NOTHING FROM THE night flight vanished or dissipated. By the time he went to his tower room at the Four Seasons New York, he needed sleep but was neither exhausted nor demoralized. The image of Luc appeared, as often before, but now more lively and happier. He didn’t think anymore of Luc dying but only of Luc living.
Luc didn’t understand leukemia, but he understood crocodiles and was hysterically afraid of them. Once, when putting him to bed, Jules saw that the child would be kept up in fear, so he said, “Look, crocodiles live in Africa, which is far away from here, and they don’t even know that this is where you live. If they knew, they wouldn’t know how to get here. And if they did know how to get here they wouldn’t be able to cross the jungle and the desert to get to the sea. And if they could cross the jungle and the desert, they couldn’t swim the Mediterranean. But if they could swim it, they couldn’t walk from Marseilles all the way to Paris. If they could walk to Paris, they wouldn’t know how to take the RER to Cergy. And if they did know, they wouldn’t have the money to buy a ticket, or know where to get off, because they can’t read and speak French. And even if they had the money and could read and speak French, once they got off in Cergy they wouldn’t know where you live. Even if they did, they couldn’t get in the front door. Even if they broke down the front door, they wouldn’t know where your room is. If they knew where your room is, they couldn’t get in the door. And even if they did, I would shoot them.”
Needless to say, this did not have the desired effect, as attested by Luc’s open mouth, widened eyes, and the fact that he hardly dared breathe. “Wait wait wait,” Jules said upon seeing this. “Forget what I just said. That was pretend. This is what it is really,” and he then went through the sequence in reverse, banishing the crocodiles back to the Blue Nile, and watching Luc relax as they grew farther and farther distant, comforted enough so that before the crocodiles had even finished struggling across the Sahara he was fast asleep.
Jules hoped that if parents and grandparents truly loved and tried their best, the children would forgive the mistakes even when those who had made them were long gone.
ACORN MIGHT HAVE hundreds of thousands of employees set in the tectonic foundation of several trillions of dollars. And in comparison to Jules, Jack Cheatham and Rich Panda might well be like advanced space aliens with brains and social senses so much more capable than his that in the arena of their type of calculation and maneuver he would be as ill-equipped as a crocodile on the Champs-Élysées. But if he didn’t fear and didn’t retreat, if he simply stood his ground and dared, he might cut through the webs made by people who spent their lives spinning them.
The meeting about the music was set for one o’clock the next afternoon. The board of Acorn would consider the rollout of what would be their international signature for a decade or longer. Jules had reserved his room for three days afterward, in case there were adjustments, contract signings, complications – of which he now suspected there would be enough to overwhelm him until there would be none, and, worn down, he would give up. Then his flight back to Paris, like the room in the hotel, prepaid and non–refundable. Including what he had spent in Los Angeles, he had parted with an enormous amount of money. Ordinarily he would have been more than anxious that the nearly €40,000 would be a loss if, as seemed possible, he would not be reimbursed. That amount could have gone a long way in regard to Luc, and was a substantial portion of what he could give to Cathérine were he to give her everything. He would do precisely that of course, but it wasn’t enough. Still, he wasn’t anxious. Acorn owed him the money, and without the vaguest idea how, he was confident that he would get it and – if Acorn proved difficult, dishonest, and dishonorable – more than what he was owed, as either interest or penalty. He wondered why he thought this, because he had no basis for doing so. How could Jules Lacour even accounts with Acorn?
For almost twenty-four hours, he slept a deep sleep, deeper than any since his twenties. In Los Angeles he had swum every day. Now he would run, and on a blue, autumnal morning, having studied the running map supplied by the hotel, he set off for Central Park. In Saint-Germain-en-Laye he had the perfect place to run, with the Seine below to the east, gardens and forest to the west, and a gravel path that was straight, level, and lonely. There was no better place in the world. Here, he had to dodge taxis and pedestrians, and when he got to the park weave his way on unfamiliar paths, cross roads stuffed with fat, aggressive automobiles, and leap over potholes and patches of mud. For many years in Saint-Germainen-Laye he had puffed along, swift only for a man his age. Long before, he had gotten used to people passing him: even children. But now in New York no one passed him. For the first time in many years he ran as if he had no weight, and as the run progressed, instead of slowing down, he sped up.
