Читать книгу The Arriviste - James Wallenstein - Страница 6

chapter one

If by 1970 I had started to slip, it wasn’t by much. To make more of the decline would be easy: exaggeration resonates in candor. My income had fallen, though not to any depth. That would have required a spectacular reversal, and, contrary impulses notwithstanding, I seem to avoid spectacular actions of any kind. I still had plenty of money in 1970, more than my neighbors could reasonably hope to come by, yet not so much anymore that I could forget them. My lawn was no longer quite big enough nor my hedges high enough.

In the little while since he had moved in, the man next door and I had had several distant encounters, tentative nods and waves from both sides of the property line. You’d have thought we were marooned soldiers uncertain whether our countries were still at war. Things between us might have begun and ended there, our curiosity satisfied by what we could see of each other—the broad, swarthy, well-groomed, well-dressed young businessman on the move I took him for and the deliberate, disheveled, abstracted, middle-aged professional he might have taken me for—and what we could infer from what we had seen—on my part, that his bearing was a bit too ethnic and his stride too hurried for an organization man; on his, well, it is hard for me to say how I came off from that distance, whether it was my eyeglasses or the hitch in my step or the rattle of change in my pocket that caught his notice. But something did catch it.

I’d see him arrive home from the train station after work, a chrome-trimmed black-and-white LeSabre coming up the driveway, his wife beside him in front—she’d shut the door on her side of the car so quietly that you couldn’t be sure the latch had caught. He himself wasn’t so quiet. He’d all but slam the door on his side off its hinges, and his voice would follow her up the flagstone path into the house. When he followed her in, that is. More than once he turned instead toward the hedge on the border, toward me.

I thought at first that he was checking his flower beds, but he hardly looked at them. Something else took hold of him, restraining the swagger that came with doing well enough to get where he had gotten. Eyes narrowed and lips pursed, he’d turn and look my way. There was confinement in that look. He’s discovered landlock, I thought. Not the fact of it—he must have known that all along—but the feeling. My way lay the Sound, and so the sea. To reach it he’d have had to go through me.

I abandoned the third-floor window, crossed to another, and parted the curtain to reveal the bay—a green sliver in summer, in winter a mighty chevron.

Our first meeting, which I thought nothing of at the time, seems now—twelve years later—to begin a story I have yet to escape. And the memory of this first meeting is framed within our second, on a late summer afternoon when he dropped in. His timing was bad.

I was at my desk, supposedly looking over some documents but really staring through the windowpanes in the grip of some bewildering emotion. I had returned from upstate, where my wife, Joyce, and I would go in August to see my mother. Joyce hadn’t come this time. I’d thought her absence might be welcome, but it made my mother, Lenore—which my older brother, Mickey, and I had long ago corrupted to Leon without letting on to her—suspicious and even more vinegarish than usual. It seemed that I was only just back when Mickey insisted on sailing across for a visit. The change in my circumstances, he said, had made him want to see whether I was holding my own.

“The change in my circumstances,” “holding my own”: the phrases were typical Mickey—bluff, evasive in the service of a politeness more abrasive than most rudeness. When it came to me that they were the same words I had used some weeks earlier to break the news of the change to him, the irony of their phony delicacy provoked me. Whether he’d meant to throw them back at me or had parroted them made no difference.

I had been served notice of this change in my circumstances on the Triborough Bridge in June. Joyce and I were on our way to meet another couple for a play. We were late. Joyce had made us late. It was her habit. Lateness seemed to excite her, to turn a ride into a race, an outing into an adventure. If it hadn’t meant keeping our friends waiting, I wouldn’t have minded. But we were keeping them waiting, and I did mind.

“We’re only a few minutes behind,” she said in that deep, diaphragmatic, merry voice of hers, a voice that gave some people the idea that she was brassy. “You act like the sky is falling whenever we’re a few minutes behind schedule.”

I held my tongue through stop-and-go traffic. The guardrail had just been painted green.

“We can always eat after the show,” she continued, her eyes on me. She turned back and stared straight ahead. “So you’re bent on ruining another evening, are you?” she asked. It was as though she was daring me to ruin it and, beyond being curious to see whether I would, wasn’t herself concerned.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “It’s all in your mind. I haven’t said a word.” I wasn’t about to have the punctuality argument again.

“You don’t have to say anything. It’s in the set of your jaw and your grip on the wheel.” She might have been discussing a picture.

Light from the city reflected off an iron crossbeam suspended from a crane—skyscrapers were going up in the outer boroughs. “I’m sick of hearing you analyze my behavior,” I said, “sick of your thinking you know what’s going through my mind.”

“Okay then, what are you thinking about?”

“I wasn’t thinking about anything.”

“You can’t think about nothing.”

“Just watch me.”

“Money, Neil? That’s where your mind goes when it’s in neutral. When other men twitch in their sleep they’re supposed to be running from something. You’re kicking figures around.”

As it happened, I did have a worry right then. A pension fund that lost several million on a questionable long-term debenture that Weissmer, Schiff, Marne—the small investmentbanking firm I was a partner in—had unloaded on them was suing for face value plus compensation. Although I had been trying to reduce my in-house counselor’s role, I was also planning to withdraw my interest from the partnership and had a particular stake in limiting the damage. But I wasn’t about to let her in on it. She’d only say it was my fault.

“I could be thinking about the rebuilding.” A hurricane had torn a section of roof off a house Mickey and I kept in the hills above Puerto de Habòno. “If I don’t keep my eyes open, we might end up with a tin shack.”

