Lawrence Elgin Coffey
When it all comes down, it all comes down.
I’m a father again. That’s what I have to keep telling myself. There I am, in the hospital this morning, holding the little bundle in my hands. A fucking miracle. Dubin has already sewed Georgie up and left, and Georgie is out like a light, but I’m holding my baby daughter, little Miss 7 lbs. 4 oz., and the tears are running down my cheeks.
Look, the whole thing’s been a little hairy. Everybody was totally convinced Georgie was going to drop the baby ahead of time. Then suddenly she’s more than a week overdue, and trying to wait it out but no sign of labor, and then Dr. Dubin starts talking C-section. This was last Friday. The next thing I know, it’s today, Monday morning, early, and I’m driving her in to the hospital.
Dubin said on Friday that the only alternative was induced labor, with a real possibility we’d end up with a C-section anyway, but in extremis. “Let’s do it now,” he recommended. “There’s nothing to be gained by waiting. I’ve got a slot open Monday morning. That way we’ll get you out before Christmas. Nobody wants to be stuck in a hospital over Christmas.”
“Including doctors?” I said.
He laughed at that, but Christmas aside, I know what it’s all about. It’s the malpractice insurance. They don’t take chances anymore. The slightest complication and it’s C-section time, and Dubin had a slot open, and he doesn’t want to be stuck over Christmas either.
“I don’t really care,” Georgie said bravely. “I’ve already had the so-called birth experience anyway, and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
Jesus, I thought, that’s major surgery and, as experienced as they are at it, it’s … well, it’s still major surgery.
“I just want it over,” Georgie said.
But the spinal doesn’t take with her. She’s sitting on a hospital table, naked except for one of those half-smocks, and these two mechanics are poking and probing at her back. She’s shivering like a leaf. It hurts, she says, plus they’ve taken all her jewelry away, even her wedding band. But the spinal doesn’t take, they end up giving her full anesthesia anyway, and she’s crying because it means she’ll miss the birth altogether. That’s how come I’m the first of our family to meet our daughter, Miss 7 lbs. 4 oz., with a hospital identification bracelet on her tiny wrist. She’s fine, they tell me. Then they take the bundle away. They tell me Georgie’s fine too but that she won’t really be coming out of it for another hour and a half.
I call downtown. According to Annabelle Morgan, my deal is ready—finally, the bastards—and I can pick it up any time. It takes all my powers of persuasion to get her to messenger the papers to the hospital. I meet the messenger at the information desk, and I’m back upstairs by the time Georgie comes out of the anesthesia.
That’s where I am now, in a state of shock.
Georgie looks like hell, her skin all gray, but she’s trying to smile.
“It’s a little girl, honey,” I tell her, bending over her. “We’ve got ourselves a baby daughter.”
“I know,” she answers faintly.
“How do you know that?” She made such a big deal, during all the ultrasounds, of not wanting to know.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, trying to smile some more. “I’ve always known. Inside. I know her name too.”
“What’s her name?” I say, but even as I say it, her eyes are closed, she’s dropped off.
Her parents show up, but I’m in no shape to talk to anybody. The room is crammed with flowers, including—you want irony?—an arrangement from good old Shaw Cross. Georgie wakes up again. They want to give her Demerol. She doesn’t want Demerol, she wants her baby.
Somebody—her mother?—says to me, “Isn’t she a gorgeous baby?”
“Yeah,” I mumble. “Awfully proud too.”
I guess I am, or would be if I wasn’t in such a daze.
I’ve already read my deal.
Read it? I already know it by heart, the cocksuckers!
The operative clause anyway.
The bastards have clobbered me. They strung me out for two months—two whole months!—and now, at the end of the day, they’ve bitten me off at the knees!
For Christ’s sake, I’m out of business before I even get started!
I can’t leave the hospital, though. How can I leave?
I have to outwait everybody.
Jesus.
Finally they’re gone. I lean over Georgie, her hair dark against the pillows.
“Her name is Zoe,” she says softly, looking up at me.
