Eli Gottlieb’s first novel, The Boy Who Went Away, won the prestigious Rome Prize and the 1998 McKitterick Prize from the British Society of Authors. It was also a New York Times Notable Book. Serpent’s Tail has published his second novel, Now You See Him. Eli Gottlieb lives in New York.
Praise for Now You See Him
“A beautiful, wise and funny book about grief and about friendship – but most of all about marriage. I’ve rarely seen the decline of a relationship observed so wittily, or in such piercingly accurate detail. My jaw kept dropping in envy – God, this man can write!” Jonathan Coe
“A true literary page-turner in which a string of startling revelations unfolds within the constructs of lush and beautiful prose. It is at turns both heartbreaking and breathtaking” Ann Patchett
“A heartbreaking thriller. Our book of the summer” Sunday Times
“A beautifully observed portrait of a marriage being stifled by the weight of unfinished business” Kate Saunders, The Times
“Subtle and convincing” Harry Ritchie, Daily Mail
“Thrilling ... Gottlieb’s talent as both a writer and storyteller shines through to create a deep and gripping tale of unbreakable childhood bonds and inevitably doomed love in what is ultimately an enduring expression of the solitary and selfish nature of the human condition” Aesthetica
“A heartfelt picture of enduring friendship and inconsolable, debilitating grief” New York Times
“A mesmerizing blend of suspense and long-buried family secrets ... Gottlieb skillfully ratchets up the suspense ... a startling conclusion that will rattle even the genre’s most experienced readers ... With his pitch-perfect dialogue and flawed yet empathetic characters, Gottlieb’s sophomore effort should win him widespread recognition” Publishers Weekly
“The boy Gottlieb done good” David Baddiel, The Times
“Now You See Him was one of the outstanding novels of the year ... Gottlieb writes so beautifully, and offers so many witty, clear-eyed insights into domesticity, male vanity and the nature of friendship, that you can’t help but feel profoundly uplifted. A small, overlooked masterpiece” Sunday Tribune (South Africa)
“A beautiful writer” Sunday Business Post
A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request
The right of Eli Gottlieb to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Copyright © 2012 Eli Gottlieb
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published in the USA in 2012 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, New York
First published in 2013 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3a Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
website: www.serpentstail.com
ISBN 978 1 84668 908 6
eISBN 978 1 84765 877 7
Designed by Diahann Sturge
Printed by
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my parents:
Leonard Gottlieb, 1917–2008
and
Esther Gottlieb, 1921–2010
Pain had a voice. It spoke to her as she shot off the top step and forward into space, patiently explaining that this was not how her life was supposed to end. It was supposed to end, the voice whispered, with her enjoying her dotage in some great British country house, filled with mullioned windows and about a mile of lawn. Or before a roaring fire of some kind, chilled gin in hand, witty remark at the ready. Returned afterward to her upstairs room, there’d be the littlest hiccup, the tiniest blip in the cardiac flow. And then she’d be lowered quietly and forever into distinguished oblivion.
A rhythmic pinging interrupted the daydream. It resembled the noise of someone counting change. Where was she having these thoughts, exactly? Were her eyes open or shut? She couldn’t tell.
Something awful was happening. She was certain of that. She was tumbling downward in what felt like slow motion while experiencing a terrible concussive series of blows to the head. These seemed a confirmation of sorts; the fit end to a long period of wondering what was going to happen next. This was going to happen next. A stair smashed into the orbital bone around her eye. Another one fractured a rib. She wanted to explain to someone that always, from childhood on, as a girl capering butterfly-bright around the house slung over Duxbury Bay, she’d had her realest conversations with books, with the endless piles of poetry and old novels whose characters moved with grave faces around the important questions of life, and that this, which was happening now, was something they would have certainly, thoroughly, and absolutely disapproved of.
The next stair slammed into her upper forehead and opened up the skin, thereby causing a spray of arterial blood to darken the auburn hair once fingered by Joey Vandermere while they sat kissing in a car parked at Russian Hill below a bowl of summer stars, his voice soft in her ear as he whispered that college would soon draw each of them away into the far, cold reaches of the future, and in the meantime, did she love him long enough to let him unbutton her pants?
