A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [106]
Standing next to Bennie, who watched Scotty while frenetically working his handset, Alex felt what was happening around him as if it had already happened and he were looking back. He wished he could be with Rebecca and Cara-Ann, first dully, then acutely—with pain. His handset had no trouble locating his wife’s handset, but it took many minutes of scanning that section of the crowd with his zoom to actually spot her. In the process, he panned the rapt, sometimes tearstained faces of adults, the elated, scant-toothed grins of toddlers, and young people like Lulu, who was now holding hands with a statuesque black man, both of them gazing at Scotty Hausmann with the rhapsodic joy of a generation finally descrying someone worthy of its veneration.
At last he found Rebecca, smiling, holding Cara-Ann in her arms. She was dancing. They were too far away for Alex to reach them, and the distance felt irrevocable, a chasm that would keep him from ever again touching the delicate silk of Rebecca’s eyelids, or feeling, through his daughter’s ribs, the scramble of her heartbeat. Without the zoom, he couldn’t even see them. In desperation, he T’d Rebecca, pls wAt 4 me, my bUtiful wyf, then kept his zoom trained on her face until he saw her register the vibration, pause in her dancing, and reach for it.
“It happens once in your life, if you’re the luckiest man on earth,” Bennie said, “an event like that.”
“You’ve had your share,” Alex said.
“I haven’t,” Bennie said. “No, Alex, no—that’s what I’m saying! Not even close!” He was in a prolonged state of euphoria, collar loose, arms swinging. The celebration had already happened; champagne had been poured (Jägermeister for Scotty), dumplings eaten in Chinatown, a thousand calls from the press fielded and deferred, the little girls ferried home in cabs by the joyful, exultant wives (“Did you hear him?” Rebecca kept asking Alex. “Have you ever heard anything like him?” Then whispering, close to his ear, “Ask Bennie again about a job!”), closure achieved with Lulu at the introduction of her fiancé, Joe, who hailed from Kenya and was getting his Ph.D. in robotics at Columbia. Now it was well after midnight, and Bennie and Alex were walking together on the Lower East Side because Bennie wanted to walk. Alex felt weirdly depressed—and oppressed by the need to hide his depression from Bennie.
“You were fantastic, Alex,” Bennie said, mussing Alex’s hair. “You’re a natural, I’m telling you.”
A natural what? Alex almost said, but stopped himself. Instead he asked, after a pause, “Did you ever have an employee…named Sasha?”
Bennie stood still. The name seemed to float in the air between them, incandescent. Sasha. “Yes, I did,” Bennie said. “She was my assistant. Did you know her?”
“I met her once, a long time ago.”
“She lived right around here,” Bennie said, beginning to walk again. “Sasha. I haven’t thought about her in a long time.”
“What was she like?”
“She was great,” Bennie said. “I was crazy about her. But it turned out she had sticky fingers.” He glanced at Alex. “She stole things.”
“You’re kidding.”
Bennie shook his head. “It was kind of a sickness, I think.”
A connection was trying to form in Alex’s mind, but he couldn’t complete it. Had he known that Sasha was a thief? Discovered it in the course of that night? “So…you fired her?”
“Had to,” Bennie said. “After twelve years. She was like the other half of my brain. Three-quarters, really.”
“You have any idea what she’s doing now?”
“None.