can’t think about nothing.”
“Just watch me.”
“Money, Neil? That’s where your mind goes when it’s in neutral. When other men twitch in their sleep they’re supposed to be running from something. You’re kicking figures around.”
As it happened, I did have a worry right then. A pension fund that lost several million on a questionable long-term debenture that Weissmer, Schiff, Marne—the small investmentbanking firm I was a partner in—had unloaded on them was suing for face value plus compensation. Although I had been trying to reduce my in-house counselor’s role, I was also planning to withdraw my interest from the partnership and had a particular stake in limiting the damage. But I wasn’t about to let her in on it. She’d only say it was my fault.
“I could be thinking about the rebuilding.” A hurricane had torn a section of roof off a house Mickey and I kept in the hills above Puerto de Habòno. “If I don’t keep my eyes open, we might end up with a tin shack.”
She kept shifting positions. She never could get comfortable in a bucket seat. “I see,” she said. “Your obligations may make it impossible for you to be an amiable companion tonight.”
“That’s right. They can do that.”
“And lateness has nothing to do with it.”
“I don’t think it does.”
She might have started to answer, but we had come to that part of the bridge approach where the road’s surface changes from asphalt to metal grid and the hum of the wheels drowned her out. It seemed I had carried my point—a rare victory, tainted by the sulfurous odor rising from the river.
I sped up when I saw that a taxi driver was about to cut me off. He tried to do it anyway, and I blew my horn.
“I think I’ll go for a while,” she announced when we were back on asphalt.
“Go? Go where?”
“Go, you know, away.”
“On a trip? Sure, I guess. Have you thought of taking Vicky?” I was speaking of our daughter.
“Vicky’s a big girl. She’s about to take her own trip.” Seagram’s Seven cascaded into a highball glass on a neon billboard. “And I’m not taking a trip.”
“What do you mean?”
I didn’t see it. The bridge, its silver cables and beams and rivets; the river, the wavelets rolling northward; the sky, a low arrow of haze extending from LaGuardia to the Bronx—none of these would let me see it.
“You know what I mean, Neil.”
“I don’t, I’m afraid.”
“I mean, leave home.”
“Leave home?” I thought of her dark eyes and a dimple that appeared at a corner of her mouth when she smirked, fondly or contemptuously—identical yet unmistakable expressions. I thought of the inward curl of her hair above her shoulders, the slenderness of her arms, on which the articulation of the muscles around the wrists and of the wrist bones themselves would have been seen as exaggerated had they been sculpted. I thought of how when she was excited she opened and closed her hands as though clicking castanets. Her hands were doing that now.
“You mean, me.”
She stared straight ahead.
“You mean me, don’t you,” I repeated. It had grown warm inside the car. I lowered the window.
Some genius a couple of cars ahead had missed the change basket at the toll and gotten out to hunt for his dime.
“Why?”
Another genius behind us leaned on his horn.
“Put that window up. It’s freezing.”
I put it up halfway. “Why?”
“Oh, come on, Neil. How many laughs have we had lately?”
“Laughs? I seem to’ve lost count. Sorry.”
“Well, it’s not for lack of fingers.”
The FDR Drive was clear for a change. The feeling that at any moment traffic might back up kept me from making up much time, though.
“And since when have you been counting?”
“Since when? Oh, I don’t know. Sometime after Peter.” She meant our son, who had died at eleven in 1961.
“Are you telling me that for nearly ten years—”
“I don’t know if it’s been ten years, Neil.”
“I said ‘nearly.’”
“Let’s just say it’s been a long time.”
She wasn’t going to let it go on any longer. Next morning, after what might have been a pleasant night out, she left. She seemed to have condensed all the air in the house into her suitcases.
“This is how it happens,” I heard myself say aloud. There wasn’t air enough to say more.
But my happiness had never been my brother’s worry. His expressions of concern were the merest pretense. I tried to discourage him from visiting by insisting that Joyce would be back. He came anyway. “Always looking for an excuse to spend time on the boat,” he told me. It was clear before long that he was working up to something.
“Well, there aren’t any obvious signs of chaos anyway,” he said, dropping his heavy frame on a lounge in the sunroom. His mouth hung open and the points of his incisors glinted in the light coming through the window. “No change in the atmosphere in here.”
“The atmosphere? The dehumidifier runs without a woman’s touch.”
“But what about you?”
“I’m all right.”
“Are you? You’re looking gaunt, frankly. I don’t guess you’re putting away your three square. And you’re dressed like an undertaker, not that anybody would take you for one. Undertakers are always well shaved, and you’ve missed a whole patch along your jaw. Looks like an outline of the state of Maryland. And what’s that, a sore on your lip? I hope you haven’t gone out and caught the clap. Slide those down this way, will you?” He pointed to a bowl of nuts and a nutcracker on a lacquered tray in the center of the coffee table between us. It was no nearer to me than to him, but he’d have had to sit up to reach it. No one had touched the bowl since his last visit. To everyone else it was an ornament, but Mickey was a great one for nut cracking. Pecans, Brazil nuts, macadamias, hazel nuts: he’d crack them all. Eating them was an afterthought—he’d half grimace at the taste of them. They seemed to make him cough. I slid him the tray.
There was a silence while he took a walnut and ran it over his palm. I yawned, but he didn’t seem to notice. “These things can cost quite a bit,” he said, “quite a bit.” I thought he meant the nuts. “Half your assets and a good chunk of your pretax income, if she shoots the moon. You’ll need to make it up.”
“With Joyce?”
“Well, sure, that’d be best, of course. . . .” He took up the nutcracker and squeezed the shell of a Brazil nut till he was red in the face. He turned it and had at the other seam, but it still wouldn’t open. “Stubborn little cunt,” he muttered. “Only, that isn’t what I had in mind.”
“No?”
“I was thinking that the expense—alimony, property division, et cetera—might make you hungrier than you’ve been.”
It hadn’t taken him long to show his cards—he’d hardly made it through a quarter of the bowl. Our fraternity rested less on a common fund of childhood memories than on a stable of profitable partnerships-at-will we had formed, in coal and natural gas initially, later in building and manufactures as well. Mickey