Another Broken Wizard (15 page)

“I can imagine this is tough. Were you here last night?”

“No. He’s pretty out of it. So there’s nothing I can do here. I saw some friends out in Worcester.”

Gerry asked about my night with the eagerness older men have for hearing the exploits of younger men. And I gave him a sanitized version, and there was a lot to sanitize. From there, we did our recaps—where Gerry had worked with Dad, what Dad had said about me—small talk, daily concerns. I could feel the muscles in my shoulders knotting up again. Gerry stayed another hour and we picked the bones of the Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, stocks, politicians, cities and suburbs, career, home, golf and occasional drunkenness that comprised the horizon of Gerry’s life, as it was supposed to do for me. After he left, I hung around for another few hours, watching what the news network itself would call ‘filler.’ I thought about the long weekend ahead and I thought of Olive. I called Serena once I’d found Route 9.

“Hey you,” I said, trying to be fun.

“Hey,” she said, flatly.

Someone cut me off on the road and I got distracted. It made the flatness of her hello sound even flatter and made me forget to keep the banter afloat, to joke through the gloom imposed by the day in the hospital.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, just hungover. Listen, I’m just hanging out with Hannah and Aria right now. Can I call you back?” she said, sounding more distracted than me.

“Sure. I’ll talk to you later.”

Back at the Fountainhead, I divided my clothes into piles of clean, dirty and maybe. I stacked some of Dad’s half-unpacked boxes in the corner. I couldn’t seem to speed through the TV’s hundreds of channels fast enough, so I went to the Fountainhead’s health club and climbed onto the elliptical machine. I needed the exercise, even if just for my back. Twenty-nine and a chronic back problem. Mortality is too weak a word. I commenced fake running over imaginary distances under the fluorescent lights for a long time.

But after that, a shower and a frozen pizza, I was still racing through the channels. In the TV’s glare, I imagined the bars in all the chain restaurants in the Metro-West suburbs at nine-thirty on a Friday night, the single women leaning forward from their stools, pushing their breasts forward and their asses back, hoisting fruity drinks in elaborate glasses, picking at popcorn and tortilla chips in the restaurant’s engineered gaiety. I imagined the local bars, tucked into the town centers of Westborough, Marlborough, Framingham, with patrons who’d known each other their whole lives. I thought of taking a few Tylenol PMs from Dad’s bathroom and calling it a night.

I really would like to say I called Serena first. I would like to say I was drunk or profoundly anguished. I would like to say I had a damn good reason when I called Olive. I would like to say we commiserated until our frustration, anxiety and grief forced us together. I would like to say she made the first move. I would like to say I didn’t know what I was doing. I would like to say I didn’t know what would happen. I would like to say it was necessary. But I can’t.

Olive was dressed the same as she was in the hospital that afternoon, and that decided it. Our first kiss occurred at the opening of the heavy apartment door. There was no trepidation or hesitation. Her small breast with its red knot of nipple heaved warm under my hand. From the knock on the door, through the threshold of the apartment, out of our clothes, onto the couch, into her to the last bucking spasm, the whole thing had the quality of a rubber band snapping, forceful and inevitable. The first time was like that, anyway.

It was around two when she left. I flipped through the channels slowly and fell asleep on the couch to a Robert Redford movie about skiing.

28.

Friday, January 2

Regret and shame from the night before did pursue me down Route 9 to the hospital. But there was something about it I couldn’t leave alone. It was the spot of life that I needed more than I regretted.

The inside of Dad’s car smelled like years of spilled Diet Coke. I cranked up the heat and cracked the window. Led Zeppelin was screaming on the radio, like they always did on car radios in Massachusetts. I passed the interchange with I-495, where Raytheon used to make the Patriot Missiles that lit up the skies of the first Gulf War.

I had spent a long morning sending in resumes and writing e-mails, and I felt appropriately helpless. I planned again how I would explain myself, ambitious and enterprising but reasonable and obedient, in an interview. I hoped that would be enough, because, for all my white-collar credentials, my own survival is largely a mystery to me. I’d made research reports—not shoes or missiles or loaves of bread. I’d traded the reports for money my employer made by deeply arcane means. I could trace it all back to the creation of paper currency and banking in the 12th century, I guess.

