I Regret Everything (17 page)

And then she started crying. That threw the whole balance off. Dodd didn't know what to do. He rubbed Harlee's shoulder and looked at me with what felt like sympathy. It was too late.

When I discussed that evening with Dr. Margaret at our next session she said that whenever you find yourself standing on a chair in a restaurant you need to take a hard look at what led you to that point.

Yes, that was true. What was great about it, though, was that the numbness I would retreat into when life was overwhelming was not there in the restaurant. You don't get on a chair and say embarrassing things if you're numb. Drunk, maybe, but not numb.

Love was not going to save me. Love was only a substitute for what your parents were supposed to provide and mine so consistently bungled. I longed to express all of this to Mr. Best, to write about the paradoxical impossibility and necessity of love. How was I supposed to convey these feelings without making a complete idiot of myself? Was that even possible, or was being a total idiot the whole idea?

T
he field of trusts and estates presents ample opportunity for outright larceny. As clients are overtaken by the myriad indignities of age their minds will often cloud and the wily attorney, if endowed with a soupçon of unscrupulousness, can, with the mere adjustment of a comma, redirect amounts of money the size of the night sky. This was never my approach because greed is the least attractive of the deadly sins. The truth is, I had never done anything that could remotely be construed as unethical much less illicit

In the daisy chain of police states known as the Soviet Union, government-sanctioned writers were provided with dachas, country houses where they could retreat to ponder the important things Soviet writers pondered, like how to get toilet paper. While the stunted creative lives of these Eastern European artists were tragic, their real estate situation was enviable. What writer doesn't think he needs, strike that,
deserves
a dacha? Certainly every American one, and since the government didn't provide them, literary folk had to take matters into their own hands. In the rolling Berkshires Herman Melville rusticated at Arrowhead, Edith Wharton at The Mount, homes that burnished the reputations of their illustrious inhabitants.
 
How is this relevant to anything other than early American property values? For the simple reason that I had been living in a one-bedroom apartment for five years and despite its proximity to the sylvan environs of Prospect Park found myself in want of a country house. Nothing too grand, no sweeping lawn or lakefront required, just something appealing and in good condition less than three hours from the city that I could escape to on weekends. If the treatment worked and I lived, a house was something I could enjoy for decades. Were the Reaper's scythe to swing in my direction it would become The Best Colony, a retreat for writers, painters, poets, and artists of every stripe. I had set up foundations for clients and was intimately familiar with the ins and outs of the process. Dirk Trevelyan was only one of a number of potential benefactors I could approach to underwrite this project and a modest endowment would allow several artists at a time to avail themselves of the retreat. In years ahead it might come to rival Yaddo and MacDowell. As legacies go, it was one of which I could be proud. And if in the meantime it served as my country house, where was the harm?

This should have been something that demanded no monkey business on my part, but I had lost a lot of money in the most recent market crash and, motivated by the fear that has animated nearly all of my life choices, sold most of my stocks at a low point rather than patiently waiting for the inevitable uptick. There was not a great deal of cash on hand (and what there was had been marked for modest charitable contributions and street musicians). Circumstances required a shortcut.

The Montauk, N.Y., home of the recently deceased Brenda Vendler perfectly fit the bill: a saltbox that needed cosmetic work but sound as a Stickley chair. To sweeten the pot, the house sat on several acres with a pond and an old barn that could be turned into a writing studio. Several heirs were sprinkled around the country, all distant relatives; most of them, except for Claude, the one badgering me with hostile phone calls, unfamiliar with the housing market at the easternmost end of Long Island. There were funds in the estate that would be released to their grasping hands as quickly as the courts allowed. And Mrs. Vendler had appointed me her executor.

I reviewed the deed to double check that she actually owned the place and there were no liens against it. Then I went online and did a quick search of other properties for sale in the area. From this I was able to conclude that if the structure was not falling down it was significantly undervalued.

