A Perfect Wife and Mother

by Peter Israel

  “Thanks, Leon,” I say bitterly. “So what are my choices? Just tell me what my choices are.”

  “Choices? The sensible one I already gave you: Wait for Vic. A point here, a point there, it could make a big difference to you in the long run. But if you want to, you can always sign it the way it is, right now. I’ll sign it too, and we can get on with it.”

  He says it offhandedly, as though he really doesn’t give a shit one way or the other.

  “But the clause stands?”

  “The clause has got to stand.”

  “What I feel like doing,” I say, “is wiping your ass with it.”

  This time he’s quick to react. Eyes small, jaws tight. Voice full of Great White menace.

  “That’s enough now. You’re way out of line, Larry. You do what you want to do. You can also walk out the door, that’s your decision. But this conversation is over.”

  He’s standing too. A little shorter than me but heavier. Also a good twenty years older.

  “It’s not over, Leon,” I say, unblinking. “Let me tell you something. You can send me down the tubes if you want to, but I’m taking you with me. You, The Cross, the whole goddamn company. Let’s not fuck around with each other anymore. I can do it too. I know enough, where the bodies are buried, and you know I know it.”

  He doesn’t blink either.

  “That sounds like a threat to me,” he says.

  “That’s exactly what it is.”

  “Do you want to repeat that in front of a witness?”

  “I’d be glad to.” Christ Almighty, does he think I’m bluffing?

  “Are you sure? Do you really want to start something you could regret for the rest of your life?”

  The son of a bitch is staring me down. I feel myself break out in little sweaty prickles all over.

  “Annabelle?” he calls out, his eyes not leaving mine. “Please come in here a minute.” Then, when she does, “Shut the door behind you, please.”

  She shuts the door. The three of us are standing, in the Great White’s office, Annabelle Morgan looking questioningly at her boss.

  “Mr. Coffey has just said something to me that I’d like him to repeat. All you have to do is listen.” And to me: “Go ahead, Larry.”

  It’s Rubicon time. All of a sudden I’ve the dryness in my throat. God Almighty. Thirteen years down the tubes and maybe a whole lot more. My whole fucking career. Well, go ahead, Julius, cross the fucker.

  I repeat it.

  Into the downtown canyons, and all the way to the hospital, I’m shaking like a wino. Two parts anger, one part fear, mix and stir well.

  Georgie is in the midst of breast-feeding the baby. She always said she’d never do it, and she didn’t with Justie. Not for her, she always said. But in the middle of the night, last night, and after all she’s gone through having this baby, she decided she had to try it. You never know, Zoe could be our last. Except now she’s anxious over whether Zoe’s getting enough milk. Do I think she’s latching properly? Also she—Georgie—slept badly. And hurts like a son of a bitch. This much I can tell later when I help her to the john. Something about her wound being held together with staples—can I imagine?—right across her belly. Metal staples. It’s positively medieval.

  “But Larry, why are you so distracted? So jumpy? You’ve hardly sat still since the minute you got here.”

  “Jumpy?” I say. “I wasn’t aware of it. I guess I hate to see you hurting like this.”

  “I know,” with a tired smile, “but look what we’ve got in exchange.”

  “Yeah. Little Zoe.”

  “Zoe Elizabeth Coffey. I haven’t told anybody the name yet.”

  “How come?”

  “I want us to live with it first, make sure we like it. Well? What’s wrong? Don’t you like it?”

  “Sure, it’s fine. It’s a fine name.”

  “But do you love it?… Larry, can’t you focus for a minute? You seem a million miles away! We both ought to love it. We’re all going to have to live with it a long time.”

  Christ, what am I supposed to say? That, much as I love my new daughter, I don’t know how I’m going to pay for the roof over her head, come the new year, so what difference does it make if her name is Zoe or Christabelle or Marie Antoinette?

  “I love it,” I say. “Zoe Elizabeth Coffey.”

  “Well, let’s live with it another couple of days, till we’re sure. I want us to be sure.”

