“It’s sashimi,” Heather said. Unless you forcibly stopped them, the waiters handed you another drink. Some idiot fell or jumped into the pool in his clothes. It was time for dinner.
In the bathroom I had to hold on to a wooden post to keep from falling down. The pool house had been built to resemble a rustic Malaysian jungle hut, made from exotic hardwoods, with an overgrown sod roof you could supposedly eat. I washed my hands in front of the bathroom mirror and noticed a drunk, middle-aged fraud whose moment of notoriety and one published book had faded years ago. Anyway, who was I kidding? I couldn’t use any of this stuff. Screwing a married lady, ridiculing her, dumping all over my wife and kids? I’d cause irreparable pain and harm. The fiction would collapse under the weight of the facts. And when was I supposed to get it done? Between diapers, boo-boos, and screaming fights? And scraping melted cheese off the wall? And waking up in the night when I felt like dying? As it was, I barely made it through my days. Back when I’d had no one to worry about and only bare-bones freelance gigs, a thirty-two-page comic had taken six months, eighteen hours a day, working like a galley slave. The last issue, seven years ago, had nearly killed me. I’d be in a nursing home by the time this thing was done. Someone sat in the stall behind me, grunting loudly on the toilet like my father.
The sinks were giant wooden tree knots carved into beautiful bowls. There were stacks of crisp white hand towels. I tucked in my shirt and found, in the pocket of my shorts, a Mercedes-Benz key, which I’d grabbed to stop Amy from driving home earlier and had forgotten to give back, and started cursing. Although if I had the key, she couldn’t exactly leave. Marty Azamanian flushed and came out of the stall behind me and went to the other sink. He wore a straw cowboy hat and jeans and a Hawaiian shirt.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked.
From the other pocket of my shorts I pulled out two small, sharp, pointy objects, which I held up close and examined. A pair of diamond studs, Amy’s earrings.
“Shit. Fuck.”
“You got a problem?”
“Me?” I might’ve stolen them on purpose. “No.”
He placed his cowboy hat on the counter between us. “Doing okay?” He checked himself out in the mirror.
“Yeah, thanks for having me. Doing well. Keeping busy.”
“Well, I’m sixty-five years old and I look like hell and I’m growing a pair of titties.”
I couldn’t do it, couldn’t shoot the shit with a billionaire. And anyway, he was impossible to talk to, and it felt like punishment to have to thank him for something I didn’t want and hadn’t asked for and couldn’t repay.
He touched the bags under his eyes. “I’m starting to look like my ma.”
On that stretch of Fordham Road, black and Italian and Chinese gangs roamed, and if you wandered onto the wrong block you’d better be ready to run for your life. The first time we met I took a wild guess, then told him my dad had lived across from the big playground. Maybe that was why he liked talking to me, and why I never fell for his ghetto dialect and streetwise baloney. I couldn’t stand it, the horrible everythingness of his wealth, the crushing blackness and blindness of it, sucking me in, the museum-quality house and cowering domestic partner and fucked-up kids, the thinness of his party costume as one more way to combat the nothingness. I thanked him again, and hoped I wouldn’t see him for the rest of the night.
My father also got himself out of the Bronx, and worked to make a better life for his kids, killing himself to get where he was going, blaming us, my mother, brother, and me, not ashamed, as if the whole human race walked around that way. He’d commuted to the city, and every other week to the insurance company’s home office in Hartford, and on the weekends he’d used sports and yard work to numb himself, and in that state was often warm and loving, sometimes silly, comic, athletic, and enthusiastic. A health nut, highly intuitive, hypersensitive, and emotionally unresolved. Unconscious, sarcastic, demanding, at times physically intimidating, threatening, destructive, and terrifying, and unable to communicate on an intimate level. He worried he’d end up broke again and back in his miserable childhood. He saw himself as a sellout and eventually decided, when he couldn’t stand it anymore, to retire at sixty-two, then ran out of money.
It would be an exaggeration to say they were broke. Their house was paid for. They were fine as long as they didn’t buy anything else. They had groceries. They had vitamins. They couldn’t afford new clothes or dinner in a restaurant. They didn’t buy gifts for each other or anyone else. Their bills were sometimes a problem. A fender-bender deductible last year had sent shock waves through their balance sheet. No vacations, no trips. If you needed him, my father could be found talking to himself in his asparagus patch, in his filthy gardening clothes and a hernia belt, or on the lookout for expenses they could trim. He was in some ways better suited to it because he’d been poor as a kid, although in other ways it was worse for him because his modest success had been his identity. He claimed he wasn’t angry, just sick of it all—not depressed, but in his retirement he didn’t need human contact, except for my mom, and had become very deep, into nature, and spent fantastic amounts of energy building his woodpile, sweating over it, sawing and chopping and crying into it because half their savings had vanished in the financial crisis and he worried about paying their heating bills. Since the meltdown, he kept their savings in cash and municipal bonds, missing the stock market rebound, and every time he opened his bank statement he thought about killing someone.
People were already taking their seats. On the lower patio there were three long, narrow tables, maybe thirty places at each, and torches at intervals on bamboo poles. Seating not assigned, food on the table, large white steaming ceramic tureens every few seats with boiled lobsters, and small dishes between us of corn pudding and balsamic-vinegar-drenched diced tomatoes. Hunks of Brie, cakes of veiny blue cheese, crusty bread, and purple orchid petals strewn around. I started eating everything but the flowers.