Bluebeard
I knew when we got to the hotel she would expect me to come up to her room for coffee. We’d met at one of her business conferences. She worked for Boeing and was in charge of finding suppliers for airplane equipment. When she ordered a drink at the bar, I guessed, from her accent, that she was from Queens (although it wasn't a guess) and she admitted she had grown up around New York but now lived in Connecticut. Now she was in my car, oblivious to what was going to happen, and I was sorting out in my mind what I was going to say to her when it did. It would have to be brutal this time. She had a lot of confidence despite her age--or perhaps because of it--but I knew she was desperate. It would not be difficult.
Her name was Sarah. She had pale legs, pale fingernails, and palms like dragonfly wings–veiny and fragile. The white imprint of a wedding band circled her third finger and I knew that the ring was in her purse somewhere, buried under cherry lip gloss and blood pressure pills. She tried to pass as a younger woman, someone in her late twenties--and she almost pulled it off–a natural beauty–but I knew she was thirty-seven. I knew she was frustrated with her husband, Abe, and with her two kids, Mindy and George. She was a career woman and had begun working for Boeing straight out of college and flew all across the country on their dime and had never cheated on her husband and was, for the most part, for all intents and purposes (a favorite expression of hers) a good wife. She had told me none of this, of course, but I knew.
She did not wear her ring to these conferences. She drank dry martinis and sucked on the olives and ran her finger around the moist rim of the glass as she surveyed the crowd. She laughed at my jokes. Occasionally, she leaned in and touched my arm and did not flinch when my fingers brushed the inside of her wrist, and when I asked her if she wanted a ride back to the hotel, she did not say no, though I'm sure she had a rental car parked somewhere nearby. That was good. It was a three-day conference but I didn't want to stay any longer than necessary. I pride myself on efficiency.
At some point, it is routine. At some point, one can relax and enjoy the process. But I don’t relax. I don’t understand why people cheat on their spouses, but then I don’t understand why people get together in the first place. I guess they fall in love, but that is only a kind of weather, a kind of dreaming, not different from the blind release of saliva from the smell of lemons. But I never judge.
Her husband calls me in the car. His name doesn't show up–I'm too careful for that–but I swipe away before she can recognize his number.
"Work?" she asks.
"No rest for the wicked."
She frowns and looks out the window.
Do I enjoy my job? I admit that I'm very good at it. I'm very good with women–that is, on the clock. Outside of my work I cannot see them. I only hear a faint screeching sound, like a mosquito. But I use the word vocation, which comes from the Latin, meaning a calling, meaning something passed down from above. Those who know me do not know that I am religious. In my own way, I feel I am guiding lost sheep back into the fold. I protect the innocent. I work small miracles. I think of the children, Mindy and little George, and I ensure that they will not suffer.
My clients have almost always been family men. I charge a flat fee of three thousand dollars, in cash or a wire transfer to a business account under another name. I never advertise. Sometimes, though not very often, I'll check in on the couple a few months later to see how they're doing. Those who take my advice, who take their spouse on a vacation or renew their vows or perform some other connubial ritual, do quite well. Those who do not--the results are mixed. Nothing is perfect.
Later, after I have broken Sarah's heart, I'll get a call from her grateful husband. She will have been too prideful to confess her humiliation but her husband's impeccable timing (carefully pre-planned) and his simple sincerity will touch her to the quick. She'll remember again his defects, his carelessness, but also his perfections. She'll remember how good he is with the kids and that there is no one else in this world to whom she can be perfectly vulnerable, no one who encompasses her so totally--except, perhaps, her father, and with the exception of this little misadventure. She'll tell him she’s catching the first flight home in the morning; she’s coming home and she misses him. And it will be true, all that she says, and my job will be done.
So, yes, I guess I can admit a certain satisfaction in my work and if not for that woman--if only I had never met that woman--I should have concluded my existence as a hero, a knight of the round table, a Galahad. That woman was the ruin of my life.
—
It was eight months after the job and I was on my way to another, in Odessa, very different from the usual affair, very contrary to my sense of morals, but with an obscene payout. That was my first mistake. The beginning of compromise, I have heard, is the end of perfection. It was on the connecting flight to Vienna that I noticed a familiar face: it was Sarah.
