The Emperor of Ocean Park (68 page)

(II)

M
Y LUNGS ARE SIGNALING
that they have had enough. Running more slowly now, I cut through a side street four blocks from my house. This route takes me past the sprawling campus of Hilltop, the stuffiest of the city’s several private elementary schools, and I remind myself that just about a year from now we will be making an appointment so that Bentley can have his interview. To see if he is good enough for the Hilltop kindergarten.
Interview.
At all of four years old! I jog onward, not quite believing that we are going to put our little boy through this nonsense. Once upon a time, all the university kids got in, but that was before rising costs, and their eternal partners, tuition hikes, forced Hilltop to go in search of the children of the region’s commercial class. Last year the school rejected the youngest of my colleague Betsy Gucciardini’s three shy daughters, and for the next month Betsy wore her frustration and despair like twin veils of mourning, seeming to equate failure to gain a place at Hilltop with the end of her child’s productive life. I wonder, not for the first time, what has happened to America, and then I remember that my old buddy Eddie Dozier, Dana’s ex, is about to publish a book advocating the abolition of the public schools and rebates of all the tax dollars that support them. The market, he assures us, will provide a plentiful supply of private replacements. So every child in America can have an interview before starting kindergarten. Swell.

“Focus on what matters,” I wheeze, slowing finally to a walk.

By the time I stumble through the door, it is past seven. Kimmer has bacon and eggs ready—usually my job—and she even kisses me lightly on the lips. She is so sweet that the last few months might never have happened. She apologizes: not for refusing to listen to me last night, but for the fact that she has to go to the office this morning. She hoped to work from home today, but too many things have come up. I smile and shrug and tell my wife I understand. I do not tell her that I am wounded. I do not tell her how sure I am that the main thing that has come up is that I told her that I might work from home, too, so we could spend the day together.

Instead, I smile.

“What are you so happy about?” Kimmer asks, her arm surprisingly around my waist. In response, I kiss her forehead. There is no safe answer to her question, even though there are many true ones. I realize that I have finally bested the Judge: I am his equal at hiding my feelings, and his superior in pretending to be delighted when I am miserable.

Over breakfast, we leaf through our two daily newspapers, the
New York Times
and the
Elm Harbor Clarion,
each of us, for very different reasons, searching for articles about my father. I am deep inside the
Clarion
sports page, mulling over the latest injuries to players on the university’s hapless basketball team, when I decide that the time has come to tell my wife the one last thing I must do. I do not expect her to like it.

I fold the newspaper carefully and look at her exquisite face, the bright brown eyes intense behind her glasses, the lines of middle age deepening above her cheeks with every passing month. Her mouth is drawn up in a little bow. I know she knows I am watching her.

“Kimmer, darling,” I begin.

She flicks her gaze at me, then drops it once more to the
Times
editorial page. “Wanna hear a funny op-ed about the President’s tax plan?”

“No, thanks.”

“It’s really clever, though.”

“No, Kimmer. I mean, not just now. We need to talk.”

Eyes rolling in my direction, rolling back to the paper. “Is it important? Can it wait?”

“Yes. And, no, I don’t think so.”

My wife, looking splendid as always in a robe, glances up and blows me a kiss. “You’ve found her? Your
nzinga
from the ferry?”

At first I am nonplussed, thinking that she has somehow discovered my tête-à-tête with Maxine on the Vineyard, but then I see that she is only joking, or maybe hoping.

“Nothing that interesting.”

“Too bad.”

“No, not too bad. I love you, Kimmer.”

“Yeah, but only because you’re a glutton for punishment.”

Smiling as she says it, putting me off, not wanting to hear what I am going to say. But I have to make my point and, seeing no way to sugarcoat it, I decide to say it right out.

“Kimmer, I have to go see Jack Ziegler.”

The paper closes with a snap. I have all of her attention. When my wife speaks, her voice is dangerously low. “Oh, no, you don’t.”

“I do.”

“You
don’t.
”

“I would just call him,” I propose, pretending that our disagreement is on a slightly different subject, “but he doesn’t really talk on the telephone much.”

