Back in Zell am See, when the subject came up of what that cannibal would do if he ever gained power, people tended to look down or away like someone had farted. We
knew
what he’d do if he won, but who wanted to talk about it? Particularly in light of the fact that we were the ones making a great big building for the other side, also known as the sperm of the dead. When the Saruvian ambassador to Qatar and his family were machine-gunned in front of the embassy there, Palm went to Vienna and came back with seven more security guards who had allegedly been trained specifically in counterinfiltration techniques. Their presence made us feel both more secure and more vulnerable. After a week on the job, these guards were seen infrequently and didn’t say much. Palm told me they were the best of their kind but also gave the vibration he
didn’t want to answer questions about them, so I shut up and did my work.
Hasenhüttl never reappeared. The night before Claire arrived I went to the woodpile where we’d spoken and had a chat with him, wherever he was. I told him I was growing more confident every day about the museum. I told him ideas and questions that had come from reading the Koran and the Bible, and how I was going to ask Claire to live with me. I shared a mixed jumble of passing thoughts and enthusiasms, hopes, worries with him. When I was finished and feeling sheepish about having spoken to the ghost of an angel, I realized I had told very few of these things to Morton Palm. Not that I wouldn’t, or that I was trying to keep any of it from him. I just hadn’t told him. Getting up from the pile and brushing my hands off, I said to my invisible Invigilator, “Now that you’re gone, you’ve become my friend!”
IF I HADN’T DUCKED
she would have smacked me right across the face. Perfect movie scene—Clark Gable waits with a bouquet of roses at the airport, Carole Lombard appears at the arrival gate and smiles hugely when she sees him. Darling! They come together for the kiss to end all kisses. Only Carole slaps his kisser rather than kisses it.
Claire came through smiling and looking fabulous. Her hair was shorter and she wore jeans and a baseball warm-up jacket that showed off her legs and wide shoulders. She also wore more makeup than usual. I imagined her standing in the tiny airplane toilet putting on mascara with one hand while leaning against the wall with the other. I imagined her seat in the airplane; no Styrofoam cups jammed cracked and ugly into the seat pocket, no mussed blanket on the floor. Her magazine or book would be unwrinkled and in a safe place. That was Claire. She was emotional but neat. She chose vibrant colors and designs but knew where to put and order them to their best advantage.
“Hiya, sweetie!” I offered the bouquet at the same time she swung. I ducked. My mother used to belt me once in a while when I got out of hand, and the radar you develop as a child stays. Claire missed but the wind was strong. I thought it was a joke, but one look at her expression and it was clear the punch was no joke.
“I don’t even know why I’m here! I don’t even know why I left L.A., you creep! Why do I have to love you? It’d be so much simpler if I didn’t!”
“Claire—”
With a backhand flick, she sent my flowers flying. Red and green splashed across the air. We both watched them go, as did everybody else in the neighborhood.
“Claire—”
She walked to the nearest group of flowers and stomped a foot down on them. “You’re a pain in the ass, Harry, and it’s bloody fucking hard putting up with you and your ego a
lot
of the time. But I do, because I love you and I think there’s greatness in you. But all that aside, you betrayed me, you son of a bitch!”
“What? How?”
A policeman came up to us and asked in broken English what was wrong. I took Claire’s arm and said over my shoulder to the cop my wife had just had a hard flight and wasn’t feeling well. She jerked her arm away and said, “I feel fine. Get your hands off me.” She strode off. I gave the cop a “gee-whiz” shrug and ran after her.
At the baggage claim she wouldn’t talk. When I tried to say something, she tapped her foot madly and said, “I don’t hear you. Don’t even try. I don’t hear you.” So I shut up. I don’t know what I’d have done if, after getting her bag, she’d refused to come with me. Hit her over the head and smuggle her into the trunk of the car? Thank God she came, but for the first half hour of the trip she was silent. I asked if she wanted to hear music. Silence. Was she hungry? Silence. Did she want to kill me? She was sporting a look that could have frozen
the sun. It might have been better if I’d pulled off at a rest stop and confronted her square on, but there’s something hypnotic about driving along at a speed that I hoped would gradually work to calm her down. I was so glad to see her. I wanted to hug and kiss her and tell her many things, but I kept quiet.
About forty-five minutes later, I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and knew she’d turned to look at me. “Fanny called me, you know.”
I nodded. If I spoke and said the wrong thing it might send her right back into silence.
“She called and said she wanted to talk about you. Now that she’s getting married and you two are finished, she said she wanted to tell me some things.”
I saw a sign for a roadside rest two kilometers away. I put the blinker on to move into the slow lane. If I was going to hear what I
thought
I was about to hear, I wanted to be off the road and looking at Claire. Fanny was capable of many things, one of them being fang-toothed nastiness. When she’d been hurt she rarely listened to the other side’s point of view.
She’d
been hurt and now someone was going to pay for her pain. Pity the poor fucker she targeted. After we broke up, despite that being her decision, I had a lingering hunch she would do something unpleasant. As the weeks passed, that suspicion evaporated and I felt she’d manifested her hurt by originally being the one to say our relationship was over. I was wrong. Telling me to go away
wasn’t
enough for her. That’s why she’d asked after Claire the day we spoke on the phone. Knowing something I didn’t, she was waiting for it to go off like a timed fuse. Isn’t there some kind of bug or snake that sleeps under the ground for years and then wakes, only to stick its head out and bite whatever happens to be passing? If not, there should be because science could call it the Neville adder.
“Do you know what I’m talking about?”
There was the roadside stop. I decelerated more and turned the wheel. “I don’t know. Tell me what you mean.”
