Attachment (4 page)

O
ver the next
two and a half months, Jean exchanged dozens of juicy e-mails with Thing 2, with Munyeroo, with My Own Mountain Goat, with Ginger, who didn’t have red hair, or with just plain Giovana. She watched for reactions from Mark. She worried when he went to London—and surely met his mistress—that her interference would be revealed. But in her compulsion to follow the trail, she persuaded herself that, even if Mark could do such a thing, he’d never, ever
talk
about it—and his characteristic cheer on his return seemed to confirm her hope. She explained her frequent trips to town (and the Internet café) as a newfound passion for fitness—the gym. She did feel energized, as if she’d run a mile.

Anticipation, in particular, was better than any treadmilled endorphins. Yes! There was something in her in-box. Every time she opened the account she felt the flush of excitement, like a child spying the glint of colored foil across a garden, a chocolate egg “hidden” by a parent directly in her line of sight. Her pleasure in the moment was embarrassing, or it would have been if she’d been less engrossed, and less anonymous. She could forget that she wasn’t supposed to see these letters, and Giovana abetted her illusion by never using Mark’s name. Though Jean often cringed at the names she got, she never retreated from the feeling that she
was
Thing 1, Lover, Big, Huge, Gigantor, Master, Manster, Bun, Boss, Rod (Rodney, Rod Stewart), or, and in the end best of all, just Sir. Giovana’s e-mails were almost exclusively about sex, and each included at least one photograph—a contraband brownie smuggled into her lunch box.

In one message, which Jean then particularly feared would give her identity away, she forgot her impersonation of Mark and tried, with all her native and professional usefulness, to neutralize her rival with advice.

You’re not bad looking, Gio,
she found herself typing.
You have lovely hair. You should be more self-confident. Really, you needn’t try so hard…

In addition to recommending two esteem-building manuals and a hairdo that didn’t cover half the face, she’d thought it worth pointing out, gently, that extruding your breasts through the slash holes of a tightly laced PVC bodice was a plausible definition of trying too hard. But maybe Mark disagreed. (Giovana, anyway, was exasperatingly humbled: under a picture of herself in a puff-sleeved dress and licking a lollipop, she had apologized.
I did bad. XXX Tell me how I am to be punished.
) Jean wondered what kind of experience PVC bustiers promised—if, just possibly, all this theatrical strut and know-how went beyond sex toward a counterintuitive, postfeminist liberation. Would she, in her own future happiness, dress like this? The word “negligée” could mean “neglected,” Jean thought while examining Giovana in a filmy transparent babydoll of tan-enhancing blue, but it might also mean “to give little thought to”—to be cool.

She skated over the notion that she was having her own affair with Giovana—flirting and fantasizing like deluded typers all over the world. (Did it matter, really, about her hidden quest or the murderous nature of her fantasies?) Far from
busting Mark, maybe she was actually backing him up. She
was
Mark; she was Thing 1; of course she knew how he felt. Sometimes, her interest drew mainly from her own side of the conversation—a challenging diversification for any columnist, who was, inevitably, something of a persona. And her Thing 1 was, if she said it herself, debonair. As Mark could be—an amalgamation of Christopher Plummer, Roger Moore just past his prime, with a pinch of revamped, upper-class Terence Stamp, whom Mark, with his bright pale eyes and wide brow, inescapably did resemble. This was more or less where she pitched it—she had a perverse wish for Mark to be
worth
having an affair with—and she was justly proud of her creation.

Mark didn’t seem to notice her obsession, but her work was suffering. One column about healthy minibreaks hardly lifted above the industry standard, recommending, under a banner of “ecotourism,” short hikes and the reuse of hotel towels, while the next one promoted a seaweed cure-all of absolutely no use to her readers, none of whom lived within a thousand miles of a source of magic algae. And strangely, though no more strangely than a lot of other things these days, she missed Mark.

What would he say if she let him in? Imagine getting beyond denials and the tawdry local phenomena of whens and wheres. He’d probably tell her that, if only she’d left things alone, been less proactive (“less American,” he would surely have said), he’d have been onto a leggy Swede before the original letter arrived in Christian’s sack, and finished with her, too.

