The Altruists Read online

  “Yeah.”

  Maggie coughed.

  “I’m actually glad I ran into you,” Shawn said. “I dropped my phone in the toilet last week and lost, like, all my numbers. But I’m having a little get-together . . . well, not so little—I’m actually getting married this spring?” He raised his left hand. A gleaming gold band hugged his ring finger.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Well, and so, there are these boats? They leave from Hell’s Kitchen and go down the Hudson, to the Statue of Liberty and back. Really slow, though. You’re on the water for six hours. So we’re doing that. A little, not-so-little party. To celebrate. You should come, Ethan. I met my fiancé on one of these things. It’s kind of full circle for us.”

  “Thanks, but I’m not sure that’s my type of—”

  “You haven’t changed a bit! Come on, Ethan. It’ll be fun. A boozy cruise down the Hudson. We have at least a hundred people coming. Maybe you’ll meet someone!”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “I won’t take no for an answer.”

  “When is it?”

  “Yay! The eleventh. The second Saturday of April.”

  Maggie’s eyes bugged wide. She nodded vigorously at the letters on the table between them.

  “Oh!” said Ethan. “I can’t.”

  “No?” said Shawn. “Why not?”

  “I’m going to St. Louis with my sister.”

  Shawn pouted. “Oh, well.”

  Maggie’s phone whined again. She tore it from her pocket, muttering, “What, what, what!” A stack of push notifications from RoseBox informed her that there were six people with matching damages nearby.

  “Well, it was good to see you,” Shawn said. “You look good. You always looked good, Ethan.” And with that he returned to his table.

  “Glad to see you had a change of heart,” said Maggie.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Ethan sipped his coffee.

  “If you bail on me, I’ll tell him you’re free after all. I’ll find him and I’ll tell him. You know I will.”

  “What did that mean, ‘You always looked good’?”

  “It’s a compliment.”

  “Did you hear an undertone? I heard an undertone.”

  “You’re insane.”

  The bell above the café door rang. A large man in a gray hoodie lumbered inside. The hoodie read Champion and the kangaroo pocket had been torn off. His beard was thorny and stained yellow at the mouth. In his right hand was a large plastic bag full of other, smaller plastic bags. The manager rushed over and shooed him back out the door.

  “Hey,” Ethan said suddenly. “What was it you used to call Mom?”

  “Huh?”

  “You know.” He waved a hand around his head, tracing an invisible corona.

  “Oh, right. ‘Madame Furry.’”

  “Because she had that—”

  “Coat, yeah.” Maggie fluffed her hair. “With the fur-trim hood.”

  “Madame Furry. Right.”

  “I thought it made her look aristocratic.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like a queen.”

  * * *

  —

  The cardinal regret of Maggie’s life was that she hadn’t been with her mother when she died. After all the time she’d spent at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, pacing the antiseptic halls of the Monsanto Cancer Center, falling asleep at her mother’s bedside, she was absent at the moment that mattered most. Even worse was where she’d been instead: on a river in the Ozarks, lying tipsy on a raft, floating lazily toward graduation.

  If there was a better portrait of civilization-threatening entitlement than two hundred wasted undergrads in inner tubes clogging the Meramec River in Missouri, Maggie couldn’t name it. Boys with dad guts and girls in tan-ready positions, tops unhooked and asses gently raised. Coolers full of sun-soured beer. Coolers with their own rafts. Entire floating apparatuses devoted to the coolers, loose cans floating downstream beside them like obedient pets. Cozies and anklets and tank tops, sunglasses in any one of six different colors with the Danforth University logo stamped across the temples. Everything snaking down the river, one of the largest free-flowing in Missouri, churning so slowly it seemed almost to be moving backward.

  She was riding with Mikey and his best friend, Feinstein, who lay passed out next to her. The boys bought into Senior Week—seven days of tuition-sponsored outings for the graduating class—with shameless sincerity, and after Maggie balked at Cardinals tickets, trivia night, and the gala in the botanical gardens, which Feinstein obnoxiously pronounced gay-la, she felt obliged to join them on the float trip.

  She should have been at Barnes-Jewish, humbling herself by a hospital bed.

  “I don’t see why you can’t enjoy yourself this once,” Mikey had said, catching a mosquito in flagrante and mashing it against his leg. Maggie pretended not to hear him. He went on about his nana being sick some years before, how she wouldn’t have wanted him to mope and grumble all day long about it.

  “You know,” she said, “it’s not the same thing at all, actually.”

  But he was right, in a way. She was determined to hate the float trip. By hating it she could not be accused of enjoying herself for even one moment while her mother slowly perished.

  “It’s like you’re trying to be miserable,” he said.

  She burned at just how right he was, and wondered where those skills of perception had been for the past five months of their, whatever, thing.

  Feinstein was a beer snob and had assured them he would “handle it” vis-à-vis float drinks. But his twelve-can bounty of small-batch IPAs was drying Maggie out beneath the fat sun, and there were still three hours left on the trip. The uniformity of their surroundings and the rafts’ imperceptible velocity obliterated space. There was only time, and much too much of it. A thread of cloud broke in the distance. A different mosquito kept returning to the same bulbous bite on Maggie’s ankle. After Mikey had her pinch a pimple on his back and after Feinstein woke to tan his belly, splotched with moles, she found she could stomach the boys no longer, and vomited over the side of the raft.

