The Stark Truth

by Peter Israel

  We talked, but I’d be hard pressed to say what about. She ran her own business, some kind of party-catering outfit, maybe it was that. Or Sprague, her married name. I’d known Spragues in school, but apparently her Sprague hadn’t been one of mine. I remember her saying something about the Osborne, that ornate hulk of faded Victorian splendor at Fifty-seventh and Seventh, diagonally across from Carnegie Hall, but whether it was that she’d always wanted to live there or had never understood how people did I couldn’t tell you. And that, of course, was because I was traveling my own single track, sure in the knowledge of where we were going to end up, and relishing it.

  We reached her building, one of the newer towers on Central Park South, where, from high up, the snowy park stretched straight, broadly, between the verticals of east and west. I imagined making love to her on that snowy blanket. We faced each other under her canopy. Her cheeks were flushed, the tips of her ears pink, her eyes aglitter. I held her arms firmly, fingers deep into her fur, while her hands touched my lapels, and the smell of her, the heavy musk of her perfume, rose strongly, mingling with the fumes of my cognac.

  I kissed her, bending her back lightly, tasting her.

  “I think I should come up with you now, Kitty,” I said, inhaling her.

  I saw her eyes go dull, the way women’s often do at the moment of acquiescence. But then abruptly alert, small, a fleeting angry glance. She looked down, away, and her hands pushed at me.

  “No,” I heard her say. She was shaking her bowed head, her hair in my face. I heard something indistinct, like “I don’t want this,” or “I don’t want it this way.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said, still holding her. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said. Her voice was muffled. “I’m sorry. I don’t want—”

  “For Christ’s sake, Kitty, you’ve been asking me all night! Who picked who up?”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  With that she tore loose from me, yanked her arms free. Her black hair swirled. Her eyes, I saw, were wet with tears.

  “I said I’m sorry,” she repeated, glaring at me. Then, stiffly: “Thank you for the evening. I hope you’ll call me again.”

  I felt something approximating rage—an unaccustomed feeling—erupt inside me.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I blurted out. “Make an appointment with you?”

  She took that like a slap, mouth agape, which was how I’d meant it. Then she suddenly swiveled on her high heels, pivoting on hard cement, and I saw a uniformed doorman push open the glass door for her. She turned back to me from the doorway.

  “Call me,” she said aloud. That was all, and she disappeared into the lobby in a blur of russet fur.

  3

  I came back to the office around three, one Friday afternoon a few weeks later, to find Kitty Goldmark sitting in the armchair next to my desk, a leather portfolio at her feet and her fox coat flung over the couch behind her.

  No appointment, needless to say. In theory my staff was free to make appointments for me without my knowing about it, but only with established clients, and I’d had a clean slate for that afternoon except for a meeting of the Recruitment Committee.

  “Well,” I said, closing my door behind me. “Happy New Year, Kitty. If you don’t mind my asking, how did you get here?”

  “On foot.”

  “I mean, without an appointment?”

  “What difference does that make? You’re available, aren’t you?”

  She glanced at my desk, at the corner next to the computer console where I kept my calendar. It turned out she’d arrived a bit after two and, claiming she was a new client and had already talked to me, had simply browbeaten her way past my secretary. While waiting for me, she’d had enough time to inspect the premises pretty thoroughly and form her opinions, which, I learned later, were largely negative. Sterile space, she called it. Where were my books, my framed diplomas? She’d have thought my kind of Social Register clientele wanted a leatherbound library in glassed-in mahogany, and oriental rugs on the floor.

  It did no good to explain that I was something of an anomaly in the firm, in that our principal business wasn’t with individuals but corporations, or that the massive-tomed law library was a thing of the past, supplanted by the microchip and computer-accessed research services.

  But this, as I say, came later. Right then, the atmosphere between us was stiff, even irritable.

  “Do you always take such long lunches?” she asked as I sat down.

