“Five more and we have to go home,” Kendall said.
“Ten!”
“OK, ten. Ready? Leaf-catching Olympics starts—now!”
* * *
And now it was a Monday morning in January, the start of a new week, and Kendall was on the train again, reading about America: “There is one country in the world where the great social revolution that I am speaking of seems to have nearly reached its natural limits.” Kendall had a new pair of shoes on, two-tone cordovans from the Allen Edmonds store on Michigan Avenue. Otherwise, he looked the way he always did, same chinos, same shiny-elbowed corduroy jacket. Nobody on the train would have guessed that he wasn’t the mild, bookish figure he appeared to be. No one would have imagined Kendall making his weekly drop-off at the mailbox outside the all-cash building (to keep the doormen from noticing the deposit envelopes addressed to the Kewanee bank). Seeing Kendall jotting figures in his newspaper, most riders assumed he was working out a Sudoku puzzle instead of estimating potential earnings from a five-year CD. Kendall in his editor-wear had the perfect disguise. He was like Poe’s purloined letter, hidden in plain sight.
Who said he wasn’t smart?
The fear had been greatest the first few weeks. Kendall would awaken at 3 a.m. with what felt like a battery cable hooked to his navel. What if Jimmy noticed the printing, shipping, and warehouse costs for the phantom books? What if Piasecki drunkenly confessed to a pretty bartender whose brother turned out to be a cop? Kendall’s mind reeled with potential mishaps and dangers. How had he got into something like this with someone like that? In bed beside Stephanie, who was sleeping the sleep of the just, Kendall lay awake for hours, visions of jail time and perp walks filling his head.
It got easier after a while. Fear was like any other emotion. From an initial stage of passionate intensity, it slowly ebbed until it became routine and then barely noticeable. Plus, things had gone so well. Kendall drew up separate checks, one for the books they actually printed and another for the books he and Piasecki pretended to. On Friday, Piasecki entered these debits in his accounts against weekly income. “It looks like a profit-loss,” he told Kendall. “We’re actually saving Jimmy taxes. He should thank us.”
“Why don’t we let him in on it, then?” Kendall said.
Piasecki only laughed. “Even if we did, he’s so out of it he wouldn’t remember.”
Kendall kept to his low-profile plan. As the bank account of Midwestern Storage slowly grew, the same beaten-up old Volvo remained in his driveway. The money stayed away from prying eyes. It showed only inside. In the interior. Every night when he came home, Kendall inspected the progress of the plasterers, carpenters, and carpet installers he’d hired. He was looking into additional interiors as well: the walled gardens of college-savings funds (the garden of Max, the garden of Eleanor); the inner sanctum of a SEP-IRA.
And there was something else hidden in his house: a wife. Her name was Arabella. She was from Venezuela and spoke little English. On her first day, confronted by the mountain of laundry in the master bedroom, she had shown neither shock nor horror. Just hauled load after load to the basement, washed and folded the laundry, and put it in their drawers. Kendall and Stephanie were thrilled.
At the lakefront co-op, Kendall did something he hadn’t done in a long time: he did his job. He finished abridging Democracy in America. He FedExed the color-coded manuscript to Montecito and, the very next day, began writing proposals to bring other obscure books back into print. He sent two or three proposals per day, along with digital or hard copies of the texts in question. Instead of waiting for Jimmy to respond, Kendall called him repeatedly, and pestered him with questions. At first, Jimmy had taken Kendall’s calls. But soon he began to complain about their frequency and, finally, he told Kendall to stop bothering him with minutiae and to deal with things himself. “I trust your taste,” Jimmy said.
He hardly called the office at all anymore.
The train deposited Kendall at Union Station. Coming out onto Madison Street, he got into a cab (paying with untraceable cash) and had the driver let him out a block from the all-cash building. From there he trudged around the corner, looking as though he’d come on foot. He said hello to Mike, the doorman on duty, and made his way to the elevator.
