Company Man (22 page)

Nick got in a little earlier than usual, got a cup of coffee from the executive lounge, and checked his e-mail. As usual, his inbox was cluttered with offers for Viagra and penis enlargement and low-interest mortgages, the subject headings inventively misspelled. The putative wives and sons of various deceased African heads of state urgently sought his assistance in transferring millions of dollars out of their country.

He thought about this woman, Cassie Stadler. She was not only seriously attractive, but she was unlike any woman he'd ever met before. And she—who, of course, had no idea what he'd done—was clearly as attracted to him as he was to her.

No message from the Atlas McKenzie guys—the mammoth deal that had unaccountably fallen through—but that didn't surprise him. He was going to have to confront them on it, find out what the reason was, see if there was a way to sweet-talk them back on board.

Marjorie wasn't in yet, so Nick placed the calls himself. It was 7:10
A.M.
The Atlas McKenzie guys were usually in by then. Ten digits away. Not a lot of work to press those ten digits on the telephone keypad. How many calories did this take? Nick imagined a tiny scrap of the twiggy cereal Julia wouldn't eat:
that
many calories. Why wouldn't he place his own calls?

The woman on the other line was really sorry. Mr. Hardwick was still in conference. Nick imagined Hardwick making throat-cut, I'm-not-in gestures.

There it was.
That
was a reason not to place your own calls. To spare yourself the humiliation of dissembling secretaries. The smile in the voice that accompanied the sing-songy formula
I'm sorry
. The micro–power trip of putting one over on a CEO. Fun for the whole family. He wondered whether the waitress at Terra really had spit in his arugula salad. She'd brightened a little when she brought it out, hadn't she?

Nick felt a little acid come up his gullet as he stared at the silver-mesh fabric panels in front of him. There were certain things that money and position protected you from. There were certain things that it didn't. When his driver's license needed renewing a couple of years ago, he didn't stand in line at the DMV, the way he once had to. The CEO of a major corporation didn't wait in line at the DMV. Some young staffer from the corporate counsel's office did, and it got taken care of. Nick couldn't remember the last time he'd waited in line for a taxi at an airport. Senior execs had cars; you looked for the guy holding a sign that said
CONOVER
. And senior execs of major corporations didn't haul their own baggage. That got taken care of, too, even when Nick was flying commercial. But when the weather was bad, it was bad for you too. When your car was stuck in traffic, it didn't matter what your company's valuation was; traffic was traffic. Those things were the Levelers. The things that reminded you that you lived in the same world and were going to end up in the same place as everybody else. You thought you were a master of the universe, but you were just lording it over a little box of dirt, the tyrant of a terrarium. Having a kid who hated you—that had to be a Leveler too. And so was sickness.

And so was death.

Next he tried MacFarland—that was the name of the Nixon look-alike. But his assistant apologized: Mr. MacFarland was traveling. “I'll be sure to let him know that you
called,” MacFarland's assistant told him, with the bright artificiality of someone from a casting director's office. Don't call us, we'll call you.

Twenty minutes later came the faint settling-in noises, the heavy vanilla smell of Shalimar: Marjorie was in.

Nick got up, stretched, stepped around the partition. “How's the novel coming?” He tried to remember the title. “
Manchester Abbey,
was it?”

She smiled. “We did
Northanger Abbey
a few weeks ago. This week is
Mansfield Park
.”

“Got it,” Nick said.

“I think Jane Austen wrote
Northanger Abbey
first, but it didn't come out until after her death,” Marjorie said, turning on her computer. She said distantly, “Amazing what comes out after people die.”

Nick felt as if someone had touched his neck with an ice cube. His smile faded.

“
Persuasion
did too,” she went on. “And
Billy Budd,
which we read last year. I didn't know you had such an interest, Nick. You ought to come to our book club.”

“Let me know when you decide to do the Chevrolet Suburban Owner's Manual—that's what
I
call a book,” he said. “Listen, I'm expecting a call from those Atlas McKenzie guys. Hardwick, MacFarland. Let me know when they're on the line. Wherever I am, I'll take the call.”

Nick spent the next couple of hours in conference rooms, two back-to-back, bun-numbing meetings. There was the supply-chain-management team, whose seven members had reached an important conclusion: Stratton needed to diversify its suppliers of metallic paint. They were bubbling with excitement as they reviewed the considerations they had taken into account, like they'd discovered penicillin. Then there was the industrial-safety team, which always had more lawyers than engineers, more concerned about lawsuits than limbs. Nobody came to spring him. No message from Marjorie.

He gave Marjorie a questioning look as he made his way back to his desk.

“The Atlas McKenzie people—they were supposed to get back this morning?” she asked.

