1
I got home from Boston on schedule and Jenny was there to pick me up at the airport. Jenny and Jacob both, and when I emerged from the jetway, I saw them there in the concourse, Jenny awkwardly crouched down around her pregnant belly so that she could speak softly into Jacob’s ear. She pointed me out to him, and I saw his little eyes scan quizzically in my general direction, and then lock on me, first with recognition and then with delight.
“Daddy!” he shouted, and then took off in a dead run, his sudden absence causing his mother to topple over onto her backside. I quickly moved out of the line of deplaning passengers, and crouched down much as Jenny had been. “Daddy! Daddy!” Jacob said again and again, the red lights in his shoes blinking with every stride, and in a moment he was in my arms, squeezing me as tightly as he seemingly could, and me squeezing him right back.
We stopped at a fast food joint on the way home for dinner, where we could get decent hamburgers for Jenny and me, and a hot dog swimming in ketchup for Jacob. French fries all around, of course. Dining out with Jacob was no simple feat, but Jenny, as usual, was more than prepared. While I was up placing and collecting our order, she wiped down his chair and tabletop with a sanitizing wipe, strapped his portable booster seat in place, unrolled and fastened a fresh plastic table topper -- this one emblazoned with Sesame Street characters instead of his favorite tank engine crew -- got his royal highness into his bib-smock, strapped him into his booster seat and pushed his chair up as close as she could to the edge of the table. When I arrived with our tray of food, Jacob was already sucking noisily on his sippy cup while he pushed a dozen or so Cheerios around the heads of his favorite muppets.
While Jacob was more or less occupied with his jumbo dog Jenny and I talked about the interview and the strange experience I had had in the Emerald Club.
“They must be really interested in you,” Jenny said.
“You think so?”
“Absolutely. Sounds like this Thompson is a real piece of work and they can’t wait to get rid of him. Did you see any of the other candidates while you were there? At the airport, I mean?”
I hadn’t, and now that she mentioned it, I realized that I hadn’t seen any of the other candidates at the offices either. There had been other candidates, hadn’t there? I mean, Pamela Thronsby had said there were, and she seemed to be carefully marshalling us around the office to make sure we didn’t accidentally run into each other.
That night in bed we talked about it some more, and by that time I had almost convinced myself that there hadn’t been any other candidates, that their purported existence had been a ruse to keep me off balance, to keep me from thinking that I had this thing in the bag.
“Alan, I love you, dear, but that’s just crazy.”
She was re-reading her worn and dog-eared copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, propped up against some pillows propped up against our headboard, and I was lying on my side next to her, looking up at her face from below.
“Maybe. But I don’t think so. That Pamela Thornsby turned out to be about as phony as they come. It’s a safe bet that anything she told me was at best some veiled version of the truth.”
“You’re paranoid,” she said, not taking her eyes off the page.
The next day was Saturday and we had a birthday party to go to. One of Jenny’s cousins had a daughter a year or two older than Jacob, and that was reason enough for another one of those bashes at Jenny’s aunt’s house on the lake. The preparations for the trip and subsequent appearance made getting Jacob ready for his Happy Meal look like child neglect. Start to finish, including a shower, I needed about twenty-five minutes to be ready to go somewhere and look presentable, but Jenny needed at least two hours, and tacking a third on was usually a good idea if you didn’t want to be twenty minutes late.
It was more than just getting herself ready, of course. There was Jacob, always Jacob, to think of. The backseat of our car was already littered with his toys -- but those, of course, were his car toys. He couldn’t possibly be satisfied with just those, he would have to bring some of his house toys with him as well. There was Milo, the little blue stuffed puppy dog that had been with him since the day he came home from the hospital, he would have to come, of course, there was no question about leaving him behind, but there were any number of other important decisions to make.
And then there was all the equipment and paraphernalia that would need to be brought to keep the little man satiated and fed during the ordeal to come. A dozen or more little pieces of Tupperware, each containing something salty or sweet -- grapes, mozzarella sticks cut into little bite-sized pieces, the ubiquitous fish crackers -- all of them my job to cut and prepare, and all of them stuffed into an old diaper bag with a dozen juice boxes kept in a small ice-packed thermos in order to keep each little eight ounce serving of sugar water at the optimal temperature for the thirsty man on the go. And speaking of diaper bags, there were also a dozen or so pull-up diaper shorts, wet wipes and butt paste thrown in for good measure. Jacob had successfully been potty trained, but he still had accidents from time to time, especially in unfamiliar or exciting locations.
By the time the cargo manifest had been checked and confirmed, we were all buckled into our car seats, and we were backing out of the driveway we were already twelve minutes late, and it typically took between twenty and thirty minutes to get to the party destination.
But no one seemed to notice. As was typical, our arrival was treated like the social event of the season, with our names chortled out with glee and a long line of aunts, uncles, and cousins marching to the home’s wide foyer to welcome us and bestow hugs, kisses, and handshakes all around. They had all clearly been waiting for our arrival so that the birthday ceremonies could begin, but no one brought that to our attention or even seemed all that concerned. When we entered the home’s enormous living room, we saw an even larger collection of relatives arranged in a kind of amphitheater of bar stools, chairs, and sofa cushions, all directed towards the large brick fireplace, upon whose hearth sat, surrounded by brightly-wrapped presents, the very guest of honor whose slowly advancing age we had all come to celebrate.
“Happy birthday, Jessica!” Jenny shouted, holding our contribution to the excess above her head as she maneuvered herself and her pregnant belly through the assembled crowd to deposit our gift on a pile already teetering at a height higher than the birthday girl herself.
Jessica, a blonde-haired and brainless angel of six -- or was it seven? -- in a pink party dress and bare feet with tiny, painted toenails leapt and clapped her hands. “Now. Mommy? Now?”
“Yes, Jessica,” one of Jenny’s cousins -- Rachel, I think -- told her. “Go ahead, honey.”
The ritual that followed was a familiar one. While thirty or more adults and other children sat quietly and watched, Jessica, exulting in the glory of all that attention, took one gift after another off the pile, announced who it was from, and opened it. With every rustle of wrapping paper, the family dog, a smelly, furry beast of indeterminate breed, would come forward to investigate and would be first told and then gently pushed away. Silly dog. With every reveal, those of us in the audience would obediently ooh and ahh, even when we had no idea what the colorful piece of plastic was. What is it? An older relative would inevitably ask, only to be told in a string of syllables that they did not have cultural context to understand. Silly grandpa. And with every gift, Jessica, already at six -- or was it seven? -- was trained enough to hold the item up beside her smiling lips and largely vacant eyes for the dozens of photographs that would be taken and never looked at again.
It was enough to make one contemplate taking one’s own life.
Later, after the cake had been served, and people were allowed to drift to the rooms and company that suited them best, I found myself in the den with a much-needed beer in my hand.
“Hey, how’s that job search going?”
It was Tom, one of Jenny’s cousins. Was he the one married to Rachel? I couldn’t remember. I knew that he worked in financial services.
“Okay.”
“Did you have that phone interview? With that firm out in Boston?”
I always marveled at how much information the people in Jenny’s family could remember about me. Tom and I had spoken about my job search more than a month ago, and then for no more than three minutes, and here he was asking me about it like it was yesterday.
“Okay, I guess. They asked me out for an in-person interview. I just got back.”
“From Boston?”
“Mmmm hmmm,” I said, taking a sip of my beer.
“My man!” Tom said with what could only be taken as genuine enthusiasm. He held up his hand and I slapped it. A little macho, sure, but better than getting another hug.
Tom wanted all the details, and I gave him as many as I thought prudent. Or, to be more precise, I only gave him the ones that I thought reflected favorably on me. That’s what people do, right? When they’re speaking to people they don’t really know? In those situations you can’t share any of the doubts and despair that keep you up most of the night. When I got to the part about the meeting in the airport lounge, Tom’s eyebrows really went up.
“Hey, Alan, that’s great. It sounds like they really want you.”
