Afterburn (52 page)

Of course, everybody bought everything through the mail now. You could furnish a house in three days if you spent enough time on the phone. And that's what she'd done, weeks and weeks ago, she'd said the previous night, after confessing that she'd closed on the house way back in July, when he was away on business, actually signed a mortgage agreement. When she was worried that she was getting sicker, but before things really started to get worse. And
that
was when he told her that he'd paid off the house, that Ted Fullman had taken care of everything. By five o'clock that same afternoon, she could consider the Vista del Muerte house and property paid for, forever and ever. She had actually clapped her hands and kissed him. "Oh, Charlie!" The only caveat, according to Ted, was that the property could not be transferred after the death of the surviving spouse to children or any other heirs, and your executors had to sell the property to a buyer previously approved by the Vista del Mar Admissions Committee. A nice little controlled-supply scam, but Ellie and Charlie were ahead on the demographics, Julia had pointed out. The great boomer bulge followed them; there'd be no shortage of potential buyers when the time came. Ellie had hugged him tearfully, pleased that he accepted the place, her decision, this course of action. "I knew this would be fine," she'd said in relief, "I
knew
."

She was also,
he
knew, not saying anything about what she thought she remembered reading in their apartment, and the reason was simple. It was gone. As asked, Lionel had dropped Towers's report down the trash chute, telling no one, not even Mrs. Ravich when she returned the next day after her humiliating lipstick-and-nightgown episode, and so, when she could not find the document anywhere, not in the kitchen or the bedroom or Charlie's office, she'd begun to wonder if she'd made it up—fevered it into her pillsy imagination. This he'd surmised upon his return, because not only did she not say anything about the document, but she'd thrown away all her lovely sleeping aids. "I had a bit of
drop-off
while you were gone" was all that Ellie would tell him, adding only that Dr. Berger was surprised at the mixing and matching of medications to which she'd confessed. "I did get a bit confused about things, but Julia picked me up and took me to Dr. Berger's and I feel really rather good now."

She looked good, too, sitting in the leather seat of the Lexus, her hair pulled back, a kiss of color on her mouth, eyes bright as she inspected the old maple trees. But a lot is going on in there, he told himself, not just happy excitement, but fear and self-doubt. "Perhaps dementia, certainly rising anxiety," Julia had reported to him when he called her from the plane. "What about that piece of paper she thinks she read?" Charlie had asked slyly. "Oh, I don't know, Dad," Julia had answered. "I was over there and looked for it but never found
anything
. The doctor says that if she was so anxious and possibly a little addicted to the sleeping pills and also perhaps having the first touch of Alzheimer's, then she might have been in a highly suggestible state. He's had patients see things on television and then swear it happened to them that same day." At age fifty-seven? Wasn't that just too young? "I asked him the same thing, Daddy." Julia had sighed bravely, the weight of daughterly responsibility all too clear. "The test results will be back in a few more days. She'll be okay for the short term. She just needs a great deal of reassurance." Reassurance. Yes. Hence the payoff by Ted Fullman, hence Charlie's willingness to be driven in a company car straight from JFK the afternoon before to the new house, where Ellie had been waiting.

"Canada geese." Ellie pointed again as Charlie eased the car around the community lake. "They actually expanded what was a farmer's pond. They said that it used to get cold enough to skate over every winter. The farmer would measure the ice, and if it was three inches thick, then everybody could skate on it."

She wants to be here, he told himself. She knows that if she becomes sicker they will take care of her—because he would not. Not really. Not with a full and easy heart, not with a company to run. She knows I'm just a selfish bastard, Charlie thought, so she's planned accordingly. Very wise, his wife. They'd seen the long-term-care facility, which appeared rather well staffed, and which included not just the acute-care ward, the beds and dining rooms and physical-therapy facilities, but an operating room. Why? he'd asked their guide, the Director of Admissions, a grayster with the soft, soap-clean pleasantness of a retired minister. The man had smiled euphemistically over his half-frames. Why an operating room? Why
not?
To nip out all the things old people sprouted, the moldy malignancies and ferny polyps and porridge lumps. To perform the colonoscopic cauterizations and Goodyear blimp angioplasties, to reset hips broken on winter ice, to yank up guts falling through hernias into the scrotum, to saw off the bunions of old ladies, to section bowels rotten with cancer, to spoon out the bacon grease clogging the carotid arteries. To keep the Vista del Muerte population
alive
, their annual fees rolling
in
.

