Fortunate Son

17

Raela Timor took her place at an ebony dining table that was so large it took up almost the whole dining room, and that room was twenty feet wide and thirty long. The family of four was at the north end of the table, with Kronin Stark — still in his tailor-made suit, still wearing his red silk-and-gold tie — at the head. When Rita the maid served Raela her sliced pork roast and red cabbage, the girl thanked her but did not pick up her fork.

“You gonna eat that, sis?” Michael asked.

He hadn’t been home in a week, but he could tell that there was something wrong. His court-appointed guardian, Maya, was drawn and haggard, while Kronin looked even more menacing than usual. Raela, as always, was beautiful. If anything she was even more ethereal, slighter, even closer to taking off on the slightest passing breeze.

“I’m not that hungry,” she said.

“You should eat,” Maya suggested, worry stitched into the words.

“Maybe later.”

“Eat your food,” Kronin Stark growled.

“Is that an order?”

“You damn well better believe it’s an order.” The master of the house spoke in his deepest, most threatening bass tone.

Michael felt a quailing in his chest.

Raela rose from her seat.

“Sit down,” Kronin commanded.

“I will not stay at a table where men are cursing at me,” she said.

With that the girl walked out of the room. Michael thought that she seemed a little uncertain on her feet.

“Raela,” Kronin called, his voice filled with sudden grief.

But the woman-child left the room without looking back.

“What’s wrong with her?” Michael asked.

“Shut up and eat your food,” Kronin snapped.

Later that evening Michael found his sister in the upstairs living room. She was knitting him a sweater made from a skein of uncolored raw silk that was specially imported from Tibet by one of Kronin’s thankful business partners.

Raela was always happy to see her brother. She cared for him more than anyone, at least until she’d met Eric — and now Tommy.

“What’s wrong with Stark?” Michael asked. “He’s like a grizzly.”

“It’s nothing,” she said, not interrupting her stitch count.

Though Michael was the older sibling, he knew better than to make demands of his sister. He brought out one of his economics texts and sat there vainly trying to plumb the secrets of money and how it made and destroyed men’s lives.

A half an hour or so later, Kronin Stark lunged into the room. He was still wearing his suit but had discarded the tie. His feet were prone to swelling, so he wore slippers instead of shoes.

“Leave us alone, Michael,” Stark said, while his eyes bored into the downcast girl.

Michael stood, and so did his sister.

“You stay,” Kronin ordered.

“I’m not your damn servant,” she said, barely raising her voice. “And neither is my brother. If you want to talk to me, do it with Mikey here.”

Michael felt like a bug he’d once seen on the nature channel. Beneath the sand a hypersensitive subterranean snake was stalking him while from behind came the shuffle of a small rodent that had picked up his spoor. He’d die if he ran and die if he stood still. Michael had turned off the show, unable to bear it because of his identification with the insect.

“I will not be bullied by you,” Kronin said to the queen of his heart.

“I’m not the bully.”

“What did you do with that money?”

“It’s my money, and I can do with it what I please.”

“Not ten thousand dollars.”

“Why not? Didn’t you put it into my account? Didn’t you tell me that you trusted me to make sensible decisions?”

“I don’t know if I trust you anymore.”

“I’m tired,” Raela said then. “I’m going to bed.”

“Eat something,” Kronin said, no longer loud or a bully.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You’ll die.”

“Everything dies.”

Michael was beyond understanding this confrontation. He was unaware of Eric’s relationship with his sister. He hadn’t heard much from his friend since the funeral. Michael had called Eric, but that phone number was disconnected and he’d taken a leave from UCLA.

Raela walked out, leaving the older man seething and the younger one perplexed.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Kronin asked Michael.

“No, sir.”

“Why not? You brought him into this house.”

“Who?”

“That Eric Nolan. He’s bewitched her. She’s taken all the money I gave her and given it to him.”

“To Eric? Why?”

“Talk to your sister. And if you want to keep coming here you’d better make her listen to reason. The only reason you are suffered in this house is because of her.”

Michael had always known that he was not a true member of the family. Maya never wanted him, and Kronin hadn’t adopted him. Everyone loved his sister, not him. But no one had ever spoken these words. No one had ever told him that he was worthless. And so, even though he revered Stark and loved his life among the rich in Bel-Air, Michael went to his room and packed up his few things. He drove away from the Stark residence with no intention of returning.