She continued standing and then falling, head over heels. The staircase seemed endless. And as she fell, she remembered not just Joey but all of them, a solemn procession of boys and then men, each of them taking his turn and passionately pleading his case. Many of them were married. These were invariably the most winsome in their appeal. Their self-adoring looks; their sly and roguish winks and grins: one of the things they had in common was the way each gave signs of “understanding” her, and of seeing her “special inner grace,” even as they took their clothes off with their faces gone suddenly cold with sexual concentration.
Had she married one of them herself? Had she finally become more than that girl who still sat in her room, lifting her eyes again and again from her books, and looking into the onrushing dark of the future? Had she become famous and had children of her own?
She hit the ground floor hard, and as she lay there unmoving, she seemed to see as if down the barrel of a long lens to the cropped image of her childhood dog, Brandy, rearing up before her with its bright button eyes and its pink scrap of tongue. Then the lens pulled back to include the trees, homes, mountains and rivers around the dog, and then drew farther back in such a way that the earth slowly revealed itself to be a ball of clouds and blue water resting calmly on a palm of air. She continued to recede backward until the planet, eventually, winked out of sight in the dark immensity of space.
The pinging grew louder. She suddenly thought she understood. The pinging was coming from the large wooden metronome that had crouched on a shelf for the entirety of her childhood and spoken its clicking language as she sat playing her violin. Probably she was still a child, lying abed and dreaming she was an adult to whom terrible things had just happened. Probably, for that, she was just now coming home from school, rounding the corner at a tilt, zooming into the house with a breathy slam of the screen door behind her, and then up the stairs to where the violin lay in its case like a sleeping child. Tenderly she drew it out and placed her chin on the chin rest. She rosined her bow and pulled it along the strings. A clear voicelike note sang out. This was music. The metronome ticked like a single person applauding in an empty room. She was playing a Brahms composition. It was intensely sad and beautiful; it seemed as if the darkness were expressing itself. She played and played, while the metronome applauded, her bow leaped and wiggled on the strings, and the music mounted on a ladder into the air. The sound was imps and demons; it was gas become liquid and flowing upward, impossible. Then she was playing the fiendishly difficult “vivacissimo” passage with its triple stops and it was going perfect. This was a bursting-forth, a flowering of her. She drew from the instrument the last beautiful note and opened her eyes.
When her vision cleared, she saw several women standing before her. Were they angels? They had little pins on the whiteness of their breasts and small boatlike white caps on their heads. One of them leaned forward. The ongoing pinging sound seemed to be calling something of terrible importance to order. It was coming from a white box on the wall by her bed. The angel gave a smile of pure forgiveness. Then, incredibly, the angel opened her mouth and said her name.
He heard her before he could see her. He’d called for a volunteer from the audience and she emerged from the darkness like a woman out of a lake. Tall and slender, she somehow processed smoothly up the stairs toward him. Though she wasn’t especially striking, he noticed right away that she carried herself with pure, complete confidence in her own attractiveness. She was as filled with it as a glass of milk is with white.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like you to meet—”
“—Margot,” she said, looking at him evenly.
“Margot,” he relayed to the crowd through his microphone. “Margot,” he said to her, “thanks for coming up onstage. We’re going to get to you in a second.” He turned again to face the audience of about sixty middle-level managers, unemployed salespeople, suspicious spouses and a smattering of New Agers. It was midmorning of his daylong seminar called The Physique of Finance: The Art of Face Reading and Body Language for Professional Advantage. His name was Lawrence Billings and he was fifty-three years old.
“In the meantime, a little check of our collective humors, everybody. As I already mentioned, we’re gathered today for that most honorable of reasons: because we need a leg up. We’ve gathered because the life we knew as kids is now a big fat mess of dots and signals, and who among us doesn’t feel a little snowed in by that digital blizzard? Remember the good old days of handshake contracts, folks? Remember signing documents with”—he made a slight grimace—“a fountain pen? Well, file all that under Extinct, and put it on the shelf by the Dodo, because it’s never coming back!”
He’d started out his adult life as a classics major, had dropped that for the study of psychology, and over the course of it all spent twenty years polishing his innate sensitivities into something sellable.
“But the body,” he said, “doesn’t know a megabyte from a man on the moon. The body is continuing to tell its own simple truth about the person living in it, and if we can read that truth, we’ll have an advantage even in a business climate as rushed, as strange, as flat-out bizarre as ours. Five hundred years from now, when a computer named President Tron lives in the White House, the body will remain the primary point of reference for that which makes us human.”
