Bluebeard
It had been six months since my last job, and I was on my way to Odessa for a new one, a strange one, absolutely contrary to my sense of morals, but too lucrative to ignore. That was my first mistake. The beginning of compromise is the end of perfection.
On the connecting flight to Vienna, a familiar, though unwelcome, face: Sarah, a former mark. She spotted me right away. We sat across from each other on opposite aisles, in the first class cabin. Her accent when she ordered her drink, her pale, fragile hands, the twisting and untwisting of her cocktail napkin, everything was familiar. It was like the performance of a magic trick whose secret I had already mastered, and therefore could provide me no more wonder. Had her husband confessed? Did she know what I really was? What I had done to her? That our brief, unconsummated courtship was an elaborate facade?
Finally, she got up, made as if to use the bathroom and, finding it occupied, glanced back down the aisle. Our eyes met. Soon, she was sitting beside me, her hands clasped in her lap, neither of us able to say anything. Embarrassment on her part, disinterest on mine.
“I thought it was you,” she said.
“Another business conference?” We had met at one of her business conferences. She hadn't worn her wedding ring then.
She shook her head. “Just got back. I’m meeting my family–” She paused and glanced at me. I was mechanically thumbing through emails on my phone, hardly able to discern the shapes of the letters. “I’m on vacation,” she said.
“That’s good. I remember you said you felt overworked.”
“I never said that,” she replied, springing up in her seat.
My thumb froze for a second. Idiot. It was her husband, the client, who had told me that, not her. “Really? I guess I just got that sense.”
“I never said ‘overworked’–how come you don’t look at me?”
“Then why are you taking a vacation–what?”
“Why don’t you look at me?”
I looked at her. She was still beautiful. It was a difficult job, back then, it was hard to keep to my principles and not betray myself.
“So?” I said.
“Why did you do that?” she said, very softly.
“Do what?”
“You knew.”
I went back to the emails.
“Yes,” she said, as though I had vehemently denied it. “You did. You knew all along. You knew I was married.”
Every once in a while my clients will come clean to their wives. Nothing sacred can be built on lies, but confessions lose their sting with the passage of time. Two years, five in some cases. If he had told her so soon, it was out of weakness. But I could tell that he had not told her, nor that she had revealed her suspicions to him, for that would mean also revealing her own humiliation, her own weakness. Likely she had followed the money (my services are not cheap) and something in her which forever denied the possibility of coincidence had snapped shut at once upon the truth.
“I can see you’re upset,” I said.
“No,” she said, coldly. “I just want to understand: this is what you do? This is how you make a living?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You don’t want to talk about it, fine. I don’t really know why I sat down.”
“The bathroom is free,” I said, gesturing with my eyes.
She peeked down the aisle to confirm this, but remained seated. The plane began to tremble from turbulence; the fasten-seatbelt-sign pinged on overhead.
“How many people have you done this to?” she whispered. “For how long? No, I just need to know that I wasn’t the only one. When did you start? How do you even get into something like this? Were you a–did you…for money?”
“I’ve never done that.” I said, trying to keep my voice even. "That would be adultery. And prostitution. And illegal." The turbulence got worse.
“How did it start?” she asked, with an unusual, though not unfamiliar, tenderness. She couldn't help herself. It was her curiosity, the feminine curiosity that obsesses over human experience, the blind desire to know what it is like to be another, to embody the foreign. It is the basis of my unnatural trade: curious women and their troubled husbands.
“Seduction, I learned from my father,” I said. "Understand: he taught me nothing–I don't know if it was a paternal feeling or some kind of cold professionalism–but he was careful to keep me away from it. I had to learn by watching him. It was a game for him and he loved the game, and unlike me, he never shied from its rewards. Reason and religion were weapons to be disarmed. Marriages, morals, families…but with me he was never cruel and never false. I never knew my mother, but I never felt the want of her. What I am, what I do, I partly learned, and partly I inherited. It's a vocation. A calling. A penance."
She laughed. She found my whole existence absurd.
"How's your husband? And the children?" I asked, not without malice.
Then she was grim.
"Who do you think I did it for?" I said. "Who do you think asked me? Shouldn't you rather be thanking me?"
"You're disgusting."