Six blocks away his cell phone sounded.

“Hello?”

“Come back home, Michael,” Maya said into the receiver.

It was the first time she’d called him in well over a year. He disconnected the call.

A few minutes later the phone sounded again. Michael wouldn’t have answered except that it might have been his sister.

“Yes?”

Kronin Stark’s voice boomed into the young man’s ear. “Michael.”

Again he disconnected the call.

Michael drove for many miles that night, taking the same path that Christie had when she’d made her fateful decision. He couldn’t have known where Christie had gone, but there he was. He stopped at a motel outside of Twentynine Palms and gave them his credit card.

“Do you have another one, son?” the silver-haired proprietor asked. “This one’s being declined.”

The room was only twenty-nine dollars a night, a promotional offer for the off-season. Michael had enough money to last him a week.

He went to his room, which opened onto the parking lot, and sat on the lumpy mattress, amazed that Kronin had canceled his credit card so quickly. This made Michael feel insubstantial. It was as if his whole life had been jotted down in light pencil and at any moment it could be completely erased. He had no mother or father, no one who loved him.

“Do you love me?” he had asked his sister when he was seventeen and she was eleven. He asked because he needed someone to care, and he believed that he saw his love reflected in Raela’s eyes.

“I would die for you,” she replied.

That night he went across the highway to the Monster Bar and ordered a beer. It was a small bungalow under the huge, looming shadow of a billboard in the shape of a Gila monster. The reptile’s fat red tongue lolled lasciviously.

The woman behind the bar was named Doris Tina Warren. Her lower lip had been deeply cut from side to side, and the scar was like another, fatter lip bulging out from the first one.

“You stayin’ at the hotel across the street?” she asked him.

“Yeah.”

“Vacation?”

“I just got kicked out of my sister’s father’s house.”

“You have different fathers?”

“No. We have the same father, but he died. This guy adopted her but not me.”

“That’s fucked up,” the fake platinum blonde said. “What is he, some kind of a pervert?”

“I don’t know. He gave me a credit card a long time ago, but as soon as I was gone he canceled it.”

“But you have cash?”

Michael looked into the thin woman’s eyes, which were two different shades of blue, and realized that she was worried that he couldn’t pay.

“I got enough for this beer and the next one,” he said.

Doris liked the sentence. It was the way her first boyfriend’s father used to say things. The boy was a dog, but his father always made promises that he kept.

“Even after Manly dropped me, his father made him give me the car he promised,” Doris was saying many hours and many beers later.

“Manly was the son?” Michael asked, a little unsteady on his bar stool.

It was three in the morning, and Doris had closed at one. She opened the tap then and refused to take any more of Michael’s money.

“Yeah,” she said. “Manly was the son, and Big Boy was his old man. Only Big Boy was the man, and Manly was the boy. You want another beer?”

“I don’t think I could even walk across the road if I did,” he said.

“You don’t have to worry,” she said. “I’m gonna help you to your bed.”

“You are?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I knew that from the minute you said that you had the money for one beer and another.”

They’d both been drinking.

“So your sister’s just fifteen and she’s with a senior in college?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“You gonna go kick his ass for robbing the cradle?”

“Huh?”

“Don’t you hate him for doin’ that?”

When Michael turned his head, his eyes and brain seemed to wait a second before following. He turned to look at Doris’s eyes, felt a moment of fuzzy light-headedness, and then she materialized out of his confusion. This momentary hallucination seemed to have deep meaning for the young man. He touched her lip-scar with his finger.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“I said you must wanna kick his ass for molesting your sister. That’s a crime, you know.”

“Yeah, but I don’t, I don’t hate him. My sister is like, I don’t know... she’s like a woman. I mean, Eric is the smartest guy I’ve ever known. He can do like... anything. And my sister’s like that too, only there’s nothing holding her back. She has eyes like a snake, but I love her.”

“Kiss me,” Doris said.

In his desert motel bed he saw how skinny and scarred Doris was. She admitted to him that she was twenty-eight and that she drank too much. She’d slept with “more than a few men,” she said.

“I’ve used this motel a whole lotta nights,” she admitted after their first time making love. “I’ve fucked at least three guys in this bed.”

Michael realized that this was a test of some sort. He knew that he couldn’t say that that was all right. If he said that, she’d think that he thought she was a whore but he didn’t care because that’s why he was with her. And he knew that he couldn’t say that what she had done was wrong but that he still wanted to be with her because then he’d be looking down on her and she’d get mad.