  I stay until I’m too pent up to stay any longer. Then I kiss both of them good-bye, saying I’ll be back later, and head over to the club. They haven’t even opened the bar yet for lunch, but I sit there and, taking a deep breath, start making my calls. No Penzil, no Holbrook, nobody who’s going to tell me not to do anything rash. Instead I start with MacFarlane, knowing I won’t get him, but I leave a message on his machine—I want his ear to the ground again—and then I get onto some other people I know, who were close to the Drexel situation. The way I put it is that a customer of mine—no names, but I owe him—has come to me for advice. For reasons of his own, he’s ready to blow the whistle on one of our competitors, but he’s scared, understandably, about what could happen to him along the way. So who can he talk to discreetly in the regulatory agencies? I need a name, somebody who’d be willing to protect him, at least at the very beginning.

  Sign of the times. To a man, their first reaction is that I have to talk him out of it. I say I’ve already been that route and failed. My guy’s mad as a hornet, there’s no way I can stop him. I don’t know all of what he has—I don’t want to know—but I’m pretty sure he’s going to spill it no matter what I say, and the best I can do, under the circumstances, is make sure he doesn’t spill it to the Journal or the New York Times.

  It’s midafternoon by the time I get what I want. Some can’t help, or won’t, but finally I come up with a name—the same name—from two different sources. A Department of Justice lawyer called Joe Richter, who’s attached to the U.S. Attorney’s office.

  By then I’ve had a few rounds at the bar. The lunch crowd has long since vanished. I’m wondering if this Richter might already be looking at The Cross. I’m wondering if there was anything in what MacFarlane said, back in November.

  Hey, Joe Richter, it’s Big Bear on the horn, how’d you like a nice money-laundering scandal laid right in your lap?

  Hey, says the Great White, baring his white fangs, do you really want to start something you’ll regret for the rest of your life?

  Rubicon city.

  I make the call.

  I can’t tell whether he knows who I am or not. I suggest an exploratory meeting, strictly off the record.

  Done. For tomorrow. In an uptown watering hole I know, not that far from Georgie’s hospital.

  When I hang up, though, I realize I’m shaky again, inside, and it’s not from booze. The fucking enormity of it, Jesus Christ, have I gone stark raving? Don’t do something you’ll regret for the rest of your life.

  But the son of a bitch gored me!

  There’s not a soul in the world I can tell right now. That’s getting to me already. Even before I’ve met with Richter, I’m the loneliest guy in town.

  Talk about things you’ll regret. I call Georgie. I’m at the club, I say, but something’s come up. Mulcahy’s in town (sotto voce), and I’m sorry as hell about it but there’s no way I’m going to make it back to the hospital.

  “Are you all right?” she wants to know in her small voice.

  “I’m fine,” I lie.

  I can hear people noises in the background. She’s telling me who’s there—she says she doesn’t know where to put all the flowers—and I’m trying to tell myself that’s why I’m not going back to the hospital, because I can’t face any of them right now.

  Georgie says she misses me. So, she says, does my daughter. Well, I say, I’ll call when I get home if it’s not too late. Else I’ll be there in the morning, first thing.

  And there goes another lie.

 
Easy, honey, once you get the hang of it.

  It gets worse.

  Sweet Jesus.

  I’m home after dark. Justie has finished dinner and Harriet has him in the tub. There are phone messages from any number of people, but they can wait, and so can I, sipping Scotch in the den, until she brings him down.

  We talk awhile. Last night, by the time I got home, they were both asleep. That is, all the lights were out on the third floor.

  I tell Justie about his baby sister. The kid yawns. Harriet’s done wonders with him, according to Georgie, but he still looks awfully puny to me.

  Georgie’s genes, I guess.

  She doesn’t stop looking at you. She has this way of looking you over, up and down, as though her eyes are coming right in through your pants. It started when she moved in—the eye contact, the offhand remarks, the accidental brushes and touches—only one time, the night Georgie stayed over at her folks, it wasn’t accidental.

