Eliot remains silent.
“He has you do his copying? Here?”
“His machine is broken,” Eliot mumbles.
“I’ve got something like it here,” Mr. Person wheezes from one of the aisles, to Eliot’s relief. “It’s not quite what you’re looking for, but it might just fix you.”
The man is forced to turn around and face Mr. Person’s lightly panting form.
“D-e-r-m-i-t-i-to,” Mr. Person is spelling. “I think you’ll find it works nicely enough.”
Eliot gathers his copies in a cold sweat—he will have to forgo the last few. He opens up his backpack and begins dropping the modest stack into it, but one of the copies slips somehow off the top and drifts, face up, almost directly to the man’s feet.
“Great,” the man says in Mr. Person’s direction, and bends to pick up the paper before Eliot can dive over.
Eliot stands rooted in the position he has lunged into, with the blood pounding in his ears like a contained explosion. The man looks from the page to Eliot, eyebrows raised in genuine surprise. Then he hands it back to him silently. Eliot reaches out and takes it, shoves it hastily into his backpack.
“Let me just ring you up, then,” Mr. Person is saying in a high, breathless voice as he squeezes, yet again, through the counter.
Eliot slips his pack on and darts out of the store, through the insipid tinkle of chimes and the man’s “Wait a minute—hey—” and out into the relieving non-cinnamon-scented sunshine.
WHEN CAROLINE WAKES UP, her father has left for work already and Eliot’s door is closed. Still asleep, probably. Instead of jogging this morning, she will take a swim, she decides. Better for thinking.
Caroline has lost weight over the last few weeks; her bikini feels a little baggy and her skin looks too pale. The usual scattering of freckles across her nose and chest have faded like a leafy shadow under a cloud. Under her bare feet, the grass feels sharp beneath the deceptively soft tips of its blades. The dogs are out; she can see them racing across the back lawn, chasing some poor squirrel or rabbit into the trees. Her father has installed one of those underground electrical fences that gives off a shock when crossed by any animal wearing a matching collar. On the first day the fence was activated, he put on one of the collars and walked over it to see how much the charge it gave off hurt. Apparently, by whatever criteria he was using (painful enough? too painful?), it was satisfactory. Now Caesar and Brutus are free to run around as they please. Caroline opens the fence around the small kidney-shaped pool and shuts it hurriedly behind her.
The pool has not been used yet this year, although Wheelie opened it up almost a month ago. The pebbly concrete around it and the surface of the water are flecked with brown helicopter leaves and dead cicadas, little fuzzy balls of linden blossoms. Caroline brushes off one of the slatted lawn chairs and spreads her towel on it. Then she walks back around to the stairs and steps in, kicking at the surface of the water to send the debris floating off to the edges of the pool. The splash sounds loud and harsh in the morning silence. In its wake, the world feels startlingly empty.
Caroline wades in up to her waist and drops under. She has not swum in ages and it feels good—the pressure of the water rushing in her ears and the smooth muscled effort of moving forward through this thicker substance. After only ten laps, she flips onto her back and floats on the surface. Above her, the sky has a solid, lidlike stillness. She closes her eyes and lets her fingers slip in and out of the gelatinous water.
It is only day three of her job as Stephan’s “production liaison” and already she has her doubts about the position. Stephan wants to set up an interview with her father, which, it seems to her, is something of a conflict of interest. The division between production liaison and subject seems to be shrinking. At least in theory; in practice, her father would never agree to such a thing. Stephan may think that since she is his daughter she can persuade him, but this is an enormous misperception. Her father is a man of stubborn and unshakable convictions. He does not bend his own rules on petition.
Poor little Eliot, who has to spend so much time alone with him! She feels a stab of anger toward her mother for leaving him here, in this cold creaky house, to the care of his father. Why couldn’t she just have held together until, at least, he was safely away at some boarding school? Caroline drops her feet to the bottom of the swimming pool in a sudden, ungainly movement and pulls herself up onto the rough concrete. She will go see if Eliot would like, maybe, to go out for breakfast. The least she can do while she is stuck here is make Eliot’s life a little more pleasant. He is so quiet and remote lately; she can’t imagine what is going on in his head. Why, for instance, did he suggest going to Roxbury yesterday?
