Down the Shore (17 page)

“How's that?”

“The people who just want money never get it, or they don't get it in the quantities they imagine. Right now you think you want all the stuff you just mentioned, but it's not really about that. The stuff”—Michael held up the bottle, wagged it back and forth—“isn't the point. It's how you rationalize what you're doing. The big house is just something to look at, but what you're aiming for is something else. You, my friend, are not going to get comfortable and walk away.”

“How do you know?”

“I'm looking at you and I'm telling you that you have what it takes, because I know what that looks like. Remember when you told me that story over lunch? Your mom's friend? The one who killed herself with all the pills? That was a stone-cold thing to do, and you didn't hesitate, because you had the cards. You don't really understand what you're aiming for right now, but you're definitely not the trout-fishing type. I don't even think you're as naive as you're pretending to be. Or maybe you actually believe you can just make some coin and walk away, in which case I don't know whether I want you to be right or whether I want to watch it get beaten out of you.”

I had the sense that he could go on like this for days. Cocaine agreed with him in that it allowed him to agree deeply with himself, drowning out whatever doubt he may have had about his own convictions. The drugs didn't do that for me. I wanted to tell him that he was wrong about the story I had told, that I was still ashamed about the way that I had let him bait me. It hadn't felt stone-cold to me at all; the instinct and the delivery had both been white hot inside my head. I never felt like I was holding any cards. I wondered how much that mattered, given that no one else had read it that way. The wine, which I could barely taste, was almost gone.

“Should we switch to red?” Michael asked, fishing out another bottle, another Burgundy.

“Is that shotgun loaded?” I asked.

“Wouldn't be much good if it wasn't. There's another one upstairs.”

“What are you worried about?”

“What do you think I'm worried about?”

“Someone who knows you went into my mom's shop and told her that I should be careful because people might be gunning for you.”

Michael barely masked a flash of shock. I watched him fight the desire to ask me more, and lose.

“Who was this?”

“I don't know,” I lied. “Some guy from Morgan Stanley.”

“When?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“Did you say anything to Clare?”

“No, of course not. Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask me whatever you want.”

“Where did all that money go?”

“So you read the paper.”

I nodded and tried to convey, through my expression, that I was trustworthy, that he had nothing to lose by telling me the truth, that he could look at it as a good deed, an act of mentorship, a cautionary tale.

“Two years ago, I was sitting by the pool at a hotel in Corsica next to some other balding middle-aged white guy. He was Russian, but he was speaking French to this girl who'd shown up to keep him company for the day. At one point she stops talking and says, ‘You obviously weren't paying attention.' And he says, ‘I'm still not paying attention.' I thought that was funny. I thought: Hey, we've got the same sense of humor. She was gone the next day, but he was back at the pool, and we started talking. I asked how long he was there for and he said a month, that he came to this hotel every year for the month of August. We spent some time together over the next few days, had a few drinks, a few meals together. We talked about our families and our kids and the things we still wanted to do with our lives. On my last day we had lunch, and he told me that he thought we could do some business together. He must have looked me up, or had someone look me up, because we barely talked about our work, which was refreshing. Anyway, he said he would hate for anything to interfere with our friendship, and that there was some risk, blah, blah, blah, and I told him I understood, and why didn't we try it out and see what happened. I knew by then that it was probably better if I didn't ask too many questions. I called my office, and we got him some money, not a huge amount, but nothing you'd want to throw away. Six weeks later, I got a call from some private banker in Anguilla who had an account in my name with double the money I had wired to this guy. Just like that. The next time we spoke, I asked how much business we could do, and he said as much as I wanted, that he couldn't promise it would always be like that, but that he knew he could make money. He put some cash into my fund, mostly as a sign of good faith.”

“What was he doing with your money?”

“What do you think he was doing?”

“I don't know. Guns? Drugs?”

“I didn't know either.”

“You never asked?”

“What was I going to do, run through the financials with him? Listen, the fund made money—I made money—because I knew things about companies, about industries. This engineer just came up with the next big thing; the clinical trials are fucked; they're selling the furniture; whatever. This was just instinct—someone tells me he can make money with my money and I believe him, because I've been doing this for a while, and I know a thing or two about it by now. I just let go and went with my gut. It was a whole new thing for me, but hey, evolve or die, right?”

“What if he was doing something really bad?”

“Like what? What's really bad in your mind? Look, if you have a piece of a mutual fund, then you're making money from oil, from tobacco, from big pharma, which is literally ten thousand times bigger and more evil than this,” he said, pointing to the coke between us. “You want to do some real damage? Go the legal route. I knew everything about the industries I covered, and once you know everything, you realize that the distinctions between white collar and black market are pretty arbitrary. One guy has an MBA from Wharton and the other guy has a face tattoo and a gold-plated AK-47, but they're both fucking ruthless and they both live and die by the bottom line. It's true across the board. You're making money in fashion because you've got five-year-olds chained to sewing machines in El Salvador. Go to China sometime and meet the folks who made your TV and your laptop, see how they live. You want to tell me one is better than the other because it's government sanctioned, publically traded? Don't be so naive.”

