I Regret Everything (22 page)

It was easy to picture the transfiguration of the Vendlers' spread into an artists' colony; playwrights, painters, and composers working in their studios, wandering the grounds; a discreet kitchen staff preparing meals for delivery to poets' doors; novelists holding forth during evening gatherings in the dining room. The Vendler heirs would get their money. No one was stealing. At least that's what I told myself.

To one side of the house behind a copse of trees a swimming pool was half filled with murky rainwater. Mosquitoes lurked virulently, buzzing an ominous hum. It appeared as if no one had swum in the pool for years and in the absence of humans a colony of frogs had moved in. They floated, swam, and leaped along the slate tiles that bordered the fetid water. The frogs appeared to have been there from time immemorial. We stood beside the brackish depths.

“I'm sleeping with Reetika.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “I have cancer.”

“That isn't funny.”

“I'm not joking.”

This revelation was received with bewildered silence. While waiting for Margolis to respond, I looked up and saw an oriole with a worm hanging from her beak glide to a branch in a nearby oak tree. She hopped along the branch for a few inches then landed in a nest where she would feed it to her hatchlings that in turn would enact the same scene with their own offspring. After Margolis recovered his ability to speak he offered the usual nostrums served to those we believe to be goners while silently praising whatever deity he worshiped for sparing him.

“Are you going to be all right?”

“Sure, sure,” I said. “But we need to address the situation with this house.”

I pointed out the bird's nest. There was no point in being a downer and it gave us a chance to shift the discourse. Margolis asked if the sale of the house to him and then from him to me was, strictly speaking, kosher. I said we were, strictly speaking, in a gray area, a not entirely accurate assessment. I glanced toward the house. Above us the oriole took flight again, beating her wings, free. The wisdom of the deal had begun to fray, but swept up in the power of my action I pushed ahead.

“There's a reason we're not putting anything on paper or in emails. I'm prohibited from buying property from the estate, but you can buy something and sell it to me.”

“Is there any way this could
. . .
”

“Not unless one of Mrs. Vendler's relatives showed up and wanted the house, and I'm sending them all checks as soon as we close.”

“If I buy it.”

Rather than look at Margolis—no one liked pressure—I searched the sky for the oriole and after a moment started to feel dizzy. The sensation quickly passed but I was reminded of the poison coursing through my veins, the transitory quality of the entire tableau.

“With what you'd make you could produce your theater piece.”

Margolis appeared to be considering how to tell me the second thoughts he was having and his essentially risk-averse nature were not going to allow him to proceed.

“All right,” he said. “Let's do it.”

We clasped hands and patted each other on the back. Margolis whooped and for a few seconds I felt like Leonard Nimoy at a
Star Trek
convention.

The rumble of a cranky motor could be heard putt-putting nearby. Spaulding appeared from around the side of the house riding an old lawn mower. There was no vestige of the near disaster yesterday, no sense she had been battered and nearly killed. This was Spaulding triumphant. Replete with possibility, the personification of a future receding before us, her golden image shone inside a frame of profuse grass and deciduous trees all set against the blue dome of late summer. When the image became diffuse I realized tears were forming in my eyes for the second time today. It had been years since I had cried but ever since I'd heard those violinists in Central Park play the Bartok Duo this abiding sadness was never far away.

Back in Brooklyn we dropped Spaulding off at the subway. Margolis waited in the car when I got out to say goodbye.

“It's important we not call or text,” I said.

“No electronic trail. Totally.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“My tooth kind of hurts. Kiss me anyway?”

I did. We threw our arms around each other and then she disappeared into the subway.

Spaulding went back to Connecticut and for the next several days did not come to the office. I expedited Margolis's mortgage and by the oiling of certain gears was able to generate the papers and get them signed and notarized in what had to be the fastest time on record. While I was preoccupied with logistics I thought a lot about Spaulding and my overcautious request that we not call or text. Yes, the disaster in Iowa had been caused by an electronic trail, but so what if it happened again? I was going to be dead anyway.

But what if that wasn't true? If the treatment worked and I lived? The law is clear when it comes to the matter of trusts and estates attorneys and self-dealing: It is
verboten
. This was the kind of ethically challenged behavior that had cost my father his law career. Why hadn't this realization crystallized earlier? Had I allowed the stress I was under to turn me into a younger version of him? That was horrifying. Fear had blinded me to this but the situation had changed. What if I were found out? Exposed. Prosecuted. Disbarred. My life would crumble. I would have no job, my prospects would be dismal, and it was impossible to know how Spaulding would react. And the only person whose opinion mattered, the only one, was Spaulding.

It was imperative that I immediately reverse course and put a stop to the sale of the house. The papers had already been submitted. I couldn't just submit them and un-submit them without attracting attention. It would look erratic. Margolis had to do it and he was in Mexico. I frantically tried to reach him but this proved impossible. My only hope was that the two weeks would pass quietly and when he returned we could clean up the mess I had created. Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII would have to find another source of funding.

At the office I maintained a placid exterior but was desperate with worry. Drafting an amendment to a document my heart would begin to thud and I needed to walk around the block to restore a sense of equilibrium.

“Margolis,” I nearly screamed into the phone, “this is the seventh message I'm leaving. We need to fix this. Call me immediately.”

I had just come back from my latest walkabout. It was mid-afternoon and the thermometer was north of ninety. My forehead was still moist from the exertion and the air conditioning in the office made my skin clammy. I daubed the perspiration with a handkerchief. When I looked up Reetika was standing in the doorway staring at me with maternal concern.

“I heard yelling,” she said. “Is everything all right?”

“Has Margolis called you since he's been away?”

“He's out of cell phone range.”

“I know
 
he's out of cell phone range,” I said, perhaps with too much emphasis. “If you hear from him, please tell him to contact me.”

