He had a hand on Mike’s shoulder, smiling with no upper lip. She glanced at the photo. “Mike did a deal. We were friends. He used to take us places.”
On the drive here I’d imagined an awkward meeting, which might’ve led to fumbling intimacy, nymphomania, the hostess lighting candles in a hot tub. But now I felt stupid and drank my water. Her face looked longer, with a pointy chin, and in a low voice she said, “How’s Boston?”
“Fine. I’m done.”
She leaned against the counter, looking at the floor.
“I’ve been in a courtroom for the past five days, sketching cops and suicide bombers.”
“You’re heading home.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“What do I owe you for the water?”
I saw her hands shaking. Over her shoulder, Cheney held his pose. “I do this thing where I can’t stop checking my phone. Do you do that?” I said yes. “Are we supposed to keep this up forever? Is there something else?”
“Like what?”
“Telepathy? Bigger keyboards? Smaller thumbs? I can’t keep up this flirting. I’m not cut out for this shit.” She put her palms against her eyes. “I lose my phone and until I find it I’m a crazy person.”
“It can be a little distracting.”
“I yell, and I never yell.”
“Don’t yell.”
“It’s bad. We’re bad.” I couldn’t understand the point of that kind of talk. “This whole thing. We’re sick.”
“They’re sick. We’re the good ones.” The stupidity of my response exhausted us.
She stepped through the pantry into a hallway to check on her son, snoozing in his stroller, sucking his thumb. She silently slipped off his corduroy jacket, sighing softly, showing distress, glancing at me for direction. I figured I should leave. Unfortunately, I’d lost my sense of how to retrace my steps. There was a wall of framed photos—the husband made up for his bald head with some hairy forearms. I couldn’t help noticing a small black-and-white one of a moonfaced girl with barrettes and a dimpled smile. Amy came closer, breathing next to me, and said, “I think that was the last time I brushed my hair.”
She put her hand on my shoulder as some kind of steadying gesture. I knew I was sick. It was a game that made everything else go away. It was as corny as the pi?a colada song, and as irrational as a noxious fear in the night, a fear of maiming and death by some rich guy’s hired thugs while my children watched in horror. The sneaking around demanded exhausting and myopic concentration, and made me schizo and paranoid. There was nothing I could do about the guilt.
Anyway, I couldn’t stop myself. My own ethical dilemmas seemed small in comparison. She believed in prayer and public service, a certain godliness, and, even so, couldn’t stop herself from texting me photos of her naked butt. She wanted to create a stimulating after-school environment for poor kids in Detroit, and worked at it day and night, using all that moolah she’d ripped from the bones of humanity. She went down the hall. Half in a fog, I followed.
There were some serious crown moldings, beautiful bookshelves filled with new hardbacks, a bio of Rudy Giuliani, some T. S. Eliot. Weirdly, some part of me grew to fill the size of the space. Another part of me felt like the victim of a war or famine, contemplating the high-walled fortress of a conquering army. Envy felt unsafe. The power of her money made almost any interaction disorienting, manifesting in feverish insecurity. Stuff on lower shelves confirmed the unthinkable, an engraved chunk of marble, thanking him, and also plaques and paperweights in wood, metal, plastic, and glass, acknowledging his service on the governing bodies of clubs, hospitals, colleges, and museums. Engraved pen holders, letter openers, staplers, and an actual chair with his name burned into the back beneath the crest of a Midwestern university. A piano sat on a raised area of polished hardwood floor, under a domed ceiling with tall windows on all sides, a sort of dance floor where an orchestra might set up. She’d hosted something the night before, and in fact an orchestra had set up, on that raised area by the windows. There were stacks of rental chairs, tabletops, and glassware in racks.
The inner-city school thing sometimes meant baking three hundred cupcakes and driving sixty miles to sit in class all day letting kids from the barrio braid her hair. The school endeavor was a bigger time suck and sometimes meant flying to Chicago or Miami to negotiate the lease on a building on loan from the Catholic Church. Call it philanthropy, or a kind of grassroots activism, or white billionaires dismantling public education. Although at least she was doing something. She could’ve just as easily spent every afternoon humping her tennis pro. She had powerful friends, parties, pet projects with which to work out her ten-cent philosophies. The party the night before had been to help clean up Long Island Sound. They’d handed out plastic pails with plans for the next beach cleanup and encouraging data. She offered me a pail.
Last year she’d had two yards of sand carted into the house so the kids could have a scavenger hunt, but the weight of the sand had made the floor joists creak, and when people started dancing she thought the house would fall down. This year Brooke Shields co-chaired the event.
“I have so much leftover food.”
I had no zany fundraising stories to share. I felt shaky and middle-class. I had brains and an education and was not lazy but maybe worse than lazy, barely scraping by, donating twenty dollars here and there to the charity of my choice, while the superpowered people saved the world.
We walked on. We passed a big red room, a round ottoman, a Chinese triptych, giant vases. A white room, chrome, glass, glaring bright white sofa as long as a Greyhound bus. Dining room, earthy wooden table, fireplace, wrought iron chandelier like in a Frankenstein movie. We passed an actual painting by Thomas Eakins of a woman looking bored shitless in a pink dress, and a framed photo of an astronaut floating in space, inscribed by the astronaut with a Sharpie, thanking Mike and his investment fund. Then a room that looked like where they actually lived, with beat-up couches, toys, a TV, corduroy pillows with the stuffing falling out, and a kid’s piano.
We passed a big guy in a dark T-shirt and sweatpants, splattered with paint, holding a paint roller, talking in Spanish on a cellphone. No flicker of recognition passed between them. She seemed involved in deeper calculations.
We traversed the mud room, gleaming Moroccan tile, blue walls, stone sink, deep shelves, sneakers, shoes, boots, flip-flops, baseball caps, straw hats, rain ponchos, scarves, mittens, earmuffs, gloves, shawls, and capes. Past the mud room we descended into a part of the house where people folded laundry, including a woman watching a hip-hop video on low volume. She sat on the couch in a collared white shirt and a cardigan.