I Regret Everything (2 page)

Despite the early hour, hip-hop music throbbed from the apartment next door. When the landlord had informed me that the new neighbor was Croatian, my Slavophile—Dostoevsky! Prokofiev! Borscht!—ears pricked up. He was a fortyish man named Bogdan who entertained at odd hours and had a great fondness for international interpretations of urban music and hashish, which regularly wafted from beneath his door into the hallway. Several times, when the
BOOM-THUNKA-THUNK
of the bass abused my ears at 2:00
A.M.
, I knocked on his door and requested it be turned down. Invariably, he would be stoned, but the druggy membrane would barely filter the enmity he exuded like body odor. His look seemed to say, I'm in America now and I can do whatever the fuck. The volume would be lowered, but a day or two later the same thing would occur and again I would ask him to be more neighborly. The last time I stood at Bogdan's door in the middle of the night I saw three dark-suited men who looked like they had just returned from performing a contract killing in Chechnya. They eyed me like I was a capon. I threw in the towel and purchased earplugs.

Showered and shaved, I ate a breakfast of yogurt and half a banana while I labored over a new poem. After an hour, when it became clear I had written myself into a corner from which no escape seemed possible, I put down the pad. To ensure the early morning wouldn't be a total waste I dashed off two checks for five hundred dollars each, one to a local food bank and the other to the New York Public Library Annual Fund. Then I walked from my apartment on a tree-lined street in Carroll Gardens through a Brooklyn bouillabaisse of vigorous mothers pushing baby-laden strollers with gym-toned arms, medicated children of high achievers shouldering bursting book bags, and sullen hipsters slouching sleepy-eyed toward coffee shops, to the F train.

While soaping myself in the shower I had noticed a lump in my groin, a slight swelling just to the left of my pubic bone. Anatomy was not my bailiwick. The area to the left of my business was terra incognita. Swelling anywhere was not good, but what was swollen usually reverted to the mean before long. Unfortunately, because my livelihood required the constant projection of worst-case scenarios, I found myself battling the nagging notion that this symptom spelled The End. My mother had been treated for lung cancer and although she was a lifelong smoker I feared a similar fate.

“Mr. Best, hello?” In my reverie, I had forgotten about Spaulding.

“Sorry, what?”

“My therapist told me it's okay to joke about anything.”

“What were you talking about?”

“I said you were halfway to dead.”

Halfway to dead
—delivered with a smile, like it was amusing, which, under the circumstances, it was not. It was audacious, though, and announced a will to engage in an exchange that might provide passage from the drab confines of Thatcher, Sturgess & Simonson to worlds uncharted. It invited a comeback, a rejoinder that would raise the temperature of the room and alleviate the tedium of the day. But in the time it took to review the situation and game the possible outcomes only an idiot would conclude there was anything to be gained by even an innocent flirtation with Ed Simonson's teenage daughter. So I gazed at her evenly and waited. If she wanted pop and fizz it was not being served. When Spaulding realized no response was imminent, she absently ran the tip of her forefinger along the sleeve of her sweater, ignoring me completely. She wore rings on several fingers, including one made of silver and shaped like a chevron on her right thumb. Her purplish nail polish was chipped.

“It was inelegant,” she said. “Do you like that word?”

“Inelegant is excellent.”

I returned my attention to the liquidation of the Vendler estate. It held a Montauk saltbox anyone might covet and I pictured myself cradled by a chaise with a book in my lap lounging on a buttery summer day. This was a stalling tactic because Spaulding's presence required, strike that,
demanded
, attention. I had no intention of giving in so easily.

Kevin Pratt strode past the office door with an armful of files. A sixth-year associate, he was a hale and fit former college squash player and looked like the kind of person who never suffered a head cold. Over six feet tall with a wide chest, he walked on the balls of his feet, which gave him the aspect of a faintly menacing rabbit. At Thatcher, Sturgess & Simonson he was the closest thing I had to a friend. Pratt glanced in and stopped when he saw Spaulding upholstered on my couch. I asked if he had met Ed Simonson's daughter. He looked her over appraisingly and reported he had not.

