Bleeding Edge (28 page)

Maxine has brought Reg’s DVD and a tiny Panasonic player, which Platt, not sure of where the wall outlets are exactly, allows her to plug in. He beams at the little screen in a way that makes her feel like a grandchild showing him a music video. But about the time the Stinger crew get set up,

“Oh. Oh, wait just a minute, is this the pause button here, would you mind—”

She pauses it. “Problem?”

“These weapons, they’re . . . Stinger missiles or something. A bit out of my ground, I hope you appreciate.”

And if she wanted a runaround, she’d be over in Central Park.
“Right, I keep forgetting, you people tend to be Mannlicher-Carcano types.”

“Jackie and I were dear friends,” he replies coolly, “and I’m not sure I oughtn’t to resent that.”

“Resent, resent, please, I knew this was a mistake.” She’s on her feet, picking up her Kate Spade bag, noticing an unaccustomed lightness.  Naturally, the one fucking day she probably should have brought the Beretta. Reaches to eject the DVD. By now Platt’s diplomatic reflexes have taken over, or maybe WASP control freakery. Murmuring something like “There, there,” he hits a hidden call button, which rapidly brings in the intern with a pot of coffee and an assortment of cookies. Maxine wonders if Girl Scouts were inappropriately involved in this. Platt watches the rest of the rooftop footage in silence.

“Well. Provocative. Perhaps if you could spare me a couple of minutes?” Withdrawing to an inner office and leaving Maxine with the intern, who is leaning in the doorway now gazing at her, she wants to say inscrutably, but that would be racist. Absent a full ingredient list, she is of course not about to start scarfing cookies.

“So . . . how’s the job? your first step in a legal career here?”

“I hope not. What I really am is a rap artist.”

“Like uh, who, Jay-Z?”

“Well, actually I’m more of a Nas person. As you may know they’re in this feud at the moment, that old Queens-versus-Brooklyn thing again, hate to take sides, but—“The World Is Yours,” how can anything even compare?”

“You perform in public, like clubs?”

“Yeah. Got a club date coming up soon, in fact, here, check this out.” From somewhere he has produced a TB-303 clone with built-in speakers, which he now plugs in and powers up, and starts fingering a major pentatonic bass line. “Dig it,”

Tryin to do Tupac and Biggie thangs

With red velvet Chairman Mao piggy banks,

like Screamin Jay in Hong Kong

jumpin to wrong conclusions

old-movie confusions, yo who be dat

Scandinavian brand of Azian

ya dig wid some Sigrid be

the daughter of Kublai Khan,

Warner Oland, Charlie Chan, General Yan

bitter tea, for her stupidity pullin rank

Bette Davis shanked by Gale Sondegaard

like they was on the yard

or down in some forgotten cell

far, far from the corner of

Mott and Pell—

“Yes oh and Darren,” Chandler Platt reentering a little brusquely, “when you have a chance, could you please bring me those copies of the Braun, Fleckwith side letter? And get Hugh Goldman for me over there?”

“Mad cool, yo,” unplugging his digital bass and heading for the door.

“Thanks, Darren,” Maxine smiles, “nice song—from what little Mr. Platt has allowed me to hear.”

“Actually, he’s unusually tolerant. Not everyone in his demographic goes for what we like to think of as Gongsta Rap.”

“Y— I thought I might have caught one or two, I’m not sure, racial overtones . . .”

“Preemptive. They gonna be give me all rice-nigga remarks and shit, this way I beat ’em to it.” He hands her a disc in a jewel case. “My mix tape, enjoy.”

“He gives them away,” Chandler Platt blinking his eyes at regular intervals and without motive, like faces in low-budget cartoons. “I made the mistake of asking him once how he expects to make money. He said that wasn’t the point, but has never explained what is. To me, I’m appalled, it strikes at the heart of Exchange itself.” He reaches for and sits contemplating a chocolate-chip cookie. “Back when I was getting
into the business, all ‘being Republican’ meant really was a sort of principled greed. You arranged things so that you and your friends would come out nicely, you behaved professionally, above all you put in the work and took the money only after you’d earned it. Well, the party, I fear, has fallen on evil days. This generation—it’s almost a religious thing now. The millennium, the end days, no need to be responsible anymore to the future. A burden has been lifted from them. The Baby Jesus is managing the portfolio of earthly affairs, and nobody begrudges Him the carried interest . . .” Suddenly, and from the cookie’s point of view, rudely, chomping into it and scattering crumbs. “Sure you won’t have one, they’re quite . . . No? All right, thanks, don’t mind if I . . .” Grabbing another, two or three actually, “I just spoke with some people. A most puzzling conversation, I have to say. At least they picked up.”

