“That’s not weird. That’s just Elise trying to show she’s an intellectual. Trust me. She wants to be superior to everyone. At least me and you, anyway. She’d rather say she was reading than admit she was doing something as commonplace as buying a necklace.” He felt that familiar aggravation well up inside him when he thought about his family, like his insides were microwave popcorn bursting through the bag. Of course his girlfriend couldn’t see the reason Elise had fibbed about her morning. She suspected something sinister or deceptive, when it was plain old haughtiness.
“If you say so. I didn’t press her on what she was reading or anything,” Natasha conceded. “I think I’m going to hit the gym. What are your plans for the rest of the day?”
“I called the kids’ room and Darius picked up. He and I are going to try the rock wall together. I’m swinging by his cabin in a few minutes to pick him up.”
“All right. I’ll see you at dinner later. I can’t wait for this boat to arrive in Sint Maarten tomorrow. Feeling claustrophobic,” she said, slipping out of her blouse and into a sports bra.
“I wouldn’t mention that around my family,” Freddy cautioned. “I’m pretty certain our suite could hold all of their cabins combined.”
Natasha leaned down and kissed him and he found himself peeking down the valley of her sports bra.
“Stop worrying so much about what I will and won’t say. That goes for you too.” She patted his cheek before stripping out of her jeans and into leggings with tantalizing mesh panels.
He nodded, knowing she was right but well aware it would be nearly impossible for him to heed her advice.
“Speaking of the fearsome Feldmans, do you think they actually believe that our intercom is broken?” he asked, knowing from the way Natasha looked up at him from her shoelaces that she was getting annoyed.
“It is broken,” she said, popping in her earbuds. He heard the blare of the pop music she exercised to seeping out through the thin space between her lobe and the headphones.
“One of them anyway,” Freddy said louder.
“Well, they don’t have to know we were in the shower when the announcement came on, Freddy. That speaker is broken. The technician said so. You want to have your mom and sister come test it out?” She didn’t wait for an answer, spryly standing up and heading out the door without so much as a wave.
* * *
—
Freddy felt light on his feet as he made his way down the fourteen flights of stairs to the floor where Darius’s cabin was located. Taking the elevators was proving a superhuman feat. Even with two elevator banks on board with eight lifts apiece, it was still at least a five-minute wait for one, and all too often when the doors slid open there wasn’t space for even a stick figure to squeeze in. He hated to think what the situation would be by the end of the week, after the free food practically thrown at them stretched them into caricature versions of themselves, swollen and bloated in all the wrong places.
Spending time with his nephew was finally something he was looking forward to on the cruise. He’d hoped for Rachel when he called, not because he would rather be with her than Darius, but because the two of them had some unsettled business to attend to. He had signed off on a letter from the court that said he’d oversee Rachel’s fifty hours of community service, and he had yet to check in on her progress. But Darius said he had no idea where his sister was and Freddy thought he detected a note of irritation in his voice.
“Let’s you and I do the rock wall, okay?” Freddy had asked spontaneously. “I can be at your room in about twenty minutes.”
“Sure,” Darius said almost immediately. He got the feeling Darius would love to try many of the cool features on the boat—the bumper cars, the surf pool, the paintball obstacle course—but felt lame going it alone.
Freddy walked briskly down the narrow hallway, noting how much closer together the doors were on this floor than on his. After a lengthy walk in the aft direction, he reached the kids’ room. Through the door Freddy heard muffled voices that quieted after he rapped on the door. He assumed it was his nephew flipping off the TV, but when the door swung open, he came face-to-face with his sister.
“Elise,” he said, hoping his voice didn’t convey disappointment. “What are you doing here? Are you going rock climbing with us?” His sister had been a great athlete once upon a time—cocaptain of their high school tennis team, if he remembered correctly—and he could imagine that she’d be rather nimble on the rock wall. Probably much more so than him, though they’d both be terrible compared to Darius, who had the simple fact of youth on his side, limbs that didn’t get arthritic in the rain, and a limber back that allowed him to go from sitting to standing without missing a beat.
