And West Is West Page 2

  He hopes not. They have been living together a bright six months in Ethan’s glass-walled Battery Park condo and lately he has been imagining his sun-swept days with her repeating endlessly into the future.

  Their mornings usually begin with a cup of Nespresso near the corner window—through which can be seen growing the upper skeleton of the Freedom Tower, only a few blocks away. Being slightly myopic, Ethan generally limits his focus to the steam rising from his cup. The blinkering enables him to speak about their life together in a way he cannot when he looks at her lovely face—a face that he still cannot believe rests next to his every night.

  This morning, after mentioning that Alex wanted to introduce them to his newest “friend,” Ethan tried to turn the conversation back to themselves. Looking into his latte he’d said: “I’ve calculated the tower’s solar transit. When the top floors go up we’re going to lose thirty minutes of afternoon sun. But only in January and February.” When Ethan looked up at Zoe she was looking at the tower, but her gaze was empty. It was as if she had not understood what he was implying—that they would still be a couple at the building’s completion, that by then, in a year or two, he would be ready to suggest a permanent commitment. Marriage. Perhaps even children.

  Alex and Lola return to the sidewalk table where Ethan and Zoe have been silently waiting. Lola’s finger, swaddled in beige gauze except for the tip, resembles a miniature papoose.

  “The cook shared his first-aid kit,” Alex says.

  “So, you’re okay?” Zoe asks Lola.

  “It’s all magic,” Lola says. “Nothing can hurt you if you don’t let it.”

  “Uh-huh,” says Zoe.

  “The manager took one look at Lola’s finger and comped our meal,” Alex says. “That’s magic.”

  “Ha-ha,” says Lola and goes petulantly silent. With her uninjured hand she fiddles with an odd little spike pushed through the top of her left ear.

  Alex turns his attention to Ethan. “So, given any thought to the loft?”

  “What loft?” Zoe asks.

  “A floor in an old paint warehouse off Canal,” says Alex.

  “Right. I’ll just go write a check,” Ethan says sarcastically, even though he could do exactly that.

  “Sell the condo,” Alex says. “River Terrace is so close to New Jersey you might as well still be living with your parents.” This is Alex’s standard joke about Ethan’s apartment, usually made when he visits to hang a new painting of his that Ethan has bought. “Plus,” he adds wryly, “you’re running out of wall space there.” Alex turns to Zoe. “If Ethan puts up the money I can do the renovation. Build out a studio for myself and an apartment for Ethan. He’ll have twice the square footage.”

  “That would be so great,” Zoe says. “Ethan, why haven’t you told me about this?”

  Ethan would like to say to Zoe, “Because Alex wants to build a bachelor pad and I’m no longer single.” Instead, he says, “The neighborhood’s still pretty rough.”

  Alex comes back at him. “It’ll turn. Then your investment triples.” He winks at Zoe. “That’s how you talk to bankers.”

  “Fine,” Ethan says, employing his voice of reason—his Gregory Peck cadence. “But in the meantime we’ll have to live there. And I just don’t think it’s safe.” His voice, which is higher than Gregory’s, makes the sentiment sound more wimpy than wise.

  “Jesus, man, for once in your life take a chance,” Alex says. “Be a real New Yorker.”

  “It does sound cool,” Zoe says.

  Now even Lola joins in. She crinkles her face and looks at Ethan like the decision is a no-brainer. “If I had the loot I would jump on that like it was Chris Hemsworth.”

  Ethan’s three dinner companions aim their eyes at him as if their gathering has become an intervention.

  Ethan is getting angry. “You saw those needles in the alley. There’re probably addicts squatting in the building,” he tells Alex.

  “Who’s going to mess with you? You’re nearly six-three when you stand up straight.”

  “Okay. I’d be worried about Zoe then.”

  Now something goes wrong. Both Alex and Zoe look away as if conspiratorially embarrassed.

  Lola breaks the silence. “I’ve lived in some pretty crappy hoods. You just have to watch your back.”

  Ignoring Lola, Ethan looks from Alex to Zoe. “What? What is it?”

  “Ethan,” Zoe says quietly. “I’ve told you that I’ve been looking for work in Washington.”

  Ethan tries to swallow. His mouth is dry. “Oh?”

