The Deed (26 page)

“So what can he do? I mean, the guy’s
crippled.
So he reaches over and carefully, trying not to cringe, unzips the guy’s fly. He tries to leave again, but the guy says, ‘Thanks, buddy, but, uh, now could you…could you pull it out for me?’”

“This is a true story, right?” said Nick.

“So now the guy’s really depressed,” Louis continued. “He looks around, and there’s nobody else in the men’s room, so he’s, like,
Oh, what the fuck. This guy’s got a shitty life, the least I can do is help him out a little.
”

“Give him a hand,” suggested Jason.

“Right,” said Louis with an appreciative nod. “So he reaches in and pulls out the guy’s cock. And it’s the most disgusting, filthy schlong you could possibly imagine.” This elicited grins, and Louis pressed the point home. “I mean, it’s lumpy and green, and it smells like bad cheese, and it has knotted bristly hair and—”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Nick. “Get on with it.”

“Right,” said Louis, but everyone was cracking up already; he owned the room. “So anyway, it’s too late to back out now. So he holds the guy’s evil, diseased, greasy proto-penis with the tips of two fingers while the guy takes a leak. I won’t even tell you what the piss looked like.”

“So it
is
a true story,” said Kyle.

“And when he’s done, the no-armed guy of course asks him to put it back in and zip up for him. So he does, even though what he really wants to do is lean over and puke in the urinal. And finally, the guy says, ‘Thanks, man. I know it took a lot of courage for you to help me, and I really appreciate it.’ ‘No sweat,’ says the Good Samaritan. ‘But, buddy, I gotta ask you: What the fuck is wrong with your johnson?’

“And the no-armed guy does this little contortion, and pulls his arms from around behind his back and out through the sleeves of the jacket, and he says, ‘Fuck if I know, but
I
sure as hell ain’t touching it.’”

Jason erupted in laughter, but Nick only rolled his eyes. “You got that out of
Martha Stewart Living,
” he accused.

It was a porterhouse steak, tall and proud, branded with a perfect cross-hatch of grill marks, running with juice, in fact still audibly sizzling. Amazed by the sheer beauty of the thing, Jason wanted to touch the meat with his hands, to dig his thumbs into it, to rub it on his chest. A small pile of forlorn, wilted vegetables rode shotgun, but Jason knew they’d be sailing back to the kitchen untasted, next to a big greasy hole where the perfect steak had once been.

Pierced with a tentative fork, the meat gave a little hiss, and Jason effortlessly carved off a wedge, like a spoon through gelato. He suspected he could have cut it with the napkin. The bite fell away like a sheared cliff, splashing into a shallow pool of rich blood grease to reveal an obscenely pink middle. And then, without delay, into the mouth. The beef was silky and smooth, like some sort of dessert meat, lightly crispy at the edges, bursting with juice. Amazing. One bite and he knew with absolute certainty that he’d never eat another salad in his life.

“Well, fuck McDonald’s,” he said aloud, to scattered chuckles.

The joy of dismantling the steak helped revive Jason from his opium-like trance; his buzz retreated to a more comfortable level without dispersing altogether.
This is what it’s all about,
he was thinking. The best food money can buy, an endless supply of liquor, no hassles. The good life.

Jason had been brought up, as are most people, to believe that money didn’t matter in some important cosmic sense. But he was starting to see the idiocy of that concept; it was a simplistic frame of mind available only to the sheltered young or the willfully enchanted. Wealth allowed you to work less and enjoy life more. Maybe it was true it couldn’t buy you happiness, but it seemed awfully suspicious that only poor people ever said so. It could clearly buy you sensual pleasure, prestige, insurance against future spells of rotten luck…happiness sure seemed a damn sight easier with it than without it. He tangentially wondered whether adulthood was a simple process of being able to absorb increasing amounts of cynicism into your philosophy.

“Jason,” said Nick, again, and he turned, with infinite slowness; the grins of the three were upon him.

“He’s zoned,” said Louis good-naturedly.

Jason grinned sheepishly. “Yeah, I guess I am; sorry. What?”

“I want to tell them about your deed. And the Indian chick. Is that okay, or is it still a state secret?”

Jason rolled his eyes. Amanda had warned him to keep the whole thing quiet, but her concern seemed paranoid and girlish in the present context, and, in any event, the sea of expectant faces would brook no refusal. “I don’t care,” he said, shrugging. “It’s not that interesting.”

But it was. Nick launched into a colorful rehashing of the events surrounding the mysterious deed; at every point, his enthusiasm seemed about to carry him over into the first person. Jason abstained from correcting his friend on minor points; for the purposes of this dinner, this might as well have been a fictional anecdote. Perhaps it was. But no, he corrected himself, he didn’t really believe that anymore.

“The deed to Manhattan,” repeated Louis appreciatively. “That’s classic. You gotta get me into rent control.”

“The girl’s a lawyer?” said Kyle.

“In law school.”

“It’s gotta be bullshit, right?” he went on. “I mean, I can’t believe there’s not some law on the books declaring all deeds that haven’t come out yet are null and void.”

“Agreed,” said Nick. “Our ancestors screwed the Indians out of this land fair and square.”

