BEA’S HUSBAND, PRESTON, General Counsel of Flexalt Corporation of Teterboro, New Jersey, sat in a restaurant in Manhattan’s Meat Packing district. He watched his son Ross, called Flossy, walk away from their table. Blithe was popular with film people, Flossy had sotto-voced over risotto. Only Flossy could have dragged Preston to a place like this. Single ears of wheat bristled from perforated plywood. A great, spot lit arte povera heap of millet sprigs sat in the middle of the polished concrete floor. Departing, Flossy stepped around the pile without the least inhibited caution, not even looking down. Shoulders square, he gave no one in particular a nod and breezed past the doorman into the pink glow of the awning outside. Before the doors eased shut on lush hinges, Preston could see Flossy looking immensely contented with himself.
Flossy must have inherited his grand manners from his mother’s side of the family, the Noroton crowd, even though Bea herself had none of it. But Preston didn’t think the boy’s pride was entirely innate. Flossy enjoyed it too much for that. He had a touch of social ambition. That could only be a good thing in this city, in this day and age. He was the soundest of the three kids—three, leaving out Eleanor, who was too young to decide about. Yet wasn’t there also something dense about Flossy? A happy money-grubber and blinkered. It’s always the servants who are the clear-eyed ones, and parents are the servants of their heirs.
Preston disliked Blithe and would have left with Flossy after their two o’clock lunch. He stayed and had another drink just because he liked the hostess who’d led them to their table. She noticed his interest. Seeing him abandoned, she came over to fuss for a moment. A serene beauty, she looked like a California vintner’s wife, Preston decided. Her defenseless, almost infantile, friendliness was a kind only ever glimpsed in the cloisters of luxury. On the way out, he paused by her dainty lectern to flirt a little more. Bluff, harmless, he showed her the book he’d picked up, and she laughed.
Her gentility was particularly sweet, because Preston felt like a Cossack. He’d dealt with an ethically unpleasant case in meetings all morning. This unease with his profession came over him at regular intervals, a hound’s breath at the back of his neck. The power he’d spent his life accumulating as a lawyer had no decent uses at all, really. Having drunk too much, he decided to go straight home instead of to the office in Teterboro.
President Clinton happened to be in town, and traffic had come to a standstill around Penn Station. Preston got out of the cab to walk the last blocks in sweltering heat. His too-starchy shirt chafed at his belly, which was solid and squared-off like a bag of potting soil. He was in time for a 4:49. Quirky, train schedule time. He paused for a vodka tonic at a commuter bar in the station. A feint of Fourth of July exuberance in the décor did nothing to disguise the dismal functionality of the place. Preston hurried his dose and left.
At the last moment, just as the doors were pinging, a young woman with a baby got into Preston’s car, alone but with all the bustle of a horde. Convinced she was being looked at critically by everyone, she flounced into the seat facing Preston, crossly hefted a grubby-cheeked baby in a paisley sling, and drew her Tibetan saddlebag—or whatever it was—close to her hip. In the saddlebag she found a tub of mashed lentils and began feeding the baby. She took alternate spoonfuls herself.
She wasn’t truly dirty. Her skin and hair, the paisley and the saddlebag, the thin skirt and the blue jeans underneath—that had to be hot—all had a well-thumbed softness. Maybe she was some university president’s daughter with a weakness for India. Resentment and dysentery hadn’t destroyed her looks, but they gave her a beetling, vengeful attractiveness. Severe, prematurely aged, she looked like a coed made up to play Medea. She also appeared ready to blow up in anger at any moment.
Preston did watch her, but not critically. He didn’t mind the way she sucked up attention, something many people find annoying. He wanted to speak to her, in fact, partly as a distraction, partly out of curiosity. A delicate job, clearly. She’d probably turned her back on a father a lot like Preston to go on her penurious pilgrimage to India or Myanmar or Sri Lanka.
Preston had always been one of those people who strike up conversations with strangers. It wasn’t an inveterate loner’s meek abandon. Nor the twitchy monologist’s incurious sociability. It was interest and seduction. He did it by reflex. He knew through experience that this girl wasn’t as unlikely a prospect as she seemed. He displayed his book invitingly, so she could read the title, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. She never glanced at it.
He took the book up and riffled its pages in a subject-broaching sort of consternation, working his lips. Full of unnecessary movement, he fished a pen from his pocket. He opened the book and began sketching rapidly on the flyleaf. Not drawing her, of course, but the saddlebag. After a moment his work got a frown from her, and he instantly murmured, “Amazing motif.” He didn’t look up.
“What are you, a designer?” she asked sourly.
Preston made a meaningless, deprecating sound.
