by Jonathan Dee
What had he done? It was a question he asked himself more in wonder than in regret. He couldn’t even bring himself to regret the manner in which it had happened, the damage done to others, because the damage itself defined him now, defined even his flickering relationship to Sara, in that he had something to prove to her, though he wasn’t yet sure what, or how. He had renounced himself: that was as far as it went. But that was pretty far.
It was a ten-mile drive to town, and there was nothing in town anyway, so Ben had little to do all day but think—not that different from rehab, really, save for the atmosphere of relentless silence. The cabin resembled Stages too in its technological isolation from the wider world, for it was socked in by hills and Ben’s phone got no reception whatsoever. It wasn’t wired for cable either. Once a day, sometimes twice, Ben would drive into town, park around the side of the Mobil station where he couldn’t be seen from its front windows, and check for messages from his few remaining contacts in the world. In truth, if you left out all those emails that still came to him robotically for one reason or another, like bank statements and unchanging frequent-flier account updates, he was down to two correspondents. In the gray late afternoon when he was likeliest to catch her on her way home from school, he sat in the driver’s seat with the heater on high and texted his daughter. This was both satisfying and frustrating, for Sara was a stingy texter, and he was left unsure whether this was a generational thing, or a measure of her own impatience and lack of thumb-typing skills, or whether she was trying to forget about him but lacked the fortitude to come right out and tell him so.
Hows ur new school?
Ok.
Hows ur new apt?
Sux.
She had an entirely new life, but you wouldn’t know it from her lack of affect, if it even made any sense to criticize text messages for a lack of affect. At least she hadn’t blocked him. After ten or fifteen minutes of this sort of exchange—she didn’t know where on earth he was; she didn’t seem to need to know—he’d walk into the Mobil station for a poisonous cup of six-hour-old coffee and a New York Times, and then he’d go back out to the car and call his lawyer.
That guy had turned out to be a find. If Ben still had a job himself, he would have hired Bonifacio in a heartbeat. Like most good litigators Ben had known, Bonifacio was a killer, a misanthrope, with the vengeful air of a man whose embarrassing delusions about the goodness of people had long ago been destroyed. Or maybe it was just that he knew how to hire a good PI, but in any event he had managed to turn up so much dirt about Cornelia Hewitt—including, delightfully, an affidavit that down at Duke she had slept with one of her professors—that they were able to settle the suit for what amounted, when compared to the nightmare scenarios of just a few months earlier, to pennies on the dollar. So Ben would still have some money left after all. The real financial winner in the end, though, was Bonifacio himself, who had even let slip to Ben, with a provocatory slyness, that he and his wife had briefly looked into buying Ben’s old house when Helen first put it on the market.
But the criminal case, though manipulable, wasn’t so easily closed. The sexual assault charge was, as Bonifacio had predicted, dropped before it could be dismissed, which indicated mercifully that there would be no trial, but also that there was some bargaining going on. Ben had little idea from day to day where things stood, or when the resolution might come. When the first of February passed—when he had been at Parnell’s cabin on the lake, with nothing to do, for two full months, and the lake was finally frozen over, and he had read every ridiculous Tom Clancy and James Patterson book in the place, and it was dark and bone-cold even inside his car during the half hours he spent texting back and forth with Sara while she sat watching TV in her new apartment, before abruptly signing off mom here gotta go—he returned a call from Bonifacio and learned that even the best plea deal his lawyer could negotiate was going to have to include some token jail time.
“Twenty-eight days,” Bonifacio said. “The DA says he can’t go any lower. It’s a high-profile case, and DWI is just such a political thing these days. Frankly, if you think about the position we were in three or four months ago, it isn’t half bad.”
Ben, though he felt oddly calm, was shaking. He turned the heat up another notch with his free hand. “It’s a good deal, I know,” he said. “Nice work on your part.”
“Well, I went to high school with the guy,” Bonifacio said.
“I assume you’ll let Helen know?”
“Don’t assume it,” Bonifacio said coolly. “I represent you separately now, at least until you revisit the custody issue, which nobody seems quite ready to do yet. Apart from that, the only mandatory disclosures are financial. The money left over from escrow covers child support until, I don’t know, the summer I think. I’ll tell her where you are if she asks me where you are. Otherwise, it’s not my place.”
“Has she ever asked you where I am?”
“Not to date. She knows you’re out there somewhere.”
Wow, Ben thought. Good for her. “Does she know I’ve been in touch with Sara?”
“Ooh,” said Bonifacio. “Not smart. In fact I think I’m going to have to pretend you didn’t tell me that. Anyway, I haven’t actually seen Helen in months. Of course, I haven’t seen you in even longer. My biggest clients! We’re all just voices in each other’s ears now.”