She spotted me right away. We sat across from each other on opposite aisles and, for my part, I remembered her quite well. Her accent, her fragile hands, the drink she ordered, the twisting and untwisting of her cocktail napkin, indicating a nervous indecision, everything was like the performance of a magic trick whose mystery was known, and therefore could no longer hold any further interest. She could not be sure who I was and I could not be sure if her husband had confessed to her the truth and moreover I could neither express recognition nor pretend ignorance of our brief encounter and in that perfect limbo (if only it had lasted), we remained for the better part of an hour.
Finally, she got up, made as if to use the bathroom and, finding it occupied, glanced back down the aisle. Involuntarily, I raised my head and our eyes met and very soon she was sitting beside me, her hands clasped in her lap, neither of us able to say anything, her out of embarrassment, myself from disinterest.
“I thought that it was you,” she said.
“Another business conference?”
She shook her head. “Just got back. I’m meeting my family–” here she paused and glanced at me sidelong. 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 said, springing up in her seat.
My thumb froze for a moment. “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. And I remembered that she was beautiful and perhaps she remembered it also, for there was still that trace of haughty self-satisfaction–mired in insecurity–that must have attracted her husband to her in the beginning.
“So?” I said.
“Why did you do that?” she said, very softly.
“Do what?”
“You knew the whole time.”
I looked back at the emails.
“Yes,” she said, as though I had vehemently denied it. “You did. You knew all along.”
Once in a while, my clients will give up the whole game, and, in fact, I do not discourage it–nothing sacred can be built on lies or illusion–yet one must first be inoculated by time. 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. Very likely she had followed the money, and something in her which 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, but did not get up. The plane began to tremble from turbulence and 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…?”
I gazed at her steadily, without mirth, and she sank back, a little frightened, like those flowers which close their petals when you touch them.
“I’ve never done that,” I said. And then, thinking of the job in Odessa I was going to, I wondered if that was true.
“How did it start?” she asked, with an unusual tenderness.
I have often observed that feminine curiosity is less concerned with material truths than with human experience. Feminine curiosity is the love of knowing what it is to be another. A love which makes them kind to their enemies and dangerous to their friends. A love upon which, in many ways, my livelihood depends–as much as upon the infidelity which its consequence.
I do not say this to justify my confession. And I do not know why I told her anything, except that by her unseemly suggestion she had produced in me the first seed of doubt, which had I heeded, might have saved me from all that was to follow.
“Everything I know I learned from my father…” And I told her, in lurid detail, of a few of my father’s adulterous escapades, the character of the women he had bedded and the glee with which he had disarmed their reason and religion; the families he had destroyed, the marriages. No, I never knew my mother, and no, I cannot remember my father ever having been cruel to me, and no, he never deigned to teach me any of his sportive tricks, his sleights-of-hand–whether out of paternal feeling or cold professionalism–yet I had inherited them all the same, and put them, I thought, to better use. “Vocation,” I concluded, “comes from the Latin vocare, meaning ‘to call’.”
She found my whole existence ridiculous. But it was only when she began to smile and then to laugh that I innocently inquired after her children. Then she became grim. She concluded that I was, “for all intents and purposes”, a creature worthy of pity and commiseration. “You’ll be lonely your whole life,” she said. “Because how can you trust anybody?”
“I see you’re wearing your wedding ring now,” I replied. She instinctively went to touch it, as if to cover it up, but then she didn’t. In her expression, I saw nothing else but pity, as one has for wounded animals and cripples, and I decided I would go through with the Odessa job after all–I would take the money–and I excused myself and went to the bathroom to wash. When I returned, she had gone back to her own seat and we exchanged not so much as a glance for the remainder of the flight, as though we were perfect strangers.
—-
She was fifty-eight years old and a former dancer for the Bolshoi ballet. She had pirouetted before prime ministers and former presidents, dined with nobility, and she clung as equally to these pretensions as to her former beauty, though there was nothing left now of either. Her husband, a man nearly three decades her junior, had no desire for reconciliation. He had married her for money and now wished to divorce her for money.
