Emperor of Ocean Park

CHAPTER 38

Tuesday is trash day. I drag the cans down to the curb underneath a wrathful sky, then take a short jog along Hobby Road, which is all my body can bear: three blocks west, which takes me toward the campus, three blocks back, then three blocks the other way, which takes me to the edge of the Italian working-class neighborhood that borders Hobby Hill, and then, just as the cold winter rain begins to spatter, three blocks home. Twelve blocks total, probably less than a mile.

I have slept poorly during the week since my conversation with the diminutive Ethan Brinkley. I know what has to be done next, but I am loath to do it. And not only because my wife is all but begging me to stop. The truth is, I am afraid of learning anything else about my father. I have discovered that the Judge paid somebody to do murder, and hiring a killer is a capital offense in most of the United States. The rest can amount to no more than variations on a theme.

For several seconds, I try very hard to hate my father, but I lack the capacity.

Instead, I run harder. My muscles, considerably out of shape, set fire to my tendons in protest, but I press on. Nice and easy, nothing too strenuous, but keep moving, keep moving, you can run for miles if you just forget to stop! I pass my house again, cozy and warm, and temptation yawns before me, but I decide to run on. The air is crisp, good jogging weather, with little hints of distant spring on every breeze. I run and I think.

A sedan-not green and muddy like the one in Dupont Circle, not a Porsche like the one John Brown and I saw behind the house-zips through a puddle and sprays me with dirty water. I hardly notice. I am reviewing my colleagues in my mind, face by face, the kind ones and the haughty ones, the bright ones and the dim ones, the ones who respect me and the ones who despise me, trying, with no success, to figure out who among them might have betrayed me-if you call it betrayal when the only obligation broken is the obligation of humanity. For someone around the building seems to be keeping a close eye on me, knowing when I am off to the soup kitchen and when I am heading for the chess club. Who is the unseen enemy? An ambitious youngster on the rise, like Ethan Brinkley? A member of the old guard, like Theo Mountain or Arnie Rosen? Why not Marc Hadley, my wife’s rival? We were friends once, but that has been a while. Or the great Stuart Land, who thinks he still runs the law school? Goodness knows what fantastic calculations are masked by his plastic smile. Must the spy be male? Dean Lynda seems to have taken a powerful dislike to me. .. although I have made it easy for her. Must the spy be white? The distant Lem Carlyle, in the best Barbadian tradition, keeps his true opinions to himself… and he has been evasive around me lately. But guesswork will solve nothing. My wife spent the entire weekend in San Francisco: the deal, she says, is coming to a crucial point. I spent the entire weekend with my son. I did no work of any description, just cared for my boy. When a weary Kimmer returned yesterday afternoon, she sat in the kitchen sipping Chardonnay while I tried to talk to her about the events of the past week, but she cut me off: Please, not now, Misha, I have a headache. Smiling at her own witticism to hide the basic truth that she is tired of listening to me on this theme. Instead of hearing me out, Kimmer walked around the counter and kissed me for a while to shut me up, then rummaged in her bag and handed me my latest second-place trophy, a goldrimmed quartz desk clock, signaling me that her latest transgression was huge. I thanked her unhappily and hurried out the door, rushing to make an evening lecture by a law school classmate who now teaches at Emory, where she has become the nation’s leading expert-possibly, the nation’s only expert-on the Third Amendment. I returned home three hours later to discover that Kimmer, despite her exhaustion, had waited up for me, and we made the hopeless, passionate love of clandestine paramours who might never see each other again. Later on, just before falling asleep, my wife told me she was sorry, but she never said for what.

My lungs are signaling that they have had enough. Running more slowly now, I cut through a side street four blocks from my house. This route takes me past the sprawling campus of Hilltop, the stuffiest of the city’s several private elementary schools, and I remind myself that just about a year from now we will be making an appointment so that Bentley can have his interview. To see if he is good enough for the Hilltop kindergarten. Interview. At all of four years old! I jog onward, not quite believing that we are going to put our little boy through this nonsense. Once upon a time, all the university kids got in, but that was before rising costs, and their eternal partners, tuition hikes, forced Hilltop to go in search of the children of the region’s commercial class. Last year the school rejected the youngest of my colleague Betsy Gucciardini’s three shy daughters, and for the next month Betsy wore her frustration and despair like twin veils of mourning, seeming to equate failure to gain a place at Hilltop with the end of her child’s productive life. I wonder, not for the first time, what has happened to America, and then I remember that my old buddy Eddie Dozier, Dana’s ex, is about to publish a book advocating the abolition of the public schools and rebates of all the tax dollars that support them. The market, he assures us, will provide a plentiful supply of private replacements. So every child in America can have an interview before starting kindergarten. Swell.

