“I got drunk,” she said.
“I noticed,” he said. “When did that happen?”
She reached out for him. She was wobbling and he held her in his arms trying to contain her. “On and off in the bathroom,” she said.
He returned to the living room with beers and Frank announced that he wanted to make a toast. “To your house,” he said. They all clinked frosted mugs and drank to Tim’s house. Then Tim broke the news that Jane wasn’t feeling well and had gone upstairs to lie down. She might be out for the night. Frank and Linda expressed concern.
“We should go then, maybe,” Linda said to Frank.
“No, please,” said Tim. “I’d hate—”
Jane walked into the room. “You must be Hank,” she said.
Tim turned around as Jane came forward to shake Frank’s hand. She tripped on the rug, steadied herself and looked down at her feet. Then she turned and left the room.
All three of them stared with great stillness at the doorway. Tim stood. “She must be feeling better,” he said to his guests. Then he almost collided with her as she came back in. “I forgot my drink,” she said, flicking spilled wine from her hand as she transferred the glass.
“His name is Frank,” he whispered fiercely.
As they ate appetizers, Tim and Frank made small talk about TVs and appetizers in general and then, for some reason, and for a long time, Chex Mix in particular. He didn’t want to talk about Chex Mix. He wanted to share with Frank, a man who could be trusted, the physical and psychic toll of all his recent months in the room.
“Yorba Linda,” he overheard Jane say to Frank’s wife. “Where Richard Nixon was born.”
“Yorba Linda?” said Frank’s wife.
“Because I was thinking, Linda, Linda, because of your name, and then I thought, Yorba Linda.”
Her lamb managed to be edible. By then she wasn’t saying much. She had sunk down into herself far below the frequency of conversation. Tim took charge of the ordeal by summoning his resources as a former Troyer partner and bored his two guests all night with stories of famous cases. They listened politely while sipping their wine. When the monologue was over, they left.
5
He left Peter and Masserly and returned to his office. The motion for summary judgment in the Keibler case was still warm from the printer. He sat down behind his desk and opened the bottom drawer and filed the motion away just as he had planned to do. He tried to recapture the purer impulse that had prompted him to write it and the nourishment the writing itself had offered him during the long and lonely weekend. But now only the sad diminishment of the final product’s destiny meant anything to him. Into the drawer, what a waste. Peter and Masserly together couldn’t formulate half as cogent an argument against the plaintiffs in Keibler if they spent six months knocking their simian brows together, and he’d done it in a weekend. It pissed him off, Masserly’s sense of entitlement and Peter’s unmerited partner status.
He shut the drawer and then rested his arms on the desk and looked through the doorway, burdened and discontented. He tried to think an appropriate thought, something ennobling and proud. Staff attorneys are people, too, he thought. Then he thought, Oh, fuck that.
He took the motion with him down to Mike Kronish’s office. Empty. That was a good thing. He didn’t think he could do it if he had to hand it to Kronish in person. He set the motion on Kronish’s desk and wrote a quick note. He departed with renewed hope and a bad case of butterflies. He was halfway down the hall when he started fretting that he’d done the wrong thing.
6
Twice a day during his time in the room they unstrapped one hand and turned him to prevent bedsores. They did this when he was sleeping. They applied antibiotic ointment to the backs of his legs where the skin had rubbed away.
Becka unstrapped him one night and walked around the bed for the ointment when he grabbed her hard at the wrist with his one free hand. She let out a startled cry.
“Don’t unstrap me again,” he said, his grip tightening.
“You’re hurting me, Dad.”
“If you unstrap half, I will unstrap the rest.”
He let go of her.
“I won’t make it,” he said. “I’ll walk out and I won’t come back.”
They had to find a new way to prevent bedsores. Bagdasarian prescribed a liquid sedative they administered by needle, which toward the end, when he was more or less incoherent, was no longer necessary.
7
Within the hour he was refreshing his inbox every ten seconds in expectation of an email from Kronish. He was watching his phone for it to ring. By half past eleven the wait was killing him and he had to leave. He programmed his office phone to forward all calls to his BlackBerry, and he strode down the hall toward the elevator, wary of being seen.
Frank Novovian stood at his post in the lobby like a raw blister. Coming in or going out, he tried to avoid Frank at whatever cost, but there was little maneuvering with the security man so close to the escalator. He often hid himself in a pack of lawyers but it wasn’t quite lunch hour yet and he was alone. Frank looked up as he approached, and they locked eyes.
“Hey, Frank.”
“Mr. Farnsworth.”
“Getting some lunch,” he said. “Can I pick you up something?”
“My wife packs a lunch for me,” said Frank.
“She does?” He casually walked over to the security post.
“Every day.”
“That’s nice of her. How’s she doing?”
“Loves her new job.”
“She changed jobs, did she?”
“Well, same job, different bank.”
Tim had not recalled, perhaps had never known, that Linda worked at a bank. “Good for her. Wish her luck for me.”
“And how’s your wife doing these days, Mr. Farnsworth? If you don’t mind me asking.”
Tim lowered his voice and peered at Frank across the lobby post.
