Leon never went to the airport unless he was getting on an airplane to go somewhere, but he had always found it hard to say no to Elizabeth. He had only arrived from London the day before Christmas, and he had just a few more days to spend with Lewis in New York; nevertheless, he hired a car to take him back out to JFK and meet Elizabeth’s plane.
After all these years, there still lingered between them a decorum left over from the days when he had escorted Elizabeth around New York. There was a kind of blind majesty in the way Elizabeth portrayed herself which made Leon behave like a courtier; he felt that he had to be there to observe her, to guard her from affront, and perhaps to catch her if she fell. She made no overt demands, but with the power of her reticence and her ladylike demeanor, she made it clear that she expected tending. It never occurred to Leon to disappoint her. In fact, her expectation seemed irrefutable. He behaved like a robot, opening doors and throwing down his cloak for an empress; he joked about the psychology of it with Lewis, claiming that the absence of graciousness in that other lifetime of his boyhood had made him a slave to courtesy as a way of distancing himself from the domestic cuffs and abuse he had grown up with. Some deeply ingrained sense of alarm about the vulnerable made him respond to a woman in distress, and Leon was perfectly well aware of it. Elizabeth was good at distress—she underplayed it so convincingly.
‘Just leave the key with the doorman. I’m sure I can get myself into the city somehow.’ That’s what she had said on the telephone, yesterday, New Year’s Eve. But her voice had been so pale, so mournful, that Leon had wondered how she would heft the receiver back onto the hook when she hung up the telephone.
From the leather window seat where he sat listening to the telephone conversation and looking out through the plate glass over the wind-scraped, icy trees of Central Park, Lewis had turned toward Leon with a look of mild concern, even though Lewis had never laid eyes on Elizabeth.
‘So we’ll have her here for a little while. Yeah?’ Lewis pushed his rimless granny glasses back up the broad, chocolate shine of his nose with a thoughtful, shell-tipped finger. He was freshly showered and shaven. His unbuttoned white shirt collar stood up crisply against the thin, brown column of his neck, and his cuffs flashed across the backs of his hands at the edges of his dark jacket sleeves.
Leon sighed.
‘It doesn’t bother me, man!’ Lewis was smiling. ‘We’ve got space. What are the holidays supposed to be about anyway? The woman’s obviously miserable.’
‘She’s the type that can use up all the oxygen the minute she walks into a room, you know?’
‘So, you’re planning to treat me like dirt,’ Lewis taunted lightly, ‘is that what you’re saying? Hey, I’m curious; she’s part of your past. I can cope with headcases, too, honey; she’s coming to the right place. Maybe I can prescribe her some drugs that’ll cheer her up a little.’ He laughed and the soft light from the room reflected off the lenses of his glasses as he moved and stood up.
Leon was hanging over the smooth, square, limestone block that formed a central counter in their plain, enormous kitchen and living-room. Lewis walked around the counter, leaned on it next to Leon, and reached up and draped a bony arm around his shoulders. They both gazed at the swathe of Manhattan skyline that ran along the opposite wall above the long leather seat and above the massive oak table where they hardly ever ate; the distant, winking buildings were already showering light into the New Year’s dusk.
‘Seriously, Leon, you’ve been telling me about Elizabeth for a while now, yeah? How she’s so beautiful, so fine, so rare. How she’s been working you on the phone and so on? I’m dying to see her. I might like to own her myself. It’s really not a problem.’
He stroked Leon’s shoulder with his hand, stopped, then stroked it again playfully. ‘And by the way, this sweater I gave you is nice—smoo-oth. Damn, they didn’t have my size and I had to give this thing away to my sweetheart.’ He took off his glasses and laid them down on the counter, the brown of his eyes lighting up the brilliant whites.
Leon threw his arms around Lewis in a huge embrace and covered his face with kisses, practically crying out in pleasure. ‘You always say yes to everything, Lewis. You’re just a yes-man. Yes to Elizabeth; yes to Leon. Yes yes yes. You’re just sucking up to me, the magician of yes.’
‘You know my mama said I was born sweet,’ Lewis struggled to get free, laughing and talking in a falsetto southern accent, ‘and I promise you I am going to say yes when you ask me whether I still want to go out for a walk and a glass of champagne. And otherwise why did I get into this fancy-Dan sport coat, since I can impress you just as much by being naked?’
‘And when we get back here?’ Leon’s voice had a huge tease in it, and his yellow eyes gleamed.
Lewis flushed and grinned, snatching up his eyeglasses again. ‘Yes. Maybe yes, later. Before the company comes.’
As he waited for Elizabeth outside the customs area in the sparse, slowly milling crowd, Leon thought about how much David must have changed over the last six or eight years.
What had happened to her? Leon wondered. It was as if David had beaten her, locked her up, starved her.. It was impossible to understand.
Leon felt somehow that he was responsible for whatever savagery she had suffered at the hands of the man he had once thought could make her happy. What mother would leave her children and cross the Atlantic during their Christmas vacation? She had to be in great pain; she couldn’t possibly be doing all this for effect.
And there she was, in a slim, short, black coat over black pants and a black sweater, wearing dark glasses at three o’clock on a dark January afternoon, as if she had just been widowed and had wept all the way across the Atlantic. Her skin looked dry, creased as if with a sudden passage of time, and roughened around her nose in little reddish patches. White opaque diamonds flaked from her chapped lower lip. Her hair was pulled back in a messy chignon, a zigzag of brown reaching backwards toward the blonde lights of some long-ago trip to the hairdresser.
He bent down and folded her in his arms and she was as brittle as a beetle, armored, light as air, flailing backwards and away from him, even though he was trying to right her, trying to help her get her feet back on the ground.
‘You don’t have luggage?’ he said, still supporting her by her elbows with each of his big hands.
Elizabeth was carrying only a large black leather shoulderbag.
‘There,’ she said and turned slightly, gesturing with her head. How had she managed to get help with her luggage in JFK? wondered Leon. He was sure he had never before noticed a skycap in international arrivals, but Elizabeth had in tow a silent black man in a blue uniform and red cap wheeling two little Louis Vuitton cases on a dolly.
‘Come on, then,’ Leon said and pulled her insect arm gently through his, leaning down toward her protectively, guiding her to the the car. He felt like he was holding an empty coat sleeve against his hip with his elbow, all fabric and no flesh, a hanger, a scarecrow.
‘I don’t want David to know where I am,’ she said in the back of the car. She was still wearing the dark glasses, and her voice was so quiet that Leon instinctively glanced at the driver, as if he might be a spy who could betray her.