She kept shifting positions. She never could get comfortable in a bucket seat. “I see,” she said. “Your obligations may make it impossible for you to be an amiable companion tonight.”

“That’s right. They can do that.”

“And lateness has nothing to do with it.”

“I don’t think it does.”

She might have started to answer, but we had come to that part of the bridge approach where the road’s surface changes from asphalt to metal grid and the hum of the wheels drowned her out. It seemed I had carried my point—a rare victory, tainted by the sulfurous odor rising from the river.

I sped up when I saw that a taxi driver was about to cut me off. He tried to do it anyway, and I blew my horn.

“I think I’ll go for a while,” she announced when we were back on asphalt.

“Go? Go where?”

“Go, you know, away.”

“On a trip? Sure, I guess. Have you thought of taking Vicky?” I was speaking of our daughter.

“Vicky’s a big girl. She’s about to take her own trip.” Seagram’s Seven cascaded into a highball glass on a neon billboard. “And I’m not taking a trip.”

“What do you mean?”

I didn’t see it. The bridge, its silver cables and beams and rivets; the river, the wavelets rolling northward; the sky, a low arrow of haze extending from LaGuardia to the Bronx—none of these would let me see it.

“You know what I mean, Neil.”

“I don’t, I’m afraid.”

“I mean, leave home.”

“Leave home?” I thought of her dark eyes and a dimple that appeared at a corner of her mouth when she smirked, fondly or contemptuously—identical yet unmistakable expressions. I thought of the inward curl of her hair above her shoulders, the slenderness of her arms, on which the articulation of the muscles around the wrists and of the wrist bones themselves would have been seen as exaggerated had they been sculpted. I thought of how when she was excited she opened and closed her hands as though clicking castanets. Her hands were doing that now.

“You mean, me.”

She stared straight ahead.

“You mean me, don’t you,” I repeated. It had grown warm inside the car. I lowered the window.

Some genius a couple of cars ahead had missed the change basket at the toll and gotten out to hunt for his dime.

“Why?”

Another genius behind us leaned on his horn.

“Put that window up. It’s freezing.”

I put it up halfway. “Why?”

“Oh, come on, Neil. How many laughs have we had lately?”

“Laughs? I seem to’ve lost count. Sorry.”

“Well, it’s not for lack of fingers.”

The FDR Drive was clear for a change. The feeling that at any moment traffic might back up kept me from making up much time, though.

“And since when have you been counting?”

“Since when? Oh, I don’t know. Sometime after Peter.” She meant our son, who had died at eleven in 1961.

“Are you telling me that for nearly ten years—”

“I don’t know if it’s been ten years, Neil.”

“I said ‘nearly.’”

“Let’s just say it’s been a long time.”

She wasn’t going to let it go on any longer. Next morning, after what might have been a pleasant night out, she left. She seemed to have condensed all the air in the house into her suitcases.

“This is how it happens,” I heard myself say aloud. There wasn’t air enough to say more.

But my happiness had never been my brother’s worry. His expressions of concern were the merest pretense. I tried to discourage him from visiting by insisting that Joyce would be back. He came anyway. “Always looking for an excuse to spend time on the boat,” he told me. It was clear before long that he was working up to something.

“Well, there aren’t any obvious signs of chaos anyway,” he said, dropping his heavy frame on a lounge in the sunroom. His mouth hung open and the points of his incisors glinted in the light coming through the window. “No change in the atmosphere in here.”

“The atmosphere? The dehumidifier runs without a woman’s touch.”

“But what about you?”

“I’m all right.”

“Are you? You’re looking gaunt, frankly. I don’t guess you’re putting away your three square. And you’re dressed like an undertaker, not that anybody would take you for one. Undertakers are always well shaved, and you’ve missed a whole patch along your jaw. Looks like an outline of the state of Maryland. And what’s that, a sore on your lip? I hope you haven’t gone out and caught the clap. Slide those down this way, will you?” He pointed to a bowl of nuts and a nutcracker on a lacquered tray in the center of the coffee table between us. It was no nearer to me than to him, but he’d have had to sit up to reach it. No one had touched the bowl since his last visit. To everyone else it was an ornament, but Mickey was a great one for nut cracking. Pecans, Brazil nuts, macadamias, hazel nuts: he’d crack them all. Eating them was an afterthought—he’d half grimace at the taste of them. They seemed to make him cough. I slid him the tray.

There was a silence while he took a walnut and ran it over his palm. I yawned, but he didn’t seem to notice. “These things can cost quite a bit,” he said, “quite a bit.” I thought he meant the nuts. “Half your assets and a good chunk of your pretax income, if she shoots the moon. You’ll need to make it up.”

“With Joyce?”

“Well, sure, that’d be best, of course. . . .” He took up the nutcracker and squeezed the shell of a Brazil nut till he was red in the face. He turned it and had at the other seam, but it still wouldn’t open. “Stubborn little cunt,” he muttered. “Only, that isn’t what I had in mind.”

“No?”

“I was thinking that the expense—alimony, property division, et cetera—might make you hungrier than you’ve been.”

It hadn’t taken him long to show his cards—he’d hardly made it through a quarter of the bowl. Our fraternity rested less on a common fund of childhood memories than on a stable of profitable partnerships-at-will we had formed, in coal and natural gas initially, later in building and manufactures as well. Mickey had a talent for structuring deals along heads-we-wintails-you-lose lines, and roughed-up entrepreneurs were forever suing our joint holding company, McNeil Bros. Ltd. These suits had always been dropped or dismissed, until, about a year before, a ruling had gone against us and opened the gates to other claims.

“Just wanted to see how I was holding up, did you?”