“Not the standard corporate chitchat, then.”

“No, something else, something . . . peculiar. Not out loud, or in so many words, but as if . . .”

“Wait. If you don’t want to tell me—”

“. . . as if they know already what’s going to happen. This . . . event. They know, and they’re not going to do anything about it.”

Is this all yet another exercise in freaking out the common folk so we’ll keep bleating and begging for protection? How scared is Maxine supposed to feel? “I didn’t get you in any trouble, I hope.”

“‘Trouble.’” She thinks she’s seen most of the looks of despair available to men of this pay grade, but what now briefly appears on his face you’d have to open a new file for. “In trouble with that bunch? Never that easy to tell, really. Even if there were to be unpleasantness, I could rely without hesitation upon young Darren, who’s board-certified in everything from nunchaku up through . . . well, Stinger missiles, I’m sure, and beyond. Rest easy as to my safety, young lady, and look instead to your own. Try to avoid terrorist-related activities. Oh, and would you mind going out the back way? You weren’t here, you see.”

The back exit happens to be near Darren’s cubicle. Maxine glances in
and finds him standing by a window, turned away in quarter profile, looking,
sighting,
down fifty stories into New York, down into that specific abyss, with an intensity she recognizes from the DeepArcher splash screen. Should she run in, break his concentration with questions like, Do you know Cassidy, did you pose for the Archer, provoking him into who knows what don’t-be-in-my-face-bitch gongsta displeasure . . . Is she that desperate for a literal link between this kid and some screen image? when she knows all the time there is none, that the figure was there, has always been there, that’s all, that Cassidy thanks to some intervention nobody knows how to name found her way to the silent, stretched presence at the edge of the world and copied what she remembered and immediately forgot the way back there . . . .

Jangling with unquiet thoughts, Maxine emerges onto the street and notices it’s only a short walk to Saks. Maybe a half hour of fashion-related fugue, don’t call it shopping, will soft-sell her back down. She cuts across to Fifth Avenue by way of Forty-Seventh Street. It being the Diamond District, who wouldn’t? Not only on the chance however remote of glimpsing from afar exactly the stones, the setting she’s been looking for all her life, but also for the general air of intrigue, the feeling that nothing, nobody on this block is positioned where they are by accident, that saturating the space, invisible as the wavelengths that carry soap operas into the home, dramas of faceted intricacy are teeming all around.

“Maxine Tarnow? Isn’t it?” Seems to be Emma Levin, Ziggy’s krav maga teacher. “Just down here to meet my boyfriend for lunch.”

“So you two are what—shopping for diamonds? maybe . . .
the
diamond? Oh! What’s that . . . dingdong sound I hear? Could it be . . .” No. She didn’t actually say this out loud. Did she? is she really turning into Elaine, nonconsensually as Larry Talbot into the Wolf Man, for example?

Naftali, the ex-Mossad boyfriend, works security for a diamond merchant here on the street. “You’d think we’d’ve met years ago on the
job, field guy in on a visit to the office, kaplotz! Magic! but no, it was a fixer-upper. Same lightning bolt, however . . .”

“Ziggy’s been bringing home Naftali stories since he started krav maga. Big impression, which on Ziggy it’s hard to make.”

“There he is. My dreamboat.” Naftali is pretending to lounge against a storefront, a flaneur who can be triggered silently, instantly into the wrath of God. According to Ziggy, the first time Naftali visited the studio, Nigel immediately asked him how many people he’d killed, and he shrugged, “I lost count,” and when Emma glared, added, “I mean . . . I can’t remember?” Maybe a case of kidding a kidder, but Maxine wouldn’t want to have to find out. Flabless and close-cropped, a black suit, a face amiable from half a block away reacquiring as it comes into focus its history of laceration and breakage and feelings kept at a professional distance. Though for Emma Levin he makes exceptions. They smile, they embrace, and for a second they’re the two brightest sparklers on the block.

“Ah, you’re Ziggy’s mom. The tough guy. How’s his summer going?”

Tough? her little Ziggurat? “He’s somewhere off in Iowa, Illinois, one of them. Practicing his moves every day, I’m sure.”

“Good place to be,” Naftali speeding his beat a little, and Emma flashing him the look.

As an ex-blurter, Maxine can relate, but still, wondering what he’s almost saying, she tries, “Wish I could figure a way to get out of town for a while.”

