The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  “We do the best research on the Street.” Mark’s Adam’s apple went up and down like the pump action of a shotgun. “We know more about the companies we look into than most of the major institutional investors. Sometimes more than their own executives. So I’d suggest to you, Mr. Schulman, that a company that sends its general consul trudging around town to try and stifle legitimate criticism is wasting its investors’ time and money and doesn’t have much of a future.”

  “And I suggest to you that you work harder on getting your facts straight.”

  Barry reached into the brown Coach attaché case at his side and pulled out a small stack of court papers. “You have a report on your Web site saying our company stands to lose fifty million dollars in the lawsuit over the squirrel monkey patent,” he said.

  “They’re not your monkeys,” Mark Young replied stiffly. “Nieman and Tsyrlin developed them in their lab at MIT. They were the ones who figured out how to give the monkeys Alzheimer’s for the experiments. By the time this suit’s over, they’re going to be taking over your office and picking out the new curtains.”

  “I am now giving you a half-dozen depositions and research papers from six of the top geneticists in the country, telling you that’s not true.” Barry thrust some of the documents at him that Lisa Chang had helped him gather. “I’ve got the best people from Yale, Berkeley, and Princeton on the record saying these claims are worthless. This case will probably never make it to trial. You now have this information in your possession. So if you continue to spread these false allegations about us on your Web site and on TV, I guarantee you that we will sue you for slander, and when we win, we will not only pick out the new curtains in this office but the new fish in your tank.”

  A half-smile flickered across Mark’s bony face and then faded. Clearly, here was a man who was up for a little midmorning jousting. In a different part of his life, Barry would’ve enjoyed going one on one with him.

  “Snake oil is still snake oil,” Mark said. “You guys said you were going to get a product to market within four years that would reduce amyloid plaques and tangles in the human brain, and you’re nowhere near that. And in the meantime, you’re about to get lapped by half a dozen other drugs. Why don’t you just admit the jig is up and shut the circus down?”

  “Listen.” Barry lowered his voice. “I’ve read some of your research, and I know you’re a sharp guy. But this is not my first rodeo either. I’ve got my own money tied up in this company.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Mark laughed. “It’s usually better to be the knave than the fool.”

  “I know we’ve had a few setbacks, but I believe in what we’re doing. Let me tell you something. My old man was the strongest guy I ever knew. He was the only white store owner who didn’t move off his block after the riots in Newark. He rebuilt the place with his own hands, and when they came to burn it down a second time, he stood outside and said, Kiss my ass, motherfucker.” He decided to omit the detail that Dad had ended up bagging groceries at a Pathmark in Nutley after the second store failed. “And I saw this man slip away right before my eyes because of Alzheimer’s. So believe me, this isn’t any scam.”

  “Then why did your CEO sell off four thousand shares of his own stock right before it fell to thirty this summer?” Mark asked.

  “Bullshit.”

  “No, it’s true,” Mark said evenly. “Ross Olson dumped about a fifth of his holdings in August. He did it through a third-party sale, but our researchers picked up on it. Hey, it’s not against the law. People need the cash sometimes. Or maybe they just want to spread the risk around …”

  Barry’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. From the corner of his eye, he saw a blue triggerfish tear off a piece of coral and start chewing so loudly that its jaw could be heard snapping through the glass.

  The cell phone rang in his breast pocket. He took it out long enough to see that it was Lynn calling and then put it back again.

  “Look,” he said, staying poker-faced, “we’re in it for the long haul. We’ve got drugs in the pipeline that we haven’t even started to tell people about. You want to keep betting against us and get yourself caught in a short squeeze, be my guest.”

  Just the mention of a squeeze, in which Mark would lose money because stock price suddenly shot up, made the cords in his neck bulge slightly. A tiny piece of coral fell out of the triggerfish’s mouth and drifted down toward the goby at the bottom.

  “I just don’t know why a bright young guy like you spends all his time ripping other people’s companies apart when they’re trying to make something worthwhile,” said Barry.

