On Labor Day Weekend my parents had a dinner party. I was in my room watching a Marx Brothers video, with Iphigenia grooming me for lice, when my mom knocked on my door. She was decked out in black silk pants and a low-cut gold blouse that showed more of her than anyone ever saw at Modern Age.
“Wow, Mom.”
She glowed at me. “Darling, we’ve been telling our friends about Iphigenia. They’d like to meet her. Just make sure she doesn’t jump on anybody. Some of these people might freak out.”
When I brought her out, perched on my shoulder but still in my grip, my parents’ friends oohed and aahed. My mom said, “Billy, show them what she does. This is so cute,” she confided to the dinner table.
I dug a cherry sourball out of my pocket and popped it behind my tongue. Iphigenia went into her act. Of course for her it wasn’t an act — it was hunting and gathering. If I kept my jaws shut she yanked even harder and sometimes hissed, but it was a playful hiss, a kind of language that she and I spoke, not the kind of raging threat she directed toward my brother.
This evening she held my nose with one chilly hand to force me to open my mouth. Everyone laughed.
One of my father’s guests was a client named Max Russo, the head of a Manhattan advertising agency. Max had lips the color and texture of fresh wet liver. I disliked him and I couldn’t tell you why, except maybe it was because he always wore black, plus a lot of flashy gold bracelets and gold chains.
Max said, “Billy, will it do that all the time?”
“Mr. Russo, Iphigenia is a she.”
“Excuse me.” He made a fancy little bow, and his chains jingled. “Will she do that all the time?”
“Yes.”
“With any flavor?”
“She likes cherry best.”
“Would she do it with anyone, or just with you?”
“Do you want to try, Mr. Russo?”
He thought it over, and said, “No.”
The following week my dad called me from his office on East 56th Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan. He explained that Max Russo and a few people from his agency wanted to see Iphigenia eat a hard candy out of my mouth a second time. Would I oblige?
“I guess so.”
Max Russo and his gang drove out to Long Island in a black Cadillac stretch limo and watched while Iphigenia did her diving act for three different flavors of Life-savers. An underling filmed it with a Sony Handi-Cam.
Iphigenia and I were then invited to the city, and the humungous limo picked us up at eight o’clock in the morning. When we arrived in the office on Madison Avenue, a dozen people had gathered in a conference room with a long mahogany table and leather chairs. My dad was there, too. Max Russo wore a black outfit that made him look like the hit man in Godfather Part II, the one who tries to suffocate the old Jewish mobster with a pillow, and gets shot.
Max licked his liver lips. “Billy, we’re developing a new marketing campaign for a hard candy called Fruities. Isn’t that a great name?”
“It’s okay.”
He seemed nervous, as if monkey snacking history might not repeat itself. Harris Garth, the young marketing director of the food company that owned Fruities, was one of the people watching.
But Iphigenia and I went through our act with the same result. Harris Garth smiled, and his gang of kiss-asses applauded and cheered. Everybody fawned over me.
Afterwards my dad and I went to his law firm, which occupied the fortieth and forty-first floor of a modern steel-and-glass building, so that from my dad’s corner office you could look out over most of downtown Manhattan. Drawings by Georgia O’Keefe hung on the walls, and my dad sat behind a teakwood desk that seemed to stretch halfway to Battery Park. He asked me what I thought about doing the commercial for Fruities.
“Will I have to say stupid things, Dad?”
“Probably.”
“Stuff like, ‘Fruities is better than Life-Savers and better than the sourballs you buy in a big bag for ninety-nine cents at Wal-Mart.’?”
“The implication will be there. That’s why they’re going to pay you, Billy.”
“To lie?”
“To make a statement that might or might not be true but that sounds reasonable. Lawyers do it all the time.”
“Max Russo is a creep.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I feel it in my bones.”
“Be specific, Billy.”
“I think he’d cheat you if he had a way to do it. He’s insincere. Superficial.”
“He’s very good at what he does.”
“I don’t think I want to do it with him,” I said.