Nick sighed. “I'm beginning to feel like I'm getting the bum's rush. I phoned first thing today, you know, and they said Hardwick's in conference, MacFarland's on the road, they'll get back to me.” Then again, they were supposed to return his call from yesterday too. Apparently they had other priorities.

“You think they're trying to dodge you.”

“Could be.”

“Want to get them on line?” Marjorie looked sunny but sly. It was a good look.

“Yup.”

“Let me have a go.”

Nick took a few more steps toward his desk as Marjorie made a couple of phone calls. He couldn't hear everything. “That's right,” she was saying. “United Airlines. We've located the lost baggage, and he gave us a cell number to call him at. James MacFarland, yes. He seemed frantic. But the clerk must have written it down wrong…”

A minute later, an intercom tone told Nick to pick up his Line 1.

“Jim MacFarland?” Nick said as he answered the phone.

Cautiously: “Yes?”

“Nick Conover here.”

“Nick. Hey.” Friendly, but with a tremor of unease.

Nick wanted to say,
Do you realize the amount of money and man-hours we've spent designing your goddamn prototypes? And you can't be bothered to return my calls?
Instead he tried to sound breezy. “Just wanted to touch base,” he said. “About where things stood.”

“Yeah,” MacFarland said. “Yeah. I meant to give you a call about that. About the current thinking.”

“Lay it on me.”

A deep breath. “Thing is, Nick—well, we hadn't realized that Stratton's on the block. Which kind of changes the picture for us.”

“On the block? Meaning what?” Nick struggled to keep
his voice calm. At the start of his career, Nick figured that being the boss meant not having to kiss ass. A nice thought, anyway. Turned out there was always somebody whose ass you had to kiss. The commander in chief of the free world had to suck up to farmers in Iowa.
It's good to be the boss
—wasn't that what they said? But every boss had a boss. Turtles all the way down. Asses all the way up.

That was how it felt sometimes, anyway. That was how it felt just now.

“It's just that Hardwick's always real concerned about stability when it comes to sourcing and support,” MacFarland was saying. “We hadn't realized things were in flux that way. It's not like you had a big ‘For Sale' sign over the front door, right?”

Nick was dumbfounded. “Stratton's not for sale,” he said simply.

There was a moment of silence on the other end. “Huh.” Not the sound of agreement. “Look, Nick, you didn't hear this from me. We use the same law firm in Hong Kong that Fairfield Partners does. And, you know, people talk.”

“That's
bullshit,
” Nick said.

“What it is, is water under the bridge.”

“Come on. I'm the CEO of the company. If Stratton was being sold, you'd think I'd know, right?”

“You said it.” The chilling thing was that MacFarland sounded kindly, sympathetic, like an oncologist breaking the news of a bad diagnosis to a favorite patient.

Marjorie poked her head around at ten thirty.

“Remember, you've got a lunch at half past with Roderick Douglass, the Chamber of Commerce guy,” she said. “He'll be wanting to hit you up again. Then there's the meeting with the business development execs right after.”

Nick swiveled around and looked out the window. “Right, thanks,” he said, distracted.

It was a beautiful day. The sky was blue, deepened a little by the tint of the glass. There was enough of a breeze to flutter the leaves of the trees. A jet was making its way across the sky, its double contrails quickly turning into smudgy fluff.

It was also the seventh day in a row that Andrew Stadler hadn't been alive to see.

Nick shivered, as if a gust of cool air had somehow made it through the building's glass membrane. Cassie Stadler's fragile, china-doll face now filled his mind.
What did I do to you?
He remembered the look of infinite hurt in her eyes, and he found himself dialing her number before he was even conscious of having decided to.

“Hello.” Cassie's voice, deep and sleepy-sounding.

“It's Nick Conover,” he said. “Hope I'm not calling you too early.”

“Me? No—it's—what time is it?”

“I woke you up. I'm sorry. It's ten thirty. Go back to sleep.”

“No,” she said hastily. “I'm glad you called. Listen, about yesterday—”

“Cassie, I'm just calling to make sure you're okay. When I left, you didn't look so great.”

“Thanks.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I—it helped, talking to you. Really helped.”

“I'm glad.”

“Would you like to come over for lunch?”

“You mean today?”

“Oh, God, that's ridiculous, I can't believe I just said that. You're this big CEO, you've probably got lunch meetings scheduled every day until you're sixty-five.”

“Not at all,” he said. “My lunch meeting just canceled, in fact. Which means a sandwich at my desk. So, yeah, I'd love to get out of the office, sure.”

“Really? Hey, great. Oh—just one little thing.”

“You don't have any food in your refrigerator.”

“Sad but true. What kind of host am I?”

“I'll pick something up. See you at noon.”

When he hung up, he stopped by his assistant's desk. “Marge,” he said, “could you cancel my lunch meetings?”

“Both of them?”

