The Nest Part 9

"Not the one I would have chosen," she'd said, trying to sound dismissive but not defensive.

"Why on earth not." Tuck stared at her so intently she backed up a few steps. "The yellow dress, the parasol, those hanging ducks. I thought it was brilliant. Strong."

"Oh," she said, relieved. "I like that photo, too."

"I didn't know there were others," he said. "I'll have to find them."

"That's the best one," she said. She could feel her face and neck flush and tried to back away. His stare was so direct. It was exhilarating.

"Stay for a bit." He put his hand on her arm and her entire being lit up. "Everyone here is dull. Stay and tell me an interesting story."

She showed up in his cla.s.s the following week and every week after that for the rest of the year. She was a good student, serious and hardworking, quiet and una.s.suming. She wasn't a great poet, but Stephanie had been right; it was fun to do something new, something without a particular result or pressure to perform attached.

Bea waited until she was no longer Tucker's student to sleep with him. He a.s.sumed her reluctance was because he was almost twenty years older, married with grown children, but it wasn't any of those things. Bea simply didn't want to have s.e.x with the teacher, didn't want that to be the beginning of their story and by then-when it wasn't a question of if but when they would be together-it was clear to both of them that they would, in fact, have a story.

Or at least that was the narrative she wove for Tucker, and it was partly true, but something else was true, too-she loved the power his desire afforded her. Her inability to produce anything significant of the novel made her feel like such an imposter, frightened even, and his desire was a balm. She loved the secret of what they were surely going to do. She flirted with him mercilessly at the beginning. Requesting private conferences that she dressed for as if she was going to be undressed, even though she knew she wasn't. She carried his l.u.s.t around like a magic coin in her pocket that she could spend when she decided she was ready.

He acquired the apartment on the Upper West Side shortly after they began their affair, wanting a place where he could spend time with her that was not the c.o.c.kroach-infested studio she rented on the Lower East Side with the occasional junkie pa.s.sed out in the lobby. He would have left his wife-his kids were grown and his wife taught in Dublin most of the year-but Bea liked their arrangement. She needed solitude.

When she grouped the pa.s.sing years into logical increments, it didn't feel so confounding. The story collection published and then a year in Seville, trying (failing) to write what she was calling her bildungsroman. The year after Seville when she returned to New York and accepted every invite-readings, conferences, interviews, panels-and met Tuck. The following year when Tuck made her decline every invite because she was writing (finally!) and the two subsequent years (still writing) when the invites stopped. The year she set aside what she'd started to call a spiritual coming-of-age and went to work with Paul Underwood because her advance was long spent. The year she threw that away and went back to the bildungsroman. Tucker's stroke and aftermath-two years when she tended to him and loved him and didn't write. His death and the year she spent broken by grief and trying, once and for all, to salvage the novel (now a combination of the first and second, a not-very-spiritual unwieldy coming-of-age disaster). Last year when she gave it up for good. Eleven years of life and heartbreak and work and failed paragraphs-when she broke it down like that, it didn't seem so inexplicable, but what had she done every day? How had so many years of days gone by with nearly nothing to show outside of her work at Paper Fibres? No impressive salary. No children. No partner. She didn't even have a lousy pet.

When Tucker died, she'd prepared to vacate the premises. It was the one time in her life she'd asked Francie for an advance on The Nest, the only time in her life she even thought about The Nest. She'd been stunned to receive the call from Tucker's attorney saying that the apartment was hers. She owned it outright, no mortgage. Tucker had worried about her; he was dismissive and dubious about the nebulous legal and financial structure of The Nest.

"If you're really receiving a trust, there should be financial statements, an executor other than that loon of a mother, someone protecting your interests."

She'd laughed at him. "You do not understand the people you're talking about. This is just how my family works."

