“I understand,” I say. “I appreciate.”
“I’m no innocent, I’m not suggesting. At twenty-two I was already married and divorced, did you know that?”
“No, I don’t think I did. Kids?”
“Nope, but a miscarriage. I was water-skiing. It was stupid.”
“These things happen.” I hunt for a synonym. “They eventuate.”
“You know one thing Wes used to do? We’d go into a restaurant or something, he’d say to the waitress, ‘Now what do you recommend for a couple of newlyweds?’ He thought it got you better service that way, and maybe sometimes we did get a free drink or a piece of cake, but he was doing it years after we’d been married, and it was mortifying.”
It was mortifying: Yes, it was the very way Sally had described how Wes, back when he was courting her, employed the identical stratagem. For he stayed true to the old ruse—but how different the circumstances! How different his world had become, some thirty-plus years further on. It was mortifying for Sally because Wes’s question suggested to a stranger the existence of racy intimacies that she, his proper betrothed, wouldn’t consider granting him. And it was mortifying for Tiffany because it reminded her, who continued to look like a schoolgirl, that she had stepped up to the altar with this beaming, leering, snowy-haired man . . .
“My divorce was one more thing Wes didn’t want me spreading round. But the point is, Wes was so persuasive, I really did mostly nearly believe everything he told me. He was some big shot, he was indispensable to Great Bay, he was practically running their Cincinnati office, and when they transferred him back to Stags Harbor, it was going to be wow a great promotion. But not even Wes was able to turn it into a promotion when they fired him.”
“Fired him? Isn’t that a little harsh? He was due to retire.”
“That’s one way of looking at it. That’s Wes’s way, but I tell you I learned eventually if you were looking at something Wes’s way, you’d better be preparing yourself for a nice shock. No, they pushed him out, didn’t want to pay his health insurance, and he was fighting back tears the day he like oh so casually announced the big news to me. Right there where you’re sitting . . .”
And while this may sound hard-hearted, it cheers me to hear about those fought-back tears of my father’s. Or my response to them cheers me: I feel a hot, welcome discharge of sympathy coursing through my chest—sympathy, if not exactly for the wily, oily old salesman who sat in this very chair with tears in his eyes, then at least for the kid in the snapshot taken at his brother’s graduation, tilting his wrist to expose his fancy watch to the camera. I feel sorry for that small-town gallant with the elaborate pompadour and his upcoming life of whittled dreams.
I drain my drink and say, “It seems he had less and less to hold on to. His job. His previous children. His marriage to you.”
“Wes was impossible to live with. It was so embarrassing, him always coming on to other women—always hitting on my friends.”
“He kept that up? Even the last few years?”
“Even the last few years? Especially the last years.”
“I’m sorry . . .”
“Evening, folks, and my, my, don’t the two of you look comfy.”
I don’t know if this is a man’s voice or a woman’s. It’s a throaty greeting in any case, followed by a harsh bark of laughter. I swing around and see, stepping out of the dining room onto the deck, a tall, bony woman in a pair of khaki shorts and an olive T-shirt. Who is this? Whoever it is, she entered the house without knocking.
“Hel-lo, hel-lo,” Tiffany calls—sings—and adds, “Talk about your pleasant surprises—d’you have time to join us? We’re having wine coolers.” Tiffany leans toward me and explains, “Patty’s just coming off some wicked laryngitis.”
“Tiffany’s famous wine coolers,” Patty in turn says to me, and supplies a confidence of her own, in a whisper that breaks harshly: “She puts buckets of vodka in them.” And another hacking laugh.
Something about this woman instantly rubs me the wrong way. I suppose I feel I’ve been making progress with Tiffany—learning things—and any interruption would be regrettable. But in Patty’s particular case, something in her long and narrow face, with its loose-jawed, almost vulpine smile, instinctively makes me edgy.
Patty takes the chair beside mine and crosses her lean legs, which are very tan, and lights a cigarette.
“I have someone I want you to meet,” Tiffany says. “Patty, this is Luke Planter. Wes’s son. Luke, this is my friend Patty Boudreau. Patty lives down the street.”
