A Few Corrections

by Brad Leithauser

  “Quite a bit, I think. Though I gather there was one painting he coveted.”

  “Mm?”

  “A Chicago street scene.”

  “Oh the famous Michigan Avenue in the Rain! You can’t believe the battle waged over that one. The two brothers went to war.”

  “And Wes won.”

  “I suppose Wes won.”

  “By getting Adelle to say she’d only lent it to Conrad.”

  “Oh but you must understand: Adelle wasn’t lying. No, I’m sure of it. No, by the time Wes got through with her, she was totally convinced that lending it is precisely what she’d done. He was very persuasive.”

  “So why the big battle? I gather the painting’s ugly.”

  “Oh it’s ugly all right. It looks like what it probably was: something you’d buy in a hotel lobby. Yet Dora loved it. Why? I think in her eyes it stood for everything that’s cultured and refined. Chicago was a dream for her—as much as France has been a dream for me. That’s why Conrad wanted it.”

  “And that’s why Wes didn’t want Conrad to have it?”

  “Oh I suppose.”

  “It became a question of which boy was in fact the rightful owner of Mother’s dreams.”

  “I like how you’ve put that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But I was telling you about Conrad’s innate conservatism, his I’m-an-ordinary-accountant’s uneasiness with certain forms of outlandishness. You know, I was in a swanky restaurant in Miami with him when the maître d’ seated a man and woman at the table beside us. Well, it became clear in one minute that this was a gentleman of very florid, feminine gestures. And clear in another minute that the woman was no woman. And what was so interesting was Conrad’s response: It drove him up the wall. We had to leave; we couldn’t even stay for the drinks we’d ordered. And this wasn’t twenty years ago; it was in the last year or two. Given his love of shocking remarks you might think nothing would have pleased him better than to take me to such a place—but oh no, he was miserable.

  “And in some obscure way it’s all connected to his hatred of California. Miami was meant to be lively but also grounded and unweird. He wanted to be near the beach, he wanted to see the young men, I suppose, and it may be hard to envision but Conrad on a beach was himself once something to see: He exuded physical strength, as well as an athlete’s grace, and I remember one occasion when a storm was blowing in, and the sea was all a shiny silver gray, and the sky was silver gray—Winslow Homer colors—and out of the breaking waves looking just like some sort of Greek god strides bronze Conrad. The man was truly beautiful.

  “So it made sense he loved the beach, unlike Wes. And yet he didn’t want to be out on the West Coast with what he called ‘all the weirdos.’ Sometimes Conrad could sound more like your average accountant than your average accountant.”

  “Tell me about Wes and the beach.”

  “Wes? I suppose he felt bested by Conrad. He was like you— his skin never would take a tan—and he fretted that his shoulders were too narrow.”

  “He felt like a weakling?”

  “Oh it was all so ridiculous. Wes was so handsome, with or without his clothes! You know what was maybe the most amazing thing about him? It was the way he stayed so handsome, whatever level you inspected him on . . . I mean that man had truly beautiful ears! Most people’s ears are nothing to write home about— mine have kept me from wearing my hair up for years—but I remember one day looking at Wes’s ears and realizing they were picturesque. Like fabulous glowing seashells. And when he went for a physical, I don’t doubt for a minute the doctor with his tongue depressor used to marvel at what gorgeous tonsils Wesley Sultan had.”

  “I met Tiffany recently. And the twins.”

  “Tiffany?” Sally sips deeply from her empty coffee cup. “And?”

  “And she was pretty much what I’d envisioned. But the reason I mention it is because I was amazed, really, how much little Jess resembles Wes. You talk about gorgeous Wes with the flashing blue eyes—well I’ve recently seen the six-year-old version.”

  “That girl’s going to have men jumping out of office buildings for her.”

  Yet for all of Sally’s cheer and levity, melancholy weighs the corners of her eyes. And why not? How could she fail to experience some heartache at the notion that the purest radiance she’d ever known—Wes’s charm, Wes’s charisma—has been reborn in a world removed from hers?

  “We should go back,” she tells me. “You need to lie down, you need to sleep. Then I want to hear all about your visit with Tiffany . . .”

