The Dismantling (6 page)

“The subway,” she said. “I messed up the transfer.” She glanced around the restaurant. “This is where you do business?”

“I thought it would be more pleasant than my office.”

“So you're making an exception for me?”

“Most donors don't show up alone,” he said carefully. “They bring their mom, their husband, whoever. Since you're here by yourself, I thought it might be nice to make things a little less impersonal.”

She frowned. “I don't want your pity.”

“That's not how I meant it.”

They sat in uncomfortable silence until the waiter stopped by and rescued them. Simon ordered coffee and a croissant while Maria flitted around the menu, finally settling on a cheddar and ham omelet with a side of sausage, white toast, and strawberry jam. Their orders in, Simon asked what she was planning to do that afternoon.

“Walk,” she said. “I can't do that at home. If I want to go for a walk there, I have to drive somewhere else first.”

“Where's home?”

“Los Angeles.”

“Yeah, but where?”

“Torrance.”

“What's it like there?”

“It's a place to live. I don't hate it. I don't love it either.”

He reminded himself to be careful, not to ask too many questions. “I've never been to California.”

“I've lived in every Los Angeles neighborhood you've never heard about,” she said. “I say LA, what do you think of?”

“Hollywood. Beverly Hills.”

“What else? The other side of the coin.”

“I don't know. South Central? Watts. Compton.”

“It depends on what movies you've been watching, right? What music you've been listening to. They don't make movies or songs about the neighborhoods I grew up in. Not because they're so bad, but because they're so boring. Shabby, but mostly homicide-free. Nobody wants to hear about that.”

“Your family, they still live in the city?”
Stop it
, he told himself.

“My mother's dead. My father lives in some shithole in the Valley, rounding up illegal immigrants to mow people's lawns. Prune their topiaries. It's the best job he's ever had.” Her tone was more ironic than hostile, as though her father were too absurd a subject to merit actual disdain. “I don't really talk to him. I guess you could say we're estranged.”

Their breakfast arrived, and Simon told himself that he wasn't really interested in her background, that he was just doing his due diligence for Health Solutions. Maria demolished her omelet in less than two minutes. Outside on Madison Avenue, a Pomeranian lifted its leg and pissed on the wheel of a parked Mercedes. Simon sipped his cup of coffee, which cost five dollars and was excellent.

“How many people know you're here?” he asked.

“How many know I'm not in LA? Five or six. That includes my boss at the bar. He thinks I'm visiting my aunt in Bakersfield. How many know I'm in New York? Two. My son and my sister, who's looking after him while I'm gone. Not that my son has any idea what New York even is. How many know what I'm
doing
here? None.”

“Your son.” Simon tried not to sound surprised. She was so young, and the medical records she'd supplied hadn't mentioned anything about her having given birth, although it wasn't a certainty that they would.

“Yeah.”

“How old is he?”

“He's three.”

“And what's his name?”

“Gabriel.” She paused. “You want to know why I'm doing this, right?”

“You don't have to tell me that.”

“But that doesn't mean you don't want to know.”

“What's important is that the team at the hospital thinks
they
know. It doesn't matter what I think.”

“And you have a story for them?”

“Part of one, yes.”

He told her about Lenny: first, the extent of his illness, and then the outlines of his—and her—fictional extended family.

“Second cousins? Couldn't they just look that up and see it's not true?”

“That's not as easy as you might think. But don't give them a reason to and they won't even try.”

She picked at her toast, nodding. “Well, in case you want to know anyway, I have a job pouring drinks for cheapskate alcoholics and a son whose father wants nothing to do with him. It's not any more complicated than that.”

He tried a joke: “You also have a dear cousin in need.”

Her face split into a smile. “And I've been possessed by the spirit of giving.” Her teeth were white and straight except for the top right incisor, which was crooked and marbled gray, like an old gravestone. She closed her mouth. He wanted to ask her to keep smiling, so he could see the tooth again. He liked how its irregularity reshaped the rest of her face, the flaw making the whole more appealing.

“This guy,” she said. “Leonard.”

“Lenny, yeah.”

“Lenny. How long would he have left? Without me.”

“A year. Maybe less. And it wouldn't be a good year.”

