Down the Shore

by Stan Parish

  “They’re good,” I shouted.

  It was true, and he seemed eager for my approval, which I didn’t understand. Michael slapped me on the shoulder. We were about the same size, I realized, picturing myself in his thin beige cashmere sweater and gingham dress shirt, which looked like something he might have worn to the office at some point. What would happen if I took his keys and walked away while he was busy talking into his son’s ear? If I got into the car and drove? I knew from my valet parking days that Porsches have a heavy clutch, but I learned to drive stick on an ’86 Ford Bronco, so I was used to that. I imagined Camille sitting up in bed back at the house, reading something in her native language. The sound of the garage door lurching upward as headlights swept across the bedroom wall. I climb the stairs and walk into the bedroom after letting myself in. She looks up with tired recognition, but no surprise in her expression. I’d seen enough of their life to feel fluent in it, ready to shift between situations as easily as the guitar player was changing chords on stage. I watched as he took the neck in hand and bent three strings up a full step, rising onto the balls of his feet with the sound.

  By the time we piled back into the car, I had hit a patch of exhilarated clarity somewhere inside a third wind that felt like it could last for days. Michael put the windows down, and blasts of cold air wicked sweat off my face. My eyes were too dry and too tired to read the number on the mailbox as we turned down the drive, and my ears were still ringing from the music as Michael showed me to my room on the first floor. He paused in the doorway as I was unfastening my watch.

  “Sleep tight,” he said, and laughed to himself as he shut the door.

  I lay on top of the comforter in all my clothes, and was suddenly profoundly thirsty. The first floor of the house looked like it had been furnished all at once from a single showroom; the owners had managed to take an ancient home and make it feel like no one had ever lived there. As I walked into the kitchen, I noticed an over/under shotgun leaning in a corner near the door, the oldest-looking thing in sight, the bluing on the barrel worn thin from however many pairs of hands. I wondered what trouble Michael was expecting as I sucked down water from the big chrome arch of the kitchen faucet, too high to be frightened.

  “How about a glass?” Michael said from the doorway, when I came up for air.

  I nodded, wiping my mouth with my sleeve. Michael filled two glasses from a filter in the fridge, and we faced each other across a marble countertop, me on a high stool, him on his feet.

  “How much coke do you have left?”

  I stopped midswallow.

  “You boys were lit when you got here, weren’t you? A father can tell. Seriously, though, what’s left?”

  “Some,” I said. “Enough, I guess.”

  “Do I need an engraved invitation?” he asked. “Or do you just not want to share?”

  “You want some?”

  “Do you think I’m kidding? Unless you’re all partied out. No? Go ahead then, do the honors.”

  Michael laid a prepaid phone like mine on the counter while I unfolded the paper packet and cut lines with my St. Andrews ID card. I realized he had been outside on a call.

  “Do you drink with this stuff?” he asked as he rolled up a £100 note.

  “It doesn’t hurt.”

  “I’m not asking if one drinks with this stuff. I’m asking if you do.”

  I said I’d have a drink, and he dug into a temperature-controlled wine cabinet beneath the counter and withdrew a bottle. It was white Burgundy from Puligny-Montrachet, the faded yellow label marred by a neon orange sticker announcing that the wine had been purchased from a private collection. Michael turned his back to me and rummaged through a drawer until he found a corkscrew. Later, I looked up the bottle. The average price online was equal to a month’s rent on my mother’s house.

  “How’s school?” he asked, passing me a wineglass, and then leaning in to take a line.

  “It’s good. It’s kind of an adjustment.”

  “So’s everything. How’s my son holding up?”

  “I think he likes it.”

  “Do you actually believe that, or are you saying what you think I want to hear? Have people figured out who his daddy is yet?”

  “A few people know.”

  “He tried to hide it?”

  I nodded, and Michael laughed.

  “Are they pissed? Righteously indignant? What?”

  “I don’t think anybody cares that much.”

  “The Brits are pretty laissez-faire about this stuff. They talk a lot of shit in the privacy of their homes, but outward moral outrage isn’t their thing, from what I’ve seen. I think they think it’s tacky.”

  “No one’s bothering him about it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I’m not worried about that. That’s something he needs to learn to deal with. But I am glad he has you to watch his back.”

  I nodded to let him know that he was welcome, for whatever that was worth. I did a line, and then another, trying and failing to think of something conversationally benign. Michael had something else in mind.

  “Your old man wasn’t really in the picture, from what I understand,” he said.

  “Not at all.”

  “Do you know how lucky you are?”

  “Sorry?”

  “You probably never thought of it that way, but it’s a blessing in disguise. Could be the key to your success. You know who my dad was?”

  I shook my head.