‘Okay,’ Leon said, trying to use an unexciting tone of voice because he thought that guarantees should be offered calmly, as a proof that they were genuine and that they could without special effort be upheld. He wanted her to trust him and to confide in him, but he resisted saying, ‘You can trust me’, because he felt such a phrase would send her a message that she should not hear.
‘What about the children?’ is what he said instead.
‘They’re busy with Christmas presents; they’ll be—fine.’ Her lips closed in a firm, bloodless line. They rode along without speaking for a while until she said, ‘I told David I would see a doctor. In theory, that’s why I’m here. Maybe you have a good one?’
‘My doctor’s good,’ said Leon. ‘I haven’t seen him since I moved to London, but we’ll give him a call.’ After another pause, he said, ‘What’s going on, Lizzie? Have you got cancer or a coke habit or what? Is this all David’s doing? That he’s not—what—not interested in you anymore? If he wants you to see a doctor, he must care about you.’
Elizabeth looked away from Leon out the window.
‘Why wouldn’t you let me come see you in London when things first started going wrong?’ he asked. ‘Facing all this, whatever it is, all alone, is too much for you.’
Still, she said nothing.
‘Do you ever talk to anyone anymore, Lizzie? The last time I stopped by in Belgravia was what, in October? You were okay, then, weren’t you? I thought you were okay. Why are you always alone, Lizzie?’ Leon stopped talking, inwardly chastising himself for letting exasperation creep into his voice.
But it was too late. From beneath the wrap-around dark glasses he saw a tear slide down the desert of Elizabeth’s cheek.
‘What’s wrong with being alone?’ Then she audibly sobbed.
‘I’m sorry, Lizzie.’ Oh, fuck, Leon was thinking. How am I going to do this? Then he said, ‘I’m not criticizing you. I just wonder if alone is what you really want. Especially if you’re sick.’
‘I’m not sick. I need to see a doctor because I told David I would. It’s important to me to keep my word to him, to do everything he asks me to do. To behave properly. That’s all.’
Then under her breath, she said something more that he couldn’t hear. Leon thought maybe she said, ‘The blame is all his,’ or maybe it was, ‘The shame is all his.’
The scene at the apartment scared Leon a little.
In the elevator on the way up he reminded Elizabeth about Lewis. She hardly seemed to listen.
‘I don’t want to see people or go out or anything,’ she said, her black bug-eye dark glasses staring straight ahead of her at the elevator doors. ‘I didn’t come to have fun.’
‘We’re not thinking especially of going out. I’m hardly ever home at the moment; we’re happy just hanging out.’
‘Don’t stay home for me. I’ll be fine. You can go hang out all you want to.’ She said this in a bored tone of voice, as if nothing they could get up to could possibly make any difference to her anyway.
‘Well, no, that’s not what I mean; we’re happy just hanging out at home.’
As the elevator slowed, Elizabeth resettled her black bag on her shoulder, running her opposite hand around the inside of the strap as if the pressure of the upward ride had somehow hurt her and could now be eased.
‘Yeah, but you can go…’ and then she stopped and turned her head toward Leon. ‘Where’s his apartment?’ she asked, more alert.
‘Lizzie, this is his apartment.’
Here we go, Leon thought; I should have taken her to a hotel, even if she is sick.
‘He doesn’t keep a place of his own?’
‘Why would he?’
As the doors opened on the fifth floor, she said again, surprisingly loudly, ‘I don’t want to see anyone.’
And there was Lewis, in the hallway, in his sleek new gray-green sports jacket and his gray flannels, his arms hanging in a long V to his hands folded demurely right over left at his groin, the toes of his well-shined brown shoes gleaming under his trouser cuffs. He looked Elizabeth up and down and slowly nodded his head, leaving it bowed, as if in respect.
Elizabeth froze, and the automatic elevator doors started to close with a sucking jolt so that Leon had to throw an arm in front of them. They jolted open again, and he gently pushed Elizabeth out into the hallway, reaching back with one foot pressed against the door to grab her two little suitcases.
Still Lewis stood with his head bowed, his close-curled black hair glowing like oiled nylon in the dim light. Leon thought to himself that Lewis would definitely have heard her say, I don’t want to see anyone. But Lewis gave nothing away.
‘Lewis, this is my friend Elizabeth. Elizabeth?’ He had his hand on the small of Elizabeth’s back, at the top of her tiny, fragile pelvis. He didn’t push her forward again; he waited to feel her go by herself.
Stiffly and slowly, Lewis reached out with his right hand and took a half-step toward her. He looked up only enough to see where he was going; he didn’t look at Elizabeth’s face or try to catch her eye.
Elizabeth didn’t move.
Leon felt murder rising inside him at her rudeness. I’m not standing for this, he thought, who is she to judge my friends or my lovers? To ignore Lewis’s outstretched hand? Never again; it’s too important. The rage was huge and dangerous; Elizabeth, he knew, was as weak as a baby. He couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t hear because the blood was pounding so hard in his head.
Then, in an instant, Lewis stepped to one side of the carpet, with his back to the wall, sweeping his extended right arm along toward their open front door, gesturing welcome, bowing now from the waist, and saying in his rich, cultivated voice, ‘After you.’
It was such a skillful maneuver that Elizabeth suddenly, unexpectedly floated through the door. They all pretended that Lewis had never intended to shake her hand at all.
Lewis entered last and gently closed the door, then with a kind of subdued efficiency he slipped around them toward the kitchen, saying, ‘I’ve made some ginger tea. May I serve you some, Elizabeth? Or would you like to have a little rest or freshen up?’
Now Leon was afraid he might burst out laughing, and he hung back by the door, horrified and touched by Lewis’s domestic antics. The rage had not altogether abated, but the comedy began to work on him irresistibly. As he watched and waited, Elizabeth at last removed her dark glasses.
So now what? thought Leon. She feels she’s safe? Suddenly this counts as private?
She walked out into the middle of the vast living-room, turned around and said, ‘I like the minimalist look, Leon. It suits you. And the underfurnishing is clever—for someone your height, living in an apartment, I mean.’ She said it as matter-of-factly as if she had seen him yesterday, as if there was absolutely nothing wrong in the world and nothing wrong in her life. She also said it as if Leon lived alone in the apartment, as if Lewis wasn’t in the room, as if Lewis didn’t exist.
Then she dropped onto one of the pair of stone-colored velvet sofas, throwing her dark glasses down beside her, and reached up and pulled apart her chignon, shaking her hair out and running her fingers through it.
‘Ginger tea sounds fine, Lewis. Thank you.’
She didn’t even look at him.
Leon had to see some clients the next day. At ten thirty he decided that he couldn’t wait for Elizabeth to emerge from her room. He crushed the newspaper back along its folds, tossed it onto the window seat, paced across the room, snatched up his empty coffee mug from the oak table, carried it around the limestone island, and dropped it in the sink with a dangerous smack. Then he turned and leaned back against the edge of the limestone counter surrounding the sink, crossing his arms.
