Bleeding Edge Read online

  “Interesting thought, Maxine,” Reg trying to talk her down. “So you filed the appeal?”

  Actually, no—as days passed, there were always reasons not to, she couldn’t afford the legal fees, the appeals process could all be just for show, and the fact remained that colleagues she respected had thrown her out on her ear, and did she really want back into that kind of vindictive surroundings. Sort of thing.

  “A little oversensitive, these guys,” seems to Reg.

  “Can’t blame them. They want us to be the one incorruptible still point in the whole jittery mess, the atomic clock everybody trusts.”

  “You said ‘us.’”

  “The certificate’s put away in storage, but still hanging on the office wall of my soul.”

  “Some rogue.”

  “Bad Accountant, it’s a series I’m developing, here, I got a script for the pilot, you wanna read it?”

  3

  The past, hey no shit, it’s an open invitation to wine abuse. Soon as she hears the elevator doors close behind Reg, Maxine heads for the refrigerator. Where, in this chilled chaos, is the Pinot E-Grigio? “Daytona, we’re out of wine again?”

  “Ain’t me drinkin that shit up.”

  “Course not, you’re more of a Night Train person.”

  “Ooh. Do I really need wine-ism today?”

  “Hey, you’re off it so I’m just kidding, right?”

  “Therapism!”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You think twelve-step people’s a lower class than you, always did, you on some spa program, lay around with the seaweed all on your face and shit, you don’t even know what it’s like—well, and I am telling you . . .” Pausing dramatically.

  “You are not going,” Maxine prompts.

  “I am telling you, it is work, girl.”

  “Oh, Daytona. Whatever this is, I’m sorry.”

  So it all comes plotzing forth, the usual emotional cash-flow statement, full of uncollected receivables and bad debts. Bottom line, “Do not, ever, associate with nobody from Jamaica the island, he thinks joint custody means who brought the ganja.”

  “I was lucky with Horst,” Maxine reflects. “Weed never had any effect on him at all.”

  “Figures, it’s that white food y’all eat, white bread and that,” paraphrasing Jimi Hendrix, “mayonnaise! All in your brain—every one of y’all, terminally honky.” The phone has been blinking patiently. Daytona gets back to work, leaving Maxine to wonder why Rasta drug preferences should have anything to do with Horst. Unless Horst is somehow on her mind, which she can’t say he has been, not that much, not for a while.

  Horst. A fourth-generation product of the U.S. Midwest, emotional as a grain elevator, fatally alluring as a Harley knucklehead, indispensable (God help her) as an authentic Maid-Rite when hunger sets in, Horst Loeffler to this day has enjoyed a nearly error-free history of knowing how certain commodities around the world will behave, long enough before they themselves do to have already made a pile by the time Maxine came into the picture, and to watch it keep growing higher while struggling to remain true to some oath he apparently took at thirty, to spend it as fast as it comes in and keep partying for as long as he can hold out.

  “So . . . the alimony’s good?” inquired Daytona, her second day on the job.

  “Isn’t any.”

  “What?” having a good long stare at Maxine.

  “Anything I can help you with?”

  “That is the craziest crazy-white-chick story I have heard yet.”

  “Get out more,” Maxine shrugged.

  “You got some problem with a man partying?”

  “Of course not, life is a party isn’t it Daytona, yes and Horst was fine with that, but as he happened to think marriage is a party also, well, that’s where we found we had different thoughts.”

  “Her name was Jennifer and shit, right?”

  “Muriel. Actually.”

  By which point—part of the Certified Fraud Examiner skill set being a tendency to look for hidden patterns—Maxine began to wonder . . . might Horst actually have a preference for women named after inexpensive cigars, was there perhaps a Philippa “Philly” Blunt stashed in London he’s playing FTSE with, some alluring Asian arbitrix named Roi-Tan in a cheongsam and one of those little haircuts . . . “But don’t let’s dwell, because Horst is history.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I got the apartment, of course he got the ’59 Impala in cherry condition, but there I go, whining again.”

  “Oh, I thought it was this fridge.”

  Daytona is an angel of understanding, of course, next to Maxine’s friend Heidi. The first time they really got to sit down and chat about it, after Maxine had gone on at a length that embarrassed even her.

  “He called me up,” Heidi pretended to blurt.

