Julia shouldered past the waiters—business hair, business walk—a woman, as always, in a hurry but never late. Except for motherhood. She'd waited too long, and now the frantic catch-up hadn't worked. She was tall like he was and always a little thin, he felt, thinner than she needed to be. Why the anxiety? She'd found a partner and made partner; she was set. Maybe if she weighed ten pounds more, he thought, she could get pregnant.
"Good trip?" She bent close for a kiss.
"Too much Chinese food," he said.
"But it's good Chinese food."
"Sure, best in the world. But you eat too much, you start dreaming Chinese dreams."
She smiled fiercely at a waiter to bring menus. "I'm sorry I got so upset on the phone. I'd just gotten the news."
"How is Brian with all this?"
She sighed. "He's coming around. We could have a surrogate pregnancy; that's the next thing."
"They fertilize another woman with his semen?" asked Charlie.
"Yep. Very lovely idea, I think not." Julia dropped her napkin into her lap. "Brian isn't crazy about it, either. It raises so many questions for the kid. I mean, you have to explain that the biological mom is not your actual mom, and then they're starting to say that these donor-egg kids have this weird rejection feeling, like why did my mom give her egg away, or sell her egg?" Julia smoothed the table with her hands, one of Ellie's mannerisms. It suggested that people were reasonable, problems had answers. It calmed. He felt sure Julia did the same at polished conference tables around the city to great effect. She'd soared through law school, married a real egomaniac bastard, divorced him, run wild for a year or two, met Brian, soared through her law firm. A quick study, dependable, good judgment, great energy. But no baby. "Now they're doing these tests," she continued, "where they put the DNA from one woman's egg into the shell of another's. Then fertilize it. The woman would have her own kid, using the egg of another woman. It'll be too late for me, though. But this is just going to keep going. Theoretically, you could have a grandmother give birth to her granddaughter's child—to her own great-grandchild. You could also have the opposite. You could have the granddaughter give birth to her grandmother's fertilized egg, in which case the granddaughter would be giving birth to her own great-uncle or -aunt. It's getting crazy. Then there's the multiple fertilized eggs that a couple will have genetically tested."
"I don't get it."
"Let's say Brian and I had six healthy embryos. Soon there will be tests to select the one with the best math skills, fastest runner, best resistance to skin cancer, whatever. Stuff like that."
"They can't really have that technology yet," Charlie said.
"No, but it's coming."
"And you're sure you don't want to try one more time?"
"One more time?"
He shrugged.
"For me?" Julia asked. "Or for you?"
"For you, sweetie, of course."
Julia drank her water. "I've accepted this, Dad."
After they ordered he asked, by way of retreat, "So, what about plain old adoption?"
"Maybe, I don't know. We're pretty worn out. Also I've got to get all these drugs out of my system. At least Brian doesn't have to give me any more shots in the butt." She smiled gamely, knowing there was humor in anything, if only you were willing to see it. "I kept telling him that as long as he's got the needle in there he can withdraw some fat."
"Sweetie, come on, you're a beautiful girl."
"I'm feeling old. I'm bossing people around now, you know?"
"Think how I feel."
She waved her bread at him. "Oh, Daddy, you just keep going. You're indestructible. It's Mom I worry about."
This surprised him. "Why?"
"She's anxious about everything."
"She wants to move out to a retirement village."
But Julia saw through this, as always. "She wants it for you. She wants to take walks in the woods together. I think it's a nice—"
"You've seen it?" he interrupted.
"We went last week," she admitted, watching his reaction. "Drove down there in about ninety minutes. It's very well done. They kept a lot of the old trees."
"Mom liked it?" he asked.
Julia frowned at his ignorance. "Loved it. She took all the papers with her."
"The papers?"
"The purchase agreements, that kind of stuff."
But hadn't told him.
"I miss Ben," Julia suddenly said. "This baby thing wouldn't have been so bad if I could have talked to him."
