A high, whistling lamentation rises from under the table.
“Don’t worry, I promise. Look, you’ve got 3D worried too.” Together they comfort the dog.
“All I know about real estate,” Victor says, “is that sun-drenched means ‘small.’ Why does sun-drenched mean ‘small’?”
“Hmm, let’s think. Maybe because the windows are so close together the sun reaches all the way in, all day long?”
A few months before the wedding, CeCe and her friend Nellie Turner—of the Turner Group, LLC, where Iris is employed—encouraged her toward this line of work after she told George she would apply for a hostess job one of the local restaurants was advertising. Over iced tea on CeCe’s veranda, they suggested that if she wanted an activity, residential sales, rentals to start, might be more appropriate. A career, and only as much of a career as one liked. Nellie spoke about the historical legacy of the houses in and around town and implied the business of finding people homes was both feminist and feminine, a feminism split down to smaller and softer domestic units, atomized to the prettiness of drawer pulls and doorknobs, finials and joists, and even as Iris found this argument depressingly retrograde, she agreed to give real estate a try.
“My problem is,” she says to Victor, “I imagine every house being my home. Even the sun-drenched shoeboxes. I fall in love and then they’re gone.”
“Doesn’t that make you a good agent? When you pitch it, you mean it?”
“You’d think. But no, they said I don’t have the right tone. ‘Too much enthusiasm doesn’t project discernment,’ that’s how they said it.”
“Who are you getting your advice from, Nell Turner? The Duchess?”
“The Duchess? My mother-in-law?”
“You haven’t heard? Whoops.”
“I love it. You like not smoking?”
“I do. Even though it makes me sad.”
“You don’t want the old life,” she says, “but you miss it anyway.”
“Is that what we’re talking about? Smoking? Let’s cheer up. Tell me a bad joke. Make it better than last time.”
“Okay. I bought a box of animal crackers. It said, ‘Do not eat if seal is broken.’”
“That’s awful.” Victor’s slim, tattooed forearm is pressed against her spine. His tattoo, a mountain lion—or is it a dog?—nobly astride the back of a giant shrimp, together riding the crest of a wave.
“Now you tell me a joke.”
“I can never remember jokes. I’m thinking, I’m thinking!”
“I am sorry I lost your book.”
“I have one! A dentist, a priest, and a hangman go to a gun show. Turn over please.”
“A dentist, a priest, and a hangman.”
“They get to the firing range. They have AK-47s. They stand side by side and the priest says, ‘Dentist, how long has it been since you—’ Shit, I can’t remember. No it’s—no. It goes something, something, something, alligator. Forget it.”
They laugh, but an unexpected and urgent worry for her mother-in-law springs up in her chest. It has the same texture as the worry of her dream.
6
After dinner with his mother in the dining room—“The napkins are maroon,” she’d said, with a quiet and sage disgust, as if their color foretold all humanity’s pending griefs—George spent the night at a nearby hotel. He’d promised to return to Oak Park for breakfast and goodbyes and to make sure there was nothing more he needed to request in person on her behalf—the quality of the soundproofing between rooms, for example, she’d need the night’s sleep to discover. But alone at the hotel, with the television chattering in the cabinet and the curtains pulled, as the evening wore on, a vital nervousness began to net his thoughts. So much to be done, and none of it in that gray room! Well past midnight, he called the car service and asked them to pick him up as soon as they found a man to drive out to him; yes, extra for the distance and the hour. How could he stay a moment more? She doesn’t need him. He’ll be back soon enough. She’s already having a good time, outfoxing the staff, inventing demands. That routine, rolling into the closet. As he’d followed her down the hall, he’d experienced an unfamiliar, mixed-up feeling. But then he entered the closet and she said, “Oh, it’s only you.” And so at 4:00 a.m. he stole across the dim lobby and slid into the backseat of the car. Fast to cover the miles, fast back to life. Still, five hours on the road, two in asphyxiating traffic with the city just out of view! At last, the car turns onto the George Washington Bridge and Manhattan appears in the weak early sun across the wide churn of the Hudson. Tuesday morning. He’ll go straight to work, put in an appearance, ensure everything is clanking along on schedule and then attend to his libretto. From the backseat of the car, with the partition to the driver closed so the air-conditioning circulates an optimally tight flow around him, the skyline is stalagmite, elemental, each building a slice edge of steel. Looking at the city from the bridge, it’s hard to believe anyone’s in there. How nice, he thinks, the city would be if the streets were empty. To slide through gray midtown without seeing another soul, without hearing a sound but the click of the traffic lights. The car plunges into the stink and speed of summer in New York. They pass through neighborhoods where George would variously be the wrong kind of man—West Harlem, the Upper West Side. He looks away, to the yellow legal pad on the leather seat beside him. He takes it up and balances it on his knee and begins to write.
