The Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  We should have tried harder, I realize as my stomach churns. My failings are surely as great as Kimmer’s—but we should have tried harder. I consider saying this, even suggesting that we try again, but the hard set of my wife’s lovely face tells me that she has already locked that proposition out of her mind.

  Our marriage is truly over.

  “We’d better go,” Mariah whispers, tugging at my arm, when I just stand there staring at my wife, who returns the stare unflinchingly.

  “Okay,” I say softly, tearing my gaze away, fighting the hot mist on my eyes, willing myself to act as the Judge would have acted, even though the Judge would never have been in this predicament in the first place.

  Wait.

  I sense the edge of something: the Judge, who would never have been in this mess, and my wife, defiant in the hall, the images running together, fitting in with that last conversation with Alma, as the final, astonishing piece of the puzzle clicks into place.

  Mariah and I drive down Hobby Road, away from the elegant old house where, until the night I was shot, I lived with my family. I do not look into the rearview mirror, because my father would not have done it. I am trying, already, to draw the line he always preached. The process will be as much fun as having an organ removed, but it is never too early to start planning. Yet, through it all, buried in the deepest crevice of my mind, is a tiny exaltation.

  I know who Angela’s boyfriend is.

  (II)

  WE MAKE THE NERVOUS DRIVE OVER TO DARIEN, and I move into Mariah’s guest house. By the next day, I am a member of her household. For two weeks, I eat healthy meals prepared by her cook, walk the well-tended grounds, and swim in the heated indoor free-form pool, the rest and food and exercise building up my strength. I coo sincerely over the new arrival. I telephone Bentley every morning and every night. I play with my sister’s disorderly children and, in the evenings, listen to her disorderly theories as she flips through the channels looking for another game show. Howard is almost never around, either spending the night in the city or flying off to the other side of the world. So we sit there, Mariah and I, on the imported brushed-leather sofa in the forty-foot family room of the nine-thousand-square-foot manor house. All the furnishings are so perfectly arranged that the children are allowed to visit very little of the first floor. It is like living in a magazine layout, and, indeed, Mariah says sadly that the designer submitted photographs to Architectural Digest, but nothing came of it. Her tone suggests that this is a genuine defeat.

  I watch my sister, the best of us all, soldier her way through her loneliness in the midst of all this wealth while the au pair raises the children and the cook prepares the meals and cleans up afterward and the gardener comes by every other day to tend the plants and cut the grass and the cleaning service drops in twice a week so everything sparkles and the accountant calls every few days to discuss a bill that just came in—it occurs to me that Mariah really has nothing to do. She and Howard have purchased every service that middle-class folk like myself assume adults are supposed to perform. Apart from regular breast-feedings of little Mary, shopping and watching television and decorating are all she has left. So I start taking her out: to the movies, to the mall, hobbling on my cane around an art exhibit in the city while we push Mary in a stroller and two or three more of her children gambol in our wake. Mariah is too restless to take much interest. I try to talk to her: about the latest Washington scandal or the new Toni Morrison, because Toni Morrison has been her favorite author ever since The Bluest Eye. I ask after her children, but she shrugs and says they are right there if I want to see how they are doing. I ask how her golf lessons are going, and she shrugs and says it is still way too cold. Recalling what Sally said about how she and Mariah liked to go to clubs together, I offer to take my sister out to listen to some jazz, but she says she is not in the mood. Nothing draws her. She seems too unhappy to bother being depressed.

  One afternoon, a couple of my sister’s Fairfield County friends drop by, wealthy white wives she knows from one country club or another, with the coerced skinniness of personal training and the gossipy languor of lives as empty as Mariah’s. Sitting listlessly in the sunroom, with its shiny silver-and-white tiles, sipping lemonade because it is there, they gaze at me in frank curiosity, even a little uneasiness—not, I finally realize, because I have been shot, but because I am a member of the darker nation. It is as though, in order to accept Mariah into their secret circle, they have schooled themselves to forget that she is black, and I am playing the role of the ghost at their elegant little banquet, calling them to remember an inconvenient fact they have cast aside.

