The Stager: A Novel (13 page)

“???”

“But the pig is gone. So there’s a new set of 3.”

“Elsa what r u talking about?”

“I can’t find the pig. When I get home I’m going to ask the Stager.”

“Nabila said it would be better to let the Stager just do her job.”

“She’s nice Mom. U would really like her. She has purple nail polish like mine.”

“Nice.”

“Remember u said purple nail polish with sparkles was not for grownups?”

“No.”

“You said it was tacky.”

“I did not say it was tacky.”

“Yes you did.”

Bella remembers that each of these international texts is costing one dollar. “I think you misunderstood me,” she writes. Although maybe she hasn’t. Now Bella seems to have some dim memory of Elsa wanting to paint Bella’s nails purple just before she left for a conference in Brussels, and she’d been in both a rush and a bad mood.

“Ok Elsa. I’m glad u like her but she has a lot of work to do.”

“Ok. Wait. Mademoiselle Shapiro wants me to put the phone away.”

“Oh my goodness, yes, put it away! I didn’t realize u were in class.”

“It’s ok. I told her it’s u. She knows u r very important and so she said it’s ok.”

“No. It’s not ok. We’ll talk later.”

“Ok. Also I am going to leave the Stager alone but first she said we could paint the chair and fix the rabbit that has crooked ears.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I painted a chair like the Stager. She likes to paint chairs. Ok bye Mom! Socks!!!”

“?”

Elsa doesn’t reply, so Bella tries again: “Does she like to paint chairs, or pictures of chairs?”

Still no answer. Bella has been uneasy about having a stranger in her house, mucking around with her things, particularly while we’re both away, but Amanda has insisted that the house needs staging in order to sell, and Bella figures this is probably true. After the house sat idle for three months the first time it was listed, she’s in no position to argue. Disturbingly, Elsa seems to be weirdly fixated on this woman, the Stager, whoever she is. And this thing with chairs—does she paint the chairs themselves, like a furniture restorer, or does she paint pictures of chairs? It is a possibly important distinction.

Bella sends another text. “Did you hear my voice mail?”

After a moment, she writes again: “Don’t forget your dad is on his way home. Remember to give him the msg.”

I am, indeed, on my way home, and I order another tiny bottle of gin to celebrate this fact.

*   *   *

NOT SEEING RAYMOND
was part of the promise Bella made when I learned of the affair. She said we were going to have complete transparency in our marriage, from that moment forth. “Transparency” became her favorite word. She used it in reference to her interactions with Raymond, to our finances, to her work and travel plans. I began to feel strangely proprietary about transparency, like it was
our
word, the key to
our
repair, and I bristled when I heard it used in other contexts (see transparent Belgian lace curtains, transparent data encryption, transparent fish, etc.). Then, when Bella was named Luxum’s Vice-President for Transparency, I began to wonder if my life was someone’s practical joke.

Even back in the pre-omniscient days, I knew more than she knew I knew, which is to say I knew not only about Raymond, but also the salient details of the sordid liaison with Guillermo Peña and the resultant mess. Guillermo she hadn’t seen in ten years, although that had less to do with self-restraint than with the fact that he’d essentially disappeared off the face of the earth. Bella was under the impression that after his brief if celebrated three-year stint as the Yankees’ first baseman, he’d gone back to El Salvador, although she could no longer recall where she might have heard this. Possibly from one of our housecleaners, who claimed—unreliably, I think—to be his distant cousin. Bella had tried to look him up, but there’d been no mention of him in cyberspace since his contract had failed to be renewed, which was only a few months after his name had surfaced in reference to performance-enhancing drugs. She wasn’t really looking for him, but if she happened to run into him in a dark alley someday, she’d tell him not to worry—Elsa wasn’t his, she didn’t want anything from him, and, so far as she was concerned, it was for the best that he’d disappeared. She had no lingering interest in Guillermo. To be honest, she’d never had any real interest at all.

Raymond and Bella had both been huge Yankees fans, and they’d even once managed to attend a game together, which was something of a coup, since there were few opportunities for them to appear together in public. But back in the flush days of print journalism, the newspaper had leased a corporate box, and it was sometimes possible for employees, and even for summer interns such as Bella was at the time, to finagle a free ticket or two. Finagling was one of Bella’s specialties, one of many sidebar talents, which is why she became such a successful banker. “Finagle” was not necessarily a word in Raymond’s vocabulary: he got everything in life he wanted, and free baseball tickets was the least of it.

