Screwed (17 page)

Edit is confused. There are so many elements of her stepdaughter’s statement that she can never relate to.

“Rolled you?” she says, almost afraid to ask.

Evelyn elaborates. “Yeah. I had to do a little light hooking for beer money.” She winks. “You know that story, right Edit?”

One of the hovering bellboys snickers and I decide this is the ideal moment to get my aunt squared away before she gets the both of us tossed.

I take a good grip on Evelyn’s belt and march her past the snicker-er. “Elevators back here, Edit?”

Edit’s Laboutins (Fashion Police) tick-tack the marble as she hurries to keep pace with my marching feet.

“Yes. Big golden doors. You can’t miss them.”

That’s not true. You could miss them. All the doors in this place are big and golden, even the restrooms. I take an educated guess and pick the set of golden doors with call buttons.

The Costello penthouse is more subtle now that Edit is pulling the curtain cords. I remember being here once before, the year before Dad introduced the family car to a concrete wall. I was fifteen and mom brought me over for a reconciliation attempt. The logic being that I was the spitting image of Paddy himself as a young man and that gazing into the time-mirror might melt the ice packed around Old Man Costello’s heart. Mom didn’t really want to be there, but she didn’t really want to be where she generally was either and so allowed Evelyn to talk her into coming over.

Father wants to see Dan, Evelyn had told us on her last visit. Dan’s a scrapper and you know Dad’s a sucker for a spunky hard-ass.

I remember sitting in the antechamber waiting for an audience, feeling a little anxious about the phrase spunky hard-ass.

In those days, the Costello penthouse apartment was like something from the Acropolis, with honest-to-God Greek pillars and a couple of busts mounted on plinths. The décor was all from the testosterone school, including the mounted head of a twelve-point buck and a taxidermed mountain gorilla, which was scaring the pants off me with its unblinking stare even though I knew its eyes were glass. I remember Mom hugging the gorilla and calling it Buttons, but that only made the thing creepier. If it had come alive at that moment and squashed my mom in its powerful black fingers I would not have been in the least surprised.

We were kept waiting for half an hour, then a light over the office door flashed green, which meant Mom was cleared to enter.

She squeezed my hand and said. “Okay, Dan, I’m going into the lion’s den. Don’t worry if you hear shouting. That’s just how Paddy Costello communicates.”

Mom slipped inside, the double-height doors making her look elfin, and there was plenty of shouting, almost immediately. I managed to contain myself until I heard the musical tinkle of breaking glass, then I thought to hell with this and barged into the sanctum.

I was feeling pretty good about myself in the role of protector. Only the previous week I had pushed my dad so hard that he cracked his spine on the tabletop and I regularly messed up boys much older than me. Surely I could manage an old man.

Paddy Costello was not even the giant I had built him up to be, in fact I was half a foot taller than he was, but the guy had an energy coming off him in waves, an aura of harsh intimidation. He reminded me of a billy goat, with his spearhead Vandyke, wiry frame and wild, darting eyes. Those eyes flitted from the trophy cabinet, with its glass door that had been shattered by the hurled book, to my mother, who huddled scared in a low wooden chair, then finally to me. The boy who had come to rescue his mother.

My grandfather spat on his own floor then pointed a stiff finger at me, as though I was to blame for the thrown book. I didn’t know what to say to this old guy—I say old but I guess he was maybe fifty—but I needed something strong. My mouth went ahead of its own accord and said, “Fuck you, old man.”

The fuck you didn’t bother Paddy at all. It was the old man that riled him.

“Old? I could take your head off with a punch.”

I didn’t bother responding to that challenge. I just arranged my feet the way my school boxing coach had taught me. Now either he would fight me or shut the hell up.

Paddy did neither. Instead he chuckled, showing a mouth of craggy teeth, and crossed behind his desk to the trophy cabinet.

“Young Daniel. A chip off the Costello block, so they say. Seems like a day doesn’t go by without someone filling my ears with stories of young Daniel.”

I did nothing but keep my eyes on him. Could be he was a tricky bastard.

“Daniel is bright and he’s tough. Daniel could carry on the Costello business, if not the name.”

Paddy reached into the trophy cabinet, through the ring of jagged shards, ignoring the fresh cut on his index finger.

