Another Broken Wizard (3 page)

“Farragut Ward.”

It was a big bank in Manhattan. I’d already started counting the money and planning my excuses to Dad—
I’m sure you’ll be okay. It’s just this new job. I’ll try to come up on weekends, once things settle down
.

“It went smoothly at first. The human resources lady liked me well enough. And I seemed to impress the guy who would be my boss.”

“That’s good. What was he like?” Dad asked.

“He was the head of equity research, a decent guy—more intelligent than ambitious. He knew what he was doing, and we got along well enough. That part was fine. But then I met his boss, some senior vice president of something or other. He got my name wrong and seemed to do it on purpose—kept calling me Tim, even after I told him it was Jim. He was one of these guys with perfect teeth and a tan in December. He just seemed shifty.”

“I know the type—senior management with an MBA from Bally’s fitness. Just smart enough to pick the right tie and screw the other guy.”

“Pretty much. So he starts asking me how long I’ve been out of work and how I lost my last job. I tell him about the layoffs at Bigelow Spencer, which he had to know about. They were in the papers for a week. But he wanted to see me squirm, I guess.”

“I’ve been on interviews with bastards like that. They make senior management and think that makes them a Pharaoh or something.”

“So this guy asks me if I saw the problems coming, the ones at Bigelow. And I said no, that I wasn’t doing research for the part of the company that fucked up. Then he asks me if I should have found out. And I said that, with all the Chinese Walls at Bigelow, I couldn’t have found out without breaking the law. Then he
stares
at me like he’s waiting for me to confess the real truth, that I had been behind the problems at Bigelow and had come to his office to infect his firm. It was bizarre.”

The waitress came by with more fish and more beer.

“Then it got even worse. He asked me why I was laid off when Bigelow was purchased, instead of the equivalent guy from Numera Partners, the guy who made me redundant. I explained that they canned my whole team from Bigelow. So he does another one of those staring pauses, again, like I’m lying to him. Then he says ‘Now, I don’t know you, Tim. We just met. But what I want to know is, are you loyal?’”

“
Loyal
?” Dad said through the sushi in his mouth.

“Yeah—loyal. I swear, I wanted to jump over the desk and kick his fucking Chiclet teeth down his throat. So I took a breath, and I asked him what he meant by
loyal
. Did he mean loyal to my employer? And he said yes, mostly, but also loyal in general. And I tried not to lose it, but I said ‘Well, was Bigelow loyal to me? After a few bad quarters, will Farragut be loyal to you? I mean, pay me what we agree on and I’ll do my job the best I can. I won’t steal or complain. But
loyal
? I don’t see where loyalty figures into it.”

“What did he say to that?”

“He did the staring pause for another minute, then just said it was nice to meet me and he’d hold onto my resume.”

“The kiss off.”

“Looks like it.”

“Loyalty? Obviously, this guy wanted you to say something,” Dad said and gestured for another beer.

“Yeah. I don’t think I gave him what he was looking for.”

“Sometimes it pays to stand up to a bully. But I don’t think this was one of those times.”

“I think you’re right. I’ll see what comes in after the holidays.”

“Loyalty. I heard a lot of bullshit in my day, but I never heard that question before. He must have really gotten burned.”

“I thought I had all my interview answers down pat. I guess my bullshit isn’t as cutting edge as I thought.”

“My last job before the one I’m at now—they were like that. We’d have these ‘culture conventions’ every month or two with this consultant and talk about our feelings, about what the company fucking
meant
to us. The company meant a goddamn paycheck. But some people would just go on and on with this absolute horseshit about
community
and
personal growth
. After a couple meetings, I just scheduled sales calls for those days.”

“It’s like that scene in
The Natural
—‘you pay me to hit baseballs, not listen to some headshrinker.’ Why can’t I just show up, do a good job and go home? Why do I have to buy into ‘core principles,’ and so on?”

