DAVID CAPERINI, EX-FRENCH tutor, was the son of a Princeton professor whose life’s work was a mind-numbing concordance of The Faerie Queen. David had been expected to do something in the academic line. He was physically tremulous, precociously a heavy drinker and could be fawning and evasive in argument. But he balked at things like final exams, requisite credits and graduation. In fact, he had trouble finishing anything, even his brilliant midnight conversations with friends. Fueled by beer and braininess, they lasted until total exhaustion set in at dawn. David had ended up unemployed in his late twenties without any laurels or prospects whatsoever. “Pity our ambition didn’t trickle down to the next generation, thine or mine,” was his father’s jowly aside to a fellow academic who had a similarly wayward son. David considered himself a writer. He had a sixty-page manuscript proving it, but he was now writing almost nothing at all.
As a boy, David had the bad luck to have a slight spinal deformity, which left him on the short side. One futile treatment kept him flat on his back in a brace for a year. Since he couldn’t raise his head, he’d used prismatic glasses to read. That year of voracious inactivity set the tone for his life. To this day, he nervously dipped into everything from Kant to Aquaman to Vanity Fair. Time, whole days or months, lurched past. He felt a sickroom inability to concentrate on anything more involved than forewords and afterwords, lists, a bit of critical apparatus, liner notes, glossaries, squibs and droll literary gewgaws of the Punch-New Yorker variety. Aphoristic Pascal was his current enthusiasm. Reading him kept his French up.
After leaving the Van Nest household, David found work at a New York non-profit. The organization provided living wills and lawyer-vetted DNR orders to anxious older people all over the country. The mailroom where the wills were put in envelopes and addressed was called “Fulfillment.” The head of Fulfillment was a woman, single and surprisingly young, who had decided to start a family in vitro without the active involvement of men. She now had an eighteen-month-old. Intrigued by her co-worker’s erudite tameness, she invited him to move into her tiny Tudor City studio to form some kind of relationship. David agreed. Now, while his partner was at the office, David watched over the baby and tried to write. As always he read snatches of this and that. A stack of books and magazines rose every day next to the padded play cage.
When Jane Brzostovsky ran into David again in New York, she sized him up and decided he was her fated companion, at least for the present. He could be both a friend and more punishment, a reminder of how far she’d fallen. Like the head of Fulfillment, except not amorously, Jane judged David to be indefinably masochistic, bully-able yet astute, socially passive. When he could get away from the Tudor City apartment and the baby, David would go along with Jane to see any movie or gallery show she liked. They gossiped about the Van Nests and Lawrence Academy at first. Jane dragged him to bars, paying for his time with drinks. After a banal first meeting at a Columbia University watering hole, they saw each other constantly for weeks. David teased her that his hard-working partner was getting jealous. One groggy pre-dawn, he asked Jane to marry him but backed down immediately. He pretended he’d been joking.
Jane called David on one of those summer Sundays when so little is going on in New York that the natural world almost shows through like an underpainting. The sumac trees nod, and huge red-brown dragonflies slalom in from the Hudson so fast their flight appears to hang in the air behind them for a second like string. If the buildings and pavement could go just a little transparent, the silence increase just a notch, the underground streams rise out of the storm drains—the original Mannahatta, the world of the Lenape, seemed ready to snap into focus, their canoes gliding below Riverside Park.
Jane had chosen Poco Loco, a Mexican restaurant popular with doughy young corporate types, who were working at the New York office for a year before transferring back to Dallas. For Jane’s purposes, it was as obscure as it was popular. Being seen with David in front of real New Yorkers somehow embarrassed her. Poco Loco was like meeting at a provincial mall.
They had to wait outside for a table. David was agitated. He rooted something out of his eternal plastic bag full of newspapers and magazines. The New York Post. The paper was damp from the sweat of his palms, and the outer page tore softly when his forefinger prodded it.
David started telling Jane about a column by a conservative pundit he’d found a perverse way to admire. The syndicated blowhard wrote philistine op-eds foreshadowing the hammy politics of Newt Gingrich. The current column recounted a story about a teacher fired for using the word “niggardly.” Students didn’t recognize the word but protested racism. “Can you believe that?” David chuckled at the column title, Three Syllables, Sounds like Racism.
Jane was meant to laugh. Was David twitting her? He knew her politics. “To me,” Jane said. “That’s just some piggish white guy claiming black people are dumb. I hear him saying—”
“No! It’s about the ignorance. Their completely impoverished vocabulary!”
