A Visit From the Goon Squad (14 page)

At the cocktail party, she spotted Kathy—who else?—across a crowded expanse of terrace. As Stephanie was wondering whether she would again merit an actual hello or be downgraded to a crabbed
Who are you?
smile, Kathy caught her eye and began moving toward her. Introductions were made. Kathy’s husband, Clay, wore seersucker shorts and a pink oxford shirt, an ensemble that might have seemed ironic on a different sort of person. Kathy wore classic navy, setting off the bright blue of her eyes. Stephanie sensed Bennie’s gaze lingering on Kathy and felt herself go tense—a residual spasm of unease that passed as quickly as his attention (he was now talking to Clay). Kathy’s blond hair hung loose, still bobby-pinned at the sides. Stephanie wondered idly how many bobby pins the woman went through in a week.

“I’ve seen you on the court,” Kathy said.

“It’s been a while,” Stephanie said. “I’m just getting back into it.”

“We should rally sometime.”

“Sure,” Stephanie said casually, but she felt her heartbeat in her cheeks, and when Clay and Kathy moved on she was beset by a giddiness that shamed her. It was the silliest victory of her life.

II

Within a few months, anyone would have said that Stephanie and Kathy were friends. They had a standing tennis date two mornings a week, and they’d become successful doubles partners in an interclub league, playing other blond women in small tennis dresses from nearby towns. There was an easy symmetry to their lives right down to their names—Kath and Steph, Steph and Kath—and their sons, who were in the same first-grade class. Chris and Colin, Colin and Chris; how was it that of all the names Stephanie and Bennie had considered when she was pregnant—Xanadou, Peek-a-boo, Renaldo, Cricket—they’d ended up choosing the single one that melded flawlessly with the innocuous Crandale namescape?

Kathy’s elevated status in the pecking order of local blondes gave Stephanie an easy and neutral entrée, a protected status that absorbed even her short dark hair and tattoos; she was different but okay, exempt from the feral scratching that went on among some others. Stephanie would never have said that she
liked
Kathy; Kathy was a Republican, one of those people who used the unforgivable phrase “meant to be”—usually when describing her own good fortune or the disasters that had befallen other people. She knew little about Stephanie’s life—would surely have been dumbstruck to learn, for example, that the celebrity reporter who had made headlines a few years back by assaulting Kitty Jackson, the young movie star, while interviewing her for
Details
magazine, was Stephanie’s older brother, Jules. Occasionally Stephanie wondered whether her friend might understand more than she gave her credit for;
I know you hate us
, she imagined Kathy thinking,
and we hate you too, and now that we’ve resolved that, let’s go rub out those bitches from Scarsdale
. Stephanie loved the tennis with a ravenous aggression that half embarrassed her; she dreamed about line calls and backhands. Kathy was still the better player, but the margin was shrinking, a fact that seemed to pique and amuse them equally. As partners and opponents, mothers and neighbors, Steph and Kath were seamlessly matched. The only problem was Bennie.

Stephanie hadn’t believed him at first when he’d told her, the summer after the invasion—their second in Crandale—that he felt people giving him odd looks by the pool. She’d assumed he meant women who were admiring the clutch of brown muscles above his swim trunks, his wide dark eyes, and she’d snipped, “Since when do you have a problem with being looked at?”

But Bennie hadn’t meant that, and soon Stephanie felt it too: some hesitation or question around her husband. It didn’t seem to bother Bennie deeply; he’d been asked, “What kind of name is Salazar?” enough times in his life to be fairly immune to skepticism about his origins and race, and he’d perfected an arsenal of charms to obliterate that skepticism, especially in women.

Around the middle of that second summer, at another hedge-fund-fueled cocktail party, Bennie and Stephanie found themselves chatting, along with Kathy and Clay (or Cardboard, as they secretly called him) and some others, with Bill Duff, a local congressman who had come from a meeting with the Council on Foreign Relations. The topic was the presence of Al Qaeda in the New York area. Operatives were present, Bill confided, especially in the outer boroughs, possibly in communication with one another (Stephanie noticed Clay’s pale eyebrows suddenly lift, and his head gave a single odd jerk, as if he had water in one ear), but the question was: how strong a link did they have to the mother ship—here Bill laughed—because any kook with a grudge could call himself Al Qaeda, but if he lacked money, training, backup (Clay gave another quick head shake, then flicked his eyes at Bennie, to his right), it made no sense to allocate resources…

Bill paused midsentence, clearly baffled. Another couple broke in, and Bennie took Stephanie’s arm and moved away. His eyes looked placid, almost sleepy, but his grip hurt her wrist.

