Killer Instinct (3 page)

Sometimes I can’t believe that a woman as intelligent and sophisticated and, oh yeah, unbelievably beautiful, settled for a guy like me. She likes to joke that our courtship was the greatest job of salesmanship I ever pulled off. I don’t disagree. I did close the deal, after all.

When I walked in, Kate was sitting on the couch watching TV. There was a bowl of popcorn in her lap and a glass of white wine on the coffee table in front of her. She was wearing faded old gym shorts from her prep school, which nicely set off her long, toned legs. As soon as she saw me come in, she got up from the couch, ran over to hug me. I winced, but she didn’t notice. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I’ve been so worried.”

“I’m fine, I told you. The only thing that got hurt was my pride. Though the tow truck driver thought I was an idiot.”

“You’re totally okay, Jase? Were you wearing a seat belt and everything?” She pulled back to look at me. Her eyes were a great shade of hazel green, and her hair was full and black, and she had a sharp jawline and high cheekbones. She reminded me of a young, dark-haired Katharine Hepburn. Endearingly enough, she considered herself plain, her features too sharp and exaggerated. Tonight, though, her eyes were bloodshot and puffy. She’d obviously been crying a lot.

“The car just went off the side of the road,” I said. “I’m fine, but the car got messed up.”

“The car,” she said with an airy wave, as if my Acura TL were a wad of toilet paper. I assume she inherited these aristocratic gestures from her parents. You see, Kate comes from money, sort of. That is, her family was once very rich, but the money never made it to her generation. The Spencer fortune took a big hit in 1929, when her great-grandfather made some really dumb investment decisions around the time of the Crash, and finally got finished off by her father, who was an alcoholic and only knew how to spend money, not manage it.

All Kate got was part of an expensive education, a cultivated voice, a lot of rich family friends who now felt sorry for her, and a houseful of antiques. Many of which she’d jammed into our three-bedroom colonial house on a quarter acre in Belmont.

“How’d you get back?” she said.

“Tow truck driver. Interesting guy—ex–Special Forces.”

“Hmm,” she said, that not-interested-but-trying-to-fake-it noise I knew so well.

“Is that dinner?” I said, pointing to the bowl of popcorn on the coffee table.

“Sweetie, I’m sorry. I just didn’t feel like cooking tonight. You want me to make you something?”

I could visualize the brick of tofu lurking in the refrigerator, and I almost shuddered. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll just grab something. Come here.” I hugged her again. Braved the pain without wincing this time. “Forget about the car. I’m worried about you.”

All of a sudden she started crying as I held her. She kind of crumpled. I felt her chest heave and her hot tears dampen my shirt. I squeezed her tight. “It’s just that I really thought…this one was going to work,” she said.

“Next time, maybe. We just have to be patient, huh?”

“Do you not worry about
anything
?”

“Just stuff I can do something about,” I said.

After a while, we sat down together on the couch, which was an uncomfortable but no doubt really valuable English antique as hard as a church pew, and watched some documentary on the Discovery channel about bonobos, which are apparently a species of monkey smarter and more highly evolved than us. Seems the bonobos are a female-dominated society. They showed footage of the female bonobo trying to seduce a male, spreading her legs and putting her butt up to the male’s face. The announcer called that “presenting.” I suppressed a remark about our own conjugal relations, which had become just about nonexistent. I don’t know if it was the fertility treatments or what, but our sex life lately had turned into a kind of bed death. I couldn’t remember the last time Kate had “presented.”

I took a handful of popcorn. It was air-popped and lightly spritzed with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. It tasted like Styrofoam peanuts. I couldn’t politely spit it out, so I finished chewing and swallowed it.

The female bonobo didn’t seem to be scoring, but she kept at it. She stretched out an arm and beckoned at the male with upstretched fingers like a silent film star playing a harlot. But the guy was a dud. So she went up to him and grabbed his balls, hard.

“Ouch,” I said. “I don’t think she’s read
He’s Just Not That Into You
.”

Kate shook her head and tried not to smile.

I got up and went to the bathroom and swallowed a couple of Advil. Then I went to the kitchen and served myself a big bowl of ice cream, Brigham’s Oreo. I didn’t bother to ask Kate if she wanted any, because she never ate ice cream. She never ate anything remotely fattening.