I almost ask, Whose name is Zoe?
“Zoe,” she repeats. “Zoe Coffey. Your new daughter. Zoe Elizabeth Coffey. What’s wrong? Don’t you like it?”
“No, fine. It’s a fine name. Zoe Coffey. It even rhymes.”
“I love it,” she says.
“Look, honey, it’s been a horrendous day. They’ve put you through the mill. You need to get some rest now. I guess I’m a little tired too, and I still have to go home, check on Harriet and the kid.”
“Do you think I should take the Demerol? I’m hurting awfully.”
“Of course you should.” I bend over, kiss her. “You do whatever you want to do. And I’ll be back, first thing in the morning.”
I read it to Penzil over the phone, the minute I get home. It—the operative clause in the agreement—says:
Coffey will be free to develop his own accounts (“The New Accounts”), which will henceforth be considered his in exclusivity, provided, however, that Coffey agrees not to trespass on any of the Company’s pre-existing accounts or relationships.
“Is that new language,” Penzil asks after I’ve repeated it, “or a new concept?”
“New? It’s out of fucking left field! Totally!”
“What exactly does it mean to you?”
“What do you mean, what does it mean? It means what it says: ‘Coffey agrees not to trespass on any of the Company’s pre-existing accounts or relationships.’ For Christ’s sake, the stuff I sell? Big Bears? It’s pretty sophisticated, Joe, high-ticket. It’s not for your average pigeon. Do you know how many customers there are, worldwide? Shit, if I can’t ‘trespass on pre-existing accounts,’ which means anybody The Cross did business with before, which means anybody I did business with before, then who the fuck am I supposed to sell to? Georgie’s cousin Millie in Houston?”
“Now calm down, Bear. Are you telling me you had no inkling this was coming?”
“Joe! They’ve been diddling me for two whole months, you know that! It’s been like pulling teeth, getting the paperwork out of them, and there was this detail to negotiate, that to decide, and Gamble was away, or Gamble’s been too tied up, or—”
“But this is substantive, Bear. This isn’t just a detail.”
“No shit, Sherlock! Joe, I had everybody lined up, all my old customers! They knew that. They knew I was talking to them right along! What they’re doing now is putting me out of business!”
Even as I say it, I hear Holbrook in my ears. Expand your customer base. He’s been saying it for weeks, that I can’t rely solely on my Shaw Cross contacts. And God knows I’ve been trying.
“Maybe it’s just a negotiating tactic,” Penzil is saying.
“Negotiating tactic?”
“Maybe somebody—Gamble, I don’t know—woke up at the last minute and realized they were giving you the store for no good reason. Maybe somebody said, ‘Why the hell are we paying Coffey a full commission on house accounts? It’s going to cost us a fortune.’ Maybe they figured the only way they could back off was to hit you with a worst case and negotiate their way out of it when you blew your cork. Maybe—”
But it’s not a negotiating tactic. Suddenly I get it, the whole picture. They’ve just dropped the other shoe.
For the last week or so, my phone has gone progressively dead. Mulcahy, first. No, Mr. Mulcahy isn’t in the office, he’s away on vacation. Where? On some island in the Caribbean. But can’t I call him there? I’m sorry, Mr. Coffey, the phone service down there is practically nonexistent. But Mr. Mulcahy will be calling in once a day, do I want to leave a message?
I leave a message. He doesn’t call. Maybe I’d have thought it unusual—time was Gerry Mulcahy wouldn’t go to the john without calling me first—and left it at that, but then it happened again. This one out sick, that one also on vacation.
In early December?
Of course I noticed it! But I didn’t have time to focus. Once Georgie’s due date arrived, and the baby still hadn’t dropped, she hit this deep depression. She’d been flat on her back mostly—Dubin’s orders—and now, I could tell, she was scared shitless. I’d hear her calling for Harriet, and when I went upstairs to see how she was doing, Harriet would be leaning over her, over the bed, and she—Georgie—would say something like, “I’m hanging in there, Larry,” in her small voice, “I’ll be okay,” and I couldn’t tell her anything about what was going on. I couldn’t concentrate. I just couldn’t focus!