"What's disgusting is that I'm necessary. That your husband paid me three thousand dollars–"
“You’ll be lonely your whole life,” she concluded. “Because how can you trust anybody?”
“I see you’re wearing your wedding ring now,” I replied. "That's good." She instinctively went to cover it up, like some kind of wound or scar, but then she didn’t. In her expression, there was nothing else but pity, as one has for wounded animals and cripples. That expression sealed my fate.
—
Outside of my work, women constitute only a faint screeching sound, like a mosquito. But my work is a kind of religion. We must remember that the word vocation comes from the latin, vocare, "to call", and we must consider who it is that calls us. Consider the children of Sarah Robinson, Mindy and little George, my intervention prevented their suffering. The family remains together, even today. There is nothing quite like shameful secrets to bring together a husband and wife, they are more potent than marriage vows.
My clients are always family men. Jobs come through word of mouth, because the necessary discretion makes it difficult to advertise. The Odessa job, which was the beginning of the end, was the sole exception.
The mark was a fifty-eight year old retired dancer. She performed ballet in the Bolshoi theater and had pirouetted in front of prime ministers and former presidents, dined with nobility, and clung as equally to these pretensions as to her former beauty (of which there was nothing left). Her husband, a man nearly three decades her junior, had no desire for reconciliation. He had married her for money and wanted now to divorce her for money.
“The great dancers–Pavlova, Pilsetskaya, Karsavina–in what did their greatness consist? Technique? Method?” she asked me, on our first meeting, at the Kafe Edip. “Do you know? The life of a dancer is by no means simple. It takes ten years to shape a dancer. Every time the hand comes up or the foot comes up, to a certain level it must come up, and exactly this way the next time, and the next time, fifty times out of fifty times. And they say, ‘what technique!’, and they attribute a method, a school. No, my friend. It is passion alone which sustains us.” She slipped out a cigarette from an ornate silver case, and, placing it between her weazened lips, waited with the impatience of a beautiful woman, one who has never in her life carried a cigarette lighter, for a flame. I obliged her with perfect readiness. Smoking is a disgusting habit but such props are often necessary in my line of work. “It is beautiful,” she said, squinting her large, bulbous eyes at the lighter. “But not your taste.”
“It was my fathers,” I admitted, a little surprised. The uncontrollable laughter of a child rang out from a nearby table and she tilted her head very slightly to observe its source. The expression upon her face in that moment, so fleeting and tender and so contrary to her hard, shriveled features, if I could remember her by that, only by that, and let all the rest be forgotten…
“You have many regrets in your work?” she asked. “Failed ventures?”
I shook my head and frowned, remembering Sarah, distinctly aware of the fading peals of the child’s laughter. “A few of the businesses I’ve consulted have gone under, but that’s an inevitable consequence of the law of large numbers and I’ve never lost any sleep over it. On the whole, I do pretty well.”
“And your father was a military man.” And she added, seeing my surprised expression, “They give those lighters to officers. I’ve seen them before.”
“He was stationed in East Germany,” I admitted. “Interrogation.”
“Yes,” she said and continued the conversation in fluent German, blowing her smoke with a mysterious pleasure when I responded to her in the same.
She was an experienced woman, and despite all her talk, slow to passion. It took nearly a month of these innocuous meetings, and all of my inherited schemes, before I finally obtained her confidence and she invited me to dine with her, privately, in her villa. The trap was set. The dinner would advance to its inevitable climax and her husband would find us in a state of undress that required no explanation.
“She’s too damned honest to try anything else,” her husband assured me, the night before the fateful dinner. He had surprised me at the hotel and dragged me down to the restaurant for a premature celebration. “She’ll have no choice, really. These bourgeois women–they hardly feel about their money the way you and I might, it’s almost obscene to them–but their conscience, that they hold in the highest regard. Especially these Russians. Have you read Dostoevsky? It’s all there. Such willingness to sacrifice one in order to satisfy the other–well, as much to our advantage, I say.” He held up his champagne glass. We toasted but my drink remained untasted.
“What time?” I asked.
“Nine, I suppose. Nine-thirty. What?”
“You do understand that everything depends on your timing?”
He wiped his mouth with the napkin. “Alright,” he said.
“Nine-fifteen. Sharp.”
“I shan’t miss it.”
