The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up (8 page)

Arnold had considered leaving New York until the situation blew over, maybe renting a bungalow in the Catskills for a few weeks. Or going on a cruise—turning the getaway into a second honeymoon. Nobody ever criticized dissidents for fleeing China or Iran. Or Einstein for leaving Nazi Germany. But the more Arnold thought about it, running away seemed as bad as apologizing. In either case, it was giving in. Moreover, he’d envisioned a temporary escape. It had never crossed his mind that they might relocate permanently—that they would end up refugees like his ex-brother-in-law in Fiji. Arnold could imagine only one fate worse than permanent banishment from New York: Being permanently banished from New
York
and
having to raise a child in exile.

“I don’t want to leave New York,” said Arnold. “And you don’t want to leave New York either. You’re not thinking straight.”

“Why not?”

“Please, Judith. In the first place, you’re fifty-one years old. You’d be seventy when the kid graduates from high school.”

“I’ve been reading a lot about older parenting. On the internet,” insisted Judith. “It’s far more common than you think. Look at Tony Randall. Or Saul Bellow. Or Anthony Quinn.”

Arnold recognized this as one of Judith’s traps, that she wanted him to say was:
But they’re all men
—so she could dismiss his objections as sexist. What he’d actually thought was:
But they’re all dead
. He knew enough not to say this either.

“And how exactly do you propose to have this baby?” he demanded.

Judith paused in front of a long walnut sideboard covered in knickknacks and photographs, picking up a hand-carved wooden stork that they’d purchased on a trip to the Canary Islands. “There are ways,” she said. “I don’t care about
having
the baby. Or even that it’s a baby. We can adopt a ten year old from Africa or a little girl with Down’s syndrome….
But I want a child
.”

“I thought we were on the same page about this,”
pleaded Arnold. “I thought we’d decided….”

“I’ve changed pages,” snapped Judith. “I’m glad you wouldn’t apologize. If you’d apologized, everything would have stayed the same. I’d have gone on listening to Bonnie Card and her bullshit about the indecency of motherhood until I really was too old to raise a family. It all seems so horrifically obvious to me now: I’d have ended up one of those pathetic old widows who pesters strangers with photographs of her nieces and nephews.” She slammed the wooden stork against the sideboard, snapping off its bill. “Well I’m not going to let that happen! Bonnie Card can go fuck herself.”

“Okay, okay,” said Arnold. “We’ll figure something out. But can’t we deal with one problem at a time? I don’t think this is really a conversation to have while the Black Nazis are camped outside our door.”

“This is precisely the time to have this conversation, my dear,” answered Judith. “I want to know what I can expect from the rest of my life.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m going to have a child, Arnold. One way or another.” Judith’s voice was suddenly calm. “I love you and I’d like you to be part of that experience. But whether you want a child or not, I’m going to have one. All you have to do is decide whether you want to share that with me.”

“But I love you…” said Arnold.

“I’m not bluffing.”

“I know you’re not,” he answered. “Let me think about it.”

That was the wrong answer. Arnold realized his mistake as soon as the words left his mouth—that a “maybe” was as good as a “no.” Both suggested that he’d consider leaving her, or letting her leave him, that the status quo wasn’t an inevitability.

Judith stared at him blankly. Then she knelt down on the carpet and gathered together the pieces of the shattered stork.

Later that afternoon, at the nursery, a second incident reinforced the sudden fragility of Arnold’s marriage. He’d ordered Guillermo to make sure that he wasn’t disturbed, and then he’d sat in his office, the door bolted, munching on cornflowers and pitying himself. Dozens of pink phone messages lay on his desk blotter—mostly from various news outlets, but also from at least two progressive law firms who’d volunteered to take “his case”
pro bono
. His aunt had also phoned from her summer cabin outside Santa Fe in order to let him know that she’d seen him on television. “Just wanted you to know; no need to call back.” At least his parents were dead. And Judith’s too. That was some solace. If Arnold had had to listen to his father describe the bombing of Rotterdam, or the three years he’d spent concealed under the floorboards of the baboon cage at the Utrecht Zoo, stinking perpetually of primate shit
and surviving on monkey rations smuggled to him by a devout Catholic keeper, he’d have lost his resolve. Pieter Brinkman was the sort of man who loved the Statue of Liberty as much as his own wife and who experienced a chill down his spine when he saw the American flag draped at half-mast. He’d volunteered to fight in the Korean War, but his age and severe asthma had rendered him unfit for service. Eleanor Brinkman had also been a fierce patriot in her own way—a social worker who spoke of “my” President, as though he belonged to her personally, and who’d insisted upon mounting a portrait of FDR on her wall in the nursing home. How odd that none of this had rubbed off on Arnold. He balled up the pink slips one at a time and lobbed them at the wastepaper basket. Three of them were from Cassandra Broward at the
Daily Vanguard
.

