Rich Boy

by Sharon Pomerantz

  New York was especially hot and humid that July, and for the first time in a while he had trouble with his asthma. One evening at work, he had to pull over for fear of driving off the road. The customer, an elderly man, had seemed sympathetic at the time, talking of a granddaughter with the same problem and insisting on paying the full fare. But the man filed a complaint with the review board—such complaints, in a year of falling ridership, were taken seriously, plus the man, it turned out, was a retired judge, and Robert feared having to go to a hearing. Was driving a cab even worth the hassle anymore? Yet how many other jobs fit his limited hours?

  Nights were the worst. When he did sleep, his nightmares returned, perhaps brought on by the frequent use of his asthma inhaler. He had recently bought a proper mattress and box spring because sleeping on the floor was bad for his asthma. He had a small air conditioner in his bedroom, too, bought used, and it helped cool the place down, but never so much that he needed even a top sheet. One morning, at four, he awoke from a nightmare unable to breathe. He grabbed for his emergency inhaler, knocking over a lamp, and put the thing to his lips. The mist hit his throat, and he waited, seconds passing—nothing happened. He pushed the release button again, wheezing now. Barry entered the room and turned on the light.

  “What’s wrong?” He looked at Robert, pale and panicked. “The stuff’s not helping?”

  Robert felt light-headed and pointed to the bathroom. There was some cheap stuff from the drugstore; sometimes it worked when the prescription didn’t. Barry went to find it as Robert passed out. When he woke up, Barry was ripping the device from its plastic casing, holding it over Robert’s mouth. “You want to go to the hospital?”

  Not waiting for Robert to answer, he went to the phone and dialed 911, then quickly cleared the apartment of any offensive matter. They arrived fifteen minutes later, just as Barry was finishing up, and by then Robert seemed to be breathing just fine.

  “Who knew you guys actually came when called?” Barry said to the attendant, who insisted on strapping Robert onto a gurney and carrying him out reclining like a pasha.

  “Could this be any more embarrassing?” Robert asked Barry, as the attendants took him out to the elevator. Barry turned down the chance to ride along; he would follow in his car.

  Robert expected to be taken to Harlem Hospital, which was public, or to NYU, which, though on the other side of the city, and private, might cut him a break because he was a student. Instead he was taken to St. Luke’s, closest to his house. In the ER, patients were not curled up on tables, or moaning in pain for all the world to see. Instead, they had spaces curtained off where you could be examined and suffer in private. The floors were spotless, and every few minutes a nurse arrived to see how he was, assuring him that the doctor would arrive any moment. How was he going to afford this?

  Half an hour later, Barry arrived and found Robert behind his curtain. “I fucking hate hospitals,” Barry said. “They just remind me of when Pop was sick.”

  “Before I woke up, I was dreaming about him,” Robert said. He had seen his father swimming in the ocean, like he used to, with his uncles Frank and Fred, and his grandfather, all of them, swimming one minute, then belly-up, like dead fish, the next. And Robert stood onshore watching them, one after another, float to the surface.

  “Robert,” Barry said, “you gotta calm down, man.”

  “It’s you that’s making me nervous,” Robert said, watching Barry pace in the small, curtained-off space, too small for such movements, so his elbows kept jostling the curtain.

  “You ever wonder why no one in our family ever did what they set out to do?”

  “What did they set out to do?” Barry asked. “Besides keep a job and pay the mortgage? I never really noticed the agenda beyond that —”

  “Could you put it in neutral for a minute?” Robert said, his voice raspy and strained, as it always was after a bad attack. He wanted, more than anything, to sleep, but the medicine kept him up. It was a kind of purgatory, added to by his brother’s refusal to stand still or stop talking.

  Barry took out a silver flask from his jacket and had a drink.

  “It’s not even five in the morning.”

  “You want me to come down?” Barry whispered. “It’s this or smoke a joint, and I don’t think I can do that here.”

