Mortal Bonds (12 page)

W
ith Tino visiting friends out in Greenport for two days, I had been inveigled into escorting Angie and her mother to a Wednesday pre-matinee lunch at Sardi’s. We were finishing our coffee, Mamma had just gone to “freshen up,” and I was waiting for Angie to pick up the check.

We were “discussing” which show would be best for the Kid’s first time in a Broadway theater the following weekend. It wasn’t going well.

Angie had purchased four fifth-row orchestra tickets for Sunday afternoon to a show I considered to be wildly inappropriate for young children—and probably outright dangerous for my son. She had paid almost three times face for them—an extravagance made doubly painful by the fact that all of her money had once been mine.

I had Paddy’s four vouchers for house seats to a lighthearted 1920s musical revival with a book by P. G. Wodehouse and a plotline that could easily be followed by a golden retriever. It also featured an original Stutz Bearcat that rolled on stage at the end of the second act—a theatrical event guaranteed to put a rare smile on the Kid’s lips.

The show Angie picked had been panned by every reviewer in the Northeast and was playing to sold-out crowds eight shows a week. Paddy’s show had won raves and was covering costs, and if they made it through the summer, they had a good shot at keeping it running through the end of the year.

“Angie, I spend hours each week trying to keep him from biting people, and you want to take him to a fucking
vampire
show!”

The sound of the fricative
f
followed by the hard consonant caught the attention of the four matinee ladies at the next table. They did not look our way, but their antennae went up.

“It’s a
love
story,” Angie countered in an acid whisper that could easily have carried to the back of the house. “And I don’t like that language.”

Unless she was using it.

“Fine. I won’t say ‘vampire’ again.”

She actually smiled. It reminded me of how rare smiles had been when we were together.

“When did you turn into such a worrier?” she said in a more conciliatory voice. “All boys like vampires. He’ll be fine.”

I wasn’t a worrier, I was a parent. The distinction was perfectly clear when you were a parent.

“The Kid doesn’t like vampires—he doesn’t know what they are. He knows about cars. If you don’t want to see Paddy’s show, that’s fine. But can’t you find something better for the Kid than this?”

“Mamma is dying to see it.”

“So, take her! Tino and I will take the Kid to the zoo and meet up with you later. No problem.” I thought I scored some points with the ladies across the aisle.

“Tino wants to see it, too.”

Impossible. Tino had taste. “Challenge.”

“Now, stop with this,” she continued. “If the Kid doesn’t like it, I’ll bring him out at intermission and you can come pick him up.”

My cell phone rang. I checked the screen. Skeli.

“I have to take this,” I said.

Angie waved her hand in dismissal.

I had called Skeli three or four times every day since the disastrous graduation dinner, but I had not spoken to her. Her phone went straight to voice mail every time. After two days I stopped leaving messages, though I kept calling. I turned away from Angie and answered the phone.

“Please tell me this is not a butt-dial.”

“How come you stopped leaving messages?”

“Nice to hear your voice,” I said.

“Well?”

“Well?”

“How come you stopped leaving messages?”

Because I hated sounding so pitiful. “I’m not good at talking to machines.”

“You’re not alone, are you?”

I was not a natural dissembler, but having traded trillions over the phone in my time on Wall Street, I thought that my control over my telephone voice was one of my major strengths.

“I don’t know why you would think that,” I said.

Skeli burst out laughing. “Call me when you can. I want to take you to lunch tomorrow. Someplace special.”

I hung up, feeling more than a touch better than I had a few minutes earlier. And possibly a touch more generous as well.

“Angie, I’m being a bear. Take the Kid to the show. I’ll come, too, in case you need help.”

“Thank you, boo,” she said, looking up at me with a model’s blank smile. “But it’s sold out.”

“I’m sure I can find one lousy scalper’s ticket.” For six or eight times face value.

“That will not be necessary. I can take him. This whole trip you have insisted upon watching over my shoulder whenever I am with the boy. I think I know my limitations, and don’t need your constant reminding.”

