Текст книги "A Fatal Debt"

Автор книги: John Gapper

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

6

I’d been to the Hamptons a few times to visit friends with summer rentals or to hang out on the beach for a day, but I’d never penetrated those high hedges and pristine gardens. How could I have? Staked by each house on the roads south of Route 27, where the wind rustled the tall trees, were foot-high signs with security company logos and white heraldic boards with black script: Private Property. Private Way. No Trespassing.

So as I sat in the front seat of a stone gray Range Rover, scanning white wooden gates and broad driveways, I enjoyed being welcome for once. I glanced to my left every so often, not only to observe a cottage or mini-mansion, but also to take a glimpse at my driver. I knew only her first name: Anna. It was all she’d given away.

When I’d emerged from the airport building into the parking lot, she’d been standing by the car, one black flip-flop-clad foot propped against the driver’s door, chewing a stalk and refixing her straw blond hair in a ponytail. She’d been hard to miss because there was no one else in sight and she’d given me a wave and a broad smile, pulling her lips so far back to show her teeth that it looked like a contortionist’s trick. I’d grinned back stupidly, wondering what someone like her was doing there-I’d have expected to find her in the city.

She was in her late twenties, I guessed, but had a girlish affect, from her unbridled smile to her dewy skin and red fingernails. She wore a lime green T-shirt, and as she’d turned away to climb into the car, I’d seen the tiny blond hairs on her swanlike neck. She seemed to straddle the border between innocence and experience.

“Beautiful gardens, aren’t they?” I said, looking out to my right.

She laughed. “They’re crazy, some of them. Look over there on the right, by that white house.”

We swung round a corner and passed a long hedge with a tall gate in the middle. Arrayed along both sides of the hedge were six plane trees, each trunk held vertical by three duckbill cables pegged to the ground.

“None of those trees were there last week. They all went up on Sunday.”

“You’re joking.”

“That’s how they do things here. They don’t believe in delayed gratification.”

“There’s a lot of security.”

She laughed. “You’re telling me. They’re all paranoid someone might break into their little paradise. I went with Nora to a cocktail party once, a place over near Water Mill some billionaire owns with his blond Hungarian model third wife-she’s about seven feet tall. We were in a room at the back and they had these giant screens showing shots of the beach and the ocean. Nora asked her what they were for.”

Anna put on an Eastern European accent. “ ‘Our security is gutfrom the bay side, but we are wulnerablefrom the south,’ ” she said, then switched back to her normal voice. “Ha! Wulnerable from the south! What was she scared of? A platoon of Marines and a beach landing?”

We were getting close to the ocean. I could smell the sea air, and the light had gone a milky white, as if the sun were being refracted through frosted glass. We turned down a lane with a line of houses on the ocean side, perched along a high dune. Anna slowed at the end by a gray split-rail fence. Two weeping willow trees flanked the entrance to a pink gravel drive, which she followed as it curved back on itself and up the steep rise of the dune. Nature had been tamed on this side of the slope. It was planted with sculpted bushes and lawn, divided up the middle by a stone path. We passed two gardeners giving a hedge a morning shave and halted on a square of gravel by one of the prettiest houses I’d ever seen.

It was more cottage than house, like something out of a fairy tale: an oblong stuccoed in pale green, the same color as the lichen spreading over the stones on the ocean side. The roof was tiled in brown cedar shingles that curved over the eaves and around the top of each doorway like a thatch. To the west, where we stood, was a small tower topped with a wizard’s hat of shingle. On the side facing the ocean was a pristine lawn ending at a ridge from which the dune tumbled to the beach. A swimming pool edged with white stone, no more than thirty feet long, was cut into the lawn, and beyond was a view of dunes, pristine beach, and ocean that ran for miles.

Sitting on the lawn, gazing out to sea, was Harry.

The girl walked toward a small sign by the side entrance that read SERVICE. I wasn’t sure whether it was a comment on our status or just the easiest way to go, but she led me into a light-filled, slate-surfaced kitchen with big stainless-steel appliances. She went over to a brushed-steel intercom on the wall and prodded a button.

“Nora, your guest is here,” she said, hardly louder than her normal speaking voice, and gestured to me to pass by her through another door.

