Vintage Attraction (18 page)

And a couple of weeks later, I still hadn't told Izzy what
happened. I couldn't tell her. She wouldn't understand. She'd only ever known me as an employed adjunct professor. She'd think I'd been a baby, that my grievances were imaginary. She'd say that people who existed in the real world had to subject themselves to worse things, greater indignities. She'd be right, too. How could I dispute the fact that in the real world it didn't matter who used “affect” or “effect” correctly? So each morning she'd expect me to, I left for school. I'd have coffee and read the
Times
at a corner bodega. Today, instead of taking a bus to campus to sit in the library when I finished, I returned to the apartment. I wanted to look for jobs.

The MacBook awoke from its slumber quickly. Izzy, the last to use the laptop, hadn't shut it down. I sifted through my documents, found a recent copy of my vita, and cleaned it up.

Firefox wouldn't kick in when I entered the
Chronicle
's URL. I closed the window and opened another, but couldn't connect to the Internet. In despair, I pulled down the Apple menu, selected Force Quit, and terminated the browser process. There were other applications running, too. Safari, Microsoft Excel, Address Book, Adobe Reader, Bluetooth File Exchange, and Preview were all open. Jesus. Really, was it that hard for Izzy to exit a program when she was finished with it?

To a detached
Vintage Attraction
Excel production schedule, I chose not to save changes. I closed Adobe and Preview in a command-Q flash. Then came Bluetooth Exchange. Before terminating, I instinctively scanned the open transaction history file. Izzy must have been synching her BlackBerry e-mails and calendar from the bistro's server. I discovered she had, inadvertently, maybe intentionally, downloaded data to the hard drive. In the factory-installed Outlook client on the desktop that I thought nobody used, I could view all her messages.

There must have been some reason for her pathological indifference of late, skipping the dog's meals and walks, not turning the TV and the lights off at night, the parade of shoes and clothes down the hall. Judging by the number of her e-mails that originated from the same sender, I had a pretty good idea now of the cause of her carelessness. She couldn't be bothered to cover her computer maneuvers probably for the same reason she left the faucet hemorrhaging water for ten minutes when something called her attention away from her cooking or toothbrushing. Probably for the same reason she stopped coming home directly after working a night at the bistro. Probably for the same reason that she could never go out for one drink and really mean it. Someone I'd hoped could vanish back into the past without my having to confront Izzy about him in the present was still preoccupying her. And they'd been corresponding.

Off and on, since Ishiguro alerted me to Pacer Rosengrant's return, since I met Pacer Rosengrant in my bedroom, I'd entertained both the possibility that I was overreacting, as well as the possibility I wasn't reacting enough. Perhaps perspective on the situation was what I lacked most conspicuously. I needed a voice of reason, or at least objective, disembodied words. So I closed the laptop and texted my old student Ari Marks, the journalist. The last time he and I talked, Izzy's and my relationship was going well. We'd just gotten married. Ari was putting his piece about the sommelier and her new restaurateur husband for
Daley Machine
to bed. It was difficult to imagine having to say that things were fucked up, that I'd found Pacer Rosengrant in our bed and, now, on Izzy's BlackBerry so short a time thereafter.

I think Izzy's cheating on me,
I typed.
Call to discuss.

Ari rung me an hour or so later. An editorial meeting awaited him in a conference room, but he wanted to talk anyway. “What happened?” he asked.

I told him what I knew, up to the point of the morning following the department party. “Wow,” Ari said, as though scandalized. I heard clanging, then rustling. “Sorry. I'm eating a Clif Bar.” He partially muffled his crinkling. “How did Izzy take your finding the guy?”

I already felt like a loser for revealing this much. I wished we weren't having this conversation and were, instead, trading anecdotes about the ineptitude of his columnist colleagues and my students and the analogous poverty of their intellects, like we used to. I'd give anything to have unflattering scenes of gracelessness and missteps that I committed on Internet dates for him once again, instead of this.

“Well,” I began, “that's the thing. I didn't actually tell her I found him.”

