Authors: Michael Tolkin
The swindle lasted ten months. The alliances within the group had never been more socially complicated than the conspiracy needed, so they hardly ever met when it was over, having little to talk about except their history. Among the people who knew one another already, Farrar discouraged social connections, on guard against friendships among the wives, which could promote more time shared by the men and might lead to private chats beside
the barbecue, one testing the other to see if he was game for another round of big money, which might lead to further crime, which might lead to arrest and then betrayal and the exposure of this careful fraud, and Paul Farrar's arrest. Tom was certain that Farrar would have killed to save himself. Seven years on, the statue of limitations had passed and they were free in the eyes of the law. Farrar joked, “With time off for good behavior, we'd be getting out about now.”
Tom liked to talk to Farrar about the implications of living with the memory of sin; it was one of Tom's favorite subjects, how the knowledge of an unpunished crime grinds a lens through which the world looks small and more easily managed. Paul noted to Tom that of the four marriages in the group, there had been no divorces. “I picked right,” said Farrar. “Everyone I picked was stable.”
They knew that guilt destroys some men, and Tom credited Farrar for refusing to pretend that their occasional streams of bad feeling weren't guilt. Each of them discovered that the world made more sense, knowing that anyone they met might just as easily have a secret such as theirs. Over the years, as the crime passed into a dimming legend even in his own dossier, Tom confessed small pieces of it to new friends, or alluded to his villainous past in a way that gave the impression he was talking about a few years wasted on drugs, hardly a special event, but he cast his net with a careful intonation when he wanted to test a hunch with someone he suspected of his own criminal story. He didn't expect anyone to suddenly tear the
wrapping off his secret any more than Tom would have opened up. If the other was as vigilant against exposure as Tom, he would, with tact and speed, move the discussion to neutral territory. Then Tom knew. Skilled deflection was the giveaway.
What if he pushed himself to one of the women by the pool and said straight to her face, “Listen to this carefully: a lot of people don't get caught, and sometimes there's no way to look at a man and guess his crime, but let him lift the veil on his own past, just a little, and when you know your own felony, you can see it on him like a tattoo.” What then?
Five days into the vacation, and none of the women had yet dragged a fantasy out of him. And then on the sixth day, the airport bus delivered her.
With hair short as Joan of Arc's, the woman on whom Tom would fix his fantasy sat with her feet in the water, reading an ancient edition of
Sense and Sensibility
. The book had a faded hunter-green cover, with the title embossed in a chipped gold. She wore a wedding ring and a small diamond. Tom was jealous of the woman's husband. Here was a woman careless enough to risk staining a rare book with suntan oil, just for the pleasure of reading a nineteenth-century novel in a nineteenth-century binding. What a wife she must be! What a companion! How well must she encourage her husband if she allows herself such a violation of custom. There's a husband who can share his secrets with his wife! But why are they here? The husband of such a woman, wouldn't he be a greater
success than the rest of the men at the Montego House, elevated by his wife's beauty, confidence, taste, and careless attachment to precious things, wouldn't he have the wealth for a suite at the Four Seasons, or a villa with a staff and room for his friends? Or was Tom's little movie of their success the payoff for an ambition she could have helped her man achieve, but together, servants of the highest moral style, they had rejected? Did she teach him that she was all the prize a man could want? Did she reward him for leaving the office in time for dinner with the children, helping them with their homework, reading poetry in bed? She could love him so well that her love tamed his striving after the real cost of the Four Seasons' fluffy towels and twenty-four-hour in-room dining. There's a noble wife for these greedy days, there's the woman of valor! Take the rare book to the beach because you want to. Don't work so hard that you miss the pleasures of the moment.
Tom watched her turn the page, slowly. From what service of devotion other than a love of precious thingsâlike this bookâand the freedom to lose them, damage them, could he recognize a woman whose conversation would surely slide from erudition to the capricious to the risqué to bed? She was everything he had ever needed from a stranger. The intrigue of her signs melted his brain; her combination of fashion and literature, narcissism and intellect, made her the closest thing at the beach to Paris. Had she cut her hair for comfort? He hoped not. He wanted her to have almost shaved her head for a purpose
so complicated that her motivation was deeper than she might know; he wanted her to have cut that gorgeous hair in defiance of the world, to deny the raving famished beast of the world the morning milk of her beauty. He might have broken a window with his hand if he thought that by cutting her hair this woman's sacrifice was also cruel, to protect her man from the sin of adoring something she could lose, to ruin the revered crown of her beauty and diminish her beloved husband's strength for work, destroying his shot at marriage-wrecking wealth.
