Black Maps

Chapter Twelve

The taxi dropped me in front of Ned’s building at three in the afternoon on Thanksgiving-only an hour late, despite my best dilatory efforts. A guy I didn’t know held the big bronze door for me. I crossed the vast lobby to the concierge’s marble bunker, and another guy I didn’t know. He rang upstairs to announce me. The elevator guy I knew. He nodded at me.

“Long time,” he said. Not long enough.

The elevator door slid open, and I stepped into a foyer about a hundred feet square. The walls were cream colored, and the floor was black and white stone, set in a diamond pattern. A small, bronze chandelier hung from the high ceiling. There was an ebony table to my left, with some flowers on it, in a tall, glass vase. Straight ahead was a pair of glossy, black doors. I pressed the bell and heard a deep chime inside.

Meg answered. She’s a jumpy girl from County Mayo, with lots of freckles and skittish blue eyes. I’d be jumpy too, I guess, if I were Ned and Janine’s maid, and had to wear that silly getup. I heard music, something baroque, and voices and glassware.

“Hi, Meg,” I said.

“ ’Lo, Mr. March. Nice to see you,” she answered in a soft brogue. I stepped inside, and she took my coat. I was in a much larger foyer, with pale gray walls and white molding. Some Dutch landscape sketches that I’d always liked were hung on the walls, and a big Oriental carpet covered the floor.

My sister-in-law Janine inspected me from the opposite doorway. Dressed appropriately? Unexpected guests? Visible contusions? Weapons? I was wearing olive corduroys and a black sweater over a blue shirt, so the clothes passed muster. I was alone, wound-free, and if I was carrying it wasn’t obvious. She smiled and crossed the foyer to greet me.

“Hello, stranger. It’s been a while,” she said. She patted my arms and made a kissing noise near my ear. Janine is forty-two, a year younger than Ned, but like Ned she looks and acts more like fifty. She’s five and a half feet tall, with a long, fragile-looking neck, reedy arms and legs, and a body like a plank. Her hair is an expensive blond, worn in a rigid page-boy. Her nose is straight and narrow, and her mouth is small, with thin lips that are prone to pursing. Her eyes are a bright, cornflower blue, with aperture settings that range from large as saucers, as when Ned presents her with some expensive bauble, to narrow as knives, as when she flays an impertinent junior member of one of her charity boards. With me they were dialed to wary.

Janine wore tailored camel pants, a chocolate-colored cashmere twinset, and pearls. Her eyes flicked to my packages and grew quizzical.

“For the boys,” I said.

“Oh, John, you didn’t have to. They have too much as it is, really. What is it?”

“Puzzles for Alec and Legos for Derek.” I gave her the packages, and she put them down in a corner.

“They’ll love them, I’m sure. They’ve been asking every five minutes when Uncle Johnny will be here.” She guided me across the foyer, to the left down a wide hallway, and finally to the living room. The music and the voices and the glassware sounds grew louder as we approached.

The living room, like the whole apartment, was large and formal. We stood at one end of the broad, high-ceilinged space. The walls were a green just darker than money, and the pilasters and molding and beamed ceiling were a crisp white. A white marble mantelpiece dominated one wall. The wall opposite us was mostly windows and French doors, framed in green and gold drapery. The doors opened onto a terrace that wrapped around much of the apartment. The waning sun filled the room with amber light.

The furniture was old and French, and though there was a lot of it, the room did not seem crowded. The ten or so people in it didn’t come close to its capacity. Most of them turned to look as we entered. Some of them smiled. Ned was there, and so was Lauren, with her husband, Keith. Liz was there, talking to an older, dark-haired man I didn’t know. My brother David was on the terrace, talking to someone I couldn’t see. His wife, Stephanie, was sitting with some more people I didn’t know. Ned crossed the room to greet me.

“We thought we’d have to start without you,” he said, and clasped my shoulder. “Good to see you, Johnny. Let me get you something to drink.” He led me to a large chrome drinks trolley. “Cranberry and soda still your choice?” I nodded, and he took a tumbler off the cart and started fishing for ice in a silver bucket.

