Closing Costs

by Seth Margolis

  “I’m just glad we came. I used to feel so tense coming here, like I was presenting myself for a panel of judges each time I walked in. Tonight I really didn’t care.”

  “Then why did you ever come here?”

  “To prove that I could make the judges like me.”

  “You were such a confident little girl, so pretty, and an A student. I don’t know why you always felt you had to prove something.”

  Lily observed her mother drinking wine, blissfully unaware that she might have played even a small role in forming Lily’s craving for approval. She’d been an A student because Peggy viewed A-minuses as only marginally less tragic than teenage pregnancy.

  “Let’s order,” she said. “The Dover sole was always tolerable.”

  Peggy hadn’t fully realized how much wine she’d had until she set off for the ladies’ room. The floor rose to meet her feet with each step, like that time on the Caribbean Princess when they ran into a storm off the coast of Belize. She spread both arms to keep her balance. How silly she must appear—how embarrassed Lily must feel, watching her lurch along, and she was watching, Peggy felt certain, always on guard for the poor choice of word or fork that would betray the unsophisticated roots from which she’d sprung like some sort of genetic mutation. Inside the bathroom, one stall was occupied. She entered the other one. A good evening, all in all; she’d forgotten what fun Lily could be. How long since they’d had a meal together, just the two of them? Too long. Nice to be out with someone who hadn’t yet qualified for Medicare, talking about things other than grandchildren and prescription drugs and how this store or that one overcharged. A flush from next door, then the sound of someone else entering the small bathroom.

  “How have you been?” A woman’s voice, naturally.

  “I’ve been wonderful. You?” Another woman’s voice. Both had that silky lilt Lily had picked up somewhere between high school and Park Avenue.

  “Did you see who’s sitting in the first booth?”

  “I almost choked. I’d heard she’d moved away.”

  “Only to the West Side. Who’s that she’s with?”

  “Must be her mother.”

  “Who knew she had one? I think she’s put on weight.”

  “Well, some people eat under stress. I’m the opposite. I lost five pounds planning the leukemia benefit.”

  “You should write a book, The Leukemia Diet!”

  “You’re terrible. I’m surprised she’d come back here. I mean, everyone knows about her husband.”

  “One of his former partners called Seb and practically begged him to keep our money in the firm.”

  “I meant the girlfriend, not the money.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “No one did. But Seb saw her photograph in the Times a few weeks ago, on some business matter. Francine Sparkler, one of those severe-looking finance types, all business until they get into the bedroom, and then they’re all about 24/7 blow jobs and positions that would give Olga Korbut a hernia.”

  “Stop.”

  “Listen, after Seb came back, I lost seven pounds just from the…I mean, we were at it all night, two, three time a week, and it wasn’t like the old days, when I could just lie back and wait for him to be done. And that was on top of the weight I lost while he was gone.”

  “The Cheating Husband Diet.”

  “I mean, these girlfriends do things. They have to, I suppose. Where were we? Oh, Francine Sparkler. Apparently, she used to advise Barnett on what stocks to buy. But Seb’s attorney’s partner is now her attorney, and one hears things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, just that the Feds have been all over her, thinking she knows where Barnett is. I hear they’re convinced she’s sending money to him, wherever he is.”

  “I thought he absconded with the millions he took from the firm.”

  “Well, that’s one theory, I suppose. The other is that she’s supporting him. Still, I miss her in a way, Lily Grantham. You could always count on her at parties to keep the conversation moving. And the men liked her. If you put her at their table, they were less likely to whine about having to stay till after dessert.”

  “No one could laugh at a bad joke like Lily Grantham. Seb always used to say that she…”

  The silky voice dissolved a second before the door closed. Peggy got right up and left the bathroom, neglecting even to wash her hands.

  “Francine Sparkler,” she mumbled as she made her way back to the table.

  “Are you feeling okay?” Lily asked when she sat down. “I was about to go after you.”

  “Francine Sparkler.”

  “Who?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute. First write the name down. Francine Sparkler.”

