“Yes, I think I follow you.”
“That’s what you’re going to teach him—what work is. What it is to get your ass into work and work your ass off. Do boring shit and do it all day long. He has to learn. He has to learn willpower. The boy’s got no willpower,” Sandro says, lightly gasping. “You’re going teach him willpower.”
It doesn’t end there.
Eddie—This idea of making Alain’s allowance contingent upon his achieving a certain weight loss strikes me as bordering on the unkind. Is there any way you could talk to your brother? Surely there must be a better way to proceed. In any case, I fail to see how my responsibilities extend to this sort of thing. Must I be involved?
Eddie would of course never talk to Sandro about Alain. My phantom inquiry’s phantom answer is: Yes, I must be involved.
The awful business is broken down, like the steps of an execution, into small, intrinsically blameless parts. Every Monday and Thursday, Ali accompanies Alain to the corporate bathroom and invites him to step into a stall, undress to his undershorts, and step on the scale. Ali sees the boy’s feet step on the scale and sees the indicator jerk well past the 100 kg marker. He records the final measurement and e-mails me the number. I enter the new datum on a spreadsheet that reckons what allowance, if any, Alain will receive that week. The formula is Sandro’s (i.e., his accountants’): essentially, Alain’s weekly allowance depends on the progress he has made toward his weekly weight-loss target. It falls to me to communicate to the boy the result of this appalling computation, which always produces the same result: zero allowance. I discharge this burden by placing on his desk, during his lunch break, an envelope containing a Calculation Note and a Progress Graph. The Progress Graph charts Alain’s progress toward the 90 kg weight target his father has set for him. If and when he achieves this target, he will receive the keys to an Alfa Romeo 1750 Spider Veloce that sits in a garage in the Isle of Man. Why the Isle of Man? Because its residents are permitted to drive at the early age of sixteen—a tantalization that will, it is hoped, induce the fifteen-year-old to achieve his weight target ASAP. (The USA, with its minimum driving age of fourteen to sixteen, was not an option. Alain’s portfolio of nationalities—the kid is a citizen of Lebanon, Ireland, France, the United Kingdom, and St. Kitts and Nevis—does not yet include the American one.) Sandro has instructed me to buy an apartment on the Isle of Man with a view to creating (false) residency credentials for his son who, it’s safe to say, has no clue where the Isle of Man is. I am happy to take care of the property transaction, but I will not be party to any deception of the Manx authorities. I haven’t made an issue of this with Sandro because the issue is moot: the kid has actually been gaining weight, and I would be amazed if he gets down to 90 kilos any time soon. Of course, it’s not my job to be either amazed or unamazed. I am not this kid’s overseer or Dutch uncle. It isn’t for me to counsel him that drinking a giant beaker of Coca-Cola every lunchtime runs counter to his dietary objectives, or to root for him, or to lie awake at night wondering what will become of him and how things could be made better for this large, soft child whose circumstances give one not the slightest basis for hoping against hope that somehow he will acquire the wherewithal to care and be cared for, which is surely the great purpose and the basic meaning of growing up.
Still, it’s in everybody’s interests that the internship goes smoothly and productively, and to this end I’ve introduced the little big guy to Sudoku. The puzzles come in paperbacks and therefore do not offend against the no-computer rule; neither do they break the no-fun-and-games rule because they offer a brain workout that’s certainly better than meaningless number crunching. To make things even more exciting, I’ve introduced Alain to the Martial Arts Sudoku series, which has White Belt puzzles for beginners, and so on, up to Black Belt for real experts. When I call him over to my desk and explain how Sudoku works, he seems uninterested. But not much time passes before he tosses the White Belt book onto my desk and says, “Too easy.” “Wow, that’s pretty fast,” I say. I have the next book ready for him and not without ceremony remove it from a desk drawer and deliver it into his possession. I say, “Check out the frontispiece.” (I feel it will do the kid good to hear the word “frontispiece,” even if I am not exactly sure what “frontispiece” means. I like to slip him the odd ten-dollar word, like “litigious” and “iconoclastic” and “intricate.” They might come in useful.) I show him the plate that, in anticipation of this moment, I’ve pre-glued onto what I think may be the “frontispiece” of this book. The plate reads,
Alain Batros is hereby admitted to the rank of Sudoku Green Belt.