Ari was aghast. “You didn't say
anything
?”

I shook my head, but then remembered he, on the phone, couldn't see me. “No,” I had to say to fill the space. “I mean, I haven't found the guy here again or anything, but now I'm suspicious of everything. Her behavior has been very . . . textbook. Absences, evasiveness, distraction, aphoristic speech.” On the verge of tears, I told Ari about the downloaded e-mails and BlackBerry messages waiting to reveal everything, there on my MacBook, beckoning, taunting. It was almost as though Izzy were daring me to catch her.

Ari paused for a moment. I could hear him typing something. Then he said, “Well, you have to start reading.”

“The texts?”

“The texts, the e-mails, everything.”

“I don't know.”

“How do you not know?”

“Because I never wanted to turn into that guy. The jealous, possessive, spying type. That's not me.”

“Professor, don't be a fucking idiot. You have to see the evidence before you make any pronouncements. Would you have let me get away with a move like this in a short story draft for workshop? The character wants the reader to give a shit about his being cheated on, he needs some proof.”

“You're right.”

“You're goddamn right I'm right.”

Even with Ari's convincing exegetic argument, I still felt like it was wrong to invade. At the same time, I couldn't say at that moment I trusted Izzy, either. No matter what emotional and platonic excuses I wanted to generate on her behalf, no matter how hard I tried to put it out of my mind, ever since my wife had brought another man into our Rabbi Ethan Allen–sanctified marital bed, I only thought the worst. And that was her fault. Her treachery alone had to justify my incursion.

This wasn't the first time in my life I'd suspected someone I was in love with of cheating on me. I thought something was going on when I dated Sydney and she started hanging out with Greg, her summer-job doorman. It was before our senior year of high school. She revealed that fall she'd smoked pot with him and slept with him once when he worked the overnight shift and came upstairs “hungry.” In undergrad, there was a point I started to feel like my girlfriend Amy's new engineering major friend Christos Utrecht from the Honors College was someone more than just an acquaintance with whom she was starting a “literary magazine.” A Neil Young show at Mandel Hall she secretly attended with him during a long weekend I'd gone back to New York confirmed it. I'd never told her I knew about that concert. I never let on that I was aware of the saved drafts of letters she'd been writing him, which I'd found on her old IBM. Unsummoned, she never confessed. And most recently, Talia. I sensed, before anyone informed me, that she'd taken up with someone else, and he turned out to be her indie-rock idiot. All of this was more experience than I cared to admit I had. It had left me with the unfortunate and sobering knowledge that once enough pall-casting doubt amassed between two people, there was never any redemption. It was much like when TCA bacteria infiltrated a wine cork, which then corrupted the entire bottle. Izzy often got
Vintage Attraction
guests with questions on the subject. Whether or not consumers realized it, one out of every ten bottles plugged with a natural closure was affected. It didn't take a lot of the trichloroanisole compound to “cork” wine and make it taste like wet newspaper. Mere parts per million—a drop in a swimming pool—and humans could detect it. Even those without professional noses. Besides, we were way beyond misunderstanding here. Though Izzy had been conveniently absent at the high-thread-count unveiling, I'd still found Pacer Rosengrant
in our bed.
It didn't matter whether he'd just fallen asleep there shirtless and alone after an arduous night of blind-tasting wines at the Biscuit Lofts as he'd claimed, or if between those hemstitched linen sheets he'd committed actual adultery with my beleaguered spouse. Either way, it was pretty fucking bad. Comportment was out the window. We were operating under martial marital law now.

I pressed ahead through the downloaded files. I faintly hoped I'd uncover evidence here that Pacer Rosengrant's interest in my wife was simply a professional one. I wouldn't even have minded learning that her involvement with him amounted to nothing more serious than just one of those stupid phases when someone relegated to the far reaches of romantic nostalgia manages to insinuate himself into the present moment. I'd recently weathered a Talia crisis of conscience. If Izzy's liaison with Pacer had turned chronology momentarily on its head, it wouldn't have necessarily concluded that she'd permanently damaged trajectory—our trajectory.