  “Come on!” she says, annoyed that his out-of-itness might be real.

  Actually, it is. Lately Ethan has become ultrafocused on his algorithms. Certain new possibilities are emerging. He has been preoccupied. He allows that Zoe must have mentioned her job search—how could she not have since her two-month UNIFEM internship is almost over. This is logical. Ethan clenches his hand. His face turns to stone.

  “There’s the mask,” Zoe says—her word for Ethan’s brooding expression, which he displays regularly enough for her to have named it. “Now I’ve gotten your dandruff up,” she adds sympathetically. She puts a forgiving hand on his.

  “Dander,” Ethan corrects, noticing some flecks on his sleeve that most likely come from his scalp. He had put on a black shirt for tonight because he wanted to feel cool. Now all he feels is humiliation.

  THE WEEK FOLLOWING the Fourth of July Ethan puts in eighteen-hour days working on his own version of fireworks—a modification to UIB’s currency trading algorithm, which currently monitors volatility in relation to news reports of terrorist activity. His new concept focuses on antiterrorist activity and has been okayed by his manager. This is what makes him useful to UIB: his combination of technical skill and real-world imagination, his ability to see connections that neither the pure programmer nor the pure trader is likely to see. He binges on coffee and Provigil to keep alert.

  By the start of his second week on his project Ethan has added Ritalin to his brain cocktail in order to stay in the zone—that place where code pours from the fingertips in impulses directly from the brainstem with no detours up to the cerebral cortex or higher consciousness. Those parts of his frontal lobe have begun to suspect Zoe of more than a job search, for whenever he does make it back to River Terrace to crash, he more often than not finds notes and not her.

  Out of town till Thursday on the great job hunt. Pizza in fridge. Don’t eat cold. Microwave! read the first of these, left on the kitchen counter.

  The latest: Making a quick day trip. Don’t wait up if you’re home.

  He resists texting her for details because he knows how to play the game of hurt silence. Also he has a fantasy that by ignoring her absences he can stop them. But his suspicions about what she is really up to are growing. They have not had sex since Alex broke up with Lola—which happened the day after Lola torched her finger and then set his bed on fire while smoking. Whenever Ethan considers this time sequence his apartment begins to sway under him as though a hurricane is rocking the building.

  His suspicion gives him license to go through Zoe’s handbag whenever she is home. Late at night after she has gone to sleep, all Ethan finds are receipts for the Dragon Deluxe Chinatown bus to Washington. Then, a week later, a ticket stub for the Acela appears and he realizes what is happening. She must have a lover, a politician she met at the UN, and he has upgraded her travel arrangements to DC. Ethan imagines that he can outwait this stranger’s play for Zoe. He is probably married anyway. Zoe will quickly see her mistake. At least it doesn’t look like Alex is her lover.

  It is three o’clock in the morning. Zoe is asleep in bed. Ethan is sitting with Zoe’s purse in the living room. He swallows a Ritalin and opens his laptop to write code.

  “HAVE YOU BEEN up all night?” Zoe asks. Already dressed for work, she locates her hobo bag and energetically rummages among the tissues, gum wrappers, and lip balm, all the contents that Ethan had carefully put back in their places
. “Crap. Where’d it go?”

  Innocently Ethan dips his nose into his espresso cup and averts his eyes. What he blurrily perceives—through the corner window, around a curvilinear glass monolith and over the canyon of West Street—is his fragment of the Freedom Tower, which is beginning to oppress. Passing by it lately during his morning commute, he looks up and the tower becomes, with its twitching rooftop cranes, a monstrous mechanism with a skeletal head topped by antennae—an autobot from the Transformers movies ready to wreak havoc on lower Manhattan and then the world.

  He worries that the psychostimulants are overfertilizing his imagination.

  “Have you seen my Amtrak receipt?” Zoe asks.

  “What receipt?” he replies.

  “My train ticket. I need it for reimbursement. A hundred seventy bucks.”

  Ethan puts a hand in his pocket and touches the ticket stub.

  “Oh, well,” she says, giving up. “Good thing I’ll be cashing a real paycheck soon.”

  “A what?” Ethan says.

  Zoe shrugs. “I didn’t want to tell you until it was a sure thing. I got a job in Washington.”