  I wonder whether their lapse into agnosia counts as racial progress.

  Sometimes, late at night, Mariah sits in the library and logs on to AOL—the response time is very fast, for she and Howard have invested in a T-1 line—and chats with friends around the world. I watch as instant messages pop up: in cyberspace, at least, she does not appear to be lonely, and perhaps the very anonymity of the chat room is a part of what attracts her to it. She knows a few conspiracy theorists, it seems, and although she has never told them who she is, they have shared all manner of “information” about the way the Judge “really” died. She shows me a chat room dedicated to nothing else. I try to follow the conversation, which ranges over witnesses I know were not present and evidence I know does not exist. I nod sagely and wish I could see inside her tortured brain. Mariah is pressing, her refusal to face facts intentional. She continues to babble about the autopsy, even though she knows as well as I that two pathologists and a photographic analyst hired by Corcoran & Klein agreed with the medical examiner that the specks are only dirt on the lens. Mariah tells me she has e-mailed the photographs to cyberfriends around the world. It occurs to me to ask whether any of those friends are hiding out in Argentina, but she only smiles.

  Howard is home for dinner once or twice a week, and as I get to know him, I warm to him. He seems incompetent at dealing with their many children, but his complete devotion to my sister reassures me. After dinner, Howard usually works out in a room set aside for that purpose, full of all the latest equipment, and he invites me to join him. Watching him pump, I realize that Howard Denton is, after all, nothing but a grown-up child with a talent for making money. He talks about his work because he does not know what else one talks about. Mariah is plainly tired of his stories of merger fights; I find them fascinating. Listening, I remember, with more sentiment than I would have guessed, my days as a practicing lawyer. I wonder whether Kimmer and I would have married had I remained in D.C. rather than fleeing to Elm Harbor.

  In my plentiful spare time, I hunt through the boxes of notes and documents Mariah has stored in one of the six bedrooms of the main house, the fruits of her many trips to Shepard Street. Almost everything is useless junk, but a couple of items catch and hold my interest. In a file she has labeled UNFINISHED CORRESPONDENCE? I discover handwritten drafts of several letters, including four efforts at a note to Uncle Mal resigning from the firm, dated around the last Thanksgiving of the Judge’s life, eleven months before he died, and a fragment of a note of apology addressed only to “G”—I do not know whether you will believe me when I tell you I am heartily sorry for the pain you have endured because of your simple and unadorned love of—at which point the note simply stops. I show this one to my sister, who, pleased by my interest, explains that it was intended for Gigi Walker, which I do not believe for a second. I do not think Mariah believes it either. If the Judge intended to follow the of by the truth or by justice, the letter could as well be addressed to Greg Haramoto. But when I call his family’s importing firm in Los Angeles, I am told that Greg is on an extended overseas trip and cannot be reached. I ask for his voice mail and his e-mail address. After checking with somebody, the receptionist refuses to give me either.

  As we sit up watching Letterman late one night, I tell Mariah what I am thinking and she agrees, reluctantly, to share with me her own speculations: that W
allace Wainwright may have been correct, that our father wanted to get caught at whatever he was up to. Nothing else could explain why he would invite Jack Ziegler, facing trial for murder and extortion, to meet him at the federal courthouse, where, even in the dead of night, witnesses were bound to see him and records were bound to be kept. Maybe he just wanted out at any price. Maybe, says Mariah, he hoped that if he was hanged for meeting with his old roommate nobody would look deeply enough to penetrate to what was really going on. If the second was true, the grand juries that were convened probably shook him severely.

  “Suppose he was fixing cases,” says Mariah, sadly.

  “Justice Wainwright says he wasn’t,” I point out, the last ray of hope.