And now this! This isn’t the beginning of a negotiation. This is the end of one!
Penzil is saying something about legal remedies. Penzil thinks that, provided everything I say is true and documented, I have the basis of legal action, with damages. Penzil is asking me about my paper trail.
“I don’t give a flying fuck about my paper trail!” I yell at him. “I want Gamble by the short hairs!”
“Now calm down, Bear.” That’s what he keeps saying, over and over, that I should calm down. Keep cool. Nothing rash. It’s late, I should sleep on it. We’ll talk about it in the morning. Am I taking the 7:12? He’ll meet me on the platform. Above all, I should calm down.
I calm down enough to know that, for once, I don’t want Joe talking me out of anything.
Even back in November, well before my phone went dead, I may have smelled a rat. This was when the Great White had Schwartzenberg running interference for him, and I had a draft of an agreement (without the no-trespassing clause), but every time I tried to pin Schwartzenberg down, I got stuff like, “You know him as well as I do, Larry. He’s got to be hands-on,” or, “Leon says just go ahead and set it up, we’ll pick up on the details later.”
So that’s what I did. I set it up. For two fucking months.
But I also stirred up the ashes a little.
The Aquarium had been damn near decimated on Bloody Wednesday. The Great White cut a wide swath through the ranks generally, but Big Bear’s troops tasted the sword almost to a man. It made no sense. Even Howie MacFarlane, for Christ’s sake. If anyone didn’t deserve it, it was MacFarlane. Do you know what the poor bastard’s doing now? He’s driving a taxi, while his résumé sits in a pile on a hundred or so desks. I’ve told him, “I hope to hell you don’t find anything. Just sit tight till I get my act together.”
Everybody I talked to, when I was still going in, mornings, said, “Yeah, it’s tough, but you know the score, Bear. It’s the times. We’re all bleeding.” Meanwhile, I was told to give over my accounts temporarily to some four-eyed young nerd who’d been parachuted in off the trading desk, and I said to my customers, who thought The Cross was playing some kind of joke on them, “Just hold on to your money, guys, the Bear’ll be up and running come January.”
After a while, though, I stopped going in. It was too much of a downer. One day a hero, the next a bum, because not only did the survivors treat me like some kind of leper, so did people I ran into who’d been put out on the street.
“It stands to reason, Bear,” MacFarlane explained. “In their eyes, you came out smelling like a rose. For all they know, you sold them down the river.”
“But that’s a crock!” I protested.
“You and I may know that, but …”
“Do you? Do you know that?”
“Yeah,” he said, but with about as much conviction as a caterpillar trying to cross Fifth Avenue in rush hour.
Still, it was MacFarlane I turned to in mid-November.
“Come on, babe, I need your help,” I told him on the horn. “You’re still pretty plugged in at The Cross, aren’t you? I want to find out what the fuck’s going on.” I alluded to the runaround I’d been getting from Schwartzenberg, but beyond that, the sentiment on the Street was that The Cross had overreacted on Bloody Wednesday and no one knew why, not even Holbrook. Sure, as Holbrook pointed out, in a privately held company only a handful of people know the real numbers, but even in a quiet market, which was the understatement of the year, was there any way The Cross could actually be losing money? Only making less, maybe. And even then …?
“You’re right about one thing, Bear,” MacFarlane reported back—this was late in the month. “Something definitely is going down, only nobody at my level knows what. As far as what you said, it’s true, the Great White’s been out of the office a lot, and when he’s there, he’s mostly closeted with a handful of people.” He named them. All the inner circle, plus Harvey Cross, who was the last of the Shaws and Crosses and something of a joke inside the company. “Also,” MacFarlane went on, “people I talked to say he’s really been chewing ass. Even more than usual. Up one side and down the other. They say it’s Armageddon time, like he’s trying to milk every last nickel from the operation before the roof caves in.”
“But why?”
