Deforestation
Mark Jacobs
Here we are, the two of us. You’re listening, right, you’re not playing with your phone? You should know, if you don’t already, that for several years I rented a room from a woman who referred to herself as the Widow Jakes. It was a joke. She found it funny. Clarissa Jakes’s husband was a banker. Rafer died young, leaving her in titled possession of one of the handsome old homes the lumber barons put up in a previous century to announce their success. A high cost in trees was paid to gratify their vanity, you will say, and get no argument from me. The house commanded prime ground on Elm Street, a block up from Main. Dutch elm disease killed the street’s namesake foliage long ago. More dead trees. A cause for concern, it has long seemed to me.
I should mention that Clarissa’s home had a name. Turnbridge, after the lumber man who erected it. It was that kind of house, Victorian, with wraparound porches, gingerbread at the eaves, and a turret with curving windows.
Clarissa was only fifty. Rafer Jakes died young, in the counting house, as it were, running his fingers through a heap of doubloons, some time before I arrived. She was statuesquely tall, and buxom. I understand that the adjective has fallen out of favor, but it’s how she described herself. She had a cherries-and-milk complexion and wore her caramel hair piled in configurations that had a precarious look. Shake her head emphatically, you were tempted to think, and the whole edifice might come tumbling down.
Now there was a picture.
Clarissa was always talking about getting her realtor’s license but never taking the test. I’m too young to be a widow, she liked to say. True enough. The pout was pure put-on.
If I were a different sort of person I might have been a target for her longings, which she took no pains to disguise. But this is not about me.
You could make the case that it’s about my neighbor. By neighbor I mean Gleebyk, who rented the room across from mine on the upper floor of Turnbridge. We shared a bathroom at the end of the hall, which was not as gross as it sounds. Abraham Lincoln shared a bed with traveling companions when he was out lawyering and telling yarns around nineteenth-century Illinois. We’ve gone overboard, it seems to me, walling ourselves off from each other. We’re ashamed of the wrong things. Bodies should not be on the list. Well, and I am a routine person. That helped. Gleebyk knew when I used the bathroom and vice versa. It was easy to stay out of each other’s way.
I have always preferred doing the same things at the same time. Dinner each night at six thirty at Phil Terisi’s Marathon Diner. Why not? As often as not, the wait staff saved me the booth I liked, up in front by the window where I could see the residents of our little city going about their business, which often included pleasure.
Gleebyk was some sort of engineer at a paper mill not too far outside of town. Yes, you do need trees if you’re going to operate a paper mill. That, at least, is how it’s always been. The company trucked them in from ever more distant states. You’ve seen those monster log trucks on the highway. If you’re driving behind one, the load can look as precarious as one of Clarissa’s hair constructions.
I tell myself, let other people worry about the trees.
I’m an accountant, which may not surprise you. During the pandemic I worked from my room. I am a private person so you might expect that I found the arrangement congenial. I did not. As soon as we were offered the option of returning to the office, I did. I need to be around people a certain number of hours each day or I begin to disappear. Weekends can be dangerous. By Sunday evening I’m so thin I can’t turn sideways.
That’s one of the reasons this is not about me.
Gleebyk was a blunt man. The features of his face were coarse and had little to do with one another. The hard eyes, bent nose, churlish mouth were independent actors in a one-act play you suspected would end badly. His jet black hair shone, his manner was assertive. The boots he left at the front door, coming into Turnbridge, were bigger than they needed to be. You wouldn’t think Clarissa would be attracted to a person like him.
Gleebyk spoke English curtly, with an accent. If you asked him where he was from he cut you off with a single gruff word. Boston. I was reasonably certain he was born in one of the Balkan countries but had no idea which. I’m no good with languages, or geography. My strength is in numbers. If I applied myself, I could take a good hard look and estimate the number of trees cut down in what used to be a ten-acre parcel of second-growth forest.
Few people, in my experience, find numbers as stimulating as I do. I except, of course, the professionals, a guild in their own right of which I am a reluctant member. I’d rather be somebody else.
A basket case, I overheard Gleebyk saying to Clarissa one evening. This was some time ago, before things came to a head. I couldn’t say with certainty he was talking about me, but his tone of voice led me in that direction.
The strange thing was, Clarissa did not lack for options. Just the opposite. When I’d been under her roof about a year, she began confiding in me. This or that man – guys she met around town, guys she bumped into online, acquaintances through her deceased husband – was always expressing interest. She was beautiful, in her singular and conceivably offputting way. She was financially secure. She gave off a sexual vibe. That’s why I fail to this day to understand what drew her to Gleebyk. You read about such things; sometimes you see it happen. A woman of quality is attracted to men who are dogs, or wolves, or jackals. But Gleebyk?
I used to look forward to Clarissa’s confidences. I walked through the door of an evening and there she stood as if waiting for me, perky and perfectly put together. Everything matched, one item of clothing complementing the others. A drink, Barkie? Sure. I’m a numbers guy, and I keep to myself, but I’m not a hermit. Despite certain disappointments I have experienced, I retain a certain amount of faith in the pleasure principle.
She mixed a mean Manhattan, an old school drink I grew fond of in her elegant oversized multiple-mirrored living room, where we sat at opposite ends of a French provincial sofa and she filled me in on the details of her latest rendezvous. Dinner and drinks, a ski trip to Vail, a long weekend in Barbados, a play or the opera in New York. Those were the kinds of activities she was regularly plied with by what seemed to be an unending succession of men, not all of them single but all of them available. Sometimes she said yes, more often no. But no one she skied or drank wine or traveled with satisfied the itch that plagued her. It refused to be scratched.
Once, in mid-May, she invited me to have a summery glass of white wine. We sat outside in the back yard in the flower garden back by the summer house, where rabbits had found a haven from which they would not soon be evicted. Birds swooped in the mellow mild air as the sun spilled its can of pastel paint across a stretched canvas of clouds. The kind of moment you wanted to go on forever, you would sell your soul to any devil or deity who could make it stay.