My dad looked surprised. “Max’s group has put quite a bit of time and effort into this project so far.”
“Is that a good reason for me to work with people I don’t like? And to do something that’s against my principles?”
He blinked, and his intelligent face, the eyes now blue as steel, went through several changes of expression, as if he were solving complex mathematical equations and at the same time outlining a college course on ethics. At the end of it he said, “No, son, it’s a bad reason. And I’ll tell them tomorrow that it’s not going to happen.”
So it looked as if Iphigenia wasn’t going to make me rich.
But if my dad had been clairvoyant, that monkey would have been on her way to a zoo the next day.
Chapter 7
“I’m flying to Washington this morning,” my mom said, consulting her Palm Pilot. “A meet with congresswomen who are going up against Big Tobacco. And a client offered your dad a ticket today to the World Series game at Yankee Stadium. Isn’t that fabulous? Inez has the day off — she’s visiting her brother in Great Neck. Will you be all right on your own, Billy?”
“Fine,” I said, barely able to contain my joy.
It was Sunday morning, the morning after I had found Amy bleeding on Red Dirt Road. My mom continued: “Jack, I’m in a hurry. Make yourself a sandwich of smoked chicken. In the casserole, bottom of the fridge. Zip-Lok bags in the drawer to the left of the stove.” My dad always had trouble finding things in the kitchen. He whizzed off to catch a 9:30 jitney in order to connect with a taxi at Jamaica in order to meet his client outside Gate B of Yankee Stadium.
My mom’s sister Grace, a therapist, lived nearby in East Hampton. She looked just like my mom except that she was thirty pounds heavier and her frizzy hair was different shades of yellow and orange. She had a son, Bryan, who was Simon’s age. Aunt Grace was divorced, liked to drink, and that Sunday she was at a therapists’ conference in Atlantic City. My mom called her to ask a favor.
“Don’t sweat it, Gracie. Six thirty’s fine. Just look in on them.”
Then my mom jumped into her Range Rover to drive to Islip-MacArthur Airport, halfway up island toward New York, her attaché case stuffed with documents that were going to make the world a better place to live in.
I put on a white shirt, my brown suede windbreaker, and my good gray flannel slacks. I dug out my reserve Nikes and found a pair of new laces. I tried to comb and brush my hair, but that was hopeless. I still had Uncle Bernie’s transatlantic smuggling bag so I slipped Iphigenia in there and zipped it shut. I dropped a few sourballs in my pocket, then ran down to the kitchen and filled a plastic bag with fruit, an onion bagel, a strawberry yogurt, and a tin of anchovies. I took a bottle of Evian water from the fridge.
I ordered a taxi, and on my way out the door I noticed that my dad had left his leather briefcase on the floor in the den. It bulged with papers and chicken sandwiches. I thought about calling him, but he was already halfway to Yankee Stadium.
Enjoy the game, Dad.
The taxi driver was a young guy with a pigtail. “How do you plan to pay for this, sonny?”
I waved my bankroll at him. I carried it the way Mafia guys did, in a rolled-up wad held together by a thick rubber band.
The road to Southampton was mostly a two-laner flanked by big leafy elms and potato fields. All the way I was thinki
ng about what a gross thing had happened to Amy Bedford, and that I’d been banned from rock climbing the first day that I’d fought my way to the top of Crab Rock. My mind was racing between those two things, and I was getting dizzy.
Maybe, I thought, Amy Bedford had tripped and fallen against some sharp edge in their house. Her mother hadn’t been around to help, so Amy had run out into the road, and then collapsed.
No, I didn’t think so. Someone had stabbed her. But who and why remained a mystery. I had to know the answer. And I had to see Amy. Nothing on God’s earth would have stopped me.
The smell of blood mixed with dust was in my memory, and I couldn’t exorcise it except by thinking about the rock climbing that I’d done without my parents’ permission. Now I couldn’t climb until I was thirteen. Maybe even fourteen. Until my parents said so, that’s what it came down to.
