“I didn’t know what else to do,” I said lamely.
“What happened?”
“I think Vasquez killed him.”
A sharp intake of breath. Even now, when I’d no doubt ripped apart every illusion she once cherished, I was still capable of surprising her. An affair—bad enough; but then murder.
“Oh, Charles . . .”
“I think . . . I believe, this man, the man who died, may have been taping me. Setting me up, sort of.”
“What do you mean, setting you up? ”
“He was an ex-con, Deanna. He was an ex-con and an informant, I think. He was obligated, maybe.”
“You’re telling me . . . ?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure. But I’m worried.”
And so was she. But maybe the biggest thing she was worried about was where love goes when it goes. This steadfast devotion of hers, which had been pummeled and knocked around and stomped on. Where?
“I knew something was wrong, Charles. I thought some money was missing before—when you took the first ten thousand, I guess. Maybe it’s my imagination, I thought. So I didn’t say anything. Maybe I was imagining everything — the way you were acting. The hours you were keeping. Everything. I thought it might be a woman. But I didn’t want to believe it. I was waiting for you to come tell me, Charles. . . .”
And now I had told her. But more than she could have actually imagined.
She asked me a few more questions—some of the ones I’d expected she would. Who was this woman, exactly? Was she married, too? Was it really just that one time? But I could tell her heart wasn’t really in it. And then other questions that maybe her heart was in, or what was left of her heart — how much trouble was I really in with the police, for instance, things of that nature.
But in the end, she told me to leave the house. She didn’t know for how long, but she wanted me out of there.
A few weeks later, weeks I spent avoiding Deanna and retiring to the guest bedroom after Anna went to bed, I found a furnished apartment in Forest Hills.
THIRTY
Forest Hills seemed to be made up of Orthodox Jews and unorthodox sectarians. People who seemed alone, or who were without a visible means of support, or who didn’t seem to really belong there. In that particular apartment or particular building or that actual neighborhood. I fit in perfectly.
For instance, I looked like a married man, but where was my wife? I was undoubtedly a father, but where exactly were my kids? And then I even became a little shaky on the means-of-support thing.
On the first Tuesday after I moved out, I took the train into work at Continental Boulevard.
I was called down to Barry Lenge’s office. That itself was unusual, since office hierarchy dictated that bean counters—even the head bean counter—travel to your office when a face-to-face was needed.
I went anyway. After all, I think I was suffering from a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome, and whatever self-confidence I had left was down to the approximate level of a whipped dog.
Barry Lenge looked even more uncomfortable than me. That should have been my first clue.
His triple chin made him appear physically agitated, in any case — as if his head couldn’t find a position where it wasn’t imposing on another part of his body. But today he looked worse.
“Ahem,” Barry cleared his throat, which should have been my second clue; there was something in there he was going to have a little trouble getting out.
“I was just looking over the production bills,” Barry said.
“Yes?”
“This Headquarters job. There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
Now it must have been me who looked truly uncomfortable, because Barry looked away — at his set of silver pencils — and I remembered how Eliot had doodled on his stationery the morning I was fired off my account by Ellen Weischler.
“The thing is . . . something’s been brought to our attention.”
“What?”
“You see, there’s forty-five thousand here for music.” He was pointing to a piece of paper sitting on the desk in front of him. The same bid form I’d looked at before.
“Seethat?” Barry asked him. “Right there.”
I pretended to look, if only because that’s what whipped dogs do when given a command — they obey. I could see a number there all right; it looked like forty-five thousand.
“Yes?”
“Well, Charles . . . there’s a problem with that.”
“Yes?” Was that all I was going to say — answer each of Barry’s revelations with a yes?
“Mary Widger heard the same music on a different spot.”
“What?”
“I’m telling you this same piece of music was on another spot.”
“What do you mean?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong. Forty-five thousand dollars was for original music, right?”
“Right.”
“So it’s not original.”
“I don’t understand.” But I did understand, of course. Tom and David Music had found a piece of music in a stock house, and they hadn’t bothered to see if someone else had used it before. Someone had.
“Well, maybe it just sounds the same. It’s just a bed, really.”
“No. She brought it to the musicologist. It’s the same piece. Note for note.”
She brought it to the musicologist. Musicologists were generally consulted to make sure that any music we did wasn’t too close to any other existing piece of music we might be trying to imitate. For instance, we might cut a commercial to Gershwin’s “ ’S Wonderful,” but if the Gershwin estate wanted an arm and a leg to let us use it, we might attempt to rip it off, but not too closely — because the musicologist would say no. Only in this case, of course, it wasn’t Gerswhin who was being ripped off.
“I’ll talk to the music house,” I said, trying to sound as officially indignant as Barry did. Instead of scared.
“I talked to the music house,” Barry said.
I didn’t like the way Barry said that — music house — with a noticeable derision. A pointed sarcasm.