“Cheers, Barkie Underliss,” Clarissa said, lifting her glass.
“What are we drinking to?”
“His name is Max. I think I’m in love.”
My heart sank. Yours would, too. Not that I had the ghost of a chance with her. Intriguing, I was not. I did my best, I always did my best, to hide what I felt for Clarissa. She knew, you’ll say. Maybe. Probably. Almost certainly. But I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself. That wouldn’t be fair to either of us. It bears repeating: this is not about me.
Max was a friend of her deceased husband’s, a recent widower himself (cancer, the same disease that took Rafer), a financial consultant. He had high emotional intelligence. Everything seemed perfect. I congratulated her, because that was the right thing to do. She went to New York with him. Stayed four days. When she came home she was subdued, and the next time we shared an evening cocktail she told me it hadn’t worked out.
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s what I like about you, Barkie.”
“What?”
“You never pump me for the prurient details.”
It may have been about this time that I began dreaming about trees. Well, I had always worried about them. It makes a certain amount of sense that they would come into my dreams. If some portion of your dream life has to do with the fulfillment of wishes, another portion arises from anxiety.
It took me a ridiculously long time to tumble to what began to go on between Clarissa and Gleebyk. Willful blindness, you will say. Possibly, though possibly not. She may have wished to spare my feelings. As for Gleebyk, I was beneath his contempt, definitely not a person in whom he would confide.
The relationship came into the open last September during one of those warm spells that have been known to sweep across New England in the fall, offering a kind of political litmus test: global warming or a traditional Indian summer, to be enjoyed without guilt?
The three of us sat in the living room with the windows open, the breeze not strong enough to ruffle the heavy brocaded drapes but toying with the sheers behind them. No Manhattans. Gleebyk didn’t like them. He preferred sweet drinks. Somehow he persuaded her to make a round of Singapore Slings. Clarissa was not a docile person but went along with the request. That should have been a warning.
“Cezar has been telling me about his work at the paper mill,” she said, handing me my Sling with a barely perceptible shrug as if apologizing that it was not the Manhattan I had come to expect, the Manhattan I deserved. “It’s such an interesting occupation, don’t you think, Barkie?”
It was the first time I heard his first name. Knowing it did nothing toward warming me up to the man.
It was a brutish conversation, conducted mostly by Gleebyk, with Clarissa listening attentively and prompting him the way women so often do even when they know better. He was working on an invention, a clever machine that would cut in half the time it took to reduce the fact of a tree to the utilitarian status of paper. You didn’t expect me to be thrilled by the topic, did you? The sexual chemistry between them was somewhere between discreet and obvious on a demonstrability scale.
Gleebyk was convinced his invention would make him a rich man, and sooner rather than later. The way his mind worked, even the possibility of wealth made him fatally attractive to his landlady. I have lived long enough not to dismiss a thing out of hand merely because I find its prospect repugnant.
I think I could have handled the relationship. After all, I had zero chance of making any headway with Clarissa myself, and tastes in love are not subject to the laws of logic. But as the weeks went by a change came over her that was more than I could bear. She became – there’s no other word for it – subservient. To Gleebyk, improbable as that may sound to you. She catered to his every whim, she hung on his words, she dressed in the manner he dictated, she dropped friends he didn’t like. On and on went the transformation. I was flabbergasted. I was outraged. More than anything, I was deeply saddened.
There came a day when I told myself I could take it no longer. I would move out, I would find another home, rather than bear witness to the degradation I confronted when I came through the front door. All I had to do was work up the nerve to give two weeks’ notice to Clarissa. That was fair.
Yes, it did occur to me that Gleebyk would take my departure as another victory, one more notch in his big stick. That was probably why I held off.
I tried to make Clarissa see what her pig of a lover was doing to her. He was sent by the paper mill on a business trip to North Carolina for a few days, which opened up some operating space for me, and I went to work. No beating around the bush. Despite a congenital preference for angles, I went at her straight on when, the first day of Gleebyk’s absence, she served us Manhattans.
“For old time’s sake,” she said, handing me mine in a voice that cloyed annoyingly.
She was dressed in the style Gleebyk had urged her to adapt in a low-cut blouse, a skirt that was shorter than her former norm. She looked sexy, sure, but at what cost? It was winter, and the big house was heated by an old-fashioned oil burner that was anything but efficient. There were goose-bumps on her exposed flesh. I felt a profound sexual longing, so deep that even in the moment I knew it would leave a scar.
I pointed out what I had been observing, in detail, with specific examples, verbatim quotes, pinpoint recollections. She did not contest a bit of it. But my words put her back up. We were sitting on the French sofa. She set her glass down on the coffee table, stood up, and told me what Gleebyk said and she did were two things with one thing in common. They were none of my business.
“I know that. But…”
“But what?”
I shook my head. The way I saw it, I was making a sacrifice, becoming the target of her anger in the service of high and holy truth. She had a slow fuse but burned steadily. I was mortified by seeing in her some of the contempt that was Gleebyk’s emotional stock-in-trade. I put my glass down, excused myself, and beat a retreat to my room. I skipped dinner at the Marathon that evening, didn’t want to risk running into Clarissa again. Where it counted, I was tender.
I want to be precise here. The contempt Clarissa showed me was nothing like as thoroughgoing as Gleebyk’s. How could it be, in such a generous woman? It stung, though. Man, did it sting.
My nemesis returned all too soon from North Carolina, and I started looking online for other rooms to rent. I could have bought a house, or rented an apartment – I’m not penurious, and I’m frugal – but either of those choices would run the risk of my disappearance. Besides, I was used to living in a rented room, and you will have realized by now the price I put on stability.