Hot dogs and beer, the national anthem sung by a troop of Boy Scouts from Staten Island, the whiff of Raymond with his fabulously exotic cologne, the name of which he refused (pretentiously) to disclose but which had traces of sandalwood and Scotch, his difficult-to-isolate accent, part British, part Irish, part New York. Bella had pulled out her phone and sent her friend a message: “I am love.” (Not to be confused with the Italian movie of the same name, starring Tilda Swinton, which appeared several years later.)

Her friend had gotten stuck on the typo, which turned into a jokey exchange about whether Bella was in love, or whether she was love itself. They decided on the latter. Then the friend said that
being love
was fine, but being
in love
with Raymond was a train wreck.

Bella knew this already. It wasn’t simply that they were both married, or that he had young children—that was the normal sort of train wreck that happens every day, whether of the sordid tabloid variety or the more refined opera-libretto version, in which the protagonists, because they are successful or highly educated, think their tryst of literary or cosmic significance. From the moment Bella laid eyes on Raymond, she knew it was going to be bad. Bad with the precision of a Swiss watch; you only had to read his poetry, steely and unsentimental and harsh, to get that he would add Bella to the list of people he’d eventually undo. He was not just a known philanderer; he was coldness personified, which might explain his need to so compulsively find women with whom to warm himself in bed. Even his rare pastoral sonnets (ears of corn, grazing sheep, farmhands with craggy faces, etc., etc.) had in their cadence a nuclear chill.

In a
New York Times
review of his most recent collection,
Black Monday
, the critic remarked that Raymond Branch’s sonnets were defined by the same cold concision that made his name, back when he’d worked in finance, synonymous with Ivan Boesky. Did I mention that the thumb on his right hand was missing? Or that he leaned on a cane? Or that he was more than ten years older than Bella? I’m not sure what makes the man attractive to my wife; perhaps it is simply that he is not me.

That night, at the baseball game, after dating Bella for about six months (the use of the word “dating” was theirs, which added a quaint air of innocence, I suppose), Raymond tried to break it off. He delivered this information during the bottom of the sixth inning, with no prelude, at a particularly inelegant moment, when Bella had a hot dog stuffed in her mouth and a bit of mustard dribbling down her chin. She’d actually been thinking the very opposite sort of thought, had been in the midst of some sentimental or maybe just hormonal surge that had her fantasizing about leaving me, easing his wife out of the picture, and creating a future with Raymond, hanging curtains in the beautiful New York penthouse they used as a pied-à-terre. (Bella had been there a few times—Raymond was apparently not hampered by pedestrian sentiments about bringing other women into the marital bed.)

She figured he was bluffing about the breakup, even though Raymond had spent half the baseball game on his phone and at one point he told whoever was on the other end that he loved her; from what Bella could tell, he hadn’t been speaking to Seema, his wife. She texted some of this to her friend, who replied sharply, “I told you he’s an asshole.”

Peña was on fire that night. He’d batted two home runs and had tagged Hernandez at first base. During one spectacular maneuver, Peña leaped into the air, twisting like he was about to do an acrobatic flip, glove extended, and fell flat on his back without dropping the ball, ending the inning with runners on each base. Raymond, who had missed the play since he’d been in the middle of sending a text, slipped his phone back into his pocket, clapped distractedly, and then gave Bella’s knee a little squeeze. She leaned into him and whispered, as a joke, that if he ever really let her go, she’d get Guillermo Peña to take his place. He was the man of the moment, Guillermo, landing on the covers of the
New York Post
and the
Daily News
about once a week, celebrated for both his athletic prowess and his celebrity dalliances: he’d been spotted variously with an eighteen-year-old rapper who had just won a Grammy, and with the forty-seven-year-old philanthropist wife of a billionaire hedge-fund manager. One had at least to applaud his range. Raymond had laughed, and told her to go for it. Bella couldn’t tell if he thought this was simply amusing in its audacity, or if he was mocking her. It hadn’t really occurred to her at the time that Raymond didn’t particularly care what she did.

