For reasons that were difficult to think about in any great detail, let alone explain to his wife in New York, Anton had rented a room on the island of Ischia for the off-season. In exchange for a hundred euros a month and the understanding that he’d wash his own towels, he was given a small blue-painted room overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea with the outline of Capri visible in clear weather against the edge of the sky. For the first few days the silence was miraculous, and he thought he might finally have found what he was looking for.
His wedding had taken place six days prior to his arrival on the island, after a long and frankly disastrous engagement: Sophie found a dress, bought it, had a panic attack when she tried it on at home, and canceled the wedding. This was a fantastically costly maneuver involving several dozen hours of therapy at three hundred dollars an hour and a mailing of two hundred uninvitations: “The wedding of Sophie Berenhardt and Anton Waker has been post-poned for personal reasons. Thank you for your understanding.” She informed him that there was no hyphen in “postponed,” took up meditation in addition to the therapy, and came to him a month later with the news that she’d had an epiphany: the wedding was meant to be. Two hundred and fifty all-new wedding invitations were mailed out, in shades of spring violet; the flowers blossoming in the corners of the invite, she told him, represented rebirth. Anton had just been reading about how violets pinned to a girl’s lapel in a certain era had represented lesbianism, but chose not to mention this. Two hundred and one RSVPs arrived without incident. She showed up at work during his lunch break in tears, clutching the two hundred and second. All it said was “We’re so glad for you! We’ll be there!” and it was only from someone’s obligatory aunt, but he knew before she spoke that the wedding was off again. She was scared, she said. It wasn’t him. She just needed more time.
“Because I really love her,” he told his friend Gary, in response to a question.
He canceled the hall and the caterer and sent out two hundred and fifty uninvitations in shades of blue. The wording on these was much the same, except that she removed the hyphen between “post” and “poned,” and then he added the word “indefinitely” right before he sent it to the printers, and then he had to sleep on the couch for two nights. They spent a polite six weeks avoiding the topic. He wasn’t sure what to do, but he told himself he’d always known she was flighty and should have seen this whole mess coming. Marrying her was the only course of action that seemed honorable. He was living in a strange limbo wherein he couldn’t remember if he loved her or not and he sometimes felt he was losing his mind. He took endless walks through the streets of Manhattan and didn’t sleep well. In the evenings while Sophie was working he spent a lot of time with his cat; Jim lay across his lap and purred while Anton read.
Their friends went to absurd lengths to avoid bringing up the wedding. Everyone was terrifically sympathetic. The therapy bills were stupendous. Topics of conversation seemed to change abruptly when they entered rooms where their friends were sitting. He tried to protect her from all this as best he could and to make things generally as pleasant as possible—coffee in bed in the mornings whenever feasible, flowers every Saturday—and he could tell she was trying to keep the mournful cello music to a minimum and tried to appreciate the effort. He sat on the sofa outside the closed door of her study with the cat on his lap and lost himself in the unspeakable beauty of her music.
“I don’t mean to state the obvious, but being in awe of some-one’s talent isn’t really the same thing as being in love with them,” Gary said, when Anton told him at the end of spring that Sophie was finally ready to get married again. “But what the hell, maybe third time’s the charm?”
“Third time’s more or less my outer limit,” said Anton, and tried to convey this to Sophie in much gentler terms later on (“I don’t want to pressure you, sweetie, but . . .”) and she took it fairly well initially, but then played what sounded like funeral music in her study for days. When he cracked open the study door to see if she wanted to talk about it she just murmured, “I’m working,” without looking up from the score, which forced him to close the door again because they’d agreed that when Sophie was working no one could talk to her. He took long walks, read in cafés, went out for drinks with Gary and made very little progress on anything that week.
The manager of the hall he’d booked for the two previous wedding attempts laughed and hung up on him, so he booked a new hall that was slightly more expensive and had been his first choice from the beginning, mailed out three hundred new invitations with a completely different color scheme, agreed with Sophie that it would probably be best if she let him handle the RSVPs this time, and set about relaunching the catering, floral decoration, and wedding-music operations. Some of her old friends from Juilliard had a rock band on the side, so he booked them against his better judgment and tried not to think about what the music might sound like.
All three hundred guests RSVP’d in the affirmative almost immediately—most, he suspected, out of sheer curiosity—and Sophie seemed happy and uncharacteristically calm, although she was playing a lot of frenetic atonal modern music in the evenings. On the day itself she was a vision, dark curls and white silk and the plunge of her neckline, blue necklace on pale skin. It was an evening wedding in a church lit with nearly a thousand candles, and time skipped and moved strangely in the half-light. He was watching her float down the aisle, there were candles everywhere and so many roses that the scent and the candle smoke made him dizzy, she was beside him, they were listening to the priest and he couldn’t retain a single word that was being said. She was a mirage in the candlelight and he stood beside her in a kind of suspended animation, he was kissing her, Gary hadn’t forgotten the rings, I now pronounce you husband and wife. The band wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, his new wedding suit was less uncomfortable to dance in than he would have expected, they stayed at the reception til three in the morning, at intervals he heard himself laughing and he felt that he was observing the scene from some distance away.
