I took my house key and locked my front door and walked down my front walk, unaware of where my feet were carrying me but willing to let them lead.
“Good timing,” said the salesman. “They just went on sale.”
I sat on a low velvet bench. He measured me once again and brought out two boxes. “Basic black is your best bet, although the oxblood’s lovely, as well. You can’t go wrong with them for casual wear. Of course, you don’t have to choose just one.”
I looked at the price tags: three hundred ninety dollars a pair, plus tax. An exorbitant amount for shoes.
But she had given me instructions. And I was a millionaire.
“Autograph, please ... Thank you very much.” He handed me my bags. “You’re a Mephisto man now.”
19
I chose my lawyer because his office was within walking distance. Also, Davis Solomon was one of those people with two first names or two last names, depending on how you look at it, which sort of thing appeals to me, in the way that logical paradoxes or figure-ground illusions do. He charged four hundred twenty-five dollars for an initial consultation, during which he advised me, with no trace of irony, not to start blowing through my savings. Under the best of circumstances, Middlesex County South probate court moved at a crawl.
I asked what would happen if Eric contested the will.
“He’d have to show that you exercised undue influence over Ms. Spielmann, i.e., both that she was capable of being manipulated and that you did in fact manipulate her. It’s tough to prove. In the past, people have tried to point to suicide itself as evidence that the decedent was, by definition, not thinking clearly. But the burden of proof is on them. Bear in mind, that doesn’t prevent him from being a pain in the neck. You get the ones who drag it out—women, mostly. Side of caution, I’d say you’re looking at a year, once all the conditions are met.”
I’d been envisioning something along the lines of the Publishers Clearing House, Charles Palatine ringing the doorbell and presenting me with a four-foot cardboard check. “There’s nothing we can do to speed it up?”
Solomon shrugged. He had huge shoulders, golem shoulders, and the act suggested a mountain uprooting itself. “If you want to feel productive, you can round up some evidence of your relationship with her. That might be useful, in the event he does sue. Photographs of the two of you, or letters. That sort of thing. Something to show that it was genuine, and not mercenary.”
He seemed to think that Alma and I had taken road trips together.
“I don’t have any photographs.”
“Someone who knew the both of you and could testify that you were close.”
The only person I could come up with was Dr. Cargill.
“There you go. Otherwise we wait and see what happens. Meantime, you might want to get started on that paper.”
THE NEXT MORNING, I awoke to humming.
“Goddammit,” I said, emerging onto the landing. “Didn’t I say n—”
Daciana screamed and dropped her vacuum and ran into the TV room, locking herself inside. I realized that I hadn’t warned her about moving into the master suite.
“Open up.” I pounded. “Daciana.”
Moaning, keening.
“Open up.”
“Oh no, oh no.”
It took a good ten minutes to persuade her that I was not a phantom. When she finally did come out, I said, “Listen, I told you the last t—”
“Okay seer,” she said, rushing past me and commencing to vacuum.
I watched her for a minute, then gave up and went downstairs.
My intention was to go through my existing dissertation, salvaging as much of it as possible. What point was there in starting from scratch when I already had so much text? Belly filled with tea, I fetched down all eight hundred pages and sequestered myself in the library, where I spent that entire day reading. (Save an hour when Daciana kicked me out in order to “clean book.”) Having not touched the manuscript in almost a year, I could come to it with newfound objectivity, and what I found disturbed me. It was as though I had been sent back in time, forced to confront my earlier self, a self whose vanity, immaturity, and impatience shone through on every page. I used four words where one would do. I indulged in extratextual references. Large swaths did not cohere, consisting entirely of tangents, all sprung from a higher-level tangent ... itself emerging from a third cluster of tangents ... Finnegans Wake with a bibliography.
“Finish, seer.”
Through dry eyes I saw her standing in the doorway, her blouse shadowed with sweat.
I set down the manuscript, tugged out my wallet, counted off sixty dollars.
“This is the last time,” I said. “Do you understand?”
“Okay, seer.” She stuffed the money into her brassiere, then bent to pick up her basket of cleaning supplies. “See you soon.”
