The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  He decided to omit that unpleasant bit of arm-twisting he’d had to do with Mrs. Crawford at Town Hall. Davis would certainly hear about it soon enough.

  “Are you an attorney?” said Jack Davis.

  “A humble consort of the devil, just like yourself.”

  “Then do you really think it’s appropriate for you to be both a witness and a witness wrangler in this particular rodeo?”

  “I’m not sure how else these witnesses are supposed to appear if nobody calls them. Is this court a magical jurisdiction?”

  Jack Davis paused as if he was seriously considering the question.

  “I’m sorry,” said Barry, “but this is more than a matter of passing concern to me and my family. This man has posed an ongoing threat to us. My wife had a disturbing run-in with him at Home Depot the other day. And that night she got a rather threatening message over the Internet.”

  Barry noticed a subtle change in the air quality of the room and realized that a door had opened behind him.

  He turned and saw his secretary, Shameequa McPherson, from Do-or-Die Bed-Stuy, waiting by the Styrofoam NCAA backboard next to his bookcase. Cornrowed hair framed her delicate features like a beaded headdress, and thin yellow Walkman headphones rested on her clavicle like an Egyptian princess’s necklace. You could never be sure if she was listening to Master P or Mastering Italian. She raised a fingernail as curved and carefully adorned as a Grecian urn.

  “Attenzione,” she said sotto voce. “Mr. Olson wants you.”

  Barry lightly covered the mouthpiece. “Tell him I’ll just be a minute.”

  “Mr. Olson wants you pronto.”

  Something in her voice produced a tug in his side, and he was reminded once again that a good secretary could do as much with nuance and intonation as a great musician could.

  “Mr. Davis, I’m going to have to call you back later today,” he said into the phone.

  “Call me anytime you like, just don’t call me late to supper.”

  “Thank you.” Barry put the phone down with a grimace and stepped away from it.

  “The ways of white folks,” he said.

  “You’re telling me.”

  “What’s up?”

  “The message was: ‘The coach wants to see you. Bring your playbook.’” She held the door open wide for him.

  “That’s what they used to say in football when they were about to trade you.” He felt a tiny crick in his neck as he snatched his suit jacket off the back of his chair.

  “And it’s what I told my last boyfriend when I broke up with him. ‘Don’t you try those moves on anybody else.’”

  She looked him up and down as he buttoned the coat and brushed off his lapels.

  “Bello. Not bad for an old guy,” she said. “If you were a couple of years younger, I might be giving you un occhio sessuale.”

  “Or if I had a couple more dollars in the bank.”

  He heard the joke land with a thud and realized something serious was afoot.

  “What’s the matter?” He followed her out of the office.

  The back of her dress drew taut over her hips. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Which is the same as saying something. I know you.”

  “Maybe you don’t know as much as you think you do.”

  He stopped in front of her desk, where the gondoliers of Venice drifted across her computer screen. “You trying to scare me?”

  “Honi soit qui mal y pense.” She sashayed on ahead of him.

  “That’s not Italian. That’s French.”

  “I know. It means Evil be to him who thinks evil.”

  Before he could ask her to explain, she doubled back to answer a ringing phone on her desk, leaving him to walk the rest of the way on his own.

  The floor between here and Ross Olson’s office seemed to roll out before him like a long red velvet tongue. For the last two weeks, Retrogenesis stock had continued to plummet downward to five dollars a share—five dollars!—as other money managers began to follow Mark Young’s lead in shorting the stock. Every other day, a rumor tore through the office about a white-knight investor coming along to rescue them—on Tuesday it was the Japanese; on Thursday, it was Merck—but Ross just insisted everyone needed to take a Coridal and be patient while he searched for the best deal possible.