  Right. “What, Horst? Called . . .”

  “He wanted a date?” eyes too wide for total innocence.

  “What’d you tell him?”

  A perfect beat and a half, then, “Oh, my God, Maxi . . . I’m so sorry?”

  “You? and Horst?” It seemed odd, but not much more than that, which Maxine took as a hopeful sign.

  But Heidi seemed upset. “God forgive me! All he did was talk about you.”

  “Uh-huh. But?”

  “He seemed distant.”

  “The three-month LIBOR, no doubt.”

  Though this discussion did go on, for a school night, quite late, Heidi’s escapade doesn’t rank as high as some offenses Maxine in fact still finds herself brooding about from back in high school—clothes borrowed but never returned, invitations to nonexistent parties, Heidi-arranged hookups with guys Heidi knew were clinically psychopathic. Sort of thing. By the time they adjourned for exhaustion, it may have disappointed Heidi a little that her mad fling had somehow only found its natural place among other episodes of a continuing domestic series, begun long ago in Chicago, which is where Horst and Maxine originally met.

  Maxine, in on some overnight CFE chore, found herself at the bar in the Board of Trade building, the Ceres Cafe, where the physical size of the drinks had long been part of the folklore. It was happy hour. Happy? My goodness. Irish, which for some says it all. You ordered a “mixed drink,” you got this gigantic glass filled up to the brim with, say, whiskey, maybe one or two tiny ice cubes floating in it, then a separate twelve-ounce can of soda, and then a second glass to mix it all in. Maxine somehow got in an argument with a local bozo about Deloitte and Touche, which the bozo, who turned out to be Horst, insisted on calling Louche & De Toilet, and by the time they had this sorted, Maxine wasn’t sure she could even stand up let alone find her way back to the hotel, so Horst kindly saw her into a taxi and apparently slipped her his card also. Before she had a chance to deal with her hangover, he was on the phone snake-oiling her into the first of what would be many ill-fated fraud cases.

  “Sister in distress, nobody to turn to,” and so forth, Maxine went for the pitch, as she would continue to, took the case, pretty straightforward asset search, routine depositions, almost forgotten till one day there it was in the Post, S-S-S-PLOTZVILLE! SERIAL GOLD DIGGER STRIKES AGAIN, HUBBY DUMBFOUNDED.

  “Says here it’s the sixth time she’s cashed in this way,” Maxine thoughtfully.

  “Six that we know of,” Horst nodded. “That’s not a problem for you, is it?”

  “She marries them and—”

  “Marriage agrees with some people. It has to be good for something.”

  Oooh.

  And why, really, go into the list? From check kiters and French-roundoff artistes to get-even dramas that have pinned her revenge detector way over in the blind, forget-but-never-forgive, sooner-or-later-felonious end of the scale, still she kept going for it, every time. Because it was Horst. Fuckin Horst.

  “Got another one for you here, you’re Jewish, right?”

  “And you’re not.”

  “Me? Lutheran. Not sure what kind anymore ’cause it keeps changing.”
>
  “And my own religious background comes up because . . .”

  Kashruth fraud in Brooklyn. Seems a goon squad of fake mashgichim or kosher supervisors have been making their way around the neighborhoods pulling surprise “inspections” on different shops and restaurants, selling them fancy-looking certificates to put in the window while rooting through their inventory stamping jive-ass hechshers or kosher logos on everything. Mad dogs. “Sounds like more of a shakedown racket,” to Maxine. “I just look at books.”

  “Thought you might have a rapport.”

  “Try Meyer Lansky—no wait, he’s dead.”

  So . . . some kind of Lutheran, huh. Way too early for any shaygetz-dating issues to arise of course, still, there it was, the outside-your-faith thing. Later on, deep in the first romantic onset, Maxine was to hear a certain amount of wild—for Horst—talk about converting to Judaism. How ironic that “Jew” also rhymes with “clue.” Eventually Horst became aware of prerequisites such as learning Hebrew and getting circumcised, which triggered the sort of rethink you’d expect. Cool with Maxine. If it’s a truth universally acknowledged that Jews don’t proselytize, Horst certainly was and remains a prime argument for why not.

  At some point he offered her a consultancy contract. “I could really use you.”

