Ark (5 page)

Gertrude handed Rebecca a wine screw. “Do the honors, please.”

Rebecca uncorked the bottle. There were two glasses on a small table beside her. She poured the wine, and they touched glasses.

“You know, before you showed up, Rebecca, I was working on a chair, and I became so distracted by the word ‘fornicate' I almost took off another finger.” She held up her left hand. Half the middle finger was missing. She had accidentally sliced it off with a saw years before. “It's one of my favorite words in the whole English language. Don't you just love it? Say it, Rebecca.
Fornicate.
”

Rebecca indulged her neighbor. “Fornicate.”

“It makes the whole mouth come alive, doesn't it? God, I love that word. You know, you're very pretty. You're very pretty!” She was like a cuckoo clock when she said it, her eyes and mouth convulsing, and her voice reaching up two octaves. Suddenly, Gertrude got up from her seat and went back into her shop. When she returned, she handed Rebecca a footstool made of a dark wood. This wasn't a breezily nailed together object. Hard work was evident in the details.

“It's beautiful, Gertrude.”

“You said you had nothing to elevate your feet at work.”

Mother of pearl was embedded over the screwheads. Rebecca's initials were monogrammed on top. She said, “You made this for me?”

“I hope it serves you well. Now, give me more wine!”

Rebecca raised the bottle and poured. Gertrude took the cork and pushed it back in the bottle. She said, “I can't stand it when people don't put the cork back in. Maybe that makes me anal. But what reason do I have to be that? Am I holding shit up there?” She rose from her seat and tapped her posterior. “Must be, you know?”

All of a sudden, Rebecca said, “I got a strange call from my father today. His sister, she's suing him. She's suing the whole family, actually. My dad was telling me all about it. He seemed out of his mind.”

Gertrude's eyelids fluttered. She said, “Describe your father.”

“My dad? Oh, well, he's sensitive and prone to instability. He's not weak exactly, not a coward. But when faced with adversity, he tends to run the other way. He lost his mind once before.”

“Did he ever find it?”

“Most of it.”

“But not all?”

Rebecca shook her head.

“You expect he'll band together with his parents?”

“Maybe,” Rebecca said. “But probably not. With these people, it's all irrationality and destruction. It was so hard for him to break free of his family. It took him fifty-eight years to do it. Working with his sisters all his life, and with his parents part owners in the company controlling everyone and everything, and my father being so susceptible to their influence. They rode him hard. His sisters, too. Being in business with these people meant getting hammered down on every day for thirty-five years straight. The screaming, the violence. I remember my dad coming home with a black eye one day. Sondra—she sucker punched him. She had a diamond ring on her finger, too, and he had to get six stitches. But he went back to work the next day and fell right into line. He would never leave. Until two and a half years ago, that is, when he remarried. At the time he was this big,” Rebecca said, holding her fingers close together. “But after moving to Los Angeles—his wife is from there—and cutting off the yoke, he became something of a whole person again.”

“You don't visit him, do you?”

“Occasionally. My mother's in L.A., too.”

“But you would never live there. Well, why would you? Your whole family's left. You've got the whole city to yourself. So, what's wrong with this aunt of yours?”

“My aunt?” Rebecca took a drink of wine, thinking. “Between all her parents' children, she's the un-pretty one. She's not as likeable as her siblings, either. She's a bully, like her dad.”

“Mmm.”

“And she has no relationship with her parents. She doesn't see them more than once a year. I don't think they talk on the phone very much. And then, her parents have a lot of money. She might think she's been cut out of the will—for all I know, she has been—and she could be trying to get hers. Gertrude, I want to help my dad.”

“I never had that problem.”

“Well, I've been very selfish over the last fifteen years, and that's had its uses. But I've never done anything important for my father. Maybe I can help him win this lawsuit. I can put him in touch with the right people. I can direct him. My grandparents, too.”

“Did they ask for your help?”

“No. But in their minds, I'm still a child. It would never occur to them.”

“Maybe they don't want your counsel. I say, sit back. Wait for them to ask. Don't insert yourself into their problems.”

“So, you think I should just keep on living my life as if none of this were happening?”

“For as long as you can,” Gertrude said. “Yes. That's exactly what you should do.”