He knew these things, but they didn’t matter. They didn’t matter to him because of how he felt.

“I’m twenty-one,” he said, fingering a crescent-shaped scar on her rib cage, just below the tattoo of the red rose on her left breast. “And this is the first time that I’ve ever felt like anybody has ever seen me. You know what I mean?”

Doris stared into his face with her mismatched blue eyes. She wanted to speak but didn’t or couldn’t.

“I’ve never had such a long talk with anybody,” he said. “Man or woman. Not a real talk where I said things about myself and they wanted to know what I was saying.”

“I want to stop drinking,” she said.

“Will you still talk to me if you do?”

“What do you want from me?” Kronin Stark asked Raela five days later.

She was too weak now to get up from her bed. The giant loomed above her. Because of the weakness of her vision, he seemed to be shimmering.

“You know,” she said. “And I want my brother back in the house and for you to apologize to him.”

“You think you can order me?”

“Leave me alone.”

She closed her eyes until the shadow that covered her was gone.

The next morning in the lounge area of the Cape Hotel in Beverly Hills, a slight man in a rumpled light-gray suit approached Kronin Stark’s table. The man’s name was Silas Renfield, but everyone called him Renny. Renny worked for the governor, though he had no particular job title — no official position at all. He showed up at odd hours and traveled extensively around the state and the nation. Whenever he appeared at the governor’s door he was always admitted whether or not he had an appointment.

“Hello, Mr. Stark,” Renny said, remaining on his feet.

“Sit,” Kronin replied.

“How are you, sir?”

“I don’t have time for pleasantries, Mr. Renfield. You know what I want. Are you ready to give it to me?”

“The boy was convicted of a violent crime under a state law that the governor himself pushed through the legislature. It would be... unseemly for him to rescind his own legislation.”

“I’m not asking for him to overturn the law. All I need is for him to allow clemency for one boy, a hero.”

“This boy was convicted of gang activity.”

“He was abandoned by the system, left on the streets to fend for himself. He was shot down even though he was unarmed, and he saved a child’s life from a mad gunman, almost dying in the process.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Stark, but the governor was quite clear with me this morning. He is not offering clemency for anyone convicted under his law.”

“I understand that,” Kronin replied. “A man should stick by his principles. But don’t you forget that all of the resources I used to get your man elected will now be used against him.”

“Mr. Stark—”

“This meeting is over.”

“What about the fund-raiser at the arena this Saturday?”

“Canceled as of noon today.”

“And the dinner with the Royal Family?”

“I’m rescinding the offer.”

“This is a mistake, Mr. Stark.”

“Yes, it is,” Kronin replied. “And you and your governor are the ones making it.”

At first Constance Baker thought that she only wanted Eric for a plaything. She said as much to him on that first night between their early bouts of torrid lovemaking. But she had found something in his arms that she’d never known before with a man. Maybe, she thought, it was because he was so young and sweet. But she doubted that. He spoke to her in low tones while they were in passion. He didn’t whisper sweet nothings, he made declarative statements about what he was going to do. And he did everything he promised. Constance felt taken over by the young man. She wanted to make herself his.

At three in the morning she woke him to say that she had just called her Jim Harris and ended their six-year relationship.

“Why?” Eric asked.

“Because I never knew what being with a real man could be like. When you make love to me I feel like crawling out of my skin. You make me want to get down on my hands and knees. No man has ever made me feel like that.”

Eric had heard words like this before from women and girls, but he was surprised at Constance. She seemed so in control of herself, so in charge. He didn’t mind when she said that she wanted to sleep with him. He thought that it was just sex.

“I told the doorman to call me if you came by,” she’d told him when they closed the door to her bedroom. “I told Jim that something had come up at the office and I had to go have a meeting.”

Just sex, the young man thought to himself.

“But Connie,” Eric said after she professed her love. “I’m just on vacation. I’ll be going back to L.A. soon. I’ve got a girlfriend back there.”

“Stay with me until you have to go,” she said, giving him a coquettish smile. “Maybe I can change your mind.”

“What about my brother?”

“He can stay with us. The girl can stay too if you want.”

Eric stared at her face and saw Christie when the first bullet hit her in the abdomen. She had let out a terrible cry that he had heard even through the thick glass of the revolving door.

