Outside in the wind, he held a cup of milk. He turned to look at the cottage. Built in 1805, one of the farmers at the restaurant had said, and undergone innumerable additions and renovations since then. He finished his milk. You are going to help her, he told himself, you are going to do only good things.
Back inside, he slipped on his watch and searched for his old belt; the mice had gotten into his bottom drawer and left him three short chewed pieces of leather and the buckle. He had one suitcase—something rattling around inside. He popped the case open. A pair of shoes, good Italian leather ones, cut narrowly with a new heel. He hadn’t worn them in four years. They’d probably cost him a couple of hundred dollars, a criminal amount of money. Well, he’d been a criminal. He sat on the low camp bed and set the shoes on the floor. Then he took the left shoe and slipped it on his foot. Didn’t quite fit. He could barely jam the foot in. He pulled off the shoe and tried the other foot. Same thing. Maybe his feet had collapsed, maybe it was the calluses, going barefoot so much that his feet were wider. The shoes he wore each day were a pair of old farmer’s clodhoppers he’d bought by the side of the road down a few miles, where, among the usual household utensils, cheap wooden furniture, and worn-out hand tools, a woman had sold off her late husband’s effects. One of those tough old women who didn’t cry as they cashed out their lives.
Now he set the good shoes aside and folded a few clothes into the suitcase, then made his bed, turned off the propane, disconnected the refrigerator, throwing some old rice and beans into the weeds, locked the shutters across the windows of the cottage, washed out his dishes, and put them in the drainer next to the sink. It was 4:00 a.m.; he had to beat the Manhattan rush hour. He put the three tomatoes in his coat pocket, locked the door, and stuck the key under an old oyster shell in the weeds. In the barn he found his bow saw, dull now after four years of cutting firewood, and as he closed the door, he confronted the dark stand of humped sunflowers, watching him leave like disapproving old men.
While his truck idled just off the public road, the tomatoes on the dashboard, he walked back along the drive and cut a sizable oak—a foot wide at the base—so that it fell across the lane leading to the cottage. You’d have to use a chain saw or a bulldozer to get up the drive in a vehicle, and if somebody did cut up or drag away the tree, then Rick would know when he returned. He had enough boat money to last a few days; beyond that he would have to retrieve some of his cash in Aunt Eva’s basement. He slid the saw behind the seat in the truck and drove west. Thirty miles on Route 25, then seventy-odd miles on the Long Island Expressway, the needle right into the heart of New York City. He would run into some traffic, then head north toward the prison. Even stopping for breakfast, he’d get there well before 9:00 a.m., just to be safe. Christina would not want to see him, he knew. But she wasn’t expecting him, either, and he hoped that, in the moment of recognition, she might understand that he’d been imprisoned, too, in his own way, certainly not as badly as she had been, but caged by remorse and grief for the time lost. Their time lost.
WHEN HE ARRIVED at the prison, he pulled the truck into the visitors’ parking lot and gazed toward the brick buildings on the hill. It didn’t look like a prison, not really, more like an old factory or abandoned school surrounded by the meanest fence he had ever seen in his life—savage razor wire coiled everywhere. The state wasn’t spending much money here, except for the wire. He watched a few women in green uniforms walk slowly up the hill. In the cement-block building attached to the prison’s main gate, a heavyset guard looked up from a table.
“Sign in and put your keys and coins anything made of metal in the tray step through the detector.”
“I’m not going in,” Rick answered, anxious at the idea of visiting even a women’s prison. “I’m just waiting for someone to come out.”
“Who?”
“Christina Welles.”
“I just got on my shift. Let me look at the log. Maybe she left.”
“How do they leave if no one’s here to pick them up?”
“Prison gives them forty dollars and generally they call a cab,” the guard replied. “Cab takes them up to the train station about a mile away, then they go into New York.”
“I think she probably hasn’t come down yet,” Rick said. “You mind calling inside?”
When the guard hung up the phone, he shook his head. “No, you got it wrong.”
“I was told she was being released here.”
“You got bad information.”
