Look Closer

3

Monday, July 4, 2022

“Oh . . . my . . . God,” I whispered. Even though the whole reason I came to the club today, my first time in several years, was that I thought you might be at the Fourth of July festivities. Even though I’d been thinking about you since that day in May—who am I kidding with “that day in May,” it was Friday, May 13, at 2:04 p.m.—when I saw you on Michigan Avenue. Even though I’d tried to conjure up ways to “accidentally” run into you. Even though I’d literally rehearsed lines in a mirror like a nervous schoolboy.

Still, seeing you, Lauren, standing on the club’s outdoor patio, a view of the golf course behind you. It felt like something fresh and clean and right, as if I were seeing you for the first time.

I opened my hands, palms up, like I’d conjured something from magic. Because magic was a good word to describe it. “It’s . . . you.”

You were wearing a white sundress. Your skin was tanned. You were once again wearing those Audrey Hepburn sunglasses. Your hair was pulled up in back. You’d been laughing with friends, but I must have caught your peripheral vision and you turned, for some reason. I’d like to think it was the gods smiling down on us, some mystical inspiration that made you turn your head.

“It’s you,” you replied, removing your shades, squinting into the sun. You seemed less surprised than me. “Simon,” you said, like you enjoyed saying my name.

You broke away from your group, which did not appear to include your husband, Conrad. I appreciated that you thought our first meeting (our first one in nineteen years, at least) deserved some privacy, even if we were surrounded by a couple hundred people at the club’s Fourth of July BBQ and fireworks.

“What are . . . what are you . . .” I didn’t finish the sentence.

“Oh, I—I moved back into town,” you said. “Well, the Village.”

“You live in Grace Village?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m married. I’ve been here a few years. You’re still in Grace Park?”

“Same house,” I said.

You nodded. “I thought you might be. I thought I might run into you here at the club. I remember your family were members here. I . . . thought about calling, just to maybe break the ice—”

I waved a hand. “Oh, no worries. That was . . . a long time ago.”

You seemed relieved, a real weight lifted, at those words. You smiled at me as if grateful.

I was supposed to be so nervous. I’d built this hypothetical reunion up in my head so much that I figured I’d be sweaty and jumpy, stuttering and stammering. But my nerves instantly fluttered away when I saw you, whatever lines I’d rehearsed vanished. It was just you and me again.

“You’re married?” you asked me, seeing the ring on my finger.

“Almost ten years,” I said. “Her name is Vicky.”

“Is Vicky here?”

No. Vicky wasn’t at the club. Vicky wouldn’t be caught dead at a country club.

“She couldn’t make it,” I said. I think my face showed something, because yours did in reaction, like you realized you’d touched a nerve.

You weren’t as beautiful as you were nineteen years ago, Lauren; you were more beautiful. You looked experienced, tested, wiser. You weren’t the hot, blond twenty-year-old paralegal burning a path through my father’s law firm but someone who had ripened into a poised, confident woman, who had lived and learned, who knew where she was and who she was.

It bothered me that I didn’t tell you that I’d seen you back in May on Michigan Avenue, that the only reason I’d come to this stupid event at the Grace Country Club was that I’d looked up the membership roster and saw that you and your husband, Conrad, were members, and I thought I might run into you at this Fourth of July party. That my “surprise” at seeing you was not completely sincere. It bothered me that something that could be so real between us was starting under false pretenses.

So I told myself, Okay, one white lie, but that’s it. I will never lie to you again, Lauren.

On my way home from the club, I stopped and bought this spiral notebook, just some ordinary notebook with a green cover. (Green for fresh and new, I suppose.) It’s been years, Lauren, years since I kept a journal. I’d given up writing my daily thoughts. Maybe because I no longer had anything interesting to say. I have a blog and law review articles and class to talk about the law, and the law has basically become my blood and oxygen and nourishment. What else is there to talk about? A wife who doesn’t love me A marriage that’s grown loveless and stale? My personal best time in some 10K?

So it’s back to a journal—hello, Green Journal—because now I have something to write about, Lauren. Or someone, that is.

Someone who agreed to meet me next week for coffee!

No harm in having some coffee, is there?

