The Coaster (2 page)

Chapter Two

I got home promptly at five as requested and fixed myself a drink. As I sat down to relax, I heard a truck pull up our gravel driveway. I walked over to the kitchen window and looked out to see what my wife was up to now. Nothing really would have surprised me, but almost anything would have annoyed me.

I heard a piercing whinny and saw a horse trailer headed for our barn. Most of Sarah's financially ruinous boondoggles involve horses. She can't bear to see one put down, so we're generally running an old folks' home for horses. We could have fed and clothed ten villages in Africa for every horse we've ushered gently over to the other side.

One time Sarah brought home a horse so old my dog, Max, tried to drag him into the house and put him in his bowl. His back was so swayed, your feet would touch the ground if you tried to ride him, not that anyone would. You could walk faster. The few remaining strands of hair that passed for his tail couldn't even knock a fly out of the air. Instead of his name, it should have said
Do Not Resuscitate
over his stall.

The poor creature was miserable. So naturally Sarah wanted him to undergo an expensive medical procedure that would extend his wretched existence a few months or years. If he were lucky, it would kill him. It's always difficult to tell the vet something is a little too expensive for a mere animal, especially when your sobbing wife probably told him to do whatever it takes to save Gluey. I always assume the vet is an animal lover or he wouldn't have become a vet in the first place, so I tread carefully.

The vet put a hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye and, perhaps blinking back a tear, said, “Don't worry, Bob. I know how much you love Gluey, and I can assure you he'll receive the best equine medical care in the world.” And that's what he got. Those last two weeks hooked up to one-hundred-thousand-dollar machines may have been the best of Gluey's life.

I drained my scotch, washed out my glass in the sink—it was nice to get one in before Sarah started counting—and headed outside. When I got to the barn, Sarah and her trainer were wrestling a big black stallion out of the trailer. I could tell it was a stallion because I know a lot about horses. And it was wild and aggressive. And it had a big black cock.

Sarah was struggling to get the beast into a stall.

“What do we have here, honey?”

Sarah turned and smiled sheepishly. “Bob, this is Oedipus Platinum. He's going to be staying with us for a while.”

“That's good. We need some more aggressive, violent animals around here. The kids are getting too comfortable.”

“They'll be fine.”

“By the way, didn't the original Oedipus screw his mother and kill his father?”

“I have no plans to screw the horse, Bob.”

“So you're leaving open the possibility that he might kill me.”

“I'm not his mother and you're not his father. Oedipus is his show name. His barn name is Rex.”

“What's Rex doing here?”

“It's a pre-purchase trial. Gives me a chance to check him out before leasing or buying him.”

I stared up at Rex. He was massive, completely black except for a flash of white like a lightning bolt between his eyes. He looked like a horse superhero. “What kind of horse is he?'

Rex leaned down and snorted as Sarah patted his muzzle. “He's a Dutch Warmblood, bred in Holland to jump. Seventeen hands. Nearly fifteen hundred pounds. Big, powerful, graceful, and athletic. To put it in terms you would understand, he's the power forward of the horse world.”

“An impressive animal, to be sure. But do we really want a stallion around here?”

“If you geld him, he'll lose his aggressiveness as a jumper. Not to mention giving up any chance at breeding him if he's a champion.”

I reached up and tried to rub his muzzle as Sarah had. He snorted and yanked his head away. “I sympathize with you there, boy. I'm not a champion, but I still like to breed.”

I turned to Sarah. “Seriously, a stallion will try to kick you in the head every chance he gets.”

“It will be good for the kids to learn caution around dangerous animals.”

“Weren't there any tigers or crocodiles available? We might as well be running a fucking zoo.”

Sarah stared at me like I'd suggested getting a pet that wasn't a rescue. “You know I would never force an animal to live in a cage.”

“Are you kidding? Every wild animal would love to live at a zoo. You think they enjoy hunting for their food? Have you noticed you never see a fat predator? That's because they hunt just enough to stay alive.”

“An animal should be free to roam in its natural habitat.”

“All the animals would run for the front of the line if they were offering zoo placement. Food and mates are brought to you while you lie around all day. It's like a fucking luxury spa for animals. Hell, I'd like to live in a zoo.”

