The Hazards of Good Fortune Page 8

  “You’re a man with a lot of weight on your shoulders,” Jay remarked.

  “I can handle it,” Breeze said. “I wish I had better news for you.” He spoke in the sandpapery tones of someone who has seen too many gangster movies where the tougher the tough guy is the more quietly he speaks. “But it is what it is.” It is what it is. A phrase Jay found annoying, what a dullard remarked when he couldn’t think of anything else. “And listen, Jay, I don’t have to tell you what a huge inconvenience this is going to be for your tenants. I did a little research and found out how many rental units your family controls. That’s a lot of pissed off customers.” Breeze took another sip of his beer. Over the rim of his glass, he looked at Boris in a way that let him know he was not afraid of Marat Reznikov. Boris said nothing, only returned Breeze’s gaze.

  “It would be extremely inconvenient for them,” Jay said.

  “We all want to avoid that,” Breeze gangster-whispered.

  Jay smiled in a way to suggest he was taking the labor leader into his confidence. It was painless, disarming. Had he not been born into a successful business this smile would have helped him build one.

  “Here’s the thing,” Jay said, placidly. The union leader tilted his head back and jutted his smooth chin. Jay looked directly into his dark, slightly bloodshot eyes. “I hired a private investigator and a forensic accountant. I didn’t tell any of my associates, so you don’t have to worry about that.”

  Breeze tried to hide his astonishment at this news, but a quiver of the left eyelid was his tell. “You got to the books?” Jay nodded. “How’d you get to the books?” He asked as if he were inquiring about directions to 34th Street, no big deal.

  “Come on, Gus,” Jay said. “Who do you think you’re dealing with? The house you purchased in Southampton last year with money siphoned from the pension fund, the one on Swallow Lane with the four bedrooms a block from the beach that the union owns but only you and your family seem to use? It could be a problem with your membership, not to mention the attorney general of New York. The same goes for the condo in the Virgin Islands. You needed both? Maybe your union might have overlooked one vacation home, but two?”

  This information was all imparted in the friendliest, most confiding way.

  “It’s not what it looks like.”

  “Listen, Gus, it pains me to say this, but I’m—I think disappointed would be the word. Yes, I’m disappointed. How long have we known each other?” Breeze did not answer, nor did Jay expect him to. “Over a decade. We’ve been honest with each other, forthright. But after we offer your union a fair deal, one that I believe to be generous, you put me in a position where I have to hire a private investigator.”

  At this point in the conversation, Gus Breeze resembled a flounder pulled from Sheepshead Bay lying in a dinghy, mouth open, lips moving barely perceptibly.

  Jay continued, “This reputable man who I have no reason to distrust comes to me with certain information and then you and I have to talk about these problems you’ve created for yourself that in other circumstances would not be any of my business. You think I enjoy squeezing you? I don’t enjoy it at all. I don’t want to dig around in your personal affairs like this, believe me. Everyone knows I like to operate on the up and up. What you’ve done might have passed in 1962, but it doesn’t fly for a union leader in 2012. So, I’d like to get these negotiations wrapped up.”

  Breeze mumbled something about how unions operate, but the confidence to press the point had abandoned him.

  “Think about what you want to do, Gus.”

  Jay paid the bill, and he and Boris walked out. It had been a strange day. Nicole had implicitly threatened their marriage, Franklin appeared to be siphoning funds from the company, and this union ballbreaker thought he could press an advantage. Perhaps if Jay were more swaggering, more puffed up and bullying, he would never be challenged. But that was not remotely his style. When would people learn that no one was going to beat Jay Gladstone?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The same morning Jay began to suspect his cousin Franklin was looting the family till, his daughter Aviva careened down a tree-lined path that ran along the north side of the main quadrangle of Tate College astride a fat-wheeled bicycle with old-fashioned upright handlebars. Fierce brown eyes, full lips lightly glossed, and a nose in no way too big but one a less confident person might have considered having bobbed, arranged in a pretty face. Wavy chestnut hair cascaded to the middle of her back from beneath an emerald green knit hat. Bright sunlight illuminated five gold studs piercing her left ear.

