Lily waited until late the next morning to confront Barnett. By ten o’clock he’d been at his computer for three hours, the kids were safely at school, and she’d been amply fortified by strong coffee and a half hour of exercise. She’d fired D’Arcy as an economy and found that she could replicate on her own most of what he’d been doing with her. She couldn’t, of course, hurl a medicine ball at her own abdomen, but she didn’t, unsurprisingly, miss that part of the regimen, and her abs were surviving without it.
She entered his study without a word. He jabbed at the keyboard and the monitor went blank.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Working.”
“On what?”
“On finding the missing money, clearing myself.”
“What does HornyNymphets.com have to do with finding three million dollars?” He started to speak. “Answer me, Barnett. Do you think the money was stolen by a horny nymphet? Or was it perhaps taken by a cum-eating slut or an anal whore?”
“You’ve been snooping.”
Snooping. It was so like Barnett to reduce her panic over the unfolding disintegration of their lives to a silly, Nancy Drew–ish word like snooping.
“You haven’t been doing one thing to help yourself, to help us. You’ve been sitting in here jerking off for weeks.”
“That’s ridiculous, utterly outrageous.”
“Don’t start with the upper-class indignation. This is serious, Barnett. I don’t know how much longer we can afford to stay here. If you did take that money, you can talk to the lawyers and maybe—”
“No!” His face crimsoned. “I did not take that money.”
“I know you didn’t,” she said, mustering all possible conviction. “But we can’t afford to sit back and wait for the government to figure out who did.”
“The government? The government is going to help us? Is that what you think?” His voice had acquired the shrill, maniacal lilt of a cornered mad scientist. “Lily, the government isn’t looking for the money. They’re convinced I have it in an offshore account. Mort Samuels called yesterday, he said the government is thinking of revoking my bail.”
“What?”
“I’m being uncooperative, apparently. I know where the money is, but I’m not telling them. Ergo, uncooperative. Ergo, back in jail.”
“Oh, no.”
“I can’t spend another minute in jail, I simply can’t,” he said, a bit melodramatically, though perhaps such a sentence couldn’t be uttered any other way.
“Then why aren’t you doing anything?”
“Because there’s nothing to do,” he said. “No one at the firm will take my calls. I keep thinking I’m overlooking something, but I don’t have any clues.”
“You could have told me, you could have told me instead of sitting here staring at these…these women and…Barnett, do you like these things?”
“I don’t know what—”
“Dildos and anal sex and…and black women. I mean, you never said anything all these years. I can’t do much about my race, but if I thought you really and truly wanted me to—”
“Lily!” He jumped up. She stepped back.
“I feel I don’t really know you, that’s all.”
“That’s completely absurd, absolutely ridiculous.”
More WASP indignation.
“It’s not ridiculous. You’ve retreated to some sort of sick fantasy world when there’s so much to do.”
“There’s nothing to do.” His shoulders unsquared, as if to drive home the point.
He looked pathetic. She’d gotten used to thinking of Barnett as a doer, a man of action, someone in complete control of his destiny (and, by extension, hers). But had he ever been such a character? He’d spent his days buying and selling stocks on the computer, leaving his desk only to seduce wealthy investors and pension fund managers over lunch and dinner at well-reviewed restaurants.
“Let’s work together,” she said. “All that money can’t simply evaporate. There’s got to be a trail…we’ll find it together, starting now.” She dragged a chair next to Barnett. “Okay, where do we start?” she said, and though she regretted her own Nancy Drew–ishness, she felt confident that what Barnett needed above all was a bit of encouragement.
“There’s nothing to do,” he said slowly, barely moving his lips. “You don’t seem to get it. You never get it. The government has its target, and they’re very happy with their target. Their target is rich, or so they think, their target is well known, their target’s wife is out every night in a new dress that costs as much as they make in a month. No one is on my side.”
“I am,” she said.
“What can you do?” he said with such contempt she found herself short of breath. What she could do was gape at him, paralyzed. “You see, you can’t do a damned thing for me. You never could.”
Still speechless, she wondered briefly, perhaps absurdly, if this was about sex after all. He seemed so petulant, so adolescent in a legs-shaking-under-the-desk kind of way. What if, all these years, she’d encouraged him to plunge a giant black dildo into whatever orifice he pleased, would he now be turning to her for succor instead of turning on her, as if she were somehow responsible for his downfall?
“And now I’m going to prison,” he said petulantly. “What can you do about that, Lily?”
She stood up and, while fleeing, slammed her thigh into a corner of the desk.
“Fuck.”
“You see, you can’t do anything, Lily. You can’t do anything. No one can. I’m going to jail, Lily, and you can’t do anything about it.”
She left, but not before his fingers resumed tapping on the keyboard.
