Authors: Eli Gottlieb
The Face Thief (7 page)
L
awrence managed to close out the dinner without anything untoward taking place, but at the end of the evening, as he was saying good night, she surprised him by pressing swiftly against him with an openmouthed kiss on the lips that shocked for how it caused him to linger there, caught in a thick buzzing confusion, until a sharp signal of a sort shuddered between them. At which point, satisfied, she drew away and looked at him, her face gleaming. An average person would have only assumed her happy and replete. But tiny signs of asymmetric contraction around the eyes and mouth alerted him to the ambiguity of her pleasure. Other emotions were leaking out across her face; darker, colder emotions moving particularly across the left or “personal” side of her features. But before he could come to any further conclusions, she patted him on the cheek and spun swiftly away, her heels clopping down the night street.
They had set a lesson appointment for five days hence. As chance would have it, those next days were dense with the bureaucratic side of his business. In reality, he didn’t mind. Lawrence wasn’t a natural showman; he’d had to train himself over the years in the inflationary gestures and exaggerations of the stage. He’d become good at it, but it remained something willed and only marginally enjoyed. That being the case, he found these administrative operations actually a kind of relief. Fine-tuning future seminars, laying out schedules, checking on his assistant’s availability, and doing everything possible to ensure that the machine known as Lawrence Billings, LLC, ran forward as smoothly and uneventfully as possible was part of the busywork of life. He didn’t mind it.
By degrees, he also found himself extra attentive to his wife in this period. He took her out to dinner; he laughed with emphatic animation at her jokes, and upon her return from her book club, feigned deep interest in the discussion. In bed, at night, he rubbed her feet, her temples, her face with the calendula oil she loved. During the night itself, he sometimes felt himself half consciously hunting for her in the bed like a nocturnal creature sensitive only to variations of warmth and chill. Fresh, only partly guilty erotic impulses overwhelmed him from time to time. She was receptive, and a new season of feeling rolled through their marriage.
And why,
he asked himself,
shouldn’t it?
He adored his wife’s solidity, her serene power. She took up space with definitive emphasis. Her hips were large, her breasts were full and her heart, which he sometimes thought of as literally heart-shaped, included in its curves a beautiful breadth of care for plants, animals, justice, and himself most of all. But his feelings were given a twist by his new sense of a terrible fated terminality to everything. When she turned abruptly from a chair to stand up, he now feared she might fall. Slightly overweight people of middle age overtaxed the levers of their bodies on a regular basis and broke things. When she drew a long knife out of the drawer to chop something, he saw her slipping dramatically and ending up transfixed and wriggling like a fish on the shank. Burglars lay in wait and rushed in and hit people on the head. Planes broke open in the sky; cars swerved off the road because of the fatigue of tiny elbows of metal and killed all aboard. The world was a series of cocked guns and ticking probabilities.
Margot called twice; he didn’t pick up, and she left no message.
On the fifth day, as planned, he was at his office and waiting for her. He had successfully disguised his excitement by displacing it into a fresh awareness of the cheap construction of his suite. When would he ever get the crappy particleboard walls repainted and the moldy bathroom tiles regrouted? And what about that new T1 line he was forever mulling over? Could he simply move on it?
A brisk little knocking on the glass panel of the office interrupted his reverie.
“Who is it?” he called out, knowing full well.
She made a dramatic stage entrance, pushing one long leg forward in front of the vestibule, touching the point of her sandaled toe to the floor and then rolling it forward to slide her leg into the room up to the thigh. It was campy, high school theater, obviously crude, but it worked. He was intrigued.
“Come in,” he said calmly.
She slid the rest of herself into view and took a bow. “Good morning!”
She was dressed in black leggings, a tiny pouf skirt and a fitted black top. Her curves were on display, and her blond hair had been cropped short and freshly gelled.
“Good morning, Margot,” he said. “You look very . . .”—he searched for the right word—“sleek.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
She was sitting down, shucking her laptop out of its case, straightening her back and lifting her face to him. He was staring back at her with his eyesight concentrated especially on her smiling mouth. People had no idea what an encyclopedia of information the human smile was. As he often explained to students, the key diagnostic trait of the fraudulent smile was the zero engagement of the muscles around the eyes, and he searched hers for a moment.
“How’ve you been?” she asked casually.
“Just fine,” he said, “very busy. You?”
“How have I been?” She seemed delighted by the question. “What’s the word for better than great?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Sublime?”
“It’s the work, Lawrence. I’ve just been on this high about it. It’s like those people who after being deaf their whole lives get a . . . coch . . . a cocky . . .”
