The Arriviste. James Wallenstein

      chapter one

      If by 1970 I had started to slip, it wasn’t by much. To make more of the decline would be easy: exaggeration resonates in candor. My income had fallen, though not to any depth. That would have required a spectacular reversal, and, contrary impulses notwithstanding, I seem to avoid spectacular actions of any kind. I still had plenty of money in 1970, more than my neighbors could reasonably hope to come by, yet not so much anymore that I could forget them. My lawn was no longer quite big enough nor my hedges high enough.

      In the little while since he had moved in, the man next door and I had had several distant encounters, tentative nods and waves from both sides of the property line. You’d have thought we were marooned soldiers uncertain whether our countries were still at war. Things between us might have begun and ended there, our curiosity satisfied by what we could see of each other—the broad, swarthy, well-groomed, well-dressed young businessman on the move I took him for and the deliberate, disheveled, abstracted, middle-aged professional he might have taken me for—and what we could infer from what we had seen—on my part, that his bearing was a bit too ethnic and his stride too hurried for an organization man; on his, well, it is hard for me to say how I came off from that distance, whether it was my eyeglasses or the hitch in my step or the rattle of change in my pocket that caught his notice. But something did catch it.

      I’d see him arrive home from the train station after work, a chrome-trimmed black-and-white LeSabre coming up the driveway, his wife beside him in front—she’d shut the door on her side of the car so quietly that you couldn’t be sure the latch had caught. He himself wasn’t so quiet. He’d all but slam the door on his side off its hinges, and his voice would follow her up the flagstone path into the house. When he followed her in, that is. More than once he turned instead toward the hedge on the border, toward me.

      I thought at first that he was checking his flower beds, but he hardly looked at them. Something else took hold of him, restraining the swagger that came with doing well enough to get where he had gotten. Eyes narrowed and lips pursed, he’d turn and look my way. There was confinement in that look. He’s discovered landlock, I thought. Not the fact of it—he must have known that all along—but the feeling. My way lay the Sound, and so the sea. To reach it he’d have had to go through me.

      I abandoned the third-floor window, crossed to another, and parted the curtain to reveal the bay—a green sliver in summer, in winter a mighty chevron.

      Our first meeting, which I thought nothing of at the time, seems now—twelve years later—to begin a story I have yet to escape. And the memory of this first meeting is framed within our second, on a late summer afternoon when he dropped in. His timing was bad.

      I was at my desk, supposedly looking over some documents but really staring through the windowpanes in the grip of some bewildering emotion. I had returned from upstate, where my wife, Joyce, and I would go in August to see my mother. Joyce hadn’t come this time. I’d thought her absence might be welcome, but it made my mother, Lenore—which my older brother, Mickey, and I had long ago corrupted to Leon without letting on to her—suspicious and even more vinegarish than usual. It seemed that I was only just back when Mickey insisted on sailing across for a visit. The change in my circumstances, he said, had made him want to see whether I was holding my own.

      “The change in my circumstances,” “holding my own”: the phrases were typical Mickey—bluff, evasive in the service of a politeness more abrasive than most rudeness. When it came to me that they were the same words I had used some weeks earlier to break the news of the change to him, the irony of their phony delicacy provoked me. Whether he’d meant to throw them back at me or had parroted them made no difference.

      I had been served notice of this change in my circumstances on the Triborough Bridge in June. Joyce and I were on our way to meet another couple for a play. We were late. Joyce had made us late. It was her habit. Lateness seemed to excite her, to turn a ride into a race, an outing into an adventure. If it hadn’t meant keeping our friends waiting, I wouldn’t have minded. But we were keeping them waiting, and I did mind.

      “We’re only a few minutes behind,” she said in that deep, diaphragmatic, merry voice of hers, a voice that gave some people the idea that she was brassy. “You act like the sky is falling whenever we’re a few minutes behind schedule.”

      I held my tongue through stop-and-go traffic. The guardrail had just been painted green.

      “We can always eat after the show,” she continued, her eyes on me. She turned back and stared straight ahead. “So you’re bent on ruining another evening, are you?” she asked. It was as though she was daring me to ruin it and, beyond being curious to see whether I would, wasn’t herself concerned.

      “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “It’s all in your mind. I haven’t said a word.” I wasn’t about to have the punctuality argument again.

      “You don’t have to say anything. It’s in the set of your jaw and your grip on the wheel.” She might have been discussing a picture.

      Light from the city reflected off an iron crossbeam suspended from a crane—skyscrapers were