Authors: Eli Gottlieb
The Face Thief (13 page)
H
is mother had experienced something called a transient ischemic attack. After an anxious night waiting while tests were done, Potash was at the hospital at seven
A.M.
sharp when the news was brought to him in the waiting room. The conveyor of this news was an unnaturally handsome doctor named Feyadh, the Iranian (“we prefer ‘Persian’ ”) resident. His mother had had a kind of ministroke, the doctor explained in his sweetly jumbled English, batting his doe eyes, but as was often the case, the condition had “self-resolved,” and though it was a dark precursor of serious things to come, it had left no traces in its wake.
Potash felt relief the approximate weight and size of a log roll off his chest. Entering her room ten minutes later, he found his mother unsedated and sitting happily up in bed.
“Well, good morning,” he said, unable to keep from smiling hugely himself. Her recovery seemed to him faintly magical.
“Don’t act surprised. You think you were gonna get rid of me that easy?” The lines were vintage, but he noticed that she for her part seemed to be glowing.
“Oh, Mom,” he said, shaking his head affectionately.
“I’ll tell you what it was, ” she said, and held a hand to her mouth like a mini-megaphone. “It was like a twenty-four-hour flu that turned off my talking power.” She lowered the hand. “Snap, like that. But the important thing is that it turns out I have nothing wrong with me.”
“Not exactly,” he said, “but almost.”
He moved over and, very gently, sat on the side of her bed.
“Well, happy to see you too,” she said tartly. “What, you can’t let your old mother enjoy her recovery? I feel fine, and so should you.”
He smiled at her.
“You wanna provide me my laugh cues, Mom, and tell me when to cry, too?”
But she ignored that, and said simply, “Home, James! Momma can’t wait!”
“I’ll take you as soon as they say I can.”
“Who they? Doctors? What do they know?”
“You really are back.”
“You didn’t believe me?”
“It was pretty scary.”
“Well, I’m a tough old bird.”
“Yeah, lots of sinew.”
He laughed as she raised one hand in which she held the daily paper and slowly, with great care, swatted him on the head.
“For shame!” she cried.
They were both very happy.
On the way back to her house, having promised her he’d be back that evening around dinnertime, he called his wife. Though still vaguely despairing about the bigger picture, he was feeling somewhat expansive in a local, under-the-circumstances way, and was all the more dismayed to meet with a sharp corrective to his fledgling good mood. His wife was worried. The children were “acting out,” and the therapist Dr. Feibenbush said that the older child, Louis, apparently suffered from something called “video-dependency syndrome.” This was a condition whose main symptom was an inability to tolerate more than an hour away from a computer screen bearing biomorphic, faintly dragon-shaped entities at war, or phenomenally realistic infantrymen plinking away at distant targets. Deprived of them, he’d become aggressive and unruly—too much, apparently, for a tenderhearted woman alone with him for days on end. To make things worse, she’d recently discovered a trove of gun and weaponry magazines in his closet, and for parents with male children of a certain age (as she’d already explained to him), Columbine was never far away. Her voice was teary, breaking up.
After calming his wife down by promising that when he got home in a few days he would take matters in hand and enroll his stepson in a martial arts program run by one of those flinty, warmhearted ex-Marines with a reputation for positively channeling adolescent angst, they had a lovely few minutes together. She was deeply relieved to talk to him, and he for his part was fortified by the feeling of having exercised his masculine, not to mention professional, bona fides.
He pulled the car into his mother’s driveway and set upon freshening things up for her imminent return from the hospital. It was now ten thirty in the morning, and when the phone rang from an unidentified California number, his first thought was: early riser.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Potash?” said a familiarly plummy, theatrical voice.
“Yes?”
“Wilbraham here. I hope this call finds you in good health.”
“Ah, Mr. Wilbraham, of course. Uh, I’m fine enough.”
“Good to hear. I’m calling,” he announced dramatically, “to tell you the creature has been located.”
Potash, who had been in the midst of nervously finger-combing his hair, stopped with his hand held crablike on the side of his head.
“You found her?”
“Not I, but Herve, my dear assistant and part-time bloodhound. She goes by a variety of names, our girl, and the inside word is that law enforcement is drawing up an indictment. Wire fraud, embezzlement, RICO statutes—the book, summarily, will be thrown at her. Herve tracked her down to a small hospital in New York City, of all places. My information”—there was a rustle of papers—“is that the creature is there due to an injury of sorts, and furthermore is currently under police protection. I needn’t tell you all this makes her apprehension a quite formidable task.”
“Yes.”
“Quite formidable, yes,” Wilbraham repeated, half to himself.
“Still,” said Potash carefully, “this is great news, no?”
“No,” said Wilbraham, “and yes.”
“Why no?” Potash asked.
There was a pause, during which Potash could imagine Wilbraham massaging his soft, fleshy face with the palm of a hand.