“Come on. Who cares?” Jane scoffed. “How important is niggardly? Do we even need it?”
David’s mouth hung open as if niggardly was Amen.
Jane suspected a catastrophic depression was coming for David. She’d seen it looming from the moment they reconnected. The Tudor City setup was unsustainable. Jane found it hard to believe David didn’t see the falsity of the relationship himself. Of course, her own self-ignorance when it came to Barry Paul had been virtuosic. But this was different. Maybe David just wasn’t as smart as he’d seemed at the Van Nest’s table. Or did screaming babies really oxidize intelligence as she’d always suspected?
After a handful of visits Jane had observed that David wasn’t much of a father figure. Holding a glass of scotch in one hand, he inattentively tried to quiet the baby with a fistful of colored pencils. The baby knocked the rainbow kindling from his hand with several uncoordinated slaps. Without lowering his eyes from the ceiling David finished his witty story about Darius Van Nest, the closet mosaicist. The story was only slightly embellished.
Today, David brought up a conversation he and Jane had had months ago. He got excited. “Don’t you even remember?” he cried, red-faced. Jane, exactly like the blowhard columnist, had said something scathing about political correctness. He quoted her. How did he remember these things? Making an effort to be no more argumentative than a drifting leaf, Jane pointed out they hadn’t been talking about niggardly.
Animated, David said he wanted to write an article elaborating how the left-right divide was a mirage, because here, among many examples, was something you yourself said that’s perfectly in line with the thoughts of a notorious conservative. His emphasis made Jane wince. She couldn’t help eyeing the slab-like bros in off-duty golf shirts. They were also waiting for brunch tables. Were they listening to this raving? “Why not do an article like you said—get it out of your system?” Jane agreed softly.
“Ha!” David scoffed. “Maybe if the milieu of influence weren’t so closed!” he challenged bitterly. “You haven’t tried publishing anything lately.”
People kept entering Poco Loco and coming back out to wait amidst the growing crowd. David continued his stuttering tirade about how the world works, how you had to know people. Rhetorical questions were posed, grabbed out of the air and flung to the gum-spotted concrete. Fate, it seemed, had chosen Jane as company for self-repressed David at the very moment of his breakdown.
Condensation dripped onto Jane’s scalp from an air conditioner hose overhead. When she shifted, David flared, “Stop—stop moving away from me!” She’d never seen him so aggressive. His domineering spasms were usually comical, if she noticed them at all. Other people really were eavesdropping now, whispering intermittently in sham conversations of their own. David said, “It just bugs me that everything has to be so false. Why—I don’t know why people can’t—whatever happened to criticism? Why is it always bad to be critical? Why can’t people say something is—well—shit, if it is? If they think it is?”
Jane hummed in a soothing pretense of engagement which caused David’s eyes to narrow.
In the brick wall next to her, the kitchen’s gray metal street door squealed open. One of the dishwashers appeared. He balanced on the doorway’s raised threshold on the balls of his feet and propped the door open with an elbow while he lit a cigarette.
“What are you thinking, Jane?” David demanded. “And the worst—well, I think the worst is in friendship. When friends don’t tell each other what they really think. Fuck irony!” he exclaimed.
Jane’s embarrassed casting about must have made their conversation seem slightly public, open to anyone, so the dishwasher smiled cheerily at them. Jane smiled back. The dishwasher kept butting the door open with his shoulder or elbow. He blew smoke upward and out like a fountain. Whenever the door fell back against his shoulder, the jet of smoke flinched from his lips.
Jane tried changing the subject. “Except for this place, the city’s completely empty. Why do they all come here?” She fanned her chin. “Balmy. Wouldn’t it be better to be lonely on a beach—I mean, on a lonely beach somewhere?” She was half-addressing the dishwasher.
Peculiarly, David asked, “Have you ever stolen anything?”
“What?”
The dishwasher spoke up. “You got that. About the beach. I like to be at the beach today.”
David decided to conceal his rage. He put on a wooden grimace and echoed, “She got that right. That’s for sure, man.”
Still, tipping playfully on the balls of his feet, the dishwasher ignored David and addressed Jane. “We got the best beaches in my country, Mexico. You ever been?”
“Of course,” Jane said, friendly but brisk. She couldn’t tell whether the dishwasher was a jerk. She mentioned getting lost at a teocalli as a child and being afraid the feathered priests would find and gut her. “A few years ago I was in Chile. Now that was beautiful. The fjord country.” She mused aloud, “That’s what New York reminded me of today. Strange to say.”
