The Havana Room Read online

  And I was sorry, terribly sorry, though that didn't matter, either. I imagined little Wilson Doan's mother staring disconsolately at her breakfast. Toast, cold eggs. She was said to be dangerously depressed. Losing weight and losing touch. A few years into the future, parents would clone their lost children. Society would decide it was acceptable and let them do it. But not yet. Maybe the Doans would have another baby, but even if they had buckets more kids, there'd always be an ache, a shadow. I had only to think of losing Timothy to imagine their agony. I'd wrecked half a dozen lives, I had not read the list of instructions for each boy, I had sought satiation in the form of Thai takeout and dancing babes, I had somehow not been as vigilant as I could have been. This I told myself. You idiot, look what you did. You and your stupid billable hours and retirement accounts and receding gums. You are revealed as a clown— no, a monster-clown. It doesn't matter if absurdity ravished un-likelihood. There are no complete accidents. All effects have causes. You did it. You suggested the boy be invited. You deserve to die instead. But you won't and you can't; you have a family to care for.

  Yes, people find it difficult. They don't want you around their own children. They don't want the taint, the stain. The best of them smile blankly and find scheduling conflicts. The worst of them sport a certain anthropological curiosity and examine you for proof of remorse— teeth-gnashing perhaps, a sudden onset of Tourette's syndrome, the eating of glass, a burning tire placed around one's own neck, maybe. But if you are trying to live anything close to a normal day, if you still have responsibilities for such things as buying apples and paying your electric bill and kissing your own boy good night ("Everything's going to be fine, pal, I promise…"), then you are scraping by, dealing as best you can. And they, those scrutinizing the tightness of your tie knot, don't like what they see. They see you sigh and say, "We're just going to have to get through this." They don't like that because it's confusing. It's unpunished. They want to know if there are "legal ramifications." So what if it was an accident, a stray fingernail clipping of God falling in the wrong place? This is America. If you don't get convicted, you do get sued. O. J. Simpson escaped prison— even though he cut off his wife's head— but was successfully sued. They want to know how it's "affecting the marriage." How do you think? I wanted to scream, but didn't. We're dying.

  Judith fell away from me almost instantly. She stopped having sex with me, and my idiotic banter about water skis and basketball disappeared like so much else. There was one night a month or so afterward when I felt her turn in her sleep and hold me from behind, like she used to do, her hands wrapped around my chest, and even as I felt a deep balm go through me she stiffened with a sudden inhalation of breath, pulled her hands back to herself, and turned the other way.

  I could stand the loss of Judith, perhaps, but I could not stand the loss of my son. He didn't understand why people said bad things about his father. I explained what had happened, but the kids at school called him names, said his dad killed children. Said he was going to the electric chair. "It's not true," Timothy said hotly, repeating the conversation. "It's not true." But his eyes searched mine for some explanation as to how everything would go back to the way it had been before— Please, Daddy, his eyes begged, make it better— and when I couldn't do that, then his faith was diminished. The idea of dad, of father, shrank and curled inside him. He hated me, I knew, for I had destroyed his universe.

  Yes, everyone finds it difficult. The school required counseling for Timothy and for us and suggested we seek "an alternative placement." We had to pull him out of the school, because of the tension, and again and again he asked why his friends didn't have him over for play dates anymore. The other families in the apartment house seemed less interested in taking him out to the park with their kids, as if a blond eight-year-old boy might somehow be a menace, might conduct lightning on a clear day. This was unfair, but expectable. We're still superstitious, all of us. Monkey-men clutching magic feathers and sniffing the wind. The secretaries in my firm, usually cackling and amicably rude, spoke to me with formality, especially after the firm kept me out of its biggest deal of the year, a $400 million office building finance-and-rent-back in midtown Manhattan. I lost eye contact with people. My accountant didn't return my calls. The grocery boy examined the bills in his hand as if they were soaked with plague. Our elevator man, who'd carried the EMTs up and the body of the boy down, whistled silently and looked away.