On the far side was a large living room with two white sofas facing each other across a broad wool rug with a geometric pattern in gray and black. There was a low table on which sat an antique brass sculpture of a hand grasping a ball. Above was a light housed in a globelike shade studded with colored tiles that looked like a piece of art. The room led out onto a veranda facing the lawn with a long wooden table, set with white napkins and glass candleholders like a ship’s lanterns. The whole thing was perfectly ordered and restful, an aesthetic intelligence behind it.

After I’d stood there by myself for a minute, Nora entered from the far side. She wore a pale linen shift with an embroidered front and linen pants, and she looked far more at ease than she’d been at the hospital. She walked across to me and, before I could shake hands with professional formality, kissed me on the cheek. It left a pleasant impression of soft skin and expensive scent.

“How is your father? I’ve been worried about him,” she said, gesturing to me to take a seat on one of the sofas. It seemed unlikely that she really had, since she’d never met him and she hardly knew me, yet she sounded genuine.

“He’s doing okay, thank you. I think he’ll recover all right if he follows his doctor’s advice.”

Nora smiled knowingly. “Getting middle-aged men to do what they’re told can be hard, can’t it?”

I found her hard to argue with, but I felt the need to restore some of my authority after the manner in which I’d been brought there. I tried to sound stern.

“It was kind of you to arrange the flight, but I’d expected to see Mr. Shapiro back in New York, as we’d agreed.”

Nora gave an embarrassed grimace. “I’m sorry. Harry wanted to come here to rest, and I didn’t want to agitate him. I hope you understand. Would you like to see him now?”

I walked through the living room to the conservatory and onto the lawn. It was a blissful sensation to step straight out of that ordered house into an infinity of nature and ocean, with the breeze blowing in my face. Harry had his back to me and was reading a book through half-moon glasses. As I reached him, he looked up and studied my face for a while. His own was tense but less agitated than before.

“Sit down,” he said.

There were chairs at the table, all of them soft and cushioned. I looked around for a solid seat-something suggesting formality-but there was none in sight, so I sank into one of them. I tried to compensate by perching forward on the edge with my hands clasped.

“Move around so I can see you,” Harry instructed.

I dragged my chair over to the spot he’d indicated and found myself squinting at him with the sun in my eyes. It was an old maneuver of his, I suspected. It irritated me, but it was at least encouraging that Harry was getting his game back.

“How have you been feeling, Mr. Shapiro?” I asked.

He had a cup of tea resting on the arm of his chair, and he pulled at the string of the bag a few times while he mulled the question. Then he laughed bitterly. “I’ve had better weeks. You try being locked up, having your razor taken away every morning, and someone shining a flashlight in your room during the night.”

“Patients often find the precautions difficult, but there are reasons for them.”

“Maybe for some people. Not for me.”

He did some more stage business with the tea bag and gazed away from me out to sea. He was talking faster than in hospital, which was a good sign-the psychomotor retardation was easing as his brain started to function better.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’ve slept some more.”

“You haven’t had any thoughts of death?”

He glanced at me with a creased brow, as if he couldn’t grasp what I was getting at. Then he frowned, gazing down at the lawn.

“I’m not going to kill myself.”

He hadn’t looked me in the eye, but it was at least a firm declaration of the kind he hadn’t given before. A good thing. Harry levered himself upright and looked across the lawn to where a row of flower beds lined the edge of the dune. “Let’s take a walk,” he said, striding to a break in the beds, through which lay a wooden platform.

Joining him, I saw that it marked the top of a stairway leading down the dune onto a line of cracked, weathered planks. The planks formed a rolling path up and down the sand and sea grass until they ran out after thirty yards, leaving only a sandy path the rest of the way to the beach. It would have been a wonderful place for children playing hide-and-seek, an amorphous territory between habitation and nature. We walked down the steps in silence: it was so narrow that I had to follow behind him.

He had the beach to himself. In the distance, where the road off which Anna had turned to reach the house ended, a woman in a head scarf was throwing sticks for her dog. Apart from her there were only sand and waves, crashing on the beach and throwing up spray. The sand near the dune was fine and hard to walk across, but down by the ocean’s edge it formed a smooth, solid surface. When Harry reached that area, he started to walk westward.

“Tell me more about what happened,” I said as I followed him.

It was hard to keep up with his long strides, and his renewed sense of purpose reassured me. He remained silent for about three hundred yards and then grunted a couple of times as if preparing to say something. The disadvantage of walking by him was that I couldn’t see his face to observe his reactions, but it provided detachment, like an analyst’s couch. The silence extended as we walked, and then he halted, facing the sea, where tiny waves foamed into the sand.