She wondered if he ever wrote to Giovana himself, from the St. Jerome Hotel where he went to play tennis and check his office e-mail. Certainly there’d been a few unexplained endearments:
Bubischnudel
was one that stuck in her mind, along with other Teutonic notes—
bis bald
—see you later—and
tschüss!
Maybe this was just the residue of his German projects, but it was new. Jean had heard the lovers on the phone—she’d walked in on them mid-conversation. She specifically heard him whisper “darling”—softly, as if he was talking to a child, one he was trying to jolly back from a tantrum. Thinking it must be a distressed Victoria calling for comfort, she’d waited, and was surprised when he abruptly hung up with a bizarre yet perfunctory “Got to run, Dan”—obviously some preestablished code. Mark called lots of people darling, men and women, including everyone whose name he couldn’t remember. But he didn’t
whisper
it.

A feeling too good to last: Jean had been right about that. In the days and weeks following the discovery, she found herself soberly trawling through the past—hers, Mark’s, and theirs, plus the parents’—combing for any warning of impending calamity and, less hopefully, for any solution. In addition, Jean took on the hard work of cold-shouldering her panic. She weeded her garden and she yawned a lot, just couldn’t stop yawning.

And though she didn’t know why, earlier desolations—newly revealed as practice panics—bubbled up to consciousness with seismic force: as when Jean was packing to go up to Oxford and her Anglophile mother, hot at the prospect of vicarious pleasures, presented her with a taffeta ball gown—immense, and yellow.

Now, clad in her usual grubby gardening gear, Jean could hardly countenance the existence of such an item, let alone its place among her possessions.

But this parting gift was exactly Phyllis’s idea of fun or, rather, fun in an ancient European setting. In her worldview, it was axiomatic that if you had the clothes, the experience would surely follow. At that moment, Jean, holding the bunched yards of dully shining silk with both hands, came to know a couple of things she had not yet even suspected. The first was that her mother—pretty, neat, and short, though Phyllis preferred
“petite”—had married too early to get in her fair share of fun. Jean’s father, William Warner, attorney-at-law, was shrewd, thoughtful, droll, and arguably dapper, but not the kind of fast-talking high-spirited fun her mother seemed to want. It was Jean who’d taken his advice to go to Oxford and follow him in the study of the law, even though she’d already completed a perfectly good American degree in English literature; it was Jean who admired and shared his crackling brand of humor, so dry you might miss it, this wit that made Mark’s punsome ways seem like slapstick. The other thing Jean understood on the presentation of the dress was that she wouldn’t be going to the ball. Not ever.

Nevertheless, she’d kept the spinster gown, old but unworn, rolled in mothballs and stowed now for decades in a box marked may. Jean never considered offering it to nineteen-year-old Victoria, already launched in her own weightless selection of slinky, shimmery dresses worn as tight as Ace bandages—and not just because it was yellow and dated, out of the dance at Twelve Oaks in
Gone with the Wind.
Jean passionately wished not to press any freighted idea of allure on Victoria, particularly not one she herself had rejected.

But the unflattering dress, with its explosion of fabric just at the hip, had done its work, and perhaps this is what saved it from Oxfam. For it was while
not
attending her own year’s May Ball that Jean had met Mark, deep in Crime and Thriller at the back of Iffley Road Video.

“I grew up in this town, but I don’t go to the university,” he’d told her, answering the evidently obvious question on her face. “I make collages, you see. In London.” Jean hadn’t known what to say. He seemed so much older than her fellow students and even her tutors. He’d been to Camberwell art school in South London and, that May, he was on a rare visit home, for his first solo exhibition at a new gallery in Jericho. As they waited for their videos at the cash register, he held out an invitation to the opening.

“You
must
come,” he said, refusing to dilute his command with an ingratiating smile, both of their hands on the card. “Just exactly as you are: don’t change a single thing.” She remembered how she’d looked down at her bumpy brown hand-knit sweater and jeans. And that, from the beginning, was Mark: he’d had a vivid and unshakable idea of her qualities and, even better, his compliments gave pleasure long after they’d been paid. She wasn’t just beautiful; to Mark, hers was a “
refreshing
beauty.” He didn’t just adore her; she “filled the sky.” His clarity of purpose, and the apposite phrase, were talents he shared with her father, perhaps the only things they had in common, and for Jean that was enough, the nonnegotiable minimum.