  “Yes, as a rule.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Well, to enjoy myself,” I answered truthfully enough.

  She didn’t seem to like that.

  “You never called me,” she said, looking away.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged. For once, an answer didn’t come to mind.

  “The last time I saw you,” she said, “you couldn’t wait to go to bed with me. Do you normally drop women so fast?”

  “Only when they drop me first,” I said lightly.

  She didn’t like that, either. I saw her jaw set firmly in profile as she gazed out the sealed and tinted windows behind me.

  “But what did you think?” she said harshly. “Did you think I was just some piece of meat that you could sling around and slap into bed?”

  “I didn’t—” I started to say.

  “Well, but that’s how you treated me: like a slab of beef in a butcher’s window. Why didn’t you call when I asked you to? That you didn’t only proves what you thought of me. You probably went off and got one of your Social Register pieces of meat. We’re all pretty interchangeable, isn’t that what you think? Well, that’s not who I am, Mr. Thompson, and if that’s who you think I am, then …”

  And off she went, in that vein. It was, to my astonishment, quite a performance, a full-scale Kitten rage complete with tears and recriminations. But what I didn’t realize at the time was that Kitty, once she thought she’d been wronged, fueled the storm herself.

  At some point I said, “I’m sorry, Kitty. But I seem to remember it was you who picked me up, not the other way around. You said you’d done it on a bet, but that turned out not to be so.”

  “And what does that mean?” Suddenly suspicious.

  “Just what I said. You told me you’d won a hundred dollars by picking me up. Your brother said you hadn’t won anything.”

  I’d thought it amusing. I’d run into Goldmark a week or so before, when he’d been in to see some of our Mergers and Acquisitions people. I hardly knew him—a Wall Street whiz kid, people said, and he was pointed to as a sign of the changing times—a Jew who’d made it in an all-Wasp shop—but I couldn’t resist twitting him about losing a hundred dollars to his sister. Except that he’d denied it. Yes, he’d brought her to the party, and he’d told her who I was. Probably, he admitted, he’d even said something to the effect that I was out of her league. But he said he’d learned the hard way never to bet against his sister.

  Kitty, though, failed to see the humor in it.

  “So, just because he told you I lied, you believe him?” she said in a bitter tone. “Now why is that? Let me guess. Because he’s a boy and you’re a boy? Of course. But suppose I insisted it was the truth. Suppose I swore to you that he owed me a hundred dollars. What then?”

  “Well, then, I’d believe you.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. But didn’t it even occur to you that Teddy’s the kind who can’t ever admit he’s lost anything? No,” she answered herself, tossing her head, “it didn’t occur to you. But I’ll prove it. Where did this conversation take place?”

  “Look, Kitty, why make so much of it? I—”

  “Where did this conversation take place?” she insisted.

  I thought back. It had been around noontime. I was on my way out to lunch, and I’d run into Goldmark in the corridor with a group of our M and A Mafia. We’d waited by the elevator bank together; we’d ridden down together.


  “You mean you had this conversation in an elevator?” she asked. She would, I thought in passing, have made a hell of a prosecuting attorney.

  “Yes. At least I think—”

  “And you’d expect Teddy to admit he’d lost a bet? To me? In a crowded elevator, in front of a bunch of other men?”

  I smiled. From what I knew of Goldmark, no, maybe not.

  “Do you see?” she said in triumph. “You’re not so sure now, are you?” Then, before I could get her off the subject: “What else did he say about me?”

  “Nothing,” I answered.

  “Nothing? I don’t believe it. There’s no way he’d miss the chance to put me down.”

  In fact, Goldmark had said something else, but under the circumstances there was no way Kitty was going to get it out of me. For as quickly as it had risen, the storm subsided in her. This, too, was very much the Kitten style, the rage boiling over and then quieting, the heat off, the planes of her face suddenly calm, the amused glint back in her eyes. Provided, that is, that she’d made her point.

