A Dual Inheritance

by Joanna Hershon

  So she hung around the Hungarian Pastry Shop with Francisco, the self-described asexual heir to a Puerto Rican shipping empire. She studied and talked with Francisco about politics, philosophy—everything except anything resembling popular culture or living breathing humans. Francisco had also gone to boarding school but had been kicked out due to the fact that he’d (having never seen Harold and Maude) faked his own death. He had a unibrow, a contagious laugh, and excellent knife skills. One Saturday night he made osso bucco on his dorm stove for Rebecca and Bob—a wiry, unsmiling, self-described liberation theologian from Troy, Michigan. Bob smoked Pall Malls and drank Jägermeister and did a weekly night shift at a Bronx soup kitchen. He got straight A’s, played cards with old men in Riverside Park, and seemed to have read every book ever written, and when, two weeks later—at her suggestion—he relieved Rebecca of her virginity, his crucifix dangled in her line of vision and she didn’t even close her eyes.

  And to whom did Rebecca place a call, the morning after her deflowering?

  “What do you mean a crucifix?” asked Vivi. “It’s probably just a little cross, no?” Vivi had befriended several Italians on campus and had already absorbed their expressions and inflections.

  “No. It’s a crucifix. It’s Jesus. On a cross. With blood.”

  “Blood?”

  “Approximation of. It’s all silver.”

  “Bet your dad will love that.”

  “I doubt my dad will meet him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  “Because he wears a crucifix?”

  “No!”

  “You’d better be careful,” Vivi said. “Don’t start lying to yourself.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You know.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “All I’m saying is that it wouldn’t be the worst thing to piss your father off again. You can do that more than once in a lifetime.”

  “Coming from someone whose father thinks everything she does is downright dreamy.”

  After that, she saw less of Vivi. In the winter they met while it was still dark out, swam laps in the university pool. They were at their best when they weren’t talking, when they were—like the toddlers Rebecca read about in her psych class—doing something like parallel play. Outside, with their hair still wet, they drank café con leches and ate sweet rolls; their hair froze in the snow. When they hugged goodbye, Vivi was the last to let go. I miss you, she sometimes said, as if they weren’t living not only in the same city but also attending the same school.

  Rebecca never did introduce Bob to her father. And after they’d broken up after less than a year, for plenty of good reasons—Rebecca made out with several other people; Bob, it turned out, was a pretentious alcoholic—she never once regretted it.

  But, somehow, once Vivi graduated and moved to Los Angeles, Rebecca and Vivi’s history of tension ceased to matter. They talked on the phone more than they ever saw each other in college. Vivi’s development job seemed to mean she was licensed to meet for drinks with attractive guys who’d graduated from film school, full of expectations. Unsurprisingly, Vivi was very good at this. She was soon promoted. When she came to New York for a meeting, she told Rebecca to meet her at the Royalton. Vivi expensed it. Vivi was Hollywood; Rebecca, a do-gooder: That narrative seemed to work. But then Rebecca went to law school, and Vivi met a Buddhist monk at a party in Venice Beach, and by the next week Vivi had quit her job and agreed to work on the monk’s documentary about Bhutan.

  Vivi wrote Rebecca one long letter from Bhutan, through which Rebecca basically deduced that the film was going nowhere. But the film, as it turned out, was not only completed but it won some kind of German humanitarian award, after which Vivi worked consistently, for a good two years, as a producer of another indisputably substantive film. And then, after she confided she was not cut out for producing (Not even you could keep all this shit straight, she’d explained at the Carlyle, before literally falling asleep at the bar), instead of moving on to the next thing, as Rebecca had imagined she would do, Vivi somehow managed to convince enough people that—despite their usually minuscule budgets—she was indispensable as a visual consultant/location scout. She made it happen.

  Rebecca not only stopped being so self-righteous (she was a summer associate at Davis Polk, writing briefs on behalf of a … tobacco company), she also stopped keeping track of where Vivi was, knowing that she’d blow through New York soon enough and would call her from a hotel bar. They justified the astronomical prices by the fact that they never saw each other.

  They were both—when you got down to it—two girls who loved a treat.

  Now, ten years after her Columbia graduation, and three years after the obliteration of the World Trade Center, not one mile away from where she was now battling her way through an unexpected, torrential downpour (it was December—where was the snow?), Rebecca Cantowitz was bone-cold, exhausted, and already certain she felt a nascent scratch in the back of her throat. When she passed through the doors of this new downtown hotel—ambient lighting, expensive currant scent—the chill and the rain were immediately distant.

  “Rebecca?” asked a tall Asian man at the front desk.

  Rebecca nodded, fighting the urge to wipe her nose with the back of her sweater sleeve.

  “Your friend is in the drawing room. May I take your coat?”

  Checking items always seemed to overcomplicate matters—why involve more people in one’s entrance than absolutely necessary? Why couldn’t she simply drape a coat—such an elegant gesture—over the back of a chair? But she nodded, and, fighting her more-natural instincts (eccentricities, said her mother), Rebecca flashed her best pretty smile and handed over her trench coat before moving forward. Her spike-heeled boots—likely ruined in the rain—clicked across the marble floor.

