Eve's Stepchildren

By Naomi Gayle

Grace is the daughter of Holocaust survivors; Roger is a descendant of people who came over on the Mayflower. Despite their families' objections and their own very different social and political outlooks, they married.

Now they want a child, but because of fertility issues they are opting for adoption the child of a young woman from South America with her own compelling heritage.

Eve's Stepchildren is the story of the lies we tell ourselves and each other to preserve family myths, and how couples are torn apart and brought together by the challenges they face.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491853030

Naomi Gayle

NAOMI GAYLE has published articles in local and national magazines and newspapers. She has written lyrics for children’s TV and film. A lover of travel, she has been on a perpetual journey, both spiritual and actual, to discover herself even as she explores the world around her. She has lived, loved, and worked in Los Angeles, London, Tel Aviv and the South of France, but her heart belongs to the island of Manhattan to which she always returns.

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© 2014 by Naomi Gayle. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 07/21/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-5302-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-5303-0 (e)

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

PREFACE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PART I

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

PART II

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY Naomi Gayle

48946.png    Landscapes in August

48944.png    Mindscapes

48942.png    The Scribe

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PREFACE

I ALWAYS ASKED QUESTIONS. FROM the start I was curious and restless. Why do one and one make two? Why can’t we invent our own system of numbers and words? As I grew older the questions grew bigger. Why do I have to go to school every day? And bigger still. Is this all there is?

I wanted to understand the world and all beyond. I wanted to know why I was Jewish and what it meant in a world that wasn’t. When I was about sixteen, someone asked me a profound question that still resonates with me today.

What if we didn’t have separate religions?

I was stymied. It seemed so obvious that I was Jewish. It was a fact, just as I was a female. Then I began to think about it, really think about it, and I began to understand that some differences were choices we made. Believing in something didn’t make someone else’s belief wrong, just different. As a female I was already learning the lessons of being other, even though it took many years and many political incarnations for me to really understand that some of those choices were really decisions others made for and about me.

As my friends and I married and crossed religious boundaries, I began to understand the implications of those choices. It was the sixties and we thought we could do whatever we wanted, yet our parents came from a generation rooted in tradition and discrimination. One family sat shiva, the period of mourning for a death, for a friend who married a gentile.

When I chose to do the same thing, my parents cried and argued but finally went along with my choice. I even found a Rabbi, from a congregation other than the one in which I had grown up, who would perform the ceremony.

That marriage ultimately didn’t work. Religious difference did play a part in our growing apart. So did infidelity and a general lack of preparedness. That failure let me experience another great taboo of the times, divorce. So common now, it was rarely discussed then. I didn’t know I was riding the wave of the future, part of the great revolution in marriage and family that would follow.

This book was written to explore what happens when those with strongly held convictions have to confront each other. Holocaust survivors and those who founded this country in a Christian tradition.

When I began this project, we seemed to be coming together—bridging differences and prejudices to form new alliances and perspectives. As I complete this, it seems we are growing further apart, more divided over issues and beliefs.

Just as this family struggles to find meaning and a future despite their differences, I can only hope that this country, this world can also move forward towards more tolerance.

Naomi Gayle

January 2014

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I WROTE THE FIRST DRAFT of this book in the 1980s and it is true to its time and place. I thought about updating it to take into account all the changes that have taken place in the world since then, but I decided not to. So many things have altered in the intervening years in technology, lifestyle and world view, that to address them all would have changed this book beyond recognition. Some of the obvious differences are the introduction of cell phones and the disappearance of smoking from public places. But there was also another mindset. Viet Nam and the draft were very different from Iraq and a volunteer army. Social attitudes, customs and mores were both more rigid and, in retrospect, perhaps a bit more naïve. Technology and medicine affected our lives in very different ways.

So, while I did not intend to write an historical novel, in the end this is a piece of history, and I have chosen to leave it as it was written.

I believe in the sun even when it is not shining,

I believe in love even when I do not feel it.

I believe in God even when He is silent.

Found written on a wall in a cellar in Cologne, Germany where Jews had hidden from the Nazis.

PART I

1

January 1986

THE PEARLS HAD BEEN HER mother’s, and her mother’s mother’s before, and even earlier had been extracted one at a time from the soft stomachs of Indian Ocean oysters.

A woman in a white dress had carried each oyster up the fifty feet from the underwater coral reefs to the waiting boats, and men with greedy hands had taken the oysters, pried them open and probed in the milky mantle for that lustrous ball of nacre, that jewel of the universe for which Caesar had set out to conquer Britain, for which the merchant man went and sold all that he had, for which countless women in white dresses had drowned in the Indian Ocean.

