Bleeding Edge

12

Tallis is briefly back from Montauk and able to make some space for Maxine before work. Very early in the morning, through queasy summer light, Maxine first heads downtown to a weekly appointment with Shawn, who looks like he’s just pulled an all-nighter at a sensory-deprivation tank.

“Horst is back.”

“Is that, like,” air quotes, “‘back’? Or just back?”

“I’m supposed to know?”

Tapping a temple as if hearing voices from far away, “Vegas? Church of Elvis? Horst ’n’ Maxine take two?”

“Please, this is what I’d hear from my mother, if my mother didn’t hate Horst so much.”

“Too oedipal for me, but I can refer you to a really awesome Freudian, flexible rates, all that.”

“Maybe not. What do you think Dōgen would do?”

“Sit.”

After what seems like a good part of the hour has ticked away, “Um… sit, yes, and…?”

“Just sit.”

THE CABDRIVER ON THE WAY uptown has his radio tuned to a Christian call-in station, which he’s listening to attentively. This does not bode well. He decides to get on Park and take it all the way up. The biblical text being discussed on the radio at the moment is from 2 Corinthians, “For you suffer fools gladly, seeing you yourselves are wise,” which Maxine takes as a sign not to suggest alternate routes.

Park Avenue, despite attempts at someone’s idea of beautification, has remained, for all but the chronically clue-free, the most boring street in the city. Built originally as a kind of genteel lid to cover up the train tracks running into Grand Central, what should it be, the Champs-Élysées? Sped through, at night, by stretch limo, let’s say, on the way to Harlem, it might register as just bearable. In broad daylight, however, at an average speed of one block per hour, jammed with loud and toxic-smelling traffic, all in advanced states of disrepair, whose drivers suffer (or enjoy) a hostility level comparable to that of Maxine’s driver here—not to mention police barricades, Form Single Lane signs, jackhammer crews, backhoes and front-end loaders, cement mixers, asphalt spreaders, and battered dump trucks unmarked by any contractor’s name let alone phone number—it becomes an occasion for spiritual exercise, though maybe more of the Eastern type than anything connected with this radio station, now blasting some kind of Christian hip-hop. Christian what? No, she doesn’t want to know.

Presently they are cut off by a Volvo with dealer plates, flaunting its polyhedral crush zones, secure in its exemption from accident.

“Fucking Jews,” the driver glaring, “people drive like fucking animals.”

“But… animals can’t drive,” soothes Maxine, “and actually… would Jesus talk like that?”

“Jesus would love it if every Jew got nuked,” the driver explains.

“Oh. But,” she somehow can’t help pointing out, “wasn’t… he Jewish himself?”

“Don’t give me that shit, lady.” He points to a full-color print of his Redeemer clipped to the sun visor. “That look like any Jew you ever saw? Check out his feet—sandals? right? Everybody knows Jews don’t wear sandals, they wear loafers. Honey, you must be from way out of town.”

You know, she almost replies, I must be.

“You’re my last fare of the day.” In a tone so strange now that Maxine’s warning lights begin to blink. She glances at the time on the backseat video display. It is far from the end of any known shift.

“I’ve been that rough on you?” Hopefully playful.

“I have to begin the process. I keep putting it off, but I’m out of time, today’s the day. We don’t just get scooped up like fish in a net, we know it’s coming, we have to prepare.”

All thoughts of insult tips or end-of-ride lectures have evaporated. If she arrives safely, it’s worth… what? Double the fare at least.

“Actually, I need to walk a couple blocks, why don’t you let me off here?” He’s more than happy to and before the door’s fully shut has peeled away around a corner eastbound and on to some destiny she doesn’t need to think about.

