OLIVER CAME BACK into the city a month later. He saw his dermatologist about a keratinous something on his forehead. He met with a portly, throat-clearing banker at the Hell’s Kitchen offices of a private trust company—the Van Nest family bank, as they called it. The fact that the offices looked like a fly-by-night travel agency bothered him not at all. Oliver was considering moving the business to Philadelphia anyway, because New York was getting too expensive.
He was invited to dinner again at Cassie’s. Cassie bought cold salmon this time. She was taken up with her plan to give him the trompe l’oeil painting. Buying the dinner at a traiteur and serving it from the cartons, opting to wear blue jeans and an untucked white blouse, downplayed the munificent ceremony of the gift.
On entering, Oliver clasped his hands in front of his belly loosely as if accepting congratulations on a sermon. Cassie’s mwah was awkwardly thwarted by his posture. His distracted babble of pleasantries was almost too soft to hear. “Well! Didn’t notice this rug last time.” He narrated his slightest actions. “Drink the drink. Take a couple paces and sit down—here or here? Do you—? Well, here, then. And try one of these rice crackers wrapped in—seaweed, it looks to me. Sort of a papery taste. Not peppery, ha!”
At length Oliver looked at Cassie with extreme gravity. “No,” he seemed to disagree with everything he’d just said, even with the way he’d behaved for most of his life. “I’m thinking. I had a drink before coming over here and was thinking about the boy. What you said.”
“What I said?”
“Last time I brought him down to the city—the only time, to be honest—I started to have a little talk about money with him,” he continued slyly. “And I found—I found I was quite moved by—well—everything you said about him. That is, I noticed I wasn’t thinking, Oh, this is a terrible chore—weekend in the city—father, son.”
Cassie felt a flicker of unease. When Oliver had been quiet for a long time, she tried changing the subject gently. “Am I crazy or did someone tell me you used to have something to do with government? The CIA? That can’t be right, can it?”
“Yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. How I met Sohaila, actually. Bombay. Not something I can talk about, of course, but there it is.” He sounded like a terrible liar. Like he was riding the opportune story as a surfer catches a wave.
Cassie’s skin crawled. Trying not to sound skeptical, she asked, “You met in Bombay? Mumbai, I guess we have to say now.”
“Right. Her family was exiled by the Shah. They were quite grand and made the Shah nervous politically. This was long before any of that later business—revolution, Khomeini, what have you. But that’s beside the point. What was I—? Oh. It occurred to me I’m not the best father-professor-teacher in the world. I mean to say I could do it, and rather brilliantly, but I don’t. I’m talking about the boy. Because I’ve never thought it’s right to impose your way on others. Nothing outrages me more, speaking for myself. So I don’t do it. But because Darius seems fairly well screwed up in a rich boy sort of a way, I thought maybe I should tell him being rich isn’t so bad. If it isn’t, that is to say. This all came from what you recommended.”
Left an opening, Cassie started weakly, “I’m not sure—I wouldn’t like to think I was butting in.”
“But you said I shouldn’t treat him like an orphan boy. I should spoil him.”
“I did?” She recouped. “Well. Clearly the key is being kind. But also getting the privileged kid to have a sense of responsibility towards others. Make it clear the whole thing—money—just depends on luck. Which—I’ve found—” she slowed. “Well, a lot of rich people don’t seem to believe that in their hearts. They think they deserve it. Even if they learn how to say, I’m just lucky. You know—to make themselves sound good.” She eyed Oliver nervously, “You know—Ha, ha, it’s all dumb luck. I’m just like you. But I’m lucky.’”
“You are?”
“No. I mean that’s what they say. Or they learn to say it without truly believing it in their hearts. Often. I don’t mean to say I’m lucky myself.”
“You’re not lucky?”
“No. Wait. What are we talking about? Of course I’m lucky, but I’m not rich. Not rich rich.” She waved at her sumptuous apartment irritably. “Weren’t we talking about money?”
“Ah. So you think with Darius the idea should be, Don’t spoil him! Chores, job, not getting anything he wants. Discipline.”
“Well, no. Of course we spoil people we love. But you have to give a kid a keen sense of... of the difficult position of others in the world.”
Oliver made a fish-lipped show of consideration. “I hope I didn’t do everything backwards. What I wanted to convey to Darius—last time, when I began having that money talk with him, well, I wanted to show him I was generous, I think. I was tough on him as usual—but not in my usual hands off way—and I found he responded. I thought he was quite touched as a matter of fact.” Oliver, a creature of fantastic reticence, thought any confidence, any secret shared, was a sign of love. And because the secret he’d imparted to Darius involved money, the greatest form of information possible, the love had to be greater, too, overwhelming. Oliver believed even his bizarre threat of disinheritance bound him to his son like the perfect kiss or like the shared ordeals of brothers in arms.
Cassie broke off the strange conversation and excused herself. She went to the kitchen to pour a second round of drinks. She’d put the open cartons of salmon and tomato salad on Majolica serving platters. The expectant array looked forlorn. The gloss on the dill sauce had clouded. Her plan was going awry. Not only the timing but the emotions were all wrong. She fixed the drinks mechanically. She searched herself for the best possible of a small clutter of emotions.