Well, he'd been righter than she could have imagined. But thanks to him, she was okay with how and when and if Leo paid her back. The apartment was her nest, literally and metaphorically. She could stay there forever and manage on a modest income. She could sell and move someplace cheaper and live contentedly for a long time. Her family didn't know she owned; it wasn't anybody's business.

Bea didn't dwell on the sum of cash Tucker also left her that was almost the exact amount of the portion of her advance she ended up having to pay back to her publisher. She preferred to think of it as an unsettling but lucky coincidence and not what deep down she knew: something Tucker recognized about her that she couldn't admit to herself.

In last night's dream, Tucker was trying to tell her something important. He was jabbing furiously at a piece of paper with his good hand, and she was unable to make out the words, keep her eyes open and focus. She wondered, not for the first time, what he would think of her new work. She imagined he would approve.

She stood and started straightening the mess on the table: piles of notebooks; a handful of fountain pens and two bottles of ink; spools of merino wool and a hand spindle. Bea wanted to knit mittens for Melody's twins, had a few ideas about how to work the yarn. She picked up a small plastic bag of weed and her rolling papers. For a fleeting moment, she considered pretending it was still Sunday, getting high and knitting all day. She could call in sick; Paul wouldn't care. But she shouldn't. She couldn't.

The radiator finally came on. She picked up the Collected Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay, which she'd been reading since she awoke, thinking about Tuck and the poems he loved. Her fingers were so stiff, she dropped all 758 pages and the book landed on the uneven, hardwood floor with a boom and a healthy reverb. Before she even had a chance to brace herself, her downstairs neighbor started banging on his ceiling with a broomstick. He must carry that broom around the apartment with him, Bea thought. He must sleep with the d.a.m.n broom. Did he even sleep? Or did he just sit, alert, clutching his broomstick, waiting for her auditory trespa.s.ses.

"Sorry, Harry," she yelled down through the radiator.

She wasn't sorry. She disliked Harry, the seventysomething widower who had always lived beneath her. Over the years, she'd realized that he was easily placated by a regular string of verbal apologies. The more she ignored his banging, the more hair-trigger the banging became. He'd pound when she dropped an apple, walked two steps in her stack-heeled boots. Harry was unpleasant but she understood he was lonely and that their ritual comforted him, connected the noises of her life with the silence of his and that even if the connection was relentless complaint and apology, their call-and-response interaction settled him.

Still, when was he going to get a little deaf? Too feeble to live on his own? Sometimes she fantasized about Harry dying and his family offering his apartment to her at a good price, well-below-market-value. His son liked her; he called her sometimes to make sure Harry was doing okay. He lived in Chicago and didn't get back as often as he should. If she owned Harry's apartment, she would break through the floor, put in a simple spiral staircase like the people on the D line down the hall had done. She'd have two floors and never have to move again. She could have a real office with an actual library. A guest room.

Of course, even given some kind of ridiculously discounted insider price, she was in no position to buy anything-not without The Nest. Thinking about The Nest made her think about her new pages (they were good!) and then about Leo, which led back to Dream Tucker, and then she lit a joint. She wondered if Leo would stop by the office today. Maybe she'd ask him to lunch and take the plunge. She imagined handing him her new work and him reading and reacting with enthusiasm and excitement, saying I knew you had this in you!

He'd been her biggest fan once. He'd watched out for her. She remembered when she was a freshman in high school, Leo a senior, and she'd let Conor Bellingham do things to her in the backseat of his car in the school parking lot after a meeting for the literary magazine; Leo was the editor, she was on staff. As she and Conor made out, she was simultaneously ecstatic and disappointed. Ecstatic because she'd had her eye on Conor for weeks. In addition to being handsome and popular and the cla.s.s president, he'd submitted a shockingly good story to the magazine and she hadn't been able to stop thinking about it, or him, or the last line of the story: "Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away." Disappointed because he refused to talk about writing. She didn't get it. Or how someone who, frankly, seemed a little doltish could write something so moving.

"Have some more," he'd said, pa.s.sing a small flask. The flask was gleaming silver and heavy in her hand. "Irish whiskey. My father's. The good stuff."

