House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  Grace selected a not especially interesting-looking salad from the cooler and a plastic pint of apple cider.

  “Let’s eat outside,” Jessica said. Through a window she could see a patio filled with unused tables.

  “It’s not exactly summer out there,” Grace protested, but she did what Jessica wanted. For as long as she could remember, all the girls always did what Jessica wanted, and she was annoyed with herself for letting the pattern perpetuate itself here.

  “Did you really run off with Eddie?” she asked as soon as they were seated.

  “Yeah,” Jessica said in an offhand tone that suggested she didn’t want to talk about it. “Let me ask you something.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Around. It doesn’t matter,” Jessica said. “Do you remember, when we got to the party, there were reporters outside?”

  “What do you mean, around?”

  “All right, we went to New Orleans. I don’t want to talk about that. Do you remember the reporters?”

  Grace looked disappointed. “Yes, I remember them,” she said sullenly.

  “And there was one of them, a lady, you said you knew her.”

  “Are you kidding? What’s this about?” Grace protested.

  “It’s not about anything. I want to know her name.”

  Grace put down her fork and put the plastic cover back on the remains of her salad. “Her name is Sharon Lamm,” she said. “She does business stuff for Newsday. She was very nice to Daddy when he had that problem.”

  Grace’s father had been indicted for insider trading.

  “Thanks so much, Grace. We’re really going to have to talk, I can’t now,” Jessica said. She stood up, said “Thanks” again, and turned to go.

  Grace watched her a moment, baffled. Then she got up and hurried after her. “What’s wrong, Jess?” she asked.

  “Nothing. I’ve got to get going, that’s all.”

  “Get real, please. We haven’t seen each other since graduation, you drive all the way up here, ask one question, and go. That doesn’t strike you as odd?”

  “Actually,” Jessica said, “we saw each other at Amy’s funeral.”

  Sharon Lamm listened without interrupting for almost twenty minutes. Then she leaned back and looked across at the pretty and eerily calm young lady sitting at the opposite side of the desk, her legs crossed, her hands resting like a kitten on her lap. “Why are you telling me this?” Sharon asked.

  She had been taking notes on the little steno pad she always used for interviews, copying down whole sentences in her self-invented shorthand. She never used a tape recorder for interviews because it made her feel like a television reporter, just sticking the technology in someone’s face and letting the journalism happen. Writing the words down, choosing what to summarize, what to ignore, what to transcribe verbatim made her feel as though she were already shaping the story. She believed in stories more than she believed in facts.

  A hundred questions raced through her mind while she was listening, but none of them was worth asking until she had an answer to this one. Why was this girl telling her all the things she was telling her?

  Jessica had known she would be asked this question because it was the first question she asked herself. On the ride down from Poughkeepsie, flanked by the throbbing colors of the autumn forest that spread out on both sides of the parkway, surrounded by carpets of orange flame, carpets of yellow flame, blankets of rich russet, she felt almost as though she were in danger of being swallowed up by the death of all these things dying back around her. Here and there, young deer, two or three together, browsed listlessly by the side of the road, showing no sign of that intent alertness that always made the deer she saw in the Bedford Hills yard seem so achingly fragile.

  How many different forms, she wondered, could the same thought take in one person’s mind? It had taken a hundred different forms since this morning, when Martin came into the kitchen where she was having breakfast and said, “I don’t know what to do, miss, I don’t know whether to tell your daddy or what.” And then he told her that he took her mama downtown yesterday and waited for her and she came back with a man and the police showed up and made a big scene, and one of them said something about the man killing someone. Martin didn’t tell her who the man was because he didn’t know, but Jessica didn’t need to be told. She knew it was Chet Fiore, her father’s gangster associate, and she figured the police were there because they were following her father’s car. She wasn’t sure how much trouble her father was in, but it sounded serious.

  That was when she decided to go see Grace, who knew a reporter who helped her father when he had that problem. For weeks she had hated her father but now she was sure she loved him and that he needed saving. If she had been older, she might have known herself well enough to distrust her better instincts, but for all the growing up she had done in the past eight months, she was still a child. She still believed in the stories that had been read to her as a child, simple stories about innocent creatures touching one another with tender acts of kindness. Jessica liked to imagine that the world was really like that even though she knew better. Above all, she thought that she was like that. It meant nothing to her that saving her father and destroying him took exactly the same form, and that only a few hours before, relatively speaking, she had walked out of Montefiore Hospital hating her father with a fierce and piercing hatred. That was when she first thought about telling someone he was involved with a gangster. She wanted to pay him back for everything that had happened to her. She didn’t do it, though. Until she decided she had to do something to save him.

  “I think my father’s in trouble,” she said in answer to Sharon Lamm’s question. Both her feet rested on the floor, her knees touching, her feet splayed apart, like a little girl waiting to be asked to dance. “Grace said you helped her father.”

  Well, Sharon Lamm thought, she had her answer. But she wasn’t sure she believed it. Oh yes, she believed the facts she had been told. But not the story that shaped them in this girl’s mind.

