I’ll give Peter a blow job right after rocking Byron to sleep, she decided. I can always masturbate later.
“MARKET’S CLOSED,” Sammy said in the manner of a public-address announcer at Yankee Stadium.
Joe, Sammy’s father, Eric’s boss, pushed his chair away from his Quotron. “A good day,” he judged. Joe had a pompous voice to accompany his stolid figure and unsmiling face. “I’m going for a walk,” he said, and strolled to the door like a king wandering out of his castle. “I’ll be back at four forty-five. Sammy, have the totals ready.”
“I’ve already got ’em!” Sammy said, his leg hopping nervously, always the eager son ready to anticipate demands.
That stopped Joe. “Indeed?” he said, “The numbers change right up to close—”
Sammy smiled triumphantly; outperforming his father’s expectations was his ultimate satisfaction. “I keep a running total using the spread sheet. Up-to-date every thirty seconds. Want the numbers now?”
Joe shook his head no. “Very impressive. Print them out for later.”
Sammy grinned at Eric — exhausted Eric, red-eyed Eric, disgusted Eric, weary of life and of defeat and of these two and their repetitive psychological conflicts.
Joe continued to the door. “Very impressive.” He opened the door. “But unnecessary.” And left.
“Fuck you!” Sammy said, furious, without any irony or self-consciousness.
Eric tried to explain. “He just pretends he’s not pleased, Sammy. He’s very proud of you.”
“He doesn’t want to give me the satisfaction. He’s a son of a bitch!”
Irene, Joe’s secretary for thirty years, got up from her position at the phones. “Sammy!” she warned, like an indulgent aunt.
“Oh, shut up!” Sammy screamed, a spoiled nephew, casually insulting, confident of clemency. “Come on,” he said to Eric. Sammy got up and beckoned Eric to the one private room in the fifteen hundred square feet Joe had leased from Bear Stearns. This private corner room, which had a sweeping view of the southern end of Manhattan, was ostensibly Joe’s, although he stayed in the main room with Sammy and Eric for most of the day.
“I have to go home,” Eric said, but with hopelessness in his tone.
“Ten minutes!” Sammy said. “The baby can wait ten minutes.”
Dutifully, Eric rose. He had been in the chair since lunch. He had to steady himself on the desk for a moment, his circulatory system shocked by the change, and then went into Joe’s office. Sammy shut the door. “You know where he went?” Sammy said, his face in a sneer of contempt.
“Your dad?”
“No, Reggie Jackson! Yeah, asshole!”
“For a walk. He’s gone for a walk after the close ever since I’ve known him.”
“He goes to get laid.”
Eric had gotten his first job at the age of eighteen clerking for Joe at Bear Stearns. It was temporary, a summer job, but Joe had adopted Eric, kept him on as his assistant, and taken him along three years later, when Joe opened his own firm. Thus Sammy treated Eric as if he were a brother and Eric felt obliged to listen to his troubles. But he was tired. Eric rubbed his forehead to keep awake. He had averaged three hours of sleep a night since Luke’s birth four weeks ago. He was making trading mistakes right and left. Eric hadn’t come up with art idea for his, or Joe’s, client list since Nina went into labor. He had been passing along Joe’s picks. And Joe was hot, his trades finding fast profits in a sluggish market. Only Joe’s belief in family, and especially in fathering a son, had prevented Joe from castigating Eric and confiscating his commissions. Under normal circumstances, with Eric fallow, Joe would demand half of Eric’s commissions — all on the days Eric had been absent. Instead, benignly, Joe had let Eric mooch off his brain without compensation, asking careful questions about Luke’s health, passing along remedies for colic from his wife, Ceil. Joe’s uncharacteristic benevolence toward Eric, a pardon given because of Eric’s new stature as a father, had turned Joe’s gruff paternal face to reveal a tender profile: he believes in fatherhood, Eric now knew, he really loves Sammy.
Eric used to feel completely sympathetic to Sammy’s fits of temper about his father, believing that Joe had crushed his son’s self-confidence in boyhood and kept Sammy working in the firm as his final act of sadism. Eric had forgiven Sammy his adolescent behavior toward Joe, the combination of worship and hate, although it was sick in a twenty-five-year-old, because he thought Sammy a victim.
Now Eric wondered — because of the mewing, unhappy Luke at home — whether Joe hadn’t merely been an unlucky father, and was doing his best to help Sammy; angry, to be sure, at the weak product of his loins, but with a fury that concealed love and protectiveness. Until the birth of Luke, Eric had perceived the son as the victim and given him a moral blank check to write punishing amounts against the father; he wasn’t sure anymore and wished he had never allowed Sammy to confide in him. Eric rubbed his forehead. He wanted to go home. “What are you talking about?”
“Pop!” Sammy said, happy to be full of knowledge, even if the news was bad. “He goes to a whorehouse every day at four.”
“You don’t know that!” Eric yelled. Sammy looked surprised. Sammy was used to the reverse: Eric enjoying it when Sammy spat at the idol; hating it when Sammy worshiped.
“Yeah, I do!” Sammy exclaimed in an aggrieved teenager’s voice. “I followed him when you were out playing papa. He went to the same place every day, a dingy little building by the river. In, out. So I checked. It’s a whorehouse.” Sammy reached into his pants, leaned against the door, and took out a vial of cocaine. “Can you imagine that? Mr. Pious.” Sammy lifted a little hill of powder out of the container with a miniature spoon. A baby’s spoon, Eric thought. Sammy pressed one nostril closed and snorted the drug into the other, replenished the spoon, and repeated the procedure for the neglected one. Sammy offered the vial.
Eric shook his head no and tried to picture Joe fucking a prostitute: proud Joe, his big head squashed onto a square, stocky body, squinting skeptically at the world, like a Jewish owl commanding a Wasp barn; wise, arrogant, petty, vain, cold Joe — with his pants off, humping a twenty-year-old in hot pants.
Sammy urged Eric again with the vial. “Keep you up for the baby.”
“No, I’ll be too wrecked later.”
“Get yourself some for home, you cheap bastard. Keep you going through the night.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to raise a kid on coke. Besides, I can’t afford it.”
“Oh, this is gonna be great! I’m gonna get myself another job.”
Eric thought: ignore him, get up and go. Instead: “Why? ’Cause I don’t want a hit?”
“You need this stuff. You’re fuckin’ dead on your feet. You haven’t had a decent pick in three weeks.”
“Fine. I’ll have a hit tomorrow morning. I don’t want to go home stoned.”
Sammy looked at his watch. “Pop’s probably getting his cock sucked right now.”
“This is sick, Sammy. Why don’t you go out and get laid? Stop thinking about your father’s prick and take care of your own.”
Sammy put the drug back in his pocket. “My poor mother,” he said, with eagerness, not regret. “What a husband.”
Eric left the office before Joe returned. He rode his bike back home; that had replaced swimming as his daily exercise. Near Canal Street Eric began to feel woozy and almost got hit by a cab when he weaved making a turn onto Sixth Avenue. His heart pounded from the fright and he paused before continuing.
Eric didn’t want to believe Sammy’s story about Joe. Not that he thought going to a prostitute was so bad. The routine, every day at four for half an hour, although ludicrous on the surface, seemed the worst thing about it — treating sex as something which could be regulated, like evacuation, just a necessary daily body function.