One night, in her English class at CCB, she was struck by a particular F. Scott Fitzgerald quote shared by the teacher, about the test of a first-rate intellect being the ability to hold two conflicting thoughts without going insane. She carried it back to Felix, another tribute to drop at his feet, like a house cat with a mouse.
“So you must have a first-rate mind,” she said. “If you think you can really love two women at the same time.”
She assumed he would at least have the courtesy to say that he loved her best but couldn’t leave his wife while the children were young. Or that Bambi wouldn’t give him a divorce under any circumstances. Once he had told her he could never marry a shiksa, but she had fixed that problem. So what was holding him up?
“Yes siree,” she said, trying to keep her tone light. “You and F. Scott Fitzgerald, two first-rate intellects for the ages.”
“Who says I’m not crazy?” Felix said, kissing the top of her head.
March 9, 2012
Sandy decided to call it a day after talking to No-Longer-Tubby Schroeder. One of the perks of being a consultant was making his own hours. The downside was that those hours could never be overtime. Work as much or as little as he wanted. Didn’t matter, no one cared. He earned a flat rate, no benefits.
But it filled the evenings, reading the Julie Saxony file, and he found himself gravitating back to it even as the days were growing longer. It was really two stories, parallel universes. A missing woman from Havre de Grace. A dead woman in Leakin Park. Fitting, he thought, for a woman with two lives-Juliet Romeo, Variety headliner. Julie Saxony, respectable business owner, valued member of the Havre de Grace Merchants Association, which had put up a reward when she disappeared.
He rubbed his eyes. Even now, after two years, the house ached with quiet. Not that Mary had been a loud person, quite the opposite. Nor had Bobby Junior been noisy, not by a child’s standards. When he was a toddler, Sandy and Mary had called him the colonel, mistaking his silence for dignity. Who knew, back then, what could be going on in a kid’s head? Mary knew. She always knew, even before the trouble started. She kept it to herself as long as possible, outright lying to pediatricians and teachers and, eventually, Sandy. So when Bobby’s problems started, about age six or so, they seemed to come out of nowhere. But it was just that Mary had papered over them for so long. For someone who usually couldn’t tell a mild fib, she had been a disturbingly good liar when it came to Bobby Junior.
Then there were the five hard years, the years when they fought about what to do, only to have the decision made for them: Bobby needed to go away. It was an ugly truth, but a truth nonetheless, that Sandy had been happy to have Mary all to himself again when Bobby was sent to “school.” Maybe if Bobby Junior had been different, normal, Sandy wouldn’t have felt that way. How could he ever know what he would feel? His kid was born different, not right. The fact that Mary still gloried in Bobby Junior was the essence of Mary, the reason Sandy loved her so much. After all, she had gloried in him, too, despite his flaws, the mistakes that her parents said made him unsuitable as a husband. He was just grateful that the decision about Bobby was taken out of their hands, that they could stop fighting over it.
Mary wasn’t. But she rallied because that’s what she did and Sandy thought they had a pretty good time after that. Thank God her family had the money to pay for Bobby’s care, set up a trust. There wasn’t enough cop overtime in the world to pay for that kind of thing.
The Saxony file was open on the dining-room table, all the various pieces spread out. He started gathering them up, not because he was a neat freak, but because he knew the mere act of organizing a set of papers could highlight something he hadn’t considered yet. It was as if his fingers knew things, but they couldn’t show him unless they were moving, touching. He had to think it was similar for carpenters and writers, and he knew it was the same for chefs. It was a kind of muscle memory, ingrained by years of doing a thing. The body led, the mind followed. He was good at being a murder police and proud of being good at it. But was it so wrong that he had hoped to be good at something else in his lifetime?
Sandy’s retirement, almost ten years ago, had been full of promise. He had stayed on the job longer than most, making it to thirty years of service. But he was only fifty-two then and he had no intention of truly retiring. Almost no one who left the department did. They went to other government jobs, or into private security. Some of his older friends were double-dipping now, drawing two government pensions and their Social Security. They lived well.
But Sandy had a different idea for his retirement, a dream he had nurtured for years. He had wanted to open a restaurant, an authentic Cuban one that would serve the dishes of his childhood. There was no place in Baltimore that really did it right, and don’t even mention the Buena Vista Social Club to him, which was basically a great location that served nachos. Nachos! Sandy was going to make arroz con pollo and plantains and real Cuban coffee. People who had eaten in Miami’s best-known Cuban restaurants said Sandy’s food was as good, better.
And maybe it was, but that didn’t change the fact that no one came. If a plantain falls in the forest and no one’s there to eat it-he still had nightmares, thinking about the waste, the uneaten food, the not-special-to-anyone specials.
The location was good, or should have been. Mary-she was always up for whatever he wanted-found a storefront on Hampden’s Thirty-sixth Street, not far from their Medfield home. Hampden was gentrifying at a fast clip at the time, although, like most Baltimore neighborhoods, it never turned the corner all the way. But real estate was going up, up, up in a way that had never happened in Baltimore. It seemed so smart to extend themselves to buy the building, with a long-term eye toward renovating the upstairs for apartments. Within six months of the purchase, the building was worth twice as much as they had paid for it. Except they hadn’t really paid for it. They had put nothing down, borrowed 110 percent. Everyone was doing it.
Seven years later, when he went to sell the building, it was worth about 60 percent of the debt they were carrying. They had never established any real equity because they had used a second mortgage-and a third and a fourth and then cash from the money that Mary’s parents left her when they died, money outside the trust set up for Bobby Junior-for improvements to the restaurant. They sold it in a short sale, the most excruciatingly long process Sandy had ever endured at the time, although Mary’s allegedly fast cancer took half the time and felt longer still. Sometimes, watching television, Sandy came across a rerun of Seinfeld about a Pakistani guy who runs a restaurant that’s always empty and it’s played for laughs, being a sitcom and all, and all Sandy wanted to do was throw a brick at the TV set. Maybe running a failing business is funny when you’re a millionaire comedian, but when you lived it, the jokes didn’t come so fast.
Sandy was that rare person who understood he didn’t have much of a sense of humor. He had faked it well enough at work, knowing when to laugh, even getting a good line off every now and then, but he wasn’t inclined to see the funny side of things, and life didn’t tempt him to change his point of view.