The Nest Part 12

"No, no," he said. "I don't mean the mirror is temporary; it's yours. I bought it for you. I mean you still need to deal with the underlying problem." He sounded angrier than he intended. Matilda was frowning. He took a breath. Stop. Rewind. He started again, keeping his voice even. "The mirror is just a temporary fix is what I meant."

In her heart, Matilda knew Vinnie was right. Of all the things people had said to her over the past six months, all the useless advice and meaningless plat.i.tudes (G.o.d never gives you more than you can handle, everything happens for a reason) and quoting of Bible verses, what Vinnie said about elective amputation and losing her ankle made the most sense. Matilda grew up knowing that you didn't get anything without giving something up. In her world, that was the prevailing logic. It was just a matter of knowing how much you were willing to lose, how many pounds of flesh, which in her case would be literal. ("If thy foot offend thee, cast it off"-that Bible verse she understood.) When she was in rehab, one of the nurses told her Vinnie was someone they called a "superuser." He healed so swiftly and learned so fast that he'd been chosen to test the cutting-edge prosthetic he wore. And here she was, barely able to hobble around on her clunky, ugly rubber foot. She was the opposite of Vinnie. She wasn't a superuser, she was a superloser.

But more surgery, more rehab, better prosthetics? It would all cost money. A lot of money. "I don't have that kind of insurance. I don't have that kind of money, and I don't know anyone who does," Matilda said. She sounded defeated, resigned.

"Yes, you do," Vinnie said. "You do."

IT HAD TAKEN VINNIE A FEW TRIES, but before he took the mirror to Matilda, he'd managed to convince her cousin Fernando to meet with him privately. Fernando was suspicious at first and Vinnie quickly realized the source of all the wariness, the secrecy and protectiveness around Matilda: fear of deportation. Vinnie slowly pulled the story from Fernando-the wedding, the ride in the fancy car, the emergency room, the hastily called meeting in an attorney's office only days later, the rush to sign papers and take the check, the refusal to fight Leo Plumb in court or insist on an insurance claim. The family wanted to avoid a police report because a police report would mean that Matilda's parents-and Fernando's mother who was also illegal, not to mention most of the rest of their extended family-would come to the attention of the immigration authorities, as George Plumb had repeatedly threatened, according to Fernando. Vinnie tried to understand exactly what kind of agreement Matilda had signed (in the hospital, hopped up on morphine; it was ridiculous, a travesty). He finally convinced Fernando that a conversation with Leo Plumb was not going to incite legal action. "I just want to have a friendly chat with him," Vinnie said.

Fernando had burst out laughing. "You understand why that doesn't sound entirely plausible to me?" Fernando had almost punched Vinnie the day he'd yelled at Matilda in the pizza parlor; he didn't trust the guy.

"I swear to you," Vinnie said. "On my mother's grave. I wouldn't do anything to hurt Matilda. You have to believe me. I would never, ever bring harm to Matilda."

Fernando did believe that part because Vinnie was clearly head over heels. And Fernando also felt a not-insignificant amount of guilt about the weeks following the accident. He had panicked; they all had. He'd been blinded by the sum of money the Plumbs were offering as much as anyone and was ashamed to think of how Matilda had helped him pay off some of his law school loans. He'd been so relieved, he'd barely protested.

"Okay," he finally said to Vinnie. "But you have to tell Matilda what you're planning and she has to agree. Promise me you will tread carefully."

"You have my word," Vinnie said. He wasn't scared of anyone, and the mysterious Leo Plumb sure didn't intimidate him. He respected Fernando's hesitation, but he knew without ever having to meet him what kind of a person Leo Plumb was: He was a f.u.c.king coward.

Matilda was so full of shame about the night of the accident she couldn't see clearly, but Vinnie could. What kind of person leaves his wife at a wedding and lures a young girl out to his car with a lie? What kind of person doesn't even think twice about driving given his blood alcohol and drug levels? What kind of person doesn't f.u.c.king apologize and check on the girl who, because of his spectacular hard-on, no longer has a foot? A coward, that's who. And here was another thing Vinnie knew about cowards: They were easy to break.

Vinnie had a plan. He was going to request a meeting with Leo Plumb and make it clear they weren't after money, because they weren't. Vinnie wanted access. He'd done his research and he knew Leo had traveled in the right circles. Leo could put Matilda in touch with the right people and help her with any number of programs where she would get a.s.sistance with her prosthetics, including further surgery if necessary. He wanted Leo to pull some strings, and he wasn't going to give him a choice. He was going to make it clear that he wasn't afraid to expose him for the coward he was. He'd put on his uniform, stand with Matilda at his side, and humiliate Leo Plumb until he buckled. Leo could come after him and Vinnie would welcome that fight, but he'd never have to engage. Because the other thing he knew about cowards? They were most afraid of being unmasked. This was going to be easy.

