Riverside Park (6 page)

“WHERE DOES SHE
find these guys, in a catalog of the weird and the strange?” Sam Wyatt asked his wife.

“I think she met him through work somehow,” Harriet said quietly, putting the finishing touches on a second platter of hors d'oeuvres. They were on a second round because their youngest was two hours late and they were starving. They also had to entertain the latest boyfriend their older daughter had brought home to share their Thanksgiving meal.

Sam Wyatt's eldest daughter, Althea, was thirty-one, black, Methodist and worked on Wall Street. The guy in the living room had gray hair, was white, and with a name like Donnelly was probably Catholic and had some kook job on Seventh Avenue. Sam always knew they would regret having sent Althea to that Muffy-Buffy school on the East Side for rich girls. Althea had grown up with so few black friends it was no wonder she dated white guys.

Admittedly, Sam and Harriet revolved in a somewhat
rarified circle of New York. He may have started life as the youngest of six dirt-poor kids of an army sergeant who died young, but Sam had earned a college degree and today, at sixty-one, was a senior vice president of Electronika International, the second largest manufacturer of electronic office equipment in America. Harriet, whose skin was much lighter than Sam's, began in the training program at Gardiner & Grayson book publishers and today was Vice President of Publicity, Marketing & Advertising.

“Be polite, Sam, that's all I ask,” Harriet murmured, picking up the tray of hors d'oeuvres.

“Yeah, yeah.” He finished pouring the old white Catholic guy a second glass of wine. Sam hadn't had a drink in over twenty-one years, which was a good thing since it had been under only that one condition that Harriet had allowed him back into her and Althea's life. That was why there was an eleven year age difference between their daughters. Althea was from Round 1 of their marriage while Samantha was their AA baby, the child from Round 2 who benefitted most from her parents being in Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon.

Where the heck was Samantha? he wondered, looking at his watch. Traffic, he supposed. Harriet said after the scolding they gave Samantha about her last cell phone bill she would probably claim it had been “uneconomical” to call them from the road.

“Cliff was just remarking on the boat,” Harriet said when Sam came in, nodding in the direction of the framed picture of their sailboat.

Sam handed the old white guy his glass of wine.

“Thanks, Mr. Wyatt. Althea says you moor it in Manhattan for part of the year.”

“At the Seventy-Ninth Street Boat Basin,” he confirmed.
He sat down and took a sip of Crystal Lite. (It wasn't half-bad compared to the other low-calorie crap Harriet was always trying to get him to drink.) “This time of year we keep it at our place in South Carolina.” One of the reasons they had been anxious to get the girls together was to tell them he had finally worked out early retirement with Electronika; he and Harriet could afford to stop working in the spring. They were planning to downsize from this apartment (thank God they had made the stretch to buy it) to a two bedroom and spend half the year in South Carolina and half up here in Manhattan.

Althea would be fine with not having them around half the year. After breezing through Columbia at their expense, Althea had gone off to Berkeley with her boyfriend at the time to get an MBA. With the degree (and without the boyfriend) Althea came back to New York and took a job on Wall Street, something she said she would do until she paid off her student loans from graduate school. She became an investment analyst, one of those brainy people who researched companies to see if the firm should underwrite a bond issue for them. If the analyst's recommendations were correct, the firm often made a ton of money; if the analyst was wrong, though, the firm might still make some money up front but its reputation could take a hit which ended in long-term loss. The analyst responsible tended to vanish.

When Althea had told Sam she wished to stake her career on specializing in alternative energy, Sam's heart had filled with dread. Leave it to whacked-out Berkeley to prepare his daughter to be the only person on Wall Street who would never make any money. But then, of course, the oil crunch came and a drawing of Althea's face appeared on the front page of
The Wall Street Journal
as the high scorer in a suddenly enticing field. Her recommendation to underwrite a bond issue for a
small company holding a patent that promised to revolutionize the production of hybrid engines was a grand slam, while earlier bond issues—in wind turbos, micro-turbines, corn refineries and municipal thermal-dynamic energy plants—were sent flying around the bases. Her latest venture was underwriting an outfit reopening abandoned sugar factories.