The kid neither acknowledges the honor nor disdains it. He returns to his seat, assumes his slouch, and sullenly flicks through the pages of new puzzles. For what it’s worth, sullenness strikes me as a logical, healthy, and correct stance for Alain. But whether he is sullen or sunny—or in good or bad health, or succeeding or failing—is something I refuse to be dragged into. Once I have satisfied myself that he is for the time being safe and self-sufficient, I am entitled to view him as factically as possible, that is, view him as being on a par with the other occurrences—pencils, microbes, light streams, sounds, galaxies, etc.—out of which arise the accidental phenomena of this room and my consciousness of it. The kid becomes just part of the givens. That he may be overweight or fear the dark or have trouble making friends or enjoy watching basketball is not my concern and cannot be made so by Sandro placing him in the same room as me and counting on this obligatory mutual vicinity to make me act in loco parentis or in loco amicus or otherwise wear some unwarranted caretaking hat. I am obliged to accept the son’s presence as my intern and to be a decent and reasonable temporary boss; but I am not obligated to accept and will not accept any responsibility for his greater welfare. Any occasional act of kindness I may choose to do for the kid is of a strictly private nature and between him and me and does not as it were constitute any kind of waiver or abandonment of my right to dwell within the aforementioned limits of obligation.
In order to strengthen and give helpful physical expression to these limits, I have instructed Ali to arrange for a partition to be placed between me and Alain—to, in effect, enclose me in my own room-within-a-room. That way the kid and I won’t have to spend the day feeling under the other’s surveillance. Although he may be an inept teenager, I would be crazy to lose sight of the fact that he is a Batros and in a position to blab about me. This will not have escaped him. Children are natural snitches and squealers and accusers. This is because adults are natural policers, prosecutors, fact finders, judgers, punishers, torturers, hangers, electrocuters, gravediggers, and defamers of the dead.
The kid is flipping to the back of the puzzle book, where the solutions are set out.
“Hey,” I say. “You can’t do that.”
He slouches some more. Evidently he is stuck.
“Let me see that,” I say, and there is a loud squawk of chair legs as he gets up. I take a look at the puzzle. “Mm,” I say. “Not easy.” I’m not lying. It isn’t an easy problem; and the fact is, I’m only a Brown Belt, and just barely. A lot of Brown Belt puzzles stump me, and too often I am faced with the choice of making a guess or abandoning the puzzle. Guessing is out of the question, of course, since that would defeat the point. The trouble is, not finishing the puzzle also defeats the point.
(I am in awe of Sudoku Martial Arts Black Belts. I would love to meet one of these logical warriors and find out how he or she does it—how, in particular, s/he masters the challenge of bifurcation. Bifurcation is called for when the path to the solution fatefully forks and it is no longer possible to induce whether numerical path A or B is the correct one. (Maybe it would be clearer to think of it as a “symbolic” path, since the nine Sudoku numbers are not mathematical objects and function only as representations of nine unique things.) At my skill level, the player/martial artist has no option but randomly to choose one of the two paths and provisionally follow it in the hope
that the guess will turn out to be correct. This process of tentative exploration is the hard part, because (assuming you don’t cheat by lightly penciling numbers into the puzzle with an eraser-tipped pencil) it is far from easy to keep aloft in one’s mind the multiplying number-scenarios produced by your progress. If the provisional path proves to be a dead end, the player must backtrack all the way to the fork in the road (bifurcation is sometimes called Ariadne’s thread) and take the alternative path—which could itself bifurcate, down the road. I have never met a Black Belt and find it hard to believe that actual Black Belts are out there, in the real world.)
Before I disclose the solution to his problem, I say to Alain, “This here is the wall in the puzzle. You’ve hit the wall. And beyond this wall, there’s probably going to be another wall. That’s why you play Sudoku in the first place—to scale the walls.” (“Scale”: a sneakily high-value verb for the kid.) “I’m going to give you a little bit of help this time, but next time you’re going to do it yourself.” Throughout this little pep talk he looks into space with an expression of vacancy I completely respect. He thinks I am very, very lame, and he is right. Still, we must go on. I show him a way to figure out his next move. He catches on and rapidly fills out a few more boxes. “OK,” I say, “now we’re cooking with gas.” As he makes to leave, I say, “Hold on there, mister.” I get scissors. I cut out the solutions pages and toss them into the trash. “We won’t be needing these. Our prowess renders them superfluous.”
And he drags himself back to his seat ten feet away from mine and I begin again to boil with rage that I have had taken from me a work space that by rights should be mine alone and in which I should be entitled to put up my feet and pick my nose if I want to and live my life on my own fucking terms.
