The Unnamed (16 page)

“Are you serious?”

“Swear to God.”

“And how do you know
that?
”

“It came out at trial.”

“What trial?”

“Just listen. The guy he hooks up with in Chinatown, at first this guy doesn’t even have to go outside the country. He has a three-foot rattlesnake from Arizona delivered to Lev at the firm. It comes in a box. Inside the box is the cage, and inside the cage is the snake. There are feeding instructions. Do you know what certain types of rattlesnake do to your respiratory system?”

She hugged her knees. “Are you kidding about this?”

“So Lev takes the snake home,” he said, “and he tells his wife that if she wants to stay married, if she wants to keep the family together and the house and all that, from now on she’ll be having sex with a snake in the room.” He paused, letting that sink in. He had gained confidence that she wasn’t going to leave the room until he was through. “I’m going to go out on a limb,” he said, “and say that that one comes as a shock to old Mrs. Wittig.”

“You think?”

“But it’s a fantasy he’s had for years and he’s not going to suppress it any longer. This is what he tells her. A snake in the room gets him excited. So he puts the cage up in one of the guest rooms and he tells her that he’s going to let it out, and she can either be in there already or come in after, but either way, they’re going to have sex with the snake on the loose. So she goes up to the guest room and she sees the snake in the cage and she comes back down and opts for the divorce.”

“Which is the only sane thing to do,” she said.

“Thank you for listening to me,” he said.

“Is that it? Is that the end of the story?”

“No.”

“So why are you thanking me?”

“I just felt like thanking you.”

“Dad,” she said, “finish the story.”

“So what does Lev do? Despite the threats and manipulations, he can’t really do much of anything except move out, given what she can now testify to at family court. So he moves to an apartment near Central Park, and that’s when he starts to hire the prostitutes.”

“To go with the snake?”

“He’s got the money,” he said, “and he wants what he wants.”

“Who
is
this guy?”

“Lev Wittig. Wrote the tax code. Dullest man you’ll ever meet.”

“
I’m
not meeting him.”

“He tells them a little fib about how everything must be absolutely dark or he can’t, you know, perform, and then they go into the bedroom, and this is exciting for Lev because there’s a snake present.”

She squirmed and shuddered audibly and gathered herself closer, holding her legs tighter.

“And here’s the thing. Each time, it has to be a different snake. That turns out to be part of the kick. The guy from Chinatown brings Lev cobras and vipers and green mambas, I don’t know what all. Not good snakes to have around.”

“Define a good snake,” she said.

He held up an index finger to indicate that her point was well taken. His hand went only so far because his wrist was held tight to the side of the bed. “He gets good at handling them. He’s got equipment, you know, the boots and the gloves, and he has a pair of snake tongs that allow him to get the snake in and out of the cage, and when that’s done, he puts the cage in a box and walks to the park, where he lets it go.”

“Lets it go in Central Park?”

“Rare and extremely venomous snakes.”

“I can never go there again,” she said. “I can never go to Central Park again.”

“And this keeps up until one night, one of the girls goes into the room and walks toward the bed and steps on the snake.”

“Oh, my God,” she said. “What happened?”

“The girl died. I don’t imagine she was in very good health to begin with. Now, say what you will about Lev, he does call nine-one-one, and he tells the EMTs exactly what happened, and there’s the snake right there in the cage, and the snake tongs, and the snakebite on the girl’s thigh, so they call the cops and he gets arrested.”

“I can’t believe you knew this man.”

“These are the people I work with,” he said. “I saw him one last time, before he went to prison. It was just before his trial. He was out on bail. He went from office to office explaining why he’d done what he’d done. Not in a contrite sort of way. Sort of mystified, and sort of looking for understanding. Because he was not the only rich, ugly partner at Troyer, Barr known to indulge himself. And I remember I ran into him in the hall and he pulled me aside. I had just made partner. And he wanted to know if I’d heard the story. So I said I had. And he just looked at me with his bug eyes and his big neck and basically said I’d do the same thing one day. Just wait, he said. He basically cursed me with his own fate. Then he said something like, ‘This has been my cross to bear my entire life. I don’t want to fuck unless there’s a snake in the room, and I just love to fuck.’ ”

Becka sat in the chair hugging her legs and shaking her head.