“Wes’s son?” Patty echoes, as though incredulous.
“Not with me,” Tiffany pretends to explain, and giggles. “By an earlier marriage.”
From her voluminous pitcher, Tiffany pours Patty a drink and, without asking whether I’d like another, refills my glass, as well as her own.
Until now I haven’t noticed the third glass waiting on the tray. Oh. Tiffany has been expecting her friend. And Patty will be here for a while.
“I can’t believe you’re Wes’s son.” Patty blows a doubtful cloud of smoke my way.
“I’m afraid we don’t look much alike.”
“Oh it’s not that . . .”
She gives me a cool, openly measuring stare, then turns and nods at Tiffany, who nods in corroboration and giggles—a comprehensive female exchange of information I can’t begin to decipher. But what is evident is that with Patty’s arrival the ambience of our little patio conversation has shifted.
It seems I’ve become some sort of exhibit. This should make me nervous, and yet the atmosphere gradually warms. The two women talk about each other. Patty explains to me what a splendid mother Tiffany is; Tiffany tells me how indispensable Patty is to the main office of the Haggerty Construction Company. An odd protracted crepuscular glow has come down from the heavens, as though our boozy leisureliness had succeeded in retarding the flow of time. The children, in their shadowy sandbox, continue to play with fawnlike quietness. Tiffany has mentioned a barbecue, but when will she get started? A covered grill waits on the edge of the deck. So far as I can tell, Tiffany hasn’t made a stab at a start at a beginning of a dinner . . .
At first I assumed it was a joke, but it seems Patty was telling God’s own truth in reporting that Tiffany spikes her wine coolers. My drink burns, pleasantly, in my throat. The stars are clarifying in the sky just as my vision begins to blur.
“Patty is an absolutely fabulous runner,” Tiffany tells me. “She’s been doing it for years.”
This might seem an unlikely assertion, given that since her arrival Patty has nursed her laryngitis with half a dozen cigarettes. Still, she has those stringy runner’s muscles in her calves and thighs. Patty exudes a strange, conflicted air of malady and vigor, vice and virtue.
I ask her, “How much do you run?,” and Patty croaks back, “Usually ’bout forty miles a week,” and I say, “That’s quite a lot,” and “There’s no stopping her,” Tiffany inserts.
“There’s no stopping me. It’s an affliction.”
“Fortunately, it isn’t contagious,” Tiffany says. “ I haven’t exercised since seventh grade.”
“Since your first period,” Patty points out, and coughs out another laugh, as Tiffany giggles brightly.
They’re a study in contrasts, the two friends: Tiffany, short and plumpish, with beautiful fair young skin; Patty, long and stringy, tanned, a little haggard.
Tiffany goes into the house, presumably to fetch some food at last. Patty swings toward me and says, “Wes was always talking about you.”
“Wes? Did you know him well?”
“Course I did, Tiff’s my best friend. We even have the same birthday. Same year and everything.”
Same year? I would have figured Patty for five years older, anyway. Or ten.
“He was always on about how smart and well-educated and everything you were.” This comes from Tiffany, who returns not with food but with a lit pair of scented candles, which she se
ts on the white plastic table between us.
“I don’t know about that . . .”
“First in your class—weren’t you first in your class at college?”
“Heavens no. Nothing like.”
Absurd as it might sound, potent feelings of shame well up inside me. I see the two women once again glancing at each other, and their faces in the candlelight share a look of knowing cynicism. It seems they both feel taken in: Once again, once again they’ve caught Wes Sultan in a bald-faced lie.
So it isn’t an urge to defend my own academic prowess, Lord knows, but to refurbish my father’s deservedly shaky reputation for accuracy, that inspires me to boast, pathetically, “But I did graduate Phi Beta Kappa. As a math major. And I did graduate first in my high school class.” I add, “That must have been what Wes was thinking.”
“Wes was always going on, too, about how successful you are,” Tiffany says. “In business. In Manhattan.”