“Let me tell you something,” he said, almost in a whisper. “I sure appreciate your discretion on that subject.”
He nodded to Frank to lend his words some definitive thrust of body language, as if he had actually told the man something about how Jane was doing. Then he drummed his knuckles on the marble counter.
“Now I’m going to get something to eat,” he said.
He checked his BlackBerry going down the escalator and all across the lower lobby. Jane was fine. Jane came home from the treatment center tomorrow. But Tim didn’t know what business that was of Frank Novovian’s.
8
Jane was asleep on the chair next to the bed. He called out to her and she stood up and turned on the lamp. His eyes adjusted, and he saw that it wasn’t Jane but Becka. She waddled back to the long-suffering La-Z-Boy and flopped down on it as if she were stuffed with plastic beans, invertebrate and sprawling. The jaunty springs died quickly. Her settling might have indicated a day’s honest labor, the spent effort of a middle-aged waitress come home to her lonely recliner, but she was instead a young student exhausted by the inconvenient hour and the simple upkeep of this arid and stuffy vigil she brokered when her mother was not around.
“Becka,” he said, “where does she go?”
Becka yawned and shook her head. “I don’t know, Dad. If I knew, I would tell you.”
“I don’t ask her,” he said.
She yawned again.
“You’re tired,” he said. “You should go to bed.”
She didn’t move. He watched her closely. It wasn’t morning as the clock determined it but it was morning to him—the one time in the cycle when for an hour or two he was capable of engaging as nearly a full human being again. If she stood and walked out of the room, kissing him good night before she left, he would lie awake in the dark, and his desire to engage would give way to despair. He had to have this one hour.
“Have I ever told you the story of Lev Wittig?” he asked.
She raised her head off the back of the chair and look
ed at him with heavy eyes.
“Lev Wittig was a partner at Troyer, Barr,” he said. “Tax partner from Connecticut. Family man, went to Yale. Dullest man you will ever meet. And ugly. He had a neck on him. The largest continuous piece of flesh I’ve seen on a human being.”
She rested her head on the recliner’s gold velvet arm. That chair belonged in a different house, in an alternative family history in which festive struggles were ones of car troubles, bill paying, and who controlled the remote. He looked at his daughter over the edge of the hospital bed. Poor girl, middle of the night, she was so tired.
“But this man Lev Wittig was really a genius at tax,” he said. “You don’t find many of those. Some of the most effective structures currently in place that keep the really big corporations from paying federal income tax were devised by Lev Wittig. You do that at Troyer, Barr, and there’s no question you make partner. Do you want to hear this?”
“Sure,” she said.
“You’re not just taking pity on me?”
“Taking pity on you?”
“It’s so late.”
“Go on with your story, Dad.”
“Okay,” he said. “Lev Wittig. He brought in so many clients, made the firm so much money. But you know what some of our partners are like. Just dull, dull, dull. So rich, so dull. And a guy like Lev Wittig, ugly, too. Rich, dull, and ugly. Now, that’s a powder keg. Are you sure you want to listen to this?”
“Why do you keep asking me?”
“I’m saying if you have to go to bed I’ll understand.”
“Dad, I’m up, I’m listening.”
“I bet you could unstrap me,” he said. “For an hour. I’d be fine.”
“No,” she said.
He sank down into silence.
“Dad?”
“I feel like talking,” he said.
“So talk.”
He remained silent another minute. “Lev Wittig. He throws all his energy into becoming the tax king of the world, and after twenty years, he’s at the top of his game. It’s never going to get any better. He’s sitting on more money than he knows what to do with, and he’s a powerhouse at one of the city’s most prestigious firms. Then he starts to feel age creep up on him. He turns fifty—this is what happens when you turn fifty, you feel age creep up on you. And something in Lev sort of breaks, where he says, if I’m going to work this hard and make this much money and be this good at my job, I’m gonna do whatever I goddamn well want to do. And so he sets forth to do what he wants to do.”
“Which is what?”
“Indulge his sexual proclivities. Which is what all of them want, basically. Are you up to hearing your old man tell you the story of someone’s sexual proclivities?”
“Is it going to make me uncomfortable?”
“No,” he said. “It’s too weird.”
She motioned for him to continue.
“Okay, so he wants to indulge himself, so he finds a guy in Chinatown. Who knows how he finds him, but Lev Wittig’s got money, and when you have money, you can always find a guy. This guy specializes in smuggling exotic animals out of China, Africa, wherever, for people in the city who want to own them as pets and can bear the cost. And Lev Wittig can bear the cost.”
Becka lifted off the arm of the chair. “Where’s this going?” she asked. She curled her legs under her so that now she sat as if meditating.
“Now, the other thing you have to know is, Lev’s sick of having sex with his wife. And you can’t really blame him, because Lev Wittig’s wife, let’s just say, is a brutish woman. Mustache, thinning hair. And he doesn’t want to do it anymore.”
“How do you know?”
