Mike Offit - Nothing Personal - A Novel of Wall Street

She looked at the ring in her hand, then took it in her fingers and put it on. “And I have something to tell you.” She looked up at him, with tears now streaming down her cheeks.

“Tell me.”

“There is nothing in the world that I want more. I want to marry you.”

They came together again for a long kiss. They were both smiling.

“You know, the first time I ever saw a girl naked, I was standing right here,” he said.

“When was that?” She wiped away the tears, grateful for the transition.

“I think it was around 1968 or ’69. There was a moratorium—an antiwar protest—here, and a bunch of hippies climbed the statue and took off their clothes. I think I was about ten or eleven.” The memory was vivid in his head, the warm summer day, the bongo drums, anti-Johnson chants, and the smell of pot smoke and horse manure from the mounted police. It seemed as if only a minute had passed, yet it was a million miles away.

She took his arm, and they turned back to the car. “I bet you were the cutest little boy at the moratorium,” she said, and for twenty yards, they were both children again, their dreams still ahead of them, in a night that held no threats, only promises.

It was hard not to feel silly, with the sunglasses and the driving gloves, but they were both practical, and she looked great. The engine made a growling sound as she ran through the gears, accelerating up the entrance ramp onto the Northern State Parkway, then punching the throttle and easing into the left lane. A serene, almost blissful look was on her face as she banked into a right-hand curve after a quick downshift, gaining speed through the turn and topping ninety on the empty road.

Warren had turned off the radio, wanting to enjoy the whine of the exhaust and eliminate any distraction for her. He was settled down into his seat, with a light mohair blanket on his lap, relaxed, enjoying the scenery as it sped by.

When Robert Moses had constructed this highway through the heart of Long Island, he had claimed enough land on either side to guarantee a permanent buffer of trees and woodland. Even now, in late winter, one could rarely see any sign of civilization other than the roadway and its signage, and in light traffic it was like a personal touring track.

Warren had agreed to deliver the car to East Hampton for Cornelia Harper, who offered them the use of her house for the weekend as recompense, although the drive alone would have sufficed. The Aston Martin DB5 belonged to Ray Karr, Austin’s dad, and Cornelia was storing it for him in her garage. Chas had confided in Warren that his mother and Ray Karr had been seeing a bit of each other, and the car had been the only thing Ray’s ex-wife had let him take from their house in Far Hills. He and Cornelia had taken off for the Alps and asked Chas to look after it. When Warren mentioned that he and Sam had been planning to spend the weekend in Montauk, Chas had hatched the alternative plan.

The powerful Aston was perfectly maintained, and they’d agreed to split the driving. At the speed she was going, though, her forty-five minutes would get them most of the way. Although he spent so much of his childhood there, it was difficult to recognize much of the Hamptons. In the daylight, unlike on the trip he’d taken before with Larisa, he’d was disgusted at the way the land had been developed, the houses springing up like deformed shoe boxes in flat potato fields, the Hollywood types and Wall Streeters competing for who could build the most square footage. As with so many other places, the conversations he heard about the Hamptons sounded like supermarket talk—everyone was simply comparing house prices, just as they did with their art collections and their takeover bids.

Warren decided to let Sam do all the driving. She was enjoying herself, and he would get to look out the windows. Plus, she was a much, much better driver than he would ever be. When they reached Southampton, he directed her to the back roads, rather than the main highway, so she could enjoy the driving, and he could investigate the changes. They went down Flying Point Road in Water Mill, then back to Cobb Road and across the highway again. Everywhere, Warren saw the ungainly developments and the new houses shoehorned in next to two-hundred-year-old shingled farmhouses and manors. The old Henry Ford estate had been converted into a dozen monstrous white elephants, with spindly trees already dying from the underestimated winds and salt spray. In Sagaponack, smaller, cheaper versions nestled on sparsely vegetated cul-de-sacs. They stopped briefly at the old general store that sat among the fields on Sagg Main Street, and Warren was amazed to see a display of designer food and a half dozen $30 pies where he’d once found only bottles of Coke and sandwiches made on Wonder bread. A snack cost twelve bucks, but he had to admit the seafood salad was fresh.

From the general store, it was only a few minutes back to the highway, then down Buckskill Lane to Baiting Hollow and Hedges and they were on Lee Avenue. A left, then a quick right, and they found the Harpers’ at the end of Terbell Lane—a large, but not massive, shingle-style house surrounded by trees on a slight rise overlooking Hook Pond and, farther on, the Atlantic. As promised, the garage was unlocked, and Warren hoisted the door for Sam to drive in. He grabbed the two green duffel bags from the tiny boot and located the front-door key in the Martinson’s coffee can on the floor. The gravel crunched under their feet as they crossed back to the house, which felt warm and cozy once he had gotten the door open and the lights turned on.

Gal Harper had bought the Terbell house almost fifty years before, eschewing the grand manors on Lily Pond Lane and Lee Avenue. Like Ray Karr, he didn’t want oceanfront property on a flat, unprotected sandbar, as he referred to Long Island, and he wouldn’t have owned a house there at all except that his wife liked to spend summers on the East End. He had given the house to his daughter on her twenty-fifth birthday and, once his wife passed away, had never visited again.

His first child, Peter, a fullback at Yale and his heir, had broken his neck and drowned while bodysurfing at the Main Beach in a summer squall in 1947. His body had washed ashore and lain unnoticed for several hours until a local boy, out digging for crabs, had stumbled across it. After that day, Gal Harper almost always had an excuse to stay in the city or travel to Maine in the summer.

Cornelia Harper had mourned her older brother just as she mourned her younger brother when he died in Korea. She had worn black and been sad, even though Peter had been a bully and beaten her up until he’d been sixteen, and Charles had always resented her. She had taken photographs of her two brothers to a portrait painter on Park Avenue, and the two canvases hung in the dining room in East Hampton in curious homage to sudden and untimely death.

A note from the caretaker was on the foyer table, which Warren read out loud as they toured the house. Three main rooms were on the first floor, all with large picture windows, which opened out to the lawn, the marsh, and the dunes beyond. The kitchen was surprisingly modern and bright, and a small library was tucked into the eastern corner of the house, with French doors that opened to a summer garden, now evidenced only by the neat flagstone grid and canvas-covered evergreens that delineated its beds and borders.

As he read, Sam opened the refrigerator, well stocked, as promised. They climbed the stairs to the master bedroom, an L-shaped space with gabled ceilings, decorated in hunter green and white, with toile-de-Jouy wallpaper and delicately flowered curtains. Two piles of towels were laid out in the master bathroom, which had wide, chestnut plank floors and Portuguese tile around the sink and bath, which sat by another large window open to the wetland vista.