I wasn’t so sure, but I kept my mouth shut.
Tom clinked the ice in his glass, probably assessing when it would be time for another rum and coke. “So is Jenny already looking at houses in Boston?”
Suddenly there was a loud crash in another room, quickly followed by the wails of a pair of shrieking children. One of the high-pitched voices, undoubtedly now being heard throughout this affluent neighborhood, was unquestionably that of my own son.
When Tom and I arrived on the scene we could only join the gaggle of spectators that had bottle-necked in the entrance of a wide set of double doors that let into a sunken and ill-lit den at the very back of the enormous house. Craning my neck I could see that, despite the leather chairs and the dusty bookshelves, someone had tried to repurpose the room as a kind of play room for the youngest children, with a small table and chairs, two fingerpainting easels, and, now, a million or more plastic building blocks scattered all over the slippery throw rugs and darkly-stained hardwood floor. Against the central wall was a low entertainment center, the large television set that had once sat atop it now tipped over and broken on the floor before it -- clearly the source of the crashing sound we had all heard. Crouching among the debris were two adults, Jenny and her cousin Rachel, each ministering tender mercies to one of the two children, mine and a boy of about the same age. Jacob, at least, had stopped shrieking, and now stood petulantly and pouty-mouthed while Jenny spoke to him soothingly. The other boy -- Hunter, I think his name was Hunter -- was still crying openly.
A sudden surge of anger rose up within me. I had no evidence for who was at fault -- for which child had broken the television or for what they had done to cause the damage -- but the secret shame I harbored inside had no ability to wait for evidentiary procedures in such a circumstance. It had been Jacob, of course it had been. He had been doing something he shouldn’t have been, something no normal child would ever dream of doing, and he had broken what looked like a two thousand dollar flat-screen television.
But before my rage could manifest itself in any action, Jenny’s aunt Carol pushed her way through the crowd. It was Carol’s house and by extension Carol’s television that lay broken on Carol’s hardwood floor. She was one of those unflappable and ever-happy older women -- not quite the matriarch of her clan but clearly heading in that direction and supremely comfortable and confident in her ability to take on that mantle. Her reaction when seeing and understanding what had occurred was very different from mine.
“Oh my!” she said after working her way through the knot of relatives. “Is everyone all right in here?”
There was not a trace of anger in her voice. She moved quickly from place to place, ensuring first that Rachel and Hudson were okay -- Hudson, that was his name, not Hunter -- and then performed the same duty for Jenny and Jacob. “Such a big TV!” she said, the tone of her voice expressing commiseration more than any other emotion. “It must have been very scary when it toppled over like that.”
Then she began issuing orders. First to the two mothers, take the children into another room. Then to two of her grown sons, Tom, evidently, being one, to begin cleaning up the mess of the broken television. Then to the rest of us, disperse, the damage was done, there is nothing else for anyone to do. She spoke with calm authority and no more concern than if someone had tipped over a cup of soda.
“Alan!” Jenny cried, in contrast, her voice in great distress. “Help me with Jacob!” There was a desperate and more frantic message in the tone of her voice that I’m sure was apparent to all. I’m eight months pregnant, you son of a bitch! Help me!
I waded into the room, unintentionally kicking my way through a sea of plastic bricks and crushing a few under my shoes. After helping my wife to her feet I scooped up Jacob and we retreated from the room as a family. Hands were placed on Jenny’s back, and people wished Jacob well as we passed. It’s okay. Don’t worry. You’re fine. Everything will be fine.
But I wasn’t fine. I managed to maintain a cool exterior, but on the inside I was a wild, rampaging beast. How the fuck had this happened? What had Jacob done? What was everyone thinking of us? And who was going to pay for that goddamn TV?
2
On the way home Jacob had to go potty.
“Pull over, Alan. Jacob has to go potty.”
“Can’t he wait until we get home? It’ll just be another ten minutes or so.”
“Can you wait, honey? Can you wait to go potty when we get home?”
“NO! I need to go potty now, Mommy! NOW, Mommy!”
“Alan! Pull over! Find a place where Jacob can go potty!”
“All right! All right!” I yelled, craning my neck in six directions to make sure I could move the car safely out of traffic. We were on a major thoroughfare, moving out of the city and into suburbia, and were surrounded by strip malls and fast food joints. There shouldn’t be a problem finding a place to make a pit stop.
I pulled into a parking lot as Jenny continued to coo her soothing incantations to Jacob and his sensitive bladder. It’s okay, honey. It’s okay. Daddy’s finding a place. Just hold it a little longer. It’s okay. As I said before, Jacob was pretty much potty trained, but he usually waited until the absolute last minute to communicate his need to pee. He could have gone at Jenny’s aunt’s house, of course -- if he needed to go this bad, he clearly would have been able to go fifteen minutes ago when we were getting goodbye hugs from everyone in the foyer -- but that would have been the furthest thing from his mind. We’d been through this before, and there had been times when Jacob had wet himself in the car when we couldn’t find a bathroom quickly enough for him.
I stopped in front of a sandwich shop and put the car into park. In a flash Jenny was out of the car and the top half of her appeared in the back seat, quickly unbuckling Jacob from his car seat and dragging him out and down onto the blacktop. The door slammed shut and I watched as Jenny waddled hurriedly into the store, her arm tethered to Jacob’s and dragging him along behind her.
“I’ll just wait here,” I said to no one.
Initially I just sat there. Through the glare on the plate glass window I could see dimly into the sandwich shop, where there was a long line of people standing and waiting to place their orders, and my wife and child weaving their way apologetically through them until they disappeared around a corner and down the hallway where the restrooms were.
Part of me felt relieved that we had made it, that we had found a place and it looked like the accident had been avoided, but there was another and much larger part of me that was still steaming from what had happened back at the birthday party. No one had been able to determine how that accident had happened -- how the television set had been pulled down and broken -- the only two witnesses being Jacob and the even younger Hunter, and trying to get a credible account out of either one of them was a waste of time. When questioned, Hunter was unable to do anything other than cry, and Jacob seemed completely unaware that any sort of crime had even been committed.
Jacob, what happened to the TV?
It broke, Daddy. It fell over and got broke.
How, Jacob? How did it get broken?
It fell over.
Yes, but how did it fall over? Did you push it? Did you touch it?
It fell over, Daddy. It fell over and got broke.
It was infuriating, but I knew he wasn’t lying or consciously trying to cover anything up. He honestly didn’t know how the TV got broken. He was still too young. He lived in a world where effect didn’t follow cause. Things just happened around him. Any agency of his own was so focused on the satiation of his own overwhelming desire that it seemed to him more like animal instinct than the workings of a rational mind.
Nevertheless, I knew. I went to Jenny’s Aunt Carol to apologize on behalf of my overly rambunctious son and to offer to replace the set, but Carol would hear none of it.
“Alan,” she said, a glass of white wine in one hand and an oven mitt in the other, “don’t be silly. That old TV needed replacing anyway.”
I pressed her again, knowing from the size and the slim profile of the television that it had to have been in a box at an electronics store no more than three months ago. But she was supremely unconcerned. She just asked me to hold her wine as she bent over and brought the warm artichoke dip out of the oven.
But I was still running the numbers in my head. I was going to buy them a new TV. I didn’t know where I was going to find the two thousand dollars, but I’d be damned if I’d let Carol brush this off like it was a broken dinner plate.
I was still stewing in those juices when I realized that a lot of time had passed since Jenny had gone into the store with Jacob. Longer, far longer that should have been necessary for that little man to empty his bladder. Was he pooping, too? Sometimes Jacob would take his own sweet time when he had to go number two, secretly enjoying, I thought, the extra time on the toilet. I held up my hand to reduce the growing glare on the store window and could still make out the long line of customers, but saw no sign of either my wife or child.
Great. Well, his royal highness must be taking a shit, and if so, there was no telling how long I was going to be sitting there. I fished my phone out of my pocket, flipped it open, and began absently scrolling through my recent texts. And, of course, there they were, the texts Bethany had sent while I had been in Boston.