The pearls contained the history of the women who had dived for them, the women who had strung them together with knotted silken thread, the women who had worn them, the women who had passed on this heritage from generation to generation, a heritage of purity and passivity and perfection.

Grace fondled the pearls with pink-tipped fingers as she sat on the edge of the gray velvet sofa in the middle of her living room. When Roger came in, she could stand and plump the cushion on which she had been sitting with one surreptitious gesture. If Roger came home with company, that is. If Roger came home alone, she could sink back into the cushions as if she had had nothing better to do all afternoon after work than sit around in her good pearl gray knit outfit reading a book on—she picked up a book from the coffee table to check the title, Corporate Companions—a book on succeeding in business. A book that had been at the top of the best seller list for seven weeks. A book that might have been about Roger. Certainly not about Grace.

Grace was all nervous energy, edges and angles and a cloud of dark hair that wouldn’t ever stay in place. Her clothes were basic, practical, with shoes that she could walk in and sweaters just a little too large. She was prettier than she could ever imagine, and since she couldn’t imagine it she didn’t take the time to develop into what she might have been. She just knew that she didn’t fit into the world of women who belonged with the men in that book and so she didn’t try.

She opened the book in the middle, her eyes following her finger across and down the page, her ears listening for the sound of a car, followed by the slam of a car door, followed, or not followed, by men’s voices. There were no voices. She relaxed back, and the words on the page began to form sentences, take on meaning.

Roger kissed her after he had hung his double-breasted navy cashmere and wool overcoat in the closet, before he poured himself a drink. He might have stepped out of the pages of the book, a shock of light-streaked hair falling over his penetrating blue eyes, the taut lean body and well-fitted suit and polished shoes of the successful man of business.

Eyes on the page, fingers on the pearls, she told herself not to comment on the drink. She swallowed the words as he swallowed the Scotch, then she moistened her lips with her tongue. How did it go? she finally asked when she realized he would not begin.

He shrugged. Nothing new.

Then you didn’t… , they didn’t? Her words were as jumbled as the words on the page.

The slight tic that appeared when he was annoyed pulled at the right corner of his mouth. I told you, it takes a while. They want to make sure I’m the right man for the position.

You’ve been with them five years. Don’t they know by now?

Grace.

She carefully closed the book and put it on the table, pointing to it as she spoke. It says here that some of the best people get passed over because their families aren’t an asset to the company. Is that the problem? She kept her eyes on the book so she wouldn’t have to see the way his mouth moved, as if he were chewing and then swallowing his words instead of speaking them.

He poured himself another drink. It’s not about you.

Then why? She looked at him now, saw the burning light gray eyes under eyebrows arched like the base of a ruined Roman aqueduct, the thin lips taut over crooked teeth, the cheeks indrawn as if he had just taken a deep breath and was holding it in by force.

I don’t know. The words were quick, fierce, the opening round of an argument. All Mac says is that the Board needs time to make sure before they offer me the partnership. Don’t forget, I get shares in the company. I’m going to be one of them.

Is there anything else, anything you haven’t told me? From before, I mean. In college, or the Army. Some time when we weren’t together. She was trying to move responsibility away from herself, find other reasons why the investigation had gone on for so many months.

Damn it, Grace. First it’s your fault, and now it’s some sinister secret from my past. Why can’t you just accept it as part of the bureaucratic process and let it go. His hair was almost completely gray now, and there were lines in his forehead that hadn’t been there six months ago when this process began.

Because it’s hanging over our heads. I don’t know if the phone is tapped, if someone is watching me when I go to the supermarket. Is it all right for you to eat sweetened cereal for breakfast? Am I buying the wrong brand of toilet paper? Is one-ply more ecologically sound than two-ply? Maybe I spend too much. Or too little. The girl at the checkout counter always seems to study the total. I have to wait for my change. Yesterday she read the amount out loud for whoever was listening. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was going to pass out. I felt like I was suffocating there in the middle of the supermarket with everybody watching.

You’re certainly suffocating me. He turned away from her to stare out the French doors leading to the back yard from the dining room. The grass needs to be cut, he said.

She stood by him, seeing the late winter mud-brown lawn, seeing in anticipation the soft green spring fuzz. Not yet, I think. Her voice was a whisper. She hoped her tone, not her words, would reach through his anger and touch the softness she knew was at his center. He could be hard and cold and calculating, like the men whose careers formed the subject of the book she had been trying to read, but he had a tender spot, an Achilles’ heel, that allowed her to love him when she could reach it.