Maxine is no stranger to the Upper East Side, though it still makes her uncomfortable. As a kid she went to Julia Richman High—well, she could’ve been on the natch once or twice—over on East 67th, rode crosstown buses five days a week, never got used to it. Deep hairband country. Visiting over here is always like stepping into a planned midgets’ community, everything scaled down, blocks shorter, avenues less time to walk across, you expect any minute to be approached by a tiny official greeter going, “As mayor of the Munch-kin City…”

The Ice residence, on the other hand, is the sort of place about which real-estate agents tend to start cooing, “It’s huge!” To put it another way, fucking enormous. Two whole floors, possibly three, it’s unclear though Maxine understands she isn’t about to qualify for a tour. She enters through a public area, used for parties, musicales, fund-raisers &c. Central air-conditioning is set on high, which as the day is developing couldn’t hurt. Further in, some respectable fraction of a mile, she glimpses an elevator to someplace undoubtedly more private.

The rooms she’s allowed to pass through lack character. Celadon walls on which are hung assorted expensive works of art—she recognizes an early Matisse, fails to recognize a number of abstract expressionists, maybe there’s a Cy Twombley or two—not coherently enough to suggest the passions of a collector, more like the need of an acquirer to exhibit them. The Musée Picasso, the Guggenheim in Venice, it ain’t. There is a Bösendorfer Imperial in the corner, at which generations of hired piano players have provided hours of Kander & Ebb, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber medleys while Gabe and Tallis and assorted henchfolks work the room, gently thinning the checkbooks of East Side aristos on behalf of various causes, many of them trivial by West Side standards.

“My office,” announces Tallis. A vintage George Nelson desk but also one of his Omar the Owl wall clocks. Uh-oh. Cute Alert.

Tallis has perfected the soap-opera trick of managing through all the daylight hours to look turned out for evening activities. High-end makeup, hair in a tousled bob with every strand expensively disarranged, taking its time, whenever she gestures with her head, to slide back into its artful confusion. Black silk slacks and a matching top unbuttoned halfway down, which Maxine thinks she recognizes from the Narciso Rodríguez spring collection, Italian shoes that only once a year are found on sale at prices humans can afford—some humans—emerald earrings weighing in at a half carat each, Hermès watch, Art Deco ring of Golconda diamonds which every time she passes through the sunlight coming in the window flares into a nearly blinding white, like a superheroine’s magical flashbang for discombobulating the bad guys. Who, it will occur to Maxine more than once during their tête-à-tête, maybe includes herself.

A downstairs maid of some kind brings a pitcher of iced tea and a bowl of root-vegetable chips of different colors including indigo.

“I love him forever, but Gabe is a weird guy, I’ve known it since we first started dating,” Tallis in one of these small, sub-Chipmunk voices fatally charming to certain kinds of men. “He had all these, not creepy, but to me, unusual expectations? We were only kids, but I could see the potential, I told myself, honey, get with the program, this could be the perfect wave, and it’s been… the worst it’s been is educational?”

Me, I want a hula hoop.

Tallis and Gabriel met at Carnegie Mellon back in the golden age of the computer-science department there. Gabe’s roommate Dieter was majoring in bagpipes, which CMU happened to offer a degree in, and even though the kid was allowed only a practice chanter in the dorms, the sound was enough to drive Gabe out to the computer cluster, which still wasn’t far enough. Soon he was out gazing at student-lounge television screens or using the facilities at other dorms, including Tallis’s, where he quickly slipped into a tubelit clustergeek existence, often unsure if he was awake or dreaming in REM, which might have accounted for his early conversations with Tallis, which she remembers nowadays as “unusual.” She was his dream girl, literally. Her image became conflated with those of Heather Locklear, Linda Evans, and Morgan Fairchild, among others. She went around anxious about what might happen if he ever got a good night’s sleep and saw her, the real Tallis, without the tubal overlay.

“So?” with a look.

“So what am I complaining about, I know, exactly what my mother used to say. When we were talking.”

One concept of raising a topic, Maxine supposes. “Your mom and me, we’re neighbors, it turns out.”

“Are you a follower?”

“Not too much, in high school they even thought I had leadership potential.”

