Paranoia (5 page)

She shook her head, smiled, pursed her lips. “You have a problem with punctuality. I don’t ever want you to be late again, are we clear?”

I smiled back, the same smile I give cops when they ask if I know how fast I was going. The lady was tough. “Absolutely.” I sat down in a chair facing her.

Wyatt was watching the exchange with amusement. “Judith is one of my most valuable players,” he said. “My ‘executive coach.’ My
consigliere,
and your Svengali. I suggest you listen to every fucking word she says. I do.” He stood up, excused himself. She gave him a little wave as he left.

You wouldn’t have recognized me anymore. I was a changed man. No more Bondomobile: now I drove a silver Audi A6, leased by the company. I had a new wardrobe, too. One of Wyatt’s admins, the black one, who turned out to be a former model from the British West Indies, took me clothes shopping one afternoon at a very expensive place I had only seen from the outside, where she said she bought clothes for Nick Wyatt. She picked out some suits, shirts, ties, and shoes, and put it all on a company Amex card. She even bought what she called “hose,” meaning socks. And this wasn’t the Structure crap I usually wore, it was Armani, Ermenegildo Zegna. They had this aura: you could tell they were handstitched by Italian widows listening to Verdi.

The sideburns—“bugger’s grips,” she called them—had to go, she decided. Also no more of the scraggly bed-head look. She took me to a fancy salon, and I came out looking like a Ralph Lauren model, only not as fruity. I dreaded next time Seth and I got together; I knew I’d never hear the end of it.

A cover story was devised. My co-workers and managers in the Enterprise Division/Routers were informed that I had been “reassigned.” Rumors circulated that I was being sent to Siberia because the manager of my division was tired of my attitude. Another rumor had it that one of Wyatt’s senior VPs had admired a memo I’d written and “liked my attitude” and I was being given more responsibility, not less. No one knew the truth. All anyone knew was that one day I was suddenly gone from my cubicle.

If anyone had bothered to look closely at the org chart on the corporate Web site, they’d have noticed my title was now Director of Special Projects, Office of the CEO.

An electronic and paper trail was being created.

Judith turned back to me, continued as if Wyatt had never been there. “
If
you’re hired by Trion, you’re to arrive at your cube forty-five minutes early. Under no circumstances will you have a drink at lunch or after work. No happy hours, no cocktail parties, no ‘hanging out’ with ‘friends’ from work. No partying. If you have to attend a work-related party, drink club soda.”

“You make it sound like I’m in AA.”

“Getting drunk is a sign of weakness.”

“Then I assume smoking’s out of the question.”

“Wrong,” she said. “It’s a filthy, disgusting habit, and it indicates a lack of self-control, but there are other considerations. Standing around in the smoking area is an excellent way to cross-pollinate, connect with people in different units, obtain useful intelligence. Now, about your handshake.” She shook her head. “You blew it. Hiring decisions are made in the first five seconds—at the handshake. Anyone who tells you anything else is lying to you. You get the job with the handshake, and then the rest of the job interview you fight to keep it, to not lose it. Since I’m a woman, you went easy on me. Don’t. Be firm, do it hard, and hold—”

I smiled impishly, cut in: “The last woman who told me that . . .” I noticed she’d frozen in midsentence. “Sorry.”

Now, head cocked kittenishly to one side, she smiled. “Thanks.” A pause. “Hold the shake a second or two longer. Look me in the eye, and smile. Aim your heart at me. Let’s do it again.”

I stood up, shook Judith Bolton’s hand again.

“Better,” she said. “You’re a natural. People meet you and think, there’s something about this guy I like, I don’t know what it is. You’ve got the chops.” She looked at me appraisingly. “You broke your nose once?”

I nodded.

“Let me guess: playing football.”

“Hockey, actually.”

“It’s cute. Are you an athlete, Adam?”

“I was.” I sat down again.

She leaned forward toward me, her chin resting in a cupped hand, checking me out. “I can tell. It’s in the way you walk, the way you carry your body. I like it. But you’re not synchronizing.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’ve got to synchronize.
Mirror.
I’m leaning forward, so you do the same. I lean back, you lean back. I cross my legs, you cross your legs. Watch the tilt of my head, and mimic me. Even synchronize your
breathing
with mine. Just be subtle, don’t be blatant about it. This is how you connect with people on a subconscious level, make them feel comfortable with you.
People like people who are like themselves.
Are we clear?”