Time seemed to be moving very rapidly now. He drank champagne and danced with his bride. His friend Ilieva put a flower behind his ear and he left it there for an hour. He felt strangely still inside through the whole thing, calmer than he thought a man getting married really should be—but it wasn’t until he was thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean the next day, Sophie asleep in the seat beside him, that he realized he’d been confusing calm with indifference. He wasn’t, now that he thought about it, calm at all. Nor had he fallen out of love, exactly—indifference was the wrong word, it was something softer and more precise—but he also wasn’t at all sure that he should have married her. His exhausted bride slept on unaware.
He made his move on the island of Ischia. They arrived in the harbor village of Sant’Angelo in the late morning; a taxi let them off outside an archway beyond which no cars were allowed, and they dragged their suitcases down a cobblestone street to a pink hotel that stood by the water. It was a small two-story building with a half-dozen rooms on the second floor, the first floor taken up by a restaurant. There was no reception desk; the owner, a perpetually smiling man in his fifties named Gennaro, took reservations from a phone set up in a corridor by the door. The corridor led to the restaurant, and a flight of stairs led up to the rooms.
They checked in and spent the day wandering the streets of Sant’Angelo, and Anton thought it was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen. The village allowed no cars and couldn’t have accomodated them; the streets rising up from the harbor were open-air corridors between the pale walls of villas, rough cobblestones turning every now and again into stairs. There were walled gardens glimpsed through iron gates, vines spilling over the tops of plaster walls. They turned a corner and the sea was brilliant far below them, bright-painted boats bobbing in the harbor waters. Three cafés competed on a large open piazza, and from the hillside above the harbor their umbrellas were sharp white circles and squares in the sunlight. Sophie and Anton ate dinner in the hotel restaurant and went to bed early, and in the morning they went down to the piazza and sat for a while reading the paper and drinking coffee together.
“You know,” Anton said, as casually as possible, “I was thinking about maybe staying on a while.”
She looked up from her café latte.
“Our plane tickets are for Thursday,” she said. “We have to go back to Rome tomorrow.”
“I was thinking if I stayed here for a little bit,” trying not to emphasize the I too cruelly, failing, “I could get some traction on my book. You know, really write for a while.”
“It’s a new kind of travel book. I’ve been meaning to tell you about it. I just can’t get going with it at home,” he said, “but the atmosphere here . . .”
“A new kind of travel book,” she repeated.
“‘We stand in need of something stronger now,’” he said. He was quoting a book review he’d read in the New York Times a while back, but he surmised from her baffled stare that she hadn’t read it. He pressed on regardless: “‘A travel book that you can read while making your way through this new, alarming world.’”
“That’s what you’re writing?”
“Well, I haven’t started yet. But here, you know, with no distractions . . .”
“Well, if you can’t write it in New York City, Anton, you won’t be able to write it here either.”
“Bukowski,” he said. “I like that.”
“What?”
“Isn’t that what he said? Something about writing in the apocalypse with a cat clawing up your back? Anyway, I just think—”
“No, he said if you’re going to create, you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your back while the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment, flood, and fire.”
“Oh,” he said.
She regarded him silently.
“As I was saying. I just thought . . . I just think it might be nice,” he said, “after all we’ve been through, you know, it’s been so intense with the wedding and everything, all the cancellations, I thought maybe we should be apart for a while. I mean, when I say a while, not a long while, just maybe a couple weeks. Sophie, please don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying.”
“You probably hate me,” he said. “Suggesting this on our honeymoon of all times.”
“No,” she said. She was digging in her purse.
“It’s okay, I’ll pay for your latte. Are you all right? Tell me honestly.”
“Fine,” she said absently, without looking up. Her handbag yielded a ferry schedule. She examined it for a moment, glanced at the antique gold wristwatch his parents had given her as an engagement gift, stood up from the table and started out of the piazza without looking at him. By the time he found a ten-euro bill in his wallet she was out of sight. He left the money on the table and ran after her, lunged through the door of the hotel and then realized at the bottom of the staircase that she hadn’t gone in. When he came back out into the sunlight, blinking, she was already halfway up the road that led out of the village. He caught up with her as she was getting into a taxi.
“Sophie, what are you doing?” He thought he’d never seen her so calm before and wondered if she somehow thrived on catastrophe.
She said something in Italian to the taxi driver, who nodded and started his engine. Somewhat at a loss, Anton climbed in beside her and closed the door.
“Sophie, come on, this is unnecessary. Your luggage. Your passport.”
