Chains Around the Grass (13 page)

He took a deep breath. “Ruth, the business is finished. We’re wiped out. Everything is lost.”

Her hand went instinctively over her mouth, as if she feared what might come out. She looked at him helplessly, waiting.

“The company lost its patent. Some stupid technicality. They have to stop working immediately.”

“But the factory, the equipment, it can be sold. There has to be something left!” she pleaded, as he had pleaded with Hesse.

“Nothing. There were debts, see. Hesse lost everything too.” He buried his face in his hands and trembled.

“Dave, Dave. It isn’t the end of the world. What’s the matter with you?” She shook him gently, then harder. “Dave! Please! Stop!” He looked at her thinking: My dear wife. My dear, dear wife.

“Oh, is it the end of the world? Is it? It’s only money, right?”

She laughed a short, bitter laugh. “Thank God we’ve still got the other five thousand…” Something in his face startled her. A darkness, like a shadow.

It was then that what had really happened suddenly bore down on her with a hard physical impact that made her reel. She groped toward the couch and sat down heavily, not looking at him, but listening to his breathing and her own. Later, she was not sure how much later, she asked, “Everything?” the way a child asks, hoping to be called foolish, to be laughed at and comforted.

“You see, honey, you see,” he begged, “I thought, such a good deal. Twice as much invested could earn us twice as much. I didn’t know…I thought…”

She felt something shatter—an idea, a view of their life together—and thought: all the King’s horses, and all the King’s men… He hadn’t asked her. He had taken the rest of the money—all of it—without so much as discussing it with her. As if she didn’t exist, as if anything she might have had to say was irrelevant. Like a child, she thought. First my father handing me over to Saidie, then Morris arranging my future, and now Dave. Dave too. And I hadn’t known, hadn’t realized, all these years, what he really thought of me…the contempt. “You thought,” she said quietly, not looking up.

With a strange detachment, she watched him sit down next to her and throw back his head. His mouth opened but no sound came out. A part of her cried for him, but most of her was indifferent, shutting him out, separating his grief from her own. And then she heard the sickening small sobs struggling up from deep within his chest. She watched him and a blankness came over her, erasing what had been so definite just a moment before. The fight left her. The will to overcome.

“Stop it!!” she cried out.

Then, seeing that he could not, she wanted to take his head between her hands, to kiss the soft vulnerable flesh so close beneath his thinning hair. She wanted to… Instead, she looked at him the way one might look at a stranger who has thrown up on a bus, with discomfort and a little grudging pity.

She ran her fingers through her hair, smoothing it back with dignity. She tucked her blouse into her skirt, took off her damp apron and hung it neatly on the door hook. And then, in a movement which she would always feel changed the course of her destiny, her husband’s and children’s lives, a movement for which, rightly or wrongly, she would never forgive herself, she turned her back on him and walked slowly out the front door.

He watched her go. His eyes were desolate.

Chapter eleven

For the next three days, he went over it obsessively. A hundred, maybe a thousand times. Waking, sleeping. It was like a television show that kept starting from the beginning and never got past the station break. Something was unresolved. There was a piece missing, but what it was, God help him, he couldn’t figure out. At first he thought maybe it was that business with the office again. But Hesse had explained all that: the regular offices were closed weekends and his apartment was much further from Rockaway. It made sense. So why did he see that red light flicking on each time he thought about that Saturday morning with Hesse in the dingy Brooklyn office? The shock, sure. But he was getting over that. Some you win, some you lose. Hadn’t Reuben lost his pants the first time he went into business? He had made plenty of bad deals he wasn’t talking about now. If it hadn’t been for his wife’s money bailing him out… As for Morris and his advice. Let him be a big shot with his stinking job, his stinking pension. If you never went into the kitchen, you never broke dishes.

So what was it?

The answer came to him gradually, in flashes, like words written white on black. At first you can only see the black incomprehensible shapes in between the letters. Then, out of nowhere, the white words appear. And once you see them, you can never unsee them. They are there every time you look, mocking your blindness, your stupidity.

