The Rothman Scandal (32 page)

“Everybody else has a place in the Hamptons,” Charlie said. “Everybody but us.”

Lenny was finding Charlie's whining tone somewhat annoying. “And how would you expect us to pay for a place in the Hamptons?” he asked testily. “You can't even rent a decent place out there for less than fifty thousand, Memorial Day through Labor Day.”

It was the only thing they ever argued about. Money—or the insufficiency of it—was the only source of friction between them. Charlie still sometimes spoke of “my inheritance.” But that was spent long ago, much of it on the creation of Adam Amado. When Charlie was angry, he sometimes reminded Lenny of this, since Adam had been Lenny's original idea. If it weren't for Lenny, Charlie seemed to imply, he would still be rich, which was nonsense, because if Charlie hadn't spent his money on Adam he would have frittered it away on something else. Now, neither one of them was rich. They lived—well enough, to be sure—on what Lenny managed to bring in. But they were always just a little bit in debt.

“Of course I don't suppose it would ever occur to you to
work,
” Lenny said with an edge to his voice. “Some people work for a living, dovey. I've just spent a particularly exhausting week at the office, and you talk about getting a place in the Hamptons.”

“Work? I've got a full-time job just keeping house for you—Mary,” Charlie said.

“And speaking of keeping house, those picture frames on the piano could do with some polishing—Mary.”

“I've put through three loads of wash today—most of it yours, Mary!”

This could be dangerous, when they started calling each other Mary, and Lenny mentally groped for a change of subject. With a slight
frisson
, he thought: Was it possible that Charlie was becoming bored with him after all these years? He hardly ever talked with Charlie about what went on at the office. The fascinating office intrigues did not fascinate Charlie. They bored him. Having never worked in an office, Charlie didn't even understand them. Office politics were
terra incognita
to Charlie. Lenny could not discuss the Fiona threat with Charlie. He wouldn't grasp its significance. The news that Alex Rothman was under a state of siege would bore him. He could not tell Charlie about Aunt Lily's secret stock-cooking scheme. Charlie wouldn't understand it and, besides, when more than two people were in on it, a secret wasn't a secret any longer. And Charlie was a notorious blabbermouth. He couldn't even tell Charlie about his plans for the Isfahan, exciting though they were, or about what he planned to do next with two signed Boulle commodes.

Charlie was looking very pained and pouty now. And, suddenly in a mollifying mood, Lenny decided to drop just a little cheerful hint. “Actually, I'm working on something right now that may turn out to be a nice little thing for us,” he said.

“Oh?” Charlie sat forward, looking interested. “What is it? Money?”

Lenny smiled a prim, sphinxlike smile. “Never you mind, dovey,” he said. “But let me just say that if all goes well you might just get your precious house in the Hamptons. And you might get it sooner than you think. Just leave everything to dear old Lenny, dovey dear.”

At that very moment, not many blocks away, Joel Rothman was walking up Madison Avenue toward the Westbury, a spring in his step, his feet in their Paul Stuart loafers barely seeming to touch the pavement, on an adrenaline high. He was free! Mom had been as good as her word, and Otto was gone! Gone forever! There had been quite a scene, and Frank, the elevator man, had told him all about it. It had taken three security men from the building to subdue Otto and carry him out, kicking and screaming and cursing all the way, and brandishing his expired police officer's badge in their faces. Joel laughed at the picture of it, and wished he could have seen it. “Germans,” Frank said. “I was in the war, and I killed my share of 'em. They're all alike, them Germans. Krauts, we used to call 'em.”

As he strode up Madison, he paused to appraise his reflection in a shop window. Not bad! He had spent the afternoon shopping. At Stuart's, he had bought a new light blue shirt with a rolled collar, a blue-and-green regimental striped tie, and a pair of color-coordinated blue-and-green-striped socks. She was the kind of girl who noticed these things, and he was wearing them now. He had been especially careful in his selection of underwear. He was also wearing his new double-breasted blue blazer and gray doeskin slacks from Sills of Cambridge. She had teased him about his “specs,” as she called them, and so tonight he was wearing his contact lenses. He had also found time for a haircut at Jerry of Bergdorf's. Tonight was their first real date.

