The Divide (5 page)

Three minutes later she heard her name being called and looked back to see Angelo running over the bridge she had just crossed. She waited for him to reach her and gave him her coolest smile. Through his panting he managed to explain that his aunt had been taken ill that morning. Bless him, Sarah thought, surely he could do better than that. But he seemed so genuinely contrite and distressed for having kept her waiting that she couldn’t help but forgive him. Okay, she was a pushover, but what the hell? He was a lot better company than the merry widows, who had probably written her off anyway as too damn snooty.

The Scuola Grande was filled with Tintorettos. The upper hall was vast and dark and sumptuously furnished in red velvet and polished walnut that gleamed in the pooled light of the wall lamps. There were perhaps fifty or sixty people there and all, even the schoolgirls who were now there too, stood peering in silent wonder at the paintings that adorned the walls and ceiling. The pictures themselves were dimly lit and Sarah had to put on her glasses to make out the religious themes they depicted.

Angelo was as diligent and informed a guide as he had been the previous day on the island. He whispered to her that the place was built in the early fifteen hundreds and dedicated to San Rocco, the patron saint of contagious diseases, in the vain hope that he might save the city from the plague. Tintoretto, Angelo said, had spent almost a quarter of a century decorating it. It was the kind of information that could easily have been plundered from any guidebook and the cruel thought occurred to her that perhaps he made a habit of picking up female tourists of a certain age.

The most renowned of Tintoretto’s paintings,
The Crucifixion,
was in a small adjoining room and they stood there for a long time staring at it. Sarah had never known quite what to make of religion. Her mother was a lapsed Catholic and her father a lapsed atheist, now teetering in his seventies over the edge of agnosticism into an as yet amorphous realm of belief. Benjamin had always denounced any form of religious belief as a convenient excuse for not thinking. And though Sarah was less zealous in her skepticism, her attitude on this—and so many other issues—had been infected by his.

So perhaps it was, again, some futile, half-conscious attempt to excise his influence, to mark herself out as an independent mind, that she allowed herself to be so moved by the painting. It was a tumult of suffering and beauty, each cluster of characters busy in its own drama. And the nailed Christ, winged and crowned with light against the stony sky and gazing down from his cross at his executioners, radiated such serenity that Sarah found herself filled with a confused and nameless longing.

Behind her glasses her eyes began to brim but she managed to keep the tears from spilling. She was sure, however, that the young man at her side noticed. He had been saying something about Tintoretto’s habit of putting a self-portrait into his pictures but he broke off and walked away a few paces to study another painting. Sarah was grateful. If he’d tried to touch or comfort her she would certainly have lost control and started to sob. And she had done enough crying these past few years. It mystified, even slightly angered, her that a mere picture could bring her so close to the brink and she used the anger to chastise and compose herself.

Stepping again into the sunlight was a relief. They wound their way to the Grand Canal just in time to catch a vaporetto to the Rialto Bridge where Angelo said he knew a good little restaurant. Venetians ate there, he said, not tourists. It turned out to be a modest place, halfway along a narrow alley. White-coated waiters, all of whom seemed to Sarah curiously small, scurried between the tables with trays stacked with fresh seafood and steaming pasta. The one who took their order did so with a curt politeness.

She told Angelo to choose for her, that she liked almost everything. He ordered a salad of sweet tomatoes, basil, and buffalo mozzarella and then some grilled whitefish whose name meant nothing to her but which, when it arrived, looked and tasted a little like striped bass. They drank a whole bottle of white wine which he said was made from grapes that grew along the eastern shore of Lake Garda. It was cool and creamy and Sarah drank too much of it and began to feel a little light-headed.

She had never felt comfortable talking about herself. It was a subject about which she felt there was nothing to say that could possibly be of interest to anyone. Of course, after Benjamin left, she had gotten a lot better at it. Iris and the handful of close friends who rallied around her hadn’t given her much of an option, urging her to explore with them the failure of her marriage, examining every wretched corner and wrinkle of it until there seemed to be nothing left to say and they all grew sick of it.

