Janet was brushing her teeth. Felix was sitting on the edge of the bed, still in his jacket and bow tie. He looked handsome in bow ties, had since he was a kid. They"d just come from an office party, where he"d had several seltzer waters-lately he felt it necessary to remain clearheaded at all times-and she"d had enough wine that the little chapped patches of skin on her lips had gone purple.
"I think the new partner likes you," he said.
Janet spat in the sink, ran the water. "What makes you say that?"
"I can just tell."
"That"s not a bad thing, is it?"
"No." He undid his tie, still sitting. For some reason he lacked the will to stand up and undress. After a moment, Janet flushed the toilet. She emerged from the bathroom and slid next to him on the bed. She seemed happier than usual. At the party, an a.s.sociate had been trying to convince her to get an iPod, saying there were so many scholarly podcasts on the Web, it was a shame not to have access to them during her long commute. Especially someone like her, who worked in research, and liked to keep up-to-date.
"You seem to like info," he"d said.
"Oh, I"m an info maniac!" Janet had said, not hearing how it sounded until it was too late. Then her face had contorted, and the whole group had erupted with laughter.
"You know, there are treatments for that now," said the new partner, dabbing at his eyes with his napkin. "Perhaps Felix could help you out with that." Then they"d all laughed again, Felix with his hand at the small of his wife"s back.
Beside him on the bed, she leaned over and kissed his neck, then bit the end of his loosened tie and pulled it off with her teeth. She smiled at him with the thing still in her mouth, like a puppy. She looked ridiculous-and cute. He knew there"d been times she"d thought of leaving him. After the failed fertility treatments, for a while they"d both avoided s.e.x, and he"d wondered if it might be forever tainted with a subtle ache, the memory of failure. The failure was difficult to forget, not least because they"d never refurnished the nursery. Janet"s therapist had advised her to make room for a child in her life, to visualize and prepare, to attract success by a.s.suming success. So Felix had refinished an old mahogany sleigh crib that had been his father"s, and Janet had bought onesies, baby-bjorns, and a rocking-chair"s worth of stuffed bunnies, lambs, and giraffes at stores with names like Babycakes and Little One. They"d even had a local artist decorate the walls with scenes from their favorite nursery rhymes in low-fume paints. On one wall stood a little match girl whose hair and tiny flame were the same color as the whorls of stars on the ceiling-a silvery b.u.t.ter. In the end, neither of them had had the heart to take it all away, paint over the stars. So they just kept the door closed, a la Miss Havisham.
She was unb.u.t.toning his shirt. Her hands dropped to his belt. The cheerful speediness of her movements stilled and excited him. He kissed her forehead as she worked off his shoes. He hadn"t seen her like this in a long time. Maybe it was the wine; he made a mental note to ask the host for the vintage.
Afterward, she curled away on her side of the bed, the sheet up to her chin. He moved over and put his hands on her shoulders. They were quavering.
"Janet," he said.
She kept sobbing. "I"m sorry," she said, without turning around. Her voice sounded strange and faraway.
He took his hands off her. "For what?" he said.
"I was reading this book and it said: "When you don"t forgive someone, it"s like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die." " She wiped her nose with the sheet. "But what if the person you can"t forgive is yourself?"
He exhaled. For a second he"d thought he was about to hear her confess to an affair, potentially ending his marriage and his premonitions in the same breath. Instead it was just the old pain, rearing its graying head. Their pain was aging along with them.
"Then forgive yourself," he said.
She reached for a Kleenex. "I don"t think it"s that simple."
"Sure it is," he said, taking her hands. "I, Felix, forgive thee, Janet." He waited. "Now it"s your turn to forgive you."
"You know I hate it when you get like this," she said, but there was a smile in her voice.
He pulled her hands behind her back. "Say it," he said. "Like you mean it. Or I"ll keep you as my prisoner forever."
She started to speak, but as soon as she opened her mouth, her eyes filled again. He felt her body go limp. Then, a moment later, she did it.
"I forgive you, Janet," she said quietly, barely breathing the words.
He drew her into an embrace. "You can still be my prisoner," he said into her hair. Then he released her and looked at her seriously. "We need to redo the nursery," he said.
Things were good between them for the next few weeks. But Felix had a secret, and Janet was catching on. Why was he keeping a tape recorder under his pillow at night? How come he kept calling in sick to work when he wasn"t really sick? What was making him so edgy? He told her the tape recorder was in case something came to him in a dream. Janet laughed. As if the illogic of dreams were worth remembering. He explained that work had become stressful and boring-if it was possible to be stressful and boring at the same time-and that his stomach really had been bothering him. Janet looked him over and said she knew what he needed. He needed a vacation.