On the third day, taking the subway into the city to look for work, he went over it again. The small, unfamiliar room littered with dead ?ies and dusty old paper cups. Hesse’s hand on his shoulder pressing him gently into a chair. The grave eyes that looked directly at his without wavering, without avoidance. Dave felt that same rush of admiration for Hesse’s calm, businesslike acceptance of defeat. He himself had been such a coward, unable to look at Ruth’s eyes at all, terrified of exposing himself, or seeing her pain. But Hesse had looked at him without a flicker. As if he was used to it. As if he had done it before.

He sat back hard in the plastic seat, unseeing, letting station after station roll by, losing track of time. He pressed his nails into his palms, tearing away at the callused flesh until it began to bleed. Only then was he satisfied, seeing the blood ooze out, wishing there was more of it, wishing he could smash something soft and fleshy and see the streets stained with it. His blood or Hesse’s. What did it matter?

It took about twenty minutes to find a pay phone that worked. He dialed carefully and when the stiff recorded female voice said “disconnected,” he put the phone down and tried again, this time catching the “this phone has been…” In Hesse’s office, they said he had taken a short vacation.

It took forty-five minutes to reach the upper West Side. He was amazed at how clear his head felt. He could pick out every detail around him: the slivers of glass in the smashed side window of the car ahead of him. The perfect cutting edge of skyscrapers against a high, indifferent sky. He was, he thought, like a drowning man going down for the last time who sees the water with other-worldly clarity, not as

a blurry mass, but as individual drops piled one upon the other.

He noticed and was impressed once again by the doorman and the large potted palms, the clean old marble squares in Hesse’s lobby. He waited for an opportunity to go in unnoticed, then sneaked quietly up the stairs. Hesse’s door. Hesse’s bell. He pressed the buzzer; not knowing really what he would say when Hesse’s friendly, open face appeared at the door. He began to feel a little foolish after all.

When there was no answer, he knocked and waited for footsteps. He wondered out loud if they were deaf or something in there. Then he tapped on the door with his wedding ring. Gently at first, adding one knuckle at a time to make the sound a little louder until, before he knew it, he was banging on it with a clenched fist. He would have continued inde?nitely, not knowing what else to do, if one of the neighbors hadn’t opened the door to tell him what he had known all along.

“You’re wasting your time,” the thin, well-dressed older woman said not unkindly (perhaps even with a touch of pity, he winced). “He moved out three days ago.”

So Dave went home. In the mornings, he would just sit around the house, his eyes, with despair, following Ruth everywhere. He tried to help, washing dishes, cooking, doing the laundry. At night he drove a cab for a big fleet in Manhattan. The midnight to 7 am shift. Through Harlem. Through Brooklyn. The only job available.

At first he tried lawyers (at fifty dollars a shot) who listened quietly as he described once again what they had agreed upon—he and Hesse—explaining the whole business as carefully as it had been explained to him, laying out the signed documents, the promissory notes. Sometimes, as he searched the faces of these men, men who had been to college, who wore suits and had brokers and a house in the suburbs, he imagined he saw a trace of irony, a smirk… But in reality, they all remained totally, professionally expressionless as they told him the same thing: the signed agreement was a worthless legal document. A fake. All he had, really, was Hesse’s receipt and all he could do was find Hesse and bring him to court, get him to admit the verbal agreement that had been breached, the guarantees. But if he was out of the State, they were out of luck. Fraud was not an extraditable offence in New York, or any place else in the country.

So then, reasonably, he tried to find out where Hesse was. A private investigator (two hundred dollars, plus expenses, all borrowed money) told him the following:

Item One: Vincent Hesse, a.k.a. Bernard Ratsin, a.k.a. Bernard Cooper, a.k.a. Carl Bernard, a.k.a. Arnold Shawn had plied his trade on a variety of people, mostly middle class, mostly elderly, mostly female. He was under indictment in Florida for having sold one Ella Engles, at the time 64 years old, title to land under swamp water in lieu of her life savings. There were several women in Illinois and Kentucky, middle-aged widows, who had sued him for breach of promise and for the return of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry and cash. In California, Hesse had been recently indicted for extracting 19,000 dollars from a Grace Pernell, having promised to buy shares in a chemical company that was about to go public. The indictment had been dropped when Pernell died of injuries sustained in a fall from the fifteenth floor of the office tower of Laine-Rebbers (suspected suicide) where she’d worked as a secretary for thirty-five years. With no inheritance, no relative could be found willing to undertake the legal expenses of pursuing the charges.

