Grist Mill Road (15 page)

It is as if his mind is readying him for the moment when he will be called upon. Something is going to happen, he can feel it.

Every week he sits in Dr. Rosenstock's office telling him none of this. And he doesn't tell Dr. Rosenstock about Matthew, Red Moose Barn, or Jean-Jacques Rougerie, because what if his therapist begins to suspect him of something? What if he feels duty bound to report him to some kind of authorities?

Or what if Dr. Rosenstock is part of the plot?

And it has to be some kind of a plot, doesn't it? The offer to make Red Moose Barn a reality coming from the one person in the world whose offer Patrick can never accept? What other tortures does life hold up its sleeve? And how can this be an accident? No, the world has turned against him. First Trevino, then Matthew. And who else might be in on this? Who next? A taxi driver failing to yield at a crossing? A skateboarder careening across the sidewalk? Or Hannah? Might Hannah be next?

No, Hannah loves me,
he thinks.

Sure, because you're quite the catch, Paddyboy. Bed-maker, laundry boy, food blogger
.

June, July, August.

It happens slowly, piece by piece, day by day, like with the growth of a child. You look away for a few months and when you turn back it seems as if a new person has entered the room.

Patrick can feel some kind of structure being gradually built up around him, the scaffolding rising pole upon pole. And soon there are panes of frosted glass being erected, the panels of a structure whose purpose is to keep him from the world, to keep the world from him, Patrick bound in a foggy kind of prison.

At home he still cooks, slogging his way through the recipes and techniques of Jean-Jacques Rougerie, refining the menu of Red Moose Barn, calibrating the ingredients in his breads and biscuits and waffles. He must keep himself busy busy busy, because if he stops moving, everything will be over. Only on the weekends can he relax, making breakfasts that he and Hannah eat in bed before settling down with the newspaper or a book. Slow mornings, idle time. To be in a room with another person doing nothing feels like meditation, to be idle in a room all alone feels like disease.

Now the depression seems even worse than it had been in his late teens, then twice in his twenties. But can that be true? This time around he doesn't want to hurt himself—he wouldn't want Hannah to find him. This is just one of the ways in which his wife saves him, over and over, every day of his life.

And yet something is fading between them, so that the night of their wedding anniversary has begun to feel like one last great fling, their midnight hours on the table reminding Patrick of his late twenties, the end of an eight-month relationship with a woman called Nina. The breakup, the bedroom floor, Nina packing her bags the next morning.

Why doesn't Hannah ever ask him what he's doing with his time? Why doesn't she ask what's going on with him?

Perhaps she doesn't want to know.

Well of course she doesn't want to know. Who wants to know that everything in the world is not fine? No one—his wife especially, perhaps. And so he must stay behind his panes of
frosted glass, living in the half-light, only half alive in the world, looking on as the glass thickens.

Becoming a ghost. That's how he feels. Patrick is slowly turning into a ghost.

*   *   *

IT HAS BEEN SIX WEEKS
since the aborted lunch date at Le Crainois and what has he done apart from shop, cook, blog and record his steadying obsession with Don Trevino, his gradually diminishing sex life?

Answer. He has learned how to stabilize the emulsion of salad dressings with soy lecithin. He has become a master of the dark arts of pressure caramelization. He can make a chocolate ganache so pliable you can tie it in a knot.

You the man, Paddyboy.

And then one afternoon, before leaving the apartment, he pulls one of his kitchen knives from its wooden block, the knife a present from Hannah, bought when they were on vacation in Japan from a place in an alleyway near Tsukiji Fish Market. He selects it because it fits snugly into the pocket of his cargo pants, where it will remain, hidden up against his thigh, until it is time.

The pain of doing nothing for so long has to be released. Patrick has to do something.

In the elevator a neighbor smiles, says hi and asks how it's going, as his neighbors still do. The frosted glass structure being built around him must be almost complete, because apparently no one can see the storm pounding and raging inside him.

Patrick steps into the lobby where Jorg
é
is on duty at the front desk. Funny how Jorg
é
always greets him when he's leaving the building and says farewell whenever he arrives.

