Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  Which is why I must tread carefully.

  “So, if I can’t call you handsome,” she sighs, “what would you rather have me call you?”

  I want no intimacy with this woman. Or, rather, what I want is irrelevant, since I are married. “Well, given the difference in our ages, you should probably call me Professor Garland, or Mr. Garland.”

  “Yucch.”

  “What?”

  “I said … yucch, Professor Garland.” Flashing those dimples at me. “And you’re not that much older than I am.” Smiling.

  I am tempted to smile back. “Why are you following me?” I ask, trying to stay on track.

  “In case you change your mind about that skating lesson.”

  She laughs. I don’t.

  “Come on. I’m serious, Maxine. I need to know what’s going on.”

  “You’ll figure it out sooner or later.” Her wide, lively face is buried in the menu. “I hear the crab cakes are the best on the Vineyard,” she adds as the waiter nears, but half the restaurants on the Island make the same claim.

  We both order the crab cakes nevertheless, we both choose the rice, we both ask for salad with the house dressing, we both decide to stay with the sparkling water we are already sipping. I am not sure which one of us is copying the other, but I wish he or she would stop.

  “Maxine,” I ask as soon as the waiter is gone, “what are we doing here?”

  “Having an early dinner.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we need to talk, handsome. Sorry, sorry. I mean Professor Garland. No, I mean Misha. Or I could say Talcott. Tal? Isn’t that what they call you? By the way, did anybody ever tell you that you have too many names?” More laughter. Maxine, however many names she may have, is far too easy to be with.

  I stay on message. “You just thought you’d run into my car so we could have a talk?”

  That fun-loving grin again. “Well, it got your attention, didn’t it? Oh, yeah, before I forget.” Maxine opens her large brown purse, and although my exhausted eyes might be playing tricks, I am pretty sure I see a holstered gun before she pulls out an envelope and snaps the bag closed again. Still smiling, she drops the envelope on the table. It is as thick as a telephone book. “Here.”

  “What is that?” I have no particular desire to touch it, not yet.

  “Well, I did wreck your bumper, and I can’t exactly give you my insurance card.”

  Shaking my head at the unreality of the moment, I pick up the envelope and peek inside. I see a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills. Lots of them. Not new, either: well used.

  “How much money is this?”

  “Um, twenty-five thousand dollars, I think.” Not managing to sound quite as casual as she wants to. “Around that, anyway. Mostly hundreds.” The pixie grin again. “I know foreign-car repairs can be expensive.”

  I drop the money back on the table. Something truly weird is going on. “Twenty-five … thousand?”

  “Why, it’s not enough?”

  “Maxine, I would sell you my car for maybe one-tenth of that.”

  “I don’t want your car.” Deliberately missing my point. She taps the envelope. Her unpainted nails are trimmed very short. “I have a car. Take the money, honey.”

  I shake my head, leaving the cash exactly where it is.

  “What’s the money really for?”

  “The damage, handsome. Take it.” She tilts her head to the side. “Besides, you never know when you’ll need some extra cash.”

  Somebody obviously knows about our debts, a fact that irritates me.

  “Maxine … whose money is this?”

  “Yours, silly.” Oh, but Maxine has a smile! I struggle to keep my composure.

  “What I mean is, where did you get it?”

  She points. “Out of my purse.”

  “How did it get into your purse?”

  “I put it there. Do you think I let just anybody go through my purse?”

  I pause, remembering the lessons from my years of law practice. In a deposition, formulate the questions with care. Most of them should be capable of Yes and No answers. Lead the witness, through her Yeses, to where you want to be.

  “Somebody gave you that money, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Gave it to you to give to me?”

  “Maybe.” She is being playful, not cautious, which is scarcely surprising, given that I have no means of compelling her to answer.

  “Who was the person who gave you the money?”

  “I’d rather not say.” But a toothy grin to make it friendly.

  “Was it Jack Ziegler?”

