Surface (36 page)

“How did we get here?” she asked miserably.

There was no answer in his gaze, only the strain of the last minutes, and months.

“I had what amounted to a one-night stand with the most horrific consequences,” she said, wiping her tears. “And you’ve apparently been having a long-term affair, and now you’ve almost literally robbed Peter to pay Paul? My God, Michael, how did we make such a mess of things?”

He blinked repeatedly, as if some convoluted details were finally registering. “I wasn’t having an affair. There was never anyone else. You think Taylor was . . . some woman I was sleeping with?”

Claire felt her anger reignite. “You apologized to Nick for the situation with her. I
saw
the e-mail. Or more accurately, you were sorry Nick apparently overheard some conversation and found out about her. How can you keep on denying what you’ve—”

“Claire,” Michael said, looking more desolate than she’d ever remembered seeing him, “Taylor was a boy I knew in Belmont Hill when I was a teenager. And he died.” He cupped his face in his hands as he continued. “He killed himself because he was gay. Because I—we . . . hazed him. We were just kids—three stupid, cocky seventeen-year-olds—and we didn’t think about consequences. Christ,” he moaned, his eyes once again distant and focused on that faraway time and place. “He was a nice kid, a pool boy at the country club. And we just got swept up in all of the . . . the one-upping that goes on with teenagers. And then one day, in the middle of the summer, he hanged himself. In his parents’ shed.”

Claire’s mouth went slack as she tried to digest this particularly unexpected and tragic secret. “Oh my God, why didn’t you ever tell me? This is so—”

“Horrible? Devastating? Yeah, it was all of those things, multiplied by a factor you could never comprehend. No one could. We made stupid choices in our immaturity, and a life was lost. An innocent, struggling boy. There had been a note, no names mentioned, but our taunts were spelled out in it. My parents, they helped Taylor’s family afterward. Financially.” Michael’s body seemed to have folded in on itself in the chair. “And none of us ever spoke about it again. I couldn’t do anything to change what had happened other than to—to move forward and try to be a better man, to live a life with a higher purpose. But I failed miserably,” he murmured in a small, broken voice. “I failed.”

“Michael,” Claire intoned. She followed with a flood of questions, which he went on to answer with weary resignation. He explained that Nicky had found out about Taylor at Paul and Margot’s house just before coming home from Andover. They had asked him at dinner, as was their custom, what his proudest accomplishment had been at school. He had gotten an A, he had told them, on a speech about Tyler Clementi, the gay student who killed himself after his roommate webcammed him. Hate crime legislation was the final topic in speech and debate class, and his speech had gone over so well that he was going to use it for tournaments next year. Apparently things got very uncomfortable and weird at the table after that. And Nicky apparently did some listening at their door later.

“That’s what you two were discussing in the study before you left for London, wasn’t it?” Claire asked, still stunned by the turn of events.

Michael bowed his chin. “He told me I was a hypocrite for not standing up to my friends and doing the right thing like I’d always hammered him to do. That I had no right to get on his case about not calling Chazz’s sister after taking her out once—which is a whole separate story—given the much more
damaging
choices I had made at his age.”
Hypocrite,
Michael repeated despondently. “And he asked me if I regretted letting my father buy me out of the whole mess and make it all disappear. He didn’t buy me out of anything, Claire,” Michael said, shaking his head, his swollen blue eyes focusing on her. “It was a different time. People weren’t as open and accepting, and families liked to keep things like this private. So Paul did the only thing he could do under the circumstances, and Taylor’s parents were grateful for the . . . help. I told Nicky that I regretted my actions every day of my life, but all he could see was cowardice and a failure in character. I mean, how do you tell your kid you were just clueless and immature, when you ask him to be so much more?” He shook his head again and turned away from her.

But for Claire, it was as if the drapes suddenly had been drawn open on their marriage, and for the first time her view was unobstructed. Her husband’s secrets and motivations were not those of the unfaithful, deceitful man she had come there to condemn, but of a haunted and conflicted man who had spent his life in flight from himself and his failures, trying to right an unrightable deed by stacking up accomplishments and money and good works, and hoping to win back the respect of the man he had least wanted to disappoint. And by pressing their son to live up to the high family standards he had long ago failed to uphold.
Seventeen already, Jesus,
she could hear Michael uttering.
On the verge of everything promising.
The promise of doing better than he had. And the fading promise, Claire thought, that Michael might, at least, have the respect and admiration of his son. That Nick had discovered his father’s secret at that very same age when the hubris and naïveté of adolescence often collide—and that once again the results had been ill-fated—was almost too sad an irony for Claire to bear. And as she imagined how scarred Michael must be, she also considered how much those scars should count toward excusing his inability to forgive her and commiserate over their mistakes. After all, it was their
compounded
carelessness, though from different decades, that had come home to roost.

