New England White (7 page)

Kellen wondered the same thing. He used to tease her about wasting her life. Maybe Mary Mallard was right. Maybe Kellen had left her his surplus. Maybe he even expected—

No. No. She would not pursue it. She would stay sane, which meant staying away from thoughts of Kellen. She stood in the window as the wind whipped the snow into high sleek drifts, wondering what had happened to all the rich, surging energy she poured into life. It was her brother’s death all over again. Only three Marines died in the Grenada operation, but Jay Veazie was one of them. He received a posthumous Navy Cross for “extraordinary heroism,” which Mona had thrown into the pond not far from their house on North Balch Street. After that, her politics went from radical to scary.

As for Kellen, well, as far as Julia was concerned, there was supposed to be a reckoning, not this absolute, this grim, gray wall, the scary firmness of life’s end intruding on its middle. Absent a diagnosis of cancer or an unexpected stroke, the physical organism we call human was not supposed to betray the trust imposed by its owner, or not for many years to come. She remembered that last argument with Kellen, at the mall up in Norport, and how she had not let him finish whatever he was trying to tell her about
inventory risk
and how
the dark matters.
When she spotted Bitsy and Regina and jumped up, Kellen grabbed her arm and asked if they could set up a time to talk. Positive that his motives were as always ulterior, Julia had climbed on her high horse and told him that was probably not a good idea, and, by the way, would he please take his fucking hand off her arm?—for she was a different person around him, and a lot of the difference came out of her mouth. He said they really needed to talk, as soon as possible, and that they could meet in some out-of-the-way place if it would make her feel better. Julia, perhaps overwary, experienced these words as an invitation to dalliance, and told him to leave her be. The last thing she needed in her life was any of his nonsense, she told him, and the anger of her parting shot, her decision to turn on her heel and stalk away before Kellen had a chance to answer, was a gnawing pain in her gut: she had not even said goodbye.

CHAPTER 7

TRICKY TONY

(I)

A
MONG
J
ULIA’S FAVORITE STUDENTS
was a peaceable fellow named Poynting, a brilliant and puzzled gay activist who found himself drawn by the rigor and learning of Orthodox Christianity, and hoped to find space within it for one narrow exception to the received tradition—which he otherwise endorsed wholeheartedly, right down to what the Orthodox and the Catholics called “fidelity to Apostolic tradition” and outsiders called “not letting women be priests.” On the cold but clear Monday morning following the funeral, Poynting sat in Julia’s office to ask about possible sources of grant funding for a proposed trip to Bologna over the summer to research the confraternities established in the thirteenth century to enforce the sexual mores of the Church. Possibly what Joe Poynting really wanted was a free trip to Italy, but most of her colleagues would be quick to accept one. So Julia, with a few minutes to spare before she had to meet with her boss, took considerable pleasure in opening her well-ordered files to find a foundation likely to support him. In the event, they found three or four, which was three or four more than she found for most students looking for financial help to do something interesting, because religion in general, and divinity school in particular, were considered unsexy. Finding ways to twist student projects into smeary reflections of what the foundations really wanted to fund was one of her favorite parts of the job: mirrors were, after all, her thing.

As Poynting, quite happy, was leaving, Julia stopped him.

“Joe? Weren’t you an econ major at Vanderbilt?”

“Years ago.”

“But you remember some of the terminology?” Neatening her desk, sliding the application forms back into their proper folders, and the folders back into their proper drawers. “Like ‘capturing the surplus.’ What does that mean?”

Standing in the doorway, her student drummed his fingers on his own mouth. “Oh, well, you know. The consumer surplus, say, is the difference between the value of a good to you and what you pay for it. Theory says you’ll only buy when the price is less than the value you place on it. The point is, the seller wants to make that spread as small as possible. That is, the seller wants to capture some of your surplus if he can. He does that by trying to get you to pay a price very close to the actual value you place on the good.” Poynting laughed. “Or something like that.”

Julia thought it over. As simple as that? “One more question.”

“Shoot.”

“Why would somebody think that the best way to capture the surplus is an auction?”

“Does this have something to do with that professor who got killed? The one who was your friend?” Diplomatically put. “Is that why you’re asking?”

Julia hesitated. She knew that Joe Poynting, like many of the black students at the university, harbored an uneasy respect for Kellen Zant, who was seen, on the one hand, as the consummate race man, always on television decrying discrimination in corporate America; and, on the other, as a kind of racial entrepreneur, building a consulting-and-lecture-circuit empire on the foundation of the guilty consciences of white businessmen. Some of the students even considered Kellen a sellout. Julia was not sure exactly where on the spectrum young Poynting fell, and so, wanting not to offend, she settled for avoiding the question.

“Just help me out here, okay?”

