The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates

by Jacob Bacharach

  “Because he’s black?”

  “Well, yes. You know Abbie is a terrible racist, don’t you? I mean, not in the Fayette County sense. He’d never say nigger or anything like that. It’s very genteel. It takes the form of condescension and silent disapproval. He’s the sort of person who thinks that, oh, those studies about IQ and race are very interesting.”

  “I find that hard to believe, to be honest.”

  “How do you think he got along so well with those rednecks down in Fayette County? What do you think endeared him to Sherri Larimer and Donald Cavignac and that whole gang? His business acumen? Ha!”

  “Well,” Isabel said.

  “Lord,” said Veronica. “I can only imagine what else he’s told you.”

  They finished their meals and drank more of the sweet, doughy beer. The waiter returned and asked if they’d like dessert. “We’d like another drink,” Veronica said.

  Isabel said she couldn’t.

  “Of course you can. You need a digestif.”

  She knew the owner, although he wasn’t there that night, and she knew that he kept a bottle of Alsatian eau-de-vie for certain occasions. They drank a round of fiery pear liquor out of little clear thimbles. Isabel felt extraordinarily drunk.

  “So,” Veronica said. “Did Isaac say why it was that he and Sawyer broke up?”

  “I think Sawyer broke it off with him. He said . . . I’m sorry, this is very strong. He said—Sawyer, that is—something to the effect that their relationship lacked an and-I-quote core of physical intimacy.”

  A strange expression chased itself across Veronica’s face like the headlight of a car passing across a window at night. “He said that Sawyer said that?”

  “To that effect,” Isabel repeated.

  “Well, that would be very odd.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what Abbie told Sarah after she found out that he knocked up that poor woman.”

  “I’m sorry,” Isabel said. Then, evenly, she hoped casually: “What poor woman?”

  “Oh, back in New York. Before they moved out here. You know Abbie could never keep his dick in his pants. Cathy was her name.”

  “Hmm,” Isabel said.

  “You know, they liked to pretend that they had some kind of open marriage, which is what people do when they oughtn’t have ever married in the first place. Actually, I think Isaac must be a lot like his father in that regard. Anyway, Abbie was fucking around, imagine that, and Sarah snooped and found out and threatened to end it, but you know Abbie, he can never admit defeat, not even when it’s really victory. So he told her he’d ‘have the thing taken care of’—I mean, honestly, is there anything quite as awful as a man speaking about an abortion, whether for or against? They’re so very proprietary about it. Anyway, Sarah was giving him the whole how-could-you routine, and Abbie told her that he loved her and wanted to be with her, but that their relationship lacked a core of physical intimacy, which he must therefore seek elsewhere, and then he proposed that they make a new start of it. This was all conveniently elided in retrospect to make room for his supposed discourse with Yahweh, but the truth is that they came out here so that Abbie could save his marriage. Astonishing, isn’t it, how much trouble we go through for things that are obviously doomed?”

  Isabel laughed. She was drunk, and she knew she had to play that part or else give the depth of her interest away. She asked if they should get the check.

  “I’ll get the check. And don’t argue. My brother may have screwed me, business-wise, of course, but I did get paid, ultimately.”

  “All right,” Isabel said.

  “Anyway, Sarah got him back when she slept with poor Arthur Imlak.”

  “Isaac told me that wasn’t true. And I’ve never heard anyone describe Arthur Imlak as poor. Not even metaphorically.”

  “I’m sure Isaac believes that. He can be shockingly naïve, actually. And Arthur, oh, I don’t really mean it, not literally. I do think he was actually in love with Sarah, though, and for all the money he made I don’t think he ever got the thing he really wanted.”

  “He’s really about to get what he wants. Did you hear? Barry is giving him the Carnegie Award.”

  “What on earth is that?”

  “Oh, God. It’s our annual—well, usually annual—award that we give at our annual gala. For contributions to sustainable urbanism.”

  “That seems ironic. And I didn’t know you all had Carnegie money.”

  “We don’t. Well, a little, but it’s just a small operating grant. Believe it or not—I asked—it was your old business partner who had the idea. Back when he was on the board. He thought it sounded classy.”

