DARIUS DRIFTED THROUGH his next year at Columbia. He completely misunderstood the attentions of successive suitors. Their friendships just seemed weird to him. When someone appealed to him clearly enough for him to act, a sudden mute fixation made it impossible to talk. He figured out how to go to gay bars on his own. And he and Alan still enjoyed witty dinners together at whatever restaurant was the most talked about and the most difficult to get into.
Darius’s mediocrity in classes led to a half-resigned expectation he’d end up at a law school somewhere. He had no more positive goal, but he dreaded the bizarre, luxurious unemployment of Oliver. In all this time, he never saw his father, though both were living on the same small island. He got through to him by phone a handful of times. They made plans that went nowhere. Darius walked by the building on Cedar Street a few times a year, thinking he might see Oliver in the neighborhood, but he never did. It wasn’t until Darius’s last year of school began that he finally contrived to meet his father briefly.
Sohaila had called Darius. Her we’re-both-on-our-own-now voice was even crisper than usual. She asked Darius to dinner at the New Jersey house. He could spend the night if he wanted. The occasion for the invitation sounded innocent enough. Rolf, the son of a beloved family friend, was visiting from Paris. He was seven years older than Darius but that was close enough. Sohaila made her invitation with a greater than usual frost of pleasantries. She refused to beg a favor, though if Darius came, it would make entertaining Rolf a lot easier. When Darius asked if something was wrong, Sohaila said No guardedly. Darius was left to wonder what she was hiding during his train trip to New Jersey.
When he walked in, Sohaila was at the kitchen sink rinsing a vase for a bunch of anemones. She gave Darius a weak, staticky smile at first. She glanced at Stan who was slouching against the counter. His mouth opened to say something. He thought better of it and merely smiled. He returned to contemplating the pretzel sticks in his palm.
Sohaila decided to make a show of enthusiasm. She shook her hands and gave Darius a light, wristy embrace, keeping her damp hands off his shirt. When Darius asked about Rolf, Sohaila shrugged. “He was resting earlier, I think.” She glanced at the defunct bell register. The cockeyed arrows pointed to the same quaintly labeled rooms they’d pointed to for decades, including Rolf’s room: Guestroom No. 2.
Stan slapped his hands together and began chafing them as if literally trying to kindle good cheer. “What has our metropolitan scholar to teach us about? What great new dance performance must we all rush to?” For a moment, he held Darius’s gaze with playfully aggressive intensity. He sounded as sarcastic as ever, but he, too, was avoiding some subject.
“Dah-li-ush. Could you—?” Sohaila asked nervously. She tugged the lavender-patterned paper from under the anemones and slid it across the counter toward Darius. He disposed of it for her. He smelled his hands after crumpling the paper into the garbage. His mother measured the thick flower stems against the vase.
Stan said, “We’ve had shocking news.”
“Stan, please. Not right away.”
Uncharacteristically tractable, Stan straightened and made a curious, antique bow. He wasn’t being ironical about it. His hands mimicked a wave of emotion coming from his breast, and he apologized, “I’m always, Out with it! For So, there’s the perfect moment.”
“Nothing to do with Dad?” Darius asked in alarm. The other two exchanged a look, before Sohaila said No and Stan commented with a creeping half-shrug.
“Oliver is fine as far as I know,” Sohaila said, clearly displeased about being cornered.
“The not fine is on our side,” Stan said gravely. “I’m sorry.” He promptly retracted the remark. He pressed his lips together.
Sohaila asked, “What do these look like? Are they too—?” She stepped back. The anemones lolled against the rim of a celadon vase like queasy ferry passengers.
“I like them like that,” Darius said.
With energy, Sohaila lifted the flowers from the vase to trim the stems more. She looked crushed that she’d done such a poor job at first.
“Remember, So,” Stan said gently. “This is not a little tiny thing. Not a little emotional poke in the eye. We’ve discussed this. It’s monstrous, because it has a major impact on our life. Real harm.”
“What are you talking about?” Darius asked.
Sohaila set down her shears and the flowers. She covered her face with one hand. She gripped her elbow with the other. She wasn’t crying. She even peeked through her fingers at the kitchen door, not wanting to be surprised by Rolf. She seemed to smell the life-fragrance of the flowers on her fingers, the same way Darius had. She closed her eyes. Her hand fell. She looked at Stan, helplessly giving him permission.
