Through the Heart (15 page)

A man shouldn’t know these things.

It turned out that she chose the color specifically for me. She announced it at the beginning of dinner. She tinged her wineglass and said, “This night is to help everyone understand the position we are in now as a family. Unfortunately, thanks to Timothy, we are now in the red.”

I hadn’t told her about what had happened that week. I’d been saving it.

She turned to me. “Timothy, do you have anything to say to that?”

“Yes,” I told her. “I’m afraid I have bad news.”

Her lips pursed, but she looked almost perversely pleased. My mother does love a good tragedy, once she embraces it. Who doesn’t like the image of himself, or herself, suffering terribly? Not the actual suffering, mind you. Just the image of it.

“I’m afraid, after this week you’ve chosen the wrong color.”

“The wrong color?”

She wasn’t pleased anymore; she didn’t understand, and she didn’t like that.

“It should have been black,” I told her.

“Black?” There was a long pause as she took that in. “You mean . . .”

“It was a good week,” I said,

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” she demanded, sounding almost angry.

If I had been expecting her to be happy, I might have been disappointed. But I knew that she wouldn’t be. She didn’t like surprises, my mother. Even good ones.

I also knew that she couldn’t resist the idea of money—it turned her giddy. So her bad mood would only last until she saw the spreadsheet.

“Do you have a printout for me?” she asked a second later.

I reached under my chair for my folio and pulled out the weekly report I’d put together.

She had her hand out waiting, and I gave her the paper.

She took it, looked at it, and smiled. Then she started grilling me. She wanted a blow-by-blow account of every successful trade. That took us through the appetizer and into the main course. But when she heard I had taken profits and had pulled back, she went from giddy to furious in a second.

“Just when we have a chance to actually make some money, rather than simply making back what you lost, you get scared?” she demanded. “I honestly don’t know what I was thinking, putting you in charge of managing the money. I would do it myself, if I had more time.”

I looked over at my father. He was silently cutting the last of his steak (rare and very red). He didn’t even look up. It was actually my father who had put me in charge. And he might let my mother have her way in all other things, but he would never in a million years let her take over managing the money. That was understood.

Eventually, when we got to dessert, my mother moved on from me to the rest of the family, but she didn’t have enough time to really rake them over the coals. It gave me another reason to feel good—I felt like I had spared them.

But, as is so often the case, other people often don’t see things the same way. My sister, for one, didn’t see it quite in the same light, which I discovered a few weeks later when she came to see me in the office.

My sister never came to see me in the office. Or maybe I should amend that—my sister never came to see me at all. I had never thought about it much, but we had no real relationship. I sat with her at the dinner table every week, and I heard about what she was doing from my brother Edward, but when we saw each other, she and I rarely even exchanged more than hello and a polite kiss on the cheek. And it had been that way for as long as I could remember. In the family order, it was me, and then Andrew came a year later. Then my mother took a few years off before having Edward and then Emily. I was five years older than Edward and just over seven older than Emily. I went off to college when Emily was eleven, so I wasn’t there for the years she spent in and out of hospitals and clinics for the eating disorder that set in at puberty.

I have to admit, other than having a laugh about her crazy marriages, and thoroughly enjoying the fits my mother had over her, I never really thought about my sister. She might as well have been a stranger. In fact, she was.

I got my first sense of this when my secretary, Marie, knocked on the door of my office and told me Emily was outside and wanted to see me. I swear to you, for a good ten or fifteen seconds, I searched my memory for an Emily I had slept with and who might have gone so far as to find out where I worked and shown up there. Then I realized that she meant my sister Emily. That’s how unexpected her visit was.

“Tell her to come in,” I told Marie.

Emily entered a few seconds later. Even though she was thirty-five now, in some ways she looked like the twelve-year-old I remembered. For one, she was about the same size. She had been tall even back then, and she still had the straight-as-a-board, pre-puberty body. She wore a blouse with a ruffle at the collar, like a girl. And she wore her hair like a girl’s too: long and straight, pinned up with a simple barrette.

I got up and came around my desk to kiss her cheek. “Hi, Emily.”

“I hope I’m not bothering you,” she said.

“No, I can take a break.”

She sat down in the chair across from my desk—not over by the couch. So I went back around the desk and sat down.

She didn’t look at me right away. She looked down at her lap. She placed her hands on her legs, then spread her fingers out, as if inspecting them.

I waited.

“I’ve met someone,” she said without looking up.

“Really? Who is it?”

She looked up at me then. “Don’t pretend. I know that Edward told you about him.”

“I didn’t know if you were talking about the same man,” I said. “It’s been at least a week since I talked to him.” I couldn’t help teasing her.

She looked at me levelly. “I guess I deserve that. And I don’t expect you to believe this either, but Alejandro is different. This time it’s real.”

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t believe her.

“We’re going to get married.”

“Congratulations,” I said, though I have to admit, my tone was a little dry.

She heard it.

“Fuck you,” she said.

“That’s better,” I said. It annoys me when people aren’t honest and try to play nice because they want something from you.

“You’re such an asshole. I wanted to come in here and have a civilized conversation.”

“You wanted to write the script for how it was going to go,” I corrected her. “I don’t like reading from a script, at least not one that someone else writes for me—especially since I gather that you’re not here for a social call. I’m assuming you want something.”

“Edward told me it didn’t matter if I came in and cursed you out. He said you’d do what you were going to do.”

“You should have listened to him. So why don’t you tell me what you want.”

“Fine.” She obviously still wasn’t happy that things hadn’t gone her way. “I told Mother about Alejandro, and that we were going to get married.”