"Some of my favorite writers are Irish," she'd said.

"Yeah? Well, I guarantee they drink this stuff."

"Who are your favorite writers?" She smiled brightly, trying to get him to look at her and not out the window.

Conor shook his head and laughed a little. "You have a one-track mind, you know that?"

She shrugged and bent her nose to the flask and breathed deeply, imagining she was smelling Ireland-the surprisingly sweet fermentation and then the quick sting and heat, the heady aroma of peat and smoke.

"To the old sod," she'd said, tipping the flask and taking a long sip. She liked it. Conor liked it. Conor liked her! She drank some more and they laughed, about what exactly she wasn't sure, and then they were kissing again and his hands started moving lower and she stiffened. "Relax," he said. She took a long sip from the flask and then another. She could feel something on the cold, steely surface. She held it up toward the window and in the light of a streetlamp read the engraving.

"What does 'Trapper' mean?" she asked him.

"Nothing. A silly nickname."

"I think I should probably go." She realized she was getting very drunk.

"Don't go," he said.

"Look outside." Her voice sounded thick. "It's starting to snow. I should get home." Out the window, it was dark and she was having trouble focusing. Conor moved closer, his hand successfully creeping beneath her skirt this time.

"'The newspapers were right,'" he said, whispering into her ear, "'snow was general all over Ireland.'"

"Joyce," she whispered, turning back to him.

"Yes," he said. "Joyce. I like James Joyce. So there's a writer I like." And that was it. Her resolve melted and her clenched knees unfurled like the petals of a ripening peony. She didn't think anything when he didn't call over the weekend. And told herself he must not have seen her when she walked by his locker early Monday morning. At lunch, she strolled over to the table where he was sitting and stood for a minute, waiting for him to see her and to smile and invite her to sit. After far too many beats, after his friends were staring at her, half of them confused, half of them smirking, he looked up and raised an eyebrow.

"Hi," she said, trying to hold on to confusion because what came after that, she knew, was going to be worse.

"Can I help you with something, Beatrice?"

She knew her face was flooding with color, knew she was probably flushing from head to toe; she could feel her knees sweat. Somehow she mustered enough breath and energy to turn and walk away. She heard him mumble something to the rest of the table, and they all burst out laughing, a few pounding the table in uproarious amus.e.m.e.nt.

(Years later, in a feminist literature cla.s.s during a discussion on p.o.r.nography, she would hear the term "beaver" for the first time and would remember with shattering clarity the feel of that flask in her mouth, the sulfur taste of silver, the smell of whiskey and peat. She would burn with shame for days, weeks, realizing what "Trapper" indicated and what it had meant when Conor slid his hand beneath the elastic of her underwear that night and whispered, very much to himself, Seventeen.) "I'm so dumb," she'd said over and over to Leo, crying and wiping her nose. "I just can't believe I was so dumb."

"Conor Bellingham?" Leo didn't get it. That guy was a loser.

"He wrote the best story," she said. "Did you read it? Did you read the last line?"

"The one he lifted from The Great Gatsby? Yeah, I read it. He's lucky I didn't turn him in for plagiarizing."

Bea didn't think it was possible to feel worse, but she bent at the waist and groaned. "I'm so, so dumb."

Leo wrote the limerick the next day using the byline "Anonymous." He typed it up and made copies and before lunch nearly the whole school had enjoyed his handiwork, featuring an unnamed student, his string of romantic conquests, and the moment in the backseat of his car when the boy would get the girl alone and inevitably, lamentably, prematurely e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e. The ident.i.ty of the boy was obvious to the students but so cleverly done, so easily denied, that it didn't cause trouble for Leo. And then there was this: For Conor himself to object would mean casting himself as a premature ejaculator, which Leo knew he'd never do. At first, everyone thought Bea was "Anonymous," and even though she never denied it, any number of women Conor had mistreated claimed credit for the piece and then started writing their own punishing rhymes (with Leo's subtle encouragement and often with his a.s.sistance) about Conor and soon other school miscreants. Finally the administration stepped in and put a stop to anything by the increasingly notorious and multiheaded Anonymous that became the highlight of that school year. Later, Bea would think how the silly limerick was really the start of what Leo would create with SpeakEasy-at the beginning anyway, before it turned kind of desperate and dirty.