  It was after eight o’clock when Elaine Lester got home and found Jeffrey in the living room, his bare feet up on the coffee table, his ankles crossed, his fountain pen in hand, a stack of reports in his lap. He had taken off his suit and was wearing the robe she had given him. A symphony by Vaughan Williams was playing on the stereo. It was one of his gifts to her.

  “Am I that late?” she asked.

  She looked tired. There was a tightness at the corners of her lips, a slackness at the corners of her eyes. He had thought of ordering in dinner, and it would have been here already, and now he was sorry he hadn’t done it.

  They kissed just inside the door and then she stepped out of her shoes and handed him the brown paper bag she was carrying. “Open one of these,” she said.

  He felt two wine bottles in the bag. He pushed through the door into the kitchen and took the bottles from the bag. There was an American Cabernet and an Italian Chianti. It was like her to buy two bottles of red, leaving him a choice only after her choice was made. He decided on the Cabernet. The thought struck him that when he and Phyllis had their first apartment there were three different wine racks in the kitchen, all of them always well stocked.

  Christ, he thought with a wry, self-mocking laugh, in another minute I’ll be quoting “The Gift of the Magi.” It wasn’t true that he had been happier when he first came to New York, single and nearly broke. It really wasn’t. It wasn’t true that life was simpler then, carrying home a wine bottle with a sense of something like triumph, opening it with a sense of something like ceremony. The plain simple honest bedrock fact of the matter was that he had never, as far as he could remember, found life simple or enjoyed it simply.

  Until now.

  Elaine joined him in the kitchen. She had changed into jeans and a T-shirt, and she looked fresh, and younger. But it took him only a moment to see that the careworn look he noticed when she came in was still there, underneath the brightness. />
  “Hard day?” he asked, handing her one of the wine glasses he had just filled.

  “Let’s see what we can find to eat,” she said, “and then we’ve got to talk.”

  Got to talk was different from talk. It sounded a warning bell in the back of Jeffrey’s brain.

  They found the remnants of a salad in the refrigerator. And some chicken in a peanut sauce from a Thai restaurant. There was some nice bread, and some Brie, which needed just to sit out a little while to soften. They ate the chicken with their fingers straight from the container and then moved to the living room with the wine, the bread, and the cheese. Jeffrey sat down but Elaine walked about restlessly, adjusting the positions of small objects on the coffee table and the lamp table next to the couch. She stood in front of him a moment, as though she couldn’t make up her mind where to alight.

  “I don’t know if anyone’s ever mentioned this to you,” he said, “but when a man knows a woman isn’t wearing anything under her jeans, it’s almost impossible for him to look at her without thinking about that.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Mm-hmm. It’s exactly the same as when you know that the guy sitting next to you on the plane has a bomb in his briefcase. Even if you can’t see it, you can’t think about anything else.”

  She laughed, but not with her eyes, which studied his face for what seemed a long time. She knew how astute he was, that he never missed anything. She had seen the flicker, the momentary tightening of his lips when she said We’ve got to talk, and she was certain she understood the purpose of his playfulness now. She felt for a moment an almost overwhelming tenderness for him, as though, just possibly, he was a far more fragile man than she had ever allowed for in her thoughts.

  “Jeffrey,” she said, “two of my men followed Chet Fiore today. He met your wife.”

  He tipped his head back, resting it against the back of the couch, and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to be talking to Elaine about Phyllis. He said nothing, waiting for her to tell him the rest.

  “They went to an empty town house on the East Side,” Elaine went on. “They made love.”

  They did, did they? Jeffrey thought. Empty made it possible for him to see it all, exactly as it happened, as though he were in the room with them, invisible. Bare walls and a bare floor. They wouldn’t have even gotten naked. Once, the winter before he and Phyllis announced their engagement, he took her to Massachusetts to introduce her to his parents. In the evening, after his parents were in bed, he made love to her in the den and she didn’t even get undressed for it, didn’t even take off her panties. She guided him into her and he came almost as soon as the head of his penis touched the wetness of her flesh. It was the silk above all that excited him, because it meant that all of a sudden there was no distinction between dressed and undressed and because in that moment he believed, with the clarity young men enjoy when they are in love, that for the rest of their lives together she would always be naked for him under her clothing.

  Well, he thought with bitter and wry detachment, it hadn’t quite worked out that way, had it?

  He got to his feet and walked away, moving to a window.

  “I thought you should know,” Elaine said.

  He turned to face her, and for a moment she was confused. “You knew already?” she asked.

  “No,” he said.

  Now she was even more confused. He could see it in her eyes. He moved to her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m supposed to be outraged, aren’t I? I hope I’m not disappointing you but I can’t quite manage outrage.”

  She smiled, a pleasant, comfortable, even triumphant smile. There are few things more gratifying than learning that your lover’s wife has a lover, and one of them is learning that he doesn’t care.

  For the first time she had the courage to ask the question that had been hanging over their relationship from the moment she spoke to him in the fiction section of Barnes & Noble. For the first time she was confident she knew what the answer would be.