And yet long before that, almost as long as Sarah could remember, when she and Benjamin had been—at least, as far as she was concerned—happily married, she had developed a simple technique to avoid revealing too much about herself. She would ask questions instead and soon discovered that the more direct and startlingly personal the question, the more likely it was that the person asked (especially if it happened to be both a stranger and a man) would start talking about himself and forget to ask her anything. And this was what she was now doing with Angelo.

She asked him about Rome, about his studies, about what kind of architecture interested him; about his aunt (whose sickness, surprisingly, seemed to be authentic); and finally even got him talking about a German girlfriend called Claudia to whom someday he hoped to be married. At which point, the disparity between his confessions and her almost total reticence became so great that he placed his palms upon the white crumb-strewn tablecloth and demanded a few answers from her.

He asked if she worked and she told him about selling the bookstore and what a relief it was after all these years to be free of it.

“You didn’t like it?”

“I loved it. Books are my great passion. But small independent stores like we were have a hard time competing nowadays. So now I don’t sell them, I just read them.”

“What are your other great passions?”

“Mmm. Let me see. My garden. Knowing about plants.”

“And now you have sold the bookstore, you can enjoy all these things. You are . . . How do they say? A lady of pleasure.”

“I think what you mean is a lady of leisure.”

Sarah smiled and looked at him over the rim of her glass while she took another slow sip of wine, realizing as she did so that she was flirting. It was about a hundred years since she had felt like flirting with anyone. She thought she’d forgotten how to. But she was enjoying it and, in that moment, had he asked her if he might come back with her to her hotel room for a shared siesta, she might even have found herself saying yes.

“So you were married,” he said.

“Correct.”

“But no longer.”

“Correct.”

“For how long were you married?”

“A lifetime. Twenty-three years.”

“And you live in New York.”

“On Long Island.”

“And you have children?”

She nodded slowly. Here it was. The most compelling reason to avoid questions. She felt pleasure draining from her through the hole he had just unplugged. She cleared her throat and replied quietly in as level a tone as she could.

“One of each. A boy and a girl. Twenty-one and twenty-three.”

“And what do they do? They are students, yes?”

“Uh-huh.”

“At college?

“Yes. Kind of. Can we get the check?”

She needed to leave, to be outside again. And alone. And she saw that, of course, he was puzzled by this abrupt change in her. How could the mere mention of children so snap a woman’s mood? It was the subject above all others to which they normally warmed. The poor boy would misinterpret it, naturally. He would probably assume she was embarrassed to admit that she had children not much younger than himself. Or conclude that she wasn’t really divorced at all, just out for a good time and that the mention of children had struck some chord of guilt. She felt sorry for him and sorry too for fracturing what had been so easy and pleasant between them. But she couldn’t help it. She stood up and took a credit card from her purse and placed it on the table in front of him, ignoring his protest. Then she excused herself and walked off to find the restroom.

Outside, bewildered, he asked her if she would like to visit another gallery and she said no and apologized, pretending that the wine had made her feel unwell, that she wasn’t used to it. She thanked him for being so sweet and such a fine guide and for all the wonderful things he had shown her. He volunteered to accompany her to the hotel but she said that, if he didn’t mind, she would rather go alone. She said good-bye and offered him her hand and he looked so forlorn that instead she put both hands on his shoulders and kissed him on the cheek, which only seemed to confuse him more. When she walked off he looked quite bereft.

Back at the hotel, the lobby was quiet. A young British couple was checking in. They had the shy felicity of honeymooners. Sarah collected her key and walked toward the elevator, her heels clacking sharply on the white marble floor.

“Mrs. Cooper?”

She turned and the concierge handed her an envelope. She pressed the elevator button and while the cables clanked and whirred behind the glass door, she opened the envelope. It was a message from Benjamin in Santa Fe where he now lived with that woman. He had phoned at eight that morning and again at ten. He wanted her to call him back. It was urgent, he said.