Memo to self,
thought Jason,
try to get Nick into the same room with Amanda’s mother sometime.
“Well, the argument
for,
” he said aloud, “is that Indians are winning these battles, on a much smaller scale, of course. A deed’s a deed forever—that’s why you have title insurance.”

“This is a scam,” said Kyle. “She’s scamming you.”

“How is she scamming me?” he replied defensively.

“All scams start with the same basic strategy,” said Kyle. “If you want someone to part with
X,
lead them to believe they stand to win ten
X
.”

“Or in this case, a million
X,
” said Nick with a grin, clearly enjoying the little social game he’d set up.

“For one thing,” Kyle continued, “the government can just take any property it wants by eminent domain. There’s the first hole in the plan.”

“But they do have to pay you market value,” piped in Louis.

Jason smiled appreciatively. “I could live with that,” he said. “I was actually trying to compute it the other morning. There’s a lot of zeroes.”

“This thing could go to the Supreme Court just on entertainment value,” continued Louis, an unexpected ally.

“Ah,” said Nick, “but can the Supreme Court adjudicate a deed that’s older than the Constitution their authority derives from?”

“I’ve actually wondered that myself,” said Jason. “If the deed predates the country, what’s the proper jurisdiction?”

“The United Nations?” suggested Louis.

“Perfect,” said Nick, breaking into a broad smile.

“Why?”

But Jason was able to field this one. “Because the UN headquarters is situated on my land, and I’m fully prepared to evict the bastards if they don’t rule in my favor.”

“If they don’t rule in your favor, you won’t be evicting shit,” said Kyle, reentering the fray. “Has this chick asked you yet for any old papers, family heirlooms, that kind of thing?”

Frowning at the general direction in which this was going, Jason was tempted to answer no, but the intimacy of the room evoked honesty. “Just a family Bible,” he replied quietly. It felt like a betrayal.

Kyle grinned triumphantly. “Mm-hmm. But you didn’t give it to her, right?”

Jason paused momentarily; it was all the opening Kyle needed. “You
did?
Sweet—the game’s afoot!” He took a sip of his drink. “Hope it wasn’t worth much.”

Jason shook his head. “You’re barking up the wrong tree.”

Kyle’s smile broadened. “Is it old? Valuable?”

“No,” said Jason. “I mean, yes. But she didn’t even know about it.
I
didn’t even know about it.” Peripherally, he couldn’t miss Nick’s shit-eating grin; he wondered if he could paste it with a forearm without taking his gaze away from his more immediate antagonist.

“A hundred bucks says you mysteriously haven’t been to her apartment yet,” said Kyle, obviously enjoying himself immensely.

“Let me get this straight,” said Jason, taking the offensive. “You think she concocted this elaborate plan just to steal a rare book? Spent a whole day in a graveyard, another carting me back and forth to Long Island? And her mom’s in on it? There’s got to be better ways to earn a living out there.”

“See, it sounds stupid when
you
say it,” said Louis, still on his side.

“I’m not saying she’s after your Bible,” said Kyle with thinly disguised mockery. “It’s obviously more complicated than that. Maybe she returns it to you as proof of her trustworthiness, to soften you up for later. Or maybe…,” he said, trailing off momentarily. “Maybe there is a deed, but it’s in her name, not yours. Have you thought of that? Maybe she just needs your records to help her establish
her
claim.”

Jason shrugged, disturbed, but not moved. “Then why not just tell me the truth?”

“Because you’d extort her for millions, of course. Wouldn’t you?”

“I trust her.”

“Oh, you trust her,” said Kyle, looking around the table with a smug smile. “Have you even fucked her yet? Not that
that
means anything.”

“I’m officially dropping out of this conversation,” Jason replied.

“I wanna do business with
you,
man.”

Nick finally stepped in to help. “Maybe there’s something to it,” he said. “If you found out someone stood to make a pile of money, wouldn’t you go make nice with them?”

“Well, that’s it exactly,” said Kyle. “What’s her motive? It’s great that you trust this babe, but ask yourself what she’s really in it for. Does she think if you get the island you’re just going to hand it over to her people? ‘Here you go, enjoy it, kids, I’ll be back slaving away at my day job.’”

“I think it’s cigar time,” said Nick, in a transparent effort to disperse the ugly mood that had begun to creep up on the gathering.

“I’m for that,” agreed Louis, and Jason nodded dumbly, his confidence shaken.

“Super,” said Kyle, rising to his feet. As they gathered coats and filed out the door, he paused to take Jason’s hand in a hearty handshake. “You know I’m just kidding around, right?” he said unconvincingly. “But it’s true that you won’t know a thing till you do her. You know that, right?”

Entering the pool room was like walking into a cigar: tight and brown, and full of the thick, roasty stench of old tobacco. There was even a fire at one end. Despite a sizable loitering crowd, an open pool table proved easy to claim, and Jason wondered if this, too, had been arranged. He reached in his pocket for quarters, but Kyle was already procuring a rack and he realized there was nowhere to put any money. The last trace of guest responsibility fluttered away, and Jason sat on a seat to drink his drink.