Mickelsson's Ghosts (85 page)

“I'm not sure I do.” He had not brought something to read.

Finney laughed. “First time, eh? I figured it must be, that deal you cooked up for 'er.”

“She hasn't accepted it?”

“She'll accept, don't you worry! But first we have to go through the motions a little, old game of give and take.”

“Wait a minute,” Mickelsson said.

“Take it easy, Professor!”

The only furniture in the room was a long maple table with six matching chairs. Windows looked down at the snowy street, a few slow, cautious cars. Finney pulled out a chair at the corner of the table and motioned for Mickelsson to sit. Leaning over him, his belly protruding as if cantilevered, Finney smelled of cologne, maybe aftershave, but also, sickeningly, of perspiring flesh. From his stuffed briefcase he drew out a yellow legal pad crammed with figures and illegible notes. She hadn't exactly rejected his offer, nearly twenty thousand dollars—more than half of what he made in a year—but she had added twenty thousand more to it: life insurance, money for the children's education, mortgage payments on the house he'd left to her, payment to her lawyers. …

Mickelsson stared at the figures, both hands flat on the tabletop. “That's crazy,” he said. “Where am I supposed to get forty thousand dollars a year?”

“Well, that's alimony,” Finney said, and laughed. “The screwing you get for the screwing you got.” He laughed again.

“If we went by that theory,” Mickelsson growled, “all she'd get would be a couple of tires from the car.”

“Don't get up tight, now,” Finney said. “It's not completely unreasonable. Unreasonable, I grant you. But not completely.”

He looked up at the flushed, tight-skinned face, skin so tight and pink it looked peeled. “Whose side are you on?”

“Easy, now! Whoa there!” He put his hands on Mickelsson's shoulders. “I told you it's just games. You gotta pay your income taxes, right?—both this year's and seventy-seven, seventy-eight's? Pay her twenty thousand dollars and you can't do that, right? And the I.R.S. won't be giving you any choice. So what's she want from you, blood? Does she want you in the slammer where all you can send her is censored picture postcards? So OK, we hold the line.” He made a fist and shook it, the hand oddly small, like a child's, but so fat it looked inflated. “Maybe we can even chip away just a little. Teach her a little appreciation of the har-de-har finer things.”

“It's not that I want her to lose the house,” he said.

“Right, I understand that.
That
much is wonderfully clear to me.” With his puffy right hand he swept away all reasonable objections. “You want her to have the house, you want her to have the car, you want the kids to go to college. Right?”

“Well—”

“Impossible but right. I swear, you act like
you're
the guilty party. That's how both of you act. I know, don't tell me! You were a real crapola husband, and she's desperate, that's her nature. Scared lady. OK. OK, so we'll hold the line. But of course she imagines she can't handle the mortgage, which is probably true, and she's got these lawyers' bills—three fucking lawyers, one for reading, one for writing, one for chewing on the pencils—which three aforesaid lawyers she also can't pay. So where does that put us?”

Mickelsson leaned forward, resting his forehead on his hands. After a minute he said, “I guess I don't know what you're talking about.”

Finney straightened up and put his hands on his hips, pushing his chin out and aiming it down at Mickelsson. “I'm talking this deal you've offered her, mafriend. You tell her what you'll give her, she tells you what it costs, and you tell her you can't pay it. What kind of facockta deal is that? So we gotta get this straight right here and now, me-you.”

“All I make in a year—”

“Look, why don't we throw it to the court and just fuck her? You know what the court will say she's worth, gold teeth included? Big fat zilch!” He hit the tabletop with his hand. “After you've got the settlement, you can always pay her more than zilch. Take it off your taxes as a charity, kid! Sign up for more than you can pay her, she'll throw you in the clink. You won't like it there, believe me. The tobacco store sucks.” Not quite lightly, he slapped Mickelsson's back and laughed. “So what are your instructions?”

“As I've said from the beginning,” Mickelsson said. He felt confused, nauseous. It was ridiculous that he couldn't seem to figure it out. It was simply not that hard. When he tried to concentrate, he got an image of Leslie walking with him down by Rizdy, sea-wind in her hair, about a week after he'd left Ellen. They were holding hands, Leslie swinging his arm, apparently in high spirits, talking about the wonderful possibilities of Mickelsson's new life, and then suddenly she had turned to him, tears streaming down her cheeks, crying her heart out.

