The Dismantling (5 page)

“I hope you enjoyed that little performance,” Lenny said.

Simon made a noncommittal noise.

“Cheryl's problem with me,” Lenny continued, as though answering a question Simon hadn't asked, “is that I'm an ungrateful person. I don't appreciate her. I don't appreciate our kids. Now I don't appreciate Howard and what he's doing for me. The thing she doesn't understand about Howard is that he wants this to work more than I do. It ain't just coming out of the goodness of his heart.”

“No?” Simon said, trying to seem as neutral as possible without causing offense.

“The thing with Alvin Plummer happened during my last season with the Jets, when they were draining my knee every damn week. We were playing in Philly. As soon as it happened, we all knew it was bad. You can't see that hit and not know. The man's neck . . . I was on the sideline fifty yards away, and I knew something was seriously fucked up. They took Plummer to the hospital by UPenn. Howard went up there late that night. He didn't tell anybody about this until much later. What happened was the family wouldn't let him in. Plummer's mother stood there in the lobby, looked him in the eye, and told him to get the hell out. He never talked to Plummer, not then, not ever.”

Lenny sipped at his drink and waited. When Simon kept quiet, he continued, more heatedly now: “Don't you get it? Plummer finally croaks, so now Howard's flailing around, looking for something—s
omebody
—he can fix. It's just money. He's got enough of that. Sure, I'm grateful,” Lenny said, “sure. But that doesn't mean I don't think paying somebody for a piece of their liver isn't fucked up. It doesn't mean I don't see why Howard's really doing this. What Cheryl wants is for me to bow down and kiss Howard's ring. And that's not something I'm gonna do.” He knocked back the whiskey and poured himself another one. “But, okay. Why should you give a shit. Let's talk about what you came here for. You've found my donor.”

“I might have,” Simon said. “She seems like a good candidate so far.”

“She?”

“Gender doesn't make a difference. I'd like to tell the hospital you're cousins. Second cousins.”

“You're kidding.”

“It's the easiest way. Look.” Simon pulled a printout of Maria's photo from his jacket pocket and laid it flat on the table.

Lenny looked at the photo. “I guess I see it. So what's the problem?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said ‘might have.'”

“She's smaller than a typical donor for someone your weight. But so far the imaging indicates that her liver is large enough to work.”

“And what about this?” Lenny waved the empty whiskey glass in front of Simon's face. “I've been trying to cut back, but, you know, old habits die hard and all.”

Simon clamped down on his irritation. “The less drinking you do over the next week, the better. But what's most important is that you tell Cabrera's social worker you gave it up months ago.”

“That shouldn't be too hard. I've been lying to Cheryl about it for years.”

Simon outlined the narrative. Lenny's father was Maria's mother's cousin. Maria and Lenny may have always lived across the country from each other, but they share memories of childhood reunions, barbecues in Syosset and Bay Shore. He gave her a tour of New York City when she visited after graduating from middle school; he arranged for tickets to his games whenever the Jets traveled to the West Coast.

Simon wrote key names and plot points on a legal pad and tested Lenny's retention. It was slow going. Lenny's memory was erratic; facts slipped out of their rightful places, unbalancing the story. Fifteen minutes in, Lenny started to fidget like a kid stuck in detention. Simon asked him again to characterize his relationship with Maria.

“Close,” Lenny mumbled.

“Please,” Simon said. “Can you try to elaborate?”

“This is stupid,” Lenny said. “Don't sit here and drill me about shit that's not even real.”

“I'm trying to help.”

Lenny stood abruptly, upending his chair. “Screw your help. Howard's too.”

Simon sat very still, the pad perched on his lap. “We can stop for the night.”

“You condescending
shit
.”

With the back of his hand, Lenny knocked his glass off the table. It clattered across the linoleum and into the wall, spinning on its side, like the needle of a busted fuel gauge, before coming to rest.

Simon placed the pad on the table next to Maria's photograph. “Would you like me to leave?”

