The Face Thief (11 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

T
he envelope lay on the floor like a clue. Rather than being placed in the mailbox at the foot of their driveway, it had been inserted by hand through the long-unused mail slot in the front door. Lawrence and Glynis stood at the entrance, luggage in hand.

“What is that?” she asked, speaking for the first time in an hour.

“Well, a letter obviously,” he said, bending forward, picking up the envelope and turning it over in his hands. His name and address were neatly typed in the center, though no return address was given. Aware that she’d moved slightly closer and was looking over his shoulder, he pulled out the letter and then held it from the top, pinched in his fingers, as if to take as little possession of it as possible.

“What the hell?” he said slowly.

Dearest Lawrence,
it read,

I know you’re scared. I could tell you were frightened of the power of the feeling between us. It’s why you acted as you did. I now understand everything. Please be patient with me, because I’m very vulnerable right now. But believe me when I say I can’t wait to go to that place again.

Margot

The feeling for a moment was of falling through the words into a chasm of open space, before a guttural explosion of air behind his head caused him to spin around in time to see his wife literally running away from him into the house. “What?” he shouted, disbelieving. “Oh, come on, Glynis! You can’t possibly think . . .”

But she was already stomping up the stairs, and after a moment of hesitation, he was running heavily after her, yanking himself upward with the help of the banister, while shouting, “Don’t tell me you’re falling for this, for God’s sake! Please, honey, don’t you see? Your reaction is exactly what she wanted. That’s why she planted the letter there. Glynis!” But she put on a burst of speed, spun into the bedroom a few steps ahead of him, slammed the door shut, dead-bolted it with a heavy
thunk,
and then slammed the inner bathroom door shut as well. After a moment, audibly, she began running the shower.

He stood openmouthed with shock, serially pummeled by the uproars of first the scene in the car, and then this. As if, he thought, the girl was directing his afternoon on a large video screen in a war room, and pulling the various triggers perfectly on time. What should he do now? Shatter the bedroom door, burst into the shower and plead his case amid the pelting water? He had half a mind to. But what would that accomplish? He’d apologized already and had done nothing wrong between that moment and now. No, the wrong had come into their life from outside it, courtesy of the girl, who he’d made the mistake of allowing a half square inch of purchase on his inner world.

He went slowly back down the stairs to the kitchen, slumped in a chair and put his hands over his eyes. From the first, he had seen the signs—of her crookedness, her disingenuousness—and
still
fallen into the trap she’d laid. Was it because he’d come to think of himself as invulnerable; was that it? Thousands of people had attended his lectures over the years; tens of thousands had read his books. Had the sound of his own voice in his head somehow crowded out clear reasonableness? He raised his eyes and looked out the window to where the copse of fruit trees—peach, pear, apple—trembled guilelessly in the breeze.

For a long time he sat there, thinking furiously with nothing clear resulting. When the upstairs bedroom door finally opened and shut, the sound was as loud as a gunshot. This was followed a moment later by the emphatic thumps of feet on the stairs. His wife turned the corner with a brisk stride, and, involuntarily, he got to his feet.

Glynis had made herself up painstakingly, drawn on an attractive sheath skirt, heels, and a top that flattered her ample curves. She looked beautiful and rejuvenated, and having made love to her five times in the previous forty-eight hours, he felt a visceral desire to kiss her. Instead, his glance lowering over her body, he was shocked to see her clasping the handle of a small rolling bag.

“I’ve decided,” she said calmly, “to allow you to do what you need to do.”

“What?” His voice sounded strange to him. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know whether this is about the child,” she said, using a phrase that was shorthand for a crazy season of their life, about ten years earlier, when they’d decided to try to have children, she’d gotten pregnant, miscarried, and at the doctor’s insistence, had had a hysterectomy, “or your own midlife crisis, or a return to your previous cheating bullshit, but I don’t care. I’m done with worrying about it.”

“Done? What?” He heard the rising tones of panic inside his head and felt them particularly in his nostrils, where a sharp salt sensation prickled.