  The campus was located in Schuylkill, a quaint town in the Hudson River Valley. Founded in the 19th century as a Christian seminary, it had become a model of progressive education that attracted the kind of student who formulated her own interdisciplinary major and aspired to found a nonprofit, be an artist, or create an app designed to end world hunger. Individualism was extolled, conformity abhorred. Aviva fit right in. Born with a right leg that was ¾ of an inch shorter than the left, Aviva had worn a lift in her shoe since childhood. The sense of apartness this caused waxed and waned, but she always felt different.

  Laboring over a paper on Djuna Barnes for her Gender Theory class deep into the night, she had overslept and was late for rehearsal. The next day she was leaving on a free trip to Israel provided by an organization whose mission was to expose young Diaspora Jews to the prodigious history and manifold delights of the Jewish state, and still hadn’t gone over the packing checklist. Like her father, Aviva had too much to do.

  The March wind gusting off the river reddened her pale cheeks as she vigorously pedaled, wool scarf fluttering over her nylon backpack, unbuttoned pea coat flapping like a pirate flag over a sweater and ripped jeans. She rang the bell on her bike and weaved past two boys ambling down the path holding hands. When Aviva flew by them, one shouted a greeting. Aviva acknowledged her friend with a wave and nearly lost control of the bike. She quickly righted herself and sped toward the theater.

  Aviva’s phone rang. Continuing to pedal, she reached into her pocket and extracted it. Her father.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m just calling to tell you to have fun in Israel and stay out of trouble.”

  “Why would I get into trouble?” Guarded, wary of aggression.

  “Aviva—” She could hear him sigh. This strained back-and-forth was the pattern of their interactions. “It’s an expression.”

  “Okay. I won’t. Anything else?”

  “Your mother told me she’s going to be out of town on Passover so I’d like it if you came to the Seder at our house this year. Nicole’s pulling out all the stops.”

  Aviva said she would think about it.

  Her parents divorced when she was fourteen, and until Aviva went to college, she shuttled between their two households. In the wake of the split, when Jay’s ex-wife wanted to move from the Bedford home to the city, he agreed to spend weekdays in Manhattan as well so his daughter’s life would be less disrupted.

  In the manner of guilt-ridden parents of means, her father plied her with gifts, trips, a horse (Aviva: Can I sell him and give the money to charity?)—but his attention had no discernible effect. To his sensitive daughter, Jay was a series of large gestures and loud sounds. He was obsessed with his work, which did not interest her, and sports, which she viewed as a waste of time. When Aviva was in fourth grade, he insisted she play basketball in the local recreational league and he coached the team. Although the lift in her sneaker allowed her to run comfortably, she would pretend to limp just to get her father to remove her from the game. On the rides home, he would give her pointers and Aviva would either ignore him or say, “Leave me alone, I’m a cripple.” If the price of his attention was going to be the development of athletic skills, she wasn’t interested.

  Aviva had a complicated relationship with her infirmity. Although her parents assured her it meant
nothing, for Aviva, it had been a humiliating flaw. As a small child, she attended a school where the social-emotional learning component did little to stop playground taunts. She was angry about what nature had wrought and often expressed that anger, indirectly, at her parents. The weakness it represented to her was anathema. But it made her strongly identify with marginality, economic, racial, or gendered. Alienated from her circumstances, these were her people. The children with cleft palates in magazine advertisements, indigenous tribes whose forest redoubts were being despoiled by the ravages of capitalism, street beggars in India, they all tore at her. In their dire need for protection, they were the opposite of Jay Gladstone, who towered over her world like a forbidding peak. She allowed that missing ¾ of an inch to define her, as what she deemed to be her father’s perfection came to represent Aviva’s view of him.

  When she was still living at home, they would often talk about politics.

