And West Is West Read online

  With luck Jessica you will not get this letter because you are no longer where I sent it. With luck you are healthy again and out of the hospital and putting your new life together. With luck you will be leaving the problems of your old life behind. I know you have lost much. Your job. Your Air Force friends. Your future as you imagined it. But do not let misfortune break you like it broke me.

  Your loving father,

  Don

  CHAPTER 14

  New York City, Ulster County

  “Who’s the babe?” asks John Guan. A kleptomaniac when it comes to his co-workers’ personal data, Guan has cracked Ethan’s BlackBerry password. Sitting in Ethan’s chair, heels propped on Ethan’s desk, he is going through the photos on Ethan’s phone. Ethan has just returned to his office—a windowless twelve-by-twelve shell next door to the UIB servers. The white noise of their spinning hard drives penetrates the walls. But, frankly, Ethan finds the buzz soothing. And this space is his alone, not a cubicle in a bullpen.

  “Here’s your coffee. Now get out of my Aeron, shithead,” he tells Guan.

  “Touchy.” Guan stands up, a good foot shorter than Ethan, and hands over Ethan’s BlackBerry.

  Actually, more often than not, Ethan finds Guan likable. As with most of the workers in the analytics section of the UIB tower, Guan is socially inept. Guan’s difference is that he embraces his awkwardness—an archeologically stained tie, for example, is his hipster beard; the saggy jeans and Keds, his concept of gangsta; his bedhead hairdo of cowlicks, a punk manifesto; the way he frequently probes an ear with a finger, his version of the “peace out” sign. But when you need good data fast, Guan’s your go-to. He can add a column of twenty ten-digit numbers quicker than Ethan can click the sum button in a spreadsheet. But this is only a parlor trick. Though fourth-generation American, Guan knows Mandarin and the Mandarin mindset. He can tell you what to expect out of Beijing and Shanghai—and right now Ethan wants him for just that. He is adding scenarios to his drone-strike algorithm and needs variables and odds pertaining to potential Chinese reactions. China, after all, is heavily invested in natural resources in Africa, where US drone activity is increasing. Guan moves to the chair opposite Ethan’s desk and slurps his coffee.

  “Give me five,” Ethan says, referring to the number of scenarios he hopes to plug into his model.

  “I’ll give you twenty-five.”

  “No, too much work.”

  “But you want to be accurate. You want to duplicate the potential reality of the situation.”

  “And you know that’s impossible. I just need to model close enough to know if there’ll be movement between euros and yuans in most situations.”

  “Okay, I get it,” Guan says. “You wanna track yuans to tell if you’re over the euro.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  Guan looks intensely at Ethan’s left ear—Guan never looks anyone in the eye; the ear is as close as he gets. “But you should also register if the renminbi is making the dollar duller and the peso passé.”

  “Fine,” Ethan says and leans back in his chair. “Please, go ahead. Get it all out of your system.”

  “Thanks a zloty.”

  Ethan looks at his BlackBerry, at the image Guan has brought up. Zoe.

  “I’d like to pound her,” Guan says.

  “What?” Ethan says. “Fuck you.”

  “Oh, sorry. She’s your current see, huh?”

  “My ex.”

  “Ex-cellent,” says Guan. “You need to give me her number right now.”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Ahh, I understand you well, white man.” Guan twists the ends of a long, imaginary mustache. “Your winky is as tiny as you are tall. You fear that I bling your ex briss, do you not?”

  “If you mean ‘bring her bliss,’ no,” Ethan says, trying to keep up with Guan’s ADHD.

  “You make fun of my race? The way I speak?” Guan pounds a fist on Ethan’s desk. “There will be a person for you to see up in human resource!” Then Guan unknots his fake-angry face. “Seriously, guy, aren’t you seeing another female now?”

  At work Ethan does not discuss his relationships, and especially not with Guan. But Guan has broken into his phone and Ethan now sees that he has missed a text—a text that Guan has apparently read.

  “Mangez avec moi?” says Guan just as Ethan scans the same words in Yahvi’s message. Guan points a finger at him. “You guys with the schnozes get all the chicks. Big nose, big hose, am I right, bitch?”