“I carry my passport in my handbag,” she said, “and you can dispose of my luggage as you see fit.”
Sophie had nothing to say the rest of the way to the ferry terminal. He was on the shoreline side of the minivan; he stared out the window at the jumbled chaos of hotels and villas and the sea beyond, thinking of how beautiful the sea was and how much crassness and vulgarity lay between him and it. She had nothing to say at the ferry terminal either. She ducked away from his kiss and got on the ferry without speaking to him while he hung back uncertainly on the shore.
The way she departed: standing on the ferry moving away from him over the water toward the city of Naples, looking at him where he stood. She was half-smiling in a way that he felt was meant to convey something—sorrow, hope, reproach?—but he couldn’t bear it and so he turned away almost immediately, while her features and her half-smile were still clearly visible and the boat still loud in the water, and he realized later that this had been the moment when the cord had finally snapped between them.
He found himself repeating the motion at intervals in the weeks that followed, trying to recapture the clarity of that moment at the ferry terminal. Standing on the road near Sant’Angelo and looking out at the sea, for example, he would turn very slowly and deliberately away from the sunset, and he was invariably disappointed by the lack of finality in the movement.
For the first two weeks on Ischia he did very little. Once he had explained to the hotel owner that he planned on staying a few weeks or possibly longer and worked out an arrangement for the off-season—“You will help me watch the place, yes?” the hotel owner said—the question of what to do next hung overhead like a cartoon thundercloud. He was waiting for an event, and thoughts of it crowded out everything else. He had ideas about his travel book but was too distracted to write anything. The room was so small that he felt claustrophobic unless the doors to the balcony were open, but then the sea was too blue, the air was too bright, and before long he found himself down in one of the cafés on the piazza with a glass of coffee and the International Herald Tribune, reading and absorbing sunlight and doing the crossword puzzle and watching the boats. Anton had no books with him that he hadn’t already read, which was a problem, and there was an enormous amount of time to kill. He was startled by how much he missed his cat. He’d rescued Jim as a kitten two years earlier, and the cat had been an adoring orange one-eyed presence in Anton’s life ever since. He went for long walks up the stairs of the town, past houses and gardens terraced up the side of the hill, and spent hours sitting by the harbor at night. On clear nights Capri was a distant scattering of lights. He could see it from his room but preferred to be down by the harbor, where you could walk to a certain point at the edge of the piazza, turn away from Capri, and imagine that nothing stood between you and the north coast of Africa. He harbored vague notions of escaping to Tunisia.
“Are you having a nervous breakdown?” Gary asked, over a phone line crackly with enormous distance.
“No,” Anton said. He was leaning against a wall beside the pay phone in the Sant’Angelo piazza, looking out at the boats moving silently up and down in the harbor waves. Imagining the phone lines running under the Tyrrhenian Sea. The piazza was deserted. There were people inside a nearby café that was frequented mostly by fishermen, but the restaurants and shops were shuttered and dark. The wind off the water was cold.
“You’d tell me, right? Your best man and everything.”
“Of course,” Anton said. “The question’s not unreasonable.”
“What did you tell the office?”
“What did I tell the . . .? Oh,” he said. “The office. They’ve probably figured it out by now.”
“You didn’t tell them you were abandoning your job?”
“Well, the job abandoned me first. And I didn’t know before I left that I wasn’t coming back again.”
“So you’re not coming back.”
“I don’t know.”
“You can see how a concerned friend might conclude there was something amiss,” said Gary. “Even if he hadn’t been your best man two weeks ago.”
“I could. Yes.”
“What’s your means of support over there?”
“I’m expecting some money soon. It isn’t expensive. I could last quite a while here.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. Listen, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I’ll call you later.” Anton hung up and walked to the edge of the piazza to look at the boats.
Anton’s job had faded out at the beginning of summer, slowly at first and then with increasing momentum, until he found himself alone in a dead-file storage room on the mezzanine level of the tower where he worked. The process began on the day his secretary disappeared, although it was far from clear at the time that things would snowball so quickly; this was near the beginning of June, and the third and final wedding attempt had just been scheduled for the end of August.
Anton was the head of a small research division at an international water systems consulting firm. Most of its projects to date had been in the desert cities, places like LasVegas and Dubai, where some impractical visionary had once touched a point on a map and said, Here. Never mind that the place touched on the map was uninhabited for a reason: “But there’s no water there,” some inevitable naysayer would protest, and this was where Water Incorporated eventually came in. There was also work done in other, less glamorous municipalities around the world, towns from Sweden to Montana with leaking aqueducts and purification issues. But the New York City contract was something unusual, and the details made Anton shiver when he read them: most of the 1.3 billion gallons of water that flow each day into the city of New York are supplied by two pipes, completed respectively in 1917 and 1935. The conduits have become so fragile over time that the supply can’t be interrupted in order to perform routine maintenance; the pipes are held intact only by the pressure of the water rushing through them, and the system leaks thirty-six million gallons of water per day. A third pipe has been under construction since 1970, but whether it will be completed before the older pipes fail is anyone’s guess. If the first two pipes were to fail before the third pipe is ready, then New York City would be rendered uninhabitable overnight, the supply of drinking water cut off. Water Incorporated’s contract called for studying the situation and coming up with recommendations on how to provide the residents of New York with a temporary supply of drinking water within twenty-four hours of a catastrophic pipe failure.