‘I’m sure she’s still sleeping,’ Lewis said, watching him from the sofa. ‘Her light was on till dawn.’
Leon raised his eyebrows in a silent question, letting out a breath through taut nostrils.
Lewis added, ‘She turned it off when you left to run around the park.’
‘What are you going to do today?’
‘I told you, I’m going to stay here and guard her for you. You are fretting for no reason.’
‘Some vacation,’ Leon muttered.
‘It’s a game for me, sweetheart. A camp, even. Instead of playing doctor today I’ll just play servant. She’s happy with that. I know exactly what I’m doing with her, believe me. And I can’t wait to get started, either—the match of the titans.’ Lewis stood up, pulling his bathrobe around him and cinching the cord. ‘But get lost now, because I’ve got to get showered and into my outfit before she walks out of there. I’ve got everything all picked out. If she gets too big an eyeful of nigger flesh she’s going to shit bricks.’
This made Leon grin, but it made him wince inside. He walked over and kissed Lewis goodbye with an angry lump in his stomach; he was afraid, and he didn’t want to be. He was telling himself that Lewis was for real, the most for-real thing he’d ever come across. That meant there was nothing to be afraid of. And as he bent to kiss him, he slipped a defiant finger inside Lewis’s bathrobe against the smooth expanse of his breastbone; his heart was welling up with tenderness.
Lewis laughed in his throat. ‘How you dare!’ he said.
Leon kissed him again, gently, on the lips and then walked recklessly out the door.
If you don’t believe him when he says he can deal with it, you don’t deserve him, Leon told himself in the elevator. And then as he crossed the icy pavement looking for a cab, he thought, But why the fuck does she deserve him?
By the time Elizabeth woke up, Lewis had made her a breakfast tray with a tiny serving of mango cut up in a little china bowl, a piece of dry toast, a cup of black coffee. He had asked Leon how she liked her coffee; the rest was a guess.
He knew she was awake because he could hear the water running in her bathroom. He tapped on her door, heard no answer, opened it gently and peered inside. The bathroom door was closed and it sounded like the shower was running full blast. He put the tray down on the floor, darted in and pulled the covers loosely together on the bed, smoothed them a little, then picked up the tray, put it on the bed and slipped out again. It was as if he was trying to catch a unicorn.
Eventually she came out of her room. Lewis was sitting on one of the velvet sofas in his grey flannels and a newly washed and ironed white button-down shirt reading The Magic Mountain when he heard her door open. He marked his place, put the book down on the rug, and stood up briskly. Then he waited.
As she came into view along the hall, two things immediately pleased him. Elizabeth was carrying the tray herself, and he could see, even from across the room, that she had eaten most of the mango and taken a bite of the toast. He rushed to take the tray from her hands.
‘Thank you,’ she said, giving it up with a little exhalation of breath.
Lewis said nothing. He set the tray down by the sink and waited again.
After a long minute or so, Elizabeth said plaintively, ‘Is Leon here?’
‘I’m afraid he’s seeing some clients today.’
‘Oh.’ Her surprise was meek, slightly hurt.
She started to drift across the room, aimlessly, self-consciously. When she had put a good fifteen feet between them, she said, ‘Well, I’ll just—I’ll be fine.’ She had taken possession of the room, and she was dismissing him.
‘Maybe you’d like to go for a walk?’ he asked politely. He nodded at the long, horizontal window behind her, above the leather seat. ‘It’s a fantastic day, as warm as it’s been for a while, not too windy.’
Elizabeth turned and looked out the window at the cobalt sky and the pale thrusts of buildings coldly glowing in the morning light.
‘I don’t mind escorting you, Elizabeth.’ He sounded noncommittal. ‘If you think it might help your jetlag.’
Elizabeth looked a little surprised. She stood up very straight and then she reached up and fingered her hair with both hands. It was still wet from the shower.
‘And I don’t mind giving you a hand with your hair, either,’ Lewis said. ‘Because you shouldn’t go out with it wet like that.’
‘My hair?’
‘Let me get Leon’s dryer,’ said Lewis, starting down the hall. ‘Why don’t you just sit down. Sit there, by that plug, so the cord will reach.’ He gestured to the stools lined up along the living-room side of the freestanding limestone counter. There was a group of plugs concealed underneath the lip of the limestone.
Elizabeth took a step toward the counter, then she bent a little and looked.
‘Mm-hm,’ she said, as if to acknowledge that Lewis was correct about the plugs.
Then she perched on one of the stools, stunned, and when Lewis came back, she said dreamily, ‘My brush is in my room.’
‘Sure,’ said Lewis. And he went in and looked through her things on the sycamore dressing-table and in the bathroom, found the brush, cleaned the long hanks of bronze-blonde from between the bristles and carried it back out to the living-room.
‘Your hair is falling out by the handful,’ he said gently. ‘Sometimes that’s bad diet.’
Again she said, ‘Mm-hm.’
And she let him blowdry her hair.
Neither one of them said a word while the dryer blew its hot stream. Lewis pursed his lips in concentration, lifting her hair carefully in long narrow sections, keeping his fingertips moving over the roots all the time so that he didn’t burn her scalp and didn’t flatten the hair. He brushed it only a little, at the ends, so it wouldn’t pull and wouldn’t come out. His fingers were long, agile, committed.
Part of the time Elizabeth closed her eyes. Her face took on a serene blandness. It was as if she was hypnotized.
‘So,’ Lewis said at last, switching off the dryer, ‘do you want to finish in the mirror?’
‘Yes.’ She stood up and brushed herself off with her hands.
Lewis watched her with a clinical eye. He couldn’t see any hairs on her arms and legs. What did she think she was brushing away? What imaginary dirt clung to her?
‘Will I be warm enough?’ she asked him, indicating her neatly tailored, striped hip-hugger trousers and her thin cashmere pullover.
‘Maybe boots?’ Lewis looked at her brown suede mules, her feet bare in them. He handed her the hairbrush.
When she came back from her room, her hair was tucked up in the chignon again; she had changed into flat black suede boots and she had a fine cloud of white scarf wrapped thickly around her neck and shoulders. Lewis found her coat in the front hall closet and he held it out for her, slipped it delicately up along her arms, wrapped it close around her. He stopped short of doing up the buttons for her.
The only thing she said during their promenade along Central Park West was, ‘Do you have any particular—job?’ The crystal air misted with her breath.
Lewis said, ‘I’m a psychiatrist.’
