Memento Park Page 20

  The rhythm of Tracy’s gentle stroking of my hair slowed. “I can’t believe Abby fired you over McCabe,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” The fingers stopped.

  “It wasn’t because of McCabe. It’s because I came home now. For you.”

  Moments later, Tracy’s snores rumbled through the sheets like an approaching thunderstorm. I knew that I would have to tell her everything and that I could never tell her everything. I listened, instead, to the snores, each one distinct in its own musicality, their coarse timbre as strangely beautiful as Kálmán’s ugly paintings, and I allowed myself to be carried into sleep upon their vibrations.

  * * *

  TO MY SURPRISE, in the weeks following my return, I was briefly in demand again as an actor. Being an actual hate-crime victim suddenly made me irresistible to the Industry. Whatever the reason, I didn’t question it, and I auditioned tirelessly and with aplomb. Oh, I still found it all trivial. But I needed to be busy, to fill the weeks leading up to the arbitration with some kind of purpose, if only to prevent my thoughts from devouring me. It was breathtaking, the speed with which Tracy and I resumed the contours of our earlier life, even as my infidelity pressed upon my chest. Twice I nearly told her. Once we were enjoying a stroll down the side streets of our neighborhood at dusk, and once we were having dinner back at the sushi restaurant where we’d had our first date. Both times my nerve failed. Both times I wondered whether, by my remaining silent, the relationship might survive. It seemed we were both eager to return to our comforts, to what had been, so we conspired in this last coproduction.

  It was weeks before Rachel and I spoke again. Were we parrying, I wonder, circling to see who would call first? Or was there, as she insisted via the occasional, terse e-mail, nothing new to report? Her time was consumed preparing for the arbitration. All that paper, so much of it, flowing endlessly from her desk to my inbox and back to her again. I stopped looking at it, it meant nothing to me. My case had taken an unhappy turn for her, and I was quite sure I knew the cause. It came out, at last, one evening over a cocktail at a fashionable Beverly Hills hotel bar, full of black glass and sharp angles, when we both felt we could defer our reckoning no longer. It took little prompting for her to unload.

  “It’s a terrible thing we did, Matt,” she said, dipping her finger in her gin. “So unethical for so many reasons. Honestly, I would quit this case right now if I could.”

  “That would make me sad. And it would raise a lot of questions.”

  This irritated her. “What’s wrong with that? Why are you so scared of questions?”

  Her bluntness startled me but she apologized.

  “Have you told her?”

  I shook my head.

  “Are you going to?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out what to do.”

  She nodded with sympathy and I changed the subject. “How’s Bernie?”

  She smiled at the mention of her father. “Good, thanks. The same. Eternal.”

  “What does he think about the case?”

  “He’s on your side. He believes in restitution. I tell you, he’d probably disown me if he knew what we did.” I watched her fiddle with her drink. Her sense of herself, her belief in her rectitude had been undermined. A heaviness had settled on her, such a pointed contrast to the evanescence I had witnessed that first day in her office. She looked tired, her eyes ringed with regret. I felt as though I had ruined something fragile and beautiful.

  “You know,” she said, “sometimes I feel like what happened to you in Budapest was my fault. I was the one who dragged you there. And if we hadn’t behaved that way in the park…”

  “Restitution?” I asked. She shrugged.

  “It’s possible.”

  “Rachel. I got beat up because I picked a fight with two Neanderthals who were bigger and stronger than I am.”

  “Now you sound like Colonel Almasy.”

  “Yeah, well. Broken clocks. Et cetera.”

  Rachel took my hand, raised it to her lips. The gesture surprised me until I realized it was a goodbye kiss.

  “Listen, Matt. I’ve never been ‘that woman’ and, barn doors notwithstanding, I don’t want to start,” she said, setting my hand back down on the bar. She stood up to leave. “If you figure out your relationship with Tracy, let me know. But until that time, let’s stick to business, okay?”

  It was a reasonable request. I nodded.

  “See you in Chicago,” she said as she left the bar.