“All of you should be proud,” Anton’s director told the staff. “It’s your good work that brought us to this moment.” He was standing on a chair to address the troops. The New York City contract had been announced the day before and they were having an office party to celebrate. Anton was drinking wine with two of his staff: Dahlia, who he would have liked to drink with more often if he weren’t already engaged, and Elena, his secretary, who he’d been secretly in love with since he’d met her under criminal circumstances two and a half years earlier. “Now, as you can no doubt imagine,” the director said, “the systems we’ll be studying hold significant interest for terrorists.” He said terrorists in a slightly hushed tone, as if al-Qaeda might be holding a competing office party in an adjoining room. “We’re talking about the New York City water supply here. So in the coming weeks before the project commences,” he said, “we’ll be performing background checks on all staff who will be involved in the project. It’s a new regulatory compliance thing.”
Anton excused himself and went to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face and stare at his own reflection in the mirror. A background check. He felt as pale as he looked. In the days after the office party life continued as normal, but three weeks later he arrived at work on a Monday to find that his secretary had vanished. An unfamiliar blond specimen was sitting in her cubicle.
“Where’s Elena?” he asked.
The impostor, who was chewing gum, looked at him distastefully. “Who are you?”
“I’m Anton Waker. This is my office. You’re sitting at my secretary’s desk.”
“They didn’t tell me anything about an Anton,” she said. “They said I was supporting Louise and Jasper.”
“It’s Gaspar, not Jasper. I’m afraid you were misinformed. Where’s Ellie?”
“Who’s Ellie?”
“I’m your secretary.”
“You just told me you weren’t.”
“But then you said I was misinformed,” she said. He went into his office and closed the door behind him. He sat for a while at his desk going through yesterday’s research reports, spent a half-hour on the phone with Sophie who was crying because someone had cut in front of her in line at the bakery and she hated people and why was everyone always so horrible and mean, and when he ventured back out a few hours later the new secretary was gone. He heard her voice from somewhere down the hall and walked in the opposite direction to avoid her. Later in the afternoon he asked Dahlia if she’d made progress on the report she was supposed to be writing, and she told him that actually she’d been told to report to Gaspar in the Compliance and Regulatory Affairs department from now on.
“But you don’t do that kind of work,” he said.
She was embarrassed but had no explanation. It was just what she’d been told. His other seven direct reports told him the same thing, awkwardly, with their eyes downcast. No one really knew anything. It was embarrassing. The sympathy in their eyes made him want to punch someone. He couldn’t very well go across the hall and speak to Gaspar about it (“So, what’s this I hear about my entire staff reporting to you now?”), and repeated calls to his supervisor were not returned (“I’m sorry, Anton, he’s still unavailable. Would you like me to take another message?”), so he spent the day in his office with the door closed, waiting for an explanatory memo that never arrived. When he left at five his staff was in a meeting that he hadn’t been invited to. He heard Dahlia’s laugh and the strange new secretary’s voice through the conference-room door. Anton felt very formal all the way home.
Sophie was working; he heard the cello through her study door. He turned on the television and turned it off again, ordered Malaysian takeout and ate alone in silence, read the morning’s newspaper for a while and spent time with the cat, ate a few spoonfuls of ice cream, sat for two hours in the living room spell-bound by Sophie’s music. He talked with Sophie about the day’s news headlines when she emerged from the study around ten o’clock, brushed his teeth, kissed her, slept fitfully, came back to the office at a quarter to nine. He was met at the doorway of his office by a man from HR. Jackson was about Anton’s age and of similar build, but always slightly better dressed. He had a way of smiling a beat too quickly, and Anton had always found him somehow suspect.
“Anton,” he said. His voice was hesitant. “It’s good to see you.”
“Jackson. Good morning. Do you know where my staff went?”
Jackson smiled. “I believe they’re all in a meeting. May I talk to you a moment?”
“If they’re my staff,” Anton said, “and they’re in a meeting, why wasn’t I invited to the meeting too? I’m supposed to be supervising them?” He hadn’t meant the last part to sound like a question.
Jackson continued to smile instead of answering, but his smile was strained; he had the look of a man who’d have prefered to be doing almost anything else. Anton closed the door of his office behind them. He wondered if this was the last time he’d ever sit behind his desk, and he glanced up at the diploma on the wall to steady himself. Jackson sat down on one of the chairs across from him.