  “Nope. Sorry.”

  I ponder, watching Maxine sip her Perrier. “Did the person who gave you the money tell you what it was really for?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And what was the money really for?”

  “For your car.” Pointing toward the window. “If anything happened to it.”

  Okay, I admit I was never a very good lawyer. Maybe that is why I became a law professor.

  “You planned all along to hit my car?”

  “Well, yeah. Probably. I mean, sure, I could have been more dainty about it.” She shrugs, a significant movement in a woman six feet tall, signaling me, perhaps, that there is nothing dainty about her at all. “I mean, you know what they say. Accidents can bring people together, right?” Tilting her head now to the other side and fluttering her eyelashes. Playacting, but not ineffectively.

  “Sure, that’s the way I always meet people. Crash into their cars and take them to lunch.”

  “Well, it worked.”

  Okay, I am still a married man and the mystery is still too much, and we have done enough flirting. I lean across the table. “Maxine, that’s nuts and you know it. Now, I need to know what’s going on. I need to know who you are. I need to know what you are.”

  “What I am?” Her eyes glitter. “What do you think I am?”

  “You’re somebody who … who keeps turning up. It’s like you know where I’m going to be before I do.” I fork some salad into my mouth, chew a bit, swallow. “For instance, you were waiting for me at the skating rink.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, you got there first. I’d be very interested to know how you knew I was going there.” A horrible thought occurs to me. “Did you bug my father’s house?”

  Maxine’s response is leisurely. “Maybe I didn’t get to the rink first. Maybe I just got my skates on first.” She takes a small bite from a breadstick. “Think about it. How long were you at the rink before you saw me? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? Plenty of time for me to follow you there, rent some skates, and lose myself in the crowd.”

  “So you did follow me there.”

  To my surprise, she gives what I take to be an honest answer. “Sure. You’re pretty easy to follow.”

  This irritates me for some reason. But just briefly. “You should know. You followed me—my family and myself—to the Vineyard back in November. And you followed me in Washington.”

  “Not very well.” She giggles, and this time the corners of my lips twitch. “I lost you at Dupont Circle. That was a neat trick, what you did with the taxi. If I can’t do any better than that, I’m not gonna have a job.”

  An opening large enough for a truck. And intended, I have no doubt, for me to drive straight through.

  “Exactly what is your job?”

  All the fun goes out of Maxine’s expression, although her eyes are passionate and alert. “Persuading you,” she says.

  “Persuading me of what?”

  She pauses, and I can see that she has played the whole game to get to this precise point. “Sooner or later, you’re gonna find out what arrangements your father made. When you do, it’s my job to persuade you to give us what you find.”

  “Who’s us?”

  “We’re kinda like the good guys. I mean, not the great guys, we’re not saints or anything like that, but we’re better than some people you might give it to
.”

  “Yeah, but who are you?”

  “Let’s just say … an interested party.”

  “Interested party? Interested in what?”

  She answers a slightly different question. “Whatever you do, don’t give it to your Uncle Jack. In his hands, it’s a weapon. It’s dangerous. In ours—it disappears, and everybody is happy.”

  (II)

  MAXINE TURNS OUT TO BE RIGHT. The crab cakes are delicious, for the chef has managed to keep them flaky and light without leaving them with the fishy taste that is a sure sign of undercooking. The sauce is peppy but unintrusive. On the side are long serrated wedges of baked potato that fool the eye, but not the palate, into thinking they are fried. The waiter is helpful and present when needed without seeming to hover, and he evidently feels no need to share his name with us. It is, in short, a good place, of which the Vineyard has many, some, like this one, hidden away on side roads, far away from Oak Bluffs and Edgartown, known mainly to the well-to-do folks who own second homes up-Island but invisible to tourists and, just as important, to tourist guidebooks.