“It’s not like that.” It was exactly as she had called it. Good intentions—mine or hers—were not going to cut it. Try as I might, I was not prepared to trust her. And, I was sure, neither was the Kid.

“And I will have Mamma and Tino with me.” Her voice ratcheted higher and louder. The four matinee ladies had given up all pretense and were watching us with an intensity usually reserved for
Real Housewives
.

“That’s not the point.” I let my voice top hers.

“No, Jason. The point is that you still don’t trust me.” She leaned forward, and I expected her to lower the volume. She didn’t. “It was my intention to invite you to come to see me get my ninety-day chip. I thought you’d be pleased. Happy for me. Well, you can go fuck yourself, Jason.”

I leaned across. We were almost touching. The two wolves were fighting in my head—the ones from the old Cherokee fable. The story where the wise old man tells about the good wolf and the bad wolf fighting inside all of us and the child asks which one will win and the old man says, “The one you feed.” My angry wolf said, “You have got to be shitting me, Angie. Did you really expect me to fly halfway across the country to watch you pat yourself on the back? I’ve got a life! And you don’t figure in it. And
that
is making me happy, thank you very much.” But the wolf didn’t say it out loud, and neither did I.

I tried feeding my good wolf. “Angie,” I said out loud, “you have done a wondrous thing. I salute you. And I appreciate that you would ask me. But I can’t do this. I’m not your pigeon. I’m not your buddy. We have a history and we have a son—and that’s all it’s ever going to be.”

“You have never been there for me—when I needed you. Never.” Her index finger threatened to pierce the table as she beat out the rhythm of her words.

To hell with the good wolf. “That is such BULL SHIT.”

Whatever meager goodwill I had with the matinee ladies was exploded. One of them began waving frantically for the check.

Further escalation would have required physical violence. We glared silently. Angie recovered first.

“You and I were finished years ago, but I didn’t leave. You did.” She was still angry but managed to sound calm and reasonable, as though this madness might actually make some sense—on her planet.

“Christ, Angie. I went to jail.”

“Don’t you hide behind that! You were gone long before then. As soon as I got pregnant, you were looking the other way. You were done with me. I was fat. Moody. I had hair growing in all kinds of new places, and you turned your back.”

I was floored. It wasn’t like that.

“No! I was afraid to touch you. You were growing like some perfect honeydew and I just knew if I did the wrong thing, it would be all twisted around backassed. I’d mess it up. How could you think it was you? Jesus, I’m sorry. I thought you were beautiful.”

“Fat? Hairy?”

It was like dancing through a field of land mines.

“No! Glowing. With life. Twice over.”

“You barely spoke to me.”

I had been juggling a half-billion-dollar accounting fraud that required forty-eight-hour-a-day attention.

“Jesus Christ! I was a little preoccupied there. My goddamned career was swirling down the drain and I was looking at serious jail time and you were bent out of shape because I wasn’t
chatting
! So I didn’t have much to say when I came home and you ran on about the new nanny quitting. Again. So sue me. You want an apology? Fine. I am sorry. Shit. I can’t tell you how many times I wished I had never started down that road. But, Christ, I spent two fucking years in federal prison for that shit. Isn’t that enough? I thought that once I was out we could have found some way of putting everything back in place. Moving on. Together.”

It was the longest, most heartfelt speech I had made to her—possibly in my life. And I wanted nothing in return but for her to release me from the guilt of making her unhappy. I got it. In spades.

Her face went rigid. “Thank you, Jason. Thank you very much.”

An arctic blast swept through me.

“I came to New York to see my son, of course. But I also came here for my recovery. Step nine. Making amends. Whether you find it in your heart to forgive or not is not the point. The point is that I acknowledge my mistakes and apologize for them. Are you understanding me?”

Her voice was like toxic honey.

“Angie, please. None of this matters anymore. We both made mistakes. You don’t owe me a thing.” It was a feeble attempt to head off the inevitable. And it failed.

“No. I have to say this.” She paused while the four women scraped back their chairs and filed out, all doing their best to ignore us—and failing.

I would gladly have traded the next ten minutes of my life for an hour in hell and called myself lucky.