  So we amble back through the sunlight to Sally’s new apartment. She brings out for display her French textbook, her class notes, her homework assignments. She is enrolled at the Académie Varoise de la Langue Française, an institution whose sole building is, she tells me, far less imposing than its name. Her instructor is the iron-haired Mme. Guendouzi, the most immaculate human being in God’s creation, who has branded two of Sally’s homework assignments “un peu sale.” None of the students, not one, has escaped the stigma of being sale, not even Mme. Jeong, a young Korean woman who during class incessantly scrubs her hands with Handi Wipes. Meanwhile I find something hugely heartening in Sally’s amusement with her classmates, and in her flexible ability to transplant herself and flourish in a new routine and a new home— and also I find here something reproachful, as my thoughts drift to the fly-by-night little apartment on East Seventy-ninth Street where I’ve lived the past two years. (And this is perhaps the place to acknowledge publicly what these pages doubtless have already reflected: With each paragraph assembled here, I’m feeling a stronger impulse to step forward and plant myself center stage. It’s a temptation I mean to resist, largely restricting myself to those parentheses and brackets so congenial to the mathematical mind, or at least to the ex–math major—though I do intend, as a reward for good behavior, to grant myself the last word . . .)

  I go upstairs and lie down for half an hour, until I realize that, although my brain’s loopy with fatigue, I’m not yet ready to sleep, and we climb into the Renault and I drive down to the beach.

  In the summer, this narrow stretch of sand (on one side encroached upon by a string of hotels and brasseries and bike-rental shops, on the other by an incoming tide that pushes its prone bathers back upon themselves) must be a dense tapestry of flesh. But on this warm, sunny Saturday in October, it’s relatively empty. There are people playing badminton, and a scatter of children are chasing a yapping little terrier. I strip down to the bathing suit under my trousers and walk steadily into the cold sea, which deepens rapidly.

  I’m a poor swimmer, and a distrustful one—a fitting grandson to the Chester Sultan who drowned in Lake Huron in 1942. When I let go of the land, dropping my legs behind me, I shiver with a midwesterner’s instinctive uneasiness at the sea’s sweeping power. When was the last time I swam among waves? I can’t recall—can’t recall anything, for it seems one result of my surrendering to the sea is the washing away of the very underpinnings of my memory. Pushed mindlessly this way and that, I couldn’t put a sentence together if I tried. It’s all I can do to count one by one as I breaststroke into the bobbing swells—ten strokes, twenty strokes, thirty, forty, fifty. A wave splashes into my mouth and the Mediterranean’s ancient salt flavor on my tongue (a flavor that, way down deep in the brain, ought to taste like home) is a shocking, burning thing. I give up the fight, circling round and capitulating into a sidestroke which, with the sea’s help, brings me within moments back to shore.

  People talk about the moon’s “borrowed light.” My mother sits in borrowed shadow, that of somebody’s else’s vast umbrella. Its owners must have set their towels and picnic basket beneath it hours ago. The sun has since moved on, and the umbrella’s shadow along with it, inching into an empty stretch of sand now claimed by Sally. Even in the shade she wears a long-sleeved cotton turtle-neck, a floppy straw hat, and sunglasses. Her skin, unlike mine, can hold a tan, but neither of us has ever h
ad much use for the sun.

  Still, it’s hugely cheering to have before us a shifting, shouting parade of nearly nude souls—people whose skins lap up the sun the way a cat laps cream. Spirits are high. Under the dark shade of our umbrella, shuttered behind our sunglasses, we might almost be moviegoers sitting in a darkened theater. The film we are watching is called An October Day on a French Beach. With a cast of dozens, if not hundreds. People drift by; conversations chase one another down the sand. It’s all a shaggy-dog story, in which a shaggy dog actually materializes—far down the beach, its body prone on a towel, confronting the incoming waves with noble, leonine placidity.

  Torsos are narrower than they would be at home.

  A few of the women are topless.