“Can you believe that?”

She continued to shake her head. The story was over. What, he wondered, would they do now?

“Are you tired?” he asked. “Do you want to go to bed?”

She suddenly yawned as if in answer. He had to think of something.

“Do you know Mike Kronish?” he asked.

“The name’s familiar,” she said.

“You’ve met him,” he said. “He’s the managing partner for litigation.”

“What animal does he have to have in the room with him?”

“Listen to this,” he said. “Will you listen to just one more?”

She let her head fall back, but her eyes stayed open.

“So Kronish makes it a policy as managing partner to personally interview every candidate for hire, which is a pretty arduous task when you consider how many people we look at in any given year. But this is a legendary control freak, even worse than me if you can believe it. And he tells every candidate a little autobiographical story, which I can confirm is true because I was on the plane with him right after it happened. He tells it so that the incoming class of associates understands his personal idea of an exemplary Troyer, Barr attorney, and the story goes something like this. Kronish worked on a case, a very famous case involving the government’s attempt to break up a big tech company for what it considered antitrust violations, a case that went on for several years. Part of that case took place in California, where one of the tech company’s competitors had brought suit against it. And Kronish, who had just made partner, worked the case, so he had to be in California for trial prep. Now, he said he intended—although I sort of doubt this—he intended to fly back to New York a few weekends every month, you know, to spend time with his wife and kids. He had two boys, they were, like, six and eight at the time, maybe eight and ten. And for about two years, except for holidays, Kronish never made it back home. So the boys would come out to visit, and their mom would take them to Disneyland and the beach, and more frequently than not, they’d return to New York after an entire week’s visit having seen their father literally for a dinner or two at the hotel restaurant. So when the case is over—we won, by the way—to make things up to the boys he says to them, okay, you and I are going to spend an entire week at the house in the Hamptons, just you and your mom and me, and we’re going to catch up on lost time. So one Friday they drive out to the Hamptons, and that very night, that Friday night, Kronish gets a call from an important client. And this client says to him that while Kronish has been in California saving the tech client’s ass, another partner at Troyer has been fucking up his own impending trial, and with only two months to prepare, the client’s considering defecting to another firm unless Kronish, and yours truly, step in personally. So Kronish, in the Hamptons with his boys less than twelve hours, calls his driver to turn around and pick him up. He tells the boys that he has to fly to Houston that night and won’t be able to spend the week with them after all. And the boys’ hearts—now this according to Mike himself—the boys’ hearts break. Tears, tantrums, everything Kronish detests about children. So he hands them off to his wife and goes upstairs to pack his things and then comes back down and waits for the car outside the house. The driver comes. Kronish gets inside. And then one of the boys breaks free of the house and runs toward the car. Not a tear on this boy’s face. He promises never to cry ever again if Kronish will just stay. He promises no more crying, and Kronish can see his little face quiver, but he doesn’t say a word to the boy, he just rolls up the window and tells the driver to drive. And the kid just bursts into tears behind the tinted glass while Kronish heads off to Houston. And he tells me on the plane later that night that if the kid hadn’t cried as the driver started off, he would have considered staying. It was like a test, he tells me. Personally I doubt that. But that’s the story he tells me on the plane, and it’s the same story he tells every member of the firm’s incoming class, and he tells it to crowds of people at firm events and to clients so that everyone knows what he considers to be his idea of client commitment. And what is the first thing you see when you walk into the man’s office? You see an eight-by-ten glossy of him and his family on the wall next to his law degree. They’re grown now, those boys. They call Mike ‘Uncle Daddy.’ Now, I dropped the ball with you sometimes,” he said to her, “but I was never as bad as that.”

“You never dropped the ball with me, Dad,” she said.

“In high school,” he said. “I let you down.”

“I was an asshole in high school.”

“I was an asshole from nineteen seventy-nine onward,” he said.

