The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (27 page)

It seems no one is immune to the downturn—even Martha. With over 90 percent of her wealth reportedly tied up in her own stock, she’s lost nearly 84 percent of her net worth. Not only that, but according to her blog, both her houses in the Hamptons and in Bedford were struck by lightning the week after Brent and many of his colleagues had been laid off. To add to her string of bad luck, a Web site reported that Martha learned that the man she’d called her boyfriend for a decade had become engaged to a Swedish model in her twenties. And that Martha first found out about it from a gossip site.

Brent, the consummate businessman, harbors no ill will about his termination. Had he been in the CEO’s place, he’d have made the same decision. MSLO, like all media companies, is hemorrhaging money.

But I can’t help but wallow just a little in schadenfreude for Martha’s recent misfortunes. She never once e-mailed or called Brent after his layoff. In all my years as an employee, and later as a manager and partner, I have never let a terminated colleague disappear without privately acknowledging her or his contributions, and offering to help in any way that I could. For a woman who has publicly lamented her lack of friends, it’s hard to believe that her sixty-nine years of human interaction haven’t illuminated the cause.

But it’s hard to dwell too long on unpleasantness on a bright fall day at the Beekman. Even our relationship troubles seem to have melted away a little.

“This one looks pretty decent,” I say, holding up one of the apples off of our Golden Delicious trees for inspection. “If we shoot it from this side.” I hold up the unblemished side for his inspection.

“It has that little warty, crackly thing there,” Brent says, pointing.

“That’s hail damage.” After noticing the strange defects on many of the apples a few weeks earlier, I’d researched their origin online. “It doesn’t affect the taste. It’s going to be on most of them.”

“Maybe we’ll just retouch it out,” Brent says.

“I’d rather spend the afternoon making the tarte tatin than retouching photos of apples.” We’ve planned for our weekly “How-To” blog entry to be a step-by-step photo slide show of the method for making the classic French dessert. And, since it’s a beautifully warm Indian summer day, we’ve invited some of our friends to come by and share dessert and coffee on the porch. It will probably be the last outdoor entertaining we do for the year. Of course it will all have to be perfectly documented for the Web site, just like all of Martha’s parties. Well, maybe not exactly like her parties. Hopefully our guests won’t skulk around, bitching about us behind our backs.

About a dozen people show up for our “impromptu” dessert party on the back porch. We haven’t seen many of them for several months, having sacrificed our social life all summer as we chased the chaos of building the Beekman brand.

Everyone has gathered on the porch, and I shuttle between the groups of friends and neighbors taking “candid” pictures for the blog. Our friends know the drill and do their best to look natural. They’ve grown used to posing for the Web site. In the last six months we’ve enlisted nearly everyone in the town for some sort of project for Beekman 1802. If not to work making and wrapping the soap directly, they’ve been asked to open up their homes for blog entries, or to be interviewed by journalists to whom we’ve successfully pitched Sharon Springs/Beekman stories.

Doug and Garth are dressed in neatly pressed autumn flannels, and Michelle is wearing a chic peasant top. Heidi, the manager of the American Hotel, crosses the porch toward me. Spending most of her days surrounded by the whirlwind of Doug and Garth has made her equally quick and acerbic.

“Where have you been?” Heidi asks, pausing to hold her plate up to the camera for me to take a better shot.

“You’re a local. You should know,” I answer, angling in with the camera for a luscious close-up of the tarte on her fork. “We’ve spent the last three weeks trying to preserve every last tomato before the frost hits.”

“If you were really like the locals,” Heidi says, “you would’ve been down at the bar having a drink with a trunk full of Del Monte and a garden full of tomatoes rotting on the vine.” She adjusts her plate. “Did you get a good shot of that apple sliver on the edge there?”

I zoom in on the close-up.

“Can I get a shot of you leaning on the porch railing with the plate? The sun is perfect.”

She maneuvers herself between two other guests, leans against the porch pillar, and stares just over the camera lens.

“How’s this?” she asks.

“Great. Perfect. Hold it.”

I snap away. I hear Brent behind me, talking with some neighbors about…yep, Martha. She’s become as ubiquitous a topic as the weather around here.