  Meanwhile, Wilson Doan Sr. attacked. He was powerful enough at his bank to force a renegotiation of the bank's of-counsel relationship with my firm. Our performance had been excellent, largely, but I made sure to absent myself from the discussion, which occurred in their offices. We sent my colleague, a senior partner named Dan Tuthill. A good guy, Tuthill, a pal. He was perfection in the law firm, self-destruction everywhere else: he ate sludge for lunch (veal, German chocolate cake), went on extramarital dates with hookerish, raccoon-eyed women he met in bars, and always bought stocks at their top. But he was loyal and determined and righteous on my behalf. By prearrangement, he called my office on his cell phone as he was entering the bank's conference room and placed the phone on the table among his papers. I shut my door and put the call on my speakerphone. This is done all the time, by the way. Sometimes the conversation is secretly taped on the other end or transcribed simultaneously. I could hear the room start to fill, the warm-up chatter, the briefcases clicked open. Donuts and bagels on the side. The coffee-stirring of commerce. I realized that Wilson Doan was not in the room. The conversation went smoothly enough without him, though, and the bankers outlined how they would need the firm's assistance in the coming year. There were a couple of staffing issues, half a dozen technology questions, and a few minor grievances. Very typical. Then Amanda Jenks, the bank's negotiator, said, "Our last area of our concern involves Mr. Wyeth."

  "Please explain," Dan Tuthill said.

  "We feel that Mr. Wyeth presents genuine difficulties."

  A long pause. I stared at my speakerphone.

  "It's a matter of confidence," she said.

  "Mr. Wyeth is an extraordinary lawyer," came the voice of Dan Tuthill. "You yourself have said as much in the past, I believe."

  The room was silent.

  "He's a hell of a vicious negotiator."

  More nothingness.

  "This is nuts. We're talking about a good guy."

  "The circumstances are unusual, I would agree," said Amanda Jenks.

  "Yes, and everybody is genuinely sensitive to that," answered Dan Tuthill.

  "It's very problematic."

  "Yes, but am I not correct that Mr. Doan is not intimately involved with the day-to-day legal matters of the bank?"

  "Mr. Doan is extremely valuable to this bank," Amanda Jenks said evenly. "I think you know that. Let's speak plainly, Dan, okay? We can't conclude this agreement if Mr. Wyeth is involved."

  "Involved?"

  "On the account, yes."

  "Your bank has a successful eighteen-year relationship with this firm, one that includes dozens of personnel on both sides, and you're willing to cancel that because of Bill's presence on the account?"

  Amanda Jenks did not reply. Someone coughed, as if to emphasize the silence. "What are you guys billing us?" she finally said. "Twenty, twenty-one million a year?"

  Thus did I hear the gunshot of my own execution.

  Dan Tuthill then gave a very nice speech, but they wouldn't budge. Later I learned that Wilson Doan and a few of my firm's most senior partners had played a round of golf a week earlier at the Blind Brook Country Club north of the city and whatever needed to be said had been uttered by about the fourth hole so that they could enjoy the game. They hadn't bothered to tell Dan Tuthill, either.

  I was taken off the bank account, which cut my hours at the firm by more than a third, but Wilson Doan was not done, not by any means. As predicted, he and his wife filed a $40 million personal injury negligence suit against me. How did they arrive at the sum of $40 million? Certai
nly we didn't have money anywhere close to that. The suit was handled by Adolphus Clay III, the famous trial lawyer, a balding, droopy-eyed fox who stood before the television cameras and explained that the Doans were not in any way vindictive but were concerned with getting the message "out there" about the dangers of peanut products. "This is their sole motivation," he said. "I assure you."

