Noah's Turn (3 page)

“I wanted to ask you a small favour.”

“Shoot.”

McEwen's quick response caught Noah off guard. He clumsily started digging through his backpack
as he cranked out gratuitous apologies for nothing. Noah hated McEwen for the response he was able to elicit without even looking up from his plate. But he hated himself more for hating McEwen, someone who should mean absolutely nothing to him. “I'm sorry to spring this on you at lunch without any notice. I should have told you why I wanted to meet, but this sort of thing makes me nervous and … I put it in here … and I …”

“What is it?”

“I'm sorry.”

“For what?”

“Nothing.” Noah's hands were trembling as he pulled an 8 × 11 brown envelope from his bag and put it on the table.

“This could be crazy, but that's an outline for a novel. I mean … I know how hard it is to get a novel … I thought you might have one of your editors take a look at it. I don't want you to … I mean, I'd love it if you also read it … but that might be a conflict of interest. Or not.” Noah smiled, thinking he had salvaged something with this last slightly glib remark.

McEwen fingered the envelope without saying a word. Then just as his lazy gesture was beginning to
look to Noah like a cliché out of a Hollywood movie, McEwen looked up and said, “A novel.”

“You don't have to.” Another one of Noah's intractable projectiles that shot out from God knows where in his psyche. No matter what transpired between these two, Noah would never overcome his beta male role.

“Do you know the name Hobson? Very rich, I think.” McEwen changed the subject without any reaction to Noah's offer to let him off the hook and this left Noah feeling rudderless in the new conversational current.

“Peter Hobson?”

“Could be.”

“If he runs a hedge fund, I think my cousin knows him.”

“That sounds right.”

“He's supposed to be a prick.” Noah could only think one thought now: “Let's get back to the outline, fucker.”

“His daughter's in my creative writing class. Incredibly gorgeous and smarter than both of us together. It's driving me crazy. Don't say anything.”

“Never. No, no. Have you got a little something …”

“God, no. I'd never touch that. They not only fire you, they jail you for that shit these days.”

“I have a seventy-five-year-old bag lady sleeping on the sidewalk in front of my apartment. Same problem—almost.” Noah was trying to think of a way back to the outline when McEwen smiled at the joke and Noah's suppressed rage softened. But when he picked up the cheque without a hint of resistance from McEwen his resentment again flared.

McEwen continued to extol The Hobson Girl's virtues, without addressing the fate of the outline, until the waiter returned with the credit-card receipt for Noah to sign and the two men stood to leave. McEwen picked up the envelope with the outline inside and tucked it under his arm. Mission accomplished.

I
t was mid-2008 and the world economy was in a tailspin. The problem was called a “credit freeze,” and experts tossed the term around like they knew what they were talking about, when in fact no one really knew what had happened or where it was going or how to fix it. TV, that perennial cash cow, was not immune. Advertising dollars were drying up at record rates and networks were facing possible bankruptcy. “Downsizing” swept through the industry to “restore economic health,” which meant firing large numbers of people lower down to save the fortunes of a few higher up. On the show that employed Noah, the first to go were the unionized writers. There was an unstated understanding that anyone could write this crap. You could pay a guy to cannibalize old scripts,
change names, juggle scenes and come up with something that sounded new. Noah was not the most enthusiastic and hard-working member of his staff and was one of the first to go. There was little he could do about his situation given the financial climate, and besides, he lacked the energy to fight for a job in which he had lost all interest. He could not fathom the concept of any other kind of permanent employment, was ill-suited for office work and refused to contribute to the corruption of “the word” by using it to sell, market or advertise anything. He had once, at his wife's urging, seen a corporate headhunter, whose not completely facetious response to Noah's bio and so-called ambitions was that his only mistake had been to not marry money.

So Noah decided to start visiting his aunt twice a week.

“Your auntie just fell asleep. Let me make you a cup of hot tea.”

Jeanne took Noah's coat and noticed the lining was still in tatters.

“I didn't have a chance to get it in, but I'm taking it to my guy on the weekend.”

They drank tea without saying much. Just a few feigned compliments for Noah's aunt, who had been quite the racist bitch in her prime.

After a minute or two of slightly awkward silence, Noah rubbed his temples with his fingertips. “I've been having horrible headaches the last few days. I think they're migraines.”

“That's not good,” Jeanne said with a genuine look of concern.

“I was thinking, my aunt's painkillers—she couldn't spare half a dozen or so, could she?”

Jeanne stood up. “Of course. She doesn't need the doctor when they run out. I call the pharmacy and walk over and pick them up.” Jeanne left the room.

“Terminal cancer has its upside,” Noah thought. Two Percocets with a glass of good scotch was just what he needed. His aunt was a strict gin drinker, but his uncle had been a serious scotch man, and Noah knew there was still lots of it kicking around. He went to the dining room and pulled half a bottle of ten-year-old Macallam from a sideboard, poured a glassful, took a quick glug from the bottle, put it back and returned to the kitchen with his glass just as Jeanne came through the other door.

“My uncle's scotch. People say it's good for migraines.”

“I'm not so sure of that,” Jeanne said as she put six Percocets into a sandwich bag and handed it to him. “You
be careful with these, specially with alcohol,” she said, touching his upper arm. This contact felt very strange to Noah, out of place but at the same time genuine.

Jeanne turned to the counter and poured more tea while Noah quickly, without her seeing, swallowed two pills with a big swig of scotch and stuffed the baggie into his pocket. Jeanne turned around and rested back against the counter with her tea cupped in her hands. Noah could sense that something was going on but he wasn't sure what until Jeanne smiled and dropped her look to the floor.