  I watched her go with a deep sorrow, coupled with relief. In all our time together, it was the only thing you got wrong, Rachel. I’m not scared of questions. I can ask them for days. It’s the answers that cause all the trouble.

  RABBI WOLFE WAS TOO SICK to travel, and so we agreed to hold the arbitration hearing on her turf. Tracy accompanied me. The conference room was lushly padded, like a cabin aboard a private jet, and sat high above the Magnificent Mile, with cloudless views of the Sears Tower and the dazzling blue of the great lake beyond. The city gleamed with the humid buoyancy of late summer and seemed altogether more welcoming this time.

  Rachel introduced herself to Tracy, shook her hand, the first of several moments I had been dreading for days. I hadn’t told Tracy about Budapest, nor had we returned to our rocky phone conversation at the side of the river. I was sick with guilt, and I suspect Tracy felt her own share in the wake of my beating, and we both simply hoped that a little benign inattention might set things, if not right, then at least familiar again. They exchanged friendly hellos, and Rachel began to arrange papers as we were pointed to the coffee. Even with all the briefs that had already been submitted, forests of paper littered the conference table.

  Then there was the judge. I shall call him Judge Handlebar, and not out of any great disrespect but because it simply feels right. It’s the way I’ve made my choices as an actor, never one for elaborate backstories. He was interchangeable, after all, his seat could have been filled by any competent jurist. The only thing that made any kind of impression on me was his elaborately lacquered handlebar mustache. Mostly white with streaks of brown and orange, it gave him the mien of a cartoon character and told me that he was prone to the theatrical. Which I supposed might favorably dispose him to my claim—we performers must stick together. I thought of my father’s unprepossessing pencil mustache.

  We were arranging piles of paper like stones upon graves, when a wraith appeared before us. Rabbi Wolfe and her lawyer. I was shocked at the sight of her. In the months since I’d crept into her synagogue, she had withered. Her cheeks were hollowed out like an ill-fitting mask and she struggled to hold her head upright. Her clothes no longer fit her, she rattled loose within them. Only the rawness of her hands remained as she took my hand by way of greeting. Did I note a flare of recognition in her eyes? If she remembered me, she gave no impression of it, another crafty cardplayer. I was introduced to her lawyer, Gawain something-or-other (yes, I know, bear with me, it hardly matters now), to whom I was immediately and inexplicably drawn. He was around my age, but seemed decades deeper. His thinning blond hair conferred an unexpected gravitas, and although he was my nominal adversary, he had a kind and gentle manner and, oddly, I wanted him to like me. Such strange footing for this enterprise. But it had all stopped seeming real to me and I felt, for a moment, as I did in my hospital bed in Budapest, drifting from one state to another, the distant notes of the Hashkiveinu in my ears.

  Judge Handlebar cleared his throat and then the dance began, all bits of business, pockets of busy, papers turned in, statements made, questions answered. The plot moved forward and I was barely in the room. It made no difference, I knew the particulars of our claim all too well, and the bits of Rabbi Wolfe’s claim that drifted in seemed thin and circumstantial: a substantial family collection, a sacked gallery, and then years of gaps in the provenance reduced to a half-dozen ledger entries: “ELK/BSS.” It all unfolded around me, reduced to a kind of buzzing as I kept glancing from Tracy to Rachel to Rabbi
Wolfe, wondering when the whole thing would come down around me, as I knew it must. And the painting. Oh yes, right. Something to do with that. Restitution. The word kept flying around the room, penetrating my haze, and I thought of my father’s ashes, languishing at home. We were spoken to, Rabbi Wolfe and I, at least I seem to remember that we were, each given our moment in the spotlight, asked questions by both parties, and even Judge Handlebar roused himself to clarify a point here or there. It was all very gentle and civilized, Rachel deferential to Rabbi Wolfe’s condition, and her lawyer solicitous of my own recent traumas. The beating, my dead father. I wished I’d brought him. What would Judge Handlebar have made of that? Oh, why don’t you ask the old man himself, then wham, remains on the conference table as though I were throwing down a winning hand at a high-stakes poker game.

