They could also do a lot with a person who had knowingly withheld such information for several yearsâthat would be Caroline, if she had understood the significance of the tape. Such an act constituted obstruction of justice at the minimum, and in a case as charged as this one was certain to be avidly prosecuted by the Manhattan DA's office. And then, there was me.
I
could use that tape. I could
really
use that tape. It would make for a great story, it would make for helpful police contacts for years, and maybe it could be leverage against Hobbs firing me. Upon reflection I doubted that; he lived in another stratosphere; he would fire me if he had to, if only to show that his word as a despot was good. But if I had recently broken a big story, the chances were improved that I'd get rehired quickly by one of the other papers. Wren, they would see, still had the stuff. I turned off the machine and, with a sort of greedy acceleration of my breath, slipped the tape from the machine and into my own deep coat pocket. Then I put the empty box back into the steel trunk with the other boxed tapes, lest it appear that any was missing.
But what to do? Run out of the bank with the police tape or stay there, cold-bloodedly searching for the tape that Hobbs had demanded? The latter task could take
hours
âI still had dozens of tapes to seeâand I was too jumpy to stay. I would only worry that Caroline or one of the bank officials might arrive, that the riot tape might somehow be taken from me.
Get out, get out
, my head told me.
But I didn't. I stayed another two hours, flitting through the rest of the tapes, looking for the image of Hobbs. It was more of the same. Finally I closed the door behind me and
hurried down the carpeted hallway. I reminded myself not to walk too quickly, and I casually kept my hands in my coat pockets, in order that the shape of the Fellows tape not be perceived. It was the worst cheap acting, but guards and receptionists, being from the lower classes, are deferential to white men in good suits. When the elevator reached the ground floor, when all that lay between me and the street was the lobby and the glass doors, it occurred to me that if Caroline was not forthcoming with the other tape, I could use the new one against her. I'm not proud of this thought, but then again, measured against all that followed, this was but a small sin in the wash of great ones.
Â
Â
Lisa was standing quietly over the kitchen sink when I got home. She looked ashen. I guessed Josephine had told her about the gun.
“You know?” she asked when I came in.
“The gun.”
She nodded. “I thought about firing her, right there.”
“So did I.”
Lisa came over and held on to me. “It's a hard decision. I wasâI don't know if I ever was more upset. Not even when Daddy died.”
“How did she react?”
“We both cried a lot.”
“The kids love her,” I said.
“She loves them.”
“We're never going to find anyone better.”
Lisa nodded exhaustedly, and I remembered the operation. “How did it go?”
“I think I did a pretty good job,” she said. “The tissue pinked up nicely.”
Later that evening, we watched the children in the bath. They shrieked in happiness and splashed water out of the tub and I barked appropriately and they kept playing with the soap and plastic toys, sweet and unknowing. Sally, as uninhibited as she will ever be, hooked her heels on the edge of
the tub and thrust her hips up into the air, exactly the movement I've seen in strip bars when the women present themselves knee-first for the tip of a bill slid through the velvet garter. Now Sally put her hand on herself. “Is this my bottom?” she asked.
My wife shrugged. “Well, that's a place called your vagina, sweetie.”
She looked at me in confusion. “A place called China?”
“No, sweetie, your
vagina.
Now put your legs down.”
“There is a place called China.”
“Yes, that's different, though.”
And when they were out of the tub they ran around and shrieked some more, Tommy riding his fire truck naked, his little penis jiggling in a silly, rubbery way until I grabbed him and slapped a diaper on him with the speed of a short-order cook in a deli. And then the little pajamas and socks. Same with my daughter, and then the drinking of the milk, she from a cup, he from a warmed bottle. After they were asleep, Lisa called her transcription service to dictate the last of the paperwork on the operation, the first part having been dictated immediately after the operation on a wall-phone outside the operating room, Lisa still in her operating gown. Any documented advantage to avoid or win a malpractice suit. I could see her in the bathroom brushing her hair with one hand and talking into the portable phone with the other: “ ⦠evaluation of motion at left metatarsophalangeal joint and interphalan-geal joint. Period. Monthly evaluation of extension. Period. Monthly evaluation of adduction power ⦔
She stopped when she saw me. “I had a funny new patient come into the office this afternoon after the surgery. She complained of basic rheumatoid arthritis.”
“But you're a surgeon.”
“I know. But she wanted an appointment with me anyway. She had called this morning, made a fuss.”
“You don't do arthritis.”
“I'll break a bad fusion sometimes, you know, if the fingers are terribly crooked.”
“What happened?”
“Well, she came in, and I was really surprised.”
“Why?”
“She was
quite
beautiful,” Lisa said. “Beautiful face and eyes, sort of like Uma Thurman except with a much fuller figure. She couldn't have been more than twenty-eight, twenty-nine. I was really dumbfounded.”
A silent scream in my head: Carolineâcrazy, ruining my life. “What can you do for arthritis?” I said. “Aspirin, anti-inflammatories?”
“In her case, nothing.”
“Why?”
“Because she doesn't have arthritis.”
“What does she have?”
“Nothing. Her hands are perfectly healthy.”
“Presumably her hands hurt her.”
“She told me she had a lot of pain. But she doesn't.”
I could see that Lisa had been evaluating it, had stacked up a set of observations into an argument. “How can you tell?”