“Focus on what matters,” I wheeze, slowing finally to a walk.

By the time I stumble through the door, it is past seven. Kimmer has bacon and eggs ready-usually my job-and she even kisses me lightly on the lips. She is so sweet that the last few months might never have happened. She apologizes: not for refusing to listen to me last night, but for the fact that she has to go to the office this morning. She hoped to work from home today, but too many things have come up. I smile and shrug and tell my wife I understand. I do not tell her that I am wounded. I do not tell her how sure I am that the main thing that has come up is that I told her that I might work from home, too, so we could spend the day together.

Instead, I smile.

“What are you so happy about?” Kimmer asks, her arm surprisingly around my waist. In response, I kiss her forehead. There is no safe answer to her question, even though there are many true ones. I realize that I have finally bested the Judge: I am his equal at hiding my feelings, and his superior in pretending to be delighted when I am miserable.

Over breakfast, we leaf through our two daily newspapers, the New York Times and the Elm Harbor Clarion, each of us, for very different reasons, searching for articles about my father. I am deep inside the Clarion sports page, mulling over the latest injuries to players on the university’s hapless basketball team, when I decide that the time has come to tell my wife the one last thing I must do. I do not expect her to like it.

I fold the newspaper carefully and look at her exquisite face, the bright brown eyes intense behind her glasses, the lines of middle age deepening above her cheeks with every passing month. Her mouth is drawn up in a little bow. I know she knows I am watching her.

“Kimmer, darling,” I begin.

She flicks her gaze at me, then drops it once more to the Times editorial page. “Wanna hear a funny op-ed about the President’s tax plan?”

“No, thanks.”

“It’s really clever, though.”

“No, Kimmer. I mean, not just now. We need to talk.”

Eyes rolling in my direction, rolling back to the paper. “Is it important? Can it wait?”

“Yes. And, no, I don’t think so.”

My wife, looking splendid as always in a robe, glances up and blows me a kiss. “You’ve found her? Your nzinga from the ferry?”

At first I am nonplussed, thinking that she has somehow discovered my tete-a-tete with Maxine on the Vineyard, but then I see that she is only joking, or maybe hoping.

“Nothing that interesting.”

“Too bad.”

“No, not too bad. I love you, Kimmer.”

“Yeah, but only because you’re a glutton for punishment.”

Smiling as she says it, putting me off, not wanting to hear what I am going to say. But I have to make my point and, seeing no way to sugarcoat it, I decide to say it right out.

“Kimmer, I have to go see Jack Ziegler.”

The paper closes with a snap. I have all of her attention. When my wife speaks, her voice is dangerously low. “Oh, no, you don’t.”

“I do.”

“You don’t. ”

“I would just call him,” I propose, pretending that our disagreement is on a slightly different subject, “but he doesn’t really talk on the telephone much.”

“Fear of wiretaps, no doubt.”

“Probably.”

Kimmer’s gaze is unwavering. “Misha, honey, I love you, and I also trust you, but, in case you’ve forgotten, I am being considered for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals. If my hubby traipses off to visit a Jack Ziegler, it is not going to do my chances any good.”

“Nobody has to know,” I say, but I am reaching.

“I think a whole lot of people would know, and most of them happen to work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

I have considered this, of course. “I would clear it with Uncle Mal first.”

“Oh, goody. Then he can tell everybody else in Washington.”

“Kimmer, please. You know what’s been going on. Some of it. As much as you’ve let me tell you.” Her eyes widen at that one, but I cannot stop now. “I’ve learned a lot of… of ugly things about my father in the past few weeks. Now I have to know if they are as ugly as I think they are. And I think Jack Ziegler knows.”

“If the facts are ugly, there’s no question that Jack Ziegler knows them.”

“Well, that’s why I have to go. People will understand.”

“People will not understand.”

“I have to know what’s going on.” But I think of Morris Young and the story of Noah and wonder if I am mistaken.

“I don’t think there is anything going on, Misha. Not like what you seem to think, anyway.”

“You’re probably right, darling, but…”

“If you talk to him, there is going to be more trouble. You know there is.” She does not say from whom, so I suppose it could be a threat.