On that first night Thomas and Clea had found Connie’s condoms and used one.

“You come like a woman,” she said to him as they lay there side by side in the unlit room looking through the glass wall out on the lights of New Jersey. “I thought that you were hurting, and your eyes looked scared.”

“I’m sorry,” Thomas said. “I really am. It’s just, it’s just that I’ve been thinking about that for so long, and I never knew it would feel so, so...”

“So what?”

“I don’t know. It was like you were all silk and all I ever knew was rocks. And when you looked at me and nodded I felt so powerful that I was scared that I’d hurt you. I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she said, curling around him. “It was really wonderful what you did. It was like I had your soul in my hands, like I was hurting you but it was okay.”

“I don’t know, Clea,” Thomas said. “I never knew anything like that before. But you know, maybe you shoulda gone away with that other guy.”

“I don’t want to be with him.”

“Yeah, but you see how it is with me. Here I can’t even walk down the street without getting arrested. I don’t even hardly know how to read, and you can read things in four languages.”

“So? We’re not getting married or anything. We’re just havin’ a good time.”

She put her hand on his forehead the way his mother did when he was overtired and couldn’t sleep.

Thomas dozed off and dreamed that he was floating on a pink-and-blue ocean with the sun all around him and fish swimming on top of the water.

The boys moved their things out of the Y and brought them down to Connie’s. Eric felt funny about it, but he had been honest with his mentor. They had a good time together, and she taught him all about Wall Street.

Two weeks went by, and Thomas learned about love from Clea as Connie did from Eric. The boys spent their afternoons together exploring the city.

One cloudy morning Eric brought Thomas to deliver one of Connie’s antique watches to a watchmaker whose office was on the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building. They entered the Russian’s office a little after nine.

“Yes?” the burly man asked. He was frowning at Thomas.

“I brought a watch from Constance Baker,” Eric told him.

This took away the scowl.

“Let me see it.”

It was a tiny pocket watch with gold-filled numbers and a shiny blue lacquered back.

“It’s lovely,” the watchmaker said.

Thomas wandered over to the window at the back of the shop. The sky outside was opaque white, pure and unfathomable.

Eric exchanged the watch for a receipt.

“Let’s go, Tommy,” he said.

“What’s with this window?” the young black man asked.

The watchmaker, Mr. Harry Slatkin, smiled.

“Open it up,” he said.

Tommy pulled the old-fashioned window wide. The dense white mass hovered outside.

“What is it?”

“The clouds,” Slatkin told him. “We are in the clouds.”

Thomas talked about it all the way down in the Art Deco elevator.

“We were actually in a cloud, Eric. I never did anything like that before.”

“You never flew?” Eric asked.

“Where I’ma fly to? The soup kitchen?”

Then one morning Eric got a call on a bright-red cell phone that Raela had given him.

“Hi, Eric,” the raven-haired girl said into the line. Her voice was exultant.

“Hi, honey,” he said.

Connie, who was lying next to him in the bed, sat straight up.

“The governor of California has commuted Thomas’s sentence, and he’s persuaded the district attorney to drop all the other charges,” Raela said. “You can come home. Daddy’s sending a plane tomorrow to pick you up at Stewart Airport.”

“What time?”

“Three in the afternoon.”

“We’ll be there.”

When he disconnected the call, Connie said, “You’re leaving?”

“Uh... yeah.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow... at three.”

“Tomorrow?”

“I told you we were going back.”

“But just one day’s notice?”

“We’ve got to go. That’s where we live. I have a daughter there.”

“You’re married?”

“No. But I told you about my girlfriend.”

“So you take advantage of me and then walk out with hardly a good-bye?”

“Connie.”

“Get out of my house.”

Telling Clea was somewhat easier. She cried a little.

“Will we ever see each other again?” she asked Thomas.

“I’d come back if you want me to,” he said. “I could maybe get my GED and a job at the museum. I could stay at the Y.”

“Maybe I could come out to California in the summer,” she said. “Then you’d have time to see your family awhile. I mean, it sounds like you haven’t had a break in years.”

“I love you.” Thomas hadn’t remembered using those words since he was a boy with Branwyn.

“Go back home, Thomas, and call me. If it’s right I’ll come out this summer and we’ll see.”

“I don’t want to leave you, but I want to go home too.”

“Go.”