Inside, Caroline patters barefoot across the kitchen in her towel and wet bikini. “Eliot!” she calls. There is no answer. Maybe, she reminds herself, he is still sleeping. She walks through the dining room, past the long empty table and reproachful-looking form of Sir Percival, through the dim brown reception room and the narrow hallway to the bottom of the stairway.
“Eliot?” she calls again, more gently. Under her bare feet the floor feels cold and an artificial, air-conditioned breeze raises the fine hairs on her clammy thighs. In front of her the broad pine steps are shiny, worn down in the middle by so many years of footsteps. Sold to a different carpenter, on a different day, they could have made a coffin—could lie decomposing in the crowded sod beside St. Bartholomew’s. The thought sends an anxious pang up through her.
She climbs the stairs, two at a time, and when she gets to Eliot’s door she opens it without knocking. “Eliot?” she whispers, but she can see he is not there. He is already gone, must have left before she even got up or she would have seen him go. But where to this early? For a moment she stands absolutely still next to his papier-mâché sculpture and she can hear everything—the ticking of the clock in the downstairs hall, the steady purr of the air-conditioning, below that, the stiff creaking of the house settling into time.
From down the hall, there is the shrill ring of the telephone. Caroline starts, her heart racing as if it is Eliot calling from wherever he is to tell her to get out of his bedroom. She heads down the hall to her father’s room, still clutching the damp towel around her.
“Oh, Caroline,” comes her mother’s voice from the other end of the phone. “I’m so glad you’re there.”
“Why?” Caroline says. She does not feel like dealing with her mother right now. “Did something happen?” She sits down on her father’s unmade bed and lets her eyes pass over the room, which she has not been in for God knows how long. It looks startlingly chaotic—the shades drawn to different levels, the bed unmade, and T-shirts—how long has he had these up?—hanging over the old family portraits.
“No! No, no! I just wanted to check in—I felt—I’ve been worrying about Eliot.” She does actually sound highly excited, but not in her usual tentative, anxious way.
“How come?” Caroline demands, resisting the chill of the coincidence.
“Oh—I—well, it’s silly, I just wanted to check in and see if he was there to say hi to and . . .”
Caroline is not listening anymore, though. Sitting on the edge of her father’s bed, she has caught sight of a paper lying on the bedside table. There is a cartoonish image of a little man in a baseball cap flipping hamburgers on a grill in the bottom right-hand corner of the page and a series of blank lines beside Spanish words, filled in with their English counterparts in an unfamiliar neat, curlicued, script. Caroline reaches forward and picks it up to look more closely. Barbacoa = barbeque, sopapilla = sandwich, and then down here at the end, two lines filled in with a different, larger, more angular and familiar script. Her father’s: paragua = umbrella, mustaza = not for hamburgers.
“Is he there?” she hears her mother ask.
“Eliot?”
“Yes, of course Eliot—I’d love to say hello, just—”
“I can’t find him,” Caroline says blankly, turning th
e paper over. There is a small coffee stain, a scribble as if someone were trying out a pen, nothing else. Mustaza = not for hamburgers: a little private joke. She would have said, two minutes ago, such an exchange could not possibly have emanated from her father.
“In the house?”
“I don’t know.”
“Know what?”
“I don’t know where he is, Mom. Can I—can we call you back later?”
“Is everything all right?” the old panicky sound has crept back into Faith’s voice.
“I don’t know,” Caroline repeats.
“Well, should I—should I come back? And come help you—”
“No, no.” Caroline snaps back into focus. The last thing she wants to do is throw her mother into some kind of panic that brings her scampering, nerves raw and exposed, back to Concord. “It’s okay,” Caroline says. “It’ll be fine.”
She sits for a minute after she has hung up the phone, holding the vocabulary paper in her hand. Why is this on her father’s bedside table next to his boyhood copy of Gulliver’s Travels and framed photo of his mother?
AT TEN A.M. Jack is settled in his oak-paneled office on the thirty-fourth floor of the Hancock Building trying to review the memo his secretary has placed on his desk for his perusal. The room feels too hot, though. He gets up to pull the blind partway, loosens his tie, takes a deep breath. But he can’t shake this unfamiliar asthmatic feeling he has been having since driving down Center Street yesterday.