“Friend,” he began, “we are now arrived in the course of our relationship at what I like to call The Good Bad Place. Good because the malefactors have been found. Bad because now we’re faced with what to do with that fact.”
As was often the case with Wilbraham, Potash felt himself wanting to pierce the large, cloudy ball of words that seemed to rotate around the man. He said simply, “What now?”
“Indeed.” Wilbraham cleared his throat explosively. “It goes like this, Mr. P. Police arrest criminals. Then prosecutors take cases to trial. Then juries convict, if in fact they do, and judges sentence. But that takes a long, long time. By that time, their booty, which is to say your ex-booty, has either been depleted by legal fees or, as is increasingly the case, is cooling its heels in untraceable offshore accounts. Does the name ‘Canary Islands’ mean anything to you?”
“Yes, I know all about my chances. Mr. Bortz was quite up front about them.”
“Ah, the punctilious Mr. Bortz, of course. Well, that being the case, I have a modest proposal for you.”
“I’m dying to hear it.”
“No doubt, which is why I suggest the following: that you fly to New York and intercept the creature during a public errand when she leaves the hospital, as she no doubt shortly will. Supermarket parking lots, for example, are perfect sites for this. You surprise her when she is laden with foodstuffs and her guard is down.”
“What?” Potash asked, and then again, “What?”
“You’re impatient. You’re incredulous,” said Wilbraham. “I can’t blame you. But please lend an ear. This story begins with you employing the services of a moonlighting deputy in your area who is a very good friend of mine named Edward Berke. Mr. Berke is an unusual soul, who is both amenable to working in the legal shadows, and, if necessary, not. With him riding sidesaddle in the car with you, you will not only be indemnified against violence, you will also have the full moral weight of the law on your side. He is fully armed with the various implements of his profession but he is in plainclothes. Are you with me?”
“I think so. And I’m already in New York, or in Connecticut, for my mother.”
“Bingo,” said Wilbraham sonorously. “To move on, then: you arrive with Mr. Berke and at the right moment you leave the car and you intercept the creature in an open space such as this parking lot. Very quietly you explain to her that she has ruined your life. She is a sociopath, of course, so you quickly add that if she in any way wants to flee, Mr. Berke will have her incarcerated for a very long time. Now here’s the important thing. Having leveled with her, you explain that if she accompanies you to your car and specifically to the computer there and initiates a wire transfer for the monies back into your accounts, you will drop all charges and chalk everything up to bygones. If she says she has already spent some of it, then you generously offer to allow her to keep that. In the money recovery business, we deal with percentages. During all this palaver, you adopt a tone of utterly calm exposition. You talk to her the way you would an errant kitten. You are firm but controlled. If she does in fact try to run, Berke will immediately give chase and apprehend her. Berke is quite fleet of step for a heavy smoker. If she runs, then the likelihood of your recovering your fortune will have statistically just leaped to a far shore. But on the off chance that she realizes you’ve effectively got her blocked in, she may just, as young people say, ‘go with the program.’ ”
There was a pause. Potash heard himself breathing into the phone.
“I’ll do it,” he said immediately.
“Which ‘it’?”
“Berke,” said Potash. “I’ll go with Berke. Can you have him call me?”
“Wonderful, my dear Potash.” Wilbraham said. “I’ll have him phone you promptly. Berke is very expensive, but then again”—he laughed his light, candid, utterly disarming laugh—“so am I.”
And with that, five thousand dollars’ worth of a retainer clicked off the line.
As soon as he could, Potash went upstairs to the study and began unpacking his laptop. He was eager to get Wilbraham’s e-mail containing “the creature’s” home address.
Waiting for his computer to boot up, he called Cas at his office. They’d had a general plan to meet, but Potash wanted to know if he could bump his lunch today, because he had something very special to talk about. There’d been, he added, “a break.”
“Sounds promising,” said Cas, who put him on hold for an unbelievably long time. When he got back to him, he said grandly, “You will be accommodated.”
“Great,” said Potash, “because this is gonna be good.”
“I’m sure of that. And by the way, I have an in with some pretty high-level law enforcement types just now. What did you say the chick’s name is?”
“She’s got a barrel of pseudonyms, apparently. But all I’ve got is ‘Janelle Styles’ and the various wire transfer coordinates and bank records, which I can e-mail you. You know the rest.”
“That’ll do,” said Cas, hanging up fast.
F
our days slid by without his wife coming home. Four days during which the house itself, by some mysterious additive process, seemed to grow larger and looser around him, the ceilings higher, the inner spaces traversed by imaginary drafts. He had future classes to prepare, and an introduction to write to a friend’s book. Yet he was stayed from these activities by a growing conviction that he’d made a mistake. Not only the mistake with the girl, but a larger life mistake, which accounted somehow for the vehemence of his wife’s reaction.
