Middle Age (48 page)

For the first time in Lionel’s experience, Harry Tierney was at a loss for words.

S L  a patient at the clinic. His neck pain had diminished, miraculously; but he was in terror of it returning.
Without Siri,
there is only pain
. As Siri’s patient, Lionel was required to partly undress and to lie quietly, passively, without resistance on Siri’s table; sometimes they behaved as if they were strangers, addressing each other in formal voices as “Miss Siri” and “Mr. Hoffmann.” The therapist’s deft trained hands controlled Lionel. What a powerful erotic tension between them!

Lionel’s penis pulsed with blood, he groaned with desire Siri primly refused to appease.

“Mr. Hoff-mann! If anyone should
see
.”

D  S disappeared. Where? With whom? Lionel dared not accuse her, she laughed in his face saying she hadn’t disappeared to herself, had she, only to him.

“I am my own self, I hope. I don’t belong to
you
.”

She wanted him to marry her, Lionel guessed. Just as, a lifetime ago, Camille had wanted him to marry her. An engagement ring, ritual celebra-tions culminating in a lavish wedding party, marriage and a house, a baby, and another baby. Vertigo overcame Lionel, he had already lived his life.

The babies, now grown, possessed of adult demands, bombarded him with telephone calls, the most embarrassing of which came to Hoffmann Publishing, Inc., and incessant e-mail messages. It was rare for Lionel to check his personal computer in the apartment on East 6st, he couldn’t

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bear it. He prowled Siri’s grungy neighborhood off St. Marks Square. Did it trouble him that he was the oldest individual in sight, excepting homeless persons dozing in doorways or babbling into their hands?

He called the clinic, he risked humiliating himself by dropping by the clinic. The receptionists knew him. Siri’s sister-therapists knew him.

Some of them smiled in sympathy, or in pity. Or were they laughing at him. “Mr. Hoffmann! Siri isn’t in today.” With as much dignity as the tremor in his voice allowed, Lionel inquired if anyone knew where Siri had gone, for instance had she gone out of the city? And when was she expected back? And who were her friends, her male friends, what were their names, surely names could be supplied, for a price?

“Mr. Hoffmann. No.”

The pain in his neck returned. He listed to one side, clenching his neck in his hand. He was walking on a Midtown cross-street. He was headed for the Plaza Hotel where he’d made a reservation to have lunch with Kevin, finally he’d agreed to see Kevin who’d been pleading with him
Dad! We have to talk
.
We really have to talk
.
What all this craziness is doing to
Mom, scares me!
But when Lionel arrived at the Plaza, Kevin wasn’t there.

When Lionel checked with the maître d’, he discovered there was no reservation in his name. When the maître d’ checked his reservation book, he discovered that Lionel’s reservation had been for the previous day.

Siri returned. Siri telephoned Lionel. In a pocket of the sealskin coat Lionel had bought for her at I. Magnin he would discover a boarding pass for a Continental flight, San Diego to New York. Seat E which was first-class, window. Who’d paid for this, Lionel wondered. Him?

I   Hoffmann Publishing, Inc.! Siri had hinted that Lionel might sell the business, retire as a multi-millionaire and travel the world
, why not, you are not getting any younger or any poorer, yes?
Siri had a friend, a divorce attorney. Siri’s attorney-friend also dealt in prenuptial contracts.
That house in Salthill you have never taken me to, maybe it
should be sold? Such a big expensive property for a sad old woman living there
alone
. At Hoffmann Publishing, Inc., Lionel was CEO and very much respected and feared. Even the older Hoffmann shareholders approved of him. Of course, Lionel wasn’t the man his father had been, but the company was doing exceptionally well. Riding the ongoing wave of American prosperity, they were selling more books, bringing in more revenue, year
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after year. There were interested buyers, of course, an immense American conglomerate. If Lionel sold, he’d make a fortune. But he’d have to confront his relatives. Oh, but he was bored with publishing eight-hundred-page illustrated books priced at two hundred dollars, on such subjects as endocrinology, gastroenterology, otolaryngological surgery, ophthalmo-logical surgery, cardiovascular surgery! If once he’d been genuinely intrigued by medical science, as his father had been, he’d long since lost interest. Mankind was overwhelmed with specialized information, as the universe was composed of invisible wormholes in incalculable quantities, merely to contemplate the phenomenon of such quantities was to risk vertigo, nausea, spiritual exhaustion, and despair.
Money
-
making
was far eas-ier.
Money
-
making
in a booming free market economy.
Money
-
making,
which he’d done, and might even take some pride in, if he wished. If Lionel Hoffmann still considered himself a man of pride.