He might as well have given her an electric shock. He could feel the jolt go right down her spine under his hand where it politely barely touched her shoulderblades, then down her legs, and into the frosty pavement. She skittered on her feet and grasped his free arm with her hand; for a moment, he had to hold her much more firmly against her shoulderblades.
She acted as if she had stepped on a slick of ice. In a way, she had, Lewis thought.
‘I’m not working this week,’ he added.
Elizabeth nodded silently.
He could feel how frail she was; how the walk, how everything, tired her. The flight must have nearly killed her, he thought.
He said, ‘Maybe tomorrow we can cross the street and walk in the park.’ Not today, he thought. It’s too far.
When he got her back upstairs, Lewis made Elizabeth a tiny sandwich from very thinly sliced, pale wheat bread with a tissue of chicken breast inside, four or five mustard sprouts, no mayonnaise at all.
She sat on a stool at the counter again, studying the sandwich, touching the bread. He had cut it into four pieces not much bigger than postage stamps and offered it on a butter plate. He stood across from her making another sandwich for himself.
At last she laid one of the postage stamps on her tongue, as if she were going to lick it or take it as communion. She closed her mouth and chewed slightly. It was hard for her to swallow; there seemed to be a stiffness in her throat, an insurmountable tension.
At last when it went down, Lewis felt her resistance in his own throat, like sandpaper, like regret.
He left his sandwich on the cutting board without tasting it, and he thought to himself, I can eat when she’s resting.
Elizabeth began to talk to him, whining at first, as if she now felt that she had to justify her bad behavior to him and as if she resented it.
‘It’s been stressful for Americans living in London this year—since September Eleventh, I mean. Europeans just don’t understand what happened. I worry about my children a lot, and my husband travels all the time.’
Lewis ignored the way she implied a complete change in his status. He had already been behaving in just the way he wanted to behave. And he didn’t believe she really resented him; he believed she was just embarrassed. It was all the same to him, as he tried to show her with his indifference. He looked her in the eye for the first time since she had arrived, mildly, and he nodded slightly a few times, his glasses flashing.
She went on talking in generic terms, still defensive. ‘I’ve been overtired, you know? I need some time to myself.’ But then she gave over to something like gratitude. ‘This is ideal, a little break.’
Again Lewis nodded and held her eye for a moment, waiting.
She ate another square of sandwich, quickly, without apparently thinking about it this time. And then suddenly details began to pour out of her. Everything up to now had been priming her to overflow.
It was a familiar story. A selfish husband who had never understood her and, when he had exhausted her, went on to the next attraction. The insult, far worse than the betrayal. The ruin of her marriage despite the sacrifice of everything—her own career, body and soul, life itself.
Lewis kept busy, boiling water and peeling lemon rind for canarino, his back to her, murmuring, ‘Uh-huh,’ from time to time.
He understood that Elizabeth needed recognition. He understood this because he understood that everyone needs recognition. The story was important because it was her story, the pain because it was her pain. At first, he didn’t pay much attention to the details, or at least he didn’t seem to; he’d heard them all before anyway. And he knew that the details welled up from her so freely precisely because he didn’t seem to pay too much attention.
When he had made the canarino, he guided her to the sofa, helped her get comfortable, slipped the hot mug into her tense, needy fingers. On she talked, in her sad-sounding southern voice, the long sweep of a decade recounted in an unbroken monotone, as if it were all a single episode, a single undifferentiated experience: how hard she had tried, how bewildered she had felt by the way marriage turned out to be, how overwhelmed she had been by motherhood, how unprepared for the formlessness of time in the wake of childbirth, the gray unchanging hopelessness of a life whose result was unimportant and would go unreported, the so-called friendships with people she didn’t care about and who didn’t care about her, her lack of respect for practically everyone and for herself in her failure, the piling up of fears in the long black nights, the paralyzing lack of clarity she felt about anything at all, and when the blow of revelation finally came, the certain insight that she had been betrayed, her wish to withdraw, to lie down, to not know, the beast torpor which overcame her and which swallowed her up, the cavern where she lay, bottomless, inescapable.
After a while, Lewis had to get his sandwich. He wolfed it down on the window seat, just out of her view.
‘I’m not giving up,’ she said with unselfrighteous dignity.
‘Of course not,’ Lewis said, chicken springing from one corner of his mouth, weighted down by the mayonnaise, plopping onto his flannel leg. He wiped it away with a fingertip which he silently sucked clean.
‘Sometimes in the morning, I can’t get dressed. I try to make myself, for the sake of everyone else. I have to find some way, now, to make a life. To—get back. This right now is just a little break. Until I can feel something that matters to me again.’
‘I know,’ said Lewis. He was impressed by the gentleness of her complaining. This long lament came without a tear, without histrionics. It achieved its effect by the sheer length at which she sustained it.
The light had hardened outside, and still she murmured on; Lewis decided that her words were tears. She was crying articulately. The same sorrows came around again; they repeated themselves, even as new ones also emerged and mingled with them. She talked with the tenacity of Scheherazade, riveting his attention to her, and he let her.
She presented herself as somehow detached and separated from her own existence. There was a domestic scene going on back at home in London which she had at one time set in motion but in which she was not really engaged, at least not any longer. There were children, servants, a dog; she had escaped from them. They were like something she remembered from a long time ago, as if she had died and severed all the bonds, mourned her death, their loss, and was now going forward alone. With nothing. She had given everything up. She had given everything back. She wanted nothing of David’s—his wealth, his position, his children. She wanted nothing to do with him. She rejected all of it. She had come away, and she was not going back. She asserted this fiercely.
Gradually, Lewis began to see that she was, in her own way, immensely strong; she was surfacing from her long depression because she had been able to jettison everything which felt to her like a burden, an attachment. She was getting ready to start again, to find the person who had been lost in the avalanche of her life. Her neurosis was arrogant, magnificent, all-absorbing. Her husband hardly figured in the story; she didn’t really let him, villain that he was. He was just a member of the public, her public. She commanded all the attention in her tale. She had achieved this through force of will, because she was determined to. It was part of her strategy for survival. Lewis admired her strength, and he took pity upon her weakness. He could have looked at her beautiful face for ever.
As the afternoon wore on, they both felt as if they had known each other for years. They were at ease; they were, in some sense, in love. They would rather, that day, have been with one another than with anyone else on the planet. They found one another completely attractive and completely engrossing. They established an extraordinary degree of trust. Lewis seemed to know everything Elizabeth was going to say and do, and she knew that he knew, and it was fine with her. She had never felt so unthreatened by anyone, so well looked after. She began to be able to breathe, to see, to think, for the first time in a long time.
She asked him one or two questions about himself and about Leon.
