The Wrong Kind of Money (37 page)

Anyway, it was a lovely day, and we were diving in clear water, not very deep, no more than twenty feet, among the coral reefs, and I noticed my father gesturing at me, pointing at something. At first I thought he'd found an unusual shell, or coral piece, and I swam closer. I saw what he had in his hand was what looked like a child's bracelet, or perhaps a napkin ring, of pink onyx. At first I wondered what a bracelet could be doing at the bottom of Toyana Bay, and then I guessed he'd got it from the palace. And then—and this is difficult for me to talk about—he unzipped the front of his wet suit to show me his erection. He placed the bracelet on it, smiling, gesturing to me, suggesting I could have it if I would reach out and take it off.

I shot up to the surface of the water like a bullet, and climbed back on board the boat. I think if I'd known how to manage the boat, I'd have pulled up the anchor and driven off and left him there—escaped! He came to the surface a few minutes later. He'd pulled himself together, the pink onyx piece was nowhere to be seen, and he was acting as though nothing at all had happened. He was in a very jolly, almost carefree mood, and I began to wonder if I'd imagined the whole thing. But I knew I hadn't. Who could imagine a thing like that? “Don't you want to dive some more?” he asked me. “I want to go home now, Daddy,” I said. “I have an earache.” I couldn't look at him. And so he got out of his diving gear, and we headed for the shore and home. In the car, he talked a lot but about nothing in particular. I couldn't think of what in the world to say to him. At one point he reached out and touched my knee. I pulled away from him. “I was only joking,” he said. I didn't answer him. He didn't frighten me. He disgusted me. I pitied him.

I couldn't bring myself to tell my mother what had happened. I couldn't bear to look at my father. And I couldn't even bear the thought of ever seeing David again. I was too ashamed. Ashamed of my father, and ashamed of myself for having a part in it. I felt as though I'd been a part of a terrible crime that he'd blame me for, that he'd hold me accountable for in some way, and so I just stopped seeing him. When he'd call, I'd hang up on him. He wrote me letters. I tore them up. It wasn't that I hated him. I hated myself, and felt I wasn't worthy of him anymore. I suppose he must have wondered what had happened, but I didn't care. All I knew was that whatever we'd had between us was over. Not long ago I heard that he married a Japanese girl. I hope they're happy.

But I did tell Cassie about Toyana Bay. Somehow, I had to tell somebody. She sat very still for a long time, looking worried and scared, and then she said, “That was how he started with me, too—exposing himself.” Started? Started what? She wouldn't say. All she would say was that there had been other things. She'd been younger than me, too young to really understand what was going on. She hadn't known there was anything wrong with it, that it wasn't normal to have these secret things go on between fathers and their daughters. She thought all fathers and daughters did these things, and she said she was glad to see that I knew better. I asked her, “Does Mama know?” She just bit her lip and said she didn't think so. That was when she told me she was going to marry this boy who had a cattle ranch in Australia, a boy she really didn't love at all, just to get as far away from home as possible.

That was when I decided that I was going to leave home—run away, if necessary. I began to make my second runaway plans. I told my parents I wanted to go to boarding school in the States. My father said he couldn't afford such a thing. I would have to settle for the American School in Tokyo, where the children of American government employees could go for free. So, on my own, I wrote to Ethel Walker in Connecticut. I applied and got accepted on a full academic scholarship.

“Look at this, Daddy,” I said to him, showing him the letter.

“Where are you getting the money to travel to the States?” he said. “Not from me.”

And so, faced with that, I began scheming of ways to get enough money for my ticket. It became a crazy time for me. I thought of forging his name on a check. I thought of trying to steal one of his credit cards. I thought of trying to blackmail him, threatening to tell my mother what had happened that afternoon. I knew he'd just deny it. “But what about Cassie?” I'd say to him. “Is Cassie lying, too?” But I knew I couldn't drag Cassie back into it. She was already making her escape. I even thought of going back to David and his family, and asking to borrow the money from them. But, as I say, I just never wanted to see David's face again.