The penthouse was empty. Not even a maid around. The elevator let you off on the lower floor, and as Kendall was going down the hall, on his way to the circular stairs to his office, he passed Jimmy’s Jade Room. He tried the door. It wasn’t locked. And so he stepped in.
He had no intention of stealing anything. That would be stupid. He just wanted to trespass, to add this minor act of insubordination to his much larger, Robin Hood–like act of rebellion. The Jade Room was like a room in a museum or an exclusive jewelry store, with beautifully carpentered walls filled with built-in shelves and drawers. At evenly spaced intervals lighted display cases contained pieces of jade. The stone wasn’t dark green, as Kendall expected, but a light green. He remembered Jimmy telling him that the best jade, the rarest, was almost white in color, and that the most prized specimens were those carved from single pieces of stone.
The subjects of the carvings were hard to make out, the shapes so sinuous that at first Kendall thought the animals depicted were snakes or serpents. But then he recognized them as horses’ heads. Long, tapering horses’ heads enfolded upon themselves. Horses tucking their heads against their bodies as though in sleep.
He opened one of the drawers. Inside, on a bed of velvet, was another horse.
Kendall picked it up. Ran his finger along the line of the horse’s mane. He thought about the artisan who’d fashioned this thing, some guy in China, sixteen hundred years ago, whose name no one knew anymore and who had died along with everyone else alive during the Jin Dynasty, but who, by looking at a living, breathing horse standing in a misty field somewhere in the Yellow River valley, had so seen the animal that he’d managed to render its form into this piece of precious stone, thereby making it even more precious. The human desire to do something useless like that, something exacting and skilled and downright crazy, was what had always excited Kendall, until it ceased to excite him because of his inability to do it himself. His inability to keep up the necessary persistence and to accept the shame of pursuing such a craft in a culture that not only didn’t prize the discipline but openly ridiculed it.
Yet somehow this jade carver had succeeded. He would never know it, but this pale white somnolent horse that had lived long ago was still not dead, not yet, for here it was in Kendall’s hand, softly lit by the recessed halogen bulbs in this jewelry cabinet of a room.
With something like veneration Kendall returned the horse head to its velvet drawer and closed it. Then he let himself out of the Jade Room and went upstairs to his office.
Shipping boxes filled the floor. The first editions of The Pocket Democracy had just come back from the printer—the real printer—and Kendall was in the process of sending copies to bookstore buyers and historical museum gift shops. He had just sat down at his desk and turned on his computer when his phone rang.
“Hey, kiddo. I just got the new book.” It was Jimmy. “Looks fantastic! You did a helluva job.”
“Thank you.”
“What do the orders look like?”
“We’ll know in a couple of weeks.”
“I think we’ve got it priced right. And the format is perfect. Get these next to a cash register and we can up-sell these babies. The cover looks terrific.”
“I think so, too.”
“What about reviews?”
“It’s a two-hundred-year-old book. Not exactly news.”
“It’s news that stays news. OK, ads,” Jimmy said. “Send me a list of places you think can reach our audience. Not the fucking New York Review of Books. That’s preaching to the converted. I want this book to get out there. This is important!”
“Let me think a little,” Kendall said.
“What else was I going to—? Oh yeah! The bookmar
k! Great idea. People are going to love this. Promotes the book and our brand. You giving these out as promotional items or just in the books themselves?”
“Both.”
“Perfect. What about making some posters, too? Each with a different quote from the book. I bet bookstores would use those for a display. Do some mock-ups and send them to me, will you?”
“Will do,” Kendall said.
“I’m feeling optimistic. We might sell some books for once.”
“Hope so.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Jimmy said, “if this book does as well as I think it will, I’ll give you health insurance.”
Kendall hesitated. “That would be great.”
“I don’t want to lose you, kiddo. Plus, I’ll be honest, it’s a headache finding someone else.”
