I haven’t conveyed the discomfort Marco was in as he recounted all this. Despite the sardonic humor he maintained, it was clearly intense; present in his wracked expression, in the pitch of his voice, in the flinching, frowning, jerking-back motion that periodically seized him: a sort of excruciated recoil, as if from some unsavory presence continually encroaching on his private space. He’d convinced himself that Sauer was acting out of purely cynical, gutter-journalism motives; that his claim to believe Julia’s article was “important” was hypocritical crap; his proof being the half-heartedness with which Sauer actually made this claim. He believed this half-heartedness was intentional; a deliberate, jeering signal that Sauer didn’t in fact give a damn whether the piece was “important,” or even true; that along with the prospect of a juicily salacious story, he was enjoying himself making Marco writhe. There was the business about knocking his father also, Marco believed, and bound up with that, possibly, a class-war element, with Sauer, definitely not a beneficiary of a private education judging from his writing style, reveling in having got a son of privilege into his grimy clutches. Again, I wasn’t sure I agreed with every aspect of the analysis—Marco was always a little quick to read class warfare into his exchanges with other Brits—but I could see how Sauer’s oily pretense of concern could get under his skin.
“Almost the worst of it,” he said, “aside from not being able to sleep, is not being able to think about anything else. As you can see I’ve become a complete monomaniac. Even if my friends and colleagues don’t shun me for being a sexual predator, they’ll do it for being a crashing bore. Listen to me! I haven’t even asked about your kids! How are your kids?”
“They’re fine,” I said, wincing at the sound of him using that terrible phrase “sexual predator” about himself. It was as if he were trying to get used to it ahead of time, and I felt a burst of real sympathy for him. “And you’re not being a bore.”
“Christ! What the hell are those?”
He was pointing toward the window. I looked out.
“Wild turkeys.”
Two toms and a hen, part of a large flock that often came out of the woods for the spillage from Caitlin’s bird feeders, had wandered onto the meadow beyond our lawn.
“They look like dinosaurs!”
As they came close to the lawn, the larger of the toms raised his black tail feathers and fanned them into a tall, bronze-ringed semicircle. The three of us watched as he began moving in short, suave bursts toward the hen.
“Speaking of sex . . .” I said.