  Sally says, “To think I grew up in a house where dancing wasn’t permitted. Along with cardplaying and theatergoing, it was one of the ‘notorious trio.’ You think I’m kidding, but the phrase is genuine, I believe it came down as an official Synod pronouncement. Such activities were invitations to the devil. And somehow I wind up on a topless beach. Honestly, if my parents could see me, their every worst fear would be confirmed.”

  Some twenty feet away, a young German woman (more girl than woman—she can’t be older than eighteen) is playing an odd form of badminton. The racket is shorter than a conventional racket and the birdie is broader and solider. She is wearing no top and the bottom half of her bathing suit is a crisp V about the size of a pocket handkerchief. Her legs are lean and muscular and her breasts are high and full and am I the only person on the beach who feels that under the circumstances there’s something wonderfully improbable in the concentration she invests in her game? For she’s quite skillful, and her boyfriend/opponent (a hollow-chested ponytailed kid also wearing a V of a suit, who might play better if he didn’t insist on keeping a cigarette poked in his mouth) is no match for her. Farther off, a group of frantic small boys is repairing a sand castle undermined by the incoming tide. And farther still, little polycolored sailboats glide, the V’s of their sails inverting the V’s of the skimpy trunks on the narrow hips of the men and women bathers.

  “I’m going to have my second smoke of the day,” Sally says, and I watch—taking pleasure in her pleasure—as she ritualistically prepares for that first, finest puff on a brand-new cigarette.

  As she exhales, she announces, “I’m feeling bad about something,” and in fact this seems a perfectly opportune moment for an admission beginning I’m feeling bad . . . For Sally is radiating contentment, and on such a day, in such a place, nothing she might confess could possibly upset either one of us very much. She says: “Wes died owing me a substantial amount of money.”

  “But surely you’re okay. Financially secure. If you’re not, perhaps I could—”

  “Sweet of you to miss the point, Luke. But I’m not upset on my own behalf.” She inhales another cloud, exhales. “I’m upset on yours.”

  “On mine?”

  “Let’s face it. I’m never going to get that money back, am I? And if I hadn’t given it to Wes, I could have set it aside for you. You’ve read my will, Luke. You know you’re the principal legatee.”

  “So you loaned money to Wes?”

  “After Gordon died. Different times. And I’m still feeling guilty about it. I tried to tell you before. That day in Domat, sitting in the abbey chapel. I meant to tell you then. But I suppose the place intimidated me; the fear of God got into me . . .”

  “How much money?”

  “Seventy-seven thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “Hey, you weren’t kidding.”

  “Plus interest, if anyone was counting, which of course no one is. In retrospect, that’s one of the humorous aspects to it: Wes’s absolutely insisting that the money be repaid with interest.”

  “Good Lord, it’s a fair amount of money. Actually, I’m surprised, frankly. I thought Wes did okay, financially. They must have paid him decently at Great Bay.”

  “Not enough. And evidently less and less as the years went by. You know how the company nearly went under. He was working largely on commission, and the company was offering him less and less that anyone could sell. But it wasn’t living expenses most of the money went to. It was investments.”

  “Investments?” And didn’t I have a right to sound skeptical? Wasn’t this my field, after all?

  “You know how Wes was always scheming.”

  “That’s something most people outgrow, after a loss or two: the schemin’ and dreamin’. They learn to keep it down to a couple dozen lotto tickets.”

  “Oh I’m sure Wes bought those too—Wes bought the whole kit and caboodle, I’m afraid. At first it was some sort of diesel-engine company. And then I think a reforestation process. The truth is I didn’t have the heart to refuse him. Wes was so desperate to break free and show everyone at Great Bay what he could do. That’s the phrase he kept using, ‘to break free.’ How was I going to refuse him?”

  “Now wait a minute. Let’s just hold on one minute. Given that I’d made a career, a if I may so successful career, in investment banking, wouldn’t you think he might have wanted to consult with me?”

  “Wouldn’t you think that that’s why he wouldn’t?”

  Sally’s logic is better than mine.

  I say to her: “And you really thought you might get your money back?”

  “That’s it exactly: I really thought I might. Stranger things had happened in my dealings with Wes Sultan.”

  “And it’s all gone?”

