Love In The Air
Love In The Air
James C. Collins
A hugely romantic debut novel about love and destiny. Previously published as Beginner’s Greek and now available as an ebook.‘Love in the Air’ is set in New York City and tells the story of a young man named Peter Russell and a young woman named Holly Edwards. Peter works for a prestigious financial firm on Wall Street, and Holly teaches Latin at a private girls' school – when they sit next to each other on a plane journey, an intoxicating tale of romance, coincidence and thwarted plans starts to unfold. Other characters include: Jonathan Speedwell, an extremely handsome writer who is also Holly's husband, Peter's best friend and, crucially, a cad; Charlotte Montague, Peter's rather tiresome and pretentious wife; Arthur Beeche, the dignified, formal and very, very rich proprietor of the firm where Peter works; Julia Montague, Charlotte's beautiful, young step-mother and Dick Montague, a successful, vain lawyer who is Charlotte's father.Take all these characters and throw in miscommunications, letters going astray, adulterous relationships, fiendish behaviour and ultimately an ending in which everyone gets their due… The result is a debut novel that is charming, fresh, clever and beautifully written; a deeply romantic story about the transformative power of love.
Copyright (#ulink_3adae349-c8cc-56e3-a559-41e1bc52128c)
Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
This Harper Perennial edition published 2008
First published in Great Britain as Beginner’s Greek by Fourth Estate in 2008
Copyright © James Collins 2008
James Collins asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
‘Beginner’s Greek’, from Collected Poems by James Merrill and J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser, editors, copyright © 2001 by the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University. Used by kind permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Quotations from The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann are taken from the Everyman’s Library edition, with a translation by John E. Woods.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007255825
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2014 ISBN: 9780007580699
Version: 2019-06-18
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Dedication (#ulink_74ed227d-21a3-5e84-a04d-34d10e6cb5ad)
To
VIRGINIA DANCE DONELSON
Contents
Cover (#u486d5798-d957-5915-a4a8-96f85e73a53f)
Title Page (#uf1a6839f-ec68-59ea-ae88-f0c94542b934)
Copyright (#ulink_505c5641-ebc6-5438-b57f-e16b30f1c426)
Note to Readers (#uc1d7d4b9-328d-5b05-bc34-50f729882154)
Dedication (#ulink_660273f3-2b6d-519e-93e1-bf28fbe96ade)
Prologue (#ulink_bbdd2788-2590-5355-b659-8deea27da225)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_fc231b7b-cad9-5d6a-9d76-4a2dd154120d)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_8ae7415c-ab00-5fc8-866e-2fb50ed215ee)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_9e206325-3f53-5466-850b-4adc4e286707)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_d4f539bd-213e-5a4d-a54a-bd80f9d81e3e)
When Peter Russell boarded an airplane, he always wondered whether he would sit next to a beautiful young woman during the flight, and, if so, whether he and she would fall in love. This time was no different, except for his conviction that—this time—it really would happen. Of course, he always believed more than ever that this time it really would happen. But he knew. He knew. He was working his way down the aisle of a plane bound for Los Angeles from New York, and he figured, realistically, that the occurrence he envisioned would more likely take place on a long trip. He was pleased to discover that on his side of the plane the rows had only two seats, an arrangement that would promote intimacy and arriving at his assigned place he found that his row mate had not yet appeared, which would allow his mind to savor the possibilities for at least a few more minutes. He stowed his suit jacket, briefcase, and laptop, and settled into his seat by the window. He opened his paper and then looked to his right, regarding the pregnant emptiness beside him. The clasp and buckle of the seat belt lay there impassively, indifferent to whom they would soon embrace. He looked at the scratchy gray and red upholstery, with its abstract design that vaguely recalled clouds at sunset. Peter remembered being at dinner in college one time and listening to an incredibly pretentious jerk, his best friend, impress everyone with some stuff from the highly selective English seminar he was taking—something about how absence implies presence. (“So I guess I shouldn’t worry about cutting class so much.” General laughter. Jerk.) Well, Peter had to admit, the most prominent thing about the throne of absence beside him was the presence that it lacked.
A man wearing a beige shirt and jacket stopped at Peter’s row. He was short and Eastern European—looking and had a small mustache. He looked at the stub of his boarding pass and at the row number and back again and moved on. Peter was relieved. But who knew? Anyone who sat with him might transform his life in ways he would never expect. The man coming down the aisle, the one with the bulldog face and gold tie clasp, might be the owner of a smelting concern in Buffalo, and he might take a shine to Peter and ask him to become a vice president, and Peter might say yes, and move to Buffalo, where he would find the people more complicated than he expected and where, in an appealing way, the grime would climb like ivy up the walls of the old brick buildings. He would marry someone nice who had worked in New York for a couple of years but preferred Buffalo and being near her companionable, well-off parents, and he and she would live in a spacious Victorian house, with several old trees whose leaves in summer were as big as dinner plates. Or what about the ancient, bent-over gentleman in the three-piece suit? Couldn’t he be a great-uncle who had disappeared in Burma decades ago and about whom Peter had never heard but whose identity would be revealed when Peter noticed that his ring bore the same distinctive device as one owned by Peter’s grandfather? He would leave Peter his fortune.
The tie-clasp man walked past Peter; the ancient one sat before reaching him. Most passengers seemed to have boarded by now. Yet Peter felt a tingle. Something, he knew, was about to happen. Yes—definitely—a young woman was going sit down next to him, and not just a young woman, the young woman: a really pretty, really kind young woman, and they would get to talking, and they would become enclosed, in their pair of seats, in a kind of pod within a pod, suspended far above the earth, and by the time they landed it all would be settled and clear. More happy, happy love! Naturally, he had given this individual a lot of thought. He would add and subtract her attributes. She would be pretty and kind. Then pretty and kind and smart. Then pretty and kind and smart and funny, and, in a general way, perfect. Was that too much to hope? He very well knew that it was. He knew that real people with whom one really shared a real life in the real world had flaws. Aren’t the slubs and natural variations what give a fabric its special character? Yes, but he didn’t want to fall in love with a fabric. He wanted to fall in love with a young woman, a young woman who was pretty and kind and smart and funny and—well, pretty and kind would do, if only she would also fall in love with him.
Peter stared out the window: a truck was pumping fuel into the plane’s belly through a thick, umbilical hose. Peter was a happy fellow, basically. He was in his early twenties and he was good-looking, with an open face and light brown eyes and fine brown hair that flopped over his forehead; he stood a shade under six feet and had a strong, medium-sized frame. He liked his job, basically, and he was doing well; he had friends; he was a decent athlete; he had had a relatively happy childhood. But this love business—so far, it had not been very satisfying. He had been involved with girls he liked; he had been involved with girls he didn’t like. In neither case had he ever really felt … whatever it was that he imagined he was supposed to feel. He was shy, so that even though he showed determination at work, and playing hockey he positively enjoyed giving an opponent a hard check, he shrank before a girl who attracted him, and this made the search for someone who would make him feel whatever it was he was supposed to feel particularly difficult. Moreover, he wasn’t cold-blooded, so he couldn’t pursue and abandon girls with the same relish as some of his friends, his best friend in particular; rather, he had a sympathetic streak that, in the matter of making conquests, seemed much more like a weakness than a strength.
Peter watched a crewman begin to uncouple the fuel hose. Then he felt a Presence. It was a female, he sensed. Could this be the very one, could this be She? He turned his head and did see a woman. A woman who was perhaps seventy years old wearing a black wig. In place of eyebrows she had two arched pencil lines, and she had applied a large clown’s oval of red lipstick to her mouth. Peter’s eyes met hers. Her false eyelashes reminded him of tarantula legs. My darling!
“What row is this?” the woman asked him. Peter told her. She looked at her boarding pass and threw her hands up. “Ach,” she said, “my row doesn’t exist. There is no such row. It’s a row they tell you about for a joke. They skipped it. I have the plane where they skip rows. If my son would visit me, I would avoid this aggravation. But no. The wife—the wife gets dehydrated on the plane. Dehydrated, you know—water?” She looked hard at Peter. “Are you married?” she asked. He shook his head. “Marry a nice girl.” She paused a moment to make sure this advice sank in and then turned around and headed back toward the front of the plane.
Peter could see no other passengers in the aisle. A flight attendant strode by closing luggage bins. Peter listened to the engines. Any minute now the plane would begin to pull away from the gate and the monitors drooping from the ceiling would begin to play the safety video. Peter looked at the empty seat beside him. His earlier agitation and euphoria had dissipated, replaced by a hangover of irrational disappointment. He looked at the seat belt, two lifeless arms embracing no one. Of course, all that could be inferred from absence was absence. He now knew who would sit beside him: nobody.
Peter sighed and shrugged his shoulders. Then, like a depressive pulling the covers over his head, he spread open his paper so that it surrounded him and began to read a story with the headline “Council Rebuffs Mayor on Wake-Zones Measure.” It was quite interesting, actually. There was an effort to slow watercraft to prevent damage to shoreline structures. Like Venice. Peter had been reading for a couple of minutes when he heard some rushed footsteps coming toward him, the light, tripping footsteps, he noted, of a young person, most likely a female young person. Then, when they had seemed to reach his row, the footsteps stopped. Peter became aware of a form hovering nearby. But because of his newspaper, he couldn’t see who it was. He nonchalantly folded the paper back, glanced to his right, and saw that a young woman was hoisting a bag overhead. As she lifted her arms, she revealed a tanned, well-modeled stripe of abdomen. Peter’s heart fluttered. He concentrated on his paper. “In New South, Courthouse Towns See Change, Continuity.”
The young woman sat down. As well as he could, while pretending to idly look around the cabin, Peter studied her. She appeared to be Peter’s age, and she had long reddish blond hair that fell over her shoulders. She wore a thin, white cardigan and blue jeans. What Peter first noticed in her profile was the soft bow of her jaw and how the line turned back at her rounded chin. It reminded Peter of an ideal curve that might be displayed in an old painting manual. His eye traveled back along the jaw, returning to the girl’s ear. It was a small ear, beige in color, that appeared almost edible, like a biscuit. Her straight nose had a finely tooled knob at the end, and her forehead rose like the side of an overturned bowl; her complexion was as smooth and warm-toned as honey. As to her form, she was lanky, with long legs and arms and thin wrists. Her long neck held her head aloft.
Now the young woman turned in Peter’s direction, looking for the clasp on her seat belt. The trapezoid created by her shoulders and her narrow waist, the roundness of her bosom, the working of her fingers, so long they seemed like individual limbs, all moved him deeply. Then she raised her head, looked at him, and smiled. The effect was like seeing the sun over the ocean at midmorning, a tremendous blast of light. It was as if the young woman had raised some mythic golden shield whose brilliance would prostrate the armies of the Hittites. She had an oval face, and her large eyes were set wide apart; they were green, as green as a green flame! Peter instructed the muscles at the corners of his mouth to retract in a friendly way, with a hint of flirtatiousness. He imagined the result was like the grimace of someone breathing mustard gas. The girl nodded and looked away, buckling her seat belt and settling herself in.
Before she sat down, Peter noticed, she had thrown a thick paperback onto her seat. He hadn’t been able to see the title. Now she opened it and began to read. In her left hand she held back a thick wedge of pages, about two thirds of the book. After a moment, Peter saw out of the corner of his eye that she had let go with her left hand and the book had fallen closed. She sat staring before her, lost in thought. Peter saw the book’s cover and was taken aback: The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann.
To sit next to a beautiful young woman on a flight from New York to Los Angeles is one thing. To sit next to a beautiful young woman on a flight from New York to Los Angeles who is on page five hundred of The Magic Mountain is quite another. If you look over to see what the beautiful young woman next to you is reading, and it turns out to be a book about angels, then you can with perfect justification refuse her entry into your life. What could you possibly have to say to each other? The same logic applies even if the book is more respectable, but basically dumb—a harrowing but ultimately life-affirming memoir. And if the book is utterly respectable but still basically dumb, say the new book by a fashionable, overrated English novelist, then the young woman is especially dismissible, since the worst alternative possible is talking to someone who thinks she is clever but isn’t. At the same time, if she were reading something that showed that she really was extremely smart—a computer-science journal—then there would be no point in talking to her either: she would be far too intimidating. In sum, an argument could be derived from virtually any reading matter that would allow a young man—scared out of his wits—to persuade himself that it was perfectly sensible, rather than the height of cowardice, to ignore the beautiful young woman who would be sitting next to him for the following five hours. Any reading matter, that is, except The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. A beautiful young woman reading The Magic Mountain—how could he weasel out of this challenge? It was a serious book, but not one suited to a preening intellectual, who would prefer one that was more difficult and less stodgy. A young woman reading The Magic Mountain had to be intelligent and patient and interested in a range of different ideas, many of them quite old-fashioned. She would also happen to be reading the only long German novel that Peter Russell himself had ever read.
Needless to say, for all his daydream eagerness, now that he was actually presented with the possibility of falling in love with a beautiful young woman sitting next to him on an airplane, Peter was terrified. Terrified that he might actually get what he’d dreamt of getting and terrified that now, having the opportunity to get it, he would screw up. If he did not find some way to speak to this young woman, and charm her, he would kill himself. If he spoke to her and she, without even looking at him, gathered her belongings and moved to another seat, he would also kill himself. The plane had taken off by this time and drifted slowly, as it seemed, above a thick wadding of cloud. The sound of the engines was loud but had become familiar and functioned as thought-extinguishing white noise. Peter was hanging in the air and for five hours essentially nothing would change. The unvariegated membrane of time that stretched before him would be dimpled only when the flight attendant handed him a beverage and a packet of pretzels. Yet, and nevertheless, notwithstanding all this inertia, tremendous forces of potential energy were gathered in this setting. For without even speaking to her, Peter was convinced, he knew for a certainty, he had not the slightest doubt, that he could spend the rest of his life with the young woman who had happened to sit next to him, and it would be blissful.
He could tell this not simply on account of her appearance, or the book she read, but because of the way she held the book in her hands, the way she tilted her head, the way she lightly set her lips together. All this provided more than enough evidence of her kindness, devotion, wisdom, grace, wit, and capacity for love. Never in his experience had he learned more about a woman’s character after thorough, and often quite unpleasant, explorations of it than he had already known within thirty seconds of meeting her. (With men, he had discovered, you needed five seconds.) And now he heard the voice of emotional maturity explain to him, patronizingly, that his assumptions about this young woman were based on a “fantasy.” Real life, real marriage, involves a commitment to a real person with all her flaws and individual needs. A real life together was doing the dishes when you were tired and paying the mortgage. He stole another glance at the young woman. He imagined her thumb and forefinger grasping a ballpoint pen and writing out a mortgage check, her hand working like some antique mechanism that was a marvel to the world. Bring on the dishes.
So, as we have seen, however inert the setting might seem to be, tremendous forces were gathered in the cabin of this aircraft. Forces. Tremendous ones. Peter knew that with the smallest effort he could potentiate the situation, with epochal consequences for his life and happiness. It was as if the entire cabin were filled with the tasteless, odorless fumes of powerful romantic-sexual gas, and only a spark was needed to create an explosion; the plane would suffer no damage, the other passengers wouldn’t even notice, but the result would change his life.
What would that spark be? Peter was not one of those people who easily strike up conversations with strangers. If there were a subset of that group from which he was even more decisively excluded, it would be that which consists of men who easily strike up conversations with strangers who are pretty girls. His best friend was able to meet the eyes of a girl in line at the movies and smile and casually say something like “So, do you think this really is as good as his last one?” Then they’d be off and running. Peter, meanwhile, expected to address the girl’s friend, would stand by, mute.
The young woman sighed, shifted in her seat, stretched a little, and looked up. Here was his moment. He could look over and ask, What takes you to Los Angeles? He could say that. What takes you to Los Angeles? The words circled around and around in his head, like the tigers who turned to butter. What takes you to Los Angeles? What takes you to Los Angeles? What takes you to Los Angeles? He became almost dizzy with their silent repetition. Then something strange happened. This was very odd. Peter was not prone to auditory hallucinations, but he thought that he actually heard the words “What takes you to Los Angeles?” being spoken aloud. Suddenly understanding, he jumped in his seat.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he heard a warm mezzo voice say. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I was just wondering: What takes you to Los Angeles?” The young woman had spoken to him, and Peter looked at her and her mild, friendly expression. He noticed, as he had not before, how her philtrum rhymed with the shallow cleft in her chin. It was time for him to say something. He was looking at her; she was looking at him with that mild expression of conversational invitation. His brain clicked and whirred and blinked.
Finally, he managed to say, “Work.” (More accurately transcribed as “Grk.”)
Now Peter braced himself for the inevitable: What sort of work do you do? New Wave, West Coast jazz pianist. Vintner. Assassin. No, he would have to say that he worked for a Wall Street firm and right now was in the corporate finance department—and therefore was the most boring human being you could possibly meet on a plane flying to Los Angeles. Corporate finance. My God. Well, you see, right now we’re issuing some convertible debt for a midsized bank … In fact, there were aspects of it that were interesting to him, but no regular human being, and certainly no beautiful young woman, would ever want to have a conversation about such a subject or believe that a person so employed was worth talking to about anything. He would tell her what he did, and the remaining four hours and fifty minutes of the flight would pass in silence.
But the young woman didn’t ask about his job. Instead, she asked, “Do you like Los Angeles?”
“Do you like Los Angeles?” Another impossible question! He knew that the accepted thing was to hold “L.A.” in contempt. Still, you couldn’t act too proud of yourself for bashing the place, since that was so conventional. If you made a smug wisecrack about it—“Breast implants? Those people need brain implants!”—you risked sounding like a very tiresome person eager to beat a horse that had already been turned to dust. Yet you couldn’t actually say you liked L.A., could you? What pressure. Pro, con? Funny, serious? Knowing, naïve? Good, bad? Yes, no? Zero, one? Up, down? Back, forth? He toggled between responses and finally produced a sort of ingenious synthesis: “L.A. is all right.”
He watched the aperture of the young woman’s lovely face close ever so slightly and felt a pang in his heart. Two nearly monosyllabic responses did not exactly encourage further conversation. He was losing her. So he said, “I guess I really don’t know it very well. I guess you do a lot of driving.” This was brilliant stuff! He continued: “I know there’s a whole world of young movie stars living in old movie stars’ houses and spending millions on thirties French furniture, but that’s not what I ever see. From what I see, Los Angeles is like any other city where they have lots of highways and air-conditioning. The tables in the conference rooms where I spend my time have the same executive walnut veneer. Otherwise, I’m in my rented car or at the hotel. I guess there are palm trees. I guess there is this tremendous myth of Los Angeles: you’re with your girl by her pool at her huge place, built by a silent-screen star; you are both as beautiful as a youth and maiden in a heroic painting; the beads of water on your skin are glittering in the sun. There’s that sealed-in, airless feeling you get that makes you think you’re isolated even though millions of people surround you. It’s a bright, still Wednesday afternoon, and naturally you don’t have anything else to do on a Wednesday afternoon but look great with water beads glittering on you. But the Los Angeles I see, it’s like a city in the Midwest in summer, just with palm trees and longer distances to drive.
“I do remember once going to a bar with some people after a dinner meeting. Hi ho, let’s have some fun. One of the people who lived out there took us to a place, and some young movie stars were there playing pool. They were all so good-looking that just looking at them was completely engrossing. Anyway, one of them, an actress, took off her gloves—she was wearing these old-fashioned gloves with cross-stitching on the fingers—and set them down by her beer and started to play. She was very good, actually, and she had these long, lithe arms, which she was definitely showing off while she played. She seemed haughty and shallow. Simply from watching them play pool I knew that neither she nor her friends were possessed of any civilization or culture or charity or seriousness. And I thought to myself: God, I wish I were one of them.”
He stopped, out of breath and in a state of panic. How could he have kept babbling on nonsensically like this? During his speech, he had been addressing the back of the seat in front of him. Now, fearfully, he looked over at the young woman, and—her expression was not so discouraging! She seemed to have been listening intently. Her eyes were wide and her lips were apart. She almost seemed transported by what he had said. Encouraged, he gave her a smile indicating his appreciation of her receptiveness. She lowered her eyes for a moment and then looked up at Peter and said, “That is the most beautiful, the most inspiring thing I have ever heard in my life.” Then she began to laugh. She raised one long-fingered hand to cover her mouth and turned away.
To his surprise, Peter noticed that this response had not caused him to blush hotly; rather, something in the young woman’s tone and manner emboldened him.
“Okay,” he said, “since it worked out so well for me, maybe you can explain why you are going to Los Angeles.”
The young woman didn’t answer right away. She ran her finger down the lock on her tray table. Looking at the lozenge of her nail, Peter thought about the soft pad on the other side. The pause grew longer. Peter waited. She turned to him with a dimmed smile, as when the edge of a cloud passes over the sun.
“I’m going to visit my sister,” she said. “She just had a baby, a girl named Clementine.” She laughed. “It’s going to be a little strange being Aunt Holly.”
Holly.
“My sister’s living with my father at his house. It’s in the hills behind Malibu. My sister and I lived in L.A. when we were little, but then my parents got divorced when I was three and my sister was five, and my mother took us back to Chicago, where she was from. My father was a director. Once in a while, he still rolls down the hills and goes into town to let some old producer pal buy him lunch. Mostly, though, he spends his time drinking schnapps and reading detective stories.” She paused. “He made some okay pictures,” she said. She paused again, before continuing. “We’re a little cross with my sister. She naturally didn’t think it was really necessary to have a husband to go along with the baby. The father is living with somebody else in Hawaii. He’s all excited about the kid and was in the room for the delivery. The only thing that surprises me is that he didn’t insist on his girlfriend’s being there, too.” She sighed, then looked at Peter. “Hey, here I am telling you all my family problems and I haven’t known you for five minutes.”
She smiled and studied him. She was looking at his eyes and he looked back at hers. Then their focus shifted, and they were looking into the other’s eyes, rather than just at the surfaces. For that instant, Peter felt that the whole universe simply stopped, as if its entire purpose had been to whip out its material until it had reached this perfect point of equilibrium. They both forced their eyes to dart away, and matter and time took up where they had left off.
Holly insisted that Peter tell her something about his family and his childhood, despite his protests that it was all very dull. He had grown up in New Jersey and had two older sisters, and he was the son of a business executive and a mother who was passionate about three things (aside from her husband): her children, her charities, and her garden. Holly succeeded in forcing Peter to talk about corporate finance and she actually managed to seem interested in it. He even showed her a tombstone ad in the paper announcing a deal he had worked on. Holly, meanwhile, was not really sure about her career; right now she was teaching high school math in the Dominican Republic, and this was inspiring on some days and incredibly depressing on others. She got to New York fairly often because her aunt lived there. They talked about a lot of things. And for periods they were quiet. She read and he looked at spreadsheets. Then one of them would say something, speaking the words aloud as naturally as he or she had thought them. They would talk for a time and then once again fall into a friendly, active silence. As in a painting, the negative space counted.
“Well,” Holly said after a long period of quiet, “that’s enough of Hans for a while.” She turned to Peter. “Have you ever read this?”
“Yes,” Peter said. “It’s a Bildungsroman.”
“Correct.”
“Do you like it?” Peter asked.
Holly thought for a moment. “Do I like it? I don’t know. It’s not exactly one of those books you ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ Reading it, I feel as if I’m attending a very, very long religious ceremony, which sometimes seems ridiculous and at other times is tremendously absorbing and disorienting. But ‘liking,’ as in ‘enjoying,’ doesn’t really come into it.
“I guess I do like being plunged into this totally serious—even if it does have its ironic bits—profound, ultraprofound consideration of all the big things. Life, love, death, art, freedom, authority. It’s like being transported to a different planet. And then, when you think about what eventually really did happen to Europe, it’s hard to complain that it’s portentous.”
“I totally agree,” Peter said. “But I have to admit that the thing that struck me most, even though I knew that I was supposed to be thinking about all that big stuff, the thing that struck me most was—”
“Second breakfast,” Holly interposed.
“That’s right!” said Peter. “That’s right! How did you know?”
“Well, come on,” Holly said. “Who reads that they have a meal at the sanatorium called ‘second breakfast’ and doesn’t think that, tuberculosis or not, it sounds like paradise? With a mild case like Hans’s? It would definitely be worth it.”
Two minds with but one thought! Peter felt faint, but he carried on.
“Where are you now?”
“I just finished the snowstorm.”
“My favorite part.”
“A little gruesome. The dream about the old ladies dismembering a child …”
“Yes,” said Peter. “But, you know, despite that sort of thing and the incredible thick soup of philosophizing, I was surprised that the book does have moments that are romantic, actually. When Hans is thinking about Clavdia’s wrists. And even though she is a complete drag, you can see how she gets under his skin. The love thing, it manages to sprout a few blades through the cement.”
Holly turned toward him and tilted her head. “So you’re a romantic?” she asked.
Peter blushed. He couldn’t answer or look at her. Eventually, clenching his hands together and staring in front of him, he managed to say. “I guess. Kind of”
He could see Holly out of the corner of his eye, still looking at his profile.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s not a fair question to ask a male. Sorry. But anyway … me, too.”
Peter turned to her. “Could I see the book for a second?” he asked. She handed it to him, and he flipped through the section she was reading.
“Here it is,” he said. “Here’s the line I remember, a couple of pages back. Since it’s italicized, it’s easy to find.” He swallowed and then read. “‘For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts’”
“Yes, that’s the one,” Holly said.
They were silent for a time. Holly’s hands were resting in her lap, with the back of one in the palm of the other. Slightly bent and turned upward, her fingers looked like fronds. Eventually, to Peter’s relief, for he feared that he had put a permanent stop to the conversation, she asked him what book he was reading now (David Copperfield, which he explained that he had never gotten around to as a boy), and after talking about that they ranged over a number of topics: hockey, why famines occur less frequently under a democratic system of government, more about her family, the schools they had attended, the music they liked (a striking conformity of taste in that crucial area), the differences between Third and Second avenues, books, TV shows of their childhood, economic growth rates in Scandinavia and the Netherlands …
So while the plane cruised over the flat, unchanging Midwest, the prairies and the desert, Peter was in a state of serenity and bliss. The spark had flashed, but there was no explosion. Rather, all had undergone an invisible change of state like magnetization. As soon as they had begun talking, all the momentousness of the occasion had melted away and he had felt unconsciously happy. He looked out the window and saw the mighty and forbidding Rocky Mountains. Mighty and forbidding? Maybe to Lewis and Clark. He was soaring thirty thousand feet above them.
How did he feel? It was interesting. He felt sort of the way he did when he floated on his back in cold ocean water on a clear hot day and aligned his body with the sun. The cold wavelets lapped up against him; the sun warmed his face, and he felt deliciously stimulated and calm. They had not talked about anything particularly intimate. They had not fused their identities with the force of smashed atoms. They had come together as simply as two flowers intertwining. How happy he felt. And then, once again, that wet-blanket voice piped up in the back of his head, telling him that it was absurd to feel “happy” under these circumstances. He didn’t know this young woman at all. In relations with another person, “happiness” is not the by-product of superficial impressions. Rather, “happiness,” so-called, in a committed relationship was the result of grueling, arduous, unrelenting effort. Maintaining a committed relationship is hard. It requires courage, forbearance, stamina, sacrifice. A useful comparison would be working in a leper colony. The notion that you could meet a beautiful and sympathetic young woman on an airplane and chat with her about the subtle differences between Third and Second avenues and that this could produce “happiness” that was any more meaningful than the happiness produced by licking an ice cream cone, this notion was, frankly, rather childish. And in any event, if he thought that his life could be “fixed” by another person, rather than by dedication to his own growth, then he was sadly mistaken. Peter knew this argument. He knew it very well. And he knew that he was in love with the beautiful, sympathetic young woman beside him and that his life would be changed forever.
Peter looked at her. She was explaining something to him about Mary Queen of Scots. “So,” she said, “she was visiting Darnley’s bedside and a couple of hours after she left, the house he was staying in blew up, and it was obviously Bothwell …” When Holly talked, she moved her hands, as if she were juggling, a trait that Peter found endearing.
And did not the question of lust come into it? Yes. Usually, desire made him feel more tense than a sapper defusing a bomb. Curiously, in this case he felt different. He didn’t feel the incredible excitement mixed with terror that one succumbs to when anticipating the possibility of sleeping with a woman for the first time. Rather, he felt desirous, infatuated, stimulated but not agitated—as if he were anticipating sleeping with a woman for the second time. It all seemed so right, certain and pleasurable. He looked at her hands, now in her lap again, and the V-shaped creases made in her jeans by her crossed legs, and the curve of her hips, which was barely perceptible.
“Hey! You’re not listening,” Holly said.
“Uh … uh … yes, I was! Uh … Ridolfi … you know … Ridolfi—”
“Well, you seemed to be thinking about something else.”
The pressure in the cabin changed. The captain had made the announcement that they were beginning their descent. A general stirring rippled through the passengers, sounds of clasps opening and closing and papers being redistributed. The atmosphere had changed literally and figuratively. The shadows, figuratively, were getting longer and there was a little chill in the air and the sun was setting earlier—all announcing to Peter the end of the warm, fat, unchanging summer days that had been his for the past few hours. Their time was up.
Accordingly, the moment had come to ask Holly her full name, her address, and her phone number, and to ask her if he could call her sometime. All that. Yet it seemed so contrived, and embarrassing and horrible and jarring, to introduce a “dating” note into their sweet communion: Can I call you? Yuck. They belonged together like the ocean and the shore. To present himself to her as a guy who wanted to buy her dinner at a Mexican restaurant would ruin the state of grace they had miraculously achieved. But there was no way around it, he would have to say something. He tried to put the words together in his mind and finally he settled on a formulation. He took a deep breath. He cleared his throat.
“I guess we’re going to land soon,” he said. “I wonder if, when you’re back in the city sometime—”
“No, look,” she said, “how long will you be here?”
“Uh … I’m sorry?”
“How long are you going to be in Los Angeles?”
“Um, until the end of the week, actually.”
“Do you think you’ll have any evenings free?” Holly asked.
“I think so—”
“Then would you like to come out to my father’s for dinner some night?”
Peter detected vulnerability in Holly’s eyes. Her voice had the slightest quaver. His own nervousness was immediately replaced by a desire to reassure her.
“That would be great!” he said. “I would love to do that!”
“Great!” Holly said.
“How should we—”
“Why don’t you call me and tell me what night is good? I can promise you that whenever it is we won’t have any plans.”
“Okay, sure,” said Peter. He made a searching movement with his hands and glanced around for a moment. “Oh, my book, it’s in my briefcase, up in the thing …”
They both looked about them.
“Here,” said Holly, “let me borrow your pencil.” Peter had been making notes with one of those plastic mechanical pencils, and he handed this to Holly. She opened her book and wrote something on the title page, which she then tore out. “Here you go,” she said. “There’s the number.”
Peter looked at the page. Under the title she had written “Holly” and a phone number below it.
“Good. Thanks,” Peter said. He folded the paper and put it in his shirt pocket.
“You can call us basically anytime,” said Holly. “My father gets up at five, but Alex and I are night owls, and with the baby, who knows.”
“Okay. I may have a dinner thing tomorrow,” Peter said, “but the next night? I don’t know how late I might have to work, but I’m pretty sure there isn’t anything—”
“That sounds good,” said Holly.
“Anyway, I’ll give you a call.”
They exchanged a couple of eager, flirtatious glances.
The plane landed and Peter and Holly collected their things and walked down the aisle together. Walking down the aisle together, he thought. Someday, he would mention this to her. They passed by the food courts and tie shops on the way to the baggage claim area, where they waited for the carousel to begin to turn. Finally, its great scales shuddered into motion, and Peter watched the passengers’ mostly rather sad-looking suitcases process before him. They were made of black and red synthetic fabric and had large silver plates with Frenchified brand names; they had wheels and plastic handles, and they were full, Peter was certain, of heartbreakingly banal possessions, underpants with dead elastics. Then, curling into view, there came a boxy suitcase made of leather the color of butterscotch sauce. “Oh,” Holly said, “there’s mine.” Peter heaved the suitcase off the carousel for her.
“Do you see yours?” Holly asked. Peter looked and immediately saw his garment bag. His heart sank as he watched it approach, unstoppably. He knew that as soon as it reached him, Holly and he would part. “There it is,” he said, and picked up the bag. Now the two looked at each other once more. He knew it: as soon as she left his sight, the world would close up over her, the way a pond closes up over a pebble that’s thrown into it, and she would be lost. He would even begin to wonder if she had ever existed.
“I guess I better get my rental car,” he said.
“Dad ordered a car for me,” said Holly. “I guess it should be outside.”
They looked at each other. The carousel continued to turn. A couple of times, they both began and halted a movement to embrace. Then Holly lightly pressed the fingers of her right hand against the breast pocket of his suit jacket, which was right above the breast pocket of his shirt, which was right above his heart.
“Call me about dinner,” she said. “Dad can make his specialty. I hope you like goat.”
“I do! I mean, I’m sure I would, if I’d ever eaten it.”
Holly dropped her arm down and he caught her fingers in his left hand, held them for a second, and let them go.
So long, he said. Bye, she said. She picked up her suitcase and walked away, turned once after she had gone a few yards to smile back at him, continued on; and then Peter lost her in the crowd.
Peter took a deep breath. He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to fix a picture of Holly in his mind. Then he slipped two fingers into his shirt pocket and felt the page from the paperback; then he patted his jacket in that spot a couple of times. He stood still a moment. And now he had to begin to collect his thoughts. He checked that he had everything. His laptop, his briefcase, his garment bag. He slung the laptop case over his shoulder and picked up the other two, the regulation battle array for the traveling businessman. He started off, looking for the signs that would point him to the rental car agencies. The trail wasn’t well marked, and he got turned around a couple of times, and when he finally did find the right place he looked at his watch and realized he better call the Los Angeles office and his own office to check messages. So he put down all his stuff and got out his primitive cell phone. A meeting had been changed. Back in New York, somebody needed some numbers. Now he had to decide: it would actually be a waste of time to call the person in New York. But he would look efficient if he called from the airport. So he did, and he and his colleague had a pointless discussion that nevertheless made them both feel better about having “touched base.” Peter had, he thought, conveyed proper on-the-ballness. He made two other arguably unnecessary calls. Taking a small notebook out of his briefcase, he used the plastic mechanical pencil to scribble some reminders to himself and then clipped the pencil inside his shirt pocket. It didn’t occur to him that Holly had just held that pencil, for by now his mind was like a set that had been struck and entirely rebuilt for a new scene. He couldn’t think about Holly when he was thinking about all the expectations he had to meet over several different time horizons. Most immediately, there were the logistics of renting the car and driving to his hotel, a nontrivial challenge in this city. Then there was his schedule for the next couple of days. He had it all recorded in several places, but he could not help going over it again and again, re-solving the same problems of how he would get from one meeting to another on time, girding himself for the possibility that a client might actually ask him a question, refiguring some calculations. Lurking behind these thoughts were worries about a couple of matters that he knew he hadn’t attended to properly. Still further forward in time, he had to consider how the results of this trip would play in New York. And then there were the projects that were to come to fruition within the next few months. And, finally, while he stood there in line for his rental car, his thoughts leapt all the way ahead to the rest of his life and career.
At the counter now, he listened as the attendant in her tie and vest explained that there was a problem with his reservation. He accepted the offer to go bigger for the same amount and signed in all the appropriate places. Before moving on, he checked again: garment bag, laptop, briefcase. Wallet. Credit card back in wallet. Contract in inside jacket pocket. Map from the rental-car counter. The drive into Los Angeles was not too bad. Stuck in traffic, he remembered something else he needed to do and awkwardly jotted that down on his map. He got off at the right exit, although he suddenly had to cross several lanes of traffic to do so. He found the huge intersections nerve-wracking. Twice, coming from both directions, he overshot his hotel. But finally he arrived.
He checked in. The clerk handed Peter a large envelope that had been hand-delivered, documents and binders sent over from the Los Angeles office, and, following a well-practiced script, he described some of the hotel’s special services and its various breakfast offerings. “I very much hope you enjoy your stay with us,” the clerk said. In his room, Peter hung up his jacket. Sitting on the bed, he returned more calls. On one, he had to dance around a bit. Then he lowered his back on the bed. He took a deep breath. He squeezed his eyes shut. And then, as if there had been music playing all this time, particularly beautiful music, which he had been too distracted to notice, Holly came into his mind. Now he swelled with a simple, single feeling. All his worries melted away. A picture of Holly appeared. She was standing on a scrubby, dusty California hillside and the late afternoon sun caressed her face. She was smiling at him. Maybe … he wondered … would she have gotten home? … maybe he could call her right now?
Lying there on his back and staring at the ceiling, Peter became aware of the left side of his chest, the place under his shirt pocket. He felt the pressure of Holly’s fingers there. He wondered … he wondered if he could possibly feel the weight of a folded piece of paper in his shirt pocket? Of course not. He lay on his back looking at the ceiling and thinking about Holly, about the page from The Magic Mountain, the title page, on which she had written “Holly” and her father’s phone number. He lay on his back staring at the ceiling and thinking about these things. He was preparing to lift his right hand and retrieve the page. He paused before doing so. He paused a little longer.
Then he did lift his right hand and inserted the index and middle fingers into his shirt pocket. The starched oxford cloth felt surprisingly rough and sharp. He waggled his fingers inside the pocket; he didn’t feel a piece of paper. He waggled his fingers again, and then he put his hand down by his side. Still lying on his back and staring at the ceiling, he took a couple of deep breaths. All the blood seemed to drain from his body. The piece of paper was gone.