  “Exactly. There’s this story he used to tell me: He’s driving his 1961 Mustang from Cheyenne to Minot, North Dakota. Straight shot for seven hundred miles, maybe three other cars on the road the whole way. At some point dad hits black ice and goes into a skid. There’s one telephone pole a hundred yards in front of him, and he’s keeping an eye on it, not too worried, just waiting for the car to lose some steam. But he’s not slowing down fast enough, so he starts spinning the wheel left and right, trying to stay clear of this pole, but eventually he realizes that he’s headed straight for it, that there’s nothing he can do. He can’t fucking believe he’s about to hit the only thing for miles. Wrecks the front end of the car. You know why he hit it?”

  “I don’t know. God’s will?”

  “He hit it because that’s what he was looking at. That’s what he used to tell me. One time I asked my mom about the time dad wrecked his Mustang. You know what she said? ‘Never happened.’ It’s not a story about driving. It’s about hitting what you’re looking at.”

  “I’m not sure I get it.”

  “Do you know how to ride a motorcycle?”

  “Yes.”

  “So how do you turn?”

  “You lean.”

  “Wrong. You look where you want the bike to go. Do you see what I’m getting at? When your dad’s around, that’s what you’re looking at—whatever he is. That’s why my dad told me that story. So I would stop looking at him. So I could be something bigger, something else. Then you spend your whole life building something, and your kid comes along and you realize that everything you’ve done is hanging over his head. When you’ve done a lot, it’s a lot to look at. It’s hard for kids to see around it when it’s that big and in their faces all the time. Even if the money doesn’t rot them from the inside, they need to be able to imagine something different. You want something better for your kids, but you hit what you’re looking at, or something before it. Now look at you. There’s nothing in your way. You aren’t even thinking about what your mother does, because you’ve always known you’re better than that. What’s that look about? You’ve never heard that outside your head? Don’t be ashamed of that. She wants that for you too. That’s my point: you can do whatever you want. I was worried that I’d fucked things up for Clare, but I think this mess will be a real asset for him in a few years. It’s the best thing that could have happened, actually. I�
�m out of the way now. He can be whatever he wants. So what are you trying to be?”

  “Rich.”

  “Keep going. Why?”

  “I don’t want my mom to have to work. I want problems that aren’t money problems. I want a big house down the shore. I want a boat.”

  “And then what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You make your money, you get all that shit, and then what? What do you think happens after that? There’s not a right or a wrong answer. This won’t be on the exam. I’m asking you because I don’t remember what I thought when I was your age.”

  “I don’t know. Retire early? Raise a family? Play golf on days that end in Y, or whatever you said?”

  “It’s harder than you think. I don’t mean getting there. That won’t be very hard for you. I mean getting out. You hit this point where you’ve made more money than you can reasonably spend, and you’ve passed four or five of your personal I’ll-retire-when goals, and you keep waking up and doing it anyway. Force of habit, I guess is what it’s called. My first boss at Lehman used to get really sentimental about this, which is probably why he was still herding first-year analysts at forty-five. He used to talk about retirement ad nauseum, about getting a place on the Snake River and just catching trout. He’d tell us it’s not normal to hoard in abstract figures. We’re supposed to want enough to get us laid, to marry the girl we couldn’t fuck in high school, to get more house than we can use, but that’s it. To keep going is a perversion of a natural instinct, is what he used to say. Like a cancer. The whole time I knew he was wrong.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The people who just want money never get it, or they don’t get it in the quantities they imagine. Right now you think you want all the stuff you just mentioned, but it’s not really about that. The stuff”—Michael held up the bottle, wagged it back and forth—“isn’t the point. It’s how you rationalize what you’re doing. The big house is just something to look at, but what you’re aiming for is something else. You, my friend, are not going to get comfortable and walk away.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m looking at you and I’m telling you that you have what it takes, because I know what that looks like. Remember when you told me that story over lunch? Your mom’s friend? The one who killed herself with all the pills? That was a stone-cold thing to do, and you didn’t hesitate, because you had the cards. You don’t really understand what you’re aiming for right now, but you’re definitely not the trout-fishing type. I don’t even think you’re as naive as you’re pretending to be. Or maybe you actually believe you can just make some coin and walk away, in which case I don’t know whether I want you to be right or whether I want to watch it get beaten out of you.”

  I had the sense that he could go on like this for days. Cocaine agreed with him in that it allowed him to agree deeply with himself, drowning out whatever doubt he may have had about his own convictions. The drugs didn’t do that for me. I wanted to tell him that he was wrong about the story I had told, that I was still ashamed about the way that I had let him bait me. It hadn’t felt stone-cold to me at all; the instinct and the delivery had both been white hot inside my head. I never felt like I was holding any cards. I wondered how much that mattered, given that no one else had read it that way. The wine, which I could barely taste, was almost gone.

  “Should we switch to red?” Michael asked, fishing out another bottle, another Burgundy.

  “Is that shotgun loaded?” I asked.