R U THERE?
I NEED 2 TALK 2 U.
PLEASE CALL ME IF U CAN.
I started deleting them from my phone and then realized that there were more from Bethany, still texts that she had sent me the last time I had been at Carol’s house. I deleted those, too, and actually considered, but refrained from deleting Bethany entirely from my contacts.
I hadn’t heard from Bethany at all that weekend -- not since our secret and somewhat abrupt conversation on Thursday night, the night before my interview in Boston. That shouldn’t be odd. As far as I could remember, we had never spoken to each other on any other weekend in history, but since she had started texting me, and since the time we had spent together in Miami, it felt like none of the old rules applied anymore. She had called my home, I now remembered. She had called my home looking for me, and had spoken to Jenny a few minutes before or after she had spoken to me. That still didn’t make much sense to me, but it felt way safer to let that sleeping dog lie than go over and kick it. I didn’t want anything more to do with her, outside the bounds of a professional relationship at least. I supposed I would see what she was thinking and feeling when I saw her back in the office on Monday.
There was still no sign of Jenny or Jacob, and now I was starting to get a little worried. Did he fall in? And did he drag Jenny down with him? What the hell were they doing in there so goddamn long?
I decided to go in and investigate. I turned off the car, got out and shut and locked the doors. I then walked around the back end of the vehicle and started making my way towards the glass door of the sandwich shop -- but stopped dead in my tracks. With the car shielding some of the glare on the windows I could see more clearly into the store, and I saw both Jenny and Jacob framed in the glass pane of the door. Jacob was red-faced, contorted, in the middle of a full-blown tantrum, and Jenny had her hands cupped into each of his armpits, struggling and somewhat failing to keep him from flopping down onto the floor. I pulled the door open and the force of Jacob’s cries hit me like a wall of sound. I hesitated just a second, supremely conscious of all the staring eyes around the scene, in a flash contemplating the feasibility of getting back in the car and driving away, but then I rushed forward, claiming, in front of witnesses, the screaming and broken child as my own.
“What the fuck is going on!” I found myself yelling, the rage overwhelming me in an instant, like a geyser of hot lava rushing up through my chest.
“He wanted a cookie!” Jenny screamed back, her voice matching the milky tears on her own face. “Help me! Help me get him out of here!”
I grabbed Jacob around the middle, his flailing limbs blindly kicking and punching me in the process, lifted him clear of his pregnant mother, and turned to leave the store with him. He was wet and hot, like a sick animal, and our movements threw me off balance, and I fell roughly to the floor. Jacob flopped out of my grasp and banged his head on the tile.
“Alan! OH MY GOD!”
If he was seriously hurt, Jacob seemed oblivious to it. He was in the throes of his all-consuming tantrum, a searing fire that burned at the heart of a super massive star. He screamed, but he was already screaming. He writhed about on the floor, but he was already writhing.
I scrambled back to my hands and knees and shot across the floor to him, scooping him up again, and holding him tight against my chest before attempting to stand. Using a nearby wall for support, I skooched myself up with him and then resumed my hasty exit. A new customer was just entering the sandwich shop -- an elderly woman with tightly permed hair and a magenta jogging suit -- and I barreled past her, almost knocking her down the process -- desperate to get the two of us out of there.
“Jenny! Open the goddamn door!” I barked, meaning the car door, and in a moment Jenny was ahead of me. She pulled on the door handle and it popped out of her hand without budging.
“It’s locked!”
The keys were in my pocket and Jenny had to fish them out while I held Jacob tight, tying and failing to keep his hard rubber shoes from connecting with his mother’s head.
“JACOB!” I shouted in his ear. “CALM THE FUCK DOWN!”
His wet face had been pressed against mine, and now he gave himself another great twist, his head moving away, turning, and then coming swiftly back to smack me right in the nose, watering my eyes and causing blood to flow. If I had been strapped into the rocket ship of anger before, this mindless, useless, and oblivious action blast me off into orbit around planet fury. It took everything I had to stop myself from throwing him down onto the pavement and kicking him.
“It’s open!”
And so it was. Jenny waddled out of the way to reveal a wide open car door, a child’s fish cracker-encrusted booster seat and a pile of toys and torn activity books. I rushed forward again and body slammed him into the seat, his wailing temporarily stifled as the breath whooshed out of him. His kicking and flailing continued unabated and I tried desperately to both keep him pinned in place and snake the straps of his restraints out from underneath him. I could feel the blood dripping out of my nose, and I took half a second to wipe some of it away with an errant hand, but that just bloodied my fingers and made the job of manipulating and snapping the buckles into place that much more difficult.
“JACOB!” I could hear my own voice screaming -- screaming to the point of breaking, but still somehow muffled, as if I was under water. “STOP IT! GODDAMN YOU! STOP IT!”
He was inexhaustible, raging on and on, grunting and bleating now, his throat worn raw, the gyrating movements of his plump limbs expressing only his own helpless fury. He began to slide down in his seat, his shirt coming up to his neck and revealing his soft belly and sunken chest. I had to grab him by the armpits and move back into position, and his head rocked back and forth, unable to shake the fabric of his shirt off his face.
It was the moment I needed to finally get the buckles snapped over him, pinching his pink flesh at least once in the process. Secured and cinched tight, I was able to take my hands off of him and pull his shirt, thick with slobber, down from over his face.
“STOP IT!” I shouted at him again. “FOR FUCK SAKE JUST FUCKING STOP IT!” I was lost in my own rage and was oblivious to what was going on around me. In that moment I hated him, hated him and myself in equal measure, and I wanted to do something hurtful, something to show him who was boss, something that would get him from being the horrible monster he had become.
Possessed with such wickedness, I began grabbing his toys one by one, holding each up in front of his face, and then chucking it, throwing it as far from the car as I possibly could. First up was his doodle pad, a purple piece of plastic with a stubby magnetic pen hanging by a cord. It sailed across the parking lot and smashed to pieces on the roadway we had so recently left.
“Alan!” Jenny screamed behind me. “Stop it!”
Next up was a coloring book, happy cartoon animals smiling at me, each smeared with a blur of color across its black lines. It flapped like a wounded bird and landed less than six feet away. The back seat of the car was so full of his junk that I had no shortage of things to choose from. I taunted Jacob with each item before it left, cruelly telling him it was gone, gone forever, and that he needed to stop his tantrum if he didn’t want to lose everything.
“Alan!” Jenny screamed again, now actually tugging on my shirt and trying to pull me away.
Nothing was premeditated. I was acting on instinct. An evil and base instinct, one that couldn’t abide anyone or anything getting the better of me. And they were. They were all getting the better of me. They were all spitting on me. My career, my job, my wife, my son, my own roaring sense of my own inadequacy -- they were all spitting on me, spitting their poison venom and hatred right in my goddamn eyes.
Suddenly Milo was in my bloody hand, the little blue puppy dog that Jacob treasured above all else. When the stuffed animal was thrust momentarily into Jacob’s face, his breath hitched and his eyes went wide, but I was too far gone to even notice that I had finally penetrated Jacob’s own cloud of rage. As quick as Milo appeared to him, he was gone, sailing across the parking lot and landing in the gutter.
“Alan!” Jenny screamed again. “That’s enough!” And now she started hitting me, clubbing me on the back of my head and neck with her heavy fists and forearms. “Stop it, goddammit! You fucking monster!”
Grunting with desperate effort, she managed to shove me aside and I found myself stumbling and falling to the pavement. In a flash Jenny’s wide form filled the space of the open car door, and then she had Jacob in her arms, his crying loud but his tantrum over.
“Go get it!” she spat at me.
I felt like an alien abductee who had just been plopped back into a deserted cornfield. One second a tornado had been raging around me, a freight train roaring in my ears, and now I could hear the birds chirping and the warm sun on my skin. There were pebbles pushing into my palms, and over me stood a mother, her crying son in her arms. I thought I knew her. She seemed strangely familiar.
