“You’re not making sense, Greg. You talk about making money, but only poor people troop through your office.”
“Latins are always poor; you know that as well as I.”
“That’s what I mean. You’ll never get rich with that kind of client. But I’m glad you are the same sentimental fool you always were: that’s why I love you. You always look after others; I don’t know where you find the strength.”
That facet of his character had not been apparent when he was just one cog in the complicated machinery of a large firm; it had emerged when he became his own boss. He could not close the door to anyone who asked him for help—in either his office or his private life. He was knee-deep in people with problems, so many he could scarcely look after them all. Ernestina Pereda worked miracles to stretch the hours of his calendar. Often his clients became his friends, and more than once he had someone living with him who had nowhere else to go. A look of gratitude seemed sufficient reward, but he often had rude awakenings. He did not have a good eye for identifying scoundrels in good hour, and by the time he tried to get rid of them it was too late: they turned on him like vipers, accusing him of every vice of his profession. Be careful you don’t get us into a malpractice suit, Mike Tong warned his boss when he saw him placing too much trust in his clients, among whom were con artists who made a living by abusing the legal system and had a history of lawsuits behind them. They would work a few months, do something to get fired, and then file suit for discrimination; others faked injuries in order to collect the insurance. Reeves also made mistakes in hiring. Most of his employees had problems with alcohol, one with gambling—he bet not only his own money but anything he could filch from the office—and one suffered chronic depression and twice slit his wrists in the washroom. It was years before Reeves realized that he attracted neurotics. His secretaries could not handle such high drama, and few lasted more than a month or two. Mike Tong and Tina Faibich were the only normal people in that circus of misfits. In Carmen’s eyes, the fact that her friend had not gone under was irrefutable proof of his fortitude, but Timothy Duane called that miracle pure and simple luck.
• • •
He entered his office by the service door, as he often did to avoid clients in the waiting room. His desk was a mountain of papers, and the floor was covered with stacks of documents and reference books; a sweater lay on the sofa beside several boxes of glass bells and reindeer. The growing clutter threatened to engulf him. As he took off his raincoat, he checked the health of his plants, particularly concerned about the funereal droop of the ferns. Before he could ring, Tina was waiting with the day’s agenda in hand.
“We have to do something about the heating; it’s killing my plants.”
“You have a deposition at eleven, and remember that this afternoon you must be in court. Can I help a little here? This place looks like the dump, if you’ll forgive my saying so, Mr. Reeves.”
“All right, but don’t touch Benedict’s file; I’m working on that. Write the Christmas Club again not to send me any more of this junk. And can you bring me an aspirin, please?”
“I think you’re going to need two. Your sister Judy has called several times; it’s urgent,” Tina announced, and left the room.
Reeves picked up the telephone and called his sister, who told him with little elaboration that Shannon had come by early that morning to leave David with her while she went away on a trip, destination unknown.
“Come get your son right away. I have enough with my children and my mother; I can’t be responsible for this monster. Who is wearing diapers, by the way. Did you know that?”
“David?”
“Mother. I see you don’t know anything about your own son.”
“You’ll have to put her in a nursing home, Judy.”
“Right, that’s the easy solution: throw her away like an old shoe. That’s what you would do, no doubt, but not me. She looked after me when I was a little girl, she helped me raise my children, and she’s stood by me in moments of need. How can you think I’d put her in a home! To you, she’s nothing but a useless old woman, but I love her and I hope she dies in my arms, not cast aside like a stray dog. You have one hour to come get your son.”
“I can’t, Judy; I have three clients waiting.”
“Then I’ll turn him over to the police. In the short time he’s been here in my house, he’s put the cat in the clothes dryer and hacked off his grandmother’s hair,” Judy said, trying to contain the hysteria in her voice.
“Shannon didn’t say when she’d be back?”
“No. She said she has a right to live her life, or something like that. I could smell the booze, and she was very edgy, almost desperate. I’m not blaming her: that poor woman doesn’t have any control over her life; how could she have any over her son?”
“So what are we going to do now?”
“I don’t know what you’re going to do. You should have thought about this a long time ago; I don’t know why you bring kids into the world if you don’t mean to look after them. You already have a daughter who’s a drug addict. Isn’t that enough? Do you want David to follow his sister’s example? If you’re not here in exactly one hour, go to the police; you’ll find your son there,” and she hung up the telephone.
Reeves buzzed Tina to tell her to cancel his appointments for the day. She caught up with him at the door, pulling on her coat and carrying her umbrella, certain her employer needed her in a crisis of this magnitude.
“What do you think of a woman who abandons her four-year-old son, Tina?” Reeves asked his secretary halfway to Judy’s house.
“The same thing I think of a father who abandons him when he’s three,” she replied, in a tone she had never used before.
“OK, I am going to take care of this soon, but I have to initiate a custody battle,” said Gregory, putting an end to any conversation. The rest of the drive they were silent, listening to a concerto on the radio and trying to curb their worst imaginings. With David, anything could happen.