The entire development spread over some nine hundred acres, and Ellie was eager for him to see all of it. Already they'd inspected the Vista del Mar Community Hall, the business services center, the travel/insurance/brokerage/real-estate agency, the game room, the outdoor pool, the indoor pool, the basketball court, the twenty tennis courts, the three automatic bank machines, the homeowners' association offices. The common buildings, linked by useless picket fences, all smelled like new hotels. The staff wore green uniforms with VdM gold-monogrammed on the shirt breast, and they smiled easily and often, which suggested that they were well paid or terrorized by their superiors or both. The grounds crew seemed to number in the dozens, and everywhere was raking leaves, pruning trees, mulching garden beds. He let the car nose along softly. They passed from the golf course into one of the five residential clusters, and in this one, the oldest, or rather the first one sold out, the trees had started to fill in and the houses already were weathered. It occurred to him that the VdM executives probably tracked the geographical demographics of the place, making sure that not too many of the oldest residents clustered in one neighborhood or block, thus spreading the die-out rate through the whole facility. The elderly expired more often in the colder six months, the common flu knocking off a regular percentage, and so, he surmised, each spring the VdM management could look forward to new selling opportunities spread across their facility. Clever, he thought, somebody very clever put this whole place together.

And how much would all of this cleverness cost him? The night before, he'd inspected the paperwork. He estimated two million dollars, when it was said and done. Two million, yes, sir. Thank you, Sir Henry, for you know not what you have done for me. The membership fee was two hundred and fifty thousand, the house was a million, the landscaping fifty thousand, the furniture—no antiques, either—would top out around two hundred thousand, the in-ground heated forty-foot pool ("Our
own
," Ellie said, "otherwise you won't do it.") would run about one hundred and fifty, including the decking, cabana, and below-ground pool-machinery room. She was already talking about a guest cottage and a tennis court. Julia loved tennis, played at Yale. He hadn't even asked yet about the property taxes, but figured forty or fifty thousand a year. Real money. But easy money, thanks to Sir Henry Lai and his mouthful of red vomit. Blessings on you, Chinky billionaire-sir. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for Vista del Muerte. I am a true bastard, he thought. Good for me.

Was he free, then? Yes, almost. Depended on how you figured it. There was the question of Melissa Williams and the question of the company. In Shanghai, after bribing Mr. Lo, he'd returned the unused cash to the hotel manager, then spent an hour on the phone to New York, trying to chat up the price of Teknetrix. The scaffolding materials and an army of laborers had reappeared at the factory's construction site the next morning as he was about to leave, Tom Anderson had reported, amazed admiration in his voice, and with Charlie's permission, he'd bring on more men. The construction boom in Shanghai had slowed considerably, and you could pick up welders and electricians willing to work by the day. Perhaps feeling the strange tea, Charlie had approved the extra expense and told Anderson there was a one-hundred-thousand-dollar bonus coming from him, Charlie,
personally
, if Anderson got the factory on-line on time. Marvin Noff remained unconvinced, but the company's price had lifted off its three-month low. Volume a bit heavier than average. Some good institutional contrarian buying. And Ming had called, pleased, he said, by the press release on the Q4. The company was not out of trouble, not yet anyway, but it was going in the right direction. Companies struggled, that was the truth. They struggled with competitors and the market and with themselves, and so far, Teknetrix had always come out of it, always survived the sudden altitude drop, the unsynched vibration, the low-fuel, one-chance landing.

