I’m sure you have the same trouble with Lemaster, Tessa had murmured with the quick, sloppy racial judgment of the white intellectual, holding her cup in both hands, the way people did in television commercials and nowhere else.
I most certainly do not.
Tessa had nodded, blue eyes full of pity at the romantic self-deception of so many women who, if only they saw the world unadorned and authentic, would toss off the shackles of tradition and false consciousness and build something thrilling and new.
“You can be such a bitch sometimes,” said Julia, maybe to Tessa, maybe to herself, maybe even to Mona, because she had been dreaming and now snapped awake as the Land Rover hit the gravel of the long driveway up to Hunter’s Heights. She blinked and glanced around. Vanessa was still out, for real this time.
“Thanks,” said Julia to Mr. Flew. “That was fast. And very smooth.”
Jeremy Flew was not listening. He had slowed at the switchback several hundred feet from the house, the headlights washing over the snow, the thickly huddled trees beyond inky and silent in the darkness. “Was there an accident, Mrs. Carlyle?”
“An accident?”
He had stopped the car. The yellow cone from the headlights picked out two of the smart black coach lamps that lined the Carlyle driveway every twenty feet, both broken off at the base and lying in the snow.
“Oh, that. It happened in the storm last week. The night—the night Professor Zant died. I think Mr. Huebner hit them with the plow. I already left two messages, but he hasn’t called me back.” Julia wondered whether she was giving too much information, because Jeremy, in the mirror, was looking at her oddly. “You wouldn’t know him,” she gabbled on, wishing she knew how to change the subject. “But Mitch Huebner is kind of a legend in the Landing, living out there in the woods with his guns and his dogs and never a word to say to anybody anyway. I don’t think he’s really much of a telephone guy. Maybe I should send him a note.”
The silence was deep and thrilling as Julia waited to see how much of this nonsense Lemaster’s assistant would choose to believe.
“Are you sure?” said Mr. Flew at last. “That it was Mitch Huebner?”
“As opposed to whom?”
“The newspapers report that there is a good-sized dent in the front left fender of Professor Zant’s car. The police have asked anybody who might have had a hit-and-run accident last Friday to call, et cetera, et cetera.”
Julia rubbed her eyes. She looked out the window. The switchback where the lamps were down made a little valley, from which you could see neither the house nor the road—meaning that neither the house nor the road could see you. The driveway was a plunging, winding, sliding, death-defying mess. Every winter Mr. Huebner’s plow shaved off the gravel, piling it at the top of the hill, and every spring they paid him again to spread the gravel back down. “I still don’t get your point,” she lied. In the wing mirror demons capered, but it was just a trick of yellow light playing on blowing snow.
“The broken lamps are on the left side of your driveway.”
“When Mr. Huebner has been drinking—”
“Perhaps you should call the police, Mrs. Carlyle.”
Panic. Had the detectives noticed the lampposts last weekend? But they had not asked. Neither had Lemaster, or any of the many well-meaning visitors. “Jeremy, please. Listen to me. Kellen Zant was not at this house Friday night. Please, don’t even suggest that.”
“Is it possible that he was here and you didn’t notice? You and Mr. Carlyle were at Lombard Hall most of the night.”
“But that’s just the point.” Julia had trouble staying calm. “There was no reason for him to be here.” Alongside the switchback was a turnaround, a flat surface where drivers could repair their mistakes. That was where the broken coach lamps were, at the turnaround. Julia drew herself up. “Lemaster and I were at the dinner for the alums. Vanessa had a date. Jeannie was supposed to be spending the night with a friend, but she got sick. Anyway, Kellen would have thought the house would be empty. So why come all the way up Hunter’s Meadow in the storm if there was nobody home?”
“That’s what I was wondering,” said Mr. Flew. He put the Land Rover back into gear, and continued to climb the winding drive toward the looming house. Julia turned her head and watched the switchback until shadow claimed it.
(II)
LATER. Julia stood at her favorite spot in the living room window, looking downhill toward the road, wondering whether Kellen had really been in her driveway the night he died; and wondering, too, why she had not yet shared this possibility with the police, or even her husband. She wore woolen pajamas and her favorite housecoat, threadbare and ankle-length, blue and voluminous, left over from their honeymoon, which she believed to carry the family luck. She wore glasses to rest her eyes from the contacts. She had checked her e-mail and come away suitably uninvolved. She had tried to exchange instant messages with friends, but nobody she knew was on, not even Tessa, like herself a night owl. Surfing the Web had yielded fewer mentions of Kellen than she expected, but plenty of information on Mary Mallard, including Web sites dedicated to promoting her theories and Web sites dedicated to debunking them. An empty box of Vera’s cappuccino truffles resided in the kitchen trash, snuggled against an empty bag of microwave popcorn—the unbuttered kind, because she was watching her weight.
She was thinking about her last encounter with Kellen himself, in the shopping mall up in Norport, three days before his murder.
I’m in trouble, he had told her, glancing around wildly as they sat in the food court, Julia wondering if their meeting was just chance. Several bags of Christmas presents circled her feet: she was an early shopper. I need your help, Kellen had added, which was what he always said.
