The Dismantling (4 page)

“I've never been to New York.”

“You'd have $5,000 and two weeks to see how you like it.”

“Yeah,” Maria said. “So what's the number of that lab?”

Simon gave it to her.

“They're ready for me?” He could sense her eagerness and at the same time her attempt to suppress it, as though she could take or leave what he was offering. “When can I call?”

“Today, if you want.”

“Today is all right,” she said. “Today is good.”

T
HE
next evening Simon waited in the fluorescent bowels of Penn Station, under the LIRR departures board. He was on his way to Leonard Pellegrini's house, where they would begin preparations for the Cabrera psychosocial interview. Simon had suggested meeting in his office, but Lenny said he didn't like taking a train into the city—he wasn't driving these days—unless he had absolutely no choice. Looking around Penn Station, Simon couldn't blame him. The place—low ceilings, crappy food, horror-show lighting—would depress anyone. At 6:15 p.m. the station was crowded beyond even what he'd expected. Each time a track number appeared on the board, a portion of the waiting mass of commuters detached itself and stampeded toward the track entrance, a riot of elbows and briefcases and shopping bags. When his train's number came up, he waited until the rush had cleared and was rewarded with a standing-room spot next to the lavatory, its stale, uric smell wafting through the train compartment each time somebody wrestled open the sliding door.

After an hour, he stepped out of the train and into the failing dusk. Headlights sliced though the parking lot's busy shadows. His taxi driver nodded at the address and sped over the Sunrise Highway and past a high school, the football field's goalposts glowing white against the sky. At Lenny's house all of the lights were out. Simon opened the screen and knocked on the door. He waited, then knocked again. The door was locked. He dialed Lenny's number on his cell phone, and he heard the ringing in his ear and its echo inside the house. He stepped back onto the porch and looked up at the second-floor windows. The curtains were pulled tight; if Lenny was in there, he didn't want anybody to know it. Simon sat down on the porch steps. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen.
Screw this guy
, Simon thought.
Why should I help him when he can't even be bothered to help himself?
As he was dialing a taxi to take him back to the train station, a black Lexus swung around the corner and pulled to a stop in front of the house. The driver's-side window rolled down; Crewes's head popped out.

“I drove as fast as I could,” he said. “Lenny just remembered about you. Shit, man, you gotta tell me about this stuff. You can't expect him to remember.”

“Where is he?”

“Get in. I'll take you.”

They quickly left Lenny's town behind, heading north on the Cross Island Expressway. Crewes drove fast, weaving in and out of traffic, Al Green pleading on the stereo. Fifteen minutes later they exited the highway for a new town. Here, large houses were set back from the road; hedges shielded the properties from each other. Crewes drove up a gravel driveway and parked behind six or seven other cars. The house was large, not as big as Crewes's, but older, more solidly built. A brick chimney rose out of a shingled roof; lights blazed in every window.

Simon looked at Crewes. “Where are we?”

“Don MacLeod's house.” Simon knew the name; MacLeod had played fullback for the Giants during the early nineties, one of those players reliably cited by announcers for the integrity of their “fundamentals.” “Once a month,” Crewes said, “some guys, some retired players with the same problems as Lenny, they come over with their wives. Etta MacLeod hired a therapist to lead some discussions. Sessions, I guess you call them.”

“The same problems? You mean drinking?”

“Can be. But more the headaches. The moods. The screwed-up marriages. Get your bell rung enough times while you're playing, and these things seem to go together.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“You think he would come if I didn't show up at his door and drive him? He and Cheryl went once, when they were still living together. He hated it. Said he was being condescended to. Said it was humiliating. So they never went again. But I knew if I could get him here, she'd come too. That's her car right there.” He pointed at a maroon Honda. “I drive him, hang out in the car during the meeting. When the session's over, I'll come in, have some coffee, and talk to Don. Reminisce about the time I popped his helmet off in a preseason game.”

“You're not allowed inside during the meeting?”

“Of course I'm allowed. But I don't come here for myself. It wouldn't be right to sit there and watch, like it's some kind of show.” Crewes checked his watch. “We'd just arrived when he remembered he was supposed to be meeting with you. This will be over in fifteen minutes. If he doesn't want to do it now, you can reschedule with him in person. He'll remember it better that way.”

They stared at the house in silence for a few minutes, like cops stuck on some desultory stakeout. Simon again felt as though he'd lost control of the situation, this job still refusing to fall in line with the choreographed procedures of his first dozen.

Crewes said, “I'm guessing you've never come across anybody so resistant to having their life saved, huh? But you have to understand what it is for somebody like him to accept help. Asking for help can make you feel like you're too weak to do it yourself, right?”

“I guess sometimes it can.”

“Well, it can for Lenny. And for a lot of us. I didn't even know what was happening to him until one of the other guys organized a dinner, a team reunion. This was last year. Lenny and I were close when we played together, and we stayed that way for a while after he retired. But over the last few years he drifted away from me. Turned out he drifted away from everybody. I thought he might be at the dinner anyway. When he didn't show, I wanted to talk to him, but I couldn't get him on the phone. I kept getting his wife instead.”

