Simon never thought the weekend was going to be anything other than fine, and despite his bone-tired exhaustion, and those new concerns considered on the drive, he is buoyantly happy seeing his sisters, seeing his sisters with his children, seeing his wife laughing with their daughters and his sisters. Happy knowing he will soon plumb his mother’s expertise. Happy knowing he will soon celebrate his father’s fantastic achievements, and later, when the two of them have time alone, ask Harry for advice. Simon pictures everyone together at breakfast tomorrow, outside in the splendid desert morning—bagels and cream cheese and lox and onions, and the mimosas Harry loves, juice for the “wee ones,” as Camille has called his daughters since their births, the adults still flying high from the Man of the Decade party—and then, when everyone is sated, and a little tipsy once again, he will tell them about the ILA invitation, the conference in Colombia, he and Elena taking the trip together, his parents offering, without his having to ask, “Of course, you’ll bring the girls back here, leave them with us, we’ll take care of everything, no, not a word, we’re not going to take no for an answer,” and he is smiling enormously when he says to his sisters, to his wife, to his young daughters fidgeting beneath their car seat straps, “Follow me. I’ll lead the way. I’ll lead us back home.”
And in a few minutes, engines on, air-conditioning at full blast, Simon leads the charge in Elena’s blue SUV, followed by Camille in her trusty old green Honda, followed by Phoebe in her pristine year-old black Audi coupe. The three cars exit the mall and return to the highway for a while, then coast off it, motorcading through the city, making the rights and lefts needed to reach, at last, Agapanthus Lane, a lane that is peaceful and quiet, with its large, wellkept homes set far back, protected from view by tough desert plantings.
Up the long drive to the house, at the midpoint the forty-foot palm tree that Camille, at thirteen, named Double M for Margaret Mead, and Lucy remembers, chanting, “Double M, Double M, Double M, Double M,” in a constant loop. Another few moments, and they spot Roma in the doorway, waving them in, grinning at them, her love washing over them.
“You said noon, and you’re all here at noon on the dot,” she calls out. “And all together, this is a first. Where are my delightful granddaughters?”
Simon and Elena lift them out and the little girls run to their savah. “Oh, yes, these hugs are yummy! Who’s hungry? Who wants to swim in the pool? Who needs something cold to drink?”
Suitcases and duffels and hanging bags are set at the front door, and when everyone has gathered around Roma, she says, “I’m just going to throw this out there, that I think you should all consider staying on, staying for the week. Nobody say no, just think about it. No one really needs to go home tomorrow. Here’s what I know, what we all know, that life happens while we’re away. Don’t let’s do that this time. Let’s spend real time together. Let’s be the family we have always been. I need you all here. I always need you all here.”
The siblings, as in sync as a choir, begin laughing all over again, the tenth or fifteenth wave of laughter they’ve experienced since coming together at the mall.
“What?” Roma says. “What’s funny?”
“Usually you wait a few hours before asking us to stay longer,” Camille says.
“I decided not to waste time.”
“Hey,” Simon says. “Where’s Dad?”
Roma would like to know where Harry is, too. She has texted him twice and left a voicemail, and her husband seems to have gone AWOL, which has left her with a flicker of worry. But for her children, she smiles and gives an unconcerned shrug, even as she takes in that Phoebe is alone, no Aaron Green holding her hand, that Camille is oddly aglow, that Simon’s eyes are sunken, with black circles around them.
“His match probably went long. But come on, everybody, let’s go in. I’ve made a pitcher of lemonade iced tea, and the chaises are all waiting for you around the big pool, and to eat we have …” And Simon, the sole man this moment among all these capable, strong women, is left collecting the bags, using his shoulder to close the tall front doors behind him.
SEVENTEEN
HARRY IS PARKED IN an alley, utterly failing in a desperate attempt to reverse time, to return to this morning, when he woke in his bed as the man he was, or rather, as the man he thought he was, before this awful knowledge changed everything.
