The Death of All Things Seen Read online

  ‘And Daniel suspected Norman?’

  ‘Norman was high on the list, though Daniel had suspected me at first. I’d been looking for some sort of greater commitment. Daniel was also mixed up in a Ponzi scheme with his father-in-law. It had begun to unravel. Daniel had hidden his sexuality from his father-in-law. After accusing me, he thought that maybe the letter had been sent by his father-in-law to make him want to commit suicide... I don’t know. Toward the end Daniel was looking behind his back all the time. He felt he was being set up as the fall guy by his father-in-law.’

  Kenneth trailed off. He said by way of atonement, ‘You think bad of me, having sex with a married man?’

  It was a question out of left field, yet Joanne allowed a measure of understanding. She said, ‘No, Kenneth, I don’t think badly of you.’

  Kenneth let out a long breath. ‘Honestly, I’m not placing you. I’m trying. You lived downstairs from us, that’s what you said, right, and you were with a poet?’

  Joanne raised her voice. ‘Peter, he wasn’t famous. You probably never noticed either of us. To be honest, I remember you only because of your looks. I used to say to Peter, I thought Norman was getting the better end of the deal.’

  Kenneth let her candor register. He walked a small circle under the flood of light. ‘Look, Joanne, this isn’t a case of me not caring. I just don’t know what I can do.’

  Joanne felt a rushing relief. Could this be that Kenneth wasn’t interested in returning? She contained the flood of relief. She needed to show continuing concern.

  ‘Okay... but could you call Daniel, maybe do that, persuade him to say that it was a misunderstanding? The letter was sent as a joke. I think it would help greatly.’

  Kenneth said flatly. ‘The thing is, we’re not together anymore.’

  Joanne asked against her own interests, ‘Do you still love Norman?’

  In his silence, she asked again, and Kenneth answered, ‘No.’ He stepped beyond the icy cube of the gas station and began talking in a way that had nothing to do with what was happening with Norman. The call had evidently affirmed some decision already landed upon.

  ‘I’m standing out here, and honest to God it seems there’s no world beyond, just blackness. That is something, right, the way the eyes take time to adjust, to find what’s really there? That’s maybe how it is with most everything.’ In his voice there was a disjunctive quality at odds with the person Joanne thought he would be.

  Kenneth hunched his shoulders against the cold. ‘To be honest, I never found my place in Chicago. I learned some lines for a play in school. It was everybody’s idea I become famous. I was thinking the army, like my brother. I believe I had a sense of myself back in high school. It was just others pushing me to find something else. I eventually settled on Chicago. You could say that external pressures were brought to bear on me that were never my choice.’

  He said it in a way so it was the distilled truth of what he had felt for a long time, and to say it with a measure of dignity, in one sentence, seemed enough.

  ‘I auditioned for a short piece Norman was staging. He agreed to give me pointers. I was moved in with him before I was decided what I felt about any of it. I was on his sofa for a month, not paying rent, and, in the day, reading parts that weren’t me. Norman helped, then didn’t. I was just there on his couch. He wrote. He’d say nothing for hours, then come out of his room and begin making lunch, or invite me out for coffee. He didn’t make any advances. He had these great ideas and theories on life. That’s how he spent his days, working out what he thought about the world.

  ‘I remember saying to him I had never heard of that as a job, but it seemed like the most important job in the world if you could handle it. It was a lonely life. He gave me money. Women in Chicago were different, or I couldn’t find my footing. Maybe you need a sense of confidence and money, something that defines you... I don’t know how to say it... how it shifted, my sense of who I was. I began thinking of myself as a potential partner. I was subordinate in the most obvious way. You know what it’s like to have nothing, to walk around with nothing in your pocket? In the city you stop making eye contact. It’s the opposite of how you might think of city life, of all those millions of people, and suddenly, you’re alone...’

  Kenneth let out a long breath. He had his index finger and thumb to his head, his cigarette smoldering. He took another long pull. He was settled on giving an account of himself.