Item Two: In his youth, the subject had worked briefly in Hollywood as a bit player in several melodramas.

Item Three: Ratsin/Hesse was last seen in New York City, on September 28, at a Greyhound Bus Station. His destination couldn’t be traced.

Dave took the report home. He hid it under his old shirts. And then he took to his bed. For three days, he couldn’t eat, didn’t sleep. For three days, he lay in bed and thought. Ruth hovered over him, bringing him chicken soup, begging him to see a doctor. But he just shook his head, turning his face to the wall. For three days he thought, until finally, brutally, he had flayed himself of that layer of self-love that insulates every human being from the utter despair inherent in the act of living.

A Ponzi scheme. And he had been the mark. The vision of what had really happened, his own role in the scenario, sent him spinning into the center of a maelstrom. Like the winds of a tornado, the terrible downward spiral succeeded in stripping him naked of his last shred of dignity, flinging him bruised and helpless thousands of miles from where he had started; too far to ever find his way back again.

Ruth hugged him. She kissed him. She tried to comfort him. She begged him to cheer up, to forgive her. She brought him food, insisted he eat, refusing to understand that he just wasn’t there anymore. It was a shell she shook and nurtured. His entire insides seemed to be burning away as if someone had spilled hydrochloric acid on them. His body became his enemy, an entrapment, his insides burning and twisting with hatred and despair. Slowly, he began to disintegrate, to fail to accommodate the flow of life that had coursed through him with such energy and hope throughout his whole existence on earth.

He burned, burned.

Then, sometimes, the burning would come out in words, in a monstrous lapping flame. “I’ll tell you what I need!” he’d sometimes admit to Ruth in a rasping whisper. “Not soup. Not medicines. Not kisses. I need to find him. To find that bastard. To put a bullet through his head!”

“Dave!” Such talk terrified her.

“You think I couldn’t do it? That I’m too soft, huh! Well, let me tell you the old Dave is finished! I’m a new man now. I could break his neck with my bare hands.”

She’d turn away from him, unable to stand it. What more? What else could she say or do? She wanted to escape: to leave him, the kids, the constant talk about Hesse; to be a young girl again, working as a medical secretary with handsome bachelor doctors who were always pleasant and made such easy small talk! Sometimes, she was terrified that he would become a criminal. It was as if that devil, Hesse, had not only taken his money but his soul.

And then, one clear day two months later, David Markowitz saw Hesse again. At first he couldn’t believe his eyes, feeling like a parched and dying wanderer in the desert who sees a gushing waterfall. But as he drove closer, he saw the proud little chest thrust forward, the shiny patent leather shoes tapping the ground impatiently. He saw those smooth, manicured fingernails, the diamond pinkie ring… He was just standing there, out in the open, in front of the Diplomat Hotel, like nothing had happened. Could it be possible? Out there in the street with other human beings like…like…he was one of them? Like he had nothing to hide? He saw Hesse lift his hand and realized with panic that he was about to hail a cab. He would be gone in a second, disappearing into the flow, like garbage going down the incinerator chute.

Dave swerved quickly and heard the angry honks well up all around him. He ignored them, pulling up to the curb and jumping out of the cab, running as if his life depended on it. He tapped Hesse gently on the shoulder, needing to feel the good, solid flesh beneath his hand, afraid Hesse would turn out to be liquid, a vapor that would slide through his fingers. Hesse turned slowly, the mild surprise frozen on his face widening into shock.

Dave grasped him firmly around the wrist. “You sonofabitch, you lousy sonofabitch!” he said with quiet menace.

“Hey Dave, what’s up!?” But there was real fear behind the smile.

He saw Hesse struggling to change faces, to find the right one, like an actor in rehearsals. But that didn’t work with Dave Markowitz twice. Dave Markowitz was a shmuck. A loser. A mark. But at least he learned. His large, rough hands squeezed the other’s small one. He thought how strange it was that he had once viewed those small clean hands with envy, even feeling a certain disgust toward his own. But now, staring at his work-callused fingers, he felt grateful for the work he had done in his life that had given him those broad, strong fingers; the good, honest work that was paying him back now like an ally. He had the strength. Hesse was captured.