That Monday morning I tried to phone Fadia on the last number I had for her, but when the call connected a singsong British accent told me it was no longer in service. I sent her an email, and then another, as I had in the past, but she did not reply. Later that morning a messenger delivered a parcel, but this time it was nothing more menacing than a new phone, a gift from Meredith, ‘To help us keep in touch,’ her note said. I turned the thing on, following the directions to set it up, and dialed her number.
‘I received your little gift,’ I said into the phone. ‘I’m calling you from it.’
‘I know, Dad, your new number is already in my contacts. Do you like it?’
‘It’s a phone, darling, what’s to like?’
‘They’re objects of desire.’
‘Perhaps your desire, but not mine.’ There was a pause on the line. I was disappointing Meredith, who only wanted to help, just as she did when she upgraded my airline tickets or arranged car services to fetch and deliver me, acts designed to insulate me from the realities and messiness of life. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. It’s a fine-looking thing. Very sleek. And I suppose it’ll allow me to do all kinds of things I couldn’t do before, like finding a decent restaurant in Midtown.’
Meredith laughed although she did not sound amused. It was not a laugh I recognized.
‘Darling?’
I could hear her breathing, a quick exhalation, almost as if she were smoking a cigarette.
‘It’s — I just thought it would help us stay in touch.’
Once a landline was enough, and I wonder if, in the past, we didn’t trust each other more, knowing there would be stretches of every day when we would not be able to contact our spouses or children or parents, trusting they were simply getting on with their lives and being faithful to us and whatever they later reported having done was true, or at least plausible. For each of us, the freedom of not being reached, of wandering untracked through the city, browsing in bookstores and libraries, living life in a way that the mind did not feel hunted or followed or simply distracted by the silliness of unwanted messages and the ability to check stock prices every thirty seconds or receive alerts of breaking news, must have meant that as recently as a decade ago we were thinking more and reacting less. Is it any wonder we have entered a more reactionary age? Our technology is teaching us to react rather than reflect, so that even the leftwing movements of the present seem no longer to be based in ideas as much as in the constantly shifting desire to respond to offense or inequality or injustice, and yet the discourse surrounding whatever the movement or outrage du jour might be seems too often founded on a wafer of historical and ideological ignorance. These were the kinds of thoughts I was once able to share with Susan — in fact such conversations were the foundation of our relationship when we were in our twenties, married overnight, with a daughter nine months later, and no knowledge of each other except the quality of our respective minds. How I missed the possibility of such talk, and in the spirit of spontaneity and the desire to see, perhaps one last time, whether there might still be the possibility of a more serious rapprochement, I got in a cab and went uptown.
When I spoke into the intercom Susan said nothing, but the door buzzed and I pushed my way back into that familiar old entrance, the tile floor a little grubby, the lobby sharp with the scent of aluminum mailboxes. Susan’s dog, yapping from behind the door at the top of the building, reminded me of the dog we once owned together, that Westie we had named Lotte Lenya because she looked like the actress, dour face, mouth that was all teeth, a dog who dragged her heels every time we tried to bring her home from Riverside Park.
Seeing Susan’s face again, and the little dark eyes of that very white dog looking up at me, I felt such a strong sense of hominess that I embraced my ex-wife without thinking and began to cry in her arms. Despite her anger the day before, she was, apart from our daughter, the only person I felt I could trust, since my mother is no longer as accessible as she was in the past. How comforting it would be to return to the life we once shared, to live again in this apartment, to make Riverside Park and this stretch of Broadway my territory again, after my years of exile. But then, as I stepped into my old apartment, moving down the hall to the living room, I was shocked to find Peter sitting on the couch. Seeing him there, so comfortable and sleek, I thought, ‘this is like a Jew walking into a place of supposed safety only to find a member of the Gestapo lying in wait, welcomed by the hosts.’
Peter smiled, the same smile I had seen on his parents and one that, on occasion in the months since my return from Oxford, I had seen on Meredith as well. It was a smile with no heat.
‘I’ve spoken with my lawyers, Jeremy. They’ve made a referral, and the other firm, you know, they can do it all at our place, this evening or tomorrow, although I think the sooner the better, don’t you?’
‘Do what exactly?’
‘Go over the facts of the case as you’ve laid them out, look at the evidence, the files you’ve received and all your bank records if you have them. Maybe you could print them out and bring them, and then we can start to think about how to deal with the authorities, if that becomes necessary, I mean, if the lawyers think there’s anything that has to be addressed. Can I ask, has anyone else seen the files you’ve received?’
‘The doormen at my building.’
‘You showed the doormen your files?’
‘They saw the boxes I received. Which contained the files.’
‘But not the files themselves?’
‘No, not the files per se.’
‘So you’re the only person who has actually looked at the files, the papers I mean, with the words and numbers printed on them.’
‘Yes, that’s correct. They’re, you know, they’re very private.’
I thought he was concerned that other people might have discovered what was happening, but then, looking just off to one side, he asked, ‘And you’re certain the files are not, just maybe, something you sent yourself?’
‘Why would I do such a thing?’
‘I don’t know, and forgive me if this seems rude, but are you certain these files don’t contain, I don’t know, scrap paper, or even blank pages?’
‘Absolutely certain. And the record of phone calls made and received is not something I could have produced myself.’
‘You could have noted down every time you made a call, who you were calling, the duration, the times. You could be one of those people who never deletes his browsing history and then printed it all out.’
‘But I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I’m not obsessive compulsive, Peter, if that’s what you’re suggesting. Susan can attest to that.’
‘It’s true. Jeremy’s too chaotic to be OC,’ Susan laughed, though there was no delight in it. ‘But he was always a very good liar. Why do you think he had to leave Columbia? Flexibility with the truth. Hazardous for a historian.’
‘Enough, Susan. I’m not making this up and I resent the suggestion that I might be.’
‘Why do you think you feel so defensive about this, Jeremy?’ Peter asked.
‘Listen, I could get in a taxi right now, go home, get the boxes, and bring them back, if that will convince you.’
‘Is it important to you that we be convinced of your sanity?’
‘Yes, of course it is. What kind of idiot are you?’
Peter paused. ‘There’s no need to be insulting. We’re just trying to help you.’
‘I’m not being insulting. I’m frustrated. You’re frustrating me because you’re casting doubt on what I’m saying. Why are you even here, Peter?’
‘I was in the neighborhood and stopped by to see how Susan is doing. She was upset after your visit yesterday.’