Spaulding possessed the sensor that tells a woman when someone is doing a sexual Dun & Bradstreet on her and gave a polite smile that Pratt, had he any sensors at all, would have read as an invitation to go away. My colleague was competitive when it came to women. In his state fair, Spaulding was a blue ribbon.

“Do you want a tour of the office?” he asked.

“Maybe later,” she said, in a way that meant never. “I'm having a private conversation with Mr. Best. Nice meeting you, Mr. Pratt.”

Spaulding wielded the power inherent in being the managing partner's daughter, while at the same time mocking that power. There was a captivating lightness to her manner, a sense that the entire scene was being staged for her enjoyment and she appreciated the effort everyone was making. Dismissed by the duchess, he departed.

“I've got a lot to do,” I said.

She rose from the couch and rounded my desk. Reflexively, I hit the key that returned my monitor to the screen saver, a color photograph of Lake Winnipesaukee surrounded by flaming autumn foliage selected for its banality. She stood behind and to the left of me, no more than a foot away. There was a pleasing scent. Her hair? I tried not to notice autumn and pine and the savory tang of fresh ginger cookies because it was June and humid and Spaulding.

“These are all poetry?” She had removed a delicate volume from the shelf:
Lord Weary's Castle
by Robert Lowell, pub. 1946.

“Be careful. They're first editions.”

Spaulding returned the book to its place. “Whose will are you working on?”

It would have been a relief to have described my desire for Mrs. Vendler's house, for a quiet place to write, somewhere to pursue my destiny away from the kingdom of her father, but what I said was, “I can't talk about it, although nothing would give me more pleasure. Well, that's an exaggeration.”

The mellifluous laughter sounded like a cascade of pearls and caught me by surprise. Spaulding moved away from me, then turned and relaxed into the sofa.

“I read your poem in
The Paris Review
,” she said. These are eight words guaranteed to freeze the blood of any poet while he awaits the follow-up. Whether the verdict is positive or negative, one develops an instant case of acute stress response, otherwise known as fight or flight, and further brain activity ceases until the situation is resolved.
I liked it
or
I hated it
doesn't matter. What matters, and matters deeply, is the stating of some,
any,
opinion. It violates the laws of the universe to say
I read your poem
followed by nothing. This is to stare into the yawning void itself. “That's why I came to talk to you, but if you're really tied up, we'll do it another time. Okay, so.”

I waited. She placed her hands behind her neck and with an outward flick of fingers delicately fluffed her ambrosial curls.

“It was good.”

I could have smoked a cigarette.

Then she stood up to leave. “You can stay a minute,” I said, trying to convey with a mixture of insouciance and feigned impatience the strain her continued presence was going to be. At this I failed spectacularly. Of all of my bad qualities, vanity is perhaps the one of which I am least proud. So if someone wants to make “The Valley of Akbar”—the title of my poem—the center of attention, the experience has the voluptuous quality of a Roman orgy. Spaulding returned to her previous attitude on the sofa, and held me in regal regard. “Finish your thought,” I said.

“I already did.”

Was she going to make me interview her, to extract another morsel of a compliment? I had to finish dealing with Mrs. Vendler's estate and prepare for a client meeting. There was no time to dither with Spaulding. “So you read
The Paris Review
?”

“They had it at my school. My English teacher subscribed and he knew who you were. He didn't believe you worked with my father. And, yes, I read it. Why do you use a pseudonym? Don't you want to be famous?”

“No one wants to hire a poet to do what I do. The stereotype persists. Clients want paragons of probity.”

“Then you probably shouldn't say ‘paragons of probity,' since it sounds kind of poetic.”

“In the law, dullness is a virtue.”

“A boring lawyer didn't write that poem of yours. You slice a terrorist's balls off and give him breast implants? All in
terza rima
? Pretty punk rock.”

“It was supposed to be about empathy.”

“Weren't you afraid the ayatollahs would get all
jihadi
with you?”

“I don't think they're the
Paris Review
demographic.”

