Read Online The Dismantling by Brian Deleeuw - Free Book Online Page A

telling his twice-monthly lies.
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    A fter Simon switched trains at Broad Channel, his car pulled into the Beach 116th Street station, and five minutes later he was knocking at the familiar door, his father appearing with a burning cigarette stuck into the middle of his red-cheeked face.
    â€œYou should get a car, Simon,” he said. “It would make your life easier.”
    â€œWant to buy me one?”
    Michael grabbed his son in a rough hug, the glowing tip of his cigarette narrowly missing Simon’s earlobe. “We’re having roast chicken,” he said. “How does that suit the good doctor?”
    Simon followed his father toward the kitchen, glancing up the darkened stairway as he passed to the back of the house. He wondered again how often his father went upstairs, to the second floor and Simon’s and Amelia’s old rooms—if he ever did. Michael opened the oven, and the kitchen’s air thickened with the smell of crisped chicken skin. He set the pan straight onto the table, the bird resplendent in a pool of its own juices, and poked at the breast with a pair of tongs. The table was set with two bottles of Stella, two chilled glasses, two carving knives. Simon and his father sat down and took turns slicing chunks of meat off the bone, a loaf of sourdough bread on hand to transport the meat from plate to mouth, a bowl of mayonnaise for lubrication. Simon kept up a difficult pace of eating and drinking, afraid that the moment his mouth was found empty, he would be forced to invent some new fantasy about medical school. But this was not the topic his father had in mind.
    Michael cleared the plates and brought out a fifth of Jameson and two tumblers. He wanted to talk about the banks. They were all diseased, he said. Some might be cured, others put out of their misery. There was no logic here that he could see. Nobody knew what the hell they were doing. Simon listened, watching his father’s face. The firm in the back office of which Michael now worked appeared to be safe for the moment, but who knows? It was ironic, he said, that avaricious, unchecked risk, the one thing he’d tried to avoid since Exley Chatham, might screw him over yet again.
    Simon had watched, in real time, this excision of risk from his father’s life. He’d been too young to understand much of it as it was happening, but even then he’d known a shift was taking place within his father, not just a shift of circumstance, but an internal shift, a shift of character. Michael Worth—the middle-class North London boy who’d won over a stubborn Italian American graduate student while on scholarship at University College London, arrived in New York a year later with his new and pregnant wife, torn into his first job trading bond debt at Chatham, seen his wife killed by pancreatic cancer less than a year after their second child’s birth, and doubled and tripled his efforts at Chatham, becoming a vice president on the currencies desk just before the entire firm came crashing down—Michael Worth had turned away from the part of himself that had carried him this far. He’d turned away from jealousy and ambition and hunger. He understood Chatham’s collapse as his own, and, financially, it was. And so he methodically carved away the aspects of himself that might ever prove a threat to the few things that remained for him: his children and his home. Exiled were his competitiveness, his impulsiveness, but exiled also were his energy and his desire. He became an attenuated Michael. When Amelia died, there was little left to give over to grief; his already narrow world simply became narrower.
    Or so it appeared to Simon. How could he know what his father really felt? He might as well ask a tree or a rock or the ocean; he might as well not ask at all. Michael’s life had become something that would have been unrecognizable to his younger self. And yet