“It could have been a great deal,” he said. “A great deal. It wasn’t a sure thing, they never are, but if the market hadn’t tanked, it would have worked out fine. There was no way I could have known. I couldn’t have known.”

He gazed at the horizon, and he seemed to be responding bitterly to the voices in his head. I had no idea what he was talking about. Then he bent down to pick up a shell and scraped sand off the underside with his thumb as he spoke.

“It was about a year ago, I guess. Things were going so well for Seligman, it was great. There were rumblings over subprime and some hedge funds had closed, but it felt like our time had come. We’d turned that little place into something. You know what I’d always wanted it to become? I wanted us to be like Rosenthal. They were never going to let it happen. I know that now.”

Even I had heard of Rosenthal amp; Co.-everyone had. It was the one Wall Street bank that had escaped the housing crisis, had come through the crash without collapsing or even being bruised. Everyone seemed to admire it, or be jealous of it, or think it had some unfair advantage. I didn’t know the difference between one bank and another, but I could grasp what had driven Harry. There was an outfit like that in every field-the place for which everyone wants to work. Episcopal was the Rosenthal of New York medicine, or so we convinced ourselves and so the patients believed.

“I knew a guy who’d run private equity in Europe for Rosenthal. Marcus Greene,” Harry said. “Knows his stuff. Hard-assed on deals, would squeeze you for a dime, but I thought he was a good guy. Nora was friends with Margaret, his wife. We’d see them on weekends out here. They’ve got a place over in Sagaponack.

“Greene left Rosenthal in the mid-nineties and started his own firm. He called it Grayridge, after a hill in Georgia he knew as a child. So he says, anyway. Felix thinks Greene made it up. He’s never met anyone who’s heard of the place. It was good timing, when LBOs and hedge funds were getting big. A decade later, he was a billionaire. He had the Rolling Stones at his fiftieth birthday. It was fun,” he added wanly. “He calls me one day, supposedly to chat about CDS clearing or something. ‘You know, Harry,’ he says, ‘it’s time for us to talk. I think Seligman and Grayridge would make a great fit.’ I thought it was a terrific idea, it could put us up there with Rosenthal, so I said, ‘Sure, Marcus, we’ll take a look.’ I’d heard talk that things weren’t going well for him. They might be in trouble.”

“What did you find?”

“I’ll tell you what I thought I saw: a firm that had grown too rapidly and had a few problems, but nothing we couldn’t handle. We’d close down a couple of funds, inject maybe a billion in capital, and have a good business. Plus, we wouldn’t have to pay a premium, and there wouldn’t be any messing about with who was in charge. Marcus would take the number two spot and we’d see how things went from there.”

“It didn’t work out?”

Harry sighed. We had reached a rivulet that ran down from a pond behind the dunes and couldn’t go farther. He scored a curve in the sand with the toe of one shoe, and the bottom of the tiny trench filled with water like the moat of a sand castle.

“We did the deal, but the market went bad and it turned out Grayridge had bonds on its books that Greene hadn’t told me about. Mortgage paper that everyone thought was safe. We held the triple-A, for fuck’s sake, stuff the ratings agencies loved. It all turned to junk and we lost billions. I felt like I was being dragged down, like I was drowning. You don’t know what it feels like to see everything you’ve built falling apart.”

He shuddered at the memory, and as I looked over at him, I understood for the first time what had brought him to Episcopal. Loss is hard on the psyche. We aren’t built to cope with it immediately: it takes a period of mourning. The worst thing is feeling trapped and helpless, unable to fight or flee. It made sense of everything-even Harry’s gun. Harry turned at the rivulet and started walking back. I followed, catching up after about ten yards.

“What did you do when you found out?”

“We had no choice. The share price had gone to shit and we were in trouble rolling over repo funding. Not just us-half the Street was in distress. I’ve never known anything like it. We ended up one weekend at the Fed begging them to help us out. They agreed to it, but Treasury demanded a sacrifice.”

He swept his right hand across his throat in a slitting gesture. As he did it, he closed his eyes and tightened his jaw, as if his hand were cutting his throat like a blade. He looked as if he were experiencing the agony of death.

“That’s when you lost your job?”