III. APRÈS LE DÉLUGE

 

Summer moved along, and Ben did his best to ignore Sondra's lawsuit. He made his art. He shopped for groceries. He cooked chicken and wandered Chinatown. He thought about refrigeration. He sat at the dining table at the house in Southampton and cut obituaries for his files, dozens and dozens of them, walked on the beach at sunrise on Saturday and Sunday mornings and did his exercises there in the sand, napped in the late morning and again in the afternoon on the deck beside the pool, and sought new ways to open up his mind and give fresh energy to his body. For instance, he bought thousands of books at the Salvation Army in Hoboken—every kind of book, books of poetry and cookbooks and collections of plays and books on childcare and on mental health and encyclopedias and almanacs and dictionaries—and stacked them all over the loft, in his studio and his office and in the living room, having decided it would make him feel stronger to be surrounded by so many books. And at times, he imagined, it was working. However, neither the books, nor the exercise, nor the fresh ocean air was potent enough to combat the devastating physical and mental effects of Sondra and her lawyers, who were finding new reasons to file charges against her father and mother every other week. No, the case wasn't going away as quickly as the lawyers had originally assured him it would. In fact, Ben wasn't hearing any details about the lawsuit moving toward a conclusion. Only about new bills. It seemed he'd racked up a hundred-thousand-dollar fee in just a month. Had it been longer? Perhaps a couple of days, a week. But now, by the time July rolled around, the bill was up to one hundred and fifty thousand, and then, come August, two hundred and fifty thousand, and then four hundred thousand by September, and now six hundred thousand with the start of autumn. Ben screamed at his lawyers—what was going on! When would this stop? They told Ben that for all intents and purposes things were going briskly. His daughter was relentless. She was doing everything to protract the suit, to drain him of his financial resources and his energy. And what could they do about that?

On the late November morning that the legal bill hit eight hundred and forty thousand dollars, Ben received a call from the superintendent at his warehouse in Jersey City. The artist and his assistant were parked in the Cadillac, waiting for Eliza to finish up at the hairdresser on Mott Street. The superintendent began explaining how a week of rain had flooded the room where Ben's art was stored. He couldn't be specific about the damage to any work. He hadn't been inside to look. What he knew for sure was that there was water. And perhaps lots of it.

Jerome rushed from the car into the hairdresser's. Seeing the artist's wife seated in a black salon chair, a white barber's apron cinched at the neck, her short red hair marked with thin pieces of tinfoil, and with Violet standing at her side, Jerome, visibly breathless and shaking, explained what had happened.

“Oh,” Eliza replied. There was a Band-Aid above her eyebrow. She had fallen off the bed yesterday and hit her head on the floor. Still, she looked pleased. She said, “I hope it's all washed away. It's garbage which has to be gotten rid of by someone at some point anyway.”

Her position on Ben's art had long ceased to offend Jerome. But he said, “Another crisis might kill him.”

“I don't see any change in my husband of late.” Looking up into the mirror, Eliza said, “Do you, Violet?”

Amenable, subdued, Violet said, “No, Ms. Arkin.”

“Perhaps you're not aware of how much Ben spends on that warehouse. It's three thousand and five hundred dollars a month. Running around scraping together money to pay these lawyers, and here he is wasting so much. Now he can finally get rid of the place.”

“Eliza, this might kill him.”

“Well, then I'll finally get to winter in Miami. You'll come with me, Violet, won't you?”

To be heard above a hair dryer, Violet leaned into the old woman's ear. She said, “Ms. Arkin, I go where you go.”

“We can go anywhere. We'll have to go somewhere. I must get out of that loft. I can't live there another day. It's simply a terrible place. The moths have taken over. There's no light. I think Southampton in the summer, and Miami in the winter. What do you say, Violet?”

“Ms. Arkin, I say yes.”

“My husband is not well. He should be put away and given extensive psychiatric treatment.”

Jerome said, “Please, Eliza, just listen to me for a second.”

“He's a danger to society, don't you think, Violet?”

“He
is
different,” the nurse replied.

“You're just being nice now,” Eliza said.

Jerome's dark eyes flashed a severe look. He didn't have time for this conversation. He told Eliza and Violet to take a taxi home. “I don't know when we'll be back. Maybe by six or seven o'clock.”

“Take all the time in the world,” Eliza told him. “We won't be waiting for you.”

Fifteen minutes later, the artist and his assistant were driving through the Holland Tunnel. Neither person spoke. When Jerome couldn't endure the silence another moment, he gave Ben's knee a pat, and told him not to worry. He said, “I think you could save a lot of money putting more miles between the warehouse and the city. We should consider a move.”

“Shut up,” Ben said. “Don't talk.”

“Go five more miles into Jersey, and the rents are half as much as what you're paying for your place.”