  “Hey, anytime,” a piece of lighthearted industry repartee which this time, however, would prove fateful. Later on, post-nup, she grew much more careful with the blurting, reaching, in fact, along toward the windup there, almost to the point of silence, while Horst sat grimly pecking at a spreadsheet application he’d found in some Software Etc bargain bin, called Luvbux 6.9, totaling up sums in the range Hefty to Whopping he had spent for the sole purpose of getting Maxine to fall silent. To torture himself further, he then opened a feature that would calculate what it had been costing him per minute of silence actually obtained. Aaahh! bummer!

  “Once I realized,” as Maxine presented it to Heidi, “that if I complained enough, he’d give me whatever I wanted? just to shut me up? well, the romance, I don’t know, somehow went out of it for me.”

  “As a natural kvetch, it got too easy for you, I understand,” Heidi cooed. “Horst is such a pushover. The big alexithymic lug. You never saw that about him. Or rather, you—”

  “—saw it too late,” Maxine joined in on the chorus of. “Yes, Heidi, and yet despite it all sometimes I would almost welcome somebody that accommodating in my life again.”

  “You, ah, want his number? Horst?”

  “You have it?”

  “No, uh-uh, I was going to ask you.”

  They shake their heads at each other. Without needing a mirror, Maxine knows they look like a couple of depraved grandmas. An untypical adjustment to have to make, their roles being usually a little more glamorous. At some point early in their relationship, which has been forever, Maxine understood that she was not the Princess here. Heidi wasn’t either, of course, but Heidi didn’t know that, in fact she thought she was the Princess and furthermore has come over the years to believe that Maxine is the Princess’s slightly less attractive wacky sidekick. Whatever the story of the moment happens to be, Princess Heidrophobia is always the lead babe while Lady Maxipad is the fastmouthed soubrette, the heavy lifter, the practical elf who comes while the Princess is sleeping or, more typically, distracted, and gets the real work of the princessipality done.

  It probably helped that they both had East European roots, for even in those days you could still find on the Upper West Side certain long-lived intra-Jewish distinctions being drawn, least enjoyable maybe the one between Hochdeutsch and Ashkenazi. Mothers were known to shanghai their recently eloped children down to Mexico for quickie divorces from young men with promising careers in brokerage or medicine, or from ravishing tomatoes with more brains than the guy they thought they were marrying, whose fatal handicap was a name from the wrong corner of the Diaspora. Something like this happened in fact to Heidi, whose surname, Czornak, set off all kinds of alarms, though the matter didn’t get quite as far as the airplane. On that caper it was the Practical Elf who acted as agent and presently bagperson, holding up the Strubels for a sum nicely in excess of what they had initially offered to buy Heidi, the little Polish snip, off. “Galician, actually,” Heidi remarked. It was not for her the issue of conscience Maxine had been afraid of, for Evan Strubel turned out to be a feckless putz who lived in reflexive fear of his mother, Helvetia, whose timely entrance that day in a St. John suit and a snappish mood prevented Evan from putting further moves on Maxine herself, is how serious he was about Heidi to begin with. Not that Maxine shared details of young Strubel’s perfidy with the Princess, settling for “I think he sees you mostly as a way to get out of the house.” Heidi was far, further than Maxine expected, from desolated. They sat at her vast kitchen table counting the Strubels’ money, eating ice-cream sandwiches and cackling. Now and then down the line, under the influence of assorted substances, Heidi would relapse into blubbering, “He was the love of my life, that evil bigoted woman destroyed us,” for which the Wacky Sidekick would always be there with a witty remark like “Face it, babe, her tits are bigger.”

  Certain lobes of Heidi’s spirit may have been compromised—because Mrs. Strubel had perhaps only casually threatened Mexican divorce, for example, Heidi presently found herself in a struggle with the Spanish tongue rivaling that of Bob Barker at a Miss Universe pageant. The language question in turn spilled over into other areas. Heidi’s idea of the echt Latina seemed to be Natalie Wood in West Side Story (1961). It did no good to point out, as Maxine has done again and again with dwindling patience, that Natalie Wood, born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, came from a somewhat Russian background and her accent in the picture is possibly closer to Russian than to boricua.