  The McDonald’s near Penn Station was half full. No, it was half empty, Guy decided as he waited for Derek Ventnor to arrive. The lighting bathed the mostly solo diners in a sallow gloom, a great equalizer, in a way: Everyone—black, white, Asian, Hispanic—looked identically jaundiced, members of one race: the depressed.

  Was he depressed? Mentally Guy tore off a piece of foolscap and drew a line down its center. On the left he drew a plus sign and under it wrote “marriage, twins, Positano, new apartment.” Then, on the right column, he drew a minus sign and wrote, after a long hesitation, “marriage, twins, Positano, new apartment.” He reviewed the right column from the bottom up: The renovation was a nightmare, Positano was running on fumes, the twins, after several weeks of sleeping through the night (if “night” could be defined as the fidgety interval between the end of the eleven o’clock news and 5:15 A.M.), had recently formed a perfectly synchronized and very noisy partnership whose sole objective was to keep their parents in a constant state of bleary-eyed consciousness, and he and Rosemary, thanks to all of the above, had slipped into a mostly silent, occasionally bickering, and completely sexless…relationship seemed too positive a word—more like détente.

  And yet if the right-hand column essentially negated the left, that didn’t add up to depressed, just…equilibrium? Survival? Just getting through the day, the week, the month, the year—an animal or bird doing whatever it took to survive, over and over and over again.

  “My man!” Ventnor looked right at home in the sickly gloom. “You’re not eating?” he said.

  “I prefer Burger King,” Guy said.

  “You should have said something.” Ventnor shrugged and toddled off to the back of the restaurant. He returned several minutes later. “You bring the check?” Ventnor asked as he began to unwrap a half-dozen Styrofoam and paper containers.

  Guy handed him the ten-thousand-dollar check and added the name Derek Ventnor to the right column of his mental foolscap, which tilted the scale decisively toward “depressed.”

  “I have this friend,” Ventnor said as he deposited the check in his shirt pocket. He went at his burger, consuming nearly half of it in one raptorous bite, his mouth dilating impressively to accommodate the intake. “Actually, he’s more of a colleague,” he added through a mouthful of burger and roll.

  Guy felt a surge of nausea at the thought of what a “colleague” of Ventnor’s might want.

  “He runs a Web site, one of the top twenty most-visited sites, in fact.”

  It seemed unlikely that Ventnor’s colleague was Jeff Bezos.

  “A porn site?”

  Ventnor made a “duh” gesture.

  “He’s having trouble scaling.” He aligned three plastic packets of ketchup, ripped off their tops in one brutal movement, and squeezed the contents onto a pile of waiting fries. “At a certain point you gotta monetize your traffic or you’re just a destination with no revenues. This fellow, he showed me his books the other day, you wouldn’t believe the churn he’s got.”

  “I’m sure your astute advice is precisely what he needs to turn his business around.”

  “I’ve given him a few pointers. But the thing of it is, we’re talking a gay site. Not that my friend is gay, don’t worry. But gay is wher
e the bucks are. More disposable income, no kids, and they have more time to surf the Net without worrying that the wife is gonna catch them whacking off to beaver shots when they said they were planning the family vacation on Expedia. And then you have the closet cases, married guys who live out their fantasies on gay sites. I’ve thought about getting into gay myself—not the straight gay scene, as in two women performing for men, I already got that covered—I mean the gay gay scene, as in two men. Or three men or twenty men or an army of men—group scenes are very big in that world, you know. And they got toys you wouldn’t believe.” Ventnor crammed a fistful of ketchupped fries into his mouth. “So here’s the thing.”

  Guy braced himself mentally and, gripping the edge of the table with both hands, physically.

  “My friend, he spends like half his time sending e-mails to his clientele. He sends each one himself, it’s a friggin’ nightmare. And his click-through rate is like less than five percent. I told him about Positano and he’s big-time interested.”

  “I’ll send him a brochure.”

  “See, that’s what we don’t need in this instance. I already sold him. He’s ready to sign a license agreement. My point being, I’d like a commission.”