  Francine died later that same hour.

  The float trip was supposed to be her one indulgence. Her one brief respite from the barbed beep of the PCA pump, the groan of convulsing MRI coils, the pervasive smell of puke and the peroxide cover-up. The drips. And she had been—rightly, she felt—punished for it.

  After coffee with her brother, she called Mikey and invited herself over to his apartment.

  Their breakup had been needlessly impulsive. That much she was willing to admit. He was a good-natured kid, considerate and generous, but one afternoon, toying with his laptop, she’d discovered an endless YouTube cache of interviews with prominent New Atheists. She endured forty-three seconds of measured Islamophobia before storming into the steamy bathroom of their Midtown apartment and announcing to Mikey that she was moving out. The shock caused him to slip in the shower. He brought the curtain down with him.

  He’d taken the breakup pretty hard, though she knew he had grievances of his own. He hated when she reduced the heroes of his favorite movies to disorders from the DSM. (“Scarface isn’t a narcissistic personality!” he’d shout. “He’s just Scarface!”) In any case, she gathered that he was doing well for himself, having moved from Midtown to Williamsburg.

  “Williamsburg?” she said, when he opened the door.

  He was doughier than when she’d seen him last, and balder, though he looked, somehow, younger, less like a man than a toddler with baby fat to spare and hair still growing in. “You know when people talk about this neighborhood being ‘over,’” she said, “it’s because of people like you.”

  “Good to see you too.”

  “Sorry. I’m in a mood.”

  “We’re all in moods. You can’t not be.” He leaned i
n for a hug.

  “Maggie!” came a voice from the couch.

  “Well, shit,” she whispered into Mikey’s shoulder. Behind him, in the living room, she could see Feinstein’s nest of curly hair jutting out from the far end of a beige IKEA sleeper sofa. A movie was playing on the TV in front of him, a documentary following an American violinist on a cultural tour of China. “What’s he doing here?” she asked.

  “Visiting,” said Mikey. “I took the day off to see him. You know I work, right? You can’t just barge in on a weekday afternoon.”

  Maggie shrugged. “Worked this time.”

  Feinstein sat up and made room on either side of him. Mikey sat on his left. Maggie stood on the other side of the sofa.

  “Grab a seat,” said Feinstein. His eyes were hidden underneath a fringe of hair, his cheeks sooty with stubble.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Feinstein’s visiting from Boulder.”

  Maggie feigned interest. “What are you doing out there?” she said.

  “Guess,” Feinstein smiled.

  Maggie rolled her eyes.

  “I work at a holistic dispensary.”

  “Got it.”

  The American violinist was berating a group of young Chinese musicians on the television. “It’s not just about technical proficiency!” he shouted.

  “Yeah,” said Feinstein. “There’s a lot of money to be made out there. I mean it, Maggie. A lot.”

  “Since when are you so entrepreneurial? Weren’t you a chem major?”

  “My parents think I’m in med school.”

  “Jeez,” said Maggie. “How have you kept that up?”

  Feinstein shrugged. “It’s easy. They don’t ask a lot of questions.”

  Mikey mouthed the word divorce across the couch.

  “Oh. Sorry to hear that,” Maggie said aloud.

  “Hear what?”

  Mikey looked away.

  “This time, with feeling!” raved the violinist.

  “Um, nothing,” Maggie said. “Hey, Feinstein, do you mind if I talk to Mikey alone? In his room?”

  “Sure thing,” said Feinstein. “Whatever you say.”

  Maggie gestured to Mikey. He rose, slowly, and led her down the hall.

  “I didn’t know Feinstein was in town,” said Maggie, as soon as the door shut behind them.

  “He’s having a hard time,” Mikey explained. “Divorce proceedings. Both of his parents summoned him to testify on their behalf.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “Okay.” He scratched the back of his neck. “I’m actually glad you’re here. It’s good to see you. I know you said we’re meant for other things and other people, but—I still like seeing you.”

  Her eyes watered. Spending time with Mikey—and Feinstein, for that matter—made her feel as though she was still an undergrad at Danforth. As though his presence alone sent her back in time, back to college, to St. Louis. Back before her mother died.

  “Do you ever talk about me?” he asked.

  “Come here,” she said, and kissed him.

  “But . . . Feinstein . . . ,” he muttered, as she pulled his shirt over his head. They shed their clothes and fell onto his mattress, sheeted with the baby blue blankets that she recognized from college.

  She climbed on top of him and drew him into her. She brought her face to his and kissed his neck. But no matter how much she shut it out, her mind returned to the Meramec. The heat. Her parched mouth.

  She closed her eyes.