She opened her Millay to one of the poems Tuck had loved and sometimes read to her: I pray if you love me, bear my joy. She was too antsy to read the whole thing. She refilled her cup of tea. Jesus, she was h.o.r.n.y. How long had it been? She went into her room and rummaged through her bedside drawer for her miniature vibrator. She pulled it out and switched it on. Nothing. The batteries were dead.

She looked up and saw herself standing in front of the mirror, braids sloppy and uneven from sleep, some of the hairs around her face turned gray and wiry. She was winter pale and her eyes were bloodshot and unfocused from the weed. Was this who she was now? A middle-aged woman with a spent vibrator and a pile of typed pages that she was h.o.a.rding like they were dead cats? She was extremely high. She could hear Lena Novak's voice as if Lena were standing in her bedroom. "It must be hard-being Beatrice Plumb."

"Must be hard to be me," she said to her reflection. "Hard to be Bea." She threw the vibrator back in the drawer and went to get her coat. Bear my joy, that's what she would say to Leo. Read these pages and tell me they're good and let me have them and bear my f.u.c.king joy.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

Weeks after (barely) graduating from college, Jack moved to Greenwich Village with a very particular goal in mind: to have s.e.x, lots and lots of s.e.x. Va.s.sar had been somewhat disappointing in that regard. At first, Jack attributed the lack of free and easy f.u.c.king that he had a.s.sumed would come with his student ID and highly coveted dorm single to statistics: A former women's college, there were fewer gay men than women on campus. Then he a.s.sumed the problem was AIDS, which was cutting a terrifying swath through the gay community. But the gay population at Va.s.sar seemed more angry than scared. Ninety miles south in New York City, Larry Kramer was sending up his clarion cry of outrage and the mostly well-to-do, mostly white sons and daughters of Va.s.sar were complying-in spades. They organized, marched, protested, heckled, debated, and demanded. Outrage, Jack learned, was not an aphrodisiac; it was exhausting.

Jack wasn't against activism precisely, but campus politics seemed trivial to him, almost laughable. It was activism of the easiest sort, run by idealistic youth barely out of their teens who never left the peachy enclave of their campus in Poughkeepsie. Enlightenment fueled by a heightened sense of mortality was certainly logical, but it also seemed blatantly self-serving in a way that infuriated Jack. Years later, he would experience the same intolerance about the surge of patriotism that swept through New York after 9/11-the run on American flags by people who would also confess in lowered tones how they'd recently put their place on the market while looking at houses in New Jersey or Connecticut or in their hometowns somewhere in the Midwest, "n.o.body's flying a plane into the Gateway Arch." True patriotism, Jack believed, would have been for his fellow Americans to look inward after 9/11 and accept a little blame, admit the attacks had happened, in part, because of who they were in the world, not in spite of it. But no. Suddenly at every public function his previously G.o.dless neighbors would stand with hands on heart to earnestly intone the Pledge of Allegiance and sing "G.o.d Bless America."

"I wish Kate Smith had never been born," Jack said at a dinner party one night, inciting a nasty argument about patriotism and its relative merits. The woman sitting across the table went on and on about the duties of civilians during wartime and in the face of terrorism until he broke off a piece of his baguette and threw it at her. He'd meant to startle her, shut her up, not hit her square on the chin. He and Walker had missed dessert.

The mini ACT UP protests at Va.s.sar felt self-indulgent to Jack. How daring was it to stage a "Kiss In" in front of one of the most s.e.xually diverse and accepting populations for miles and miles? It had all felt frivolous and half-a.s.sed and bloated with self-regard.

