Closing Costs

by Seth Margolis

  The men didn’t respond. Sophie and William joined her to watch. DiGregorio closed a Word document and clicked on the Internet icon. After a half-second there appeared some sort of financial page crammed with numbers. The two men exchanged glances, then DiGregorio clicked on the address box to see which sites Barnett had recently visited. He clicked on the most recent address. The screen jumped to a page called Expedia. Special Agent Sammet leaned closer to the monitor.

  “What’s that?” Lily mouthed to William.

  “Travel site,” William whispered. He spent half his life online.

  DiGregorio clicked around the Expedia site for a few minutes, then went back up to the address bar and clicked on the second address from the top. After the briefest pause a new screen appeared, this with a small gray box at the center. As the five of them watched, the gray box gradually gelled into an image, like a developing Polaroid. Two people, on a bed, having sex. In a corner of the box was a digital clock, ticking away time in hundredths of seconds.

  “Sophie, William, out!”

  They stared open-mouthed at the screen. She, too, couldn’t turn away. The quality of the image was awful, and the performers moved in sudden, jerky jumps (one moment, a hand clutched a shoulder; the next, it was squeezing a buttocks…how did it get there?), but the amateurish nature of the show enhanced its immediacy. The two performers looked thoroughly bored, the man on his back, the woman sitting on him, his cock presumably siloed within her. Both men were working hard to suppress smiles. Lily heard a man’s voice from the computer’s speaker, an off-camera whisper that nonetheless seemed louder than the performers’ pathetic attempts at moans. “Pump up the volume, people,” it said. “You look like a couple of loxes.”

  “GetItLive dot-com,” Special Agent Sammet said. “I read somewhere it’s like the tenth or twentieth most popular site on the Internet.”

  “Can we leave this?” Lily said. “That isn’t my husband there on the screen, as I’m sure you realize.”

  “Mommy!” Sophie punched her hip.

  Special Agent Sammet opened the address list again, but this time Lily wasn’t going to wait to see what Barnett had been up to. She didn’t have to.

  “Let’s go,” she said, grabbing an arm of each child.

  “We’re going to take this with us,” Special Agent Sammet said, patting the computer tower under the desk. “We have experts downtown who can—”

  “Take it,” Lily said. Soon enough it would all be gone, everything.

  She led the children back to the bedroom, where they all sat on the bed. None of them spoke for a while, but they all held hands, tightly.

  “What’s going to happen to us?” Sophie said quietly. Both children stared at her, more innocent and vulnerable than they’d looked in years, which was some consolation. Barnett’s desertion had made them children again.

  “I don’t know,” she said. The phone rang. Sophie and William looked at her anxiously. Jay DiGregorio appeared in the doorway. She picked up the bedside cordless.

  “Hello?” she said without the slightest expectation that it would be Barnett, calling to explain everything.

  “Lily, it’s Mother. I’m at the hospital.”

  Thirteen

  Lily sat up abruptly, convinced she was about to be run over. But it was only the alarm clock signaling six-thirty A.M. with the harsh, rhythmic cawing of a reversing truck. She groped for the clock on the coffee table in her parents’ living room at 124 West Sixty-seventh Street, wondering, as she did most mornings, if the clockmaker had considered a range of sounds before settling on the hacking bark of a truck backing up. She finally found the clock and smacked the Off button. After six weeks she still awoke each weekday convinced that she was being run over or attacked or dive-bombed or blown up. It was just one of many things about her new life in her parents’ new apartment that she hadn’t gotten used to, having to start each day with the conviction that she was about to be dead.

