The New Republic

Edgar raised his empty Amstel and clinked it against Falconer’s mug. “Just got yourself one more, then.” Edgar’s inability to complete the toast with a swig seemed apt. If idolatry made a poor basis for a friendship, pity wasn’t much of an improvement. Falconer seemed like a dead nice guy, and Edgar felt robbed.

“When you off to Barba?”

“Soon as I can pack.”

“Good luck with Saddler, anyway.”

“I don’t expect to have good or bad luck with Saddler,” Edgar protested. “He disappeared, remember? Abracadabra. Hell, the guy probably just fell in a ditch.”

“The likes of Saddler don’t just fall in ditches. Or if they do, there’s plenty more to the story, and nine times out of ten they crawl out again. I got a gut sense says the legendary Barrington belongs in your life.”

Edgar found himself obscurely cheered up. Much as he might resist the prospect of some bombastic and unaccountably fawned-over scoundrel bursting unannounced through his front door, suddenly he felt he had a future, and its vista widened into the big, big, big—big as life; bigger, even. As Falconer settled the bill at the bar, having waved off a half-heartedly proffered ten-spot, Edgar studied the plain, kindly face, searching its prematurely haggard lines scored by “three hyperactive kids and a depressive wife,” too many red-eyes out of Addis and tight connections in Rome. Though he thought he was scanning for some flicker of the sly, playful Adonis at whom he’d marveled at Yardley, Edgar recognized in his failure to see any resemblance at all that he didn’t want to see a resemblance.

Out on the street, they shook hands. Edgar clapped Toby’s shoulder for good measure. Neither made a feint toward meeting again. “Take care of yourself, Falconer.”

“You know, there didn’t used to be an airport in Cinzeiro, only a bus from Lisbon. Now there are two planes a day. Presumably to make it that much easier for the SOB to blow them up. Watch your back, Kellogg.”

Instead Edgar watched Toby Falconer’s. In no time the beige knit shirt and gray slacks blended with the bland attire of other pedestrians, helping to form the backdrop against which strange or striking New Yorkers would stand out.

chapter 4 (#ulink_8a9345f8-e75a-5890-a039-fe5d8d9da6b8)

Inversion 101

Hanging on the subway strap, Edgar considered Toby Falconer, Joe Average. Certainly senior year at Yardley Edgar had caught a harried look in Falconer’s eyes, the submerged panic of a boy who couldn’t swim sinking below the surface. Edgar had worked hard at the time at foreshortening his former icon into another small-pond egotist.

From a distance, Edgar had discovered everything that had captivated him about Falconer could be slyly inverted: confidence transposed to arrogance, grace to effeminacy, popularity to shallowness. That famous sense of humor upended into flippancy, powers of persuasion into slimier powers of manipulation. Apparently the most sterling quality could be turned upside-down, like a reversible placemat. Courage flipped to irresponsibility, passion to mawkishness. The self-sacrificial were dupes, and the loyal? Were clingy. Now Falconer had gone and inverted himself. It should have been satisfying.

Childhood obesity having put his own flaws on such flagrant display, in self-defense Edgar had developed an eagle eye for the faults of other people. Though the facility gave him a deadliness it didn’t make him happy and it probably didn’t make him attractive. Nor did it save him from practicing the craft of inversion on himself. Resigning from Lee & Thole, for instance: heads, the move was bold. Tails? It was retarded.

Fearing a failure of nerve, Edgar had rung the Portuguese airline TAP from a pay phone in front of The Red Shoe to make a reservation for Barba via Lisbon three days hence. That would give him just enough time to wrap up loose ends—like Angela—and not enough time to back out.

The process of inverting Angela was almost complete. He had yet to get over wanting to fuck her, but everything else that had first drawn him to her had capsized. Her far-flung general knowledge, for instance, translated neatly into superficiality: she could discuss anything for five minutes and nothing for half an hour. When she professed strong views about new Freud biographies at parties, she’d only read the reviews. She subscribed to all the right magazines but only skimmed the pull-quotes, and in movies concentrated primarily on the credits. That she remembered names, exact addresses, and which restaurants had changed hands had once made her repartee seem zippy, but nowadays when Edgar pictured her mind all he saw was the Yellow Pages.