  “Wouldn’t be much good if it wasn’t. There’s another one upstairs.”

  “What are you worried about?”

  “What do you think I’m worried about?”

  “Someone who knows you went into my mom’s shop and told her that I should be careful because people might be gunning for you.”

  Michael barely masked a flash of shock. I watched him fight the desire to ask me more, and lose.

  “Who was this?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied. “Some guy from Morgan Stanley.”

  “When?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “Did you say anything to Clare?”

  “No, of course not. Can I ask you something?”

  “You can ask me whatever you want.”

  “Where did all that money go?”

  “So you read the paper.”

  I nodded and tried to convey, through my expression, that I was trustworthy, that he had nothing to lose by telling me the truth, that he could look at it as a good deed, an act of mentorship, a cautionary tale.

  “Two years ago, I was sitting by the pool at a hotel in Corsica next to some other balding middle-aged white guy. He was Russian, but he was speaking French to this girl who’d shown up to keep him company for the day. At one point she stops talking and says, ‘You obviously weren’t paying attention.’ And he says, ‘I’m still not paying attention.’ I thought that was funny. I thought: Hey, we’ve got the same sense of humor. She was gone the next day, but he was back at the pool, and we started talking. I asked how long he was there for and he said a month, that he came to this hotel every year for the month of August. We spent some time together over the next few days, had a few drinks, a few meals together. We talked about our families and our kids and the things we still wanted to do with our lives. On my last day we had lunch, and he told me that he thought we could do some business together. He must have looked me up, or had someone look me up, because we barely talked about our work, which was refreshing. Anyway, he said he would hate for anything to interfere with our friendship, and that there was some risk, blah, blah, blah, and I told him I understood, and why didn’t we try it out and see what happened. I knew by then that it was probably better if I didn’t ask too many questions. I called my office, and we got him some money, not a huge amount, but nothing you’d want to throw away. Six weeks later, I got a call from some private banker in Anguilla who had an account in my name with double the money I had wired to this guy. Just like that. The next time we spoke, I asked how much business we could do, and he said as much as I wanted, that he couldn’t promise it would always be like that, but that he knew he could make money. He put some cash into my fund, mostly as a sign of good faith.”

  “What was he doing with your money?”

  “What do you think he was doing?”

  “I don’t know. Guns? Drugs?”

  “I didn’t know either.”

  “You never asked?”

  “What was I going to do, run through the financials with him? Listen, the fund made money—I made money—because I knew things about companies, about industries. This engineer just came up with the next big thing; the clinical trials are fucked; they’re selling the furniture; whatever. This was just instinct—someone tells me he can make money with my money and I believe him, because I’ve been doing this for a while, and I know a thing or two about it by now. I just let go and went with my gut. It was a whole new thing for me, but hey, evolve or die, right?”

  “What if he was doing something really bad?”

  “Like what? What’s really bad in your mind? Look, if you have a piece of a mutual fund, then you’re making money from oil, from tobacco, from big pharma, which is literally ten thousand times bigger and more evil than this,” he said, pointing to the coke between us. “You want to do some real damage? Go the legal route. I knew everything about the industries I covered, and once you know everything, you realize that the distinctions between white collar and black market are pretty arbitrary. One guy has an MBA from Wharton and the other guy has a face tattoo and a gold-plated AK-47, but they’re both fucking ruthless and they both live and die by the bottom line. It’s true across the board. You’re making money in fashion because you’ve got five-year-olds chained to sewing machines in El Salvador. Go to China sometime and meet the folks who made your TV and your laptop, see how they live. You wan
t to tell me one is better than the other because it’s government sanctioned, publically traded? Don’t be so naive.”

  “That’s your thesis? ‘Everything is fucked so just do as much harm as you want?’”

  “You don’t buy that?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “I can tell you don’t really respect me,” he said, finally. “But I can’t tell whether it’s because of what I did or because I got caught.”

  “I can’t tell either.”

  “But you want what I had.”

  “Some version of it. With a different ending.”

  “Ending? What ending? Nothing’s ending. I was just on the phone with someone who’s trying to get me set up.”

  The drugs and the wine had allowed him to look past his present circumstances, but I could see that it was coming back to him in flashes as the last of my coke faded, his confidence like a radio broadcast interrupted now by bursts of ugly static. The shotgun was real; you couldn’t not look at that. I was looking at him and thinking: Is this what I’m supposed to become or what I already am or something I’m never going to be? And then Michael Savage produced a vial of cocaine from his pocket, this one as big as a shotgun shell.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  The urgency with which he tapped out a pile and nodded that I should cut it up made me think back to the day we met, and the way he had insisted that my mother’s dead friend couldn’t have been out of options, that there must have been something else she could have done after the cops let her attacker go. That was really about him. He was out of options, and he knew it, and it was killing him.