Aloft (24 page)

"Let's leave it alone. And anyway, that's not the issue. The issue is, What are you doing here? I asked you not to come around here, remember?"

"I wanted to talk."

"You could have called me at home. He's having guests today."

"Champagne brunch and tennis."

"That's right."

"You know I'm thrilled that you're not saying
e ,
we.

"This is Richard's house, not mine."

"And when you're married?"

"That's none of your business."

"He has you signing a prenuptial, right?"

"I'm not talking to you."

"I knew it. He's got it all spelled out, I bet. If you divorce or he dies, you don't get the house, or the cars, or the bearer bonds, or the Aspen ski lodge, or the bungalow in Boca. You just get whatever clothes or furs or jewelry he bought you, plus some parting gift, a check to cover six months' expenses."

"That would be a lot more than I got from you."

188

C H A N G -R A E L E E

"Hey, you never asked. And I would have given you anything you wanted. Anything. I would have given you my house. My plane."

"What would I do with your plane, Jerry?"

"I'm just saying. Come on, Rita. Come back home with me.

I'll build you a tennis court in the backyard. There's plenty of room, where the pool was. I'll make it whatever surface you like, concrete, clay. I'll even do grass. It's a bitch to maintain but I can get the special mowers. .."

"Will you please stop, Jerry? I just want you to leave, before Richard comes in and you embarrass me. I'm asking you nicely now but I swear if you don't listen to me I'll never talk to you again. Never, never, I swear. Are you hearing me?"

I am hearing her, hearing her good 'n' plenty, as my mother liked to be silly and sometimes say, but that doesn't seem to matter because I'm not moving in the direction she wants—

namely, out the door—and instead I'm still just standing here in this mahogany-paneled purgatory and jabbering what is clear pure reason to me but obviously sheer bankrupt babble to this woman I have loved perhaps wisely but not too well (or maybe not even that). Rita is glaring at me and crossing her arms in the way she does and I've long known, which might appear like plain pissed-offness but is really, if you could touch her, a steady boa-like self-constriction, the kind of anal-retentive stress response that you'd think would never afflict a beautiful fiery Latina; but in fact Rita is neither too fiery nor too much of a Latina, and never was, which is in no small measure why she and yours truly could have any history at all. The last gasp end of said history, I can finally see, has long commenced.

And that is when I tell her, out of body, and amazed with every word, "Theresa's in trouble."

A L O FT

189

"What trouble?" she says, stepping toward me now. "What are you talking about?"

"She and Paul have seen a doctor."

"They're pregnant? Something's wrong?"

"Yeah."

"What's wrong? Is something wrong with their baby?"

"It's complicated."

"If you're pulling something here, Jerry...."

But right then who pops in but Solicitor Coniglio, in his own shock-white tennis togs, looking tan and trim and not even that gray up top, an upmarket Jack La Lanne.

"I had a suspicion it was you, Jerry," Richie says, shaking my hand, all bluster and smile, like he's the fucking chair of the membership committee. "Have you eaten lunch yet?"

"Nope."

"Come outside, then, Alva's got her special buffet going.

She's an amazing cook, you know. Rita can vouch for her. Her curried lobster salad is stupendous."

glance at Rita; she's been thrown enough off balance, I can see, not to call me out on the kilim. And now I'm sorry that I brought up Theresa at all, because Rita has always loved both the kids, though naturally in different ways, tending to mother Jack and be girlfriendy with Theresa, which was just right for who they were.

But then she says weakly, "He was just going."

"Oh come on, Jerry, that's silly," he says to me, like I'm the one protesting. "You're already here. Besides, my doubles partner just pulled up lame, with a tight hammy. We'll all have a quick bite, and then you can fill in."

He says to Rita, "You know, Jerry used to play a lot."

"Not really," I say. This is mostly true, save for the summer
19f)

C H A N G - R A E L E E

before senior year in high school, when I decided to try something different from the Catskills camp and took care of a three-court tennis club up on the coast of Maine. I played with anyone needing a partner, and I found the game came naturally to me. By the end of the summer I was giving this small college-team player a run for his money, and when the school year started I lettered on the tennis team, at #2 singles, somehow making all-league honorable mention.

