The Wrong Kind of Money Read online

  She settles back in her seat with a smile. “Don’t slouch, Cyril,” she says.

  5

  Bike

  A man, in his house, where he lies, and sleeps sometimes with his wife (especially on summer nights when it is hot and still outside and cool and air-conditioned inside, when one can lie naked on the bed without covers or a sheet) on one of the twin beds—pushed, at first, romantically close together, but now, because it is harder to vacuum that way, separated by a prim nightstand, should be a man at his bravest and best. And this man, when he is lucky enough to have a wife he has once loved thoroughly, and an apartment in a fine building that his money has bought, and his own money manages to maintain, is a man of countable blessings. But to be that man, and to be, as he is, so sure that this man nearly approaches the idea of the man he had once dreamed of himself becoming (white-flanneled, randy, sipping cool beer on warm afternoons after tennis, white-shirted shoulders by Lacoste in the summer sunlight on some lawn, a child playing happily somewhere in the distance) was sometimes of little tangible comfort as you approached age fifty, and your contemporaries were suddenly talking of early retirement and needle fishing in Florida, and here you still were, in this one of a pair of twin beds (long ago, you agreed, tacitly, which one it was to be), staring mutely at the changeful pattern of night city lights on the ceiling, and getting a hard-on for no practical reason. And then, too, though the apartment is yours and bought with your own money, and though you worked closely with your wife on furnishing and decorating the rooms, there were times when that apartment had little reality except for the heat, which sometimes sounded like Ross Perot’s laugh when it came on (There had been complaints about this in the monthly tenants’ meetings. Should the building invest in a new heating plant? No!), and a small spot on the guest bathroom wallpaper that always reappeared, no matter how many times you repapered it (something to do with the Ryersons on the floor above, and he really should mention it to Harry Ryerson someday, but he never had), and the carpet in the long hallway which, unless you walked consciously up and down the edges of the carpet, which one tried to do, grew thin and bare at the center after a couple of years. And then, though your wife did not age like a rug or grow thin and shabby, or fade in the sun like drapes and wallpaper, your wife grew, too, after a time, to lose the precise outline she had once had in your mind, until, coming home, your home was merely a structure, and the picture of your wife in the dining room was no longer a picture of your wife when young, but merely a picture of a young woman full of spirit, and part of the dining room, which was a territory within the structure. With a certain deliberate aim at dissolving yourself this way in the familiarity of furniture and routine, you discussed things with your wife, made plans, agreed, disagreed, quarreled, made up, blamed, took the blame, apologized, and all these processes of course took time, and the time was charged to the future as part of the plans which were for the future and, if anyone asked, you would say this was half the fun. But the trouble was that after a few of these interactions, you both knew how and where they would end even before you had begun. But the discussions and the let’s-talk-this-over idea were too sacred, too precious a part of whatever you believed your marriage to be, to be discarded, and so you observed the ritual and began and ended the discussions as time-honored custom decreed, politely. “I’m sorry.” “No, you’re probably right.” “I didn’t mean it.” “I shouldn’t have said that.” Et cetera, et cetera. Looking at it this way, Noah tries to remember when, if ever, their talks had not had this quality of ceremony—the subject, deemed appropriate by a mutual nod, was opened, it was advanced a little, then thrust gently back, then was perhaps dropped altogether, for the moment, to be brought up again at a mutually agreed upon, more propitious time. He couldn’t remember any times when it hadn’t been this way, and he decided finally that for many years he had been walking cautiously up and down the edges of his wife, carefully avoiding the center where the fabric was tender.

  He was once much more venturesome. Sometimes it startles him to remember how venturesome he once was. At the small elite men’s college (now co-ed) he’d attended in New England, his father had offered to buy him a car. But Noah hadn’t wanted a car. He’d wanted a motorcycle, and so his father (the apple of whose eye he then was) had let him pick out a big, muscular, 600 cc Harley-Davidson, bright red with scrollwork of reptilian design. In those days he thought of himself as Steve McQueen, Jimmy Dean, the young Marlon Brando, a rebel without a cause—not a Hell’s Angel, exactly, but a What-the-Heck’s Angel.

