The Hoax Read online

  “Where’s Mommy?” I asked.

  Inside the house, crammed with antique French furniture, books, and paintings, Edith appeared from the kitchen. She wore jeans and an old corduroy shirt and her honey-colored hair fell to her shoulders. Her face was drawn, unsmiling.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I thumped down in an overstuffed chair with Nedsky on one knee. “I looked for you at the boat. I got scared to death. I thought the plane crashed, or you cracked up the car, or God knows what. Home is the sailor, home from the sea. What’s behind all this good cheer I’m greeted with?”

  “This,” Edith said, and tossed an envelope in my lap. I could see now that she had been crying. My anger vanished. I reached out to touch her but I knew what was in the envelope before I even saw it.

  “I went this morning to the bank,” Edith said, “what I thought would be a favor to you, to pick up your mail.”

  “And who told you to open it?”

  “I knew. I don’t know the handwriting, but I catched one look at that letter and I smelled it. I knew it was from her.”

  “Caught,” I said, “not ‘catched.’” Born in Germany and educated in Switzerland, her English grammar was roguish and unpredictable; and to me, endearing. But she was in no mood for lessons today.

  The envelope bore a London postmark but no return address. The scrawled note inside was unsigned. I scanned it.

  Darling,

  I heard through the grapevine that you were in London last month. You bastard — I agree that we agreed not to see each other, but you could have called me at least. I’ll be coming to Ibiza in January. Do you think I could pop up to the studio and that you could spare a minute to see me?

  “That bitch,” Edith raged. “The madonna that smiles so sweetly and swears to my face — just last summer! — that she doesn’t know whether or not she loves you, and you swear it’s only platonic or some such bullshit. And what she does is try to steal another woman’s husband! If I see her on the street in Ibiza,” Edith vowed, tears beginning to film her eyes, “I cut her face with a razor. If she comes up to your studio, I kill her.”

  I coaxed Nedsky out of the room and told him to find Barney and Antonia and Rafaela, the maid. Then I turned to Edith, who sat on the red leather couch, head buried in her hands.

  “Darling, listen. I didn’t see her in London. I didn’t even call her. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

  Raising her head, Edith said scornfully: “You couldn’t. You were with me. If you’d been alone you would have called her.”

  “Never,” I lied. “It’s over. We agreed to that. She agreed to it, too. I haven’t seen her since last summer and you know that’s true. And she’s not asking for anything in her letter. For Christ’s sake, read it! All she asks is can she pop up to the studio for a minute to see me. Is that so godawful?”

  For nearly an hour the argument veered back and forth, raking up the past, bemoaning the present, portraying either a bleak or blood-drenched future. She was the hurt wife who feared the other woman. I was the man who knew the truth but dared not say it. Her world was that of a fairy tale where the prince and princess lived happily ever after in a castle in Spain, safe from all dragons. Her rage rose to a volcanic crescendo when I said: “It’s a perfectly innocent letter, and if you’d read it without being prejudiced and without hating her guts, you could see that.”

  “You mean she calls you ’darling’ and that’s innocent? What you think I am, a fool? One of your mindless sluts you lay because you’re bored with your wife, your home, your children, your work, your life?”

  I winced inwardly. Her words had jabbed at the periphery of a truth — not the center, but close enough to make me uneasy and want to veer away.

  A vase filled with red and purple geraniums, freshly picked from the garden for my homecoming, stood on the big coffee table. Edith sprang to her feet, snatched up the vase in both hands, and smashed it on the tile floor at my feet. I had jumped up, trying to duck to safety, but it was too late. Glass flew in all directions, water drenched my trousers and shirt, and a few of the geraniums, by some law of physics that still puzzles me, landed on top of my head. With that red and purple wreath garlanding my soaked hair, and water dripping down my cheeks, I stood astonished, unable to speak. I checked for blood and embedded glass, but there were only flowers.

  “You fool,” Edith said, trying to keep a straight face.

  There was nothing to do after that but laugh, and then kiss and make up, which we had done so many times before.