They left the party soon after. Bennie paid the babysitter, a sixteen-year-old nicknamed Scooter, and drove her home. He was back before Stephanie had even glanced at the clock and reflected on Scooter’s prettiness. She heard him setting the burglar alarm; then he thundered upstairs in a way that made Sylph, the cat, dive under the bed in terror. Stephanie ran from the bedroom and met Bennie at the top of the stairs. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he cried.

“Shh. You’ll wake up Chris.”

“It’s a horror show!”

“That was ugly,” she said, “although Clay’s an extr—”

“You’re
defending
them?”

“Of course not. But he’s one guy.”

“You think everyone in that group didn’t know what was going on?”

Stephanie was afraid that it might be true—had they all known? She wanted Bennie not to think so. “That’s totally paranoid. Even Kathy says—”

“Again! Look at you!”

He stood at the top of the stairs with fists clenched. Stephanie went to him and took him in her arms, and Bennie relaxed against her, almost knocking her over. They held each other until his breathing slowed. Stephanie said softly, “Let’s move.”

Bennie pulled back, startled.

“I mean it,” she said. “I don’t give a shit about these people. It was an experiment, right? Moving to a place like this.”

Bennie didn’t answer. He looked around them at the floors, whose rose parquet designs he’d sanded himself on hands and knees, not trusting whomever they might pay for such intricate work; at the windows in their bedroom door that he’d spent weeks excavating with a razor from under layers of paint; at the stairwell nooks he’d ruminated over, placing one
objet
after another inside and adjusting the lights. His father had been an electrician; Bennie could light anything.

“Let
them
move,” he said. “This is my fucking house.”

“Fine. But if it comes to that, I’m saying we can go. Tomorrow. In a month. In a year.”

“I want to die here,” Bennie said.

“Jesus,” Stephanie said, at which point they were stung by sudden, itchy laughter that soon became hysterics, both of them doubled over on the parquet, shushing each other.

So they’d stayed. After that, when Bennie noticed Stephanie putting on her tennis whites in the morning, he’d say, “Going to play with the fascists?” Stephanie knew he wanted her to quit, renounce her partnership with Kathy to protest Cardboard’s bigotry and idiocy. But Stephanie had no intention of quitting. If they were going to live in a place whose social life revolved around a country club, she sure as hell was going to stay on good terms with the woman who guaranteed her easy assimilation. She had no wish to be an outcast like Noreen, their neighbor to the right, who had clanging mannerisms and wore oversize sunglasses, whose hands shook violently—from medication, Stephanie presumed. Noreen had three lovely, anxious children, but none of the women talked to her. She was a ghost. No thank you, Stephanie thought.

In the fall, when the weather cooled, she began arranging her tennis games for later in the day, when Bennie wouldn’t be home to see her change clothes. Now that she was working freelance for La Doll’s PR firm, scheduling Manhattan meetings as she wished, this was easy. It was slightly deceptive, of course, but only through omission—to protect Bennie from knowledge that distressed him. Stephanie never denied having played if he asked. And besides, hadn’t he engaged in his share of deceptions over the years? Didn’t he owe her a few of her own?

III

The following spring, Stephanie’s older brother, Jules, was paroled from Attica Correctional Facility and came to live with them. He’d been gone five years, the first on Rikers Island awaiting trial for the attempted rape of Kitty Jackson, another four after the rape charge was dropped (at Kitty Jackson’s request) and he was convicted of kidnapping and aggravated assault—outrageous, given that the starlet had walked into Central Park with Jules of her own free will and sustained not a single injury. In fact, she’d ended up testifying for the
defense
. But the DA had persuaded the jury that Kitty’s support for Jules was a version of Stockholm syndrome. “The fact that she insists on protecting this man is further evidence of how deeply he has hurt her.…” Stephanie recalled him intoning at her brother’s trial, which she’d watched over ten agonizing days, trying to look upbeat.