“That’s right—trying to keep you afloat.”

“Isn’t the litigation wearing you down?”

“Why should a few hardship cases wear me down when the law is on our side and there are opportunities wherever I look?” A piece of almond that had attached itself to his lower lip bobbed as he spoke. He felt it there and tried to lick it off between phrases, but it stuck.

“You’ll have to seize them without me.”

“But can you still afford to be on the sidelines?”

“It’s no time for me to take chances.” This was only half true. If I didn’t keep ponies or host shooting parties or race my own cars, I still had about as much as I wanted. I could identify the pinched feeling etched on the multitude of new faces around me, but I hadn’t known it myself. And as long as I minded my own business and remained wary of Mickey’s prospects, this was how it would stay.

Mickey wouldn’t hear of it. Every building site we drove past—and they were everywhere: you couldn’t tell whether the shopping malls were going up around the new houses or houses around the malls or whether both were there for the sake of the roads that led to them—provided an occasion for a harangue on the favorable climate. He kept at me until I agreed to look over documents he’d happened to bring with him. It was these that I was pretending to grapple with upstairs when my neighbor dropped in to thank me for the favor I’d done him when we first met.

He didn’t seem to remember that I hadn’t done the favor willingly. Or if he did remember, he didn’t care.

A record playing in the living room (a scratchy string quartet I’d stopped listening to in the search for the pack of cigarettes I was beginning to suspect I’d again left by the pool), the tones of Vicky’s phone voice merging from upstairs with the line of the viola, our scaredy-cat mastiff Frances sprawling across the newspapers that were scattered at the foot of an Eames ottoman in the library, ice cubes melting in a tray on the kitchen counter: such was the scene when he stuck his head through the screen door and said “Hello?”

Frances went through her routine, the folds wrinkling between her eyes as a sense of alarm penetrated her anvil skull. She rushed for the door, pulled up short, and barked once perplexedly before hiding herself behind the couch. “Come in,” I answered.

“Big dog,” he said, staying put.

“Big pussycat.”

He entered and extended his hand to me, a straightforward offer after many cautious salutations. “I’m Bud.”

He didn’t look up close as I’d imagined he would. Black, Vitalis-sheathed hair pushed back and to the side, broad brow barely creased but heavily freckled, eyebrows tapering into arrows that pointed at his pulsing temples when he frowned, hooded eyes, a nose that was big without being long or wide and suggested the bowl of an upside-down tobacco pipe, an upper lip that didn’t fit evenly into the lower. His face was an odd fit, a motley composite hard to take in all at once, hard to take in and hard to pin down because he was always in motion; he talked with his hands, listened with his brow, agreed or disagreed by touch. No wonder that my brush with his memory comes as a clap on the shoulder.

“Bud?” I asked. “As in . . . ?”

“As in Schullberg, Adler, Hackett, Rommel.”

“Rommel?”

He clapped me on the shoulder. “Jumpy, huh? Just seeing if you were listening. I often get away with that. My last name’s Younger, by the way.”

Younger than whom? I thought, and nearly said.

“I moved in next door a few months ago. You’ve seen me coming and going, haven’t you? I know I’ve seen you.”

“Well, sure,” I said, finally taking his hand. “Neil Fox. Pleased to meet you.”

His wife had taken his five-year-old daughter, who was running a high fever, to the hospital. It was just a precaution, he explained; there was no real danger. Still he wanted to borrow a car to go see them.

He had put me on the spot. I owned three cars, but only my pleasure car was in its bay, an Alfa Romeo runabout in that red that only the Italians seem to be able to get—vermilion luster with crimson depth—or that looks the way it does only beneath their enamel. I had lent the car out before, and it hadn’t come back in the same shape. Even good drivers were prone to struggle with its tricky clutch. Who knew what a father racing off to save his daughter might do to it? The simplest thing would have been to drive him there myself. The fact that I’d put a few scotches under my belt wouldn’t have stopped me, except that I’d recently been pulled over and couldn’t risk its happening again.

“You see, I’m due somewhere.”

“You wouldn’t have to take me. I could borrow a car.” He absentmindedly swept a few bits of ice from the countertop into the sink. “Your wife—you’re married, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t she drive?”

“She’s away.”

He nodded in the direction of our three-port garage. “And you haven’t got another car?”

“Normally, yes, but just now they’re out of commission.”

“Maybe you’d have time to drop me there beforehand?”

“I’m afraid not. You see yourself that I’m not dressed to go out.”

“How long will that take?”

“A taxi would be here sooner, I’m sure.”

“A taxi, here? It’d take forever.”

“I’m sorry, if it was any other time . . .” Any other car, I meant.

My refusal staggered him. That is, the look he gave me before he turned to go—part wince and part sneer—staggered me.

“Hold on a minute,” I said, following him out the door. “Can you handle a sports car?”

“I used to sell them for a living, practically.”

I decided to go with him. At least this way I’d be able to assess the damage to the car if not to control it and, after some coffee, drive back myself. “Be with you in a minute,” I told him and went upstairs to run a razor across my face and change my clothes.

He was waiting by the car when I came down. “Were you able to change your appointment?”

“No trouble at all.”

He did know how to handle the roadster, handled it so well that—despite the usual difficulty getting into reverse—I enjoyed the ride, a rare occurrence as a passenger in my own car.

I wasn’t the only one enjoying myself. He seemed to be taking us on a tour of the neighborhood.

“If it’s the hospital you want,” I said as we made our second lap around the local streets, “there are more direct routes.”

“There’s a shortcut to the Expressway. You go behind the park up there.”

“Take a right up here. It’ll put you on the access road.”