Tom tried to read her more deeply and studied her for ten happy minutes like a birdwatcher in a rookery. Now the full scene at the pool, so loud and annoying without this woman, giggled with the life of children in water. Nothing had changed except Tom's fervor.
Without warning, the woman's children hugged her from behind: her daughter, Tom guessed six; and a boy, probably four, whose Girl Friday brought them to her for just those kisses, on their way to the children's buffet. When they toddled off, the woman with short hair set the book down and leaned back to do stomach crunches, lifting her feet out of the water and pumping her legs in and away. Was she showing off? Good. Was she bored? Even better. What theater did she hope the attention would open? He tried to add up what excited him about her, and weave into this the elements of the day, the heat, the heavy wet air, and the fumes of his second imaginary rum punch. Taking these things together, he convinced himself that she was a rare free spirit with a profound inner
life like his, and if so, she would be available to him if he found the right words.
When he passed by, she stirred a little, and he knew that she knew, without knowing exactly why, that someone wanted her. He was certain that the Jane Austen of Jamaica felt all of this secret attention as a subtle pressure in the air from Tom's direction, and from then on that day, even as his furthest stray thought retrieved a mental image of her when she was somewhere else in the resort, she would look over her shoulder.
In bed that night, Rosalie said, “You're finally relaxing.”
“Yes,” he said. “It always takes me a while. I'm sorry.”
“That's why vacations last a few weeks. You work hard, you need a lot of time to find yourself.”
The next afternoon Tom saw Jane Austen's husband walking on the beach with the little boy and girl. Tom thought at first that this fat man in a pink Lacoste shirt, lime-green Bermuda shorts, brown socks, and black sandals, this sweating parody of the revolting American tourist, was only a friend, but the little boy called him Daddy and held his hand, chattering about octopus tentacles, and what happens if you cut off the tentacle of an octopus, and does the tentacle grow back? So Jane Austen, the best inspiration this stupid resort could offer him, was married to an oaf. If he was going to give himself a fever over a stranger, he wanted a worthy rival to illustrate the dust jacket, a handsomely corrupt pirate standing defeated in the background while Tom made love to his lady. He
wanted someone who threatened him, a lean man with the perceptive gaze of a flight instructor, a judge of character, a man who could size you up and, by the way you stood at ease or agony when no one was watching, judge even your father. But then a thought gave Tom fuel for his fantasy: the fat man and Jane Austen were lying, this marriage was all for show. She was his slave and would never see her real husband again, that man of muscle and sinew, if she didn't cooperate. Tom found himself rescuing Jane Austen from the demonically obese kidnapper only to return her to her grateful thin husband, a pediatric eye surgeon working among the poor in Haiti.
If this were so, thought Tom, how could I signal to her that I was here to help? I could tell her about Ira. I could sit beside her at the pool, and I could say, “I used to have a friend named Ira. He inherited a construction business from his father. He was always late to meetings, and he was lazy and slow and the business failed. He was fat. I'll tell you the truth, I used to bore my wife with all the excuses I made for Ira, because Ira was my friend. Even though he came to his mother's funeral in a hooded blue sweatshirt, I wanted to help him. One day he asked me to loan him money so he could buy an industrial coffee roaster, so he could open a coffee business. My wife said that if I wanted to throw my money away, I should at least buy the industrial coffee roaster myself and then lease it to him, so if he went bust I'd have something to sell. Of course the business died, what do you expect, because Ira was a loser. I sold the machine at a loss, but this was
good for me, a tuition payment on experience. In the difference between the price and the damage, I stopped justifying Ira's failures. I stopped having sympathy for Ira. I stopped looking at his inanimate bulk as the expression of some pain that made him such a disaster at business, at love, at friendship. Would you like to know why? Because of my wife. My wife didn't see obesity as a problem. She pointed out to me the many fat men in the world who transcend all of Ira's most unfortunate attributes: a thick nose, small eyes, big stomach, dying hairline; men with stunning women, maybe their wives, maybe just women they fuck. I saw these men, these larded medieval Jew barons, I had always seen them, but denied the implication of what they proved, to protect my buddy Ira.
