Noah Hawley - Before the Fall

He took out a pack of cigarettes, shook one between his lips.

“Meanwhile,” he said. “Get the flan. You won’t regret it.”

Then the man in the turtleneck walked to the waiting black sedan and got in. Kipling watched as it pulled away.

They went to the Vineyard on Friday. Sarah had a charity auction. Something about Save the Tern. On the ferry out she brooded about their failed dinner with the maybe in-laws. Ben apologized. A work thing , he told her. But she’d heard that too many times before.

“Just retire then,” she said. “I mean, if it’s stressing you out this much. We have more money than we could ever use. We could sell the apartment even, or the boat. Honestly, I could care less.”

He bristled at the words, the implication that this money that he’d made, that he continued to make, was somehow worthless to her. As if the art of it, the expertise he’d accumulated, his love of the deal, of every new challenge, was valueless. A burden.

“It’s not about the money,” he told her. “I have responsibilities.”

She didn’t bother arguing further, doesn’t bother saying, How about your responsibilities to me? To Jenny? As far as Sarah was concerned she’d married a perpetual motion machine, an engine that must keep spinning or never spin again. Ben was work. Work was Ben. It was like a mathematical equation. It had taken her fifteen years and three therapists to accept that — acceptance being the key to happiness, she believed. But sometimes it still stung.

“I don’t ask for much,” she said, “but the dinner with the Comstocks was important.”

“I know,” he said, “and I’m sorry. I’ll invite the guy to the club, play nine or eighteen. By the time I’m finished buttering, he’ll be president of our fan club.”

“It’s not the husband that matters. It’s the wife. And I can tell she’s skeptical. She thinks we’re the kind of people who try to buy their way into heaven.”

“She said this?”

“No, but I can tell.”

“Fuck her.”

She gritted her teeth. This was always his way, to dismiss people. It only made things worse, she believed, even as she was jealous of him for being so carefree.

“No,” she said. “It matters. We have to be better.”

“Better what?”

“People.”

An acerbic reply died on his tongue when he saw her face. She was serious. In her mind they were bad people somehow, just by being rich. It went counter to everything he believed. Look at Bill Gates. The man had committed half his wealth to charitable causes in his lifetime. Billions of dollars. Didn’t that make him a better person than what — a local priest? If impact was the measure, wasn’t Bill Gates a better man than Gandhi? And weren’t Ben and Sarah Kipling, by donating millions to good causes each year, better people than the Comstocks, who gave — at most — fifty grand?

* * *

Sarah was up early Sunday morning. She puttered in the kitchen, straightening, figuring out what they needed, then put on her walking shoes, grabbed her wicker basket, and walked across the island to the farmers market. It was muggy out, the marine layer in the process of burning off, and the sun magnified through airborne water molecules made the world feel liquid somehow. She passed the leaning mailboxes at the end of their turnoff and walked along the shoulder of the main road. She liked the sound of her shoes on the sand that lined the macadam. Her rhythmic soft shoe. New York was so loud with its traffic and subterranean subway clatter that you couldn’t hear yourself moving in time and space, couldn’t hear your breath sounds coming and going. Sometimes with the jackhammering and the explosive hiss of kneeling buses you had to pinch yourself just to know you were still alive.

But here, the steel chill of night giving way to the mug of a summer day, bubbling rainbows in the air, Sarah could feel herself breathing, her muscles moving. She could hear her own hair as it brushed against the collar of her light summer jacket.

The farmers market was busy already. You could smell the seconds fermenting in hidden baskets out of sight, bruised tomatoes and stone fruit boxed for cosmetic reasons, even though the mottled fruit was the sweetest. Every week the vendors set up in a slightly different order, sometimes the kettle corn at one end, sometimes another. The flower vendor favored the middle, the baker the end closest to the water. Ben and Sarah had been coming here for fifteen years, first as renters and then, when rich became wealthy, as owners of a modern concrete sleeve with an ocean view.

Sarah knew all the farmers by name. She had watched their children grow from toddler to teen. She walked beside weekenders and locals, not shopping as much as feeling part of the place. They were going to catch an afternoon ferry. It would be pointless to buy more than a single peach, but she couldn’t not come to the farmers market on a Sunday morning. Those weeks when it rained and the market was canceled, she felt rootless. Back in the city, she would wander the streets like a rat in a maze, looking for something, yet never knowing exactly what.

She stopped and studied some watercress. The fight she and Ben had had after the dinner — his cold shoulder, the mid-meal walkout — had been short but fierce. She let him know in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t going to put up with his selfishness anymore. The world did not exist to satisfy the needs of Ben Kipling. And if that’s what he wanted — to surround himself with people that he could walk on as he pleased — well, then, he should find another wife.

Ben had been uncharacteristically apologetic, taking her hand and telling her she was right, that he was sorry and would make every effort to make sure it never happened again. It took her off guard. She was so used to fighting with the back of his head. But this time he looked her in the eye. He told her he knew he had taken her for granted, that he’d taken everything for granted. He’d been arrogant. Hubris was the word he used. But from here on out it was a new day. He actually looked a little scared. She took the fear to be a sign that her threat had actually landed, that he believed she would leave him and didn’t know what he would do without her. Later she would realize that he was already afraid — afraid that everything he had, everything he was, was on the verge of eclipse.

And so today, having witnessed her husband’s contrition, having lain with him in their marital bed, his head between her breasts, his hands upon her thighs, she felt a new chapter in her life begin. A renaissance. They had talked into the late-night hours of taking a month off and going to Europe. They would walk the streets of Umbria, hand in hand, newlyweds again. Sometime after midnight he had opened his mahogany box and they had smoked some pot, the first she’d smoked since Jenny was born. It made them giggle like kids, sitting on the kitchen floor in front of the open refrigerator, eating strawberries straight out of the crisper.

She wandered past English cucumbers and baskets of loose-leaf lettuces. The berry man had arranged his wares into a trinity — green baskets of blueberries grouped with blackberries and gum-red raspberries. She peeled back the rough husks of summer corn, her fingers hungry to feel the yellow silk below, lost in an illusion. Here on the Vineyard, at the farmers market, at this precise spot, in this moment in time, the modern world vanished, the unspoken division of our silent class wars. There was no rich or poor, no privilege, there was only food tugged from loamy earth, fruit plucked from sturdy branches, and honey stolen from the beehive bush. We are all equal in the face of nature , she thought — which was, in and of itself, an idea born of luxury.