“Fear of wiretaps, no doubt.”

“Probably.”

Kimmer’s gaze is unwavering. “Misha, honey, I love you, and I also trust you, but, in case you’ve forgotten, I am being considered for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals. If my hubby traipses off to visit a Jack Ziegler, it is not going to do my chances any good.”

“Nobody has to know,” I say, but I am reaching.

“I think a whole lot of people would know, and most of them happen to work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

I have considered this, of course. “I would clear it with Uncle Mal first.”

“Oh, goody. Then he can tell everybody else in Washington.”

“Kimmer, please. You know what’s been going on. Some of it. As much as you’ve let me tell you.” Her eyes widen at that one, but I cannot stop now. “I’ve learned a lot of . . . of ugly things about my father in the past few weeks. Now I have to know if they are as ugly as I think they are. And I think Jack Ziegler knows.”

“If the facts are ugly, there’s no question that Jack Ziegler knows them.”

“Well, that’s why I have to go. People will understand.”

“People will
not
understand.”

“I have to know what’s going on.” But I think of Morris Young and the story of Noah and wonder if I am mistaken.

“I don’t think there
is
anything going on, Misha. Not like what you seem to think, anyway.”

“You’re probably right, darling, but . . .”

“If you talk to him, there is going to be more trouble. You know there is.” She does not say from whom, so I suppose it could be a threat.

“Kimmer, come on.” My tone is gentle. I am concerned that Kimmer will start shouting, as she sometimes does, and wake Bentley. Or the neighbors. Neither of which would be a first. “Come on,” I say again, still softly, hoping Kimmer will be soft in reply.

“You’re the one who always says Jack Ziegler is a monster.” Her tone is indeed soft, but more in hiss than compromise.

“I know, but—”

“He’s a murderer, Msha.”

“Well, he was never convicted of
murder.”
She has me sounding like one of Uncle Jack’s countless lawyers now, and I don’t much like it. “Other crimes, but not murder.”

“Except he killed his wife, right?”

“Well, there were rumors.” I try to remember the way the Judge answered that one before the Judiciary Committee, for it was that single question from Senator Biden, and my father’s unhelpful response, that cost him more than any other.
I don’t judge my friends based on rumors,
my father said—something like that. And he folded his arms across his chest in a gesture that even the most incompetent public relations coach could have warned him never, ever, to make on national television. Although understandably angry at what he considered an unfair line of inquiry, my father came off as haughty and disdainful. One columnist wrote that Judge Garland seemed to be dismissing a man’s possible murder of his wife as a triviality—a ridiculous assertion, but one my father invited by losing his temper before tens of millions of viewers. I knew, at that horrible televised instant, that the fight was lost; that, no matter how the Judge might duck and weave, his opponents had backed him into the corner of the ring; that the knockout punch would, at any moment, come flashing into his vision, just before it laid him flat. And I felt a rampant anger, not at the Senate or at the press, but at my father:
How could he be so stupid?
There were about six thousand possible answers to Biden’s perfectly reasonable question, and the Judge picked the worst of them. Yet now, under Kimmer’s cross-examination, I find myself following my father’s lead.

“But he was never indicted, darling. He was never even arrested. As far as I know, what happened to his wife was an accident.” Almost letter-perfect, I am sure: exactly what the Judge said to Senator Biden. Except for the
darling.

“She fell off her horse after twenty years of riding and broke her neck by accident?”

“It’s not a very good way to murder somebody,” I point out. “You could fall off and walk away with a few scratches and live to tell everybody who pushed you.”

Kimmer gives me a look. “You’re joking, right?”

“No, I’m serious. I’m saying we don’t know exactly what happened to Jack Ziegler’s wife, but murder doesn’t seem very likely. Am I supposed to hang him on rumors?”

Oh, I hate this side of myself, I truly do, the same way I hated this side of the Judge, but I cannot seem to stop.

“Rumors!”

“Well, since he was never charged . . .”