“That's your thesis? ‘Everything is fucked so just do as much harm as you want?
'”

“You don't buy that?”

“No,” I said. “I don't.”

“I can tell you don't really respect me,” he said, finally. “But I can't tell whether it's because of what I did or because I got caught.”

“I can't tell either.”

“But you want what I had.”

“Some version of it. With a different ending.”

“Ending? What ending? Nothing's ending. I was just on the phone with someone who's trying to get me set up.”

The drugs and the wine had allowed him to look past his present circumstances, but I could see that it was coming back to him in flashes as the last of my coke faded, his confidence like a radio broadcast interrupted now by bursts of ugly static. The shotgun was real; you couldn't not look at that. I was looking at him and thinking: Is this what I'm supposed to become or what I already am or something I'm never going to be? And then Michael Savage produced a vial of cocaine from his pocket, this one as big as a shotgun shell.

“Jesus,” I said.

The urgency with which he tapped out a pile and nodded that I should cut it up made me think back to the day we met, and the way he had insisted that my mother's dead friend couldn't have been out of options, that there must have been something else she could have done after the cops let her attacker go. That was really about him. He was out of options, and he knew it, and it was killing him.

“You really never found out what that guy did with your money?” I asked.

“Of course I did, eventually. He was doing things you'd probably describe as ‘really bad.'”

“Like what?”

“I said that you could ask me anything. I didn't say I'd answer.”

“OK,” I said. “Fuck, this wine is good.”

“To the finer things in life,” he said, raising his glass. “Now I'm going to go piss some of this out, if you'll excuse me.”

I closed my eyes when he was gone and imagined I was sitting on a stool that was balanced on a radio tower on top of the tallest skyscraper in the world. I had never been that high. I could hear Michael Savage directing a stream of piss into the toilet in the powder room. The flush of a toilet, the splash of a sink. He strode back into the room.

“Here,” he said, handing me another £100 note, this one unrolled. “That's for sharing earlier. Now, where were we?”

I was staring over his shoulder, and Michael, to his credit, saw in my face that his son must be standing in the doorway at his back. I snatched the vial off the counter while he did what I was probably constitutionally unable to, and swept the loose coke onto the floor.

“What are you doing?” Clare asked.

His father didn't turn around.

“We were talking,” he said, looking straight at me. “Tom and I were just swapping stories.”

H
ow's it driving?” I asked my mother, slapping the center console of the BMW as we pulled away from the terminal at Newark.

“It's fine,” she said. “Frances is borrowing the Celica, so I took this. The registration's about to expire. The gas mileage sucks.”

“So sell it for parts,” I said, putting my feet up on the dash.

“Don't be a brat. Did you sleep on the plane?”

I shook my head. We were driving south on the turnpike, past refineries and factories and oil storage tanks with “Drive Safely” printed around their midlines. It was good to be home.

“If you're not too tired, I have a surprise for you,” my mother said. “I hope you're hungry.”

One of her cooks had quit the year before and transformed a small Victorian house outside Princeton into a BYO restaurant—a place where she could showcase the considerable kitchen chops that had been wasted on our catering jobs. The long slab tables in the dining room had been cut from a tall black walnut that had come crashing through the attic in a storm. I had landed just in time for the friends-and-family Christmas party, which happened to coincide with their review in the New Jersey section of the
New York Times
. No one had seen the story when my mother walked into the dining room ahead of me to whoops and clapping. There was a rumor that the review would be online at 10:00 p.m., and one of the restaurant's investors, an investment banker who lived down the block, had instructed one of his first-year analysts to e-mail him the text as soon as it went up.

“He'll be there all night anyway,” John said, staring down at his BlackBerry. I had never seen one before.

“Yeah, this is what you have to look forward to,” he told me when I asked him how it worked. “No peace, ever. Getting fucking chewed out by a client in all caps while you're on a boat in Martinique.”

Dinner was served as soon as we sat down; the kitchen had been waiting for my mother. We ate slivers of vinegar-cured tongue on toast, shards of raw fluke with Asian pear and jicama and jalapeño, short ribs slow-cooked for two days and served with grapes breaded in cornmeal and deep-fried until they were dense and sugary, like a bite of apple pie. I speared the last grape off my mother's plate and popped it in my mouth.

“Really?” she said. “I thought you ate like this all the time at school.”

It was the tone she used with people who worked for her. I was stung, and too jet-lagged not to let it show.

“That was one meal, like, three months ago.”

