Part 6 (1/2)

”You might put on a s.h.i.+rt there, nature boy,” Cynthia said to him, rolling her eyes at the girls, and so he stood up again and went to the bedroom to get one. Simon, having dried off the chairs and opened the umbrella that shaded the table, was pouring coffee and taking omelet orders. He was one of the house's amenities; in the hot off-season, he went to college in Atlanta, and in the winter he saw to the needs of the villa's guests and went home to his parents' place at night. Cynthia caught April and Robin nudging each other from time to time when Simon was entering the room, or leaving it, but that was okay. Let them. She prided herself on not talking to her daughter about s.e.x or men in the censorious way most mothers would.

”Robin,” she said, ”that skirt is so cute on you.” They'd given it to her for Christmas, and Cynthia was proud of the rightness of it for her. She was fascinated with Robin, who had both everything and nothing. She just loved it that you could have such bitter f.u.c.k-ups for parents and still somehow foil them by turning out so sweet and poised and confident at age fifteen.

Robin paused before she sat down and gave a modest little comic twirl. ”It's really beautiful, Cynthia,” she said. ”Thank you again. So, what's on the agenda today?”

”Hmm,” April said. ”Tanning by the pool for a few hours and then eating again?”

”That's what I love about you,” Robin said. ”Always willing to think inside the box.”

”Adam,” Cynthia said as he sat down again, ”you're golfing this morning, right? What time?”

”Nine forty-two,” he said.

”So precise,” Cynthia said. ”That's what I admire about golfing.” Turning toward her son, she caught him artlessly checking out Robin's b.r.e.a.s.t.s again; Jesus, it must suck to be a boy, she thought. Completely pathetic and condemned to know it. ”When are you going to initiate young Jonas into the golfing mysteries, anyway?”

Jonas dropped his fork and waved his hands in front of him. ”Please, G.o.d, no,” he said.

”Maybe someday when he's done something really horrible,” Adam said. They fell silent as their plates arrived. The shadow of the villa receded over them as the sun rode a little farther up the sky. Adam drained his coffee and held his hand over the cup as Simon moved to fill it again; he excused himself and went to the bedroom to change into shorts and a collared s.h.i.+rt and a baseball cap. He threw his clubs in the back seat of their rental car and drove north on the island's one highway, past the overgrown lots and the discreet high-end resort entrances and the bright pastel exteriors of houses no one was living in anymore. At one point he waited patiently for some goats to develop the urge to get out of the road. He drove past the golf course and all the way to the little business district in Shoal Bay East, at the island's northern end. There was a bar there that was open even at ten in the morning; he parked in the shade behind it and walked across the street to the Royal National Bank of Anguilla.

It wasn't really much of a bank; it looked more like a doctor's office, with a heavy-lidded fat woman in a tight pink dress sitting at a receptionist's desk and a closed door behind her with a security camera above it. The woman was not someone Adam had seen before.

”Mr. Bryant?” he asked her. Regally she looked him over and then stood and pa.s.sed through the door behind her without a word. Adam looked up at the camera. In a few seconds she reappeared and beckoned him through, smiling now as she closed the door behind him.

Mr. Bryant rose from behind an old metal desk and shook Adam's hand; behind him were two low metal filing cabinets, the paneled wall, and, through a narrow window, the blue marina. ”Merry Christmas to you, Mr. Adam,” he said. ”You have everything you need?” He meant at the villa. He had absolutely nothing to do with the villa or its operation, but he liked to ask. ”You are enjoying yourself?”

”As always,” Adam said.

”Your family is well?”

”Very well. And yours?”

Mr. Bryant nodded in answer, or maybe he was just nodding approvingly at the question. They would never meet each other's families, but the civilities could not be bypa.s.sed, as Adam had learned, when you dealt with Mr. Bryant. Now he unfolded his long-fingered hands, opened his desk drawer, and took out a collection of five checks, all for different amounts, all payable to cash, held together by a paper clip. He removed the paper clip and handed the checks to Adam. Adam looked them over, though not carefully; he folded them in half, put them in the pocket of his shorts, and rose to shake hands a second time.

”My friend says to expect him next around Easter,” Adam said.

”At your service. When do you fly home?”

”Tomorrow.”

Mr. Bryant clucked regretfully. ”You'll miss the regatta,” he said. ”Oh well. Duty calls, I am sure.” They shook hands yet again, warmly. Adam never understood why it was so important to Mr. Bryant to treat this like a friends.h.i.+p, but would not have dreamt of offending him either.

