Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (57 page)

When I first came upon Bernie Schleifer, C.P.A., at a party in late September, he was manically extolling to a fellow guest the merits of a particularly bizarre tax shelter. The scheme itself seemed well outside the law as I understood it, but Bernie’s attitude and ingenuity struck me immediately as just right for my needs. Furthermore, he was good-humored and likable, and I always assume that people like that will do better for you in tax audits — and tax audits would be an inevitable feature of any financial identity worth establishing. Also, I could see right off that Bernie was not a stickler for rules, which was an absolute requirement in my situation. In fact he is about as easy-going, when it comes to rules, as you can be without winding up in prison. It is true that Bernie wears a great deal of jewelry and drenches himself with a deplorable cologne, but as I only talk to him by telephone, these faults do not concern me.

“Hello, Bernie? My name is Jonathan Crosby. You may not remember, but I met you a couple of months ago at a party — it might have been given by someone named Selvaggio — does that ring a bell? Anyway, I remember being intrigued by a tax shelter opportunity you were describing that involved erecting windmills on historical buildings for some sort of double investment tax credit—”

“Oh sure, Jonathan, I remember now. How are you, anyway? I’m glad you called! We’re not doing that particular deal anymore, for technical reasons, but I have something I think might really interest you. This is being syndicated by—”

“Actually, Bernie, I’m not so much looking for shelters. What I really want is someone who can handle all my personal bookkeeping and records and do my taxes.”

“O.K., Jonathan, let’s
do
it! When can we get together and go over everything? How about Friday?”

“Actually, Bernie, we can probably handle everything over the phone right now. That way I wouldn’t waste too much of your time. Basically, I’ve just moved to New York this year. I’ve been living with my family in Switzerland and different places—”

“Tell me, Jonathan, are you a U.S. taxpayer?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, Jonathan.” He said it as if I had told him I had leukemia. “Still, we may be able to work around it. How much of the year would you have to say you were here, if someone asked you?”

“I plan to be resident here pretty much permanently. And I am a U.S. citizen.”

“Well, maybe we should approach this from another angle, Jonathan. Can you send me copies of your returns for the last two years? That’ll give me an overall picture. By the way, are you keeping a diary of your expenses?”

“No, I’m not. I—”

“Well, that’s not so important. You can always take care of that afterward, if you’re audited, but I’ll need the back returns.”

“This will be my first return.”

“Great! That’ll give us a lot more flexibility. And you might be able to let the state returns slide for a while as long—”

“Actually, Bernie. All I’ve got here is some short-term capital gains. Under a hundred thousand for the year. And I’m not employed. In fact, I don’t think there should even be a Schedule C.”

“Don’t worry, Jonathan. You’ll have a Schedule C. We’ll find something. And there’s still plenty of time to get you into some shelters. I have—”

“Bernie, let me just give you a little background on my situation. My family all live in Switzerland, and they have some fairly substantial assets outside the country, and I think some of those assets may actually be mine, or intended for me or something. Maybe they’re in trust. I’m sure it’s all perfectly all right, but still, I’d rather not do anything that would get the
IRS
interested in me or my family — especially not just to save a few dollars. I’d rather do everything according to the rules and not attract any attention.”

“I get you, Jonathan. On the stuff out front you want to pay every penny you owe — go strictly by the book. There are situations where that’s a really smart strategy, although it can be pretty costly. But it could work. Let me just make a note of that one. But one thing you’re sure right about is offshore assets. We have a number of foreign clients in the office, and we’re very familiar with these problems.”

I had made a visit to his office, and I knew that he did in fact have a number of foreign clients, some of them surprisingly respectable.

“That’s great, Bernie. Do you mind my asking what your fees will be?”

“Jonathan, of course not! I only bill you for the time I actually put in. It’s a hundred dollars an hour, which is pretty standard.”

