Vulgar Boatman (29 page)

“So what do you think I should do?”

I grinned. “You should give the guy his money back. You should go to the wife and tell her what you found out. You can’t play God in people’s lives, and you can’t blackmail folks.” I leaned forward, my elbows planted on the table, my chin on my fists. “By the way,” I said, “didn’t the man ask for negatives?”

“Oh, sure he did.”

“And did you give them to him?”

“I hate to tell you this.”

“So don’t. I rendered you more than ten bucks’ worth already.” I pushed my chair back and started to stand.

He reached across the table and put his hand on my wrist. “No, wait. You want another ten-spot?”

I sat down. “The hell with it. What about the negatives?”

“You’re not going to like this.”

I shrugged.

“I had a set of negatives with me. We burned them.”

“We?”

“Well, actually I burned them. In the ashtray on the table in that cruddy bar in Chelsea.”

“What negatives were they, Les?”

He rolled his brown eyes upward. He reminded me of a sheep. His expression certainly qualified as sheepish. “It was a roll of film I shot last summer on the Cape. Nothing much good. Artsy stuff. Boats. Sand dunes. Surf. Not my forte.”

“And the man didn’t examine them?”

“I kinda did it quick. Talked through it. He never questioned it.”

“You are a piece of work, you know that?”

Les smiled. “What can I say?”

“You still have the negatives, then.”

“Yep. I got ’em.”

“So what are you going to do?”

He shrugged elaborately. “What can I do?”

“You can make another set of prints, show them to your client. You can give the poor guy his money back.”

Les stared over at the two waitresses. One of them waggled her fingers at him. He waggled back at her. She opened her mouth and ran her tongue all the way around the inside of her lips. Les smiled and turned to me. “Nah. I don’t think so. But thanks for the advice. It was worth ten bucks. Easy.”

A
BRILLIANT JANUARY SUN
had burned away the smog and crud that usually hung over the city. I kept sniveling around in my chair to look at it. The fishing season was too far off to allow myself to dream about it. The golf courses would remain frozen for months. I liked the gray days of January better, when slush lay in puddles on the sidewalks and the dirty snow huddled miserably against the buildings, and a man could more easily accept the futility of wishing for spring.

Anyway, I had contracts to revise, estates to settle, codicils to compose, clients to call. There might be the odd divorce, perhaps a deed to research. I would get through this day, and the next.

There came the scratching of long, well-tended fingernails on my door. I called, “Come on in, Julie.”

My dark-haired, green-eyed secretary entered, with a smile that eclipsed the brilliance of the sun, and a mug of coffee, freshly brewed. She placed the mug on my desk and herself on the chair beside it.

“We have a problem,” she said.

“Keeping our passions in check,” I answered.

“Not that one. That is not a problem.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“I emphatically was. This concerns our telephone system.”

I sipped my coffee and lit a cigarette. “Sounds like just the kind of problem I’d like to tackle today. Shoot.”

“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “When we put somebody on hold, because you’re making plans to go fishing with Mr. McDevitt or Dr. Adams or somebody, like the time you were arranging that trip to Alaska, and Dr. Adams wanted to bring his wife and you really didn’t want a woman along but you couldn’t figure out how to tell him and besides you’ve got this little thing for her anyway, and while you were beating around the bush with your friend, Mrs. Bailey had to wait for nearly twenty minutes to tell you that they were taking her husband off life support—”

“Jesus, Julie. Get to it.”

She scowled. “I am. Anyway, you do spend a lot of time on the phone.”

“So I do. The telephone is an indispensable tool for attorneys.”

She gave me a phony smile. “You bet. Listen. What we can do, they say, is, we can have music play into the phone while somebody’s on hold.”

I nodded. “Good. Sounds good.”

“Well, the question is, what music? I don’t know about you, but that Ray Conniff stuff makes me feel like I’m on an elevator and want to get off. No way I’d stay on hold if they played that crap into my ear. So what kind of music do you want?”

“Mötley Crüe. Twisted Sister. Ozzy Osbourne.”

“Get serious, Brady.”

“Okay,” I said. I frowned for her so she’d know I was giving this conundrum my full attention. I swiveled around to study the Copley Square skyline. Then I swiveled back. “For my clientele, I think Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, maybe a little Sinatra.”

“Don’t you think that stuff is a little avant-garde for your clients?”