Judy was waiting at the door with her nephew’s belongings, while the boy, dressed in a soldier suit, raced through the yard, throwing rocks at the crippled dog. Tina opened her enormous umbrella and twirled it like a Ferris wheel, bringing David to an abrupt halt. His father went toward him with the intention of taking his hand, but the boy threw a rock at him and rushed toward the street. He did not get there. With the grace of an illusionist, Tina collapsed the umbrella, hooked the handle around one of David’s legs, tripped him up, caught him by the tail of his shirt, lifted him off his feet, and shoved him into the car, all without losing her habitual smile. She was able to keep him immobilized all the way back to the city. That afternoon Gregory Reeves appeared in court with more than his usual zest for a battle, while his invincible secretary waited outside, subduing David with stories, french fries, and now and again a little swat.
Thus began Gregory’s life with his son. He was not prepared for an emergency of this kind and had no time in his routine for a child, much less one as difficult as his own. David was so insecure that he could not be alone for a minute; at night he crawled into his father’s bed to sleep, clinging to his hand. At first Gregory had to take David with him everywhere; there was no question of his staying alone, and Gregory could not find anyone to take charge, not even Judy, despite her natural love for children and the large sum of money he offered her. If in a few minutes he managed to cut off my mother’s hair, the next thing would be her head, was Judy’s response. Reeves’s house and car were overflowing with toys, stale food, chewed chewing gum, and piles of dirty clothes. Short of any other solution, Gregory took David to the office, where employees tried at first to ingratiate themselves with Reeves’s son but quickly gave up, honestly acknowledging that they loathed him. David ran across the tops of the desks, nearly choked on paper clips and then spit them out on the documents, unplugged the computers, flooded the washrooms, yanked out the telephone lines, and rode up and down in the elevator until it stal
led. At Tina’s suggestion, Gregory hired an illegal Salvadoran immigrant to watch David, but she lasted only four days. She was the first of a long line of nursemaids who filed through the house, leaving scarcely a trace. To hell with traumas, I’d give him a good spanking, Carmen recommended by telephone, although she had never had reason to spank Dai. Instead, Gregory consulted a child psychiatrist, who counseled a special school for children with problem behavior, prescribed pills to calm him and immediate treatment, because, as he explained, the emotional wounds of early childhood leave ineradicable scars.
“And in passing, I suggest that you enter therapy yourself; you need it more than David. If you don’t correct your own problems, you won’t be able to help your son,” but Reeves discarded that idea without a second thought. He had been brought up in an atmosphere in which psychiatry was not in the vocabulary, and he still believed that men should solve their own problems.
Gregory and Shannon went to court to fight for the custody of their son. At the beginning she wouldn’t even discuss giving up the child, but in the mediation sessions she realized that a trial would hurt David even more and every detail of her personal life would come out. Finally she relented and turned him over to his father.
That was a difficult year for Gregory Reeves. This is the height of your bad fortune; you don’t have to worry now because the future will be much easier, Olga assured him later, as she was trying to convince him of the efficacy of crystals in counteracting bad luck. Calamity followed calamity, as the fragile equilibrium of his reality crumbled. One morning a distraught Mike Tong came into his office to tell him that he owed the bank more than he could possibly pay, that interest payments were strangling the firm, and that the expenditures for his divorce were still outstanding. The women Reeves had taken out for years were disappearing one by one as it became their turn to know David; none had the strength of character to share Gregory with his unruly offspring. It was not the first time Reeves had been besieged by adversity, but now he had the added burden of caring for his son. He woke early in order to pick up the house, prepare breakfast, listen to the news, plan dinner, and dress the boy; he left David at school once the prescribed sedatives had taken effect; then he drove to the city. Those forty minutes of commuting were his only peaceful time during the day. As he drove between the proud towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, which looked like tall, lacquer-red Chinese bell towers, with the dark mirror of the bay crisscrossed by pleasure and fishing boats on one side and the elegant skyline of San Francisco before him, he remembered his father. The most beautiful place in the world, he had called the city. Reeves gave his attention to the music on the radio, trying to keep his mind a blank, seldom successfully because of the interminable list of pending responsibilities. Tina made all his appointments early in the day so he could pick up David at four; he took documents home, intending to work on them in the evening, but never had the time; he could not have imagined that a child could occupy so much space, make so much noise, or need so much attention. For the first time, he felt sorry for Shannon. Besides David, there were his pets, and it was the father’s job to wash out the fish tank, feed the mice, clean the parakeets’ cage, and walk the yellow sheep dog they had named Oliver in memory of Gregory’s first friend.
“You were stupid to let this happen. You shouldn’t have bought this zoo in the first place,” Carmen said.
“You could have warned me earlier; there’s nothing I can do now.”
“Yes there is; give away the dog, let the birds and mice loose, and throw the fish in the toilet. Everyone will be the winner.”