"NO," MATILDA SAID. "Absolutely not." She'd let the mirror fall to the floor, and she was furiously hopping across the kitchen. "I'm not going to talk about this."

"We're going to talk about it." Vinnie stood firm.

"Get out of here. Please. Thank you for the pizza, the mirror. I'm tired and I want-"

"This-" Vinnie said, pointing to Matilda's stump, "is bulls.h.i.+t."

Matilda had her back to him, holding on to the kitchen sink. "Why are you yelling?" she said, turning to him. "Why are you always fighting? Always mad at everyone and everything."

"Why aren't you?" In the harsh light of Matilda's kitchen, Vinnie's left hand was clenching and unclenching. "Why aren't you f.u.c.king p.i.s.sed off?"

"Because it doesn't do any good."

"I disagree."

"Maybe you need to tell your brain a new story. Go ahead, use the mirror. Take a look at your face and see how ugly it is when you're mad."

He took a deep breath and then he slammed his palm against the refrigerator next to her. She flinched. "Why aren't you mad enough to ask for what you deserve?" he said.

She sat down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs, her face drawn and bleak. She looked like she might cry; Vinnie had never seen her cry. Matilda couldn't even look at Vinnie. She'd tried so many times to will herself back into that pantry, back into the before, when Leo was waltzing her to the music. If only she could do it all over again, disengage, walk away from Leo and back to Fernando in the kitchen and pick up her squeeze bottle of vinaigrette. She looked up, somber. "I can't ask for more because I did get what I deserved," she said. "I got exactly what I deserved."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.

Nathan Chowdhury had been livid when Leo wanted to sell SpeakEasyMedia.

"It's ours," he'd said. "We made the f.u.c.king thing and it's finally doing well and getting bigger and better and now you want to hand it over to a bunch of corporate drones? Why? And do what?" Nathan had argued for weeks but Leo held firm and Nathan couldn't afford to buy Leo's half of the business. "I'm done," Leo told Nathan. "I'm out."

Leo was tired. Tired of working around the clock and the c.r.a.ppy offices that were one step up from his living room but barely. Tired of the young, clever, petulant glorified interns they employed and had to manage in every conceivable way-Leo felt like a housemother half the time. He'd walked into the tiny conference room twice in one week to find two different couples making out. Someone was constantly letting food go to mold in the tiny refrigerator; the sink was always full of dirty coffee mugs.

He was tired of being broke. Tired of running into friends from college and hearing about expensive trips and shares in the Hamptons and admiring their nicer clothes. Tired of not wanting anyone to visit his apartment because it was still the depressingly nondescript postwar one-bedroom that he'd always illegally sublet, a second-floor apartment where every window looked out onto a neighboring roof of below-code air-conditioning compressors; the rooms actually rattled when they were all going at once.

He was tired of gossip. G.o.d, was he tired of gossip. By the time he sold it, SpeakEasyMedia had fully morphed into the very thing Leo most loathed. It had become a pathetic parody of itself, not any more admirable or honest or transparent than the many publications and people they ruthlessly ridiculed-twenty-two to thirty-four times a day to be exact, that was the number the accountants had come up with, how many daily posts they needed on each of their fourteen sites to generate enough clickthroughs to keep the advertisers happy. An absurd amount, a number that meant they had to give prominence to the mundane, s.h.i.+ne a spotlight of mockery on the unlucky and often undeserving-publis.h.i.+ng stories that were immediately forgotten except by the poor sods who'd been fed to the ever-hungry machine that was SpeakEasyMedia. "The c.o.c.kroaches of the Internet," one national magazine had dubbed them, ill.u.s.trating the article with a cartoon drawing of Leo as King Roach. He was tired of being King Roach.

The numbers the larger media company dangled seemed huge to Leo who was also, at that particular moment, besotted with his new publicist, Victoria Gross, who had come from money and was accustomed to money and looked around the room of Leo's tiny apartment the first time she visited as if she'd just stepped into a homeless shelter. ("When you said you lived near Gramercy," she said, confused, "I thought you'd have a key to the park or something.") Heading to his meeting with Nathan, Leo remembered what it was like to be charged with adrenaline, optimistically nervous. He almost walked right past Nathan who was sitting at the bar in front of an open laptop, head bent. Leo was glad to have a minute to observe his old friend, his years-long companion in the pursuit of business and pleasure and a winning season for the Jets. The welling affection he felt at seeing Nathan's familiar profile was genuine. Nathan, who had a seemingly endless ability to stare at spreadsheets and pie charts and see a story. Nathan, who was still wearing his pants too short and his jacket a little tight and drinking his standard drink: a s.h.i.+rley Temple.

