PRESTON LOOKED AT the conical divot in the sliding glass door, which the arrowhead, striking the outside, had punched away on the inside. It was Sunday, and he had the house to himself. He bent forward, legs hurting, and touched the divot in the glass. Yup, inside. Tucked behind a potted ficus next to the door he noticed a small blue plastic tub. Inside it was a slurry of coins, pennies mostly. The water had partially evaporated. Only an inch or two was left. He thought he recognized the coins from a cracked red lacquer rice bowl he kept on his dresser for loose change, a hoard he’d given Eleanor last Sunday. She had to be washing them.
Preston opened the refrigerator and, bending over, legs hurting, he pulled a bottle of ReaLemon juice from the door. He emptied this into the blue tub. Satisfied—but a little worried by the soreness in his legs—he went back to the refrigerator and poured himself some tomato juice, which he spiked from the freezer’s fingertip-scalding bottle of vodka.
The soreness in his legs was worse since yesterday. A little like the time he’d pinched a sciatic nerve. But he was afraid it was a flare-up of herpes, which he’d gotten a million years ago and which had driven an enraged Bea to go on a long natural history cruise to the Galapagos. The bane of dirty teenagers hadn’t fit with who he was, or seemed to be. Supposedly, an epic course of Acyclovir had done away with it. But the soreness in his hamstrings felt familiar. And his recent work and family anxieties made it all but diagnostic—herpetic stress.
Unhappily, he returned to last week’s worry. Lifelong fealty to the harsh and lofty good sense of the adversarial system looked like cynicism. It was clear to him this morning that life was all about tracing and retracing the story we’ve mistaken for our life. Time came in repetitive layers rather than longitudinal extension. Today, he wanted to ignore his lack of progress. His tender lemon-juice service to Eleanor couldn’t atone for much. He ought to be drinking water. Maybe water could dilute the herpes—were they spirochetes, as well? Little screws that punished a little bit of screwing. Heaven help him if Claire Malouf got it.
In the library, he spun a lavish four-foot enamel and silver-gilt globe to Mongolia and shuffled together the blasted pieces of the Sunday Times. Hamstrings twinged when he straightened. He dumped the glanced-through mess of newspaper into a brass bucket holding one spindly log from last winter. He thought he might enjoy getting angry with Dean. So he gave the layabed a warning phone call, saying only that he was coming over to put the garage storage room in order today, a likely pretext.
Barefoot, he padded out onto the asphalt loop of the drive. Bea must have had the sprinklers on earlier. A leggy black gloss spread down the slope of the sun-heated matte drive. A barefooted childhood memory came to him, vague but keen—a new memory, never thumbed-to, as fresh as experience. He smiled with pleasure and watched Flossy’s car coming up the drive.
The pleasure of memory turned into speculation—mostly jocular—about whether he may have sensed Flossy was about to arrive and had come out to the drive to wait for him. Flossy parked. Preston greeted him with a routine how-d’ye-do warning that the boy’s decrepit Saab was burning oil. Flossy placed fancy restaurants ahead of cars, a priority Preston couldn’t countenance.
Flossy was wearing a tank top and long baggy shorts. Preston thought he recognized gay fashion. He also thought with approval that it didn’t come off too much that way on Flossy. Perhaps because the boy was relatively square-built and unfussy. Flossy even got away with those ankleless little socks women used to wear for tennis. In fact, the faggiest thing his son wore was the bead choker, Preston’s recent gift to him. Seeing it—a tender service he’d forgotten—pleased Preston in a motherly way.
The choker was strung with turquoise glass trade beads from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Preston found it while shopping for an antique gewgaw for Claire Malouf. Though he had no idea whether the beads had been scratched from the dirt in Indonesia or the Mississippi delta, Preston swore up and down to Flossy, as the seller had sworn to him, that the little blue cylinders and batonnets had been made at the same Spanish manufactory that produced the strings of beads Peter Minuit used to pay for Mannahatta. A perfect charm for Flossy, whether or not it was gay. Or too gay.
“Is everything burning up out here?” Flossy asked about the garden. He was carrying a manila envelope with an old-fashioned red string clasp. He started doing isometrics with the envelope.
“Not too bad.” Preston shrugged. “You out for a few days now, Rosso?”
“Yessir, I think so. But I was hoping to go over this list with you today.” The envelope started nodding at Preston, isometrics turning into a kind of Namaste greeting. “Cause the auction’s on Monday, and I’ll have to drive out pretty early.”
