by North, Will
Whenever Tyler Strong walked into a room—the living room of a friend hosting a party, a meeting room at a business conference, the reception line at a charity function, the hostess’s podium at an acclaimed restaurant, an hotel bar where he was to meet someone, an airport waiting lounge, the aerobic machine room at the Washington Athletic Club—anywhere—he scanned for women. Like a vampire hunting for fresh blood, he was in continuous search for the attention of new women who could give him meaning, give him life. And he knew immediately which woman would do it for him.
It wasn’t so much predator and prey as it was a meeting of the mutually needy.
***
IN THE PANTRY hall where the Petersens’ dishes and serving plates were stored in old floor-to-ceiling, glass-fronted cabinets, Tyler slid his spatula under the salmon fillet, separated the crisped skin from the pink flesh, and transferred it to a large, chipped, cream-colored ironstone platter of uncertain antiquity. The way the old house was built, the pantry shelves were accessible both from the back hall and the kitchen itself. Through the glass doors on the kitchen side he saw Rob’s wife Peggy bent over the kitchen’s center island scooping her potato salad into a bowl. Slipping soundlessly into the next room, he grabbed her from behind so she’d jump. Then he reached around her warm body and swept the salmon platter to the counter before her.
“Tah-dah!”
“Very nice, I must say,” she said.
“The salmon?”
“Not the salmon.”
“The surprise?”
“As if you didn’t know.”
“You’re looking exceptionally luscious tonight, neighbor, which is saying something…”
“And what is it saying?”
He pressed his pelvis against her soft bottom, briefly, then stepped away. “It’s saying, ‘Yum.’”
She backed up against him again to feel the bulge, just for a moment, then returned to her salad.
“Be careful,” she warned.
“Hard, when I’m feeling dangerous.”
Peggy shivered. “Um, yes. Hard.”
Tyler was sure the word “voluptuary” must have been coined just for Peggy March. Tonight, she was wearing a vintage Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress in black and white diagonal stripes that guided one’s gaze, like an airport’s vector signal, to the golden declivity that ran southward from the cupped hollow between her collarbones to the shadowy chasm between her heavy breasts. A part of his martini-fuzzed brain wondered what piece of intimate undergarment engineering she had chosen this night to keep those luminous lobes upright. He decided he’d discover that later. Peggy, he’d learned in the last two months, had expensive taste in lingerie. And creative ideas about sex.
“Alex was here a few minutes ago; did you need another martini?” Peggy asked. There was just the slightest archness in her question.
He leaned toward her ear. “I need nothing but thee.”
“Oh?”
He lowered his voice. “Hugely.”
She smiled into the salad. “Good.”
“You, too?”
“Me, too.”
There was a commotion outside, and suddenly Peggy’s fifteen year-old daughter, Katerina, flew through the door from the front porch with her brother, twelve year-old Mickey, in train.
“Why do I still have to eat with the babies, Mom? It’s not fair!”
Mickey punched her.
“Oww!”
“I’m not a baby!”
“Okay, okay!”
“Stop it, you two!” Peggy ordered. “First of all, as your brother has just reminded you, there are no babies. Only kids, and you’re not much older than most of them.”
Tyler, observing Katerina’s adolescent body and noting she was developing rather nicely, begged to differ, but did so to himself.
“Second,” Peggy added, “it’s a tradition. And on the last day of the season we observe traditions. You graduate to the adult table at sixteen. Next summer will be different. I promise.”
“Next summer is next summer!” the girl wailed.
Tyler crossed the room, put his arm around the girl’s shoulders, and leaned down, catching the warm, salty scent coming off her body.
“Look, it sucks, I know. But here’s what I want you to think about,” he said in his deepest, most seductive voice. “Right now you’re Queen of the Hill with the kids: the oldest, the smartest, the most beautiful, the one everyone looks up to, the one in charge. I know you know that; I’ve watched you. You’re terrific with them. A star. But step into the adults’ group tonight and you’ll be nobody. Poof! Just like that: Invisible. Loved, of course,” and here he gave her a sideways hug that made her squirm, “but invisible. Now, which sounds better to you?”