Hello, gentleman, says Jorg
é
.

Goodbye, Jorg
é
, he says.

*   *   *

IT IS ONE OF THOSE
late summer afternoons in New York when the sunlight falls like dust and even the traffic seems sapped
by the long burn of the season, cars and SUVs bumper-to-bumper, the summer Friday crawl, Manhattan packing up early, heading off to second homes in the Hamptons, upstate, New Jersey, the Berkshires … It feels to Patrick like an appropriate day for what he has planned, a Friday-ish sort of activity. Knife, stroll, action. Nine months ago, when Trevino had fired him, that had taken place on a Friday as well. It is all coming together.

The lights are kind to him as he walks toward Forty-Seventh, thinking it through, just as he has thought it through a hundred times before, a thousand, more.

Was there something else he could have done in Trevino's office that day? Was there any other way he could have played it? Did it even matter what answer he gave?

Nine months have passed and he can't stop thinking it through, reconstructing it, debating it all over again. He supposed that eventually it would get better, that time would soften his bitter recollection, but it only got worse.

Don Trevino's office, dress-down Friday, Trevino's tie patterned with little Donald Ducks.

Take a seat, Patrick, says Trevino from behind his desk, his hands laced together, fingers moving gleefully, forming a steeple, bird, roof. I'll get straight to the point, I've called you in to ask you a question, the same one I'm going to ask Clark in a minute. So here's the thing, Patrick, we all know the latest financial weather forecast—tornadoes with a 50 percent chance of Apocalypse. It gives me no pleasure to say this but I have to lose someone. Idos Investments simply can't maintain its current staffing levels. So here's the question. Who should I let go? You or Clark? One-word answer.

Patrick crosses Sixth Avenue, thinking that Clark Anderson is sitting in the offices of Idos Investments right now, in the same chair two cubicles along from where he used to sit, Data Acquisition, their department sandwiched between Risk Team and Programming.

What? Don … Mr. Trevino, you can't …

Come on, it's a simple question. You or Clark?

On Trevino's desk there is a birthday card with a yellow sticky note attached and on the note the words,
Your son's birthday, 16yo, Sunday
.

Every time that Patrick gets to this part, recalling the next three, five seconds, every time he thinks it through again, he tries to remember his reasoning. What was it that led him to his answer?

Trevino, no longer even looking at him, has reached for his computer mouse and is clicking away at something on-screen.

Me, says Patrick.

Me
. The word remains lodged in his head like shrapnel.

Good, says Trevino, still not looking at him. Good, you can go now then, Patrick. Send in Clark when you get back to your desk. I'll let you know my decision by the end of the day.

Me?
What was it that led him to say this?

Was it because Clark Anderson is a father of three with a mortgage and a stay-at-home wife?
Sure, wouldn't you like to be the hero just once in your life, Paddyboy.
Or had he actually thought that this was the correct answer, that this would save his job? Because after an answer like that, Trevino would have to see that he was a good guy, the kind of solid, decent human being you should want to hold on to, right? Or had it simply been a trick all along? Had it mattered at all what answer he gave? If he'd said
Clark,
wouldn't Trevino have claimed that he wasn't a team player? Surely it was a trick.

When Clark Anderson came back from Trevino's office, Patrick asked him what he had said.

Clark looked offended at the question. What do you think I said, Patrick? What in the hell did
you say
?

Trevino called a meeting five minutes later. Everyone had been summoned, asset managers, developers, risk engineers, programmers …

Trevino gave a speech about the precarious state of the economy, dropping in the same phrase he had used in his office,
tornadoes with a 50 percent chance of Apocalypse
. And then Trevino had said, More than ever I need people who believe in themselves,
people who stand up for themselves. I need my employees with some fight in them. This is the toughest challenge our business has ever faced.

Patrick knew what was coming. He should have run at him right then, he should have knocked Trevino on his back, pinned him down. They should have had to pull Patrick off him, yelling, punching, screaming.