“Do it, you son of a bitch! Go get Milo!”
And then the shame filled me. Filled me so close to bursting that had there been a knife I would have cut my own throat. People were staring and she hated me -- and they were both justified. People should stare, and women should hate a monster such as me. Only slowly was I able to find my feet and stagger over to where the little blue puppy had landed.
3
For the rest of that awful Saturday and the entirety of the following Sunday, Jenny and I pretty much avoided each other. I did apologize, as soon as we got home and had the car cleaned out, but Jenny just sniffed at me and I knew it would take her a lot longer to forgive. Forgetting was probably out of the question.
Jacob was a different story. When I peeked in on him that evening -- scant hours after my irresistible force had met his immovable object -- I caught him again playing with his trains, an elaborate wooden track snaking in a hundred directions on his bedroom floor.
“Daddy,” he said, not taking his eyes off the long chain of cars he was pulling through a wide turn. “Can we build another race track?”
I knew what he was referring to. I remembered the time we had built a pair of long, sloping tracks and had raced his various engines down them -- and I remembered the tantrum and injuries that had inexplicably followed.
“Maybe later, buddy,” I said, moving fully into his room. “How about we do something else?”
“Okay,” Jacob said with bored ease.
In no time we had built a long straightaway on the floor and were testing how many cars one of his battery-powered engines could pull to its end without being dragged to a stop by the increasing weight.
“How many do you think, Jacob? Five? Six?”
“Fifty!” he chortled with his special kind of glee.
It was likely the biggest number he could think of and, as such, a placeholder for the biggest number there was. I like to think that it said something about the size of his little heart, and its capacity to both forgive and forget. When the little tank engine made it to the end of the track with eight wooden cars trailing magnetically behind it, he clapped and threw his little arms around my neck.
Later that night, in bed, Jenny asked me about it. She had heard us playing together and had decided not to interrupt. But there were things she needed to know. In the dark her voice came stealthily, laced with both concern and contempt. How had Jacob seemed? Was he all right? Was he scarred? Had I broken his fragile spirit with my pig-headed selfishness? These words weren’t said, but they were there nonetheless.
“He’s fine,” I said, deciding to speak my lonely truth in as few words as possible. “And I’m sorry.”
“I hope so,” she said, rolling herself over and presenting her back to me.
I remember laying there in the dark for a long time that night, consumed with worry, sadness, and inadequacy. I didn’t know what was wrong with Jacob -- I didn’t even know if there was something wrong with Jacob -- but I was convinced there was something wrong with me. There had to be. I was broken, had been since I was Jacob’s age, broken and crushed by a world that had no room or sympathy for sensitivity or quirkiness or any but a strict and conditioned understanding of boys and men, sons and fathers. I remember crying, I’m not ashamed to admit it, but I also remember rolling away and stifling my sobs to keep Jenny from hearing them.
4
For the first time in years I was happy to go to work on Monday morning. I was up early after snatching only an hour or two of sleep in the wee hours of the morning, and I showered, dressed, and left as quietly as I could so as not to disturb anyone else in the house. I didn’t even peek in on Jacob before leaving, deciding that I couldn’t afford the sentimental luxury with what was likely facing me in the office that day.
Somewhere in the middle of the night I had become convinced that Bethany was going to quit on me. She was going to turn in her resignation, and might even make some kind of public scene, angry and dejected, both at the secrets we had shared and those that I had kept from her. I was at my desk in my tiny office long before anyone else arrived that morning, and I cringed each time I heard the elevator ding and a new gaggle of voices make their way onto our office floor.
I was hunched over my keyboard, pecking absently away at it when I finally heard Bethany’s voice -- not distantly as if just stepping off the elevator, but loud and present and in the very doorway of my office.
“All right, Alan,” she said, swiftly shutting my office door and perching herself on the edge of my plastic visitor chair. “Now tell me. Tell me everything.”
I looked at her blankly, fear the only and overpowering emotion rushing through my veins. She was wearing a navy blazer over a white blouse, a big and beady necklace hanging tightly around her throat. But it was her eyes I noticed most, her bright and glaring eyes, filled with an incessant need.
“Everything?” I said, looking both ways to avoid whatever ambush lay waiting for me. “Everything about what?”
“About the interview!” she cried, as if I was the densest man she had ever met. “Where is it? What’s it for? When are they going to make you an offer?”
Oh. That.
I didn’t really want to tell Bethany about it. As I had already promised myself, I didn’t really want anything else to do with Bethany. But as I began to politely drip some innocent details of my adventure in Boston out to her, she responded with such eagerness, such willingness, and such desperation -- desperation, I realized, to imagine and vicariously experience something, anything better than the company we worked for -- that she pushed me completely off my guard. I had lost sleep thinking she was going to resign in anger, but I now began to realize that she might be thinking that I would be able to take her with me.
“So that’s it?” she said, after I had shared Steve’s parting words to me in the airport lounge. “They’re going to set-up another call with you? Have you heard from them yet?”
“Uh, no. It’s only Monday morning. Steve said his assistant would be reaching out to me sometime this week.”
“Steve,” Bethany said, somewhat dreamily. “It’s a good sign that you’re already on a first name basis with him. It sounds like he really respects you.”
Was I? On a first name basis? I was pretty sure that the next time I spoke to Steve I was going to call him Mister Anderson, but I decided not to share that with Bethany.
“Uh huh.”
There was a knock and I looked up and saw Gerald standing on the other side of my closed door. When he had my gaze he pointed at me and then held up five fingers, evidently wanting that many minutes of my time. I looked back at Bethany but she was turned around, also looking back at Gerald. Before I could say anything she was up and out of her chair.
She patted me on the hand. “Let’s get lunch together today,” she said sotto voce, standing over me, her hips and shoulders intentionally blocking Gerald’s view. “I want to hear a lot more than this.” And then she leaned in even closer, so close I thought she meant to kiss me. “I’m so excited for you,” she whispered instead.
And then she spun on her sensible heel. She opened the door and stepped aside to let Gerald into my small office.
“What are you two conspiring about?” Gerald asked, his voice unpleasant, but no more than normal.
“Secret stuff,” Bethany said playfully and left the office, closing my door behind her.
Gerald did not look amused. Nor did he take a seat, simply standing there and scowling at me through his eyeglasses. He seemed stiff, much stiffer than normal. Gerald typically had an uncaring nonchalance about him, as if he floated above the petty concerns of us mere mortals. Something was definitely up.
“What can I do for you, Gerald.”
“I wanted you to know that I’m planning to leave.”
I heard the words, but I had a hard time processing them.
“What?”
“The company. I’m planning to leave the company. Next week if we can make the proper arrangements.”
His words were clear, but I still wasn’t connecting the dots.
“Wait. What? You’re quitting?”
“Not exactly, but something like that. A lot depends on you.”
My heart sank, the import of what Gerald was saying suddenly made manifest there if not yet in my brain. I was already covering for Susan and Michael. How was I supposed to cover for Gerald, too? I’d never fucking sleep. And what would Mary say? She and Don already blamed me for driving Michael out of the organization. How well would they take another resignation on my senior team?
Gerald appeared to be waiting for me to say something, but I was too occupied with my own panicked reactions.
“Do you want to hear more?” he said eventually.
“More?”
“Yes. When I go, I’m taking your client with me.”
That finally got my attention. I’m not sure how, but that particular combination of words just plucked me out of the sea of fear and worry I was drowning in and dropped me dry and clear-eyed on the deck on my own ship.
“What do you mean, you’re taking my client with you?”
“Just that,” Gerald said, still standing, and crossing his arms across his chest. “I’m hanging out my own shingle. I can run a business that runs circles around Mary Walton, and I’m going to prove it. I’m taking the biggest jewel out of her crown and building my own business with it.”