  “I assume so, and I feel more guilty than I can say. I honestly cannot tell you how guilt-stricken it’s left me feeling. I keep thinking about Gordon, who was always so frugal about his savings, so conscientious about ensuring I’d be provided for after his death . . .”

  The poor Catholic kid from Newark: That’s how Gordon liked to picture himself. He, too, had wanted to break free and show them what he could do, and in his unflashy way he’d managed precisely that, with a solid medical practice and a lifelong habit (unimaginative but in the end irreproachable) of buying a few good blue chips and never budging from them. At his death, he’d left Sally an estate of just under $900,000, not including the house in Grosse Pointe and the condominium in North Carolina.

  “So you’re out eighty grand. Your finances are still in good shape.”

  “The fact is, until recently, when you left Gribben, I thought the money wouldn’t much matter to you. That was my rationalization, you see.”

  “And it won’t matter. For heaven’s sake, listen, it’s your money, not mine.”

  “Well, you may be sitting on a comfortable nest egg at the moment. But you don’t have a job, dear, and I assume your funds are finite, just like the rest of ours. How long can you carry on like this? This is your third flight to France in a few months.”

  “I told you, the flights are free. When I left Gribben, I had over four hundred thousand miles banked in frequent-flyer accounts.”

  “But you don’t have four hundred thousand now. Do you see what I’m saying? Things run out.”

  Things run out . . . The contingency Sally is pursuing is dark, and spooky—and almost as remote as, let’s say, the cloud formations arranged over the town of Stags Harbor on my fourth birthday—my first birthday after my parents’ divorce. My memories of earliest childhood are distressingly few. I do much better after Gordon came on the scene, when I was seven, but with his arrival, money worries ceased to be a primary concern. Only if I went far far back, where all my memories blurred into family folktales, could I find accounts of genuine necessity and exaction: that foul, fabled, ferocious land called Want, in which young Sally Sultan, having been disowned by her parents for divorcing Wes, sometimes was forced to swallow all pride and go hat in hand to borrow twenty dollars from a neighbor. A single mother, young Sally had watched her nickels and dimes with care, and still she sometimes would discover, at the end of the month, that she couldn’t meet the electric bill, the phone bill, the car payment. What had
those days been like for her? Of course Sally has always been a worrier— and back then she must have woken up fearful, and gone to her lonely bed fearful, she must have tallied the sums in her head, over and over and day after day, only to ascertain, as the vicious knot in her stomach pulled itself tight, that again she’d come up short . . . Everything in the passage of my own remembered life, which essentially began in Grosse Pointe and proceeded from there to Princeton and from there to Manhattan, was terribly remote from that dark land of Want. For me it was all something of a lark: I liked these tales about the basement apartment on Downward Lane.

  Does it upset me to learn that Wes squandered some eighty thousand dollars of “my” money? Hell, I want Wes to have it— want to resurrect him and present him with the check myself. No, what pains me in Sally’s tale is something else: the image of Wes as the classic doomed “small investor,” plumping down his dream-stake on a roulette wheel spun by a hand he couldn’t see, with all the gambling proceeds to be gobbled up by a “house” he couldn’t identify. (There are times when—I have to think—virtually everyone in the investment game, even the most ruthless, greed-mad, gung ho capitalist, must feel something far more profound than deep reservations: occasional shuddering moments of true horror at a glimpse into a system that consumes the weak as thoughtlessly as a cruising shark tears the leg off a swimmer.)

  “Luke, I know I should have drawn the line at ten thousand. Or let’s say twenty. But I never could stand up to Wes. If I hadn’t felt by rights it was your money, I suppose I would have given him everything I had.”

  “Never able to stand up to him? I hear otherwise, incidentally. Conrad tells me you once gave Wes a black eye.”

  Sally swings round and inspects me—her gaze asks, Is this a story you’re ready for?—before taking a deep drag on her cigarette. Then she says, “Do you want the short version or the long version?”

  “The no-stone-unturned version. This sounds exactly like my sort of story. I want to hear how Sally Admiraal, well known for brushing away mosquitoes rather than swatting them, came to give my father a black eye.”