4 Simon

This is risky. Just parking here, up the street from Lauren’s house, a bit before eight in the morning, could bring trouble. These are the homes we used to call the “Lathrow mansions,” running through the middle of Grace Village like a tourist attraction. Some of the pearl-clutching neighbors on Lathrow Avenue tend to call the police whenever they see someone who is “not from the neighborhood.” Usually that code stands for something very different than me, a middle-aged white guy in a respectable-looking SUV, but still . . . If I idle here for too long, I’m bound to draw someone’s attention, followed not long thereafter by a police cruiser swinging by for a quick inquiry. How’s your day going, sir? Can I ask what you’re doing? See some ID?

And it’s not as if I’d have a great answer. Making the most of my time in early July, when classes are out and my schedule is flexible, to spy on an old girlfriend and her husband, trying to learn more about her and him and them, trying to glean whatever morsels of information I can? That doesn’t sound so good.

That’s all I need—the cops show up and make a scene. Maybe even give me a ticket for some residential parking violation. Meanwhile, Lauren walks out of her house or looks out her window and sees ol’ Simon Dobias parked nearby for no apparent reason. Creepy!

I’m from around here, but not really from around here. I’m from Grace Park, mostly middle-class and proudly progressive—just ask us. But when Mortimer Grace founded the Park in the 1800s, he broke off a three-square-mile chunk and incorporated it separately as Grace Village. Mortimer’s views on class and race and religion would not be considered enlightened by today’s standards. He wanted the Village to be a gated community of wealthy, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants like him.

The gates are gone, and the charter was amended to remove insensitive comments back in the 1940s, but some would argue that the Village hasn’t really changed all that much. More than anything, the wealth. Most of the kids don’t attend Grace Consolidated High School like I did; they go to private prep schools. And when they grow up, most return to the Village to raise families of their own. There are sixth-generation Villagers there.

Lauren’s not from here, either. She’s from Old Irving Park on the north side of Chicago and still lived there when I first met her (Lauren as a paralegal at my dad’s law firm, me as a college kid doing gofer work). But here she is now, living in a palatial home, married to Conrad Betancourt, a twice-divorced guy fifteen years her senior, who runs one of the most successful hedge funds in the world.

I’ve probably exhausted my luck with my recon missions this week. And I’ve compiled enough information for now. I rip out the page from my green journal and review.

A town car picks up Conrad Betancourt every morning at six sharp and heads for the expressway downtown. He works out at the East Bank Club and then drives to his offices in the Civic Opera Building on Wacker Drive. He doesn’t return home at any predictable time—at least he hasn’t this week.

Lauren, from what I can tell, has no job. Every day this week, she has played tennis in the morning at the Grace Country Club. A round of golf afterward. Twice this week, she had dinner downtown, neither time with Conrad, always with a group of women. Each of those times, she spent the night in her condo on Michigan Avenue, not returning to the Village.

Every morning that she has awakened here in Grace Village, she has gone for a run. She runs through the town, usually about three or four miles in total, back by 8:30 a.m.

Run, tennis, golf. No wonder you’re so fit, Lauren.

Two teenage girls come walking by on the sidewalk, gabbing and looking at their phones while the Pomeranian on a leash sniffs a fire hydrant. One of the teens glances at me and does a double take. I have my earbuds tucked into my ears, so I start talking, as if in a phone conversation, which for some reason makes me seem less weird sitting in a parked car.

God, what am I doing? I should stop this. Forget the whole thing. Forget I ever saw you, Lauren. Move on, like I told myself I’d done. But it’s an argument I keep losing.

I don’t think I can let go again.

5 Vicky

The administrator in the emergency department sees my credentials, hanging from a lanyard around my neck, and nods at me. We’ve never met. Some of them have gotten to know me. “Social services?”

“Right. I’m Vicky from Safe Haven. I’m here for a Brandi Stratton.”

Near eight o’clock, the emergency department is in a lull. A woman sits with her arm around a boy sniffling while he plays a game on a tablet. A man is holding his hand, wrapped in a towel, with a woman sitting next to him.

“Curtain six,” says the administrator, “but they’re still stitching her up. Sit tight.”

“Sure.”

My phone rings, a FaceTime call from the M&Ms—Mariah and Macy, my sister’s girls. I step through the automated doors and narrowly avoid a gurney on its way in, a woman grimacing but stoically silent as paramedics wheel her by.