“No, and neither is Darius,” she said sharply and Freddy wondered if she had any idea how much she sounded like their mother, so shrill and inflexible, determined to have things her way.
“Mom, I can work on it later,” Darius protested.
Freddy peered over Elise’s shoulder, since she was standing sentry in the doorway, and saw his nephew seated on the corner of a twin bed, a baseball cap pulled low over his face. Freddy couldn’t see his eyes, but it sounded like he’d either been or was about to start crying. He remembered a few of the occasions when his parents brought him to tears long after it was socially acceptable for a child to cry, how he’d overwork his throat muscles to keep the lump at bay and bite down on his bottom lip to stop it from quivering. Once was when Annette called him a lazy sack of you-know-what after his math teacher complained for the umpteenth time about him not turning in assignments. Another time it was because his father said he couldn’t go to the Allman Brothers concert with his friends because he had come home from the mall smelling like cigarette smoke.
Elise spun around to address Darius.
“You’ve been putting this essay off for the entire summer. There are seven essay topics to choose from on the common application. Surely you can come up with something.” She turned back to face Freddy. “I’m sorry to crush your plans to go rock climbing, but Darius is way behind on his work and needs to focus now.”
Darius gaped at him with a helpless expression that his mother did not see. It made Freddy pity him, but he was also just so grateful that he himself was no longer a child, puppeteered by a clueless parent.
“Maybe I could help?” Freddy asked. He was about to say that he’d taken several writing courses at the Aspen Institute through their Aspen Words program but stopped himself. In fact, the professor had singled out a creative writing piece he’d done, about a young woman who learns at age thirty that her parents are in the witness protection program, as an example of excellent plotting for the entire class. But he wasn’t quite ready to uncork his life in that way, to reveal something about himself that would unleash a flurry of questions from Elise.
“No,” Elise said, at the same time that Darius said, “Sure.” Their monosyllabic answers collided like a car crash.
“No, thank you,” Elise repeated and Darius shrugged his shoulders limply. “We’re going to hammer this out together until it’s time to go down for dinner. Tonight is the around-the-world buffet,” she added in a lighter tone, perhaps hoping that the opportunity to get corn arepas, chicken lo mein, and lamb vindaloo in one meal would make Darius any less put out about being crammed into his cabin with his mother to float essay ideas when the sun was shining brightly and there were at least fifty activities going on that were preferable to brainstorming.
Freddy looked past Elise again, wondering if he was perhaps missing another part of the room, a corner around which a generous living area revealed itself. But no, Darius and Rachel’s room really was that small. There wasn’t even a window out of which to gaze at the sprawling ocean that he and Natasha had been taking for granted. And with Rachel and Darius not caring to tidy up, the entire floor was littered with clothing and towels, so Freddy couldn�
��t even tell if it had the plush carpeting of his suite or, as he suspected, cheap parquet. No wonder his niece wasn’t hanging around. Freddy wondered if Elise’s room was equally tiny but couldn’t imagine asking to see it without sounding like a complete asshole.
“Okay, then I’ll catch you later, D,” Freddy said. “Elise,” he added with a solemn nod, knowing the formality made him sound like he was concluding a business meeting and not bidding adieu to the girl with whom he used to take bubble baths well into grade school until it got weird.
“By the way, what’d you do this morning? Before bingo.” He addressed his sister.
She seemed to flush a little before saying, “Oh, nothing. Relaxed. Went to the pool for a bit. Why? I mean, what’d you do?”
“Not much,” Freddy said, suddenly feeling that Natasha was onto something. “See you guys later.”