“Your father cheated your mother in a particularly outrageous way,” Stan said. He eyed Darius.
Dabbing a tear or eyeliner with her littlest finger, Sohaila made a sighing noise, as if she wanted to moderate Stan’s harshness.
“Completely illegal,” he insisted. “And showing a certain cruelty I think you’re familiar with in him.”
“He’s a fantasist,” Darius breathed. He felt horribly guilty. He worried instantly about looking like he was lying for some reason. He was impressed by Stan’s barbarous gravity. The way the Romanian doffed irony or donned earnestness so completely made Darius feel, vaguely, that he was up against someone both powerful and sincere.
“You didn’t know about this, Dah-li-ush?” Sohaila pleaded.
“Of course not,” Darius assured both of them a touch evenly.
Nodding toward a plastic hamper by the basement door, Sohaila warned them about the housekeeper. “Tina’s going to be up and down with laundry. We shouldn’t bother her. Can’t we go to the living room, Stan?”
All three of them walked through the hall to the front drawing room with their arms tightly folded. They said nothing but drifted to a stop near the room’s midway point, next to a huge armorial fireplace. Sohaila chose a few lamps to switch on. Hurrying their discussion at the same time she flower-arranged the lighting, she whispered, “I don’t know when Rolf will be coming down. Any minute, I imagine.”
“I’ve never heard about any beloved family friend from Europe. I thought you and Dad had barely any friends.” Darius felt Stan’s gaze on him.
“Rolf’s family, his father, was an enormous help to us in Mumbai. To me and Oliver. When I left Iran for good.” She turned off one of the lamps, leaving three lit. She stationed herself so she could see into the front hall and to the foot of the stairs. Past the hall on the other side, a table set for four glittered in the murk of the dining room like the flank of a dozing silver-scaled dragon. “This is all so—” Sohaila returned to the issue at hand. “Who knows? Who knows what to do?”
“What’s—?”
“Your father seems to have an enormous—”
“And Dah-li-ush!” Sohaila interrupted. “Why couldn’t you tell us you knew Ali?” She lashed out.
“What?”
“Ach! He knows you. From Columbia.”
“Ali? The Kuwaiti guy? But he—”
“Yes, you see who I mean now. You know him. I knew he was Arab, but that’s all.”
“No, I haven’t seen him in years. He tried to get me to join St. Anthony’s. What does he have to do with any of this?”
“There are two things we found out,” Stan stopped Sohaila. “Ali works for a group called Ta’aleem, run by a guy Sohaila knew, an Iranian from the Old Westbury crowd. Sohaila introduced this Iranian friend to Oliver many years ago.”
“Not really a friend. It was only because it was a charity,” Sohaila explained. “Ta’aleem is a charity. For the Palestinian thing.”
Stan shrugged. “Anyway, Ali came by—”
“Here?”
“—or rather the Iranian called and told us to talk to him, so Ali came by and said Oliver used to give a large amount of money every year to Ta’aleem. But now he’s stopped. Naturally, they were wondering why and couldn’t get in touch with him any more than we could.”
“And I knew nothing about this. Nothing about the money he was giving. Nothing at all,” Sohaila said.
“Yes. But Ali told us—do you know about this?—that the money Oliver gave always came in the form of a check from—Mather Capital.” Stan dramatized, “What?” He paused for effect. “What is this? A company? A private equity firm, it turns out. Do you know what that is? I didn’t. I’d never heard the term private equity firm. I thought Sohaila must know about Mather Capital, because of the divorce. But she didn’t either. So what is it? Why don’t we know about it? Is it big? Is it all Oliver? Yes and yes, it turns out. Mather Capital is even important enough to be a partner with the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority in certain things. But who runs it, since Oliver obviously can’t be. This, even my investigator has been unable to find out!”
“You know what this sounds like, you two,” Darius said drily.
“We’re not attacking,” Sohaila snapped, anger and reproach making her choose an odd word. Attack. “Stan’s mother in Bucharest has just found out she has cancer!”
“No, no, let’s—that’s a different issue, So. No emotional pleading. This is legal fairness we’re concerned about.” Stan hurried on in a snaky, calming whisper, trying to stage-manage the conversation. “But did you know about Mather Capital?”
