“Grad school?” Aviva was shocked. “You didn’t even tell me you applied.”
“Well, I did.”
“What are you going to study?”
“Education.” Then, in her “street” voice—the ghetto intonation nearly always used ironically, but not this time—Imani explained: “Black girl don’t have the opportunities white girl got. You wanna blow up some bronze Pilgrim, go ahead. But we graduate in a month, and then shit gets real.”
“When did you become so cynical?”
“My people don’t have the luxury of purity,” Imani said.
That afternoon Noah texted Aviva and Axel that he was out, too. Nearly having been decapitated the previous night convinced him that the armed wing of the antiracism crusade would have to make do without him.
Aviva had a paper due the next day for her critical theory class but could not concentrate. The confidence with which she held her political beliefs remained steady, but her ideas about how to enact them were no longer so certain. If Imani and Noah, both of whom were African-American, were not going to participate in Axel’s plan, then what was she doing? Would it not be patronizing to take it upon herself to make a point in such dramatic fashion when two of the people that the action was intended to benefit wanted no part in it? What Imani said distressed her. Aviva’s advantages allowed her to play at changing the world. Imani had to enroll in graduate school to improve her chances of getting a job. What job would Aviva ever have to get? She could renounce her birthright and pretend to be a proletarian warrior for social justice, but there would always be a net ready to catch her should she fall. Although she might experiment with her identity, there was no changing the root of who she was.
Aviva turned her computer off, pulled on a jacket, and in late afternoon light walked to the weathered two-story house with the view of the Catskill Mountains that Axel shared with Noah and several other Tate students. Two guys were smoking weed and playing a video game in the living room. When she asked where Axel was, they pointed to the kitchen. She found him straining lentils over the sink. He gave her a rueful smile. Comadre.
“I’m done,” she said.
Axel stopped what he was doing. His smile vanished.
“With what?”
“Everything. It’s stupid.”
“Because those two pussies bailed, you’re out? That is bullshit, Aviva.”
“We’re doing a play, Axel. We’re not revolutionaries.”
“Come on! We can go down to the city tonight. It’ll be fucking awesome.”
“Forget it. Not happening.”
“For real?” He inclined his head and stared at her. She met his gaze. From the other room came the sound of the video game. Automatic weapons, screaming tires, hip-hop.
“You shouldn’t do it either, Axel. It’s a terrible idea.”
Aviva observed him processing her words, how his expression shaded from disbelief to resentment. She thought about freshman year, the times they had slept together.
“You might wanna cover up, Aviva, your origins are showing.”
Ordinarily, this insult would have offended her, but after the explosion in the woods and the sight of her friend’s blood, Aviva was less sensitive to personal attacks.
“That’s all you’ve got?” she said.
“What else is there?”
“The revolution’s in your head,” she said.
“Oh, snap,” was his comeback.
“Noah could’ve been hurt way worse.”
“A flesh wound,” Axel said, as he turned his attention to the lentils, emptying them from the colander into a pot. His back was to her.
“I’ve been listening to you since I was a freshman, Axel. You said read Fanon, so I read Fanon, and Edward Said, and the postcolonial African novelists.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I learned a lot, so thanks, I guess. But I’m playing Patty Hearst in a play; I’m not turning into her.”
“For sure, you’re not.” He lit a match and turned on the gas.
“You can keep fooling around with guns and bombs and whatever other delusional shit you’re into, but I have a paper due tomorrow, and I’m gonna finish it now.”
He turned around to face her.
“You’re such a lightweight, Aviva.”
“And you’re a poser.”
“That’s what you think?”
“You were born in the wrong era. What you really ought to build is a time machine. That way you can fight the fascists in Spain, or join up with the Castro brothers in the mountains of Cuba or sign on with Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, but until you figure out how to slip through a hole in the time-space continuum, you’re stuck in 2012 with the rest of us.”
The contempt on his face did not move her. Aviva left the kitchen. She walked past the gamers getting high in the living room without acknowledging them, and out the front door. The struggle would endure but on her terms. What would the destruction of a statue accomplish? The whole idea was juvenile.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
When his team was swept 4-0 in the playoffs, the world blamed Jay. If the owner had not caused such a calamity, the hive mind declared on websites and their vitriolic comment threads, on television shows and in barroom conversations, surely the result would have been different. Jay ignored the opprobrium and rarely even turned his computer on anymore.
After the murder charge was made public, the City Planning Commission postponed their ruling on the Sapphire project until Jay resolved his legal situation. He expected this and accepted it philosophically. A line of potential buyers had materialized, all of them making generous offers, and league sources were crowing about how quickly they had excised the outdated and unacceptable attitudes that Harold Jay Gladstone represented.
After consultations with Bebe and Doomer, and much reflection, Jay had come to believe what Marat had told him: He could do prison. He would read books; learn a foreign language. He had agreed to surrender on the following Friday morning. The arrangement called for him to arrive at the Westchester County Courthouse to be formally sentenced and from there be taken into custody to begin serving his time at a prison three hundred and twenty-eight miles north of Manhattan. He spent most of the week in the city, tidying up business affairs. In the evenings, he returned to Bedford.