“I lost everything. They ruined me.”

“And all these losses. No one realized?” I said. I’d thought that people who worked on Wall Street were smarter than that. It was the people like me who made stupid mistakes with money, not bankers.

“A couple of hedge funds made money out of it, and Rosenthal did fine, of course. Treasury made sure of that,” he said stonily.

I felt sorry for Harry at that moment, realizing what Felix meant by him having a heart. He radiated a baffled sense of loss, as if someone had stolen from him everything he’d had. He walked slowly up the path toward the steps without me. I stayed where I was to take in the view of the house, now arrayed on the dune above me. Nora was in the room where we’d talked earlier, reading a magazine on one of the sofas. Farther along, I saw a room with bookshelves lining one wall and a desk with a twin-screened computer. It had to be Harry’s study, where Nora had found him with the gun. By the time I got back up to the lawn, he was in his chair again, looking tired and downhearted.

I sat by him. “There are a lot of things I think it’s worth us talking about.”

“Analysis, you mean?” he said with an edge of contempt, either at me for being a psych or at himself for being vulnerable.

“I wouldn’t suggest therapy at this stage, more of a conversation, but a regular one, two or three times a week at first.”

“I guess that’s okay. I’ve got time. All I’ve got is time,” he said.

I walked back to the house. It was the third time I’d talked to him and the first time I’d felt better as a result. My discomfort about having discharged him from the hospital was easing, and I thought I was starting to gain some insight into his condition. There was even a prospect of getting Harry back to Episcopal and into treatment. This could work out fine, I thought.

7

I found Nora in the kitchen talking to Anna, who was perched on a countertop in bare feet, crunching a green apple. “You two met before, didn’t you?” Nora said, and Anna nodded silently, her teeth embedded in the fruit.

“Anna kindly drove me here,” I said.

“I can take you back to the city, if you want,” Anna said, having finished her bite and lobbed the core into a trash bin. “I’m going to see a friend.”

“Are you sure, Anna?” Nora said. “It would be wonderful if you could. I know he wants to be back soon. You can take my car.” She stepped one pace to her right and draped an arm over Anna’s shoulders as if they were friends rather than employer and employee. “I can’t tell you how much I rely on her.”

Anna looked across the room at me with a cool, appraising stare that made me lower my eyes. The prospect of spending several hours in a car with her was unnerving, but she intrigued me more than I cared to show.

“I’ll wait for you outside,” she said, then slipped off the countertop and padded softly out of the room.

Nora waited until the door had closed behind her and then looked at me tensely. “How was he?” she said.

“Good, I think,” I said. “His mood seems to be improved and he’s agreed to see me on Monday. As long as he keeps taking his medication and comes to see me regularly, I think the prognosis is excellent.”

I hoped to reassure her after everything she’d suffered, but it was true. Harry didn’t seem to be chronically depressed, and there were already signs of life in him. With luck, he might be experiencing the only episode of his life, and the gamble I’d taken in discharging him would have paid off. He’d have to adjust to the loss of his job, but most people did that in time and the Shapiros weren’t exactly on the streets. Maybe I’d just launched a career as a therapist for Wall Street billionaires.

“That’s great. That’s a relief,” Nora said, exhaling and letting her shoulders relax. I was glad to have brought her good news-she deserved it for her loyalty.

“You must keep a close eye on him, however,” I said. “We don’t want anything to go wrong now.”

“I will, Doctor. Absolutely,” she said, beaming.

When I went outside, Anna was standing by the Range Rover with her back to me, gazing at the sea. I stole another look at the graceful curve of her neck before she heard me and turned around. Her eyes looked pale blue in the ocean light.

“Ready to go?” she asked.

“All done. It’s kind of you to give me a ride. If you just drop me at the rail station, that’d be fine.”

“You’d be waiting a long time if I did. People commute by helicopter around here, you know.” She walked across to me and laid her left index finger on my lapel, gently prodding me backward. “Get in the car, Doc.”

I obeyed her, remembering the pleasurable sensation of the brief contact between us as she guided the Range Rover down the drive and out along the lane. She knew my profession, I noticed, even if the way she’d demonstrated it had been playful. There clearly couldn’t be many secrets between her and Nora. She gestured over to my left as we passed a low cottage set back from the lane.

“That’s the guesthouse, in case they summon you out here again. I sneak over for yoga or a nap sometimes. Like Goldilocks.”

