Things had got a little testy as Schuyler and Ariana chatted for the first time. The group of Muslim maniacs from New Jersey had just tried to blow up the World Trade Center: a van full of explosives set off in an underground garage. That means it was 1993 — eight years before the very much more successful 9/11 attack. The garage explosion is how Ariana dated the anniversary of meeting Schuyler. (The anniversary of their meeting is how Schuyler remembered the garage explosion.) Ariana was horrified by that failed fantasy of bringing down the towers. But she was not deaf to the idea that, as Israel’s ally, the U.S., in Arab eyes, kind of had it coming. Schuyler would have none of it. Yes, he was repelled by Israeli encroachments on the West Bank, the settlements. But bombing had been an even more indiscriminate barbarity: a half dozen dead, a thousand injured, something like that.
“Oh, yes. Everything is situational,” he said sarcastically. “But at some point you have to draw the line. You have to recognize the existence of evil.”
“You sound like Reagan,” Ariana said. “Evil empire. You sound like Rush Limbaugh.”
You can’t just turn on your heel and walk away from a conversation like that. Schuyler said they should get together for a drink sometime. They exchanged numbers. He called two days later.
They met at Joe Allen’s, a theater bar west of Broadway. It was convenient to the CBS headquarters on Sixth Avenue, if a bit farther from Bruxton & Nathanson, the agency in which Schermerhorn was trying to feather his nest for retirement following an honorable but penurious career in print journalism at The Times. Ariana was about to make her move from on-camera to management — a loss to television, Schuyler always argued. He would point to the early work she did with the documentary unit they had at CBS News in those days. She had picked up some awards and a certain amount of prestige within the organization. But you get old fast on-air, and, as Ariana got used to saying: “I had no desire whatsoever to be Barbara Walters. Even if I had had her talent, which I didn’t, I wouldn’t have wanted to get as old as she did on screen. To hell with facelifts. I was ready to go corporate, kick ass, make some money.
After a couple of drinks, she needed to get out of Joe Allen’s. Schuyler was happy to oblige.
The rest of the evening might be lost to memory, except for a relic of it that made its way into one of his notebooks. Ariana had happened upon a few months ago. She seemed to have been cast in the third person, as “Ruth,” but this time Schuyler wrote from his own perspective.
From Joe Allen’s we walked over toward Ninth, past the transient hotels with lobbies haunted by old-time gays with their toupées and gold bracelets, past the empty storefronts with the soaped-over windows, and the peep shows and porno theaters. Unexpectedly, this hotshot career woman has the tag end of a joint with her.
We’re walking along, passing the joint back and forth when Ruth says: “Listen.”
Traffic noises. A night crew with a jackhammer; somewhere in the distance, a siren lances the darkness.
“Listen to that.”
“What?”
“The tap dancers.”
Now I could hear it. There must have been a dance studio down the block or just around the corner. Up four flights, windows open to the night air.
Tippity tippity tap. Tippity tap. Tap. Tippity tap. Tap. Tap.
“The ghosts of ten thousand showgirls,” Ruth says. “Half a century of Broadway showgirls.”
I look over at her.
“Can’t you just see her, Schuyler, stepping off the train from Oswego. It’s a cold day in January. It’s 1937.”
Ruth does this funny little dance: Kick tap. Kick tap.
“Oswego gets a break. It’s only the chorus, but Broadway is Broadway. She gets another show. The work comes steady for a while.”
Kick. Kick.
“She moves into a room in the West Fifties with a hot plate and a young guy. Sideburns and suspenders. He sells insurance.”
Tap tippity tap.
“She moves up a row toward the front of the chorus. The Ziegfeld people start talking front row, maybe even a spotlight number someday, a solo. Nothing guaranteed. Just keep with it, honey, and don’t get preggers.
“Her best friend gets the part. The guy in suspenders moves out to Long Island City with a sales girl he’s crazy about.”
Kick. Kick.
“She fades back a row.”
Kick. Kick.
“Kicking her little heart out.