On this day that is supposed to be a red-letter day in his life, he thinks about confessing to Roma this wicked, corrupt, immoral, unscrupulous truth about himself. Will she ever believe he had no recollection of his deceit until it was revealed to him on his usual court playing his usual Saturday tennis with Levitt? Will she ever believe he had no idea that she knew all these years about his illicit trading, that he didn’t know to be grateful she has never once mentioned it, or used it against him, or reminded him why they really moved to the desert? Will she ever believe there is a voice, a voice that is not his, speaking to him in his head? And how will their children respond when they learn everything they believe about their father is grounded on a bedrock of falsehoods?
Bedrock? Yes, because the swamp of his lies has long solidified.
Falsehoods? That’s a falsehood in itself.
What he did was not merely utter falsehoods—how he wishes it had only been that, but it wasn’t. Nothing so trivial, so easy to forgive. What he did—what he did was intentional and active wrongdoing.
He, Harry Tabor, long ago in his past, executed, effected, made happen, serious wrong.
He leans against the headrest and closes his eyes. He sees himself in his relative youth, in his sharp suits, in the hallways of the stockbrokerage firm, taking advantage of the new electronic trading platform Instinet, and the new exchange-based NASDAQ system, able to make hundreds—nay, thousands—of trades based on verboten information, without having to step onto the stock market floor and dealing with the open outcry format, without the brokers’ eagle eyes and ears monitoring his dishonest buy and sell orders, working instead in the shimmer of the blue glare of the computer screen in his own office, in total privacy.
And in that total privacy, one night … yes, he remembers.
He’d said genug.
The Yiddish word his mother used. Lenore didn’t know many Yiddish words, her parents had saved that language for their private talk, but she knew that word, and so Harry knew that word, too. And that particular night, he’s seeing it so clearly … he was in his office reviewing what he’d amassed from information he shouldn’t have used, from which he’d created a fortune, an unbelievable accumulated profit, the spoils electronically wired to that CST account in the Cayman Islands, and he’d said genug.
He remembers telling himself genug, enough, that it was time to stop, and he had stopped.
But today, that genug is another hard lash against his back, for he didn’t stop trading randomly, didn’t pluck a number out of a hat, for the number at which he stopped himself was eighteen million.
He had blasphemed something inherently Judaic. In childhood, of course he had learned the importance of the number eighteen, that it was related to the Hebrew word for life, chai, and that Jews gave chai, financial gifts and donations in multiples of eighteen. Had he given any thought back then about why he stopped the trades there? Did he think he stopped for no apparent reason?
The reason is so apparent, for that number is sewn into his life, into his upbringing.
He thinks of the eighteen-dollar checks Mordy and Lenore gave him on his birthdays when he was a boy, a check for ninety dollars and eighteen cents when he graduated high school, a check for nine hundred and eighteen dollars when he graduated from college, a check for eighteen hundred dollars when he graduated from business school. And he thinks of himself and Roma writing heartfelt birthday cards to Phoebe, Camille, and Simon, slipping in checks in amounts that were multiples of eighteen, the checks growing larger each year from their thirteenth birthdays on. After their wrapped and bowed presents, his children opened that one special card,
which held a multiple-of-eighteen check, and he had always taken them on their birthdays to stand in line at the bank, walking them up to the window, watching them release the check from their hot little hands and slide it over for depositing into the accounts he had set up for each, instructing them, as they walked out of the bank, that the check came with responsibility to not waste it on frivolous things, but rather to grow the money, to donate some part to a charity of their choice. He had been teaching them about what money could do, about the prospects for the future that it could provide. Oh! he thinks, how sanctimonious he was, in his certainty about himself, that he knew what was best, because he was doing his best, was a leader among men, was a carrier of flaming candles into the dark, while he had taken the truth of his memories and obliterated them.
