The Executor

by Jesse Kellerman

  Everything on the walls and in the display cases spoke of wealth and taste, and I was beginning to regret having tried to dress up, a feeling that spiked nastily when the lawyer himself entered in a bespoke suit. Fleshy, humpbacked, stertorous as an outboard motor, he hobbled in and hopped up into the giant chair, combing one liver-spotted hand through the sparse remains of a crew cut as he looked me up and down.

  “The famous Joseph Geist,” he said.

  I tried to smile. “Famous to whom.”

  He didn’t answer. He reached for the topmost of a stack of folders, opened it, took out a stapled document, unfolded a pair of reading glasses, and stared at the text in silence until I began to feel like I was on trial.

  “What’s happening with her funeral?” I asked.

  He peered at me over his glasses.

  “I’m sorry, I’m—I’m not familiar with what’s supposed to happen next.”

  Palatine closed the folder. “There isn’t going to be a funeral.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Her instructions were clear: no service, no clergy.”

  “Is she going to be buried?”

  “As soon as the autopsy is complete.”

  “When—”

  “I don’t know. The ME is backed up to the rafters, not to mention incompetent. It could take months.”

  Disturbed, I said, “So she’s just ... lying there?”

  “For the time being.”

  “Okay, well ... When the burial does happen, I’d like to be there.”

  He pursed his lips. “I’ll have Nancy contact you.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  He went back to reading. “I told her it wasn’t proper, not having any sort of ceremony. I told her several times. Not that she ever listened to anything I said.”

  I said nothing.

  “She could be very stubborn.” He looked up at me. “But I’m sure already you knew that.”

  I said nothing.

  “After thirty years, I know better than to argue. That always was a losing game with her. When she told me about you, for instance. To be honest, I thought it was a lousy idea.” He smiled at me. “You don’t even have a credit rating.”

  I opened my mouth but said nothing.

  He leaned back in his chair. “Tell me: what did you two talk about, during your little philosophical discussions.”

  Silence.

  I said, “Free will, mostly.”

  “What about it.”

  “Whether it exists.”

  “And what did you conclude.”

  “We didn’t conclude anything,” I said. “It wasn’t that kind of conversation.”

  “What kind of conversation.”

  “The kind that concludes.”

  He snorted. “Well,” he said, “it’s over now.”

  I said nothing.

  He sighed, rubbed his face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is all such a rotten business.”

  I nodded.

  “Normally, I’d have done this by mail, but given the nature of her instructions, I thought it’d be better to meet in person.”

  He pushed the folder across the table.

  “Have a look.”

  I opened it. Inside was Alma’s will. I looked at him.

  “Go on.”

  The first sections were technical, invalidating previous wills and codicils, ordering the payment of taxes, and so forth. The distribution of the estate began with various donations to charities promoting literacy, as well as an Austrian cultural center. Doctor Cargill was to choose a piece of jewelry from the upstairs vanity. The middle paragraphs referred to several preexisting trusts, the beneficiary of which was Eric Alan Banks, and each of which was given to him on conditions that I deemed more or less impracticable. One of the trusts hung—absurdly, I thought—upon his completing a college degree. Another held the funds for tuition. Just about the only fund I could ever imagine him gaining access to was the one that provided the money for a defense attorney in the event that he was charged with a crime carrying a potential prison sentence of five years or more. I almost felt bad for him; reading the will, one got the sense that Alma was mocking him. Still, none of it had anything to do with me until, all at once, it did.

  SECTION IX.

  a. To Joseph Geist, who has been a most suitable and pleasant companion to me, I leave my home, its contents, and all assets not otherwise specified in the preceding paragraphs, provided he meet the following conditions: 1. he shall complete his doctoral dissertation;

  2. that dissertation shall be submitted to and accepted by the department of philosophy, Harvard University;

  3. he shall graduate from Harvard University with a doctoral degree in philosophy;

  4. the foregoing three conditions shall be met within twenty-four months of the date of my death, during which time he shall be permitted to live in the house and to draw upon monies specified in section IX, paragraph E.

  b. Upon fulfillment of these conditions, ownership of the assets specified in section IX, paragraph A, shall pass into his hands immediately.

  c. Should he fail to meet any of the conditions specified in section IX, paragraph A, or fail to do so within the period of time specified in section IX, paragraph A, part 4, the assets specified in section IX, paragraph A, shall revert in equal parts to the parties specified in section VI, paragraphs C—K.

