“Of course it’s yours.”
“I’m just a temporary custodian. My job is to distribute it. Don’t worry—it all comes back to you in the end. Bread upon the waters, Patrick.”
“I can’t believe you’re giving me this hippie shit after I busted my capitalist ass to make you rich again.”
The conversation deteriorated from there. Somehow, after all these years of cherishing our differences, we seemed at that point in time to have hardened against each other. What, after all, did we have in common anymore, if ever?
My other life resumed, and another year went by. Until one day in August, when my family was in Nantucket, Taleesha called to say she was in town. I canceled a meeting so we could have lunch. It was an eerie day in the city: a hurricane was coming up the coast; the streets were unusually clear and windows all around town were crisscrossed with masking tape, in anticipation of flying glass. She took me to the Russian Tea Room, where she was greeted as a favorite. Other diners glanced up, trying to place her; this towering black woman so regal and elegant that she had to be a star of some kind.
When we’d settled in our booth, she admitted that she had come to town on and off, but that after the events of my wedding, she was reluctant to call. “I just thought—we thought—maybe you needed to get on with your new life.”
“Maybe you were right. I haven’t been very good about keeping up either.”
She shook her head, absolving me. “Will called a few months ago and got your wife. She didn’t sound too happy.” Taleesha saw that this was news to me. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry.”
I was surprised, and then again I was not. “No, I’m sorry.”
“God,” she said, “listen to how polite we’ve gotten.” She laughed and I suddenly recognized the teenager I’d met under the Biltmore clock. Is it still there, I wondered. Had they taken it away?
She talked about L.A., where they’d been living for years now—they’d just bought a place on the ocean in Malibu—and I showed her pictures of my daughters, Caroline and Amanda. As happy as I was to see her, I needed time to feel the old intimacy; and Taleesha was, if anything, more reserved than me. I managed to wait until the borscht arrived before I asked the inevitable question.
She sighed and put down her glass. “He’s in Kyoto, at that monastery of his. The free clinic was a wonderful idea, but if he doesn’t stop giving away money … think that’s what he wants, you know, to give it all away, to wash his hands.”
I hesitated. “Look, if he needs a loan, I could do it through you. He wouldn’t have to know. Don’t be so quick,” I said as she raised her hand to brush this offer away. “I make a ridiculous amount of money.”
“You have a family.” She took a sip of her iced tea. “That’s the problem, actually. Family. The family he has and the family that he doesn’t. I’ve had three miscarriages, Patrick. Will blames himself. He’s sure it’s all the drugs and booze and what all that’s fucked up his chromosomes. Basically he thinks it’s karma. I think he’s so conflicted that his sperm are paralyzed with fear. He’s not sure he wants to turn any more Savages loose on the world and anyway he sure doesn’t want to give his old man the satisfaction.” She took another sip. “Or maybe it’s me that’s paralyzed, afraid I’ll turn out like my mother. Not to mention the whole race thing. I mean, I can handle it if we never have any kids, but now that we’ve failed Will won’t let go of it. When we’re trying to conceive he lays off the drugs for months. And then after we fail, he goes on a binge to burn off the guilt.”
She laughed ruefully. “I was about three minutes away from marrying Aaron,” she said. “And then you had to invite me to your wedding.”
After lunch we walked along Fifty-seventh Street, Taleesha towering over me in her heels. The sky was a dark green canopy above us, swollen with the impending storm. I put her in a cab at Sixth, and we claimed we would see each other soon, though at that moment I doubt that either of us thought it was likely.
XXIII
One autumn, shortly before Thanksgiving, the phone rang at three o’clock in the morning. The words were slurred, but I recognized the voice immediately.
“Do you have any idea,” he said, “what it feels like to fuck your father’s wife?”
“No, I can’t say that I do.” When there was no response, I whispered, “How does it feel?”
“Who is it?” said Stacey, rolling out of bed to check on the girls.
Will mumbled something I couldn’t make out. “What?”
“Feels crowded.”
I waited, listening to the static of a bad cellular connection.
“Feels like shooting a cat,” he said. “Ever shot a cat? Even if it was a bad cat, doesn’t feel like you thought it would.”
The line went dead. Having no idea where he was I couldn’t call him back.
“Who was it,” Stacey asked again, returning from maternal reconnaissance.
“Wrong number,” I lied, having discovered in my wife a recalcitrant core of willfulness that sometimes surprises me still. A child of privilege, she could be imperious on certain points, such as the care of children; when the girls were younger we went through nannies about as fast as they went through diapers. Will was another subject about which Stacey had strong feelings.
That phone call marked the midpoint of Will’s final binge. A few weeks afterward Taleesha sent a Christmas card with the news that Will was in India with the Dalai Lama. Another year slipped away.
Then, at a word from my secretary, the seamless flow of the days stopped … blinked and started up again—though with none of the earthquake signs that announced the day the Mississippi River flowed backward. Will was on the line, calling from the Carlyle, just a few blocks from our apartment on Park; he sounded more embarrassed than proud as he explained he was about to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame over a big dinner at the Waldorf.