“Why, what’s wrong with it?”
“She be at court today, State Supreme Court.”
“In Manhattan?”
“Think so.”
He realized that he couldn’t see his truck from where he stood, couldn’t see who was sitting in what car in the prison parking lot, waiting for him to return. “I was told she’d be here, at 9:00 a.m.”
“That was wrong, too. She left before that.”
“I was told 9:00 a.m. on very good authority.”
“They telling everybody that, I guess.”
He didn’t like this. “What do you mean?”
“I mean”—the guard mustered a cruel little smile—“you already the second guy come looking for her this morning. She’s gone, pal.”
817 FIFTH AVENUE, MANHATTAN
SEPTEMBER 9, 1999
HE TOOK A BIG RED PLANE and a little blue pill, and woke up on the other side of the world, alert as coffee and hanging eight thousand feet above Manhattan’s stony skyline, which, after the glass rocketry of Hong Kong and Shanghai, appeared worn and obsolete. As he bounced through customs and immigration and into the black company car waiting for him, he forgot the dream he’d had on the plane but remembered the eight million after-tax dollars vomited from Sir Henry Lai’s mouth. A very pleasing sum of money, enough to procure an East Hampton mansion, a minor Picasso, or—better than these and not nearly as expensive—a secret child. A boy, a girl, who cared? Assuming that Martha Wainwright had followed his wishes, his advertisement would appear in the personals sections of the next issues of The Village Voice and New York magazine. Read each week by thousands of young, fertile, intelligent, and caring women who could recognize a good deal when they saw one. Who would be intrigued by an ad placed by a “mature executive” willing to support mother and child for twenty-one years. Medical expenses paid. Education expenses paid. They’ll write me, Charlie thought, how could they not? And while that might be good, here was something bad, handed to him by the driver in a sealed folder prepared by Karen: the weekly sales tracking report! Did he dare peek? The summary showed raw numbers only, but he knew what to look for, and what he saw was Manila Telecom coming after him in every market with every product, jinking around, stunting and harassing him, stealing his salespeople away, cutting prices to the bone, copying Teknetrix’s products, even bribing clients’ purchasing personnel. MT had two major factories in Indonesia. Give me a little labor riot there, Charlie thought, give me a currency fluctuation, something to slow MT down. He had to get the factory in Shanghai up and operational or MT was going to keep gnawing away at Teknetrix’s market share, and with it, Charlie’s breakfast. No, worse than that. After MT ate his breakfast, it would chew through his tongue and esophagus and right on down to his shoes. That was the telecom-component manufacturing business. Supply or die.
The car phone rang—it was Karen.
“You got the sales report?” she asked.
“Yes. What else?”
“Your daughter will meet you at the restaurant for a late lunch, and Martha Wainwright will be here at five.”
He glanced at a taxi speeding past. The driver was reading a newspaper. “Any update on the factory?”
“No.”
“It’s late.”
He knew the on-site generator had arrived, but there seemed to be a question about the scaffolding contractor. “Call Conroy, tell him I’m pissed off.”
Then he dialed Ellie. “This is your first husband reporting.”
“Terrific. What could be better?”
“I’m just asking you to look at it, Charlie.”
“I’ll do it to get on your good side.” He paused. “If you know what I mean.”
“Which side is my good side, exactly?” Ellie asked.
“Both are very nice.”
“Flattery will only get you so far.”
“Far enough, I think.”
“You’re horrible,” Ellie said, but he could hear she was pleased. “Oh, and, Charlie, how was the sales report?”
“Manila Telecom is killing us.”
“Kill them back.”
THE DRIVER nosed them toward Manhattan, past outdoor billboard advertising already changed in the week Charlie had been away. New movies and TV shows and car models. The speed of everything! The quad-port transformer Ming was so curious about had been a faulty prototype three months ago, a plan six months ago, an idea a year ago, and an impossibility a year before that—merely theoretical, assuming advances in signal compression and polymer chemistry. And if they could get the Q4 into production in six months, it would be obsolete two years out. Terrifying, Charlie thought, if you think about it, which I do, which is why I shouldn’t.