The plan was to go snorkeling off San Diego, stay in a bed-and-breakfast, eat clam shooters and drink white wine, sleep till noon. It was not as relaxing as it sounds. It was bad enough to be on an airplane when you felt Something Big was about to happen, but the baritone in the row behind them was some sort of amateur earthquake enthusiast. At one point Felix balled up bits of his c.o.c.ktail napkin and stuck them in his ears. Janet turned away. After she finished her b.l.o.o.d.y Mary she began folding her empty peanuts bag into smaller and smaller triangles. Finally she said, "Is that so you won"t have to talk to me?"
Once they were settled, he was less at home in the ocean than was Pisces Janet, and at one point swallowed so much water through his snorkel that he coughed for twenty minutes. He"d always thought snorkeling-the renting of mouthpieces hundreds of other people had mouthed-was disgusting, like eating bowling shoes. But Janet seemed determined to get her money"s worth, so he swam along, one eye on her black bikini (she could compete with any twenty-five-year-old), and the other eye scanning the periphery for barracudas and sharks.
At dinner they both ordered the mahi mahi, and as soon as the waiter was out of sight, she stared him down.
"What," she said, "is going on with you?"
"Nothing," he said. He saw little bulbs of muscle at her jawline tense.
"You do realize there are all kinds of betrayals in a marriage," she said. "s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the neighbor"s wife isn"t the only one." A gull cawed in the distance, and she turned to the ocean. "You used to tell me everything," she said.
He sat perfectly still. She was right. He"d told her things he"d never told another living soul, things he knew she"d take with her to her grave. When they were first dating, they used to sleep together on his twin bed, and they could have fit two more people.
But there was no way to explain this to her. After his mother, Janet was the most practical woman he"d ever met. She would laugh him out of the restaurant. She would think less of him.
"It"s a surprise," he said. "You"ll see. You won"t want to have known in advance."
"I"d rather not be surprised," Janet said, unswaddling her knife and fork from their napkin.
The waiter arrived with the appetizers. "Well, you"re going to have to be," said Felix.
Back in their room, Janet stuck to her side of the bed and immediately went to sleep. All night long, while she slept beside him, he stared at the ceiling fan, as alert as if the cashews he"d eaten from the minibar had been fistfuls of espres...o...b..ans. The red numerals on the alarm clock seemed to quiver with life. Something"s coming, they said.
The Monday he got back, the head of the firm called him into his office. "We had a problem while you were away," he said. Felix felt a percussive rhythm in his chest. "Hackers got into our system. I"ll need you to draft a letter to all your clients explaining what has happened. And you should expect an internal audit of all your accounts."
In his head, Felix began scanning his data banks for possible humiliations. As unpleasant as it was to contemplate his boss reading every personal e-mail he"d ever written, he hadn"t done anything objectionable. At least, nothing he could think of. But he didn"t really want to think about it too much. Instead, he went into his office, closed the door, and began to work on the letter.
While he set out to make a list of his cases with the most sensitive confidential information, that wasn"t the list he found himself composing.
Bartlett v. Johnson vindictiveness, lying Crump v. Orozco stinginess, stonewalling Mykytiuk v. Hydratia greed, negligence, subsequent lying One of his most important clients was a company that was spending more money defending its toxic dumping than it would have cost to clean it up. He laid down his mechanical pencil and stared at the page. He didn"t recall having written the final three words, but there they were: I hate this.
At the end of the week, he went to Bandera. Janet didn"t expect him until late on Fridays, and Bandera was always crowded in a way that made him feel part of the throng rather than separate from it. Not that he would have minded being alone. By this point, the antic.i.p.ation had escalated to a low-frequency ringing in his ears, and after a long day, he sometimes had difficulty understanding what people were saying.
Tonight it was the opposite of when he"d come with Daphne. It seemed he couldn"t drink enough. He ordered a gimlet, then a vodka tonic, then a martini. He was hoping to discover the elixir that would clear his mind, sober him up. Nothing did. It was a mistake to have admitted to himself that he hated his work, and now that he had, he couldn"t take it back. He could see with painful clarity how he"d wound up in this predicament. He"d enjoyed the study of law, but the practice of law had less to do with John Rawls and more to do with filing BlueBacks. Law school had been the cla.s.sic intellectual sanctuary from certain practical considerations. Then it had ended, and he"d needed to make a living. So here he was.
