A Private Sorcery (26 page)

E
VENINGS, WHEN SHE
leaves for work, she stands outside Santiago's apartment door waiting for the elevator, listening to the faint strains of a Cuban guitar and thinking how she should knock on his door and invite him for tea. She is home all day. He is home all the time. She cannot explain her refusal, the way she holds to the Tuesday reading sessions, not allowing anything more.

Then, in early December, an evening passes when she hears no music. In the morning, Pedro tells her that Santiago is in the hospital.

“The girl who comes to clean, she found Mr. Domengo on the living room floor. She told me Mr. Domengo, he was conscious, but with one eye rolled up. Mrs. Lehrman, the lady in 7C, said it was a stroke.”

Pedro shakes his head back and forth. “Twenty-four years, ever since I came to work here, he's been my friend. Before he lost his son, there was always a smile on his face. But after that, he was broken. When he went blind, the doctors said it was something medical, but to me it seems he just didn't want to see no more.”

Had Santiago called out, hoping she'd hear him?

“The daughter, she is very cold. Never once do I see a letter from her. Every few years she comes to visit, but all she does is shop when she's here. She doesn't even take him out. Always asking me to do things for her. Once she gave me this bag of dresses and asked if I could get a box and pack them in it for her. When I told her I don't have no box, she said things to me, you would have thought she came from a different kind of family.”

She thinks about calling Grita Lehrman, but then, at the end of the week, she sees her in the elevator, bundled in hat and scarf with a stack of oversize envelopes pressed to her chest.

“Off to the post office,” Grita announces. “To beat the morning rush.”

“I was going to call you to ask for Santiago's hospital address.” Grita Lehrman sighs. She straightens the pile of envelopes. “Save your stamp, dear. He's passed the point of ‘get well' wishes.”

S
TANDING OUTSIDE THE
law firm's glass doors, she hears
the din of voices and then recalls the memo in her cubby about the office Christmas party. She considers simply turning around, but before she can make up her mind, one of the associates spots her and waves. She looks down at her jeans and work boots and thinks, oh, what the hell.

Inside, the women are spruced up for evening: a jacket removed at the end of the workday to reveal a chiffon blouse or sheath dress, extra-high heels, freshly applied lipstick. The associate who'd waved approaches, his face flushed.

“A gate-crasher!” he says, raising a plastic champagne glass as she realizes the wave was not recognition but rather compulsive flirtation directed at any female face. “I love it!”

He places a hand on Rena's shoulder and leads her to the large conference room, where a bar is being run by two young women in black tuxedos. There's a table laid with a half-devoured spread of food. He spears a shrimp with a toothpick and points dolefully at an empty silver tray at the end of the table. “But you're late. There was Alaskan king crab earlier.”

She recognizes him as Kyle Stuart, the enfant terrible of the firm, his antics—two fails on the bar exam, a handful of indiscretions with various secretaries—buffered by his managing partner uncle. Sari, the office manager who hired Rena, hurries over. She takes Rends hand. “I'm so glad you came. I haven't laid eyes on you in ages.”

“Well, by accident. I thought I was coming to work. Otherwise I would have dressed for the occasion.”

“Ladies, champagne across the board,” Kyle announces. At the bar, he pulls one bartender's ponytail, pokes at the other's bow tie.

“Let's make our escape before the menace returns,” Sari whispers. Rena follows her to the atrium in the middle of the office. The secretaries' cubicles have been pushed back to make room for dancing. At the rear, Beersden sits behind an electronic keyboard. Rena sees the drummer and bass player from his band. A woman with hair fried from too many perms is singing a jazzy rendition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” A few people are self-consciously dancing: a senior partner with a firstyear
associate, some of the younger lawyers with the paralegals.

Rena watches Beersden, who is bent over the keyboard. She feels her body stirring, the memory of her legs wrapped around his waist. At the end of the piece, he looks up. She watches him squint, bringing her face into focus, listens as he announces a break. Someone turns on a tape of sixties music, and a few more people, including Sari, are cajoled into dancing. Beersden makes his way toward her, his progress halted by various back-thumpers.

