A Dual Inheritance (25 page)

The house was dark, but the too-bright streetlight meant to deter bandits was illuminated, and it filtered through the curtains that his wife had so carefully (
obsessively
, he’d argued) considered—brightly colored batiks chosen from a stall on Uhuru Street, from the most convincing of vendors who’d shouted and whistled for his
mzungu
bride. There were crumbs along the countertop of the small kitchen; a cluster of red ants was arduously clearing them away. He wondered, briefly, what she’d eaten to leave such crumbs and if it had been her whole dinner. He imagined crystallized honey on crumbly bread—the swallowing again and yet again, waiting for the taste to improve.

He turned on the bathroom light and relieved himself, checked his stool as Shannon had taught him to—for irregularities, for darkness—smirking as he always did, because he remembered Raoul Merva telling him a story about how, as a young man in Hungary, he’d suffered terribly from insomnia, until one summer, when he’d been working on a dairy farm (
I’d been using my hands
, Raoul had solemnly explained), he’d begun to give some thought to feces, about why, as human beings, we are so afraid of our feces. Perhaps, he’d mused, these thoughts had blossomed because he’d grown so fond of the cows, who (he’d clarified) really knew how to take a shit. Raoul told Hugh with considerable pride
how one evening he’d had enough of fear. “My friend,” he told Hugh, “I relieved myself in the shower. And I looked at it. And do you know what I did? I picked it up. I picked it up, and I held it in my hands.” Hugh nodded and nodded until he couldn’t hold back his laughter. He’d laughed until it became clear that Raoul had something more to say. “Since that day, I have slept like a baby. Since then,” said Raoul, “I am not afraid.”

Hugh smirked because he remembered what it felt like to be that young and laughing and because there was nothing funny about shit these days; nothing funny about shit at all. A few chalky antacid pills remained, and he took one with a tall glass of water, wincing, as he always did, when he felt the pill go down. He turned off the light and went into the living room, sat for a moment on the green couch that looked comfortable and cheerful but was in fact punishingly hard. Hugh glanced around. He could be anywhere. The house looked the way he imagined an army barracks house might look, like the home of some poor drafted son of a bitch heading from Texas to Saigon, with the scared wife sleeping in the lumpy bed, praying for a safe return.

The draft
, argued Ed,
unifies a country. Certainly you’re not saying that anyone really deserves a special exemption?

It was a stupid argument, one of their many, as neither one of them thought the war was just, and frankly—for different reasons—neither one of them was going to fight in it (Hugh wrangled himself a job as a Peace Corps evaluator, while Ed remained in school as long as possible—there were somehow always more classes in which he apparently
had
to be enrolled—before finally enlisting in the reserves). But their conversations had become increasingly polarized during the few times they’d seen each other over the years, and the war, the draft—it was an obvious place to start. Ed believed in the draft but not the war, which Hugh argued meant that he couldn’t believe in the draft, because how could he support a draft for a war in which he did not believe?

It was like that.

It was—during the few times Hugh had been through New York—two quick drinks and one long lunch, over which they had their final blowout three years ago, over the goddamn Middle East.

All Hugh had done was bring up a
New York Times
editorial he’d read that morning in the gastrointestinal doc’s office, which had questioned the wisdom of Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem’s old city, and Ed—who’d seemed agitated upon sitting down, who frankly had not seemed remotely relaxed with Hugh since they’d said goodbye at the ferry dock in New London after that awful Fishers weekend at the Ordways’—became suddenly enraged. He’d broken down the history of the Jews: their expulsion from every country after committing the sin of success, their near extermination, the subsequent allowance (
thank God
) by the rest of the world for—finally—a Jewish state. When Hugh tried to maintain that, though he was not arguing with Ed’s position (he really wasn’t!), Ed had to admit that this
allowance
had not exactly been established with much concern for the existing indigenous Arab population, Ed grew silent and twitchy.

Hugh said, “Listen, you’re upset. I understand it’s emotional.”

“I’m not emotional,” said Ed. “Listen, you know what? We don’t have to agree.” He picked up a toothpick, turned it over in his hands.

