“I’m not sure how I could help her. And, yes, I do want to move on. That’s what I’ve been trying to do here!”
“The money? Is this why—”
“Yes. Francie funded the settlement from the trust,” said Leo. “There’s not a lot left, not as much as everyone was counting on, and that’s why they’re circling around here like fucking vultures. Everyone wants me to magically come up with what they think they’re owed. You can see my predicament.”
“Your predicament?”
“How am I supposed to make that kind of sum appear out of thin air? Those three aren’t thinking clearly.”
“But you’re thinking clearly?”
“Comparatively? Very much so.”
“I see.” Stephanie stood and took a wineglass down from the cabinet, opened a corked bottle on the counter, and poured herself an enormous glass. She thought about the pregnancy app on her phone. The first day she opened it, she’d paged through all nine months and had been amused to see week sixteen, the one that said, This week your baby is a plum! A Plumb. She dumped the wine down the sink.
“What’s her name?” Stephanie asked Leo.
“What difference does that make?” Leo sounded irritated.
“Do you even know her name, Leo?” Stephanie watched him carefully. His cheeks were pink from the shower, his hair slicked back. His eyes were guarded, flinty—ugly within his otherwise lovely face.
“Matilda.” He bit the word hard, as if there were something illegal about lingering too long on each syllable. His unwillingness to hold her name in his mouth made Stephanie mad.
“What was that?” she said.
Leo straightened and spoke more clearly. “Her name is Matilda Rodriguez.”
“And she was nineteen? She was a teenager?”
“Yeah, well.” Leo pictured Matilda’s fingers and remembered how she’d nervously licked her palm before taking him in her hand. He shook his head, trying to block the image, which had already caused a regrettable hardening in his pants. “She was old enough,” he said.
That was the thing he would take back, the words that evoked the tiny but perceptible flinch from Stephanie. She walked over to the table and picked up Bea’s story.
“What are you doing with those?” Leo said.
“What are you going to do with them?” Stephanie gripped the pages in her hands.
“You see why it can’t be published. Forget about me,” Leo said. The heat radiating from Stephanie alarmed him. “What if Matilda reads it?”
“Matilda’s a big reader of literary fiction?” Stephanie said. “You were able to figure that out during your brief car ride?”
“Okay, forget about Matilda,” Leo said. “I’m trying to re-create a life here. Rebuild some kind of business. Bea publishes a new Archie story? Come on. That’s news. She publishes this story—it’s even bigger news and everyone finds out what happened and that’s it. I’m fucked. Who’s going to work with me?”
Stephanie felt dizzy and nauseated. She had to eat. She was afraid she was going to vomit.
“You know I’m right,” Leo said, pacing the kitchen now. “You know if this story is published, people are going to know it’s really about me. She can call the guy Archie or Marcus or Barack Obama, it’s about ME.”
“Even if it is about you, Leo,” Stephanie said, shoving a cracker in her mouth, trying to steady the room, soothe her gullet, quell her anger, and ignore her fear. “Even if it is about you, and even if Bea gets the thing published, and even if someone reads it and connects it to you—” Stephanie took a long sip of water. Exhaled. “Even if all those things happen, who is going to care?”
It was that last sentence she would call back if she could. That was the one where she saw the shift, the slightest narrowing of his gaze, the moment when she had—inadvertently and slightly, but clearly in Leo’s eyes, concisely in his mind—positioned herself on the wrong side of a dividing line.
That was the thing she would take back.
CHAPTER TWENTY–NINE
Early morning on the Brooklyn waterfront. The sheer number of people out on a brilliantly sunny but bitingly cold February day surprised Leo. The chill of the wooden bench beneath his legs seeped through his wool trousers and heavy coat. The blue sky felt like a harbinger of spring, but the water was still a dire wintry gray. The leather satchel containing Bea’s story was on his lap. It had only been days since he read it but it felt like weeks. He closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind, suppress his rising anxiety, but instead he found himself picturing Matilda’s right foot in what would be its waning minutes. Before they got into the car and when she was slipping on her silver shoe, he’d noticed how her toenails were painted bright pink, how the pink glowed against her golden skin, how the elegant arch of her foot sat against the shoe and how, when she stood and looked at him and tugged at her shirt, she was perfectly steady on her two intact feet. Quite possibly the worst thing for him about Bea’s new story was this, how it conjured Matilda and everything about Matilda from where he’d buried her deep, deep in a tiny box in some remote corner of his brain.
