Identity Thief Read online

  Finally, I filled out the online application for twenty thousand dollars. I watched a computer-generated dot spin around for a nervous minute or two before getting the ecstatic message that this other bank approved the twenty-thousand-dollar credit line. I—or rather, Jesse Falcon—could use it as a checking account, direct deposit, or debit card. I checked the box for direct deposit, since I couldn’t wait for anything to get mailed to me.

  Maybe I was rationalizing, but Jesse Falcon’s online photo minimized any guilt I was feeling. He had one thick eyebrow arched higher, and the corners of his lips turned down in an ironic grin, as if he thought he were James Bond or something. He’d also written a conceited blurb in which he described himself as an “intellectual” and a “passionate lover of fine wine and living life to the fullest.” There was even a pompous quote from Virgil in the original Latin: Audentis fortuna iuvat. Upon searching for an online translation, I learned it meant Fortune favors the brave. I imagined him as one of those professors who always singled out a student to bully, to show how superior he was.

  Offhand, I couldn’t find out why Jesse Falcon quit his job and moved so far away. My guess was that he knocked up one of his students. But then, I didn’t need to know that right now. Though I was new to breaking the law, I intuitively embraced the criminal golden rule to keep things simple. Don’t tempt fate unless you have to.

  I told my mom I was getting a settlement with 21st Century Solutions. I don’t think she believed me for a minute, unless her saying, “When it comes to bullshit, you take after your father,” was a vote of confidence. But she had a firm belief in people making their own beds and sleeping in them. Mom took it for granted that all people were louses and considered this sad fact of life to be none of her business. She cut me more slack than she did other people, though sometimes I thought if I ever really got in trouble—like if I murdered someone—she’d say something like, “You did the crime, so do the time.”

  But my mind was not focused on Mom or for that matter, murder. Instead, I went straight to a divorce attorney. I needed to do what seemed perfectly normal under the circumstances. Plus I might need a lawyer in a big way down the road. And so it all began.

  Whatever else happened, I faced it like a man. I have to keep telling myself that. And I did learn one important lesson. The biggest mistake you can make is thinking you know who you are.

  "LOOK AT ME,” she kept saying, like a little girl wanting her daddy to watch her jump rope. “Look at me.” Only she wasn’t a little girl, and nobody was jumping rope. I was screwing the daylights out of her, thrusting so hard I worried that the rubber would slip off or break. “Jesse . . . why . . . can’t . . . you . . . look . . . at . . . me?” she blurted

  out between thrusts. “Are . . . you . . . thinking . . . of . . . your . . . wife?”

  Truth be told, it wasn’t like I never looked at the woman inches below me, I merely wasn’t relentlessly staring at her with every cell of my being. How could I explain that no, I wasn’t thinking of my wife. Sad but true, my wife Esther would be the last person I’d be thinking of at a time like this. I just didn’t want this woman I was with to get the wrong idea. Supposedly she understood that our relationship was purely recreational. For the record, she even had a husband. But sure enough, she was starting to want what is obnoxiously referred to as “more,” or putting the relationship on “another level,” which always conjured an absurd image in my mind of all the couples in the world occupying different steps on a long, long stairway with hell at either end. Lesbianism notwithstanding, sometimes I wondered if women would be capable of orgasm if things like bridal magazines and china patterns ceased to exist. Or maybe I cheated with all the wrong women.

  It was ludicrous to feel like I had to change the subject in the middle of having sex, but I did. Tactfully, I put my index finger to her lips. “Shhh,” I said. But instead of turning things down a notch, she coyly put my index finger in her mouth, indicating with an arch expression that she understood the signal for “blowjob.” This may have been seductive in different circumstances, but since we were already naked and fucking, it didn’t make sense. It was like handing someone a gift, and then after they opened it, saying to them, “I have a gift for you.” Subtle she wasn’t. A control freak she was.

  “Are you pretending my finger is your husband’s?” I asked, giving her a taste of her own medicine. “And I don’t mean just his finger.”

  It was fortuitous that precisely at that moment, we both came.

  Afterward, she sat up, reaching for her panty hose. “You don’t like me at all, do you?” she asked, her supple leg extended in midair as she yanked up her stocking.

  “You don’t like me. You only think you’re supposed to.” I zipped up my wool suit pants over my boxers. “You’re projecting your disdain onto me.”

  She gave her hair a quick comb out with her fingers, fastening her blouse at the same time. “I don’t get what you mean.”

  “Yeah, you do. You think what you’re doing with me is bad. That makes you a bad woman. You convince yourself you quote-unquote like me, which transforms you into a good woman. A victim of love and all that bullshit.”

  She slapped me hard across the face.

  Just as suddenly, as if she had multiple personalities, she put her hands to her mouth, horrified by what occurred. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I overreacted.”

  I rubbed my jaw where she slapped me. “You always overreact. You wouldn’t know what to do if you didn’t overreact. On your tombstone, they should write, ‘She’s overreacting.’ But I’m used to it.”

  “Oh, you . . . ” She tisk-tisked, as if resigned to her fate. “Honestly, the things I put up with.” For an instant, it was like we were a married couple ourselves.