“Kimmer, come on.” My tone is gentle. I am concerned that Kimmer will start shouting, as she sometimes does, and wake Bentley. Or the neighbors. Neither of which would be a first. “Come on,” I say again, still softly, hoping Kimmer will be soft in reply.

“You’re the one who always says Jack Ziegler is a monster.” Her tone is indeed soft, but more in hiss than compromise.

“I know, but-”

“He’s a murderer, Msha.”

“Well, he was never convicted of murder.” She has me sounding like one of Uncle Jack’s countless lawyers now, and I don’t much like it. “Other crimes, but not murder.”

“Except he killed his wife, right?”

“Well, there were rumors.” I try to remember the way the Judge answered that one before the Judiciary Committee, for it was that single question from Senator Biden, and my father’s unhelpful response, that cost him more than any other. I don’t judge my friends based on rumors, my father said-something like that. And he folded his arms across his chest in a gesture that even the most incompetent public relations coach could have warned him never, ever, to make on national television. Although understandably angry at what he considered an unfair line of inquiry, my father came off as haughty and disdainful. One columnist wrote that Judge Garland seemed to be dismissing a man’s possible murder of his wife as a triviality-a ridiculous assertion, but one my father invited by losing his temper before tens of millions of viewers. I knew, at that horrible televised instant, that the fight was lost; that, no matter how the Judge might duck and weave, his opponents had backed him into the corner of the ring; that the knockout punch would, at any moment, come flashing into his vision, just before it laid him flat. And I felt a rampant anger, not at the Senate or at the press, but at my father: How could he be so stupid? There were about six thousand possible answers to Biden’s perfectly reasonable question, and the Judge picked the worst of them. Yet now, under Kimmer’s cross-examination, I find myself following my father’s lead.

“But he was never indicted, darling. He was never even arrested. As far as I know, what happened to his wife was an accident.” Almost letter-perfect, I am sure: exactly what the Judge said to Senator Biden. Except for the darling.

“She fell off her horse after twenty years of riding and broke her neck by accident?”

“It’s not a very good way to murder somebody,” I point out. “You could fall off and walk away with a few scratches and live to tell everybody who pushed you.”

Kimmer gives me a look. “You’re joking, right?”

“No, I’m serious. I’m saying we don’t know exactly what happened to Jack Ziegler’s wife, but murder doesn’t seem very likely. Am I supposed to hang him on rumors?”

Oh, I hate this side of myself, I truly do, the same way I hated this side of the Judge, but I cannot seem to stop.

“Rumors!”

“Well, since he was never charged…”

“Oh, Misha, listen to yourself. I mean, how legalistic can you get?” You sound just like your father, she is saying. Which is true.

“It’s just a visit, Kimmer. One hour, maybe thirty minutes.”

“He’s a nut, Misha. A dangerous nut. I don’t want us to have anything to do with him.” Her voice is growing louder, and a clear edge of hysteria is creeping in.

“Kimmer, come on. Look at the facts. Freeman Bishop is dead-”

“The police say it was drugs-”

“And Colin Scott impersonated an FBI agent to get information on the Judge, and now he’s dead-”

“It was an accident!” So much for soft.

“An accident while he was following me. Following us.”

“Well, it was still an accident. He got drunk and he drowned and he’s dead now, okay? So you can drop it.”

“And you don’t think we should be a little bit worried?”

The wrong thing to say. Absolutely wrong. I know it at once. I feel like a chess player who has just advanced his knight, only to notice, an instant too late, that his queen is about to fall.

“No, Misha. No, I’m not worried. Why should I be worried? Because I’m married to a man who has gone off the deep end? Whose sister has turned into some kind of… of conspiracy theorist? A man who now thinks that the solution to all his problems lies in flying up to Aspen to drop in on a thug who murdered his wife? Inviting that thug into our life? No, Misha, no, I am most certainly not worried. There is nothing to be worried about.”

I try to mollify her. “Kimmer, please. The Judge was my father.”

“And I’m your wife! Remember?” She is holding on to the sides of the doorway as though worried that her anger might blow her away.

“Yes, but-”

“Yes, but! You’re the one who always talks about loyalty. Well, be loyal to me for once! I don’t mean loyal like never even looking hard at another woman so you can feel holier than thou. Than me. I mean loyal like you’re doing something for me. Something that makes a difference.”

“I’ve done plenty for you,” I tell her in the calmest tone I can manage. I like to think I have developed an immunity to my wife’s taunts, but her words sting.

“The stuff you do for me is the stuff you want, not the stuff I want.”

