The Altruists Page 6

  “That’s a dollar for the jar,” Maggie said. “And we don’t have anger problems.”

  “Yeah,” said Bruno. “It’s ODD.”

  “What actually happened?”

  Bruno explained. Apparently, he’d been outed during recess when a classmate, Trevor Kwan, correctly identified Bruno’s flip phone as being six years obsolete. Worse, Trevor had swiped the clunky thing, which didn’t technically work, seeing as Bruno’s father had trashed the battery years earlier and Bruno had been using the old phone as a prop, making loud fake calls at recess. At which point the Kwans, Trevor’s gang, began chanting “No-phone! No-phone! No-phone!” while tossing the silver Motorola over Bruno’s head.

  “So,” Bruno explained, “I punched him in the teeth.” He raised an arm. His hammy knuckles were battered with dents and scratches.

  “Guys,” she said, “I thought we talked about this. About conflict resolution? And how we handle ourselves at school? You have to know that I worry about you as much as your mom does. And not because it’s my job. You guys are like family to me.”

  “Our mom doesn’t worry,” Alex said.

  “That’s not true!”

  “No, it is,” said Alex. “She told us: ‘I don’t worry about you.’ Two of her cousins got cancer from Chernobyl. She said: ‘I have bigger worries than you.’”

  “Okay,” said Maggie, “well—okay. Just be safe at school, okay? For my sake.”

  “It’s my disease.” Bruno shrugged. “Nothing to be done about it.”

  * * *

  • • •

  That evening, having exhausted her patience with everyone in her life, but still feeling terribly lonely, Maggie accepted an invitation to her aunt’s house for dinner.

  For Ethan, who contrived an excuse not to attend, these trips out to New Jersey were a hassle. Maggie made them out of solidarity. Though her aunt’s lifestyle confounded Maggie, Bex was still her closest link to her mother, and a companion in grief.

  You could never grieve too long for women like her mother. Eagle-eyed but never critical, intelligent without the need to show it, Francine had selflessly sacrificed career advancement for the preservation of her family—for which she’d served as moderator, referee, and peacekeeping body. She was, to Maggie, both a role model and a cautionary tale. A case study in what women were expected to be, and what they had to give up to be it.

  An hour before sundown, as Maggie surfaced at 175th Street, Bex pulled up in a military-grade SUV. “My baby!” she gushed, stamping Maggie’s cheeks with kisses. Her skin was taut and fragrant, tugged back by a ponytail and viscous from her liberal application of a guava-enriched moisturizer. She ran her fingers through Maggie’s coiled hair.

  “God, it’s soft.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Like your mom’s is. Was.”

  “Bex . . .”

  “Ahh,” she said, dabbing at her lashes with a tissue. “Look at me, all emotional. This is a happy occasion.”

  “Occasion?”

  “Everyone’s excited to see you, gorgeous.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Everyone! It’s Shabbat, beautiful.”

  “Oh,” said Maggie, “I guess I forgot. I’m not exactly . . .” She looked down at her black jeans, months unwashed and crusty with line-of-duty splatter from the Nakaharas. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Don’t worry. You can borrow some clothes. You look thin!”

  Maggie shrunk in her seat, the prickling heat returning to her cheeks.

  Bex looked her over as they crossed the George Washington Bridge. “Your mother used to give me a hard time when we were girls. I would skip meals before a big date, that kind of thing. Francine wasn’t having it. She was a therapist before she was a therapist, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “And that’s all I’ll say about it.”

  Bex had Francine’s warm, dark eyes. Her head down, Maggie stole glances at her aunt’s uncanny face while the civilian tank rolled through the open-air Lexus dealership that was New Jersey.

  Maggie liked her aunt, or at least took a sociological interest. Bex Goldin of Bergen County, born Rebecca Klein in Dayton, Ohio, had, some thirteen years earlier, married Levi Goldin, heir to the tristate area’s largest asset appraisal and liquidation company. In addition to the Jersey palace, he and Bex kept an Aspen house, where he had once made Maggie’s father plunge a steak knife into the frozen earth because he’d sliced cheese with it.

  “What’s new?” Bex asked, nearly running a sedan off the road.

