House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  On the other hand, this newfound intimacy between them put demands on Phyllis that she wasn’t prepared to accept. It didn’t make sense, because for years she had yearned for a relationship with her daughter that would be free and familiar, a fantasy of friendship and trust. But when it came it frightened her, and she realized that Jessica had been much easier to deal with at a distance. Missing her was better than being with her. The weeks between the funeral and the start of Jessica’s freshman year dragged on like a torture for Phyllis.

  She sat through the meeting of the New York City Ballet Outreach Committee, listening abstractedly to the presentation of proposals for bringing the art of the dance to public schools in the poorer parts of the city. Two dancers from the company had been invited to the meeting, a girl scarcely older than Jessica, stick thin, as flat-chested as a boy, and a muscular young man in a tight tank top that he wore like skin. Neither was particularly articulate, but they managed to convey some of the excitement of their visits to schools on the Lower East Side, in the Bronx, and in Spanish Harlem, where they staged demonstrations and then invited seventh and eighth graders to participate. They actually managed to convince at least a few young boys that there was nothing faggy about a job that consisted in significant part of holding and handling women’s bodies.

  Phyllis envied them. She couldn’t remember a time when she had felt that kind of enthusiasm about anything. Certainly not now, and probably not at their age either.

  She knew that Jeffrey would be at the office late, but after the meeting she took the precaution of phoning home and telling Carlos that she would be having dinner with friends. The cook should wait to make something for Mr. Blaine when he got home.

  It was five o’clock when she left Lincoln Center but the sun was still high in the sky, bathing everything in warm, syrupy light. She decided to walk instead of taking a cab. She walked quickly, flowing past the dense streams of people on their way home from work. In her mind they were merely stray objects drifting in the flow of a wide and stately river, while she, with her long strides and the steady drumming of her heels on the pavement, was a sleek scull propelled swiftly forward by powerful strokes.

  At the hotel, she took the elevator up to the fifteenth floor, not drawing her room key from her bag until she was at the door. She let herself in and poured herself a scotch from the bar that was kept locked next to the squatty little refrigerator in the room’s comically inadequate kitchenette. She drank the scotch as she undressed and was naked by the time she finished it. She rinsed the glass, discarded the little single-shot bottle, and went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. Then she got in bed to wait.

  She touched herself between her legs so that she would be ready for him when he came. But she was thinking about the girl dancer, who giggled nervously as she talked, shy no doubt about expressing herself other than with her body.

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She didn’t know what time Jeffrey came in last night. She remembered waking up a little after one and he wasn’t home. She knew he was having an affair and had known it for months, from the time she saw him reading a novel she knew he would never read. Years ago there were little clues like that, the first time it happened. Back then she used to cry every time he was out and she didn’t know where he was. Now it was different. Because she didn’t give a damn. It was hard to see just what men saw in sex that gave it so much importance. She enjoyed sex as much as anyone, she assumed, but not to the point of losing one’s perspective.

  As she lay on the stiff hotel sheets that smelled like hospital sheets, she thought of telling Jeffrey I’ll give up mine if you give up yours, and wondered whether he would see the humor in the proposal. Yes, of course he would. Jeffrey had his faults, but an inability to be amused by life’s more interesting ironies had never been one of them. Not until recently in any case. He seemed somehow to have changed over the last few months, distant from her, distant from himself. Certainly a new girlfriend could be the cause of the difference. Or the result. The thought made her question whether she had been changed by her affair in any way, but she couldn’t see that she had.

  It was a depressing thought. If she was still the same woman she had always been, then what exactly was the point of this whole complicated business?

  Yale was like nothing Jessica had ever experienced. There was an intensity to everything that happened there, to everyone around her, that almost literally left her gasping for air. She was just barely managing to keep up. Her classmates argued passionately about absolutely everything, an interpretation of a few verses from Ezra Pound’s Cantos or a chapter of Bleak House, an attitude about Freud or Marx or Woodrow Wilson. They argued about science and literature, music and history. They argued over beers at a local tavern called The Rectory and then continued the arguments until sunrise in their seedy little dormitory rooms with eighteenth-century plumbing and nineteenth-century wiring. Or was it the other way around? as the local joke went.

  They were ironic about everything except themselves. They worked hard to create and preserve the myth that their lives had always been exactly what they were now. They wanted the world to believe, and came to believe themselves, that they had spent their high school years in a fever of intellectual excitement, because each of them knew that admitting anything else would have amounted to a confession that one was in some sense an impostor, that one didn’t belong here.

  It took Jessica almost a month to get up enough courage to ask her roommate Barbara, a lanky, athletic girl from Boulder, Colorado, “Do these kids seem as weird to you as they do to me?”

  “Weird?” Barbara asked, guarded, as though she didn’t want to commit herself until she had a clearer indication where this was going.

  “Like they’re not real,” Jessica said.

