Ark (13 page)

“Dad, I can't be turned against you.”

But Rebecca underestimated his sister's power, he said. “She's a sociopath. You understand that, right? You do? Tell me if you don't. Because you have to know. Or else you're likely to get fucked by her too somehow.”

“Yes, I understand, Dad.”

“You do?”

“Yes, Dad.”

Her cheeks white and eyes burning, Rebecca followed after her father. He was only wearing underwear. Some clothes would have made him seem halfway sane. He went into Ben's office, turned on the lights. There were the papers scattered everywhere across Ben's desk. New wills, old wills, handwritten notes, printed emails. Oliver said he had all the evidence right there. Everything to prove Doris had broken the law.

“Well, call her up and confront her.”

“No way, Rebecca!”

“Why not?”

“No! I won't do it.”

Rebecca told her father that they could talk this through. This was a misunderstanding. These wills on the table—who knew if they were copies of Ben and Eliza's actual wills. There was no reason to jump to any conclusions. “Just call her up.”

“What do you think she'll say? She'll just lie to me, Rebecca. Tell me she has no idea about any of it.”

“You don't know that.”

“Of course, I do. I know. I know just how she is.”

Rebecca looked around Ben's office. She saw his journals on a shelf. The room smelled of camphor. She said, “You have to get out of this place. I'm taking you to Los Angeles.”

Oliver crumbled against Ben's desk, breathing heavily, going to pieces. He said, “I'm not going anywhere. I have to get my money back. And the house in Southampton! I can't just go to L.A. I'm going to suffocate her with lawyers, Rebecca. I'll make sure they squeeze all the air out of her and that she dies of fucking asphyxiation.”

“Dad, don't say that.”

“I mean it!”

“Maybe I should talk to her.”

“I already told you, stay away from her. Just stay away. I mean it!”

He was flipping through the papers on the desk, twitchy, spooked. Rebecca wondered if she shouldn't dial 911. Maybe he needed to be taken away. How did one know? She couldn't leave him here like this, could she?

“I'm begging you, Dad. Let's go to Los Angeles. Please. Please. I can't leave you here. I'm afraid of what will happen.”

“Afraid of what?”

“You're not well.”

Suddenly, Oliver's left hand seized the back of his head, his eyes widened—some new misery had sprung to mind. Rebecca asked him what.

“The gold. The diamonds. Where are they?”

“What are you talking about?”

“My mother's jewelry. She's taken it all, hasn't she!”

“I don't know what you mean?”

“Oh my God, she has.”

The next hour and a half was not unlike an FBI raid. Rebecca watched while her father tore the loft apart. He went room to room. He tried to think like his mother, who would go to great lengths to hide her valuables. So he busted through walls, he used a crowbar on the wood floors beneath his parents' bed, he removed cabinets, cut open the backs of picture frames, emptied out pieces of luggage. He checked the pockets of every coat. He went through his mother's purses. She had dozens. He used a box cutter on the divan where his father had spent his last months, slicing open the upholstery. He carved into his parents' bed, he looked for loose stones inside coffee canisters and cereal boxes, shook each one, making sure that nothing inside jingled. There were grates everywhere, in the kitchen and the bathroom, in the studio, in the halls—and Oliver unscrewed them all, inspecting behind the metal plates.

While Rebecca was thinking,
Yes, he's lost his mind. I should call an ambulance now. I must. I must
.

Then suddenly her father dropped to the floor. He hadn't fainted, but was seated in a cross-legged position. His eyes were open, he was breathing hard, and his knees were up high. He was sweaty, and seemed drugged—medicated—as if the effort of demolishing the whole loft had worked on him like a horse pill. His head moved side to side. He looked at his daughter.

“She's stolen all of it,” he said. “The jewelry, the millions in gold and diamonds—she's stolen every last piece, Rebecca. Don't you see? Look. It's all gone.”

