22

So Eddie was stumped, Cindy hadn’t done squat to help the situation, Carole did nothing but cry and shrug when he went to her for a third opinion, and Charlotte, who usually had fantastic judgment when it came to such knotty things and was the most objective gal he knew—she simply recused herself and kept resolutely mute. What to tell Ben, when, how, if—all that uncertainty dropped back into the lap of poor beleaguered Eddie Parker, right where the whole conundrum had begun. But there was just no way he could live with a decision as crucial as this one was likely to be—not on his own—And so he opted at last to bring it to committee, to schedule a four-part conference of the people most concerned with Ben’s well-being, and let them jointly make the final call.

Cindy handled the arrangements, as she had handled everything else in Ben’s life these past seven years. One of the Atherton limos would pick everybody up, on—well, it turned out that Tuesday would be the perfect day: Ben had business in the City all day Tuesday, proffering pontifications to the hosts of several shows, so that was the safest time for them to meet without his knowledge. Eddie watched Ben’s interview on Bloomberg on his I-Pad as the limo motored off.

They went to Albert’s on Highway 36, their go-to local venue to eat. Twice a week, three times, maybe more, singly or in pairs or in multiples, they would all dine there, whether for lunch or dinner or a midnight snack. Albert’s was as private an eatery as they needed it to be. The driver would take them around the back, the horn would honk, the door would open as if by some limo-tropic magic eye … and there to greet them with a welcoming hand and a big wide smile on his face would be….

Greg.

Now Gregory Barton was a genuine character, all right, unique to their little Jersey world. He didn’t own the place, but he pretty much ran it as though he did. Greg had a history that everyone knew by heart from repetition, and a current narrative that no one really wanted to hear, although he exulted in telling it anyway. His story, your story, every person-who-dined-at-Albert’s story got lodged in Greg’s multi-studded ears, then retold lavishly embellished, re-retold a second time more baroquely embellished than the first time he had tossed it out, and finally broadcast wholesale to the whole wide world like a banner headline in the Post.

It’s probably best to get to Greg’s story first, which goes as follows: He’d been a hairdresser once, but got allergic to the dyes the dressers had to use—You should have seen me, Mr. Eddie, I blew up like this, like, huge bal-l-o-o-n!—Then, phase two, having deflated down to normal size, Greg enrolled in school to master home decoration; but regrettably the Great Recession had the gall to muscle in—I had contracts galore, Mr. Ben, but all of them cancelled the same day—Oh, it was a nightmare! What a nightmare, nightmare day!—Then the temporary job at the restaurant came along—just so he could eat and pay the rent, of course—And—click!—What fun! Old Greg had found his true vocation at last—and he’d been the mainstay of Albert’s ever since.

So Greg, with his college-freshman smile and liquid walk, met them at the door, bowed in his genuine but sycophantic way, and led them to their customary table in the back, out in the corner of a semi-private room that kept them insulated from the politicos and the autograph hounds and the purveyors of luxury vehicles out front. Greg knew the drill as well as anyone could possibly know it, and was always richly rewarded for his pains.

He was the quintessential restauranteur, and looked the part too—always with that immaculately pressed white coat, the neat bow tie, the jeweled studs running up both ears from lobe to apex; then the glittering rings on three of his fingers, two thumbs and one index; and, to top the lavish presentation off, a luscious scent that could put the emanations of a florist’s shop to shame.

So the inimitable Greg ushered them in, such as he was; they sat; he helped the ladies with their chairs; he fluffed the spotless napkin draped across one arm, curled a bottle of preselected wine in the fellow hand, bowed dexterously, and, once the folks were nestled in their places and tucked against the table snug, he elegantly asked:

“And where might Mr. Ben be today, Mr. Eddie? Are we not expecting him for lunch?”

“Not today, Greg. If you switch the TV in the other room to Bloomberg, you’ll see for yourself where he is right now.”

“Oh—well!— He’s a real celeb, isn’t he? You know, my new friend Allan was ultra-impressed to learn that I actually knew the famous Mr. Ben.”

“Allan? I thought you said his name was Ethan.”