Althea was going to make partner in January. Last year Sam and Harriet had been agog to learn Althea's salary was ninety thousand dollars—supplemented by a $650,000 bonus. To his daughter's credit Althea gave over seventy-five thousand dollars a year away, paid something like three hundred thousand dollars in taxes
(three hundred thousand dollars in taxes!)
and moved into a two million dollar loft in SoHo.

This kind of money seemed insane to Sam and Harriet. And yet their own apartment, overlooking Riverside Park, had been appraised at over a million five. (They had bought it for two hundred and fifty thousand!)

But that was the nature of the great have and have-not divide of the new America, wasn't it? The whole country seemed morally out of whack. You had everything or you had very little.

However lucrative Althea's career might be, she was paying for it in other ways. Her work was wildly intense and geographically complicated. When she was in New York she worked a minimum of twelve hours a day and otherwise was on the road for the better part of each month. It was not fun travel, either, or even sequential. It was “go to Sacramento to pitch a bond issue to the California state pension fund, then get back in time for the meeting with the partners and then get down to Knoxville to scout that company before anyone else gets there and don't forget next Monday is the public hearing on the Nova Scotia wind project, and Thursday is the
Westminster Bank summit in London, and the following week you must get in to see that nutcase in Venezuela” kind of travel.

The Wyatts were also particularly proud of Althea's personal agenda in her work, to generate jobs, products and energy options in places where there were few. Why not use the earth's earliest and most bountiful foods like corn and sugar to stretch our oil reserves? Why not harness desert winds to make electricity? Or turn the endless summer sunshine of Alaska into the electricity needed to run air conditioners in the continental United States?

Now as for Samantha, the Wyatts' nineteen-year-old, she was a very different matter. Frankly speaking she was a little spoiled and being that much farther away from them for six months of the year made both Harriet and Sam a little nervous.

“How much longer do we have to wait for Sammy?” Althea wanted to know, reaching for a piece of celery. She crunched down on it, showing the beautiful teeth from childhood orthodontics. Althea was a good-looking woman, tall, slim, with great cheekbones Sam recognized as his own. But it was Samantha who was the beauty of the family. Samantha looked like her mother.

“We'll give her another ten minutes,” Harriet said.

Althea sighed, grabbed a piece of cheese and sank back into the cushions.

“So what exactly do you do on Seventh Avenue?” Sam asked the guy. (He wished Harriet would go into the kitchen to check on something so he could eat some cheese, too.)

“I'm a textile designer.”

“Samantha will be so interested,” Harriet said. “She's in a theater group at school and loves making costumes.”

What the hell kind of job was it for a man to be a textile designer? Sam wondered. “I guess you have to be, uh,” Sam said, “
inclined
toward that kind of work?”

Althea rolled her eyes.

“I'm afraid my husband gets slightly deranged when he's not fed,” Harriet explained.

The white-haired guy was laughing. “It's okay. My dad had the same reaction.”

“Your father's still alive?” Sam blurted.

Althea picked up a carrot from the tray and gently threw it at her father. It bounced off Sam's barrel chest to the carpet.

“It must be my hair,” the guy said to Althea. He looked at Sam. “It's a family trait, Mr. Wyatt. A lot of us go silver before thirty-five.” He smiled, looking hopeful. “I'm only thirty-four, sir.”

“Don't bother explaining anything to him,” Althea told her boyfriend, “because I won't be speaking to him again as long as I live.” She glared at her father. “You got it now, Dad? Cliff is not gay, he is gainfully employed and he's thirty-four, okay?”

Sam mumbled an apology and then looked at his watch. “Where is that girl?”

“I vote we go ahead and eat,” Althea said.

“Five more minutes,” Harriet said, “and if she isn't here…”

“So, Cliff,” Sam said, sitting back in his chair, “why don't you explain to me exactly what a textile designer does.”

“Well, I'm a chemical engineer by training, Mr. Wyatt.”

“Oh, a chemical engineer,” Harriet repeated approvingly, raising her eyebrows.

“He went to MIT,” Althea added.

“I work in a lab to create new fibers. For different manufacturers.”

“He just created something for Ralph Lauren,” Althea said.

“Good for you,” Sam said, although it still sounded a little poofy to him. He turned at the sound of the tumblers in the front door.

“That will be Samantha,” Harriet said, jumping up and going to the foyer.

“Hooray, food,” Althea said, standing up.