I throw in my AirPods and answer the call. Both girls are on—Macy, age ten, and Mariah, age thirteen-going-on-nineteen. They both take after their mother, my sister, Monica, beautiful just like she was, those almond-shaped eyes and the lustrous hair, traits that somehow avoided me. I used to joke that Monica and I must have had different fathers, which in hindsight might not have been a joke.

“Hi, monkeys!” I try to be cheerful. I don’t do cheerful well.

“Hey, Vicky,” they say in unison, the faces huddled together to see me. “Calling you back,” says Mariah. “We were at the pool when you called. Dad said we had to finish piano before we could call.”

Makes sense because we sometimes spend a long time together on the phone. That won’t happen now, with the call I must make on Brandi Stratton, curtain six.

I called the girls earlier today just to check on them. I wasn’t sure if they realized what today was, the anniversary of their mother’s death. Everyone remembers birthdays. People don’t focus as much on days of death. I do. I will sometimes forget my sister’s birthday. I will never forget the day she died.

But it seems to have escaped my nieces’ notice. To them, today was just another July day at the pool with their nanny and their friends. So I’m sure as hell not going to remind them. They seem to be doing better now. Macy, the younger one, not as well as her older sister, but they both seem to be living pretty normal and happy lives. At least that’s how it seems, with most of my contact recently by FaceTime. And even in person, you can only penetrate the adolescent psyche so far.

“I’m working,” I say, “so I’ll probably have to call you tomorrow. Macy, you should be in bed anyway, shouldn’t you?”

“Um, it’s summer?”

I walk back into the emergency area. The administrator nods to me. “Gotta run, princesses. Talk tomorrow? I love you, monkeys!”

“Curtain six,” the administrator reminds me. “You know the way?”

I definitely know the way.

The administrator pops the doors, and I wind my way through to curtain six, with the familiar cocktail of smells—disinfectant, body odor, alcohol. A man moaning in one curtain, another shouting out, belligerent and drunk.

A police officer, a young woman, stands outside the curtain. “Social services?”

“Right. Safe Haven. Officer Gilford?”

“That’s me.” The officer nods toward a quieter spot, a nook around the bend of the corner, and I follow. “Her husband did a pretty good number on her. Beat her with a frying pan. Apparently, he wasn’t impressed with the dinner she made. He didn’t even wait for the pan to cool down. Then he went old-school and just used his fists.”

I break eye contact. “But she’s not pressing charges.”

“Nope, she sure isn’t.” The officer tries to remain clinical, but there’s only so much disgust and disappointment you can hide, no matter how much you see this stuff.

“And there’s a daughter?”

“Yeah, cute little girl named Ashley. Age four.”

That’s what my intake record says, too. “And the asshole’s name is . . . Steven?”

“Steven Stratton, yep.”

I push through the curtain. The mother, Brandi, age twenty-two, sits on the hospital bed, her little girl, Ashley, asleep in her lap. The little one, thank God, appears untouched. Brandi’s right eye is swollen shut. The left side of her face is heavily bandaged. Her right forearm is wrapped—a burn, according to the intake sheet, when she tried to deflect the frying pan.

Brandi looks me over, fixes on my credentials.

“Hi, Brandi,” I say quietly, though I doubt the girl will awaken. “I’m Vicky, with Safe Haven. You want a place to stay tonight?”

“I can’t . . .” She looks away, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear with her free hand.

She can’t go back there. She can’t go back tonight. She can’t go back ever.

But almost all of them do. He’ll apologize. He’ll shower her with affection. He’ll make her laugh and feel loved. She’ll blame herself. And she’ll consider her lack of other options. Rinse and repeat.

“It’s your decision, Brandi. Our facility isn’t much. You’d have to share a room, and our A/C sucks, so it’s just fans. But it’s quiet and it’s safe. We have locks and a security guard. Maybe . . . maybe you and Ashley deserve a quiet, peaceful night’s sleep?”

Maybe you’ll come to our facility and let me convince you to leave that abusive creep you call a husband? We can do so much for them if they let us. They can stay with us for up to two weeks. We can get them counseling. We can find them a pro bono lawyer to get restraining orders and file divorce papers. We can find them alternative housing.

But they have to say yes. They have to learn to fight for themselves.