He knew that within seconds his heart would race and his nerves crackle; for the moment, though, he felt the odd, stunned serenity of a condemned man. Now, using both hands to keep the pocket open, he looked inside. He turned the pocket inside out. The piece of paper was lost, there was no doubt about that. Peter would surely conduct a frantic and thorough search. Like a drunk desperate to find enough change for a drink, he would turn out all the pockets of his clothes, where he would find all those little pieces of paper that he had accumulated during his trip. “Not valid for flight.” He would rifle through the documents in his briefcase and then, with steely patience, turn them over one by one. He would slide his hands around the various plastic sleeves of his laptop case, finding errant pens and business cards. He would retrace his steps to the front desk and then to his car, where he would unfold and refold and unfold his rental car contract and open the trunk. Then, returning to his room, he would in one last frenzy strip out every article of clothing in his garment bag and search through all the pockets and every pleat and cuff. He would even look in the pockets of the shirts that were still in the plastic bag from the cleaners. Magicians did things like that, didn’t they? The card you picked would appear inside another sealed deck, or an apple?
All of this would be completely useless, he knew, but he would do it. He stared at the ceiling. He closed his eyes. He could see the printed words on the page clearly. As for the handwriting, he could remember its general look and the space it took up, but he could not picture anything specific, except the name: “Holly.”
Holly.
1 (#ulink_7aeefb8b-479a-54f2-8f29-79a41ca8eb63)
For its entire history, the firm of Beeche and Company, which could trace its origins to New Amsterdam, had engaged solely in one commercial activity: trading. At no time had it cultivated or mined or manufactured any good; it acted, rather, as merchant, factor, broker, financier. At its beginnings, it imported the axes that it traded for wampum, which it traded for beaver skins, which it sold for export. Later on, it bought corn and wheat from the farms of the north and sent its ships laden with them to the Caribbean, where they exchanged their cargo for sugar, rum, molasses, and indigo, which, on the ships’ return, Beeche re-exported to the east and west; sometimes, the eastbound ships, after first calling in Britain or France, traveled down to the African coast and then sailed back across the Atlantic with cargo that was human. Beeche was among the first in New York to trade commercial and government paper, and as the years passed it added the securities of banks, then of railroads, then of manufacturers, to its repertoire. By the turn of the last century the firm had grown into a large financial enterprise with thousands of employees, branches throughout the world, and a dozen divisions. Yet its basic business remained the same: trading for its own benefit and brokering the trades of others. No Beeche had touched a plow or a hammer for centuries, nor had he employed anyone who did.
Unlike its competitors, Beeche was still owned by its founding family; no partners had been invited in, nor had shares been sold to the public. Moreover, the Beeches had passed the company down roughly according to the right of primogeniture (although there had been times when women had run it—Dorothea Beeche famously made a killing in the Panic of 1819), so the ownership had remained concentrated. Since it was a private firm, no outsider could easily judge what Beeche and Company was worth, but it typically ranked at the top as an underwriter, and it was legendary for its ability to make huge bets and refuse to fold when the markets (temporarily) turned against it, so its capital must have been very substantial.
Apart from the firm, there were, of course, other sources of Beeche wealth, and their value was even harder to determine. The Beeches, for example, had acquired land continuously, and it was said that they had never sold an acre, but the extent of their holdings was unknown, as they had long since stopped using their own name in making a purchase. Then there were the collections of antiquities, paintings, sculpture, furniture, manuscripts, tapestries, books. Always patrons of American cabinetmakers and silversmiths, the Beeches also took shopping sprees in Europe that had preceded those of other Americans by a couple of generations. One of the Beeches had made a practice of providing liquidity to embarrassed maharajahs by buying their jewels; in the 1940s and 1950s, another had accepted paintings in lieu of rent from impoverished artists living in Beeche properties in lower Manhattan. Nor was it possible to say how much money the Beeches had given away. From the earliest Spastic Hospital through settlement houses on the Lower East Side to the newest program to eliminate malaria, they had exerted themselves philanthropically, usually with the right hand kept ignorant of what the left was doing.
Yet while precision might be elusive, it could be said with confidence, in a general way, that the Beeche fortune was vast.
The incumbent Beeche was named Arthur (as most of his predecessors had been). His legacy, with all its attendant powers and duties, had come to him at the age of forty. He was now fifty-three. One wet morning in June, Arthur Beeche was being driven from his house on Fifth Avenue to Beeche and Company’s headquarters on Gold Street. He had left at his usual time, four-fifteen, and at that hour the trip took ten minutes. Rory, the chauffeur, had minded Arthur since he was a little boy and, on account of his employer’s generosity and good advice, and his own shrewdness, he had acquired his own fortune. Right now he was making a big bet on volatility, as he told Arthur on the way downtown. They arrived at the Beeche Building, an enormous new edifice. The rain had made black patches and streaks on its slate cladding. Rory opened the car door for Arthur and scampered to open the door of the building. Although he was a large man, Arthur moved in a kind of shimmer, as if an invisible force were conveying him a finger’s width above the ground. “Good morning, Mr. Beeche,” said a security guard. Arthur smiled and said, “Good morning, Ignazio.” He shimmered over to his private elevator, and Ignazio pushed the button for him; the doors opened instantly. “How’s your little boy doing?” Arthur asked. “The first-grader.”
“Oh! Good, Mr. Beeche,” said Ignazio. “Very good.”
“Did he get glasses?”
“Yes, sir. It’s a big help.”
“That’s swell,” said Arthur. “But the other children don’t tease him?”
“Oh no. Maybe a little, but not so bad.”
“I’m glad to hear such a positive report,” Arthur said, entering the elevator. “See you tomorrow, Ignazio. Take care of yourself.”
“Yes, sir. You too, sir,” said Ignazio. “Don’t fight the tape!”
Arthur laughed. This was a little joke of theirs. “I’ll try not to!” he replied.
When Arthur got off on the seventy-seventh floor, a beautifully groomed woman, Miss Harrison, was there to meet him. She carried a folder full of correspondence. As they walked toward his office, he and Miss Harrison talked quietly about how Asia had closed. They passed by some empty desks, through a well-furnished anteroom, and then into Arthur’s office proper. It was large and decorated in the expensive but reserved style of a masculine upstairs sitting room in one of Arthur’s houses. There were three large paintings and several smaller ones. Arthur changed these regularly, enjoying the chance to study his pictures during his long hours at work.
He sat at his desk, which was bare of any papers. Miss Harrison placed the folder in front of him. She brought his attention to several matters. “Thank you, Miss Harrison,” he said, and she withdrew.
Arthur Beeche was six feet three inches tall and was powerfully built. He had a large head with a flat brow; his black hair had always been rather thin and, combed straight back, enough of it now remained only to cover his skull. The most striking thing about Arthur’s appearance may have been his mouth, which was incongruously sensitive-looking for the thick superstructure of his jaw and cheekbones. Today he wore a gray suit with a thin, faint red check, cut in the English style.
Arthur was thinking about something that he had not been able to get out of his mind since he first put the suit on that morning: his tailor had died. This event saddened and preoccupied Arthur. He was, naturally, concerned about finding someone who would make his clothes as skillfully. But he wasn’t thinking about that. The news was taking an emotional toll on Arthur, for his tailor had been a particular friend.
Sam Harrison (someone at Ellis Island had given his father, a Russian Jew, the same name as Arthur’s aide, who was a Harrison of Virginia) had become a Communist in the 1930s and had remained one. The greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, to his mind, had been the Normandy invasion. By the time the Allies had finally opened the second front, Sam always insisted, even Stalin had come to think that the Soviets could defeat Hitler alone, which would have secured all of Western Europe for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The very rich men of affairs among Sam’s clients took pleasure in it when he ranted against capitalism: the irony and humor of being abused by your incredibly expensive Communist tailor was delectable. Meanwhile, the idle men of fashion who patronized Sam all more or less agreed with him.
While Arthur’s fellow plutocrats treated Sam with amused, condescending patience, Arthur talked with him frankly and seriously. He didn’t relish the incongruity of paying someone to make his suits who, theoretically, would just as soon have seen him guillotined; his mind didn’t work that way. He disagreed with Sam and said so forthrightly, taking Sam’s opinions at face value, and Sam treated Arthur’s with the same respect, and as a result, as they argued over the years, they became better and better friends. What especially bound them together, though, were their discussions on a topic that was dearer to Sam even than politics: his wife, Miriam. He had married when he was twenty and his bride was seventeen, and he thought then, as he thought now, that Miriam was the most beautiful woman in the world (and he was not deluded in this). He had three sons and two daughters and many grandchildren and even a couple of great-grandchildren: he had loved them all and they had all made him proud (well, one of his daughters had married that pisher, but they got rid of him). But most of all, there was Miriam, a tall woman with long auburn hair and a sweet voice and even sweeter disposition. Sam loved her.
Now, Arthur had also loved his wife. They had fallen in love when he was twenty and she was seventeen, but, unlike the Harrisons, they were not married until several years later (and for that occasion, Sam had made Arthur a new morning coat for free). Without question, that had been the happiest day of Arthur’s life. As he said his vows, his voice cracked and he wept. He and Maria (pronounced with a long “i”) had been married for sixteen years, and he loved her throughout all that time and he loved her now. But she had died of cancer at age forty (at her most beautiful, Arthur and others believed). As he had been purely happy on his wedding day, so he was in pure despair on the day that Maria died. If the sun had burnt out and the seas dried up, Arthur might have been mildly troubled. Maria’s death made him distraught.
The person who best understood what had happened to Arthur was Sam Harrison. “It’s a tough break, kid,” Sam had said. Arthur had trembled.
“You know, Sam,” he had said hoarsely, “I have to travel a lot. The worst thing about it was always leaving her. But it was almost worth it because of how wonderful it was to see her again.” Arthur had been unable to speak for a moment. “Now I won’t see her again.” He had looked at Sam and saw the loose skin under his chin quiver and his eyes, each studded with a mole at the lower lid, begin to water. Sam held Arthur’s arm. “Yeetgadal v’yeetkadash sh’mey rabbah,” he had whispered. “B’olmo d’vero keerutey.” Arthur had not understood the words, nor had he fully grasped the significance of an atheistic Marxist’s uttering a prayer, but he appreciated the sentiment.
Sam and Arthur had always talked about Miriam and Maria, and they continued to long after Maria’s death. Years later, Arthur would ask Sam about Miriam, and Sam would grin and say, “Well, the other day …” But he would pause and look at Arthur, who would look back at him in the three-way mirror. Then Sam would say, “You’re still thinking about her.” And Arthur would say yes, and he would tell Sam some memory he had recently had about Maria—the soup in Madrid, her salamander brooch.
Maria was dead. They had had no children; Arthur himself had been an only child. His father was dead and now old Sam Harrison was dead. Arthur rose and looked out the window. The rising sun gave the rain clouds a dull glow. More cars had appeared. In a typical office building, even on a floor at this height, you could hear traffic, especially the slithering sound of tires on wet asphalt; typically, on a stormy day on a floor this high, the wind created spooky sonic reverberations and the building actually swayed. Arthur’s office was different. He heard no traffic or wuthering wind, and he felt no swaying. In his office, all was quiet, still. From his vantage he could see a dozen other buildings, and he thought about all the people who would soon be arriving for work. They constituted a lot of energy, activity money. A lot of life. Arthur did not wonder what it was all for. It seemed obvious to him what it was all for. His own life was busy and full. He had good friends; his mother was still alive and he was close to her. But he felt heavyhearted and alone.
A few hours later on that same June morning, a meeting was taking place on the fifty-ninth floor of the Beeche Building. It was in the small conference room, the one with no windows. One of the participants in the meeting, indeed its central figure, was a young man named Peter Russell. Peter was thirty-two years old; he had been working for Beeche and Company since his graduation from college, and he had advanced nicely. Despite the doubts he sometimes entertained about the value of his work, he had enjoyed it, he had enjoyed his success, and he had enjoyed his high pay.
On this morning, though, Peter was quite unhappy. In fact, he was at this moment the unhappiest he had ever been during his entire time at Beeche. The meeting, which he had gone into with enthusiasm, had become a savage, grotesque spectacle in which he was the victim. His tormentors had poured hot lead down his throat, cut off his private parts and stuck them in his mouth, and now, while he was still alive, they were tying each of his limbs to four different horses before sending the horses galloping off in four directions. Peter had fixed his face with an interested, wry expression while he listened to his colleagues, but he knew he was blushing bright red and that he was fooling no one. He felt sweat trickling down from his armpits.
It had all come about like this. A few weeks earlier, after a couple of his patrons had been shifted to different offices around the world, Peter had found himself working for a boss whom he didn’t know well. The things he’d heard about Gregg Thropp were not encouraging. Thropp was a short, stocky fellow, and he displayed all the Napoleonic traits so common among those of his physical type. He was driven, ambitious, self-important. When he walked, he moved his stubby legs so fast that even the long-legged had to work to keep up. Peter could see for himself that Thropp was insulting and rude to those below him. Others had warned him that Thropp was a devious, lying, backstabbing worm.
Yet toward Peter, Thropp hadn’t acted badly at all. To the contrary! Thropp had treated Peter with courtesy. He’d shown Peter respect in meetings. He’d given Peter credit when it was due him and encouraged and praised him, calling him “Champ.” Oh, sure, sometimes he could be pretty blunt, but it was hard to see what was so bad about Gregg Thropp. Peter had come to trust Thropp so much that he even went into Thropp’s office one day to show him something that had made Peter especially proud. He had played an important part in a couple of notably profitable transactions that had come to fruition when he was working for Thropp but that had been initiated previously. On this day Peter had discovered a small square envelope in his interoffice mail; inside, there was a handwritten note from Arthur Beeche himself! The note read as follows:
Dear Mr. Russell,
Please accept my congratulations on your fine work in the reinsurance and Italian bond matters. Well done!
Yours very truly,
Arthur Beeche
P.S. I hope you will join us soon for one of our entertainments.
Well, as one might imagine, Peter had been bowled over. A personal note from Arthur Beeche! What was more, it looked as if Peter was in line to receive an invitation to dinner at Beeche’s house. Arthur entertained often, and his dinners were legendary for the quality of the food and drink and for the glamour of the guests. A few people from the firm were usually included, and to receive your first invitation was an important honor. You were supposed to act nonchalant about it, but Peter had been so amazed and pleased that he’d taken the note into Thropp’s office and showed it to him.
“Well, well, well!” Thropp had said. “The Champ scores!” He had stood up and begun to lift and lower his arms in front of him, an absurd-looking motion for one so short. “Come on! The wave! The wave!” Thropp did this a few times before he started laughing too hard to continue. When he had recovered, he had looked at Peter earnestly.
“I’m proud of you, Peter,” Thropp had said. “I really am. One thing you can sure say about Arthur Beeche is that he has his eye out for talent. You’ve done good work and you deserve to be noticed. Congratulations.”
Thropp had held out his hand and Peter shook it.
“When I’m working for you,” Thropp had continued, “and it looks like that’ll be any day now, you won’t screw me, will you?”
They had both laughed.
Thropp wasn’t such a bad guy!
A few days later, Thropp had wandered into Peter’s office, looking thoughtful. “Say, Peter,” he had said, “you know your idea about securitizing home equity? I’d like to have a meeting on it.”
“Really?” said Peter. “But, God, it’s such a big thing, and it was just something I was fooling around with. I don’t think it’s anywhere near ready for a meeting.”
“Oh, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Just Huang, Kelly, Matt, you know, people like that.”
“But—”
“I’ve been thinking about it. There are a lot of possibilities. Let’s kick it around. Be a good thing for the team. Get some juices going.”
So it had been agreed that in a few days a meeting would be held at which Peter would give a presentation on his idea. This was the aforementioned meeting, which had descended into a bloodthirsty dance of death.
Peter had gotten a jolt as soon as he had entered the conference room. First of all, the place was already full, which was suspicious. Then he noticed that he didn’t see Huang, Kelly, Matt, or any of his other friends. Where was T.J.? T.J. should have been there! Peter barely knew some of the attendees. More troubling still, a man and woman from Upstairs were sitting in a corner of the room, away from the table. The man, a trim, fortyish black guy, was wearing his jacket even though everyone else was in shirtsleeves. The woman, in her fifties, sat there with an imperious, pre-bored expression. Peter had never met them, but he knew who they must be. He set up his computer and its connections; he noticed that his hands were shaking.
Thropp had begun the meeting. “Welcome, everyone.” He nodded toward the man and woman. “Rich, Andrea, thanks for taking the time to come down.” He rubbed his hands together. “Well, now, we’re all here to listen to Peter tell us about his new idea. Peter has been quite mysterious about it, playing it close to the vest, so I can’t tell you much about what he’s cooked up. He tells me it has the potential to be something very big. I’d usually want to spend some time going over a presentation like this myself, but Peter was so insistent on having a meeting that I said okay just to get him off my back!” Mild chuckles.
Thropp turned to Peter with a smile and gestured to him. “Go ahead, Peter,” he said. “It’s your meeting.”
This isn’t right, Peter thought. His heart began to pound. “Thank you, Gregg,” he said with a quaver.
What he had to say was very preliminary, he explained, and he had only a few slides to show. Then he had gone through it all: What is the greatest source of wealth in the country? The equity people have in their houses. Over the past twenty years, the debt on people’s houses had been securitized, providing a great benefit to borrowers and investors—and the firms in the middle. In Peter’s view, the mortgage market looked shaky. Would there be a way of securitizing home equity? Say a homeowner could sell some of the equity in his house. There could be individual transactions (after all, each mortgage is individual), and you could bundle up those equity stakes just as in the mortgage-backed market. Think of the advantages: home buyers would have an alternative to debt; homeowners could pay down debt and benefit from a rise in prices without selling their houses or borrowing more; they could diversify, buying equity in houses in different markets from their own. With the home equity securities would come hedging opportunities: people could short their own houses if they were in a bubble, and there would be any number of derivative plays. It would spread risk around, make the market more efficient. Then imagine the money you could make if you were the first to come up with such a product.
Peter liked his idea even though it was at only the fantasy stage, and as he spoke he couldn’t help but become more enthusiastic about it; this excitement combined with his anxiety made for a great agitation within him, as he allowed himself to think that he might possibly have carried others along.
He hadn’t. After he finished, saying, “Well, that’s about it. As I mentioned, it’s all very preliminary,” there was silence. A cough. A rustle of papers. Some taps of a pencil. Another cough.
Thropp spread out his hands. “Reactions? Rajandran?”
Rajandran was one of Thropp’s liege men, and Peter didn’t know him well; he spoke with great precision, polishing every phoneme. “Well, I am sure we all agree that Peter has some interesting ideas.” He smiled. It was amazing how white his teeth were. “But it seems to me that he’s missed the boat on this one.” Rajandran rattled on for several minutes, enumerating all the reasons everything Peter had said was absurd. The basic premise was nonsensical. The problems with execution would be horrendous. Peter completely misunderstood the market, the simplest model would show that. And on and on. Someone—some mysterious person—had obviously briefed Rajandran on what Peter was going to say and then instructed him to prepare an informed rebuttal. Peter glanced at Thropp, who was rocking in his chair and trying to suppress a smirk. Peter thought he could hear him humming.
As soon as Rajandran finished, before Peter could even begin to respond, someone else piped up. “You know, of course, Peter, that a futures market for housing prices was tried in London and was a complete disaster.” Another case of advance research!
“Yes,” Peter said, “but, really, there was a marketing problem—”
“Marketing problem!” his antagonist said sarcastically. “You want the firm to spend billions of dollars to redo the economics of housing—and you think a few ads will make the difference?” A snicker traveled the room.
A third henchman joined in. “What about the owner’s balance sheet?”
And then each member of the trio simply began to fire away: “Look at the piss-poor reaction to the Chicago Merc product.” “Wouldn’t insurance make more sense?” “Is it stochastic?”
Peter tried to answer (“… preliminary, something that would need to be looked at, I can’t be sure, um, uh …”). And then he just sat there listening, trying to look unfazed despite his red face and the sweat trickling down from his armpits. Finally, the bloodlust of his tormentors seemed to have been sated.
“Anyone else?” Thropp asked. When no one spoke, he turned to Peter. “Well, Champ, I guess you’re a few bricks shy of a load.”
The man and woman from Upstairs had whispered to each other and gotten out of their seats and were now leaving. They gave a nod to Thropp, who said, “Rich, Andrea, we’ll try to give you a better show next time.”
Peter’s head throbbed. He felt rage and shame. He knew that he was putrefying before everyone’s eyes. A nauseous odor was beginning to arise from him, the putrescent stench of failure. From this moment on, people would slip by him quickly in the halls; they would respond to his phone messages and e-mails in the most perfunctory way; they would edge toward the walls when they found themselves in the same room with him. Even if some of them knew that Peter had been set up, they would treat him as one infected with the plague; it was enough that somebody very senior had wanted to lay a trap for him and that he had fallen into it.
“Okay, everybody,” Thropp was saying. “That’s it.” Then he turned to Peter with hooded, menacing eyes. “My office. Five minutes.”
When Peter presented himself at Thropp’s office, he found Thropp rocking in his chair with his folded hands on his stomach; he wore gold cuff links the size of quarters.
“Ah, Russell, come in,” he said.
Peter stood in front of the desk. Thropp didn’t invite him to sit.
“Quite an interesting meeting,” Thropp said.
Peter nodded.
“Yes, quite interesting,” Thropp said. “Tell me, Russell, do you like walnuts?”
There was a large bowl of walnuts sitting on Thropp’s desk, but this non sequitur bewildered Peter. He shrugged.
“Go ahead and pick out a couple,” said Thropp.
Indifferently, Peter picked up two walnuts.
“Take a look at them.”
Peter did so.
“Now give them to me,” Thropp said.
Peter handed the walnuts to Thropp, who looked at them for a moment while rolling them around in his right hand.
“Do you know what these are?” Thropp asked.
Peter shook his head.
“These are your nuts, Russell,” Thropp brayed. Still holding the walnuts in his right hand, he squeezed them so hard that his fingers turned white. “And I’ve got ’em, right here!” Then he leaned back and laughed. “Oh, it was wonderful!” he said, laughing even harder. “‘Home equity securities!’” He could hardly speak. “’Home equity securities!’” Stretching out his thumb and pinkie, he held his hand up to his head like a phone and put on a deep voice. “‘Hello, I’d like to buy one hundred shares of 487 Maple Drive.’” Thropp was laughing so hard now that tears came to his eyes. “And the look on your face when Raj got going! Oh God! Beautiful!” He laughed and laughed and wiped his eyes. “Oh, it was wonderful,” he said finally, as his laughter subsided in a sigh.
“I’m happy to have been able to give you so much pleasure,” said Peter. “But I wonder if I could ask why you’ve done this?”
“Why? Why?” Thropp’s eyes narrowed and his face went black with malice. “I’ll tell you why: I despise you.” He snorted and began to grind his teeth. “Peter Russell, so bright and attractive, everybody says. Such a hard worker, such nice guy. Top decile. Everything going for him. It makes me want to puke. Before I’m through, nobody will think you’re worth your weight in cockroach dung!” Thropp cackled. “But, oh, did you ever fall for it when I came on all lovey-dovey! Think of it, you come in here”—now he put on an effeminate voice—“‘Oh, Greggy, yoo-hoo! Look-see, I’ve got a note from Arthur Beeche!’” He fluttered his eyelashes and flapped his hands with loose wrists; then his voice became vicious again. “I’m going to destroy you, Russell.” He laughed with depraved glee. “I’m going to destroy you!”
Peter waited a moment before speaking.
“Okay, Gregg,” he said patiently. “What I’m hearing is that you despise me. Is that right?”
“Yep.”
“I’m also hearing, Gregg, that you hope to destroy me.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I see, I see.” Peter said. He furrowed his brow and thought for a moment. “Gregg, I wonder if the real issue isn’t that my skill set may not be the one you’re looking for. Under the circumstances, I’m wondering—and I’m just throwing this out—I’m wondering if it would make sense for me to transition to another spot. I’m thinking about the team, here.”
“You aren’t going anywhere. I’ve been looking forward to this too much.”
“I think, Gregg, that there might be others in the firm who—”
“Nobody’s going to save your ass, Russell. Furlanetto—you’ve crawled up her sphincter, right? Well, she’s in Switzerland for the next two years. And Mulvahey? He’s jumped ship.”
This news startled Peter.
“You didn’t know that, did you? Yeah. It’ll be out in a day or two. So when you try to run to Mommy or Daddy, there ain’t gonna be no Mommy or Daddy.”
Peter looked glum.
“Poor little Peter Russell,” Thropp said. “His ass is grass, and I’m the cow.” This didn’t sound quite the way Thropp had wanted, and he paused quizzically before continuing.
“Now, Russell, here’s the situation. I can’t get rid of you right away because I do have to cover my rear, and anyway the damn lawyers will say I’ve gotta have cause. So I need to make you look so bad, like such an idiot, that the only question people will ask is why I let you last so long. It’ll take some time, but the nice thing is that I’ll get to watch you suffer.” Thropp allowed for a dramatic pause. “I’ve come up with a little plan that, if I do say so myself, is brilliant. I’m going to give you a new assignment.” He paused again, smiling malevolently. “I’m sending you off to work for Mac McClernand.” Enjoying himself, he watched as this news sank in.
Mac McClernand. Oh no, not Mac McClernand.
McClernand was a burnt-out case whose continued employment at Beeche and Company was a mystery. Working for him was career death: you would either be lost in one of his labyrinthine schemes, never to reappear, or the association would so damage your reputation that you would be forced to leave.
Peter began to speak, but Thropp raised his hand.
“Nothing to say about it, my friend. Sent the memo already. Mac’s expecting you to report for duty today. He’s tickled pink about it. That’s exactly what he said, ‘I’m tickled pink.’” Thropp chortled. “Oh, this is going to be fun!”
Peter indulged Thropp’s laughing for a moment or two, then spoke. “Congratulations, Gregg. It’s a plan of such diabolical genius that only you could have devised it. The world has never known such villainy! Yes, Gregg, it’s a clever plan, very clever. Unfortunately, it contains one fatal flaw.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
“I actually haven’t figured it out yet, but it’ll come to me.”
Thropp laughed with still greater hysterics.
“Is that all?” Peter asked.
“Not quite. Have you seen this?” Thropp held the walnuts, one between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, displaying them to Peter like a magician. He put the nuts on the desk, rubbed his hands, then picked one up, interlaced his fingers, and worked the nut so that it was between the heels of both his palms. He squeezed, cracking the shell, and then burst out laughing again.
“How do you like that?” Thropp greedily picked some meat out of the walnut and ate it. Slivers of shell stuck to his chin.
Peter turned and began to leave.
“Hold on! Got to do the other one!” Thropp called after him. The sound of his laughter followed Peter far down the corridor.
It was a long walk back to Peter’s office. His mind raged with emotion and competing impulses. He would go above Thropp. But to whom? He would annihilate the bastard. But how? He would quit. But he had an employment contract; and besides, Beeche was the only place he wanted to work. And in two weeks, he was getting married.
Peter reached his office. Various numbers blinked on his big screen as indexes and rates changed around the world. On his computer monitor, he saw that he had a dozen e-mails. He pushed a button and they all came up, tiled one under the other. Then he noticed the large black diamond on the display of his phone: he had messages. He looked at the clock and saw that it was nearing ten o’clock. At exactly two minutes to ten, it was crucial that he be on the line to Frankfurt.
The phone rang; he could tell by the ID that it was his fiancée, Charlotte Montague.
He picked up the phone and said, “Hi there.”
“Hi, Peter!” said Charlotte. “How are you?”
“Oh … uh … I’m okay.” Peter didn’t feel like talking about his presentation, and he could already tell that Charlotte must be preoccupied with a wedding crisis, so this wasn’t the moment anyway. “How are you doing?”
“Well,” said Charlotte, “I’m fine. But the reason I called was that Mother is being completely unreasonable about the cheese. The French people just won’t understand about serving it before dinner.”
Oh. The cheese. This was serious. Peter didn’t mind, really. He knew what was expected of him in his role as bridegroom: listen patiently, show your interest, respond with sympathy, say “yes.” With the wedding only two weeks away, Charlotte’s nerves were frayed, naturally, as were her mother’s. Charlotte kept talking, and Peter had to admit that his mind had begun to wander, as he remembered the meeting and his encounter with Thropp, as he watched the lines skitter on the screen before him, and as he, inevitably, imagined what it would be like to be marrying the woman he really wished he were marrying.
Charlotte talked on. “Scalloping … Bartók.” Bartók? Then Peter could tell from her tone that she was bringing her own remarks to a close and that he would have to comment. Experience had taught him that in these situations, it was best to leave a few brain cells behind to listen, even as the rest of his mind withdrew.
These scouts gave their report, and Peter said, “God, Charlotte, of course you’re completely right about the cheese. I mean, I wouldn’t know, but I’d trust you on that more than your mother! Anyway … oh, I think that scalloping, you know, might be kind of fussy? And I really like the plan for the music, so I agree with you, we should stick with what we have. I mean, I’m sure it’s a beautiful piece—”
“Oh, good,” said Charlotte, “I knew that you’d feel that way.”
By carefully calibrating his responses, Peter hoped to show that he had given each issue due consideration and was not simply agreeing with Charlotte in order to humor her. The Bartók had raised a genuine concern: Charlotte was impressionable, and if one of her interesting musical friends suggested Bartók for the church, as seemed to have happened, there was a chance that it would be Bartók.
“Well,” Charlotte was saying now, “I’d better run. I’m sorry I won’t be able to join you tonight.”
“Me too.”
“Duty calls.”
“I know! Don’t worry about it. We all understand.”
“I’ll be sorry to miss Jonathan’s reading.” Peter’s best friend, Jonathan Speedwell, was a writer, and he was giving a reading that night from his new book of stories. Peter and Charlotte had planned to go to it and have dinner with Jonathan and his wife afterward. But Charlotte had to go to an event for her work. Charlotte liked Jonathan a lot and flirted with him in a girlish, free-spirited manner with which she did nothing else. “Did you see the review today in the paper?”
As if Peter had time to read book reviews. “No,” he said. “Was there one?”
“Oh, yes! I’ve got it right here. Let me read it to you—”
“Charlotte—” Charlotte, I’ve got to make a call, Peter was about to say. The flashing numbers. Frankfurt. But he was too late.
“Let’s see,” Charlotte said. “Oh, here we are. ‘With Intaglio, his new collection of short stories, Jonathan Speedwell once again demonstrates triumphantly that he is among our most potent younger voices writing today. In luminous silverpoint prose, he deftly renders the struggle of men and women desperate to maintain their purchase on life …’”
Deftly, Peter thought. With Jonathan it was always “deftly.”
“‘… But if there is one quality that truly marks Mr. Speedwell as a writer of distinction,’” Charlotte continued, “‘it is his deep compassion for his characters.’”
Christ. Again, the compassion-for-his-characters thing. Peter could not understand why it was such a big deal for a writer to have compassion for his characters, as opposed to, say, real people.
“‘In perhaps his most finely wrought tale, “The Copse …”’ Well, I won’t read you the whole thing. But isn’t it terrific?”
“Yes.”
“He must be very pleased. Will you congratulate him for me?”
“Of course.” Charlotte was an earnest person whose demeanor generally was almost grave. Peter imagined what she would be like as she congratulated Jonathan—winsome, crinkling her eyes and grinning.
“He’s still pleased about being best man, isn’t he?”
“Sure. I told you, the only problem is, he wants to give me away.”
“Oh.” Charlotte’s mind snagged momentarily on the word “problem.” Then she got it. “Oh! Yes. You said that. How funny.”
“Charlotte—”
“Uh-oh, that’s my other line. Sorry, I’d better take that. Thanks for your help. Have fun tonight. Call me.”
“Sure, right, okay. Bye.”
Throughout this conversation, Peter’s other phone lines had quietly burbled again and again. The black diamond seemed to become denser and denser and heavier and heavier with the weight of added messages. Staring at his screens, he saw more e-mails arrive and numbers blip and charts jitter. As usual, the clock in the upper right-hand corner barely seemed to change when he was staring at it, but then when he looked away and checked it again, he was shocked to see how far it had advanced. Still, Peter didn’t begrudge Charlotte this expenditure of his time at a pressing moment of his day. Those were the phone calls that brides made two weeks before the wedding, and they were ones a decent bridegroom would tolerate. It was part of life. And, he supposed, it was part of life to be screwed over in your job once in a while. It was part of life to see your best friend have undeserved success. It was part of life, also, not to get the girl.
Just in time, he reached Frankfurt.
Why was Peter marrying Charlotte? Why was Charlotte marrying Peter? Charlotte worked in the New York office of L’Alliance Générale et Spécifique des Pays Francophones. The AGSPF fostered economic and cultural exchange among the French-speaking peoples of the world and tried to promote the French language and Francophone civilization in all places sadly suffering from their lack. Dogged and intelligent, Charlotte had mastered the politics of Chad (Djamous, the finance minister, was on the rise, though not supported by the Quay d’Orsay) and the diplomacy of Laos. She was, it seemed, always writing a report on intra-Francophone trade. There were lots of tables. In addition to this intellectual work, Charlotte also participated in the AGSPF’s busy social life: no minor Algerian poet could pass through New York without a reception. That’s what was happening tonight. Charlotte had to attend a dinner for a Belgian economist, who had appeared in town unexpectedly.
For a time, Charlotte’s father had worked in the Paris office of a New York law firm and the family had moved there when Charlotte was seven. With this credential, she could legitimately make France her thing, which she proceeded to do. After her parents divorced, when she was sixteen, Charlotte’s father and her stepmother bought a small property in the countryside, where they went every summer and where Charlotte would visit. Charlotte majored in French and she spent two years in Paris after college.
There she had had the requisite love affair with a Frenchman, with lots of tears. Maximilien-François-Marie-Isidore had been thirty-seven, an incredibly ancient and sophisticated age for Charlotte, then twenty-two. He was always lurking in the background, supposedly poised to swoop in and carry Charlotte back to Paris forever. That never seemed to happen, but on a regular basis, heavy-smoking, black-whiskered French friends—Héli, Valéry, Claude, Hilaire-Germain, Alexandre-César-Léopold, Gilles—would pass through New York. They would take Charlotte and Peter to obscure rock clubs and talk endlessly about American bands and films and writers whom Peter had never heard of. Of course, they all spoke English perfectly, and from time to time one or the other would engage Peter in conversation, while making it evident that he was merely doing so out of politeness.
One requirement for Charlotte’s job was that she speak the language well, and she did, using all sorts of slang. Nevertheless, whenever she spoke it with a Frenchman, there was always the air that she was performing, an amateur-hour talent, rather than simply talking to someone. Whenever they went to a French restaurant, she engaged the staff in long conversations, and they were delighted. Peter—who had taken AP French!—sat there smiling uncomprehendingly for the most part. Eventually his existence would edge into the consciousness of the captain, and he would turn to Peter with an expectant smile.
“Er …” Peter would say. “Pour commencer, je voudrais prendre aussi les moules” As soon as he heard Peters accent, the captains smile would disappear and he would adopt a manner of cold courtesy while Peter, losing his way grammatically, would give the rest of his order.
“Very good, monsieur, and for the wine, shall I give you a moment to decide?” Okay, so he answered in English. Big deal. In fact, that suited Peter just fine, for somewhere deep in his Celtic-Anglo-Saxon bones, he believed that it was improper for any real man to speak French.
Another requirement of Charlotte’s job was that she dress well despite her low pay. Charlotte did dress well, if by “well” one meant fairly expensively. Her clothes were fashionable and of good quality. Yet she did not dress well, really. There always seemed to be too many flaps or folds or layers or lappets or something. She always seemed to be reaching for an effect, an effect that was neither achieved nor worth achieving and one that, even if those conditions were met, would not show Charlotte off to her best advantage. When Peter thought about Charlotte’s clothes, her stepmother, Julia, always came to mind. She was ten years older than Charlotte and was naturally chic, but as far as Peter could tell she mostly wore a skirt, cardigan, and pearls. Charlotte had always cast Julia in the role of her guide in the ways of the world. Why not simply copy Julia’s clothes? But Charlotte, with no intuitive sense of these things, was blind to the example her mentor set for her.
As with Charlotte’s clothes, so with her grooming. It was always, somehow, just a bit off. The haircut was either too severe or too full, and, in either case, had a life of its own, regardless of how determinedly brushed; the lipstick was one shade too fauvist; the nails were ragged (Julia wore clear polish on her nails and kept them shaped liked torpedoes). These superficial flaws bothered Peter much more than he thought they should. For reasons that are mysterious, some people—men and women—are always able to look well put together, stylish, suitable, whereas others, to a greater or lesser degree, fail in this. Well, so what? Some people can wiggle their ears, and other people can’t. If someone has a good heart, how can that sort of thing possibly matter? Irksomely, it did seem to matter. In a way that was more than irksome, so did Charlotte’s looks. It wasn’t a question of whether she was good-looking: she was. She had a long, rather concave face, large eyes, and a prominent nose and chin; indeed, it would not be inaccurate, and it would not be at all displeasing to Charlotte, to say that her face was “Pre-Raphaelite.” She was pretty.
And yet. When they were at her apartment for the evening and had been reading for a while, and Peter raised his eyes from his laptop and looked at her, that action did not release the spring of delight that he hoped for. He could look at certain paintings over and over again, or certain views or buildings or other people or children, and he would always feel an aesthetic and emotional shiver. Looking at Charlotte after a half hour of reading, he had a rather dull reaction. He had known women who, strictly speaking, were less good-looking than she but whose faces charmed him. The nose might be wrong, but there was some alluring interplay between the eyes and the lips; or everything was too small, but taken together with that big smile that came out of nowhere, it made you swoon. He did not swoon when he looked at Charlotte.
In truth he never had. They had met two years earlier at a party given by married friends, the kind who see matches everywhere. It was more or less a setup. They talked about how terrible the Dutch side of St. Martin was, especially as compared with the French side. They talked, inevitably, about France. They talked about their friends. They got along pretty well. Charlotte liked him, Peter could tell. He liked her, and as he got to know her better, something about her moved him. She had a good heart, and beneath her determination lay a touching vulnerability.