“Oh, hi, Rosanne,” Sam heard Harriet say in the hall.

“Rosanne?” Sam said, glancing at Althea. “What's Rosanne doing here?”

“I think Mom invited her to dinner.” Althea balanced her empty glass on the hors d'oeuvres tray and picked it up. “But she was going with Jason and Mrs. Goldblum over to the Stewarts'.” Cliff stood to pick up the other glasses and soiled cocktail napkins. “Rosanne was my babysitter way back when, Cliff, so be warned, if you don't mind your p's and q's at the dinner table she might pinch you.”

Harriet reappeared in the living room and by her expression Sam knew something was wrong. “What's wrong? Where's Samantha?”

“She went to her room. She's not feeling very well.” She turned to Cliff. “I hate to do this to you,” she began.

“But it would be better if I left. Of course, I understand.”

“Fix Cliff a plate to take with him,” Harriet said.

“No way, I'm taking him to Captain Cook's,” Althea said. “After making him sit here half the night the least I can do is give him dinner.”

“No, Althea.” The tone of Harriet's voice got everyone's attention. She added, in a quieter voice, “I wish you would stay. I think your sister would want you here.”

A feeling of foreboding flooded through Sam and wordlessly he headed for Samantha's bedroom.

“Sam, wait—”

Rosanne was standing next to three suitcases outside Samantha's room.

“A lot of baggage for three days,” Sam observed.

“Mr. W,” Rosanne said, “we need to talk for a sec.”

Sam went to the door and found it locked. He knocked. “Samantha? This is your father. Open this door.”

“If I could just talk to you for one minute,” Rosanne pleaded.

“Oh, Rosanne!” Sam heard his daughter wail from behind the door. “What's the use?” The handle turned and the door swung open.

“Samantha, what is it?” Sam asked, wincing as he looked at his daughter's tearstained face. And then he looked down, between the parted sides of her coat. When he brought his eyes back up his daughter's expression confirmed it. Samantha was pregnant.

HE KEPT PUTTING
off telling Amanda about it and now he was running out of time. Christmas would just about finish him financially.

The deals he thought would set things right at the agency had never materialized. Instead, his number one associate announced she was moving to another agency and was taking two of Hillings & Stewart's biggest writers with her. To be fair, Howard had assigned these two midlist authors (writers who sold consistently well but never quite seemed to make a bestseller list) to her because they were taking up so much of his time. The associate placed them at new publishing houses where first one and then the other popped onto the bestseller lists. Now the income from huge new contracts for these two writers was gone with his former associate.

And then there was the death of Gertrude Bristol, the international bestselling romance-suspense writer Howard had edited at Gardiner & Grayson who had become his founding
client. Year in and year out for eight years Howard had received a Bristol novel to sell to publishers in twenty-one countries, to Reader's Digest Condensed Book Club, to audio publishers and to movie and TV producers.

Gertrude had been ninety-three when she died so it wasn't as if her passing had come as a great shock, but what happened after did. It was not unusual for the longtime publisher of a bestselling writer to enlist a ghost writer to keep writing books under the name of the deceased writer. It was a marketing thing, where the author as a brand name promised to deliver a certain kind of book. Everyone fromV. C. Andrews to L. Ron Hubbard had been writing from the grave for years, and Gertrude Bristol was the kind of traditional “cozy” novelist who had written so many books for so many years that more than one excellent writer could emulate her style. Howard found the right writer, the publishing house was ecstatic and ready to go, and then—

The niece, Gertrude's literary executor, said, “No.”

Of course, since the niece had inherited some twenty-six million dollars and the rights to forty-seven novels, what did she care about money? What was important to her, she wrote Howard, was that her dear aunt's work remain her own.

Howard understood the niece's sentiments but he also knew this decision put his agency in bad straits. His accountant had been warning him since he bought out the distinguished Hillings & Hillings Literary Agency to form Hillings & Stewart that Howard was operating on a very slim margin for error. Howard did not let the people go from Hillings & Hillings that the accountant advised him to; Howard had gone ahead with what was considered the Cadillac of health insurance plans; and Howard also instituted a retirement plan the accountant warned could come back to haunt him if any of his young
employees ever got serious about saving. Yes, the accountant admitted, Howard could comfortably meet these obligations now. But what if something happened and costs went up and income came down? What then?

