And West Is West (11 page)

DR. PORTER COOMBS
lives six blocks from work on a street mixed with residences and embassies and art galleries. His row house, a brick federal three windows wide with black shutters and stone lintels, looks as formal as Porter behaves at the office. Zoe turns her key and steps inside. Strangely, she hears the television and smells popcorn. And before she can backtrack she is caught.

“Hey,” Cassie Coombs says over the back of the living room couch as if Zoe's late appearance in her father's home is the most ordinary of things. Cassie, just four years younger than Zoe, is enrolled in prelaw at Georgetown. She lives in the dorm and sometimes spends the weekends here. But she never stays overnight on school nights, so she has surprised Zoe.

“Hi, Cassie,” Zoe replies awkwardly. Porter, even though his ex-wife is remarried, likes to keep his worlds separate. Or is it that he doesn't want his daughter to find out that his girlfriend is almost thirty years his junior?

“Dad's taking a bath,” Cassie says.

“Okay,” Zoe says, her smile locked.

“So you guys are dating,” Cassie says, then offers Zoe popcorn from a steel bowl.

“Just ate,” Zoe apologizes. On the television, investigators at a crime scene are standing over a corpse. Cassie settles back in the couch to watch.

Upstairs, Zoe hears water slosh. “It's me,” she whispers through the closed door.

More water sloshes and then it goes still. “Zoe?” Porter whispers back.

“Sorry. Can I come in?”

Porter meditates a moment. “What the heck.”

Later, when Porter goes downstairs to say goodnight to Cassie, Zoe gets in bed and checks her phone. There's an email from Alex castigating her about Ethan. For not communicating. She deletes it.

“You all right?” Porter asks when he returns.

She puts the phone on the nightstand and turns out the light. “It's nothing.”

The bed creaks as Porter gets under the sheets with her.
“Shhh,”
Porter says. “You can hear a pin drop through these floors.”

But Zoe hasn't moved. Now she runs a hand up the inside of Porter's thigh. “What do you think she thinks we're doing?” She sees Porter's eyes sparkle, darting in the ambiance filtering through the closed blinds. “Your daughter is grown up,” Zoe says.

“And she seemed fine with us?”

“Like it was barely worth commenting about.”

“Wait till her mother finds out.”

“Finds out what?” Zoe asks even though she knows he means their age difference. For the hundredth time Zoe considers that their age gap might make her laughable. Within herself, however, she imagines herself to be his peer. Her hand touches Porter's penis, which is thickening. She clenches it as if squeezing a lemon.

“Ouch,” he whispers. “I'm sorry.”

Everyone is sorry for something tonight. “Sorry for what?” Zoe asks. Is he sorry for calling her out about her Indian summer comment? Is he sorry for letting her send extortion money to Jean-Pierre in Burundi? She squeezes Porter again.

Porter squirms and tries to restrain a giggle, but he does not push Zoe's hand away. They are equals now. They are both acting like naughty, gleeful children. But the moment passes. Zoe takes back her hand and listens to their breathing. In the dark, she hears Porter swallow.

“I'm sorry for not going with you to your parents' funeral. I should have been there for you,” he says.

CHAPTER 19

New York City

“Red cadium,” Ethan says, brushing the snow from his fleece top.

“You mean cad
mi
um,” the clerk corrects.

“Cad
m
ium? Are you sure?” Ethan asks. He reviews Alex's list. It reads
cadium
.

Ethan is a double-checker. How he lost his job over a misplaced decimal point is a mystery. He was overtired, certainly. He had worked the previous night through, yes. But he had tested the algorithm twice with pseudo-data before making it live. Over the past three months he has mentally reconstructed his keystrokes countless times and has concluded that the decimal point shift was not his. That someone had sabotaged him.

“No such animal,” states the clerk like an offended expert. He is close to a decade younger than Ethan, boasts fingernails encrusted with pigment.

“Do you know Alex Carr?” Ethan asks.

The put-upon clerk—put upon because he is wasting his genius on an art amateur like Ethan, put upon because he is probably only clerking here to steal the painting supplies he can't afford—says, “I've heard of Carr.”

Things are happening fast. Alex's local fame is the new norm. His star began to rise—following a mention in
Time Out
and a sidebar review in the
Voice
—after Ethan's imploded. Ethan shows the clerk Alex's list. Taking dictation, Ethan had scrawled the supplies on the back of a Duane Reade receipt for Wellbutrin. “This is his handwriting,” Ethan fibs, pointing to his own misspelling.

