“She’s not with him,” she said. “I went to see her.”
He shook his head, frowning.
“Lily, you need to move forward. You need to put everything behind you, including his affair, what he did to his firm—”
“Did to his firm? You’re his lawyer, for God’s sake, and you think he’s guilty?”
“He fled the country.”
“Because he was being framed, he was facing a jail term for something he didn’t do.” Though she was more or less convinced of his guilt, it seemed important to argue for his innocence in the presence of his attorney.
With a pitying, almost patronizing smile he shifted over to the sofa. It took every bit of her willpower not to shift away from him.
“Innocent men have an almost visceral need to exonerate themselves.”
“When have you ever represented an innocent man? Anyway, the only visceral need Barnett had was staying out of jail. He wouldn’t have lasted a day behind bars.”
“Yes, well, I’m not sure he’s much more comfortable in Zug.”
“Where?”
“Oh. I thought you knew. Zug is a town in Switzerland, very nice, and the lowest tax rates in the country, not that Barnett has to worry about taxes. Apparently he’s living in some sort of pension.” Ponh-si-onh—his French pronunciation, though laughably off-key, hardly conjured images of suffering.
“Tell me something, Morton. Why do offshore banks have to be in places like Switzerland and the Caribbean? Don’t they have enough goodies there for the naughty rich? Why aren’t there offshore banks in Ghana and Romania and Iran? I mean, if you’re going to steal money from your partners, shouldn’t you have to suffer just a teeny little bit when you go to pick it up?” She took a deep breath. “Are you sure he’s in…Zug?”
“The firm has an office in Geneva. We have several clients in and around Zug.”
“You should set up a ponh-si-onh for your clients. L’Hôtel On-the-Lam.”
Samuels coughed. “In any case, Barnett’s been spotted.”
“Doing what?”
“Going about his business. Despite what you might think, he lives very simply, even austerely. Still, he must have some source of income…”
“Well, he’s hardly living like someone who ran off with millions of dollars.”
“Lily.” Samuels gently squeezed her knee with a bony, liver-spotted hand—she thought, a touch regretfully, of the ball-and-claw legs on the twelve Chippendale dining-room chairs she’d once owned, bought at auction at Atherton’s. “Don’t do this. Don’t carry a torch for a man who left you and your children high and dry. A man who cheated on you, cheated his partners, cheated his clients.”
“How can you talk about your client this way?”
“Ex-client. I’ve moved on, Lily.” So did his hand—up her leg. “Now you need to move on. You’re a charming woman, still quite attractive…”
The “still quite attractive” hit a nerve deeper than talon gripping her leg.
“If he’s no longer your client, then hand over your files on the case.” She gently pushed his hand off her leg. “I’ll need to find alternative representation.”
“You don’t need representation, Lily.” His took her left hand in both of his. “You need a life.”
“When I find out who took that money—”
He released her hand and reached around her back.
“Let it go,” he said, pulling her toward him. “It’s time to move on.” His breath was like the first stale whiff from a long-unopened closet.
“Let me go.” She shoved him away and stood up.
“I think we’re done here,” he said in a flat voice. Checking his watch, he added, “I have a three o’clock.”
“I want my husband’s case files,” she said.
“I’m afraid it’s firm policy not to give any paperwork regarding a case to the client when there’s an outstanding invoice.”
“Don’t give me policy, Morton. You are the firm.”
He crossed his legs, exposing a patch of hairless, marbled flesh above his sock, and checked his watch again.
“How much do we owe?”
“Somewhere north of three thousand.”
“I don’t have that. As you of all people know, the government took everything. Just give me the files. What’s three thousand dollars to you?”
“Two hours’ work,” he said with a grim smile.
“Exactly. To me it’s a fortune, to you it’s a rounding error.”
“It’s the principle.”
“Principle? You’re a lawyer, Morton.”
“This conversation isn’t leading anywhere.”
“Okay, what if we settled on half, fifteen hundred? Fifteen hundred dollars for the files and we’re through.”
“We don’t negotiate our fees.”
