A Dual Inheritance (40 page)

“Poor guy,” she said. She swiped a glass of champagne from a passing waiter’s tray. “You were a mess then.”

“Yes,” Ed said, because he owed her that acknowledgment, even if he wasn’t sure how true it really was. He didn’t remember himself as a mess. He remembered a youngish man with more options than he had at the present moment.

“I do hope time has healed that wound.” And, with a meaningful look, she took a sip of champagne.

“What wound?”

“Helen,” she said.

And it was as if the collective Cold War nightmare suddenly culminated in a nuclear white-flash instant. It was that intense, that unreasonable, as Connie said her name. He felt dizzy and nauseous, and when he remembered he was holding a drink, Ed sucked down nearly all the bubbly, his nostrils tingling from the rush of it.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I never told her.”

And Ed was sure Connie could somehow feel the velocity of his heart as it dropped straight into his bladder, as, simultaneously, he dropped to the floor outside his rented room, where Helen was sitting, waiting for him. Waiting. For him. He was sure Connie could also feel the sheer curiosity pulsing at his temples, his chest, and—most insistently—his prick. Ed wondered if Connie was as surprised as he was by just how forcefully such insinuation had affected him. In a weird way, in a generous way, he wanted to let her know.
Connie, you have thrown me
. But: “Oh, right,” said Ed. “Of course.”

“Of course?”

“Time heals.”

“Well, good,” she said. “I’m glad.”

It was as if he were rooted to the wood planks of the floor, as if the adjacent socialites and art lovers and and politicos and all those years and people and countries and all that money coming and going and the very real threat that his company was failing and unable to meet its monthly commitments: It had all been nothing more than distraction from this story, the one about Helen, the one about that morning at the Y when she was sitting in the hallway, waiting. He knew this wasn’t true. He’d been crazy about Jill—certifiable. And he knew that his love (puny, feeble word!) for Rebecca was sometimes more than he thought he could stand. But at that moment it was as if Connie—in an attempt to take him down—was intentionally projecting an air of familiarity, and her plan was working. He felt weakened by her proximity. Connie’s straight nose and white teeth drew him closer and closer with their promise that all problems had corresponding concrete solutions, and goddamn if he didn’t feel as if none of his relationships were as real as what came before having an income or an apartment—not to mention a wife and child—before the president was gunned down in Dallas that November and Hugh and Helen were together somewhere in Africa, which may as well have been the moon, and there was nobody else he wanted to call.

“So you and Helen,” managed Ed. “You’re in touch?”

Connie waved to several couples and fielded three sets of air kisses before answering. “Well,” she finally said, “back then, after you and I were—” She interrupted herself here to indicate Ed with her champagne glass, as if to imply disappointment itself. “I wrote to her. I reached out. I just—I don’t know why.”

“I’m surprised.”

“Well, we
were
friends, Helen and I.”

“Yes, but—if I recall—you didn’t exactly have the nicest opinion of her. You told me she was—”

“I remember what I said, Ed.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Ed?” she said firmly, “I remember everything. I remember how I felt about Helen Shipley, and I remember how I felt about you.”

“Oh,” he said, and though taken off guard by her sudden candor, he was also distinctly relieved. “Me, too.” He remembered Connie’s warmth, her humor; he remembered her sophistication, which had always seemed slightly studied somehow. He remembered her breasts, too, and how the rest of her felt too slight, and how this slightness was the sole quality she’d possessed that made him feel nervous. He remembered the sense that, while he was in her company, she was always looking out for him, and he remembered thinking that she, Connie Graff, was the woman he was supposed to end up with. And it was exactly this sense that he had turned from. He remembered when he’d turned from it—from her; it had felt, with its requisite bit of pain, exactly like freedom.

“She wrote back immediately.” Connie nodded, her words now stripped of their sparkly surroundings. It was a voice that belonged to the middle of the night, when trappings no longer mattered. “For a while there, Helen wrote all the time. She wrote about five letters to every one of mine.” And, as if she realized that she’d come across as boastful, Connie added, “She was lonely, obviously.”