As a child, he saw things. He had a diviner’s gift for the hidden occult mysteries of ordinary life. Where other children saw an apple in a tree, he beheld a beating heart on a vine, intricately nourished by long, forking veins of green and eating dirt and sunshine to stay alive. Where they glimpsed a house on a patch of lawn, he saw an exploded box of wood and brick holding itself barely upright against the furious downward will of gravity. It was unclear to him why the moon didn’t drop from the sky like a nickel coin or the people of the planet get thrown sideways into space like dust off a spinning top. The boring visible world shouted out loud with inner enigmas and adults were either in a conspiracy to pretend it wasn’t so or were simply dumb.
“As Hamlet put it,” he said resonantly, “‘Like a whore, I unpack my heart with words.’” But then he immediately added in a normal speaking voice, “And did you know that seventy percent of the impression we make is nonverbal? And that on top of that”—he drew himself up—“the least reliable thing in this world is the information coming out of someone’s mouth?”
Even as a boy, he’d understood the commonness of lying. People did it as naturally as singing. They simply slicked their hair back and belted out howlers, one after another. They held their heads subtly to the side by way of preparation. Then their eyes went all funny, a shot of trembly nerves went through their lips, and they lied. Parents did it to children. Children did it to siblings. Dogs did it to cats and cats to birds. And the TV did it to everybody, loudly, and all day long.
“A perfectionist,” he said to the audience, “has more than two vertical lines between their eyebrows, true or false?”
“True,” someone sang out.
“A big chin?” he asked.
“Gotta always be right.”
“Straight eyebrows?”
“Linear thinker.”
“Attached earlobes?”
“Commitment to family.”
“All right”—he forced a laugh—“who’s been looking at my notes?”
Attendance at his seminars had been declining steadily over the years, and in recent times a cold, whispering little wind of fear had begun to play at his back. Originally, at least a substantial portion of the crowd had been in it for kicks, party favors, recreational fun. But over recent years the weakening economy had salted the room with fiftysomethings whose faces had about them the peculiar bleakness of formerly successful people now out of work and dazed by the recognition that help was probably not on the way.
“How about a gap between the front teeth?” he asked the audience.
There was a silence. Maybe that hadn’t been in the breakfast handout.
“Risk taker, obviously,” he said smoothly into his mike. The headset was slightly overamped; the sound boomed; he’d have to talk to the hotel manager about that.
“And speaking of risk,” he said, “I’d like us to do a bit of live study with our lovely volunteer, Margot.”
Their gazes crossed, and she stared at him a moment, smiling slightly while saying nothing back in return. Usually volunteers were unnaturally eager to please, and nervous, but this woman simply sat there, perfectly composed. Her hair was long and parted in the center, her eyes were strikingly large, green and alight; and she had a sense of calm containment about her, like someone waiting for a train.
“Go on,” she said.
Staring at her, smiling back, he suddenly felt the Bump. The Bump was when the thing, the muscle, moved in the space under his solar plexus. A little sideways skip in his gut that was his special private way of signaling to himself that he was having a reaction, or better a Reaction, writ large. He saw dozens of people up close in a year. Of those, maybe half were women. Of those, only a handful were odd or interesting enough to snap him out of his reflex professionalism long enough to note their singularity. Every once in a while, he’d feel the slight shock of recognition of meeting someone genuinely compelling. The reasons for this were finally mysterious. By long-standing habit, he noted the Bump, and then buried it, deep.
“Please,” he said to the crowd, “direct your attention to the video screens.”
He busied himself for a moment in turning on a video camera, adjusting some small onstage lights, and then centering Margot’s face in the camera. Her image, tremendously enlarged, appeared on the screens: big eyes, strong nose, thick, incurved lips.
“And here it is,” he said, “the centerpiece of creation, the locus classicus of human feeling, the, ah, what I’m saying is, human face. Now normally, when we look at the faces of people we know, our looking is smudged all over with how we feel about them, good or bad. But what we have here”—he waved at the gigantic unsmiling face of Margot—“is a visage none of us have ever seen before, and that’s a good place to start. More specifically, let’s start at the top, with her hair.”
He whipped out a small laser pointer and put a magnified dot on her forehead.
“Her hair is beautiful and rich. She looks like an out-of-work Breck girl. But what can we say about her hairline, eh?”
