Everything on the Line (14 page)

Eight executive mouths drop open and sixteen executive eyes bug out and the conference room at 6 East 57
th
Street is now a mausoleum.

“Well,” Dick Malberg adds as he and Odi make their exit, “I see you folks need a little time to mull this over. Why don’t your lawyers call our lawyers by noon tomorrow? Good day, gentlemen and ladies.”

* * *

“Can we talk?”

Avis Spade has been waiting to hear these three little words from her son, Jack, for nearly seven years.

“Well, of course, my dear, you can always talk to your mom.”

“Um, er…,” Jack fumbles, “Mom, I think I have a little problem.”

Avis thinks she knows what it is but dares not interrupt.

“Well, it’s…it’s…
Ira
,” Jack blurts. “I know he’s behind me all the way and wants me to succeed, but sometimes…sometimes he just drives me up a wall!”

Avis Spade feels a tinge of exoneration after all these lonely, long-suffering years.

“Mom, if you don’t know already, I’ve been taking…pills…that help me hold it together.”

Avis knows.

“And sometimes I get so nervous that I rip things up and even hurt myself. I just feel this pressure to win, and the only thing that makes the feeling go away is taking these pills. I mean, I don’t think my father’s such a bad guy, not really, but sometimes it seems like when he’s pushing me real hard…it’s almost like…
the devil makes him do it
!”

Took the words right out of his mother’s mouth.

Avis’s mind wanders back to the halcyon days of her marriage, eons ago it seems, when Ira used to bring her flowers, when he used to listen to what she had to say, when he was actually a caring human being. There he is, helping her with groceries, assisting her with the dishes and with changing Jack’s diapers. So when did it start going south? Squinting her eyes as if to see more clearly back into the past, she fast-forwards from when Jack was an infant…2032, no…2036, no, Jack was six and things were still pretty good…2039, hmmm, no, still okay…2040?…yeah, that was the start of things, when Jack was nine, no, ten, and the tennis thing began to snowball and Ira started pushing hard and it became the biggest thing in his life, and maybe the
only
thing…

* * *

If things in Dallas are the
biggest,
things in New York City are the
most.
Most cultural, most commercial, most active, most exciting, most international, most celebrated. And also, most
rough.
In terms of rough American towns, Detroit is in second place, oh, about a gazillion miles behind.

And this year of 2047 is no exception. Roughly once every twenty-three minutes a murder is committed in Gotham. Roughly once every nineteen minutes a suicide occurs. Roughly once every twelve minutes an accident happens. Roughly once every eight minutes someone enters the ER of one of the City’s overcrowded hospitals.

That’s rough.

Ira Spade jukes around a couple of homeless men lying on the sidewalk at Broadway and Forty-fifth. A stubble-faced drunkard bumps into him, grabs him by the shoulders, and burps unapologetically in his face. Filled with disgust for the whole of humankind and reeking of secondhand Jim Beam, Ira enters Mahoney’s Bar and furtively slaps a crisp $100 bill into the palm of the hostess. She smiles and, elbowing past a dozen disgruntled waiting patrons, leads him to the only booth still available, way there in the back.

Thanks to the 2045 U.S. repeal of the ban on smoking in public places, the visibility in the saloon is barely more than three feet, the billows of cigar and cigarette smoke turning the establishment into one of those murky scenes in a Sherlock Holmes mystery that is dominated by a swirling, opalescent fog.

Ira fidgets for a few moments, removes an index card from his breast pocket, jots something down, puts the card back into his pocket, takes it out again and crosses out the note, puts it back into his pocket. He has not noticed the youngish lady who has slinked into the booth and is seated opposite him.

“Well, hi there, stranger!” the slinker coos.

Ira tosses the bimbo a patronizing glance. “Hi. You been taking care of yourself?”

“Yup.”

“Lookee here,” Ira says, his left eye twitching to beat the band. “I asked you to come here tonight…”

The young woman closes her eyes, as if they are weighed down by all that mascara. When she opens them, they are moist, and terribly red, betraying a lifetime of hardship and a chronological status decades beyond her actual thirty-three years.