More to the heart of the matter, that enigmatic quality of hers had revealed itself in time as garden-variety duplicity. For everything Angela said there was something else she omitted. At first the gaps had been scintillating. But after living with her for two years Edgar put his gift of inversion to proper use for once and concluded that Angela wasn’t elusive. She was a liar. She wasn’t mysterious or complicated. She was, and always had been, in love with someone else.

As Edgar slipped his key in the apartment door, he could hear Angela chattering on the phone, and before he’d pushed inside he knew she’d be on her feet.

Pacing, fidgeting from one piece of furniture to another, sure enough Angela was picking and poking at faxes and fountain pens; she couldn’t stand still. Edgar’s entrance earned him a distracted nod. As usual, she’d wedged the receiver between her ear and shoulder so that she could use her hands when she talked. He used to find it charming.

Now Edgar could only picture what Angela doubtless looked like when she was talking on the phone to him. Perhaps she languished on the sofa with her eyes shut, the cord slack, one arm tossed limply midair. In any event, she definitely didn’t use this voice—plosives pipping, aspirates rushing, and fricatives fizzing with the effervescence of Perrier:

“You should have seen him—that’s exactly! Then naturally after—HAH! ha-ha-ha-hahhhhhh …”

As for content, there wouldn’t be any that was discernible on this end. He’d heard her go on like this for an hour without planting enough substantive key words in a row for him to determine whether the conversation was about toenail fungus or Senate hearings on the Waco siege. Of only one thing could Edgar be certain: she was talking to Jamesie—an affectionate private nickname that Edgar had only recently started using aloud.

This glib, gray-templed geeze in his fifties had kept Angela on the side for years. James pre-dated Edgar, who had come to suspect that he wasn’t the first to fill in for James when the old fart was nailing someone else. Angela was forthright about having once been gaga for this big-spending silk importer, but that was all over and now, officially, James and Angela were just “veryveryveryvery good friends.” After two patient years of observation, Edgar had concluded that those two should probably spring for an extra very.

Edgar’s initial tolerance of this “friendship” had won him credit with Angela for being a sophisticated man who realized that all adults in their thirties had pasts. Edgar didn’t go funny when she announced that she was meeting James for dinner, and he didn’t wait up. He didn’t replay Angela’s messages, rifle her mail, or sniff her panties; he didn’t third-degree and he didn’t stage scenes. All of which made him a secure,mature,respectful partner, a.k.a.—Inversion 101—a chump.

“Bye—I can’t now, you know why—later! Bye-bye.” She hung up tenderly. “You wouldn’t believe what—oh, I forgot.” Angela’s bubbly cadence sloshed a bit and then went stagnant. “No more stories about James. You’ve got touchy.”

“Just bored.”

“You were sent some more rejections. They’re on the counter.”

The flaps were sealed. “How can you be sure they’re rejections?”

Angela tossed her hair impatiently, and Edgar finally noticed that it was the same color as the adolescent Toby Falconer’s. “These days, only bad news comes in the mail. That’s what it’s for: to blow you off with as little personal contact as possible. Good news comes in phone calls, or for the last year or two e-mail, if the opposite party is the slightest bit hip. Christ, they should start dyeing all envelopes black.”

“You sure seem torn up about my disappointments.”

“I don’t mean to sound callous, Edgar, but if I stroked your head every time one of those letters arrived, you’d go bald. This journalism gambit sounded good at first, ’cause I thought we’d go somewhere exciting. Even James—” her spine straightened in a refusal to apologize—“James travels everywhere, like, China, Hong Kong. So far your ‘freelancing’ has landed us mostly in this apartment. Night after night, I might add.”

“I’m happy as a clam to eat out,” Edgar said flintily. “You just have to pay for it.”

“I’m a publicist, for Christ’s sake. The Garden swamps me with comps but they pay crumbs, and you can’t satisfy AmEx with free tickets.” She flounced theatrically into the kitchen, to retrieve a lone can of Bartlett pears.

Edgar’s heart wasn’t in an argument, and he cast his eye around his living room with the generosity of nostalgia. Even quotidian quarters achieved an Edward Hopper glow when you were leaving them forever. So did women. Contemplating his girlfriend—her lithe legs, impetuous gold hair, and close breasts that didn’t need a bra but still had an alluring quiver—Edgar despaired that there was one attribute he had never successfully inverted. Good taste boomeranged to snobbery, self-respect to self-regard. But he was at a loss to hold against any woman the fact that she was beautiful.