  I put my thumb under her chin and gave her a quick kiss. “You need to go.”

  “I know, I know.” She distractedly reached for her coat and purse.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Dr. Falcon,” said my receptionist. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but your next patient has been waiting now for ten minutes.”

  “Bring her in.”

  “It’s a he, remember?”

  “Oh, right. Bring him in.” I turned to my female patient who had occupied the past hour of my time. “Same time next week, Mrs. Goldstein?”

  “Yes, Dr. Falcon. Thank you. I’m really making progress.” She winked at me. It was such an obvious, arch wink that she might as well have put up a billboard announcing to the world that we were fucking. Fortunately, my receptionist was one of those modest, not very bright people who had the decency to realize she wasn’t very bright, so she never paid attention to anything that wasn’t part of her job description.

  My next patient was the biggest schmuck I had ever met in my life. It was always the same song and dance about how nobody liked him because he was superior to other people. “My good looks intimidate people,” he would say. “And my intellect.” I’m not the best judge of male looks, but he seemed to me to be pretty much an average looking young man, and as for “intellect,” he read science fiction. Big deal.

  Yet even had he been the most riveting conversationalist I had ever encountered, my mind would have been elsewhere. Mrs. Goldstein was becoming a major pain in the ass. My wife, Esther, said she would leave me if I cheated on her again—and what is more, that she would take me for every penny I was worth. Esther herself made good money as an interior designer. In the year since our hasty move cross-country, she’d already landed several upscale clients. But, she said, it was the principle of the thing. The principal of the capital interest was more like it.

  What Esther didn’t realize, of course, was that when you make an adult feel like some teenager on probation, it isn’t long before he starts doing exactly what he isn’t supposed to do. She thought she was being so patient and understanding to give me another chance after I got in hot water for having an utterly consensual affair with one of my graduate students back at the universit
y. The school wanted the whole thing kept quiet, naturally. No college wants to advertise: “Come to Acme U., where the professors have sex with students.” When they fired me, the cover story was that I wanted to “pursue other opportunities.” I thought about suing them since I had tenure, but the father of the grad student was a real blabbermouth, and it would have ruined my reputation forever if I made even the slightest wrong move.

  Esther and I decided to make a fresh start cross-country. I’d set up a private practice as a psychologist, while Esther would build a design clientele. Fortunately, money was not an issue. We sold our home and income properties for a decent profit, and I also had a solid monthly allowance from my trust fund. It wasn’t enough to buy Esther the Hope Diamond, but if business was slow, we could still get by. And, as it happened, business had not been slow at all for either of us. I’d invested my inheritance from my father wisely and conservatively. There was a handy retirement to look forward to. Our one child, Sabrina, recently finished her MFA and was teaching sculpture at a rarified liberal arts college. Finally, she was off the family payroll. Esther may have seen herself as Mrs. Martyrdom, but even when we first dated, I was never faithful to her. She knew what she was getting into. I happened to love sex. Excuse me for breathing. As a psychologist, I knew as well as anybody that supposedly this was indicative of deeper issues, and some people even would’ve called me a sex addict. But I didn’t buy into all that addiction talk. Everything was called an addiction. For openers, if there were three hundred million people in the United States, then logically it would follow that there were three hundred million television addicts.

  Really, the only problem was Esther. If she wanted to fool around with other men, I wouldn’t have minded at all. Occasionally, I wished for a different wife who was into couples swapping and that kind of thing, but that wasn’t for me, either. I liked casual sex, and I liked having mistresses. I didn’t want Esther involved in what I did with other women. In some cultures, that’s considered perfectly normal.

  However, mine was not one of those cultures. After years of suffering in what she erroneously called “silence,” Esther made her ultimatum. We would start over in a different place, and I would keep my pants zipped up at all times. Literally, at all times. Esther, you see, didn’t exactly suffer from nymphomania. She could’ve worn a T-shirt that read: “I have a headache.” We hadn’t shared the same bed for years. She claimed it was because she couldn’t be vulnerable with me, knowing what I was really like. Vulnerable, schmulnerable, if you ask me. Sex is ecstatic. It’s fun. What did being vulnerable have to do with it? To me, vulnerable was when you got robbed at gunpoint or had a fatal illness.

  I was a good boy for about two weeks. Soon, I started having lunch-hour quickies in hotels with girls who hung around hotels. I fooled around for a month or so with a divorced woman who lived in our neighborhood. One of my patients made a play for me, which I resisted for about five minutes before succumbing to my natural urges. Naturally, I did not neglect to say it was a normal phase of the process to be attracted to your therapist. She sensibly decided to terminate treatment, though in a mischievous moment I referred her to a lesbian therapist. (I later saw them holding hands at an outdoor table of a wine bar.) There also was another patient who ended her first session early because she said she felt attracted to me, which was flattering. And another who, after we got it on, threatened to blackmail me, which was not flattering at all. In the end, she said the whole thing was boring her, and she wanted to go live with some guy in Barcelona. She settled for a few thousand, and Esther was none the wiser.