I wished I had taken the plunge and left, however, the evening Clarissa handed me an invitation to a party she was throwing. Gleebyk’s idea, of course. The guest list was heavy on the management staff at the mill where he worked, along with a sprinkling of her friends and acquaintances from around town. He intended to show her off.
“I’ll see if I can make it,” I told her.
Her eyes widened. They were hazel. They expressed her skepticism. I was always around. Why wouldn’t I make it?
“Let’s be friends, Barkie,” she said.
The way her mind worked, inviting me to her party was a peace offering after the falling-out we’d had when Gleebyk was away.
So. I could tough it out. I was an Underliss. But I wasn’t giving up my quest to sabotage the relationship between Clarissa and the man she seemed to enjoy calling Cezar, as though he were the emperor of her affections. And I caught a break. I happened to be driving on Route 51 – that’s the highway along which the paper mill in question sits – on the morning when a log truck sideswiped a pickup, and one hell of a wreck ensued. The police and fire department were already on the scene. Traffic was halted. I got out of my car and snapped pictures of the devastation. Logs lay everywhere, like a gigantic game of pick-up sticks tossed by the hand of a feckless god. An ambulance was on hand, loading victims for transport to the hospital. The driver of the log truck was being handcuffed by a state cop.
I sent the pictures to Clarissa. I debated for some time including a caption, or a comment, but decided the unadorned images would accomplish what I hoped to accomplish, which was to turn her off to the business of converting trees to stationery, or toilet paper, or Christmas wrapping. If that happened, Gleebyk would be found guilty by association.
A tiny advantage, those photos; I admit it. But at the party, two days later, I pressed it. Her well appointed living room and the adjacent study were full to bursting with burbling guests, glass in hand, me among them although not burbling. A Salvadoran couple served drinks and canapes, he short and stout, she much taller and verging on willowy. Made me wonder if there was a Spanish version of the Jack Sprat rhyme.
I waited until Clarissa was in earshot before asking Gleebyk whether the company he worked for did any reforestation of the lands their work despoiled. An impolitic question, given the guest list. And Gleebyk took offense, as I knew he would. I had hoped to catch him out in an admission that no, they didn’t bother with that sort of tree-hugger shit. But he wasn’t a complete fool. He hid his reaction and spouted some nonsense about the economics of replanting, how it made sense even in the medium term.
Clarissa smiled.
She had reason, by her lights, to smile. The party turned out to be the platform for the announcement of her engagement to Gleebyk. I staggered, in a manner of speaking.
Over the next few days I worked on multiple fronts. I took time off work and drove out into the country to land that had been recently logged and took pictures that wound up in her email inbox.
Pretty tortuous, you will say. You’re right. But I had an idea for more direct action. It occurred to me that I could plant drugs in Gleebyk’s car and then call the police to tip them off. That would remove him from the scene of the crime he was about to commit. But the plan suffered from a practical difficulty. I had no idea where to buy illegal drugs, and I figured if I asked around, the asking would open me up to suspicion. For lack of a solution to a basic problem I let that particular field of action lie fallow.
At the diner one evening, midway through a spinach omelet, I had an insight, or a brainstorm, or some other sort of semidivine intervention. Gleebyk being the person he was, it came to me, he almost certainly had a shady, and possibly a criminal, past. One of our accounting clients was a young private detective trying to establish herself in a field still dominated, in the popular consciousness, by men. It was time to go see her.
“Thanks, Barkie,” the waitress said when I handed her a ten-dollar bill. I was not known as an extravagant tipper. She had a winsome face and was working her way through community college, and now and then I surrender to an impulse. “You must have really liked the omelet.”
“You’ve brought me luck,” I told her.
Next day I drove two towns over to visit Jane, who has asked that I not include her surname in this account. Detectives rely on their discretion, and I respect her respect for the conventions.
Jane used to teach middle-school math. Approaching forty she hungered for a career change. Opening her own detective agency was a long shot, she knew that. But why not try? She was the single mother of a son who was impressed by his mother’s new job. Her somewhat matronly appearance, I thought, might prove to be a professional advantage. The bad guys wouldn’t see her coming.
She was eager to take on the job, so I wrote her a check and drove back to the office hoping for the best. The best would be an outstanding warrant for Gleebyk’s arrest back in Belgrade, or Sarajevo, or Zagreb.
I waited. What else could I do? No one stepped out of an alley to offer me drugs I could purchase in quantity and place in Gleebyk’s car, which I happened to know he left unlocked. I had one moment of hope. Gleebyk was out, one evening, I had no idea where and refused to ask Clarissa. We sat companionably as of yore and chatted over a drink. Almost insensibly she drifted onto the topic of her betrothed, and setting a date. He wanted to take her to North Carolina for the honeymoon. He had enjoyed his work visit to the state.
“Can I tell you this, Barkie? I have no interest in North Carolina.”
I sensed that her reluctance to spend her honeymoon in the Tarheel State was a proxy for a more wide-ranging reluctance having to do with the man himself. Tricky business, this. I could not be too direct now, or too negative. I coaxed her for the source of her doubts, and she surrendered them, one by one. Yes, Gleebyk had a strong personality. Possibly too strong. He was opinionated, and liked getting his own way. Some of her friends were complaining that they never heard from her, she was always turning down their invitations. And yes, she sometimes felt naked, on display, dressing the way he liked her to dress.
I thought we were making headway, advancing toward truth, when she stood up abruptly. She clapped her hands to her face to hide her tears and rushed from the room. Finally, I thought. She’s beginning to see the light. Change is pain. The engagement just might not survive.
Wrong.
Soon enough she was oozing enthusiasm for North Carolina and its multiple delights. Seashore, mountains, a rich cultural mix. All that. She might buy a banjo and take lessons. Meantime Jane the detective was having no luck turning up the dirt on Gleebyk. It was there. I had no doubt it was there. And I had confidence in Jane despite her thin sleuthing résumé. I told her to keep digging, the internet was her friend. I transferred the next installment of fee-plus-expenses money to her account.