He had no answer to that, no answer at all.
Julia touched his hand. "I'm sorry, Daddy, I shouldn't have brought it up."
"Yeah," he said vaguely. "It's okay."
"I'm going to go pee and check my voice mail." She pulled a phone from her bag. "Simultaneously."
He watched his daughter walk through the restaurant, a woman, a wife, maybe a mother someday, but no longer a sister. He loved her painfully all the more for knowing what he had lost. His son, his Ben, his boy, his beautiful Ben-boy, blowing a bubble of spit as he slept in his baby carriage, sucking greedily on Ellie's milk-lumpy breasts at night, standing like a loyal sentinel in his crib as his diaper filled with shit, fifty-nine pounds of enthusiasm at age six, cut over the eye by a swing when he was seven, sitting in the tub and pulling on his penis like a man trying to start a lawn mower, lighting a cigarette off the kitchen stove when he was ten, helping Charlie paint the bathroom when he was twelve, playing the trumpet badly for years, showing Charlie that he could do seven one-handed push-ups, running the mile in four minutes and twenty-eight seconds as a lanky sixteen-year-old, working as a logger in Montana the next summer, just nicking his shin with a chain saw, arrested for fighting in a bar out there—wrote them a beautiful letter explaining the circumstances of the arrest, an argument over Ronald Reagan's politics—then enrolled at Brown, later admitting to Charlie that he'd spent most of the first semester having sex with the beguiling daughter of a Mexican diplomat and reading translations of Mayan poetry. And then his Ben, his only boy, his flesh, his dream, woke up one day with dark bruises all over his legs, his skin almost splitting from the swelling, purple arcs beneath his eyes, panting weakly, and it was a blood problem, said the first doctor; it was leukemia, said the second doctor; there's nothing we can do at this point, said the last doctor, and indeed there was not. Strong as he was, Ben did not linger; he was ejected out of the world and carried to the other place, wherever it was, and that was fifteen years ago, barely a minute, and none of them, Ellie, Julia, or Charlie, had ever been the same.
ON HIS WAY INTO THE OFFICE, he nodded at the security guard and continued toward the elevators. Teknetrix spread across three floors on Park Avenue, each leased for four more years at three hundred thousand dollars a year—two hundred sales and accounting and technical support people overseeing another eleven thousand globally, almost all of them fifty-dollar-a-week factory workers in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and Taiwan. The executive offices sat tucked away on the company's top floor, just eight men and their assistants, a small kingdom of technocrats that Charlie ran like a flight squadron. They didn't need more people than that. Charlie was very hands-on yet gave his vice-presidents broad responsibility, keeping them too busy to fight one another. Teknetrix was small as companies go, too new to feel secure, too lean to replace the carpeting in the back hallways.
Karen looked up when he entered. "Bill McGellen called."
Charlie glanced at his watch. "The market just closed."
"Yes."
"How bad can it be if the market is closed?"
"He can tell you, I guess."
"Okay. Did a package arrive from China?"
"Not yet."
"A big bowl for my wife."
Karen smiled politely, but her eyes said, Call McGellen. Which he would. But first he dialed the toll-free number of Marvin Noff, one of the investment newsletter advisors who had made Teknetrix a strong buy several months before, partly on the
announcement of the construction of the factory in Shanghai. Charlie listened to the automated chatter, then punched in his company's stock exchange symbols. "Tek-net-rix," the computer voice responded. "For our—technology growth—model, we have—downgraded—Tek-net-rix—to a—hold—position. This rating was adopted—" that same date, three minutes after the market close. Noff's followers, thousands and thousands of them, the lemmings who made up the market, religiously checked his hotline and Web site each day, and now a significant portion of them would be selling Charlie's company tomorrow. McGellen, the New York Stock Exchange specialist who handled Teknetrix, razoring a slight profit on every order, was not one to panic. Usually he had enough buy orders to accommodate a wave of sell orders. But not now.