He picked up his briefcase as he left the room. I’ve got work to do tonight. Let me know when dinner’s ready.

She changed for cooking into a royal blue sweatsuit that had never been worn for working up a sweat. She liked its softness and flexibility for housework, which she rarely did, and for watching television, which she did often. Too often.

As she rattled pots and pans and pulled out packets of frozen foodstuffs, the radio played songs about lost love, found love. Old songs about lovers climbing mountains and swimming seas. I’ve got you under my skin… . New songs about learning to live alone. One less egg to fry… .

Grace, the voice from the den called, I can’t think.

She had been thinking too much. In the silence, her mind played its own love songs. Let me dream a little longer… , and I’m the best thing that ever happened to you… . She fingered the pearls with one hand, while the other hand held the wooden spoon with which she stirred the soup.

Pearls are for tears, she thought, no longer wanting to cry, but still wondering whether her every move was scrutinized, her every word overheard. Some days, coming home from work earlier than Roger, she crawled around the house on her hands and knees, looking under and behind everything, hoping/not hoping, to find a small object, such as she had seen on too many television shows, a small metal object with which they could spy on her. She had found nothing, which proved only that either they were very clever, or she was very inept. It was not possible that she was wrong.

Grace couldn’t stand a repetition of recent nightmare dinners—silence and serving, silence and chewing and swallowing, and silence again. She began a monologue, hoping that Roger would join in.

I went to the park at lunch today, she began.

His knife grated against his plate. She felt the noise inside her and gritted her teeth.

I rode the carousel. I got on one of the outside horses, a green one with a yellow saddle. It went up and down in that funny circular motion carousel horses have. Sort of like those Swiss horses that can dance.

They’re Austrian, he said. Lipizzaner.

Oh, yes. Right. She waited, hoping he would say something else.

He helped himself to more salad.

There weren’t any brass rings, but I reached out anyway as if there were, as if just at the front there was a hook filled with brass rings that anyone could grab. I reached my hand way up and out and the little boy next to me whose horse was always up when mine was down said, ‘Watch out, Lady, you’re gonna fall off.’ Funny, it was like reaching for the stars. He didn’t know I wouldn’t have minded falling off.

Did you?

What?

Fall. Did you fall off the horse?

No. I didn’t get any brass rings either. But know what I did?

He didn’t answer, but he chewed his chicken and nodded for her to go on.

I pretended that boy belonged to me. To us. I rode round and round pretending he was ours, and I worried whether he was strapped onto the horse—there were these leather reins and worn leather straps to hold the kids onto the horses, especially the small ones—and whether he’d be able to get down when the ride was over.

Roger put down his fork and leaned back. Did he look like you or like me?

Both of us. He had dark hair, wavy like mine, and light eyes like yours and the sort of nose and chin that could have come from either one of us.

But he didn’t come from me or you.

She stabbed at her own chicken. I really wanted to grab that boy and bring him home. Isn’t that sick?

Grace. You have to stop doing this. He looked at his watch, but he didn’t leave the table.

I don’t know how. She laid her knife and fork across her plate.

The table was in front of the French doors that opened out to the rear of the house. The curtains had been pulled back and outside stars twinkled against the night black sky. I wanted that boy. I wanted him to be ours. It was the same as reaching for a brass ring that wasn’t there. It was like reaching for the stars. Have you ever gone outside and looked up at the sky and had the feeling you could touch the stars and if you did you could grab one and put it in your pocket and take it home.

What good would having a star in your pocket do? It was a question that didn’t need an answer.

I lied before. I said I wouldn’t have minded falling. That’s not true. I mind. I mind every day that goes by that I don’t have that brass ring, that we don’t have that boy. Our own boy.

Grace, we will. Be patient. It takes time.

Everything takes time. Your promotion. Our child. Everything.

He leaned back as if he had the time to listen. Then what did you do?

We rode around three times. Both of us. And one or two other children. I was the only grown-up there. I liked the feeling. I’d bought three tickets. It seemed like a lucky number. But suddenly the third ride was over. That was it. No more tickets. I sat there for a minute wondering if I should help the boy get down or if he was going to ride around endlessly. Maybe he was the son of the man who ran the thing. A man I hadn’t noticed before came in and walked straight towards me and then past me to the boy. The boy reached out his hands and said, ‘Hey, Daddy, know what that lady did?’ The man noticed me then. He didn’t look anything like you. He was short and square and had a beard, a reddish brown beard. ‘No,’ he said, ‘what did she do?’ ‘She almost fell off her horse.’ They laughed. I laughed too.

