Up in the Air (16 page)

Getting out of the cab and walking up the driveway, I set off a series of motion-detecting floodlights. The yard goes from dark to a Hollywood premiere. Wheels of mist surround the sprinkler heads buried in the fresh-mown lawn and their droplets splatter a trio of campaign signs for local Republicans. Otherwise, it’s quiet. My nephews’ mountain bikes lean against a wall of the three-bay, cedar-shake garage. This is Utah, the state of early bedtimes, and Jake and Edward are probably asleep now, dreaming of good grades and science fairs.

The peephole in the front door is faintly blue; someone, deep in the house, is watching TV. That would be Julie. Asif disdains pop culture. He came here from Pakistan to work and save, and the purity of his will is undiminished. Our family felt vaguely shamed by him at first, intimidated by his priestly poise and engineer’s exactitude of spirit, but that was our own unworthiness at work. He’s tough on himself, but he spoils his sons like princes, for which they’re none the worse, amazingly. If anything, they’re embarrassed by his lavishness and out to prove that they too can rise unaided, taking on extra science work at school and pitching in on chores like little sailors. I fully expect that by the time I’m old this branch of my family will be a minor dynasty, and I’m flattered that Asif has mixed his blood with ours. Except for my mother, we all are. She’s still cautious. She can’t believe this wealth is honest, somehow, and hoards savings bonds for her grandkids,
just in case.

I open the door and set down my bag and case in the darkened hall. I smell a recent meal—encouraging. As a strict vegetarian in beefy Utah, Asif has had to learn to cook.

“Hello?”

“Down here,” Julie whispers. “Everyone’s sacked out.”

She’s dragged a couple of cushions off the couch and is sitting on them like a yogi, legs crossed, spine straight, watching an old Road Runner cartoon on a children’s cable channel. Beside her is a plate of cheese and bread and a tall glass of juice, but this looks staged. She hasn’t been eating. Her cheeks are two dirty ashtrays, gray concavities, and her hair, whose fluffiness tells me that it’s clean, doesn’t reflect the TV glow the way it ought to. The silk pajamas she’s wearing must be Kara’s. The top is bunched and wrinkled—it’s buttoned wrong—and the bottoms, they just look empty.

After I kiss her, I ask her, “Did you rest?”

“I tried,” she says. “I’m still buzzing from the drive. My van’s so big and shaky. Bad shocks or something. Nice jacket—out of a catalogue? It fits you. Must be nice to be shaped like people in catalogues. The wedding’s just going to be suits, no formal wear. Mom’s grumpy about it, but men look weird in tuxes—the kind you can rent in Minnesota, anyway. Those bands around the waist, they look like trusses, like something to hold in a hernia. Ryan?”

“Yes?”

“There’s a big plate of raisin cookies in the kitchen.”

“What were you going to say to me?”

“Stop staring. This is my ideal weight. Just hug me, Ryan.”

It’s the part I always forget, and women need it. Her body feels old and stony through her PJ top.

“I think your ideals are a problem,” I say.

“Yes.”

It’s always wise, in my experience, to turn off any nearby TVs or radios when trying to dissipate emotional tension; they have a way of blurting out bad thoughts, of lobbing idea grenades into the room. When I settle in on the sofa with the cookies, the Road Runner has changed places with Porky Pig. Is Julie just dying? A cleaver-wielding farmer is chasing Porky, over whose head looms a panicked thought balloon filled with hams and chops and bacon strips. Could it be any worse?

“I’m sorry about those dogs,” I say.

“It wasn’t them. It’s me. I ruin everything. Have you ever looked inside my car? It’s all old phone bills and spilled McDonald’s Cokes. I can’t catch up with myself. I’m underwater. I promise to do something simple, like walk those dogs, but then I remember another promise I made, and another one on top of that, so I make up a list with boxes and little checkmarks, but before I can finish it my pen runs dry, so I run off to find a pen, and then it’s quitting time. Pretty soon things have piled up so high I have to call in sick to clear my head, and when I come back they’re all angry at me, furious, so instead of buckling down, I run and hide. And it isn’t just work I’m talking about. It’s everything. It’s breathing. It’s sleeping. It’s feelings. Does this make sense?”

“It’s all about managing time.”

“It’s more than that.” She digs a raisin out of a cookie and eats it, the raisin, but leaves the rest untouched. “Anyway, I’m sorry I dragged you up here. You were on business and I screwed you up. Where are you supposed to be tomorrow?”

“Phoenix. I’m meeting my publisher. I hope.”

“Kara told me you were writing something. Wow. A mystery?”

“A business parable.”

“Is it long?” she says. “I like the long ones. So I can really snuggle in, get cozy.”

“Business readers don’t curl up with books.”

Julie rests her head on my knee. I stroke her hair. I’m ashamed to admit that her thinness has its charms, elongating and defining her throat and neck.

“That was the sweetest wedding present,” she says. “Keith opened it by mistake. You really splurged. Who told you we needed one? Mom?”

The gift’s not mine; my sister has it confused with someone else’s. I picked out the luggage set just yesterday and was waiting for my card to be reactivated before I placed the order. And there’s no way for her to know about the stock. Then again, this may be Kara’s work. Her standing assumption is that I’m irresponsible when it comes to my sentimental duties; she probably sent something practical in my name, a microwave or upright vacuum cleaner, and forgot to inform me. She covers for me this way, forging my signature on thoughtful gestures.

I probe. “You needed one?”

“Well, no one
needs
one. Our grandparents did without them, obviously.”