  There had been a time when Maggie enjoyed sex. She’d slept with a few other boys in college, and while she could appreciate the informality of campus hookups, the culture turned you into an emotional puritan. Mikey had been the rare guy who wasn’t afraid to show interest. They quickly fell into a routine, the sex decent and about as mutually beneficial as it could be with a young conservative. But since her mother’s death, she’d become all too aware of the harm a body could cause, the damage it could do to itself and others. For nearly two years now she’d been chasing the unburdened pleasure she’d once felt, enveloping Mikey in search of it, and coming up short each time.

  “Have you lost weight?” he whispered.

  She put a hand over his mouth. A prickling heat crawled up her body. She looked up at the Scarface poster on the wall before her, the books piled on the bedside table. The Alchemy of Finance. The Case for Israel.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  Her vomit sloshing into the river.

  Maggie swallowed. “The Alchemy of Finance? Not exactly a turn-on.”

  “Says the trust fund baby.”

  “What was that?” She rolled off him and lay on her back, crossing her arms over her breasts. “Shut up.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why would you say something like that?”

  “Maggie,” he pleaded. “I’m sorry.”

  “You can finish yourself off.”

  He shut his eyes and placed a hand on Maggie’s thigh. A minute later, with a groan and a twitch, he stopped moving.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said.

  They lay side by side in silence. Mikey’s breath slowed to a normal pace. Then he asked if her dad was in town.

  Maggie made a gagging sound. “I’m naked. You’re naked. What kind of question is that?”

  “Is he?”

  “No . . .”

  “Did you recently see him?”

  “No.”

  “What about your brother?”

  She turned red. “Why do you care?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “Wondering.”

  “Because in college, you only initiated sex when you wanted to blow off steam.”

  “Not true!”

  “I’m thinking post-Thanksgiving, post–winter break, Parents’ Weekend . . .”

  “Okay, okay, okay!”

  There it was again, that perceptiveness. Maybe she had underestimated Mikey. Though, in fairness, he was easy to underestimate. Or, at least, to estimate. He was a Jewish boy from White Plains. She never had to ask about his past because she could assume it: summer camp, Maccabi Games, bar mitzvah speech co-authored by helicopter parent. SATs, Birthright, Portnoy.

  “You know,” she said, “It’s not a ‘trust fund.’ My situation does not make me a ‘trust fund baby.’ You realize that, right?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “You are so callous!”

  “Seriously, what’s the difference?”

  “First of all, it’s not in a trust. It’s an inheritance I received after suffering a personal loss. Second, I didn’t grow up knowing about it. I lack the trust fund baby mentality, which is what people mean when they say ‘trust fund baby’ in the first place. And, thirdly, I’ve renounced it!”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes!”

  “Except that you haven’t, though, have you?”

  “I’m going to!”

  “You can’t say you’ve renounced money that’s still in the bank. Under your name.”

  Maggie grunted.

  “I’m sorry. Listen . . .”

  Mikey’s problem, Maggie realized, had less to do with his moral character than it did his trajectory in life. Here was a fundamentally good person who had grown up too fast. Global finance, weight gain, political conservatism: this was not the life of a twentysomething. Whereas Maggie—she was doing it right, capitalizing on her youth and disseminating the perks of her privilege, all in the most effective way possible . . .

  “Are you listening?” he asked. “I said, I still care about you.”

  “I should go.”

  “Stay. Please. Talk to me.”

  Mag
gie shook her head. “I’d rather die than live a superfluous life.”

  * * *

  • • •

  And besides, she was due back in Queens. The M train carried her east past the top floors of ruined warehouses, their windows shattered or blown out, the neighborhoods degentrifying, dilapidating, falling into honest ruin as she went. Debarking at Myrtle-Wyckoff, she ran to meet the Nakahara brothers at their school. Oksana was working late and her husband was in bed with the flu.

  The boys attended a charter school housed within a century-old Methodist nursing home, an improbable Victorian pile just removed from the street by a narrow strip of campus as if to say, Look at me, ahem. The roof shot up with spikes and spires. Pale stones rippled through the patterned brickwork. Litter clumped throughout the yard where four basketball hoops—no backboards—stretched skyward, slim poles and rims in raw space.

  Maggie made it in time, at three o’clock, as children began seeping through the rasping gates, carting their tiny backpacks and lunchboxes. Bruno and Alex were among the last to appear, escorted by a severe-looking authority figure in a wool cardigan and an obvious wig. Alex ran ahead while Bruno walked hangdog beside his captor.

  “Do these belong to you?” she asked.

  “Um . . . ,” said Maggie.

  “You’re the nanny, yes?”

  “I’m more of a mentor-slash-tutor, or think ‘life coach’ minus the New Age gibberish.”

  “Well whatever you are, this one here needs to learn that violence doesn’t solve anything,” she said, one hand clamped to Bruno’s neck. “He assaulted a poor little boy today.”

  “Bruno,” Maggie said.

  “I take it you’ll be punishing him?” the woman asked.

  “All right.”

  “Promise?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m not comfortable releasing this boy until you promise me that you’ll be disciplining him.”

  “Yeah, okay, fine. Come on, guys.” They set off for the boys’ apartment.

  “It’s not my fault,” Bruno muttered.

  “It’s not,” chimed Alex. “He doesn’t have a girlfriend. I have two, and do I look like the kind of person with anger problems?”