Arnold considered returning Cassandra’s calls—but to what end? No matter how many times he assured himself that his intentions were purely professional, that he’d have done the same for any reporter who shared his politics, the fact remained that he hadn’t phoned back the other periodicals whose messages now lay crumpled around the trash can. And several of these, like
The Nation
and
The Village Voice
, had run editorials in his defence. If he phoned Cassandra, no good would come of it: Some itches weren’t meant to be scratched. Instead, he flipped on the television set that he’d commandeered from his manager’s office—nominally, because the staff had been sneaking into
Guillermo’s quarters on breaks to watch the news updates, but really because he was growing addicted to the coverage of himself. He was constantly a bit on edge about what else they might reveal of his past, but also curious that they might uncover something even he didn’t know. They’d already tracked down Judith’s estranged brother, to whom nobody in the family had spoken in twenty years. (The man ran a pawn shop in Bethel, Alaska, with his Yupik wife, and kept referring to Arnold as “Alfred.”) But that afternoon—the third since the baseball game—the cable networks were merely rehashing the week’s events. On the
right-wing
station, the camera panned across the demonstrators, many of whom had brought along umbrellas and trench coats to ward off the drizzle, so that the mob now looked slightly more civilized, like FBI agents attending a funeral. Four men held a green-and-black canopy above Spotty Spitford to keep him dry. The minister looked so pleased with himself, like a cat who dined on canary at every meal. Then the camera pulled back and surveyed the opposite side of the street: the bored cops chewing the fat under the sassafras tree, the octogenarian who lived on the other side of Ira Taylor, and her centenarian mother, relaxing in lawn chairs on their stoop. That’s when Arnold caught sight of Gilbert Card. The immigration lawyer was wearing a trench coat with the collar turned up and walking rapidly. Not unusual behaviour, considering the weather, but it gave Arnold pause nonetheless. He watched helplessly as
Gilbert waited on his porch—his back turned to the jeering throng—until Arnold’s wife opened the door. In the brief interval when the door stood open, Arnold caught sight of Judith in the entryway. It looked to him as though she’d been smiling.

Up until that moment, it had never crossed Arnold’s mind that Judith might have a secret love interest of her own. They’d always been far too happy with each other, their lives far too intertwined, for infidelity to gain a foothold. Judith was constantly saying that if he were to die first, she’d never remarry. Not because she objected to a second husband in principle—that was probably the psychologically healthy choice—but because she just didn’t have it in her to start over again. (He’d admitted that he probably would remarry eventually, that anything was better than growing old alone.) It was hard to reconcile the Judith who criticized unfaithful wives
in movies
, the
sharp-tongued
creature who had no compunction about telling a dinner party that “Emma Bovary got what was coming to her,” with the Judith who was bonking his best friend on the sly. But, in hindsight, maybe the woman had protested too much. If he could have a crush on Cassandra Broward, Judith might as easily have a thing for Gil. After all, the lawyer was good-looking, personable, easy-going—and it didn’t take too much reflection for Arnold to realize that Bonnie Card wasn’t giving Gilbert what he needed in bed. She couldn’t be. Which meant that all of those references
to national borders might have been a secret code that referred to other, more personal barriers. Maybe Judith’s baby was just a symptom, not the underlying problem.