Ned is a couple of inches shorter than I am, and broader. His gingery hair is short and wavy, and it was thinner and grayer than the last time I’d seen him. He has a ruddy complexion and a square face with blunt features. His gray eyes looked tired and distracted, and there were more lines than I remembered around his small mouth-the burdens of being the number two guy at Klein amp; Sons. He was wearing dark gray trousers and a navy blazer over a white shirt. Turkeys strutted over his red tie. He handed me my drink and looked like he was about to speak, but before he could, I felt a dig at my ribs and a kiss on my cheek. Liz.

“What happened, you forget how to tell time, or has it been so long you forgot the address?”

“Hey, yourself,” I said, and kissed her cheek. She was wearing a black cashmere turtleneck over a short, plaid skirt. A matching plaid ribbon was tied in her thick, blond hair. Liz is rangy and tall, just my height in flat shoes. She’s thirty-six and looks it. She has shrewd, green eyes, a strong nose, and a wide mouth, all set in a lean face. The effect is more handsome and smart than conventionally pretty.

The traders who work on the hugely profitable desk that Liz runs at Klein would probably use different words to describe her. “Scary bitch” would be the kindest of them, and they might have a point. Liz is handsome and smart, but she’s also brutally impatient, utterly intolerant of mistakes, and merciless in her sarcasm.

Her companion was cut from the same cloth as all her men friends: older, European, attractive, and affluent looking. She introduced him as Marco. He smiled with a bemused detachment that I envied.

“Back in the bosom of your family. I knew you couldn’t stay away,” she said, looking me up and down. “You’re too skinny, eat something.” Meg was walking around the room with a silver tray heaped with smoked salmon, pate, shrimp, and a few things I didn’t recognize. Liz hauled her over. I took some salmon and felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Lauren said she’d ground you down. It’s nice when it happens to someone else. How you doing, John?” A wry smile lit Keith’s narrow face. Lauren’s husband is tall, around six foot four, and thin, with a thatch of unruly brown hair, piercing blue eyes, and a long, bumpy nose. He wore khakis, a tweed jacket, and a rumpled denim shirt, open at the collar. Keith has a Ph. D. in molecular biology, and he does things with DNA at Rockefeller University. I smiled and shook his hand. Lauren was behind him.

“See, it’s not so bad,” she said. “You’re having a great time already, I can tell.”

“Whee,” I said.

“Come meet our strays.” She and Keith led me to one of the large sofas and introduced me to a German couple and a young Italian man. They worked in Keith’s lab, and they were all new arrivals to the city. Their English wasn’t great, but they seemed pleasant enough, if a little nervous. Sitting next to Stephanie for too long can have that effect.

“You made it. David and I were betting that you wouldn’t.” Stephanie smiled thinly at me. She’s thirty-four, the same age as David, and the two of them have been inseparable since b-school. It’s no wonder. I can’t imagine that either of them had ever encountered anyone as driven or abrasive as themselves before. It was either marry or kill each other. I guess they made the right choice.

Stephanie is five foot three and whippet thin, with wiry brown hair that she wrestles into strange shapes, darting brown eyes too big for her pinched face, and a bitter little mouth. She’s an equity analyst for a big firm downtown, and a good one, from what I hear. But her real talent is scheming with David on how best to advance his career, and at whose expense. We were not close.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” I said to her. I turned to Lauren. “Where are the boys?” My question was answered the next moment when two bundles of tousled energy exploded into the room.

“Uncle Johnny!” they both shouted. Derek, the elder at six, made a lame attempt to compose himself and shake my hand. His four-year-old brother, Alec, wrapped his arms around my legs and head-butted me in the knees. I lifted each one in turn for a hug and a kiss. My nephews have thick, gingery hair-in wild disarray, just then-and their dad’s broad face and features. They’d doubled in size since the last time I’d seen them.

Janine had dressed them alike today, in khakis, blue oxford shirts, and loafers, but they were massively disheveled-faces red, shirttails out, sleeves up, trousers sagging. Alec had only one shoe. An amused-looking girl in a gray skirt and black sweater followed them in, holding the other one. Tyler is Ned and Janine’s au pair, from somewhere in the Midwest. She’s about twenty, with long blond hair and cool blue eyes. She smiled at me and knelt to help Alec with his shoe.

“You guys look like five miles of bad road,” I said.

“You look like ten miles,” Alec laughed, and whacked me in the thigh.