The clerk takes the list. “It's cadmium,” he mumbles as he goes into the aisles, efficiently returning a few minutes later with the list items—the ten tubes of paint, the extrawide hog bristle brushes, the turpentine, the linseed oil. Scanning barcodes he asks Ethan, “Carr wouldn't need a
good
studio assistant?” Ethan says nothing and gives the clerk his credit card.

While the card is run Ethan asks himself if this is true—not whether he is a lousy studio assistant, but whether a studio assistant is what he now
is
.

He has spent much of the past three months assisting Alex—though it could be argued that Alex is assisting him. Picking up supplies, stretching canvas, helping Alex move to his new studio in Chelsea have been healthy distractions for Ethan while he takes on his old company. His lawyer's advice was to go on the offensive. This would be expensive, perhaps ruinously so. But UIB's clawback would have ruined him anyway. Why not fight?

Having never sued anyone, he is finding the process exhilarating. The strategy sessions, the briefs, the petitions, the counterclaims are, in fact, overstimulating. He cannot settle down to the drudgery of looking for a new job. And what work could he find anyway, with his professional reputation in shreds? For that matter, away from the influence of Dwayne Hoke, he's been reflecting on his old work beyond the math. “Think of it as creative destruction,” Hoke had said whenever he'd expressed the slightest reservation about profiting from military violence, or sometimes just, “The world's going into the shitter, pussy. Man up and do your job.”

Well, he had, and if he's to go after another job like his old one, he will have to hold his nose and man up again. Maybe this, he thinks, is what's caused him to delay his job search. Disgust.

But how can this be? Poker-wise he'd gone all-in on a banking career. He can't just fold. What else does he have?

Helping Alex set up his Tenth Avenue studio, running out for their lunches, stretching canvases, has proved an effective therapy against the anxiety of his indecision. It's even given him an occasional sense of joy—no doubt aided by the Wellbutrin. But drugs and Alex's friendship are stopgaps to his falling apart and not a sustainable career path.

It is late afternoon when Ethan exits the supply store and the weather has deteriorated. A sideways sleet gums his eyelashes. Flagging blindly with a bag in each hand, he is refused by one cab after another until their hissing tires send him to the subway. He surfaces at Chambers Street into a wet wind smashing up the Hudson. In his lobby's mirror, his gaze meets the stare of a teary-eyed, white-haired, red-faced old man. It is just himself—in forty years. He brushes the snow from his head.

THE NEXT DAY,
traces of the blizzard imprint the sky like muddy boots. Today Yahvi has consented to see Ethan for the first time since their split, after he slept with Zoe.

As he crosses Canal Street a scrap of blue tantalizes at the horizon's vanishing point. Ethan continues north, trudging over arctic berms. At the agreed-upon coffee shop Yahvi kisses Ethan warmly on the cheek.

He orders up two espressos and they perch on stools at the countertop in front of the window. When Ethan begins to speak she hushes him with a finger to her lips. “Listen,” she says. Ethan opens his ears. The sound of an engine grows until finally a snowplow crunches past their window. Then the stillness settles back in. The lack of traffic, the muffling snow, the cloud-saturated sky, have transformed what should be a rush hour. For once on the streets it is not the sound of engines that takes precedence. He and Yahvi can hear nature's silence. Even inside the cafe the conversations are muted to match the outer calm. Yahvi had always pointed out street noises to Ethan when they were together—the sound of dueling car horns harmonizing, the oddly affecting drumming of a talented busker. He recalls telling her about the Fibonacci sequence and how Black Star used it in the song “Astronomy.” Mathematicians and musicians were not that far apart. He and Yahvi had once had real potential. Ethan blinks hard to dissipate a tear. Yahvi turns from the window to study him.

“You've lost weight?” she says.

“Have I?” Ethan prevaricates, unsure if her question is a criticism or a compliment. His ghost in the window does seem thin to him.

Yahvi clasps his arm. “You must eat. You
must
.” Her sympathy soothes like a quilt tucked around him.
This
is why he wanted to see her. Also, he cannot bore Alex with any more of his problems.

To appease her concern Ethan buys a danish. “I'm not on a regular feeding schedule,” he says. “Anyway, you look wonderful.”

Yahvi's kohl mascara makes her eyes immense. When she was young her grandmother taught her to make up this way to scare off malign spirits. At times she keeps up the tradition. Ethan is glad she did this today—even if it means that she is putting up her guard against him.