He drove back along a different route, taking his time, less for clandestinity's sake than to catch one last view of the hills of Saint Martin across the water before it got too hazy. It was still only about quarter to eleven, though, and a plausible round of golf had to last three hours at least. So he drove back to the course, went into the pro shop, and bought two large buckets of b.a.l.l.s for the driving range. He took the checks out of his pocket and zippered them into one of the compartments of the golf bag before he got started. It was so hot by now that he was the only one out on the range, but he didn't care. The heat rarely got to him, and the scolding a slight sunburn would earn him would only help cement the question of his whereabouts.

Half an hour later, sweat was pouring off him, but he was absolutely striping the ball, better than he'd hit it in months. He had the driver going a good 280 yards. He was so locked in, he wound up sorry there wasn't enough time to get out on the course after all.

There was a lunchtime board meeting of the Coalition for Public Schools at some restaurant down in Soho, which by any reasonable standard should have been over by three; but it wasn't, and when Cynthia couldn't stand it anymore she rose to excuse herself early, telling everyone she had a doctor's appointment uptown. She couldn't make it out the door without ten women stopping her to express the bogus hope that it was nothing serious. On days like this she just had to take a deep breath and remind herself that it was all for a good cause, namely the separation of these aimless gossips from some of their millions, so that those millions could start to do some good in the world. It took up a lot of time. You could just stay at home and write checks, of course, and when Adam had started making serious money that's all she initially thought she would do; but a big check was wasted on these halfwit dowagers with no idea how to do anything more substantial than send out invitations to a benefit, and before you knew it you were involved. Not just the CPS either; she'd become involved to various degrees with the Riverside Park Fund, the Coalition for the Homeless, and Big Brothers Big Sisters. She did have a rule about staying away from disease charities: there was something about them that just struck her as especially haughty, a blithe tossing of money at the ineffable, like Won't You Please Join Us in the Fight Against Death. She knew on some level she was wrong about this but obeyed the feeling anyway. She preferred causes that dealt with what might actually be improved, not the hard-to-fathom world of genes and viruses but just the generally f.u.c.ked-up way in which human inst.i.tutions worked-homelessness, public schools, Habitat for Humanity, things like that. Anything that improved the lot of children got her money in a heartbeat. ”You're sweet,” Cynthia said, smiling and backing away, ”but no, it's nothing major, just something I scheduled months ago, and you know how hard it is to get in to see these guys.” Which probably left them all thinking that she was going in to get her a.s.s lifted or something, but so what. In truth all she had to do was make a phone call, but it was a private one that had to be made before close of business and she had lost faith that they could wrap up this meeting in time. It was a kind of universal truth in the nonprofit world that everything took at least twice as long as it needed to. She used to have to schedule her shrink appointments for five in the afternoon, because her commitments had grown to the point where that was the only window; but if she had an evening event, as she often did, there were days when seeing the shrink meant not seeing the kids at all, and so she'd finally just quit therapy altogether. No room in her day for it anymore, which was probably the best circ.u.mstance for terminating, she thought, and probably why doing so had turned out easier than she'd expected.

Despite the accursed narrowness of those Soho streets, her driver was idling right there in front of the restaurant. They inched toward the West Side Highway and she started to open up her phone right then, but she didn't want to make the call in front of the driver either. He was totally trustworthy but it had nothing to do with that. Half an hour later she was home. They'd been in the new apartment on Columbus for almost two years now, after a restless few years in the place on East End she'd loved so much when they bought it. Almost as soon as the renovations were done she'd started glancing adulterously at the real estate section. But the priceless thing about Adam was that he didn't really give her much more than one night's s.h.i.+t about it, because the truth was, he understood. He got why she didn't mind packing up again, why there was such romance in the new, why it was so hard to stay in a place that had maxed out its own potential. Plus they'd made a fortune each time they sold. This was Manhattan, after all; everyone wanted a foothold, and they weren't making any more of it.

Still, the place on Columbus was so wonderfully eccentric that Cynthia couldn't imagine ever growing tired of it: a penthouse duplex that looked directly down onto the planetarium behind the Museum of Natural History. At night the spheres glowed blue through the planetarium's gla.s.s walls, and from the wraparound windows thirty stories up it seemed to Cynthia almost like their home was returning to the planet after a day's journey into s.p.a.ce. The kids had the downstairs floor mostly to themselves; it had a separate entrance, which meant she had less of a sense of their comings and goings than she used to. They were too old to want or need an escort back and forth to school, and they had so much else going on in their lives, socially and otherwise, that it wasn't always possible to know exactly when she'd see them next. Or Adam, for that matter.

Which could sometimes give rise to a sort of loneliness; but today Cynthia was just as glad to come home and find n.o.body else there. It was still well before five, so she called their accountant; she knew he would have taken a call from her no matter the time, but she liked to be considerate about it. She asked if he would please handle a wire transfer for her, a small one, just ten thousand, but it was important that it be done right away.

”Charles Sikes,” she said.

She heard him typing; he wore one of those phone headsets, like only receptionists used to wear. ”Same account as before?”