Rita's eyes plead no contest, and I plead the Fifth, so Richie ushers us through the kitchen and dining room to the back patio, where his colleagues are sitting around a large wrought-iron table with their drinks, a huge market umbrella shading them from the hot sun. The women are out on the court, playing Canadian doubles. I'm introduced by name only, and everyone tells me theirs, though I forget them instantly, as I'm sure they do mine. The men are attorneys in the firm, one of them younger than Richie and me by at least ten years, the other two quite a bit younger still, this clearly being the senior-partner-hosting-the-underlings sort of gathering, probably so that he can remind them again why they're billing 3000 hours this year and next year and every year after that.

But it's not an altogether typical crew (though probably I'm dead wrong), as the two young lawyers are minorities, black and Asian (their wives or girlfriends are both white, I should note), only the older one being more or less what you'd think, this vaguely Teddy Kennedy—looking fellow with a florid, Irishy face and a gut and obviously pushing fifty and a first by-pass. He's the one who's strained a muscle, no doubt trying to hold up his end competing with Richie against the young-uns, who I'm certain feature assured, classy games groomed at Hotchkiss-Choate-Trinity-Williams. They're of completely dif-A L O F T

191

ferent races, of course, but they look to me like they're very much the same, oddly identical in their cool, semi-affable carriage, that self-satisfied apprentice master of the universe demeanor with which they encounter everyone but red-phone Richie, who rates the alpha-wolf treatment of flattened ears and tucked tail and gleeful yelps of respect and gratitude, and not so metaphorically speaking. The Asian associate is a bit more brownnosing than the black one, in that he laughs too heartily at Richie's jokes and observations and talks just like him, too, in tenor and rhythm. The black kid is somewhat careful, superpolite, his tentativeness masking what is probably a world-shaking ambition. Lame Teddy K. over there comports himself with plenty of self-possession, but probably exactly as much as Richie will allow. You can't blame any of them, certainly, because it is, if you'll excuse me, pretty fucking incredible around here, even in my long experience working for the Island gentry. Richie's property stretches magnificently beyond us in this run of lawned space long enough that I could probably land
Donnie
on it in a pinch, the Har-Tru tennis court tastefully sited to one side and screened by a low boxwood hedge

"fence," so as not to spoil any vista, trees and shrubs and paths like something you'd find in the Tuileries, the stonework weathered to just that seemly state of honorable decline. And then there is icy Alva's kitchen handiwork, an all-white tulip centerpiece accenting a buffet spread that would put any cruise ship's to shame, not just with its curried lobster and other pricey salads but also littlenecks on the half shell and gargantuan deep-fried prawns and fan-sliced tropical fruits and breads and a colorfully arrayed homemade dessert cart that includes my personal favorite, fresh coconut cream pie.

Richie flashes a china plate and asks what I'd like, apparently
192

C H A N G - R A E
L E E

ready to serve, which I can't help but notice instantly warms his guests toward my surprise presence. It seems, though, to have an opposite effect on Rita, who suddenly excuses herself and heads inside. Richie, meanwhile, piles on the grub, and as I eat (Why not? It's here, and I like the idea of making my own mi-nuscule ding in the ocean liner of his bank account) Richie, most surprising to me, tells his guests the story of how I once saved him from a certain beating by a greaser known as The Stank (from Stankiewicz). He's doing this to show his softer side, I have to guess, though the tale is conveniently set more than forty years in the past and thus is effectively about somebody else.

The Stank was a hulking kid, in that he'd been left back two or three times early on and by eighth grade was pretty much a man-child, with muscled forearms and full mustache and the armor-piercing b.o. of a plumbing contractor. They didn't know it then, but he had one of those rogue bacterial problems that no amount of washing can cure, which it was rumored he did at least two or three times a day, slipping off to the locker room to shower between classes. He wasn't so much mean or a bully as he was volatile—say, grabbing an earth science teacher's throat if he thought a question was meant to embarrass, which may or may not have happened but became part of school lore. I never had any problem with him, even though I was one of the bigger kids in the school, which can often mean in the eyes of the school that we'd have to square off, almost by default, like they do with top prizefighters.