But how would I trace this—being unemployed and trapped by in a place I hated? Now some smartass could say well, you’re trapped by your bourgeois morality. But I say that bourgeois morality is the only thing that ever paid my bills or afforded me the quiet hours I count as freedom. It all made me sick with an unanswerable uneasiness.

I passed the Sheraton done up like a huge Medieval castle. Nondescript concrete and glass office buildings perched on the shoulders of farther hills. After Natick, the towns started to take on that intentional New England shine, like they were trying out for PBS. Not even the snow banks, blackened by road salt and exhaust fumes could diminish the
upscale
feeling of things there.

Parking outside the hospital, I took some breaths and walked to the hospital without my coat. I walked slowly, deliberately looking away from whiskeynose’s booth as I did. Dad was still intubated and dormant in his glass cubicle. The lines on the screens looked a little perkier, but what do I know?

I kept reading about King Philip’s War. During the war, the Colonists emptied out the Praying Indian towns and sent them off to Deer Island, in Boston Harbor. Half of the Praying Indians died when the Colonists got too busy to send regular supplies over to Deer Island. A hell of a way to treat your friends. I thought of the senior vice president asking me if I was loyal. I wondered what loyalty had ever gotten anyone.

After a few hours, Dad’s oncologist came in carrying a leather folder overstuffed with paper. He was a little old Jewish guy with white hair and eyes that seemed too big and too alert for his face. He introduced himself and then stared down at the pages in his folder, then at the clipboard on the end of Dad’s bed. He checked and re-checked some things, his eyes blinking with careful curiosity.

“I have good news for you and for your father. The mass the surgeons removed was completely benign.”

“Really, what was it then?” I asked.

“I was surprised. It was actually a non-toxic goiter—a swelling of the thyroid gland. It will usually swell up in the throat. But this one went south. So that’s good news. It’s completely benign and your father won’t need any more surgery.”

I nodded and swallowed. The fear that entered the room with the word oncologist had passed.

“So is he the first one to ever have this condition?” I asked.

“No. But it is uncommon.”

The hair on top of my head prickled with rage.

“Could a more qualified doctor have seen this for what it was, I mean, instead of going through the … ordeal … of open heart surgery?”

Dad beeped and breathed behind us. The nurse waited outside to monitor and adjust the machines.

“I understand how you must feel. But the condition is so rare that it’s not even something we test for when we find a mass like your father had,” the doctor said, looking up at me with big wounded eyes. He was in earnest. I felt like an asshole.

“Okay. I was just curious why we were here.”

The doctor said some more things about how anomalous the mass was, about how dangerous its position was and something more about tests, but I had withdrawn. We shook hands and he left.

“Well, that’s good news,” I said to Dad.

The TV said that somewhere in the Middle East, a group of grown men were burning the American flag and jumping around with automatic weapons. It said that someone from Washington would fly over and talk to them about that.

“I’m going to get some lunch, you want anything?” I said to Dad, whose eyelids twitched. I took that as a good sign.

I skipped the cafeteria and went out to the parking lot. The sky was clear and pale, the sun was bright, if not warm. The trees and buildings were brown and gray, the snow banks white and brown, the ground just gray. It wasn’t much for the eyes, but warm and vivid after the fluorescent lights of the hospital. Instead of Whiskeynose, a surprisingly friendly guy from Africa took my ticket and my money with a please, a thank you and glad tidings for the rest of my day. I drove through Wellesley and got back onto Route 9, where I found a D’Angelo’s sub shop. A young kid with sloppily dyed hair coming out of his D’Angelo’s baseball hat took my order and struggled with the cash register. The manager came over. He was a pale guy, so skinny that his eyes seemed like they were on opposite sides of his head, like a fish.