They popped out of the tunnel and into the dense bake of the city proper. Inside his moving air-conditioned cave, he could see down the blurred avenue, women pinching their blouses, the shimmering heaviness of the buildings, taxis piled against red lights like overheated beasts. Carbon monoxide layered beneath the oxygen, in and out, exhaust and exhalation. He thought of Ellie in this heat, five or ten years hence. Another reason she wanted to leave.
INSIDE THE RESTAURANT, waiting for Julia, he watched the businessmen and -women finishing their lunches. Soldiers of twenty-first-century capitalism. The shoes, the neckties, the smiles. So prosperous and young they looked! How fast they talked! I’m a dinosaur to them, thought Charlie. Gray hair and a nice suit. He remembered underestimating some of the old pilots in Thailand, guys who’d seen action in Korea, even one who’d flown at the end of World War II. All dead now. Dead as Sir Henry, the news of whom appeared in that morning’s Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, but already seemed ancient. News cycles and jet lag. Phone calls and sleeping pills. Was he having trouble keeping up? Yes. No, not really. His dream would come back to him. He so rarely remembered them these days. That happened as you got older; your dreams dribbled away like the piss dribbled out of him now—no strong hosing, just a weak and intermittent stream.
Julia shouldered past the waiters—business hair, business walk—a woman, as always, in a hurry but never late. Except for motherhood. She’d waited too long, and now the frantic catch-up hadn’t worked. She was tall like he was and always a little thin, he felt, thinner than she needed to be. Why the anxiety? She’d found a partner and made partner; she was set. Maybe if she weighed ten pounds more, he thought, she could get pregnant.
“Good trip?” She bent close for a kiss.
“Too much Chinese food,” he said.
“But it’s good Chinese food.”
“Sure, best in the world. But you eat too much, you start dreaming Chinese dreams.”
She smiled fiercely at a waiter to bring menus. “I’m sorry I got so upset on the phone. I’d just gotten the news.”
“How is Brian with all this?”
She sighed. “He’s coming around. We could have a surrogate pregnancy; that’s the next thing.”
“They fertilize another woman with his semen?” asked Charlie.
“Yep. Very lovely idea, I think not.” Julia dropped her napkin into her lap. “Brian isn’t crazy about it, either. It raises so many questions for the kid. I mean, you have to explain that the biological mom is not your actual mom, and then they’re starting to say that these donor-egg kids have this weird rejection feeling, like why did my mom give her egg away, or sell her egg?” Julia smoothed the table with her hands, one of Ellie’s mannerisms. It suggested that people were reasonable, problems had answers. It calmed. He felt sure Julia did the same at polished conference tables around the city to great effect. She’d soared through law school, married a real egomaniac bastard, divorced him, run wild for a year or two, met Brian, soared through her law firm. A quick study, dependable, good judgment, great energy. But no baby. “Now they’re doing these tests,” she continued, “where they put the DNA from one woman’s egg into the shell of another’s. Then fertilize it. The woman would have her own kid, using the egg of another woman. It’ll be too late for me, though. But this is just going to keep going. Theoretically, you could have a grandmother give birth to her granddaughter’s child—to her own great-grandchild. You could also have the opposite . You could have the granddaughter give birth to her grandmother’s fertilized egg, in which case the granddaughter would be giving birth to her own great-uncle or -aunt. It’s getting crazy. Then there’s the multiple fertilized eggs that a couple will have genetically tested.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Let’s say Brian and I had six healthy embryos. Soon there will be tests to select the one with the best math skills, fastest runner, best resistance to skin cancer, whatever. Stuff like that.”
“They can’t really have that technology yet,” Charlie said.
“No, but it’s coming.”
“And you’re sure you don’t want to try one more time?”
“One more time?”
He shrugged.
“For me?” Julia asked. “Or for you?”
“For you, sweetie, of course.”
Julia drank her water. “I’ve accepted this, Dad.”