  “Justice Wainwright isn’t psychic. Suppose Daddy was fixing cases and found a way to hide it from his buddy. Maybe, after the hearings, he went to Jack Ziegler and said he could not continue to do . . . whatever he was doing . . . under these conditions, and Jack talked to his partners, and they agreed to let him resign. Or maybe he resigned on his own. Either way, he finally had an out.”

  I consider this. “If Greg’s testimony was no surprise, the letter might make sense.”

  My sister nods. “If it was intended for Greg, then Daddy was a superb actor. If it was intended for Gigi, well, we’re better off not knowing.”

  True enough. But, thinking about it, I am sure Mariah is right about Greg. Then all those long nights of deep depression that Lanie Cross reported, when my father would talk about the wreck of his career, when he asked whatever happened to loyalty, he was not blaming Greg: he was blaming Jack. He allowed Greg to take the fall, in effect, but that, too, was part of the fiction. If Mariah is right, if the Judge was fixing cases for Jack Ziegler and friends after all, then to admit that Greg was telling the truth might have been the signature on his death warrant, or his family’s. But that answer seems insufficiently to capture what must have been the complexity of the moment. The Judge probably wondered whether he should have given it all up, whether he did the right thing when he sabotaged his own nomination to the Supreme Court. Some of his hatred for Greg Haramoto was probably genuine.

  Then the baby starts to cry, and Mariah has to run off. In the morning, she will talk of the Judge no more. How he died, she desires passionately to discover. How he lived, she would rather not know.

  On the Friday, my wife drives Bentley down for a visit, explaining to me in great detail how to take care of him, the way estranged spouses do. She pecks me on the lips and pats me on the back. She oohs and aahs over little Mary, gives my sister an unwanted hug, then heads back to Elm Harbor until Sunday, perhaps to do something with Lionel, perhaps because she just needs a break. I am careful to walk away from the door, leaning heavily on my cane, before she streaks down the drive. I am relieved to have my son back in my arms at last. But he seems skittish around me, preferring to spend his time with Mariah’s brood. So, instead of hugging him for hours, which is what I would like, I watch him from a distance, in the yard, in the pool, in the basement playroom, and my heart sobs.

  On the Monday, with Bentley back in Elm Harbor and Mariah off at some charity event, I borrow my brother-in-law’s Mercedes and drive to Borders in Stamford, where I buy enough books to keep me occupied for a while. Reading is easier than feeling. But I am planning, too. Planning my approach to Angela’s boyfriend. I not only know where he is; I also see the need for extraordinary caution. Even with Colin Scott dead and Foreman dead and Maxine and her employer fooled, there is another enemy out there, the one who hired the men who beat me up.

  I ask my sister to try to find out who made the offer to buy the Shepard Street house, but she meets a blank wall. Some corporation, is all the broker will say.

  Over breakfast on my ninth day in Darien, Mariah tells me that she will have a second houseguest next week, a divorced woman she knows from Stanford and her sorority, a fellow journalist, a mother of two, who will be leaving her children behind in Philadelphia to make this trip: “And Sherry is a wonderful person,” Mariah enthuses, “intelligent, successful, and really, really gorgeous.” When my sister adds shyly that Sherry will be taking the second bedroom in the guest house, I realize that her old friend’s visit is for my benefit, not Mariah’s, that even though I have been separated from my wife for perhaps a month—depending on whether one counts from Kimmer’s ultimatum or my release from the hospital—my sister is already trying to fix me up with somebody else. I do not know whether to be furious or charmed; I do know that it is time to go.

  I tell her so.

  Mariah begs me to stay longer, no doubt because I am the living proof, bullet holes and all, of her conspiracy theories. When I insist that I have to get back to work, my sister insists on helping. So she spends three days driving me all over Elm Harbor and its suburbs, looking at rentals, and giggling ostentatiously every time some silly real estate agent sees the baby in her stroller, makes the obvious assumption, and calls her “Mrs. Garland.” The agents giggle right back, even though they do not get the joke. None of the condos we see strikes my fancy. One is too small, another has no view. A big one on the harbor is too expensive, and Mariah, who has been unreasonably generous already, is too wise to offer me a subsidy. One of the agents says he has something in Tyler’s Landing he thinks I would like, but Tyler’s Landing is Eldridge territory, and the look on my face is enough to tell him to suggest another suburb.