Doomer had informed Jay that he could initiate legal proceedings against Franklin from prison. He continued to meet with the lawyers who were helping him contest the sale of the team. He vowed the Sapphire would be built and planned to petition the Planning Commission. He visited his mother, explaining that he had to go away on an extended business trip but would try to call her whenever he could. Helen Gladstone believed in rectitude. Jay was thankful his mother could not understand what was going on.
He continued to exercise and watch his diet, but the ordeal had taken a toll. The ongoing stress of his situation caused his blood pressure to rise. More gray hair appeared, and he fought against a further thickening of his middle. He did not have the stamina he once did. Two flights of stairs left him short of breath. Mirrors revealed his father’s visage staring back. With prison rushing at him, time seemed to accelerate.
He thought about Nicole and reflected on his part in the dissolution of their relationship. She may have been responsible for her actions, but Jay recognized that it was his stubbornness that pushed the marriage over the edge. That he had not been more open to having another child filled him with regret. It pained him to realize that he had viewed Nicole’s desire as a distraction from plans for another skyscraper, or the pursuit of a sports championship, or an ambassadorial post, and now that all of these things receded before him, forever out of reach, he could not escape the mortifying thought that the abundance of his life before the trials that befell him had somehow not been sufficient.
Although Jay agonized over the people in whose mi
sfortunes his behavior played a role, he did not consider himself guilty of anything other than hubris. But something about his way of passing through the world had robbed him of his family and his freedom, and he could not shake the idea that everything might have been different if he had only listened to the people that he loved.
Each morning no later than 7:30, Jay drank his coffee then sauntered down to the barn. He stepped into the shadows and savored the gamy perfume of hay and manure. He saddled Mingus, mounted, and rode the trails around his house. Sunlight filtered through the tall trees as the horse’s hooves clopped over the carpet of pine needles. Jay found himself vacillating between the sense of profound contentment engendered by the pastoral surroundings and sheer terror in anticipation of what lay ahead. Swaying in the saddle, he took comfort in the notion that he would not be the first person of distinction to be removed from society against his will. Napoleon sprung to mind, and Gandhi, and of course Nelson Mandela. Although Napoleon came to a sticky end when he fled Elba, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela achieved their greatest victories upon release. In no way did Jay consider himself equal to these men—he understood the comparison to be both grandiose and vaguely comical—but this benighted tradition of jailing figures who deserved better was a consolation during the gloomy hours. On the mornings when he moved Mingus from a trot to a canter to a gallop, the lives of those heroes suffused him with a vivifying brightness.
Jay spent the night prior to his surrender writing emails, attending to as many loose ends as he could reasonably manage. Bebe met him for dinner in a nearby town, and when she asked if he wanted her to stay with him at the house so he would not be alone on his final night of freedom, he declined.
“I’m not going to have complete solitude again for years,” he told her. “I want to savor it.”
Before he went to bed that night, he turned on all the lights in the house and walked through every room, spending a couple of minutes in each one, imprinting the geometry and the textures in his brain so he could call on them in his imprisonment. He no longer felt sorry for himself. People had survived worse.
Lou Pagano from the district attorney’s office had insisted on escorting Jay to the courthouse, and he was due to arrive at nine o’clock the next morning. Jay set his alarm to be sure he rose early for the last ride on his horse.
Russell Plesko could not believe his fortune. He had quickly shifted from the life of a patrolman to being a part of the district attorney’s team. While he may have only been a low-level grunt, working with the lawyers fired his ambitions. After an encouraging talk with Lou Pagano, now considered a mentor, Russell planned to finish his undergraduate degree and then take the law boards. Several of the local universities offered night courses, and if he applied himself, he would get his degree in four years. He and his wife reconciled, and he had moved back into his Port Chester home.
The alarm went off as usual at six thirty. Crystal rolled over and stroked his hair, half awake. She had been up for the usual middle of the night feeding, and Russell wanted to let her rest. He hit the snooze button, promising to only sleep another few minutes, but before drifting off, he heard his daughter fussing in the other room.
As he hoisted the baby from the crib and placed her on the adjacent changing table, he thought about the coming weekend. Because the family lived in a one bedroom apartment, they had transformed the living room into a nursery, and Russell was determined that his kid was going to have a room of her own. Russell and Crystal had been looking for a larger apartment for the last three months. He hoped they would find a new place tomorrow. Now he changed the diaper and put his daughter back in the crib while he quickly prepared a bottle of pre-pumped breast milk. Crystal was religious about breast milk. His daughter took the bottle hungrily, and Russell returned to the bedroom to get dressed.
Although he was now working for the district attorney’s office, he still wore his police uniform every day. It pleased him that his new co-workers seemed to like cops. He showered and shaved and before going into the closet listened to see if his daughter was making noise.
All quiet on the Plesko front.