  She rolled herself out of the crevasse at the center of the sofabed’s ancient mattress. White morning light shone through the large, curtainless windows, illuminating a room so crammed with furniture, it still startled her each morning, as if gremlins had set up a consignment shop while she slept. Peggy had thrown nothing out, given nothing away. Instead, she’d shoehorned seven large prewar-sized rooms of furniture into four small postwar rectangles. Since moving in with her parents that August, Lily had tried many times to talk her mother into divesting at least a chair or end table, but Peggy always had a very specific justification for holding on to everything. Your aunt Marion gave me that when she sold the place in Bayside. Your father’s parents bought that for their apartment in Forest Hills, I couldn’t think of giving it away, ugly as it is. There’s barely room enough for the people in this place, Lily would say. Well, we’ll just have to cut back. Which one of us are we going to give away?

  Peggy’s pack-rattiness had only worsened with Monroe’s heart attack in the spring. She seemed desperate to hold on to the past. Monroe had made what the doctors called a full recovery, but his spirit was badly damaged. The only thing that interested him anymore was his pill-taking regimen. If Peggy was even a half-minute late with a pill, he’d begin calling for her in a voice so feeble, it wouldn’t have made it beyond the den in their old apartment; at 124 West Sixty-seventh Street, of course, Monroe’s gargling whispers could be heard perfectly well in each of the apartment’s wallboarded rooms, and probably in the neighbors’ apartments as well. There’s nothing wrong with Monroe that a ten percent rise in the NASDAQ won’t cure, Peggy would say wistfully. But Lily doubted even a new bull market would reenergize him.

  She navigated an obstacle course of chairs and tables and sealed moving cartons and, safely in the small foyer, headed to the kids’ bedroom. Life as she’d known it had ended abruptly in late July, when federal marshals appeared at 913 Park Avenue and removed anything that wasn’t nailed to the tenth floor. It had struck her, even as it was happening, as a fitting end to the first half of her life. A tasteful auction of the furniture and paintings she’d acquired sixteen years ago on the not-to-be ignored advice of her decorator, a leisurely search for more modest accommodations—this was not to be her lot, and in a way she was grateful. There could be no pretense about her circumstances, not with the way things had turned out, not with everything she owned displayed on the sidewalk, half of New York (well, her New York) gaping in delighted horror at the dismantling of her life. Without so humiliatingly public an end, she might have tried to cling, pathetic and desperate, to her old life.

  And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t been warned. Bring us the missing money and we’ll leave you alone, the Feds kept telling her, deaf to her insistence that, even if Barnett had taken the money, which he hadn’t, she’d be the last person to know its whereabouts. Then why did he flee? they wanted to know. They seemed completely unwilling or unable to accept the notion that a woman her age, in this day and age, could be so completely ignorant of the family’s household affairs. Sadly, she shared their incredulity. We’ll take everything you have unless you lead us to the money, they warned. My husband mortgaged the co-op without telling me, she’d say. He invested in dot-coms while insisting that he was playing it safe. He lusted after lesbians with giant strap-on dildos but never so much as allowed me on top during our Monday-night “vanilla” sex, as it was referred to, sneeringly, on his favorite Web sites. Do you really think that if he actually stole three million dollars from his partners and clients he’d tell me?

  Both of the children’s schools had refused them scholarships, since as far as they were concerned, she and Barnett had at least three million dollars stashed away—just ask the government! The building’s co-op board had sent a registered letter informing her that she had to vacate the apartment by July 31—not only had she been unable to pay the monthly maintenance, but the bank was about to foreclose. That same day, July 31, Peggy and Monroe had vacated their rambling apartment at 218 West End Avenue for a claustrophobic b
ox on West Sixty-seventh Street, which lent an air of ironic perfection to the moment: She would be moving in with them on the very dawn of their own, albeit voluntary, downsizing.

  She entered the children’s room. William had dragged a dresser to the center of the room and piled it with art books salvaged from Park Avenue (the Feds, apparently, were not interested in coffee table books, though they had dragged away the coffee table itself), where it formed a privacy screen between his half of the room and Sophie’s. She rapped on the door frame.