  ‘I’ll be honest, I never wanted to hear anything again from Norman. One of my major problems has been letting people define me. I’d never been with a man before I moved in with Norman, and then he ended up not being the first. I don’t know how to explain it. I reconfigured myself to how I thought Norman wanted me to be, so when it happened, I would be ready, if that makes sense – not the physical part of it, but somehow the emotional readiness. I got in the habit of men buying me things. I gave that vibe at a certain point, the daytime cafés and the transience of a life where I found myself the object of men’s advances.’

  There was the crunch of gravel underfoot, Kenneth moving out toward the further reach of the dark. ‘I think for the longest time, up in Chicago, I was looking at a version of me that was me and wasn’t me. Then things changed for Norman. He finished a play about his parents. He attributed his success to me. I was with him at parties. He just reached for my hand. He started wanting it then. I was suddenly somebody else entirely. It was overwhelming. I never loved him, not like that. Sometimes I’ve tried to explain it as honestly as I can, and the people I’ve said it to, they’ve condemned me, and asked, “How could you?” when I don’t think it would be said of a woman. They do it all the time. I was just holding onto something, just surviving.’

  Joanne felt the trenchant weight of his words, this same life explained, the hallway, the kitchen, the office, all of it re-appropriated and begun again in Kenneth’s absence. She said quietly, ‘Everything you just said, I’ve felt – the aloneness, the fear, all of it.’

  Kenneth said again, ‘I wish I could place you better, but, honestly, I think Norman has made a good choice.’

  Joanne closed her eyes at the words good choice, her prescriptive, scolding directive toward Grace, the make good choices simplicity of assessing the world. It was obvious she had alighted on a life in transition, in the way the Prodigal Son must have returned, not so much changed, but with a greater awareness and deeper regard for the bad choices made. She had suddenly the idea of a civil ceremony broaching modern reality, ‘Dearly beloved, we are here to join these two, who have made some very good choices...’ That was all one could hope for, really.

  It rescued her from the moment. She said, for the discharge of honesty, ‘I wouldn’t like to put myself up against you. That’s what I feared in calling you, that you’d come back, that I wouldn’t stand a chance.’ She was trying to contain her emotions still, and couldn’t. She was crying. It was better he knew it, better she revealed it, too, to herself.

  Kenneth said, as a non sequitur to break the mood, or to offer her the alternative. ‘I was baptized last month by an orderly at my mother’s nursing home. Thomas Strait, a Christian with liberal views who reads his Bible in how the Word is meant to be received. We did the baptizing in my mother’s room at the home in the handicapped shower. The shower started, and I felt saved in a way I never did before. Thomas says people don’t value what it truly means to be saved, to know that for all Eternity you will live in the light of the Almighty.’

  Joanne felt prompted to respond in a way Kenneth felt was testimony. ‘Peter, he went out to Oklahoma in the fall late last year and never came back.’

  Kenneth made a whistling noise. ‘That sounds like the first line of a very long and very complicated end to something that needs the power of Jesus’s healing love.’

  It roused her, the stark simplicity of the message. It was just beyond her, or it was at that point, but she recognized it in Kenneth. It was enough to know it existed and that it might be accessed even
tually.

  They talked some more, or Kenneth did. Joanne put the phone to her other ear. There was a threshold beyond which one lost interest or compassion in another human being, Kenneth moving to issues that predated Norman, disconnected from her, and yet there were points and times when it made a difference, not to the listener, but to the one talking. Joanne held a silence in deference to what she might need eventually, this compassion and understanding.

  Mercifully, a pickup rolled over a rubber trigger mechanism. A bell sounded like the start to a prizefight. Kenneth’s voice was suddenly rushed. ‘Look, I got to get this, but you tell Norman, I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my savior. I know he’ll think it cliché, and I pray for his soul.’

  He was gone and the line dead in Joanne’s ear.

  What was significant, upon reflection, was how Kenneth had asked nothing about Grace. It had passed midnight. She could see it by a clock in the kitchen, the day ended somewhere back in the conversation, in the way time and years can escape notice.

  12.