  There were a number of other cyclists in the little college town, and with their bikes they formed an informal little club, tearing up and down the highways and country lanes, across fields and sand-lots, up and down the sides of quarries and gravel pits. The more experienced bikers taught Noah the tricks of the sport—front and rear wheelies, creek jumping, rock jumping, and stump jumping, and racing up and down the concrete steps of the hilly campus. On what had once been the college’s football field (before the new stadium was built), they devised a game of motorcycle polo, using croquet balls and mallets.

  Style is everything to a biker. They’d carefully prime their carburetors so their bikes would start on the first kick. A biker whose “hog,” as they called them, wouldn’t leap off like a rocket suffered a real stigma. It was tantamount to a gun jamming in combat, or an actor blowing a key line in a major speech: “To be or not to be, aye, there’s the rub.” If you flooded your carburetor on the first launch, you tried to atone for it by screeching off on one wheel, gunning your engine mercilessly to get up a head of steam before popping the clutch. There were injuries, of course, though none of them major. That was part of the game.

  At college Noah had been invited to join Delta Chi Epsilon, which was considered one of the top fraternities. But after a while he began to sense that—despite the ritual hugging and handholding and singing of the sacred Delta Chi songs at the secret monthly meetings in the fraternity house’s Goat Room, where members, rather like Klansmen, wore robes and hoods—he was not really a popular member of Delta Chi. He began to suspect that this had something to do with his bike and his “townie” biking friends. His fraternity brothers looked on disdainfully as his biker friends roared up to the Delta Chi house to collect Noah for an afternoon’s adventure on their wheels. This, of course, made Noah even more defiant and rebellious as he slammed on his helmet, kick-started his Harley, and thundered off after the others, leaving his fraternity brothers in a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes. To hell with them, he said to himself, and their Mustangs and Corvettes. To hell with Delta Chi Epsilon and:

  Delta Chi, thy loving eye

  Is on us all today!

  All strong and true,

  We follow you,

  In brotherhood’s grand w-a-a-a-y!

  Then, in Noah’s third year at college, there was an incident. It was on a Saturday night in February, after one of the monthly house meetings, when the brothers of Delta Chi gathered in the upstairs party room for drinks and beer before the jacket-and-tie dinner.

  The president of the fraternity, whose name Noah has now forgotten, approached him rather haughtily and said, “I guess you know, Liebling, that you’re lucky to be in this house.”

  “Oh?” said Noah warily. “What do you mean by that?”

  “When your name came up during rush week, most of the members didn’t want you,” the president said.

  “Oh?” Noah said. “Because of my bike?”

  “It had nothing to do with your bike, Liebling. It’s just that we’ve never taken in people like you. In fact, there’s a clause in our national charter that we had to ignore to take you in.”

  “Okay,” Noah said. “If nobody wanted me, why did you pledge me?”

  “It was simply because, at our final pledge meeting, when you were about to be unanimously turned down, Charlie Washburn said, ‘But listen, guys. If we take this guy in, his old man will probably supply the house with free booze for four years.�
� That swung the vote the other way. That’s the only reason we took you in. The chance for free booze. But we never got any free booze, did we? So it really wasn’t worth it, was it, for us to take in our first Jew? And risk getting kicked out of the national.”

  That night he got very drunk. Around midnight he went outside, pulled the tarp off his Harley, hopped on her, and started her up. He swung her at full speed toward the fraternity house steps, mounted them, and threw his hog at full throttle into neutral outside the front door, shouting, “Open up, you bastards!”, racing his engine until one of the brothers, in Jockey shorts, came down from his room to see what was causing the commotion. Once the door was open, Noah charged into the house at full speed. First he swung the bike to the right, into the room that was called the library, careening between sofas and chairs, knocking over tables and lamps. Next, on a wheelie, he charged across the entrance hallway into the living room, where the bike continued on its path of destruction through the furniture. He log-jumped a sofa, overturning it as he went, and headed for the big dining room, charging at chairs and tables that had been set up for the next morning’s breakfast, sending crockery and glassware flying and crashing in all directions. Meanwhile, the brothers, in various stages of undress and sleepiness, were gathering on the upstairs landing to try to figure out what the hell was going on. “Take that, you bastards!” Noah shouted as he came down from his wheelie across the head table with a splintering crash.

