“We can talk tomorrow,” Millard pledged. “I’m free all afternoon.”
He didn’t want to unlock his office door until the woman departed.
She scrutinized him, as intense as the Grand Inquisitor. “You are going to be here tomorrow, are you not? You are not planning a vacation.”
“No,” he assured her. “I am not planning a vacation.”
That didn’t seem enough to pacify her.
“All I need is five minutes. Five minutes.” She held up her hand, four-and-a-half knotty fingers splayed, as though the concept might be alien to him. “You cannot possibly be so busy that you cannot spare five minutes for an old friend, can you?”
“I can’t spare you even four-and-a-half minutes, Hecuba. Not today.”
“But you must,” she insisted, oblivious to his malice. “To tell you the truth, I have heard a rumor that you are stepping down.”
He turned to face her, his back against his office door.
“Who told you that?”
“I’d rather not say,” said Hecuba. “But if it’s true, I feel you owe it to me to tell me. I don’t think it’s any secret that I’m interested in the position—when you’re ready to step down—and I’m hoping we can arrange a seamless transition.”
“A seamless transition?” echoed Millard.
“That’s all I’m requesting.”
Did this woman really believe he owed her anything? Phenomenal! If he owed her something, it was, as Jackie Gleason would have said, a good sock in the kisser. How could a forty-something assistant professor believe herself in line for his job? No sane person would appoint Hecuba Yilmaz dog catcher, let alone head of her own division, but he’d served up similar predictions many times before, only to be proven wrong. Anything was possible in academia, especially with the right bedfellows.
“I do not want there to be any conflict between myself and Stanley,” she said. Yilmaz had the habit of calling people by their “full” names—which often involved butchering these names for her own pleasure, almost sadistically, as though the distortions gave her power over her victims like the spells of a Shakespearean witch. Stan Laguna’s given name was actually Stanislaw. “People will commend you for a smooth transition, Millard. I am looking out for your legacy.”
Yilmaz touched him on the elbow—a benign gesture that, bestowed by another party, might have come across as endearing, but originating from Hecuba, the act made him want to wrest free his arm. Or change his clothes.
“Thanks for your concern, but rumors of my retirement are greatly exaggerated,” he said. “Especially anonymous ones. I’m far more likely to die than to retire.” He looked pointedly at his wristwatch: nearly twenty past ten. “If I plan on expiring unexpectedly, would you like me to give you advance notice?”
“I am sorry,” answered Yilmaz, “but it is irresponsible to leave these things up in the air.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” he agreed. “I am a grossly irresponsible person.”
He’d given up on courtesy; now he was merely striving to remain civil. Already, a fantasy was leaching into his psyche, a desire to tell this hideous woman exactly what he thought of her.
“Come back tomorrow, Hecuba . . . .”
“You’ll be here? You’re not going to phone in sick, are you?”
“Even if I’m dying of cholera or yellow fever, I won’t call in sick.”
He unlocked his office door.
“Five minutes? Is that really so much to ask?”
“At the moment, I’m afraid it is,” he said—and he shut the door behind him.
You’re an unbearable narcissist and nobody likes you, he thought, but he resisted his compulsion to reopen the door and give voice to his contempt. Because even if he told her how unpleasant he found her, she wouldn’t believe him. That was the amazing thing about disturbed personalities like Hecuba’s: everybody else suffered, but she plowed forward without insight, sowing exasperation and fury in cheerful oblivion.
6
Millard had arranged to meet Lysander at a restaurant in Morningside Heights, on the roof of a one-time luxury hotel just north of Columbia University. He repeatedly assured himself that the choice of location was largely incidental—selected because his own father had favored the Overlook for business lunches—but as the rendezvous hour approached, day by day, he could not shake his other, quiescent motive: Carol, his first wife, lived in one of the park-front high-rises around the corner. Millard had never, obviously, visited her apartment. He wasn’t even certain which of the several upscale towers she inhabited. But as his final breaths grew closer, he found himself drawn to her mesmerically, like a male mantis inching fatally toward a mate’s open jaws. His plan, nonsensical as it sounded, was to stand opposite her complex, across from the cast-iron gate with its hostile finials, from eleven o’clock until noon, allowing fate to determine whether he encountered her on the sidewalk. He recognized the absurdity of this providential approach—especially for a man who’d exiled the Tooth Fairy from his home and had once written to his state assemblyman urging a ban on commercial fortune tellers—but that insight didn’t prevent him from taking the IRT (emblazoned with its bright red numerals) up to 116th Street. He arrived at Carol’s address with five minutes to spare, although his only appointment was with himself.