“I said shut up!”

“But Ben, you haven't given me my salary for two weeks!”

The artist, in tunnel-flickering light, raised his left hand in the air. He had never hit Jerome. Yet he looked as if he'd strike him now. “Just drive the fucking car, you hear me!”

Jerome didn't answer.

“Do you understand!” the artist screamed.

“Yes, Ben. Yes, I do.”

The artist lowered his left hand into his lap and held it tightly with the right for the duration of the drive.

The warehouse was ten minutes beyond the tunnel, on a street in Jersey City that no one would ever find unless he was looking for it. No homes nearby. No people out walking. No businesses. No life. It was a six-story white brick building surrounded by mud filled with all the toxins that gave Jersey its reputation. Jerome pulled up out front. Reynolds, the superintendent, was waiting for them on the steps, clad in a navy jumper, and with his legs pretzeled beneath a tremendous belly. Ben was always warning Jerome that if he kept eating the way he did, he'd look like the superintendent one day. And that if he didn't start using his head, he'd end up with a job like the superintendent had. However, Reynolds had always seemed happy to Jerome, significantly happier than Ben Arkin, who now came slowly from the car with his chin up high and his shoulders pulled back. He brushed past the superintendent without saying a word.

“You'll need a flashlight,” the superintendent told Jerome. “I killed the power. Had to. Else there could be a fire.”

“You think it's bad down there?” Jerome asked.

“Can't say,” Reynolds answered. “There's water. That's all I know for sure.”

Jerome could see Ben descending the stairs to the basement, and he ran to catch up but didn't get there in time. Ben opened the basement door. A surge of water rushed in past his ankles.

“Fucking shit!” Ben yelled.

“Ben, wait for me,” Jerome called down from the top of the stairwell.

“Fucking mother hell.”

“Just hold on a second,” Jerome said.

Inside the warehouse, water came up to their thighs. The ceiling felt close. There were a few thousand works stored here. Forty years of sixteen-hour days, minus the time for the prostate cancer, the dental work, the obsessive grocery shopping, and however much more for the vacations Ms. Arkin had forced on Ben. All that life's worth of work. At least three-quarters of it was under water. That was Jerome's initial estimate when he shined a beam of light through the room. The assistant, silent, weak with fear, followed after Ben through the water. The old man struggled with each step, but was slowly getting farther and farther from the entryway. Then he waved Jerome off. He said, “Get away from me. Go. Please.” Ben turned and disappeared into a corner.

Jerome shut off the flashlight then and was in darkness. It was better to wait without seeing, besides. He touched his fingertips to the water, skimming the surface, making a light splash of sound. Then he said Ben's name.

“Ben, what's going on out there? Do you need me?”

Only silence. Was he having heart attack? A stroke? No, Jerome told himself. No, not even this could kill Ben. He was the toughest man Jerome had ever known. He had starved through the Depression. His father had died before it was over. Jerome didn't know how. Ben wouldn't tell him. He didn't like to talk about his past. The assistant still imagined he knew more about Ben than most people. The artist had had two brothers, three sisters, and his mother to support by the age of fifteen. He'd graduated high school at sixteen, and had been given a position at Macy's on Thirty-Fourth Street not long after as a gofer in their ad department. Ben hadn't said much about the job. Only the cafeteria. The greatest day of his life had been when he'd first walked into the Macy's cafeteria as an employee and could eat as much of anything as he'd wanted. Every day, turkey and mashed potatoes, meatloaf, ziti, fried chicken, apple and cherry and key lime pie. He still spoke about that Macy's cafeteria. The Depression had made Arkin mad about food. Jerome drove the artist to the Shop Rite in Jersey City, where things were cheaper than in Manhattan, and he would stock up: pasta and rice, cereal, dried fruits, chocolate syrup, tomato juice, walnuts, peanuts, cashews, pecans. He didn't eat any of the food, but put it away in the warehouse in case a day should come in the future of humankind, an event so catastrophic that the whole food supply vanished. He said that being prepared for life's inevitable disasters was part of his genius. Ben had headed up his own advertising firm on Madison Avenue, sold it, and retired a multi-millionaire at forty-two. After which, he'd put himself away in the studio to become an uncivilized animal and make art with blood. Those were his words. Ben hadn't put any effort into becoming famous. Said Ben on the subject: “It's a waste of time for a genius like me to peddle his art. I say get down to the bloody work, make something the world's never seen, and when you're dead perhaps they'll find out about you—if they're lucky!”