“He told me. He told everybody. I was just an associate when all this was going on, but he told me how sick he was of having sex with his wife and I didn’t even work in tax. At major firm functions, he’d tell entire groups of people. We’d all be in a circle, you know, everybody dressed up, drinks in hand, and he’s telling it like it’s a courtroom anecdote. But he was Lev Wittig. He practically wrote the tax code.”
“Still gross,” she said.
“But the truth of the matter is this,” he said. And he paused, but not for too long. He wanted to build tension but he didn’t want her losing interest. “Under certain circumstances, he can still have sex with her.”
“How do you know this?”
“Under very particular circumstances,” he said, “he can still do it.”
“Which are what?”
He paused again, longer this time. “There has to be a snake in the room,” he said.
“What?”
“He can’t get an erection unless there’s a snake in the room.”
“Are you serious?”
“Swear to God.”
“And how do you know that?”
“It came out at trial.”
“What trial?”
“Just listen. The guy he hooks up with in Chinatown, at first this guy doesn’t even have to go outside the country. He has a three-foot rattlesnake from Arizona delivered to Lev at the firm. It comes in a box. Inside the box is the cage, and inside the cage is the snake. There are feeding instructions. Do you know what certain types of rattlesnake do to your respiratory system?”
She hugged her knees. “Are you kidding about this?”
“So Lev takes the snake home,” he said, “and he tells his wife that if she wants to stay married, if she wants to keep the family together and the house and all that, from now on she’ll be having sex with a snake in the room.” He paused, letting that sink in. He had gained confidence that she wasn’t going to leave the room until he was through. “I’m going to go out on a limb,” he said, “and say that that one comes as a shock to old Mrs. Wittig.”
“You think?”
“But it’s a fantasy he’s had for years and he’s not going to suppress it any longer. This is what he tells her. A snake in the room gets him excited. So he puts the cage up in one of the guest rooms and he tells her that he’s going to let it out, and she can either be in there already or come in after, but either way, they’re going to have sex with the snake on the loose. So she goes up to the guest room and she sees the snake in the cage and she comes back down and opts for the divorce.”
“Which is the only sane thing to do,” she said.
“Thank you for listening to me,” he said.
“Is that it? Is that the end of the story?”
“No.”
“So why are you thanking me?”
“I just felt like thanking you.”
“Dad,” she said, “finish the story.”
“So what does Lev do? Despite the threats and manipulations, he can’t really do much of anything except move out, given what she can now testify to at family court. So he moves to an apartment near Central Park, and that’s when he starts to hire the prostitutes.”
“To go with the snake?”
“He’s got the money,” he said, “and he wants what he wants.”
“Who is this guy?”
“Lev Wittig. Wrote the tax code. Dullest man you’ll ever meet.”
“I’m not meeting him.”
“He tells them a little fib about how everything must be absolutely dark or he can’t, you know, perform, and then they go into the bedroom, and this is exciting for Lev because there’s a snake present.”
She squirmed and shuddered audibly and gathered herself closer, holding her legs tighter.
“And here’s the thing. Each time, it has to be a different snake. That turns out to be part of the kick. The guy from Chinatown brings Lev cobras and vipers and green mambas, I don’t know what all. Not good snakes to have around.”
“Define a good snake,” she said.
He held up an index finger to indicate that her point was well taken. His hand went only so far because his wrist was held tight to the side of the bed. “He gets good at handling them. He’s got equipment, you know, the boots and the gloves, and he has a pair of snake tongs that allo
w him to get the snake in and out of the cage, and when that’s done, he puts the cage in a box and walks to the park, where he lets it go.”
“Lets it go in Central Park?”
“Rare and extremely venomous snakes.”
“I can never go there again,” she said. “I can never go to Central Park again.”
“And this keeps up until one night, one of the girls goes into the room and walks toward the bed and steps on the snake.”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “What happened?”
“The girl died. I don’t imagine she was in very good health to begin with. Now, say what you will about Lev, he does call nine-one-one, and he tells the EMTs exactly what happened, and there’s the snake right there in the cage, and the snake tongs, and the snakebite on the girl’s thigh, so they call the cops and he gets arrested.”
“I can’t believe you knew this man.”
“These are the people I work with,” he said. “I saw him one last time, before he went to prison. It was just before his trial. He was out on bail. He went from office to office explaining why he’d done what he’d done. Not in a contrite sort of way. Sort of mystified, and sort of looking for understanding. Because he was not the only rich, ugly partner at Troyer, Barr known to indulge himself. And I remember I ran into him in the hall and he pulled me aside. I had just made partner. And he wanted to know if I’d heard the story. So I said I had. And he just looked at me with his bug eyes and his big neck and basically said I’d do the same thing one day. Just wait, he said. He basically cursed me with his own fate. Then he said something like, ‘This has been my cross to bear my entire life. I don’t want to fuck unless there’s a snake in the room, and I just love to fuck.’ ”
Becka sat in the chair hugging her legs and shaking her head.
“Can you believe that?”
She continued to shake her head. The story was over. What, he wondered, would they do now?
“Are you tired?” he asked. “Do you want to go to bed?”
She suddenly yawned as if in answer. He had to think of something.
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