I Regret Everything (24 page)

“Stay away from her, Pratt.” My hand throbbed. Had I just slugged a fellow associate? Associates did not punch each other. Braining Spaulding's assailant had emboldened me but this was self-destructive. “Hey, I'm really sorry, okay?” One of my legs started to shake. Pratt took out a handkerchief and held it to his cheek.

Our fracas had drawn the attention of Amanda and the other attorneys, who looked at us unclear whether we were fooling around or about to tear each other to shreds. To his credit, Pratt forced a sodden smile and they turned back to their conversation.

“Jesus, you dick. Are you drunk?”

“I already apologized. I should not have done that.”

“No shit.” He spat on the deck. His saliva was flecked with blood.

“But she's had some problems.”

Pratt put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me to him, bro-style. “You're such a faggot. If you could punch harder I'd have thrown your ass overboard.”

Laughing hollowly because it was easier than further engaging with Pratt's repartee, I inhaled the fresh harbor air. My chest expanded and my heart ceased fibrillating. I exhaled through my nostrils. Another drink would have been useful but a trip to the bar required moving and my knees couldn't be trusted not to buckle. I looked toward Manhattan. There was a slight movement in my peripheral vision. Had Spaulding tried to signal me?

“What was that?” Amanda said. She had returned to our conversation.

“We were just messing around,” Pratt said. “Best was showing me his stuff.” He shadowboxed in my direction and I tried to grin.

“You guys up for some dinner at the Charcuterie?” This was a restaurant that had recently opened in the meatpacking district. It was impossible to get a table. People waited for months. It had been an unavoidable topic of conversation at the office, where the lawyers, most of whom were liberal arts majors, channeled their need for culture toward a religious interest in food preparation.

“Thanks but I'm meeting an old friend later,” I lied (again).

Why didn't I want to go with them? I needed to make up with Pratt. He could tell the partnership committee I had punched him. Amanda was a witness. She could corroborate his story and that would destroy my chances. And they weren't bad people. Intelligent, successful, personable. Amanda was engaged to a banker in Boston and he was going to move to New York in the fall. They were looking for a co-op on the Upper East Side. Pratt was the kind of guy who remembered your birthday. Both had gone from college to law school to Thatcher, Sturgess & Simonson as if they were on a conveyor belt that would take them into relaxed-fit clothing, quiet pension years, and death. Were they alive to the possibilities of the universe? Had they ever known what it was like to burn incandescently? To exist in a larger, all-encompassing way that would allow them to transcend their flavorless days spent in pursuit of an ersatz happiness and exist in a more vibrant reality, alert to the lamentations of the cosmos and their brief time as vessels of consciousness?

Oh, please. Did I? Not to put too fine a point on it but no. At least not until Spaulding had walked into my life. But I judged them, the Amandas and the Pratts and the rest of my oblivious colleagues, and who was I to do that? What transcending was I doing? Talk all you want about transcendence, it is even more difficult than finishing a poetry collection and apparently I couldn't do that either. Amanda migrated toward the lower deck. Pratt and I were alone.

His fist drove into my stomach before I could react. I bent forward fully expecting a blow to my head that would send me reeling into the harbor. Pratt laughed as I struggled to breathe.

“If I wasn't up for partner, I would totally fucking kick your ass,” he announced, standing over me drunkenly relishing what he had wrought. Then he departed in a haze of satisfaction, ire, and hops. My stomach ached. Blood oozed from the back of my hand so I pressed it against my lips. When I managed to stand upright I glanced toward where Spaulding had been but she had vanished. The urge to look for her was interrupted when strong fingers squeezed my shoulder. I looked over and saw Ed Simonson's ruddy face. Would this cruise never end? His veined hand gripped a Scotch and soda. What was he doing on this deck and shouldn't he have been mingling with the summer associates? Was this going to be about Spaulding?

“What did you say to Trevelyan?”

It was difficult to discern the angle of the Raptor's attack. His expression was, as usual, impossible to read.

“What do you mean?”

“Why do you think I sent you up there back in June?”

