Noah's Turn (5 page)

She was now married and had three girls in school. With her law degree she could work half days doing family cases at her uncle's firm. Why she ended up having sex with Noah was a mystery to him. He guessed she had her reasons and he wasn't going to pry. He could, however, tell that this was her first illicit sex and that it had definitely settled some personal score. She claimed this was also her first orgasm in fifteen years as she sank back into his bed afterward like someone who had just set a record swimming the English Channel. All in all, it was a good fuck for both of them.

Andrea had put on weight since the church choir and was embarrassed by her stretch marks after three children. None of it bothered Noah and she appreciated that. For him, this was the realization of a twenty-five-year dream to get his hands on those orange halves and that made her very sexy, even now. However, he wasn't certain that the same erotic impulse would survive another encounter, and when she called a few days later and he saw her name on his caller ID, he didn't pick up the phone. She didn't call again, and he was able to convince himself that once was most likely enough for both of them.

Sitting at his desk with a three-shot Americano from Starbucks, he thought about his run-in with
Andrea Scott. He scribbled a note and taped it to his wall of “ideas” in front of his laptop:

D
uring the first week in April, his aunt stopped eating, bringing her eldest son, Noah's cousin James, across the pond from his banking job in London to, as James put it, “get out in front of the curve re: Mom's funeral.” It wasn't like James to move into the house and stay by his mother's side until the end. This was both unnecessary, since he was the executor of the will and already knew exactly what he was getting, and “not terribly social,” since he had a number of old friends to catch up with. So he camped out at the family “farm” in the wooded hills an hour northeast of the city and threw a number of parties.

The farm was a large stone house, built in the late 1800s, which had been recently renovated by a Japanese
architect friend of James's with offices in London and New York. It had every green feature on the market, from toilets to energy supply, and was tucked into fifteen hundred acres of untouched woodlands. When trying to figure out a best-case number for the size of the family fortune, and what a first cousin's piece of the inheritance might be, Noah would factor in the price of this land as if it were rezoned for residential development. The number was astronomical.

But Noah knew that the rich didn't get rich by giving it away. These were “his people” and deep in his heart he anticipated the worst. Fuck them all was his presumptive state of mind.

Three days after James arrived, his mother died. Noah was hopeful that he could pay his final respects with some kind of grace that would put to rest the whole incident around Jeanne and the cancelled visits. He called James and volunteered as a pallbearer.

The church was less than half full and the speeches were short. His aunt had been old and not well liked and this moved things along quickly. Not surprisingly,
she had retained her worst qualities as she aged, which had dampened the enthusiasm of most who knew her, outside of the extended family.

His dead aunt wasn't heavy—in fact, at the end she was a mere wisp of anger and ingratitude—but the coffin was another story as Noah hoisted his corner onto his shoulder. Since his aunt had done some volunteer nursing service overseas during the Korean War, it was decided to shoulder the coffin military style. It was one of those Cadillac models with solid brass handles and details and was made, he suspected, out of oak. Even though the funeral director had given a quick lesson on how to hoist and hold it, the base of Noah's corner dug into his shoulder. He wasn't about to shift his grip now that they were on their way. As the coffin moved out of the church down the centre aisle, Noah spotted Jeanne. She had a seat on the aisle in a back pew. She wore dark glasses and a tight black dress made of a shiny material that buttoned up the front, with a wide black belt that sucked in her waist and pushed out her tits like two proud cannonballs. This was almost the exact black version of her nurse's white uniform. Noah smiled at her but couldn't make out a reaction behind her large sunglasses. The whole setting, the church, the organ
playing “Amazing Grace,” Jeanne in black, the coffin on his shoulder, the inevitability and finality of death, all gave Noah confidence that he had put his aunt and the confusion with Jeanne to rest and that Jeanne accepted it and him. As he passed her, the edge of the coffin now digging into the base of his neck causing what he felt was the sweet pain of redemption, he thought he heard her whisper “motherfucker.” He wasn't sure it was “motherfucker,” especially in a church, especially during a funeral and to a pallbearer, coffin in hand. But it sure as Christ sounded like “motherfucker,” and he prayed she wouldn't go to the event back at the house. Just in case, he complained of nausea at the cemetery and excused himself from the gathering afterward.

O
n the Sunday after the funeral, James invited Noah to a party at the farm. Why should he go, he thought? To seethe with jealousy holding a glass of expensive wine and watch them ride and enjoy their fucking lives with that nonchalant pride of having everything?

He arrived by taxi, since he didn't drive. One way, it cost him $135. As the taxi pulled up to the front door of the farmhouse it passed two horses in a fenced-off area attached to the barn. “Horses,” the Sikh driver said after not saying a word the entire trip up. By this, Noah figured the driver meant that his host had horses and therefore his host had money, therefore Noah had money, therefore the tip would be substantial. Noah got out, fumbled with a pocket full of fives, tens and
twenties, handed over a messy ball of bills and quickly turned to the front door before the driver could count it and calculate the size of the tip. A sign on the door said “Come in.”

