“Why, my dear Maggie Darling,” exclaimed Lawrence Hayward, battling his way toward her through a knot of Trumps, Kravises, and Perlmans. Maggie was astonished to notice that Hayward, the once skeletal ascetic, had turned positively plump since his appearance at her supper table months earlier. His war-wound limp had turned into a kind of comfortable waddle. “How are you, you lovely creature?” he said.
“Very well, thank you, Lawrence,” she said, watching as he snatched a nugget of gougere from the tray of a passing waiter.
“You know how to make these things?” he inquired.
“Piece of cake,” she half hollered above the din.
“No, it’s more like cheese pastry,” Hayward said.
“I meant, we make them all the time.”
“Perhaps someday you might instruct me in the art.”
“You want to learn how to cook?”
“I’m developing an interest. And I owe it all to you.”
“Really?”
“To that moment of … of revelation at your Christmas party when you placed a roasted oyster in my mouth. Until that moment I couldn’t be bothered with anything beyond the animal mechanics of digestion. I feel as though you’ve opened a door in my life.”
“Gosh. Imagine that,” Maggie said, trying sincerely to think of Hayward as an improved human being, and having some trouble despite his poetical flourish.
“I saw you in People a while back,” Hayward said.
“That vile rag!”
“Don’t be offended. I didn’t actually read the item. Closely. Say, where’s the Englishman tonight?”
“Can we talk about something else?”
“We can talk about your ex-husband.”
“He’s not quite ex yet.”
“Oh?” Hayward seemed surprised. “The two of you reconciling after all?”
“God, no. What made you think so?”
“Well, since Kenneth’s gone kerblooie, I thought he might have come crawling back for a hot meal and a place to sleep.”
“Pardon me. What do you mean kerblooie?
“Since he tanked.”
“What do you mean ‘tanked’?” Maggie asked, her interest turning into anxiety.
“Why, I mean lost it all.”
“I saw him just this afternoon,” Maggie said. “He’s going through a transition, all right, but he didn’t seem completely crazy. Any more than usual, that is. When he’s not on drugs.”
“I don’t mean his mind,” Hayward said, leaning close now to speak more directly into her ear as the musical number crescendoed in a cacophony of shrieking synthesizers. “I mean his money.”
“Excuse me, did you say money?”
“Yes,” Hayward said, as the music stopped. “He lost it all the past month.”
“Lost all his money!” Maggie cried, and a score of heads, many of them famous and some of them beautifully coiffed, ratcheted in her direction. She seized Hayward by the elbow and literally steered him out of the room to the corridor between Dendur and the Chinese galleries. Hayward seemed not to mind being steered about. “What do you mean ‘lost all his money’?” Maggie said, trying to suppress a rising hysteria.
“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings. Your, uh, husband got involved in some dubious derivatives—Malaysian mortgage options, Japanese synthetic petroleum bonds, and double-loaded pension fund share resale futures—and leveraged pretty much all he had on a bet that the yen would fall three quarters of a point against the deutsche mark. It wasn’t a good bet.”
“You mean he’s wiped out?”
“Well, yeah. I think the SEC has paid him a few calls, too.”
“What! Please, Lawrence. Be literal!”
“He could be subject to prosecution. Some of these trading instruments he created—they were a little iffy.”
“Oh, God!” The blood drained out of Maggie’s head and she had to lean against the marble wall, which was shockingly cold in its own right. The first horrible fantasy that assaulted her was a picture of bank officials and sheriff’s deputies swooping down on Kettle Hill Farm armed with repossession notices. The house had been paid off years ago—but who was to say that Kenneth hadn’t gone and somehow hocked it in this orgy of financial self-destruction? And what of the promised divorce settlement? She literally imagined a flock of thousand-dollar bills fluttering away into the blue sky like a mob of starlings.
“Are you all right, Maggie?”
“No. I need a drink.”
“Want me to go in and grab one for you?”
“First I need some air,” she gasped, glancing this way and that way like a cornered animal.
“You just hold on there a moment, Maggie Darling.” Hayward reached for a slim cellular phone on his belt and punched a single button on the keypad. “Bring the car around to the front of the museum,” he barked into it. Then, he placed his hand on the back of Maggie’s waist and navigated her like a sleepwalker through the otherwise deserted galleries to the exit, where a guard let them out.
9
Gotham
“Drive around the park,” Hayward told his chauffeur through an intercom; then he opened a veneered console revealing a minibar. “What’s your poison?” he asked Maggie.
“Vodka, please.”
“I, uh, don’t have any. How about Scotch?”
“Okay. With some of that sparkling water.”
A machine spat ice cubes into a crystal tumbler at the touch of a button. Hayward made a strong drink and presented it to Maggie as though he had concocted a terribly complicated cocktail, say a zombie or a Sazerac, and deserved to be praised. She knocked half of it back in a couple of gulps and gazed wanly out the window at the artificial pastoral of the park in murky twilight.