“As I've said from the beginning,” Mickelsson whispered, raising his hand to his forehead.

Abruptly, all Finney's gyrations stopped at once and he stared at Mickelsson with distaste. “Right,” he said at last, nothing moving but his mouth. He clicked his ballpoint pen shut and put it in his pocket. “You want her to have the house and the car and fifteen hundred every month, maybe a little extra for the kids' education. No problem, except the arithmetic.” He raised both hands slowly, then laid them on the table, leaning over. “Professor,” he said, “maybe you could learn a new trade, like for instance computer crime.”

“How come you told me you had all this worked out?” Mickelsson asked.

“Practically
worked out,” Finney said. His grin looked malicious. “We got the both of you here to talk at least. All right, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll tell them it's definite at twenty thousand smackers, which God only knows how you'll pay even that, and if she thinks she needs more to keep the house, let her fucking take in washing.”

Before Mickelsson could say another word, he was gone, papers fluttering.

For two hours after that he sat staring out the window. Then Finney was back. “Her lawyers make an interesting point,” he said. He laid the papers on the table in front of Mickelsson.

Three hours later, by a process of reasoning he couldn't follow in the least, in fact made almost no effort to follow, Mickelsson was in the courtroom, tentatively committed to paying thirty thousand dollars a year to his ex-wife, every penny he made, and an additional twenty thousand this year “to put her on her feet.”

“Never mind,” Finney said. “We got a fail-safe. I slipped in a clause on ‘changed circumstances.' If we find we're in trouble we'll just hop back into court.” He gave Mickelsson a fierce little salute. Mickelsson ignored it.

Then, blazing with rage, as if Mickelsson had tricked her, robbed her children of their birthright, publicly insulted and humiliated her, Ellen came into the courtroom with her lawyers, two old men and a fat, redheaded woman in a pants-suit. “Bastardl” Ellen hissed, bending her large, puffy face toward him, beet-red. “Asshole!” The judge at the bench scowled darkly. Mickelsson looked down at his folded hands and felt himself going cold all over. It was astounding what power she had over him, even now. “Liar! Fucker!” she whispered. The sound was like fire. Clearly she believed he had cheated her terribly. She was insane, simply. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the woman lawyer reach out gently for Ellen's arm. Now huge tears streamed down Ellen's face, streaking the mascara. Her black, thick hair looked dead. The pale blue eyes in the artificially darkened face—some kind of chemical tan—were unmistakably those of a madwoman.

When it was over, Ellen was led out first, with her lawyers. Mickelsson waited, his face in his hands, and when the coast was clear went up to the room where he'd passed all that time—he no longer knew why—and retrieved his coat and scarf. He could hear Ellen shouting in the hallway downstairs, her theatrical voice filled with sorrow and rage, utterly convincing but without any hint of real life in it, convincing like the elocuted rant of King Lear. And yet—though Mickelsson couldn't fathom how it was that she could feel that way—he was convinced that, for all the disguising stage-voice, her righteous indignation, her Medea-wild feeling of betrayal was real. He felt no stirring of interest in the observation, even though, for the moment, he believed it to be sound. Our Dada, which art in Dada … She was swearing now; presumably she'd caught sight of Finney. Mickelsson imagined her contorted, painted face. It was an astonishing thing that all those years with him had changed her to this from what she'd been when he'd first known her, good-natured to a fault, high-minded, beautiful. … He stepped back from the memory as from an elevator shaft. Now, downstairs, he heard the voice of The Comedian soothing her. “Come on, El, let's go eat,” the young man said. “You can
eat?”
she flashed back. But she wasn't quite shouting now.

On the street outside the courthouse he found his daughter waiting in her beat-up convertible. When she saw him, she looked startled, then smiled. She waved, tipping her head, then opened the car-door, slid out, and came running to him. “Hey, man, is it over?”

