“I was just with Thaddeus,” I said. “And Grace. I bought some land off of them.”
“Now isn’t that something? I remember how close you and Thaddeus used to be, so it doesn’t surprise me, not in the least. So what about you? You look healthy, youthful. Are you in a committed relationship? Hey, do you ever hear from Daphne Holt?”
“No. So, uh, when was this party?”
“Last summer. And we’ve met for lunch a few times since then.”
“Is that a fact?” Unrequited love is a petri dish for jealousy, and after years of envy that extended from his sex life with Grace to the brave little chickadees that landed on his shoulders when he came out to pour sunflower seeds into their feeders, the image of Thaddeus and Bruce chatting away over beers and BLTs in some Windsor County café was galling to me.
“Yes, yes, I only wish we’d made more time. But we’re both very busy—Thaddeus, as you know, is always writing. And my studies can be somewhat of an endurance test. But he is always eager to meet and I love talking to him. He has a way of listening that makes you think most people don’t listen at all. He’s so present. He’s always asking me about what it’s like to make the choice I’ve made. At first, he was so intrigued by it.”
“I’m not surprised you’re going to be a priest,” I said. “In college, the way your mind could engage with these very abstract philosophical ideas.”
“But it’s not the mind that brings you in, at least not for me. The mind sees all the inconsistencies, the impossibilities, the absurdity, really. The mind’s mission is to make mincemeat out of faith. It’s the heart that brings you in. And the hunger. And that was the main thing that seems to interest Thaddeus. What gives our life meaning? And how can we tolerate life without meaning? Is it money, prizes, notches on your belt? These things that are so transient and that cause us so much anxiety? He’s starting to wonder if life without God—some kind of God, maybe not mine, maybe not the God of the Holy Mother Church, but God nevertheless—if we are without it, what possible meaning can there be to life?”
Oh please, give me a fucking break, I thought, just as you would shield your eyes if someone emerged from the darkness to shine a flashlight in your face.
“But we know this to be true,” Bruce said. “Without God, our lives are intolerable. Without meaning, how do we live? Thaddeus sometimes wanders into churches. Just to sit there. And it’s always one of ours.”
“Well, yours are the ones that are always open. The other ones are usually locked.”
“Yes! Exactly!” Bruce said, as if I might be on the path to agreeing with him about a great many things. “I don’t think he’d mind me saying this to you. He has considered conversion. Taking instruction. Making the choice.”
Really? My Ashkenazi dreamboat raised on Trotsky? How dare he! What was he really looking for? A new hiding place, this one reeking of paraffin?
The train entered one of the tunnels leading to Penn Station and our car went dark. I closed my eyes and felt the tears pulsating behind my lids. I cleared my throat, shifted my weight in the darkness.
“Well, we made it without anyone casting stones,” invisible Bruce said. “Thank God.”
Yeah, sure, I thought.
“Are you okay?” Bruce asked quietly.
In my bitterness, my loneliness, my furious nostalgia for the happiness I had felt only half an hour ago, I fled all possibilities of God and sought my refuge in the familiar embrace of Mammon, which is to say I wondered what a priest pulled in. I had read somewhere the average salary was about 40K per. If I was given a year-end bonus of forty thousand dollars, I would start looking for another job. In my business, a 40K bonus was a fucking pink slip. And Bruce wasn’t even making that, in all likelihood. He was a seminarian. Living in a dorm. Listening to the snores of other celibates. Happy with a sandwich, a glass of beer. On his way to becoming a kid diddler, as Kenny Adler would say. Pope blower. Mackerel snapper. I never asked Adler why he hated priests so much. But he did. He asked, How can any of them be trusted, ever again? Call one if you’re in trouble and you just might end up thinking that the curate was worse than the disease. (Rim shot!)