He answered them unhesitatingly, for instance, ‘No, I wouldn’t have come to New York if Leon hadn’t asked me to. My life was in Boston; that’s what I was about. And my mother and my younger brothers and sisters and so on. At least that’s what I used to be about.’
‘And then he left you here?’ Her voice was full of shocked sympathy, which made Lewis smile before he could stop himself. So she smiled, too, because she saw he thought she was overstating things and she wanted to show him she recognized that her case and his case were not the same.
Nevertheless, Elizabeth wanted to see parallels; she wanted to find her case answered by his case, by him. Already she felt that Lewis was hers, that he had offered himself to her and that he would make everything up to her: he would save her. In her mind, she went ahead taking him over, looking for clues to her circumstances, for a course of action. And at the same time, she began to adopt his attitude of wisdom and generosity, of justness and righteousness, toward herself and her situation, as if his attitude were a piece of clothing he could lend her and she could put on then and there.
She did all these things without real discrimination, according to her inward state, her needs, not considering outward facts, not considering the fit. And she did it silently. Lewis, only half-aware, did nothing to stop her.
Lewis thought he had the measure of her. He thought he knew exactly what she needed, what she could not do without. He thought he could help her without breaking his stride. Unguardedly, proudly, he shared whatever she asked for. It was his nature to do so.
He answered her casually. ‘Yeah, well, the London thing. That’s just for now. Maybe I could work in London. But I won’t. I’ve moved once for Leon, and he understands that I won’t move again. It’s not just a black man’s pride, because I’ve already made myself completely available to him. But I’m set up now with work I want to do in New York. I’m committed. A lot of my patients are adolescents; I don’t just give them pills, I talk to them. I’m sure you can understand, Elizabeth, that I can’t ask them to trust me and then walk out on them—they’ve had that probably from every adult they ever came across. I have to be there and be there and be there. Maybe they need to beat on me like on a rock. Some of my kids are victims of crimes and abuse you don’t want to know can happen, from a tiny age, and they are trying to resist being pulled into all the gang stuff and drug stuff that makes law-abiding citizens like you and me scared to walk down the street. I didn’t work my guts out at Harvard Medical School just to follow some rich white guy around the world, but, you know, I want to be happy like anybody else. Hey, my mother wouldn’t accept it unless I was with a woman anyway, so she’s not even trying to wrap her head around white.’ He flourished one hand in the air and smiled again, snorting, a half-laugh.
Elizabeth was silent. Lewis watched her without anxiety. She didn’t acknowledge the details of what he had said, and he accepted that she was absorbing what she was able to absorb. Conclusions, judgements were still beyond her, he thought—about him anyway. Then, after a pause, she continued asking about his relationship with Leon as if that were the only topic between them.
‘And what if he—I mean, are you happy living in his apartment? You trust him?’
‘More like does he trust me, don’t you think? I love this place.’ Lewis laughed. ‘He’s got me where he wants me. Kept. Well kept. I’m not leaving. And he knows. The man with the real estate, that’s the man with the power.’
Elizabeth solemnly blinked. Real estate and power, she thought. I have neither. I’ve never asked for anything. I don’t want anything; I don’t need anything. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for David, for David’s children. This was the first time that it occurred to her that marriage was like slavery—if you gave up too much for it. She didn’t say so to Lewis; she thought he might feel insulted. It was the first thing she consciously held back from him, but it wouldn’t be the last.
‘He can bring in all the boys he wants,’ Lewis went on, ‘he’s not getting rid of me just by hurting my feelings.’
‘Boys?’ Her voice was very quiet.
Lewis tilted his head toward her and lifted his eyebrows, mocking gently. ‘Don’t be prissy, Elizabeth. Why should that shock you? Listen. Leon’s not so confident as he makes out. Who is? The boys are—well, let’s put it like this: Leon sometimes used to feel he had to score to feel real—hockey, the stock market, boys, whatever. It’s not like he doesn’t know that. He and I had our problems over it, and, okay, that’s a big reason why I did decide to move down here. He didn’t want to live like that anymore, and I didn’t want him to either; so we made the commitment. Lately there haven’t been any boys that I know of, but one boy here or there isn’t going to change things frankly. Obviously, I don’t like it that Leon’s away so much, but I don’t let it make me nervous. Basically, I think I’m winning. So—this is my home now. Leon makes it home for me.’ There was a lilt in Lewis’s voice now, a love lilt. ‘Leon’s a guy worth some fussing over.’
Elizabeth didn’t say anything. She kept her eyes on Lewis, but inwardly, she was looking away. Looking away from the behavior of men—Leon, Lewis, David—behavior that was so dark to her, so incomprehensibly animal, with the ropiness and sweat, the sharp gloom of the jungle on it. Boys, violence, adultery. She couldn’t correct these things. She left them as a gap in her mind, a blank, an aporia; she drew a veil over them. They were too pungent, too disturbing.
Then Lewis added, softly, ‘I trust him.’ Because he wanted Elizabeth to know he understood that trust was something she had heavily on her mind.
Elizabeth inclined her head in understanding. But it didn’t make sense to her. Why did Lewis trust Leon? With evidence abounding of his faithlessness, of his selfishness, of his restlessness. She certainly didn’t trust David. Not any more, never again. Elizabeth didn’t consider that love might come into it. She was starting to think now, about power, about control; she was beginning to cast about for where it lay, and to feel an appetite for it.
What was Lewis using to keep hold of Leon? Lewis has no power at all over Leon, she thought; he just has Leon’s attention—for now. And attention makes you feel—what did Lewis say? Real? I have no power at all over David. Again she insisted to herself that she had never wanted any power, never asked or expected anything from David. That it had all been forced on her. Unwanted, like David’s attention. His excessive attention. I certainly don’t have his attention anymore. And she wondered, just for a moment, about being free. Free, with nothing. Could there be any savor in that? Had she known the answer once? She couldn’t remember.
But what if she did want something—on purpose. Really craved it. Sought it out, asked for it, fought for it? What would it be? How would she get it?
Lewis thought that he could see into her mind. ‘Were you ever happy with David?’ he asked. ‘Did you ever trust him?’
There was a long silence.
At last Elizabeth said, with surprising enthusiasm, ‘Oh, yes. I was happy. We were both happy. But then—I lost my confidence. That’s the thing. In—everything.’ She paused and then went on more reflectively, ‘When I placed myself in his hands, I was sure it was—okay. Twelve—well, I don’t know, really ten—years ago. But then the children ate away at that, and his never being there, never noticing, until—this year. This year changed everything.’ Again she paused and her voice turned bright, bold. ‘I’m in my own hands now—aren’t I? And in fact it’s been that way for a long time. It’s just that I didn’t realize it. Now I know.’