The plan: find a buyer to whom the house could be sold for less than market value, wait a year and a day (this was the time period during which an estate's executor could not own anything held in the estate), then buy it back, dealing my co-conspirator in for his trouble, and live out my days in Elysian splendor. This, let me be clear, is not against the law. Is it unethical? In a world where the riches generated by outright scams are calculated in the billions, the conclusion is clear. When this was done I would draft a letter to Claude Vendler apprising him that I had found a buyer.

And so on a Friday afternoon in early August, I found myself in a Middle Eastern restaurant on 1st Avenue in the shadow of the 59th Street Bridge seated across the table from my old college friend Margolis. At my office he had fallen into a long conversation with Reetika about the state of the contemporary theater from which I had to tear him away so we could walk to the restaurant. The two-time winner of a playwriting award at our alma mater, Margolis had graduated with lofty theatrical ambitions. Now an overpaid author of press releases for an international public relations concern with a specialty in disaster management, he had recently fled Los Angeles and transferred to their New York office. His marriage had collapsed and he was looking to begin life anew.

Margolis's crinkly hair was graying under a sun-bleached Mets cap that he did not remove during lunch. He wore frayed jeans, high-topped Nikes, and an old sweatshirt. Although rumor had it he had accumulated a large 401(k) in California, it looked like he might not have enough to pay for his share of the meal. I had ordered a falafel sandwich and Margolis was having hummus and lamb. He had been talking for fifteen minutes about the move from California, his job, and the perilous state of his career as a playwright.

“It's tough to get anything on in New York,” he said. “My last production was at a theater in Wyoming. But now I've finished a new multimedia piece about the marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.”

“It sounds terrific,” I said, taking another bite of falafel. Encouragement would put him in a more receptive mood.

“There's video, dance, shadow puppets, and the whole thing is going to be produced in a converted airplane hangar in Teter­boro, New Jersey. Provided we get funding. You'll come.” I assured him I would. He eventually ran out of things to tell me and asked what was new.

“I've written a collection of poetry,” I said, purposely confusing the verb tense.

Margolis did not seem impressed. He sipped his iced tea. “Have you sold it yet?”

“It's coming out next year.” I have no idea why I lied, other than my reflexive need to impress Margolis. Wanting to make it difficult for him to detect this prevarication should he immediately Google me, I dropped the following gem: “In France.”

If his eyes could have flown from his head on springs they would have. Astonishment mixed with envy, chased by anger subtly downshifting to hostility before coming to rest at barely concealed resentment which he attempted to disguise with a half-smirk.

“
You
are publishing a collection of poetry? In
France
?” he said in a tone he might have used had I told him my dog could speak. Your
dog
can speak? Then quickly, “I didn't mean it like that. Congratulations, man, that's . . . amazing?” I thanked him and he asked if the poems had actually been composed in French.

I chortled modestly and told him they had not. I didn't want to be caught out in the event he asked me to say something in French, a language in which after
bonjour
I was more or less
perdu
. “Someone translated it.”

“Why there and not here?” To this I offered what was an attempt at a Gallic shrug, intended to convey puzzlement at the inscrutability of the universe. “Just fucking amazing.”

“Thank you,” I said. He just nodded his head, entirely lost for words. To throw a lifeline, I asked where he was living.

“I'm renting a place in
DUMBO
. I don't like it,” he said. “Too many art galleries. A man can't buy crackers.”

“Margolis,” I said, delicately probing, “Did your wife really get all the money?”

“Not all of it.” He morosely stuck another piece of lamb into his mouth. He hadn't even asked what the poems were about, just happy to change the subject. I didn't blame him. Margolis was someone for whom the success of others ranked just behind lupus on The List of Things That Are Unendurable.

“Did she get the house?”

“I have about an hour of prime material on her,” he said. “I've put it in King Henry's mouth. Yeah, she got the house, but my lawyer forced her to return my nuts, which she'd hung next to the wind chimes. Every time the Santa Anas blew they'd bang like castanets.”

