Beauty: A Novel (3 page)

Carol sat in the president’s chair and still said nothing. CFO and Production looked at the silenced Mathews and said nothing themselves. Sales and Marketing tried on his smile and leaned forward with an elbow on one knee, then thought better of it. Carol had long since learned that silence worked better than inviting nervous, assertive executive bullshit. Mathews looked out the window at the Mercedes he got to keep and the sod he hadn’t quite got placed.

A sequence of quick banters signaled someone coming down the hall toward the open door. That would be Human Resources, and apparently he had a word for every assistant in every open door. Either he was a jerk or they liked him. Neither of which made him honest, but if Carol had to keep one of these guys around, he might be the one. He was the one officer who had not been with the company forever, which could put him outside the golf foursome in ways that would be helpful to her.

He came in, checked out his colleagues sitting on their hands like felons, and walked across the room to her, smiled, and said, “You must be Carol MacLean. I’m Dave Parks. You’ve figured out I’m HR. Sorry to hold you up. Somebody has a medical insurance emergency.”

He had his hand out to shake, and when she didn’t look at it, he put it in his pocket.

“Okay,” he said. “No talking. I get it,” but he looked her in the eye and kept a pleasant smile as he sat down among the others.

When he was down and the smile was gone, Carol stood and said, “We’re going to get some packing boxes, and then we’re all going to go together to each of your offices so you can gather your belongings and leave the property. Computers stay. If your car is a company lease, call a taxi.”

Elizabeth Island was not corporate heartland, and Elizabeth’s Fish was a corporate minnow, but these were still grown men at the top of the local pile. Wherever the golf course was, they belonged, and most of them had to have second homes and boats. Even so, it was only Production who stood up indignant. Then Mathews stood because he had to. Sales and Marketing spread his arms and made an incredulous face and stayed down. Hard to figure HR, though he stayed down, too. The chief financial officer looked ready to curl up in a ball.

Production said, “What the hell are you talking about?” and managed to say it like he meant it.

This was one of many times when the Beast thing worked for her. She wasn’t taller than he was, but she was as tall, and she said quietly, “Everybody sit down, and I’ll remind you what I’m talking about. The short version.”

Production put his hands on his hips and stared at her, and she stood still and straight and watched him.

Mathews sat, and Production sat.

Since she lacked necessary background, Carol would have to bullshit now. But it wouldn’t have been hard to read this group even if you’d just wandered in out of the rain.

She said, “As soon as the German group started to come apart, you found someone under the radar there to okay your plant and help you leverage your reserves. You moved that money through local real estate interests and local builders and local landscapers and local anybody else with an understanding of happy billing. Your salaries rose to match the prestige of ESP and your new facility. When you needed more money, you borrowed more, enough finally that Baxter Blume probably can’t pile any new debt on the company. None of which addresses the hardware in the plant; when I tackle the reselling of all that new equipment, I won’t be surprised to find verifiable evidence of sweetheart markups, which could be an easy prosecution. You’ve put up a perfectly useless plant under the noses of distracted Germans but Germans just the same. Which means you did things carefully. All told, a fair amount of money disappeared into your pockets, but it isn’t going to be worth filing charges unless there are flags. Since you guys are smarter than I am, and you knew the territory, there probably won’t be flags. For now, I only want to get you out of the building and then check to be sure all your private cash flow spigots have been shut off. If anybody has anything to say about that, I will begin investigations in order to prosecute. Let’s do HR’s office last.”

They helped each other gather and sort, packing one another’s souvenir hats and portrait photographs. Carol watched the packing and watched Parks.

When they got to Human Resources, to Parks, she asked him to hold up on the packing and wait in his office for her while she walked the rest of them downstairs and out. The offices wing was not big, and it was mostly emptied for the end of the day. The line workers from the plant were long gone. But there were a few people in the executive parking lot to watch the parade.

Once she had them out the door, Carol watched from inside the lobby with its shimmering fish wallpaper and its sepia blowups of historic waterfront scenes. The CFO was bent over with fear, but the other three held their heads high and walked to their cars with a little bounce, Mathews a big bounce, not only as if he’d figured this would happen and didn’t care, but as if they still had good things coming to them. Somewhere inside the company, they had definitely left a few spigots open for themselves.

