33

Cindy looked kind of down. And she looked pretty stressed as well. All of them were stressed right now, the guys at AthCorp sure—every single one of them—but half the folks in Red Bank too; and its surroundings, and the surroundings of its surroundings, from the City clear up north down to Trenton and Philly in the south, and way out west to the Water Gap just about. People knew Ben; and loved him; and the hundreds—probably thousands—of people who knew him, and loved him, and had heard about the test he was going to be having on his heart—Hell, half of the Eastern Corridor was sitting there biting their figurative nails till the results came in, and till they showed he was OK, at which point they could sit back gladly and relax, all of them could. But now, this morning, you could say the collective Jersey world was teetering at the edge of it cumulative seat.

That call from Tommy Mulroy first thing Tuesday morning: “Get Ben checked,” he’d said to Eddie; then Eddie had got on the phone to Carole. And wham—bam! once you told Carole and got her on the case, knowing how protective—you’d have to call it compulsive—she was about her darling husband Ben—well, anyone could have predicted the alarm bells that call was bound to set off. Carole wasn’t the kind of worrier who’d let sleeping dogs lie, even if their teeth were bared and their mouths were full of foam

So what she does right after Tommie’s phone call: she gets on the phone to the doctors’ offices; and the doctors’ offices, the receptionists, the nurses, the techs—hell, even the docs themselves—everyone loves Ben Atherton, right? And everyone owes him big time. All the gifts, the favors, the big and little kindnesses the guy had lavished on every single soul he’d ever come in contact with, while never asking even the smallest ‘thank you’ in return: Well, now, here’s a chance to pay him back at least a nickel on the buck for all he’s given you, all he’s done for you, all he’s done to help your friends, your relatives, your kids.

“Can you get him in as soon as possible?” That’s what Carole asks when she calls, and, hell, if she would have called at the stroke of midnight Sunday, they would have taken Ben straight in for the test at one a.m. Monday morning. They would have turned the lights on in the lab; they would have called the techs in from their couple hours of sleep—Sure they would have. But Carole made the call on Tuesday, shortly after Tommy via Eddie had set her to the task. So as it turned out in the end, Wednesday morning right around 11:00, she agreed, would be an appointment time that would suit their requirements just fine.

OK, so here they were on Wednesday morning, not too terribly long a wait, considering. And the test that our mechanical genius Mulroy had prescribed was scheduled to get done just before noon this very day. All the Atherton folks who’d got wind of what was brewing: they’re nervous, they’re brooding, they’re biting their collective nails, you’d have to say, paying no attention whatsoever to the work they had to do—All of them are worried shitless right now—with the significant exception of …

Ben.

“The boss in?” Eddie asked. Cindy’s face looked white, pasty, frightened.

“Sure, Mr. P.” She said it boldly, but you could hear the tremor in her voice. “You want me to buzz or you want to surprise him yourself?”

“I’ll surprise him, Cindy, if you don’t think he’ll mind that much. He goes to the doctor this morning, right? You got it in in your schedule book?”

“Sure do, sir, sure do. Mrs. A. is picking him up herself, and she’s going along to see to it personally that he actually shows up for the appointment and gets the testing done—What is it again that they’re testing, Mr. P.? Do you know what the exam they’re doing is called?”

“Yeah, sure I know—I know the name, at least. It’s an echocardiogram. That’s what the kid recommended, but don’t ask me what the hell that means. From what Tommie says, if it comes out OK, Ben gets a clean bill of health, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief. So let’s keep our fingers crossed that nothing the kid got concerned about shows up.”

“Everybody’s hoping that, sir. But I’m pretty sure Mr. A. is as healthy as anybody here in the building.” Cindy spoke the words alright, but the voice she spoke them in showed you just how really terrified she was. “You can tell he’s healthy, Mr. P., can’t you? I mean, look at him; just look at the energy he’s got. For a guy in his middle fifties, he sure runs circles around me.”

Eddie smiled. Not a proper time for smiling, no; but he couldn’t resist. Circles around Cindy, eh? Shit, you could burn a tank of Exxon Premium doing a couple of circuits around Cindy’s hefty flanks. But he bit his lip and passed her by without her noticing the expression on his face. And when he thought of Ben again—which he did within a second or two—the smile was instantaneously gone.

“Hey, Bennie, how ya doin’? How do you feel today?”

“You asking as a formality, Ed, or you still worried about my heart?” Bennie chuckled. That was Ben, alright: he seemed to be the only person in New Jersey with no concern whatever about the chance of his being sick.

“Hey, it’s not me, Ben; it’s the kid. I don’t know heart disease from hemorrhoids. Your boy Tommy’s the one who’s been calling me every goddamn hour since yesterday morning making sure we got you scheduled for that test.”

“Yeah, he’s really something, isn’t he? It hardly seems possible that I only met him the other day. He’s been calling you a lot too?”