"Mr. Ravich, afternoon, sir," said McGellen. "I've got about four hundred sell orders waiting for the market to open tomorrow."
"What's the size?"
"Some small, just a few large. But they add up to much more than I'm holding."
"Give me your numbers."
"I've got new sell orders on three hundred thousand shares at prices from this afternoon's close of thirty-four all the way down to twenty-seven. As for very large buy orders, I have an old one for nine thousand shares at twenty-six."
Charlie sighed. The company was often criticized for not having enough shares on the market, only sixteen million, making it thinly traded and subject to unnatural volatility. "What's your gut?" he asked.
"Once some of these bad boys get involved, we're looking at a big blow-off tomorrow, maybe even twenty percent. There's a lot of fear in the market. The stock is going to get spanked."
"What do you think you'll open at?"
"Hard to say. It could be four points down."
He looked out the window, saw a piece of paper rise past, carried on an updraft. His stock was going the opposite direction. Teknetrix was going to have to defend its price—an ugly business—by buying back stock on the open market. So long as a company had a board-approved buy-back plan and this fact was public information, the action was legal. He called the company's broker and told him to defend the price at twenty-nine dollars a share.
"Noff fucking with you guys?"
"Yeah," said Charlie. "You want to call your portfolio boys upstairs and let them know our stock is cheap tomorrow, I won't mind."
He was spending a few million to avoid losing forty or fifty million in market value. In another season he would've let the price ride down, but he didn't want Mr. Ming to see a sudden drop in Teknetrix's value and start wondering about the fifty-two-million-dollar loan. Nervous guys, Chinese bankers, chewed too much ginseng root. A lower stock price made a hostile takeover easier, too. For all he knew, Manila Telecom was quietly accumulating Teknetrix shares. All this because of Noff, some asshole newsletter guru, some hype-hopper who didn't have suppliers and factories all over the Third World but instead just flooded select ZIP codes with direct-mail campaigns, sucking in new suckers.
MARTHA WAINWRIGHT—gray, dependable, sixty pounds past a size eight, and maybe a lesbian, for all he knew—arrived in his office smoking a cigarette, and when he looked up from his papers, he could see the anger in her face, her mouth tight, her eyes accusatory. He closed the door. "Let me just get to my chair, Martha, then you can start—"
"I see no reason for this, Charlie."
"That doesn't surprise me. Did the advertisement go in?"
"Yes, it went in," she answered, eyes glaring. "Charlie, there are so many homeless children, so many neglected kids. Why not choose one of them?"
He breathed out. "That's a reasonable question."
Karen came in with an ashtray, then hurried away when she saw Martha's face. "Is it only vanity, Charlie?" she asked, taking the ashtray. "That's what this strikes me as, vanity. Male vanity, I might add."
She meant well, of course; she wanted to present him with every argument in order that he know his own mind. "Hey, my daughter is infertile."
She shook her head in irritation, blowing smoke at him. "Your daughter could adopt."
"I know."
"That's not good enough?" Martha protested. "You won't feel warmly toward that child?"
"Of course I will feel warmly toward that child. I'll do everything I can to make that child's life the best possible."
"And that's not good enough?"
"No. It doesn't comfort me."
"You're doing this for your own comfort?"
"In a sense, yes."
"You want something of yourself to go on."
"Yes, Martha."
She stood in irritation. He could hear her wheeze softly. "This is about vanity and fear and weakness. This is not about love. A woman would never have this attitude."
"Are you sure?"
She glowered. "Yes."
"I think a woman would never have this attitude because a woman, Martha, could not be in this situation. Fifty-eight-year-old women still, for the most part, cannot have children. I can procreate, Martha, you cannot."
"It's a mistake, an immoral mistake."
"Why? You're saying that it's immoral to bring a child into the world and give his mother the resources to raise that child properly?"
"Yes, when the resources could go to children who are already born."
"You're an estate lawyer, Martha. This is what you do. You help people to pass their wealth on to whomever they choose. You're telling me I can't do that?"