Attributing this to the long sleep, he knew that he would not tire, and that by one o’clock he would be even stronger and more clear-headed. So he ran faster and faster, slowing of course on Heartbreak Hill just south of Harlem, but racing down the west side of the park on the home stretch. He even leapt low fences, something he hadn’t done in decades.
In his room, which often was above the clouds, he showered luxuriously in a Niagara of hot water, put on a suit and the $300 deep blue tie he had bought in Beverly Hills, and left for the meeting, having breakfasted and had a haircut while still in running clothes. In Los Angeles his suit had been a prisoner of the closet. Now, on 57th Street, it happily met the cool air, and his dress shirt glowed like snow in sunshine.
THE ACORN TOWER was so high that in strong winds the top swayed like a pendulum. If they turned pale enough, visitors to the executive floor at the very top were given air-sickness bags. Much smaller Acorn buildings had sprouted around the tower as if it were an oak, because the multitrillion-dollar behemoth had set grafted limbs to grow until they themselves had to scatter their own Acorns to office parks or glass plinths: in Connecticut (for the criminal trading of derivatives), London (insurance and re-insurance), Washington (pensions, public relations, legislative bribery), Boston (art), Philadelphia (old money), Short Hills (financing new-money monstrosities with one-hundred-car garages, faux mine shafts, and master-bedroom, in-wall, gold-plated popcorn machines), to mention just a few.
The efficiency and wealth of this organization became immediately apparent upon realization that whereas its two-or-three-hundred-thousand-and-change employees managed its trillions, the Federal government mismanaged not much more than twice the sum with four million civilians and military on staff. Of course, Acorn didn’t send rockets to Mars or have a navy. It was just a great money machine. Like a whale, it cruised the markets, sweeping up cash in its baleen. Like a clam, it sat amidst constantly mobile currents and strained them for things of value. It produced no wool, wheat, or flax, no lawn-mower engines, apples, or fedoras. It was solely conceptual, the purely intellectual construction of statistics, fears, gambling, demography, predictions, assurances, numbers, and lies. Three things happened in its labyrinthine, magnificently decorated offices. Numbers were sliced, diced, churned, whirled, wiggled, and juggled. Payments came in. Once in a while, payments went out, too, but it was the job of the actuaries, auditors, adjusters, and lawyers to keep these to a minimum. All in all, a happy situation for Rich Panda, who with time kept getting richer and richer – like the rosewood in the boardroom that with time also kept getting richer and richer. But whereas the wood was a rich red, Rich Panda was a rich butter color.
His glasses, which he wore for appearance rather than to correct his vision, were a rich butter color. His hair was a rich (thinning) butter color. His skin, unlike Shymanski’s, which was sallow to the point of taupe, was a rich butter color, tinged with a rich, buttery red. His suit, of the softest, richest, most glowing wool in the world, was a rich butter color – anything but black and white. His tie – it need not be said. All in all, he resembled the sun setting over Napeague Inlet as it turned from white to a rich butter color. He was very heavy but not jolly; as round as the man in t
he moon and as deeply menacing, because you could not quite see him. Not because he was blinding like the sun, or hidden in a briar patch of flounces and curls like Louis XIV, but because you could not even vaguely sense, despite his smile, what was going on behind his cold, sled-dog-blue eyes.
When Jules stepped from the elevator and into a reception area adjacent to a most spectacular boardroom, he was met by a stunningly attractive woman standing beneath a huge Picasso. She greeted him and brought him to his seat.