“And how did she take it?” I asked—though I knew already without her even needing to tell me.

“She said that if I went through with it, not only would she cut off my money, but that I would never have another cent and I’d be taken out of the will.”

“Big guns. Did you go to Dad?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“He said if Alejandro loved me, he would provide for me.
Provide
for me. What, are we living in the nineteenth century now?”

“Well, couldn’t he? Edward told me that the guy—Alejandro is it? Anyway, Edward said that he had money.”

She was silent for a minute. Then she said, “Yes, but what if it doesn’t work out? What if I’m wrong?”

“You’re risking a lot,” I agreed.

“I don’t think it would be healthy for our relationship to have me completely dependent on Alejandro.”

“What does he say?”

“He says he’ll always be there for me. But that’s what men always say. And then they’re not. How can I trust him?”

“I don’t have any insight on that one. So why did you come to me? Are you hoping I could change her mind?”

“Do you think you could?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“No,” she agreed.

I waited.

“I thought you could help me another way.” She looked at me for a few seconds, waiting.

I didn’t say anything.

“You’re not making this any easier for me,” she burst out.

It was always people like my sister—victims—who thought other people should always be making things easier for them. Well, that’s what she’d had her whole life, and it didn’t seem to have helped her any. I just looked at her.

“Okay, I get it. I wanted to ask you if you could give me some money. A lump sum, not a huge amount, just something that would make me feel secure.”

Enough to make her feel secure—I’d like to know what that amount is. Of all the people I’ve come across, none of them, no matter how rich, seemed to have that magic number—the one that would make them feel secure. Security, as far as I could tell, came from a different place altogether. But I had a feeling my sister didn’t want to hear that.

“How can I give you money if Mother said no?” I asked her.

“Oh, come on. There have got to be ways. You could pretend to buy some stock, and then write down that you’ve sold it at a loss.”

“You want me to cook the books.”

“I just want you to help me out a little. It’s not a big deal.”

“It’s a big deal to me. And I’m not going to do it.”

“So now you’re this really moral person who’s not going to do anything wrong?”

“No, I’m just not going to put myself in a dangerous position in order to give you money because you spent all of yours.”

“Then give it to me from your own money. I know you have bags of it,” she said, and she couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice.

“Emily, I started out with the same amount as you did. If I have more now, and you’ve blown through yours, is that supposed to be my problem? Even if I did give you money, it wouldn’t be enough. You’d be back here in a year, asking me for more. You’re like our mother in the way you go through the cash.”

“I’m like Mother?
Me?
” Her voice climbed in disbelief. “My God, you’ve got to be kidding me. You’re the one who’s like her. Exactly. You look like her; you sound like her; you’re obsessed with money like her. Don’t you wonder why she gives you all the attention and none to anyone else? Because you’re just a reflection of her.”

Up to then I had been mildly amused by the scene, but at that point I started to get annoyed. “If it were up to me, you could have one hundred percent of her attention, Emily,” I said. “If she ignored me completely, nothing would make me happier.”

“Oh really? Then why don’t you just fax her the update at the end of the week? I’ve heard her ask you to do that, but you never do. You always bring it with you. Why is that?”

“I thought I was actually doing you a favor, taking up her time and letting the rest of you off the hook.”

“You have got to be kidding me. You mean you’ve been telling yourself you’re the hero of the family? That’s what’s been going through your head? You’re sicker than I thought.”

“Me? I’m sick?”

She didn’t seem to hear me. She just barreled on.

“And clueless. You’re good at money and absolutely nothing else. You have no idea what’s actually going on. You bring that stupid spreadsheet with you every week because if you didn’t it would become embarrassingly obvious that there is absolutely nothing else going on in your life. There would be nothing else for Mother to talk to you about.”

“You don’t know anything about my life,” I told her.

“Don’t fool yourself, Timothy,” and the contempt in her voice was so real, it penetrated even my thick skin. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve got this girl or that girl or twenty of them. They might as well be blow-up dolls, for how real they are to you. We all know it. Even Mother. That’s why she doesn’t bother asking.”

“You’re just pissed because she doesn’t butt into my life.”

“See, you still don’t get it. She doesn’t butt into your life because you don’t
have
one. You don’t have a life; you don’t have friends; you don’t have anything but money. You know, I’ve just decided I’m going to go and marry Alejandro anyway. Even without the money. And that terrifies me, but not doing it terrifies me more. Because I worry that I might end up like you.”

“There are things about me you don’t know.”

“Yeah, right. I would love it if that were true. But the sad fact is, you’re the one who doesn’t know. You don’t know about yourself, or anyone else for that matter.”

“Yes, I do. I know more than you think. I knew about Alejandro, didn’t I?”

“You only know what Edward tells you, and he doesn’t tell you shit. He and I talk about what bullshit he’s going to feed you this week. It’s a game for us. We laugh at you.”

I didn’t believe her. I said to her, “Maybe I don’t know the details, but I don’t give a crap about those.”

She looked at me pityingly. “You don’t believe me. Okay. How about this? Edward has been writing books for years now. He has four published, under a pseudonym of course, so Mother won’t know. His fifth is coming out this spring. And, Andrew, he’s gay. He and his wife still live together, but she knows and he’s got his own place downtown where he stays half the time. Dad, he has a house down on St. John. We went down last year. Me and Edward and Andrew and Dad’s mistress. The woman he’s really been with for the last twenty years, and you’ve never even met her.”

She had to be lying. That’s what I told myself. She must be lying. But then why did I believe her?

She stood up. “I’m sorry, Timothy, but I thought it was time that someone told you the truth.”

Then she turned around and walked out.