Still, when Jack's best friend at college, Arthur, took a job with the Gay Men's Health Crisis and invited Jack to share an apartment on Barrow Street, Jack jumped at the chance. He would have preferred Chelsea, where the gay scene was a little younger, a little more hip, but Barrow Street was great. Barrow Street was cla.s.sy in a way Chelsea wasn't, historical, only blocks away from the Stonewall Inn. Sure, he told Arthur, he'd be thrilled to volunteer at GMHC, was desperate to get to the front lines, do something that mattered.

But what Jack really wanted was to have s.e.x. Not earnest, leftist, collegiate s.e.x-s.e.x that required far too much conversation and not nearly enough lube-but Greenwich Village, Christopher Street, drop your pants but leave on those leather chaps, mindless, mind-blowing, anonymous s.e.x.

So it was with a certain karmic comeuppance, Jack would realize later, that mere months after arriving in the West Village, he would meet the love of his life, Walker Bennett.

WALKER LIKED TO SAY that he'd been born gay and middle-aged. He'd grown up in Greenwich Village; his parents were roving adjunct professors, self-anointed socialists who intermittently practiced open marriage and dabbled in bis.e.xuality and refused the tenure track because it was nothing more than a union to protect the interests of the already-coddled upper cla.s.s. When Walker came out to them in high school, it had all the Sturm und Drang of him announcing that he was switching from violin to cello.

Early on, Walker knew he wanted a different kind of life from his parents who lived paycheck to paycheck, collected furniture on the street the night before the bulk garbage pickups, counted coins in the sofa cushion to pay for take-out fried rice. After graduating from law school in the mid-1980s, he returned to the West Village, planning to work at the same corporate firm where he'd done his summer internship, only to find himself deluged by neighbors and old family friends, mostly gay men, who were suddenly getting sick and dying in alarming numbers and under mysterious circ.u.mstances. They wanted Walker to help them write a will or fight an eviction or understand their disability insurance. Within months, Walker had more work than he could handle, some funneled to him from GMHC, some from the prominent, often still-closeted gay business community. They trusted Walker. The premium he charged his wealthier clients allowed him to take on a lot of work pro bono, which he loved. After only one year, he was able to hire help, rent office s.p.a.ce. Soon he was a neighborhood fixture: Walker, the genial, slightly overweight neighborhood attorney who would handle pretty much anything-even if you were broke, especially if you were queer.

The night Walker met Jack, he'd wandered into the raucous bar down near the Christopher Street pier on a whim. He usually preferred the quieter gay watering holes, but he'd had a long day. He was still in his work clothes, and as he made his way through the lively Friday night crowd, he spotted Jack, who was difficult not to notice, bare chested and wearing extremely short shorts, dancing by himself, ecstatically, to "I Will Survive." Walker hated that stupid f.u.c.king song. Everyone around them was most a.s.suredly not surviving. Two of his clients, both sick and quarantined at St. Vincent's, had died that week, making six in just the last month. He needed a drink. He needed to get really, really drunk. As he approached the bar, Jack started waving at him, calling him over. Walker wondered if they'd met before. Was he a client? A friend of a client?

"Have we met?" he yelled at Jack, trying to be heard above the deafening, thumping dis...o...b..at. Jack shook his head no and looked Walker up and down. Then he leaned close to Walker's ear; his cheek was damp and smelled of perspiration and some kind of too-sweet cologne. "That suit looks really uncomfortable," Jack said, his voice hoa.r.s.e from singing. He handed Walker a shot of tequila.

And in a move so out of character, so weirdly un-Walker-like and spontaneous and defiant and hopeful, Walker tipped back the shot, swallowed, put the empty gla.s.s on the bar, grabbed the back of Jack's sweaty head, and kissed him full on the lips.