“What do I
mean,
Harry? I mean the night you and I went to Lowry’s for dinner. Where did you go afterward? Remember you said you had work to do and I believed it? Stupid, trusting me. I needed you that night! And what about the wonderful leather bag you bought me? You went back and bought
her
one too? You drove all the way back to that store to buy her the same bag? You didn’t even get a different color. That’s what I loved most about it. That marvelous sexy blue! Did you ever go back to a place you’d been with her to get something for
me?”
The answer to that was yes, but I wasn’t about to say it
then.
Her list went on. Lies, gifts, meetings, things said and not said. Fanny had decided to “come clean” with Claire Stansfield because now that she’d told me to go to hell, she wanted the other woman in my life to know exactly what had gone on between us so that Claire could decide whether she wanted to be involved with such a black-hearted, megalomaniacal, deceiving villain. She was as complete with her report as a tax auditor. Claire listed at least twenty rotten things I’d done behind her back, between the lines, in broad daylight, et cetera.
“Are they true, Harry? Did you really do them?”
“Generally, yes.”
“What do you mean, ‘generally’? Don’t play word games.”
“I mean yes, I did them with some little differences. I assume you know Fanny told you about them with just the slightest
slant
in her favor.”
“I assumed that. I’m not so dumb. And I’ll tell you right now that when she was finished I said, ‘Thank you, Fanny. Now I understand why Harry chose me and not you.’ And I hung up. She can drop dead. But that has nothing to do with
us.
These things are all betrayals, Harry. They’re shitty and wrong and selfish, and people who love
each other just
don’t do them.
That’s all. It’s as basic as that. So I want to know why you did. And why you did them so often to me. I don’t care about you and her.”
A truck zoomed by on the autobahn. A car with Polish license plates pulled into the rest stop. Two small people jumped out and ran for the toilet. When they emerged a long time later both of them wore the smiles of the just. I still hadn’t spoken. My mind’s computer had placed all its programs into RAM disc and skimmed each for possible answers. But in the same nanoseconds, I discarded each response because they were either too clever or evasive or simply not true.
“I wish I could give you the answer you’d like to hear. I’m sure there’s one that’d soothe you or make you feel better. But you know the only word that’s in my mind, Claire? Struggle. I’m not getting political on you and I’m not trying to avoid the issue. I’m talking about the truly difficult, everyday struggle to do the right thing. You’re a genuinely good person and because of that … gift, I don’t think you know what it is to have to work
hard
to simply do the right thing, especially with the people that matter to you. You have it innately, and sometimes I’m very jealous. It’d also be easy to say ‘lightning only strikes the highest peaks,’ meaning, if you’re going to love me, you’ve got to take the whole package and accept the way I am. But you have every right to reject that too. Maybe I do have greatness in me, and I can honestly tell you that in the last months I’ve been working like never before to do right, not only for the moment, but for all concerned. Did I do those shitty things before? Yes. Would I do them again? I hope not. I hope not. I hope not. Right now I want you. I want to treat you the way you deserve. I want to treat you as well as you’ve treated me all along. And I
am
trying. Please know that I’m trying. But I am not a character in a novel or a television series. Things always make sense there and we get used to thinking life should really be like TV or a Dickens novel. The bad guy has a terrible experience,
gets brought up short by life and boom—he changes everything and becomes a good soul. I’d love to be a good soul. I’d love to be a good soul for
you
and I’m trying. That’s the only thing I can say with any certainty: I
am
trying.”
“That sounds good, Harry, but you did betray me.”
“I betrayed you. A hundred percent.”
“Which means you’re not to be trusted.”
“I doubt if anyone has ever trusted me.”
She jammed me in the arm with her elbow. “Oh goddamn you, Harry,
I
trusted you! I knew your shortcomings and how deeply involved you were with Fanny, but I still trusted you. That’s what’s so hurtful about this—I gave you so much rope because I knew you needed it, but you took that rope and twisted it around my neck, not your own! I’m the one who’s choking here, not you!”
I put my forehead on the steering wheel. “I will try. I will struggle, I—will—try. I can make no other guarantees.”
“You’re in no position to make guarantees.”
Cars passed. Thin gray clouds looking like racing greyhounds came in and moved out again.
“Even if I believe that you’re trying, I
hate
the fact I can’t trust you. It’s like having sex but always stopping just before the orgasm.”
“Huh?”
“Because when the orgasm comes, a good orgasm, you click everything else off and just fall into it. Because you know your love will catch you. When it’s over, you’re on safe ground again. How do I get back to that with you?”
The few days we had together in Zell am See before the Sultan arrived were fragile and sad. Like a person with a new scar, we’d just begin to function normally when something was said or done that stretched our “skin” too much, and instantly the new weaker tissue would scream. We were formal. I talked too much and tried too hard to keep her entertained. One afternoon we were feeding ducks by the
lake and she started to cry. I asked if there was anything I could do. She held out her mechanical hand, palm up, and without saying a word, opened and closed it again and again. Coming when it did, the gesture was so odd that it made me too uneasy to ask what she meant.
Another time, apropos of nothing, she told me her parents’ favorite Claire-as-child story. When she was four, her mother asked her what were her favorite things. “Love, zebras, and my husband.”
We screwed too much, and frequently it was the same variety: crazy-aggressive, hot but without any closeness; look up at the wrong moment and you were likely to catch a cold eye watching you. I was very glad Morton was around because he quickly sensed the tension between us and did what he could to lessen it. We ate meals together where he entertained us with wild stories about his days soldiering for the United Nations. He and Claire went cross-country skiing one day and into Salzburg one afternoon. When he asked what was wrong I told him, trying carefully to give as fair and balanced an account as I could. He seemed sympathetic, but distant. For the first time, I asked him if this was the sort of thing that had caused him and his wife to break up. “No, Harry, I was true to her. I did other things wrong, but I always believed one person was enough for a lifetime.”