A Conflict of Interest (32 page)

After Elizabeth and I were married, I threw myself into Christmas with the zeal only a convert possesses. I wanted to get the biggest tree, and that first year I must have spent five hundred dollars on ornaments, much to Elizabeth’s amusement. “Most people just wait until they’re fifty percent off the day after Christmas and stock up then,” she laughed at me.

I’m more excited about Christmas this year than ever before. Charlotte didn’t seem to grasp the concept of presents the first three holiday seasons. Last year she was excited about it for the first time, but really couldn’t recall it from the year before. This Christmas, however, she remembers last year’s, so she knows what to expect, and she doesn’t have the slightest doubt about the existence of Santa Claus. By next year, I suspect that will no longer be the case.

In front of the window in our living room is a seven-foot Douglas fir that is half-decorated. Charlotte insisted we stop putting ornaments on and pick what’s going to go on top of the tree. She has a theory that what ultimately goes on the top of the tree will impact the subsequent placement of ornaments.

I’m on a step stool, holding the winged fairy in place. Charlotte is eyeing it with a squint. She has already rejected the snowflake, and she’s deciding between the fairy and the gold star when the phone rings.

Elizabeth doesn’t like making phone calls or receiving them. She carries a cell phone but almost never answers it.
No one ever has anything to say that can’t wait,
she’s told me on several occasions when our phone
is ringing and she doesn’t move to get it.
It would be rude for me to stop talking to you and start another conversation with someone else who was in the room, so why is it any more polite if that person doesn’t even have the decency to visit us?
Like a lot of things Elizabeth says, there’s some pretty convincing logic at work, and yet I also know it’s a bit twisted and off.

“Can you answer the phone?” I call out to her. She seems annoyed by my request, but nevertheless walks over to pick up the receiver.

“Hello. Oh, hi, Joan. Yeah, he’s here. Hang on a second.” She pulls the phone away from her face. “Alex, it’s your aunt Joan.”

I climb down off the step stool and take the phone out of Elizabeth’s hand. For some reason, I know it’s a call for which I’ll want some privacy, and so I walk to the bedroom even before saying hello. I sit down on the corner of my bed.

“How are you, Joan?”

She doesn’t answer. Instead, she says, “I don’t know if I should tell you this, Alex, but it’s been making me crazy, and I … I just think you deserve to know, especially now.”

“Okay,” I tell her, although I’m not sure that’s it’s actually better to know the truth than not to know it in all instances.

“Well, it’s about your mother.” I expect her to come out with it, but she hesitates. “It’s about both your parents, actually,” she finally says.

“Okay,” I say again, now concerned.

“I don’t know how to say it.”

“Please, Joan, just spit it out. It’s okay.”

“Alex, your father believed that your mother was having an affair.”

Goddammit. He knew. The one piece of solace I had taken through all of this was false. My father knew.

“What did he say?” I ask quickly.

“You knew?”

Joan sounds surprised, which makes sense. She had no reason to believe I’d learned about my mother’s affair with Ohlig during the trial.

“I knew she was having an affair with Michael Ohlig. It came out during my representation of him. I didn’t know my father knew about it, though. How did you find out?”

“Your father actually told me. Well, not exactly. What he said was that your mother was in love with someone else.”

“He actually used that term—in love?”

“Yes.” I can hear sadness in her voice. This couldn’t have been easy for her to share.

“Thank you,” I say.

“There’s more, I’m afraid.”

“What?”

“Please don’t be mad at me, Alex.”

“Joan, just tell me.”

“Okay. Okay. She told your father about this on the day before he died.”

She doesn’t say anything more, and so I press her, as I would with a hostile witness whom I suspect is holding back on me. “Joan, please just tell me what he said. I want to know all of it—what he said to you and what you said to him,” I say, using a common lawyer formulation for questioning witnesses in a deposition.