And when Nathan looked up, he was visibly happy to see Leo, too. He stood and they hugged. Not the backslapping hug Leo was used to, the bro hug that was more exuberant handshake and head dip than body contact, but a true hug. Nathan drew Leo close and held him tight, and Leo was unnerved to feel himself tear up. Anyone watching might mistake their moment of reunion for something sadder. Then they straightened, did the hearty backslap, and took a few seconds to appraise each other.

Nathan grinned, nodding. "Yup, yup. I'm still the better-looking one. By many fathoms." This was a long-running joke. To say Nathan was not conventionally handsome was generous. For a big guy, his shoulders were unusually narrow and all his weight gathered around his midsection. He had the kind of pear-shaped body more common on women. The enormous gap between his two front teeth managed to be charming. His hair was completely gone, but the bald head worked with his strong features, the fleshy nose, the severely arched brows that nearly had a life of their own.

"Want a real one of those?" Leo said, pointing to Nathan's drink and ordering himself a whiskey.

"Afraid not. I have precisely twenty minutes until I have to leave for an uptown charity thing and I'm introducing someone so . . ." Leo was not encouraged to hear that he'd been apportioned such a tiny slice of Nathan's day. He'd have to talk fast. He went through the motions, asked after Nathan's family, saw a few photos, listened to a recap of his "nightmare" town house renovation.

"I heard about you and Victoria," Nathan said. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It's better for both of us." Leo hoped he hit the right mix of rea.s.surance and regret. He was glad Nathan brought up the divorce, he wanted to use it. "You were right back then when you told me we brought out the worst in each other."

Nathan plucked the bright cherry out of his ginger ale and ate it, chewing on the stem. "I don't take any satisfaction in being right about that."

"I know. Just coming clean with an old friend. I should have listened to you-and not just about Victoria, about a lot of things."

"Water under the bridge," Nathan said. "You look good. And unless the grapevine is just desperately gnawing on very old intel, I think I heard something about you and Stephanie. True?"

"True. Yes. For now. We're going slowly, but it's good so far."

"I'm happy for you, mate. Don't f.u.c.k it up this time."

"I'm not planning to," Leo said, bristling a little at the sanctimonious comment. Nathan had f.u.c.ked up plenty of relations.h.i.+ps in his day. "I'm ready to get back in the game, so to speak. That's one of the reasons I wanted to see you."

"I thought as much. I've heard you've been dropping my name around town. Telling people we're working together."

"That's not true," Leo said, stunned that his movements had already been reported to Nathan.

"I've heard it from more than one person."

"Stephanie told me about your idea and I was curious. Really curious. I'm interested. I've been making calls and doing research and asking questions, but I never misrepresented myself. I never told anyone I was working with you or that we had any official affiliation. The conclusions people draw on their own when they hear my name and your name are not my doing."

Nathan stared at Leo for a few minutes, a.s.sessing. "Okay. I see how that's possible. I hope it's true."

"It is true."

"Because I can't hire you."

"Can we back up a little?" Leo couldn't believe he'd lost control of the conversation so quickly. "Can we start over? I know you're busy and I came prepared."

"I'm confused as to why you'd want to be involved with this fairly modest project I'm considering."

"It doesn't sound modest. It sounds ambitious and worthwhile."

"Believe me, it's modest."

"It also sounds like something that was once my idea." Leo stopped; he hadn't intended to bring that up at all and certainly not so quickly. He couldn't let Nathan rattle him.

Nathan looked up at the ceiling, as if seeking for patience from above. "You hardly invented the concept of an online literary magazine. Don't go Al Gore on me, Leo."

"I know. I'm sorry. That came out wrong. I-we-have the experience. We were a good team. You don't even want to hear my thoughts? You know what I can do."

Now Nathan let go his booming laugh. Leo was unnerved by how casual he seemed, how matter-of-fact. "Sadly, that is very, very true."

"Let me just give you a quick overview, how I think you could expand Paper Fibres in some really interesting and fruitful ways." Leo opened up his folder and took out the stack of printed pages.

"Jesus," Nathan said. "Did you make a PowerPoint deck?"

Leo ignored him, paging through the sheets in front of him and pulled out one with a mocked-up logo. "Right down to an event-based app that would also push content." Leo put the page in front of Nathan who stared at it, confused.

"An app?"

"You've got to have an app."

"This is not news to me, Leo. Every sixteen-year-old in New York City is trying to build an app."

Leo said, "That's one tiny element. I have an entire-"

Nathan interrupted. "Leo, I appreciate that you put thought into this. And I'm genuinely thrilled to find out you're with Stephanie. Really. When I heard that, I thought, Okay, whatever s.h.i.+t has gone down for the last few years, he's got his head back on straight. And I hope you do. I hope you find a gig that makes you happy. But even if I wanted to work with you-and I don't-I need someone young who will work for next to nothing. Someone who is already up to speed and isn't"-Nathan gestured dismissively at the page in front of him-"breaking ground with an event app."

