Middle Men (16 page)

“It was client appreciation night, not Bobby appreciation night,” said Nora, offering him a sip from the bottle of champagne she had stolen on the way out. When they stopped at a light, he grabbed the champagne bottle and threw it out the window. It smashed against the curb and for a moment they both sat there in silence; then Bobby jumped out of the cab.

He hated Nora for a couple weeks, but kept hoping for her to call and apologize to him. When his cell phone got shut off, he checked his email obsessively, but there was nothing. Since they were kids, growing up a few blocks from each other, they had always fought and made up, and the time in between was pure desolation. But he never heard from her and he realized that he was being overly sensitive and a little self-righteous.
He envied Nora's ability to turn herself on and off, to indulge in vile misanthropy one minute and false pleasantry the next. This golden switch guaranteed her future. She had a great place in the Inner Richmond, and on more than one occasion she had loaned money to her dearest cousin, though both knew it was a donation. She had worked hard to establish her place in the world, while he had made a shambles of his education and drifted from one crappy job to the next. He didn't have the on/off switch, and he understood now, with thrilling clarity, that Nora's path to success—corporate, dignified, incremental—would never work for him. Bobby required a bonanza.

In the email he sent last night, or early this morning, he told her he would be in the city tonight, ready to show her the prototype. He encouraged her, only half joking, to bring along some of her venture capital friends. The Man Handle, he explained, would appeal to the very men who had the power to invest in it. Indeed, it was a tool that no depraved capitalist could do without. He sketched out his business plan, which had evolved over the last few days from a few bullet points of satirical bombast to something that actually seemed plausible and real, and then he took some time to tell her how things had been going for him, personally, since they last spoke that night in the cab. In June, the house flipper had disappeared, without paying Bobby for his last month of work. After that he answered a Craigslist ad—“$$$$ Sales Pros Needed $$$$”—and got hired to sell ad space for an East Bay newspaper conglomerate. It was horrible and he discovered, once again, how much he hated sales. At some point he stopped going to work and by now he was pretty sure they had fired him. He was broke and the walls were closing in, but in this moment of darkness, he had found inspiration. Cometh the Hour,
Cometh the Man Handle: the thing pretty much marketed itself. However, his sudden lack of income and increase in free time was causing friction with his latest batch of roommates. The guy farthest down the hall, a programmer from Lahore, had caught Bobby using his laptop a few times, and Bobby knew that it was only a matter of time before the guy slit his throat with a bejeweled dagger. Looking back, it was a pretty macabre email and it worried Bobby that her response was so short. Nora usually wrote back in a tone and style that was as equally paranoid and macabre, but this time she just said that if he was around, she could meet him for a drink in the city at eight o'clock, and she named her favorite Irish pub. Even worse, she had signed her name without the usual “love” or “cheers” above it.

As he left the library, the alarm went off. A security guard asked to see his duffel bag. Bobby complied and watched the guard remove a book.

“I forgot to check it out,” Bobby admitted.

The guard then pulled out a twelve-inch length of brass pipe that had been wrapped in black grip tape, the kind that went on skateboards.

“What's this?” he asked.

“It's a prototype.”

“Of what?”

“The dumbest thing ever invented.”

Bobby grabbed the bag from the guard and brought his book to the front desk.

“Please get in line,” said the young librarian, a cute and supremely archetypal librarian—shy, bespeckled, and wearing a green cardigan, the kind Nora used to model. Bobby had wanted to talk to this librarian for the last couple weeks, but
it seemed that whenever he had a book to check out, the desk was occupied by some miserable crone who would give him grief about his fines. Now, with a clear-cut opportunity, Bobby felt suddenly embarrassed by his appearance; he wished he had shaved, but all of his roommates' razor blades were dull.

The librarian stood a few feet back from the desk.

“This will only take a minute,” said Bobby, putting his book on the counter.

“You can't check out reference books,” said the librarian.

“Just me, or everybody?”

“Everybody.”

“I'm joking!” Bobby handed her the book. “What's your name?”

“Catherine.”

“I'm Bobby.”