My thoughts were racing again, but this time the engine was my head instead of my heart. There were a lot of companies like the one we worked for out there, providing management services to non-profit and other organizations too small to manage themselves. It was not uncommon for smaller ones to splinter out of the larger ones, as the needs of the individual client organizations found themselves increasingly at odds with the needs of the growing management company that served them. Even what Gerald was suggesting was not unheard of; a client organization, dissatisfied with the minimal service it was receiving from an increasingly thin management structure, signing a deal with the person or the people it knows in the company for more dedicated and individualized service. But for something like that to happen, the client organization had to be dissatisfied, and as far as I knew the client both Gerald and I worked with was anything but. Mary’s entire focus was seeing to that. She was so much in bed with Eleanor, that I couldn’t imagine anything like what Gerald was talking about happening.
“Have you been talking to Eleanor?”
“No,” Gerald said, smiling devilishly. “Not Eleanor. Paul Webster.”
Paul Webster. The vice chair of the client organization’s board. The man with the gray hair and the blue suit that had questioned Mary and me about the circumstances of Susan’s and Michael’s resignations, and if we were responding appropriately to the staffing holes they left behind.
“He’s working on getting a majority of the board aligned with him. He wants to vote to cancel Mary’s contract at their next board meeting, and we need to be free and clear for the switch to be made.”
This was big. This was perhaps the biggest thing that had ever walked into my office, even if it had so far refused to take a seat. If more than half the board was in on such an action, then things had been in play for a very long time. Looking as shrewdly as I could at Gerald, I tried to remember all the times I had seen him in close and quiet conversation with members of the board. I always thought he was doing his job -- getting the leaders engaged in his department’s agenda. But now I re-imagined all those interactions with a different purpose in mind: selling them all on the idea that he could do the job better than Mary.
Wait a minute.
“Gerald, why are you telling me this?”
A look of pained exasperation passed over Gerald’s face. I could see him try unsuccessfully to stifle it, but it was there nonetheless.
“Because,” he said. “I want to take you with me.”
“You what?”
“I want to take you with me. I want you to quit your job here, too, and come work for me.”
No he didn’t. That much was obvious to me. He was saying the words, but he didn’t mean them, not in their entirety, at least. The pained look was still on his face, and for the first time he looked uncomfortable standing there in my tiny office in his pressed slacks and freshly ironed shirt.
“Gerald,” I said. “Why don’t you have a seat?”
He looked at my plastic visitor chair, put a hand on its back, and then slowly lowered himself onto it. He did it without taking his eyes off of me, as if he was afraid that I might make some sudden move.
“Gerald,” I said again. “What’s really going on here? You don’t want me to go work with you. You hate me.”
Gerald looked honestly offended. “Alan! I don’t hate you. Why would you say such a thing?”
I thought back on all the times that Gerald had been dismissive of me and my authority -- throughout the length of our doomed staff qualities effort, for example, or, still very fresh in my mind, the time he had questioned my ability to lead in front of others in our staff office in Miami Beach. I was under no illusion. Gerald thought I was an inexperienced hack. Why would he want me to come work with him?
“All right,” I said. “Maybe you don’t hate me, but you’ve never thought too highly of my leadership abilities. You’ve made that clear. Why would you want me to come work for you?”
Gerald pursed his lips tightly. “Look, Alan, there’s no simple way to say this, and it’s probably not worth beating around the bush, so I’m just going to lay all my cards down on the table.”
I nodded and said nothing.
“Paul said there would be no deal unless I brought you along.”
It felt like I was back to not hearing him clearly.
“He said what?”
“Paul said there would be no deal -- that they would not break Mary’s contact and sign on with me unless you were part of my team. Once the separation is made, I plan to recruit a lot of Mary’s team away from her. We’re going to need them if we’re going to preserve the kind of continuity Paul is demanding. But there’s one person he won’t allow me to leave to chance. You. You need to be on board with this or there will be no deal.”
I looked at Gerald blankly, hearing, and understanding what he had said, but not entirely believing it. Me? Why would they want me?
Gerald quickly rose to his feet.
“Look, Alan. I realize now that I’ve approached this whole thing wrong with you. I want you on my team -- not just because Paul is demanding it, but because I think you will have a crucial role to play in the future of both organizations -- both mine and Paul’s. I should have led with that, and I regret that I didn’t. Why don’t we get together for lunch today -- somewhere away from the office -- and I can lay out my plans and make you the formal offer that you deserve. How does that sound?”
“Ummm. Okay.”
“Grand. Meet me at the elevators at noon. And please, keep all of this under your hat, at least until we’ve had a chance to discuss this over lunch. Will you promise me that?”
“Sure.”
Then Gerald smiled at me, a weak and flaccid thing that spread across his face like a stain of raspberry jam. He nodded, turned, and left my office without another word.
5
Gerald left my office door standing open. He hadn’t been gone more than ten seconds before I went over and closed it. First I looked out into the larger office. It was still early, but more than half of the pods were already occupied, people blowing on their coffee cups as they waited for their computers to boot up.
I looked right, down where Don’s Enormous Pod was situated. Given the angles and the heights of the intervening pod walls I couldn’t tell if Don was there or not. I looked left and saw Ruthie’s empty desk guarding Mary’s open door. It looked very much like the lights in her office were still off.
I shut my door and sat down again at my desk. I looked at my computer screen for a few moments, the characters of the email message I had been working on as meaningless to me as Sanskrit.
I picked up my phone and dialed my home number.
“Hello?” Jenny said guardedly.
“Hi,” I said, swallowing the lump in my throat. “What are you doing?”
“I’m feeding Jacob his breakfast, what do you think I’m doing?”
Ouch. “I thought you might be sticking pins in that voodoo doll of me you keep under our bed.”
“I’ll do that later,” she said.
“Look, I know you’re still mad at me, but I need that incredible brain of yours right now. Can we call a truce for the next 10 minutes or so?”
“Hold on,” she said. “Let me get this plate of fruit out to Jacob, first.”
I waited patiently, hearing the knife hit the cutting board a few times and then her footsteps moving away. Here you go, honey, I heard faintly, and then footsteps coming back.
“What’s up?”
Her tone had shifted, and I was glad to hear it. Prior to her pregnancies, Jenny had been a public relations professional, and had been in and out of more companies than I had. In times like this I looked to her as a kind of business coach, and she knew it.
I told her everything that had happened so far that morning, skipping over my encounter with Bethany and going right to the discussion with Gerald. I told her that he was planning to quit, planning to take the client and start his own business, that he wanted me to go with him, and that Paul Webster had said there would be no deal without me.
“Whoa,” she said.
“I know, right? What do you think?”
There was a pause on the line. I imagined Jenny standing in our kitchen in her bathrobe and disheveled hair, one hand on her pregnant belly and the other holding the phone against her ear. In the background I heard Jacob call out for more blueberries.
“Just a minute, honey,” Jenny said to him, and then aimed her voice back into the phone. “I think you should call Paul Webster.”
That came out of left field. “What? Why would I do that?”
“Mommy! I want more blueberries!”
“How do you know Gerald is telling you the truth?”
“Why would he lie about that?”
“Because he’s a shifty asshole. You know that.”
“MOMMY!”
“Oh, Jesus. Wait a minute, Alan.”
While she was gone I turned things over in my mind. Jenny, of course, was right. Gerald was a shifty asshole, but even so, I didn’t see how a lie about Paul Webster wanting me to be part of the deal made any sense. If that wasn’t true, why would Gerald even bring me into the loop? Despite his protestations, he didn’t think highly of me. If Paul wasn’t compelling my inclusion, what other reason would Gerald have for approaching me? I mean, with this kind of information, I had him over a barrel. One word to Mary and Gerald and his secret deal would both be dead.
I told Jenny as much when she returned to the phone.
“Yes, I guess that might be true,” she admitted. “But I don’t trust Gerald and you probably shouldn’t either. He’s asking you to quit your job, isn’t he?”
“Yes. He says we have to both be clear of the company before Paul orchestrates the vote to cancel Mary’s contract at the Board meeting.”
“That’s a pretty big risk, ain’t it?”