  “That man.” Veronica shook her head. “I sometimes wonder what ever happened to him.”

  “I couldn’t say,” Isabel said. In fact, she’d tracked him down and was hoping to find a way to meet him. She never did.

  “Well, I suppose Arthur has given you enough money over the years.”

  “Still,” Isabel said. “It’s going to be terrible. People are already planning a protest. The governor—the state had just elected a Democrat who’d campaigned on a promise of a gas excise tax—was supposed to give the keynote, but we’re hearing rumors he might pull out.”

  Veronica smiled and waved her Amex at the waiter. She sighed. “Poor Arthur,” she said.

  • • •

  What Isabel didn’t tell Veronica was that she’d argued against the whole thing. “Is it really appropriate?” she’d asked. “I mean, given his business?”

  “Arthur’s business is our business,” Barry told her, and he looked at her across his desk with the slight scowl that he affected when he wanted to remind her that they were not, after all, peers. Then he told her that since she and Arthur got along so well, he thought it would be a good idea if Isabel were the one to tell him.

  So there she was at another one of Imlak’s absurd parties in his great glass shoebox in downtown Pittsburgh. It was a pre-Christmas Light-Up Night. A brass band was playing carols in Market Square. Philip Johnson’s mad glass castle at PPG Place glowed like a giant, misshapen lightbulb. It was cold, and from far above, Isabel could see tiny skaters going around the ice rink in the plaza. She didn’t know anyone else at the party. It was Arthur’s peculiar genius to forever find new people to occupy the crowd scenes that his sense of social obligation occasionally required. He kept complaining about the caterers, and for a while he elbowed the bartender out from behind the bar and had a grand time mixing too-strong drinks himself. At midnight, he threw everyone out except for Isabel and a few younger and more beautiful women, whose glum dates he sent down the elevator with a gleeful and evil little wave of his fingers. He gave the ringleader of these girls a cartoonishly large satchel of coke and the iPad that controlled the house sound system. He left them with these and a bottle of booze in the grand living room, then hauled Isabel off to the kitchen to drink what he claimed to be sixty-year-old scotch. He produced a second and more realistically scaled baggie of cocaine and drew out two lines on the counter.

  She bent to do one. She tossed her head back. “You gave the other ladies a volume discount.” She laughed.

  “I gave the youth the stepped-on shit,” he said, relishing a phrase that someone else had taught him. “It would be silly to waste the quality on the undiscerning.”

  They got high.

  Isabel said, “It’s a terrible idea to give you the Carnegie Award, you know.”

  He chuckled, pleased. “Of course it’s a terrible idea. It will undermine whatever credibility you have. Which isn’t much, frankly.”

  She frowned, because even if it were true, she still didn’t like the suggestion that her employer was in some way a fraud. She asked him, a little testily, why, if that were the case, would he even accept.

  He did a few more lines without offering any to her. He said, “I find it entertaining to watch Barry squirm between the twinned imperatives of his organization and its principles.” H
e rubbed his nose. “The whole notion of non-profit companies performing the good works that idiotic Americans refused to permit the true public sector to perform is an absurdity. He laughed and told her that he was in fact a good Marxist who was “heightening the contradictions.” He seemed especially pleased by the phrase.

  “Yeah, well,” Isabel said, annoyed in spite of herself, “isn’t it just the deranging influence of guys like you and your big piles of loose cash that prevent America from having a reasonable public sector in the first place?” She put a hand on her hip.

  He told her that his piles of loose cash were ultimately the result of those same idiots ignoring their own best interest. He obscurely referred to some comment that H. L. Mencken supposedly made about Russia and America, but when Isabel pressed him to remember it exactly, he told her she’d have to look it up on her own. “You’re the scholar,” he teased. His eyes had grown narrow.

  “I guess so,” she said.

  Imlak said, “In any event, I like superseding that moron commie governor that the good people of the Commonwealth have just elected. If you can’t beat them, and you won’t join them, undermine, undermine, undermine.”

  Isabel shrugged and asked him if he was ever going to attend to his other guests.

  “The presence of a gauche female element,” he told her, “is purely a matter of reputation management. A man must appear to be a certain thing.”

