Without Prejudice (25 page)

5

‘There’s not a lot to eat,’ he said, peering first into the fridge, then the freezer compartment next to it. ‘You can choose, and I’ll cook. How’s that sound?’

‘When’s Mom coming back?’ Sophie replied.

He laughed. ‘Tomorrow. Is my cooking that bad? Tell you what, how about if I get—’

She beat him to the punch. ‘Chinese takeaway?’

And sixty-three dollars and a Chinese
grand bouffe
later (Sophie always insisted on Peking duck), he was putting down his chopsticks when the phone rang. ‘Why don’t you get it?’ he said.

He listened as Sophie talked with her mother, promising to go to bed soon, describing their feast.

Then he spoke briefly with her as well. She sounded perfunctory: yes, she had arrived all right; yes, the hotel was very nice; now she was going to bed because she had a breakfast meeting.

He put Sophie to bed, ignoring her complaints that she wanted to stay up since her mother wasn’t home. Once she was tucked in (though he suspected she was reading under the covers) he cleaned up in the kitchen.

He felt nervy, uncomposed. He and Anna were rarely apart, since he was able in the new job to keep travel to a minimum. When he was away – usually New York, and just for a night – he felt that Anna, staying at home, functioned as a beacon for him, throwing out light from a hub to give him his bearings. But now that he was the hub, he felt completely in the dark.

He wanted to call Anna back. Was he looking for reassurance, he wondered? Probably. He dialled her cell, but it was switched off. He called information in Washington and got the number of the Madison Hotel. Something was starting to agitate him and he waited impatiently while the switchboard operator searched for Anna’s name.

Fruitlessly. He spelled it any number of ways until the operator politely pointed out there was only one resident with a surname starting with ‘D’ staying at the hotel, and that was a Dr Daniels. He even tried Anna’s maiden name, which was Pomfret, but she wasn’t there, either. He put down the phone feeling faintly sick, and poured himself three fingers of bourbon, absent-mindedly throwing in a bunch of ice cubes from the freezer’s fancy machine. Pacing around the kitchen, he told himself not to jump to any conclusions, though he felt confident that he knew what this meant.

There seemed no point ducking it, for though he thought of trying the cell phone again, that would just provoke another kind of lie. Instead he rang back the hotel, getting the same woman at the switchboard. He thought he heard her sigh when she heard his voice, so he said, ‘I don’t want to be put through to anyone, miss. Could you tell me if you’ve got a guest registered under the name of Masters?’

And she said without hesitation, and without any knowledge of how momentous her words might be to him, ‘Philip Masters?’

So now he knew.

6

When he had come to think his ex-wife was going to leave him, it had been a gradual process, moving from intimation to suspicion to certainty. She had taken to going ‘on location’, a producer’s prerogative she had never shown much interest in exercising before. In retrospect he saw that she had gone through a large stage door labelled ‘Distrust’. But when he had first had doubts, he had stamped on them. Had he been doing the same with Anna?

A mistake, he thought, as he cleared up the breakfast things, finished making Sophie’s packed lunch, then walked his unknowing, happy daughter (Mom would be home that night; Dad was here to spoil her) to the corner just in time for the day camp minivan.

He had been trying to attribute his recent jealousy to his desertion by his ex-wife, telling himself it was natural to be hypersensitive after that had happened. So he had persuaded himself that there was nothing wrong, which made it impossible to voice his suspicions to Anna – not when he doubted them himself.

He didn’t have any doubts now, and through the morning at work felt alternately despairing and bewildered. What was he going to do? Would Anna and this man go back to England, taking Sophie with them? Would Robert follow? The only home he felt he had was Anna and Sophie – not Chicago, not Primrose Hill: it didn’t matter where he lived if he wasn’t living with them. Here in Chicago he had no real friends, but it didn’t seem to matter. He felt he could tolerate anything – cuckolding, the loss of Anna’s love – if he didn’t lose his family.