Because Trevelyan had been fleeced by his wife and his anger was assumed to be seismic and possibly uncontrolled and it was just the kind of cataclysmic and potentially hostile emotional climate a partner would use his seniority to avoid.

I said, “Because it was a trusts and estates matter?”

“That's what you thought?” Where was he going with this? My mouth was dry. On the lower deck, knots of eager summer interns kissed up to partners. Pratt and Amanda stood at the railing with fresh drinks. Spaulding was nowhere in evidence. Several seconds passed. Ed seemed in no hurry. My wounded hand was still leaking and I shoved it in my pocket.

The Raptor booms, intent insidious / Expression open, heart perfidious.

“It's your poise, Jeremy. The man was understandably distressed and you are Mr. Even Keel. I don't know what the hell you told him, but he was impressed.”

“Really?” I tried to keep my voice from leaping a register. This was semi-successful. What would Ed think if he knew Mr. Even Keel had just smacked Kevin Pratt? That he was having an affair with Spaulding, looting a client's estate, and had nearly killed a homeless person in the Simonson den.

“He's pretty damn persnickety.” Simonson turned toward the skyline. My nervous eyes dutifully followed. “The city's changed a lot since I moved here. Our business has changed a lot, too.” Ed had always been professional toward me, guarded, never chummy. Now he appeared genuinely wistful, as if he was revealing something he didn't display to non-partners. “My father and grandfather were both attorneys. Back then, when they were working, you made partner and you were set for life. The partners looked after each other like family, all-for-one sort of thing. But that's gone to shit.” With two fingers he massaged the side of his neck. I thought about Dr. Tapper's examination room, the strange mixture of brightness and fear. “Christ, who chose this godawful music?”

“Someone evil.”

The Raptor shook his head in dismay. Together we suffered the relentless beat. At that moment, I felt a singular and altogether unfamiliar closeness to him.

“These days, it's all about alliances. Who's going to protect you, who can you protect, and what benefit redounds to you from whatever action you take. Do you follow me?”

“I think so.”

“The partnership meeting is next week.” I nodded. He swirled the ice in his glass and observed the summer associates, the associates, the partners, all in a web of ambition, calculation, and systemic anxiety. I had the barely containable urge to tell him that I loved his daughter even though I might be dying and she had become important to me in a way I did not expect him to understand. Instead, I gazed toward the horizon with what I hoped was a commanding and confident look that contained just the right degree of supplication. “Keep it up.”

It was not the Simonson style to bestow an endorsement, but that was as close as he would get. Whatever my ambivalence about being an attorney, and my gnawing concern that this path on which I had been traveling was entirely wrong for me, the financial security inherent in a partnership—however compromised the institution had become—was welcome. Never mind that my concern in this area was already beginning to seem vestigial.

“Ed, there is one thing,” I said. He was done with me already so his look was impatient, get on with it. “When you asked me how I was, I misspoke. I may actually have a serious health problem and you should be aware of it.”

“Then tell me.”

“I'm being treated for cancer.”

He asked me how serious it was and I told him what I knew.

“I've started chemotherapy. The doctor said that we'd know pretty soon whether or not it's working.”

The depth of the breath he took expanded his chest to the point where the fabric on his white shirt pushed against the buttons. “I'm sorry to hear that, but you've got to hang in there.”

It would be hard to feel further from another human being than I felt from Ed Simonson at that moment. Our bond over the dreadful music a distant memory, it was as if all the emptiness of time and space separated us and we each floated cold and alone in the unforgiving void. When Ed saw I was not going to do a conversational save and reassure him I'd be returned to glowing health in no time he cleared his throat and said, “You're not going to die, Best. A little chemo, some rest, you'll be fine. Look at me. I drink too much, have high blood pressure, a second wife who won't let me lie down on the weekends, and I'll tell you this, I'm not going anywhere. Screw that cancer, all right?”

“Screw it.”

“That's the spirit.”

He awkwardly pawed my shoulder and for a second I thought he might try to pull me into a one-armed hug, but mercifully, that did not occur. He nodded again, repeated that I should take care of myself, made an excuse about having to talk to the summer associates, and departed.

