A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [47]
Bennie pulled back, startled.
“I mean it,” she said. “I don’t give a shit about these people. It was an experiment, right? Moving to a place like this.”
Bennie didn’t answer. He looked around them at the floors, whose rose parquet designs he’d sanded himself on hands and knees, not trusting whomever they might pay for such intricate work; at the windows in their bedroom door that he’d spent weeks excavating with a razor from under layers of paint; at the stairwell nooks he’d ruminated over, placing one objet after another inside and adjusting the lights. His father had been an electrician; Bennie could light anything.
“Let them move,” he said. “This is my fucking house.”
“Fine. But if it comes to that, I’m saying we can go. Tomorrow. In a month. In a year.”
“I want to die here,” Bennie said.
“Jesus,” Stephanie said, at which point they were stung by sudden, itchy laughter that soon became hysterics, both of them doubled over on the parquet, shushing each other.
So they’d stayed. After that, when Bennie noticed Stephanie putting on her tennis whites in the morning, he’d say, “Going to play with the fascists?” Stephanie knew he wanted her to quit, renounce her partnership with Kathy to protest Cardboard’s bigotry and idiocy. But Stephanie had no intention of quitting. If they were going to live in a place whose social life revolved around a country club, she sure as hell was going to stay on good terms with the woman who guaranteed her easy assimilation. She had no wish to be an outcast like Noreen, their neighbor to the right, who had clanging mannerisms and wore oversize sunglasses, whose hands shook violently—from medication, Stephanie presumed. Noreen had three lovely, anxious children, but none of the women talked to her. She was a ghost. No thank you, Stephanie thought.
In the fall, when the weather cooled, she began arranging her tennis games for later in the day, when Bennie wouldn’t be home to see her change clothes. Now that she was working freelance for La Doll’s PR firm, scheduling Manhattan meetings as she wished, this was easy. It was slightly deceptive, of course, but only through omission—to protect Bennie from knowledge that distressed him. Stephanie never denied having played if he asked. And besides, hadn’t he engaged in his share of deceptions over the years? Didn’t he owe her a few of her own?
III
The following spring, Stephanie’s older brother, Jules, was paroled from Attica Correctional Facility and came to live with them. He’d been gone five years, the first on Rikers Island awaiting trial for the attempted rape of Kitty Jackson, another four after the rape charge was dropped (at Kitty Jackson’s request) and he was convicted of kidnapping and aggravated assault—outrageous, given that the starlet had walked into Central Park with Jules of her own free will and sustained not a single injury. In fact, she’d ended up testifying for the defense. But the DA had persuaded the jury that Kitty’s support for Jules was a version of Stockholm syndrome. “The fact that she insists on protecting this man is further evidence of how deeply he has hurt her.…” Stephanie recalled him intoning at her brother’s trial, which she’d watched over ten agonizing days, trying to look upbeat.
In prison, Jules had seemed to regain the composure he’d lost so spectacularly in the months before the assault. He went on medication for his bipolar disorder and made peace with the end of his marriage engagement. He edited a weekly prison newspaper, and his coverage of the impact of 9/11 on the lives of inmates won him a special citation from the PEN Prison Writing Program. Jules had been allowed to come to New York and receive the award, and Bennie, Stephanie, and her parents had all wept through his halting acceptance speech. He’d taken up basketball, shed his gut, and miraculously overcome his eczema. He seemed ready, finally, to resume the serious journalism career he’d come to New York more than twenty years before to pursue. When the parole board granted