A Changed Man (34 page)

“I was there when you told your mom, remember? Very diplomatic.”

The thought makes Vincent want to gag. That is so like those middle-class idiots, adopting a designer Bulgarian baby when there are millions of perfectly healthy American kids, white kids, without homes. To say nothing of the fact that the guy already has two kids, one of whom is getting stoned daily and no one seems to notice.

Vincent feels a familiar vibe emanating from Danny. It reminds him of how the atmosphere got when some chick was about to cry, and there was nothing he could do. Vincent’s glad he never had kids. Women are hard enough.

Vincent says, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” says Danny. “As long as I don’t have to answer.”

“When your mom and dad split up, was there a big custody battle?”

“No,” Danny says. “My dad signed some papers. The lawyers met. It took about five minutes.”

Not exactly what Vincent imagined: the cardiologist rolling over. Maybe the doc feels guilty. So here comes the Bulgarian baby.

Vincent drives for a while. Scales of sunlight bounce off the Hudson and give the air a silvery gleam. The road curves through a patch of forest. The kid loves it. Who wouldn’t? Vincent feels Danny shedding some of the tightness he brought back from school. But he’s still hiding something. He’s got something to say. And he wants to say it before the drive is through. Go ahead. Spit it out. Vincent’s all ears. To be here for the little pip-squeak is the least he can do.

Finally Danny says, “Today when I got home from school, there was this guy parked in the driveway.”

“What kind of guy?” says Vincent. Very calm, very cool.

“Pickup truck,” says Danny.

“And?”

“Swastika on his right hand.” So that’s what’s been bugging the kid. Everything becomes clear. Vincent’s got to give him credit for not blurting it out the minute he walked in the house. Where was Vincent when all this was going down? Inside, taking a nap.

“Got the picture,” says Vincent. “What did he want?” What a stupid question. Raymond wants Vincent dead.

“He said to tell you he knows where you are.”

“Obviously,” says Vincent.

“Is this guy going to kick your ass?” says Danny.

“He could try.” Vincent likes the unperturbed, Clint Eastwood– like way he sounds.

“Does that scare you?” Danny asks. Talk about stupid questions. Does Danny think Vincent’s looking forward to getting his ass kicked?
Anybody
would be scared knowing there’s somebody out there who wants to hurt you, somebody sneaking around so you’ll never know when he’ll jump out of the bushes. Sure, he’s scared. Danny knows about being scared. Danny knows it better than anyone.

Vincent checks his rearview mirror. Not a car on the road as far back as he can see. He would have noticed if they were being followed, especially by a pickup. Raymond was in their driveway. While Vincent slept in the house. Vincent wonders if this is how Maslow felt, dodging one bullet after another.

“Shit,” says Vincent.

“You said it,” says Danny.

The Warrior does not admit to fear in the presence of a child who is looking for a model of adult male behavior. Bonnie would say that Vincent was wrong, that men should admit they’re scared. Let Bonnie see how useful it is to admit it when Raymond shows up. I’m scared. Please don’t hurt me. Why is Vincent having a conversation in his head with Bonnie?

“What the hell. It was bound to happen. The past has a way of catching up.”

Vincent can tell that Danny’s impressed. He doesn’t think it’s macho bullshit. He thinks Vincent is being brave. He thinks Vincent is a guy who runs toward danger instead of away. Which must mean Vincent
is
that guy. And what does Vincent get out of this? A second chance to die for World Brotherhood Watch.

“Why is he after you?” Danny says.

“They don’t like people to leave the fold,” Vincent says. “It makes them feel rejected. No one likes anyone to leave. That’s why everything is so much harder to get out of than get into. Marriage, for example. Anything involving another human being. Any kind of organization. It’s like one of those joke Mexican finger traps. You can put your finger in, but you can’t get it out. Like some giant roach motel.”

“Life’s a roach motel,” says Danny. “Man, how true is that? So what now? Do they still want you in their organization? After you’ve left, and done the stuff you’ve done, I’d think they wouldn’t trust you.”

“Who said anything about their wanting me back? That’s not how they operate. There was this guy in Wyoming ARM who never really believed it all in the first place, but he needed a place to stay, and he sort of got with the program….” Vincent’s embroidering now. He’s talking about himself. He knows nothing about the Wyoming guy, except the next part, which is true. “Anyway, five, six, guys came after him, and they sat him down and talked to him about how he’d screwed up. It’s what they refer to as putting someone in the hot seat. And then—” He pauses a beat, for emphasis. “Then they cut off three of his toes. Nice, huh?”

“Gross. But I don’t get it,” Danny says. “If you’ve stopped thinking the way they think, why don’t they cut you loose and forget it?”