“Oh, Misha, listen to yourself. I mean, how legalistic can you get?”
You sound just like your father,
she is saying. Which is true.

“It’s just a visit, Kimmer. One hour, maybe thirty minutes.”

“He’s a nut, Misha. A
dangerous
nut. I don’t want us to have anything to do with him.” Her voice is growing louder, and a clear edge of hysteria is creeping in.

“Kimmer, come on. Look at the facts. Freeman Bishop is dead—”

“The police say it was drugs—”

“And Colin Scott impersonated an FBI agent to get information on the Judge, and now he’s dead—”

“It was an accident!”
So much for soft.

“An accident while he was following me. Following
us.”

“Well, it was still an accident. He got drunk and he drowned and he’s dead now, okay? So you can drop it.”

“And you don’t think we should be a little bit worried?”

The wrong thing to say. Absolutely wrong. I know it at once. I feel like a chess player who has just advanced his knight, only to notice, an instant too late, that his queen is about to fall.

“No, Misha. No, I’m not worried. Why should I be worried? Because I’m married to a man who has gone off the deep end? Whose sister has turned into some kind of . . . of conspiracy theorist? A man who now thinks that the solution to all his problems lies in flying up to Aspen to drop in on a thug who murdered his wife? Inviting that thug into our life? No, Misha, no, I am most certainly not worried. There is nothing to be worried about.”

I try to mollify her. “Kimmer, please. The Judge was my father.”

“And I’m your wife! Remember?” She is holding on to the sides of the doorway as though worried that her anger might blow her away.

“Yes, but—”

“Yes,
but!
You’re the one who always talks about loyalty. Well, be loyal to
me
for once! I don’t mean loyal like never even looking hard at another woman so you can feel holier than thou. Than me. I mean loyal like you’re doing something
for
me. Something that makes a difference.”

“I’ve done plenty for you,” I tell her in the calmest tone I can manage. I like to think I have developed an immunity to my wife’s taunts, but her words sting.

“The stuff you do for me is the stuff
you
want, not the stuff
I
want.”

I am trying to remember how close I felt to Kimmer last night as I
held her in my arms, stroking her back, listening to her apologize before she fell asleep.

Last night. Last year. Last decade. All equally vanished.

“Kimmer, if—”

“And it’s not like I’ve never done anything for you!”

As my wife’s eyes continue to flame, I am astonished by her passion, magnified in the cramped space of the kitchen. Standing there in her bathrobe, her Afro awry, Kimmer remains the most desirable woman I have ever known, yet I have the eerie sense that if I make a move she doesn’t like she will knock me down. This fury has been percolating ever since my return from the Vineyard. Despite the news about Marc Hadley, Kimmer seems to think her chances of appointment are slipping away. I do not know exactly why she believes this; I do know she blames me for it. As she blames me for much else. I have heard the litany a hundred times, a hundred different tales about how Talcott Garland ruined her life. How she married me to please her parents when there were far more exciting men interested in her. How she left her lively practice with one of Washington’s most prestigious firms to follow me to this deadly-dull New England town. How most of our acquaintances (we have few friends here, Kimmer will note accusingly) are university types who look down their noses at her because she isn’t one of them. How she easily earned a partnership at an unimportant law firm that nobody has ever heard of. How she had a baby to make her husband happy without really thinking about what she was getting into and is now stuck in a bad marriage because of it. How her life ever since has been a slow race between boredom and insanity. Kimmer made all the choices. But I take all the blame.

“I’m sorry,” I say, raising my hands to make peace.

“Misha, please. For my sake. For the sake of our marriage. Our son. Promise me you will not invite that man into our life. That you won’t visit him. Or call him.”

And I discern something else, a version of the same screechy timbre I detected in Jack Ziegler’s voice in the cemetery, as unexpected now as it was then: Kimmer is afraid. Not the physical fear of the soul for its fleeting mortal life, nor the desperate protectiveness of mother for child. No, this is her career fear. She is at the edge of what she has always wanted, and does not want Uncle Jack to spoil it for her—and how can I blame her?