I was puzzled by how close Clarissa had come to seeing through Gleebyk, that one time over drinks, to no avail. Finally it came to me. She had used me to exorcise her doubts. I didn’t mind being used, but not for such a nefarious purpose.
I wondered about their sexual relationship. It took all the self-control I could muster to consign my curiosity to the ash heap of history.
This was in early December. I suffered. My suffering had nothing to do with seasonal affective disorder. I was trolling the internet looking for the best, or perhaps I mean the worst pictures of deforestation from countries at every latitude around the world. I forwarded them to Clarissa. She never said stop, and I didn’t. But I finally had to realize that nothing I did or could do was going to change Clarissa’s mind. I was at the diner again, enjoying poached salmon and brussels sprouts, when the sudden insight came. Detective Jane could turn up something truly terrible from Gleebyk’s past; I still held out hope. But murder, armed robbery, drug-running, no allegation however well substantiated was going to dent her affection. That was screamingly obvious, you must be thinking. All I can say is that it was not obvious to me until it was.
Clarissa and Gleebyk announced a wedding date. April 16th. The weather would likely be fine by then. The paper of the invitations and their envelopes was thick, of a rich cream color. I forbear mentioning trees in this context. She didn’t say anything to me, but I knew that once they married I would no longer be welcome under her roof.
To distract myself I went to Jane’s son’s piano recital, and mighty thin gruel it was.
Every year, the week before Christmas, Clarissa hosted a holiday party. It was a local tradition. People liked dressing up for it, and she went all out for the event. The food and drink were festive and abundant, a classical guitarist in a tuxedo played carols, the Salvadoran couple sparkled in black and white making sure everyone was served promptly and in style. Gleebyk made a tactical decision not to bah-and-humbug his way through the night. Nevertheless his smile was insincere, any dolt could see that.
So be it. I was at peace, or as close to peace as was practical under the circumstances. I had lined up a list of places to visit where I could rent a room. I intended to be gone before the wedding. That would make it easy on Clarissa. She wouldn’t have to shove me out the door, lodger dislodged. There was a kind of consolation, not to be disparaged, in knowing there was nothing I could do about the situation.
I was on the fringe of a conversational group sipping and munching when somebody brought up the recent murder of an environmental activist in Brazil, deep in the Amazon. An indigenous woman, Mafalda dos Santos was known for her courage and her media savvy. The attack was brutal; a video of her horrifically abused body was circulating on the internet.
As luck would have it, both Clarissa and Gleebyk were in the same circle. But Gleebyk’s reaction to the news about Mafalda had nothing to do with luck. It was destiny, it was the inexorable revelation of character.
“She deserved it,” he said, knowing full well that the partygoers listening to him would be appalled by his words.
“Cezar didn’t mean it the way it came out,” Clarissa put in.
“Yes I did.”
He glowered, she hung her head. And he went on a tear, raving about sanctimonious do-gooders and environmentalists in general, the threat they posed to the business in which he had invested heart, soul, and engineering skills. If the greenies had their way, the wheels of industry would grind to a standstill. Going into attack mode, he impugned the activists’ motives and their mothers. Vituperative, that’s the only description that suits. The vitriol dripped from his thin contemptuous lips. People wanted to turn away from the spectacle. But didn’t. Because people don’t.
It came to an end only when Clarissa shouted for him to stop. He did. Instantly. She was shaking her head in shame and disbelief. Had this really happened at her Christmas party? Was this the man she was soon to marry? He seemed to realize that this time he had gone too far. Somebody changed the subject, and in a few minutes the chat group broke up. Everyone was relieved to get away.
After that, the party righted itself, because the guests and their host wanted it to be what it was intended to be, a celebration of community in the season of fellowship. The holiday mood triumphed. Clarissa made her traditional self-deprecating speech about how much the assembled guests meant to her, how grateful she felt to live here, how lucky. It was as though the murder of Mafalda dos Santos had never come up.
As though, I say. Because of course it had. And it was the beginning of the end for Gleebyk. My only regret was that I had nothing to do with his downfall. Clarissa began fighting back. Tentatively, at first, and then with increasing consistency. She criticized things he said, the clothes he wore. His big boots. She criticized his mustache, and his vocabulary. She talked about trees in a rueful tone of voice. They quarreled. She did not give way. She began dressing to suit herself, not him. And Gleebyk knew, he had to know, that he had well and truly blown it with his rant at the holiday party.
I kept looking at the calendar. He moved out on January 15th. When I came home from work that evening I found Clarissa in the study, not her usual hangout. A stack of books was piled on the desk. She was looking for something to read. At her invitation I took a seat on what had been Rafer’s leather sofa.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she warned me.
“Of course not.”
“How could I have been such a fool, Barkie?”
There is no good answer to that question, you will rush to point out, but I was way ahead of you. I kept my mouth shut.
“I keep thinking about that poor woman in Brazil,” she told me. “I almost watched the video. I’m glad I didn’t.”
“I’m glad you didn’t, too. The police keep promising to bring the murderers to justice, but as far as I can tell nobody believes them.”
“They’ll get away with it.”
“So they say.”
“Impunity.”
It was a heavy word and dropped like a stone between us. The way of the world.
We sat there for a couple of minutes. She asked me if I could suggest a book. I wished I had read something worth recommending.
She looked at me. Quizzically, I want to say, but that’s not quite right. Wistful? That’s not right, either. That’s okay. I’ll have plenty of time to sort out my adjectives. I fantasized, briefly, that Clarissa would come to me on the rebound, or as a reward for my fidelity, my steadfastness, my refusal to complain. But, as I’ve been at pains to point out, this is not about me.