  “What are you doing with that flask?” Robert asked. Barry passed it to him, and he took a sip, then wiped off the excess with the back of his sleeve. The liquid felt good going down, warm. “There was a guy I knew in college had one of these.”

  “It was payment,” Barry snapped. “On a debt.”

  “I was trying to say before that they had dreams, you know. Pop owned that candy store before we were born. And Uncle Frank with the repair shop.”

  “For like five minutes.”

  “But he still owned it.”

  “And Uncle Izzy Vishniak, with the lightbulb that never burned out.”

  “Did he ever get a patent?”

  “Whadda you think? And then Uncle Georgie, with the night school classes?”

  “Yeah, but he never got a diploma.”

  “My point exactly. They all wanted things and they all ended up at the post office.”

  The doctor arrived and began to examine him. Barry talked the whole time, so that the doctor, who was around his own age, asked Robert if his brother needed assistance, then placed a mask attached to a nebulizer over Robert’s mouth and told him to breathe. Barry stepped away for a few minutes, and when he came back the doctor was writing a prescription for a new pill, telling Robert that something even better would be approved soon, was already used in Europe and Canada. Barry asked the doctor what he’d prescribed—steroid? Tranquilizer? Upper? Downer?

  Robert took the nebulizer off his face. “Shut up already! Could you do that for me?”

  The doctor smiled, then told Robert to keep the mask on and left.

  “Why don’t you go call Stacia?” Robert asked.

  “You want me to tell them you’re here? What are you, crazy?”

  “No, just call,” Robert said. “See if Pop’s okay.”

  “I’ll scare them half to death at this hour. And keep that damn thing over your face.”

  Robert did as he was told.

  An hour later, at seven, having signed all the necessary paperwork, he stood in front of the hospital, watching an ambulance roar down 113th. Barry pulled the car around. “Maybe I should drive,” Robert said.

  “I’m in better shape than you are.”

  “No you’re not.” They argued and then flipped a coin, and Barry won. He drove down Broadway, past the bookshops and bars and restaurants, the pharmacy and bodegas, a strange mixture of high and low, stores that served both Harlem and the university. Store owners were coming out to unlock the metal gratings on their establishments; a garbage truck stopped in front of a bar. Two women, dressed as if it were still night, walked arm in arm toward the Barnard dorms. Barry halted at a red light and asked Robert what was wrong.

  “I wonder how much that stay is going to cost, is all,” he said. For years he had spent very little and now, all at once, his whole life was bills. “Not much coming in these days.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Barry said.

  “Easy for you to say,” Robert replied, as the light turned green.

  “I mean, I paid it. I was the one that called the ambulance, and I had a good month.”

  “When don’t you have a good month?” Robert asked, but then thanked him. He never knew how to take a spontaneous act of generosity from Barry.

  “At least they tried,” Barry said. “You could be from a family where nobody even tried.”

  “True,” Robert said. He leaned his elbow out the open window. Already he could feel the beginnings of the heat of the day. By noon it would be unbearable. “You remember what Uncle Frank always said?”

  “Nice guys finish last?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Think of it this way,” Barry
replied. “Frank is a hell of a lot nicer than you’ll ever be.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Barry replied, shifting the clutch as they turned down Eighty-sixth Street and sped toward home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Robert makes the grade

  Perhaps his brother was right, because a week later Robert found out that he’d made Law Review. The news came in a phone call from the editor in chief, a third-year named Nan. Robert asked if it was his comments on the landmark preservation case that had made the difference. “No,” she said, chomping on some gum as she spoke, “your summary read like notes to the gardening-club set.” What had impressed the staff was his personal statement, an essay to which he had given all of fifteen minutes of his time, about his work at the law center.

  Making Law Review bestowed a kind of importance on Robert—his classmates, Nan told him, would know who he was now; his professors would, too. He felt as if he’d been rescued from some terrible future by a lucky fluke. Lucky. He rolled the word around in his mind. Probably there was another word for this.