As for Melissa Williams? Was she an aberration or a trend? A celebration of life or an early shovelful of dirt on his marriage? More R&D needed. He couldn't pull out of this particular dive just yet. Not close enough to disaster yet, Charlie-boy; when it gets close you'll pull out, in more ways than one, ha-ha, not so funny, and get yourself on home. Just one more time, he thought. I'll do a better job this time; I can tell. Like going from the T-37 trainer to the F-101 in 1963. You couldn't get it right the first time. You didn't understand the plane's speed, the way it moved. Second time, better. He'd had Karen reserve Suite 840 at the Pierre, the one Teknetrix used regularly. They were due to see each other that night. Ellie had wanted to have sex the night before, but he had begged off, said he was exhausted from the plane, in order to save his shot. Conserve ordnance. He'd be completely hard; he could just
tell
. His back felt so good that he had not minded, had not been existentially insulted, when, after Karen mentioned a message from the fertility clinic doctor, he'd returned the call and been told that his sperm sample was no good. "Motility average, sperm count insufficient," the doctor told him. "Which means not that you
couldn't
get someone pregnant, but that we need a better deposit if we are going to use technology to avoid a poor outcome."

But perhaps a poor outcome was good news, of a sort. Perhaps he had an easy chance to forget the whole hire-a-mom thing, no harm done. A little money and time wasted, nothing more. You could look at it that way. Or you could say you still wanted a child, Charlie-boy. Maybe
more
so, now that Ellie would be packed away in Vista del Muerte. The logistics might be easier. Maybe visit a child from time to time. Just stop by for an hour. Don't need to be involved, just pop in, say, Hi—gee, he's getting heavy. A warm bottle. Fingers and toes. Goodnight moon. And maybe this
was
where Melissa Williams came in. He'd thought about her, he'd thought about her all too much. In the baby way and in the other kind of way. She'd been so sweet, so generous. He could tell that for a young woman she had a lot of sexual experience, which presented itself as kindness and patience. Women always talked about men being considerate lovers, expecting that men didn't really care how the woman acted, so long as she opened her legs and didn't watch television at the same time, but that was not the case. Certain women put men at ease; they had the gift of sexual generosity, and this you could say about Melissa Williams. He'd had his doubts and anxieties just afterward, but the more he'd thought about her, sitting in the Peace Hotel on his last morning in Shanghai and watching the coal barges move along the muddy flat river outside, the more he'd remembered their night in the Pierre and wanted to repeat it. Clearly he could not get anyone pregnant easily, and clearly she was the kind of girl who didn't pick up diseases and viruses and all the other things running through the population. Towers had told him as much, with the report on her blood donation. So that minor anxiety, that flicker of doubt, had eased, too. She wanted to see him, he wanted to see her. Maybe they'd meet a few more times and he'd raise the question of a baby. Or maybe they would have a sad little talk that night and then go their separate ways forever. He'd apologize for whatever confusion or hurt he'd caused. He didn't know and he didn't mind not knowing. He'd simply leave about four, take the New Jersey Turnpike into the city, park the car, take a shower, call Ellie to say he'd arrived safely, then walk over to the Pierre at seven. There's a Miss Williams staying here, has she arrived? He really did want to see her again. Certainly all that Towers had told him suggested she was the right sort of young woman. Good background, good values.

"What're you thinking?" Ellie asked suddenly, her voice perky, eyes bright. "You've been quiet for five minutes."

"Values," Charlie said. "Good values."

"You think this place has it?"

"Yes. Absolutely."

She looked at him sweetly. "It
is
the right thing, Charlie."

"Again, absolutely."

"I wish you could stay a second night."

"I do, too."

"Couldn't Karen send down all the papers and stuff?"

"I need to meet with people, get some things started," Charlie said, watching the road ahead of him even though he was going eleven miles an hour. "Tomorrow is a long day, too."

"These
new
pills knock me out around nine."

"I'll call when I get in, and then in the morning," he told Ellie.

"That's fine. You're leaving around four?"

"I thought I might."

"There's just one more thing I want to show you," she said happily, "and I'm pretty sure you'll indulge me."

"What is it?"

"The bird feeder in the backyard. I'm surprised you didn't notice it. Up on a big pole near the spruce? Has room for thirty-six purple martins." She smiled at him. "Like a sweet little hotel for birds."