“A cochlear implant?”
“And suddenly their world opens wide?”
“I like the analogy.”
“It’s like I walk out into the street and I look at people with this kind of second sight or x-ray vision. I can see the bitch a mile away and make evasive maneuvers. I can see the third-rate seducer with his mind in the gutter from before his first crappy come-on. It’s a revelation.”
“For some people it really can be that.” Suddenly he felt moved to talk about himself. “I’ve always hoped that in addition to everything else, the work would help enlarge people’s vision, give them a wider perspective in life generally. It’s not simply looking for ways to get ahead; it’s about reading humanity, the book of life.” He paused, contracting back. “Not to get too overwrought about it.”
She was smiling at him again. He’d noticed before that she had the kind of eyes, typically seen in the Asian world, which appear overfull of liquid. He suddenly felt the need to anchor things in the professional. “And your homework for this week?” he asked. “Did you find it useful?”
“When you love the material, it’s all useful.”
“Right answer!” he said with a grin. “You feel like giving me a recap?”
“You bet.”
Biting her inner lip, she opened her tabbed loose-leaf notebook. From upside down, he observed her pages covered with handwriting whose leftward slant indicated a desire for emotional concealment, while bearing the large letter loops of someone sensitive to criticism.
“Let’s begin with touch,” she said, raising her eyes to his before lowering them. “It’s the mother of all sales drivers. In fact, research at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration—”
“Thank you,” he interrupted her.
“For?” She looked up, startled.
“Remembering the correct attribution,” he said, “that’s all.”
She made a kind of downward, bosomful nod of the head, said, “Sure,” and then went on, “research indicated that the tips of servers went up distinctly when servers touched the arms of diners. Let’s see if I can remember the details.”
She looked over his head and squinted into the distance in an effort at recollection. “Average tips increased 20 percent when they were touched on the shoulder, I think it was, and 35 percent when they were touched twice on the hand.”
All it had been was a kiss, he was thinking; a brief, if intense little clasp of the lips. And yet somehow she’d frontloaded the entirety of her eros into that moment. How had she done that?
“Exactly right,” he said.
“In fact, touch”—she was now looking at him appraisingly—“is currently understood to be a key hidden commercial factor. The work done by Fortwell—”
But he’d zoned out, and unusually for him, had stopped listening. He was instead remembering that morning, at age forty-one, when he’d reached up to scratch his own ear and been amazed by the thinness of the lobe. It was as if, unbeknownst to him, the fluids of his body had been traitorously draining away while he slept. For the next hour he’d explored his body with his hands, pinching skin and fat, testing for the places where old age was making its inroads.
This,
he thought, watching her without hearing,
is what makes men greedy for young women—the promise of somehow recuperating that initial plump alacrity of flesh.
She was saying, “The feet, because they’re connected to the limbic system, are the classic autonomic tells, and the Chinese say . . .”
“That’s enough,” he said. She cocked an interrogative eyebrow.
“I, I think it’s time we clear something up,” he said.
“Okay, sure. What did you have in mind?”
He felt a reckless, vaulting energy pushing him forward to make a clean breast of things.
“I want us to feel relaxed in our roles,” he said. “I enjoy teaching you and mentoring you. But I think it’s important to stress that that’s all I am, your teacher.”
“Good . . . because I’ve always needed a teacher, and you’re just the best at what you do.”
Her smile widened, becoming apparently more real. As he’d explained to his students, many of the muscles of the face were purpose-built for certain emotions, like grief, and could not be activated fraudulently. But a small group of people were able to fire these muscles independent of their feelings. They were rare, but they existed.
“Thank you,” he said.
“And now can
I
say something?”
He nodded his head.
“If I sometimes overstep my bounds, then please understand what I’m doing in that context as enthusiasm, really. And no more.”
“I’m glad for that,” he said, feeling increasingly solid in his position. “And I very much appreciate it.”
“Oh, goodie.”
“Right,” he said, “and you should know that while I find you very attractive”—he paused a second, nodding—“that simply is not the kind of thing I do.”
“Got it.” Her eyes were bright. “Oh, and what is
that
?”
“That?” He stopped nodding. Perhaps he’d gone too far.
“Uh, have . . . relations with students,” he said.
Her smile widened further. “I so
totally
understand”—she leaned forward as if to impart a confidence—“and I’m so
totally
in support of that.”
“Well . . . great,” he said with an effort.
“And you know what?”
“What?”
