“Jules. Jules Jones.”
Bosco wrote for several minutes.
“Okay,” he said, then made his laborious return and handed the paper to Jules. Jules read it aloud: “I, Bosco, of sound mind and body, hereby grant to you, Jules Jones, sole and exclusive media rights to cover the story of my decline and Suicide Tour.”
Bosco’s exertions had left him spent. He sagged against his chair, reeling in breath, his eyes closed. Bosco the demented scarecrow performer appeared spectrally, naughtily in Stephanie’s mind, disowning the morose behemoth before them. A wave of sadness felled her.
Bosco opened his eyes and looked at Jules. “There,” he said. “It’s yours.”
At lunch in MoMA’s sculpture garden, Jules was a man reborn: jazzed, juiced, riffing his thoughts on the newly renovated museum. He’d gone straight to the gift shop and bought a datebook and pen (both covered with Magritte clouds) to record his appointment with Bosco at ten the next morning.
Stephanie ate her turkey wrap and gazed at Picasso’s
She-Goat,”
wishing she could share her brother’s elation. It felt impossible, as if Jules’s excitement were being siphoned from inside her, leaving Stephanie drained to the exact degree that he was invigorated. She found herself wishing, inanely, that she hadn’t missed her tennis game.
“What’s the matter?” Jules finally asked, chugging his third cranberry and soda. “You seem down.”
“I don’t know,” Stephanie said.
He leaned toward her, her big brother, and Stephanie had a flash of how they’d been as kids, an almost-physical sense of Jules as her protector, her watchdog, coming to her tennis matches and massaging her calves when they cramped. That feeling had been buried under Jules’s chaotic intervening years, but now it pushed back up, warm and vital, sending tears into Stephanie’s eyes.
Her brother looked stunned. “Steph,” he said, taking her hand, “what’s wrong?”
“I feel like everything is ending,” she said.
She was thinking of the old days, as she and Bennie now called them—not just pre-Crandale but premarriage, preparenthood, pre-money, pre–hard drug renunciation, preresponsibility of any kind, when they were still kicking around the Lower East Side with Bosco, going to bed after sunrise, turning up at strangers’ apartments, having sex in quasi public, engaging in daring acts that had more than once included (for her) shooting heroin, because none of it was serious. They were young and lucky and strong—what did they have to worry about? If they didn’t like the result, they could go back and start again. And now Bosco was sick, hardly able to move, feverishly planning his death. Was this outcome a freak aberration from natural laws, or was it normal—a thing they should have seen coming? Had they somehow brought it on?
Jules put his arm around her. “If you’d asked me this morning, I would have said we were finished,” he said. “All of us, the whole country—the fucking world. But now I feel the opposite.”
Stephanie knew. She could practically hear the hope sluicing through her brother. “So what’s the answer?” she asked.
“Sure, everything is ending,” Jules said, “but not yet.”
V
Stephanie got through her next meeting, with a designer of small patent-leather purses; then ignored a warning instinct and stopped by the office. Her boss, La Doll, was on the phone, as always, but she muted the call and yelled from her office, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Stephanie said, startled. She was still in the hall.
“All good with Purse-Man?” La Doll kept effortless track of her employees’ schedules, even freelancers like Stephanie.
“Just fine.”
La Doll finished her call, shot some espresso from the Krups machine on her desk into her bottomless thimble-sized cup, and called, “Come, Steph.”
Stephanie entered her boss’s soaring corner office. La Doll was one of those people who seem, even to those who know them well, digitally enhanced: the bright blond bob cut; the predatory lipstick; the roving, algorithmic eyes. “Next time,” she said, tweezing Stephanie briefly with her gaze, “cancel the meeting.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I could feel your gloom from the hall,” La Doll said. “It’s like having the flu. Don’t expose the clients.”
Stephanie laughed. She had known her boss forever—long enough to know that she was absolutely serious. “God, you’re a bitch,” she said.
La Doll chuckled, already dialing again. “It’s a burden,” she said.
Stephanie drove back to Crandale (Jules had taken the train) to pick up Chris at soccer practice. At seven, her son was still willing to throw his arms around Stephanie after a day apart. She hugged him, breathing the wheaty smell of his hair. “Is Uncle Jules home?” Chris asked. “Was he building anything?”
