A Thousand Pardons (16 page)

“Enough,” said Arturo. He stood up from his chair, buttoned his jacket, and turned upon them a stare so ostentatiously cold that a less handsome man could never have pulled it off. “Nobody is getting fired over this,” he said, “so there’s no need to start eating each other. Look. We can argue about strategy in here all we want, but what we do outside this room—what we do in the world—is predicated on belief. Everybody has to pull together, everybody has to believe in the idea at hand just as you would if you thought of it yourself. Everybody has to not just understand but completely internalize what we are fighting for. You can’t be an impartial advocate. You are either all in or you are part of what we’re fighting against. Do you understand what I mean when I use the word ‘belief’? Not a performance, but the real thing. Not ‘I will act
as if
my client is in the right.’ The public sees through
that in a second. And I see through it. Doubt is a cancer, whether it’s doubt in our strategy or doubt in the people we represent. The distinction doesn’t matter. Cancer is cancer. When you walk out of this room in a minute, do it with a sense of your mission on the other side. And if you can’t do that, don’t come back at all.”

He closed his briefcase and left the room. They watched him through the glass walls all the way to the elevator bank. “Wow,” Shelley said. “Extra hot when he’s angry.”

Helen, despite herself, was stirred. There goes a leader of men, she thought. I could never do that job. The more she thought about Arturo’s words, the less sure she felt what he was actually talking about—it was really just sort of a variation on my way or the highway, with a little Messiah complex thrown in—but still, he was right, it wasn’t just about what you said to the world, it was about what was in your heart when you were saying it.

FREEDOM FROM HER FAMILY, freedom from a sense of place, freedom from peers who knew all about her, freedom from familiar objects: all of this had happened to her once before, Sara reflected, but not when she was old enough to remember any of it. “Rebirth” was too strong a word, maybe, but it was both truer and more mischievous to say that she felt like she was up for adoption again.

Here was one of the differences between her parents: she knew she could never figure out her father’s email password in a hundred years, but it had taken her all of five seconds to correctly guess her mother’s, which was “Sara.” Sara sent an email, from her mother’s account, dropping out of the basketball program entirely; she carefully deleted both the sent email and the coach’s understanding reply. She still rode the bus across town every Tuesday and Friday after school, though, usually just to wander in and out of stores or, when the weather got a little warmer, to lie on the grass embankment between the West Side Highway and the Hudson River, a spot she found soothing and also far enough from most human traffic that detection wasn’t a worry. Once in a while she’d take a picture of the river and upload it straight to
Facebook, less for the benefit of her few friends from school who might see it than just to create some record of where she was. Sometimes these friends would respond, sometimes they wouldn’t, and then one day a few of them came and surprised her en masse, two she knew and three others. They sprinted across the highway like idiots to reach the embankment, rather than go two blocks out of their way to take the underpass.

They sat and watched the boats, Sara’s cheeks growing hot in the midst of them, talking about nothing—mostly waiting for some jogger to go by, or for some middle-aged guy to emerge from below the deck of his weathered boat, so they could fall silent and then mock him after he’d disappeared again. One of them, a boy in a green army jacket and a sad Jewfro that the wind off the Hudson kept shaking like some kind of jello mold, had a pocket-size bottle of Jägermeister with him; but after one swig everybody pretended they were buzzed just so they wouldn’t have to taste it again. Sara’s sort-of-friend and chem lab partner, Tracy, seemed to want to cultivate the impression that she was with one of the other guys, a fellow eighth grader named Cutter (at least that’s what he had named himself), whose family, she’d heard, was more well off than anyone else’s in the school, which, because he was black, probably shouldn’t have seemed ironic but did. Cutter kept catching Sara staring at them, which was not cool; she made herself look instead at the tide racing upriver toward the George Washington Bridge.

She heard his voice on the hill behind her, diluted by the pulse of traffic sounds from the highway, and then she realized he was saying, “What’s her name?”

“Sara,” someone answered him.

“Hey, Sara,” Cutter said, “you live near here?”

She swallowed. “No,” she said, “I’m all the way across town. Not too far from school.”