The look Tiffany gives me is open, discriminating, fervent. Are you a fraud, too? it wonders. Like your father? Her big eyes flicker in the candlelight and I’m struck in this moment of earnestly exchanged glances by just how extraordinarily pretty she is. More than that. Is she too short?—too plump to fit society’s prevailing standards of beauty? Maybe, but all such reservations melt away in the darkness and for a moment I feel sure I see Tiffany as my father once saw her. Those blue eyes of his peered out from under the ivory crown of his pompadour and glimpsed a creature who incarnated all the youth and vivacity and delicacy, all the sweet, ingenuous credulity, that are the world’s true, best bounties. He unpacked his finest wares for her—his dusty patter, his hoary jokes, his incongruously boyish gestures, his fluttering eyelashes—and he felt them “take” in the young woman before him. She was proof positive, wasn’t she, that he hadn’t lost a thing? And that any recent failures with women were no more his fault than his career disappointments? Surely it wasn’t his fault . . . No, weren’t such failures the fault of a world (an increasingly sloppy, slovenly, ill-mannered, ill-dressed, profane world) that had abandoned its allegiance to the obsolete virtues he embodied?
And I’m reminded of a weird evening, early in my tenure at Gribben Brothers, when I went out to dinner with quite an international crew. We were discussing a Delaware-based petrochemical company. There were a couple of Japanese bankers, and a Korean, and a German, and a Swiss, as well as my boss at the time, Jason Gillespie. Over dessert and coffee Jason launched—out of the blue—into a little discourse about cockroaches. Jason could be an overpowering presence—suave and genteel and handsome and ruthless—but his face looked bloated and bloodshot with drink and I had the feeling he was about to overstep the bounds. I was wrong. He explained that cockroaches can continue to mate even after they’ve been decapitated. “The little fuckers are too damned stupid even to know they’re dead.” This observation, which stunned the table, was succeeded by a strained and befuddled silence, during which many napkins were contemplated. And then Jason made his point: “What we’re looking at here, gentlemen, is a fucking corporation too damned stupid to know it’s dead.”
Well, it turned out that no businessman anywhere—in New York, in Europe, in Asia—had ever uttered a comparison quite so trenchant and witty as this one of Jason’s. Ringing, resounding laughter followed, and a joyous refilling of wineglasses . . . But the words later came back to haunt me when I realized that much the same thing could be said about Great Bay Shipping. Yes, the institution to which my father gave his life turned out to be a brainless, headless organization, managed by people without the least notion of contingency planning. To anyone who knew anything about business, the history of Great Bay Shipping was a reeling from catastrophe to catastrophe, the busy extraction of each new resource until, one unforeseen day, the last of them went dry.
And those words of Jason Gillespie’s came back to haunt me further when I realized they might likewise be applied to my father himself—a man slow to recognize that the horse he’d bet on, the company he’d chosen to carry his life, was hobbled in one foot. And having finally noticed his error—or having been thrown from his hobbling horse—what did Wes do but lurch away on his own and plunge into one ill-planned, underfunded get-rich scheme after another, throwing his savings away? Had the company held him back over the years? Oh no. No, it seems the company had protected him from his own foolishness and incompetence—and what a humbling lesson that must have been for Wesley Sultan to digest as he entered his seventh and final decade . . .
Of course it would be the easiest thing in the world, sitting in a pricey French restaurant in Manhattan over profiteroles and crèmes brûlées, to dismiss Wes and his entrepreneurial visions—and easier still to dismiss Wes’s final wife: a short, fleshy Midwestern college drop-out and divorcée and single mom who prided herself on her “homemade” wine coolers. But the light shifts, or perhaps a single candle flickers on a backyard patio, and suddenly this very woman is the embodiment of all the world’s preciousness, and the man who loved her is a seeker after a heartbreaking excellence—and how must Wes have felt when Tiffany told him she had “outgrown” him?
So I want to think that I, in some circuitous but not laughable fashion, am defending my father when I puff myself up a bit: “Well, Tiffany, that’s a funny world, doing the sort of business I do in New York.” The sentiments feel legitimate; in this moment, I might still be on the Gribben Brothers payroll. Might still be someone who was once put in charge of restructuring $450 million of Jeppco debt. And got the paper placed in record time.