“Come on! I’ve never heard of it. I don’t care about any of that.”
“Never heard of it,” Stan echoed.
“Dah-li-ush!” Sohaila barked. “Dah-li-ush, I don’t have money! You don’t! Forget about what this place looks like. I spend everything I have. And a lot of it—a lot of it—on you.”
Stan said, “So if the case is that Oliver had—who knows?—which he never told anybody about. If it was secret at the time of the divorce... Well, this is a lawsuit. I’m sorry. A very important one.”
“Stan,” Sohaila said, near tears. He put his arm around her, something he’d never done before in Darius’s presence.
Darius wrestled to conceal different kinds of surprise. Oliver’s old boasting about his immeasurable wealth might not have been the early sign of mental illness he’d assumed. Or not that alone. He remembered his father talking at Grand Central. He remembered Oliver’s crackpot scheming against Sohaila and Stan but only as a kind of rant. Feeling he shouldn’t be, Darius was just as surprised as they were.
Darius was equally surprised by the news about Ali. The plump Arab’s suave interest in him had been romantic, the docile and unambitious sexual attraction young people tolerate in someone a couple of decades older. As passing as their Columbia acquaintance had been, Darius now felt tricked. It stung that Ali had all along been fund raising as much as he’d been infatuated. Darius was better prepared to be betrayed on a grand scale by Alan than he was to be fooled by Ali.
“No one’s talking about suing,” Sohaila sighed, massaging her clavicles.
“Not yet.”
“I want you to talk to him, Dah-li-ush, if you possibly, possibly can. I know it’s hard. But, you see, I can’t. Not about this. Obviously he’s arranged it so I’m supposed to come crying and begging to him.” The muscles of her face deformed. Darius thought she was about to sob. But her painted expression resolved into ghastly delight. She cried out, “Rolf, darling! Rolf! Rolf! We’re here, all of us!”
An incredibly tall man, all long arms and legs, rounded the great newel post at the foot of the stairs. He crossed the hall toward them and became a lanky shadow for a long time before the three little lamps showed his boyishly correct gray jacket, a touch short in the sleeves, wide, deeply colored lips smiling in perfect confidence, and blue eyes.
The change of gears had been so brutal for Sohaila that she let out a giggle. She fanned her throat and exclaimed naughtily, “You are so, so tall, Rolf!”
Rolf’s smile lasted longer than it should have.
Sohaila was quick to apologize. “Oh, you must be so completely bored to hear it. Everyone tells you, of course.”
Rolf’s smile dragged on expressively.
“Darling Rolf, I have no drinks or anything ready yet. I’m sorry. This is my Dah-li-ush, in any case. This is Rolf, whose father—so gracious to Oliver and me.” Her ingénue fluttering made Darius think for the first time, with sudden gloom, that she was old.
At dinner, Rolf picked up that something was amiss with his hosts. Since he was extraordinarily well-mannered, a diplomat’s son, he labored to keep the conversation afloat with non-controversial observations about the United States. It was his first visit. His opinions were so non-controversial that Darius began to wonder if he might actually hate America.
While they were still at the table, Tina came in to say she was going home. She said there was still a load of laundry in the dryer, though, she mentioned pointedly, she’d already taken out Rolf’s shirts and panties. They heard her slam the door. They listened to the hoarse cough of her Cadillac in the drive. They remained silent until Stan apologized to Rolf, “It’s not you. She doesn’t like me. And through me, she doesn’t like anything European, not even the underwear.”
“Ah,” Rolf said, lofty and vague, his smile reforming like a careful measure of oil. He was finding the dinner odd.
“Not true. Not true,” Sohaila said. Her delay was so strange, none of them knew what she was talking about at first. One of her ears was cocked to a new favorite, Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsodies, in honor of Stan. She’d switched it on before leaving the drawing room. When she saw them all looking bewildered, she explained. “That she doesn’t love you, Stan. That’s not true. She loves all of us—and we love her, of course.”