"But what about experience? What about name recognition."

"Name recognition?" Nathan was incredulous. "That, my friend, is part of the problem. What have you done since we sold SpeakEasy? Seriously, Leo. What have you done?"

What had he done? First, he and Victoria had lived in Paris for six months and then Florence, all without improving his French or Italian one iota. Those days and weeks were long blurs of visiting friends and meals and trips to "the country" that somehow he ended up paying for. Then Victoria declared New York "boring," so they went west and leased an apartment in Santa Monica for a few years. He was supposed to be working on a screenplay, but he really went to the beach every day and tried to surf and then got stoned while Victoria spent a lot of time meditating and doing some kind of aromatherapy s.h.i.+t. They talked incessantly about opening up a small art gallery but never did. When her dermatologist found a precancerous mole on her otherwise unblemished decolletage, it was back to New York where she convinced him to fund a small theater group downtown so they could "nurture emerging talent," which pretty much meant Victoria "producing"-and starring in-bad plays written by people she'd grown up with in the West Village. He'd gone for long walks and taught himself all about single-barrel whiskey. He read, quietly resenting anything he deemed good. He spent months designing a custom bike that he never rode.

"I wish I'd done a lot of things differently," Leo said. "But I can't go back in time."

"I agree," Nathan said. "You and me?" He wagged a finger between the two of them. "That's trying to move back in time. We had a good run." He slapped Leo on the arm, hard. Leo winced. "A b.l.o.o.d.y good run." Leo knew the meeting was over when Nathan amped up the Briticisms. He watched Nathan gather his folders and slide his laptop into a briefcase. "I'll have my a.s.sistant call you. We'll have dinner. You, me, my wife, Stephanie. It will be fun. You can come uptown to take a look at the ma.s.sive money pit and laugh at my folly."

Leo hadn't had a chance to say anything he'd planned. "Let's reschedule. I realize now I should have sent you my ideas ahead of this meeting-"

"This isn't a meeting." Nathan tossed a credit card on the bar, started pulling on his coat.

Now Leo was annoyed. He deserved better. "Come on, Nathan. Don't be like this."

"Like what? In a hurry?"

Leo tried to think of what he could say to persuade Nathan to stay. The credit card on the bar was a black Amex. Leo couldn't believe Nathan was doing that well.

"Do you need money?" Nathan asked, noticing Leo staring at the card.

"What? No."

"Because if this is about money, I can float you a loan. I can do that."

"It's not about money. Christ. Why would you think I need money?" Leo was furious remembering that he had thought about borrowing money from Nathan. h.e.l.l would have to freeze over.

"I talk to Victoria now and then."

"Fantastic. f.u.c.king fantastic. Victoria, the most unreliable narrator of all time."

"To her credit, I had to drag the information out of her."

"It's not to her credit; she signed an agreement. In fact, I find it very interesting that she's trying to turn people against me-"

"Cut the bull, Leo. I asked about you as a friend. I was worried. n.o.body's against you."

Leo took a deep breath. "So put me on your calendar. Let me give you my presentation. Just hear me out."

"You say you've done your homework?" Nathan said.

"I have."

"So you know who our CFO is?"

"I didn't memorize the organization chart, no."

"Peter Rothstein." Nathan signed the bar copy and started ripping his receipt into tiny pieces, which he carefully placed back on the edge of the plastic bill tray. Leo frantically tried to remember why the name might be significant. Nothing.

"His brother was Ari Rothstein," Nathan said.

Leo felt a vague familiar nagging, but still-nothing. "Do I know him?"

"That's one way to put it. The one who gets it done. Sound familiar?"

Leo's heart sank. Ari Rothstein had been one of the last SpeakEasy stories of his tenure. A community college kid-kind of portly, dull looking-who sent in a video resume for a tech-support job. Leo had come to the office one morning to find everyone standing around a monitor, hooting and laughing. The tape started with Ari Rothstein in an ill-fitting suit reeling off his technical experience and then absurdly and awkwardly interrupting himself by removing his jacket, putting on a baseball cap, and singing a nonsensical rap parody about tech support. The chorus was the inelegant and forgettable "I'm the one to get it done." (I'm the ONE. I'm the ONE. I'm the ONE to get it DONE!) It was awful, and hilarious.

"We're putting it on the site," Leo had said, before he'd even watched the entire four minutes and thirty-two seconds. Everyone thought he was kidding at first, but he knew click-through gold when he saw it. It was SpeakEasyMedia's first huge viral video, and Ari Rothstein had been vilified and mocked for weeks, everywhere-online, in print, on television. His clip ended up on a Today Show segment called, "How NOT to Get That Job You Really Want."

"You hired that guy?"