Elizabeth felt the blood faintly warming in her veins with Lewis talking to her, approving of her, loving her. There she was—real— in his comprehending gaze. And she began to feel that, after all, she was entitled to something. Why push it all away? Why reject everything of David’s? She thought that settling for trust, for attention, had been naïve. She thought Lewis was naïve, though she didn’t tell him that yet. And she pictured herself besting Lewis, pushing on past him. His situation is precarious, she thought, childish, even. He needs to grow up.
I was so good at getting attention—from just about anyone. I still can, Elizabeth thought. But now I’m going to need more than attention. I’m going to need something I can be really sure of. She had a glimmer, too, of how she might go about getting it. She saw that, in fact, it was already within her reach.
When Leon telephoned around four and said he was on his way home, it made a difficult transition for the pair at the apartment. Lewis, in his vigor, negotiated the transition easily. He couldn’t wait to share his day and his new-found obsession with Leon. But he had to help Elizabeth.
‘I’m not your patient,’ she pleaded, ‘but, Lewis, our conversation—it’s private. Treat it as—as discreetly as you would a conversation with a patient. Please, Lewis? I haven’t been well.’
Lewis didn’t like the request, padded out as it was with psychological blackmail. It was the first resistance he had felt in himself toward Elizabeth, and he knew that he felt resistance because she was asking him to separate himself from Leon. Only a tiny separation, only a small area of knowledge. But he didn’t like even a film of habit to creep between himself and Leon. The Atlantic offered them enough challenges.
‘We’re all friends, Elizabeth.’
Her face darkened in fear. The fear seemed real to him. And he considered that it was his own fault; he’d used tricks of his trade on her. He’d doctored her because she needed doctoring, and now she was asking for a patient’s privilege: secrecy.
It’s no big deal, he thought, to give her a little time, a little space. He felt the inner swagger of his natural strength, of his confidence, of his wish and his need to be the one to help such an old close friend of Leon’s.
‘Yeah, Elizabeth. You have my word.’
‘She’s a human being, Leon. So she’s a responsibility. What can I do?’ Lewis half-whispered as he sat on the edge of their bed putting on his socks.
‘Ah, the good doctor! For starters, don’t take sides. Let’s find her a doctor of her own. You belong to me.’ Leon didn’t smile as he said this, though his ferocious tone was made comical by the fact that his massive physique was clad in black running tights and a sweatshirt with a childish hood pulled snug around his face.
Lewis looked up at him with dubious eyebrows and his dark eyes were opaque and trembling with irritation, but then he chuckled. ‘Don’t forget Mr Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation.’ He stood up and straightened his trousers, twisting the belt around, shaking out the legs. ‘I’m not taking sides,’ he went on, ‘and you know it. I started in with her for your sake, man. Don’t be a baby. Get in the shower before you freeze to death. No—wait.’
Then he stepped around the end of their bed, put his arms around Leon’s waist, and butted his hips gently forward into Leon’s thighs, nestling his face against Leon’s chest and saying in a reassuring voice, ‘There’s nothing she told me that you couldn’t guess if you used your imagination. I know you trust me when I tell you that.’ He butted against Leon a little harder.
‘What about David?’ Leon still sounded impatient. ‘What’s he planning to do about his wife?’
‘Talk to her, ask her. I never met the guy.’
‘How can he have become such an asshole now? That she’s such a mess?’
‘Look, he clearly never knew who you were, did he? And you were together—all the time, right? Why should he know who she is? Maybe he’s just in the marriage for something he wants, not for something that was really ever there. From what you tell me, he wouldn’t have had to change all that much to be a real shit.’
Lewis pulled back a little with a sudden grin and then became earnest again. ‘You can see from looking at her that she needs support—unconditional support. And she knew where to come for it. She and I both know, Leon, that you understand unconditional. It comes naturally to you. Once you decide on somebody, you don’t hold back. That’s why I’m here, and that’s why she’s here.’
‘So what about David? Why isn’t he here?’
‘Shit, man, that’s a lot of unconditional!’ Lewis talked into Leon’s chest, laughing a little now, rubbing his cheek back and forth against the damp gray sweatshirt, the corner of his eyeglasses catching and pulling so that he had to duck his head down and push against Leon to release the snag. ‘I guess he just doesn’t need it. Or maybe nobody told him you were offering?’
‘She needs to call him. I want her to call him.’ Leon sounded intent, businesslike.
Lewis broke in with a lazy, dismissing voice, rubbing against Leon like a lion against its cage, familiar, content. ‘Don’t pressure her. She doesn’t need a lot of reality just yet.’
‘I’m an old man, and I’m fucking terrified,’ said Leon, closing in on their embrace and dancing his hips against Lewis. ‘Thank God she’s a woman.’
‘Hey, you’re not so old.’ Lewis lifted his head and smiled with just one side of his mouth, resettling his eyeglasses and eyeing Leon appraisingly. ‘But don’t stop the jogging; I don’t know that I ever met a woman who interested me quite the way she does.’
‘You little fucker,’ said Leon, shaking Lewis between his arms, ‘you’ll die queer and you know it.’
‘Who says I’m dying?’
‘Get the fuck out of here. Get to work before I rape you.’ Leon’s face split wide in a smile and he pushed Lewis away.
‘Louder, man!’ Lewis cried out. ‘You’re not scaring anyone. She’s all the way in the next room asleep.’
They both fell silent suddenly, listening for Elizabeth in real anxiety, and then they burst into giggles.
Finally, Lewis looked serious and said, ‘You’ve got to feed her from an eyedropper today, Leon. Don’t get impatient and ruin everything.’
‘I’m going to take her out to eat.’
‘Don’t do that; don’t make her eat in public. And don’t watch her. Don’t crowd her with talk. And—’ Lewis was importunate.
Leon threw his hands up in mock apology. ‘Okay, okay! I was only kidding, doc. I’m going to be just like you—only nicer. Doctor Leon. Saint Leon, actually. Wait till you hear what she’s going to tell me while you’re out. Incest, child abuse, bestiality. We go back a long way, Lizzie and I.’
Lewis grinned. ‘I’m leaving, man. You beep me if you need advice. There’s a woman psych at the hospital I’m thinking of for her. I’ll talk to her today. She’s on, I’m pretty sure. We’ll see how Elizabeth is tonight and maybe suggest it.’
When Leon left to fly back to London the next day, Elizabeth stayed behind at the apartment in New York with Lewis.
It was obvious that she was avoiding seeing the woman colleague Lewis had recommended. She just wanted Lewis—as much of him as she could get. Each day they had found an opportunity to talk, and each day they had covered again the things they had talked about before, rolling backwards and forwards over the same ground, a little faster each time as if Elizabeth was a wind-up vehicle gradually picking up speed, as if she might finally launch and become airborne.