VII. OLD LOVE

 

Over the following days, Rebecca didn't speak with her father. She would later think that she had been in a state of shock. After all, when leaving the loft that night, she had been determined to find her father a doctor. He was in trouble. He needed professional help. She had to get him into a hospital. And then to be in touch his wife. Where was she? It was time Sheila came to New York, confronted her husband, got him out of his parents' bed. Yes, heading home from the loft that night, Rebecca had been intent on pulling in Sheila and any number of doctors who might be able to save her father.

But two weeks on, though she had asked around for a good therapist and had thought about calling her stepmother, Rebecca hadn't followed through on either.

And thank God she hadn't.

This was the opinion of Gertrude Fish, who conveyed her thoughts to her neighbor over a bottle of red wine in her woodshop one night. The carpenter said, to start with, a daughter couldn't rescue her father from self-annihilation, so she shouldn't even go about trying. What a daughter should do with a father whose life was nothing more than a series of mistakes and feuds and crises and poor luck was to let him know that she couldn't do anything for him. That she wasn't made to save him. That that wasn't how the system had been drawn up. That a daughter needed a father to be strong, and that if he couldn't be that in any real way, then he better do his best to fake it. And that if he wasn't any good at acting, then he better take lessons. Or remove himself from the picture. Because a dad without a prayer was a problem for a daughter. So he should put himself somewhere that he couldn't be seen. A place not visible to anyone, and especially not his daughter, since she wasn't put on the earth to watch him suffer. No, a daughter wasn't made for that. Gertrude said that her own father had instilled this wisdom in her by being such a tremendous failure.

“Wasn't he schizophrenic?”

“No, Rebecca. He just didn't know who or what he wanted to be, so every day he was someone different. You're being taken advantage of. The demolition of his parents' home—that was a show, Rebecca. A put on, a stunt, an attempt to make you someone that you're not. That is, his caretaker.”

“Gertrude, no. That's not true.”

The carpenter vigorously rapped her knuckles on a small can of wood finish, used a flathead screwdriver to pop the lid, and then carefully stirred the dark, thick substance with a paintbrush. As the night wore on, Gertrude would become more and more disheveled. But the time now was 9:30 p.m., and her gray hair was calm on her head, her brown eyes were clear and fresh, her gray jumper unstained. Even the woodshop had an orderliness to it. There were no used sheets of sandpaper on the floor. The jars on the shelf holding every kind of screw and bolt were in their right place. Saws hung by their handles on a long metal spoke that came out of the wall. The floor looked swept. Rebecca was leaning next to an open window, telling Gertrude that her father hadn't thrust his problems on her. If anything, she had invited herself in.

“He would have you think that,” Gertrude said. “But don't you see, this is your town now. He can't come back here, set fires in other neighborhoods, and expect you not to smell smoke in your own.”

“It's a big city,” Rebecca said.

“More like a village,” Gertrude replied.

“He has a right to be here.”

Gertrude dipped the paintbrush in the can and applied the finish to a small, square piece of wood. She said, “If I were you, Rebecca, I would ask myself, ‘Am I my father's daughter? Or, his mother? I mean, don't you want to have children of your own?”

“And the two are related how?”

“Rebecca, you can't be a mother to your own children if you have to be one to your father.”

“I won't blame my romantic troubles on him.”

“Then tell me about your father's wife. What's she like? Warm? Caring? Maternal?”

“No.”

“Of course she isn't. Because if she were any of those things, your father wouldn't be alone here right now, depending on you. He'd be with her, getting what he needs. Now wake up, Rebecca. This is all painfully obvious.”

“I am awake.”

The next day was a Tuesday in early September. Rebecca was seated in a boardroom on the forty-third floor of a Midtown office building. A meeting about an upcoming IPO offer was supposed to begin in five minutes, but Rebecca was the only person in the large conference room. Her phone began flashing the name “Laura Saks.” The device went silent, but only briefly, for now Laura was calling a second time, and then a third. There was a voice message. And after the meeting, while at lunch in an Au Bon Pain, Rebecca acknowledged with a pass of her hand over the back of her neck that she hadn't had any contact with her father for far too long. And where she didn't want to hear Laura's voice—even a recorded version, for she disliked her father's ex-fiancée so intensely—what if she were calling to tell Rebecca that her father was in a hospital, and Rebecca had to get there at once? Or maybe he had done something horrific to himself. Yes, perhaps he had hurt himself.