  We took a break for lunch. Rachel, Tracy, and I. It was unbearable, worse than being trussed up in my hospital bed. A quick sandwich in a loud lobby café, soggy brown salads on wet serving trays. To my astonishment, Tracy and Rachel seemed to get on. Is it always this way, when the gods wish to destroy? What should I have preferred? Arid silence? There were, I was coming to understand, no good outcomes. My only thought throughout that endless meal was of green model paint soaking its way through the fabric of my pants, my knees damp and sticky.

  Then back to the conference room, the second act, perfunctory and limp, as though the playwright had run out of ideas. Closing statements, notable for an absence of passion, and as quickly as it had begun, it was finished, Judge Handlebar announcing he’d take a few days to absorb the material. I wasn’t sure Rabbi Wolfe had the days to spare.

  We were collecting our papers and were about to leave, spent by the day’s effort, when Rabbi Wolfe approached, her troubled eyes upon me.

  “I’m sorry, but it’s been bothering me since you came in. Have we met?”

  There it was. I could have lied, Virgil. Perhaps I should have. The performance would have been effortless, instinctive, perhaps even the truth after a fashion, so deeply would I have convinced myself of its veracity. I am certain I could have made Rabbi Wolfe doubt the memory of her own senses.

  I felt Tracy’s eyes upon us. Or were they Rachel’s? No more half-truths. I nodded.

  “Yes. Briefly. We shook hands.”

  “In my temple. Yes, I thought so.”

  I did not have to face Rachel to see the surprise on her face. “You went to Chicago? When?”

  “Just after my father died.”

  “But why?” Who asked that? Rachel? Tracy? Or Rabbi Wolfe? Perhaps they said it together, like some angry Greek chorus.

  I shrugged. “To lay eyes on you. To see who I was dealing with, I guess.”

  Rabbi Wolfe nodded, satisfied, it seemed, and shuffled out of the conference room. Rachel waited until she was gone to speak.

  “I asked you not to go, Matt. You promised me you wouldn’t.”

  I turned to face her. I could feel Tracy’s gaze, insistent on me, on us.

  “I know. You did.”

  “I wanted this to be clean, honorable. No sneaking around. I told you that. But you went anyway.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry.” In truth, I was irritated.

  Rachel shook her head and began to pack up her papers. In the corner of my vision, I saw Tracy frown. What did she want of me? What did everyone, finally, want of me?

  “I guess it didn’t feel important enough to tell me? A phone call or an e-mail if you didn’t have the guts to face me?”

  And then it all gave way, Virgil. It would be easy enough to play the moment she was looking for, eyes downcast, abject, apologetic. I’d played that part many times before. Instead, I once again felt the same dry crack in my chest that I felt that day in Glendale with my father. This was, quite literally, my moment of truth. I suppose I can report that I did not disappoint.

  “Don’t fucking talk to me that way,” I snapped at Rachel. I’m sure she was shocked but it didn’t register because I turned to Tracy, my voice even but coiled.

  “There’s something I need to tell you. Rachel, can we please have a moment?”

  * * *

  I’VE HAD SOMETHING OF A FLASH, Virgil, I’ve just realized, revisiting it all here tonight, it’s not about fathers and sons at all, is it? All this, it’s not about the Jews or the war or family history lost and regained. Rachel. Tracy. Rabbi Wolfe. I’ve been looking in the wrong place.

  Don’t fuck it up, Matt.

  I HAVE NEVER EXPERIENCED as strong a feeling of dislocation as during those weeks I spent at my father’s house in New York, erasing his traces, waiting for the decision from Judge Handlebar. Rachel and Tracy had forsaken me. The truth had come out, and neither would return my calls, so I decided to leave town, to use the time to dispose of my father’s belongings and clean up his affairs. Better than pottering around my empty house, waiting for the phone to ring.

