Lies You Wanted to Hear (17 page)

Matt

My job was a godsend. During the dark days of the divorce, it gave me something challenging to focus on and kept me from spending all my time being angry and feeling sorry for myself. I cut back on the number of trips I made but still spent a lot of nights and weekends in the office when I didn’t have the kids. Javi gave me free rein. I was the primary contact with clients, managed the couriers, and coordinated all pickups and deliveries. I did the payroll, taxes, and billing.

“You gotta pace yourself, partner,” Javi said the last time he dropped by the office. “Why don’t you hire a bookkeeper?”

“Nah, I’m okay for now.”

I handed him the latest financials. He gave them a once-over and let out a whistle. “Can’t argue with the results. Lean and mean.”

“Lean maybe, but definitely not mean.” There were days when I felt like a toady dealing with some of our clients.

I had to keep reminding our couriers that we had
clients
, not
customers
. Our personnel consisted of four men and a woman who specialized in escorting children. They were all ex-cops Javi and I knew from the force—reliable, trustworthy people who occasionally needed a little polishing. I’d correct one of them and get an eye roll or a sarcastic salute.
Listen
, I’d tell them,
we’re professionals. That’s why we wear coats and ties and fly first class. You want customers, go deliver pizzas.
The parameters of the job were defined by our name—Discreet Courier
Service
. It was important for the clients to see us as savvy, no-nonsense operatives, but we also had to know when to bow and scrape.

The first time Javi told me about DCS, at lunch at Jake Wirth’s, he mentioned the painting he brought back from Germany that was so beautiful it gave him chills. I didn’t think about it much at the time. I was more interested in the business opportunity. But I soon learned what he meant. My third trip as a courier took me to London, where I picked up a painting by a Dutch artist named Salomon van Ruysdael. It was a river scene—two men in a rowboat with a cloudy sky and tall, overhanging trees. It was a small oil on an oak board only about eighteen by twenty-four inches, but you could get lost in that world. Not all the pieces I transported had the same effect on me. Some antiquities seemed to be valuable only because they were old, and as far I was concerned, most of the abstract paintings were the emperor’s new clothes. But our clients paid huge sums of money for the artwork we transported and I wanted to learn more.

I was never much of a museumgoer. Before this job the only exhibit that ever really knocked my socks off was the treasures of King Tut. Then, as a courier, I started visiting museums in the cities where I traveled. In Frankfurt I came across
The
Geographer
by Johannes Vermeer, a painting of a man standing by a window with a pair of dividers in his hand, that mapmaker’s tool for measuring distances. It was a small canvas about the same size as the van Ruysdael. The light coming through the window looked so real the paint seemed to glow. I stopped in the museum shop to buy a print of it to hang on the wall at home, but the reproductions didn’t come close to capturing the magic of the original. The difference was so startling I went back into the museum and stared at the painting. In the end I bought a postcard of the picture and put it in a drawer in my office. It was the first of many. Reminders of the real artworks I wanted to go back and see again.

We had gotten a call recently to pick up a collection of daguerreotypes in Amsterdam, and I decided to take the trip myself. I had never been to the Netherlands and wanted to see the Vermeers and Rembrandts and go to the Van Gogh museum. I was also curious about the red-light district where the prostitutes displayed themselves in windows, waiting for johns. I couldn’t quite see myself hiring a prostitute, but maybe it was time to start. My sex life had been nonexistent since Lucy and I split. Maybe I could make it a theme trip—fine art and whores.

A week before I left, I went to an opening for several new artists at a gallery on Newbury Street. I didn’t care for that sort of thing, but Billy Tuttle insisted I come and meet a potential client. Billy was a dealmaker in the Boston art world and a good source of business for DCS. The prospect he wanted me to meet was Pamela McDermott, a furniture heiress from North Carolina. She was about fifty, a short, pudgy platinum blond upholstered in a red leather pantsuit. When Billy introduced me, she eyed me up and down like I was a slave on the auction block. We had only exchanged a few words when someone came along and spirited her away.

“So,” Billy said, raising an eyebrow, “what did you think?”

