'You're wearing a cashmere sweater.'
'Yes I am.'
'It's beige.'
'Yes.'
'And that's your hand-beaded skirt.'
'Yes it is.'
'I'm noticing. How was the play?'
'I left at intermission, didn't l?'
'What was it about and who was in it? I'm making conversation.'
'I went on impulse. The audience was sparse. Five minutes after the curtain went up, I understood why.'
The waiter stood by the table. Elise ordered a mixed green salad, if manageable, and a small bottle of mineral water. Not sparkling, please, but still.
Eric said, 'Give me the raw fish with mercury poisoning.' He sat facing the street. Danko stood just outside the door, unaccompanied by the female. 'Where is your jacket?'
'Where is my jacket.'
'You were wearing a suit jacket earlier. Where is your jacket?'
'Lost in the scuffle, I guess. You saw the car. We were under attack by anarchists. Just two hours ago they were a major global protest. Now, what, forgotten.'
'There's something else I wish I could forget.'
'That's my peanuts you smell.'
'Didn't I see you come out of the hotel just up the street while I was standing outside the theater?'
He was enjoying this. It put her at a disadvantage, playing petty interrogator, and made him feel boyishly inventive and rebellious.
'I could tell you there was an emergency meeting of my staff to deal with the crisis. The nearest conference room was at the hotel. Or I could tell you I had to use the men's room in the lobby. There's a toilet in the car but you don't know this. Or I went to the health club at the hotel to work off the tension of the day. I could tell you I spent an hour on a treadmill. Then I went for a swim if there's a swimming pool. Or I went up to the roof to watch the lightning flash. I love it when the rain has that wavering quality it rarely has these days. It's that whiplash sort of quality, where the rain undulates above the rooftops. Or the car's liquor cabinet was unaccountably empty and I went in to have a drink. I could tell you I went in to have a drink, in the bar off the lobby, where the peanuts are always fresh.'
The waiter said, 'Enjoy.'
She looked at her salad. Then she began to eat it. She dug right in, treating it as food and not some extrusion of matter that science could not explain.
'Is that the hotel you wanted to take me to?'
'We don't need a hotel. We'll do it in the ladies' room. We'll go to the alley out back and rattle the garbage cans. Look. I'm trying to make contact in the most ordinary ways. To see and hear. To notice your mood, your clothes. This is important. Are your stockings on straight? I understand this at some level. How people look. What people wear.
'How they smell,' she said. 'Do you mind my saying that? Am I being too wifely? I'll tell you what the problem is. I don't know how to be indifferent. I can't master this. And it makes me susceptible to pain. In other words it hurts.'
'This is good. We're like people talking. Isn't this how they talk?'
'How would I know?'
He swallowed his sake. There was a long pause.
He said, 'My prostate is asymmetrical.'
She sat back and thought, looking at him with some concern.
'What does that mean?'
He said, 'I don't know.'
There was a palpable adjustment, a shared disquiet and sensitivity.
'You have to see a doctor.'
'I just saw a doctor. I see a doctor every day.'
The room, the street were completely still and they were whispering now. He didn't think they'd ever felt so close.
'You just saw a doctor.'
'That's how I know.'
They thought about this. With the moment growing solemn, something faintly humorous passed between them. Maybe there is humor in certain parts of the body even as their dysfunction slowly kills you, loved ones gathered at the bed, above the soiled sheets, others in the foyer smoking.
'Look. I married you for your beauty but you don't have to be beautiful. I married you for your money in a way, the history of it, piling up over generations, through world wars. This is not something I need but a little history is nice. The family retainers. The vintage cellars. Little intimate wine tastings. Spitting merlot together. This is stupid but nice. The estate-bottled wines. The statuary in the Renaissance garden, beneath the hilltop villa, among the lemon groves. But you don't have to be rich.'
'I just have to be indifferent.'
She began to cry. He'd never seen her cry and felt a little helpless. He put out a hand. It remained there, extended, between them.
'You wore a turban at our wedding.'
'Yes.'
'My mother loved that,' she said.
'Yes. But I'm feeling a change. I'm making a change. Did you look at the menu? They have green tea ice cream. This is something you might like. People change. I know what's important now.'
'That's such a boring thing to say. Please.'
'I know what's important now.'
'All right. But note the skeptical tone,' she said. 'What's important now?'
'To be aware of what's around me. To understand another person's situation, another person's feelings. To know, in short, what's important. I thought you had to be beautiful. But this isn't true anymore. It was true earlier in the day. But nothing that was true then is true now.'
'Which means, I take it, that you don't think I'm beautiful.'
'Why do you have to be beautiful?'
'Why do you have to be rich, famous, brainy, powerful and feared?'
His hand was still suspended in the air between them. He took her water bottle and drank what remained. Then he told her that Packer Capital's portfolio had been reduced to near nothingness in the course of the day and that his personal fortune in the tens of billions was in ruinous convergence with this fact. He also told her that someone out there in the rainswept night had made a credible threat on his life. Then he watched her absorb the news.
He said, 'You're eating. That's good.'
But she wasn't eating. She was absorbing the news, sitting in a white silence, fork poised. He wanted to take her out in the alley and have sex with her. Beyond that, what? He did not know. He could not imagine. But then he never could. It made sense to him that his immediate and extended futures would be compressed into whatever events might constitute the next few hours, or minutes, or less. These were the only terms of life expectancy he'd ever recognized as real.
'It's okay. It's fine,' he said. 'It makes me feel free in a way I've never known.'
'That's so awful. Don't say things like that. Free to do what? Go broke and die? Listen to me. I'll help you financially. I'll truly do what I can do to help. You can reestablish yourself, at your pace, in your way. Tell me what you need. I promise I'll help. But as a couple, as a marriage, I think we're done, aren't we? You speak of being free. This is your lucky day.'
He'd left his wallet in the jacket in the hotel room. She took the check and began to cry again. She cried through tea with lemon and then they walked to the door together, in close embrace, her head resting on his
