The Stager: A Novel Page 5

  Bella doesn’t reference this directly, but I sense the intercom incident looming in the backdrop of our Jorek conversations. But that is not why I mention it here. I mention it here to contrast the size of our Bethesda home to the size of our hotel room in London, where we occupy a mere five hundred square feet and we can hear each other respire.

  I don’t expect to find Bella back at the hotel when I return after Jorek and I purchase the skylights, but she’s stopped in to change into evening attire for her dinner. She is on the phone. (She is always on the phone, my wife.) When she sees me enter the room, she looks a little startled, puts her index finger in the air to signal to me that she’ll be back in a minute, and goes into the bathroom and closes the door. Logically, at first, I think that the reason I can still hear her talking, even with the door closed, is our close, really our too-close, proximity in this tiny hotel room. But soon I will come to understand that, thanks to certain peculiar and extraordinary circumstances, I can hear her talking from any place at all. No matter where she is physically located, the transmission is as clear, barring static or other atmospheric disturbance, as if she is standing right beside me. It’s like she’s inside my head.

  On this particular occasion she seems to be talking to my doctor, and what I hear her say is this:

  “Maybe his reaction to the new house and this whole light business has to do with his Swedish childhood? They’re big on light over there. Summer solstice and all that stuff.”

  The voice on the other end asks what she means by this. (Full disclosure: I am only guessing at this. I don’t know for sure what the other person is saying, since I can only hear Bella.)

  “Well, maybe it’s just too British? What with the chintz curtains and the Aga … Oh, it’s a fancy English oven, sort of a status symbol here, like a hearth version of a fancy car, kind of hard to explain, I’m not sure I really get it myself. But anyway, my point is that the house he grew up in was right out of Swedish central casting. Honestly, you could use it for an IKEA catalogue photo shoot. You should see it … It’s a small, sleek, unassuming rambler, the furniture’s all spare straight lines, absolutely stark, and now that I think about it, with those sheer white panel curtains in every room, it’s like a Nordic winter itself. Last time we visited his mom, there was even a Volvo in the driveway, and nothing but wheat fields as far as the eye could see. His mother still lives there with his thirty-seven-year-old brother, something I obviously should have paid closer attention to when we first met, although I get that I can’t blame this entirely on genetics. Well, maybe a little bit.”

  The doctor then asks more about my brother, I assume.

  “I don’t know. He never married. I don’t know if they ever diagnosed him. Maybe he’s just … off somehow. I never thought about it too much before, but you’re right, it’s a little strange.”

  There is a long silence as the doctor responds, and then Bella, sounding disappointed, says, “I see. So you think maybe just give in … that his behavior, this whole light thing, isn’t necessarily indicative of some sort of psychosis?”

  Bella sounds skeptical, and although I only hear half the exchange, my guess is that the doctor is taking my side. He understands that my reaction to the light is a reasonable response to the new family home. What is happening here is that we are having a petty domestic dispute, and not a mental-health crisis.

  “Look, I hear you,” Bella says in frustration, “but my concern is that, okay, maybe the house is a little dim, but I honestly don’t think this is about the light. My theory—and, please, just hear me out here—is that he’s having some kind of adverse reaction to the new medication. Or maybe he’s taking everything in the wrong order—would that make a difference, do you think? Or maybe the dosage is off? I’m not saying that would be your fault, of course. Maybe the pharmacy screwed up?… What?… Oh sure … Let’s see, he’s got about a dozen prescription bottles here. We’ve got Zuffixor … Romulex … Luxemprat … Zumlexitor … Praxisis—and I’m a little worried about that one, the bottle is almost empty and we just refilled it. He eats those like candy … Also there’s Volemex, Zaxivon—although I’m not sure if he still takes that one—and Amulerex. There’s more at home, I think. That’s a lot to be taking, isn’t it? We had trouble clearing customs. I mean that literally. We were brought into a back office and we had to talk to the police.”

  She listens for a while longer, then says “okay” and then “uh-huh” and then “okay” a few more times, and then she hangs up the phone.

  All this while I’ve been feigning absorption with my computer. Jorek has sent me the link to a YouTube video on skylight installation. He says that although he has never done one before, he has Googled around and found this demonstration, and it looks so simple he’s sure he can do it on his own. We’ve agreed to each watch this, and then to meet back at the house in the morning to get started.

  After Bella gets off the phone with the doctor, I urge her to come watch the video with me. I tell her that Jorek has suggested that installing a skylight is a piece of cake, and that, with my help, we can do it in a day.

  “Really, Lars? You’re going to help install a skylight?”

  My wife is evidently in a bad mood.

  “I’ve never seen you so much as change a lightbulb without causing some catastrophe!” (This is not true, but in a marriage one has to allow for occasional hyperbole of precisely this sort.) Also, I have just popped a Praxisis (she is right about that part—Praxisis is, hands down, my current drug of choice), and I am therefore feeling rather mellow. And one more also, and this is sad to say, but I am used to being treated like this by Bella. I know she cares about me in her way; she treats me with kindness—just not with warmth. She addresses me in a different tone than she does Elsa. With Elsa she is pure sweetness; with me it’s just duty.