  “Not much. I’m thinking of going to see my dad in St. Louis.”

  “Arthur? Oh, Maggie . . .”

  “You don’t think I should?”

  “Look—he’s your father, not mine. You can’t shut him out forever. Although I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “I know you can, gorgeous. But stay on guard, okay? I don’t want you getting hurt. You can never be too careful.”

  A tall iron gate permitted them into the compound. The Goldins’ tremendous house, protected from the street by a long, narrow driveway, concealed behind it a swimming pool and clay tennis court. An engraving of a compass rose was etched into the courtside walkway, a concrete circle nested in the brick, with Maggie’s cousins’ names inscribed beside each cardinal direction: Ezra (N), Lauren (E), Maxine (W), and their dog, Solomon (S). At its end, the driveway widened into a paved plaza where no fewer than three cars were ever parked.

  “Come inside,” said Bex. “Come come come. The kids are excited to see you.”

  Mirrors of different sizes and shapes hung assorted near the kitchen entrance. The icy adornments had a chilling effect, populating the space with cool reflections. Maggie saw Lauren and Maxine glide across the surface of a hallway mirror seconds before they appeared in front of her.

  “Say hi to your cousin,” Bex instructed.

  The girls grumbled. They were twins, fourteen years old and hiding beneath curtains of black hair.

  “Give her a kiss,” said Bex. She’d picked up this habit from her husband’s family. It wasn’t an unwelcome gesture, but compared to the Goldins, Alters tended not to touch.

  “Fine,” said Lauren, and the girls pecked Maggie on her cheeks.

  “Teens,” said Bex, rolling her eyes and making cuckoo circles with her finger to her ear.

  The hallway led to an airy salon with a white piano and matching white chesterfield sofas. Maxine scurried to the piano and began plunking random keys.

  “Going to play something for Maggie?” Bex called. “No? Okay. Maybe later.”

  She gestured for Maggie to follow her up the stairs. “Ez-ra,” she called. “Your cousin Maggie’s here! Come give her a kiss and let her help you with your homework!” She turned to her niece. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  They found him sitting on the floor of his room beneath a mounted wall-sized chalkboard labeled EZRA’S GRAFFITI WALL in bubble letters. “Come down for dinner in twenty,” Bex said. “I’ll lay out some things for you to wear.”

  “So,” said Maggie, after Bex had gone downstairs. “What are you working on?”

  Ezra groaned and knocked on the cover of a textbook on the floor beside him. Imperialism Reconsidered: A Primer.

  “You’re in sixth grade?”

  He nodded. Maggie thought of the Nakaharas’ crumbling school, and the penises littering Bruno’s homework.

  “We’re doing Africa,” Ezra explained. He waved a xeroxed map of the continent, labeled 1881–1914. “We each get to be a country. I’m England. I have to color in the places that I want and then tomorrow in class we’re gonna fight over them.”

  “The places you want?”

  “Yeah. For like, resources.” Ezra took a red Magic Marker to Algeria.

  “Do you n
eed any help?” Maggie asked.

  Ezra looked up. “Can you get me a Capri Sun?”

  After begrudgingly fetching her cousin the wrong kind of laminated juice pouch (“Wild cherry? I hate wild cherry”), Maggie wandered the upstairs hall. She counted two, three, four spare bedrooms for guests. Or refugees! Lots were pouring in from the Middle East and thereabouts. There was a civil war on in Syria. It was an incontrovertible fact: there were always going to be people who needed rooms, and there were always empty rooms in Bex’s house. It was that kind of opulent waste that frustrated Maggie to no end. The thought was enough to make you loathe your blood relations.

  She found her way to the master bedroom. An outfit was laid out on the bed for her. But she gravitated toward a marble countertop instead, where she found a neat row of necklaces displayed on a long velvet pillow. She looked to the doorway behind her. She listened for footsteps. Nothing. Emboldened by her aunt’s spacious house and her cousin’s entitlement, Maggie justified the swiping of a rose gold chain, so thin and fine it seemed to be made of air, letting it fall into her pocket to be pawned in the name of some greater purpose.