“I told myself I was helping you,” she continued. “That it was going to help us. Our marriage. That was a lie. I didn’t know it was a lie, but I know it now. I did it to hurt you. That’s the truth. Cheating never helps a marriage—it can only hurt. That’s what I have to say. Oh, and, I’m sorry.”

“Angie, I don’t know anything about this. I’m not sure I want to know. When are we talking about? I hear the word ‘cheating’ and the brain starts shutting down.”

“Oh, please. Are you saying you knew nothing about this? I cannot believe that.”

I wanted it all to go away. And I wanted to hear it all. Who? How many? How often? Dates. Times. Concrete facts that I could look at and set into a logical, emotionless story line that would fit into a minor chapter of my life, so I could turn the page and make it go away and not hurt. I was wrong. It was all going to hurt.

“You had an affair. One?”

She was offended. “Of course one. What do you think I am?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to offend. I’m just trying to take this in. When was this?”

“Before we got divorced. I mean, of course; otherwise it wouldn’t have been cheating, would it? While you were having your troubles. It only lasted a few months.”

“Was this anyone I know?” Please say no. Please say no.

“That’s why I was sure you knew. I thought it was all over your office. Jason, I didn’t bring this up to go over all this old stuff, I just wanted to tell you that I was wrong in lying to myself about why I was doing it. That was wrong. I don’t know what could have saved our marriage then, but my lies to myself certainly didn’t help. So, I’m sorry.”

The depth of Angie’s faith in her pre-Copernican view of the universe always took me by surprise.

“Who?” There was no good reason for me to know. This was all ancient history. Three or four years in the past. I had thanked the gods of fortune a thousand times that Angie and I were through. On the other hand, once I knew the worst, there would be nothing left to hurt me.

“You really didn’t know? David.”

David who? I only knew one David. Impossible. “David Chisholm? My boss? You were screwing my boss? Are you kidding me? The guy had permanent halitosis from too much bad coffee.” And she was right. The whole trading floor would have known.

I remembered a strange conversation with the head of the bank funding desk. It was strange because although we had always been friendly and gotten along, the story he related was a bit of gossip—almost salacious, but related in a tone of both confiding in me and comforting me. He told me that Dave, our mutual boss, had been approached by a young trader who was going through a hard time. In addition to losing money in the market, he was afraid that his wife was cheating on him. Dave patted him on the back, told him to take some time off to clear his head. Recommended a fishing camp in Belize where the guide had put him on to permit, snook, tarpon, and bonefish—all on the same day. Then, while the guy was away, Dave broke it off with the wife, because of course it was all true and Dave was the one doing the deed. He broke it off, but not until he got one last good ride. It was such an ugly story, I wasn’t entirely sure why he had told it to me. Now I understood. He was telling me that Dave was a shithead and everybody knew it. If they also knew that I was one of his victims, it was no reflection on me. I silently thanked him. It was just what I needed.

“Angie. Here’s my take on all this. Four years down the road and it hurts. No doubt. But what really gets me is how somebody as classy—as fucking
regal
—as you would be willing to spread ’em for a creep like that. I know for a fact that you weren’t his first, and I would bet dollars to doughnuts you will not be his last. This asshole had the power to save my career—to stop me from digging the hole I buried myself in—and he sat back and watched and cashed the checks. He didn’t
make
me run a fraud. I own up to my own goddamn mistakes. But he is about as low as they come, and you fell for his line, whatever it was. I hope it was all worth it. And if I never talk about this again, it will be way too soon.”

“I never came with him.” I thought she really believed she was offering me comfort.

“Are we still in step nine? Christ, put that on his tombstone. I don’t want to hear it.”

Mamma returned to the table and dropped into her chair.

“What a line to get in there! Y’all would not believe alla soaps, an’ lotions, an’ perfumes they have in the little girl’s room. It’s like the whole perfume counter from Abdalla’s Department Store in one bitty room. Oh, listen to me talkin’ ’bout Abdalla’s. Showin’ my age. How long has that store been gone? Years anyway.” She beamed at us. “It is so nice seein’ you two jawin’ away together. Jes’ like old times.”