I sat back down and dug into the ice cream while the narrator said, “The females kiss and hug and rub their genitals together with their special friends.”

“So where are the male bonobos, anyway?” I said. “Sitting on the couch with the remote control?”

She watched me tuck into the ice cream. “What’s that, babe?”

“This?” I said. “Fat-free tofu ice-milk substitute.”

“Sweetheart, you know, you might want to lay off the ice cream at night.”

“I never feel like it at breakfast.”

“You know what I’m saying,” she said, and touched her perfectly flat belly. I, on the other hand, was already developing a potbelly at thirty. Kate could eat anything she wanted and not gain weight. She just had this incredible metabolism. Women hated her for that. I found it a little annoying myself. If I had her metabolism, I wouldn’t be eating bulgur and tempeh.

“Can we watch something else?” I said. “This is getting me too horny.”

“Jason, that’s disgusting.” She grabbed the remote and began flipping through the hundreds of channels until she stopped at a show that looked familiar. I recognized the actors who played the beautiful high-school-age brother and sister and their divorced father, himself a divorce lawyer. This was that Fox show
S.B.
, about beautiful rich high-school kids and their broken families in Santa Barbara—proms, car crashes, divorce cases, drugs, cheating moms. It had become the hottest TV show of the season.

And it was created by my brother-in-law, Craig Glazer, the hotshot TV producer who was married to Kate’s older sister, Susie. Craig and I pretended to get along.

“How can you watch that crap?” I said, grabbing the remote and switching the channel to some old
National Geographic
–style show about a primitive Amazonian tribe called the Yanomamo.

“You’d better deal with that hostility before Craig and Susie come next week.”

“Without my hostility, what’s left? Anyway, they have no idea how I feel about him.”

“Oh, Susie knows.”

“She probably feels the same way about him.”

Kate cocked a brow provocatively but said nothing.

We watched some more of the nature show, sort of listlessly. The narrator said in a plummy British accent that the Yanomami were the most violent, aggressive society in the world. They were known as the Fierce People. They were always breaking out into wars, usually over women, who were scarce.

“I’ll bet you like that, huh?” I said. “Fighting over women?”

She shook her head. “I studied the Fierce People in one of my feminism classes. The men beat their wives too. The women think the more machete scars they have, the more their husbands must love them.” There was always some book about feminism on Kate’s bedside table. The latest was called something like
This Sex Which Is Not One
. I didn’t get the title, but luckily there wasn’t going to be a quiz.

Kate had gotten interested in obscure African and South American cultures in the last few years because of her job, I think. She worked for the Meyer Foundation for Folk and Outsider Art in Boston. They gave money to poor and homeless people who made paintings and sculptures that looked like they could have been done by my eight-year-old nephew. But they didn’t give much money to their employees. The foundation paid Kate eight thousand dollars a year and apparently believed she should be paying them for the privilege of working there. I think she spent more in gas and parking than she earned.

We watched the show some more. Kate ate popcorn and I ate Oreo ice cream. The narrator said that Yanomami boys proved their manhood by “blooding their spear,” or killing someone. They used axes and spears and bows and arrows. And blowguns carved from bamboo that shot poison darts.

“Cool,” I said.

The Yanomamo tribe cremated their dead and mixed the ashes into plantain soup and then drank it.

Maybe not so cool.

When the show was over I gave her the latest news about how the divisional vice president, Crawford, had just left the company for Sony and took six of his top guys with him. Which left a huge, gaping hole in my department. “It sucks,” I said. “Huge mess.”

“What are you talking about?” Kate said, suddenly interested. “It’s terrific.”

“You don’t get it. Entronics just announced they’re acquiring the U.S. business of this Dutch company called Meister.”

“I’ve
heard
of Meister,” she said, sounding a little annoyed. “So?”

Royal Meister Electronics N.V. is an immense electronics conglomerate, one of our biggest competitors. They had a unit based in Dallas that sold the same things we did—the LCDs and the plasma screens and the projectors and all that.

“So Crawford’s getting the hell out of Dodge. He must know something.”

