Dead Money (12 page)

I was just talking to FitzGibbon, Warwick said. He seems quite smitten with you.

I’m glad to hear that, I said, ignoring the homoerotic choice of phrase.

Good job, said Warwick. This could be the start of great things for you.

I forced a smile.

Thanks, I said. I’ll stay on it.

Excellent, he said. We’ll have that morale problem licked in no time.

I gave that one a pass.

On the way out, I gave Cherise a wink. I figured I owed her one.

To the uninitiated, that brief conversation might not have seemed so bad. But in reality it was fraught with import. Venom. Spleen. Fear.

Morale, shit. The only morale Warwick gave two shits about was his own. And his morale was fed by power, nothing else. The right to squash, humiliate and defile with boundless guile and glee.

I don’t know, maybe he had a good side. I just hadn’t seen it for a while.

What made it worse, we’d come up in the business together. Worked side by side in the trenches. Reviewed documents in dingy conference rooms for days on end, until we fairly bled to death from paper cuts. Drank at the same bars. Chased the same women in those same bars. We’d actually had some fun together, back then.

It was hard to imagine now.

I called Dorita.

It was too late to crow about my morning triumph over the moss-eared man. But at least I had Warwick to bitch about.

Dorita wasn’t in her office.

That only left one thing.

SHEILA SPECIALIZED IN ADDICTION
. Junkies, drunks, cokeheads, aspirin freaks, whatever. She got a lot of cancellations.

I called her up. Her three o’clock had OD’d, so she had a slot for me. I decided to walk over. It was a nice day.

Her office was in an upscale building in the east seventies, otherwise residential. You’d never have known the office was there. I supposed most of the residents didn’t. I was quite sure that the lunching ladies with Pekingese I passed on my way into the building would have been quite scandalized to know that back behind their very own marble-floored palm-plastered lobby, eight hours a day, fifty-five minutes at a time, sat, weeping, whining and rationalizing, scores of the city’s most hopeless slaves to substance.

The doormen, on the other hand, certainly knew. They knew everything. And being even more snobbish than their tenants, though also professionally discreet, they never failed to give me a tiny nod and a subtle sneer. Which I invariably returned.

I didn’t have to wait. The door was open. Sheila was in her recliner. I always called her Sheila. I liked the name. It reminded me of old Jack Lemmon movies. I knew she didn’t approve, though she never said so. But whenever she left me a voice mail she never said, ‘It’s Sheila’; she always said, ‘It’s Dr. Schwartz.’ And I would always make it a point to begin my return voice mail with, ‘Hi Sheila, got your message.’

That was the extent of my rebellion, though. We actually had a very good relationship.

I hoped so, for two hundred bucks an hour.

We talked about Warwick. She nodded sympathetically. She said the right things. What a terrible man, she said.

She made me feel better.

We got down to work.

You were telling me about your father, last time, she said.

Yes, of course, I said. Father, Warwick. Not subtle. But possibly effective. Yes, I was twelve.

When he died, I meant. He was thirty-seven. Keeled right over. Face in the lasagna. I wasn’t there. I heard about it later. Aneurism, they said. I envisioned a dark-clawed beast, stalking the unwary in the night. The dreaded Aneurism. The reality was simpler, more insidious. A vessel burst, the bleeding uncontrolled. Invisible.

After that, only women. Mother, sister, wife, daughter. I’d never had a son. I didn’t have a brother, either, anymore. My brother died. But don’t feel sorry for me. I barely remembered him. I was four. He was three. He’d had a fever. They took him away. He never came back. It was really only from stories I was told that I remembered him at all. It was years after the fact that I began to miss him. To regret.

Twelve years should be enough, I said, to have generated one fond memory.

You would think, Sheila said.

But I don’t have any. Not one. No hugs. No kisses. Not a pat on the shoulder. Not a good word. Nothing.

That’s terrible.

Her sympathy was palpable, genuine.

Not really, I said. I mean, he didn’t beat me or anything. I didn’t grow up in a war zone. I have all my limbs. People endure worse things. And even if he lacked the skills to love a child, he did leave me something. He went to work every day. A real job. In the copper mine. Not a pussy job like mine. He never missed a day. Never complained. If he’d been sick a day in his life, he sure didn’t let us know about it.

