She gave him a long, searching look.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Well, if you don’t know, then you don’t have plans, do you?”
He could be so damned literal.
“Then I don’t have plans,” she agreed. “Happy?”
Jeffrey took a moment to formulate exactly how to put what he and Phyllis had decided he would say to her. “Your mother and I would rather you didn’t go anywhere,” he said.
“You’d rather?”
He rephrased it. “Come home right after school.”
“I’m grounded?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“You wouldn’t want to tell me why?”
“You don’t know?”
“I’m asking. Is that a clue or what?”
“Don’t get smart with me, Jessica.”
“No, I really don’t know,” she said, drawing out every syllable and putting long spaces between the words. She could put more weariness and urgency into her voice than a woman six times her age should have been able to manage.
“Your mother and I are both very uneasy about—”
She didn’t let him finish. Which was just as well. Sometimes lately, when sternness was called for and he tried being stern, he found himself talking to her as though he were dictating a memo, and he always regretted it.
“All right all right all right,” she said. “You don’t like my boyfriend.”
“Am I hearing this?” Jeffrey said. “Do you really think it’s a question of liking your boyfriend?”
Jessica came right back at him. “He didn’t do anything,” she said hotly. “If you remember, and I’m sure you do, he was downstairs with me the whole time.”
Jeffrey didn’t want to get into an argument on the subject. She knew perfectly well what the issues were. “Just give me your word that you won’t see him and you can do whatever you want after school.”
Trust was a keystone of the family. It had been clear to Jessica since she was old enough to understand the concept that her word would always be enough.
“I’ll be home right after last period,” she answered coldly, declining the offer. She leaned forward and said, “Let me off at the corner, I want to get something.”
Martin said, “Yes, miss,” and rolled to a stop.
She was out of the car before her father could get out a word of protest. He watched as she waved to a couple of girls walking toward the school. The curb was a lake of slush but she hopped it easily and raced into a convenience store at the corner. He felt a sudden tightening of all the muscles in his body.
“The Plaza, sir?” Martin asked.
Jeffrey’s eyes were on the door to the convenience store, his mind on Jessica. It took him a second to realize that he had just been asked a question. “Yes, the Plaza,” he said, and then, when the car started from the curb, he changed his mind and said, on an impulse that surprised him with its intensity, “Let’s just wait a minute, Martin.”
“Yes, sir.”
The car slid back to the curb. A minute passed. Then another. Jessica didn’t come out of the store. Jeffrey checked his watch, then checked it against the dashboard clock. They agreed with each other that it was eight-thirty.
“How long will it take us to get there?”
Martin did a quick calculation before answering. “Fifteen minutes,” he said. Martin never guessed, approximated, or thought. His answers were categorical.
Jeffrey hated being late for meetings. He could say with assurance that he had never once in his life kept a client waiting. His fingers drummed on his knee. He wanted to get out of the car and march into the store, but if he did that, he would be telling his daughter he no longer trusted her, and once he did that, all bets were off.
Well, he thought, how was this any better? He was spying on her. Even Martin understood that. He tried to tell himself that he wasn’t spying, that he was waiting for her the way you wait outside when you drop someone at their door until the light comes on inside. You can’t drive off if the light doesn’t come on, but that doesn’t make it spying.
He reached for the door handle, then froze in that position as the front door of the store opened. But it wasn’t Jessica. It was a tiny Puerto Rican woman with a shawl over her head.
“That’s fine, Martin,” he said. “We’d better go.”
He turned to look in the store window as the car rolled past. He saw Jessica at the payphone in the corner. Why was she using a payphone? She had her cell phone in her pocket.
He knew the answer instantly. The bill came to him, with its carefully enumerated list of calls.
He bit at his lip and felt his face flush. He turned away, awkwardly conscious of having seen something he wasn’t supposed to see.
It was strange, he thought as he settled back in his seat, that at her age she still let her father drive her to school. As she moved deeper and deeper into adolescence, she had taken to forbidding more and more of the favors and attentions she had always relied on, even insisted on, as a child. When she was younger he used to worry that they were spoiling her, but then he made up his mind that she was one of those kids who prizes her independence too highly to stay spoiled for long.
“Is Mr. Bolling here yet?” Jeffrey asked as Harold, the maître d’ at the Oak Room, led him to his table.
“Yes, sir. Only a moment ago,” Harold said. “Coffee for Mr. Blaine, please.”
A waiter dashed off to get it. Clint Bolling stood up and extended his hand. “Hell of a nice party,” he said. “Thanks muchas for the invite.”
Jeffrey had almost forgotten that Bolling had been at the party. He must have left early, which was just as well.
“I’m glad you could make it,” Jeffrey said blandly.
“What the hell,” Bolling answered with a surprisingly loud laugh. “Beats sitting in a hotel room playing with yourself.”