“There are always people more successful than you are,” I go on. “And always people who used to be more successful who are now out on the pavement, looking for a job. Looking for your job. There’s a lot of luck involved . . .”
“Wes said you used to fly all the time to London.”
“That’s right. I once flew there three times in eight days.”
“I love to fly,” Patty declares and I think she intends her declaration to soar. But not having spoken in a couple of minutes, her voice emerges as a croak—less the sound of a bird, about to take wing, than a frog, up to its hunkers in silt.
Tiffany at last summons the children from their dark-swallowed sandbox. They march toward us silently out of the depths of the night. To my surprise, to my profound delight, one of them rubs up against my arm, clambers into my lap.
“Would you look at that!” Tiffany calls. And both women laugh with pleasure.
“Hello, Wendy,” I say. It’s the other one—the one who doesn’t look like Wes. Meanwhile, Jess climbs up into Patty’s lap. Only the twins’ mother sits without a child.
“It’s Winnie,” Tiffany corrects me.
“Of course it is,” I murmur into the girl’s sandy hair. Of course it is. The wine, or vodka, has bedeviled my brain. “I’m afraid I’m inexcusably bad with names.”
“Wes was just the opposite,” Patty points out.
Of course he was. For he’d worked at it until it became a simple reflex . . . And all at once I can picture him at the age of about eighteen, sitting in a drugstore in Restoration, Michigan. It’s 1953, and Wes is poring over a magazine article titled “Making Your Way to the Top.” (Meanwhile—as my boozed-up imagination takes wing—I can even picture the writer of the magazine article. The author of “Making Your Way to the Top”? A desperate bottle-hitter, many times fired, with a mortgage payment due on his house in the Bronx, and a daughter whose teeth need straightening, and a mother-in-law with a bad knee, tap-tapping out his article while throwing down shots of cheap gin.) The article advises young Wes to pay special attention to names, not just the important people but the underlings too. This is practical wisdom which the eighteen-year-old boy-man takes fully to heart. Oh, can’t you just see him, in conversation a few days later, stroking a grateful aged secretary with her name—someone whose boss doesn’t appreciate her, and whose boss’s clients don’t appreciate her, and whose long-deceased husband didn’t appreciate her? Wes apprecia
tes her . . .
Wendy, Winnie—actually it’s all the same to the warm, lightweight bundle in my lap, who doesn’t care what she’s called and who within moments has fallen sound asleep. What about her dinner? Something in me would naturally prefer to have her sister in my lap, little Jess. Though perhaps it would feel disorienting to have Wes’s face, metamorphosed into a beautiful girl-child’s, so close to my own.
Tiffany at last puts some hamburgers on the grill, which, it turns out, was readied before my arrival. The sleepy bed of coals has remained hot. Patty blows the smoke from a fresh cigarette over the head of the little girl in her lap. I down my drink and it seems the last of the day’s light is swallowed up. Night has fallen and a chorus of crickets begins to sing that song titled “There Used to Be No Houses Here, This Used to Be a Forest.” I’ve had way too much to drink.
Tiffany offers to lead the children up to bed, but both Patty and I protest. They’ll wake up when the hamburgers are ready; in the meantime, we’re happy to have the girls in our laps.
In fact, neither of the children fully awakens when offered their dinner. A few bites of hamburger, a couple of carrot sticks, and they curl back up into slumber . . .
I notice (and am proud of myself for so observantly noticing) that my own burger is charred on the outside and raw within. I don’t mind. I accept another glass of Tiffany’s silly but lethal wine cooler. Drinking it is like getting hit over the head with a very large stuffed animal. Resuming our conversation where we’d dropped it hours or days before, when Patty arrived, Tiffany says, “Wes made it impossible to live with him.”
“Impossible,” Patty echoes.
“Absolutely unforgivable.”
“Totally—totally unforgivable.”
“Hitting on all my friends. I mean honestly.”
I find my tongue. “Well, it’s all behind us now,” I declare, eager to curtail all such talk. For these are hardly words appropriate in the presence of children—or, for that matter, the presence of a non–family member like Patty.
A Few Corrections Page 13