So they got along, there was some kind of emotional connection, and, also, they made sense together. In this day and age, when marriages were no longer arranged and no father would dare forbid his daughter to marry anyone, the notion of suitable matches was supposedly archaic. Yet even when there were no overt social conventions to keep lovers apart (and to inspire novels), it struck Peter how often people still married within a fairly narrow social range. Within that range, there were further delimitations; the mates tended to come out with the same overall score on a gender-adjusted index of talent, money, expectations, polish, personality, intellect. The process of weighting and calculation was far less cynical than that employed by mothers during the London Season of the nineteenth century, but it seemed to Peter that it bore a resemblance. There were still rules, and lots of people still married the people they were supposed to marry, despite all this talk of marrying for love that one has heard for the last several hundred years or so.
Peter was an attractive fellow with a good job and a suitable background. He was presentable. Charlotte, meanwhile, was also attractive. She had the kind of job that the kind of woman whom Peter would marry would have. She had the kind of parents and friends that a woman whom Peter would marry would have. They got along. They were good, decent people. The numbers went into their supercomputers time and again, and time and again the results came out: marriage. He knew he was not in love with Charlotte, and he accepted that. But this was not because he was indifferent to love. Indeed, the opposite was the case. The reason he accepted his lack of passionate love for Charlotte was not that he did not feel love strongly but rather that he felt love much too strongly. He was capable of being deeply, passionately, heartbreakingly, searingly in love with someone. Indeed, at this very moment he was deeply, passionately, heartbreakingly, searingly in love with someone. That person just didn’t happen to be Charlotte. And that person was unavailable to him. So he had given up on love altogether.
It had taken him some time to come to that position. Peter happened to be in love with Jonathan’s wife. Before Jonathan and she were married, Peter watched intently, looking for any break. Yet day by day, month by month, year by year, they moved steadily closer. Had there ever been a sign of trouble? Had Jonathan failed to call? But Jonathan had never been the type who failed to call, and his wife had never been the type to be upset if he had. Had Jonathan offended her family? No. Had the magic simply disappeared? No.
Jonathan’s wife was very pretty, she was kind, she was smart, she was funny, and she was much too good for Jonathan, who was a fairly despicable character. She and Peter particularly liked each other. That had been true before she married Jonathan, but there were rules about how you conduct yourself around your best friend’s protowife. If they broke up and a decent interval passed, you could then make an approach. But the honorable friend would do nothing to drive the two apart. Really, honor alone had not inhibited him. So had the fear of rejection, and he considered the odds of rejection high. Whatever affection Jonathan’s wife may have felt for him back then, and felt for him now, he knew that, romantically, it meant nothing—to the contrary. They had established the kind of fraternal relationship, perhaps a bit closer than the typical one, that often arises between a man’s girlfriend or wife and his best friend. She took an interest in Peter and in his love life in the way married women, or virtually married women, do with the single friends of their mates, the ones they like. Their “intimacy” had been possible for the very reason that it had no sexual or romantic overtones. If Peter tried to convert intimacy of this type into sexual currency, he knew, he would be met with shock, disgust, pity, laughter, and derision. He would lose his friend, his friendship with his friend’s wife, and his pride. He would have to kill himself.
Peter had been the best man at the wedding, and after that he had given up on ever marrying someone with whom he was deeply, passionately, heartbreakingly, searingly in love. Then he met Charlotte. They got along. Over time he became attached to her. She moved him. Charlotte was attractive to him, periodically. Charlotte was the kind of person a person like him married, and she wanted to marry him. Love—come on. How many people are really in love when they get married? And if they are at that moment, how many remain so two years later?
Having allowed matters to proceed as far as he had, Peter would have found it very difficult to break things off. Charlotte had something in her, that fearful look in her eye, that made it hard, very hard, for Peter to hurt her. True, her panic about getting married may have been premature, but in her circle, there seemed to be an unstated agreement that if you let your early thirties go by without settling on someone, then it was a very fast shoot to forty, when you really would be desperate. Peter did not think so well of himself or so little of Charlotte to assume that if he didn’t marry her, she would never be able to find any happiness. Still, she was counting on him. Charlotte had wanted to get married so badly. Steadily applying herself and moving at a pace that was faster than what was natural, she had begun to treat him more and more like a presumptive husband, taking him to events with her family or friends or related to her work to which one would take only one’s fiancé or spouse or the person one had been living with for ages. She would ask him to perform spousal tasks, like picking her mother up at the airport. She used the first-person plural pronoun. Soon enough, Peter found himself in a different country without the right papers to get back over the border. Then, too, like all young people nowadays, they had had a conversation initiated by the woman about whether their relationship was moving forward; they had been seeing each other for about a year at that point, and they’d agreed that it was.
Over and over and over, Peter asked himself if it was really fair for him to marry Charlotte if he wasn’t truly in love with her. An advice columnist would say it was not, without question, and he sometimes wished he could agree. But this was the real world. Of course the chances of Charlotte’s being happy were better if Peter married her. Or maybe this argument was just a rationalization for his cowardice. But no, it was surely the more loving thing to marry Charlotte. And as for Peter himself? Married to Charlotte or not, he was out of luck. He was due to marry, and he and Charlotte had a pretty good chance of being pretty happy. It would be fine.
And Charlotte, why did she want to marry Peter? She liked to present herself as being very worldly, always collecting interesting people, scoffing at the bourgeoisie, but she was, in fact, deeply cautious and conventional. Although she would never have admitted it, she was terrified of being either unmarried or married to someone who was odd or ugly or impoverished or who required her parents and grandmothers to make an uncomfortable social stretch. Peter saved her from those fates. Also, she did love him. She liked the feel of his arms around her. He had a comforting, dry smell, like cork. He was kind, and her father, though charming and well dressed, had never been. Once when she was thirteen, she was going to a dance in what was really her first grown-up dress, and she ran into the living room to show it to him and her mother. “Ah,” he had said, drink in hand, “voici la coquette!” She felt as if he had slapped her, but she couldn’t explain precisely why. When she got older, she learned enough from her therapists and her friends and her friends’ therapists to understand that there was a danger that, replicating the relationship with her father, she would marry someone cruel. She had tried to avoid that. Maybe—maybe she had to force it a little bit; maybe she wasn’t “in love” in love with Peter and had to fashion a notion that she was. This she managed to do. In any case, she had already filled in the Passionate, Crisis-Filled, Tempestuous Love bubble on her answer sheet of life. Deep down, she suspected that, probably, Peter was not “in love” in love with her either, but this was a condition she could live with. The marriage problem would be solved, and she knew she could trust him and that he would treat her with kindness.
So it had come to be that, on an evening in early spring, Peter had arrived at Charlotte’s door with the intention of asking her to marry him. She lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a brownstone on a handsome block uptown between Park and Madison avenues. Peter had come from work and, leaving the subway, he had passed a Korean market, where it had occurred to him to buy some flowers. He decided on daisies; they seemed winningly simple. The daisies smelled of earth and grass; water had dripped from their green stalks onto Peter’s hand when he took them out of their bucket. Daylight saving time had just returned, and the light at that hour, still so surprising, made Charlotte’s street look as if a lid had been lifted from it. The brownstone seemed softer, and the air, a little warm now, seemed to buoy him up gently.
No young man carrying flowers on an evening in early spring down a handsome street with the intention of asking a woman to marry him can be entirely immune to the romance of the occasion. And indeed Peter did feel romantic, nervous and eager. His jacket pocket held a small velvet box that contained a diamond ring whose stone was not ostentatious but still sizable.
He greeted Charlotte. She was wearing lighter clothes than she had worn in recent days. She had had her hair cut that day and looked especially young. She had known telepathically that something was up and greeted him with a longer and more than usually tender kiss. “How pretty. Let me put these in water,” she said, taking the flowers from him. “Lots of chances for me to play ‘He loves me, he loves me not.”’
They sat down on the love seat and chatted awhile. For the thousandth time, Peter looked at the framed engravings taken from an eighteenth-century French instruction book on dancing, at the painting above the fireplace that had been a gift from her father and her stepmother when Charlotte turned twenty-one.
Peter decided to be gay, as the occasion warranted. “Let’s have a glass of champagne,” he said. Charlotte usually kept a bottle in her tiny refrigerator. She looked at him, and their eyes met for a second. “Champagne? What are we celebrating?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Daylight saving time? Your haircut?” She gave a little hmm and went to the kitchen. As she walked away from him, she seemed self-conscious, as if she were thinking that he was looking at her, which he was, and he was reminded, with a trickle of lust, that the back of her neck was a good feature. She returned with the bottle and two wineglasses (champagne flutes were something you got as a wedding present). “Here,” she said, “you know how to do it.”
It was a little joke between them how her father had once pedantically demonstrated to Peter the best way to open a bottle of champagne. He gently prodded the cork with his thumbs while turning the bottle, as he had been taught, and the cork fell out, rather than rocketing, with a faint, hollow report and a wisp of smoke. The ceremony complete, he filled their glasses halfway; the bubbles tossed up their tiny hats.
Charlotte and Peter talked a little bit more.
“We have Moroccan agriculture people coming next week,” Charlotte said. “They’re going to meet with these Quebecois researchers who have done some interesting work on barley, which is about three percent of Morocco’s exports.” Charlotte’s expression became quizzical. “It’s odd that the Moroccans have asked for so much information about golf courses in the area. I don’t think that anyone is coming from the tourism ministry”
A breeze entered through the window, bringing a tarry smell from the street. There was a pause in the conversation. Peter refilled their glasses. As he did so, the image of Jonathan’s wife came into his mind, and he felt as if a trapdoor had opened under him. He tried to keep his hand steady as he poured. There she was. Well, never mind. What was not to be was not to be. He glanced over at Charlotte. Her eyes were pretty. The silence lasted a few seconds longer than a normal conversational gap. Peter sipped his champagne and looked over his glass at Charlotte. She looked away. She was nervous, and that made Peter feel warmly toward her.
“Charlotte.” Peter’s voice had an unusual resonance as he took her hands in his. “I have something I want to say, or to ask, actually. Um …” He swallowed. “You know, we’ve been talking about this. And so I was wondering … I mean I’d like to ask … I wanted to ask …” Here Peter paused. “Will you marry me?”
Charlotte had never received a marriage proposal before, not from her French lover and not even during free-play time at nursery school. In this instance, the man making the proposal was one whom Charlotte would quite like to marry. So she immediately began to cry and let out a large sob. She was reacting out of joy, and also from a release of tension, tension that it seemed had been building in her from the time of her birth.
“I know this is all rather sudden,” Peter said.
Charlotte laughed and gulped air. “Yes, why … sorry … just a second.” She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief and tried to catch her breath. When she finished she looked at Peter and in her gray eyes there was the glow of love, an effect enhanced by their moistness.
“Well.” She cleared her throat. “Well, the answer to your question is yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Yes. Completely, totally yes.”
They embraced. The kiss lasted a long time. Peter’s first emotion was faint irritation with the way Charlotte kissed. She didn’t push her lips out enough, or something. Then he immediately began to think that he had made a tremendous mistake, and he wanted desperately to take back the words he had said a few moments before. Then he thought: It’ll be okay. It’ll be fine. I do love Charlotte, really. He felt the back of her hand press against the back of his neck, which produced a stirring of affection and desire within him. And then—and then he thought about Jonathan’s wife, Mrs. Speedwell. Since the wedding, he often addressed her that way. “Hello, Mrs. Speedwell.” “By all means, Mrs. Speedwell.” The bottom fell out of his stomach. And then, again, he recovered and thought: It’ll be fine. Charlotte will be happy enough and I will be happy enough. Parallel to his fundamental disappointment, he also felt a thrill. He had just made a marriage proposal, and he had held this woman unclothed in his arms countless times. He knew the flaws in her body, her bony hips. This accumulation of intimacy had its effect. Smiling, Peter pulled back from their embrace.
“Hey, wait a minute,” he said, reaching into his pocket, “there’s something that goes along with this.”
Peter finished his conversation with Frankfurt. Already, the departing tide of his day had taken him far from his betrothed and any thoughts of her. As usual, though, from time to time throughout the day’s voyage he saw in the distance the most beautiful mermaid, sunning herself on a rock, plashing into the sea and rising up again. Against the sun her smoothed head looked like a paper silhouette. It must be said that the creature did not resemble Charlotte, nor, however, was she mythical in her appearance. Even at a distance, Peter recognized her. He would be seeing her that evening, along with his despicable best friend, the writer Jonathan Speedwell.
2 (#ulink_f1896396-f530-5159-b5d1-42ee533f12d7)
Peter arrived at the bookstore late. It was larger and more commercial than the venues where Jonathan had read in the past. The crowd was larger too, although its composition was the same: mostly postgraduate women who were mostly willowy, mostly with their dark hair loosely pulled back. One or two of them may have primped for this evening, which meant wearing new sandals and a discreet application of paint. It was June, so they were wearing filmy skirts or short skirts with tops that showed off their slender, downy arms; those who wore jeans looked really good in jeans and wore the same kinds of tops. There were also some older women in modish clothes but with heads of gray hair, coloring it being anathema to them. They kept up with the new books. A smattering of skinny, unkempt, unshaven young men lurked in the back, their sullen faces registering both envy and disgust. Later, at the bar downtown, they would snigger about how Speedwell truly did suck. There were no older males. Only Peter was wearing a suit.
At first glance, Jonathan himself might have seemed not very distinguishable from his rivals. His dark brown curls fell to his collar without discipline. He too had stubble. He wore a checked shirt over a T-shirt, just as they did. But there were differences. While Jonathan was on the tall side and certainly remained romantically thin, his outline was drawn with a thicker nib than that used for the others, for, unlike them, he had both been partaking of lobster ravioli at restaurants and spending hours each week at the gym. Jonathan’s hair, while tousled, was clean. His jeans were clean. He had clean hands and clean, trimmed fingernails. Indeed, he was certainly the only person in the room who ever received a manicure at the Waldorf-Astoria barbershop. His black shoes, seemingly unremarkable, were custom-made five-hole derbies, which of course he never wore two days in a row.
More than anything, though, what set Jonathan apart from the other young men in the room was his glorious beauty and the sweet light that surrounded him. Standing before the audience, Jonathan seemed like the most innocent creature of heaven, favoring this base world with a sojourn. His untended curls and blue eyes and fair skin with hints of pink all suggested a person of pure goodness. No snigger passed those delicate, crimson lips. What was most beautiful was that although he possessed such physical charms he appeared to have no knowledge of them. Artless and free! How painful it was then, considering all this, to realize that his work registered so acutely the harshness with which we so often repay love, the cruel deceptions that greet those who trust. Jonathan Speedwell, his readers knew, must feel all that very deeply. And yet, and yet, how much humor and strength were in his work! And in the man himself!
As Peter arrived, Jonathan was just finishing a story. Here is what he read:
It was cold. The sky was clear. Dogs growled and barked. The man next door kept three, tied up. A breeze, out of the south now, carried a faint, acrid odor from the plant. The rusty frame of a swing set, with no swings, stood near the fence. Typical Jake, to scavenge the frame and never find swings. At this time of year it was hard to believe that in a few months wildflowers would grow up around it. Dana tried to picture them, and to remember their names: pussytoes, Venus’s looking-glass, cocklebur. The sun rose higher in the bright azure sky. All of a sudden, Dana saw the crystals of frost on the grass glitter with reds and purples and yellows. It was as if the entire yard had been scattered with gemstones.
Dana shivered. She lit a cigarette. On the sofa in the double-wide, Jen was still asleep. Dana should wake her. Jen would say, “Mom, you’ve been smoking!” Dana would wait. She would finish her cigarette and she would wait awhile. This was something Jen didn’t have to know. There were so many things that she did.
Here Jonathan fell silent. He kept his head down, still staring at the book on the lectern. He tightened his lips. Then he looked up with a distracted, vulnerable expression. The inside tips of his eyebrows were raised, creating an ankh-shaped wrinkle in his brow. When the audience began to applaud, Jonathan lowered and raised his head again. Startled, pleased, humbled, embarrassed. Then he nodded his thanks, as a gray-haired woman stepped up to the lectern.
“Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you. That was just marvelous.” After a new crescendo, the applause died down. The woman spoke. “I’m sure many of you have questions for Jonathan. And goodness, the hour is drawing nigh, isn’t it? So I think, now, if Jonathan wouldn’t mind, we’ll open up the floor.”
“Certainly, Martha, thank you,” said Jonathan. A willowy young woman, but they were all willowy young women, raised her hand.
“Yes, right there,” said Jonathan.
“Hi, Jonathan,” she said. “Thanks. I’d just like to ask, what do you think about the environment?”
A question like this, both very heavy and inane, didn’t faze Jonathan for a second. “It’s incredibly important,” he replied in a solemn tone. “I get so angry when I think about what we’re doing to it. I wish my publisher would use recycled paper. There’s no reason that a tree should die for this.” He held up his book, prompting gentle, sympathetic laughter. “Well, they say that trees are one thing that are renewable. I try to do what I can. What I think is very important is … mindfulness … to have mindfulness about how we are treating our world. You know, there are poets who are known as nature poets, but to my mind, all writers are nature poets, and so have a special interest in protecting nature, and a special duty.” Applause.
There were a few more questions. “In your first novel, when Sam drowns in the drinking game, did that really happen?” “Where do you get the names for your characters?”
Jonathan called on another young woman. “Hi,” she said. She was dark-skinned and slight, and she wore a thin, peasanty blouse. “I just wanted to ask, you seem to be able to write about women so well, from their point of view. I wonder if you would tell us something about that?”
“Oh, that’s kind of you, very kind.” Jonathan smiled thoughtfully. “Let me think. I don’t really know what to say.” In truth, Jonathan had been asked this question at every reading he had ever given and in every interview. “If I’m able to get into the heads of women I guess it’s because women have always seemed so much more interesting to me than men, frankly. Women are more powerful, and I’m interested in power. So maybe I’ve watched women more carefully.” Jonathan paused. He looked down and swallowed. He seemed to be collecting himself. Then he spoke.
“But … but I guess there’s a simple explanation. It’s not something I usually mention, but something about tonight …” The heads of loosely gathered hair canted forward. “You see … my mother died when I was quite young.” Jonathan paused again, remembering. “In the last memory I have of her, we were at the shore and we were playing in the waves, and she was holding me.” He fell silent. The room was silent. The salt water, the sun, the smell of his mother’s suntan lotion, the feel of her body against his, the thrilling surf—everyone in the room believed that they were sharing Jonathan’s recollected sensations. “So of course I’ve spent my whole life trying to get her back and a lot of time trying to get close to women, studying them, trying to figure them out.” He laughed. “Trying to get them to love me!” The audience laughed, then sighed, then applauded.
Jonathan signed books for a while, chatting with members of his public. They said things to him that they had obviously been rehearsing in their minds. “Thank you for telling the truth.” Bashful Jonathan would reply, “Please—no. Well … thanks.” Peter hovered outside the eddy of admirers. Finally Jonathan had given his last humble smile, the smile of a servant unworthy of his mistress’s praise, and turned so that his eyes lit upon Peter, which prompted a different kind of smile. He signaled Peter over with a nod. Jonathan stood up and they shook hands.
“Hello, my friend,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”
Peter looked at him for a second.
“When did you get so green?”
“Me?” Jonathan said. “Why, I’ve always been that way! You remember—I drove that guy’s hybrid once.” Then he began to chuckle. His eyes narrowed and he grinned, pleased with himself.
“How did you like the thing about my mother?”
“I thought it was asinine.”
Jonathan chuckled.
“Your mother lives on a golf course in South Carolina.”
“Oh, come on,” Jonathan said, “nobody’s going to write an exposé. Anyway, if I ever became famous enough for anyone to care, it would just cause a fuss about how I mythologized my past. That’s always good copy.” He laughed and shook his head. “Maybe I’ll try a dead little sister next time, ‘the bravest person I’ve ever known’ … Oh, Christ! Hold on a second.”
Two women were approaching, one in her forties, the other in her twenties, and Jonathan moved to greet them.
“Sasha! Allison!” Jonathan said. He embraced them both. “Thanks for being here. It makes it so much easier to get through these things.”
You were terrific, it went great, they told him. Jonathan made the introductions.
“Sasha Petrof, Allison Meeker, this is Russell Peters, one of my good friends. Russ, Sasha is my editor, the person who has almost convinced me to share her delusion that I can write. And Allison’s her assistant, and she’s—well, she’s the person I depend on for everything.”
Both women were very good-looking. Sasha was lean and tall, chicly dressed; Allison was shorter and more voluptuous, a quality that seemed to embarrass her, and dressed more like a kid, but expensively. They both carried the same costly bag (Sasha was married to a Wall Street guy and Allison was the daughter of a Wall Street guy). Peter shook hands with them. Sasha’s fingers were narrow and he could feel the bones and knuckles. The skin was moisturized, but a little rough nevertheless. Shaking Allison’s hand, in contrast, was more like grasping a ripe plum. Peter noticed how in chatting with Jonathan they both had the same coded look, a look that was intended to be understood by Jonathan but not the other person standing there.
Sasha addressed Peter. “Allison and I were talking before. We hadn’t known that Jonathan’s mother had died when he was so young. Is that something he’s ever really talked about?”
“No,” Peter said. “No, he never has.”
“Did you know?”
“If you had asked me, I would have told you Jonathan’s mother was living.”
“Really? Jonathan, you’re so private, not even your friends …?”
Jonathan glanced at Peter. “No, I don’t talk about it … well, the cancer. I’ll tell you about it sometime, Sasha. I’m not sure what came over me tonight.”
They chatted a little bit more about Jonathan’s publicity schedule. Then Sasha made a whoop. How could she have forgotten! The review in the paper! She had called Jonathan but hadn’t reached him.
“Oh, that,” Jonathan said bashfully. “I guess it was okay.”
“It was just terrific!” said Sasha. “Some wonderful things. Really insightful.”
“Just so long as there’s a money quote,” said Jonathan, skillfully making the cynical crack of a noncynic.
“Oh, there was! There was!” said Sasha, laughing. Allison, her lips moist, glowed with awe.
After some more talk, Jonathan said, “Well, we need to get downtown for dinner. I guess we should get going.”
“Yes, I’d better run home,” said Sasha. “You were great, Jonathan. Really great. We’ll talk.” She embraced him and gave him an all but undetectable extra squeeze.
“Bye, Jonathan,” said Allison. “You were great.” She embraced him and gave him an all but undetectable extra squeeze.
In the cab downtown, Jonathan leaned his head against the seat and let out a sigh of exhaustion. He started talking. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to be screwing both your editor and her assistant? Christ, it’s complicated. Allison … God … Allison. She has this way of lifting her legs up and putting her heels on your back and sort of massaging it with them. The thing about Allison—God. She’s young and not that experienced, but it’s the enthusiasm. The zest. She just loves it. Though, of course, in the hands of the master … She’s such a kid, unsure, and I so dig that, you know?”
Peter, actually, didn’t know.
“But then when Sasha is tough and businesslike it’s also one of the most exciting things. ‘No, Tom, I will not give him a two-book contract!’ I remember once we were, uh, in conference and she was running late. She had herself completely put back together in about two minutes and was all business. I just wanted to grab her and start all over again. I love the way her hands feel, sort of corrugated.”
The cab proceeded down Park Avenue South, with its disturbingly narrow “parks.”
“But, you know, there have been some real close calls, with both of them. And it’s not only that. I have to remember which one I’ve said what to, and when all three of us are together, there’s the chance that somebody is going to make a slip. I mean, usually it’s only two people out of three, but here it’s all of us! Then when I call for Sasha I get Allison, and of course I’ve got to give her some of the old okeydoke. ‘Oh God, Allison, you are so beautiful.’ And then she switches me to Sasha, and immediately I’ve got to go through it with her. ‘Oh, God, Sasha, I just can’t stop thinking about you, I think it’s the backs of your knees …” Jonathan looked over at Peter with a leer. “All true by the way,” he said before continuing. “Then back to Allison to make the appointment, and I have to hope she won’t be mooning when Sasha brings her something to type or some damn thing.” He shook his head wearily. “Yep, it’s hard. Especially with Mags, too, you know, that chick from the fancy soup place? Old Maggie Mae. Catholic girls. Jesus. There’s nothing like seeing the crucifix bouncing around their collarbone. Sometimes she clenches it in her teeth.”
All the while that Jonathan spoke, Peter had been staring at a tear in the back of the taxi’s front seat. It was vaguely K-shaped and had been covered with dark red tape, a shade lighter than the rubbery purplish seat back itself. The edges of the tape were gummy and dirty. The cab, making the usual sudden starts and stops, jounced Peter around, but he kept staring at this cicatrix. His brow and lips and nose and chin were all shut up like a drawstring pouch. He really had no thoughts about what he was hearing, or rather his many thoughts formed an undifferentiated, scowling black cloud in his mind. It was all disgusting and infuriating. This was not because, in general, Peter was puritanical about such activities as Jonathan described. Over the years, he had listened to his friend’s accounts again and again, and while they were often repellent, Peter could not help but find it fun and exciting to hear them, and to admire Jonathan in the way that all men, in truth, admire another’s promiscuity.
For some time, though, Peter’s reaction had been more judgmental when Jonathan talked like this. “I don’t suppose,” he said finally, “that the fact that you’re married makes it any more complicated.”
Jonathan said nothing for a moment and then looked over at Peter with a kind, condescending expression. “Ah, Peter,” he said. “When you’re older, you’ll understand these things better.”
Peter continued to study the ill-repaired gash.
“Don’t sweat it, old sport,” Jonathan said, putting his hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Nothing’s going to happen. Nobody’s going to get hurt.” He laughed. “I’m going to be sent to hell, is all.”
Peter and Jonathan entered the restaurant. It was small and crowded, with stark décor and very large windows.
“You are the first to arrive,” the maître d’ said. “Would you like to sit at the bar, or shall I escort you to your table?”
They went to the table and ordered drinks, a martini for Jonathan and a beer for Peter. Jonathan asked for the wine list, and as he studied it he made a running commentary. Sipping his beer, Peter began to undergo the physiological changes that he always experienced when he was anticipating the appearance of Jonathan’s wife: his heart began to pound, his arteries throbbed, he felt pressure in the hollows of his hands, he swallowed several times, his stomach did flips. He imagined that he would feel the same way just before his first skydiving lesson. What was ridiculous was that he had been in this situation a thousand times, so it made no sense to still have these reactions.
“Incredible,” Jonathan was muttering, “two hundred bucks for that piece of crap.” In restaurants like this, he always ordered the cheapest wine, and it gave him a nice feeling of satisfaction to see what the suckers were buying. As Jonathan spoke, Peter was looking toward the door. He could see the maître d’s back, partially obscured, and the top quarter of the door. The door opened, and Peter caught a glimpse of blond hair. His heart leapt into his throat. She had arrived. He could see the maître d’ lean forward to talk to her, and nod, and then turn and lead her toward the table. As she walked behind the maître d’, Peter saw a part of her face, her shoulder, her arm.
“Here you are, miss,” the maître d’ said, stepping aside. “Gentlemen, the other member of your party has arrived.”
She was wearing a pale green sundress; the color brought out her green eyes. Her long brown arms were bare, and she had her hair pinned up, exposing all of her long brown neck. She was not necessarily the most stunning woman in the restaurant; she was not someone who would cause a stir just by walking in. But she was so pretty. Her reddish blond hair was thick and sleek, although exhibiting a little frizz on this muggy June night. The green eyes were large and set far apart and her jawbone made a beautiful curve from her ear to her chin; her nose had a delicate little knob at the tip. She was on the tall side and nicely formed, slender without noticeable hips (unless one made a point of noticing them), with fine shoulders, wide, level, smooth, rounded. Her collarbones looked like arrow shafts.
She was smiling and she looked flushed and bright-eyed from having hurried to arrive without being too late, and from the pleasure of seeing them both.
“Hello, boys,” she said.
Jonathan and Peter stood up.
“Hello, luv,” said Jonathan. They hugged and kissed, more than just a token public peck.
“Hi, Holly!”
She gave Peter a kiss on the cheek, and in returning it Peter had to put his hands on her bare shoulders.
As they settled into their seats, Holly apologized for being late (“It took me longer to get ready than I expected”; she and Jonathan exchanged conjugal looks, mock sheepishness on her part, mock exasperation on his), and she told Peter that it was so nice to see him but that she was so sorry Charlotte couldn’t come.
“She was really sorry to miss you both,” Peter said.
“Well, say hello to her for me, will you?” said Holly. She ordered a glass of wine. “Oh, Peter, weren’t you supposed to be giving some kind of presentation today?”
“Did I mention that?”
“Yes, I think so, when we were arranging dinner. I think you said that tonight would be good because you’d be done with that, or something.”
“Oh.”
“So how did it go?”
“I killed,” Peter said.
“Really! That’s great!”
“It wasn’t a big deal at all.”
“I’m glad it went so well,” Holly said. “Jonathan, did you hear? Peter killed.”
“Yes, I heard. Congratulations, Peter. What was it all about? Debentures?” Jonathan thought it was funny just to say the word “debentures.”
“Oh, it was nothing worth talking about.” Peter shook his head dismissively.
“Okay,” said Holly, looking at Peter with a tiny frown.
“And how was the play?” Peter asked. Holly taught eighth- and ninth-grade Classics at a private girls’ school, and she had helped with the eighth-grade play, which had been performed that night.
“It was wonderful!” Holly said. “The girls were great. They were so funny! The boys too. And boy, let me tell you, there is nothing quite as intense as a thirteen-year-old Hermia who really is in love with her Lysander.”
The girls had performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream with students from an all-boys’ school. As the rehearsals progressed, complicated romantic dramas had, of course, arisen among members of the cast.
“Well,” said Holly, nodding at Jonathan, “and how about Anton Pavlovich here? Did you see the review?”
“Oh God,” Peter said. “Charlotte read only part of it to me. Don’t tell me it made that comparison.”
“It did. And I have to live with him.”
“Please” said Jonathan, “you know me. Unworthy as I am to receive such praise, I accept it with the deepest humility and gratitude.”
Holly asked about the reading. It went well, they told her.
“So we all have something to celebrate,” she said, and they talked some more. Then the waiter came over and started describing the specials, ingredient by ingredient, and at about the third appetizer (“fava beans …”) Peter’s mind began to wander. It drifted back … back … back to that fateful night three years before …
After he graduated from college, Jonathan lived in a one-bedroom apartment far downtown, but then his stepfather died (as Jonathans father had before him) and his mother inherited an apartment in a hotel on the Upper East Side. She and her husband had used it only on visits to the city but she decided to keep it—more accurately, Jonathan convinced her to keep it—as an investment. While it appreciated, it only made sense for someone to live there—Jonathan, say. He could not afford the monthly maintenance, so she handled that as well as the room service charges, which the hotel simply sent her as a matter of course. The apartment consisted of a bedroom, a library, a dining room, a sitting room, and a kitchen (which saw little use). Meanwhile, Jonathan kept his old place to use as an office (and it didn’t hurt his social life to have some geographical diversity). It was from these precincts that his tales of human struggle issued forth.
One day Jonathan called Peter and said that he was having a few people over that night and that Peter should come. It was an invitation Peter readily accepted, for the people Jonathan had over were usually women whom Peter found very attractive; of course they were pretty, but they were also either smart or a little tragic or rich or minor geniuses at something or other—or all of these. Beautiful, taken-seriously painters who came into a vast fortune as infants when their parents were murdered, these were Jonathan’s specialty. Moreover, at Jonathan’s, a fume of amorousness always hung in the air, and, so, well, who knows?
“Sure,” Peter said. “What time?”
“Around ten or whenever.”
“What can I bring?”
“Just your fascinating self, that’ll be fine.”
Peter asked who was going to be there and Jonathan mentioned a few names. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “and this girl I met at a campus thing.” A prestigious university had invited Jonathan to spend a term in residence. “We’ve kind of been hanging out a lot together up there.”
“Uh-huh.”
Jonathan paused for a moment before continuing. “I’ve got to say, she’s, well, she’s kind of fantastic, actually.”
“She is.”
“Yeah, she is.”
“So what’s her name?”
“Holly.”
Holly.
Peter reacted with a start. His heart began to pound and he flushed. Four years before he had sat next to a girl named Holly on a long airline flight and had fallen deeply in love with her; he had lost her phone number and had never seen her again, but he had thought about her hourly ever since. But what were the chances that Jonathan’s Holly and Peter’s Holly were the same person? He wanted to ask Jonathan more about her. But it was crazy. There were a million Hollys in the world.
Jonathan’s apartment was already crowded when Peter arrived. How glossy everyone always looked at parties there, how loud and vibrant was the cacophonous talk. Peter got a drink and chatted with some people, and then he looked around for Jonathan. He found him easily, for he was sitting on the sofa in the living room. A young woman sat next to him, and she and Jonathan were holding hands. It was the young woman whom Peter had met on the plane. She looked almost exactly the same, except that her hair was shorter. The sight of her stunned Peter, knocking the wind out of him.
He needed a moment to recover, but Jonathan had seen him and waved him over. The introduction. Exclamations. We’ve met before! You have? Yes, years ago on a plane. How amazing! Holly was excited and very friendly, but Peter felt nothing but despair, for she gave no indication that she had spent every waking moment since their parting thinking about him. She was wearing a rather low-cut silk blouse and extremely narrow black pants with a faint chalk stripe. She looked fantastic.
Peter and Holly told Jonathan their story. They had bonded over Thomas Mann, of all things! Then their narrative petered out.
“Well, so,” Jonathan asked, “you never saw each other after that?”
Peter took Jonathan’s question to be a challenge. Of course, any halfway competent male who flew across the continent sitting next to a young woman like Holly would have managed to get her phone number. Peter felt compelled to stake his own claim to Holly, to show Jonathan that he had not failed in this respect, and to make sure Holly knew what had happened, whether she cared or not. True, in achieving these aims, he would make himself look idiotic, but that was not too high a price to pay.
“Actually,” he said, “we were going to see each other again. Holly wrote her number on a piece of paper, and we were going to have dinner.” To identify the piece of paper would be to give Jonathan too intimate a detail, Peter thought. “But … uh … well …” He paused, turning red. “Well, I actually lost the piece of paper.”
“You lost it!” said Holly. She put her hand on Peter’s arm. “You lost it! I always assumed that you just blew me off!”
“Oh no!” Peter said. In his solipsism, it had never occurred to him that Holly might have been hurt. “I lost the number. I know, it was a fairly idiotic thing to do. I was at my hotel, and it was gone. I looked everywhere,” Peter said, “but somehow or other, the thing just disappeared.”
“How kind of too bad,” Holly said. Her tone and expression reflected a touch of spontaneous warmth toward him that had thus far been lacking.
“I sure thought so!” said Peter.
“I bet you did!” said Jonathan.
They all laughed a little.
Jonathan had been observing the others closely. Now he smiled at both with affection. “What a close call for me!” he said. “If it had been different, then, well, who knows what might have happened? And maybe we would all be sitting here together, but it would all be … different.” His tone was mild, sweet, humorous, even a wee bit vulnerable. “I’m pretty lucky that Peter chose that moment to be fairly idiotic. It might be hard to believe, Holly, but that was actually out of character for him.”
Holly laughed and squeezed Jonathan’s hand. No spoilsport, Peter laughed too. He and Holly exchanged a glance, and then some other guests approached, and the party’s momentum swept them all away. For the rest of the night, Peter sought out Holly, trying to have a private moment with her, but for some reason this opportunity was always denied him.
One evening shortly after Peter had met Holly again, he received some further information about her attitude toward the Lost Phone Number. Holly was out and Peter was having a drink in Jonathan’s apartment before going to dinner. Waiting for a call from some other friends, Peter watched a hockey game and Jonathan corrected a proof.
“Hey,” Jonathan said, without looking up from the page, “did you know that Holly really got a crush on you that time when you sat next to each other on the plane?”
Trying to remain as cool as possible, Peter took a sip of his beer and continued to watch the Devils’ power play. “Really?” he said.
“Yeah,” said Jonathan. He scrawled a couple of words in the margin and continued to work as he talked. “Yeah. We were talking about it, and that’s what she told me. So naturally it got me concerned and I said, ‘So what about now?’ She laughed. She said, ‘You’re jealous over somebody I sat next to on a plane years ago? Are you crazy?’ I guess it did sound pretty silly. Oh hell!” Jonathan drummed his pencil on the paper and then made an erasure. “Anyway, she told me not to worry. ‘You know how those things go,’ she said, ‘you meet somebody someplace with some kind of forced intimacy and you think there’s been some magic, and then two days later you’ve forgotten all about them.’ It’s interesting. That’s really true, don’t you think?” He whispered aloud a few words of his text and made a change. “Well, also she said that, you know, you’re such a nice guy that she bet you felt bad about not calling, but actually it was a relief that you didn’t. She had gotten so wrapped up in the baby, you can imagine, and there was the whole scene with her father and her sister, and then her mother coming. She didn’t know what she would have done if you had.” He crossed out a couple of words. “So anyway, phew. I wouldn’t want to have had to shoot you.” He teethed on his pencil, reclined in his chair, and held the proof up, frowning at it.
This account had the unmistakable ring of truth, although Peter wished desperately that he could convince himself Jonathan was making it all up. But why would he bother? He had Holly. Also, Peter couldn’t remember a time when Jonathan had lied to him. Indeed, Jonathan had his own code of honor and rarely outright lied to any of his friends, not even to the women he was involved with; it was almost a principle, and it was part of the game, to juggle them without resorting to sheer mendacity.
