Surface

by Stacy Robinson

  “Do you have anything to say?” she pushed, after a long stretch of quiet.

  He fixed on the CD case and reached to pick it up. “What’s this?”

  “That? That’s the very unfortunate truth. All of it.”

  He turned it over in his hands, which appeared to have developed a slight tremor. “What are you talking about? You march in here like some bad Broadway detective with some kind of evidence of the truth? I don’t have time for theatrics, Claire. I’ve got a lot of work to do here.”

  “Yes, I’d say you do. But,” she said, sitting down in the other partner’s chair and reflexively flicking the heel of her ballet flat off and on, “I’m going to help you.”

  His lips moved, as if trying to compose the correct response, but all he managed was a dull “Huh?” His hands still gripped the CD.

  “You’ve been very busy this last year—and then some, I’m sure—with your girlfriend and—”

  “Girlfriend? Seriously?” He tossed the CD into the trash. “You’ve got a lot of guts accusing me of whatever it is you think I’m guilty of after the mess your little . . . diversion caused.” He picked up the desk photo of Nick and turned it toward her, something fierce flashing in his pupils.

  She caught a retort between her teeth, and held it. “Let’s be clear about something, Michael,” Claire said. “You’ve been making me out to be the wicked whore of the west, leaving me to drown in my guilt, and all the while you’ve been playing a much more wicked game with our lives.” No, she thought to herself, nothing golden remained. “There are consequences for our decisions. I know this better than anyone. And now it’s your turn to face them.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about San Diego and the mortgage on the house and our Schwab holdings. I’m talking about Mac Kessler and the company pension you used as your own personal bank account.” She watched Michael’s face blanch as she continued. “I could forgive you for Taylor”—she practically spat out the name—“but this,” she said, retrieving the CD from the trash, “makes everything easier for me. Because now I know that it wasn’t just one unfortunate lapse in judgment. It’s an epic string of lies and cheating, and complete disregard for me and for Nicholas. And I won’t suck that up.”

  “Taylor,” he whispered, looking confused. “You know about . . . Taylor?” He ran both of his hands through his hair, rocking back and forth in his chair and revealing circles of perspiration in the creases of his Turnbull & Asser bespoke shirt. “How?”

  She eyed the disc. “That’s hardly the issue, Michael. What is at issue are the many lines you’ve crossed, both legally and ethically. And to coin a choice phrase of yours—it stinks. It stinks to high heaven.”

  Michael’s eyes darted around the room, the desperation of his reaction accentuated by the dark half-moons above his cheeks. There was a time bomb between them, Claire felt. And it was ticking off the seconds before one of them blew. She took a mental step back, digging deep through the recesses of her memory. Michael’s defensiveness, the fear, the indignant responses—they really had been a pattern for some time, along with the detachment and apparent insomnia. A pattern, she thought, of a guilt-ridden soul challenging the elasticity of its integrity. God only knew what other secrets he harbored, and that she had failed to connect the dots on. But this time, she reminded herself—as had Richard, and the girls and Cora—she had all the tools and ammunition she needed. And she could finally stop pretending. She exhaled her own indignation and smiled sweet as Sara Lee. “There are a couple ways I can choose to handle the information I have. But like I said, I’m willing to help you out.”

  Michael shifted in his chair. “You’re going to help solve a—a—” His voice took on the familiar mumbling tic of the dysarthria patients in Nick’s speech classes. “A complex real estate and financial market . . . problem? Enlighten me. Please.”

  “The complex problem is not about markets at all. It’s about embezzlement, and how you’re going to make things right.”

  “Embezzlement? All of a sudden you’re some kind of expert on embezzlement? You know nothing about the intricacies—”

  “I wouldn’t underestimate what I’ve become an expert on,” Claire said, interrupting him and checking her watch. “Here’s the deal, Michael. You took three-point-two million dollars from your company pension and used it to fund business deals. That’s not your money to spend. Theft from an employee benefit plan is a federal crime, and you will undoubtedly have some legal issues. But if you return that money immediately, and volunteer to the authorities to pay whatever interest and fines they slap on this, you will hopefully ingratiate yourself and not go to prison.”