~ ~ ~
July 2026
Mark Jacobs
Here we are, the two of us. You’re listening, right, you’re not playing with your phone? You should know, if you don’t already, that for several years I rented a room from a woman who referred to herself as the Widow Jakes. It was a joke. She found it funny. Clarissa Jakes’s husband was a banker. Rafer died young, leaving her in titled possession of one of the handsome old homes the lumber barons put up in a previous century to announce their success. A high cost in trees was paid to gratify their vanity, you will say, and get no argument from me. The house commanded prime ground on Elm Street, a block up from Main. Dutch elm disease killed the street’s namesake foliage long ago. More dead trees. A cause for concern, it has long seemed to me.
I should mention that Clarissa’s home had a name. Turnbridge, after the lumber man who erected it. It was that kind of house, Victorian, with wraparound porches, gingerbread at the eaves, and a turret with curving windows.
Clarissa was only fifty. Rafer Jakes died young, in the counting house, as it were, running his fingers through a heap of doubloons, some time before I arrived. She was statuesquely tall, and buxom. I understand that the adjective has fallen out of favor, but it’s how she described herself. She had a cherries-and-milk complexion and wore her caramel hair piled in configurations that had a precarious look. Shake her head emphatically, you were tempted to think, and the whole edifice might come tumbling down.
Now there was a picture.
Clarissa was always talking about getting her realtor’s license but never taking the test. I’m too young to be a widow, she liked to say. True enough. The pout was pure put-on.
If I were a different sort of person I might have been a target for her longings, which she took no pains to disguise. But this is not about me.
You could make the case that it’s about my neighbor. By neighbor I mean Gleebyk, who rented the room across from mine on the upper floor of Turnbridge. We shared a bathroom at the end of the hall, which was not as gross as it sounds. Abraham Lincoln shared a bed with traveling companions when he was out lawyering and telling yarns around nineteenth-century Illinois. We’ve gone overboard, it seems to me, walling ourselves off from each other. We’re ashamed of the wrong things. Bodies should not be on the list. Well, and I am a routine person. That helped. Gleebyk knew when I used the bathroom and vice versa. It was easy to stay out of each other’s way.
I have always preferred doing the same things at the same time. Dinner each night at six thirty at Phil Terisi’s Marathon Diner. Why not? As often as not, the wait staff saved me the booth I liked, up in front by the window where I could see the residents of our little city going about their business, which often included pleasure.
Gleebyk was some sort of engineer at a paper mill not too far outside of town. Yes, you do need trees if you’re going to operate a paper mill. That, at least, is how it’s always been. The company trucked them in from ever more distant states. You’ve seen those monster log trucks on the highway. If you’re driving behind one, the load can look as precarious as one of Clarissa’s hair constructions.
I tell myself, let other people worry about the trees.
I’m an accountant, which may not surprise you. During the pandemic I worked from my room. I am a private person so you might expect that I found the arrangement congenial. I did not. As soon as we were offered the option of returning to the office, I did. I need to be around people a certain number of hours each day or I begin to disappear. Weekends can be dangerous. By Sunday evening I’m so thin I can’t turn sideways.
That’s one of the reasons this is not about me.
Gleebyk was a blunt man. The features of his face were coarse and had little to do with one another. The hard eyes, bent nose, churlish mouth were independent actors in a one-act play you suspected would end badly. His jet black hair shone, his manner was assertive. The boots he left at the front door, coming into Turnbridge, were bigger than they needed to be. You wouldn’t think Clarissa would be attracted to a person like him.
Gleebyk spoke English curtly, with an accent. If you asked him where he was from he cut you off with a single gruff word. Boston. I was reasonably certain he was born in one of the Balkan countries but had no idea which. I’m no good with languages, or geography. My strength is in numbers. If I applied myself, I could take a good hard look and estimate the number of trees cut down in what used to be a ten-acre parcel of second-growth forest.
Few people, in my experience, find numbers as stimulating as I do. I except, of course, the professionals, a guild in their own right of which I am a reluctant member. I’d rather be somebody else.
A basket case, I overheard Gleebyk saying to Clarissa one evening. This was some time ago, before things came to a head. I couldn’t say with certainty he was talking about me, but his tone of voice led me in that direction.
The strange thing was, Clarissa did not lack for options. Just the opposite. When I’d been under her roof about a year, she began confiding in me. This or that man – guys she met around town, guys she bumped into online, acquaintances through her deceased husband – was always expressing interest. She was beautiful, in her singular and conceivably offputting way. She was financially secure. She gave off a sexual vibe. That’s why I fail to this day to understand what drew her to Gleebyk. You read about such things; sometimes you see it happen. A woman of quality is attracted to men who are dogs, or wolves, or jackals. But Gleebyk?
I used to look forward to Clarissa’s confidences. I walked through the door of an evening and there she stood as if waiting for me, perky and perfectly put together. Everything matched, one item of clothing complementing the others. A drink, Barkie? Sure. I’m a numbers guy, and I keep to myself, but I’m not a hermit. Despite certain disappointments I have experienced, I retain a certain amount of faith in the pleasure principle.
She mixed a mean Manhattan, an old school drink I grew fond of in her elegant oversized multiple-mirrored living room, where we sat at opposite ends of a French provincial sofa and she filled me in on the details of her latest rendezvous. Dinner and drinks, a ski trip to Vail, a long weekend in Barbados, a play or the opera in New York. Those were the kinds of activities she was regularly plied with by what seemed to be an unending succession of men, not all of them single but all of them available. Sometimes she said yes, more often no. But no one she skied or drank wine or traveled with satisfied the itch that plagued her. It refused to be scratched.
Once, in mid-May, she invited me to have a summery glass of white wine. We sat outside in the back yard in the flower garden back by the summer house, where rabbits had found a haven from which they would not soon be evicted. Birds swooped in the mellow mild air as the sun spilled its can of pastel paint across a stretched canvas of clouds. The kind of moment you wanted to go on forever, you would sell your soul to any devil or deity who could make it stay.