  “Jeffrey,” she said, “what’s going on between you and Chet Fiore?”

  “Other than his sexual relations with my wife?” he asked.

  She felt happy, joyful, exultant. All this while she and Schliester and Gogarty kept talking about Fiore and the banker. They had never once considered the possibility that it was Fiore and the banker’s wife.

  “Yes,” she said. “Other than his sexual relations with your wife.”

  “Do you want me to tell you even if it’s something you don’t want to know?”

  “No,” she said, feeling suddenly hollow and empty.

  Why hadn’t he said, There is none. Fiore and my wife—that’s the only connection?

  Why hadn’t she said Yes?

  PART SIX

  25

  The voice at the other end of the line was almost incoherent. “Where are you?” Fiore asked. “I’ll be right over.” “Where am I…, where I am…, doesn’t matter, that’s no good,” Noel Garver mumbled.

  The man was clearly drunk.

  “All right, look,” Fiore said, “take a couple hours. Do you know the Hudson Diner?”

  “On Twelfth?”

  The Hudson Diner was on Twelfth Avenue in the Twenties.

  “That’s right. Get yourself a cup of coffee. Don’t have anything else to drink,” Fiore lectured. “I’ll meet you there at nine o’clock. Tell me what I just said.”

  “Nothing to drink,” Garver parroted. “And coffee.”

  “And where am I meeting you?”

  “Can’t be here. That’s no good.”

  “The Hudson Diner,” Fiore repeated patiently. “On Twelfth Avenue. At nine o’clock. Have you got that?”

  “Right, right.”

  “Now tell me.”

  Garver repeated the information in the irritated tone of a man who was being greatly put-upon. Fiore pegged the odds at slightly better than even that Garver would be there.

  In cold weather the Hudson Diner does a brisk business with the net-stockinged crowd of West Side whores. The window booths, especially the ones facing the parking lot, are popular with drug dealers. The decor is pure art deco, chromed like a fifties Buick. According to legend, it was here that left-wing journalists, left-wing novelists, and left-wing dramatists rubbed shoulders with cabbies and truckers. But that was a long time ago.

  Garver was already sitting at a corner booth far from the door when Fiore arrived with Jimmy Angelisi at his shoulder. A young man, no more than twenty-five years old, with short, neatly trimmed hair, sat next to Garver in a charcoal gray sweater. Fiore wasn’t pleased at the addition of a stranger to the party, but at least they had coffee cups in front of them.

  “I was just telling Wayne a little bit about this place,” Garver said, dispensing with introductions. “It has rather an illustrious literary history.”

  Even at the best of times, Fiore wouldn’t have been inclined to waste time on the folklore of a diner. Garver’s message said that he had urgent information to communicate and Fiore would have preferred a sense of urgency. “Never mind that,” he said. “If we’ve got business to talk about, it’s going to have to be just us.”

  “Wayne is my secretary and assistant, practically a partner,” Garver said. “I have no secrets from Wayne.”

  He smiled a lopsided smile that was probably meant to be seductive. His eyes were filled with the chronic sadness of an aging queen, but at least he didn’t sound drunk anymore.

  “Maybe you don’t have secrets from him,” Fiore said. “I do.”

  “Strictly speaking, that’s not true,” Garver said, smirking as though he had just made a joke. “Not as far as this business is concerned anyway. Wayne knows everything about it I do. If you can keep a secret,” he added, leaning so far across the table that he had to put his hand on his tie to keep it from dangling in his coffee cup, “that little story I wrote that never got published—you remember that one, don’t you? That was Wayne’s work.”

 
His breath smelled like some kind of flowers, whatever it was drunks used to hide the fact they were drunks. When he had made his point, he sat up straight, smiled again, and tried to put everything he had just said in its proper context by adding, “From time to time Wayne writes under my byline.”

  There was no point, Fiore realized, in making an issue of the young man’s presence. Garver probably couldn’t even take a leak without this kid’s hand on his cock.

  “And besides,” Garver grinned, “it was Wayne who took the call.”

  “What call is that?”

  “From Sharon Lamm,” Wayne said.

  The name meant nothing to Fiore.

  Garver laid his long-fingered hand on the back of Wayne’s hand. “You’ve answered the gentleman’s question,” he said sweetly, “but you haven’t given him the information he needs. If you’ll permit me.”

  The young man looked down at the table. It was easy to imagine that these little tutorial sessions went on all the time, all wisdom and graciousness on Garver’s part, all humility and mortification on Wayne’s.

  Without removing his hand from Wayne’s, Garver took Fiore back to the night of Jessica Blaine’s birthday party. Fiore hadn’t known that Garver had taken the liberty of inviting Sharon Lamm, from Newsday, to join him inside the restaurant. Someone on Stasny’s staff removed her from the premises before Fiore arrived, but she had seen enough for a story and would have filed one if she had been able to find anyone to corroborate what she saw with her own eyes and heard with her own ears. Instead, the mothers of all three of the girls involved assured her that she must have been misinformed, that their daughters had all returned home safely, and she knew she would have gotten the same answers if she called the fathers.