House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  The man nodded a grudging acknowledgment and went back to his duties in the station.

  Five minutes later Jeffrey was in Riverside Park. He felt out of place wearing a business suit in the park. A few minutes ago the place had looked deserted, except for the woman with the Rottweilers. Now he could see eight or ten joggers and dog walkers. The grass was soft from rain.

  Two men holding hands walked ahead of him, then turned down the path toward the river. Jeffrey followed them.

  When he reached the river, the gay couple was gone. There were old men fishing here, some of them with two or three lines trolled out into the river, the butts of their poles wedged into the mesh of the fence that followed along the edge of the water. They kept their hands in their pockets, cigarettes jammed into the corners of their mouths. There was, Jeffrey realized, an entire New York universe that he knew nothing about even though he had lived in the city for almost twenty years. He never would have imagined that people fished in the Hudson.

  He passed a set of tennis courts as he had been told he would and finally saw what had to be the parking lot in question. Two yellow cabs were parked there, motors off, the drivers nowhere in sight. Two rental limos were parked side by side. The drivers had takeout food they were eating on the hoods, their backs to each other. And there was a Mercedes.

  Jeffrey walked to the Mercedes. Chet Fiore was sitting in the back seat. “Don’t get in,” he said when Jeffrey opened the door. “Let’s take a walk.”

  He left his driver at the wheel, the engine running.

  “Is all this necessary?” Jeffrey asked. Fiore was leading the way back down to the river.

  “Who the fuck knows,” Fiore said. “You want to find out it was and we didn’t do it?”

  He scarcely seemed the same man who had come to Jeffrey’s house in Bedford Hills. There was a slurring of consonants, a flatness in the intonation that apparently Fiore could turn on and off at will. Which one, Jeffrey wondered, was the real Chet Fiore and which one was the act?

  “It’s an amazing river,” Fiore said. “This time of day, the way the sun kind of falls on top of it.”

  “Yes,” Jeffrey agreed. “Very dramatic.”

  Fiore looked at him as though he had just said something strange. “Did you ever try to think how much water goes down here every minute?” he asked. “Gallons, cubic feet, however you want to put it. Numbers you can’t imagine.”

  Well, Jeffrey thought, here was the gangster-philosopher again. He had been offered the briefest glimpse of something else and instantly it was taken away, like a door that is quietly swung closed by an unseen hand as one passes in a corridor. He looked out over the water. It looked black and cold, breaking the late afternoon sunlight into gleaming dark shards. Here and there the wind, which had picked up in just the last few minutes, whipped the surface into white-topped waves. The day, which had seemed so warm and springlike when he left the office, carried reminders of winter in its winds. A tugboat pulling a heavily laden barge worked its way upriver, the barge low in the water. Beyond the river, the sun slipped behind the high-rises on the New Jersey shore, producing a dull and colorless sunset.

  Fiore, too, was looking out over the water. Jeffrey waited, conscious now of the chill but far from sorry he had come.

  “Let me ask you something,” Fiore said without turning. “You invest money for people?”

  “That’s one of the things we do. We’re not a brokerage, we’re an investment bank.”

  “And the difference is?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “I’m not a stupid man, Mr. Blaine.”

  Jeffrey forced a laugh. “No, of course not. I didn’t mean that. I just wasn’t prepared for an abstract discussion of banking on the banks of the Hudson River.”

  “You’re not cold, are you?” Fiore asked.

  “I’m fine,” Jeffrey said, embarrassed about being cold, as though it were a weakness. “Let me put it this way. We service the investment community in pretty much the same ways a neighborhood bank services individuals.”

  “But on a larger scale.”

  “Vastly larger.”

  “And you keep records,” Fiore said.

  “Of course.”

  “Of everything?”

  “Everything.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It’s required by law, Mr. Fiore,” Jeffrey said. He didn’t like the way he sounded, prissy and fastidious.

  “I wouldn’t ask you to knowingly break the law, Mr. Blaine. There wouldn’t be much point to that, would there?”

  He slapped Jeffrey on the shoulder in a friendly sort of way and the two of them walked back to Fiore’s car. They talked about nothing on the way. Jimmy Angelisi got out to open the door for them.

  They drove Jeffrey across town to his apartment. Fiore talked about the Knicks and the Rangers. Jeffrey had absolutely no idea what this meeting had been about.

  The apartment was dark except for the lamp on the table in the foyer. The note from Phyllis tucked under the base of the lamp said that she and Jessica had taken the car up to the country house and that Jeffrey should take the train. He should call to let her know what train he was on so she could pick him up at the station. The note also said she called him at the office but Jennie said he had gone out and she didn’t know if he’d be back. She said she didn’t have anything for you on her calendar, the note said.

  He cursed under his breath. Eight years ago there had been an affair, with all the attendant secrecy and recrimination. Ever since, whenever his time was unaccounted for, he worried about what Phyllis might be thinking. To make matters worse, he hadn’t brought any work home because he didn’t want to carry a briefcase up to Riverside Park. Now he would have nothing to do on the train.