“Yeah, I guess it is.”
“You guess? Quit your job and our only source of income on nothing more than the word of Gerald Krieger?”
Okay, I acknowledged, it was a pretty big risk. No guessing about it. I told Jenny about the lunch appointment Gerald had made with me, about how he promised to fill me in on more of the details and make the formal offer of employment that I deserved.
“Uh huh,” Jenny said, less than impressed. “I would still call Paul Webster. If not before lunch then definitely after. You absolutely shouldn’t make any commitment to Gerald without talking to Paul and verifying the story.”
I told her not to worry, that under no circumstances was I accepting or quitting any jobs today. I would gather what information I could and then we could talk about it over dinner tonight.
“Okay, Alan. Sounds good.”
“Thanks, Jenny. I love you.”
“I love you, too. Bye.”
And then she was gone, back to whatever obstacles Jacob planned to put in her path today. Our parting words of affection had felt perfunctory but genuine, and I took that to be a good sign.
6
In order to meet with Gerald, I had to cancel my lunch date with Bethany.
“Hey,” I said into the phone after calling her extension. “Can we take a raincheck on lunch today?”
“Sure, I guess,” she said. “Is something up?”
“Not sure, yet.”
Gerald and I didn’t go to the basement. There was a little bistro down the street that Gerald thought would be much more appropriate to our needs. It was part of a strange urban bed and breakfast and had only six or seven tables, none of them large enough for even the two people that were expected to sit at each. It had a French theme and was completely overgrown with houseplants, any one of which clearly received more water than any of the paying guests.
Getting settled, reviewing the menu, hearing the specials, placing our orders, waiting for the food to arrive -- through it all Gerald kept the conversation light and friendly. Had Jenny and I ever spent a night at this bed and breakfast? He had once, with his wife, before his divorce, and it was nice, a kind of getaway. They felt like tourists in their home city, going to the art museum, having dinner at one of those ritzy places overlooking the lake, taking breakfast in bed the following morning. It was almost like a second honeymoon, but God knows it wasn’t enough to save the marriage. He and Kate probably shouldn’t have tied the knot in the first place, but at least there were no children to worry about. They still saw each other from time to time, that was the funny part, usually for a play or a concert or something they could both agree on. But never a movie. God no, he and Kate had completely opposite tastes when it came to movies.
It was more information than I wanted to know, but I smiled and nodded politely, wondering only when he was going to shift to what we had come here to discuss. Eventually, the waitress returned with two oversized plates, one in each hand, and placed them down in front of each of us -- mine a few pillowy ravioli looking abandoned in their cream sauce; Gerald’s a towering pile of salad with more Bibb lettuce than anything else.
“Can I get you gentlemen anything else?” the waitress asked us. She was older than my mother, with her hair dyed blue and enormous discs in her earlobes.
“No, thank you,” Gerald said for both of us.
She disappeared and Gerald and I sat staring at each other.
“Dig in,” Gerald told me, picking up his fork and knife and beginning to shred his lettuce into a thousand smaller pieces.
I had the first ravioli in my mouth, cradling it on my tongue, while sucking in some air in an attempt to cool it down, when Gerald shifted gears.
“I have a message for you.”
I grabbed my water and poured some into my mouth. “You do?” I said, when enough had been cleared to allow me to speak.
“Yes. From Paul Webster. I called him this morning, and told him we were having lunch today.”
Having lunch today. Three innocent words. People had lunch all the time, didn’t they? Every day, as a matter of fact.
“And?” I said around an ice cube.
“He wants you to give him a call this afternoon.”
“He does?”
“He does. I’m going to give you all the particulars, and hopefully that'll be enough for you, but he wants to encourage you directly. Wants you to know that he is fully on board with this, and that he’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”
“Taken care of?” I asked, suspiciously. “What does that mean?”
So Gerald began to tell me. He told me we would each resign in the coming weeks, him first, and then me a few weeks later. Not so close together that it would raise any suspicion. He had already filed the incorporation papers and he already had his business ID, so for all legal intents and purposes, his new firm, Krieger and Associates, was already alive and kicking, albeit it wouldn’t have any clients or cash flow until Paul severed Mary’s contract and pivoted to us. It might take a month or two before either one of us would start getting paid, but when it started, Gerald had already negotiated a package that represented a big bump for the both of us. Mine would be thirty percent more than I was currently making. What did I think of that?
What did I think of that? I wanted to know how he knew what I was currently making, that’s what I thought of that.
“Paul told me,” Gerald said simply, as if the subject of my salary was a common topic of discussion between the two of them.
That rubbed me the wrong way. Paul was a Board member, so he had access to the organization’s finances, but he wasn’t supposed to know what individual staff people were being paid. From the client’s point of view, they paid a flat fee to Mary’s company for all the services we provided, and how Mary decided to carve that up among the rest of us was her business. But Board members were notoriously nosy about those kinds of things, especially with what they often erroneously thought to be highly compensated staff, and it wasn’t unusual for such numbers to get passed around on the backs of envelopes.
“What’s your bump going to be?” I asked.
Gerald smiled. “Bigger than yours,” he said unapologetically. “But it’s my company. You’ll be working for me.”
He said those words like they were the most attractive part of the offer he was making, but that’s not how I heard them. In fact, the thought of reporting to Gerald Kreiger almost made me choke on my pasta. I tried to hide my reaction by coughing into my fist.
Gerald went on. He talked about how the company would be structured, and who we would lure out of Mary’s company in order to fill many of the positions. He talked about how he would be the lead on the client and how I would serve as his deputy, but how different that would be compared to the box Mary had painted me in. He would initially focus on the transition and the turnaround -- he was good at that kind of thing -- but once the client organization was up and running on all cylinders, he would turn its operation over to me so that he could focus on new client acquisition. That’s the only way to grow in this business, he assured me, gobbling up as many clients as you can and staffing them as thinly as possible. Once he pivoted in that direction, the day-to-day would be all mine, and I could start doing all the things Mary would never let me do now.
I’ll be honest. The more he talked the less appealing the offer became to me. I’ve said before that Gerald was a pompous ass, and that side of him was on full display as he laid out all of his half-baked plans. There were a thousand holes in what he was planning, some of them big enough to drive a monster truck through, and every time I pointed one of them out to him he dismissed it with a wave of class-ringed hand.
“Oh, we’ll figure that out,” he would say, his confidence in his use of the word “we” indicative of his delusion that he was effectively selling me. “We can’t write everything in advance. But we’ll tackle that, better than Mary would ever dream of.”
His animosity against Mary was also on full display. He hated her -- even more than I did, it seemed. She was small-minded and in-over-her-head and an idiot. Sure, I could go along with those ideas, but with Gerald the anger seemed to go deeper than that. It wasn’t just that she was a clown, somehow she was a clown that was making her audience laugh at Gerald’s expense. As if her incompetence was somehow a direct threat to Gerald’s competence, that by working under her he was admitting that he was as much of a fraud as she was.
“She won’t know what hit her,” he said more than once during that lunch conversation, a devilish twinkle always coming into his eye. “When I take her client away from her, she just won’t know what hit her.”
And that seemed to be the only thing Gerald was really clear about. Everything else was fuzzy, something to be worked out later, after we had both quit our jobs and sat waiting for Paul Webster to make his move. By the time we were done with our meals I had more or less decided that I wasn’t going to follow Gerald on his mad quest, even regardless of what Paul Webster had to say, should I ever even call him. Calling him, I knew, would make me complicit in this conspiracy, and that wasn’t something I was willing to do. If I was going to turn State’s witness on Gerald, I would need to keep my nose clean.
“So, what do you think?” Gerald asked me near the end, most of the tiny bits of lettuce cleaned off his plate and only one stuck in his teeth.
“I’ll need to think about it,” I said casually. “Talk to my wife.”
“Of course,” Gerald said easily. “Take a day. Or even two. And give Paul Webster a call. If you’ve got any doubts, he’ll remove them. The future is going to be so much brighter. For both of us.”