Obviously that was a joke, but Jeffrey didn’t know the man well enough to know what kind of joke it was. He changed the subject and asked how he was enjoying his stay. For the next few minutes they talked about New York, the shows Bolling had seen and the ones he wanted to see. In both Norman and Dallas he subscribed to the symphonies but didn’t like them much. He saw the road companies of all the Broadway shows and liked them better. “For a while there, I used to see Evita every time I came to New York. Then they went and made a damn movie out of it. I don’t know anymore.”
Jeffrey recommended a few shows and asked him if he was interested in hockey or basketball. “I have a box at the Garden,” he offered.
“I’ll tell you the goddamned truth,” Bolling said, leaning forward as though he were about to confess one of the darkest secrets of his psyche. “I always liked baseball, always will. It’s a real game, y’know what I mean. You catch the ball or you don’t, you hit it or you don’t. Hockey, I mean what the hell is that? Skating around on ice, for Christ’s sake. Why would anyone do that? Basketball’s okay if you like watching a bunch of tall rich niggers jumping up and down.”
Then, apparently for the benefit of the waiter, a black man who was standing over his shoulder, he added, “No offense. I’m just an old country boy.”
The waiter’s face showed nothing.
Jeffrey made sure to address him by name when he ordered and reminded himself that an apology would be in order afterward.
They got down to business while they waited for their breakfasts to be served and then while they ate. Jeffrey had three funds in mind for Clint Bolling and laid out the pros and cons of each. Bolling didn’t seem to be listening. He asked no questions. Each of the investment funds called for an initial buy-in in the twenty-five-to fifty-million-dollar range. “You call that a range?” Bolling said. “We’ve got ranges a lot bigger than that where I come from.”
Jeffrey had no idea what he meant. It almost seemed as though Bolling had picked up on the word range simply to have something to say, like a man pretending he is keeping up with a conversation he really
can’t follow. But that made no sense. Despite his bumpkin act, Clint Bolling was a shrewd man, not likely to get confused by the preliminary details of an investment.
Yet there he was, plainly distracted, fidgeting around the edges of the discussion as though he wished they could get back to talking about Broadway shows. After a minute or two more, he plucked his napkin from his lap and held it over his plate like a dead bird. “Don’t you go giving me three choices,” he said, dangling the napkin as he got to his feet. “When a man wants a chunk of my money, I damn well expect him to put his balls on the line.” He dropped the napkin on the plate. “You figure out your best offer and tell me what it is. Either I write you a check or sayonara. It’s that simple. I’ve got to go to the can.”
He walked off toward the front of the dining room, almost bumping into a man from the next table who got up when he did. The man from the next table seemed almost to be stepping in Bolling’s footsteps as he followed him toward the restrooms.
The waiter appeared immediately. “Is your friend finished, Mr. Blaine?” he asked.
“My associate,” Jeffrey corrected, to make it clear that Bolling wasn’t a friend, “was insufferably rude. I’m very sorry, Brian.”
“No need for that, sir,” Brian said. “Shall I clear the table?”
“Please. And fresh coffee.”
Jeffrey called the office while he waited for Bolling. He asked Jennie to get someone in research to run some numbers for him and have them ready for presentation to Bolling that afternoon. There were no messages for him. He half expected there would have been a call from Fiore. Something told him the man was as impatient as he was efficient, and that before very long he would want something in return for all that efficiency. A man doesn’t take care of a problem in the middle of the night, drive forty miles in the morning before he goes to bed, make coffee, and ask for nothing. The call would come. Jeffrey was sure of that. What he wasn’t at all sure of was what he would do when it did.
Bolling was in the men’s room almost fifteen minutes. When he got back, Jeffrey started to tell him he would have workups on one of the proposals later in the afternoon but Bolling waved him off.
“Don’t worry, we’ll get around to all that,” he said.
He didn’t sit down. He was gone even before Jeffrey signed for the check.
Phyllis met Jeffrey at the door when he came home and brought him straight into her study. She closed the door and pressed the play button on her answering machine.
“Mrs. Blaine, this is Monica Seifert from the dean’s office. There seems to be a problem here that I would suggest requires your immediate attention,” a woman’s voice said in such studied and precise diction that it sounded as though she were reading from a prepared statement. Monica Seifert taught honors math and was the school’s top college-placement expert. “Jessica missed three classes this morning,” the meticulously accented voice continued. “When I asked her about it, she said that she overslept. I would have to characterize the manner of her response as rude. And not really to the point, is it? If it turns out Jessica can’t get herself to her morning classes, then I believe you and Mr. Blaine will have to take steps to get her here. Please feel free to call me at any time. I’m sorry to bother you with such problems. I assure you that if Jessica had been in the least amenable to dealing with the matter herself, this call would not have been necessary.”
Jeffrey and Phyllis looked at each other over the machine. “I thought you drove her this morning,” Phyllis said.
“I did.”
He walked out of the room and down the corridor to Jessica’s room. The door was closed. He knocked sharply. “Your mother and I want to talk to you,” he said. “In her study. Put some clothes on and come there.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
He walked back to the study.