  This is what I think Bella thinks: because she has made this mess of me, she is obliged to take care of me. That’s my working theory most days, but, then, I have a few other theories as well. Is it possible, for example, that each individual is allotted only a certain amount of bandwidth? Like, say, perhaps, a person can be super-brilliant, but only a smidgeon warm?

  I’d recently asked her, for example, if she still found me attractive, and instead of saying yes, she’d stared at me for a full minute, considering her reply. “When I look at you, beneath the flesh I still see hints of magnificent bone structure. I see a formerly handsome man who has become too round,” she said.

  I had quipped that she could have just told me I was handsome, and that no one was going to call in The New Yorker’s fact-checking department to confirm the accuracy of her reply.

  But let’s not dwell on the past. That is, I assure you, a black hole, a motherfucking bottomless pit that has, for now, been covered only by leaves. The past is break-your-neck treachery. I gravitate not toward darkness but toward light.

  “Of course I can help Jorek with a skylight,” I say. “And I wish you wouldn’t make such a big deal out of this. It’s perfectly normal to want a little more light in one’s house.”

  “Things in our life have been so weird for so long, Lars, that our definition of normal has become frighteningly elastic.”

  On this point, the fact-checking department would have to agree.

  * * *

  EVEN BY THE least elastic measure of the word, however, the rest of the day is pretty normal. Bella goes off to her dinner. I order room service, watch a movie, and go to sleep. I dream of animals, and there is even a rabbit, but nothing menacing occurs.

  One day at a time, as they say. Two normal days in a row is a lot to ask for, even under normal circumstances, which ours, admittedly, are not. Accordingly, the next morning begins with a predawn phone call, which is rarely a good thing unless, perhaps, you are expecting word from the Nobel Prize selection committee or such, which, again (see above re not normal circumstances, and apologies in advance for the forthcoming word repetition), admittedly, I am not. I confess that I hear my phone
ring, but I am emerging from one of those deep sleeps that feel heavy, like the fog of general anesthesia, a sensation that I am unfortunately all too familiar with as a result of the multiple operations on my knees.

  It takes me a few moments even to remember where I am, but then the scent of Bella moving over me, her lump of a husband wrapped tightly, inertly, a practically calcified man inside a duvet, helps me locate. She fumbles in the dark for my phone—someone is apparently calling me!—but not before knocking over a glass of water and causing our accumulated nightstand debris, our miniature marital still life of Bella’s many books that she rarely has time to read yet carts around the world with her, as well as our glasses, watches, and pill bottles, to spill to the floor.

  Not that the additional mess is of consequence, given the state of our hotel room. Until Jorek came into my life, I’d been sleeping half the days, explaining to Bella—reasonably, I think—that it made no sense to adjust to U.K. time, since I’d be headed home in a week. I’d put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door and drawn the curtains, and turned the maid away whenever she tried to enter our suite. Room-service trays have piled up, the minibar is mostly drained, and all of the towels (really, every last one of them, including the washcloths) lie in a wet heap. I regret this, and the laundry situation as well; even though I’ve promised Bella I’ll take care of it, I’ve forgotten to organize her dry cleaning, and she is now out of fresh shirts. (Because I have nowhere to go, or at least I hadn’t before Jorek materialized, my own laundry situation is less dire.)

  My phone is very porous, and I can hear the lilt of Jorek seeping through the tiny speaker as he asks for Mr. Lars. Bella points out that it’s not even 7:00 a.m., that I am asleep and, for that matter, so was she. Poor Jorek; I know he is intimidated by Bella, so, whatever this is, it must be pretty important for him to call this early. He asks again to speak to me, and Bella tries to shake me awake, but my instincts—always sharp except when it comes to my enduring fealty to my wife—tell me to continue to feign sleep; besides, my body feels heavy, as if I am doing all of this listening and thinking from under water. Bella takes my arm and pulls it from beneath the warmth of the duvet and feels for my pulse, a gesture that’s sweet enough to cause me to continue to play dead just to see her reaction, and, I confess, to solicit more of her touch, even if only in the form of her hand on my wrist. If she feels no beat, will she call the British equivalent of 911, or just pull a sheet over my head, order a room-service breakfast, and get ready for work? I do not learn the answer, because she detects the flicker of a life force in me. She asks Jorek if she can take a message, and promises she’ll have me call him back.

  “Tell Mr. Lars that I decided three skylights, not two.”

  Now Bella sits up in bed and turns on the nightstand light. She begins to use what I think of as her “office voice,” which will be familiar to you if you’ve ever seen her on TV, which you likely have. It’s a blend of morning news anchor—fake friendly, fake warm—with the not-so-subliminal suggestion that she will slash your throat with the thin tip of her Pilot pen should you make her cross.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Bella says. “Let’s put this entire project on hold, Jorek. It’s better to do this once we have properly moved in.”

  “But I already bought another on my way home last night.”

  “I only gave you money for two.”

  “So now you pay me more.”

  “That’s not how this works, Jorek.”