“We’ll take care of it. Now, who was I telling? What was the name of that place? Blithe. I told someone at the office, My son’s started living like Donald Trump. What’s your net worth?”
“Not to brag, but I think I have a lot more class than he does,” Flossy smiled.
“Uh-huh. And how’s your fortune?”
Flossy smiled. He told no one—no one—that he was up to three hundred and forty-eight thousand dollars now—at age twenty. “I’m doing all right.”
“Not telling me?”
“No, sir.” Flossy had picked up the habit of littering his remarks with sir from Preston, who’d picked it up from the World War Two generation at Flexalt.
“OK, Floss, we’ll do your Simon Legree bit,” Preston nodded at the envelope. “But let me get my shoes on, and help me with a chore first. You mind?” Rosso didn’t mind. He could have been the son in a fable or a bible story, loving and obedient. Bea actually had trouble trusting in the boy’s too-golden character. Even Preston used to think there was something wrong with him. Sadness, trouble—the gay business at seventeen, for instance—came over him with the naturalness of storms, then cleared entirely. Not like Anna and Philip. And unlike them, Ross was untalkative, considered a bad sign nowadays.
Flossy stretched hugely and announced on the exhalation, “I joined a gym for the first time. So I’m sore in all these weird places.”
“It gets worse,” Preston indulged himself with the wry woe of the aged. “What did you do? You mean weightlifting?”
“A little, I guess,” Flossy admitted with a shy frown. “It’s boring, though. I’d rather do real things. The gym’s just—” He pumped his biceps limply. “—boring.”
“I thought you looked a little pumped up.”
“Nice try. I’ve been maybe five times.” But his biceps looked as plump as a sofa cushion, with a thick vein as neat as piping.
As yet another tender service—for he knew Flossy was all but in love with him—Preston forced out, “Well, you’re looking good.” Awkward as it made him feel, saying this to his gay son, dutiful love must have been magical, because he was instantly cured of herpes. It dawned on him that his hamstrings were sore because he’d also pumped up—pumped down, that is, on Claire Malouf. He had sore muscles from an old man’s energetic fucking, not herpes. “Good thing you like real. This chore’s all muscle work.” And Flossy nodded, a contented laborer.
They knocked on the garage apartment door. Dean Quinn appeared in pin-striped boxers and a UPenn T-shirt. Inside, the shaded, weakly air-conditioned apartment had a germinating dankness. The tousle-headed tenant chortled, “Sorry. Heavy night last night, guys.” He grabbed coin-ballasted khakis from a broken spindle-backed chair by the door.
Without even looking, Preston caught a subtle shock of desire from his right side, from Flossy. It made his own anger more satisfying somehow. “Go ahead up, will you, Floss?” he rumbled.
Flossy took the stairs two at a time. Preston made a passing face at Dean’s fug. Interesting, since in the outside world, Dean always looked as crisply put-together as a Mormon on a mission. The flowery scent of beer hovered in the background. “I don’t know what you want me to do,” Flossy called from the door to the storage room.
“Start making a pile of things we can throw out.” Even as Flossy thumped across the floor upstairs, Preston started crowding Dean. One leg in his khakis, the boy had to hop backwards, jingling. Giving him no time to collect his thoughts, Preston started in with menacing joviality. “What the hell do you do in Asbury Park?” The belt buckle thudded when Dean dropped his pants. He grabbed them up. “Dean-o, I’ve got to ask you, what’s this crazy story about a car that got banged up in Asbury Park?”
“Not—”
“Did I get that right? Was that you?”
“Not banged up!”
“Did you steal my fucking rental car?”
“I’m so sorry, so sorry, Prez. That wasn’t banged up. That was like a—like a dent. They can punch ’em out with a ball-peen hammer. You never even noticed the next day, right? Did you? I’m so sorry, man.”
“You stole my car! You little prick. What’d you think I wasn’t going to hear? Company’s not going to tell me some dickhead got a ticket on my car?”
“I’m sorry. Really sorry. The distributor’s been screwed up on my car, so it doesn’t even start a lot of times. I had to go out with Pia. I knew it was wrong.” He looked pathetic, near tears almost. It made the thing less enjoyable for Preston. “I was sorry. I was actually sorry—I swear—when I saw you left the keys in it. Why’d you do that? You can’t do that, man.”