“Hey, we saw the stuff you got us. Want to build Legos?” Derek asked.

“Not now, sir,” Janine said, coming up behind him. “We’re about to eat, so you two get yourselves cleaned up. I don’t know how you got into this state.” She looked pointedly at Tyler, who seemed not to hear her.

“After dinner, guys,” I said, as Tyler led them away.

“Here’s David,” Janine said to no one in particular. “Good. Let’s go into the dining room, shall we?” David is about my height, and thin. He has the same ruddy coloring as Ned, and the same wavy, ginger hair, worn longer. His sharp features are gathered closely on his face, which seems always caught somewhere between a scowl and a sneer. He had on the same blue blazer-gray flannel rig as Ned, but with a blue-striped bow tie. He was coming in from the terrace, and someone was with him.

She was wearing little black shoes that had a strap over the top and a buckle on the side, forest green tights and a black pleated skirt that ended a few inches north of her knees, a wide suede belt with a buckle made of horn, and a close-fitting, high-collared tunic in a green that matched her tights. Sherwood Forest by way of SoHo. She wore no jewelry other than the one diamond and two emerald studs in her small ears. Her mouth was curved in a polite smile at something David was saying, but as she stepped into the room Jane Lu looked up and cocked one of her delicate brows at me.

I turned to Lauren, who wore a little smirk. “Another stray?” I asked.

“Yep. Her family is in Boston, and she’s working tomorrow, and no one else she knew was in town. So I invited her. Didn’t I mention it?”

“Must’ve slipped your mind.” I followed her into the dining room. It was smaller than the living room, but not by much. It was painted a deep orange, and had its own set of French doors, with green drapes. An old tapestry depicting fruits and vegetables hung on one wall. The table was a long oval. Even with fifteen of us there was plenty of elbow room.

Ned and Janine had taken no liberties with tradition, but had attempted to cover all the bases. There were three kinds of stuffing with the immense turkey, cranberry in sauce and relish forms, potatoes mashed and sweet, peas, creamed onions, candied carrots, fresh-baked white bread and corn bread, pumpkin pie, apple pie, and Indian pudding.

There was a lot of shifting of seats as the meal progressed, and a lot of talk, as there always is when my family is together. Tablewide discourse was mainly about the financial markets and politics. The smaller conversations were more varied. Keith and Jane Lu discovered some mutual acquaintances in Cambridge and compared notes on a defunct biotech firm. Liz and Lauren traded stories about our cousins. Ned and Janine tried in vain to determine where in Europe Marco was from. Jane spoke for a while in rapid German to the German couple, who laughed and seemed not so lost afterward. Lauren and Liz and Jane talked about moving and decorating and laughed a lot. Tyler explained to Marco about the different Kansas Cities, and where exactly Missouri was. Janine and Stephanie spoke acidly about some parties they’d attended recently. Ned and David and Liz had a long conversation in low, serious tones about Klein matters. Their faces were grim and tired looking. The boys bent my ear about some cartoon where the heroes were cuddly bunnies that transformed into giant, war-waging robots.

It was a pleasant enough meal. The only hiccup in the conversation came when the German woman asked what line of work I was in. David and Stephanie gave little snorts, almost in unison, Lauren and Liz shot them both dirty looks, Ned coughed nervously, and Janine nearly spilled her wine. I told her, but English was a struggle for her, and she looked puzzled. Jane said something to her and she nodded.

“Magnum, P.I., ja?” she said, smiling.

It was after coffee that the inevitable happened. Ned buttonholed me as people were drifting out of the dining room. He looked like his collar was too tight. We sat back down. David lingered at the far end of the table and drained the last of the Chablis into his glass, a sour smile on his face.

“Why do you waste your time?” he said to Ned. “You know he’s not interested. He never has been.”

Ned frowned and cleared his throat. “I’d like to talk to John alone, if you don’t mind,” he said. David drank some wine, shook his head, and left.