“I’m going to Marley’s for a good while, to think things over and allow you to work things out.”

Marley was her lone single friend, a loud, overdressed woman who was perpetually on the hunt for a good man. Reflexively, from the first time they’d met, Lawrence had detested her.

“Oh, come on, honey! Really?”

“Yes,” she said.

“But this is ridiculous,” he said. “It’s a setup, plain and simple, and you’re falling for it. I mean, can’t you see that? Tell me you’re not really that naive.”

She smiled from a million miles away. “Up to your old tricks, Lawrence? Enjoy your superiority. It should be a great comfort in your new life.”

He shook his head and said slowly, “It’s not about my superiority, Glynis. It’s the fact that you’re going to offer up our marriage to a deranged woman, and in the process give her exactly what she wants.”

She looked at him with a sad smile. “What do
you
want, Lawrence? You brought this woman into our marriage, I didn’t. Or was it all an accident and did you accidentally”—she paused on the word for emphasis—“find yourself with your tongue in her mouth and God knows what else?”

“I can’t believe this.” He looked out the window as if to gather support from the cloudless afternoon. “So now you’re putting our future in jeopardy because I made out for a half minute with an emotionally disturbed student?”

“Was she emotionally disturbed before she met you, or afterward?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, stop it, please.”

“I thought I knew you, yes I did. If you’d asked me as recently as last night, I would have said I did. But now?” She gave a long, rolling shrug of the shoulders.

A spasm of rage gripped him for a moment, and then passed, leaving in its place a deep fatigue.

“Well, then I’ll miss you,” he said simply.

“No, you won’t.”

He held his hands up on either side of his head and said loudly, “I can’t believe what’s happening here.”

“What’s happening,” she said rapidly, “is that you’ve made it perfectly obvious what your priorities are, and I’m giving you the chance to explore them in peace. That’s what’s happening.”

“No, what’s happening is you’re obeying word for word the script someone else has written for you, someone who happens to wish the worst for both of us!”

She began to walk away, but paused at the door and turned. “Do have fun sorting out your erotic issues with your friend, Lawrence,” she said. “Because I’m sure the two of you will have a helluva lot to talk about.”

And with that, his wife, who he couldn’t remember ever looking so poised, centered, and nearly annealed in confidence, walked straight out of the living room, got into her car and drove away.

And he was left as thunderstruck as if a loitering tornado had stuck an arm of wind sideways through a window and yanked him all the way to Kansas.

T
hat night Lawrence slept in the basement on a small pull-out sofa. The feeling of being in a subterranean chamber was vaguely comforting. The small television at the foot of the bed flickered and droned on for hours without consequence, like a drunk at a bar. Two, maybe three hours of dreamless sleep were all he got, and he woke the next morning feeling he’d been physically assaulted.

Moving up the stairs slowly, he crept into the sunny kitchen like a thief. Dog-eared magazines were piled in a straw hamper in a corner; oven mitts hung in a cluster like so many phantom hands; jars of beans and pastas ran in sequential order from large to small on a shelf over the stove, and farming prints of nineteenth-century life enlivened the walls. The wholesomeness of the scene was like a last, lingering wifely rebuke.

Strong coffee began to bring him around and gave him a clearer perception of himself as a man grotesquely overpunished for small indiscretions. He knew that though he wasn’t conventionally attractive, to certain women his reserved, professorial manner and low-key wit were irresistible. Being a person so conversant with inner worlds, it was impossible that he not understand the affinities he could occasionally ignite in women.

But this woman was dangerous and unbalanced and he’d have to somehow neutralize her before she could do any more damage. It was on his second cup of coffee, and feeling the trademark jittery rush of bad energy coming on, that he managed to piece together the elements of an idea. To disarm the girl, he would have to meet her. To meet her, he would have to use bait. How bracing it was to think clearly! He trudged upstairs to his study, seated himself at his computer, took a last swig of coffee and with the feeling of lighting a small fuse of dynamite, typed the following words.

Margot my dear: I’ve been away, and have only now received your communication. I’m intrigued, but we must act very discreetly from here on in. For the moment, what do you say to us meeting in the near future? We should have dinner together.

