“No.”
“Well, you are,” he said. “In fact, right now, as we speak, you and I, you’re the nineteenth-richest person in Washington State. Give or take,” he added, “your net worth is four hundred forty million dollars.”
I said, “Who’s the joker?”
Sides chuckled a third time. “Your friend Barry,” he answered. “He named you in his will.”
I didn’t answer. I sat there thinking, like an English teacher, that even $440 million didn’t stand between me and annihilation. “Feature this,” urged Sides. “Right now your projected investment income for ’06, from dividends and interest alone, is twenty-two million.”
I laughed—or should I say I snorted skeptically. Sides plucked a document from his desk and, after sliding on glasses, read, “‘I, John William Worthington Barry, a resident of Clallam County, Washington, and a citizen of the United States, declare this to be my Last Will and revoke all my prior wills and codicils.’ Et cetera. He leaves you everything.”
Sides put the will back on his desk, set the glasses on it, joined his hands in his lap, and, swiveling again, smiled at me. “Forget about the recorder,” he said. “I can’t make it work.”
I said, “You’re sure about this?”
“Trust me, Neil.”
“Have you told anyone?”
Sides pointed toward his door, next to which hung a framed reproduction of a World War II poster, a stark, Cubist depiction of a burning ship half beneath the waves above the tongue-twisting and cautionary caption LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS.
I said, “So do you do a lot of wills?”
“I don’t do wills at all.”
“But this will is good? Because you hear about ‘bad’ wills. You hear about contested wills. You—”
“As in Anna Nicole Smith,” said Sides. “But you’re not Playmate of the Year.”
A jetliner was passing behind him now, and because I was in the Columbia Center, or not merely in the tower but on its seventy-first floor, I felt the presence, or convergence, of terrorism icons. I also noticed on the sill to Sides’s left a plastic box of golf balls. That’s when it hit me—that Sides was the lawyer from Eugene who’d freed John William from Seaside’s jail in the summer of ’74—that he was, according to an aerogramme I got in Europe that August, John William’s “pro-bono savior.” I even remembered John William’s phrase about him—“pissed about the right stuff.” Now I watched Sides brush the dust from his loafer; maybe the advance of morning light had brought this dust to his attention. I said, “Ivan Gempler.”
“You’re definitely the guy,” Sides replied. “Those are some magic words.”
BESIDES Federal Environmental Laws 2005, the 2004 Revised Code of Washington, and Salzburg’s Federal Evidence Update, Sides kept on his desk a fake oversized martini stir stick complete with fake plastic olives. This he rotated between the fingers of his right hand while telling me how he’d met John William. “Summer of ’74,” he said, “I went to work for the Oregon Wilderness Coalition, out of Eugene. Mostly what we did was keep clear-cuts on hold during back-and-forth appeals. You know, paper warriors—we kept trees standing for an extra nine months. Anyway, we were constantly sending students out to inventory timber sales and roadless areas. I did a lot of legwork myself. I was involved in inventories of the Rogue and Ump-qua. A bunch of us worked out of the Survival Center at U of O. I started in organizing—I was a field organizer all up and down Lane County. This turned out to be my talent—bringing people together. I signed up recruits, which was easier than you might expect in a community where you could get fifteen hundred people out to a save-the-trees march. To bring you to my point, it was through my work as an organizer that I met your guy Barry. I found him in a jail cell,” he said, “on the coast near Seaside, and I gave him a lift to Eugene. You got it right—he called himself ‘Ivan Gempler,’ and did Ivan Gempler ever smell bad. And talk a lot. Rabid. I mean, to the point that I regretted having him in my car.” Sides slumped a little farther in his chair, with that far-flung sky behind him. He said, “I dropped him off at this tepee and got him work counting deadwood. I got him a paying gig building trail through some old growth where we wanted to get politicians in to see the trees. He was good. He was reliable. He was into it. He got the point. Lane County Audubon needed some spotted-owl counters, so they could challenge a timber sale under NEPA regulations, and I sent them Gempler. I sent him to the Wilderness Society. I even got out there with him once on something, but you know what? He drove me nuts. His mouth was always open. There are people who like to have conversations, and then there are people who like to talk—your guy was the latter. I mean,” said Sides, “you’re in a tent after a long day of putting miles on your boots, and your tent-mate has to sit yogi-style on his sleeping bag so he can lecture you at two in the morning about whatever’s in his head—except, for whatever reason, your guy didn’t have a sleeping bag. Instead, he had a blanket that was more like a hairshirt, and scary, because it looked loaded with lice; hygiene was not your guy’s specialty.”