“Fifty cents on the dollar, Morton. It’s better than nothing.”
“I’m sorry, it’s the—”
“The principle, you already mentioned that.” She plopped down in the chair facing him and crossed her legs.
“My three o’clock…” he said.
“Go right ahead and have your three o’clock. I don’t mind the distraction. I have no plans, I never have plans anymore.” She picked up a thick legal book from the coffee table and began thumbing through it. “Plans cost money. I have no money.”
He considered her for a few moments, and it was all she could do not to flinch.
“Fifteen hundred, then,” he said at length.
“I thought you’d see it my way.” She reached into her pocketbook, took out a thick wad of bills, and began dealing twenties onto the coffee table, counting out loud.
“Lily, what are you doing?”
“Two hundred and sixty, two hundred and eighty…I’m paying you, Morton. Three hundred. Three hundred and twenty…”
“This is…this is ridiculous.”
“Four hundred and eighty, five hundred…”
He became increasingly agitated as she continued to count. Well, the sight of so much cash was unnerving, she knew, though God knows she’d gotten used to it. Suddenly the entire foundation of a class act like Forsling, Creighton & Samuels seemed like nothing more than an elaborate mechanism for generating cash. For Samuels, watching her count out twenties must have felt like having to visit the pitch-dark and sweaty diamond mines from which had been excavated the diamond ring he’d given his latest trophy slut—it didn’t glisten quite so brilliantly once you knew where it came from.
“How much longer will this take?”
“Eight hundred and twenty, eight-forty, eight-sixty…Relax, Morton, it’s only money.”
“Where did you get this?”
“I printed it myself…Three hundred sixty, three hundred eighty…It’s surprisingly easy to print money, you know.”
“You’ve become sarcastic and mean-spirited and vulgar.”
“Fifteen hundred!” she said cheerfully. She slid the pile of twenties over to him. “Would you like to count it?”
He frowned as he got up, then went over to the credenza behind his desk and returned with a thick manila folder.
“There wasn’t much paperwork, as it turns out. Barnett left the country before we’d gotten started, and of course the matter never went to trial.” As he spoke, his eyes never left the pile of twenties.
She took the folder, reached around his neck, and pulled him close to her, pressing against his bulbous stomach. “Morton,” she whispered in his ear. “Now that this is all behind us…”
“Yes…” Lust moistened his eyes.
“I don’t have many…resources. I mean, I pay my legal bills in cash—how pathetic is that? But you, Morton, you’re a powerful man…”
“I can help you, Lily…” His breathing was accelerating. If it wasn’t for his protruding midsection, she had no doubt she’d be able to feel his stiffening prick.
“I’ve lost everything and you’re a powerful man…so what you did before, groping me, was disgust
ing. Unforgivable. You’re an asshole, Morton. A total scumbag.”
He started to move away but not before she landed a solid knee to his groin. He bent over from the waist, moaning.
“I’ll tell your secretary to send in your three o’clock,” she said as she left his office.
“You know that phrase you only see in the crosswords, ‘at sea’?” Peggy asked her friend Gert Goldman. They were sitting at the tiny kitchen table in Gert’s apartment in Peggy’s old building at 218 West End Avenue. Gert had invited her for lunch, which invariably meant dry tuna sandwiches and iced tea from a mix, always served in the kitchen. The only time Peggy had ever sat in Gert’s dining room was during a shiva call following Ed Goldman’s death from liver cancer ten years earlier. Gert had had platters sent over from Zabar’s. The second and last time would be after Gert’s passing, Peggy thought with a mental sigh more for the awful inevitability of things than for Gert herself, who could be infuriatingly obtuse.
Gert squinted dumbly. “See what?”
“At sea,’” Peggy said. “The definition is always something like ‘lost’ or ‘adrift.’”
“I see.”
“No, Gert, it’s at sea,” Peggy said. “It always seemed like one of those pointless expressions you only find in the crosswords, like erne, a seabird, or Eero, some architect’s first name. But just this morning I realized it perfectly describes how I feel lately about our new apartment.”
“What does?”
“At sea.”