  “Come on, Tommy,” she said, “done is done. Let’s have some fun now. I’ve brought you some business.” I think I must inadvertently have glanced at my watch, for she went on: “I know, you have a meeting, I saw it on your schedule. But this won’t take long. I have it all laid out for you.”

  She made me sit next to her on my couch while she spread her papers on the coffee table in front of us. They concerned her late husband’s estate. She showed me the Petition for Probate and the appendant paraphernalia—citations, waivers, affidavits, and depositions—that accompany the filing of any will, plus the 706 (Federal Tax) and the TT-86.5 (State of New York). At a glance, they certainly looked in proper form, but she insisted on walking me through them.

  Edgar Chalmers Sprague had named Kitty and his attorney as coexecutors. Nothing unusual there, although Kitty took it that way. It was her late husband’s means, she said, of trying to control her even from the grave. I knew of the attorney in question, Henry Fifield, although we’d never met. He had his own small firm, and a solid reputation. Furthermore, Sprague’s will was simple enough a few specific bequests, with the balance to Kitty. The investments the executors had made seemed properly prudent: T-bills and government securities, for the most part, and a little under one hundred thousand dollars in a money market account.

  “It all seems in good order to me,” I said.

  “Oh, that it is. Very good order. In fact, you’ve just described Gar to a T. No mess, no fuss, no risk.”

  “Well,” I said, picking up the sarcasm in her voice, “there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”

  “Just one thing,” she said, turning toward me, her body slithering on the leather of my couch. “It’s boring. It’s also bad business.”

  “An estate’s hardly a business.”

  “And why shouldn’t it be? Why shouldn’t you run it like a business?”

  “Well, for one thing, it’s of relatively short duration. An uncomplicated estate like your husband’s, I’d guess it’d take no more than two years, three at the outside, for the tax audit, and then it can be liquidated, the assets disbursed. In the interim, the role of any executor or attorney who happens to be involved is simply to safeguard the assets. That may be boring—it is boring—but that’s his role.”

  She laughed at that.

  “What law school did you say you’d gone to, Tommy?”

  “I don’t know that I did say. But Harvard.”

  “I think Henry went to Columbia, but it sounds like you took the same courses. He said almost the exact same thing.”

  “With reason,” I said. “Any good attorney would, and I understand Henry Fifield’s a good one.”

  “I’m sure he is,” Kitty replied. “I just fired him.”

  “Did you?” I said, amused. “But I don’t think you can actually fire an executor except for gross misconduct, and even then the courts have to approve.”

  “I’m not actually firing him,” she said. Then she laughed again, and I saw the animated flash in her eyes. “He’s willing to step down, resign, whatever it is you do. He took a little convincing, but I’m good at that.”

  I smiled back at her. From what her brother had said—the comment I’d suppressed—I’d have guessed she’d just made the understatement of the year.

  “And that brings you to me?” I asked.

  “Exactly. I want you either as coexecutor or as attorney to the estate.”

  “But why me?”

  “Because I’m told you’re the best in the business.”

  Flattering as that might have been, I didn’t see that she, or Edgar Sprague’s estate, required “the best in the business.” Furthermore, I judged her smart enough to know that. But she had something else in mind.

  “I want to play with the assets, Tommy. Before you say anything, let me explain. Gar never had any fun in life—no risk, no fuss, that’s the way he was. But I’m in charge of the money now, and it’s criminal to leave it lying there, wasting. Over a million dollars going to waste. Look, I’ll show you what I mean.”

  She pulled a file from her portfolio, with columns of handwritten numbers on legal-size sheets, and put it in front of me. It was a summary she’d prepared of what would be hers after expenses and bequests. The bottom line showed seven figures.

  “That’s mine, Tommy,” she said, pointing out the number with a scarlet-tipped index finger. “Mine to throw out the window if I want to. I don’t, but I’d sooner do that than make nickels and dimes.”