The Ghosts of Fish

D
ave Parks watched out his window as the guys drove away. Maybe Mathews was as glad as he said he was, just to finally have it over. It could also be that he and the other guys had something extra working. Dave didn’t want to know about that. He hadn’t wanted to stay on when plans for a ridiculous new plant surfaced, already in an advanced stage, but they offered him straight salary for what everybody sensed was a few more years. It was enough to pad the nut for the rest of his life, and he took it. He did an honest day’s work, and it let his wife, Barbara, continue to comfortably run her nice little diet center—nice because it brought in pocket money for her and comfortable because she didn’t feel she had to do it, something she might have felt if he hadn’t taken his extra years.

Carol MacLean wouldn’t know anything about that, but she had figured that he was the outsider on the executive team. That had to be why she wanted him to stay behind, to help her shut things down honestly. Not something to jump up and down about, but a few more months of salary wouldn’t hurt, and he wouldn’t mind honoring the good years he’d spent at the old plant. Besides that, MacLean looked like a working-class kid made good, which was a point in her favor as far as Dave, a working-class kid himself, was concerned.

He wondered if MacLean’s father had worked on a floor. If so, taking a swing at the bosses might feel good to her. It had to feel better than her next step, going onto the floor here with her news. What a job. And after she was finished here, she’d have to do it all over again someplace else. He couldn’t imagine anybody wanting to do this again and again.

MacLean had told him—asked him, to be fair—to wait for her and forget about cleaning out his stuff for a minute. Still, he took a position beside his box, looking good-boy-ready to load up and make his own walk through the parking lot. He took a confirmation call.

And here she came.

She saw him putting the phone down, and she looked, just a passing thing, as if she figured he had been spreading news of the massacre. It didn’t appear to bother her, and just the same he said, “The medical insurance cleared. Patient can afford to live.”

He said it cheerfully. He was a cheerful guy, and she came over and shook his hand and smiled at his eager posture with the box. He had his radio turned low to oldies and pointed at it as the Supremes came on, did a shrug of a move. He was a little older than she was, but he imagined they’d gone to similar high schools in working-class suburbs. Long time ago.

“Have you done this before, Dave? Been around a burial? You’re pretty calm.”

“I started out in Pittsburgh,” he said. “At the end, we were three years winding it down, but we did good by the guys on the floor, as good as we could, better than most. I was proud of it. And I had time to get something started somewhere else. I figured on the opposite of steel, but who knew fish were going the same way?”

“This won’t take three years,” Carol said. “Do you mind if I sit? Long day.”

Dave gestured at his desk chair, but she shook her head and sat in the guest chair. Her phone rang, but she looked and didn’t take the call.

Dave was center stage, and he went on with it. He said, “Carol, if you’re asking me to stay on and give you a hand, I’m happy to do it.”

“I would like your help, Parks, and I can make it worthwhile, and I’ll send you into the world looking like a good guy.”

“I am a good guy.” He realized he’d said that while he was standing over her, which was not what he’d meant to do, and he sat behind his desk and smiled to take any edge off.

She said, “I apologize. I didn’t mean to suggest you weren’t a good guy. I guessed you were. Let’s you and I make it as right as we can with the men in the plant.”

In Dave’s experience, most people in business who apologized out loud didn’t mean it, but Carol sounded like she did mean it and was moving on, which was another point in her favor.

She said, “I need you for more than HR, Parks. This is a small company, and you probably know most of it. I need you across the board.”

“We used to be a smaller plant but a bigger company, and I don’t know it all, but I’m here. What I’ve got, you’ve got.”

She wasn’t all that obvious with it, but Carol was studying him. Dave assumed she wanted to go out of Elizabeth’s Fish with a good report card herself, and for that she needed to know if she could trust him. He wondered if she had a sense of humor. He said, “Trust me,” and she laughed. Definitely a good sign. Mary Wells came on the radio, and he looked for a reaction.

Carol said, “I’m from Detroit.”

He said, “Pittsburgh and Detroit. Steel to wheels. Where do we start?”

“Those other four have something else still working, and I’d like to shut it off. Can you help me there?”

“If you’re asking whether I have something working myself, the answer is no. I don’t have any part in anything working, and never have. To your actual question, our second in command in Finance is a straight arrow, and she’s been in the company a long time. She could plug leaks, and she’d know places to look that I don’t. Annette Novato. So far, all I’ve heard her mention is missing electricity.”