“So you just like boats?”

She laughed, still without looking at him. “My mom thinks I’m playing in a basketball league,” she said. “But I just come here.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. ’Cause I like boats?”

“What about your dad?” Cutter said. “Where’s he think you are?”

“Don’t know,” Sara said, but none of them heard her because they were all yelling at Cutter to try minding his own fucking business and stop asking people personal questions. “This is why no one will hang out with you except us,” the Jewfro guy said.

Next Wednesday in school, Sara was standing in the cafeteria line, which stretched out the door, when she felt a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, boat girl,” Cutter said. “What’s your first class after lunch?”

“English,” Sara said.

He snorted. “Come on,” he said. “It’s a beautiful day.” He took her hand, which kept her from dwelling too much on anything else that was happening as they walked straight through the kitchen and out the fire door onto Seventy-seventh Street. He hailed a cab going west, and at first she thought he wanted, for some bizarre romantic reason, to go back to the embankment by the boat basin where they’d met, but no, the cab kept going south all the way to the Hudson ferry slips, where he bought them two tickets for the Circle Line. They sat on the deck—it was two-thirds empty, no one but out-of-season tourists and a couple of lame class trips—and circled the island of Manhattan, watching the sun split by the peaked tops of the buildings, the silent cars, the way the crosstown streets would open up to their full depth just at the moment you passed them and then flatten out again. Cutter pushed her hair out of her eyes with one finger. Sara felt a bit like she’d heard drugs were supposed to make you feel—dangerously receptive, like in the future it was going to be too hard to resist knowing that you had the power to feel this way again.

“Better, right?” Cutter said. She looked at him quizzically. “To be the one on the boat,” he explained, “getting looked at by the people on the shore.”

He had a thing for boats, it turned out, even though they were no great novelty for him since his family owned one, which they kept at their place out in Sag Harbor. It was a little disappointing to Sara to realize that that was the initial basis of his interest in her—that she reflected an interest of his own. On the last Friday of the nominal basketball
season, he took her to ride the Staten Island Ferry. The ferry itself was about the least quaint thing imaginable, and the harbor was surprisingly crowded, and if you looked too closely at the water it was pretty full of garbage, but Sara loved it anyway, in large part because of the uncharacteristic smile it put on Cutter’s face. When you got to Staten Island there was really nothing to do—some storefronts, an empty baseball stadium, MTA buses that went God only knew where—but there was the ride back to look forward to, with Manhattan expanding in front of you, as you tried to pick out from the forest of mismatched structures along the water the one small maw toward which the ferry was pointed.

She’d never been anybody’s girlfriend before, and she wasn’t sure she was now; the most official-seeming aspect of it was that Tracy wasn’t speaking to her anymore. She and Cutter never went to each other’s homes, though if the weather turned wintry again and they kept hanging out like this, she could see how that was going to emerge as an issue. For now they dated the way she imagined two homeless people might date. The first time he tried seriously to make out with her, they were on a bench on the East River promenade, and she was freezing. She pulled her head back and looked into his desire-clouded eyes.

“What is your real name?” she said, stalling. “I don’t see how I can kiss a guy when I don’t even know what name your mother gave you.”

He shrugged. “What name did your mother give you?” he said.

Which undermined her just enough to make her want to end the conversation; she unzipped his jacket so she could get her arms inside it for warmth, and kissed him until she could feel that her whole throat was bright red.

He talked a lot about adoption, actually, and about race, with passion but with no sense that these were subjects about which she might know something he didn’t. He claimed that a lot of people assumed he was adopted, since he was black and had money. Sara had never seen any instance of this assumption, though, and she decided that it was probably something that had happened to him one time but had become such a big deal in his mind that his recollection of it had swelled. It was true that no one knew why his family had him in public school
when they had the resources to send him anywhere they wanted. Liberal guilt, Cutter said: it isn’t just for white folks. Though in the next breath he’d insist that he wouldn’t go to one of those elitist private banker-factories if you paid him to. Not many of his friends had actually seen where Cutter lived, but those who had, or said they had, all agreed solemnly that it was enormous.