  She rearranged the others to fill the vacancy on the pillow. “Mag-gie, Ez-zie, din-ner!” she heard Bex call from below, in a voice that sounded nothing like her conscience. She ignored the ensemble on the bed and went downstairs in her street clothes.

  A mafia of Goldins had gathered in the dining room. Tan women stood leggy in short skirts, heels hoisting them above their husbands. Maggie made the requisite rounds, hugging the rhinoplastied women of Levi’s family, all of whom lived in colossal homes nearby and convened for Shabbat every Friday night on a rotating basis. “Maggie,” said her aunt, clearly at pains to ignore her niece’s crusty jeans, “you remember Sarah, and Alexis, and Adam, and Leila, and Justin, and Madison . . .”

  She felt two massive hands on the back of her neck. Her uncle. He turned her around and enveloped her in a robust hug.

  Levi was six foot something and extremely fit. Duty bound, at eighteen he had pilgrimaged to Israel in order to voluntarily enroll in the IDF’s paratrooper division, a fact that seemed to hover above his slick head, not unlike a tiny paratrooper, anytime she saw him. “I’m glad you could join us,” he said.

  The room hushed as two sheepskin-boot-clad granddaughters escorted Sol Goldin, paterfamilias, into the room. He paused to lean delicately forward and pet the dog that bore his name. Sol wore a pink shirt with a patterned inner lining and suspenders, his sleeves rolled up over woolly white arms. He greeted heads of family one by one, appraising each of their faces. His wife, Doris, looked on approvingly.

  When he reached Maggie, she found herself in an involuntary bow, which he answered by kissing her forehead.

  There was something unsettling about the orderliness with which the dinner proceeded, everyone sitting only after Solomon sat, eating only after he began to eat. Talk mostly concerned Ezra’s upcoming bar mitzvah. Who would cater, what to wear, how he was progressing with his Torah portion.

  “Are you practicing?” Doris asked him.

  “Yes, Grandma.”

  “Good boy.”

  Across the dining room table, over roast chicken and a London broil—Maggie doubled up on stuffed cabbage—Levi asked after Ethan.

  “He’s good. I saw him earlier today, actually.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Oh, yeah, he says—he’s sorry he can’t make it. Something came up.”

  Her uncle scoffed. “What could have come up? He doesn’t have a job!”

  Levi was the kind of lesser magnate who believed that everyone should have a job, irrespective of his or her net worth. That there was dignity in neckties, purpose to be found in fishbowl conference rooms. Although, come to think of it, Maggie didn’t know how he spent his time, what actually comprised the day-to-day of a professional vulture. She knew he played tennis. That was all. Before Francine died, Levi used to challenge Arthur every time he visited, though Maggie’s father always deflected. “What Levi doesn’t understand,” he told his family every time they left New Jersey, “is that tennis—played at our level, that is—is a game of skill, not strength. Levi lacks the former. Now the pros, of course, need both.” He’d turn to Maggie in the backseat. “Your uncle is a big guy,” he said, “but Daddy would wipe the floor with him.”

  “Oh, well,” said Maggie. “You never know with Ethan.”

  “And you?” asked Levi. “Are you working?”

  “Here,” said Bex, “let me go get some tea. Does anybody want tea?”

  “I work.”

  “Oh?”

  “Babysitting, tutoring, that kind of thing.”

  “I mean work work.”

  “Work work?”

  “You’re not going to be an errand girl forever.”

  Maggie bristled. She knew that Levi was aware of the inheritance. Francine’s money meant little to him, his family fortune dwarfing hers by orders of magnitude, but she could tell he wanted to know what she would do with it. What her next move was. The necklace burned in her pocket.

  “What’s your dream job?” asked Alexis, or Madison. A whole arc of the table was listening now.

  “I’m majoring in business!” offered Leila.

  Across the table, Sol had fallen asleep. “I think my work is meaningful,” Maggie said. “Helping people in my neighborhood.”