“The great dancers–Pavlova, Pilsetskaya, Karsavina–in what did their greatness consist? Technique? Method?” she asked me, in 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 of this, they say, ‘what technique!’, and to this 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. I obliged her with perfect readiness. I object to smoking on principle, but such props are often necessary in my line of work. “It is beautiful,” she said, squinting her large, bulbous eyes–which were like two folded tulips–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–like the cheerful softness of a broiled tomato–if I could remember her by that, only by that, and let all the rest lie 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 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 with an equal fluency.
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. Then, 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. I toasted him but did not drink from mine. Though he spoke like an aristocrat, he ate like a common soldier and I found myself nauseated by the difference in refinement between him and his wife–and, I guess, by extension, him and myself.
“What time?” I asked.
“Nine, I suppose. Nine-thirty. What?”
“You do understand that everything–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.” I remained silent but he did not press me, only waited, and then, when I still did not speak, he resumed eating. “What’s going to happen to her?”
He cut vigorously into his piece of fish, until the knife scraped 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?” But secretly I was relieved. For every client, I maintained 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 over the years I’ve found their knowledge to be imperfect. Often, I have to learn on the job. With this particular husband, perhaps precisely because of his duplicity, there was no guesswork. He had filled out the preliminary questionnaire I send out to all my clients–usually returned with a quarter or even half of the questions left blank–with the thoroughness of a tax auditor and subsequent experience had found nothing wanting. I trusted his word absolutely in everything concerning his wife and, finding myself for once on the other side of the moral transgression, I craved assurances. “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. I’d had enough.
“Nine-fifteen,” he said.
***
I can remember very little about the villa. It was by the sea. There were Persian rugs hanging on walls instead of paintings. There were empty bookcases. But, of course, I remember very well the small unassuming door with the curlicue handle, the room which I had, upon first encounter, mistaken for the washroom.
“Not that door but the one further down,” she had said in a trembling, almost panicked voice (I did not sense the panic then). And I can feel, even now, the fluid, almost noiseless return of that handle, as smooth and as inevitable as the action of a guillotine.
“I don’t think there’s anything sacred about the human body,” I said, smiling in a way I knew was winsome. I was wearing the gray suit she liked, 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 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. “You know. But it is difficult for them to understand this thing: that I did not choose. That 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. I looked at my watch. It was nine-thirteen. I was ready. She brushed her thumb against the corner of my eye, under the pretense of a fallen eyelash, and I remember that when I kissed her, I thought of money, of my father, and of the perfect clockwork of my plans.
	When dawn broke the next morning, I was still livid. I hadn’t slept, merely laid limply beside her, willing my limbs and breath and body to quietly vanish. He 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. I had been in the room with the curlicue handle, I had seen the old photographs, the terrible shrine, the rack of gray suits, and when finally she offered me money, I am ashamed to say that I accepted 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. With patience unusual of one dying from lung cancer.
	“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 swiped it discreetly. “She give you something for your troubles, at least?” I didn’t speak. Above us, the dancer switched out with another girl as her shift came to an end. “I bet you got a 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 how 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 like fleas. He shook his head, incredulous. “Uncanny. You seen the pictures? The drawings? Well, of 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, and then he looked up at the stage toward the dancer, following her nubile body as it spun around the pole, popping the peanuts into his mouth. “Listen,” he said, not looking away. “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? Well, I mean 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 Texas 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 what else you gonna do? Will you listen to me for a second? Would you just stop for one second? Alright? No more bullshit. I’m telling you 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 that there’s nothing else for him. A point comes when you’ve seen something–I can’t explain it but you know what I mean–when the veil comes off, and you see it, you know there isn’t anything else for you in this world. You know you were made for this, only for this.”
I gripped the steering wheel, shutting my eyes and thinking now of her, now of the photographs of my father in his gray suit, now of all the clients I had helped, of those 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 unclicked the lock on the passenger door, I felt neither surprised nor ashamed, but only resigned to whatever lay ahead.