The Last Refuge sahm-1

by Chris Knopf

  I had the feeling the two of them had spent much of their adult years together, locked in continuous, unsuccessful quests for romantic involvement. Holding on to each other through shared heartaches and unrequited obsessions.

  “Robin and Laura. Sam, my favorite customer.”

  “Robin,” said Robin, the one with the blond hair.

  “Laura,” said Laura.

  “Hello.”

  “Out for the weekend?” Robin asked. “People are doing that a lot now—coming out in the fall.”

  “Here full time. I live on Oak Point.”

  “Used to come on weekends, right?” said Amanda.

  “It was my parents’ place. I inherited it.”

  “Some nice rentals up in North Sea. We do well up there,” said Laura.

  “We do well up there,” Robin repeated.

  Laura picked up her glass with two hands and sucked on the straw. I noticed she had a pack of cigarettes and a pretty white porcelain lighter. I dug out the Camels and offered them around. Laura took me up on it.

  “Walk a mile.”

  “If you don’t run out of breath first,” said Robin. Laura swatted her.

  We lit up anyway. Robin had her eyes on me, flagrantly assessing. I hoped my grooming was up to it. She seemed like one of those wide-open women who liked to guess something about you to prove her powers of perception. She was drinking red wine—it went well with her hair. Laura luxuriated over the Camel and looked out at the crowded room, counting the house.

  “You’re in real estate?” I asked them.

  “Yup. Partners for over ten years. House Hunters of the Hamptons. The old triple H. You’ve seen our signs.”

  I had.

  “You do a lot of rentals?”

  “Half and half,” said Robin. “There’s plenty of both. Do you ever rent your place?”

  “No. My mother lived there until a few years ago, then I moved in. Never had the chance.”

  “You’d be amazed at what you can get. A lot of year-rounders rent and go someplace else for the summer. Or rent something cheaper. Can pay the whole year’s mortgage. You’d be amazed at what everything is worth out here. Most locals are.”

  “Even in North Sea?”

  “Especially—tend to have lower mortgages, and in this market, you can still get incredible rentals with lesser properties. No offense or anything. I love North Sea myself. Last of the real Hamptons, if you ask me.”

  “I guess I would be amazed,” I said, truthfully.

  “What do you get when there’s more demand than supply, and the demanders have more money than God and all His angels put together?”

  “Inflated property values?”

  “The man’s a genius,” Robin said to Amanda.

  “Isn’t yours on the water?” asked Amanda, with innocent sincerity.

  “Oh, well,” said Robin, “that’s a whole ’nother kettle of fish. Waterfront you double or triple.”

  “Do you rent a lot on Oak Point?” I asked.

  The two real-estate women looked at each other and shook their heads.

  “I always figured there were mostly year-rounders out on the peninsula. Locals,” said Laura.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Hm,” said Robin.

  Amanda was sitting next to me, so I couldn’t see her very well. I could, however, feel the backs of her fingers brushing lightly across my thigh under the table. I let my hand drop to my lap so I could squeeze her hand.

  “Ever heard of Bay Side Holdings?” I asked.

  They looked at each other again. Exchanging telepathic messages.

  “Weren’t they trying for some variances a few years ago?” asked Robin.

  Laura nodded. “Yeah, they wanted to reconfigure some of the lot sizes on stuff they owned over there. They were trying to reshape pre-existing boundaries. We didn’t pay much attention to it. I don’t think the Appeals Board let them do it. The Town’s a bitch on non-conformance. Though I don’t remember anybody from what’s-its-nose, Bay Side, pushing real hard. The only reason I remember anything is ’cause the lawyer they brought in from the City was so adorable.”

  “If you like tall, dark and loaded,” said Robin.

  “It just sort of went away,” said Laura, ignoring her. “I have to admit I was a little curious. I get into that stuff more than Robin—spend enough time in those damned hearings and you turn into a zoning junkie.”

  “High drama,” said Robin, sarcastically.

  “It can be,” Laura shot back, a little insulted.

  “I thought their lawyer was a woman,” I said to the pair of them.

  Laura examined her drink before taking a sip. “You sayin’ I’m a dyke?” she said, in an awkward way.

  “Jacqueline something—Polish name?”

  The two of them rolled their eyes in unison.

  “Jackie Swaitkowski,” said Robin.

  “She’s a local. Lawyers from out of the City usually like to have a hometown connection. Cutie-pants had Jackie fronting the thing.”

  “Fronting’s a good word for it,” said Robin.

  “Robin, really.”

  “I’m not saying anything.”

  “Jackie’s a little flaky. That puts some people off,” Laura explained.

  “Some people?” Robin asked, rhetorically.

  “She’s actually very nice,” said Laura.

  “Not a big career planned in rocket science,” said Robin, with a forced smile.

  “She’s a lawyer, Robin, how dumb can you be?”

  “In this case, very.”

  I was relieved when Laura decided to drop it. Amanda seemed even more uncomfortable than me with the turn of the conversation. Bickering, especially between adults, always makes me tense. I feel like I’m back in the office, struggling to restrain the human compulsion to rend and eviscerate each other. Or back in the dining room with my father glaring down the long table, trying to bait a reaction out of me so he’d have someone to contend with, someone to put up a little resistance against his relentless fury. It always makes me want to be somewhere else.