6

Friday, July 15, 2022

Well, once again, I built up all these terrible outcomes in my mind, and it turned out so much better than I expected.

I wasn’t even sure this would happen. Telling someone, Sure, let’s meet for coffee, is easy enough to do and then cancel later. Promise to follow up, sure, but then it doesn’t happen, or you don’t return a text. And it’s too amorphous to know whether it was an intentional blow-off or just one of those many things in life that ends up not happening, nobody’s fault, “no worries,” etc.

I’d basically convinced myself that when we saw each other at the club last week, you only agreed to meet for coffee to be nice, because what else were you going to say? Say yes now, blow me off later.

But there you were, Lauren, at Max’s Café, just as promised, in a white tennis outfit, ponytail tucked through the back of your hat.

And you spent so much time asking me about me, which is good manners and very thoughtful, though for some reason not what I expected. And I didn’t lie or sugarcoat anything when I talked, Lauren. I made a vow that I would never lie to you again, and I didn’t.

I didn’t lie to you about Vicky, either. It started as small talk, what she does for a living, how long we’ve been married, and pretty soon I was opening up about Vicky’s childhood, growing up in poverty in West Virginia, running away from home at age seventeen, getting hooked on drugs and doing degrading things to support herself. How she was a mess when I met her, but so was I in different ways, both of us adrift and helping each other get back to the shoreline. How proud I am of her, how much we mean to each other, and before I knew it, Lauren, I was so comfortable that I was unloading, telling you everything, and I mean EVERYTHING. How I love Vicky and always will, but that we’re different, we started in very different places and never really met in the middle. How we care about each other, we’d do anything for each other, but however our relationship had evolved, the spark is gone. We’re more like roommates than spouses, more like pals than lovers.

I laughed a nervous chuckle when I was finished. “Gee, aren’t you glad you asked?” I said. “Sorry about that brutal-honesty thing.”

But you didn’t smile, you didn’t wave it off. No, what you said in response changed my life.

“Would it make you feel any better,” you said, “if I told you my marriage was a train wreck?”

It did make me feel better, actually, and here’s an example of why you will never read this journal, Lauren. I wouldn’t want you to know how much I wanted to hear those words. I know how that sounds, but it’s true. I was hoping you’d tell me you were unhappily married, too.

We spent the next hour going back and forth on our marriages. Sometimes it’s easier with a stranger, not someone close to you. And maybe it’s even easier to do it with someone who’s been a recent stranger, but whom you once loved more than any with whom you once were intimate.

Or maybe it’s none of that, and we just connect.

I would never have imagined having so much fun telling someone that my wife doesn’t love me anymore. But those two hours outside at Max’s Café felt like a life in itself, the birth of something, the promise of forever.

Corny, I know. But fuck it. Nobody else will read this journal. If I want to be corny, I will. Aren’t we all corny in our thoughts? Aren’t we corny with the ones we love? We’re just too afraid to say it to others for fear of embarrassment.

And then the kiss. Had it been up to me to initiate it, I’m not sure it ever would have happened. It was our goodbye after coffee (which turned into a piece of carrot cake, too), two friends catching up and bidding adieu by your car.

You leaned up and kissed me softly. I wasn’t ready for it. I almost didn’t close my lips before you did it, which would have been awkward. Your lips lingered on mine just long enough to make sure there was no misunderstanding, this wasn’t a friendly peck, it wasn’t a platonic gesture, it wasn’t a “this was so much fun!” goodbye.

No. It wasn’t. My heart was hammering against my chest.

You looked up at me and said—and look, some of this dialogue I’ve had to paraphrase from memory, but this line I will never forget.

You said, “Would you like to see me again?”

You already knew the answer.

7 Vicky

I meet Rambo in the parking lot of the Home Depot off U.S. 30 in Merrillville, Indiana. I didn’t want to talk over the phone or use email. This has to be in person. And I don’t have much time, because I’m meeting Simon for lunch, so I need to head back to Chicago soon.

When he gets out of his beater Chevy, manila file in hand, he says, “Miss Vicky,” as he’s always called me, dating back to when he was a cop and one of my clients in the “entertainment” business, back before I moved to Chicago and met Simon and got straight. Rambo was okay. Never got rough with me. And he paid me, even though as a cop, he probably could have gotten freebies. I always figured one of the reasons I never got busted for solicitation was a cop like him having my back, though he never actually said that to me.