For the first time in decades, Jean wondered what her father had said that caught her mother’s attention the first time they met.

“Worse ski accident I ever had,” he joked after the divorce, twenty-eight years later. He’d met Phyllis Jean Amery by chance, in Aspen, Colorado, in February 1955, in a lift queue. So what had Bill said to her mother as they rose through the cold mountain air, suspended between slope and sky? Jean thought he’d probably begun by trying to impress her with some interesting fact about the natural world—too absorbed to notice, as he should have, that conversations with no people in them made Phyllis fidgety. Once, also on a chairlift, he’d told Jean that it took a snowflake eight minutes to complete its fall to earth, the same amount of time it took the image of the setting sun to reach the human eye. And, like Mark in the video store, her father had only had about that long to make his pitch, to make Phyllis want to get
back
in line with him. Jean’s brother, Billy, was born in November the same year, on Thanks-giving
Day; still, she had the idea that whatever her father had come up with on that chairlift also contained the seed of her parents’ separation: the fact of it encoded in that first encounter, imprinted, unalterable.

When she thought about it now, the Warner children’s personal creation myth, with its clean sound track of sleigh bells wafting up from the old mining town at the bottom of the mountain, Jean was once again searching for some explanation of their individual destinies. And, once again, any hint of the real shape of things remained blurred. Back on the shelf, then, that random meeting she kept in a small glass dome, nostalgia enhanced by poor visibility in this pocket-size blizzard of love.

Mark was due for another trip “ashore”—their word for home, as if St. Jacques was not an island but a raft. She knew she had to pull back from his affair, whatever else she decided to do about it, but had she learned enough yet? What mission had been accomplished that could allow her to lay off? Looking out the kitchen window over her sinkful of dirty, misshapen vegetables, Jean saw the hummingbird she called Emerald flickering in the bushes: busy, always so busy. A bird of work. And she thought about Mark’s work. “I cut up magazines,” he’d told her that first day in the video shop and though she thought he’d been joking that’s exactly what he did. He cut and reassembled and reanimated images clipped from advertisements, and the results were judged to be “political.” In fact, Mark had no politics and was instead guided by his feel for shape and color, for the lovely lines of old products, for unusual typefaces, and by a distinctive, fairly childish sense of humor.

That first Oxford show received solemn praise and sold out, Jean’s lumpy sweater swelling with pride when she heard the news. Like Mark himself, the collages were a compelling mix of the elegant and the slightly goofy, and sometimes they were touching, even if, as with all good art, it was hard to say quite why they should’ve been, these homemade gardens of ultraearthly delights: consumer galaxies of known brands, household products gaining in beauty and strangeness as they were wrenched from humdrum uses and set on a planetary course that revolved, in one way or another, around him.

The first piece she saw at the exhibition in Jericho had at its center a photograph of the artist at eight, blue eyed and blond, a perfect dimpled cupcake of a face, with thick mother-combed hair. He was irresistible: his nose sprinkled with freckles, his bright eyes peering out with the look of slight hesitancy he wore even now. Was it the work she’d fallen for—and the idea of untouched innocence at the still heart of this mundane swirl—or just this dear, unsure English boy, his clever eyes both daring and held in check? Jean simply could not imagine what someone like Giovana would see in him, and her failure to conjure up a connection only increased her solitude.

Maybe something in her own character invited betrayal. If this sounded like the mind-set of a victim, the opposite was true: a lawyer by training and inheritance, Jean could not accept a fate devoid of responsibility, and she knew that in her marriage she’d been, as her daughter might put it, actively passive. Until that evening in the video shop, she’d wished she could be the kind of girl who not only went to the May Ball but who twirled like a weather vane atop a dawn-lit fountain in a soaked and possibly shredded yellow gown. But Mark had changed all that. He was an artist with a sold-out one-man show. And she no longer worried about graduating with a law degree that wouldn’t be recognized in her own country. That wasn’t going to matter, because Jean wasn’t going to live in America.