“You gentlemen need anything else?” It was our blue-haired waitress.
“We’re good,” Gerald said confidently. “Just the check, please.”
7
When I got back to the office my next steps seemed clear.
“Hey, Ruthie, you got a minute?”
Two minutes later Ruthie and I were walking into Mary’s office, Ruthie closing the door behind us. Mary was just getting back from a business lunch herself. She plunked her car keys down on her desk and looked at us suspiciously as she began pulling her laptop out of her Coach handbag, beige like the pant suit she was wearing.
“What’s up?” she asked.
I told her as succinctly as I could what Gerald was planning. As I recall, I got it all into one sentence.
“Gerald just offered me a job at the company he’s started to steal your biggest client away from you.”
The words more or less froze Mary in her tracks, but the look on her face told me that they barely registered with her.
“Say that again,” she said.
I exchanged a cautious look with Ruthie and she gave me a motherly nod.
“I said, ‘Gerald just offered me a job at the company he’s started to steal our biggest client away from us.’”
Mary’s next reaction surprised even me. She laughed. Her eyes and her arms gave an appeal to the merciful God in Heaven and she laughed, not loudly and not with relish, but with a strange kind of satisfied resignation.
“Have a seat,” she said, motioning me to one of her visitor chairs. And then, “Ruthie, ask Don to come down here and make sure we are not disturbed.”
I took the chair she had indicated and watched her continue and complete the process of docking her laptop in its station and powering it up.
“Mary--”
“No,” she said, holding the palm of one hand up to me and using the fingers of the other to type in her password. “No, Alan, Wait for Don to get here. Please.”
She didn’t sound angry, but she did sound serious. I didn’t know what she thought was going to happen when Don got there, but it wasn’t going to be fun and games. Not knowing what else to say, I sat there silently and watched Mary go to work on her computer. Her screen was at a difficult angle, and I didn’t want to crane my neck, but from what I could see it looked like she was accessing personnel records of some kind.
Don appeared long before I would’ve expected him. He must have been in the neighborhood, not all the way on the other side of the office in his Enormous Pod, or the conference room that adjoined it.
“What’s up?” he asked, shutting Mary’s door behind him.
Mary spun in her chair, very much like the boss had just arrived. “Have a seat, Don. Alan, tell Don what you just told me.”
I watched as Don eased his bulk into the second visitor chair, the bolts that held it together straining but holding firm against his mass. He turned and looked at me with his bloodshot eyes and I repeated what I had now said two times before.
At first, Don seemed to have no reaction to my words at all. He gave Mary a sidelong glance and I saw Mary return a knowing nod, and then, quite unexpectedly, Don began to interrogate me.
I’m not sure what else to call it. There was a sudden barrage of questions, digging into every aspect of my conversation with Gerald. Where we were, what was said, who was around us, what might’ve been overheard. A crime had been committed, Don was the police investigator, and he was going to get to the bottom of it. Under the withering assault, I told Don how Gerald had first approached me in the office this morning, laying out his plan, and then inviting me out to lunch to discuss the details.
“And why did you choose to go to lunch with him?”
I was ready for that line of questioning. Don and Mary, both, were the kind of people who jealously protected what they had, and saw enemies and plots around every corner.
“To get more information,” I replied quickly, pitching the tone of my voice to convey my unwavering loyalty to them and their company. “I wanted to see who else he had been talking to. To find out how far this betrayal went. I hoped it didn’t go any further than Gerald and Paul Webster, but if it did, I needed to know so I could warn you.”
I was the first one to mention Paul Webster’s name, and from the look on Don’s face you would’ve thought I had let off a stink bomb under his chair. His wide nose wrinkled on his fleshy face, and it looked like he might vomit.
“Yes,” Mary said. “Paul Webster. Don, we’re going to have to give Mister Webster a call.”
Don nodded, swallowing back his gorge and getting himself under control. His questions began again, as fast and furious as before. It began to feel very much like he was trying to catch me in a trap. I did the best I could to avoid them, which wasn’t too hard because I was essentially telling them the truth. The only thing from the whole episode that I held back was the phone call I had made to my wife, seeking her advice and what I should do. They must never know that I had even halfway seriously considered Gerald’s offer. That, I knew, would spell my doom as much as Gerald’s.
Eventually, the interrogation ended. Don fell into an uncomfortable silence, his pudgy fingers gripping the arms of his chair.
“Okay, Alan,” Mary said. “Thank you for bringing this to our attention. That will be all.”
I looked at her. While I had been sweating under Don’s bright lights she had been busy typing on her keyboard, printing a handful of documents, and paper clipping them together into a pair of identical and unlabeled folders.
“Ummm, okay,” I said. “What happens now?”
“Go back to your office,” she told me gently, the way a parent might speak to a child they intended to spare from something grown-up and grisly. “Don’t speak to anyone. Go back to your office, close your door, and don’t come out until I come to get you.”
Next to me, Don was lifting himself out of his chair. When the difficult maneuver was completed he stood beside me, evidently willing to serve as my escort if necessary.
“What are you going to do?” I asked Mary, rising to my own feet. “Are you going to fire Gerald?”
Mary remained seated behind her desk, looking up at me with her best poker face. “We’ll discuss it when I come to meet you in your office. Now go.”
I looked at Don and he gave me a stern look, extending an arm to begin the process of directing me towards the door.
Not knowing what else to do I complied, leaving Mary’s office by the same door I had entered. Whatever confidence I had brought in there with me, I was taking none of it back out. Everything that had happened had felt wrong, and I had no idea what was going to happen next.
“Ruthie,” Don said as he shut Mary’s door behind us. “Will you make sure Alan makes it back to his office and stays there?”
“Yes,” Ruthie said, springing suddenly to her feet and extending a hand to me like I was lost on an elementary school field trip.
I looked at her hand, the latest ring Desmond had given her sparkling on one of her fingers.
“I can find my own way,” I said, defiantly, and walked away.
8
What happened next will probably go down in history as the worst firing ever executed. From the walled cocoon of my office I could only rely on my sense of hearing, but that was enough to know that there was shouting, slamming doors, and, at one point, what sounded suspiciously like the scuffle of a physical altercation.
The deed was probably done in Gerald’s office, three doors down from mine, and Gerald’s voice would occasionally penetrate the various layers of drywall and unblemished paint that separated us.
“He’s a fucking liar! Alan Larson is a goddamn fucking liar!”
That was the first outburst. Through the glass of my office door I could see a handful of junior staff in their workstations, their heads first coming up in curiosity, and then hunkering down in fear.
A few minutes later, we all heard, “Take your paper and shove it up your fat ass, Don!”
Now I saw Ruthie fluttering by my office door, gathering people up and out of their workstations, and taking them probably down to the break room so that they would be out of the line of fire when Gerald was perp-walked down to the elevators.
It deteriorated quickly, and although Gerald’s voice continued to bleat like a slaughtered pig, not once did I hear the words of either Don nor Mary that must have been sticking him. They were playing it cool, I knew, having seen both of them in action before. Don Bascom was a master at The Firing, exhibiting a kind of ruthless efficiency that seemed absent from all of his other responsibilities in the company. At no point would he raise his voice, break a sweat, or show any other form of agitation. A decision has been made, and he was simply here to tell you about it.
“Take your goddamn hands off me! You stupid fuck!”
This one was much louder. Clearly Gerald’s office door had been opened and that was when the scuffle occurred, the soft and subtle slaps and grunts of grown men wrestling with each other. I was self-consciously biting off one of my fingernails when the combatants walked by my office, Gerald first, with Don tightly on his tail but with neither of his goddamn hands on the doomed soul. As he passed, Gerald struck out and banged his fist hard against my glass, rattling the whole door in its frame and, as I would discover later, cracking the glass deeply enough that it would need to be replaced.
“You’re a dead man, Alan! You’re a fucking dead man!”
