The Wrong Kind of Money (57 page)

Her mother eyes her narrowly. “You think so?” she says.

“Oh, I'm quite sure of it, Mama,” Carol says. “That would be the Christian thing, wouldn't it—to share?”

“To convince you of your sin, and your apostasy? Do you think that's what she wants?”

“Of course that's what she wants, Mama. It's quite obvious that's what she wants. How else would she convince me of my sin?”

“But she doesn't exactly say that in her letter.”

“But remember Saint Augustine, Mama. He said, ‘God always writes straight, but sometimes in crooked lines.'”

“That's true. At least you remember some of the things Father Timmons taught you.”

“I remember everything he taught me. Is the letter upstairs in your room, Mama?”

“No, I have it here.” Slowly she reaches inside her soiled blouse and withdraws the letter, and hands it to Carol.

“… and now let's go next door and try some Ballachulish,” he says. “I think you're going to like it.”

The lights in the room come up again, and the applause begins.

“Maybe you'd better hold your applause until after you've tasted Mr. Kelso's brew,” he says, and there is laughter. “And now, before I leave the microphone, I have just one favor to ask of all of you before we all start partying in earnest. I'd like to conduct a blind taste test. As you enter the party room next door, each of you will be given two ballots. On the table on your left, in numbered plastic glasses, will be samples of Angus Kelso's whiskey along with samples of fourteen other premium single malts. I'd like you to taste each of these, and rank each on a scale of one to ten—based on the usual three criteria: taste, nose, and color. On the table on your right will be samples of the water from Mr. Kelso's caves, along with nine other premium bottled non-carbonated waters. I'd like you to do the same with these. When the results are tallied, then maybe we'll have something to celebrate.”

There is more applause, and people begin rising from their seats.

Noah looks out across his audience to the double glass doors that lead to the lobby. The girl and her suitcase are gone.

And now the wrap-up cocktail party is in full swing. The results of the taste test were even better than Noah had dared hope for, with Angus Kelso's scotch coming out the easy winner, and with eighty percent of the voters voting it their favorite. The test of the bottled waters was almost as encouraging; sixty-five percent chose Kelso's as their favorite. Now Noah moves around the room, shaking hands, accepting backslaps and congratulations, using his old trick of looking a man straight in the eye and at his name tag at the same time.

“Hey, Phil … Yo, Paul … How're you doing, Harry? … Hey, Dave—your wife have the baby yet?”

“Little boy.”

“Congratulations, buddy.”

“Great presentation, Noah. Really great …”

“I got a great name for it, Noah—Highland Fling!”

“Not bad. Write 'em all down, send 'em all in. Ten thousand to the winner …”

“What about Heather Hill?”

“Too close to Heaven Hill? But send 'em all in. Ten thousand—”

“We're gonna knock the competition on its ass, Noah.”

“That's my intention, buddy.”

Someone named Peter corners him. “Listen, I've got a terrific marketing idea for this, Noah,” he says. “We should market the booze and the bottled water
under the same name
! We can't advertise the booze on network TV, but we can advertise the
water.
So the water promotes the booze—get it? Hell, we can even advertise the water in the Girl Scouts' magazine!”

“Believe it or not, that's exactly my thinking, Pete. It's like what they say, great minds—”

Peter looks crestfallen. “Anyway, it's a million-dollar idea,” he says.

Noah finds Frank Stokes standing alone at the bar, nursing a drink. “C'mon, Frank,” he says. “It's not like it's the end of the world. Nothing's like it's the end of the world.”

“That's what it's like for me,” Frank says. “Like it's the end of the world.”

With tongues loosened by liquor, the noise level in the room rises, and in certain sections the party becomes almost raucous, as waiters circulate with trays of drinks and others with trays of hors d'oeuvres.

“Anybody want to get laid tonight? There's this girl called Estelle …”

“Didja hear the one about the rabbi who got stranded on a desert island?”

“I won eight hundred bucks at roulette last night. Whaddaya think of that?”

“And it was quite a few years before he was rescued, you see, and by the time they rescued him he'd—”

“Roulette? Shit, that's a sissy game. I'm hitting the craps table one more time before I head home.”

