Mount Pleasant (5 page)

Dick took a breath and then attacked his drink. “The thing is, he talked about Tess all the time. Which for Dale … I think he was really gone on her. Anyway.”

“You don’t think it affected his work?”

“Love,” Ebbetts said, as if that was an answer. “Dale was one of those guys who was all instinct. He was conservative, but he felt those rhythms, he listened to them. He called Nortel. That falling fucking knife.”

“What kind of investments did he get his clients into?”

“Old school: banks, dividend stuff, railways, utilities. To get into junior oils for him was like stepping off a cliff. But after he was eviscerated by the whole Tess thing, he loosened up. He put money into the oil sands, figures that’s the future, world’s running out, blah blah—puts it into this company, Pathos, a junior oil that lucked into a lease right on the Athabasca River. They don’t have any capital, but they’re sitting on this gold mine and they’re going for, like, eighty cents a share on the Venture Exchange, and Dale figures three things.”

Dick held up his stubby left hand and counted off the fingers with the right. “One: West Texas Intermediate is going to hit $150. Two: the Chinese need a stable energy supply for a billion people who suddenly want Lincoln Navigators after ten centuries of raising pigs in their living rooms. And three: Pathos is going to get listed on one of the major exchanges and the institutional money is going to get on it like teenage sex. He starts buying this thing, and it starts to move, and I’ll tell you the feeling, you don’t get it often—some guys never. But
you back something and you’re watching it like it’s your kid learning how to walk and it picks up speed, lurching a bit, and then it takes off, and when that happens, it’s like you just figured out the key to the universe and you’d be accepting the Nobel Prize but you’re too busy fucking a supermodel. Pathos gets north of twenty bucks. West Texas hits $147. Dale’s got I don’t know how much in this. But he’s shitting gold. And he unwinds the position a bit, starts thinking like an investor instead of a lottery winner. The Chinese are crawling around the oil patch, looking for a deal. It’s like the Red fucking Army—hundreds of them, I’m not kidding. And the smart money figures Pathos and maybe Husky are the takeout targets, which will drive up the price, though you have to figure that most of this is already built in. Then one night the entire Red Army checks out of their hotel and heads back to Beijing. I mean they all leave. Not a fucking word. A week later they buy a $100 billion stake in a Saudi play. You know the rest.”

Harry nods, but Ebbetts continues. “Oil drifts down to thirty-five bucks. There isn’t any credit out there to build a $23 billion upgrader. The environmentalists are all over the oil sands. Pathos goes to twenty-four cents and gets delisted, and Dale can’t unload this shit—there’s no one out there buying—and by the time they’ve bagged all the bodies, he doesn’t have much left.”

But surely he was taking money off the table before that, Harry thought. It was in his DNA—preserve. He would have taken half, at the very least. Where was that money? He didn’t want to grill Dick on this point, though, because he didn’t entirely trust him.

A waiter hovered and Harry glanced at the menu, its essayish descriptions, the nod to provenance and odd couplings—vodka and dark chocolate with lingonberry accents. Harry ordered quickly and randomly. Ebbetts took his time.

His mother didn’t like any of the men Dale had worked with, but held a special contempt for Ebbetts. Felicia had a witchy intuition about people. Harry wondered if she was right about Ebbetts.

“What’s your take on Press?” Harry asked bluntly. Prescott Lunden was president of the company, and Harry had always assumed that he and Dale were close. They were certainly cut from the same cloth.

Ebbetts downed the dregs of his martini and set the empty glass carefully beside his water glass. “Press likes to come across as the kind of guy who can hold his own, a tough guy, someone who knows someone at the track, et cetera. If he loses that look, the look of a guy who knows gold is being jerked around by three South Africans he knows on a first-name basis, the guy who’s got an ear on the ground in Saudi—he loses that look, he’s gone. People think Press knows someone who’s in a mud hut talking to Nigerian warlords about whether they’re going to blow the pipeline and oil’s going to spike. And they like the excitement, they like the information. People have something on the inside, it gives them a hard-on. They walk around all day like they have a little piece of sunshine up their ass, and they can’t wait to tell someone because information is how you determine your place at the trough. Press is supposed to be the connection between the WASPs and the real world. Except Press has never stepped foot in the real world. What does he know? He knows the banks will go up four percent a year until the sun dies. That oil will go up then go down. That people will believe in equities because they believe there is belief. You take away that infrastructure, that brilliant vacuum that people walk into, and there in the centre is Jesus with his wallet out, then the whole religion is ready to take a leap.” Ebbetts stared at his empty glass. “And that is one scenario that benefits no one.”