“On dark days you must dress brightly,” Yahvi says, referring to the layers of gold and orange silk that envelope her against the weather.

In his gray fleece top and faded jeans, Ethan is particularly drab and their mismatch makes him miss her even more.

“I heard your suite,” Ethan manages. In January he'd taken the subway to Brooklyn College for the premiere of
Ganesh in America
, the composition she'd started when they were dating.

“Why didn't you say hello?” Yahvi asks.

His memory is of leaving the postperformance reception after spying her on the arm of the bearded lead violin, who played his instrument so violently he had to replace his bow. He and Yahvi seemed a matched pair and Ethan had felt punched in the stomach. “I waved to you over the heads of the crowd. You were the evening's superstar. I couldn't get close to you,” he says.

“And what are you up to these days? Where do you work?”

“Remember that UIB thing? It's not quite done.”

“Wait? Does this mean you don't have a new job yet?”

Ethan has no good answer to her amazement. Perhaps his overnighter with Zoe wasn't the only reason Yahvi and he broke up. What he is, a man with a limited focus, has disheartened her again.

“Ethan, it's time to move on and grow.”

Ethan hems. “There's been some progress. My lawyer just forwarded UIB's proposal. They'll back off on the bonus clawback if I desist from my wrongful termination claim.”

“That's great! Then you've won.”

Ethan shakes his head. “Not yet. Someone sabotaged me and I'm going to prove it. All I need is a look at the mainframe backups from my last day at work. I know UIB kept them—legal would have insisted. What I need to show is that the program I was working on was resaved after I left the office.”

“But there's a problem with this?” Yahvi asks.

“UIB won't release the backups. And my lawyer is having trouble with the subpoena.”

“Then, Ethan! Just let it
go
!” Yahvi's cry turns heads in the cafe. She digs her pianist fingers into Ethan's wrist and whispers. “
Move
on with your life.”

“KEEP MOVING,” ETHAN
tells himself. His sneakered feet are frozen, his fingers about to snap off in their gloves. On the clearer avenues, cabs slip over the packed snow as he marches in the streets with the other pedestrians.

Alex's new work space, found by Juliette, and temporary, is in a Chelsea warehouse that is soon to blossom into a boutique apartment building. Inside, Alex is leaning from a ladder to reach the edge of a twelve-by-twelve canvas, blank except for a horizontal black stripe. The ladder tilts and Ethan steadies it while Alex sweeps a fat curve through the stripe. They move the ladder and do another curve. Alex has created a sideways dollar sign that Franz Kline might have painted. “Got my cadium?” he asks.

“Cad
mium
,” says Ethan.

But only after Alex stops painting does any conversation begin.

“Looks good,” says Ethan about the red-framed dollar sign.

“Later it won't be obvious,” Alex says. He builds his paintings in layers. “So, what up?”

Ethan shrugs. “Nada. Yahvi says hello.”

Alex nods. “You two going out again?”

“Nah. Just had coffee. She's dating a violinist.”

“Shall I cut his strings?”

“Would you?”

“Done. And what else? You're wearing your badass face.”

“Am I?” Ethan says. He's been waiting to talk about this with Alex. “Flying Tiger,” he says. “I'm committed now.”

“Fuck,” Alex says.

Th
e
Flying Tigers
was Ethan's favorite movie as a boy after he saw one of the actual planes at an air museum. It was about a squad of American pilots in China prior to Pearl Harbor. In the final scene, John Wayne and a Clark Gable lookalike named John Carroll are on a mission to blow up a Japanese ammo train. But at the last second their plane is hit and Wayne bails thinking Carroll is right behind. Wounded, Carroll chooses to dive-bomb the plane into the train in best American kamikaze style. He's going to die anyway so why not make it worthwhile?

“Your lawyer. Does she recommend a suicide attack?” Alex asks.

“She says that this latest offer is the best I'm likely to get. That if I piss off UIB by not accepting they'll dig in their heels and outspend and outlast me.”

“Sounds like a good read of the situation,” Alex says. “They just want back your bonus from last year, right?”

“That's not the point anymore. And besides,” Ethan says, jokey, “I've already changed my Gmail address. Flytiger3.1416.”

Ethan's complaint, a lost career, he knows is minor compared to what others have lost to the banks: homes and families. But he feels a similar humiliation. It's insulting that despite the ruin they have inflicted, they still tread like giants. That Ethan is one of the few who can resist obligates him to try. “I'm going to nail UIB,” he says.

“
Magnifique
, Ethan,” says Juliette, who has just entered the studio.