For Guy, last night had been troubling on two levels. First, the call from Derek Ventnor, and then Rosemary’s anger at his refusal to discuss it. Once they were back in their apartment, Rosemary stopped questioning him about it. Actually, she’d stopped speaking entirely, which made the cramped confines of their apartment seem even crampier. There was nowhere to hide from her silence.
“I think that went well,” he said as they undressed in the bedroom. “We should get an official answer tomorrow.” He climbed on a chair. “But I’m sure we’re in.” He lowered the top of the room’s only window a crack and squeezed an old camp blanket in the opening, then fanned it out to block the light from the street lamp just outside. Blinds for the bedroom window had been a recurring and unresolved theme of their marriage for several years, along with going to the theater more often and, more recently, letting the twins cry themselves to sleep.
She nodded.
“You really hit it off with that Ratliff woman,” he said, jumping down from the chair. “Once we move in, she’ll probably treat you like her in-house Antiques Roadshow, lugging down every tchotchke in her apartment for you to appraise.”
She offered the tiniest of nods.
They were both naked as they performed the final ablutions of the day: tooth-brushing, face-washing, peeing. Strange, to be so comfortably naked and simultaneously not on speaking terms. Marriage in a nutshell, he supposed, intimacy and hostility in perfect balance. Her body had altered visibly since the twins’ arrival, though in clothes it looked unchanged. She’d once been thin and small-breasted; now she was less thin, though hardly fat, and her breasts had acquired a heft that still surprised him. They practically never had sex anymore, or so it seemed after five child-free years of near-daily fucking. But most nights he cupped her breasts before kissing her good night, happily awestruck by their new heft. He watched her from the bed as she brushed her teeth in the tiny bathroom, the vigorous movement of her right arm sending tiny ripples through her buttocks (she approached dental hygiene as she approached every task, as if it were a daily battle requiring relentless application). The truth was, his body had changed more than hers postpartum. He ran his hands over his midsection. Even in his senior year in college, when a bout of mono had sent his weight below one-fifty, he’d never had visible abdominals, the coveted six-pack. One of the disappointments of his life: He’d never felt his own abs except behind a layer of intractable fat. Now that layer had thickened and tended to soufflé over the elasticized tops of his boxer shorts, leaving a zipper imprint around his waist when he undressed at night.
Rosemary began flossing with the vigor of a violinist attacking a Hungarian scherzo. Despite everything (Ventnor’s call, Rosemary’s hostility, and of course Positano’s sagging stock price), he found himself aroused. How long had it been since he’d simply watched her, naked, brushing and flossing? That probably counted as quality time. He idly stroked himself, thinking that a quick fuck would do more to ease the tension between them than any conversation. That had always been the way with them. Nothing short of sex ever fully dissipated whatever tension was building between them—no wonder things had been edgy since the twins’ birth. Funny how the sweaty abrasion of two bodies, the desperate insertion of one organ into another, the panting climax, could have such a restorative impact on a relationship, so much more effective than talk or flowers or even therapy at working things out. That was how it would happen tonight, he thought as he flung off the covers to expose his jutting olive branch.
She deposited the used floss in the toilet and turned, facing him.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said, eyeing his peace offering. “You really are clueless, you know that, Guy?” She grabbed the covers and flung them back over him.
“Darling…” he said quietly as she joined him in the bed.
“The boys will be up in five hours, Guy. If we’re lucky. Go to sleep.”
Guy held no secrets from Rosemary, never had, so it confused him, that night and the next morning, his reluctance to tell her about Derek Ventnor. All he’d have to do is tell her who and what Ventnor was and the chill between them would thaw instantly. She’d understand what he’d done, and what he had to do now.
But he couldn’t. When they’d first met, Rosemary had been a successful appraiser for the most prestigious auction house in New York. She was beautiful, had a graduate degree in art history from Barnard, knew the ten best restaurants in New York at any given moment in time and had been to most of them. From the perspective of the Jersey veal farm, she was untouchably sophisticated. All he’d had in his column was what one old girlfriend had called a swarthy handsomeness—and that only went so far with women. Eventually the basic dreariness of his life kicked in like a recurring rash and at that point most of the women he’d met got second thoughts. Rosemary had seen something else in him, intelligence and charm, he liked to think. And then, almost overnight, he’d gone from code-writing frog to high-tech prince. He didn’t want her to know that her prince was beholden to a porn king.
Henry Delano knocked on his always-open door and entered his office.
“Our stock’s on hyperdrive,” he said, crossing the big room to Guy’s desk. A giant angel fish seemed to follow him, moving with an unfishy lack of urgency from one end of the big tank to the other. “Two million shares traded already this morning, up to nineteen and change.”
“Wow.” Positano’s stock was very thinly traded, which was one reason it was so volatile. “The right direction, at least.”