I grinned disarmingly, or what I thought was disarmingly, anyway.

“And another thing.” She leaned in even closer until her face was a few inches away from mine. She whispered, “You’re wearing too much aftershave.”

My face burned with embarrassment.

“Let me guess: Drakkar Noir.” She didn’t wait for my answer, because she knew she was right. “Very high school stud. Bet it made the cheerleaders weak at the knees.”

Later, I learned who Judith Bolton was. She was a senior VP who’d been brought into Wyatt Telecom a few years earlier as a powerhouse consultant with McKinsey & Company to advise Nicholas Wyatt personally on sensitive personnel issues, “conflict resolution” in the uppermost echelons of the company, certain psy-ops aspects of deals, negotiations, and acquisitions. She had a Ph.D. in behavioral psychology, so she was called Dr. Bolton. Whether you called her an “executive coach” or a “leadership mastery strategist,” she was kind of like Wyatt’s private Olympic trainer. She advised him on who was executive material and who wasn’t, who should be fired, who was plotting behind his back. She had an x-ray eye for disloyalty. No doubt he’d hired her away from McKinsey at some ridiculous salary. She was powerful enough and secure enough here to contradict him to his face, say shit to him he wouldn’t take from anybody else.

“Now, our first assignment is to learn how to do a job interview,” she said.

“I got hired here,” I said, feebly.

“We’re playing in a whole new league, Adam,” she said, smiling. “You’re a hotshot, and you have to interview like a hotshot, someone Trion’s going to fall all over themselves to steal away from us. How do you like working at Wyatt?”

I looked at her, feeling stupid. “Well, I’m trying to leave there, aren’t I?”

She rolled her eyes, inhaled sharply. “No. You keep it positive.” She turned her head to one side and then did an amazing imitation of my voice: “I
love
it! It’s totally
inspiring!
My co-workers are
great!
” The mimicry was so good, it weirded me out; it was like hearing your voice on an answering machine tape.

“So why am I interviewing at Trion?”

“
Opportunities,
Adam. There’s
nothing
wrong with your job at Wyatt. You’re
not
disgruntled. You’re just taking the logical next step in your career, and there are more opportunities at Trion to do
even bigger, better things
. What’s your greatest weakness, Adam?”

I thought for a second. “Nothing, really,” I said. “Never admit to a weakness.”

She scowled. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. They’ll think you’re either delusional or stupid.”

“It’s a trick question.”

“Of
course
it’s a trick question. Job interviews are
minefields
, my friend. You
have
to ‘admit’ to weaknesses, but you must
never
tell them anything derogatory. So you confess to being
too faithful a husband, too loving a father.
” She did the Adam-voice again: “Sometimes I get so comfortable with one software application that I don’t explore others. Or: sometimes when little things bother me, I don’t always speak up, because I figure most things tend to blow over.
You don’t complain enough!
Or how about this: I tend to get
really absorbed in a project,
so I sometimes put in long hours, too long, because I love doing them, doing them right. Maybe I work on things more than is necessary. Get it? They’ll be salivating, Adam.”

I smiled, nodded. Man, oh man, what had I gotten myself into?

“What’s the biggest mistake you ever made on the job?”

“Obviously I have to admit something,” I said nervously.

“You’re a fast study,” she said dryly.

“Maybe I took on too much once, and I—”

“—And you fucked it up? So you don’t know the depths of your own incompetence? I don’t think so. You say, ‘Oh, nothing really big. Once I was working on a big report for my boss and I forgot to back up, and my
computer crashed,
I lost everything. I had to stay up till three in the morning, completely re-create the work I’d lost. Boy, did
I
learn my lesson—always back up.’ Get it? The biggest mistake you ever made was
not your fault,
plus you made everything right.”

“I get it.” My shirt collar felt too tight, and I wanted to get out of there.

“You’re a natural, Adam,” she said. “You’re going to do just fine.”

