The Face Thief (12 page)

Chapter
Twenty-Three

M
argot’s
response was not long in coming.

Hi!
she wrote.
I’ve
been incredibly busy on a trip to points west and have barely had time for
e-mail. I’m so glad we’re on the same wavelength, dear Lawrence, and that
your little temper tantrum was just that. Can I simply tell you that I’ve
always been drawn to men of mastery and your work is genius, and gets to me?
When certain people meet, the rightness of that meeting brings a ton of new
truth to the table that they didn’t even know they had till that moment.
You’re one of those people for me. I feel like my original self around you.
I’m sorry to have had to resort to something like a letter to get in touch,
but you hadn’t answered my e-mails all weekend long and I guess I panicked!
But in retrospect I realize I might have put you in a compromising
situation.

Where would you like to
meet, my friend? And when?

Alone in the kitchen—he’d moved his laptop there in
the hope of kindling some warmth for himself in the now-chilly-feeling
house—Lawrence gave a long, sick, wheezing laugh and shut his eyes, calculating
the exquisite terms of her future erasure from his life. He would do
something—find some expeditious way to remove this woman—and the nastier the
better.

Opening his eyes after this gust of feeling, he
looked around in the hope of some small transformation in his situation. But the
house returned his glance with the same cold impassivity as ever. The
forty-eight hours since his wife left had been a trial. During the first day in
particular, out of force of long-standing habit, he’d tried to call her several
times, but her phone, maddeningly, rang on through, and it was suddenly borne in
on him just how powerless a person is to make someone else love them when that
other person either (a) doesn’t, or (b) is withholding that love for reasons of
being white-hot pissed.

In the meantime, when not actively engaged and
on-task, he found thoughts of Glynis coming forward, in waves. She seemed in his
mind to have assumed effortlessly the idealized status of a paragon; to be
without flaws, Platonically perfect in every way. This process, first begun out
of guilt during his initial flirtations with The Girl (he would no longer
dignify her with her name), had deepened upon her departure, and now took the
form of a long, closely reasoned argument, ongoing in his mind, which had as its
object the undeniable proof that his estranged wife was the greatest woman he’d
ever met.

Drumming his fingers idly on the kitchen table, he
stared out the window, pondering his day. On a nearby sidewalk, a mother was
half dragging two young children to school. As part of his training, Lawrence
often thought in terms of evolutionary biology, and staring now at the
mother—she was turning the corner toward the elementary school and still
effortfully chivvying her kids—he saw not only a young woman immersed in the
drudgery of her daily life but a human whose forebears had been naturally
selected for their kindness toward their own offspring. A few million years of
such winnowing had produced a coiffed, carefully dressed biped who was hardwired
to make long-term sacrifices for her children, and thereby perpetuate the
species.

One of the children, the boy, now tried to kick her
in the shin, and she adroitly dodged him, and then shook her finger in his face.
In terms of evolutionary biology, the world around us was a time-lapse film in
which all animal, vegetable and mineral life was continually swelling in a vast
crescendo of sorts—but toward what? What was the end result of those billions of
blind alleys into which unsuccessful life-forms had stumbled and died en route
to producing the pure, perfect inevitability of the world we knew? Was there an
improvement, for all that work? Were we better than our arboreal forebears, with
their browridges and haunted ape eyes? Terrifyingly more dangerous, infinitely
more subtle, yes, but better?

The woman and her fractious children turned the
corner out of sight, leaving him alone in the kitchen and returned to the glum
particulars of his life. Until his wife left, he hadn’t understood how crucial
she’d been to providing a vibrant human current in the house. His hands were now
no longer drumming on the table, but his mind was active, and hovering in
nostalgic memory over the small caches of heat her body held: the twin dips of
the clavicle, the webs between the fingers, the soft divots behind the knees.
She had a potbelly, and her breasts sagged as if aligning themselves with the
magnetic poles of the earth, and most of all, she was, to him, beautiful. The
web of affinities they had slowly built around themselves had been shredded by a
person whose motives—he didn’t buy the “new truth” bullshit of her e-mail for a
moment—remained to him still unclear.

