’m worried about Lysander,” said Millard, grateful for the familiar ground. “He’s lost.”
Carol laughed. “You’re just realizing that? He’s been lost for years.”
“I guess I wasn’t paying enough attention. We won’t live forever . . . .”
“Nor will he,” replied Carol. “You know Stanley and Livingstone, right? Well, Livingstone didn’t consider himself lost, even if Stanley chose to find him.”
“So what are you saying? That we give up?”
Millard sensed he was fighting a battle that had long been decided—like a colonial minister advising Mad King George not to let his colonies slip away. If Carol, who fed on a currency of status and credentials, had chalked off Lysander as a capital loss, who was he to insist that the boy might yet rise to his promise? He cupped his fist in his palm.
“Not give up. But maybe we need to lower our expectations,” said Carol. “You’re the one who wanted to name him after the great Spartan lawgiver . . . .”
“That was Lycurgus,” said Millard. “Lysander is named after an admiral.”
A smirk flickered across Carol’s lips. “Do you always have to be right about everything?”
The reality was that they’d both been that way. Stiff-necked; pigheaded. In the era before Internet searches, they’d argued for hours—without respite or irony—over whether the Great Wall of China could be seen by the Apollo astronauts and if the actresses Jean and Maureen Stapleton were sisters. For two straight days, they’d spoken only when essential, divided by the riddle of which hand Australians used to hold their forks while dining. (A phone call to the consulate had ultimately vindicated Carol.) Neither of them had been willing to let anything slide, so life degenerated into constant scorekeeping, an endless quarrel over trivia—often literally—with both of them tabulating mental chit sheets. During their marriage, Carol might even have insisted that Lysander had been a lawgiver. How frivolous it all seemed at a distance of thirty years . . . .
“I’m sorry,” apologized Millard. He glanced at his watch. Nearly noon. “I should go.”
She retrieved the glass from his hand. “I’m glad you stopped by,” she said. “Truly I am. I’d like to do this again . . . if you would. Maybe have lunch?”
“Sure,” agreed Millard. “I’d like that too.”
“How about tomorrow? Japanese?”
That was when he sensed that she might seek more than an armistice. He had mentioned nothing of Delilah—so how could she know? After all, he had spent forty-five minutes leering at her as though she were the reincarnation of Betty Grable.
“Call me tomorrow,” he said. “Okay?”
“Very well. I’ll ring you up at ten,” said Carol, pleased. To his surprise, she added, “I already have the number.”
“I’m so glad I had a chance to see you,” said Millard. “Really, I am.”
Yet as the elevator descended into the blistering heat of the courtyard, he wasn’t even sure that this was true.