“Who knows? Do you suppose it could it be some kind of investigation?”
“What kind of investigation?”
“Beats me. Who would it be? The IRS? SEC?”
“Did anybody say that?”
“No. But the people I talked to said Gamble’s become a bug on documentation. Everything’s changed. The way it is now, they say they’re up to their armpits in paperwork.”
I wondered, at the time, if MacFarlane was playing cat-and-mouse with me but decided he was just a smart kid guessing, the way I used to guess when I was in the Aquarium. I’d always been careful to protect him from certain things I either knew or suspected. If he was guessing right, I thought, maybe it explained a lot of things. But not, I also thought, why they were jerking me around. If they were jerking me around?
And then my phone went dead, early December.
And now Penzil’s talking about paper trails and telling me to keep calm. Sleep on it.
Yeah, Runt, and if pigs had wings …
I’m calm enough to get myself up in time to catch the 6:48, where I don’t know a soul. I call Georgie from the World Trade, tell her I’ll be late getting to the hospital. Something’s come up and I have to stop by the office first. Then I ride up to the thirty-ninth floor. I’m determined to beat Gamble to his desk.
I even beat Annabelle Morgan. I walk into the Great White’s inner lair, shut the door behind me, sit in his fucking chair. I’m still sitting there, a little after eight, when he walks in.
Black briefcase in hand. Elegant son of a bitch, except for the white socks. Why the white socks, everybody wants to know? The Aquarium wits have always had a field day with the white socks, but as far as I know, nobody’s ever dared ask him, at least and lived to tell about it.
He stops cold when he sees me there. His mouth goes open a little and his shaggy eyebrows up. Then down. It just isn’t something you do at The Cross: occupy the Great White’s throne.
“Well, Larry,” he says, noncommittally, “what are you doing here this early? What’s up?”
“Don’t let me get in your way, Leon.” I stand. “Come on. Sit down.”
I have the agreement out on his otherwise polished desk top. It’s open to the relevant paragraph.
“Sit down, Leon,” I repeat, ushering him. I stand next to him, pointing at the agreement. “Have you read this?”
“What’s this? Oh yeah, our deal with you. Of course I’ve read it.”
I didn’t notice Annabelle Morgan come in behind him, but here she is, tall and chic and surprised as hell to see me.
“Hi, Larry,” she says. “How—”
“No calls for the minute, Annabelle,” the Great White interrupts. “Just leave the door open, thank you. Now Larry, I—”
“Have you read this part?” I say, pointing again. “‘Coffey agrees not to trespass on any of the Company’s pre-existing accounts or relationships’?”
It can’t be news to him. He reads it anyway, and then I can see the wheels turning, like he’s choosing a reaction off some inner menu. He picks “Grunt” first, a short sound. Then his head comes up, his hand combing the mane of white hair, and he studies me. The beginnings of a smile at the corners of his mouth. Then, no smile.
“You know, Larry,” he says, “you think you run the most efficient organization in the world, bar none, and then something happens and you realize it’s a crock. I told Vic, ‘Coffey’s going to shit a brick when he sees this, you’d better talk to him first.’ Hard to believe, but I take it from the expression on your face that he didn’t? That he just gave it to you, without explanation? Is that correct?”
“That’s correct.”
Vic is none other than Victor Schwartzenberg, Chief House Counsel of The Cross.
The Great White is shaking his head.
“What a fucking comedy of errors,” he says, disgusted. Then he booms out: “Annabelle?” Then thinks better of it, tells her to forget it when she appears in the doorway. And back to me: “You want to know what really happened, Bear? I didn’t read this myself until last week. Of course, I spotted the omission right away. I said to Vic, ‘For Christ’s sake, the way you’ve drafted this thing, you’re giving away the store. We can close the fucking doors, Coffey’s going to own us.’ Obviously, that was never our intention, much as we want the deal with you. It was just bad drafting. I told Vic to talk to you about it, but come on, Bear, admit it, we go back too far together. You didn’t really expect us to let you cherry-pick our customer list, did you?”