He reread Margot’s latest, just to confirm his
disgust, and rather than respond, clicked off his computer, as if to stop the
flow of her malignity. Then he got up, stretched his back, and decided to head
out for breakfast. He went to the local diner, where in tribute to his wife’s
concern for his health, he ordered an egg-white omelette with spinach. He might
thereby feel a little bit closer to her. A waitress with the immature milk teeth
of a twelve-year-old girl served him, and he ate happily and felt content.

Fortunately, in service of his good mood, he had a
new wave of bureaucratic things to attend to, and upon returning home, these
consumed the rest of his morning. His book was being published in several
foreign translations, which necessitated correspondence with well-intentioned
English as a Second Language speakers who needed lexical mysteries ironed out.
From Denmark: “Can you explain to us precise derivation of the phrase ‘mind
maze.’ ” From Brazil: “Please Mr. Billings be so kind to lend the hands, so that
we can request from you the answer as follows: ‘stare-down.’ What is?”

He answered some more of these questions, and the
rest of the day passed uneventfully, immersed in lakes of lost time in a state
approaching dynamic inaction. At one point, noting happily some bills to be paid
that were normally taken care of by his wife, he found saving cover for sending
her an e-mail. He tried to be objective and businesslike for a few lines, but
then his reserve melted, and he told her he loved her and missed her
terribly.

Part of him was hoping to hear right back. But the
afternoon planed silently and imperceptibly into evening, the sun shapes on the
wall thinned and merged into dusk, and at a certain point, having mindlessly
defrosted and eaten a pizza in front of a mindless television news show, he
decided to write the girl back.

Margot, I’m pleased to
hear back from you. I like the way you think. I’d like to propose that we
meet in three days at the Orbis Restaurant, second floor. Dinner at seven
thirty. How does this sound?

After mulling it over, he finished with a very
modest,
Love, Lawrence
.

Then he hit Send and whipped shut the case of his
laptop so violently he was afraid he’d broken something.

Afterward, he felt too restless to simply stay at
home. It was already evening, and he didn’t want to feel himself prisoner of her
eventual response, waiting on it like a supplicant. What to do? He decided to
undertake something he rarely did. Go to a bar.

Lawrence was of the generation of men who liked to
drink, though not usually in public. But on this night he got in his car and
directed himself to the downtown area, where he parked, and strolled along the
street, before darting into the loudest, most raucous club he could find.
Stunned for a moment by the violence of the music, he went directly to the bar,
where a couple of stools remained open. The bartender was young and handsome
with high cheekbones and the lantern jaw of a born tyrant. Behind him were the
ranked rows of liquor bottles, lit from below and glowing like isotopes.
Lawrence ordered a gin and tonic, and then turned on his stool and, as if from a
distant star, gazed at his fellow citizens.

Everyone in the mostly college-age crowd seemed
still struck with the gloss of youth; still dewy and shiny, as if fresh minted.
His mind in the grip of his evolutionary musings of earlier, he also saw how
this biological scrimmage of high heels and bustiers, of muscle T-shirts and
sexual bulges in clinging jeans, had the dead-serious function of perpetuating
the genetic codes. Of course, these girls making themselves up for a night on
the town in agonies of expectation—daubing bowerbird colors on their eyelids,
and painting sexual emphasis onto their lips—had no idea that they were doing
the vast, transpersonal will of their species. No, they were just getting ready
to get liquored up and maybe get laid in the bargain.

