“Same DA in Westchester who didn’t indict that cop? She’s in charge of Dag’s situation.”
Babatunde said, “You feeling McDonald’s?”
“I ain’t hungry. And I’ll tell you something else.”
“I know you will.”
“Jay Gladstone,” Lourawls said.
“What about him?”
“If he committed a crime, if there was some lawbreaking he did?”
“It was a car accident,” Babatunde said.
“That’s all they’re saying so far,” Lourawls said, “but you don’t know. If there was a crime.”
“Say there was.”
“You think that white DA lady is gonna indict Gladstone? He’ll never spend a day incarcerated.”
“They locked the man up already,” Babatunde remarked.
“All right, one night. But that’s it. No more jail for him.”
“Gladstone seems like an okay dude.”
“He cut Trey from the damn team,” Lourawls reminded him.
“Church Scott cut Trey. He’s the coach.”
“He runs everything past Gladstone.”
“How do you know that?”
“He works for him, Babs.”
“I got no problem with Gladstone.”
“The man is white,” Lourawls said.
“So?”
“So, you think he’s gonna be himself around you? Liberal white people be all friendly around black people. But when they’re by themselves.”
“What?”
“Watch out,” Lourawls said.
“You sure you not hungry?” Babatunde asked.
“How’m I supposed to eat, man?” Lourawls shook his head from side to side as if he could not understand how Babatunde could be so obtuse. “You always reading that civil war stuff, slavery stuff, the underground railroad and shit.”
“So?”
“That’s how white people still look at us.”
Babatunde declared: “The president is a black man.”
“Don’t let that deceive you.”
Lourawls took the exit for Alpine. They were on a commercial strip and then on a road lined with tall trees and big homes.
“How many black people do you think live in these houses?” Lourawls asked.
“Chris Rock lives around here.”
“Besides Chris Rock.”
“I don’t know,” Babatunde said “A few.”
“The black population is pretty much you, me, Trey, and Dag, and if Dag ain’t here—”
“Why wouldn’t Dag be here?”
“I don’t know, man. Weird shit happens. If Dag ain’t here, you think these people want us around?”
“I haven’t thought about it.”
“Dag is famous, and he’s rich. His color is money.”
“The man is black, Lourawls!”
“And green.”
“What’s your point?”
A flashing light appeared in the rearview mirror. Babatunde and Lourawls exchanged a resigned glance. It had been nearly two months since they had been pulled over for no reason. The cop must be new. Lourawls guided the car to the shoulder, put it in neutral, rolled down the window. Both men made sure their hands were visible. Then they waited for the routine to begin.
A young police officer appeared at the window on the driver’s side. He couldn’t have been twenty-five years old. Lourawls handed him his license and registration.
“You can put those away, sir,” the cop said. “How’s Dag?” Lourawls and Babatunde looked at each other, confused. “This is his car, isn’t it?”
“He’s in a coma, man,” Babatunde said.
The cop chewed his cheek, unhappy to get confirmation of what he had seen on the Internet. “Everyone at the station is praying for him.”
They mumbled thanks, and the cop told them to have a peaceful night. Lourawls put the car in gear, stepped on the gas, and drove slowly away. For a few seconds, neither of them spoke. Then, as if nothing had happened, Lourawls said:
“You best be thinking about your future.”
“I got Trey’s back,” Babatunde said.
“I got Trey’s back, too. But Trey goes hard in the paint. He can look after himself.”
“You burying Dag?”
“No, I ain’t burying Dag,” Lourawls said. “I’m praying he’s all right, like those motherfuckin’ cops. Full recovery.”
“Boy gonna bounce back.”
Lourawls guided the Escalade through the gates. The automatic lights were on, illuminating the trees and casting nervous shadows on the lawn. They got out of the car and trudged to the front door, each wondering how long they would continue to live in this house on this street.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
After the hospital visit Jay considered going to the office, but the sight of Dag’s prostrate, unconscious, intubated body wired to all of those beeping devices combined with the unexpected Nicole encounter to create an effect so disconcerting that he beat a tactical retreat to the apartment. His primary goal for the day: To ensure Dag would receive the best care available. From having served on hospital boards, Jay’s list of contacts was formidable. He determined that two of the finest brain trauma specialists were in Geneva and Toronto. After ample donations were promised to their institutions, both agreed to fly in for consultations the following day. Private jets were dispatched to collect them.
It was late afternoon when Jay called his club and asked them to send over an order of Dover sole. While he waited for the food to arrive, he poured himself a glass of scotch and returned phone calls. Given that the last exchange with Franklin, at Passover, had been inauspicious, he hesitated before calling him back but decided it would better serve his purpose to not act like anything between them was amiss. Franklin expressed sympathy, asked if there was anything he could do to help, and did not mention the potential audit Jay had alluded to when they last spoke. He next called Bebe, who wanted to visit him at the apartment and bring soup. Jay declined the offer and said he would see her in the office the next day. Mayor House was thrilled to hear from him, asked how he was doing and whether the media reports about Dag’s condition were accurate. After Jay briefed the politician, he suggested the deal on the new arena be expedited and requested that the city’s lawyers review the contract so they could get it signed. The team had a home game against the Miami Heat Saturday night, and Jay invited the mayor to join him there.