“We contract all of our security work at Klein to Risk Management Associates-you probably know that,” Ned began. I did know it. RMA was a competitor of Brill, a big international investigations outfit. “They’ve done a fine job for us, for over a decade, and we have no complaints. But they notified us recently that the partner who has handled all of our business, a fellow we have a lot of faith in, is retiring. This, combined with the fact that our security needs have become more complex and sensitive in the last few years, has led the management committee to decide that we need someone in-house to manage our relationship with RMA. To be the point man, so to speak, for all of our security issues. This is a senior role, an SVP slot. I’ll cut to the chase, John-we think you’d be the right fellow for this.” I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “Thanks, Ned, but no. I could recommend some people who have much better backgrounds than I do for that sort of thing. But it’s really not for me.” Ned began to speak, to try and sell me, but David reappeared and cut him off.

“I told you it was pointless. Just like him-pointless-a waste. He doesn’t want a real job, no matter how good it is or how much trouble you’ve gone through to create it for him. He’d rather keep doing whatever it is he does-peeping through keyholes, spying on people. He’d rather keep on being an embarrassment.” Ned drew a sharp breath and his face darkened, but David turned to me and continued.

“And you-you’re nothing if not predictable. Though I’m not sure why you bother; Mother’s not around to be upset by you anymore, and Dad’s not here to be amused. Who are you playing to now?”

“I didn’t solicit your opinion, David,” Ned said icily. “You’re not on the management committee, and this has nothing to do with you. Now apologize and excuse yourself.” But before David could say anything, I got up. We looked at each other for a long moment.

“Thanks anyway, Ned,” I said. I walked down the long hallway, past the living room, where most people had congregated, through the den, where Keith was watching football and explaining it to Marco, and out the French doors to the terrace and the night air.

Windows were lit in the big buildings across Park Avenue, and people were moving in them. Parties, families. Between the buildings, I saw the dark mass of Central Park and the smaller, colder lights of the West Side. From up here, the streets were silent. A chilly breeze carried some of the heat from my face. I leaned against the stone parapet and breathed out slowly.

Insufferable prick though he was, David had a point. But it wasn’t just me that was predictable-it was that whole sorry fracas. My family and I have been having that argument, or something like it, for years.

There’ve been a few changes. Before career prospects, it had been about the company and the hours that I kept, and before that, about the probations and the suspensions from school. And before it was Ned, it had been my uncles offering the well-intentioned, sensible advice. Until her death, the kind words were spoken not by David, but by my mother, Elaine. And ever since my father, Philip, passed away, we’d been short one bemused, distracted spectator.

But the basic quarrel-about irresponsibility, expectations, and disappointment, about waste and embarrassment-endures. It’s old business, and it goes all the way back to Philip and Elaine, and their larger struggle.

It wasn’t outright war between them-there were no pitched battles, and it wasn’t that well organized. It was more a simmering border feud, with fierce skirmishes, stretches of nervous quiet, and an endless tallying of encroachments. But as to who was defending what territories, and against whom, I couldn’t say. Nor can I say how I became my father’s proxy in these firefights-how I became a lightning rod for so much of my mother’s disapproval and discontent. Maybe I was just less expert than my siblings at keeping out of the crossfire-at keeping my head down or choosing sides.

A door opened, and there were slow footsteps. Lauren stood next to me.

“Sorry,” she said. She spoke softly. I laughed a little.

“I won’t say I told you so. ”

“Please don’t. I feel lousy enough as it is. I dragged you here, and told you this wouldn’t happen, and…”

“We’ve been at this a long time, Laurie. It’s not your fault.” She looked down at the street.

“Ned means well,” she said after a while.

“And David?” I asked.

“David’s a putz.” She laughed, and I laughed with her.

“His Mom impression is coming along,” I said. “Close your eyes, and you can’t tell the difference.”

Lauren turned to look at me. “She meant well, too, you know. Really.”

“If you say so.”

“It’s just that… you were too much like Dad,” Lauren said. “At least she thought you were.” A cold gust blew across the terrace, and I felt her shiver beside me. She crossed her arms, hugging herself.

“And that was by definition a bad thing, right?” I asked. “She did marry the guy, after all.” We were quiet, and watched a plane crawl across the sky.

“Ever wonder why?” she asked. “Ever wonder what the hell they saw in each other?” I chuckled.

“I don’t give it a lot of thought,” I said. “There’s only so much you can know about people-and less still about marriages. And when it comes to your parents’ marriage-forget it.”

“Is that a professional opinion?”

“If you asked me professionally, I’d say what I say to people who want their spouses followed: Are you sure you want to know? ” She laughed a little.