Although my thoughts immediately dove to my own nether regions and whatever cellular malevolence was percolating down there I wrenched them back to the restaurant, laughed politely, and asked if he was looking to buy a place on the East Coast. When he said that he was I explained the situation with Mrs. Vendler's saltbox and briefly outlined my plan.

“You could do a lot of things with that money.”

I stared at him but he didn't make eye contact. He rubbed his chin then gazed at the crudely executed mural of the Pyramids on the wall across the room. Finally, he looked at me. “I don't have to do anything but hold on to the house for a year?”

“You do have to buy it, but I'll pay the mortgage.”

“Besides that?”

I assured him the only requirement was that he agree to purchase the house then sell it to me at a tidy profit.

There were not a lot of people I could ask to do this. No one at work could be allowed to find out. My life was not dotted with old friends and there was no family on which to lean in this kind of situation. I needed Margolis to say yes. When the check came I grabbed it. Margolis asked what the catch was and I assured him there wasn't one. I hoped his skeptical look was more out of habit. He told me he would think it over but agreed to look at the Vendler place that Sunday.

Margolis thanked me for lunch and said, “Tell me about Reetika.”

“My assistant? Smart, funny, a little desperate.”

“We have a lot in common. Would you mind if I asked her out?”

The tender optimism implicit in this question was affecting. His career as a playwright (Anne Boleyn in a Teterboro airplane hangar?) was on the verge of crash landing in Dashed Hopes, a land where Reetika was fluent in the language. Still, the two of them persevered. Maybe they were perfect for each other.

“You should absolutely ask her out,” I said. “Knock your socks off.” We toasted to Montauk and the budding renaissance of the Margolis love life.

“By the way,” Margolis said, “what's the timing on the deal?”

“Now.”

“Doesn't it take a while to get a mortgage approved? I'm asking because I'm going fishing with some friends down in Mexico for two weeks and we're leaving next Friday.”

“I can make some phone calls and get it expedited.”

A televised Yankee game failed to distract me that night and although I was tempted to drown myself in a large whiskey I resisted the urge and sipped herbal tea instead. Lying between clean sheets my thoughts chased each other like monkeys—Was the chemo working? What to do if it failed? Should I confess my feelings to Spaulding? I was risking my job, my law license, any real means of making a living, but the threat of extinction had released me from my ethical moorings and just how far was I willing to go?—until finally sleep curtained my tired eyes and delivered black relief.

Dawn skidded in bright-eyed and I spent the better part of the glorious Brooklyn morning nauseated from the chemo and with a headache that gripped my skull like a badger. To reassert control of my spiraling existence, I put on clean khakis and a fresh oxford cloth shirt. At a corner deli I ordered a large coffee and with my notebook in hand made for Prospect Park. Over the next several hours I began to feel better and managed to get some writing done. When I left the park I passed an accordionist sporting jaunty facial hair seated on a wooden stool warbling the Stephen Foster song “Beautiful Dreamer.” To his astonishment I added a fifty to the modest pile of bills in the shoebox displayed for that purpose.

On the walk home I stared at the sidewalk, diamond dust glinting in the late afternoon light, and thought about the word slake, how it included the noun lake and whether that was germane to its etymology. I failed to notice the person seated on the steps of my brownstone.

“Mr. Best.”

She wore a short yellow cotton dress with a pearl-gray cardigan. Her sandals had delicate straps that wound like tendrils several inches above slender ankles. Her hair was tied in a thick ponytail from which several long curls had escaped and framed her pretty face. There was a trace of pink lip gloss on her mouth and her eyes were delicately shadowed in a manner foreign to most teenage girls. A small black purse on a gold chain hung from her shoulder. On her lap was the Moleskine notebook. In the pink light of the late afternoon she held up her phone and took my picture. Given all that was weighing on me I could not have been happier.