What happens if I fail to replace the bogus currency with legal tender? One way or another, Simpkins vows he’ll get his money. “If I have to, I’ll sell the information to that Wainsborough lady. And as for you, I’ll let the police figure out what to do.”
“Ha! How are you going to do that?” I fortify myself with another swig of the Macallan, congratulate myself for being such a smart boy. Anonymity is my trump card, a cloak of invisibility allowing me to evaporate mistlike from Simpkins’s grasp. But then I remember the sonogram picture in his file. My throat tightens up, goes dry. He’s crafty and devious enough to break into hospital databases. Even if he doesn’t know who I am, he surely has ways of finding this out. “Do you even know who I am?”
“Buddy, I know plenty about you,” Simpkins says, grinning. He tells me my social security number, date of birth, current address, and license plate number, rattling them off by memory. “What’s more—you’re a deadbeat alcoholic loser driving a midnight-blue Volvo station wagon, but you’d much rather be driving a Tesla, a Maserati, something with the glitzy class to match your sense of entitlement.”
I stare at him.
“I’m a private investigator. A private investigator. Secrets are my business. I don’t have all the pieces on you yet, but so help me god, give me fifteen minutes, and I’ll figure out your credit card numbers and their security codes, your bank accounts, and the PIN number for your ATM card.”
“What good will that do? I’m broke. I have no money. All my credit cards are overdrawn,” I say. Never before had I considered insolvency to have its benefits. “You won’t be able to get any money off me even if you try.”
Simpkins shakes his head. “Buddy, listen to me. One way or another, you’re going to give me the ten grand you owe me. Passing off counterfeit currency is a federal offense. If you fuck me over on this ten grand, I’ll pinpoint you so deftly that prosecutors will have no choice but to prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law. Got it?”
Driving away from Simpkins’s office through the downtown streets, I don’t know where to go. I’m a slacker in search of a stupor, a wallet in search of some cash. I don’t want to see Trish. I don’t want to see Laurel. Nor do I wish the embarrassment of having my credit card declined at the watering holes that are my usual refuge. Years ago, as I drove these exact streets home from a rollicking Fourth of July barbecue at some senator-in-law’s Chevy Chase manse with Jack Riggs, he waxed poetic about this being the land of opportunity, the wide DC boulevards paved with kickbacks, government-funded bailouts, and under-the-table agreements. Like any Gatsby, I wanted to believe America was America, a land of hopeless opportunity where, if you scratched the dirt deep enough, you’d find streets paved with gold. A land where, on a clear day, you could see Prosperity in the distance.
Freezing rain plinks against my windshield. Regrettably, I left the Macallan behind at Simpkins’s office, having imbibed just enough to strand me in that melancholy middle state of being: neither drunk nor entirely sober, nothing seems bleary or cold, just unbearably sad. I reach into my back pocket for the phone I bought just to call Laurel, but it’s not there. I must have dropped it in Simpkins’s office, but there’s no way I’m going back there just to reclaim it.
Only after Simpkins told me of Laurel’s betrayal did I realize how much I loved her. I am not a dog. I did not flee into Laurel’s arms at the first sniff of pheromonal attraction. Trish had been arguing with me about surrogacy. In the weeks immediately after Jack Riggs mentioned it, the idea of surrogacy ricocheted and triangulated through my thoughts. My mind wandered to the idea that another woman’s womb might carry the child I long hoped Trish would carry. From there, I let my mind wander to how my child might get into this other woman’s womb. The thoughts were insidious, overtaking me for hours at a time. I couldn’t tell any of them to Trish, so ashamed was I for thinking these things.
When I met Laurel, thoughts of surrogacy again popped into my mind. I looked at her and felt bouncy. Mired by our infertility problems, Trish succumbed to despair. She moped around the house, rarely letting us accept the cocktail party and dinner invitations friends extended to us. I’d long since ceased to be a source of constant happiness for Trish, but Laurel ate up my flattery, and it felt good being able to make someone happy again. When I set eyes on her at her restaurant, she laughed and bantered with diners, totally comfortable with her role and surroundings. With her, there were no connivances, no drama, no despair. Instinctually, I knew she’d be the mother of my child. I hadn’t approached another woman since first laying eyes on Trish, but with Laurel I felt this compulsive need to introduce myself and seduce her over with geniality and intimations of wealth. I wanted her to love me. I wanted her to bear my child.
Weeks prior to Anne Elise’s birth, I moved Laurel out of her dank Woodley Park basement efficiency and into a gorgeous five-room riverside apartment in a historic complex not far from the Kennedy Center. Seeing it the first time, Laurel brought her hands to her face and erupted with astonishment when I opened the gilt-green living room curtains to reveal the spectacular view of the placid sun-drenched Potomac that would be hers for the six-month duration of the lease I signed on the apartment. Sliding floor-to-ceiling windows led out from what would become her bedroom onto a balcony where, on her first night in the apartment, we held hands and kissed, our lips warmed by thoughts of a shared future and mugs of brandy-laced hot chocolate. Two rowboats were on the water, beating back against the current. We stood together, watching them, listening to the splash of their oars. Since the lease was renewable, and since I preferred not to think of myself as perpetually strapped, I let her believe the apartment was hers for keeps.
With nowhere else to go and wanting to be alone, I head to this apartment. Three days’ worth of newspapers are piled up against her front door. No one has been inside since I rushed Laurel to Sibley on the morning she gave birth, and when I key open the door, I see the signs of an interrupted life: the can of chicken noodle soup sitting on the blue granite kitchen countertops that she opened just before her water broke; the nappy amber towels I threw down to absorb the amniotic fluid that gushed out of her onto the tile floor; the living room television on mute but still stuck to the Weather Channel, informing us that for the third straight day the DC area will be overcast with intermittent wintry tempests.
The apartment’s furniture is blond and retro mod, the kidney-shaped living room tables, low-slung chaise longue, and bucket chairs all items that wouldn’t look out of place in a Jetsons episode. Laurel wanted furniture with a sense of whimsy, something that would point to the excitement of the future but also hearken to the comfy well-defined past of Saturday-morning cartoons and a tight-knit nuclear family. I tidy up the apartment, putting a few things back in place, and then wander into the nursery, the one room where the furniture is all new and bought, rather than rented, and because the walls still smell of fresh paint, I open the windows to air out the room. Sitting on the cane rocking chair, I plug in the coolest device I bought for Anne Elise—an orb-shaped nightlight that projects pink stars and a crescent moon onto the ceiling. Gazing into the illuminated firmament of twinkling stars, I think about how much I looked forward to showing her these exact stars. “Grab them!” I’d tell her as she lay on her back and stretched out her arms to the astral illuminations on her ceiling. “Reach as high as you can!” I can’t believe Laurel tricked me, used me, took advantage of my desire to be her George Jetson.
One of my other cell phones rings. It’s Trish asking where I might be and when I might come home. She’s tired and hungry but not upset. “I’m sitting by the fireplace. I’d like you to come home and build me a fire. Brew me a carafe of chamomile tea, and we could snuggle.”