“I’m sorry you’ve been living with all of this,” she said, meaning it. “But your behavior toward me since the accident—all of this makes it doubly irrational. Why were you so callous, so unwilling to try and work through everything?”

He chewed on his lip for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he said feebly. “I thought I was losing Nicky. He’s everything to me, the best thing I’ve ever been part of. And I couldn’t believe that life and death could so easily be . . . intersecting for a kid again, my kid. Maybe it just made everything more manageable if I could blame someone else. I don’t know.” He avoided Claire’s eyes as he continued. “And then the portfolio problems, everything was imploding. The pension money was supposed to be a one-week float at the most. But there were complications. So many fucking complications.” He paused, exhaling somberly. “But the bigger truth is, our marriage wasn’t working anymore. It hadn’t been for a while, Claire. You had to have seen that.”

Claire shook her head slowly.

“Not because of what
either
of us did.” He looked her in the eye now, his grief clearly mirroring her own. “Just . . . because. Life sometimes happens that way, you know? And I’m sorry. For everything. I just kept thinking I could somehow get out from under all of it.” A glimmer of sun hovered on the horizon, framing him in a burnt-umber glow.

She was surprised by the lack of anger she felt with his explanation. Mostly, though, she felt sad that they had both been lost and living with their own bad decisions for far too long. “I thought we’d built something good for the longest time, Michael. And then I guess we just stopped paying attention. I’m sorry I didn’t pay better attention.”

He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “And I thought for the longest time that staying together was the right thing for Nicky. But I guess I was just distracting myself from being responsible for another terrible disappointment. I couldn’t be . . . responsible again.” The sharp contours of Michael’s habitually squared jaw were gone. “Another failure wasn’t an option. Well, until it . . . was.”

Claire pondered this uncharacteristic show of honesty and emotion. There was something so unexpectedly vulnerable, so Nick-like in his face. The furnace clicked off, and she steadied a hand on the desk as she stood, processing her own truth that as hurt as she was, it wasn’t the shattering hurt of lost love. But the final, undeniable shattering of the illusion. They
had
loved each other once. Just not in a timeless love-story sort of way. And for the sake of that once-lovely truth, and the gift of their son, she made a choice.

“We need to put an end to this quickly, Michael. So we don’t continue to hurt each other, or hurt Nicky,” she said, taking the folder from her purse and picking up the CD. They were just two parents now. “I came here to force your hand. I was going to insist that you go to Paul tomorrow and ask him for the three-point-two million to repay the pension, or I would give this information to my attorney—who would be compelled to report everything to the authorities. And I was going to have you ask Paul for additional funds to be wired to me, so that, among other things, I can buy this house.” She removed a Coldwell Banker brochure from the folder and pushed it across the desk. “But,” she said, knowing that it really wasn’t her nature to live life through a lens of darkness or revenge—and banking that it really wasn’t Michael’s either, “I’m hoping that you’ll come to your own conclusions about the right way to handle all of this.”

Michael took the brochure and read through it, looking up at her every few seconds, as if to remind himself that it was Claire sitting across from him. “It’s a nice house,” he said. “But I’m not going to my father.” He untwisted a paper clip into a jagged hook. “You should know that better than anyone.”

She did know now—how desperate he had been to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the man who had rescued him once before, and what a
Sophie’s Choice
it would be to ask for his help again. “What I know is that he’s your best option, your
only
option, if you want to minimize the extent of your problems. It’s difficult, I get that. But pension fraud is serious business, Michael, and I don’t want you to go to prison. You need to get that paid back immediately.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Think about Nicky’s best interests. Is your pride more important than being around to help raise your son?” She could hear him breathing, could see his chest actually heaving. “I know your parents would not want to see you in this position. You’ve proven yourself enough to them over the years. And you know how they feel about Nicky.” She didn’t bring up the potential for an embarrassing scandal that
couldn’t
be kept under wraps if he didn’t make an effort to resolve things quickly. Or that she would go to Paul if she had to. “Call him, Michael,” she urged. “The longer you wait, the trickier things are going to get with the Department of Labor.”