She had sounded overjoyed with the idea when he called her earlier in the day. “Pop by my place around seven,” she said. “We'll have a bit of bubbly.”

“Then I'm taking you out to dinner,” he said.

“Oh, super!” she said.

He glanced at his watch, and forced himself to slow his pace. It was quarter of seven, and he didn't want to be a minute too early or a minute too late. He had timetabled the evening very carefully in his head.

Seven o'clock, arrival.

Seven to seven twenty for the bit of bubbly.

Then he was allowing about an hour for serious fucking, on those blue satin sheets!

Then, allowing for time for them to shower and dress, he had made dinner reservations for half past nine, at Le Cirque. Le Cirque seemed like the perfect place to take a woman like Fiona for dinner. It was where the women in Mona Potter's column always seemed to eat, when it wasn't Mortimer's, and Le Cirque was so much grander than Mort's. And more expensive, of course, but that didn't matter. As a graduation present, his grandfather had given him his very own American Express Gold Card, with a five thousand credit balance. Tonight it would be put to use for the first time. Membership had its privileges.

And after dinner? Well, that would doubtless take care of itself. She might, or she might not, feel ready for a little more action, and after a dinner at Le Cirque she certainly might.

At the corner of 69th Street, Joel stepped into a drugstore and bought a packet of condoms. The night before he had been unprepared. A purchase like this was so much easier now than when you were a kid, and had to wait until no grown-ups were within earshot, and then had to whisper to the druggist to tell him what you wanted, and half the time he pretended not to hear you, to make you speak up louder so the whole damned store could hear, and then you had to hope that the druggist wouldn't roll his eyes (when all you wanted them for, for Chrissake, was to figure out how to put one on—the instructions were a little vague). Now they were all out on the counter, all makes and varieties, and all you had to do was make your selection and take it to the register. Like buying a pack of Life Savers. No, it was not even like that. Condoms had become the status symbol of the '90s. Buying them was more like strolling into Cartier's and picking out a gold tank watch, Joel thought.

At the checkout counter was a sample bottle of some new men's cologne. He spritzed some into the palm of his hand and rubbed it into his cheeks. Ah, yes, he was ready now! He gave the cute checkout girl a big wink. She knew!

That purchase made—thinking of that white-white face and those tiny, firm, pointy breasts—he continued up Madison Avenue. Yes, this was the real thing now. This wasn't going to be like the time with the whore in Concord, the one Otto had got for him—a forty-dollar whore with garlic breath. That had been disgusting, actually—watching her pull off her sweaty pink slip to expose the stretch marks on her fat thighs, and hearing Otto the Hun pumping away on another one in the next little cubicle … and then, when it was over, watching her lick her thumb as she counted out the bills. It was damned lucky, in fact, that that experience hadn't turned him off sex altogether. He had heard of that happening—one disgusting experience like that one with a stretchmarked whore in a water bed with semen-stained sheets could easily turn a guy off sex altogether. But thank God that hadn't happened, though it could have, disgusting as the whole thing was.

In the next block, he made one last stop, at a florist's shop, where he picked up a dozen long-stemmed red roses. He checked his watch again. Two minutes of seven, and he pushed his way through the revolving doors of the Westbury, his roses in one hand and his condoms in the lefthand pocket of his Sills navy blazer. He made his way straight to the elevators. “Don't have them announce you. Just come straight up,” she had said. He pushed the button for the eighteenth floor.

At the door to apartment 1815, he pressed the doorbell, and waited for the sound of footsteps.

From inside the apartment, he could hear a telephone ringing. But no one was responding, and it continued to ring. After a minute or two, he pressed the doorbell again.

Now a second phone was ringing, a different tone, and now both telephones were ringing, their rings alternating. Joel counted the rings … ten … eleven … twelve … He pressed the doorbell a third time, but there was no response.

It was eerie, listening to those phones ringing. And all at once a third phone in the apartment began to ring, and now there were three different telephone lines ringing all at once. Presently he heard a beep, as an answering machine picked up on one of the lines, and then he heard a man's voice delivering what seemed to be a long, complicated, urgent-sounding—even angry-sounding—message. But even with his ear pressed against the door, Joel could not make out the words. One by one, the other telephones stopped ringing, but the man's unpleasant voice continued from the answering machine. Joel pressed the doorbell once more, then tried the knob. The door was locked. Joel wondered all at once if she might be in some sort of trouble. He knocked loudly on the door, and called,
“Fiona! Are you there?”