  DANIEL EINHORN DIDN’T sleep with his wife anymore. It happened without argument, part of the natural evolution of a relationship that had diverged along the way. Einhorn was in his office. There were overseas markets that needed attention at 3 a.m., in the voracious insistence that capital and opportunity awaited no one.

  He stared at the cycle of feeds on the home security system, stopped on his wife’s bedroom. A TV threw a shifting light, so there was apparent movement and the faint sound of a laugh track, a rumor of life, when it was just the two of them.

  Elaine was asleep. Einhorn zoomed in further. He could see she was wearing her mouth guard. It upset him greatly, in the way Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane had chided Peter to stay awake and keep him company. She had benefitted from all that had been perpetrated.

  He was tempted to wake and involve her in what was to come. He felt it would happen tonight. He was shaking. There would be no reprieve. He was still the outsider in the family nearly thirty years after marrying Elaine. It hurt, but this was what the great reach of men like his father-in-law Saul Herzog could exact in loyalty; how Saul had come to head the Chicago office of Goldman Sachs and head it early.

  They would come for him here, Saul’s men, and whatever transpired, he understood Elaine would acquiesce. Einhorn was no match in the pitting of Elaine’s loyalty to him against her father.

  In pajamas and bare feet, Einhorn was like a penitent on a long and difficult path. He had been called the previous late afternoon by law enforcement. At first hesitant, he had stepped out in the lobby away from Saul, who had looked up and seen him. They were in the endgame of a Ponzi scheme unraveling with the financial crisis. It was only a matter of time.

  The call had turned out to be about the fraudulent Health Department Letter he had received months before. His tone registered the halting embarrassment of somebody caught out, but it was not something he could explain to Saul, not the essence of what was ostensibly a gay affair. He was caught in the sullen awareness that this was the end, or the beginning of the end. Saul had watched him throughout the call and at the end, he came forward, inquiring who had called. Under the pressure of deceit, Einhorn had named a client who would not and did not corroborate that there had been a call. It was in this way that Daniel Einhorn knew his life was over, and so suddenly, but it was not unexpected.

  *

  For the better part of a decade Einhorn had been watching his back, the secret trysts in hotels in the late afternoon, the complicated sequence of heading to the health club, changing for a leisurely run, and ending up literally running to a hotel room for hours lost here and there. It was a sexual awakening that might have been tolerated and managed under different circumstances. The world was an enlightened place. At issue was not Einhorn’s homosexuality, but Saul’s essential hold on him. Einhorn didn’t conceivably have a life without Saul Herzog. They were in too deep in a fraud that could not see any break in the ranks.

  Einhorn knew in his heart that he was a hand-picked scapegoat from the very beginning, chosen purposely three decades ago for his loose-ended family, for his expendability when the time came. Though, at the time, Saul had lauded Einhorn and made an elaborate pretense that Einhorn held a great sway and power within the family, because it would be needed in whatever defense Saul eventually mounted. In this regard, Saul was the most charismatic, sinister and calculating of characters Einhorn would ever know, and yet he submitted to Saul’s overtures, when the end was always inevitable.

  He imagined now the amalgam of details, how it would end – his disappearance. At first take, it would seem a good, stable life – Daniel Einhorn, married twenty-seven years, husband of Elaine Einhorn, father to four children – a grounding series of facts establishing a life and fidelity in marriage. He had a son with a Harvard MBA who had been on the fast track in New York with Lehman Brothers before its sudden collapse during the Financial Meltdown. There were three daughters married to doctors. He gave generously to worthy causes. His youngest daughter, Rachel, had a son, Noah, with Cystic Fibrosis. He had run a marathon to raise awareness and pushed Noah in a modified baby jogger. He had a picture of the finish line on his desk and in his wallet. This would undoubtedly be the shot against which the enigma of his disappearance would be cast, until the eventual disclosure of the fraud that had been perpetrated. It would be all Einhorn.