With their house of cards collapsed and splayed around them, it amazed her, the amount of urging it took. But if not for his hubris and her years of standing quietly, blindly by, she recognized that they wouldn’t have found themselves wading through such wreckage. And so she reiterated her case, in addition to clarifying her wishes on the issues of an educational and medical trust for Nicky, a lump-sum divorce settlement, and all of the other financial imperatives she’d gone over with Gail.

“I’d like to be able to restart my life with a nice home for Nicky. So if you’ll get the loan from your father and forward the funds for me to buy the house next week, I’ll walk away with the number we discussed,” Claire said, trying to ignore the heartrending sense of disbelief that it had all come down to this. “I don’t want to fight or drag things out unnecessarily. We’ve already done enough damage.”

Michael’s stared numbly at her, and she could see that he had expended the extent of his emotional capital for one afternoon.

“Just toss it around—with or without your lawyers. It’s fair. And if nothing else, we owe each other that.” Claire looked at him with regret and gathered her things. “Good-bye, Michael,” she said softly. “Call me by noon tomorrow and let me know where we are.”

She counted the steps to the door as she walked out, willing herself not to look back. She had been squeezing into the role of guilt-ridden partner for so long, that in peeling it off like a too-tight pair of jeans, she could breathe again. It felt almost euphoric, until she began to hyperventilate.

And in her wired, uncertain state, she didn’t hear Nicholas quietly shut the door to his bedroom behind the study, didn’t hear him tear the sheets from his bed.

C
HAPTER
44

“O
h, hon, you didn’t ask for nearly enough. You’re holding all the cards now, and Paul Montgomery could write you a check for a couple million every year until he croaks and still never spend half his money.”

Claire, Gail, Jackie, and Carolyn sat at the back of DJ’s, an out of the way café in the Highlands, filling the hours until noon and buffering Claire’s tenterhooks.

“I didn’t want to give the old man a stroke,” Claire said over her plate of uneaten eggs Benedict. “And I don’t want to be beholden to them. I just want to be able to walk away from this as honorably and as quickly as I can. And not be financially tied to Michael’s choices anymore.”

“You did good, Claire,” Jackie said. “You and Nicky will have a great place to live, he’ll be taken care of financially,
and
you’ll have a nice cushion to start over with.”

“It’s all still a big ‘if.’ I couldn’t get a good read on Michael when I left. And I honestly don’t know what’s more frightening to him—going to Paul with the truth and asking for his help, or dragging this Wincor thing out to the bitter end and risking prison.” She didn’t tell them about Taylor, except that to say that
she
was a
he,
an old friend with no impact on the present situation. The rest would remain Michael’s secret, his story to explain, or not, to Nicholas.

“Sweetie,” Carolyn assured, “Michael will do everything in his power to keep his ass
and
his reputation pristine, if you know what I’m saying. And if that means requesting a little cash from Daddy, you can bet he will. Never mind that you’ve given him a head start with the authorities
and
offered him the deal of the century. I wouldn’t have been so generous to the lying bastard.”

“And never mind that our attorney is going to need a therapist when you tell him what you’ve offered without his advice,” Gail said.

Claire looked at her watch nervously.

“Michael’s just digesting things,” Jackie reassured her, glancing at Claire’s iPhone, which was propped against the bread basket. “And I’m sure that’s requiring more than the usual amount of Pepto.”

“I don’t know. It’s eleven thirty, and still nothing.” She could feel her optimism for a simple resolution waning with the morning. “I wish I could just push a button and have this all behind us.”

“Isn’t there an app for that?” Gail asked, reaching her fork across the table to Jackie’s French toast.

“Gail,” Carolyn said, “you know better than anyone that this is not going to be simple.”

“I know. But I also believe that Michael and Paul will come through. It’s far too good a deal for them not to,” she said to Claire, shaking her head. “Paul is a smart man.”

“I have to agree that you’ve made things far easier than they ought to be, sweetie. That money will be gone quicker than you think. And I’m feeling incredibly concerned about your future.”