She nodded, and Bobby felt good when he got outside. He finally knew her name, at least. In the distance he could hear the final movement of the carillon. Before he got on his bike, he turned back to the library, a block of dusty green marble reposing in the milky afternoon light. It looked like the palace of a Babylonian king.

•  •  •

Earlier that morning, on her flight back from Los Angeles, Nora examined a laminated safety card that depicted plucky cartoon figures surviving a series of airborne catastrophes. Whenever she got on a plane, some part of her hoped for a crash landing. She was interested in her own reaction to mortal danger—would she act stoically or just shit herself?—but more than anything she thought about how fun it would be, afterward, going down one of those big yellow inflatable slides.

They were somewhere over the central coast. She could see brown hills, the ruffle of breaking waves. A few clouds dotted the sky, but otherwise it would be a pure blue drop. Members of the Geneva marketing team were spread throughout the cabin, sipping coffee and cooing into the bonnets of their laptops. In the next seat, Nora's assistant Jill scrolled through her iPod. Nora ordered a gin and tonic and when the drink came she asked the stewardess if she ever had the chance to go down the rescue slide.

“No,” whispered the stewardess, a cheerful older woman with gorgeous silver hair. “And I hope I never do.”

Then she patted Nora on the shoulder and, feeling her touch, the touch of a stranger, Nora almost melted with gratitude. She wanted to follow the stewardess down the aisle and sit with her on the jump seats. She wanted to ask for a job application.

This year's CTI Media B2B Software Development Conference & Expo had been, as Nora had feared, a brutal dry hump. Geneva had dropped ten grand for their booth, five grand for collateral inserts in the official conference backpacks, fifteen grand to have the Geneva logo placed on water coolers and cups spread throughout the exhibit hall, and twenty-five grand to sponsor a luncheon that featured, as entertainment, a sullen stand-up performance by a former cast member of
Saturday Night Live
. The carpet-bombing strategy had come down from Dave Grant, and with another staff restructuring on the way, Nora had asked him how he could justify this kind of spending. Dave felt confident that the risk would pay off, not so much in the short term, for staff, but down the road, for the company. “I'm sorry,” he said, “but that's the reality of the situation.” He showed some discretion, however, by staying
in San Francisco and sending Nora to Los Angeles to handle the conference. That way, when she came back with a meager list of new prospects to hand over to sales, her name would be tarnished, not his. It was a suicide mission. Nora, who had always taken great comfort in the endless sorrow of Irish history, thought of De Valera sending Michael Collins to sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

For three days the pipe-and-curtain corridors were empty; the only people she really talked to were other software exhibitors. The asset managers and hedge fund reps who did show up to sample the goods were greeted as liberators; they nodded their heads, shook hands, exchanged cards, and left each booth laden with spoil. Yesterday was especially bleak and after packing up their booth the Geneva marketing team ran up a huge tab at a trendy tapas bar. Nora considered tapas a scam, so she left early and walked by herself through the barren maze of downtown Los Angeles. Part of her was hoping to get mugged—a major trauma would simplify everything. Her responsibilities, though dreary and minor, were all-consuming, and a nonfatal stab wound seemed like just the thing to get people off her back for a while. She hailed a cab and instructed the driver to take her to the nearest Del Taco, which was the only thing she missed about SoCal. At the Bonaventure Hotel she ate her No. 6 combo in a concrete alcove above the main lobby and then spent an hour riding the glass elevators, feeling more relaxed than she had all week. Later, curled happily in bed, with a full stomach, she turned off her BlackBerry and finished rereading O'Flaherty's
Famine
.

“Are you okay?” Jill asked.

“Yes.”

“You're just staring out the window.”

“I can see the ocean.”

“If you're bored,” she said, offering her iPod, “I have some NPR podcasts.”

“I'm not a Bolshevik.”

Jill laughed mechanically, and reinserted her earbuds. She had no time for the curdled sarcasm of her elders; whenever she laughed, it seemed like a calculated decision. A year removed from Stanford undergrad, Jill embodied the kind of blond forthright striving that Nora associated with Viking oarsmen. Her mind was keen and adaptive, streamlining every new project with speed and precision, but Nora had never quite trusted her assistant. She sensed that the girl had no experience with failure, at least not professionally. Nora amused herself with visions of what would happen after the next restructuring. Jill weeping at her desk; Jill throwing herself off the roof; Jill running amok with a shotgun. But these were only fantasies; in the end Jill would use her severance to travel through Asia or South America and then she would write about her experience in her business school application.