Did you?

Of course. I had reached out my hand for a brass ring that wasn’t there. I was reaching for stars that were too far away. What else could I do but laugh and go back to work.

You could have called me.

I was afraid you’d be too busy to talk.

Roger pushed away his plate and prepared to leave the table, then he paused. I have to go to Colombia.

A series of questions tumbled out of her mouth at once. When? Why? How long? Where? What for? And, Are you dealing drugs?

He smiled, as if her confusion was what he had intended, and then stood up.

Roger, please.

In a few days. For work. The back of his head had no expression.

She stood in the door of the den, waiting for permission to enter. When did you find out?

He sat in his chair, facing the desk that faced the far wall, facing away from her, speaking to the wall. Last week sometime.

When do you leave?

Wednesday. Day after tomorrow. The wall did not respond.

Grace gave up pretending to be a wall. For how long?

He laid his briefcase flat on the desk top and ran his hand over its black leather surface. Couple of days, maybe more. Depends. He clicked open the briefcase’s brass locks, lifted the lid and rummaged through the papers inside.

On what? The pearls snapped in her fingers and one dropped to the floor. Pearls are for tears.

On how it goes.

She searched the carpet for the pearl and couldn’t even say, Oh, which was the only response that flitted through her mind. It was more than the wall would have said.

Grace, I’ve got work to do. He swiveled his chair to face her.

She stood up, holding one pearl teardrop in one hand, the broken strand of tears in the other, looking down at the pearls instead of at his face. I broke the pearls.

They can be fixed.

You don’t understand.

Probably not, I seem to be very slow these days.

They were my mother’s.

He reached out a hand and took the strand of pearls and twisted them over his fingers. His hands seemed so strong in contrast to the pearls. But then, a pearl could last three hundred years. His hands were only there for one lifetime. Do you know how oysters make pearls?

Grace tossed her hair back out of her eyes and bit her lower lip. It was a game they had of challenging each other with seemingly simple questions. This time she knew the answer. She recited it as if by rote. She wondered if she had answered that way in school, a little girl waiting for a pat on the head. A grain of sand gets inside the shell, the oyster covers it with nacre which is really calcium carbonate and some other stuff I can’t pronounce, like the inside of a conch shell, only all white. Usually.

That’s what the pearl makers want you to think. In fact it’s the oyster’s way of getting rid of something that bothers it, like taking an antacid for indigestion. And it’s not only a grain of sand that starts the process, sometimes it’s a worm, a small parasitic worm. Just think, inside each of these pearls, he held out the strand of pearls on his palm, is a small dead worm.

Why do you have to spoil it?

Grace, you want to make everything significant. My hidden past. A boy on a carousel. Sometimes things just are.

Like your trip.

Like my trip.

Even if it means you’ll be gone when I’m… when we could, you know… .

It’s just one month. He handed her the pearls and turned back to his desk and shuffled the papers in front of him.

I know, but I was sure this month it would happen. She tried to smile but all the while something like a worm was eating away inside her, only she wasn’t creating a pearl, wasn’t even creating a child in that spot that was so empty, that would remain empty now for at least one more month. Maybe she should have kidnapped that boy on the carousel.

He put down his papers and turned to her again. What makes this month so special?

I don’t know, I just thought I was feeling better and… She wanted to see herself replicated in miniature, her children and grandchildren after, all a part of herself, beginning at this moment. She wanted that boy on the carousel, that brass ring.

When exactly will be the best time? he asked gently now, his arms around her as she sobbed. The pearl and pearls lay on the floor.

Wednesday.

So, if I postpone the trip one day it will be all right?

Yes. She cried harder because he was giving her something she wanted. The brass ring was within her reach.

I’ll see what I can arrange. He kissed her hair and walked her into the bedroom.

She clung to him, wanting to arouse him now the way she had wanted to reach him before."

I’ve got work to do. He left her alone in the bedroom.

She tried to stay awake till he finished working, so she would be lying still and pretending to sleep as his cold body crawled under the warm sheets, waiting to see if he would reach out to her.

She dove down deeper, deeper, her lungs bursting, twenty feet, thirty feet, forty feet. A woman swathed in white swam beside her. She carried a small sac of white cloth. Come, further, follow me, the woman gestured. The rough edges of the coral reef snatched at their gowns.