Kick. Kick.
“Back another row. Kicking her life away.”
Ruth was almost whispering by then. I put my arm around her and we headed back toward Seventh. A one-legged derelict had set himself up on the sidewalk outside one of the big theaters. He rattled his cup at us not expecting much, a paper coffee cup with some coins in it. He had the appropriate pant leg rolled up to show that his fake aluminum shin was for real.
What intrigued — and relieved — Ariana about her suddenly ardent suitor was that he seemed to place as high a value on his independence as she did. Not so his then-current wife. For Maggie the goal of a marriage was to conduct as much of it in tandem as could be arranged, even their work life — a perfectly honorable goal. But ye gods, girl! How about a life of your own? In order to be an at-home mother for the boys, she had cut back from freelance magazine articles to copyediting medical journals, which she could do from anywhere. It didn’t surprise his friends, but all that togetherness brought out the claustrophobe in Schuyler.
Ariana was definitely not interested in a bicycle built for two. She let Schuyler know that right from the start. One evening in the early going — they had moved on into her bedroom on the third or fourth date — she was fresh back from Rio. Rio could have been business for her. Just as likely, Rio could have been a quick vacation. She was making good money. She could have bought the tickets before she and Schuyler even met. He put it this way: “What was Rio about? Work or play?” Ariana toyed with him for a moment: It was “a little of both,” she said, “work and play.” The network was putting together a major documentary on vanishing rainforests, with the Amazon as Exhibit A, and she was going to be all over that. “I tacked on three extra days and went to the beach. I wanted to see Ipanema.
Schuyler channeled the old Getz/Gilberto lyric: “And did “the people go ‘ahhh’?”
“I hope so,” Ariana said.
“And were you alone? What does the girl from Ipanema do after hearing people say ahhh.”
She didn’t tell him to mind his own business — not then and there — but she stiffened.
He put his cards on the table: He said he was crazy about her. He wanted to know where their relationship was going. He wanted to know who Ariana was? And while she was at it, maybe she could tell him who the man was with her when, a few days earlier, they had run into each other on the street.
“His name is Max,” she said flatly.
“So who is Max?”
“Max is an old friend.”
“An old friend and an occasional lover?”
Ariana made her hand into a visor over her eyes and looked across the bar, like the stereotype of an Indian chief scouting the horizon.
“I don’t see Max in here. Did I miss him walking in? Why are we talking about him? What difference does it make or whether I sleep with him from time to time, or if I sleep with him from time to time? Or a whole lot? Or never?”
“Look, Schuyler. Here’s the way this can work — for me, and I hope for you. When we are together, I’m all in. I’m yours. You interest me as much as any man, more than most. The sex is good. We seem to have interests in common. … And when we are not together, I am not yours. And, of course, you are not mine. I’m a very private person. You have no say over that part of my life, the part away from you. No rights. And the same is true for me. I want your life away from me to be as interesting as my life. It makes it only that much more interesting when we are back together. Perhaps we will even want to bring each other up to date on our adventures. I said perhaps. Don�
�t pry. I won’t either.”
Schuyler quickly got with the program. Ariana’s infidelity — maybe “fidelity” is the better word, because she was nothing if not consistent — inspired him to have his own adventures. But they remained the center of each other’s fantasy life. He told her they were perfect for each other. She said she had never met a man as willing to let her be herself. It was a backhand way of saying he was the man she wanted him to be.
“And you’ll never meet another,” he said, half in jest.
“Then I guess I should marry you,” she said.
He took it as a taunt: “No thanks,” he said, “but how about we try living together.”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
They found an apartment in the West Sixties, convenient, nothing fancy. They went down to City Hall two months later and disavowed their shared resolve never to get married. Max, whatever his relationship to her, was followed by a longer-term entanglement with Gregor, an agency art director with a lengthening list of corporate clients who insisted that he handle their accounts and an inability to give up the little walkup in the East Village — his toehold on the wild side. It had been home before he married and went suburban. And then there was the Jamaican percussionist that Ariana discarded when his heroin habit got in the way of what she had earlier told Jenny was spectacular sex.