“Twenty-eight is generally too young for the onset,” Lisa began. “Ten years later, okay. And the kind of pain she was describing is more than just inflammation of the synovial membrane, it gets into destruction of the articular cartilage. She didn't have morning stiffness or redness or swelling or symmetricality of symptoms. In fact, I pulled pretty hard on her joints and she didn't flinch. Plus she wasn't
thinking
about it. Most patients want a fix, you knowâan end to the pain. At least an explanation. They want to be told what the problem is, how it works, and everything, what they could eat that would make it better, vitamins, drugs, acupuncture, exercises, hot water, cold water, anything to relieve the pain. This woman was not in pain, not in the thumb or forefinger or the first joints of the other fingers, nowhere.”
“Don't you have some kind of test?”
“We can check the sedimentation rate. It's a blood test for inflammation.”
I was listening to my voice for insincerity. “Did you do that?”
“No.”
“What did you do?”
“First I decided to say nothing.”
“Then?”
“Then I saw her fiddle with her watchband, and if she had the pain she was describing, that would be impossible.”
“You confronted her?”
“I told her it didn't seem to me that she had arthritis.”
“Was she surprised?”
“No. Not a bit.”
“No?”
“She knew she didn't have arthritis. She made it up,” said Lisa.
This had to be Caroline. “Why?”
“Mystery.”
Don't do it
, I warned myself.
Don't ask her name.
“Did she say anything else?” I asked.
“She asked me about being a surgeon. Why I did it, and so on. She asked about the children.”
“Like what?” I said evenly.
“How I managed with them, school and so on.”
“All right.”
“She also asked me what my husband did.”
“You told her he was a sex fiend.”
“I said he's a reporter.”
“Had she read the column?”
“I didn't ask her.”
“Did she say what she did?”
“She didn't say, no.”
“Soâ?”
“So she was letting
me
know that
she
knew that
I
knew that she was faking it. There was no shame. Usually fakers who get found out feel some shame. Not her. I think she came to my office to ask me questions about myself and my children and to tell me that she didn't have arthritis and didn't care if I knew it.”
“Sounds like a nut.”
“She
wasn't.”
I shook my head at the seeming incomprehensibility of the thing. Then we sat there. A marriage has these pauses. The silence was a possibility. I could fill it up with an explanation. I could begin at the beginning and tell Lisa all about it and she would listen. She'd be furious, but she would listen, listen for the tones and words and modulations that would tell her how it would go from there on out, if this was a little problem or a catastrophic one. She would know inside the first sentence of my telling how it was all going to go. She knew me that well, she knew herself that well, and in truth I hated this. I loved it but I hated it. I saw the marital value in being known so well, but I saw, too, that it left me naked. I didn't want to be naked with my wife.
Instead, I took off my clothes. “I can't talk about hands anymore,” I told her. “I need other parts.”
It worked. Lisa seemed relieved. Her husband was more interested in screwing than in talking about some crazy woman. Certainly if something funny was going on, he would be unable to pretend that this wasn't so and then have sex with his wife. He wasn't that kind of a monster.
But he was. And so to bed: the darkness, the exhalation of the day, the waiting to start, the far musical hush of the city somehow inside the room, the you-first or the me-first, the decision to start, the evasions and the concentrations, the getting started. My father and both of his older brothers have all had prostate surgery, as did their father before them. It's a bloody operation, and all were rendered impotent by the surgery, so I figure that I probably have the same fate awaiting me. Perhaps I will reveal this little death to my son in the same way that my father revealed it to me. In any case, every night passed is a night closer to that possible fate, and so I take my pleasure while and as often as I can, while I am still young enough to do so easily, for time is upon us, an invisible hand upon the back of our neck, pressing down.
“Come up here now,” Lisa said.
I moved toward her head, resting on my knees, and she opened her mouth for me. After a minute or so, one of her hands moved down between her legs. I have studied her as
she does this, in the dark watched her closed or half-opened eyes, and understood nothing. At first, I think, she was merely being generous toward my desires. But in time, as each night Lisa urged this, I saw that she enjoyed it, the fleshy brutal possibility of it, and was teaching herself something about relaxing her throat. She liked to use her teeth and wanted to see how hard she could bite without really hurting me. She liked it to go in and out against her teeth, not only against her lips, and she was not happy unless I pushed hard into her. She would gag and I would pull back immediately, but, with an unambiguous hand on my ass from behind, she would push me back in. In this, I came to understand that as much as my wife was with me, she was also having a private dialogue with herself, one that did not need to be explained. One that needed
not
to be explained. She liked to have the dialogue, and the way that she had found to have it, at least for the time being, was to have me in her throat.
Now I moved my hands through her hair, down her forehead, her eyes, her nose, her lips, running a finger across her top lip, right at the edge where the three different pieces of flesh met, each piece feeling two others, all slipping back and forth and across in wet confusion. I could feel the stretch in the skin of her cheek, the little ridge in the corner of her lips, the warmth of her breath through her nostrils. I understood that I, the man, was a mere instrument being played by her, the woman, and there was a great, strange freedom in this. Then she uttered a deep-throated cry, her mouth full of muffled sound, and I looked down to see her closed eyes fluttering. She arced and relaxed. Her eyes opened, unseeing, then closed.