  On the first day of his second year, Robert awoke elated. Drinking his early-morning coffee, he felt as if the world were his. Barry, seeing him rushing back and forth in the kitchen, gathering his things and whistling, asked what he was on. “I’m high on life,” he replied.

  “You’re a fucking psycho is what you are,” Barry yelled after Robert, who was now waiting for the elevator. “All summer you brood like Hamlet. I can’t say a word without you snapping at me!”

  Robert decided to walk the three flights down. Barry went to the top of the stairs and yelled after him, “These moods of yours, Robert! Get yourself a shrink!”

  THE GETTING OF THE THING proved more exciting than the reality. Soliciting, fact-checking, and proofreading articles was hard, detail-oriented work under the best of circumstances, but he now worked in an overheated, moldy basement office with a group of younger, tightly wound perfectionists who labored for the glory of faculty members and the hope of publishing the occasional note or lending a suggestion. He enjoyed the articles on legal history—was allowed, even, to write a short piece on how the zoning changes in lower Manhattan were affecting the shape of the city. But theory and its obtuse, endlessly circular language bored him to tears. The same people proofed and reproofed each other’s work again and again—the point being to catch even the tiniest human error, then champion oneself for having caught what one’s colleagues were too stupid to catch—a process guaranteed to create screaming matches over minutiae.

  They worked particularly hard in the week before one of the Review’s bimonthly issues went to press, and during those times he was often thrown in with the sloppily attractive but annoying Nan, the editor who’d said such critical things about his application. Nan worked harder than any of the men she managed and did not wear her position with any particular modesty. By winter she had secured a clerkship after graduation with an appellate judge, and she took particular relish in bossing everyone around. Her clothing was wrinkled because she often slept on the battered conference table instead of going home. Her curly brown hair half-covered her face, the occasional loose strand winding up stuck to a galley, or in his coffee cup or someone’s lunch; her presence was said to be just that ubiquitous.

  The stress of the place when they were on deadline, the backaches and headaches from leaning over long strips of type, the manner in which Nan, chewing vigorously on endless sticks of wintergreen gum, stood over his shoulder pointing out problems that it was generally too late to fix, made him tense and horny. He supposed it did the same thing to her, because after these late-night deadlines they often went back to her studio on West Tenth Street and, before they could even get the key in the door, were undressing each other on the stairway. There was no question of their relationship being more than physical. In the light of day they couldn’t stand each other, fought often, and were considered, in the politics of the Review, to be mortal enemies, a fact that made their rendezvous even more intoxicating and ultimately, disposable.

  The Law Review made a whole new level of job possible for Robert, and this was doubly so after his first midterms went well. Among the many places he interviewed for summer work was Alexander, Lenox and Wardell, a midsize firm known for its real estate department. The firm’s cofounder, Jack Alexander, was just then in the news as one of the lawyers who’d presented friend-of-the-court briefs supporting the preservation of Grand Central Station.

  His advisor, an alum who was married to a lawyer at a very large first-tier firm, said that Alexander, Lenox and Wardell had just started recruiting at NYU—in the past, she said, they generally got their people from Columbia and Yale—and the place was known to be formal in its style, kind of stodgy. “I could stand a little bit of formality,” Robert replied, “a little stodginess.” Though this firm did not pay as well as some of the larger ones, to him the summer money was enormous—four hundred dollars a week, over twice what his father made per week after thirty years of service.

  His first interview, just before Christmas, involved facing four lawyers, all overly serious young associates. The three men and one woman wore black suits and white shirts—one man had a royal blue tie, but the others stuck to neutrals. They sat in a row, looking to Robert like a firing squad that also provided funeral services, and their questions focused on the basics: what courses he enjoyed most, why he’d gotten mostly Bs his first year when clearly he was capable of better—were there mitigating circumstances? Robert wondered when a B had ceased to be respectable, but pointed out that it had taken him awhile to get the hang of things, which was probably the wrong answer. He was also asked many questions about his work at the Patricia Friesèe Alexander clinic—which was funded by, among other people, Jack Alexander. The late Patricia was his wife—Robert’s work at the clinic was part of why he got the interview, though his enthusiasm for the place did not get him any smiles. What, he wondered, might have made these people smile? The woman on the panel talked mostly about what they might offer him, and this made him relax a bit more and finally sit back in his chair.

