The Unfortunates (17 page)

When they were reintroduced a decade back, George recognized Bob with a vivid and tongue-tying flash of hero worship. At boarding school, Bob was two classes ahead, a hard shoulder and an unlaced rugby cleat, a poet and a captain, and at the parties where George dourly slinked the perimeter, there would be Robert, bending over the table with this girl, that girl, making nice tight lines, expertly helping a tremulous young one get the stuff up her nose, tipping her chin with his hand. A house abandoned by someone’s parents for the weekend—there was a polar-bear rug, its fierce head thrust under a glass table and Robert saying to the girl whose face he held, a math-mouth George had thought he might have a chance with, “Nobody owns you but
you
, Barbara.” And while there was no crisis anyone got wind of—no flashing red lights, no flashing blue lights—one day he was gone, and George heard nothing of him for years.

“I tell this woman with the Warhol,” Bob says, wiping the rain from his face, “I’m her cousin. I’m like, I don’t want to take your painting away. We’re family. I just want to bring my friend the appraiser over. Then I want to give you money. And the old girl, she’s practically holding a horn to her ear, she says, ‘Cousin Bobby, mow my lawn.’ Bitch of it is, she doesn’t have a lawn. She has a folding chair on the sidewalk. We’re at a stalemate. How’s Iris? She go up with you to the, what was it, PT?”

“Nope.” George reaches for his glass. He finds it is empty. He finds he is reciting Iris’s work schedule, for reasons that elude him, and concludes, “Sometimes I am the doer when there is a thing.” Adding, “You miss my point.”

“Hey, why the long face? This is a great hotel. I always forget about this place. It’s so close to the office. You’ve ever been up in one of the rooms?”

“Never.”

“They throw some unusually classy bric-a-brac up, the prints on the wall are half-decent—not watercolor sailboats, anyway. And the concierge.” Bob drops his voice and leans farther in. “Great concierge. Want to rent a tiger? Want a toothbrush, and a tiger to brush your teeth? Done. Look at those assholes over there, that one knows the concierge, for sure. Ten bucks. Hey,
you
all! You know the concierge?”

The suits with the two women look up.

“Bob,” George says, “what the hell.”

“You can’t turn a tanker around with a speedboat.” Bob leans low over a fresh drink, eyeing it with ardor and suspicion as if it might be the unfaithful love of his life.

The women frown and look away. George becomes aware of their plastic sheen and how hard they’ve worked to look that way—shining, straight hair, gleaming sandals, fingernails tipped white. Their eyes, cups and saucers, banded gold and green. One looks to have begun the day olive-skinned and the other palest white, but they’ve met in the middle courtesy of spray tan. Something about this disturbs George. Their essence, despite the bronze, is not out-of-doors but rather of those public indoor spaces that aim to be eternally sufficient—the airport, the mall. They
are
escorts, looking right only under something electric. The grounds of Oak Park come suddenly to mind—the bordered gardens, the small lake with its precise edge, the cool promise of the surrounding woods.

“The concierge you’re thinking of is Demetri,” the older, stockier man says.

“Right, Demetri! Did he introduce you all?”

“Oh, no,” George says.

“Ah.” The man frowns. “That’s hilarious.”

Ten years back, George and Bob were briefly employed at the same D-list securities firm, George’s last job in the for-profit sector after several humiliatingly unsuccessful placements procured for him by his mother’s friends. By then, Bob was drained and slack jawed and lubberly, telling sad jokes about how the girls at business school liked holding on to his love handles during all the oddly positioned fucking he’d been busy with while blowing off Domestic Markets 202. On weekends, he wore a leather jacket that was wrong-decade tight. His glory was behind him. George and Bob became friends, playing wheezing games of squash or retiring to the Penn Club after work or to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central, and over the years they saw each other’s lot improve—Bob was doing well at a hedge, Tryphon Capital, and well by his what-is-she-doing-with-him wife, Martha. Their twin boys, Robert Jr. and Thierry, six this year, his pride and joy. White-blond, pie-faced future captains of industry, their wisping hair parted a deep right, their navy blazers with gold buttons matching, the school insignia on the breast pocket. Bob’s favorite thing about Martha, he said, was that she didn’t give a shit except she did, God bless her.