Julia invited him to explain.
I can’t hold my inventory. I have to spread the risk.
What risk?
The inventory risk. He grabbed her hand. She grabbed it back. These are dark times, said Kellen, who ordinarily avoided metaphors conflating darkness with evil. They’re dark times, and the dark matters. You’re the only one who can help.
Julia had started in on her speech about how he had to stop following her around, this could not go on, he had to leave her alone, the same speech she always delivered, and Kellen had started to explain, as he always did, that he was serious this time, he wasn’t flirting, he really did need her help, and that was when she had spotted Regina Thackery and Bitsy Farnsworth, both Ladybugs, emerging from Lord Taylor upstairs, and had leaped to her feet, telling Kellen she had to run, because the last thing she needed was for the Sister Ladies to spark stories about Julia’s clandestine rendezvous with you-know-who.
I have to spread the risk. The inventory risk.
Another term from economics. Like capturing the surplus. Kellen loved his jargon, to be sure, and squeezed it into ordinary conversation as often as he could, usually to obscure his purposes, as he did back in their Manhattan days, when, after Julia tired of screaming at him, he would describe his flings with other women as rational exercises in maximizing utility. This time, however, she had a hunch that he had been trying to tell her something. Something that Mary Mallard thought she already knew.
Julia watched the snow, wondering if Kellen had really tried to make it up the driveway in that terrible storm the night he died, expecting the house to be empty, and whether, upon seeing the babysitter’s car, he had turned in panic, striking the lamps. She did not understand why he would want to come to the house when nobody was home, any more than she knew what he had meant at the shopping mall when he said he wanted her to share his inventory risk; or that the dark mattered.
But maybe it was better not to care.
Kellen Zant was her past, and he had no right to drag her back into his life, even by dying and leaving a puzzle behind: he had wounded her, nearly killed her, and had no claim on her.
Standing in the living room window now, New England night softly alive around her, Julia gathered Rainbo
w Coalition into her arms, because the children were too big. She had coveted in life, and she had been coveted, and the messy life both produced was, she had thought, behind her. Lemaster was her sanity. Her safe harbor. Nothing else was supposed to happen.
But something had. First Vanessa burning the car, and now…all this.
Julia picked up the empty wineglass she had left on the low side table and turned toward the long living room, done in period green wallpaper, where the broad bay windows stretched from the nine-and-a-half-foot ceiling to eight inches above the floor. A grand piano, a vintage Steinway, filled the bay, salvaged from Amaretta Veazie’s townhouse, where, in the old days, Duke Ellington would occasionally tickle its ivories. Preston and Aaron played badly, and the youngest, Jeannie, not at all. Vanessa played beautifully. When the extended family gathered last year for Thanksgiving, Julia and her daughter had presented the fruits of six weeks of rehearsal with an experienced coach, Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Capriccio Espagnole,” among the most challenging piano duets in the classical repertoire, and, despite a couple of flubs, brought tears to every eye, even Lemaster’s.
“I hate this,” Julia said, speaking of his job, and, implicitly, hers. Probably she was talking to her late brother, Jay, her twin. “I really, really hate this.”
Jay did not reply.
She felt lonely and cold. Lemaster’s dedication to his tiny fraternity annoyed her afresh. The Empyreals were dying; everybody said so. In the upper reaches of the darker nation, these memberships mattered in a way her white friends never quite understood. Lemaster could easily have joined one of the larger, more prestigious clubs, but had declined their overtures. Tonight of all nights, to go off to New York, and then to Washington—
She made herself stop. He had rescued her. It was as simple as that. She had truly loved only two men in her life, one who had destroyed her, one who had put her back together. Yet she wondered when life would stop happening to her and she would start happening to life.
Kellen wondered the same thing. He used to tease her about wasting her life. Maybe Mary Mallard was right. Maybe Kellen had left her his surplus. Maybe he even expected—
No. No. She would not pursue it. She would stay sane, which meant staying away from thoughts of Kellen. She stood in the window as the wind whipped the snow into high sleek drifts, wondering what had happened to all the rich, surging energy she poured into life. It was her brother’s death all over again. Only three Marines died in the Grenada operation, but Jay Veazie was one of them. He received a posthumous Navy Cross for “extraordinary heroism,” which Mona had thrown into the pond not far from their house on North Balch Street. After that, her politics went from radical to scary.