  Next he headed straight for the swinging doors that led to the kitchen, crashed through them and into the kitchen, where, at full speed, he circled the central cooking island several times, knocking over serving carts and steam tables as he went. Then it was back through the crazily swinging doors again, back into the dining room on an obstacle course between overturned tables and chairs. He slalomed out into the entrance hall again, and then, still at full throttle, galloped up the front staircase to the second floor where the bedrooms were, while the brothers cowered and hugged the walls to get out of his way. Then it was down the long central corridor, churning up the carpeting in great folds as he went, heading for the president’s room, which, naturally, was the largest and best-situated room in the house, with its own bathroom. The door to this room stood open, and Noah and his bike sped through it and into the room, and around and around it, while Noah kicked out with his feet at every object in the room that could be knocked over and destroyed—stereo, radio, television set, nightstand, desk lamp, typewriter, everything in sight. With one neat shot that would have made his polo-playing buddies proud, he caught a tennis racket, in its press, with the toe of his shoe and booted it straight at a window, shattering the glass.

  Then it was out into the corridor again, bounding down the stairs, across the entrance hall, out through the front door, which still stood open, and down the front steps into the night street. The whole episode had lasted less than five minutes, but in that short time he had trashed the Delta Chi Epsilon house.

  At the street corner he stopped, idling his motor. He was breathing hard, and the cold night air burned in his chest. Six inches of fresh snow had just fallen, and the streets were eerily hushed and silent, that cushioned and cottony silence that always follows a snowfall, though in the distance he could hear the rising wail of police sirens. What now? What next? Because somehow he knew he was not yet finished with them. His rampage must continue.

  At the end of the street, bathed in the glow of a streetlight, was the white Georgian mansion where the president of the college lived. Its windows were dark. He headed for that. On his bike he mounted the four curved steps that led up to the front door with its graceful fanlight, and stopped. Idling the bike at full throttle, he dismounted and unzipped his pants. Then, choosing a stretch of virgin snow as his canvas, he began to pee, writing in yellow on the doorstep of the president’s house. He was able to write FUCK YOU—NOAH L before he ran out of pee. Then he remounted his bike, bounded down the four steps, and roared off into the night again as the sound of sirens drew closer and lights in the president’s mansion began to come on.

  The next morning—fined, released, and expelled—he headed home to his parents’ house in Tarrytown.

  It was a Sunday morning, and his parents should have been there. But when he entered the house, it seemed as eerily silent as the snow-bound streets of the New England college town the night before. He was still on an adrenaline high, and he walked through the empty rooms, calling, “Hey, Mom! Hey, Pop! Hey, Pop, I got kicked out of college! Hey, where is everybody?” He started up the wide double staircase.

  The door to his parents’ room was closed, and when he flung it open, he saw that the curtains were drawn, and it was a moment before his eyes became accustomed to the darkness. Then he saw a stirring in the room. “Hey, Pop, I got kicked—” he began. And then he saw a sight he would never be able to erase from his memory as long as he lived. He closed the door quickly and ran back down the stairs.

  Later, his father said to him, “Son, I heard about what happened up there at that college of yours, and I want you to know I’m proud of you. You were insulted, and you fought back like a man. You didn’t take the insult lying down. You stood up to the sons of bitches and showed them what you thought of them. Unlike that poor excuse for a brother of yours.”

  “What should Cyril have done? Lied?” He’d heard the Cyril story.

  “He could have denied everything. That’s what he should have done. Denied everything. Sons of bitches never could have proven anything. But your damn fool brother had to confess to the whole thing.”

  Noah said nothing.

  “Anyway, I want you to know I’m proud of you, son. You’re five times the man your brother will ever be. Ten times. Twenty times.”