“Oh that, Mr. Eddie—No Ethan went the way of all the rest, regrettably. Allan is new. Allan is—wait till you see him, Mr. Eddie. Allan is a dreamboat of a friend. He’s a little on the youngish side for yours truly, but, between the two of us, who’d kick someone out on his you-know-what just ‘cause that special someone is a little young?” Greg winked at Eddie and Eddie nodded back conspiratorially; it was their customary way. “Here try this, my adorable guys and gals; it’s a trifle on the dry side, and I know you’re not that big a fan of dry, Mr. Eddie, but I had Emil put some veal rollatini on the grill for you four delicious people to sample when I saw the car pull up, and this Chateau Rondine goes impeccably with veal.”

“It’s fine, Greg. Whatever you pick for us is always fine—So—Let me ask you something, huh?— We’re gonna have a little meeting here today, and it would be nice if you could keep things particularly private back here—Like no other patrons in the room—Can you take care of that for us?”

“Can I take care of it! I’ll pull the fire alarm and clear the whole place out for you if you want. Can I take care of it!—Sheesh!”

With which Greg sashayed off in something of an artificial huff, having left the bottle of Chateau-whatever-the-hell-he’d-said-it-was on the table. “If Mr. P would care to pour,” he added, relative to the uncorked wine. And once he left and the coast was clear, Eddie felt it appropriate to kick off the festivities with:

“OK, Carole, Char, Cindy—it’s been three days now since I got this shit dumped in my lap, and I’ve gotta do something pretty quick, so we need to come to a decision today.”

Everybody nodded in agreement, but it was Carole who spoke up first, as one would have expected her to do, since she was the person most affected by Ben’s sulky mood when things commenced to head south. She queried:

“Well where do we stand now, Eddie? I haven’t said a word to Ben so far—Have you?”

“Me? About the kid they matched him with? No—God no! I wouldn’t have a clue what to say. All that’s happened so far is, I showed him the picture that Charlotte and I found last week.”

“And that was when?—What day did you show it to him?—Wasn’t it the next day after we met Ben in the City last week?”

“Yep, next morning right on cue; a week ago tomorrow. When Bennie asks you for something, you do just what he asks. He asked to see the picture, so I brought it to his office the minute I got to work—So—did he mention it to you, Carole? Did he say anything about it afterward?”

“Not right away, he didn’t. Not that same day, I mean. It was two or three days later that he finally said something. That’s why I asked you if you’d brought it to him right away.”

“OK, so—what exactly did he say?”

“Not very much. You know, normally we never even mention Lizzie’s name or even refer to her in passing, but—well if you gave him the picture on Thursday, then it must have been Saturday or maybe Sunday that he finally brought it up. He told me that he’d seen the photo, and…. I think he said he’d almost forgotten how pretty Lizzie was back then. I was shocked—I mean, ordinarily when he even thinks of her, he gets unbearably depressed. But this time—I don’t know—he seemed almost philosophical about it. He wasn’t what you’d call cheerful exactly, but he didn’t strike me as being all that broken up.”

Eddie took a twenty-second pause to digest Carole’s new information. All of them did, apparently, but after that brief intermission, it was Charlotte’s turn to speak: “So, sweetheart—let me ask you this: That morning when you showed the picture to Ben—How did he react to it?”

“Funny, kind of. It wasn’t what I expected, at all. He took it from me and just kind of held it for a while. Actually, it was quite a while, so long that I got a little nervous just sitting there watching him stare at it like that. He didn’t say anything, which got me antsy quite a little bit, so finally I asked him if he was OK.”

“And what did he say to that?” Carole queried from his left. Cindy was seated to his right, with Charlotte straight across the table from him, facing him past the uncorked bottle of too-dry wine.

“Nothing. That’s the hell of it, he said nothing. He just sat there and stared at the picture, and after that—it seemed like an hour at the time, but probably it was just a couple of minutes or so—after that he opened the drawer and set the picture in—carefully, like the way you’d set one of those Rembrandt etchings of yours in a safe.” Eddie directed this at Carole, of course. “And then he looked up, right into my eyes, and said: ‘I’m OK, Eddie, everything’s OK.’”