“I see.”
Peggy bit into her sandwich rather than continue along what would surely be an increasingly meandering and ultimately dead-end conversational trail, and immediately added a mouthful of iced tea to lubricate the chalky tuna. She doubted Gert used a teaspoon of mayonnaise for an entire can of tuna and was tempted to say something but, after all, Gert was eighty-two, so there seemed little point. Achieving the proper ratio of mayo to tuna was a new trick that old dog would never learn.
“Maybe in time I’ll settle in, but with Lily and the children living with us, it’s not easy. And their Nanny, so-called—don’t get me started.”
She waited for Gert to solicit more details but, ever infuriating, she chose that moment to be silent, so Peggy moved on.
“Monroe’s completely helpless. I have to take him to the bathroom, help him get dressed. And the worst part is, I suspect he’s really capable of doing these things by himself, he just doesn’t want to.”
“Depression?” Gert breathed the name of humanity’s latest scourge the way people once whispered “cancer.”
Peggy nodded. “First the stock market, then the heart attack. I’m thinking of getting him a prescription.”
“Fred’s on Zoloft,” Gert said. “And Andy takes Lipitor.”
It irritated Peggy no end that Gert blithely assumed she would know who Fred and Andy were—though in fact she knew them to be Gert’s sons-in-law, lawyers both. (That she had confused matters by injecting a cholesterol drug into a conversation about depression only added to her irritation.) She would never presume to mention Lily without the qualifying “my daughter,” and Lily had been famous, in a way, and was now almost notorious. Just last week the Times had run an article on prominent fugitives, in the Sunday Styles section, of all places, and Barnett had been featured. The article suggested he was in South America, but Lily seemed to think he was in Switzerland, though she wouldn’t say how she knew. She kept so many things secret lately.
“Of course, Monroe doesn’t think he’s depressed. Maybe depressed people never think they are, it’s part of the problem.”
“Maybe you should consider an antidepressant.”
“What are you talking about? I’m not depressed.”
“How do you know, you just said—”
“I know what I just said. How about some more iced tea? My mouth is parched.”
“What are your plans for the holidays?”
“I can’t even begin to plan,” Peggy said as Gert scooped a teaspoon of powder into her glass. “Monroe’s in no condition to go to temple, and Lily hasn’t been inside a synagogue since she married Barnett. As for the kids, I doubt they even know what Rosh Hashanah is. Yesterday I heard my granddaughter’s boyfriend, Paco—yes, Gert, P-A-C-O—I heard Paco say that their school was going to be closed for Rosh Hashanah’s birthday.”
Of all the disturbing aspects of Lily’s retreat from the life she’d grown up with, her abandonment of Judaism had been most painful for Peggy. Plenty of mixed couples raised their children Jewish. At temple nowadays you saw Asian wives and black husbands and kids with mix-and-match features wearing yarmulkes and no one batted an eyelash. The temple’s monthly newsletter proudly announced the Bar and Bat Mitzvahs of “Aaron O’Sullivan” or “Christy Schwartz.” “William and Sophie Grantham” would hardly have stood out. But Lily had shown no interest in being Jewish, which was a shame. She’d been such a diligent Hebrew-school student, chanting her Torah portion so beautifully at her Bat Mitzvah, everyone thought she could have had a career in music. And for what?
“I’m spending Rosh Hashanah with Charlotte and Fred, and Yom Kippur with Marlene and Andrew.” Gert plunked a glass in front of Peggy. “It’s all I can do to keep everyone happy over the holidays, they all want me with them.”
“You have such problems.”
“It’s true,” Gert agreed. “Char called first this year, but naturally I—”
“Do you have a spoon? There are iced-tea crystals floating in my glass.”
“I thought I gave it a good stirring,” Gert said, handing a spoon to Peggy.
Having succeeded in diverting Gert from the topic of her exemplary daughters and devoted sons-in-law, Peggy turned to a more pressing issue.
“Lily has a new source of income. Somehow she always has money lately.”
“Everyone has savings.”
“Not Lily. She used to borrow bus fare from me. Now she’s taking cabs.”