“Shit, Dink, I don’t belong in this club. Can you imagine Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson sitting up there on some thundercloud, sharing a reefer, saying—‘Savage, that ofay motherfucker?’ I think when the decision was made the committee was under the impression that the honor was posthumous. ‘Savage? Yeah, sumbitch died with a needle in his arm, didn’t he?’ Now they’re hoping I’ll make a big donation for the fucking museum in Cleveland.”
Hearing his voice after so long, it was easy to imagine that he’d just gotten back to school from a family holiday in Memphis, that we were still dewy and ductile, waiting for our lives to begin. He preferred to meet me at home, saying that in his new sobriety he was avoiding restaurants and public places. Not at all sorry that Stacey was in Marblehead with our daughters, visiting her parents, I told him to come on over.
Though still stately and plump, Will had lost perhaps fifty pounds, and his eyes seemed to me to have regained the old clarity and focus. And yet I almost missed that fanatic blaze in his pupils, a certain manic rhythm of the limbs. But he refused the offer of a seat, preferring to stand and pace. “I’ve heard it said everybody in this life gets a bathtub full of coke and a swimming pool full of gin. I was starting in on my third tub and my fourth pool, not to mention a lot of acid and quaaludes and smack. Taleesha finally pulled me out of the deep end. Almost drove her away but not quite.”
In my mind they had never really split. Their epochal separation seemed more fond and intimate than most marriages.
“It’s funny,” he said, “to look back now and realize I never really believed I’d see forty.” We had both passed that melancholy milestone recently. “I think that’s one of the reasons I nearly let Taleesha slip away when I did. I didn’t want her to find me wrapped around a tree, or cold and blue one morning on the kitchen floor.”
He continued to pace the room, stopping now and again to examine a picture or an object. Looking at my home through his eyes I saw a nest of haute bourgeois strivers, crowded with eighteenth-century English furniture, hunt prints and Audubon plates. It’s fortunate that only rarely are we given the oppor
tunity to see ourselves as types.
Examining the physical evidence of my life I couldn’t help but feel a dichotomous sense of confusion and contentment. When the doorman smiles and says, “Good evening, Mr. Keane” when, on those occasions that I am home early enough, I open the door to the squeals of my younger daughter; when, at night, I steal into the rooms of my children and watch them sleep—I sometimes feel as if this were someone else’s good fortune, someone else’s life. A cigar after dinner, the tongue-and-groove fit of precedent and new case, the easily stanched tears of Amanda, the melancholy soughing of the Atlantic from the porch of my father-in-law’s house on Nantucket, the crisp, leafy air of Manhattan in October—these are the things that make me feel lucky. The fecund and portentous air of spring, on the other hand, makes me restless and sad, germinating a sensation of regret, stirring an awareness of all the roads not taken and all the desires stifled as if under perpetual winter woolens. It is in the spring that I cannot shake the sense of what I have surrendered. And if on an April day I am filled with desperate longing at the sight of a young man in a white cotton sweater strolling like a god across the Hellespont of Fifty-seventh Street, hailing a cab with his tennis racket, does that mean my life is a lie? If the love I feel for my wife is almost fraternal, if she often seems only half real to me. If I have been more or less in love with my best friend for thirty years? Studying the living room that night, I suddenly realized how feminine it was, all chintz and pillows, with its pale garden of floral Benison and Brunschweig fabrics.
“Let’s sit in the library,” I said. There, at least, we were surrounded by my books, by old leather and dark cherry paneling. It was also a cliché, but at least it was my cliché.
Looking through the framed photographs on the library table, Will spotted one of the two of us, taken that first year at prep school just before we went off to Memphis for Thanksgiving. He picked it up. And I was proud that it was there, signifying a small gesture of domestic assertion on my part. This and my refusal to accompany Stacey and the girls to church were among my few declarations of independence.
Gingerly replacing the photo, he laughed and shook himself like a wet dog. “Well, now that I’m saved, what are we going to do with the rest of our lives?” He rapped his knuckles on the table. “I tell you what, though, I feel like a whole different person than I was two years ago.”
Slightly skeptical of this new-man notion, I said, “You still have the same father, yes?”
“Talked to him recently, matter of fact. Taleesha and I are planning a visit this fall.”
After all these years, this simple declaration was quite astonishing, the banality of the phrase “planning a visit” quite inadequate to the occasion. I asked what had happened during his last visit, the one I had brokered.
“I never told you?”
I shook my head. “Sit down, will you, for God’s sake.”
Will lowered himself into a beat-up leather club chair which I’d had for years and fished his ivory cigarette holder out of his pocket, along with a pack of Camels and a Dunhill lighter. “How much do you know?”
“Just enough to be incredulous. Even after my long association with your family. As I recall, your father was being blackmailed.” I paused, looked over at him enthroned in my chair, like a king returned from exile. “I always kind of suspected it was you.”
“Good guess.” He rubbed his hands together as if he planned to use them to tell the story and settled back in the chair.
After Cordell called and asked for his help, Will explained, he’d checked with his own mysterious sources and come up with nothing—the blackmailers were not “his people”—and evidently that cleared the way for his father to come down very hard on some of his own associates. In the end, Cordell was able to squelch the publicity for considerably less than the original asking price. Cheryl eventually turned up in Geneva, asking for a divorce.