“And what did you say?” Funny: Carole on the left and Charlotte straight across from him asked Eddie this question almost in unison. And the synchrony of their asking made each of them puff out a nervous little laugh while Cindy raptly looked on.

“Jeez—What could I say?” Eddie shrugged. “I think I mumbled something about our guys in Graphics doing such a fabulous job of enlarging the photo and enhancing it. I told him I could get more copies if he wanted them. I just blurted out a bunch of silly bullshit like that; I hardly knew what I was saying. Then—it was weird as hell, I’ll tell you—then Bennie closed the drawer that he’d put the photo in; he got up; he stepped around the desk, and he came over, bent down, and gave me a great big hug. I’m talking, not just your ‘hello-good-bye’ kind of hug or your ‘thanks-a-lot-pal’ hug that I’m used to from him, but what you’d call an affectionate hug, the way he hugged me the night that Lizzie died—that night when I ran over to the house; I’ll never forget it—Whew!” Eddie shook his shoulders in a sort of reactive shiver. “Anyway, I had to leave the room ‘cause I had tears in my eyes and I didn’t want him to see. But I guess he knew, ‘cause he didn’t try to stop me from running out.”

“Which drawer?” Cindy asked that, with such imponderable incongruity that Eddie shook his head and blinked his eyes in confusion. It was the first time she’d said a word since the four of them sat down.

“Huh? Which drawer, you’re asking? Umm—on the right, I think—Yeah, it was the top drawer on the right. Definitely top drawer on the right. But why…?”

“He looks at it,” said Cindy, cutting him off mid-question. “He looks at it a lot.”

“At what, Cindy? At the picture? Like when?”

“Like a lot, like I said, Mr. P. He looks at it a lot. Sometimes I’ll go in for something—with a memo or to bring him lunch, and he’ll be sitting there with that drawer open just staring down into it. I wasn’t sure till now what he was staring at until you told us what was in there.”

Carole put her hands up on the table and carefully, nervously smoothed the cloth. She was calm on the surface, but you could sense that she was all worked up inside. “Well … it’s a lot better than we might have figured it was going to be,” she said. “A year or two ago, if this had happened, he would have been back on the meds again, or maybe in the hospital with that heart thing where his rhythm goes berserk.”

Everybody mumbled their collaborative assents to that, and as they did, the plates of appetizers came around. But no one was very hungry. No one was very thirsty either, since they hadn’t touched their bloody-purple wine as yet. Greg glanced dubiously at the unused glasses and asked:

“Bad choice? On the Rondine? Would you prefer a blush or a rosé instead, Mr. Ed? That would go with veal every bit as well as the one I brought.”

“You know, Greg, I don’t think we’re all that hungry just yet; or thirsty either. Give us a little while, would you? Any of you ladies want a different kind of wine?”

They shook their heads in unison, and Greg traipsed off again unfazed.

“So—the picture that we’re talking about, the one in Benny’s drawer: Everybody’s had a look at it, right?”

Charlotte had, of course, and he’d shown it to Cindy just the other day, but as for Carole:

“No, Eddie, I haven’t seen it yet.”

“Ben never showed it to you? You’re in his office every other day—didn’t he offer to open the drawer and let you have a look?”

“No. He didn’t mention it at all, except for that single time when we were at home. And it’s something I wouldn’t dare to ask about if he didn’t bring it up himself.”

“OK, well I’ve got it here along with a couple of other ones I need to show you all. Here, let me pull it out, if you want to have a look. And Cindy, Char—I want both of you to look at it again, just as a point of reference.” With which Eddie reached into his jacket’s inner pocket, took out an envelope, pulled three folded pieces of computer-printed paper from it, took the top one from the rest, and handed it leftward into Carole’s waiting hands.

She stared at the paper for a while, set it on the tablecloth, smoothed out the folds, lifted it again, and stared some more. You could see the emotion in her face, the liquidity in her eyes. But she covered her discomposure well—for thirty years she’d been covering her discomposure well. And when she was sated with her staring, after maybe a minute, maybe a little more, she passed it on to Cindy, who looked at it again briefly, passed it in turn to Charlotte, who looked at it just as briefly, then gave it back to Ed.