“I got this, Sean, you go to the chopping station,” the fish-eyed manager said. “And remember what I said: It’s like a zone defense. So if Tanya needs help at the grill, give her an assist.”

The manager looked past me as he finished the transaction with perfunctory courtesy. Then he was back on the long-haired kid, who apparently wasn’t cutting the peppers right. The long-haired kid let his reluctance be his protest and watched the manager cut the peppers correctly. The kid was learning what can only be learned the hard way—that you have to work. It made me glad not to be young anymore.

Back at the hospital, Gerry and another guy, around the same age with a combed shelf of dyed brown hair, were sitting with Dad.

“Hey, did you go
out
to lunch?” Gerry asked, as if he was building a case.

“Yeah. There’s only so much cafeteria food I can take.”

I introduced myself to the new guy, who said his name was Robert and said we’d spoken on the phone. We sat and made small talk.

“IBM finally caught on that these guys were basically just buying the hardware from them, installing their own software and reselling them for twice the price. So IBM decides that it can just do the same thing, so it doubles the price of the hardware and starts going after their clients,” Gerry said.
Hahdwaya.
He was wearing a suit with a shiny gray tie and big cufflinks, obviously on a break from work.

“And so, another one is going to bite the dust,” Robert volunteered, pressing his lips together.

“So, how do you know my dad?” I asked Robert.

“We worked together at Rebus Tech when it was a billion-dollar company.”

“They were all billion-dollar companies in 1999,” Gerry added.

“Don’t remind me. That was four jobs and two houses ago. How about you? Your dad says you’re in finance,” Robert said.

“I was an equities analyst. I’m between things now,” I said, surprised to be fitting in at the grown-up table.

“I’ve been between things for three years now,” Robert said.

He nodded and his shelf of dyed hair shook slightly. Gerry shifted in his seat and looked at a blank portion of the hospital wall.

“I’ve never seen it so tough out there. Your dad got lucky when he got his job at Aerovan. But Robert, Dan Wong, Fred Landon, all these guys who were on top of the world just can’t get a second interview ever since the bubble burst,” Gerry said.

“I heard from Freddie. I think he’s going to take that job down in Atlanta,” Robert said.

“What’s his wife have to say about that?” Gerry said.

“Plenty, I’m sure. But someone has to pay the mortgage.”

“How long was Freddie out of work?” Gerry asked, chasing away the fundamental concerns Dad presented with powerful trivia.

Robert and Gerry took turns recounting the reasons for their personal woes. When the tech bubble burst in 2000, half the businesses in the Route 128 and I-495 corridors were suddenly driven to their knees. And no one wants to hire a sixty-year-old salesman with three decades of experience, not when they can hire some thirty-year-old guy for half the money. Gerry and Dad had taken pay cuts to land on their feet. But Robert was looking at a forced early retirement, doing twenty hours a week at Barnes & Noble, mostly to keep from going crazy.

Then Gerry said he had to get back to the office, holding eye contact with each of us for a long second, which was his version of warmth and sincerity for the unemployed and sick he was leaving behind him. Then Robert and I struggled sporadically to fill the air for a half hour, while the nurse checked in and out. The hospital room began to feel like the inside of a submarine, with every beep and intercom quip only deepening the sense of dread and bad luck.

“So, this is a nice hospital. How much is it?”

“Uh, I have no idea. His insurance covers it.”

“Yeah. I’m surprised to see so much of Gerry. He said he was coming by tomorrow, too. I wouldn’t have guessed. You can never really tell who’s going to step up with things like this,” Robert said.

Before long, Robert found a reason to leave. On the news, some actor angry about the environment was holding a fashion show where the models all wore gorilla masks. A middle-aged man said he was not impressed. I went around the channels a few times and then left.

29.

It was already dark when I pulled out of the parking lot, trying to return the honest good will that the African guy at the toll booth seemed to radiate. At a stoplight over Route 128, I saw I had missed a call from Serena, and called her back. She was taking the bus home from work when she answered. The conversation started nice enough, with her saying she missed me and me trying to cover my guilt with affection.