“Beersden, you son of a gun.”

“Hey, Beersden, next time we get across the table from one of those stick-up-their-rear-ends from Cravath, we'll send you in with your keys to lighten things up.”

She squeezes past the group of people lingering in the atrium archway and heads down the long hall to the secretaries' lounge, uncertain if what she's fleeing is Beersden, the way he'd stopped the music on seeing her, or the feeling of temptation: the wind on her cheeks as they'd ride uptown on his motorcycle, her hands on his shoulders as he'd unlace her boots.

She closes the door behind her and looks in her cubby, where each night she finds her graveyard assignments—empty tonight save for a note from Sari. “Revel and enjoy.” See, she says to herself. Permission. A night off.

Wrong, the little priestess in her, that amalgam of her best self and Rebecca, rejoins. There are no nights off. You sleep with him tonight and Monday he'll be here waiting for you.

The door opens wide enough for Beersden to come inside. He places a finger over his lips. They stand in silence while a group of people passes in the corridor outside. He leans against the row of cubbies. “For someone who used to advise politicians on how to put themselves together, you look like you could use some help yourself.”

“I didn't realize tonight was the party.”

She sees that her words have stung him, that he's been harboring the idea that she'd come to see him.

“So I must be an unpleasant surprise.” He moves closer. She can
smell the beer on his breath.

“You're not doing anything to make it pleasant.”

“Oh, I see. I'm supposed to get down on my hands and knees and beg you to fuck me again?”

Her heart pounds. She remembers the bang of his glass on the table two months ago. Does he know he'd scared her? Unsure what she is doing, she crosses the room, relieved when she sees the coffeemaker. She rips open a packet of coffee, fills the pot from the watercooler. Beersden sinks into the couch.

“I thought you didn't want people to know about your music.”

“It got to be too much of a burden. I couldn't concentrate on my playing. All night, I'd be peering into the audience, worrying that someone I knew was going to show up. Besides, there's a long tradition of lawyers who are also musicians. Now that I've let people know, I'm Mister Popularity around here.” He kicks his legs out in front of him, crossing his feet. “These guys bring their wives and college kids down to the club, make a big show of coming up to talk to me at the breaks. I'm a piece of exotica they can append to their lapel.”

“My mother knew a lawyer who was a jazz saxophonist.”

“Who's that?”

She hesitates before saying his name. “Freedman.”

“There's a family of lawyers by that name. A guy I knew in law school clerked for the old man, Ben Freedman. Two of his brothers and one son were lawyers, too.”

Her ears ring. All these years in the city and she's never let herself wonder if any of the faces around her belong to her father's family.

The door swings open. “No work!” Sari sings out. “Work is banned tonight. You tell her, Mr. Beersden.”

“Donald.”

“You tell her, Donald. Too serious, this one. You need to get her out of here and onto the dance floor.”

“Righto,” Beersden says, lifting himself up from the couch.

Rena holds up two cups. “These need to be washed.” Out in the corridor,
she moves quickly to the reception area. She throws her coat over an arm and pushes the door open. Not until she is in the elevator, dropping down the twenty-six floors, does it register that the dirty cups are still in her hands.

P
EDRO GIVES HER
a package sent to her old apartment and forwarded on to the new.

She reads the return address: Por Juguete, Rambla de Cataluna, Barcelona, España.

“
Por Juguete
,” Pedro says, leaning over her shoulder. “That means for fun. Maybe a toy store?”

Inside her apartment, Rena places the package on her desk. She cuts the string and tape, pulls out the pink and blue tissue paper. Underneath is a soft purple giraffe with yellow spots and a black felt nose.

She holds the giraffe to her cheek. Feeling strangely nervous, as though someone is watching her, she stares out at the river and then down at the street, where a man with a briefcase is waiting at the bus stop. She lowers the shades and then empties everything out of the box. Nothing but tissue. She rips the packing label off, but there is no other paper beneath.