One of the advantages of his new posting was that he was no longer required to wear the patrolman’s belt, although he still carried a gun. He pulled on his uniform, slid his holster on to his belt, and leaned over to kiss his wife. Crystal was one of those women who could clean the apartment on a ninety-degree day in August and somehow still smell like a window box filled with geraniums. Russell loved that about her.
“The baby has a bottle,” he said.
His wife murmured her thanks and went back to sleep. Russell went into the living room, picked his daughter up from the crib, kissed her neck, and inhaled the milk and talcum powder baby smell. He laid the girl back down and touched the mobile that hung over the crib so its movement would draw her attention.
Lou Pagano had asked Russell to meet him at the county courthouse an hour before they usually appeared at the office. The two of them were going to pick up Jay Gladstone and convey him to court where he would officially enter the prison system. Russell already knew how lucky he had been to avoid prosecution, but today he felt exceptionally fortunate. Jay Gladstone’s situation could have been his own. He was a free man and next week he would begin his duties as the interim coach of the Fenian’s Little League team. When Russell saw Pagano waiting for him in the parking lot drinking takeout coffee, he fought the urge to hug him.
It was dawn when he slid the barn door open. Jay had risen early to go on a longer ramble than usual. The sun made a feeble attempt to assert itself, but the slate sky let nothing through. He didn’t care if he got caught in the rain. He hoped it would rain so he could store as many sense memories as possible. He greeted Mingus and scratched the animal behind the ears while he fed him a carrot. He ran his fingers through the horse’s thick mane and pressed his face against the muzzle, inhaling the animal’s musky odor. He opened the gate, led the horse to the trough, mucked the stall, shoveling the manure into a bucket and dumping the contents into a composter behind the barn. This activity was usually the duty of the groom, but today Jay wanted to perform every task himself. Only then did he throw the saddle over the horse’s back, affix the straps, and mount.
On his ride, he reflected on how he had arrived at this point. The failure of two marriages, the alienation from his daughter, who, as he saw it, rejected him for no logical reason. Then there were Franklin’s machinations, the vanished opportunity to gift the city he loved with one of the world’s great buildings, the imminent loss of his team. All of it continued to fester, and he concluded that this burgeoning litany of trouble had one thing in common with the countless blessings life had visited upon him. They had happened for no reason at all. He considered the expression: “If I knew then.” But if he knew then, what? Would he have handled those situations differently? He would have led the same life, made nearly all the same choices. The complete randomness of the whole business came as a revelation. It was bewildering.
Jay was half a mile from the house. He had been riding for over an hour, and it was getting near the time his police escort was due to arrive. As far as he was concerned, they could wait. It would be his last act of self-assertion for a while. Much of the ride had been spent managing his rising nervousness. He noticed his breathing was shallow and he had to consistently remind himself to take gulps of the piney air and let his breath out slowly. Birds chittered. A chipmunk fled. It was a timeless rural landscape and yet he felt his anxiety begin to spike. He chided himself, frustrated at his inability to master his nerve, and took another deep breath. He stretched his arms to his sides and over his head, shook the tension from his hands. If any government agents were at his home when he emerged from the woods, he wanted them to see just how in command he was.
Jay slid back in the saddle as he rode down a declivity and when the grade evened he headed for a dogleg in the trail that would deliver him back to the barn
. He was feeling good again but did not want to canter as he usually did at this point in the ride. Today there was no rush to get back to the house. He had focused his attention on a red-tailed hawk that was gliding over the treetops, so he heard the man before he saw him.
“Yo, Gladstone.”
Just off the trail not more than fifteen feet ahead stood a tall black man dressed in athletic gear. He looked vaguely familiar—but from where? Then, Jay realized: This was Dag’s brother, the one they had cut in training camp. What was his name again? And for what purpose was he in these woods? That was when Jay noticed the handgun dangling at his side. The man raised the gun and pointed the barrel at him.
“Jay Gladstone,” he pronounced.
“What are you doing?”
“Don’t you worry.”
“Jay Gladstone—” The voice was resonant and filled the woods. “In the name of Allah—”
Allah? What was this imbecile talking about? The man’s face showed the purest contempt, and he was walking toward Jay, who stared down at him from the height of the saddle, momentarily transfixed. He’s not going to. No.
“Bang bang, motherfucker.”
“It was an accident!”
The bullet tore into Jay’s thigh, rending his flesh. Mingus started at the gunshot. As the man squeezed the trigger again, the stallion reared up and whinnied, hooves wildly punching the air. Pain burning through his leg, Jay gripped the reins and prepared for the impact of another gunshot, but there was only the agitation of the horse and the indecipherable muttering of the would-be assassin who was again trying to shoot him. The gun had jammed.
When the horse’s front hooves hit the trail, Dag’s brother was examining the weapon, trying to make it work. Jay dug his heels in and sped past the assailant, who tried to grab his leg and rip him out of the saddle. Jay galloped down the trail toward the barn, ten, twenty, thirty yards. He heard another gunshot and a bullet whizzed past. He bent over the animal’s mane and once more spurred him with the heels of his boots, one of which was filling with blood.
The Hazards of Good Fortune Page 54