Grace reached out for a dark oval shape. It came away easily in her hands. It was a brass ring. No. It was an oyster shell. The woman held out a knife. Grace pried open the shell. A perfect ball of iridescent white floated up out of the shell. Grace followed after it. The waters parted above her, the moon shone a silvery path across the seas. She followed the path. Buddha, his third eye gleaming luminescent in his forehead offered her wisdom, a dragon belched forth flames, Christ offered her salvation, Venus rose from the waters and offered love.

A flash of lightning penetrated the universe. The pearl sank below the waters and Grace followed it down again, past the Virgin, down to the Great Mother, the life giving power of the universe, to the origin of birth and rebirth, an endless cycle of reproduction. At the bottom, a giant scalloped mollusk shell opened to greet her and she entered, as Jonah had entered the whale, and a flash of lightning entered with her, the union of fire and water, granting enlightenment, cosmic life, and creating not only one perfect pearl, but one perfect child, containing all knowledge and justice. And then a worm entered the oyster, and was covered by the same luminescent coating and Grace stared at the two pearls and couldn’t tell them apart. As she rose back up through the waters with the two pearls in her hand she felt Roger nudge her gently awake.

2

GRACE WAS SURE THIS WAS it, but she didn’t want to tell Roger. Maybe she would wait and tell him when he got back. His trip had been delayed two weeks already, and her period was late and she was happy.

I’ve got good news. Roger’s voice had the distant echo that meant he was using his office speaker phone; she was in a meeting in her own office at the Museum.

It’s been decided?

There was a pause, then voices behind him. I’m still in a meeting.

She knew he meant, they can hear you. What is it?

Mac’s invited us to dinner.

Great. She didn’t ask when.

Meet me at my office at six.

His office. His job. The only thing that mattered to him, and therefore to her.

Grace’s own job was assistant to the curator at the Museum of American Civilizations. The MAC it was often called. Grace was amused that both she and Roger worked for someone or something called Mac.

Her master’s degree in education from Columbia University had led directly and indirectly to this position. She had chosen to study education over social work, because, as she told her mother at the time, You can influence more people through education. Shira, however, thought it was the perfect education for a woman to follow before she got married and quit to raise a family. After a major confrontation on the subject, they had agreed never to raise the subject again, which was far easier for Grace than for Shira.

Grace’s office was cramped and cluttered; the old wooden desk, one corner propped up on a pile of out-of-date catalogues, was covered with papers; the walls, painted yellow like an egg yolk, were hidden behind shelves hidden beneath more papers. Behind the desk was a high-backed maroon leather chair that some corporate sponsor had donated to the Museum. Behind the chair was a window.

Outside the window was a tree. Christmas tinsel adorned its bare boughs. In December, she had leaned out the window and tossed handfuls of synthetic snow and silver sparkles into the air letting the wind carry them over to the tree. Now it was almost mid-March. Soggy white shreds still dangled limply from the upper branches. Man had made his fake snow and plastic stars strong enough to withstand wind and winter weather, it seemed not even God was tall enough and strong enough to shake them loose.

Grace, are you still here?

Grace looked at Ivor Granville, the Museum Curator, the man she had worked for over the past two years. He had never invited her to dinner with or without Roger. Once he had invited her to lunch in the cafeteria. They had each paid for their own food. Grace had eaten a tuna fish sandwich on soggy white bread with mayonnaise; Ivor had eaten a BLT on toast. They had spent most of the time in line, waiting first for the bacon and then for the toast.

Ivor had always seemed ideally suited for his role at the museum, something archaic transplanted to this century and kept under glass, to be admired but not touched. Looking at him, Grace realized how impeccably attired he was, how his grooming contrasted with the museum’s fusty, dusty ambiance. His hair was white and sleeked back. He always wore a tie, and he never fidgeted with the knot as if it were too tight. His shoes gleamed with polish, and the soles were never worn, as if they never trod the concrete streets outside the museum. His suits were pale grey, almost glistening under the museum’s lighting, but they didn’t seem to be made by any particular designer. European, he had once replied when asked about their provenance, and Armenian, when asked about his tailor. He spoke with an Oscar Wilde note of sarcasm and made a face at Grace behind the questioner’s back.

I’m here, Grace said, bringing herself back to the present.

Good then let’s get back to work.