Simon sensed that Crewes had been waiting to tell somebody, anybody, this story. It was something Simon had often run into over the last eight months, this compulsion on the part of his clients to reveal their circumstances and motivations and exigencies, to present their narratives. Part of it was that Simon already knew what was most difficult to tell anybody else—that they were willing to purchase another person's organ to save themselves—and part of it was that they seemed to seek a generalized absolution it cost him very little to grant. Still, even though it was sometimes difficult not to care, he tried his best to remain uninvolved, to preserve, like Cabrera's surgeons, a layer of professional distance, all the while hoping he never appeared as callous and mercenary as he sometimes felt himself to be. He was not a judge, but not a friend either; he was a facilitator, a middleman, grease for the wheel, oil for the cog. He would listen to his clients if they wanted him to, even offer an opinion if asked, but his involvement in their lives usually ended the moment the recipient checked out of the hospital and the donor received his cash. Through all of this, he was discovering the moral absolution that strict professionalism offered to its most zealous adherents, a condition, he'd come to realize, second only to freely circulating cash in the essential qualities of a functional modern capitalism. That such detachment—especially justified as it was—happened to suit his own natural personality did not escape his notice either.

“His wife?”

“Yeah. Cheryl was still living with him at the time. She kept feeding me all kinds of bullshit. ‘He's fishing.' ‘He's fixing the car.' ‘He's napping.' ‘So why can't he call me back, Cheryl?' Finally she slips a bit and says he's sick. She wouldn't say how. So I drove out there to see for myself. The drinking was obvious. He didn't try to hide it. Painkillers too. He didn't even seem surprised that I showed up. It's funny, because all he needed to do was get on the phone once and lie to me for a few minutes and I probably wouldn't have thought about it twice. But he didn't.”

“She left him?”

“I wouldn't say she left
him
. But she left, as in she moved out. She wouldn't live with him anymore, mostly because of the drinking. Once they knew his liver was failing and he'd made it clear he wasn't going to change a damn thing about his behavior, she refused to sit there and watch him slowly kill himself. And I guess there were other things too.”

“What other things?”

“These headaches, man. He'd hole up in his room for days. Pull the shades, lock the door. Wouldn't talk to anybody, wouldn't eat anything. He said it was like his head was being crushed in a vise. Like his brain was too big for his skull. I got the idea that he lashed out at Cheryl during these things if she tried to help him.”

“The kids live with her.”

“Yeah. Gregory and Daniela. Six and three. Young. Like I told you before, I think they're the only reason he agreed to this. Anyway, after Cheryl moved out, I started driving up there more often. I thought it might help. But it was hard to tell if he wanted me there or not. He didn't seem to care one way or another.”

The front door of Don MacLeod's house opened, and a rectangle of light spilled out onto the steps. A large silhouette paused in the doorway, a shorter, slimmer silhouette standing by its side for a moment before disappearing back inside the house. The larger silhouette stepped forward onto the lawn, and Simon saw it was Lenny, his shoulders hunched inside a jean jacket.

He limped over to the car as Simon and Crewes got out. “Sorry,” he said, unconvincingly. “I got the dates confused.”

“It happens,” Simon said.

Crewes put a hand on Simon's shoulder. “Why don't you wait out here for a minute. We won't be long.”

Crewes and Lenny walked up the stone path and through the open doorway. Simon's eyes followed them through the window as they moved across the living room and paused to talk to a wiry blond who appeared to be in her late thirties. She looked from Crewes to Lenny, and then, frowning, out the window to where Simon stood by the parked cars. He knew she couldn't see him, looking out into darkness from a bright room, but still he felt exposed. It was outrageous that he'd been forced by Lenny's forgetfulness into such a semipublic appearance. The fewer people in Lenny's life who saw his face, the better; an ideal number, in fact, would be zero. The three of them turned and disappeared through a doorway in the back of the room. Simon could see a sliver of kitchen, the flicker of bodies moving across the doorway. It was the wives, of course, who had made all of this happen, who had pulled these men out of their private miseries, who had forced them to see that their battered bodies and brains were not something to be ashamed of or denied but instead something that needed to be shared with others who suffered as they did.

A few minutes passed, and then Lenny and the blond woman reappeared in the living room. They exited the house and headed toward Simon, the woman leading with spiky, irritated steps. She reached him first and stuck out her hand. “You must be Simon,” she said. “I'm Cheryl Pellegrini.”

“Simon Worth.” Her fingers were cold, her skin dry; her bangs gripped her forehead like a claw.

She looked him frankly in the face. “I thought you'd be older.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.” He winced internally; he didn't mean to sound peevish.

“If you can do what Howard says you can do, I don't care if you're twelve.” She glanced back at the house. Lenny stood a few feet behind her, staring off into the hedges. “Howard's going to stay for a while and visit with Don. I'll drive you both back to the house, and you can talk with Lenny about whatever it is you need to talk about.”

Simon nodded. He hated how thoroughly his original plans had been derailed, but what could he do about it now? Demand to drive Cheryl's car himself? He sat in the backseat of the Honda, as though he were their child, while Cheryl accelerated, yanking the gearshift like she was trying to snap it in half. She asked Lenny what he'd thought of that evening's session.

“It was fine,” he said tonelessly.

She wrenched the car into third and pointed out that he'd been there, after all, and therefore maybe he'd formed some more substantive opinion.

“Okay,” he said. “I could live without Don's name-dropping. Who cares that he still talks to all these guys? We were all in the league. We were all there. It's like he's still trying to kiss his coach's ass fifteen years later, and the guy's not even in the room.”

Cheryl nodded rapidly. “That's what you took away from the meeting. That's what you'd like to discuss.”

“I don't want to discuss anything. You asked me the question.”

“You don't try,” she hissed, swinging the Honda out into the passing lane. “You don't even fucking try.” She flicked her eyes at the rearview mirror. “Simon's thinking he didn't sign up for this. Well, Simon, I'll tell you what, you're gonna earn your commission with us.”

Cheryl jerked to a stop in front of the house, speeding off as soon as Simon stepped away from the car. Lenny unlocked the front door and walked straight to the kitchen. They sat at the table. Lenny poured himself a glass of Jim Beam and offered the bottle to Simon, who declined.