UH crossing Federation Europa in search of exiled leader of Climate Refugees, rumored hiding in principality formerly known as France. Abandoned court interior. Hall of mirrors—broken! UH sits at a table with Agent X, ambassador to the EAST. Table with skinned animals, candle. UH & X study large map.
George’s vision is of a future where rain falls only in a thin, temperate band around the world; the rest is famine and fire. He’s still impressed with the originality of his story, its moral clarity. But he can’t quite get X and UH’s duet right. UH must convince X that he is not the marauder—Murderer! Rapist!—the queen’s regime has, upon his escape, broadcasted him to be. The car curves under the brownstone arches of Central Park, past a group on horseback trotting a dirt path, down the Upper East Side with its green awnings and pristine esplanades. They pass the John Stepney Somner Library, a gray, French-neoclassical hulk on the corner of Fifth and Seventy-Eighth. Incredible, always, to think his mother lived there as a girl. An only child, thirty-seven rooms. The smooth marble steps up to the columned entrance, under a sculpture-nestled pediment: her front door. Wrought-iron balconies girding the upper stories. Now it’s a museum and an archive, exhibiting the history of music, open to the public. No coincidence his love of opera. It’s deep in his young education, in his genes—when John Stepney Somner, George’s great-grandfather, commissioned the residence in 1911, moving the family uptown from lower Fifth Avenue, half the downstairs was dedicated to music. Among the libraries and drawing rooms and gallery and dining rooms there was a music room—in honor of his wife, Fanny, an accomplished pianist—and a formal recital room with murals depicting the interior of La Fenice in the 1830s. John Stepney, too bad for him, lived only a year in his elegant fortress, killed by cirrhosis in 1913; when Fanny died fifteen years later, CeCe’s father inherited the house. By the time CeCe was out of school, Edward George—Georgie—and his third wife (the marriage to CeCe’s mother being his second and least discussed) had moved to less drafty accommodations nearby and dedicated John’s House, as the family called it, to the public.
And how John made his fortune! CeCe told George after he’d found himself confronting his great-grandfather’s name as a multiple-choice option (D, incorrect) to a question on industry barons of the nineteenth century during a middle-school history test. He was delighted when later that year his social studies class was asked to produce a paper entitled “My Family Story.” As his friends complained of awkward interviews with this or that grandparent, George lifted his essay from the public record and went to the movies. From the encyclopedia and The New York
Times obituaries, with a smattering of quotation marks and a few changes for originality and sophistication, he transcribed:
John Stepney Somner was born to prosperous farmers in 1837 in New York. At the age of twenty-five he bought out of service in the Civil War. After losing a tavern bet over the material origin of the newly invented rubber stamp, he set out on an expedition to Brazil, where he joined the Amazonian rubber boom. He invested in plantations and harvested the white sap called LATEX.
By thirty-five, Somner returned to the US of A. Somner Rubber, a manufacturing company, and Somner Chemical, a “subsidiary producer of vulcanizing agents” and solvents. Such as sulfuric acid and AMMONIA. He lived in Stockport, Connecticut, “having, with diplomatic finesse, enlisted as overseas managers of production and transport those expatriates of the Confederacy who fled the newly United States for Brazil in 1867.” 1867 the year the Amazon opened to “international shipping.” Stockport is very conveniently located between New York City and Naugatuck, where he built his plants. It’s a nice drive.
“The Somners were Union folk but, as John put it, ‘not opposed to hiring these our honorable cousins of a different mind.’”