  I unpacked the car and then, later in the day after a siesta, drove up to my studio. Five miles from the house, behind the Roman walls of the Old Town of Ibiza and perched on a rock that jutted out above the sea, reached only by a narrow, winding dirt road, the studio was my sanctuary from the world. It had long been agreed between us that Edith only came there by invitation. The sun flooded in through the glass doors and there was no need to turn on the gas heater. I sat down at the desk, shoved the pages of my novel to one side, and stared out at the sea.

  If my life had had any design for the past seven years, it had been woven chiefly of four threads: Ibiza, my work, Edith Sommer, and Nina van Pallandt.

  Ibiza was home. I had first come there in 1953, settling there to work for a season because it was cheap and old and exotic and beautiful: all that Europe should be for a young American who dreamed of being a writer. La isla blanca, the Spaniards called it — the white island. I kept coming back. By 1970 I had written four novels there and a book about Elmyr de Hory, the art forger who was my neighbor, and for a writer the place you work well in is often the place you wind up calling home. I had good friends there, a house, a sailboat, an easy life. But more than that, for me, it was the place where everything that seemed important in my life had happened. Claire, my second wife, who had died in a California car crash when she was eight months pregnant, had been introduced to me on Ibiza. Then, in 1960, wandering along the port, I saw a girl of fragile beauty whose red hair sparkled like warm blood in the sun. Her name was Fay. We traveled around the world, we were married, we had a son, and we were divorced — which is a poor way to sum up five years, but the story has no place in this tale.

  Again on Ibiza — before that divorce, in the spring of 1964 — I met Nina van Pallandt.

  I was separated from Fay, who was living in the village of Santa Eulalia while I had a small apartment in the Old Town of Ibiza. Nina, Danish born, was married to Frederik van Pallandt, a bearded, good-looking Dutch baron who fancied himself an intellectual and a guru in the mysteries of the Sufi sect. I had met Frederik some months before and after fifteen minutes’ conversation with him had a feeling of déja entendu; his speeches reminded me of the discussions we had indulged in during my sophomore philosophy courses at Cornell. He and Nina sang folksongs for a living and had a strong following among the mums and dads of the English midlands. In public they were the golden couple: beautiful, talented, titled, and in love, with two beautiful, golden-haired children. In private life they were miserable —” You and the children,” he had said to her once, “are the stones round my neck that keep me from becoming the man I need to be” — although they kept up what pretense they could for the sake of their career.

  The pretense vanished when Nina and I met. Frederik had bought a yacht and was sailing it down from England to Ibiza, where they were building a summer home. Nina and I, and two friends, were part of an expedition to dig for Phoenician relics on the north coast of the island. We toiled up a mountainside in the hot spring sun and then dug for hours, with our hands, in the cool of the cave. A few potsherds and a cracked head of the goddess Tanit were our reward, and if the goddess had visited a curse on those who ravaged her resting place, we were its victims. What words we exchanged that day I have long forgotten. When you fall in love, other voices speak to you and the words you really hear are of little consequence.

  We were together for three weeks when Frederik returned unexpectedly to Ibiza. He had
been seasick in the English Channel, gone ashore in France, and entrusted the yacht to its crew for the remainder of the passage to Spain.

  “I can’t lie to him,” Nina said, and I replied: “Don’t. Tell him the truth. I love you and I want you to go away with me.”

  She came to me the next afternoon in tears. Frederik, she said, had begged her not to go, had pleaded: “Don’t take my children from me …”

  “He wants to try again. He took me for granted. He never realized he could lose me. He swears it will be different.”

  “And what do you want, Nina?”

  “I don’t know …”

  A week later she was still on the rack of uncertainty, torn between her husband, her children, her career, her guilt — and a man she had known for less than a month. “I love you, my sweet, but I can’t throw it all away. I can’t do it to him.”

  “Then stay with him.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “No. I want you with me,” and she added, sobbing, “I can’t let you go, either.”

  But she was pinned to the rack and as it stretched her day by day, she grew weaker and thinner and came to me each time bearing the scars. The great blue eyes that had always smiled with such wistful pleasure were permanently filmed with tears. The lines cut deeper into her cheeks and she would rock back and forth in a chair, her mass of golden hair cupped by suddenly veined hands. It was an agony for her, and I heard her repeat Frederik’s constant refrain: “Don’t take my children from me …”

  My own marriage to Fay had ended six months earlier and I had lost a two-year-old son. As much as compassion I had my own guilt, my own fears.