“I know you,” the second man says, looking at Bob. “Delaware? Media incorporation. Laurus? Friar? No. Corn Refiners Association, Lunch-n-Learn.”

“Shit, yes, those assholes! Lunch-n-Learn!”

“Jim Frame.”

Then they are shaking hands and pushing the tables together. George leaps to his feet and begins shaking everyone’s hand as well. Bob is telling the first man, from Munich it turns out, a Carsten with a
C
, that they’d bet one hundred bones that Carsten with a
C
knew the name of the concierge, and now George is in the red.

Something is expected. George takes out his wallet.

“Give it,” Bob says. And to the men: “You guys do a next-level drill down with those corn pricks?”

“Menus,” Carsten says.

“Do the trick,” pale-to-dark says to Carsten, looking at George’s money, with a low, practiced kind of baby-brightness in her voice. She has an accent too, but too faint to identify. George raises his empty glass, a salute and a plea; he’s both dejected by whatever is coming next and beginning to enjoy himself. Good old Bob.

“Corn refiners, not easy,” Jim Frame says. “We were almost on the wrong side of that demographic. Dropped out right before the FDA sent a corpse down the sales-and-delivery pipeline, yeah?”

“Christmas bonus,” Bob says, by way of praise.

“Cash,” Carsten says, “is what we need for the trick. Funny Face here doesn’t trust me with hers.”

“We don’t have any cash, I told you.”

They all laugh at this. George is still looking at his wallet when he sees Bob handing a bill to Carsten. He’s missed a cue. He finds the glass in front of him is full again, this time of cold vodka. He swallows and shudders. The woman who is dark-to-pale claps her hands tightly over her mouth. She is laughing, but isn’t making any sound. Is she deaf? He decides he
is
enjoying himself.

Carsten gets serious. He folds and unfolds the bill; he holds it up to the light as if to inspect it; he shows it to the bronze women and the tourists, now watching over their menus. He holds it up to George and Bob, who says, “Another round,” to a passing waiter.

“Love the city!” one of the tourists says.

“No,” Carsten rejoins, “I learned this trick in a village. From a villager.” His hands clasped midair.

“A round of drinks for that table too,” calls Bob.

Carsten clasps his palms together. He whisks them around his ears. He separates them and the bill is gone. “I stole your money.”

“Lame!” George shouts.

The tourists clap. “Great job!” one says, but they look a little nervous. George claps too. He takes a sip—was it always vodka? He’s lost track of what they’re saying. Food arrives. At some point they turn back to the topic of Bob’s pending art acquisition. George forgets to listen, until he hears one of the women say, “We’ll miss you.” The man named Carsten is shaking George’s hand. Next he looks, Carsten is gone and the women are eating in silence. Bob and Jim are talking stocks. Dull gibberish. Something—“That’s your sector now? Interim clinical? Phase three? Suicide. What are you going to try to turn me on to next, fucking commercial printing?”

George drinks and picks at a shrimp cocktail he’s discovered on the table. He has no idea what Bob is going on about. George looks down and finds the silent woman’s hand is resting on his forearm. Why, it isn’t Bob who’s speaking. It’s he himself! He’s complaining about Peterson and Fielding. He’s saying something that must be clever, because everyone’s laughing, and now Bob is shouting, directly at him—something about a piano, or someone named Pianot, maybe Bob is back on art, Pianot could be an artist, or a town, sounds like a town, or maybe Bob is saying
IPO
, and George feels he’s responding well, but then Bob says, “Why so silent, Georgie boy? You look like a moose. My man started early, I think.”

George would like to share that he hasn’t been sleeping much. Instead, he answers, “Goor tired.”

“Want this?” Bob asks, and with a
plink!
a pill lands on George’s plate.

“Dernt take that shut since college.”

“Suit yourself.”

“What’s it?” George asks, recovering a little. “Do I get cranked?”

“No, what? Where have you been hanging out? It’s that shit all the kids use to stay focused in school. A little-kid dose. Jesus.”

“Over here,” Jim Frame says.

“Eh.” George shrugs and takes it. “I’m why so quiet because I have nothing to talk about.”

“Want my dad’s advice on that?” Bob says. “If you have nothing to add, ask a question. It’s flattering. Everyone’s a narcissist. Everyone’s an expert. How about asking these gals to explain something of the world to you? How about opening your mind, Georgie? It doesn’t even matter what you ask. Right?”