“Ever been woken by a bear?” I said lightly, excited at having left the Shapiros’ estate and feeling as if I’d finally regained control of my life. Of course, I should have realized that it was an illusion. Sitting in Nora’s car with Anna driving wasn’t much different from sitting in Harry’s Gulfstream with Felix as my guide. It was all in the family.

She giggled. “Not even a small one. Anyway, Nora doesn’t have to look far. He has the whole estate wired. I’m never out of reach.”

“What’s that like?”

“Uh, excruciating? It’s nice to escape to the city for a night. Look over there. That’s the big news around here,” she said, gesturing out of my window. We had snaked along a maze of roads with vast lawns and reached the junction to the main thoroughfare. There was a long curved pond surrounded by neat lawn.

“What?” I asked, unable to see anything noteworthy.

“The swan mother is on her nest on Town Pond. She had five cygnets last year and it was all anyone talked about. I felt like I was losing my mind.”

As she said it, she pushed down on the accelerator and we sped out of the village as if we were being chased. Like me, she seemed to perk up just to be leaving the place behind. We were both silent for a while as we whizzed up Route 27, and I tried to catch glimpses of her face without her noticing me. Something was going on inside me that I hadn’t felt for a long time. It was foolish because I couldn’t do anything about it. The last thing that made sense was to start an affair with Harry’s housekeeper, even if I stood a chance, which I probably didn’t. But I wanted to prolong the thrill I felt when I was with her even if I couldn’t act on it.

I thought of the look she’d given me as she stood in the kitchen, one that suggested she knew all about me although we’d only just met. She could see all of the bad things inside me-my cruelty, my coldheartedness-and she didn’t care. It was only my fantasy, but that was how she made me feel. It was like the first time that I’d fallen in love as a teenager, the sensation of adoring someone for reasons I couldn’t articulate and of craving her physical presence. Laura Kendrick had been her name, and it had lasted a year. As I sat there, I thought of Laura, now married with two kids, and smiled to myself.

“What?” Anna said. I hadn’t noticed her looking at me.

“Nothing.”

The sad thing was that it didn’t remind me of Rebecca. I’d been fond of her, admired her, even loved her, but I had never craved her in that desperate, chemical way. There were things I’d always kept from her, and I’d felt guilty that she cherished me so much. He isn’t me, I wanted to say to her. That man you love. He’s a better person than I am. I’d never said those words because she was my best friend and I’d been afraid to hurt her, but she’d realized it and she’d left. She’d saved me the heartache of jettisoning her.

I’d been having a recurrent dream about Rebecca. I was on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, standing next to my mother and seeing her gray hair and her soft, kind face. We were talking-I didn’t know what about, but it made me happy. Then I glanced up the steps and saw Rebecca wearing a summer dress. “Come on,” I said to my mother, and we set off after her. We couldn’t find her inside, and we started hunting through galleries, my mother now leading the way. Then we came to a gallery where there was a party, with a crowd of people drinking champagne around a painting.

I walked up to the painting and saw that it was a nude of a woman lying on a sofa. She was beautiful, and I reached forward and felt one of her breasts, which was soft and warm to my touch. Then my mother called to me, pointing toward a window through which Rebecca had climbed. I saw that Rebecca had scrambled down a rope into Central Park and was running across the grass to a clump of trees.

“Becca!” I shouted, but she didn’t turn round.

That was how the dream ended.

We’d met at Episcopal two years after I’d arrived in New York, so my mother had never known her. I’d always believed they’d have got on well-both of them were sweet and loyal. On our first date, she told me I was different from the other shrinks, which I took as a compliment. We were sitting in a restaurant on the Upper East Side, one of those Italian spots that are institutions, although they don’t deserve it anymore. I spent most of the meal enjoying her presence, and as we left, she turned to me to be kissed.

I’d chosen psychiatry despite the questions it raises. They screen for a degree of empathy when they admit you to medical school: they don’t want scientists who can’t talk to other people. But the competitive spots are for cardiology, radiology, or ear, nose, and throat, the entry point to plastic surgery-anything that involves expensive procedures and minimal chat. Other residents suspected the psychs of being lazy or crazy. Lazy because psychiatry involves little night work apart from emergency shifts. Crazy because many were drawn to it by some affinity with their patients. Either they were odd themselves-working out an inner demon by finding one in others-or they had a family history. Guilty on both counts.