She laughed. Really nothing Jonathan had said had surprised Peter. Still, he felt heartsick. The Devils’ pusillanimous line had barely managed to get off a shot before the two sides evened up. Peter drank again from his beer and continued staring at the TV “Oh, yeah,” he said, “we had a lot of fun talking on that flight. Holly’s great.”
Peter saw very little of Jonathan and Holly over the following several weeks. She was getting a master’s degree in Classics at the university where Jonathan had his fellowship, and he virtually moved in with her as she finished. When they came to the city, Jonathan did not include Peter in their activities. Uncharacteristically, Jonathan rarely came to the city by himself, and he seemed to be devoting all his attention (within reason) to Holly alone. This time, it seemed to be serious. Holly had a thesis topic she was quite excited about (Horace, “authority”), but did she really want to be an academic? Jonathan was urging her to move to New York, and when Holly learned about a last-minute opening at an excellent girls’ school she applied and was hired. After a summer of travel, she and Jonathan established themselves in his apartment. Having seen Holly so rarely, Peter had not had much chance to return to the subject of their first meeting, and as time passed it felt more and more as if it would be awkward and strange to bring it up.
The thing between Jonathan and Holly was serious. After living together for a while, they were married. Peter and Holly had become quite good friends, but they never discussed their first meeting again. Peter had watched and waited—foolishly, he knew—and then he’d given up.
Peter had eaten his appetizer without taking any notice of it; he could not have told anyone what it was. Holly was saying something to him, but he hadn’t answered.
“Peter?”
“Oh sorry. What was it you said?”
“You seem to be a million miles away. Thinking about the big day?” Holly said this with the smile of a female friend who is indulgent of a man’s dread of his own wedding.
“Oh, no, actually. But I should be. There’s a crisis about the cheese.”
“Oh God!” Holly cried. “How horrible! I suppose Charlotte and her mother are treating it like the Algerian civil war.”
“Basically, yeah. Torture, assassination, the whole bit.”
“I guess I was lucky. My mother sat back and sort of vaguely watched everything happen. ‘That sounds lovely, dear’ was all she ever said. The only problem was that she easily could have forgotten the date and set off that day to buy a butterfly collection, or something else she had suddenly decided was a necessity.”
“She certainly looked beautiful,” Peter said.
“Well, she couldn’t help that.” Holly looked at Peter sympathetically “I hope your nerves hold out for the next couple of weeks.”
“Me, too.”
Holly turned to Jonathan. “And as for you, you know your job, right? You do for Peter what he did for you: make sure he shows up.”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Jonathan. “He’ll show up. Even if it’s at gunpoint.”
The following morning Mac McClernand’s secretary called Peter to say that Mr. McClernand would like to see him “ay-sap.” After hanging up Peter stared at the phone. Maybe he should just resign right then and there. He could have a new job in a day! But … but … Beeche was where he wanted to work and he had come pretty far, and if he quit, Thropp would win. Peter had told his father about the situation, and he had laughed. “A boss who’s a son-of-a-bitch, a real son-of-a-bitch!” he had said. “Welcome to the club.” Peter’s father had begun his career working for an industrial pipe manufacturer, and he had risen fairly high in the company that had bought the company that had bought that one. He was canny and levelheaded about these things, and he advised Peter not to quit or to go at Thropp directly, but to figure out whose team he wanted to be on and do everything he could to convince that person that he was indispensable to him or her and that he or she had to steal him away from Thropp. Otherwise, he should sit tight. Some employers value loyalty, and this trial would pass. That was all very sound, but didn’t it reflect an old-fashioned corporate mentality that ill suited today’s buccaneering, fast-paced securities industry, where patience and loyalty lasted only as long as it took for the bonus check to clear? Actually, at Beeche patience and loyalty were often well rewarded, and the culture discouraged self-serving intrigue, although the firm still had its Thropps. It was a class operation, as people liked to say. So, okay, he’d overcome other challenges, it was just a matter of bearing down, enduring this one and learning as much from it as he could.
Okay! All right! Let’s do it! With his confidence and optimism renewed by this self-administered pregame pep talk, Peter set off to find McClernand’s office. This was more difficult than he’d expected, even taking into account the size of the Beeche Building. He went up and down and up again in a couple of elevator banks until he finally reached the wing and floor that he thought were the right ones. Stepping out of the elevator, Peter found that there was no security desk or departmental receptionist, just a pair of glass doors at one end of a vestibule. He approached them and saw that the device that read identification cards had a yellowing, handwritten sign over it: OUT OF ORDER PLEAS CALL SECURITY. He noticed that one door was open a crack, and he tried it; it swung open easily—its lock and latch were broken. He walked along a corridor and in one office saw desks and chairs stacked up. In another, computer monitors lay strewn on the floor.
Peter followed the office numbers until he found the right one. The door was open, and he peered inside and saw a woman with her head bent over her desk; he knocked, and the woman looked up, saying, “Oh! It’s you! We’ve been expecting you! Please come in!”
Peter entered and the woman quickly rose to greet him. She was full-figured and in her fifties, with brassy red hair, black eyebrows, and one discolored front tooth. She made every utterance with great enthusiasm.
“You’re Mr. Russell, aren’t you?!”
“That’s right.”
“I’m Sheila, Mr. McClernand’s secretary!”
“How do you do, Sheila?”
They shook hands.
“Very nice to meet you! I’m so glad you’re here! Now, just have a seat, and I’ll tell Mr. McClernand!”
Peter sat. He had noticed that she had been working on a crossword puzzle and now he saw that well-worn books of crosswords and brainteasers were piled on her desk.
“Mr. McClernand?! Mr. Russell is here to see you!” A pause. “Yes, sir! I’ll tell him!” Sheila hung up the phone. “He’ll be with you in just a few minutes!” She smiled brightly at Peter, as if she had delivered the most exciting news. And then she returned to her crossword.
Peter waited. The only sounds came from the occasional scratch of Sheila’s pencil and the white hum of the air handlers. Time passed. No one popped his head in the door to have a word with Mac. The phone did not ring, and no lights shone to indicate that any lines were engaged. Sheila’s pencil made a skittering noise, like a small reptile running across the sand. After what seemed like a long time, the door to the inner office did suddenly open, very loudly, and, preceded by a waft of “masculine” scent, there appeared Mac McClernand.
“Well, well!” he said, smiling broadly and holding out his hand. “Peter Russell! Sorry to keep you waiting. Got hung up on a couple of things.” He cocked his head toward the ceiling with a smirk. “Sixty-eight. You know how it is.” Sixty-eight was a floor where some of the biggest big shots had their offices.
Peter rose and shook McClernand’s hand.
“How do you do?” he said.
“Fine, fine. I’ll just be one more minute.” McClernand spoke sharply to Sheila. “Sheila, did we get that packet out?”
Sheila had not been listening.
“Sheila, did we get that packet out?”
Sheila heard this time and looked up with an expression of shock and bewilderment. “The packet …?” she said. “The pack—? Oh! The packet! Yes, sir! It’s being messengered!”
“Good,” McClernand said. “And you’ve moved my breakfast with Erlanger to Wednesday, right?”
“Yes, sir! All taken care of!”
“Okay! Well, Peter, please, come on in.”
McClernand put his hand on Peter’s back and guided him through the door, then turned to Sheila. “Move my five o’clock back to five-thirty,” he said. “Oh—and hold my calls.”
Mac McClernand was in his sixties. He had an egg-shaped body, and his pants, held up by suspenders, rode at the latitude of greatest circumference. Freckles covered his hands and face, and his flesh tone was taupe. His furzelike hair seemed to hover above his scalp, and Peter could not determine whether that was because of its natural buoyancy, or because it was a comb-over, or because it was fake.
They had sat, and McClernand was leaning far back in his desk chair and looking at Peter so that his chin and jaw disappeared in folds of flesh. His hands were clasped, except for his index fingers, which were extended together; studying Peter, he tapped his mouth with their tips.
“So. Peter,” he said finally. “I guess we’re going to do a little work together.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I hear good things about you. You’ve made quite a name for yourself.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Of course, they only send me the best.” McClernand laughed, baring his grayish teeth. Presently his laugh turned into a phlegmy, wheezing, racking cough. He covered his mouth with a handkerchief and bent over, coughing so long and hard that his face turned red and his eyes teared.
Peter half rose from his seat. “Are you okay?”
“Fine, fine,” McClernand said in a stage whisper. After a moment or two he brought the eruptions under control, took a gulp from a glass of water, and wiped his brow and eyes.
“Harrumm. Harrumrummrum. Damn allergies. So where were we? Oh yes. Yes, I’ve been told damn good things about you.”
“I’m certainly glad to hear that.”
McClernand smiled a bit devilishly.
“But,” he said, “but … I guess maybe you took a knock with that new idea of yours.”
“It was very preliminary.”
Holding up his hand, McClernand knit his brow and pursed his lips and nodded. “Oh, I know, I know. It was very preliminary, just something to kick around. Of course.” He chuckled and shook his head. “But still, I guess they figured it wouldn’t do you any harm to buddy up with an old bastard who’s seen a thing or two in his time, eh?”
“Yes.”
As he looked at Peter, McClernand’s expression softened, becoming almost paternal. He nodded his head slowly. “You know,” he said, “you remind me of myself when I was just coming along.”
Oh God! Peter almost blurted out. “Really?”
“Yes, yes indeed,” McClernand said. He beamed at Peter. He made a mumbly-grumbly noise. Then he clapped his hands, rubbed them together, and said, “Okay, then. Let’s get to work.”
He swiveled in his chair and lifted an object off a shelf. Then, holding it with care between his hands, he gently set it down on his desk. He adjusted it fussily so that it was parallel to the desk’s edge. Then he took his hands away slowly, as if it were carefully balanced. He had been mumbly-grumbling throughout this operation, but now, leaning back in his chair, he stopped and sighed. He gestured to the object with an open hand, smiling. “Peter,” he said, “what do you see in front of you?”
It was a breakfast-cereal box.
Peter was unsure of what to say. There didn’t seem to be many alternatives. “A breakfast-cereal box?”
“Ha!” McClernand said. “Not a wrong answer. But not the right one either. Look again. Tell me what you see.”
What Peter saw was a breakfast-cereal box.
“I … I don’t know,” he said. He smiled. He was a good sport! “I give up!” he said brightly.
McClernand nodded. “I’ll tell you what that is,” he said. And then he leaned forward, fixed his eyes on Peter, and said in a low voice, “It’s money.” Then he leaned back in his chair again, still looking at Peter but now with his former devilish grin.
Money. Right. Yet there was nothing to do but carry on. “Money?” Peter asked. “How so?”
“Pick up the box and tell me what it says on the top flap.”
Peter picked up the box. “‘May fight heart disease.’”
“No! Not that! Further over on the side.”
“Well, there’s a thing here. It says that the company will give your school ten cents for every one of these coupons you send in.”
“Very good,” said McClernand. He stood up and began to pace behind his desk. “I suppose I would be correct in saying that in many cases you can send the cereal manufacturer some box tops and receive a toy in return, wouldn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent. Peter, let’s think a little about that coupon. It’s just a piece of paper, isn’t it? Now, what—”
“Cardboard, actually.”
“All right, cardboard,” McClernand said with a look of annoyance. “Now, what happens when you send this piece of cardboard to the cereal manufacturer? The manufacturer gives something of value to you, or rather, in certain cases, to a third party as directed by you. Are you with me so far?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Tell me, the piece of paper—or rather, cardboard—does it have any intrinsic value?”
“No.”
“But it represents a claim on an asset, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what does that sound like?” McClernand, still pacing, was taking great pleasure in this use of the Socratic method.
“A stock certificate, a bond, any security, really.”
“Bingo!” McClernand said. “Just think, Peter, there are millions upon millions of boxes of cereal sitting in kitchen cupboards or closets or on kitchen counters at this very moment, each one with a top—a top that is not doing anything for anybody. People don’t want to bother to redeem their box tops. They don’t want the toy, or they don’t care enough about their school.
“What if those very same box tops could be sold for cash? Eh? Do you see where I’m going? If someone could sell a ten-cent box top for five cents, and a school could buy it for five cents and redeem it for ten cents, wouldn’t everyone come out ahead? Or if you needed twelve box tops for a toy, you could buy them for cash, rather than spending the money to buy the extra cereal boxes. You see, don’t you?
“But first, there has to be a box-top market. To create that market somebody has to act as an intermediary. And do you know who that’s going to be? Beeche and Company. And then, once the market is launched and flourishing, the paper will begin to trade on its own, as an investment or speculation. Think of the volume! With the firm taking a little bit on either side, the profits will be phenomenal!
“Of course, there are all sorts of challenges and uncertainties—the Internet auction people; taxes; regs; there’s an option aspect, since most cereal box tops expire; and so forth. But that’s where you come in, laddie.” McClernand smiled at Peter with pride and affection. Then his expression slowly changed to one of mystical transport.
“So,” he said quietly, “that’s the idea. But we aren’t stopping there. No. No. We aren’t stopping there.”
Peter had had a feeling that they weren’t stopping there. The worst thing about all this, he thought, was that he must have sounded just like McClernand to everyone at Thropp’s meeting. Maybe they did belong together.
“It won’t be long,” McClernand was saying, “before banks start to accept cereal box tops for deposit and to make loans accordingly. Securities firms will allow you to write checks based on your holdings. The same way people used discounted paper in the past as money, they’ll start using box tops. You know what will happen, don’t you?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “The Fed isn’t going to stand back and lose control of the money supply. So they’ll want to step in.” McClernand smiled quiveringly at Peter and continued in almost a whisper.
“It’s only a matter of time before the dollar goes completely in the tank. Everybody knows that the euro is a piece of crap. So you see? You see? The world is going to need a new reserve currency. Gold?” He let out a braying laugh and exclaimed, “Gold? Pathetic! No. No! The cereal box top!”
Then his voice grew soft again and even more intense. “All this time, while we are making a market in them, we are slowly accumulating and accumulating and accumulating, so when it all comes together, who will have amassed holdings of cereal box tops that are greater than even those of the United States government? Us, Peter, us! Beeche and Company!” McClernand closed his eyes for a moment of silent meditation, then popped them open with a big grin. “Quite a play, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” said Peter.
3 (#ulink_1ce3fa38-57c4-5cd2-aaa6-272b423bfef5)
Having depressed the appropriate keys and pedals with all his strength, the organist suddenly removed, respectively, his fingers and his feet from them, and his instrument fell mute. The last fortissimo chord of the prelude expanded and refracted in every direction, overlapping itself, shifting its shape and color, until it finally decayed into silence, a silence so deep that it seemed as if the mighty blast had permanently driven all sound from the church. Yet, to Peter, at least, standing in the transept, that silence itself reverberated with one low tone, the sound of one’s own existence, of a windless wood, of the Marabar Caves.
Within seconds, the organ would begin to play again, and the bridesmaids and ushers, and then the flower girls, and finally the bride and her father, would begin their slow march, out of time and out of step, and approach Peter more and more closely. Then they would arrange themselves on either side, and her father would hand Charlotte off. Then they would have the ceremony. And then it would be over. Peter was about to take the most important action of his life. Staring down the aisle, with Charlotte’s and his families and all their friends fuzzily crowding his peripheral vision, he tried to smile, as he thought he ought to do.
The ceremony was taking place on the North Shore of Long Island. The day was muggy; the church was hot. Peter felt uncomfortable in his rented cutaway, pants, waistcoat, tie, and shoes. His discomfort was both physical and mental. The costume was silly, he thought. Rented, it was by definition a contrivance. Rented shoes! He was participating in this most personally profound event while wearing rented shoes? Meanwhile, the shirtsleeves were too short. In dignity and dress, Peter believed he compared quite unfavorably to the officiant, who stood to his right. Reverend Micklethwaite looked awfully good in his surplice and gold-embroidered stole. He was a handsome, robust man in his sixties with a full head of steel gray hair and weathered hands. From what Peter had gathered during premarital counseling, it was pretty clear that Reverend Micklethwaite had spent a good deal more time thinking about the gauge of his spinnaker sheets than about the doctrine of the Real Presence. He stood there beaming, aglow with vitality and optimism.
Then, on Peter’s other side, stood Jonathan. He wore his own morning coat and almost gaudy waistcoat, bought, he had explained, because he had been going to so many weddings in England. If Peter had worn that waistcoat, he would have looked moronic, but on Jonathan it had flair. The coat hung beautifully on Jonathan’s long frame, and it was very smart. Jonathan managed to look both more trig and less stiff than Peter. So attired and with his long brown curls brushed but still giving the hint of disorder, Jonathan might have been the hero of a nineteenth-century romance.
As Peter stared down the aisle, he was aware of one blurry dot on his left, but he was determined not to look over there. Earlier, he had noted Holly’s place, three rows back on the groom’s side. He had studied her while pretending to aimlessly survey the congregation. But he would not look again. He would not! Especially at this of all moments. Of course, his effort at self-control failed. He could not help himself, and he slid his eyes over for one last glance. She was looking at him and smiling. A thousand suns. In her smile there was affection and a tiny mock suggestion of pity. Peter could not help but think that of all the people in the church, including the members of the Holy Trinity, the two who were in closest communion were Holly and he. Today, with her hair up and wearing more makeup than usual—her red lipstick was a darker shade and more thickly laid on, as was appropriate for a formal, “lipsticky” occasion—and with the added color induced by the drama of a wedding and in the handsome setting, which became her, she looked especially beautiful. Yet this was as nothing compared with the beauty of her soul. Balanced, graceful, funny, and kind. If there was a Holy Trinity, Peter was quite sure that as they looked down on her they sighed with approbation. He loved her. He loved her. But she would never be his. But she would never be his.
The organ sounded. Peter felt Jonathan’s hand on his back.
“Here we go,” Jonathan whispered. “Whatever you do, don’t laugh.” Hearing this, Peter laughed.
The bridesmaids and ushers began their approach, the former galumphing and the latter shambling like hungover zombies. Here were the flower girls, dropping petals with solemn care. They made Peter smile. After them, the bride herself, on her father’s arm. She was beaming and her face was flushed. She wore a simple dress; it had some kind of beads on it. She was very, very happy. A woman on her wedding day. Peter thought she really did look wonderful. Her father released her and stepped back. She looked at Peter with excitement, joy, love, and … what? Trust: she was safe. He smiled at her, and there was love in that smile. It would be fine.
“We are gathered here in the sight of God,” Reverend Micklethwaite proclaimed in his luscious baritone.
It would be fine.
As he led his daughter down the aisle, Dick Montague had reason to feel well pleased with himself, not that he ever really needed a reason. He had had a new morning coat built for the occasion, and he did look very fine. He was about six feet tall, and he had a face that was ruddy with health and prosperity and thick light brown hair that he held aloft like a pennon. He was paying for the wedding and everything was being done just right, without ostentation but with evident expense. In fact, he had had nothing to do with the planning—his former wife handled all that—except to upgrade the wines, but the effect would redound to him.
It would be a better dinner than the one the night before, given by the groom’s parents. They had hired out at a restaurant, quite a nice restaurant, but the waiters were a little too evangelistic with the water pitchers and they scraped food onto plates as they were clearing. Indifferent food, and as for wine, borderline plonk. Of course, the Russells were at a disadvantage, as parents of the groom always are when they are from a different town. They were nice, nondescript people. The father was an executive with a big company, Dick could not remember which one. While not particularly old, he had thinned-out white hair and a face with lots of lines going in different directions. The wife was very pleasant; today she wore a coral suit. Dick’s toast had gone off well, rather better than anyone else’s, in fact (somehow, in thanking the Russells for the dinner, Dick had managed to work in his own ancestors). He and his wife, Julia, had gone back to the city for the night and returned this afternoon.
That had caused some friction with Charlotte’s mother, Janet, who was annoyed that he would not be “on hand.” As he looked up the aisle, he could see Janet sitting thirty inches away from his current wife. In her pale blue dress, Janet looked thick around the shoulder blades, but it thrilled Dick to see the back of Julia’s neck. Julia never gave any trouble over this sort of thing, and Janet had too much pride to make a fuss, so there had been immediate agreement on where the stepmother would sit, but Dick knew that sharing the pew with Julia, as was customary, would make Janet livid. Of course, it was often difficult dealing with his ex-wife, and an occasion like this wedding—the first of any of their children—meant they had to reconstitute the family like some ersatz beef product. There was tension. The divorce had all been very painful for everyone. Or anyway, that’s what Dick said to himself. He had simply not been able to feel too bad about it either at the time or later. Julia had played an instrumental part in the breakup.
As awkward as it sometimes was, when Dick had to talk to his former wife or see her or hear about her, it usually gave him satisfaction. Every time that she tried to get the better of him or hold her own or stand on her dignity he secretly gloated. The same was true when he heard about her divorcée life, the interior decorating and trips with friends (the fjords, St. Petersburg). She had thick, green, leaf-shaped objects in her divorcée house. How did these things appear, like mushrooms after a thunderstorm? There were occasional “boyfriends.” How basically pathetic to be a grown-up woman and to have to have “boyfriends” and worry about the phone ringing. She made some false starts at marrying again, and each one ended in a mild humiliation. It was quite simple: Dick had won.
As for his children, he had vanquished them, too. In addition to Charlotte, there were two others, both younger, David and Deirdre. David was a groomsman, and Charlotte had dutifully made Deirdre her maid of honor. Dick had not crushed them completely, but it was understood that he could. Each one felt like a mouse caught in his fist. At bottom, he liked that too. Charlotte was a bit tiresome. In fact, she bored him to tears. She was the kind of person who wanted to win over her stepmother, instead of saying, “That harlot destroyed my family (such as it was), I despise her, if I see her I will spit upon her.” No, Charlotte thought she should be worldly about it all and that she and Julia should be “friends.” So she would invite Julia to lunch. Julia was a good sport and had lunch with her now and then, and they were “friends.” They would talk about clothes—Charlotte went through phases at overreaching to be chic—and Julia liked clothes, but Charlotte would talk about them in such a charmless, methodical way that, as Julia put it, she sounded as if she were preparing for her A levels.
There was the son, David. Drugs. The terror and work associated with this fell almost entirely to Janet. The worry about the call in the middle of the night was hers, the visits to the emergency room, all the lies. The scenes in the kitchen—the smell of sautéed garlic (Janet was something of a cook) and Janet’s screaming, “How could you do this?!” Oh, how she loved her son, though, and how he could make her laugh, and how much better company he was than her daughters. She had seen the scabs, bruises, and thick purple lines running down his arms. This was on the hairless inner side of the arms, the soft pale paths her fingers had walked up when he was a little boy. What could she do? How could she stop him? What did they say in those meetings? She couldn’t stop him. It was his self-esteem, and the divorce … But to Dick, in an odd way, David seemed most vital in his pursuit of his drug avocation. He had never been particularly focused or accomplished, had never had very much drive; he was a bookish, indolent, dreamy, nervous boy who drew girls to him but who was unfit and a poor athlete. He certainly had drive now. Still, the fact remained that David was a fairly pointless piece of protoplasm. This gave Dick subconscious satisfaction: he had won. It was all very well for men to talk about how eager they were for their sons to make a success of themselves, how much more it meant than their own success, how tickled they were by the idea of a son entering the firm. Bullshit. Wives and sons: they were the ones who would plot against you, either separately or in treacherous alliance, and if they did, they must be put down, ruthlessly if necessary, all the villages burnt.
Finally, Deirdre. She had freckles and a round face, but she was quite pretty (of all the siblings, David was the best-looking). Deirdre had always had trouble in school. She was dyslexic, and even though they were always reassured that dyslexia has nothing to do with intelligence and that lots of kids who suffer from it are superbright, Dick was always amazed at her ignorance and primitive methods of analysis. Her mind seemed like a map with vast areas left blank. “Pearl Harbor—that was World War I, right?” She loved animals and had a knack for working with horses and dogs, which her parents hoped would turn into something. Dick liked her more than his other children, quite a bit more. She wasn’t like Charlotte, bringing her tiresome friends from Paris to his house in the countryside, speaking her pedantic idiomatic French and always trying to act so grown-up; or like David, with his problems and sarcasm. “Hi, Dad,” Deirdre would say, whereas Charlotte called him “Father” or “Papa” with the accent on the second syllable and David didn’t call him anything.
Dick was now married to a woman nineteen years younger than he. She was much prettier than his first wife had ever been, and she was very clever about—about everything, really, but particularly about clothes and furniture and silver and so on. His wife made him happy. That morning they had almost made love, but there hadn’t been enough time. Then they had had a good early lunch in town with some friends. Dick could still taste the wine and the crispy artichokes. In the afternoon, when they arrived in their suite at the club where the reception would be held, he suddenly became ravenous and ordered a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, some coffee, and chocolates. In his dressing gown, he ate his sandwich, which was delicious (the frizzled crusty corners tucked up in just the right nooks of his belly), and drank the coffee; he ate some chocolate. His wife drank coffee and nibbled on a piece of chocolate. She was wearing a slip, and Dick thought how nice it would be to work his fingers up her inner thigh. Grasping her slender forearm, he drew her to him; but once again there was no time; she had to attend to her hair.
Here is what Dick Montague was thinking as he escorted his elder daughter down the aisle. He was thinking about the poppies in a painting he was working on and about a young woman in London whose lips had within recent weeks found themselves girdling his copulatory organ. He was thinking about Julia’s best friend, Anna, who was blond, big-boned, and athletic, not a dark, fine-featured chic type like his wife, and who was beautiful and neurotic about men. One of Dick’s greatest pleasures was to sit on the terrace of their house in France drinking the last wine of lunch and watching Julia and Anna talking intimately; with her loose, open-necked blouse settled against her freckled chest, Anna licked olive brine off her lips (she flirted with Dick and teased him, calling him “cher maître”). A possible weakness in a very complicated contract that was near completion kept nagging at him. The damn windows in the apartment. Also, there was a money thing, an awkward situation.
Then—of course—he was thinking about the event unfolding before him and his surroundings. He was happy for Charlotte. She looked good and she was excited. The night before, as the dinner was breaking up (and while Julia stood patiently off to one side), he had taken Charlotte’s hands and looked at her and said, “So tomorrow is the big day. My little girl isn’t going to be mine anymore. It doesn’t seem so long ago that you were running around with that little pony of yours, Chestnut—”
“Peanut.”
“Peanut. And now here you are. I know you are going to look beautiful tomorrow. Peter is a very fine man. I’m so proud of you. You seem very happy. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. And I know that you and Peter will always be happy.”
“Oh, Papa,” Charlotte said. She threw her arms around him and pressed against his chest, wetting his tie with tears.
Dick held her; her body was shuddering.
“Oh, Papa, I am happy. Thank you so much for everything.” Throughout this scene Dick thought he should say “I love you,” but there didn’t seem to be a good moment for that. And although Julia was standing nearby with perfect patience, he was conscious of keeping her waiting, so he thought he should conclude with Charlotte. That’s what he wanted to do anyway. He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her head. Then, almost imperceptibly, he shifted his pressure in the other direction, pushed her away gently, and took her hands. “Let’s have another look at you.” She wore an expectant expression that he could not bear to meet, so he smiled and looked at her in an unfocused way. “Beautiful girl,” he said. They remained in this pose for a moment, as long as Dick believed was sufficient. Then he gave her another quick hug, and, with a minimum of violence, released her.
“Well!” he said. “Big day tomorrow! Good night, my dear.”
“Good night, Papa.”
“Try to get some rest.”
He turned, and, with too quick a step, betraying that he felt he was making an escape, joined his wife.
Walking down the aisle with her now, Dick brimmed with pride. This was a mixture of fatherly pride and self-regard, for as he saw all the smiling people look at them, he had the impression that they were admiring him as much as Charlotte. He was looking well, although it was true that his middle had grown a shade thicker than he liked. He had to watch that and take some more exercise. Still, he thought about the silky claret and the fried artichokes at lunch and the grilled ham and cheese sandwich, the chocolate, and almost purred. He thought about his wife wearing her satiny slip, which revealed her shoulders and the smooth inside of her breast. He glanced up the aisle: in her suit she looked chic and shipshape. She had pinned her hair up so that it was as neat and tight as a flower bud (Janet had had her hair “done,” balloon-style). There was something both orderly and vibrant about it all that made Julia particularly desirable; he wanted to tear off those clothes like the paper and ribbons of a crisply wrapped birthday present. Later that night, when all this was over and they were in their room, he would order some brandy …
Dick and Charlotte were approaching their destination. She was smiling broadly and crying a bit and trembling on his arm. Ahead of them stood Peter Russell, the man Charlotte would marry. He seemed like a decent fellow. By Dick’s lights, indeed, he was ideal. The only real danger that daughters posed, in Dick’s view, was that they might marry some fantastically successful young guy who would show him no respect. All he needed was to have some aggressive kid who was making a fortune ironically calling him “sir” all the time. And with a second serve like a bullet. At the same time, it mattered to Dick that his sons-in-law be suitable. Given these considerations, Charlotte had made an exemplary choice. This young man, Peter, was perfectly presentable. He worked for Beeche, the financial outfit, doing … in fact, Dick didn’t exactly know what he did there. But he had a good well-paid professional job at a place everyone recognized. Peter was deferential. There had been a much older Frenchman with whom Charlotte had become involved, a dark, dramatic know-it-all bohemian from an ancient family. He would dominate the whole house with his restlessness, and, correcting Dick on some point of history or politics, he would be downright rude. Thank God he was gone. Peter was far from being that way. When he called Dick “sir,” it was with unqualified courtesy.
Dick saw the row of bridesmaids, some of whom he vaguely recognized. One was a true knockout. Deirdre looked overweight in her dress; Dick had never seen her face so made up. It didn’t suit her. Then the smiling minister. Dick had known these virile, confident churchmen, impossibly self-assured. The groom, looking quite nervous and sallow but smiling bravely. Ah, well. Poor bastard. He’d be moderately miserable for the next forty years, but he’d be okay. Next to Peter was his best man. A writer. Julia had sat next to him the previous night and had said he was “very interesting.” He looked like a fruit. Then, stretching to Dick’s right, the line of ushers, who, overall, were not too grotesque a sampling of youths. There was David, looking skeletal. At least he had cleaned up, even shaving, albeit patchily.
Now it was time to hand Charlotte off. He pressed one of her hands in both of his and gave her a smile, which she returned tremulously. Then he took a couple of steps back and awaited his cue to say, “Her mother and I do,” after which he would withdraw to the front pew and sit between his wives. Janet would smile at him, as if to say, patronizingly, “Good job.” But mixed with that smile would be detestation. As the mother of the bride, as the hostess of the big party to follow, as his ex-wife, she would be surrounded, despite her outward composure, by an invisible, agitated cloud of female anxiety, nostalgia, sentiment, bitterness, joy, envy. For the next forty-five minutes, he would be subject to all these emanations, and every time she moved, the scratchy noises made by the tulle or some damn thing she was wearing would irritate him. He would try to take solace in the calm, erect presence of Julia on his left. She would look perfect and act perfectly, he knew, throughout this whole—ordeal. He could not wait until it was all over and they were alone, and he would dishevel her. How satisfying that she belonged to him.
“Oh, Peter, you looked so handsome up there, and she is such a lovely girl. We’re so happy for you.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Matthews. Charlotte and I are so happy you could come.”
“Well, Peter, so it’s life without parole, is it?”
“Oh, Dan!”
“It’s not so bad, son. Food’s decent, and sometimes they let you out for an hour, you know, have a walk around the prison yard.”
“Oh, Dan!”
Peter laughed appropriately. “Great to see you, Mr. Matthews. Thanks for coming.” They were friends of his parents. The wife was short and thin; the husband was short and stout, with a red face. He had gripped Peter’s hand so hard as to cause him pain. They had a son whom Peter used to smoke pot with; he now ran a landscaping business.
Everything had gone well. They had heard a reading from Colossians. Reverend Micklethwaite had given a brief sermon (“I always tell the bride and groom not even to bother listening, because they’ll never remember a word of it anyway”). They had said their vows. Charlotte had had a catch in her voice. Jonathan had proffered the ring at the right moment and Peter had slipped it on Charlotte’s finger. They had kissed. They had gone down the aisle while the organ blared out an anthem. Flushed with excitement, they had been driven to the reception. Some long kisses in the back of the limousine. “I love you, Peter.” “Oh, Charlotte, I love you.” The photographer, a dark little man of foreign aspect, had behaved like a vicious dancing master and the picture taking was over quickly. And now they were in the receiving line.
He did love Charlotte. She looked very pretty today. He did love her. She was laughing, giggling! She had given him a passionate kiss in the car, and her thin lips seemed engorged. He could not think of a single reason not to have married her. They had some fun talks. She was bright. She was a good person, without excessive neuroses (sure, her family, but everybody had a family). He liked her friends, and they had some in common. He did love her.
Everything had gone well. The family members and friends from both sides were meshing easily. Charlotte’s and Peter’s parents were behaving as well-socialized grown-ups do. Peter’s were interchangeable with all the other members in their set, a set that entirely lacked the éclat of the guests from Charlotte’s side, but the Russells could hold their own, and these distinctions didn’t bother anyone very much. So it was all going well. As for protocol, the only slight lapse was that Isabella, the one truly stunning bridesmaid, had practically joined the receiving line. The maid of honor and the best man were supposed to be there, but not any of the other attendants. But Jonathan had been talking to the girl and they kept talking as he took his post, so that guests would try to shake her hand too. She was Chilean and very tall, with black hair but fair skin. When she laughed at something Jonathan said, she lowered her head and looked up at him through her long lashes. Her forearm was a slender shoot. In time, she wandered off, with a glance back at Jonathan, who attended more faithfully to his duties.
Later, Peter heard Jonathan saying to Charlotte’s jolly, round great-aunt, “Now, you know, Mrs. LeMenthe, it’s really not fair of you to upstage the bride this way, looking so beautiful!” Then Jonathan looked over again at the Chilean, who was talking to someone. She noticed this and slid her eyes toward him. Peter sighed. Who knew where this would lead? Jonathan worked fast. Then Peter supposed that they had book festivals in Santiago, in February, when it was summer down there. First-class ticket. The girl was drinking champagne, and Peter was thinking about how the tall, slender, delicate flute resembled her. These considerations abstracted him so much that he did not notice the guest who was now before him, having already chatted with Charlotte.
“Oh! Holly! Hello!”
“Hi!”
“I saw you in the church.”
“I saw you there, too.”
“Everything okay? Have you gotten a glass of champagne? Some hors d’oeuvres? They have these little puffy ham things—”
“Yes, I have everything I could want, and it’s all perfect.”
“Good, good. So—I was okay?”
“You were perfect.”
“And how about Jonathan? The way he handled the ring? Outstanding.”
“Not bad. I like to see a sharper attack on the pocket. But not bad.”
Peter and Holly stood there looking at each other, and all of his urges flooded back. This was the moment to seize her and run off.
Holly pressed his hand with both of hers. “I hope so much that you will be happy, Peter,” she said. “I know you will. To see you happy makes me very happy.” She began to cry. “Oh, how silly!” she said. She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, then crumpled it up. “I get to kiss the groom, don’t I?”
“Of course.”
They kissed on the cheek.
“Have a great trip,” Holly said. “Send a postcard and call us as soon as you get back.”
Us.
So it was all over. Peter had to put aside his hope or dream or fantasy, or whatever it was. He had married Charlotte, putting the final barrier between them. Holly could not be his and now he could not be hers. He had watched and waited to see if her bond to Jonathan would crack. Three years. Three years of dinners with the two of them, of watching her cook while they waited for Jonathan. (“Of course you can help! Let’s see—how about making some lemon zest?”) Three years of abashed answers to her discreet inquiries about his romantic life. Three years of going with them to the beach, and seeing her remove, to take one example, the short white denim skirt she had worn over her bathing suit, so coarse against her smooth thigh; and the flecks of blond hair against her tan forearm, slivered, golden glints. Three years of hearing her say things like “I was reading that new book the other day, you know, Europe in the High Middle Ages? And you know what’s really funny?” Three years of hearing her tell the truth when it would have been easier to lie, of seeing her help out friends, of watching her save a pupil from some ghastly situation or other, in addition to teaching her the ablative absolute. Even now, at this moment, while one of Charlotte’s cousins was telling him how much she loved their China pattern, Peter could feel the pressure of Holly’s hands. And he thought about the three years of seeing her overtip.
Well, forget it. After three years, it seemed clear that Holly was not going to break Jonathan’s heart and throw herself at Peter. How many millions of times Peter had considered taking some action of his own. He could have declared his true feelings. After all, she had once had a crush on him, if only for two minutes! And how many millions of times had he imagined her response, assuring him with utmost kindness that they were friends and that that was how she wished them to remain. Peter, such a nice guy. He could have told her the truth about Jonathan. You just didn’t do that to one of your mates, though. And he just couldn’t do it to her. In any event, the effect would have been so destructive to her that the messenger would hardly have been a candidate for Jonathan’s successor. In fact, Jonathan would probably have found a way to turn it all to his advantage (“I’m afraid of how much I love you”), and then the whole tearful drama of the second chance would have brought them even closer, as would their mutual disgust for the weasely busybody who had interfered. So Peter had simply lurked and waited, to no purpose. Holly would never be free. Never. So it was time for Peter to give up. To put her away from him. He felt a little like someone who had joined the French Foreign Legion to get away from a married woman with whom he had fallen in love. Farewell, dear friend (chère amie
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James C. Collins
A hugely romantic debut novel about love and destiny. Previously published as Beginner’s Greek and now available as an ebook.‘Love in the Air’ is set in New York City and tells the story of a young man named Peter Russell and a young woman named Holly Edwards. Peter works for a prestigious financial firm on Wall Street, and Holly teaches Latin at a private girls' school – when they sit next to each other on a plane journey, an intoxicating tale of romance, coincidence and thwarted plans starts to unfold. Other characters include: Jonathan Speedwell, an extremely handsome writer who is also Holly's husband, Peter's best friend and, crucially, a cad; Charlotte Montague, Peter's rather tiresome and pretentious wife; Arthur Beeche, the dignified, formal and very, very rich proprietor of the firm where Peter works; Julia Montague, Charlotte's beautiful, young step-mother and Dick Montague, a successful, vain lawyer who is Charlotte's father.Take all these characters and throw in miscommunications, letters going astray, adulterous relationships, fiendish behaviour and ultimately an ending in which everyone gets their due… The result is a debut novel that is charming, fresh, clever and beautifully written; a deeply romantic story about the transformative power of love.