“… built a hospital, a yeshiva school, a community center, and two synagogues.”

“This Estelle gives great head, man.”

“So they said to him, we can understand you building the hospital, the yeshiva school, and the community center. But why
two
synagogues?”

“Hell, you can't get AIDS from a girl giving you head!”

“And the rabbi said, ‘The other one I wouldn't set foot in!'”

“You
can
?”

Noah moves, smiling, shaking hands, through all of this. Before he is finished, before he can leave the party and go home, it is essential that he greet every single person in this crowded, noisy room. “Hey, Dex … Yo, Wally … Hi, there, Eddie …”

“Telephone call for you, Mr. Liebling,” a waiter says. “You can take it in that little room over there. Quieter …”

It is Edith Ackerman. “Mr. Noah,” she says, “I just wanted to make sure you got my message—that Miss Hannah wants to see you at her house before you go home tonight. As soon as you get to New York, no matter how late it is. She says it's very important.”

“Yes, Edith, I did get that message. Thanks.”

“Oh, Mr. Noah!” There is a sob in her voice.

“What's the matter, Edith?”

“Oh, Mr. Noah—the most awful thing has happened.'

“What is it, Edith?”

“The Little Girl is dead!”

“Dead?” He carries the phone with him to a chair and sits down. “Now tell me,” he says. “Tell me exactly what happened, Edith.”

“This morning she had some sort of seizure. Her blood sugar was up. I gave her an injection, and she seemed better, but I didn't think she should go to her school today, and so I had my neighbor come in, and—”

“Oh, you're talking about your
niece,”
he says. “Oh, thank God …”

“What?”

He bridges his left hand over his eyes, as though to shield them from the light, though the light is behind him. “I just meant … it must seem like such a release for you, Edith. She's been such a burden to you, Edith, such a care … all these years, and …”

“But still, Mr. Noah,” she sobs. “But still. She was all I had.…”

You did this, Carol is thinking. You did this, yes, you did. And I hurt. I hurt here, and here. And also here. Oh, you bastard. You hurt me so much I no longer know where I'm going, or even where I've been, you bastard whom I hate. And also love. Because hating someone you love is the worst kind of hate there is. She adjusts the sun visor on her little green car.

Did you think I never had opportunities to do to you what you've done to me? Did you think Johnny Pearlstein never tried to put his hand inside my dress that night after we all went to see
Born Free,
and you were taking the sitter home, and I just pushed his hand away? Or were you doing the same thing to the sitter? How many chances to hurt you this way have I turned down? Dozens, you bastard, and even more than that, if I were to count all the times on my fingers. And just the other night, when Beryl and Bill Luckman and Georgette came up for drinks, did Bill Luckman—or did he not—whisper to me, “I find you very attractive”? And did I not just smile and go on passing the cheese and crackers? I could have hurt you like this dozens and dozens and dozens of times. But did I?

And speaking of Beryl, she's obviously been getting her jollies while Frank is out of town. In fact, she's probably been getting them from Bill Luckman. She was all over him like a tent that night. Yearbooks. I heard her tell him she had some old school yearbooks. “Come up and see my yearbooks.” Sure, that's what she did. Took him up to her place after she left my place and screwed him. I could have done the same, you bastard. At least he's an adult. In fact, he's probably the one she wrote that letter to, though how it got faxed to Mama at Greenspring Hills I'll never know. Did you think I could be someone like Beryl, as dumb as she is?

How long has this been going on, you bastard? How long has Melody been spending her vacations with us? Three years? Four? As long as that? And right under my nose, under my own roof. That's the worst part. That's what hurts the most, because it makes me feel so stupid, stupider than Beryl Stokes, and that's pretty stupid. You think I'm stupid. No one ever called me stupid before. Four years of college in three, and a Phi Beta Kappa key even so. “No wives at sales conference, that's the rule,” you told me. But what about teenage girlfriends? That was the question I was too stupid to ask, you bastard, my love I love to hate, my hate I hate to love. The line between the two is so thin that it's nothing but a tiny, blurry squiggle now.
Oh, I could kill you for what you've done to me, Noah, kill you for what you've killed in me, I really could.