  The drawing room was absurdly cozy, and she scanned the room for Vivi, who’d last been in town about a year ago, doing postproduction consulting for the fifty-something German director, whom she had dubbed the Sentimental Penis. Vivi had worked on his film about a village in Malta, where he’d spent a seminal summer as a child. The three of them had gone out late one night and Rebecca had been impressed with Vivi’s command; she told him where she wanted to eat, what wine to order, and, when he’d reached over to touch Rebecca’s leg, Vivi had stopped him cold.

  Out of your league, she’d said.

  And there she was now; there was Vivi at a table by the window—rising slowly and hugging her quickly. When she felt those willowy, strong arms around her, Rebecca was afraid she might start crying, something she swore she wouldn’t do today. Vivi held on a little longer than the usual embrace, the one Rebecca knew in her bones. “You look so great,” Vivi said, after pulling away.

  “I sort of believe you,” said Rebecca. “Because I’m finally sleeping.”

  “Oh, thank God.”

  “Ambien,” she said. “I relented.”

  “You’re so stubborn about taking drugs.”

  “Wait,” said Rebecca suddenly. She stared at Vivi openly. “Something’s different.”

  Vivi shrugged, but Rebecca detected a twist of a smile.

  “It’s something. Your boobs?” mouthed Rebecca. “Did you—”

  Then Vivi started to laugh for real, in the way that meant something more than the answer.

  “What can I get for you?” asked the waiter, foreign and handsome.

  Vivi smiled at him, not flirtatiously but somehow attentively. “My very best friend will have a very dirty martini.” Then, glancing at Rebecca, “Am I right?”

  Rebecca nodded. She’d planned on avoiding hard liquor tonight, but now such an idea seemed ridiculous. Here in the profoundly unfamiliar world of joblessness, she not only had to work so much harder to avoid her father’s phone calls but she’d taken to going out frequently; there were more overeducated unemployed people than she’d ever imagined. They emailed links: some to potential jobs but mostly
to travel bargains and excellent sample sales. They met for drinks well before five.

  “And I’ll have …” Vivi glanced over the wine list. “I’ll have a glass of the Bordeaux.

  “So I’m worried,” she heard Vivi say, after the waiter walked away.

  When Rebecca turned her attention to her, Vivi wasn’t smiling.

  “I’ve been worried about you,” she repeated.

  “I know,” said Rebecca lightly. “You said so on the phone.”

  “Listen,” Vivi said. Her face shed a layer of pretense that Rebecca hadn’t noticed was there. “What’s going on?”

  “What are you talking about?” She shook her head, as if to shake off the direction this conversation was taking.

  “With you. What is going on with you.”

  “What’s going on with me is that I’m looking for a job. Or looking into getting another degree. I’ve taken up running. What else? I don’t know—I’ve been going on some dates?”

  Vivi just stared.

  “You read the Times article,” said Rebecca. “You read all the articles. You said so on my voice mail. So I know you know what’s going on.”

  Vivi sat up straighter, looked out for the drinks, and when they were not in sight, she returned her attention to Rebecca. “You’re acting insane,” she said.

  “I’m acting insane?” asked Rebecca.

  “Yes. Listen. You are my best friend,” said Vivi, as if—at the moment—this might not be an altogether welcome truth. “Your father made a series of bad decisions, but that doesn’t give you the right …”

  “The right to what?”

  The waiter returned with his appropriately lascivious waiter grin. They both turned their attention to him so completely that it seemed amazing to Rebecca that he neither blushed nor fumbled the tray. He set down their drinks with care. Not a drop spilled from the chilled martini glass, and Rebecca had to sit on her hands in order not to grab it before it was fully relinquished.

  Vivi took a discreet sip of wine. “That’s perfect,” she told him approvingly, and then, to Rebecca after he took his leave once more, “I must have left you ten messages.”

  Her skin, Rebecca noticed with a stab of pure envy, looked particularly good. From the first moment Rebecca saw her tonight, Vivi had looked younger, and Rebecca finally realized it was because Vivi had actually gained some weight. Huh. She carried it well. Back before they’d conversed about something other than the all-encompassing lawsuit against him, Rebecca’s father had been in the habit of asking her to please gain five pounds. Rebecca wondered: If she’d done so, would she look mysteriously younger, like Vivi, or simply thirty-two years old and five pounds too heavy?

  “I know you’ve been calling,” Rebecca said. She took a long sip of her martini. “And I’m sorry. It was rude of me not to return your calls.”

  “I don’t give a shit about your manners.”

  “I know,” said Rebecca, and suddenly she really did know. She knew that Vivi was truly worried and that here she was acting like a pain in the ass. Just as she knew that if she’d understood the seriousness of the lawsuit brought against her father by the justice department on behalf of the IRS—if her father had been remotely straight with her—she might have in fact followed Gabriel’s advice and not gone through with quitting her own lucrative position at the firm. She might have followed Gabriel’s advice, and maybe she would have finally pushed through her chronic, mostly professional dissatisfaction, and maybe—it was possible!—they would still be together. But knowing all of this did not make it any easier to stop acting like a pain in the ass. In fact, the knowledge that she was acting this way made Rebecca more impatient than ever. “What’s going on?” she repeated. “My father—who, as you know has always made a big deal about being an honest guy, wronged by my cheating mother and all that—has been nailed for tax fraud. Fraud.”