She takes off her clothes and puts on Saul's pajamas. From the bed, she stares at the giraffe on her desk.
Giraffe
. That's what Reed had called her when they first met. Because she'd been so skinny and frightened-looking. She gets out of bed and examines the giraffe under her desk light. The button eyes. The braided yarn tail. She examines the seams, behind the stiff ears, along the neck, on the back. She examines a part of the seam on the belly that looks slightly puckered.

She takes the giraffe into the bathroom, locking the door behind her. Sitting on the lid of the toilet seat, she holds a nail scissors in one hand and the giraffe in the other. Carefully, she cuts the seam in the spot where there's a pucker. She cuts about two inches and then pushes two fingers inside. There's the foam stuffing and then something different, like a piece of plastic. She pulls out some of the foam and works an edge of the plastic out to the seam. Slowly, she pulls out a baggie. Opening
the bag, she counts one hundred and twenty hundred-dollar bills.

F
OR SEVEN DAYS
, she leaves the money inside the resewn giraffe while she struggles with the question of whose money it is. Not whose money it was—clearly, it came from the sale of the hospital pharmaceuticals—but whose money it is now. The insurance company that paid the hospital's claim? The government? Money that, were she to report it, would be used to try to trace a path to Reed.

She marvels at Reed's certainty that she wouldn't turn the package over, that she could no more turn over evidence against him than she could with Saul.

On the seventh day, she places the box and the tissue paper in the garbage can in the service entry to her hall. She puts the packing label through the shredder at work. She waits for three days, half expecting each morning as she returns from work to find a DEA agent outside her door, but when nothing happens she takes the nail scissors and for a second time cuts open the giraffe. She puts the baggie in a manila file labeled
G
in her locked file cabinet and sews up the giraffe's belly again. Dropping the giraffe in a garbage bag, she dumps the contents of her kitchen can on top, and on her way to work tosses it in a trash basket in the park.

She spends the first of the hundred-dollar bills at a post-Christmas sale at Bloomingdale's, where she buys her own pair of pajamas. Slowly, she exits the store, studying the crowd around her for the person who will squeeze her arm, saying,
miss, you need to come with me
. The next day, she cashes a second bill at the health food store, where she buys two bags of organic produce.

She imagines clicking sounds on her telephone line. She rips apart her room looking for a hidden microphone. She waits but nothing happens.

S
HE WAKES EARLY
on New Year's Day, relieved that the holidays have come to a close. She thinks about calling Saul, but despairs at the thought of the endlessly busy line. Or is the despair about the giraffe, the burden of keeping a secret? Here she'd cleared Beersden, and
now this. For the first time, it bothers her that the package was addressed only to her. Does that mean Reed knows about Saul's arrest—that Saul is right that when Reed left, he had known Saul would be caught?

Since her last visit, she and Saul have exchanged short, chatty notes. Saul's—humorous anecdotes about prison life, pithy reflections on the human condition—have echoed her tone, a tone meant to convey that they no longer have a hold on each other, no longer expect the other to take responsibility for their well-being. Only the news about Santiago, that the stroke had been followed by a staph infection that developed into a pneumonia, has introduced a somber note.

When the phone rings a little after nine, she imagines it to be Saul. Dislodged, it takes her a moment to recognize Leonard's voice.

“Happy new year.”

“Happy new year to you, too.”

“They let them get incoming phone calls between seven and eight on holidays. I had my finger on the phone at six fifty-nine and miraculously got through. I promised Saul I'd call you to wish you a happy new year from him.”

Leonard tells her about Saul's three resolutions for the upcoming year: to read all of Shakespeare's plays, to learn how to play chess, to work on his triceps.

Rena laughs at the triceps resolution. “What's that about?”

“I didn't ask. Maybe it's a way of getting respect in there.”

“If I know Saul, there's some grander reason.”

There's a pause and then Rena continues, blurts out, it seems to her, “I just want you to know how much your calls have meant to me. I wouldn't have blamed you if you'd decided to have nothing to do with me after I told Saul about wanting the divorce. I hope we'll remain in touch.”