“And I’ll be waiting,” he muttered, “to tear your fucking head off.” But having said these terrible things aloud, he didn’t necessarily believe them. Instead, he finished the e-mail, hit the Send button, lay his head on the desk, and in the middle of a busy morning, fell asleep with his head on his forearms.

Chapter Twenty-Two

A
s expected, the viewing of the gravestone was a wrenching experience. In the middle of sunshine and thriving, luxuriant grass that seemed cruelly to underline the finality of the occasion, they briefly bowed together. His mother wept quietly; his brother, always the emotional one, also wept, a little too loudly to his taste. Potash cried silently, the tears dripping, stinging, the three of them loosely embracing, swaying slightly, each lost in his or her thoughts. If emotions could be bodied forth in images, then the moment of feeling would have been represented as a large glistening bubble of a sort grown like a dome over the spreading lawns where his father, that quester after the origins of stars, would now forever rest on earth.

Later that day, bags packed, he stood in the vestibule, heartsore but ready to return home at last. But his mother, now that the weekend was over, seemed indifferent to the emotional claims of the moment.

“Bon voyage,” she said to him in a flat, tired voice.

“Thank you, Mom.”

“Right,” she said, and then looked pointedly out the screen door to the driveway where the cab was waiting.

“Well, I guess this is it, then.” He stood in front of her in the hallway of the house he knew better, probably, than any structure in the world.

“Yup.”

“And I’ll call the moment I touch down,” he said, leaning forward to sink his face into the familiar refuge of powder and warmth.

“Or not,” she said, and he pulled away and looked at her in dismay. She was furious at his stupidity. The removal of her money, even though she no longer had any use for it, stung badly.

“Mom,” he said again, “you know what? I’m not—I just can’t leave it like this.” He turned to the driveway where the cab was waiting and motioned to the driver that he’d be a little bit longer. Then he grabbed her gently by her elbows, where the flesh now hung in pleated folds over the bone. “C’mon back in,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”

“Talk?” she said. “Again?”

He took a deep breath. “Yes,” he said, “again, imagine that.”

He steered her back into the living room of the house and toward the couch.

“Here,” he said, patting the tufted cushions. Shakily, on creaking haunches, she sat. He sat next to her and took her hands in his.

“You know,” he said, looking into her eyes, “sometimes we just get carried away chatting about casual things. There’s a time and a place for that, but this isn’t that time. I have some things I need to say to you, right now, right here.”

“Okay,” she said, “so, say.”

“I intend to,” he said. “Number one, I love you, Mom.”

It had to be said. It was also true. And declarations such as these had become easier to him after a year of life in Northern California, with its emphasis on sharing and caring and in particular, its men’s groups where honest, forthright, hardworking guys wept in public like young girls. “I know,” he went on, “that I was difficult at times as a child, but that’s what childhood is, right, a place for kids to screw up? The mess I’m in now is entirely of my own making, but I will find a way out of it, just like I always do. From weak to strong, remember? I dance out to the very edge and then come shooting back. I
will
come shooting back. The most important thing is that you not worry and relax and enjoy yourself. That would be a gift not only to me, but most of all to yourself. Do you see that, Mom? Can you give yourself that gift?”

“John,” she said softly.

“Yes?”

She paused, and frowned a moment, as if in receipt of troubling information. Then, lowering her eyes, she added, “I hope you recover the money. I know you need it, and your marriage needs it, and I—I—”

Her mouth stretching open silently, she made a soft
unh
sound, and then her head gently fell downward until it was resting on her breastbone.

“Mom?”

She raised her head and looked at him, her mouth still oddly open, and then lowered her gaze, directionally. He followed it, and both of them looked at her left hand, clenched now into a frozen claw.

“Mom?” he said more loudly.

She shook her head slowly with her mouth still open wide. No words came.

He jumped to his feet. “Can you hear me, Mom?”

She nodded slowly.