From his office he can see out over the Boston Common to the theater district and off over the river into Cambridge to the north. Anything southward—Roxbury, Dorchester, the South End—is obscured by the other half of his own building. Below him, on the green rise of the monument-topped hill in the middle of the Common, there are a few tiny figures walking and sitting on the grass. Who are they? Homeless people? Tourists? Who can afford to be out in the park at nine-thirty on a Tuesday morning? Jack strains to make out more about them, but it is impossible from this distance: they have the same inscrutable, representative feeling as figures in a diorama. But what do they represent? Slovenliness, irresponsibility? This isn’t exactly it. Irrelevant. He squeezes his eyes shut to regain focus, turns back to the desk.
Jack has not slept since yesterday. Has, in fact, spent the night in the basement dismantling the diorama he was stupid enough to think he should try to finish. He has taken the pieces apart and cleaned the studio out from top to bottom, sorted through his old supply drawers, weeded out hardened glue cartridges and decrepit bits of plywood. He has even taken a Dustbuster to the crevices in between cabinets and walls, along the backs of the dusty shelves. The place is now immaculate, scrubbed clean, no more traces of unfinished projects. It looks just as it did when he first built it.
And he is not tired this morning; he just has a headache. A light, persistent knocking, as if something in his brain is clamoring from the inside. He reaches into the top drawer of his desk, shakes four Advils into his hand, and swallows them without water. He is aware of his throat constricting to press the pills down into his body, of his whole body working to absorb them like some soft, elaborately winding, tight-walled cave.
There are four messages on his voice mail. One from an associate, one from Frank Berucci of Colby Kesson fame, two from Lilo. She is perfectly willing to be filmed, she intones haughtily from the receiver, but thinks he should strongly caution Caroline against involving herself with an artist. Jack has no idea what she is referring to. It sounds alarming—an interview with Lilo cannot be a good thing, but he doesn’t have time to think about it this morning. He skips her second message.
Frank Berucci, on the other hand, he will have to deal with. There are young associates he could assign to fire the man, but this is not the way Jack operates. Even under pressure. Put a call through to Frank Berucci, he instructs his secretary, Candice, and a breathless, ingratiating-sounding Frank is on the line in tweny-five seconds flat. How did Jack like “Choices”?—the crowd was a little thinner than usual, of course, but—Jack cuts him off and lays out the facts. Three months’ pay, a solid recommendation, and health insurance through October. He has been unusually generous. As he speaks, he finds himself dying to get off the phone. His words seem heavy and inflexible, as if he has to traverse rough, arduous terrain to access them.
There is a pause on the other end when he is finished. Jack braces himself for the usual angry commentary, bitter insults, and hang-ups such conversations inspire. But instead there is just silence.
“I could revise the program,” the man says finally, and then adds, “I guess that’s not the point.”
This time Jack is silent.
“And my family?” The man says.
Jack gets up and walks to the window with the phone. The Harvard crew is out on the Charles, their boats like delicate centipedes skimming the surface of the water. “My wife is pregnant. I’m just—”
“I’m sorry,” Jack says. He wants, more than anything, to hang up the phone. And then there is an incredible sound—very faint, but unmistakable. Frank Berucci is crying. Jack holds the receiver away from his ear. The man is a spineless fool. But the sound creates a terrible, grating feeling in Jack’s stomach.
“You’re just doing your job,” the man says. His voice is like a tiny doll’s voice, coming from the receiver Jack is holding at arm’s length. “I know.”
“You can call our Human Resources Department to follow up with any questions on your package,” Jack says into the mouthpiece again, but before he has finished he can hear the receiver on the other end click back into place. Hurriedly he puts his own back into its cradle. Done. He is sweating—the room seems to be getting hotter, pressing in on him with its unsustaining recycled air. Well, he can give the acquisitions team the go-ahead now.