  “It’s six-thirty,” she said quietly. Their classes at the Booker T. Washington High School began at 7:45 in order to accommodate the swelling enrollment of largely non-English-speaking immigrant children. The children stirred. She went to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. Abandoning the apartment and the East Side, sharing a small room at their grandparents’ place, leaving private school, enrolling at Booker T. Washington—Sophie and William had greeted the prospect of each new adjustment in their lives with strident protests and frequent tears, but once faced with the reality of their new situation, they were remarkably complacent. For her part, Lily had found that, after twenty long years hoisting herself up the greasy pole, the well-lubricated slide down was almost exhilarating. Money brought choices; lack of it eliminated them. There was something undeniably soothing about not having to constantly decide among a galaxy of temptations and opportunities. She recognized, of course, that her parents shielded her from true destitution, but she also exulted in a strange new freedom—emancipation from decision making. Co-op gone? No choice but to move in with Peggy and Monroe. No money for tuition? Easy—enroll the children in the local public school. Oh, how she’d agonized, a decade ago, over which private school to send William to, how she’d labored over those applications and plotted her admissions interview strategy, from what clothes to wear to which names to drop. Such concerns seemed almost quaint now. In August, she’d simply walked over to the Booker T. Washington High School on West Eighty-fourth Street, which she’d attended before transferring to Bronx Science (though it had been called, more reassuringly, the Felix Frankfurter School back then), wearing a white cotton sweater over old khaki slacks, and filled out a one-page form. The Booker T. Washington High School didn’t care who the children’s grandparents were or what their parents did for a living or if they had any special talents or even if they spoke English.

  Sophie and William, both dressed for school, wandered into the windowless dining area as she was finishing her first cup of coffee.

  “What would you like for breakfast?” she asked, as she did every morning.

  “Eggs Benedict,” William said. “With sausages and home fries.”

  “Funny. Frozen waffle or a bagel?”

  “Western omelet,” he said, unsmiling. “On second thought, make that an egg-white Western omelet with dry toast.”

  William’s adolescent sullenness, which had been until recently altogether normal if hard to tolerate, had metastasized into overt hostility. There were so many potential causes (father gone, friends gone, money gone), she had difficulty even thinking about how to deal with it. She turned to Sophie.

  “Waffle or bagel?”

  “Waffle, please.”

  In place of her old uniform, a dirndl and plaid skirt, Sophie now wore a tight, nipple-defining T-shirt, baggy jeans, and the clunky, square-toed pumps of a Tenth Avenue streetwalker. Dropping the uniform had been the one aspect of their new situation that Sophie relished, that and the steep reduction in homework. But even in her new grunge/hooker ensemble her inherent sweetness shone through.

  Lily went to the narrow kitchen and placed two frozen waffles in the toaster, making a mental note to expand her breakfast repertoire to include an egg dish.

  “Well, at least we get to eat breakfast together without doing homework,” she said cheerfully as Sophie and William ate their waffles. “Last spring you’d both have your noses in a textbook, worried to death about some test.”

  “Is that supposed to make us feel good?” William asked.

  “I always thought you both had too much homework,” she said.

  “Funny, you never mentioned it at the time,” William said.

  She looked down at her coffee cup, but not before catching a sympathetic—or was it pitying?—glance from Sophie.

  “I told you back in August, if you’re not happy at Felix…at Booker T. Washington, we can look into applying to private schools for the January term. By then—”

  “Yeah, right,” William said. “By then Daddy will be back and we’ll be rich again.”

  “By then,” she said evenly, “the government will have found the missing money and we’ll be able to apply for a scholarship. I don’t think we should pin our hopes on…on recovering…everything.”

  “I don’t mind school,” Sophie said quietly. “I don’t feel so, like, you know…” She swirled a piece of waffle in a puddle of syrup and slurped it down.

  “So pressured?” Lily asked hopefully.

  Sophie nodded. “And the kids aren’t bad. I mean, it’s weird, feeling different all the time. But I kind of got used to that in the last six months. Now I’m different because of who I am and not what my father did.”