  “You can’t decide,” I said.

  “No. Don’t you see that I can’t? Clifford, tell me what to do.”

  We were sitting on the rocks by the sea, on a headland near the town of Ibiza. “Go back to him,” I said. “You have to. What you’re doing now will kill you. Give it a chance. You love him, I know that. You’re in love with me but maybe it will pass. Call it a summer romance that came a little out of season.”

  She looked at me solemnly. “Do you believe that?”

  “No,” I said after a while. “I don’t believe it for a minute. But you’re going back to him and so I’ve got to pretend it’s true, for the sake of sanity. And so do you.”

  I said goodbye to her and left her there on the rocks above the sea, the tears unchecked and streaking her cheeks and her body huddled on the stone, shaking.

  The memory of Nina lay between Edith and myself from the beginning, when we met that summer while I was finishing my fourth novel, The 38th Floor. I still had the apartment in the Old Town and Edith owned a small finca in the country. She was Swiss, a painter, a lovely and ebullient 28-year-old girl who prized her independence above everything else. When I met her in July, she had two daughters and was separated from her husband, a German industrialist from the Ruhr. By December they were divorced. We let love come to us slowly, with neither pressure nor promises, and in January we began living together. The finca on the San José road became our home.

  But the shadow of Nina was always there. I had some money for the first time in my life and Edith and I traveled through southern Spain, to Morocco, to the West Indies. She was the most giving woman I had ever known and she held back nothing, but the shadow followed me. I knew from mutual friends that Nina and Frederik’s marriage had cracked within a year of our parting; the only thing holding it together was their career. And in the summer of 1966 she came to my studio at Los Molinos and the affair began again. For both of us it was an obsession that lurked below the surface of our lives, ready to spring forth at a look from the far corner of a room, the mention of a name, the sudden flicker of memory. Call it love, call it madness — it may have been both. The only difference now was the presence in my life of Edith. I wanted her, too, and I refused to turn away from a harmony and warmth that grew season by season. Call it love, call it greed — again, it may have been both. The man who is willing to define his love has proved its artifice.

  In January of 1967 I went to New York for a month, and Nina flew north from a holiday in Antigua to meet me. We were together in the city for almost two weeks, and word of the rendezvous leaked back to Ibiza. When I came back in February to the finca on the San José road, Edith was with someone else. My clothes were packed. “Go,” she begged.

  Her hurt and my guilt were too much for me to deal with. I moved to my studio in Los Molinos. Nina was in London, still with Frederik, still unhappy, busily decorating a new apartment on the Chelsea embankment. We wrote to each other, but she was too involved to leave and I felt, instinctively, that it would be a mistake for me to go to her. Whatever was to happen would have to happen in its own time. We were all in flux and I knew somehow that to fly from one woman to another would be to follow the path of a fool. Nina, equally unsure, knew it too.

  Edith left the island for a month, but when she returned I was at the airport to meet her, and I said: “It’s you I love. If you feel the same way, forgive me, and let’s try again.”

  Wounds of the sort that we had inflicted on each other heal slowly. Edith was uncertain and I was restless. Throughout the end of May we read the papers and listened to the radio, and in that season the Arab threats against Israel mounted to a crescendo. I talked with several Jewish friends on the island. We considered volunteering. We could drive a bus in Tel Aviv, we could do whatever was needed. It was quixotic, but our feelings were real; yet inertia triumphed and we did nothing. On June 2, 1967, I left the island on the night boat to Alicante, headed for Gibraltar where I had to change the license plates on my old Peugeot station wagon. The next afternoon, in Granada, I read that Israeli tanks had broken into the Sinai desert. The Spanish newspapers carried only the stories of Egyptian victories.

  I telephoned the Israeli Embassy in Paris and was told that no flights were leaving for Tel Aviv. I went on to Gibraltar and then back up to Malaga before I made up my mind. I flew to Paris, and there I waited. Two days after the war officially ended, flights began; I booked the only seat available on an Air France jet and cabled Edith: FLYING ISRAEL CONTACT ME KING DAVID HOTEL JERUSALEM TRUST ME LOVE YOU CLIFF.