Trevino told the room exactly what had happened, Patrick's answer, Clark's answer. McConnell, you're outta here! he said. I'm not going to believe in a man who doesn't believe in himself. Sorry, gotta let you go, pack up your things, back to work everyone. You could tell right away that the room got the message—behold the sacrificial lamb and work harder, or you're next.

No one in the room would look at him. It felt to Patrick as if he were invisible, the world moving around him, unaware of his presence—and perhaps this was the precursor to how he feels now, a ghost. Or maybe this was the precise moment he began to fade from the earth.

And what did he do? What did Patrick actually do? Nothing.

Not true, Paddyboy. I do believe you packed up your shit.

He crosses Forty-Fifth Street, Forty-Sixth, knowing what he has to do. Trevino will say sorry, has to say sorry. Patrick wants to see the look in his eyes as he holds the knife to Trevino's throat. He wants to see the fear, feel him shaking.

And then Trevino will apologize. He needs to know what it feels like to be treated like something small and worthless, to feel so powerless. Yes, Don Trevino will be sorry.

*   *   *

HE SIDLES UP TO HIS
usual spot on the sidewalk. Patrick has already scouted the street and made a tentative plan—a delivery entrance to a building farther along Forty-Seventh, Trevino has to pass it on the way to his lunchtime sandwich spot, Patrick will push him inside and show him the knife. Quiet now, Don,
shhhh
.

He has to wait only twenty minutes before he sees him, the elevator doors opening, Trevino stepping out in a white seersucker
suit and exchanging a few genial words with security. Patrick raises his map to half cover his face. Never in his life has he felt this ready.

But when Trevino exits the building, he steps to the curb and waves his arm, a taxi pulling up beside him on the street.

What to do? Should he postpone the plan?

No, his iron is hot right now. He must strike before it cools. The taxi pulls away and Patrick starts to run.

The traffic is heavy on Forty-Seventh and he doesn't have to run fast. But then the taxi turns right on Sixth Avenue, stopping at the next light—and when the signal changes, the cab will have a clear run all the way north to the park, so he starts running faster, passing the taxi, crossing Forty-Eighth.

As the lights change the traffic surges up Sixth Avenue, Trevino's taxi speeding past him (47851, he tries to remember the number). And then, attempting to keep the taxi in view, Patrick runs suddenly into an oversize tourist who has stopped moving for no good reason at all, the man's gallon-size drink flying from his hand, ice spilling over the sidewalk. But the sound of complaints fades away as Patrick keeps running and running, feeling like a child again, his lungs sparkling with life.

However, the collision has distracted him enough such that he can no longer see Trevino's taxi. The crossing light is red at the next junction, pedestrians crowding the street corner as traffic starts to move. Patrick pushes through anyway, voices yelling at him, a van driver seeing him and blasting his horn. But everything is clear to him now, as if he can see out through the frosted glass for the first time in weeks, a path of light shining in front of him and Patrick sprints hard, hearing brakes screech, more horns, and yet he makes it over unscathed, the crowd on the other side of the street parting for him.

Central Park is only two blocks away now. What if Trevino's taxi made a turn before it reached the southern edge of the park? But he keeps running anyway until he reaches Fifty-Ninth, looking frantically, his senses wildly alive. Left or right?

Right, he gambles, eyes searching the traffic, so many taxis. A
four followed by a seven is all he can remember. He sees horses pulling tourists in carriages, one of them fouling the street without breaking stride, a cyclist shouting obscenities at a bus. But no four-seven anything.

And then, pushing his way past a line of paired schoolchildren being waved along by a teacher, convinced of his failure, Patrick feels a flash of euphoria as he spots the shimmering white seersucker no more than fifty yards up ahead.

Trevino turns right into a building, a hotel doorman tipping his cap as he passes. Patrick can feel the sweat running down his back, even his legs. And then he notices a pain in his thigh, a bruise perhaps, his collision with the tourist, or did that van perhaps clip him? But no time to stop, he pushes his loose shirttails back into his pants.