She had agreed to telephone David.
‘You don’t have to say where you are, Lizzie,’ Leon said. ‘Just tell him you’re safe. Just tell him you’re—better.’
Then, with the driver waiting downstairs and the front door already open onto the hall, he asked, ‘Do you want me to go see David? When I get there? Maybe that would—’
She was silent, suddenly haggard.
Lewis put his hand on Leon’s shoulder. ‘Don’t go see him. I don’t think Elizabeth wants that,’ Lewis said.
Leon shrugged off the feeling that Lewis and Elizabeth were in league together, the feeling that he himself kept on not quite getting the point. He could rely on Lewis. He knew he could rely on Lewis.
‘I’m not going to do anything Elizabeth doesn’t want. I thought it might help, that’s all,’ Leon said.
‘I’ll call David, Leon.’ She sank her upper teeth into the fragile blue tinge of her lower lip. He put an arm around her, bent down, gently kissed her unyielding cheek. And he looked at her, wondering.
She could tell he had his doubts. ‘I promise I’ll call him, Leon.’ Then she topped it. ‘I need you to help me, you and Lewis.’
Leon couldn’t remember Elizabeth ever admitting she needed anything from anyone. It wrung his heart.
So he kissed Lewis, just a peck on the cheek in the hallway, and went.
None of these people were the sort of people who would break their word. None.
After Leon left, Elizabeth seemed tense. She didn’t want to talk and she didn’t want to go out; she hovered in her bedroom, with the door open most of the way, perching on the bed for a few minutes at a time, then wandering to the window and looking out, then wandering to the bedroom door and looking up and down the hall.
Lewis started in on the paperwork that had silted up on the oak dining-room table during the last ten days and tried to ignore her. But he could feel her checking on him and avoiding him at the same time. He figured Elizabeth might be finding the new arrangement just a little too cozy.
Finally he said over his shoulder, without turning around toward where she stood across the room near the hall, ‘You know, Elizabeth, I feel comfortable around you, but if you don’t feel comfortable around me, maybe we should talk about it now, because I have work here.’
He looked up in time to see her sort of rise and fall in place without moving her feet. He thought she was embarrassed.
‘Well, I—no, I’m comfortable with you.’ It was unconvincing.
Lewis pushed back his chair, stood up, and took a few steps toward her. ‘So you told Leon you’d call home, and it’s making you restless?’
She smiled at him, maybe nearly laughed, then dropped her eyes like a little girl. Lewis thought she was relieved that he had busted her.
He grinned, too, and said in a friendly way, ‘Obviously, I can’t make the call for you, and I’m not going to hide in my bedroom in my own home. But I guess I have a friend I’d like to see. I can give you some privacy. Adios.’
At this he saw her pupils swell and shrink in her blue eyes. She wasn’t sure of herself.
‘God, you’re a fragile, needy thing, aren’t you?’ he said. He put his hands on both her shoulders and ducked down to look her squarely in the eye. ‘You can do it, Elizabeth, and you can do it alone—whatever you decide to do. I’m not ditching you. I’ll come back in an hour. But you better make the damn call, girl, because you promised Leon you would. Don’t let him down. Leon would never do that to you.’
His tone was fierce; it surprised him. And Lewis thought to himself as he left the apartment that he was a little angry with Elizabeth, and that he was perfectly entitled to be. But he knew the anger would pass.
By the time Elizabeth phoned home, it was too late to talk to the children.
‘I’ve put them to bed, darling, ages ago!’ David said, crushing out his cigar as if she might be able to see it and object. ‘It’s after eleven here.’
‘Of course.’ Her voice was deadpan. David half-wondered if she had really called to talk to the children anyway, but he tried to sound encouraging.
‘Why don’t they call you tomorrow? Norma will be back. I’ll tell her.’
‘Where’s Norma?’
The question seemed to reflect surprise at Norma’s absence rather than curiosity as to her whereabouts; David answered with deliberate vagueness. ‘Just—I don’t know. I gave her the day off. She’s been working every day since—well, since you—got ill.’ He found it difficult to find the right phrase to describe what had happened to Elizabeth.
‘Who’s with the children?’
‘I am!’ How could she ask this now, after all that had happened? After spending so little time with them for over a month? But David repressed his exasperation; maybe the question meant Elizabeth was starting to recover, maybe it showed she was starting to think about the children again.
He went on, ‘I didn’t work today. I’m not working much tomorrow, either. In fact, I’ve hardly worked at all since Christmas. It’s been great—’ He stumbled, embarrassed, trying to tone down the enthusiasm building in his voice. ‘Well, not—I mean it’s been surprising for me. I needed a break from everything. We’ve had a good time, the three of us. Of course they miss you. But don’t worry. You shouldn’t worry.’
He realized how protective he felt of the children and also of his time together with them in Elizabeth’s absence. The truth was, David had sent Norma home on New Year’s Day as soon as Elizabeth had left for New York. He had felt so afraid that day of where everything was heading that he had decided to prove to himself that he could carry what remained of his family on his back if he needed to. It had never felt so critical before, being a father to Gordon and Hopie; he had been suddenly shocked by how long it had taken him to realize that the fabric of their lives, fragile, gossamer, might be unraveling with Elizabeth’s health.
Elizabeth’s departure had proved to be a liberation from tension and uncertainty. The house had been full of thoughtless, easy energy, scuffles, screams of laughter. He didn’t want Elizabeth to get the impression that nobody missed her, but it had been such a holiday from whispering and tiptoeing that they certainly hadn’t gotten around to missing her yet. They had barely finished smashing all the usual decorums and were only now settling into a routine.
They had begun by watching videos until after midnight on the machine Elizabeth had had brought into the master bedroom, then they’d slept, pretty badly, in a sweaty pile in the big white bed and gone out for breakfast at a warm and shabby Italian coffee shop in Pimlico; they’d eaten seconds and maybe thirds of flaky, sweet almond croissants all over the back of the car on the way home and spent the rest of the day at the Electric Cinema in the Portobello Road, sprawled back on the business-class leather seats and stuffing themselves with popcorn and candy. They had skipped baths, skipped brushing teeth—the extreme of their debauchery. By the third day, dragged down by the extravagant lassitude of sugar-eating, eyes bruised by sleeplessness, the children had agreed to ride their bicycles to Hyde Park in the morning while David jogged slowly along beside them. Gordon had a whistle around his neck from his Christmas stocking and pretended he was David’s personal trainer, blowing remorselessly for changes of pace. Today they had gone swimming and then eaten rigatoni with gorgonzola sauce for lunch at La Famiglia. They had devotedly and repeatedly walked Puck, and David had rewarded them with one more not-so-late night in the master bedroom cinema. He had washed Hopie’s hair twice now without getting shampoo in her eyes.