Lenny rocked onto the balls of his feet, leaning across the table. Simon could see competing emotions rush across his face, see his mind spinning. The lid of his left eye fluttered; his breath smelled of whiskey and coffee. For a moment, Simon was sure he was going to be punched, that his jaw would be broken. Then, as suddenly as it had seized him, the tension left Lenny. He went limp, slumping against the wall.

“Do whatever you want,” he said dully.

“I'll leave. That's enough for now.” Simon ripped the top page off the pad and pushed it across the table. “The day after tomorrow?”

Lenny shrugged, his hair falling over his eyes. He didn't look up as Simon stood and backed slowly into the kitchen doorway. Simon waited there for a moment, and when Lenny still said nothing, he turned and crossed the living room to the screen door and the porch beyond, his pulse twitching in the hollow of his neck.

 • • • 

T
WO
weeks later Simon waited for Maria Campos in one of JFK's shabby baggage claim areas. It was eight thirty in the morning; she was due any minute, off the last red-eye from LAX. As the waiting limo drivers checked their phones and sipped their scalding coffees, a new load of passengers slogged down the hallway from the arrival gates, and he saw her then, walking slightly apart from the main flow of passengers, dragging a small roller bag. Her long, dark hair was crazy with static electricity; a pair of large purple sunglasses covered half her face. She stopped near the baggage carousel and looked around. Simon moved to greet her, but then something held him back. She had no way of recognizing him, and he wondered how he would appear to her. A bland, starched white guy of average height and average build, hair a desiccated blond nearly the same tone as his skin; a face lacking specificity, his overall physical appearance an act of collaboration with whomever was doing the viewing.

She frowned, set down her rolling bag, checked her watch.

He wondered what would happen if he just left, if he slipped out of the terminal and never answered her calls or e-mails. She would eventually take a taxi to the hotel near Times Square and sit in her room and wait. She had no one else to call; he hadn't even told her where the operation was going to take place. Maybe she'd be furious about wasting her time; maybe she'd be relieved not to have been forced to go through with it. Maybe she'd take it as a sign and stop seeking the quick, radical fix to her money problems, whatever they were. Or maybe she'd just find another broker.

He let go of the fantasy and approached her. She saw him coming and offered a speculative, noncommittal smile, pushing her sunglasses up onto her forehead. Her eyes were slick black pebbles, dark enough to show no difference between pupil and iris, heavy purple half circles anchoring them into place above her cheekbones. Her fingers picked at the cuffs of her baggy sweatshirt, the nails unpainted, bitten low. Despite the smile, her body seemed coiled, ready to run.

He stopped a few feet in front of her, at what he hoped was an unthreatening distance.

“Maria Campos, right?”

“Who are you?”

“Simon Worth,” he said. “From Health Solutions. I'm here to pick you up.”

The black eyes stared at him, as though weighing the reality not just of this statement, but of the proposition of his entire existence. Then her smile softened, even as her fingers continued to worry the sweatshirt cuffs. “For a moment I was afraid this was a trap.” Her voice was sandpapery, her cadences stoner slow. “Like, just kidding! You're under arrest!”

“No trap. Just a guy who should've taken a cab instead of the AirTrain.” She stared at him blankly. “What I mean is sorry I'm late. Ready to go?”

They retrieved her checked luggage—a large, overstuffed duffel bag—from the carousel. Simon shouldered the bag out to a taxi, wondering why she'd bothered to pack so much.

As their cab crawled out of the JFK loop, he asked about her trip.

“Weird,” she said. “It was my first time flying.”

“Really?”

“My family wasn't the vacationing type.” This with acid sarcasm.

“How was it?”

“Fine, I guess.”

“It didn't bother you?” he said. “Being up in the sky like that for the first time?”

“I thought it might freak me out. But it didn't, not at all.” She shrugged and looked out the window. When she spoke again, it was after enough of a pause that Simon was for a moment unsure what she was talking about. “It wasn't that big a deal.”