  Lemaster Carlyle finally resolves my dilemma. He strolls into my office on the third afternoon of my fruitless search, wearing one of his perfect suits, this one a lightweight navy worsted, handmade, featuring the faintest breath of chalk stripes, along with a monogrammed blue shirt, a tie of bright marigold and cobalt blue, and matching braces—an outfit any Wall Street lawyer would be delighted to own. His confirmation hearings are next week. I am in the building for only an hour or so, checking my mail, before Mariah comes to pick me up, so he must have been looking for me. I smile and we shake hands. Lem makes no mention of the events in the cemetery. He comes right to the point. He has heard about my problem, and we can help each other out. He and Julia, it seems, own a condo on the water—in a development just down Harbor Road from Shirley Branch’s, as a matter of fact. Two bedrooms, three baths, a finished basement, fine views, even if not as fine as Shirley’s. It was their first home in Elm Harbor, back when Lem was a promising young professor rather than a middle-aged academic superstar, and when they moved out to Canner’s Point, the market was so dead that nobody made a serious offer to buy the place; they began to rent it out, and have never dropped the habit. Their most recent tenant, a visiting professor of Christian ethics from New Zealand, left early and unexpectedly, with six months’ rent unpaid. They need a tenant, I need a place to live.

  “I don’t know how you feel about having a colleague as a landlord,” says Lem, with the good grace not to look embarrassed. “But I suppose we won’t be colleagues very much longer, anyway. Besides, we can offer you a nice deal on the rent.”

  I am beyond shame. Losing your wife to a student does that to you. “How nice?” He names a figure, which I recognize as a substantial discount from the going rate. I do not want charity, but I do not have much money. The mortgage payment on the Hobby Hill house is deducted monthly from my paycheck, not Kimmer’s, despite her substantially higher income, because the university’s Own-in-the-City program saved us two and a half points on the interest.

  “So, what do you think?” he asks.

  I make a lower counteroffer, just for form, and Lem has the further good grace not to display the annoyance he surely feels.

  We split the difference, and Lem hands me the key. We are lawyers, of course, one of us on the verge of judicial office and therefore ethically painstaking, so he also hands me a lease to sign. As I scribble, he continues to chatter. He and Julia, he says, want to have me over for dinner as soon as the hearings end. As it is, Julia is already planning to deliver enough casseroles to keep me eating well into the summer.

&nbs
p; I thank him.

  So now I have a place to live. My sister dutifully exclaims over it, especially the rather distant view of the water, even though she is plainly disappointed that I am leaving her guest house and missing the gorgeous and desperate Sherry. But Mariah is a good sport. We drive over to Hobby Hill to pick up more of my things, mainly books and clothes, but only during the day, when Kimmer is not around.

  Don Felsenfeld and Rob Saltpeter help me load the car.

  “So now you have your bachelor pad,” says Don, twinkling. But I am thinking of the need to wait, impatiently but necessarily, for the right moment to visit Angela’s boyfriend.

  I see Bentley as much as I can, which means as much as Kimmer will let me—which turns out to be quite a lot. She talks about how much she loves our son, how much he needs her with him, but her billable hours matter too. Kimmer has no au pair, and needs none: she has me. When she is running late, she calls me to pretty please pick him up, never asking whether it is convenient. When she has to go out of town unexpectedly, she calls on no more than an hour’s notice to ask if I can take him for a few nights. After all, I have nothing to do all day but recuperate from three bullet wounds, a bruised kidney, two bent ribs, and a broken jaw. Dana Worth murmurs one afternoon over lunch at Cadaver’s—her treat nowadays—that I should fight Kimmer for custody. I am tempted, but the truth remains what it has been all along: custody battles are ruinous to children’s lives, and I love my son too much to tear him in half.