The dinner’s only excitement came when Rolf learned that the house had once belonged to Colin Vail. He’d heard of him and was clearly an admirer. “Vail is almost like Pierre Klossowski—not their work so much, but as cultural figures. They’re so deeply peculiar. Anti-popular. And probably much more appreciated in Europe, I think. Especially now. They adore Vail in Paris.” Darius had never imagined that Colin Vail might be known outside of the United States. The weedy power of culture to spread impressed him. He had always assumed Vail was a wholly private taste, a man doomed to being forgotten as an artist. Now his idol had an entirely independent existence through Rolf and Europe.
Immediately after dinner, Darius called his father’s number from the basement. He left a message saying it was important they meet soon. That much he’d tried before. He had to call many more times and leave many more messages over the next weeks. At first he kept second-guessing his tone of voice, his choice of words. When, inexplicably, he got the living person, Oliver sounded appallingly normal. It threw Darius into confusion for a minute. What happened to the incommunicado for years, the fantastic scheme to defraud Sohaila? Darius peremptorily announced a meeting. “I’ve decided I have to stop by your place. Afternoon, because I know you prefer it. Three, I guess. We have to talk about some things. And this is—sort of—required.” He wasn’t at all sure it would work.
The visit was set for a Saturday. The Friday evening before, Darius went out with friends, an unexpectedly fun-loving Barnard girl and her taciturn African lover of the moment. As they all danced to an Angolan band at a rock club downtown, the African and Darius were slowly crowded from the girl’s vicinity by a group of husky Greeks. She seemed happy enough, so they sipped beers on the sidelines. Watching her dance and watching the milky glitter of the African’s eye following her, Darius had the idea to use her power with straight men for his own purposes. He’d ask her to come with him the following afternoon. Her presence might make it more difficult to talk to Oliver about money, and in truth Darius didn’t know the girl that well. But he had an intuition laying a virgin on his father’s altar could be just the thing. Oliver used to be well-behaved around Cassie.
Oliver’s apartment was in a neighborhood of skyscrapers built atop a seventeenth century village. The shadowy streets were barely wide enough for the modern mercantile bustle of hawkers and deliveries. On top of that, day-workers sheep-dogged the sidewalk crowds with petitions for Greenpeace and Planned Parenthood. Box trucks teetered half off the curb. People sidled between truck tires and storefronts. An Office Furniture Giant truck had pulled up to the diminutive back entrance of a huge office tower. Its crew shoved plastic-wrapped desk chairs down the truck’s welt-covered loading ramp. With each slide, the chair casters brayed like an elephant trumpeting in pain. Everything about the neighborhood (except the flyers) made Darius think, Oliver must hate this.
The building on Cedar Street was a nineteenth-century spice warehouse. A discounter of adding machines and electronics shops owned the place through the sixties. Urban pioneers started living there in the seventies and eighties.
His companion had no idea how momentous this visit was for Darius. As they walked, she idled by store windows, disparaged the beetling masses who hold regular jobs and, after they got inside the building, pursed her lips at a long wait in front of the blank steel apartment door. She spotted a man who looked like a super at the end of the long hall. With the egalitarian brusqueness New Yorkers like to have on hand, she cried, “Hey! Hey! You know if this guy in?”
“He’s in,” Darius whispered tautly. He wasn’t sure they’d get an answer.
The door opened with a loud unsticking noise, as if it had been painted shut. “Darius,” Oliver enunciated slowly in a macabre voice. He sounded a little comical, a little threatening. Patches of seborrheic dermatitis reddened the sides of his nose. A torturer’s amusement lighted his eyes. But the instant Oliver caught sight of the girl, his expression died. Whatever little scene he may have prepared for Darius was aborted. Discountenanced, he hunted for a normal-sounding greeting. “Ah! Ah-ah! How d’ye do, then? Uh. Darius?” He finished severely. Darius introduced the girl.
Oliver’s expression kept changing. Originally willful tics had turned into a neurological jumble. He’d lost weight. Sagging cheeks had slightly altered the line of his jaw and chin. He’d shaved but had missed a large patch of several days’ growth which looked like gray toothbrush bristle. He was dressed as a penitent or prisoner in a yellowing white button-down and beltless gray slacks. He wore white socks, but no shoes. Though he was acting as poised as he could possibly manage, his intense awkwardness made it seem Darius and his friend had, in some hallucinatory fashion, blundered into his weird internal privacy, the mind-realm ruled by this homunculus Oliver. The sprinkler pipes and capped gaslight lines were his paint-crusted neurons. The steel shutters at the front of the loft were his eyelids seen from the inside.