“We never have,” said Hugh. He’d smiled. He’d tried to catch his friend’s eye, but Ed was looking at the maître d’, signaling for the check.

Ed shrugged. “I just think, y’know, why force it?”

“What are you talking about?”

The maître d’ brought the check, and Ed slapped down his credit card.

“Let me,” said Hugh. “You paid last time.”

But Ed shook his head.

Hugh nodded. “I hope we can chalk this up to another chapter of a lifelong argument.”

“Look,” Ed had said, squinting out the window at the streets of Manhattan, where he so obviously belonged now. “We’re old friends,” he’d
said, still not looking at Hugh. “And old friends?” He shook his head. “They usually grow apart.”

Now he tried not to wake his wife as he moved the cloud of netting aside and climbed into bed. He tried not to shift, not to breathe. He could get a few hours’ sleep if he didn’t wake her. If he did wake her, they might get to talking, and when they talked at this late hour, neither one could go back to sleep. Sometimes it was nice—she’d make coffee with hot milk, maybe they’d fool around—and sometimes it was not. Sometimes she decided they needed to figure out their future straightaway in that one sleepless moment: when could they move, if maybe Hugh should go back to school, if maybe she
could
give in and have a baby after all, even if they stayed right where they were.

“That you?” she murmured.

“Maybe,” he said.

Recently Helen had been talking in her sleep, and he often tried to engage her in conversation. Sometimes he told her about these nocturnal exchanges and always portrayed a funny scene, but, in fact, his motives were not as lighthearted as he described; he knew what he was really doing was trying to catch her in the middle of something—he wasn’t sure what, but in the grip of a secret life is what he’d begun to suspect.

“
Maybe
it’s me,” he said, smoothing the blankets on top of her hip. “And maybe it isn’t.” He heard her quietly snoring again and was strangely disappointed.

When he thought of Ed these days, as he was doing just then, it was usually because he craved his opinions, the very opinions against which he’d always fought. He knew he was thinking of Ed because of what he would say if he could see him now, in bed with Helen, after coming from Aisha. Leaving aside the impatience, the arrogance, and the aggressiveness—Ed was the most loyal guy he’d ever met. That Ed had essentially dumped him as a friend somehow didn’t disrupt this idea. Hugh still saw Ed as being loyal to his own beliefs, loyal to his feelings of disconnection, to the idea of friendship as being something true, something you feel or you don’t.

When he’d told Helen about that awful lunch in New York, she’d seemed oddly relieved, as if she’d secretly been thinking that Hugh’s friendship with Ed had been doomed from the start. They’d even fought about it; when Hugh accused her of never having liked Ed, of even looking down on him, she’d grown furious—she’d even cried. Hugh ended up apologizing; they’d hardly spoken of Ed again.

But now he pictured the Cantowitz arguing style of sitting up straighter and straighter, of posture improved by ire, and for some reason—at this late hour, at this very moment—picturing this friend who had written him off over a stupid political argument
that hadn’t even been an argument
strangely made him feel—if not exactly better—somehow more authentic. He’d valued the obvious differences between Ed and him and still frankly revered the idea that people could, in fact, come from wildly different worlds, completely disagree, and still remain true friends. The funny thing was that he knew this guiding principle separately rankled both Ed and Helen. He knew they each pegged him as a bit phony, too cerebral or worse.

“Where were you?” Helen asked suddenly, and Hugh could tell that she was no longer sleeping.

“The clinic,” he said, pulling her close.

“Mmm,” she said, yawning. “What time is it?”

“Around five.”

“Hugh?”

“Yes.”

“Someone spit on me today.”

“Someone spat at you?”

“A woman. I didn’t have any money on me. I went into my purse to give her something, and when I couldn’t come up with something, she spit at my feet.”

“Helen—”

“I was angry, Hugh. I didn’t recognize myself. I wanted to spit back.”

“Oh, Helen,” he said. “Oh, no.”

A mosquito dove into his ear and—defeating all previous attempts at
quiet—Hugh slapped furiously before bounding out of bed for the badminton racket, purchased for this specific purpose.
From China, my friend
, the Hindu had said.
Superior choice for killing mozzies
.