  “We don’t pay third parties a—”

  “Fifty percent.”

  “Out of the question.”

  “I listened to your second-quarter conference call on the Internet a while back. Even with a fifty percent commission, you’ll make money on the deal. Your gross margins are, like, seventy-eight percent.”

  Positano’s gross margins were precisely seventy-eight percent. Wasn’t the Internet a wonderful thing? Not to mention the SEC’s new full-disclosure policy, which meant that anyone, even a greedy pornographer, could listen in on a company’s quarterly earnings call with analysts. What used to be a clubby quarterly ritual was now a spectator sport, all in the interest of fairness. The notion that Ventnor had been listening to him recite Positano’s second-quarter numbers and business strategy was profoundly creepy—no doubt two of Ventnor’s performers were fucking in the background as he cheerily talked up the company’s prospects for margin improvement.

  “We don’t pay third-party commissions,” he told him again.

  “I’m not your typical third party. If I decide to make our relationship public—”

  “Twenty-five percent,” Guy said. His head rang with the creaking and groaning of his principles giving way.

  “Fifty.”

  “Thirty.”

  “Fifty.”

  “Thanks for being flexible.”

  “Listen, porn is what the Internet’s all about. You’ll never make it unless you figure that out. You think AOL and Yahoo are any different? They’re portals to sex sites. Okay, so there’s eBay and a few travel sites, but trust me, while the wives are selling shit from the attic on eBay, their husbands are looking at pussy…or dick.”

  Guy stood up. “Who do I send the contracts to?”

  “To me. I’ll handle everything. Hey, I gotta earn my commission.” Ventnor’s smile drove Guy’s spirits, already depressed, to a new, NASDAQ-style low.

  “Send me an e-mail with the details,” he said, and walked away.

  Twenty-two

  Francine Sparkler lived on Lexington Avenue on the seventh floor of exactly the sort of undistinguished white-brick building from which Lily had rescued Barnett twenty years earlier, a fact that, in Lily’s eyes, made his betrayal all the more bitter. She doubted Francine would let her up if the doorman announced her, so she whisked right by him to the elevators. If you looked unthreateningly affluent and projected an attitude of blithe entitlement, you could breeze by most Manhattan doormen in the larger, more impersonal buildings.

  “It’s Lily Grantham,” she shouted through the closed door of apartment 7R, in response to a surprisingly husky “Who’s there?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Trust me, you don’t want to have this conversation with me out in the hallway,” Lily shouted, though in such a large, soulless building it was possible that the resident of Apartment 7R had never exchanged more than cordial greetings with the occupants of Apartments 7A through 7Q, let alone cared that they knew she had been the mistress of an international fugitive.

  “Go away.”

  Her voice faltered over the two words. Encouraged, Lily banged a fist on the door and pressed the doorbell several times with her other hand. The door opened.

  “I have nothing to say to you,” Francine Sparkler said. “I’ve told the U.S. Attorney everything I know.”

  Lily didn’t know what to focus on first, the fact that the Feds had already spoken to Francine—meaning the U.S. government knew her husband had been fucking her long before Lily did—or the fact that the object of her husband’s…call it lust…was a plumpish woman not much younger than she. She had steeled herself for a hard-bodied, age-inappropriate vixen—and found herself nonplussed by the flaccidity of her competition. In cheating on her, Barnett had traded down both in location and looks.

  Francine was a small woman, but Lily doubted anyone would call her petite. A mass of ringletted hair flounced from the top of her head, adding crucial millimeters to her stature. Her face was pretty enough, with the smooth, unlined skin that was the one benefit of pudginess. She had on a cream silk blouse and dark linen pants—there was probably a matching Ann Taylor jacket draped over a chair in the bedroom, since she looked like she was about to leave for work, Lily having arrived, following a sleepless night contemplating the latest horror to beset her, at eight in the morning. It was difficult to imagine her making million-dollar decisions on Wall Street, let alone making love to Barnett. She exuded neither competence nor sexuality.