She considered this for a moment, although he couldn't quite parse her reaction. “So what's next?”

“Tomorrow morning you'll go to the hospital to meet the transplant coordinator and surgical team, and they'll take another look at your liver. Thursday we'll prep together some more. Friday you'll meet Lenny. And then Saturday's your psychosocial exam.”

“The screening interview.”

“Yeah. That's when they make sure you're not getting paid, among other things. I'll tell you what to say. I'll show you the exact questions they're going to ask. You'll be fine.”

“And if I pass?”

“
When
you pass, they'll schedule the surgery. It'll be no more than a few days later. They don't see the point in waiting.”

She nodded. He could see her counting off the days in her head: less than two weeks until payday. “What about you, Simon?”

“What about me?”

“Health Solutions. It's not your company, is it? You're not the one running the show.”

“Why not?”

“You're too young, for one thing.”

“I've heard that before. Anything else?”

“It just doesn't seem like the kind of business you'd want to build for yourself.”

This sounded like flattery. “That's a strange thing for someone in your position to say.”

She shrugged. “So then tell me: how did you end up doing what you're doing?”

“We're not having this conversation.”

“I'm not supposed to ask questions?”

“Donors ask all sorts of questions. Just not about me.”

She shrugged again. “I'm a curious person.”

“And this is my dream job.”

“Uh-huh.” She smiled, and there was the tooth again, like a chip of concrete wedged into her gum.

T
HAT
evening Simon rode the A train out to the Rockaways for his biweekly dinner with his father, during which he would continue to spin out the lie that he was still enrolled in medical school. He'd kept this up for nine months now. The first time he'd seen his father after his official withdrawal from school, they'd sat around the kitchen table, eating pork chops and red onions grilled on the rusty outdoor Weber, drinking bottles of Stella, and talking about the rapidly tanking stock market. Simon had felt at each successive moment as though he was going to make his announcement, but then that moment would pass by unexploited, and the next and the next, and soon enough they'd finished their dinner, and Simon found himself on the train back to Roosevelt Island, entirely sure that during the following visit he would speak, that at the next dinner he would unburden himself and offer a full and convincing explanation. Of course no such thing happened, not that next visit and not on any other visit either. But still there was no avoiding the dinners. The simple truth was that his father did not have anyone else, and although Simon had to admit he was now a liar, he refused to be a delinquent son.

The ride out to the Beach 116th Street station was as interminable as it had always been, the train wending its way under the entire borough of Brooklyn before crossing Jamaica Bay and delivering Simon onto the spit of the Rockaways. It was on this train ride—it was
because
of this train ride—that he had first come to distrust his father's decisions. He'd just turned twelve when Michael Worth determined that a stretch of promenade above the FDR Drive would be the best place to inform his two children that their small family was moving from Yorkville to the farthest reaches of southeastern Queens. Exley Chatham, the brokerage firm at which Michael was a vice president, had imploded in tandem with the Japanese currency market a few months before. Simon remembered his father looming like a scarecrow as he outlined in his mild North London accent why his children would be required to take the subway for an hour and a half to get to school that fall. Michael's chest and arm hair were white as milk, and when the sun slipped out from behind one of the East End apartment towers to backlight him, the fuzz on his body glowed as though he were swaddled in tiny white-hot filaments. He was, as usual, wearing a pastel Polo shirt open at the neck—this one, Simon remembered, lime green—and, also as usual, smoking a Parliament, and all of this—the fiery hair, the shirt, the cigarette, the accent, the chopping motion of his hands as he delineated the concept of square footage—combined to form a sort of ur-Michael figure, the concentration into one moment of everything that made Simon's father his father.

When Michael asked if there were any questions, it was all Simon could do to shake his head. Amelia, though—his younger sister, ten years old, fifty-five bony pounds swallowed up by a pink sweatshirt—said, “We're poor now, aren't we?”

“Shut up,” Simon said, but Michael just laughed as though he were choking.

“Not yet,” he said. “Poor
er
—well, I can't argue with that.”