Ed followed as she inched farther and farther from the center of the room in a kind of thoughtful silence. They brushed by several potted palms. Older couples strained to hear one another above the cocktail music; dinner would soon be served. Connie was no longer fielding waves and air kisses; it seemed as if people knew to stay away. Ed and Connie drifted to the periphery of the party, though they never did sit down.

“Did you—” started Ed. “Have you seen them?”

“I saw her that summer. She came to visit her parents. Hugh didn’t come. Helen—she seemed okay. A little worn out, a little overwhelmed, but, then, she had some trouble after the baby was born.”

A baby? They had a baby? They stayed together and had a goddamn baby?
“What kind of trouble?”

“She was never the most perky person,
obviously
, but … I think she took a bad turn there for a while. God knows what it was like where
they were living. Hugh always had some kind of punishing—or self-punishing—streak, don’t you think?”

“Hugh didn’t like being rich,” said Ed. “That’s what I think.”

“But I think it went further. I don’t know. She was very tight-lipped about their living conditions—I got the feeling that she was always holding back from telling me the real story. She was protective of Hugh; you know how that is.”

“How what is?”

“You know—being married. People turn private.”

“They do?”

“Oh, stop it. You know what I’m talking about. She didn’t want me to think badly of Hugh.”

“Why would you think badly of him?”

“Ed.”

“Fine.”

“Stop digging.”

“I said fine.”

“I mean it.”

“Okay,” he relented. “Go on.”

“I don’t know that there’s anything more to say. It was as if she made some kind of decision. I started to hear less from her, she seemed more settled, and—” Connie abruptly stopped talking.

“What.”

“You didn’t know they had a child?”

He shook his head and thought about Helen pregnant, about Hugh holding their newborn, and he wanted to sit down. He wanted to lie down. Had he really not considered this possibility? He must have considered it. He’d considered everything at one point or another. Hadn’t he?

“You looked so … crushed when I mentioned it.”

“I’m not crushed,” he said, with an attempt at incredulity. “Of course I’m not.”

“They have a daughter.”

“Oh,” he said. And then, because he couldn’t stop himself, “I do, too.”

“I know,” Connie said softly.

“You do?” She nodded.

“And how about you?” he asked.

“How about me?”

“You’re wearing a ring.”

She smiled, and it was such a relief. He’d forgotten her real smile. “The man who spoke at the podium? That’s my husband, Micha. We have a boy and a girl. They’re eight and ten.”

“That’s terrific,” said Ed. “Just terrific.”

“It’s the best,” she said. As if to say:
The rest of this conversation has been meaningless
.

“I’m going away for a couple of months,” he found himself saying. “But when I’m back, maybe we can get together.”

“Where are you going?”

“China,” he said. “I’m leaving in the morning.”

“Really. Where in China?”

“Shenzhen. I’m flying into Hong Kong. But maybe when I’m back we can—”

“Well, safe travels.” She smiled. “Our friends just went—adopted the most delicious little girl.”

She caught someone’s eye in the distance and began nodding and laughing, and he was jealous. He was jealous in a way that the younger man—so full of options, so full of himself—never could have understood.

That night he poured himself a glass of Diet Coke, sat at his desk in near darkness, and, under the one desk lamp’s bright yellow light, the conversation with Connie and its sense of timeless urgency faded away. He was relieved that this was possible. He was relieved, too, to be able to
focus on his legal pads and on his (thus far) relatively private potential disaster. He could not comprehend his interminable (why not just name it?) obsession with Helen and—in a different way—Hugh. He could not comprehend the fact of their parenthood or their enduring marriage. He could not exactly comprehend the demise of his own marriage, either, or the fact that his daughter was not somehow down the hall in her oddly spare bedroom, eating orange sections between bouts of sulky letter-writing. He could not comprehend any of this. But here at his desk, by the light of his stainless architect’s lamp purchased at the Harvard Coop in 1961, he could begin to think straight. And as he sat with his head in his hands, all that remained were these two facts: He was in trouble, and he had a plan.