  Ethan only needs one hand to calculate his successes with women over the years. But as these dates were not with paid escorts or Russian mail-order brides, he appreciates Guan’s point. He has been luckier than the average dedicated numbers worker. The clan of the quant does not devote much time to normal relationships. Whether it is their unwritten code of work-focused behavior or a weakness in the altruism allele of their genetic code, the lonely quant is more likely to settle for, as John Guan might say, cash and marry.

  “Right,” Ethan says.

  ETHAN PASSES THROUGH UIB’s light-flooded lobby and out into the relative dark. This time of year, mid-November, he walks a path of neon and brake lights from Exchange Plaza to Battery Park—a route he follows with postal dedication despite heat waves or blizzards or the gloom of night. It is the sole good thing he does for his heart.

  A block into the walk, his thumbs retrieve Zoe’s number from his BlackBerry. The thought of calling her has weighed on him all week.

  “Sorry, you’ve got my voicemail,” says Zoe’s digitized voice. “And I’ve got your number. I’ll get back to you soon.”

  “Hey, Zoe,” Ethan starts, attempting to be casual. “Look, I’ve been meaning to call. About your dad’s papers . . . Sorry I didn’t mail them up there until Saturday. I, uh . . .” Ethan stops himself from going on, from recanting his ignorance about the folder’s contents. “Sorry about the delay. If you need anything you have my number. Take care of yourself.”

  And that is it. He is through. Ethan is worried that the papers tell only part of the story—possibly a grotesque story that he would not want to help Zoe uncover.

  Having recently seen Chinatown, he speculates that Susan Leston might be both Zoe’s mother and her sister. The doctor’s euthanasia of his unaware wife legally made him a murderer and revealed his problematic morals. Incest may be a leap, but it is not a leap over a canyon. Yet if this were true, wouldn’t Leston have destroyed the papers?

  The other alternative is almost as complicated—that Zoe has a father she never knew. That she is kin to a whole family she doesn’t know. Some apparently sad or pathetic family that Dr. Leston was trying to protect his granddaughter from.

  Whatever the truth, the doctor’s gambit to make Ethan responsible for Zoe will not work. He is moving on.

  Ethan strides along Trinity Place, not as invigorated as usual by the walk. He shortens his stride past the construction bordering Church Street as he opens the photo album in his BlackBerry. Locating the Zoe folder, he begins to delete her images—the way he might delete virus-infected email. Zoe is not the only one who needs protection from her past. Erasing her from his life is the best thing that Ethan can imagine for the both of them.

  Then he calls Yahvi.

  “Hey you,” Yahvi says, her breezy voice dispersing the Lestons’ clouds. “I’ve just finished the second movement of my Ganesh suite. It poured out of me. Bollywood references and all.”

  “That’s great,” Ethan says.

  “You don’t think I’m a sellout? Making the India link so explicit.”

  “Come on. You’re expressing your heritage.”

  “Yeah. Kind of. I’m almost guaranteed to get a grant or award if I write . . . ethnic.”

  “Artists do what they need to do to get by. I bet Alex wishes he was from somewhere cooler than Delaware.”

  “You mean like me? Ohio.”

  An incoming call bleeps. “Hold a sec,” Ethan tells her and then looks at his phone. Zoe’s picture
smiles up from the screen. He lets the phone chime . . . and answers on the last ring before voicemail. “Hey.”

  Zoe sounds distracted. “You just called? I was finishing with the real estate agent.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “The house goes on the market Sunday. She thought we could get a better price if we did some cleanup. But I’m going to dump it, contents and all.”

  “That’s understandable.” Crossing Vesey, Ethan dodges a veering Mister Softee truck—he doesn’t ever recall seeing one in motion. They’re usually lurking on side-street corners.

  “Goddammit, Ethan,” Zoe says.

  Hearing her sob, this is exactly what he had feared. Emotion. “Zoe—”

  “Look, I don’t care about the house, or that the lawyer said my father was broke when he died. I care that I didn’t know who I was. And you read these papers, didn’t you?”

  “Wait, Zo, no. Not at first. But, then, uh, yeah, just before the funeral.”

  “So why didn’t you give them to me yourself? You drop this on me through the mail?”