“I meant a follower of my mother’s Weblog? Tabloid of the Damned? Not a day passes without her flaming us, Gabe and me, our company, hashslingrz, she’s been on our case forever. Obvious mother-in-law trip. Lately she’s throwing around these wild accusations, massive diversions, a covert U.S. foreign-policy scam, of money overseas bigger than Iran/contra back in the eighties. According to my mother.”

“I take it she and your husband don’t get along.”

“No more than she and I do. We basically hate each other, it’s no secret.”

The estrangement from March and her father Sid apparently began Tallis’s junior year. “Spring break they wanted us off on some horror vacation to witness them screaming, which there was enough of already at home, so Gabe and I went to Miami instead, and apparently there was some footage of me topless that found its way on to MTV, tastefully pixelated and all, but it just got worse from there. And they got so busy fucking with each other’s brain, by the time that was sorted out, Gabe and I were married and it was all too late.”

Maxine keeps wanting to mention that she doesn’t put into family dynamics, even if this is what March has her over here doing. But miles across the parquetry between them, some inertia of resentment is carrying Tallis along. “Anything bad she can find to say about hashslingrz, she’ll post it.”

But wait. Did Maxine just hear one of those implicit “buts”? She waits. “But,” Tallis adds (no, no, is she going to—Aahhh! yes look she’s actually putting her fingernail in her mouth here, ooh, ooh), “it doesn’t mean she’s wrong. About the money.”

“Who does your auditing, Mrs. Ice?”

“Tallis, please. That’s part of… the problem? We use D. S. Mills down on Pearl Street. Like, they actually do wear white shoes and stuff? But do I trust them? mmmh…?”

“Far as I know, Tallis, they’re kosher. Or whatever WASPs have for that. The book on these guys is the SEC loves them, maybe not enough to be the mother of its children, but enough. I can’t see what problem they could be giving you.”

“Suppose something’s going on that they’re not catching?”

Suppressing the urge to scream “Al-vinnn?” Maxine gently inquires, “Which… would be…?”

“Ooh, I dunno… something weird about the disbursements after the last round? Considering the prime directive in this business is always be nice to your VCs?”

“And somebody at your company is being… mean to its?”

“The money is supposed to be earmarked for infrastructure, which since all that… second-quarter trouble last year has been going dirt cheap… Servers, miles of dark fiber, bandwidth there for the grabbing.” Seeming to ditz over the technical stuff. Or is it something else? Just a skip, like you get from a blemish on a disc, nothing you’d ordinarily notice. “I’m supposed to be the comptroller, but when I bring any of it up with Gabe, he gets evasive. I’m beginning to feel like the babe in the window.” Out with the lower lip.

“But… how do I put this tactfully… you and your husband have certainly had a grown-up chat, maybe even two, on this subject?”

A mischievous look, a hair toss. Shirley Temple should take notes. “Maybe. Would it be a problem if we didn’t?” Did she say “pwobwem”? “I mean…” An interesting half a beat. “Until I know something for sure, I figure why bother him?”

“Unless he’s in it up to his eyeballs himself, of course.”

A quick inhale, as if just occurring to her, “Well… suppose you, or a colleague you might recommend, could look into it?”

Aha. “I hate matrimonials. Tallis. Sooner or later a firearm comes out. And this here, I can smell it, could turn matrimonial faster than you can say, ‘But Ricky, it’s only a hat.’”

“I’d be very appreciative.”

“Uh huh, I’d still have to bring in your auditors.”

“Couldn’t you—” With the fingernail.

“It’s a professional thing.” Feeling all at once, in this obscenely overpriced interior, like so totally a sucker. Is Maxine slowing down? OK, maybe she can invoice this virtual bimbo any fee she wants to, the price of a high-ticket vacation far, far away, but not till later, deep in the winter months, as she relaxes on a tropical beach, will the rum concoction in her tall frosted glass suddenly curdle in her hand, as crashing in on her, too late, there arrives a freak wave of understanding.