  “Well, yes,” said Vivi, “but how is he?”

  Rebecca shrugged. Once she knew—courtesy of the New York Times business section—exactly how much money he’d hidden in offshore accounts for over fifteen years (and on which he’d avoided paying those much-discussed taxes), she’d had a hard time not bringing greed and hypocrisy and irresponsibility into every conversation. The last time she’d seen her father, he was moving into a Midtown rental the size of his former study. This, after so many years of flying back and forth to China in pursuit of … what exactly? She’d lost track of his ambitions. First it was BMW, and when that never amounted to anything, he’d invested in some Western-style hotel—but nothing had ever brought him the success that he craved, the success for which he’d gotten risky and stupid and screwed with the IRS. She’d gone with her father to the diner on the ground floor of the new building and ordered sad weak coffee that neither of them drank. He’d continued with his plentiful excuses. He repeated that he hadn’t done anything that any schmuck with a business degree and a passport wasn’t doing all over the globe. He said, yet again, that he was being unfairly targeted.

  But you broke the law, Rebecca said.

  And this was how he’d looked at her: as if all those decades of discussing honesty and strong character and being a decent person had added up to nothing. As if, really, he was disappointed in her because she hadn’t been paying attention to what he’d actually been saying all these years. As if they’d been engaged the whole time in a kind of double-speak: Don’t do as I say, do as I do.

  You think it was easy, he’d asked, keeping you in the manner to which you’d been accustomed?

  She barely hesitated before throwing money on the table and walking out that smudged glass door.

  Rebecca, he yelled after her, but if he was anything besides angry, he hadn’t shown it.

  “He must be terrified,” said Vivi now.

  “I don’t think so,” said Rebecca. “But, then again, what do I know?” She swallowed slowly, savored the kick of gin. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “What are you talking about? You can’t pretend you and your father aren’t close. Whether or not he’s a shady businessman, he’s still your dad. He’s still Ed!”

  “I haven’t talked to him in three months.”

  Vivi sat back on the banquette, clearly at something of a loss. Rebecca, perhaps unfairly, was pretty sure how Vivi had thought this evening might go: Rebecca dishing about her dad, dishing about the court case; venting and maybe crying and certainly realizing how lucky she was to have Vivi, who was (she really was) particularly good at joint venting.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” said Rebecca. “I’m too angry.”

  Vivi nodded.

  “And,” she continued, “you can’t tell me that you’d be so compassionate if you found out that your father had done this.”

  “I don’t know,” said Vivi.

  “That’s because you know it could never happen.”

  “Maybe,” Vivi acknowledged.

  Rebecca looked down at her ragged fingernails. She tried to picture Hugh in a situation remotely similar to her father’s. She could not. Hugh was too transparent for corruption. You saved my life is what Hugh had whispered to Rebecca at the airport sixteen years ago, when they’d said the strangest of goodbyes. She’d felt Vivi watching, she’d felt her father watching, and she’d been intensely awkward. Hugh had smiled when he’d seen Rebecca’s father at the airport. He had smiled for real when her father approached them, out of breath, his face in a serious scowl. Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on here? She would always remember how her father was sweating through his usually crisp Italian white button-down shirt. Knowing what she knew now—that he had returned not an hour before from that first trip to China, the trip that had played no small part in the chain of events that led to his undoing—rendered this already uncomfortable memory that much more so.

  “All right,” Vivi finally said. “So are you hungry?”

  Rebecca nodded. This was what she’d wanted from this evening: to live in the fading sphere of their genuine com
mon ground, and if that was currently limited to a shared love of food and drink, so be it. When they’d fought on that bench in the middle of Broadway, they were on their way to a falafel lunch, and they’d both later admitted that part of their mutual distress was that—on top of their conflict—they were depriving themselves of eating that falafel together. Their one conflict during the whole summer they’d Eurailed was on a Naxos beach, midday: Rebecca wasn’t hungry and Vivi was disappointed.

  Rebecca signaled for another martini. “Go ahead and order. You know what I like.” Then she stood up and made her way to the ladies’ room. As soon as Vivi was out of sight, Rebecca felt chastened, remembering the night Gabriel had moved out and how she’d cried and cried into the phone and how Vivi had listened. And then, when Rebecca hadn’t been able to stop crying, when Vivi told Rebecca that she’d stay on the line but that Rebecca needed to go stand on her head because it really would make her feel better, Rebecca had yelled, Fuck that, fuck you, I’m not standing on my fucking head, and Vivi hadn’t argued.

  In the single bathroom of this downtown hotel: light so dim she could barely find the toilet paper. In the mirror: a dark-haired animal, a waif applying lip gloss. On exiting: another woman with the familiar (and strangely conspiratorial) post-ladies’-room grin of women all over the globe. She felt the martini. Rebecca floated above the floor this time; she didn’t hear the clicking of her heels.