Bleeding Hearts(11)

James’s office was a large room that took up most of the space on the brownstone’s second floor, carpeted in pearl gray like the door downstairs, painted in cream, hung with house plants that spilled green leaves out of planters into the vast empty overhead space made by the twenty-foot ceiling. Science, that was the ticket. All of the people who came to James Hazzard liked to believe they were disciples of science, although of an alternative and More Humane kind. They wanted to feel connected to the force of the universe and get in touch with their feminine side. They wouldn’t have sat still for one minute in a dirty trailer, or by the side of an old woman who had not taken care of her teeth. They were all desperate and they were all miserable and they were all scared to death.

Now it was seven-thirty and James’s last appointment for the evening had just walked out the door. Her name was Katha Parks, and she was a kind of meta-example of fear and trembling. She had the most successful catering business on the Main Line, a personal income of well over two million a year, a Ferrari Testarossa, a vault full of jewelry, and a vacation house in Montego Bay—and she was frantic. That was the only word James had for it. Frantic. She worked out three hours a day. She never let more than eight hundred calories pass her lips in any twenty-four-hour period. She refused to see her maid until she’d put on her makeup. It was crazy. And, James thought, the richer and more successful they were, the crazier it got. That was why people like Katha Parks were willing to pay $1500 an hour for a personal charting session with James Hazzard himself.

James made his way around the huge marble copy of a drafting table he used instead of a desk, went to the office door, and looked out into the hall. Light spilled down the stairwell from the third floor. James went to the rail and called up.

“Max? Are you still there?”

“I’m still here,” Max called back.

James winced. Max was sounding definitely swish, angry-swish, the way he did when some fool woman came on to him and wouldn’t take no for an answer. James didn’t mind the swish in itself—he was a cosmopolitan man with a tendency to regard sex as a pleasant activity no matter whom he did it with, or of what sex—but he did mind what it represented, which was an impending explosion. It had been a long day. James wasn’t ready to deal with Max in one of his revolutionary-warrior moods. He wasn’t ready to deal with a telephone operator with a bad attitude. He wanted a strong cup of coffee with a shot of Scotch in it followed by a long, pleasant dinner at the Harmony Café.

James went around the stairwell and climbed to the third floor. The light on the landing was not on—Max was always saving electricity and being a Friend of the Earth—but the light coming from Max’s office was enough. James went in and found Max sprawled out in the swivel chair behind his desk, looking like a cross between a college student and a life-style ensemble in one of the better sportswear catalogues. Max was a devotee of $100 jeans and $600 plaid lumberjack’s shirts. James sometimes thought Max kept Ralph Lauren Polo in business all on his own.

“Coffee just perked two seconds ago,” Max said, not looking up. He was frowning at a stack of papers in front of him. James recognized columns of figures and got bored. “Pour some for yourself, will you? I’ve got to finish up here before we talk.”

“When you finish up here, are you going to tell me what pissed you off?”

“Dina Van Rau pissed me off. You’re going to have to raise the admission prices to the seminars. To at least three fifty a head. There’s no way around it. Expenses are up and the profit margin is down.”

“I’ve been thinking about John Calvin,” James said. “About the theology that said some people were born saved and other people were born damned and you could tell the difference because the saved people had more material wealth. Does that sound familiar to you?”

“Pour me some coffee too,” Max said. “I’ve got to go out tonight to one of those places where they serve nothing but herb tea and bean sprouts. God, I hate the healthy foods movement.”

James hated the healthy foods movement too. He especially hated the part of it where people like his father thought you were an unenlightened mess in need of immediate therapy if you had a cocktail every night before dinner. He poured two cups of coffee, doctored them both liberally with Johnnie Walker Black, and passed one over to Max.

Max had finished with his columns of numbers. He took the coffee James was handing him, put his feet on his desk, and said, “Your sister Caroline called. Not five minutes ago. She was hysterical.”