“Honey, go ask Marissa for seconds if you're still hungry,” she said, overcompensating now, correcting for the lapse in maternal sensitivity. I wondered if she had forgotten how to do this. “Here, take the rest of this. I'm done.”

“I'm good,” I said.

The review was due up any minute, and John asked if I would mind grabbing four more bottles of champagne from the trunk of his Mercedes. I remembered what Nick had said about being the help, or not. John tossed me his keys.

I lit a cigarette in the sharp December air. Inside the trunk, the running lights revealed a case of champagne surrounded by presents in elaborate gift wrapping, loose golf balls, tools, and a baseball bat that was either for Little League or self-defense. I spun around at the sound of the restaurant's door, smoke stinging my eyes. Roger Hokenson was coming down the steps.

“Just the man I wanted to see,” he said. “How's Scotland? Did you play the Old Course yet?”

“I did,” I said, holding out my pack.

“How'd you shoot?”

“Three under par.”

“You're shitting me,” he said, popping a cigarette into his mouth.

“I'm shitting you.”

Roger lit up and winked at me with his lungs full of smoke.

“Hey, I didn't realize that was Michael Savage's kid living with you guys.”

“Who told you who he was?”

“Your mom mentioned it, I think.”

A lie and a sign that he didn't know my mother as well as I had thought.

“How's your mom?” I asked.

“She's good, you know? She saw someone in town on a Vespa the other day and told me she should get one. It's like no one told her she's eighty goddamn years old. When do you head back?”

“Right after New Year's.”

“Where's your buddy?”

“With his family.”

“Have you met him?” Roger asked. “His dad, I mean.”

I knew exactly what he meant.

“I never met his dad.”

“Put that on your résumé. ‘Never even spoke to Michael Savage.' Give yourself an edge in the job market when you graduate.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

“Anytime. You don't know where he is, do you?”

“Clare?”

“The whole family.”

“Why are you asking me that?”

“Just curious.”

“I'm serious, who wants to know?”

“A lot of people want to know. But hey, forget it. Nothing to get all riled up about, OK?”

“I've gotta get these inside for the toast,” I said, slamming the trunk.

Roger watched me as I pitched my cigarette and arranged the champagne in my arms.

“See you in there,” he called.

The review had just gone up when I walked in the door. John held up his hand for silence as he scrolled down through the text his analyst had e-mailed him. The antenna on his BlackBerry quivered, as if it couldn't take it anymore.

“Excellent,” he said, smiling and nodding. “Highest rating.”

Marissa, the chef, opened her mouth and clapped her hands to her face as everyone ripped up from the long black walnut benches to applaud.

•   •   •

“Tell me about the people,” my mother said. She was driving us home, her hands at ten and two, her eyes fixed on the dotted line.

“Speed up,” I said. “It looks worse when you go this slow.”

“Don't tell me how to drive when you've been drinking. You shouldn't know a damn thing about that. I asked you a question.”

“There's this girl I met at a party in New York before we went over there. You'd like her. She grew up down the shore.”

“You met one girl from South Jersey in four months over there?”

“Her and a bunch of her friends,” I said, laughing, realizing how that sounded. “She's the only one from Jersey. She sort of took Clare and me under her wing.”

“Well, that's nice. I just hope you're meeting everyone you can while you're there. You don't know how lucky you are.”

“I do know.”

“Everyone keeps asking if you've seen the prince yet.”

“I know him. I mean, I've met him a few times.”

My mother looked over at me.

“What?” I said.

“Are you serious?”

“No, I'm lying.”

“Oh.”

“No, Jesus, I'm not lying. That's the truth.”

“You've met the prince of England?”

“That girl I was telling you about is friends with him.”

“What's he like?”

“Seems like a nice guy. He likes to party.”

She looked at me again, and shook her head in disbelief.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Hey, why would Roger care about Clare's dad?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“He asked if I knew where he was.”

I glanced at her when she didn't answer and almost did a double take. The concern on her face made her look five years older.

“What's wrong?” I asked her.

“He asked me the same thing,” she said.

“Is something going on?”

After a mile of silence, I turned on the radio, and found some classic rock to get us home.

•   •   •

During the day there were endless glasses to buff, garnishes to chop, deliveries to inspect, issues with the staff. Nights kicked off with the panicky pitch of a hostess's last-minute requests, followed by the din of a doorbell as the arrivals came in waves. The crush was always blinding—two hours of perpetual motion split between the heat and clatter of the kitchen and rooms thick with the smell of perfume. We caught a badly needed break in the middle of a holiday family reunion when our Friday client called to inform us of a death in the family—some ancient great aunt whom they hadn't seen in years but had to bury. This was on Wednesday. They had already paid in full.

“Should we have a dinner party?” my mother asked. “There's so much food.”

“I'm going down to visit Casey if we've got tomorrow off.”

“Well, bring him back with you. I've got twenty pounds of tenderloin.”