As for Kellen, well, as far as Julia was concerned, there was supposed to be a reckoning, not this absolute, this grim, gray wall, the scary firmness of life’s end intruding on its middle. Absent a diagnosis of cancer or an unexpected stroke, the physical organism we call human was not supposed to betray the trust imposed by its owner, or not for many years to come. She remembered that last argument with Kellen, at the mall up in Norport, and how she had not let him finish whatever he was trying to tell her about inventory risk and how the dark matters. When she spotted Bitsy and Regina and jumped up, Kellen grabbed her arm and asked if they could set up a time to talk. Positive that his motives were as always ulterior, Julia had climbed on her high horse and told him that was probably not a good idea, and, by the way, would he please take his fucking hand off her arm?—for she was a different person around him, and a lot of the difference came out of her mouth. He said they really needed to talk, as soon as possible, and that they could meet in some out-of-the-way place if it would make her feel better. Julia, perhaps overwary, experienced these words as an invitation to dalliance, and told him to leave her be. The last thing she needed in her life was any of his nonsense, she told him, and the anger of her parting shot, her decision to turn on her heel and stalk away before Kellen had a chance to answer, was a gnawing pain in her gut: she had not even said goodbye.
CHAPTER 7
TRICKY TONY
(I)
AMONG JULIA’S FAVORITE STUDENTS was a peaceable fellow named Poynting, a brilliant and puzzled gay activist who found himself drawn by the rigor and learning of Orthodox Christianity, and hoped to find space within it for one narrow exception to the received tradition—which he otherwise endorsed wholeheartedly, right down to what the Orthodox and the Catholics called “fidelity to Apostolic tradition” and outsiders called “not letting women be priests.” On the cold but clear Monday morning following the funeral, Poynting sat in Julia’s office to ask about possible sources of grant funding for a proposed trip to Bologna over the summer to research the confraternities established in the thirteenth century to enforce the sexual mores of the Church. Possibly what Joe Poynting really wanted was a free trip to Italy, but most of her colleagues would be quick to accept one. So Julia, with a few minutes to spare before she had to meet with her boss, took considerable pleasure in opening her well-ordered files to find a foundation likely to support him. In the event, they found three or four, which was three or four more than she found for most students looking for financial help to do something interesting, because religion in general, and divinity school in particular, were considered unsexy. Finding ways to twist student projects into smeary reflections of what the foundations really wanted to fund was one of her favorite parts of the job: mirrors were, after all, her thing.
As Poynting, quite happy, was leaving, Julia stopped him.
“Joe? Weren’t you an econ major at Vanderbilt?”
“Years ago.”
“But you remember some of the terminology?” Neatening her desk, sliding the application forms back into their proper folders, and the folders back into their proper drawers. “Like ‘capturing the surplus.’ What does that mean?”
Standing in the doorway, her student drummed his fingers on his own mouth. “Oh, well, you know. The consumer surplus, say, is the difference between the value of a good to you and what you pay for it. Theory says you’ll only buy when the price is less than the value you place on it. The point is, the seller wants to make that spread as small as possible. That is, the seller wants to capture some of your surplus if he can. He does that by trying to get you to pay a price very close to the actual value you place on the good.” Poynting laughed. “Or something like that.”
Julia thought it over. As simple as that? “One more question.”
“Shoot.”
“Why would somebody think that the best way to capture the surplus is an auction?”
“Does this have something to do with that professor who got killed? The one who was your friend?” Diplomatically put. “Is that why you’re asking?”
Julia hesitated. She knew that Joe Poynting, like many of the black students at the university, harbored an uneasy respect for Kellen Zant, who was seen, on the one hand, as the consummate race man, always on television decrying discrimination in corporate America; and, on the other, as a kind of racial entrepreneur, building a consulting-and-lecture-circuit empire on the foundation of the guilty consciences of white businessmen. Some of the students even considered Kellen a sellout. Julia was not sure exactly where on the spectrum young Poynting fell, and so, wanting not to offend, she settled for avoiding the question.
“Just help me out here, okay?”
“For you, anything.” They grinned at each other. “The answer is what’s called the ‘winner’s curse.’ Suppose you’re bidding for a good you plan to resell, but you aren’t sure what the resale value is. You have to guess in order to bid. And the trouble is, if the auction is contested, you often have to bid more than the resale value to get the good. That is, you can’t immediately turn around and sell for what you paid. If your motive is resale, in other words, it’s possible for the seller in an auction to capture all of your surplus.”
“Does that always happen?”
“Of course not. The market value might not
be the most important thing. That is, you might want the good for reasons other than resale. And there are ways to set up auctions that try to avoid winner’s curse and some of the other famous paradoxes. But I’m not really up on auction theory.” He brightened. “I seem to remember Professor Zant published a paper on auctions a couple of years ago.”
I’ll just bet he did. “But what if somebody referred to something as his own surplus?”
“If he knew what he was talking about—if he was an economist, say—he would probably mean something he had managed to hold back in an exchange, something he would have been willing to give up but didn’t have to.” A pause as the young man seemed for a moment to look into her soul with all-seeing eyes. “Something of value to him.”
“And inventory risk? What does that mean?”
“Oh, well, that’s pretty basic. You’re a businessman. You hold inventory for sale. The problem is, it can decline in value. You get stuck with computers nobody wants. Or with dresses that are out of style. You try to reduce your inventory risk. One good way to do it is to get somebody else to hold your inventory, so you’re not stuck with it. That way, you order it as needed, and the inventory risk rests with somebody else.”
“Dark times? Darkness that matters?”
Stephen L. Carter Page 7