The Emperor of Ocean Park (17 page)

“But do you promise?”

She seems to think I have some choice. I am not sure I really do. Because love is a gift we deliver when we would rather not.

“I promise, darling.”

She slumps back in her chair as though worn out from all this pleading. “Thank you, honey. Thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome.” I smile. “I love you.”

“Oh, Misha,” she whispers, shaking her head.

The waiter brings a bottle of wine that I scarcely remember Kimmer ordering. I do not drink, given my father’s history, but the Madisons consider the prudent consumption of high-priced alcohol a part of the sophistication of the palate. She takes a few sips and smiles at me, then leans back in her chair again and looks out over the room. Then she suddenly hops up. I know this routine. She has spotted somebody she knows. Kimmer loves to work a room: that’s why she was president of her graduating class at Mount Holyoke and of our local bar association and might soon be a federal judge. As I watch, she hurries across the restaurant to greet an Asian American couple dining over by the far wall. They shake hands, and they all share a good laugh, and then she is back. The man writes editorials for the
Post,
she explains. She met him this morning, when she went to see her friend from college. His wife, Kimmer continues, is a producer for one of the Sunday-morning television talk shows. “You never know.” She shrugs. Then she retakes my hand and plays with my fingers in the candlelight until our main course arrives. I would usually be willing to let Kimmer play with my fingers all night, but my brain refuses to cooperate. As I cut into my overpriced steak, a thought occurs to me, prompted by my wife’s table-hopping.

“Darling?”

“Hmmm?”

“Do you remember the last time we saw my father? I mean, both of us, together?”

She nods. “Last year. He was in town for the alumni association or something.” She will not concede he might have wanted to see Bentley, or me, still less
her.
She shifts in her seat. “About this time.”

“And you said he looked . . . worried.”

“Yeah, I remember. We’d be sitting at dinner at the Faculty Club or something and you’d ask him a question and he wouldn’t say anything, he’d be looking into the middle of nowhere, and you’d ask again and
he’d say, ‘You don’t have to shout.’” Her gaze softens. “Oh, Misha, I’m sorry. That’s not a very happy memory, is it?”

I choose not to go there. “I’ve seen him since then. Once.” When I was in Washington on business and we had dinner. He was distracted then, too. “I just wondered . . . did it seem to you . . . when you said he seemed ‘worried,’ did you mean . . .”

“Just tense, Misha. Stressed.” Taking my hand again. “That’s all.”

I shake my head, wondering why the image of the Judge’s last visit to Elm Harbor leaped so nimbly to mind. Maybe Mariah’s creepy insistence that the causes were not natural is starting to get to me.

The talk turns to other things: gossip about the law school, chitchat about the firm, jockeying our vacation schedules. She tells me what her sister, Lindy, is up to these days, and I recycle old stories about Addison. I tell Kimmer what fun Bentley had on his first day on in-line skates, but not about the woman who flirted with me, or about my temptation to flirt back. Kimmer, perhaps detecting something in my eyes before I glance guiltily away, teases me about the crush everyone once thought I had on Lindy, the more solid and reliable of the Madison sisters, whom my parents fervently hoped I would marry. We banter on, as we used to in the old days, the good days, our courting days, and then, as dessert arrives, Kimmer, who has been watching the time, tells me that an hour has passed. She is all business again. I sigh, but dutifully summon the waiter and ask him where the telephones are, and he produces one with a flourish, plugging it into a jack underneath the table. I wink at my wife.

“You could have used my cell phone,” she says glumly.

“I know, darling, but I’ve always wanted to do this. Just like in the movies.” Her return smile is tight; I realize just how overwrought she is. I pat her hand and push buttons on the phone. Grace picks up and, as promised, puts me right through.

“Talcott,” booms the great Mallory Corcoran, “I am so glad you called. I was just about to send out an all-points bulletin. Look, we have a serious problem. In the first place, Jack Ziegler is not currently under investigation by the Justice Department. They wish they had something on him, because, well, you know, it’s every prosecutor’s dream to put a powerful white guy away”—he barks these words with no sense of irony—“but right now they just don’t. So they are busy frying other fish.”

“I see,” I say, although I do not. Kimmer, reading my face, looks fearful.

“That’s not the problem, though. The problem is this. Morton Pearlman talked to the Attorney General and the AG talked to the director of the Federal Bureau and he talked to his people. And here’s what they tell me. I heard it from the AG himself. The FBI did not know that you talked to Jack Ziegler in the cemetery yesterday, Talcott. There was no surveillance. And nobody from the FBI came to see you today, Talcott. Why would they? Nobody from the FBI has asked you anything about Jack Ziegler at all. And the background check on Kimberly hasn’t really started yet.”