Copyright (#ulink_3adae349-c8cc-56e3-a559-41e1bc52128c)
Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
This Harper Perennial edition published 2008
First published in Great Britain as Beginner’s Greek by Fourth Estate in 2008
Copyright © James Collins 2008
James Collins asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
‘Beginner’s Greek’, from Collected Poems by James Merrill and J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser, editors, copyright © 2001 by the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University. Used by kind permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Quotations from The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann are taken from the Everyman’s Library edition, with a translation by John E. Woods.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007255825
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2014 ISBN: 9780007580699
Version: 2019-06-18
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Dedication (#ulink_74ed227d-21a3-5e84-a04d-34d10e6cb5ad)
To
VIRGINIA DANCE DONELSON
Contents
Cover (#u486d5798-d957-5915-a4a8-96f85e73a53f)
Title Page (#uf1a6839f-ec68-59ea-ae88-f0c94542b934)
Copyright (#ulink_505c5641-ebc6-5438-b57f-e16b30f1c426)
Note to Readers (#uc1d7d4b9-328d-5b05-bc34-50f729882154)
Dedication (#ulink_660273f3-2b6d-519e-93e1-bf28fbe96ade)
Prologue (#ulink_bbdd2788-2590-5355-b659-8deea27da225)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_fc231b7b-cad9-5d6a-9d76-4a2dd154120d)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_8ae7415c-ab00-5fc8-866e-2fb50ed215ee)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_9e206325-3f53-5466-850b-4adc4e286707)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_d4f539bd-213e-5a4d-a54a-bd80f9d81e3e)
When Peter Russell boarded an airplane, he always wondered whether he would sit next to a beautiful young woman during the flight, and, if so, whether he and she would fall in love. This time was no different, except for his conviction that—this time—it really would happen. Of course, he always believed more than ever that this time it really would happen. But he knew. He knew. He was working his way down the aisle of a plane bound for Los Angeles from New York, and he figured, realistically, that the occurrence he envisioned would more likely take place on a long trip. He was pleased to discover that on his side of the plane the rows had only two seats, an arrangement that would promote intimacy and arriving at his assigned place he found that his row mate had not yet appeared, which would allow his mind to savor the possibilities for at least a few more minutes. He stowed his suit jacket, briefcase, and laptop, and settled into his seat by the window. He opened his paper and then looked to his right, regarding the pregnant emptiness beside him. The clasp and buckle of the seat belt lay there impassively, indifferent to whom they would soon embrace. He looked at the scratchy gray and red upholstery, with its abstract design that vaguely recalled clouds at sunset. Peter remembered being at dinner in college one time and listening to an incredibly pretentious jerk, his best friend, impress everyone with some stuff from the highly selective English seminar he was taking—something about how absence implies presence. (“So I guess I shouldn’t worry about cutting class so much.” General laughter. Jerk.) Well, Peter had to admit, the most prominent thing about the throne of absence beside him was the presence that it lacked.
A man wearing a beige shirt and jacket stopped at Peter’s row. He was short and Eastern European—looking and had a small mustache. He looked at the stub of his boarding pass and at the row number and back again and moved on. Peter was relieved. But who knew? Anyone who sat with him might transform his life in ways he would never expect. The man coming down the aisle, the one with the bulldog face and gold tie clasp, might be the owner of a smelting concern in Buffalo, and he might take a shine to Peter and ask him to become a vice president, and Peter might say yes, and move to Buffalo, where he would find the people more complicated than he expected and where, in an appealing way, the grime would climb like ivy up the walls of the old brick buildings. He would marry someone nice who had worked in New York for a couple of years but preferred Buffalo and being near her companionable, well-off parents, and he and she would live in a spacious Victorian house, with several old trees whose leaves in summer were as big as dinner plates. Or what about the ancient, bent-over gentleman in the three-piece suit? Couldn’t he be a great-uncle who had disappeared in Burma decades ago and about whom Peter had never heard but whose identity would be revealed when Peter noticed that his ring bore the same distinctive device as one owned by Peter’s grandfather? He would leave Peter his fortune.
The tie-clasp man walked past Peter; the ancient one sat before reaching him. Most passengers seemed to have boarded by now. Yet Peter felt a tingle. Something, he knew, was about to happen. Yes—definitely—a young woman was going sit down next to him, and not just a young woman, the young woman: a really pretty, really kind young woman, and they would get to talking, and they would become enclosed, in their pair of seats, in a kind of pod within a pod, suspended far above the earth, and by the time they landed it all would be settled and clear. More happy, happy love! Naturally, he had given this individual a lot of thought. He would add and subtract her attributes. She would be pretty and kind. Then pretty and kind and smart. Then pretty and kind and smart and funny, and, in a general way, perfect. Was that too much to hope? He very well knew that it was. He knew that real people with whom one really shared a real life in the real world had flaws. Aren’t the slubs and natural variations what give a fabric its special character? Yes, but he didn’t want to fall in love with a fabric. He wanted to fall in love with a young woman, a young woman who was pretty and kind and smart and funny and—well, pretty and kind would do, if only she would also fall in love with him.
Peter stared out the window: a truck was pumping fuel into the plane’s belly through a thick, umbilical hose. Peter was a happy fellow, basically. He was in his early twenties and he was good-looking, with an open face and light brown eyes and fine brown hair that flopped over his forehead; he stood a shade under six feet and had a strong, medium-sized frame. He liked his job, basically, and he was doing well; he had friends; he was a decent athlete; he had had a relatively happy childhood. But this love business—so far, it had not been very satisfying. He had been involved with girls he liked; he had been involved with girls he didn’t like. In neither case had he ever really felt … whatever it was that he imagined he was supposed to feel. He was shy, so that even though he showed determination at work, and playing hockey he positively enjoyed giving an opponent a hard check, he shrank before a girl who attracted him, and this made the search for someone who would make him feel whatever it was he was supposed to feel particularly difficult. Moreover, he wasn’t cold-blooded, so he couldn’t pursue and abandon girls with the same relish as some of his friends, his best friend in particular; rather, he had a sympathetic streak that, in the matter of making conquests, seemed much more like a weakness than a strength.
Peter watched a crewman begin to uncouple the fuel hose. Then he felt a Presence. It was a female, he sensed. Could this be the very one, could this be She? He turned his head and did see a woman. A woman who was perhaps seventy years old wearing a black wig. In place of eyebrows she had two arched pencil lines, and she had applied a large clown’s oval of red lipstick to her mouth. Peter’s eyes met hers. Her false eyelashes reminded him of tarantula legs. My darling!
“What row is this?” the woman asked him. Peter told her. She looked at her boarding pass and threw her hands up. “Ach,” she said, “my row doesn’t exist. There is no such row. It’s a row they tell you about for a joke. They skipped it. I have the plane where they skip rows. If my son would visit me, I would avoid this aggravation. But no. The wife—the wife gets dehydrated on the plane. Dehydrated, you know—water?” She looked hard at Peter. “Are you married?” she asked. He shook his head. “Marry a nice girl.” She paused a moment to make sure this advice sank in and then turned around and headed back toward the front of the plane.
Peter could see no other passengers in the aisle. A flight attendant strode by closing luggage bins. Peter listened to the engines. Any minute now the plane would begin to pull away from the gate and the monitors drooping from the ceiling would begin to play the safety video. Peter looked at the empty seat beside him. His earlier agitation and euphoria had dissipated, replaced by a hangover of irrational disappointment. He looked at the seat belt, two lifeless arms embracing no one. Of course, all that could be inferred from absence was absence. He now knew who would sit beside him: nobody.
Peter sighed and shrugged his shoulders. Then, like a depressive pulling the covers over his head, he spread open his paper so that it surrounded him and began to read a story with the headline “Council Rebuffs Mayor on Wake-Zones Measure.” It was quite interesting, actually. There was an effort to slow watercraft to prevent damage to shoreline structures. Like Venice. Peter had been reading for a couple of minutes when he heard some rushed footsteps coming toward him, the light, tripping footsteps, he noted, of a young person, most likely a female young person. Then, when they had seemed to reach his row, the footsteps stopped. Peter became aware of a form hovering nearby. But because of his newspaper, he couldn’t see who it was. He nonchalantly folded the paper back, glanced to his right, and saw that a young woman was hoisting a bag overhead. As she lifted her arms, she revealed a tanned, well-modeled stripe of abdomen. Peter’s heart fluttered. He concentrated on his paper. “In New South, Courthouse Towns See Change, Continuity.”
The young woman sat down. As well as he could, while pretending to idly look around the cabin, Peter studied her. She appeared to be Peter’s age, and she had long reddish blond hair that fell over her shoulders. She wore a thin, white cardigan and blue jeans. What Peter first noticed in her profile was the soft bow of her jaw and how the line turned back at her rounded chin. It reminded Peter of an ideal curve that might be displayed in an old painting manual. His eye traveled back along the jaw, returning to the girl’s ear. It was a small ear, beige in color, that appeared almost edible, like a biscuit. Her straight nose had a finely tooled knob at the end, and her forehead rose like the side of an overturned bowl; her complexion was as smooth and warm-toned as honey. As to her form, she was lanky, with long legs and arms and thin wrists. Her long neck held her head aloft.
Now the young woman turned in Peter’s direction, looking for the clasp on her seat belt. The trapezoid created by her shoulders and her narrow waist, the roundness of her bosom, the working of her fingers, so long they seemed like individual limbs, all moved him deeply. Then she raised her head, looked at him, and smiled. The effect was like seeing the sun over the ocean at midmorning, a tremendous blast of light. It was as if the young woman had raised some mythic golden shield whose brilliance would prostrate the armies of the Hittites. She had an oval face, and her large eyes were set wide apart; they were green, as green as a green flame! Peter instructed the muscles at the corners of his mouth to retract in a friendly way, with a hint of flirtatiousness. He imagined the result was like the grimace of someone breathing mustard gas. The girl nodded and looked away, buckling her seat belt and settling herself in.
Before she sat down, Peter noticed, she had thrown a thick paperback onto her seat. He hadn’t been able to see the title. Now she opened it and began to read. In her left hand she held back a thick wedge of pages, about two thirds of the book. After a moment, Peter saw out of the corner of his eye that she had let go with her left hand and the book had fallen closed. She sat staring before her, lost in thought. Peter saw the book’s cover and was taken aback: The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann.
To sit next to a beautiful young woman on a flight from New York to Los Angeles is one thing. To sit next to a beautiful young woman on a flight from New York to Los Angeles who is on page five hundred of The Magic Mountain is quite another. If you look over to see what the beautiful young woman next to you is reading, and it turns out to be a book about angels, then you can with perfect justification refuse her entry into your life. What could you possibly have to say to each other? The same logic applies even if the book is more respectable, but basically dumb—a harrowing but ultimately life-affirming memoir. And if the book is utterly respectable but still basically dumb, say the new book by a fashionable, overrated English novelist, then the young woman is especially dismissible, since the worst alternative possible is talking to someone who thinks she is clever but isn’t. At the same time, if she were reading something that showed that she really was extremely smart—a computer-science journal—then there would be no point in talking to her either: she would be far too intimidating. In sum, an argument could be derived from virtually any reading matter that would allow a young man—scared out of his wits—to persuade himself that it was perfectly sensible, rather than the height of cowardice, to ignore the beautiful young woman who would be sitting next to him for the following five hours. Any reading matter, that is, except The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. A beautiful young woman reading The Magic Mountain—how could he weasel out of this challenge? It was a serious book, but not one suited to a preening intellectual, who would prefer one that was more difficult and less stodgy. A young woman reading The Magic Mountain had to be intelligent and patient and interested in a range of different ideas, many of them quite old-fashioned. She would also happen to be reading the only long German novel that Peter Russell himself had ever read.
Needless to say, for all his daydream eagerness, now that he was actually presented with the possibility of falling in love with a beautiful young woman sitting next to him on an airplane, Peter was terrified. Terrified that he might actually get what he’d dreamt of getting and terrified that now, having the opportunity to get it, he would screw up. If he did not find some way to speak to this young woman, and charm her, he would kill himself. If he spoke to her and she, without even looking at him, gathered her belongings and moved to another seat, he would also kill himself. The plane had taken off by this time and drifted slowly, as it seemed, above a thick wadding of cloud. The sound of the engines was loud but had become familiar and functioned as thought-extinguishing white noise. Peter was hanging in the air and for five hours essentially nothing would change. The unvariegated membrane of time that stretched before him would be dimpled only when the flight attendant handed him a beverage and a packet of pretzels. Yet, and nevertheless, notwithstanding all this inertia, tremendous forces of potential energy were gathered in this setting. For without even speaking to her, Peter was convinced, he knew for a certainty, he had not the slightest doubt, that he could spend the rest of his life with the young woman who had happened to sit next to him, and it would be blissful.
He could tell this not simply on account of her appearance, or the book she read, but because of the way she held the book in her hands, the way she tilted her head, the way she lightly set her lips together. All this provided more than enough evidence of her kindness, devotion, wisdom, grace, wit, and capacity for love. Never in his experience had he learned more about a woman’s character after thorough, and often quite unpleasant, explorations of it than he had already known within thirty seconds of meeting her. (With men, he had discovered, you needed five seconds.) And now he heard the voice of emotional maturity explain to him, patronizingly, that his assumptions about this young woman were based on a “fantasy.” Real life, real marriage, involves a commitment to a real person with all her flaws and individual needs. A real life together was doing the dishes when you were tired and paying the mortgage. He stole another glance at the young woman. He imagined her thumb and forefinger grasping a ballpoint pen and writing out a mortgage check, her hand working like some antique mechanism that was a marvel to the world. Bring on the dishes.
So, as we have seen, however inert the setting might seem to be, tremendous forces were gathered in the cabin of this aircraft. Forces. Tremendous ones. Peter knew that with the smallest effort he could potentiate the situation, with epochal consequences for his life and happiness. It was as if the entire cabin were filled with the tasteless, odorless fumes of powerful romantic-sexual gas, and only a spark was needed to create an explosion; the plane would suffer no damage, the other passengers wouldn’t even notice, but the result would change his life.
What would that spark be? Peter was not one of those people who easily strike up conversations with strangers. If there were a subset of that group from which he was even more decisively excluded, it would be that which consists of men who easily strike up conversations with strangers who are pretty girls. His best friend was able to meet the eyes of a girl in line at the movies and smile and casually say something like “So, do you think this really is as good as his last one?” Then they’d be off and running. Peter, meanwhile, expected to address the girl’s friend, would stand by, mute.
The young woman sighed, shifted in her seat, stretched a little, and looked up. Here was his moment. He could look over and ask, What takes you to Los Angeles? He could say that. What takes you to Los Angeles? The words circled around and around in his head, like the tigers who turned to butter. What takes you to Los Angeles? What takes you to Los Angeles? What takes you to Los Angeles? He became almost dizzy with their silent repetition. Then something strange happened. This was very odd. Peter was not prone to auditory hallucinations, but he thought that he actually heard the words “What takes you to Los Angeles?” being spoken aloud. Suddenly understanding, he jumped in his seat.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he heard a warm mezzo voice say. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I was just wondering: What takes you to Los Angeles?” The young woman had spoken to him, and Peter looked at her and her mild, friendly expression. He noticed, as he had not before, how her philtrum rhymed with the shallow cleft in her chin. It was time for him to say something. He was looking at her; she was looking at him with that mild expression of conversational invitation. His brain clicked and whirred and blinked.
Finally, he managed to say, “Work.” (More accurately transcribed as “Grk.”)
Now Peter braced himself for the inevitable: What sort of work do you do? New Wave, West Coast jazz pianist. Vintner. Assassin. No, he would have to say that he worked for a Wall Street firm and right now was in the corporate finance department—and therefore was the most boring human being you could possibly meet on a plane flying to Los Angeles. Corporate finance. My God. Well, you see, right now we’re issuing some convertible debt for a midsized bank … In fact, there were aspects of it that were interesting to him, but no regular human being, and certainly no beautiful young woman, would ever want to have a conversation about such a subject or believe that a person so employed was worth talking to about anything. He would tell her what he did, and the remaining four hours and fifty minutes of the flight would pass in silence.
But the young woman didn’t ask about his job. Instead, she asked, “Do you like Los Angeles?”
“Do you like Los Angeles?” Another impossible question! He knew that the accepted thing was to hold “L.A.” in contempt. Still, you couldn’t act too proud of yourself for bashing the place, since that was so conventional. If you made a smug wisecrack about it—“Breast implants? Those people need brain implants!”—you risked sounding like a very tiresome person eager to beat a horse that had already been turned to dust. Yet you couldn’t actually say you liked L.A., could you? What pressure. Pro, con? Funny, serious? Knowing, naïve? Good, bad? Yes, no? Zero, one? Up, down? Back, forth? He toggled between responses and finally produced a sort of ingenious synthesis: “L.A. is all right.”
He watched the aperture of the young woman’s lovely face close ever so slightly and felt a pang in his heart. Two nearly monosyllabic responses did not exactly encourage further conversation. He was losing her. So he said, “I guess I really don’t know it very well. I guess you do a lot of driving.” This was brilliant stuff! He continued: “I know there’s a whole world of young movie stars living in old movie stars’ houses and spending millions on thirties French furniture, but that’s not what I ever see. From what I see, Los Angeles is like any other city where they have lots of highways and air-conditioning. The tables in the conference rooms where I spend my time have the same executive walnut veneer. Otherwise, I’m in my rented car or at the hotel. I guess there are palm trees. I guess there is this tremendous myth of Los Angeles: you’re with your girl by her pool at her huge place, built by a silent-screen star; you are both as beautiful as a youth and maiden in a heroic painting; the beads of water on your skin are glittering in the sun. There’s that sealed-in, airless feeling you get that makes you think you’re isolated even though millions of people surround you. It’s a bright, still Wednesday afternoon, and naturally you don’t have anything else to do on a Wednesday afternoon but look great with water beads glittering on you. But the Los Angeles I see, it’s like a city in the Midwest in summer, just with palm trees and longer distances to drive.
“I do remember once going to a bar with some people after a dinner meeting. Hi ho, let’s have some fun. One of the people who lived out there took us to a place, and some young movie stars were there playing pool. They were all so good-looking that just looking at them was completely engrossing. Anyway, one of them, an actress, took off her gloves—she was wearing these old-fashioned gloves with cross-stitching on the fingers—and set them down by her beer and started to play. She was very good, actually, and she had these long, lithe arms, which she was definitely showing off while she played. She seemed haughty and shallow. Simply from watching them play pool I knew that neither she nor her friends were possessed of any civilization or culture or charity or seriousness. And I thought to myself: God, I wish I were one of them.”
He stopped, out of breath and in a state of panic. How could he have kept babbling on nonsensically like this? During his speech, he had been addressing the back of the seat in front of him. Now, fearfully, he looked over at the young woman, and—her expression was not so discouraging! She seemed to have been listening intently. Her eyes were wide and her lips were apart. She almost seemed transported by what he had said. Encouraged, he gave her a smile indicating his appreciation of her receptiveness. She lowered her eyes for a moment and then looked up at Peter and said, “That is the most beautiful, the most inspiring thing I have ever heard in my life.” Then she began to laugh. She raised one long-fingered hand to cover her mouth and turned away.
To his surprise, Peter noticed that this response had not caused him to blush hotly; rather, something in the young woman’s tone and manner emboldened him.
“Okay,” he said, “since it worked out so well for me, maybe you can explain why you are going to Los Angeles.”
The young woman didn’t answer right away. She ran her finger down the lock on her tray table. Looking at the lozenge of her nail, Peter thought about the soft pad on the other side. The pause grew longer. Peter waited. She turned to him with a dimmed smile, as when the edge of a cloud passes over the sun.
“I’m going to visit my sister,” she said. “She just had a baby, a girl named Clementine.” She laughed. “It’s going to be a little strange being Aunt Holly.”
Holly.
“My sister’s living with my father at his house. It’s in the hills behind Malibu. My sister and I lived in L.A. when we were little, but then my parents got divorced when I was three and my sister was five, and my mother took us back to Chicago, where she was from. My father was a director. Once in a while, he still rolls down the hills and goes into town to let some old producer pal buy him lunch. Mostly, though, he spends his time drinking schnapps and reading detective stories.” She paused. “He made some okay pictures,” she said. She paused again, before continuing. “We’re a little cross with my sister. She naturally didn’t think it was really necessary to have a husband to go along with the baby. The father is living with somebody else in Hawaii. He’s all excited about the kid and was in the room for the delivery. The only thing that surprises me is that he didn’t insist on his girlfriend’s being there, too.” She sighed, then looked at Peter. “Hey, here I am telling you all my family problems and I haven’t known you for five minutes.”
She smiled and studied him. She was looking at his eyes and he looked back at hers. Then their focus shifted, and they were looking into the other’s eyes, rather than just at the surfaces. For that instant, Peter felt that the whole universe simply stopped, as if its entire purpose had been to whip out its material until it had reached this perfect point of equilibrium. They both forced their eyes to dart away, and matter and time took up where they had left off.
Holly insisted that Peter tell her something about his family and his childhood, despite his protests that it was all very dull. He had grown up in New Jersey and had two older sisters, and he was the son of a business executive and a mother who was passionate about three things (aside from her husband): her children, her charities, and her garden. Holly succeeded in forcing Peter to talk about corporate finance and she actually managed to seem interested in it. He even showed her a tombstone ad in the paper announcing a deal he had worked on. Holly, meanwhile, was not really sure about her career; right now she was teaching high school math in the Dominican Republic, and this was inspiring on some days and incredibly depressing on others. She got to New York fairly often because her aunt lived there. They talked about a lot of things. And for periods they were quiet. She read and he looked at spreadsheets. Then one of them would say something, speaking the words aloud as naturally as he or she had thought them. They would talk for a time and then once again fall into a friendly, active silence. As in a painting, the negative space counted.
“Well,” Holly said after a long period of quiet, “that’s enough of Hans for a while.” She turned to Peter. “Have you ever read this?”
“Yes,” Peter said. “It’s a Bildungsroman.”
“Correct.”
“Do you like it?” Peter asked.
Holly thought for a moment. “Do I like it? I don’t know. It’s not exactly one of those books you ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ Reading it, I feel as if I’m attending a very, very long religious ceremony, which sometimes seems ridiculous and at other times is tremendously absorbing and disorienting. But ‘liking,’ as in ‘enjoying,’ doesn’t really come into it.
“I guess I do like being plunged into this totally serious—even if it does have its ironic bits—profound, ultraprofound consideration of all the big things. Life, love, death, art, freedom, authority. It’s like being transported to a different planet. And then, when you think about what eventually really did happen to Europe, it’s hard to complain that it’s portentous.”
“I totally agree,” Peter said. “But I have to admit that the thing that struck me most, even though I knew that I was supposed to be thinking about all that big stuff, the thing that struck me most was—”
“Second breakfast,” Holly interposed.
“That’s right!” said Peter. “That’s right! How did you know?”
“Well, come on,” Holly said. “Who reads that they have a meal at the sanatorium called ‘second breakfast’ and doesn’t think that, tuberculosis or not, it sounds like paradise? With a mild case like Hans’s? It would definitely be worth it.”
Two minds with but one thought! Peter felt faint, but he carried on.
“Where are you now?”
“I just finished the snowstorm.”
“My favorite part.”
“A little gruesome. The dream about the old ladies dismembering a child …”
“Yes,” said Peter. “But, you know, despite that sort of thing and the incredible thick soup of philosophizing, I was surprised that the book does have moments that are romantic, actually. When Hans is thinking about Clavdia’s wrists. And even though she is a complete drag, you can see how she gets under his skin. The love thing, it manages to sprout a few blades through the cement.”
Holly turned toward him and tilted her head. “So you’re a romantic?” she asked.
Peter blushed. He couldn’t answer or look at her. Eventually, clenching his hands together and staring in front of him, he managed to say. “I guess. Kind of”
He could see Holly out of the corner of his eye, still looking at his profile.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s not a fair question to ask a male. Sorry. But anyway … me, too.”
Peter turned to her. “Could I see the book for a second?” he asked. She handed it to him, and he flipped through the section she was reading.
“Here it is,” he said. “Here’s the line I remember, a couple of pages back. Since it’s italicized, it’s easy to find.” He swallowed and then read. “‘For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts’”
“Yes, that’s the one,” Holly said.
They were silent for a time. Holly’s hands were resting in her lap, with the back of one in the palm of the other. Slightly bent and turned upward, her fingers looked like fronds. Eventually, to Peter’s relief, for he feared that he had put a permanent stop to the conversation, she asked him what book he was reading now (David Copperfield, which he explained that he had never gotten around to as a boy), and after talking about that they ranged over a number of topics: hockey, why famines occur less frequently under a democratic system of government, more about her family, the schools they had attended, the music they liked (a striking conformity of taste in that crucial area), the differences between Third and Second avenues, books, TV shows of their childhood, economic growth rates in Scandinavia and the Netherlands …
So while the plane cruised over the flat, unchanging Midwest, the prairies and the desert, Peter was in a state of serenity and bliss. The spark had flashed, but there was no explosion. Rather, all had undergone an invisible change of state like magnetization. As soon as they had begun talking, all the momentousness of the occasion had melted away and he had felt unconsciously happy. He looked out the window and saw the mighty and forbidding Rocky Mountains. Mighty and forbidding? Maybe to Lewis and Clark. He was soaring thirty thousand feet above them.
How did he feel? It was interesting. He felt sort of the way he did when he floated on his back in cold ocean water on a clear hot day and aligned his body with the sun. The cold wavelets lapped up against him; the sun warmed his face, and he felt deliciously stimulated and calm. They had not talked about anything particularly intimate. They had not fused their identities with the force of smashed atoms. They had come together as simply as two flowers intertwining. How happy he felt. And then, once again, that wet-blanket voice piped up in the back of his head, telling him that it was absurd to feel “happy” under these circumstances. He didn’t know this young woman at all. In relations with another person, “happiness” is not the by-product of superficial impressions. Rather, “happiness,” so-called, in a committed relationship was the result of grueling, arduous, unrelenting effort. Maintaining a committed relationship is hard. It requires courage, forbearance, stamina, sacrifice. A useful comparison would be working in a leper colony. The notion that you could meet a beautiful and sympathetic young woman on an airplane and chat with her about the subtle differences between Third and Second avenues and that this could produce “happiness” that was any more meaningful than the happiness produced by licking an ice cream cone, this notion was, frankly, rather childish. And in any event, if he thought that his life could be “fixed” by another person, rather than by dedication to his own growth, then he was sadly mistaken. Peter knew this argument. He knew it very well. And he knew that he was in love with the beautiful, sympathetic young woman beside him and that his life would be changed forever.
Peter looked at her. She was explaining something to him about Mary Queen of Scots. “So,” she said, “she was visiting Darnley’s bedside and a couple of hours after she left, the house he was staying in blew up, and it was obviously Bothwell …” When Holly talked, she moved her hands, as if she were juggling, a trait that Peter found endearing.
And did not the question of lust come into it? Yes. Usually, desire made him feel more tense than a sapper defusing a bomb. Curiously, in this case he felt different. He didn’t feel the incredible excitement mixed with terror that one succumbs to when anticipating the possibility of sleeping with a woman for the first time. Rather, he felt desirous, infatuated, stimulated but not agitated—as if he were anticipating sleeping with a woman for the second time. It all seemed so right, certain and pleasurable. He looked at her hands, now in her lap again, and the V-shaped creases made in her jeans by her crossed legs, and the curve of her hips, which was barely perceptible.
“Hey! You’re not listening,” Holly said.
“Uh … uh … yes, I was! Uh … Ridolfi … you know … Ridolfi—”
“Well, you seemed to be thinking about something else.”
The pressure in the cabin changed. The captain had made the announcement that they were beginning their descent. A general stirring rippled through the passengers, sounds of clasps opening and closing and papers being redistributed. The atmosphere had changed literally and figuratively. The shadows, figuratively, were getting longer and there was a little chill in the air and the sun was setting earlier—all announcing to Peter the end of the warm, fat, unchanging summer days that had been his for the past few hours. Their time was up.
Accordingly, the moment had come to ask Holly her full name, her address, and her phone number, and to ask her if he could call her sometime. All that. Yet it seemed so contrived, and embarrassing and horrible and jarring, to introduce a “dating” note into their sweet communion: Can I call you? Yuck. They belonged together like the ocean and the shore. To present himself to her as a guy who wanted to buy her dinner at a Mexican restaurant would ruin the state of grace they had miraculously achieved. But there was no way around it, he would have to say something. He tried to put the words together in his mind and finally he settled on a formulation. He took a deep breath. He cleared his throat.
“I guess we’re going to land soon,” he said. “I wonder if, when you’re back in the city sometime—”
“No, look,” she said, “how long will you be here?”
“Uh … I’m sorry?”
“How long are you going to be in Los Angeles?”
“Um, until the end of the week, actually.”
“Do you think you’ll have any evenings free?” Holly asked.
“I think so—”
“Then would you like to come out to my father’s for dinner some night?”
Peter detected vulnerability in Holly’s eyes. Her voice had the slightest quaver. His own nervousness was immediately replaced by a desire to reassure her.
“That would be great!” he said. “I would love to do that!”
“Great!” Holly said.
“How should we—”
“Why don’t you call me and tell me what night is good? I can promise you that whenever it is we won’t have any plans.”
“Okay, sure,” said Peter. He made a searching movement with his hands and glanced around for a moment. “Oh, my book, it’s in my briefcase, up in the thing …”
They both looked about them.
“Here,” said Holly, “let me borrow your pencil.” Peter had been making notes with one of those plastic mechanical pencils, and he handed this to Holly. She opened her book and wrote something on the title page, which she then tore out. “Here you go,” she said. “There’s the number.”
Peter looked at the page. Under the title she had written “Holly” and a phone number below it.
“Good. Thanks,” Peter said. He folded the paper and put it in his shirt pocket.
“You can call us basically anytime,” said Holly. “My father gets up at five, but Alex and I are night owls, and with the baby, who knows.”
“Okay. I may have a dinner thing tomorrow,” Peter said, “but the next night? I don’t know how late I might have to work, but I’m pretty sure there isn’t anything—”
“That sounds good,” said Holly.
“Anyway, I’ll give you a call.”
They exchanged a couple of eager, flirtatious glances.
The plane landed and Peter and Holly collected their things and walked down the aisle together. Walking down the aisle together, he thought. Someday, he would mention this to her. They passed by the food courts and tie shops on the way to the baggage claim area, where they waited for the carousel to begin to turn. Finally, its great scales shuddered into motion, and Peter watched the passengers’ mostly rather sad-looking suitcases process before him. They were made of black and red synthetic fabric and had large silver plates with Frenchified brand names; they had wheels and plastic handles, and they were full, Peter was certain, of heartbreakingly banal possessions, underpants with dead elastics. Then, curling into view, there came a boxy suitcase made of leather the color of butterscotch sauce. “Oh,” Holly said, “there’s mine.” Peter heaved the suitcase off the carousel for her.
“Do you see yours?” Holly asked. Peter looked and immediately saw his garment bag. His heart sank as he watched it approach, unstoppably. He knew that as soon as it reached him, Holly and he would part. “There it is,” he said, and picked up the bag. Now the two looked at each other once more. He knew it: as soon as she left his sight, the world would close up over her, the way a pond closes up over a pebble that’s thrown into it, and she would be lost. He would even begin to wonder if she had ever existed.
“I guess I better get my rental car,” he said.
“Dad ordered a car for me,” said Holly. “I guess it should be outside.”
They looked at each other. The carousel continued to turn. A couple of times, they both began and halted a movement to embrace. Then Holly lightly pressed the fingers of her right hand against the breast pocket of his suit jacket, which was right above the breast pocket of his shirt, which was right above his heart.
“Call me about dinner,” she said. “Dad can make his specialty. I hope you like goat.”
“I do! I mean, I’m sure I would, if I’d ever eaten it.”
Holly dropped her arm down and he caught her fingers in his left hand, held them for a second, and let them go.
So long, he said. Bye, she said. She picked up her suitcase and walked away, turned once after she had gone a few yards to smile back at him, continued on; and then Peter lost her in the crowd.
Peter took a deep breath. He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to fix a picture of Holly in his mind. Then he slipped two fingers into his shirt pocket and felt the page from the paperback; then he patted his jacket in that spot a couple of times. He stood still a moment. And now he had to begin to collect his thoughts. He checked that he had everything. His laptop, his briefcase, his garment bag. He slung the laptop case over his shoulder and picked up the other two, the regulation battle array for the traveling businessman. He started off, looking for the signs that would point him to the rental car agencies. The trail wasn’t well marked, and he got turned around a couple of times, and when he finally did find the right place he looked at his watch and realized he better call the Los Angeles office and his own office to check messages. So he put down all his stuff and got out his primitive cell phone. A meeting had been changed. Back in New York, somebody needed some numbers. Now he had to decide: it would actually be a waste of time to call the person in New York. But he would look efficient if he called from the airport. So he did, and he and his colleague had a pointless discussion that nevertheless made them both feel better about having “touched base.” Peter had, he thought, conveyed proper on-the-ballness. He made two other arguably unnecessary calls. Taking a small notebook out of his briefcase, he used the plastic mechanical pencil to scribble some reminders to himself and then clipped the pencil inside his shirt pocket. It didn’t occur to him that Holly had just held that pencil, for by now his mind was like a set that had been struck and entirely rebuilt for a new scene. He couldn’t think about Holly when he was thinking about all the expectations he had to meet over several different time horizons. Most immediately, there were the logistics of renting the car and driving to his hotel, a nontrivial challenge in this city. Then there was his schedule for the next couple of days. He had it all recorded in several places, but he could not help going over it again and again, re-solving the same problems of how he would get from one meeting to another on time, girding himself for the possibility that a client might actually ask him a question, refiguring some calculations. Lurking behind these thoughts were worries about a couple of matters that he knew he hadn’t attended to properly. Still further forward in time, he had to consider how the results of this trip would play in New York. And then there were the projects that were to come to fruition within the next few months. And, finally, while he stood there in line for his rental car, his thoughts leapt all the way ahead to the rest of his life and career.
At the counter now, he listened as the attendant in her tie and vest explained that there was a problem with his reservation. He accepted the offer to go bigger for the same amount and signed in all the appropriate places. Before moving on, he checked again: garment bag, laptop, briefcase. Wallet. Credit card back in wallet. Contract in inside jacket pocket. Map from the rental-car counter. The drive into Los Angeles was not too bad. Stuck in traffic, he remembered something else he needed to do and awkwardly jotted that down on his map. He got off at the right exit, although he suddenly had to cross several lanes of traffic to do so. He found the huge intersections nerve-wracking. Twice, coming from both directions, he overshot his hotel. But finally he arrived.
He checked in. The clerk handed Peter a large envelope that had been hand-delivered, documents and binders sent over from the Los Angeles office, and, following a well-practiced script, he described some of the hotel’s special services and its various breakfast offerings. “I very much hope you enjoy your stay with us,” the clerk said. In his room, Peter hung up his jacket. Sitting on the bed, he returned more calls. On one, he had to dance around a bit. Then he lowered his back on the bed. He took a deep breath. He squeezed his eyes shut. And then, as if there had been music playing all this time, particularly beautiful music, which he had been too distracted to notice, Holly came into his mind. Now he swelled with a simple, single feeling. All his worries melted away. A picture of Holly appeared. She was standing on a scrubby, dusty California hillside and the late afternoon sun caressed her face. She was smiling at him. Maybe … he wondered … would she have gotten home? … maybe he could call her right now?
Lying there on his back and staring at the ceiling, Peter became aware of the left side of his chest, the place under his shirt pocket. He felt the pressure of Holly’s fingers there. He wondered … he wondered if he could possibly feel the weight of a folded piece of paper in his shirt pocket? Of course not. He lay on his back looking at the ceiling and thinking about Holly, about the page from The Magic Mountain, the title page, on which she had written “Holly” and her father’s phone number. He lay on his back staring at the ceiling and thinking about these things. He was preparing to lift his right hand and retrieve the page. He paused before doing so. He paused a little longer.
Then he did lift his right hand and inserted the index and middle fingers into his shirt pocket. The starched oxford cloth felt surprisingly rough and sharp. He waggled his fingers inside the pocket; he didn’t feel a piece of paper. He waggled his fingers again, and then he put his hand down by his side. Still lying on his back and staring at the ceiling, he took a couple of deep breaths. All the blood seemed to drain from his body. The piece of paper was gone.
He knew that within seconds his heart would race and his nerves crackle; for the moment, though, he felt the odd, stunned serenity of a condemned man. Now, using both hands to keep the pocket open, he looked inside. He turned the pocket inside out. The piece of paper was lost, there was no doubt about that. Peter would surely conduct a frantic and thorough search. Like a drunk desperate to find enough change for a drink, he would turn out all the pockets of his clothes, where he would find all those little pieces of paper that he had accumulated during his trip. “Not valid for flight.” He would rifle through the documents in his briefcase and then, with steely patience, turn them over one by one. He would slide his hands around the various plastic sleeves of his laptop case, finding errant pens and business cards. He would retrace his steps to the front desk and then to his car, where he would unfold and refold and unfold his rental car contract and open the trunk. Then, returning to his room, he would in one last frenzy strip out every article of clothing in his garment bag and search through all the pockets and every pleat and cuff. He would even look in the pockets of the shirts that were still in the plastic bag from the cleaners. Magicians did things like that, didn’t they? The card you picked would appear inside another sealed deck, or an apple?