  “Depends,” her uncle replied, “on what you mean by ‘work.’” He sat up straight the way men often did, to remind you of their physical dominance. “Listen. It’s like this. We work to survive. In the jungle, in the desert, wherever, you hunt or you die. You catch food or you don’t eat. Survival. But, you’ll say, we’re not in the desert any longer! Correct. And what comes after survival? Look. I have a saying. ‘First survive, then thrive.’ It’s the same instinct on a different level. You don’t understand this yet, because you’re not a parent, but once you’ve ensured your stability, you turn next to your children. Their security. And then their children. So they never have to work like you did.” He considered this, and nodded. “And still, it’s necessary, work. I also say: ‘You retire, you expire.’ Show me a man who quit his job at thirty-five and I’ll show you a soul in decay. We were not meant to be idle. See? That’s the trick of it. You work and work and work toward the inadvisable goal of never having to work.”

  Maggie had a strong conviction that her uncle was wrong. That his ideas were self-serving and vainglorious. That he was not accounting for big, out-of-her-depth abstractions like, say, the interconnectedness of the global marketplace and the ethical responsibilities of the wealthy. “Work is—” she began, hoping to refute him, but suddenly she felt as though she’d looked down while crossing a rickety rope bridge. Like she’d noticed the thrashing river below, the fraying cables, the rotten wood.

  Mercifully, Bex returned from the kitchen to interrupt her, a silver tray balanced on her palm. “Doesn’t she look gorgeous?” she said, stroking Maggie’s hair with her free hand. “I would kill to be that age again.”

  Levi nodded. “Yes,” he said. “A girl like her always has options.”

  FOUR

  The previous week, Arthur Alter woke and realized that he missed his children.

  Saturday morning. Seven o’clock. An abrasive, scouring sunlight found his face. Outside, pre-meds and math majors and other dermabrasioned nondrinkers milled about the green while the rest of Extended Campus slept off its hangover. A window was cracked open in the bedroom to accommodate the spring draft. Particles of undergraduate chatter blew in through the fissure from the quad.

  He sat up slowly, wary of his worsening back, and dragged his legs over the side of the bed. Beside him, Ulrike was still asleep on her stomach. Resting on her bedside table Arthur noticed, for the first time, the cover of the dog-eared novel she’d been reading. In the jacket photo, a proud acacia tree foregrounded an oran
ge sun. He took offense at its earnest, dawn-of-man orientalism, but then again this was Ulrike’s apartment, and he supposed she could read what she wanted.

  Ulrike lived in a small, faculty-sponsored one-bedroom situated in the basement of a raucous freshman dorm on Danforth’s West Forty, a parcel of land for underclassmen housing named for its vast acreage. It was a demeaning existence, Arthur thought—down there, beneath a bed of hormones, Ulrike was a veritable den mother, a chaperone, a bridge troll—but it was subsidized, and he had no grounds to judge. Lately he’d been living there too.

  Arthur’s shoulders popped as he rolled them. He and Ulrike were up half the previous night, their voices raw with argument, sparring over a fellowship offer that would take her to Boston for a year. She told him she was seriously considering it, said it was effectively a no-brainer, career-wise. Which presented an interesting opportunity for Arthur. Ulrike leaving town would be the perfect epoch ender, a conclusion to the Two-Years’ Guilt. It would spare him the mess of ending the affair himself. (Ulrike was thirty-five, and Arthur did not believe women when they said they didn’t want children.) But what would become of him without her? His kids were gone. His house was verging on foreclosure. His career was in a coffin, ignored by even the thirstiest of academic vampires. Without Ulrike around, he’d have to confront the loneliness that had frightened him into her arms in the first place. But she had been party to, and in many ways responsible for, the implosion of his life; he had knit his fate to hers; she seemed to actually like him. He had talked her into staying. Into considering staying, at least. “A pedophilic priest and the biomedical industry walk into a bar,” he’d said, “and it’s a sports bar. That’s Boston. That’s where you’d be moving. Trust me. You’ll hate it there.”

  He lumbered to the kitchenette. He fished through her cabinet for something to eat and pulled out a box of Cocoa Scabs. His left arm, which he’d slept on, buzzed at his side. He could hear Ulrike breathing into her pillow in long, chunky sighs. The tiny, teen-adjacent apartment, her Teutonic snore—though Arthur had been slow to admit it, these were more than minor irritants. He depended on them. They were the very materials of his life.