I nodded. “Good point. They do tend to be pretty old and conservative. What about Bach, then?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “All that weird counterpoint. Unsettling for old nerves.”

“Mozart?”

“Hmm,” she said, pretending to cogitate on the matter. “Maybe Ray Conniff isn’t such a bad idea after all.”

The light on my desk phone blinked. Julie reached over and picked it up. “Brady L. Coyne, attorney at law,” she said into it. “Good morning.”

She paused, then smiled, first at the phone and then at me. “Well, I’m trying to get him to do a little work for a change. Not having much luck, actually. … Sure. I’m sure he’ll be happy to. Hang on a sec.”

Julie held her hand over the receiver. “It’s Gloria.”

My former wife called me at least weekly. Julie considered all of Gloria’s calls urgent. Julie believed—not without some justification—that my relationship with Gloria had not been entirely resolved by our divorce eight years earlier. She hoped we would, as she persisted in saying, “get back together.”

Gloria had raised our two sons, Billy and Joey—William and Joseph, Gloria usually called them—through all the tough times. She never accused me of evading my responsibilities. She didn’t have to, because I slogged around in my own guilt without any encouragement. Usually when she called me it was with a problem. A balky oil burner. Squirrels in the attic of the house in Wellesley that I moved out of when we split. Billy’s physics grade. Joey’s experimentation with cannabis.

There were other agendas between us that remained unstated. I was sure she was as aware of them as I. Never either during or after our rocky marriage had either of us declared an end to love. It was a subject that, by tacit agreement, remained taboo.

I took the phone from Julie. She winked at me and left the office, closing the door behind her.

“Hi, hon,” I said into the phone, using a term that had once been an endearment and remained as a habit.

“Brady,” said Gloria, “do you know what today is?”

“Um, Friday. January something-or-other.”

“Try again.”

“Well, it’s not Groundhog Day, I know that, because Groundhog Day is my favorite holiday and I’ve got it circled on my calendar. That doesn’t come up until next month. And we just had Martin Luther King Day. Oh, shit. Did I forget somebody’s birthday?”

“Nobody that I know of. One of your Hungarian ladies, maybe.”

“There’s only one Hungarian lady, Gloria. It’s not her birthday. Give me a hint.”

“Something important happened in your life on this date several years ago.”

“I passed the bar exam. No, that was in August. I remember, because I had just gotten back from Montana and—”

“Brady, I’m serious.”

“I give up, Gloria.”

“It’s our anniversary, damn you.”

“Aha!” I said, “if this is a test, you can’t nail me with trick questions. We got married in May. I missed a whole week of trout fishing because of our honeymoon trip to that little tropical island where I got a sunburn surfcasting and there were twin beds in our room.”

“Not of our wedding. Our divorce, dummy.”

I sighed. “Oh. Right. I had forgotten the exact date.”

“Do you remember the day?” Gloria’s voice was soft.

“Indeed. A memorable day. A significant day. I wasn’t aware that we acknowledged this day as some sort of holiday. We haven’t exactly celebrated it. We never exchanged cards, sent flowers—”

“Well, I was thinking that we should.”

“Send flowers?”

“Celebrate it. Or acknowledge it. Consider it an important day.”

“Well, then, happy anniversary of our divorce, Gloria, and many more.”

“Don’t be facile, Brady Coyne.”

“I’m sorry.”

She chuckled. “You used to say that a lot.”

“I had a lot to be sorry about. I was not a very good husband.”

“To me, you weren’t. But that was mostly me. You were okay.”

“What is this, Gloria?”

“I thought we should celebrate. That’s all.” She paused. There was apology in her voice.

“Why?”

“Do you remember what we did that day?”

There had been no animosity, I remembered that. We had walked out of the courthouse with our lawyers. On the sidewalk out front, while rain misted down and glazed the street, our attorneys shook hands all around and walked away. Gloria and I remained standing there, reluctant, for some reason, to make the final parting.

“Well,” I had said.

Gloria’s smile was small. “Well.”

“I guess that’s it, then.”

“It’s not like we won’t be seeing each other,” she said. “The boys. You’ll be around.”

“Of course.”

“I bet there are a lot of things we have forgotten about.”

“I did leave some books I want at the house.”

“Sure. Just come by anytime.”

