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“She gave up early on everything she desired most. Before she found out she wasn’t up to it.” Sara had been the outstanding university actress of her generation but had left it there, forever leaving behind the greasepaint and the crowd without a word of regret. Later she would also abandon her thesis and get a job in advertising, emerging from the chrysalis of her bluestocking wardrobe and spreading gorgeous butterfly wings.
    This was soon after their marriage ended. When Solanka found out about it he was briefly furious. All that effortful reading for nothing! And not only reading. “Thanks to her,” he raged at Eleanor, “I saw L’Annee derniere a Marienbad three times in one day. We spent a whole weekend working out that damn matchstick game they play. ‘You wont win, you know’. – ‘It’s not a game if you can’t lose.’ – ‘Oh, I can lose, but I never do.’ That game. Thanks to her it’s still stuck in my head, but she’s buggered off to the universe of if you’ve got it flaunt it. I’m stuck here in the blasted couloirs of French fiction and she’s in a Jil Sander power suit in a forty-ninth-floor corner office on Sixth Avenue, pulling down, I have no doubt, some major bucks.”
    “Yes, but for the record, you dumped her,” Eleanor pointed out. “You found the next one and traded Sara in: left her cold and flat. You should never have married her, obviously, which is your only excuse. That’s the great unanswerable question about love posed by your Queen Lear: what on earth were you thinking of? Also, you got yours when the next one, the Wagnerian Valkyrie with the Harley, threw you over for which composer was it?” She knew the answer perfectly well, but it was a story they both enjoyed. “Fucking Rummenigge.” Solanka grinned, calming down. “She worked as an assistant on one of his three-orchestras-and-a-Sherman-tank efforts and afterward he sent her a telegram. Kindly refrain from all sexual intercourse until we can examine the deep bond that evidently lies between us. And the next day a one-way ticket to Munich, and she disappeared into the Black Forest for years. She wasn’t happy, though,” he added. “Didn’t know when she was well-off, you see.” When Solanka left Eleanor, she added a bitter postscript to these reflections. Actually, I’d like to hear their sides of these stories,” she said during one difficult telephone call. “Maybe you were just a coldhearted bastard from the start.”
    Malik Solanka, strolling alone toward a late-night Meslowski double bill at the Lincoln Plaza, tried to imagine his own life as a Dekalog movie. A Short Film About Desertion. Which Commandments could his story be said to illustrate or, as the Kieslowski scholar who introduced last week’s episodes preferred, interrogate? There were many Commandments against the sins of improper commission. Covetousness, adultery, lust, these things were anathematized. But where were the laws against sins of improper omission? Thou Shalt Not Be an Absentee Father. Cometh to Thinkst of It, Thou Shalt Not Walk Out of Thy Life Without a Fucking Good Reason, Buster, and What You’ve Put Up So Far Doesn’t Even Come Close. What Dost Thou Think? Thou Canst Do Any Goddamn Thing Thou Wantest? Who the Fuck Dost Thou Imagine Thou Ist: Hugh Hefner? The Dalai Lama? Donald Trump? At What the Sam Hill Art Thou Playing? Huh, Bub? Huh???
    Sara Lear was probably right here in town, he suddenly thought. She would be in her late fifties now, a big shot with a booming portfolio, the secret booking numbers for Pastis and Nobu, and a weekend place south of the highway in, ah, Amagansett. Thank heavens there was no need to track her down, look her up, congratulate her on her life choices. How she would have crowed! For they had lived long enough to witness the absolute victory of advertising. Back in the seventies, when Sara gave up the serious life for the frivolous, working in ad-land had been slightly shameful. You