  “Cool,” Ethan says, though his face is locking up.

  “I start next week.”

  “Cool,” Ethan repeats through his teeth.

  Zoe gives him a look, the one that always melts him—it is both a frown and a smile. “Ethan, you know that being with you has meant a lot to me.”

  “Sure,” Ethan says. Unable to breathe he manages to keep looking at Zoe’s lovely face. He may as well be looking up at the undercarriage of a subway car that is running him over.

  “Oh, Ethan,” Zoe says. “For a second I thought you were okay with it.”

  “I am okay with it,” Ethan lies.

  “God, I have such a hard time reading you.”

  After Zoe finishes readying herself for her penultimate day at the UN, she interrupts Ethan at his laptop. He is tracing an error in the code he wrote earlier that morning, a bug in a loop statement that is causing his program to repeat endlessly. His brain is stuck in a similar pattern, telling him over and over that he has lost Zoe forever, forever, forever.

  “Hey,” Zoe says. “Can I ask a huge favor?”

  “Sure,” Ethan says, staring at the laptop screen.

  “My parents are back home. They’re having a dinner tomorrow night and want to meet you.”

  Dr. and Mrs. Leston, now retired, have been on back-to-back world cruises, tours of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres that coincided with Ethan’s life with Zoe.

  What’s the point? Ethan wants to say. Aren’t you moving to Washington? Aren’t we done? “Sure,” he says, managing not to stutter. He keeps his eyes on his coding to hold himself together.

  “Thanks. You’re a pal,” Zoe says and leans over to hug him. He inhales her hair. “By the way, I borrowed some of your Ritalin to keep me going. Busy times,” she says and is out the door.

  For the rest of the day, just as he might obsess over an algorithm, Ethan fixates on Zoe. On whether they are done or not done. On the possibility of a long-distance relationship. On the fear that they might never have had a true relationship but only a variation on a hookup. Yet if this were the case, if they had only been live-in fuck buddies, why had she invited him to meet her parents?

  CHAPTER 2

  Upstate New York

  “Dr. Leston, I presume,” Ethan says nervously. Extending a hand, he tries to grin away the lame joke.

  Zoe’s father regards him perhaps the way he regarded the tumors he once excised for a living. After a hesitation, he takes Ethan’s hand and crushes it. Like many surgeons he makes his presence known. His height, an inch over Ethan’s, his crystalline eyes akin to his daughter’s, and his nose, arched and bony in a long face, give him a severe authority. Zoe had been a late child so he calculates that Leston must be at least seventy, but he still possesses a thick mane. “I presume you’re referring to Dr. Livingstone, a great humanitarian,” Leston says before releasing Ethan’s hand and walking to the other side of his den.

  “Dad, don’t be such an old grouch!” Zoe says. In a black dress and a string of pearls, Zoe has regressed in appearance and manner to an era when people embraced adulthood earlier, a show of maturity obviously intended for her parents.

  “What’s your poison, Winter?” Leston asks. He opens the liquor cabinet.

  “I, uh, don’t,” Ethan replies feebly. Leston’s steady gaze forces him to explain. “It’s a long drive back to the city.”

  “Stop drinking before we eat and you’ll be fine,” Leston says dismissively.

  “Just sparkling water,” Ethan says, feeling like a boy drawing a line in the sand. He moves toward the fireplace, which is burning with a decorative gas flame. Zoe comes up behind him.

  “Thanks for this,” she whispers and nips Ethan’s ear. Then she wipes from the lobe what he guesses is her lipstick.

  “Sure,” he says, her proximity soothing, the side of her breast pressing his arm.

  “Zoe, go check up on your mother,” Leston interrupts. “Make sure her dress is on right side out.”

  “Stop it, Daddy!” Zoe shoots back. Then she whispers to Ethan, “Hold the fort.”

  “Huh?” he says before grasping her words. After she’s gone he freezes as though he has stumbled into a cobra’s nest. Leston’s den is male, heavy with dark wood and leather upholstery. The volumes on the bookcases stand tidy and matching—the complete Dickens, Wells’ History, Gibbon’s Fall of the Roman Empire—with most of the spines creased. There is scrimshaw on a varnished plank table that looks like a boat hatch. On the wall above the bar hang black-and-white photographs of a schooner, once the doctor’s, Ethan presumes. But he does not ask.