The plants were on a street known as Rubber Avenue. “John persuaded New Haven Railroad to add Stockport to its station line, tripling the value of John’s various real estate holdings and over the decades transformed the little hamlet to the bustling.”
His plants in Naugatuck produced boots and gloves. Specialty gloves for telegraph linemen and hospital workers. Until Somner rubber gloves, hospital workers tended their patients bare. They experienced burns from antiseptic fluids, carbolic acids and bichloride of mercury. “The benefit of gloves to sterility was only later discovered.” Also, CONDOMS.
John merged his company with six others to create American Rubber, a “monopolizing consortium.” Right before the 1896 creation of the Dow Industrial Average of twelve stocks, a coincidence, including American Rubber.
“He became John Stepney Somner of New York, serving one term in the state senate, twice mounting failed gubernatorial runs.” By the first year of the new century, he’d added to his homes in Washington Square and Stockport a gaming retreat in Virginia, just south of DC, and a “monolithic estate on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, used only six weeks out of the year, which, “for reasons lost to time,” he named Apollo Court.”
After the conference with his teacher, CeCe arranged for George to take his first private tour of the library, one evening it was closed; they ate a sandwich in the stern topiary garden at the side of the mansion, behind the ornate, black iron fence that separated them from the sidewalk. In the dim room of antique instruments, a docent unlocked the display cases. George was allowed to touch them all: the gittern and the sorna and the sitar. Sad, he thinks now, how his mother has always been immune to the pull of great music. Merely, unsentimentally, appreciative. But not George. George understands why it’s the highest of all arts, the only form that can set the soul free.
The car winds into the upswing glint of midtown east. It begins to rain, a hot-anyway city rain, under a bright sun. The dank concrete pavement and the yellow warp of the walk signs through the pebbles of rain rolling down the outside of his window and the black umbrellas snapping up to obscure the faces of those caught on the crosswalk all remind him that he’s tired, that it’s been a week of sleepless nights. Still, he’s in a good mood. The silence in the car, the muffled city sounds outside—a jackhammer, the grind of the taxi’s brakes. The thought of Iris at home—he’s happy to be a commuter, a man with a house in the shade of a great white ash. A man in a marriage sliding through the wet city, the city transformed into the back of a submarine just risen from the water. To be alone but not alone, what better? At a red light he taps the glass separating himself from the driver. The panel recedes and he sees which of the men who drive him is at the wheel. He knows most in the rotation assigned to him. His driver’s license has been suspended twenty years—cocaine, hurricane—a status he has no pressing desire to dispute. It’s the old guy. How are the granddaughters? Fifth grade, already? Easy, careless, not caring about the answer, the driver not caring either, unified in the pleasantness of not caring about each other.
At work, George ducks past the receptionist and heads down the narrow corridor toward Audrey, his assistant. She’s sitting in the tightest part of the U of her wraparound cubby, eating a pile of tuna out of wax paper and aluminum foil. The smell hangs in the hermetically vented hall. He shakes the rain from his long black umbrella and hands it to her. She’ll want to talk about the Cultural Initiative Grants. He doesn’t want to talk about the Cultural Initiative Grants. Just thinking about it kills his mood. He hopes she doesn’t ask him how his mother is. In the last six months he’s taken days off here and there, ostensibly to join CeCe at various medical appointments. At work he’s had to outbright everyone, dazzle them out of pity and out of the possibility they might strike up a meaningful conversation, so he smiles and says:
“Hello—tuna! It’s kind of early for tuna?”
Office jocularity affords few and simple topics, for which he is grateful. New hair. New outfit. Commuter pain. Computer pain. Sustenance. Wait—did he? He cups his chin. Yes, in his haste to leave the hotel, he forgot to shave.
“George, hi.” Audrey looks startled to see him. “No carbohydrates. Pretty rugged.”
“You, come on! Why would you do that? You look great. What have we got? Stacks to read, floor to ceiling?”
“I—” They pause to greet Stanton—Will, William—who’s wandered silently around the corner in his usual way, relaxed a blink shy of coma: already an ambler in his fifties, with the pink of a baby out of a bath. As always, his clothes appear just-bought—today, a navy cable-knit sweater, khakis, expensive gray running shoes. The unspoken rule that only the boss gets to wear sneakers, to bring his dog. George smoothes his rough chin, his tie. The massive golden retriever glitters at Stanton’s side.