I stare down at him for a minute. I said: “Dynamite try, Leon.”
His eyebrows go up again.
“What do you mean by that?” he asked.
“I mean that two months ago almost to the day, you made me an offer. You, not Schwartzenberg. You were putting me in business for myself, you said, your Number-One Seller. The next day, I started talking to these same customers you’re now telling me are off-limits.” I name names, ticking them off on my fingers. “I’ve been talking to them ever since, Leon, and you know it. You’ve known it all along. Some of them are your best customers. You talk to them all the time. You could have stopped me any time you wanted to.”
I’ve just called him a liar, pretty much, and I expect him to react in kind. He doesn’t, though.
“You’ve got it wrong, Larry,” he says evenly. And nothing more.
“You knew it all along,” I repeat. “For Christ’s sake, you’ve been stringing me for two whole months, using Schwartzenberg as your front man. First it was this, then it was that. He had to talk to you, you weren’t here, you were out sick, you were in Timbuktu. I’ve been busting down the fucking doors to get the final deal out of you. So finally, yesterday, I got it. Right up the ass. And let me tell you, Leon, this is no oversight. What kind of jerk do you take me for? You—”
“Let’s stop wasting our time,” he interrupts. “There’s only one way we’re going to resolve this.” He half-stands. “Annabelle!” he shouts at the open door. “Get me Schwartzenberg. I don’t care where he is, what he’s doing, I want him in Here.”
We wait a minute or so. He starts pulling papers out of his briefcase, a signal, I suppose, that I’m in his way, but I don’t budge. Then Annabelle Morgan sticks her head in the door. Surprise, surprise: no Schwartzenberg. As far as anyone knows, he’s en route to the office.
“Then get him on his car phone,” the Great White tells her.
“I don’t think he drives. He takes the train.”
“Son of a bitch.” Then, to me, “Well, if you want to stick around, Larry, we’ll talk when he gets here. There’s no point going any further without him.”
“I can’t stick around,” I say. “I just—”
“Oh, that’s right, I almost forgot!” Brightening, big smile, standing. “Congratulations, Bear! It’s a girl, isn’t it? Everybody okay?”
He holds out his hand. I don’t take it.
“Let me ask you something,” I say. “Who told them to stop talking to me?”
“Who told who to stop talking to you?”
I list the names for him. “For the last two weeks, I haven’t been able to get through to a single one of them. They won’t take my calls, they’re gone, they’re in Timbuktu, too. It’s no coincidence, Leon. It’s a fucking stone wall.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.
“Oh, come on, this is Larry Coffey you’re talking to, remember me? The Big Bear? Somebody told them to stop talking to me, and don’t tell me it was Schwartzenberg, for Christ’s sake, I wasn’t born yesterday. It was you, Leon. You’re the only one they’d have taken it from.”
For just a second, I’ve got him. I can see his lips working, spreading his cheeks, the jaw muscles clench. It’s the big boil inside, the Great White on a rampage, and I’m supposed to back off and crawl under my rock.
But I don’t back off, and once again, I can see the wheels turning as he controls himself.
“Let me talk to you as a friend for a minute,” he says. “We all get a little paranoid sometimes, say things we don’t mean. You’re going through a rough time, Bear, don’t think I don’t understand it. Big changes in your life, and your wife just had a baby, that’s enough to drive any man crazy. I’ll tell you what I’m willing to do. If you can’t hang around today, let me talk to Vic, see if there isn’t something we can do to ease the pain. We’ll work something out. You call him whenever you can. I’ll tell him he’s got to see you right away.”
“If that clause stands the way it’s written,” I say, pointing at the agreement, “then there’s nothing to work out. Tell me straight, Leon. Does it stand?”
“Of course it stands. It has to.”
Just like that. I guess it’s his cool that unnerves me. I feel as though somehow I’ve blown the situation. Or maybe, though it’s taken me two months to wise up, it’s that he’s fucking me, and there’s not a goddamned thing I can do about it.