After they ordered he asked, by way of retreat, “So, what about plain old adoption?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. We’re pretty worn out. Also I’ve got to get all these drugs out of my system. At least Brian doesn’t have to give me any more shots in the butt.” She smiled gamely, knowing there was humor in anything, if only you were willing to see it. “I kept telling him that as long as he’s got the needle in there he can withdraw some fat.”
“Sweetie, come on, you’re a beautiful girl.”
“I’m feeling old. I’m bossing people around now, you know?”
“Think how I feel.”
She waved her bread at him. “Oh, Daddy, you just keep going. You’re indestructible. It’s Mom I worry about.”
This surprised him. “Why?”
“She’s anxious about everything.”
“She wants to move out to a retirement village.”
But Julia saw through this, as always. “She wants it for you. She wants to take walks in the woods together. I think it’s a nice—”
“You’ve seen it?” he interrupted.
“We went last week,” she admitted, watching his reaction. “Drove down there in about ninety minutes. It’s very well done. They kept a lot of the old trees.”
“Mom liked it?” he asked.
Julia frowned at his ignorance. “Loved it. She took all the papers with her.”
“The papers?”
“The purchase agreements, that kind of stuff.”
But hadn’t told him.
“I miss Ben,” Julia suddenly said. “This baby thing wouldn’t have been so bad if I could have talked to him.”
He had no answer to that, no answer at all.
Julia touched his hand. “I’m sorry, Daddy, I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“Yeah,” he said vaguely. “It’s okay.”
“I’m going to go pee and check my voice mail.” She pulled a phone from her bag. “Simultaneously.”
He watched his daughter walk through the restaurant, a woman, a wife, maybe a mother someday, but no longer a sister. He loved her painfully all the more for knowing what he had lost. His son, his Ben, his boy, his beautiful Benboy, blowing a bubble of spit as he slept in his baby carriage, sucking greedily on E
llie’s milk-lumpy breasts at night, standing like a loyal sentinel in his crib as his diaper filled with shit, fifty-nine pounds of enthusiasm at age six, cut over the eye by a swing when he was seven, sitting in the tub and pulling on his penis like a man trying to start a lawn mower, lighting a cigarette off the kitchen stove when he was ten, helping Charlie paint the bathroom when he was twelve, playing the trumpet badly for years, showing Charlie that he could do seven one-handed push-ups, running the mile in four minutes and twenty-eight seconds as a lanky sixteen-year-old, working as a logger in Montana the next summer, just nicking his shin with a chain saw, arrested for fighting in a bar out there—wrote them a beautiful letter explaining the circumstances of the arrest, an argument over Ronald Reagan’s politics—then enrolled at Brown, later admitting to Charlie that he’d spent most of the first semester having sex with the beguiling daughter of a Mexican diplomat and reading translations of Mayan poetry. And then his Ben, his only boy, his flesh, his dream, woke up one day with dark bruises all over his legs, his skin almost splitting from the swelling, purple arcs beneath his eyes, panting weakly, and it was a blood problem, said the first doctor; it was leukemia, said the second doctor, there’s nothing we can do at this point, said the last doctor, and indeed there was not. Strong as he was, Ben did not linger; he was ejected out of the world and carried to the other place, wherever it was, and that was fifteen years ago, barely a minute, and none of them, Ellie, Julia, or Charlie, had ever been the same.
ON HIS WAY INTO THE OFFICE, he nodded at the security guard and continued toward the elevators. Teknetrix spread across three floors on Park Avenue, each leased for four more years at three hundred thousand dollars a year—two hundred sales and accounting and technical support people overseeing another eleven thousand globally, almost all of them fifty-dollar-a-week factory workers in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and Taiwan. The executive offices sat tucked away on the company’s top floor, just eight men and their assistants, a small kingdom of technocrats that Charlie ran like a flight squadron. They didn’t need more people than that. Charlie was very hands-on yet gave his vice-presidents broad responsibility, keeping them too busy to fight one another. Teknetrix was small as companies go, too new to feel secure, too lean to replace the carpeting in the back hallways.
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