“Right.”

Marjorie smiled. “Going to play hooky? It's a beautiful day.”

“Hooky? Does that sound like me?”

“Hope springs eternal.”

“Nah,” he said. “I just need to run a couple of errands.”

The house on West Sixteenth, in Steepletown, was even smaller than he remembered it. A dollhouse, a miniature, almost.

Two stories. White sidings that could have been aluminum or vinyl, you'd have to tap to be sure. Black shutters that weren't big enough to pretend to be shutters.

Nick, holding a couple of brown bags from the Family Fare supermarket he'd stopped at on the way over, rang the bell, heard the carillon tones.

It was almost half a minute before Cassie came to the door. She was in a black knitted top and black stretchy pants. Her face was pale, and sad, and perfect. She was wearing glossy orange lipstick, which was a little strange, but it looked right on her. She also looked better, more rested, than she had yesterday.

“Hey, you actually came.” Cassie opened the door, and walked him past the vase with the dried flowers and the framed embroidered sampler to the small living room. He could hear “One Is the Loneliest Number” come from the small speakers of a portable CD player. Not the old Three Dog Night version. A modern cover. A woman with a voice like clove cigarettes. Cassie switched it off.

Nick unloaded the stuff he'd bought—bread, eggs, juice, milk, bottled water, fruit, a couple of bottles of iced tea.
“Toss whatever you don't like,” he said. Then he unwrapped a couple of sandwiches, placing them ceremoniously on paper plates. “Turkey or roast beef?”

She looked doubtfully at the roast beef. “Too bloody,” she said. “I like my meat burned to a crisp, basically.”

“I'll have it,” Nick said. “You have the turkey.”

They ate together in silence. He folded up the Boar's Head delicatessen wrappers into neat squares, a form of fidgeting. She finished most of her iced tea and toyed with the cap. It was a little awkward, and Nick wondered why she'd invited him over. He tried to think of something to say, but before he could, she said, “Hey, you never know what you're going to learn from a bottle cap. It says here, ‘Real Fact—the last letter added to the English-language alphabet was the “J.” '”

Nick tried to think of something to say, but before he could, she went on: “Aren't you supposed to be running a Fortune Five Hundred company or something?”

“We're not a public company. Anyway, I had a boring lunch I canceled.”

“Now I feel guilty.”

“Not at all. I was happy to have an excuse to miss it.”

“You know, you really surprised me yesterday.”

“Why?”

“It wasn't very ‘Nick the Slasher.' I guess people are never what you expect. Like they say, still waters—”

“Get clogged with algae?”

“Something like that. You know how it is—you see someone who seems so desperate, and you just have to reach out and help.”

“You don't seem desperate.”

“I'm talking about you.”

Nick reddened. “Excuse me?”

She got up and put the kettle on. Standing at the stove, she said, “We've both suffered a loss. It's like Rilke says—when we lose something, it circles around us. ‘It draws around us its unbroken curve.'”

“Huh. I used to have a Spirograph set when I was a kid.”

“I guess I figured you for the typical company man. Until I met you. But you know what I think now?” Her gaze was calm but intent. “I think you're actually a real family man.”

He cleared his throat. “Yeah, well, tell that to my son. Tell that to Lucas.”

“It's a bad age for a boy to lose his mom,” Cassie said quietly. She took a teapot down from a cabinet, then some mugs.

“Like there's a good one?”

“The kid probably needs you badly.”

“I don't think that's how he sees it,” Nick said, a little bitterly.

Cassie looked away. “You're saying that because he's isolated and he's angry, and he turns on you. Am I right? Because you're safe. But you'll get through it. You love each other. You're a family.”

“We were.”

“You know how lucky your kids are?”

“Yeah, well.”

She turned to face him. “I'll bet being a CEO is sort of like being head of a family too.”

“Yeah,” Nick said acerbically. “Maybe one of those Eskimo families. The kind that puts Grandma on the ice floe when she's not bringing in the whale blubber anymore.”

“I bet the layoffs were hard on you.”

“Harder on the people who got laid off.”

“My dad had a lot of problems, but I think having a job helped him keep it together. Then when he found out they didn't want him anymore, he fell apart.”

Nick felt as if there was a metal strap around his chest and it was steadily tightening. He nodded.

“I was mad at Stratton,” Cassie said. “Mad at you, is the truth. Maybe because I'm a girl, I take these things too personally. But it might have had a bad effect on him. Someone with a thought disorder, it's hard to know.”

“Cassie,” Nick started, but whatever he was going to say died in his throat.

“That was before I met you, though. You didn't want to do
this. The people in Boston made you. Because, end of the day, Stratton is a business.”

“Right.”