Freddy stepped back into the hallway and headed to the spa level to find Natasha. Huffing up the stairs to the sports club, he couldn’t stop thinking about his poor nephew, trapped in that minuscule box with his uptight mother who was intent on drawing words from her son’s mouth onto the computer screen, as if writing an essay was just a matter of transcription and force of sheer will. Freddy noticed his knees were suddenly weak. Watching Elise seem so disappointed by Darius felt like a fresh assault on his own childhood. Or maybe it was just that he was an out-of-shape old man who had stupidly rejected his girlfriend’s dogged requests to join her at the track at the Aspen rec center. Halfway to the spa, Freddy gave up on the stairs and headed toward the nearest bank of elevators.
He was standing quietly, mulling his sister’s attitude and his nephew’s look of desperation, when all of a sudden a group of teenage boys who looked like the stoners that operated the ski lifts on Ajax began to gaze in his direction. Freddy looked down at the floor, considering the range of possible reasons why any group of people stare: His fly was open; they had seen him with Natasha and were hoping for another glimpse of her; mistaken identity. The boys were whispering to each other, looking back at him, and then whispering again. He saw them all laughing and shoving this one particular kid until they pushed him forward so that he was a mere inch from Freddy’s face.
“Are you Freddy Feldman?” the boy asked while his friends all cackled like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.
“Yes,” he said tentatively. It was then he noticed the embroidered bong on the boy’s T-shirt.
“Dude, you’re a rock star. Can we, like, get high with you tomorrow? There is supposed to be some sick ganja on the islands. You can get a hookup right on the pier. You would know that, of course.”
“How do you know who I am?” Freddy asked, lowering his voice and gesturing with his hand for the boys to do the same.
A different kid stepped forward, with unruly dreads spilling out from a trucker hat.
“Dude, you’re on the cover of High Times. Don’t you know that? They said you have a fifty-million-dollar pot empire. How’d you do it, man?”
Freddy’s eyes widened. The article wasn’t supposed to come out for another week. And he’d never said a word about how much his business was worth. The reporter, who had looked no more than seventeen years old and barely took notes, had asked how he got his start in the business, what his favorite variety to smoke was, and to expound on the future of edibles. Freddy had opined on the environmental impact of the pot business and shared his views on legalization while the reporter gazed at him with admiration and awe. They’d never once broached the topic of how much money he had. Freddy wanted to pound his forehead with the palm of his hand for being so naive. Natasha had told him he should hire a publicist to help guide him through the interview and liaise with the reporter, but he’d scoffed, saying this wasn’t a Dateline exposé. At the end of the interview, he’d driven the kid to the train station, stopping off on the way for ice cream at the famous Paradise Bakery. Freddy had treated.
“I gotta go,” he stammered, taking a few steps away from the group. He needed to read this article, fast, in the privacy of his room. The Wi-Fi on board had been spotty, but Freddy would storm into the central command station to get a fast connection if necessary.
“You gotta get high with us, man,” another boy pleaded, but Freddy had already started flying down the hallway back toward the steps. “Weird guy,” he heard someone utter.
He practically ran the entire length of the boat to get to his suite, arriving in a full pant. The door was propped open with a housekeeping cart.
“Discúlpeme, por favor. Necesito privacidad ahora mismo. Lo siento mucho.” Freddy’s Spanish was fluent now from conversing with the workers who tended diligently to his plants. Ironic that the Spanish now flowed from his tongue like a native language when as a student he couldn’t grasp a verb conjugation to save his life. He remembered his mother’s anguished face while she tested him, the look of disbelief at his incompetence washing her in a grayish shadow. He was the classic student of life, simply unable to learn things unless they had a practical application. Unfortunately his parents had walked out of the movie of his life a long time ago and so they had no idea that a foreign language, writing, and especially math no longer gave him trouble. He could calculate the yield of each new grow house he acquired in his sleep. He could compare same-store sales month over month without even a computer.
“Yo voy a salir ahora mismo, Señor Feldman,” the housekeeper said and slipped outside with her cart. “Voy a regresar más tarde con uno plato bonito con vegetales y caviar.”
