Timmy’s the second one to jump, but without his teddy, because Anouk’s got that and she knows my name, and she’s in Hell’s Kitchen, where I bump into Lisa, whose trip had been paid for by someone else…

He thought of Anouk’s grandfather, of his blog (The sharks will rip out the teeth of that whore who fucked the cancer into my son’s body) and as the pain cut like a welding burner across the back of his head to the neck, he thought of the torch, of how Anouk liked to draw, how she scratched herself. Elena’s face that had blown up into a balloon alternated with the drunk man from the disco and his neon drink… and for a second he had it.

The answer.

The solution.

All of a sudden everything was clear, but then there was a crack in both ears and this time it wasn’t the speaker in the ceiling, but the overflow valve in his head that had shut itself off on its own.

And while the fraught voices around Martin got quieter and quieter, the sun set in his mind’s eye and the world turned black.

46

Naomi

I committed adultery. In the most despicable way possible. I had sex for money.

*

It began with a misunderstanding during my student days. At the time I was still called Naomi McMillan. I was working as an assistant at a trade fair stand in San Francisco marketing automobile accessories to earn a bit of money in the holidays. Us girls were accommodated in a hotel on site, and on the last day of the fair we were in high spirits as we partied at the bar. I got to know a young, good-looking rep from Chicago. We laughed, drank, one thing led to another and the following morning I woke up in his room. He’d already gone on his way, but not without leaving something for me: two hundred dollars in cash.

The man had assumed I was a prostitute.

I remember staring at that money on the bedside table for a solid hour. I was shaking, but not with anger at the guy whose surname I never knew and whose first name is irrelevant. No, I was shaking in disbelief at myself. For instead of feeling thoroughly ashamed or thinking I was cheap, deep down I found myself getting excited at the idea of having surrendered myself to a stranger for money. And what was even worse, I was minded to repeat it.

When the next university vacation came around I returned to the trade fair hotel. In skimpy clothes and sexy make-up. I sat at the bar. My husband never found out how I financed my studies.

My expensive handbags.

The trips to Europe.