  Clay, it may be remembered, was the man who won a $700 million class-action suit against the cigarette companies, so naturally he had an additional motivation to take this case— as a precursor to another class-action suit against the prepared-food manufacturers who used nut oil in their goods without explicit warnings on the packaging. The day he announced the suit, the stock price of the country's largest peanut oil manufacturer dropped by ten points and the major peanut allergy Web site had an additional 320,000 hits. I had stepped from the safety of my own small private life into the serrating edge of American mass culture. On our first consultation, my lawyer put Clay's chances of winning a large verdict at four out of five, and said that even an unsuccessful defense would cost me perhaps $1 million, with a $100,000 retainer, payable immediately, now, right here, in his hand.

  When I reported these details to Judith she nodded and said she was going out to have her hair done.

  * * *

  I was not present when Judith first met Wilson Doan Sr., privately, at her suggestion, for only much later was I told, but I know her well enough to bet that her desire to sleep with him probably began at the funeral, which she attended alone— though dressed rather well, her black silk blouse not as loose as it could have been. Doan was massive in his sorrow, and this would have quietly appealed to her. She would have found an enormous, distinguished man heaving in grief unbearably sexy. And the strange violence in his face surely thrilled her. She met Doan somewhere discreetly and let him know, with a touch on the hand, or perhaps even a frank lowering of herself against his thick wool pants, that she wanted him. For Doan's part, Judith's quivered offering of herself would have been an unexpected pleasure that only improved his fury at me, not diluted it. Men are quite able to separate their lusts from their angers, or to mix them, as necessary.

  I do not hate Judith for this. Not so much, anymore. She was doing what she thought was best for Timothy. I think she and Wilson spent parts of six or seven days in one of the smaller hotels on the Upper East Side. Long lunches, lost afternoons. I imagine Judith was quite vigorous in her exertions, quite multiple in her enthusiasms. He was probably a good lover, old Wilson Doan, probably gave my wife a hell of a good fucking, certainly of the weird large-eye/small-eye variety, and that would have rattled her on a whole other level. I have no doubt that Judith surrendered to him completely, abandoned herself to the moment, breasts bouncing, mouth agape, eyes rolling. And why not? Sex gets more explicit as you get older. It has to. The clock is running. I imagine she told him he could put it wherever he pleased. Wilson Doan would not have smiled or joked or been relaxed, for the sex was a way for him to strike at me, and being an intelligent man, he would feel the hatred in his own pleasure.

  The danger of the interaction undoubtedly excited Judith beyond her usual capacity, and she would have seen this contrast as further proof of her problems with her husband. Somewhere in the talk afterward she let Doan understand that she was going to divorce me and move away. She is a planner, Judith. She paid for these encounters with our family credit card, not bothering in any way to conceal them from me. But this wasn't quite as cruel as it seems. The human dynamic here is quite complicated, in fact, and you have to hand it to Judith, for she is extremely intelligent when it comes to the human dynamic; by giving herself to Wilson Doan, she allowed him, as I said, a measure of retribution against me, indulged her own anger at me, and even found comfort from her own alienation. But that is not all. She probably wanted to make some sort of symbolic atonement and hoped, too, that sleeping with Doan might soften his wrath. Or perhaps she knew his wrath was coming anyway and wished to get on the other side of it before it fell. Or maybe sleeping with Wilson Doan was, paradoxically, an act of sisterly support of his wife, who, tomahawked by grief after the funeral, had retreated to a very nice room in the psych ward of New York Hospital— the logic being that she, Judith, understood the wife's incapacity and wished to take up some of her wifely duties during her infirmity. Or, quite the opposite, maybe Judith was striking directly at Doan's wife, warning her not to endanger Timothy, lest she risk losing her marriage as well. It may have been any of these things, or a bit of all of them. Yet I think it was something else, too, and in a perverse sort of way, I could have warned Wilson, man to man, that Judith was more than his equal.