Katerina hesitated. It was as if she was chewing the problem to digestible bits. Finally, she dropped her head and said into her sandals, “Yeah. You’re right. But I don’t have to like it.”
“No, you don’t. And next year you won’t have to. I shall look forward to that.”
Her head turned sharply, “You will?”
“You bet.”
Katerina gave him an ear-to-ear smile, jumped up to peck him on the cheek, grabbed her little brother’s hand, and danced out of the kitchen.
Peggy had her hands on her hips, which accentuated her décolleté. “You certainly have a way with the ladies.”
He leaned across the kitchen island, ran a finger down her bare arm, and said, “I’d certainly like my way with one of them…”
Peggy blushed. She hated that she always did, that her need was so transparent. But tonight, after three Cosmos, she didn’t care.
“West End? Two?” she whispered. “Under the Madronas? Rob will be asleep by then.”
“Two.”
At that moment, Pete burst through a swinging door from the back hall, her arms laden with plates.
“Two? Were you talking about Two? Please, let’s not. Let’s just get through this day without reliving tragedies—okay?”
As if someone had flicked a switch, Tyler shifted to attentive husband mode.
“No, no; the ‘two’ are just our new guests tonight, Todd and Jemma Keating.”
“I like her,” Pete said. “She’s smart and thoughtful. But I keep thinking she’s analyzing everyone.”
Pete had changed into a simple spaghetti strap cocktail dress in bias cut black silk charmeuse that emphasized her shoulders, her summer tan, and her sun bleached hair, a dress that somehow managed to be both demure and sexy. Her high heels brought her almost to kissing height beside Tyler, but not quite. He slipped his arm around her waist, gave her a hug, and briefly kissed her hair, still damp from the shower.
“I know what you mean. But here’s my signature salmon done, and Rob’s flambé shrimps are on their way, the showy bugger. Colin’s finished cooking for the kids and Todd’s out there, too, scorching ribeye steaks and brushing them with some English brew called ‘Daddy’s Sauce.’”
“Right. I’ll just take these plates out to the dining room,” Pete said as Tyler held the door for her.
Peggy March, who’d busied herself with the potato salad, stole a look at Tyler and lifted an eyebrow.
“Daddy’s Sauce?”
twenty-two
JEMMA KEATING STOOD BEHIND HER assigned seat at the dining table and willed the other chairs to stop moving. Damn that Tyler’s Cosmos! There were place markers—little tents of manila from cut up file folders with names lettered with the practiced hand of a calligrapher. Pete, she wondered? Todd’s place, she noted unhappily, was all the way across the table from hers. To her right, the little tent said “Rob.” To her left, “Tyler.” She would have preferred Colin. She wondered who’d arranged the seating.
She slid into her chair, hoping a lower center of gravity would steady things, which it did, and moments later the men swept in with platters of steak, salmon, and shrimp and the room filled with a rich fragrance of olive oil, garlic, citrus, oregano and charcoal. Jemma was suddenly rav
enous. The women had already laid out salads. Tyler went to work uncorking bottles of wine: three chardonnays from Oregon for the fish eaters, two Washington pinot noirs for the carnivores.
Then Tyler sat, leaned toward her ear, placed an oddly possessive hand on her thigh, and whispered, “Welcome.” She moved her leg. The wine was passed around and Tyler jumped up beside her.
“A toast, please, to both another season drawing to a close and to the company of wonderful new neighbors! To the Keatings!”
Jemma ducked her head slightly and Todd waved a disjointedly loose hand and pleaded, “Please, please, no fuss; lovely to be invited to join you all…”
Everyone else raised a glass, mumbling “the Keatings!” and “Hear, hear!”