It came almost as a relief when Duval called him, just before noon. He had just cancelled lunch with Andy Stephens, the accountant, since Robert felt in no condition to talk business for an hour and a half.

‘Hi, Duval,’ he said, trying to sound cheery.

‘Any chance you can meet me in fifteen minutes?’

Why not? It might take his mind off things. ‘Sure. Same place?’ He was growing attached to the Marchese Building.

‘Can you come to the Hancock Building? There’s a coffee shop there on the Michigan Avenue side. It’s a level down from the street.’

He could see no reason to say no. ‘Sure. See you there.’

It was hot enough that he took off his linen jacket on his walk the few blocks north along Michigan Avenue. He remembered the construction of the Hancock Building, how astonished people had been when its bracing angular brackets turned out to be not temporary accompaniments during the build, but an inherent part of the tapering tower itself. It looked elegant now, decades later, a useful meditative point between traditional needle-like skyscrapers, and the post-modernist penchant for Lego-like ins-and-outs or Gehry-like curves.

He spotted Duval standing in the little plaza below street level. Looking down at him, Robert forgot the sheer height of the building above, a blessed minor amnesia for him, height-shy as he was.

‘I got us a surprise.’ Duval proudly waved two tickets in front of his face.

‘What’s that?’ asked Robert.

‘Tickets for the top.’

Robert felt a sudden stab of anxiety. This wasn’t part of the plan. He wondered if Duval could get a refund. But before he could say anything, Duval said, ‘This time it’s my shout.’

He looked so proud of paying for this ‘treat’ that Robert didn’t have the heart to spoil things. He would just have to grit his teeth and get through it.

Inside they waited in a queue of tourists, until a squat man took their tickets and they entered an enormous elevator. Robert headed immediately for the far corner and gripped the rail. The doors closed, and they rose slowly at first, then the elevator accelerated and his stomach struggled to stay on a lower floor. Robert looked up at the LCD floor indicator clicking off the floors – 47, 48 . . .

They stopped with a sudden lurch at the observation deck on the ninety-fourth floor. The doors opened at his end, and he managed to get out, feeling shaky. Then he saw through the windows an apartment block in the far distance, sitting like a child’s toy, so far below his line of sight that it made him realise just how high up they were. He began to feel panicked.

He fought the impulse to turn around and run back into the open elevator, and already Duval was striding towards the bank of windows, exclaiming at the view. Robert couldn’t desert his friend. He followed cautiously, his legs wobbly as stilts, and when he joined Duval at the window, he grabbed onto the waist-high protective bar, hoping to steady himself.

They were on the south side of the building, with a view of the Loop a mile away, then behind it the neighbourhoods of the South Side, stretching out in an indiscriminate mass of brownstone houses and apartment buildings, dotted with the odd park here and there, the ribbon-like roads of the Ryan and Lake Shore Drive, and on the left edge the bordering blue of Lake Michigan. Robert tried to focus his eyes on individual buildings and places – the Prudential Building, the Millennium Park, in the distance the dome of the Museum of Science and Industry – but coherence seemed unattainable as his agitation increased. So much for ‘exposure therapy’, he thought bitterly. Faced with his greatest fear he felt swamped by anxiety that showed no sign of subsiding. Inexplicably, he felt the strongest instinct to jump out of the windows.

Duval said, ‘Everybody keeps saying how much the city’s changed. All these new public places and skyscrapers. But tell you the truth, I never knew it that well before. I hardly ever came downtown – maybe once a year at Christmas. I couldn’t tell you if Michigan Avenue’s changed. I was just a little ghetto nigger who knew his own neighbourhood. And yours, I ’spose.’

‘I had grandparents up here,’ Robert said deliberately, trying to picture his words – anything other than the reminders, each time he looked out, of how high up they were. ‘But I spent almost all my time in Hyde Park. I thought Chicago
was
Hyde Park.’ He dared a quick look down towards the South Side, and regretted it as the world below shuddered vertiginously.