“Let me tell you something, Daniel,” he said drawing out the book. “I don’t need someone to carry on my business or name. I’m gonna live longer than a man has ever lived and after that they’ll put me into the ground. Then I could give a shit about the whole ball of wax. The whole world can go to nuclear hell and I won’t know a thing about it. I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been.”

My mother once told me that her father only had two moods: bad and worse. I supposed that he was giving me a peek at worse.

Paddy thrust the book at me and I caught it on reflex.

“Here’s a test for you, boy. That book is a signed first edition of The Fountainhead. You can sell it today for ten grand. There’s a guy on Fifty-ninth that would give you twelve. But if you hold on to it for a few years it could be worth ten times that. Choose wisely, boy, because this book is all you’ll ever get from me.”

I looked down at the book with the spatter of his blood soaking into its leather cover, then at the man, my grandfather, who had given it to me. He wanted me to throw it back in his face, but I wouldn’t, because when little Patrick was older, ten grand could get us to London. Far away from our father. I’d take Mom with me then, just as I would take her out of here now. So I said:

“You better take two steps back, old man, or you’ll be going into the ground a lot sooner than you planned.”

He wasn’t convinced I was serious, so I played the schoolyard trick of faking a punch. The old man wasn’t used to that sort of behavior. It had probably been a long time since someone faked out Paddy Costello, so he flinched and I laughed in his face. I saw in his eyes then that he would kill me if he could, right there in his office, and I knew I had sealed Mom’s fate as an outcast, but there was no upside to being beholden to this man.

“Get out,” he spat. “Take my . . . your mother with you. And do not ever come back.”

So I took my mother with me and I never came back. Until now.

And the book? I sold it the following day and hid the ten grand in the trunk of our car inside the first-aid kit. It was incinerated when Dad rammed that wall.

I often remind myself that there are people worse off than me; in the Lebanon and so forth, or Calcutta. But on dark days, I can’t help thinking that I’ve been cursed to live a certain kind of life. I try to take care of my friends and run a straight business but instead I get people hurt or run foul of people who want to hurt me. Maybe I have some kid of dark destiny, or maybe that old maxim the luck of the Irish doesn’t apply to me.

Years later, I spotted a secondhand copy of The Fountainhead at a stall on Mingi Street, the rambling souk adjacent to the UN HQ in Beirut. I tried to resist but a person clings to anything with resonance in a war zone. So I paid my ten bucks and pocketed the paperback along with some editions of Will Eisner’s The Spirit. I liked The Fountainhead fine, and I realized that Paddy Costello’s whole “I regret nothing” speech was lifted from the book. I understood then that Gramps considered himself to be in the same principled genius bracket as Rand’s architect Howard Roark.

When I hit on that notion, I laughed until tears rolled down my cheeks and the guy in the top bunk threatened to smother me with his pillow. Of course I couldn’t stop laughing then on principal so there was a bit of argy-bargy and I may have popped someone’s shoulder out.

You might not believe it, but I like thinking about Granddad; it vindicates me for despising his ghost.

So anyways, Edit swipes us into the apartment, where every trace of Paddy Costello seems to have been replaced with stuff that Howard Roark might actually have approved of if he ever took a break from being noble. I don’t know much about modern design but I bet most of the furnishings in here come from some Scandinavian store that ain’t IKEA, and the artwork looks so bovine and gloomy that it must be worth a fortune.

Evelyn is on her last legs, usually by this time in the evening she’d be keeping herself topped up with Everclear and getting set to commit to a major bender, but she hasn’t had a drink in several hours and she’s hurting. Edit leads us down a corridor longer than a subway car and into a guest bedroom that probably cost more to decorate than my entire club. Nice though. Tasteful. Chocolate brown rugs on golden wooden floors, and a king bed in the same colors set askew in the corner.

I lay Evelyn on the bed and she whimpers a little, begging me for a drink and I can’t help remembering how she used to be.

What’s the word?

Vivacious.

Now she’s a drunk, and drunks all have the same personality; a blend of cunning and pathetic. Evelyn looks pretty far gone in the face and it occurs to me that this beautiful room is going to look like a portaloo exploded in here pretty soon.

“She’s bad,” I tell Edit. “Running on fumes. It’s gonna be a rough night.”