We pulled into the station and the lights in our car stuttered back to life. Bruce stood and retrieved his bag—black leather, shaped like a doctor’s satchel—set it on the arm of his seat, opened it. I saw a flash of purple satin, and a Detroit Tigers baseball cap. He placed his book in the bag, deliberately, as if it was something of a ritual, and redid the clasps. I shoved my work into my briefcase and wordlessly followed behind Bruce. We stood in the aisle while two people helped a woman in a wheelchair off the train and then we filed out with the rest of the passengers. The light in the tunnel was gauzy and gray, it must have been one hundred degrees, and the air smelled of diesel. Up one flight of stairs to the Penn Station mezzanine and then up another to the main hall, with its throngs of people, smells of scorched tomato paste and doughnuts, urgent gibberish coming through the public address system.
Bruce stopped and we shook hands. It was time to say goodbye, go our separate ways. There seemed to be something that needed to be said, but I didn’t know what it was.
“So long, Bruce,” I said. “Maybe we’ll meet again soon.”
“I hope so, Kip—do people still call you Kip?”
“Yes. Everyone. I was Kip in the crib.”
“I don’t think I ever knew your given name.”
“Christopher, actually.”
Bruce smiled broadly, shaking his head.
“That’s as far as it goes,” I added.
There was a small disturbance to our right. A collective murmur, a small parting in the sea of humanity. I generally think something awful is happening when there is a sudden shift in the intricate urban routine—if traffic has stopped there’s been a horrible wreck, if there’s a bad smell in the corridor one of the locked doors will lead to a decomposing body. But in this case, the excitement was benign. Several balloons, red, orange, and silver Mylar, were heading in our direction, and as they drew closer I saw they were being held by a phalanx of men who I could immediately identify as seminarians—with their well-scrubbed faces and assembly-line haircuts, dark slacks, and white shirts. Mixed in were a couple of actual priests. “He’s here!” shouted one of them, older than the others, jolly and red-faced, his white hair springing out on either side of his Yankees cap.
“I knew it, I knew it,” Bruce cried.
“We were stuck in traffic,” one of the seminarians said.
“We prayed that your train would be late,” said another. “Hey! Happy birthday!!”
“We have to get to the subway to the stadium,” the white-haired priest said. “Ready? On three?” He counted out loud and the group let go of their balloons and let them float away and they all fell silent, and craned their necks and followed the balloons’ uncertain ascent. The bright silver Mylar balloons, decorated with sparkly stars, nuzzled against the station’s low ceiling while the others meandered.
“Mine’s winning!” one of the guys called out.
I was slowly backing away, as you would creep out of a child’s bedroom after the last lullaby. “So long, Bruce, happy birthday. Go Tigers.” He was absorbed with his friends, the birthday, the balloons. Back five steps and then turn. Walk away toward the Seventh Avenue exit. Luck was on my side! I was in a taxi within a minute and on my way home. The driver had rosary beads wrapped around the stem of his rearview mirror. That’s what piety will bring you—sixty hours a week fighting traffic in Midtown Manhattan.
I closed my eyes. I had nothing to do that night. Of course that wasn’t precisely true. I had a lot of work. Nothing I cared to do was more like it. Nothing. I thought about Bruce and his Bible buddies rattling toward the Bronx on the D train for that night’s game, and felt . . . I couldn’t identify what it was that was making me miserable as the taxi brought me downtown. I felt such emptiness and rejection, even though I didn’t know these people and I didn’t want to go to a baseball ga
me in Yankee Stadium, or anywhere else. If Bruce had turned toward me and said, I don’t suppose you could be tempted into joining us. . . . It actually would have been the polite thing for him to do. We had been traveling together, side by side. We’d shared confidences. And suddenly it was as if I didn’t exist. It was actually quite rude. All this concentration on eternity, while the here and now slips through the cracks. Yes, I thought, he should have invited me. I would have said, No thanks. I would have said, Oh, I’m jammed for tonight. Enjoy! And that would have been that.
Priests have horrible manners, I thought.