“But I’m telling you, we can go parallel to it.”

There was no such shortcut but I let him drive on. It had been a while since I’d taken any notice of the hilly streets named for fallen stands of trees or of the specimens that survived along the edges: locusts along The Locusts, birches along The Birches, dogwoods along The Dogwoods, hemlocks along The Hemlocks.

When the crash of ’29 threatened to ruin the masters of the estate of Dunsinane—its hillside chateau commanding the harbor, stables, polo grounds, and dairy—they sold their woods to a builder who put up the genteel houses he christened “Dunsinane Gardens.” Now, a generation later, the professional men who had been its pioneer settlers were moving on or dying off and their successors, far from being the sort that the masters of the manor might have known, weren’t even the sort whose names they could have heard without alarm.

My place in this succession was unusual. I had come later than the first generation but earlier than the second. My house was higher than the others, my grounds larger.

But not by as much as they had been. Bud’s land had until recently belonged to me. Selling off an acre of the property had seemed like a perfectly good idea. The builder was trustworthy and the price was right. Besides, I hadn’t figured on staying. The prospect of looking at what had once been mine didn’t concern me.

“Lucky for you we’re in a hurry,” Bud said as we were beginning our third lap. “Otherwise I’d find that shortcut.”

We turned off the residential streets and onto an empty boulevard over which traffic lights hulked from braided cable. The lights had four and five and even six different lenses that flashed the alert or blinked for prudence or pointed to new roadside oases: to a turquoise and orange ice cream parlor-cum-motor lodge, to a transmission service endorsed by a former middleweight champ—or onto the highway itself.

I haven’t sensed anyone’s inner clock ticking so loudly at a red light as Bud’s. Trivialities already consumed enough of life, I could hear him thinking, without this automated bureaucracy adding to the sum. And being behind the wheel of a machine that strained at idle as much as he himself did must have made him even edgier. When it stopped, that car didn’t sit so much as crouch like a sprinter on the starting block. The lights went our way and we flew down the boulevard past the motel and the rest, up the highway ramp, and over a buckle in the road that stirred the memory of a wreck I’d been in some years earlier. “Let’s get there in one piece!” I exclaimed.

He didn’t answer. He gave no sign that he’d even heard me. He saw daylight and went full throttle. The space closed up and he hit the brakes. He had to, though he didn’t have to slam them. The tires screeched.

“Take it easy!”

“How can so many people be heading for the city at eight on a weeknight?” he muttered. “Where do they all come from, the bottom of Lake Ronkonkoma?”

He veered to the right and, finding the service road at a standstill too, eased the car onto the shoulder and sped up. Everyone honked as we passed, and I started to protest that this was making us conspicuous.

“If you don’t like being conspicuous,” he asked in an off-thecuff manner that distanced him from the question, “what are you doing with a car like this?”

I didn’t answer. The present held all the embarrassment I could contemplate. Our race down the shoulder of the road drew more honks and killing glances. I slunk lower in my seat and, withdrawing from conversation with my go-go neighbor, studied a cotton-ball cloud to the west.

I’d have liked to turn around the moment I dropped him off but thought I’d better take a few minutes to sober up. The walk from the parking lot might have been longer than the drive. I picked up a cup of coffee in the cafeteria and made my way to the emergency room.

It was hot. Nixon and Rockefeller stared down from the wall like hawks waiting for someone worth diving for. Two men wondered whether the air conditioning was out or off; the subject changed to annuities. I lit a cigarette. In less time than it took me to smoke it the Naugahyde seat was sticking to my bottom. I switched places and, waiting for the new seat to stick, leafed through a discarded afternoon paper that was hardly different from the morning edition. Volatility was in short supply.

Bud came in as I was getting up to leave.

“Lizzy’s fine,” he said, shaking my hand. “Stick around for a moment and you’ll meet my wife.”

“I’d better be on my way.” I thought I’d been imposed upon enough for one afternoon.

But on the way back I found myself ruing my departure. What had become of my spontaneity, my sense of event? I waved the feeling away—the driver beside me seemed to think I was making some sort of hand signal and slowed down. I went home to the ice tray I’d left out on the kitchen counter. The cubes had all melted in their boxes. Melting ice, that too was an event.

As he had when he’d come to borrow the car, he rapped on the doorjamb, pulled open the screen door, and shouted “Hello?” like a city kid calling from the street to a friend in an upstairs tenement. An open door meant an open house to him, and when no one answered, he let himself through the side gate and into the yard. From the window beside my desk, I saw him, a package in hand, going down the path in back to the swimming pool, where Mickey was fulfilling his daily quota of laps and lengths.

The weather had begun to turn, summer to retreat: every day the sunlight blanketing the water’s wobbly surface did less to warm its depths. Soon fallen leaves would clog the skimmers, stilling their flaps and blocking the light, and darkness would rise from the bottom as in a lake. It would be time to close the valves, shut the pump and filter down, and drain the pool. The approach of winter always weighed on Mickey, who’d be determined to get in as many workouts as he could before it got cold. Though not a fluid swimmer, he was dogged. Even from my window I could see that he was in his own world, a trance of hums and slaps, of hurried breaths and clumsy strokes and kicks. Bud put the package down beside a chaise and stood waiting to be noticed at the edge of the pool. Running out of patience, he grabbed Mickey’s wrist as he was coming to the end of a lap. It must have startled the hell out of my brother. I could almost hear the heart that had been throbbing from exertion knocking inside him from fright.