  He gaped at her, his hands shaking on top of the desk. “Well, since you appear to have all the details, you know that the bank account’s a little anemic at the moment. I’m working my ass off to secure some new funding. So stop this ridiculous charade and go take care of Nicholas, would you? Aren’t you supposed to be picking him up?”

  Just as her veneer was cracking, another alarm sounded in Claire’s head. Michael was like a cornered animal, and he was lashing out. And she understood that she had to make him see the logic of her plan without lashing back at him and further arousing his fears and insecurities. “Michael,” she restarted as calmly as she could, “I’m well aware that you’ve depleted much of our joint brokerage account, in addition to mortgaging our house. All without consulting me.” She watched him fumble with a pencil. “But I’ll put that aside for now, in light of your need to make restitution on the pension. Immediately. And it seems that your only option for quick cash is your father. He could help you make this all go away, or at least improve your—”

  “My father? Are you nuts?” He launched out of his chair, sending it crashing into the bookshelf behind him. He turned and kicked the casters, knocking over a dish of pistachios in the process and sending them raining onto the floor, all the while muttering to himself and incubating . . . something. After an agitated bout of pacing, he turned to her, his face a riot of red splotches. “I have a reasonable expectation of privacy, so don’t think for one minute that my lawyers won’t nail you to the wall for breaking into my computer, which is obviously what you’ve done here,” he shouted. “I’ll give you the fight of your—”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, cutting him off. But instead of a swell of self-assurance as she was about to take her folder dramatically from her purse and give him the “when you play, you pay” line she’d rehearsed, her voice froze in her throat. Her body shuddered and her eyes blurred. She sunk back into the chair, overcome. “Shit. Shit! What are we doing?” She looked at Michael, at the landscape of their history all around them, those happy moments frozen in the picture frames insinuating themselves where, just a second before, outrage boiled. “What the hell are we doing? This isn’t us,” she cried. She bent her head into her hands. “It’s not me.”

  The guttural sound that erupted and echoed through the room startled Claire, and she looked up to see Michael’s rage dissolving under his own squall of tears. Slowly he groped for his chair and lowered his body into it with uncharacteristic submission, then braced his hands on the desk as he rolled forward, the drone of the furnace a mournful accompaniment to his visible anguish. For a long while they both sat steeping in their grief. And in his raw, hiccupping exhales Michael was transformed to Claire from the two-dimensional villain of her outrage into a flawed human being.

  “How did we get here?” she asked miserably.

  There was no answer in his gaze, only the strain of the last minutes, and months.

  “I had what amounted to a one-night stand with the most horrific consequences,” she said, wiping her tears. “And you’ve apparently been having a long-term affair, and now you’ve almost literally robbed Peter to pay Paul? My God, Michael, how did we make such a mess of things?”

  He blinked repeatedly, as if some convoluted details were finally registering. “I wasn’t havi
ng an affair. There was never anyone else. You think Taylor was . . . some woman I was sleeping with?”

  Claire felt her anger reignite. “You apologized to Nick for the situation with her. I saw the e-mail. Or more accurately, you were sorry Nick apparently overheard some conversation and found out about her. How can you keep on denying what you’ve—”

  “Claire,” Michael said, looking more desolate than she’d ever remembered seeing him, “Taylor was a boy I knew in Belmont Hill when I was a teenager. And he died.” He cupped his face in his hands as he continued. “He killed himself because he was gay. Because I—we . . . hazed him. We were just kids—three stupid, cocky seventeen-year-olds—and we didn’t think about consequences. Christ,” he moaned, his eyes once again distant and focused on that faraway time and place. “He was a nice kid, a pool boy at the country club. And we just got swept up in all of the . . . the one-upping that goes on with teenagers. And then one day, in the middle of the summer, he hanged himself. In his parents’ shed.”