“Anton,” he said, “I realize the timing of this is a little unfortunate, but . . .”
“The timing of what?”
“As you know,” Jackson said, “we’ve been conducting some background checks recently.”
“Right, to prevent terrorist cells from infiltrating the office,” Anton said, but Jackson seemed not to find this as amusing as he did. “Well. Is there anything I can clarify for you?”
“There is, Anton. Listen, this might be awkward, but it would be best if we could speak as frankly as possible.”
“About . . .?”
“Well, let’s start with your academic background.”
“Sure. Harvard.”
Jackson smiled again but it was a different kind of smile, one that Anton thought contained an element of sadness. “Right,” Jackson said. He stood up, smoothing imaginary wrinkles from the front of his suit jacket. “Well, we’ll speak again about this soon. Did I hear a rumor that you’re getting married?”
“End of August,” Anton said.
“Congratulations. Are you going anywhere afterward?”
“Italy,” Anton said. “Rome, Capri, Ischia.”
“Ischia. Is that an island?”
Anton nodded. “In the Bay of Naples,” he said.
On the way in to the office sometimes, in the days after the first conversation with Jackson, Anton closed his eyes in the subway train and tried to concentrate on everything that wasn’t ruined yet. There was an idea he’d been thinking about for years now but especially lately, which was that everything he saw contained a flicker of divinity, and this lent the city a halo of brightness. Fallen, maybe, but beauty in the decrepitude, and it still seemed plausible in those days that everything might somehow fall back into place, that the background check might not have turned up anything of interest, that his original secretary might reappear at any moment. Easy to take refuge in the idea of holiness, with so much still possible and so much at stake.
The idea that everything might be somewhat holy had come originally from his mother, reading excerpts from a book on the philosophy of Spinoza on a Sunday afternoon. He was no older than twelve, and they were sitting together on the loading dock. She was reading him something impenetrable, he didn’t understand half the words and she glanced up and saw the blank look on his face. “Look,” she said, “I know the language is intense. None of the words are important, it’s the idea that matters: he’s saying God didn’t create the universe, God is the universe. Do you understand?”
“I do,” he said.
Look at my holy fiancée in the mornings, pale and darting-eyed as she anoints her face with creams and powders. Look at my holy one-eyed cat, rescued two years ago as a sickly kitten from an unholy doorstep on West 121st Street. Look at the holy trains that carry us down into the depths of this city, passing through stations that shine like harbors in the deep. Look at the holy trees down the center of Broadway, the holy newspaper lying discarded on the sidewalk, the holy cathedral of Grand Central Station where we pass each morning under a canopy of stars. Anton glanced up every morning as he crossed the main concourse. Its ceiling was a chalky green-blue upon which stars were pinpointed in lights, the shapes of constellations etched in gold around them. The constellations were backward; the artist had been influenced, the sponsors claimed after the fact, by a medieval manuscript showing the stars as seen by God from above. It was impossible to stop and look up at the ceiling in the blazing crowd, everyone rushing in different directions to different jobs, but the glimpses were nearly enough. Anton was aware of no place more beautiful in the city. The color of the ceiling always struck him as being more ocean-like than sky-like, and the stars made him think of phosphorus, which he’d read about but never seen. There was one morning in particular when he wanted to ask Elena if she’d ever seen phosphorus, but it was Thursday and of course Elena had vanished four days ago, and he was waging a war of attrition with his new secretary. She ignored him as he walked past her into his office that morning.
He didn’t look at her either, per their unspoken terms of engagement, but it occurred to him as he closed the office door that he’d had no occasion to ask her for anything yet, which struck him as odd. She had come to him for nothing; there had been no phone messages. As he sat down he noticed that his inbox was empty, for the first time in months. He remembered having reached the bottom yesterday afternoon, and he realized with a falling sensation that nothing new had been placed in it. He sat down at the desk, chilled by the air conditioning, and checked his voice mail. No messages. He had left his corporate cell phone in his desk drawer overnight. He tried to check his messages there too, but he couldn’t get more than a fast busy signal no matter which combination of buttons he pressed. He logged on to his company email, or tried to, and then spent some time leaning as far back as his chair would go, contemplating the error message on the screen. Access Denied.
Jackson’s card was on his desk. Anton hadn’t really wanted to touch it since Jackson had left it there. He’d been moving his paperwork carefully around and over the card for the past several days in the hope that it might just disappear by itself. He looked at his screen another moment and then dialed Jackson’s number.
“Anton,” Jackson said, in a tone implying that Anton was absolutely the last person he wanted to speak with that morning. “What can I do for you?”
“Good morning, Jackson. Listen, I’m locked out of my company email account.”
“I see,” Jackson said.
“And my cell phone’s not working.”
“Really?”