The plane landed safely and Nora and Jill got in a cab together. As they swerved onto the 101, Jill called her mom. She talked loudly and without embarrassment. Nora could never get over this—it was as if Jill and her mom were friends. Nora felt obliged, finally, to turn on her BlackBerry. It was only ten o'clock and she already had six emails from Dave Grant. There was a meeting at three o'clock in the “Golden Gate Room,” which was actually just Conference Room B. Two years ago, when Dave became Executive Vice President and General Manager of Global Accounts, he renamed all the conference rooms after local landmarks. So far this was his greatest legacy.

She scrolled down farther and saw another message from
Bobby. She hadn't responded to anything he had written in the past week, even though she had been relieved to hear from him. He had a “business” idea, apparently, but she couldn't tell if it was a joke or not, which gave her a sinking feeling that she didn't want to deal with in the middle of the conference. Now, opening his latest message, the sinking feeling came back. The first paragraph didn't seem to end. She kept scrolling, and the paragraph went on for another three or four pages. Entire sections were set off in parentheses and she saw a distressing number of exclamation points. She went back to the top of the email and saw that he had sent it at four o'clock in the morning.

Bobby wasn't sleeping again.

They drove past Candlestick Park and through the gloomy hills of South San Francisco. The peninsula was shrouded in fog, but across the bay Nora could see the bright green hills of Berkeley and Oakland. He was somewhere over there, marauding in sunlight. She wrote back quickly, telling him she could meet for a drink. She would have to collect him. Get him drunk in a friendly atmosphere and then bring him back to her place and slip him a valium. It had worked before. Then she would call his mom, who was now remarried to a blackjack dealer and living in a trailer outside of Las Vegas. She would be very worried but in the end offer no real help. Nora's parents had always been there to bail out Bobby's parents—Bobby's father, an independent contractor, was a better plumber than businessman—and this arrangement had been passed down to the next generation. Six years ago, when Nora announced that she got her dream job in San Francisco, everyone on both sides of the family, instead of congratulating her, said with great relief, “You'll be
near Bobby!” So now she would collect him, again, and then he would end up sleeping on her Pottery Barn couch for a month or two, eating all her food and generously offering to move in full-time, to help her out. The worst part was this: they would have a great time together, staying up late, watching crap on TV, and she would miss him when he was gone.

•  •  •

With a few hours to kill, Bobby decided to have a swim at the Claremont, a luxury hotel and country club in the Oakland hills. He rode his bike through campus and down Telegraph Avenue. He saw people on the sidewalk selling tie-dyed shirts, and he smelled vomit wafting down from People's Park. As a rule, he believed in the extermination of hippies, but here he was, ten years later, still hanging around Berkeley. After he flunked out of school, Bobby thought he would return to SoCal, but his mom wasn't there anymore, and neither were any of his high school friends. He kept trying to leave Berkeley, but then he would find a job or a new girlfriend. He paid cheap rent in the flats and he stayed in good shape riding his bike everywhere. Nora, on one of her rare visits to the East Bay, told him that he might as well learn how to play the sitar.

By the time he got across town and up the hill, he was soaked in sweat. He locked up his bike and took a path that led to the back of the hotel. Three years ago he got a job at the Claremont's poolside café. During his orientation, as he sat between two Senagalese nationals, the hotel's operations manager said that if anyone took more than fifteen minutes for their break, they were stealing from the hotel. Bobby actually liked the job. He walked around the pool all day, delivering gourmet sandwiches to hotel guests and club members. The
sprawling patio offered panoramic views of the East Bay and on clear days you could see the Golden Gate Bridge. For a while he dated another server, who had just graduated from high school. One afternoon she stole a passkey from a maid and they fucked for fifteen minutes in the tower suite. In the fall, she left for college, and shortly after, Bobby got fired for stealing avocados from the kitchen.