“Oh. But,” she somehow can’t help pointing out, “wasn’t… he Jewish himself?”
“Don’t give me that shit, lady.” He points to a full-color print of his Redeemer clipped to the sun visor. “That look like any Jew you ever saw? Check out his feet—sandals? right? Everybody knows Jews don’t wear sandals, they wear loafers. Honey, you must be from way out of town.”
You know, she almost replies, I must be.
“You’re my last fare of the day.” In a tone so strange now that Maxine’s warning lights begin to blink. She glances at the time on the backseat video display. It is far from the end of any known shift.
“I’ve been that rough on you?” Hopefully playful.
“I have to begin the process. I keep putting it off, but I’m out of time, today’s the day. We don’t just get scooped up like fish in a net, we know it’s coming, we have to prepare.”
All thoughts of insult tips or end-of-ride lectures have evaporated. If she arrives safely, it’s worth… what? Double the fare at least.
“Actually, I need to walk a couple blocks, why don’t you let me off here?” He’s more than happy to and before the door’s fully shut has peeled away around a corner eastbound and on to some destiny she doesn’t need to think about.
Maxine is no stranger to the Upper East Side, though it still makes her uncomfortable. As a kid she went to Julia Richman High—well, she could’ve been on the natch once or twice—over on East 67th, rode crosstown buses five days a week, never got used to it. Deep hairband country. Visiting over here is always like stepping into a planned midgets’ community, everything scaled down, blocks shorter, avenues less time to walk across, you expect any minute to be approached by a tiny official greeter going, “As mayor of the Munch-kin City…”
The Ice residence, on the other hand, is the sort of place about which real-estate agents tend to start cooing, “It’s huge!” To put it another way, fucking enormous. Two whole floors, possibly three, it’s unclear though Maxine understands she isn’t about to qualify for a tour. She enters through a public area, used for parties, musicales, fund-raisers &c. Central air-conditioning is set on high, which as the day is developing couldn’t hurt. Further in, some respectable fraction of a mile, she glimpses an elevator to someplace undoubtedly more private.
The rooms she’s allowed to pass through lack character. Celadon walls on which are hung assorted expensive works of art—she recognizes an early Matisse, fails to recognize a number of abstract expressionists, maybe there’s a Cy Twombley or two—not coherently enough to suggest the passions of a collector, more like the need of an acquirer to exhibit them. The Musée Picasso, the Guggenheim in Venice, it ain’t. There is a Bösendorfer Imperial in the corner, at which generations of hired piano players have provided hours of Kander & Ebb, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber medleys while Gabe and Tallis and assorted henchfolks work the room, gently thinning the checkbooks of East Side aristos on behalf of various causes, many of them trivial by West Side standards.
“My office,” announces Tallis. A vintage George Nelson desk but also one of his Omar the Owl wall clocks. Uh-oh. Cute Alert.
Tallis has perfected the soap-opera trick of managing through all the daylight hours to look turned out for evening activities. High-end makeup, hair in a tousled bob with every strand expensively disarranged, taking its time, whenever she gestures with her head, to slide back into its artful confusion. Black silk slacks and a matching top unbuttoned halfway down, which Maxine thinks she recognizes from the Narciso Rodríguez spring collection, Italian shoes that only once a year are found on sale at prices humans can afford—some humans—emerald earrings weighing in at a half carat each, Hermès watch, Art Deco ring of Golconda diamonds which every time she passes through the sunlight coming in the window flares into a nearly blinding white, like a superheroine’s magical flashbang for discombobulating the bad guys. Who, it will occur to Maxine more than once during their tête-à-tête, maybe includes herself.
A downstairs maid of some kind brings a pitcher of iced tea and a bowl of root-vegetable chips of different colors including indigo.
“I love him forever, but Gabe is a weird guy, I’ve known it since we first started dating,” Tallis in one of these small, sub-Chipmunk voices fatally charming to certain kinds of men. “He had all these, not creepy, but to me, unusual expectations? We were only kids, but I could see the potential, I told myself, honey, get with the program, this could be the perfect wave, and it’s been… the worst it’s been is educational?”
Me, I want a hula hoop.
Tallis and Gabriel met at Carnegie Mellon back in the golden age of the computer-science department there. Gabe’s roommate Dieter was majoring in bagpipes, which CMU happened to offer a degree in, and even though the kid was allowed only a practice chanter in the dorms, the sound was enough to drive Gabe out to the computer cluster, which still wasn’t far enough. Soon he was out gazing at student-lounge television screens or using the facilities at other dorms, including Tallis’s, where he quickly slipped into a tubelit clustergeek existence, often unsure if he was awake or dreaming in REM, which might have accounted for his early conversations with Tallis, which she remembers nowadays as “unusual.” She was his dream girl, literally. Her image became conflated with those of Heather Locklear, Linda Evans, and Morgan Fairchild, among others. She went around anxious about what might happen if he ever got a good night’s sleep and saw her, the real Tallis, without the tubal overlay.
“So?” with a look.
“So what am I complaining about, I know, exactly what my mother used to say. When we were talking.”
One concept of raising a topic, Maxine supposes. “Your mom and me, we’re neighbors, it turns out.”
“Are you a follower?”
“Not too much, in high school they even thought I had leadership potential.”
“I meant a follower of my mother’s Weblog? Tabloid of the Damned? Not a day passes without her flaming us, Gabe and me, our company, hashslingrz, she’s been on our case forever. Obvious mother-in-law trip. Lately she’s throwing around these wild accusations, massive diversions, a covert U.S. foreign-policy scam, of money overseas bigger than Iran/contra back in the eighties. According to my mother.”
“I take it she and your husband don’t get along.”
“No more than she and I do. We basically hate each other, it’s no secret.”
The estrangement from March and her father Sid apparently began Tallis’s junior year. “Spring break they wanted us off on some horror vacation to witness them screaming, which there was enough of already at home, so Gabe and I went to Miami instead, and apparently there was some footage of me topless that found its way on to MTV, tastefully pixelated and all, but it just got worse from there. And they got so busy fucking with each other’s brain, by the time that was sorted out, Gabe and I were married and it was all too late.”
Maxine keeps wanting to mention that she doesn’t put into family dynamics, even if this is what March has her over here doing. But miles across the parquetry between them, some inertia of resentment is carrying Tallis along. “Anything bad she can find to say about hashslingrz, she’ll post it.”
But wait. Did Maxine just hear one of those implicit “buts”? She waits. “But,” Tallis adds (no, no, is she going to—Aahhh! yes look she’s actually putting her fingernail in her mouth here, ooh, ooh), “it doesn’t mean she’s wrong. About the money.”
“Who does your auditing, Mrs. Ice?”
“Tallis, please. That’s part of… the problem? We use D. S. Mills down on Pearl Street. Like, they actually do wear white shoes and stuff? But do I trust them? mmmh…?”