  He went into the kitchen, rummaged around for something to eat, finally settling for a few slabs of Gruyère and mustard on a thick slice of potato bread. He ate it standing at the counter. Carlos and Irena, the maid, would have gone to Bedford Hills with Phyllis and Jessica. Martin, he assumed, had been given the weekend off. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been in the apartment when it was empty. The rooms seemed desolate and unfamiliar, and he felt again as though he were in a stranger’s home.

  The bookshelves in his study didn’t offer anything that appealed to him for the train ride even though half a dozen unopened books he intended to read lay in a stack on a bottom shelf.

  He turned off the lights and locked the door. He told the cab driver to take him to Grand Central but on the spur of the moment he asked the driver to stop when they drove past the Barnes & Noble at Rockefeller Center.

  He wandered around inside for almost half an hour with no idea, really, of what he was looking for. He felt sickishly uneasy, almost the way he felt the time Dr. Lanz told him there was a suspicious lump on his colon but that it was probably nothing to worry about. That turned out to be the case, thank heavens, although the news when it finally came did nothing to undo the wrenching weakness that entered his life with that first glimpse of his own mortality. He had a sense now that large parts of his life were coming unglued, although he wasn’t quite sure why he felt that way. Maybe it had something to do with Jessica, who still hadn’t forgiven him for demanding that she give up her boyfriend. If she never said anything about it, that was only because she hardly said anything at all. Their lives at home were filled with silences.

  He was disturbed, too, by his pointless and pointlessly clandestine meeting in the park with an organized-crime boss who had actually been a guest in his own house. Disturbed and disappointed. He had expected something a bit more dramatic, if not quite a Faustian struggle between himself and the devil over the ownership of his own soul, then at least an offer he could refuse. Instead, the gangster withdrew at the first suggestion that Jeffrey Blaine wasn’t about to bend the law. End of story.

  No, it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. Jeffrey’s radar was too good to be fooled so easily. There had to be more to it than…
>
  The answer came to him with the jolting clarity of a toe stubbed in the dark. It was so obvious he was surprised he hadn’t seen it immediately. Chet Fiore hadn’t dragged him up to the windswept banks of the Hudson River to chat about banking and then take him home. The only reason the meeting ended before Fiore asked a single significant question was that Fiore already had the answer to the only question that really mattered. Would Jeffrey Blaine come or wouldn’t he?

  Just by being there, Jeffrey told Fiore everything he needed to know.

  And he told himself something about himself he hadn’t known. He wanted to hear Fiore’s proposition. He was interested. Next time Fiore got in touch, he wouldn’t be so squeamish. What is it you want? he would ask straight out, and he would be ready for whatever Fiore’s answer might be.

  There was something thrilling in the thought. His nerves tingled. And when he found himself in the fiction section of the store, he had to pause for a moment to remind himself why he was there.

  He picked up a Faulkner novel he had never read and leafed through it, testing to see if it piqued his interest. He put it back on the shelf and let his eye drift down the row of paperback spines in all the gaudy colors books sported these days. He drifted farther down the aisle and picked up a book by an author named Milan Kundera. That seemed more to the point. Faulkner was from his school days. Why go back? He knew nothing about Kundera but had heard the name. A picture of the man on the back cover of the book was reassuring, a thick neck rising out of an open shirt, a massive head that looked as though it were carved in granite.

  “He’s wonderful, isn’t he?”

  Her hair wasn’t blond, but on the other hand it was too light a brown to be called brown. It was more the color of oak leaves in autumn, oak leaves on the ground, in profusion. Her eyes were dark, almost black, her lips full but pale. His first thought was that she was very beautiful, but he realized almost at once that in fact she wasn’t. She was, however, dramatic, conveying a suddenness, an unexpectedness that took a man off guard, almost the way beauty does. It seemed to him, even in that first instant, that even if she were someone he knew, even if they had arranged to meet here, her entrance would have felt unexpected. Some women have this quality of endless surprise. She was about thirty years old, perhaps a year or two older.

  “Sorry,” he said, not quite certain what she had said.

  “Kundera. Isn’t he wonderful?”

  “I don’t know, really,” he confessed. “I’ve never read him.”

  “Oh. Then that isn’t the place to start.”

  She took the book out of his hand with an easy familiarity that surprised him, like the way your wife helps herself to something on your plate. She put it back on the shelf and handed him another. It was called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The title sounded familiar.

  “I’m being very presumptuous, aren’t I?” she said.

  “No. Not at all.”

  “Helpful?” she asked.

  “Yes, helpful.”

  They both smiled awkwardly, and for a moment there was a silence that seemed to call for some response. On his part, he assumed. “I don’t really read much fiction,” he said. “I was looking for something to read on the train.”

  “This was written to be read on trains,” she said. “I’m serious. Look.”

  She took the book back and flipped to a page very near the beginning. “‘He had first met Tereza about three weeks earlier in a small Czech town,’” she read. “‘They had spent scarcely an hour together. She had accompanied him to the station and waited with him until he boarded the train. Ten days later she paid him a visit. They made love the day she arrived.’”

  She handed him the book again. “See?” she said. “Trains.”

  “Trains,” he agreed. “Remarkable.” There was another long silence. “Speaking of which, I’ve got to catch mine,” he said.