  Claire’s mouth went slack as she tried to digest this particularly unexpected and tragic secret. “Oh my God, why didn’t you ever tell me? This is so—”

  “Horrible? Devastating? Yeah, it was all of those things, multiplied by a factor you could never comprehend. No one could. We made stupid choices in our immaturity, and a life was lost. An innocent, struggling boy. There had been a note, no names mentioned, but our taunts were spelled out in it. My parents, they helped Taylor’s family afterward. Financially.” Michael’s body seemed to have folded in on itself in the chair. “And none of us ever spoke about it again. I couldn’t do anything to change what had happened other than to—to move forward and try to be a better man, to live a life with a higher purpose. But I failed miserably,” he murmured in a small, broken voice. “I failed.”

  “Michael,” Claire intoned. She followed with a flood of questions, which he went on to answer with weary resignation. He explained that Nicky had found out about Taylor at Paul and Margot’s house just before coming home from Andover. They had asked him at dinner, as was their custom, what his proudest accomplishment had been at school. He had gotten an A, he had told them, on a speech about Tyler Clementi, the gay student who killed himself after his roommate webcammed him. Hate crime legislation was the final topic in speech and debate class, and his speech had gone over so well that he was going to use it for tournaments next year. Apparently things got very uncomfortable and weird at the table after that. And Nicky apparently did some listening at their door later.

  “That’s what you two were discussing in the study before you left for London, wasn’t it?” Claire asked, still stunned by the turn of events.

  Michael bowed his chin. “He told me I was a hypocrite for not standing up to my friends and doing the right thing like I’d always hammered him to do. That I had no right to get on his case about not calling Chazz’s sister after taking her out once—which is a whole separate story—given the much more damaging choices I had made at his age.” Hypocrite, Michael repeated despondently. “And he asked me if I regretted letting my father buy me out of the whole mess and make it all disappear. He didn’t buy me out of anything, Claire,” Michael said, shaking his head, his swollen blue eyes focusing on her. “It was a different time. People weren’t as open and accepting, and families liked to keep things like this private. So Paul did the only thing he could do under the circumstances, and Taylor’s parents were grateful for the . . . help. I told Nicky that I regretted my actions every day of my life, but all he could see was cowardice and a failure in character. I mean, how do you tell your kid you were just clueless and immature, when you ask him to be so much more?” He shook his head again and turned away from her.

  But for Claire, it was as if the drapes suddenly had been drawn open on their marriage, and for the first time her view was unobstructed. Her husband’s secrets and motivations were not those of the unfaithful, deceitful man she had come there to condemn, but of a haunted and conflicted man who had spent his life in flight from himself and his failures, trying to right an unrightable deed by stacking up accomplishments and money and good works, and hoping to win back the respect of the man he had least wanted to disappoint. And by pressing their son to live up to the high family standards he had long ago failed to uphold. Seventeen already, Jesus, she could hear Michael uttering. On the verge of everything promising. The promise of doing better than he had. And the fading promise, Claire thought, that Michael might, at least, have the respect and admiration of his son. That Nick had discovered his father’s secret at that very same age when the hubris and naïveté of adolescence often collide—and that once again the results had been ill-fated—was almost too sad an irony for Claire to bear. And as she imagined how scarred Michael must be, she also considered how much those scars should count toward excusing his inability to forgive her and commiserate over their mistakes. After all, it was their compounded carelessness, though from different decades, that had come home to roost.

  “I’m sorry you’ve been living with all of this,” she said, meaning it. “But your behavior toward me since the accident—all of this makes it doubly irrational. Why were you so callous, so unwilling to try and work through everything?”

  He chewed on his lip for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he said feebly. “I thought I was losing Nicky. He’s everything to me, the best thing I’ve ever been part of. And I couldn’t believe that life and death could so easily be . . . intersecting for a kid again, my kid. Maybe it just made everything more manageable if I could blame someone else. I don’t know.” He avoided Claire’s eyes as he continued. “And then the portfolio problems, everything was imploding. The pension money was supposed to be a one-week float at the most. But there were complications. So many fucking complications.” He paused, exhaling somberly. “But the bigger truth is, our marriage wasn’t working anymore. It hadn’t been for a while, Claire. You had to have seen that.”

