The Deed (11 page)

“But it’s
not
a pipe dream,” Amanda insisted. “It’s real.”

“You don’t know that,” said Jason, going back to his salad.

“But I
feel
it,” she replied, grabbing his free hand, where it lay on the table between them. “Jason…there’s something else.”

He looked up wearily, and waited.

She took a deep breath that served both to calm her and rein in the pace of the discussion. “My mother said she has something to give you,” she announced. “
If
you turn out to be who I told her you are, of course.”

Jason paused, one elbow on the table, an empty plastic fork locked in a stationary holding pattern just outside his mouth. Amanda shrugged, a sheepish smile tugging up one corner of her mouth.

Her eyes radiated a calm certitude, and her warm hand still enveloped his, and for all his skepticism, Jason felt himself yielding to the irresistible force of her enthusiasm.

“What’s that supposed to be,” he replied grumpily, “a trump card?”

Emboldened by the slight humor that had returned to his voice, Amanda smiled cautiously. “I swear to God I don’t know what it is.”

“All right, let me see how things shake out at work today, and I’ll
think
about it. Is that good enough? What?” he said, when her smile broadened.

Amanda leaned forward, crouching intimately across the little table. “Can’t you feel it?” she asked in a low voice.

He shook his head with exaggerated slowness while keeping his eyes focused on hers, refusing to release her. “No,” he confessed woodenly. “Whatever it is, I can’t feel it.”

“It’s Manahata,” she whispered breathlessly. “The spirit of the island.” She laid her hands out flat on the table like a fortune-teller. “That rumbling you feel under your feet…it’s the return of a god.”

Jason shook his head soberly. “It’s the number seven subway,” he replied in a low tone. “Times Square to Grand Central and on into Queens, every ten minutes.”

Amanda’s eyes flashed with devilish amusement. “We’ll see.”

MADISON AVENUE
, 3:30
P.M.

In all the animal kingdom, there is nothing more terrifying than being interrupted in midflight by the syrupy stickiness of a freshly oozed morning spiderweb. Once you feel that irresistible tug on your wings, the elastic snap of dewy webbing, all hope is lost. No more swarming with the gang around trash cans at dusk, no more wonderful, week-old road carcasses, no more wallowing in moist summer dog shit. Never more will you dodge swatters, bump millifaceted eyes into windowpanes, wade in the vertical waters of a cow’s eye. Game over; thanks for playing.

You struggle, of course, though you know that your thrashings can only bind you tighter, that each movement jerks a glutinous filament that reaches into the very heart of the spider’s lair, a homespun dinner bell. You are about to be devoured alive between the slavering jaws of the ugliest, most pitiless creature on the planet; in the end you struggle simply because there is no other way to occupy the final seconds of your life.

The spider danced across Jason’s office ceiling upside down, unaware that she was being watched, her horrible attention focused squarely on her quivering prey. The fear was the tastiest part, mind-numbingly delicious, the prize that made the endless hours of concentric toil worthwhile. She always approached her dinner slowly, exoskeletal legs playing a death knell on the harp of her web. “Fly away!” she’d hiss. “Hurry up—
aaah,
the spider’s coming!” And she would laugh and laugh, a horrible grating sound like a torn tin can caught between sliding chalkboards.

Jason placed
Roget’s Thesaurus
squarely against the spider’s back and squidged it into the unforgiving plaster. Stepping down from the chair, he wiped the book on the lip of the garbage can with a grimace and stood up abruptly. He ran both hands through his hair, as if trying to remove the thick layer of dryer lint that coated his brain.

“This is absurd,” he said aloud.

He checked his watch: He’d now officially spent a solid hour wallowing in a paralysis of distraction, creative engines frozen to the touch. He had far too much on his mind for inspiration to get a foothold; being had to spring from nothingness, after all, and his brain was positively jumping.

Clearly I’m not going to shake this funk until I get this line of thought out of my system,
he realized.
So here goes.

He walked toward the window, where he silently observed a pair of police helicopters scooting in low over the park like monstrous dragonflies.
The locusts are coming,
he mused.
We must go and tell Pharoah.

What if Amanda was right? It was the big navel-pondering question around which all the world revolved. Forget the rational objections for a minute, he urged himself. What if he had, in fact, just hit the biggest Powerball in the history of the world?

Like everyone else in the Western world, Jason had played the what-would-you-do-with-the-millions game a thousand times. In whatever incarnation—the unexpected inheritance, the winning Lotto ticket, the six-foot check from Publisher’s Clearinghouse—that great glittering pot of unearned gold danced in the dreams of every true American, and Jason was culturally incapable of
not
playing. But dreaming was one thing, a properly empty exercise. Considering such a windfall as a real possibility, however slim, was a quantum leap Jason found difficult to make. He’d simply grown up too well-off—the rich don’t have to shelter the popular delusion of the lottery as winnable.

What the hell would it all be worth?
he wondered, gazing out at the skyscrapers. The real estate alone, for God’s sake. Billions? Trillions? How many zeros? How do you value something that is utterly without context?
Well, Frankfurt sold just last month for eleven-five, but of course it’s only three million bedrooms, and it doesn’t have central air.

