Domestic Violets (15 page)

“So, how are things?” she asks. “I’ll pretend you haven’t been avoiding me and just assume that you’re busy.”

“They offered me a promotion at work. Vice president of . . . I don’t really know . . . something mildly important.” This must sound as silly to my mother as it did to Katie, because she just laughs. It’s very telling when your own mother finds the prospect of you in charge of something to be a joke.

“We’re getting off track here,” I say. “We’re talking about Gary. He’s a mess. I don’t think he even knows how to use the appliances. It’s probably dangerous to have him in your house by himself.”

“Helplessness isn’t necessarily an attractive quality in a husband, either,” she says.

Across the yard, Hank makes a halfhearted run at a few squirrels. They scramble up their tree and glare down at him, barking in that weird squirrel way. I pick my dad’s book up from the grass and run my finger over the raised “CV” on the spine. Every sentence and passage I see is familiar. In “Macy’s,” I read my dad’s brief description of the fictional version of me. I’m frightened of the escalator and of being alone for the very first time. I’m about to put it away, to toss it back in the grass and continue watching my mother hide out here with her plants, but then I notice the title page.
See, Maryanne
, Curtis has written.
I told you it would happen
.

“Did he send you this?” I ask. “Did you . . .
see
him?”

She shakes her head. “He actually left it on our porch one night a few weeks ago. I saw him from the bedroom. I think he was drunk.”

“What does it mean? ‘I told you it would happen’?”

“When my book came out, when we first got married, he took me out to this little restaurant in D.C. to celebrate, down on East Capitol Street. You were actually there, too. We couldn’t afford a babysitter back then. He told me how proud he was of me, but he said I’d have to work hard to keep up because he was going to win the Pulitzer someday. I told him he was being an ass.”

There are very few memories for me of them together. This would have been a nice one to have. “Wow, so he was intolerable even
before
he was famous?”

She sits back down next to me again, leaving her little shovel in the grass. I’m sure there’s a name for it, and it’s not just referred to in the gardening world as a “little shovel.” There are tears in her eyes even though she’s smiling, and I get that panicky rush of feeling that men get when their mothers are about to cry. “We’ve talked on the phone—just two or three times—not that much. He actually told me he was sorry, for everything, and that he wishes things had gone differently. It took him more than three decades to say that, and all it did was piss me off. All these years, I’ve been watching him from afar, making mistake after mistake with those stupid, silly girls. His life could have been so much better. He would have been happier if he’d never left.”

“But you wouldn’t have. You know that, Mom. He
left
us, but Gary never did. Gary has been there the entire time.”

Her face looks raw, and I wonder how long she’s been out here in the yard. “Curtis left
me
, Tom. But he never left you. I think you’re the only thing he actually likes about himself. I imagine that’s why he’s staying with you. He just wants to be with you guys for a while.”

“So, you know about that, huh? I wasn’t sure if . . .”

But she nods, forgiving me.

“Why are you talking again
now
? He wins a Pulitzer and suddenly that changes the last thirty years? It’s just a gold stamp on a book, Mom. It has nothing to do with you, or with me, or with Gary. You’re better off now. As long as I’ve been alive, I’ve watched everyone give him get-out-of-jail-free cards. He doesn’t deserve it—not from you.”

She pats my title page and smiles. “Who’s being melodramatic now? If you really thought the Pulitzer was just a gold stamp on a book, you wouldn’t have spent five years writing this when you could have been doing anything else in the world.”

When she’s right about something, my mother knows it, and she enjoys it quietly. Through the sliding glass door into Bernice’s kitchen, I see Allie. She’s holding a glass of lemonade and waving at me.

“I’ve been thinking about your father a lot lately, and I’ve realized something. I married Gary specifically for the fact that he
wasn’t
Curtis. If your father has an opposite, it’s Gary. I just need to decide if I want to spend the rest of my life with someone I married by default.”

I miss Gary now, the constant underdog. I wish he were here to tease my mother about reading so much and ask me about the oil in my Honda.

“So, what’s your book about? Really?”

“It’s about a teenage boy who finds out he’s adopted. He thinks that his real dad is this famous actor, so he steals his adopted dad’s car and runs away to Hollywood to find him.”