Rob March had lifted his glass too, as if by reflex, but said nothing. The mass of him seemed to be pulling energy out of the stuffy dining room as if he were a small cosmic black hole. Jemma liked Rob: attentive to his kids, obviously besotted still with his wife. Despite his bulk, he had soft, doe-like eyes, eyes that spoke on his behalf even when he was silent, as he was tonight. Just now they seemed focused somewhere in the far distance, as if he longed to be elsewhere. Peggy March noticed, too, tilted her head to one side in silent question, but failed to catch her husband’s gaze. The man was troubled; Jemma wondered why.
The volume of table chatter rose and platters were passed from hand to hand. Jemma was amused to see Alex’s three bean salad speeding, untouched, around the table. Out of sympathy, she took a spoonful.
“So, Todd,” she heard Tyler say beside her. “Did I understand you’ve already retired? You’re not even fifty, dude!” It seemed to Jemma there was an oddly forced heartiness in his voice.
“Don’t know about ‘retired,’ but I did sell my business. Maybe ‘unemployed’ is a better term…” Todd smiled.
“Happily unemployed?”
“Not unhappily.”
“You’re in computers, is that right?”
“Not really.”
“Then…?” Tyler persisted.
“Software. We created applications for smartphones. Before we were bought out, by Apple.”
“Way to go!” Tyler said, looking around the table for confirmation of the significance of this announcement and seeing none. “That must make you a zillionaire!”
Todd squirmed, as if the subject under discussion were wife-swapping.
Jemma stepped in: “Todd creates small technology firms—‘idea labs,’ he calls them—and then, when they’ve created something of value and taken off, he sells them. The smartphone applications are just the latest.”
His embarrassment past, Todd grinned at the others. “I get bored and move on; I have the attention span of a flea…”
Colin, who was sitting between Todd and Pete, laughed and said, “Oh, I don’t think we believe that for a moment.”
“No, it’s true; I work on something for a while with my team, really struggle with it, and then I’m done. I want it off my desk; I want to move on.”
“Thankfully,” Jemma said, smiling across the table, “that doesn’t extend to wives.”
“Yet,” Tyler cracked.
Eyebrows lifted around the table but Todd ignored this and did a little bow toward his wife with his head and shoulders.
“I believe, Todd,” Lucia said from the far corner of the table, “that whatever mathematical or programming skills you possess, you are nonetheless a man driven by a passion to create, yes? You get bored, as you say. Then you create again. You are an inventor, and in that sense you are a pioneer. So very American.”
“Whereas Rob and I are merely parasites!” Tyler barked, so loudly and unexpectedly that it was like an explosion in the room. A few people looked at him; others attended resolutely to their plates.
He turned to Rob, grinning. “Right, old man?”
Rob glanced at him slowly, as if coming out of a trance.
Then Old Adam, seated at the head of the table with Sylvia to his left and her daughter Alex to his right, spoke up, his gravelly voice rumbling down the length of the table like a seismic shift. “I beg your pardon, counselor?”
“Come on, Adam; law school tries to brainwash us into believing that we’re crusading advocates for the weak, defenders of the truth, upholders of the law, protectors of the damaged and downtrodden. But the plain fact is that we feed off other people’s troubles. Without their miseries, we’d be out of business. We’re maggots.”
“Nonsense,” Old Adam snapped.
“Do you forget your Shakespeare, uncle?” Tyler continued, his voice at too high a pitch for the small room, as if flirting with hysteria. “‘…First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers!’”
“A fine quip,” Old Adam countered, “but your inadequate education is showing. Shakespeare did not say that; a scoundrel in Henry VI says it, whereupon he commits a heinous crime. Perhaps you missed the irony.”
Colin had been watching Pete watch Tyler. Initially, there was the slightest hint of a frown, but then her face became expressionless, as if she were listening to distant music playing in her head.
Colin wondered whether this strange show wasn’t all for Jemma’s benefit; Tyler belittling his profession so that someone, like Jemma, would interrupt and say how noble it was. If it was a performance, it wasn’t working. Though her head was tilted roughly in the direction of her tablemate, Jemma’s body was angled away from Tyler and her eyes were focused on Pete, as if waiting for a parent to upbraid a wayward child.