He laughed aloud. Thinking how close to
monkey
-
making, money
-

making was
.

“ N  the right to judge
me
.”

Thoughts like maddened wasps in Lionel’s skull! He was thinking he would not be bullied by self-styled moralists. Not by his intrusive children, not by his strangely uncomplaining wife, not by his Hoffmann relatives, not by Salthill friends. Former friends! Not by the pious dead.

Adam Berendt hadn’t been any saint, far from it. Adam too had made money in real estate and junk bonds and there was something shadowy, possibly even illegal about his finances, but you’d never have guessed it from the man’s pretense of living like Socrates, for Truth and Beauty.

Lionel had heard plenty in the months since Adam’s death. There were rumors that Adam had used false names in money-making schemes, that there was a cache of love letters from women, including certain Salthill wives, hidden beneath the floorboards of his studio; there were shocking photos of nude women, some of them depicting sex acts, taken by Adam himself.

Lionel smiled to think of it. No, it was disturbing. It was sickening. Yet perhaps liberating, too.

Maybe the rumors were exaggerated, and maybe not. Who knew.

(Lionel knew there were lurid rumors making the rounds in Salthill, for his daughter Marcy had e-mailed him the information, knowing it

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would upset him. Lionel Hoffmann involved with a woman “young enough to be his daughter.” Lionel Hoffmann of all people involved with a “model,” a “go-go dancer,” a “soft-porn actress,” a “high-class call girl.”) Still, if Camille had been involved with Adam, that would account for her readiness to forgive him. Sending him messages that clawed at his heart.
Lionel dear, I will always love you
.
I will always be your loving wife
.

Please know that! Your Camille
. If Siri discovered these, she was furious, and ripped them into bits. It was Siri’s conviction that Camille wasn’t forgiving at all, but manipulative.

“She’ll do anything to keep you, but not for love.
I
am the one who loves you, my Mr. Hoffmann.”

And Siri demonstrated how.

A     , on a Midtown street, Lionel heard a familiar voice call his name, and turned to see an eagerly smiling Roger Cavanagh striding toward him. “Lionel! How the hell are you?” The men shook hands. Roger seemed to Lionel an apparition out of a dimly recalled and vaguely regretted past. But Lionel had always liked Roger, one of Salthill’s battered souls.

“How am I? I’m—fine.”

The men had drinks in a Sixth Avenue bar. Roger’s eyes glittered with secrets. He was in the city on business: he was doing volunteer work for the National Project to Free the Innocent—“You know, one of Adam’s causes. He left them fifty thousand dollars. I’ve gotten involved.” Roger spoke with unnerving animation of the case he was appealing in federal court, the 8 conviction for first-degree murder in Hunterdon, New Jersey, of a black man named Elroy Jackson, Jr. Lionel listened. Or tried to listen. How tedious, another’s idealism. But no: he was feeling envy. To care about something other than oneself, one’s ridiculous sexual needs . . .

Lionel was trying not to think of Siri. Their most recent disagreement.

His
disagreement, with her. He felt like a man who has devoured a rich gourmet meal, carrying it now like lead in his bowels.

