“Understood,” I said. I was gripping the phone so hard that I hoped it might break.
“You know why,” you said. “Right?”
“No,” I said. I was stalling.
“The pain,” you said. “But the pleasure is part of it, too. I need it all off the table.”
“So let’s clear the table,” I said.
“Well, no,” you said. “That makes it sound like a clean slate, and like something might be later put there. The whole table has to be gone, and everything around it, too. There can’t be things that are next to the table, waiting to be lifted up and placed there. There can’t be anything. There has to be nothing. I am saying this as much to myself as to you.”
“I was just following your metaphor,” I said.
“I know,” you said. “I’m not sure I’m finding the right words. I’ve gone through it all. I went through accepting the side deal. I went through hating you. I went through her-or-me, and play-me-or-trade-me. I don’t know where I am now, or what to call it. I just know that it has to be far from you, and that there has to be a high wall between us. I have to go.”
“I have to go,” I said.
“What?” you said. “You mean hang up?”
“Yes,” I said. “That sounds right.”
“Jesus,” you said. Your voice sharpened. “Is your wife home? I thought I heard a door close.”
“Okay,” I said. “That sounds great.” I paused. “Yes. It’s the corner building. I just have a few pieces of furniture up on the roof-deck: two chairs and a table. There’s an umbrella, but I think I can remove it before you get there. Nine o’clock, you said?”
“You’re an asshole,” she said.
“That’s right,” I said. “Off the table.” I hung up the phone. My hand was cramped from clutching it so hard. I opened it and closed it experimentally. My wife was not home. She was working late. That’s what happens when you are a lawyer for a publishing firm and the other lawyer in your department has a child and decides to work from home and then, as the months go on, to hand over enough responsibilities that it becomes clear that the rest of the responsibilities will soon follow. You—if you are the remaining lawyer, if you are my wife—step into the breach. You stay late. You go to the office on Saturdays. You explain to your husband that the two of you are happiest when you are working—you at your office, he at his property-management firm—and you remind him that when the two of you had too much time on your hands, a kind of restlessness infected the marriage. “Our conversations then were an invidious reminder of how poorly we were addressing our own needs,” my wife once said. She leaves me notes in the morning when she leaves, and I put notes on top of her notes when I go to sleep. We communicate through these documents: the primary, the secondary, the others. This is why I am happy writing a letter to your letter. I have years of training in these matters.
Dear X,
Why did I let you believe that my wife was home when she was not? Because it would injure you. Why did I want to injure you? Because you had injured me. You wanted to take it off the table, all of it, despite the fact that for nearly two years it had sustained me. When I met you, my wife and I were going through a difficult period. I told her that it was the hell of adjusted expectations. She frowned and said that we were “above timberline.” It was not the right time for her fluency. I took a deep breath, sat down on the bed, and said that I was not sure that I loved her, that despite all that she had meant to me, I just could not see around the corner.
A few days later, I met you. It was at an open house for one of my properties. Usually I don’t attend them myself, but it was a weekend filled with bad weather, and I needed somewhere to go. I let Janice, the agent, off the hook, and told her I would cover it myself. “Thank you, Mr. Ramirez,” she said. She yawned and stretched. Janice has always had a thing for me, and she’s beautiful, but I was never the type to run around. When I started off in business, they used to call me “Play-It-Safe Paco,” though in fact usually I did not play it at all. I held my residential properties for years, let their value grow slowly, like a tree rather than a flower—there was not always as much beauty in the process as there could have been, but there was a thick trunk and there were roots. I behaved similarly in my dealings with women. When Janice yawned and stretched, when she pressed her body against the fabric of her clothes, I cannot face.
Janice left. I stayed. The apartment was a small two-bedroom with a bath and a half. The master bedroom was big and had one large walk-in closet. The kitchen had just been redone with a beautiful marble counter. The fireplace didn’t work, but the detailing on it was exquisite. I showed the place to a gay couple, then a straight couple, then to a man who was in the middle of a divorce. He was the most interested, and also the most interesting—he touched everything and shook his head, as if he were trying to rouse himself from a fog. He thought he’d put in an offer. “I just wish I knew what direction things were going to take,” he said. “I am ninety percent sure that I’m going to need to buy my own place, but that ten percent really weighs on me.” I wished him luck. I was sitting on a folding chair I had brought, reading a
A knock came at the door.
A small woman was standing in the hallway. It was you. As you came into the room, I revised my first impression. You were short, certainly, but you were not skinny, and you had a presence, partly as a result of your beautiful arms and partly because of your enormous eyes. Neither was adventitious. “Karen Lewis,” you said, and extended your hand.
“Francisco Ramirez,” I said.
“That’s a very grand name,” you said.
“Well, I am a nobleman,” I said.
“Really?”
“No,” I said. “Only a rich man.”
You laughed. Perhaps you thought I was joking, I realized later. You had no way of knowing that I owned not only this apartment but nearly two thousand others. You had no way of knowing that I was worth ten thousand times as much as when I first came to the United States, fresh from a short but not entirely unsuccessful career as a waiter and restaurant manager, or that earlier in that career I was so poor that I sometimes had to steal from customers. I would like to say that the stealing was infrequent. The truth was that it was nearly constant. When I told my wife about it, she stared off into the middle distance and then returned with a vocabulary lesson. “Stealing and robbery are different,” she said. “Stealing is related to words like ‘stealthy.’ When you steal, you’re trying to escape detection. Robbery’s very different. That’s when you confront someone and take something by force.” I’m sure she was right, or mostly right. At the very least, I could not argue with her. English was not my first language. If I had told you about my early transgressions, I do not think that you would have come back at me with surgery performed on my words. You would have judged me, or loved me, or both. I did not tell you about my stealing. You did not lift your lovely arms over your head. We stood professionally near one another, and I manufactured enough concentration to speak about the central air and the marble countertop.
You did not like the apartment. You felt that the closet was situated awkwardly in the master bedroom, and that the whole place was overpriced. I made a mental note to call the gay couple and tell them the apartment was theirs if they wanted it. On the way out, you picked up the
“Why?” I said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“You can ask anyone anything anytime,” you said.
One week later, we were lovers.
Dear X,
I fold your letter, unfold it, read it again, refold it. I have done this four or five times over the past hour. They say that you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer. The letter did not bother me so deeply when I first received it. As I have said, I called to talk things through. No part of it was unexpected. We had been weakening each other for months, especially since we stopped sleeping together. I realize that I have skipped from