Roger Rampkin is his full name, but everyone calls him Rambo. Not just a play off his name but his army background before joining the force in Indianapolis, and he’s got some size on him, too. The kind of cop who would scare the shit out of you in an interrogation room.

He retired from the force four years ago, now working as a private detective and doing some “security” work as well. He’s done some work for me in the last few years and proven his worth.

“You clean up nice,” he says.

Not sure I’d say the same for Rambo. The years have not been so kind to him. He has at least twenty more pounds in his midsection, his eyes heavily bagged, his beard more salt than pepper. Less badass-cop now, more mountain-man-crazy.

I take the file from him and hand him an envelope of cash. “Thank you very much, sir.”

He tosses the envelope through the open window of his car onto the front seat and lights a cigarette, offers me one. I decline. I quit smoking when I quit everything else. Smoking was harder to kick than cocaine.

“Tell me why,” he says.

“You’ve never asked why before,” I say.

He blows out smoke. “I’ve always known why before. But I take your point.”

Mind your own business, is the point. “That’s a good boy, Rambo.” I wag the folder, noting how light it is. “Not much in there.”

“Not much in there,” he agrees.

“Give me the highlights.”

“The highlights are . . . there’s not much in there. I did a full workup, all over again, like you asked. Every source I could tap. Vicky Lanier was born in Fairmont, West Virginia, went to Fairmont Senior High School, disappeared in 2003 at the age of seventeen and was never heard from again. Declared a missing person, but it was never known if she was a runaway or abducted or murdered. Never showed up on the grid. Never filed a tax return, never got arrested or fingerprinted, never enrolled for school, never opened a bank account, never took out a credit card, never got a W-2 or 1099, never opened a social media account, never did a single thing after age seventeen.” He looks at me, squinting into the sun.

“Okay, so no irregularities? No red flags?”

“No irregularities. No red flags.”

“Bottom line,” I say. “I’m still safe using Vicky Lanier’s identity.”

“You are safe. Though I never understood why you picked an alias with the same first name as you.”

How quickly he forgets. I slip my foot out of my shoe, bend my leg, and hold my foot up for him to see the tattoo above my right ankle, a small red heart with the name Vicky wrapped around the top half. A bad idea when I was sixteen years old. And pretty hard to explain if I used an alias with the name Jane or Molly or Gina.

“Oh, yeah, I guess I forgot about that. It’s been a while since I’ve . . .”

Since you’ve seen me naked. Yeah, Rambo. I’d just as soon put that behind me. I have put it behind me, as much as you can ever put something like that behind you.

“So, Rambo, nobody could say I’m not Vicky Lanier, right?”

“Nobody could say that. As long as your story is that you ran away from home at age seventeen from Fairmont, West Virginia, and kicked around doing things that kept you off the grid. Paid in cash, that kind of thing.”

The sad part is that my real bio isn’t far off from that. And that’s no accident; that’s why I picked Vicky Lanier for my identity. Rambo himself was the one who said it to me—back in the day when he was a cop hearing bullshit from suspects, sorting out the truth from the crap—the best lies are the ones closest to the truth. I didn’t live in West Virginia, and nobody abducted me, but I did leave home at age seventeen in 2003. So when I had Rambo create me an identity, I had him find a girl named Vicky who went missing in 2003 at age seventeen. I wasn’t sure there would be a match with criteria that specific. Turns out, there were three girls who fit that description, which is disturbing in itself. Vicky Lanier from Fairmont, West Virginia, looked the most like me, so I chose her.

“Just make sure nobody does a fingerprint-based background check on you,” Rambo says. “Then your prints would come up with your real name.”

Right. But I can’t do anything about that.

He cocks his head. “You realize you just paid me to do the same thing I did when I created this identity for you. I wouldn’t have given you ‘Vicky Lanier’ in the first place if it wasn’t clean.”

“Always good to update,” I say.

“Nah,” he says out of the side of his mouth. “You’re expecting someone to inquire. To look into your background. You’re expecting trouble.”

I stare at him with a perfunctory smile.

“Never mind,” he says. “I don’t want to know.”

He’s right on both counts. There’s going to be trouble. And he doesn’t want to know.