  “Well, then, I’ll tell you why.” Mark stood back, planting his feet firmly. “It’s because there’s a lot of crappy companies out there, taking money away from legitimate investors. Or, in a case like yours, steering money away from other companies doing serious work. You were asking about the fish tank before. It’s the same thing. There’s an ecosystem. The wrong kind of bacteria gets in, it’ll poison all your fish. You need a few bottom-feeders to eat the excess and keep the tank clean. It may not be pretty, but we get the job done. And if we keep a little something for ourselves in the meantime, what’s it to you?”

  Barry watched the goby swallow the coral, along with a few gravel stones, and then squirt the residue out through its gill pouches, oblivious to the kaleidoscope of Cuban hogs, yellow tangs, lion-fish, angel flames, and red-breasted mattress thrashers circling above it.

  “Hey, that’s all well and good,” he said. “But don’t you think that once you start paying more for your fish tank than you do for your secretaries, you maybe lose just a foot or two off the moral high ground?”

  He turned and saw the receptionists giggling into their headsets.

  “I guess you know your way out.” Mark nodded toward the elevators.

  13

  STILL FEELING DIZZY and vaguely sick, as though she’d been inhaling paint thinner, Lynn went fifty in the Saab along the narrow little roads climbing higher into the West Hills, suspension rattling, springs squeaking on the turns. She made the quick right off Prospect and found the brawny new center hall colonial at the end of the cul-de-sac called Love Lane, a great gift-wrapped Macy’s box of a house, a run-on sentence of a house, a house she’d really hoped to like, with huge black shutters, tall Greek revival windows, gables the size of small planes, and Georgian columns on the front porch.

  She parked halfway into the long circular driveway, jumped out, and raced up the steps to the front door. Even though the family had been there since August, Sandi had never invited Lynn in, saying she didn’t want her oldest friend to see the place until absolutely everything was ready. As if Lynn was going to bring a camera and a writer from Architectural Digest. She rang the bell, a stately remote chime barely audible under the bank alarm wailing in her mind.

  After a few seconds, the door opened, and Isadora, Sandi’s seven-year-old, in a black leotard top worn inside out, a white tutu, and a pair of black jeans and untied Keds, looked up at her. A silver lamé scarf was tied haphazardly over a long uncombed brown ponytail.

  “Where’s Mommy?” she said impatiently, as if Lynn had been hiding her.

  “Um …”

  Lynn’s mind emptied out. What were you supposed to say to a child under these circumstances? Her eyes probed into the darkness of the foyer, hearing the echo of voices from deeper within the house.

  “I don’t know, sweetie.” She touched Isadora’s crusty white cheek and saw no one had washed the girl’s face yet this morning. “Is your daddy around?”

  “Yeeeahhhh …” She rolled her eyes with the same premature exasperation that Sandi had at that age, as if she already knew the best she’d get out of the men in her life.

  “He’s up in his office,” she said, a slight lisp whistling through the gap in her front teeth. “Still on the phone. Blah, blah, blah.”

  She rolled her eyes again to show she’d given up trying to get his attention. God, she rea
lly did look just like her mother. Lynn shuddered a little, thinking about the sorrows that awaited this child.

  “Has anybody given you breakfast today?”

  “I made myself a waffle in the toaster.” Isadora smiled proudly. “I made one for Dylan too. With butter.”

  “Your little brother’s lucky to have you.”

  “That’s what I keep telling him.”

  Lynn stepped across the threshold and closed the door behind her. Dylan, the five-year-old, was more brittle than his sister, always had been. Kept his mother on bed rest for the last four months of her pregnancy and still slipped out six weeks early. Lynn remembered seeing him under the bilirubin lights in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, a scrawny little red chicken fighting for his life in the incubator. He’d been a little neurasthenic ever since, dragging one of his mom’s old silk slips to nursery school as a security blanket. So how the hell was he supposed to make it through the next seventy-five years?

  “Would you run upstairs and let Daddy know I’m here?” Lynn said, resisting the urge to scoop the little girl up in her arms and hug her, lest she get frightened by Mommy’s friend starting to cry for no reason.