Claire felt every last bit of mileage she’d put under her belt in the last few weeks. “I appreciate that. But I’m coming from a slightly less elevated rung on the financial ladder than you and Gail, and I’m fine with what I offered. I’d rather walk away with a smaller amount now than wait for all of Michael’s deals to stabilize and start cash flowing again, and be dependent on a monthly check. However, given that I haven’t been able to sleep for more than two hours at night, I
have
spent considerable time thinking about my own future cash flow. And,” Claire said, amazing herself with a smile, “I’ve come up with a plan I’m actually excited about.”

The women put down their coffees and put on their reading glasses, and focused as Claire expounded on the business proposal she placed in the center of the table. “I’ve made some calls and reconnected with my mentor and old colleagues in New York and London, and my plan is to do private art consulting.” Her as yet unnamed advisory service, she explained, would help clients identify onetime purchases or long-term collecting strategies, as well as source and acquire works. “I’m thinking about doing a private tour to Art Basel in December. Miami’s on fire now. I can also advise on framing, placement, and installation, too.” Her voice rose in excitement. “Hell, I’ll do it myself. And given the economy, I anticipate a brisk business in selling off single pieces, and liquidating entire collections, too.”

Jackie shot her a knowing smile. “I’m proud of you,” she whispered.

“Sign me up as your first client,” Carolyn said ecstatically. “Now that the collection’s in my name, you will be my go-to person for all acquisitions and sales. I also need to have a few pieces independently appraised,
and
I’ve been wanting to shift everything around on the main level. But I just can’t get the vision right. So,” she said with a flourish of her checkbook wallet, “you’re hired!”

With all the enthusiasm and light bubbling up around her, Claire felt as if she were taking the first steps out through the shadows. “Oh, let’s not worry about fees. I’ll come over and we can spend a morning creating a new vision for the space. And I can bring my appraiser, too.”

Carolyn leaned back into her chair, obviously pleased with the prospect.

“You know,” Gail said, pouring more syrup onto Jackie’s French toast, “Zibby’s been very tied in with the San Francisco art scene ever since she bought her little pied-à-terre there. And she just adores you, so I’m sure she’d be happy to make some introductions.”

“Thank you.”

“By the way, hon, what are you going to call this fab new brainchild?”

Claire relaxed slightly. “Well, my first thought was ‘Nothing Toulouse,’ but I’ll probably need to go with something a little more refined.” She laughed.

“How about Renaissance?” Jackie suggested after some consideration.

Claire rolled the idea around. “Renaissance Fine Arts Consulting,” she repeated, envisioning logos and business cards, and warming to this idea of her future. “That’s not bad.” Just then her cell phone vibrated and lit up with Michael’s name. It was 12:00. Claire looked from the phone into her cheerleader’s faces. “I guess this is it,” she whispered.

“No,” Jackie firmly stated. “
This
is it.” She pointed to the business plan. “Everything else is just details.”

“Hello,” Claire said with a small pit in her stomach.

The call lasted a mere two minutes. As Claire listened, her expression shifted from one of hope to devastation. When it was over, she set the phone down and wiped her mouth with her napkin.

“Sweetie?” Carolyn asked after a stunned silence. “What happened?”

Claire took a sip of water and gathered herself. “He called Paul.”

“So, he accepted your proposal?” Jackie asked

“Yes.”

“Then why so downbeat, hon? This is what you wanted, right?”

“Apparently Nicky came home early and overheard me make my demands. And he confronted Michael about the pension fraud after I left. Nick got very agitated and threatened to call Paul himself, if Michael didn’t. He’s terrified of his dad going to jail, and he’s devastated by the whole mess,” she explained, feeling no elation in what should have been a small victory. “I guess it was a very long night. And Michael’s apoplectic.”

“Shit,” Jackie said, summarizing Claire’s mood.

“But he’s following through on what you asked?” Gail pushed. “The restitution and the money for you?”

“Yes. Both Paul’s and Michael’s attorneys will be contacting Jack on Monday,” she said, distractedly.

“Then it looks like Nicky helped to make your offer one that Michael couldn’t refuse. Which is good for both of them in the long run.”

“But drawing Nick into everything was not my plan. He’s suffered enough collateral damage already. This is his father, and he really didn’t need to hear about all the financial crap.” She closed her eyes and tried to imagine what it must have been like for a kid to learn—for the second time—that his boyhood hero was anything but super.