After a while, with no sign of Anna wanting to break the silence, I did. I was puzzled by what she was doing in East Hampton, especially given her skepticism about the place. It didn’t appear to be her natural habitat.

“How come you work for the Shapiros?” I asked.

“How long have you got?”

“Until we reach the city, I guess.”

“It shouldn’t take that long. Let’s see. Grew up, went to liberal arts college in Massachusetts. Very pleased with itself, but I thought it was kind of crappy. I came to New York, got a job as an assistant to a magazine editor, and turned out to be good at that, weirdly good.”

“That’s great.” I noticed that she’d taken one open-ended question and given me a brief rundown of her entire adult life.

“Except I was working so hard, really hard, and holding myself to such an insanely high standard that I started to go a bit nuts. I was having panic attacks in my cubicle, sweating and freaking out.”

“Did you seek treatment?”

“I took drugs. They calmed me down a bit, but I knew by then that I wasn’t happy, so I quit.”

“That was brave.”

“Brave, reckless, stupid-all the things I’ve always been. Anyway, I thought I could teach yoga instead, so I took a course. That’s how Nora found me. I was covering a class for a friend at the Ninety-second Street Y and she came along. It went from there. Now I’m everything-housekeeper, cook, indentured servant. My job is to make things easy, whatever that takes.” Her voice was lightly satirical, but I heard a note of bitterness.

“What are they like to work for?”

She turned her attention from me to check her mirror and merge onto the Long Island Expressway. We passed low pine forests on either side as we headed into the city. She overtook two trucks and then, pulling into the right-hand lane, answered my question as if she’d been considering it since I’d asked.

“Nora’s great. I love her and she treats me like family. It’s almost too cozy with her sometimes.”

“And Mr. Shapiro?”

“Harry’s fine,” she said tonelessly. “Anyway, you know all about me now. What about you?”

There was a glint in her eyes as she looked at me. She seemed to find me entertaining, which was a start.

“What do you want to know?”

“Okay, you’re a psychiatrist, right? Nora says you’re treating Harry.”

“I can’t talk about that, I’m afraid.” Even as I said it, it sounded stiff and ponderous, and I wished I didn’t have to rebuff her.

“Wife, children?”

“No.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Can we change the subject?”

Anna grinned. “Why? That’s all my therapist wanted to talk about, my old boyfriend. Him and my childhood and whether I was seeking a father figure. Nathan would have been a terrible choice if I had been.”

“So you’ve seen a therapist?”

“I admit it.”

“And you had a boyfriend?”

She laughed, giving me an amused glance that made me feel good, but then stopped talking as we passed under bridges with ragged American flags fixed to them in memory of soldiers who’d died in Iraq. When she spoke again, she was quieter.

“He was borderline, my therapist reckoned. He hooked me, and then made me suffer for loving him. I would have talked about it forever, but I had to stop in the end. You guys charge a lot for a forty-five-minute chat. You know why I really ended it, though? One day I was listening to myself talking and I thought: I could be making all of this up.”

“Were you?”

“No, but I might have been, right? He’d listen to me each week and take everything I said seriously and try to find a meaning in it, but how did he know any of it was true? He thought he needed to make me feel good-explain away everything I’d done as a reaction to my past or something. I could have been a terrible person. He wouldn’t have known.”

“You’re nota bad person, are you?”

“I don’t know. Honesty matters to me. I’ve always got into trouble for trying to tell the truth. People think I’m just a bitch. Maybe I am. Anyway, I didn’t think he could keep me honest, so I stopped.”

She laughed sheepishly, as if she had given away more about herself than she had intended. Dusk was falling and taillights were glowing in a red line ahead of us as we passed the big-box stores and projects of Queens. The vehicles around us gradually adopted New York driving habits and started to weave in and out of the lanes, making her curse softly. We popped into the Midtown Tunnel and out onto the city streets. I’d done that swift border crossing a dozen times, but it always surprised me. Despite my halfhearted protests, she drove down Lexington and around Gramercy Park to deposit me on Irving Place by my apartment building.

“Bye,” I said, holding out my hand as she idled the Range Rover at the curb.

She grasped it and gave it a satirical tug, as if I were being absurdly formal. Then she pulled out a scrap of paper, wrote a number on it, and gave it to me.