I can actually hear her sigh, as if she’s gathering strength for what is to follow. “The day before your father died, he called me. He sounded very upset and asked me to come over because he didn’t want to be alone and he didn’t know who else to call. When I got there, I could tell that he’d been crying. He reminded me of a little boy. Lost and scared. I asked him what was wrong and he just came out and said that your mother was in love with someone else. I asked him what happened, why he would think that, and he said that’s what your mother had said to him.” There’s a long silence before she says, “I wanted to tell you at your father’s funeral, Alex, but then I thought about it more and I decided maybe it was better that you have the best thoughts possible about your parents. But after that man was arrested, and it was in the newspapers about him and your mother, I thought you’d want to know. I hope I made the right decision.”

My father knew that my mother was in love with someone else, and the next day he was dead. My mind flashes back to the rabbi’s words at my mother’s funeral, and how wrong he was. It was my father, and not my mother, who died of a broken heart.

I don’t remember saying good-bye to Joan, although I doubt I just hung up on her, but a moment later the phone is beside me on the bed, my head is in my hands and I’m sobbing. It feels almost like I’ve lost him again.

“What is it?” Elizabeth says in a whisper as she enters the room. She sits down beside me and places her hand on my back, rubbing in a circular motion, the way we do with Charlotte when we’re trying to comfort her.

Elizabeth is a patient sort, and so she doesn’t ask me again, even though a good thirty seconds go by without an answer. Finally, catching my breath, I say, “He knew. My father knew about my mother and Ohlig.”

“Is that what your aunt said?”

“Yeah.”

I straighten up and wipe the last tear from my eye. Looking into Elizabeth’s face I see only concern, and just like I was when I came home after breaking it off with Abby, I’m jarred by just how unfair this is—her comforting me about my father being betrayed by his wife.

“I’m so sorry, Alex.”

She still doesn’t know the worst part, the part that really pushed me over the edge—my father found out the day before he died. Could that really be a coincidence?

But then something else occurs to me, a fact I’d overlooked. My initial premise was that my mother told my father about Ohlig only because she was leaving him. But that made sense only if Ohlig was going to leave his wife too. Then why didn’t they finish the plan? Why weren’t they openly together?

Because my father died, I realize. The ultimate ironic twist—my father’s death kept my mother and Ohlig apart. Now they’d have to wait. After a respectable period, they could tell everyone how, in their mutual grief, my mother turned to my father’s oldest friend for comfort, and he toward her and, though no one planned on it happening, they fell in love. And then they could live happily ever after, the end.

Then, come last Thanksgiving, my mother must have assumed that
enough time had passed, but Ohlig apparently had second thoughts. A lot had certainly happened since my father’s death, not the least of which was that he was about to go on trial for securities fraud. He must have told her it wasn’t the time to leave his wife. Maybe they had that discussion before and she was tired of his excuses. My mother must have threatened to tell Pamela, and that bastard couldn’t risk that the truth would come out.

“What is it, Alex?”

Elizabeth’s voice startles me.

“Nothing. I’m just trying to process it all.”

I
’m very glad this year is over,” I say to Elizabeth as we’re sitting on the couch preparing for the ball to drop in Times Square.

“What did the queen call the year that Diana and Charles divorced and the castle burned down?” she says. “Annus Horribilis or something?”

“I wish the worst thing that had happened to me this year was that our house had burned down.”

“That’s the great thing about New Year’s, Alex. A chance to close the book and write a new one. Anyhow, it wasn’t all terrible this year.”

Elizabeth says this while looking down in her arms, where Charlotte sleeps soundly, curled up like a kitten. Charlotte is still wearing those ridiculous eyeglasses that they sell on the street corner for a dollar, the ones with the year serving as the eye holes.

Elizabeth had offered that we go out tonight. The mother of one of Charlotte’s friends, a woman whom Elizabeth has become friendly with through play dates, was having a party. I wouldn’t have been interested under the best of circumstances, but when I found out it was black tie, I told Elizabeth I’d much rather welcome in the New Year wearing my pajamas. She said that she was actually thinking the same thing.

“What do you think of the picture over there?” I say, pointing to the Scary Lady, who has taken up residence in the dining room.

Two days ago, I’d picked her up from the framer, who had given her a makeover with a cherry wood frame and off-white matting. The guy in the frame store told me that the lighter border would make the colors brighter.