He wasn’t sure why he felt so reluctant to indulge Amanda’s little fantasy, even just for fun. She’d rejected him, sure, but this resistance ran deeper. Over the past few months, he’d felt a growing urgency to start actively managing his life, particularly his foundering career. The postcollegiate party was winding down; already he could feel his friends and colleagues beginning to define themselves with careers and relationships, or with a maturing sense of purpose, anyway, and it made him feel naked. Galloping around on a lunatic fantasy with a hot young thing seemed just alluring enough to distract him from whatever cheap destiny lay realistically within his reach. If sex with Amanda were an option, it might justify the prodigious waste of time she was proposing…but it wasn’t, so the case was closed.

The United Nations. The Empire State Building. The New York Stock Exchange. What about the museums and libraries—would he have any claim to their holdings? The New York Public Library? Dear God: the Met? the Guggenheim? What would the change of ownership do to the fashion industry, to book publishing, to Broadway?

If I could whip up this kind of enthusiasm for anything work-related,
Jason thought wryly,
Bill Gates would be wiping my ass with an embroidered hankie.

What to do, what to do. The temptation to yield to the mysterious turn his life was taking, to simply let the current wash over him, was powerful; surely, hunting for buried treasure couldn’t be much more absurd than peddling Hair Peace. Still, Jason resisted abandoning the wheel of reason altogether, trendy though it might be in a world of animal graveyards and Partridge Family reunions. He had evolved by choice into a creature of intellect, and if rational analysis and deduction had never brought him great happiness, neither had they failed him as a source of identity. Faulty or not, they were the steel with which he framed his world.

Jason let out his breath, fell back in his chair, and cast his eyes skyward, where a tiny black grease spot pinpricked the vast whiteness of the ceiling like a feeble pirate’s curse. A thousand forgotten flies, avenged at last.
Sic semper arachnidis!

Just being able to trace back my ancestry a couple of hundred years is probably worth the effort all by itself,
he decided.
Nothing says I have to swallow this thing whole.

He chuckled in amusement at the rationalization.
Jason Hansvoort, reporting for hideous emotional abuse, sir.

“Hello?” came a frail voice from the other end of the line.

“Grandma?” said Jason, as if there were any doubt.

“Yes,” she replied querulously. “Who’s this?”

That must be something,
Jason marvelled,
to identify yourself as a grandma objectively, no matter who’s asking.

“It’s me, Jason.”

“Oh, hello, Jason. I was just finishing my instaghetti.”

He smiled at this. Marguerite was technically his step-great-grandmother, the scandalously young second wife of his great-grandfather. She’d survived her crusty old husband by twenty years and counting, and remained sharp as a tack, thanks to patented reaper dodges like straight lemon juice, ice-cold showers, and a daily tussle with the
Times
crossword puzzle. Grandma (he always left off the prefix “great,” which she considered excessively complimentary) was a predictable fan of one-pot meals, and liked to season them with entertaining nicknames.

“So how are you, Jason?” she continued. “You know, I see commercials all the time and I always wonder if any of them are yours.”

“Oh, probably not, Grandma—there are so many. The last one I did was for—”

Sweet Springs Douche-a-Day.

“—a motor oil.”

Though he loved her dearly, Jason only called Marguerite a couple of times a year. It was hard to feel pressured: The spry old bird gave off such a thoroughly convincing show of immortality that he felt justified in assuming he’d have decades of conversation with her before she succumbed.

“Grandma, I have a quick question for you,” he proposed after a few moments of small talk. “I’m trying to do a sort of family tree, and I was hoping you might help me fill in some of the branches.”

“Well, you’re in luck,” she told him. “That’s just the sort of thing grandmothers are particularly good at.”

Jason grinned. “Well, that’s what I thought, too. How far back do you remember Grandpa’s family?”

“Oh, let’s see now,” she began after a moment’s consideration. “Well, my husband, Robert, your great-grandfather, he was a merchant, and
his
father, Sam, was a blacksmith. He did the gates at West Point.”

Having previously commandeered a blank notepad, Jason began quickly jotting down names, though still on familiar ground. “That’s great,” he said. “Can you go back any further?”

“Yes, yes,” she confirmed. “Sam’s mother’s name was Ida, I remember that, and she was married twice…”

For several minutes long-dead names rolled off her tongue, through the phone system, and onto Jason’s little pad. It was a very pleasant distraction, which meant work was almost certain to intrude at some point.

“She called him Adie. Oh, my; she had names for everyone, and some of them not so nice. She was still alive when I was a teenager, but she’d died by the time I married your grandfather. Your great-grandfather, I mean. Good Lord! Adolphus—that’s her husband, the first one—was a schoolteacher, and he was a stern, stern man. He was quite feared, from what I’m told. He’s buried in the old Haansvoort graveyard.”

Jason started. “The what? We have a graveyard?”

“Oh, yes. It’s in Tuxedo Park, New York,” she replied. “Unless they moved it.”

“That’s amazing,” said Jason. “This is great, Grandma.” As if on cue, his other line began flashing.

“Oh, we had a lot of time to talk about such things before the television,” she replied.

“Grandma, I hate to do this, but I’m calling from work and someone’s trying to reach me on the other line. Would you mind if I put you on hold for just a minute?”

“Okay,” she said, “but don’t dawdle. I’m ninety-two.”