“S’where her hair begins?” a woman’s voice sang out from one of the front rows.
“It’s kinda jagged?” someone else asked.
“Bingo.” He looked up into the darkness. “The hairline is like a graph of life during adolescence.” He traced the laser dot along the ridges of her hairline. “And this jagged edge right here, well, that probably means our friend Margot’s adolescence was less than smooth sailing, am I right?”
Just perceptibly, the corners of her mouth drooped as the shot went home. She looked directly into his eyes.
“You’re right,” she said, speaking intentionally loud enough to be picked up by the overhead mike. “Like many people I had a difficult, um, transition to adulthood.”
He was still looking out into the darkness while savoring the moment when Margot leaned forward and, in a soft voice intended only for the two of them, asked, “Why do you seem to be enjoying this so much?”
After he sent her back to her seat, Lawrence spent the rest of the seminar subtly aware of her in his field of vision. Her tart rejoinder had surprised him, and out beyond the lights, where people were various piles and squibs of gray, he felt his eyesight snagging on the particular shadow he thought she was, and noting her, despite himself.
Smoothly, with a patter born of long practice, he led them through the Posture Circus, the Eyes Have It, and Mouthing Off. He did Right Face and Left Face, Feet First and All Hands Aboard, broke for lunch, and returned with his afternoon summaries: Bearing and Business, Voice and Value, and Finance and the Face.
He had mostly forgotten about the girl by the time the seminar concluded at five to a round of sustained applause and his appeal—done with fake bashfulness—to buy his book.
Fifteen minutes later, he was onstage packing up his notebooks when he felt her rising up the sides of his eyes. When he turned, she was standing in front of him, and to his surprise, he felt the Bump again; this time it wasn’t in the solar plexus but near the liver.
“Hi there,” he said.
She had small, close-to-the-head ears and an appealing aerodynamic skull that he hadn’t noticed before. Below the level of body language, the actual structure of the body itself was a text, and he believed caches of readable data inhered in the way hips were fitted to pelvises; throats held the weight of the head; fingers tapered and skulls were shaped. A person was an endless manifest written over with the most intimate human information.
“Thank you,” she said, “is what I want to say.”
“Well, you’re most welcome,” he said, this time letting his eyes rest in hers in the “frontal social position.”
“Margot Lassiter,” she said, and held out her hand, flashing large green eyes at him.
“The first name I’d already gotten,” he said, briefly shaking her hand.
He noticed that she was swaying, very slightly, as if hypnotized, on her feet. It was hard for him to square this suddenly bubbly open female with the reserved, suspicious woman he’d seen onstage. As if she’d divined his thoughts, she said, “I know, sorry about that. You probably formed a pretty nasty first impression of me, didn’t you?”
He actually laughed a moment, before catching himself.
“Nasty? Of course not,” he said.
“I would have, in your shoes. But no hard feelings, I hope. You converted me,” she said, and showed small white teeth to him in a smile, “over the course of the day. Can I call you Lawrence?”
“Sure.”
She came a little bit closer.
“What it is,” she said, “is I need work.”
“Oh?”
“Drills, practice; I need to get up to speed as quickly as I can.”
“Sounds pretty urgent.”
“Well, it is, kind of. I have a business trip to the West Coast planned in a few weeks.”
“Nothing replaces just sitting down and doing it. You’ve got the workbooks.”
“Can I say something? I feel like a diner at a new restaurant with a menu of a thousand choices. It’s all a bit, what, overwhelming.”
“Can be,” he said agreeably.
“And I totally intend,” she said, “to do as you advised, and work on it a little bit each day, but uh...”
The slight weaving of her body, so subtle the average person wouldn’t have noticed it, stopped on the spot. She seemed to grow slightly taller. Her voice had dropped at least six microtonalities to what, in his work, he sometimes called the range of the Insinuating General.
“Is it true you teach privates?” she asked.
Afterward—after she’d given him her card, told him she’d try to book an appointment with him via his website and chastely shaken his hand good-bye—Lawrence returned to his packing with a fresh thought in the forefront of his mind: she was a player! She had about her the bright, stylized artificiality of someone keeping up a front while angling for advantage. He shook his head to himself as he slid the microphone into its case. More often lately he was approached after seminars by middle-aged, somewhat defeated and usually out-of-work people who told him gamely he was helping them get “back on track.” They often employed the vocabulary of recovery and had an air of deflated buoyancy about them. But players? People wanting to add this to their arsenal of deception who were already—because she was; he’d deduced this right away—gifted at self-concealment? That was something else entirely.