“No longer. I'm a connoisseur now, and we have a name for these men: my wife and I call these men the Realized Iras. Realized Iras are otherwise grotesque men of commerce whose vivacious appetites make them sexually attractive, whose expansive capacities for money, food, pleasure, and friendship intimidate the world. And if I were going to leave my wife for you, Jane Austen, even in fantasy, your fat man would be a Realized Ira, not the sunburned sloth who made you his slave. Your alleged husband has no tone, no buoyancy, none of the elastic grace of the Realized Iras, and he has none of that grace in his heart,” which is why Tom killed him for what he did the awful night of the Reggae Party, after Tom had already resigned his tangled daydream.
It happened on the eighth night of the trip, when Tom was trying to make the best of things. He took his daughters swimming in the ocean every day, giving Rosalie the time to rest. This commitment yielded his marriage an allowance for gladness. He began to relax. He encouraged himself to see his surrender of Jane Austen as his triumph over an addiction to distraction. Rosalie, sensing a change in Tom's relationship to life, from sullen detachment to quiet acceptance, soon hugged him in pure appreciative companionship. “I love you, Tom,” she told him. “Tom, I really love you. You're so good, and I've been so bad. I have to apologize, I've been distant, I've been cold, and I see you with the girls, and I realize how much I've been withholding from the three of you. I'll try to be better.” So she blamed herself, the chill between them was her fault, blind to the price he made Rosalie pay for his passion for Jane Austen. He might have told her that the fault was his but considered that perhaps Rosalie was confessing in her own oblique way to sins he never suspected. He could have said, “Look,
Rosalie, it's not just you, it's me. I have my crimes, what are yours?” No, give her privacy. He hoped she was telling the truth in her own way, to relieve herself of a burden. He thought he could read her mind, which told him, “We always try to hide the secret of our lives. What I believe to be the hidden core of my life will not easily be deciphered, even when I give a hint, as in this shy apology, to the outer circumstances.” He loved her for this, and he hugged her close, and when she said, again, “Tom, I'm sorry,” he found a heavy tear that fell down his cheek, for he was crying in gratitude, crying in praise.
They went to dinner. The girls ate with all the other children on a different terrace, watched over by the nannies. Rosalie brought Tom to a table with a woman she was excited about, Avital Davis, an American who lived in Jerusalem with her husband, an Israeli, who was at home. Avital was here with her parents and sister and her sister's family, all from Cincinnati, for their annual reunion. Everyone was agreeable: the two sisters, women of attractive high intelligence and culture, and their parents, serious and attentive, taking their place in an unforced easy way with a younger generation. The mother was a labor lawyer. The father was a judge, and Tom, for the first time that week, found himself in conversation with a man he admired. Tom, in turn, felt Judge Davis's interest, curiosity, and respect. The men let the women talk about children and education while they talked about jail. They came to the subject easily. Judge Davis had many things to say about the breakdown of the prison
system, which fascinated Tom, who did not tell the judge that his obsession with life behind bars was not just academic. He craved to know what his life would have been like if the conspiracy failed and the men were arrested. Here was the syndicate's weakness; Farrar swore the men never to tell their wives. “Call me when you want to talk about itâat any time of the day or nightâif you can't bear your guilt, but don't tell your wives.” Farrar was a genius, and a genius is someone who understands men, one at a time. Though they trusted Farrar and wanted his admiration, Tom composed a fugue of betrayal in which one of the doctor's wives, suspicious of her husband, discovers his hidden money, and then the crime, and, in a fit of ethics, leaves him, hires a divorce lawyer, himself an ethical man who encourages her to bring her evidence to the district attorney's office, and she, made horny by her lawyer's integrity (in Tom's imagination, he's in a wheelchair), falls in love with him while informing on her husband, devoting the rest of her life to the service of this honest invalid. She leads a fight for the rights of the handicapped while Tom is in jail.