Having seen Bernie’s billing, I knew that it was not standard for Bernie, anyway. At $100 an hour, I would be his best client, but, under the circumstances, that would be an excellent thing for both of us.

“That sounds very reasonable, Bernie. You know, I’m kind of busy with a lot of different personal things and traveling a lot, and I think I’d like to have your office just handle all my financial stuff for me. I’m going to have all my brokerage statements sent to your office, if that’s all right.”

At $100 an hour, it would presumably be all right. I gave him Willy Winslow’s name and number and told him to expect a call. Then I called Willy and told him to call Bernie and to change the mailing address on my account.

I waited a few days to be sure that Bernie and Willy had chatted about me and then called back.

“Jonathan, baby! I’m glad you called! I’ve been going over your account with your broker, what’s his name, and you know, you’ve been having a pretty good year.”

“I’ve been quite lucky.”

“We’ve got to get you into some shelters right away! The end of the year is coming up, and you’re going to be paying fifty cents on the dollar in taxes. It’s like throwing money out the window! I want to send you something I’ve worked up that could be just the thing for you. It’s a newsletter start-up. Basically, you’ve got the thing on an accrual basis and you treat the unused portion of each subscription as a liability, so no matter how fast income increases, the liabilities have to increase faster, and it all passes straight through to the limiteds. The one I’d like to put you into is an economic forecasting letter — it’s very good. I have this guy I work with out on Long Island who writes them—”

“Bernie, it sounds very interesting, but I don’t think I’d really want to invest in an economic forecasting newsletter.”

“He’s also about to start putting out one on fly-fishing in—”

“Bernie, I really don’t—”

“And I have another thing here — this isn’t for everyone, but it’s an attractive deal — soft-core video production. This is very different from what you’re used to seeing here in New York. This stuff is produced for the midwestern market. You don’t actually see any genitals. More tasteful, and I’ll tell you, it’s still surprisingly good. I mean, you look at these movies, and who wants to see some guy’s schlong projected on a screen eleven feet long? In a way, it’s almost better not to—”

“Bernie, I think we’re in agreement on that. But the reason I called is that it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t paid you any retainer. Do you think two thousand dollars would be fair?”

“You know, Jonathan, that might be a good idea, come to think of it.”

“Well, then it suddenly struck me that I don’t even have a checking account here in New York for things like this. You don’t by any chance know a good bank I could use, do you?”

“Sure, Jonathan. We keep a lot of our client accounts here at Mechanics Trust.”

“Well, that would be great if you could arrange it all for me. I could have Willy send over a check for ten thousand dollars to open the account, if you think that would be enough.”

“More than enough, Jonathan. I’ll set up everything, and then you can just stop by the bank and sign the signature cards. Let me give you the address and the name of the bank officer we work with—”

“Gee, if there’s anything to sign, why don’t you just send it to me here at my uncle’s apartment. You know, now that I think of it, I’d rather have you get all the bank statements and everything too. And put your name on the account so your office could pay bills for me and so on. Would that be all right?”

“Jonathan, leave it to me. We’ll take care of everything.” By the end of the week I had my checking account. In a few weeks, when the printed checks arrived, Bernie would mail me one book, which I would hide in a storage closet in the Crosbys’ apartment. At about the same time, I would receive my first credit card. Jonathan Crosby was nearly a person.

T
hen, one evening in early October, as I was walking up central Park West, I saw a girl I had known once, not very well. Ellen something — it would come to me. Ellen Nicholson. Almost the only thing I remembered about her was that she had been very attractive, and now I was abruptly seized with an awful longing for her — whether because she seemed familiar or because she seemed beautiful, I could not say. But when you go for months without speaking to another human being except over the telephone, and for days without speaking at all, it becomes difficult to think clearly about the people and things drifting across your field of vision. The emotional contours begin to blur, and it is not so easy to distinguish between loneliness and lust.

