He wants me to think and seems to believe himself-and it may be the truth-that his essential nature is now subsumed by the condition of being overwhelmed. "I used to have a personality," he will say, "and a life I rather liked. Now I run an orphanage on a street where I am the only heterosexual man for ten blocks in every blinking direction."
On the other hand, I'm not sure what that personality was, the one he claims to have had. He can predict whether a client will prefer a Miro etching to an obscure Delvaux oil painting, and he is consulted by museums and foreign governments to detect forgeries, but in matters of his heart, nuance is a rare commodity. When I asked him how his marriage had changed over the years, all he said was, "Once the children arrived, we quit having sex on Saturday afternoons."
My friends are divided over the nature and severity of Daniel's affliction. Those who have spent time in England insist that his passport is his destiny, and his answer to my question about his marriage passes in that population for soul-searching. Other friends ascribe his limitations to gender. "He sounds just like a man," Annabelle said, "but worse." It may be most accurate on any continent to say that he is what Winston Churchill said about Russia: a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
But there is something else you should know about Danieclass="underline" I think he is still in love with Blair. She has this embalmed, waxy, forever-thirty-nine, Dick Clark quality. Perfect, silent, stricken, enveloped in the aura of her New York Stock Exchange pedigree and a life of excruciatingly good deeds. She founded and ran a literacy-and-reading center for inner city families and was always getting plaques and certificates from the mayor, the governor, Channel 7, the Amsterdam News, El Diario, and the Helen Keller Foundation. Daniel sells modern masters, wears Armani underwear, and a wristwatch as thin as a quarter, but his living room walls are now crammed with three-dollar pressed-wood plaques and ersatz diplomas from local TV news anchors who think Blair should have shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela.
Poor thing was hit by a UPS truck the year before while bicycling on Hilton Head Island, where she was attending her only sister's wedding. Can Daniel marry again without divorcing his brain-dead wife? The subject has not come up between us. We are efficient communicators in the sack and above-average conversationalists on terra firma, but on the question of our future-I mean anything beyond tomorrow-we are neophyte speakers of English, permanently stalled in the present tense.
Blair is a tough act to follow, though I give it all I've got. In addition to baking Christmas cookies with Daniel's children in June, I frequently do a full-dress imitation of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, which they have seen on video twenty-five or thirty times. I braid my hair and wear a polka-dot pinafore and a pair of glittery red shoes I found in a thrift store; and I rigged up a little stuffed dog, attached to a real leather leash, which I drag up the stairs of their brownstone and then sling over my shoulder, squealing, "Toto! Toto! I don't think we're in Kansas anymore!"
One night I made the mistake of imitating their father for them. I put on one of his silk suits over my own clothes and carted four metal lunchboxes and a handful of naked Barbie dolls into the bedroom where they waited for me, perched on the edge of Vicki's bed-Vicki, the oldest, Vicki, who keeps a shelf of books about children who have no parents. This child who first heard English spoken three years ago has read The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, Peter Pan, Pippi Longstocking, and, in a category of loss entirely its own, The Diary of Anne Frank.
That night I studied each of their faces and said in the lowest growl I could summon and my best English accent, "What's all this blinking mess in here?" I pretended to trip and sent the lunchboxes and Barbies flying. They landed hard and clattered across the bare wood floor. From downstairs, Daniel hollered, "What's all that blinking noise up there?" and we collapsed with laughter, and I was still laughing when Tran said to me, "Now do Mommy."
"But I don't know Mommy."
"You don't know Dorothy, either," Vicki said. I knew only that I was bound to fail in this, but four pair of beautiful, almond-shaped black eyes were on me, and I could not deprive them of another mother, even of the flimsy imposter they knew to expect.
I slipped out of Daniel's clothes and tried to organize a game of Chinese checkers with them, tried to be a funny, light-hearted, old-fashioned, TV kind of Mom, before TV moms were cops and cardiologists, but my heart wasn't in it, or maybe I mean that I didn't want them to see how much it was in it, so I held back, and the whole thing fell flat. "Who wants peanut butter?" I said lamely. "Who wants to take a Tarzan bubble bath? Who wants an enormous plate of asparagus for dessert?" But none of them laughed, and I was relieved when Van said, "Do Dorothy again."
At breakfast they have said to me, "Do our dad, please."
"The school bus is outside."
"Then do Toto."
"Honey, let Sophy finish her cereal."
"One little time, and we'll never ask you again."
"I will," said Cam, the youngest, always out of synch with the consensus.
"Don't get dressed up," Tran said. "Just talk funny and throw the Barbies."
Early on, when Daniel and I were in bed and it was dark and our skin was as slippery as the inside of an oyster, he whispered, "Do me."
"What?"
"Do me."
"Baby, I am doing you."
"Imitate me. The way you did today at lunch."
"Now?"
"Now."
"You pervert."
"Don't stop moving."
"You narcissist."
"I'm guilty."
"You're out of your blinking mind."
"Do me."
'"I have a little, uh, Chagall etching in the vault, uh, you might find enchanting. Once in the collection of His Majesty the Shah of Iran. Or was it the Duke of, uh, Windsor? Two-point-five.'"
"His etchings never sold for that much."
"'For you, then, two-point-three.'"
"I never bargain. Or mix up monarchs."
"You are out of your mind, Daniel."
"I know."
"I know you know."
The truth was we both were. Fourteen days before, in a howling March nor'easter, on an island called Swansea, off the coast of Massachusetts-a place as desolate as the Hebrides that time of year-I had left my husband and a hideous hybrid hound dog with pointy ears. He was not only my consolation prize for not having a baby, but a sign from God, I'm sure, that had I succeeded, the poor creature would have been Rosemary's Baby. I had driven away from a ten-year marriage with what I could fit in a rented Toyota and a promise I did not think I would keep: to reconsider my decision when I got to New York.
So much has happened since then. For one thing, the dog is gone. For another, I've just begun to write the story of my own life, at a desk in the house on Swansea that I walked out of in March, and I'm on a firm deadline. The story starts on a high note: a woman leaves her husband in search of happiness and ends up on a big-city roller-coaster ride that feels for moments at a time like sheer bliss, an urban fairy tale come true. Then, out of nowhere, her new life takes a plunge, then another, and a few dips, and before long she feels like Job. But there isn't much of a story to tell unless a few things go wrong, is there?
I'm not going to trouble you with the story of my entire life since before my birth, like David Copperfield. I think it's best to stick to what's happened lately, starting two months ago, the morning of June twenty-second, when I was still in New York, still caught up, for the next few hours, in the great, mad joy of just being there, the morning of the day the police called.