This generosity wasn’t grounds for reappraisal and regret. Jimmy had taken his sweet time, hadn’t he? And the promise was phrased in the conditional. If, not when. No, Kendall thought to himself, just wait and see how things turn out. If Jimmy gives me insurance and a nice raise, then maybe I’ll think about shutting Midwestern Storage down. But then and only then.
“Oh, one more thing,” Jimmy said. “Piasecki sent me the accounts. The numbers look funny.”
“Excuse me?”
“What are we doing printing thirty thousand copies of Thomas Paine? And why are we using two printers?”
At congressional hearings, or in courtrooms, the accused CEOs and CFOs followed one of two strategies: they either said they didn’t know or they didn’t remember.
“I don’t remember why we printed thirty thousand,” Kendall said. “I’ll have to check the orders. As far as printers go, Piasecki handles that. Maybe someone offered us a better deal.”
“The new printer is charging us a higher rate.”
Piasecki hadn’t told Kendall that. Piasecki had become greedy, jacked the price, and kept it to himself.
“Listen,” Jimmy said, “send me the contact info for the new printer. And for that storage place up in wherever it is. I’m going to have my guy out here look into this.”
Kendall sat forward in his chair. “What guy?”
“My accountant. You think I’d let Piasecki operate without oversight? No way! Everything he does gets double-checked out here. If he’s pulling anything, we’ll find out. Don’t worry. And then that Polack’s up shit creek.”
Kendall’s mind was racing. He was trying to come up with an answer that would prevent this audit, or delay it, but before he said anything, Jimmy continued, “Listen, kiddo, I’m going to London next week. The Montecito house’ll be empty. Why don’t you bring your family out here for a long weekend? Get out of that cold weather.”
“I’ll have to check with my wife,” Kendall said tonelessly. “And the kids’ school schedule.”
“Take the kids out of school. It won’t kill them.”
“I’ll talk to my wife.”
“Anyway, you did good, kiddo. You boiled Tocqueville down to his essence. I remember when I first read this book. Must have been twenty-one, twenty-two. Blew me away.”
In his vibrant, scratchy voice, Jimmy began to recite a passage of Democracy in America. It was the passage Kendall had printed on the bookmarks and for which the small press was named: “In that land the great experiment of the attempt to construct society upon a new basis was to be made by civilized man,” Jimmy said, “and it was there, for the first time, that theories hitherto unknown, or deemed impracticable, were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared by the history of the past.”
Kendall stared out the window at the lake. It went on endlessly. But instead of finding relief and freedom from the view, he felt as if the lake, all those tons of cold, nearly freezing water, were closing in.
“That fucking kills me,” Jimmy said. “Every time.”
2008
FRESH COMPLAINT
By the time Matthew learns that the charges have been dropped—there will be no extradition or trial—he’s been back in England for four months. Ruth and Jim have bought a house in Dorset, near the sea. It’s a lot smaller than the house Matthew and his sister grew up in, when Ruth was married to their father. But it’s full of things that Matthew remembers from his London childhood. As he climbs to the guest room at night or goes out the side door on his way to the pub, familiar objects leap out at him: the carved figurine of the Alpine hiker, in lederhosen, purchased on a family trip to Switzerland, in 1977; or those glass bookends that used to be in Dad’s office, solid blocks of transparency, each containing a golden apple that, to his child’s eyes, had appeared magically suspended. Now they’re in the kitchen, holding up Ruth’s cookbooks.
The side door opens onto a cobblestone lane that winds around the back of the neighboring houses, past a church and a cemetery, into the center of town. The pub is opposite a chemist’s and an H&M outlet. Matthew’s a regular there now. Other patrons sometimes ask why he’s come back to England, but the reasons he gives—problems with his work visa and tax complications—seem to satisfy their curiosity. He worries that something about the case will pop up on the Internet, but so far nothing has. The town lies inland of the English Channel, 120 miles from London. PJ Harvey recorded Let England Shake in a church not far away. Matthew listens to the album on headphones while he walks on the moorlands, or runs errands in the car, if he can get Ruth’s Bluetooth working. The lyrics of the songs, which are about ancient battles and the English dead, dark places of sacred memory, are his welcome back home.