How is he to behave now in these drastically altered circumstances, with these brutal facts known to him? It is impossible, that’s what all of this is—all these feelings, this newly recovered knowledge of his propensity and talent for lying, for duplicity, impossible to be saddled with such egregious information, knowing, because the dry voice told him so, that there is more to come, that will be revealed to him, or rather, that he must reveal to himself.
Somehow he had nodded with a semblance of artificial pleasure when Levitt said, “We’re going to celebrate tonight in your honor,” and then managed to drive away from the park, away from Levitt standing at his Maserati, to Luigi’s, where he now sits in his car with the air conditioner running.
Through the alley-side barred glass door, he sees Luigi in the back of his shop, a tailor made for the movies—short, friendly, old-world Italian—who once made fine clothes for the movie stars during that Palm Springs heyday; that heyday long gone when he brought Roma and their young daughters to this desert; that heyday now, at long last, making a comeback. This adopted city of his has changed for the better in the years since their arrival, and until this morning he was sure he was doing his part.
He had looked forward to this errand, to the tailor holding out the sharp tuxedo he made specially for Harry, donning the tuxedo for final inspection, when it still belonged more to Luigi than to him—though the bill was paid in full previously, Luigi fussing around him, over him, over the opulent suit, one last time, to make sure all met the tailor’s exacting standards.
Harry bangs his head against the headrest again and again, then stops. He cannot indulge himself in this pitiful way. He is no longer entitled to savor this moment, this experience. He may have to wear that tuxedo tonight, but he can’t pretend those memories are still blocked and forgotten. Not now, when he recalls the trading and the money he made from that trading.
Money he grew with smarts and talent. And when the banking laws changed, when it became harder to keep numbered accounts, he did the right thing, turned the money into Treasury notes of various durations, that he redeemed stateside as they matured, depositing the funds slowly into CST’s accounts. And those accounts are all legitimate, reported each year, taxes properly paid.
But wait. Wait, wait, wait.
Among all those obliterated memories, this is newly recalled.
Or rather, he recollects taking those actions, of course he does, but where did he think the money came from? Had he thought he was handling his earnings from his stockbroker years? He made a lot of money back then, proper, clean, and legal money, but had he really believed he’d hard-earned eighteen million? Much more than eighteen million by then, with the accrued interest, with the way he’d managed it.
Yes, he had believed it.
He absolutely had believed it.
A double transmutation, a two-step sorcery—illicit information into unclean money, then his memory washing it clean. Under different circumstances, he could almost marvel at his brain’s tenacious ability to erase.
What he knows about himself now, it’s horrible.
Horrible, but was it any worse than what others were doing during those years? Horrible, but his actions had never hurt anyone. Horrible, but he has used the illegitimate money only for philanthropy, only for CST. Does it matter why he founded CST when his misdeeds funded altruism? When he has helped so many people? That’s all solid and real. Shouldn’t it be weighed and measured, constitute a balancing of the scales? It’s a splinter of leeway, a flicker of hope instantly extinguished. He has no origin story, as the reporter phrased it, only a creation myth.
He is staring into the nothingness of the sky and then Luigi steps out through the back door, sees Harry sitting in his sporty gold Mercedes. His face lights up, and he raises a wrinkled hand with long, thin fingers as limber as a dancer’s legs, and calls out in his movie-perfect Italian-accented English, “Come, come, my fine friend, come see the work of impeccability I have made for you,” and Harry has no choice but to open the car door and step out into his changed world, bewildered. How is he supposed to figure out what there is left to figure out, to remember about his past?
In the shop’s chilly air, the tailor points to the ebony tuxedo gleaming alone on a metal rack, casts a hard eye at Harry’s tennis clothes, at his slick skin.
“Ah, Mr. Harry, you are too sweaty to try on, but I have no worries, and neither should you, my work is faultless, without any shortcuts. I’ll put it in its bag, and off you can go. Come tell me next week how you felt wearing it tonight.”
Then Harry is out in the alley, setting the singular suit flat in the back, climbing into the driver’s seat, wondering how to handle, to manage, to correct his past, which he used to trust with conviction, when it was fixed and inviolable, a past of which he could be proud.