  “Me too,” she said. “Don’t let me keep you.”

  He hesitated but didn’t know what else to say. So he thanked her and started to walk away. He got only a step or two before he stopped and turned back to her. “‘Me too’?” he asked.

  She looked puzzled.

  “I said I had a train to catch,” he explained. “You said ‘Me too,’ didn’t you?”

  She laughed. For a man so well dressed, well groomed, obviously self-assured and successful, there was a boyishness about him that surprised her, a delighted kind of surprise. “Yes,” she said. “Me too.”

  “Grand Central, I hope. Not Penn Station.”

  “I believe you’re inviting me to share a cab,” she said.

  “And a drink.”

  “I thought you had to catch your train.”

  “They run every hour.”

  In the cab they discovered they were taking the same train. She was going as far as Mount Kisco, and he was going to Bedford Hills, the next stop.

  They went straight to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central without checking the board for the schedule. He had a Bushmill’s and she had a San Pellegrino with a wedge of lime. He reached into the bag she had set on the table and slid out the book she had bought. It was a novel by Doris Lessing. “Do you recommend her?” he asked.

  “It’s about justice.”

  “Are you a lawyer?” he asked.

  “There must be other people interested in justice besides lawyers,” she said.

  “As far as that goes,” he laughed, “I’m not even sure my lawyer is familiar with the term.”

  “But he’s good at what he does?”

  “Is there a reason you’re not answering my question?”

  “I am a lawyer,” she said. She took her book back and slipped it into her purse.

  “A criminal lawyer?”

  “As a matter of fact I’m with the United States Attorney’s Office.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “We don’t all look like Rudy Giuliani.”

  Before he was mayor, Giuliani was a federal prosecutor.

  “On the contrary, I was just thinking how little you look like Giuliani.”

  They both laughed.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me what you do?” she asked.

  “It’s too boring,” he said.

  “But it pays well.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Well enough for a house in Bedford Hills,” she said.

  Mount Kisco, where she was going, was a marginally white-collar bedroom community. Bedford Hills, just five miles farther up the line, was the start of Westchester County’s horse country. The homes in Bedford Hills were much larger than the homes in Mount Kisco and used less often. They were weekend retreats.

  On the train they talked about the train service in New York and famous trains in books, and about growing up in Mount Kisco, always just a little too far from the excitement of New York. When her station was announced she said, “This was all over a couple of books and we didn’t even get to read them.”

  “I will,” he said.

  “Promise?” she asked.

  It was a question that seemed to presuppose something.

  “Promise,” he agreed, making himself part of the implicit compact. Complicit. That was the word that came to mind.

  He watched her walking down the platform, and then the train was moving again and he took the book out of his overcoat pocket and studied the cover. Alone on the almost empty train now, he felt the edges of the despair he had felt in his empty apartment beginning to creep back over him, like a chill coming in through an open window.

  He looked out the window and saw her walking toward the stairs. And then the train was out of the station and he couldn’t see her anymore. He should have gotten her number. He hadn’t even, for that matter, gotten her name. Elaine. He knew her name was Elaine. But that was all he knew.

  No. He knew she was a lawyer in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. How many Elaines could there be?

  He opened his new book and started to read.

&nbs
p; Elaine Lester stopped walking as soon as Jeffrey’s train was out of the station. She stepped across the platform to wait for the next train back to Manhattan. It came in less than fifteen minutes.

  She had the train almost to herself. On Fridays, early in the evening, the trains were filled with wives going to meet their husbands because they had theater tickets, dinner after the show, and then a late train back. And kids heading south to catch a band somewhere downtown, CBGB’s or the Knitting Factory or a hundred other places, hanging by the train doors as if they couldn’t wait to get to Grand Central so they could get out and grab a smoke. She knew all this because years ago she was one of those kids, although more often than not she just wandered the streets of the city when she got there, more interested in taking the pulse of the place than in anything any band might have screamed at her over a desolate splurge of guitar chords.

  This middle-of-the-evening train was new to her, its emptiness new to her. A woman sat about five rows ahead, in a seat that faced backward. Why would anyone sit backward when there were empty seats all around? The woman was dark-skinned, Hispanic, pretty and precise, her hands folded on her lap, her eyes fixed on nothing. A maid? Definitely a maid. Not given the night off until after dinner was served.

  Jeffrey Blaine, she realized, hadn’t left her side once from the time they met in the bookstore until she got off the train in Mount Kisco. Which meant that he couldn’t have called ahead, that there’d be no ride waiting for him at the station. The men all called home. I’m on the eight-eleven, I’m on the nine-seventeen, I’m on the ten-twenty. But he didn’t call.

  She knew perfectly well why a man would skip calling home.

  An interesting man, this Jeffrey Blaine. Looking for a novel to read. Tentative and careful, as though a book asked a commitment of him. On the other hand, willing to experiment. Up to a point. There was a kind of simplicity to him she hadn’t expected in the least. The way he came back looking for her, asking if she was taking a train. What train? And only then…

  Thirty plus, closer to forty, and not quite sure how to ask a lady for a drink. He had to find an excuse for it. What train? The same train. Oh my, in that case…