When he was young, perhaps because of the premonitions, he"d wanted to be a magician. In a box somewhere in his mother"s attic there was even a photograph of him in a peach tuxedo, holding a black hat and a pack of cards, grinning. As a teenager, he"d told his secret ambition to his mother, a woman who lived as if she"d come of age in the Great Depression rather than the 1950s. "Dreamer," she"d muttered, under her breath. But Felix had heard. Some mornings he wondered if he"d become a lawyer precisely because it was the least dreamlike thing he could be.
There was Daphne. She was sitting at the other end of the bar, with what must have been her boyfriend, a surprisingly preppy-looking guy in a St. John"s lacrosse shirt. Felix rose and ambled toward her, sliding his gla.s.s along the polished bra.s.s countertop.
"h.e.l.lo, Miss Edmunds," he said. He could see the lacy outline of a black bra through her blouse. "And how are you this evening?"
"Bug off, buddy," said the boyfriend.
Felix was eager to correct the impression that he was a suitor. "We work together," he said. He thought, but did not say: I"m her boss.
"Whoop dee do," said the boyfriend. Daphne was plucking a cherry off a toothpick with her dark fingernails. "Leave her alone," he said. "You"re not her type."
Felix looked at Daphne. The minx lifted her shoulders and let them fall, as if to say: You"re not; what can we do?
Of all the-"Look, pal," Felix said, straightening to his full height.
The boyfriend laughed. "Look? Yeah? Look where?"
Felix checked himself. It wasn"t worth it. None of it was worth it. He walked back to his stool and grabbed his coat, tapping his forehead in a quick salute.
"See you "round," he said.
He was too drunk to drive, too agitated to sit still in a cab. So he decided to walk. As he swayed his way up the freeway on-ramp, he realized why no one walks in Los Angeles. All these drivers, swerving and honking, in a hurry and angry about it! It was as if they were all late for somewhere they didn"t want to be going in the first place. Why didn"t they just go somewhere better?
Then it hit him. That"s what he would do. He would change his life. It wasn"t too late. He had money in the bank; Janet had a good job; he didn"t have to sit at a desk growing bitter like Daphne-clearly she was more bitter than he"d first imagined. He could switch careers, take a risk-he wouldn"t have to become a magician, but he could do something he enjoyed more than practicing law. Heck, at this point, almost anything would satisfy that criterion. He picked up his pace. He felt more surefooted. Maybe this thing wasn"t something that would happen to him so much as something he would initiate himself.
But he needed a plan. A plan was paramount. He pressed his fingers to his temples and tried to think. The driver of a red Taurus threw an empty Pepsi bottle out the window, and it nicked his elbow. Felix didn"t care. The world, like a bride, was finally unveiling its hidden mysteries to him. He had a friend who was opening a bar and had asked him to look over the paperwork. Perhaps Felix could go in on it with him, be his partner, make it a place like Bandera. Or maybe he could start a restaurant that also had a cabaret in the back, for musicians and actors, even magicians.
He was smiling and his heart was beating fast. It was possible he"d found the perfect solution. When he got home, he would open up and tell Janet everything. She might not like his idea at first, but she would come around-she always did. He would kiss her on the lips while she was still asleep, then he would turn on the bedside lamp and explain to her that change was possible. Change, life, all of it. The dream of his youth was not entirely dead. There was a flicker of something true that burned within him still. It was a relief to realize such a thing. No, it was victory. It was the thing itself.
Someone yelled something and waved his arm out the window. Felix ignored it. A feeling he recognized from childhood had crept into his chest and was radiating out his skin. He felt free for the first time in decades; it was as if the air he"d been inhaling up till now had all been made of counterfeit oxygen. Tomorrow morning he would quit his job, then he would call his mother and ask her to look for that picture of him in the peach tuxedo. Life could still be an adventure. It wasn"t too late. Cars whizzed past him, but he didn"t even notice them anymore. His eyes were fixed on the moon, full and low and lovely, like a beacon. Like a rolling ball of white light in the sky.
It all happened so quickly it was hard to feel anything except surprise. He got home and closed the door quietly; he didn"t want to disturb Janet. He stepped inside, feeling stealth and tiny, like an ant that had just completed a long journey. But as soon as he crossed the threshold, there she was, standing in the foyer, her eyes glossy with a happiness he"d never seen in them before. As if she"d been waiting for him. As if his adventure were just about to start.
THE LAZIEST FORM OF REVELATION.