Chapter 13
Motown
Adler Associates was small. We weren’t moving markets or making news. We had sixty or seventy investors, each of whom had between $8 and $15 million with us, though Ken let a few friends and cousins in for a smaller commitment. We had the endowments of three colleges and the pension fund of the advertising company where Ken’s father had worked. AA took an annual fee of 0.075 percent out of your account if you had over $5 million and 1.2 percent if you had less. All in all, Adler collected about $9 million in fees every year, enough for Ken to pay himself a large salary and to keep the rest of us fairly happy. Though the heavyweights at places like Merrill Lynch or Lehman Brothers would have considered it paltry, I was astonished by my compensation.
Ken wanted me to form personal relationships with some of our clients—the cultured ones, the ones whose names were listed as donors by their local symphonies or museums of folk art, the PEN supporters, and in one case an affluent surgeon who was part of an effort to buy The Atlantic Monthly. Lunches, dinners, sailing parties, confirmations, weddings—it was a version of the monetized friendliness I’d been encouraged to show my grandfather. What I was there to do was make the investors feel they had entrusted their money to people who were not only savvy but elegant, and who, in the person of me, took a special interest in their financial well-being. I suppose it’s baked into the capitalist soufflé that every transaction is to one degree or another an exaggeration, a hustle, or a lie. All we had to do at Adler was outperform the overall market, even by 1 percent, and give our clients the sense that, for reasons that may have been difficult to explain, we saw them as individuals, quirky and fascinating, decent and lovable, and that our own sense of well-being hinged on our ability to protect and grow their capital. This mercantile chumminess made more sense when the majority of AA’s clients were either closely or distantly related to Ken, but over the years our roster of customers had grown and helping to maintain the illusion that we had some overarching, emotionally charged commitment to our investors became part of my job.
One of the people with whom I had formed a business friendship was named Parker Brown. He had been disastrously married to one of Ken’s cousins but stayed with us after the divorce. Poor Parker had succumbed to cocaine and lost his medical license, but he still owned several McDonald’s franchises in Detroit, which, selling chopped-up cows, were cash cows themselves. The scandal surrounding the lost medical license and the toxic aftermath of the messy divorce left Parker isolated and more or less friendless. He needed a lot more hand-holding than most of our clients, but I was willing to give it to him, partly out of duty, but mainly because I could combine a trip to see him with a visit to my parents and sisters.
I would spend the night in my childhood house. My sisters’ shared bedroom was now where my mother had graded papers while she still taught seventh grade and where now she spent time on her computer and read—I noticed her library reflected a growing concern with health issues. I sensed something was unspooling within her. Her hands trembled and sometimes when she spoke her lower lip trembled as well. My old bedroom still contained my childhood bed, but I had to share the space with stacks of Hilary Custom Shirts’ signature blue and white boxes, now that Dad ran what remained of his business from home. When he met with his few customers, it was at a nearby Marriott, generally on the first Tuesday of the month.
Sometimes my sisters, Lois and Loretta, would come to the house when I was there. Lois, solid and hardworking, had followed Mom’s career path and worked at a day school in Lansing. She was married to a Nigerian named Daveed Okafor, who taught geology at Michigan State, and they had two kids, whose pictures were all around my parents’ house, mixed in with photographs of Loretta’s child, Joy, who was born with a defective heart and had not been expected to live beyond her first birthday. Thanks to Daveed’s brother, a pediatric surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, Joy lived but Loretta’s marriage had not survived. The last time we were all of us together, I noticed the united front between Loretta and Lois had gaps in it—their once steady stream of smirks and eyerolls had become a parched trickle, and the avid nods one would make while the other spoke had been supplanted by quizzical looks and interruptions. Now unmarried Loretta, slimmer than I’d ever known her, wearing futuristic earrings, her hair boyishly bobbed, was saying things that implied she and I, the unmarried siblings, shared an understanding of the world that the others, deluded by togetherness, could not perceive.
“Kip and I have a singles lifestyle,” she would say. “It’s way more of an adventure.” Then, resting her chin in her hand and opening her eyes, signaling her receptivity to the wildest story I could tell, she would ask me, “So? Who have you been dating?” She had that alcoholic way of inserting people into a drama that seemed primarily to be taking place in her own mind. She’d point to you when she wanted you to say something and wave you off the moment she’d had enough. I maintained I was seeing several people but no one too seriously. She had always been suspicious of me. Hey there, Batman, how’s Robin? was her regular greeting when we were young.