  She said … well, she said a lot of things that night. I did too. We were in the den, and she was perched on my desk, legs dangling, and she kept telling me she shouldn’t be there, that it was awful, laughing her soft, throaty laugh meanwhile, until I wanted her so badly I could taste it. We kissed finally, one of those long, exploratory, wraparound jobs, and I couldn’t believe it, she was so young, fresh. Smelled like a meadow in summer.

  She pushed me off. She tried to pass it off as a great misunderstanding, and when that didn’t work, she pleaded with me to lay off her, and when that didn’t work, she started to cry, even though—and this I will swear to, Georgie, on a stack of Bibles—she’d started it.

  She said she couldn’t do it to you, not as long as you were pregnant.

  Whatever that meant.

  Hey, I may be no Boy Scout but I’m not exactly a rapist, either.

  Ever since then, though, it’s been sheer torture, just having her under the same roof. Maybe I should have said something to you—shit, I know I should have, but like what? “Honey, we’ve got to get rid of Harriet?”—but you were upstairs in bed, and I didn’t, and sometimes just the sight of her, like tonight, like when her eyes are working me over and she’s brushing her hair back, laughing a little, asking me how it feels to be a daddy again, running her fingers slowly along one temple to behind the ear …

  If I ever needed R&R, it’s tonight. And you’re not pregnant anymore.

  Good God Almighty.

  She’s taken him upstairs, his head nodding off in her arms, and I’m waiting for her to come back down.

  She doesn’t.

  I’m standing the whole time in my doorway. Glass in hand. Sometimes I’m aware that I’m holding my breath, sometimes that I’m taking these deep draughts. I can hear my own pulse pounding.

  Finally, I go up after her.

  The lights are all out on the third floor.

  I mean, what the hell are you supposed to do when the pressure boils over?

  I guess some guys beat the daylights out of their wives and kids. Some tie one on. Some get laid.

  Or all three.

  Upstairs, in the darkness.

  “For God’s sake, Larry!” she hisses at me through her closed door. “Not with him in the next room!”

  “Then come downstairs with me,” I tell her.

  We spar back and forth through the closed door. She’s not saying no either, but there’s Justie, and I tell her Justie would sleep through an earthquake, but if it’s Justie she’s worried about, there’s the whole house, pick a room, the whole outdoors, even in December, I promise her, she won’t be cold.

  I hear her laugh at that. What does she want from me? I can taste her!

  Then I try the door. She’s locked it. Goddamn, in my house people don’t lock the doors!

  I rear back. I ram the fucker in.

  Pitch dark.

  “You’re crazy, Larry! Be reasonable, your wife just had a baby! Cut it out now! I won’t, not this way! For God’s sake! Stop it, for God’s sake!”

  Something like that. Because I don’t give a damn, I’m going to have her this time whether she wants it or not. I’m heaving and banging into stuff with her in the dark, struggling and dripping sweat, the two of us.

  Then, loud and clear: “Get the hell out of here!”

  Sweet Jesus Christ.

  I must have let go of her, because somehow, suddenly, she’s switched on a light, and now, in the light, she’s all cowering, and I see her face screwed up, and her body’s shaking even before a sound comes out. She’s got on one of those knee-length T-shirts, white with a big yellow Tweety Bird on it.

  She looks wild, but not sexy wild. Now she’s laughing her head off, but it’s one of those mean, rictus-y laughs, the not-funny kind. In between she’s babbling stuff I don’t get, except that, poor bastard, I don’t have a clue, and somehow, tonight, that seems to be the laugh riot of the century.

  Well, I guess I don’t—don’t have a clue—at least as far as this little prick teaser’s concerned. But she’s shut my systems down, and when she tells me to get out again, I get.

  I’ll tell you, honey, she may be great with Justie, but underneath she’s one screwed-up piece of work.

  Okay, so it’s not my finest hour. Look, Georgie, I’m sorry as hell, that’s all I want to say to you. That, and that, at the end of the day, I still love you.

  Justie slept through the whole damn thing.

  19 December

  “Yes? Who’s this?”

  “He’s talking.”