  She’d left me a budget of twenty thousand dollars.

  A long, foggy silence.

  I said, “Does Eric know about this?”

  “Not yet.”

  “When is he going to find out?”

  “I wanted him to be here today,” said Palatine, “but he’s indisposed.”

  “Where.”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Is he in jail?”

  Palatine said nothing.

  In the distance, a tugboat honked.

  He said, “I’ll have you know that I did my best to dissuade her. Games like this never lead to anything but strife.”

  I said nothing.

  “Nancy will have copies of everything sent to your attorney.”

  “I don’t have an attorney,” I said.

  “Then you’d better get one.” He stood. “Have a good day.”

  I MUST HAVE LOOKED like some harried clerk out of Kafka, struggling to keep my huge stack of papers neat as the train lurched and swerved. In addition to the will, I had been given a slew of other documents, a fiduciary and probate surety bond, a military affidavit, and, most significantly, a year’s worth of statements from fifteen different banks in the United States, Austria, and Switzerland. I paged through them rapidly, totting it all up: in addition to the real estate and the collectibles, she had left me two million dollars in stocks, bonds, and cash.

  I was so addled that I almost missed my stop, leaping up as the tone sounded. My foot got caught on the edge of the platform, and I tripped, sending everything flying. I fell to the concrete, lunging and grabbing for pages, aware of people giving me a wide berth as they passed.

  I stopped at a drugstore and asked for plastic bags. The weight of all the paper caused the bag handles to cut into my palms, and my fingertips were purple and numb by the time I arrived at Drew’s.

  I buzzed.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me.”

  “What’s up.”

  “Let me in, please.”

  He was blessedly accepting, asking nothing as I came in and sat down on his couch, where I stayed, bags of paper piled at my feet, until the late afternoon.

  “I’m gonna hop in the shower,” he said.

  “Alma’s dead.”

  He blinked. “Oh, shit.”

  “She left me everything.” I looked at him. “She left me the house.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  I shook my head.

  “ ... wowie. ”

  I said nothing.

  “What happened?” he said.

  I said nothing.

  “
Are you okay?”

  “I can’t go back there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t.”

  “Joseph—”

  “No. ”

  “Okay. Okay. Sorry.”

  Silence.

  He stood. “I have to go to work.”

  I said nothing.

  “There’s stir-fry in the freezer.”

  I nodded.

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  I said, “I don’t know.”

  After a beat, he left the room. I heard water running. I put my head back and closed my eyes.

  OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS I moped around the apartment, cleaning, an exercise in futility if ever there was one. No sooner had I finished wiping down countertops and alphabetizing DVDs than Drew would come home, compliment me on my achievement, and then undo it, five hours’ work gone in five minutes. Interestingly, he would put everything back where I’d found it, this particular tea-stained mug on that particular chair, the half-roll of duct tape kicked under the desk. Even he had a system, it seemed.

  I can’t say that his grief-counseling skills were very nuanced, but he did make an effort to cheer me up.

  “Have you ever considered,” he said to me one evening as he sat as his computer, fingers flying, “that one of the few places in the world where you can’t order from Amazon is in the heart of the Amazon itself?”

  I said nothing.

  “You know, at some point you’re going to have to accept that this is what she wanted.”

  I rolled over on the sofabed.

  “Fine,” he said. “Just—stop cleaning up, okay?”

  I hoped Alma was getting a big laugh out of this. I hoped she thought this was totally hilarious. If she had wanted to reward me for my companionship, if she’d thought she could spur me to work, there had to be a better way. I had before me the possibility of what every struggling intellectual longs for—financial freedom—and what I felt was not relief or gratitude but guilt and helplessness.