He set an example for you.

That’s what I’m saying. Something in me always makes me slog ahead. Never give in. Keep on keeping on. And I know what it is. It’s what he gave me.

But there’s more to being a parent than setting an example, Sheila said. It would have been one thing if you had gotten some love from your mother.

Right, I laughed.

My memories of my mother were far more vivid. Most of them involved humiliation. But Sheila and I had been through all that.

It’s a terrible thing, she said. It’s a huge gap in a person’s life. I don’t know if you can ever fill it.

I liked it that she’d say such things. I was quite sure that they weren’t in the shrink manual.

I don’t know either, I said.

Really, I thought, wasn’t all this the worst kind of self-indulgence? Who the hell had nice parents? Warm, loving,
Leave It to Beaver
folks? Nobody I knew, that’s for sure.

I changed the subject.

There’s something to be said for displacement, I said. It’s the differentiation. I read an article about it the other day.

Sheila leaned forward.

I loved the way she always seemed interested in what I had to say. So what if I was paying her to be interested? So what if she probably acted just as interested in the turgid tales of all those addicted idiots, every stupid recidivist story of stopping and starting and telling the wife and kids they’re sorry and starting again and puking blood in the airplane bathroom and passing out and not remembering a thing the next day and wondering where the hell that big gash on their forehead and the stuffed penguin came from, sounding exactly the same after a while from every pathetic one of them? So what?

I liked it anyway.

Children, I continued, the theory goes, contrary to the popular conception, go out of their way to differentiate themselves from their siblings. People are always surprised. My, they say, how different Johnny is from Joe. But it’s actually not surprising at all. It’s the natural order of things.

I was on a roll.

Differentiation is a strategy designed to maximize parental attention, I went on. A Darwinian world like any other. Your older brother already has a lock on, say, freestyle Frisbee. You can’t compete. He’s had three years’ practice before you were born. So you take up tennis. Occupy the tennis side of Mommy’s brain. Find a vacuum. Fill it.

There’s a lot of truth to that, Sheila said.

Yes, I said, but here’s the problem: You grow up. You become a lawyer. And then what? Who do you compete with for attention, wealth, success? All those things that stand for love in this society? A bunch of goddamn lawyers, just like you. And in that world, anybody the slightest bit different is viewed with suspicion, fear, hostility. Contempt. Who does he think he is, wearing sneakers to work? It’s everywhere. Christ, they spy on you.

Warwick, she said.

Back to Warwick, I laughed.

Of course, I mused aloud, without this competition to be the best of a bunch of folks just like you, we would never have a genius. The one who transcends it all. By taking sameness through the looking glass. Newton. Darwin. Shostakovich. But meanwhile, the rest of us pay the price. Anonymity. Wage slavery. Disgust. Despair.

But some people don’t feel that way, she said.

I suppose that’s right. Or at least not as strongly as I do.

Not nearly.

Not nearly.

Next time we’ll explore that.

Okay, I said.

My time was up. I was always agreeable about the fifty-five-minute rule. Some people were offended. But I used to drive a cab. I understood how a meter worked.

I CHECKED DORITA’S OFFICE
. She was furiously typing something. So concentrated that she didn’t notice me in the doorway. Or so I thought.

I quietly installed myself in her burgundy velvet armchair.

Hi, Ricky, she said, without slowing down or looking up.

Hi. Hey, did you have a rough childhood?

Nah, not me, she said, the keyboard clattering away. Rabbi father, mom a junkie hooker. The normal suburban thing.

I didn’t believe her, of course. Any more than I had the other seventeen times she’d invented a set of mismatched parents in response to a question about her past. Bikers, bankers, doctors, child molesters, thieves and poets. They’d all had their moment hanging from a branch on her invented family tree. I wasn’t sure whether she did it to protect herself from some truly awful family history, or because the truth was so benign, so uneventful, that she was ashamed of it.

Either way, it was always entertaining to ask the question. To see what she’d come up with next.