“Are you and Brent doing okay?” Heidi asks.

“Sure, why?” I answer, trying to cover my surprise.

“I dunno. No one saw you both all summer. And now Brent’s spending all his time up here alone.”

“No, everything’s fine. I’ve just been really busy at work.”

“Okay, my thigh is numb,” Heidi says. “And I’m out of pie.”

“It’s tarte tatin.”

“You say ‘tomato,’ we say ‘tomater,’” Heidi quips. “Did you make it yourself?”

“Yep.”

“It’s good stuff.”

“Really?”

“You didn’t taste your own pie?”

I realize that I hadn’t. The tarte had taken the entire afternoon to make. I probably could’ve made it in an hour and a half or so, except for all the photos. Wash,
snap.
Peel,
snap.
Slice,
snap.
Caramelize,
snap…

I head back into the kitchen to grab a piece for myself. The kitchen is still filled with the scent of baking; my mouth salivates. I also hadn’t eaten lunch or dinner, I realize. Nor a single bite of any of the apples we’d picked all morning. We were so consumed with inspecting them, trying to discover the “perfectest” one. Except for the small number we needed for the tarte, we’d sent the other bushels of apples with a neighbor to be pressed at Sharon Orchards.

On the kitchen table, the platter that held the tarte is empty, save for a few picturesque crumbs.

Brent’s and my annual apple-picking weekend has passed by and I haven’t had a single bite of an apple.

Brent insists on cleaning up after every party before we go to bed. In his mind, I’m sure he’s worried that someone might drop by for breakfast and see the mess. But as we walk our guests to their cars, Brent seems kind of distracted. When the final taillights vanish out the driveway, I turn back toward the house. Brent doesn’t follow.

“Whacha doin’?” I ask.

“I think I’m gonna go for a little walk.”

Brent’s not the type of person who goes for little walks. No more than I can picture Martha simply taking a stroll to nowhere.

“Okay,” I say warily. “Don’t let the coyotes get you.”

It takes me nearly an hour and a half to clean the kitchen. I start worrying about Brent after about a half hour, and by the hour mark I was planning on calling all of the local hospitals like I’d seen done in Lifetime movies. Except that there’s only one hospital in a fifty-mile radius. If Brent had somehow been hit by a passing car, he wouldn’t have even made it to the hospital yet.

I hear footsteps on the porch. Brent passes by the kitchen window in front of me, throwing a shadow against the counter. I hear him take his shoes off, one by one, by the door.
Clunk. Clunk.
He enters.

“Where were you?” I ask. He looks strangely blank.

“I was just weeding some. In the garden.”

“At ten o’clock at night?”

“It’s a full moon. Or nearly.”

He crosses to the refrigerator and takes out a small bottle of Diet Coke. Diet Coke is his secret shame. It goes against everything he preaches, but he can’t break the habit.

“You know, the weirdest thing just happened,” he says. He’s holding the refrigerator door open so I can see his face.

“What?” I ask, leaning against the sink. Weird things don’t happen to Brent. He doesn’t allow them to.

“I was kneeling in the garden, weeding,” he says, “and then I just broke down crying.”

This
is
weird. Weird enough to actually frighten me a little. In the almost decade we’ve been together, I’ve never seen Brent cry. I’m the dramatic one. He’s the autistic robot MBA MD.

“What were you crying about?” I ask tentatively.

“I dunno,” he says, taking another swig of Diet Coke. I believe that he actually doesn’t know. He’s mentioned to me in the past that the only time he’d shed a tear in his life was when his father passed away.

“Is it your job?” I ask.

“No. I don’t think so,” he says, screwing the top back on the bottle and replacing it. Bathed only in the light from the refrigerator he looks sickly, and small, and so alone that he seems half made up of shadows.

“It’s just weird,” he says again. “It just seems as if everything’s ending and we weren’t ready for it.”

He closes the refrigerator door and heads upstairs to bed.

The following Tuesday, during the agency’s weekly partner meeting, it becomes apparent that our shrinking revenues will not support most of the company’s salaries for much longer.

Including mine.