In prison, Jules had seemed to regain the composure he’d lost so spectacularly in the months before the assault. He went on medication for his bipolar disorder and made peace with the end of his marriage engagement. He edited a weekly prison newspaper, and his coverage of the impact of 9/11 on the lives of inmates won him a special citation from the PEN Prison Writing Program. Jules had been allowed to come to New York and receive the award, and Bennie, Stephanie, and her parents had all wept through his halting acceptance speech. He’d taken up basketball, shed his gut, and miraculously overcome his eczema. He seemed ready, finally, to resume the serious journalism career he’d come to New York more than twenty years before to pursue. When the parole board granted his early release, Stephanie and Bennie had joyfully offered to house him while he got back on his feet.

But now, two months after Jules’s arrival, an ominous stasis had set in. He’d had a few interviews early on that he’d approached in a state of sweaty terror, but nothing had come of them. Jules doted on Chris, spending hours while Chris was at school assembling vast cities out of microscopic Lego pieces to surprise him when he returned. But with Stephanie, her brother maintained a sardonic distance, seeming to regard her futile scurrying (this morning, for example, as the three of them rushed toward school and work) with wry bemusement. His hair was straggly and his face looked deflated, sapped in a way that pained Stephanie.

“You driving into the city?” Bennie asked, as she hustled breakfast plates into the sink.

She wasn’t driving in—yet. As the weather warmed, she’d resumed her morning tennis games with Kathy. But she’d found a clever new way to edit these games out of Bennie’s view; she kept her tennis whites at the club, dressed for work in the morning, kissed him good-bye, then proceeded to the club to change and play. Stephanie minimized the deception by making the lie purely chronological; if Bennie asked where she was going, she always cited an actual meeting that would take place later on that day, so if he inquired in the evening how it had gone, she could answer honestly.

“I’m meeting Bosco at ten,” she said. Bosco was the only rocker whose PR she still handled. The meeting was actually at three.

“Bosco, before noon?” Bennie asked. “Was that his idea?”

Stephanie instantly saw her mistake; Bosco spent his nights in an alcoholic fog; the chances of his being conscious at 10:00 a.m. were nil. “I think so,” she said, the act of lying to her husband’s face bringing on a tingly vertigo. “You’re right, though. It’s weird.”

“It’s scary,” Bennie said. He kissed Stephanie good-bye and headed for the door with Chris. “Will you call me after you see him?”

In that moment, Stephanie knew she would cancel her game with Kathy—stand Kathy up, in essence—and drive to Manhattan to meet Bosco at ten. There was no other way.

When they’d gone, Stephanie felt the tension that always seemed to arise when she was alone with Jules, her own unspoken questions about his plans and timetable clashing silently with his armature against them. Beyond Lego assembly, it was hard to know what Jules did all day. Twice Stephanie had come home to find the TV in her bedroom tuned to a porn channel, and this had so disturbed her that she’d asked Bennie to bring the extra set to the guest room, where Jules was staying.

She went upstairs and left a voice mail on Kathy’s cell phone canceling their game. When she returned to the kitchen, Jules was peering out the window of the breakfast nook. “What’s the deal with your neighbor?” he asked.

“Noreen?” Stephanie said. “We think she’s nuts.”

“She’s doing something near your fence.”

Stephanie went to the window. It was true; she glimpsed Noreen’s overbleached ponytail—like a caricature of everyone else’s subtly natural highlights—moving up and down beside the fence. Her giant black sunglasses gave her the cartoonish look of a fly, or a space alien. Stephanie shrugged, impatient with Jules for even having the time to fixate on Noreen. “I’ve got to run,” she said.

“Can I hitch a ride to the city?”

Stephanie felt a little pop in her chest. “Of course,” she said. “You have a meeting?”

“Not really. I just feel like getting out.”

As they walked to the car, Jules glanced behind them and said, “I think she’s watching us. Noreen. Through the fence.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“You just let that go on?”

“What can we do? She’s not hurting us. She’s not even on our property.”

“She could be dangerous.”

“Takes one to know one, eh?”

“Not nice,” Jules said.

In the Volvo, Stephanie slipped an advance copy of Bosco’s new album,
A to B
, into the CD player out of some sense that in doing so she was strengthening her alibi. Bosco’s recent albums consisted of gnarled little ditties accompanied by a ukulele. It was only out of friendship that Bennie still released them.