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The Stager: A Novel Page 9


  “Okay, well, we’re going to talk about this more when I get back. I’ve got some books we can read about moving. And maybe about pets passing, too. You’ve got a whole lot going on, and I feel awful that I’m away right now, but I’ll be back very soon. In fact, your dad is on his way back right now. His flight gets in late tonight. I could tell you needed one of us home. In the meantime, please remember that when we get to the new house we can plant a new garden, and it will be just as beautiful. We can even talk about getting a new rabbit.”

  “I don’t want a rabbit. I’d like a dog, remember?”

  “Okay, I get it, Elsa. I understand. But just tell me one more thing. Why did you run away? Did anything bad happen with the people with the cameras?”

  I’m not sure how to answer this. Maybe something bad did happen. Maybe they caught me stealing Nabila’s bag of leaves that are maybe tea and maybe marijuana. I am definitely not going to be the one to bring this up, however.

  “No, Mom, I told you, I saw Dominique, and I followed him. But he squeezed under the fence, so I went around into the Shays’ garden and he was there, but he was just getting ready to squeeze under their fence into the Mehtas’ house, so I walked around into their yard, and then, when I got there, he went under the back fence, which was really a problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, because I had to walk all the way around the block.”

  “Elsa, I don’t understand why you didn’t try to get Nabila. You know you aren’t supposed to go wandering around the neighborhood by yourself.”

  I have reached the point where my own lies are so confusing I don’t know how to keep them going.

  “I did try. Remember? I got locked out. I was in the basement, looking for the vacuum, and I saw the bag with leaves in Nabila’s room, and then these strangers showed up with cameras, and then I saw Dominique, and…”

  “What bag with leaves?”

  Have I mentioned the bag with leaves? I truly didn’t mean to. I am terrified that I’ll get Nabila in trouble. I remember the cleaning lady who disappeared after the stirrup broke on the American Girl horse. I don’t want Nabila to have to leave, too, and I especially don’t want her to have to go back to the country with the warlords and scrawny rabbits. So I just say, “What?”

  “What bag with leaves are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know. What bag with leaves? What are you talking about?”

  “Okay, never mind. This whole conversation is getting a little loopy, Elsa, but just go on, tell me what happened next.”

  “Well, I walked all the way around the block, but by then I couldn’t really figure out where Dominique had gone, and then I saw a whole bunch of rabbits in the other direction. Why are there so many rabbits, Mom?”

  “It’s spring. Breeding season, I guess. You know, think about the whole Easter thing, with the chocolate rabbits and stuff.”

  I think about Easter bunnies, and I look at the Dominique I’ve just drawn and think he couldn’t look any less like an Easter bunny unless I put a cigarette in his mouth or drew him a mustache.

  “Anyway, there was a fence, and there was a hole in the fence, and all of a sudden I was someplace else.”

  “You wound up in Unfurlings. And you know very well you aren’t supposed to cross the road.”

  “I didn’t! I’m telling you, I just squeezed under the fence and I was there. Maybe the back of the Unfurlings place backs up to The Flanders.”

  “Maybe,” says my mom. “Although I don’t quite see how that would work, given that it’s across the street.”

  “Well, maybe there’s a secret passageway.”

  “Sure, Elsa. Why not toss in a little magical realism? I mean, really, with everything else going on, why not?!”

  “What do you mean, Mom?”

  “Nothing, Elsa. Go on.”

  “Well, actually, now that you mention it, it was like some magical place. There was all this land, and so much green, and it wasn’t even a golf course! And there were patches with giant vegetables, and I saw a llama!”

  “Well, that sure sounds like Unfurlings. Maybe you were back in the service area or something.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I just mean maybe there’s a parcel of the land that extends farther than I thought.”

  “Unfurlings is a dumb name.”

  “Not as dumb as The Flanders!”