“Then you buy in, and they lay you off at the first sign of a drop off. I was saying the other day, your generation has it so much worse than mine did,” Dad said, drinking from a fresh Ichiban. I motioned for one.

“Tell me about it. I just hope that the market will come back sometime soon,” I said.

“It’s an absolute mess out there right now. If we didn’t have the government contracts at Aerovan, we’d be in real trouble. I’m almost totally out of the market right now. What are they saying down in New York?”

“There’s not much to say. A few million people lied to each other for a decade or so until someone called out ‘bullshit,’ and everyone ran for the exits. I guess a pipeline of empty promises isn’t the best way to run a world. Go figure. It’s just shameful. And it’s a shit time to be out of work, that’s for sure.”

I took a breath, ate some fish, drank some beer.

“Anyway, you look good. How much weight have you lost?” I asked.

“About sixty pounds.”

“That’s great. You’re putting years on your life with that.”

“I just have to make it through this next month. Once they cut out this thing, I’m going to live a long time.”

And there, Dad paused and looked right at me. He wouldn’t imagine a scenario in which the mass wasn’t benign. He was an optimist, come from nothing much, fought in a war, gotten a college degree, and made his way to the upper middle class, for a while anyway.

“I’m going to live long enough to piss on your mother’s grave,” he said.

Thanks Dad.

Half drunk and full of sushi, I drove us back to the apartment. Dad and I talked, then let the TV do it for us. Sometimes even a whole lifetime together isn’t enough to come up with something to say. We switched between sports shows, history shows and the news. Then he passed me the remote and went to bed. I called Serena and told her voicemail I had gotten in safe and to have sweet dreams.

Then I went into the room where my father kept the miscellanea of his divorced life—his computer, golf clubs, big cases of toilet paper and coffee. I inflated my bed.

5.

Thursday, December 25

I guess if my folks had split up at a younger age, I wouldn’t find the process of leaving one to visit the other so uncomfortable. My stomach squirmed and I had trouble swallowing. I guess the divorce still bothers me. Those are the words I had to go with the sick feeling.

Mom lived in Framingham, a half hour to the east, also on Route 9. The trip out there was a long reminder—the furniture store that used to be a nightclub, the Chinese buffet that used to be a barbershop, the Brazilian steak house that used to be an Italian restaurant, the liquor store that was always a liquor store, the Starbucks that used to be a hillside. Home is a place you can never see with fresh eyes.

Even Dunkin Donuts had closed for Christmas day. But the stucco blob that sold Honey-Baked Ham, according to its sign, was jammed. The place never made much sense to me as a business. On Christmas day, though, it even had a cop directing traffic. Up the hill from the ham-hawker was the yellow-beige brick apartment complex where Mom had lived since the day she packed up her things and left a note on the kitchen table while Dad was out golfing.

The guard at the gate waved me through with all of his impatience and resignation at having to work on Christmas. From the parking lot, I could see the two of the biggest shopping Valhallas of Route 9, whose parking lots were empty that day, eerie and ceremonial as archaeological sites. I gathered my breath and Christmas presents.

I buzzed Mom’s apartment and she buzzed me up. After negotiating the door numbers, I found hers. Like Dad, she had lost weight and had dyed her hair since the divorce. I kissed her cheek on my way in. Her face was resuming the proportions of old photos, but with extra skin now hanging loose on it. She seemed very small. We sat down at the old wooden kitchen table, which took up too much of the apartment’s dining area. She was glad to see me. Maybe not as glad as Dad. But then, she wasn’t staring down the barrel of major surgery with no family in the world.

It was warm in the apartment, but Mom wore a fleece jacket just the same. She followed me as I dropped my bags and jacket in her spare room. It was clear that my presence threw her usual apartment routines into disarray. She offered me lunch, then breakfast, then a snack. I bargained it down to a soda and we sat down in front of the TV in the living room. Her apartment was clean and colorful. The pale sunlight did the best it could there.

“So how are things with you?” she asked.