He reached in his coat pocket for the pack of American Spirit cigarettes he’d bought on a whim but hadn’t opened yet, not wanting to further irritate Stephanie by smelling like tobacco. He opened the pack, withdrew a cigarette, and, leaving Bea’s leather satchel on the bench, walked over to the railing on the water. He felt sheepish about smoking, which also irritated him. And then he was irritated to feel irritation. Irritation was pretty much his primary sentiment lately, when it wasn’t anxiety.
Things were not good inside the little jewel of a brownstone that was Stephanie’s. From the street, the rooms behind the new but historically accurate windows glowed with an amber-infused warmth, inviting and cheerful. From the outside, the house looked like the perfect place to take shelter from any variety of storms, but inside? Inside, he and Stephanie were barely maintaining a civil politeness. The softness that had taken root between them since the night of the snowstorm and slowly blossomed into something expansive and occasionally exuberant had collapsed—not a slow leak either, but a sudden deflation, like a sad, sunken soufflé.
They’d fallen into their old ways, accusatory and evasive, which was reassuring in a perverted way. Leo understood the nasty pull of the regrettable familiar, how the old grooves could be so much more satisfying than the looming unknown. It’s why addicts stayed addicts. Why he’d walked away from buying cocaine before the family lunch at the Oyster Bar but now had a neat glassine envelope in his pocket. Why he was fingering an unlit cigarette in his hand and wondering what to do about Stephanie as he had countless times before.
Leo could see his future with her and he didn’t like it: He would be one of those people who started to parcel time into “years clean.” He’d build a callus of superiority around his own self-denial and would become, because of the accident and its aftermath, someone with a bifurcated past, all the accomplishments he valued would be relegated to “before,” and his narrative would build around the “after”—the accident, rehab, divorce, how he straightened up, straightened out, rebuilt from the beginning. If he stayed, he’d have to divide up his money. He’d have to get a job, like every other chump. Since his meeting with Nathan he’d e-mailed or called countless old contacts and all his inquiries added up to a big fat nothing. A few polite brush-offs at best; some never bothered to respond. He didn’t know if Nathan had been pissed enough to actually blackball him around town or if he had just gravely miscalculated his own relevance. He didn’t want to figure it out.
However he parsed it, his future in New York could only be a diluted reflection of his before, a whiter shade of pale. Evenness defined his present, the by-product, he often thought, of small minds and safe living. In his new after, there would be no ups and downs, no private jets or unexpected fucking in a tiny bathroom of a bar, or walking home from a riotous evening under a pinkening sky. It wasn’t luxury he missed, it was surprise. The things money
could buy weren’t the reward; the reward was to feel lifted above everyone else, to get a look at the other side of the fence where the grass was rarely greener but always different and what he loved was the contrast—and the choice. The ability to take it in was what mattered; the ability to choose was what mattered.
He’d always leaned into the unknown. Stephanie, too. So why, he wondered, when it came to each other, did they always find themselves spinning their wheels in the same old rut, in the same exact way? He turned his broad back away from the wind coming off the water, enjoyed the familiar feeling of hunching his shoulders and cupping his hand around a lit match until the end of the cigarette glowed a steady amber. He took a deep drag and exhaled energetically. He felt better almost immediately.