And then 9/11. Besides the psychological fallout from the tragedy, property taxes skyrocketed and so did the rents on midtown office buildings. Insurance premiums of all kinds went through the roof. And then there was the fact that it took months for the book publishing industry to return to any sense of normalcy. And God help any author whose book had been published in the interim. A techno-thriller about terrorists Howard represented had had a first printing of four hundred thousand copies coming out in November. Because of its subject matter the publisher delayed publication by ten months, at which time it sold barely thirty-five thousand copies.

Howard's children had been badly frightened and so he had not even hesitated about buying the house in Woodbury. At the time he qualified for a good mortgage rate and he wanted his family safe. The house, in turn, started a slew of new expenses and it was not long before Howard was taking a lot more money out of the agency than the agency receipts could support.

By last year Howard knew he had to do something so he had put out a feeler with Henry Hillings about the possibility one of his grandchildren might be interested in learning the business. The old man instantly got fired up about the idea because he had one grandson, he said, “Who's just the ticket,” and it was not long before a lawyer called Howard to express Henry's interest in buying his grandson into the agency as a partner. A partial cash-flow solution seemed to be near. But when it came time to show the agency books, Howard put it
off because the agency at that moment was out over two hundred thousand dollars on a credit line with a bank that was failing. That's when he had hustled to get the Gertrude Bristol deal going and got shot down.

Subsequent meetings with his accountant did not go well. If Howard wanted the agency books to look good, he was told, he had to pay off the credit line, lay off at least three employees, sublet one of the offices and make his employees pay at least thirty percent of their health care premiums. Also, if he didn't want trouble with the IRS, he needed an extra hundred thousand to set things right. His finances, the accountant told him, were now officially a secret disaster.

Howard took out a second mortgage on the Woodbury property (bringing up the percentage he owed to one hundred and twenty-five percent), paid the IRS, paid off the agency credit lines and balanced the books. The accountant only shook his head, saying it was no good to put personal property at risk when the agency had been incorporated expressly to shield his family. Why did Howard do it?

Howard did it because Howard couldn't stand the idea that Henry Hillings would think he had sold his distinguished literary agency to a loser. In Howard's eyes it was a far better thing to be in a temporary personal financial bind than for even a hint of tarnish to appear on the Hillings & Stewart name.

He had told Amanda none of this because this was the one area—money—he had sworn to her she would never have to worry about on his end. He had learned his lesson with his first wife; Howard would make his own money. Amanda owned the Riverside Drive apartment free and clear and she also had a generous trust fund, the revenue from which they could rely on. Amanda didn't care how much money Howard made; she only cared that Howard did not drift into the finan
cially carefree attitude he had developed in his first marriage.
That
was why he had been so excited about buying the Woodbury property.
He
was buying a beautiful home for his family; it was the money
he
had earned that would keep his family safe.

Amanda's reaction to the house had been everything Howard had hoped for. Her jaw dropped in disbelief and then she had burst into tears, telling him she couldn't believe it, how much he had achieved in such a short period of time, and how she and Emily and Teddy (for Grace had not yet even been imagined) were the luckiest people on the face of the earth.

“Howard,” his mother said.

Howard blinked and then looked across the living room. His mother was driving him crazy tonight, talking about what a wonderful husband and provider Howard's father had been—even if he hadn't gone to college like Howard and hadn't had fancy friends. She was just declaring there was no shame in a man working with his hands when the phone rang.

“I'm proud of Dad, too, Mom,” Howard said, jumping up to answer the phone.

“I'm over here at Captain Cook's if you still feel like having that beer,” the insurance salesman aspiring to be a novelist told Howard.

“I'm glad you called,” Howard said, trying to put on an act of grave concern for his mother's benefit. This would be his only chance to get out of here for a while. “I got an e-mail this morning from Australia I'd like to discuss with you. So don't move, I'll be there shortly. I'm sorry, Mom,” Howard said, hanging up the phone, “but I'm afraid I have to go out.”

When Howard saw Celia behind the bar at Captain Cook's he thought,
How weird is that?
Amanda had just asked him
about Celia today and now here he was walking in like the regular he wasn't.

“How are you?” Howard greeted the insurance salesman who was sitting at the bar, shaking his hand and giving him a pat on the shoulder.