  “Okay. And then will you play chase with me?”

  “What? Oh, yeah. Sure.”

  All right, smile. Act normal. Don’t let on that her world is about to disintegrate. Children need routine.

  She watched Sandi’s daughter run down the long dim hall, the plastic ends of her untied laces scatting on the onyx floor. She stopped at the foot of a stairway and did a little splay-armed, stiff-legged twirl before the newel post. Shafts of sun poured through a skylight above her, shining down on her upturned face and turning her skirt into a fine diaphanous mist. And for the only time this morning, Lynn wished she had her camera with her so she could somehow freeze this last careless moment and give it back to the girl years from now when she would surely need it again.

  She listened for the scampering of feet up the stairs and then allowed herself to sink a little, relieved of having to prop up this cheerful facade. Why wasn’t the girl in school today anyway? Hadn’t Jeff thought of asking one of Sandi’s friends to take her? God, the last thing she would want would be her kids hanging around the house waiting in vain for her for the rest of their lives.

  She moved cautiously down the hall, drawn by the sound of a TV droning. The echo of her footsteps seemed to amplify her grief. She always thought of Sandi as being so busy and eclectic that she was sure there’d be some off-the-wall touches, like carved wooden duck decoys or her oil canvas of Mr. T in a ruffled Elizabethan collar or her acrylic portrait of six great American first ladies dressed as astronauts. Instead there was just cold austere space, bland beige wallpaper, and a twenty-foot-high domed ceiling above the stairs.

  She pictured Sandi with a man’s hand over her mouth. Someone had held her down and cut her throat.

  Had she understood what was happening? Had she begged? Had she thought of the children just before her head was severed? It was an image that Lynn didn’t want in her brain, but it kept coming back at her.

  She rounded the corner and saw that the living room had scarcely more furniture. The women’s morning talk show The View played on the four-foot-wide Sony flat screen against the wall, Barbara Walters holding forth with memories of Lady Di. A floor lamp stood uncovered in the corner, its bare bulb making a soft singing sound and revealing ghostly outlines of places where chairs and couches had been pushed against the walls. Dylan lay on the cream rug next to the long glass coffee table, playing with scuffed plastic Pokémon toys.

  “Peeeeek-aaaahh,” he screeched in a demented tinny voice, wagging a stumpy yellow mutant cat at an orange dragon-troll. “Peeeekk-ahh-choo!!”

  “Charizard, SLASH!” he answered himself in the deepest baritone he could muster. “Fire spit! Get back, or I’ll lock you in your room and never let you out.”

  “Whaddaya doing, Dyl?”

  She knelt down beside him, a little catch in her throat as she remembered Clay at this age, playing on the floor with his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Donatello. Michelangelo. The names were so much more poetic then, weren’t they? And weren’t Pokémon sort of old hat anyway? She was surprised he didn’t have newer toys.

  “Dyl?”

  A straight ash-blond curtain of hair refused to turn and acknowledge her.

  “I’m going to put you in a cage and make you my slave,” he nattered on in his heavy-breathing dragon voice. “Peek-ahhhhh!”

  She noticed the higher voice edging toward hysteria.

  “Dylan, are you okay, honey?”

  “Shut up, you stupid bitch.”

  She lurched back, as if he’d just turned in on her with dripping yellow fangs.

  “What’d you just say?”

  He ignored her, off in his own world again. “Charizard, flamethrower! Hyyuhhhh!”

  “Dylan, what’d you just say to me?”

  A squished moppet face finally turned around with a ring of syrup around the mouth. “Will you play Chinese checkers with me, Lynn?”

  “Um, sure. But, Dyl? Who did you hear talk like that?”

  She remembered Sandi and Jeff prattling on like old fogies about using bad language in front of the children, even though they both swore like teamsters when the kids weren’t around.

  “Inspector Gadget, goynk, goynk, goynk! Inspector Gadget, goynk, goynk …”

  He picked up a dismembered robot leg and waved it in her face, almost as if he was warning her off. A cheapo plastic made-in-Taiwan movie tie-in from a McDonald’s Happy Meal a couple of years ago.