Nothing in this fateful moment is what it seems. This woman here, despite her M.B.A., ordinarily a sure sign of idiocy, is playing you, smart-ass, and you need to be out of this place as quick as possible. A theatrically stressed glance at her G-shock Mini, “Whoa, lunch with a client, Smith & Wollensky, meat intake for the month, call you soon. If I see your mom, should I say hi?”

“‘Drop dead’ might be better.”

Not too graceful a retreat. Given Maxine’s lack of success, and the likelihood that Tallis’s coolness will continue, she is stuck with telling March the unedited truth. That’s assuming she can get a word in, because March, now under the impression that Maxine is some kind of guru in these matters, has begun another commencement speech, this time about Tallis.

A few years back, one bleak winter afternoon, on the way home from the Pioneer Market on Columbus, some faceless yuppie shoved past March saying “Excuse me,” which in New York translates to “Get the fuck outta my way,” and which turned out finally to be once too often. March dropped the bags she was carrying in the filthy slush on the street, gave them a good kick, and screamed as loud as she could, “I hate this miserable shithole of a city!” Nobody seemed to take notice, though the bags and their strewn contents were gone in seconds. The only reaction was from a passerby who paused to remark, “So? you don’t like it, why don’t you go live someplace else?”

“Interesting question,” she recalls to Maxine now, “though how long did I really need to think about it? Because Tallis is here, is why, there it begins and ends and what else is new.”

“With the two boys,” Maxine nods, “it’s different, but sometimes I’ll sit and fantasize, what it would’ve been like, a girl.”

“So? go have one, you’re still just a kid.”

“Yeah, problem is, so is Horst and everybody I’ve dated since.”

“Oh, you should have seen my ex. Sidney. Disturbed adolescents from around the country would show up on pilgrimages just to inhale his secondhand smoke and stay calibrated.”

“He’s still…”

“Still kicking. He ever passes, it’s gonna be such a rude surprise for him.”

“You’re in touch?”

“More than I would like, he lives out on the Canarsie line with some 12-year-old named Sequin.”

“He gets to sees Tallis?”

“I think there’s a restraining order dating back a couple years from when Sid started hanging around in the street under their window with a tenor sax and playing this old rock ’n’ roll she used to like, and of course Ice put the kibosh on that quick enough.”

“One tries not to wish anyone ill, but this Ice person, really…”

“She goes along with it. You never want to see kids repeat your own mistakes. So what happens, Tallis goes ahead just like me and marries the wrong promising entrepreneur. The worst you can say for Sid is he couldn’t handle the stress of being around me all the time. Ice on the other hand appreciates stress, the more the better, so naturally Tallis, my perverse child, goes out of her way not to give him any. And he pretends he loves it. He’s evil.”

“So,” carefully, “job title at hashslingrz and so forth aside, how duked in would you say she is?”

“On what? Company secrets? She’s not whistle-blower material, if that’s what you’re hoping.”

“Not disgruntled enough, you mean.”

“She could be going around in a fit of rage 24/7, what difference would it make? Their prenup has more riders on it than the subway. Ice fucking owns her.”

“I was only there for maybe an hour, but I got this feeling. Like an agenda she may not be sharing with the wunderkind.”

“Like what?” A hopeful gleam. “A person.”

“We were only talking fraud… but… you think there could be a BF in the picture also?”

“Certain chapters of history would suggest. Tell you, frankly, it wouldn’t break her mother’s heart.”

“Wish I had better news for you.”

“So I’ll go on taking what I can get, my grandson Kennedy, I’ve got a graft in with the baby-sitter, Ofelia, she finds us a minute or two alone now and then. What else can I do but keep an eye on him, make sure they don’t fuck him up too bad.” Looks at her watch. “You got a minute?”

They proceed to the corner of 78th and Broadway. “Please don’t tell anybody.”

“We’re waiting for your dealer, what?”