“OK, so we’re all on the same page here, right? Everybody familiarize themselves with what Ben and Lizzie looked like thirty years ago? That’s a photocopy of the picture that Char and I found.”

They all nodded and mumbled yes.

“That’s the picture just the way I got it from graphics—after they touched it up, I mean. And what I got back in my email three days ago was a couple of amazingly good matches for both.”

“So what you told me on the phone,” asked Carole, “the FaceMate people that you’re dealing with—they actually did put Lizzie’s picture in their program to get it matched?”

“Yep, just like I said the other day. That’s just what they did.”

“But why?” Carole exhibited a mixture of disbelief and outrage in her face and voice. “Why would anyone try to match up a girl who’s been dead for thirty years?”

“Yeah, well, there you are: This nut-case Alex character: If you met him you’d realize there is no asking why. The damn kid lives in a whole different reality than the rest of us do.”

“OK, but even so….”

Eddie shrugged. “Hey, what’s done is done. Now we gotta deal with the fall-out from it. And the fall-out is this, ladies: I’ve got two kids who sent in letters wanting to correspond with the people who look like them. And when I say ‘look like them’, what I’m saying is…. Well, Cindy had a peek at the pictures I got emailed the other day. Tell them what you saw, Cindy. Tell Charlotte and Carole your impression before I let them see these FaceMate photos for themselves.”

“Uh-huh, Mr. P is right in what he’s telling you.” She looked at Carole and Charlotte in turn. “They’re amazing. The matches they sent are incredible.”

“Sure are,” said Eddie, “You won’t believe your eyes when you see them. But before I pass them around for general inspection, let’s review the primary problem we’ve got to solve—which is the reason we’re meeting today: And that is—over and above how I respond to the two poor kids who wrote in looking for their match-mates—What in the holy hell am I supposed to tell Ben? How much of this stuff do I show him? And how do I do it; and when; and where? Carole? Cindy? And you too Charlotte—we all know Ben like we know ourselves, and we all love him like a husband or a brother or a best of friends—So for God’s sake, between the three of you—tell me what the hell to do and how to do it. I can’t make the call all by myself, so we’re gonna need to figure it out as a team.”

Eddie looked left; he looked right; he looked across at Charlotte, but to no avail whatever. The three women just stayed mum and solemnly shook their heads.

“OK,” said Eddie, “maybe there’s not enough information yet for us to come to a decision. Let’s toss this into the mix then: Maybe these two other pictures will help the three of you decide.”

With which he reached in his envelope once again and pulled out the rest of the contents. The uppermost picture was of the handsome young man. He passed it leftward to Carole, who blurted out, gaping:

“But this is….”

“It sure looks like him, doesn’t it? The way he looked thirty years ago, I mean.”

“Eddie—It doesn’t just look like him. It IS him. That’s Ben, Eddie, just the way he looked when….”

“When Lizzie died; I know. That’s when the other picture was taken, the one Charlotte and I found in the closet; the one in Benny’s drawer.”

“Let me see,” said Charlotte, for she had been there when the original was discovered, but had not yet seen the photos of the match-mates. Carole handed the picture of the young man to her, albeit reluctantly; her eyes hadn’t quite yet had their fill.

“So you’re saying this isn’t Ben?” Charlotte looked puzzled to the point of incredulity. “It isn’t another picture you came across from when he was a kid?”

“Nope, sure isn’t. It’s a young man who lives in Arizona. The information on him is there at the bottom of the page.”

“It’s incredible!” said Carole.

“It really is. Beyond belief,” concurred Char.

“Yeah, Cindy thought so too when I showed her this stuff the other day. But I’ve got this other picture to show you girls as well. It’s just as unbelievable, but in a crazier, spookier way. Do your best not to scream or faint, OK?”

With which Eddie passed the third of his three print-out photographs to Carole on his left. She took it, looked at it, looked more closely at it, trembled visibly, violently, and then began to sob. She didn’t speak, for she was speechless, as Eddie had fully expected her to be. If Carole went to pieces like this—Christ Almighty!—how could he possibly show the goddamn thing to Ben?