“Yes?”
“Yeah. I talked to the music house. So the question I have for you is this. How much?”
“How much what? ”
“How much? If I was to give you a bill of what you owe this agency, how much should I make it out for?”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Yes.”
“I think you do. I think you understand perfectly. The music house is a paper company, Charles. It doesn’t exist. It exists only to make illegal profits from this agency. So if I want those profits back — how much do I need to ask you for?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’ve uncovered some kind of scam here . . .”
“Look, Charles . . .” And now Barry didn’t seem the slightest bit uncomfortable anymore. He seemed right in his element. “Look—if you pay us back the money, there’s a chance this won’t end up in court. That you won’t end up in court. Are you following me? Not that that would be my decision. If it was up to me, I’d throw you in jail. But since I’m the company comptroller, money’s kind of close to my heart, right? Eliot feels differently. Fine.”
Eliot feels differently. I'd been wondering if Eliot knew anything yet.
“Look, maybe I suspected something . . . I thought maybe something was . . . Shouldn’t you be talking to Tom and David?”
“I talked to Tom and David. They both had plenty to say. So you want to keep fucking with me, fine, but you should know that if you keep this up, Eliot will reconsider his decision. Why? Because I'll tell him to. They don’t want the bad publicity — I understand. But they want their money back. And you know something? When it comes to money versus a momentary smudge on their reputation, they’ll take the money. Trust me on this.”
It was clear I had a decision to make. I could admit taking the twenty t
housand dollars. I could even pay the twenty thousand dollars back — if Deanna let me go near Anna’s Fund again, which might not be so easy. On the other hand, I had the distinct feeling Tom and David had implicated me to a greater degree than the facts actually warranted — and that Barry wasn’t going to believe twenty thousand dollars was the extent of my fraudulent activities. No, the bill was going to be higher. If I admitted anything, I decided, I was done.
“I didn’t have anything to do with this,” I said as forcefully as I could. “I don’t know what Tom and David told you, but I wouldn’t necessarily trust the word of two guys who’ve apparently been cheating you for years.”
Barry sighed. He tried to loosen his collar, an impossible task since it was already two sizes too small.
“That’s the way you want to play this,” he finally said. “Fine. Your decision. You say you’re innocent, we institute company procedures. Fine.”
“Which are . . . ?”
“We suspend you. We hold an internal investigation. We get back to you. And if I have any influence on the powers-that-be at all—we fucking arrest you. Understand, pal?”
I got up and left the office.
THIRTY-ONE
Time passed. One week, two weeks, a month.
Time I spent mostly wondering in lieu of working. I was wondering, for instance, if Deanna was ever going to forgive me and whether or not I was going to be arrested for murder or indicted for embezzlement. None of those things had happened yet. Still, there was always tomorrow.
I decided after my first day as a jobless person that I was a creature of habit and was habitually programmed to go to work in the morning. So I rode the train into Manhattan just like I always did and commuted back in the afternoons. My depressing environs had something to do with it; the furnished apartment was like a motel room without maid service. I felt a little like Goldilocks sleeping in someone else’s bed. Someone who was about to show up at any minute and demand my immediate departure. There were clues who this someone was — little relics of actual habitation left behind in this now sterile desert.
A paperback, for example. A dog-eared copy of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. But was it a Martian or a Venutian who’d once owned it? It was hard to say.
A toothbrush discovered behind the stained toilet. One of those fancy ones with a curved brush for those hard-to-reach areas. Lavender. Was that considered a feminine color or a masculine color, or neither?
And in my one desk drawer: a sheet of lined paper filled with what appeared to be New Year’s resolutions. “I will try harder to meet people,” was the first one. “I will be less judgmental.” And so on. I decided the writer of this list and the owner of the book were probably one and the same, since both pointed to a devotee of rigorous self-improvement. I wondered, if Deanna was from Venus, was I from Pluto?
I visited the 42nd Street Library. I strolled the Met. I spent an entire day half sleeping in the Hayden Planetarium, waking periodically to a canopy of stars — like an astronaut coming out of suspended animation, alone in the universe and so far from home.
I made sure to call Anna every afternoon — always from my cell phone, since the elaborate cover story we’d worked out to explain my absence was that I was shooting a new ad campaign in Los Angeles. Once, I’d spent two months out there doing just that; it seemed like an excuse that might actually work.
Where are you now? Anna would ask me.
The Four Seasons pool, I'd reply.
A studio in Burbank. A street in Venice. In a rented car at the intersection of Sunset and La Cienega.
Cool, Anna would say.