  Enter Mrs. Goldstein—or should I say Linda? We had similar marriages, and we also had similar sex drives. I did manage to interject some actual therapy, and anyway, her insurance paid for her visits, so what was the problem? Linda, of course. She started saying how it was hard to have sex with someone without developing deeper feelings, etc. And somehow I was supposed to do something about this. Like what? Divorce Esther and let her take me to the cleaners? And who said I wanted to marry Linda Goldstein? Certainly not I. In her delusional state, Linda believed that the only thing standing in our way were our marriages. That kind of monolithic thinking is never a good sign. The tepid affair was like a snowball rolling down a hill, getting bigger and bigger until no one could control it. Life as I knew it would be over.

  “So, Dr. Falcon,” said my boring male patient. “What do you think?”

  “About what?” I had no idea what he’d been talking about.

  He laughed. “You headshrinkers are all the same. Always bringing it back to the patient. Oh, I’m wise to you, all right.”

  I feigned a cough, for want of anything else to do. “As you were saying?”

  “I think I was right to say that if she didn’t go out with me, it was her loss.”

  “Yes, good for you.”

  As we shook hands good-bye, he reached to give me a hug. I stopped him by patting his shoulder.

  My next patient was like an X-ray of the patient before. All his morbid doubts and fears were right there on the surface, all gooey and quasi-suicidal. Everything was always so serious. “I honestly do believe in God,” he said, in something less than a convincing tone. Unless believing in God made people into zombies.

  “Just the other day, some old lady at the pharmacy was screaming about how she was ninety years old, and she shouldn’t have to pay for her twenty different prescriptions and how she couldn’t open the bottles herself and how nobody cared. And I thought, ‘There has to be something more to life than this. There has to be a God.’” After an interminable pause, he added. “What do you think, Doctor Falcon?”

  To be honest, I had no idea if there was more to life than either dying too young or dying too old. But when you’re a shrink, you’re supposed to act like you’re president of the Life Fan Club.

  “What matters is what you think,” I offered pleasantly.

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  The way he said this, you’d have thought he was saying, “But the sun will be going out for good in a matter of minutes.” Maybe what made me a good shrink was this element of detachment. I honestly didn’t know why people believed that what they thought was so damn important.

  “Well, you’ve posed the question to yourself. That means you’ll find an answer.”

  “I want my life to mean something, to make a difference.”

  “It will. Be patient.” I smiled warmly. “I’m afraid we’re out of time.”

  Driving home, the traffic was impossible as always. It was well after six by the time I walked in the front door. Our house was spacious and got a lot of sun, and Esther had decorated it with her fanatical good taste. Everything was white or else a very pale color, as if every room was coated in talcum powder. But you couldn’t touch this and you couldn’t break that, so I never experienced relaxation when I came home.

  Esther, who worked a good deal of the time at home, was there to greet me, if you could call it a greeting. “Hello, dear.” She smiled as if her teeth were ice cubes and condescendingly offered me her cheek to kiss.

  I kissed it. “Hey, babe,” I said.

  “I already ordered dinner,” she said. “Take-out Thai.”

  “You and your coconut sauce.”

  “Sweet and savory go well together.”

  Esther was one of those people who thought every decision she made had to signal her superb taste and urbane demeanor. If she went to heaven when she died, she’d rearrange the clouds. There were times I wished I could analyze her to see if there was a human being beneath the millions of pronouncements she lived by. But there was no way into her. Even if she sat there humming while reading Architectural Digest, she seemed to be someplace else.

  “Fine. Thai, whatever.” I hung up my coat and rummaged through the mail. There was a letter from the grad student I’d left behind, which I was sure Esther already noticed. Not in the mood for rehashing all that, I tore the unopened letter to pieces, which I tossed in th
e wastebasket like confetti. “Sorry to disappoint you, Esther,” I said.

  She shrugged quizzically. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Okay, fine. I was too drained for an argument. Besides, I noticed that a letter from some unfamiliar lender company had arrived by certified mail.

  “What’s this?” I asked Esther.

  “Oh, I signed for it. I have no idea.”

  Thinking that the certified element was a publicity gimmick—to make sure you would read the contents—I tore open the envelope and read the somber letter within:

  Dear Dr. Falcon:

  Your current balance of $20,000 plus $1,500 in late penalty fees is now past ninety days overdue. This means that payment is due in full.

  You have made no effort to contact us, and we had to locate your new address ourselves. To avoid further action, please pay the amount due in full today. There is a $10 service charge for all payments made online or over the telephone.

  “Esther, did you do this?” My day-to-day business matters were handled by my accountant, who happened to be my kid brother. I knew I could trust him. Every business quarter, he sent me a breakdown of my finances down to the penny.

  Esther reached for her designer reading glasses and studied the letter. “Of course not. You know I don’t spend that kind of money without talking to you first.” That much was true. Maybe because it was her job to buy other people pretty things, Esther shopped for our own home only as needed. Once a room was done, it was done. And she wasn’t extravagant when it came to things like travel, clothes, food, or jewelry, either. She didn’t live like a pauper, but she was the same sensible girl I married straight out of prep school twenty-five years earlier. Having grown up around money—and a family who conservatively hoarded every penny—she found extravagance to be vulgar.