  Isabel still believed him when he said this, though she found it insulting, even if it wasn’t directed at her, even if in saying it to her, Imlak was implicitly exempting her from his contempt. And then—it was the hour, it was the aged scotch, it was the good cocaine—she asked him flat out with the insistence that only drink and drugs and an hour past decency permit if he was really Isaac Mayer’s father, his biological father. And Arthur Imlak, who not two hours before had been all loose tie and cocktail shakers and bad jokes, put his hands on the counter on either side of her; she squirmed, and he said, gravely, “Yes.” His breath stank. He fixed his clouded, pinpoint eyes on hers, and he held her in his stare and said, “But you, you believe it’s just a rumor.” She realized that one of his hands was now gripping her wrist. It wasn’t painful, but it was almost painful. Isabel couldn’t think of what to say; she knew that she should shout at him, she should tell him to fuck off, but she found herself instead searching for something funny to say, as if it were up to her to make him realize that this was all hilarious, ha ha, just a joke; but humor failed her too, so she just said that yes, that was what she believed. Arthur was older than her, and she’d have doubted that he could have kept up on a three-mile run around the park, but right then he felt very big. Isabel could feel his elbows on her sides. He was much taller than she was. He was leaning forward to bring his eyes level with hers, which made their faces even closer. She didn’t want to look away from him, because she was afraid it would make him angry. His whole demeanor was changed. “You are not to say anything,” he said. She shook her head. Then he leaned closer. His mouth was by her ear. She could hear the sound of his tongue moving behind his teeth. She felt as if her skin was going to peel away from her own body and her throat was going to turn inside out. “Good,” he said. Then, more quietly, his mouth even closer, he said, “No one would hear you.” Then he was somehow on the other side of the kitchen, leaning against the counter, swirling a scotch, grinning as if none of it had happened. She made herself stop shaking. She wasn’t some dumb girl. She wasn’t afraid. She stopped herself from shaking and went out with him into the living room as if nothing had happened and made herself party with him and those drunken young women for another hour in some vague hope that he would not connect what had just happened with why and when she chose to leave.

  • • •

  Eli said that he would kill him, kill Imlak, do it himself with his own hands around the sick old man’s soft neck, and Isabel thought he thought he was trying to mean it, the poor guy. “You can’t kill him,” she said, meaning both that it would not do to actually murder Arthur Imlak, nor did she believe Eli could actually go through with it, even if the moral question did not obtain. She’d called him after two in the morning, and he’d arrived at her apartment at four. He smelled of coffee and the cigarette he’d smoked in the car on the way.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. She hadn’t asked him to come, only told him what had happened.

  That was when he made the threat. That was when she said he couldn’t kill Arthur.

  “Arthur,” he spat. “Fuck that man.” He came inside, and Isabel made tea. “Isabel,” he told her, “you’re too old to take these drugs.”

  “Oh, thanks. So I’m old, and it’s my fault.”

  “I don’t mean that.” He didn’t mean that. They sat on the couch and drank tea. Then she lay down and put her head in his lap.

  “Anyway,” she said. “You can’t kill Arthur. He’s Isaac’s father.”

  “No he isn’t.”

  “He admitted it.”

  “They’re all liars. Arthur. Abbie. Sarah. Isaac.”

  “You work for them.”

  “Well, so do you, in a way.”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t want to say any more about that. Instead, he told her that for years he’d thought of going to Canada where his sister lived, to Vancouver, out to the island, or up north on the mainland, somewhere with cheap land on a hill near the water. He would do, ironically, what Abbie had done: design and build a house, all his own, although it would be a different sort of house, and he would build most of it himself, with his own hands. It would be small. It would have thoughtful windows. It would be the sort of house that made the people who lived in it decide what they needed to keep and what they must part with. It would have a steep roof and feel like a tent beneath the tall trees. There would be a wood-burning stove in the kitchen, and he would keep a canoe at a small dock on the water, which he would take out when the weather was calm. There would be whales and eagles, and even in the winter it would be green. He dreamed of it, sometimes, the house, the water, the forest. In the dream, sometimes, a black bear came out of the trees while he stood on the porch. It shuffled across the pine needles. Its breath was visible in little puffs. When it got close to him, no more distant than the far side of a small room, it stood on two feet. The bear’s sad, lovely eyes looked into Eli’s, and his into the bear’s. It dropped back to its feet and shook itself like a dog coming out of the water, and coughed, and wandered back into the forest. “A monster in the woods,” Isabel murmured, and she thought, but later decided she’d been wrong, that she heard Eli say one of the names of God. She fell asleep around this point, and when she woke up, he was sleeping too, his head tilted back against the wall, snoring lightly, his feet on the coffee table, his legs crossed at the ankles.