“You're not really a yeller, Jeremy. Are you sure there's no problem?”

It would have been a relief to have unburdened myself to Reetika. To enumerate my misdeeds, receive absolution, and use her as a sounding board in my effort to conjure a less crazy-making, more satisfying future. But while we may have been together in the same physical space, I was alone. A fresh trickle of perspiration ran down my back.

“Everything is fine.”

I
took your car out of the garage, I bumped into a light post, and I'm really sorry, okay? It was stupid, I shouldn't have done it, and I'll pay.

Edward P and I were standing next to the Tesla in the parking lot of the Metro-North station in Stonehaven. The dent in the fender glared accusingly. My tooth nagged. My father was calibrating his response. One of the advantages of being considered mental is loved ones aren't so quick to scream at you.

—That's a couple of thousand at least.

—I said I was sorry.

And now I had to bring Edward P into the loop and tell him that far from being a boring place, Stonehaven had its own homicidal maniac. I hadn't imagined it. The house wasn't safe and he needed to be clued in.

—Look, Dad, the hobo that followed me home from the train station tried to strangle me last night. I know that sounds hysterical but it's true. And my tooth is bothering me.

I delivered an edited version of what had happened, leaving out the part about Jeremy swinging the sailing trophy like a mace. As Edward P listened, I could tell he was trying to determine whether or not this had actually occurred, but it must have been convincing because after asking me a couple of questions that seemed more reflexive than anything else (What time did it happen? and What did he look like?) we drove to the Stonehaven Police Department, where I gave a description of the attacker to Officer Felix, a curt cop with a flattop that you could have landed a helicopter on. When he asked me why the man had fled, I told him a dog's bark scared him, and no one questioned it.

Officer Felix checked the log from that night. He eyed me.

—There was a call from a Mr. Ezra Pound reporting the assault.

—The poet? my father said.

—I told this man at the train station, I said. He called.

—Why didn't you call? Edward P asked.

—Because I was too freaked out. God! Why does it matter?

—Why did he say he was Ezra Pound?

—Maybe because that was his name. Why are you asking me all these questions? Shouldn't you be asking if I'm all right?

—Are you?

—No. I'm in a police station, I was attacked, and I don't even know if you think it happened.

—Spall, calm down, okay? I believe you. And your welfare is the priority here.

I told the whole mostly true story again from beginning to end, again leaving out Jeremy's participation. I still wasn't sure whether or not my father believed me. Maybe he thought I
thought
it happened but it was really just something I imagined. Officer Felix said he would be in touch.

When we got back to the house I took Edward P into the den and stood over the rug.

—See this? I said, pointing.

—He looked down. What, Spall? I don't see anything.

I dropped to my knees and pointed to several red stains.

—This is blood, okay? You can have some police lab guy out here and run a test if you don't believe me. Don't wash these stains. They're evidence.

When I went upstairs, he was thoroughly confused. For all I knew he thought the marks on the rug were cranberry juice and his was daughter insane.

No phone calls, no texts, the night was nearly impossible. I painted my gums with Anbesol, swallowed two aspirin, and tried to sleep. My muscles tensed with each creak in the old house. Every car that drove past ferried a murderer to a victim. I threw the light blanket off and stared at the dead poets' faces, wondering how any of them managed to survive. Somehow, I tumbled into sleep. The next morning my tooth throbbed. I lay in bed, trying to marshal the energy required to live. Sylvia Plath's pretty blondness stared back at me from her place on the wall between photographs of Sara Teasdale and Vachel Lindsay at the nexus of the suicide section. I tried to block out the pain.

When I was in sixth grade my math teacher, Mr. McCloy, had recommended
The Bell Jar
. If you missed the oddball detail in that last sentence, it's this: Math Teacher. The book was one that every private-school girl read by the time she went to college but I was eleven. An English teacher might have recommended it purely as a fine novel but a math teacher could only have suggested this particular book as a prescription for what he believed, accurately, to be ailing me. I was a good math student but quiet, and on the rare times I spoke in class it was to ask questions like, “If the universe can't be measured, why bother to have math?” Mr. McCloy took sadistic delight in calling to the blackboard girls who did not shine in his classroom. He couldn't get me that way, so instead he recommended
The Bell Jar
.

At breakfast, when Edward P saw I couldn't bite down he instructed Katrina to get me to a dentist immediately. It turned out to be an impacted wisdom tooth and the dentist sent me to an oral surgeon who for good measure extracted all four of them. The next two days were spent on my back in front of the television with an ice pack fashionably strapped to my face. With my grotesquely swollen cheeks, I looked like a clinically depressed chipmunk. I didn't trust myself to text Jeremy because the painkillers that had been prescribed might have made me too truthful.

By early evening on my second day of confinement I was feeling much better. Outside the bedroom window fading fingers of vermillion and umber stretched along the horizon. Marshall and I were watching a YouTube video of a kid smoking a bong on a treadmill when I looked up and saw Edward P standing in the doorway.

We took Katrina's BMW because the Tesla was being repaired. In the car he asked about the writing workshop and I told him it had ended the previous week.

—Go well?

—Definitely.

He never asked to read anything I'd written. I was used to it. I wished it didn't matter.

Edward P was a fast driver and we were humming along. An SUV materialized in the opposite lane. My father's phone vibrated. He glanced at it and as he texted a reply the car began to swerve.

—Dad . . .

The SUV driver leaned on his horn and my father corrected course before a collision.

—We have to get milk on the way home.

—You realize you could get us killed texting while you drive.

—I've managed to avoid that so far.

—Katrina couldn't wait ten minutes to hear back from you?

—You of all people shouldn't tell me what to do, he said, maybe because it came out with the wrong tone.