Once the ugly idea took root in Arnold’s thoughts, it wasn’t too difficult to rethink his entire past. All of those dinner parties with the Cards now acquired a sinister meaning: Gilbert
was
always wandering off with Judith to look at her paintings or to offer her wisdom on interior decorating. Arnold had always just been pleased that they’d gotten along so well. How many evenings had he listened to Bonnie criticizing Western Civilization’s irrational censure of bestiality, or our culture’s peculiar reverence for corpses, or insisting that chimpanzees be given the right to vote? He imagined listening to her declaim on the moral equivalence of golf and genocide, as he had done only last month, while her husband was going down on his wife in the linen closet. For all he could tell, Bonnie might have been in on the arrangement. Arnold could imagine her saying:
There’s nothing natural or preferable about monogamy. It’s just an arbitrary choice, like monotheism
.

He could easily return to the house and confront the pair, disrupt their lovemaking and drive Gilbert naked from his bedroom. But what if he were wrong? And worse, what if he was right—but the affair was taking its natural course and would soon be water under the bridge. The last thing Arnold wanted to do was to force his wife’s hand, to transform an unfortunate transgression into a
marriage-breaking
calamity. Under the circumstances, maybe not knowing was best.

He picked up the phone, intending to call Gilbert’s cell. All he wanted was to hear the lawyer’s voice—to see if the man admitted where he was. But Arnold’s entire hand shook as he lifted the receiver. What would he do if Gilbert lied to him? What could he do? Instead, he dialled Bonnie’s number at home. The machine picked up:

You’ve reached Gilbert and Bonnie. Please leave a message. Beep
.

“It’s Arnold and I’m leaving a message,” said Arnold. “I just wanted to say hello and to tell you two how much we enjoyed dinner the other night and—”

“—Arnold. Hey, it’s Bonnie.”

“You’re there.”

“Can’t be too careful. You wouldn’t believe the sorts of phone calls I get,” answered Bonnie. “On second thought, I suspect you’re getting your fair share.”

“Judith pulled the phone out of the wall.”

“Been there, done that,” said Bonnie. “So how is notoriety treating you?”

“You’ve been through this, Bonnie. When will it end?”

“I’m surprised it’s lasted this long. I was sure you’d have given in by now.”

Arnold was suddenly struck by the realization that he didn’t like Bonnie Card—that he’d
never
liked Bonnie Card.

“I’m not giving in.”

“Why not?” asked Bonnie. “Why do you care what a bunch of total strangers think about you? And particularly if they’re right-wing lunatics?”

“I’m not giving in,” Arnold repeated. “
You
didn’t give in,” he objected. “Why did
you
care what all those cystic fibrosis people thought of
you
?”

“I’m not a good role model, Arnold. In the first place, I’m an ethicist. I have to worry about my professional credibility. Nobody expects the guy who sells them vermiculite to stand up for civil liberties.” Bonnie paused—probably to let the vermiculite jab sink in. “But what you’re missing, Arnold, is that I
enjoyed
being under attack. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it was a picnic. Let me tell you: There are few experiences less pleasant than finding a dead foetus nailed to your front door. But, on the whole, I relish the good scrap. A battle-royal. It keeps my blood flowing. Gilbert’s the same way. So what if we have to call out the bomb squad every once in a while to open our mail? When strangers send us white powder, we sweeten our tea with it. You and Judith, on the other hand, you’re not fighters. Quite frankly, you’re made of softer stuff. What do you hope to achieve by resisting? Will it really be worth it….?”

Arnold had reached his saturation point with Bonnie Card. Only five days earlier, Bonnie Card had been urging
resistance to the last—and now she wanted him to roll over. It was all a game to her, just an endless series of questions that led to more questions. If he took one stance, she’d choose the opposite—merely to demonstrate that the opposing side also had merit, that our social universe was entirely constructed and no philosophical principle was truly sound. For a professor of ethics, Bonnie Card was utterly amoral. But no sane person could lead his life like that, and Arnold wasn’t going to let the woman twist his thoughts in circles.
Not this time
.

“Thanks for the wisdom,” answered Arnold.

“Any time.”

He drew a deep breath.

“How are you and Gil?”

“Busy, the usual chaos. He’s been working long hours.” Arnold detected a hint of derision in the woman’s voice—but he wasn’t sure whether she was merely complaining about Gil’s schedule, or hinting at something more. “He’s really sorry about the other day,” added Bonnie. “He thought you
wanted
to apologize.”