“Betsy’s looking handsome,” George says.
“And how is—it has a strange name?”
“3D. He has us on a leash. Those two”—George leans down and touches Betsy with his index finger—“should have a playdate. We’d love to have you and Anita out for a visit.”
“Hmm.” Stanton sighs. “Glad we’re all with Liz on reviewing the Program Guidelines.” He must think George attended Friday’s meeting. He’s surprised Stanton attended. Stanton’s time is usually reserved for the board and the big donors, not the day-to-day. George agrees, Liz was right on. Says he can’t wait to take a look at her material. Stanton and the dog move down the hall.
As program director for the Arts and Culture Fund at the Hud-Stanton-Fox Foundation, George makes $75,000 a year. His mother supplements this income with what she calls “infrastructure” (subcategories: productive leisure, real estate tax, Iris), which is granted as a relatively modest disbursal once a year through CeCe’s lawyer so they may avoid speaking of it and he may avoid his shame in taking it.
“Trust him with a trust?” she’d said. “I trust it is only through work he will not descend into moral turpitude, and I trust he will only work if I provide him with the essentials and no more.” This to the lawyer—George at eighteen, sitting like a giant, disembodied pimple between them, the only time the three had met together until this year. Until her illness.
“I didn’t expect you in until tomorrow. Your mom’s called twice this morning. How’re you holding up?”
“I’m well. I’m great.”
Awkward. Audrey’s concern, draining as the fluorescents. She yanks her rubber band out of her jet curls and reknots the bun with a violence that still startles George, though he’s seen her do it a hundred times a day for two years. She forks a bite of the wet lump in the foil. In silence together they search and find Stress, the North Star of office camaraderie.
“Wow,” she maws, “it mushed be streshfu.”
“Stress can be a powerful and driving force.”
&nbs
p; “Your mom calls me Ellen. Wasn’t your first assistant named Ellen?”
“No,” he lies.
Lying, lying, lying. To cheer himself up he pictures lying under Audrey in her starter-kit apartment. A plastic alarm clock on top of a plastic milk crate. The Official Audrey Fantasy does not have its usual soothing effect; in its place he imagines her the damp, gunmetal gray of a Pacific tuna.
“What’s first priority today? Cultural Initiative? City Hope Orchestra?”
“I got through those while you were gone.” She swallows. “I had some spare time Friday. Not that—I mean, you should double-check everything, right?”
Most workdays George sits in his well-appointed office in front of the computer and clicks through glossy, photo-filled presentations sent by organizations requesting grant money. Photos of, say, a child playing a violin next to a pie chart, above an investment report. He slices open the few applications that still come by hard mail with a letter knife shaped like the wing of a gull. The knife is a corporate gift he received his first year at Hud-Stanton. All the program directors got one, but George recognized it was modeled after Brancusi’s Bird in Space, with the addition of a serrated spine, and, having always admired the sculpture, felt it had been chosen particularly for him. Next, they batch potential grant recipients: Allocate Funds (suggested amount; timeline; rationale); No with a Note; Special Consideration; Friend of X; No. Worthy causes: endowing a symphony, or, say, last month’s project—a onetime grant to restore a collection of Revolutionary-era chairs for display at the New-York Historical Society.
At first, Audrey Singer wanted to open and print and arrange these grant requests for him; otherwise she had little to do. The previous year, Hud-Stanton had absorbed—merged with, officially—the Fox Foundation, several polite years after the death of its founder, Henry Fox. Fox and Hud-Stanton shared many board members and the endowment-doubling vote to merge was near unanimous. For reasons of diplomacy, working out the balance of responsibilities allotted to various duplicate programs is slow going. George knows Hud-Stanton is taking delicate care in folding the Fox programs, one by one, into their own. He began his libretto in the bounty of extra time brought by the merger. Audrey has as little to do as he; it doesn’t help that as a rule he won’t let her get him coffee.
The Unfortunates: A Novel Page 6