“The dinner starts at eight. I’ll arrive at seven thirty. Chit-chat, entertainment, dinner, more chit-chat and we’ll retire at nine-oh-ten. Five minutes to get in position.” I placed my outstretched fingers gently on the table and looked at them. “I’d prefer to keep things as brief as possible, you understand?”
“Oh, I understand perfectly.”
“It’s a matter of efficiency,” I added, in response to his smirk.
He looked down at the plate and raised his brows, as much to say “whatever you like”.
“And the money–”
“Contingent upon the conclusion of all the paperwork,” he said. “However long that takes.”
“You said six months.”
“I said probably six months. It is rather a large estate and you know how the advocates get once they smell blood… but rest assured, it shall be handled with all speed. We’ll get no resistance from her, at any rate.”
“I’ll want a flight out the next morning–no, scratch that, the night of. Have someone bring my suitcase to the airport.”
“Anywheres in particular?”
“Whatever’s available. Someplace far from here.”
“Anything else?”
“No. Yes.” He did not press me, only waited, and then went on eating. “What’s going to happen to her?” I finally said.
He cut vigorously into his piece of fish, until the knife struck against the plate. “She won’t be jumping in front of any trains, if that’s what you mean. She’s made of stronger stuff, I dare say–or else I’ve severely underestimated your charms.”
“I meant is she going to look for me?” For every client there was a dossier, an encrypted folder on my hard drive containing all the little details: the mark’s favorite brand of shampoo, their shoe size, what high school they went to, what color of nail polish they like. The husbands supply most of this information, but their knowledge is often imperfect. Careful observation of the mark is usually necessary to guess the rest. With this particular husband, perhaps precisely because of his duplicity, there was no guesswork. He had filled out the preliminary questionnaire–usually returned with a quarter or even half of the questions left blank–with the thoroughness of a tax auditor. He knew her cold. “She won’t look?” I asked again.
He did not even dignify the question with a response, but only smirked at me, as before.
“Nine-fifteen,” I said, standing up and buttoning my coat.
“Nine-fifteen,” he said.
—
The villa was by the sea, for I can still remember the waves. There were Persian rugs hanging on the walls instead of paintings. There were empty bookcases. And, of course, there was the small unassuming door with the blue handle, the room I had mistaken for the washroom on first encounter and had almost opened that day (if only I had!).
“Not that door but the one further down, my friend” she had said in a trembling, almost panicked voice (I did not sense the panic then).
“I don’t think there’s anything sacred about the human body,” I said, later, as we sat down to dinner. I was wearing the blue suit she had picked out for me, weeks before, somewhat old-fashioned, somehow also familiar, and she stared at me as she had stared at me the whole night, the way one stares at an old photograph, a memory.
“Do you know? They have asked me, many times, why I chose to be a dancer.”
“Who asked you?”
“People.” She dismissed these conjured inquisitors with an opening of her hand. “ It is so difficult for them to understand that I did not choose. One never chooses, but, in fact, one is chosen–and with this, you live all your life.”
“But your father was a dancer.”
“Yes?”
“I’d at least consider the possibility it was genetic.”
She squinted and shook her head as though I’d said something incomprehensible. “A materialist!” she said.
“And does God choose even the dancers?” I said, laughing.
“Think only of the miracle of the foot.” Here she bent down a moment, slipped off her shoe, and placed it on the table, a pink slipper, which in the candlelight seemed like the plastic equipment of a doll. “Upon twenty milimeters your whole weight rests. And for this there is a cost paid, a fatigue so great that the body weeps, and sometimes there is no sleep. And sometimes frustration. And small deaths every day. And, still, you traverse, you come into the light, you work, work, work. You perfect. And then this foot, this body, becomes a sacred instrument. There is your divinity. Whatever is necessary for it, I say, it is not chosen. Therefore, I treat it with honor, with joy, and with fear too, but finally with blessing.”
“I think you give your father too little credit.”
“Then you must also admit your own inheritance.”
She decided she was finished with her meal, and waving at one of the servants, took out her cigarette case, prompting me, with Pavlovian assiduity, to summon my lighter. My watch said nine-thirteen. She brushed her thumb against the corner of my eye, under the pretense of a fallen eyelash, and when we kissed, I must have thought of money, of my father, and of the perfect clockwork of my plans.