  Twenty thousand dollars might sound like a lot, but until then I hadn’t been paying for food or utilities. If I had to get a job, that would in effect negate my twenty-four months of supposed free time.... Why twenty-four? From her perspective, all I needed was a kick-start. One year would not have been enough, while three would only encourage more of the same.... Two years, then, which meant I should aim to get a draft done by June, so that I could spend the coming summer revising and the second academic year finishing up everything I needed to get done in order to submit, defend, graduate.... My head hurt with all the variables. The lawyer was right. No good could come of this, especially not after Eric found out. How much of that twenty thousand would I have to spend to make myself feel secure? I’d have to put in an alarm. I’d have to redo the locks, secure the windows.... It added up.

  Now, it would have been easy to disentangle myself. All I had to do was fail to meet Alma’s conditions and the estate would pass right out of my hands, leaving me the same as before. But that didn’t feel right, either. Because Drew had a point. People could do whatever they wanted with their money. Could I, in good conscience, deny her last wishes?

  One thing I ask of you before I die.

  I left a thank-you note, gathered up the papers, and walked over to the house.

  The house?

  My house.

  Assuming, of course, that I did my work.

  The concept of ownership is totally bizarre. I recognize that it’s fundamental to society and so forth, but when one examines it closely, it starts to look a lot like voodoo. Political philosophers have spilled a lot of ink trying to determine what makes a person’s things his. To cite one famous example: Locke writes that we acquire property when we mix our labor with it—by cultivating a piece of land, say. (Leading Robert Nozick to ask, three hundred years later, “If I own a can of tomato juice and spill it in the sea so that its molecules mingle evenly throughout the sea, do I thereby come to own the sea, or have I foolishly dissipated my tomato juice?”) Of all the explanations for what creates ownership—general consensus, political or physical might, a receipt, etc.—none seemed to address the present situation. The house, its contents, and all assets not otherwise specified had been thrust into my domain without my asking for them, paying for them, or giving my consent.

  Afraid of going inside, I set the bags down on the sidewalk and stood trying to bend my mind around the notion that this thing, so large, so Victorian, so goddamned quaint, was—would be—could be—mine.

  My house.

  An awkward phrase, an ill-fitting phrase, a suit five sizes too big. I tried again, out loud.

  “My house.”

  Oh, Eric would be angry, all right.

  But it wasn’t up to him.

  It was her choice. What she did, she did freely. For her sake, I had an obligation to her to get over myself. To refuse to try would be the height of disrespect.

  “My house.”

  Why did I feel so guilty, anyway? I knew why: because I had imagined this very outcome. I had driven myself mad imagining it. In its original incarnation, the fantasy entailed that I harm her, which thought gave rise to guilt. But I hadn’t actually harmed her. There is a world of difference between an omission and an action. It wasn’t logical, the way I’d been persecuting myself. Alma had lived for the relentless pursuit of truth, and the truth was that having bad dreams didn’t make me culpable for anything. What she did, she did freely.

  “My house.”