  His relationship with Elaine dated to a 4th of July party at the Herzogs’ during the deregulatory zeal of the Reagan Administration and Trickle-down economics. He was interning at the time with Sachs. Elaine, a twenty-eight-year-old debutante, had studied psychology and was at a loose end. She was not unattractive, but she didn’t catch Einhorn’s eye in a way where something might blossom, and yet Saul insistently put them together.

  Einhorn was no fool and understood that Elaine was part of the package being offered. If Elaine was mindful of it, she never let on. She had seemingly been set up with a series of love interests all aligned with Saul’s business partners. She discussed them openly, without indicating that Einhorn was any different. Her sisters had been married off, but to more connected families, life for the Herzogs tied to a series of mergers and acquisitions, so why should love fall so far outside the domain of practical interests?

  It was never stated that way, but it was felt and lived by all the Herzogs and their ilk, and if the worst that could be said of them was that none of them fell head over heels in love, then so be it.

  In swapping out one existence for another, Einhorn became part of family gatherings centered on tradition and ceremony. They had a rabbi on hand to bless each and every gathering for the equanimity of moral guidance, and their house was always filled with men of notable distinction in finance and industry, willing to invest, and if there were few among them who might have been considered good-looking, well, they were concerned with greater interests, like tradition and purity of stock.

  Einhorn was the exception. He had rowed at Yale. He was athletically and academically distinguished, and yet he bore a family secret. His mother, a one-time beauty, didn’t know who Einhorn’s father was exactly, but she was sure he was one of any number of men, less than five, she assured him of it. She used to count them off on her hand, one at a time, with an apparent history that still tugged at her heart in the baited sense of how in demand she once was. She was defined by her looks. As Saul intuited, good looks could impede one’s interest.

  Einhorn had advanced against all odds, but the prejudice was there. He was the tolerated guest at friends’ houses, regarded with quiet suspicion. He did nothing to incite this, but it was said of him, as he grew into manhood, that other men’s girlfriends and wives were always interested in him. Early on in high school he had aligned with how tragic heroes in the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies had irreconcilable flaws that were their undoing, and he had embraced this essential fatalism, not least after confiding in a drama teacher, who had set his hand on Einhorn’s knee and then eventually Einhorn’s co
ck, imparting that nothing was gained without courage and risk-taking. So Einhorn submitted, tragedy alive, his thick penis in the hand of his instructor, who explained how in ancient times wisdom was imparted between men and boys. It fucked Einhorn up.

  *

  Elaine Herzog was an answer to a question yet not fully answered in Einhorn’s heart, but what he had believed in more back then was the genius and prospect of what Saul Herzog was offering him, and so he became a fixture at the house at Saul’s behest. In late fall that same year after the 4th of July party, he asked for Elaine’s hand in marriage. Elaine deferred to her father. Einhorn should ask Saul. It was how it was done with the Herzogs.

  He felt, in retrospect, in entering the pageant of their family, the stirring of a tragedy, and yet he willingly took his place with the understanding that this was the best he could have achieved under the circumstances, and that achieving anything short of this would have been a failed life. He knew the risks, and he had accepted them. It didn’t make it easier now, but there could be no denying it.

  It surfaced, the wager of what he had agreed to so long ago, the halcyon days of that summer into early fall, the intoxication of luxury such a stark contrast to his growing up in a two-room apartment with his mother, the great ceremony of it, and how Saul had his secretary pre-order two kosher porterhouse steaks and a bottle of 1956 Bordeaux in the advent of Einhorn’s asking for Elaine’s hand. It was as Saul had planned it, but it seemed all down to Einhorn’s good fortune, his persuasion and charm, when it was otherwise.

  It was a complicated association. As Saul put it, a hypnotist could not make a man do what he didn’t want to, but a hypnotist could call upon what was within a person. And Saul, a reader of the Old Testament, fell upon the story of Daniel and told it to Einhorn – how it was some trick, how the Daniel of the Bible put his head in the mouth of a lion, and that it required great faith, and that he, Saul, could tell Einhorn had come from a people who were used to putting their heads in the mouths of lions. It was decided then, not by Einhorn but by Saul, how the relationship would unfold.