Roger was saying, having shifted to another subject without Lionel’s awareness, “Marriage! It’s the great mystery, Lionel, isn’t it? We can’t live without it, and we can’t live within it. Obviously men weren’t intended to be domesticated, like animals. Men were intended by nature to be polygamous, promiscuous. This is common knowledge. Our glands know it. We
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were meant to impregnate as many females as possible before we collapse or get killed by some other zealous seed-bearer. That’s ‘nature’—and nature is irrefutable. At the same time, anything other than marriage with a woman you love is just shit. You know it, Lionel, and I know it.” Roger drank, shaking ash carelessly across the table. The men were in a swanky lounge called The Cigar Bar where busty waitresses in black spandex tank tops and tights emerged out of the shadows like Nubian slaves bearing drinks, with luminous made-up faces like leering masks. Lionel laughed, resenting Roger’s remark. “
Do
I know it? Know what?” Roger ignored Lionel’s belligerent tone, saying, “There’s no life in loneliness, even in being alone. How Adam did it, I can’t comprehend. There was a man made for family life! I think he felt he wasn’t ‘worthy’ of a complete life. He’d done something, or caused something to be done, I think. When he was a kid. I never asked him outright, of course. As his executor I’ve been making inquiries into his past but always come to a dead-end. He’s from Minnesota, yet also from Montana. He was born in 8, or in 6. I’m pretty certain he changed his name, officially. And used other names, unofficially. If a man wants to erase his past it’s for a useful reason, right? A friend should honor that.” Lionel asked, intrigued, “Adam changed his name officially?

From what?” It came to him that the folly of his life sprang from his remaining “Hoffmann” when he was no “Hoffmann.” If he’d had the courage to change his name, and to choose another; to walk away from his family’s money . . . Roger said, “A man needs a family as much as a woman does. I know, I’ve lost mine. I’ve lost my daughter, who hates my guts. I’ve been in love with a woman, and it hasn’t gone well.” Roger paused, and signaled for another drink. Lionel was embarrassed. He guessed that Roger was speaking of Marina Troy. At Adam’s cremation ceremony he’d seen Roger with Marina, and at the ghastly spreading of Adam’s ashes—that sick, stricken look in Roger’s face when Marina pushed away from him. That, too, he’d envied. “She disappeared from Salthill. She left
me
. Though we weren’t what you’d call lovers, I know she meant to leave
me
. The hell with it.” Roger laughed harshly. The men drank in silence for a while. Lionel was resigned to a night alone, in anticipation of calling Siri in the morning. And he was becoming resigned to marrying her. For if he didn’t marry her, he would lose her. And if he lost her, he couldn’t bear it. And so he would have to divorce Camille, and that would destroy Camille. In a sensible, pragmatic, polygamous society, Lionel could simply have added on Siri as a second wife. A new, young,

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physically robust female. A fertile female. By now, in his prosperous early fifties, he’d have had several young wives. He wouldn’t have become a mummy, pain throbbing in his neck. He wondered what edgy, nerved-up Roger did for sex. For love.

Suddenly, with a guarded expression, Roger said, “My real news, Lionel is: I’m going to be a father.” Lionel said, “A—
what?”
Roger said, grinning, “A father.” Lionel said, “You already are a father . . .” and Roger said,

“For the second time, I’ll be a father. And this time I mean to do it right.”

As Lionel listened now avidly, Roger told him that the woman was a young paralegal working for the National Project to Free the Innocent with whom he’d become “involved” since the previous fall but with whom he wasn’t in love—“And Naomi certainly isn’t in love with me.” There had been the possibility of the young woman having an abortion but through a

“mutual arrangement” she was going to have the baby, and . . . Roger spoke excitedly yet with an air of wonderment like one who has been struck over the head by a blunt weapon. Lionel listened in disbelief, and in dismay. A father! A second time! And by way of a woman Roger didn’t love!

The thought of Siri pregnant with his child both excited and repelled Lionel. And yet: what a testament to a middle-aged male’s virility.

Lionel had no option but to ask when the baby was due, and Roger said, proudly, July eleven. In a lowered voice he added, “When Robin learns she’ll be disgusted.” Lionel said, impulsively, “My children are disgusted with me, too.” The men laughed suddenly.

They drank, and laughed. Lionel felt his sinuses aching. Elsewhere in the lounge men were smoking cigars. Luxuriantly, lasciviously. Busty waitresses in shiny black spandex moved through clouds of smoke with fierce, fixed smiles. Lionel was laughing but his jaws seemed to have locked. A searing pain lifted from the nape of his neck into his skull. Hot tears ran down his cheeks but in the smoky twilight of The Cigar Bar his companion could pretend, with impeccable Salthill tact, not to notice.

I     that Lionel returned alone to the apartment on East 6st to discover a faint stink of cigar smoke pervading the rooms.