“Cheers, Barkie Underliss,” Clarissa said, lifting her glass.
“What are we drinking to?”
“His name is Max. I think I’m in love.”
My heart sank. Yours would, too. Not that I had the ghost of a chance with her. Intriguing, I was not. I did my best, I always did my best, to hide what I felt for Clarissa. She knew, you’ll say. Maybe. Probably. Almost certainly. But I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself. That wouldn’t be fair to either of us. It bears repeating: this is not about me.
Max was a friend of her deceased husband’s, a recent widower himself (cancer, the same disease that took Rafer), a financial consultant. He had high emotional intelligence. Everything seemed perfect. I congratulated her, because that was the right thing to do. She went to New York with him. Stayed four days. When she came home she was subdued, and the next time we shared an evening cocktail she told me it hadn’t worked out.
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s what I like about you, Barkie.”
“What?”
“You never pump me for the prurient details.”
It may have been about this time that I began dreaming about trees. Well, I had always worried about them. It makes a certain amount of sense that they would come into my dreams. If some portion of your dream life has to do with the fulfillment of wishes, another portion arises from anxiety.
It took me a ridiculously long time to tumble to what began to go on between Clarissa and Gleebyk. Willful blindness, you will say. Possibly, though possibly not. She may have wished to spare my feelings. As for Gleebyk, I was beneath his contempt, definitely not a person in whom he would confide.
The relationship came into the open last September during one of those warm spells that have been known to sweep across New England in the fall, offering a kind of political litmus test: global warming or a traditional Indian summer, to be enjoyed without guilt?
The three of us sat in the living room with the windows open, the breeze not strong enough to ruffle the heavy brocaded drapes but toying with the sheers behind them. No Manhattans. Gleebyk didn’t like them. He preferred sweet drinks. Somehow he persuaded her to make a round of Singapore Slings. Clarissa was not a docile person but went along with the request. That should have been a warning.
“Cezar has been telling me about his work at the paper mill,” she said, handing me my Sling with a barely perceptible shrug as if apologizing that it was not the Manhattan I had come to expect, the Manhattan I deserved. “It’s such an interesting occupation, don’t you think, Barkie?”
It was the first time I heard his first name. Knowing it did nothing toward warming me up to the man.
It was a brutish conversation, conducted mostly by Gleebyk, with Clarissa listening attentively and prompting him the way women so often do even when they know better. He was working on an invention, a clever machine that would cut in half the time it took to reduce the fact of a tree to the utilitarian status of paper. You didn’t expect me to be thrilled by the topic, did you? The sexual chemistry between them was somewhere between discreet and obvious on a demonstrability scale.
Gleebyk was convinced his invention would make him a rich man, and sooner rather than later. The way his mind worked, even the possibility of wealth made him fatally attractive to his landlady. I have lived long enough not to dismiss a thing out of hand merely because I find its prospect repugnant.
I think I could have handled the relationship. After all, I had zero chance of making any headway with Clarissa myself, and tastes in love are not subject to the laws of logic. But as the weeks went by a change came over her that was more than I could bear. She became – there’s no other word for it – subservient. To Gleebyk, improbable as that may sound to you. She catered to his every whim, she hung on his words, she dressed in the manner he dictated, she dropped friends he didn’t like. On and on went the transformation. I was flabbergasted. I was outraged. More than anything, I was deeply saddened.
There came a day when I told myself I could take it no longer. I would move out, I would find another home, rather than bear witness to the degradation I confronted when I came through the front door. All I had to do was work up the nerve to give two weeks’ notice to Clarissa. That was fair.
Yes, it did occur to me that Gleebyk would take my departure as another victory, one more notch in his big stick. That was probably why I held off.
I tried to make Clarissa see what her pig of a lover was doing to her. He was sent by the paper mill on a business trip to North Carolina for a few days, which opened up some operating space for me, and I went to work. No beating around the bush. Despite a congenital preference for angles, I went at her straight on when, the first day of Gleebyk’s absence, she served us Manhattans.
“For old time’s sake,” she said, handing me mine in a voice that cloyed annoyingly.
She was dressed in the style Gleebyk had urged her to adapt in a low-cut blouse, a skirt that was shorter than her former norm. She looked sexy, sure, but at what cost? It was winter, and the big house was heated by an old-fashioned oil burner that was anything but efficient. There were goose-bumps on her exposed flesh. I felt a profound sexual longing, so deep that even in the moment I knew it would leave a scar.
I pointed out what I had been observing, in detail, with specific examples, verbatim quotes, pinpoint recollections. She did not contest a bit of it. But my words put her back up. We were sitting on the French sofa. She set her glass down on the coffee table, stood up, and told me what Gleebyk said and she did were two things with one thing in common. They were none of my business.
“I know that. But…”
“But what?”
I shook my head. The way I saw it, I was making a sacrifice, becoming the target of her anger in the service of high and holy truth. She had a slow fuse but burned steadily. I was mortified by seeing in her some of the contempt that was Gleebyk’s emotional stock-in-trade. I put my glass down, excused myself, and beat a retreat to my room. I skipped dinner at the Marathon that evening, didn’t want to risk running into Clarissa again. Where it counted, I was tender.
I want to be precise here. The contempt Clarissa showed me was nothing like as thoroughgoing as Gleebyk’s. How could it be, in such a generous woman? It stung, though. Man, did it sting.
My nemesis returned all too soon from North Carolina, and I started looking online for other rooms to rent. I could have bought a house, or rented an apartment – I’m not penurious, and I’m frugal – but either of those choices would run the risk of my disappearance. Besides, I was used to living in a rented room, and you will have realized by now the price I put on stability.