“The keys are in the car, so you—you’re a dickhead. You have no self-control. Why the fuck didn’t you just ask?”
“I know, man. I’m so sorry.” With a tragic look over his shoulder at his lair, he asked, “Is this going to mean—”
“No,” Preston said judiciously. “I wanted to get the story from you. It’ll probably cost you, though. We’ll see. You ever fuck with my stuff again—”
When Preston went upstairs, Flossy stood with his eyebrows raised eloquently. He was silently asking what that was all about. Preston shrugged, shook his head a little, and held up a finger to mean, I’ll tell you later. It hadn’t been as satisfying as he’d hoped. He looked around him with a sigh. A 1988 renovation had come to nothing. A kitchenette along one wall had never been used. The label in the basin of a stainless sink had only ever been wetted enough to wrinkle. The space under it was packed with wallpaper rolls and mini-buckets holding pucks of dried caulk. Over the years the room had filled with junk. Broken, paint-caked lengths of molding bristled with nails. Another spindle-backed chair was as gray as driftwood. “Let’s throw everything the fuck away. Everything,” Preston said. Promptly, Flossy unpegged the loose back of the chair. Preston helped in a token way, but Flossy soon told him it would be just as easy to do the whole thing himself.
After Flossy had thrown everything out a window, gathered it all in contractor bags and made a heap of them by the garbage, he went hunting for his father in the library. Preston was grateful and happy to go through Flossy’s list. Flossy unspun the red string from the disc on the envelope. Noticing his hands were dirty from work, he wiped the pigment of rust onto his shorts and began, “We’ll just do the ones I was thinking of taking. Should be about five minutes.”
“You take whatever lien you want? I thought it was an auction.”
“It’s this little group of old guys. Maybe six in all. When I first did it, I didn’t get their system. But what we do is we sort of talk ahead of time and divide it up, so we aren’t bidding against each other.” He smiled when he saw Preston raise his eyebrows.
“You saying you’ve got it rigged?”
“No sir.” He stopped smiling. “It’s only a few of us. And we don’t keep anybody out. They never tried to keep me out. Like they do in New York, supposedly. But let’s just go.” As usual, after a rumbling of ethical thunder, Flossy was all blue sky.
The lists in his manila envelope were of properties in several Monmouth County towns—names, addresses and property values. Other columns noted details like lot number, acreage, building type and the annual tax assessment. The key column came last: total taxes in arrears. The county was auctioning off the taxes to private investors at attractive interest rates. The government got ready cash, and the investors profited behind the scenes—less if the delinquents paid off right away, more if they couldn’t and were subject to mounting interest, fines and, ultimately, foreclosure. Although, as Flossy explained it, the system benefited the delinquents by postponing foreclosure, he must have had a vague qualm, because he wanted to make sure he never bought the taxes of anyone the family knew.
“The first ones are peanuts. Don’t know if it’s even worth it. Gates, Londra E. 6208 Fairhope Drive. Condo.”
“Nope.”
“Davenport, Guy and Louanne. 14 Teakettle Lane. Townhome.”
“No.”
“Oberdorfer, Harry. 1280 Plainview…Fanelli, Frances. 923 Maple…Testaverde, Anthony and Gail. 717 Garfield…Vijay and Sanjay Inc. 1300 Woodmere…”
“What was that one, Vijesh?”
“Vijay. I think it’s a business.”
“OK. No, then. No for all of them.”
“Lester and Gross, partners. 48 Olde Towne Road…”
“Architects, I think. Don’t know them.”
“Van Nest, Sohail—”
“Ho-ho!”
“Shit, you know him? That’s a big one.”
“Her. It’s just her name on the listing?”
“Yeah.”
“No. I don’t really know them. Or her. It’s strange, though. Her husband is supposed to be a very rich guy. Old money. Or so they said. They’re divorced now. Everyone also said he was crazy.”
“What are you saying? Maybe it’s just a cash flow problem for her? She’ll pay it right off? That would be less interesting.”
“Listen to you.”
“No. I’m sorry. It’s just—any information helps.”
“I’ll tell you I’m very surprised the name is there. Maybe she’s a screw-up with money.”
“That would be better.”
The list went on and on. Preston’s energy flagged, and he stopped teasing his son about the odor of the thing. But the list, intoned with an inquisitorial lack of inflection, was sad. Preston was sensitive today. Imagining all these people were cheats or low-lifes made the summary of failure more bearable. But Preston wasn’t innocent enough to believe it.