“OK, let me see it too,” coaxed Charlotte, but Carole kept it tightly tethered to her hand. A minute passed before the sobbing turned to weeping and Carole relinquished the photo of Liliana Glinskaya tremulously to the woman’s waiting fingers on her left.

“Oh God, Eddie—it’s her! It’s exactly her! No. No, you can’t show this to Ben. You can’t. Ever!”

“So what do I do then? Do I tell him? Do I tell him about the guy and not the girl? Do I tell him anything? And what do I do about the two nice kids who sent their pictures in? What about this Liliana girl, Carole?—Would you like to see a perfect image of your long-lost sister again? Would the girl in the picture want to know what happened to her thirty-year-deceased identical twin?”

For a while—for quite a while, in fact—the four of them looked somberly at one another, looked back at the pictures splayed out on the table, mumbled their communal sense of disbelief, and simply shook their heads. Eddie gathered up the print-outs again, set them to his right on the tablecloth, the antique photograph of Ben and Lizzie up on top…. And amidst the shock and disbelief and confusion of the scene, above them and behind Charlotte’s shoulder-blade came a lilting basso voice, intoning musically:

“All right, you lovely people, I know you said you weren’t hung-r-y, but these clams casino are to d-i-e for. Seriously. You’ve g-o-t to try them, even if you didn’t like the veal. You simply must have a taste. Here, Mr. Eddie, and you too, Mrs. Atherton, take one while they’re hot, and….

A lengthy pause, a bit of movement over to Eddie’s right, and then….

A gasp. “Oh my LORD! Is that…? That picture, Mr. Eddie—tell me it isn’t Mr. Ben. Oh my GAWD! That isn’t Mr. Ben when he was just a young whippersnapper, is it?” Greg picked up the papers before Eddie had the chance to tell him NO! He would have certainly tried to stop him if he could have, but Greg was way too fast, way too importunate, way too skillful in his motion. And by the time Eddie moved his hand, by the time he had a chance to raise his voice, it was way, way too late.

“Oh, but he was gorgeous, wasn’t he? I know he’s a handsome devil now, our Mr. Ben is, but he looks absolutely GORGEOUS in this picture when he was young!—Oh, you’ve got to make a copy for me so I can show it to Allan—Will you, Mr. Eddie? Please? PLEASE?! And this other person in the picture, the young lady—Is that….”

But he knew who it was well enough. Everybody in Red Bank knew the story as though it were their own. He might not have remembered the name, the date, the precise circumstances surrounding the tragedy, but he knew the association. Greg was a one-of-a-kind sort of guy, Greg was a stand-out in many ways, eccentric, flamboyant—But the one thing Greg wasn’t, was a dunce.

Nor did he prove to be a dunce when it came to the other papers in his hand. He knew about the website—Good Lord! Everybody in Red Bank—nearly everybody on the planet—had been buzzing about it for weeks. So when he leafed through the pages, once, and then again, it was no great shock when he concluded that:

“And these must be the matches you guys’es website found—no? But it’s unbelievable that they could come up with two other people so amazingly close—except that….”

“Right,” said Eddie, “except that the two pairs of people in the pictures are thirty years apart, age-wise, and one of them is….”

“Oh, my!” said Greg.

“Oh GOD!” thought Eddie, thinking this as the realization dawned on him that the cat had just popped out of the bag. Greg was the gossip of all gossipers. He had been witness to the secret reason the four of them were meeting here today. And thus: everyone in Jersey would know about it soon enough; and all this amazing revelation would get back to Bennie in a heartbeat. The only way anyone could prevent that from happening would be to put poor Greg to death right here and now and grind his slender body into pulp.

For once he left this secluded back room of Albert’s, everybody in the kitchen would know the facts as well as he, and ten minutes after that everyone in the establishment would know the facts as well as he. And half an hour after that, everyone in Red Bank would know. And twenty minutes after Red Bank knew….

The cat was out of the bag, all right. The decision had now been graven in stone. Ben would have to be told everything, ASAP.

And as for writing back to the two delectable matches autistic Alex had regrettably found—well, as for that, they might as well let Benny himself make the final call.