“The new frame is nice,” Elizabeth says.

It’s not lost on me that the compliment is for the frame only. “We can take it down if you’d prefer.”

“No. If it makes you happy here, that’s fine with me.”

Ryan Seacrest is on TV, introducing this year’s group with the hot
song. I’ve never heard of the band or even the song for that matter. It seems that this year, or at least the second part of it, I’ve lived outside of the world, as if nothing happened that didn’t happen only to me. I haven’t been to the movies or read a book. Where did the year go?

“Did you make any resolutions?” I ask Elizabeth.

“I did,” she says coyly, almost flirtatiously.

“Care to share?”

“You know that if I do, they won’t come true.”

“That’s only birthday wishes, and maybe for a shooting star. It doesn’t apply to New Year’s resolutions.” I say this with an air of seriousness, as if this is an expertise I possess, the knowledge of the distinction between resolutions and wishes.

“Nothing that extravagant,” Elizabeth says, apparently having been convinced that resolutions can be shared without losing their potency. “Just to be happier.”

“Just to be happier.” I’m not sure whether I’m repeating her resolution or trying it on for size myself. “Just like that?”

“Why not? I could say I’m going to lose twenty pounds or learn Chinese, but I know I won’t do either of those things. I think being happier is a more lofty goal anyway.”

“You should put in an order for me on that one. You know, happiness for two.”

She sends me the look that says things are about to become more serious. “Only you can make yourself happy, Alex.”

“I know. I know.” Even as I agree with Elizabeth, I’m still far from certain that Abby didn’t have this right when she offered the opposite opinion.

Elizabeth gets up from the sofa while still cradling Charlotte and walks toward the Pink Palace. From the couch, I can see into Charlotte’s room and watch Elizabeth pour our daughter into bed, bringing the covers up to her shoulders. Elizabeth reaches into the toy bin and pulls out Belle the bunny, gently tucking it under Charlotte’s arm, before kneeling beside the bed and kissing Charlotte’s forehead.

Elizabeth returns to the couch and adopts a very similar pose to Charlotte’s, curling her body and tucking herself under my arm. I
begin to stroke her long hair with my palm, causing Elizabeth to make a purring sound to indicate her appreciation. There have been numerous moments like this over the past few months when I’ve wondered what happened to us. How did we—maybe I should say
I
—get here? I never have an answer.

“What about you?” Elizabeth says, startling me for a moment.

“What about me what?”

“Resolutions. You’re a pretty big list maker. I bet you have some good resolutions.”

“Nothing really,” I lie,
really
giving it away, I’m sure.

“C’mon, Alex. I told. Now you tell.”

“I kind of like the whole be-happy thing,” I say looking into her face. “It wraps up everything so well.”

“No fair. You can’t steal my resolution.”

“I can’t be happy?”

“Okay. You can
borrow
that resolution, but how about a new resolution we can share?”

“What do you have in mind?”

“We should try to have more spontaneous, shall we say,
intimate
moments in the new year.”

“That’s a resolution I can get behind.”

“Alex!” she laughs.

“Sorry,” I say, realizing the joke. “I mean I fully support the sentiment.”

Without another word, Elizabeth pulls her T-shirt over her head. She’s not wearing a bra, and she presses her breasts against my chest. I pull back a bit to remove my own shirt, and then our bodies come together again.

We are as one on the couch, just like it used to be, when I hear the honking horns from the street and the screaming from the party down the hall indicating the arrival of the new year. Elizabeth opens her eyes and stares into my face inches above her.

“Happy New Year, Alex,” she breathes.

“Happy New Year, Elizabeth.”

“This is going to be a better year,” she says, her eyes sparkling. “I promise. I really promise. Please don’t give up on us.”

F
or a city that never sleeps, just before nine in the morning on January 1st is pretty dead. I would wager that half the people I see on the street have not been home since yesterday, continuing their New Year’s Eve revelry well into the sunlight. Even if they had been to bed, it most likely was not their own, and they must have hightailed it out of there as soon as they woke up.