Papers piled up on the boxes that served as bed tables. Reeves had to abandon his travels and delegate cases in other cities to his associates, who were not always sober or sane and who made costly errors. The business lunches ended, the golf games, the opera, the evenings out dancing with women in his black book, the drinking bouts with Timothy Duane; he did not even go to the movies, because David could not be left alone. Videos were no solution, because David would watch only movies with monsters or extreme violence, the bloodier the better. Sickened by so much death and torture and zombies and wolf-men and extraterrestrial treachery, Gregory tried to introduce David to musical comedies and animated cartoons, but he was totally bored by both. It was impossible to invite friends to the house; David accepted no one, thought that anyone who came near his father was a threat, and had jealous kicking fits that invariably precipitated the flight of the guest. Occasionally, if he was going to a party or had a date with an interesting conquest, Gregory got someone to watch the boy for a few hours, but he always returned to a house leveled by a hurricane and a baby-sitter on the verge of nervous collapse. The only person with enough patience and endurance was King Benedict, who turned out to have a gift for baby-sitting and who himself enjoyed the video games and horror movies. He lived a long distance away, however, and after all was as disabled as his ward. Gregory was always uneasy when he left the two alone, and hurried home, imagining the infinite disasters that could befall them in his absence. Weekends were devoted entirely to his son, to cleaning the house, marketing, making repairs, changing the straw for the mice, and scooping out the fish he tended to find floating on the top of the tank because David threw whatever was at hand into the water. Even when he was asleep, Gregory was pursued by unpaid debts, back taxes, and the possibility of finding himself in a devastating lawsuit; he lacked confidence in his associates, and he himself had been negligent with some of his clients. As the last straw, he had to cancel his legal insurance because he could not make the payments; this horrified Mike Tong, who prophesied financial catastrophe and argued that practicing without insurance protection was suicidal. Reeves was running out of money, strength, and time. He was exhausted and longed for a little solitude and silence; at the least he needed a week at the beach, but it was impossible to travel with David. Donate him to a laboratory, they always need children for their experiments, suggested Timothy Duane, who refused to come to his friend’s house for fear of encountering the child. Gregory’s head was jangling with noise, as during the worst days of the war; calamity stalked him from every side. He began to drink too much and was constantly plagued by his allergies, gasping as if his lungs were filled with cotton. Alcohol produced a brief euphoria and then plunged him into lingering melancholy; the next morning he awakened with flushed skin, a buzzing in his ears, and swollen eyes. For the first time in his life he felt that his body was betraying him; until then he had made fun of the California fanaticism for keeping fit. To Reeves, health was like the color of your skin, something permanently allocated at birth and therefore not worth discussing. He had never worried about cholesterol, refined sugar, or saturated fats; he was as indifferent to the digestive tract and fiber as to the mania for tanning oil or jogging—unless you had to get somewhere in a hurry. He was convinced that he would never have time to get sick and would die of a sudden attack, not old age.
For the first time, his interest in women flagged; this caused some concern, but at the same time he felt relieved: on the one hand he feared the loss of his virility, but, on the other, he knew his life would have been easier without that obsession. He had fewer and fewer rendezvous; they were reduced to hasty encounters during the day, because in the evenings he had to be home with David. Sexuality, like hunger or sleep, became a necessity that was to be immediately satisfied; he was not a man for long preambles, and his desire had a certain tone of desperation.
“I’m getting fussy. It must be age,” he commented to Carmen one day.
“It’s about time. I don’t understand how a man who is so selective in his clothes and music and books, who takes pleasure in a good restaurant, buys the best wines, travels first class, and stays at luxury hotels, can run around with such turkeys.”
“Don’t exaggerate; some of them aren’t so bad,” he replied, but deep down he knew Carmen was right: he still had much to learn about women. The only pleasure in which he took his time, consciously prolonging the experien
ce, was music. During the night, when he could not sleep and was too impatient to read, he lay on the bed staring into the darkness and listening to a sonata.
At the end of March, Nora Reeves died of pneumonia. Or it may have been that she had been dying little by little for more than forty years and no one had noticed. In recent years her mind wandered along winding spiritual paths, and so she would not lose her way she carried the invisible orange of The Infinite Plan everywhere she went. Judy asked her not to carry it when they left the house; she didn’t want people to think her mother had her hand out to beg. Nora thought she was seventeen years old and living in a white palace where she was visited by her sweetheart, Charles Reeves, who appeared every teatime wearing a cowboy hat; he brought with him a tame serpent and a bag of tools to repair the world’s imperfections. These visits were as regular as those he had paid every Thursday since the day long ago when the ambulance took him away to the other world. Nora’s last illness began with an intermittent fever, and when she passed into a twilight world, Judy and her husband took her to the hospital. She was there two weeks, so frail she seemed nearly to have evaporated, but Gregory insisted his mother was not dying. He installed a sound system in her room so she could listen to her opera records, observed her feet moving slightly to the rhythm, and saw something like a baby’s involuntary smile on her lips: conclusive proof that she did not mean to go.