“Didn’t ask for a penny,” Will said, “and married her sailing instructor the day the papers cleared. Funny thing is, she totally loved this guy, who didn’t have anything to do with the scam. They’re living in Maine or someplace, just had a kid. But these people, they’d been waiting for months to get something on the old man. They had the hairdresser on the payroll and when she saw romance developing between Cheryl and the sailing guy they wired both hotel rooms in Saint-Tropez and sat back to wait. The old man was fucking crushed, but then he got busy on some of his partners.” He laughed. “More than this, my friend, you don’t want to know.”
Suspicious of all this intrigue and skulduggery, I said, “What are you telling me—people were killed?”
“You’ve never wanted to believe the worst about my father, Patrick, never wanted to look too deep under the surface of things. Don’t start now.”
I resented this. “I’m not inclined to invent conspiracies when there’s a simple logical explanation—if that’s what you mean.”
“Lone gunman. Isolated occurrence.”
“Sometimes, yes. In this case the least convoluted explanation was that you were the blackmailer.”
He leaned back in his chair and laughed at the ceiling. “See,” he said. “The obvious answer, in this case, is dead wrong.”
“You didn’t do it?”
“No, but I am the logical suspect. And hell, I almost pulled it off myself.” At this he smiled cryptically.
“You don’t happen to recall,” I asked, “a certain late-night phone call to that effect?”
“Hey, you could fill a fucking library with what I don’t recall. Volumes one through seventeen—Late-Night Phone Calls.”
“This was something about sleeping with one’s father’s wife,” I said. “Sounded more than hypothetical.” I took a Cohiba Esplendido from the humidor I kept on my desk, cut and lit it.
Will blushed, something I’d never seen him do, lowered his head and wiped his face with a hand. He sighed. “God, did I get into that—my brilliant campaign? I was almost beginning to think I dreamed it.”
He watched the smoke from my cigar for some minutes. I’d long ago learned to wait.
“I schemed for years,” he began. “Had private detectives map out the old man’s schedule. Arranged to run into her on my trips to London. Just happened to be strolling down the street outside her beauty parlor. ‘Wow, what a coincidence. How are you? No, we can’t tell Dad. But great to see you. How about a drink?’ I worked on her practically a year, flew to England three or four times. ‘Hey, it must get lonely over here. Stranger in a strange land.’ And she was lonely, totally out of place, the hairdresser the only person she could talk to. And even she turns out to be spying on Cheryl for the old man. Well, I suspected as much, I know my old man, so I paid her off, too.” He laughed, fit another cigarette into his holder. “That bitch made out like a bandit, didn’t she? Anyway, I told her my father wouldn’t understand my innocent desire to see my stepmother, so why worry him about it? And Cheryl really was happy to see me. Always wanted to know all about everything back home. Did the dogwoods and the redbuds still bloom in March? Pining for the taste of collard greens. She was ripe. So finally I get her to my suite at the Dorchester. A couple drinks. Few lines, a lude. I’ve got three hidden video cameras covering the bed. Took twelve hours and three former British spooks just to set up the equipment. I wanted to make sure my old man got a clear picture.”
“You were going to send him the videotapes?”
“That was the point.” He shook his head ruefully. “But I couldn’t go through with it. I mean, I did …” Will’s peculiar modesty reasserted itself at this point, so that I never got a clear picture. “Something weird happened to me in the middle. All of a sudden I was absolutely terrified. It was … I don’t know how to describe it.” As he stared into the middle distance, I noticed for the first time the gray in his sideburns.
It was as if, he said finally, he had discovered the ecstatic moment of union with the cosmos he’d been searching for all those years, through the mediation of all t
hose chemicals and narcotics. But his epiphany was not euphoric or even benign. He was looking into the abyss at his own death, suspended by the finest of threads over a whirlpool of pain and despair and damnation. It was not his Buddhist Nirvana but the Christian perdition of his ancestors. Afraid that he would die in that bed, his flesh inside the flesh of his father’s wife, he suffered a kind of seizure. He lay there for hours, paralyzed, drenched in sweat, trembling, his teeth chattering while Cheryl asked him what was wrong and tried to spoon him tea. But he was unable to speak, to describe to her his awful visions.
“It was like the worst motherfucking acid trip I’d ever experienced, only ten times darker.” He lit another Camel, this time eschewing the holder. “When I finally regained control of my senses”—he exhaled a great cloud of smoke—“I destroyed the videotapes. I was blown apart from the inside. I’d lost it. Somehow I managed to get out of there, get myself on a plane. But it was a long time before I could pull myself out of that pit.”
We sat in silence, me smoking.
“And then,” he said, “a year later, two years, you call me from London, and then Cordell’s on the line, my father—asking for my help. And even more incredible—somebody else had done essentially what I’d planned to do. What I did. And he sounded broken. The invincible, omnipotent bastard was wounded and bleeding. It was the moment I’d been waiting for. But I got no satisfaction when it arrived. The thing I thought I’d wanted for so long didn’t fill the old hole.”