  A typical exchange:

  “All property is theft.”

  “Feel free to donate everything you’re going to inherit.”

  “Watch me. I will.”

  “And then you can live in a hovel somewhere.”

  “That’s my plan anyway.”

  “How are you going to earn money for rent?”

  “By helping people.”

  “That’s admirable, Aviva.”

  “The differently abled are just as capable of contributing to society as any other group. No one is going to push us aside.”

  Jay viewed his daughter’s handicap differently. You overcame obstacles. A person moved forward, a view inculcated in Jay by his father.

  “Your grandfather was born on March 4th,” he said. “March f-o-r-t-h. It was his motto.”

  “I don’t believe in mottos.”

  Another exchange:

  “The rents in your buildings are crazy, where are the poor people supposed to live?”

  “There’s housing for people in all income brackets.”

  “What about the homeless, where should they go?”

  “There are shelters.”

  “You should build homes for them.”

  “I’m not the government.”

  “The government is an occupying force.”

  “Why don’t you run for office and change things?”

  “Because the whole system is corrupt.”

  Although Aviva considered herself to be the polar opposite of her father, when it came to will she was his mirror image. Her bat mitzvah project entailed calling every one of her parents’ hopelessly bourgeois friends to request they donate one old coat, then asking those people to each call five friends and implore them to do the same. By the time she finished pestering, one thousand two hundred and fifty-three homeless people had winter coats. The bitter February afternoon Aviva spotted a man panhandling in a Comme des Garçons was one of the happiest moments of her life.

  “I don’t see why I can’t play Field Marshall Cinque,” Aviva said.

  “For real?” Imani asked. “You can’t play Cinque because he was a black man.” She was a rangy black woman. In the winter uniform of jeans and a hoodie, she had smooth, light skin and smelled pleasingly of coconut oil. Her curly hair had blonde tips and was tied back with a strip of kente cloth, a gift from Aviva when they started sleeping together in October.

  “Why can’t I play the dude?” Noah asked. “At least I’m black.”

  Half black, half Jewish, and gay, Noah Booker (uniform: jeans and hoodie) was a slim six foot two with a long, thin face. Short dreadlocks peeked from a do-rag.

  “Semi-black,” Imani teased.

  “Said the soul sister,” Noah responded.

  “The white girl playing the black dude is more provocative,” Axel said. Imagine the face of a Leni Riefenstahl subject upholstered with a scrubby growth of beard, dirty blond hair gathered in a short ponytail. Six feet tall and broad-shouldered, he wore a pullover sweatshirt, cargo pants, and canvas shoes. Although no longer enrolled in the college, he had become their de facto director.

  In the otherwise empty rehearsal space in the basement of the theater arts building, the four of them sat on folding chairs arranged around a table. Scripts covered in markings next to Styrofoam cups of cold coffee. On the walls, rows of framed posters of student performances going back to the 1960s, Stoppard, Chekhov, Shepard.

  “Don’t we want to mess with people’s preconceptions?” Aviva said. She knew the status conferred by society on people like the Gladstones had the reverse effect in her current environment where both her “whiteness” and her family’s wealth left her at a constant disadvantage, but still felt bound to advocate for her position.

  “Absolutely,” Imani said. “We do. But those are some weird racial politics.”

  Aviva’s self-designed major was Form and Mechanism of Political Art, and for her senior project, her intention was to create an original theater piece. A fruitless week of staring at a computer screen led her to ask Imani and Noah to collaborate. To help facilitate their conversations, they invited Axel, who lived in the same off-campus house as Noah, to join them. The show they devised told the story of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a ragtag group of bumbling revolutionaries—deadly and incompetent in equal measure—that exploded into international prominence in the 1970s with the kidnapping of the newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst.

  Working title: Patty Revolution.

  Performances set for early May, just before graduation. The show revolved around the connection between Patty Hearst and Field Marshall Cinque, the ex-convict who was the leader of the SLA.