Jack kissed Walker back, then pulled away and grinned, and said, "How about we start the weekend by undoing that belt?" They'd been together ever since.

STANDING AT HIS AND WALKER'S BEDROOM WINDOW in Greenwich Village (technically the far, far west village; their building was as far west as you could go without living on a houseboat in the Hudson), Jack watched a Carnival cruise ship glide up the center of the river, heading to collect its pa.s.sengers at Pier 88. He'd probably see the boat later that evening, being tugged in reverse until it reached the open harbor and could swing south. A cruise sounded good to Jack right now, anything to get him out of New York and to take his mind off Leo and his ma.s.sive Leo-related migraine.

The afternoon was so cold that the bike paths along the river were deserted. The Christopher Street pier, across the way, was no longer the decrepit, free-for-all cruising spot it had been when he and Walker moved in, more than twenty years ago, a place you could go for an easy afternoon frolic or to sunbathe nude when the weather was fine. Giuliani had cleaned up the piers and transformed the entire waterfront into sanitized paths and miniparks for walkers and bikers and strollers. ("Fooliani," Walker would say; he'd hated Giuliani's particular brand of dictatorship almost as much as he'd hated Koch's insistence on remaining closeted.) Even scrubbed, the pier remained a gathering place for gay youth. No matter how biting the cold, there were always a few hardy souls out, huddled, trying to shield their cigarette lighters from the wind. Jack wondered why they weren't at school, if they were there because they didn't have anywhere else to go. He envied the teens on the waterfront, hopping up and down to stay warm, drinking beer from a paper bag-no cares, no worries. What did you have to worry about at seventeen when you were young and untethered and in New York City? How bad could it be, really? Did kids even worry about being gay, worry about having to tell their families? He wished that was all he had to agonize about. He'd give anything for that to be the thing he needed to confess.

Jack took out his phone and opened Stalkerville. Melody had shown him the day they had lunch and although he'd made fun of it, he also hadn't objected when she downloaded it to his phone and "connected" him to Walker.

"It's addictive," she said, "you'll see."

The whole thing perplexed Walker. "I always tell you where I am. I'm always at work or with you, anyway. Why do you need to check on your phone?"

"I don't," Jack said. "It's just interesting to know I can. Creepy but interesting."

And it was creepy, but Jack had to admit that Melody was right, it was also addictive-opening the screen and seeing the icon of Walker's face appear and then the roaming blue dot-at the drugstore, at the grocery, at his office. Right now, he was at the gym, probably sitting in the sauna instead of exercising, thinking about what to make for dinner. Something about being able to see Walker move around during the day, seeing how connected their lives were, how small Walker's world was, how much of it revolved around him-them-made the financial mess he was in feel even worse.

Jack didn't think about this too often anymore, but he knew he was probably alive because of Walker. When he met Walker, all those years ago, in the midst of his freewheeling days in Chelsea, on Fire Island, in the bathhouses and the clubs, Walker had been the one to insist on condoms, to demand fidelity. Jack had taken umbrage at first; hardly any of the couples they knew were exclusive. They were young and out and living in the greatest city in the world! But Walker recognized what Jack refused to face then: men getting sick, being denied treatment, dying. Walker worked with the doctors at St. Vincent's; he believed what they told him about prevention, and he scared the s.h.i.t out of Jack.

"If you want to spend every morning checking your exquisitely beautiful body for sores that won't heal or worry about every little cough, that's your choice," Walker had said in the early weeks, "but it's not mine."

Walker was scrupulous-condoms and fidelity were nonnegotiable. "If you want to mess around, that's fine," Walker said, "just not while I'm in the picture." Jack tried to resist Walker at first but found himself drawn to the man in ways he didn't understand and couldn't explain. Something about Walker-his goodness, his compa.s.sion (and, okay, the size of his d.i.c.k, Walker was huge)-was more compelling than sleeping around. It was one of the nicest things Jack could say about himself: that he had recognized the value of Walker. Before they moved in together, they'd both gotten tested and Jack didn't think he'd ever been as scared as the day they went to get their results. They had collapsed into each other's arms, weeping and laughing with relief, when they were negative.