The car’s fluorescent lights winked out. Their sudden disappearance revealed a mise-en-scène for terror lying under the surface of things. The tunnel’s bare bulbs strobed noirishly. The silence of the passengers felt more like doomed foolishness than unconcern. Preston kept sketching.
The girl waved the spoon through a drifting cleaver of light to see whether the baby had gummed it clean. “Ripping off traditional design?” she wise-cracked.
“I’m not a designer. Far from it. What’s the bag, though? Tibet? Burma?”
The girl said nothing. She gripped the spoon in her mouth and shifted the saddlebag so Preston couldn’t see it.
Obligingly, he closed his book. He lied, “I work for an oil company. Agip, but here in the States.”
“Oh, God!” she groaned, making the spoon’s handle flicker like a silver tongue before she pulled it out.
“They’re Italian. We are. Maybe a little less rapacious.” He chuckled.
“I doubt it.”
“You must be—not to assume—but maybe you’re—anti-globalization—what have you—all that.”
The girl said nothing. Then she mocked, “All that.”
“If so—I don’t want to take you from your baby—but I’d adore asking you a business question. Advice.”
The lights came on. The girl had pinched her nostrils unpleasantly. She turned her head to read the title of Preston’s book.
“I had a terrible morning,” Preston continued. “Meetings and meetings with a gaggle of advertising types. We’re opening up an oil field over in Kazakhstan. Kashagan by the Caspian Sea.” Preston had no idea where this elaborate lie was leading. Flexalt had consulted with a company called Mercator on the project, but that was it, and he’d had nothing to do with it himself. “We’re—uh—trying to figure a way to spin it. Not for the locals. We could spill all the oil in the world. They couldn’t care less. Couldn’t get worse in that country than it is now—after the Soviets. But it’s people like you who monitor every move we make.”
“You’re asking me how you can get away with such a— such a—?”
“Am I?” Preston wondered innocently. “I guess I am. You seem to know your mind.”
She spoke over him. “Stay out. That’s my advice. Leave them alone for once. Not that you will.”
Preston appeared satisfied with her answer. His finger scribbled idly over the dog pictured on the cover of his book. When the train broke out of the tunnel, sunlight blazed on his hand. The heads of the passengers made wakeful turnings, greeting the sun in New Jersey. Everywhere in the broad, motionless industrial landscape, shining patches of river, chrome bumper and airplane fuselage revolved with the motion of the train—as if noticing its arrival.
“That’s what my son and daughter would say—the older two. The younger two don’t care, but Anna and Philip, they’re more like you. They’ve gone off. She’s in Asia, and he’s in Central America.” That much was true. “They’re both environmentalists of a sort. The thing is, the environment there—this is in Kazakhstan—it’s already been trashed. In our plan we put a little aside for restoration, so ironically, it might be better for the environment if we do go over there. I’m not saying it definitely would be, but it could.”
“Exxon Valdez. Heard it all before,” she chirped bitterly.
“Are you an activist? A traveler obviously.”
“Traveler, I guess, in a way. Activist, no. But I care. Like a lot of people do. Whatever it is you’re planning on getting into over there, I hope you fail. I really do.”
She didn’t say a word more to him and got off at one of the first New Jersey stops. Preston nodded vaguely. He wasn’t offended. In fact, a sparkling pleasure had replaced the worries about the law and children that had been preoccupying him all day. It was a pity his good mood came at the price, in a sense, of this wanderer-mother’s misery. That was the very problem with Anna and Philip. Both had an incurable longing. The source of it, he’d long ago decided, was in Bea’s family.
He’d picked up on it right after marriage. Afternoons with his wife’s family in Noroton had been strangely spiritless. He hadn’t expected the sharp-elbowed disorder of his own New Jersey upbringing, but maybe a touch more awareness—the occasional wink. It never came. Never a drunken fight, never the slightest messy hoopla. They were one of those loftily self-effacing WASP families with no talent for celebration, if not exactly a horror. Unavoidable big occasions, like weddings, came out pallid successes. To them, the mother-in-law’s seventy-fifth birthday, Bea’s own marriage to him, were almost unpleasantly ostentatious. They preferred living under the radar. When Preston cottoned on to this, he realized that he loved it. He wasn’t like them, but he loved it, and he could afford to love it because he wasn’t like them.
In their obscure conviction of unlimited self-worth, they may have been trying to use the back entrance to eternity. Rather than mark time with turning points and big parties and accomplishments—rather than sink their claws into the passing flank of history—they preferred not to engage. Letting time remain undifferentiated made it look a bit like “forever.” This had seemed the perfect setting for his life, an eternal human coziness, and he’d relished their polite serenity. There was a kind of power in their unworldliness which he certainly didn’t possess himself.