He’s watching her intently, not exactly smiling but pleased, like somebody who’s been in on enough interrogations to appreciate the etiquette. “Out here in the open, you know, you get all these stories. The problem is, most of it’s garbage.”

“Which doesn’t help that much, if you’re a worrier.”

“You’re a worrier? I wouldn’t have thought.”

“Naftali Perlman,” Emma growls, “now you stop hustling her, she’s married.”

“Separated,” Maxine batting her eyelashes.

“See, how possessive,” Naftali beaming. “We’re going to lunch, you want to join us?”

“I’m due back at work, but thanks.”

“Your work . . . you’re . . . a model?”

In a very precise way, Emma Levin draws one foot to the side, cocks an elbow, puts on her kung fu–movie face.

“My kinda woman!” An explicit squeeze which Emma cannot be said to avoid.

“Behave, guys. Shalom.”

T
he boys call in one night from Prairie du Chien or Fond du Lac or someplace to tell her they’ll be home in two days.

All, as Ace Ventura sez, and even sings, righty then. Maxine wanders uneasily around the place, convinced she has left evidence of misbehavior out in glaringly plain sight that will, not exactly get her in trouble with Horst, but oblige her to be heedful of his feelings, which despite appearances, he may actually have. She runs through the company she’s kept—aside from Windust—since Horst left town. Conkling, Rocky, Eric, Reg. In every case she can claim legitimate work reasons, which would be fine if Horst was the IRS.

Though Heidi is likely to be less than helpful, “Maybe you and Carmine could drop by, say, accidentally?” Maxine wonders.

“You’re expecting trouble?”

“Emotions, maybe.”

“Mm-hmm? . . . so what you’re really saying is you want Horst to see me in a relationship with another person, because you’re paranoid Horst and I may still be an item? Maxi, insecure Maxi, when will you be able to just let it go?”

Heidi seems on edge these days, even for Heidi, so Maxine isn’t too surprised when her girlhood chum makes a point of not showing up, with Carmine or without, when the Loeffler menfolk at last come roughhousing home again, loud and sugar-high, down the hall and through the door.

“Hey Mom. Missed you.”

“Oh, guys.” She kneels on the floor and holds the boys till everybody gets too embarrassed.

They’re all wearing red Kum & Go ball caps and have brought Maxine one too, which she puts on. They’ve been everywhere. Floyd’s Knobs, Indiana. Duck Creek Plaza in Bettendorf. Chuck E. Cheese and Loco Joe’s. They sing her the Hy-Vee commercial. More than once.

Arriving in Chicago, they promptly got a tour down memory lane, which for Horst was the LaSalle Street canyon, his first and oldest home turf, where he’d been one of those handjiving adventurers who dared the pit every trading day. Started at the Merc trading three-month Eurodollar futures, both for clients and for himself, wearing a custom trader’s jacket with tastefully muted green and magenta stripes and a three-letter name tag pinned to it. After the pits closed around three in the afternoon, he shifted to civvies and walked over to the Chicago Board of Trade and checked in at the Ceres Cafe. When the CME decided to ban double trading, Horst joined a good-size migration over to the CBOT, where no such qualms existed, though Eurodollar activity was noticeably less intense. For a while he shifted to Treasuries, but soon, as if answering some call from deep in the tidy iterations of Midwest DNA, he had found his way into the agricultural pits, and next thing he knew, he was out in deep American countryside, inhaling the aroma from handfuls of wheat, scrutinizing soybeans for purple seed stain, walking through fields of spring barley squeezing kernels and inspecting glumes and peduncles, talking to farmers and weather oracles and insurance adjusters—or, as he put it to himself, rediscovering his roots.

Still, farm fields Kum & farm fields Go, but it’s Chicago that really
pulls you back. Horst took his sons to the traders’ cafeteria at the CBOT, and to the Brokers Inn, where they ate the legendary giant fish sandwich, and to old-school steak houses in the Loop where the beef is hung aging in the front window and the staff address the boys as “Gentlemen.” Where the steak knife next to your plate is not some flimsy little serrated blade with a plastic handle but whetstoned steel riveted into custom-hewn oak. Solid.

The Loeffler grandfolks, all through their visit, were over the moon, the specifically Iowa moon, which from the front porch was bigger than any moon the boys had ever seen, rising over little trees whose silhouettes were shaped like lollipops, making everybody forget about what they might’ve been missing on the tube, which was on inside but more as an accent light than anything.