Carol said, “You stayed out of it.”

“I’m here. But I stayed out of it. I did my job. I’ll call Annette and have her lock up the checks.”

“Are you going home after that?”

Which Dave took to mean that Carol planned on working late and wanted him to sign up. What the hell? “I could stay,” he said. “It’s Motown night on the radio. We can order in. It’s not the city—people go home when the bell rings, so we’ll have the building to ourselves. You want me to see if I can get Annette to come back?”

Dave thought he liked Carol. She was to the point, seemed to know what she was doing and did it, had a sense of humor, knew Motown.

She said, “No, but would you lead me through town to the old plant on the harbor? It’s still listed in the assets.”

Yep, working late to check out a not-exactly-decrepit fish-processing plant, especially after a five-hour drive and a quick-draw boardroom massacre—in Dave’s book, that counted, earning your keep.

“It still has the old lines in place. I can get you keys.”

“It still has the old lines?”

“It has everything. It has the ghosts of fish.”

Too Old a Zebra

I
t was dark when Carol followed Parks down through the heart of town to the harbor. Elizabeth’s Fish took up most of a little spit of land that reached into the harbor, and even in the dark she could tell that an original building had been expanded and connected and connected again to other once-separate buildings along the water. Those would have been the growth decades in the business, when the generations of the family that really built Elizabeth’s Fish were smarter and more ruthless than anybody else and had the added benefit of an ocean full of fish.

There were broken security lights, a section of Cyclone fence falling off its poles; Keep Out signs had their first graffiti; in places, the asphalt underfoot was broken to gravel.

Parks said, “Shut a plant, and next day it’s Halloween.” He said it offhand, but he didn’t sound happy.

With the shadows and the night, with the added emptiness of water out beyond the building, the plant would have felt big to someone who wasn’t accustomed, but Carol had been around bigger operations.

By the splashes of light from the working security poles, she could see that the biggest investment for some time had been in the façade. The respectable generations would have said, Let’s make the place look respectable. After that, every several years, as the amounts of fish and cash flow subsided, it would have been a matter of choosing new colors for the repaintings and then slapping up a new version of the old logo. Carol might be able to find evidence of the German tenure, but probably not the Japanese. The Japanese were selling even as they bought.

“Go home,” she said to Parks. “I’m just looking.”

“I’m fine,” he said. “This is a cemetery that matters. I worked here. Met my second wife here.”

“You liked it.”

“I don’t know liked. I was still young enough to make a go of it, but it wasn’t easy at first.”

“After Pittsburgh.”

“After Pittsburgh. I left things in Pittsburgh. Didn’t you ever have an ‘after Detroit,’ Carol?”

Dividing the blocks in her neighborhood, the “village,” people called it, were alleys behind the houses. It was a clean neighborhood in those days, but the houses were small and the lots narrow. The brick of the storefronts in the village was stamped tar paper. In the alley behind her and her father’s house, boys met to work on motorbikes and then motorcycles and then cars. They had a garage that could hold one car at a time. Carol found those boys and hung around when she was so much younger that they couldn’t even hate her for being a girl. Over the years she learned about motors and then everything to do with cars. When she was still much too young, she made runs to the parts store for the boys. After a while, the parts store guys gave her a little something, and the boys gave her a little something. When she was older, she realized that was business, and she knew she liked business. When she was older still, she realized she would fall in love with one of these boys.

She didn’t need to call up any of that, least of all Dominic. She said, mostly to herself, “I never had any befores.”

Parks, a good guy, said gently, “That sounds like a song, Carol.” Then he laughed and said, “I wish I’d never had any.”

Carol nodded to be polite. She hardly ever thought about Dominic. When she did, she ached like she was missing everything. Right now, however, she was looking at her last burial, and after that, no, she was not going to get everything, but she was going to get what she was allowed to want: her own company. She wanted that a lot.

She said to Parks, “So the lines are still inside?”

“If you wanted a fish stick, we could go in right now, pull out a block of frozen, saw off a shingle, run that through the piece cutters and onto the shake pans as the belts move the patties under the oil spray and then the breading sifters. On through the ovens. Are you hungry, Carol? Do you mind me calling you Carol? I’m fine with Ms. MacLean if you prefer.”

“I’m not hungry, but I am glad to get an idea of how the line travels. And yes, thank you, please call me Carol.”

