The Palace Thief (2 page)

I know it is commonly assumed that a shortstop has better range than a third baseman, but in this case I can attest that such was not the case.

In those days, Eugene and I spent nearly all of our afternoons together after school. He had a sister, as did I, and his father, like mine, was never at home, so that in a funny way it might have seemed for a while that our families, in our identical houses, were interchangeable. We washed his car together. We learned to ice-skate and for a time spent our afternoons in the frosty, round rink, trying to catch the skates of girls in earmuffs who glided past us snapping their gum. We learned to roll cigarettes that burned evenly and to drink whiskey without coughing.

However, there came a time when our lives diverged. After high school I was able to benefit from the discipline my father had bestowed upon us even in his general absence and go to the state university, where I began to pursue a degree in accounting. At this point our separation became clear to us both. Mr. Peters had taken a job in an auto-parts dealership stocking inventory at the time I was learning the indifference curves and just beginning to understand where the intersection of supply and demand could be found for an inelastic commodity, such as city water. He found new friends at the auto warehouse, and I began to live my life with no friends at all. I attended school during the day, answered telephones in a hospital in the evening, and studied at night. Whenever I saw him at that time, he teased me for still living at home, although he well knew why I did.

To clarify: It became apparent that we had diverged because he was interested in the present and I was interested in the future. I do not mind saying that accounting did not come easily for me and I was studying strenuously. However, I did
not waver from my commitment to it. In fact, in time I came to see that it contained a natural eloquence, unbent by human will, and that it was a more profound language than the common man might have assumed it to be. Indeed, at times I felt it was capable of explaining not only outlays and receipts but much of the natural world. It was only rarely, late at night with my books of tax law and microeconomics, that I indulged the small daydream that I might one day leave my studies and instead become a professor of music history at a small college. But I seldom indulged this thought. Indeed, I came with time to cherish my daydream for the principal reason that it challenged and therefore reinforced my resolve to make something of myself. Sitting at the window in the library, where the septate leaves of a Japanese maple brushed the glass, I would look up from Samuelson and allow my mind to wander to the third movement of Berlioz’s
Requiem
, or to the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, wherein the strings, though barely moving, weep for humankind. Then, deliberately, I would snap back to the Samuelson text and redouble the efforts that had brought me near, I do not mind saying, to the top of my class of accounting students.

Again, I say this as background. Once a week I spent the whole night awake with my books, and I took no time away except Sunday mornings, when I ate breakfast with my family, and Saturday nights, when I allowed myself a date if I could find one or a movie if I could not. Needless to say, this regimen produced a commendable record at my graduation, which Mr. Peters attended, although he did not dress correctly.

He wore a baseball cap, and I could not help noticing—I do not mind saying this with some satisfaction—that while I was graduating with honors in business accounting, my friend seemed to want nothing more than to stock gaskets and price piston rings until the short hair at his temples turned gray.

However, shortly after I graduated and had taken a job with Priebe & Emond, Mr. Peters approached me and asked for a one-thousand-dollar investment in a concern he claimed to be starting that was going to manufacture magnetic oil plugs. At the time he approached me, we hadn’t spoken since my commencement exercises. He came to my office, again in a baseball cap. The idea was simple, he said: The magnetic plug would collect the flecks of metal that ordinarily circulated in the dirty oil of a car’s engine and caused abrasion damage to the pistons and cylinders. Engine life would therefore be extended.

I was unsure whether any of the managing partners had seen him enter my office in a billed cap, and it goes without saying that I felt some discomfort at having him there. I was still new at the firm. To be frank, the idea seemed like a good one, but since I had just spent four years in school all day, at work all evening, and at my desk half the night while he was idling his days at a warehouse and his evenings at bars, I asked him instead whether he had ever considered the flexibility of consumer demand for his product. I asked him this instead of giving him the money. He left our offices still trying pitifully to give the impression that he had understood my question, and I went back to my job, where in six months I made my first advancement.

However, the fact is that three years later his company employed twelve men, was doing $2.3 million in gross sales and was rumored to be considering a public offering. Mr. Peters had been profiled in the business section of the newspaper, and in that photograph he wore the same baseball cap he had worn at my commencement and in my office. Indeed, the cap seemed to have become a sort of a symbol for him, although I do not know of what. The magnetic oil plugs had been picked up by at least two major auto-parts chains, and I saw them for sale everywhere I went. I changed the supermarket where I shopped
because one day I found the oil plugs for sale there. My friend’s company had also begun manufacturing an auto emergency kit that sold well to women and accounted for a good deal of his profits. He was diversifying. Though we didn’t speak anymore, I saw him driving a blue Chrysler New Yorker and heard through our old friends that he had bought a sixteen-room house in Hillsborough and a villa with boat bays at Lake Tahoe. By now several of our high school classmates worked for him.

I myself was not making a bad salary at the time. In fact, I was doing quite well, and I do not mind saying that if not for the success of my friend I would have considered myself perfectly fortunate in my business advancement. Mr. Emond, the elder partner at my firm, had taken an interest in me, and by working late and servicing extra accounts I had elicited a promise from him that I would be made partner within five years.

At this point I decided to marry. At the time I was seeing two girls, LeAnne and Scheherazade. LeAnne was the assistant in the office of my dentist, and one morning while she was placing the light-blue paper bib around my neck for a teeth cleaning, I asked her outright to have dinner with me. I fell in love with her immediately. On one of our early evenings together at a moderately expensive Greek restaurant a man at the next table suffered a coronary, and without hesitation LeAnne moved aside the furniture and laid him down, keeping her hand on his pulse until the ambulance arrived. That kind of levelheadedness attracted me. On another occasion a skirt she had purchased at a department store ripped along a seam and LeAnne took it back there, where she had to speak not just with a sales clerk but with the manager of the entire operation. Though he tried to intimidate her, saying she had purchased it on sale, LeAnne persisted and gained the return of her money. I don’t mind saying that this kind of respect for the value of a dollar won my heart as well.