Jack picks the phone back up and calls his secretary to have her cancel his meetings for the rest of the day. He knows what he has to do. He is a responsible man, after all. Contrary to the implications of Rosita’s brother-in-law, he has never shirked the consequences of his actions. Not when he knows what they are. He dials his lawyer, George Burt, himself, makes his way past two secretaries, and then waits on hold, an insipid, vaguely familiar melody playing in his ear. He does not relish the prospect of explaining the situation to George, who has not only been Jack’s lawyer for the last twenty years, but was in fact his grandfather’s estate executor. But he needs advice and there is no better place to get it. George can be trusted to be tight-lipped. He is a circumspect man of the old-fashioned variety—and he is good at his job, a real gentleman’s lawyer.
By the time Jack has given the minimal explanation required to arrange a meeting this afternoon, his overheated, short-of-breath feeling has become almost unbearable. In the small private bathroom adjoining his office, Jack splashes water on his face and rubs a towel vigorously over the skin, bringing the blood back to the surface. He looks haggard and unkempt; a rough growth of stubble—gray, it still surprises him—coats his chin and neck. He has forgotten to shave this morning. It doesn’t matter, really. He doesn’t need to look professional to carry out his plan. But he would like to. It would bring a certain dignity to the situation; he is, after all, acting responsibly.
All things, as his grandfather always said, happen for a reason. There was that letter Rosita sent him months ago, which he should have opened. In a way, didn’t he suspect what it contained? Didn’t he know, in any event, the moment he saw Rosita at Colby Kesson? Articulating this thought turns the tapping in his head into a monstrous pounding. He is not entirely to blame. Why didn’t she try harder to contact him if she was indeed pregnant with his baby? He does not want to look into the answer to this, which his brain already has waiting: She thinks he is the sort of man who wouldn’t care that he has gotten his son’s babysitter pregnant. And she has no citizenship, no papers, no court system to fall back on.
But Jack will show her she was wrong. He will not be called a delinquent by her brother-in-law when he
has not been given a fair chance to do better—not really. He will show the man who he is. Because he is a Dunlap, after all, a man who stands by his actions. You get a girl in trouble, you get her out of it—whatever it takes. This was the extent of his grandfather’s advice on carnal matters. He will have George draw up an agreement, something reasonable and discreet, contingent on proof of paternity. Which is more than fair play. If the baby is his, he will subsidize its existence. He chooses clinical terms to form his thoughts, keeps himself on the safe ground of abstraction. Twenty thousand a year is a fair amount—generous, really. As for Rosita herself—
Jack’s brain grows hard and blank around the name, like flesh around a bullet. He will think about her later. One thing at a time. Jack tightens his tie and puts on his jacket.
When he walks out into the chambered nautilus of cubicles that lies beyond his office, he can hear a distinct, high-pitched humming in the air—the whir of electricity through wires or infrared signals or some other high frequency humans aren’t supposed to tune in to. At her desk, his secretary is inspecting her long, blood-colored nails, which she plunges guiltily below her keyboard as he passes.
“Will you—” he can hear her calling something after him, but he ignores it and keeps going. In a moment he has made his way out into the elevator lobby, past the row of receptionist cubicles and the nervous-looking young associates in their uniform of oxford shirts and khakis. Past the potted plants and antique maps and familiar, trustworthy signs of industry. Now that Colby Kesson is settled, he can call in the Harvard B-school kid, set things in motion. If all goes smoothly with George, he can have something preliminary to deliver this afternoon, can possibly make it back to the office before sundown, even.
FAITH’S BRAIN has been spinning since she hung up the phone with Caroline. Eliot is missing and Caroline sounded strange—tired and unoptimistic. Faith is used to getting Caroline’s reassuring voice.
She had to go back and check on the children, she told Lucy, on whose cell phone the call transpired. Not only on account of Eliot’s whereabouts, but because of what Rock Coughlin said last night. What was that? Lucy asked, frowning. Well, not much, Faith found herself explaining, something about a mess, whatever that means. . . . Lucy stared at her with the intent look of a parent listening to a child describing something bad he cannot name. In any case, Faith did not expect Lucy to agree that she should leave early. She was half suggesting it because after last night the thought of making noncommittal chitchat with Jean Pierre over the lunch table or during the softball game planned for the afternoon had begun to terrify her. But to her surprise, Lucy nodded. It sounded like her children needed her, and Pete was taking the boat in at two, which could get Faith to the four o’clock bus. . . .
The Hazards of Good Breeding Page 19