“Would you like to come into my room? Auntie won't be up for hours and my room belongs to me when the door is closed. What I do in there is private. A person who is live-in needs her own place.”

“Holy Christ,” Noah thought. That was without a doubt the horniest thing he'd heard in years. The scotch had already hit him hard and he suspected the Percocets were bubbling into his blood as well. He was not the type who got propositioned by women. In fact, no woman had ever propositioned him. He had always led in his past mating dances, with varying degrees of success.

Noah felt engulfed by her body, inundated by a force of nature. He remembered as a kid being swept
away by the undertow in Palm Beach and his mother fighting like a maniac through the ocean's power, a person who wasn't going to take shit from the forces of nature when it came to her boy. Thank God his mother wasn't here now, and he let himself be pulled under and dragged away. Jeanne moved up and down on top of him and whispered, “Grab my ass. Put your fingers in my ass.” Noah had never heard this from any other woman. He struggled to hold back his orgasm. To come too fast would appear like common racial exploitation and he wasn't going to reduce this to that. This was too good.

Jeanne handed Noah his coat at the door. They said nothing about the sex.

“I'll see you soon. Be careful with those pills,” she said, holding the door open.

“Yes, yes. I will. Thank you.”

Jeanne closed the door.

On Noah's next visit the sex with Jeanne got better. His aunt again slept through the whole thing, even though Jeanne's bed's legs screamed across the hardwood floor.
The following visit his aunt was awake the whole time. There was no sex but he was able to have a conversation with her during which she mistook him for one of her sons. On another visit, just two days later, Noah's sexual hunger had him running half the way there. An attractive Asian nurse answered the door. “Jeanne isn't here today. I'm filling in for her.” Noah, deflated, stepped in and took off his coat.

“But she's coming back,” Noah said. “This is only today.”

“Yes. She's at the doctor.”

“The doctor?” Noah repeated nervously. “Is she okay?” The Asian nurse had missed this. She had taken his coat into the other room and left him alone in the foyer. “The doctor,” he muttered again. He started pacing, turning the phrase over in his head. Two short steps, turn, another two steps, turn. Noah was the type who could lose sense of his own physical actions when a wave of anxiety rolled in. “The doctor. What if she has AIDS?” His mind started tumbling. He had to get out of there. He scrambled to find his coat like a balloon that had been inflated, left untied and let go to careen around the house.

The Asian nurse reappeared. “Jeanne is getting wisdom teeth removed.”

Noah stopped dead. “Wisdom teeth?”

“Yes, sir. Would you like something to drink—water or a juice?”

Noah didn't hear a word of the offer. He took a deep breath, pushed a hand through his hair and started to jabber about wisdom teeth and dentists and dental plans for the poor as he poured himself a celebratory scotch from the dining-room sideboard. He then virtually soft-shoed it up the stairs to his aunt's room, where she was sleeping. He took two Percocets from the bottle next to her bed and downed them with a single gulp that finished off the Macallan. He pocketed six more pills, kissed the paper-thin skin of his aunt's forehead and headed back down wondering if maybe, just maybe, Jeanne had given her “cute little Asian replacement” instructions to have sex with him. When he saw her waiting in the foyer, hands clasped in front of her, a sweet smile on her innocent face, he came to his senses, told her his number was on a card taped to the fridge door and asked her to call if there were any problems.

“That's very good of you. I'm sure we'll be okay. Thank you.”

He wanted to grab her and pull off her white uniform and panties and bra and swallow her small breasts
and lick down her stomach to her tight black fluff vagina and drive his mouth deep into her ass and he knew if he started she wouldn't resist but would join in this bicultural explosion of lust. “Anything you need?” he offered.

“No, I think we'll be fine, sir.”

He pulled on his coat and left.

N
oah got a phone message from Patrick McEwen's wife, Janice, asking him for lunch Friday. She wanted to talk business. That was all. No other details. When he got to the restaurant she was already sitting over a glass of white wine and her BlackBerry. She wore a crisp white shirt with a starched collar that flared up like the sartorial wings of the Flying Nun. This was more to conceal her neck than to take flight. Noah thought she wore too much jewellery to get airborne anyway. She was one of those women with rings on at least eight of her fingers, including one thumb, which Noah found aggressively non-sexual. Too many things could be snagged during sex. And if she took them off before sex, the whole procedure would be far too mechanical and premeditated.

When he sat down, Janice immediately took charge. She put her BlackBerry away and ordered him the same wine she was drinking and an appetizer for the table. There were no children to discuss on either side so she got down to business. “I know they dropped you and some other writers from your show but the networks are getting killed out there. We're also feeling it at the magazine—part of it is shrinking ad revenue, part the readership's move away from print to online. We figured that the best defence is a good offence, so we have decided to expand our online profile rather than cut back and play scared. That means strategies that will attract readers to our website on a daily basis—like a TV blog that will talk about last night's shows with brains and humour and no bullshit. We're calling it an electronic water cooler. Your name kept coming up.”

“I'm flattered,” Noah said with a playful false humility. He knew that false humility and its nonchalance, more than arrogance, placed him above the pedestrian reality of the situation, which was, plain and simple, a less than appealing job offer to someone who was unemployed and broke. Real humility, on the other hand, was of no interest to Noah because
it lacked imagination. He had never forgotten that as Mohammed Ali's physical powers diminished, it was his imagination that won the fights.