The strangest sensation comes over Vincent, the urge to tell someone, anyone. This kid would be perfect. He’s an innocent. He’s got no power. He wants to hear the truth. It will feel great to say it. Vincent wants that clean five minutes of having everything off his chest. This must be the reason Catholics line up in church every Sunday morning.

Vincent says, “You know how earlier this afternoon you caught me in your room and we laughed and let it go because I was just borrowing one marijuana bud? Remember?”

“Yeah, I remember. That was an hour ago.”

“I took some stuff from my cousin. And let’s just say it was a little more than one bud.”

“Got it,” says Danny. “What did you take?”

“A truck. Some money.” No need to mention the drugs. It’s not that Vincent feels especially guilty or embarrassed about the medication. He just doesn’t want to be the first person to introduce the kid to the wonderful world of pills, even though half his friends are probably abusing Ritalin.

Danny thinks for a minute, then says, “What happened to the truck?”

“Broke down on the way to the city,” says Vincent. “My luck. I had to ditch it and take the bus.” He doesn’t like lying to the kid, but on the other hand, hearing that Vincent is keeping his escape route open might not be the best thing for Danny’s already wobbly sense of security and well-being. How would it look if first the dad and then Vincent just, one day, took a hike? What kind of model would that be of adult male behavior?

“How much money?” Danny says.

“What?”

“How much did you take?”

“Let’s just say it was more than one bud.” Vincent laughs. “It was a bad move. I see that now. I shouldn’t have done it, okay?”

Danny considers this for a while. Runs through the implications. But it’s too much for him to process. He doesn’t ask again how much money. The kid’s had a hard day. They both have.

“Shouldn’t we go home?” Danny says.

“Definitely,” says Vincent.

W
ELCOME.
You’re the first to arrive. Would you care
to go to your table?”

Rendered speechless by the beauty of the receptionist, a smoldering gypsy in a pigeon-colored suit, Bonnie nods and is ushered past Scopello’s famous Wall of Fish, a cascading cornucopia of ice lit by the atrium skylight and studded with fat pink snappers, iridescent flounder, lobsters the size of lap dogs. Everyone’s come to eat fish with shiny eyes, and though the cost of lunch will be over the top for Brotherhood Watch, Bonnie’s betting that just being here will make Laura Ticknor feel happy and generous.

Bonnie stops and stares at the Wall of Fish, as she is meant to. The receptionist is used to it. She pauses a few feet ahead. Calamari will be least likely to break the bank. Bonnie can’t waste the money they should be using to buy vaccines or free prisoners and spend it on sixty-dollar-a-pound wild Patagonian sea bass. But maybe Laura will. The important thing is to focus and not be distracted by the thought of Vincent picking up her van.

Why should it bother Bonnie if a guy who drives better than she does goes ten blocks in a Toyota with a hundred and twenty-five thousand miles on it? If you can trust someone to speak at the Brotherhood Watch benefit dinner, if you can take off your glasses and…well, you can trust him to get your vehicle from the garage. Bonnie wishes she’d told Vincent to go straight home. He probably will, on his own. She just wishes she’d made it clear. Would that have insulted him? She can’t always tell. She can never tell what Vincent thinks is going on between them. Bonnie never offers to let him drive the car. How emasculating is
that?
No wonder the guy wouldn’t fuck her even when she practically asked. What the hell. It’s her van. Vincent is her houseguest.

Of course, it’s at that moment, when Bonnie is thinking the thought least likely to arrange her features in a confident expression, that tidy, stylish Laura Ticknor sweeps into the room. Where did Laura learn to tie her cashmere sweater in that perfect capelet, both arms lying flat without a bulge or twist? Where does she get her hair streaked? How sloppy Bonnie feels, even though she dressed with such special care that her best high heels are viciously mashing her toes together. She crosses her legs and feels her pressed-down thigh spreading across her chair.

Laura too pauses by the Wall of Fish, and only now does Bonnie realize that the fish display is not just restaurant design but interactive performance art. Everybody watches everybody else checking out the fish. Were there people observing her search for the squid? Laura takes it all in and, crisp and precise, with her hands slightly out at her sides, like a cross between a little girl and a fifties film star, she swings around and follows the receptionist to Bonnie’s table.

Bonnie half rises as she and Laura blow kisses at each other.

“Hi, sweetie, how are you?” Laura says.

The
sweetie
means nothing. From the minute Bonnie met Laura, Laura—she has the money, she calls the shots—has acted as if they were old friends. Complaints about her husband and kids, girl-talk about hair and shoes. It’s also semi-ironic, as if intimacy is a joke. Laura and Bonnie will never know each other any better than they do now, or than they did when they met. It was then that Laura said that Brotherhood Watch was Larry’s bribe for her ignoring the bulimic intern he was currently poking. Women like Laura challenge Bonnie to be especially open and sympathetic. Nonjudgmental. Sure, Laura is worth a fortune. But she’s in pain, like everyone else. Her husband doesn’t love her. She supports good causes, instead of just going shopping. Though probably she shops plenty.