“And look, hon. If money is ever a problem…”

She nodded quickly. “It’s a generous settlement. You were very kind.”

“It wasn’t like it was really adversarial, after all.”

“No.”

Suddenly we became awkward. I lit a cigarette. Something to do. Gloria looked at her watch. She smiled brightly up at me. “Well, the single woman with no plans for lunch.”

I hunched into my topcoat. “The single lawyer with no lunch date, either.”

We went to the Iruña, a little Spanish place just off Harvard Square. We had a fruity red wine, clicked glasses, and agreed that it was a silly thing for us to do. Gloria ordered an avocado stuffed with seafood. I had a bowl of paella. We sampled from each other’s spoon. We finished the bottle of wine. Then we went to my car and—on what pretext I can’t recall—drove to my new little studio apartment on Beacon Street.

We made love on the rented pullout sofa, and afterward Gloria cried and I held her familiar body close and promised I’d never abandon her. And when we made love the second time, it was as if it had never happened before. I found new hollows along her back, a different roundness to her belly, a startling hunger in her mouth.

We both recognized it. We knew we had lost something that we could never recover. We were saying good-bye. It wasn’t easy.

And since that day we had kept our awkward distance from each other. We avoided being alone together. The telephone connected us. Sometimes we went places with the boys. We met at parties, funerals, graduations. We acknowledged that we liked each other. Sometimes the line got blurry. Usually it was I who drew it sharp again.

“I remember the day very well, hon. It was a long time ago.”

“Eight years. Exactly.”

“A lot has changed.”

“Yes. It has. I was thinking…”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“The Iruña is still there,” she said quickly. “It would be—”

“It would be dumb.”

I didn’t recognize the sound I heard. It was muffled. It took me a moment to realize that she had covered the receiver. It was a sigh of exasperation. Or anger. Or it might have been a sob.

“Look, Gloria.”

“You are a first-class prick, Brady Coyne. All I wanted to do was have a civilized lunch with a man I like. An old friend. And you, you’re thinking we’re still where we were eight years ago.” She blew out her breath quickly. It hissed in my ear. It reminded me of the natural-childbirth classes we had taken together before Billy was born. “I don’t know about you, but I’m in a different place now. And if you can’t handle it, well—”

“Hey,” I said. “Whoa. You’re right. I spoke without thinking.”

“The Iruña at noon, then,” she said.

“You’re bullying me, Gloria.”

“For a change.”

I laughed. “Okay. What the hell. Maybe we should go easy on the wine this time, though.”

“Maybe,” she said softly, “we shouldn’t.”

I replaced the receiver gently and leaned back in my chair, my fingers laced together behind my head. It would be dumb, I had said. I was right. Picking at old scabs that had been hardening for eight years. Dumb.

I sighed. I would be jovial, distant. I would creep carefully around the sores that still festered. Delay, misdirection, evasion. Good lawyer’s tricks. I could handle it.

The telephone buzzed. I picked it up. “Yes, Julie?”

“You’ve got a call. She’s been holding. We should’ve had music for her.”

“Who is it?”

“Rebecca Katz?” It was a question.

“I don’t know her.”

“Well, that’s all I can tell you. Maybe someone you picked up on Washington Street?”

“I don’t lurk around Washington Street, Julie.”

“She sounds agitated. I’ll put her through.”

There was a click. I said into the phone, “This is Brady Coyne.”

“Mr. Coyne, this is Becca Katz.”

I hesitated. “Yes?”

“Lester’s wife.”

“Oh, sure. What can I do for you?”

“The other day Les mentioned that he had retained you. You’re his lawyer?”

Les had given me ten dollars. I had given him advice. It was not my usual business arrangement. “Yes,” I told his wife. “What’s up?”

“He wants to speak to you. You’re the only one he’ll talk to. He’s—”

“So put him on, Mrs. Katz.”

There was a long pause. When she finally spoke, I detected a tension in her voice that I hadn’t noticed before. “I can’t put him on, Mr. Coyne.”

“Well…”

“I’m at the hospital. Les was unconscious for around thirty hours. He just came out of it. He asked for you. ‘Brady,’ he said. ‘Gotta talk to Brady.’ The policeman came in. Les wouldn’t talk to him. He wouldn’t talk to me. ‘Get me Brady,’ he said. That would be you, wouldn’t it?”