“Flossy wants to rent the globe,” he mentioned to Bea that evening. She was sitting in a pink-slip-covered chair by the little fireplace in their bedroom. An explosion of dried flowers between the fire dogs was cobwebbed and dropping litter. The old air-conditioner buzzed with faint, flying saucer oscillations. Preston lay in bed, sketching the flower arrangement on the blank pages of a book.
“Rent the globe!”
“Your dad’s globe in the library.”
“Oh. I thought you meant rent the world.”
“Ha. No, he’s got some pal works in the movie business, set decorator. And the guy said he’d pay two thousand to rent the globe for a couple of days. Move it themselves. Flossy said he’d give us half. Rapacious commission, now I think about it.” He chuckled.
“I don’t know, Preston. It’s such a nice old thing. Moving it around—movie people moving it—couldn’t it get damaged? I bet it could.”
“That’s what I told him you’d say. Anything that came from Noroton is sacred. No touchee.” He snapped to a new page in the book and continued drawing.
“Come off it, Preston. You always say that, and it’s not true. I’m much more relaxed than you think I am.” She draped the accordioned directions for a bible quotation gizmo across her lap and gazed at him. “Are you mad?”
“Not a bit. Why? Oh. No, I’m just playing here.” He snapped to another page.
“When did you start drawing?”
He shrugged. “Why did you say it was kismet that me and Flossy cleaned up over in the apartment? Actually, Flossy did all the work. I just jaw-boned like—an old guy on a pickle barrel.” He wiggled his toes and flexed his legs to worry the soreness.
“Ah. It was fate, because of Jeanette Paul.”
Suddenly very dainty with the pages, Preston leafed back to the first drawing. The twinging in his hamstrings became an all-over frisson.
“She’s been at church an awful lot lately and asked me a favor,” Bea explained. “Which is not really a favor, but might be a good idea for us. But first, tell me if this is a good time. She asked me a while ago, and I’ve held off, because I know you have an awful lot on your plate just at the moment. Work.”
“What? The ATCA thing? That’s always there. I don’t know if it’s a good time.”
“Her son Barry’s come back into town from out West, and it turns out he’s a perfect sort of a yard guy.”
Preston said nothing for a while, canceling his drawing with hash marks. “You know, we can’t just throw Dean out.”
“I’d like to, as a matter of fact. He’s useless for anything but shooting up my windows with his silly arrows. But the point is, he and Barry are old friends. Apparently they’d be fine together if Barry took the upstairs. There’s enough room for two over there.”
“Pay him, you mean? Who can afford somebody new?” Without looking up, he asked pointedly, “Jeanette Paul asked you this? Can my son live at your place?”
“Yes. Not in those words. But it’s because of Lynn, don’t you see? I know she’s a strange woman, but you were friends with Lynn.”
“I was never friends with Lynn. Never had two words with him.”
“All right. But you were both at Lawrence together.”
“Never had anything to do with him. Nobody did. Nobody wanted to touch him. He had that—I don’t know what it is—a repulsive quality. Perfectly OK up to a point, but if he got too close, he made you cringe.”
“Who cares what he was like? The poor man’s dying of cancer. You’d think we could help a little. I’m surprised. I always thought I was the more hard-hearted one. What is it, sweetheart?” Her voice changed instantly as she looked toward their bedroom door. Preston hadn’t even heard the mousey knocking.
The door creaked open. Eleanor walked in. She held something in her fist. She walked in a strange way. She pressed herself flat against the wall Egyptian style. She gave Preston a glance, but she was evidently keeping as far from him as she possibly could. Sidling along the wall like a jumper on a parapet, she hurried stiffly, with bizarre shyness, to Bea’s chair and crumpled, half on her mother’s lap, half on the floor. Spilling directions and bible computer, Bea leaned forward to hear a secret and caressed the girl’s hair. Like cruelty, Bea’s love thrived on the helplessness of its objects.
They whispered for a while. Eleanor opened her fist covertly. Preston could hear Bea’s half of the exchange. “I don’t think so, but who knows? Sometimes a chemical reaction—and even if it was, it’s a nice thing, nothing to worry about. Your hand smells like lemon. Did you put juice in with them?”
Preston’s drawing had turned into a cross-hatched darkness. He downed the puddle of limed meltwater in his old-fashioned glass.