  “So, Winter, my daughter tells me you’re one of the masters of the universe,” Leston says.

  Ethan feels almost flattered, as if they might, in retro fifties fashion, be talking man-to-man. But he doesn’t want to build himself up as something he’s not—not yet. “Really, I just work for—”

  Leston’s mouth wrinkles into a sneer. “It wasn’t a compliment.” He approaches, tinkling, with iced drinks in whisky glasses. “You just enable them then?”

  “Them?” Ethan takes the proffered glass.

  “Those banking sons-a-bitches that wrecked my portfolio, the economy, a hundred million Americans’ retirement, what have you.”

  Ethan’s bank, United Imperial Bank, had contributed its share of shaky credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, but all this was outside his division. Leston is blaming him for steering the Titanic into an iceberg when he was only manning the ship’s telegraph. His work as a quant, Ethan believes, actually hedged some of the damage by providing liquidity to the markets—his algorithms increased the number of daily trades and prevented the currency market from falling, albeit fractionally, farther than it might have. But try to explain this to anyone. Ethan gulps the drink that the doctor has put into his hand and it sluices down his throat like broken glass. Some of it comes back up.

  “Slow down. That’s good gin. Don’t waste it,” Leston says.

  Through his coughing Ethan responds. “I’m just . . . an analyst.”

  The doctor, smacking Ethan’s back, almost tips him into the fireplace. “Don’t be modest, man. I know what a quant is. I might have become something similar if I’d grown up on the banks of the Orinoco.”

  “Really,” Ethan says, not quite remembering where the Orinoco is.

  “Yes. I’d have been a witch doctor.”

  “Columbia,” Ethan says, offering his college in defense.

  “They teach voodoo there? That’s a shame.”

  The conversation is less male bonding than mano a mano combat. Silently Ethan watches the fire. He takes a moment to form his words and puts his drink on the mantel. “Dr. Leston. You do know that Zoe is leaving me to work in Washington?”

  “Oh?” Anticipatory, the doctor’s eyes gleam with malice. He swirls his glass an
d studies the rattling ice.

  “That means we’re not engaged. Or going to get engaged.”

  The assertion makes Leston smile large. His teeth are so even and so white that Ethan decides they must be false. “God forbid that,” the doctor says with a laugh.

  Ethan swallows the insult. “And that means you don’t have to worry about me. Or prove your dominance. In a matter of days I’ll be out of your daughter’s life and you can forget we ever met. You do know that?”

  “Yes.” Leston nods agreeably.

  “Then why are you knocking me?”

  A burst of laughter sprays Ethan and again Leston slaps his back in macho, comradely fashion. “Why? You ass, you’ve been sleeping with her. People like you, the advantage takers, disgust me. You take up with some bright-eyed young girl and get rid of her after you’ve had your fun.”

  Ethan feels like he’s stepped through a time warp. Does he really need to explain to the doctor how relationships work these days? If anything, Zoe is more casual about what they are doing together than he. After all, she is the one who is leaving.

  “Having a nice chat, boys?” a throaty voice calls through the double doorway separating Leston’s den from the living room. “Bring yourselves on in here.”

  Solid but elegant, Elizabeth Leston stands as tall as her daughter and also wears black. But this is all they have in common—Elizabeth is a much softer woman: her face round not oval, her nose snub not aquiline. Around the high neck of her gown glistens a spray of diamonds. If real, they must be a better investment than her husband’s stock portfolio. Being numeric, and now morally freed by Leston’s verbal assault, Ethan begins to appraise the couple’s possessions. Elizabeth’s necklace—fifteen thousand. The renovated country farmhouse—six hundred thousand. The five-year-old Mercedes in the driveway—thirty thousand. The Inuit scrimshaw and other unseen household valuables—one hundred thousand, roughly. Leston’s damaged retirement portfolio—one million, two maybe. In total Leston is worth, generously, three million. While Ethan, if he can last as a quant for another five years and make VP, hopes to earn twenty percent of that amount per annum. He steps over a leather footstool in the shape of a bull and exits the doctor’s study. “Mrs. Leston,” he says brightly when he reaches her.