  Better. Easier. Still far from perfect, though, and so I said it again and again, cinching it up here, straightening it there, embroidering it with various inflections, making conversation with myself. “My house has shingles.” “My house has gables.” “My house is white.” “My house is a hundred years old.” Repetition soon turned the words familiar and then meaningless and then almost comical. “My house,” I said. “Mine.” Did the concept fit? Not yet. Not perfectly. Not remotely. But I could feel myself growing, and it shrinking. Look up there: there it was: my house. My house had a front yard and a porch and cement pavers and a weather-beaten trellis and a mailbox and the thingy that holds a flagpole, whatever it’s called, painted white to match. It was my house, and these were its components. How many times had Alma teased me for my aversion to life’s finer things? I dressed like a hobo, my greatest personal indulgence was scrambled eggs and toast at a diner, and with her last act she sought to change my mind. Did I not owe it to her to give it my best effort? It was puerile, was it not, to throw a tantrum. All around me, the country was falling apart, good hardworking people losing their homes left and right, and I had the audacity to say thanks but no thanks; I can’t take a house. What was wrong with me? It was a house, for God’s sake. A house. Mine. My house. And not just my house but everything inside, too. For the first time in my life, I owned stuff, lots of stuff. My house, its contents, and all assets not otherwise specified. Money. Antiques. Furniture. I was to be rich. A most suitable and pleasant companion, that’s what I had been. She wanted me to have it all. Could I disobey her? Of course not. I might feel guilty, yes, but I would feel guiltier about letting her down, and when I thought about it that way, it occurred to me that not only was Eric not entitled to anything, but I had an ethical obligation to keep her property, which is to say my property, out of his hands. She was wiser than I had ever given her credit for. This was her way of administering justice. This was her way of teaching him a lesson. She had seen him for what he was, a leech, and she would let him know. He had taken advantage of her in her lifetime, never realizing that by doing so he forfeited a far greater future bounty. Hence I was duty-bound to take hold of the place, to make it mine, and to shut him out. And in order to do that I had to stitch up any guilt, stash it someplace never to be looked at, be a man and accept what was mine, and thus it was with proud pounding heart and hot swimming head that I climbed up my stairs to my porch and unlocked my door and dropped my bags containing my documents in my entry hall and stood a
dmiring as never before my living room and my mantel clock and my pale pink sofas. There were no ghosts here. Just my Carolina parakeets screeching, my seascape rolling. It didn’t take long to adjust to this, did it? No, it did not. My desire, conceived in agony months before, now quickened, contracted, came fully into the world, bawling for my undivided attention. Mine. Mine, I chanted to myself as I walked down my hallway to my room—they were all my rooms now—and grabbed a pen and a piece of paper, both mine, from my desk and began to write down everything I could see. My leaded window with my tiny hunting scene. My back porch. My wicker chairs. My yard with my grass, my quince dying its yearly death. My pillows and my blankets and my bed, not just a bed that I slept in that belonged to someone else but a bed actually mine. I wrote it all down and then I went on to my music room, where I enumerated my vases and my record player and my wooden music stand holding my copy of Sibelius’s Humoresque No. 6 in G Minor. Over the arm of my loveseat hung my large woolen blanket, and on the floor sat my violin and my record player and in my chickenwire cabinet my extensive collection of classical LPs. Linens and cedar hangers and mothballs and shower curtains and dishes and glasses and the fridge and the oven and I hadn’t even taken into account the library. Mine. And I walked the length and breadth of my kingdom, opening the shutters, letting in the forgotten sun, thinking about me before and me now and what had changed. Because I did not feel the same anymore. Does change happen all at once, at the cusp, or is it the sum of an infinite series of events, each individually tiny but, taken together, unstoppable? Who sets the billiard balls in motion? And I thought about her shape in the sheets, a shape that matched the rent in my heart. I thought of how I had wept for her, not having done so for anyone since my brother, and I had been good to her; she had called me a good boy; she had used my name. And if they were to be mine, truly mine, this house, its contents, and all assets not otherwise specified in the preceding paragraphs, then I could not be afraid of a room. There were no ghosts here. I asked myself what she would do and I knew the answer, and so I took a box of trash bags from underneath the kitchen sink—mine, both of them—and went upstairs to her bedroom, my bedroom. She didn’t live here anymore; I did. These were the facts. Accept them. I had her example to follow. So: no sentimentality: no self-indulgent beating of the breast: but truth, what we had always sought, the two of us together on our private journey. And what was the truth? The truth was that I could sleep in that big bed if I wanted. I could and I would. I would move in and make it mine. No longer stuck in the back of the house like a tenant. I flipped on the lights and lifted the blinds. The room reeked. But there were no ghosts here. I tore off the blanket, stripped the linens, piled them at the foot of the bed. Ocher stains had worked their way through to the mattress pad—more vomit? Blood? Urine? Mine, too. Mine to feel disgust at and to want to be rid of, mine to dispose of if I saw fit. There was dust everywhere. I stripped the pad as well. I emptied the closets and dumped out the chest of drawers: sweaters, skirts, socks, slacks, blouses, a humiliating multitude of undergarments. I made great heaps, pushed it all into the trash bags, carried everything down to the service porch. I couldn’t decide whether to wash it or put it out by the curb. I left it there for the time being. As per my proprietary right. Because there were no ghosts here. And if there were, they belonged to me.