Edit sits on the bed and takes Evelyn’s rough hand in her manicured fingers and even that little snapshot tells a lot about how each woman spent the past decade.

“A doctor is coming, Evelyn. He’ll make you feel better.”

“One drink,” Evelyn mumbles. “I’m a goddamn heiress, aren’t I?”

Aren’t I? Ev’s Manhattan/Hamptons accent is reasserting itself faster than that kid Shea jettisoned his.

“Of course you are,” says Edit soothingly and she gets in close to hug Evelyn tight, ignoring the grime compacted in the folds of her stepdaughter’s clothing, ignoring the sour, stale smell of alcoholism. “Everything will be all right.”

When I said that, it sounded like Christmas cracker cliché, but when Edit says it, in her singsong accent, it sounds true. I want to believe it myself.

Can everything be all right? Is that possible?

Edit offers Evelyn a couple of light sedatives and Evelyn gobbles them from her palm. You will never hear an addict ask what’s in that? Whether it kills or cures doesn’t really matter, as long as the edge is taken off. The mere fact that she has ingested a drug of some kind calms my aunt and she lies back on the bed, good-naturedly cursing us for assholes until she nods off, snoring through a nose that looks like it may have been busted since I saw her last.

Only then does Edit allow her own shoulders to droop a fraction and the worry to show in her eyes.

“I’ve seen people come back from worse,” I say. “She’s got all her teeth, which is a good indicator. Once they loose their teeth there’s not far to go.”

Edit shivers at the thought. In her ivory tower, people only lose teeth they don’t like.

Edit laughs. “You know what, Dan? I need a drink.”

I smile. “You know what, Edit? Me too.”

I am surprised to find Buttons the gorilla still guarding the office door.

“I didn’t figure you for a taxidermy girl,” I say, rubbing the big ape’s nose for luck.

Edit pushes through the doors. “Buttons. Toward the end, he was all the company I had.”

I don’t express my sympathies because I don’t feel any. Edit is an okay lady, but she knew what she was getting into, marrying a billionaire who could probably remember when Johnny Carson took over The Tonight Show. Sure it cost her ten years of her life but she came out of it pretty sweet.

Edit has left her mark on the office too. The trophy case has been replaced with a Japanese bamboo water fountain and where Paddy’s old desk used to squat, now stands what looks like reclaimed railway sleepers on brushed steel legs.

I could never live here. Even the furniture has a philosophy attached to it. Trying to interpret the wallpaper would give me an aneurism.

“Whiskey okay, Daniel? Irish, of course.”

“Of course.”

Edit pours a couple of generous shots from a bottle of Bushmills that looks nearly as old as I am.

“You better lock that cabinet when we’re finished. Or better yet have someone shift the entire cabinet out of here. Locking the door would only work for about ten seconds.”

Edit passes me a glass and we clink. “You’re right. Don’t worry, Dan. I’m committed to this process. Evelyn will have the best treatment. No sending her away this time, I’ll have her treated here.”

We sit on opposite ends of an L-shaped sofa with fake zebra cushions, our feet sinking into a patterned rug that is probably loaded with symbolism that I am too brutish to understand, and we sip our velvety drinks in a civilized manner. I am so glad that Zeb is not here as he would doubtless blanket bomb this classy situation with crass comments in an attempt to get Edit to either sleep with him or lend him money.

Zeb told me once that society dames like to fuck down, as he called it. Why else you think Rapunzel kept throwing her hair out the window? You honestly believe Prince Charming was the first swordsman up in that tower?

When I was a kid I read Rapunzel maybe a thousand times and that particular moral never occurred to me.

Something does occur to me now. It took a while, but I am not accustomed to being around decent people.

“I admire you, Edit. What you’re doing for Ev.”

My gran studies the pointed toes of her shoes. “She’s family, Dan. I’m all alone without her, and you too.”

“Maybe. But like she said, Evelyn’s the heiress. She comes back and you’re out of the driver’s seat, right?”

Edit laughs. “Oh God no. I’m not that much of a do-gooder. Paddy was pretty hard on Evelyn. When she disappeared, he left everything to me, except a trust fund should his prodigal daughter ever come back. It’s a big fund, don’t get me wrong, but she’s very much a guest in my home.”