What she almost said, and decided not to say, was “Please call me Carol instead of Beast.” What her own guys, Baxter especially, had said out loud in the conference room in New York, that had stung more than usual. But she needed to focus on business, period. She sure as hell couldn’t afford to get distracted and give Baxter a last-minute reason to renege on his promise. She was so close to getting her own company that, just now, here in the dark in front of Elizabeth’s Fish, feelings that she’d shut up and forgotten seemed bursting to get out. She was full of her dad raising her alone and her looking out for him like she looked out for the boys in the alley, and then learning to do business the same way, looking out for everybody at Baxter Blume, and doing it as the Beast. And this was the Beast’s last appearance. She wanted to hold her breath until she had her company, and then with her first free breath, then she’d smile, and the Beast would be gone.

Parks startled her to attention. “And in the new plant, the lines are shinier and have bells and whistles.”

“But it’s basically the same line in both plants, right? Fish sticks are fish sticks?”

Parks nodded and said, “Fish sticks are fish sticks.”

Carol said, “I’m going to stand here for a while by myself, get this perspective on the new plant. Why don’t you head home? We’ll map things out in the morning.”

Parks handed her a ball of keys and drove off, and Carol was glad to be alone. Parks seemed a straight-ahead guy, and she liked him. She thought she trusted him. He had flipped a switch on the past, but that wasn’t his fault. The switch had been there. Dominic was always there if she let him be there. She switched herself back into focus.

Now that her eyes were more accustomed, she spotted a gap in the plant’s façade. She saw that the fencing had been bent up enough for someone to slide under. She lay down on her back, reached under, and got a grip on the fence from the other side. She pulled herself through until she could stand. She was in a tunnel of darkness between two of the buildings.

She walked toward a pale glow of lights and what she thought would be the harbor. At the end of the tunnel, water spread from beneath the edge of the dock she stood on. The lights of town stacked up the hill to the left. A dozen small working boats, docked one to another, floated beyond the pier. One fair-size boat on the other side of the harbor had serious, blue-bright lights shining down to the machined clutter of its deck.

Carol didn’t know fishing, but she knew the feel of living business, and there was hardly a pulse here, which she half loved. And not because a pulse going away meant a job. The deserted plants and factories had always been sadly beautiful to her, museums of echoes and iron.

Someone came out on the deck of the lighted vessel across the way, and she could hear him talking to someone else inside the boat. The water carried the sound to where she stood. She couldn’t make out what he was saying, but he spoke slowly enough that his words, whatever they were, came singsong.

She walked back through the tunnel to the security lights and pulled herself under the fence again. She swiped sand off the back of her suit and got in her car and dialed Remy.

She would find out what he had been doing at the meeting, what he’d learned about her company, what the problem was earlier in the day when she’d been trying to bring her focus together for this one last burial.

Remy picked up and said, “Listen, Carol.”

Carol was not somebody who ordinarily needed reassurance, but she had needed it just now, and she liked hearing Remy’s voice and imagining him at his desk in New York. She could manage to bury one more body, for God sake. No sweat, as Baxter liked to say. Now she waited for Remy’s actual news.

When he didn’t say anything, she said, “What?”

Remy said, “Baxter was trying to give you a heads-up with his ‘Beast’ and his you-don’t-belong-here. Because Blume is pushing you out. It’s done.”

She wasn’t hearing this right, and she didn’t believe it.

She said, “No.” But she’d been afraid of it since before Battle Bay, almost since Baxter first proposed giving her a company to run.

“You’re out, Carol. It’s done.”

“Baxter’s unloading me?” He was, and now, when it was already done, her stomach knotted with fear, as if the possibility was just ahead.

“Blume, but yes.”

“Blume?” Oh, Jesus. What had she done wrong? Nothing.

“He wanted Susannah to babysit the stand-alone division they’re picking up, the one you were supposed to get. It’s a little bigger than they thought. Blume got cold feet about giving it to you. He thought you were too old a zebra to get bigger stripes was the way he put it.”

Carol sat in her car and felt her company being pulled out of her belly. It felt horrible, and it felt right, as if it was what she’d asked for.

Remy said, “I’m sorry.”

“This means I’m an undertaker for life.”

“No, Carol.”