Two middle-aged women in pants suits, laden with shopping bags, stepped off the elevator and started down the corridor in his direction. As they passed him, both seemed to give him peculiar looks. Was it because they had seen him with his ear to the door? Or because they had heard his loud banging or his yelling? Or was it the bunch of long-stemmed roses he was carrying? Or had they noticed the bulge of the packet of condoms in his jacket pocket, or another bulge, the beginning of an erection, in the silhouette of his doeskin slacks? He pressed the doorbell impatiently several more times, and the ladies in the pants suits glanced back at him from down the corridor, and one of them whispered something to the other.

Downstairs, he approached the receptionist's desk. “Is Miss Fenton in?” he asked.

“Miss Fenton? Oh, you mean Her Ladyship. No, Her Ladyship went out at about four o'clock, and I believe she may have gone for the weekend. She had luggage.”

“Did she leave any sort of message for me—Mr. Rothman?”

The clerk looked at Joel over the rims of his horn-rimmed glasses, another look that struck Joel as peculiar. “No, sir, she did not.”

From Joel Rothman's journal:

6/23/90

9:30
P
.
M
.

I put the roses in Mom's room with a note thanking her for getting rid of Otto for me. No point in letting Fiona's roses go to waste.…

I'm sure she didn't mean to stand me up tonight. Something very important must have come up, some family emergency perhaps. After all, Fiona is a pretty important lady. She wouldn't have deliberately stood me up, and I know I'll hear from her soon with the explanation.… I'm sure she tried to call me this afternoon while I was out shopping, getting my haircut and all that shit, but she didn't leave a message because she didn't want Mom to find out about our date. But still the whole experience of tonight has kind of spooked me, because I was really horny for her, and she seemed to be looking forward to our evening, too. “I'd adore to see you tonight,” she said. Oh, well. Came home. Jacked off. And now I feel really shitty about having done that. Funny thing happened after I left the hotel. I was walking down Madison, and as I was waiting for the light, I looked back and I swear to God I saw old Otto in the crowd on the sidewalk, about half a block behind me, as though he was still following me! But when I looked again, he was gone, so it must have been my imagination. It must have been because I was feeling so spooked about not having my date with Fiona. I'm sure that's it. Today's journalistic question: What about “tuna fish”? Recipe in today's
N.Y. Times
called for tuna fish. But isn't
tuna
the name of the
fish?
So isn't “tuna fish” a redundancy? We don't say “bass fish,” “trout fish,” “salmon fish,” etc., etc., etc. Swordfish, cuttlefish, needlefish seem okay, since they're all one word. But
tuna fish
sounds wrong to me. Or am I being silly? Spooked
.

17

Henry Coker was one of the most buttoned-down men she had ever known. Even here on her sunny terrace, on a Saturday morning when he could not possibly be going to his Wall Street office, he was dressed for business, in a dark blue suit with the tiniest of pinstripes running through the fabric, a dark blue necktie and wingtip shoes. He was a tall, thin man whose prematurely white hair had the odd effect of making his not-unhandsome face appear more boyish. Henry, Alex guessed, was about her age. Alex, by contrast to Henry's buttoned-down look, was wearing faded blue jeans, rope-soled sandals, and one of Joel's old Brooks Brothers shirts, with the tails knotted at her waist. She had pulled her hair back into a loose ponytail, and tied it with a red scarf. She had dressed for the drive to Long Island.

Henry Coker put his coffee cup down, and snapped his briefcase closed. “Well, as I say, your contract is pretty cut and dried,” he said. “Your title and duties are clearly defined. This contract is hardly of the boilerplate variety, if I do say so myself.” He smiled slightly. “Since I helped work out the terms for you. So I don't anticipate any difficulties. I feel confident that I can persuade Herbert Rothman that what he proposes is in violation of the terms of this instrument, to which you are both signatories. And I trust I can settle this—ah, disagreement—with Mr. Rothman or his attorneys on amicable terms, without the threat of legal action on our part. At least this is what I hope to do, Alex.”