Twenty-three years had elapsed since he had laid eyes upon Carol, twenty-seven since he’d last spoken to her. But he kept tabs on her life, intermittently, at a distance. During the first decade following their split, he’d read the wedding announcements in the Times every Sunday, hoping to encounter her name; how much less self-reproach he’d have felt if she’d also found a match. Marriage—heterosexual marriage, at least—he’d come to realize, too late, was a tortuous cat-and-mouse game of implicit contracts between the sexes: You exhausted a woman’s youth and beauty, then kept her company during middle age, eschewing fresher, more alluring mates, until the tables turned once again and she looked after you in your decline. Unless, of course, you breached that contract as Millard had done—absconding with Carol’s halcyon years and then shifting his affections to Isabelle, ten years her junior, ultimately cheating destiny once again by offing himself before he grew dependent upon others. Regrettably, Carol’s name never did appear in the Lifestyle section. He’d gladly have fixed her up, if she’d have let him—but he understood she’d have sooner disemboweled herself with a tachi than accepted such humiliation. As the daughter of an alcoholic bookie who drank on credit, his first wife had cared deeply about pride, appearances. On open school night, she insisted the teachers address her as Dr. Sucram. Never, God forbid, as Mrs. Salter. (I didn’t spend seven years studying signal processing to be Mrs. Anything!) Precisely the sort of woman to suffer the most from his treachery. More recently, as Millard’s plans solidified, he’d taken to scanning for her name in the obituaries, afraid that her demise would forestall his own. Of all the contingencies that might have foiled his ambitions, he’d decided, only two commanded any weight: a miraculous recovery by Delilah, which was implausible, or Carol’s sudden death. He didn’t want his older children, especially Lysander, to mourn both parents in short order. And if that sounded calculated—even cold—he wouldn’t deny it; losing Isabelle and Hal in succession, two final blows along a brutal gauntlet, had ossified whatever remained of his capacity for grief.
The last time he’d seen his first wife had been at Arnold’s marriage. That had been only three years after they’d finalized the divorce. In hindsight, he realized, bringing Isabelle with him to the wedding had been a grave error in judgment. Carol refused to acknowledge his existence. Standing only inches from him in the shadow of the billowing chuppah—his son’s cheerfully committed in-laws beaming at the opposite end of the raised platform—his ex-wife wore a tense, unyielding expression that was neither smile nor frown, just pure pain. His mind revved blindly, searching for some word or phrase to palliate her wrath, but you couldn’t undo high treason with a remark about the balmy morning
or the beauty of the Missouri Botanical Garden. (He recalled, bitterly, the hackneyed joke: But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?) During the closing processional, his elbow inadvertently brushed the trumpet sleeve of her gown, and a glacial chill goose-stepped up his arm into the pit of his neck, as though the blood had congealed solid in his arteries. Five years later, when Sally married her naval architect, he’d stayed clear. So that had been a small portion of his penance: shelling out $60,000 for a lavish affair where he dared not show his face. Of course, it wasn’t true penance, because absolution demands remorse. While Millard deeply regretted how he’d betrayed Carol, and especially the eighteen months of deception he’d perpetrated, which had culminated in Maia’s birth, all under the self-serving delusion that he was protecting his wife and children, he did not regret Isabelle—not one kiss, not one stolen caress, not one precious moment of her company. That was asking too much.
Millard seated himself on a bench opposite Carol’s complex. Someone had abandoned a partially consumed sandwich on the adjoining bench; flies circled the wax paper and a company of red ants carried off grains of what looked like roast beef and pastrami. A homeless young woman and her dog, a well-tended beagle, dozed on a slab of cardboard under a nearby linden. From the park below rose the shouts of toddlers scampering through sprinklers. Pedestrians emerged from the ivy-coated walkways on either side of the speared gate—an elderly couple holding hands, a bare-chested jogger with a mynah bird atop his shoulder—but not Carol. Lurking at her door in his necktie and sweater on the warmest day of the summer, his sport jacket draped over his forearm, an uneasy self-consciousness overcame Millard. He’d hoped to appear inconspicuous, just another old man out for a harmless bask, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he looked like a stalker—a deranged ex-lover come to spy on his former spouse. Rationally, of course, he understood his fears to be groundless: He’d sat on countless park benches on summer mornings, clad in identical clothes, and not once had such a fear crossed his mind. Deep down, he realized that had he been seated on the very same bench, engaged in the very same behavior, but for a different purpose—let’s say, waiting to pick up his granddaughters from ballet—he’d have felt perfectly at ease. Context, alas, proved defining. Murder, as they say, will out. And prowling too. Strangely enough, waiting for Carol also had a regressive effect on his psyche—he momentarily felt like her husband once again, beset with all of the fears and anxieties that had cleaved them apart.
A particular experience with Isabelle came to mind: They’d attended her fiftieth high school reunion at the Hotel Pennsylvania. Millard had been there once before—with his father, in 1964, to cheer Robert Kennedy during his run for the Senate. In his memory, the gold-lacquered balustrades had glistened, as though polished hourly, while the ceilings in the grand ballroom had towered twenty yards. One could easily picture Glenn Miller on the bandstand or the Boswell Sisters warbling “I Found a Million Dollar Baby” beneath the cut-glass chandeliers. In contrast, the hotel they actually entered that evening had a shabby, poorly tended aura of evaporated swank. Plastic plants poked from oversized brass tureens in the lobby. “I don’t think Glenn Miller would be caught dead in this place,” he whispered to Isabelle—knowing that she would jab his side, her cue that she wanted him to behave himself. He tried his darnedest. He rocked his hips to Martha and the Vandellas, slow-danced with his wife to Dean Martin crooning “Everybody Loves Somebody,” listened with clamped tongue to her childhood girlfriend, Linda Blauer, extoll the virtues of Ayurvedic medicine. He even took his turn at the karaoke mic, belting out “Under the Boardwalk” in the wrong key. Isabelle, who looked truly radiant in her strapless evening gown, appeared to be enjoying herself, so Millard was dumbfounded when, in the cab on the ride home, she burst into tears.