“Okay, here, lie down.” He tilted her slightly backward on the couch, stuffing the space behind her with cushions. “I’ll get you a glass of water.”

She was shaking her head. He brought his head down near hers to hear.

“Ticky glug,” she whispered.

He jerked his head back and stared at her. “What, Mom?”

“Hissle fazz,” she whispered, while through her partly open mouth, he watched her tongue as it flexed like an undersea creature, unnaturally live and pink.

“You want what?” he asked.

“Sussy suff,” she said and then she looked at him, her open mouth turning subtly downward in a frown.

“Mom,” he said.

“Whoo?”

“I think you just had a stroke or something.”

“No!”

“Mom.”

“Tom?”

“What month are we in?”

“Muzzy might,” she said, nodding.

He whipped out his cell phone and punched in 911. “Uh, I think I need an ambulance,” he said, giving the address and then explaining to the bored-sounding operator that his elderly mother had suddenly begun talking gibberish. As an afterthought before he hung up the phone, he shouted, “And come as quickly as possible!”

There then intervened a strange period of white light in his head. From within that white light, he was aware of making her comfortable lying on the couch with her claw hand and her O-ring of a partly open mouth. He was aware of her being completely unperturbed and even content—so it seemed—about what had happened to her. Not long after, out of the edges of the white light, he heard the sirens coming.

“Mom,” he said, “just lie still. The ambulance is on its way.”

She nodded, her brow wrinkling quizzically. “Fancypants?” she asked.

The sirens grew in volume. There was a gritting of tires on the pavement, and a slamming of doors. He ran out onto the front stoop in time to see two EMT techs in blue twill uniforms stepping out of the eye-catchingly painted vehicle in their driveway. The fronts of the houses around them suddenly came alive with twitching blinds.

“This the home of the little lady in distress?” the fatter of the two men asked, wheezing a little as he hefted what looked to be a big orange toolbox and climbed the three stairs to the door.

“Yes,” said Potash, “thanks for getting here so fast.”

“Speed for need,” the smaller one said, coming up behind his colleague, “is what we do.”

“Please come in,” said Potash. “She suffered an I-don’t-know-what.”

The two men went by him into the house trailing a whiff of acrid body odor and medical disinfectant.

“Hi, sweetie,” the big one said.

His mother, as best she could, smiled.

“Distension of labial cavity,” the little one said out loud.

“Right,” said the other, whose name, Lance, was printed on the breast of his uniform, “and we’ve got a little facial palsy and limb ataxia, I see.” And then in a louder voice, “You feeling a little under the weather today, darling?”

The little one, Gary, ran back to the ambulance and removed from its back a gurney whose spindly legs sprang open, quivering as it was pulled free.

Lance whipped out a mike. “We’ve got a 9-12, mobile. We’ll need some emergency attention at the ingress, on a gurney.”

“Let’s dance,” said Gary, pushing the gurney lightly over the threshold of the house and into the room. The two men gently examined his mother, listening to her heart and taking her blood pressure while she blinked at them coquettishly. They then grabbed her and in a single coordinated heave swung her off the couch and onto the mattress of the gurney. As they began rolling her out of the house, she caught Potash’s eye and gave him the cheerful wave and wink of a retiree embarking on a Caribbean cruise.

“Can I go with?” he called after the men.

“It’s against the rules,” Gary said.

“But you can ride behind us in your car,” said Lance, and then craned his neck backward to add: “And shoot the red lights on the way.”

“Thanks, guys.” He locked the house behind them and watched as they carefully slid his mother into the back of the ambulance. The implications of what was happening were deeply upsetting, but Potash outwardly gave no clue to his feelings. Only, as he got into his mother’s ancient car, which was so redolent of her that he felt nearly like he was
wearing
her in some way, he was suddenly consumed with blinding rage. He started the engine, which caught with a cough and then smoothed into an idle. He backed out of the driveway after the ambulance. It shot off down the street, and in the second before the siren began screaming, Potash had his first utterly clear thought of the day. The thought was that, though a peaceful man, he would hunt down Janelle Styles and stomp her to death with his shoes.