“If you don't shut up, you're going to find out what it's like to live in the barn.”

***

We managed to get the stallion in his stall and calm him down when he suddenly reared to his full height as a flying object buzzed past his head.

“Goddammit, Nick,” I yelled. “You're freaking the horse out.”

I ran out of the barn and found my son, Nick, holding the remote control to his drone spy-plane. “Hi, Dad.”

“Jesus, Nick, what are you doing? Your mom's going to kill you for spooking the horse.”

“Sorry, I lost control.”

The toys kids have today are incredible. This thing can fly for an hour on one good charge and record audio and video to Nick's computer. When I was a kid, we'd spend all day putting together a balsa wood plane with a rubber band propeller and then it would fly two feet and crash. But, then again, when my father was young, he had to play with a football made out of a pig's bladder. Nick's kids will probably fly jetpacks to school.

Chapter Three

Inside, I was showered and dressed by six. My pre-game routine for one of these command performances is a couple of tequila shots. I find shots to be the most effective method because they don't fill your bladder and they can be downed quickly enough that your wife won't see you carrying a drink around. Sarah tends to frown on my drinking before we leave the house because she knows I might hit it pretty hard during dinner. What she doesn't know is that I could barely make it
to
the event without at least a couple of pops.

I tossed back the two tequila shots and sat down to wait. Despite repeatedly badgering me to hurry, Sarah herself is invariably thirty minutes late. It doesn't matter what she needs to do to get ready. If by pure chance she happened to be ready right at the appointed hour, she would somehow fill the time with a randomly selected activity until we're thirty minutes late. She doesn't even wear a watch. Like a veteran quarterback who knows instinctively when the rush is about to get to him, she has a clock in her head that tells her when we're the right amount of late. When she reaches that point and she's ready to go, she's instantly annoyed the rest of us aren't already sitting in the car with the motor running.

Sarah only has two settings: (1) obliviously holding everyone else up and (2) impatiently hurrying others. She expects everybody to be on high alert until she's ready to leave. The family waits silently, only communicating through hand signals like a SWAT team waiting for the “go” signal from their chief hostage negotiator. It might be fifteen minutes, it might be an hour, but we maintain our readiness. LIVES ARE AT STAKE, PEOPLE! The second Sarah herself is ready, she expects the entire family to spring into action. If one makes the mistake of going to the bathroom right at that moment, she'll call our names in an agitated voice, and then finally say with a sigh, “I'll be waiting in the car!”

“Bob, Let's go!! We're going to be late!! What are you doing?”

“Sitting on my ass waiting for you, like I do every time we leave the house.”

“Well, hurry up!! I'll be in the car!”
See? Back off, fellas, she's all mine.

After she went outside, I waited five extra minutes just to piss her off. I knew that somewhere inside that layer of wife-insanity even she had to realize her anger was completely unreasonable. Like a psychiatrist, I was trying to get her to examine and confront her feelings. Or I was just being a dick.

***

When I got in the car, I said, “Sorry. I didn't mean to hold you up.” I don't think Sarah could tell if I was being sarcastic, so to her credit, she didn't respond. I drove and Sarah sat in the passenger seat, scrolling through texts or e-mails or something on her iPhone. I would be more than happy to suffer through the entire ride in blessed silence, but Sarah feels like she has to make conversation at times like these, even though she is clearly more interested in what she's doing on her phone. I don't know if this is one of the many ways she completely misunderstands me and what I might want, or more likely, she doesn't care what I want but is trying to live up to some ideal in her mind of what happy couples do when they're alone in the car. She figures they ask each other about their day and, you know, talk to each other. I wouldn't know about any of that. I don't know any happy couples.

Tonight, for whatever reason, Sarah wanted to pretend to talk, so without looking up from her phone, she asked me, “What's going on in your life?”

I actually do think we're pretty happy, but I also think we should be secure enough in our happiness not to force conversations and pretend to be interested in each other's lives just because Sarah failed a relationship quiz in
Cosmo
this month. Plus, even if I had any small talk to offer, I needed to save it to fill in the awkward silences at the living hell of a cocktail party we were heading for.

But I'd been feeling a little depressed about my lack of a satisfying career. I even briefly went to a psychiatrist to sort through my feelings on the matter. The doctor didn't think I had a problem.