She thought about this and nodded. It was not only unusual for me to have a spontaneous conversation with a reader who had responded to my work, it had never actually happened. And that she knew
terza rima
—the
a
,
b
,
a
rhyme scheme popularized by Dante in
The Divine Comedy
—was aphrodisiacal. Spaulding swung her feet to the floor, placed her elbows on her knees, and lit me with her eyes. “What else have you written?”

“I've published poems in literary journals you've probably never heard of and I'm finishing a collection.”

“Finishing?”

Was that a skeptical brow furrow? Hard to tell. People think lawyers play fast and loose with the truth but this is not my modus operandi. The truth is easier to remember, and so it is what I habitually sling.

“Soon.”

“So, Mr. Best.” I waited. Like a deer hesitating on the misty shoulder of the Taconic Parkway, she seemed to be deciding whether or not to proceed across. “I think Edward P. Simon­son is kind of busy today.” There was a brief pause in the conversation, then, “Want to take me to lunch?” Her voice was barely above a whisper, barely above a thought, really, and I wasn't sure I had heard correctly. “Never mind, forget it.”

“What?”

“That was crazy.” She hesitated, then out flew, “If you took me to lunch you could tell me about the poetry collection you haven't finished.”

I laughed, which was something I rarely did at the office, and Spaulding's cheeks flushed. There was some kind of interior struggle going on that made me root for her.

“Much as I'd savor your disdain, I've got a lot of work to do.”

From somewhere there came an exasperated exhalation of breath and I looked up to see her father's bulky form in the doorway. “Spaulding,” he said in a voice redolent of regattas and swizzle sticks, “What are you doing here?”

“You were in a meeting.”

He told her to wait for him in his office. She rose languidly, said goodbye, and strolled past her father. Before departing she turned and mouthed, “I won't tell him you're a poet.” It was hard not to grin. When Ed apologized for his daughter's unscheduled visit I assured him she had not been a problem. Ed was fifty and had the fleshy look of an ex-athlete.

“Your billables for May were the same level as they were in April,” he said. Ed's tone was beige but I knew that my April billables were more than acceptable. That was his setup. Now came the attack: “Kevin Pratt did well in May.” I nodded, giving nothing away. This was a favorite tactic of his. He would suggest that perhaps one was not performing at the highest level, stoke interoffice rivalries, and then wait for a reaction. In these moments I coped with his presence by composing nonsense couplets:

Simonson was my savvy captor /
He spoke fluent Velociraptor.

Then without another word he was gone, presumably to play the same kind of mind games with his daughter. Between Ed's gamesmanship, Spaulding's pheromones, and what I had discovered in the shower, it was difficult to concentrate. The rain had stopped so I told Reetika I was going for a walk.

In Central Park two elderly violinists were playing a Bartok Duo. Wisps of steam rose from puddles. Pedestrians strode past. The only other people who stopped to listen were an older lady wearing a sun hat and clutching a WNET tote bag and a nanny whose charge was asleep in a pram. The music was lovely, the hurly-burly of the city faded, and for a few moments there existed no thoughts of meetings or clients, the future or the past, only the soothing tones of the timeless melody. When they finished I dropped a crisp twenty into an open instrument case and turned quickly away so the musicians would not see that I was weeping.

T
hat year went from heinous to outstanding and back to dreadful. My mother's third marriage broke up so she was more unavailable than usual. My father was over a decade into his second one and no closer to divorcing this wife who treated me like I had the Ebola virus. Then there was the month I spent in “rehab” which was really a mental hospital but my parents insisted we call it “rehab” since being marinated in drugs and alcohol didn't have the same stigma as crazy. Oh, and my older brother Gully who lived in Seattle where he was learning how to build sailboats only came to visit once while I was recuperating.

I was living with my mother in Manhattan and planning to enroll at Barnard in the fall. It was good to be back in the city. I had gone to Spence until my parents divorced and they shipped me off to school in Switzerland. It wasn't that they didn't love me. But parents have their own needs and everyone's needs were equally important as my mother explained to me after polishing off her third gin and tonic in the Swissair departure lounge when I was twelve and flying to Europe alone for the first time.