She pressed for her messages.

“You have one new message.
New message
…‘Hi Rebecca, it's Laura. We have to talk. It's about Oliver. He's in trouble. I'm sure you already know. Your aunt really fucked him this time. But don't worry, he's getting out of the loft. I was there yesterday, and I told him that he had to get out and he knows. I have a realtor looking around for him right now, and it should all be settled shortly. We're up against a lot of dangerous people. I promise you, it's going to be okay. I'm taking care of everything. Just call me. I want to make sure you stay informed. Love you. Ciao.'”

Rebecca had another meeting in ten minutes, but she snatched her purse from the back of her chair and hurried outside. On Lexington and Fifty-Second, she hailed a taxi and told the driver the address to the loft. Traffic was slow-moving on the avenue. Rebecca asked if there wasn't a better route.

“It's going to open up on Fortieth Street,” the cabbie told her.

“Please,” she said. “I'm in a hurry.”

But to think how hard she'd had to fight to disentangle herself from Laura Saks.

There's no way I'll let her back in
, she said to herself.
No. It won't happen
.

Shortly before Laura and Oliver's third engagement was called off, Oliver began seeing Mandy Sears, a music journalist. At night, Oliver would call Laura and tell her that he was tired, his head hurt, he was out of sorts, he and his sisters had fought all day at the office, he couldn't find a taxi home, and his feet were killing him. Or his back was out of whack, his stomach was in knots, and so he wouldn't be able to see her. That's right, he had to be alone. Why? Because that's just the way it was. He was getting off the phone. Yes, right now. They could talk tomorrow. Would he see her then? Probably not tomorrow. The day after? Perhaps. He was sorry he had been less available these days, he wanted to see her, but no, not tonight.

After getting off the phone with his fiancée, he would take Rebecca aside: he would be having dinner out, he'd be back soon. If Laura called, Rebecca should say that he was asleep. Although she probably wouldn't call because he had just spoken to her and said goodnight. Then he would walk out the door and ride seventy blocks in a taxi to Mandy's apartment on Third Avenue and Tenth Street.

However ugly Rebecca found Mandy Sears—the petite, plump, large-chested blonde would come by the apartment on occasion, but she sought no rapport with her lover's daughter—her father was cheerful in her company. He had no complaints about his health, his day, his life. He laughed, smiled, made jokes, put on good clothes, shaved and combed his hair. To see him try and impress Mandy after an apathetic five years with Laura was encouraging for Rebecca. This remained true for six months. Then Laura learned about the affair.

Rebecca dialed Oliver in the taxi just south of Pete's Tavern. A few people out walking were putting up umbrellas. A white pigeon preened on the bust of Washington Irving outside the high school bearing his name. Her father was on the line now. Rebecca began shouting at once. “What's going on, Dad?”

“Sweetheart, is that you?” There was a clearness to his voice, an energy, which Rebecca hadn't heard for months.

“Laura Saks just left me a terrifically psychotic message. You should probably hear it. It's one for the ages.”

Oliver said, “Sweetheart, what happened?”

“What happened, Dad? What happened? You tell me what happened!”

“Well, don't worry about anything.”

“What do you mean ‘don't worry,' Dad? Tell me what the hell you mean.”

“I mean, Laura is helping me with some things.”

“Laura Saks?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mean it?”

“Yes, I mean it,” he answered calmly. “And why not?”

“Well, where to start?” said Rebecca. “How about her head is screwed. And who knows what she's after. It's not worth finding out.”

“Rebecca, she wants to find me a new apartment and lend a hand with the lawsuit I'm preparing against Doris.”

“Dad, Laura is a goddamn idiot. Please, don't associate with her.”

“I understand, Rebecca. I know you're only saying this because you care about me.”

“That's right. I am, Dad. Laura can't be trusted. Don't you see that? Whatever she's offering, don't take it.”