Kate sat up, drew her knees to her chest. “Listen, Jase, don’t you realize what this means? This is your
chance
.”

“My chance?”

“You’ve been stuck at the level of district sales manager for
years
. It’s like you’re frozen in amber.”

I wondered whether she was dealing with the bad pregnancy news by throwing herself into my career. “Nothing’s opened up.”

“Come
on,
Jase, think about it. If Crawford’s gone, along with six of his top guys, the sales division has no choice but to backfill some of those slots from inside, right? This is your chance to get into management. To really start climbing the ladder.”

“Greasy pole, more like it. Katie, I like my job. I don’t want to be a VP.”

“But your salary’s basically capped out right now, right? You’re never going to make much more than you do now.”

“What do you mean? I’m doing pretty good. Remember how much I made three years ago?”

She nodded, her eyes fixed on mine, like she was weighing whether to say more. Then she said, “Honey, three years ago was a freak. Plasma screens were just coming out, and Entronics owned the market, right? That’s never going to happen again.”

“See, Kate, here’s the thing. There’s this corporate egg-sorting machine for guys around my age, okay? It starts dropping the eggs into the Large and Extra Large and Jumbo cartons, right?”

“So what are you?”

“I’m not going into Jumbo. I’m just a sales guy. I am what I am.”

“But if you get into management, baby, that’s when you start making the real money.”

A couple of years ago, Kate used to talk to me about how I should focus on climbing the corporate ladder, but I thought she’d given that up. “Those guys in upper management never leave the office,” I said. “They have to put a LoJack on their ankles. They turn fishbelly white from being in meetings all the time. Too much sucking up, too much politics. It’s not for me. Why are we talking about this?”

“Look. You become the area manager and then a DVP and then a VP and general manager and pretty soon you could be
running
a company. In a couple of years, you could be making a
fortune
.”

I took a deep breath, wanting to argue with her, but there was no point. When she got like this, she was like a terrier that wouldn’t let go of its Nylabone.

The fact was, Kate and I had very different ideas of what a “fortune” was. My dad was a sheet-metal worker at a plant in Worcester that made ducts and pipes for air-conditioning and ventilation systems. He rose as high as shop foreman, and he was pretty active in the Sheet Metal Workers Local 63. He wasn’t a very ambitious guy—I think he took the first job that came along, got good at it, stuck with it. But he worked really hard, did overtime and extra shifts whenever possible, and he arrived home at the end of the day wiped out, unable to do anything more than sit in front of the TV like a zombie and drink Budweiser. Dad was missing the tips of two of the fingers on his right hand, which was always a silent reminder to me of how nasty his job was. When he told me he wanted me to go to college so I didn’t have to do what he did, he really meant it.

We lived on one floor of a three-decker on Providence Street in Worcester that had asbestos siding and a chain-link fence around the concrete backyard. To go from that to owning my own colonial house in Belmont—well, that was pretty damned good, I thought.

Whereas the house Kate had grown up in, in Wellesley, was bigger than her entire Harvard dorm building. We’d once driven by the house. It was an immense stone mansion with a high wrought-iron fence and endless land. Even after her boozer father had finally killed off what remained of the family fortune with some lame-brained investment, and they’d had to sell their summer house in Osterville, on Cape Cod, and then their house in Wellesley, the place they moved to was about twice as big as the house she and I lived in now.

She paused, then pouted. “Jason, you don’t want to end up like Cal Taylor, do you?”

“That’s a low blow.” Cal Taylor was around sixty and had been a salesman with Entronics forever, since the days when they sold transistor radios and second-rate color TV sets and tried to compete with Emerson and Kenwood. He was a human cautionary tale. The sight of him creeped me out, because he represented everything I secretly knew I was in danger of becoming. With his white hair and his nicotine-yellowed mustache, his Jack Daniel’s breath and his smoker’s hack and his never-ending stock of stale jokes, he was my own personal nightmare. He was a dead-ender, a timeserver who somehow managed to hang on because of a few tenuous relationships he’d built over the years, those he hadn’t neglected anyway. He was divorced, lived alone on TV dinners, and spent almost every night at a neighborhood bar.