  This is one of those classic chicken-and-egg situations one reads about, by which I do not mean the money (and, frankly, I am a little embarrassed that Bella is giving Jorek a hard time about money, given how well off we are). What I am talking about here is the light. Bella doesn’t seem to understand that we can’t possibly move in until we create more light; she thinks we should create more light after moving in. I’m not entirely sure what Jorek says in response, since by now Bella is out of bed and moving toward the bathroom. After a few more exchanges, she clicks off and returns the phone to my bedside, then undresses and gets in the shower. Once I hear the water running, I call Jorek back and arrange to meet him at the house in a couple of hours.

  Now I feign sleep again. Bella emerges from the shower, does her morning ritual of hair and makeup with a practiced efficiency, and then dresses. As she is getting ready to leave, she sits down beside me and says, even though I am fake asleep, “If you are really so light-obsessed, Lars, perhaps you ought to consider opening the curtains.” Then, without further ado, she grabs her bag and leaves.

  Here she has a point. Not only are the curtains drawn decidedly shut, but I have also employed the special room-darkening blinds. Even at midday, it is deliciously cavelike in this room. This is emotionally tricky territory. I need light in my life, yet prefer darkness in my room. Please don’t ask me why. I don’t have all the answers.

  After I hear the door click, I lie in bed contemplating this riddle, the riddle of me, Lars Jorgenson, until I can motivate myself to emerge from beneath the tangle of bedclothes. Finally, with trepidation, I approach the window. I stand with my fingers clutching the pull rod on the curtain, but find myself frozen—I try to shift it in a rightward direction, but I actually, physically cannot. It’s as if I’m having some adverse reaction to the possibility of light, or at least light in this room, and the complete illogic of the situation is paralyzing. I sit on the edge of the bed for a while, staring at the curtains, and then I go into the bathroom and swallow a Praxisis. These can be slow to kick in, so I crawl into the bathtub to wait. And let me tell you, if you have never taken a Praxisis, it’s always worth the wait. Although lately it seems the wait does not always deliver, and after an interminably long time, when nothing happens, I swallow a couple more.

  After about thirty minutes, I climb out of the tub, walk over to the window, pull the cord on the blinds, and then draw back the heavy flax drapery. It’s almost biblical what happens next: the sun streams in so blindingly that I have to shut my eyes and fumble about the room until I locate my sunglasses.

  And then—outside! A rich emulsion of pedestrians streaming by, every one of them looking so purposeful, carrying coffee and newspapers, computer bags slung over shoulders; a young woman, her hair still wet from the shower, or maybe from the pool, clutching a bouquet of wildflowers, which makes me wonder if she’s having a dinner party, or if it’s someone’s birthday. Some refrain from a book Bella often refers to pops into my head. Something to do with flowers and dinners and glorious days in June. I feel myself begin to soar. Maybe this is why she likes books so much; the poetry is its own high. I wish I liked books. But for now, I find Praxisis to be a good facsimile of the intellectual stimulation I am lacking in my life.

  Across the street is a patch of greenery, and I wonder if perhaps we’re situated across from one of those famous London parks. Bella had said something about our hotel being in a posh section of town, within walking distance to many popular attractions (a bit of travelogue, dropped frequently, and not very subtly, into random conversations, surely meant to plant the seed of my going out), but this failed to entice me before now. I’d chosen to see the entire city as cold and aloof, although maybe it was just all that steely wrought iron, the beeping horns, the ever-present chill in the air. Still, I have the sense I could live here for the next ten years and never really belong, or even comprehend what’s going on. But then I see a bunch of schoolkids in uniforms emerging from the park, and that’s an easy thing to understand, no matter where you are. From the D.C. suburbs to an upscale London neighborhood to, perhaps, Jorek’s Poland, your compass points in a certain direction when you see a group of kids. This seems possibly profound, or at least it does for a second or two, while I search for a pen and a pad of paper on which to write it down, but all I manage is “kids” and “compass,” by which point I can’t really remember what it is I wanted to say, and whatever it is was probably trivial and clichéd, or at least no longer an observation that might hold the key to
my repair. I sit there for the longest time, staring out the window, pen still in hand, but can’t think of anything else to write down.

  ELSA

  At school, I’m so busy I almost forget about Dominique and the Stager and the Rule of Three. I take my math quiz, and I know even before the teacher grades it that I got everything right. Also, I know all the answers in French class and raise my hand seven times, although Mademoiselle Shapiro only calls on me once. But Diana is being weird. We always sit together at lunch, and we almost always eat pizza and French fries (although sometimes we eat macaroni and cheese and chicken nuggets), but today she’s brought a turkey sandwich from home, and when I ask her why, she says she’s decided to stop eating unhealthy food. I explain that pizza and French fries aren’t necessarily unhealthy, that it depends on how they’re cooked, but she says I’m wrong; they’re always fatty and greasy. French fries are potatoes, I say, refusing to give up. And since potatoes are organic and locally grown and from Whole Foods, they’re good for you. Ditto for the pizza, which has both calcium and vitamin C.

  I don’t know if any of this is true, but sometimes facts are the enemy of truth. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I once heard my mom say this on television when she was talking about problems at the bank where she works.