“Since you were here a few days ago,” Anton said, “I just thought you might be in a position to tell me what’s going on.”
“Well, I’m not a technical support person, Anton.”
“Jackson, listen, my staff isn’t reporting to me. Let’s not pretend this is a technical issue.”
Jackson was silent for a moment, and then Anton heard a soft click on the line.
“Anton,” Jackson said very clearly, “have you thought any more about our conversation last week?”
“Am I being recorded?”
Jackson went quiet again, and then asked Anton if there was anything he’d like to add to last week’s conversation.
“Nothing,” Anton said. “Absolutely nothing, Jackson, but thank you for asking. Sorry to bother you.”
Anton hung up, spent some time staring at the diploma on his office wall, and then dialed Jackson’s number again.
“Jackson, I’m sorry to bother you again. But I wondered if you could tell me what happened to my secretary.”
“Your secretary? She isn’t at her desk?”
“I meant Elena,” he said. “Elena James.”
“Marlene is your secretary, Anton.”
“Is that her name? My former secretary, then. She wasn’t fired, was she?”
“Of course not. No. Her reviews were excellent.”
“Yes, I know her reviews were excellent, Jackson, I wrote them. Was she transferred somewhere? A different department?”
“I’m afraid I can’t divulge—”
Anton hung up again and spent the remainder of the day reading and rereading the New York Times, drumming his fingers on his desk and staring into space, walking back and forth across the room with his hands in his pockets, writing his letter of resignation and then crumpling it up and throwing it across the room, wishing he were in Italy already.
The stop before Ischia was the city of Naples. Anton and Sophie came in by train after sunset and emerged from the station into a broad curved cobblestone street where no one spoke English but the taxi drivers all insisted that they knew where their hotel was, and the streets glimpsed near the train station were dark and strewn with trash, ancient apartment buildings towering unlit. The driver took them at high speed through an intricate network of freeways, and the overpasses curving overhead had a futuristic and sinister gleam. As they sped around corners the city was fleetingly visible, a gray glimmering chaos of buildings clinging to the hillside as far as the eye could see, and then they were plunging down the hairpin turns of a narrow street, passing between buildings that appeared to have sustained some unrepaired shell damage during the course of the Second World War. The driver performed a harrowing U-turn and screeched to a halt before the Hotel Britannique. They checked in and ascended in silence to the room, where Sophie took a shower and Anton stood on the tiny terrace six stories above the traffic. He was looking out over a scattering of palm trees that stood across the street, down over the narrow section of city that descended from their street to the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Bay of Naples calm below. There were boats in the moonlight. He heard the bathroom door open in the room behind him and he realized that he and Sophie had barely spoken in hours, and not at all since they’d arrived in the city. Anton turned and through the gauze curtains she was a ghost in the steam, drifting across the room toward her suitcase, pulling a dress on over her skin. He parted the curtains and she stood barefoot and pensive before him, hair dripping dark water spots on the sky-blue linen of her dress. She looked at him and for an instant he thought he saw panic in her eyes.
“I’m just tired,” she said quickly.
It took him a second to notice that her eyes were red. Three months ago, he thought, he would have noticed that instantly.
“That’s why you were crying?”
“I just get tired sometimes,” she said.
“I know you do. It’s okay.”
She smiled and twisted her hair up behind her head, secured it with a clip, seemed unaware of her beauty as a few strands escaped and fell over her neck.
“Sophie,” he said. She looked up. “Let’s go out and see the city.”
On the street outside the night was subtropical, palm trees lit up against a deep blue sky. The sidewalk was narrow, cars and scooters passing so close that he could have reached out and touched them. Sophie clung to his hand. The street began a curve that didn’t seem to end. They kept walking uphill, the road turning and turning ahead of them, until Anton thought they should have gone in a complete circle. There was no breeze from the sea below—it was as hot here as it had been in New York when they’d left—and his shirt was wet against his back. It was a long time before they came to a restaurant. He pushed open the wooden door, and Sophie moved past him into the room without speaking. The sign read Ristorante, but it was more of a lounge; a dim space filled with tables that terraced down toward a small stage where a girl in a sparkly dress was singing in English. Anton thought she was pretty and wished for a moment that he could share this observation with his wife.
“She’s singing a New Order song,” Sophie said suddenly. “Listen.”
“I have this album,” Anton said. “I used to listen to it all the time.”
“I know, but she’s singing it at half-speed. Like a nightclub song.”
“Well,” he said, “it is a nightclub.”
“Do you hear an accent?” Sophie asked. She didn’t seem to have heard him. “I think she’s British.”
“I think you’re right.”
“She’s terrible,” Sophie said after a moment.