  “If you came here to stare at me, fine. Now go away.” Roused from her unkind musings, Lily lunged inside.

  “I really don’t care what you and Barnett were up to,” she said. As if to undermine her own words, she glanced with undisguised curiosity around the living room, which opened directly from the small foyer. Wheat-colored sofa with matching love seat, fabric blinds in a neutral tone, framed Impressionist posters, new Oriental carpet. A generically comfortable environment. She’d been betrayed—she, whose apartment had nailed ten pages in Architectural Digest—for a doughy investment banker and a shrine to Crate & Barrel.

  “Can I offer you a tour?”

  “Oh…I was just…” The mistress had a sense of humor, at least. Was that part of it? Or did she enthusiastically offer up her “third input,” in the quaint locution of one of Barnett’s favored Web sites, Assettes.com? Was she perhaps handy with a dildo?

  “You’re making me very uncomfortable.”

  “Yes, well, as I was saying, I really don’t care what you and Barnett…did. I just need to find him.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t care if I never see him again.” She paused, struck—in fact, almost exhilarated—by the truth of that statement. “He left us, my children and me, without a penny. We lost everything we had.”

  “So I’ve heard, but I don’t know where he is.”

  “When I learned he had fled the country, I thought, No, that’s not like him. But when I learned, just yesterday, that he’d been…with you…I realized that running away was precisely like him. He was a rat. I just never knew it.”

  “He hated the dishonesty. He was on the verge of telling you when…when he had to leave.”

  “Telling me? Are you saying he was about to—Wait a minute, when he had to leave? He didn’t have to do anything.”

  “He didn’t have to fall in love with me,” she said quietly.

  “Oh, please.”

  Francine crossed the living room and sat heavily on the wheat Crate & Barrel sofa. After a few moments, Lily joined her, choosing the matching love seat. Love seat! Good Lord. Feeling a choking panic coming on, she ran her hands along the nubby fabric on which, no doubt, Barnett and Francine, fleshily naked as Rubens satyrs, had engaged in
sexual gymnastics worthy of a Web site. Rubenesquemiddleagedsexcontortionists.com.

  “When exactly did you…”

  “Mornings, mostly, and sometimes at lunch. There are new hotels downtown that we—”

  “When did you first meet?”

  “Oh.” Francine blushed. The Brontes would have described her as “handsome,” Lily supposed, with her flawlessly milky complexion and dark, “spirited” eyes. “Three years ago, at the CS First Boston High Yield Conference.”

  “That must have been very romantic.”

  “We had a lot in common,” Francine said quietly. “We talked about everything.”

  “Junk bonds, default rates, discounted cash flows.” She offered a smug smile.

  “Passion, fears, dreams.”

  “Passion, fears, dreams,” Lily repeated. Barnett had those?

  “I miss him terribly.”

  “So do—”

  So do I, she almost said, competitively.

  “He was terrified he’d be arrested, and for something he didn’t do.”

  The mistress is always so credulous, Lily thought. It must be part of the turn-on for the man.

  “Three million dollars is missing. There are checks, drawn on client accounts, with his signature on them.”

  “Anyone with practice can forge a signature.”

  Don’t lecture me on forgery, Lily was tempted to say.

  “The man I knew never stole a dime. But the man I knew would also rather kill himself than go to jail for something he didn’t do.”

  “But he didn’t kill himself, did he? He ran away.”

  “He was right,” Francine said under her breath.

  “About what?”

  “About you.”

  “What do you—”

  “About your not loving him, not understanding him, not respecting him.”

  “How dare you?” Lily said with all the indignation she could muster, which, even to her own ears, wasn’t much. (When stripped of dignity, was it even possible to exhibit indignation?)

  “He said you used him, that you wanted a certain place in society and saw him as a stepping stone. I used to see your picture in the Sunday Times, even before I met Barnett. You were always referred to as Mrs. Lily Grantham, or sometimes even Mrs. Barnett Grantham, but Mr. Grantham was never in the picture. Literally and figuratively.”