Oliver was chuckling complacently to himself when Cassie returned. “Funny to talk family with you. Feels like we ought to be beyond that.”
Cassie frowned.
“I know you think I keep a very odd household. Sohaila and Stan in there.”
“Frankly, yes.”
“I could even bring you into it if I wanted.”
“No,” Cassie laughed. “No.”
“It’s separate apartments in a manner of speaking. And Stan is contemptible, which helps.”
“But doesn’t it bother you sometimes?”
Unlike himself, Oliver was thoughtful. “Maybe it’s just the way I am. Passive, fatalistic, shut down. All that probably helped when I was in the spy biz,” he joked. “But that’s not my focus anymore.”
“Oliver,” Cassie breathed with real uneasiness.
“Cassie, now it seems a lot—too much—to ask, but I had in mind—part of the reason I wanted to talk about all that with the boy—”
Cassie’s cheeks grew hot. Haughtily her finger stroked the inner corner of one eye. Was she wiping away or inducing a tear?
“I was thinking, because, as you’ve hinted, I’m too hard on Darius.”
“No,” she whispered.
“Well, I am. And I was thinking I might want to get him a little something he loved, really loved. I was maybe tough on him about the money, and, I don’t know, carrot and stick is the idea. So I was thinking—something he loved—why not that artwork he flipped for, Colin’s thing, the Battle of I’m-not-sure-what? Amertume? And Hopes?”
“Oliver. I don’t have it. I don’t have it anymore.” She blushed even more intensely. She averted her gaze. She smiled stiffly through the tender concussion of a wave of drunkenness.
“I’d want to pay,” he murmured, fascinated by how hard it was to ask for something.
“No, Oliver. I don’t have it.”
“No, that’s fine.” He frowned curiously at his failure.
Cassie gestured across the room. “Look!” The white prism on which the Battle of Desires and Bitternesses had been sitting last time was bare. She stood. “Come. I’ll show you. This is the most hideous irony. I’ve got—” She stopped herself from swaying. “Oliver?”
Giving him the painting was anything but splashy. Cassie was at sea emotionally, but she didn’t think generosity was one of the emotions. She forced a smile as small and precise as the clear-eyed disquiet she couldn’t ignore. Even with all the other emotions in her, she couldn’t ignore this small disquiet. She’d meant to take Oliver’s hand, so hers rose. It wilted back to the thigh of her jeans when he failed to take it.
“Are you all right?” Oliver asked, confused. His glasses had slipped to the tip of his nose. He looked back at the painting, staring vacantly, his mouth unclosed like a carp.
“A little present I got for you,” Cassie explained. “Nothing, really.”
Mouth still agape, Oliver put his hands on his hips in polite astonishment. “Oh, Cassie! Cassie, my goodness!”
She tittered in agony. It seemed the whole thing might work for a moment. Or at least not be a disaster. He was evidently touched.
“I’m—” A hand patted his belly. He let out a happy fragment of a sob. But he also frowned, shaking his head. He reached out to touch her shoulder but missed, stroking the lightly perfumed bedroom air.
She’d expected him to be tight as a drum when it came to thanks. She tipped her head to look at him.
“This means a great deal to me.” His voice was momentous, low and slow.
Cassie spun the black bracelet on her wrist. “Not something I made, but—you see, I traded the other for it—the Battle—absurd irony, if it turns out that’s what you really wanted.”
Oliver picked up the small painting. He held it at arm’s length—surprisingly possessive about it already, Cassie thought. He marched a few steps and rested the painting gently on a slipper chair. Turning back, he made good on stroking her shoulder. The ceremoniousness of his movements was peculiar, as if he’d blocked the scene the day before and was a terrible actor, besides. “You’re tired of all my blah-blah about Darius, aren’t you?” He gave her a yellow-toothed grin, unsettling at this point.
“I meant to wait till after dinner. Are you hungry?” Cassie asked evasively. He’d embraced her. He was abnormally shy physically, always twiddling at the back of her neck or poking her in the nipple and then no more. But now he held her in a vise grip. He kissed her on the lips: peck, peck, peck. Peck, peck. Peck.
“You, madame, are delicious.” He swatted a cheerful rhythm on her buttocks.
Cassie let out a virginal peep. Then a more surprised one at the sudden, lewd wetness on her neck. It tickled. He smelled of smoke and salt, low tide almost. Her hands faintly bongoed a response on his lower back. It was uncomfortable the way he was squeezing her.
He threw her to the bed and came tumbling atop her with a gruesome, “Ha ha.” It hurt. For a moment they were all middle-aged bracings and knocked elbows until he got her in his grip again.
His ashy breath wheezed over her. He shook her roughly, playing at tiger seizing fawn. Cassie’s disquiet had exploded. The scene was disgusting. She hated Oliver, at least for the moment, and she experimented with a few seconds of laxness, a feint with escape as its object. Oliver knocked his hips against her, uninhibited and inept. He worked his fleshy, loose-seeming erection against her thigh. Though his glasses were unhooked from one ear, he smiled directly at her, yellow, proud, blind, humping.