Harry remembered Press from a party decades ago. A cocktail in his hand, flirting with someone’s wife. One of those silver-haired guys who look like they scored the winning touchdown.

Their lunch arrived and they ate quietly for a few moments.

“Sampson is the sharpest knife in the drawer,” Dick said. “Poor bastard has cancer. He might have two months.”

“My father was essentially broke when he died, Dick.”

Ebbetts stared upward into the soft gloom of the restaurant. “That I can’t imagine, Harry. I’d check those accounts. He might have been cleaned out, but you want to see the paper on that.”

“How hard is it to manufacture that paper?”

“People do it.”

His father’s death hadn’t done any of the things Harry had hoped it would. It hadn’t given Harry a fresh lease, or delivered a mid-life epiphany. It hadn’t resulted in a meaningful inheritance. On almost every front, Dale’s death had been a disappointment. He pondered this as he was buzzed into his father’s apartment. Dixie was still living there and had asked him to come over and talk. Harry assumed she wanted a debriefing on Dale’s perverse will or wanted to offer him Dale’s clothes before they went to Goodwill.

Dixie greeted him at the open door wearing a black skirt and a tailored white shirt and a bit too much gold jewellery. Her regular features, the residue of a tan.

Dale’s apartment had a fabulous southern view, and Harry was always surprised that the city looked like a vast park from this vantage, acres of trees, thousands of them eclipsing the houses that ran down toward downtown. The light caught the first few yellowed poplar leaves in a comforting glow.

“Harry,” Dixie said, coming to join him at the window to stare out at the city. “I feel like you’re the only one in the family I can talk to. I can understand that your mother hates me.” She cocked her head to emphasize the obviousness of this statement. “Maybe it isn’t even me. I mean she’s going to hate anyone who comes along …” Dixie moved her hand around in her ash blond hair. “But I always felt that you and I, we had some kind of connection. You’re probably the only one in the family who’s always known that what I wanted to do, what I did do, was make your father happy.”

Actually, Harry didn’t know that. For one thing, it was hard to describe his father as happy, even during the happiest of times. He was a man whose joys were mysterious and internalized to the point where they may have been unknowable even to himself.

He turned to gaze around the large, breezy space, which had last been decorated by a woman who ran with the modernist ball and put in a Le Corbusier sofa and a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair in calfskin that Dale had hated. Dixie had inherited the furniture, which his sister, Erin, had assumed would be going to her. As Erin had pointed out in a murderous tone after she heard this news, not only was the furniture the most valuable part of their father’s estate, but she, as a designer, appreciated and understood the furniture, while Dixie would sell it for far less than it was worth to some estate-buying creep who would flip it for a profit.

Harry had carried that secret number in his head—the million he would inherit. What had been the number in Dixie’s head, he wondered, the number that had surely formed in the early months of her relationship with Dale and, once formed, become something like rosary beads that she could take out and play with absently when she was on the subway or getting her
hair done. Harry guessed that her number was around $500,000.

As his companion of almost fourteen months, a woman who had been his rod and his staff, who had discreetly disposed of unfortunately stained underwear, who had cooked for Dale from what Harry guessed was a limited repertoire, had picked up his dry cleaning and ordered from the takeout menus that had print too small for Dale to read, who had been his reluctant but inventive lover: for all this, she deserved more. Her bequest worked out to less than $2 an hour over fourteen months, a calculation she had no doubt made.

They sat in the living room while Dixie made a dignified plea for Harry to make things right. The sums that Dale had left them were so Lilliputian they seemed ironic or whimsical or colossally mean-spirited. Dixie said she assumed there had been some kind of financial sleight of hand—Dale’s assets transferred to a family trust in the Cayman Islands or put in the name of a grandchild. As she skirted carefully around the issue, Harry realized she thought he knew where the secret fortune was stashed. She sat beside him, her mascara slightly blurred, her gaze expectant.