  Maxine and I are talking, improbably, about our childhoods. The envelope full of cash has disappeared back into her bottomless bag, just like a conjuring trick. Maxine has declined, so far, to improve on her brief statement of her purpose in following me, parrying my every dialectical thrust with her hearty grin and contagious laughter. Yet, unlike my similarly hopeless effort to pry information out of the late Mr. Scott, this one rouses in me principally a sense of play; and possibly something more. I am having a far better time with this mysterious woman than a married man really should, particularly when you factor in the intelligence that she just ran into my car to get my attention, that she tried to bribe me, that she is carrying a gun in her shoulder bag, and that she was on the Island when my other pursuer, Colin Scott, went into the water.

  “Even in high school, I was always taller than most of the guys,” she is saying, “so I never got many dates, because most guys don’t like taller girls.” Inviting a compliment that I elect not to bestow. So she talks on.

  Maxine, it turns out, was a faculty brat, her parents both professors at old black colleges in the South. She refuses to specify which.

  “So I was kind of happy to get an assignment that involved another academic.”

  “I’m an assignment?”

  “Well, you’re not an assignation, Misha.”

  Using my nickname again. Then she startles me by asking how I got it. I startle myself by answering. I do not tell the story often, but I tell it now. I tell her how my parents, in their wisdom, named me Talcott, after my mother’s father. And how I changed it because of chess. My father taught me to play during some early Vineyard summer. He tried to teach all of us, insisting it would improve our minds, but the other children were less interested, perhaps because they were already in rebellion. Chess was one of the few things the Judge and I had in common when I was younger, and maybe when I was older, too; for we never seemed to agree on very much.

  I do not remember my precise age at the time of my first lessons, but I do remember the event that led to my rechristening. I was playing chess with my big brother on the creaky porch of Vinerd Howse when my Uncle Derek, the big Communist whom my father more or less denied at his hearings, stumbled drunkenly from within, shading his rheumy eyes from the morning sunlight with his thick fingers, stained a tobacco yellow. The Judge used to lecture Derek for his weakness, not realizing that the same tendency to alcoholism, perhaps an inherited trait, would later snare him, too, at a moment of depression. For Derek, having soured by then on the possibility of a revolutionary movement among American workers, was terribly unhappy, as we could always detect in the worried glances of his wife, Thera. Now, swaying on his feet, my uncle looked down at the chessboard. Despite the difference in our ages, I was beating Addison soundly, for this was the only arena in which I usually bested him. Uncle Derek squinted at the two of us, puffed out his sallow cheeks, exhaling alcohol fumes strong enough to make us children dizzy, grinned unpleasantly, and mumbled, “So, I guess you’re Mikhail Tal now”—the Latvian wizard Mikhail Tal having been, for the briefest of historical moments, the chess champion of the world, and Uncle Derek having been, for nearly all of his life, an admirer of most things Soviet and, in consequence, an enduring embarrassment to my father. But Addison and I knew nothing of the larger chess world, and certainly had never heard of the great Tal. We looked at each other in confusion. We were always a little bit scared of Uncle Derek, and my father, who thought he was crazy, would have preferred to have no contact with him at all, but my mother, who believed in family, insisted. “No,” said my uncle, squinting against the glare. Our heads swung back in his direction. “No, not Mikhail—just Misha. That’s what the Russians call Tal. You’re a kid, so let’s call you Misha.” He laughed, an ugly, liquid sound, accompanied by a gurgling deep in his chest, because he was already ill, although he would linger, in declining health, for another few years. He shuffled to the edge of the porch, coughing helplessly, the timbre thick and wet and physically disgusting to my child’s ear, for it takes many years on God’s earth to learn that what is truly human is never truly ugly.

  I would have let the name go, but Addison, who hated chess, liked the sound of it and began to call me Misha, especially once he discovered how much it annoyed me; so did his many friends. I learned to love the nickname in self-defense. By the time I got to college, I rarely identified myself as anything else.