  By the second interview, a month later, he was less frightened of the place, which took up two floors of a glass-and-chrome office building on Sixtieth, close to Lexington. The firm had been around since the war, but the decor was strangely modern, even futuristic. The walls were white, the stairs up to the second floor metal. Behind them hung an enormous silk weaving in swirling colors of black and white and gold. Walking behind the secretary to the office of the partner who interviewed him took concentration—he wanted to examine the cream-colored walls with their assortment of abstract art, paintings so spare that a child might have done them in art class. Certainly the place did not feel stuffy, but he did not understand then that a decorator’s taste and a firm’s philosophy could be two different things.

  He met with Phillip Healey, a freckled blond who dealt with the summer associates. He was young for a partner, or at least youthful-looking, and had a cultivated but friendly manner.

  “Is there a lot of public-interest law done here?” Robert asked, thinking of the firm’s connection to the law clinic.

  “A certain amount,” Healey said, enunciating his words with care. “Summer associates particularly, but if you’re looking for a major commitment to the public sector —”

  “I want to make money,” Robert said.

  The man smiled. “That’s honest,” he said. “Perhaps too honest.”

  So what was the right note? he wondered, beginning to panic. He wanted to make money and, when possible, he wanted to do right. Were the two incompatible? Did he sound naïve? Robert felt that the interview was not going well, but then Healey gave him a hand.

  “You mentioned that you were interested in landmark preservation. Can you elaborate?”

  “Yes. I think it’s only a matter of time before more of lower Manhattan goes the way of SoHo, especially now, with so many tax incentives for development
and conversion.”

  Healey smiled and leaned forward, and Robert continued talking, feeling encouraged. “But with opportunity, I think, comes responsibility—and the tension between a livable city and a profitable city excites me.”

  “We represent several big and many smaller developers,” Healey said. “If you know at this stage of the game that real estate is your passion, even better. There are other practice groups here, but real estate is a big focus.”

  “So I’ll be working mostly for real estate lawyers?” Robert asked.

  Healey assured him that he would get plenty of experience, but he didn’t answer Robert’s question. “It’s a tough time, as you say, but there are opportunities,” he continued, “public-private partnerships, and a renewed interest in preservation even, assuming such interests can be made profitable. At A, L and W, we’ve managed to stay in the game.”

  “I think I’d be able to learn a lot here,” Robert said, taking the man’s cue.

  “You will indeed,” Phillip Healey said. He tipped his chair back and smiled at Robert in a way that reminded him of one of his favorite high school English teachers.

  After the interview, Robert floated out as if on a cloud, feeling that he had a good chance of being hired. Healey had told him that if he wanted real estate law, this was the place to be. Certainly there were other places, but they were larger, and he liked the idea of being in a firm with fifty-five lawyers, big enough to show strength but small enough that he might distinguish himself. A bigger firm might try to persuade him to specialize in something else, or he could get lost in the crowd.

  He walked past the two secretaries, who smiled at him, then down a long hallway lined with black-and-white photos of children playing on the streets of Harlem and back into the lobby, with its pale, armless couches and black-and-white rug, all seemingly guarded by the portraits of three men, the founding partners. The red-haired Jack Alexander, youngest of the three, seemed to be scowling at him, as if to caution that he didn’t have the job yet. Alexander, Lenox and Wardell was written in dignified silver script over the entrance. As Robert pressed the button for the elevator, he was only half aware of the distant, discordant slamming of a door, and the sound of heels clicking angrily against wood flooring, the rapid pace advancing in his direction as, alone, he got into the elevator.