When I reached the text messages received over the past weeks she'd imported, I discovered what Pacer Rosengrant wanted wasn't merely to learn about wines from an accomplished industry professional. I now had the data to correct certain crucial recent misperceptions. When she'd sat beside me, not paying attention to the important Swedish film I'd Netflixed—too tired to read the subtitles, she claimed—but alert enough to react when the BlackBerry buzzed, and then respond to a line of text with another she clicked out, touch-typing furiously with two thumbs, it wasn't Chef Dominique who'd contacted her. When we were at brunch and she said she was letting her coffee cool down before drinking it—ten minutes after it was served—hands and eyes in her lap, they were the words of Pacer Rosengrant that had invaded.

Wut r the subdistricts of rioja

i kno ur at brunch but i need to see u n study

w/service ok it's theory that fucks me up

i miss u taste smell my hands all over u body

yes i am serious said service not a prob lol

im just gonna sit here n stroke throbben cock til u answer

How was she able to read this shit and eat peanut butter and banana pancakes? How could she talk about the honey that was too thick on the biscuits with Pacer Rosengrant sexting her lap? How could she tell me she had a headache from the night before while she was getting these subliterate linguistic lures and I ordered her another Bloody Mary? How could she sit there and field this fuckalogue and patronizingly agree with my unoriginal and likely flawed analysis of Bergman's contributions to cinema's auteur period? It was staggering.

That evening, I discovered Izzy's BlackBerry pressing uncomfortably against my spine between the couch cushions. Not even caring enough to take the thing with her was yet even more evidence of her baffling late-onset heedlessness. But it gave me an opportunity to conduct a more thorough investigation of her private digital life. I spied pointlessly on group gluten-free-reservation alerts from Chris at the bistro, address book entries belonging to no one I didn't already know. I paged through the camera-phone album. Each frame I advanced compounded the panic over what I might turn up. I feared a picture that would expose just how much more serious an entanglement with Pacer Rosengrant existed for Izzy than I realized. But the shots weren't incriminating. The reel was mostly wine labels and portraits of me from our festival trips. Perhaps fortunately, perhaps unfortunately, I found in the device nothing beyond words to render additionally damning what Pacer Rosengrant's sexts so eloquently limned.

She'd been filming today, which meant a Citron and soda or two at Mamacita's or The Lodge would follow the wrap. Izzy found solace in the lack of artifice and warmth at these neighborhood joints. The Spanish she didn't understand was a welcome contrast to the all-too-comprehensible noise above our apartment, her putative reason for needing to stay away from here for as long as she could. But it was getting late.

Izzy came in an hour later looking like a Kabuki character, still in her studio makeup. She had on black mascara, which simultaneously narrowed and enlarged her eyes. Her skin had a foundation of plaster. Her lips were painted a deep garnet. Offstage, wearing this much on her face was absurd, especially when juxtaposed with her vintage gray-and-silver Chanel embroidered silk dress and black cashmere sweater. Yet the presentation was strangely, alarmingly, alluring. At a moment I didn't even want to be in the same room she inhabited, I couldn't think of anybody I wanted to fuck more.

“So that's where that was.”

I was holding the BlackBerry. It was encased in a protective, dark watermelon–colored plastic overlay, which I'd bought her. I hadn't reflexively ditched it when I heard her key in the lock. I hadn't even tried to hide it behind a pillow on the couch where I sat. My thumb twitched over the trackball. She caught me red-handed, literally. I'd predicted it was going to end up exactly like this the moment I picked up the thing.

“Izzy, I know you've been seeing Pacer Rosengrant.”

She squinted as though I was a flickering image. But there was no shortage of clarity in the room. Light bounced off of the windows, black with night on the other side. The glow heightened the convenience store sensation. With a formidable intake of breath, she respired her olfactory mucosa, which elevated snot into her brain. I suspected that illicit trafficked agents had spent the better part of the night up there colluding with her latent lower-minded impulses.