“No.”
Sides slid his chair forward. “What was it with ‘Gempler’?” he asked. “How do you explain him?”
“I don’t.”
Sides smiled. “But you’ll take his money.”
I shrugged, and Sides added, “I mean that in a good way. Because you don’t have to get him to be his heir, do you? He just has to get you.”
Sides nodded as if in affirmation of his own point and said, “Off the subject. I lost contact with ‘Gempler.’ I didn’t see or hear from him for two and a half years. I got involved with some things in San Francisco, and then I joined a firm up here. We were in the Hoge Building, on the fifth floor, and Gempler comes to see me. Unannounced, right? I get a call from the receptionist saying there’s an Ivan Gempler. No beard now. No appointment. This is March of ’77. This is twenty-nine years ago or thereabouts. I come out to the foyer and he says, ‘Found you in the phone book.’ I tell him fine and try to work him out the door, try to get him to see I’m a big-deal lawyer. No dice. We end up in my office. He’s got all these documents in a bag—birth certificate, driver’s license, bank stuff—and he shows them to me, so I find out he’s not Ivan Gempler.
“Okay,” said Sides. “It’s John William Worthington Barry’s twenty-first birthday, and he wants a will. I tell him I practice environmental law—I don’t do wills. But he’s got this thing about me. He doesn’t want somebody else. So”—Sides threw up his hands—“I did it.”
“His will.”
“Here it is,” said Sides. “All kosher. Two witnesses. No holes. Very simple. I’ve held it for twenty-nine years.”
But it was still hard to believe. And I couldn’t think of anything to say anymore. Who were the eighteen richer than me, besides Bill Gates and Howard Schultz? I thought of checking Forbes’s list. I said, “Isn’t there some kind of stair race here?”
“Leukemia and Lymphoma Society,” said Sides. “Top time right now is in your age group. Believe it or not, a guy named Wiggles-worth, who has it down to under eight minutes. Last year, we had a guy age ninety-nine do it in twenty. But look—just pay someone to do it for you.”
I said, “I’ve never been here before. But I did read The 9/11 Commission Report. This building was targeted.”
Sides shrugged. “I know why they hate us,” he said. “I hate us, too.” And he added that this particular Columbia Center was soon to be outstripped in height by a new one being built in Manhattan, which would include not only an architectural spire but a wind turbine, LED lights, and a gray-water system. “It doesn’t change anything,” he said.
His screensaver, on dual monitors, roiled like the colored mineral oil in the lava lamp Carol used to keep in her bedroom. I said, “So what’s the next step?”
“You celebrate,” said Sides. “And then I cultivate you as a client until you put me on retainer.”
“Okay.”
“Welcome to my world,” said Sides.