Although everyone he spoke to expressed sympathy at his predicament, talking on the phone further exhausted him. He knew if he went to bed now he would pass out for several hours, wake up, and not be able to get back to sleep. The food still hadn’t arrived. He needed to eat. He considered turning on the television but did not want to watch the news and knew he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything else. He lay down on the sofa in the living room and thought about whether he should work what had happened to him into the Tate commencement address. “Taking responsibility,” “overcoming adversity,” “doing for others”—these were universal themes.
Ten minutes later his phone rang. It was Aviva.
“Mom asked me to check in and see how you’re doing.”
The two had not spoken since she and Imani fled the Seder table. Despite the distance in her voice, he was relieved to get the call. Aviva planned to be in the city tomorrow and asked if they could meet for lunch. When Jay suggested the Paladin Club, she countered with a Vietnamese restaurant on Ninth Avenue where “no one knows the Gladstones.”
They agreed to meet there.
Jay ate dinner, took a sleeping pill, and thought about what lay ahead. His relationship with the team he owned would be affected, but other than that he clung to the wild hope that his business life would proceed without too many obstacles. In the moments when he was not consumed with Dag’s conditi
on, thoughts about his own fate crept in (the man, after all, was not a saint). The political appointment he had been gunning for was in jeopardy. Could the ambassadorship to Germany or Austria (and, frankly, at this point, he’d be willing to accept a posting anywhere without a war going on) be awarded to someone involved in this kind of nastiness? There must be some precedent. But what did it matter? None of this held the same meaning that it did a week earlier. Jay would gladly have traded any future opportunity for Dag’s full return to health.
Why had he gotten in the car that night? How could he have done something so deranged?
He comforted himself: People made mistakes, terrible things occurred.
He reassured himself: Dag would recover, rehabilitate his injuries and, with the help of another marquee free agent signing, lead the team to a title.
He encouraged himself: In two years, he would return from a diplomatic posting—perhaps a remote Pacific Island nation—to attend the championship round.
Yet he could not fall asleep. Because he worried he might be kidding himself.
Like many of his brethren, Jay took pride in visible Jewish achievement. One of the first ballplayers his father told him about was Hank Greenberg, the Detroit Tigers slugger from the 1940s. He reveled in the Bob Dylans and Norman Mailers of the world, the Golda Meirs and Felix Frankfurters. But the binary of these superstars were the villains: the gangsters, the notorious insider traders, the Bernard Madoffs. Bernie Madoff! The gonif to end all gonifs! That gift to anti-Semites! (Jay personally knew people he had capsized.) He thought of his cousin Marat Reznikov, whom he had watched commit murder in the Bronx.
At summer camp, Jay and his bunkmates would lie awake at night and make lists of The Greatest Jews of All Time, and that is what he did now. He began with the Bible, and after he ticked off Abraham, Moses, Kings David and Solomon, Sarah, Rachel, and Leah, he remembered Jesus was a Jew, and his disciples. From there his mind leaped to Maimonides and Gustav Mahler, the poet Heinrich Heine (anyone who converted because of societal pressure still counted as a member of the tribe for Jay’s purposes), then alighted on Benjamin Disraeli, before winging off to Sigmund Freud, the Gershwins, and Anne Frank. Back and forth he ranged over Jewish history, through artists and athletes, public servants and philanthropists, totting up numbers until his laurel circle swelled to a hundred. This was the group of super achievers he aspired to join. Tormented by the thought that he was sinking into the underworld and somehow his image would come to be linked with the tiny handful of high-profile Jews who had horrified the world, Jay strove to keep hopelessness at bay.
He considered whether it was a Jewish instinct to think in these terms. Did Baptists keep a tally of their fellow adherents, the ones that best represented the faith or the miscreants that brought shame upon it? Did Hindus or Buddhists? Was the position of the Jews in the universe so precarious that they had to prove their worth to themselves with recitations like this one? Was life a perpetual trial and this tendency the presenting of evidence to the world that was once ready to believe Jews used the blood of Christian children to make matzo? And what was making his mind work this way? Matzo and the blood of Christian children? That was demented! This was America in 2012. Jay was assimilated, married (at least for now) to a non-Jew, had never even traveled to Israel. He had other, more personal things to worry about than the public image of his co-religionists. While Jay was thinking about this, Baruch Spinoza peeked out from behind a curtain in his unconscious. Had he remembered to put him on his list? Spinoza made him think of Nicole because before Jay’s entire life began to fall apart, she had been plowing through a biography of the Dutch philosopher. His thoughts quickly slipped from his wife’s reading habits to her physical presence, the smoothness of her skin as he ran his hand along the curve of her hip, the faint lemon scent of her shampoo, the memory of her pungent taste on his fingers, and to his surprise an entirely unwelcome erotic longing consumed him. What does it mean to want to have sex with someone who just reached down your throat and ripped your insides out? Jay did not want to think about it. Since they were married, he had imagined it was she who would watch him die. He had envisioned decades of companionship.
