“How much what? ”
“How much? If I was to give you a bill of what you owe this agency, how much should I make it out for?”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Yes.”
“I think you do. I think you understand perfectly. The music house is a paper company, Charles. It doesn’t exist. It exists only to make illegal profits from this agency. So if I want those profits back — how much do I need to ask you for?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’ve uncovered some kind of scam here . . .”
“Look, Charles . . .” And now Barry didn’t seem the slightest bit uncomfortable anymore. He seemed right in his element. “Look—if you pay us back the money, there’s a chance this won’t end up in court. That you won’t end up in court. Are you following me? Not that that would be my decision. If it was up to me, I’d throw you in jail. But since I’m the company comptroller, money’s kind of close to my heart, right? Eliot feels differently. Fine.”
Eliot feels differently. I'd been wondering if Eliot knew anything yet.
“Look, maybe I suspected something . . . I thought maybe something was . . . Shouldn’t you be talking to Tom and David?”
“I talked to Tom and David. They both had plenty to say. So you want to keep fucking with me, fine, but you should know that if you keep this up, Eliot will reconsider his decision. Why? Because I'll tell him to. They don’t want the bad publicity — I understand. But they want their money back. And you know something? When it comes to money versus a momentary smudge on their reputation, they’ll take the money. Trust me on this.”
It was clear I had a decision to make. I could admit taking the twenty thousand dollars. I could even pay the twenty thousand dollars back — if Deanna let me go near Anna’s Fund again, which might not be so easy. On the other hand, I had the distinct feeling Tom and David had implicated me to a greater degree than the facts actually warranted — and that Barry wasn’t going to believe twenty thousand dollars was the extent of my fraudulent activities. No, the bill was going to be higher. If I admitted anything, I decided, I was done.
“I didn’t have anything to do with this,” I said as forcefully as I could. “I don’t know what Tom and David told you, but I wouldn’t necessarily trust the word of two guys who’ve apparently been cheating you for years.”
Barry sighed. He tried to loosen his collar, an impossible task since it was already two sizes too small.
“That’s the way you want to play this,” he finally said. “Fine. Your decision. You say you’re innocent, we institute company procedures. Fine.”
“Which are . . . ?”
“We suspend you. We hold an internal investigation. We get back to you. And if I have any influence on the powers-that-be at all—we fucking arrest you. Understand, pal?”
I got up and left the office.
THIRTY-ONE
Time passed. One week, two weeks, a month.
Time I spent mostly wondering in lieu of working. I was wondering, for instance, if Deanna was ever going to forgive me and whether or not I was going to be arrested for murder or indicted for embezzlement. None of those things had happened yet. Still, there was always tomorrow.
I decided after my first day as a jobless person that I was a creature of habit and was habitually programmed to go to work in the morning. So I rode the train into Manhattan just like I always did and commuted back in the afternoons. My depressing environs had something to do with it; the furnished apartment was like a motel room without maid service. I felt a little like Goldilocks sleeping in someone else’s bed. Someone who was about to show up at any minute and demand my immediate departure. There were clues who this someone was — little relics of actual habitation left behind in this now sterile desert.
A paperback, for example. A dog-eared copy of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. But was it a Martian or a Venutian who’d once owned it? It was hard to say.
A toothbrush discovered behind the stained toilet. One of those fancy ones with a curved brush for those hard-to-reach areas. Lavender. Was that considered a feminine color or a masculine color, or neither?
And in my one desk drawer: a sheet of lined paper filled with what appeared to be New Year’s resolutions. “I will try harder to meet people,” was the first one. “I will be less judgmental.” And so on. I decided the writer of this list and the owner of the book were probably one and the same, since both pointed to a devotee of rigorous self-improvement. I wondered, if Deanna was from Venus, was I from Pluto?
I visited the 42nd Street Library. I strolled the Met. I spent an entire day half sleeping in the Hayden Planetarium, waking periodically to a canopy of stars — like an astronaut coming out of suspended animation, alone in the universe and so far from home.
I made sure to call Anna every afternoon — always from my cell phone, since the elaborate cover story we’d worked out to explain my absence was that I was shooting a new ad campaign in Los Angeles. Once, I’d spent two months out there doing just that; it seemed like an excuse that might actually work.
Where are you now? Anna would ask me.
The Four Seasons pool, I'd reply.
A studio in Burbank. A street in Venice. In a rented car at the intersection of Sunset and La Cienega.
Cool, Anna would say.
Deanna had told me she didn’t wish to speak to me for a while. The torture involved how long a while that would actually turn out to be. Occasionally she would pick up when I called and I’d hope that awhile had ended right then. But she’d call out for Anna and wait silently until our daughter picked up the phone. In a way, it wasn’t that different from all our years A.D.—after diabetes—that stifling silence about things we couldn’t mention. Only there was a terrible reproof in her silence now, as opposed to just plain grief. And where before silence had been filled with the inconsequential and bland, it was now filled with the kind of quiet western movie heroes were always running into just before an ambush. It's quiet, they’d say to their amigos, too quiet.
It was late February, the Monday of my third week of banishment and joblessness, when I saw Lucinda again.
My first instinct was to hide and duck back farther into the faceless crowd. My second instinct was to say hello. Possibly because it was good to see her up and about again; it alleviated my guilt a little. Up and about and even talking to someone.
I’d wondered about her, of course. If she could ever recover from what Vasquez had done to her. I hoped so.
And now I thought that maybe she could. The rings under her eyes had gone away. She looked beautiful again; she looked like Lucinda.
I was so entirely fixated on her, it was probably a minute or so before I even took notice of whom she was talking to. Was that her husband — glimpsed briefly that day in front of the fountain at the Time-Life Building?
No. It wasn’t her husband she was talking to. This man was shorter, younger, frumpier. A fellow broker, perhaps — a friend from the neighborhood.
They seemed to be on good terms with each other, at least. They’d stopped in front of a newsstand and were engaged in a lively discussion.
I was in a kind of no-man’s-land, I realized. Neither far enough away to be invisible, nor close enough to be conversational. One look to the left and Lucinda would see me for sure — stuck in limbo, the man who’d failed her, a reminder of all she’d been through.