There was no point worrying about what to wear for dinner, she was wearing it, and she’d given up her membership at the health club so she couldn’t go there and shower. She might as well resign herself to the inevitable and continue to work. Grace moved to sit in the second visitor’s chair next to Ivor. It was understood that when they worked in her office, she did not sit behind her desk.

We need a new subject for our Spring exhibit. Ivor’s hair was silver blond and sparkled in the fluorescent light like the tinsel in the sunshine.

"I thought it was all set. Fertility and Fetish." She had spent weeks immersed in studying fertility rites in primitive cultures.

We’ve gotten some flak from the Board. ‘This is a place for families and children.’ He gave an identifiable imitation of a voice Grace had often heard over the phone.

Without fertility there wouldn’t be families or children. It was a subject she knew personally as well as professionally.

Logic is not relevant. What people do at home in the dark is fine, we just can’t show it here. ‘We have a responsibility to the public.’

That’s why all the exhibits are fully clothed?

It’s more comfortable with clothes on.

Is that what Tarzan told Jane when she moved into the jungle, or are you speaking from personal experience? She looked him over, suddenly curious. Was there a something more behind that fastidious exterior?

Look, Grace, this isn’t a fight between us. I’d like to be as authentic as possible, but I personally don’t have any money. The Board does. What they want, we do. They want another topic for the Spring exhibit.

I’m not mad at you, I just don’t like censorship in any form. It’s like painting over Michelangelo’s nudes in the Sistine Chapel.

Ivor smiled. If we were exhibiting Michelangelo, I’d agree with you.

Have you ever noticed that we have more on the American Indian than on any other native culture, and yet it’s the one culture for which we have no sexual artifacts.

Is that a question or a statement?

I was just wondering whether that was due to Museum policy or whether some puritanical streak in our ancestors destroyed anything to do with sex.

Maybe the American Indian was just a prude.

Maybe.

Or maybe, his eyes gleamed behind his round wire-rimmed glasses, we have all those exhibits hidden away in a locked room in the basement. He did his Groucho imitation, lifting his eyebrows and flicking his cigar. Want to look for them with me, Sweetheart?

She leaned back, crossed one leg over the other so Ivor could see her calf muscles and smiled. Sure. Let’s go.

He looked at his watch. Damn. I’ve got an appointment in five minutes. Now about the Spring exhibit… .

Marshall Dillworth, CEO of Global Resources, smoked phallic black cigars and drank dry Tanqueray martinis with little white onions wedged in the bottom of the glass. He had gray hair that puffed out over his ears and flopped from one side of his head to the other. Despite the camouflage, Grace was acutely aware of how light from the overhead crystal chandelier reflected off the pale pink skin of his scalp.

Roger was pretending to be at ease with Marshall. He called him Mac and spoke loudly and leaned back in his chair, his jacket unbuttoned, his tie tilted to the side because he had forgotten his Harvard insignia tiepin, although he was wearing his maroon and gray rep-striped silk tie and charcoal-striped Brooks Brothers all-cotton shirt with spread collar and two-button adjustable notched cuffs.

I see Global making it into the Fortune Five next year. Right near the top. And we’re not going to merge or let anyone buy us out to get there. Young guy came in to see me talking Venture Capital and Leveraged Buy Out. I told him he was scratching someplace that didn’t itch. I’ve got an idea for a new division that will put us over the top within six months. Mac put down his cigar and looked around as if checking to see whether everyone else in the restaurant had been listening.

"Like being number one on the New York Times Best Seller List the first week out. It was the first comment Grace had made since Hello, how are you, and Fine, thank you," and they were already starting the salad—wilted endive and arugula with a creamy vinaigrette dressing.

Roger’s look suggested she should have remained smiling and silent and concentrated on eating her salad, but Mac offered her his own smile, reached out to turn his cigar in the ashtray where its pungent aroma was adding an overtone of masculinity to the meal, and said, My wife likes books. She reads ’em all the time. We practically have a library in the house. Lends ’em out too, after I’ve read the ones I wanted to. I won’t read it if someone else has read it first. Got their fingerprints all over it. And their breakfast too, most likely. Never could stand reading about some man who’s made a million by intelligence and hard work and finding a butter stain over the dollar amount. Means the reader has no respect for money.

Or for books. Roger needn’t have worried. Grace had nothing to say.

Roger filled the gap. I’m surprised you have time to read.

Make time. Mac picked up his cigar and studied it from all angles. Each of his fingers was as thick as the cigar. "Always good to know what’s going on. Don’t bother with stories though. Reading the review’s as good as reading the book most of the time. When I travel, I read. Helps soften people up