  “Dylan, put that down for a second. I’m trying to talk to you …”

  “Inspector Gadget …”

  “Dylan, please …”

  She shook her head in frustration, and for a second her eyes lingered on a light brown-red smear near the phone jack on the baseboard.

  “Hey, Lynn, thanks for coming.”

  She whipped around and saw Jeff in a blue bathrobe, standing in the wide proscenium doorway behind her and looking like he’d been up all night giving blood. His jowls were heavy, and the middle of his face was dull and smeared-looking, as if someone had tried to rub it away. A lock of hair lapped over his brow like an exhausted dog’s tongue.

  “Jeff, oh my God …”

  She got up to throw her arms around him as he stood there, stiff and wavering, smelling of sweat and Smirnoff.

  The truth was, she’d always felt the same way about Jeff as she had about the house: that she’d really wanted to like him. Sandi had always had such terrible taste in boys, going all the way back to high school. There’d been Dougie Mason, the back-up quarterback, who always had two or three girls on the side. Then Larry the Mooch, who always made her pay for everything. And worst of all, that dunce Sir Jimbo of Piscataway, that horseback-riding idiot she’d met at the traveling Renaissance fair where she’d worked for six months after she flipped out at Sarah Lawrence. So Lynn had been thrilled back in ’93 when Sandi called her and told her that she’d finally met her Barry, a handsome successful Harvard-educated “Love God” she called him. In fact, Jeff was kind of a stud then. His chin was a little firmer, the union of man and hair a little more certain. But even during the first dinner at Bouley, she’d thought there was something a little young and unformed about him. That he was not quite a full-grown man yet but still a boy collecting baseball cards in his father’s garage.

  Now she gave him an extra hug, silently urging him to bear up.

  “I came as soon as I heard,” she said, taking his hand and leading him into the hall, wondering if the police had already been here.

  “Lynn, I’m such a mess.”

  “I know. All the way over here, I was telling myself, ‘This is a dream. You’re going to wake up any minute.’”

  And this was only the first day’s sadness. From Mom’s death last year, she knew grief had its own inevitable arc. The shock and numbness, the faltering effort to carry on for everyone else�
�s sake, and then the way your mind keeps circling back unexpectedly. A Post-it note on a refrigerator or an old phone number scribbled in familiar handwriting on the back of an envelope could plunge you into months of despair. All this and more awaited poor Jeff. At least she’d had a chance to prepare herself in her mother’s last days.

  “She was the love of my life,” Jeff said. “What am I going to do without her?”

  “You’re going to lean on the rest of us. You’re going to pull your friends around you.”

  She squeezed his hand tightly, trying to send a stronger pulse to his heart, and noticed how small and clammy his palm felt, almost like a little girl’s.

  “So, what have you told the kids?” She sniffed.

  “Nothing. I haven’t figured out what to say.” His eyes were burned-out flashbulbs behind his glasses. “I’m still trying to get my mind around what happened. I talked to her Sunday afternoon on the cell phone. I told her I was taking the four-o’clock shuttle from Boston so I could see the kids before they went to sleep Monday night. And then I get home and there’s no sign of her. No message. No nothing. Just your voice on the machine.”

  She felt a stirring at the base of her spine and realized she was starting to grow a little impatient with him. Unfair, she knew. The man was still reeling, just like she was. You couldn’t hurry him through this. His wife had been slaughtered. Someone had slashed her throat and shredded her larynx. They’d left her children motherless. The impatience gave way to churning revulsion again.

  There were children running around this house with unwashed faces. The baby-sitter clearly wasn’t here yet, so someone had to start thinking about dinner for them.

  “Look, you have to tell the kids something” she said, realizing that she had to think about dinner for her own brood as well. “Izzy still thinks her mother’s coming home.”

  “What am I going to say to them, Lynn? God, I can’t even deal with it.”

  His voice bounced down the empty hallway, and she looked around, making sure neither of the children was in earshot.