  “I know, right?” I start laughing. “The Flanders” really is such a stupid name. It always makes me think of Ned Flanders on The Simpsons, even though my mom has explained that where we live is about a different Flanders, in Belgium, where the houses look sort of like our house, but actually not really, since our houses are all twice as big.

  My mom starts laughing, too, and we stay on the phone laughing for a while, and I think maybe we’re done with this conversation and I’m not going to have to talk about it anymore, but I’m wrong.

  “So then, Elsa, what happened next? Tell me about this so-called fairy-cake house.”

  “It’s not a fairy-cake house, Mom. It’s a house where they were baking fairy cakes. Can we do that sometime? Marta—that’s the mom of the kids who live there, who are twins—said she’ll give me the recipe.”

  “Sure, but really, Elsa, this is so astonishing. Don’t you remember all the conversations we’ve had about not going into strangers’ houses? And then you just go waltzing right in there, and you eat their food, and Nabila doesn’t even know where you are?”

  “I know, Mom, but you also said sometimes you have to follow your gut. Like how you bought the new house because of the stone rabbit.”

  “I know what you’re saying, sweetheart, but, still, don’t you see why this is different?”

  “Not really. You would have gone inside, too, Mom. They’re really nice! The twins are only seven. A boy and a girl. They go to that school on River Road and they can walk there. Why don’t I go to that school? Why do I go to a school where I have to drive half an hour?”

  “That’s an excellent question. One more way for your mom and dad to watch their money bleed away so you can learn to play field hockey and eat with a salad fork.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing. That was a dumb thing to say. In London, you can walk to your new school.”

  “I don’t want to walk to my school. I want to take a bus. I’ve never taken a bus before.” I keep staring at the painting, and then I have the idea that maybe I can fix the crooked ears with red paint, the same color that door is going to be. I go over to the easel and pick up the pot of paint, but the lid isn’t screwed on properly and it winds up spilling on the floor. Now there’s red paint on the white carpet, and I wonder how much more trouble I can possibly get in. I walk to the bathroom to get a towel.

  “Elsa, promise me you are going to stay away from this place!”

  “They drank milk out of wineglasses, Mom. Can we do that? There aren’t any real dishes, just the pretend ones on the table that is always set, and makes it look like whoever lives there is about to eat dinner. And they have a television but no cable, so it’s just for show, so that other people, when they visit the house, will see that that’s the place where the TV would be if they lived there. Except that now no one is even trying to live there, so Marta said, Why let a perfectly good house go to waste?”

  The towels are gone in the bathroom that is attached to my room, and all I can find is a bag from Target with new towels in it. I wonder if it’s worse to use new towels to wipe up the paint, or to just leave it there. Probably best to just leave it there.

  “So this lady, this Marta person, is squatting with her kids in the model home at Unfurlings?”

  “It’s a real house with beds and everything, it’s just that it doesn’t have a lot of regular stuff in it.”

  I turn from the bathroom back toward my room and realize that I have accidentally stepped in the paint, and now it’s all over the carpet, and you can see where I walked from the e
asel to the bathroom and back. Little red footsteps, like Hansel and Gretel but with paint instead of breadcrumbs.

  “I’ve got to go, Mom. We can talk more when you come home.”

  “Elsa, wait. I want to tell you something else.”

  “Gotta go do my homework, and Nabila is calling me for dinner. Bye!”

  “Wait, Elsa! A couple more things. I’m going to be on television at seven p.m., that’s seven p.m. your time—and you’d better watch, because I blew you a secret kiss.”

  “Okay. Great.”

  She starts to say something else, but I push the button to end the call.

  LARS

  If you’ve ever been on an airplane, then I don’t need to sell you on the light. It’s of a different quality up here: purer, brighter, practically symphonic in its brilliance. Also, you can see the clouds from inside out. Although I can’t actually feel the light to assess its texture, I bask in the warmth through the Plexiglas window.