“I just think you’re the coolest guy for saying so!” And here she gave a shake of her head, with its cropped furze of blond hair; tossing it like a horse does, with a big lunging motion of the neck, and as he watched, something in his chest turned over with an incomplete motion and he said softly, “Okay.”
Then she reached out and touched him again. It was just a touch on the arm, but he somehow seemed to feel it ringing like a struck bell in his body.
“Yet you seem sad,” she said.
“Do I?”
“Yes, and I just want you to understand that I’m here for anything you need from me. If you never want to see me again, I’ll understand. If you want to tell me a joke, I’ll laugh. If you wanna give me a chaste little kiss, I’ll probably kiss you back. I love what you’re bringing to my life, Lawrence, but I don’t want to be a burden, even a little.”
“You’re a . . . dear,” he said, and heard how quaint and even auntish was the phrase. And it was at that moment, for the very first time, that Lawrence Billings felt old. He’d felt mature before; he’d felt accomplished; he’d felt at midcareer, midpoint, midlife before. But at the moment, beached on the sound of that word
dear,
he simply felt dusty.
She leaned toward him; she entered his personal space. He was feeling his own thoughts turning slow, syrupy. In the voice of a running-down record, he was saying to himself,
I am a solid husband. I am a man at the exact center of his life.
“Maybe not just sad, but pensive too,” she said, and he felt the entire swirl of time through the room, like smoke, thickening.
Unable not to,
he reached out to her. His mind would attach itself to that phrase from here on, riding forward in a gathering mass of nonaccountability.
Unable not to,
he drew her toward him. Seen from up close, her eyes sparkled with an unearthly mineral fire. Her perfume enclosed him like a room within a room.
Unable not to,
he kissed her, and gratefully drew her closer still, and she put her strong tongue in his mouth, and then began nuzzling him along the neck with fine bites.
Unable not to,
he floated free of his itching, arguing, contradicting mind, and became a simple body again, potent and limber, and at that moment in time, he no longer knew who he was, and couldn’t have cared less.
Y
ou didn’t miss it till it was gone, Potash thought, winging his way back east, to his mother’s. From his window seat, he watched as puffy, dreaming sierras of cloud slid silently by below the airplane. You took it cheerfully for granted over the years, he thought, and you came to see it somewhat like water pouring from the tap, or the hugeness of electricity trickling dependably from the wall. Then, when it was removed, you couldn’t believe how much of the previous version of yourself became stuck, dry, and chalky, and how a certain gliding comfort you’d believed your birthright was only the emollient effect of dollars in your life.
The clouds opened up, revealing a dun stretch of earth below. On some damnably specific part of that earth, occupying her life to the very edges of the frame, Janelle was no doubt laughing with the jingling, sexual sound of all that new cash in her voice. Perhaps (now squinting to look through the cold-frosted porthole) she was recounting to friends the story of the moron who, in an access of startling credulity, had collaborated in the extraction of nearly his entire net worth.
He stared balefully out the window. Two days earlier he had driven to see the PI whom Bortz had recommended. Bortz had described him as a “somewhat peculiar individual” who happened to be the best “skip tracer” on the planet, and “supremely gifted” at finding missing persons. Potash, ringing the buzzer of an office that appeared to be merely the wing of a condo, was met by large man in his early fifties with a soft, somewhat disorganized face. Teddy Wilbraham wore a dark dressing gown and stood at the apex of a triangle of several small fox terriers that rushed forward and, as if in denial of their tininess, barked furiously at his feet.
“Welcome,” he’d said in a deep, tired voice, holding out a hand.
One of the dogs snarled angrily at Potash and, bug-eyed, advanced forward on twig legs, trembling.
“Quite the fierce creature you’ve got there,” Potash said, reaching out his hand to shake and smiling uncertainly.
“A stone-cold killer,” said Wilbraham drily. “Please come in.”
Nodding, Potash had stepped into the vestibule. It was a high-ceilinged space whose expensive terra-cotta floors and crown moldings hosted a scene of deep, apparently long-term disorder. Jackets hung higgledy-piggledy on pegs. Shoes were scattered around the floor. An aviary of scarves was tossed and wilting on hooks, and something ripe in the air made Potash want to breathe as shallowly as possible.
“Maid’s day off,” said Wilbraham, watching as Potash’s eyes swiveled quickly around the space. “Would you like a coffee, Mr. . . .”
“Potash. No thanks.”
