Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [23]
I thought of calling Barbara, my ex-wife, but she lived up in New York, and I couldn’t afford very much long-distance. I liked to tell people that we were on good terms, except that it always sounded as though we’d had some kind of business relationship rather than a romance that had petered out like a flower that needed more watering than either of us could agree to. She was a stockbroker and I was a cop, and never the twain did meet, and even now, after five years, I had yet to figure out how it was that the longer we were together, the more like strangers we became.
But I didn’t call Barbara, and it wasn’t just the long-distance charges either. We were both too far gone from one another, and I didn’t feel like hearing about the Dow Jones or about her new boyfriend, whoever he was this time around. There were times when she dropped hints to the effect that she wanted kids and I might still be in the running for sperm donor. It seemed that in that overheated Barnard brain of hers the baby clock had begun to go tick-tock, and I suppose it was to be taken as a compliment that she still thought I had good genes.
But it was clear from the way she put it that what she had in mind was in no way to be mistaken for a possible reunion. I got the impression that her idea was for me to fly up, then make like the Lone Ranger, leaving behind a silver bullet. It was not the worst offer I’d ever gotten, yet there was a certain chill to it just the same that failed to move me. But maybe that was just me being old-fashioned again.
I took off my shirt and lay on my bed and looked up at the ceiling fan for a while. That didn’t help much either, though. An egg of an idea was trying to hatch itself in my brain, but it needed a little nudging along, so I got up, went over to my desk, opened the bottom drawer, and took out the last letter Vivian had sent me. I popped another beer and sat down at my table with its two undersize chairs and read it again for at least the hundredth time since she’d sent it to me. I knew it by heart—right down to the freaky line breaks, but I read it again anyway; it was like sipping from an empty glass.
The letter was written in plain English, but as usual I went over it slowly, lingering on each word like a sun-dazed archaeologist deciphering obscure hieroglyphics. She was right. I had backed down, or rather I had backed away, and it wasn’t because Vivian hadn’t been worth fighting for. I had fought harder for much less. At the time I had seen Matson’s incursion as a test of loyalty on her part, and when all the signs made it clear that she had failed that test, I jettisoned them both, girlfriend and client, in a flash of pride. To hell with the both of them, I’d thought.
The part about the money was also true, though I had refused to think about it. America might be a classless society, but there was a hierarchy of cash that could be overlooked only until the first time the waiter handed you the wine list. The economics of the romance started dawning on me after the first couple of dates, when I began to realize that I was going to have to train half of Coral Gables in order to keep up with her. I came clean with her on the subject, and she laughed and said it didn’t matter. But it does matter. And while her father treated me like an equal, most of her friends thought that she was slumming, that she would come around once the shine wore off my charm.
My self-esteem had never been based on the gold standard, but Fitzgerald was right: The rich are different. Their feet touch the ground only when they want them to, but mine were there