“He’s idealized the image of his father, then?” she says, frowning at my pages. I imagine her standing at a blackboard staring out at a bunch of sleepy-eyed teenagers.

I tell her maybe, but then her face changes when she sees what should be my name on the title page. “Who in the world is Thomas Ferris?” she asks.

“That’s me. It’s my pen name.”

“Pen name? Why? And where did you get Ferris?”

I consider lying, or coming up with some interesting, intellectual response. But I’ve got nothing. “
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
was on TBS a few months ago. I liked the sound of it.”

“Well, that’s certainly literary.”

“I thought he was totally kick-ass when I was fifteen.”

“What’s wrong with Thomas Violet?” she says. “I like that name.”

The answer seems so obvious, like one of those lines you cut out of an early draft because you don’t want to hit the reader over the head with it. “Come on, Mom. A family can only support one writer, right?”

Sadly, this pitch-perfect piece of circular storytelling is wasted. My mom hasn’t even heard me. She’s too busy reading, and I’m left to stare at a dozen unplanted violets moving gently in the breeze.

Chapter 19

M
onday mornings are
usually tiring, never-ending affairs of infinite sadness, like watching
The English Patient
. But on this Monday, I’m energized with a sense of purpose. Because I am a professional copywriter, allow me to draw up my agenda using bullet points. This morning I plan to:

• Tell a frightening multimillionaire from the UK to shove it.
  
• Inform my boss that he is about to lose his job.
  
• Apologize to Katie for my behavior at Johnny Rockets.
  

This third bullet is the one I’m really dreading, mainly because I have no idea how I’m going to do it. On the surface, I’ve done nothing wrong at all. I’ve had a friendly, short exchange with a coworker in a restaurant and introduced her to my family. However, as my mother reminded me yesterday, I’m a Violet, and so the surface means nothing.

I’ve arrived at the ungodly hour of 8:10 a.m. I didn’t even know the building was open this early, and Cubeland is a lonely ghost town. Upstairs though, en route to Buckingham Palace, worried executives are hard at work, doing whatever it is that executives do. There’s hand-wringing, and a few overextended souls are pacing about their offices while MSNBC blares in the background.

“I’m here to see Ian,” I tell Lauren. Even though it’s hardly dawn, she looks foxy today.

“Oh, are you?” she asks.

“Indeed I am, Lauren. We’ve got some pretty important business to discuss. It’s all very complicated.”

“Hold on, Mr. Trump. I’ll give him a buzz.” A moment later, she seems surprised to find that her boss—
the
boss—is available to see me. “Well, apparently you’re as important as you’re pretending to be.”

“I tell you what. When I make my first billion, you and I’ll sneak off to the Caribbean somewhere. Say good-bye to the corporate thing forever. How does that sound?”

“I’ll look forward to that,” she says, boredly waving me toward Ian’s closed door. When my hand hits the knob, all of my posturing crumbles and I am 100 percent uncertain. This could turn out to be a profoundly stupid move. Jesus, the least I could have done was wear a tie. What’s the matter with me?

He’s sitting at his desk, his suit coat folded neatly on a chair, his own tie slack on his neck. This is how the titans look before securing their armor for the day. “Hello, mate,” he says. “Just the man I wanted to see. What’ve you got there?”

I sit down and slide the British edition of
The Bridge That Wasn’t There
across his desk. “Just a little something.”

His eyes grow wide when he sees the title page. On the way home from my encounter with Ashley this weekend, I had my dad sign it and write,
To Ian, All the Best in the World of Business
.

“I ran into my dad this weekend. He owed me a favor.”

“Well then, this is quite lovely, mate. Cheers.” He flips the book over and looks at the picture of my dad, and I can see that I’ve made him happy. I’ve regressed, back to pleasing authority again like a kid, and this sudden levity only brings more uncertainty. My wife, up north with her librarians now, is almost certainly right. I am not Curtis Violet, and Brandon will probably call me this week and advise me to look into a career in accounting because my book is a festering turd, not even worth the MSW-stolen paper on which it’s printed.

“This is a gift of celebration then, I presume?” he says. “If it weren’t before 9 a.m. I’d suggest a toast.”