“Tell me one thing, Leon. Why didn’t you just fire me in October? Wouldn’t it have been easier? Or were you just trying to save another severance package?”
“I told you at the time. You’re far too valuable to this company.”
“Only now you’re putting me out of business?”
“I think you’re grossly underestimating your own capabilities.”
“Thanks, Leon,” I say bitterly. “So what are my choices? Just tell me what my choices are.”
“Choices? The sensible one I already gave you: Wait for Vic. A point here, a point there, it could make a big difference to you in the long run. But if you want to, you can always sign it the way it is, right now. I’ll sign it too, and we can get on with it.”
He says it offhandedly, as though he really doesn’t give a shit one way or the other.
“But the clause stands?”
“The clause has got to stand.”
“What I feel like doing,” I say, “is wiping your ass with it.”
This time he’s quick to react. Eyes small, jaws tight. Voice full of Great White menace.
“That’s enough now. You’re way out of line, Larry. You do what you want to do. You can also walk out the door, that’s your decision. But this conversation is over.”
He’s standing too. A little shorter than me but heavier. Also a good twenty years older.
“It’s not over, Leon,” I say, unblinking. “Let me tell you something. You can send me down the tubes if you want to, but I’m taking you with me. You, The Cross, the whole goddamn company. Let’s not fuck around with each other anymore. I can do it too. I know enough, where the bodies are buried, and you know I know it.”
He doesn’t blink either.
“That sounds like a threat to me,” he says.
“That’s exactly what it is.”
“Do you want to repeat that in front of a witness?”
“I’d be glad to.” Christ Almighty, does he think I’m bluffing?
“Are you sure? Do you really want to start something you could regret for the rest of your life?”
The son of a bitch is staring me down. I feel myself break out in little sweaty prickles all over.
“Annabelle?” he calls out, his eyes not leaving mine. “Please come in here a minute.” Then, when she does, “Shut the door behind you, please.”
She shuts the door. The three of us are standing, in the Great White’s office, Annabelle Morgan looking questioningly at her boss.
“Mr. Coffey has just said something to me that I’d like him to repeat. All you have to do is listen.” And to me: “Go ahead, Larry.”
It’s Rubicon time. All of a sudden I’ve the dryness in my throat. God Almighty. Thirteen years down the tubes and maybe a whole lot more. My whole fucking career. Well, go ahead, Julius, cross the fucker.
I repeat it.
Into the downtown canyons, and all the way to the hospital, I’m shaking like a wino. Two parts anger, one part fear, mix and stir well.
Georgie is in the midst of breast-feeding the baby. She always said she’d never do it, and she didn’t with Justie. Not for her, she always said. But in the middle of the night, last night, and after all she’s gone through having this baby, she decided she had to try it. You never know, Zoe could be our last. Except now she’s anxious over whether Zoe’s getting enough milk. Do I think she’s latching properly? Also she—Georgie—slept badly. And hurts like a son of a bitch. This much I can tell later when I help her to the john. Something about her wound being held together with staples—can I imagine?—right across her belly. Metal staples. It’s positively medieval.
“But Larry, why are you so distracted? So jumpy? You’ve hardly sat still since the minute you got here.”
“Jumpy?” I say. “I wasn’t aware of it. I guess I hate to see you hurting like this.”
“I know,” with a tired smile, “but look what we’ve got in exchange.”
“Yeah. Little Zoe.”
“Zoe Elizabeth Coffey. I haven’t told anybody the name yet.”
“How come?”
“I want us to live with it first, make sure we like it. Well? What’s wrong? Don’t you like it?”
“Sure, it’s fine. It’s a fine name.”
“But do you love it?… Larry, can’t you focus for a minute? You seem a million miles away! We both ought to love it. We’re all going to have to live with it a long time.”
Christ, what am I supposed to say? That, much as I love my new daughter, I don’t know how I’m going to pay for the roof over her head, come the new year, so what difference does it make if her name is Zoe or Christabelle or Marie Antoinette?