  Tracy had taken the news with a degree of stoicism I hadn’t expected. Rachel packed her belongings and left us, and I explained what had happened in Budapest, leaving nothing out. She asked a few questions, all of which I answered, and then she left the conference room, her admirable dignity intact. It was all very adult, no scenes, no tears. They would be shed in private, later, if at all. A week or so afterward, I watched helplessly in our bedroom as she packed her roller bag for a final, one-way trip. I sat there, trying to think of something I might say that could change this outcome but nothing came. The silence dragged on, irritating her.

  “You don’t have to sit there, you know. In fact, this might be easier if you didn’t.”

  She was right. I collected myself and started to leave, then I paused and turned back.

  “That day we spoke on the phone, when I was at the river—”

  “Matt, please.”

  “—you said you didn’t know what I believed in—”

  “Seriously, there’s no point now. It’s done.”

  “—and that I was, what, that I couldn’t see past my nose? Is that really what you thought? Think?”

  She paused in her packing, long enough to look at me with, it seemed, pity.

  “Did you really think I was having an affair with Brian? And that I was somehow plotting against you with your father?”

  I shrugged, uncomfortable. Asked in this manner, in this tone, it was obviously a ridiculous notion. She inhaled before speaking.

  “I think … maybe we were never fully sold on each other, you know? So you had your painting, I had my case, and that got our energy instead. I don’t know. I’m sorry, Matt. I really am.”

  And then she zippered her suitcase and was gone.

  She apologized to me, Virgil. I cannot seem to fathom the way human beings operate. It’s as though, along the way, I picked up all the wrong sorts of knowledge. I can tell you in excruciating detail where Ervin Laszlo Kálmán spent the winter of 1939, but I cannot tell you what that apology meant.

  In the days that followed, a deep depression settled over me, a paralyzing gloom. When I climbed out of bed at all, I lumbered from room to room without purpose. Chasing the occasional ray of sunlight beneath which I would lounge, recalling that reclining odalisque Rachel and I saw at the Norton Simon. I stopped eating; the prospect nauseated me. I drank to excess. That’s what people do, isn’t it? And I flagellated, oh, how I self-flagellated. Played back every moment, remembered every bad decision, tried to imagine following a different path, though I could feel how bound to my fate I had been all along. I did not shower, brush my teeth, groom for days. It was only when I caught a whiff of rotting onions and realized I was the source that I attended to myself.

  It was into this wretched soup of malaise that Brian inserted himself, without invitation. The insistent knocking early one Saturday morning roused me from my torpor. I donned some sweats and stomped down the stairs, irritated by the invasion. What, I demanded, flinging the front door open, to be brought up short by the unexpected presence of Siegfried on my doorstep. He apologized for disturbing
me but he’d been trying to reach Tracy for days and she’d gone off radar. He had news and I could tell from his mien it wasn’t good, though I couldn’t imagine how Ricky McCabe’s saga could get any worse. I invited him in for coffee. He entered respectfully, as though trying to adjust himself to the size of the space, to avoid looming over me. He hung back as I led us to the kitchen, where I prepared coffee. He inquired how my recovery from my incident was progressing, expressed the appropriate level of anger and commiseration over what had befallen me. I was hungover, unhappy, impatient. I drove him to the purpose of his call.

  “What’s going on, Brian? You look a mess.” Hah, coming from me.

  He fiddled with an invisible thread on his sleeve. “Where’s Tracy? I feel like I should tell her in person.”

  “She doesn’t live here anymore. We split up. But I know where she is. What’s up?”

  “Oh shit. Man, I’m sorry. I really am.” His sorrow seemed genuine, another for the catalog of misjudgments. “That’s why she’s been so quiet.” I nodded and looked at him expectantly. He sighed, then decided to confide in me.

  “McCabe confessed.”

  I gripped the countertop, reeling on Tracy’s behalf. No, it couldn’t be. Oh, Tracy. She had invested so much purpose, so much heart … so much faith. And now the story she had believed for so long was about to be taken from her, another narrative unbuckled. I winced as I remembered how I had pressed her about her certainty.

  “Jesus. I thought he had a child’s IQ? Maybe he’s just saying it?”

  “I thought so, too. Hoped. But he led the police to where he tossed the gun, which had his prints on it.” We stood there staring at each other, sharing a single thought.