“Peanuts?” Hayward asked, producing some little foil pouches. “I get them on airplanes. They give them out, you know. For years and years I never ate them.”
“Have you been collecting them?”
“Well, they were free.”
“No thanks,” Maggie said.
“They stay fresh a long time.”
“I thought you said you never ate them.”
“I used to never eat them. Lately I’ve gotten to appreciate them. They’re good, and good for you. And I defy you to tell me what year any given bag is from. They’re vacuum sealed.”
Maggie sipped her drink as they drove up along the reservoir. Here and there, the campfires of the radical indigent flickered in the gathering darkness.
“Did I hear you say that you saw Kenneth recently?” Hayward tried a fresh tack.
“Just this afternoon,” Maggie said quietly. “He came over to the house. He talked about opening some kind of therapy center over in Ridgefield.”
“Therapy center?”
“I don’t know. It all sounded very New Age, but I thought, Who am I to judge?”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, Maggie, I think your husband could use some of his own medicine.”
Maggie sighed. The Scotch was finally salving her nerves. “He said he was prepared to settle our separation. It was my impression that it was the main reason he came over. Why would he say that if he was … ruined?”
“When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.”
“Where does that leave me?” Maggie fairly whispered to herself.
They drove in silence toward the Harlem Meer. A crowd of perhaps a hundred came into view gathered around a blazing trash can by the lakeshore. The mellow bonking of Caribbean steel drums was audible against a background of hooting and laughter. The tragic cornices of 110th Street loomed darkly in the distance. Hayward nervously jingled the ice around in his glass.
“You know, I’m a very wealthy man,” he said.
Maggie half expected to feel his hand on her thigh.
“I’m not looking for a sugar daddy, Lawrence.”
“How about a friend?”
“It depends on what kind of friend.”
“A friendly one,” Hay
ward said, reaching for the Scotch bottle. “Recharge?”
“Thank you.”
“I help my friends.”
“Kenneth is your friend.”
“Kenneth was a business associate,” Hayward said. “He screwed me on those Malaysian mortgage options, by the way. Skinned me out of a cool fifteen million.”
“Good gosh!” Maggie muttered.
“Oh, I can absorb a loss of that order. It won’t affect my standard of living one iota. But it’s a lot of money. I’m not so out of touch with normal life that I don’t recognize that. I was once normal myself.”
“Normal in what sense?”
“I got up in the morning. I went to an office. I worked like a dog. I drove around goddamned Cleveland all day and all night picking up bags of money at my car washes.”
“That sounds like hard work,” Maggie said, chuckling mordantly, “picking up bags of money.”
“Do you have any idea how much five hundred dollars in quarters weighs?”
“No.”
“It’s like loading feed sacks onto a freight car. Take it from me. I did that, too, when I was sixteen in Logansport, Indiana.”
“Is that where you’re from?”
“Yes, ma’am. Cass County, Indiana.”
“Were you poor?”
“Not at all. My father was a machinist. He made a good wage, even in the Depression, boring holes in engine blocks for the Lawnsman Mowing Machine Company. We lived in a nice little bungalow in a decent neighborhood. ’Course, if you wanted pocket money in those days, you had to work, and, believe me, I was happy to load feed sacks onto freight cars. It made me the man I am today.”
Maggie turned fully to Hayward for the first time since they’d embarked in the car. He looked less like a rat now than a squirrel with cheek pouches puffed full of nuts. There was a light in his eyes, too, that could as easily have been a sparkle as a glint.
“Anyway, I just wanted you to know that you can depend on me if you find yourself in a jam,” he said.
“That’s very nice of you, Lawrence, but you’re a married man.”
“This has nothing to do with romance. This is friendship. If that doesn’t work for you, let’s call it business. You make a bit of money at these enterprises of yours, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “Yes, I do.”
“About how much?”
“I … I can’t believe we’re talking about this.”
“Why? Do you think it’s indecent? A lot of you Easterners do, you know. It’s worse for you than pornography. Your boy Kenneth was like that—except when he was on drugs. That’s how a fellow knew when he was on them. He loved to talk about money when he was stoned.”
“You knew about the drugs?”
“Oh, sure. So what do you figure your net earnings amounted to last year?”
“Roughly two and a half million,” Maggie said.
“A person could live on that,” Hayward said.
“It does seem like a lot of money,” she agreed.
“Of course, when you’re used to a certain level of expenditure, it’s surprising how things add up—clothes, foreign travel, the like.”
“I have a staff. There are many regular ongoing expenses. But I’m hardly profligate.”
“Then you have nothing to worry about.”
“Frankly, Lawrence, I’m worried that Kenneth might have hocked the house.”
“I doubt that he could have accomplished that without your knowledge and approval. How much do you figure it’s worth?”
“We bought it for two-fifty in 1981. But it was a wreck back then. Now it’s … it’s been considerably improved.”
“A million and a half?” Hayward ventured.
“At least.”