Jules noted the members of the board, their faces, and how they were attired. Three women – one perhaps in her thirties, two certainly over fifty – were dressed expensively and elegantly, with expertly done hair and makeup. Lightly but noticeably bejeweled, they sat with backs as straight as ramrods, and each one had purses and portfolios of extremely expensive leather in which various electronic slabs were discreetly hidden. He could smell their perfume. They were pretty. But although these women had every attribute of femininity – delicacy, beauty, grace, and more – they were patently unfeminine merely because they chose to be. Suspicion, aggression, self-assertion, and the sense that they were crouched to spring radiated from them quietly but unmistakably. Perhaps they felt that these qualities were necessary in what had formerly been a man’s world, but Jules was as repelled by their aura as he was by that of the men around the table, from whom radiated the same suspicion, aggression, and self-assertion. As a board, they were supposed to have been guiding the company with its best interests in mind. To the extent that they did this, it was to advance their own standing. They spoke either to show off or to discredit their colleagues without leaving fingerprints. They gobbled at success just as tensely as fancily dressed people in a fancy restaurant.
There were nine men, including Jack Cheatham and Rich Panda. No one acknowledged Jules, but he continued to study them.
He was fascinated by the roll of their lapels. He knew nothing about fashion and had never paid much attention to clothing, especially men’s clothing, but now he was hypnotized by lapels. Even the name was strange in English if you said it or thought about it several times, although in French (revers) it seemed more sensible. If you knew French, the English word was even stranger, as it meant the shovel. Although Jules had no idea, every suit in the room was a Paul Stuart made-to-measure by Samuelsohn in Montréal, and the roll of the lapels was expressive of much of America: its informality, its riches, its confidence, and even of the curl of waves breaking at that very moment along the hundred miles of wide, windblown beach that ran, broken by surging inlets, from Brooklyn to Montauk Point. Never in Paris had he seen such lapels. In Paris, lapels were flat and bodiless. Here, they were full-bodied, and seemed to give substance. Jules thought, if fabric is soft and rich, it should indeed roll like a wave.
Apart from the rosewood paneling and fine leather chairs, the boardroom had a lot of glass, some etched, some clear, all extremely thick and heavy. This, and a long, million-dollar, walnut table were solid counterweights to the somewhat nauseating sway of the building. Through windows in various directions one could see the Atlantic, Long Island Sound, the Hudson Highlands, and the distant Ramapos.
The board had been at work since eight and had broken for lunch in a dining room accessible by the first of many staircases descending ten floors through the interior of the skyscraper. Though the dining room was only one storey down, an electric dumbwaiter had carried up a tea-and-coffee service that, before business resumed, was laid for the board by young men and women in French waiters’ costumes. Each person had before him a gold-rimmed cup and saucer and an insulated carafe of either coffee or tea. Planted along the centerline of the magnificent table were silver salvers loaded with petits fours and stacks of the kind of cellophane-wrapped, long cookies one is given too few of in an airplane. As people bustled with their papers and partook of their coffee and tea, nothing was offered to their aides sitting against the rosewood walls.
“Okay,” said Rich. “To business.” He nodded to an assistant, who tapped a key to begin recording. “The first item on this afternoon’s various agenda is the proposal to adopt a musical theme as Acorn’s worldwide branding signature. He signaled, and the recording Jules had made in Paris swelled to fill the room. Jules heard Élodi. It was so vivid it was as if she were there. When the music stopped, once again no one said anything, or even sighed.
“Well?” Rich asked. “What do you think?”
At the far end of the table, a man who was so big he looked like he had inhaled a delicatessen, said, “Isn’t a jingle supposed to be irritating, so it becomes a brain worm, and you can’t forget it? This isn’t irritating, it’s inappropriately beautiful. These days, people don’t like that.”
One of the outside directors raised his hand briefly and said, “Has this been tested in our markets all around the world? Differences in taste and musical perception are vast. Half of humanity has a non-Western musical system.”
“No, we haven’t done any testing yet,” Rich admitted.
“As far as I’m concerned,” another titan said, “it’s too slow, too referential, and too demanding of the attention span of the Millennials who are the market we have to clinch in the next decade.”