  “Zo—”

  “I don’t even know what to think. Oh, hell!”

  “Zoe. Are you okay?”

  “Oh, I am just great, Ethan. Getting better every second.” Zoe’s voice sounds distant. As if she has put down the phone to free her hands.

  “What’s going on up there?”

  Zoe doesn’t say for a second. “What do you think? I’m filling a tumbler with my dad’s Hendrick’s. Fuck you, Ethan. Fuck you for not taking even the smallest responsibility on your own. Damn you. Damn him.”

  “Just a sec, Zoe. I was on another call.” Ethan switches to Yahvi. “It’s work. Call you back.”

  “Phooey!” Yahvi says and is gone heartbreakingly fast.

  Ethan goes back to the other line. “Zoe?” he asks. But she is not there. “Shit,” he says and redials, but to no result. And then he calls Alex. The phone rings and rings. Finally there’s a pickup. “Alex!” Ethan says.

  “Non, c’est moi,” says Juliette, Alex’s latest, whom he’d met at Alex’s last opening.

  “Let me speak to Alex,” Ethan says. He has stopped on the sidewalk. Pedestrians are peeling around him in a stream like schooling fish.

  “Ami, he is busy in the middle of work. You know, in the zone.”

  “Juliette—”

  “And later, Ethan, we have an event tonight that will be very, very important, you understand. This is Alex’s future. Okay. I will give him your message and tell him to call when he can.”

  But Ethan has not given Juliette a message. “It’s about Zoe.”

  “Ah,” Juliette says. “Poor girl. You are taking care of her, I hope. You know she is your responsibility.” And then “Quoi?” Juliette says, but not to the phone. “Ami,” she says to Ethan, “Alex needs me for something. You take care. I will pass on your message.”

  Ethan tries Zoe again. Again there is no answer. As the people on the street dodge around the obstacle he’s become, he feels himself turning. Physically turning back toward UIB. He is calculating. If he puts in three hard hours tonight he can complete the programming he needs to do for work tomorrow. Coffee and a five-hour energy drink will get him through. He will keep trying to reach Zoe. Maybe he will even try to call her neighbors—but what was the couple’s name? Really, though, why is he getting nervous? Is it because he does owe her a face-to-face? He has been an asshole about those papers. And there’s still time, if not to correct the situation then to make him feel less crappy about it. If he gets a Zipcar after writing code tonight, he can get up to Accord by one. He’ll sleep in the car outside the house until morning if he has to and that’s okay. He needs to prove to Zoe, to himself, that he, unlike her father, is human, is not a monster.

  “HEY,” ETHAN SAYS to Zoe in her hospital bed.

  She swallows, winces, blinks up at him, brings a hand toward her throat.

  “Easy,” he says taking the hand. “You’ve got an IV.”

  She lifts her eyelids higher, struggling as if they’re held by elastic tape. “Eth?” Zoe says. “Oh God. My head.”

  “I came up last night,” he says, leaning closer. “I knocked after I saw you on the couch. You weren’t getting up so I broke in.”

  “Oh, Ethan,” she says, looking at the tubes running toward her forearm, the monitor beeping by the bedside.

  “It’s okay, Zoe. They just pumped you out a little. I don’t know. I may have overreacted bringing you here, but I couldn’t wake you up.”

  “I just took a couple of pills, Ethan. And a drink. That’s all.”

  “No. I know. It’s cool. No one thinks you did this on purpose.”

  When the doctor comes, he eyes Ethan carefully and then charges him with making sure that he disposes of Dr. Leston’s pill stash.

  “This is not going to happen again,” the doctor states firmly.

  “No, sir,” Zoe says to the man’s deep-set eyes. She swallows, blinking with pain.

  “Your esophagus will heal from the tube in a couple of days. Stick with soft foods.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  BY NOON ZOE has signed herself out of the hospital. She has not said much to Ethan so far—it hurts to speak. Nor has Ethan said much to her. The sun, however, is shining. It is a crisp, pleasant day. In the hospital parking lot Ethan opens the passenger’s door for her.

  Leaf-peeping season is over and a flickering background of bare foliage goes by as he drives. Ethan turns now and again to gaze at Zoe, who does not look at him. The hospital was not far and it takes only ten of these long looks before they are pulling up to her parents’ house. No, he is still trying to get this right. Her grandparents’ house.