  “I gotta hit the head,” I said to the group. I gave Amanda’s hand a final squeeze and stood up. I wove my way through the mass of clubgoers, avoiding collisions and eye contact, passing unnoticed through clusters of friends and sexual prospectors.

  The window was wide open in the men’s room, chilling down the sticky urine smell. A rough queue had formed right outside a separate room for the urinals. There was only room in there for two, so I waited my turn. Once inside the room, you had to step up on a short platform to take a leak, which I was halfway through when I heard the door behind me snap shut. I was about to turn to look when somebody shoved me forward into the wall. Piss sprayed off the back of the porcelain and splattered my pant leg.

  It wasn’t an accidental shove. It had plenty of real meat on it. I assumed it was the kid I’d sent into the dance floor. My sphincter had already cut me off midstream, so my next thought was to get myself back into my pants. As I zipped, I hunched my shoulders and braced for the kid’s sucker punch.

  Instead, a hole opened up in the universe and a piece of heavy artillery poked through. It fired off at point-blank range into the side of my head.

  I’d been hit a lot of times as a regular fighter, but I’d never seen stars. I was a little surprised you actually could. They popped in front of my eyes like a fireworks display. I put my forearms in front of my face to block the next blow, which came from the other direction. It ripped off my head and bounced it against the far wall. Then a fist caught me above the belly button, lifting me right off my feet. I ended up on my knees down on the floor. Red fuzz filled up my eyes but I could just make out a pair of black motorcycle boots. I looked up from there into the eyes of the big trained bear that had been hanging around our cars at the beach.

  “You don’t know what you’re fuckin’ with,” he said in his clearest trained-bear voice—as dead and hollow as his eyes.

  I
was trying to think of a way to insult his BMW when one of those black motorcycle boots came up off the floor and caught me under the chin, snapping my mouth shut and sending my head for another spin around the galaxy.

  This time the stars were talking. Or maybe it was the voices of the people coming through the door. I didn’t care. I was on my hands and knees watching my blood puddle on the floor. The bear squatted down next to me and patted me on the cheek.

  He left after that, I think. I heard him bust through a group of guys clogging the doorway. They said things like, “Hey man, what the fuck?” I didn’t care. I was hoping to see some more colorful stars, though all I got were these wiggly red balls, framed in darkness that closed in on the red until that’s all there was and I went down into this gooey black hole wondering if this is how my old man felt—watching his life drip out onto the floor of a piss-soaked bathroom at the back of the bar.

  FOUR

  MY OFFICE HAD a sprawling overgrown schefflera that filled the space in front of two huge sheets of plate glass that formed one corner of the room. Right next to the plant was a steel desk Abby bought me soon after we were married. I used to sit on top of the desk cross-legged, yogi style, and talk on the phone. Of the thirty-five-thousand people worldwide in our ten-billion-dollar corporation, I was the only one who did this.

  I was sitting there looking through the leaves of the schefflera at a resplendent spring day when a call came in from the chairman of a corporate sub-committee. I’d never heard of it before, but this was nothing new. Big corporations are like gas giants—huge swirling balls of toxic, overheated gas held together by gravity, and controlled by a form of planetary tectonics that forces the entire mass into endless cycles of expansion and collapse. The energy unleashed throws off institutional debris that recombines as tiny sub-spheres of frantic activity. They drift free for a while before getting snagged by the gravitational field and sucked back into the body of the organization. But along the way there was always the danger that one of them would call you on the phone.

  “We’re doing a performance audit on your area,” the voice on the other end of line said, or something like it.

  “Sounds fine. When you’re done we’ll come over and do one on yours.”

  “We’re hoping this can be as undisruptive as possible.”

  “That’s good. Because shit like this plays hell with our performance.”

  I knew most of the people who ran the company. I’d say hi to them in the halls and occasionally stand in front of the board of directors, priestly looking guys in shiny gray suits and white hair, and tell them how I was looking after our $45-million divisional budget. They never looked all that happy or secure. I guess you can make your own crap to live in even when you earn enough in stock options alone to buy a medium-sized city. I think some of them actually liked me. I was one of the few people in the company who did something tangible, who made things you could touch. I symbolized for them a mythical time when substance was presumably valued over style.

  But still, when it all hit, they watched in silence through neutral eyes, their minds preoccupied with portfolio management and grandchildren.

  One day two big security guards, black guys I’d greet every morning as I walked through the parking lot, stood and watched me empty out the desk Abby gave me. I left it with the schefflera. It didn’t seem right to break up the set.

  They helped me throw the stuff from the desk into a dumpster behind the building. We talked about our kids and the sad decline of the normally aspirated big block V-8 engine.

  I thought of them when I came to in Southampton Hospital, watching a huge dark brown and white mass take shape as a Jamaican physician.

  “Hey ’der, you know what I’m saying to you?” I heard him say through all the wet glop stuffed inside my brain.

  I think I nodded.

  “Dat’s a yes? You call dat a yes?”

  “Yuff.”

  “Oh, so dat’s a yes. I get it.”