  In Jerusalem I was able to get press credentials. When I had flown out I hadn’t really known why I was going, other than out of some primitive streak of Jewishness and the driving need simply to be there. But as soon as I had gone to the Golan Heights and spoken to the soldiers, I knew there was one thing I could do: write a book. On the way back from Jericho I stopped with another correspondent at the King David Hotel. A telegram awaited me at the desk. I read: ARRIVING ISRAEL ALITALIA FLIGHT THURSDAY NIGHT TRUST ME TOO LOVE YOU TOO EDITH.

  Her coming to Israel was an act of bravery. You had to know Edith’s history to understand. Born Catholic, she had been a child in Germany during the Second World War, the youngest daughter of a Swiss clockmaker in a southern Alpine town. She had lived through the bombings, had seen her mother and father led away by the Nazis to be shot, then rescued at the last minute by a local official. War for Edith was a memory of nightmare. If she read a book with true tragedy in it she would often cry, and if she saw a movie with bloody scenes or torture she would leave the theater, trembling. The fighting in the Middle East was over, but it lingered in the aftermath in both sight and smell. She had flown out because I was there. She faced it with great simplicity. I was her man, and she would follow me.

  We traveled together to the Dead Sea, Gaza, the Syrian Heights, and then down through Sinai in a convoy with Irwin Shaw, Martha Gellhorn, and Jules Dassin. We trailed the convoy in a jeep, accompanied by a myopic captain of Israeli Intelligence who carried only an old rifle. The desert was full of stragglers from the routed Egyptian Army. I drove while Edith perched uncomfortably in the back of the jeep atop a litter of supplies, busily sewing two flags. One of them was white with a red cross, the other red with a white cross. “What the hell are you doing back there?” I asked.

  Finis
hing her handiwork, she held it up proudly. “One is the Red Cross flag, the other Swiss. If we meet any Egyptians, I wave both. The soldiers, the poor ones, will recognize the Red Cross flag. The officers will recognize the Swiss flag because they all have bank accounts there.”

  Two things of moment happened to us in Israel. We fell in love again, and we decided to get married and have a child. I bought a thin gold wedding ring from a local jeweler and put it on Edith’s hand. And then, one day in the lobby of the Dan Hotel, interviewing an Israeli pilot, I ran out of tape. I asked Edith to get a fresh reel from my suitcase upstairs. In the suitcase she found Nina’s last letter to me, still unanswered.

  “One thing,” Edith said, a cold but somehow frightened light in her amber-green eyes. “You write to her. Tell her it’s all over, and you don’t want to see her again.”

  I felt trapped into an act that seemed final — and where I wanted, I realized, no finality.

  “Is that an ultimatum?”

  “I want you to do it,” Edith said, unswerving. “And then you give it to me to mail. You must.”

  I sat down at the desk and wrote the letter, sealed it, and then Edith went downstairs and dropped the envelope into the mailbox.

  By any standards, the years from 1967 on were good ones for me. They started disastrously, in December of that year, two days after we were married, when a fire in my father’s New York apartment destroyed the book I was writing about the Six-Day War and the almost-finished draft of a 900-page novel. But then I wrote Fake!, which sold well, although not up to expectations. Like most writers, I blamed it on the publisher’s failure to promote it properly. And that summer, on Ibiza, my mother suffered a stroke which left her paralyzed in a Manhattan nursing home.

  But at the center of my life I felt a sense of well-being. In April 1968, Edith gave birth to a son. His given name was John-Edmond and we came to call him Nedsky. A year and a half later Barney was born. I wrote a screenplay and started a new novel. With Edith, I thought, I could live out the rest of my life and make no fundamental compromises; I could graduate from the shadowy evening of my youth to what I supposed would be a calmer middle age, because I loved my wife, my children, my home. I could keep in check the restlessness that had dogged me for so many years. I had found an answer. Beside the wife whom I loved and who expected so much from me, I had a mistress whom I loved — and she expected very little. I had Nina.