Over time he grasped that their method didn’t work. The longing came out. The university president’s daughter fucked her way to India. Sooner or later it came to them, maybe not that they were unhappy, but that they didn’t even know what happiness tasted like. Their lives had been spoken in a tone that undermined the meaning entirely—like irony, but irony that was neither funny nor mean. To get the accent right, you had to learn it as a child. Bea had. So had Anna and Philip. Flossy had been spared because he loved money. But Preston worried that he ought to have done more for the rest of his children.
Sitting in his car at the station, gloom returning, he thought of adding one more to the two women he’d desired today—make a sort of bouquet of three different types. Scrolling through the names saved on his cell phone, he came to Claire M., a colleague at Flexalt, Claire Malouf. “Claire, I’m not going back to the office today. I’ll stop by. It’ll be around six. If you get this or you’re in, wonderful. If not, no worries.” She was in. A little after six, they were in her cozy bedroom thrashing on top of her cozy bed.
Claire murmured something, spouted a laugh, and he pulled out. She’d made concluding noises, weary or wanting to be considerate, or possibly both. To pause, in any case, suited Preston. “I’m so dry, I think I have to use a crème,” she said. Cute pudor made her Frenchify the word. “We can go on—”
“Oh, I thought you’d—”
“If you want, we can—”
“No, I’m right as rain.”
“So I can see, Jupiter-Daddy,” she said with a fond slap. “Sure you don’t want to—”
“I’m a bit sore myself. Seems to have rubbed at the skin a little—what we were doing. Haven’t always rolled around so much. And with the rubbing—”
“My teeth may have done it.”
“Don’t think so. It’s more like Indian burn. Just rubbing.”
She lay there, arms flung back, Andromache chained to her rock. She pouted, eyelids fell closed. She writhed, partly pretending to struggle, partly just stretching. Grunting, Preston half-tumbled off the bed. His blood shifted like a falls. He stood for a moment recovering from spotted faintness, looking down over his belly to watch himself wind down: tick, tick, tick, tick. Claire skipped out of the room and reappeared in a peignoir as she liked to do.
Claire plugged in a laptop to check her email from work. Among her many playful fantasies, she liked to mix business with love.
Preston settled on a girly upholstered chaise without dressing. He knew he looked gross, more Silenus than Jupiter, but he’d learned Claire appreciated a touch of boorishness. Besides, he was woozy, tired. No longer gloomy, at any rate. The blinds were lowered, which made for spindly, tropical light in the room, though the air conditioner was blasting.
Claire made a little noise over one of her emails, inviting Preston to ask about it. He didn’t want to. When she made a second effort, whispering, “Christ!” to herself, he tried diverting her. “Kitten—” He was slow to think of something to say. “Kitten,” he said. “That was memorable.”
“Why, thank you, Preston. Now, you would not believe the note I got here from that funny creature who does the motor pool and all that. Winkie-something. Do you know him?”
“Not sure. I don’t think so.”
She scrolled. “Winckelmann. Well, he’s an officious creature, and I can’t honestly say I like him, but here he’s done something about an issue—something I asked him about. On your behalf, I might add. See, how I look out for you? Even when it might could come back and bite us, though I hope not.”
“What’s he say? What’s it about?”
“Well, this is all about a car. Car you rented when you went down to Trenton. Hear anything about it? ’Cause I did. Seems like there was a ding and a ticket on it.”
“What?”
“Yeah, a ding and a ticket, and not even from Trenton, but from Asbury Park. How do you like that? You ever go there? I didn’t think so. Now, look—who’s that—?” She scrolled. “Well, it’s that boy that lives with you. I know it is. Dean, isn’t that right?”
“Christ. Are you kidding? He lives in the garage. Garage apartment.”
“Right. I didn’t mean lives with you.”
“I must’ve left the car in the drive one night. He’s a loose cannon. Bea’s fed up with him. He chipped her glass door—the sliding glass door she put in in the kitchen. He’s a bow hunter, and he shot the thing right at the house, took a big divot out of it—tempered glass, too. He said he got turned around in the woods. But this is worse.”
“See, it is a problem. I wanted it quiet, so I asked Winkie to email me.”
“He was also supposed to be clearing brush for us, taking care of the property. It’s why we let him stay in the apartment for free, but it hasn’t worked out at all. Place looks awfully shabby. Maybe I’ll throw him out.”
“See, I didn’t know exactly what the relationship was. If he was a family connection or—”
“Hardly.”
“I wonder what he was doing in Asbury Park to get a ding and a ticket?” She pouted extremely.
“He’s a kid.”
“You’ve got more important things to think about. You got Vijesh, I guess, working on the ATCA case?”