“There’s a rumor floating in one of the chatrooms that someone’s buying us out. You haven’t been talking to anyone about selling, because—”
“Fuck no.” Give his child up for adoption? He’d sooner shut Positano down.
“Well, someone’s buying. I’ll speak to our transfer agents to see if they know who it is.”
He started to leave, pausing to tap the tank. Everyone did that; there must be something fundamentally reassuring about watching a dozen tiny, helpless creatures lurch into a frenzied panic at the mere touch of one’s fingertip.
“Listen…I got a call last night from Derek Ventnor.” Henry walked back toward the desk and sat down. “The asshole put his Positano stock up as collateral for a margin loan and bought a boatload of loser stocks. All underwater now. He needs cash to make a margin call.”
“Let me guess, he wants it from us.”
“Fifty thousand dollars.”
“Out of the question.”
“I don’t think we have a choice.”
“Look, when we went public we had no choice, we had to allocate him the directed shares. The IPO’s a dicey time in a company’s life cycle, you can’t afford anything unsavory or the investors won’t bite.” Henry looked pleased with his little metaphor. “Now that we’re public, investors aren’t going to dump us because of Ventnor, they can’t afford to. Anyway, he’s not as important to us as he once was.”
“I’m speaking next month at the Merrill Lynch tech conference in Boca. Our IR firm worked overtime to get me on that agenda. I don’t exactly like the thought of standing up there, knowing that everyone knows about Derek Ventnor.”
“So fifty thousand dollars is the price of speaking at that conference?”
Guy frowned. Financial types were so depressingly, predictably literal. “It’s the price of holding my head up in front of my peers. Anyway, I’m not so sure there won’t be legal implications if Ventnor goes public. We didn’t exactly highlight him in our prospectus.” In fact, Positano’s S-1 document for the IPO had made no mention of Ventnor or his company.
“We could check with legal.”
“Legal” was a lawyer, one person, a quiet, bookish woman named Hilary Hillman who’d forfeited a lucrative partnership in a major corporate firm after the birth of her third child in order to, as she’d put it, downsize her professional commitments.
“No, I don’t want Hilary or anyone else involved. I need some sort of check that Ventnor can cash but that can’t be traced back to us.”
“Christ, this is Mafia shit, like paying a bribe.”
“Don’t forget, we have the MyJob contract coming up. It’s down to us and Vignette Software. A dead heat. They’re looking for a reason to go with one company over the other. I don’t want to give them Ventnor. How soon can you get me a check?”
His cell phone chirped from its holster on his belt.
“It’s me.”
Why wasn’t there a law that only spouses were allowed to begin phone conversations with that line?
“Hello, Lucinda.”
“I just heard from the board. You’re in!”
“Great.”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me, I said the board accepted your application.”
“And I said ‘great.’”
“There’s great and there’s great. You’re not having second thoughts…”
“Of course not. I’m in the middle of something.”
“Oh, well…” She seemed flummoxed by the concept that something might be more important than being accepted by a co-op board. She probably interrupted quadruple bypass surgery to tell the doctor that his application had been accepted. “We’ll talk later,” she said. “You’ll want to get your financing ducks in a row ASAP. And start looking for a contractor. You’ll want to submit your plans to the board before you move in. Okay, G2G. Congrats.”
“So,” he said to Henry after reholstering his phone, “where were we?”
“I can get you a check this afternoon. I’ll have to work out who to make it payable to…You going to messenger it over?”
“Make it out to cash. I’ll take it over myself.”
“I wouldn’t recommend that. The less you have to do with that scumbag—”
“I need to make it clear that this is the last time.”
After Henry left, he called Rosemary.
“I just heard from Lucinda. We’re in,” he said.
“Great.” He heard his own lack of enthusiasm echoed in her voice. At least she was speaking to him, though admittedly she couldn’t just nod over the phone.
“Maybe we should go out and celebrate tonight.”
“I’ll never get a sitter on short notice. Oh, I hear them waking up now. Bye.”
He hung up, thinking that he’d have to find a way to seduce her that night; he didn’t think he could endure the cold war another day. He could also tell her about Ventnor, which might be easier than trying to coax her into sex. He glanced at his computer screen. Positano was up a full point on heavy volume. Something was happening. A jump in a company’s stock price was like a rising fever, nothing alarming necessarily but an indication that something more serious might be going on. Positano was running a fever, no doubt about it. He clicked over to his digital calendar and saw a solid mass of yellow covering all the remaining hours of the day—meetings, back to back. He added the words “find contractor” to his to-do list and minimized the calendar to a small icon at the bottom of the screen. Then he picked up a pencil and tossed it at the tank, whipping the fish into an utterly gratifying frenzy.