  Putzboy went on into a Wall Street apprenticeship, and has probably been through several more wives by now. Heidi, relieved to be single, pursued a career in academia, having recently been given tenure at City College in the pop-culture department.

  “You totally pulled my meatloaf out of the microwave on that one,” Heidi airily, “don’t think I’m not eternally grateful.”

  “What choice did I have, you always thought you were Grace Kelly.”

  “Well, I was. Am.”

  “Not career Grace Kelly,” Maxine points out. “Only, specifically, Rear Window Grace Kelly. Back when we used to surveil the windows across the street.”

  “You sure about that? You know what that makes you.”

  “Thelma Ritter, yeah, but maybe not. I thought I was Wendell Corey.”

  Teen mischief. If there can be haunted houses, there can also be karmically challenged apartment buildings, and the one they liked to spy on, The Deseret, has always made The Dakota look like a Holiday Inn. The place has obsessed Maxine for as long as she can remember. She grew up across the street from where it still looms over the neighborhood, trying to pass as just another stolid example of Upper West Side apartment house, twelve stories and a full square block of sinister clutter—helical fire escapes at each corner, turrets, balconies, gargoyles, scaled and serpentine and fanged creatures in cast iron over the entrances and coiled around the windows. In the central courtyard stands an elaborate fountain, surrounded by a circular driveway big enough to allow a couple of stretch limos to sit there and idle, with room left over for a Rolls-Royce or two. Film crews come here to shoot features, commercials, series, blasting huge volumes of light into the unappeasable maw of the entranceway, keeping everybody for blocks around up all night. Though Ziggy claims to have a classmate who lives there, it’s far from Maxine’s social circle, key money even for a studio in The Deseret said to run $300,000 and up.

  At some point back in high school, Maxine and Heidi bought cheap binoculars down on Canal and took to lurking in Maxine’s bedroom, sometimes into the early A.M., staring over at the lighted windows across the way, waiting for something to happen. Any appearance of a human figure was a major event. At first Maxine found it romantic, al
l the mutually disconnected lives going on in parallel—later she came to take more of a what you’d call gothic approach. Other buildings might be haunted, but this one seemed itself the undead thing, the stone zombie, rising only when night fell, stalking unseen through the city to work out its secret compulsions.

  The girls kept hatching schemes to sneak in, swanning, or possibly pigeoning, their way up to the gate carrying street Chanel bags and disguised in designer dresses from East Side consignment shops, but never got further than a long, leering vertical scan from an Irish doorman, a glance at a clipboard. “No instructions,” shrugging elaborately. “Till I see it on here, you understand what I’m saying,” bidding them a peevish good day, the gate clanging shut. When Irish eyes are not smiling, you should have a better story or a good pair of running shoes.

  This went on until the fitness craze of the eighties, when it dawned on The Deseret management that the pool on the top floor could serve as the focus of a health club, open to visitors, and be good for some nice extra revenue, which is how Maxine was finally allowed upstairs—though, as an outsider or “club member,” she still has to go around to the back entrance and take the freight elevator. Heidi has declined to have anything more to do with the place.

  “It’s cursed. You notice how early the pool closes, nobody wants to be there at night.”

  “Maybe the management don’t want to pay overtime.”

  “I heard it’s run by the mob.”

  “Which mob exactly, Heidi? And what difference does it make?”

  Plenty, as it would turn out.

  4

  Later that afternoon Maxine has an appointment with her emotherapist, who happens to share with Horst an appreciation of silence as one of the world’s unpriceable commodities, though maybe not in the same way. Shawn works out of a walk-up near the Holland Tunnel approach. The bio on his Web site refers vaguely to Himalayan wanderings and political exile, but despite claims to an ancient wisdom beyond earthly limits, a five-minute investigation reveals Shawn’s only known journey to the East to’ve been by Greyhound, from his native Southern California, to New York, and not that many years ago. A Leuzinger High School dropout and compulsive surfer, who has taken a certain amount of board-inflicted head trauma while setting records at several beaches for wipeouts in a season, Shawn has in fact never been closer to Tibet than television broadcasts of Martin Scorsese’s Kundun (1997). That he continues to pay an exorbitant rent on this place and its closetful of twelve identical black Armani suits, speaks less to spiritual authenticity than to a gullibility, otherwise seldom observed, among New Yorkers able to afford his fees.