By the end of the year it looked like we would both be jobless.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The day before Thanksgiving is the first time Brent and I have seen each other in over a month. I’ve been working nonstop, including weekends, to try to lure new clients to the agency. But it’s in vain. Wall Street has collapsed, and with it, businesses all across America. Every business is slashing its marketing budgets. Every ad agency is laying off swaths of personnel.

Brent, likewise, was working overtime at the farm. As the country’s fortunes and mood slipped further and further into a depression, and our soap sales continued to plummet, he valiantly fought back the only way he knew how: with Martha-like perfectionism.

The Beekman blog entries became brighter and more aspirational than ever. The photos were crisper and more colorful. The newsletters more frequent and inspiring.

I found myself checking the Beekman Web site each morning to read about the beautiful and wondrous life I was apparently living.

Unlike last year, I was dreading the holiday season. With bleaker news coming every day, it was hard to find much to be thankful for. I felt as if I were simply stumbling forward, trying to find solid footing each day, but slipping farther behind. We’d paid for holiday soap inventory in advance, but with the recession hitting so quickly, a good deal of our savings sat unpurchased on the shelves in Deb’s shop, smelling faintly of lavender and regret.

We’d also just learned that the three networks that had looked at the pitch video for our proposed reality show had passed. Our sizzle never sparked, apparently, which, looking back, doesn’t surprise me. The show was supposed to be about Brent and me “having it all,” which, given the new economic climate, now seems simply vulgar and untrue. Nevertheless, we’d been holding out hope that the show and resulting publicity might be our best, last chance to salvage our soap business.

I arrived at the Beekman just an hour or so before the rest of my family. I invited them to spend Thanksgiving with us last year, so they’d booked their trip earlier in the summer. I haven’t told them that Brent had lost his job and that I’m about to lose mine. There’s nothing to gain by it. It will accomplish nothing but cast a cloud over the entire visit. I’m hoping that maybe their presence will alleviate some of my anxiety over money, my relationship, and the mortgages. Brent’s been doing a good job pasting a happy Beekman face on the Web site, but to do it in person will be a much larger challenge.

Having not seen each other for so long, Brent quickly tries to catch me up on everything I’ve missed. As I rush around trying to determine what groceries are in the pantry and which will need to be bought for tomorrow’s feast, and which beds Brent has made and which need their sheets changed, it feels like opening night for a show we hadn’t rehearsed for.

Brent has purchased the turkey already. Given the presence of three nieces and nephews, we decided to pardon our turkeys this year, opting instead to purchase a fully dressed one from our neighbors. It’s a giant twenty-two-pound monster, grass fed and hormone free. But the rest of the feast comes entirely from the farm again, just as last year. We plan on having roasted beets with goat cheese, Brussels sprouts with cream, stuffing made from homemade bread with onions and celery from the garden, garlic mashed potatoes, apple cider–glazed parsnips and celeriac, baked Green Hubbard winter squash, and three different homemade pies for dessert with homemade ice cream and slow-cooked goat milk caramel sauce.

I’m determined to throw my family an iconic Thanksgiving—just like the one Brent and I celebrated last year. My family loved Brent from the very first time they met him. And over the years, their closeness has only grown. Brent probably e-mails my mother more than I do, and my mother scolds me if she feels I’ve slighted him in any way. She once told me that she spoke about her three “sons” so often that many people at her church think Brent is her biological offspring.

I don’t want them to realize that there is a distance that has grown between Brent and me. I’m having a hard enough time myself dealing with it. In fact, I’m not dealing with it at all. Neither is Brent, I don’t think. It was as if we believed that if we simply stayed busy in our own respective worlds maybe nothing would change. But it has, and it’s palpable to me.

Naturally, I overcompensate when my family arrives. Brent and I join them outdoors for an impromptu football game. We run with the goats in the field. Before everyone heads to bed, we huddle with my nieces and nephew in the attic telling ghost stories about Mary. It’s the most time Brent and I have spent together since late spring.

On Thanksgiving morning, we rise to put the giant turkey in the oven at sunrise. The morning ticks away as Brent and I are consumed with baking, glazing, deglazing, peeling, pitting, chopping, measuring, stirring, basting, mashing, mixing, boiling, burning, and sweating.