“Great to see you,” Bonnie says.

“Great to see
you,
” says Laura.

“You’re looking great,” says Bonnie.

“Please,” says Laura. “Let’s not talk about it. Jake turns fourteen next week.”

Bonnie vaguely recalls some gossip about the lavish Jacob Ticknor bar mitzvah. Forty kids to a Knicks game. Then the Tavern on the Green for the evening. She feels a jolt of possessiveness, as if she and young Jake Ticknor are competitors for Larry and Laura’s money.

“You
do,
” says Bonnie. “You look fabulous.”

Laura twists slightly to gaze back at the restaurant—should Bonnie have gotten up and offered her the seat with the view?—and says, “It’s funny that they think this is authentic Sicilian. Larry and I were just
in
Sicily, and I guess there were restaurants like this. There was one place in Palermo where we paid New York prices, but the joints where you got the really fresh fish always had a TV blaring up in one corner.”

Bonnie looks around the room, as if in search of a TV. But the expense-account customers lit by flashes of atrium sun aren’t paying for a television to compete with the deals they’re making. Is Laura suggesting that this place is inauthentic? Bonnie should have listened to the instinct that told her it was obscene to raise money for Brotherhood Watch over portions of fish that traveled first class by jet from Tierra del Fuego.

“Excuse me, ladies. Can I get you a drink?” The waiter, like the receptionist, is movie-star Mediterranean.

“Water,” says Bonnie. “Tap water.” Then she thinks better of it, and asks Laura, “Would you like a real drink?”

“Do you have La Planeta chardonnay?” Laura asks the waiter.

“Only by the bottle.”

“Then open a bottle and bring us two glasses.” Laura fixes the waiter with a smile of such serene command that it hardly matters she’s just arrived and is already ordering off the menu. Laura will give the foundation money. The question is, how much?

“It’s this terrific wine made by these Sicilian aristocrats who took the family fortune and planted it in grapes,” Laura explains.

The wine appears in seconds. It’s as if they’re drinking sunlight. A golden aura surrounds them. Bonnie must have been mad to think she could get through this on water.

Bonnie says, “So…where did you go in Sicily?”

“We based ourselves in Taormina. Everyone warned us against the San Domenico hotel, but we really liked it.”

“Oh,” says Bonnie. “How great.”

The waiter brings them menus they know better than to open. You order from the Wall of Fish. You order it baked or broiled.

“I’ll have the calamari,” Bonnie says.

“With the tomato-anise foam?” says the waiter.

“Sure,” says Bonnie.

“Baked or broiled?” says the waiter.

“Umm. Broiled,” says Bonnie.

Laura says, “I’ll have the Patagonian sea bass.”

“An excellent choice. Baked or broiled.”

“What do
you
suggest?” Laura asks the waiter.

“Today? Baked.”

“Baked it is,” says Laura. “And could I also have the coulis on the side?”

“Certainly. Would you like to pick out your fish?” Why didn’t he ask Bonnie if she wanted to choose her squid?

“No thanks. I’ll trust you.” Again Laura directs a beam of brilliant cosmetic dentistry at the bedazzled waiter. Then she says to Bonnie, “Larry would insist on going over there and prodding every one of those poor bastard dead fish till their eyes pop.”

Bonnie says, “So you’ve eaten here before.”

Laura watches the waiter go. Then she says, “Don’t answer if this is too personal. But do you ever get sentimental about your divorce? Do you ever wish that you and your husband were still together?”

Bonnie can hardly speak. Did she tell Laura about her divorce? Could Laura’s presumption of intimacy have lured her into confessing? In which case, what did Bonnie say?

“I don’t know,” says Bonnie.

“Well, don’t. Don’t romanticize marriage.” Laura sips her wine and smiles conspiratorially over the glass at Bonnie.

Finally Laura says, “That was some dinner. Scary.”

Bonnie knows which scary dinner Laura means. But she’s not ready to talk about it. She needs another few minutes of Laura rattling on about Larry’s character flaws. How long does it take to harvest squid and bass from the Wall of Fish and cook it?

“Scary,” Laura repeats.

“It
was
scary,” Bonnie says. “Watching Vincent go down. Not knowing if he was going to pull through…”

“I never thought he would die,” Laura says. “Maybe that’s just the way I am. An optimist. Despite everything. My therapist says that’s my problem.”

“He
could
have died,” says Bonnie, defensively. It’s a medical fact. She needs to put some spin on this, the sooner and harder the better. “The gratifying thing is how people have taken to him, how they’ve
got
his story. The most hard-boiled reporters, media vets—even they have been deeply moved. Because Vincent knew what was happening and risked his life to finish his speech.”