I began to text.

 

* * *

 

Spaulding looked pleased when she slid into the backseat of the Lincoln Town Car. I asked where she had been this week. Did I sound relaxed? In my excitement at seeing her, perhaps my engine was revving a little too fast.

“This is going to sound crazy.”

“You're just sensitive,” I said.

“But that's exactly what it's been like for me.”

“It's why I was so paranoid about leaving an electronic trail. No more of that.”

I asked where she had been this week. Did I sound relaxed? In my excitement at seeing her, perhaps my engine was revving a little too fast. There was a twinge of pain in my ribs from Pratt's blow. I concentrated on that as she told me about her wisdom teeth.

“I'd offer you a Vicodin, but since I'm trying to be chemical-free I tossed them,” she proudly informed me before looking out the rear window, presumably to double-check whether anyone had seen her get in the car. I asked if there was any news in Connecticut and she told me about Karl Bannerman.

“So he's all right?”

“It depends what you mean by all right. The detective said he was schizophrenic.”

“Does your father know that I was up there?”

“I didn't tell him.”

In this age of oversharing, her keeping my presence secret was remarkable. I squeezed her hand and she returned the pressure. To soothe my nerves, I began to talk about schizophrenia, which has two meanings. The first is a psychological condition where one suffers from social isolation and there can be hallucinations and delusions.

“That actually sounds kind of familiar,” she said. “You know, when I saw him sitting in that room in the police station I felt this strange kind of kinship with him, like we were related or something.”

“The second definition of schizophrenia,” I said, “is the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements.”

“Like the way someone can be a lawyer and a poet,” she said.

“Like the way someone can give in to an impulse that can be totally self-destructive, but in every other sense is glorious.”

Karl Bannerman's fate was terrifying, but the electric notion of contradictory ideas being somehow reconcilable, along with Spaulding's presence, put me into a hopeful mood. Pratt had slugged me and I survived. Even the chemotherapy didn't seem insurmountable.

“Are you hungry?” Spaulding asked. “Should we get dinner?”

“We can get it on the plane.”

She looked at me, incredulous.

“On the plane? Where are we going?”

“To Rome.”

“When?”

“Now. Tonight.”

“Are you serious?”

“Do you still carry your passport?”

She rummaged in her purse and there it was. The corners of her mouth rose to form a thrilled smile. Spaulding texted her father and advised him she needed a few more days off because of her surgery and was going to spend them at her mother's apartment.

Dirk Trevelyan's jet was at Westchester Airport, a G6 with a pilot, a co-pilot, and a stewardess. The smooth flight allowed for several hours of uninterrupted sleep. A taxi to a
pensione
in Trastevere. A top-floor room overlooking a quiet street.

The effects of the chemotherapy were becoming more evident, creakiness in my bones, a slight diminishment of energy, some accumulation of hair in the shower drain, but not enough that anyone would notice. At least I hoped that was the case. Either way, I determined to carry on.

Picture the two of us in a little Fiat. We bought prosciutto, cheese, and bread and rode to the Palatine Hill for a picnic. Above the faded rose, sienna, and terra-cotta of the cityscape we spread a blanket on a patch of grass in the shadow of an ancient temple. A restoration crew was erecting a scaffold around the structure, which reminded me today was not a holiday. I had sent an email telling Reetika to inform everyone I was taking a few days off.

Palatine Hill overlooked the Forum, one of the more vexing of the ancient sites. The word itself connoted grand esplanade, a place of imposing proportions where weighty people interacted and great events occurred. Yet to the unschooled eye, the Forum was a pile of old stones. Gone was the lively and bumptious atmosphere that characterized this central gathering place at the height of the Republic. At twenty, when days of good health seemed endless, it was difficult for me to imagine the existence of the people who had animated this landmark. Oh, I could picture them like sandaled actors in an old movie but the full scope of their lives lived out against the city eluded me. But now these ghostly Romans were palpable and their passage into memory suddenly relevant.