He finished packing in a hurry. He wanted to get out of the theater, out into the car, and back on the road where he could comfortably review the day. He was tired, as he always was by the end of a daylong seminar. He was lusting for his home, his gin and tonics and those dusk moments passed in his backyard with his wife in happy contemplation of nearby Hawk Mountain, where the rising tide of suburban development had stopped at last, defeated by the steepness of the slope, and left a lovely horn of green like a reference point of the dwindling natural world.
His house was an hour and a half away and, on impulse, he decided to stop for a quick drink first to refresh himself. He phoned his wife to tell her he’d be a little later than expected and then pulled over at one of his favorite roadside haunts, where he took a window seat and ordered his drink. Rush-hour traffic was thickening fast on the interstate, and as someone who spent about 150 days a year on the road, it was hard not to sometimes feel that the entire country was covered by the same whizzing, eye-level belt of noise and busyness.
His drink arrived, and as he sipped it, he took her card out and put it on the table.
Margot Lassiter, it read. Editor at Large. It then gave the name of a popular magazine. He studied the lettering and the design of the card for clues, contentedly chewing his ice. What was she after, exactly, and why the urgency to “get up to speed” before her “West Coast” trip? He’d already seen the hunger in her features; the chamfered lower lip indicating decisiveness; the slightly wolfish arrangement of the cheekbones and the prominent, take-no-prisoners chin. But it had been the watchfulness behind the eyes and the forced intonations of the voice that had alerted him to something in her that felt like cunning.
She posed a challenge—an interesting one in a season of contracting sales and rote presentations. But he was up to the challenge. And he was curious, as well. What was she finally after? He would find out soon enough, he thought, paying his bill and getting back into his car.
Three months later, in a small town in Northern California, a man named John Potash lurched awake with a convulsion as large as a sneeze, and shot out of a dream of careening forward motion and billowing fire back into his body. When he opened his eyes, the quiet of the room underlined his sensational mental violence. A leading edge of sun illuminated the thick carpet underfoot, touched the swirling colors of paintings hung on the wall, and lay most spectacularly of all on his wife, who was sprawled naked and asleep on the sheet next to him, her spine describing a long, lovely curve that seemed itself to symbolize the essence of trust.
He shut his eyes. From behind his lids he could feel the pinkish pressure of the sun, shining through his capillaries. It was the sun that was the problem. It was the blameless stupid illumination of the sun.
If not for the sun, and the languor it brought with it, he would almost certainly have let the phone ring through to voice mail when it buzzed alertly on the desk of his small rented office that day a few weeks ago. Instead, as a recent arrival in California, he’d shrugged off his (urban, Manhattan) suspicions on the spot, and stabbed “call” with his finger.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Potash?” A woman’s voice, warm with a tone of rising complicity, was on the other end.
“Yes?”
“This is Janelle Styles of Greenleaf Financial. I hope you don’t mind me calling you like this.”
“Well, that depends,” he said, hedging his voice in a way that could make his utterance either funny or sincere.
If not for the sun, he thought, getting quietly out of bed so as not to disturb his still-sleeping wife, he wouldn’t have continued to banter with the woman, who seemed at every step of the conversation somehow a step ahead of his response. He entered the small frosted glass shower cubicle and turned the taps to cold, shivering under the freezing spray while the tape of the conversation, as it had every hour on the hour for several days, continued playing in his head with crisp, punitive fidelity.
“What it is, Mr. Potash,” the woman was saying in memory, “is that Mr. Martin at the New York office personally forwarded me your name as someone who’d been an early investor in our Dyna-venture Fund and had already exited with an attractive return. I’m calling about a new, highly collateralized opportunity we feel very strongly about, and that we’re offering exclusively to our best investors.”
“Is that so?” he remembered saying, noncommittal.
“Yes. Now, normally, this type of investment wouldn’t be available to someone like yourself, but Mr. Martin asked that you be allowed to participate alongside some very high net worth individuals and institutional investors because of how appreciative we are of the confidence you’ve shown in us in the past.”