“For you, anything.” They grinned at each other. “The answer is what’s called the ‘winner’s curse.’ Suppose you’re bidding for a good you plan to resell, but you aren’t sure what the resale value is. You have to guess in order to bid. And the trouble is, if the auction is contested, you often have to bid more than the resale value to get the good. That is, you can’t immediately turn around and sell for what you paid. If your motive is resale, in other words, it’s possible for the seller in an auction to capture all of your surplus.”

“Does that always happen?”

“Of course not. The market value might not be the most important thing. That is, you might want the good for reasons other than resale. And there are ways to set up auctions that try to avoid winner’s curse and some of the other famous paradoxes. But I’m not really up on auction theory.” He brightened. “I seem to remember Professor Zant published a paper on auctions a couple of years ago.”

I’ll just bet he did. “But what if somebody referred to something as his own surplus?”

“If he knew what he was talking about—if he was an economist, say—he would probably mean something he had managed to hold back in an exchange, something he would have been willing to give up but didn’t have to.” A pause as the young man seemed for a moment to look into her soul with all-seeing eyes. “Something of value to him.”

“And inventory risk? What does that mean?”

“Oh, well, that’s pretty basic. You’re a businessman. You hold inventory for sale. The problem is, it can decline in value. You get stuck with computers nobody wants. Or with dresses that are out of style. You try to reduce your inventory risk. One good way to do it is to get somebody else to hold your inventory, so you’re not stuck with it. That way, you order it as needed, and the inventory risk rests with somebody else.”

“Dark times? Darkness that matters?”

She had finally stumped him. “New one on me,” he said.

Alone again, she tried to read admission folders from the early applicants, but could not get her mind off the conversation with Joe Poynting, and how it fit in with what Mary Mallard had told her. She could not believe she had quizzed poor Poynting about all this, just a few days after promising herself to stay clear of Kellen’s little mystery. But Kellen had always had that effect on her. No matter how often she swore off of him, she always stumbled back. Even after her marriage, Kellen would chase her down with his preternatural sense of when Lemaster was away, Kellen with his slow, sleepy, syrupy Southern voice that used to soften her and sweeten her, to melt every barrier she tried to erect, and it was sometimes only sheer luck that had kept her from stumbling back to him.

She checked her watch. Time for her meeting with the dean. Walking through the halls, she reflected that she knew at least a piece of it now. Not much, but some. Kellen was selling something. That was the big mystery. Either he had already sold it, or he was about to; but, whatever the sequence, he planned to hold back the best part for himself. The trouble was, he had wanted to spread the risk. He had wanted Julia to hold for him—whatever it was. He had told Mary that Julia would have it if anything happened to him. He was killed less than a week after asking her, and being turned down.

What she did not know was whether he had found somebody else to hold it before he was shot.

(II)

“S
O HOW’S THE FAMILY
?” said Claire Alvarez brightly. “So many children. That’s wonderful. Just wonderful. I envy you so.”

“Everyone’s fine,” said Julia.

“Does Vanessa know where she wants to go to school?”

“Ah, not yet.”

“Well, I know she’ll be a star wherever she goes. She’s amazing.” The dean of the divinity school nodded. She was a tall, ethereal woman who for the past fifteen years had taught Christian ethics to students who increasingly doubted that there were any. Her sweetness covered you like a blanket. Old Clay Maxwell, already on in years when he taught Julia over twenty years ago, liked to say that Claire could make you feel so warm and fuzzy that you slept through the part where she fired you.

“Thank you,” said Julia, although talk of Vanessa and college frightened her.

“Did she enjoy France? She was just in France, wasn’t she?”

“She loved it,” said Julia, omitting to mention that the trip had been a year ago, Vanessa’s sixteenth birthday present, a private visit to Granny Mo, before everything went bad.

“I just adore that girl,” Claire said, as if they were discussing a musician or a painter instead of a troubled teen. But Claire found few women she didn’t like. She was the nation’s leading expert—possibly the nation’s only expert—on the holiness theology of the great Methodist evangelist Phoebe Palmer, who, as far as Julia could tell from Claire’s frequent and enthusiastic lectures, had distinguished herself in the years leading up to the Civil War, when other Protestant clergy were arguing over the place of slavery in a nation that believed in Scripture, by first skipping the subject and then skipping town, preferring to spend the war years in England. “By the way, are you in some kind of trouble?”

“Trouble?” said Julia, very surprised. “I, ah, I hope not.”

“I’m sorry to sound so melodramatic,” said Claire, gentle face composed in the half-smile that was her only known expression. “I know we’re supposed to be talking about admission and financial aid, and we’ll get around to that. But I just had the strangest visit from a lawyer who’s also a major donor. It turned out, all he wanted to talk about was you. Odd, isn’t it?” Folding her hands alongside the polished silver humidor that was the improbable tradition of her office. “Tice is his name. Anthony Tice. He does those late-night television commercials.”