“Don't be so hard on yourself,” he said. “Not everyone is cut out to be a worker bee or a grinder.”

“Isn't that just an excuse for being lazy?” I asked.

“People are different,” he said. “Not every personality variance is a problem to be fixed. We could give you drugs to make you a hard worker who would focus like crazy on a task. But then you wouldn't be you anymore. Would you want that?”

“No, but my wife would,” I said. “I don't think she likes the original me anymore.”

I'd never discussed this with Sarah, and the ten-minute car ride to the party was probably not the optimal time to bring it up, but for some reason I blurted out, “I feel like I'm in a rut.”

Sarah murmured a “Hmmmm” and continued to thumb through her e-mails.

“Yeah, I'm thinking about a career change. I don't have a plan or anything, but—” I glanced over at Sarah and it was clear she was still scrolling and not listening, so I just stopped talking. She didn't notice and continued to utter listener feedback noises like “uh huh” and “yeah.” After another minute or two, she must have realized I was no longer speaking and said “That…sounds…good….” as she was putting the finishing touches on what was no doubt an important text reminding her personal assistant to pick up her dry cleaning—except I pick up her dry cleaning
.

Sarah doesn't alternate between talking and listening. She alternates between talking and waiting to talk again. She closed her phone and said, “Well, I had a great day. We had an early meeting on the blah blah blah…work-related bullshit…yada yada yada….”
So now that you're done with your work and will be paying attention, you'd like to talk? By all means, go ahead, honey, I'd love to hear about your day.

I leaned across Sarah, pulled the passenger door handle and kicked her out the open door. She bounced once on the street and then went up over the curb and tumbled down a steep, rock-strewn incline, like when someone jumps off a moving train in a movie. That's what I wanted to do. What I really did was tune her out, which I accomplished by thinking about my current work life. I'm normally not one to bring my work home with me. Why would I? There's nothing to bring. I don't have enough work to fill my days, much less my nights. But now I was spending my evening worrying about work I didn't even have, suddenly concluding I was wasting my life like a walking midlife crisis cliché. It's too late, Bob.
I like to address myself by name in my internal monologues like people who chastise themselves verbally after a bad golf shot. Come on, Jim. Finish your swing!
That ship sailed about twenty years ago.

As we pulled into the parking lot, Sarah was finishing up her story. “…and it turns out, thank God, Sharon had a backup disk in her office.”

I helped her out of the car, kissed her on the cheek and said, “Well, I'm glad everything worked out. Now if we find out terrorists are holding everyone hostage inside and won't let anyone else in, it'll be a perfect day.”

***

I was feeling good, buzzed enough to survive the gauntlet of the “important” people in our fair city for the two minutes it would take me to make my way to the open bar. I had to be on my best behavior because my in-laws were the co-chairpersons or whatever they call it now when they insist on honoring a powerful man and his faithful wife as if they were equally responsible for giving millions of dollars to the cause. And maybe they are. These events would never happen without an aggressively charitable wife trying to justify her privileged existence.

I was in my custom-tailored tuxedo purchased for just such an occasion and Sarah was wearing a beaded gown and brand new high-heeled shoes that would make her feet bleed before her second drink. If she'd told me how much her ensemble cost, I probably would have divorced her on the spot.

My in-laws are “honored” as chairpersons at a lot of these events. This is a high society mechanism for extorting a huge donation from the “chair couple.” If you say you'll be the honorary chairman of an event, there is an implied offer to give a “seed” donation. The organization in question can then say, when people ask how much they should give, “Well, the honorary chairs gave fifty thousand dollars.” It's all a scam.

The breakdown is usually as follows: a young, societally inbred couple or two are named the event's co-chairpersons. They are responsible for actually doing a few things to get the event on solid ground. They may have to make a few fundraising visits, often to their place of employment or their father's law firm, or the like. Their wives will be responsible for stocking the silent auction with donated vacation homes and what women think passes for sports memorabilia. There will also be the Honorary Chairs, and these are always the heavy-hitter names, your Old Bulls and Silverbacks. They are really expected to do nothing in terms of tangible “work,” but they are expected to cough up their Christmas card lists and make a sizeable donation to the cause.