“Good point,” said another. “It was too nineteenth-century. You couldn’t fit it into a ring-tone, and anything longer than that is kryptonite to the young unless they’re on Ecstasy.”
Rich nodded as if learning a needed lesson while surviving a necessary reprimand.
Next, one of the two older women spoke up. She was astoundingly elegant. Her hair was gray and she wore diamonds with restraint. A university president, she was simultaneously guarded and aggressive, like a bee carefully hovering before going in for the sting.
“I appreciate very much that you’ve made the effort, Rich, but it’s not going to work. I strongly recommend against it.”
Rich nodded in an accepting way.
Jules was astounded, and stood to protest. “Excuse me.”
“And who are you?” Rich asked.
“Jewels Lacour,” Jack Cheatham said.
“Who?” Rich wanted to know.
“I wrote it,” Jules said. “It’s not nineteenth-century at all but firmly twentieth-century.”
“We’re probably not going to use it,” Rich said. “We’ll let you know.”
“You accepted it. It’s written clearly in the emails.”
Rich turned to Jack, who shook his head in denial. “As always,” Jack stated, “acceptance depends upon getting the product into usable shape, which means that the supplier has to meet our needs and requirements and be willing to work with us, no matter how long it takes.”
“I’m willing to work with you,” Jules told everyone.
Silence. With a slight, barely perceptible smile, visible at the corners of his mouth, a spider smile, Rich said, “As you’ve heard, we have to test it worldwide and adjust for each market and culture.”
Thinking of Luc and time, Jules said, “No.”
“So, you’re not willing to work with us?”
“The email said accepted. The piece was agreed-upon.”
“The email, Mr. …?”
“Lacour,” Jack filled in for Rich, “Jewels Lacour.”
“Is not a contract.” The attorneys in the room remained omittedly mute.
“I don’t think we should have any worldwide signatures,” one of the board members said. “And, besides, shouldn’t this be left up to the professionals in the ad agency? We’re not set up or competent to develop such a campaign.”
It appeared that a consensus had been reached, as usual, silently welling up and incontrovertible. “So noted,” said Rich. “The next order of business.”
“So noted?” asked Jules, at first angry but then feeling as if the ground beneath his feet were falling away from him.
“So noted,” Rich replied.
TWO HOURS LATER, as the brilliant afternoon was ending in the kind of brilliant day that everywhere is the emblem of autum
n, Jules was riding in yet another elevator, rising at terrific speed to the top floors of a skyscraper even higher than Acorn’s. He had gone to the French Consulate and been directed to a lawyer at a leading firm, someone who knew French and was familiar with French law.
It was yet another building in which the windows didn’t open. Whatever the aerodynamical requirements of structures so high that winds aloft flew past them at hurricane speeds, Jules hated that huge, complex, and expensive systems were required to ventilate these lifeless boxes built in such a way as to keep out the oceans of air all around them. Better not to build such buildings than to shut out the noise of the wind in the trees, the crack of thunder or sound of rain, birdsong, the murmur of distant conversation, the sound of water in a stream or merely a gutter, and, of course, the many fresh and lively breezes.
Even worse was to be in an elevator. He wasn’t claustrophobic, but he did object to being encased in a steel box that played awful music. Time was running out and he was in the midst of a complication such as one in which half a dozen things – appliances, vehicles, plumbing – break at once and each must be fixed in a series of multiple steps, appointments, and waiting for parts. This had always shattered his concentration upon music. Some people like incessant busyness, distractions, games, a million things happening simultaneously, which blocks their awareness of oblivion. But Jules had been profoundly aware of oblivion since the retreat of the Wehrmacht and the SS through Reims in the summer of 1944.
Oblivion and grief, the darkness that gave meaning to light and life, had turned him away from games, respect for status, and the desire for position, influence, power, or even a good name in the eyes of others. These he rejected in favor of his family and the honor of doing what was right – all conveyed and confirmed by the beauty and flow of the world in transient flashes, in faces, and in the way things came together rightly when seen in tranquility and from on high.