  Lily started to say something but felt overcome by relief and admiration.

  “You’re a girl, it’s different,” William said.

  “It so isn’t different,” Sophie said.

  “It so is, you just don’t get it.”

  “How is it different?” Lily asked.

  “Girls don’t get beat up,” he said.

  “Oh.” Though it was only 6:45, and having awakened to the conviction that she was being crushed by a reversing truck, she observed that the day was, amazingly, sliding even further downhill. “Do you get beat up?” she asked William, who shrugged. “Well, do you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really? William, either you are getting beat up or you’re not.”

  “Some of the guys say things.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “About being rich and stuck up.”

  It was almost laughable—they’d been evicted from Park Avenue for being broke, and now William was tormented for being a rich kid. True, an air of hygienic preppiness clung to him despite the new environment. He had a pampered look, with Barnett’s smooth, almost opalescent complexion, and also his father’s blue eyes, so pale they seemed too sensitive for any light stronger than a table lamp in a men’s club.

  “What do you do when they tease you?” she asked.

  “Ignore them.”

  “Good,” she said, but she worried that she should be encouraging some other behavior: Challenge them, rebut them, complain to the principal.

  What would Barnett have advised? she briefly wondered before reminding herself that he’d fled the country rather than face his accusers. She recalled an incident five years ago—or was it fifty?—when several people at a catered dinner they’d thrown had come down with food poisoning. While she’d made anguished phone calls of apology to the afflicted guests, Barnett retained high-profile lawyers to sue the caterers, pursuing the case beyond all rational hope of financial recompense. At the time, she’d thought him principled, even noble. But all he’d done, really, was hire proxies to get even and, more important, to clear his name, each subpoena and deposition calling attention to his own blamelessness. And the caters, now defunct, had been just starting out; the Grantham dinner party was their big break.

  “Have they…have they actually fought with you?”

  “Not yet.” The waffle gone, he swirled the remaining syrup with his fork.

  “Do you think they will?”

  He stood up abruptly. “Look, it’s okay, okay? There’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s just pretend I never brought it up. You’re good at pretending, right? We all are, right?” He left them at the table.

  She looked at Sophie, who shrugg
ed. Lily was about to ask if she knew anything about William’s troubles at school, and perhaps if she knew what he meant by being good at pretending, when she saw Peggy padding across the living room toward them.

  “Some racket,” she said, cinching the belt of her floor-length bathrobe around her narrow waist. Her honey-blond hair swept back from her face and held in place by a headband, wearing open-toed slippers with one-inch heels, she exuded a hard-edged, Joan Crawford glamour. She walked past them to the kitchen, poured a cup of black coffee, and joined them at the table.

  “I just can’t get used to not having the Times at breakfast,” she said, as if in response to a question. “I called twice already to complain. At 218 West End we always had the paper at six o’clock sharp, rain or shine. I used to hear it hit the floor outside our apartment as I was walking to the kitchen. You could set your watch by it. Now it’s seven o’clock, seven-thirty, last week it was eight—can you believe it? It’s old news by the time we get to read it.”

  Lily nodded, having endured a version of this rant every morning for six weeks.

  “I have a bridge game at noon,” Peggy said. “I’m meeting Belle Kanter for dinner at six, then a concert with Arlette Wander at Alice Tully. Belle couldn’t get a ticket, she always leaves things to the last minute. Do you think you could watch your father for me?”

  Lily sighed. Peggy was not only more glamorous than her but busier.

  “Actually, I have to be somewhere today.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I want to talk to Barnett’s partner about his situation.”

  “His situation?” Since Barnett fled, Peggy rarely uttered his name, and when one of the children or Lily referred to him, she squinted and pursed her lips as if he were some notorious criminal or fugitive Nazi.

  “He isn’t returning my phone calls. I’m getting no information from the Feds. I need to do something. He won’t refuse to see me if I show up.”

  “No? Maybe it’s better to put this behind you.”