They ate at malls all across Iowa, at Villa Pizza and Bishop’s Buffet, and Horst introduced them to Maid-Rites as well as to local variations on the Louisville Hot Brown. Further into the summer and days to the west, they watched the wind in different wheat fields and waited through the countywide silences when it grows dark in the middle of the afternoon and lightning appears at the horizon. They went looking for arcade games, in derelict shopping plazas, in riverside pool halls, in college-town hangouts, in ice-cream parlors tucked into midblock micromalls. Horst couldn’t help noticing how the places had, most of them, grown more ragged since his time, floors less swept, air-conditioning not as intense, smoke thicker than in the midwestern summers of long ago. They played ancient machines from faraway California said to be custom-programmed by Nolan Bushnell himself. They played Arkanoid in Ames and Zaxxon in Sioux City. They played Road Blasters and Galaga and Galaga 88, Tempest and Rampage and Robotron 2084, which Horst believes to be the greatest arcade game of all time. Mostly, wherever they could find it, they seemed to be playing Time Crisis 2.

Or Ziggy and Otis were. The big selling point of the game was that both boys could play at the same machine and keep an eye on each other, while Horst went off on various commodities-related chores.

“I’m just gonna zip in this bar here for a minute, guys. Some business.”

Ziggy and Otis continuing to blast away, Ziggy usually with the blue handgun and Otis the red one, jumping on and off the foot pedals depending on whether they need to seek cover or come out shooting. At some point, going after more tokens, they notice a couple of local kids who’ve been lounging nearby watching them play, but strangely, for these arcades, reluctant to kibitz. While not actually drooling or packing any real-life weapons that Ziggy or Otis can see, they still radiate this aura of blank menace with which the Midwest so often fails to endear itself. “Something?” inquires Ziggy as neutrally as possible.

“You fellas ‘nerds’?”

“Nerds, how’s that?” sez Otis, who is wearing a midnight blue porkpie hat and Scooby-Doo shades with green lenses. “This is the package, live wid it.”

“We’re nerds,” the shorter of the two announces.

Ziggy and Otis look carefully and see a pair of suburban normals. “If you guys are nerds,” Ziggy cautiously, “what do the non-nerds around here look like?”

“Not sure,” sez the bigger one, Gridley. “They’re kind of hard to see most of the time, even in the daylight.”

“Especially in the daylight,” adds Curtis, the other one.

“Nobody scores this high on Time Crisis. Usually.”

“Ever, Gridley. Except that kid from Ottumwa.”

“Sure, but he’s a space alien. One of those distant galaxies. You guys space aliens?”

“It’s mostly just piling up bonus points.” Ziggy demonstrates. “These guys in the orange suits? New on the job, worst shots in the game, worth 5000 a pop, but 5000 here,” Pow! “5000 there,” Pow! “pretty soon it begins to add up.”

“We never find that many.”

“Oh,” Ziggy suavely as if everybody knew, “next time you see the Boss heading away from you—”

“There!” Otis points.

“Right, well, you shoot his hat off—see? real quick, four times, lead him and aim a little above his head—so now you don’t have to go straight for that tank there, first you can go in this alleyway full of all these lame bonus guys. Get em in the head, you pick up extra points.”

“You guys from New York?”

“You noticed,” sez Ziggy. “It’s why we’re into shooters.”

“How about powerboats?”

“Sounds kind of wholesome, somehow.”

“You ever try Hydro Thunder?”

“Seen it,” Otis admits.

“Come on,” Gridley sez. “We can show you how to get into the bonus boats right away. There’s a police boat with a cannon on it, Armed Response, that ought to be your kind of thing.”

“And you get to sit on a subwoofer.”

“My brother’s a little strange.”

“Hey, forget you, Gridley.”

“You guys are brothers? Us too.”

So Horst, returning from the bar after covering a margin call, arranging a July-November soybean spread, social-engineering an update on Kansas City hard red winter wheat, and putting away an indeterminate number of Berghoff longnecks, finds his sons screaming with, you would have to say, unaccustomed abandon, blasting souped-up powerboats through a postapocalyptic New York half underwater here, suffocating in mist, underlit, familiar landmarks picturesquely distressed. The Statue of Liberty wearing a crown of seaweed. The World Trade Center leaning at a dangerous angle. The lights of Times Square gone dark in great irregular patches, perhaps from recent urban warfare in the neighborhood. Intact buildings are draped in black scaffold netting all the way to the waterline. Ziggy is in the Armed Response, and Otis has the helm of the
Tinytanic,
a miniature version of the famous doomed ocean liner. Gridley and Curtis have vanished, as if they were shills not quite of this
earth, whose function in the realworld was to steer Ziggy and Otis into the ruinous waterscapes of what might lie in wait for their home city, as if powerboat skills will be necessary for Big Apple disasters to come, including but not limited to global warming.