Ariana knew that to her women friends, the one or two with whom she was totally candid, her arrangement with Schuyler probably seemed like the classic post-Sixties cliché, an “open marriage.” At first perhaps it was. But over time things changed. The official indifference to monogamy that you have to at least fake in an open marriage gave way to something more interesting.
The side action stopped being a poorly kept secret, a departure from the marriage. Instead it became an enhancement of their time together — which they were most of the time. Together. That was the default arrangement. The best of the infidelities were adventures, but they were also betrayals. They were serious. They hurt; they required atonement and forgiveness.
“You drove me wild with that stuff,” Schuyler said to her one time. “But you kept me on my toes.” The betrayals only seemed to deepen the pleasure that they took from being with each other, when the betrayals ended, at least temporarily, and they were alone again in the night, worn out by their own love-making and in a mood to talk about everything.
day fifteen
Ariana rises early, drinks coffee, heads out.
She walks up the gentle rise that separates Jenny’s block, a quietly residential block in the west 80s off Riverside, from the bustle of Broadway. The abruptness of this passage between different realms had always intrigued her. One block from Broadway, West End Avenue was the domain of drowsy doormen standing guard over mahogany apartment lobbies. Broadway was commerce and traffic and sirens. Somehow all that was unanticipated, until you reached the corner, unless you count as a prelude the Chinese laundry-slash-foot massage parlor in the basement of a building on 82nd just short of the intersection.
The clamor of Broadway is contagious. Ariana’s pace picks up. Rounding the corner, she throws back her shoulders as though ordered to attention by a drill sergeant. An old lady is leashed to a small dog gone mad at the sight of another Skye terrier across the street. A bus lumbers by, belching diesel fumes. A young man sweeping the entrance to a store rests his chin on the top of his broom to watch a woman go by, the slow grind of her haunches. A curbside vendor hawks small boxes of blueberries. Ariana imagines the little dog toppling the old lady as it yanks on the leash and tries to dart out into the intersection, a cartoonish vision of no bearing whatsoever on the morning’s agenda: a meeting with Mort Zimmerman.
She had reached his secretary during the layover in Houston. Zimmerman might have been on vacation. He might have been with a client in Chicago. Ariana was coming anyway, and she got lucky. He was in New York. His secretary said she could set something up the following week. Ariana told her that wouldn’t do. She said she would park herself in Zimmerman’s office until someone agreed to see her. The secretary had called back to say that Mr. Zimmerman could see her at ten.
Ariana enters the subway at 79th and crosses the platform at 72nd to catch the express, just rolling in. One stop later she steps out in Times Square, a half-block from the lobby of the office tower in which Zimmerman handles what’s left of the dwindling portfolio that helps keep Schuyler and his sisters, sons and ex-wife afloat.
Ariana has never met Mort, but feels like she knows him. He has been a specter in Schermerhorn family stories since he was a young pup in Morgan Stanley’s wealth management department and Schuyler’s father had only just hit it big with his one and only bestseller. When Mort broke free of Morgan Stanley, the Schermerhorn money had traveled with him to the hedge fund he set up with a cabal of equally bored-to-death investment bankers. The years have put some weight on Mort. His hair has silvered, but the brain beneath it is quick and supple and his reedy voice is strangely boyish. He comes out into the reception area, offers Ariana his hand and pulls her into the brooding brass and mahogany quiet of his inner office. The building is a modernist cliché of glass and concrete that can’t be more than fifteen years old. But Mort’s office is a stage set redolent of New York when horses pulled carriages and sleds up and down Fifth Avenue and the streetlamps were lit by gas.
My god, Ariana thinks to herself, how good it is to hear a calm and reasonable voice: the New York accent, the occasional yiddishisms.
Zimmerman asks after Schuyler, mentions the Schermerhorn sisters. He does not really have time for small talk but is trying to figure out — without bluntly asking — why Ariana so urgently needed to get in with him.