“I’ve been an asshole my whole life.”

They laughed. Then the unsettling silence set in again, and he had to try to think of another story.

His return to the firm, his steadiness behind the desk, his palpable sense of day following uninterrupted day gave him faith that it would hold. His time in the room was over. Twenty-seven months and six days of profitless labor had passed. He had endured as a half-wit, the scale of life diminished to a light fixture. Elation followed by delicate readjustment. He remembered the first time stepping out onto the lawn, etiolated, held upright on trembling legs, blinking in the awesome sun.

He walked the halls more often after his return. There was always someone to say hello to in the halls, and he liked to stop with a cup of coffee to look out at the views he had seldom noticed before. He watched taxis taking their slow, toylike turns around corners, and tugboats drifting down the great river.

From time to time he’d want out of the office as out of a catacomb, just so he could breathe fresh air and feel the sunlight on his face. How long would this reprieve last? He lived in constant fear of a recurrence, as if he were an immigrant living in the country of his dreams whose fickle authorities could nevertheless decide without warning to take him into custody, nullify his freedom and dispatch him to sorrow and dust.

On one such outing, he encountered an eclectic group of people stretching around the corner of a gray concrete building, as ornate and generic as a reconstituted bank. They were assembled single file and waiting to enter for a mysterious purpose that made passersby look twice, wondering what they might be missing. He’d seen such lines before but had never cared. Now he slid between two car bumpers, crossed the street and approached the last man in line, and, like a tourist new to the phenomenon of anonymous city gatherings, asked him what was what.

“Casting call.”

“For what?”

“Movie.”

Move on if you don’t know
, the man’s curt reply seemed to say.
We don’t need the extra competition.

But he stayed put just for the thrill of it, doubtful he’d last so long as to actually enter the building and find himself in front of a casting agent, but feeling nothing else pressing. Or trying his best not to, anyway. There was some busywork waiting for him back at the office, but nothing exciting. Soon a small gathering had accumulated behind him. He felt the interloper. Never took an acting class in his life. Never sat for a headshot or waited tables for crap pay or suffered the heartbreak of losing a part on the final audition. So this was the subculture, so often talked about but so often scattered, invisible as bedbugs, of the struggling actor. With the rest of the artists, together with the immigrants, they carried the city on their backs. Eating like hell and suffering miserable colds, serving your ahi tuna, reciting Shakespeare in the shower. Directly behind him stood two girls: one Latina with hoop earrings and curls stiff and frozen and black as tar, and the other dressed, improbably—although nothing was improbable here, if you just looked around—as a princess, a jean jacket thrown over a strapless white gown of silk and organdy that flared widely at the skirt, a silver spangled tiara in her hair. Must be auditioning for princesses, he thought.

The Latina said to the princess, “Why he think he can do me like that? I been good to him, girl! And then he treat me like some ho, like I don’t even go to church and shit.”

“Have Manny whoop his ass,” said the princess.

“What I’m gonna say to Manny gonna make him whoop his boy’s ass like that?”

“That he been saying shit.”

First the acting subculture, then the subculture of women who did not get the respect they deserved from men whose asses should be whooped by Manny. He strained to recall a single exchange—on the street, from the next table over at a restaurant—overheard in all the years he had lived in the city, within the inescapable nexus of babble he had sat in most of his life, and not one came to mind. Not one. Had he never unplugged his ears of the self-involvement that consumed him about work, when he wasn’t sick, or about sickness, when he couldn’t work? Had he never listened?

Later that day he overheard another conversation after ordering food from the Kebab King. The Kebab King was a white portable plastic hut parked down one of the numbered streets in the Forties. Laminated articles stuck to the side of the cart proclaimed the Kebab King the leader of street-vendor cuisine. The menu consisted of three items—lamb, chicken and falafel—spelled out on the front of the hut. He asked for a lamb kebab and gave his money to a small woman wearing a white double-breasted chef’s jacket and a pair of latex gloves. The Kebab Queen, maybe. The Kebab King was in a similar jacket and had his back to her as he tended to diced meat on the sizzling grill.