Bud’s nerve in grabbing a stranger surprised me, until I realized that he had mistaken Mickey for me. We weren’t much alike as brothers go, but from certain vantages we were alike enough. This was an uncomfortable realization, though not because I had a low opinion of Mickey’s looks. They were fine, certainly better than my own. But in other matters I was in the habit of thinking of myself in contrast to Mickey. Bud’s mistake made me wonder whether there weren’t other points of resemblance that my eagerness to note the differences had made me overlook—the set of our shoulders, perhaps, the shapes of our skulls, the proportions of our limbs.

Mickey unglued the goggles from his eye sockets. Bud recognized his mistake and began to retreat up the path. But instead of continuing his workout, Mickey leaned against the side, boosted himself out of the water, and toweled off. Bud remembered the package he had left behind and came back for it. He and Mickey exchanged more words, which led to Mickey’s offering him a seat or to his helping himself to one.

I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Their voices refracted off the water and scattered. I thought of Bud’s curiosity about me or my house or something that was out my way and grew uneasy. I thought next of Mickey’s pretense of interest in my well being and was uneasier still. I imagined Mickey blithering on about me and Joyce, asking my neighbor what he knew about it. Their looks and gestures were directed toward the house. They almost had to be talking about me. Who or what else did they have in common? But evidently I was in no hurry to break in on them. I stayed in my chair for a while before going downstairs.

I found them lounging on their chaises as though it was seventy-five degrees and not fifty-seven, sunlight falling through the bare spots in the branches onto Mickey, who in his goldcolored robe resembled a leopard after a good feed. Reclining in that bulky, half-open robe with his body hairs spilling between the lapels, he seemed too large for the chaise’s pallet. The broad chest and big gut merged to form a trapezoid in which it was hard to tell where the muscle ended and the gristle began. It took a leap of faith to believe that somewhere beneath that mass a skeleton was buried. Considering all that they had to support, his legs were scrawny and his skin pale for a regular swimmer’s.

“It’s out of my patch,” Mickey was saying, “but I do know a thing or two about it.”

“How are you, Neil,” Bud said.

Mickey’s right shoulder was twitching. In uneasy moments, his head was prone to twist and his shoulder to bob against it so hard occasionally that he had to clench his jaw to keep from biting his tongue. The anticonvulsive serums that he had been dosed with in childhood filled our medicine chest. The spoon often had to be jammed down his throat. He’d been right to resist. If they weren’t harmful, the elixirs were unnecessary. The tic was seldom so severe that he wasn’t able to shake it off, as he did now.

He turned to me and raised his hand to shade his eyes. “Bud was just telling me about something of his, ah . . . what did you say it was, Bud, a process?”

“I’d put it more in the realm of a concept.”

“A concept?” I asked.

“It’s a straightforward thing,” said Bud. “It’s hard to believe that it hasn’t been thought of.”

“Probably has,” I ventured.

“All great concepts have a disarming simplicity,” added Mickey.

“I see,” I said. “It’s one of the great concepts.”

“We’re looking forward to hearing all about it.” Mickey smoothed back his hair as if smoothing over my hostility. “We have an insatiable curiosity about new ideas. Comes with the territory. I gather, Neil, that packaging comes into play. That’s right, Bud, isn’t it?”

“Sounds intriguing,” I broke in. “But you know, Bud, my brother is leaving tomorrow and we have a lot of ground to cover.”

“Of course,” he answered. “I’m running late myself. I’d only meant to drop by to give you this.” He handed me the parcel he’d brought and fixed me with a look hinting that before I came downstairs my brother had been talking about me after all.

“See you again,” I said as he was leaving.

“Count on it, fella.”

When he was out of earshot, or when Mickey thought he was, Mickey turned to me. “We were having a nice chat till you came along,” he said. “What in hell have you got against him?”

I looked at the box Bud had left for me. Its shape promised a bottle of King’s Ransom, the scotch du jour. It was tasty stuff, I had to admit. Few other gifts could have made me regret my unfriendliness more. “What have I got against him? Not much. Which is why I wanted to get rid of him. He doesn’t want to get mixed up with us.”

“He’s the one who brought it up. And why shouldn’t he have? He’s got an idea he believes in. He’s casting around for backing. If it seems worth looking into, then I think we should look into it. It’s the way things are done, Neil. I’m not sure why you need to be reminded of that. You seem to think there’s something unsavory in what we do.”

“You do see, don’t you, why I wouldn’t want my brother to start doing business with my neighbor.”

“I don’t see it, I’m afraid.”

“Because if you start, I’ll end up doing business with him.”

“And what’d be the matter with that? You don’t like the idea of the sweet smell of success coming from next door?”

“It’s the other smell I don’t like, the sour one. Imagine living next door to that.”

“It’s all sour as far as you’re concerned. You’ve become so mistrustful that you wouldn’t know a fair proposition if it stood on its hind legs and sang for you.”

I unwrapped the box and found a note from Bud thanking me for taking him to the hospital. There was also an invitation to a party. The thought of it nearly ruined my pleasure in the anticipation of the gift. It isn’t that I disliked parties. But the prospect of rubbing elbows with a clutch of boisterous strivers seemed, well—it seemed the very opposite of whatever it was to sip at the King’s Ransom in the peace of my own living room. At least the party was a long way off. I’d have plenty of time to come up with a plausible excuse. But what did I care whether it was plausible? In fact, it’d be better if he didn’t believe it. He’d know not to invite me again.

I had just hung up the phone in the foyer one afternoon and was thinking about the things I needed. A housekeeper, for one—our latest, a Holy Roller who as far as I could see spent most of her day in a rocker singing hymns, had decided that it would be unseemly for her to stay in the house with a bachelor. I needed another station wagon. And after calling around to car dealerships and discovering that orders for wagons were backlogged, I was thinking that I needed a personal secretary. Joyce’s attention to romantic intangibles might have slackened over the years, but on practical matters it had never flagged.

