Authors: Eli Gottlieb
The Face Thief (15 page)
I
n their crappy rental car, gunning the gas as hard as they could, they’d kept up for a few blocks before losing him in the blazing traffic of the West Side Drive. They whipped the car onto the narrow shoulder and were giddily comparing notes on what they agreed was some kick-ass driving by a man who Cas insisted was “probably a mob wheelman,” when the phone rang and both men made the exact same gesture of reaching automatically forward with their right hands. Cas laughed, but it was Potash’s phone, and when he picked up, he saw it was his California home number. The idea of his wife sitting across the country in some quiet, sunny lake of light seemed faintly miraculous.
“Hi, honey. How’s everything?” he asked, clearing his throat.
“I miss you.” Her voice was plaintive.
“And I miss you, darling,” said Potash.
“Where are you?”
“On Mom detail, mostly.”
“And she’s continuing to improve?”
“The woman is the definition of unkillable.”
“Fortunately, she’s also a sweetie.”
Potash had never, not once in his life, thought of his mother as a “sweetie,” but he only said, “She’s hanging in there.”
“Can I call her?” his wife asked.
“Of course, and she’d love that.”
“Good, I will. You guys must have just finished up dinner, I imagine?”
“Uh, yes. Are we on speakerphone?”
“Sorry.” Along with everyone else in their small town, she viewed cell phones as carcinogenic ray guns pointed directly at her sensitive brain, and she did her best to use a headset or speakerphone to keep the hostile waves at a distance. But she would indulge him. The background hiss changed registers. “Is that better?” her crisp, clear voice now asked.
“Yes, thanks, honey.”
“So, I’ve been trying to plan our late summer trip.” Anabella was a big believer in trips.
“Yes?” A tractor trailer boomed by with a frontal shove of air that shivered the little car.
“Gosh, what was that?” she asked.
“Thunder,” he said impulsively. “It’s thundering.”
“Really? The boys were tracking you and they said the weather report called for sunshine tonight. Didn’t you?” She had turned away from the phone.
“Right.” She got back on. “John?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Anyway, Napa.”
“Napa?”
“Yes, for later this summer. I thought we could do a wine tour with the boys. They actually have some kid-friendly wineries, if you can believe that. The boys study the chemistry of fermentation and then we drink the fruits of that chemistry.”
“Not cheap” was all Potash could muster.
“No, probably not. But within our budget, I already checked.”
“Right,” he said, the word costing him an effort.
“You okay?” she immediately asked.
“Uh, yeah, why?”
“You sound a little distracted.”
“That’s because I am.”
“Of course you are,” she said.
“Yes. And uh, here,” he said abruptly, because he was sick of being slowly backed into a growing lie, “is someone who wants to talk to you.” Frowning, he pressed the phone into Cas’s hands.
“And how is my favorite
muy linda señorita
?” said Cas smoothly. Once rumored to have been in line for an ambassadorial post, Cas owned the outsize suavity of someone whose forebears, going back several generations, had never once taken out their own trash. As his friend bantered on, Potash looked out over the dusky highway, where the dotted snakelike trail of cars twisted toward the lit twin tiaras of the George Washington Bridge. At that moment, the busyness of the world felt vaguely an affront.
“Yes, and I’m glad to hear your voice, too,” Cas was saying. “I’d just been asking about you and those adorable boys.”
Cas caught Potash’s glance and rolled his eyes.
“Are they?” he said. “Well, it’s the age, Anabella. It’s the age, and there’s nothing to do about it. By the time they realize how grateful they are to you for what you’ve done, you’re half dead.” He laughed, nodding and said, “I know!”
He nodded some more.
“Good,” he said. “And you to them. Maybe Cancun or Belize this winter, en famille? I’d like that.” And then, after a moment, again winking at Potash, he said, “Bye.”
He hung up and said, “Your wife is a treasure, and you don’t deserve her.”