“Well, I’m back here for a month, or more, for the surgery and the recovery. I’m not thrilled to be back that long. But I don’t have a job. So I guess it is what it is,” I said, quoting from Bill Belichick’s defiantly bland press conferences.

“The surgery, is it serious?” Mom asked.

“It’s just a mass they have to check out in his chest.”

“Is it cancer?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do they think it is?”

“They wouldn’t do the surgery if they already knew.”

“But do they have an opinion of what it might be?”

“I just said I don’t know.”

“I’m just asking …”

“And I’ve told you all I know. If you have more questions about Dad or his surgery, you can call him yourself,” I said. The hair bristled on my head.

“I’m just asking basic questions.”

“Yeah. And I just told you all I know.”

Mom shifted in her chair.

“I’m sorry you got stuck with this. It can’t be easy.”

“It is what it is,” I said again.

The phrase said the same thing as the shrug of the shoulders that often accompanied it. One more thing you can’t help, don’t want and can’t avoid.

“I’ll be okay,” I said, reminding myself to be glad that Mom knew enough and cared enough to worry.

“Okay,” Mom said tentatively.

“It is. It’s okay,” I said, nodding my head, pursing my lips and widening my eyes to say ‘enough already.’

Things went silent for a long minute. Mom asked me if I still liked my apartment in New York, and we were back in a safer conversation, something that fit the low-ceilinged apartment and the wooden bowl of potpourri in the middle of the kitchen table.

“And how’s Serena?” Mom asked.

“She’s good, busy. She’ll probably come up one of these weekends.”

“You already told me, but sometimes you seem so rushed on the phone, how was Thanksgiving with her family?”

“It was good. It was a little stressful meeting them for the first time. But they were really nice, very laid back.”

Serena had saved me from a Thanksgiving of doing the divorced-child math of split holidays. I had just been laid off, and the prospect of meeting her parents seemed less draining than seeing my own. It was only the second Thanksgiving since the divorce and I was eager to dodge it.

“You said they were hippies?”

“Yeah, more or less. They live up by Woodstock and all that. Her father is a software engineer and her mother is the principal at a Montessori school up there.”

“I didn’t think that Montessori schools had principals.”

“Maybe not principal, but something like that.”

“So was it fun?” Mom said. I don’t know exactly how she intended the words to sound. But a knife was indeed twisted.

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to watch TV?” she asked.

Mom was just trying to be accommodating. I know that. But it was hard to hear. The TV is how my kind—the white folk from the suburbs—gently ignore each other. And in our limited Christmas together, it seemed like a hostile act, or at least a depressing one, to watch TV. But I was too tired to do much else.

“Yeah. I think there are some college football games on.”

Mom put some fish cakes and stuffed clams from a nearby seafood market into the oven. The sunlight poured through big glass doors that opened onto a tiny concrete porch. We ate and talked—not about the divorce, or Dad’s looming surgery, or the way everything you rely on for safety and comfort can vanish in the bat of an eye. We talked about my cousins, about my job prospects, about the winter. It was a courtesy. I couldn’t tell if it was hers or mine. And I couldn’t tell if I was grateful for it.

We ate and unwrapped presents in front of the muted TV. She gave me some dress shirts for the job I didn’t have, and trinkets—a deck of Patriots playing cards and a Red Sox yoyo. I gave her another fleece jacket and a couple new hardcovers. Then we drove out to Newton, to see a movie. Newton was how far east you had to drive to see a foreign or ‘art’ movie. We saw something about how people in another country (it doesn’t matter which, but it was Lithuania) have it tough, but still manage to find the beauty in everyday life. On the drive back, Mom steered the conversation from how pretentious the movie was, to the subject of sleep apnea, and what a shame it was that they’d found a cure for it.

“All those people who used to just die in their sleep, what will they do now? People used to say ‘Oh, she died in her sleep. She didn’t suffer.’ It was easy on everyone, especially the people who died,” Mom said, blowing her cigarette smoke out the rental car window. “Now they just want to keep you alive so the hospital can take every last penny.”