As Leonie laughed, I tried to record it. Not literally. I tried to imprint on my memory the unforced rise in pitch, the broken descent. I would treasure it, house it in a place of honor, like the relic of a saint. I was aware of the pathetic figure I cut. Sometimes, late at night, I Googled her, looking at the same half-dozen party shots, Leonie with her arm round a curator, a musician, the owner of a West Village restaurant. When I imagined myself in their place, being the man who took her home and made out with her in the taxi and finally, in the privacy of some luxurious apartment, slipped the straps of an expensive dress over her shoulders, I was brought up sharply against my own physical meagerness. The contrast between us was so grotesque that I could never enjoy the fantasy.
Once in a while in New York we went over to her TriBeCa loft. It was a peculiar place, in a doorman building with a marble reception desk and fresh-cut flowers in the lobby. When you got out of the elevator, you felt as if you’d been teleported. Her books sat on metal warehouse shelving. She slept on a mattress on a little plywood platform. The walls had been stripped back to brick, and the floor painted heavy-duty battleship gray. It was a facsimile, a simulation of the kind of place other artists lived in, many stops away in the outer boroughs. Everything about her domesticity was apparently careless. Ashtrays and dirty plates. Bags of recycling propped up against a wall. Part of the huge open space had been crudely partitioned by a plasterboard wall that didn’t meet the ceiling, a white box inside which she sometimes painted or shot photographs. We would hang out at her fake squat with its panoramic view of the Hudson and I would watch the sunset and listen to her friends talking about this show and that fair while she sat cross-legged on the floor in a pastel jumpsuit or a lurid eighties sweater, transparently hoping that someone would ask about the bubble-wrapped C type prints stacked in neat rows against the far wall. Somehow they never did. I never did. Not because I didn’t want to. If I’d dared, I would have asked about her pictures.
Excuse me, she said, and made her way to the other side of the pool, where she bent down and greeted a man in his fifties, one of a group sitting and eating round a picnic table. He had an outdoor tan, sailing or skiing, ruddy around the nose with white bands at his temples where some kind of goggles had blocked the sun. His hair was swept back in a gray mane. She kissed him on the cheek, and he let his hand linger on her shoulder. As she talked, rocking animatedly from foot to foot and playing with the brim of her hat, he sat, half-turned on the bench, his eyes dipping down and back up again, scanning her from knee to breast. There was something raffish about him, a whiff of the bohemian that stood out against the conservative golf wear of the other men at his table. The linen pants, the popped collar on his shirt. I was offended by all of it, his boyishly tousled hair, his air of well-fed hedonism. I waited for her to move away, but she didn’t.
Carter disappeared to take a call, and I hovered by the grill, eating a burger. I couldn’t see anyone who might be willing to talk to me, so I drifted into the pool house, a quaint old building with a tiled roof and cedar siding that had weathered almost to black. Inside it smelled of chlorine and wet towels. A huge pair of oars hung from the roof, trophies of some long-dead varsity crew. The walls were hung with photographs of swimming parties dating back eighty years. Recurrent faces, remixes of Carter and Leonie in baggy woolen suits with rubber rings and drinks in their hands.
Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, believed that sound waves never completely die away, that they persist, fainter and fainter, masked by the day-to-day noise of the world. Marconi thought that if he could only invent a microphone powerful enough, he would be able to listen to the sound of ancient times. The Sermon on the Mount, the footfalls of Roman soldiers marching down the Appian Way. I clapped my hands, listening to how the report was absorbed by the walls, but reflected by the concrete floor. The pool house had a strange tone, a particular blend of interior and exterior that made me suddenly wary. I retreated back out into the party.
People sat on lawn chairs or stood waist-deep in the pool, bonded in impenetrable social rings and hexagons. Things had gotten looser while I’d been inside, louder. Drinking and the summer heat. By the grill, one of the servants was cleaning up the shards of a broken bottle. My phone went off in my pocket. Carter was calling me.
—Get a ride and come up here.
—Where?
—To the house. Cornelius wants to meet you.
Two staff members were leaning against their carts at the foot of the hill. I walked up to them, but they didn’t acknowledge me. I trudged upwards, reaching the top in a flop sweat. Unsure if it was OK to go in through the front, I walked round to the back porch. Finding the screen door open, I picked my way in over a clutter of boots and hats and tennis rackets.
—Hello, is anyone there?
Crammed tightly together on the walls of the hallway were old prints and maps. I had a glimpse of a small room, not much more than a walk-in closet, containing what looked like a server rack, black modules with red winking lights.
Carter appeared in a doorway.
—There you are.
—So what does Cornelius want with me?
—You’re my business partner. He wants to look you over, see what he’s buying into.
—So no pressure.
—Don’t blow this, is what I’m saying.
—Jesus, Carter. Are your parents here too?
—No, they’re in Europe. It’s just Corny.
We found him in a study or office, standing in front of a huge oak desk on which sat no fewer than five screens, showing market data, news tickers, surveillance views of the property. Leonie hadn’t been joking about the binoculars. Dressed in the awkward smart casual of men who spend their lives in suits, Corny was standing at a bay window with a view downhill toward the pool, his legs braced, training a pair of German precision lenses on the party like a commodore on the bridge of his cruiser. As he formed his first unfavorable impression of me, I got a closer look at the binoculars. They were the military kind that incorporates a laser, returning various kinds of range-finding information. Beautifully engineered. Reluctantly, I made eye contact again to confirm that Leonie’s sneer was playing across a face decorated with Carter’s nose and cheekbones. The recombinant quality of this stranger in a button-down shirt was uncanny; a hostile alien intelligence animating the features of people I loved.