Trading Up (34 page)

“So the whole thing’s a scam,” Selden said. “What is it they want? Money?”

“They want what everyone wants. Fame and fortune. They watch
Entertainment
Tonight,
and they think, Why shouldn’t that be me, walking down the red carpet?” the Vole said.

Selden patted the top of his head absentmindedly. “That’s the problem, isn’t it?” he mused aloud. “Everyone wants to be famous, everyone wants to be rich, but no one wants to work for it.”

“Sort of like the stock market,” the Vole said. He tapped one thumb on top of the other, wondering how much Selden Rose made a year—one million, two million?

The buzzer on the phone went again. “Yes?” Selden asked.

“It’s Craig Edgers. He wants to know if you’re still on for drinks at your hotel tonight,” June said.

“Tell him yes,” Selden said.

The Vole stood up. “I’ve given you a written report, but none of it means that what she’s claiming isn’t true. She
was
at your brother-in-law’s hotel that night, and she did meet him. The thing you’ve got to understand about women like this is that they have a way of getting pregnant when they need to . . . and of having the right man be the father.”

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Selden frowned. “Or, in this case, the wrong man.”

“Everyone’s got to pay the piper,” the Vole said.

“How much do I owe you?” Selden asked.

The Vole took a glance around the office again. “Five thousand dollars.” He was being ripped off, Selden thought, as he took out his checkbook, but again, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

Selden Rose scuttled along the plywood ramp that led to Broadway. Puddles were already forming on the sides from the snow and he didn’t particularly want to get his shoes wet. On the street, he stopped and took stock of his surroundings. On the surface, everything appeared normal: There was his town car, for instance, parked in its usual spot on the corner of Sixty-second Street, with his regular driver, Peter, sitting behind the wheel drinking a Starbucks coffee; but Selden sensed menace in the air. A police car, siren wailing, wove through the traffic on Broadway while a scruffy young woman in a long black coat glared at him for no reason. The buildings on Broadway looked gray and lifeless, almost Soviet. And suddenly he remembered a day like this one, nearly thirty years ago when he’d been twenty-one and had been sent by his mother to rescue his younger brother from a cult.

As a kid, he’d had fantasies of himself as a comic book hero. He alone was the one who could steal the serum to save his mother’s life. In third grade, he had defended his kid brother in a schoolyard brawl, punching a fat bully named Horace Wiley in the stomach—he’d been scared to death, but miraculously, the kid had actually gone down and started crying (they’d called it “blubbering” in those days).

He was sent to the principal’s office and his mother had to pick him up, but she kept hugging him and trying to kiss him and called him her little Superman, and from then on, that was the tenor of his role in the family—he was the golden son, a serious, shining boy who could always be depended upon to do the right thing and to defend the honor of the family.

This family myth was partly responsible, he knew, for driving him to succeed even as a child—to get the best grades (he was number one in his public school class) and to get into Harvard. His younger brother, Wheaton, faced with such daunting competition, naturally fell apart—when he was fifteen, he was caught selling a joint to a couple of thirteen-year-old girls. His mother always said that Wheaton’s problem was that he didn’t think he could be as good as Selden, and therefore Selden had to be especially kind to him, but like most young people with raw ambition and a taste for achievement, Selden had very little tolerance for Wheaton’s weaknesses, which he considered ingrained personality flaws.

So he wasn’t surprised when he received a frantic phone call from his mother in 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:23 PM Page 183

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early December of his junior year at Harvard. Wheaton had managed to get into the University of Florida, but no one had heard from him for two months. And then one of his mother’s friends, a battle-ax of a woman named Mary Schekel, had taken her yearly trip to New York to watch the lighting of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, and had seen Wheaton on Fifth Avenue (!) in front of Tiffany (!), begging with a small band of Hare Krishnas (!). And he was one of them. He had a shaved head and was wearing an orange robe over a red hooded sweatshirt, and when he asked Mary Schekel for money (he obviously didn’t recognize her), she had screamed and said, “Wheaton Rose! You should be ashamed of yourself!” and then Wheaton had run away, followed by the other Hare Krishnas. And Mrs.

Schekel had almost had a heart attack.

Selden was in the middle of studying for finals, but it was understood that “this family business” took precedence over everything else, including, possibly, his future. Family was the most important thing in life, and whatever his true feelings might have been, Selden never questioned that he “loved” his mother and father and that he “loved” his brother. To not care about family was heresy; family members were the first people for whom one developed the sympathetic emotions that made you a human being. And so, feeling every bit the grim avenger, he boarded the Amtrak train to New York City on a cold morning in December.

He’d stayed at the Christopher Hotel on Columbus Circle, which Mrs. Schekel had recommended, its selling point being its proximity to Lincoln Center. Looking up the street now as he strode to his car with the manila envelope tucked under his arm, he saw that the hotel was still there and even shabbier now, if such a thing was possible. Dirty green-and-white striped awnings hung in near shreds from the windows, and a neon sign spelled out the name of the hotel. He had thought the neon sign rather grand back then, but now it looked tawdry, like an aging showgirl who refuses to leave the stage.

He reached his car and knocked on the window. Peter looked up but didn’t bother to get out of the car, and Selden let himself in.

“What’s the weather forecast, Peter?” Selden asked, as he always did, by way of making conversation.

“It’s going to snow all night, Mr. Rose. But only a couple of inches. You know what that means.”

“Slush in the morning,” Selden said. It had been snowing the day that he’d come down to New York from Cambridge, but it had been a heavy snow. It was a Friday, and for some reason, the train was full; he’d had to stand in between the cars.

One of the doors hadn’t closed properly, and for the entire five-hour journey, snow blew in through the crack. He had stood freezing, with his hands in his pockets, 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:23 PM Page 184

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thinking about the task ahead of him. There were eight million people in New York, but he had had that mysterious, almost supernatural power of youth that can will things to happen; it had been impossible to conceive that he might fail.