Ben would do his time at a minimum-security facility in a town called Mineville, north of Albany; Bonifacio had never been there himself, but he’d been assured it was the cushiest prison in the eastern part of the state. In ten days Ben would drive himself to the courthouse in Poughkeepsie, where he would surrender, make a brief court appearance to accept the plea formally and to allocute to his crimes, and then a couple of sheriff’s deputies would drive him about four hours north to jail. Ben knew full well how all of this worked, but he let his lawyer go on explaining it anyway. Then he went inside, bought a shrink-wrapped roast beef sandwich and a can of beer, and drove back out to the cabin.
He was a pariah, a dead soul, and he was unsure how any of the various purgatories he was living through was ultimately going to return him to the world. He had gone from a life dominated by routine and obligation to a life wherein each day was almost perfectly vacant, and yet, when those pointless days began to count down from five, he felt the onset of panic at their ending. It kept him from sleeping more than about an hour at a time. He wasn’t scared of prison, exactly. From what he knew of these places, this one wouldn’t be that much different from Stages, only with plainer food and fewer meetings. The last days in the cabin came and went, seeming unfairly short, even though he had no way to pass them but to sit inside with his feet near the baseboard heater and stare out at the empty lake. He thought about making a run for it. He thought about trying to get some Ambien prescribed to him, but he did not know a doctor or even a single soul in this area beyond the fat kid behind the Mobil counter. Something kept him from calling Parnell and asking for this second, negligible favor. He did call Bonifacio to ask if the prison in Mineville allowed inmates the use of their phones: the answer was no, but they were allowed limited access to the Internet each day via the prison’s own server. So he could still email Sara. The emails would be coming from a different IP address now; maybe she’d wonder about that, or maybe she wouldn’t even notice it.
He decided that his fear was a function of simple instinct and that there was nothing to be done about it. On his last morning in the cabin he was awake at dawn, stripping the bed and sweeping up with a broom he’d found. Through the window, as the light slid over the frozen lake, he could see that there was someone out there, maybe a hundred yards offshore, sitting in front of a hole in the ice. The thermometer on the porch read nine degrees. Man, Ben thought. For what? He drank a cup of instant coffee while staring at the guy, who did not move; then he rinsed out the cup, put the key to the cabin on the lintel over the front door, and drove off to meet the authorities.
CRISIS MANAGEMENT was what
she had learned to call it, but Helen’s sense of her own particular niche in the world of public relations—in the realm, as Harvey had taught her to think of it, of public storytelling—didn’t get much more sophisticated than that. She had no idea how to draw attention to her own achievements, or how to leverage the exposure (such as when the Times mentioned her in a sidebar after Bratkowski was censured by the city council) that sometimes came her way as an accidental but still natural consequence of her success. She didn’t know how to find new clients—she just said yes or no to those who approached her, and in fact she didn’t yet feel she had the luxury of saying no to anyone. She didn’t know how, or else just lacked the aggression, to be the first one to cold-call whenever something went publicly wrong: a schoolteacher who was dating a student, a hair salon that burned a client’s skin, a charity whose books were cooked. Her business model, and Mona’s, was basically to pick up the phone when it rang. It was no way to get rich, that was for sure. It was a formula for getting by, and that’s what they were all doing, with no sort of plan or even provision for the future, and with no one in her life who might offer her advice.
She did have some sense of what her skills were, even if they seemed less like skills than like instincts. She got powerful men to apologize. Maybe women too, though she was a bit curious about that one herself since she’d never yet taken on a female client. The thing was, she seemed able to do it without even trying that hard. She got them to confess because they didn’t seem to want to lie to her. Once this threshold had been crossed, it was a relatively simple matter to stand nearby while they confessed to the world at large via a TV camera or a microphone, though Helen frequently had the sensation that even in that broadcast moment the camera and the mike were still somehow basically surrogates or fetishes, material symbols of herself.
Of course she worried too that this talent for inducing apology was maybe more of a lucrative quality than a personally attractive one. In the interest of avoiding hypocrisy, she took time to reflect that she was far from guilt-free herself. Her ex-husband may have had a lot to answer for over the last year or two, but the larger fact was he had turned from one sort of man in his twenties to a very different sort in his forties, and the only X factor to point to there, the only new element, was her. She had implicitly promised her daughter a warm, stable home—had taken her from the land of her birth and spirited her around the world on the basis of that promise—and now, when Sara wasn’t in a gigantic and socially imposing public middle school where she knew no one, she was in a cramped one-bedroom apartment with her exhausted mother, ordering out for dinner, trying to remember to fold out the couch before falling asleep. (Helen had offered her the bedroom, but it was much smaller than the living room and had no TV in it.) And then there was Harvey’s death, which groundless pride had kept her from preventing and which had changed numerous lives for the worse. Who was she to tell other people to confront their sins and move on?
Still, they kept coming, if not exactly in droves. In March she got her first corporate call, even if only a local one: Amalgamated Supermarkets, a low-end grocery chain that hung on as a stubbornly sane alternative to the efflorescence of Whole Foods and Gourmet Garages, had a PR nightmare when some young mother bought a bunch of bananas with razors stuck in them. She found this out by feeding them to her children, one of whom almost died. Helen read the story over someone’s shoulder on the bus to the office, and for once her first thought was, I wonder if they’ll call us. In fact they had left a voice mail already. She headed right back uptown to Amalgamated’s corporate office, and, after a few minutes with the alarmingly young borough manager who had phoned her, she was fully if not pleasantly engaged.