Walker had saved his life. He was sure of that. And if that certainty created a certain inequity in their relationship, a certain kind of paternalistic vibe that, Jack could admit, was sometimes not particularly s.e.xy, not very hot, if sometimes Jack resented Walker's saintliness, his goodness and light and responsibility and needed to act out a little, spend money he didn't have, very occasionally and very discreetly have a late night with someone who didn't need to floss and brush and shave and apply moisturizer before dropping his pants, well, what of it? There was still a part of Jack that wondered what it would have been like if he hadn't heeded Walker's advice, had thrown caution to the wind and spent a little more time sleeping around before he settled down. Maybe he would be dead, but maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he'd be just fine-alive and better for the breadth of his experience. If Walker hadn't kissed him that very first night, maybe he wouldn't even be in this mess.

AT HIS SHOP, Jack opened the rolling gate and unlocked the door. He'd spent all week going through his inventory, trying to see if he had anything tucked away he'd forgotten about that he could sell to raise some cash, knowing the whole time he didn't. He knew his inventory down to every cast-off crystal doork.n.o.b. Whenever he found something of worth-which he did frequently, he had an eye-he knew exactly whom to call to place it. It was rare for something of true worth to linger at Jack's shop. His lucrative dealings were all private transactions with his longtime customers-designers, architects, and the esteemed ladies of the Upper East Side. The economic downturn had brought most of that business to a halt, too. Things were starting to pick up, but there wasn't time for him to acc.u.mulate anywhere near the money he needed.

If Jack didn't have a photo of the damaged Rodin sculpture on his phone, he would have thought he'd imagined the whole thing. Back at home after the aborted visit to Leo, it had only taken a few minutes on the computer to realize why it looked familiar, that it was one of the recovered pieces of art from the World Trade Center site that he'd read about years and years ago. The story was a tiny blip in the midst of all the coverage about the cleanup-how a damaged cast of Rodin's The Kiss had been recovered and then mysteriously disappeared. Jack had paid attention at the time because of his very good customer who collected Rodin.

Jack didn't know what to do with the information he had. He could do nothing, of course. He didn't care about the security guard in Stephanie's house or the statue, really. He could call someone at the 9/11 Memorial Museum that was under way and tip them off, anonymously or as himself; maybe there was a reward, maybe he'd get some press and it would be good for his business. Or, and this option was the one he was trying-and failing-to resist, he could approach Tommy O'Toole and offer to broker a sale for a sum of money, Jack was certain, so significant that Tommy wouldn't be able to refuse. And Jack's sizable commission would solve his immediate financial problems, release him from whatever Leo might or might not do.

He went to his little back office and printed out the photos of the sculpture from his phone. Jack had asked around and his friend Robert knew someone, some guy named Bruce who worked in the shadier places of art and antique sales. "I used him once," Robert said. "He'll know what to do. Tell him you're my friend." It didn't hurt to ask, Jack thought. It never hurt to gather information and know all the possibilities. Before putting on his coat, he took out his phone and the card stowed away in his pocket and dialed the number. "Hey," he said to some guy named Bruce. "I'm Robert's friend. I'm on my way."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

Leo was home alone, sitting in Stephanie's tiny second-floor back room, the s.p.a.ce he'd appropriated as his office, trying to work out his pitch for Nathan whom he was finally scheduled to meet with later in the week.