  “And Fifield objected?”

  “That’s right. He said the purpose of Gar’s will was to protect me. He said Gar would have wanted to make me comfortable, if not rich, for the rest of my life. Well, I told him I didn’t want to be buried with my husband. I told Henry—you should pardon the expression—that I didn’t give a flying fuck what Gar would have wanted. Besides, I don’t even need the money. I’ve got my own business. Gar always thought that was a joke, something to keep me occupied. Well, let me tell you something. If my projections are right, and I think they’re conservative, my little pastime is going to bring down more this year than Edgar Sprague made in the last ten years of his working life.”

  There was a kind of glitter, an exultation in her voice, when she talked about her business, and which transcended the bitter tinge whenever she mentioned Sprague. I should admit that, out of curiosity, I’d checked him out a little after the evening I’d spent with his widow. It turned out he’d been related to my Spragues after all, but distantly, obscurely, and was, in addition, a good generation older than the ones I knew. He’d been an executive in a large factoring company, one of those outfits that buy up receivables at a deep discount from companies in cash trouble and then, assuming it can collect them, banks a very tidy profit. The practice always smacked of a kind of usury in reverse to me, but it’s certainly legal, even marginally respectable. In any case, Sprague had taken early retirement and spent the last decade or so of his life teaching in some business school. Yes, it was known that he had married—late in life, a much younger woman. Also that he drank too much, and this is what had done him in, in his late sixties.

  As Kitty and I sat side by side, not quite touching but close enough for her arm to brush mine whenever she reached forward, I couldn’t put her sheer proximity out of my mind. I suppose this was no accident. It wasn’t what she wore, either. She had on a Chanel-type suit of black silk, the kind with the open, collarless jacket, and a high-necked blouse underneath, the color of amethyst. She favored the gemstone, too, in her jewelry: dewdrop earrings set in gold and an antique bracelet of amethysts surrounded by tiny seed pearls, also set in gold. Rings on her fingers but no wedding ring. It was more the way her body filled her clothes, with a firm and healthy fulsomeness. Her legs, I now saw, were full-calved yet shapely. She wore more makeup than the women I was accustomed to, and certainly more perfume: that heavy, musky scent, tinged by spice. Yet in some way Kitty, so adorned
, was more natural than the ex-debutante corps I frequented, who seemed intent, even as they approached forty, on looking as if they’d just stepped off the beach in Barbados.

  “I want to make money with Gar’s money,” Kitty said beside me.

  “Because money’s sexy?” I asked.

  She laughed at that. I had the memory of a bull elephant, she said.

  “Well, I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place,” I said. “This illustrious firm is so conservative when it comes to investments that we’d make Henry Fifield look like a crapshooter.”

  “Oh?” she said. “That’s not the way I hear it.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “Well, that you’ve been involved in some of the hottest financial deals of the eighties, with a specialty in taking public companies private. I’ve also heard your billings last year came close to Skadden Arps’s.”

  I assumed she’d been talking to her brother. The Skadden Arps part aside, what she’d said was true enough. It was also true, whether she realized it or not, that she’d touched a sore point.

  “Be that as it may,” I said, “when it comes to Trusts and Estates, we’re still in the Jarndyce and Jarndyce era.”

  “That’s Bleak House, isn’t it?” she said, taking me up on it. “The one where it’s the lawyers who make all the money?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “I could never finish it,” she admitted with a smile.

  “Neither could I. But when it comes to estate planning, we take a very conservative investment posture.”

  “Even when it means the erosion of capital?”

  “You mean because of inflation?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, we try to take that into account, of course. But yes, if we were to hit another major inflationary cycle—”

  “But suppose you were only acting as attorney to an estate and the executor chose to make certain kinds of investments?”

  “Risky ones?”

  “Not necessarily. Say, less conventional ones.”

  “It would be against our best advice.”

  “But if the executor insisted …?”