”Same bank, different city,” she said, and dug a folded, typed letter out of her pocket and read him the number. He took it down, and then as he always did he asked after her kids, whom he'd never met but knew in his way, and then they said goodbye.

Still no one home. The winter sky outside the living room was just beginning to gray. She opened up a bottle of wine, took one cigarette out of the pack she kept hidden behind the leather-bound volume of wedding photos on the bookshelf, put her coat back on, and stood outside on the balcony that overlooked the planetarium. She spent maybe twenty minutes that way, looking down on the still planets, listening to the symphony of faint sounds that pa.s.sed for silence. Then, in a spirit of beneficence, she opened up the cell phone again and called her mother.

Ruth seemed almost miffed to hear from her, though no more miffed than she was by anything that rose up unexpectedly in her day without giving her adequate time to prepare. ”We are doing as well as can be expected,” she said. ”Warren's health is not good, as you know.”

She didn't know; or maybe she did-in her mother's conversations it was hard to separate fact from dire prediction. ”Well, tell him I hope he feels better.”

”How are the children?”

”They're great. So busy I hardly see them anymore. The amount of schoolwork they have is just brutal.” There was a pause, and somehow Cynthia knew what was supposed to go there. ”I'm sorry we haven't been able to get out there to visit.”

”Probably not the best time for a visit anyway,” Ruth said.

”You're right,” Cynthia said, misunderstanding her. ”It's impossible to get away. Sometimes I wonder why they have to work so hard. But then just last week I was in this public school in East Harlem-”

”Good Lord, why?”

”This charity I work with. We were dedicating a computer lab. Anyway, you wouldn't believe-”

”Your education was always very important to me,” Ruth said. ”That came first.”

Cynthia laughed affrontedly and took another quick drag. ”Are you joking?” she said, exhaling. ”Dirksen? That place was like a drug bazaar. There was an English teacher there who killed herself over Christmas break. Remember that? It's a miracle I learned a f.u.c.king thing at that place.”

Ruth closed her eyes. She was trying to get some dinner ready, even though Warren probably wouldn't eat any of it; he was so sick he hadn't been out of the living room chair all day except to go to the bathroom, and even for that he had to call out to her. She missed part of what Cynthia was saying because when he got a coughing jag it was so heart-wrenching that she couldn't hear anything else. ”I don't know what you expected me to do about it,” she said. ”There certainly wasn't money for private school. It was hard enough to hold on to the house those years.”

”There are ways,” Cynthia said, tossing her cigarette over the edge of the patio railing, hearing a key turn in the front door inside. ”It's just a matter of where your priorities are.”

”Well, anyway,” Ruth said. ”You certainly managed to land on your feet.”

Me: SWM, 27-Big Mets fan, good income, not afraid of adventure. Willing to think long term, or, if you prefer, NSA. You: athletic, 1924, long hair. Not afraid to act if the moment seems right. Send photo, plz.

He left out, of course, any references to his face, specifically his nose, because while some women were into it, most, he found, were not. But that seemed fair, since he hadn't mentioned anything about what he liked or didn't like in a face either-those faint mustaches, for instance, which were a total dealbreaker. He hit Send and switched back to the streaming video of Kasey in her apartment in California. Maybe it was California. The windows were always covered, so she might have been in Bayside for all any of her subscribers really knew. Right now she was in the kitchen making herself some kind of smoothie. There was a laptop on the kitchen counter near the blender, as there was in every room of Kasey's house, and so she could see, as he saw, the requests typed in by feverish guys: Take off your top. Mmm how's that taste? It was pretty embarra.s.sing. He'd stopped communicating with Kasey himself months ago, but he still watched her, and the meter still ran on his credit card.

Would like b.l.o.w.j.o.b without paying for it is what his personal ad should have read, that is if there were any such thing as an honest personal ad. People said that there were women out there, maybe not a lot but some, who thought the way guys did, but that had to be a myth. The truth was, he had zero interest in thinking long term-that was just one of those things you had to say if you wanted to get any responses at all. He was just so on edge all the time, but that tension could, if you willed it, channel itself into the s.e.xual and thus could be relieved. It always worked, and it never worked for long. He had a lot of stress in his life to fight off.

And as if to punish him for letting that thought into his head, the cell phone rang in his bedroom. He had three cells, actually-they were lined up on top of his dresser-but he could tell from the ring that it was the disposable.

”Devon, what's up,” Adam said, but it didn't sound like a question. ”So we have some Bantex, right? Financial services? Start shorting it. We can take our time, though. We have a couple of months. So go slowly. Spread it out.”

That was always his mantra: spread it out. No more than a certain number of shares in one transaction, because anything over that number supposedly tripped SEC radar.

”Huh,” Devon said. ”How about that. I was just reading that they were doing really well.”