“…because…because things, well…”

The young woman’s full lips sink at the corners, devolving into a moue. She knows what is coming.

“…well, have gotten out of hand. Lola…

Ira reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a thickish white envelope.

“…this is for you. Consider it a going-away present.”

He squeezes Lola’s hand with pressure that expresses something between anger and affection. “I want you to go away,
far away
. I want you out of my life forever. I know what you’re thinking, but I’ve worked way too hard and put far too much time and sweat and moolah into the kid’s career that I’ll be goddamned if something like this comes between me and the total success of this project. Savvy?”

“Savvy,” Lola says, grabs the envelope, and sashays out of the bar and Ira Spade’s life.

* * *

“So, Jack, who do you think will win the U.S. Open this year, if you can be objective for a moment?” Bob Pasotti, the grizzled sports beat writer for the
New York Chronicle,
asks at the pre-U.S. Open press conference.

“Well, I—” Jack Spade begins.

“We think this is a no-brainer, to be honest,” Ira Spade interrupts his only child. “Sure, some of you guys are picking that Italiano kid, but you’re full of it. The next U.S. Open champ is gonna be an American from right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. And that American is gonna be Big Bad Black Jack Spade. And you can quote me on that.”

Black Jack’s cheeks turn a bright red.

“Next question?” Ira Spade asks.

“This one’s for Jack,” Walter “Happy” Upton, dean of sportswriters, says. “Jack, it’s clear that you and Ugo Bellezza are basically equals in terms of ability and potential. Yet you continue to maintain that you are better than he. So my question to you is, what makes you so cocksure?”

“Well, I—” Jack Spade begins.

“We think that you have some nerve asking that question,” Ira Spade responds. “How dare you imply that this little Italiano deaf twerp is as good as Black Jack Spade! And to prove my point, just hang around until the U.S. Open finals, and maybe from that time forward, you’ll learn to hold your tongue before making such a wacko statement!”

Ira Spade’s left eye is twitching like a demon and Jack Spade’s face is as crimson as a torero’s cape and “Happy” Upton is seriously considering punching Ira’s lights out once and for all before thinking better of it.

* * *

It is midnight at 200 East 57
th
Street, and Avis Spade is lying in bed alone, wondering where in the hell her husband is. Her exhausted eyes are closed, and although her mind is used to thinking in straightforward, simple terms, for some reason, tonight, it is projecting a metaphor, and a doozy at that. She is imagining a camel, just like the one on the old cigarette package (she interrupts the dream to wonder momentarily why they never called the cigarettes “Dromedary,” or conversely, why they never put a “real” camel—one with two humps—on the package), and the camel’s back is laden with straw, so much so that its contorted face is straining mightily under the weight and now that she examines the camel’s face more closely, she realizes with no small degree of horror that it is in fact her own face, which somehow, as a two-dimensional profile, has been superimposed on top of the beast of burden’s and there, at the end of the camel’s long neck, is her delicate, noble nose with the long, narrow, Helen-Reddy nostrils and her sad, dark brown eyes and her once-beautiful lips drained of their hope and metamorphosed through the years into a drooping pair of faded rose petals turning down at the corners.

And here comes some man alongside her and the man is a normal man except that a pair of short horns extrude from his forehead and oh no! on closer inspection this man is none other than Ira Spade and now he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a single piece of straw and slowly, meticulously, and with malice aforethought places the straw carefully—as if he were competing in the Pick-Up Sticks World Championships—onto the top of the other straws resting precariously on top of Avis the Camel’s overburdened back and Jack her son is by Ira’s side watching the deed’s perpetration as an eyewitness and throwing a conflicted look of guilt and affection to his humped mother and a conflicted look of obedience and resentment to his horned father and the careful placement of the single piece of straw on her back is just too much for Avis the Camel to bear and with a crack that can be heard for miles the spine of the camel snaps like a twig and all the pieces of straw that she has been straining to bear disperse here and there and everywhere and the camel drops to her front knees, propelled downward by the most excruciating pain, and this look of terror and panic and suffering is painted on the camel’s open-mouthed face—precisely the same look as the one on Lee Harvey Oswald’s face when Jack Ruby’s bullet pierced his body from close range—and now all four knees have crumpled to the ground and the horned Ira Spade is laughing his head and his butt off and the camera in the dream slow-zooms to Avis the Camel’s hurt and terrified face, closer, closer—

Avis Spade awakens with a start and her eyes are filled with tears and fears and her entire body and her sheets are drenched with sweat and her hands are trembling from both the dream and what lies ahead for her down the proverbial road.