8

The night before my first interview at Trion I went over to see my dad. I did this at least once a week, sometimes more, depending on if he called and asked me to come over. He called a lot, partly because he was lonely (Mom had died six years earlier) and partly because he was paranoid from the steroids he took and convinced his caregivers were trying to kill him. So his calls were never friendly, never chatty; they were complaints, rants, accusations. Some of his painkillers were missing, he’d say, and he was convinced Caryn the nurse was pilfering them. The oxygen supplied by the oxygen company was of shitty quality. Rhonda the nurse kept tripping over his air hose and yanking the little tubes, the cannulas, out of his nose, nearly ripping his ears off.

To say that it was hard to retain people to take care of him was a comic understatement. Rarely did they last more than a few weeks. Francis X. Cassidy was a bad-tempered man, had been as long as I could remember, and had only grown angrier as he grew older and sicker. He’d always smoked a couple of packs a day and had a loud hacking cough, was always getting bronchitis. So it came as no surprise when he was diagnosed with emphysema. What did he expect? He hadn’t been able to blow out the candles on his birthday cake for years. Now his emphysema was what they called end-stage, meaning that he could die in a couple of weeks, or months, or maybe ten years. No one knew.

Unfortunately, it fell to me, his only offspring, to arrange his care. He still lived in the first-floor-and-basement apartment in a triple-decker I’d grown up in, and he hadn’t changed a thing since Mom died—the same harvest-gold refrigerator that never worked right, the couch that sagged on one side, the lace window curtains that had gone yellow with age. He hadn’t saved any money, and his pension was pitiful; he barely had enough to cover his medical expenses. That meant part of my paycheck went to his rent, the home health aide’s salary, whatever. I never expected any thanks, and never got any. Never in a million years would he ask me for money. We both sort of pretended that he was living off a trust fund or something.

When I arrived, he was sitting in his favorite Barcalounger, in front of the huge TV, his main occupation. It allowed him to complain about something in real time. Tubes in his nose (he got oxygen round the clock now), he was watching some infomercial on cable.

“Hey, Dad,” I said.

He didn’t look up for a minute or so—he was hypnotized by the infomercial, like it was the shower scene in
Psycho
. He’d gotten thin, though he still had a barrel chest, and his crew cut was white. When he looked up at me, he said, “The bitch is quitting, you know that?”

The “bitch” in question was his latest home healthcare aide, a pinched-faced, moody Irish woman in her fifties named Maureen with blazing fake red hair. She limped through the living room, as if on cue—she had a bad hip—with a plastic laundry basket heaped with neatly folded white T-shirts and boxer shorts, my dad’s extensive wardrobe. The only surprise about her quitting was that it had taken her so long. He had a little Radio Shack wireless doorbell on the end table next to his Barcalounger that he’d press to call her whenever he needed something, which seemed to be constantly. His oxygen wasn’t working, or the nose-tube thingies were drying out his nose, or he needed help getting to the bathroom to take a pee. Once in a while she’d take him out for “walks” in his motorized go-cart so he could cruise around the shopping mall and complain about “punks” and abuse her some more. He accused her of trying to poison him. It would drive a normal person crazy, and Maureen already seemed pretty high-strung.

“Why don’t you tell him what you called me?” she said, setting the laundry down on the couch.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said. He spoke in short, clipped sentences, since he was always short of breath. “You’ve been putting antifreeze in my coffee. I can taste it. They call this eldercide, you know. Gray murders.”

“If I wanted to kill you I’d use something better than antifreeze,” she snapped back. Her Irish accent was still strong even after living here for twenty-some years. He inevitably accused his caretakers of trying to kill him. If they did, who could blame them? “He called me a—a word I won’t even repeat.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, I called her a cunt. That’s a polite word for what she is. She assaulted me. I sit here hooked up to fucking air tubes, and this bitch is slapping me around.”

“I grabbed a cigarette out of his hands,” Maureen said. “He was trying to sneak a smoke when I was downstairs doing the laundry. As if I can’t smell it throughout the house.” She looked at me. One of her eyes wandered. “He’s not allowed to smoke! I don’t even know where he hides the cigarettes—he’s hiding them somewhere, I
know
it!”