B
en and Eve had been in bed watching an old Cary Grant movie on the TV when Agent Kendrick called. It was a little after nine. Eve had lit candles and the flames were catching a draft from somewhere, sending shadows tilting and wobbling on the rough whitewashed walls and across the paintings and swaths of cloth that hung there. Pablo was asleep in his bedroom next door. Ben had only a short while ago looked in on him and stumbled through toys to tuck another blanket around his skinny shoulders. The boy shifted and murmured from some unknown corner of a dream, then settled again, his long dark curls spread like an aura on the pillow.

It was Saturday and they’d had the kind of perfect spring day that seasoned residents of Santa Fe took for granted but Ben continued to find miraculous. The dry desert air laced with the scent of lilac and cherry, the sky a clear deep blue and the light—that vivid, washed, almost shocking New Mexican light with its shadows sharp across adobe walls, the kind of light that could make even a color-blind philistine want to pick up a paintbrush—still, after four years of living here, could induce in him something close to euphoria.

The three of them had driven out in the Jeep for a late breakfast at the Tesuque Village Market then browsed the stalls of the flea market, Pablo running ahead of them like a scout, finding things and calling them to come and look. Eve bought an antique dress in purple and brown and orange swirls, cut on the bias. There was a hole under one arm and she haggled the woman down to thirty dollars and whispered as they walked away that it would be easy to fix and was worth at least a hundred.

In the mellowing sun that afternoon in the little backyard, the cherry tree groaning with an absurd overload of pink blossoms, they barbecued tuna steaks and sweet red peppers and zucchini while Pablo played chasing games with the little Swedish girl from next door. Eve’s house was one of an enclave of six that stood on the south-facing side of a valley of sage and pinyon that funneled down into the town’s west side. It was on one floor and made of cracked adobe, its angles rounded and its doors of ancient, grizzled pine. Both house and yard could have fit three times over into the house on Long Island where Ben had lived all those years with Sarah and where she now lived alone, but he already preferred it. He liked its spare, worn functionality, the way it belonged to the land that surrounded it. He liked it too because it was Eve’s and even more because it wasn’t his. It made him feel—as Pablo also made him feel—unencumbered, that his association was entirely of his own choosing. And this, of course, made him feel younger and more footloose than a man of almost fifty-two years deserved.

Just when the food was ready to be served the children came running up the path, all excited, saying the hummingbirds were back. They had seen one down by Eve’s studio where the yard became more jungle than garden. Eve asked them what kind they thought it was. It was too early for the rufous, she said, and from what they were able to tell her they concluded that it must have been a black-chinned. After supper, with Pablo bathed and in his pajamas, they rummaged for the feeder jars in the closet and filled them with sugar water then hung them from a low branch of the cherry tree.

Pablo wanted to wait up to see if the birds would come and while Eve took a bath Ben sat with his arm around him on the couch, reading
Treasure Island
and breathing the warm, sweet smell of him, another man’s child he had come to love as his own. The boy was nearly eight but small and skinny and looked younger. The hummingbirds never came and when it was dark Ben carried him slack and sleeping to his bed.

It was Eve who answered when Kendrick called. And Ben knew from her face and from her voice what kind of call it was. She handed him the phone and muted the TV. She sat up and swung her legs out of the bed and Ben reached out to try to make her stay. She always moved away and found something to do when his other life called. When he had once mentioned this she said it was only to give him space, but he suspected it was also to protect herself. She whispered now that she would make them some tea and be right back.

Special Agent Dean Kendrick worked out of Denver and had become Ben’s main contact with the FBI. There had been others with whom he had talked during the past three and a half years that Abbie had been on the run and many more, he was sure, who had watched him and followed him and bugged his phones and e-mails and monitored his bank accounts, faceless men and women who probably knew more about his habits than he did himself.