Where am I?

It is the sun, the sun in her eyes that is blinding her, altering familiar landmarks on the highway ahead of her, making everything she sees float strangely out of focus. In the sun's glare the landscape along the parkway, instead of gathering alongside her as she drives, seems to slide away from her on all sides and disappear. She has forgotten how far south the sun moves in mid-winter, and now, driving back to New York, as the sun sinks toward the horizon against a clear sky, it is directly in her eyes. She tries adjusting the visor again, which does not help, and she has left her sunglasses at home. She has always kept her little green car spotlessly clean and polished, but perhaps she has picked up some road dust on the trip, and this is helping the direct sunlight to shatter her vision so. Or perhaps her windshield is simply too clean, and its very cleanness is refracting the sun's light in her eyes too brilliantly.

Still, she drives the way she has always liked to drive, a little over the speed limit. Perhaps, she thinks, she has always gone at everything a little too fast. Perhaps that is the trouble. Perhaps she had wanted to leave the little town of Rumney Depot, New Hampshire, too fast, to leave the world of her Christ-obsessed mother and the ever present Father Timmons, who, her mother used to remind her, was the closest thing to a real father she would ever have. Perhaps she had wanted to leave that world so fast that she had left it before she ever understood it. Then she had put herself through college too fast, accelerating, squeezing four years' worth of study into three. Then she had gotten her master's degree in psychology too fast, in one year instead of two. Then she had speeded into marriage with Noah, whom she had met—fast—on a blind date, and fallen in love with too fast. Noah had told her he liked speed, too, speed and danger. They had run off and been married at City Hall without telling anyone, courting danger, courting disaster, and it was this marriage, Father Timmons had insisted to this day, that drove her mother over the edge, though there had been plenty of alarming signals before that. “When she heard you'd done that, she simply snapped,” he said to her. “Snapped like a bough in the wind. It was a terrible thing you did, Carol. Now your mother is a broken reed.” Then, with her accelerator pedal pressed to the floor, she sped into motherhood.
What was I trying to prove? And to whom was I trying to prove whatever it was?

But I was in love.

One falls in love because one falls in love. That's all there is to it. It's as simple as that. There's no other explanation. And probably one really falls in love no more than once, and that is probably a lucky thing. Once is enough, and more than once would probably be unbearable. The rest of the time one is just waiting to be in love, or wanting to be in love, or trying to be in love, or thinking about being in love, or pretending to be in love, which is always fruitless and pointless in the end. Oh, yes. Sometimes at night, pretending to be asleep, I will hear sounds—soft, secretive sounds—from the bed next to mine, and I know that he is making love to himself. When it first happened, long ago, I was bewildered. Then I was hurt, then I was angry. Where were his thoughts when he did this? Were they with some other lover, someone he found more fulfilling than me? Why was I not invited, not even permitted, to share these secret moments with him? I would lie very still in the other bed, keeping my own breathing soft and slow and regular, pretending to sleep, until he finished. Then I would hear him sleeping.

But then, long ago, I decided that these private, secret moments of his were all a part of sharing my life with him, a part of being in love with him and, of course, this discovery only made me love him more. Loving is more than fucking. Fucking is more like dancing, a pleasant way to pass some leisure time. Loving is not a pleasant pastime, no holiday in Capri. Love is rugged and thick with tangled underbrush and sudden, unexpected pitfalls and barriers between lovers, barricades that announce
NO TRESPASSING BEYOND THIS POINT
, and this was the worst part, the loneliest part of being in love, the whole trouble with loving at all, why love is not for the foolhardy, or even for the wise and brave. Love is for those willing to be left out. They might tell you that love is sharing, but sharing means sacrifice, as every child learns when he is being taught to share. The bigger the sacrifice, the more it hurts. And so when those times come when sharing is no longer endurable, men and women in love fight back with secrets. That was the crux of it, that was the real trouble with it. When one is in love, one is always in love alone.