He was dreading the break-up of their little gang, for it had been a gang—bonded, solid. It had been not only a gang but an idyll, David thought, so unexpected in the shadow of such wreckage. But tomorrow he had to get back to the office for at least a few hours. There was a big presentation in Frankfurt the day after that. It was time for Norma to take over.
And when Elizabeth came back? Maybe things could be a little different. Better, was what he was hoping for. A new kind of year.
He hesitated, the phone poised at his ear, trying not to ask the next, inevitable question—inevitable because Elizabeth wasn’t offering any information at all.
‘Are you—where are you? Where are you calling from?’
‘I’m with a friend.’
Was there something in her tone of voice which implied that ‘friend’ was a category he could never even understand? Or was he just torturing himself? He could tell that she wasn’t going to say much more.
‘Still in New York?’ he asked.
‘I’ve been here the whole time.’
The conversation was at risk of petering out. Although there were things he wanted to know, David wouldn’t pry. He knew it wouldn’t do any good anyway. And he felt there was little he could report to Elizabeth without sounding as if he were trying to tell her that home was fine—better—without her.
Then Elizabeth blew him out of the water.
‘David, if you want me to continue as your wife, you’re going to have to retire and move home.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve decided to stay here in America, David. I’ve found a doctor I like.’ Her voice was deathly quiet, reasonable, icily matter-of-fact. But the statement seemed absurd. He couldn’t quite take it in. It was about ten steps ahead of any sequence of events he might have imagined as an outcome to their current stand-off. How did she get there so fast? His head filled with questions. He wanted to ask them in the right order, so that he could get abreast of her.
‘Who’s the doctor? How’d you find him? Someone in New York?’
‘Yes, here in New York.’
‘Can’t he suggest someone in London for you? Or can’t you—well…’ He started again. ‘Look, stay there for now, Elizabeth, take all the time you need. Then—we’ll see. Once you’re a little stronger, you may feel differently. You can fly back and forth whenever you want to.’
‘I don’t want to fly back and forth.’
‘Well, okay. Let’s not rush into any decisions. Let’s give this time.’
‘I need somewhere to live.’
‘What—in New York?’
‘Maybe New York. Maybe some place a little quieter, where I can get in and out of New York when I want.’
‘Right.’
‘I need my own life. That’s what I’ve realized from talking to—the doctor. It’s made me ill, David, living just for you. I can’t run your house abroad. I can’t raise the children in a foreign city when you’re not even there. It’s too hard. I’m not—’ She faltered, as if searching and then settled on, ‘I’m not strong enough. And the children are Americans. They should grow up here.’
‘They spend every summer there.’
‘Yes.’ She just accepted it. She wasn’t really arguing with him. David felt it wouldn’t matter what he said. He sensed things careening in some direction he couldn’t understand. Whatever his long-term agenda for life had been, this wasn’t on it. He was trying to recover from his sense of surprise, trying to tell himself that Elizabeth might mean what she said. He had spent the last six weeks waiting for everything to return to normal and believing everything would return to normal. Now the bottom was dropping out and he was being rushed from patience to panic in one short phone call.
Behind Elizabeth there stood a doctor with an opinion about Elizabeth’s health. That medical opinion made David feel inhibited; it even frightened him a little. He felt chastised, corrected, admonished by the doctor’s shadowy figure, and he felt obliged to follow what appeared to be the doctor’s orders. They had the force for him of a moral imperative; he realized he must have always respected doctor’s orders without ever knowing how much—until now. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to fight them, but that he felt it would be wrong even to try to fight them.
He tried to talk normally, and not to let pleading or arguing enter the conversation.
‘I’ll fly over this week, Elizabeth. Let me come see you. We’ll meet with your doctor and talk this through. I can help you find a little place in the city. It’s not a bad idea anyway, to maybe buy something there again. I’d love to have a place. And you could do it up—if you feel well enough.’
‘No. Don’t come, David.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s my doctor, David. He’s not for you; he’s not for both of us.’
‘He must want to see your husband, though? He doesn’t have to spill any beans. I’m sure he knows that. I want to meet the guy. That’s all.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
David was enraged and bewildered.
‘I’m going to fly over, Elizabeth. I think we need to talk.’
‘I don’t want to talk. Not anymore.’
‘You’re making some pretty significant—requests.’ He almost said ‘demands’, but he stopped himself.
‘Yes.’
‘And what about the apartment? You can’t possibly want to buy an apartment all by yourself? You could move into a hotel, maybe a furnished place, in the Carlisle or the Sherry Netherlands?’
‘I can find a place to live, David. I’m going to call someone I know at Sotheby’s. I think they’d be willing to do the work for me.’
David was flabbergasted. Had she been thinking about this all through those long, invalid days in London, waiting to spring it on him? Could it possibly be the result of a few visits to a doctor? He kept his cool.
‘Okay. That’s a good place to start, Sotheby’s. They do stuff in the city?’
‘They handle properties—everywhere. I want something special. It’s going to be your new home. I’m going to make it irresistible.’
‘One thing at a time, Elizabeth. I like the place we’ve got right here in London. We can discuss all this in due course.’
‘I won’t discuss it, David.’ And she repeated exactly what she had said earlier. ‘If you want me to continue as your wife, you’re going to have to retire and move home.’
‘Why do you want me to retire? What’s that got to do with any of this? With moving home?’ David was prepared to pay if he had made mistakes, but if there was anything he knew about, it was fixing a fair price, and Elizabeth’s price was too high. She was trying to make him pay more than was fair.
‘I’m not the one who’s ill, Elizabeth. You’re not making sense, darling.’ He regretted these last two sentences, even as he was saying them. He felt it was unfair to use her illness against her, especially if he was the one who had made her ill; and until now he had made no reference to the question of her mind, to the question of her possibly addled wits. But some perverse, defiant impulse wanted the sentences out. It was his rage and his guilt spitting at her. She seemed to have him in a grip he couldn’t release, and he knew that he had helped her to achieve it.
‘You’ve got enough money,’ she said softly and kindly, as if she were praising him or awarding him a prize. ‘Why work anymore?’
David felt terrified by her poise, her self-possession, by the way she failed to pay any attention to what he was saying—by the way, in fact, that she failed to pay any attention to who he was.
And she went on, in her sad, coaxing way, ‘We’ve all sacrificed enough to investment banking. You said you’ve enjoyed spending Christmas and New Year’s with the children; I’m sure they’ve enjoyed it, too. I want to spend more time on music and on the foundation. It’s my turn, David, don’t you think?’