Eddie—I want to go back to the last responsive thing you said to me. You’ll recall this was back in November: I asked for your help with the Luxembourg thing, which as you know put me in an untenable position. The gist of your response was: “If you don’t like it, you’re always free to leave.” Out of shock, I said nothing at the time; and also, to be honest, out of some idea that you were right. But let me now say: “Always free to leave?” You know as well as I do, it’s not that simple. And suppose I were “free” (I take it you mean “at liberty”) to leave—well, you were likewise “free” to help me out, and your freedom (liberty) preceded mine, and the cost to you of exercising your freedom would have been much smaller than the cost to me of exercising mine. So let’s not kid ourselves. You were the chooser, not I, and you chose to strong-arm me to the maximum degree permitted by your bargaining position. Eddie, that’s not amicable.
Writing mental mail eats up time and energy. An hour passes before I have worded the foregoing to my (relative) contentment and I’m able to think about attending to my real work and my number one priority, which is drafting my personal disclaimers. I lack attentiveness, though. I am too worn out and bothered. Normally I would take forty winks but God damn it I cannot on account of the stoolie in the corner.
THE DAY AFTER MY PEDICURE, Ollie called to say that “the diving community” was putting together a “search and rescue party” for Ted Wilson. Ollie said, “I guess they’re asking us to go out and look for him. Leave no man behind and all that.”
Of course the correct response to this ridiculous idea would have been to ridicule it. But no—I was flattered to have been identified as a significant member of the “diving community” and to have been handpicked for this special operation, I who had not pulled on a set of fins in over a year. I solemnly agreed to “report” at “0430” the next morning at the Spinneys in Jumeira and from there head out to Oman in what was subsequently referred to, surely erroneously, as a “rolling thunder” convoy.
I arrived at Spinneys in my silver-gray Autobiography just as Paolo Weiss was arriving in his silver-gray Autobiography. I recognized a few other faces/cars. Dionisi Ottomanelli was there in his Jaguar XJ220, as was the Ferrari F430 of Jesper and Ingrid Poulsen. Keith Botha’s Bentley Arnage T was unmistakable, even in the dark. We stood around in the parking lot with the restlessness of men and women on a mission. If anyone was a close friend of Ted Wilson, they didn’t say so. Jesper Poulsen disclosed that he had once asked Wilson what drove him to dive. “He said, ‘Because nobody can phone me underwater.’ ” This drew a laugh of assent. Trevor Winters, the diving school owner and the chief instigator, planner, and leader of our venture, conducted the briefing. He reminded us that Ted Wilson’s “diving transport” was his Mazda MX-5 Miata Sport automatic, and that the first sign of his whereabouts could well take the form of this vehicle. There was no need for Trevor to mention that the peninsular waters are practically unlimited and that the likelihood of any one of us finding the Man from Atlantis, or what remained of him, in the ocean, was very slight. For this reason, perhaps, nobody made mention of it, although Keith Botha did ask whether, in view of the troubling passage of time since Ted Wilson had last been seen—it had been a week—our outing should be “downgraded” from an “S&R” operation to a “search” operation. Trevor said, “Keith, I’d like us to go out there today with a little hope in our hearts. But you’re right. We have to be ready for the worst.”
It was a somber and burdened and exhilarated group of coffee-drinking, scuba-qualified automobilists that set forth from Spinneys at 0500 on the dot, and we must have offered an inexplicable spectacle as we moved in the morning-night through Dubai and Sharjah in a slow-moving, tailgating, fifteen-strong procession of, inter alia, C- and CLC-Class Mercedes-Benzes, Porsches Cayman and Cayenne and Carrera, a 1 series BMW, two Audi A3 Sportbacks, and a Nissan GT-R. The undertaking was governed by a mighty mood of adventure. Certainly, and speaking for myself, it was that very rare occasion when one’s fictitiousness feels euphorically correct. I was no less animated and purposeful than if I’d been setting out to look for Red Rackham’s treasure; and, as I traveled through the nocturnal cities, it was as if an existential transfer or translation had taken effect and it was the case without counterfactuality that I was an aquanaut and the cabin of the Autobiography, dark except for the dashboard’s fire of needles and numerals, was that of a submersible passing between batholiths and brilliant upright reefs; and it was the equally real case, as the convoy turned east onto the E88 and quickened through the desert, that the moon gave the slip to a constabulary of moon-brightened clouds. Usually I find dawns disgusting: up in the Hajar Mountains, the appearance at the ocean’s edge of yellow and apricot hues provoked a happy sense of daybreak I had not felt since, it may be, I was a just-qualified attorney and in the first purr of Midtown Tunnel traffic I walked to work through empty, wintry Murray Hill, and the overnight snow, cleanly banked on every sidewalk, loomed for me as the cliffs of Dover once loomed for English seafarers. What a home the world was! What a drama! It didn’t matter that my part was that of the lemon hurrying to its juicer. I still had the verve, after twelve-hour days, for an office romance with The Beautiful Jennifer Horschel.