It was Lucia’s photographer husband, Joe, a bear of a man with a neatly trimmed beard just showing touches of gray, who finally was moved to speak,
“Surely, Tyler, you could not carry on if this was what you truly believed of your own profession.”
Tyler widened his eyes in mock disbelief and smiled at Joe as if the man were an idiot. “We bifurcate, my friend! We pretend we’re saviors but we’re actually scavengers. We’re not legal eagles; we’re like the gulls and crows out there fighting for carrion,” he said jerking his head toward the beach. “While we scavenge, we soothe ourselves by believing we are making the world a better place. It’s all bullshit.” He was speaking very loudly, very quickly, like a pilot making an emergency announcement just before a crash.
Rob March leaned forward and peered around Jemma to regard his colleague. He’d never known that Tyler had held their profession in such low esteem. And this behavior was bizarre, even for Tyler. Rob wondered how much Tyler had drunk already. Then, suddenly, he wondered if Tyler had already guessed the law firm’s decision.
Colin stepped in: “Come on, Tyler; it must feel rewarding when you win a case, no?”
Rob responded before Tyler could, as if to calm the storminess that had swept the table. “I regret to say there is at least an ounce of truth in my colleague’s bleak assessment. Look at it this way—if we win a case, somebody else loses, and no matter what you see on Law and Order, plaintiffs and defendants are seldom purely good or evil.”
“It’s about justice,” Old Adam said.
“Exactly,” Rob continued. “Consider the Innocence Project.”
“What’s that?” Alex asked, turning not to Rob but to Tyler and smiling with klieg light brilliance.
But Old Adam intervened: “It’s a dedicated team of lawyers and researchers who’ve been using DNA evidence to prove that a lot of people on death row around this country never committed the murder for which they were convicted. What’s more, in many cases they’ve found that law enforcement officials deliberately falsified or suppressed evidence to convict an innocent suspect just to get the case out of their hair.”
“That’s criminal!” Alex exclaimed.
Rob blinked at her word choice, then added, “No, it’s consciously evil. Then again, the ambiguity of right and wrong is probably even more pronounced in my own specialty, family law.”
This admission ran like an electrical current through the women at the table; they were suddenly attentive.
�
�There, everyone loses in one way or another, regardless of the verdict, regardless of who is right or wrong,” Rob confessed.
He looked at Tyler. “And I don’t think it’s black and white in your corporate law, either, Strong.”
“Bernie Madoff was certainly evil,” Tyler crowed, as if he’d just hit a home run in a game no one else was playing.
Now Jemma spoke up: “No, I think Rob’s point is still valid. Madoff was amoral, certainly, and deeply troubled in some way we may never understand, but not evil. It’s almost as if he occupied two realities simultaneously: the exceptionally adept investor and the shyster.” She turned slowly and leveled a look at Tyler. “Perhaps, like you, he bifurcated.”
“But the man ruined hundreds of people!” Peggy nearly shouted, as if she’d been one of them.
“People ruin other people all the time; they betray each other all the time,” Colin said. “My fellow New Yorker, Jules Feiffer, the famous cartoonist in the The Village Voice, called them ‘Little Murders.’ It was in a play he wrote years ago. But are those acts evil? Or just venal, or careless, or stupid, or self-centered?”
“That’s it!” Tyler cried, missing the point entirely. “That’s the lawyer’s life every day: little murders. And the hell of it is, sometimes the jury will find on behalf of real murderers!”
“Feiffer’s play was about domestic betrayal, Tyler, not the law,” Old Adam corrected, his left hand supporting his forehead as it were weighted down by his nephew’s performance. “A work of genius, frankly. I commend it to you all.”
Sylvia put her hand on the old man’s arm, not so much to silence as to calm him. He turned and acknowledged her touch and realized, as if a flashbulb had suddenly revealed what before had been darkness, that she cared for him. He was thunderstruck. Sylvia, who tonight wore a simple, scooped-neck, calf-length cotton dress in a corn silk yellow that deepened her tanned skin and returned color to her graying hair, squeezed his arm and smiled.
