Max took another strawberry. His throat was dry from the champagne. “We get it!” he croaked at Brillstein. “What happened!”
“So I swallow all the bread,” Brillstein’s face widened into a grin, “and I say, ‘What’s your best offer? I’m happy to hear any number and discuss it.’ So he frowns — he looked incredibly pissed off — and he says, ‘I won’t pay more than four hundred thousand for the baby.’ ” Brillstein giggled.
Max tried to breathe through his nose. The champagne must have stuffed it. He swallowed the rest of his strawberry and looked around for a tissue.
Brillstein seemed disappointed in the response of his audience. “Isn’t that incredible? That was double what Parker had offered. So you know what I say? And this, I have to admit, was a stroke of genius on my part — I say, ‘I can’t take less than five hundred thousand to settle it at this lunch.’ ”
Debby frowned. “But you’d already agreed to—”
Brillstein almost jumped in his desire to cut her off. “Doesn’t matter! Once he offered more it was all off the table. He’s the one with the real authority to deal.”
“Of course,” Max tried to say, but there was little air to say it. His throat thickened. He sat down.
Brillstein moved to a chair opposite him and tapped him on the knee. “So Jameson looks furious, just furious, and he says, ‘Okay. Don’t want to quibble. That’s done.’ ” Brillstein spread his arms wide. “And here I made another great move. I took out my notepad and I wrote down Carla’s name and put the figure next to it and I had him look at it to see that I’ve got it right. Now it’s as good as a done deal and he can’t back out. Then he says, ‘As to the two architects I won’t go above a total package of eight million.’ ” Brillstein clapped his hands together and let his head go back to laugh at the heavens with triumph.
Max struggled to breathe. He sucked from his stomach but nothing could get in through his mouth. His throat had filled in; his nose was sealed. He looked at the box of strawberries and was scared.
When Brillstein brought his head back from his roar of victory, there were tears in his eyes. “We settled on you getting three point five million and Nan gets four point five.” Brillstein shook his head from side to side. “He’s finding out right now. He’s in his huge fucking corner office with his Harvard degree and he’s finding out that the Gloucester House lunch cost him four and a half million dollars!” Brillstein collapsed into guttural laughs.
Max’s forehead broke out into a sweat. He put his head between his knees. He saw his right hand turn blotchy red. His eyes swelled and ached. There was no way to breathe. He stared at the sanded narrow oak floor, the floors that had carried him from childhood until now, through all the duty and grief and joy of life, and he realized those same sanded boards would soon be his deathbed.
He fell.
The ceiling was flashing yellow. A terrible pain was in his ears.
He heard Brillstein shout—“Where the fuck is it! It’s in my fucking bag!”
Max tried to kick his legs but he couldn’t — they were fat columns — dead lumps.
Debby appeared. She was flushed. “Take it easy, Max,” she said.
“I don’t know where to do it!” Brillstein was shouting. “My wife knows!”
Debby’s face covered the flashing ceiling. She pulled at something. “You’re going to be all right, Max,” she said and then he saw her come at his heart with a needle. He tried to scream at her not to kill him but he couldn’t make any sound.
She injected him in the upper arm. She cradled the nape of his neck with her hand and tilted his head back. His suffocating mouth opened to her. She covered it with hers. He felt her hot breath enter his throat. The blockage was dissolved. She leaned back and smiled down at him. His nose suddenly cleared. The ceiling settled.
“You’re fine, Max,” Debby said. “Let the Adrenalin work.”
Max rested on the oak floor and breathed easily. I’m alive, he thought. His throat eased and accepted a gulp of air.
I’m alive, he rejoiced. I’m alive. And I’m afraid.
A BIOGRAPHY OF RAFAEL YGLESIAS
Rafael Yglesias (b. 1954) is a master American storyteller whose career began with the publication of his first novel at seventeen. Through four decades of writing, Yglesias has produced numerous highly acclaimed novels and screenplays, and his fiction is distinguished by its clear-eyed realism and keen insight into human behavior. His books range in style and scope from novels of ideas, psychological thrillers, and biting satires, to self-portraits and portraits of New York society.
Yglesias was born and raised in Washington Heights, a working-class neighborhood in northern Manhattan. Both his parents were writers. His father, Jose, was the son of Cuban and Spanish parents and wrote articles for the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Daily Worker, as well as novels. His mother, Helen, was the daughter of Yiddish-speaking Russian and Polish immigrants and worked as literary editor of the Nation. Rafael was educated mainly at public schools, but the Yglesiases did send him to the prestigious Horace Mann School for three years. Inspired by his parents’ burgeoning literary careers, Rafael left school in the tenth grade in order to finish his first book. The largely autobiographical Hide Fox, and All After (1972) is the story of a bright young student who drops out of private school against his parents’ wishes to pursue his artistic ambitions.
Many of Yglesias’s subsequent novels would also draw heavily from his own life experiences. Yglesias wrote The Work Is Innocent (1976), a novel that candidly examines the pressures of youthful literary success, in his early twenties. Hot Properties (1986) follows the up-and-down fortunes of young literary upstarts drawn to New York’s entertainment and media worlds. In 1977, Yglesias married artist Margaret Joskow and the couple had two sons: Matthew, now a renowned political pundit and blogger, and Nicholas, a science-fiction writer. Yglesias’s experiences as a parent in Manhattan would help shape Only Children (1988), a novel about wealthy and ambitious new parents in the city. Margaret would later battle cancer, which she died from in 2004. Yglesias chronicled their relationship in the loving, honest, and unsparing A Happy Marriage (2009).
After marrying Joskow, Ylgesias took nearly a decade away from writing novels to dedicate himself to family life. During this break from book-writing, Yglesias began producing screenplays. He would eventually have great success adapting his novel Fearless (1992), a story of trauma and recovery, into a critically acclaimed motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez. Other notable screenplays and adaptations include From Hell, Les Misérables, and Death and the Maiden. He has collaborated with such directors as Roman Polanski and the Hughes brothers.