Then one day my mother came to me and handed me a check. It was only enough for a one-way ticket to New York, but it was all the money she'd been able to scrape together. “I know why you want to go,” she said. “And I know why Cassie wants to go.” There were tears in her eyes.

“Mama—you
know?”
I said to her.

She looked away from me and just nodded.

“Mama,
how could you?”
I cried. “How could you stay with a man who would do things like that to Cassie and me?”

“Don't you dare blame me!” she screamed. “You two can both escape from here. I can't.”

“Why not?” I asked her. “Why can't you?”

“It's the only life I have,” she said. “It may not be perfect. It may not even be any good at all. But this is the only life I have.” Of course, that was a crock, and I told her so.

And so that's how I got away from them. That's why I go back to Japan only when I absolutely have to. That's why I mooch on people like you and Carol. Once I graduate from college and I'm on my own, I'm never going to go back at all. That's why I'm never going to let myself fall in love again. Love only leads to disillusion. But it's funny. You're the only other person I've ever told about all of this, besides Cassie. I've never even told Anne, my best friend.

“Love doesn't have to lead to disillusion,” he says into the darkness.

“Oh, yes. It does. It always will. For me, at least. When I was growing up, I thought my father was some kind of god.”

“And here's another funny thing,” he says. “My own father let me down—betrayed me—in much the same way. And I was just about your age. No, a little older.”

“And it doesn't go away, does it?”

“No. Mellie, I—”

She covers his lips with her fingertips. “Hush,” she says. “Don't say another word. This is just a brief encounter—remember? Remember we only have three more nights together.”

“And then what's going to happen?”

She switches on the lamp beside the bed. “Now I want you to take a look at the script I've written for you,” she says.

But much later, in the darkened bedroom, Noah Liebling cannot sleep. Through the narrow slit in the window curtains, neon lights from the sign outside flash perpetually from white, to yellow, to blue, to white again in a changeless rhythm, while the red numerals on the digital clock mark the sleepless minutes as they pass.
For me, it all began in the tiny Scottish village of Ballachulish, population something-or-other.
No, for me it all began in an overdecorated hotel suite in Atlantic City, with a girl whose name was a tune, a girl who is even younger than my own daughter, but who somehow seems much more worldly. Statutory rape. That is the legal term for what has happened here, for she is a minor, still a child, and there are laws, terrible laws, designed to punish men like me for what I have done. Her father is a child molester, but who can blame him? So am I. Curled here on the pillow beside me, her dark hair—the scent of her hair—across her face, breathing quietly and evenly, she looks, in the dimly flashing colored lights, even younger than she is.

I should have sent her home right away. She would have been safe from that asshole at River House, the most secure building in New York. He would have not got beyond the broad shoulders of Peter, the doorman, in his heavy greatcoat with epaulets of gold braid, the uniform of a Ruritanian hussar. I should have sent her home, but I didn't, and I didn't because I didn't want to. I wanted her here, with me, like right now, and right now it is too late. The deed is done. The crime has been committed. Like her own father. He that is without sin, let him cast the first stone, or however the hell it goes.

This will last only a week, that was her promise. But this will be a week that will change my life forever, Noah thinks, and what will happen when it is time for us both to go home again? Nothing? How can it be nothing? How can she and I continue to live in the same house with Carol and Anne after this? It cannot happen. That simply will not work. No, but I could give her some money, help her find her own place to stay, turn her into a kept woman. Could I really do that to her, to Carol, and to Anne, or have I already done it? What is wrong with me?
For me, it all began …
and I'm offering a thousand dollars to any man or woman in this organization who can give me the name of what is wrong with me.

It is a feeling at the base of my skull and at the pit of my stomach, an aching. Is there something the matter with me, Doctor? Am I going crazy, or have I already slipped past that thin barrier between sanity and lunacy? When I was a little boy, I used to worship my older brother, Cyril. He seemed so elegant, so wise, the man of the world. I used to follow him around, and he hated that, and his favorite word for me was crazy. “Are you crazy, Noah? Stop acting crazy!” At night, before going to sleep, I used to break into cold sweats with fears that I was losing my mind. “That's where they ought to put you, Noah,” Cyril said as they drove past the place. “Bloomingdale's.” Not the store, but the hospital for the criminally insane outside White Plains. Criminal, and crazy. The doctor will say, “Yes, Noah, you are criminally insane.” Should I see someone? Yeah.

