(A difference between life with Suzanne and life with Vincent, one of many: he told Suzanne everything.)
“I didn’t think she’d be elegant.” Kaspersky didn’t glance in their direction. She was engaged in dabbing white wine from her lapel. “All this time, I was picturing her as some kind of disheveled crank.”
“Are you going to eat any more?” He wanted his wife to eat something, to keep her strength up, and also very much wanted her to stop staring at Kaspersky.
“No, let’s get the check.”
He got the check and attended to the details while his wife studied Kaspersky, who’d waved off the busboy’s apologies and had returned to reading some kind of document, an inch of paper held together with a binder clip. He didn’t like the way Suzanne was looking at her.
“Let’s just leave,” he said softly, when the check was taken care of, but Kaspersky was seated at the restaurant’s narrowest point, and they had to walk quite close to her table to get to the door. As they neared the table, Suzanne’s face was set in a terrifying smile. Kaspersky finally looked up when they were almost upon her. She had an excellent poker face, except that her eyes narrowed slightly when she recognized him.
“Good evening, Ella,” Alkaitis said. The SEC had closed the investigation earlier that week. There was no need to be ungenerous in victory.
She leaned back in her chair, considering him, and sipped her wine. She didn’t speak for so long that he thought she wasn’t going to say anything, and was just gathering himself to leave when she said, “You’re beneath my contempt.”
Alkaitis was paralyzed. He couldn’t imagine what to say.
“Oh, Ella,” Suzanne said. A small shard from the broken wineglass had been overlooked at the base of the bread basket. Suzanne plucked it between two fingers and dropped it delicately into Kaspersky’s water glass. They all watched it drift to the bottom.
Suzanne leaned in close and spoke quietly. “Why don’t you swallow broken glass?”
There was a moment where no one spoke.
“I’m sure you must hear this all the time,” Ella Kaspersky said, “but you two are perfect for each other.”
Alkaitis took his wife’s arm and steered her rapidly out of the restaurant, out to the cold street, where the car was waiting. He bundled her in and sat beside her. “Home, please,” he said to the driver. He glanced over and saw that Suzanne was weeping silently, her hands over her face. He pulled her close and held her tightly, her tears falling on his coat, and they stayed like that, not speaking, all the way back to Connecticut.
* * *
—
In a different life, in the library at FCI Medium 1, the visiting professor takes an uncharacteristic break from F. Scott Fitzgerald. “I want to talk about allegory today,” he says. “Any of you know the story of the swan in the frozen pond?”
“Yeah, I think I know that story,” Jeffries says. He was a police officer until he tried to arrange a hit on his wife. “The one about the swan who doesn’t fly away in time, right?”
Alkaitis finds himself thinking about the swan story later on, standing in line for his potatoes and mystery meat. The story was a favorite of his mother’s, repeated every so often throughout childhood and adolescence. There’s a flock of swans on a lake in the deepening autumn. As the nights grow colder, they all fly away. Except one, for reasons Alkaitis can’t remember: a lone swan who doesn’t perceive the approaching danger or loves the lake too much to leave even though it’s clearly time to go or is afflicted by hubris—the swan’s motivations were hazy and, Alkaitis suspects, changeable, depending on what message his mother was trying to impart at any given moment—and then winter sets in and the swan is frozen in ice, because it didn’t get out of the water in time.
* * *
—
“I thought I’d be able to get out,” he tells Freeman when she comes to see him again. “I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to let everyone down. They were just so greedy, these people, the returns they expected…”
“You feel the investors pushed you to commit fraud,” she says blandly.
“Well, I didn’t say that, exactly. I take full responsibility for my crimes.”
“But you seem to think the investors were partly to blame.”
“They expected a certain level of returns. I felt compelled to deliver. It was a nightmare, actually.”