And then, miraculously, on his second day in New York, he had seen his brother walking up the street with another Krishna. Wheaton had looked frail and his brown eyes had seemed to stick out of his head, and he was still wearing the dirty red hooded sweatshirt. But it hadn’t taken much convincing to get him to come with him to the Christopher Hotel, and then the next morning, they had boarded a plane for home and once again he was the hero . . .

He had imagined that he would remember the incident for the rest of his life, but somewhere, in the passage of time, he
had
forgotten about it. Almost completely. He hadn’t thought about it for years and years—looking out the window at the traffic stalled between Fifth and Madison Avenues, he couldn’t even remember the last time he
had
thought about it. Was it ten years ago . . . or fifteen? His brother was now a lawyer in Chicago, married to his second wife. Did he remember it? Did he think about it from time to time, and wonder at what a fool he was? Or had it completely disappeared from his mind as well? And leaning back in the seat, Selden thought about how astonishing it was, how whole sections of one’s life could disappear from memory, as if they’d never happened at all.

And if one didn’t remember them, had they really happened? And if they had, what was the point? He thought about what he was like twenty-five years ago—

more cynical and angry, and more judgmental (when he finished college and went out to LA, his father had once embarrassed him by saying he had no sympathy for people and should learn some), and so convinced that everything was significant.

Life felt big back then, everything that happened felt important. But new things came along and the old faded away. Time and nature devoured everything. Even the hand of death couldn’t stay the unraveling of memory, like when someone he vaguely knew died and three days later he would realize that he had forgotten about them as completely as if they’d never been born.

Ten years from now, he wondered, would he remember this moment? This instant right now, sitting in the car, stuck in traffic with a red Santa Claus standing on the corner, ringing his Salvation Army bell? Would he remember that he was angry with his wife for spending $50,000 or that he’d hired a private detective to investigate a paternity claim against his wife’s sister’s husband? He wouldn’t, and suddenly he felt his life disappearing before his eyes. In twenty years, he would retire, and chances were that he wouldn’t even have memories to sustain him . . .

He grabbed the manila envelope, overcome by a desire to hold on to something solid. He might not have memories, but in that moment, he would have life, and if he had life, he could be important. He could do things—hell, he was doing things 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:23 PM Page 185

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all the time, he was juggling issues and solving problems, which was why his brain had no space left for memories.

He withdrew the photograph of Marielle at the strip club and studied it.

Women had babies all the time, but this, he thought, was a travesty. If the child
was
Digger’s, he would have his head, he thought angrily. He had assigned himself the role of head of the family, and had acted as a go-between for Patty and Digger, counseling Patty to join Digger on tour and then getting his secretary to make her travel arrangements so she wouldn’t have extra stress. Janey had been against it, but Selden felt that he and Patty had a special understanding, and Patty had listened to him. And now this information would be a sort of gift to Patty, proof that she shouldn’t give up on her marriage. Though he himself was divorced, Selden still believed in the sanctity of marriage, in its ability to challenge the human being to grow to greater levels of love and understanding; and when he reached the Lowell Hotel and exited his car, he was feeling very much the hero again.

His first instinct was to tell his wife. As he turned the key in the lock and entered the foyer, he waited for her usual trilling “Sel-
den
?” But there was no sound from the interior of the hotel suite, and, feeling slightly miffed and let down, he went into the living room.

He tossed the manila envelope onto the writing desk and removed a cigarette from a small silver box on the mantelpiece. As he sank onto the chintz sofa, he suddenly realized he was bored without her. She had her flaws, and their marriage, as yet, certainly wasn’t perfect. But Janey herself was interesting, and he was never quite certain what she would do next.

Sometimes when he came in, he’d find her in the shower, sleepily soaping her magnificent body, and he knew that she had been napping or lying in bed and had jumped in the shower when she’d heard him come in, in order to hide her laziness.

He also knew that she thought she was fooling him with her ruse, but it seemed like such a funny thing to be embarrassed about that he never had the heart to catch her out. And if she wasn’t in the shower, she would usually call out to him from the living room, where he would often find her with one of the classic books in her hand, and Mozart or Beethoven on the stereo. It was another of her obvious attempts to impress him with what she wasn’t yet or what she wanted to be, or thought
he
wanted her to be, but he found it charming that she wanted to make an effort for him, even if her efforts were mostly pretense.

Marrying Janey would either turn out to be a gorgeous mistake or a beautiful triumph, he thought, but for the moment, he had to admit that he was still in the honeymoon phase of his second marriage. There were things about her that annoyed him, but there was still plenty to find amusing: From her shockingly beautiful face that was just on the wrong side of classic, to her frenetic attempts to please 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:23 PM Page 186

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him in bed, to her unabashed delight in her new status. He had to admit that it
did
satisfy his ego to be able to provide her with a happiness in life that, he imagined, had always eluded her—until she had met him.

He stood up, suddenly in need of movement. The fact was, he thought, rather pleased with himself as he walked to the window, there weren’t many men who could “handle” a woman like Janey Wilcox, and, he imagined, she had suffered unfairly for it. She had what he liked to think of as an idiot savant’s unerring judgment when it came to human beings, combined with a courtesan’s skill of manipulation. To him, her manipulations were enchantingly obvious, but he imagined that for most men, consumed with their egos and places in the world, they were not.

Even the most sophisticated man could easily be swayed by her outward charms, but confusion and anger usually set in after a short period of time, when the man understood that those charms were simply part of a greater scheme.

But other men, he thought, glancing down at the snow, which was beginning to fall steadily, were not his problem. Indeed, he could even think that he was
their
problem, for he was the one who had carried off the prize . . .