  In the meantime, Barry had had lunch twice with Lisa Chang, ostensibly to prepare for her deposition in the Monkey Suit, but in reality to talk about future prospects. In her subdued, indirectly seductive way, Lisa had encouraged him to take heart and hold the course. There’d been a couple of unexpected breakthroughs in the lab on Long Island lately, having to do with manipulating the genetically altered squirrel monkeys by raising and lowering their body temperatures, and the potential long-term implications for the Alzheimer’s market were staggering. If we can hang in there just a couple of more years, this could be bigger than the polio vaccine, she’d told him over goat cheese salad and pad Thai noodles at the New Economy Café around the corner. Unless we fuck it up and kill all the monkeys with pneumonia.

  Barry put his shoulders back and strode purposefully down the hall, trying not to think about liquidity. Five dollars a share. His equity had lost more than two thirds of its value since he’d joined the company. Less than seventy thou—that’s what he’d have if he cashed in now. The numbers came rushing into his head, just like his old shooting percentages. Less than seventy g’s in the savings account, clank; freshman-year tuition at college for Hannah would take care of half that, chink. Taxes would get a chunk of the rest, and he was still looking at three-thousand-dollar mortgage bills coming at him every month like rotating knives in an abattoir. No wonder it was easier thinking about gathering witnesses for court. At least there he felt that he was having some effect.

  As he crossed through the main open work area, noticing the unusual number of empty cubicles even for lunchtime, his eyes fixed on another computer monitor up ahead, just outside Ross’s office. An animated screen saver showed Magritte’s petit bourgeois umbrella men raining helplessly through the sky in their hats and overcoats.

  “Come on in, Baairr.” Ross cracked the heavy door and stuck his head out. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  Barry noticed his CEO’s southern accent sounding ominously more pronounced, the way it did whenever he talked to somebody down South with access to eight figures. The last time he’d heard this much twang out of Ross was at the end of a long late-night drinking session with a couple of Houston bankers at 21.

  “What’s doing?” He stepped in as the door closed with a thunderclap behind him.

  Instantly, his heart sank as he saw the reason why Ross was talking like some unholy combination of Bear Bryant and Minnie Pearl.

  There in Ross’s black leather office chair sat Bill Brenner, like the Sun King, light glaring off the top of his bare freckled scalp and a pair of black stitched cowboy boots resting comfortably on top of the CEO’s desk.

  “Hey, good buddy, long time no see.” He opened his arms. “Welcome to the New World Order.”

  “Eh bien, I can see why you went back,” said François Gortner.

  “What are you talking about?” Lynn perched at the edge of her stool, the angst of being apart from the kids growing by the minute.

  They were sitting in the office on the second floor of the Gortner Gallery in Chelsea, a set of work prints spread out on the table before them. François, ever the curator, had put two of the pictures side by side: a shot Lynn took twenty-five years ago of the old textile factory juxtaposed with the morning shape-up of immigrants last week outside Starbucks at the same location.

  “Tout le monde, it’s all here, yes?” said François, a round-bellied bearded Satyr in rimless glasses, a black blazer, and a white Turnbull & Asser shirt buttoned snug at the collar. “This light. This caractère. C’est formidable. Everything your other pictures are not.”

  Lynn frowned, distracted from her worries for a moment and smarting from the swift bac
khandedness of the compliment.

  “Regarde.”

  François moved his magnifying loupe over the older scene of tough-fingered sewing-room ladies in hair nets, taking their cigarette breaks in the parking lot while men in sleeveless undershirts unloaded giant spools of thread from trucks with white outlines of naked women on the mud flaps.

  “Everywhere else you go, these pictures you take, they are like the Weegee. This is, how you say, gawking. But when you go home—bon!—you are Cartier-Bresson.”

  “Really? Cartier-Bresson?”

  “Eh …”—he reconsidered—“perhaps Ruth Orkin.”

  She’d always had a hard time getting a precise fix on François. Everything about him seemed a little indeterminate: his weight, his nationality, his social background, his gender preferences. He wore bulky clothes even though he appeared slim at times; he claimed to be Parisian but sometimes his accent was about as exotic as 2nd Avenue; he called himself frugal but took her to only the most expensive restaurants; he could be feline and languid and annoyingly partial to Mapplethorpe but always surrounded himself with pretty young assistants. The one thing that was absolutely reliable about him was his eye.

