All told, they were responsible for more than $10 million in losses. Most of the victims were elderly pensioners. A few of them were interviewed on TV, and I learned that every penny of their precious retirement savings, all they had to live on, had been snatched away. I felt sorry for them, but it was done. The whole thing was a mediocre crime. For some reason lots of people seem drawn in by such banal lies. Maybe it’s the very mediocrity that attracts them, who knows? The world is swarming with hustlers, and with gullible people too. No matter how it was presented on TV, no matter who was at fault, this was a clear-cut fact, like the ebb and flow of the tide.
“So what are you going to do?” my wife asked me after the news was over.
“What do you mean? What can I do?” I said, switching off the TV with the remote.
“But she’s your friend, isn’t she?”
“We just get together once in a while and talk about music. I know nothing other than that.”
“She never suggested you invest with them?”
Silently, I shook my head. For what it’s worth, she never tried to get me involved in that sort of thing. That much I can say for sure.
“I didn’t know her well, but I never thought she was someone who’d do something terrible like that,” my wife said. “I guess you never can tell.”
No, I suddenly thought, that’s not exactly true. F* had a kind of special aura about her that drew people in. And within that—inside those peculiar, unusual features of hers—existed a kind of power that encroached on others’ minds and hearts. It aroused my curiosity about her. And when that special attractive force merged with her young husband’s spectacular looks, anything became possible and, perhaps, irresistible. An evil dynamic arose out of this, one that exceeded any common sense or logic. Though I had no way of ever knowing what had brought this unlikeliest of pairs together.
For several days the TV news covered the incident, endlessly replaying the same clips. Her dead-fish eyes staring straight ahead, her handsome younger husband confronting the banks of cameras. The corners of his thin lips were, perhaps instinctively, raised slightly. The kind of smile that professional movie stars have when they need it. It looked like he was sending out a smile to the whole world. There was something about his face that resembled a well-constructed mask. At any rate, a week later, the arrests were all but forgotten. At least, the TV stations were no longer interested. I continued to follow the story in newspapers and weekly magazines, but eventually these stories tapered off too, like a stream of water being sucked into the sand. Finally, they came to an end altogether.
And then F* completely disappeared from my world. I had no clue where she was. There was no way of knowing if she was still in detention, or in jail, or was at home out on bail. There weren’t any articles about her being on trial, though there must have been one, for the fraud was large enough to warrant some sort of sentence. At least according to the newspaper and magazine articles I’d read, it was crystal clear that she’d actively helped her husband in breaking the law.
—
A long time has passed since then, and still, whenever there’s a concert featuring a performance of Schumann’s Carnaval, I try to attend. And I scan the entire hall, and the lobby when I’m enjoying a glass of wine at intermission, looking for her. I’ve never found her, but I always feel that at any moment, she’ll appear in the midst of the crowd.
I’ve kept on buying any new CDs of Carnaval. And I still rank them in my notebook. A lot of new recordings have appeared, yet my number one favorite is still the one by Rubinstein. Rubinstein’s piano doesn’t rip off people’s masks. Instead, his playing gently, lightly, wafts through the interstice between the mask and the reality.
Happiness is always a relative thing. Don’t you think?
—
This is something that happened long before any of this.
Back when I was in college, I once had a date with a girl who was fairly unattractive. Actually, scratch the “fairly” part. It was a double date that a friend of mine set up, and she was the one who showed up as my date. She and my friend’s girlfriend were in the same college dorm, and they were a year behind me in school. We had a quick meal together, the four of us, then we paired off and went our own way. It was the end of autumn.
She and I strolled around a park, then went into a café and talked over some coffee. She was short, with small eyes, and seemed like a nice person. She spoke in a quietly shy, distinct voice. She must have had excellent vocal cords. I’m in the tennis club in college, she told me. Her parents loved tennis, she added, and she’d played it with them since she was little. A healthy family, by the sound of it. And a family that probably got along well, too. But I’d hardly ever played tennis, so that put a damper on that subject. I loved jazz, but she knew next to nothing about it. So it was hard to