  “What white folks need to understand (it sounded like unnastan),” Imani began, her oval face arranged in a parody of pedantry, “is that black people gotta play black people.” She scrunched her features, and Aviva tried not to laugh. Imani liked to experiment with dialect and knew how to be funny about it.

  “You gonna get all black up in here?” Aviva said, her sassiness intended as a meta-take on “sassiness,” rather than the thing itself.

  “You’re damn right Ima get all black,” Imani said. The chaffing dynamic was a familiar one, and there was no resentment in her voice. She pushed up the sleeves of her hoodie. “Can’t no white girl play a black man. That shit is blackface.”

  “Tell it, girl,” Noah said, ironically.

  “It’s a lot of appropriation, for sure,” Axel said to Aviva. “Maybe she’s right.”

  “Maybe?” Imani said.

  Axel said he needed to think about it.

  “It’s not blackface if I’m doing it as me,” Aviva said. “I would be a white woman playing a black man. Tell me how that’s any different than a black actor playing some Greek like Oedipus.”

  “Oedipus is a fictional character created by Sophocles to illuminate a universal truth,” Noah offered, flexing his theater history.

  “It’s cool how you memorized that,” Axel said. Noah did not appreciate being patronized and flipped his pen at Axel, who snatched it out of the air.

  Ignoring the male dominance game, Imani said, “Cinque was a for real black man.”

  “Race blind casting only goes one way?” Aviva said.

  “Until there’s full equality for black people, yeah, that’s right,” Imani said and crossed her arms. “Give it up, baby. I’m not going on that free trip to Israel ’cause I’m not Jewish and you’re not gonna be Cinque.”

  “I’m not sure those two things are equivalent,” Aviva said and looked at Axel to see if he agreed. In the eyes of his peers, he was uniquely qualified to adjudicate disputes like this one because his revolutionary bona fides put him on a different moral plane. The son of radical European academics (his father an authority on the Spanish Civil War, his mother a Marxist economist), Axel had moved to America as a six-year-old when they accepted teaching appointments at the University of Wisconsin. In political m
atters, he exuded more gravitas than the typical Tate student and was usually treated by his friends as something of an oracle.

  “It’s like when we liberated the pigs,” Axel said.

  Two years earlier, he had dropped out of college and traveled to Oregon to join a renegade environmentalist collective. Their most successful action, according to Axel, was the freeing of two thousand pigs from a pig farm.

  “We’ve heard the pig farm story, like, a hundred times,” Noah said.

  “Because pigs are a useful metaphor for a lot of things, which you would know if you read George Orwell,” Axel said, as Noah buried his head in his hands.

  “I read Animal Farm in middle school,” Noah said to his palms.

  “The pigs didn’t care what color we were,” Axel said, “because it wasn’t relevant. Here, it’s relevant.”

  Imani nodded, deferring to his perspective.

  “I’m glad we’ve established that pigs aren’t racist,” Aviva said. “But I’m not sure what it has to do with—”

  “Imani is right,” Axel concluded. “You can’t be a black man.”

  Aviva understood that arguments about race between people of different races rarely ended well (and given that Imani was currently her girlfriend, this one was particularly fraught), so it was time to retreat. She agreed to be Patty Hearst, and Imani would play Field Marshall Cinque. They spent the next hour working on the kidnapping scene. Over and over Imani and Noah burst through an imaginary door and confronted Aviva as Patty. They played with the idea of violence, miming it without touching one another. There was a slapstick chase. There was improvisation. Aviva experimented with her reactions. She screamed. Laughed. Sang a lullaby while Imani pretended to blindfold her. Noah danced into the room. Imani used her script as a megaphone. Noah and Imani picked up Aviva’s legs, and Aviva wheelbarrowed around the table on her hands. The games exhilarated all of them, Aviva most of all. Her family’s wealth was an unwanted carapace, a boundary separating her from others. Only in abandon did it dissolve.