The Arriviste. James Wallenstein

      chapter three

      Another diabolical particular: how the timbre of a ringing phone can seem to change in a series of identical rings, how the friendly invitation of the first ring becomes a plea by the fourth and a threat by the sixth, turns brittle by the eighth and menacing by the twelfth. And at six in the morning, the change seems that much harsher.

      Early one workday morning a couple of weeks later as I sat over a cup of coffee and watched the season’s first snowfall, the phone rang. I let it ring. It had been ringing a lot lately. Weissmer, Schiff, Marne was on the brink of civil war. The adversaries were hurrying to line up their ducks for the meetings that were supposed to straighten things out. These meetings had nothing to do with the suit or its outcome. They were internal political struggles, avoidable if I could avoid the entanglements leading up to them.

      The phone rang on and on. I stayed at the breakfast table, watching the snow through a row of slanted windows waft from on high and fall thicker and faster as it approached the ground, veering at all angles toward the objects it would land on, like birds swooping into the trees from below.

      Office politics was only half to blame for my refusal to answer the phone. I had decided in the aftermath of the party that maybe Joyce had been right to go, that we might be better off apart. This was a wise decision: the fascination with imagining where she was and what she might be doing at every instant wore off. But when my old sense of her, the one I’d developed in the course of our marriage, began to come back to me, I started to worry. I remembered her impulsiveness, her moodiness, how little it could take to make her pity herself. A cold gust or a headache or a quarrel with Jules might be enough to make her dial her old number. If she caught me in a weak moment of my own, when the sound of her voice was enough to make me think of how we ought to have gotten along, she might ask to come back—or make me want her to ask. Either way, I’d have lost ground.

      I poured myself more coffee and the ringing stopped. A half minute later it started again. I was rattled, my resolve spent. I grabbed it.

      “I hope I’m not getting you out of bed,” Mickey said.

      “Like hell you do. You wouldn’t have rung the phone off the hook if you’d been worried about waking me up.”

      “I didn’t have to worry about that. It’s obvious that you were already up.”

      “And why is it obvious?”

      “Because people are more decent when they’re just waking up. The first words out of the mouth of someone who’s still muzzy are never ‘like hell you do.’ Not unless he’s a hoodlum.”

      A water pipe began to knock behind the baseboard. “Is there an emergency? Has Leon finally given up the ghost?”

      “Are you kidding? I spoke to her last week, invited her down for the holidays. Know what she said? She said, ‘You want me to come to that fetid charnel house?’ That’s what she said.”

      “Fetid. She loosed that one on the waiter the last time we ate out. There was nothing wrong with the restaurant.” I said nothing about charnel house, which didn’t strike me as inapt. Mickey’s house was one of those late Victorians built against the sun and its devils: all hallways, nooks, back stairs, closets, and pantries under crow-ridden coffee trees and black locusts. I’d driven through storms to avoid staying the night there.

      “She also said that Diane was a tramp,” he continued. Diane was Mickey’s first wife. She was long gone. Not dead, just out of the picture. “You’re right on that score, I told her. She meant Jeanette, of course,”—his current wife. “But she’s no tramp—not that she hasn’t got it in her. Most of them do,” he added. “I wonder what she’d say about Joyce if she knew. I take it you haven’t told her?”

      “You didn’t ring the phone off the hook at six in the morning to ruminate on women’s inconstancy, did you?”

      “There are a few things, as a matter of fact. There’s Linda’s Christmas bonus.” Linda kept our books. “I thought I’d give her—”

      “I leave it to you.”

      “But it’s your money too.”

      “Then take the figure you were thinking of and double it.”

      “Well, that works out perfectly. I thought I’d give her half what you suggested. One must never be middle class about money. Right, Neil?”

      “What else?”

      “Bisbee’s up to his old tricks, trying to dicker with us on the lease extension for our drilling contract. I’m for siccing Monash on him.” Monash was a wolf in lawyer’s clothing whose services we’d had regular recourse to. “It’s time to lower the boom.”

      “Then lower it, Mickey. But will you please leave me out of it? You know what you want to do. You ask me for my advice, and then when I give it to you, you do what you want just the same.”

      “You are surly this morning. I was going to ask what you thought about your neighbor’s proposal, but I’m not sure I dare.”

      “Of course you dare.”

      “Well, then—” The water pipe knocked again. It was as if a mine were being worked behind the plaster. “What in hell’s going on there?”

      “Just some clatter from the plumbing.”

      “I thought you might be smacking the receiver against the table.”

      “I’m afraid that my aggression still comes in more evolved forms. They won’t be carting me off to the bin just yet.”

      “Good. Then you’ll be able to make it next week.”

      “No, I won’t.” An epic sigh escaped from me. “Make what?”

      “That proposal. I thought we’d all get together over a drink.” He was practically shouting. I held the receiver away from my ear. “You and I and Bud. Size him up, see if he’s for real, et cetera.”

      “I’m