A previous owner had built a kitchen and a tiny bedroom out of unfinished plasterboard. These rooms huddled along one wall like a shepherd’s hut in a ruined basilica. Next to them was a small arrangement of chairs, couch, table and lamp. Apart from this furniture, the vast space was barren, lacking anything to look at besides populations of dust bunnies along the baseboards. The room was too dim to show much color, but ruby red pellets gleamed here and there in a grid of sprinklers hanging from the pressed-tin ceiling. These pellets held open the jaws of the sprinkler heads and were ready to fail in a fire. The setup conjured a powerful atmosphere of contingency for anybody living underneath.
The girl perched gingerly on the couch, her head turning everywhere in the cavernous space. She exclaimed that it was a fabulous, fantastic apartment!
Obviously unaccustomed to people, Oliver took his chair, and stroked his shirt front and crossed and recrossed his legs, each time flashing them detailed black footprints on the soles of his white socks.
He continued to make odd facial expressions, and his hands kept stiffening. His fingers were crooked awry when he gestured to Darius. “Sit down! Since you’re here. Since you’re here. Sit down. You might as well.” Between agonized glances around him, Darius’s eyes drilled his own crossed forearms.
Oliver’s head lolled back. He appeared to count the red sprinkler jewels for a spell. He stroked his chin. He found the spot of stubble. He addressed the girl, “I don’t have—much of a bar here. You’ll forgive. As this one should have known. So.”
Her perky response that she didn’t need anything led to silence. She wasn’t stupid, and about now she realized exactly how she’d been used. She didn’t resent it. It was hard not to feel compassion for Darius when you understood the situation. In full, polite control of herself, she mentioned she’d be going on to Century 21 to shop for sweaters in a moment. “I wish we could call them jumpers like the Brits. So much cuter.”
Gratefully, Darius breathed, “I’ll follow you down in a few minutes.”
Oliver’s watery gaze prowled the girl’s bust. “Well,” he said. His hands clapped his knees as if they’d been sitting there for hours. He did it again.
“Maybe we could use a little light on the subject,” the girl said boldly.
“Ah! This—uh—” Oliver’s fingers lightly plucked the long chain of an earthenware lamp on the table next to him. “—this—uh—you know for a long time I thought this was a whispering device.” He pinched the minuscule bell at the end of the chain. “Not listening. Whispering. So silly.” He was admitting the silliness mostly for the benefit of his rational guests. “No. Ho-ho-ho!” His mouth stopped at the last O. His look of naughty boy alarm was comical.
His manner kept hitting two or three notes at once. Darius and the girl each started looking at him and wondering, was this play-acting or had he utterly lost the knack for natural behavior? What he’d done to his life wasn’t acting. Furthermore, anyone would have sensed that the same self-conscious question was coursing through his own mind. For instance, after touching the chain, he made several more weird hand gestures, deploying them, as it were, to test his autonomy.
“What have you been up—how’s it going?” Darius got out in a husky relic of his usual voice. An excess of nerves kept him from waiting for an answer, “I’ve been—we were out dancing last night.” Darius was already so tense he could barely move. Gathering any information for Sohaila and Stan looked to be impossible.
Oliver rose. “I’ve got to see about something, before we— uh—” He disappeared into the sheetrock kitchen where he rattled around a bit.
“Sorry!” Darius mouthed to the girl.
She shrugged. She smiled forgivingly, only tipping her head to mean Oliver was a piece of work. To pretend nothing was wrong wouldn’t be friendly in this case.
“I wish I hadn’t come. I’m sorry I brought you,” Darius whispered.
The girl’s eye caught the bar of light along the hinge side of the kitchen door. The light twizzled with shadow like a spiraling barber pole. Dim as the apartment was, she thought she saw a blush-colored something, which had to be the tip of Oliver’s nose or his inflamed cheek. With a marked movement of her eyes she warned Darius that his father was spying on them. When he turned to look, they heard a little thud in the kitchen.
Once the girl had departed to shop for winter sweaters, the silence wound around Darius’s chest like a boa. The easiest way to speak was to look at the floor and imagine himself alone. “Mom found out about your big plan. And Stan.”
Oliver didn’t understand.
