My mother stitched the patterns in the bathrooms, Bo said. She loved Frost.
Jesus Christ, my father thought. She loved Frost. Frost! What a riot she must have been. I bet she threw herself down the staircase every Easter morning.
My father nodded. One of the greats, he said.
On Saturday, at an hour so early the darkness was heavy as a slab of stone, the alarm clock by my parents’ bed, conveniently set by Bo the day before, went off clangingly, prompting my father to thrash wildly in the direction of the noise, taking out an ashtray and a glass of water before he found the clock. My mother muttered something indecipherably profane and he dragged himself from the bed and into the black bathroom, where he and Doppler tried to hit the bowl. He picked his way downstairs. Bo and Feeney were already at the espresso machine, a chrome-piped contraption covered in pressure gauges, its chassis enameled in Ferrari rosso corsa. It was so early there was not even a pale line at the horizon.
The transistor radio on the windowsill was tuned to the local AM, which at that hour broadcast the time, temp, and NOAA forecast on a five-minute loop. In Bo’s estimation, a good morning to be on the boat. Temperature in the teens. Nothing serious, atmospherically speaking. The storm was still making its way up the coast from the Carolinas but nothing to worry about today. None of them had slept more than three hours, and Bo’s eyes felt like someone had attacked them with a melon baller.
Bo was a pioneer in the nascent world of leveraged buyouts, the spread in Montauk a minor facet in his crown. There was a castle in Ireland he had his eye on. A storage facility in Mahwah for his collection of buffalo hides. A separate facility on East 72nd Street for his paintings. Mountains of money: a phrase never far from his consciousness. He’d never felt a need to apologize for or curb his desires. If his confidence grated, that wasn’t his fault any more than it was a tree’s fault it provided shade.
He’d been chewing on my father’s drunken rant from the night before. As another sign of my father’s jealousy, it pleased him—it pleased him far more than all the obscene praise piled on him by men who wanted to fawn their way into his good graces. Bo understood that all men wanted what he had. His stuff, his power, his ability to ignore the problems that plagued their minds and forced them to tell themselves lies about their worth in the world. To Bo, my father was no different from the rest, except in the way he expressed his jealousy, which was honest, even soulful. Maybe this was how kings felt about their jesters: a fool was one whose disdain for the king’s power was so pure that he could be trusted to tell the truth from time to time.
Doppio for you, Bo said, pushing a cup of espresso toward my father, who was still wobbly, unsure whether he’d slept or only rolled around the bed for a few hours searching for sleep, and he threw it back in one shot.
Vile, Feeney said. Americano for me.
We don’t serve your kind, Bo said.
The hell, Feeney said.
Macchina italiana, speak no Americano, Bo said.
Goddamnit, Vornado. Just give me something with a set of balls on it.
This fine fellow passed out on the couch last night, Bo said to my father. Now I have to burn the thing. Bo slid an espresso cup across the counter. Doppio.
May you have only daughters, you son of a bitch, Feeney said.
Beware your half-wit sons, Bo said.
The way they talked, they could have been a pair of former college roommates, ever bound together by the barbed wire of competitive urges, surrogate brothers still capable of squabbling for hours over baseball stats. They spoke to each other in the tones of fraternal derision common to trading floors and golf clubhouses, fangs dulled just enough to allow them to sink their teeth into the other’s hide without drawing any blood. But they’d known each other only a few years, since Bo and Jane had bought the house.
Still, my father wasn’t convinced that the two weren’t merely exceptionally skilled at wallpapering their contempt for each other. Feeney was the antipode to Vornado’s swaggering gentleman, even now pounding the table like a piston as he made some point about how the cocksucking communist rebels in South America were driving up the price of coffee. My father doubted that the man had passed out on the sofa at all. Seemed more likely that he’d lain there, vampirical, his brain churning out conspiracy theories between fantasies of hand-to-hand combat with the Japs.
What my father hadn’t yet hit on was Feeney and Bo’s shared hunger, a Nietzschean impulse toward mastery. He would understand later. He was an observer on the edge of their kinship, though they didn’t treat him as an outsider as much as a foreigner they’d come across in a bar, a sad sop who couldn’t keep up with the slang and lifted his glass like a fruit, who for fun they kept pulling with them from one dive to the next. A mascot.
My father’s only redeeming factor, by his own estimation, was that he could fish. He might be able to acquit himself on the boat. Maybe. He had fished muddy, sprawling waters as a boy, learning to thread jigs between the branches of the half-submerged trees where the bass hid on boiling summer days. Those slow chocolate rivers produced catfish as big as newborn calves, and they liked to flatten out and suction down into the sludge by the dam spillways. Towing them off the bottom was like hauling out a potbellied stove. He hadn’t fished more than twice in the thirty years since he’d left home for college, yet he considered himself a fisherman,