EIGHTEEN
HER MOTHER ACCEPTED AARON Green’s absence without a questioning look, but now, stuck in the shallow end, sandwiched between Roma and Camille on the pool steps, watching Elena bobbing up and down in the water, Phoebe is being asked to describe Aaron Green’s features. She thought she’d already done this for them months ago during phone calls in which she imbued Aaron with the right physical touches to make him real, identified his hair color, its texture, but she’s being asked to describe him again, in more detail, while her mother stares directly at her. Phoebe looks skyward, as if thinking about her lover’s many attributes.
She should simply say the relationship is over. She’s sad, but not heartbroken. While it seemed they shared much in common, they didn’t, not really. And she hadn’t mentioned it, because it’s Harry’s weekend, no reason to dwell on a failed love right now.
She’s sure she’s going to speak words that make it clear the relationship has ended, but then she says, “His eyes aren’t cat eyes, per se, but not completely almond-shaped either, and they’re a soft, late-summer green. And his voice. His voice is full-bodied, with a hint of some kind of twang, and he’s got great, broad shoulders, and strong hands, and really, really nice teeth.”
How strange that describing her nonexistent lover brings a delighted smile to her face. She wants to wipe it away. She wants to start laughing hysterically. She’s dug herself deeper once again. She can’t turn back now, but why does no one say he sounds like a man on the cover of a romance novel? She stares at the feet of her mother and her sister under the water, and then at her own toes, the family resemblance captured in those small digits.
Camille starts making a weird noise with her mouth, and then Roma is doing the same, and Elena follows along, two Jews and a Catholic ululating in a way that makes Phoebe think of Muslim women at a wedding, or a funeral.
“Yes, yes, he sounds great,” Camille says. “But how is he in bed?”
Which startles Phoebe. Not because Camille has asked this personal question in front of Roma—their psychologist mother began talking to them about sex when they were very young, with Phoebe when Roma found her with a finger down her underpants—but because in building her creation, Phoebe hasn’t once actually thought about the kind of kisser Aaron Green might be, or how they would be together in bed. Is he talented in the lovemaking arts? Gentle when called for, forceful when that’s w
hat she desires? She never even figured out his background. Where did he grow up? Where did he go to college? Was he an athlete, playing hockey or basketball? Does he still play basketball? Did he go to graduate school? Does he have two living parents? Are they still married or divorced? Does he have brothers and sisters? How was he raised? She never thought to decide whether or not he was Jewish. But she gave him the name Aaron Green, so he probably is. And if he is, then he’s circumcised, and she pictures a statuesque circumcised penis, at the ready.
What is wrong with her? Well, she knows what’s wrong with her, she’s becoming a compulsive liar, but how come in her own fantasy she didn’t imagine all the ways this fake lover would satisfy her? She should be able to roll out the specifics easily, but she can’t think of a thing, her memorial trove of past relationships, of past doings in bed, all gone from her head; even the details of the recent sex with the heart surgeon refuse to be recollected.
She looks to Elena, hoping she’ll interpret Phoebe’s reticence as a lover’s diplomacy, but Elena only grins, and then Camille laughs.
“When did you become so circumspect? You’ve told me the details about every sexual interaction you’ve ever had since we were teenagers.”
Which is true.
It is her mother who steps in. “Let’s not grill her. Sometimes sex with someone we think we might love is special and should be kept private. Is that what’s going on here? Do you think you might love this Aaron Green?”
Phoebe will be easy and breezy—her mother’s suspicions are so easily aroused—and she says, “Oh, it’s still early days. I don’t want to get ahead of myself.”
But then, because she can’t help herself, because she has either truly become a compulsive liar, or is verging on something worse, like becoming a pathological liar, which she knows, because of Roma, is a psychological condition, either a stand-alone disorder or a symptom blended into other mental disorders, she says, “But he really is sensational. I can’t wait for you all to meet him.”
The Family Tabor Page 15