“But it's never just a business to you, is it? See, I just realized something. Being a Stratton employee in the past couple of years must have been like being the daughter of a schizophrenic. One day you're a beloved family member, the next you're a unit, a cost center, something to be slashed.” She leaned against the counter, her arms folded.

“I'm sorry about your dad,” Nick said. “More sorry than I can tell you.”
With more to be sorry about than I can tell you
.

“My daddy…” Cassie's voice was hushed, halting. “He didn't—he didn't want to be the way he was. It would just take over him. He wanted to be a good father like you. He wanted…” Cassie's breathing started to become ragged, and Nick realized that she was weeping. Her face was red, bowed, and she put a hand over her eyes. Tears rolled copiously down her cheeks.

Nick got up suddenly, his chair scraping against the linoleum floor, and put his arms around her.

“Oh, Cassie,” he said softly. “I'm sorry.”

She was tiny, birdlike, and her shoulders were narrow and bony. She made a sound like she was hiccupping. She smelled like something spicy and New-Agey—patchouli, was that it? Nick was ashamed to realize he was getting aroused.

“I'm sorry,” he said again.

“Stop saying that.” Cassie looked up at him and smiled wanly through her tears. “It's got nothing to do with you.”

Nick remembered a time when he was trying to fix a lamp socket he'd thought was switched off. An eerie, hair-erecting, tingling feeling had swept through his arm, and it had taken him a second to identify the sensation as house current that was leaking through the screwdriver. He felt something like that now, guilt washing through his body like an electrical flux. He didn't know how to respond.

But Cassie said, “I think you're a good man, Nicholas Conover.”

“You don't know me,” he said.

“I know you better than you think,” she said, and he felt her arms squeezing against his back, pulling him toward her. Then she seemed to be standing on tiptoes, her face close to his, her lips pressing against his.

The moment for refusing, for backing out, came and went. Nick's response was almost reflexive. This time he kissed her back, her tears sticky against his face, and his hands moved downward from her shoulders.

“Mmm,” she said.

The teakettle started whistling.

 

For a long time afterward, she lay on top of him in the slick of their perspiration, her mouth pressed against his chest. He could feel her heartbeat, fast as a bird's, slowing gradually. He stroked her hair, nuzzled her porcelain neck, smelling her hair, a conditioner or whatever. He felt her breasts against his stomach.

“I don't know what to say,” Nick began.

“Then keep silent.” She smiled, lifted herself up on her elbows until she was sitting upright on him. She lightly scratched her fingernails across his upper chest, tangling them in his chest hair.

Nick shifted his butt against the coarse-textured couch in the living room. He rocked upward, enfolded her in an embrace, leaned forward until he was sitting up too.

“Strong guy,” she said.

Her breasts were small and round, the nipples pink and still erect like little upturned thumbs. Her waist was tiny. She reached across him to the table next to the couch, and as she did, her breasts brushed against his face. He gave them a quick kiss. She retrieved a pack of Marlboros and a Bic lighter, took one out of the pack and waved it at him, offering.

“No, thanks,” Nick said.

She shrugged, lighted the cigarette, took in a lungful of air and spewed out a thin stream of smoke.

“‘Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man,'” Nick quoted.

“Yep.”

“Needlepoint by Grandma?”

“Mom got it in some junk store. She liked what it said.”

“So how long has it been since you left this place?”

“I just turned twenty-nine. Left when I was around twelve. So, a long time. But I came back to visit Dad a bunch of times.”

“School in Chicago, then.”

“You're trying to piece together the Cassie Stadler saga? Good luck.”

“Just wondering.”

“My mom remarried when I was eleven. An orthodontist. Had a couple of kids of his own, my age, a little older. Let's just say it wasn't the Brady Bunch. Dr. Reese didn't exactly take to me. Neither did the little Reese's pieces, Bret and Justin. Finally shipped me off to Lake Forest Academy, basically to get me out of the way.”

“Must have been tough on you.”

She inhaled, held a lungful of smoke for several seconds. Then, as she let it out, she said, “Yes and no. In some ways, they did me a favor. I actually flourished at the academy. I was a precocious kid. Got a Headmaster scholarship, graduated top of the class. Should have seen me when I was seventeen. A real promising young citizen. Not the head case you see before you.”

“You don't seem like a head case to me.”

“Because I don't drool and wear bad glasses?” She crossed her eyes. “Fools them every time.”

“You talk about it like it's a big joke.”

“Probably it
is
a joke. Some cosmic joke that's just a little over our heads. God's joke. Nothing to do but to smile and nod and try to pretend that we get it.”

“You can go pretty far in life doing that,” Nick said. He sneaked a glimpse at his wristwatch, saw it was after two already. With a jolt, he realized he had to get back to the office.

She noticed. “Time to go.”

“Cassie, I—”

“Just go, Nick. You've got a company to run.”