“Probably not. It’s a little too close to thinking about them having sex-it’d cost me a fortune in therapy.” The breeze picked up, and Lauren shivered again.

“Go in,” I said. “You’ll catch a chill.”

“You come too.” She rubbed her arms.

“In a minute,” I said.

I watched Lauren go inside and stand by Keith and Marco in the den. In another incarnation, the room had been my father’s study-the site of what my uncles called his very early retirement. It had been lined, floor to ceiling, with bookshelves then, and furnished with a broken-down leather sofa, a big leather chair, and a small writing table-all gone now. With its high windows and big view of sky, the room had seemed to me, at various times, like a treehouse, a lighthouse, and a sailboat. He’d called it his duck blind.

It wasn’t forbidden to us-we could go in when we liked. But I was the only one who ever did. I’d find him sprawled on the sofa, or in the chair, or sometimes writing or sketching at his small table, and I’d sprawl too, and read with him in silence. When I was older, he’d sometimes pull a volume off the shelf and toss it to me. He never said more than “You might like it,” and he never asked afterward if I had. It was an eclectic list-poetry and fiction mostly-Rilke, Akhmatova, Borges, Raymond Chandler, Robertson Davies, John Fante, Philip Dick-and if there was a message there, I couldn’t divine it.

He’d worked at Klein, in a job my grandfather made for him there, and one day, after twelve years, he’d stopped going-I never knew why. One of many things I never knew-about him, about them both.

I put my palms on the coping and felt the cold seep into my hands. I watched the figures move in the windows across the way. I thought about my words to Lauren and shook my head.

“Are you sure you want to know?”

“A fool for a client,” I said to myself.

On paper, they had little in common. He was an only child, the end of an old WASP line whose money and distinction were spent before he was born. His legacy, he used to say, was a mildewed shack on Fisher’s Island, a decent squash game, and a bulletproof liver. She was the youngest of four-the only daughter. Her family was old too, but not WASP. She didn’t play squash, didn’t drink much, and her inheritance was considerably bigger than a shack.

They met at a party in someone’s apartment off Washington Square. They were married four months later in city hall. They flew to Italy that same day, and stayed there for over a year. It was, as far as I know, her only act of rebellion. She was four months’ pregnant when they returned.

I don’t know why they married, or why they left the country afterward, or why they stayed away so long, or why they came back. I don’t know why Philip took the job at Klein in the first place, or why he stopped when he did, to spend his time in the study or on a squash court or with a pitcher of martinis. And while I can guess about Elaine’s anger, I don’t know why she married Philip to begin with, if what she wanted was the life she’d always had. What had she been looking for?

I never asked Philip about his work, and by the time I’d had my own brush with Wall Street, it was too late to compare notes. So I never knew what he’d made of it all-if his experience was anything like mine. Was he appalled by the greed and self-indulgence? Was he stunned by the bureaucracy and politicking? Was he bored silly? Was he able to find even a single thing there to care about? I never knew.

French doors opened from the living room, and Tyler stepped outside. “The boys are asking for you.”

They were in Derek’s room, doing something intricate with Legos. I got down on the floor and helped them do it.

“You okay, Uncle Johnny?” Alec asked. He peered at me over the lid of a toy chest.

“I’m fine, buddy. Pass those green pieces over, okay?”

After the Legos, we played with Hot Wheels for a while, and then we built an elaborate railroad out of wooden tracks. Then Derek tried to teach me to play something on his Game Boy, but the point of the thing eluded me, and I couldn’t work the controls reliably. Then we played soccer with a Nerf ball, then I was a zombie, and then I tickled them both till they were sweaty and hoarse and threatening to barf. It was getting late for them by then, and they needed to catch their breath, and so did I, so we sprawled sideways on Derek’s bed, with me in the middle, and I read six or eight stories to them.

After a while I realized that they’d fallen asleep. I sat there with them, quite still, and looked at the chaos of scattered toys on the floor, and at the darkness outside their windows. Alec sighed and shifted. I looked down at my nephews and thought about the protected, privileged world they lived in, and how far it was from where I lived these days. At some point I drifted off too, and when I opened my eyes I saw Jane Lu, leaning in the doorway, watching.

“Share a cab?” she whispered.