“I love it,” I say. “Zoe Elizabeth Coffey.”
“Well, let’s live with it another couple of days, till we’re sure. I want us to be sure.”
I stay until I’m too pent up to stay any longer. Then I kiss both of them good-bye, saying I’ll be back later, and head over to the club. They haven’t even opened the bar yet for lunch, but I sit there and, taking a deep breath, start making my calls. No Penzil, no Holbrook, nobody who’s going to tell me not to do anything rash. Instead I start with MacFarlane, knowing I won’t get him, but I leave a message on his machine—I want his ear to the ground again—and then I get onto some other people I know, who were close to the Drexel situation. The way I put it is that a customer of mine—no names, but I owe him—has come to me for advice. For reasons of his own, he’s ready to blow the whistle on one of our competitors, but he’s scared, understandably, about what could happen to him along the way. So who can he talk to discreetly in the regulatory agencies? I need a name, somebody who’d be willing to protect him, at least at the very beginning.
Sign of the times. To a man, their first reaction is that I have to talk him out of it. I say I’ve already been that route and failed. My guy’s mad as a hornet, there’s no way I can stop him. I don’t know all of what he has—I don’t want to know—but I’m pretty sure he’s going to spill it no matter what I say, and the best I can do, under the circumstances, is make sure he doesn’t spill it to the Journal or the New York Times.
It’s midafternoon by the time I get what I want. Some can’t help, or won’t, but finally I come up with a name—the same name—from two different sources. A Department of Justice lawyer called Joe Richter, who’s attached to the U.S. Attorney’s office.
By then I’ve had a few rounds at the bar. The lunch crowd has long since vanished. I’m wondering if this Richter might already be looking at The Cross. I’m wondering if there was anything in what MacFarlane said, back in November.
Hey, Joe Richter, it’s Big Bear on the horn, how’d you like a nice money-laundering scandal laid right in your lap?
Hey, says the Great White, baring his white fangs, do you really want to start something you’ll regret for the rest of your life?
Rubicon city.
I make the call.
I can’t tell whether he knows who I am or not. I suggest an exploratory meeting, strictly off the record.
Done. For tomorrow. In an uptown watering hole I know, not that far from Georgie’s hospital.
When I hang up, though, I realize I’m shaky again, inside, and it’s not from booze. The fucking enormity of it, Jesus Christ, have I gone stark raving? Don’t do something you’ll regret for the rest of your life.
But the son of a bitch gored me!
There’s not a soul in the world I can tell right now. That’s getting to me already. Even before I’ve met with Richter, I’m the loneliest guy in town.
Talk about things you’ll regret. I call Georgie. I’m at the club, I say, but something’s come up. Mulcahy’s in town (sotto voce), and I’m sorry as hell about it but there’s no way I’m going to make it back to the hospital.
“Are you all right?” she wants to know in her small voice.
“I’m fine,” I lie.
I can hear people noises in the background. She’s telling me who’s there—she says she doesn’t know where to put all the flowers—and I’m trying to tell myself that’s why I’m not going back to the hospital, because I can’t face any of them right now.
Georgie says she misses me. So, she says, does my daughter. Well, I say, I’ll call when I get home if it’s not too late. Else I’ll be there in the morning, first thing.
And there goes another lie.
Easy, honey, once you get the hang of it.
It gets worse.
Sweet Jesus.
I’m home after dark. Justie has finished dinner and Harriet has him in the tub. There are phone messages from any number of people, but they can wait, and so can I, sipping Scotch in the den, until she brings him down.
We talk awhile. Last night, by the time I got home, they were both asleep. That is, all the lights were out on the third floor.
I tell Justie about his baby sister. The kid yawns. Harriet’s done wonders with him, according to Georgie, but he still looks awfully puny to me.
Georgie’s genes, I guess.
She doesn’t stop looking at you. She has this way of looking you over, up and down, as though her eyes are coming right in through your pants. It started when she moved in—the eye contact, the offhand remarks, the accidental brushes and touches—only one time, the night Georgie stayed over at her folks, it wasn’t accidental.