The dishwasher said, “We’re a very ancient people. Most people don’t know that stuff like what you said. Teotihuacan, our capital, was the largest city in the world.”
Jane stared at him. Her gaze must have loitered on his face too long, because his dark eyes appeared in an odd way to hunch expectantly. He was about to say something more when David’s hand touched Jane’s shoulder. She hated it when David touched her. A table had opened up.
Once they were seated, David began complaining about the world again. He even pulled his much-underlined copy of Pascal from his filthy plastic bag. He opened the book on her plate and translated a passage about untruthfulness word for word.
Jane simpered and asked after the baby.
David said, “We’re a bit worried. He hasn’t grown for a while, but that doesn’t—it doesn’t mean a thing, because they grow in spurts—very normal. Supposedly.”
“Ah.”
“We took him to a party, and I think—I think he’ll be a great socialite. Much better than either of us at it. He was so at ease—letting people pick him up and crawling around their legs.” David suddenly asked, “Am I being hostile? About what I was talking about before? Tell me if I am, because I’ve heard—some people have said I’ve been a bully lately.”
“Just depressed or something. But who knows?”
“Wow. Depressed. Tell me. Because I don’t see how talking about things—I mean, don’t you want people to be honest with you?”
She eyed him. “Sometimes I want them to be—yeah—a certain way.”
“What do you mean depressed? I don’t feel depressed. Fed—fed up with bullshit maybe. Anyway, what do I—I don’t have anything to be depressed about.” He looked at her sharply. “For god’s—don’t try that still-in-the-closet bullshit. I’m sick of that from people—always.” New acquaintances often assumed David was gay.
“Did I ever? I wouldn’t. And as a matter of fact, I get it, too, sometimes. But I didn’t mean to suggest your behavior cancelled everything you said. About the world being difficult. The no day job and the whole apartment-kid situation is enough to drive anybody—”
“What?” He wasn’t listening.
Thudding hollowly, the kitchen door swung open. Two fast-moving waiters, tall and short, passed through it, one into, one out of a cloud of steam. Both were holding oval platters which swung high when their bodies briefly twined together. Then a brown hand stopped the door. The dishwasher peered out, looking for Jane. She was careful not to return his gaze, but she felt it when his eyes found her. Even from the corner of her eye, she could tell he was more beautiful than he’d seemed outside, his face glazed almost to tears by the mizzling kitchen steam. The door fell closed, equal parts blow and sigh.
“Explain to me what you’re worried about again,” Jane asked David.
“I don’t know,” he groaned. “I just hate the idea—money’s become—money’s become this huge problem. I hate it. I can’t stand having low, normal problems.” He glanced at Jane to see how this was going over. “I was always afraid I’d turn out to be—I think I might be a failure.”
“Way too young still. Come on. And I doubt you have to worry about turning out at all,” Jane said drily. “Ever. Sorry.”
“Is that a gay crack?”
“Oh, please!”
“No, but I did have this one idea. To do with money. It was something I thought we could talk about.”
She guessed he was going to ask her for a loan. It was something he’d do.
“I’m—what I asked before—I’ve actually done that.”
“What?”
“What I said. What I said when we were outside. I told you I’ve stolen something.”
“I thought you were asking me if I had.”
“Whatever. I stole something from the Van Nests. Sort of. It was a—it is a serious—anyway, this is absolutely—you can’t—confidential.”
“Of course,” Jane said, compressing her mouth in a teacherly way.
“Do you know Colin Vail?”
“Maybe.”
“An artist.”
“No, then. I don’t think so. May have heard the name.”
“Anyway, he was from a very grand old New York family, and he had the house that—later the Van Nests bought it from him—or after he died—I’m not sure. It’s a little weird him owning that hideous place. Because he was sort of a cousin to the Pop movement. When I was staying there—I took—well, I took a box of his drawings. Left in the basement.” He became his old, obsequious self, chuckling with shame, leaning back for the waiter to set down his quesadilla.
Jane wondered noncommittally, “Are they worth a lot?”
“There’s a—you’d be surprised. Amazed. There’s a revival—”
“Problem solved for you.”
“No, because the thing is—the catalogue says—supposedly he didn’t do any drawings. More like assemblages were his thing—and these would be the only—which would make them even more valuable.”
“Are you sure they’re his?”
“Oh, definitely—but I would need to get them authenticated.”
“That’s a problem.”