I wished I had taken the plunge and left, however, the evening Clarissa handed me an invitation to a party she was throwing. Gleebyk’s idea, of course. The guest list was heavy on the management staff at the mill where he worked, along with a sprinkling of her friends and acquaintances from around town. He intended to show her off.
“I’ll see if I can make it,” I told her.
Her eyes widened. They were hazel. They expressed her skepticism. I was always around. Why wouldn’t I make it?
“Let’s be friends, Barkie,” she said.
The way her mind worked, inviting me to her party was a peace offering after the falling-out we’d had when Gleebyk was away.
So. I could tough it out. I was an Underliss. But I wasn’t giving up my quest to sabotage the relationship between Clarissa and the man she seemed to enjoy calling Cezar, as though he were the emperor of her affections. And I caught a break. I happened to be driving on Route 51 – that’s the highway along which the paper mill in question sits – on the morning when a log truck sideswiped a pickup, and one hell of a wreck ensued. The police and fire department were already on the scene. Traffic was halted. I got out of my car and snapped pictures of the devastation. Logs lay everywhere, like a gigantic game of pick-up sticks tossed by the hand of a feckless god. An ambulance was on hand, loading victims for transport to the hospital. The driver of the log truck was being handcuffed by a state cop.
I sent the pictures to Clarissa. I debated for some time including a caption, or a comment, but decided the unadorned images would accomplish what I hoped to accomplish, which was to turn her off to the business of converting trees to stationery, or toilet paper, or Christmas wrapping. If that happened, Gleebyk would be found guilty by association.
A tiny advantage, those photos; I admit it. But at the party, two days later, I pressed it. Her well appointed living room and the adjacent study were full to bursting with burbling guests, glass in hand, me among them although not burbling. A Salvadoran couple served drinks and canapes, he short and stout, she much taller and verging on willowy. Made me wonder if there was a Spanish version of the Jack Sprat rhyme.
I waited until Clarissa was in earshot before asking Gleebyk whether the company he worked for did any reforestation of the lands their work despoiled. An impolitic question, given the guest list. And Gleebyk took offense, as I knew he would. I had hoped to catch him out in an admission that no, they didn’t bother with that sort of tree-hugger shit. But he wasn’t a complete fool. He hid his reaction and spouted some nonsense about the economics of replanting, how it made sense even in the medium term.
Clarissa smiled.
She had reason, by her lights, to smile. The party turned out to be the platform for the announcement of her engagement to Gleebyk. I staggered, in a manner of speaking.
Over the next few days I worked on multiple fronts. I took time off work and drove out into the country to land that had been recently logged and took pictures that wound up in her email inbox.
Pretty tortuous, you will say. You’re right. But I had an idea for more direct action. It occurred to me that I could plant drugs in Gleebyk’s car and then call the police to tip them off. That would remove him from the scene of the crime he was about to commit. But the plan suffered from a practical difficulty. I had no idea where to buy illegal drugs, and I figured if I asked around, the asking would open me up to suspicion. For lack of a solution to a basic problem I let that particular field of action lie fallow.
At the diner one evening, midway through a spinach omelet, I had an insight, or a brainstorm, or some other sort of semidivine intervention. Gleebyk being the person he was, it came to me, he almost certainly had a shady, and possibly a criminal, past. One of our accounting clients was a young private detective trying to establish herself in a field still dominated, in the popular consciousness, by men. It was time to go see her.
“Thanks, Barkie,” the waitress said when I handed her a ten-dollar bill. I was not known as an extravagant tipper. She had a winsome face and was working her way through community college, and now and then I surrender to an impulse. “You must have really liked the omelet.”
“You’ve brought me luck,” I told her.
Next day I drove two towns over to visit Jane, who has asked that I not include her surname in this account. Detectives rely on their discretion, and I respect her respect for the conventions.
Jane used to teach middle-school math. Approaching forty she hungered for a career change. Opening her own detective agency was a long shot, she knew that. But why not try? She was the single mother of a son who was impressed by his mother’s new job. Her somewhat matronly appearance, I thought, might prove to be a professional advantage. The bad guys wouldn’t see her coming.
She was eager to take on the job, so I wrote her a check and drove back to the office hoping for the best. The best would be an outstanding warrant for Gleebyk’s arrest back in Belgrade, or Sarajevo, or Zagreb.
I waited. What else could I do? No one stepped out of an alley to offer me drugs I could purchase in quantity and place in Gleebyk’s car, which I happened to know he left unlocked. I had one moment of hope. Gleebyk was out, one evening, I had no idea where and refused to ask Clarissa. We sat companionably as of yore and chatted over a drink. Almost insensibly she drifted onto the topic of her betrothed, and setting a date. He wanted to take her to North Carolina for the honeymoon. He had enjoyed his work visit to the state.
“Can I tell you this, Barkie? I have no interest in North Carolina.”
I sensed that her reluctance to spend her honeymoon in the Tarheel State was a proxy for a more wide-ranging reluctance having to do with the man himself. Tricky business, this. I could not be too direct now, or too negative. I coaxed her for the source of her doubts, and she surrendered them, one by one. Yes, Gleebyk had a strong personality. Possibly too strong. He was opinionated, and liked getting his own way. Some of her friends were complaining that they never heard from her, she was always turning down their invitations. And yes, she sometimes felt naked, on display, dressing the way he liked her to dress.
I thought we were making headway, advancing toward truth, when she stood up abruptly. She clapped her hands to her face to hide her tears and rushed from the room. Finally, I thought. She’s beginning to see the light. Change is pain. The engagement just might not survive.
Wrong.
Soon enough she was oozing enthusiasm for North Carolina and its multiple delights. Seashore, mountains, a rich cultural mix. All that. She might buy a banjo and take lessons. Meantime Jane the detective was having no luck turning up the dirt on Gleebyk. It was there. I had no doubt it was there. And I had confidence in Jane despite her thin sleuthing résumé. I told her to keep digging, the internet was her friend. I transferred the next installment of fee-plus-expenses money to her account.