“Look, as long as you’re still legally married, with an interest in this property, he can’t transfer the title on you. In the worst case, if he’s collateralized it, you can pay off the lien, and if for any reason you need a loan without any strings attached, then you come to me and we’ll arrange it.”
Maggie’s head seemed filled with helium. The lights in the apartment buildings along Central Park West, now visible through the scrim of trees, twinkled with promise, as the lamps of a village might denote reprieve to a lonely wanderer emerging from a wilderness.
“Why are you doing this for me?” she asked.
“Because I admire you. I’m grateful to you. You’ve made me feel better as a … a person. Is that so terrible?”
“No.”
“Can’t anyone have pure motives?”
Maggie couldn’t help laughing heartily. A tremendous weight seemed to have been lifted off her. “I must tell you, Lawrence, you must be the least likely person in America to be considered motivated by purity and innocence.”
“Just shows you what a cynical age we live in.”
“Maybe so.”
“Talk about the People magazine mentality …”
“I’m truly grateful to you, Lawrence,” she said, “but of all the people to restore my faith in the human race, well, you’re a humdinger.”
Hayward leaned toward the intercom below the hand strap. “Dexter,” he told the chauffeur, “you can take us back to the museum now.”
“Wait. Would you mind terribly dropping me downtown?”
“No. Just say where.”
“Vestry Street, between Hudson and Greenwich.”
“Cancel that, Dexter. Head downtown, instead. Way downtown.”
10
Emergency
The big sleek silver limo exited the park at Columbus Circle and turned south on Seventh Avenue.
“What’s waiting downtown for you?” Hayward asked as they entered Times Square.
“A friend,” Maggie said.
Hayward seemed content not to inquire further.
The Disney Corporation’s efforts to sanitize the theater district had been overwhelmed in recent years by the sheer numbers of those whose livelihoods depended on vice. Prostitutes paraded luridly in front of a store selling Mickey Mouse merchandise, and drug dealers held open market at twenty-foot intervals up and down Forty-second Street, just like the old days. Farther down Seventh, Chelsea was crawling with young people in black outfits, the art mob lately removed from Soho. Sheridan Square in the West Village seemed rather depopulated by comparison, the new strains of AIDS II and III having taken their toll in recent outbreaks. When they crossed Canal Street, Maggie directed the chauffeur to Hudson and then down to Vestry, Reggie’s street.
He lived in a four-story building that had begun its life as a patent-medicine distillery in the 1860s. From this modest structure issued many thousandscore pints of Craven’s Sovereign Tonic, a ubiquitous provision on every Civil War battlefield (it had an alcohol content of 40 percent and tasted like chamomile-flavored whiskey). Since around 1900, the building had been a butter and egg jobber’s warehouse, a speakeasy, a taxicab livery and dispatch office, a Greek restaurant, and finally a discotheque, before Reggie Chang acquired the property during a real estate downturn in the early 1990s. The first floor was currently occupied by The Happy Bean Cafe, a natural foods restaurant. Reggie’s studio and home occupied the second floor—which had been Edgar Craven’s office suite for thirty-eight years—and fronted the street with a marvelous copper-roofed bay window that stretched the full twenty-five-foot width of the building. The third- and fourth-floor lofts were rented respectively to a successful cabaret singer and a lady entomologist from the Museum of Natural History. The rental income exceeded the mortgage and taxes by several thousand dollars a year, so Reggie lived there for free and then some.
From the car, the flickering bluish light of a television played across the big second-floor bay window.
“May I use your phone?” Maggie asked Hayward.
“Certainly.”
He flipped the mouthpiece open and punched the on button to get a dial tone for her. Reggie’s answering machine picked up on the first ring, as usual. Maggie waited for the
familiar greeting and electronic cue. “Reggie,” she said. “It’s me. Pick it up, will you? I’m downstairs, right outside on Vestry, in a car.”
“That his machine?” Hayward asked.
“Reggie, please. I know you’re home. I can see the TV glowing in your window. I’m coming up. I’m going to ring your doorbell in a minute and you’d better let me in.”
“Do you want me to wait here?” Hayward asked.
“No, you go ahead. I’m liable to be here awhile.”
“What if he’s really not home?”
“I know he’s there, Lawrence. I’ll grab a cab after.”
“Okay. Remember what I told you now, Maggie. You’ve got a friend.”
“I appreciate it very much.”
She felt an impulse to embrace him. It seemed natural enough, except that he was who he was. She took a chance. He possessed a solidity that was surprising and reassuring, and he wore a cologne faintly redolent of midwestern machine shops.
When the big car pulled away, she could make out sharp popping noises in the distance. It sounded a little bit like Chinese New Year. Though she didn’t know it, this was the sound of gunfire across town on the Lower East Side, where armed, radical rent strikers and their squatter allies, holed up in a desecrated synagogue on Orchard Street, were exchanging fire with an NYPD SWAT team. Close by the Hudson River, Vestry Street itself was as tranquil as a country lane at this hour.
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