> 8
PERIODIC IRRITABLE CRYING
AS IT TURNED OUT, no prosecutor was angry with me for failing to report the death of a missing person or for interring my friend in a cave twenty-two years ago, so I was rich with no strings attached, and print syndication loved the figure involved: $440 million. I was even in tabloids, which Jamie calls “comeuppance”: in fact, MUMMY BEQUEATHES MILLIONS! is now framed and hung on the wall of my garret. By May, at school, my nickname was Bling. One student asked me if I was going in for a grill and suggested platinum caps and princess diamonds. I was encouraged to change my ride, too—to get off my bicycle and get in an Escalade. A foreign-exchange student from Serbia-Montenegro asked me for a loan, explaining that his mother was dying and that he needed a plane ticket. Wiley started letting me pay for pizza after tennis. Carol urged me toward international travel—she suggested a trek in Nepal, or a visit to the Lake District for a dalliance with Wordsworth. My friend the classicist harangued me relentlessly with predictions about my “sybaritic future.” Someone I went to high school with called to say we should have lunch, on him, at a sushi house near his brokerage. My cousin Colin asked me to consider investing in a short plat. I invited him over, and we sat in my garret drinking porter and talking about Keith, who died two years ago, at fifty-three. We also discussed my father’s 1950 Westcraft trailer, which Colin wanted to rebuild with a friend in the sheet-metal trade and pull behind his truck during deer-and-elk season. Inevitably, we got tanked. Colin said I’d won the lottery. He asked if I’d heard of Billie Bob Harrell, who committed suicide after winning $31 million in Texas. The next morning, I Googled Billie Bob Harrell and ended up printing a Web page—“Tips for the Latest Instant Millionaire.” There were ten, and the last was: “Move away. And not just out of town. We’re talking out of state, possibly out of the country. You can’t expect to keep a lid on your secret forever; information wants to be free. Maybe buy a modest house with a good alarm system in a gated community with a private security force. That ought to minimize the solicitors at your door. Also be sure to get an unlisted phone number.”
I forwarded this to Jamie, who in the face of so much money is like me—surfing for cautionary tales and worried about the dark side of luck. “Big question,” she said. “Do we just laugh it off? I’m leery and sort of paranoid now. Not as screwed up as this Billie Bob guy, but leery, you know, because, basically, I’ve been happy without a private security force.”
It must be said again, though, that she’s stopped appraising real estate. As for me, as of the first week of September, I’ll be—technically—on leave from teaching. It’s a one-year arrangement, meant to keep the door open, although I’m 99.9 percent sure I don’t need it open. And that’s fine. I did my stint. Someone else will take over in Room 104, and really, it won’t matter very much to anybody except me.
Meanwhile, the ringers are off on our phones. The dog barks when someone knocks at the door. I have a post-office box now, and I’m careful with my e-mail address. I’ve also been reading more about the Gnostics, and have made it through the Hans Jonas book John William once pressed on me, though not, I confess, with complete understanding. “Dread as the soul’s response to being in the world,” Jonas says, “is a recurrent theme in Gnostic literature.” It’s a theme for me, too, even though each day, doing nothing whatsoever, I make over $60,000.
Yesterday I went to Rite-Aid and deliberated for a long time on whether or not to buy nonprescription glasses good for reading fine print. They were under $10. I’m guessing—I haven’t calculated it—that I made at least a hundred times that in interest during the time it took me to decide to buy the glasses. I could go on, but the point is, I’m still a skinflint and a bank-book watcher. For me, no risky investments. I don’t mind staying even with inflation—in fact, it’s all right with me if I lose ground. Nothing tangible has changed, except that I have time now, to write, walk, and think, and a new set of things to worry about, like what money’s going to do to our sons.
A few days after the Seattle Times ran my picture, I got a letter from Lucy Hatch—now Lucy Hatch-Myers—the woman with the silver pageboy who had once been Dorothy Worthington’s chargé d’affaires. “How glad I am,” she wrote, “to see how things turned out, as I am the executor of Dorothy Worthington’s estate and have followed her instructions as scrupulously as possible, despite her daughter’s lawyers…. The fact that there was no death certificate for John William denied them leverage…. I will admit to holding that money in trust in part to thwart Ginnie, since Dorothy was adamant that her daughter not see a dime…. It was my plan that upon Ginnie’s demise I would allow the trust to go into probate…. She absolutely loathes me…. I hadn’t expected that John William’s remains would be discovered or that a will would emerge…. I do hazily remember you moving the Bösendorfer…. My only regret is that Ginnie succeeded in corralling the majority of the artwork…. The entire Highlands collection was spirited off to Taos…. At any rate, the majority of Dorothy’s estate remained intact and is in your hands now…. Incidentally, my niece had you for Modern American Lit. her junior year…. How very bizarre this is, bizarre and wonderful.”