  “But most people still call you Tal,” says the roller woman when I am done. “You reserve the name Misha for … mmmm, your very close friends.”

  “What do you have, a file on me?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You being the good guys? Just not the great guys?”

  She nods, and this time I laugh with her, and quite easily, not because anything either of us has said is amusing, but because the situation itself is absurd.

  The waiter is back. Dessert orders occupy us: Pêches Ninon for the lady, plain vanilla ice cream for the gentleman. He nods at Maxine’s order, frowns at mine. Maxine grins conspiratorially, as if to say, I know a nerd when I see one, but I like you just the way you are. Maybe her grin does not signify all that, but I still blush.

  We talk on. Maxine’s previously raucous face grows somberly sympathetic.

  She has led me, somehow, to the night Abby died, and I am reliving the wretched moment when my elegant mother, her hand shaking, answered the telephone in the kitchen, let out that horrible moan, and collapsed against the wall. I tell her how I stood alone in the hall, peering in the kitchen door, watching my mother wail and beat the phone against the counter, far too terrified to comfort her, because Claire Garland, like her husband, encouraged a certain emotional distance. In my adult lifetime, I have shared the story only with Kimmer and, in less detail, with Dana and Eddie, years ago, when the two of them were still married, and Kimmer and I were still happy. I have scarcely told it to myself. I am surprised, and a little annoyed, to find a catch in my voice and moisture on my cheeks.

  (III)

  WE ARE WALKING NOW, the two of us, a pleasant stroll in the brisk air of an autumn evening on the Vineyard. We are sauntering along the deserted Oak Bluffs waterfront, for all the world a happy couple, passing the empty slips across from the Wesley Hotel, a gracefully sprawling Victorian behemoth built on the site of an earlier hotel of the same name, which perished by fire. The flat January water laps comfortably at the seawall. A few pedestrians pass us, headed toward town, but the harbor, like the rest of the Island in the off-season, has the texture of an uncompleted painting.

  “I can’t tell you everything, Misha,” says Maxine, her handbag, gun and all, swinging gaily from her shoulder. Her arm is linked in mine. I am pretty sure she would let me hold her hand if I tried.

  “Tell me what you can.”

  “It might be easier if you tell me what you think. Maybe I can tell you if you’re hot or cold. And what
I can’t tell you, you might be able to figure out for yourself.”

  I think this over as we walk. After dinner, we stood a little too close to each other in the parking lot, sharing that odd reluctance to part that characterizes new lovers, as well as people who follow other people for a living. It was Maxine who suggested we drive to Oak Bluffs, although she refuses to tell me where she is staying. And so we did, the Suburban following me once more, along the Vineyard Haven Harbor, over the hill separating the two towns, and down again to the center of town. We both parked on the waterfront, across the street from the Wesley. I have no doubt that Maxine knows exactly where I live, but I do not want her anywhere near Vinerd Howse.

  Call it an excess of marital caution.

  “Well, handsome?” she prompts. “Are we gonna play or not?”

  “Okay.” I take a breath. With darkness, the air has turned icy. “The first thing is, I think my father was involved in … something he shouldn’t have been.” I risk a glance at Maxine, but she is looking at the water. “I think that, somehow, he arranged for me to get some information about it after he died. Or somebody thinks he did.”

  “I agree,” she says softly, and, for the first time in this mad search, I own an actual fact.

  “I think that Colin Scott was looking for that information. I think he followed me because he hoped I would find my father’s … arrangements.”

  “I agree.”

  We walk on, headed toward East Chop, a wide outcropping dotted with shingled homes, more Cape Cod style than Victorian, many of them on high bluffs overlooking the water, most of them considerably more expensive than the houses closer to town. Kimmer and I briefly fell in love with a gorgeous house up there, three large bedrooms and a back yard opening onto the beach, but we did not have two million dollars to buy it. Probably it is just as well, given what has happened to us in the years since.