A waiter had appeared. Anton got Sophie to order for him in her phrase-book Italian, and the song finished to surprisingly fervent applause. The singer’s dress was very tight and seemed to be made entirely of sequins, so that she emitted shards of light with every movement. It hurt his eyes to look directly at her. Her hair was dark and pinned up elaborately. She wasn’t terrible, he thought. Her voice was sweet and a bit too young for her body.
“Now she’s singing old Depeche Mode stuff,” Sophie said, in the tones of a girl watching a scandal unfold, and he forced himself to avert his attention from the broken-glass dress and listen to the song.
“I like it,” he said. “I think it’s interesting.” He watched Sophie’s face, but she didn’t respond or look away from the girl. They were taking a ferry tomorrow to the island of Ischia.
“What I wish you could tell me,” Gary said at the beginning of Anton’s fourth week alone on Ischia, “is what you’re actually doing there.”
“I can’t talk about it,” Anton said. He’d been calling Gary almost every day since Sophie had left the island. He was bored and there was no one to talk to there.
“Are you waiting for something?”
“You know what’s strange,” Anton said, “and this will sound awful—but what I really miss is my cat. I miss my cat more than I miss Sophie.”
“Your cat?”
“Jim. I know it probably sounds strange, in light of everything, but he’s the one I keep thinking about.”
“You’re right, that sounds strange. Why don’t you come back?”
“I can’t. It’s a long story.”
“Is there some reason you’re avoiding New York?”
“Well,” Anton said, “now that you mention it.”
“You kill someone?”
“Please. I can’t even set mousetraps.”
“Affair with your secretary? Unpaid debt?”
“Can you think of anything more banal,” Anton said, “than having an affair with your secretary?”
“You were sleeping with her. Jesus.”
“Things happen,” Anton said. “Look, I’m not proud of it.”
“Christ. Your secretary. How did it start?”
“The way I noticed her,” he said. “It wasn’t the way you’re supposed to notice someone you work with.”
Elena in the evenings: she stood by the window at six thirty P.M., watching as the evening reflection of their office tower appeared on the side of the Hyatt Hotel. The hotel was a reflective wall of square panels no more than fifty feet away, a mirror on which the bright windows of their offices began to appear at nightfall, before five in the winter. This was the time of day when, just by looking out the window, Anton could see the movement of workers on the floors above and below him. They walked across their offices from one lit square to another, wavering like ghosts in the reflection. The exterior of the hotel was composed entirely of glass and revealed nothing of its secret life except when a window was opened, which was rarely. Once Anton looked out and a man was leaning out the hotel window smoking a cigarette, and the sight gave him a shock—he was so used to thinking of the hotel as a mirror that he’d all but forgotten about the hotel rooms and suitcases and transient human souls on the other side of the glass.
Elena liked to pause by the floor-to-ceiling window in the reception area on her way back from the water cooler and stand there for a moment, sipping from a paper cup. He knew this because he watched her through the window of his office, their reflections separated by an interior wall but side-by-side on the hotel’s dark glass. Sometimes she waved at him and then he’d wave back, but more often she didn’t seem to notice him at all and then he’d watch her unobserved. At the end of the day it sometimes made him sad to look at her. She was tragic in the way he found half the office girls he’d ever met tragic, especially the ones who didn’t come from New York. She was one of millions of girls who’d come there from elsewhere and somehow gotten stuck in the upward trajectory, lost in the machine; making photocopies and fetching coffee for other people from nine to five or nine to six or nine to eight five days a week, exhausted at the end of a workday that far too closely resembled the workday before, and the workday before, and the workday before that; young and talented and still hopeful but losing ground; bright young things held up by their pinstripes on the Brooklyn-and Queens-bound trains every weekday evening, heading home to apartment shares in sketchy neighborhoods and dinners of instant noodles from corner bodegas.
The new secretary never stood by the window, and if she had Anton wouldn’t have waved to her. When ten days had passed without Elena, without email access or an explanation or word from his supervisors, he called Sophie to tell her that some genius had called a six o’clock staff meeting and he’d be home late. He closed himself in his office with a bottle of water and a sandwich. It seemed at least possible that if Elena were elsewhere in the building, her new office might be on the side of the building that faced the hotel, in which case he hoped he might see her reflection after sunset.
Sometime after seven his office window began to appear faintly on the surface of the glass tower outside, like a photograph rising out of liquid in a darkroom. An hour later the image was clearer, and by nine o’clock—damn these endless summer evenings—Anton could see almost every window of his building reflected on the side of the hotel. He tried to watch every reflected window at once, but the angle was such that he could really only make out people on the two floors above and below him. Any higher and he could see only the reflections of fluorescent lights. Any lower and there were only windowsills and angled blinds, a potted plant in an office four floors down. As time passed most of the lights blinked out. Two floors above him a man was working late. The man paced by his window once, twice, holding a cell phone to his ear and gesturing with his other hand. Anton stood close to the glass, looking from window to window, but none of the brightly lit squares held Elena.