“I thought Baxter was testing me with the ‘Beast’ and all his bullshit about belonging in the room. I was sure that if I stood up to it, I was home. Blume looked at me like it was any other day. Did I fuck up?”

“Carol, you’re not an undertaker anymore, not for Baxter Blume. Or you won’t be as soon as you finish out the fish.”

Carol had always had more time being alone than she’d known what to do with. She’d been so alone that she worked harder than anybody else, which it turned out she had to do to get where everybody else got. She’d worked her whole life for this, from the alley, from selling parts and from answering engine fixes over the phone, to killing other people’s companies and looking in the eyes of the poor bastards she canned. Everything she’d done, she’d done to have a company she could run herself. She didn’t know how she could have worked harder. She didn’t know if she could work harder now. She had lived on the road, one burial after another. She had rights to a small interchangeable timeshare apartment in a New York building of flexible corporate timeshares; when she was there, she put out the few pictures she had. Her company was going to be the place where she would stop and stay.

“They plan to break the news when the fish company is off the books. Baxter figured you could use the early warning to start looking. You know a lot of people, Carol.”

“They think somebody else can do it cheaper. Baxter thinks once I hear about my company going to Susannah, I won’t perform. Blume knows better than that.”

“It’s Blume.”

“I’m somebody unusual in the firm, but what the hell, I’ve been unusual for years.”

“Baxter likes you. But he’s taking less of a role in the new fund, which leaves Blume in charge and you hanging.”

“And you’re the guy who can do it cheaper. Not that anybody cares about cheaper.”

“I’m sorry, Carol. If I didn’t take it, they would have got somebody else.”

She could tell from his voice that he was sorry. “It’s not your fault, Remy. I just didn’t know it would be like this.”

He said, “Carol?”

She said, “If I’m going to bury this fish, I have to go. Thank you.”

She closed her phone and could barely breathe.

She stood up out of the car and made herself breathe deeply. She was fine. There was nothing Carol MacLean couldn’t handle.

Then before she knew it, Carol MacLean was on her hands and knees in the blown sand that surrounded the last body she was supposed to bury. She was the healthiest businessman she knew, and she was on her hands and knees and sobbing so hard she couldn’t get up. Thank God Parks from HR had gone, though if he’d stayed she’d never have let herself. The sobs became gasping heaves, as if she could weep herself to death. When finally the sobs let go of her, she rocked forward and backward, knees to hands to knees to hands, until her bones were numb on the sanded asphalt.

Oh, Jesus. The lights of a car. Parks was coming back.

The thing was to pretend she had fallen.

She didn’t look at the sound of the car door and the first footsteps. It was a truck door. So, not Parks. She got her breath and she composed her face. If she’d fallen, her face could show that she was sore somewhere. She got her voice ready to work.

Beat-up work boots and jeans.

“Are you all right?” someone said.

She was so relieved it wasn’t Dave Parks that she could have put her forehead down against the asphalt and sand.

Whoever it was said, “I have a fishing boat docked across the harbor, and I saw the lights here. Thought I’d check it out.”

By now, Carol was Carol. She could have gotten up, and she would get up. This was a man with a nice voice. Instead of getting up, she said, “Thank you.”

A boot stepped closer, a serious boot but too close, and a hand took hold of her arm.

“I can get up.” Her voice was not nice.

Though she didn’t mind the hand. She could see it was a strong, callused hand, around her arm just under her armpit. The best place to hold if you’re picking anybody up. It felt like she hadn’t been touched in years.

He said, “I know you can get up, but around here, especially men like me, we don’t get much chance to practice as gentlemen. Don’t be angry.” But she was up before he was through with his speaking.

She started to tip over, but she didn’t fall because the man’s hand on her arm tightened enough to keep her steady, and with his other hand, he brushed free the strands of her hair that were caught in his grip on her arm.

Carol smiled at this man, who she realized was shorter than she was. She had lost her company before she got it, so if she was ever going to become somebody who smiled, she would have to start it on her own. She had money, not a lot, nothing like the equity players at Baxter Blume, but enough. She’d been down on her hands and knees so completely that she was unsteady even with his hand firm on her arm.

She said, “I’m . . .” and then she wasn’t standing. There was no
kind
of
fainting. It was just an elevator down, because she was disoriented from how hard she had sobbed.

He knelt beside her and helped her to sit. His other hand, which had brushed her hair, was now across in front of her, holding her other shoulder.