“Honey,” he said, hugging her. Her littleness astonished him, and suddenly his eyes brimmed with tears. “Jesus, honey, it's good to see you!”

She led him to the car, holding his hand. “Come to lunch with me?”

“Of course!”

She looked at her watch. “There's a new place I could take you. It opened since you left. They know me, so they'll treat us
right,
if you know what I mean.” She laughed, switching the key on, vrooming the engine. “I was a waitress there a couple of months. They thought I was very posh—talked wiz zee customairs wiz zees vairy sweet Fransh accent.” She pulled away from the curb as if the car were a rocket. Behind them, almost beside them, someone honked.

“I'm glad to hear your French is proving useful.”

“Now, Dad,” she said, and smiled at him.

He hardly knew her. “Really!” she kept saying, with a slight, odd accent—it sounded more like
relly
—and a curious intonation, as if she were jokingly imitating someone; he imagined some supersophisticate movie-star and saw her, in his mind, in a floppy French beret, the photography black and white, sharply focussed. Sometimes while they ate she reached out and held his hand on the table, this beautiful young woman who'd been the daughter he'd loved with all his heart through all their years together, now almost a stranger. He was painfully conscious that she had his face, except magically transformed, slimmed down, greatly gentled, merry as an elf's and then at times, for an instant, forlorn.

She talked of her boyfriend—he gathered that she loved him rather more than the boy loved her; good thing that they'd be parting in the fall, going to their separate colleges—and of her work, mainly of her work. She was a cocktail waitress every night from eight to midnight, throwing herself into it, making good money. The tips, she said, were directly proportionate to the number of ribbons one wore in one's hair. He listened fondly and coolly, as if from a great analytical distance. She was sacrificing a good deal for her work, all her nights, all her week-ends; and she had to be up every morning at eight for her classes. She never spoke of music except to mention disco, though she'd once been a good violinist.
The waste!
Mickelsson thought again and again as her talk drifted to some witless book; but gradually he saw that he was mistaken. She had character, this beautiful, rapidly chattering young stranger. She was in rebellion, yes—unwittingly, no doubt—turning with finality on all Ellen and he had “done for her,” the concerts, the museums, the plays and books, or at any rate turning on all but the French, which they'd long since begun to consider a mistake. The French and, he corrected himself, the expensive clothes.

As they drank their coffee, Mickelsson lighting up his pipe, he saw and remembered another quality in his daughter: her innate love of justice. It shone in her like a sunlit fountain. She talked of Mark. “I'm not really psyched for all that, myself,” she said, and clearly she was not; but it was also clear that she looked up to her brother with almost worshipful admiration, as she'd always done, and could talk about nukes almost as smoothly as he could, though with fewer facts and figures. “I guess the thing is,” she said, “somebody has to get the word out, you know? Make the poor silly sheep sit up and notice. I mean the government people who are supposed to watch over the nukes are all nuke people
themselves.”
She smiled at her coffee, as if apologizing for getting carried away. “Well, Mark's not crazy or anything,” she said. “He'll be all right, you'll see. It's not even that he's angry, not really. But he's like you. …”

He waited, hoping she'd explain; off-hand, he was aware of no such virtue in himself. At last he said, looking down, “I wish I
were
like Mark.”

“Oh, you are, you are, Dad!” She seemed to imply that she, to her sorrow, was not.

“Well,” he said.

She nodded, then suddenly smiled, closing doors. “Have you got a car or something? Can I drive you to the airport?”

“I've got the Jeep back at the courthouse.”

“I'll get the check,” she said, and reached for it.

“Leslie,” he said, so seriously that she hesitated. He put his hand down on hers. After a moment he said, “You mustn't hold too high an opinion of me. It's not a good idea. All human beings have faults … make mistakes. Sometimes even people who …”

She waited, smiling falsely, alerted.

“You may hear things about me,” he said, after another pause. “Pretty bad things, possibly.”

“I won't believe them,” she said.

“They may be true,” he said gently. “All I mean is, honey …” He met her eyes for an instant, then was forced to look down. “You must believe in goodness, not particular people. Believe in goodness with all your heart and soul, but as for people, even good people—”