“Cabs are so expensive lately, have you noticed?”
“That’s not my point, Gert. Where is she getting this money from? I thought you might know something.”
“Me?” Gert put a hand to her breast, as if she’d been accused of funneling money to Lily. “How would I…”
“Because of Ed.”
Ed Goldman had been a tax accountant with one of the big firms. The Times always quoted Ed when it ran an article about millionaires hiding money “offshore.”
“Do you think Lily might have a secret account somewhere—Switzerland, say—that Barnett set up for her?”
“Ed always said that setting up foreign accounts was easy, and you could earn all the money in those accounts you wanted without paying a dime in taxes. The hard part was bringing the money back into the country. If you don’t set it up correctly, the IRS will take everything you earned and then some. Barnett may have set up an account for Lily somewhere offshore, but when she went to access the account, she’d have to be very careful. Has she been making a lot of overseas calls?”
Peggy didn’t think it worth pointing out that since Ed had died the Internet and e-mail had replaced long-distance calling as a means of moving money around the globe.
“No, but she does disappear quite a bit lately.”
“I’d confront her directly. Ask her where the money’s coming from.”
“I’m just worried about her. She seems so…”
“Depressed?” Gert whispered with sympathetic anguish.
“Happy. All of a sudden she seems happy. What the hell does Lily have to be happy about?”
Peggy stirred her iced tea as the two women silently pondered this.
“Speaking of happy,” Gert said, “I went to Cecile’s funeral on Tuesday. A lovely service at Riverside, three of her friends spoke so beautifully about her—surviving Auschwitz, then cancer. The charity work. Her bridge. Such beautiful eulogies, there was even humor, you know, where you laugh and cry at the same time. I just love when that happens, I really do. I tell
you, lately I leave funerals wishing I’d done more with my life.”
“Like survive cancer?” Peggy said. “I always leave funerals wishing I had cleverer friends.”
Twenty-five
Lily immediately recognized the doorman at 221 West Eighty-third Street, Larry’s building, two decades older than on her last visit but still possessing a bemused, inoffensive cynicism, as if his position afforded him a privileged perspective on the droll carryings-on of the human species, which perhaps it did. Every building was home to a hundred dramas—marriages cooling down, affairs catching fire, children rebelling or returning, finances flourishing or deteriorating (Christmas tips being a reliable leading indicator), the inevitable births, illnesses, and deaths—and a doorman with even a modicum of imagination could piece together most of them, weaving a complete narrative from nothing more than the entrances and exits of the players.
“Larry Adler, 5F,” she said, surprised that the apartment number sprang to her lips.
He picked up the house phone. “Miss Gimmel to see you,” he said with a smile for her benefit. He’d been on duty back when she was, in fact, Miss Gimmel, twenty-plus years ago.
The lobby had changed far less than either she or the doorman, though it had aged, the marble walls and floor acquiring the mottled, yellow tinge of old teeth. The elevator, sheathed in familiar wood-grained Formica, lurched to a halt on the fifth floor, still one of the more terrifying rides in the city. As much as any historical society or neighborhood group, rent control was the great architectural preserver of New York.
Larry looked startled when he opened the door, wearing a white T-shirt, running shorts, and white socks.
“Miss Gimmel!” he said. “I thought it was your mother.”
Lily stepped inside the apartment and was submerged in familiarity. The beige carpeting, the mirrored wall facing the front door, the crystal chandelier. She felt herself succumbing to a comforting haze of nostalgia, the way reuniting friends inevitably retreat to bland, dead-end discussions of the past. But she was determined to move forward.
“I was about to go running,” he said.
She nodded and stepped around him, placed Morton Samuel’s legal files on a familiar mahogany table, its legs sunk a good inch into the thick carpet, as if the beige fibers had grown up like grass around them. She briefly considered a foreshadowy kiss in the foyer but rejected that approach as timidly indirect. Instead, she headed down the long hallway that connected the foyer with the three bedrooms, and turned without thinking into Larry’s old room.
Closing Costs Page 25
