The Unfortunates by Sophie McManus Page A

it, he has been fired more than once. The firm of Jerk, Jerk and Blaustein. He was a different man. Fifteen years ago, a junior analyst. They’d released him with a careful and glowing recommendation, not worth antagonizing the Somners. The security guard looked like a broom. His career subsequently reinvented by a claustrophobic but r é sum é -building stint at his mother’s fund. And another kind of expulsion—a hotel, in a Riviera town, what was its name? A name his mind has lost. A hotel by the sea—the hotel asked that he not return. His mother’s house is by the sea. His house is in the woods. He’s left his mother by a lake. Fitzgerald drank summers at the Belles Rives—that was the hotel’s name. Antibes. CeCe’s lawyer had called the head of guest services. The hotel welcomed his return, even sending him a hefty, four-color coffee-table book— La B ê te Merveilleuse dans le Tableau: Artists of the South of France —sent it all the way to New York, across the sea. George sent it back. Other sadnesses too. The women who’d fallen in love with him—how later, all promised to remain his friend, but not one remained his friend! Juan-les-Pins. The name of the town. Before that, worst—his break from Yale: a three-month ski trip in Jackson, Wyoming, they called it, though where he was there wasn’t any skiing.
    The clouds shift and his reflection vanishes. The great room becomes visible, as if he were at the beginning of an old-fashioned play, the curtain rising on an interior. The kind of play where everything inanimate has meaning, signifies—the worn armchair, the big radio on the mantel, a bundle of flowers wrapped in paper thrown across the sideboard. A table set for three, a hat on a hook. Except, the uninhabited space of this play features his own gleaming, modern kitchen. The star of the play will be his wife and then it will be him. He’s memorized the rhythms of his house—this makes it his house, more than any deed. Any moment, Iris will stride the room right to left, begin making lunch. He’ll enter and tell her his news, slightly modified: the financing for his opera has been secured. Backers. Iris knows he’s had more trouble finding backers than expected. Now he’s found them, hasn’t he? A car passes on the road below. For a nonsensical moment he thinks it’s his mother, come to yell at him. The balloons bump and drift in the breeze above his head. Iris crosses the room.
    His mirror heart seizes. She’s looking at him but she doesn’t see. The sunlight’s on his side. Iris, from the other side of the wide and spotless window, a stranger. Beautiful, unmade—she stretches. Lifts her arms, drops her arms. How rare to see her, to see anyone, making the no-face face of being alone, the posture of unconscious and solitary absorption. Her secret face, his secret now. He makes his thoughts loud so she might hear, a child’s trick—the sublime confusion of love and telepathy—fine piece, cunty bunny. Fine and bunny, piece and cunty, words filtered from the grate-trap of his brain like sediment. She doesn’t notice. She’s getting something from the closet. Weights. Her hands are wide and worn, knuckles like knotted wood. He can read her age only in the knots in her hands and in the incandescent parchment under her eyes. Her eyes—marine with gold flecks out-of-doors, sky-in-the-sea. Violet in the house. He has forgotten; he can never recall the precise look of her, even when she lies beside him and he has turned away.
    3D bounds in and bumps heavily against her calves. She pets him. He rolls onto his back, paws cycling. She disappears into a part of the room he can’t see. George decides he will creep around the back and—Iris reappears with Victor. Victor! They sit at the kitchen counter. 3D’s head jerks toward George. 3D is pivoting his gaze between the two men, Victor and the ghost at the window. Iris’s mouth moves. Victor smiles. George ties the balloons to the lowest