This went deeper than rock climbing; it went to your being a free person. It went right to the heart of being a kid and having parents. They told you what to do, and they told you what not to do. They were your supreme authority. They created you. Not to get you, the kid you were, because they didn’t know until years later the true result of their getting together. They just wanted a baby. Whatever you were — boy, girl; short, tall; brown-, blue-eyed — that would be fine. You existed because they were driven to do it by their hormones, their reproductive urges, their egos, the whole animal package. Of course, like it or not, you then became their responsibility. They were obligated to make sure you didn’t die, fall seriously ill, or cripple yourself. A crib to pen you, so you didn’t crawl around wildly and stick your fingers into power outlets. Fair enough. No playing with matches; keep away from the stove; no jumping off the roof with an umbrella for a parachute. Drink your milk. Dress warm. Go to bed early. Get up, go to school. No, you cannot watch Halloween Part Five until one a.m. on a school night.
All that made sense until you crossed that poorly-marked point after which you knew the things that could hurt you, and you knew what you needed to eat so you wouldn’t die, and what you needed to wear so you wouldn’t catch cold, and what you wanted to do with your short life. Then, in theory, you no longer needed a supreme authority. Except, of course, to pay the bills.
But what if you were reckless? What about drugs? What about teen-age pregnancy? What if you climbed rocks without a helmet? If you fell off and crushed your skull, the universe wouldn’t care, but your mom and dad would care a lot.
I was thinking all this when we pulled up in the driveway of Southampton Hospital.
At the front desk I said I was Amy’s cousin. Her room wasn’t far down the hall, and the door was open. Of the two beds, just the one by the window was occupied. I heard Amy talking to herself as soon as I walked through the door. She was wearing a white shift, and with the white sheets and her pale skin the only real color you could see was the coppery red of her hair. Her left shoulder was bandaged, her arm in a sling. She was sitting up in the bed, which they’d cranked it up so she could read or watch TV.
When she saw me, her mouth snapped shut.
Then she smiled. That’s what she’d tried to do when she was laying in Red Dirt Road. I felt a rush of heat in my whole body, for the most part around the heart. They tell you the heart is where you feel your emotions, but I believe that emotions came out of the spinal cord and the central nervous system and maybe even the brain. However, it doesn’t matter, because you feel them in your heart.
“Hi, Amy, I came to see you. Is that cool?”
“Sure. I’m sorry I did what I did.”
“What did you do?”
“Hit you in the face.”
“Oh, that was a long time ago. I’d almost forgotten. Can I sit down? I brought food.” I showed her what I had.
“I had lunch already, but I’ll eat some of your apple.”
I cut the apple in half with my pocket knife. “So how are you feeling, Amy? Do you remember that it was me and my friend Duwayne who found you on the road?”
“I knew it was you. I’m glad you weren’t so mad at me for hitting you that you’d just pass me by and say, ‘Oh, to hell with her.’”
She was munching on her half of the apple and half-smiling at me the whole time. I felt good. But there were things I needed to know. I don’t like to pretend for too long that something isn’t on my mind. I don’t think that’s good for you.
“Can I ask you a personal question, Amy?”
Her smile faded like a light bulb losing its juice, but she nodded: okay.
“What happened? Were you stabbed? What were you doing there on the road?”
“I thought you were going to ask me why I socked you.” She hesitated. Finally, in a low voice, she said, “I have this brother. Jimmy. He’s nine. There’s something wrong with him. We had this fight. So he picked up a knife, and… he stabbed me.”
My mouth fell open. “Your own brother?”
“Don’t you believe me?”
“Well, I’ve got a brother, too. He hates me, but I can’t imagine him stabbing me.”
“Jimmy didn’t mean to do it. I told you, he’s not smart.”
“You mean he’s retarded?”
“Carter says not to use that word.”:
“You call your dad Carter?”
“Why not? So Carter’s like, ‘Jimmy comes from another world where things are different. Don’t ever call Jimmy retarded. Jimmy is an angel on earth.’”