“Go fuck yourself,” said Potash affectionately, dialing Berke, the cop, and swinging back into traffic.
L
awrence had already ordered a bottle of wine when he saw her enter the restaurant. She was wearing a tight black skirt, heels, a form-fitting top and above it, the helmet of close-cropped blond hair. And yet, despite her outwardly polished look, he was instantly struck by her air of subtle indecision. She looked like she’d dressed herself for a seduction she didn’t quite believe in, and these mixed messages produced in him, dismayingly, a wave of sympathy for someone he sincerely believed to be among the worst people he’d ever met.
With a smile and a little wave hello, she approached across the floor with a sidling stride that gave the impression of wanting to draw near and flee at the same time.
“Lawrence, hi!”
He leaned forward and was surprised to discover that his heart was racing.
“Hi there. Long time no see,” he said calmly.
She was closing the gap to his face with hers, and then pressing her lips on his. He made no effort to kiss back; but neither did he withdraw.
“Years!” she said loudly, pulling away and then giving him a false, asymmetrical smile while he registered the chemical fruit taste of her lipstick. “You look well,” she said.
“You too.”
The smile widened, though the eyes remained cold and flattish, studying him. She fanned her face with a hand. “Is it hot in here, or am I just nervous?”
“It is a little warm in here, actually.”
“And I
am
nervous.” She laughed.
“How about a little wine?”
She sat down, nodding, while he filled her glass. Though in his revenge fantasies of this moment, he had regularly dealt her staggering rhetorical blows and piled on viciously, all he now said was, “And catch me up on how you’ve been in the meantime.”
She raised her glass and clinked his. “I will. Cheers, Lawrence.”
“Cheers,” he said, and they drank.
“Muuuch better,” she said, exhaling even as her shoulders remained tensed and vigilant, “and the short answer is fantastic.”
“How so?”
“Business has been booming, for one.”
He looked at her. “You know,” he said, “it occurs to me that I don’t know exactly what you do. Your business card said only ‘editor at large.’ ”
“That was from another life,” she said airily. “Lately, I’ve been bouncing around a bit in finance.”
“What end of it?”
“Can we not talk of it?”
“Of course.” He shrugged his shoulders.
“It’s just so booooring. Plus, there are more pressing things to talk about, like my apology.”
He furrowed his brow. “For?”
“That absolutely crazy letter I slipped through your front door. Afterward, I realized that it was really and truly nuts and I am sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“And dangerous, too. I kept asking myself, why is this man preying on my brain so? I mean, I know”—her color was deepening and a flush had begun to spread upward over her breastbone—“that you’re wonderful, and that your teachings and work gave me the confidence to strike out on my own, with great results, but why was I like”—she made a goofy grin and unmade it—“so obsessed with you?”
“Obsessed,” he said calmly.
“Yes, and then, when I was getting on a plane in Chicago, it came to me.”
She drew herself up and subtly pulled back her shoulders to raise the shelf of her breasts into his line of sight.
“You’re hot.”
He laughed out loud.
“What I mean,” she said, her color deepening further, “is you’re hot in this Distinguished Older man way that’s not always so obvious. But when someone keys into it, look out!”
He floated onto his face a smile he called the Chaplin for how the raked cheekbones produced an off-putting wall of affect, and said, “I appreciate the uh, sentiment. But that’s not how I think of myself.”
“But that’s what makes it even more so. Don’t you see?” she asked. “It’s what people don’t say, don’t do, don’t belong to that makes them interesting. You’ve got this mysterious fund of knowledge and you know what makes people tick and yet you seem like you’re thinking only of higher things, which is kinda irresistible.”
She gave him what he judged to be the first credible, full-faced grin of their acquaintance, and then, dropping her voice, asked, “But are you only thinking of higher things, Lawrence?”
“I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”
“Can I have some more wine?”
He laughed with a pleasurable release from the abdomen. “Of course.”
As he poured her a hefty glass, he saw a nearby waiter looking at him with raised eyebrows and nodded at him to approach.