Two women walking by with rolled yoga mats under their arms frowned, both furiously waving the air in front of them, as if his nearly imperceptible trickle of smoke was a swarm of stinging wasps. When had New York become so wimpy and pathetic? The city had completely lost its edge. He needed to get out, head somewhere untamed and more deserving of his talents and energy. He turned back to the water, took another satisfying drag off the cigarette, closed his eyes and thought again about his newly concocted plan, ran over the details and tested it for leaks, looked for any scraps of regret or hesitation about his decision. Nope. He felt good. He felt sad about Stephanie, that was a given, but feeling sad about Stephanie was so familiar it was becoming boring or a dangerous habit, or both. He’d casually thought about asking her to take off with him, even for a few weeks, but she never would. That kind of daring wasn’t part of her fiber.
He was still annoyed with Bea. Not as angry as he’d been the day he read the story, but still irritated. (There it was again, how had his life suddenly reduced to irritation?) And although he tried not to dwell on it, he was stung by Stephanie’s careless comment while knowing she might be right. He’d been out of the public eye so long he might not even be a story. Or he’d just be another in a long line of Internet millionaires who’d been at the right place at the right time doing the new thing and had made a ridiculous sum of money and then lost the money and done something dumb while wasted and maybe screwed the wrong person and wrecked his marriage and who, really, at this point would give a fuckity fuck. In some ways, that was almost harder for Leo to contemplate: the information about his implosion being made public and landing with an echoless whimper.
And then there was Stephanie’s inexplicable insistence that he should at least talk to Matilda Rodriguez, find out what she wanted. He knew what she wanted, and even if he did decide to distribute some of his money, it wasn’t going to be to the waitress, who’d already profited a nice tidy sum. Stephanie didn’t seem to understand that he was prohibited—legally—from talking to Matilda. (Technically, he wasn’t completely sure this was true but practically he knew it was the right thing to do. Nothing good could come of establishing contact with her.)
Something odd was going on with Jack, too, who was asking a lot of questions, a lot of questions, about trying to set something up that sounded like money laundering. He was asking what Leo knew about offshore accounts and although he didn’t precisely word it this way, how to conceal ill-gotten gains. Leo couldn’t imagine Jack pulling off something that would require such sophisticated financial maneuvers; he didn’t have the balls or the brains. Leo suspected Jack was trying to trick or trap him.
And something else was tugging at Leo. The other day, when he and Stephanie were sitting at her bay window, trading sections of the newspaper, a wary silence between them, one of the neighbors had walked by with a baby in one of those sling contraptions. He’d watched Stephanie watch the mother with the bundle strapped to her chest. She watched them from the minute they came into view until the minute they could no longer be seen. He’d gone clammy. Surely she wouldn’t—couldn’t, she had to be too old—change her mind about wanting a kid now? She’d sensed Leo assessing her and had ducked behind her hair, but not before he saw something resolute in her face, something private and determined and deeply terrifying.
But maybe worst of all was how she looked at Leo these days, like he was a sad sack, like she was just waiting for him to bail. Well, why wait?
The divorce decree had finally come down; Leo was free. He could leave New York whenever he wanted. He could go straight to the airport with nothing but a small duffel and provision himself more fully when he landed. He didn’t mind leaving everything behind, starting from scratch. In fact, he reassured himself, he was looking forward to it. Another thing he’d learned that the other Plumbs hadn’t: the beauty of rediscovering the starting line.
He’d get a few things together and head down to the Caribbean for a bit. See old friends and sort out some financial stuff. Then maybe he’d head west, far west, to Saigon. Vietnam was hot now. He could spend the foreseeable future traveling around Southeast Asia. Keep moving until the Plumbs got the picture. He wasn’t coming back for a good long time, if ever.
“Hey.” A young woman walking her dog appeared at Leo’s shoulder. “I don’t suppose I could bum a cigarette off you?” she asked.
She was tall, fair skinned, and her cheeks and nose were tinged red from the cold and the exertion of her walk. Her black hair was pulled into a high ponytail, her light eyes striking. Her voice was radio pretty. An actress, he thought. She smiled at him apologetically.
“Sure,” he said, taking the pack out of his pocket.