The phone rang again. I let it ring—a splotch of sunlight streaming through a transom onto a corner of the wall had caught my notice, a hydra-headed blue and orange shadow that twirled, disappeared, and returned in a different spot—till it occurred to me that one of the car dealers might have found something. But it was no car dealer. It was Joyce.

There were greetings and pleasantries, and I heard the old warmth in her voice, the intimate or at any rate exclusive tone she used when she was away and anticipating our reunion. But when the formalities were done, she remembered herself. Her voice closed up and she was all business: the things she wanted and needed and didn’t want and didn’t need and had forgotten to mention.

I didn’t say much myself, and was careful not to contradict her. But however I agreed on every item, there were more on her list, and more, their recitation like the construction of our estrangement’s barrier. Finally I broke in to ask her how she was really, and after pretending not to know what I meant, she declared that she was “thriving under the new dispensation.” I was all over it.

“Thriving under the new dispensation? Where’d you get that one? Don’t tell me you’ve taken up with a clergyman.”

“Watch it, Neil. I don’t have to put up with your sarcasm anymore.”

We hung up, and I found myself staring at that shadow. It was awfully busy, its spheres and specks bobbing and spinning. Too busy for my liking, evidently—I was running my hand over it like a cat trying to pin it down with a paw. When the shadow disappeared, it seemed that I had succeeded—till it was back again, as irrepressible as the meaning behind Joyce’s stilted phrase.

Though I must have come across Bud in the following weeks, I can’t say that I noticed him. Only a memory of him in his garden comes to mind: a stray lock dangles over his brow while he digs holes into which his daughter places the bulbs lying in burlap beside her. But this might well come from another time. Having been vandalized by sentiment, the dates on such images are generally illegible.

I didn’t see him, and then I saw him all the time—mornings inbound, evenings outbound. In the station house or on the platform or inside a train car, I’d see him and he me. We’d say hello and go back to our newspapers. A hint of embarrassment at my earlier rudeness to him lingered. Winding my way down the slalom-course of the newspaper’s columns I’d remind myself to make amends without really intending to do so. But I wasn’t about to invite him over. The idea of entertaining anyone, let alone him, was impossible. Joyce’s absence would make it too awkward. That I ultimately met the obligation was only thanks to Vicky—thanks, that is, to her wild backhand.

In her girlhood Vicky had been a natural at tennis, strokes smooth and balance steady from the moment she’d picked up a racquet. I encouraged her and got fast results, victories in local tournaments, and a regional ranking. But before long the round of camps and clinics and coaches was taking her away from us. Joyce was for weaning her off competition. I had another idea. I had played seriously myself and didn’t see why Vicky and I shouldn’t work out together. I decided to build a court for her at home.

And I did build it, over Joyce’s objection and despite some hostile geology: the ground was less stable than I’d been led to expect, the bedrock higher, the drainage faster, the water table deeper; a silver-colored copper beech that in the original plans had been left alone had had to come down. I let Joyce choose the barrier between the court and the surrounding ground. She rejected them all: clubhouse, fence, hedges, ditch, terraces, a stone wall. Nothing would do. The clay court we ended up with was easy on the feet and the eyes too, but it punished you for missing. Other than the brick ledges I had the builder sneak in, there were no backstops. The ball could fly or roll—or fly and roll—where it would. What we had, thanks to Joyce, was a court for experts. This was okay, my partners qualified. And Vicky could hit a spot and hit it again. You’d have had trouble pitching it from ten feet as accurately as she could put it there from the other side.

But that was Vicky at twelve. Thirteen was something else. She put her racquet down right on schedule and for the next four years hardly picked it up. It was all I could do to drag her out there. If not for visitors using it from time to time, the court would have gone to waste.

Now seventeen, Vicky had come home from a summer cycling trip with an appreciation for physical fitness. All that pedaling had done her good. She had decided to go out for her school tennis team. She would train in the afternoons and on weekends for as long as the fall weather would let her. Was I willing to help? Of course I was willing. If my legs weren’t what they had been, my eyes were still good.

It was a far-fetched plan. Tennis was serious business at her school; no one joined the team as a senior. Her real motive was for us to take up where we had left off five years earlier, to revive a broken home. But I was too enthusiastic to see it then. The plan was a portal to a fuller salvation—turn the clock back on one mischance and you turn it back on all the rest.

That evening we sat on the porch watching the last of the fireflies on the lawn, and drank to our future success. She would play on her school team in the spring, and next year in college. Had I been able to guess at the stray forehands and backhands to come, I’d have had her go out for baseball instead.

A check that I had left Vicky miraculously reconstituted itself on her return from the village as racquets, balls, shoes, and what had to be one of the skimpiest tennis dresses a father ever saw on his daughter. It was no more than a bikini, really, with a few beads for a bodice. After an arm-crossing, foot-stomping, teary melodrama, I prevailed on her to take it back.

That afternoon and the next, all through the week, we hit the court, though it’d be more accurate to say of Vicky that she hit everything but the court. She sprayed balls everywhere, upending the grooming tools, knocking roses from the vines and leaves from the trees.

She was bound to be rusty, I reminded myself. I might even have taken her wildness as an encouraging sign. But I couldn’t take it that way. Her once smooth strokes were now hurried; her hips and shoulders, whose motion had been instinctively coordinated with her racquet’s, now lurched on their own. None of this would in itself have doomed her chances, though. The damning fact wasn’t that she was missing her shots. It was that she smiled after she missed them. She hadn’t lost just her form. She had lost her drive.