  A somewhat dour steward offers me something from his clanking cart, and even though I no longer drink (not because I’ve ever had a problem with alcohol, but because several of my prescriptions come with surely overblown warnings about not consuming alcohol, as well as not driving or operating heavy machinery), I ask for one of those tiny bottles of gin. Why not? The light is making me giddy, and I feel like celebrating. A toast to our new life in London! It’s time to be positive, and now that we have three spanking-new skylights, I am turning the corner, leaning into optimism. A toast to Jorek, my savior, my new best friend! A toast to Dominique, and a mournful moment of silence, may he rest in peace!

  The first two bottles go down nice and neat, and I feel a surge of something like euphoria. (Funny that they don’t mention this as a possible side effect, instead of dwelling on the negatives.) I push the call button to summon the steward; given how much there is to celebrate, why not one or two or three more tiny bottles of gin?

  Outside the window, I imagine below some cows and sheep and rolling dales, even though in reality we are probably over the ocean. The strangest part of this is that even though I am nicely insulated inside this metal tube, and actively trying not to think about my wife, the Bella transmission becomes increasingly clear, and even intrusive. No matter what I do to try to blot her out, she is right inside me, crystal clear.

  I study the label to see if it might offer insight, but all it says is that it’s been distilled in the U.K.; that it contains 47% alcohol and is 94 proof. The more I drink, the worse it gets. I see Bella in the taxi, even though it’s pouring and the windows are clotted with rain. She is tapping in frustration at her phone. I see the chip in her red nail polish on the fourth finger of her left hand, beneath which is the wedding band she’s twisting in circles, a tic that doesn’t require a psychotherapist to deconstruct. I know that she is about to ask the taxi to pull over and drop her a few feet away, which seems to me a bad idea, given that she has only an already battered fold-up umbrella that will be useless in this sort of blustery, sideways-slashing rain. Also, she is wearing heels. She looks at her watch, fishes from her bag a twenty-pound note, and tells the driver to keep the change.

  * * *

  DID I TELL you that Bella and I first met on an airplane?

  We met in business class, which, with hindsight, is a pretty soulless place to meet, and arguably all the detail that you need about Bella and me. I’d been on the circuit that summer, en route from the Hamburg Masters to a match in Cincinnati, which included in the itinerary a nonstop flight from Frankfurt to New York. Bella had been connecting home circuitously from Florence, where she’d gone on holiday to visit the family she’d lived with ten years earlier, during her junior year abroad. That’s the wrong place to meet, at thirty thousand feet, sipping port and sampling runny French cheeses on someone else’s dime. We both feigned sophistication, pretending to be the sort of discriminating travelers who could tell a Pont l’Évêque from a Brillat-Savarin, when in fact we were people who were privately content with Kraft cheese and cheap Pinot Grigio.

  I wish I could say that a feigned enthusiasm, and then the eventual need for luxury items like five-star boutique hotels with high-thread-count sheets and Patek Philippe watches, is what led to our undoing, but it was much more complicated—or, really, maybe much more simple—than that. In fact, once I had been corrupted, the embrace of high-end consumer goods actually became a helpful balm.

  Bella had been bumped up to business class the day we met (although it wouldn’t be long before she was a regular on first-class manifests), and, me, I was deep into my fifteen minutes of fame, and had I only realized how short-lived they’d be, and how swift my descent, I would have doubled my consumption of port and smelly cheese that day.

  It’s hard to fathom, looking at me now, but as I may have mentioned, back then I turned heads. I had that celebrity rock-star glow. Le Monde had said of me just that week, “If the Romans were to name a God of Tennis, they would likely have named him Lars Jorgenson.”

  I was not the sort of obnoxious celebrity who wore mirrored aviator sunglasses indoors, but I admit that my habit of wearing an Adidas headband, even when I was in a suit, was its own version of swaggering. I was so giddy back in those days that I couldn’t even say who was footing my bill. I had an agent who took care of those sorts of things, and I just speed-dialed him whenever any scheduling snags arose or some financial reckoning needed to be done.