On this late April visit, however, I didn’t reach my parents’ house until it was nearly 10 P.M., too late for my sisters to make an appearance, and I was leaving the next morning for New York. My father let me in, his expression worried, as if I’d been out with the family car and had broken my curfew. He looked tired, dressed in pajama bottoms and a Red Wings sweatshirt. The sweatshirt gave me pause. Recoiling from his own father’s mania for sports, Dad didn’t follow any sport—Grandfather had owned shares in two welterweight boxers and had held season tickets to Pistons and Lions games, and, when the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup in ’55, Mr. Super Fan had catapulted from his second-row seat and bounded onto the ice, where he slipped, fell, and was knocked unconscious.
“Mom’s not feeling great,” Dad said, “but she hopes to see you in the morning.” He took my suitcase from me. It was a pricey little one-suiter from Mark Cross, with my initials embossed near the handle, and he looked at it admiringly. More and more, he seemed to catalog the outward signs of his son’s success, commenting on my suits and shoes and, of course, my shirts, even mentioning the details of my personal grooming. “Where do you get your hair cut?” he’d asked me the year before. “It always looks so good.” Now, as I followed him from the little entranceway of our Hydrangea Court house and into that familiar kitchen, where he had already set things up for a late night talk—a bottle of good vodka and a bowl of high-fiber pretzels—I debated with myself whether or not to mention I had recently purchased ten wooded acres in upstate New York. I wasn’t sure whether this information would interest him and make him happy for me, or if any further evidence of my affluence would make him feel diminished. I did not want to bum the old guy out, I truly did not, yet there was a temptation to do so, like how you protect an inflamed tooth from anything that might set it off, but every once in a while you suck some cold air over it, just to make sure it hurts as much as you feared.
“So you in town for Parker Brown?” Dad asked as we sat at the kitchen table. He lifted the bottle and asked by raising his brows if I wanted a drink.
“How do you remember these things?” I asked. “Do you know Parker?”
“No, no. Mr. Parker Brown and Hilary Woods are in very different circles. And he’s years and years younger than me.”
“He doesn’t look it,” I said.
“Is that a fact?” Dad asked, his expression brighter for a moment.
“Dad, you’re filling my glass to the very top. I’ll be out of my mind.”
“Ah, minds aren’t all what they’re cracked up to be. Try one of these pretzels. They’re whole wheat with just a little bit of sea salt.” He scratched his arm through the fabric of his sweatshirt and then pushed the sleeve up and pulled off a big star-spangled Band-Aid, beneath which was a bluish splotch.
“What you have there, Dad?” I asked.
“Blood test. I’ve got squirmy veins and they have to keep poking before they get a hit.” He lifted his glass. “Poke poke poke,” he said, by way of a toast.
“Why the blood test?”
“Because that’s what you do after you round the clubhouse turn, as my dear late father used to say.”
“He certainly did.”
“Speaking of your grandfather . . . ,” he said, his tone cagey.
“As we so often do.”
“Well, wouldn’t he just keel over if he were to see my son becoming so successful. You’re going to end up more successful, at least in terms of m-o-n-e-y, than that old buzzard ever was, even at the pinnacle.”
“What does it matter?”
“Ah, modesty. The luxury of success. Problem with me, I was always worried that people would think too little of me. I never had a thought of downplaying it.”
“I don’t feel successful, to tell you the truth.”
“Really. Well, if you don’t feel as if you’ve been successful, then I may as well shoot myself.” He took a gulp of vodka and shook his head as if a bell had clanged within it. The drinks were absurd. I’d be hard-pressed to drink a full glass of water, much less a full glass of his vodka. “Mom says I owe you an apology,” he said.
I prepared myself for whatever was about to be said.
“She says I never should have encouraged you to cozy up to the old man. She says I shouldn’t have encouraged such a thing.”
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