Nantucket Sawbuck

by Steven Axelrod

  He took Cindy’s arm and began. “I was thinking about the last time we were in the neighborhood. You were sick, we thought they were going to take you to Lenox Hill. But Dr. Mathias took care of you. I remember sitting in the office, waiting, thinking how much I wanted to have kids.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “No it wasn’t. It feels that way but it wasn’t.”

  “Mike, I’m going to be late if I don’t—”

  He wanted to say, “Forget it, you’re not seeing the doctor today,” but he knew that would backfire. Besides, he was on to something now and he wanted to finish it. “Just listen to me for a second. This is important. Sex felt different after that, it felt pure, like there was nothing between us and the consequences of what we were doing. Like, the consequences were what we were doing. The orgasm almost didn’t matter. It was just the starter’s gun. You know? It was scary. But it was good. It was like skydiving without a parachute, except when we hit the ground we weren’t going to die. Someone else was going to be born.”

  Cindy looked down. “Well, it didn’t work out that way.”

  “No. I know that.”

  “I wish you’d said some of this stuff then.”

  “I tried to. But it was just a jumble. I needed time to think about it.”

  “Things were different then, Mike. We were different.”

  He stopped walking, took her hands, faced her down.

  “I want this baby, Cindy.”

  She looked away, watching a Great Dane pulling a slim man on a taut leash. A woman was coming around the corner with a pair of King Charles spaniels. The dogs sniffed each other, the leashes tangled.

  “That’s not your decision to make,” Cindy said.

  “Yes it is. This is happening to both of us. Just like it happened to both of us before. I lost a baby, too, Cindy.”

  “Mike—”

  “I lost a baby, too.”

  Impulsively, she hugged him. She flung herself at him and knocked him back a step, into a big car, its make and model anonymous under a great loaf of snow. They held each other tight through their heavy coats. She was crying. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Hey, it’s okay. I love you. Cindy—it’s okay.”

  She pulled away and looked up at him, tears glittering in her eyes, snow glittering in her hair.

  “What a pair of ridiculous fuck-ups we are.”

  He kissed her. “I know. But we’ll stop. We’ll be better. We’ll have to be better. We’re going to be setting an example now.”

  “Oh God.”

  “We can do it. Our parents did.”

  She smiled. “Don’t set the bar too low, Mike.”

  They pushed off the car and walked on, across Fifth Avenue, past the museum and along the park wall.

  “It doesn’t matter about Mark Toland,” he said after a while. “I deserved that. And so did you.”

  “Well, I needed it, anyway.”

  “As long as it’s over.”

  “It barely began.”

  “Good. It balances things. It settles the score.”

  “Not really. I didn’t sleep with a co-worker, or make you the subject of choice for every malicious gossip on the island. You never had to stand making small talk with Mark Toland at a party.”

  “No. But it still hurt.”

  “Did it really?”

  “Thinking of you with that guy? Jesus.”

  “You were jealous?”

  “Come on.”

  “Unbearably jealous?”

  “Actually, I found the whole thing strangely erotic.”

  She punched his arm. “You’re sick.”

  They walked along quietly for another block. The snow was coming down more heavily now, muffling their footsteps and cutting them off from the gauzy buildings across the street and the Christmas card shadows of the park.

  “There are just two things you have to do for me,” Cindy said as they crossed the transverse entrance at Seventy-ninth Street.

  “Tell me.”

  “First, just keep talking to me.” She grabbed a handful of his hair, shook it. “I want to know what’s going on in there. I know I can be a jerk. But tell me so from now on. Don’t just nod and go off to work another seventeen-hour day. Whenever some painter’s wife tells me her husband is on the job until nine every night, all I can think is, your marriage is in trouble, Honey. If it wasn’t, he’d be home. No one has to work until nine o’clock every night, unless they’re on some corporate fast track. And you’re not.”

  “No.”

  “So come home early and talk to me. If I take your head off, I’ll make it up with sexual favors. I promise. At least until the baby arrives.”

  “Fair enough,” Mike said. “What’s the other thing?”

  “It’s about Tanya Kriel.”

  “What about her?”

  Cindy gave him her sweetest smile. “Fire the bitch.”

  “Done,” Mike said. “As soon as we get home. But right now, since this is the first time we’ve been off-island together in six months, I’d like to take you to a fabulous breakfast and a tour of the new Museum of Modern Art and maybe even an early movie before we drive back.”

  “Lunch at Papaya King?”

  “Absolutely. Five star all the way.”

  She stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. “Thanks, Mike,” she said. “I mean it. Thanks for coming. It’s the best thing anyone’s done for me since…I don’t know. Since my dad drove all the way up to Maine to take me out of that horrible Outward Bound summer camp. God, I was so happy to see that old Dodge Caravan coming up the camp road. I started crying right on the spot. No, this was better than that. This may be the best thing ever.”

  “Throw in a plate of pesto scrambled eggs, some great art, and a drastically maudlin chick flick with all the popcorn you can eat, and we may never top this.”