  “I’m sorry, it’s the middle of the night, I—”

  “I said: ‘He’s talking,’ for Christ’s sake!… Hello? Are you there?”

  “How did you find out?”

  “That’s my business. Goddamn it, man, I thought you were going to keep this from happening.”

  “Are you sure of your information?”

  “Very sure.”

  “Who’s he talking to?”

  “A federal shyster, name of Richter.”

  “No names, please.”

  “Okay, a goddamn nameless federal shyster.”

  “Do you know what they said?”

  “What the fuck difference does that make?”

  “You’ve always assured me he doesn’t know enough.”

  “And you assured me you had it under control! You let me go ahead and stick it to him! For Christ’s sake, as long as he’s talking, the wrong people can end up hearing about it. It’s a goddamn good thing they’re out of the country. He says if they …”

  “Who says? Who else knows about this?”

  “What do you mean, who else knows about it?”

  “Just what I said. Whom have you been talking to?”

  “Nobody! Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “At least one person.”

  “What do you mean, one person?”

  “The person who told you. I want to know who it is.”

  “Sorry, I—”

  “It’s their attorney, isn’t it.”

  “Listen, I—”

  “You don’t have to say anything.”

  “I don’t see what the fuck you’re so afraid of. He’s in it with us, isn’t he?”

  “So you keep telling me.”

  “Because it’s true, and you know it! But what are we going to do? I gotta know, so does he! We’ve got a goddamn time bomb that’s going off, and if we don’t—”

  “You’re going to do nothing. You did what you had to do, now you’re going to stay perfectly calm and do nothing.”

  “But—?”

  “We’re going to control the damage.”

  “Oh? Just like that?”

  “Yes, since you ask. Just like that.”

  Georgia Levy Coffey

  19 December

  It’s Wednesday morning. Zoe Elizabeth Coffey is two days old.

  I just got off the phone with Harriet. I had Justin first. He has a cold—I could hear it—and then there was something, teary-voiced, about a Christmas party they’re having at Group
, and he’s supposed to go as a knight with a cardboard sword and helmet, but Harriet says he can’t go. Then she came on.

  She’s giving him Triaminic for the cold. I agreed that he shouldn’t go to the Group party. Everything else, she said, was okay on the home front, more or less.

  There was something funny, though, about her voice. Funny? No, but she sounded subdued, quiet.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Me? Oh yes, I’m fine.”

  Then I asked to speak to Larry.

  “Oh?” She sounded surprised. “But he’s not here. I’d have thought he was with you by now.”

  “Well, he hasn’t shown up yet. You saw him this morning, didn’t you?”

  “No. I mean, he was already gone by the time we got up. Is there something you want me to tell him, in case he calls in?”

  “No, that’s all right. When did you see him last?”

  “Do you mean actually saw?”

  “Whatever.”

  “I mean, he must have gotten home pretty late last night. We were already asleep, Justin and me. But why, Georgia? Is something wrong?”

  “No, nothing. Nothing at all.”

  Only, I thought, something was. Could she be covering for him somehow? He’d said he was with the Mulcahys, the day before, those awful people. But had he been?

  But why would he have lied?

  Then, brightening, she said, “But aren’t you going to tell me something about the baby? Is she wonderful? I think it’s such a beautiful name, Zoe. And I’m so glad you decided to breast-feed! It makes me very proud, Georgia. I mean, proud of you.”

  And it didn’t even register!

  It only niggled. Something. We chatted on.

  But it registers now! Oh yes it does, you presumptuous bitch!

  I’m lying in my bed in a state of shock. Zoe’s asleep in her bassinet. Thank God nobody’s here.

  She’s lying to me! They’re both lying to me!

  Because how does she know the name? How, if she didn’t talk to Larry last night or this morning, does she know what Zoe’s name is?

  Moreover, how does she know I’m breast-feeding?

  Conceivably he could have told them the night before last, Monday. What was it he said? That when he got home that night, he was on the phone with Penzil? Something about The Deal? And that he only had time to tell Justin he had a baby sister and that Mommy was fine?