Tim Green: Exact Revenge

I was ten when she left to marry a man who drove a black Mercedes coupe. A man who owned a large paving company and who bought crushed stone from my father. A man who smelled like peppermint and wore a gold Rolex. He was for real, though. He even took her to Greece on their honeymoon.

My mother told me then that I was a man already. Ahead of my years and that I would be fine. I was like Running Deer, my namesake, the boy chief who led his people to victory over the Hurons when he was only eleven. I tried to make her words come true, to be a man.

I remember that Christmas, tramping off into the dark winter woods after school and sawing down a tree to surprise my father. Something he had always done for the three of us. I remember the quiver in my lip when I refused to give up my seat on the bus to the eighth grader who regularly taunted me. Him walking away. I remember my fingers going numb around a wrench and the smoke of my breath, lying on the cold concrete floor and looking up at the oil pan of my father’s truck as it bled a thick black ribbon into a cut-down Clorox bottle. My first oil change.

But I think I did more than try to be the man my mother said I already was. I think too that I tried to fill the void she left behind. I remember making my father’s breakfasts, breaking the yolks like her and peppering them so thick it looked like they fell in the road. Coffee in the tall gurgling percolator. The oily smell of sardines laid out over a bed of tuna salad, capped with a fat slice of onion, wrapped in tinfoil, and lowered carefully into his dented blue lunch pail. Breaking from the math homework spread out over the kitchen table and uncapping two longneck bottles of Budweiser for him and Black Turtle. Setting them down without being asked on the porch railing where the two of them sat rocking in the darkness-the way she had always done.

While my mother said I would be fine, my father said the marriage wouldn’t last long.

They were both right.

My life became a storybook of success-scholarship offers, valedictorian, All-America soccer player-and she moved on to marry one of the heirs to the DuPont fortune before I turned fourteen. Two years later, she and her third husband died when their private jet went down over the Atlantic Ocean. They were on their way to Bermuda for the season.

I tried not to cry. To be a man. But I guess all those eggs and coffees and lunches and beer caps had undermined my efforts at manhood. Sixteen and I bawled hysterically right in front of Black Turtle and my father and ran off into the woods to hide.

I only tell you all this because I want you to understand the significance of the next twenty-four hours I’m going to tell you about. Back then, I didn’t stop to think about why I felt that I had experienced some kind of spiritual ascension, I only knew that I had. Everything was right.

I had grown up afraid of being my father. I was happy to have his rugged looks, his strong back, and his quick mind. But I was determined to have more. I was going to be rich and powerful. That was the lesson of my childhood.

When I resisted Celeste Oliver’s temptation-my own forty days in the desert-I couldn’t help congratulating myself. I felt not just worthy of everything that had been placed at my feet, but entitled. I had worked and planned my whole life to be in the path of some fantastic destiny. Finally, on that summer day, I knew that it was in my grasp.

I had this amazing house that everyone wondered how I got my hands on. One of those deals you only hear about. It belonged to the family of a friend I knew at Princeton. They came to me to help work out the estate after the death of their grandmother. When I saw this place, I told them they wouldn’t even have to put it on the market.

It was an old Tudor cottage tucked into a small cove on Skaneateles Lake. You couldn’t see it from the road or even very clearly from the water because of the massive oaks and towering spruce that surrounded it. It had a prominent rubblework chimney flanked by stucco walls and brunette half-timbering. Gingerbread gableboards and diamond-pane window casements gave it a fairy-tale quality, and it had a thick slate terrace out back that overlooked the water.

The master bedroom upstairs was my favorite spot. It had a set of arched French doors in the peak of the roof that led out onto a small balcony. In the summer, the moon came up over the eastern ridge beyond the lake like a big pumpkin. From there, I could see all the way to the south end of the lake, into the next county where the tree-lined slopes descend almost a thousand feet from the ridge to the deep green water below.

By the time I got home from delivering the envelope to Roger Williamson’s mistress, dusk was on its last breath. I quickly changed my clothes and fished the velvet ring box out of the bottom of my sock drawer. Lexis agreed to meet me at Kabuki, a sushi restaurant in town at the head of the lake. During the drive to my dad’s I had called for a nine-thirty reservation at the front table overlooking the water.

My buddy’s grandmother had planted a bed of orange daylilies under the front windows and I stopped to cut half a dozen of them to give to Lexis. I got there late, but not enough to subdue the glow in Lexis’s eyes when I handed her the flowers. I drank seltzer water with Lexis, but I felt drunk anyway, and by the time we got our molten chocolate cake with green tea ice cream, I had asked her to marry me. She cried and said yes, then we drove back to my place, where I carried her across the threshold and we giggled like kids.

Upstairs, I opened the French doors and stepped out onto the balcony. Water lapped the smooth shale beach below and a broad swath of moonlight sparkled on the lake’s surface. As I turned, Lexis slipped her dress off her shoulder and it fell to the floor. I stepped inside, fumbling with my belt, then the zipper. My jeans hit the wood floor and we twined ourselves together on the four-poster bed.

It was deep in the night when I woke up. The breeze had a bite to it and the moon had either gone down or was clouded over. Beyond the balcony now was only blackness. I got up to use the bathroom and shook two aspirin out of a bottle. My water glass clinked against the tap as I filled it with lake water. I swallowed my medicine, then felt my way back into the bedroom, sliding under the warm tangle of sheets and pulling Lexis’s naked body close.

I was suddenly and inexplicably overwhelmed by an irrational fear. One day, we would die. Then we would be apart forever. Insane, I knew, but still my heart pushed up into my throat. The rest of my chest felt empty. I never wanted to be without her. Not then. Not for eternity.

“Lexis,” I whispered. “I love you.”

She stretched, and I could see her smile even in the darkness.

“I love you too,” she said without opening her eyes.

“I just don’t ever want to be without you,” I said, sick with this crazy fear.

“Go back to sleep,” she said, turning toward me and wrapping her arms and legs tight around my body. “That could never happen.”

IN THE MORNING, I took a ten-mile run in the drizzling rain. I was drenched and slick with sweat and sucking in air. I shucked off my sneakers and clothes on the end of the dock and plunged into the cold water. After looking around for any fishermen drifting in from the mist, I climbed naked onto the dock, grabbed a towel from the boat, and wrapped it around my waist.

Halfway up the slate walk to the house, I smelled food. Lexis had cooked up my favorite breakfast: broccoli and cheese omelets. We had buttered toast made from thick-cut Italian bread and coffee made from the beans of an espresso blend. We ate outside on the slate terrace even though the air was still damp from the rain. When I finished eating, I sat back and inhaled the curling steam from my coffee mug. Out on the lake, a fishing boat floated past, appearing and disappearing on the fringe of the morning mist. The laughter of the two fishermen rang out across the still water.