All of this would be completely useless, he knew, but he would do it. He stared at the ceiling. He closed his eyes. He could see the printed words on the page clearly. As for the handwriting, he could remember its general look and the space it took up, but he could not picture anything specific, except the name: “Holly.”
Holly.
1 (#ulink_7aeefb8b-479a-54f2-8f29-79a41ca8eb63)
For its entire history, the firm of Beeche and Company, which could trace its origins to New Amsterdam, had engaged solely in one commercial activity: trading. At no time had it cultivated or mined or manufactured any good; it acted, rather, as merchant, factor, broker, financier. At its beginnings, it imported the axes that it traded for wampum, which it traded for beaver skins, which it sold for export. Later on, it bought corn and wheat from the farms of the north and sent its ships laden with them to the Caribbean, where they exchanged their cargo for sugar, rum, molasses, and indigo, which, on the ships’ return, Beeche re-exported to the east and west; sometimes, the eastbound ships, after first calling in Britain or France, traveled down to the African coast and then sailed back across the Atlantic with cargo that was human. Beeche was among the first in New York to trade commercial and government paper, and as the years passed it added the securities of banks, then of railroads, then of manufacturers, to its repertoire. By the turn of the last century the firm had grown into a large financial enterprise with thousands of employees, branches throughout the world, and a dozen divisions. Yet its basic business remained the same: trading for its own benefit and brokering the trades of others. No Beeche had touched a plow or a hammer for centuries, nor had he employed anyone who did.
Unlike its competitors, Beeche was still owned by its founding family; no partners had been invited in, nor had shares been sold to the public. Moreover, the Beeches had passed the company down roughly according to the right of primogeniture (although there had been times when women had run it—Dorothea Beeche famously made a killing in the Panic of 1819), so the ownership had remained concentrated. Since it was a private firm, no outsider could easily judge what Beeche and Company was worth, but it typically ranked at the top as an underwriter, and it was legendary for its ability to make huge bets and refuse to fold when the markets (temporarily) turned against it, so its capital must have been very substantial.
Apart from the firm, there were, of course, other sources of Beeche wealth, and their value was even harder to determine. The Beeches, for example, had acquired land continuously, and it was said that they had never sold an acre, but the extent of their holdings was unknown, as they had long since stopped using their own name in making a purchase. Then there were the collections of antiquities, paintings, sculpture, furniture, manuscripts, tapestries, books. Always patrons of American cabinetmakers and silversmiths, the Beeches also took shopping sprees in Europe that had preceded those of other Americans by a couple of generations. One of the Beeches had made a practice of providing liquidity to embarrassed maharajahs by buying their jewels; in the 1940s and 1950s, another had accepted paintings in lieu of rent from impoverished artists living in Beeche properties in lower Manhattan. Nor was it possible to say how much money the Beeches had given away. From the earliest Spastic Hospital through settlement houses on the Lower East Side to the newest program to eliminate malaria, they had exerted themselves philanthropically, usually with the right hand kept ignorant of what the left was doing.
Yet while precision might be elusive, it could be said with confidence, in a general way, that the Beeche fortune was vast.
The incumbent Beeche was named Arthur (as most of his predecessors had been). His legacy, with all its attendant powers and duties, had come to him at the age of forty. He was now fifty-three. One wet morning in June, Arthur Beeche was being driven from his house on Fifth Avenue to Beeche and Company’s headquarters on Gold Street. He had left at his usual time, four-fifteen, and at that hour the trip took ten minutes. Rory, the chauffeur, had minded Arthur since he was a little boy and, on account of his employer’s generosity and good advice, and his own shrewdness, he had acquired his own fortune. Right now he was making a big bet on volatility, as he told Arthur on the way downtown. They arrived at the Beeche Building, an enormous new edifice. The rain had made black patches and streaks on its slate cladding. Rory opened the car door for Arthur and scampered to open the door of the building. Although he was a large man, Arthur moved in a kind of shimmer, as if an invisible force were conveying him a finger’s width above the ground. “Good morning, Mr. Beeche,” said a security guard. Arthur smiled and said, “Good morning, Ignazio.” He shimmered over to his private elevator, and Ignazio pushed the button for him; the doors opened instantly. “How’s your little boy doing?” Arthur asked. “The first-grader.”
“Oh! Good, Mr. Beeche,” said Ignazio. “Very good.”
“Did he get glasses?”
“Yes, sir. It’s a big help.”
“That’s swell,” said Arthur. “But the other children don’t tease him?”
“Oh no. Maybe a little, but not so bad.”
“I’m glad to hear such a positive report,” Arthur said, entering the elevator. “See you tomorrow, Ignazio. Take care of yourself.”
“Yes, sir. You too, sir,” said Ignazio. “Don’t fight the tape!”
Arthur laughed. This was a little joke of theirs. “I’ll try not to!” he replied.
When Arthur got off on the seventy-seventh floor, a beautifully groomed woman, Miss Harrison, was there to meet him. She carried a folder full of correspondence. As they walked toward his office, he and Miss Harrison talked quietly about how Asia had closed. They passed by some empty desks, through a well-furnished anteroom, and then into Arthur’s office proper. It was large and decorated in the expensive but reserved style of a masculine upstairs sitting room in one of Arthur’s houses. There were three large paintings and several smaller ones. Arthur changed these regularly, enjoying the chance to study his pictures during his long hours at work.
He sat at his desk, which was bare of any papers. Miss Harrison placed the folder in front of him. She brought his attention to several matters. “Thank you, Miss Harrison,” he said, and she withdrew.
Arthur Beeche was six feet three inches tall and was powerfully built. He had a large head with a flat brow; his black hair had always been rather thin and, combed straight back, enough of it now remained only to cover his skull. The most striking thing about Arthur’s appearance may have been his mouth, which was incongruously sensitive-looking for the thick superstructure of his jaw and cheekbones. Today he wore a gray suit with a thin, faint red check, cut in the English style.
Arthur was thinking about something that he had not been able to get out of his mind since he first put the suit on that morning: his tailor had died. This event saddened and preoccupied Arthur. He was, naturally, concerned about finding someone who would make his clothes as skillfully. But he wasn’t thinking about that. The news was taking an emotional toll on Arthur, for his tailor had been a particular friend.
Sam Harrison (someone at Ellis Island had given his father, a Russian Jew, the same name as Arthur’s aide, who was a Harrison of Virginia) had become a Communist in the 1930s and had remained one. The greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, to his mind, had been the Normandy invasion. By the time the Allies had finally opened the second front, Sam always insisted, even Stalin had come to think that the Soviets could defeat Hitler alone, which would have secured all of Western Europe for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The very rich men of affairs among Sam’s clients took pleasure in it when he ranted against capitalism: the irony and humor of being abused by your incredibly expensive Communist tailor was delectable. Meanwhile, the idle men of fashion who patronized Sam all more or less agreed with him.
While Arthur’s fellow plutocrats treated Sam with amused, condescending patience, Arthur talked with him frankly and seriously. He didn’t relish the incongruity of paying someone to make his suits who, theoretically, would just as soon have seen him guillotined; his mind didn’t work that way. He disagreed with Sam and said so forthrightly, taking Sam’s opinions at face value, and Sam treated Arthur’s with the same respect, and as a result, as they argued over the years, they became better and better friends. What especially bound them together, though, were their discussions on a topic that was dearer to Sam even than politics: his wife, Miriam. He had married when he was twenty and his bride was seventeen, and he thought then, as he thought now, that Miriam was the most beautiful woman in the world (and he was not deluded in this). He had three sons and two daughters and many grandchildren and even a couple of great-grandchildren: he had loved them all and they had all made him proud (well, one of his daughters had married that pisher, but they got rid of him). But most of all, there was Miriam, a tall woman with long auburn hair and a sweet voice and even sweeter disposition. Sam loved her.
Now, Arthur had also loved his wife. They had fallen in love when he was twenty and she was seventeen, but, unlike the Harrisons, they were not married until several years later (and for that occasion, Sam had made Arthur a new morning coat for free). Without question, that had been the happiest day of Arthur’s life. As he said his vows, his voice cracked and he wept. He and Maria (pronounced with a long “i”) had been married for sixteen years, and he loved her throughout all that time and he loved her now. But she had died of cancer at age forty (at her most beautiful, Arthur and others believed). As he had been purely happy on his wedding day, so he was in pure despair on the day that Maria died. If the sun had burnt out and the seas dried up, Arthur might have been mildly troubled. Maria’s death made him distraught.
The person who best understood what had happened to Arthur was Sam Harrison. “It’s a tough break, kid,” Sam had said. Arthur had trembled.
“You know, Sam,” he had said hoarsely, “I have to travel a lot. The worst thing about it was always leaving her. But it was almost worth it because of how wonderful it was to see her again.” Arthur had been unable to speak for a moment. “Now I won’t see her again.” He had looked at Sam and saw the loose skin under his chin quiver and his eyes, each studded with a mole at the lower lid, begin to water. Sam held Arthur’s arm. “Yeetgadal v’yeetkadash sh’mey rabbah,” he had whispered. “B’olmo d’vero keerutey.” Arthur had not understood the words, nor had he fully grasped the significance of an atheistic Marxist’s uttering a prayer, but he appreciated the sentiment.
Sam and Arthur had always talked about Miriam and Maria, and they continued to long after Maria’s death. Years later, Arthur would ask Sam about Miriam, and Sam would grin and say, “Well, the other day …” But he would pause and look at Arthur, who would look back at him in the three-way mirror. Then Sam would say, “You’re still thinking about her.” And Arthur would say yes, and he would tell Sam some memory he had recently had about Maria—the soup in Madrid, her salamander brooch.
Maria was dead. They had had no children; Arthur himself had been an only child. His father was dead and now old Sam Harrison was dead. Arthur rose and looked out the window. The rising sun gave the rain clouds a dull glow. More cars had appeared. In a typical office building, even on a floor at this height, you could hear traffic, especially the slithering sound of tires on wet asphalt; typically, on a stormy day on a floor this high, the wind created spooky sonic reverberations and the building actually swayed. Arthur’s office was different. He heard no traffic or wuthering wind, and he felt no swaying. In his office, all was quiet, still. From his vantage he could see a dozen other buildings, and he thought about all the people who would soon be arriving for work. They constituted a lot of energy, activity money. A lot of life. Arthur did not wonder what it was all for. It seemed obvious to him what it was all for. His own life was busy and full. He had good friends; his mother was still alive and he was close to her. But he felt heavyhearted and alone.
A few hours later on that same June morning, a meeting was taking place on the fifty-ninth floor of the Beeche Building. It was in the small conference room, the one with no windows. One of the participants in the meeting, indeed its central figure, was a young man named Peter Russell. Peter was thirty-two years old; he had been working for Beeche and Company since his graduation from college, and he had advanced nicely. Despite the doubts he sometimes entertained about the value of his work, he had enjoyed it, he had enjoyed his success, and he had enjoyed his high pay.
On this morning, though, Peter was quite unhappy. In fact, he was at this moment the unhappiest he had ever been during his entire time at Beeche. The meeting, which he had gone into with enthusiasm, had become a savage, grotesque spectacle in which he was the victim. His tormentors had poured hot lead down his throat, cut off his private parts and stuck them in his mouth, and now, while he was still alive, they were tying each of his limbs to four different horses before sending the horses galloping off in four directions. Peter had fixed his face with an interested, wry expression while he listened to his colleagues, but he knew he was blushing bright red and that he was fooling no one. He felt sweat trickling down from his armpits.
It had all come about like this. A few weeks earlier, after a couple of his patrons had been shifted to different offices around the world, Peter had found himself working for a boss whom he didn’t know well. The things he’d heard about Gregg Thropp were not encouraging. Thropp was a short, stocky fellow, and he displayed all the Napoleonic traits so common among those of his physical type. He was driven, ambitious, self-important. When he walked, he moved his stubby legs so fast that even the long-legged had to work to keep up. Peter could see for himself that Thropp was insulting and rude to those below him. Others had warned him that Thropp was a devious, lying, backstabbing worm.
Yet toward Peter, Thropp hadn’t acted badly at all. To the contrary! Thropp had treated Peter with courtesy. He’d shown Peter respect in meetings. He’d given Peter credit when it was due him and encouraged and praised him, calling him “Champ.” Oh, sure, sometimes he could be pretty blunt, but it was hard to see what was so bad about Gregg Thropp. Peter had come to trust Thropp so much that he even went into Thropp’s office one day to show him something that had made Peter especially proud. He had played an important part in a couple of notably profitable transactions that had come to fruition when he was working for Thropp but that had been initiated previously. On this day Peter had discovered a small square envelope in his interoffice mail; inside, there was a handwritten note from Arthur Beeche himself! The note read as follows:
Dear Mr. Russell,
Please accept my congratulations on your fine work in the reinsurance and Italian bond matters. Well done!
Yours very truly,
Arthur Beeche
P.S. I hope you will join us soon for one of our entertainments.
Well, as one might imagine, Peter had been bowled over. A personal note from Arthur Beeche! What was more, it looked as if Peter was in line to receive an invitation to dinner at Beeche’s house. Arthur entertained often, and his dinners were legendary for the quality of the food and drink and for the glamour of the guests. A few people from the firm were usually included, and to receive your first invitation was an important honor. You were supposed to act nonchalant about it, but Peter had been so amazed and pleased that he’d taken the note into Thropp’s office and showed it to him.
“Well, well, well!” Thropp had said. “The Champ scores!” He had stood up and begun to lift and lower his arms in front of him, an absurd-looking motion for one so short. “Come on! The wave! The wave!” Thropp did this a few times before he started laughing too hard to continue. When he had recovered, he had looked at Peter earnestly.
“I’m proud of you, Peter,” Thropp had said. “I really am. One thing you can sure say about Arthur Beeche is that he has his eye out for talent. You’ve done good work and you deserve to be noticed. Congratulations.”
Thropp had held out his hand and Peter shook it.
“When I’m working for you,” Thropp had continued, “and it looks like that’ll be any day now, you won’t screw me, will you?”
They had both laughed.
Thropp wasn’t such a bad guy!
A few days later, Thropp had wandered into Peter’s office, looking thoughtful. “Say, Peter,” he had said, “you know your idea about securitizing home equity? I’d like to have a meeting on it.”
“Really?” said Peter. “But, God, it’s such a big thing, and it was just something I was fooling around with. I don’t think it’s anywhere near ready for a meeting.”
“Oh, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Just Huang, Kelly, Matt, you know, people like that.”
“But—”
“I’ve been thinking about it. There are a lot of possibilities. Let’s kick it around. Be a good thing for the team. Get some juices going.”
So it had been agreed that in a few days a meeting would be held at which Peter would give a presentation on his idea. This was the aforementioned meeting, which had descended into a bloodthirsty dance of death.
Peter had gotten a jolt as soon as he had entered the conference room. First of all, the place was already full, which was suspicious. Then he noticed that he didn’t see Huang, Kelly, Matt, or any of his other friends. Where was T.J.? T.J. should have been there! Peter barely knew some of the attendees. More troubling still, a man and woman from Upstairs were sitting in a corner of the room, away from the table. The man, a trim, fortyish black guy, was wearing his jacket even though everyone else was in shirtsleeves. The woman, in her fifties, sat there with an imperious, pre-bored expression. Peter had never met them, but he knew who they must be. He set up his computer and its connections; he noticed that his hands were shaking.
Thropp had begun the meeting. “Welcome, everyone.” He nodded toward the man and woman. “Rich, Andrea, thanks for taking the time to come down.” He rubbed his hands together. “Well, now, we’re all here to listen to Peter tell us about his new idea. Peter has been quite mysterious about it, playing it close to the vest, so I can’t tell you much about what he’s cooked up. He tells me it has the potential to be something very big. I’d usually want to spend some time going over a presentation like this myself, but Peter was so insistent on having a meeting that I said okay just to get him off my back!” Mild chuckles.
Thropp turned to Peter with a smile and gestured to him. “Go ahead, Peter,” he said. “It’s your meeting.”
This isn’t right, Peter thought. His heart began to pound. “Thank you, Gregg,” he said with a quaver.
What he had to say was very preliminary, he explained, and he had only a few slides to show. Then he had gone through it all: What is the greatest source of wealth in the country? The equity people have in their houses. Over the past twenty years, the debt on people’s houses had been securitized, providing a great benefit to borrowers and investors—and the firms in the middle. In Peter’s view, the mortgage market looked shaky. Would there be a way of securitizing home equity? Say a homeowner could sell some of the equity in his house. There could be individual transactions (after all, each mortgage is individual), and you could bundle up those equity stakes just as in the mortgage-backed market. Think of the advantages: home buyers would have an alternative to debt; homeowners could pay down debt and benefit from a rise in prices without selling their houses or borrowing more; they could diversify, buying equity in houses in different markets from their own. With the home equity securities would come hedging opportunities: people could short their own houses if they were in a bubble, and there would be any number of derivative plays. It would spread risk around, make the market more efficient. Then imagine the money you could make if you were the first to come up with such a product.
Peter liked his idea even though it was at only the fantasy stage, and as he spoke he couldn’t help but become more enthusiastic about it; this excitement combined with his anxiety made for a great agitation within him, as he allowed himself to think that he might possibly have carried others along.
He hadn’t. After he finished, saying, “Well, that’s about it. As I mentioned, it’s all very preliminary,” there was silence. A cough. A rustle of papers. Some taps of a pencil. Another cough.
Thropp spread out his hands. “Reactions? Rajandran?”
Rajandran was one of Thropp’s liege men, and Peter didn’t know him well; he spoke with great precision, polishing every phoneme. “Well, I am sure we all agree that Peter has some interesting ideas.” He smiled. It was amazing how white his teeth were. “But it seems to me that he’s missed the boat on this one.” Rajandran rattled on for several minutes, enumerating all the reasons everything Peter had said was absurd. The basic premise was nonsensical. The problems with execution would be horrendous. Peter completely misunderstood the market, the simplest model would show that. And on and on. Someone—some mysterious person—had obviously briefed Rajandran on what Peter was going to say and then instructed him to prepare an informed rebuttal. Peter glanced at Thropp, who was rocking in his chair and trying to suppress a smirk. Peter thought he could hear him humming.
As soon as Rajandran finished, before Peter could even begin to respond, someone else piped up. “You know, of course, Peter, that a futures market for housing prices was tried in London and was a complete disaster.” Another case of advance research!
“Yes,” Peter said, “but, really, there was a marketing problem—”
“Marketing problem!” his antagonist said sarcastically. “You want the firm to spend billions of dollars to redo the economics of housing—and you think a few ads will make the difference?” A snicker traveled the room.
A third henchman joined in. “What about the owner’s balance sheet?”
And then each member of the trio simply began to fire away: “Look at the piss-poor reaction to the Chicago Merc product.” “Wouldn’t insurance make more sense?” “Is it stochastic?”
Peter tried to answer (“… preliminary, something that would need to be looked at, I can’t be sure, um, uh …”). And then he just sat there listening, trying to look unfazed despite his red face and the sweat trickling down from his armpits. Finally, the bloodlust of his tormentors seemed to have been sated.
“Anyone else?” Thropp asked. When no one spoke, he turned to Peter. “Well, Champ, I guess you’re a few bricks shy of a load.”
The man and woman from Upstairs had whispered to each other and gotten out of their seats and were now leaving. They gave a nod to Thropp, who said, “Rich, Andrea, we’ll try to give you a better show next time.”
Peter’s head throbbed. He felt rage and shame. He knew that he was putrefying before everyone’s eyes. A nauseous odor was beginning to arise from him, the putrescent stench of failure. From this moment on, people would slip by him quickly in the halls; they would respond to his phone messages and e-mails in the most perfunctory way; they would edge toward the walls when they found themselves in the same room with him. Even if some of them knew that Peter had been set up, they would treat him as one infected with the plague; it was enough that somebody very senior had wanted to lay a trap for him and that he had fallen into it.
“Okay, everybody,” Thropp was saying. “That’s it.” Then he turned to Peter with hooded, menacing eyes. “My office. Five minutes.”
When Peter presented himself at Thropp’s office, he found Thropp rocking in his chair with his folded hands on his stomach; he wore gold cuff links the size of quarters.
“Ah, Russell, come in,” he said.
Peter stood in front of the desk. Thropp didn’t invite him to sit.
“Quite an interesting meeting,” Thropp said.
Peter nodded.
“Yes, quite interesting,” Thropp said. “Tell me, Russell, do you like walnuts?”
There was a large bowl of walnuts sitting on Thropp’s desk, but this non sequitur bewildered Peter. He shrugged.
“Go ahead and pick out a couple,” said Thropp.
Indifferently, Peter picked up two walnuts.
“Take a look at them.”
Peter did so.
“Now give them to me,” Thropp said.
Peter handed the walnuts to Thropp, who looked at them for a moment while rolling them around in his right hand.
“Do you know what these are?” Thropp asked.
Peter shook his head.
“These are your nuts, Russell,” Thropp brayed. Still holding the walnuts in his right hand, he squeezed them so hard that his fingers turned white. “And I’ve got ’em, right here!” Then he leaned back and laughed. “Oh, it was wonderful!” he said, laughing even harder. “‘Home equity securities!’” He could hardly speak. “’Home equity securities!’” Stretching out his thumb and pinkie, he held his hand up to his head like a phone and put on a deep voice. “‘Hello, I’d like to buy one hundred shares of 487 Maple Drive.’” Thropp was laughing so hard now that tears came to his eyes. “And the look on your face when Raj got going! Oh God! Beautiful!” He laughed and laughed and wiped his eyes. “Oh, it was wonderful,” he said finally, as his laughter subsided in a sigh.
“I’m happy to have been able to give you so much pleasure,” said Peter. “But I wonder if I could ask why you’ve done this?”
“Why? Why?” Thropp’s eyes narrowed and his face went black with malice. “I’ll tell you why: I despise you.” He snorted and began to grind his teeth. “Peter Russell, so bright and attractive, everybody says. Such a hard worker, such nice guy. Top decile. Everything going for him. It makes me want to puke. Before I’m through, nobody will think you’re worth your weight in cockroach dung!” Thropp cackled. “But, oh, did you ever fall for it when I came on all lovey-dovey! Think of it, you come in here”—now he put on an effeminate voice—“‘Oh, Greggy, yoo-hoo! Look-see, I’ve got a note from Arthur Beeche!’” He fluttered his eyelashes and flapped his hands with loose wrists; then his voice became vicious again. “I’m going to destroy you, Russell.” He laughed with depraved glee. “I’m going to destroy you!”
Peter waited a moment before speaking.
“Okay, Gregg,” he said patiently. “What I’m hearing is that you despise me. Is that right?”
“Yep.”
“I’m also hearing, Gregg, that you hope to destroy me.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I see, I see.” Peter said. He furrowed his brow and thought for a moment. “Gregg, I wonder if the real issue isn’t that my skill set may not be the one you’re looking for. Under the circumstances, I’m wondering—and I’m just throwing this out—I’m wondering if it would make sense for me to transition to another spot. I’m thinking about the team, here.”
“You aren’t going anywhere. I’ve been looking forward to this too much.”
“I think, Gregg, that there might be others in the firm who—”
“Nobody’s going to save your ass, Russell. Furlanetto—you’ve crawled up her sphincter, right? Well, she’s in Switzerland for the next two years. And Mulvahey? He’s jumped ship.”
This news startled Peter.
“You didn’t know that, did you? Yeah. It’ll be out in a day or two. So when you try to run to Mommy or Daddy, there ain’t gonna be no Mommy or Daddy.”
Peter looked glum.
“Poor little Peter Russell,” Thropp said. “His ass is grass, and I’m the cow.” This didn’t sound quite the way Thropp had wanted, and he paused quizzically before continuing.
“Now, Russell, here’s the situation. I can’t get rid of you right away because I do have to cover my rear, and anyway the damn lawyers will say I’ve gotta have cause. So I need to make you look so bad, like such an idiot, that the only question people will ask is why I let you last so long. It’ll take some time, but the nice thing is that I’ll get to watch you suffer.” Thropp allowed for a dramatic pause. “I’ve come up with a little plan that, if I do say so myself, is brilliant. I’m going to give you a new assignment.” He paused again, smiling malevolently. “I’m sending you off to work for Mac McClernand.” Enjoying himself, he watched as this news sank in.
Mac McClernand. Oh no, not Mac McClernand.
McClernand was a burnt-out case whose continued employment at Beeche and Company was a mystery. Working for him was career death: you would either be lost in one of his labyrinthine schemes, never to reappear, or the association would so damage your reputation that you would be forced to leave.
Peter began to speak, but Thropp raised his hand.
“Nothing to say about it, my friend. Sent the memo already. Mac’s expecting you to report for duty today. He’s tickled pink about it. That’s exactly what he said, ‘I’m tickled pink.’” Thropp chortled. “Oh, this is going to be fun!”
Peter indulged Thropp’s laughing for a moment or two, then spoke. “Congratulations, Gregg. It’s a plan of such diabolical genius that only you could have devised it. The world has never known such villainy! Yes, Gregg, it’s a clever plan, very clever. Unfortunately, it contains one fatal flaw.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
“I actually haven’t figured it out yet, but it’ll come to me.”
Thropp laughed with still greater hysterics.
“Is that all?” Peter asked.
“Not quite. Have you seen this?” Thropp held the walnuts, one between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, displaying them to Peter like a magician. He put the nuts on the desk, rubbed his hands, then picked one up, interlaced his fingers, and worked the nut so that it was between the heels of both his palms. He squeezed, cracking the shell, and then burst out laughing again.
“How do you like that?” Thropp greedily picked some meat out of the walnut and ate it. Slivers of shell stuck to his chin.
Peter turned and began to leave.
“Hold on! Got to do the other one!” Thropp called after him. The sound of his laughter followed Peter far down the corridor.
It was a long walk back to Peter’s office. His mind raged with emotion and competing impulses. He would go above Thropp. But to whom? He would annihilate the bastard. But how? He would quit. But he had an employment contract; and besides, Beeche was the only place he wanted to work. And in two weeks, he was getting married.
Peter reached his office. Various numbers blinked on his big screen as indexes and rates changed around the world. On his computer monitor, he saw that he had a dozen e-mails. He pushed a button and they all came up, tiled one under the other. Then he noticed the large black diamond on the display of his phone: he had messages. He looked at the clock and saw that it was nearing ten o’clock. At exactly two minutes to ten, it was crucial that he be on the line to Frankfurt.
The phone rang; he could tell by the ID that it was his fiancée, Charlotte Montague.
He picked up the phone and said, “Hi there.”
“Hi, Peter!” said Charlotte. “How are you?”
“Oh … uh … I’m okay.” Peter didn’t feel like talking about his presentation, and he could already tell that Charlotte must be preoccupied with a wedding crisis, so this wasn’t the moment anyway. “How are you doing?”
“Well,” said Charlotte, “I’m fine. But the reason I called was that Mother is being completely unreasonable about the cheese. The French people just won’t understand about serving it before dinner.”
Oh. The cheese. This was serious. Peter didn’t mind, really. He knew what was expected of him in his role as bridegroom: listen patiently, show your interest, respond with sympathy, say “yes.” With the wedding only two weeks away, Charlotte’s nerves were frayed, naturally, as were her mother’s. Charlotte kept talking, and Peter had to admit that his mind had begun to wander, as he remembered the meeting and his encounter with Thropp, as he watched the lines skitter on the screen before him, and as he, inevitably, imagined what it would be like to be marrying the woman he really wished he were marrying.
Charlotte talked on. “Scalloping … Bartók.” Bartók? Then Peter could tell from her tone that she was bringing her own remarks to a close and that he would have to comment. Experience had taught him that in these situations, it was best to leave a few brain cells behind to listen, even as the rest of his mind withdrew.
These scouts gave their report, and Peter said, “God, Charlotte, of course you’re completely right about the cheese. I mean, I wouldn’t know, but I’d trust you on that more than your mother! Anyway … oh, I think that scalloping, you know, might be kind of fussy? And I really like the plan for the music, so I agree with you, we should stick with what we have. I mean, I’m sure it’s a beautiful piece—”
“Oh, good,” said Charlotte, “I knew that you’d feel that way.”
By carefully calibrating his responses, Peter hoped to show that he had given each issue due consideration and was not simply agreeing with Charlotte in order to humor her. The Bartók had raised a genuine concern: Charlotte was impressionable, and if one of her interesting musical friends suggested Bartók for the church, as seemed to have happened, there was a chance that it would be Bartók.
“Well,” Charlotte was saying now, “I’d better run. I’m sorry I won’t be able to join you tonight.”
“Me too.”
“Duty calls.”
“I know! Don’t worry about it. We all understand.”
“I’ll be sorry to miss Jonathan’s reading.” Peter’s best friend, Jonathan Speedwell, was a writer, and he was giving a reading that night from his new book of stories. Peter and Charlotte had planned to go to it and have dinner with Jonathan and his wife afterward. But Charlotte had to go to an event for her work. Charlotte liked Jonathan a lot and flirted with him in a girlish, free-spirited manner with which she did nothing else. “Did you see the review today in the paper?”
As if Peter had time to read book reviews. “No,” he said. “Was there one?”
“Oh, yes! I’ve got it right here. Let me read it to you—”
“Charlotte—” Charlotte, I’ve got to make a call, Peter was about to say. The flashing numbers. Frankfurt. But he was too late.
“Let’s see,” Charlotte said. “Oh, here we are. ‘With Intaglio, his new collection of short stories, Jonathan Speedwell once again demonstrates triumphantly that he is among our most potent younger voices writing today. In luminous silverpoint prose, he deftly renders the struggle of men and women desperate to maintain their purchase on life …’”
Deftly, Peter thought. With Jonathan it was always “deftly.”
“‘… But if there is one quality that truly marks Mr. Speedwell as a writer of distinction,’” Charlotte continued, “‘it is his deep compassion for his characters.’”
Christ. Again, the compassion-for-his-characters thing. Peter could not understand why it was such a big deal for a writer to have compassion for his characters, as opposed to, say, real people.
“‘In perhaps his most finely wrought tale, “The Copse …”’ Well, I won’t read you the whole thing. But isn’t it terrific?”
“Yes.”
“He must be very pleased. Will you congratulate him for me?”
“Of course.” Charlotte was an earnest person whose demeanor generally was almost grave. Peter imagined what she would be like as she congratulated Jonathan—winsome, crinkling her eyes and grinning.
“He’s still pleased about being best man, isn’t he?”
“Sure. I told you, the only problem is, he wants to give me away.”
“Oh.” Charlotte’s mind snagged momentarily on the word “problem.” Then she got it. “Oh! Yes. You said that. How funny.”
“Charlotte—”
“Uh-oh, that’s my other line. Sorry, I’d better take that. Thanks for your help. Have fun tonight. Call me.”
“Sure, right, okay. Bye.”
Throughout this conversation, Peter’s other phone lines had quietly burbled again and again. The black diamond seemed to become denser and denser and heavier and heavier with the weight of added messages. Staring at his screens, he saw more e-mails arrive and numbers blip and charts jitter. As usual, the clock in the upper right-hand corner barely seemed to change when he was staring at it, but then when he looked away and checked it again, he was shocked to see how far it had advanced. Still, Peter didn’t begrudge Charlotte this expenditure of his time at a pressing moment of his day. Those were the phone calls that brides made two weeks before the wedding, and they were ones a decent bridegroom would tolerate. It was part of life. And, he supposed, it was part of life to be screwed over in your job once in a while. It was part of life to see your best friend have undeserved success. It was part of life, also, not to get the girl.
Just in time, he reached Frankfurt.
Why was Peter marrying Charlotte? Why was Charlotte marrying Peter? Charlotte worked in the New York office of L’Alliance Générale et Spécifique des Pays Francophones. The AGSPF fostered economic and cultural exchange among the French-speaking peoples of the world and tried to promote the French language and Francophone civilization in all places sadly suffering from their lack. Dogged and intelligent, Charlotte had mastered the politics of Chad (Djamous, the finance minister, was on the rise, though not supported by the Quay d’Orsay) and the diplomacy of Laos. She was, it seemed, always writing a report on intra-Francophone trade. There were lots of tables. In addition to this intellectual work, Charlotte also participated in the AGSPF’s busy social life: no minor Algerian poet could pass through New York without a reception. That’s what was happening tonight. Charlotte had to attend a dinner for a Belgian economist, who had appeared in town unexpectedly.
For a time, Charlotte’s father had worked in the Paris office of a New York law firm and the family had moved there when Charlotte was seven. With this credential, she could legitimately make France her thing, which she proceeded to do. After her parents divorced, when she was sixteen, Charlotte’s father and her stepmother bought a small property in the countryside, where they went every summer and where Charlotte would visit. Charlotte majored in French and she spent two years in Paris after college.
There she had had the requisite love affair with a Frenchman, with lots of tears. Maximilien-François-Marie-Isidore had been thirty-seven, an incredibly ancient and sophisticated age for Charlotte, then twenty-two. He was always lurking in the background, supposedly poised to swoop in and carry Charlotte back to Paris forever. That never seemed to happen, but on a regular basis, heavy-smoking, black-whiskered French friends—Héli, Valéry, Claude, Hilaire-Germain, Alexandre-César-Léopold, Gilles—would pass through New York. They would take Charlotte and Peter to obscure rock clubs and talk endlessly about American bands and films and writers whom Peter had never heard of. Of course, they all spoke English perfectly, and from time to time one or the other would engage Peter in conversation, while making it evident that he was merely doing so out of politeness.
One requirement for Charlotte’s job was that she speak the language well, and she did, using all sorts of slang. Nevertheless, whenever she spoke it with a Frenchman, there was always the air that she was performing, an amateur-hour talent, rather than simply talking to someone. Whenever they went to a French restaurant, she engaged the staff in long conversations, and they were delighted. Peter—who had taken AP French!—sat there smiling uncomprehendingly for the most part. Eventually his existence would edge into the consciousness of the captain, and he would turn to Peter with an expectant smile.
“Er …” Peter would say. “Pour commencer, je voudrais prendre aussi les moules” As soon as he heard Peters accent, the captains smile would disappear and he would adopt a manner of cold courtesy while Peter, losing his way grammatically, would give the rest of his order.
“Very good, monsieur, and for the wine, shall I give you a moment to decide?” Okay, so he answered in English. Big deal. In fact, that suited Peter just fine, for somewhere deep in his Celtic-Anglo-Saxon bones, he believed that it was improper for any real man to speak French.
Another requirement of Charlotte’s job was that she dress well despite her low pay. Charlotte did dress well, if by “well” one meant fairly expensively. Her clothes were fashionable and of good quality. Yet she did not dress well, really. There always seemed to be too many flaps or folds or layers or lappets or something. She always seemed to be reaching for an effect, an effect that was neither achieved nor worth achieving and one that, even if those conditions were met, would not show Charlotte off to her best advantage. When Peter thought about Charlotte’s clothes, her stepmother, Julia, always came to mind. She was ten years older than Charlotte and was naturally chic, but as far as Peter could tell she mostly wore a skirt, cardigan, and pearls. Charlotte had always cast Julia in the role of her guide in the ways of the world. Why not simply copy Julia’s clothes? But Charlotte, with no intuitive sense of these things, was blind to the example her mentor set for her.
As with Charlotte’s clothes, so with her grooming. It was always, somehow, just a bit off. The haircut was either too severe or too full, and, in either case, had a life of its own, regardless of how determinedly brushed; the lipstick was one shade too fauvist; the nails were ragged (Julia wore clear polish on her nails and kept them shaped liked torpedoes). These superficial flaws bothered Peter much more than he thought they should. For reasons that are mysterious, some people—men and women—are always able to look well put together, stylish, suitable, whereas others, to a greater or lesser degree, fail in this. Well, so what? Some people can wiggle their ears, and other people can’t. If someone has a good heart, how can that sort of thing possibly matter? Irksomely, it did seem to matter. In a way that was more than irksome, so did Charlotte’s looks. It wasn’t a question of whether she was good-looking: she was. She had a long, rather concave face, large eyes, and a prominent nose and chin; indeed, it would not be inaccurate, and it would not be at all displeasing to Charlotte, to say that her face was “Pre-Raphaelite.” She was pretty.
And yet. When they were at her apartment for the evening and had been reading for a while, and Peter raised his eyes from his laptop and looked at her, that action did not release the spring of delight that he hoped for. He could look at certain paintings over and over again, or certain views or buildings or other people or children, and he would always feel an aesthetic and emotional shiver. Looking at Charlotte after a half hour of reading, he had a rather dull reaction. He had known women who, strictly speaking, were less good-looking than she but whose faces charmed him. The nose might be wrong, but there was some alluring interplay between the eyes and the lips; or everything was too small, but taken together with that big smile that came out of nowhere, it made you swoon. He did not swoon when he looked at Charlotte.
In truth he never had. They had met two years earlier at a party given by married friends, the kind who see matches everywhere. It was more or less a setup. They talked about how terrible the Dutch side of St. Martin was, especially as compared with the French side. They talked, inevitably, about France. They talked about their friends. They got along pretty well. Charlotte liked him, Peter could tell. He liked her, and as he got to know her better, something about her moved him. She had a good heart, and beneath her determination lay a touching vulnerability.
So they got along, there was some kind of emotional connection, and, also, they made sense together. In this day and age, when marriages were no longer arranged and no father would dare forbid his daughter to marry anyone, the notion of suitable matches was supposedly archaic. Yet even when there were no overt social conventions to keep lovers apart (and to inspire novels), it struck Peter how often people still married within a fairly narrow social range. Within that range, there were further delimitations; the mates tended to come out with the same overall score on a gender-adjusted index of talent, money, expectations, polish, personality, intellect. The process of weighting and calculation was far less cynical than that employed by mothers during the London Season of the nineteenth century, but it seemed to Peter that it bore a resemblance. There were still rules, and lots of people still married the people they were supposed to marry, despite all this talk of marrying for love that one has heard for the last several hundred years or so.