She said … well, she said a lot of things that night. I did too. We were in the den, and she was perched on my desk, legs dangling, and she kept telling me she shouldn’t be there, that it was awful, laughing her soft, throaty laugh meanwhile, until I wanted her so badly I could taste it. We kissed finally, one of those long, exploratory, wraparound jobs, and I couldn’t believe it, she was so young, fresh. Smelled like a meadow in summer.
She pushed me off. She tried to pass it off as a great misunderstanding, and when that didn’t work, she pleaded with me to lay off her, and when that didn’t work, she started to cry, even though—and this I will swear to, Georgie, on a stack of Bibles—she’d started it.
She said she couldn’t do it to you, not as long as you were pregnant.
Whatever that meant.
Hey, I may be no Boy Scout but I’m not exactly a rapist, either.
Ever since then, though, it’s been sheer torture, just having her under the same roof. Maybe I should have said something to you—shit, I know I should have, but like what? “Honey, we’ve got to get rid of Harriet?”—but you were upstairs in bed, and I didn’t, and sometimes just the sight of her, like tonight, like when her eyes are working me over and she’s brushing her hair back, laughing a little, asking me how it feels to be a daddy again, running her fingers slowly along one temple to behind the ear …
If I ever needed R&R, it’s tonight. And you’re not pregnant anymore.
Good God Almighty.
She’s taken him upstairs, his head nodding off in her arms, and I’m waiting for her to come back down.
She doesn’t.
I’m standing the whole time in my doorway. Glass in hand. Sometimes I’m aware that I’m holding my breath, sometimes that I’m taking these deep draughts. I can hear my own pulse pounding.
Finally, I go up after her.
The lights are all out on the third floor.
I mean, what the hell are you supposed to do when the pressure boils over?
I guess some guys beat the daylights out of their wives and kids. Some tie one on. Some get laid.
Or all three.
Upstairs, in the darkness.
“For God’s sake, Larry!” she hisses at me through her closed door. “Not with him in the next room!”
“Then come downstairs with me,” I tell her.
We spar back and forth through the closed door. She’s not saying no either, but there’s Justie, and I tell her Justie would sleep through an earthquake, but if it’s Justie she’s worried about, there’s the whole house, pick a room, the whole outdoors, even in December, I promise her, she won’t be cold.
I hear her laugh at that. What does she want from me? I can taste her!
Then I try the door. She’s locked it. Goddamn, in my house people don’t lock the doors!
I rear back. I ram the fucker in.
Pitch dark.
“You’re crazy, Larry! Be reasonable, your wife just had a baby! Cut it out now! I won’t, not this way! For God’s sake! Stop it, for God’s sake!”
Something like that. Because I don’t give a damn, I’m going to have her this time whether she wants it or not. I’m heaving and banging into stuff with her in the dark, struggling and dripping sweat, the two of us.
Then, loud and clear: “Get the hell out of here!”
Sweet Jesus Christ.
I must have let go of her, because somehow, suddenly, she’s switched on a light, and now, in the light, she’s all cowering, and I see her face screwed up, and her body’s shaking even before a sound comes out. She’s got on one of those knee-length T-shirts, white with a big yellow Tweety Bird on it.
She looks wild, but not sexy wild. Now she’s laughing her head off, but it’s one of those mean, rictus-y laughs, the not-funny kind. In between she’s babbling stuff I don’t get, except that, poor bastard, I don’t have a clue, and somehow, tonight, that seems to be the laugh riot of the century.
Well, I guess I don’t—don’t have a clue—at least as far as this little prick teaser’s concerned. But she’s shut my systems down, and when she tells me to get out again, I get.
I’ll tell you, honey, she may be great with Justie, but underneath she’s one screwed-up piece of work.
Okay, so it’s not my finest hour. Look, Georgie, I’m sorry as hell, that’s all I want to say to you. That, and that, at the end of the day, I still love you.
Justie slept through the whole damn thing.