Yet when they moved into the house on Beach 113th Street, on the last weekend of July 1995, Simon and Amelia were too astounded by the amount of space they could now call their own to think about much else. Two floors! A crawl space! A porch! (Concrete, but still.) It was bounteous, an abundance. They could walk to the beach in five minutes: how could their move be understood as anything other than an improvement? (And, of course, when Simon was a bit older, he understood that they weren't in fact poor at all; they'd merely slipped from the upper to the lower confines of that infinitely elastic American category, the middle class.) But then the school year began, and their days became bracketed by bleary-eyed, impossibly lengthy subway rides; they seemed forever in transit, the school day itself only one stop on some never-ending, laborious journey.

On the night before school resumed, Michael had sat Simon down in the kitchen after Amelia had gone to bed. “I'm going to need your help, Simon,” he said. “I've always been able to trust you to be responsible for yourself. Now you're old enough that I can ask you to share some responsibility for your little sister. Take her to school in the morning and bring her home in the afternoon. If I'm not back by dinnertime, order something to eat—pizza or whatever you like. I'll leave some money by the phone. Help her with her homework. Keep an eye on her. Be there for her when she needs it. I'm going to have to stay on later at work for a while, and it's going to take me longer to get home now too, so . . .” He regarded Simon very seriously, wreathed in blue smoke, the Parliament held loosely between two fingers. “Can I depend on you?” he asked.

Simon nodded. “I won't let you down.”

“Not me,” Michael said. “Your sister. She's your responsibility now too. Remember that.”

“I will. I promise.”

“Good,” his father said. “This is what it means to be a big brother.”

And what about St. Edmund's? A Jesuit education couldn't have held too much meaning for their atheist father. Simon had always assumed it was instead in deference to the memory of their mother, the daughter of first-generation Italian Americans, nine years dead by then of pancreatic cancer, and while alive a passionate if inconsistent Catholic. It was also possible that Michael Worth harbored a stubborn European distrust of the New York City public school system, and yet private school was as beyond his newly diminished means as a private jet. Whatever the reason, off to the Upper East Side Jesuits Simon and Amelia had been sent, and once he'd managed to wedge his children into the school, Michael was not going to let a little thing like the family's move to the hinterlands change his mind. The result for Simon had been a partitioned adolescence: school in Manhattan, home in farthest Queens. In each place he maintained the illusion that his real life—where you'd find his closest friends and his truest, most comfortable self—occurred in the other. For five years, the one thread that ran through it all was Amelia, and then she was dead and the whole thing—his doubly calibrated identity—collapsed like a gutted building, destroyed from within by her sudden absence.

 • • • 

T
he subway jolted out of the elevated Howard Beach station, and Simon was presented with a view of the weather-beaten little houses that backed onto a canal snaking into Jamaica Bay, the houses lifted on stilts above the turbid channel, Boston Whalers tethered to their back porches. They were rooted more in water than dry land, clinging to this far edge of the city like barnacles. A beached motorboat lay on the spongy ground by the side of the canal, “MERK” sprayed in pink bubble letters across its side. Simon watched the planes spiral into JFK as the train clattered its way over the water, the Edgemere and Arverne and Dayton projects—Rockaway's own serrated skyline—rising across the bay.

He remembered one night, the previous winter, when his tenure in medical school was beginning to fall apart. He'd gone drinking with his father at a loud, dingy bar on Maiden Lane, the kind of place where the decor, bartenders, and clientele hadn't changed much in thirty years. They'd been joined by Michael's old friends from Exley Chatham, fellow refugees from the company's 1995 collapse, who had all scattered after the firm's demise, most, like Michael, retreating from trading to the back office at any Wall Street shop that would give them a second chance. They called in favors from former classmates, former bosses, former employees, to get their new jobs. Most had lost the taste for trading, the taste for risk; they'd been burned too badly. Exley Chatham's bet had been on the continued resurgence of the yen. The firm had been highly leveraged, and when currency markets began to break in the wrong direction, Chatham had, in a bid to buy itself time to fix things, been less than forthright with its creditors about the precise status of its investments. Of course, they ran out of time, and things were not fixed; things were, in fact, broken more thoroughly than they would have been if the firm had disclosed its losses when they'd first occurred. But here, in this bar and a few others on Cedar and Pearl and John Streets, the old colleagues could sit together and drink as though the last twelve years had never happened, drink until they could barely stand; yet no matter how drunk they got, they always managed to stagger outside and flag a cab for Penn Station or Grand Central in time for the last train home to Roslyn, Pleasantville, Forest Hills.