“What? Of Pamela? Billy, you don’t mean…?”

“How much do you want the business, pal?”

“Not that much.”

“Ah, a man with
standards
.” He said it like it was a four-letter word. “Actually, she can make that sort of thing quite interesting.”

“Billy? I thought you…” Were gay
.

He laughed. “Come on, Matt. You know I try to make
everyone
happy.”

“Yes, you do, Billy,” a woman said behind me. “I couldn’t get this big ox to give me the time of day.”

Billy grinned. “Hello, Marcy.” He kissed the police commissioner’s assistant on both cheeks.

She turned to me, a glass of wine in her hand. “Sergeant Drobyshev.”

I bent down and gave her an awkward one-sider. I hadn’t seen her since I left the force a year and a half ago. I’d thought about looking her up from time to time, remembering our flirtation in the bar, but never got around to it.

Billy said, “You two know each other?”

“Vaguely,” Marcy said. She was wearing a tight blue dress. She’d put on a little weight, done something different with her hair.

The three of us made small talk for a few minutes before Billy moved on.

“Surprising to see you here, Matt,” Marcy said. She sipped her wine. “I didn’t know you were an art lover.”

I shrugged. “Trying to drum up business. What about you?”

She said one of the artists was an old friend from her hometown in New Jersey. We walked across the gallery to look at his work. The canvases were mostly cityscapes, very dark. Each painting was divided into five or six distinct parts, but somehow they all fit together.

Marcy said, “What sort of business are you in, Matt?”

I began to tell her and got carried away, talking too fast, trying to impress her. She looked terrific in that blue dress. I paused to take a breath.

“Fascinating,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“No, I
mean
it. Sounds romantic, flying all over the world.”

“Yeah, it’s neat. I get to meet some interesting people. The ones who live behind the high hedges and gates with security cameras.”

She finished her wine. I asked if she’d like me to get her another.

“Can we make it a real drink?”

“Sure.”

She gave me the claim check for her coat. It was a short black trench coat with wide lapels and a belt she cinched tight around her waist. I imagined her walking across the room, naked beneath the coat. It was a chilly evening with a light rain falling as we walked down to the Ritz. I got Bailey’s on the rocks; she ordered a Dewar’s neat. She told me she’d left the commissioner’s office at the end of last year.

I said, “So where’re you working now?”

“I’m in-house counsel for a high-tech start-up on 128. The salary isn’t much, but they gave me great stock options. Half the time I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, but I’m hoping the company goes public before anyone finds out.”

“Did you get recruited for the job?”

“No, nothing as glamorous as that. Things got complicated in the commissioner’s office and it was time to get out. Now, if you want to know why…” She finished her Dewar’s. “That requires another drink.”

I signaled the waiter.

“Oldest story in the book,” Marcy said. “Married guy, three kids. You see his name in the paper sometimes. We couldn’t go out in public, I couldn’t take him home to meet my parents. I threatened to leave him, he promised to leave his wife. All the while I’m wondering how a smart, reasonably attractive chick like me could be such an idiot. He’s calling me, writing me, feeding me lines they couldn’t get away with in a bad soap opera. Meanwhile, I’m hanging on every word like it’s Shakespeare. Get me drunk enough and I’ll recite some for you.”

“You ended it?”

“Not exactly. His wife got suspicious, so we’re taking a break. If I hold on for the next five or ten years, he might actually leave the bitch. No, that’s unfair. I’ve met her. She seems perfectly lovely. Of course, if he dumps
her
…” She smiled forlornly. “…he’ll probably start shacking up with some twenty-four-year-old intern.”

“Sorry.”

“Nah, don’t be. I did it all by myself.” She gave me a look that said,
But
I’m here with you
, and ran the tip of her finger around the rim of my glass. “Okay, it’s your turn now.”

Which I took. My story was not a short, self-mocking version like Marcy’s but the whole sordid saga. She was the first person other than Norman Claxton I told about the incident in the bedroom. I went step by step. Spared no details. It was a purging of the first order—vile, unseemly, humiliating. Another round of drinks came. Marcy slouched in her chair, a look on her face that said it was okay for me to use her like that. Perhaps listening was what she did best.