It is midnight at 200 East 57
th
Street, and Jack Spade is lying in bed alone, wondering where in the hell his life is going. Through his open window wafts a cacophony cobbled together from two simultaneous boisterous arguments, the sound of a police siren, a cabbie yelling at a pedestrian, and a crazed lunatic homeless person down there on the south side of East 57
th
cursing the day he was born.

Jack’s eyes are glued by sleep brought on by six hours of intense physical workouts with his father, and, like his mother, he is having an unusual dream, this one based on a Greek myth he discovered just last week:

King Midas was a very kind man who ruled his kingdom fairly, but he was not one to think very deeply about what he said. One day, while walking in his garden, he saw an elderly satyr asleep in the flowers. Taking pity on the old fellow, King Midas let him go without punishment. When the god Dionysus heard about it, he rewarded King Midas by granting him one wish. The king thought for a second and said, “I wish for everything I touch to turn to gold.” And so it was.

The beautiful flowers in his garden turned toward the sun for light, but when Midas approached and touched them, they stood rigid and gold. The king grew hungry and thin, for each time he tried to eat, he found that his meal had turned to gold. His lovely daughter, at his loving touch, turned hard and fast to gold. His water, his bed, his clothes, his friends, and eventually the whole palace was gold.

King Midas saw that soon his whole kingdom would turn to gold unless he did something right away. He asked Dionysus to turn everything back to the way it had been and take back his golden touch. Because the king was ashamed and very sad, Dionysus took pity on him and granted his request. Instantly, King Midas was poorer, but richer, he felt, in the things that really count.

Except that in Jack’s dream, his father is playing the role of Midas and he the role of Midas’s offspring:

King Ira was a very kind man who ruled his kingdom fairly, but he was not one to think very deeply about what he said. One day, while walking in his garden, he heard a voice
from somewhere deep down beneath the earth’s surface, from a place way down there in the distant bowels of the planet.
As the voice was gruff and muffled, King Ira put his ear to the ground and screwed up his eyes and listened intently. “King Ira,” the gruff voice began, “you are a man who knows what he wants, and I like that. And so, I am rewarding you with one wish. And what would your wish be?” And King Ira answered to the gruff voice from deep within the ground, “I wish for everything I touch to turn to gold.”

And the gruff voice answered, “There is one condition to your wish. Since I deem you not to be worthy of having this grand a wish granted, you shall have to wait until you bear a son, and then you can, through him, have your wish come true.”

And King Ira was at first sad, and then angry, that he himself was not worthy, but he went to Queen Avis and told her about what had happened and ordered her to have a son with him. And in time, she conceived a child but it was soon determined to be a girl and King Ira became angered and made his queen terminate her pregnancy. And again they tried, but alas, this time it was again determined to be a girl and again King Ira ordered his queen to terminate her pregnancy. And on the third try, it was indeed a charm and Prince Jack was born, to the delight of King Ira.

And when the child turned ten, it was apparent that Prince Jack was destined to be a great tennis champion and so King Ira desired to make his one wish come true and everything he touched soon turned to gold. He touched business deals and they turned to gold and he touched investments and they turned to gold and he touched tennis trophies and they turned to gold and then when Prince Jack was reaching the pinnacle of his career, King Ira touched him, too, and his son instantly turned into a stiff, rigid golden statue, never again to breathe the fresh air or to smell the sweet flowers or to see the rising sun—

Jack Spade awakens with a start and his eyes are filled with tears and fears and his entire body and his sheets are drenched with sweat and his hands are trembling from both the dream and what lies ahead for him down the proverbial road.