What He's Poised to Do

“That’s right,” I said. “Off the table.” I hung up the phone. My hand was cramped from clutching it so hard. I opened it and closed it experimentally. My wife was not home. She was working late. That’s what happens when you are a lawyer for a publishing firm and the other lawyer in your department has a child and decides to work from home and then, as the months go on, to hand over enough responsibilities that it becomes clear that the rest of the responsibilities will soon follow. You—if you are the remaining lawyer, if you are my wife—step into the breach. You stay late. You go to the office on Saturdays. You explain to your husband that the two of you are happiest when you are working—you at your office, he at his property-management firm—and you remind him that when the two of you had too much time on your hands, a kind of restlessness infected the marriage. “Our conversations then were an invidious reminder of how poorly we were addressing our own needs,” my wife once said. She leaves me notes in the morning when she leaves, and I put notes on top of her notes when I go to sleep. We communicate through these documents: the primary, the secondary, the others. This is why I am happy writing a letter to your letter. I have years of training in these matters.

Dear X,

Why did I let you believe that my wife was home when she was not? Because it would injure you. Why did I want to injure you? Because you had injured me. You wanted to take it off the table, all of it, despite the fact that for nearly two years it had sustained me. When I met you, my wife and I were going through a difficult period. I told her that it was the hell of adjusted expectations. She frowned and said that we were “above timberline.” It was not the right time for her fluency. I took a deep breath, sat down on the bed, and said that I was not sure that I loved her, that despite all that she had meant to me, I just could not see around the corner.

A few days later, I met you. It was at an open house for one of my properties. Usually I don’t attend them myself, but it was a weekend filled with bad weather, and I needed somewhere to go. I let Janice, the agent, off the hook, and told her I would cover it myself. “Thank you, Mr. Ramirez,” she said. She yawned and stretched. Janice has always had a thing for me, and she’s beautiful, but I was never the type to run around. When I started off in business, they used to call me “Play-It-Safe Paco,” though in fact usually I did not play it at all. I held my residential properties for years, let their value grow slowly, like a tree rather than a flower—there was not always as much beauty in the process as there could have been, but there was a thick trunk and there were roots. I behaved similarly in my dealings with women. When Janice yawned and stretched, when she pressed her body against the fabric of her clothes, I cannot face.

Janice left. I stayed. The apartment was a small two-bedroom with a bath and a half. The master bedroom was big and had one large walk-in closet. The kitchen had just been redone with a beautiful marble counter. The fireplace didn’t work, but the detailing on it was exquisite. I showed the place to a gay couple, then a straight couple, then to a man who was in the middle of a divorce. He was the most interested, and also the most interesting—he touched everything and shook his head, as if he were trying to rouse himself from a fog. He thought he’d put in an offer. “I just wish I knew what direction things were going to take,” he said. “I am ninety percent sure that I’m going to need to buy my own place, but that ten percent really weighs on me.” I wished him luck. I was sitting on a folding chair I had brought, reading a Blood-Horse magazine—since I was a little boy, I have always wanted to own thorough-breds, though now that I have the money to do so I realize that I don’t know nearly enough about it, and I am always trying to bring myself to the point where I feel, if not confident, at least competent enough to make a purchase. I collect art instead, because I know a little about it, because it gives me pleasure.

A knock came at the door.

A small woman was standing in the hallway. It was you. As you came into the room, I revised my first impression. You were short, certainly, but you were not skinny, and you had a presence, partly as a result of your beautiful arms and partly because of your enormous eyes. Neither was adventitious. “Karen Lewis,” you said, and extended your hand.

“Francisco Ramirez,” I said.

“That’s a very grand name,” you said.

“Well, I am a nobleman,” I said.

“Really?”

“No,” I said. “Only a rich man.”