The old Vicky had been intense and exacting. The new Vicky was a hit-and-giggler, as giddy at the sight of an errant ball as at a shooting star. She’d spin around, wave her arms, even laugh, and seeing my frown, cry “C’mon, lighten up, will ya, Dad?” Lighten up! I saw Vicky’s campaign as a second chance and myself as at an age where second chances are not to be taken lightly. My humorlessness seems foolish now, or worse.

We kept running low on tennis balls, though our hopper would be full to overflowing when we began. With Vicky swatting them like a sandlot slugger the shortage wasn’t surprising. We lost time collecting them, and lost them themselves in the undergrowth and in the salt pond. Then there was Frances. For such a hulking beast, she was avid for tennis balls. But she was no retriever. She’d pick them up, gallop away in triumph, and, slobbering them up, scatter them like giant seeds. We might have had tennis-ball trees everywhere.

Vicky was coming back from a recovery mission, the half-empty hopper swinging on her arm, when she announced that she’d just met our neighbor and invited him over for a game.

“Him?” I pointed Bud’s way with my racquet. “When?”

“Oh, sometime, I don’t know. I thought you’d be glad to have someone to spell you.”

“Gee, thanks. I didn’t know he played.”

“Maybe he doesn’t really. We’ll see.”

“Maybe he doesn’t really? Now Vick, you don’t want to waste your time out here. Didn’t you ask him how he plays?”

She straightened her racquet strings, which clicked like the tongues of a disapproving chorus. She could infuse our discussions with the feeling that I was interrogating her. Call it an instinct for sullenness. “Sure I asked him, but, you know, how much can you tell from that?”

“Exactly. And what did he say?”

“He said ‘un peu.’ You know, ‘a little.’”

“He answered you in French?”

She moved from her strings to her barrettes. Refastening her mane was an undertaking. She pulled back a tress and held an open barrette in her teeth. “Uh huh,” she said through the clip.

“Why’d he do that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It was in context.”

“In context? In what context?”

“In the context of my telling him I’d been in France and him asking me whether I’d picked up any of the language and my saying ‘un peu’, which is what you’re supposed to say, and so him saying it when we got to talking about playing.”

“I see. He was answering in kind. But a little might really mean a little. He might have picked up a racquet once or twice in his life. You know, when you’re working on your game the way you are, honey, you really shouldn’t agree to play with just anyone. A weak partner can bring you down.”

“God, Daddy, I was only being friendly. He seemed nice.”

“He is nice. But it may be hard to get rid of him for just that reason. I’ve been in that kind of situation before. It can be awkward. And he does live right there.”

We’d planted a dogwood on the first anniversary of Peter’s death, put a bench beside it on the third, and planted a rose that turned out to be a climber on the fifth. The rose had clambered over the bench and was taking over the tree. I was looking at it a couple of evenings later, thinking it needed trimming, when the percussion of a tennis ball being steadily exchanged reached me from the court below.

Vicky and I had agreed to take a few days off from training. She needed to get ready to go back to school, she said. They were rainy days anyway—not the misty September rain that drips in slow tears from the leaves, but a gustier variety that shakes down those leaves and sets them hopping like birds in the grass. Though I’m sure that Vicky’s excuse for our layoff was honest, I couldn’t help suspecting that she was also making me pay for the way I’d spoken to her after she’d invited Bud for a game.

I marched down the overgrown avenue in what was supposedly our apple orchard but was really our apple graveyard. We never managed to harvest the fruit, and the worms gorged themselves on it. As I came over the rise at the top, I pushed an apple aside with my toe and exposed one that was as thick as a slug, with that band in the middle like a cummerbund put on for the meal.

“Daddy!”

The call seemed to come from behind me. I took a few seconds to line it up with the figure of my daughter below on the court, reluctant to believe that the thwack . . . thwack of shots and replies like the call of a bottle-throated bird had been coming from her racquet and Bud’s.

“Neil!” he called.

I waved and they started up again. There was some uncertainty in his motion, the mechanical exaggeration in something newly learned, but he had the knack. His shots were square, and even if he’d only recently taken up the game, he and Vicky played it in sympathy.

Darkness was falling on them, pink cloud trails consuming the daylight. They’d soon have to quit, unless they were so attuned that they could play by moonlight. They stopped rallying and approached the net, and I saw that someone was watching them from the bench beside the court—a hunched figure in a dark jacket with a briefcase on his lap. “What next?” I heard myself exclaim.

I turned back up the row of apple trees.

“Come down!” Bud cried.

“Catch up with you later!” I shouted back and continued over the hill.

“Catch up with you later,” I had said to Bud, and now, deeper into the week, he was catching up with me or, having come off the court from a second game with Vicky, trying to. But again his timing was off. By catch up with you later, I must have meant something less definite and further off than later this week. He had done no more than accept my daughter’s invitation to play tennis and been a good partner to her. I couldn’t blame him. I wasn’t about to thank him for it either.

In the intervening days, Vicky and I had gone back to practicing together and I had gotten to appreciate her improvement up close. But it didn’t bring us together—we didn’t click. I wanted to help her to continue her progress, but she wanted me to marvel at it. She not only ignored my corrections, she took offense at them wherever she could find it. What she was after was a yes-man, not a coach. And that was what I became, looking past her flaws and limiting my comments to compliments that couldn’t have done her good in the end.