Sipping his drink, he remembered how he and his
wife had been spared this gaudy hormonal pageant. They’d met in that very brief
period when he’d been working as a clinical psychologist, still terribly
self-serious at the time, and she’d been a grad student seeking an internship.
Relatively inexperienced in love, though already obeying the dictates of his
profession that he appear to know everything, he was struck by how his
conversation with her somehow passed easily through the grates of his newly
self-conscious manner. Meeting her, he would later say, was like meeting his
long-lost sister, the one who his parents told him had died in childbirth. Their
ease together seemed anterior to their adult selves. Was familiarity finally the
realest basis of attraction?

Lawrence drank his gin, munched on the ice in the
glass, and gradually, as the relaxing power of the drink went through him, found
himself trying to approve of the scene around him as a way of telling himself he
was okay. This was an old and wily move of his mind, a psychic
redoublement
whereby he attached himself silently to a
social setting and drew strength from the implication of his membership. In this
particular case, he attempted to tell himself the raucous energy and optimism of
the kids around him was in part
his
energy, and as
such a corrective to that default to planetary pessimism that was so
intellectually fashionable these days.

He ordered another gin and drank it slowly,
savoring the thought. It was now a bit after ten
P.M.
and a huge new surge of bodies had pressed things to a natural
bursting point. Conversation was nearly impossible, and people shouting drink
orders were four deep behind him. It was about then that a sick, uneasy flare
lit up the triumphal landscape of his mind. Glynis’s friend Marley essentially
lived in places like this. And if bars like this one existed for youth, then
certainly a variant existed for the middle-aged as well, a bar in another part
of the city, perhaps, where his wife and Marley might be seated right now,
prospecting for the attention of well-heeled gentlemen.

Signaling to the bartender, he ordered a third gin
and tonic. But he drank it quickly because, about halfway through it, he
realized he was also growing tired of this place, with its strobing lights and
deepening social roar. His little adventure, which had seemed a lark, nearly
anthropological, an hour earlier, was becoming humanly a pain. He knocked the
drink back, paid his bill, walked to his car and weaved his way home. It wasn’t
until he was back in his house, having fumbled with the key to the front door
lock, that he announced to himself, “I’m drunk,” and drunkenly opened his
laptop. Among the many names stacked in his in-box, the girl’s leaped out at him
like something vignetted in a photograph. He clicked.

Yes,
she wrote,
yes and yes
.

He slumped in his chair. His wife hadn’t written
back. Why was she being so frustrating, so pigheadedly wrong?

He sat there staring into darkness for a long while
before going up to the bedroom. The room, because it had been the former scene
of so many years of warm unthinking intimacy, seemed to him now to have the
ambient chill of a meat locker. In the middle of it all, beneath its rumpled
chenille spread, the bed lolled like a giant coated tongue. He undressed
mechanically, lay on his side on the very far edge of the mattress with the
distinct sense of teetering for an extended moment at the edge of wakefulness,
waiting for something to save him, and was still waiting when sleep suddenly
opened like a mouth and swallowed him whole.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“G
ood morning, Margot,” said Racquel, the lead therapist at the rehab center. She had a soft, droopy face, like something left out in the sun overlong, and a mole near her lips. Margot stared at the mole. She’d been at this place for five days.

“Morning,” she said back, politely.

It was early in the day, and Racquel, who was enveloped in the chemical cold fruit smell of her shampoo, leaned forward.

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“Where do I live?” Margot repeated, and cued by the words, found herself remembering suddenly the warm spring day when she finally left her grubby communal hole on the Lower East Side and moved to her new apartment. She’d dropped her suitcases, spun around the living room, bent down to glimpse the dancing inch of the Hudson River visible between smokestacks from the corner window, gone and sat in the claw-foot tub, and then turned on the high-end Dacor oven just for the fun of it.

“744 West End Avenue,” she said slowly.

“Great!” Racquel gave her a broad smile that made her mole, disturbingly, disappear.