“You’re joking.”

“I wish I were. Now, you’re sure they said they were from the Bureau?”

“I’m sure.”

“Did you see their credentials?”

“Of course I saw their credentials.” But, thinking back, I realize that I gave their wallets only a glance: who studies photos and numbers and the rest in any detail?

“I figured you did.” He hesitates, as though uncertain how to share an unpleasant truth. “Listen, Talcott, here’s the thing. Somebody came to see you pretending to be from the Bureau. Well, that happens to be a major felony. That means they have to investigate it. As a courtesy, they are putting it off until tomorrow. But tomorrow morning, a couple of FBI agents, the real kind, want to interview you. Here, at the office, at eleven. I can’t be there, because Edie and I are going to Hawaii for a few days, but Meadows and maybe a couple of my other people will. No charge,” he adds, a considerable relief but also something of an insult. He senses my distress. “Sorry to dump all this on you, Talcott. Really sorry. But after it’s resolved, I will make the calls for Kimberly. I promise.”

After it’s resolved,
I am thinking as I hang up the phone. Meaning he will not lift a finger on Kimmer’s behalf until he sees which way the wind is blowing.

“What’s wrong, honey?” my wife asks, clutching my hand as though it can keep her from drowning. “Misha, what is it?”

I look at my wife, my beautiful, brilliant, disloyal, desperately if unhappily ambitious wife. The mother of our child. The only woman I will ever love. I want to make it right. I can’t.

“It’s not going to die,” I tell her.

CHAPTER 9
A PEDAGOGICAL DISAGREEMENT

(I)

T
HE FOLLOWING
T
UESDAY
, twelve days after the death of my father, I return to my dreary classroom, populated, it often seems, by undereducated but deeply committed Phi Beta Kappa ideologues—leftists who believe in class warfare but have never opened
Das Kapital
and certainly have never perused Werner Sombart, hard-line capitalists who accept the inerrancy of the invisible hand but have never studied Adam Smith, third-generation feminists who know that sex roles are a trap but have never read Betty Friedan, social Darwinists who propose leaving the poor to sink or swim but have never heard of Herbert Spencer or William Sumner’s essay on
The Challenge of Facts,
black separatists who mutter bleakly about institutional racism but are unaware of the work of Carmichael and Hamilton, who invented the term—all of them our students, all of them hopelessly young and hopelessly smart and thus hopelessly sure they alone are right, and nearly all of whom, whatever their espoused differences, will soon be espoused to huge corporate law firms, massive profit factories where they will bill clients at ridiculous rates for two thousand hours of work every year, quickly earning twice as much money as the best of their teachers, and at half the age, sacrificing all on the altar of career, moving relentlessly upward, as ideology and family life collapse equally around them, and at last arriving, a decade or two later, cynical and bitter, at their cherished career goals, partnerships, professorships, judgeships, whatever kind of ships they dream of sailing, and then looking around at the angry, empty waters and realizing that they have arrived with nothing, absolutely nothing, and wondering what to do with the rest of their wretched lives.

Or maybe I am just measuring their prospects by my own.

My family and I returned to Elm Harbor last Thursday after my brief interview at Corcoran & Klein with
real
agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Cassie Meadows surprisingly mature and competent at my side. Kimmer went straight back to work, instantly resuming her manic pace and crazy hours, and has already made another trip to San Francisco, for the greater wealth and glory of EHP. The real FBI has had no success in tracking down the two men who confronted me at Shepard Street, but my wife has persuaded herself that they were reporters, looking for dirt. She does not care whether she persuades me.

Mariah, meanwhile, has a new theory. It is no longer Jack Ziegler who killed the Judge; it is a litigant who blames my father for rejecting some appeal; and she is undaunted by the fact that the Judge left the bench well over a decade ago. “Probably a big corporation,” she insisted last night on the phone, her third call in five days. “You have no idea how amoral they are. Or how long they can hold a grudge.” I wondered what Howard would say to that, but prudently bit my tongue. Mariah added that a friend of hers had agreed to search the Internet for possible hired killers. But when I challenged Mariah gently, she scolded me all over again for never standing by her in the clutch.

“Sisters are just like that,” said Rob Saltpeter, the spindly constitutional-futurist who is my occasional basketball partner, when I related part of the story while we sat in the locker room yesterday morning at the Y, the two of us having been slaughtered by a couple of off-duty cops. His eyes, as always, were serene. “But, the thing is, you have to remember that
she
would stand by
you
in the clutch.”

“What makes you say that?”

Rob smiled. At six feet five he has four inches on me, but I probably outweigh him by fifty pounds. Although not, yet, quite fat, I am more than a little bit overweight; he is terribly thin. Neither one of us is an impressive sight in Jockey shorts in a locker room.