Their cab accelerated out of Jamaica, past the Maple Grove Cemetery, its carpet of gravestones unfurling below the Van Wyck. He noticed her hand gripping the door handle, white knuckled and trembling. She let go, as though she'd felt his eyes. A short time later, the Manhattan skyline came into view through the front windshield, all the iconic profiles set into detailed relief against a crisp blue autumn sky. Maria leaned toward him, and he smelled something familiar, some sugary perfume girls used to wear at his high school. She stared at the skyline fiercely, as though she were trying to burn the sight into her memory. He'd often wondered if the never-ceasing flood of photographs and film appearances of New York's most telegenic landmarks had drained the reality of the place of its impact or surprise. Looking at Maria, at the way she was inhaling the skyline with her eyes, told him that this wasn't necessarily the case, that the brute presence of the city was still more than capable of impressing.

Times Square, however, was its usual catastrophe. The taxi fought through a scrum of tour buses and pedicabs and deposited them in front of the Royal Crown on Forty-Fifth Street, just west of Eighth Avenue. Inside, the maroon lobby was dim and smelled of dusty radiators. The Royal Crown was a relic, a musty vision of what a grand Midtown hotel was supposed to be. It was also, for some unexplained reason, where Peter DaSilva preferred to put up Health Solutions' clients. Maria's room was small, a queen bed taking up half the space, the TV hidden inside a cabinet. It was clean though, and quiet twenty-nine stories above the street, with a clear view running west across Forty-Fifth.

Simon set her bag down. “Is this okay for you?”

She stood at the window, looking down at the street. “Yeah. It's good.”

“Here.” He took a padded envelope from his messenger bag. “Your advance.” He placed the envelope carefully onto the bed.

She turned away from the window and glanced at it.

“Five thousand in cash,” he said. “Take a look.”

She opened the envelope and looked inside. She stared down at the cash for a moment, then looked back up at Simon and nodded, expressionless.

“You must have a lot of questions about how this is all going to work,” he said.

She shrugged. She looked suddenly exhausted, a blurry copy of the woman in the photograph.

“Did you sleep on the plane?”

“Not a minute.”

“Get some rest,” he said. “Tomorrow morning we'll go over everything.”

He had a scrap of paper in his pocket with the address of Health Solutions' office written on it, but on an impulse he grabbed the notepad and pen on the bedside table and wrote the name and address of a café on the Upper East Side.

“We'll meet here for breakfast. Ten o'clock. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You can call me,” he said. “If you need anything.”

“Okay,” she said again. She sat down on the edge of the bed and put her hand on the envelope.

 • • • 

T
HE
next morning Simon sat waiting at a table by the window of the café, a sun-drenched place not far from his high school, St. Edmund's, which was the only reason he knew it existed. He'd arrived early and found the café still sitting smugly in its plum spot two blocks from the Metropolitan Museum. He'd peered through the window at the diners, neighborhood types and tourists visiting the museum. The former were mostly women and mostly bottle blond, all knobby wrists and severe clavicles, gold bracelets heavy as manacles. He'd never been inside before, only walked past, and so when he sat down and looked at the menu, he was not prepared for the appearance of an eighteen-dollar goat cheese omelet.

He couldn't afford this place, but the café's expensiveness was part of the point. It was the same reason he'd chosen this neighborhood, with its air of sobriety and permanence; he wanted Maria to feel confident in the people to whom she was leasing the use of her body. He had the strong impulse, stronger than with any of his prior donors, to set her at ease, to make her as comfortable as the situation allowed. Part of it was that she'd traveled to New York alone; the donors almost never did that. Another part of it, probably, was that she was young, very near his own age, which he supposed made it easier for him to identify with her and with what she was going through. The remainder of his motivation he couldn't quite account for yet, which bothered him perhaps less than it should have.

At quarter after ten, he spotted her hurrying across the street in a battered black leather jacket, half of her face hidden behind the same bulbous purple sunglasses. She rushed by the window without seeing him, then stopped inside the door, scanning the room. He waved, and she sat down opposite him, sweat glistening on her forehead.