“Actually, Uncle Jules worked today,” she said, feeling a prick of pride as she spoke the words. “He was working in the city.”
The day’s vicissitudes had resolved into a single droning wish to talk to Bennie. Stephanie had spoken with Sasha, his assistant, whom she’d long distrusted as the gatekeeper of Bennie’s misbehavior but grown fond of in the years since his reform. Bennie had called on his way home, stuck in traffic, but by then Stephanie wanted to explain it in person. She pictured laughing with Bennie about Bosco and feeling her strange unhappiness lift. One thing she knew: she was finished with lying about the tennis.
Bennie still wasn’t home when she and Chris got back. Jules appeared with a basketball and challenged Chris to a game of horse, and they repaired to the driveway, the garage door shuddering from their blows. The sun was beginning to set.
Bennie finally returned and went straight upstairs to shower. Stephanie put some frozen chicken thighs in warm water to thaw, then followed him up. Steam drifted from the open bathroom door into their bedroom, twirling in the last rays of sun. Stephanie felt like showering, too—they had a double shower with handmade fixtures whose exorbitant price they’d argued over. But Bennie had been adamant.
She kicked off her shoes and unbuttoned her blouse, tossing it on the bed with Bennie’s clothes. The contents of his pockets were scattered on the small antique table where he always left them. Stephanie glanced at what was there, an old habit left over from the days when she’d lived in suspicion. Coins, gum wrappers, a parking garage ticket. As she moved away, something stuck to the bottom of her bare foot. She plucked it off—a bobby pin—and headed for the wastebasket. Before dropping it in, she glanced at the pin: generic light gold, identical to bobby pins you’d find in the corners of nearly any Crandale woman’s house. Except her own.
Stephanie paused, holding the pin. There were a thousand reasons it could be here—a party they’d had, friends who might have come up to use the bathroom, the cleaning woman—but Stephanie knew whose it was as if she had already known, as if she weren’t discovering the fact but remembering it. She sank onto the bed in her skirt and bra, hot and shivery, blinking from shock. Of course. It took no imagination at all to see how everything had converged: pain; revenge; power; desire. He’d slept with Kathy. Of course.
Stephanie pulled her shirt back on and buttoned it carefully, still holding the bobby pin. She went into the bathroom, searching out Bennie’s lean brown shape through the steam and running water. He hadn’t seen her. And then she stopped, halted by a sense of dreadful familiarity, of knowing everything they would say: the jagged trek from denial to self-lacerating apology for Bennie; from rage to bruised acceptance for herself. She had thought they would never make that trek again. Had truly believed it.
She left the bathroom and tossed the pin in the trash. She slipped noiselessly down the front stairs in her bare feet. Jules and Chris were in the kitchen, glugging water from the Brita. Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.
The sky was electric blue above the trees, but the yard felt dark. Stephanie went to the edge of the lawn and sat, her forehead on her knees. The grass and soil were still warm from the day. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t. The feeling was too deep.
She lay down, curled on her side in the grass, as if she were shielding the damaged part of herself, or trying to contain the pain that issued from it. Every turn of her thoughts increased her sense of horror, her belief that she couldn’t recover, had no more resources to draw on. Why was this worse than the other times? But it was.
She heard Bennie’s voice from the kitchen: “Steph?”
She got up and staggered into a flowerbed. She and Bennie had planted it together: gladioli, hosta, black-eyed Susans. She heard stems crunching under her feet, but she didn’t look down. She went all the way to the fence and knelt in the dirt.
“Mom?” Chris’s voice, from upstairs. Stephanie covered her ears.
Then came another voice, so close to Stephanie that she heard it even through her hands. It spoke in a whisper: “Hello there.”
It took her a moment to separate this new, nearby voice from the ones inside the house. She felt no fear, only a kind of numb curiosity. “Who’s that?”
“It’s me.”
Stephanie realized her eyes were shut. She opened them now and looked through the slats of fence. Amid the shadows she made out Noreen’s white face peeking through from the other side. She’d taken off her sunglasses; Stephanie vaguely noted a pair of skittish eyes. “Hi Noreen,” she said.
