Emboldened by that thought, I exited the bathroom and headed back to the table, my eyes darting around the restaurant, like a jackrabbit's. No one looked suspicious. The coast was clear; there were no government agents.
The moment I reached the table, I placed my left hand on Dave's shoulder and put my right forefinger to my lips, in the sign that says: “Shhh!” In my left hand was the note, folded in half. I removed my hand from his shoulder, unfolded the note with my fingers, and then placed it on the table in front of him.
As I sat down, I watched his blue eyes literally pop out of his beefy skull, like hat pegs, as he read the note to himself. Then he looked at me, dumbfounded. I looked back, stone-faced. Then I nodded slowly. He nodded back.
“Anyway,” I said, “as far as the currency-trading business goes, I think it's a good thing, but you need to be careful. There's a lot of cash floating around there—at least that's what I hear; everyone's taking kickbacks. I mean, it was one thing when you and I did it, but it's different when there're strangers involved.” I lowered my voice for effect. “Let me ask you a question,” I whispered. “You never deposited any of the cash I gave you, did you?”
He looked at me wide-eyed. “I don't know what you're talking about. I'm broke right now.”
“I understand that,” I whispered, “but I'm not talking about right now.I'm talking about two years ago.I'm worried about the quarter million I gave you. What did you do with the cash?”
A bead of sweat began running down his thick brow. “I think you were stoned back then, big guy! I'm broke right now….”
And that was how the evening went down.
An hour later, when I handed OCD the tape, I felt a slight twinge of guilt, but only a slight twinge. After all, if OCD were to find out about this, he would understand. Ohhh, he would still have no choice but to throw me in jail for the next thirty years; but he wouldn't take my betrayal personally. He would agree that there's only so low a man can stoop before he's no longer a man, and, tonight I had reached that point, and, yes, tonight I had acted like a man.
On my way back to Southampton, I realized that I had found something very important this evening, something that I had lost many years ago, on that very first day I had walked into the Investors’ Center and saw the spreads.
My self-respect.
CHAPTER 15
THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF KARMA
After all, what other explanation could there possibly be that, within three days of slipping Dave Beall the note, the Duchess called me to reconcile? Actually, it wasn't a. fullreconciliation, but it was a major step in the right direction.
“So,” said my luscious Duchess, walking arm in arm with me along the water's edge, “if you buy me a house in the Hamptons, I think it'll be really good for us. We'd get rid of the Old Brookville house and see each other all the time again. Who knowswhat'll happen from there, right?”
I nodded and smiled warmly as we walked in silence for a few moments. We were walking west, toward the setting sun, and in spite of it being April, it was still warm enough at five o'clock that our matching blue windbreakers were all we needed to protect us against the salty breeze.
“Anyway,” continued the Duchess, “I was really mad at you for a while. I never really got over what happened on the stairs. I mean, I thoughtI did, but I just kind of buried it under the rug, along with a lot of other things.” She paused for a moment, squeezing my arm tighter. “But I'm as much to blame as you for that. You see, all those years I thought I was helping you, I was actually killing you.” She shook her head sadly. “But how was I to know? I was so codependent at the time, I didn't know which way was up anymore.”
“Yeah,” I said softly, “you're right; but only about the last part. What happened with the drugs wasn't your fault; it wasn't really anyone's fault; it just kind of happened. It slowly, insidiously crept up on us.”
She nodded but said nothing. I soldiered on, in an upbeat tone: “Anyway, I was a drug addict and you were a codependent, and together we made a mess of things. But at least we made it out alive, right?”
“Yeah— barely,”she said. “I've had to work really hard on myself over the last six months. You know, codependency is a terrible disease, Jordan”—she shook her head gravely—”a terrible, terribledisease, and I was about as classically codependent as you can get.”
“Yeah,” I said solemnly—and what a fucking joke! I thought. Codependency, shmodependency… blah, blah, blah! The whole thing was fucking laughable. Yes, the Duchess had been codependent, but to actually seek out a self-help group that had the audacity to call itself Codependents Anonymous?Still, when the Duchess had first started talking about it, I wanted to have an open mind. In fact, I even asked George if he'd ever heard of such a group, and, surprisingly, he told me he had. Yes, they existed, he said, but no one took them seriously. It was a man-haters club more than anything, a place where they turned meek women into pit bulls. In short, he concluded, they were dangerous.
But that was the Duchess: always aspiring to be perfect at something,and this was her latest gig—to be perfectly codependent. So I had no choice but to go along with it, to pretend that codependency was the latest rage. On the plus side, though, anything that motivated her to put away her prospecting shovel was fine with me.
Just then I felt a playful nudge. “What are you thinking about? I see those wheels of yours turning.”
“Nothing,” I replied. “I was just thinking how much I still love you.”
“Well, I love you too,” she said. “I'll alwayslove you.”
Shit!The second half of her statement was not encouraging! After all, by saying that she would alwayslove me, she was inferring that her love was not of a wifely nature, which is to say of a spread-your-legs nature. Instead, it was of a you're-the-father-of-my-children nature or a we-share-history-together nature, both of which were unacceptable to me. I wanted wifelylove. I wanted lustylove. I wanted the sort of love that we used to share—before I'd been dumb enough to get myself indicted! Still, this was a beginning, a starting point from which I could maneuver her accordingly. “Well,” I said confidently, “as long as we still love each other we can work the rest out, right?”
She nodded slowly. “Over time, yeah, but we need to become friends first. We were never really friends, Jordan. In the beginning, all we did was have sex; I mean, we hardly came up for air, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said gravely—and what the fuck was wrong with that? I thought. Those were the best times of my life, for Chrissake! All those lazy afternoons we made love in the closet, all those nights on the beach, the way we did it doggie-style in the back of the limousine, that time in the movie theater, during Interview with the Vampire,while that old couple one row up rolled their eyes. Who could ask for anything more?
“Yeah is right,” added the Duchess. “We were like two sex maniacs!” Suddenly she stopped and turned to me. Her back was to the ocean now, her blond hair shimmering brilliantly in the afternoon sunlight. She looked like an angel, myangel! “So what do you think, honey? Will you buy me the house?” She puckered up her lips into an irresistible pout.
“I'm not against it,” I replied quickly, debating whether or not to nail her with a kiss, “but with everything that's going on right now, don't you think it would make more sense for you to move in here?” I motioned toward the dunes. “Let's give it a shot and see what happens, Nae! If it doesn't work, I'll buy you the house in two seconds flat.”