“So Mom, we were thinking, maybe we could move to someplace less at risk? Murray Hill? Riverdale?”

“Well . . . we’re up six floors . . .”

“So at least a lifeboat, keep it near the window?”

“With what floor space, give us a break you goofballs will
you.
”

After the boys are in bed, Maxine trying to settle in in front of another homicidal-baby-sitter TV movie, Horst approaches diffidently. “Would it be OK if I stuck around for a while?”

Resisting anything like a double take, “You mean tonight.”

“Maybe a little longer?”

What’s this? “Long as you like, Horst, we’re still splitting the maintenance here.” Gracious as it is possible at the moment to be, when she’d rather be watching a former sitcom actress pretending to be a youngish Mom in Peril.

“If it’s problematic, I can stay someplace else.”

“The boys will be thrilled, I think.”

She watches his mouth begin to open and then close again. He nods and withdraws to the kitchen, from which soon can be heard sounds of refrigerator entry and plundering.

The drama on the tube is approaching a crisis, the babysitter’s evil scheme has begun to fall apart, she has just grabbed the Baby and is trying to make a run for it, in inappropriate heels, into some kind of alligator-intensive terrain, a squad of police who look like catalog models with no firm idea of which end of the gun do you point at the suspect are speeding to the rescue—all night shots, natch—when Horst emerges from the kitchen with a chocolate mustache, holding an ice-cream package.

“There’s Russian writing all over it. This Igor guy, correct?”

“Yeah, he gets it shipped in, always more than he can use, I get to help with some of the overrun.”

“And in exchange for his generosity—”

“Horst, it’s business, he’s,” smoothly, “eighty years old and looks like Brezhnev, you already ate half a kilo, you want me to call this in, find a stomach pump for you?”

Horst semimiraculously getting a grip, “Not at all, fact, this stuff is terrific. Next time you talk to that ol’ Igor, can you find out if they have chocolate macadamia over there? passion fruit swirl maybe?”

•   •   •

MAXINE SPENDS NEXT MORNING
at Morris Brothers looking at back-to-school gear for the boys, popping into the apartment around lunchtime. She’s just about to open a half-pint of yogurt when Rigoberto buzzes up on the intercom. Even over the low-fidelity speaker, you can hear some swooning in his voice. “Mrs. Loeffler? You have a visitor?” A pause as if working on how to say it. “I’m, like pretty sure it’s Jennifer Aniston, is down here to see you?”

“Rigoberto, please, you’re a sophisticated New Yorker.” She goes to the peephole and sure enough presently out the elevator and down the hall comes this wide-angle version of Rachel “I Love Ross, I Love Ross Not” Green herself. Maxine opens the door before negative thoughts like
psychopath in latex celebrity
mask
can arise.

“Ms. Aniston, first of all let me just say, I am such a huge fan of the show—”

Driscoll shakes her hair. “You think?”

“You look just like her. Don’t tell me Murray and Morris actually—”

“Yep, and thanks totally for that tip, it’s changed my life. The guys said to tell you they miss you and they hope you’re not still upset about that li’l dryer malfunction?”

“Nah, federal emergency, half of Con Ed out in the street with jackhammers, what’s to be upset? Come on in the kitchen, I just ran out of Zima, but there’s beer. Maybe.”

Rolling Rock, two bottles Horst has somehow overlooked, way in the back of the fridge. They go in and sit at the dining-room table.

“Here,” Driscoll sliding over a gray-and-burgundy envelope about the size and shape of an old floppy disc, “this is for you.”

Inside is a card on expensive stock with calligraphic hand-lettering.

Ms. Maxine Tarnow-Loeffler

The pleasure of your company is requested at

The First Annual

Grande Rentrée Ball, or

Geeks’ Cotillion

Saturday night, the eighth of September, 2001

Tworkeffx.com

Open Bar

Clothes Optional

“What’s this?”

“Oh I’m on some committee.”

“Looks like a big deal, who can afford a party on this scale anymore?”

Well, seems Gabriel Ice, who else, having as it turns out recently acquired Tworkeffx, which builds and maintains virtual private networks, has discovered among the company assets a special Party Fund which has been sitting for years in escrow waiting for something like this particular End of the World As We Know It.

Maxine’s annoyed. “All that time and nobody thought to raid the account? How idealistic is that? The crooks I deal with every day, not one—lame, idiotic, whatever—would have passed this up. Until fucking Ice, of course. So now he’s the genial host and not spending a nickel out of his own pocket.”