(That was the name applied to her by certain wistful male co-workers. In secret fact, Jenn’s legal name was simply Jenn. This monosyllable, whose dwarfism I found only endearing, was one of the things Jenn held against her parents even as she accepted that in this instance they had not sought to injure or handicap or shortchange her but merely to give her a nice name. To make Jenn feel better, I let her in on my most embarrassing secret: my first given name. This unutterable word had been written on my birth certificate in honor of a Swiss great uncle. From high school onward, I disclosed its existence only under bureaucratic duress, when filling out forms. Jenn said, “You have a secret name? What is it?” Very vulnerably, I told her—which is to say, wrote it down on a piece of paper. She stifled a shriek. “Oh my God,” she said. “You poor, poor thing.” (Not long after, a busybody in the law firm’s HR department saw fit to exhume this forename “as a matter of good order.” Ridiculously, my professional name thereafter began with the initial “X.” “It’ll make you stan
d out,” the busybody said. “It’ll give you an X factor.” How right he proved to be.) My revelation did make Jenn feel better, but her hatred of her own name was not lessened. I believe that having a stunted or halved name must in her mind have symbolized the improvidence of her chaotic upbringing in and around the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, which left her unsuffixed in some broader sense and certainly did not equip her with the familial support enjoyed by so many of her peers at Dartmouth (to which she transferred from Penn State) and at law school in Georgetown, evidently few of whom had to combine their studies with crappy jobs or needed to make room in their lodgings for a half-sister fleeing a violent boyfriend or, for several weeks, another half-sister released on parole from Lehigh County Prison. When I met Jenn, she was holed up in a doorman building on Second Avenue, up by the Queensboro Bridge. She was twenty-six—one year younger than me but (as a result of three wavering semesters I spent at grad school) one year my senior at the firm. Her seniority wasn’t just chronological. Jenn seemed unnaturally more experienced than me, able somehow to see things more quickly, as if an all-seeing tipster whispered in her ear. I guess she saw a lot, growing up—more than I saw in Zurich or Connecticut. We were both in Corporate—I in insolvency and restructuring, she in securities. She was regarded as a young superstar. We got to know each other in the cafeteria, late at night. At first we talked about the partners, those improbable fascinators; but as we continued to meet, Jenn offered a monologue, amusing and ethnological in tone, about the dark difficulty that was her youth. Combining the mentalities of the caseworker, the confidant, and the one who has a crush, I listened to her in a state of moral and romantic excitement; I even thought of taking notes, so importantly communicative seemed her disclosures of the Horschel clan’s fuckups and tribulations, the likes of which I had never come across except on TV and which left me, in relation to Jenn, with an edgeless feeling of duty. I somehow came to believe that this very lovely and intelligent and in all respects admirable person was gravely in need of help and, by fantastic good luck, this added up to a need for me. When Jenn and her Conran sofa moved into my rent-stabilized one-bedroom (in August 1998), it gave me great pleasure to write letters to her parents and siblings to the effect that she was now under my protection, that her days of housing and bailing out and bankrolling Horschels were over, that any communication with her would have to come through me, and that anyone who tried to interfere in her affairs would have to deal with yours truly. I described myself as Jenn’s “partner.” There was no question of our getting married because Jenn’s parents had gone through six marriages between them and as a consequence their daughter feared the blessed estate. I, too, feared the blessed estate, even though my parents married only once. Work sanctified our union. We were always working. When I try to think of times Jenn and I were actually in the same room and happy to be there, I think of those early days when she would bring home work and I would spend hours at her side, helping to draft client letters and notes of advice. My contribution was chiefly linguistic; Jenn, the much better attorney, contributed the analysis. She made partner at thirty; I never did, and in due course moved sideways, into private client work. At our tête-à-tête dinner to celebrate her elevation, Jenn said that she would have a baby when she was thirty-four. That should give me enough time to establish myself, she said. Very good, I said, interiorly running to keep up. What about buying an apartment? she asked. I told her that I liked the rent-stabilized one-bedroom and that the financial logic of surrendering the rent-stabilized lease in favor of property ownership was unclear. OK, Jenn said, contentedly galloping on. But we’ll get a bigger place after the baby, OK? OK, I said.
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