At the same time I was seeing Scheherazade. In my situation I felt that I needed some objectivity, and this was what Scheherazade became for me. As I found myself falling further in love with LeAnne, I went on more dates with Scheherazade. During the course of one evening with her we came upon the scene of an auto accident, and instead of getting out to help as LeAnne might have done, Scheherazade pressed me to drive on and nearly fainted from the sight as we passed. I became more convinced of my love for LeAnne. Furthermore, when we dined out Scheherazade ordered smoked-salmon appetizers and baked desserts that she left mostly untouched on her plate. Of course I had enough money to pay for the whole menu had she chosen to order it, but still, this represented a certain difference between her and LeAnne.

In fact there was only one incident that made me consider Scheherazade more seriously. As I did with LeAnne as well, Scheherazade and I occasionally went to the symphony. At the concerts I was always proud to be seen with LeAnne, for she wore elegant though simple dresses and spoke with a level eye to whomever we met. Scheherazade sometimes came in sleeveless gowns and heels that had been embedded with glitter, her lips made up in sienna-colored lipstick and her hair tossed over her head and stuck with a pearl-headed stickpin. In general I preferred going with LeAnne. As I have said, my small dream was to become a professor of music, and it was not insignificant that LeAnne always read the back-notes to the program. She always knew something of the composer’s life for our discussions after the concerts, whereas Scheherazade, who often appeared to be dreaming during the performance, often did not even know who had written the evening’s music.

One night, however, during an intermission after we had heard Berlioz’s
Romeo and Juliet
, Scheherazade waited on the open-air balcony while I purchased soft drinks for us at the bar.
When I came out, I found her leaning against the railing, and in the lights of the city square below I could see that she was weeping. Full streams of tears were on her cheeks. I asked her what was wrong, and she only shook her head. I tried to think about what might have occurred in her life. As I stood there with the two soft drinks I asked her if her mother’s health was still good. I asked if there had been an embarrassment at work or with one of her friends. I asked her about her brother, who had recently moved to New York. I asked her if she needed money. Finally I left her alone. I moved to the balcony rail and reviewed some pension documentation that I had been working on that morning. Suddenly it occurred to me that she was crying over the music. I am not embarrassed to say that this touched a part of me quite deeply, and I felt grateful to have finally understood. I myself have never cried at anything, not at a movie nor at a play nor at a concert, and I don’t see why it should have pleased me that Scheherazade had. But it did. It was a small thing, but I didn’t think LeAnne would have done it.

In the spring after I was promised the partnership in my firm I decided to ask LeAnne to marry me. I placed a deposit hold on a one-and-a-half-carat diamond ring and began to plan my proposal. The days were growing longer, and often in the evenings we took walks in the pale green hills south of San Francisco. Behind me on those paths the determined sound of her breaths filled me with the sense that the future was ours. A culmination was building, and one evening in those hills I realized that such would be the place to propose. The next night we walked up a new trail, and in the distance I saw a small, level plot of ground that looked out over all of San Francisco Bay and the foothills across it to the east. I pretended to twist my ankle and prevailed on LeAnne to turn around before she
saw the vista, but I decided that at this spot in two weeks’ time I would ask her to be my bride.

However, as soon as I made this decision I began to see her in another light. Suddenly her practical nature became a sort of shrewishness. Her steady demeanor became a source of irritation and an indication that in certain situations she might become unbending. By this point I had added to my holding deposit on the ring and was well along toward its purchase. Sometimes I looked at LeAnne and it was as if a demon had taken hold of my soul. I saw her pettiness and the unchangeable tenacity of her perceptions. I began to regard her thriftiness as penury and her practical nature as mannish. One night at a concert she remarked that ticket prices were certainly going to increase next season, and suddenly I found myself thinking back to the night Scheherazade had wept on the balcony.

Now, I have always considered myself a practical man. That is what an accountant is paid for. He is not paid to encourage foundless business schemes nor to weep at public concerts. When an accountant considers a decision, he extrapolates to outcomes and weighs the assets and liabilities. However, two weeks later, when I made the final payment on the ring, I found myself offering it to Scheherazade and not to LeAnne, and seven months later in the ballroom at the Clift Hotel, Scheherazade and I were dancing at our wedding.

I must add that our marriage has now lasted nearly three decades, and even as our passion has subsided it has been replaced by a spring of tenderness and gratitude at which I drink now as reverently as a pilgrim. I have never said this before, however, and I do not like to say it now, but I must also add that on the day of our wedding I felt gloomy. When the rabbi signaled past the congregation for my bride to approach, my heart leapt in panic, and when he gestured to the cantor at
the blessing, I felt doomed. This was a secret I carried forth into the twenty-nine years of our life together. During this time, by the way, I have divined through careful conversation that a similar feeling was present in the hearts of several of my fellow accountants during their own nuptials.

It has not escaped my attention that perhaps Scheherazade sensed my gloom and it was for this reason that she began spending my money like a bandit. In one year, unable to settle on a pattern for our living room drapes, she installed three separate sets. Our living room, I should add, is large, and so are its windows. Of course, I could afford ten sets of drapes, but that is not the point.

I did not mention the money to her because it was my duty to provide and that is what I was doing. In fact I spent little for myself. This as everyone knows is a value instilled in childhood, and I have my own mother to thank for it. When the soles of my shoes wore through I repaired them with vinyl glue, as my mother used to do with my father’s, and when my barber began charging sophisticated rates for his haircuts I went elsewhere. However, though I had intended to reduce our monthly expenditures by such practices, I soon understood that I would not be able to.