Peter was an attractive fellow with a good job and a suitable background. He was presentable. Charlotte, meanwhile, was also attractive. She had the kind of job that the kind of woman whom Peter would marry would have. She had the kind of parents and friends that a woman whom Peter would marry would have. They got along. They were good, decent people. The numbers went into their supercomputers time and again, and time and again the results came out: marriage. He knew he was not in love with Charlotte, and he accepted that. But this was not because he was indifferent to love. Indeed, the opposite was the case. The reason he accepted his lack of passionate love for Charlotte was not that he did not feel love strongly but rather that he felt love much too strongly. He was capable of being deeply, passionately, heartbreakingly, searingly in love with someone. Indeed, at this very moment he was deeply, passionately, heartbreakingly, searingly in love with someone. That person just didn’t happen to be Charlotte. And that person was unavailable to him. So he had given up on love altogether.
It had taken him some time to come to that position. Peter happened to be in love with Jonathan’s wife. Before Jonathan and she were married, Peter watched intently, looking for any break. Yet day by day, month by month, year by year, they moved steadily closer. Had there ever been a sign of trouble? Had Jonathan failed to call? But Jonathan had never been the type who failed to call, and his wife had never been the type to be upset if he had. Had Jonathan offended her family? No. Had the magic simply disappeared? No.
Jonathan’s wife was very pretty, she was kind, she was smart, she was funny, and she was much too good for Jonathan, who was a fairly despicable character. She and Peter particularly liked each other. That had been true before she married Jonathan, but there were rules about how you conduct yourself around your best friend’s protowife. If they broke up and a decent interval passed, you could then make an approach. But the honorable friend would do nothing to drive the two apart. Really, honor alone had not inhibited him. So had the fear of rejection, and he considered the odds of rejection high. Whatever affection Jonathan’s wife may have felt for him back then, and felt for him now, he knew that, romantically, it meant nothing—to the contrary. They had established the kind of fraternal relationship, perhaps a bit closer than the typical one, that often arises between a man’s girlfriend or wife and his best friend. She took an interest in Peter and in his love life in the way married women, or virtually married women, do with the single friends of their mates, the ones they like. Their “intimacy” had been possible for the very reason that it had no sexual or romantic overtones. If Peter tried to convert intimacy of this type into sexual currency, he knew, he would be met with shock, disgust, pity, laughter, and derision. He would lose his friend, his friendship with his friend’s wife, and his pride. He would have to kill himself.
Peter had been the best man at the wedding, and after that he had given up on ever marrying someone with whom he was deeply, passionately, heartbreakingly, searingly in love. Then he met Charlotte. They got along. Over time he became attached to her. She moved him. Charlotte was attractive to him, periodically. Charlotte was the kind of person a person like him married, and she wanted to marry him. Love—come on. How many people are really in love when they get married? And if they are at that moment, how many remain so two years later?
Having allowed matters to proceed as far as he had, Peter would have found it very difficult to break things off. Charlotte had something in her, that fearful look in her eye, that made it hard, very hard, for Peter to hurt her. True, her panic about getting married may have been premature, but in her circle, there seemed to be an unstated agreement that if you let your early thirties go by without settling on someone, then it was a very fast shoot to forty, when you really would be desperate. Peter did not think so well of himself or so little of Charlotte to assume that if he didn’t marry her, she would never be able to find any happiness. Still, she was counting on him. Charlotte had wanted to get married so badly. Steadily applying herself and moving at a pace that was faster than what was natural, she had begun to treat him more and more like a presumptive husband, taking him to events with her family or friends or related to her work to which one would take only one’s fiancé or spouse or the person one had been living with for ages. She would ask him to perform spousal tasks, like picking her mother up at the airport. She used the first-person plural pronoun. Soon enough, Peter found himself in a different country without the right papers to get back over the border. Then, too, like all young people nowadays, they had had a conversation initiated by the woman about whether their relationship was moving forward; they had been seeing each other for about a year at that point, and they’d agreed that it was.
Over and over and over, Peter asked himself if it was really fair for him to marry Charlotte if he wasn’t truly in love with her. An advice columnist would say it was not, without question, and he sometimes wished he could agree. But this was the real world. Of course the chances of Charlotte’s being happy were better if Peter married her. Or maybe this argument was just a rationalization for his cowardice. But no, it was surely the more loving thing to marry Charlotte. And as for Peter himself? Married to Charlotte or not, he was out of luck. He was due to marry, and he and Charlotte had a pretty good chance of being pretty happy. It would be fine.
And Charlotte, why did she want to marry Peter? She liked to present herself as being very worldly, always collecting interesting people, scoffing at the bourgeoisie, but she was, in fact, deeply cautious and conventional. Although she would never have admitted it, she was terrified of being either unmarried or married to someone who was odd or ugly or impoverished or who required her parents and grandmothers to make an uncomfortable social stretch. Peter saved her from those fates. Also, she did love him. She liked the feel of his arms around her. He had a comforting, dry smell, like cork. He was kind, and her father, though charming and well dressed, had never been. Once when she was thirteen, she was going to a dance in what was really her first grown-up dress, and she ran into the living room to show it to him and her mother. “Ah,” he had said, drink in hand, “voici la coquette!” She felt as if he had slapped her, but she couldn’t explain precisely why. When she got older, she learned enough from her therapists and her friends and her friends’ therapists to understand that there was a danger that, replicating the relationship with her father, she would marry someone cruel. She had tried to avoid that. Maybe—maybe she had to force it a little bit; maybe she wasn’t “in love” in love with Peter and had to fashion a notion that she was. This she managed to do. In any case, she had already filled in the Passionate, Crisis-Filled, Tempestuous Love bubble on her answer sheet of life. Deep down, she suspected that, probably, Peter was not “in love” in love with her either, but this was a condition she could live with. The marriage problem would be solved, and she knew she could trust him and that he would treat her with kindness.
So it had come to be that, on an evening in early spring, Peter had arrived at Charlotte’s door with the intention of asking her to marry him. She lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a brownstone on a handsome block uptown between Park and Madison avenues. Peter had come from work and, leaving the subway, he had passed a Korean market, where it had occurred to him to buy some flowers. He decided on daisies; they seemed winningly simple. The daisies smelled of earth and grass; water had dripped from their green stalks onto Peter’s hand when he took them out of their bucket. Daylight saving time had just returned, and the light at that hour, still so surprising, made Charlotte’s street look as if a lid had been lifted from it. The brownstone seemed softer, and the air, a little warm now, seemed to buoy him up gently.
No young man carrying flowers on an evening in early spring down a handsome street with the intention of asking a woman to marry him can be entirely immune to the romance of the occasion. And indeed Peter did feel romantic, nervous and eager. His jacket pocket held a small velvet box that contained a diamond ring whose stone was not ostentatious but still sizable.
He greeted Charlotte. She was wearing lighter clothes than she had worn in recent days. She had had her hair cut that day and looked especially young. She had known telepathically that something was up and greeted him with a longer and more than usually tender kiss. “How pretty. Let me put these in water,” she said, taking the flowers from him. “Lots of chances for me to play ‘He loves me, he loves me not.”’
They sat down on the love seat and chatted awhile. For the thousandth time, Peter looked at the framed engravings taken from an eighteenth-century French instruction book on dancing, at the painting above the fireplace that had been a gift from her father and her stepmother when Charlotte turned twenty-one.
Peter decided to be gay, as the occasion warranted. “Let’s have a glass of champagne,” he said. Charlotte usually kept a bottle in her tiny refrigerator. She looked at him, and their eyes met for a second. “Champagne? What are we celebrating?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Daylight saving time? Your haircut?” She gave a little hmm and went to the kitchen. As she walked away from him, she seemed self-conscious, as if she were thinking that he was looking at her, which he was, and he was reminded, with a trickle of lust, that the back of her neck was a good feature. She returned with the bottle and two wineglasses (champagne flutes were something you got as a wedding present). “Here,” she said, “you know how to do it.”
It was a little joke between them how her father had once pedantically demonstrated to Peter the best way to open a bottle of champagne. He gently prodded the cork with his thumbs while turning the bottle, as he had been taught, and the cork fell out, rather than rocketing, with a faint, hollow report and a wisp of smoke. The ceremony complete, he filled their glasses halfway; the bubbles tossed up their tiny hats.
Charlotte and Peter talked a little bit more.
“We have Moroccan agriculture people coming next week,” Charlotte said. “They’re going to meet with these Quebecois researchers who have done some interesting work on barley, which is about three percent of Morocco’s exports.” Charlotte’s expression became quizzical. “It’s odd that the Moroccans have asked for so much information about golf courses in the area. I don’t think that anyone is coming from the tourism ministry”
A breeze entered through the window, bringing a tarry smell from the street. There was a pause in the conversation. Peter refilled their glasses. As he did so, the image of Jonathan’s wife came into his mind, and he felt as if a trapdoor had opened under him. He tried to keep his hand steady as he poured. There she was. Well, never mind. What was not to be was not to be. He glanced over at Charlotte. Her eyes were pretty. The silence lasted a few seconds longer than a normal conversational gap. Peter sipped his champagne and looked over his glass at Charlotte. She looked away. She was nervous, and that made Peter feel warmly toward her.
“Charlotte.” Peter’s voice had an unusual resonance as he took her hands in his. “I have something I want to say, or to ask, actually. Um …” He swallowed. “You know, we’ve been talking about this. And so I was wondering … I mean I’d like to ask … I wanted to ask …” Here Peter paused. “Will you marry me?”
Charlotte had never received a marriage proposal before, not from her French lover and not even during free-play time at nursery school. In this instance, the man making the proposal was one whom Charlotte would quite like to marry. So she immediately began to cry and let out a large sob. She was reacting out of joy, and also from a release of tension, tension that it seemed had been building in her from the time of her birth.
“I know this is all rather sudden,” Peter said.
Charlotte laughed and gulped air. “Yes, why … sorry … just a second.” She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief and tried to catch her breath. When she finished she looked at Peter and in her gray eyes there was the glow of love, an effect enhanced by their moistness.
“Well.” She cleared her throat. “Well, the answer to your question is yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Yes. Completely, totally yes.”
They embraced. The kiss lasted a long time. Peter’s first emotion was faint irritation with the way Charlotte kissed. She didn’t push her lips out enough, or something. Then he immediately began to think that he had made a tremendous mistake, and he wanted desperately to take back the words he had said a few moments before. Then he thought: It’ll be okay. It’ll be fine. I do love Charlotte, really. He felt the back of her hand press against the back of his neck, which produced a stirring of affection and desire within him. And then—and then he thought about Jonathan’s wife, Mrs. Speedwell. Since the wedding, he often addressed her that way. “Hello, Mrs. Speedwell.” “By all means, Mrs. Speedwell.” The bottom fell out of his stomach. And then, again, he recovered and thought: It’ll be fine. Charlotte will be happy enough and I will be happy enough. Parallel to his fundamental disappointment, he also felt a thrill. He had just made a marriage proposal, and he had held this woman unclothed in his arms countless times. He knew the flaws in her body, her bony hips. This accumulation of intimacy had its effect. Smiling, Peter pulled back from their embrace.
“Hey, wait a minute,” he said, reaching into his pocket, “there’s something that goes along with this.”
Peter finished his conversation with Frankfurt. Already, the departing tide of his day had taken him far from his betrothed and any thoughts of her. As usual, though, from time to time throughout the day’s voyage he saw in the distance the most beautiful mermaid, sunning herself on a rock, plashing into the sea and rising up again. Against the sun her smoothed head looked like a paper silhouette. It must be said that the creature did not resemble Charlotte, nor, however, was she mythical in her appearance. Even at a distance, Peter recognized her. He would be seeing her that evening, along with his despicable best friend, the writer Jonathan Speedwell.
2 (#ulink_f1896396-f530-5159-b5d1-42ee533f12d7)
Peter arrived at the bookstore late. It was larger and more commercial than the venues where Jonathan had read in the past. The crowd was larger too, although its composition was the same: mostly postgraduate women who were mostly willowy, mostly with their dark hair loosely pulled back. One or two of them may have primped for this evening, which meant wearing new sandals and a discreet application of paint. It was June, so they were wearing filmy skirts or short skirts with tops that showed off their slender, downy arms; those who wore jeans looked really good in jeans and wore the same kinds of tops. There were also some older women in modish clothes but with heads of gray hair, coloring it being anathema to them. They kept up with the new books. A smattering of skinny, unkempt, unshaven young men lurked in the back, their sullen faces registering both envy and disgust. Later, at the bar downtown, they would snigger about how Speedwell truly did suck. There were no older males. Only Peter was wearing a suit.
At first glance, Jonathan himself might have seemed not very distinguishable from his rivals. His dark brown curls fell to his collar without discipline. He too had stubble. He wore a checked shirt over a T-shirt, just as they did. But there were differences. While Jonathan was on the tall side and certainly remained romantically thin, his outline was drawn with a thicker nib than that used for the others, for, unlike them, he had both been partaking of lobster ravioli at restaurants and spending hours each week at the gym. Jonathan’s hair, while tousled, was clean. His jeans were clean. He had clean hands and clean, trimmed fingernails. Indeed, he was certainly the only person in the room who ever received a manicure at the Waldorf-Astoria barbershop. His black shoes, seemingly unremarkable, were custom-made five-hole derbies, which of course he never wore two days in a row.
More than anything, though, what set Jonathan apart from the other young men in the room was his glorious beauty and the sweet light that surrounded him. Standing before the audience, Jonathan seemed like the most innocent creature of heaven, favoring this base world with a sojourn. His untended curls and blue eyes and fair skin with hints of pink all suggested a person of pure goodness. No snigger passed those delicate, crimson lips. What was most beautiful was that although he possessed such physical charms he appeared to have no knowledge of them. Artless and free! How painful it was then, considering all this, to realize that his work registered so acutely the harshness with which we so often repay love, the cruel deceptions that greet those who trust. Jonathan Speedwell, his readers knew, must feel all that very deeply. And yet, and yet, how much humor and strength were in his work! And in the man himself!
As Peter arrived, Jonathan was just finishing a story. Here is what he read:
It was cold. The sky was clear. Dogs growled and barked. The man next door kept three, tied up. A breeze, out of the south now, carried a faint, acrid odor from the plant. The rusty frame of a swing set, with no swings, stood near the fence. Typical Jake, to scavenge the frame and never find swings. At this time of year it was hard to believe that in a few months wildflowers would grow up around it. Dana tried to picture them, and to remember their names: pussytoes, Venus’s looking-glass, cocklebur. The sun rose higher in the bright azure sky. All of a sudden, Dana saw the crystals of frost on the grass glitter with reds and purples and yellows. It was as if the entire yard had been scattered with gemstones.
Dana shivered. She lit a cigarette. On the sofa in the double-wide, Jen was still asleep. Dana should wake her. Jen would say, “Mom, you’ve been smoking!” Dana would wait. She would finish her cigarette and she would wait awhile. This was something Jen didn’t have to know. There were so many things that she did.
Here Jonathan fell silent. He kept his head down, still staring at the book on the lectern. He tightened his lips. Then he looked up with a distracted, vulnerable expression. The inside tips of his eyebrows were raised, creating an ankh-shaped wrinkle in his brow. When the audience began to applaud, Jonathan lowered and raised his head again. Startled, pleased, humbled, embarrassed. Then he nodded his thanks, as a gray-haired woman stepped up to the lectern.
“Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you. That was just marvelous.” After a new crescendo, the applause died down. The woman spoke. “I’m sure many of you have questions for Jonathan. And goodness, the hour is drawing nigh, isn’t it? So I think, now, if Jonathan wouldn’t mind, we’ll open up the floor.”
“Certainly, Martha, thank you,” said Jonathan. A willowy young woman, but they were all willowy young women, raised her hand.
“Yes, right there,” said Jonathan.
“Hi, Jonathan,” she said. “Thanks. I’d just like to ask, what do you think about the environment?”
A question like this, both very heavy and inane, didn’t faze Jonathan for a second. “It’s incredibly important,” he replied in a solemn tone. “I get so angry when I think about what we’re doing to it. I wish my publisher would use recycled paper. There’s no reason that a tree should die for this.” He held up his book, prompting gentle, sympathetic laughter. “Well, they say that trees are one thing that are renewable. I try to do what I can. What I think is very important is … mindfulness … to have mindfulness about how we are treating our world. You know, there are poets who are known as nature poets, but to my mind, all writers are nature poets, and so have a special interest in protecting nature, and a special duty.” Applause.
There were a few more questions. “In your first novel, when Sam drowns in the drinking game, did that really happen?” “Where do you get the names for your characters?”
Jonathan called on another young woman. “Hi,” she said. She was dark-skinned and slight, and she wore a thin, peasanty blouse. “I just wanted to ask, you seem to be able to write about women so well, from their point of view. I wonder if you would tell us something about that?”
“Oh, that’s kind of you, very kind.” Jonathan smiled thoughtfully. “Let me think. I don’t really know what to say.” In truth, Jonathan had been asked this question at every reading he had ever given and in every interview. “If I’m able to get into the heads of women I guess it’s because women have always seemed so much more interesting to me than men, frankly. Women are more powerful, and I’m interested in power. So maybe I’ve watched women more carefully.” Jonathan paused. He looked down and swallowed. He seemed to be collecting himself. Then he spoke.
“But … but I guess there’s a simple explanation. It’s not something I usually mention, but something about tonight …” The heads of loosely gathered hair canted forward. “You see … my mother died when I was quite young.” Jonathan paused again, remembering. “In the last memory I have of her, we were at the shore and we were playing in the waves, and she was holding me.” He fell silent. The room was silent. The salt water, the sun, the smell of his mother’s suntan lotion, the feel of her body against his, the thrilling surf—everyone in the room believed that they were sharing Jonathan’s recollected sensations. “So of course I’ve spent my whole life trying to get her back and a lot of time trying to get close to women, studying them, trying to figure them out.” He laughed. “Trying to get them to love me!” The audience laughed, then sighed, then applauded.
Jonathan signed books for a while, chatting with members of his public. They said things to him that they had obviously been rehearsing in their minds. “Thank you for telling the truth.” Bashful Jonathan would reply, “Please—no. Well … thanks.” Peter hovered outside the eddy of admirers. Finally Jonathan had given his last humble smile, the smile of a servant unworthy of his mistress’s praise, and turned so that his eyes lit upon Peter, which prompted a different kind of smile. He signaled Peter over with a nod. Jonathan stood up and they shook hands.
“Hello, my friend,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”
Peter looked at him for a second.
“When did you get so green?”
“Me?” Jonathan said. “Why, I’ve always been that way! You remember—I drove that guy’s hybrid once.” Then he began to chuckle. His eyes narrowed and he grinned, pleased with himself.
“How did you like the thing about my mother?”
“I thought it was asinine.”
Jonathan chuckled.
“Your mother lives on a golf course in South Carolina.”
“Oh, come on,” Jonathan said, “nobody’s going to write an exposé. Anyway, if I ever became famous enough for anyone to care, it would just cause a fuss about how I mythologized my past. That’s always good copy.” He laughed and shook his head. “Maybe I’ll try a dead little sister next time, ‘the bravest person I’ve ever known’ … Oh, Christ! Hold on a second.”
Two women were approaching, one in her forties, the other in her twenties, and Jonathan moved to greet them.
“Sasha! Allison!” Jonathan said. He embraced them both. “Thanks for being here. It makes it so much easier to get through these things.”
You were terrific, it went great, they told him. Jonathan made the introductions.
“Sasha Petrof, Allison Meeker, this is Russell Peters, one of my good friends. Russ, Sasha is my editor, the person who has almost convinced me to share her delusion that I can write. And Allison’s her assistant, and she’s—well, she’s the person I depend on for everything.”
Both women were very good-looking. Sasha was lean and tall, chicly dressed; Allison was shorter and more voluptuous, a quality that seemed to embarrass her, and dressed more like a kid, but expensively. They both carried the same costly bag (Sasha was married to a Wall Street guy and Allison was the daughter of a Wall Street guy). Peter shook hands with them. Sasha’s fingers were narrow and he could feel the bones and knuckles. The skin was moisturized, but a little rough nevertheless. Shaking Allison’s hand, in contrast, was more like grasping a ripe plum. Peter noticed how in chatting with Jonathan they both had the same coded look, a look that was intended to be understood by Jonathan but not the other person standing there.
Sasha addressed Peter. “Allison and I were talking before. We hadn’t known that Jonathan’s mother had died when he was so young. Is that something he’s ever really talked about?”
“No,” Peter said. “No, he never has.”
“Did you know?”
“If you had asked me, I would have told you Jonathan’s mother was living.”
“Really? Jonathan, you’re so private, not even your friends …?”
Jonathan glanced at Peter. “No, I don’t talk about it … well, the cancer. I’ll tell you about it sometime, Sasha. I’m not sure what came over me tonight.”
They chatted a little bit more about Jonathan’s publicity schedule. Then Sasha made a whoop. How could she have forgotten! The review in the paper! She had called Jonathan but hadn’t reached him.
“Oh, that,” Jonathan said bashfully. “I guess it was okay.”
“It was just terrific!” said Sasha. “Some wonderful things. Really insightful.”
“Just so long as there’s a money quote,” said Jonathan, skillfully making the cynical crack of a noncynic.
“Oh, there was! There was!” said Sasha, laughing. Allison, her lips moist, glowed with awe.
After some more talk, Jonathan said, “Well, we need to get downtown for dinner. I guess we should get going.”
“Yes, I’d better run home,” said Sasha. “You were great, Jonathan. Really great. We’ll talk.” She embraced him and gave him an all but undetectable extra squeeze.
“Bye, Jonathan,” said Allison. “You were great.” She embraced him and gave him an all but undetectable extra squeeze.
In the cab downtown, Jonathan leaned his head against the seat and let out a sigh of exhaustion. He started talking. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to be screwing both your editor and her assistant? Christ, it’s complicated. Allison … God … Allison. She has this way of lifting her legs up and putting her heels on your back and sort of massaging it with them. The thing about Allison—God. She’s young and not that experienced, but it’s the enthusiasm. The zest. She just loves it. Though, of course, in the hands of the master … She’s such a kid, unsure, and I so dig that, you know?”
Peter, actually, didn’t know.
“But then when Sasha is tough and businesslike it’s also one of the most exciting things. ‘No, Tom, I will not give him a two-book contract!’ I remember once we were, uh, in conference and she was running late. She had herself completely put back together in about two minutes and was all business. I just wanted to grab her and start all over again. I love the way her hands feel, sort of corrugated.”
The cab proceeded down Park Avenue South, with its disturbingly narrow “parks.”
“But, you know, there have been some real close calls, with both of them. And it’s not only that. I have to remember which one I’ve said what to, and when all three of us are together, there’s the chance that somebody is going to make a slip. I mean, usually it’s only two people out of three, but here it’s all of us! Then when I call for Sasha I get Allison, and of course I’ve got to give her some of the old okeydoke. ‘Oh God, Allison, you are so beautiful.’ And then she switches me to Sasha, and immediately I’ve got to go through it with her. ‘Oh, God, Sasha, I just can’t stop thinking about you, I think it’s the backs of your knees …” Jonathan looked over at Peter with a leer. “All true by the way,” he said before continuing. “Then back to Allison to make the appointment, and I have to hope she won’t be mooning when Sasha brings her something to type or some damn thing.” He shook his head wearily. “Yep, it’s hard. Especially with Mags, too, you know, that chick from the fancy soup place? Old Maggie Mae. Catholic girls. Jesus. There’s nothing like seeing the crucifix bouncing around their collarbone. Sometimes she clenches it in her teeth.”
All the while that Jonathan spoke, Peter had been staring at a tear in the back of the taxi’s front seat. It was vaguely K-shaped and had been covered with dark red tape, a shade lighter than the rubbery purplish seat back itself. The edges of the tape were gummy and dirty. The cab, making the usual sudden starts and stops, jounced Peter around, but he kept staring at this cicatrix. His brow and lips and nose and chin were all shut up like a drawstring pouch. He really had no thoughts about what he was hearing, or rather his many thoughts formed an undifferentiated, scowling black cloud in his mind. It was all disgusting and infuriating. This was not because, in general, Peter was puritanical about such activities as Jonathan described. Over the years, he had listened to his friend’s accounts again and again, and while they were often repellent, Peter could not help but find it fun and exciting to hear them, and to admire Jonathan in the way that all men, in truth, admire another’s promiscuity.
For some time, though, Peter’s reaction had been more judgmental when Jonathan talked like this. “I don’t suppose,” he said finally, “that the fact that you’re married makes it any more complicated.”
Jonathan said nothing for a moment and then looked over at Peter with a kind, condescending expression. “Ah, Peter,” he said. “When you’re older, you’ll understand these things better.”
Peter continued to study the ill-repaired gash.
“Don’t sweat it, old sport,” Jonathan said, putting his hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Nothing’s going to happen. Nobody’s going to get hurt.” He laughed. “I’m going to be sent to hell, is all.”
Peter and Jonathan entered the restaurant. It was small and crowded, with stark décor and very large windows.
“You are the first to arrive,” the maître d’ said. “Would you like to sit at the bar, or shall I escort you to your table?”
They went to the table and ordered drinks, a martini for Jonathan and a beer for Peter. Jonathan asked for the wine list, and as he studied it he made a running commentary. Sipping his beer, Peter began to undergo the physiological changes that he always experienced when he was anticipating the appearance of Jonathan’s wife: his heart began to pound, his arteries throbbed, he felt pressure in the hollows of his hands, he swallowed several times, his stomach did flips. He imagined that he would feel the same way just before his first skydiving lesson. What was ridiculous was that he had been in this situation a thousand times, so it made no sense to still have these reactions.
“Incredible,” Jonathan was muttering, “two hundred bucks for that piece of crap.” In restaurants like this, he always ordered the cheapest wine, and it gave him a nice feeling of satisfaction to see what the suckers were buying. As Jonathan spoke, Peter was looking toward the door. He could see the maître d’s back, partially obscured, and the top quarter of the door. The door opened, and Peter caught a glimpse of blond hair. His heart leapt into his throat. She had arrived. He could see the maître d’ lean forward to talk to her, and nod, and then turn and lead her toward the table. As she walked behind the maître d’, Peter saw a part of her face, her shoulder, her arm.
“Here you are, miss,” the maître d’ said, stepping aside. “Gentlemen, the other member of your party has arrived.”
She was wearing a pale green sundress; the color brought out her green eyes. Her long brown arms were bare, and she had her hair pinned up, exposing all of her long brown neck. She was not necessarily the most stunning woman in the restaurant; she was not someone who would cause a stir just by walking in. But she was so pretty. Her reddish blond hair was thick and sleek, although exhibiting a little frizz on this muggy June night. The green eyes were large and set far apart and her jawbone made a beautiful curve from her ear to her chin; her nose had a delicate little knob at the tip. She was on the tall side and nicely formed, slender without noticeable hips (unless one made a point of noticing them), with fine shoulders, wide, level, smooth, rounded. Her collarbones looked like arrow shafts.
She was smiling and she looked flushed and bright-eyed from having hurried to arrive without being too late, and from the pleasure of seeing them both.
“Hello, boys,” she said.
Jonathan and Peter stood up.
“Hello, luv,” said Jonathan. They hugged and kissed, more than just a token public peck.
“Hi, Holly!”
She gave Peter a kiss on the cheek, and in returning it Peter had to put his hands on her bare shoulders.
As they settled into their seats, Holly apologized for being late (“It took me longer to get ready than I expected”; she and Jonathan exchanged conjugal looks, mock sheepishness on her part, mock exasperation on his), and she told Peter that it was so nice to see him but that she was so sorry Charlotte couldn’t come.
“She was really sorry to miss you both,” Peter said.
“Well, say hello to her for me, will you?” said Holly. She ordered a glass of wine. “Oh, Peter, weren’t you supposed to be giving some kind of presentation today?”
“Did I mention that?”
“Yes, I think so, when we were arranging dinner. I think you said that tonight would be good because you’d be done with that, or something.”
“Oh.”
“So how did it go?”
“I killed,” Peter said.
“Really! That’s great!”
“It wasn’t a big deal at all.”
“I’m glad it went so well,” Holly said. “Jonathan, did you hear? Peter killed.”
“Yes, I heard. Congratulations, Peter. What was it all about? Debentures?” Jonathan thought it was funny just to say the word “debentures.”
“Oh, it was nothing worth talking about.” Peter shook his head dismissively.
“Okay,” said Holly, looking at Peter with a tiny frown.
“And how was the play?” Peter asked. Holly taught eighth- and ninth-grade Classics at a private girls’ school, and she had helped with the eighth-grade play, which had been performed that night.
“It was wonderful!” Holly said. “The girls were great. They were so funny! The boys too. And boy, let me tell you, there is nothing quite as intense as a thirteen-year-old Hermia who really is in love with her Lysander.”
The girls had performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream with students from an all-boys’ school. As the rehearsals progressed, complicated romantic dramas had, of course, arisen among members of the cast.
“Well,” said Holly, nodding at Jonathan, “and how about Anton Pavlovich here? Did you see the review?”
“Oh God,” Peter said. “Charlotte read only part of it to me. Don’t tell me it made that comparison.”
“It did. And I have to live with him.”
“Please” said Jonathan, “you know me. Unworthy as I am to receive such praise, I accept it with the deepest humility and gratitude.”
Holly asked about the reading. It went well, they told her.
“So we all have something to celebrate,” she said, and they talked some more. Then the waiter came over and started describing the specials, ingredient by ingredient, and at about the third appetizer (“fava beans …”) Peter’s mind began to wander. It drifted back … back … back to that fateful night three years before …
After he graduated from college, Jonathan lived in a one-bedroom apartment far downtown, but then his stepfather died (as Jonathans father had before him) and his mother inherited an apartment in a hotel on the Upper East Side. She and her husband had used it only on visits to the city but she decided to keep it—more accurately, Jonathan convinced her to keep it—as an investment. While it appreciated, it only made sense for someone to live there—Jonathan, say. He could not afford the monthly maintenance, so she handled that as well as the room service charges, which the hotel simply sent her as a matter of course. The apartment consisted of a bedroom, a library, a dining room, a sitting room, and a kitchen (which saw little use). Meanwhile, Jonathan kept his old place to use as an office (and it didn’t hurt his social life to have some geographical diversity). It was from these precincts that his tales of human struggle issued forth.
One day Jonathan called Peter and said that he was having a few people over that night and that Peter should come. It was an invitation Peter readily accepted, for the people Jonathan had over were usually women whom Peter found very attractive; of course they were pretty, but they were also either smart or a little tragic or rich or minor geniuses at something or other—or all of these. Beautiful, taken-seriously painters who came into a vast fortune as infants when their parents were murdered, these were Jonathan’s specialty. Moreover, at Jonathan’s, a fume of amorousness always hung in the air, and, so, well, who knows?
“Sure,” Peter said. “What time?”
“Around ten or whenever.”
“What can I bring?”
“Just your fascinating self, that’ll be fine.”
Peter asked who was going to be there and Jonathan mentioned a few names. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “and this girl I met at a campus thing.” A prestigious university had invited Jonathan to spend a term in residence. “We’ve kind of been hanging out a lot together up there.”
“Uh-huh.”
Jonathan paused for a moment before continuing. “I’ve got to say, she’s, well, she’s kind of fantastic, actually.”
“She is.”
“Yeah, she is.”
“So what’s her name?”
“Holly.”
Holly.
Peter reacted with a start. His heart began to pound and he flushed. Four years before he had sat next to a girl named Holly on a long airline flight and had fallen deeply in love with her; he had lost her phone number and had never seen her again, but he had thought about her hourly ever since. But what were the chances that Jonathan’s Holly and Peter’s Holly were the same person? He wanted to ask Jonathan more about her. But it was crazy. There were a million Hollys in the world.
Jonathan’s apartment was already crowded when Peter arrived. How glossy everyone always looked at parties there, how loud and vibrant was the cacophonous talk. Peter got a drink and chatted with some people, and then he looked around for Jonathan. He found him easily, for he was sitting on the sofa in the living room. A young woman sat next to him, and she and Jonathan were holding hands. It was the young woman whom Peter had met on the plane. She looked almost exactly the same, except that her hair was shorter. The sight of her stunned Peter, knocking the wind out of him.
He needed a moment to recover, but Jonathan had seen him and waved him over. The introduction. Exclamations. We’ve met before! You have? Yes, years ago on a plane. How amazing! Holly was excited and very friendly, but Peter felt nothing but despair, for she gave no indication that she had spent every waking moment since their parting thinking about him. She was wearing a rather low-cut silk blouse and extremely narrow black pants with a faint chalk stripe. She looked fantastic.
Peter and Holly told Jonathan their story. They had bonded over Thomas Mann, of all things! Then their narrative petered out.
“Well, so,” Jonathan asked, “you never saw each other after that?”
Peter took Jonathan’s question to be a challenge. Of course, any halfway competent male who flew across the continent sitting next to a young woman like Holly would have managed to get her phone number. Peter felt compelled to stake his own claim to Holly, to show Jonathan that he had not failed in this respect, and to make sure Holly knew what had happened, whether she cared or not. True, in achieving these aims, he would make himself look idiotic, but that was not too high a price to pay.
“Actually,” he said, “we were going to see each other again. Holly wrote her number on a piece of paper, and we were going to have dinner.” To identify the piece of paper would be to give Jonathan too intimate a detail, Peter thought. “But … uh … well …” He paused, turning red. “Well, I actually lost the piece of paper.”
“You lost it!” said Holly. She put her hand on Peter’s arm. “You lost it! I always assumed that you just blew me off!”
“Oh no!” Peter said. In his solipsism, it had never occurred to him that Holly might have been hurt. “I lost the number. I know, it was a fairly idiotic thing to do. I was at my hotel, and it was gone. I looked everywhere,” Peter said, “but somehow or other, the thing just disappeared.”
“How kind of too bad,” Holly said. Her tone and expression reflected a touch of spontaneous warmth toward him that had thus far been lacking.
“I sure thought so!” said Peter.
“I bet you did!” said Jonathan.
They all laughed a little.
Jonathan had been observing the others closely. Now he smiled at both with affection. “What a close call for me!” he said. “If it had been different, then, well, who knows what might have happened? And maybe we would all be sitting here together, but it would all be … different.” His tone was mild, sweet, humorous, even a wee bit vulnerable. “I’m pretty lucky that Peter chose that moment to be fairly idiotic. It might be hard to believe, Holly, but that was actually out of character for him.”
Holly laughed and squeezed Jonathan’s hand. No spoilsport, Peter laughed too. He and Holly exchanged a glance, and then some other guests approached, and the party’s momentum swept them all away. For the rest of the night, Peter sought out Holly, trying to have a private moment with her, but for some reason this opportunity was always denied him.
One evening shortly after Peter had met Holly again, he received some further information about her attitude toward the Lost Phone Number. Holly was out and Peter was having a drink in Jonathan’s apartment before going to dinner. Waiting for a call from some other friends, Peter watched a hockey game and Jonathan corrected a proof.
“Hey,” Jonathan said, without looking up from the page, “did you know that Holly really got a crush on you that time when you sat next to each other on the plane?”
Trying to remain as cool as possible, Peter took a sip of his beer and continued to watch the Devils’ power play. “Really?” he said.
“Yeah,” said Jonathan. He scrawled a couple of words in the margin and continued to work as he talked. “Yeah. We were talking about it, and that’s what she told me. So naturally it got me concerned and I said, ‘So what about now?’ She laughed. She said, ‘You’re jealous over somebody I sat next to on a plane years ago? Are you crazy?’ I guess it did sound pretty silly. Oh hell!” Jonathan drummed his pencil on the paper and then made an erasure. “Anyway, she told me not to worry. ‘You know how those things go,’ she said, ‘you meet somebody someplace with some kind of forced intimacy and you think there’s been some magic, and then two days later you’ve forgotten all about them.’ It’s interesting. That’s really true, don’t you think?” He whispered aloud a few words of his text and made a change. “Well, also she said that, you know, you’re such a nice guy that she bet you felt bad about not calling, but actually it was a relief that you didn’t. She had gotten so wrapped up in the baby, you can imagine, and there was the whole scene with her father and her sister, and then her mother coming. She didn’t know what she would have done if you had.” He crossed out a couple of words. “So anyway, phew. I wouldn’t want to have had to shoot you.” He teethed on his pencil, reclined in his chair, and held the proof up, frowning at it.
This account had the unmistakable ring of truth, although Peter wished desperately that he could convince himself Jonathan was making it all up. But why would he bother? He had Holly. Also, Peter couldn’t remember a time when Jonathan had lied to him. Indeed, Jonathan had his own code of honor and rarely outright lied to any of his friends, not even to the women he was involved with; it was almost a principle, and it was part of the game, to juggle them without resorting to sheer mendacity.
She laughed. Really nothing Jonathan had said had surprised Peter. Still, he felt heartsick. The Devils’ pusillanimous line had barely managed to get off a shot before the two sides evened up. Peter drank again from his beer and continued staring at the TV “Oh, yeah,” he said, “we had a lot of fun talking on that flight. Holly’s great.”