  11

  IN RE:

  ABBOT MAYER )

  dba MAYER DESIGN LAB, LLC )

  )

  and )

  )

  MH PARTNERS LLP )

  ARBITRATION HEARING

  THURSDAY, MARCH 21, 1991

  BEFORE: SAUL MAMRY, ARBITRATOR – ATTORNEY AT LAW

  APPEARANCES:

  For Abbot Mayer:

  David and David, P.C.

  David Ben David, Esquire

  1001 Wood Street

  Pittsburgh, PA 15222

  For MH Partners LLP

  Southman Wright & Jordan, P.C.

  A. Christopher Jordan, Esquire

  590 Grant Street, 8th Floor

  Pittsburgh, PA 15219

  TRANSCRIPT OF HEARING

  Witnesses

  VERONICA MAYER

  Direct Examination by Mr. Jordan

  Cross-Examination by Mr. Ben David

  PHILLIP HARROW

  Direct Examination by Mr. Jordan

  Cross-Examination by Mr. Ben David

  ABBOT “Abbie” MAYER

  Direct Examination by Mr. Ben David

  Cross-Examination by Mr. Jordan

&
nbsp; ARTHUR B. IMLAK

  Not Examined

  PROCEEDINGS

  MR. MAMRY: Thank you. We have a court reporter who is recording these proceedings, and that is by mutual consent of the parties. My name is Saul Mamry, and I will be the Arbitrator—not, as I sometimes hear it mistaken, the Arbiter—for this, well, Arbitration. The parties have agreed to binding arbitration in this matter. The results will be, as the name suggests, binding. I am neutral, and I have no prior knowledge of the facts or circumstances of the . . . circumstances. All right? We have five, I’m sorry, four witnesses who will testify today, as well as a number of joint and individual exhibits, which will be introduced into the record. Do I have that correct?

  MR. BEN DAVID: Yes, Mr. Arbitrator.

  MR. JORDAN: Yes, Mr. Arbitrator.

  MR. MAMRY: Good. Excellent. Well, let’s begin. I take it we have opening statements?

  MR. JORDAN: Yes, Mr. Arbitrator. Mr. Arbitrator, in 1988, Mr. Abbie Mayer—

  MR. MAMRY: I’m sorry to interrupt already. That’s Abbot Mayer? He goes by Abbie?

  MR. JORDAN: He does, Mr. Arbitrator.

  MR. MAMRY: He can answer, counselor. I probably fooled you with the third person there, but as a general rule, when I address a question to a person present, the present person can answer for him- or herself. We’re not adjudicating a felony here. At least, I hope not.

  MR. JORDAN: Of course.

  MR. MAMRY: Mr. Mayer?

  MR. MAYER: I do, Your Honor.

  MR. MAMRY: Yes, thank you, Mr. Mayer. I’m not a judge. No need for your honors. Go ahead, Mr. Jordan.

  MR. JORDAN: Thank you. Mr. Arbitrator, in 1988, Abbie Mayer relocated to Pittsburgh with his wife, Sarah Mayer, who is a partner in his firm, Mayer Design Lab.

  MR. MAMRY: Once again, I’ll interrupt. This promises to be slow going if I don’t manage to keep my mouth shut. I am an inveterate kibitzer. Mrs. Mayer is not present?

  MR. JORDAN: No, Mr. Arbitrator.

  MR. MAMRY: Afraid she’d spill the beans?

  MR. BEN DAVID: Mrs. Mayer is actually nine months pregnant and due any day now.

  MR. MAMRY: Well, that’s not precisely the sort of bean-spilling I imagined. Mazel tov, Mr. Mayer.