“If that child lies to me,” Phyllis said. There was no second half to the sentence.
Two minutes later Jessica strolled into the study, emphatically nonchalant. The skirt she had worn to school had been replaced by jeans. She was still wearing the same top.
Phyllis said nothing. Jeffrey reached out and pressed the play button on the answering machine.
Jessica listened impassively until her father hit the stop button. Then she waited, glancing from one parent to the other. She said nothing. It was a contest, of course. The first one to commit to a position lost. Most of the contests in the Blaine household worked that way.
Jeffrey’s hand hovered over the play button. “Do you need to hear it again?” he asked.
She considered her options for a moment. Her father knew enough to leave her very few. She had nothing to respond to except the voice on the machine.
“That woman is such a total bitch,” she said. “I missed English, I missed social studies, and I missed health. They are not compulsory attendance courses, which she knows perfectly well, and I am acing every one of them. Which she also knows perfectly well.”
“Your father took you to school in plenty of time, Jessica,” Phyllis said.
“I just told you,” Jessica moaned. “They are not compulsory attendance courses. Are you guys going to be at Yale every morning?”
“You’re not in Yale yet, young lady. Your acceptance was conditional.”
“Can we get real, please,” Jessica groaned.
The letter welcoming her to Yale said that her acceptance was conditional on the satisfactory completion of her senior year. But all acceptance letters say that. It doesn’t mean a thing. It was a mistake for Phyllis to bring it up because it gave Jessica something she could be right about when only a second before she had been completely in the wrong. She took advantage of the moment by turning to walk out.
Jeffrey let her get as far as the door. “Who were you calling this morning?” he asked. “On the payphone in the store?”
Jessica whirled to face him.
“What store?” Phyllis asked. No one heard her.
“Were you spying on me?” Jessica demanded.
“The store has windows, Jessica. I saw you on the telephone. With whom were you talking?”
“What are you talking about? What store? Why were you using a payphone?”
“You know something, Daddy,” Jessica said. There were tears in her eyes. “Who I talk to on the telephone is none of your damn business.”
“Jessica, you were calling that boy,” Jeffrey said. Stating it as a fact.
“What payphone? What store?” Phyllis asked for the third time.
“He has a name,” Jessica shot back.
“I’m sorry. I’m not that familiar with it. You just introduced me to him the other night. Eddie something. Am I right?”
“Maybe I didn’t introduce you to him before because I knew the kind of shit I’d be getting.”
“Exactly what kind of shit are we talking about?”
Phyllis said, “You called that boy from the party? And that made you miss three classes?”
She seemed to be lagging three sentences behind the conflict going on in front of her. Jessica looked at her and then back to her father.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. He’s not acceptable. He’s not from a good family.”
“When have we ever said anything to you about anybody’s family?” Phyllis demanded, catching up, outraged.
“Because there was never anything to say, was there?” Jessica challenged. “Every boy I ever dated was perfect.”
“And what exactly is wrong with that?”
“They were boring little preppies.”
“Just because their friends aren’t rapists doesn’t make them boring.”
“I am not going to have this conversation,” Jessica said.
Phyllis looked at Jeffrey. She wanted his help. But she had turned the conversation in totally the wrong direction and there was no possibility of getting it back. He said nothing.
Jessica, who hadn’t moved from the door, opened it now and walked out of the r
oom.
“She asked me to drop her off at the store,” Jeffrey explained needlessly. “There’s a phone booth. She made a call.”
“When exactly were you planning on telling me about this?” Phyllis asked.
She sat down at her desk, which was always Jeffrey’s signal to leave.
The nice thing about a large apartment is that everyone has his or her own space. They wouldn’t have to see each other until dinner was on the table.
9
If the phone rang, there wouldn’t have been anyone to answer it. All the little cubicles were empty and the aisles between them were full. It looked like one of those nature things, bees or something swarming outside the hive. All those having business before the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, hold your water. There’s nobody home.
Schliester looked at Gogarty and raised an eyebrow. Gogarty looked at Schliester and raised both eyebrows. Schliester couldn’t top that, so he headed for the first informed person he could find, who turned out to be Greg Billings, who was wearing his gray suit with the faint herringbone pattern. He had five different ties he wore with it, none of which was right.
“What’s up?” Schliester asked.
“You don’t know?”
“How would I know?”
“We work for a living,” Gogarty said, joining them. “We don’t hang around offices trolling for gossip.”
“What’s up is Mr. Franciscan. More particularly his johnson.”
Beryl Ross said, “That’s not funny, Greg.”
Beryl Ross was only a few months out of law school. She was famous in the office for never figuring anything out.
“Why is that of so much interest?” Schliester asked.
“I’m just guessing,” Gogarty suggested, “but I assume it was up something it shouldn’t have been up.”
“Jackpot,” Billings said, raising his hand for a high five. Gogarty took him up on the offer.
Beryl Ross scowled darkly and said, “Isn’t it obvious that Mr. Franciscan has problems? Don’t you think he needs our support?”
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