“I know this is crazy, dear,” she explained, “but I’m still not popular. I’m sixty-eight years old and those girls—women—still made me feel like a gangly, unwanted teenager.” She’d even cursed several of these sexagenarian matrons by name. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I don’t know what’s come over me . . . . One too many Mai Tais, I’m afraid . . . .”
Millard had helped Isabelle laugh off the episode with an onslaught of kisses. Now, regressing to his former married self, he understood what his late wife had experienced. Even the act of standing impotent opposite Carol’s development, rather than ringing her bell, aroused feelings of inadequacy that he hadn’t stomached in decades. He could imagine his former spouse storming onto the sidewalk, fists balled, ranting at him for his cowardice. “Spineless as ever,” she’d declare. “You’re going to take the easy way out and you don’t even have the courage to face your own ex-wife before you do it. Do you really expect to build up the pluck to loop a belt around your neck?” And she’d have him dead to rights: He still dreaded her displeasure.
The homeless young woman stirred on her makeshift blanket. All that was required were a few words from him and the disheveled girl could be napping on his sofa, freshly soaked in his brass-fitted bath and wrapped in Isabelle’s favorite magenta robe, the one he’d withheld from Goodwill, despite the instructions in the red notebook—whose terrycloth he still pressed to his nostrils in moments of yearning. He might, on a whim, leave his entire estate to this unfortunate creature. Arnold and Sally certainly didn’t need the money, while Maia, who’d nearly completed her chemistry PhD, already had six-figure job offers from industry. So the only person who’d really suffer was Lysander—and who could say that a surprise disinheritance wasn’t precisely the kick-in-the-pants the boy required. Anyway, his mother would always help him in a pinch, so he was unlikely to end up starving or street homeless. How easily a few kind words to this dozing stranger could reload the dice. Yet some primeval, clannish instinct kept Millard from acting. Instead—as though to protect his estate from the pull of her misery, he launched himself off the park bench and made a beeline for the elevated security post that guarded Carol’s sanctuary.
The stout, acne-scarred guard slid open a pane in the booth.
“I was just wondering . . .” said Millard.
His words caught somewhere about his Adam’s apple. Inside the guard booth, on the radio, two voices argued in Spanish. Water trickled from the head of a nearby hydrant. Millard reached for the side of the security post, catching his balance on the metal rail.
“You okay?” asked the guard.
Millard had planned to ask whether Dr. Sucram was home, but that sounded shady, he realized, possibly even illicit, unless he planned to visit, so he had little choice. “I’m here to see Dr. Sucram,” he announced. “I’ve forgotten the apartment number.”
“East tower or west?”
Millard shook his head. “It’s been a while . . . .”
The guard did not appear persuaded. He opened a three-ring binder and ran his thumb down a list of residents until he found Carol.
“And your name?”
“Lysander,” Millard lied quickly. “Lysander Salter.”
What a farfetched moniker: Lysander. He’d wanted a distinctive, indelible name—Carol had already gotten her way with Arnold and Sally—and calling the boy after a Spartan navarch seemed, at the time, both dignified and ambitious. Maybe also a slap in the face to his wife, who’d sought something “simple and all-American.” In hindsight, of course, the name proved a farce, as improbable as a city-state run by two kings, and Hal Storch—never one to hold his tongue—had pointed out that the original Lysander had been an assassin and a pederast. Yet the most substantial irony was that Millard’s son, named after the greatest admiral of the ancient world, had never learned how to swim. According to Jewish tradition—as related by Rabbi Steinmetz—this fact alone confirmed Millard an abject failure as a parent in the eyes of God, for Talmudic law required that a father pass along only three skills to his sons: a knowledge of Torah, a trade, and a steady Australian crawl. Or, at least, enough dog-paddling know-how to keep his head above water, explained Steinmetz. The
re’s no consensus among the commentaries on precisely what is meant by swimming. Steinmetz, of course, hadn’t used the words “abject failure”; that was all Millard’s self-scourging. What the rabbi had actually said, when Millard had sought his wisdom on the subject of parenting, was that different men marched to different drumbeats. Is he killing anybody? Is he worshiping idols? No. Then let him find his way. Easy enough to say when your son wasn’t the one whose drumbeat wandered onto an ice floe.
The guard dialed Carol’s number. He looked as though he might yawn when he announced Millard’s false name, but betrayed no surprise when instructed to send him up. “East tower. Apartment 15-C. Follow that path on the right to the second set of doors and take any elevator.”
“That’s right. 15-C,” said Millard. “On the tip of my tongue.”
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