In another context, I’d like to think that I would have laughed at such melodrama. Indeed, I remember trying to console myself with an imaginary vision of Gerald twirling his villain’s mustache while tying my pregnant wife to the railroad tracks, but it didn’t work. Truth be told, I was shaken and full of doubt at what I had just done. Had I misjudged the situation? Did Gerald have some secret pull that I was unaware of, something that he could use to make my life even more miserable than it was? Or was he unhinged enough to actually make good on his otherwise ridiculous threat on my life? In that lonely crucible of my own doubts and insecurity, it seemed like anything was possible, like I was no longer in control of anything that would happen to me.
I tried to busy myself with the papers on my desk, with my fingers on the keyboard, with anything, something besides those four blank walls mocking me, closing in on me like a trash compactor, compressing and shaping me into the clueless loser they and everyone beyond them knew that I was.
It was dark stuff. I don’t know what depths I would’ve fallen to had Bethany not appeared in my doorway, tapping ever so lightly on the glass that Gerald had just broken. I waved her inside and she came in quiet as a whisper, roosting herself on the edge of my visitor chair, her hands folded protectively in her lap.
“Are you okay?”
Her first question surprised me, and made me realize that perhaps I had been crying and that perhaps she could see that I was.
“Yeah,” I said, absently wiping my eyes. “Sure. I’m fine.”
“What happened?”
“You tell me,” I said. “I’ve been stuck in this office for the last fifteen minutes.”
“They just walked Gerald out of here,” she said.
“That much seems clear,” I said. “And he made a lot of noise on the way out.”
“People are scared,” Bethany said, leaning in closer and perching her fingertips with their acrylic nail polish on the edge of my desk. “The whole office heard him shouting. We heard some of the things he said.”
That one made me pause. I knew what I had heard, but now realized that others may have heard other things, things said at a lower volume that were muffled coming into my isolation chamber but clearly audible in other parts of the office. Not knowing what else to do, I only nodded.
“What are you going to do?”
“Now? Nothing. I’m supposed to wait here until Mary comes and talks to me.”
And, as if summoned by dark magic, with the mention of her name, Mary appeared like a beige apparition in my doorway. Without knocking she opened the door and let herself in.
“Bethany,” she said, any surprise she might have felt at finding her in my office completely masked. “Could you give Alan and me a minute alone, please.”
Bethany seemed flustered, awkwardly getting to her feet and almost falling over with her sudden movement. She gave me a pained look, her lips opening silently but forming no words that I could discern. She turned to look at Mary, standing at my door with it held open to facilitate her exit. Straightening her blouse and smoothing out her skirt, she left my office without saying a word.
Mary shut the door and turned to me. “Is there something going on between the two of you?” she asked, crossing her arms.
“What?”
“You and Bethany. Is there something going on between the two of you?”
I looked at her incredulously. It was a difficult question to answer. There was definitely something going on between me and Bethany, something with many layers to it, some above, but most below the surface -- but none of them were of the nature that Mary was insinuating.
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
She looked at me suspiciously, and seemed to be waiting for me to add more to my testimony.
“Mary,” I said, speaking out against my better judgment. “Honestly, no. There’s nothing going on between me and Bethany. She just wanted to know what I knew about what had happened to Gerald.”
“And what did you tell her?”
“Nothing. She was only here for a minute. You appeared before a conversation could even start.”
Mary relaxed her arms and moved to take a seat in my visitor chair. She studied me for a few moments in silence, but this time I knew enough to keep my mouth shut.
“Well, we’ve got a real problem,” she said, her tone switching gears towards the business at hand.
“We do?” I asked, putting extra emphasis on the ‘we’. I had not even entertained the idea that I might be Mary’s second dismissal of the day until she was sitting across from me. For a sickening moment I was almost sure of it. She was here to fire me. But her use of the word ‘we’ gave me some hope and I clung to it.
“Yes,” Mary said. “Gerald said some very disturbing things in his separation interview.”
Separation interview. Only Mary could continue to use such corporate speak after the flying fuck fest that had just occurred.
“I heard some of it,” I said. “I know he called me a liar.”
“He called you much more than that.”
Mary then went on to describe all the things Gerald had said about me, evidently in-between the shouting and cursing I had heard. Evidently, he talked about me a lot, me and his low opinion of my leadership skills and my overall competency. I was in over my head, promoted beyond my ability, with poor judgment and a reluctance to act. He spent a long time talking about my handling of the situation with Wes Howard in Miami Beach, and about how it, above all else, had eroded the confidence that the rank and file had for me in the organization. No one trusted me. They knew I wasn’t up to any difficult task put before me and that, when push came to shove, I would throw anyone under the bus in order to preserve my own position and authority.
It was brutal. And coming so soon after my wrestling match with my own doubts and fears, it nearly unhinged me. Mary relayed the information in her own deadpan way -- just the facts, ma’am -- but still, there was judgment there. I suddenly remembered the conversation Mary and I had had in Miami, when she told me that Gerald wanted to be reassigned, that he no longer wanted to work under me, that he and others, including Eleanor Rumford, had lost confidence in my ability to lead. Mary didn’t mention that previous conversation, but when the memory of it flashed across my red face, she saw it, and she gave me a merciless look indicating that she knew I remembered it.
Eventually, she paused, and sat studying me, perhaps waiting to hear my side of the story, more likely waiting for me to step into the trap she had just laid.
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Mary,” I said, attempting an absolute Hail Mary. “Gerald was the one working behind your back to undermine the company. Not me.”
Mary slowly nodded. “I know that,” she said. “Still, the things he said about you, we know that they are not entirely untrue, don’t we?”
I had a few moments of disorientation as I tried to work out her double negative in my distracted mind, but I quickly realized that she was looking for me to confess. That’s what was going on. She wanted me to admit that I was the loser Gerald said I was, and probably ask her for absolution. Was that going to be necessary for us to move forward? Could I even do that? What would that mean for my self-respect, for my ability to hold my head up as I continued to move from thankless task to thankless task in this broken organization?
“I will admit,” I said eventually, “that things have been challenging for me. I’m still carrying three workloads: mine, Michael’s and Susan’s.”
As she often did, Mary visibly winced at the mention of Susan’s name, but she quickly pivoted in a new direction. “And now you will have Gerald’s workload as well. You’re going to need to apply yourself more effectively, Alan. Remember, we have that leadership meeting coming up in a few weeks.”
I knew the meeting she was talking about it, but the idea that I would have to take on Gerald’s workload in addition to the burden I was already carrying was overwhelming in its implications.
“Mary!” I cried aloud. “You can’t expect me to do the work of four full-time positions. Can’t someone be reassigned to start helping out?”
Mary smiled, satisfied, I think, that I had allowed my exasperation to show through. “We’re working on it, Alan. I’ve got a pile of resumes on my desk a foot high. We’re looking for the right people to come in, but it takes time.”
It was a figure of speech, I knew, but I also knew it was a lie. There were no resumes on Mary’s desk. I had been watching the want ads and I knew that the company had not yet even advertised Susan’s or Michael’s positions.
“I know,” I found myself saying, accepting the lie for the sake of the more direct point I was trying to make. “But what about someone already in the company? Isn’t there someone on another client that can be temporarily reassigned? I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, but having someone else take on Gerald’s responsibilities, that would be a tremendous help.”
Mary’s slippery smile only widened. “I’m sorry, Alan. You’re just going to have to figure this one out on your own. I know you don’t want to admit it, but you’ve brought most of this down upon yourself. If you get us through the leadership meeting in one piece, we may be able to shuffle some chairs, but until then, there is very little that I can do. You’re going to have to find a way.”
I looked at Mary icily. I knew what she was doing. She was doing to me what she did to everyone that had become more trouble than they were worth to her. I would not be fired. No, not unless I did something horrendous or illegal, I would never be fired. Worse than that, I was going to be worked until I collapsed and could take no more. Until I was dead. She was going to suck me dry, and then she was going to throw away my lifeless husk. She was a vampire, and I, now, had become her prey.
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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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