Bea kissed the crown of Eleanor’s head. Even her love was a well-punctuated emotion. On her way out, Eleanor flattened herself against the wall again. Again, she sidled past Preston, as far from him as she could get. What was he, an ogre? Giving him the briefest glance, she whispered, “Night, Daddy.”
Searching the crevices of the pink chair for her bible computer, Bea chortled.
“What’s with her? Am I an ogre suddenly?”
“She’s adorable! No. She was just playing. She wanted to show me. Last Sunday she washed a bunch of coins in one of the Chapel vases. I was so pissed with her about it! Anyway, she just found them where I guess they’d been sitting all week, and they’d gotten shiny. They were shiny, too. But that can happen if they soak a while—ionization or something—can’t it? Maybe lemon juice got on them. That’s an acid, right?”
“Mm. I’m worried about her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She shouldn’t be so shy.”
“What do you mean? She was just embarrassed, Preston. She probably thought you’d tease her.”
“But that walk! That twisty, tense way she moves. That bodes ill. Like she’ll end up some nutty Emily Dickinson in the attic. Probably be obvious what’s wrong, if we weren’t her parents.”
“What’s gotten into you, Preston? There’s nothing wrong with Eleanor. She’s lovely and shy.”
“Bea, they’re a mess. All of them. The naturalness and—the life’s been squeezed out of all the kids, except maybe Flossy. They don’t know how to act for themselves. God knows how they’ll get on in the world!” Blandly, he play-acted this hysteria. At the same time, he wondered whether everything he said wasn’t the absolute truth.
“Preston,” Bea scoffed. “Your daughter was wondering if I thought it was a miracle. A tiny miracle. It was sweet. Of course she didn’t want you to make fun—and tromp—over everything.”
At work Preston felt dyspeptic and groggy. The Flexalt headquarters was a bronzed, mirrored cube. It sat in a great lawn surrounded by a grassy dike. The dike had been built to baffle the noise from Teterboro Airport across Airport Road. Preston’s office faced the hangars and tarmac, and he could often watch, as he did now, the MetLife blimp slowly revolving down to its berth. Cocoa mulch had been freshly spread on the Flexalt flowerbeds. The incongruous smell of chocolate, intense outside, somehow got in through the seams of the glass cube, and a young lawyer, Vijesh Talwani, said it was making him hungry.
Vijesh felt a need to chew over their case. He’d swung a great pile of papers onto Preston’s desk when he came in. The pile included a log of company emails for which they were claiming attorney-client privilege. Vijesh rolled a small bottle of water between the palms of clay-colored hands and paced with puppyish energy. “In one sense it may be good for us that they killed Azil in such a disgusting way. And right in front of his kid brother. Because on the narrow issue of what we can reasonably have expected—how can anyone reasonably expect crimes that are psychopathic? They’re unreasonable by their nature, right?”
“But if you employ psychopaths, you have to expect—reasonably expect—” Preston advocated for the devil, or for the other side, rather. The case hinged on Flexalt’s partnership with a Mexican company. As security, the company had employed paramilitary thugs, who happily invited members of the Sinaloa cartel to join them in murdering a bothersome trade union organizer who, they claimed, was somehow informing on the drug traffickers. The victim’s mother, in New York now, was suing Flexalt for damages under the Alien Tort Claims Act in U.S. District Court.
“But these were ex-military. Who’s going to expect them to be nuts? They’ve got a sort of government imprimatur,” Vijesh argued.
“Anyone who knew anything about the military in Mexico should’ve—” Preston tried. “No. If they were ex-military, what about post-traumatic stress? Employer could’ve looked into that before hiring.”
“OK, OK, OK, I still think it’s a promising line. I haven’t worked it all out.” Jittery junior debater, he sounded a touch condescending to Preston, his senior by almost thirty years. “We can’t let our guard down, just because Doe v. Unocal was dismissed,” he instructed his boss, rhythmically patting his water bottle. “The court’s language is sympathetic to plaintiff. We’ll have to see what happens on appeal. And I don’t think it’s a good parallel with our situation, anyway. The Coca-Cola one’ll be more interesting when it comes up. It isn’t Coke they say committed the crimes but a local, independent bottler. Much more like us. And Coke’ll argue there’s no chain of liability. Flexalt could have a tiny problem making the same argument, though, because of that email to the board.” Naturally, he’d memorized it: “…ironic they want to take the ATCA route (He’s talking about the widow’s lawyers) because we had our eye on Unocal even before that case was filed in ’97, and our Mexican partnership was configured with the developing ATCA risk in mind. That’s an email I wish I could lose. We fucked up not getting it on the privilege log. We can hope they don’t find it, but if they get it on disc, all they have to do is press Search: ATCA.”