I am trying to remember how close I felt to Kimmer last night as I held her in my arms, stroking her back, listening to her apologize before she fell asleep.

Last night. Last year. Last decade. All equally vanished.

“Kimmer, if-”

“And it’s not like I’ve never done anything for you!”

As my wife’s eyes continue to flame, I am astonished by her passion, magnified in the cramped space of the kitchen. Standing there in her bathrobe, her Afro awry, Kimmer remains the most desirable woman I have ever known, yet I have the eerie sense that if I make a move she doesn’t like she will knock me down. This fury has been percolating ever since my return from the Vineyard. Despite the news about Marc Hadley, Kimmer seems to think her chances of appointment are slipping away. I do not know exactly why she believes this; I do know she blames me for it. As she blames me for much else. I have heard the litany a hundred times, a hundred different tales about how Talcott Garland ruined her life. How she married me to please her parents when there were far more exciting men interested in her. How she left her lively practice with one of Washington’s most prestigious firms to follow me to this deadly-dull New England town. How most of our acquaintances (we have few friends here, Kimmer will note accusingly) are university types who look down their noses at her because she isn’t one of them. How she easily earned a partnership at an unimportant law firm that nobody has ever heard of. How she had a baby to make her husband happy without really thinking about what she was getting into and is now stuck in a bad marriage because of it. How her life ever since has been a slow race between boredom and insanity. Kimmer made all the choices. But I take all the blame.

“I’m sorry,” I say, raising my hands to make peace.

“Misha, please. For my sake. For the sake of our marriage. Our son. Promise me you will not invite that man into our life. That you won’t visit him. Or call him.”

And I discern something else, a version of the same screechy timbre I detected in Jack Ziegler’s voice in the cemetery, as unexpected now as it was then: Kimmer is afraid. Not the physical fear of the soul for its fleeting mortal life, nor the desperate protectiveness of mother for child. No, this is her career fear. She is at the edge of what she has always wanted, and does not want Uncle Jack to spoil it for her-and how can I blame her?

I decide that there is no good reason to feed her fear. Not just now.

“Okay, darling. Okay. I’ll stay away from Uncle Jack. I won’t do anything to… to cause embarrassment. But… well…”

“You’re not going to give up looking. Is that what you were going to say?”

“You have to understand, darling.”

“Oh, I do, I do.” Her smile is warm again. She comes around the counter and hugs me from behind. We have returned to last night’s intimacy, just like that. “But no Jack Ziegler.”

“No Jack Ziegler.”

“Thanks, honey.” Kissing me again, grinning. She hops up to clear the table. I tell her I will do it. She does not object. We talk as though we have no conflict. We have grown quite skillful at pretending that there are no issues between us. So we talk of other things. We decide not to drag Bentley off to his Montessori school today. We will let him sleep late, for once, since I will be at home anyway. She reminds me that we are due for dinner tomorrow night at the home of one of her partners and asks me to confirm the sitter, a Japanese American teen from the next block who enthralls Bentley by playing her flute. I ask her in return if she will swing by the post office on the way in, to drop off two postal chess cards that I finished last night, both of which must be postmarked today. (Each player has three days per move.) When we have completed all the complex negotiations of a typical morning in a two-career family, Kimmer disappears to dress for work. She is back twenty minutes later in a dark chalk-striped suit and blue silk blouse, kisses me again, this time on the cheek, and is off, leaving, as always, promptly at eight-fifteen.

I watch through the bay window in the living room as the gleaming white BMW hurries off along Hobby Road, swallowed almost at once in the sheets of rain. I put both hands in front of me and lean on the glass. Woody Allen once wrote something, tongue firmly in cheek, about loving the rain because it washes memories away, but I still remember the photograph of Freeman Bishop’s bloody hand. I still remember the face of Special Agent McDermott glaring at me from the pages of the Vineyard Gazette. I see him on a boat with his buddy Foreman, and some disagreement, and McDermott/Scott tossed overboard. I see my father, arguing with a cautious Colin Scott a quarter-century ago, trying to convince him to kill the man who killed his daughter.

Yet, in the fresh light of day, even a day as rainy as this one, the images are a lot less scary. Not as scary, for instance, as the thought that one day my wife will drive off down Hobby Road and decide to keep on going.

Gazing out at the empty street, I remember, from a long-ago college course, a snippet from Tadeusz Rozewicz, something about a poet being someone who tries to leave and is unable to leave.

That is my wife: Kimmer the poet. Only nowadays she keeps all the best lines to herself.

Or shares them with somebody else.