I"m wearing only my underpants and sitting in a window seat with my back to the Hasidic grocery across the street. It"s one in the afternoon, and Misha is painting me. The embroidered cushion on which my backside rests was initially a comfort, but over the course of the past four hours, with the help of the midday sun, it has begun to feel like a very subtle instrument of torture. Inexplicably, it is itching me in a way I feel in my gut. There are those who spend their lives consciously or unconsciously courting such discomforts; I am not one of them. Something about Misha"s style makes him try to capture as much as possible of the final painting in the initial sitting, so I"m essentially on a twelve-hour fourth-date semi-naked marathon. At first I thought this arrangement might be enlightening, if not downright conducive to epiphanies-the endurance, the inner quiet, the lack of food. But thus far, the experience is more sweaty than transcendent.
"What are you working on?" I ask. Misha is silent, but I can see the color on the tip of his brush. "Are you doing my hair? My mane?"
"It"s a complicated red," he says half-distractedly, like a combination painter-oenophile.
"Thank you," I say. Misha says nothing. "I get it from my grandmother."
He shifts his weight to his other foot. "Is it the reason for your name?"
"G.o.d, no. I was bald when I was born. That"s just an unfortunate coincidence." I then proceed to tell him the story of my paternal grandmother, Florence-"Torchy," they called her in college-whose hair was so red that as a little girl, she wasn"t allowed to sit as close to the fire as her sisters were. Her mother was afraid her head would ignite out of sympathy with the flames. Misha seems to like this story.
"Okay," I say. "Now you have to tell me a story about your grandmother."
He dips his brush and continues painting. "What if I don"t have any?" he says. I make a pout, even though I"ve been instructed to maintain an approximation of equipoise at all times. When he gets to my face (apparently he saves this for last), I won"t be allowed to speak.
"Then make one up."
He answers while painting, his eyes fixed on the canvas. "My grandmother was a Jew," he says. "My mother, Zdena, was born inside a concentration camp. Once I asked her how it was possible for an infant to survive in such a place, but she just shook her head, and we never spoke of it again." He utters these words with a perfectly blank expression, in monotone, and I have the strange feeling he isn"t making it up at all.
"Is that true?" I say.
He shrugs.
"You shouldn"t joke around about things like that."
"Who says I"m joking?" he says, momentarily lifting his focus from the canvas to lock eyes with me. His eyes are as beautiful and opaque as polished stones.
Misha and I met two months ago, when he was walking his dachshund in SoHo. I would later learn that he"d been there to drop off his portfolio at a gallery, and that the dog was on loan from a friend who"d gone home to Ukraine for a week. A blonde in a black fur coat made ooohs of excitement and bent down to pet the animal.
"It"s a wiener dog!" she said.
Misha examined her coolly. " "Wiener dog," madam, is a racial slur."
I was standing nearby, holding my bike, about to text a friend to see if she wanted to join me for coffee. Upon hearing this, I started to laugh. I reached into my backpack and asked if it would be all right if I gave the dog a piece of beef jerky. Thirty minutes later, Misha and I were having espressos at Cafe Luxe, and I had agreed to go on a date with him. When he told me he was a painter, I think I knew that I would one day consent to sit for him.
It should have dawned on me then how breathtakingly boring it would be. The one saving grace is that Misha is actually quite good. The Marlborough Chelsea recently showed his work, and reviews called his paintings-especially the oil portraits-extremely accomplished and well-conceived. But what I like is they have an unfinished quality that makes them look alive. Still, in spite of a frequently exercised inner life, I"m restless.
"Let"s play a game," I say. Misha takes a sip from a water gla.s.s on the stool beside him. "Name something you regret," I say.
He swallows and puts down the gla.s.s. "I"m not sure I want to play this game," he says.
"Well, I"m not sure I want to sit here this long."
He appears dissatisfied with whatever he sees on the canvas. "I regret everything," he says.
"Interesting," I say, quietly hoping he doesn"t mean anything particular to me or my person. "Name something you"re afraid of."
"Falling microwave ovens," he says, then reconsiders. "Cilantro."
"You"re afraid of cilantro."
"Allergic is probably a better word."
"I see," I say. I"m waiting for him to crack a smile, but he doesn"t. "When was the last time you were genuinely happy?"
"I"m always happy," he says.
"Take the game seriously, please. Or I"ll be forced to come over there, and sit in your lap, and all will be lost."
He smiles, then thinks for a moment. "Once I was at the seash.o.r.e with some friends, and we made a fire and drank for many hours and then pa.s.sed out on the beach. One guy threw up next to my face, and mosquitoes were eating me all night. Meanwhile the tide was coming in around us. I didn"t sleep a wink. When the sun came up, it felt like the end of the world-a beautiful end of the world."
"That was when you were last genuinely happy."
"Yes."
"That might be more the European version of happiness than the American one."