“She’s a lousy mother,” I said. I had been talking nonstop for at least half an hour. “I was blind to it when we were married. I loved her. We were a family, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt. Now I look at her and realize she doesn’t have a fucking clue. She packs overnight bags for the kids to come to my house, and she’s always forgetting something. Underwear, sweater, extra pair of shoes in case it rains. It isn’t just little things. One day I get a call at the office from the director of the kids’ day-care center. Matt, where’s Lucy? We’re about to close. She hasn’t picked up the kids. Shit! I have to drop everything and go over and get them. What if I had been out of town? What was the director supposed to do? Take them home with her and keep them overnight?”

I finished my drink—my fourth—and kept going. “The woman is a fucking menace. It’s like she doesn’t have a motherly bone in her body. She lets the kids ride in the car without their seat belts. Lets them eat those disgusting sugar-coated cereals with so much food dye the milk turns pink. A month or two ago, I caught Sarah with a candy cigarette holding it just like her mother. Like she can’t wait to have a real one. Maybe she can drop ashes on the furniture like Lucy. Burn the fucking house down. I don’t know what to do, Marcy. The whole thing’s tearing me apart. I’ve
tried
talking to her. Sometimes she’ll roll her eyes and tell me to chill out, or get pissed off and go into some convoluted explanation of why she’s right. Half the time it’s like she doesn’t even understand what I’m talking about. I might as well be speaking Norwegian. It’s like she’s off on some other planet.”

“What a nightmare, Matt. Even with all that, your lawyer says you still can’t get custody?”

“That’s what he says. I paid him a small fortune to tell me, Sorry, pal, doesn’t matter if she’s a ditz and smokes pot and fucked around on you. She’s still their
mother
. No judge in the Commonwealth is going to take those kids away from her.” I threw up my hands in frustration. “You want to know what the saddest part is? It’s good advice. He’s absolutely right. I’ve talked to other guys who’ve gone through it. They all say the same thing. That’s the way the court works in Massachusetts. Divorced fathers get the shaft every time. There are men out there who are paying forty percent of their salary in child support, and they aren’t even allowed to see their kids.”

I came close to telling her I had been thinking about disappearing with Sarah and Nathan. Taking off and leaving all this shit behind. But saying it out loud would make it too real—a wish morphing into a plan. Maybe I didn’t bring it up because I didn’t want her to tell me the idea was insane and try to talk me out of it.

I went on a little longer until I wore myself out. Wore Marcy out too. I’m pretty sure she would have taken me home for a pity fuck, but I didn’t try.

***

The next week I went to Amsterdam. I told Lucy I wanted to stay a few extra days, and she said that was fine. She knew I’d make it up to her. I’d been Mr. Nice Guy since the night I stole into her house. Lucy responded to my display of good humor like a gracious big sister.
So, how are you, Matt? Seems like the business is going well. Is that a new sports coat? Looks good on you. The kids are over the moon about going to Disney World.
At least she had enough tact not to ask if I was seeing anyone, but I could tell she wanted to. The quicker I moved on with some other woman, the easier her life would be.

Amsterdam was a welcome break. I felt calm and unhurried. All the ranting to Marcy seemed to have drained some of the vitriol from my system. It was mid-May, bright sun every day. I missed the tulip season, but there were flowers blooming in every window box and public park. It seemed like everyone spoke English. I told the man who was my contact for the sale of the daguerreotypes about my interest in the museums and Dutch painters, and he offered to be my guide. Being with him was like getting a college course in art history in two days. He drove me to The Hague about an hour away to see the two Vermeer paintings.
Girl
with
a
Pearl
Earring
was nice, but the
View
of
Delft
looked like it was painted by God. I bought a postcard of the landscape to add to my collection. That night I wandered through the red-light district. Some of the women were gorgeous. I’m sure it would have been a rush to be with one of them, but I was holding out for something that wouldn’t leave me feeling like a loser ten seconds after I’d gotten my rocks off.