  By appealing to his lust as well as to his fury, Judith neatly separated Wilson from his rational awareness of what behaviors most supported his civil suit against Mr. and Mrs. William Wyeth and the hope of collecting damages and penalties from their various holdings. As soon as old Wilson slipped his stiff decision-maker into my wife, he lost his lawyer's interest in the claim, his wife's undiluted righteousness, and a jury's potential sympathies. For, of course, Judith had documented. And not just with the credit card and phone records and a couple of friendly, damn near incriminating notes to Wilson not marked PRIVATE sent to his office (duly opened, date-stamped, triplicated, and filed by his secretary, thus becoming the instant legal property of the bank), but also in the particulars: seven pairs of sexy new silk underwear, cut high on the leg, worn only once, or rather afterward, still possessing not only the occasional gray pubic hair of old Wilson Doan but leavings of the same stuff that had helped launch his doomed son: his semen, in dried form, and protected forever and ever in clear Ziploc bags. (So much in life comes down to what happens to the semen, where it ends up— inside, outside, high or low, lost or found.) If Wilson Doan continued his suit, then it might well come out— it definitely would come out— that one of the plaintiffs was banging one of the defendants, which would be very smudgy indeed, and not pleasing to Mrs. Doan or the officers of the bank. Adolphus Clay III, wiser than most and foxier than all, caught wind of his client's afternoon diversions and soon the Doans had quietly dropped their $40 million complaint.

  Not yet knowing the reason, however, I thought this development was a victory, a chance to get our old life back.

  "Great news!" I said when I came home that night. Judith was kneeling in her bedroom closet. "It's over!"

  Judith just smiled blankly, as one does when listening to the terminally ill describe a miracle treatment.

  "What are you doing?" I asked.

  "Cleaning out." She dove back into the closet and I watched pumps and flats and running shoes fly over her head. They fell on the bedspread, at the foot of the dresser, across the carpet. I didn't know much about women's shoes, but they looked perfectly good to me.

  * * *

  I'll finish this quickly— if only for my own sake.

  Larry Kirmer took me to lunch and told me I'd become "ineffective in the office." He was not wrong, but he was not kind, either. He spoke with the full authority of the firm's executive committee. There would be no leave of absence, no half-time arrangement, no face-saving explanation. I was a partner, but in the end that made no difference. According to the agreement I'd signed long ago, I'd be paid the value of my partnership over a period of seven years. They stretched it out to keep you quiet. If I contended the arrangement, the firm could cease payment. I was to be gone in two weeks, Kirmer concluded, and why don't you take your unused vacation now?

  Thus began the sudden stutter of our financial engine. We'd been happily driving a huge domestic V-8 that burned tankloads of American currency— hundreds of thousands a year, fuel efficiency very poor. But who had cared? Who had cared when we'd tossed our extra cash into a new kitchen that we didn't need? My first severance check was in hand, already trickling away, but beyond that exactly no new dollars and cents were being pumped into the engine, and over the next six months I took us down to five miles an hour. Doing nothing, barely breat
hing, cost thousands of dollars a week. I liquidated the Schwab money market account ($246,745). I stared at the monthly mortgage bill ($8,780), in shock now. The monthly apartment maintenance fee ($3,945) was outright theft. We fired Selma, our baby-sitter, who had remained loyal and true and who kissed Timothy over and over and wept on her way out the door. Private health care coverage was $2,165 a month. I stopped getting haircuts ($62) and shoeshines ($4), I turned off the lights (0.03 cent/ hour), I bought pasta ($5.90/lb.) instead of fish ($13.99/lb.), I reused the disposable razors (twenty for $9.95). Judith fired the piano teacher ($75 per lesson). I canceled the credit cards. The units of luxury got smaller, then disappeared. I ungaraged the car ($585/month). We owed some taxes ($43,876) from the previous year. I had them take away the rented piano ($259/month). I canceled the paper ($48/month) and the cell phone ($69/month). Our hubcaps were stolen and I didn't bother replacing them with the authentic manufacturer's caps ($316) or the cheap Pep Boys version ($48.99). We were going two miles an hour, the needle on empty.