When Hy and the others ousted him, Ed had convinced Wells Fargo to loan him twenty million dollars. Twenty million—by talking. The fact that the company he built with this loan could easily turn enough profits to make the monthly payments was something he’d never seriously doubted, and for years he’d been correct. But after Black Monday, one year ago, after his net worth plummeted, there was not enough money to pay the employees of those one hundred forty dealerships.

Ed’s company was in the process of filing for Chapter 11.

And he had sent his daughter away.

Looking up and out the window, he imagined the treetops of Central Park, though he was, of course, met with nothing but his own reflection. How many times had he faced himself like this? The glaring white of his unbuttoned shirt, the blue glass sweating on the desk. But he once flew to Texas in the middle of the night and, based on his powers of persuasion, he’d saved the fate of Wall Street. He had been that man, too. And the fact was (he sat straighter now) that once the company filed for Chapter 11, it would be absolved of debts and interests until there was a hearing in front of the judge, and, with the help of his most excellent lawyer, this hearing could take up to four years to sort out. He could buy himself four years. For all that he wanted to pull off, he needed those four years, that same excellent lawyer, and a telephone.

He also needed capital.

He took one last awful slug of Diet Coke and crunched down on three fat ice cubes.

What he was going to do was not legal, and he could, in fact, go to jail. It was not as if he didn’t grasp this. But he was also convinced that if he followed these plans, written out nightly with his green felt-tips on his yellow legal pads from the very first step to the very last, if he annotated these plans with questions that diminished daily with his ever-increasing knowledge—if he stuck to his plan, one step at a time—everyone would come out on top.

He called Rebecca on the dorm phone. It was late, but those kids never went to sleep on a Saturday night before two
A.M
. After several rings, a girl answered, called out for his daughter, and then told him to wait, that she’d go find her. Though he had, in fact, seen where the dorm phone was, he could picture neither the room nor the comings and goings of so many teenage girls. What he pictured—and what he knew was patently incorrect—was some kind of nineteenth-century warren.

Moments later another one came on the line. It was not uncommon to hear several chirpy voices before finally hearing Rebecca’s. “Mr. Cantowitz?” said this one. Her voice was uncommonly mature.

“Hello,” he said.

“I’m Vivi,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

He hadn’t heard a thing about this Vivi. “Nice to meet you over the phone,” he said. “Seen my daughter around?”

“She’s taking a shower right now. We went hiking—”

“It’s past midnight.”

“Right, but—I mean, you know, earlier today. At any rate, she’s in the shower. Is everything okay?”

“Everything is fine,” said Ed.

“Good,” said the girl. “Listen, don’t worry, I’ll tell her to call you right back.”

“Okay,” said Ed. Was this girl on drugs? What was with the hiking and the shower? It was all a little overexplained.

“Okay,” said the girl. “I’ll be seeing you.”

“Where?” asked Ed.

“I don’t know,” said the girl, and she started to laugh. “I just mean, you know, generally. Good night, Mr. Cantowitz.”

“Good night.”

He never heard from Rebecca that night. They spoke briefly before he left for China, and when Ed asked about the girl he’d spoken to on the phone, his daughter didn’t say much. She’d always been very independent, never too focused on her friends.

Chapter Fifteen

Caribbean Queen

They took a plane to St. Maarten, where they loaded up on
céleri rémoulade
. “Nobody wants cheese in this weather,” said Vivi’s father, and then, when he went across the street to the liquor store, Vivi’s mother picked out hunks of Brie, Gruyère, and, after some deliberation, Roquefort. She bought two days’ worth of baguettes, quail eggs, sliced ham, seafood salad, two big bars of Toblerone. Rebecca split off, wandering through the
épicerie
, only to come upon Vivi’s mother holding two jars of jam, staring into the small selection as if she’d lost all train of thought. When she saw Rebecca, she smiled, pushed a stray hair out of her eyes. “Strawberry or raspberry? It’s always a paralyzing choice.”

“I know what you mean,” Rebecca said.

“I’m getting both,” she said, her eyes widening, as if this were the definition of decadence.

“Aunt Kitty said we have to try the marinated artichokes,” said Vivi, approaching with a container.

“Well, we can’t let Kitty down,” said Vivi’s mother, and for another second she looked kind of absent. “Now, can we?”