“I’d be happy to reimburse you,” she said, winding the leash around her hand to pull the dog closer. “What are they? Twenty bucks a pack now?”
“Almost,” Leo said. “I haven’t bought one in years, I thought the guy charged me for a carton by mistake.” He turned away from the water again and lit her cigarette from the end of his.
“I know. It’s crazy. Still, if my boyfriend didn’t freak every time I smoked, I’d happily pay for them. I don’t care how much they cost.” She took the cigarette from Leo and took a long, deep drag, groaning a little as she exhaled. “Oh, that’s so good. So good. Does that sound awful?”
“Not to me,” Leo said.
“Do you mind if I stand here and smoke with you for a minute?” They both stood at the railing, watching the water. “Remember when everyone used to be able to take cigarette breaks?” she said. “How you could leave the office and stand in front of the building smoking and gossiping and watching people walk by? God, I miss those days.”
“I remember when you could smoke inside the building,” Leo said.
“Oh. From the olden days.”
He was pretty sure she was flirting with him. It was hard to tell what might be beneath her bright green, puffy jacket, but if her long, lean legs were a clue, it was bound to be nice. They were facing each other now and Leo noticed a tiny constellation of freckles down her left cheek that looked just like Orion’s belt. The single imperfection made her face even more perfect. Her skin was smooth and tight and Leo couldn’t help but think of Stephanie and how she was starting to show her age a little—deeper wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, a slight hollowing of her cheeks, a bit of droop around the jowls. The girl turned back toward the water and took another drag off the cigarette; she held her profile serenely, someone accustomed to being admired from all angles. She glanced at her watch.
“Some place you need to be?” Leo said.
“Not today. How about you? Do you work around here?”
“Sometimes,” Leo said. “I move from project to project. And you?”
“I live nearby. This is my boyfriend’s dog. He’s out of town for a few days, so I’m dog sitting. Right, Rupert?” she said to the dog. “Just you and me until Saturday.” Leo let the out-of-town boyfriend sit there and acquire a little heft. “Seriously,” she said, fiddling now with the zipper on her jacket. “Can I give you money for the cigarette?”
“Absolutely not,” Leo said. “My treat.” He was gauging whether he should ask her to grab a cup of coffee now or just ask for her number.
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br /> “I’m Kristen.” She pulled off a glove and put out her hand and Leo shook it. Her palm was warm and dry. She held his gaze and tilted her head a bit, hesitating. “Are you Leo?”
Leo sighed. “I guess that depends,” he said.
Kristen laughed. “We met a few times. At that theater in Tribeca? I, uh, I know Victoria.”
“Ah,” Leo said. He didn’t know which night she was talking about. Victoria was always dragging him to some awful performance in that tiny theater.
“I was in a play. You probably don’t remember, it was kind of stupid, but I was the younger brother’s girlfriend.”
“I do remember!” Leo lied. “You were terrific.”
“Oh, thanks, but you don’t have to say that.”
Leo studied her face and had a tiny flash of memory. This girl, standing on stage in a ripped sweater, sobbing and going on and on and on and on. He also thought he remembered her from a long, boozy dinner afterward. Had there been flirting? “You had the monologue at the end, right? You were wearing a brown sweater.”
“Wow.” She beamed. “You do remember.”
“I remember you. Couldn’t tell you anything else about the play but your performance—it stuck with me.”
“Wow.” A tiny line appeared on her brow, so isolated and faint that it had to be a minor failure of Botox. “That’s so great to hear. I worked really hard on that monologue. For weeks I drove everyone crazy practicing.”
“The effort showed,” Leo said. He held her gaze. This was exactly what he needed today. “We talked afterward, right? At that French place?”
“Yeah,” she said, amused. “We talked.”
And then he remembered. He’d cornered her in a small hallway leading to a bathroom. Nothing had really happened, a little body contact, she was there with someone, too.
“So …” She trailed off, laughed a little, and looked down at the dog then back at Leo smiling.
“So,” Leo said.
“I’m not friends with Victoria or anything.”
The Nest Page 22