Peter saw very little of Jonathan and Holly over the following several weeks. She was getting a master’s degree in Classics at the university where Jonathan had his fellowship, and he virtually moved in with her as she finished. When they came to the city, Jonathan did not include Peter in their activities. Uncharacteristically, Jonathan rarely came to the city by himself, and he seemed to be devoting all his attention (within reason) to Holly alone. This time, it seemed to be serious. Holly had a thesis topic she was quite excited about (Horace, “authority”), but did she really want to be an academic? Jonathan was urging her to move to New York, and when Holly learned about a last-minute opening at an excellent girls’ school she applied and was hired. After a summer of travel, she and Jonathan established themselves in his apartment. Having seen Holly so rarely, Peter had not had much chance to return to the subject of their first meeting, and as time passed it felt more and more as if it would be awkward and strange to bring it up.
The thing between Jonathan and Holly was serious. After living together for a while, they were married. Peter and Holly had become quite good friends, but they never discussed their first meeting again. Peter had watched and waited—foolishly, he knew—and then he’d given up.
Peter had eaten his appetizer without taking any notice of it; he could not have told anyone what it was. Holly was saying something to him, but he hadn’t answered.
“Peter?”
“Oh sorry. What was it you said?”
“You seem to be a million miles away. Thinking about the big day?” Holly said this with the smile of a female friend who is indulgent of a man’s dread of his own wedding.
“Oh, no, actually. But I should be. There’s a crisis about the cheese.”
“Oh God!” Holly cried. “How horrible! I suppose Charlotte and her mother are treating it like the Algerian civil war.”
“Basically, yeah. Torture, assassination, the whole bit.”
“I guess I was lucky. My mother sat back and sort of vaguely watched everything happen. ‘That sounds lovely, dear’ was all she ever said. The only problem was that she easily could have forgotten the date and set off that day to buy a butterfly collection, or something else she had suddenly decided was a necessity.”
“She certainly looked beautiful,” Peter said.
“Well, she couldn’t help that.” Holly looked at Peter sympathetically “I hope your nerves hold out for the next couple of weeks.”
“Me, too.”
Holly turned to Jonathan. “And as for you, you know your job, right? You do for Peter what he did for you: make sure he shows up.”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Jonathan. “He’ll show up. Even if it’s at gunpoint.”
The following morning Mac McClernand’s secretary called Peter to say that Mr. McClernand would like to see him “ay-sap.” After hanging up Peter stared at the phone. Maybe he should just resign right then and there. He could have a new job in a day! But … but … Beeche was where he wanted to work and he had come pretty far, and if he quit, Thropp would win. Peter had told his father about the situation, and he had laughed. “A boss who’s a son-of-a-bitch, a real son-of-a-bitch!” he had said. “Welcome to the club.” Peter’s father had begun his career working for an industrial pipe manufacturer, and he had risen fairly high in the company that had bought the company that had bought that one. He was canny and levelheaded about these things, and he advised Peter not to quit or to go at Thropp directly, but to figure out whose team he wanted to be on and do everything he could to convince that person that he was indispensable to him or her and that he or she had to steal him away from Thropp. Otherwise, he should sit tight. Some employers value loyalty, and this trial would pass. That was all very sound, but didn’t it reflect an old-fashioned corporate mentality that ill suited today’s buccaneering, fast-paced securities industry, where patience and loyalty lasted only as long as it took for the bonus check to clear? Actually, at Beeche patience and loyalty were often well rewarded, and the culture discouraged self-serving intrigue, although the firm still had its Thropps. It was a class operation, as people liked to say. So, okay, he’d overcome other challenges, it was just a matter of bearing down, enduring this one and learning as much from it as he could.
Okay! All right! Let’s do it! With his confidence and optimism renewed by this self-administered pregame pep talk, Peter set off to find McClernand’s office. This was more difficult than he’d expected, even taking into account the size of the Beeche Building. He went up and down and up again in a couple of elevator banks until he finally reached the wing and floor that he thought were the right ones. Stepping out of the elevator, Peter found that there was no security desk or departmental receptionist, just a pair of glass doors at one end of a vestibule. He approached them and saw that the device that read identification cards had a yellowing, handwritten sign over it: OUT OF ORDER PLEAS CALL SECURITY. He noticed that one door was open a crack, and he tried it; it swung open easily—its lock and latch were broken. He walked along a corridor and in one office saw desks and chairs stacked up. In another, computer monitors lay strewn on the floor.
Peter followed the office numbers until he found the right one. The door was open, and he peered inside and saw a woman with her head bent over her desk; he knocked, and the woman looked up, saying, “Oh! It’s you! We’ve been expecting you! Please come in!”
Peter entered and the woman quickly rose to greet him. She was full-figured and in her fifties, with brassy red hair, black eyebrows, and one discolored front tooth. She made every utterance with great enthusiasm.
“You’re Mr. Russell, aren’t you?!”
“That’s right.”
“I’m Sheila, Mr. McClernand’s secretary!”
“How do you do, Sheila?”
They shook hands.
“Very nice to meet you! I’m so glad you’re here! Now, just have a seat, and I’ll tell Mr. McClernand!”
Peter sat. He had noticed that she had been working on a crossword puzzle and now he saw that well-worn books of crosswords and brainteasers were piled on her desk.
“Mr. McClernand?! Mr. Russell is here to see you!” A pause. “Yes, sir! I’ll tell him!” Sheila hung up the phone. “He’ll be with you in just a few minutes!” She smiled brightly at Peter, as if she had delivered the most exciting news. And then she returned to her crossword.
Peter waited. The only sounds came from the occasional scratch of Sheila’s pencil and the white hum of the air handlers. Time passed. No one popped his head in the door to have a word with Mac. The phone did not ring, and no lights shone to indicate that any lines were engaged. Sheila’s pencil made a skittering noise, like a small reptile running across the sand. After what seemed like a long time, the door to the inner office did suddenly open, very loudly, and, preceded by a waft of “masculine” scent, there appeared Mac McClernand.
“Well, well!” he said, smiling broadly and holding out his hand. “Peter Russell! Sorry to keep you waiting. Got hung up on a couple of things.” He cocked his head toward the ceiling with a smirk. “Sixty-eight. You know how it is.” Sixty-eight was a floor where some of the biggest big shots had their offices.
Peter rose and shook McClernand’s hand.
“How do you do?” he said.
“Fine, fine. I’ll just be one more minute.” McClernand spoke sharply to Sheila. “Sheila, did we get that packet out?”
Sheila had not been listening.
“Sheila, did we get that packet out?”
Sheila heard this time and looked up with an expression of shock and bewilderment. “The packet …?” she said. “The pack—? Oh! The packet! Yes, sir! It’s being messengered!”
“Good,” McClernand said. “And you’ve moved my breakfast with Erlanger to Wednesday, right?”
“Yes, sir! All taken care of!”
“Okay! Well, Peter, please, come on in.”
McClernand put his hand on Peter’s back and guided him through the door, then turned to Sheila. “Move my five o’clock back to five-thirty,” he said. “Oh—and hold my calls.”
Mac McClernand was in his sixties. He had an egg-shaped body, and his pants, held up by suspenders, rode at the latitude of greatest circumference. Freckles covered his hands and face, and his flesh tone was taupe. His furzelike hair seemed to hover above his scalp, and Peter could not determine whether that was because of its natural buoyancy, or because it was a comb-over, or because it was fake.
They had sat, and McClernand was leaning far back in his desk chair and looking at Peter so that his chin and jaw disappeared in folds of flesh. His hands were clasped, except for his index fingers, which were extended together; studying Peter, he tapped his mouth with their tips.
“So. Peter,” he said finally. “I guess we’re going to do a little work together.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I hear good things about you. You’ve made quite a name for yourself.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Of course, they only send me the best.” McClernand laughed, baring his grayish teeth. Presently his laugh turned into a phlegmy, wheezing, racking cough. He covered his mouth with a handkerchief and bent over, coughing so long and hard that his face turned red and his eyes teared.
Peter half rose from his seat. “Are you okay?”
“Fine, fine,” McClernand said in a stage whisper. After a moment or two he brought the eruptions under control, took a gulp from a glass of water, and wiped his brow and eyes.
“Harrumm. Harrumrummrum. Damn allergies. So where were we? Oh yes. Yes, I’ve been told damn good things about you.”
“I’m certainly glad to hear that.”
McClernand smiled a bit devilishly.
“But,” he said, “but … I guess maybe you took a knock with that new idea of yours.”
“It was very preliminary.”
Holding up his hand, McClernand knit his brow and pursed his lips and nodded. “Oh, I know, I know. It was very preliminary, just something to kick around. Of course.” He chuckled and shook his head. “But still, I guess they figured it wouldn’t do you any harm to buddy up with an old bastard who’s seen a thing or two in his time, eh?”
“Yes.”
As he looked at Peter, McClernand’s expression softened, becoming almost paternal. He nodded his head slowly. “You know,” he said, “you remind me of myself when I was just coming along.”
Oh God! Peter almost blurted out. “Really?”
“Yes, yes indeed,” McClernand said. He beamed at Peter. He made a mumbly-grumbly noise. Then he clapped his hands, rubbed them together, and said, “Okay, then. Let’s get to work.”
He swiveled in his chair and lifted an object off a shelf. Then, holding it with care between his hands, he gently set it down on his desk. He adjusted it fussily so that it was parallel to the desk’s edge. Then he took his hands away slowly, as if it were carefully balanced. He had been mumbly-grumbling throughout this operation, but now, leaning back in his chair, he stopped and sighed. He gestured to the object with an open hand, smiling. “Peter,” he said, “what do you see in front of you?”
It was a breakfast-cereal box.
Peter was unsure of what to say. There didn’t seem to be many alternatives. “A breakfast-cereal box?”
“Ha!” McClernand said. “Not a wrong answer. But not the right one either. Look again. Tell me what you see.”
What Peter saw was a breakfast-cereal box.
“I … I don’t know,” he said. He smiled. He was a good sport! “I give up!” he said brightly.
McClernand nodded. “I’ll tell you what that is,” he said. And then he leaned forward, fixed his eyes on Peter, and said in a low voice, “It’s money.” Then he leaned back in his chair again, still looking at Peter but now with his former devilish grin.
Money. Right. Yet there was nothing to do but carry on. “Money?” Peter asked. “How so?”
“Pick up the box and tell me what it says on the top flap.”
Peter picked up the box. “‘May fight heart disease.’”
“No! Not that! Further over on the side.”
“Well, there’s a thing here. It says that the company will give your school ten cents for every one of these coupons you send in.”
“Very good,” said McClernand. He stood up and began to pace behind his desk. “I suppose I would be correct in saying that in many cases you can send the cereal manufacturer some box tops and receive a toy in return, wouldn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent. Peter, let’s think a little about that coupon. It’s just a piece of paper, isn’t it? Now, what—”
“Cardboard, actually.”
“All right, cardboard,” McClernand said with a look of annoyance. “Now, what happens when you send this piece of cardboard to the cereal manufacturer? The manufacturer gives something of value to you, or rather, in certain cases, to a third party as directed by you. Are you with me so far?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Tell me, the piece of paper—or rather, cardboard—does it have any intrinsic value?”
“No.”
“But it represents a claim on an asset, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what does that sound like?” McClernand, still pacing, was taking great pleasure in this use of the Socratic method.
“A stock certificate, a bond, any security, really.”
“Bingo!” McClernand said. “Just think, Peter, there are millions upon millions of boxes of cereal sitting in kitchen cupboards or closets or on kitchen counters at this very moment, each one with a top—a top that is not doing anything for anybody. People don’t want to bother to redeem their box tops. They don’t want the toy, or they don’t care enough about their school.
“What if those very same box tops could be sold for cash? Eh? Do you see where I’m going? If someone could sell a ten-cent box top for five cents, and a school could buy it for five cents and redeem it for ten cents, wouldn’t everyone come out ahead? Or if you needed twelve box tops for a toy, you could buy them for cash, rather than spending the money to buy the extra cereal boxes. You see, don’t you?
“But first, there has to be a box-top market. To create that market somebody has to act as an intermediary. And do you know who that’s going to be? Beeche and Company. And then, once the market is launched and flourishing, the paper will begin to trade on its own, as an investment or speculation. Think of the volume! With the firm taking a little bit on either side, the profits will be phenomenal!
“Of course, there are all sorts of challenges and uncertainties—the Internet auction people; taxes; regs; there’s an option aspect, since most cereal box tops expire; and so forth. But that’s where you come in, laddie.” McClernand smiled at Peter with pride and affection. Then his expression slowly changed to one of mystical transport.
“So,” he said quietly, “that’s the idea. But we aren’t stopping there. No. No. We aren’t stopping there.”
Peter had had a feeling that they weren’t stopping there. The worst thing about all this, he thought, was that he must have sounded just like McClernand to everyone at Thropp’s meeting. Maybe they did belong together.
“It won’t be long,” McClernand was saying, “before banks start to accept cereal box tops for deposit and to make loans accordingly. Securities firms will allow you to write checks based on your holdings. The same way people used discounted paper in the past as money, they’ll start using box tops. You know what will happen, don’t you?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “The Fed isn’t going to stand back and lose control of the money supply. So they’ll want to step in.” McClernand smiled quiveringly at Peter and continued in almost a whisper.
“It’s only a matter of time before the dollar goes completely in the tank. Everybody knows that the euro is a piece of crap. So you see? You see? The world is going to need a new reserve currency. Gold?” He let out a braying laugh and exclaimed, “Gold? Pathetic! No. No! The cereal box top!”
Then his voice grew soft again and even more intense. “All this time, while we are making a market in them, we are slowly accumulating and accumulating and accumulating, so when it all comes together, who will have amassed holdings of cereal box tops that are greater than even those of the United States government? Us, Peter, us! Beeche and Company!” McClernand closed his eyes for a moment of silent meditation, then popped them open with a big grin. “Quite a play, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” said Peter.
3 (#ulink_1ce3fa38-57c4-5cd2-aaa6-272b423bfef5)
Having depressed the appropriate keys and pedals with all his strength, the organist suddenly removed, respectively, his fingers and his feet from them, and his instrument fell mute. The last fortissimo chord of the prelude expanded and refracted in every direction, overlapping itself, shifting its shape and color, until it finally decayed into silence, a silence so deep that it seemed as if the mighty blast had permanently driven all sound from the church. Yet, to Peter, at least, standing in the transept, that silence itself reverberated with one low tone, the sound of one’s own existence, of a windless wood, of the Marabar Caves.
Within seconds, the organ would begin to play again, and the bridesmaids and ushers, and then the flower girls, and finally the bride and her father, would begin their slow march, out of time and out of step, and approach Peter more and more closely. Then they would arrange themselves on either side, and her father would hand Charlotte off. Then they would have the ceremony. And then it would be over. Peter was about to take the most important action of his life. Staring down the aisle, with Charlotte’s and his families and all their friends fuzzily crowding his peripheral vision, he tried to smile, as he thought he ought to do.
The ceremony was taking place on the North Shore of Long Island. The day was muggy; the church was hot. Peter felt uncomfortable in his rented cutaway, pants, waistcoat, tie, and shoes. His discomfort was both physical and mental. The costume was silly, he thought. Rented, it was by definition a contrivance. Rented shoes! He was participating in this most personally profound event while wearing rented shoes? Meanwhile, the shirtsleeves were too short. In dignity and dress, Peter believed he compared quite unfavorably to the officiant, who stood to his right. Reverend Micklethwaite looked awfully good in his surplice and gold-embroidered stole. He was a handsome, robust man in his sixties with a full head of steel gray hair and weathered hands. From what Peter had gathered during premarital counseling, it was pretty clear that Reverend Micklethwaite had spent a good deal more time thinking about the gauge of his spinnaker sheets than about the doctrine of the Real Presence. He stood there beaming, aglow with vitality and optimism.
Then, on Peter’s other side, stood Jonathan. He wore his own morning coat and almost gaudy waistcoat, bought, he had explained, because he had been going to so many weddings in England. If Peter had worn that waistcoat, he would have looked moronic, but on Jonathan it had flair. The coat hung beautifully on Jonathan’s long frame, and it was very smart. Jonathan managed to look both more trig and less stiff than Peter. So attired and with his long brown curls brushed but still giving the hint of disorder, Jonathan might have been the hero of a nineteenth-century romance.
As Peter stared down the aisle, he was aware of one blurry dot on his left, but he was determined not to look over there. Earlier, he had noted Holly’s place, three rows back on the groom’s side. He had studied her while pretending to aimlessly survey the congregation. But he would not look again. He would not! Especially at this of all moments. Of course, his effort at self-control failed. He could not help himself, and he slid his eyes over for one last glance. She was looking at him and smiling. A thousand suns. In her smile there was affection and a tiny mock suggestion of pity. Peter could not help but think that of all the people in the church, including the members of the Holy Trinity, the two who were in closest communion were Holly and he. Today, with her hair up and wearing more makeup than usual—her red lipstick was a darker shade and more thickly laid on, as was appropriate for a formal, “lipsticky” occasion—and with the added color induced by the drama of a wedding and in the handsome setting, which became her, she looked especially beautiful. Yet this was as nothing compared with the beauty of her soul. Balanced, graceful, funny, and kind. If there was a Holy Trinity, Peter was quite sure that as they looked down on her they sighed with approbation. He loved her. He loved her. But she would never be his. But she would never be his.
The organ sounded. Peter felt Jonathan’s hand on his back.
“Here we go,” Jonathan whispered. “Whatever you do, don’t laugh.” Hearing this, Peter laughed.
The bridesmaids and ushers began their approach, the former galumphing and the latter shambling like hungover zombies. Here were the flower girls, dropping petals with solemn care. They made Peter smile. After them, the bride herself, on her father’s arm. She was beaming and her face was flushed. She wore a simple dress; it had some kind of beads on it. She was very, very happy. A woman on her wedding day. Peter thought she really did look wonderful. Her father released her and stepped back. She looked at Peter with excitement, joy, love, and … what? Trust: she was safe. He smiled at her, and there was love in that smile. It would be fine.
“We are gathered here in the sight of God,” Reverend Micklethwaite proclaimed in his luscious baritone.
It would be fine.
As he led his daughter down the aisle, Dick Montague had reason to feel well pleased with himself, not that he ever really needed a reason. He had had a new morning coat built for the occasion, and he did look very fine. He was about six feet tall, and he had a face that was ruddy with health and prosperity and thick light brown hair that he held aloft like a pennon. He was paying for the wedding and everything was being done just right, without ostentation but with evident expense. In fact, he had had nothing to do with the planning—his former wife handled all that—except to upgrade the wines, but the effect would redound to him.
It would be a better dinner than the one the night before, given by the groom’s parents. They had hired out at a restaurant, quite a nice restaurant, but the waiters were a little too evangelistic with the water pitchers and they scraped food onto plates as they were clearing. Indifferent food, and as for wine, borderline plonk. Of course, the Russells were at a disadvantage, as parents of the groom always are when they are from a different town. They were nice, nondescript people. The father was an executive with a big company, Dick could not remember which one. While not particularly old, he had thinned-out white hair and a face with lots of lines going in different directions. The wife was very pleasant; today she wore a coral suit. Dick’s toast had gone off well, rather better than anyone else’s, in fact (somehow, in thanking the Russells for the dinner, Dick had managed to work in his own ancestors). He and his wife, Julia, had gone back to the city for the night and returned this afternoon.
That had caused some friction with Charlotte’s mother, Janet, who was annoyed that he would not be “on hand.” As he looked up the aisle, he could see Janet sitting thirty inches away from his current wife. In her pale blue dress, Janet looked thick around the shoulder blades, but it thrilled Dick to see the back of Julia’s neck. Julia never gave any trouble over this sort of thing, and Janet had too much pride to make a fuss, so there had been immediate agreement on where the stepmother would sit, but Dick knew that sharing the pew with Julia, as was customary, would make Janet livid. Of course, it was often difficult dealing with his ex-wife, and an occasion like this wedding—the first of any of their children—meant they had to reconstitute the family like some ersatz beef product. There was tension. The divorce had all been very painful for everyone. Or anyway, that’s what Dick said to himself. He had simply not been able to feel too bad about it either at the time or later. Julia had played an instrumental part in the breakup.
As awkward as it sometimes was, when Dick had to talk to his former wife or see her or hear about her, it usually gave him satisfaction. Every time that she tried to get the better of him or hold her own or stand on her dignity he secretly gloated. The same was true when he heard about her divorcée life, the interior decorating and trips with friends (the fjords, St. Petersburg). She had thick, green, leaf-shaped objects in her divorcée house. How did these things appear, like mushrooms after a thunderstorm? There were occasional “boyfriends.” How basically pathetic to be a grown-up woman and to have to have “boyfriends” and worry about the phone ringing. She made some false starts at marrying again, and each one ended in a mild humiliation. It was quite simple: Dick had won.
As for his children, he had vanquished them, too. In addition to Charlotte, there were two others, both younger, David and Deirdre. David was a groomsman, and Charlotte had dutifully made Deirdre her maid of honor. Dick had not crushed them completely, but it was understood that he could. Each one felt like a mouse caught in his fist. At bottom, he liked that too. Charlotte was a bit tiresome. In fact, she bored him to tears. She was the kind of person who wanted to win over her stepmother, instead of saying, “That harlot destroyed my family (such as it was), I despise her, if I see her I will spit upon her.” No, Charlotte thought she should be worldly about it all and that she and Julia should be “friends.” So she would invite Julia to lunch. Julia was a good sport and had lunch with her now and then, and they were “friends.” They would talk about clothes—Charlotte went through phases at overreaching to be chic—and Julia liked clothes, but Charlotte would talk about them in such a charmless, methodical way that, as Julia put it, she sounded as if she were preparing for her A levels.
There was the son, David. Drugs. The terror and work associated with this fell almost entirely to Janet. The worry about the call in the middle of the night was hers, the visits to the emergency room, all the lies. The scenes in the kitchen—the smell of sautéed garlic (Janet was something of a cook) and Janet’s screaming, “How could you do this?!” Oh, how she loved her son, though, and how he could make her laugh, and how much better company he was than her daughters. She had seen the scabs, bruises, and thick purple lines running down his arms. This was on the hairless inner side of the arms, the soft pale paths her fingers had walked up when he was a little boy. What could she do? How could she stop him? What did they say in those meetings? She couldn’t stop him. It was his self-esteem, and the divorce … But to Dick, in an odd way, David seemed most vital in his pursuit of his drug avocation. He had never been particularly focused or accomplished, had never had very much drive; he was a bookish, indolent, dreamy, nervous boy who drew girls to him but who was unfit and a poor athlete. He certainly had drive now. Still, the fact remained that David was a fairly pointless piece of protoplasm. This gave Dick subconscious satisfaction: he had won. It was all very well for men to talk about how eager they were for their sons to make a success of themselves, how much more it meant than their own success, how tickled they were by the idea of a son entering the firm. Bullshit. Wives and sons: they were the ones who would plot against you, either separately or in treacherous alliance, and if they did, they must be put down, ruthlessly if necessary, all the villages burnt.
Finally, Deirdre. She had freckles and a round face, but she was quite pretty (of all the siblings, David was the best-looking). Deirdre had always had trouble in school. She was dyslexic, and even though they were always reassured that dyslexia has nothing to do with intelligence and that lots of kids who suffer from it are superbright, Dick was always amazed at her ignorance and primitive methods of analysis. Her mind seemed like a map with vast areas left blank. “Pearl Harbor—that was World War I, right?” She loved animals and had a knack for working with horses and dogs, which her parents hoped would turn into something. Dick liked her more than his other children, quite a bit more. She wasn’t like Charlotte, bringing her tiresome friends from Paris to his house in the countryside, speaking her pedantic idiomatic French and always trying to act so grown-up; or like David, with his problems and sarcasm. “Hi, Dad,” Deirdre would say, whereas Charlotte called him “Father” or “Papa” with the accent on the second syllable and David didn’t call him anything.
Dick was now married to a woman nineteen years younger than he. She was much prettier than his first wife had ever been, and she was very clever about—about everything, really, but particularly about clothes and furniture and silver and so on. His wife made him happy. That morning they had almost made love, but there hadn’t been enough time. Then they had had a good early lunch in town with some friends. Dick could still taste the wine and the crispy artichokes. In the afternoon, when they arrived in their suite at the club where the reception would be held, he suddenly became ravenous and ordered a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, some coffee, and chocolates. In his dressing gown, he ate his sandwich, which was delicious (the frizzled crusty corners tucked up in just the right nooks of his belly), and drank the coffee; he ate some chocolate. His wife drank coffee and nibbled on a piece of chocolate. She was wearing a slip, and Dick thought how nice it would be to work his fingers up her inner thigh. Grasping her slender forearm, he drew her to him; but once again there was no time; she had to attend to her hair.
Here is what Dick Montague was thinking as he escorted his elder daughter down the aisle. He was thinking about the poppies in a painting he was working on and about a young woman in London whose lips had within recent weeks found themselves girdling his copulatory organ. He was thinking about Julia’s best friend, Anna, who was blond, big-boned, and athletic, not a dark, fine-featured chic type like his wife, and who was beautiful and neurotic about men. One of Dick’s greatest pleasures was to sit on the terrace of their house in France drinking the last wine of lunch and watching Julia and Anna talking intimately; with her loose, open-necked blouse settled against her freckled chest, Anna licked olive brine off her lips (she flirted with Dick and teased him, calling him “cher maître”). A possible weakness in a very complicated contract that was near completion kept nagging at him. The damn windows in the apartment. Also, there was a money thing, an awkward situation.
Then—of course—he was thinking about the event unfolding before him and his surroundings. He was happy for Charlotte. She looked good and she was excited. The night before, as the dinner was breaking up (and while Julia stood patiently off to one side), he had taken Charlotte’s hands and looked at her and said, “So tomorrow is the big day. My little girl isn’t going to be mine anymore. It doesn’t seem so long ago that you were running around with that little pony of yours, Chestnut—”
“Peanut.”
“Peanut. And now here you are. I know you are going to look beautiful tomorrow. Peter is a very fine man. I’m so proud of you. You seem very happy. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. And I know that you and Peter will always be happy.”
“Oh, Papa,” Charlotte said. She threw her arms around him and pressed against his chest, wetting his tie with tears.
Dick held her; her body was shuddering.
“Oh, Papa, I am happy. Thank you so much for everything.” Throughout this scene Dick thought he should say “I love you,” but there didn’t seem to be a good moment for that. And although Julia was standing nearby with perfect patience, he was conscious of keeping her waiting, so he thought he should conclude with Charlotte. That’s what he wanted to do anyway. He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her head. Then, almost imperceptibly, he shifted his pressure in the other direction, pushed her away gently, and took her hands. “Let’s have another look at you.” She wore an expectant expression that he could not bear to meet, so he smiled and looked at her in an unfocused way. “Beautiful girl,” he said. They remained in this pose for a moment, as long as Dick believed was sufficient. Then he gave her another quick hug, and, with a minimum of violence, released her.
“Well!” he said. “Big day tomorrow! Good night, my dear.”
“Good night, Papa.”
“Try to get some rest.”
He turned, and, with too quick a step, betraying that he felt he was making an escape, joined his wife.
Walking down the aisle with her now, Dick brimmed with pride. This was a mixture of fatherly pride and self-regard, for as he saw all the smiling people look at them, he had the impression that they were admiring him as much as Charlotte. He was looking well, although it was true that his middle had grown a shade thicker than he liked. He had to watch that and take some more exercise. Still, he thought about the silky claret and the fried artichokes at lunch and the grilled ham and cheese sandwich, the chocolate, and almost purred. He thought about his wife wearing her satiny slip, which revealed her shoulders and the smooth inside of her breast. He glanced up the aisle: in her suit she looked chic and shipshape. She had pinned her hair up so that it was as neat and tight as a flower bud (Janet had had her hair “done,” balloon-style). There was something both orderly and vibrant about it all that made Julia particularly desirable; he wanted to tear off those clothes like the paper and ribbons of a crisply wrapped birthday present. Later that night, when all this was over and they were in their room, he would order some brandy …
Dick and Charlotte were approaching their destination. She was smiling broadly and crying a bit and trembling on his arm. Ahead of them stood Peter Russell, the man Charlotte would marry. He seemed like a decent fellow. By Dick’s lights, indeed, he was ideal. The only real danger that daughters posed, in Dick’s view, was that they might marry some fantastically successful young guy who would show him no respect. All he needed was to have some aggressive kid who was making a fortune ironically calling him “sir” all the time. And with a second serve like a bullet. At the same time, it mattered to Dick that his sons-in-law be suitable. Given these considerations, Charlotte had made an exemplary choice. This young man, Peter, was perfectly presentable. He worked for Beeche, the financial outfit, doing … in fact, Dick didn’t exactly know what he did there. But he had a good well-paid professional job at a place everyone recognized. Peter was deferential. There had been a much older Frenchman with whom Charlotte had become involved, a dark, dramatic know-it-all bohemian from an ancient family. He would dominate the whole house with his restlessness, and, correcting Dick on some point of history or politics, he would be downright rude. Thank God he was gone. Peter was far from being that way. When he called Dick “sir,” it was with unqualified courtesy.
Dick saw the row of bridesmaids, some of whom he vaguely recognized. One was a true knockout. Deirdre looked overweight in her dress; Dick had never seen her face so made up. It didn’t suit her. Then the smiling minister. Dick had known these virile, confident churchmen, impossibly self-assured. The groom, looking quite nervous and sallow but smiling bravely. Ah, well. Poor bastard. He’d be moderately miserable for the next forty years, but he’d be okay. Next to Peter was his best man. A writer. Julia had sat next to him the previous night and had said he was “very interesting.” He looked like a fruit. Then, stretching to Dick’s right, the line of ushers, who, overall, were not too grotesque a sampling of youths. There was David, looking skeletal. At least he had cleaned up, even shaving, albeit patchily.
Now it was time to hand Charlotte off. He pressed one of her hands in both of his and gave her a smile, which she returned tremulously. Then he took a couple of steps back and awaited his cue to say, “Her mother and I do,” after which he would withdraw to the front pew and sit between his wives. Janet would smile at him, as if to say, patronizingly, “Good job.” But mixed with that smile would be detestation. As the mother of the bride, as the hostess of the big party to follow, as his ex-wife, she would be surrounded, despite her outward composure, by an invisible, agitated cloud of female anxiety, nostalgia, sentiment, bitterness, joy, envy. For the next forty-five minutes, he would be subject to all these emanations, and every time she moved, the scratchy noises made by the tulle or some damn thing she was wearing would irritate him. He would try to take solace in the calm, erect presence of Julia on his left. She would look perfect and act perfectly, he knew, throughout this whole—ordeal. He could not wait until it was all over and they were alone, and he would dishevel her. How satisfying that she belonged to him.
“Oh, Peter, you looked so handsome up there, and she is such a lovely girl. We’re so happy for you.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Matthews. Charlotte and I are so happy you could come.”
“Well, Peter, so it’s life without parole, is it?”
“Oh, Dan!”
“It’s not so bad, son. Food’s decent, and sometimes they let you out for an hour, you know, have a walk around the prison yard.”
“Oh, Dan!”
Peter laughed appropriately. “Great to see you, Mr. Matthews. Thanks for coming.” They were friends of his parents. The wife was short and thin; the husband was short and stout, with a red face. He had gripped Peter’s hand so hard as to cause him pain. They had a son whom Peter used to smoke pot with; he now ran a landscaping business.
Everything had gone well. They had heard a reading from Colossians. Reverend Micklethwaite had given a brief sermon (“I always tell the bride and groom not even to bother listening, because they’ll never remember a word of it anyway”). They had said their vows. Charlotte had had a catch in her voice. Jonathan had proffered the ring at the right moment and Peter had slipped it on Charlotte’s finger. They had kissed. They had gone down the aisle while the organ blared out an anthem. Flushed with excitement, they had been driven to the reception. Some long kisses in the back of the limousine. “I love you, Peter.” “Oh, Charlotte, I love you.” The photographer, a dark little man of foreign aspect, had behaved like a vicious dancing master and the picture taking was over quickly. And now they were in the receiving line.
He did love Charlotte. She looked very pretty today. He did love her. She was laughing, giggling! She had given him a passionate kiss in the car, and her thin lips seemed engorged. He could not think of a single reason not to have married her. They had some fun talks. She was bright. She was a good person, without excessive neuroses (sure, her family, but everybody had a family). He liked her friends, and they had some in common. He did love her.
Everything had gone well. The family members and friends from both sides were meshing easily. Charlotte’s and Peter’s parents were behaving as well-socialized grown-ups do. Peter’s were interchangeable with all the other members in their set, a set that entirely lacked the éclat of the guests from Charlotte’s side, but the Russells could hold their own, and these distinctions didn’t bother anyone very much. So it was all going well. As for protocol, the only slight lapse was that Isabella, the one truly stunning bridesmaid, had practically joined the receiving line. The maid of honor and the best man were supposed to be there, but not any of the other attendants. But Jonathan had been talking to the girl and they kept talking as he took his post, so that guests would try to shake her hand too. She was Chilean and very tall, with black hair but fair skin. When she laughed at something Jonathan said, she lowered her head and looked up at him through her long lashes. Her forearm was a slender shoot. In time, she wandered off, with a glance back at Jonathan, who attended more faithfully to his duties.
Later, Peter heard Jonathan saying to Charlotte’s jolly, round great-aunt, “Now, you know, Mrs. LeMenthe, it’s really not fair of you to upstage the bride this way, looking so beautiful!” Then Jonathan looked over again at the Chilean, who was talking to someone. She noticed this and slid her eyes toward him. Peter sighed. Who knew where this would lead? Jonathan worked fast. Then Peter supposed that they had book festivals in Santiago, in February, when it was summer down there. First-class ticket. The girl was drinking champagne, and Peter was thinking about how the tall, slender, delicate flute resembled her. These considerations abstracted him so much that he did not notice the guest who was now before him, having already chatted with Charlotte.
“Oh! Holly! Hello!”
“Hi!”
“I saw you in the church.”
“I saw you there, too.”
“Everything okay? Have you gotten a glass of champagne? Some hors d’oeuvres? They have these little puffy ham things—”
“Yes, I have everything I could want, and it’s all perfect.”
“Good, good. So—I was okay?”
“You were perfect.”
“And how about Jonathan? The way he handled the ring? Outstanding.”
“Not bad. I like to see a sharper attack on the pocket. But not bad.”
Peter and Holly stood there looking at each other, and all of his urges flooded back. This was the moment to seize her and run off.
Holly pressed his hand with both of hers. “I hope so much that you will be happy, Peter,” she said. “I know you will. To see you happy makes me very happy.” She began to cry. “Oh, how silly!” she said. She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, then crumpled it up. “I get to kiss the groom, don’t I?”
“Of course.”
They kissed on the cheek.
“Have a great trip,” Holly said. “Send a postcard and call us as soon as you get back.”
Us.
So it was all over. Peter had to put aside his hope or dream or fantasy, or whatever it was. He had married Charlotte, putting the final barrier between them. Holly could not be his and now he could not be hers. He had watched and waited to see if her bond to Jonathan would crack. Three years. Three years of dinners with the two of them, of watching her cook while they waited for Jonathan. (“Of course you can help! Let’s see—how about making some lemon zest?”) Three years of abashed answers to her discreet inquiries about his romantic life. Three years of going with them to the beach, and seeing her remove, to take one example, the short white denim skirt she had worn over her bathing suit, so coarse against her smooth thigh; and the flecks of blond hair against her tan forearm, slivered, golden glints. Three years of hearing her say things like “I was reading that new book the other day, you know, Europe in the High Middle Ages? And you know what’s really funny?” Three years of hearing her tell the truth when it would have been easier to lie, of seeing her help out friends, of watching her save a pupil from some ghastly situation or other, in addition to teaching her the ablative absolute. Even now, at this moment, while one of Charlotte’s cousins was telling him how much she loved their China pattern, Peter could feel the pressure of Holly’s hands. And he thought about the three years of seeing her overtip.
Well, forget it. After three years, it seemed clear that Holly was not going to break Jonathan’s heart and throw herself at Peter. How many millions of times Peter had considered taking some action of his own. He could have declared his true feelings. After all, she had once had a crush on him, if only for two minutes! And how many millions of times had he imagined her response, assuring him with utmost kindness that they were friends and that that was how she wished them to remain. Peter, such a nice guy. He could have told her the truth about Jonathan. You just didn’t do that to one of your mates, though. And he just couldn’t do it to her. In any event, the effect would have been so destructive to her that the messenger would hardly have been a candidate for Jonathan’s successor. In fact, Jonathan would probably have found a way to turn it all to his advantage (“I’m afraid of how much I love you”), and then the whole tearful drama of the second chance would have brought them even closer, as would their mutual disgust for the weasely busybody who had interfered. So Peter had simply lurked and waited, to no purpose. Holly would never be free. Never. So it was time for Peter to give up. To put her away from him. He felt a little like someone who had joined the French Foreign Legion to get away from a married woman with whom he had fallen in love. Farewell, dear friend (chère amie
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James Collins
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A hugely romantic debut novel about love and destiny. Previously published as Beginner’s Greek and now available as an ebook.‘Love in the Air’ is set in New York City and tells the story of a young man named Peter Russell and a young woman named Holly Edwards. Peter works for a prestigious financial firm on Wall Street, and Holly teaches Latin at a private girls′ school – when they sit next to each other on a plane journey, an intoxicating tale of romance, coincidence and thwarted plans starts to unfold. Other characters include: Jonathan Speedwell, an extremely handsome writer who is also Holly′s husband, Peter′s best friend and, crucially, a cad; Charlotte Montague, Peter′s rather tiresome and pretentious wife; Arthur Beeche, the dignified, formal and very, very rich proprietor of the firm where Peter works; Julia Montague, Charlotte′s beautiful, young step-mother and Dick Montague, a successful, vain lawyer who is Charlotte′s father.Take all these characters and throw in miscommunications, letters going astray, adulterous relationships, fiendish behaviour and ultimately an ending in which everyone gets their due… The result is a debut novel that is charming, fresh, clever and beautifully written; a deeply romantic story about the transformative power of love.