Deanna had told me she didn’t wish to speak to me for a while. The torture involved how long a while that would actually turn out to be. Occasionally she would pick up when I called and I’d hope that awhile had ended right then. But she’d call out for Anna and wait silently until our daughter picked up the phone. In a way, it wasn’t that different from all our years A.D.—after diabetes—that stifling silence about things we couldn’t mention. Only there was a terrible reproof in her silence now, as opposed to just plain grief. And where before silence had been filled with the inconsequential and bland, it was now filled with the kind of quiet western movie heroes were always running into just before an ambush. It's quiet, they’d say to their amigos, too quiet.
It was late February, the Monday of my third week of banishment and joblessness, when I saw Lucinda again.
My first instinct was to hide and duck back farther into the faceless crowd. My second instinct was to say hello. Possibly because it was good to see her up and about again; it alleviated my guilt a little. Up and about and even talking to someone.
I’d wondered about her, of course. If she could ever recover from what Vasquez had done to her. I hoped so.
And now I thought that maybe she could. The rings under her eyes had gone away. She looked beautiful again; she looked like Lucinda.
I was so entirely fixated on her, it was probably a minute or so before I even took notice of whom she was talking to. Was that her husband — glimpsed briefly that day in front of the fountain at the Time-Life Building?
No. It wasn’t her husband she was talking to. This man was shorter, younger, frumpier. A fellow broker, perhaps — a friend from the neighborhood.
They seemed to be on good terms with each other, at least. They’d stopped in front of a newsstand and were engaged in a lively discussion.
I was in a kind of no-man’s-land, I realized. Neither far enough away to be invisible, nor close enough to be conversational. One look to the left and Lucinda would see me for sure — stuck in limbo, the man who’d failed her, a reminder of all she’d been through.
I wanted to spare her that. Mostly, I wanted to spare me that.
So I turned tail. I skirted the fringes of the slowly moving crowd and tried to keep my face forward to avoid any accidental eye contact.
I made it through the crowd, a piece of flotsam moving with the tide. All the way over to the stairway leading to Eighth Avenue. Home free.
Only, I’d peeked. I couldn’t help it. I’d peeked over at Lucinda and her business associate to see if I’d remained unnoticed.
And noticed something.
I mulled it over on the cab ride to the National Museum of the American Indian and decided I didn’t know what. Whatever it was had been picked up in one quick, furtive glance. And there’d been all these people between us, too. Foreground crosses, we call it in shoot-speak. Where you walk the extra back and forth between camera and actors to ensure it looks real, that it doesn’t look like some sound stage in Universal Studios.
Only sometimes you put too many extras into the mix, and they obliterate the actors entirely. It becomes impossible to see them, and they themselves become extras in the shot. Then you have to thin out the extras and rework the blocking so the actors can be seen again.
That’s sort of what I was doing in the cab.
I was trying to push the faceless crowd of commuters off to the side so I could see Lucinda clearly. Lucinda and that business associate of hers, or neighborhood friend. Or . . .
Her brother. Yes, maybe it was her brother, only I couldn’t remember if she had a brother or not. It seemed to me we’d spent a lot more time talking about my family than hers. I’d poured my heart out to her, hadn’t I? About Anna and Deanna? I didn’t remember whether she had brothers or not.
But it seemed to me now that it must have been her brother. Or perhaps her cousin. Yes, it could have been her cousin.
It had to do with what I’d noticed.
I was trying to push those other people out of the way to get a clear look, but they were getting annoyed and pushing back. They were telling me to get lost or busy looking for a cop.
Their hands.
I thought I saw their hands touching. Not interlocked, not intertwined, but touching.
Something you might do with a brother, wasn’t it?
And even if it wasn’t her brother, ev
en if it was a friend of hers, anew friend of hers, could you blame her? I’d never asked her if I was the first. Why should I assume I’d be the last?
She was still stuck in the same awful marriage. She was desperately in need of someone to talk to. Now especially. Maybe she’d gone and found someone.
And for the briefest moment, I felt something suspiciously like jealousy. Just a quick pang, a phantom ache from a long healed wound.
Then I forgot about it.
THIRTY-TWO
It was Anna’s birthday.
I’d never missed one. I couldn’t imagine missing one now. She might give a sullen shrug of her shoulders when I brought up things like birthdays — Birthday, what’s that? — but I genuinely believed she’d never forgive me if I didn’t actually show up for one. And then I’d have two Schines in a unforgiving mode, and I was having a hard enough time with one.
So when I phoned home and Deanna picked up, I said: “Please don’t call Anna yet. I need to talk to you.”
She sighed. “Yes, Charles?” she said.
Well, she’d used my name, at least.
“Anna’s birthday is coming up,” I said.
“I know when Anna’s birthday is.”
“Well. Don’t you think I should be home for it? She’d hate me if she thought I’d stayed in California on her birthday.”
“I’m not ready for you to come home, Charles.”
Yes, that was a problem — Deanna not being ready. As for me, of course, I was more than ready.
“Well, couldn’t we . . . what if I say I came back just for her birthday and then I have to leave again?”
Derailed Page 18