“Well, yes. Because his sister—Colin Vail’s—is still alive. He’s dead—killed himself—but she’s alive and has a ton of his work, and she’s started riding this revival. So she would be one obvious expert—the best one, really, in terms of money—her imprimatur. But I could never go to her myself. Do you get it? She knows the Van Nests. Or they know her. So it would be—Where did these come from? And who did you say you were?—and obviously I worked there. Everybody knows. Or what if she recognized them? On top of that I think, there’s a remote chance Darius would remember I might have taken the box to my car one time. But you’re in a completely different position. You’ve never had anything to do with any of them. Except one teacher dinner, right?”
“No. I’m sorry, David.”
“But I—”
“I could never do that for you. If that’s what you mean. Take them to the sister for you.”
David was stymied. “I didn’t—” he tried. His leg had started bouncing so violently that when his knee accidentally hit the underside of the table, everything jumped. He looked around wildly.
“I don’t mean that I’m Ms. Virtuous,” Jane allowed, wondering if she was about to confess her own crime. She felt her brain make a dizzy quarter turn. Vision went shadowy for a bare second. The moment hadn’t been well-prepared, though for a long time Jane had probably needed to tell somebody else—somebody a little sleazy—what had happened between her and Barry.
Why now? Like snow slumping from a fir branch, the indelible words came out, “I even had a thing with a very young student of mine one time.” She immediately feared telling David every detail.
David was hardly able to weasel the bare facts out of her. “How old?”
“Same age as Darius. But completely mature, of course. No, a little older, I think.” She laughed at her defensiveness. David being weaselly, not entirely trustworthy, felt just right to her. This was a jailhouse friendship, low punishment. But she didn’t want to risk telling him too much. Surely David had seen or met Barry, so no names.
Now two people knew. The other was far more unlikely than David Caperini. Oliver’s friend Mr. Drinkwater, the ex-ambassador on the Lawrence Academy board, put it together one day with a breathtaking guess. A week or so after he’d made his fund-raising call on the Van Nests, Drinkwater still mulled over his pleasant feat of memory in the family’s kitchen. He could see their amazed faces. It was such a tiny thing, but he was proud of his enduring sharpness. Ms. Brzostovsky and Darius. Darius had a crush on loveable, popular Ms. Brzostovsky. After the tenth time the little triumph flitted through his mind—Ms. Brzostovsky and Darius—another presence joined them. The boy who’d disappeared. His memories of that boy intersected and braided into his memories of the other two, and the shocking idea came to him.
“Ms. B,” Drinkwater quavered. His craggy finger rose to stop her in a hall at Lawrence. “Ms. Brzostovsky. Please. No, right here. Yes. So.” He crooked the finger and had her follow him outside. She was irritated. Being led to a surprise was the form of passivity she most disliked. Drinkwater stopped in a courtyard formed by wings of the administration building. He looked around him, making sure they were alone. He bent his head tragically. At their feet, a dusty puddle covered the rectangular basin of a defunct fountain. Hairy with floating seed husks and shreds of glinting cobweb the black water reflected their heads, the overarching trees and sky.
“So! Yes! I have a notion things may have gotten out of line? The board had several talks about our missing student a little while back. Barry Paul. It was a poser for us all—what really happened. The parents, too. No, no!” Jane had gone sunburn red. Her eyes filled with tears. She was confirming everything before he even finished. Drinkwater hurried. He didn’t want her to speak. Returning his gaze to the motionless puddle of water he tried to be firm. The wrinkled pouches of his cheeks wobbled when he clenched his jaw. “Far out of line, and I really—really, I’m going to ask—I think you might need to break camp. Strike the tent. Sooner the better. I think you really must, because otherwise, I have a duty to the school and—of course… I’m sorry. There.” His hand reached out to her upper arm to steady her. She really looked ready to topple over.
Jane wasn’t grateful in the least for Drinkwater’s discretion. His misplaced kindliness itself irritated her. She wasn’t blind. She could see. This was a kindly man. So what was off about him? Did some types of innocence call for harshness in response? Should she have tried to lie? “Bug off, you’re mistaken.” That, Jane, is your usual impulse, isn’t it? Treating innocence roughly? But what if it was how she was made? A born teacher, molding, demanding, controlling, caressing, punishing. And what about men like Drinkwater? If kindliness was just his species, what credit did he deserve for it? She pretended she’d have preferred shackles, a noose and snare drums, but she wouldn’t have, of course.