She also remembered what was wrong with the apartment: she simply couldn’t afford it. The magazine paid for a car service whenever she needed it; in moments of tipsy grandiosity with friends she could even fudge things and say she had “a car and driver.” On top of that, hundreds of major American corporations fought for her time at work; they begged her for a little bit of attention; they spoke insinuatingly to her of the magic, aromatic junkets they’d like to send her on as Lulu Bach’s assistant if she’d be willing to describe their goods and services in the magazine. In the antiworld of promotion, money flowed like rain, and
Cachet
was a pipeline to the demographic sweet spot of twentysomething girls with throbbing wallets.

But she was broke.

“And how long have you lived there?” Racquel now said, the mole popping back into view as her smile faded.

“Uh, maybe five years or so?”

She consulted a clipboard and then looked up at her. “You’re doing just great, Margot.”

“Am I?”

She was broke, yes, because though her job carried walloping social clout, she was paid miserably. At promotional events, poised and immaculate, she could be found lingering overlong at the antipasti table, and when home alone, often resorted to ramen or many-splendored omelets to get by.

“I’d like to talk a little bit about your last job,” said Racquel.

She’d also begun getting invited regularly to a certain kind of party, an important party, of a certain quantifiable social mass, a party that was usually a module in some way of the parties thrown by Lulu Bach, with many of the same people in attendance, recycled through the long, self-renewing rhythms of the Manhattan social scene. She was establishing a reputation for a scorching wit hilariously at odds with her open ingenue persona, and people were beginning to take notice.

Many of those people were men. Not long after her arrival at the magazine, she’d begun dating, moving slowly but steadily upward through the lowlands of forgettable younger types toward that shining plateau where the wealthy older gentlemen grazed. These men were jaded by the deference shown them by young women but were struck by her slender prettiness and the disconnect between her sunny insouciance and her apparent fund of darker knowledge. She knew how to tweak them in their boredom. She knew precisely how best to sting them in their presumptions. Their surprise at her irreverence shaded neatly into erotic curiosity about the root source of her unshakable confidence, and they asked for her number and followed up.

“What did you last do for work?” Racquel asked.

“Uh, journalism?”

Within six months of her arrival in New York, she was already traveling in long, elliptical circuits through the inner dining rooms of some of the city’s better restaurants, along with, occasionally, chartered planes and the bobbing foredecks of yachts moored off Seventy-Ninth Street. More than one of her gentlemen admirers floated the idea of a quick junket to Tortola or Mustique and took her back to his home, where, over drinks, he confessed himself intrigued by her seeming to know exactly how everything was supposed to go, down to the last detail. She laughed as she told a cereal magnate that his boardroom was “high-end Kmart.” To a captain of industry she explained in sibylline detail why his decorator had committed a “punishable offense” by pairing ecru and taupe in the living room of his mansion. Sometimes these men took umbrage and went away and never came back. But often, they did.

“Can you tell me more specifically?” Racquel asked.

“I worked,” she said slowly, “as an assistant to the editor in chief of a magazine.”

Dressed in expensive off-the-rack clothes borrowed from the office, with a sheaf of business cards made up with the fanciful and importantly vague job description of “editor at large,” she was out on the town, limiting herself always to a single drink, superalert, usually in heels, and gunning it, hard.

“I’m impressed by the clarity of your memory,” said Racquel, tapping her pen on her clipboard and then signing her name on something. “This makes me feel more confident about our next move.”

About six months after having arrived in New York, she hit pay dirt. Pay dirt was named Clive Pemberthy. Pay dirt was fifty-six years old, twice divorced, and richer not only than the men from the suburbs whose sole net worth was probably a town house in some satellite community of Manhattan (she could nearly smell the sick in the hallway from the puking babies); richer than the middle-aged accountants who sucked in their guts, told her they worked in “finance,” and adverted vaguely to vast wealth available upon her compliance; richer even than the young analysts pumped up on a million-dollar year-end bonus and talking to her in a mix of dream speak and third-rate seduction about Cabo and Cancun.