  Bella had had one of those enlightened but slightly dull, solidly middle-class childhoods somewhere in a San Francisco suburb famous for its staunch embrace of mid-century functionalist housing, a style she grew to hate. Now the place has been overrun by the newly rich, and the last time Bella and her sister went to visit and worked up the nerve to knock on the front door of their childhood home, they learned it had been purchased by a twenty-five-year-old who had designed an interactive beer-bong app. Bella’s parents had both been academics, and from what she’d described, it was not the sort of hot-blooded household where hideous things were ever said, or dishes were flung; to the contrary, emotions were as repressed as the architecture, and it sometimes felt like she was living in a PBS series, or some reality show about whether a family could set out to raise two children in a community resembling some Scandinavian-inspired ideal. The most traumatic incident she ever reported was her sister falling off a swing and breaking her arm. Bella had been a model child—good grades, no miscreant teenaged behavior. Her only act of rebellion was to move back east to attend Barnard, even though her parents had pleaded with her to stay on the West Coast.

  From every exam she took to every fellowship she applied for, Bella’s trajectory was a steady upward arc. She got every job she wanted, as well as every man. Nothing got in her way until the day, two years into our marriage, that she met Raymond Branch.

  What a difference those two years made! The Bella I met that day was humble, so giddy at her luck of being bumped up to business class, of being seated next to me (might I remind you that I was, back then, a handsome, famous tennis player?), that you might have supposed, as she settled into her seat, sorting out her belongings (laptop, newspapers, a novel called Independence Day), that coach was the only deprivation this woman had ever known.

  So there we were, as fate would have it, sitting next to one another in 4A and 4B, in one of those subpar business-class situations lacking in the proper degree of privacy, which in our case turned out to be a plus. Before the plane became aloft, we had already discovered one another, and wasted no time in acknowledging our fierce attraction, clinking glasses of champagne, toasting—what?—we weren’t quite sure—the few dazzling moments we sensed we’d experience in the forthcoming months, tinged with the slight foreboding that they would quickly turn ruinous? (The career-ending knee injury, the weight gain, the depression, the scum of the affairs, the child, the rabbit…) If there is a moral to the story, it is perhaps only this: people who are going to commit themselves to spending their lives together ought to be grounded at the moment of in
ception. I say this with no pun intended. A neighborhood barbecue, a college classroom, the aisle of a bookstore, or some sort of cute meet, like the accidental bumping of carts in a grocery store, dogs colliding in a Frisbee chase at the park, a mix-up of orders at the doughnut shop—those are good ways to meet, ways that might provide some sweet shared memory to lean into when things get rough. Of course, it’s possible that the fissure already present at our inception might have had less to do with the empty trappings of United business class than with the fact that at least one of us was engaged.

  Oh, it was real, all right. I fell in love with Bella, and, for the record, I am still in love with my wife.

  I went back to Stockholm and called off the marriage to my childhood sweetheart. That these things happen every day does not diminish the heartbreak, and all these years later, I am not sure that my own mother has forgiven me. My family and friends all gossiped that I had been hijacked by my ego, and they may well have had a point. Such is the price of fame. Bella and I married shortly thereafter. It was a big, blingy wedding and I think we were happy for a time. We bought a new house in an exclusive suburban enclave. Although it was a bastardized Tudor, it was close enough to the sort of phony colony I dreamed about as a child who’d been raised on a diet of beamed-in American television. And though it has now become fashionable to disparage this style of living—to suggest that a place like The Flanders is the embodiment of excess and sprawl, and that this, combined with my own gas-guzzling Lincoln Navigator, is contributing to the breakdown of American society in general—that misses the point. What could possibly be wrong with living in a house one has earned, particularly when one is an upstanding citizen who pays his taxes and minds his own business and just wants to live a quiet life on a little patch of land? That this is how we live these days in the wealthier suburbs of Washington, D.C.—some of us, anyway—well, I can only say that this way of living was not my own very bad idea.