Out the window, the bare January trees and leafless shrubbery allowed him full purview of all the neighboring yards to the side and the rear. He could see straight down into the kitchen of the brownstone directly behind Stephanie's, the layout just like hers but reversed-the rooms a little more colorful, maybe a little shabbier. A spindly blonde in black jeans and a baggy red sweater was arranging an array of sliced fruit on a plate for two little boys bouncing and swiveling on breakfast stools at the island counter. The boys were the same size and coloring, twins probably. Leo wondered when twins had become as common as the common cold. He thought of Melody's daughters who, he dimly remembered, were a happy accident. She probably hated that people a.s.sumed she'd had some kind of fertility treatment, that she and Walter didn't get credit for two of his determined sperm successfully penetrating two of her enterprising ova. That type of thing would drive her crazy. He watched as one of the kids across the way shoved his brother off the seat and out of sight, presumably down to the floor because the mother raced over and bent down and when she stood the boy was in her arms, his legs wrapped around her waist, his face buried in her shoulder. He could see the boy's shoulders heaving, the mother stroking his back and mouthing shhh, shhh, gently rocking him back and forth. In the house next to hers, a middle-aged man walked through his kitchen with someone who looked like a contractor. The contractor was pointing at the ceiling molding with an extension of measuring tape while the homeowner nodded. Back to the right, red-sweater mom opened her back door and dumped a plate of fruit peels into what he guessed was a compost bin. He found the tableau behind Stephanie's house endlessly entertaining. He could sit and watch all the quiet lives of aspiration play out for hours. It was strangely soothing. Brooklyn was growing on him.

Though Stephanie hadn't been kidding about the drugs or borrowing money (not that he was using any drugs at the moment; not that he needed to ask for money), she'd been a pushover about the s.e.x. They'd spent most of the power outage in bed, undressed, making their bodies sing the old familiar tune. "You can stay until you find a place," she'd said a few days later.

Victoria finally shipped Leo his belongings, no more than a dozen boxes; he didn't want much. It took leaving his life with Victoria to understand how much of it had been constructed by her (using his money) in a way he didn't miss and certainly wasn't eager to re-create. The relentlessly neutral palette with splashes of dark brown or black ("It's like living in a gigantic portobello mushroom," he'd complained to her once), the spare modern furniture, the sterile metallic Italian light fixtures, her quirky (and as it turned out nearly worthless) taste in a handful of upcoming-but-still-wildly-pricey artists-he was ecstatic to leave it all behind. Aside from recovering the years of his life he'd spent wooing, winning, and then regretting her, all he wanted from Victoria were a smattering of personal belongings and a few boxes of old SpeakEasy files. He unpacked the clothes he needed and stored the rest in Stephanie's bas.e.m.e.nt. They were calling it temporary.

When Stephanie first told him about Nathan Chowdhury's alleged new project, he'd managed to keep a neutral face.

"I'm not sure exactly what it is," she'd said. "We were at a party and it was very loud and incredibly hot and, you know, he was cla.s.sic Nathan, going a million miles a minute in seventeen different directions. Genuine writers. Irreverent but vigorous. Smart but s.e.xy. b.l.o.o.d.y brilliant." She did a decent impression of him and his vaguely British accent, left over from his early years in Kilburn. "Maybe you should call him," she'd said, a little too casually. "Maybe he needs a content guy."

"Maybe."

What Stephanie had described was not a new idea of Nathan's; it was an old idea of Leo's. Back when SpeakEasyMedia was generating new sites faster than they could have imagined, Leo had wanted to create a writing hub. Something that would have a separate ident.i.ty and attract serious writers, fiction and nonfiction, reportage, high-level think pieces. They had to focus on gossip at first because it was cheap and easy and fun and people would read it-but once they had a little traction, a little more money, Leo wanted to balance the gossip and blind items with something respectable. First, they needed money, and gossip was where they'd find it.

Interesting that Nathan who hadn't been taken with Leo's idea back then ("You're describing a gaping sinkhole that will suck up money and not return a proper cent") was ready to revive the concept. On his own.

"Any specifics?" Leo asked Stephanie.

"No, it sounded very early stage. He did say he was considering acquiring an existing publication to build around." (Another idea of Leo's from back in the day.) "He asked for suggestions. I told him to look at Paper Fibres."