Duval nodded absently, but he didn’t seem to be listening. He said, ‘When I was young, and white people would see me on the street and look scared, I liked it. But not any more. Now I want to stop and say, “Listen, I’m just like you. And I’m scared, too.” Only mine’s a different kind of fear. I couldn’t even tell you what I was scared of, half the time, and it’s the not knowing that makes the fear worse.’

With the mention of fear, an image entered Robert’s head. It was from a film he’d seen, a documentary made by a pair of French brothers, about daily life in New York, that had suddenly found itself taken over by an inconceivably larger subject. Municipal workers, laying pipes beneath the surface of a street in downtown Manhattan, turned and watched through a blue sky of autumn clarity – you could feel the crispness of the morning air – as a jet sailed serenely overhead, straight into the North Tower. An eerie normality had preceded the collision – it reminded Robert of the Auden poem in which Icarus fell from the sky, watched by a farmer at his plough on what had been a completely ordinary day.

He knew no one who was not fearful after the Twin Towers had come down, but the public expression of fear was always about Islam’s war on the West, breeding a ridiculous paranoia, especially in his native country – rural counties in Michigan getting anti-terrorist subventions from the Federal government, or the coast guard instituting a no-go zone in Lake Michigan to deter incursions by speed boat that might . . . do what? Deposit suicide bombers on Oak Street Beach?

No, for Robert the terror he felt was entirely personal, since the disaster of the Towers represented his own worst nightmare. To be trapped up high with no parachute, no prospect of a helicopter rescue, no way out except the window. Just the certainty of doom, as the smoke and heat rose towards you, imprisoned a thousand feet above
terra firma
, knowing you were going to die.

He shuddered slightly, and scanned the horizon, certain that any minute now he would see an approaching plane.

Suddenly he heard Duval say, ‘You aren’t listening.’

He tried to pull himself together. ‘Sorry, Duval. Say it again.’

Duval said, ‘I
said
I got a problem, Bobby. Jermaine don’t want me in his house no more.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, it’s probably not Jermaine so much as Ella. She’s never been happy about me lodging there.’

‘Where are you going to go next?’ When he saw Duval’s face he wished he had kept his mouth shut.

‘I’ve been thinking. I don’t ’spose . . .’ began Duval, then paused, while Robert tried to look across the lake at eye level, anything to ignore the sickening, scary effect of looking downward. He sensed what question Duval was asking, but was too seized by anxiety to think of a response, much less make one. He knew he couldn’t take being here much longer.

‘What’s the matter, Bobby?’ Duval looked at Robert curiously. ‘Don’t you feel well?’

‘Do you mind if we go down now, Duval?’ He didn’t want to say anything else.

Duval seemed almost pleased by the request. ‘You don’t like it up here, do you, Bobby?’

Robert managed to shake his head, trying to control his impatience, verging again on panic. He really wanted to get down right then.

Duval slapped him on the shoulder with an open hand. ‘That’s all right, we’ll go down. Right away.’ But he took his time heading for the elevator. ‘Man, that’s funny. When I was little, I was the one ’fraid of heights. Never could go up that tree.’

The elevator took for ever to come. Robert counted silently to ten, then ten again, only half-listening to Duval. At last the doors opened, and he scooted in as people left from the other side.

As the elevator descended, he gradually regained his equilibrium. Back on the ground, he felt guilty about cutting short this expedition and suggested they go to the coffee shop in the small plaza below street level. Duval agreed but once seated said he didn’t want to eat, and this time Robert took him at his word. Duval seemed glum now, and Robert tried to make conversation, talking about the White Sox and a game he’d seen on TV until out of the blue Duval said, ‘Do you all need any more work done this weekend?’

Robert shook his head trying to look regretful. ‘We’re away this weekend, Duval.’

His friend’s face fell. Robert added, ‘But maybe next weekend. I’ll see what needs doing at the house.’

‘Don’t matter,’ Duval said, with resinous depression in his voice.