She stopped, apparently waiting for a confession.

“I’ve seen them,” said Julia cautiously, fingers wrapped tightly around the folder holding the presentation they were working up for the provost. “But I don’t know him.”

“You’re not worse off. He’s not a particularly pleasant man. Very smart, very good-looking, and knows it. He’s given us a hundred thousand dollars each of the past two years. I’m not sure why Mr. Tice thinks us worthy of his beneficence”—looking up at the portraits of past deans, as if the answer might be found there—“but the nation’s divinity schools are not exactly awash in money these days.”

“What did he ask about me, Claire?”

“Two things. Your relationship with poor Kellen Zant—”

“We didn’t have one,” Julia objected, too quickly.

“—and, second, what kind of person you are. Do you have integrity? Courage of your convictions? Are you willing to take risks for a great cause?” She rose to her feet, moving slowly around the long, shadowy office, rendered only moderately cheerier by the November sun. “It was as if he was preparing to make you a job offer of some kind. At least that’s what I thought at first.” The dean had reached the window. She fussed with her hair and watched the view, even if there was nothing to see but the drabness of Hudson Street in winter, and, from the short side of the room, the rich, ugly swankness of Hilliman Social Science Tower, looking condescendingly down on the superstitious rabble of Kepler: the one where truth was measurable but not eternal, the other where truth was eternal but not measurable. “I sang your praises, of course. I told him how proud the school has always been to count you among our graduates, and how delighted we were that you chose to come work with us three and a half years ago.”

“Thank you,” said Julia, who in fact had never completed her degree.

“And he asked how you were bearing up under the pressure. He meant finding Kellen’s earthly remains. I told him it must have been terrible, naturally, but you bear up fantastically well under pressure.” Turning back into the room, arms folded. “You do, you know. It’s one of your many marvelous qualities, Julia. Things don’t get to you. You take the same delight in God’s creation no matter what’s going on in your life.”

Julia dipped her head. This was pouring it on a little thick, even for Claire. The reckoning would surely follow. Nervous, she began nibbling on her lower lip, a habit of which Mona had tried, and failed, to break her by painting her lip with iodine.

“You’ve been here a little over three years. The students adore you. The faculty respects you. You seem to like everybody. I suspect you’d even get along with Mr. Tice, unpleasant though he can be. He wants to meet you, Julia.” Claire made it sound like a blind date. “Yes, the man’s self-centered and probably greedy, and he talks a mile a minute. But, Julia, if you can get along with Boris Gibbs, you can get along with anybody.”

“What does Tice want to talk about?”

“Kellen Zant, I think. He says the two of them knew each other. They worked on a project together. They didn’t have the chance to finish their research. I formed the impression that Mr. Tice might want to recruit you to take Kellen’s place.”

“Oh, Claire, no. No way.”

A kindly palm came up. “Far be it from me to force you, Julia. But think about it. Mr. Tice is a major benefactor of the school, after all, and you are…a dean. You might at least talk to him. Or don’t. It’s entirely up to you.” Meaning it wasn’t.

“I’ll think about it,” Julia promised. She owed Claire, and they both knew it, for the dean had searched her out in the miserable months after she lost her job in the public schools. To this day, Julia was not sure why, although Claire loved to give speeches trumpeting Kepler as a showcase of diversity.

“The only strange part came at the end of our conversation. He asked me if you were good at running your office. I naturally said you were wonderful. Well, you are. The neatest, most efficient office in the building, Julia. You know that. I told him, of course. And then he asked me if he could have a look at it. At your office. At that point I had to tell him that, as grateful as we are for his support, there are limits to—”

But Julia missed the rest, because she was pelting down the hall.

(III)

“A
RE YOU SURE NOTHING’S MISSING
?” said Lemaster, sizzling with fury.

“Nothing I could see.”

“I can’t believe this. I can’t believe it.”

“I can hardly believe it myself.”

They were sitting in Lemaster’s study, a two-story affair separated from the main house by a breezeway. Except for a few family photos, and a flurry of south-facing windows, books covered every square inch of wall. Lemaster had told her back in their courting days that he wished he could live in a library. Now he nearly did.

“I know this Tice. Sat on a couple of bar committees with him. Half his clients are scum. Mafiosi, accused terrorists, ax murderers. Seriously. All right, they all deserve representation, but I get worried when one guy feels he has to represent all of them. Tricky Tony. That’s what they call him.” A heavy sigh. “Thing is, he isn’t a bad lawyer. He’s actually pretty good. But he has no sense of morals. None. And he doesn’t have an independent thought in his head. He wouldn’t cross the street without a client paying him for it. So, if he wanted to see the inside of your office, it was on behalf of a client.”