What she didn’t know, which might have saved her a little heartbreak, was that Raymond always cycled back to where he began. His life was one repetitive and multi-pronged adulterous loop, from which someone with a sharp eye and a dark sense of humor might have crafted a successful reality show.

All this occurred back before I was the beneficiary of omniscience, so I was getting my information the old-fashioned way, by reading her communications with [email protected]. I stopped reading Bella’s e-mail long ago, and have simply taken her at her word when she volunteered that she hasn’t had any contact with Raymond for more than ten years. We have tried not to talk about it, but his name has come up from time to time, most recently, in fact, when we saw his latest collection in a bookstore at Heathrow. When I inquired as to whether Raymond was currently in London, and whether that had anything to do with our relocation, the VP for Transparency implied that I was crazy and paranoid. And since I was, by this point, crazy and paranoid, she sort of had the upper hand.

And yet here I am, watching her navigate the labyrinthine streets of Hampstead Village like an old pro. Without consulting her map or her phone, she seems to know exactly where she’s going, and it turns out to be only ten blocks from our new home. She takes a left turn and steps into a leafy cul-de-sac of stately multimillion-dollar Victorians, her eye drifting, on its own accord, to the largest address of them all. Tall and thin and severely vertical, with stone masonry and the kind of triangular arch on top that looks like it might impale a wayward bird, the house weirdly resembles Raymond himself. To say that is, of course, to ignore that on display in front of the house is the nourishing detritus of family life: Rollerblades on the doormat, a bicycle leaning casually against the tree, a shaggy dog with its head peeking out the downstairs window, gardening shears and gloves and a pair of women’s clogs on the stoop.

No one understands what goes on inside the Branch home, but there are theories that have made their way even to someone as oblivious as me. Some speculate that Seema medicates herself into acceptance; more appealing is the possibility that she is one of those wonder women who are so above it all that they can absorb and forgive and simply not care. But the more salient theory, almost impossible to fathom, is that she simply doesn’t know.

*   *   *

THE PILOT ANNOUNCES
that we should buckle up; we’re about to head into a bad patch of turbulence, and even before he finishes speaking, we hit a bump and the steward loses his balance and bits of cutlery go flying. In one gulp, I swallow what is left of my gin as a precaution against its spilling, and for a few minutes there, I lose my feed of Bella, which is now suddenly cutting in and out and is full of intermittent static. I try to order another gin to help refocus my point of view. I hit the call button, wait another couple of minutes, and then shout, but now the steward has been knocked to the floor by the turbulence and is being helped to his feet by a burly fellow passenger who shoots me an angry look. I fumble through my various pockets, trying to locate the Praxisis, but realize I must have put it in my bag in the overhead compartment, and when I try to get up, I’m quickly scolded about the seat-belt sign being on.

Even if my transmission is still a little fuzzy, I can see Raymond coming out of his house with a newspaper tucked under his arm. He turns a key in the top bolt of his door, checks his phone, then smiles and waves and goes to Bella. They begin to walk together in a way that suggests familiarity, fluidity, like they are figure-skating partners who know each other’s moves. They walk several blocks toward the Heath, cross the busy road, and find a bench. It is only then that they kiss.

I refuse to believe this is happening, and am fairly desperate for it to end. I try several approaches, from putting on eyeshades and earplugs to turning on a movie, but nothing stops the transmission; to the terrifying contrary, the harder I try not to see, the clearer the picture becomes.

Since I cannot make this scene go away, I turn my focus to some children playing near where Bella and Raymond sit. Rosy-cheeked with white-blond hair, they appear to be twins. They’re engaged in some sort of hunting game that seems incongruous with their earthy appearance. Across the way, a toddler kicks a ball; his rusty aim barely misses a pair of girls who sit cross-legged in the grass playing one of those games that involves wiggling fingers and a loop of string. It’s all a bit much, these wholesome children at play, juxtaposed to my adulterous wife, and I am somewhat heartened by the sight of a couple of possibly delinquent teens sitting on a bench, smoking cigarettes and generally looking like they’re up to no good; though I can’t say exactly why this comes as a relief, it’s helpful, I suppose, to be reminded that the world is a generally murky place full of people and their problems.