Look Closer

Simon has wandered into the middle of the massive rooftop deck, hands on his hips, looking around. “My mom and dad would dance up here,” he says. “I ever tell you that?”

I walk up to him. “No.”

“Oh, yeah, they’d come up with a bottle of wine and a little boom box and play music and dance. Sometimes Mom would sing. She was an awful singer, but boy, she didn’t care.” He gestures to the chairs. “Sometimes we’d have a little picnic up here, and I’d sit over in the chair with my juice box and sandwich while they danced. You should’ve . . .”

His head drops. He rubs his neck.

“You should’ve seen how she looked at my dad. I remember thinking how great it must be to have someone look at you like that.”

I touch his arm.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m . . . I’ve had too much to drink.”

I put my arms around him, put my face against his chest. “Dance with me,” I whisper.

We rock back and forth. I’m no singer, probably no better than his mother, so we sway to the street sounds below, kids playing and shouting, music from passing vehicles, some help from birds chirping nearby. He presses me tightly against him. I can feel his heart pounding.

Simon deserves someone who will look at him the way his mother looked at his father. He deserves more than I can give him.

“I don’t know what it was, why she was so taken with him,” he says. “When you’re a kid, you don’t realize—I mean, they’re just your parents. In hindsight, I mean, she was twenty times the person he was in every way, but God, she just swooned over him. He was everything to her. And then when he—when he—”

“I know,” I whisper. “I know.”

“It just broke her. Y’know? It just . . . broke her.”

It broke Simon, too, as it does now, as he chokes back tears.

I rub his back. “It’s all gonna be okay,” I tell him. “Everything will turn out fine.”

“I wish I was so confident.”

“Let me help you with this problem,” I say. “Let me help you with the dean.”

—

“No.” Simon breaks away from me and wags his finger. “No. Thank you, but no.”

“Why not? You said it yourself. The dean owns you. If you buckle the moment he raises your past, he’ll know he always has this over you. You’ll never get out from under his thumb.”

“I don’t care. I’ll . . . go to another school or something.”

“But you’ll obsess about this the rest of your life, Simon. I know you. You’ll obsess about Dean Cumstain and Reid Southern like you obsess over that high school jock Mitchell Kitchens.”

He picks up the bottle of Jack and takes another pull, the wind carrying his bangs. “I don’t obsess about him.”

“Ha!”

He looks at me and starts to reply but thinks better of it. Simon has often joked that he has Irish Alzheimer’s—he only remembers the slights, the grudges.

“This is different,” he says. “This is my career. This is what I’ve chosen to do with my life. I don’t want this to be . . . I don’t know . . . tainted, I guess. I don’t want to get this position because I turned the tables on the dean and blackmailed him or something.”

“You won’t get the position unless the faculty votes you in, unless you get it on merit,” I say. “All you’re doing is making sure the dean doesn’t sabotage you.”

He shakes his head, long and slowly. “No, Vicky. I’m not doing it.”

—

Simon heads off to bed drunk and depressed, and past his bedtime, given how early he gets up in the morning. I tuck him in and head down the hall to the office.

I told Christian Newsome I’d show him the trust language that restricts how Simon spends his trust—how it cuts his wife off from any access to the money until ten years of marriage.

I pull up the PDF of the amendment to the Theodore Dobias Trust that gave Simon his money, but with the string attached. I fix on that language, that wonderful little surprise that Ted left Simon on his death:

(a) In the event SIMON gets married to an individual (“SPOUSE”), the proceeds of this trust may not be spent in any way by or for the benefit of SPOUSE for a period of ten (10) years following the first day of SIMON’s marriage to SPOUSE. This restriction includes, but is not limited to, the following: (1) expenditures on anything that would jointly benefit both SIMON and SPOUSE, including but not limited to . . .

What an asshole, to do that to Simon against his wishes. Give him the money or don’t. But to do what he did, to hog-tie Simon like that, to put his foot on the chest of Simon’s marriage before it even starts? Talk about emasculating.

And, of course, there’s this:

In and only in the event that SIMON and SPOUSE remain married for the period of ten (10) years, and no petition for dissolution of marriage has been filed by either SIMON or SPOUSE within that time, the restriction on the expenditure of proceeds in paragraph (a) above shall cease to operate.

If you stay married to Simon for ten years like a good girl, “spouse,” and if nobody’s even filed for divorce within those ten years, “spouse,” then you can put your greedy, grimy hands on the money. Because then you’ll have earned it, “spouse.”

Why so cynical, Teddy? Not every woman marries for money.