“What told you it was from me?”

She lifts her head and eyes me at a slant. “Are you okay?”

“A little frazzled. Why?”

“That was such an odd question. Who else would it have been from? Are you still on that medication?”

“That was years ago.”

“So no more seizures?”

“I’ve never had a seizure. That’s like calling every lump a tumor.”

“Fine, then. ‘Fits.’ ”

“That’s even worse,” I say.

Julie is misinformed, as usual. She’s referring to the beta-blockers prescribed for a funny heartbeat that turned up during an annual corporate physical a few months after our father’s funeral. I was tired at the time, surviving on diet cola while shuttling between Denver, LA, and Houston as part of an effort to smooth the troubled merger of two mid-size regional advertising agencies. Worn down by my grief and the gloom of the assignment, which consisted of identifying redundancies and recommending layoffs, I suffered a kind of segmented collapse marked by bouts of irresistible sleepiness during several key meetings and lunch appointments. Because of the politeness of my associates, who declined to mention my little naps after I came to, and because no single individual witnessed more than one of the attacks, weeks passed before I caught on to what was happening. I imagined I’d dozed off for a few seconds, when in fact I’d been falling asleep for a few minutes. I finally learned what was
wrong at LAX, where I nodded off at a pay phone in the Compass Club and missed a flight. I was granted a paid leave. I grounded myself for seven weeks (a record), took a few classes to refresh my spirits, and made an adequate recovery. Other than the minor arrhythmia, there was just one lingering complication. It happened that during one of my brief blackouts—at a downtown Denver oyster bar—sneaky Craig Gregory had played a trick on me, slipping my wallet out of my back pocket and inserting a scribbled-on business card for one Melissa Hall at Great West Airlines. “Fantastic meeting you. Call!” the message read. There was also a row of X’s and a heart. I found the card while reorganizing my Rolodex, puzzled over it for a day or two, then thought what the hell and gave a ring. Assuming the woman was a flight attendant, I left a sweet, if tentative, voice mail, and received a call back from a mannerly Melissa—Soren Morse’s executive assistant and, I found out later, his sometime
mistress. Here’s what was strange, though: after much embarrassment, and after we’d identified the trickster—Craig Gregory knew Melissa through a cousin—she told me that she’d seen my name while making up invitations to a Christmas party Morse was throwing for Great West’s heaviest flyers. We agreed to say hi to each other at the party, which was just a month away, but my invitation never arrived. I called to inquire, but Melissa wouldn’t speak to me, and I could only conclude that Morse himself had struck me from the guest list. Jealousy? I tried my theory on Craig Gregory, who laughed it off but no doubt wrote it down for the “This is your life” file he keeps on everyone.

All in all, a murky time for me. But I repeat: there were never any seizures. My sisters spend too much time on the phone together erroneously filling in the blanks of their brother’s life.

This matter of having sisters. I’ve done my best. When Kara was born after years and years of trying—in Minnesota you weren’t supposed to have to try; babies were supposed to come like crops—my parents already considered themselves old. My arrival surprised them. My father was as pleased as any man to have a son, but he was busy by then, with a growing gas route to attend to. In helping him I saw my opening. By five I was riding shotgun in the propane truck, learning a business that, if it had survived, I’d still be in today, with no regrets. The secret was providing added value with every refilled tank—carrying the news from farm to farm, adjusting and reigniting pilot lights, delivering packages for snowbound widows. My apprenticeship secured a spot for me in my father’s everyday routine and in the larger life of the community.

Everything changed when Julie came along, a month premature but radiant and perfect, with none of that simian newborn homeliness. If I’d been a surprise, she was a shock. Her beauty felt like a judgment on our averageness, and we fell into competition for her favor. My father, who’d grown comfortable by then, cut back on his hours to spend more time at home, while Kara and my mother scrimmaged constantly over who would change the baby’s diapers and push her in the new stroller through the aisles of the downtown J. C. Penney. I was odd man out again. Whenever I managed to get alone with Julie, I spoiled her with treats and toys and labored to impress her with my manliness. When I was fourteen and she was ten, I knocked down an older boy in front of her. I took her homework when she got home from school and returned it to her in the morning, finished. I was her first crush when she turned twelve, and when I went off to college I sent her letters playing up my successes and achievements and dismissing
the girls who supposedly had eyes for me. Our romance crested during a summer vacation when I smuggled her into an R-rated movie and she rested her head on my shoulder during a love scene. A neighbor sitting a couple of rows behind us had a word with my mother. We were finished.

“The wedding present wasn’t from me,” I say. “Kara must have sent something in my name. What was it anyway?”

“A lawn mower. It follows these wires you bury in the ground and runs by remote control.”

My mouth goes dry. I can’t swallow my cookie.

“Where was it sent from?”

“Salt Lake City. Here. A store called Vann’s Electronics. You signed the card. You’re saying you don’t remember buying it?”

“I’m not saying anything. I’m going to bed.”

I lie in the dark guest room beside a window that frames the spire of the Mormon Temple, as white as aspirin and topped with a gold angel. I’ve set my sleep machine on blowing leaves and swallowed a sedative. My left hand is tucked under the waistband of my boxers and in my other hand I hold my phone.

“Talk to her. Build her up inside,” says Kara. “That’s your specialty, isn’t it? Be tough, though. Don’t tell her she’ll be okay no matter what or that she’s some infinite bundle of creativity. Don’t bullshit her, Ryan. But try to make her feel good. This is a crisis of confidence we’re dealing with.”