She cuts the suspense:
“We’re in a terrible situation, Mort. Schuyler is. At least I think he is. I’m okay. He’s been missing for more than a week. I got a call demanding a ransom …”
Zimmerman cuts her off: “Kidnapped? You’ve called the embassy? How much do they want? The ransom.”
“They won’t say. What would you guess? That’s one of the things I need help with.” She tells the financial adviser about getting slapped around by Rogelio and the boys and about their do-it-yourself approach to a ransom demand.
“Jesus, it’s like an auction,” Zimmerman mutters. “An auction with no auctioneer.” He does not add, because it would be coarse to do so, when what’s on the auction block may well be his client’s life.
She tells him about the embassy visit and the rendezvous with the DEA agent in the basilica. “You need to understand something, Mort, and I hope to god the embassy does, too. They will kill Schuyler if they know I’m breaking silence. That’s why I came all the way up here. I didn’t dare call. Discretion is of the utmost importance. And I need to leave with some significant money.”
“How much?” For the first time Zimmerman, keeper of the family exchequer, looks her squarely in the eye.
“I told you, I don’t know. They won’t say. What do you think? I’ve guessed maybe a hundred thousand gives me the leeway to deal with almost any number they come up with, hopefully much less. What do you think?”
“We deal with a moneyed clientele, Ariana. It’s true,” Zimmerman says drily. “But we don’t have a specialist in ransoms. Not in-house.”
“Maybe you should,” she says a little too snappishly. (Zimmerman, she realizes too late, had only been trying to lighten a grim conversation with a touch of irony.)
Ariana Altobelli could not be accused of having married Schuyler Schermerhorn for his money. For his pedigree, perhaps, but not for his money. She knew going in that there was not all that much of it left. On one of their first weekends together, they had got into his aging Austin Healey, a memento passed to him when his father died. With a lid of grass in the glove compartment, they ventured up the Hudson’s west bank, skipping the thruway in favor of the old riverfront towns strung together along a hundred miles of Route 9W. Finally the next town was Saugerties, 11 miles to go. They pau
sed for a quick lunch in the little harbor. A mile or two north, on the river road, Schuyler had ended a long silence and said, simply, “There. That’s it.” Pastures, easily a half-mile of them, lay to the right behind low stone walls, and in the distance, Ariana could see a slate-roofed house on the edge of the bluff looking out over the river. They passed a pair of bluestone gate posts and then another half-mile or so of pastures, a barn, a smaller caretaker’s cottage.
Who lives there now, she asked.
Schuyler said a developer had bought it from the estate and made plans to subdivide the pastures and put in McMansions. Mercifully, he had foundered financially before he could butcher the place. The Hudson, even the west bank, had come back into vogue among New Yorkers and a vastly rich investment banker had picked up the whole estate, pastures and dependencies intact, and had made Bairnwood his a weekend place. The one effacement of the grand old spread: a helipad.
Schuyler had been subdued for a while as hey drove on. Maybe the pot had undermined his usually ebullient mood. It revived over drinks at a small inn back in the village. It had to be sad for him, driving past the landscape of his youth — now lost for good. She could sympathize with that, but on other occasions and more and more over the years, she was enough of first-generation immigrant to be somewhat amused by the reversal in their dynastic fortunes, hers and her husband’s. To judge from the riverfront spread, once upon a time the Schermerhorns had indeed been flush.
The Altobellis, on the other hand, had lived the immigrant dream, scratching and slugging (and shooting) their way from Italy to an all but penniless arrival at Ellis Island in the 1920s. Their businesses had evolved from scrappy to solvent and, in due course, their bank accounts fattened nicely. She was the family darling, the one who got the college money. She was their bet on “making it” not just financially, but professionally, even socially. The irony was not lost on Ariana that her mother’s grandfather — a DiCarlo — had been affiliated with one of the more notorious mob families, a New Jersey-based clan that was, in so many ways, comparable to the syndicate that had seized Schuyler.
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