  Barbara took a long time before answering, weighing what was at stake in whatever answer she gave. But she liked this New York girl, who made friends easily but wrapped herself in a cocoon of silence that gave nothing away. If there was a sadness there, and Barbara thought there was, it wasn’t a sadness she imposed on those around her. She kept it to herself. And so Barbara decided to answer truthfully.

  “Yeah,” she said, and then added, with more emphasis, “It’s like they’re making themselves up. I fake it, therefore I exist.”

  They laughed with delight at the secret that they alone, of all their classmates, saw through the charade, and at the sense of relief it brought them. It made it possible for them to lead double lives, delving as deeply as they cared to into freshman life but able to withdraw into the comfort of their shared secret whenever they needed to.

  Eddie Vincenzo showed up one Thursday night toward the end of September. He simply knocked on the door of Jessica’s dormitory room and waited until she opened it.

  She hadn’t expected she would ever see him again. They had almost said as much when they parted in the Las Vegas airport the day he put her on a plane to go home for Amy’s funeral. Not that they talked about themselves that day. He kissed her hard and wrapped his arms around her, one hand on her ass, pulling her tight against him, as though the pressure of his body could somehow vanquish her tears for Amy. They hadn’t said a word about the future, which in that moment simply ceased to exist.

  Now here he was, grinning that wonderful grin, as though it were still summer and they were still somewhere far away. “You look great,” he said. “This place must agree with you.”

  She invited him in and introduced him to Barbara as “a friend from New York.”

  “You mean you knew real people in New York?” Barbara teased, cocking her head as she studied Eddie with an openness he wasn’t used to from a girl. He half expected her to tell him to turn around so she could get a look at him from the side and the back. He didn’t like that crack about real people even though he wasn’t sure what it was supposed to mean. There was no real and not real to it. Nobody shits flowers, whether they go to college or not.

  Jessica laughed and said, “It me
ans she likes you.”

  Eddie didn’t see how it meant that but didn’t much care one way or the other. He knew even before he got to New Haven that he wasn’t going to like the people he was going to run into there. “What do you say we get something to eat?” he suggested, looking around at the room, unimpressed. It was a dump. What was so goddamned great about Yale anyway? There was nothing special about it as far as he could see, and he felt like he had gotten a pretty good look.

  They took Eddie’s car, with Jessica giving him directions as he drove. When they got out of the car they were in the parking lot of a dim-looking restaurant on the main drag of some one-street town about fifteen miles from New Haven. He looked around and said, “What do you think? Is this far enough away?”

  She felt guilty and embarrassed, ashamed of herself and ashamed that he had been able to see through her so easily.

  For almost two months Eddie hadn’t been able to get Jessica Blaine out of his mind. She wasn’t like any of the girls he knew. Maybe the kind of money she came from had something to do with it, but he liked to think it wasn’t that simple. He had never spent so much time with one girl in his life. It was like being married or something. Except that he still didn’t know her, whereas the girls he knew you knew inside out by ten o’clock the first night you were with them. With Jessica it was like there was a door in her mind that kept closing and opening, closing most of the time, opening only once in a while, and never long enough for him to get through.

  She was crazy about him. He knew that with absolute confidence. But that was the part that messed up his mind. Because normally when a girl is crazy about you it’s like one of those poker nights when everything comes up straights and flushes and three of a kind. You can’t lose for winning. With Jessica Blaine it was like playing a game with wild cards he didn’t know about, and that was what stayed in his mind after she left him in Vegas and after he got back to the city. She wasn’t even around and she was messing up his head.

  So here he was, eating some kind of shrimp that came on a metal plate so hot it was still sizzling, and feeling the simple thrill of being with her again, feeling that strange hot coolness that radiated off her like glints of sunlight off water on the hottest day of the hottest summer anyone could remember. The feeling was exactly everything he had expected, and so was the fact that absolutely everything she said or did pissed him off.

  After dinner they found a motel on the road back to New Haven. There were maybe eighteen or twenty units and only one car in front of any of them, which made sense because nobody with any options would stop at a place like this. What didn’t make sense was why the place was still in business.

  They weren’t bad little rooms, though, bigger than you might have expected, with pretty furniture and pictures on the walls with little night lights over them. It was hard to imagine whose idea that little touch might have been. It sure as hell wasn’t the guy who rented Eddie the room, a cross-eyed geek who seemed half unconscious and needed a shave.

  Eddie went into the bathroom to take a leak and when he came out Jessica had almost all her clothes off. He thought when he looked at her that she still had an incredible body, as though he had been expecting to find that she had gotten old in the couple months since the last time he saw her.

  After they made love, he laid out a couple lines of coke. He knew she liked it better when they did the coke first but he didn’t want to make it easier for her.

  “You didn’t tell me you had that stuff,” she protested. She was just teasing him but it didn’t come across as teasing. Or if it did, Eddie wasn’t in the mood for being teased.

  “Make a difference?” he said.

  She was standing naked over the little table where he laid out the coke. Once she had her clothes off, she walked around naked all the time. Eddie didn’t know any other girls who did that. He always put on his pants when he got out of bed.

  “You don’t think it does?” she asked.