  “Just wait six months.”

  Then she took his hand and they started east through the curtain of snow, toward breakfast and the rest of their day.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The Widow

  I woke up in the dark. Fiona was kissing me. She had taken off the flannel pajamas she wore to bed in the winter, pushed my T-shirt up and pulled my boxers down; she was easing them clear of my ankles with her foot. I felt the dry tight sweetness of her naked body. I was more than ready, I was bursting. At first I thought I was dreaming: the long warm thighs sliding across mine, the breasts pressed to my chest, the firm bare ass filling my palms in the inchoate darkness. In fact I had experienced this exact dream many times as an adolescent, always with embarrassing results and an extra load of laundry in the wash before school.

  But this time I was awake. I kissed her open mouth and we rolled free of the covers. She shivered and reached behind her to retrieve them. I had never known a woman before who liked to make love in the morning. It had been an unbroken run of bad luck, from Kathy Jablonski, my first girlfriend in high school, to my ex-wife, Miranda, who could never stand any human contact until her third cup of coffee and acted like “morning mouth” was a venereal disease. I didn’t care about it and neither did Fiona. Our circadian rhythms matched perfectly, a Utopian compatibility I had never even known existed. Though, like the possibility of other inhabited planets in the galaxy, or ever getting a good-looking haircut, logic had always indicated that it must.

  I lunged up into her, feeling her come. Then she leaned down, brushing against me and whispered, “Let go.” So I did. I rolled both of us over, and the covers were on the floor and neither of us cared anymore. She pulled me down to her and said “Shhhh,” though there were no kids in the house to hear me.

  We lay side by side afterward, catching our breath, and she said, “You really did it, didn’t you?””

  She had told me the nigh
t before she would come to the station and answer any questions and cooperate in any way she could—sign depositions, testify in court, make stew for the state police. All I had to do in return was stop thinking about the case for one night.

  I kissed her cheek. “I’m still doing it.”

  “Not thinking about Preston Lomax at all?”

  “Who?”

  “I’ve heard of this before. Sexually induced amnesia. A very serious condition.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, because no one wants to get cured.”

  But I remembered everything perfectly. The clock was ticking in my head: Lomax had been dead for thirty-one hours and the need to solve the case was multiplying exponentially every minute. Fiona sensed the urgency. By the time I was out of bed and dressed she had the coffeemaker dripping and a pot of McCann’s steel-cut oatmeal cooking on the stove. The sound of her moving in the kitchen drew me out of bed. I pulled on my bathrobe and a pair of socks, glanced out the window at the crusted snow. There was no warmth in the pale morning light. The sky was white. The cold bleached the color out of everything. But the house was warm and the smell of coffee made it warmer.

  I took a deep breath. The murder investigation could wait until I finished breakfast. These few moments at the beginning of the day belonged to me. I stood still for a second, caught in a domestic fantasy. This was our actual life together, not just an occasional night fitted into the jigsaw of child custody. It was so easy to imagine. A tiny shift of thought changed everything. I could actually feel it: the exotic privilege of an ordinary moment. I shrugged. Maybe someday. And then the trick would be not taking it for granted.

  Seeing her standing at the stove barefoot, wearing a pale blue Provisions T-shirt, her red hair tangled around her shoulders, I had to doubt even that small reservation. Anyone who took this for granted deserved to lose it. She turned and smiled, still stirring the oatmeal. The kitchen looked southeast and caught the sunrise. The light from the big windows was dazzling.

  I walked up behind Fiona and wrapped my arms around her waist. She had just showered and I could smell the herbal shampoo she used along with her own scent. I kissed her neck.

  “Breakfast is almost ready,” she said. “Take a cup of coffee and sit down. Go on now. I’ll bring it to you.”

  I took a scrap of paper and a pen off the kitchen counter and sat down at the rickety blue table in a dazzle of sun, thinking about the soft lilt of her County Cork accent. I scribbled the rhyme as she put the oatmeal into a pair of blue flower patterned bowls.

  The sound of your voice

  Is my drug of choice.

  I folded the piece of paper and slipped it into my pocket as Fiona set breakfast in front of me. I poured maple syrup and a little cream into the oatmeal, sipped my coffee.

  Fiona sat down across from me, touched her mug to mine. “To the future?”

  I nodded. “The future.”

  It was her favorite toast, but only in the morning, and only over coffee. The thought of a future with her always cheered me, no matter how nasty the weather was, or how grim the day ahead promised to be. I took a first taste of oatmeal.

  “Good?”

  “Perfect. Everything is perfect. I’m trying to enjoy it because twenty minutes from now this day is going over the cliff. I wish we could spend some real time together.”

  “But we can’t. The Times came while you were getting dressed. You should take a look at it.”