“It’s dead,” said Hugh. “I got him.”

“I hate it here,” she said. “I really do.” She put her ankle over his. “You’re the only person I know.”

Chapter Nine

New York City, 1970

Armed with two summers at Ordway Keller and an MBA from Harvard Business school, Ed (with no small amount of fear and exhilaration) turned down a more permanent offer from Guy Ordway himself, and—with the conviction that too much history haunted both Ordway Keller’s stodgy protocols and his own unpleasant memories—took up with three other upstarts, three other men equally lacking in heritage but who’d convinced him to join a brand-new securities firm; they had scraped together enough money (primarily from fathers-in-law) to pay for a seat on the exchange.

Hy Bechstein was incontrovertibly fat and had paranoid fits, but his knowledge of companies was exhaustive. Ed couldn’t figure out how he’d acquired so much information, and, if Hy had any net worth whatsoever (he didn’t; they’d each disclosed their bank statements at the start), Ed would have assumed he’d hired a pack of spies. It was as if he personally went to every targeted factory and boardroom daily; he had a nose for opportunity. It had been Hy’s idea to buy the black-and-white marble notebook from the office supply near the A train and have each partner record his business at the end of the trading day. When Steve Osheroff (handsome, from Larchmont, nothing exceptional upstairs) had laughed wryly at this idea (Steve was the only one among them who
could actually pull off wry), Hy stood his ground with such conviction and such an impassioned speech about fairness that Ed and Marty Rabb (stutterer, number cruncher) were awed into rare silence.

There was a frenetic quality to each day in their Broad Street office, which suited Ed, an urgency that put him at ease. The days were so intense that he’d even given up coffee for two years now, as he’d often drunk untold amounts and had become so jittery by the end of the day that once he got into a screaming fight on the subway with a putz who refused a pregnant woman a seat. In their office, even the details of lunch were treated with serious consideration, and there was an open competition over who could a) buy it cheaper (or better—bring it from home), b) get it over faster and waste less time on eating, or c) book more lunches out with potential clients and get better tables at top restaurants—La Grenouille, Chambord, 21.
Who won lunch?
was decided with an afternoon Cert. Marty was addicted to them, went through rolls at a time, and each day at four o’clock he peeled one individually out of its gold-wrapped tube and placed it on the winner’s desk. Each day’s lunch had to produce a winner; failure to reach consensus was not tolerated.

“When articles are written about Cantowitz, Bechstein, Osheroff, and Rabb,” said Steve, while rolling a Cert around in his mouth, “they’ll talk about the importance of healthy competition.”

“When
books
are written,” said Ed, “because you’d better believe they will be, they’ll just say we were four Jews obsessed with money and food.”

“That’s fine by me,” said Hy.

“M-m-me, too,” said Marty.

Ever loyal to his first great idea, Ed became the resident expert in following all things automotive, and his first substantial record in the black-and-white marble ledger was getting the Boston Mutual Funds to invest in auto-aftermarket securities. He’d convinced them with his well-honed used-car theory and with his hard-earned statistics about automotive parts. Ed convinced them that these many manufacturers
were compelling—even necessary—securities investments. There were, in fact, more than 150 million cars on the road these days.

I don’t see that number dwindling anytime soon
, Ed had said, leaning back in his chair, after at least a full hour of leaning forward.
Do you?

He spent much of his day organizing a travel schedule for himself, as he was more or less constantly visiting dealerships and factories, and this suited him fine; he liked traveling. Having been particularly affected by Albert Finney’s roadside blonde in
Two for the Road
, he liked the fantasy of meeting women in transit (a fantasy that had, sadly, remained just that). Also, he liked having excuses to indulge his cravings for Ring Dings and Wise potato chips each time he stopped for gas. He wasn’t crazy about being at home. His apartment was a boxy one-bedroom far east on 74th Street, with more or less zero personal touches besides a framed Mondrian poster from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts gift shop, acquired during his first year in business school. He’d taken a date to the exhibition and—in a fit of excitement about both Mondrian and the date—bought the poster with every intention of giving it to her, but the relationship had fizzled by the time he’d picked it up at the framer’s.