  “I’m asking you.”

  When she turned to him, there was something about her eyes, like she was looking at him from a long way away. Then she turned back to the coke without answering him—which she had to know from months of experience was absolutely the surest way there was to piss him off.

  He slapped his hand down on the table hard, scattering the white powder like it was so much talcum. “I asked you a question,” he said.

  “What question was that?”

  Her voice didn’t give an inch. She knew everything that was going to happen next, and she didn’t give an inch.

  “I asked you if having this shit makes a difference.”

  “That all depends, doesn’t it?” she said.

  “On what?”

  “On whether you just happened to be passing through New Haven or this is going to be a regular thing.”

  “We’re not fucking married, y’know,” he said.

  “I didn’t say married. I said regular thing.”

  “I know what you said.”

  “And?”

  “And what?” he snapped, turning her to face him, stepping into her so that she had to back up. “You don’t get in the sack if you don’t get your stuff? Is that what you’re saying? Unless there’s some kind of regular thing?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said.

  His hand caught the side of her face with enough force to send her sideways onto the bed.

  He stood over her with his hand raised to hit her again. There was a purple mark on her cheek already. If he hit her a couple more times she’d cry. And then he’d hold her. And then they’d get in bed again. But he didn’t want any of that to happen, so he dropped his hand and said “Fuck you, Jessica,” and turned around and grabbed his shirt and walked out of the room.

  She didn’t move even when she heard his car start and even when she heard the tires squealing on the gravel.

  No big deal, Eddie thought as he drove down the empty road, looking for some sign that would tell him which way he was supposed to go. She’d have to call for a cab. So what?

  She had plenty of money.

  Plenty.

  17

  They met on the outdoor observation deck of the Staten

  Island ferry at two o’clock in the afternoon. A gentle breeze stirred the smells of the sea out of the Verrazano Channel like soup in a stirred pot.

  Fiore was leaning with his back to the bow rail, the salt wind feathering his hair. “How much longer is this going to take?” he asked. “People are asking questions, I’ve got to have answers.”

  It was the first time Fiore had ever allowed himself to acknowledge that he himself had people he answered to. Jeffrey filed the information at the back of his mind for safekeeping. He had no idea what use he could make of it, but thoroughness was second nature to him, a part of his banker’s instincts. He felt the pleasure a methodical man always feels when he is in possession of a fact in the afternoon that he hadn’t owned in the morning.

  “We should be ready to do something next week,” Jeffrey said. “I’ll need a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Cash?”

  “No. Not cash. Good clean money with a mother and a father and a birth certificate. There’s no sense doing this if you won’t be able to answer a few direct questions about where it all started.”

  “Don’t lecture me,” Fiore said, embarrassed at his mistake. He had known they would have to start with clean money. That was the whole point. “I’ll have a check for you. One week. Right here.”

  “Not here,” Jeffrey said. “My office.”

  Fiore scowled darkly and turned completely around to look out over the water. “Is that a good idea?” he asked.

  Jeffrey smiled, although Fiore wasn’t looking at him. “Of course it is,” he said. “I’m your investment banker. When you’re conducting legitimate business, you don’t do it in parking lots or in the middle of the river.”

  It was the second time in less than a minute that the banker talked to him the way you’d talk t
o the slow kid in class. He kept his eyes on the water and nodded an acknowledgment. “Fine,” he said. “Your office.”

  That night Jeffrey ate dinner at home and then went back to the office. He bantered with the young traders for a while, picking up an education in their end of the business. They wore headsets with microphones at their lips, like astronauts, not simply because the technology amused them but because it seemed to be a point of pride with them to do as little as possible with their hands. They had their shoes off, their feet in sixty-dollar socks up on their desks, computer keyboards in their laps. They were expansive in their answers to Jeffrey’s questions and would have been even if he hadn’t been a partner in the firm. They were gracious with their time, not because time wasn’t money but because they so conspicuously had so much of both. Jessica, Jeffrey was certain, wouldn’t be impressed with their scatological humor or their hands-free phones.

  He retired to his own office around ten o’clock to catch up on some reports. A little before midnight Gabriel Enriquez came in, wearing unpressed slacks and a V-neck sweater with no shirt under it. “What do you say we kick the tires and take her for a spin?” he said, flashing his electric smile.

  Jeffrey looked up from the report he was reading. In a few minutes he had been planning to go to the computer room to check up on Enriquez. Now he didn’t have to.

  The traders and the cleaning staff were gone by this time, and Jeffrey followed Enriquez to the computer room, a silent and airless alcove behind locked doors at the far end of everything.

  Explaining what he was doing as he worked, Enriquez used customized cables and a specially installed port on a customized laptop to tap into the mainframe that contained Layne Bentley’s database. He had taken the precaution of buying the hardware out of town and paying cash for it. There were no records of anything.

  “There are no available read-write ports on this thing,” he said, “because it’s not designed to accept input except through the dedicated channels. But it’s got a tape backup system that’s supposed to write only. I’m going in through there.”