Potash squeezed the fragrant juice of shampoo onto his head and recalled that at this moment in the conversation there’d been a pause while he’d pondered her offer. He had first been introduced to Greenleaf Financial through two of the members of his home poker game in New York, each of whom had invested with positive results. Emboldened by their stories of excellent yields on wind farms and Mexican algae plantations, he was enticed to experimentally invest five thousand dollars. When his 11 percent returns were promptly deposited in his account, he doubled the amount. His next investment raised the bar still higher, to fifty thousand, with the same results. Greenleaf was not a hedge fund, nor an extravagant risk-taking operation based on funny-number math or cooked books. It was a consortium of forward-seeking investment advisers and analysts from elite business schools who roamed the world seeking the latest cutting-edge sustainable products. Predatory, cash-rich, not averse to opportunistic bottom-feeding, Greenleaf was masterful at saving companies teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, often snatching up extraordinary assets for ten cents on the dollar or less.
“Tell me more,” he’d said to the woman.
Potash now leaned forward and turned the shower hot, then hotter still. It was as if he wanted to scald away the recollections, expunge the fluent bit of salesmanship that came next. Was he aware, he remembered her asking, of the new smartphone that boasted a bioplastic casing derived entirely from cornstarch, along with low-impact packaging and PVC-free electronics? Or how about hydrotreated renewable jet fuel to answer the need of an American aviation industry that was “sick of being the unwanted relative at the national petrochemical buffet”? If that wasn’t enough, she added with a feathery, cascading downward chuckle, there were proton-exchange membranes in fuel cells, zinc-air batteries, and by the way, had he heard about the new Japanese experiment in organically growing a birch tree that was already treated, insect resistant and ready to be used as lumber?
Potash, at forty-two, had spent the majority of his adult life as the vice principal of a small alternative high school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His expertise was administrative; his gift was inspirational. Slim, affable, his face filled with the sympathetic curves of a born listener, he’d become the go-to guy for giving convincing speeches at fund-raising dinners, and could be counted on to provide a consoling shoulder for teachers caught in the hot cross fire between eruptive adolescence and shrinking state budgets. But as of eleven months ago, all that had changed.
He’d met a woman at a New York party and fallen deliriously, sexually, in love. In the process, he’d left a childless marriage filled with frictionless boredom and leaped across the country to be with his new love in a single life-altering jump. Anabella was a forty-year-old woman with two teenage sons who worked as a research scientist in a field—fragrance chemistry—about which Potash was utterly ignorant. He wasn’t used to having children in his life; he wasn’t used to being in the dark about what his wife did; and he wasn’t used to waking each morning alongside someone for whom—differently from his ex-wife, a Realtor—money wasn’t the first order of the day. Anabella, who’d grown up in a small town in Minnesota, was lean, spiritually athirst, energetic and unassumingly pretty. Plus, she loved sex. After an amicable divorce from his wife, they married immediately. To the marriage Potash brought a sizable nest egg, some of it his elderly parents’, entrusted to him for investment purposes, and some of it his own.
“Can I send you some literature in the mail?” he remembered Janelle Styles asking him after she’d finished her pitch.
“Of course,” he’d said, and hesitated a moment before obligingly giving her his mailing address. An envelope was couriered over the very next day, and he made a point of studying the prospectuses, investment strategy and projected return schedules carefully. Years immersed in school budget battles had given him an eye for reading contracts, and he knew his way around a spreadsheet. On the surface anyway, it all checked out perfectly.
Several days later, following up, she called. Cautious by nature, but drawn to the possibility of blessing his new marriage with a whopping annuity while he spent several months shopping around for a new job, Potash agreed to meet for lunch. He arrived on time at the restaurant and paused a moment on the threshold of the entrance. A pretty woman of about thirty, dressed in a black pencil skirt, high heels and a fitted top, stood up from a nearby booth and gave him a brilliant smile.
Potash smiled back, involuntarily, and in response, her own smile deepened on the spot. In some very subtle way, she gave the impression that she’d already calculated for the small, ongoing shock wave that her presence caused among men. Was this simple sophistication, or something else? Her hand was extended toward his in greeting, and her wide, extravagantly lashed green eyes fixed on his and then blinked in a quick triplet.
“Hi, John,” she said.
“Janelle, a pleasure.” He grasped her hand in his while her other hand fashioned a kind of loose, weaving gesture in the air and came to rest against his shoulder. It lay there for a second while they spoke, light but persistent. He noticed it.