“Right,” he said to her briskly. “Shall we order?”
She looked around. “Can you do it for me? Something seafoody? I think I’m getting drunk.”
“Not a problem.”
The waiter interposed himself, and rattled off the dishes in rapid Italian. Lawrence quickly made the choices and handed back the menus.
“You’d make a good husband.”
“That’s nice of you to say,” he said, remembering that one of his persistent fantasies for this evening had been of enticing her into the erotic equivalent of those forest-floor traps lashed to a sapling that cinches tight around the victim’s foot and then flings her in a high, bone-breaking arc into the air.
“You take care of the people you love,” she was saying, “and I can tell.”
The Chaplin floating firmly in place over the next few minutes, he did a lot of refilling of her wine while she continued talking. She liked to drink and she liked to talk, though he wasn’t certain which came first, but his sense was that her inebriation, anyway, would help his cause. They’d arrived at the bottom of the bottle when two waiters swept in with a rolling cart and in a moment of smooth orchestration individually withdrew chafing dishes to serve piping hot spaghetti al cartoccio. This involved presenting a large paper bladder of a sort that when incised with a knife emitted a long hiss of steam. From within it, a glistening wealth of seafood and pasta tumbled out. The two of them were transfixed as the waiters expertly divided and served the dish.
Before the waiter left, he ordered another bottle. Though she wasn’t yet slurring her words outright, he could hear a faint jostling at the bottom of her normally precise diction and a newly emphatic tone as she lit into her latest subject: the stupidity of men.
“Because men are stupid, aren’t they, Lawrence?” she said giving a tentative stab at her pasta. “Not individually, of course, but in the aggregate, as my college professor of statistics used to say. Don’t you think? It’s like cats. Are they smarter than dogs?” She forked the food into her mouth, and slightly muffled but undeterred went on, “Oh, I know, all the bleeding heart animal liberation types won’t say so, but we know in our hearts the kitty is a sharper beast, don’t we?” She pressed the shiny fork to her breast. “And don’t we know that most men in the world are as dumb as pails of dirt?”
“I’m not sure I ever thought of it quite like that,” he said.
“Petty, cheap, vain, brittle, oh, and obvious. Men are obvious. Present company waaay excluded, of course.”
“How so?”
She looked at him a second, and for the first time that evening, raised the wine bottle and poured herself another wine. “Sexually,” she said.
He cleared his throat. “I gather you’ve formed strong opinions on the subject,” he said.
“Over a lifetime of—oh, God.” She clapped a hand to her mouth. “I
am
drunk.”
“So what?”
“So now,” she said, “you have no excuse left.” She smiled at him.
“To . . .”
“To not take advantage of me, of course.”
Always, he recalled, it happened this way. Like real lightning suddenly flashing from a painted sky. A jolt of adrenaline had already turned him wakeful, but he deliberately made his features slack, good-timey, even a little sleepy, and said, “The thought had occurred.”
She laughed uproariously for a second, and then got somewhat shakily to her feet, drawing herself up. When seated across the table from him, she’d been crunched in a posture of confiding intimacy, but as she stood up now, he was again reminded of her formal properties—breasts, hips, legs. He tried to look at her with the value-free equanimity of an entomologist would a bug, but lust fogged the lenses of his detachment and in a slightly alarmed voice, he said, “What are you doing?”
“I,” she said grandly, “am going to the bathroom to powder my sobriety. Back in a jif.”
I
n the dark, the house with its tall peaked roof resembled a witch’s hat. The windows were covered with frilly sheers and the driveway was a humped pour of macadam that glistened in the streetlight like a pair of new shoes. To the letter, it was the kind of tidy working-class home that she had staked her entire life on avoiding. They were greeted by an odor as they moved slowly up the front brick staircase that he identified as the housekeeper’s cooking.
“That’s meat loaf,” Dan France said, as if introducing her to a person.