“Of course, like the mineral, sorry. Ach, my head,” he said, turning and leading Potash down a long hallway while continuing to talk. “A night of indulgence, I’m afraid. The middle-aged hangover is a terrible thing to behold no doubt, but far worse to host. Please sit down”—he tapped a sofa—“and make yourself at home while I get that coffee for myself.”
“Great, thanks.”
Left alone, Potash noted that the waiting room continued the same theme of addled unkempt luxury. The expensive leather sofa on which he was seated had clearly seen better days, the signed Dali lithograph was askew, and the gryphon feet of a Regency armoire had been chewed by dogs. He identified the faint smell in the air as urine.
From a distant room, he heard Wilbraham shout, “I read your file. So sorry to hear of your recent troubles!”
“Thank you,” Potash shouted back.
“Fraud”—there was a rattle of dishes—“is one of the boom sectors in an economic contraction, alas.”
“Stands to reason,” said Potash.
“They’re linked like Laurel and Hardy all the way from the beginning of the modern market economy, you know. I was an adjunct professor at Fern Hills Community last year, in the economics department. Strangest thing, a little bit of education. Makes you realize how little things change over the years.” There was the chortle of a coffeemaker, followed by the gargling sound of milk being steamed. “Oh, the terms change, along with the hairstyles, the clothes and all that sort of cultural thing, but the idea”—there was a pause of a few seconds, and then he strode out of the kitchen with a steaming coffee in hand—“of getting something for nothing seems part of human nature, I’m afraid.”
“I’m not sure,” Potash said slowly, “whether to be cheered or depressed by the thought that I belong to a tradition of fools.”
“Well,” said Wilbraham, sitting down, “membership does have its privileges.”
“What?”
The investigator’s large, soft face was creased by a sudden smile, giving Potash time to notice that his two front teeth were crossed one over the other like the legs of a sitting woman.
“A joke, Mr. Potash.”
“Of course.”
“To lighten your load.”
“Got it,” said Potash, as a dog barreled across the floor, snapped its head upward, launched its Thermos-sized body through the air, and landed square on Wilbraham’s lap.
“Well, hello!” he cried, putting down his coffee and scratching the creature under the chin while it cocked its head and gazed gloatingly at Potash. “Yes,” Wilbraham went on, “the people who battened on you are good, but then so are we.” He turned to the dog. “Aren’t we, Fenwick?”
He lifted his eyes abruptly to Potash. “Might I give you a word of advice?”
“Of course.”
“Keep breathing. I noticed you stopped a few minutes ago.”
The plane dove downward through shawls of cloud. With a bison rumble, the landing gear extended. Not long after, the satisfying shudder of the wheels touching earth announced their safe arrival at Kennedy. Potash, eyes shut, was watching Wilbraham airily request a five-thousand-dollar retainer, and he was watching himself sign over a check for half his remaining assets.
You didn’t notice it until it was gone, indeed.
Deplaning, he strolled through the echoing concourse and then caught a cab, which rocketed toward Manhattan. From there, a bus took him north, into Connecticut, and twelve hours after having left his front door in California, Potash was standing at the still point of the turning world: the town he’d grown up in. Not far off was the large memory-museum of his home where his mother still lived, winding down like a dying satellite, her circuits to the store and nearby friends growing shorter, less frequent, more steeply angled each year.
A light rain had sprung up; he didn’t mind. He began walking to his mother’s house through the late-summer dusk, strolling up the long hill whose steepness as a child had been like a teacher instructing him in the outlines of his own will: if you’re tired, walk slower; if you’re stronger, walk faster; if you want to make something of yourself, run like the wind. He decided on a conservative middle-aged pace, and he soon arrived and rang the bell. A slow, sustained shuffling followed and then the door swung wide, and his mother, wearing a shapeless housedress and her short fitted cap of gray hair, leaned forward out the door, smiled at him with unnaturally square false teeth and cried, “Well, hello! You got rained on, eh?”
“Yup,” he reached forward, but she held him an extra second by the elbows, wanting to get an opening shot in. “And you look like a drowned rat.”
“Lovely to see you too,” he said.
She laughed and hugged him. Quick, cutting exchanges were her specialty, and the way—he’d learned long ago—she protected her nearly crippling tenderness.
“So, come in.”