“I have everything,” Cutter said to her, “but people are afraid of me because they think I feel entitled to what they have. Because I’m black.” They were sitting on a stoop just off Park Avenue, near Ninetieth Street, having cut last period; now other schools were letting out left and right, and sometimes they’d watch a pack of younger kids go by wearing uniforms and texting on their phones. Cutter and Sara were passing a pint bottle of warm cranberry vodka in a paper bag, though Sara had stopped after two revolting sips; now she just took it from him and then passed it back a minute later, while he was talking.

“White people are afraid of us, because they project their guilt onto us. They assume that we spend our lives thinking about them, measuring ourselves in terms of them. That’s what gives life to their guilt. It’s guilt over racism, but the guilt itself is racist, right?”

This wasn’t a side of him Sara particularly enjoyed, though she was impressed that he thought about this conceptual stuff at all. She wished there was a way to get rid of the vodka, because that seemed to draw it out of him. The only way to get him to drink less of it was to drink more of it herself. She had another small swig and passed the bag back to him.

“I don’t really see people reacting to us like that, though,” she said, in a near whisper she hoped would induce him to lower his own voice.

“Well, not so much to you, because you’re Asian,” he said. “That’s a whole other set of prejudices.”

“Okay,” she said, a little irritated, “thank you for the deep insight into my Asianness, but I meant I don’t see people reacting like that to you, either.”

Another group of middle school boys in blazers made their way down Ninetieth Street; one, who looked about ten, stopped right in front of them to tie his shoe. He had an iPod in his ears and showed no
awareness that Sara and Cutter were looking down on him from just a few feet away.

“You don’t,” Cutter said, with a muttered, throaty laugh. The boy in the blazer straightened up and moved on. Cutter stood and hopped down the steps.

“Hey,” Sara said weakly. She thought he was angry and ditching her. Instead, when he caught up to the boy in the blazer, who’d fallen behind his friends, Cutter tapped him on the shoulder and started talking to him. They were only about thirty feet from the intersection, in front of a townhouse whose courtyard was filled with manicured bushes. Whatever they were doing or saying, Sara couldn’t make it out—Cutter’s back screened her from seeing much more than the loafers on the boy’s feet. Then the feet turned and ran toward Park Avenue, and Cutter spun and walked leisurely back to the stoop, a grin on his face so wide it opened his whole mouth in wonder, and in his hands the boy’s iPod, as well as what looked like forty or fifty dollars in cash.

“I didn’t even ask him for the money,” Cutter said, shaking his head delightedly. “How fucked up is
that
?”

JAIL, FOR ALL HIS FEAR OF IT, had proved mostly just another iteration of the limbo in which Ben had been living for six months now. It even, like Stages, housed one or two minor celebrities who might brush by you on their way to the cafeteria or the gym, acknowledging with a rueful smile that they were who you thought they were. And on the day it was over, Ben once again was released into the bright sunshine with his car keys, less than a hundred dollars cash—though to be fair he still had access to much more money, in accounts in various places—no home, and nowhere special to go. To those who knew him, he was defined by his transgressions now, by the things for which he would not be forgiven, and, as rough as that was, it seemed pathetic to think about going to some random town or city just to start all over again—to pretend, at his age, to be anyone else. Not to mention that, in order to get at his money, he would have to make at least one trip to Bonifacio’s office and sign a few instruments he might well wind up drafting himself.
Half out of spite for himself, therefore, and half out of the absence of other pressing business of any sort, he took the bus to Poughkeepsie, where his car was still parked, crossed the thruway, and ended up back in Rensselaer Valley. First he stopped and checked in to a motel just off the Saw Mill, a motel he had driven past ten times a week for the last fifteen years but had never been curious enough to see the inside of. Everything he owned fit in one bag now—well, maybe not everything, but having no idea where your belongings were was pretty damn close to not owning them anymore. Storage, if that’s where they were, was where they would stay. Offhand, he couldn’t remember what, other than a whole lot of suits and shirts and neckties, was even in there.