“That’s the way it’s done,” the woman with the accent agrees. “Timeless advice.”

“Okay. Are you religious? Because in
The Burning Papers
—”

“No, no, no,” Bob says. “Not that.”

The quiet woman grabs her friend’s hand and squeezes it. They look at each other and nod.

“I love secrets, don’t you?” Bob says, smiling at this exchange.

George
is
feeling better. The little-kid pill isn’t half-bad. The room is sharpening up. The women’s plates are cleared. Soon, their glasses are empty. Jim is on his cell. The people entering the lobby are drenched. The waiter asks if the women want anything more. They shake their heads no, but sadly, and look at Bob.

“Waiter!” Bob calls. “Where have you been? What is your name?”

“That’s rude,” George says, opening his eyes, feeling passionate about the matter. “It’s rude to ask them their names. Their names are their private business. Unless they offer.”

“I’m Travis,” the waiter says.

“Travis, thank you. A bottle of champagne, have the bartender pick.”

“Shampoo!” says the talking woman, whose name George now somehow knows is Gita. “Our favorite!”

The other woman, who he’s now decided is mysterious and beautiful, pulls a notebook from the leather satchel beside her on the banquette. “Carrying a big bag—gauche, don’t you think?” Gita says to George. “But she likes her little books, to communicate. I’m trying to learn—” She waves her hands in mock sign language. “But it’s a lot of work. And”—Gita cups her mouth out of sight—“you know how it is, best friends this month, and next month she’ll be all ‘Gita who?’”

Her friend writes a moment without letting him see, shows it to Gita, and—she really
is
something—plunges the notebook back into her bag, which is red with a black fringe. She reaches over and rustles around in George’s pocket. She smells like sugar and the thick aisle-air of the CVS he occasionally frequents in Stockport. She pulls out his phone. She taps and puts it on the table. Floating on the contacts screen he reads the name
PENNY
.

“You’re kidding me,” he says. “Is this for real?”

Jim Frame looks up and does not smile.

“Look who’s the favorite man today,” Bob says. He shakes his head.

“I’ve got to go,” George says, handing his credit card to a passing waiter.

“You sure do,” Bob says.

“No, home.” George stands, steadily enough. Who cares if the Met or City won’t consider his opera? All it proves is he’s ahead of his time. He’s more confident now than ever. Confident as a knife! Confident as a clock! Confidence itself meaning secret, something to wait for, to be confided. When the time comes, everyone will see what a fine work he’s made.

“Home, right. Jim, we’re staying, yes? Jim’s got some ideas to loop. Then maybe I’ll get to go home too.”

Bob grabs and pumps George’s hand, giving him a mean, tight sort of pull toward the table. “Comes down to it,” Bob whispers, “you don’t fuck the face.”

“No,” George says, “huh.”

The waiter returns. “Is there another card?”

“Forget it, we’re not finished. Take mine, keep it open,” Bob says, waving the waiter away. “George, I’ll call you on those numbers. We don’t want the grass to grow too long on this one.”

George does not remember talking numbers.

“Good meeting you,” says Jim Frame. “That was a lot of insight.”

Gita holds out her glass. “Champagne’s turned.”

“This I will fix,” Bob says. “Don’t you touch.”

“Sorry,” George says, looking into the spoiled amber of the flute, one hand still caught in Bob’s and the other around his credit card, his voice embarrassingly flooded with sorrow. “Opening week, you’re all going to have seats in the first row. You’ll come to the theater and see it and hear it and, I promise, it will be the most beautiful you ever did.”

“What’s he talking about?” Bob asks.

“He’s a big shot up in here maybe,” Gita answers, tapping the side of her head.

“You don’t believe me? You don’t even know me!”

“Americans,” she continues, ignoring George. “Ask them what they want to be, they say
famous
. But it’s usually the ones younger than him.”

“I’ve done my very, very best,” he tries.

Gita’s laugh is sharp. “God has a glass eye. A bullshit country saying, but I like it.” She turns her back to George, back to the men at the table.

15

They take Iris’s car. They have the narrow, sunlit highway to themselves. 3D is in the backseat, one ear flapping out the window, one eye scrunched against the warm air whipping around the interior, the bright trees spinning past. The smell of new tar rises from the road.

“A perfect day,” she says.