Michael Collins - The Death of All Things Seen

They would come for him here, Saul’s men, and whatever transpired, he understood Elaine would acquiesce. Einhorn was no match in the pitting of Elaine’s loyalty to him against her father.

In pajamas and bare feet, Einhorn was like a penitent on a long and difficult path. He had been called the previous late afternoon by law enforcement. At first hesitant, he had stepped out in the lobby away from Saul, who had looked up and seen him. They were in the endgame of a Ponzi scheme unraveling with the financial crisis. It was only a matter of time.

The call had turned out to be about the fraudulent Health Department Letter he had received months before. His tone registered the halting embarrassment of somebody caught out, but it was not something he could explain to Saul, not the essence of what was ostensibly a gay affair. He was caught in the sullen awareness that this was the end, or the beginning of the end. Saul had watched him throughout the call and at the end, he came forward, inquiring who had called. Under the pressure of deceit, Einhorn had named a client who would not and did not corroborate that there had been a call. It was in this way that Daniel Einhorn knew his life was over, and so suddenly, but it was not unexpected.

*

For the better part of a decade Einhorn had been watching his back, the secret trysts in hotels in the late afternoon, the complicated sequence of heading to the health club, changing for a leisurely run, and ending up literally running to a hotel room for hours lost here and there. It was a sexual awakening that might have been tolerated and managed under different circumstances. The world was an enlightened place. At issue was not Einhorn’s homosexuality, but Saul’s essential hold on him. Einhorn didn’t conceivably have a life without Saul Herzog. They were in too deep in a fraud that could not see any break in the ranks.

Einhorn knew in his heart that he was a hand-picked scapegoat from the very beginning, chosen purposely three decades ago for his loose-ended family, for his expendability when the time came. Though, at the time, Saul had lauded Einhorn and made an elaborate pretense that Einhorn held a great sway and power within the family, because it would be needed in whatever defense Saul eventually mounted. In this regard, Saul was the most charismatic, sinister and calculating of characters Einhorn would ever know, and yet he submitted to Saul’s overtures, when the end was always inevitable.

He imagined now the amalgam of details, how it would end — his disappearance. At first take, it would seem a good, stable life — Daniel Einhorn, married twenty-seven years, husband of Elaine Einhorn, father to four children — a grounding series of facts establishing a life and fidelity in marriage. He had a son with a Harvard MBA who had been on the fast track in New York with Lehman Brothers before its sudden collapse during the Financial Meltdown. There were three daughters married to doctors. He gave generously to worthy causes. His youngest daughter, Rachel, had a son, Noah, with Cystic Fibrosis. He had run a marathon to raise awareness and pushed Noah in a modified baby jogger. He had a picture of the finish line on his desk and in his wallet. This would undoubtedly be the shot against which the enigma of his disappearance would be cast, until the eventual disclosure of the fraud that had been perpetrated. It would be all Einhorn.

His relationship with Elaine dated to a 4th of July party at the Herzogs’ during the deregulatory zeal of the Reagan Administration and Trickle-down economics. He was interning at the time with Sachs. Elaine, a twenty-eight-year-old debutante, had studied psychology and was at a loose end. She was not unattractive, but she didn’t catch Einhorn’s eye in a way where something might blossom, and yet Saul insistently put them together.

Einhorn was no fool and understood that Elaine was part of the package being offered. If Elaine was mindful of it, she never let on. She had seemingly been set up with a series of love interests all aligned with Saul’s business partners. She discussed them openly, without indicating that Einhorn was any different. Her sisters had been married off, but to more connected families, life for the Herzogs tied to a series of mergers and acquisitions, so why should love fall so far outside the domain of practical interests?

It was never stated that way, but it was felt and lived by all the Herzogs and their ilk, and if the worst that could be said of them was that none of them fell head over heels in love, then so be it.

In swapping out one existence for another, Einhorn became part of family gatherings centered on tradition and ceremony. They had a rabbi on hand to bless each and every gathering for the equanimity of moral guidance, and their house was always filled with men of notable distinction in finance and industry, willing to invest, and if there were few among them who might have been considered good-looking, well, they were concerned with greater interests, like tradition and purity of stock.

Einhorn was the exception. He had rowed at Yale. He was athletically and academically distinguished, and yet he bore a family secret. His mother, a one-time beauty, didn’t know who Einhorn’s father was exactly, but she was sure he was one of any number of men, less than five, she assured him of it. She used to count them off on her hand, one at a time, with an apparent history that still tugged at her heart in the baited sense of how in demand she once was. She was defined by her looks. As Saul intuited, good looks could impede one’s interest.

Einhorn had advanced against all odds, but the prejudice was there. He was the tolerated guest at friends’ houses, regarded with quiet suspicion. He did nothing to incite this, but it was said of him, as he grew into manhood, that other men’s girlfriends and wives were always interested in him. Early on in high school he had aligned with how tragic heroes in the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies had irreconcilable flaws that were their undoing, and he had embraced this essential fatalism, not least after confiding in a drama teacher, who had set his hand on Einhorn’s knee and then eventually Einhorn’s cock, imparting that nothing was gained without courage and risk-taking. So Einhorn submitted, tragedy alive, his thick penis in the hand of his instructor, who explained how in ancient times wisdom was imparted between men and boys. It fucked Einhorn up.

*

Elaine Herzog was an answer to a question yet not fully answered in Einhorn’s heart, but what he had believed in more back then was the genius and prospect of what Saul Herzog was offering him, and so he became a fixture at the house at Saul’s behest. In late fall that same year after the 4th of July party, he asked for Elaine’s hand in marriage. Elaine deferred to her father. Einhorn should ask Saul. It was how it was done with the Herzogs.

He felt, in retrospect, in entering the pageant of their family, the stirring of a tragedy, and yet he willingly took his place with the understanding that this was the best he could have achieved under the circumstances, and that achieving anything short of this would have been a failed life. He knew the risks, and he had accepted them. It didn’t make it easier now, but there could be no denying it.

It surfaced, the wager of what he had agreed to so long ago, the halcyon days of that summer into early fall, the intoxication of luxury such a stark contrast to his growing up in a two-room apartment with his mother, the great ceremony of it, and how Saul had his secretary pre-order two kosher porterhouse steaks and a bottle of 1956 Bordeaux in the advent of Einhorn’s asking for Elaine’s hand. It was as Saul had planned it, but it seemed all down to Einhorn’s good fortune, his persuasion and charm, when it was otherwise.