“Yes. He drove me into the city this afternoon. I had lunch with Flossy.” Preston’s hand slid thoughtfully over the heap of his belly—down to the silky, sparse pubic hair on its own little bulge below.
“Well, you’re taken up with that case and quite rightly, so why should you have to worry about this troublemaker? That’s what I thought. It is trouble, too, see, because Winkie says cars rented on the company dime—blah, blah—something like this happens and—blah, blah—could jeopardize our insurance agreements.”
“Fuck. I’ll ask him about it.”
“Now, don’t tell Vijesh—or even Winkie—that I passed it along. Though that’ll be pretty obvious. I know a touch about in-house politics from Georgia when Nicky was at Delta. And corporate types—I say it myself—are not always the most savory people in the world.”
“Worried about Vijesh? Don’t bother. And this isn’t bad. Just awkward. Was your Nicky the same as Vijesh—Indian?” Her husband, a commercial pilot, had died in a car accident years before.
“Oh, no, no, no. Nicky was Lebanese. And not hardly even that. He went to Ole Miss, and he was KA—that’s Kappa Alpha. He was one of those old, old Lebanese families that always had the general store. You might could go to any town in the south with ‘Welcome to—’ on the water tower, it used to be the Lebanese made all the money at the store. They had pots of money, Nicky’s family did, at one time.” She swung back and forth on the shammed stool at her dressing table.
When she stood to pace, he could see the desktop image on her laptop, a travel brochure picture of a woman in a white après-bain lying on an empty beach. Glowing as it was, this picture made all the rest of the dim, real bedroom look like drab frame, like the cartonnage interior of a telescope aimed squarely at fantasy. A champagne flute had tipped from the woman’s hand, so she was dozing—or dead—and the ocean was so stark that luxury looked like devouring nullity.
“Isn’t it just divine?” she asked, seeing him eye the picture. “I put it on last winter when I was all—cabin-fever-y with the cold. It’s Cay St. Georges. I need to get somebody to take me next year. I tried a resort in Jamaica on my own one time, but that was terrifying. This place’ll be more peaceful, only I don’t want to go alone. It’s kind of a be-seen place.”
“Any prospects?”
“Alas, no. You take up all my time, Preston. You’re irresistible. I’ve gotten into this horrible groove of being the tramp on the side.” She laughed gaily.
“We don’t often think about where we’re headed—” he made the gallant invitation to talk, since he was conscious of having just used her like a faucet.
As expected, she frowned slightly with glassy pleasantness. Mention relationships, adultery, widowhood in anything close to a direct way, and she froze up for several seconds. Does not compute. She actually gave her head a brisk little shake of coming to. Preston had wondered at first whether the way she zoned out like that wasn’t a technique—a specialty of southern womanhood—for driving men wild with uncertainty. But more likely her future needed to be as pretty as Cay St. Georges to bear even thinking about. He’d been shocked once to find her padded denim photo album full of pictures of himself, some clipped from company brochures. “Kitten, let me ask your advice.”
She flung herself on the bed, twisting up on one elbow, tucking the peignoir around her.
“I met a young woman on the train.”
“Uh-oh.”
“No, nothing like that. She reminded me of my daughter, Anna.”
“Uh-oh.”
“No, no. But I’ve been a bit worried about my kids, lately. In a big, general way. How they’re disaffected—let me start over—I have this book I left in the car. Silly thing about dogs that have ESP. I saw it in a window and picked it up because I had a tiny experience I thought might be a bit like that.”
“ESP? Like a dog?”
“Right. Except about my kids, not my owner, which is how the dogs get it. They sense when their owner’s about to come home.”
“How eerie! I’m so surprised at you, Preston! Your kids are coming home?”
“That’s what I thought, but it turned out to be something different. There was this woman. I won’t say who. Quite a long time ago.”
“Uh-oh. This, I’m not surprised about. Lothario!”
“Right. She had a kid. And she’s made it plain to me over the years, without causing any problems or anything—but she’s made it plain to me she thinks the kid is mine. He—the kid is a boy—went out of town a long time ago, but he comes back now and then for a visit. And almost every time, this woman manages to talk to me—not putting pressure on, exactly, but just so she knows I know the thing is still hanging over me.”
“And you had a sense this boy was coming back.”
“Exactly that. And it turns out he did. His father—his real father—and maybe it is his real father, since—”
“They’ve got tests now, you know.”
“Oh, I know. But we never got to that—”
“Not about money, even?”
“She never cared. So she said. But now the boy’s father is sick with cancer. Dying, I think. And I’m starting to think about my responsibility. If I have any. And even though there was never any test, this ESP twinge made me think, Maybe. I haven’t talked to her, though—the woman.”
“Oh, boy, honey. This is hard. I don’t know if I can help.”