  Claire shook her head slowly.

  “Not because of what either of us did.” He looked her in the eye now, his grief clearly mirroring her own. “Just . . . because. Life sometimes happens that way, you know? And I’m sorry. For everything. I just kept thinking I could somehow get out from under all of it.” A glimmer of sun hovered on the horizon, framing him in a burnt-umber glow.

  She was surprised by the lack of anger she felt with his explanation. Mostly, though, she felt sad that they had both been lost and living with their own bad decisions for far too long. “I thought we’d built something good for the longest time, Michael. And then I guess we just stopped paying attention. I’m sorry I didn’t pay better attention.”

  He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “And I thought for the longest time that staying together was the right thing for Nicky. But I guess I was just distracting myself from being responsible for another terrible disappointment. I couldn’t be . . . responsible again.” The sharp contours of Michael’s habitually squared jaw were gone. “Another failure wasn’t an option. Well, until it . . . was.”

  Claire pondered this uncharacteristic show of honesty and emotion. There was something so unexpectedly vulnerable, so Nick-like in his face. The furnace clicked off, and she steadied a hand on the desk as she stood, processing her own truth that as hurt as she was, it wasn’t the shattering hurt of lost love. But the final, undeniable shattering of the illusion. They had loved each other once. Just not in a timeless love-story sort of way. And for the sake of that once-lovely truth, and the gift of their son, she made a choice.

  “We need to put an end to this quickly, Michael. So we don’t continue to hurt each other, or hurt Nicky,” she said, taking the folder from her purse and picking up the CD. They were just two parents now. “I came here to force your hand. I was going to insist that you go to Paul tomorrow and ask him for the three-point-two million to repay the pension, or I would give this information to my attorney—who would be compelled to report everything to the authorities. And I was going to have you ask Paul for
additional funds to be wired to me, so that, among other things, I can buy this house.” She removed a Coldwell Banker brochure from the folder and pushed it across the desk. “But,” she said, knowing that it really wasn’t her nature to live life through a lens of darkness or revenge—and banking that it really wasn’t Michael’s either, “I’m hoping that you’ll come to your own conclusions about the right way to handle all of this.”

  Michael took the brochure and read through it, looking up at her every few seconds, as if to remind himself that it was Claire sitting across from him. “It’s a nice house,” he said. “But I’m not going to my father.” He untwisted a paper clip into a jagged hook. “You should know that better than anyone.”

  She did know now—how desperate he had been to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the man who had rescued him once before, and what a Sophie’s Choice it would be to ask for his help again. “What I know is that he’s your best option, your only option, if you want to minimize the extent of your problems. It’s difficult, I get that. But pension fraud is serious business, Michael, and I don’t want you to go to prison. You need to get that paid back immediately.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “Think about Nicky’s best interests. Is your pride more important than being around to help raise your son?” She could hear him breathing, could see his chest actually heaving. “I know your parents would not want to see you in this position. You’ve proven yourself enough to them over the years. And you know how they feel about Nicky.” She didn’t bring up the potential for an embarrassing scandal that couldn’t be kept under wraps if he didn’t make an effort to resolve things quickly. Or that she would go to Paul if she had to. “Call him, Michael,” she urged. “The longer you wait, the trickier things are going to get with the Department of Labor.”

  With their house of cards collapsed and splayed around them, it amazed her, the amount of urging it took. But if not for his hubris and her years of standing quietly, blindly by, she recognized that they wouldn’t have found themselves wading through such wreckage. And so she reiterated her case, in addition to clarifying her wishes on the issues of an educational and medical trust for Nicky, a lump-sum divorce settlement, and all of the other financial imperatives she’d gone over with Gail.