He entered the house, following her down the hallway whose details he knew as well as the moles and hair patterns of his own body: the plaster sculpture of an archer, poised forever to strike; the “Greek” etching of women with lutes; the grand piano crouched like a partly open sarcophagus. His parents had been defiantly “European” and classical in their inclinations, even as, inexplicably, they fetched up in this bedroom community of New York, among bluff, foursquare middle Americans who knew little about their interests and cared less. His father was a failed historian of science turned businessman; his mother was a failed ballet dancer turned piano teacher. In the space behind those failures lay a profound appreciation for the old world, and in distinction to the bright, cheerful, utterly contemporary home lives of his friends, Potash had grown up with parents whose axial lines rode back into the darkening sepia tones of the past.
A lot of good that had done him.
“Have you heard from Robert lately?” he asked.
Robert was his four years younger, doted-on, can-do-no-wrong sibling, who had finally stepped forward, at Potash’s request, and undertaken the heavy lifting of actually remaining in his mother’s orbit, and of providing the close-wired support she needed, when Potash had spun out west.
“Well, of course,” she said, and he wondered if that was tartness in her voice. “He was out here just three days ago, in the station wagon, with a new set of patio furniture.”
“Oh, good.”
“Yes,” she said slowly, staring at him with a strangely neutral or even disapproving look. “It was good.”
He forgave her on the spot for playing him off his sibling. These psychic feints and dodges were as familiar to him as anything he knew, and it was fitting that, according to historical script, they would be taking place in the emotional epicenter of the home: the kitchen.
Potash tugged a squealing chair out from the table and sat down.
“You’re keeping the place tidy,” he said.
Rather than answer, she turned away from him toward the stove. He saw the slumped shoulders, the slow, gathering contractions of old age, and felt a childlike pang of sympathy for his mother.
“Not me, but Alvester,” she said, mentioning the longtime maid.
A few moments of silence passed, and then she stopped what she was doing and turned to him. “John,” she said simply, “did something happen? You look, I don’t know what.”
A sweet, sick feeling came over him. He recalled that he had first received his allowance in this very room. It was an elaborate ceremony conducted at this same plain pine kitchen table in which his father, with a great show of parsimony, individually counted out the shining coins into his hand. His father’s brow, nose, the crooking vein on the forehead—the ever-fresh vividness of his own recollection astonished him.
“Ah, nothing much.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Let’s talk about it later.”
“You look tired, and I know from tired. The world too much with you?” she asked, intentionally mangling the Wordsworthian phrase.
“Sorta.”
“Here.” She had turned away from him a moment toward the oven, and now turned back with a fruit pie, still steaming. The oven door as she closed it made a particular squeal that he swore was among the oldest sounds he’d ever heard. He still remembered leaving Manhattan permanently for Connecticut. He was four years old, and it had been raining that afternoon—a warm summer rain—and the way the green of the lawns across the street ran in streaks and blobs on the rained-on windowpane was forever mixed up with his recollection of that day.
“For later,” she said, “but smell.” Swaddled in cloth, she put the oven dish under his nose a moment. Beneath the bubbling flour crust, a steam of sweet apples arose.
“Fantastic,” he said, and meant it.
“Oh, please.”
It was part of her program to rebuff his affection while mutely soliciting it in every way possible. Thereby working both sides of the street. She’d known he was coming, so in her eighties, hobbled by phlebitis, she’d dragged herself to the store in her ancient turret-shaped car and bought the wine he loved, and the treats. She put a bowl of pistachios on the table. From a nearby cabinet, moving with large, shaky dignity, she withdrew a bottle of red wine.
“Here. Sounds like you need it.”
He opened the wine, poured, drank a large glass quickly. On an empty stomach, the alcohol went immediately to his head.
Potash breathed a long sigh of relief, as of a pressure being eased.
“They’re unveiling Dad’s stone the day after tomorrow,” she said.
“Yes, Mom, I know,” he said, not wanting to remind her faltering memory that he was here for precisely that reason.
“And I got the phrase on it I wanted.”
“What one?”
“
Per aspera ad astra
.”
“Which means?”
“Through difficulties to the stars.”
For a moment, overcome, he could not speak. His father had been an amateur historian of celestial navigation, and Potash had spent much of his childhood alongside his father sweeping backyard telescopes through the pinpoint infinities of nighttime skies. After his father’s death, experimentally, he had taken the telescope out into the backyard again in the fanciful attempt to see if by some chance . . . there was actually some bright new celestial body shining in the heavens. The gesture was absurd, but then so was death in its remorseless refusal to negotiate its imperial discontinuity with the rest of life.
“Do you miss him?” his keen, intuitive old mother now asked.
“Terribly, yes.”
“Me too,” she said. A silence extended itself in the room. “And so,” she said finally, mostly to herself, “it goes.”
Potash, to keep his composure, had to look away.