  “You may as well come in,” she tells Ethan. “Wouldn’t want you to get in trouble for not clearing out my dad’s . . . my granddad’s stash. Who knows what I’m liable to do next.”

  “Zoe,” Ethan says.

  She smiles at his scold. “Ethan, I would have been fine. I was brought up in a doctor’s household. For God’s sake, I know about pills. Come on in. I’ll make us some eggs.”

  Seated at the Lestons’ kitchen table, Zoe is flipping through the documents as if she has missed something from an earlier perusal. She takes a cigarette from the pack on the table and lights up. Inhaling she grimaces. “I wish dad had put a photo of my mother in here. Jesus, I mean granddad.”

  “He was both, Walter was, wasn’t he?” Ethan asks, waving a hand to disperse the smoke.

  Zoe’s eyes snap to Ethan’s. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that. He adopted you, didn’t he? So that makes him both your father and your grandfather.”

  Zoe shakes her head at him. “That’s insane.” She goes back to one of the newspaper articles. “You read all of this, right?”

  “Alex read them to me on the drive up. I didn’t really look at anything in there after that.”

  “And . . . why not?”

  “I don’t know, Zoe.”

  “Apparently, I don’t know Zoe either,” she replies. “I thought I’d lost a sister, not a mother. After I left you the night of the dinner, Dad told me Susan was my sister. Could he have been that ashamed of having a pregnant, unwed daughter? Were people still like that in the eighties?”

  “It wasn’t like it is today. They condemned people for having AIDS,” Ethan says.

  She puts down the news clipping. “Anyway, what did he expect you to do with this information? Because you were right. It isn’t any of your business.” Zoe exhales smoke and then touches her throat.

  Looking at her long neck, Ethan thinks of that famous bust of Nefertiti. He also likes the bump on the bridge of her nose, a family characteristic that comes from her grandfather’s side of her family. Did her mother have a similar bump? Zoe is touching hers now, thoughtfully. Then she offers him the sympathy of her smile. “You must be tired, being up all night.”

  “I got a little rest in the hospital.”

  “Between the text, tex
t, texting.”

  “Well, I ran out of battery and forgot my charger. So I got some z’s.”

  “Still, I think you should sleep a little before you drive back. I don’t want to be going to your funeral next.”

  “I’m good,” Ethan says.

  “Look,” Zoe says, taking up their plates. “The workday will be over by the time you get back to New York. Just go upstairs and use my old room. Don’t worry, you’ll be safe. I’m not using it because it’s too creepy—my . . . grandmother kept it just like it was when I was in high school. I’ll go put on some fresh sheets.”

  While Zoe is upstairs, Ethan faces the folder on the kitchen table. It is open to one of Susan’s report cards. Zoe’s mother attended the Ethel Walker School and got straight A’s, except for a C in phys ed. Beneath this Ethan sees a letter. It is addressed to Dr. Walter Leston from a Dr. Sarnoff.

  Dear Walter,

  Something awkward happened last Wednesday that I think you should hear about from me before there is any misinterpretation. Susan missed her session that afternoon, but when I was leaving my office I discovered her waiting in the parking lot by my car. As we had been getting nowhere in our sessions, I took this as an opportunity for an out-of-office interview that might be useful and drove Susan to your home, leaving her just down the street as she requested. During that drive, I had hoped that she might open up about the father of the child she is carrying, which she did not. I drove and we talked. Susan asked about my family and I told her a little but always circled back to her story, offering her tidbits about my life to try to draw her out about hers. By the time we had reached her street, I had learned nothing more about Susan while she had learned that I had married young, that my wife was schizophrenic, and that I had divorced her after she was institutionalized. The greatest shame of my life. This is all very embarrassing and unprofessional, so I felt compelled to make a clean breast of it. As such, I do not think it would be appropriate of me to see Susan again in a professional capacity. Be aware that she is a highly intelligent young woman. Should you decide to discuss this any further with me, I am willing. Also, I would like to recommend a substitute for my services so that Susan can continue her psychiatric treatment, which I believe is critical at this stage.