NOBODY KNEW BETTER than I how quickly two years could slip away. As I began anew to wrestle with writer’s block—razing in the afternoon that which I had built in the morning—I felt the first tickles of what would soon become a constant, low-grade panic. Rereading the manuscript had demoralized me, tightening the spigot until nothing at all would come. Instead I busied myself with false preliminaries. I compiled a new reading list. I went out and bought a large whiteboard, upon which I began to draw elaborate “idea maps,” conceptual networks that depicted, more than anything else, the cobwebs in my own brain. Telling myself that I needed access to more current resources, I called up the phone company and had an Internet connection put in, which of course achieved nothing except to make me more distractible. Frighteningly, I seemed to have lost my capacity to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time. I would type a bit, get up, stretch, walk around, get a glass of water, read a couple of paragraphs from some irrelevant book, sit down, type a bit more, fret, delete everything I’d written, check the headlines, check the weather.... Eventually I’d end up at the Wikipedia entry for the Pointer Sisters, having somehow bounced there from the page on Kripke models. Desperate for inspiration, I thought back on my conversations with Alma. All those long, wonderful hours of talk—they flitted teasingly at the periphery of my memory, vanishing when I turned to reach for them. If I’d only kept a tape recorder in the room.... And when I did get my fingers around an idea, I found it useless, barely flapping, almost dead, a delicate thing I had crushed in my haste. The same discursiveness that had made our conversations so pleasurable made it impossible to fashion them into a workable argument. We didn’t have that kind of conversation, the kind that concludes. That would have defeated our purpose, which was to think, to explore, to feel unconfined. And yet now she demanded that I yoke myself to a deadline. Madness! Depravity! I felt furious at her; then I felt sorry and ungrateful; then paralyzed and depressed.... But none of this was helping me write.
I had an excuse, though, a really good one. The dissertation was only one of two obstacles. The other was Eric. Perhaps that was what was causing me to lose focus: I was preoccupied by the thought of a lawsuit. The probate citation would have to be published in the newspaper, circulated to interested parties, and returned to the court—at which point he would lose the right to object. Until then, I decided, I couldn’t expect to have the presence of mind necessary for creative work.
Thus it was that I arrived at November with nothing to show for myself.
“You know what you should do,” Drew said. He stood in the middle of the library, arms up like a signalman. “You should throw a party.”
I scoffed.
“For real. This is a great party house. I’m serious, it’s got a very classy vibe.” He sank into one of the armchairs, moaned. “That’s what I’m talking about.... How come you never had me over before?”
“She liked it quiet,” I said—a partial lie. Alma had never forbidden guests; I simply hadn’t asked, wanting to keep her to myself. Now that she was gone, I felt compelled to reveal where it was I’d been hiding. And, I must admit, to brag.
; “Do like a wine and cheese,” he said. “Or you know what? Poker night. Whiskey, cigars ... We could use that big table out front.”
“That’s the dining-room table.”
“And therefore.”
“It’s an antique.”
“And therefore.”
“It’s not a card table.”
“It’s the perfect size. All you need is a felt.”
“No.”
“Well,” he said, spinning the globe. “If you change your mind, let me know.”
Down the hall, Daciana passed, humming. Drew looked at me.
“The maid,” I said.
“Moving on up, my friend.”
“Please.”
“Like the Jeffersons.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “I told her to stop coming. She keeps showing up anyway.”
“That’s ... I don’t know what it is. Weird.”
“Indeed.”
“Why don’t you fire her?”
“You say that like I haven’t tried.”
He laughed.
“It’s not funny. She’s driving me insane.”
“How hard is it to fire someone?”
“You have no idea how persistent she is.”
“Don’t pay her.”
“I tried that.”
“And?”
“She started crying.”
We paused to listen to her hum.
“At least she has a nice voice,” Drew said.
“It’s not worth sixty dollars a week.”
We listened again.
“Thirty,” he said. “Tops.”
“If I had a party, do you think Yasmina would come? A regular party, not a poker party.”
“You understand that the goal of a party is to meet other women.”
“I don’t know any other women.”
“I do.”
“I think she’d like to see the house.”
“Look, if you’re still obsessed—”
“I’m not obsessed.”
“—just ask her to come by. You don’t need an excuse.”
“It’s not an excuse. She’ll find it less threatening if you ask.”
He shrugged. “I can try.”
“I haven’t agreed to anything. I’m speaking theoretically.”
“Yeah, well, that’s your problem,” he said. “You’re all talk.”
EIGHT WEEKS HAD PASSED since Alma’s death, and I was beginning to suspect that Palatine had “forgotten” to invite me to the burial. When his secretary did call, she told me twice that no guests were permitted.
Mount Auburn Cemetery, misty and still. I stood alone on one side of the grave. Across from me, Dr. Cargill clutched her husband’s arm; next to them, a stolid Charles Palatine leaned on a walking stick. Eric was nowhere in sight.