Richie, as he tells it now, made some wiseass comment about the barnyard odor of the lunch selections; The Stank stood a couple kids ahead on the cafeteria line, and being extra-sensitive about his aroma, glared with rage.

A L O F T

193

"I saw The Stank's face," Richie says, "and to be perfectly honest I hadn't meant to insult him. I wasn't a complete fucking idiot."

His guests chuckle uneasily, throttling back in case this is just underling bait.

"But you guys know how I like to work."

"Balls on the block," the Asian associate croons, tipping his glass toward Richie. "Ass in the fire."

"You got it, Kim-ster," Richie replies, animated. "But I couldn't help myself, something came over me, and I kept talking shit, louder and louder. The Stank is about to explode, but he gets his food and walks off, and I think I'm home free. But when the bell rings he's waiting for me and drags me outside.

I'm saying the Lord's Prayer, because I'm about eighty-five pounds, and The Stank's easily one seventy-five. He's got me literally pinned up against the school building, in a choke hold, my feet kicking. I was just about to black out when Jerry here happens by."

"You kicked The Stank's butt, Mr. Battle?" the other associate asks. I think his name is Kenton.

"No way," I try to reply, through a mouthful of smoked-trout frittata.

"My old friend Jerry here talked some sense to him. I don't remember now. What did you say, Jerry?"

"I think I told him he should probably reconsider, because he really might kill you, and then where would he be? He'd spend the rest of his life at Sing Sing, where they'd let him shower just once a week."

"In fact the same insult," Richie points out.

"I guess he let you go soon after that."

"I guess he did," Richie says, gazing off into his pastures.

194

C H A N G - R A E L E E

"After that, Jerry was my hero. I think I bought you sodas for a week."

"I would say about that."

There's a bit of a lull then, just the soft pocks of the women's ground strokes, and it's clear that the story didn't quite entertain in the way Richie perhaps thought it might, though I can't see how it would, at least from the perspective of impressing his colleagues. But then among a certain class of people, tales of woe and near-ruin have a sneaky kind of honor, these badges of pathos that lend some necessary muck to otherwise wholly splendid, smashing lives. Although Richie and I both left out a few details of the conclusion of that incident—namely, that The Stank (who was not as dumb as people thought) insisted on exacting his own price for Richie's wising-off, such that Richie had to do all his homework for the rest of the year, and also submit to one small physical punishment, both of which, I guess, I brokered. And if you look real close at Richie now you can spot it, how he has the scantest hitch to his gait, this infinitesimal hop to the left foot, where all 175 pounds of The Stank jumped up and landed with his steel shank shitkicker boot, breaking the bones of Richie's foot into an extra dozen little pieces.

"Rat and I'll stomp your fucking head," The Stank said, and Richie, to his credit, just nodded through clenched teeth. I helped him to the nurse's office, where he told her a big rock had fallen on him. She was incredulous, but didn't care enough to pursue it.

The women come back from the tennis court, saying it's getting too hot and humid to play, which it is. We meet and greet.

They're all elite professional types, two lawyers and a portfolio manager, as well as very attractive, though not in the way I prefer, meaning they're a bit too thin and sharply featured, like you
A L O F T

1 9 5

might jab yourself if you hugged and kissed them with any real verve. Daisy was slim, but she had a round moon face and was unusually supple of body, and Rita, of course, is a lovely plen-teous armful, legful, everything else, which I'm sure makes a man like me not really yearn to conquer or destroy or run my part of the world, but rather just dwell and loll and hope to float a little, relinquish the burdens.

And I'm wondering how long she'll remain inside, when Richie suggests the men play doubles; but the younger guys balk, saying they're too full with brunch, obviously just wanting to drink more beer, the older fellow still leaning on the table, trying to stretch out his leg, and Richie takes a racquet and hands it to me, practically supplanting my luncheon fork, and tells me I'm up.