Freddy dropped into the desk chair, his knee shaking. He brought his laptop to life, following a complicated set of instructions to tap into the ship’s Wi-Fi, which included a thirty-digit alphanumerical string that looked like a nuclear code. He really should tell his niece and nephew about the complimentary Wi-Fi in the suites, since they must be suffering without it. Connectivity to the internet was certainly Natasha’s biggest concern before she got on board, and since they’d set sail, she’d been updating her Instagram every hour with new pictures: glistening postworkout, at shuffleboard, smoking hot in her halter dress at the fiesta night sandwiched between two sombreroed waiters. Freddy typed “High Times” into Google and clicked over to their website and was greeted—no, petrified—by the sight of his own face. They had doctored the photo they took of him by superimposing a huge green marijuana leaf on the bottom half of his face, with a blingy dollar sign at the tip of each point. The headline read, in font large enough for the sight-impaired (or the very stoned), MARIJUANA’S MEGAMILLIONAIRE FREDDY FELDMAN ROCKS THE POT WORLD.
It was not what he was expecting. It was not what he wanted, not remotely. When the editor from High Times called him and asked if he would like to be interviewed for a profile, Freddy’s first response had been no way. He wasn’t looking for fame or glory. If anything, attracting the attention of the government or mainstream media was the last thing that would be good for his business. He operated on the up-and-up, but could he swear that all the workers in his grow houses were legal? He hadn’t personally checked every one of their papers. Was he certain that every one of his transactions was one hundred percent kosher? Many of his deals were signed with Native American farmers and which rule of law applied wasn’t always black-and-white. Then that kid reporter showed up, looking at Freddy like he held the answers to every one of life’s complicated questions in his brain, and he found himself opening up in volcanic fashion. He and the reporter even smoked together—Freddy rarely did that anymore, but he thought it was important to convey a belief in his product—and within an hour Freddy forgot about the little tape recorder set on the coffee table in his apartment logging every word he said.
He put a cold can of Sprite to his forehead and clicked on the link.
Frederick Feldman didn’t plan to make a fortune in the drug world. And when he was sitting in a jail cell in Rikers Island, wondering which of his “derelict” friends would have
the money to bail him out, he hardly thought there was any future for him at all.
Born to a traditional family on Long Island, his father a well-regarded obstetrician and his mother an office manager and homemaker, Freddy Feldman knew from a young age that he was made in a different mold than the rest of his family. His sister, Elise, attended a top medical school and graduated as valedictorian from their local public school. Meanwhile, Freddy was suspended so many times from school that his parents actually considered military school for him. He was, by his own account, a terrible student and a troublemaker.
“I just didn’t care about school,” he said. “The teachers were all annoying.”
Freddy paused, thinking about Ms. Liness, his tenth-grade chemistry teacher. She was amazing. Funny, patient, and with a soft spot for him—even after his beaker shattered because he’d been dared by one of his buddies to add baking soda to the mixture they were cooking. Ms. Liness was anything but annoying. While she’d been forced to give him a C in the class—he hadn’t helped her in that department after refusing to memorize even a fraction of the periodic table—she’d insisted on putting an insert into his report card detailing his many contributions to the class and his natural gift for science. Unfortunately his biology and physics teachers didn’t feel the same way.
Now forty-eight, Feldman speaks like a man half his age. His home, around which he toured High Times cameramen, is a modest attached condo about fifteen minutes’ drive to the base of Buttermilk Mountain and to his biggest commercial venture, Mary Jane Market. It is not the home where one would expect to find the owner of more than a million square feet of grow houses, fifteen retail boutiques, and a majority stake in an overseas edibles distributor.
“I don’t care about stuff really,” he said. “My parents were into accumulating. They had to have nice cars and a fancy house. I’m wired differently, I guess. And they just never got me or what I was about.” Feldman described his parents as “uptight” and “perpetually disappointed” in him.
The Floating Feldmans Page 16