Yearning toward the ceiling, Darius explained, “About your money. This Mather Capital thing.”
“Oh, that’s not true. None of that’s true.” Did this statement have the bored certainty of a well-disguised lie?
Darius was able to glance at his father. The older man appeared drowsy, eyes shut. “Uh. I’m talking about the stuff you told me a long time ago. You said you did have—”
“That was just a story,” Oliver interrupted. “That was all just made up.”
Darius nearly believed him for several seconds. He frowned. “But wait. It is true. Because Stan found out about it. I don’t want you to get upset, but Stan had somebody look into it. I think.” Worried about Oliver’s reaction, Darius added, in a tone of confidential disdain, “He’s so over-dramatic. Only he would do something like that—hire somebody.” Oliver’s eyes fluttered open, then closed again. Seriously, Darius said, “It was real, though. I remember how you talked about it. It was a big deal for you. Me, too. You described the whole scheme, and it turned out just the way you said it would. Sort of amazing.”
“There wasn’t any scheme.”
“I was supposed to keep the secret. And then I would get everything. Or something. Someday.”
The naturalness of his father’s chuckle filled him with doubt. “No, boy. I’m sorry.”
“OK,” Darius said. A little strength was coming to him. “Let me put it this way. Mom has absolutely no money. It’s not a joke. I’ve been taking way too much. She’s had to pay for Columbia this whole time, and she isn’t doing it with income. She doesn’t know anything about money. Neither does Stan. So they’re running through whatever you gave her. If I wanted to go somewhere—I don’t know—take some time off to travel—I mean, she’d want me to, but she’d have to pay. And Stan’s mother is sick apparently. I don’t know if that costs a lot in Romania, but I don’t think he’s qualified to do anything here. If I had money, or if I was going to get any, I’d want mom to have it now.”
This got raised eyebrows from Oliver. Darius’s hopes soared. Then Oliver said stubbornly, “Mather Capital doesn’t exist. What a name! I must have been joking. That’s the kind of man I am.”
Instead of responding to this or sticking with his mission on behalf of Sohaila and Stan, Darius blurted out, “What do you do here?” For the first time, their eyes met briefly. Oliver didn’t say anything. The hissing stillness of the loft filled Darius’s mind. The background had become the foreground. Darius had a despairing pang of certainty that his life would never fit into a cogent narrative. All of its great moments, like this one, were only the shadows of real incidents. Fearless at last, he commented, “This is insane. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t even know if it was a good thing you finally opened the door.”
“Finally?” Oliver asked. He seemed not to understand. Darius wondered whether Oliver’s sense of time wasn’t so altered that the old man actually believed there had been no incommunicado for years, that he was only getting around to talking with Darius in the ordinary course of time. Oliver flicked at the metal lamp chain, had it trickle over his fingertips. He smiled as if preparing one of his old, cruel lies. “But I assumed you were like Cassie. You didn’t want to see anything more of me.” He pouted. “Because I was too—loathsome and cold—and deceptive—and upsettingly odd—and an antisemite and a racist.”
In the days after the visit, Darius was overwhelmed by a sense of filial responsibility he knew he could never rise to. Sohaila and Stan weren’t happy with his report. He couldn’t get them to appreciate how difficult it had been talking with Oliver. And now Oliver had no one left in his life except his son. The idea of educational travel—Tunis? Rome?—was just Darius imagining escape.
Sohaila and Stan nagged him into trying one more time with Oliver. It didn’t go any better. Oliver met with him but refused to let him in the apartment this time. The half rejection reminded Darius of Alan Wilkinson. Oliver wore a preposterous pair of electric green Crocs, and father and son went downstairs to walk around the block together. The streets were so busy Oliver needed all his concentration to control his sparrow-like jitters. He wasn’t able to talk at all, except for a disagreeable hum that came out of him with machine monotony. A brute in a hardhat dropped one of the metal leaves of a store’s bulkhead basement doors. At the great bang, Oliver rounded on him and swatted the ConEd patch on the man’s breast pocket. In a sinister voice, he hissed, “Fucking idiot! What? Do you not see me here? Am I invisible?” Darius’s look of horror was just enough to calm the man. Not such a brute after all. He brushed at his chest. “Better keep your geezer locked up. I feel for you, man.”