  She got up and took it off the counter. I slipped the front page under my bowl, using it like a placemat. I saw the article instantly: top right, above the fold, next to a photograph of a wounded Yemeni sheepherder killed in a drone strike. The Mosul car bomb story ran below the picture. Beside it, there was another headline:

  Deceased Executive Indicted for Fraud, Grand Larceny

  New York State Attorney General Alan Fichter disclosed today that an ongoing investigation into financial malfeasance at the LoGran Corporation will proceed despite the untimely death of the principal subject of the inquiry, LoGran CEO Preston J. Lomax.

  “The truth has to come out,” Fichter said yesterday in a brief press conference at City Hall. “The man’s death doesn’t change that. The stockholders of LoGran and the citizens of New York State deserve to know what went on in those corporate offices and what crimes, if any, were committed.”

  Lomax, who owned numerous properties up and down the East Coast, including a recently completed multi-million dollar mansion on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, was about to be indicted on more than twenty felony counts including grand theft, conspiracy, violating general business laws, and falsifying business records. Lomax allegedly paid himself unauthorized bonuses and forgave loans to himself, an ongoing pilferage of company funds that may amount to as much as fifty million dollars.

  J. Thomas Allbright, CFO of the company, pledged all assistance and cooperation to the investigation. “LoGran is a stable and dynamic organization on the cutting edge of the global economy,” he affirmed yesterday, in a prepared statement. “This scandal extends no further than the isolated mendacity of one rogue executive. We hope to put this disgraceful episode behind us. The company is looking to the future.” Allbright, who joined LoGran three years ago after

  Continued C3

  I lifted my bowl and set the paper aside. I had no desire to read the rest of it. I glanced up. Fiona was watching me quietly. “What do you think?”

  I finished my coffee. “I don’t know. It just seems like more. More people who hated Lomax, more suspects, more complications, more publicity, more scrutiny. More trouble. Nathan Parrish was in business with Lomax. I’m going to have to talk to him again.”

  Done with breakfast, I took the dishes to the sink and let the water warm my whole body through my hands. The grumble and beeping of the earthmovers brought my eyes up to the frost-rimed windows. The crew next door was at work already, excavating a new foundation. The old house, or the partial shell of it that the Historic District Commission insisted the builders preserve, was sitting on a pair of metal beams supported by four towers of wooded brackets. The old structure had been gutted from the inside out. It seemed sad and startled, like a bird frightened off its nest.

  Fiona got up and stood beside me “They’re everywhere,” she said. “There must be at least ten houses like that around town. It would be far more sensible to just demolish them. What do they think they’re preserving?”

  I shrugged. “As little as possible.”

  “The same thing happened in Ireland, before people like Lomax destroyed the world economy.” I gave her as sidelong look “Well, all right, but he did his best. It was booming for a while, easy money and low interest rates, and new people building new houses. My mother always says, human beings are like the worm in an apple. Everything ahead of us is green and fresh. And everything behind us is brown and rotten.”

  “Wow. Really? My mom said ‘Turn a frown upside down.’”

  “Well, she was a fortunate woman leading an easy life.” She kissed me on the cheek. “I’ve got to get dressed.”

  I finished putting the dishes away, found Fiona in the bedroom, and gave her a kiss meant to last until we were alone together again.

  Twenty minutes later I was talking to Nathan Parrish, with the jostling noise of the press corps still ringing in my ears, all my phone lines on hold, a pile of interrogation transcripts on my desk, and a message log in front of me that was going to take all morning to clear.

  “Businessmen are criminals,” Parrish was saying. “Of course they are! Criminals built this country. They didn’t call J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie ‘robber barons’ for nothing.”

  I tilted back in my chair. “So you suspected Lomax was not quite on the up and up?”

  “From time to time. But it didn’t matter. This wasn’t personal. I was doing business with LoGran and I still am. It’s a straightforward corporate in
vestment. I mean…obviously the indictment complicates the deal, at least from a public relations perspective. But Tom Allbright is a good man and he has a great team over there.”

  “You mentioned all this when we spoke yesterday. You also said the deal was in question now.”

  “No, no, absolutely not! Everyone was in a state of shock, that’s all. But no one wants to abandon an extraordinary venture like this because of one man’s excesses. Or his death. We’re putting it behind us.”

  “It’s been less than two days.”

  “Time moves swiftly in the business world, Chief. We don’t have the luxury of outrage or mourning. The man did good things and bad things. Then he died. We can’t change that. But the meters are ticking, the interest is adding up, and LoGran stockholders want to see results.”

  “You mention outrage. Was that how you felt?”

  “Not really. But I’m an old cynic. Nothing Preston did could surprise me.”

  “Did he have enemies inside the company?”

  Parrish snorted. “He does now. They’re all coming out of the woodwork. But that doesn’t make the Moorlands Mall a bad investment. I’m the one they’re dealing with, and I know Nantucket.”

  I made a note on a slip of paper, looked up. “Mrs. Lomax is on-island right now. I’ve asked her to come in this morning. She should be at the station in a few minutes.”

  “Is that really necessary?”

  I shrugged. “You’re a friend of the family. How is she handling this?”