33

I STOPPED BY MY DESK AND PICKED UP MY SHOULDER BAG, WHICH WEIGHED a ton, because it had the big hardcover library book in it. My intercom buzzed. Geoff, the security guard, told me that a gentleman by the name of Max Ducane was waiting for me.

That made something clear. Admonishing myself to call him Max and not Kyle, I made my way downstairs.

Max Ducane didn’t look as happy as I would have expected a new multimillionaire to be. If anything, he seemed troubled. We made small talk as we walked out of the building. His car was around the corner-a new BMW. “Your first purchase?” I asked.

He nodded. “I had my reasons-or thought I did-but are you embarrassed to ride in it? Is it too ostentatious?”

“For someone with your bucks?”

“Maybe I’ll sell it,” he said, glum again.

Once we were settled inside it, he said, “I made reservations at the Cliffside. Is that all right? If you’d prefer, we can just go to a restaurant near here.”

The suggestion gave me pause, but I thought about the fact that I was now living rent-free, had paid off my bills from the Bakersfield move, and had just put a paycheck in the bank.

“I’ve never eaten at the Cliffside,” I said, not adding that I had never thought of myself as someone who could afford to eat there, “but I’ve always heard that it’s a great place. And it’s a smarter choice for us than anywhere nearby, I think, unless you want half the staff of the Express trying to eavesdrop on us.”

“The Cliffside it is, then.”

We were seated in a private room at the restaurant, which is part of a luxury hotel with stunning ocean views. Our waiter had a manner that suggested he was on loan from a palace somewhere. He seated me, placed a fine linen napkin on my lap with a flourish, and handed me an open menu with a smile. Before I even looked at what was sure to be the cause of a painful chapter in my financial history, I made myself say, “Will there be any difficulty giving us separate checks?”

He said, “Not at all, miss, but-” just as Max tried to protest that this was his treat.

“It can’t be, Max. I’m supposed to be working, remember?”

He glanced nervously at the waiter, who was feigning just the right amount of indifference, and said, “All right. But another time, then.”

“Another time.”

I had decided that I would do my best not to appear shocked at the prices on the menu, but the real shock turned out to be that my menu didn’t have any prices on it at all.

“Excuse me,” I said to the waiter, holding the menu out for him to see. “I think I have a misprinted one.”

Max said, “The Cliffside is a bit old-fashioned, I’m afraid. Why don’t we switch menus?”

At that point, I finally figured out what was going on. “I can’t believe it,” I said. “Only men get menus with prices on them?”

He smiled. “Neanderthal, I agree. I promise not to drag you by the hair into a cave after dessert.”

The indignation I felt over the “ladies” menu allowed me not to faint when I finally did get a look at the prices. The waiter was placing bread on the table and filling our water glasses while reciting the specials with a level of enthusiasm that suggested the chef had chosen these items in our honor. I thought about ordering nothing but a side salad, then told myself that it would be worth it to pack a lunch every day next week in order to not look like a pauper just now. I thought Max-a recent college student-would understand a low-budget order perfectly, but I didn’t want to appear to be a nobody to the waiter.

So I ordered duck in blackberry sauce, which came with grilled vegetables and little pancakes stuffed with wild rice. Max ordered a porterhouse steak. We considered and rejected the idea of having some wine, both of us having a lot of work before us that afternoon.

Max asked me how long I had worked for the Express. I told him that I was new there, but had worked at the Californian. He tried asking about that, but seemed to quickly pick up on the fact that I didn’t want to reminisce about Bakersfield.

When the waiter brought the salads, he nearly tripped on my shoulder bag, which I had set on the floor. He acted as if people tried to trip him all the time, that keeping his balance while treading a path of hidden obstacles was part of the service a member of the staff of the Cliffside was happy to render to its customers. I apologized as Max picked up the bag and set it on an empty seat. “What the hell do you have in this thing,” Max asked, “a brick?”

“A library book. Mind if we stop by the downtown library on the way back to my office?”

When I told him I was reading Interview with the Vampire, he said he had already read it, and talked about it enthusiastically, but he was good about not spoiling the ending for me.

“You okay these days?” I asked, thinking that by now he had relaxed enough to tell me what was on his mind.

“Sure. Well-no. Actually, I don’t know how to answer that.” He sighed and set down his silverware. “I don’t know what to do.” He smiled a little crookedly. “Can we talk off the record for a while?”

I agreed that would be all right. He had tensed up again, and I knew that as it was, he was feeling so uptight, I wouldn’t get much out of him otherwise.

He took a minute to figure out how to begin, then said, “When the story came out-about them finding the real Max Ducane-I felt horrible. I mean, I already feel like a fake, you know?”

“Why? Because of a name? Lots of us have names that others have had before us. Think of all those John Smiths.”

“But they weren’t believed to be someone else. Each John Smith is who he is, and his grandmother and his uncle know which one he is. Few people got their names the way I did.”

“Right. You could have been in my situation, named after an old song, and have everyone sing the damn thing to you whenever you leave a party.”

He laughed.

I liked his laugh; it was one that made you want to laugh with him.

The strangest thing happened, though. Maybe because I had been looking at pictures of Katy and Todd Ducane all morning, I could see why Warren Ducane had mistaken him for his brother’s child. I decided to keep that to myself.

“Max, if you think about it, all of us have made-up names. So you got this one in a courtroom. You’re hardly the first person to legally change his name. Unless you don’t like the name?”

“No, it’s fine. In fact…do you know who I was named after? When I was Kyle, I mean?”

“No,” I admitted.

“It was my uncle’s middle name. Adam Kyle Yeager. A man who died in prison. Now, there’s a hero. It wasn’t even anything glorious like civil rights or civil disobedience. He was a felon. A thief, among other things. From all I’ve heard, he was a local gangster.”

“He must have meant something to somebody, for you to be named after him.”

“Oh, my father thought the world of him.” He caught himself and said, “Mitch, I mean.” He looked away for a moment, then said, “For the most part, not knowing who my birth parents were hasn’t bothered me. After Mom- Estelle-died, I really wanted to know who they were, and every now and then I wondered about them. But on the upside, by the time I was ten or so, if I saw Mitch Yeager acting like a jerk, I knew he wasn’t my father. I was always free of him-I hadn’t inherited anything from him.”

“I can see both sides of it, I suppose. I think curiosity would have gotten the best of me by now.”

“That’s really all it is for me at this point-curiosity. I’ve met people who can trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower, or farther back than that, but whose own lives haven’t been worth much of anything at all. So I told myself that what mattered was what I did with my life. Who I am, what I made of myself.”

“I agree.”

“And I’ve had incredible advantages. I don’t deny that. Estelle Yeager loved me. I didn’t grow up in poverty, or being discriminated against for the color of my skin. I’ve never had health problems. Hell, just being born in this country is something to be thankful for. There are plenty of horror stories about what can happen to orphans, so for a bastard, I’d say I’ve done really well. Mitch Yeager might not love me, and maybe he’s always planned to use me for his own purposes, but he has spent a lot of money on me.”