In the hall he noticed two well-worn but obviously expensive pairs of men's knee-high riding boots. They had mud on the soles and sat flopped over at the ankle on top of each other like aristocratic lads pooped after a sweaty cluster-fuck. James was gay and lived with a partner he had left behind in London. Noah guessed that the second pair of boots belonged to one of James's young “colonial” friends.

Noah stood with a drink, smiling at no one in particular, next to a fireplace made from plates of intersecting grey steel that took up much of the wall at one end of the cavernous addition built onto the farmhouse by the Japanese architect. He had just popped two of his dead aunt's Percocets and was on his third vodka. The space, with its twenty-foot ceiling and massive Douglas fir beams, was built to house a collection of huge, abstract paintings, priced by James in the millions. This was the largest display of consistently hideous art Noah had ever seen in one place. The space and the money made him sick with envy at the same time that the overwhelming
tastelessness of the art made him gloat with superiority. The two contradictory emotions mixed with pills and vodka put him in a mood that could best be described as a snarling giddiness. It was here and in this frame of mind that Noah was coincidentally introduced to Mary Hobson. There she was, the gorgeous and brilliant student from McEwen's creative writing course, who, after McEwen's description, had taken up residence in Noah's sexual imagination as “The Hobson Girl.” If McEwen had been right about nothing else, this was a girl you could leave your wife for, if not shoot her for.

“We have a friend in common,” Noah said with a slightly ironic grin as if he held a piece of classified information.

“Oh,” she replied without a hint of curiosity or coyness. This wasn't a “Lolita” response, Noah thought. This was a fawn still too innocent to recognize danger in man. He was too drunk to form anything but this one-dimensional and inaccurate impression. Her truth was, however, more complicated and perhaps beyond him. For starters, she was twenty and hadn't yet developed that second self (which comes with maturity) with its jaundiced eye locked on the first. Noah, on the other hand, lived in the world of dualities. He knew no other.

“Patrick says you're the smartest student he's ever had in his creative writing course.”

“Not quite, omigod,” she smiled. “Professor McEwen's pretty crazy. I mean in a good way. Do you know him?”

Know him? I hate his cock-sucking, ass-kissing, pretentious guts, Noah said, but somehow it came out, “We're best friends. Patrick
is
great. Very smart. What do you think of the art?” He waved his drink hand in a circle, a slightly drunken move he hoped she didn't notice.

She looked up and around the space, feet planted, her torso twisted. This move stretched her skimpy indie-band T-shirt across her small breasts. “Some of it's okay I guess. I'm not an expert. I mean, there may be something here I can't see.”

“… something here I can't see.” What a smart response, Noah thought. Had she subtly pulled ahead of him? His paranoid competitiveness kicked in. He had to make a move. He noticed a single log of firewood standing on end alone in front of the fireplace and picked it up. “Do you think this is here because it's been up Robert Mapplethorpe's ass?”

She blurted out a short, sharp laugh. My fucking God, she got it, he thought.

“I have to catch up with my friends. I think we're leaving.”

Fucking fuck, maybe she didn't get it. She's trying to get away. I blew it. If she didn't know Mapplethorpe's work, she probably thought it was just a horrible fag joke. He could feel his panic rising. That's when the timing goes. He was familiar with the sensation.

“It was nice meeting you,” she said as she backed off.

“How about a coffee in town during the week?” Noah asked. Bad timing.

“I have a lot of work, like, three exams coming up.”

She was gone.

After a few more drinks, Noah grabbed a lift into town with a Jewish film director and his Norwegian girlfriend. Noah sat in the back seat alone, and after some small talk about Norway, melting ice sheets and climate change, he fell silent. The BMW 7 series sailed down the country roads absorbing bumps and dips as if it were in a TV commercial. Noah dropped his head back on the leather seat. What a fool I was to ask her for coffee after the Mapplethorpe joke, he thought. What an
idiot. But fuck her. It was a great ad lib that summed up the art, the money and the gay world all with one blow. Still, she was walking away—you don't ask someone for coffee once they've bailed out. What if she got the Mapplethorpe joke but thought it was homophobic? She's fucking twenty years old; they're all Stalinists when it comes to political correctness. His mind felt like a gaudy merry-go-round, with its horrible music and shrieking kids. He could hear the driver and his girlfriend talking, but their conversation seemed far away, as if it was in another language. This Jewish guy
would
have a BMW and a Norwegian girlfriend, Noah thought. No fucking cliché there.

The front-seat conversation continued. Noah turned his face to the late-afternoon sun and watched it strobe through the trees. His mind was momentarily at rest, as if the merry-go-round riders had dismounted and the ride kept going in sweet silence.

The BMW was now out of the country and on the freeway heading into the city. “Do you mind if we stop for deli?” the driver asked. Noah sat up. “Were you sleeping?”

“No, no.”

“Do you mind if we stop for deli to-go? It's ten minutes out of our way. Bergit has never had good deli and
there's a fantastic place in the Jewish area up here.” The driver scanned the unbroken ocean of look-alike houses that rolled to the horizon on both sides of the highway. “I don't know who the fuck can live up here.”