The maître d’ took them as if by design to a booth in a darker, quieter part of the restaurant, well away from other diners.
“Have you been here before?” she asked as they sat down.
“Never, actually.”
“Oh, good. I find it’s the perfect place to meet someone, because it gives that sense of being just a little bit out of the world, and thereby a little bit intimate, unto itself.”
“Nice.”
She gave him a heatless smile, and he now understood where that plush telephone vibrato of hers came from: her entire body, somehow, was a sounding board for her voice.
“Drink?” she asked.
“No, thanks,” he said, “although maybe...”
“I know, at lunch, right?” She laughed, familiarly, with square, even teeth bleached almost too white but not quite. “But a spritzer tends to go down easy and still leaves you refreshed.”
“Touché,” he said gallantly. “A spritzer then!”
When the man left, nearly simultaneously, they both opened their menus.
“So,” she said, “how long have you been living in sunshine central?”
“About ten months.”
“A newbie! Would it be too forward of me to ask what brought you out here?”
“Well, not to put too fine a point on it, I fell in love.”
“Really?” She looked up at him, openmouthed. “Does that still happen? Oh, God,” she touched her breast, “I’m sorry if I sound cynical!”
“Not at all,” said Potash, smiling. “But what can I say? I’m very happy. And I find that Northern California agrees with me. For a former New Yorker, it’s kind of like Disneyland.”
“You answered my next question, but I had a feeling.”
“What about?”
“That you were from the Northeast.”
“Why? Do I give off a big-city vibe?”
“Yes, but I mean that only in the best noncynical way.”
She laughed again, in a way that suggested an expansion of some kind, a reminder of the warm-blooded physicality behind her clothes. Potash leaned forward confidentially. “To tell you the truth, I’m still adjusting to being cheerful all the time. It’s a new sensation.”
“Bottle and sell it, if you can.”
The waiter passed again with their drinks and took their orders. She raised her glass, looked at him sportively over its edges, and winked.
“To a successful partnership and a greener earth.”
“Amen to that.”
They clinked glasses and drank.
And what happened next, thought Potash, finishing his long shower at last and stepping out into the chill, dry air before vigorously wiping himself down with a fresh towel, was what he would have to live with for the rest of his life. Because after three rounds of spritzers, and a stream of dazzling conversation about algae fuel, biomass and ethanol, he agreed to meet her and her “partners” at the nearby home offices of their firm, to discuss the possibility of “bringing him more seriously on board.”
Potash finished toweling off and then dressed, slipped on his Merrells and tiptoed out of the bedroom. The tape in his head had stopped playing for him long enough to again appreciate the nest of creaturely amenities in which he found himself. Love had brought him to this home, whose continued existence—as he walked down the main staircase and into the sun-flooded living room through air faintly scented with bougainvillea and piñon pine—depended on his now doing the exact right thing. He went into the kitchen, opened the heavy vault of the fridge door, and drank a glass of orange juice, fast, standing up. Then he strolled out the front door and swung into his SUV. His appointment with Agent Hiram Bortz of the FBI was in two hours and the office was nearly a hundred miles away. Traffic would be ramping up soon and he was hoping, for once, to beat the morning rush.
The doctor stood before her, as tall as a tower, dressed all in white and leaning close. Bending forward, he scraped his nails along the soles of her feet.
“Tell me,” he said, “do you often lose your balance and fall down a ballroom length of marble stairs?”
There was a silence.
“And do you have any idea how lucky you are?”
She didn’t know how lucky she was. She was in the hospital. What could that possibly have to do with luck? She wanted to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. The words were still hanging a distance off. The doctor was looking at her with his peculiar smile-frown.
“In addition to everything else,” he said, “the blunt force trauma to the skull produced a subdural hematoma that came very, very close to shutting you down. I wouldn’t say you’re a miracle, young lady, but you’re one whole heck of a medical outlier.”
The doctor then leaned close enough so that she could feel the soft, buttery lapping of his breath.
“Lucky life,” he whispered.
She shut her eyes, and when she next opened them a man in a blue suit was standing there smiling. His hair had a wet, seal-like glisten to it, and a box of beautiful air seemed to stand out around the bones of his face.
“You’re up,” he said in a soft small voice entirely unlike the big man he was. “Mind if I sit?”
“No,” she said carefully.