8 Simon

I’m meeting Vicky for lunch at the Chinese restaurant by the law school. She often works days, so when she doesn’t, we try to hook up for lunch, especially in the summer, when my schedule is so light.

She kisses me on the cheek. “Hey, handsome.” She wets her finger, wipes the lipstick off my cheek, and takes her seat across from me in the booth. “How’s your buddy, the dean?”

“Not this again,” I say. “What am I supposed to do, defy him? Spit in the face of the most powerful guy at the school?”

“He spit in your face first.”

Vicky, bless her heart, fights for me. She doesn’t like the idea of Dean Comstock forcing me out of consideration for the full professor slot. She can get pretty worked up when people disrespect me. I find that incredibly sexy about her, for some reason.

“Simon, all you’re doing is applying for full professor. You have just as much a right to do that as that schmuck with the rich daddy, Reid whatever. Who cares what Dean what’s-his-name, Dean Cumstain, thinks?”

“Comstock.” I laugh. “The guy who could single-handedly derail my career? I think I do care what he thinks.”

She shakes her head, disappointed and angry. I meant what I wrote in my journal. I love this woman and I always will. But she doesn’t love me back. She likes me and cares about me, but I don’t do it for her in that way. And that, for me, takes the air out of the balloon. Maybe Freud would have something to say here about the id or superego, but I’m not one of those guys who likes challenges. I’m not attracted to someone who’s not attracted to me.

When I first met Vicky, just six weeks after her sister’s suicide, she was so angry. Sad, too, but mostly angry. I was able to help her. Maybe that’s the only reason she was drawn to me. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to her. Your heart doesn’t come with explanatory notes.

“You already put your name in, right?” she asks. “All that’s left is submitting all the materials. And you have until sometime in September?”

“Yes, yes, and yes,” I say. “But I’m going to withdraw my name.”

She reaches across the table and takes my hand. It still stirs something inside me when she touches me like that, no matter what else I may tell myself.

“You deserve this promotion, Simon. You’re one of the best minds at that school. You love it. It’s what you were meant to do. I hate seeing some pompous jerk stick a finger in your eye, and you’re supposed to say, ‘Thank you, sir, may I have another?’”

“I know that. I don’t like it, either.”

“Then do something about it. At least make him promise he’ll back you the next time.”

“It doesn’t . . . work that way.”

“Why doesn’t it work that way?” She falls back against the booth cushion. “Sure it works that way. You said this guy’s more a politician than anything else. So make a deal with him. You’ll walk away this time if he promises to support you next time.”

I swipe up my menu, not because there’s any mystery about what I order but because she’s right, I should do something, but I probably won’t, and I don’t want to look her in the eye.

“You have options, you know,” she says, a hint of mischief to her voice.

I peek over the menu. “No, Vick.”

“You don’t even know what I was—”

“I have a pretty good idea,” I say, “and my answer is no.”

The waiter arrives with our drinks—water for me, pinot grigio for Vicky—and pretends he’s not eavesdropping on our conversation.

She picks up her glass and sips her wine.

“Tell me you heard me say no, Vick.”

Her eyes bulge. “I heard you, I heard you,” she says.

9

Friday, July 29, 2022

Maybe it’s best you went on vacation with your girlfriends to Paris for two weeks, Lauren, after we met for coffee. It gave me time to cool off, to think.

And here’s what I’m thinking: I don’t do things like this. I’m an ordinary guy with an ordinary marriage, working an ordinary job, living in an ordinary suburb, doing ordinary things. I don’t have affairs. I don’t have mistresses!

And it’s not too late to hit the brakes. Nothing’s happened yet. And who knows, maybe you’ll stop it—maybe you’ll be the one who gets cold feet.

But I know my reason. Vicky. Vicky Lanier Dobias, my bride of almost ten years. I know that, deep down, Vicky isn’t happy in our marriage, and she’d want me to be happy. She would. But she trusts me, and that trust means everything to her. I think I was the first man she ever trusted after that wreck of a childhood she had, and it helped her build a foundation of a life. If I tear that down, I’m not sure what will happen to her. I can’t do that to her.

No, I can’t do this. I have to stop this before it starts.

I’ll tell you in person, Lauren, when you return. And that will be that.