And then they were inside, and she was sniffing the deeper closed odor of the house, which she recognized as belonging intrinsically to Dan France and which gave her the not especially pleasant sense of having traced a person’s smell back to its source. Slowly she lowered herself to a couch. He was standing in place with his hands on his hips, watching.
“Drink?” he asked.
“Is that a verb or a noun?” she said softly. “Water, please.”
He snorted, but appreciatively, and then left. The ride back had been a tense, odd twenty minutes in which he seemed to be looking at her from a newly ironical place that allowed him to be both warm and detached at the same time. It unnerved her. She glanced now at the nonworking brick fireplace and the whitewashed walls filled with travel posters advertising the delights of Barcelona and Paris, along with the lone potted plant, the woven carpet, the large flat-screen television and the basket on a gateleg table filled with what looked to be lifeless, possibly wax fruit, and she thought:
I’ve gotta get out of here.
He reentered the room, with a tray and pitcher, saying, “And so?”
“What?” she asked.
As best he could, laden, he shrugged. “You know, the house?”
“About 1910,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“It was built.”
He laughed delightedly. “Spot-on! You knew that?”
“Is this a safe house?” she asked. “Or your house?”
Silently he placed the tray and pitcher on a nearby table. Then he looked at her as if gauging her for a moment. “It’s a safe house, all right,” he said, “but I do occasionally use it when no one’s here.”
She stared at him.
“It belonged to a well-heeled crack dealer who went away for a long time and had everything impounded, including”—he gestured—“this. The house is the fruit of one of the largest interagency seizures of cocaine in New York City history. You may think I’m joking, but I’m not. Actually, what happened was . . .”
And at that moment she mentally stepped away from the amiable, country-smart, potentially dangerous Dan France and let him run on without listening. In accordance with her long-standing habit, she tuned him out. Her eyes focused on his face, which was presently drawing itself up into great, round shapes of animation while she studied mental escape routes. These weren’t literal escapes out of the safe house, but the larger escape back to herself, which, it occurred to her, had been on her mind ever since she’d regained consciousness in the hospital.
“You know,” she said, interrupting him, “I’m really tired. Could I lie down?”
“But of course.” He sprang to his feet. “Sorry to sit here talking your ear off. Right this way.” And hefting her bag, he set off down the hallway, while she followed. Presently they were turning into a small, chill, dark-wood space.
“Your room,” he said. “Wait!” he cried suddenly. “I forgot the chair.” And spinning in place, he race-walked out of the room, bringing her back a kind of Morris chair, which he held easily over his head and then set down on the narrow strip of carpeting by her bed.
“Here you go.”
“Great.”
Gingerly, saying nothing, she sat down on the chair, placing her hands on her knees. Without warning, a sudden memory made her tremble. But not with unhappiness.
“You know what?” she said. “I’m really beat, so if it’s not too big an imposition, would you mind if I lay down for a nap now?”
“Not in the least.” He brought his hands together in a gesture of satisfaction. “Meat loaf in an hour?” he said. “We need to eat early because I’ve got to get back to the city.”
She nodded and he withdrew. When she lay down in bed, she was exhausted but far too excited to sleep. She was excited because the same memory, now widening in a starburst in her head, was casting a sharp, thrillingly detailed light over the next twelve hours. She understood exactly how they would go. Following her nap, she would have a slow, boring dinner with him, interrupted regularly by his magpie chatter about the two dullest subjects on earth: his life and prospects and her future. He would embroider this with regular darting comments about her lurid past and she’d dutifully allow as how she’d been misled by people along the way, and in the process, make him feel the secret reason for her deviation from the good had been the lack of someone as manly and true as himself in her life. Showing humility and excusing herself as early as possible, she would return to her bedroom, brush her teeth, and afterward, lying down, let the universe spin her to sleep. The next morning, awakening in the cheerless borough of Queens, she would open her eyes feeling rested, and with some of that same orbital motion still at her back, put her feet on the floor and walk step by step into her beautiful new life.