This end was mercifully approaching—the end of school vacation, that is and, a few weeks later, the end of the season. The wind would replace the dirt it had stripped from the foundation with leaves, and a dry thaw would crack the clay. The net would be taken down from the posts, the tape for the lines up from the ground, the pipes that fed the sprinklers drained, the roller and brushes stowed away, our racquets screwed into presses.

It was a matter of chance that I should have come home early from work. I hadn’t gone in till noon, but the firm’s internal investigation had reached such a pitch that I grew tired of the shouting and knocked off before five. I might have had it in the back of my mind for Vicky and me to squeeze in one last workout.

The auspices were good. At Penn Station I ducked into a train as the doors were shutting. My timing had given me no chance to pick up an afternoon paper, but even this turned out well. The trees were in their autumn beauty. The farther we got from Manhattan—past the markets, depots, sedge-stubbed marshland, and water towers of Woodside and Flushing—the farther east we traveled, the deeper the color of the leaves, the redder, the more golden, the fierier, and the more advanced the season. With the section-ends of the rails clipping beneath us like the second hand of an accidental clock, we seemed to be heading into the future, except that since I was riding backward, I imagined instead that I was backing, counterclockwise, into a lovely past that unfurled itself in retreat from the setting sun. I arrived home renewed.

I went inside, and hearing voices from the back, found Bud, Vicky, and a boy about her age in the living room, racquets, soft drinks, and a briefcase on the coffee table between them. “How are you, fella?” Bud said and stood up. He had a way of engaging you before you’d had a chance to size things up, a forward charm. But I didn’t find it charming then. Even from the periphery he was becoming a persistent presence. My domain was shrinking.

“This is my son Daniel,” he said. “Danny, shake hands with Mr. Fox.” The boy was sitting cross-legged, and the uncrossing seemed to give him some trouble. Bud might have reached over and jerked him up if the coffee table hadn’t been in the way. “Get up, Danny! Sorry, Neil. He’s got no instincts for the social graces. Brilliant kid, though. Mind like a steel trap.”

Bud wasn’t kidding about his son’s lacking social graces. Still in his overcoat, the boy looked like a seminarian. Darkly sallow, pimply, and shy, he was already taller than his father but stooped away the extra inches, which were just more awkwardness.

He limply shook my hand while gawking past me. I thought that he was staring from shyness at his briefcase till my glance shifted from the coffee table to Vicky’s side of the couch. I felt my jaw set and my blood rise. “Excuse us for a moment, will you?” I said. “Vicky, if I may speak with you privately?”

Vicky took her time getting out of her chair. A cobweb dangled from a curtain rod behind her. “Put down your glass,” I said to her, “and follow me.”

I led her to the maid’s room, shut the door, and switched on a light. The wallpaper had horse-and-buggy drawings and was beginning to peel. The bedspread was covered in newspaper, the bolster doubled up for reading against.

“I thought we’d agreed on your returning that . . . that outfit.”

“I didn’t get a chance. I needed something to wear today. No laundry gets done around here anymore.”

“You must have a dozen other things.”

“Not for tennis, Daddy.”

“And in your mother’s closets?”

“Her stuff? You must be kidding.”

“I’m not.”

As we argued, I advanced toward her and she retreated, not so far that I was standing over her but near enough to see the goose bumps on her arms—and not only her arms. In the entirety of its width and span, that Italian number wouldn’t have covered more than a few dozen goose bumps.

“We’ve already had this discussion,” I said. “We’ve got guests out there.”

“So why are we in here then? Let’s go entertain them!” she shouted and did a lewd little shimmy that her slinky top didn’t begin to clothe.

“I can’t . . . I won’t have you—”

“Listen to yourself—you can’t even speak! You should see yourself quivering like an old schoolmaster.”

“—I’m saying that I won’t have you looking like a tart!” And when I heard myself, I even felt like a schoolmaster, a tyrannical schoolmasterly father who thinks it’s his duty—his impossible duty—to see his daughter through other eyes than his own. But then I looked at her again in her half-naked ripeness and thought, She doesn’t know what she’s doing!

“I mean,” I continued more quietly, “that you shouldn’t provoke—”

“Who, who am I trying to provoke, which member of the family”—she pointed toward the living room—“the bookworm in there? He’d only notice me if I were in a book. His dad? He seems to like you. You think he’s hard for his friend’s daughter—the man he thinks is his friend. Imagine that!”

“Not them, me. You’re trying to provoke me.”

She started past me for the door.

“You are not going back out like that!” I said.

She grabbed the doorknob, and I grabbed for her. I wanted her shoulder but instead got her hair, and before I quite realized what I was doing, I yanked her by it, wrenching back her head. She staggered, and one of her barrettes landed on the twisted bolster.

She went over to get it and sat down on the bed. “Is that what you do?” she asked through tears. “I wonder why she waited so long.”

I went back to the living room. They’d had the sense to go, though Bud had found a cardboard coaster and left a note on the back in block letters, with a cursive postscript:

NEIL,

SUPPER TIME. WE’RE OFF.

SEE YOU AT OUR PARTY IF NOT SOONER.

BUD

P.S. Quite a girl you’ve got. Hits it like a ton of bricks.

That damned party—I still hadn’t sent my excuses. After this performance, it was a wonder he still wanted me to come.

I picked up the pen and scribbled on the coaster, “THANKS FOR THE INVITATION. AWAY ON BUSINESS. REGRETS,” and walked it down to the mailbox at the top of his driveway.

And what sight greeted my eyes at the bottom? An Alfa roadster not unlike my own, a newer model in a different color—beige, taupe, off white, ecru, who knew what they called it. I knew what I called it, by any color.