I was puzzled by how close Clarissa had come to seeing through Gleebyk, that one time over drinks, to no avail. Finally it came to me. She had used me to exorcise her doubts. I didn’t mind being used, but not for such a nefarious purpose.
I wondered about their sexual relationship. It took all the self-control I could muster to consign my curiosity to the ash heap of history.
This was in early December. I suffered. My suffering had nothing to do with seasonal affective disorder. I was trolling the internet looking for the best, or perhaps I mean the worst pictures of deforestation from countries at every latitude around the world. I forwarded them to Clarissa. She never said stop, and I didn’t. But I finally had to realize that nothing I did or could do was going to change Clarissa’s mind. I was at the diner again, enjoying poached salmon and brussels sprouts, when the sudden insight came. Detective Jane could turn up something truly terrible from Gleebyk’s past; I still held out hope. But murder, armed robbery, drug-running, no allegation however well substantiated was going to dent her affection. That was screamingly obvious, you must be thinking. All I can say is that it was not obvious to me until it was.
Clarissa and Gleebyk announced a wedding date. April 16th. The weather would likely be fine by then. The paper of the invitations and their envelopes was thick, of a rich cream color. I forbear mentioning trees in this context. She didn’t say anything to me, but I knew that once they married I would no longer be welcome under her roof.
To distract myself I went to Jane’s son’s piano recital, and mighty thin gruel it was.
Every year, the week before Christmas, Clarissa hosted a holiday party. It was a local tradition. People liked dressing up for it, and she went all out for the event. The food and drink were festive and abundant, a classical guitarist in a tuxedo played carols, the Salvadoran couple sparkled in black and white making sure everyone was served promptly and in style. Gleebyk made a tactical decision not to bah-and-humbug his way through the night. Nevertheless his smile was insincere, any dolt could see that.
So be it. I was at peace, or as close to peace as was practical under the circumstances. I had lined up a list of places to visit where I could rent a room. I intended to be gone before the wedding. That would make it easy on Clarissa. She wouldn’t have to shove me out the door, lodger dislodged. There was a kind of consolation, not to be disparaged, in knowing there was nothing I could do about the situation.
I was on the fringe of a conversational group sipping and munching when somebody brought up the recent murder of an environmental activist in Brazil, deep in the Amazon. An indigenous woman, Mafalda dos Santos was known for her courage and her media savvy. The attack was brutal; a video of her horrifically abused body was circulating on the internet.
As luck would have it, both Clarissa and Gleebyk were in the same circle. But Gleebyk’s reaction to the news about Mafalda had nothing to do with luck. It was destiny, it was the inexorable revelation of character.
“She deserved it,” he said, knowing full well that the partygoers listening to him would be appalled by his words.
“Cezar didn’t mean it the way it came out,” Clarissa put in.
“Yes I did.”
He glowered, she hung her head. And he went on a tear, raving about sanctimonious do-gooders and environmentalists in general, the threat they posed to the business in which he had invested heart, soul, and engineering skills. If the greenies had their way, the wheels of industry would grind to a standstill. Going into attack mode, he impugned the activists’ motives and their mothers. Vituperative, that’s the only description that suits. The vitriol dripped from his thin contemptuous lips. People wanted to turn away from the spectacle. But didn’t. Because people don’t.
It came to an end only when Clarissa shouted for him to stop. He did. Instantly. She was shaking her head in shame and disbelief. Had this really happened at her Christmas party? Was this the man she was soon to marry? He seemed to realize that this time he had gone too far. Somebody changed the subject, and in a few minutes the chat group broke up. Everyone was relieved to get away.
After that, the party righted itself, because the guests and their host wanted it to be what it was intended to be, a celebration of community in the season of fellowship. The holiday mood triumphed. Clarissa made her traditional self-deprecating speech about how much the assembled guests meant to her, how grateful she felt to live here, how lucky. It was as though the murder of Mafalda dos Santos had never come up.
As though, I say. Because of course it had. And it was the beginning of the end for Gleebyk. My only regret was that I had nothing to do with his downfall. Clarissa began fighting back. Tentatively, at first, and then with increasing consistency. She criticized things he said, the clothes he wore. His big boots. She criticized his mustache, and his vocabulary. She talked about trees in a rueful tone of voice. They quarreled. She did not give way. She began dressing to suit herself, not him. And Gleebyk knew, he had to know, that he had well and truly blown it with his rant at the holiday party.
I kept looking at the calendar. He moved out on January 15th. When I came home from work that evening I found Clarissa in the study, not her usual hangout. A stack of books was piled on the desk. She was looking for something to read. At her invitation I took a seat on what had been Rafer’s leather sofa.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she warned me.
“Of course not.”
“How could I have been such a fool, Barkie?”
There is no good answer to that question, you will rush to point out, but I was way ahead of you. I kept my mouth shut.
“I keep thinking about that poor woman in Brazil,” she told me. “I almost watched the video. I’m glad I didn’t.”
“I’m glad you didn’t, too. The police keep promising to bring the murderers to justice, but as far as I can tell nobody believes them.”
“They’ll get away with it.”
“So they say.”
“Impunity.”
It was a heavy word and dropped like a stone between us. The way of the world.
We sat there for a couple of minutes. She asked me if I could suggest a book. I wished I had read something worth recommending.
She looked at me. Quizzically, I want to say, but that’s not quite right. Wistful? That’s not right, either. That’s okay. I’ll have plenty of time to sort out my adjectives. I fantasized, briefly, that Clarissa would come to me on the rebound, or as a reward for my fidelity, my steadfastness, my refusal to complain. But, as I’ve been at pains to point out, this is not about me.
~ ~ ~
July 2026