“A lot, yeah: like three times from the garage he works in yesterday—you could hear the air tools running in the background—And then this morning again—every goddamn hour, it seems like, since around eight—which is like five or six Arizona time, you realize, so he’s picking up the phone even before he goes to work. And then yesterday—Jesus!— once he got me to call Carole to get the damn test scheduled, he called back a couple of times afterward to make sure it was the right kind of test, and that the doctor doing it was board certified in cardiology—He’s a pest, that kid, I’m telling you—a goddamn cellphone pest!”

“Yeah, funny; he’s been pulling the same stuff with me too. Every time he takes a break from what he’s doing—his tune-ups or valve jobs—whatever—I get another call, and we talk until his break is done—however long it is; five minutes or ten. Then last night—I must have been on the phone with him for two hours straight, I think—from 9:00 till 11:00, or maybe it was even later, maybe after 11:15.”

“Right; a goddamn pest, like I said before—So what do you talk about in all that time? Hey you and I never talked for even fifteen minutes straight, did we? Let alone a couple of hours—Christ!”

“If we did, I sure as hell don’t remember it, Eddie. But to answer your question, Tommie and I talk about everything. We talk about mergers and acquisitions, about carburetors and fuel pumps—Hey, he just put a new fuel pump in his mother’s car, did you know that? Did you know they have to drop the gas tank to put a fuel pump in?”

“How would I know that, huh? He and I don’t talk for hours, just for a couple of minutes about you. ‘Who’s the doctor? What are his credentials? Make sure the doctor does the test and not some technician; they don’t know what to look for.’—A pest; a fuckin’ busybody, like I said—Then he calls back right afterward to have us get a copy of the results and send it out to him. I guess he figures he’s an expert in heart tests too—I mean, who knows? Maybe a heart is like a fuel pump—and the kid does know fuel pumps, I’ll give him that; so maybe he can read the fuckin’ echocardiogram better than anybody else in New Jersey can. You know something, Bennie? I wouldn’t put it past him. Hell, I wouldn’t put anything past that goddamn genius kid.”

“Yeah, I know. I’ve seen him in action, Ed. But all this fuss is just a waste of time, you know. All you guys keep pestering me, you and Tom and Carole especially—Hell, once you get Carole on your case, there’s no way to get her off—But remember: Seriously, I do forty minutes on the elliptical every other day. Forty minutes, I’m saying—on level number five. People with heart disease don’t do forty minutes on the elliptical on level number five every other day, do they? Honestly, pal, the only reason I’m keeping the appointment is Carole, who’ll bust my chops forever until I finally get it done.”

“Yeah, well if Carole didn’t pester you about it, the kid would keep pestering me.”

“Right, I know; I realize that. It’s hard to imagine how close the two of us got in so short a period of time. One weekend, for God’s sakes, and I feel like I’ve known him for years—for all his life, in fact. Or maybe all my life—The age difference somehow doesn’t seem to apply.”

“I know. I told you, didn’t I? Didn’t I try to tell you that? That kid is you thirty years ago—you exactly. Remember I knew you thirty years ago, and when I saw that kid, that’s exactly who I saw.”

“Yeah, and not just appearance either, Eddie. When I talk to him, it’s like I’m talking to myself. He knows what I’m going to say, and I know what he’s going to say—It’s the strangest experience I’ve ever had in my life. And … it’s hard to describe, honestly, but since I met him, since he was here last weekend….”

“I know, Bennie boy. I’ve noticed.”

“Have you? You see how much my mood has changed?”

“Not just me, Ben. Everybody talks about it. It’s like you’re happy again, like the old times. Like the ‘80’s when we were back in school, I mean, the time before….”

“Yeah, don’t be afraid, Eddie, you don’t have to be afraid to say it anymore. Being with that kid took me back there, back to my twenties—I don’t know the reason or the psychologic mechanism involved, but it’s like remedial psychotherapy. It’s like—I don’t know—Best way I can explain it is, he’s got his whole life to live—our whole life to live, in a way, his and mine both—without having to live through my tragedy the way I did. And it’s almost as though I can live my life again through him—minus the disaster of losing Lizzie, that is. I know it’s weird, and I honestly have no explanation for the effect he’s having on me, but I don’t need an explanation. What I feel I feel, and it’s good—It’s more than good; it’s wonderful! For the first time in thirty years, all that awful sorrow in my heart is pretty nearly gone. Hey, I can even look at her picture in the drawer here and not be sad anymore. See?”

Ben opened the top right-hand drawer on his desk and stared down in, staring at that picture—THE picture—He stared at it for half a minute or so, then looked up at Eddie, and instead of soggy eyes and drooping lips, there was a gleam in those bright blue eyes and a wistful sort of smile across his face.

“See, pal? Can’t you tell? I’m just about cured.”