What to do? How best to atone? Sometimes physical activity trumped all the intellectual delving in the world. The next morning, after breakfast, he cleaned the first-floor windows of the house with penitential precision, drawing Windex in shining arcs through the dusty glass. It was a choking, repellent job, but he did it. That afternoon, he tackled the crawl space. Located below the screened-in back patio, it was gross by anyone’s definition. Wearing gauntleted gloves, knee pads, and a long-handled rake, he drew out mucky old newspapers, playing cards (it was probably a “fort” for a generation of children in the 1960s), a few small feral skeletons of field mice, ancient toys, and lots of rotting, smelly debris of indeterminate origin. It felt like he was allowing the house to throw up.
After a shower, he went out and bought flowers. These he placed like splashes of color at the cardinal points of the living room, and he told himself that his wife would have loved the touches.
The fit of industry was hypnotic, self-sustaining. That same afternoon, he buffed the floors slowly, bending and straightening like a Venetian gondolier, while listening to the classical station on the headphones. A Verdi string quartet suppressed the skirling sound of the pads. When evening came on, he downloaded a Moroccan chicken recipe from Epicurious, then went to the local specialty shop and bought cardamom, kale and fenugreek. As the pot simmered on the stove, feeling himself transported to Glynis through the magic of olfactory memory, he called her. His voice was light and musical with self-satisfaction.
“Glyn,” he said into her voice mail, “I’m cooking chicken Djibouti, and it smells wonderful and the house is sparkling. Everybody wants you home.”
He was not a natural cook; he measured everything to the milliliter; made dinner like he was titrating chemical reagents in a lab. But the result—and he called her again, unavailing, as he sat in front of the table—was a miracle of refined cuisine.
He ate his spicy chicken and tried, again, to think clearly. A natural list maker, he drew up one now, using a yellow legal pad and a fountain pen. It read something like this:
Good Lawrence:
Stable
Calm
Provider
Bad Lawrence:
Autocratic
Bullying
Conceited
Good Glynis:
Intuitive
Loving
Generous
Bad Glynis:
Plotting
Deflecting
Vindictive
But what was the use of thinking in these broad and silly categories? The truth, he knew, was found away from the orderly ruled universe of his yellow pad. The truth, unbeknownst to his wife, was that he’d had more—many more—than simply two “slippages.” Lawrence’s particular mental discipline took the form of absolute belief in his own story line, and of the presentation of himself as a diligent, fundamentally loyal man who lived in the sunny plateau of a good marriage. But this broad-strokes portrait was honeycombed with derelictions: repeatedly over the years he’d been unable to avoid the sudden flash of sexual interest in a woman, and repeatedly, he’d sought to satisfy it. He wasn’t proud of this fact. He’d privately gone so far as to see a therapist over what he regarded as his “compulsive” and potentially “ruinous” behavior. Occasionally, in the aftermath of his flings, he beheld himself as loathsomely Janus faced: the one side humane, skeptical, progressive, and thoughtful, the other gross and inflamed; all sexual meat.
Lawrence’s eventual answer to his quandary was to blame it mostly on them, his partners. To him they were like the succubi of classical myth, gorgeous, enticing creatures with a death-sting of seduction in their tails. Their wiles, after all, were infinite. Their gratitude at being granted the insight he had to offer was deep. Sex and curiosity occupied the same part of the brain. Who was he to lower the pedestal on which they placed his unique distinction?
But he was older now, and more mature. And part of that maturity consisted in the idea of deferring pleasure in the service of the greater good. Monogamy, after all, had a certain rough poetry to it. It spoke of the integrity of structures. Of the beauty of unmolested wholes. It spoke of clarity of purpose and fullness of intention. No, he’d have nothing sexually to do with Margot. She might have been beautiful, sharp, and as gifted a student as he’d ever known. But to sleep with her would be catastrophic. He knew it would.
The chicken, now half eaten, sat in the casserole before him with its ribs exposed like the scale model of a wooden boat. Beyond it, when he raised his eyes, he could see the wall calendar with his future dinner date with the girl circled in black, two days hence. He’d already been to the restaurant to look at it, study it, coolly consider the possibilities. It would be a master class in seduction with a nasty kick at the end. He would overrun her; crush her defenses; vaporize her self-control. And when he had her finally at his mercy, he would show her none.
Lawrence cleaned up, confident that his wife would be returning home soon, and that when she did, she would find a man renewed in spirit and self-corrected in his lacks. Afterward, he lay in bed, the bedside radio tuned to the divine intervals of Bach, and as the music bathed him with its sense of intricate problems gathered up, resolved and allowed to spill forth again, he felt a peace coming over him for the first time in days. He shut his eyes. The house, freshly cleaned, hissed from inside itself in a noise he chose to regard as contentment. The neighborhood spread around him in a series of warm, known overlaps. No enemy wanted his life. Lawrence aimed his mind at the future and entered unconsciousness like a man sliding triumphantly into home plate.
