'You okay, mister?'
'Yeah, yeah, I just got this-' He fell to the floor on one knee, gurgling. His glass toppled to the carpeting. Barbi realized he was no longer good for any money, so she stood up and turned on her heel, retreating to the ladies' room. This was what the girls tipped the bouncers for, right? To deal with the pass-outs?
The bouncers saw a man go down, nodded to each other, and lifted Ears up by the elbows. He wasn't light. His mouth was wet and hung open.
'Okay, pal.'
They dragged him out the front door as a Mexican kid vacuumed up the glass. A cab was waiting. A cab was always waiting at this place. Ears gurgled and thrashed his head.
'SoHo Grand,' said the bouncer, pushing Ears inside and slamming the door shut. He gave the cabby a fifty, more than enough to shut him up, and meanwhile counted himself pleased with the easy money he'd just earned. The big guy had slumped over in the seat.
'He gonna get out by himself?' said the worried cabby.
'The doorman will help.'
The cabby lifted his open palms. 'Is this bullshit or what?'
'All right.' The bouncer peeled off another twenty. Seventy dollars for a fifteen-buck fare.
The cabby nodded in disgust, took the bill, and let his foot off the brake. Thirty blocks south he turned off into one of the side streets. The SoHo Grand was a hot place, filled with movie stars and rich Europeans. The doormen wouldn't take this guy. Plus the cabby didn't like how quiet it was back there. Usually the drunk guys rolled around a bit, started to snore. He clicked off his meter. If anyone asked, which they wouldn't, the fare had told him he didn't feel well and wanted to walk, get some air. He turned off his lights and engine and just sat there.
Nothing. The street was empty. He noticed a smell in his cab, a bad smell, and pulled over.
He was about to yank the guy out into the gutter for shitting up his cab, when he decided to see if he had any money on him. A quick inspection of his coat pocket revealed an envelope with more than $20,000 in it.
I could buy myself a new car, the driver thought.
He slapped Ears, checking his reaction.
Nothing, just his head tossed back, panting, eyes open but unseeing.
Ears took nine distinct cab rides in the next three hours. The car's windows were down. Each was a plausible fare, uptown, downtown, crosstown, to and from the usual places. For each, the cabby made careful notations on his fare log, tore off the receipt and tossed it. He made sure to drive for a few minutes between fares, as if looking for a passenger. Finally, near the end of his shift, he pulled over on a dark off-ramp of the FDR Drive, in a spot where the long cement traffic control barriers ran parallel to each other, leaving a narrow three-foot-deep slot between them. It was a hell of a job, but he managed, hoisting Ears up over the traffic barrier to flop down into the gap, still alive but not for long. He made a rasping noise. Could easily be weeks before somebody found him. The driver flipped the man's wallet out the window forty blocks south, and an hour later had pulled into his driveway in Sunnyside, Queens, where he could be seen wiping down his passenger seat with Lysol scented disinfectant, as he always did, eager to make his cab fresh for the next day.
24
Please, God, make me rich is a prayer of the poor. The rich, of course, can afford to pray for other things. But it is a truth not widely known that as men become very wealthy, with a minimum personal net worth of, say, $100 million, they cease to worship their god in any of the usual places. They may well continue to attend church or synagogue or mosque, but if they do, the quality of their worship is diluted or even nullified by the attentions, welcome or not, from others. People are watching them, they know, for signs of happiness, torment, greed, sickness, health, greatness, generosity-anything. Genuine worship is difficult under the circumstances. The alternative is to worship in a place where one is unknown, but wealthy men prefer to be known, for to be known to be genuinely rich confers protections and advantages and identity unavailable to those who are not. Of course, it is possible that such men do not worship at all, and many do not-especially the younger ones, thus far untroubled by disease or grief or bad luck. But as very wealthy men age, they generally choose to confront big questions in places of tranquillity. The best places to do this are either places where they may be alone or places where they appear to be doing something other than worshipping.
East Hampton, New York, one of the most expensive seaside villages on earth, is loaded with men too old and too wealthy to bother going to houses of worship anymore. On weekends they are generally found on a tennis court or golf course, as might be expected. But not a small number of them may be found at Gooseman's Nursery a few miles outside of town. Very often they arrive having not necessarily set out to go there nor having told anyone where they were headed. They are drawn there, parking their Mercedes or Land Rover or whatever else they happen to be driving that day, and without speaking to anyone, set off on a private journey. The nursery covers eighty acres of the most beautiful specimen and ornamental trees to be found anywhere, trucked and flown in from around the world to decorate the ceaselessly changing face of the Hamptons. Where else may one wander into a grove of perfect Kwanzan cherry trees, then onto a beautiful miniature forest of blue atlas cedars, then among a nearly infinite array of Japanese maples, red, yellow, orange, then through a winding path of weeping birches, onward and onward through row after row of beautiful trees? Pin oaks, dogwoods, paper birches, Alaskan spruces, sycamores, dwarf pear, holly, Austrian pine, golden larch, weeping willow… it's all there. More private than a park, yet more orderly than a forest. A man wandering through Gooseman's Nursery confronts a godlike variety, an infinity of forms, the spectacular promise of growth. The power of time, expressed as a small tree. For the reality is that men can plant and move only small trees. A genuinely large tree, say higher than sixty feet, cannot be moved. So to confront small trees is to confront time future, and as everyone knows, trees may live much longer than any man. A wealthy man in his sixties, say, brushing against the soft needles of six-foot eastern white pines, knows that these trees will still be young when he is truly old and will be alive long after he is not. To look at trees is to apprehend time and death.
Martz loved Gooseman's Nursery. He drove there several times a year. Connie didn't even know it existed. Only his first wife knew and that was because they'd picked out some ornamental plantings there. Years back. Many houses ago. That first weekend place had been bulldozed and built over with an eleven-thousand-square-foot shingle-style monstrosity that was itself bulldozed and built over with a twenty-three-thousand-square-foot Tuscan villa. He didn't like to think about it, just enjoyed wandering through the cedars and spruces, in particular, sitting on a favorite bench to rest. Which is what he did now, enjoying the sweat of walking in the sun, the smell of the trees.
He looked at his watch. Time now.
'I got the wrong row,' croaked a voice.
A man in plaid shorts and a white tennis shirt appeared from between the pine trees. He shuffled a bit, watching his footing in the sand, his thin calves spidered with varicose veins.
'Right here,' Martz said, not bothering to stand but lifting his hand to shake the hand of Elliot Sassoon.
'How are you, Bill?'
'Worse than ever.'
Elliot laughed as he sat down. 'You always say that.'
Martz nodded. 'Hey, thanks for making the trip.'
Elliot shrugged. 'For you, my friend, the world. It's been awhile.'
'Couple, five years.'
'Still with Connie? Because if you're not, I want her number.'
'Still with her.'
'I figure if she'll look at you, she'll look at me.'
'She's probably looking at a few other guys, not that I could possibly blame her. What about you?'
'I'm diabetic now, that's my big news. Just take pills. Can't have sugar.'
'You look thinner.'
Elliot shrugged. 'We're old men now, Bill.'
'I know guys taking human growth hormone, swear by it.'