He called the company’s main number at nine thirty. He listened to a recorded voice reading names, but Elena’s name wasn’t in the directory. It was strange to think of her living off the company grid, invisible and out of reach. Typing somewhere under the radar, making unrecorded calls.
On Monday morning Anton arrived at the office to find Jackson talking to the new secretary—Maria? Marla? Marion?—and the new secretary looked away with an unsuppressed smirk as soon as she saw him. Jackson smiled.
“Good morning, Anton.”
“Jackson. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Anton was moving past Jackson into his office, but he stopped just inside. The room was utterly empty, the desk and chair and sofa gone, his computer. Only the telephone remained, adrift on the carpet, plugged into the jack that had been behind his desk. He lifted his diploma down from the wall and held it to his chest. Jackson was watching him from the door.
“If you were planning on firing me,” Anton said, “why didn’t you do it on Friday?”
“Oh, we’re not firing you. Can you think of any reason why we should?” Jackson’s eyes flickered over the diploma. “I just came to show you to your new office, actually. We’re reorganizing a little.”
“Why can’t I stay in my old office?”
“You’re being transferred to a new division,” Jackson said. “You’re aware that we’ve taken over space on the twenty-third floor?”
“I remember hearing something about that.”
“Well, we’d like you to head the new team up there,” Jackson said. He inclined his head for Anton to follow him and they walked out together, through the open workspace where no one looked up as Anton passed, beyond the glass doors to the corridor by the elevators, where Jackson pushed the down button and stood avoiding Anton’s eyes until Anton gave up trying to make eye contact and stared down at the carpet. When the elevator arrived Jackson pushed a button marked M between the lobby and the first floor.
“The mezzanine level,” Jackson said when Anton looked at him.
“You said the new division was on the twenty-third floor.”
“I’m afraid the offices up there aren’t ready yet,” Jackson said. “Still under construction. It will probably be a month or two before we can occupy the space, so we’re putting you in a temporary office space for now.”
“On the mezzanine level? Is that even a floor?”
Jackson managed a pained half-smile but had nothing to say to this. The elevator was descending. The corridor on the mezza-nine level was unusually wide, and covered in linoleum instead of carpet. Bare lightbulbs hung at intervals overhead and pipes were exposed along the ceiling. Anton was struck by the white noise of this place, an indeterminate rushing and whirring, the vibrating of engines—were they close to the boiler room? Some sort of enormous central pump?—and the movement of air and water through the pipes and the ductwork all around him. He thought it was like being in the depths of a ship. The doors down here were older than any he’d seen elsewhere in the building, battered wood with scratched-up brass handles.
Anton heard a sound ahead, shuffling footsteps and a rhythmic squeaking; a woman came around the corner, pushing a plastic cart full of cleaning supplies. Her ankles were swollen as wide as her knees, and she stared flatly at him through thick round glasses as he passed. It occurred to him that he had seen her on his floor a hundred times and that neither of them had ever said hello. He said Hello this time, softly, experimentally, but she didn’t answer him and her expression didn’t change. They passed doors marked Security and Building Services and then a series of doors marked Dead File Storage, one through three. Jackson paused at the fourth one, Dead File Storage Four, fumbling with keys. Anton didn’t find the name of the room particularly comforting from a career ascension standpoint.
“It’s much larger than your old office,” Jackson said.
This was technically true. The room was enormous and nearly empty, and Anton’s footsteps echoed on the linoleum floor. His desk, chair, and sofa were marooned at the far end of the room, which was otherwise unfurnished and very bright. At the end of the room farthest from his desk, a line of decrepit filing cabinets stood unevenly against the wall. There were four large windows, none of which had blinds.
“This is a very strange office,” Anton said.
“It’s temporary,” Jackson said. “Larger, though, isn’t it?”
“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. What is this new division? What will I be doing?”
“I’m afraid I don’t have the specifics. You should wait to hear from your supervisors.”
“What do I do in the meantime?”
“That’s between you and your supervisors,” Jackson said, and left Anton alone in the room. Anton went to the nearest window. He was on the same side of the tower as his old office, but so far down that the reflective glass wall of the hotel was blocked by a line of colossal air vents. His new windows were only four or five feet above a gravel rooftop. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, allow me to explain. I only wanted to work in an office, and some things weren’t possible by normal channels. This is all I ever wanted. There were certain shortcuts I had to take.
He woke that night from a dream of the other Anton. The real Anton, or more precisely, the Anton who’d really gone to Harvard. In the dream he was the other Anton and he was walking down a street in a strange city, glancing at an unfamiliar reflection in a shop window, sitting down in an armchair and taking off his shoes, petting the head of an adoring golden retriever, moving to lift the receiver of a ringing telephone, hanging up his coat in a closet; all of the details, small and personal and utterly beautiful and mundane, that make up the fabric of a person’s life.