Is this what being in love is like? It is certainly unlike any feeling I ever had for Carol, and yet the strange thing is that the feeling I have now seems to draw me to Carol more powerfully than ever, and makes me appreciate how much I have, or had, in Carol, and how lucky I am, or was, to have her. No, Carol is not as young as she once was, but she is kind, and gentle, and thoughtful, and giving, and loving, too. If love is sacrifice, as Melody says it is, Carol has sacrificed a great deal. And yet, if I love Carol so much, how can I have let myself do this terrible thing to her and to the child we had together? There is no sane answer.

“There is insanity in the family, you know.” Where had he heard this? There were supposed to be two crazy aunts, his father's sisters, who were considered “strange.” But what the nature of their strangeness was he never knew. He had never met these aunts. Both his brother and his sister had spent years seeing psychiatrists. “Do you want to see what an erection looks like?” his brother asked him when Noah was eight or nine, walking into Noah's room to show him. “My psychiatrist taught me how to do this.” Crazy.

The carousel of color slides turns in his mind, along with the white, yellow, and blue lights from the pulsating sign outside the window. Come with me to Ballachulish, Melody, or somewhere, anywhere that's been lost in time and isn't on any map, and we'll make the population grow by two more people. We'll go to Ballachulish, where no one knows us or anything about us, and we'll start a whole new life together. We'll swim naked in the limestone caves, and we'll make love on a thick mattress of smooth, golden, silky, slippery pine needles. Because Ballachulish is a magic place, and only appears out of the mists for one day every hundred years, each day for us will last a hundred years, and in a thousand years we'll be the same age. Perhaps I'll work in Angus Kelso's distillery, under a different name, of course, and we'll leave everything else behind—my wife, my daughter, my family, my career. Does that make any sense to you? Crazy. He is a man of forty-eight who has been having sex with a child, but he is the one who is thinking like a child. He is Errol Flynn. He is Roman Polanski. The names of men like him fill the crime stories of the newspapers day after day.…

It's no use. A memory as simple as the small, flat brown mole just above her navel fills him with yearnings more huge and harsh and overpowering than all the vastness of Carol's trust and love. With tears in his eyes he reaches out and touches her soft, dark hair with his fingertips. Lifts it. Smells it. Presses it against his lips, and her dreaming arm falls across his chest, producing almost an electric shock of feeling.

“I still have this funny dream,” he said to her before they came to bed. “It's something I started thinking about in college. It would be that whenever I get my inheritance—the money, the stock in the company that I'm supposed to get—that I'd like to do something really
moral
with it. Take the curse off it, as it were.

“You see, from the time I was a little kid I was aware that my family's money wasn't made in a very moral way. People looked down their noses at the way we'd made our money. It was considered dirty money. I used to think: Why couldn't we have made our money in some other way? Banking! Real estate! Railroads! Publishing! Coming up with some medical discovery that would cure some terrible disease. But no, our money was made in booze. We made it from skid row winos and Bowery bums. We called it the Distilled Spirits Industry. But we were nothing but a bunch of
tummlers
—that's all we were.”

“What's a
tummler?”

“Someone who's paid to make a lot of noise to keep the party going—a guy who runs around the room with a lamp shade on his head, trying to make people think they're having a good time. A professional buffoon. My old man used to say that the liquor business was a part of show business, part of the entertainment industry. What do you do when you entertain? You bring out the booze and pour it down people's throats until everybody's laughing and feeling better. My old man said that drinking was like going to a Broadway show, only the ticket was cheaper, and the sensation lasts a little longer. Okay, I'll buy that. But how do you feel when people from an organization like MADD march up and down in front of your building with pickets calling you a murderer?”