There was no point, because I could not talk to her or touch her, but I followed her for several blocks anyway. She wore a sort of jersey dress and nothing much else, and I stayed alongside her, so that I could watch her breasts move as she walked and the fabric stretching across her thighs with each stride. In the middle of a block she stopped in front of an awning and smiled.

“Hi!” she said. “I didn’t expect to see you guys at this thing.” A man and a woman came up to us, also smiling.

“Hi, Ellen! Still all alone?”

“Eating my heart out. You guys
still
married?”

All three of them turned into the building, and a doorman sent them to the tenth floor. I could see that it would be a party, and while they rode up on the elevator, I hiked up the stairs. It took me much longer, so that by the time I pushed through the door of the apartment, they were already long inside, and Ellen was being hugged and pawed by an enormous man in blue jeans and a tweed jacket. Aside from her, I did not see anyone I knew. Most of the guests were younger than I, and some of them looked vaguely academic. You could tell at once that they all knew each other well. They had probably all gone to the same college not many years ago. I wondered what I was doing there.

As a matter of principle, I made a tour of the apartment, pausing a while in the kitchen to sip some white wine — probably too much. The noise in the other rooms was overwhelming. People in these situations do not notice how excited they have become or that they are shouting rather than speaking to each other. It was probably a good party, but really it had nothing to do with me, and I wandered back out into one of the rooms full of people, intending to make my way to the front door.

But then, glancing a last time over the crowd, I happened to see Alice. It is always difficult to say why, in these situations, you are suddenly so struck by someone — there are attractive people everywhere — but I started at once through the room to her without giving the matter a moment’s rational thought. She was tall, in her late twenties, with strawberry blond hair, and she wore a silk dress that clung to her and spread open as she moved, in a way that was almost painful for me. Standing in a semicircle around her were several men, who seemed to be staring at her as much as talking to her, and whenever she spoke to one of them, she would bestow on him a dazzling smile which seemed full of warmth but which included two sharp canines that gave it a slightly feral quality at the same time. She moved about animatedly in their midst as she talked, and when I came up, she had just stepped out of her shoes so that she stood there barefoot. Because it was the only way to get close to her, I walked around the wall of other gawking admirers and stood behind her.

“It seems awfully rude of you, Donald,” she said good-naturedly, “to say these things against my grandmother, when you don’t even know her.”

“I’m not saying anything whatever against your grandmother.” The man who spoke was dressed in khakis and a blazer. He had long hair and, despite his youth, a pedantic, professorial manner. “I’m only saying that you can’t go about asserting the existence of ghosts.”

“But why not?” she asked ingenuously.

“Because there is no satisfactory procedure for verifying or refuting such an assertion.”

“Well, you could talk to my grandmother.”

“I… With all due respect to your grandmother, I have to weigh her reports of sense-data she has experienced and the interpretation she has put on them against the reported experiences of a multitude of other human beings, and I may have all sorts of reasons for giving one person’s reports more weight than another’s—”

“Yes, that’s right. In the case of my grandmother, you have my word. She’s the most honest person I know of. And the nicest. It isn’t at all some subtle question about interpreting sensory data or anything like that, you know. She’s perfectly clear about what she saw. Either she’s telling the truth or she isn’t.” The smile seemed to have some mischief in it, but the eyes were wide open and bright blue with innocence. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Much less of women.

“It has nothing whatever to do with your grandmother. It has to do—”

“But it’s my grandmother we’re talking about. And anyway, why shouldn’t there be ghosts and all sorts of things, just because you’ve never seen or touched them?”

Another of the men, who was wearing a grey pinstriped suit and rocking forward and back a bit drunkenly, smiled maliciously.

“Yes, Donald, why this abusive attack on Alice’s poor old granny? What’s she ever done to you?”

Donald, knitting his brow with irritation, ignored the other man and continued in the logical track of his argument. “Because I have never needed the notion of a ghost to explain any sense-data I have experienced and because I can only posit existence for those entities necessary to the most economical and predictively powerful explanation of the sense-data I experience.”