She’d met him at one of the parties. She’d known he would be there and chose a dress off the rack at
Cachet
that gripped her body like a blown bead of superheated plastic. Arriving early, she put on lipstick at half-hour intervals, waiting for him to show. When he did, she followed at a distance, and at the moment he was first separated from his friends, she made her play. This she did by walking past him in a way that would allow her intuitively to feel when she’d “hooked” his eyesight with her hips, and then turning slowly on a heel while gazing at him from under an arch of hair with a dawning recognition. He looked back, confused—did he know her?—and at exactly that moment she made a casually penetrating remark about a nearby painting on the wall.

The remark, which had cost her twenty minutes earlier that day browsing in
Wikipedia,
delighted him to the point of outright laughter, before his watchfulness reasserted itself and he grew serious and asked her point-blank who she was. She told him, and after he digested the information, he told her that this painting was by an artist he happened to collect passionately.

Smiling, she floated her upper body out onto the air, cantilevering herself slightly forward off her hips, as if about to spring.

“Tell me more,” she said.

Two weeks later, she was standing in his Italianate villa in Westchester, not far from the town of Katonah, looking out on seventy-five parklike acres that resembled a kind of spa. It was her first night there, she’d woken up before he did, and she now walked slowly down the central staircase, through the high-ceilinged main room and out the front door of the house. For a minute or two, she stood below the portico, looking out over the circular drive that hosted a variety of ice-cream-colored sports cars, a horse paddock, and beyond it, softly rolling hills leading away toward Manhattan.

Though she’d only spent a dozen or so hours in this house, she already noted that in the closet of his bedroom, behind his dress shirts and pants was a Gibraltar TL-15 tool-resistant safe, rated for an “attack time” of one hour. She’d observed that in a box on his dresser was a machine that wound his six watches—three Patek Philippes, two Rolexes and an Audemars Piguet—and that in the “aviary,” as he called it, there was a collection of paintings that hosted, recognizably, a small Renoir, some Degas pen-and-ink drawings and a delightfully obscene Egon Schiele. Casually, she’d seen the domed closed-circuit cameras in the corners of certain rooms and had deduced from conversation that a new maid had just been hired. As well, she’d noted that his wallet was hanging in his pants in the unmonitored bathroom and that this wallet contained a thick green slab of hundred-dollar bills.

It was spring, and the morning air had a coolness to it. A plane droned by overhead, beginning to bank toward JFK. She notified herself that this impersonation of a kind of arch debutante needed to be interrupted; that she needed to assert the other part, the part that earlier that night had watched him gasping above her in emulation of something approaching a heart attack, while she pretended to something she didn’t feel in the least.

Light as a gazelle, she scampered back upstairs. He was still sleeping, facedown on the bed, his lips pressed somewhat thickly against the pillow as if she were still rolling beneath him. At fifty-six, two orgasms were better than a Seconal. Today would be the maid’s second day on the job. In the bathroom, Margot peeled several hundreds off the wad of bills in his wallet and slipped them into her purse.

There was a disturbance, a scuffling sound at the door, and Dan France burst into the room, breathing heavily, excited.

“Well?” he said.

Racquel turned to him with her mole entirely hidden by the force of the happy creases in her face.

“Good news,” she said. “Our student is showing strong cognitive recovery. I’ll be talking to her case manager later today, about setting up meetings with a nutritional therapist, and getting her familiar with working with a home health aide, prior to the move.”

Racquel looked at Margot and said with mock exasperation, “We want you out of here!”

Then she turned smiling to Dan France, and added, “She’s doing great so far, and my prediction is that within a very, very short time, our Margot will be returning home, and maybe one day even taking up the life she had.”

“Imagine that,” said Dan France, shaking his head in wonder. “I mean, just go ahead and imagine that.”

Margot looked at him over the still-sleeping body of Clive Pemberthy, and behind him, the house filled with floor upon floor of wealth and privilege.

“I think I can,” she said, smiling.