“Well,” I say, because this is often how people start sentences. I change my mind, and then I change it back again. And then I look at Ian’s desk. Scattered there, from side to side, are trade magazines, folders with complicated names, spreadsheets, and piles of papers with numbers and figures on them. For most of my adult life, I’ve had no idea where I belong, and maybe I’ll never know. But I do know one thing. I sure as hell don’t belong in this place. “Think of it as a gift of appreciation. I appreciate the offer, honestly, but . . .”

Ian Barksdale’s smile fades into an expression I’m more accustomed to: the executive perma-frown.

“The thing is, I don’t think I’m the man for the job.”

“Tom, if this is about Doug, I appreciate your loyalty, really, however—”

“No,” I say. “That’s not it actually. I wish that it was, because then at least this would somehow be noble. But, I just don’t think I can do it. I want to be a writer. Actually, I
am
a writer—I just want to start being a
real
one.”

Ian leans back in his chair, eyeing me carefully. He seems about to perform an Executive Mind Trick. “A writer?”

“Yes,” I say. And then I say it again, trying to make it sound like something I’m not apologizing for.

He nods at my dad’s book. “A writer like this?”

“Well, more or less. Most likely less.”

A long breath, and then a glance out the window. “When I was at university, I wanted to teach English,” he says. “It was my dream job.”

“Really? Wow.”

“Turns out English teachers are poor, and I actually don’t like most children. They’re really quite dull.”

“Oh.”

“You’re aware of the financial opportunity that you’re about to pass up, correct? The bonus structure and the improved benefits and all of those details?” His accent makes this sound very grave, but the die is cast, and we both know it. He pushes my dad’s book to the middle of his desk and tightens his tie into a perfect Windsor knot below his Adam’s apple. His interest in me is waning by the second.

“Yes,” I say. “I am.”

“Very well then. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

As I head back toward my department, away from the executives, I realize that my hands are shaking. I’m exhilarated and a little sick to my stomach. I’m a writer, and I’ve admitted it to this powerful stranger. Forget the other shit—the drinking and bad husbanding and wildly prolific philandering—
this
is what Curtis Violet would do.

But there’s no time for self-congratulations. I need to talk to Doug right away and let him know what’s going on. By now, he should be in his office with his papers piled neatly beside his Washington Redskins coffee mug. I’ll tell him what’s about to happen. We’ll shake hands, and he’ll be grateful for the heads-up.

Breezing through Cubeland, I notice that Katie hasn’t arrived yet. She’s my third bullet of the day, though, and so I press on, sticking to my schedule. As I turn the corner toward Doug’s office, though, I see that for the first time in as long as I can remember, his door is closed. On a normal day, this would be meaningless, but today, somehow, I know that it’s not good. Through his door window, I peek in, and I see just enough to know that I shouldn’t have waited until today. I should have looked him up on the intranet site or Googled him and tracked him down at home, or at least sent him a goddamn e-mail. But I didn’t, and now, with a stunned, wounded look on his face, he’s trapped behind his desk staring at Janice Stringer, the head of HR, and one of her pasty-faced lawyers.

Our eyes meet briefly through the streaked glass. “No,” I whisper.

With the world’s slightest nod, he tells me yes.

Before I can escape into my own office, Greg stops me. He’s holding a perfectly toasted bagel that smells of fish and an obnoxious cup from Starbucks. “Doesn’t look good for Doug in there, huh? Strange, I thought they only fired people on Fridays. Maybe that’s a myth.”

“Go fuck yourself, Greg,” I say—and I’m not smiling.

When I slam the door to my office, it feels so good that I nearly reopen it so I can slam it again. At my desk, I sit and stare, contemplating some harsh realities. After my stunt up at Buckingham Palace a few minutes ago, the only person in the building with any authority or clout who doesn’t actively dislike me is currently getting fired across the hall. The tsunami is coming—there’s no way that it isn’t—and I’m a lonely little boat adrift at sea.

My computer beeps, telling me that I have a new e-mail. It’s from Katie, and the subject line reads, simply, “Sick.”

She’s not feeling well, and so she’s taking a sick day, but that’s not true at all. She’s staying home because she hates me. Because on Friday afternoon I was her hero—at least kind of, in an asinine way. And then on Friday evening I was a married father in a restaurant who didn’t even want to talk to her. And now she’s not going to be here today. And Doug just got fired. And I just turned down a promotion. And it’s not even 8:45.

I fucking hate Mondays.