Harry felt genuinely sorry for her. Here was a woman roughly his age who was beached by the same tides as Harry, and for some of the same reasons. She managed to convey, without using the word, that she was owed. He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder. “Dixie, I know you did the best you could for my father. And we all appreciated that. His last months would have been so … bereft.”

“I knew you were the one I could talk to, Harry,” Dixie said, grabbing a tissue from a box on the end table. “I just knew of anyone in the family, you were the person who would understand. I mean, your mother probably hates me, and your sister …”

“Hates everyone.”

Dixie laughed a bit as she sniffled and dabbed at her nose.

“My father, as you know, was a complicated man,” Harry said, repeating the first line of his eulogy. “He left you $7,200, which, I agree, is ridiculous.”

“Well, I knew you’d see the—”

“But it appears that’s all there is.”

“There has to be more. I don’t understand, Harry.”

“Neither do I, Dixie. I’d assumed he was in pretty good shape.”

Dixie began to sob, making small heaving noises.

“Dixie, I’m sorry. I really am.”

She nestled against Harry then, and he held her, and when she looked up at him, he recognized her expression as the fulcrum of a particular moment, the point at which the future would either remain the same or be radically altered. It might have been better to sprint across the spacious living room, vault over the Barcelona chair and crash cinematically through the floor-to-ceiling window onto the sidewalk twenty storeys down. Instead, they kissed, and Dixie took his hand and said, “Come,” and he followed her like a golden retriever into his father’s bedroom.

The novelty of touching someone, a new body after twenty-five years with the same person, was like walking into Oz. They kissed again, and Dixie unbuttoned his shirt and unzipped his pants, went down on him and engulfed him expertly. Harry was almost overcome. She gently massaged his testicles and her mouth took him with a hunger and purpose and depth that he had forgotten. She straddled him then, and soon several months of somewhat begrudged near-total celibacy led him to a roaring climax. As he came, the words that arrived immediately, that could have been yelled at the point of orgasm, were: This is how lives are ruined.

Afterward, she laid her head on his chest and toyed softly with the greying hairs around his nipple as Harry looked around the vast bedroom in a flood of guilt. The walk-in closet was open and he could see the neat rows of his father’s handmade suits, greys and blues receding into the darkness, suits that had all been made by the same white-haired Italian tailor, who worked out of a tiny storefront on the fringe of the financial district, a man who gave Harry hard European candies when he went with his father to watch him be fitted. One day the tailor’s grandson was there, a small, dark boy roughly the same age as Harry, and the two of them sat in silence, eating their hard candy, as Dale stood like a statue and the tailor kneeled in front of him.

“Dixie, when did you first notice the deterioration in my father’s mental abilities?”

“You mean, when did he start forgetting things?”

“Forgetting things, getting confused easily.”

“Well, I mean, he was pretty forgetful at the beginning anyway.”

“But it got much worse.”

“There were a couple of pretty weird moments. The first one, I don’t know, maybe ten months ago. The neighbour from across the hall, something Stevenson. She knocked on the door and Dale answered and didn’t recognize her.”

“He couldn’t remember her name?”

“No, he didn’t know who she was. I think she’s lived there for like nine years or something. And one morning I was in the kitchen making coffee, and Dale didn’t come out and I went into the bedroom to see what was going on, and his clothes were on the bed where I’d laid them out and he was just standing there, staring at them, like he didn’t know where to start.”

“You mean he couldn’t dress himself?”

“Well, he did, eventually. But it was as if he’d forgotten the order everything went on. I told him to put on his socks and underwear, and that seemed to prime the pump. But it was kind of scary.”

Harry wondered if Dale’s disease was complicated by dementia or if his confusion was simply part of the brain cancer. He’d had so little contact with his father, he had no idea what his baseline mental state had been. Did it make him a target? Had one of his colleagues seen a wounded animal and culled his money? Harry felt a pang of guilt about spending so little time with his father that his months of deterioration had gone unwitnessed.