  His hair was cut close to his scalp and he wore neat gold wire-rim glasses. His face would have been more handsome if it was smaller. The white medical coat stretched impossibly across his shoulders and chest, and a pink button-down Oxford cloth shirt showed at the neck. He had about a half dozen pens and a few evil-looking chrome instruments stuck in his front pocket. He leaned into me and adjusted something attached to the side of my skull. Nausea crept around inside my gut. My head felt like it filled up half the room. There was an IV in my arm. I looked down at it.

  “Get it out.”

  When I spoke my tongue lit up like a firecracker. I felt a big lump on the side when I moved it around my mouth.

  “Can’ do dat now,” he looked down at my chart, “Mr. A-cquillo. You need what’s in dere I’m sure.”

  I shook my head.

  “No painkillers.”

  “You don’ know what you’re askin’.”

  I nodded as furiously as my head would let me. Panic began to bubble up in my throat.

  “Rather have the pain.”

  Some people are afraid of snakes. Or airplanes. With me it’s drugs. Especially painkillers.

  “Get it out.” I shook the tube. The Jamaican’s powerful hand clamped down on my arm. He studied me carefully. Warmth flowed from his hand.

  “Don’ do dat, now. You’re my responsibility.”

  I stared at him. His face softened.

  “I go get the attending. But you gotta stay still and not do anyt’ing loony, you know?”

  “What time is it?”

  He looked at his watch.

  “’Bout five-tirty.”

  “I gotta get out of here.”

  A broad smile lit his face as he shook his head.

  “Oh no, Mr. Acquillo, you don’ go anywhere till we say. You got a concussion der prob’ly.”

  “I left a dog in my car.”

  He shook his head again.

  “No, ladies brung the car wit’ the dog. He’s at the vet’s ’round the corner. Good place. He’s all set. We do dis all the time.”

  “He’s gonna hate that. I got to get outta here.”

  “I go talk to attending, he come in here and explain your situation.”

  I couldn’t seem to keep my head up off the pillow, so I set it back down.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, but you gotta not try to take off on me.”

  I nodded.

  “You promise me, or I’ll tie you down,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Sorry. Not your fault,” I told him.

  He let go of my arm and patted it. I lay there when he left and took stock. I was conscious. I knew I was in a hospital—I assumed it was Southampton. I could move my head and all my limbs and digits. I could see, though the outlines were a little fuzzy. I could open and shut my mouth, despite that wad of something on the side of my tongue. It made it difficult to probe around the inside of my mouth, but it felt like I had all my teeth—both the real and the gold ones I got because of Rene Ruiz.

  I was in an area contained by rolling room dividers and white curtains. There was a window open nearby and wind from the Atlantic was busting in and flipping through a newspaper on the table next to my bed. No flowers. No get-well cards. No worried-looking relatives.

  Aside from a hernia I fixed a long time ago, I wasn’t very experienced with hospitals. I don’t like them. I don’t like giving myself to somebody else to look after. Plus, it’s wicked hard to get a vodka on the rocks or a pack of cigarettes out of anybody.

  The attending doctor was a skinny little guy with shiny skin and hair like balls of single-ought steel wool. He looked me right in the eyes and shook my hand.

  “Hey, welcome to the conscious. How’d you sleep?”

  “Hard to say.”

  He read the chart and nervously clicked a retractable ballpoint pen.

  “Markham tells me you tried to go AWOL.”

  “Don’t want the IV. Don’t like painkillers.”

  “Prefer the pain?
”

  “Yeah.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “That stuff makes me dopey.”

  “Some consider that a nice side benefit.”

  “Please. Get it out.”

  He spun the bag around and looked at the label.

  “Well, we got a lot of important stuff in here— like an anticoagulant. Don’t want you pulling a stroke on us. You do realize you’ve had a traumatic blow to the head?”

  “Two.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Two traumatic blows to the head. Plus one to the gut and a kick in the teeth.”

  “That reminds me,” said the doctor, pulling open my jaw and looking into my mouth. “You left a piece of your tongue back there at the Playhouse.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah. Not a big one. Otherwise, you’re in pretty good shape. Just a slight concussion and a gash. No bone damage.”

  “Hard head.”

  He reset his heavy horn-rimmed glasses on his nose and looked at my chart again. I wondered if it recorded my manifold sins and omissions. He looked up at me again as if struck with a new thought.

  “These things can be cumulative. Going by your face you’ve been through this before. You made it this far without brain damage, but I wouldn’t push your luck.”

  “Wasn’t my idea.”

  “Okay. None of my business.”

  “Guy suckered me. Hit like a bastard.”

  Markham came into the room.

  “Hey, dat’s more like it. Actin’ civil with the attending.”

  “So it was definitely an assault,” said the doctor. “The police were curious.”

  “Who told them?”

  “We told them. We always tell them when there’s a fight. They’ll want to talk to you.”

  “If you call a Town cop named Joe Sullivan you’d be doing me a favor. He knows me.”

  “I could do that.”

  “After all the trouble you give us we supposed to be doin’ you favors?” said Markham.

  I looked up at him.

  “I could’ve used you the other night.”