“Nervous as hell,” the insurance salesman said, tossing back what smelled like whiskey.

Celia came over to their side of the bar. “He's worried he's going to have to sell insurance for the rest of his life,” she told Howard.

“Hi, Celia.”

“Hi.”

“And he's scared you're going to give up on him,” a strange woman with a lot of makeup said from the corner of the bar.

“He's been hitting it pretty hard,” another customer explained.

“A Beck's, please, Celia, thank you,” Howard said, sliding onto a stool. He looked at the writer. “I don't know about your career in insurance, but I did get an offer from an Australian publisher for UK rights on your novel. It's a modest offer, but you'll be published in Australia, England, Ireland—”

The writer threw himself at Howard to hug him. The customers at this end of the bar cheered. Howard laughed, slapping the writer's back, savoring the moment. This was the joy of his job. (Telling a writer that every publisher in America had rejected their manuscript was the worst.)

Celia placed a frosted mug and a bottle of Beck's in front of Howard. “Nicely done.”

She was a pretty girl. It was funny, he didn't remember her as such. While the writer grilled him for details, Howard watched Celia and began to realize why she might have given Amanda pause for thought. She was one of those seriously
AWOL Fairfield County girls, a fascinating Waspy creature who could exude a kind of smoldering sexuality.Maybe it was the way her jeans fit her. She had a great ass.

When the writer left to use the bathroom Celia put a dish of pretzels down in front of Howard. “Thank God you had good news. He's been depressed for as long as I've been serving him.”

Her eyes were nice.Very dark. Like her hair. “Which is how long?”

“Three years,” she said, leaving to get another patron a drink.

When she came back Howard told her, “There is a school of thought that says it's good to keep writers depressed because then they stay home and write.”

She laughed. It made her much more attractive. She had a great smile.

“I hear you ran into my wife early this morning.”

Her eyebrows went up. “I did?”

“In the lobby. Around three this morning?”

Celia still looked uncertain and held up a finger, signaling that Howard was to hold that thought while she got another customer a drink.

Howard saw the writer standing just outside the bar area, holding a cell phone to one ear and covering his other with a hand. He guessed he was calling his wife with the good news.

“I got sort of hammered here after work last night,” Celia admitted on her return. “I think I remember seeing her. With the baby. Your wife has really beautiful hair, right?”

“Yes, she does.”

“And absolutely
huge
tits,” Celia added.

Howard did a double take.

Celia covered her mouth, aghast. “I'm so sorry, I didn't mean it that way. My roommate and I watch this show on BBC
America,
What Not to Wear,
and this lady Trinny's always saying stuff like that so we've been saying it to each other. I didn't mean to be rude—”

“Miss?” a customer called.

“I meant it as a compliment,” she said, moving away. “I mean, look.” She gestured to her own breasts and then made a gesture of futility.

No, there wasn't much there, Howard had to agree. But Celia did have terrific legs and that great swing to her ass.

“My wife thinks I'm lying about the Australian publisher,” the writer announced upon his return. “She thinks I'm saying it so I can stay out and drink and not have to deal with her parents. The busboy says he knows you, by the way. That one, over there. Joey or something.”

Howard smiled. “Hey! Jason!”

The teenager untangled himself from a tray of dirty dishes and came over, smiling and wiping his hands on his apron before shaking Howard's hand. “Hey, Mr. Stewart.”

“Long time no see,” Howard joked. Jason was a great kid, but really shy. Of course, with a mother like Rosanne, Howard imagined it would be hard to get a word in edgewise. “Was that turkey gross or what?”

“It wasn't that bad,” the boy said nicely. “At least it didn't have any buckshot in it this year.”

They laughed.

“My novel's getting published,” the writer told Jason.

“Congratulations. Is Mr. Stewart your agent?”

“Best agent in the world,” the writer declared, but Jason's eyes had moved to something behind them. Howard turned to see what he was looking at. Celia. Jason was looking at Celia. When Howard turned back around he could see a rash of scarlet spreading across Jason's neck.

Jason had a crush on her.

“If you want, Jason,” he heard Celia say, “you can have a second break.”

Jason's eyes lit up. “Yeah. Yeah! That'd be great,” he stammered.

“Then you better go and take it before she changes her mind,” Howard said.