Because of the cemetery’s historical significance, there was no heavy machinery allowed on-site, and it took thirty minutes for four men, armed with shovels, to get the job done. Nobody spoke. I found the whole episode profoundly anticlimactic, not to mention socially unnavigable. Not wanting to ogle the casket (too brazen) or the other mourners (too creepy), I let my gaze stray across silvery lawns crowded with headstones, whole families of Boston Brahmins mossed over and forgotten. A group of birdwatchers came over the rise, binoculars trained on some distant branch, pausing to confer before departing in unison, flocklike, down a wet path sheeted with orange and yellow leaves. Palatine shifted. He seemed to have a cold, the skin around his nostrils raw with repeated blowing. I kept thinking of my brother’s memorial service, both the original and the more recent one. A lighthouse symbolizing the presence of lost loved ones in our lives: how sick, sick and predictable. And mawkish. But what about this? Was this better? This damp banality of a morning? I looked across the grave at Dr. Cargill and saw her eyes flick away. She had been staring at me? It made me squirm in my new shoes. This was the first occasion I’d had to wear them in public. The morning rain had given me pause, and I’d almost swapped them out for my old loafers. But Alma had made one request of me before she died, and I decided to continue to honor her wishes, going with the black, a choice I imagined she would have approved of, as they were in keeping with the solemnity of the occasion and moreover matched beautifully the new sportcoat I’d bought in her honor as well.
The last spadeful of earth fell. Palatine hobbled away.
I came around to extend Dr. Cargill my condolences. Her mouth pinched slightly as I approached.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.
She nodded. “Yours, too.”
There was a small pause; then her husband put out a hand. “Ron Cargill.”
I introduced myself. “Beautiful place,” I said. “It’s kind of a shame she didn’t want a ceremony.”
“That’s what she wanted,” Dr. Cargill said.
“Yes ... Still, it would have been nice to be able to say something.”
She nodded, tucked away her handkerchief. “Well, take care.”
“Thanks. You, too. But, uh. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but she left you a piece of jewelry.”
Silence.
“So I’m told.”
“Oh,” I said. “I take it you’ve seen the, the—”
“I have.”
Immediately I felt like an idiot. I hadn’t meant to gloat, but how else could she take it? Here I was, lolling atop a fortune, while fifteen years of housecalls had earned her a bauble. Still, I thought her iciness uncalled-for. Alma had made the decision, not me.
“Was there one piece in particular that you admired?” I said.
Silence.
“I can’t say I’ve given it much thought.”
“There’s all sorts of things.” I knew I ought to shut up, but I kept digging, digging, talking and digging. “Come by anytime, you can pick one out. Or, I mean, do you want to have a look?”
She stared at me. “Now?”
“No no no, of course not, of course not now. At your convenience. ”
Silence.
“You know what,” she said. “Let’s just get it over with.”
The drive back to the house was atrociously long.
“Number forty-nine,” I said to her husband. “It’s at the end of the block.”
“He knows where it is,” Dr. Cargill said.
Upstairs, she froze on the threshold to the master bedroom. I knew right away what she was thinking: I had eradicated all traces of Alma.
“This way,” I said, striding overeagerly toward the vanity.
There were rings, bracelets, whisper-fine necklaces in gold and platinum; sapphire earrings and a matching pendant; South Sea pearls; a ruby brooch in the shape of a parrot—none of which I had ever seen Alma wear. As Dr. Cargill ran her fingers over the offerings, I found myself mentally urging her toward the cheaper-looking things. Whatever she left would be mine to sell, after all, and I had decided that twenty thousand simply wouldn’t cut it. I had bills to pay; I had research costs. I was thinking of getting a new computer, a desktop. Hunching over a tiny screen was all well and good when you had to be prepared to move at a moment’s notice, but it didn’t suit a homeowner. These things didn’t grow on trees, did they?
At the same time, I felt badly about the way I’d comported myself in the cemetery. I might need to call on the doctor as a character witness.
“Feel free to take more than one piece,” I said.
Her lips pinched again. “Thanks.”
“Would you like a drink?”
“I’m fine.”
“Do you think your husband would?”
We’d left Ron Cargill down in the living room.
“He’ll be fine.”
“All right,” I said, watching, relieved, as she set down a weighty gold cuff. “I don’t know much about jewelry.”
She looked at me.
“Why would you?” she said.
At once a frightening thought came to me: the change that I’d felt come over me on the day of
my homecoming, when I took possession of my house—she could see it on me, it had spread across my body like a rash. I tried to speak, could not.
The doctor returned to browsing, holding a pair of earrings up to look in the mirror. “I got a call from the police.”
“... did you.”
She nodded. “They asked me about your relationship with Alma.”
Silence.
“Hm,” I said.
Silence.
“I said that you cared a great deal about each other,” she said.
“... we did.”
She put the earrings down. “Obviously.” She stepped back, crossed her arms. “I don’t want any of this.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, I just don’t want anything.”
The Executor Page 18