Occasionally, as Matthew drives through the village, a flash goes off in his peripheral vision. A girl’s bright blond hair. Or a group of students standing outside the nursing college, smoking cigarettes. He feels criminal just looking.
One afternoon he drives to the seaside. After parking the car, he sets out walking. The clouds, as they always do here, hang low in the sky. It’s as if, having traveled across the ocean, they’re surprised to find land beneath them, and haven’t withdrawn to a respectable distance.
He follows the trail until it reaches the bluff. And it’s then, as he looks west over the ocean, that the realization hits him.
He’s free to go back now. He can see his children. It’s safe to return to America.
* * *
Eleven months ago, early in the year, Matthew had been invited to give a lecture at a small college in Delaware. He took the Monday-morning train down from New York, where he lived with his wife, Tracy, who was American, and their two children, Jacob and Hazel. By three that afternoon he was in a coffee shop across from his hotel, waiting to be picked up by someone from the physics department and taken to the auditorium.
He’d chosen a table near the front window so that he could be easily seen. While he drank his espresso, he went over his lecture notes on his computer, but soon got distracted by answering e-mail, and after that, by reading The Guardian online. He’d finished his coffee and was thinking of ordering a second when he heard a voice.
“Professor?”
A dark-haired girl in a baggy sweatshirt, carrying a backpack, was standing a few feet away. As soon as Matthew looked up at her, she raised her hands in surrender. “I’m not stalking you,” she said. “I promise.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
“Are you Matthew Wilks? I’m coming to your lecture today!”
She announced this as though Matthew had been hanging on the answer to this question. But then, seeming to realize that she needed to explain herself, she lowered her hands and said, “I go here. I’m a student.” She pushed out her chest to show off the college seal on her sweatshirt.
Matthew didn’t get recognized in public much. When it did happen, it was by colleagues of his—other cosmologists—and graduate students. Occasionally a reader, middle-aged or older. Never anybody like this.
The girl appeared to be Indian-American. She spoke and dressed like a typical American girl her age, and yet the clothes she had on, not only the sweatshirt but t
he black leggings, Timberland boots, and purple hiking socks, along with a general sense that clung to her of undergraduate uncleanliness, of the communal, dormitory existence she lived, didn’t keep the extravagance of her face from making Matthew think of her genetic origins far away. The girl reminded him of a figure in a Hindu miniature. Her dark lips, her arching nose with its flared nostrils, and most of all her startling eyes, which were a color that might only exist in a painting where the artist could mix green and blue and yellow indiscriminately, made the girl look less like a college student from Delaware than a dancing gopi, or a child saint venerated by the masses.
“If you’re coming to my lecture,” Matthew managed to say while processing these impressions, “you must be a physics major.”
The girl shook her head. “I’m only a freshperson. We don’t have to declare until next year.” She slipped off her backpack and set it down, as if settling in. “My parents want me to do something in science. And I’m interested in physics. I took AP Physics in high school. But I’m also thinking about going to law school, which would be more like humanities. Do you have any advice for me?”
It felt awkward to be sitting while the girl was standing. But asking her to sit would invite a longer conversation than Matthew had time or desire for. “My advice is to study whatever interests you. You’ve got time to make up your mind.”
“That’s what you did, right? At Oxford? You started studying philosophy but then switched to physics.”
“That’s right.”
“I’d really like to hear how you combine all your interests,” the girl said. “Because that’s what I want to do. I mean, you’re such a beautiful writer! The way you explain the Big Bang, or spontaneous inflation, it’s almost like I can see it happening. Did you take a lot of literature courses in college?”
“I took some, yes.”
“I’m literally addicted to your blog. When I heard you were coming to campus, I couldn’t believe it!” The girl paused, staring and smiling. “Do you think we could get coffee or something while you’re here, Professor?”
Fresh Complaint Page 20