Then there are the events that are true honoraria. These might be such things as So and So Charity's Woman of the Year, Hall of Fame honorees, and so forth. The person or persons being honored are always expected to make a giant donation to the group celebrating them. My in-laws have spent a fortune being celebrated as a power couple, giving both time and money, in our town. For several years, my wife and I dutifully trooped to event after event celebrating her father. Then after he had been feted by every conceivable organization, here came the next group of 501(c)(3)s who were primed and ready to celebrate the wonderful contributions of my mother-in-law. It truly takes a shitload of money to be honored for your selfless acts.

I hope one day to be the first nominee for one of these awards to say, “I'm sorry, I'd love to be your Man of the Year, but we just can't afford it.”

***

Sarah was stopped every ten feet as we made our way across the ballroom. We got ambushed by an attractive woman who engaged Sarah like they were old friends.

“Sarah! It's great to see you. I've missed our weekly meetings when we were on the Shymana Committee.”

I may have the name of that committee wrong.

“I know, Karen! That was so fun! Have you met my husband, Bob? Bob, this is Karen Summers.”

The woman stuck out a hand expensively manicured in one of the gothy dark colors that are popular now with the middle-aged.

It's always seemed to me it would be difficult to be taken seriously in business or government with painted finger- and toenails. All the men in their conservative blue suits and red power ties would think to themselves,
You're playing with the big boys now. My time is worth thousands of dollars an hour and this chick spends her time trying to decide whether or not to put a flower on her big toe.

Karen eyed me mischievously. “So we finally meet. I've heard so much about this mysterious husband of Sarah's but I'd never even laid eyes on him. I was beginning to think Sarah made you up.”

I'd heard this one before, the accusatory jab about how I never showed up to anything, so I had a ready reply, which I never used.
“Sarah keeps me locked in the basement and only lets me out for special occasions like sex and charity events. Unfortunately, mostly charity events.”

“They're really one and the same from my point of view,”
Sarah might have replied.

“Charity begins at home, honey,”
I'd have answered. We would all laugh.

Truthfully, I gave a fake chuckle, but it was the best I could do. An actual laugh at an event like this would be a rarity for me. Or any time, really. I'm not an easy laugher who makes everyone feel like they're engaged in hilarious banter at a cocktail party. I'm the guy you're never really sure is kidding—I almost always am—but you can't tell from the expression on my face. Many successful people are humorless and literal to a fault. As a rule they're not sure what I mean, so they move on to a new topic. Great. The last thing I want is some old society matron leaning in close to me and shouting over the noise, “I'm sorry. I don't understand.” I'm not equipped with witty, pleasant small talk.

Back to Karen. I seldom hear the other person's name when I'm being introduced. I'm too busy searching my brain for something clever to say to register information about my verbal sparring partner.

Sarah turned to me and said, “Have you ever met Karen's husband, John?”

I gave my standard reply. “I'm sure I have.” I
am
sure I have. He's the kind of guy I've most certainly met but don't remember, which would apply to the majority of the upper crust of this city.

Karen said, “You guys should get together. I'm sure you'd hit it off.”

“Of course you're sure,” I muttered under my breath. “You've known me all of ten seconds.”

“She's right,” Sarah said. “John's a lot of laughs. He's always telling jokes.” Although I might gain some insight into the current level of racism in the Midwest, the thought of hanging around with a noted joke-teller makes me ill. Guys who tell jokes aren't funny. They memorize jokes because they've got no material of their own.

Karen said, “You guys should play golf. Do you play, Bob?”

Sarah jumped in and answered. If she thinks she knows the answer, she can't help but interrupt me. She's like the little girl in class everybody hates because she raises her hand for every goddamned question. If Sarah were married to Albert Einstein and someone asked him “So how's your theory of the universe coming?” she would answer for him. “He figured it out. It's e = m something.” Remember, Einstein is standing right there.

“Bob loves golf. He plays every chance he gets. He'd love to play with John.” I do not
love
golf. I play golf. I do not play every chance I get. I enjoy it, but a huge part of my pleasure is wrapped up in the group I'm playing with. I'm not one of those guys who's just happy to be playing, even with someone like John. Of my ten most enjoyable activities, my love for golf would rank about seventh. I would absolutely not love to play with John.