“He’s saying we anticipated the argument we’re making now.”
“Right. But if he says the partnership was originally configured—before the murder—in expectation of an Alien Tort Claims Act suit, then we’ll have to explain why. They’ll say it was because Flexalt thought it likely a crime would be committed and was trying to insulate itself. It isn’t like a domestic regulatory thing—you can’t just comply with a set of rules and get airtight liability protection. Corporate mens rea is going to come up. So what was our state of mind? The law is in flux here. If we had the ATCA risk in mind we’re basically saying we expected something bad to happen in Mexico and didn’t want to be held liable.”
Preston’s phone rang. He was happy to be interrupted. Until he took the call. He looked up as if he might ask Vijesh to leave, then he didn’t. Extremely cautious, he spoke without betraying any information. This made Vijesh listen all the more carefully, though he retreated to the far side of the room and idly beat his water bottle on a bare bookshelf.
“She and I did talk yesterday evening—Yes, I think I can say I was a little surprised. Which is why I wanted to—I’d prefer face to face—That doesn’t come into it, of course. I have no reason not to assume, uh, everlasting good faith on, uh, both our parts—Please—Yes, we are a bit in the middle of things here—As soon as possible. Lunch, preferably—Or after work—She was amenable, and even I might be willing to go along, though there’s the issue of comfort—Well, isn’t that something to be dealt with?—Yes, face to face—I don’t know it, a RiteAid? Over by Short Hills Mall?—That’s not how I usually go. I take the exit after that—That’s fine. So we’ll say six?—Watermelons. OK.” He never cracked a smile, even after this last bit. When he hung up the phone, he breathed, “Miserable thing.”
Vijesh knew he shouldn’t comment, but he did. From across the room, he said in a strangely avuncular tone, crossing his arms, “Preston, old man, I think I know who that was.” When Preston didn’t say anything and didn’t look angry, Vijesh continued, “I’m not the kind of guy who brings up things like this, but—” He rushed, “Listen, I have a feeling that was Claire Malouf and—” Still Preston said nothing. Vijesh’s perfectly black eyes looked compassionate. “I’ll only say I think you should give her a wide berth. Really wide. She’s been talking to some people about you—and drinking.”
“She’s drinking?”
“No. You. Supposedly.”
“Ah. Always had a nice working relationship with her, I thought.”
“I’m not sure she feels the same way, Preston.” Both of them looked out the window. Trailing Gulliver-like ropes from front and back, the MetLife blimp dipped its nose.
Preston looked at his clock and decided an hourglass was a better model for time than the constant electric gliding of a second hand. Time ran, came to a stop, then all was inverted, shaken up like now, before it commenced seething forward again.
During the phone call, Jeanette Paul (not Claire) had proposed meeting Preston at a supermarket. She said she’d only have five minutes after Lynn’s sponge bath and before his dinner. Preston guessed she wanted him to fall in with her routine, act the supplicant. When he found her by the appointed pyramid of watermelons, she didn’t appear to be in a rush at all. Her cart was empty. A redhead with a tray was offering her a sample of cheese. Jeanette took a tiny mallet of sweating cheddar on a toothpick. She made the woman wait till Preston came over. Preston demurred twice, white extra-sharp and yellow.
Drily, Jeanette judged her sample “better than it looks.”
The redhead smiled and couldn’t have cared less. She galleoned off along a misting bank of lettuce.
Without preamble, Jeanette told Preston, “I’m not doing anything weird. Just so you know. You’re the one who wanted to see me. Which I understand—keeping tabs on my frame of mind. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no need. Nothing’s changed.”
That was a promising start. Relaxed. Preston was equally careful to appear casual. Stepping around a smattering of crushed champagne grapes, they drifted from the crowded fruits and vegetables to a quieter aisle, pausing by cake mixes. Jeanette backtracked to introductory small talk, which soon became banter. With anyone else Preston would have shrugged off the teasing. With Jeanette, teasing had a dark cast, implied a secret and tragic virtuousness like the unhappy, painful-looking, creases of her face. Not unlike the university president’s daughter twenty-five years on.