REMORSE—AND NOTORIETY—finally led me to Rand Barry. I called him right after the news broke about his son, but his reaction was so geriatrically cryptic—“What did you say your name was again?” and “I have no idea what you’re talking about”—that I immediately wrote him a letter, too, explaining my role in what happened to John William and apologizing for what I’d not done and done, right down to raiding his liquor cabinet. No reply, but then came the news about my millions, and it seemed important to call Rand again. This time, he said he welcomed the chance to talk to me, so one day, after school, I pedaled downtown and met with him—an old man bent beneath a buzzardlike dowager’s hump—in a private den at the Rainier Club. We had to dodder indecisively first—the leather armchairs of the Curtis Reading Room? the well-lit ambience of the Kirtland Cutter Room?—before settling on our discreet lair at the end of a hallway. A white-jacketed server, a college kid with the well-bred look of someone imagined by Ralph Lauren, led us there, then patrolled our retreat for empty glasses and to see if the mixed-nuts bowl needed filling. Otherwise, this zone of wainscoting and overstuffed couches, gilded portraiture and highbacked chairs, inspired—in me at least—a midafternoon sleepiness, and lent our proceedings an air of machination. Its well-conditioned air was oppressively inert, and from its walls a gallery of pitiless faces, both painted and photographed, seemed somehow to urge both profiteering and snoozing. These were Seattle’s past financial leaders—Hemphills, Millers, Stimsons, Winns, Boyds, Shorts, Prices, Bests—most looking grim about posterity. Among them stood Ben Ehrlichman in ten-button spats, alongside his nephew John Ehrlichman in short pants—the John Ehrlichman who would one day direct Nixon’s “plumbers’ unit.” So we were watched over, Rand Barry and I, by capitalists and at least one crook.
Mr. Barry, short of breath merely sitting, tried to straighten his tie by rummaging through the folds of his shirt front. I couldn’t help noticing the brevity of his torso, or its rounded collapse; his slacks were pulled high so that the distance from his wattles to his belt buckle seemed a matter of inches, and this shirt swath, which included part of his tie—the lower two-thirds was pooled in his lap—appeared rumpled in a way he couldn’t address. The futility and blindness of his effort, the absentmindedness of it—you would guess that as a younger man he hadn’t been handy, that screwing in a light-bulb might have tested his dexterity (though I did know already how much he’d loved a boat’s tiller and, by inference, the complicated trim and tackle that goes with sailing). Such native haplessness was in his face, too, though his face was most prominently stringent and severe—and, in default, torqued by consternation. Those spots old people suffer, from too much sun? Mr. Barry’s had been burned off, leaving crimson silhouettes on his cheeks and temples, shades of aborted precancerous lesions (but their removal might also have been due to vanit
y). His eyebrows, like Pierre Salinger’s, looked steel-wool-ish, a feature that ought to make a man appear merry but that made Mr. Barry seem irrational and fierce, ready to deliver a reprimand or an order. Finally, by some dermal distress, his earlobes were scabbed, and his skull, scrimmed by a few well-pomaded hairs, was liver-spotted and knotty. The picture of age, decline, and desiccation, and though there was nothing to be done about it all, the hand befuddled and restless at his shirt front belied a soul who raged against that, however feebly. Yet to no avail. Mr. Barry’s Argyle dress socks had slipped, and a sliver of his purple shins showed. His ankles, where they disappeared into his shined and buffed wingtips, put me in mind of stilts.
His infirmity seemed to me an opening. On the other hand, he’d been a Boeing executive—a vice-president in sales late in his career, and before that a project engineer—so some tincture of past authority still clung to him. Sure enough, while I vacillated, Mr. Barry took the initiative, insisting that I run down the facts of my life, which I did, in brief, beginning by reminding him that I’d chatted with him in his backyard in the summer of ’74, and ending by giving him the name, at his request, of the school where I worked for twenty-six years. “English teacher,” he observed. “I myself am not well read. I did recently complete In the Heart of the Sea by an author called Nathaniel Philbrick, which is a wonderful account of the whaleship Essex, and before that I enjoyed reading the book by Alfred Lansing on Ernest Shackleton’s voyage to Antarctica in 1914 and ’15. So I do read. Not often novels. But I am not an illiterate philistine entirely. I got out Main Street last March and took a stab at it and found it enlightening and entertaining, and earlier this spring I completed reading the Arthur Miller play Death of a Salesman.”