That her fucking a kid was the ultimate cause of Drinkwater’s awkward courtliness by the fountain made Jane’s muscles tense in anger for months. She didn’t hate innocence and kindliness. But she could never find her way to them. Her ecstatic crime and the tormenting guilt about it didn’t lie at opposite poles of the moral universe after all. They were the same. Sin-guilt was apparently a continuum like space-time, and innocence and kindliness were inaccessible for her outside the cone of her experience.
David Caperini looked frustrated that Jane had burdened him with something so momentous. He frowned. He pouted. He tried to absorb a story that, for the time being, was mostly dead weight.
“Because you confessed to me, I confess to you, I guess.” Jane sounded sheepish. With a sidelong glance, she chased the dishwasher back through the kitchen door where he’d appeared again, clumsy and persistent.
“But we never finished what we were saying about the drawings.” David emerged from calculating bemusement.
“What?”
“Let’s think about it some more.” Sounding reasonable, he continued, “My situation wouldn’t—except for the not-enough money—it wouldn’t hurt so much if I had a little emotional support. But nobody cares about straight families anymore. Not that we’re a family. I’m more like the babysitter. But you should hear what he says about us—my dad. And my mom never calls. Neither of them ever asks me any questions. Or only, If you’re gay, we don’t care.”
“They say that?”
“Well, not in so many words. No. But a lot of people have that attitude. Why do they all think I would care in this day and age? That’s the last thing worrying me. Maybe the problem is I’m so relaxed about the gay stuff. I mean, I wish I was gay. Everybody would be—Oh you poor baby—!”
“I don’t think it can be that easy.”
“It is! Or if I was a transvestite. I wish I was. I love transvestites, transexuals, whatever. I wish I was a screaming fruitcake! Nobody believes—nobody believes you are what you are if you’re not something unbelievable. Everybody’s—”
“Poor baby. Things would be so much more complicated, David, if you were a transvestite. Or transexual.” Jane felt oddly deflated that her Barry news hadn’t held its ground.
“I could make money performing,” David joked hysterically before going all at once sour, pettish. “I don’t want to talk to you about any of this. We have to go back to the Colin Vail drawings.”
“No.”
“Yes, because like you said: You confess, I confess. What you just told me changes everything. It means we’re in it together in a way and we can help each other, right?” He stopped her before she could answer. “Wait! Listen. What you said is important. I don’t want to sound like I wasn’t following you. But you should know I don’t blame you either.”
Jane felt herself going heavy and small.
“But now I just—I think—based on what we’ve talked about—what you’ve just told me you did that’s sort of worse than what I did—sorry!—now we each know something, and it would be—it’s in our own interests that no one ever learns—” He raised his eyebrows to complete the proposition. He pursed his mouth with contrasting primness. Under the table his palms ran slowly down his thighs, half-childish, half-lewd. It took Jane quite a while to understand him. He was threatening to betray her over Barry Paul, if she didn’t help him with the Vail drawings.
The plot was too outlandish for her not to doubt her understanding. No. Jane looked at David’s empty bottle of Corona. “Are you drunk?” she asked mildly.
It may have been the shortest blackmail plot in history, though probably not the least serious. David’s eyes winced closed. His head fell back then forward. He started stroking his chest and belly. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just that—Jane, I’m so desperate,” he mewled fluently.
“Listen,” Jane said. “Forgetting about whatever insane threat just popped out of your mouth—”
“No threat! No threat. Come on. Don’t!”
“—I’m thinking you should pay attention to this depression. You’re wrong about no one caring. Think about Prozac or even psychotherapy.”
“How would I ever pay?” He snorted.
He really didn’t have any money. That simple truth made Jane reconsider his seriousness. She wondered if him wanting to blackmail her wasn’t an absurdity after all. It sounded like a joke. But that’s the way real crime usually sounds at first. In her experience, anyway. That, in turn, reminded her how vulnerable she was. Truly vulnerable. Someone would say something one day. When she was in her seventies, perhaps, the way it was happening with decrepit bishops and coaches. She started to get terribly scared for herself. This sometimes happened nowadays.
“Clinics? Or I’m supposed to get a pity shrink?” David moaned. The thought was outrageous to him. “Maybe I should be daycare-ized. Yeah, put me in Davey Day Care, why not?”
“I’m not surprised you react that way.”
“This is—”
“OK. OK. Forget it. It just occurred to me. Because I was worried.”
“I don’t seem that bad, do I?”
“No. Of course not,” she lied.