  Noah still said nothing.

  “And incidentally, son, what you may have thought you saw the other morning wasn’t what you think.”

  Noah stared at his father, and then, feeling tears welling behind his eyelids, he turned his head quickly away. He had never known his father to lie to him before. But he knew what he’d seen. And now the only feeling he could summon for his father was a kind of blind, abstract pity. “Okay, Pop,” he muttered.

  His father touched his arm.

  That summer he would sell his bike. In the fall he would set off for another college in the West.

  “Too much success too soon,” he had said to Melody tonight, blaming that. But what of the man who has had too little success too late? Where did one place the blame for this? Among his friends and contemporaries Noah was certainly considered a success. In the Ingraham Building, and within the organization, he was treated with deference and respect. After all, he was the only male member of the family in the company. At the same time—but perhaps this was only his imagination working—he was certain that some of the people who worked with him and under him regarded him with a certain amount of pity. Edith, his secretary, for instance. After all, he was also a man who worked for his mother and who, in the end, followed his mother’s orders and did what she said. “Yes, Mom.” He was now, technically, in charge of the production and marketing for all the Ingraham’s labels—Ingraham’s Royal Charter, Ingraham’s Regency Rye, Ingraham’s Colonial Gin, Ingraham’s Imperial Vodka, Ingraham’s Majestic Bourbon, Ingraham’s Sovereign Blended Whiskey, and Ingraham’s V.S.O.P. Scotch, a twelve-year-old single malt, where the initials stood for Very Special Old Pale. These were the so-called prestige brands, the only ones actually to bear the Ingraham name. These were the labels advertised in magazines like The New Yorker and Town & Country. These were the brands designed to give the company its high-class image. But, as everyone in the company knew, the real moneymakers were the lower-priced blends that were advertised on outdoor billboards and matchbook covers. When the apartment of the murderer Jeffrey Dahmer was photographed in the press, with an empty pint of Thunderclap Whiskey lying on his bed, no one, fortunately, noted that Thunderclap was also an Ingraham product.

  When Rodney King was arrested fo
r drunken driving in Los Angeles, with a .19 alcohol count in his bloodstream, Thunderclap was what he had been drinking.

  Thunderclap was ten times as profitable as Ingraham’s V.S.O.P., yet V.S.O.P. was promoted as the company’s flagship label. These were the ironies of this industry. V.S.O.P. had been the only Ingraham’s label to have been granted a Royal Warrant, “By Appointment to Her Majesty.…” and Noah’s father had given his other Ingraham brands their royal-sounding names—back in Canada, where he first started—in the vain hope that one day the British monarch might give him that rare thing, a Canadian knighthood.

  His father, who had always looked, even if he had not always been, the picture of success, had been both proud and fond of Noah—proud of him for, of all things, that wild biking spree—even if Noah had not always been fond or proud of his father. And before he died, Jules Liebling (geboren Julius) had felt assured that he, as Noah’s father, would be to a great extent responsible for whatever success in life his son might achieve. Noah knew this was only partly true. Noah had come as far in the company as he had not only thanks to his father, but thanks to his own luck, charm, grace, smile, good looks, poise, and better than average mind. But in Noah’s better than average mind he was under no illusions about his father’s capabilities. His father had had plenty of luck, but very little charm, grace, good looks, or poise, and his father’s mind had hardly been analytical or even very original. In fact, Noah occasionally wondered where it had all come from, all his father’s success … all the money.

  Perhaps his father’s secret was that he never took the distilling industry very seriously. It was, he used to say, a license to steal, a license to print money. The discovery of the science of distilling, if you could even go so far as to call it a science, was lost in history. The ancients had known how to produce their equivalent of booze. Any grain, fruit, or vegetable could be fermented to produce alcohol. The world’s most primitive tribes have been doing what Ingraham’s does for centuries. Besides alcohol, and various flavorings, the only other basic ingredient was the earth’s most plentiful resource—water. All the rest was packaging and promotion, and you had something called the Distilled Spirits Industry. “I betcha even the caveman had his hooch,” his father used to say.