Stop that, I said.

What?

She looked up at last.

Enough with the typing. I’m more important.

Oh, all right, but if I lose my train of thought I’m making you finish it later.

It would be my pleasure. Though I couldn’t hope to emulate your limpid prose.

Limpid? she snorted, closing the door and lighting a cigarette. Have we been attending the book club meetings again?

No, no. It’s just a word that always comes to mind in your presence.

I’m not sure how to take that, she said, flopping theatrically into her high-backed leather executive chair, putting her stockinged feet up on her desk.

Don’t. You don’t have to take it. Anymore.

I won’t. I’m not going to take it anymore, damn it!

We paused. We smiled. We were very pleased with ourselves.

Where were you earlier? I asked.

Lunching with some ladies, what else? What’s it to you?

I needed you.

Why should today be any different from any other day?

Yes, but this time I really needed you. Lucky my shrink had a cancellation, or you might be calling an ambulance for me right now.

Why for?

I told her the story of my small triumph in court that morning. My subsequent deflation at the hands of Warwick.

Warwick again, she said.

Warwick again, I agreed.

Ricky, Ricky, Ricky. You’ve got to get over this thing you have with him. You’ve let him inside your head. You don’t have to do that. He’s obnoxious enough from the outside.

Easy for you to say. You didn’t grow up in the business with the prick. And get professionally eclipsed by him.

That’s just what I’m saying. Who gives a shit? What price has he had to pay for that?

Not one I’d be willing to pay.

Precisely. You made your choices. They were the right ones. Live your life.

Damn. If you’d been here earlier today I could have saved myself two hundred bucks.

You’ll get my invoice in the mail.

I’ve got a little T & E problem for you, darling, I said, throwing caution to the winds.

I’m back on the team?

You never left it.

God, you know how to make a girl feel good.

If only. Anyway, say I’ve got a trust deed. It leaves
x
gazillion dollars to my father, another gazillion to me. But I don’t get it until I reach twenty-five. And there are conditions that have to be fulfilled before I get the money. So, I turn twenty-five, but one of the conditions hasn’t been fulfilled. Who gets the money?

Are you pretending I don’t know what you’re talking about?

Yes.

Well, it’s pretty lame.

I know. But given the circumstances, I don’t have much choice.

Those nasty conflicts issues.

You got it.

So. To answer your question. It depends on a lot of things, my dear boy.

I knew you were going to say that.

Of course I’m going to say that. If life were simple, we wouldn’t need lawyers, would we?

Good point. So, what does it depend on?

First, whether the condition can be fulfilled later, and whether the gift is worded in such a way as to allow later fulfillment.

Let’s say it’s irrevocable.

An irrevocable trust?

No, no. The condition. The fact that the condition isn’t fulfilled. Say it says you can’t collect if you’ve been convicted of a felony. And you have.

That again.

This is purely hypothetical.

Right. Well, I suppose there could be cases where that wasn’t an irrevocable event. It gets overturned on appeal. You get a pardon. It depends on the wording, though. It always comes back to that. Did you get the language?

No, I didn’t. I’m working on that, I lied.

The fact was, I couldn’t remember. And anyway I hadn’t turned the page. Could have been all sorts of other clauses I hadn’t seen.

Let’s keep it simple, I said. Let’s assume the conviction stands. I want to know who gets the money.

This is as simple as it gets, Ricky: it depends. I’ve got to see the language.

I don’t have the language. Right now.

Then it’s very hard to answer the question. Because there can be express provisions for that. If there aren’t, then the law is complicated. Heavily fact-dependent. Most of the time, though, it would go to the nearest relative. Whoever would inherit the donor’s estate upon death, if the gift hadn’t vested yet.

FitzGibbon.

Oops.

I didn’t say that.

Right. Anyway, could be. But let’s get the language. Can’t you just call up your buddy Kennedy?

I’m sure he won’t give it to me, I said. It’s a client confidence. Kennedy’s a real stickler for that kind of stuff. He won’t bend any rules. I mean, frankly, if I were Kennedy I wouldn’t give it to me either.