	When dawn broke the next morning, I was still livid. No sleep. Just lying limply beside her, willing my limbs and breath and body to quietly vanish. Her husband had not come. Not at nine-fifteen. Not at ten-fifteen (by then it was all over). Not in the morning. There were no messages. No calls. No warnings.
	I found him three months later in a gentlemen’s club in El Paso, Texas. By that time, I knew everything. She'd shown me into the room with the curlicue handle herself, and the old photographs, the terrible shrine, the rack of blue suits, and when finally she offered me money, I am ashamed to say that I took it and that I stayed with her till the end. I don’t know what I wanted from her accomplice–there were passing thoughts of violence–but mostly it was closure and I guess a little it was communion–because we were the only ones who knew the whole truth, because the real culprit was already dead.
	“She was the one hired me,” he said, now in a practiced Texan drawl, never once slipping into the elegant accent he had used in Odessa. “But it weren’t for money. I was in some legal trouble at the time…” He proceeded to explain their acquaintance and the hatching of their plot, without the slightest trace of remorse. She had found me by accident two years ago, through one of my clients, and from that moment had begun compiling her own dossier.
	“You knew about her relationship with my father?”
	“I put it together,” he said. “She didn’t say nothing about it but I saw the pictures. That room. He must’ve been something special. A gal don’t love a man like that but once in her life–if that. It ain’t just about looks neither. You know she never married? She tell you that?”
	“She had lovers,” I said, conscious of the defensive edge creeping into my voice.
	“Yeah,” he said, smiling into his shot glass. “That she did.”
	I took out an envelope and placed it between us on the counter. “Refund,” I said. “Minus expenses.”
“That was her money.” Nevertheless, he discreetly put it into back pocket. “She give you something for your troubles, at least?” I didn’t speak. Above us, the dancer switched out with another girl. “I bet you got a real nice payout. I mean, you were the best outta all of them, being his son and all. Oh sure, she could dress them up, cut their hair, teach them to speak, how to cut their meat, probably even how to make love, but there’s certain things that are just...genealogical.” He grabbed a handful of peanuts and began staring at me as he popped them one-by-one into his mouth. He shook his head, incredulous. “Uncanny. You seen the pictures? The drawings? 'Course you have. You can see why she was so excited. Christ, that rack of suits–you know she took the time to spray them with his cologne, keep them smelling like him. It’s a sickness, is what it is. It’s a disease.”
“It was fidelity,” I said quietly. “It was love.”
He raised his eyebrows, smiling slightly, patronizingly, then he looked up at the stage toward the dancer, following her nubile body as it spun around the pole, still popping the peanuts into his mouth. “Listen,” he said, not looking away from the dancer. “I’ve got a pretty sweet mark coming up here, if you’re interested.” He turned, and seeing me walking away, he ran up beside me. “Hey, listen, man, this is right up your alley. You know how many married guys come around here every day? Just go on in the back. You just go on in the back for two seconds.”
“I’m not interested.”
“Why not? It’s what you do, ain’t it? Bringing families together and fidelity and whatnot. Just from the other side for a change. I mean we’re really helping people out here, you know?”
We were outside now, shading our eyes against the Texan sun.
“I don’t need money.”
“You don’t need money. You don’t even know what it pays yet.” Seeing me continue on towards my car, he pursued. “So you don’t need money. So do it for the girls, man. No hags this time, scouts honor. What else you got going for you? Will you listen to me for a second? Would you just stop for one second? Alright? No more bullshit. I’m telling you, man, you were born for this. I mean Christ, that jawline, those baby-blues. Angels weep. And I’ll tell you something else, a point comes in a man’s life when he gets so good at a thing there ain’t nothing else for him. A point comes when a man's seen something, felt something, a veil comes off, and then he knows there isn’t anything else for him in this world. Nothing else.”
I was in the car now, gripping the steering wheel, shutting my eyes and thinking now of her, now of the photographs she had of my father, in his blue suit, the smell of his cologne, now of all the clients I had helped, the ones I had failed, of my hatred and my love. And all the while he leaned against the window of the car, waiting and waiting, and when I finally unlocked the passenger door, I felt neither surprise nor shame, but only a quiet, faithless resignation for what lay ahead.