“For Kennedy. They’re sending him to Collegiate. Where fuckin else. They want him seamlessly programmed on into Harvard, law school, Wall Street, the usual Manhattan death march. Well. Not if his grandma can help it.”

“I bet he’s crazy about you. Supposed to be the second-strongest human bond there is.”

“Sure, ’cause you both hate the same people.”

“Ooh.”

“OK, maybe exaggerating, I do hate Tallis of course, but I also love her now and then.”

Down the block in front of the ruling-class polytechnic, small boys in shirts and ties have begun to mill around. Maxine spots Kennedy right away, you don’t have to be clairvoyant. Blond, curly-headed, an apprentice heartbreaker, he backs gracefully away from a knot of boys, waves, turns and comes at a dead run up the block and into March’s embrace.

“Hey, kid. Tough day?”

“They’re making me crazy, Grandma.”

“Course they are, semester break’s almost here, they’re just getting in a couple more late hits.”

“Somebody up the block waving at you,” Maxine sez.

“Damn, it’s Ofelia already? The car must be early. Well, my good lad, it’s been short but meaningful. Oh and here, I almost forgot.” Handing over two or three Pokémon cards.

“Gengar! Japanese Psyduck?”

“These I’m told you can only get out of machines in selected arcades in Tokyo. I may have a connection, stay tuned.”

“Awesome, Grandma, thank you.” Another hug and he’s off. Watching him run to where Ofelia is now waiting, March goes a little telephoto with her gaze. “That happy Ice couple, I’m tellin ya, either they’re still not on to me or they’re doin a great impression of stupid. Either way somebody’s told Gunther to get here sooner.”

“Nice kid, there, for a Pokémaniac.”

“I can only pray Tallis didn’t get any neat-freak DNA from Sid’s mother. Sid is still brooding about all his baseball cards that she threw out forty years ago.”

“Horst’s mother too. What was with that generation?”

“Never happen today, not with the handle these yups have on the collectibles market. Still, I buy two of everything, just to be safe.”

“You’re gonna get Grandma of the Year, you don’t watch out.”

“Hey,” March determined to be a tough guy, “Pokémon, what do I know? some West Indian proctologist, right?”

HORST CAN’T FIND the ice-cream flavor he really needs today and is showing signs of gathering impatience, alarming in one usually so stolid.

“Chocolate Peanut-Butter Cookie Dough? Hasn’t been any of that around for years, Horst.” Aware that she sounds exactly like the acid-tongued spoiler she has labored all these years not to be, at least not sound like.

“I can’t explain it. It’s like Chinese medicine. Yang deficiency. Yin? One of them.”

“Meaning…”

“I would not want to freak out in front of the boys.”

“Oh, but in front of me, no problem.”

“How do I begin with someone at your level of food education? Aaahhh! Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookie Dough. See what I’m saying?”

Maxine takes the cordless phone and uses it for half of a time-out sign. “Just going to dial 911 here, OK sweetie? Except of course, that, given all your priors…”

How serious a domestic incident this is shaping up to be no one will ever know, because just then Rigoberto buzzes up from the lobby. “Marvin’s here?”

Before she can hang up the intercom, he’s at the door. Ganjaportation, no doubt. “Again, Marvin.”

“Day and night out there bringin the people what they need.” From the soon-to-be-vintage kozmo bag he produces two quarts of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookie Dough ice cream.

“They discontinued this back in ’97,” Maxine less in wonder than annoyance.

“That’s only the business page talkin, Mahxine. This is desire.”

Horst, already gobbling ice cream with spoons in both hands, nods enthusiastically.

“Oh and this too, this is for you.” Handing over a videocassette in a box.

“Scream, Blacula, Scream? We already have a good depth of copy in the house, including the director’s cut.”

“Dahlin, I only deliver em.”

“You have a number I can call you at in case I want to forward this on someplace else?”

“Not how it works. I come to you.”

Off he glides into the summer evening.