  “But you know what I like best?” he said, adjusting the halogen lamp. “Even if you hadn’t told me, I’d be able to tell these pictures were taken in the same place, twenty-five years apart.”

  “How?”

  “Je ne sais quoi.” He magnified a corner of the newer shot. “Something that comes through. L’esprit du place.”

  “Maybe it’s because the same photographer took the pictures.”

  “Ah bébé, you are a lot better now. Though you still have a long way to go.”

  Bitch. She smiled, restraining herself, remembering how much she wanted this show to work.

  “No, this is not the technique,” he said, setting the loop aside. “This is the sujet. Some people have only one, like the fat naked ladies or the bullwhips in the derrières, and this is yours. You look at this place, and you open your eyes a little wider.”

  She studied the pictures more closely, asking herself if this could be true. She’d taken good pictures elsewhere, hadn’t she? Not just the splatter shots, but the full panoply: parades on 5th Avenue, marathon runners on the Brooklyn Bridge, country estates in Greenwich, dunes in the Mojave Desert, even the swirling unfinished Gaudi Cathedral in Barcelona. But in the back of her mind lurked the suspicion that he might be right. Somehow all those other images seemed a little fuzzy and undefined; anybody could have taken them. It was only in Riverside that everything came into sharp focus, the textures and details almost bursting out of the frames. And she wondered if she’d put something at risk trying to get that clarity back.

  “I like this one,” said François, touching the work print of George urging his ragged friend to take heart as the contractor’s Suburban pulled away. “I like to see a bit more of this guy.”

  “Oh, you would, would you?”

  “You’re starting to get closer.”

  “You think so?”

  She cringed a little, remembering how she’d ducked behind the Dumpster to change her lens that day.

  “Robert Capa said, ‘If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.’”

  She checked her watch, realizing she’d have to hustle to get the 3:28 leaving Grand Central. The dark storm cloud of guilt passed over her again, reminding her of the terrible risk she’d taken leaving town for just a few hours. i know what your doing. A part of her mind had remained back in Riverside, fretting over the minutiae of the kids’ day even though they were carefully guarded and accounted for with the new security procedures at school. She still couldn’t shake this dreadful image of someone watching them from across the street.

  “Is still not suffìsant, though,” said François.

  “What?”

  “You need to get even closer. Something’s still missing. I’m not seeing the image that pulls it all together.”

  You aren’t close enough. Is that what someone was saying to themselves in Riverside right at this moment?

  “What do you want?” she asked, feeling a surge of panic and realizing that by dividing her attention into such minuscule fractions she might have failed as both a mother and a photographer.

  “I don’t know.” He pulled on his beard. “Just … closer.”

  “Ross … what … is … this?” Barry asked in a voice like a slowly clenching fist.

  “This is the new deal. Sorry, pardner. We’ve got no choice.”

  “What about the ‘Path to Profitability’ we were talking about? What about the three new Asian markets for Coridal?”

  “You got to know when to hold ’em,” Bill Brenner sang, “know when to fold ’em.”

  In his own mind, Bill was the essence of virile robust frontier manhood, a kind of plainspoken Marlboro Man of the free-market economy. In truth, he did look more like a bridge troll, with stubby legs, pudgy hands, furry arched eyebrows, and a strikingly round head with gray-black horseshoes of hair around both of his ears. His third wife, a tall blond former Pirelli Tire model who called herself Taffy, never wore high heels and looked noticeably depressed one night when Bill half-jokingly announced he was going to take part in his company’s clinical trials for a Viagra knockoff.

  For five years, Barry had labored to keep this man from destroying himself and his own company. He’d literally found stacks of lab reports and e-mails explicitly saying that Brenner Home Care’s top executives knew that Virulant, the pesticide they were aggressively marketing, could cause birth defects, even after Bill had sworn up and down that no such documents existed. Bill lied on the stand, he lied in the boardroom, he lied in restaurants, on the company Lear-jet, at barbecues, at quail hunts, at ski lodges, at corporate retreats, at shareholders meetings, and at depositions. He lied on the putting green. He lied when you were standing next to him at a urinal. He lied when there was no conceivable reason to lie. On at least one occasion, he lied so blatantly in court that the judge threatened Barry with possible disbarment for allegedly suborning testimony. He lied, and when he was confronted, he lied some more and intimated that he would not pay Barry’s bills and expenses, telling him, If you don’t like it, you can kiss my ass sideways and sue me.