“I hate it that you’re here,” he said. “It’s like a visit from the Grim Reaper. And the thing is, we didn’t do anything wrong. This is all so fucking unfair.”
“What’s unfair?” Helen asked him. He seemed young enough to be her son; he was somebody’s son, more than likely, or he wouldn’t have had an executive’s job at his age.
“Ever tried to get a razor into a banana?” he said, a little louder than necessary. “You can’t do it! It can’t be done! I sat here at my desk last night and tried!” He held up his hands; three of his fingertips had bandages on them. “It is obvious that this broad did it herself, to try to work up a bogus lawsuit, because that’s easier than getting a job and working, a lawsuit that we’ll settle to make it go away, regardless of its transparent fucking bogusness, pardon my French, which is why I hate meetings with PR people, because PR people are always telling you to roll over and stick your ass in the air and settle, when every bone in my body is telling me we should fight this.”
Helen felt the sort of counterintuitive calm blooming in her that she had learned to expect in these situations. “You think this woman fed her son a razor blade,” she said, “to try to get grounds for a lawsuit?”
In reply the young executive—who was wearing one of those striped dress shirts with a white collar; Lord, Helen hated those shirts, they were like sandwich boards for assholes—reached into his top drawer, pulled out a file folder, and dropped it theatrically on the desk between them. “Her psychiatric file,” he said. “I had a PI pull it yesterday, and he’s got this much already. Would you like to have a look?”
“No,” Helen said. “Here’s what you do with that. You give it to your lawyer, and if you have already made another copy of it, you run that copy through the shredder. I don’t want anyone here to refer to it in public, not even by accident, and the easiest way to ensure that is for no one to have seen it in the first place.”
The man in the asshole shirt leaned forward, red-faced. Clearly it was going to take a little extra work to convert this guy. “I don’t understand you people,” he said. “You are giving this crazy bitch a license to steal from us. Where is this Harvey guy, anyway? I think a man might understand my point of view a little better.”
You people? Whom did he think she was there representing? “No one is going to steal from you,” she said. “That’s what you pay lawyers to make sure of. They will go behind closed doors and they will probably take this poor, sick woman apart, but it is important that that happens where no one else can see it. I work in the realm of the seen.”
“Okay,” he said.
“What I’m doing for you has nothing to do with money.”
“It doesn’t?”
“Well, okay, it does,” Helen said. “But only indirectly. That is, if you act correctly now, even against what you may think of as your interest, the reward will come to you and to Amalgamated later, down the road, as a result.”
He had begun to smile obnoxiously. “I have a cousin,” he said, “who’s in a church like this.”
Helen had no idea what he was talking about; she closed her eyes and shook her head once, to get herself back on track. “We have to think of it in terms of storytelling,” she said. “Imagine how you want the customers to think of Amalgamated, say, two months from now. Then we begin to tell the story that leads them to that place. If it’s a story of our guilt, of our desire to make amends, if that’s how it begins, then so be it. You have to take the long view, even if it means making some sacrifices now in the service of that greater truth.”
He tipped back in his chair. She could see he was coming around, just like they always did. “See, though, I keep coming back,” he said, “to the fact that we very probably, very likely, didn’t do anything wrong here.”
“But you don’t know. You don’t know, I don’t know, nobody knows. People want to believe you did something wrong, though. And if you keep denying what they believe, that just strengthens their suspicion. You’re already guilty in their minds. But if you take it upon yourself, if you just agree to own it, then they’re yours, then you’re the one making the choices that drive the story from that point forward. If it helps you, you can think of it as a way of making up for other things you really did do, other more legitimate grievances people might have against
you—a way to atone for sins you aren’t even necessarily aware of.”
He grinned, and shook his head. “Okay, Sister,” he said. “You’re hired. Now what do we do next?”
She raised her fee again, and they paid it without a peep; but she and Sara were still just scraping by, not in debt or wanting for anything but not setting any money aside either. Everything was so overpriced here. She’d been stupid to sign the lease on this Upper East Side one-bedroom, but it was in the district zoned for a public middle school everyone said was excellent, and so she’d grabbed it, even though Sara had only about four months of eighth grade left anyway and then the whole good-school panic would begin all over again. She’d told herself that if there ever came a day when the agency had paid all its debts and made its payroll and still had twenty thousand dollars in the bank, she would shut the place down and give the money to the seemingly resourceless Michael: she’d since lowered that hypothetical figure to fifteen thousand, but in any case it was nowhere in sight. Expenses were few yet still managed, every month, to take her by embarrassing surprise. As for the sale of the Rensselaer Valley house, she’d accepted an offer back in December, but since then the process had slowed to a crawl, and though she checked in with Bonifacio once a week or so, they didn’t even have a closing date yet.