And they got drunk that night, Michael most of all. Simon remembered his father rising out of his chair every five minutes to propose another toast, his face flushed with pride as well as liquor—pride in his son, his diligent, quiet, melancholic son, who was going to be a doctor, his son who'd soldiered on despite losing the sister who'd meant everything to him. And here Michael had wavered for a moment, his friends looking down into their drinks, before he gathered himself and finished the toast and they all drank it down.

A few of Simon's old Rockaway friends sometimes asked him how Michael was. Well, how should Simon know? His father's routine had tightened with such stricture that it did not allow for much variation. He was Michael Worth—that's how he was. He left Rockaway at six in the morning, balanced a brokerage's books until five—a dull, moderately paid job, the best he could get on the Street with the taint of Chatham smeared over his résumé like dried shit—drank until seven, rode the train back home, then did it all over again. On the weekends there was tennis, if he could find a partner, and the ocean—his nominal reason for moving all the way out there in the first place—if it was warm enough. Otherwise there was always Derry Hills and the other Rockaway bars. And Simon too, of course, paying his twice-monthly respects, telling his twice-monthly lies.

 • • • 

A
fter Simon switched trains at Broad Channel, his car pulled into the Beach 116th Street station, and five minutes later he was knocking at the familiar door, his father appearing with a burning cigarette stuck into the middle of his red-cheeked face.

“You should get a car, Simon,” he said. “It would make your life easier.”

“Want to buy me one?”

Michael grabbed his son in a rough hug, the glowing tip of his cigarette narrowly missing Simon's earlobe. “We're having roast chicken,” he said. “How does that suit the good doctor?”

Simon followed his father toward the kitchen, glancing up the darkened stairway as he passed to the back of the house. He wondered again how often his father went upstairs, to the second floor and Simon's and Amelia's old rooms—if he ever did. Michael opened the oven, and the kitchen's air thickened with the smell of crisped chicken skin. He set the pan straight onto the table, the bird resplendent in a pool of its own juices, and poked at the breast with a pair of tongs. The table was set with two bottles of Stella, two chilled glasses, two carving knives. Simon and his father sat down and took turns slicing chunks of meat off the bone, a loaf of sourdough bread on hand to transport the meat from plate to mouth, a bowl of mayonnaise for lubrication. Simon kept up a difficult pace of eating and drinking, afraid that the moment his mouth was found empty, he would be forced to invent some new fantasy about medical school. But this was not the topic his father had in mind.

Michael cleared the plates and brought out a fifth of Jameson and two tumblers. He wanted to talk about the banks. They were all diseased, he said. Some might be cured, others put out of their misery. There was no logic here that he could see. Nobody knew what the hell they were doing. Simon listened, watching his father's face. The firm in the back office of which Michael now worked appeared to be safe for the moment, but who knows? It was ironic, he said, that avaricious, unchecked risk, the one thing he'd tried to avoid since Exley Chatham, might screw him over yet again.

Simon had watched, in real time, this excision of risk from his father's life. He'd been too young to understand much of it as it was happening, but even then he'd known a shift was taking place within his father, not just a shift of circumstance, but an internal shift, a shift of character. Michael Worth—the middle-class North London boy who'd won over a stubborn Italian American graduate student while on scholarship at University College London, arrived in New York a year later with his new and pregnant wife, torn into his first job trading bond debt at Chatham, seen his wife killed by pancreatic cancer less than a year after their second child's birth, and doubled and tripled his efforts at Chatham, becoming a vice president on the currencies desk just before the entire firm came crashing down—Michael Worth had turned away from the part of himself that had carried him this far. He'd turned away from jealousy and ambition and hunger. He understood Chatham's collapse as his own, and, financially, it was. And so he methodically carved away the aspects of himself that might ever prove a threat to the few things that remained for him: his children and his home. Exiled were his competitiveness, his impulsiveness, but exiled also were his energy and his desire. He became an attenuated Michael. When Amelia died, there was little left to give over to grief; his already narrow world simply became narrower.