“I like to sit in this spot,” Noreen said.
“I know.”
Stephanie wanted to move away, but she couldn’t seem to move. She closed her eyes again. Noreen didn’t speak, and as the minutes passed she seemed to fade into the rummaging breeze and chatter of insects, as if the night itself were alive. Stephanie hunched in the dirt for a long time, or what felt like a long time—maybe it was only a minute. She knelt until the calling started up again—Jules too, his panicked voice careening through the dark. At last she tottered to her feet. In unfolding herself, she felt the painful thing settle inside her. Her knees shook from its new, awkward weight.
“Good night, Noreen,” she said as she began picking her way back through the flowers and bushes toward the house.
“Good night,” she faintly heard.
Selling the General
Dolly’s first big idea was the hat. She picked teal blue, fuzzy, with flaps that came down over the general’s large dried-apricot ears. The ears were unsightly, Dolly thought, and best covered up.
When she saw the general’s picture in the
Times
a few days later, she almost choked on her poached egg: he looked like a baby, a big sick baby with a giant mustache and a double chin. The headline couldn’t have been worse:
GENERAL B.’s ODD HEADGEAR SPURS CANCER RUMORS
LOCAL UNREST GROWS
Dolly bolted to her feet in her dingy kitchen and turned in a frantic circle, spilling tea on her bathrobe. She looked wildly at the general’s picture. And then she realized: the ties. They hadn’t cut off the ties under the hat as she’d instructed, and a big fuzzy bow under the general’s double chin was disastrous. Dolly ran barefoot into her office/bedroom and began plowing through fax pages, trying to unearth the most recent sequence of numbers she was supposed to call to reach Arc, the general’s human relations captain. The general moved a lot to avoid assassination, but Arc was meticulous about faxing Dolly their updated contact information. These faxes usually came at around 3:00 a.m., waking Dolly and sometimes her daughter, Lulu. Dolly never mentioned the disruption; the general and his team were under the impression that she was the top publicist in New York, a woman whose fax machine would be in a corner office with a panoramic view of New York City (as indeed it had been for many years), not ten inches away from the foldout sofa where she slept. Dolly could only attribute their misapprehension to some dated article that had drifted their way from
Vanity Fair
or
InStyle
or
People
, where Dolly had been written about and profiled under her then moniker: La Doll.
The first call from the general’s camp had come just in time; Dolly had hocked her last piece of jewelry. She was copyediting textbooks until 2:00 a.m., sleeping until five, and then providing polite phone chitchat to aspiring English speakers in Tokyo until it was time to wake Lulu and fix her breakfast. And all of that wasn’t nearly enough to keep Lulu in Miss Rutgers’s School for Girls. Often Dolly’s three allotted hours of sleep were spent in spasms of worry at the thought of the next monstrous tuition bill.
And then Arc had called. The general wanted an exclusive retainer. He wanted rehabilitation, American sympathy, an end to the CIA’s assassination attempts. If Qaddafi could do it, why not he? Dolly wondered seriously if overwork and lack of sleep were making her hallucinate, but she named a price. Arc began taking down her banking information. “The general presumed your fee would be higher,” he said, and if Dolly had been able to speak at that moment she would have said,
That’s my weekly retainer, hombre, not my monthly
, or
Hey, I haven’t given you the formula that lets you calculate the actual
price, or
That’s just for the two-week trial period when I decide whether I want to work with you
. But Dolly couldn’t speak. She was weeping.
When the first installment appeared in her bank account, Dolly’s relief was so immense that it almost obliterated the tiny anxious muttering voice inside her:
Your client is a genocidal dictator
. Dolly had worked with shitheads before, God knew; if she didn’t take this job someone else would snap it up; being a publicist is about not judging your clients—these excuses were lined up in formation, ready for deployment should that small dissident voice pluck up its courage to speak with any volume. But lately, Dolly couldn’t even hear it.
Now, as she scuttled over her frayed Persian rug looking for the general’s most recent numbers, the phone rang. It was 6:00 a.m. Dolly lunged, praying Lulu’s sleep wouldn’t be disturbed.
“Hello?” But she knew who it was.