“Have you ever considered how it might go, living with Jamesie?” Throwing Angela on her new future felt almost as delicious as embracing his own.

“Certainly not, not for years,” she growled, managing to make opening that can look like hard work. “We’re just—”

“Friends,” Edgar completed with a smile; funny, all the old sourness had fled. “You might think twice. Shadowy characters don’t always function in the foreground. If nothing else, Jamesie needs me around to make himself look good.”

“Honestly, Edgar, you’re getting to be impossible!”

Edgar collapsed onto the corduroy sofa with his feet up, feeling dozy, relaxed. You couldn’t say that he didn’t warn her.

Three days later, Edgar withdrew his key from the same lock, and for good measure worked the key off its ring to slip it through the letterbox. He didn’t want to be misunderstood. Shouldering his baggage, Edgar turned his back on the apartment that Angela couldn’t afford, either.

At the elevator, however, he felt a twinge of loss. It wasn’t Angela. It was stuff. All the furniture was his, and he’d not stinted. His suitcase had been too small to accommodate most of his favorite shirts, a closetful of costly suits, or his extensive collection of grunge CDs. He would need, he thought wryly, Replacements.

But then, the alternative course entailed all the recriminatory scenes he’d so elegantly finessed: a tawdry separation of Angela’s Alanis Morissette from his Gin Blossoms, hiring movers and renting storage and breaking the lease—all odious and time-consuming and totally lacking in class. Style required sacrifice. So in lieu of a hasty note, he’d left a cup of coffee cooling and a Camel burning. Leave Angela disconcerted, Edgar figured. He didn’t smoke.

Stashing his boarding card, Edgar flopped into a seat at his Kennedy gate and discarded the unread Wall Street Journal that he’d snagged out of reflex. Though almost as expensive as a round-trip, the one-way ticket tucked in his battered leather bomber jacket had a more intrepid touch and feel.

Repudiation seemed to agree with him. Why, he could acquire a taste for renouncing entire lives like this, and for the present viewed the acquisition of new ones—new friends, new jobs, new lovers—as merely a laborious prerequisite to gleefully forsaking the works. The airport itself, in its all-white nowhere-in-particular-ness, its duty-free replication of dozens of like non-places, offered up a seductive vision of pure departure, a cleanly and permanently wiped slate.

Yet once the flight was called and the plane penetrated the enveloping black vacuum, Edgar’s stomach lurched with the dread certainty that there was only one perfectly negative experience in life, and you got to pull that number only once. Unless he was rescued by an SOB bomb in the cargo hold, the thrill of departure would be inevitably corrupted by arrival somewhere else.

Worse, arrival in a country about which Edgar knew zip, whose politics were notoriously tortuous, where he was supposed to be a reporter. Edgar didn’t know how to be a reporter. Hazily he pictured a journalist dialing up “contacts,” but he’d no idea whom he was meant to phone or what he should ask. In a moment of weakness, Edgar wished faintly that the big, big, big bag of hot air would indeed show up and take his beat back.

The flight attendant was a cow, and her cart was out of light beer. Defiantly, Edgar ordered bourbon, and wolfed down his smoked almonds.

Groping into his carry-on, Edgar lugged out his portable library. The previous afternoon he had ravaged Barnes & Noble’s burgeoning Barba section, scarfing up academic analyses (The Moorish Presence in Barba After the Siege of Lisbon), the odd political treatise (When Democratic Protest Fails: Resort to International Incident as a Consciousness-Raising Tool), recent histories (The Evolution of SOB Strategy and the Rise of O Creme de Barbear), special-interest titles (An Ill Wind: The Role of Weather in Social Defiance), and sensationalist paperbacks (I Was an SOB!—an anonymous memoir by a “reformed Barban bomber” whose authenticity had been hotly contested). His checked bags were lined with general texts on terrorism, most of which said it was bad.

Between sips of JD, Edgar plowed into the book on top, whose first iteration of theright to national self-determination was more soporific than his drink. The author had heavily quoted Tomás Verdade, president of the SOB’s reputed political wing, O Creme de Barbear. Verdade’s verbiage was long-winded and dry, laden with references to dead Barban heroes like Duarte o Estupendo and Teodósio o Terrível, dense with insistence on “defending the integrity of the predominant indigenous culture and the rights of the operative majority within the context of respect for the multiple traditions on a richly varied peninsula”—which, when Edgar applied himself, reduced to xenophobic claptrap.