May We Be Forgiven

cookies for your wife.”
    I’m confused.
    “You don’t remember?” she asks, holding up a box of cookies. LU Petit Écolier. “You buy these.”
    “Yes,” I say. “That’s right, I did. I used to buy those for Claire.”
    “Of course you did,” she says.
    “Was that here?”
    “One block down,” she says. “We move, this much better location, big building right on top, big bankers, crunching numbers, need something to chew on.”
    “I’m surprised that you remembered me.”
    “I never forget,” she says, and then pauses. “I sorry for your life. I see you in the newspaper—one big mess.”
    “It’s more my brother than me.”
    “It’s you too,” she says. “You are your brother.”
    “I’m okay,” I say. “Things are looking up.”
    “See you later, alligator,” she says, walking me out the door.
    In the lobby, after lunch, while waiting for Wanda, I peel open the chocolate bar and take a bite. I am amazed that the deli lady remembered me. It’s so strange that she knew who I was. She knew me and Claire and all about my brother. She felt sorry for me and gave me a chocolate bar. No one just gives anyone anything anymore. I take another bite, no longer worried what my suit looks like or that Claire is “out there” somewhere in her tight work skirt, her heels a little too high to be respectable. In the lobby I watch people come and go, thinking of Nixon, a man of his own time, wondering what he would make of the new technology for spying, for gathering information. I’m wondering if he’d still write longhand, wondering if he’d be surfing porn sites on his iPad while kicking back in that beloved brown velvet chaise longue in his secret Executive Office Building retreat, wondering what he’d think of all the women in power these days. After all, he was the one who said he didn’t think women should be in any government job—he thought of them as erratic and emotional.

    T he afternoon is spent reading multiple drafts of a chillingly grim novella, Of Brotherly Love, set in a small California town, in which a failed lemon-farmer and his wife conspire to murder their three sons, convinced that the Lord has bigger plans for them in the next world. After the youngest son dies, the middle boy catches on and tries to tell his older brother, who treats him as though he’s gone insane—violated the very word of God. When the middle boy comes home at the end of that day and his parents tell him that the oldest boy has gone to the Lord, the boy becomes terrified. Fearing for his life, he collapses and tells his parents that there must be a reason that the Lord, having taken two of his brothers thus far, has spared him. The Lord must have a plan for him. The parents, grief-stricken, nod and urge him to go up to bed. He says his prayers, then feigns sleep. He rises after midnight and slays first his father and then his mother, all the while fearing the hand of God. He murders his parents, then sets the house and barn afire and rides off in the family car, hoping to get across the border before the authorities find him.
    The story is filled with paranoia, questions of faith, and the fear that the parents didn’t take good enough care of the children, that God himself was not pleased. The expectation is that the surviving brother should do something more, something heroic—he is obligated to make up for their loss.

    I read these incomplete fragments as Nixon’s attempt to process the early death of his two brothers, Arthur and Harold, and his own crisis of faith. Despite the unnerving morning, the afternoon brings a new comfort level. I ask for the key to the men’s room and am given a programmed card, like a hotel-room key, and told that it will expire in ten minutes. The bathrooms are deluxe; the urinal is filled with ice—which snaps, crackles, pops as my stream hits it. They say it keeps bathrooms cleaner if men have something to aim for. The card gives me the excuse to walk the halls, wondering how the Nixon documents found their way here. What is the “firm’s” relationship with the Nixon family? Someone knows someone who knows someone; it’s all about who you know, who you went to school with, who you grew up with in the backyard. After a couple of laps around the firm, I go back into the conference room. Moments later I sneeze, and a young man appears with a box of Kleenex.
    “Thank you,” I say, reminded that I am being watched.
    At four-thirty Wanda appears.