"No, I'm saying as your counselor that I find this idea to be foolhardy."
"On what basis?"
"Emotionally." She stamped out her cigarette.
"For whom?"
"Everyone, Charlie. Dammit! The mother, the child. Maybe Ellie and your daughter if they ever find out."
"The mother can pick a good husband. The child will—"
"That child will miss you all of his life!" Martha interrupted, her face reddening. "The child will want to know you! By the time he is four, he will want—"
"And if the woman marries successfully? What then? She'll be able to marry the fellow she loves, if I'm paying all her expenses."
Martha shook her head. "The child will always want to know."
Calm her down, Charlie thought. Pretend that you almost agree with her. He gave a couple of heavy nods, as if weighing all of her considerations. "If I decide to do this," he asked softly, "will you handle it for me? I mean draw up the arrangements, supervise the interviewing of the women?"
She paced to his desk, poked at his papers. "Yes, Charlie. Yes, goddammit, I will do it for you."
"Good."
She looked at him, mouth set. "On one condition."
"What?"
"You tell Ellie."
The one thing he absolutely didn't want to do. "Oh," he said. "Sure."
AT SEVEN, he eased out of his cab, looking at the sky for information—an old pilot's habit—but the only thing floating above him was the lunatic grin of Kelly the doorman, standing ready to torture Charlie with service. Every day Kelly smiled as if he had woken up wishing to smile just once at something worth smiling at—at Charlie Ravich, his great friend, not the man who gave him three hundred bucks cash each Christmas, as was the custom of the building, which you never disregarded, upon threat of an immediate drop-off in service and a vague disregard from all the staff people. But Charlie paid, always, in a crisp blue Teknetrix envelope, and so here was Kelly smiling like a man charming the devil himself, pulling open the brass door to the apartment house. Charlie nodded gruffly, hobbled into the air-conditioned comfort of the lobby, and then was conveyed upward by Lionel, the seventyish night elevator man, who wasted no energy on salutation or manners, instead concentrating his exhausted animus in the precise thrusting and braking of the elevator's brass lift handle. The thing resembled the throttle on the old T-37 trainer Charlie had first flown in 1962. Always Lionel pressed it forward to maximum upward speed just long enough to hit a momentum that, upon his pulling the handle back early enough, allowed the elevator to coast to a position exac
tly flush with the requested floor—so dead even you could lay a carpenter's level over the crack. This Lionel accomplished without change in expression or apparent contemplation, without, it seemed, even breath itself. Then he would pull the cage back himself and after being thanked by Charlie show no reaction. At most he scratched the skin flaking from his forehead. You could drop diamonds on the floor, a young woman could pull up her dress, you could cleaver off your nose and shake the bloody lump in Lionel's face. Nothing. He'd been made dead by service, and paradoxically, his deadness passed into Charlie. Every time Lionel opened that cage, Charlie felt just a little less of something. He himself would love to throttle up the elevator, fondle the mechanical tremor of it, even get the braking wrong a bit and have to feather the elevator up and down to hit the mark perfectly, but he'd never had the chance and never would.
The apartment was dark. No Ellie. Odd that she was still out. Where could she be at this hour? Funny old chick, his wife. Julia was right. Anxious these days, more anxious than in the past. Didn't really know her anymore. Sex okay, not like it used to be. Familiar as an old shoe. A brief nudge of genitals. Habit and half-forgotten remembrance. Sometimes his dick worked well, sometimes not. He was tired, or his back hurt too much. Hadn't kept up with the physical therapy, and after sitting in chairs all day, the thing just seized up on him. Plus, no Viagra because of the blood-pressure pills. Rotten all around. Ellie stayed patient. Loved her but didn't know her. Not so bad, that, because she didn't really know him. Didn't know about the eight million! Eight million dollars was a big secret—bigger than a mistress, but smaller than disease. He needed a secret, everyone did.
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