Was the physicist Niels Bohr Jewish? Jay added him to the record.
And so, he rattled through the night.
He woke up, not even sure he had slept. Showered, ate a bowl of bran, donned his office armor of suit and tie, and walked to work. The surgeons were due to fly in from Switzerland and Canada today, and this prospect raised his spirits. It was a chilly, bright morning and the air further invigorated him. The dead-eyed faces of pedestrians came to life when they recognized Jay Gladstone. Several asked how he was doing. The driver of a delivery truck called out, “Hang in there, brother!” and Jay waved to him in gratitude. At the office, after having accepted the felicitations of the support staff, and explained that, no, he was not hurt badly and they all should say a prayer for Dag, he called the hospital to check on the patient’s condition.
It remained unchanged.
Because this was the day he had planned to return from Africa, there was nothing on his schedule. He presented himself to Bebe, and his intact condition allayed her immediate concern. She closed the door to the office and turned to her brother.
“What happened in Bedford?”
He could reveal everything to his sister now, unburden himself and risk the loss of her esteem. Or he could be discreet and hope the details would remain cloudy. He realized he still did not know the story he was going to tell to the world, his version of events. Herman Doomer had not even asked what had transpired.
“I’m not sure,” he began.
“What do you mean you’re not sure?”
“Dag was on the road. I was going to give him a ride—”
“What was he doing on the road?”
“His car—” Jay remembered that he had not seen Dag’s car and immediately reversed himself before he was deep into a lie. And why was he going to lie? This was his sister, the person to whom he was closest in the world. “Bebe, you know what? I’m not exactly sure what happened. I was jet-lagged, I’d had a few drinks, I was taking painkillers.”
“Were you driving drunk?”
“No. At least I don’t think so. I don’t know. Look, this is all extremely upsetting, and the worst of it is what I did to Dag. We’ll have lots of time to talk about this going forward, but right now, I don’t appreciate the third degree. I could just use your support.”
“You have it, Jay. But I want you to be straight with me.”
“I will.”
“Where was Nicole?”
“At the house.”
“She was there when this happened?”
“Bebe, what did I just say? Nicole was at the house, Dag is in the hospital. There’s nothing else to tell you at this point.”
“At this point?”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to help you but I can’t if you won’t tell me what’s going on.”
Jay stiffened his back. He was going to need to draw on resources he was not sure he had. Hers was friendly questioning. Unlike his sister, the world would not come toward him from a position of love.
“Please. Don’t ask me any more questions right now.”
“I understand,” she said. “Just remember, I’m someone who wants to help you.”
To change the subject, Bebe informed him that their family foundation was doing a Gladstone Scholar Awards presentation in Newark that afternoon and suggested he make an appearance. Jay demurred and told her he needed to take it easy for a few days.
“Seeing that Dag receives the best care in the world has to be my priority.”
“You’re a mensch,” she said. No matter how his world shook, Bebe’s sense of familial devotion was immutable and eternal.
Next, he stuck his head in his cousin’s office. Frankli
n was on the phone and covered the mouthpiece when he warmly greeted Jay.
In the voice of John Wayne, he said, “You don’t look too bad, pilgrim.” Franklin wanted to be filled in, and Jay obliged, providing a brief and sanitized version. Now was not the optimum time to press the Asian matter.
He spent the rest of the morning drafting a letter to the chairman of the New York City Planning Commission regarding their consideration of the Sapphire project.
Jay always liked to arrive at a restaurant early since he believed it lent him a proprietary air and at five minutes to one he was seated against the wall at a back table reading the New York Times on his phone. The Vietnamese eatery was simple, bare tables and framed travel posters. A young couple sat near the front, the only other patrons. In addition to the news of the accident and his arraignment on criminal charges, a columnist in the sports section ruminated at length on the fate of the team without Dag. With a little luck and the passage of time, Jay believed, the public would move on to the next garish spectacle.
He was reading an article about Christine Lupo, who was about to announce whether she was running for governor, when he heard a familiar voice saying, “Thank God you’re all right!” and looked up to see his ex-wife, Jude Feldman Gladstone, standing next to their daughter Aviva.
“Jude, hello!” he exclaimed, quickly rising from his chair. “What are you doing here?”
“I invited her,” Aviva said. His daughter made no move to hug him or in any way show affection. Jay stepped around the table and folded her into a clumsy embrace.
Now in her early fifties, Jude’s dark hair was a mane of styled ringlets. Fashionable pumps, black leggings, and a loose maroon sweater. A quartz crystal pendant, three inches long, hung from her neck, a purple stone the size of a walnut on her forefinger. Since when did Jude wear such bold jewelry? She looked better than she had in years. Whatever she was doing with the lavish divorce settlement, it agreed with her. Rather than initiate physical contact, she inspected him and said, “I am so relieved.” He thanked her and indicated that they should sit.
“So,” he said to his ex-wife, unable to think of anything else. “You look beautiful.”
The Hazards of Good Fortune Page 37