Afterward, I sat in my car in the street outside the client's house, watching as the family gathered around a kitchen island to polish off a wedge of cake and some half-empty wine bottles from the bar. The mother stood behind her youngest daughter, braiding her hair between sips of Vouvray. Casey picked up right before his voice mail kicked in.

“Are you home?” I asked.

“Yeah, I'm here. Where else would I be?”

“Is it cool if I come down? We just got tomorrow off.”

“Sure. Melissa went to Amy's place to help her with the baby, so I'm flying solo for a few days. Come on down.”

Long Beach Island was deserted, and I rolled through a dozen flashing yellow lights before I saw another car. Casey lived above a hardware store in a small strip mall set back from the boulevard. In summer, when the streets were choked with tourists, you didn't notice the apartments that sat above the shops and bars and ice cream parlors, but now those second-story windows were the only ones with lights shining behind them. I heard a weather report on TV as I climbed the wooden stairs bolted to the building. Casey let me in, a cold draft blowing ash off the cigarette between his lips.

The decor of the two-bedroom apartment was the result of an ongoing tug-of-war between Casey and Melissa, who was ready for a shiny Philly condo with a doorman and a fitness center in the basement—a nice upper-middle-class existence on the mainland, which they could easily afford. She had picked out the black Italian leather sofa and the Lucite coffee table that was buried under one of Casey's driftwood sculptures, two old ukuleles, and a stack of
Surfer
magazines. Casey had paddled out that day, and was repairing a fresh ding in a board shaped like a blade. He surfed straight through the winter, when you can't tell a sand dune from a snowdrift, when the spray freezes in midair and rains down like hail. He offered me a beer, his face shining from a protective coat of Vaseline.

“Back from foreign lands,” he said, as he fell onto the couch. “How was it?”

The room smelled faintly of epoxy as I sat on the love seat and tried to describe my life in Scotland. I wanted him to think that I was having an enriching and edifying experience overseas, but I didn't have a lot of stories to that end. I explained Raisin Sunday, and described the after party with Prince William, which didn't seem to interest Casey. I told him about Edinburgh, and how we had passed Clare off as royalty, which made him laugh, because I told him almost nothing else about that night. Before I knew it, I was describing my second encounter with Michael Savage and omitting nothing. I told Casey how badly the whole thing had shaken me, though I don't think I realized just how badly until I finished talking.

“Did you apply to Rutgers?” Casey asked when I was finished. “I can't remember.”

“No,” I said.

“Why not? They would have taken you with a little possession on your record. Smart motherfucker like you? In state? Good grades? No way they would have turned you down.”

The derailment of my college plans was too closely tied to my afternoon at the Lawrence Township precinct for me to talk about it now. I pressed my thumb into the beveled edge of the coffee table.

“I guess I don't really get what you're doing over there,” Casey said. “It seems like you were after something, some different kind of life, and instead you got this.” He motioned vaguely at the space between us, as if what I had told him was still lingering there, like a smell.

“It's a good school,” I said. “It's a good opportunity.”

“You sound like a brochure.”

“What do you want me to say? I had to go somewhere.”

“I'm not talking about the school. I'm sure it's good to see another place like that. Anyway, what do I know? Don't listen to me. That shit about Clare's dad is crazy. I'd be laying a lot lower if I was him.”

I told him about the warning from Marcy's cousin that my mother had delivered.

“Yeah, that sounds about right. That dude Peter Szollosi down in Wildwood deals with Russians. Those people terrify me. Peter always says they hate loose ends, and they don't think twice about anything.”

Statements like that usually served as reminders of the incomprehensible distance between our lives, but suddenly he was pulling examples from his world and applying them to mine. I didn't know whether to be frightened or excited. We watched the eleven o'clock news together, and afterward a half circle of men argued over the invasion of Iraq. “So where would you draw the line?” one of them kept asking. “Where's that line in the sand? Show me the line and we can go from there.”

Casey turned off the TV and helped me make the spare bed in the second bedroom.

“There's a swell coming tomorrow, if you're up for it,” he said. “Get some sleep, amigo. You look like hell.”

•   •   •

In a dream, I walked through the empty lobby of an office building and took the elevator to the twenty-second floor. It was dark outside, but the floor was well lit and the low hum from the sleeping computers made the emptiness less ominous. I was wandering through a maze of cubicles when something floated by the window, rising slightly, spinning end over end. I tried to make out what it was and saw that the building was completely underwater. And then I heard a series of distant, muffled cracks, as if the windows on the floors below me were breaking one pane at a time. I put my hands against the glass, ready for the atmosphere to swallow me. My eyes opened then, and I realized that the sounds from my dream were real, that someone was pounding on the front door with a closed fist. The light above my head snapped on. Casey, wild-eyed and shirtless, filled the doorway.