“So it worked out well then, Bennie. I was worried, you know? Until you met the boy I couldn’t be sure.”

“It worked out better than well, pal. Only thing now is, I can’t wait to see him again. I can’t wait until Friday—You’re not stopping in Asbury this time, are you—so you can get here earlier? Is his sister coming along again?”

“No, just him. She’s seen enough of the ocean, I guess. Too bad he doesn’t live a little closer, though. Six hours flight time on the Gulfstream makes things a little slow. Hey, you know I offered him more money to take off from work and stick around a little longer, but he wouldn’t bite.”

“Yeah, I know. I tried that too. The kid’s not as motivated by money as most folks are—which is a virtue of sorts, I suppose. But anyway, whatever time I have with him is therapeutic—Here, see?” Ben looked down into the drawer again, but this time there was a hint of sadness in the smile he wore when he looked up again, and muttered: “But she was a gorgeous thing, wasn’t she, Eddie? Wasn’t she an amazingly gorgeous thing?”

“Uh, sure, Benny. Sure.”

Benny stared up at Eddie. Hard. He stared for a minute unblinking, then suddenly asked:

“What?”

“Huh? I didn’t say anything, did I?”

“I know you didn’t say anything, Eddie. It’s that look on your face I’m asking about. I know your looks well enough to ask you what the hell a look like that means?”

Ben was picking his brain again, which was maddening—Maddening to the point of being excruciating, maddening to the point of making you want to get up, get out, and run a hundred miles away. Just like that Tommie kid, just like Ben himself, when he’d picked the brains of Eddie and Charlotte and practically everybody he knew a thousand times and more these past forty-something years that the two of them had been best-of-friends. Ben and Tommie, Tommie and Ben, one and the same: Try to think a thought and keep it from them? Forget it! Ah, but this thought: This wasn’t something Ben should see right now. Not now, maybe not ever. Only time would tell; he’d have to wait and see. But just at present:

“W-what look on my face, uh, B-Bennie? C-come on! What the hell are you t-talking about?”

“What am I talking about? I’m talking about the fact that my question got you flustered, that’s what I’m talking about Hey, come on, Ed, there’s something you’re not telling me; no point denying it. You know what, pal? It’s lucky as hell you stuck to craps in your gambling days. If you were a poker player, you would have lost your goddamn shirt. You’re too damn easy to read, Eddie; you’re an open book with the main parts highlighted in fluorescent magic marker. And another thing, Ed, a good thing: You’ve never lied to me—ever. I don’t think you’re capable of it. It’s easy to read people who aren’t habitual liars. As for the people who are, I avoid them like the plague.”

“No, I haven’t ever lied to you, Bennie. You’re right about that.”

“But you haven’t always told me the whole truth either, have you?”

“Only if the whole truth wouldn’t have been to your benefit. That would have been the only time.”

“Like now, eh?”

“Why do you say ‘like now’?”

“You should see your face when you ask me that. Let me get you a mirror.”

“Come on, Bennie! Whaddya want from me, huh? Whaddya want me to tell you?”

“I want you to tell me what you’re holding back. And if you don’t start talking pretty quick, I’m going to go ahead and guess. Truthfully, Ed old pal, it isn’t all that hard to guess once I get my antennas tuned up.”

“So guess. Go ahead and guess. I can’t stop you from guessing, can I?”

Ben stared into his eyes intently, those bright blue eyes of Ben’s boring right straight through into his brain. Eddie met them for a while—ten seconds or so—then he had to turn away. Oh boy! He was in a fix, alright. What was he hiding? Ben asked? Look at the other side of the picture in that drawer, and you’ll see it plain as day. What he was hiding was the flip side of the photograph, and the gorgeous Russian girl the FaceMate kids had matched her with. What he was hiding was a seismic shock to some guy who had an iffy heart, if he had an iffy heart. Yep. Ben had handled the boy all right, he’d been fine with that, he’d been great with it, actually—But the girl! Nope, no way. Ben might never be ready to see a picture of that fucking girl!

And so for the first time in their life-long relationship, Eddie told his closest friend a lie. A flat-out lie. He told Ben:

“You know, Ben, you can stare at me forever, and you’re not gonna get me to tell you something when there’s nothing at all to tell. If I seem funny to you, maybe it’s because I’m worried about your health—Did you ever consider that? Maybe that kid’s got me spooked as much as Carole and Cindy are spooked. And everybody else who knows you the way we do; don’t you think that they’re spooked too? If you can’t see that inside my head, maybe you’re losing your touch. Yeah, that’s it: you’re getting old and losing your psychic touch. You don’t read minds the way you used to, Benny. Get your fucking antenna fixed!

Maybe that worked, maybe it didn’t, but Ben lowered his eyes and, with them, he lowered the intensity of his inquiry of gaze. Eddie was off the hook for now, though for how long the hook would be put in abeyance, he didn’t have a clue.