Bonnie’s taking a gamble here. She’s telling Laura that the foundation is currently hot. Super-hot. Perhaps she’s making Laura feel competitive with all the newcomers glomming on to Brotherhood Watch. Laura got there first. But it might be good for Laura to feel a twinge of competition.

Laura says, “So is the guy living with you?”

“In my house,” says Bonnie. “With me and my kids—my sons.”

“I meant
living
living. Are you sleeping with him?”

“No!” says Bonnie, as if she’s been pinched. “God, no! Why do you ask?” What has Laura intuited? Bonnie longs to find out. The strange thing is how pleased she is to think that Laura might have picked up some sign of romance. Bonnie wants it to be true, even though it isn’t. Unless it
is
true. You’d think Bonnie would know. Anyway, whatever may have been happening on the night of the dinner definitely stopped happening after that night.

“No reason,” says Laura. “Curious. Maybe it’s just my fantasy about the divorced and single getting a lot of action.”

“So far we’re just good friends. Sometimes we stay up talking all night. He’s a really interesting guy. He’s had a difficult life. It’s amazing, how much he’s changed.” If Laura wants a romantic fantasy, Bonnie will give her one: that charged moment of pure potential, when you’re “good friends” with a man, and anything might happen. The last thing Laura wants is for Bonnie to confess that they are days past the point at which Bonnie took off her glasses and Vincent turned her down.

“I’m sure he’s had a doozy of a life.” Laura widens her eyes unnervingly.

Maybe it would feel terrific, spilling it all out to Laura. Bonnie hasn’t told anyone about her feelings for Vincent. It horrifies her that she doesn’t have one friend she can call and ask what it means when a guy acts a certain way. She used to have plenty of friends. All those years with Joel, then the kids. Somehow she lost touch.

Laura Ticknor is not that friend, not the forgiving soul with whom Bonnie can share the secrets of her heart. It would be a terrible error to indulge in the luxury of confessing to Laura, who would make her pay for it with fake pity and real contempt. The buck would stop, like the check for lunch, at the foundation. Bonnie’s glad she has the common sense to keep from soliciting advice about the fact that Vincent apparently doesn’t want to have sex with her.

“Don’t ask me,” says Laura, as if she’s read Bonnie’s mind. “I have zero experience. I’ve been married fifteen long years. And I’ve been faithful to Larry. If you can believe it. That’s the tragedy of my life.”

“I believe it,” says Bonnie. How will they progress from this to the question of how much Laura might give Brotherhood Watch? “So tell me: What is Jake interested in?” A safe enough question that usually works. Women love talking about their kids. Bonnie hopes Laura doesn’t ask about her kids. What are their interests? TV? Bonnie promises herself she’ll spend more time with them. They’ll go somewhere this weekend.

Unfortunately, she’s missed Laura’s reply, and so can only smile, hoping that Laura hasn’t said her son was into Ecstasy and Internet porn.

God must be on Bonnie’s side. The waiter brings their food.

Bonnie should have known that the calamari would be a mistake. Probably one reason it’s so cheap is the social challenge it offers, sawing through those squirmy legs and rubbery bodies without spraying tomato foam all over the table. You could pick the tiny squid up in your hands if you were having lunch with a close friend. But not with Laura Ticknor.

Laura touches her fish with a fork and it flakes into perfect bitesized chunks of pearlescent flesh.

“How’s your sea bass?” asks Bonnie.

“Heaven,” says Laura.

They eat for a while, Laura savoring her bass, Bonnie battling her squidlets. Laura picks up her fork and, gently waving the chunk of bass speared on the tines, punctuates the interior conversation she seems to be having before she repeats it aloud.

“It
is
amazing,” she says. “Here’s this guy who could have gone in any direction, who falls into the hands of these lowlife racists and gets brainwashed into buying their party line. And then he spends a few months with you guys, and he’s a changed man. A new, improved, model human being. I don’t know what you and Meyer did with the guy, what kind of magic you worked, but basically, Meyer’s right. You can take one guy, one woman, one Israeli, one Palestinian, one heart at a time. You really can make a difference. Or at least you can try. Which is what you guys are doing, trying to make a difference. And you never see that. Courage, generosity. You never see anyone thinking about anything besides their own miserable selfish self!”

Bonnie lifts her wineglass. Laura nods, accepting the tribute. The fork completes its arc to her mouth. Laura chews and swallows.

“This is so great.” She means the bass. For this golden moment, in Laura’s mind, the greatness of the fish melds seamlessly with the greatness of the foundation. If you’ve got money, you can have both. And why not? Why not feed your body and your spirit? And someone else’s body and spirit. Bonnie dreads becoming the kind of puritan who believes it’s wrong to spend your money on delicious, costly fish. On the other hand she does believe—and it’s what she’s doing here—that for every dollar you spend on fish, you should spend a hundred on your fellow humans.