  In the end, Barry had given up some of the best years of his own life and his children’s lives to put in the countless hours required to reach a settlement in this epic of a case. The one thing he’d thought the experience was good for was giving him the absolute determination to strike out on his own. But now here was Bill’s smiling face, bobbing into view again like a child’s helium balloon freed from under a chair.

  “I thought we were going to have a discussion with the full executive committee before Bill came on board here.” He turned to Ross. “You can’t just impose this on everyone. The equity partners have a right to a vote. How much of the company are you proposing to sell Bill anyway?”

  “We’re not,” said Ross.

  “What?”

  “We’re not selling him a piece of the company. We’re going to start bankruptcy proceedings. And Bill has decided to buy some of the assets off us so we’re not just left with the shirts on our backs.”

  “But none of the goddamn liabilities.” Bill rocked back too far in the leather office chair and found that his boot heels barely reached the desk. “If I need another ball and chain, I’ll get divorced and married again.”

  “You can’t do this,” said Barry.

  “Well, obviously it’s a long process, Baairr.” Ross cleared his throat. “We have to start filing papers for Chapter 11 protection and then …”

  “No. I mean, you can’t do this. Almost all of the employees of this company have their savings and 401(k) plans tied up in stock. You’re going to wipe them all out.”

  “That’s always a risk with a start-up. If you want security, go work for the post office.”

  Barry flashed on the image of a mail-sorter turning on his supervisor
s with an Uzi. “But you sold off your shares in August.”

  “As was my right,” Ross said, his face somber and indifferent. “I was just exercising my options.”

  “Which most of the people under us weren’t allowed to do according to the company’s bylaws.”

  “But you’re not in that boat, Barry.” Ross raised his top lip like a curtain, revealing two squarish bonded front teeth. “You could’ve sold out anytime, just like me. You still could. Maybe your stock isn’t where it was back in April, but as a founding partner you might be entitled to some of the revenues from our selling the patents to Bill.”

  “As long as I go along with helping you structure the bankruptcy plan so we can’t be sued by any of the rest of our present employees, right?”

  “You’re either on the bus or you’re under it.” Bill Brenner flexed his leprechaun eyebrows. “I know a half-dozen first-rate litigators in Houston who’d be happy to help us put this baby to bed without you.”

  Barry closed his eyes and once again saw Magritte’s umbrella men raining from the sky. Gradually, their faces changed into people he knew. Steve Lyons, Bharat, Lisa, Chris from Operations, all plummeting past him, their eyes sad and steady, stoically accepting the fact that no one was going to catch them.

  “I can’t do it,” he said.

  Ross touched his shoulder lightly. “Think about it.”

  “I am thinking about it, believe me.” Barry swallowed. “I’m breaking the Guinness world record for most rationalizations per minute while I’m standing here talking to you. But this isn’t the ride I paid for.”

  “Nobody gets exactly what they pay for, Barry. That’s why we all end up needing lawyers.”

  “Well, you probably don’t need this one anymore.” Barry took a step toward the door, letting Ross’s hand slide off him.

  He had the sensation of the room disintegrating around him. All the surfaces—the polished black desktop, the leather chairs and couches, the windowpanes, the white bookshelves and computer screens—melting away. Another reality had been lurking behind the scenery all along. He was back in front of his father’s deli the day after the riots, as if he’d always been there, the storefront looking like a blackened empty eye socket with the front window smashed in and a befouled dead-animal odor wafting from the charred meat inside. All the way over in the car, Mom had fretted about what they’d find. But Barry would never forget the way his father had simply stooped his shoulders, kissed her, and picked up a broom. So now we know, he’d said, starting to sweep up.