“You understand why I wondered, though,” Preston told her with a confiding smile.
Jeanette parried with an unexpected question, “You never liked Lynn, did you?” Preston’s silence was close enough to assent, so she went on. “Yeah. In your case I used to think it was—you know, when you really wrong someone, wrong them terribly, and then you can’t stand having anything to do with them? I thought it was that way with you and him.”
“Go ahead and shop, if you need to,” Preston offered. She didn’t take her eyes off him. He told her, “I’m sorry about Lynn. Truly sad about it. I’ve known him a long time. And it’s rotten for you, Jeanette, it really is.”
“But I decided nobody liked Lynn. Nor had they ever. Nor had I maybe. Maybe he was a convenience when I decided I wanted to get married. He’d have leapt at anything, and I like my men to leap. But isn’t it terrifying—if that’s your fate—to be the sort nobody cares for? And it’s not how he was brought up or anything he did or anything that happened to him. You know I’m right. You know it’s true. In his case, it’s like autism or something. It’s in his skin and always has been. I’m not claiming that means there’s anything so all-fired saintly about me taking care of him—”
“Why couldn’t there be? What do you get out of it, Jeanette? Always making yourself seem so sinister?” Tardily, Preston smiled to make that comment seem light.
But Jeanette gave him a nettled, haughty, “Is that what I’m doing?”
“About Barry,” he said, changing the subject. Then he thought to apologize, “No. That’s not what you’re doing: pretending to be bad. I’m sorry. But about Barry—”
“Money comes into this not at all, Preston. So you can relax. If you can pay him a bit, fine. If not, not.”
It made him nervous that the thought of money was so close to the surface. “Well, of course, I can do that, but I’m a little in the dark why you never want to settle the issue once and for all. What I mean to say is, it’s been your pleasure to keep this thing in doubt for an awfully long time.”
“Pleasure?” she repeated grandly. “I’d hardly call it that. The thing—my son—always was in doubt. I told you that from the beginning. I’ve never known for sure. But it was also never a pleasure. You know perfectly well, for years I dyed the poor kid’s hair. You know that. I guess I was frantic someone might notice. Wasn’t that a pretty desperate, unhappy… not a pleasure anyway! I’m sure everyone thought I was an idiot. Or a monster.”
“Jeanette, resemblance was never the issue you seemed to think it was,” Preston cajoled. He didn’t want to come off condescending. At the same time, he tried to sound more positive than he felt. He didn’t really know—nor had he ever—what Barry Paul looked like. For a few years, Barry had been a blond boy pointed out across the pool at Westerbrook or fishing lost golf balls from a water trap on the course. Then he vanished.
“No? You never thought so? I’m not saying I necessarily think so myself. Now. But I notice your kids never went to Lawrence, even though you did. No class pictures.”
“Come on, Jeanette! That had nothing to do with it. Bea decided all that. Schools.”
“Really? I seem to remember you and I having a talk at some point.”
“No. Where I said the kids wouldn’t go to Lawrence? I don’t think so.”
“I told you I was sending Barry there.”
“I don’t remember that. They were all at the club together with Barry often enough during the summers.”
“Only when Lynn and I belonged. Not a long time at all. But why get into all that?” She put a stop to it, so he couldn’t. “Look, if you feel you have to know, know absolutely, before you throw him a shekel, then by all means, let’s do the DNA test like some—some ghetto couple. I feel not the slightest need myself. But if you do, let’s be done with it. Who knew at the time there’d ever be this magic test?” The wildness of her threat warped her vowels. She was speaking in a low-pitched, laughter-like tone of voice. Neither of them could help looking up and down the aisle.
This was her line. Preston was certain of it. To perpetuate doubt forever. Since no demands had ever been made, she could think of herself as pure, untouched by vulgar self-interest. Whatever the cost to her, her life became a thing of beauty, as if it were art she was making with the thousand moral pigments of her frustrated existence. She’d come to him forever, whispering, I’m not doing anything.
“Let’s stop pussyfooting, Preston,” she said. “I know you don’t believe it, but I’m not coming after you. I’m not! I’m not!”
“Why don’t you want the kid at home to help you with Lynn, then?”
She smiled. She shrugged. “I need peace and quiet to poison the bastard, don’t I?”