“Just a sense that I get.”

“You’ve never even met her.”

“I have two sisters,” objected Rob, whose fundamental warmth is tempered by a zealous certainty that all families are, or should be, like his own.

“Not like Mariah.”

“It doesn’t matter what she’s like. Your obligation to be there for her is exactly the same no matter what. It doesn’t come from her behavior.
It doesn’t come from what you think of her. It comes from the fact that you are her brother.”

“I thought we abolished status-based relationships about a century ago,” I teased, a typically silly lawyer’s inside joke. In a status-based relationship, the parties’ obligations are determined by who they are (husband-wife, parent-child, master-servant, and so on), rather than by agreement.

“Man abolished them. God didn’t.”

Nothing much to say to that, and I suppose I agree. Rob is, by his own description, an observant Jew, and he talks about his faith more than any other professor I know, including, to the squirmy chagrin of many students, in the classroom. Perhaps it is this oracular side of Rob Saltpeter that keeps us from becoming closer friends. Or perhaps it is simply that I am not a friendly fellow. To cover an unexpected surge of pain, I asked him for advice.

“Nothing to do but go on,” he shrugged, which is his answer for just about everything.

Well, fine. I am going on. Badly.

And so it is that on this, my first day back in the classroom, I find myself persecuting an unfortunate young man whose sin is to inform us all that the cases I expect my students to master are irrelevant, because the rich guys always win. Now, it is true that some poor fool announces this conclusion every fall, and it is also true that more than a few professors have earned tenure at some very fine law schools by pressing refined, jargon-chunky versions of precisely this thin theory, but I am in no mood for blather. I glare at the cocky student and see, for a horrible moment, the future, or maybe just the enemy: young, white, confident, foolish, skinny, sullen, multiply pierced, bejeweled, dressed in grunge, cornsilk hair in a ponytail, utterly the cynical conformist, although he thinks he is an iconoclast. A few generations ago, he would have been the fellow wearing his letterman’s sweater inside out, to prove to everybody how little it meant to him. When I was in college, he would have been first to the barricades, and he would have made sure everybody saw him there. As he is sure everybody is looking at him now. His elbow is on his chair, his other fist is tucked under his chin, and I read in his posture insolence, challenge, perhaps even the unsubtle racism of the supposedly liberal white student who cannot quite bring himself to believe that his black professor could know more than he. About anything. A light frosty red dances around his face like a halo,
and I catch myself thinking,
I could break him.
I remind myself to be gentle.

“Very interesting, Mr. Knowland,” I smile, taking a few steps down the aisle toward the row in which he sits. I fold my arms. “Now, how does your very interesting thesis relate to the case at hand?”

Still leaning back, he shrugs, barely meeting my gaze. He tells me that my question is beside the point. It is not the legal rules that matter, he explains to the ceiling, but the fact that workers cannot expect justice from the capitalist courts. It is the structure of the society, not the content of the rules, that leads to oppression. He may even be half right, but none of it is remotely relevant, and his terminology seems as outdated as a powdered wig. I pull an old pedagogical trick, inching closer to crowd his field of vision, forcing him to remember which of us is in a position of authority. I ask him whether he recalls that the case at hand involves not an employee suing an employer but one motorist suing another. Mr. Knowland, twisted around in his chair, answers calmly that such details are distractions, a waste of our time. He remains unwilling to look at me. His posture screams disrespect, and everybody knows it. The classroom falls silent; even the usual sounds of pages turning and fingers clacking on laptop keyboards and chairs scraping disappear. The red deepens. I recall that I had to upbraid him three weeks ago for fooling around with his Palm Pilot during class. I was circumspect then, taking care to call him over after the hour ended. Still, he was angry, for he is of the generation that assumes that there are no rules but those each individual wills. Now, through the crimson haze, my student begins to resemble Agent McDermott as he sat, lying through his teeth, in the living room at Shepard Street . . . and, very suddenly, it is too late to stop. Smiling as insolently as Mr. Knowland, I ask him whether he has undertaken a study of the tort cases, sorting them by the relative wealth of the parties, to learn the truth or falsity of his theory. Glaring, he admits that he has not. I ask him whether he is aware of any such study performed by anybody else. He shrugs. “I will take that as a no,” I say, boring into him now. Standing right in front of his table, I tell him that there is, in fact, a substantial literature on the effect of wealth on the outcome of cases. I ask him if he has read any of it. The antiquated fluorescent lights buzz and hiss uncertainly as we wait for Mr. Knowland’s reply. He looks around the classroom at the pitying faces of his classmates, he looks up at the portraits of prominent white male graduates that line the walls, and at last he looks back at me.