I knew there were a lot of people who thought angels were real, either pure spirits who lived on earth or spirits sent down by God to take care of other people. I wasn’t so sure. In old paintings they’re always hanging around naked ladies, and their fat little dicks don’t look so angelic to me.
“And did Jimmy pick up a knife and stab you deliberately?”
“I hid in a closet. I was in there, you know, a long time. When I got out, I guess Jimmy was pissed off I stayed in there so long.”
She looked so sad when she told me these things. Was it wrong to ask her all these questions? I wanted to know the answers to things. That’s how I am.
“Wasn’t your mom home? And Carter?”
“My mom runs this storage place, so she was checking out the units. And Carter was fishing in Montauk with his amigos. He’s still out on the boat – still doesn’t even know what happened. So I ran out on the road to get away from Jimmy.”
A tear rolled down her cheek, and she wiped it away with the sleeve of her hospital gown.
I had a hunger pang. I dug into my paper bag and brought out my can of anchovies and the onion bagel. “Do you mind if I eat? I haven’t had lunch.”
As soon as I peeled open the tin of anchovies, Iphigenia smelled them. She began to try and push the zipper open. Amy’s eyes widened, and she pointed a finger at the Adidas bag. “Something’s moving in there.”
“Come out, Iphigenia. This is my friend Amy.”
Iphigenia, freed, shook herself like a dog. Then she took a little leap to sniff at the anchovies. She didn’t like them. I knew that already. But she liked to sniff. She was like me. You never knew what you might find.
“We can let her hunt for bugs,” I said. “She likes that.”
I told Amy the story of how Uncle Bernie had brought her from Italy and how I’d won her from him in a backgammon game. I asked Amy if she played backgammon and she said yes, her mom had taught her. I told her that if I had lost I would have had to pay Uncle Bernie close to a thousand dollars.
“Where would you have got the money? Are you, like, rich?”
“My parents are… I guess affluent is the word. But I work for my money, except when I get presents for holidays and birthdays and stuff. Do you have any money saved up?”
“About three dollars,” she said. “In a jam jar under my bed.”
I told her about the Yummy-in-the-Tummy Lemonade Company.
“Next summer, if you want to, you can work for my company. I’ll give you a quarter—no, a third of the profit. I’ll supply the lemons and the
sugar and the plastic cups and the Thermoses. I start as soon as school stops and I go right through Labor Day. It works out to four or five days a week, because I get tired if I do it every day, and then on rainy days, naturally, I stay home. Want to do it with me?”
“Awesome. Except I don’t know if we’ll be here next summer.”
I felt this gritty ache in my chest. The heart is the place for pain, too.
“Why not?”
“Carter says he can get a better job up island.”
I could understand that he’d want a better job than that of a garbage man, but understanding it didn’t help what I felt.
Amy said, “One of his amigos, a guy named Woody, is moving to Sayville.” Sayville was on Long Island, but halfway to New York. “Woody can get Carter a job at the marina there.”
A nurse came into the room. I went, “Sssst.“ Iphigenia, hunting under the radiator, froze.
“How are we feeling, Amy?”
The nurse took Amy’s temperature, and then she left.
“Billy, that monkey is so smart,” Amy said.
I asked her if she thought they would do anything to her brother Jimmy.
“Who’s they?”
“The cops. Because he stabbed you.”
She didn’t make any sound, but tears leaked from her eyes again. I decided this was a subject I’d better drop. I handed Amy a Kleenex so she could wipe her face.
We talked, and time flew by, and it began to grow gray outside and threaten rain. I knew I had to be back before six thirty because Aunt Grace would be coming to check up on us. I told Amy about my rock climbing, although I left out the part about getting so scared when I didn’t have the rope to hang onto. I told her about my mom and dad and how they traveled all around the country doing all they did for the environment and the murderers on Death Row who might be innocent. I told her how they met at an art opening in Greenwich Village, and how my mom, whenever she tells the story, breaks out into song: “… across a crowded room…”
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller Page 5
